Driving disruptive innovation for digital cowboys

Cape Town – It’s time to embrace disruption in the workplace to drive innovation and competitive advantage, a leading digital expert said on Thursday.

At the same time, Kim Andersen said, Generation Y employees need to be reined in to ensure sensitive information is not compromised, especially because of the enforcement of the Protection of Personal Information Bill (PoPI).

Andersen spoke on the subject at the Gartner Symposium at the Cape Town ICC on Friday.

In this story:
- AUDIO: Fin24’s Matthew le Cordeur interviews Kim Andersen, account CTO at T-Systems.
- SLIDE SHOW: Kim Andersen’s presentation at the Gartner Symposium in Cape Town on Friday.
- VIDEO: Understand how T-Systems is helping companies secure their workplace.

Digital cowboys let loose

Technology is fundamentally changing the business environment, revolutionising practices and processes and driving greater efficiencies, said Andersen. “But it also presents a challenge, one that is exacerbated by the emergence of Generation Y into the workforce,” he said.

“Organisations need to rethink their workplace, not only to develop the necessary agility and flexibility to remain competitive, but to cater to the employee of the future.”

Generation Y, or digital cowboys as Andersen termed them, are called this for a reason, because they always ask, ‘why’.

He said companies face the challenge of reining in those digital cowboys with technology that makes them want to be in your company – “because if you don’t do this you won’t be attractive and they will leave you and go help your competitor” – and so that’s the adoption companies should take. “Get your digital cowboys under control.”

Listen:

He said organisations are faced with the challenge of creating a workplace that supports Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and the ability to work from anywhere, at any time, on any platform, while still ensuring data is secure and cannot be compromised.

“Managing the integration of a new generation into the workplace, the complexities of BYOD and the disruption these cause, while ensuring compliance with legislation designed to protect data integrity, such as PoPI, is a challenging task,” he said.

“The law actually stipulates that you should be doing something about this or else the CEOs are in trouble,” he said.

View:


Get your house in order

“So one of the key takeaways is to get your house in order, make sure that you have at least done what you can do, and then embark on a journey where you get your information management system in place so that you only have one view of the truth around people’s personal information.

“It’s a big challenge for South African companies, because they’ve never had to do this before, so it’s not just a simple clean up.”

“I think one of the bigger issues that is happening there is that the CEOs don’t actually know what technology can do in order to improve performance of a company or actually maybe to disrupt the existing model in for you to transform your business to the next level.

“The CIOs are not providing the technological leadership to actually inform the CEOs of what’s possible and what is at the forefront of what can be done,” he said. “Or maybe [they] are not able to communicate it in a way that is understood by the business.”


Left to right: The T-Systems team at the Gartner Symposium expo: Lebohang Thokoane (marketing and communication head), Kim Andersen (account CTO at T-Systems), and Alwin Matthews (DWP expert).

View: