Meet our candidates: Grete S?yland

My passion lies in digitalization and transformation that assist organizations to empower each individual through vertical and horizontal information connectivity, as well as bringing the customer and stakeholder view into the loop. The end goal of such connectivity, is to create a solid foundation for the board to deliver on its shareholders expectations, including ESG and sustainable commitment.

As a deputy chairman of several joint venture steering committees, I led the standardization and digitization of cross-functional tasks related to decision-making. We utilized the existing available IT software in a Lean “keep it simple” way. Through this transformation, I obtained transparency, traceability, and trust, which again led to improved and efficient decisions processes.

What do you see as the biggest obstacle for companies to succeed?

One major key in digitalization processes is to transfer the business needs into IT solutions. Often are big obstacles about; defining our need, to keep it simple, break it down and not be tempted to solve everything in a “one-go sexy-way”, or taking the simple path: “digitize directly the manual process”. Or we could even fell into the trap tending to think, that IT people who-knows-IT, suddenly are business-need experts and we leave the definition task to them. It is important to bear in mind, IT are only going to create a synthetic version of others knowledge. When we divide our business need into very simple steps, understanding the why, what and how for each step through e.g Lean methodology, we will make sure we understand our own business need before we involve other experts, like IT. Once we involve IT, we would like to understand what is possible from an IT perspective given our business need. If an on-shelf IT solution is of interest, it is important to dare to challenge and simplify such solution with our defined need in mind, as on-shelf could already be too complicated for our normally simple need.

What is it about board work that excites you so much?

I am passionate about empowering others and building a better together culture. If I got the opportunity to take part in enhancing people’s workday by assisting creating a culture of sustainable growth, innovation and improvement through digitalization and transformation, I would be energized and truly happy.