Rethink instead of restart: smart companies are the future after the pandemic

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IBM’s Think Digital conference guides businesses in digitalization, adaptation and business process transformation

The coronavirus has rewritten the rules of the game in business. Conditions have changed, competition for customers has intensified, while resources have been dwindling due to the sudden downturn. The pandemic has shown that in this new situation, digitalization is no longer a goal, but for many it may be the only means of survival. According to IBM, companies need to rethink, not just restart their operations, and this is what IBM will be providing support for at the IBM Think Digital Summit online conference on October 27, which is free to attend.

According to a recent global survey by IBM, the coronavirus pandemic has not slowed, but accelerated the digital transformation of companies, in our region as well. A survey of more than 3,800 senior executives across 20 industries and 22 countries also found that 6 out of 10 companies accelerated digital transformation due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the study entitled COVID-19 and the Future of Business, IBM has identified 3 key areas where successful business leaders are acting proactively: organizational flexibility, artificial intelligence (AI), automation and the use of other exponentially evolving technologies. Additionally, a new type of leadership, engagement, and innovative approaches to employees is needed.

“These are not only trendy buzzwords, but the engines to competitiveness. This is what the IBM Think Digital Summit digital conference is about”, emphasized Johannes Maurer, General Manager, IBM South East Europe. “For leading companies, digital transformation is a no brainer, the pandemic is forcing everyone to quickly make up for any gaps in this area. In the meantime, we have to pay attention to another very important problem: the conclusion of our research shows that retaining the employees and managing burnout are also key to competitiveness. Digitalization can be helpful in this area as well: in the long run, successful leaders will be those who are empathetic, promote personal accountability, and support teamwork that employs design thinking, agile methods, and DevOps tools and techniques. We try to help in this at the conference by showing good examples and practices that can easily be introduced.”

Along with the event, IBM announces a number of companies in the South East Europe region who have turned to IBM to help them digitally reinvent and deliver superior results:

• Antenna Hungária Zrt. (Hungary) is a long-established state-owned company, whose main activity has traditionally been broadcasting and telecommunications. However, its scope of activities has recently expanded, with the emergence of event technology, event organization, program production, IT, and IT security services. In 2019, AH’s management committed to entering the IT security market, and as a result of the past year and a half, AH Security Operation Center has been developed – based on IBM technology.  In their Think 2020 presentation, they tell the history of the introduction of the service; how, with the help of IBM experts, they were able to build a service that is now in operation from scratch.
• Atlantic Grupa (Croatia) is one of the leading food and distribution companies in the region with operations in eight countries, predominantly in South-East Europe. The company is using IBM tools to aggregate data around various data sources and then present and analyse it. This is important from both business decision making perspective and regulatory perspective, as the company reports to the Zagreb Stock Exchange where its stock is listed in the ZSE Prime market. Atlantic Grupa also uses IBM Planning Analytics, firstly for business planning, and they recently also implemented IBM Watson Assistant for the company’s People&Culture processes, in order to offload P&C experts from repetitive manual jobs and to create more opportunity for them to focus on analysis, employee engagement, well-being and other value added programs.
• Banca Comercială Română (BCR), a member of Erste Group, is one of the most important financial groups in Romania, including universal banking operations (retail, corporate & investment banking, treasury and capital markets), as well as the profile companies on the leasing market, private pensions and housing banks. BCR is one of the main supporters of cashless transactions and is an active player in this market deploying several projects supporting cashless payments with BCR cards for Bucharest’s transportation system. All of the card transactions are being hosted on IBM Power Systems.
• Informatika d.d. (Slovenia) is a cloud-services provider that offers integrated end-to-end support and handles challenges regarding IT solutions and infrastructure. They are specialized in providing IT support and services to electric power distribution companies, as well as to some affiliated companies in Slovenia. They use IBM’s Maximo solution to increase assets utilization, decrease the costs of new assets, increase successful in-warranty claims, reduce stocks and minimize outsourced maintenance.
• Telekom Srbija, one of the leading telco providers in Serbia and in the SEE region, has partnered with IBM and selected IBM Cloud Pak for Applications to improve business processes and enhance relationship with its business partners in Trouble Ticketing Management area. The company decided to establish a unified access to trouble ticketing system where all external systems of its business partners can be easily connected. In addition, business partners which are not having its own trouble ticketing system will be able to access similar functionalities thru a web portal of Telekom Serbia. Through this project Telekom Srbija will establish access and rights to its IT systems over business partner ecosystem and enable future process automatization related to data and services partner ecosystem requests. By using IBM Cloud Pak for Applications, Telekom Srbija has successfully modernized its existing applications and set a base for future application and services development to support customer innovation and digital initiatives.

Community knowledge, sharing good experiences

The free-to-attend professional day will cover, among other things, how IT can increase organizational flexibility, how to configure new infrastructure while also taking care of cybersecurity and how to build smart companies with agile methods.

Speakers will include scientist Aleksandra Mojsilović, IBM Fellow, Head, Foundations of Trustworthy AI, who will help you understand how to use AI safely in almost any area of ​​your business.

• Anna Nowosielska, Infrastructure Services Leader IBM CEE, will present through practical examples, how to successfully move a company’s entire business safely into the cloud.
• Lee Harris, IBM MSSP Sales Leader Europe, warns that cybercrime is becoming more common as we do more and more things online. Every tiny part of the technology people use will be under constant attack in the future. In his presentation, he shows how we can take up the fight against total cyber warfare as Neo did in The Matrix.
• What if we have already suffered a cyber-attack? If we weren’t properly prepared? If hackers discovered a vulnerability and caused massive damage? Companies may also want to know how to prevent an employee from misusing business critical information. Business Process Specialist Duncan Blain will talk about recovery and appropriate responses, the preparation of the IT infrastructure, and other recovery and prevention experiences.

As mentioned, the conference guests will include Aleksandra Mojsilović, an accredited researcher of artificial intelligence at IBM with numerous prestigious accolades, as well as several regional IBM leaders, ethical hackers and cybersecurity experts.

Register for IBM Think Digital Summit here.