The stakes are high -- and I welcome the challenge

A little more than four months ago, I began my new role as EY Global Vice Chair of Transformation – a newly created position to help EY and clients confront the challenges and opportunities inherent in our collective new normal. During this time, I have been moved, beyond words, by the overwhelming support and well wishes from colleagues and clients. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but I’m excited to continue our journey.

For more than 30 years, I have helped Fortune 500 companies adapt and transform. It is no surprise that the most successful organizations have put their people at the heart of any transformation initiative. It was true back then, and even more so now.

While much of my career has been spent helping other businesses transform to meet a range of technology, regulatory, socio-political and customer demands, I am now helping to lead EY’s digital transformation, one that is well under way. While we have a long way to go, we have made significant strides. With more than 44,000 technologists, our people will continue advancing the digital skills of its people and recruitment in areas such as data science and digital architecture.

To future-proof the workforce and equip them with the digital skillsets necessary to thrive in tomorrow’s business landscape, we introduced EY Badges. This is an initiative that enables people to “earn” digital badges for future-focused skills such as data visualization, data science and artificial intelligence (AI). It also instills skills for transformational leadership and inclusive intelligence. This year, we launched the EY Tech MBA – an independent degree available to all our people around the world, for free.

Our stellar team of multidisciplinary technologists and industry professionals is developing appropriate and proprietary technology solutions that will help clients accelerate and realize the full benefits of their digital transformation journeys.

The time for transformation is now.

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the way businesses operate. And while underlying structural trends, such as a significant rise in remote working, supply chain disruptions and changing customer preferences are not a new phenomenon, the sheer scale, scope and speed of the pandemic necessitates that businesses transform rapidly to address these new challenges.

Even before the pandemic hit, meeting the evolving needs of customers and employees was a priority for many leaders as they grappled with and tried to leverage the rapid growth of digital technologies. Transformation was viewed as a long-term journey prior to the pandemic – an evolution, if you will – in rethinking data and technology solutions from the back to the front-end.

No longer.

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the notion of digital transformation as a journey. Almost overnight, companies have come to accept that transformation is now more revolutionary than evolutionary, thus forcing each one to accelerate their efforts in order to rapidly meet widespread and – in some cases –- radical changes in customer and employee needs and behaviors.

Business leaders need to rapidly intensify efforts to deploy the use of digital technologies and data, at scale, to bring clarity to the chaos of our world. And indeed, while some companies presumed they had more time – potentially years to transform – the timeline for transformation must accelerate.

People, Technology and Innovation: The Keys to Transformation Realized.

Our Transformation Realized approach is designed to drive transformative change and help clients harness new core drivers of business value. By placing humans at the center, driving innovation at scale, and leveraging technology at speed, we are helping businesses to reframe their future. This means products and services that are shaped and defined by customer need, and an organization that has articulated its purpose in a way that galvanizes its employees. It means change rapidly deployed on the back of digital technologies – artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud, cyber, data and analytics, and Internet of Things/5G. These technologies enable organizations to continuously collect, assess and use data at scale and speed to create more resiliency within the business, greatly improve experiences for customers and employees, and generate long-term value for investors. And it means putting innovation at the heart of the business, with the capabilities and know-how to scale the best ideas.

Transformation Realized is integrated into NextWave: a global strategy and ambition to contribute to clients, people and society. NextWave is inspired by the way innovations spread through society, where the rate of growth follows the shape of an S-curve. This, combined with focusing on a broad set of stakeholders with a company's distinct purpose in mind, is what will help sustain companies for the long-term. For without it, capital and talent will shift from organizations that focus too narrowly on their own set of interests to those that create long-term value for a much broader set of stakeholders. Customers will abandon lackluster digital experiences for those that best accommodate a new and evolving set of needs.

At EY, we are moving through the transformation journey with purpose and at speed to win in today’s environment. The same is true for clients. And as we navigate this journey together, on the other side of the pandemic, we will find resiliency, agility, and equally as important, a sense of clarity, that will enable our partners to thrive in an unpredictable and volatile future.

I invite you to join the conversation and reach out to me. I look forward to connecting with you, hearing about your challenges and figuring out ways to help your organization realize its full potential. Be well and stay safe.

---

The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.