The Strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the Strength of the Wolf is the Pack

(Huawei employee can view a fuller article on internal 3MS)

Today is my 8th anniversary in Huawei. The last time I penned down my thoughts was on my 3rd anniversary: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly . My first three years in Huawei was the honeymoon period: the very conducive environment then (not forgetting the great first manager of mine) gave me the opportunity to adapt to Huawei’s core values and culture, and to work with fellow colleagues to quickly bring solutions to customers, creating values for the company. Back then we only experienced the initial light impacts from the trade war. And, little did we know what lay ahead: COVID-19.

Now, five years later, many things have changed. The difficult business environment from the trade war is the new norm; supply chain challenges are here to stay especially with some technologies being controlled by some countries; and the thing which had the greatest impact on me: the countless Huawei heroes overseas in harsh environments who fought on during COVID-19. I ended my 3rd anniversary article with five words: True Gold Fears No Fire. The past five years have reinforced my belief that “Gold” refers to the collective efforts by the thousands of heroes in Huawei. No man is an island, and I chose this famous quote from English novelist Rudyard Kipling as the title of this article: The Strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the Strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

True Gold Fears No Fire

The first “fire” is COVID-19. After being stuck in Singapore for 18 months, I accepted the invitation from the Regional President to travel to C?te d'Ivoire in August 2021 to attend the Northern Africa mid-year meeting. After doing his due diligence, the President made the brave decision and took many precautions to host this major onsite meeting during the pandemic. Despite that, my family was of course worried for me especially given my age, but we were soon put at ease thanks to the great care and warmth shown by the many Huawei heroes out there, from the HR to the administrative personnel, from the drivers to the hostel caretakers and chefs. Some put themselves at risk just to protect us, such as the team that rushed through the new hostel construction in Abidjan during the peak of COVID-19, the administrative staff who learnt to conduct PCR tests on us, and many local employees (e.g. driver, caretaker) who stayed away from their families to stay with us in the hostel. Due to quarantine requirements in Singapore, I decided to travel for about four months before going home. I give a big salute to these Huawei heroes of C?te d'Ivoire, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Tunisia, and UAE.

These heroes allowed us to continue with our business, to bring solutions to our customers when other vendors pulled out especially in developing African countries. One such customer told me I was crazy to travel there to meet him but he appreciated it very much. I truly admire the courage of our account managers, solution managers, delivery managers, and their supervisors for staying on willingly. These are the heroes who held our flag high during COVID-19. While fighting side by side with these heroes, I learnt so many stories that I decided to produce an internal “1,001 Nights” series to record their extraordinary efforts in helping customers, in creating value for the society through our product portfolios and solutions, and more importantly in keeping everyone’s morale high. From protecting customers against COVID-19, to innovative contactless signing of contracts, to sales people learning and taking up solution and even delivery roles, and the numerous use cases in digital government, smart city, education and healthcare.

The second “fire” is the difficult business environment due to the trade war. While there are a couple of countries that do not buy from Huawei due to political reasons, there are those that do not take a stand, but that remain key decision makers that be easily influenced. I respect our frontline colleagues for not giving up and continuing to develop such customers. I have met quite a few such public sector customers in APAC and Europe. My strategy is to never be defensive and try to explain ourselves against rumors and even fake news. I focus on our innovations, citing our investments and inventions, our industry thought leadership, and our global references, especially from developed countries. Frequently, these customers can infer by themselves that what they have been hearing is not true since we are doing well globally, even increasing our stake in R&D, and as thought leaders in digital transformation.

?

The third “fire” is the fact that we are 20 years late in the enterprise market compared to our competitors. This is especially true for the public sector since a common mentality is “If it ain’t break, don’t fix it”. The Ministry of Finance of a country is still using mainframe. When it was first acquired decades ago, there were five COBOL programmers to support the mainframe. Now, the ministry is panicking because there is only one such programmer left. In view of this mentality, for us to break through to such customers, we should not seek the immediate replacement of our competitors, but we should focus on greenfield areas and new capabilities, and co-existence with our customer’s current environment.

?

After successes in a major government department, I suggested to the local Huawei management to develop other public sector customers. Through our distributor we managed to have our first meeting with the CIO of Ministry of Education. Before I could open my mouth, the CIO said he was a fan of Company C and only used its products. I changed my tactics immediately and talked about use cases, solutions, and references relevant to education that Company C does not have. The CIO had a different idea of Huawei after that first meeting, and with the good work by local experts, we soon signed a contract with this customer. I met this CIO a couple of times thereafter; he is now a fan of Huawei too and we can expect more business with them.

?

Another example is Country G, where we lost a few major public sector contracts. The Regional President knew I was planning to be away from home for long in 2021, and asked me to stay in Country G for a little longer. In total, I spent six weeks there. For years, ABC department of a ministry has been a top Huawei customer and I met them a few times before and during COVID-19, and assisted in developing national digital transformation projects through them. In the same ministry, there is XYZ department that is not so friendly to Huawei. The representative office used my profile to seek a meeting with XYZ. Using the same strategy to talk about areas for which our competitors do not have solutions, my first meeting with XYZ went very well. After knowing I would be in the country for weeks, XYZ met me a total of five times, including in-depth workshops ultimately leading to POC. After the initial breakthroughs, experts from the Global Public Sector business unit, regional office and representative office continue to engage this customer. As of now, we have already signed $xxM contracts with XYZ.

Employee Localization

It is a good thing I am seeing more employee localization in our operations outside China. Some representative offices are even hiring senior people from our competition, especially in those market where our competitors are many years ahead of us. However, the past success of these senior people from the competitors are not necessarily repeatable in Huawei. In their previous companies, the brand could be well established, and at times the brand sells by itself. In Huawei, one of the six core values, Dedication, means all of us must persevere, and roll up our sleeves and work hard. Once, I was in Country X to support a regional event, thereafter the regional management asked me to stay back to support the country’s business too. To my surprise, the newly appointed government systems director, a local employee who used to hold a senior position in Company C, told me he recently lost some of his sales managers, and that he did not arrange any customer meetings for me since he is not a salesperson. I was rather taken aback and I told him everyone in Huawei is a “salesperson”!

?

Of course, that was an exception, majority of our local employees globally are working harder and even more dedicated in Huawei as compared to working for traditional MNCs. Before the pandemic, three of us non-Chinese employees were the first batch of Huaweiers to visit a new city under planning by the Red Sea to explore opportunity, and back then, the transportation was very inconvenient. At that time, that Government hired many Western retired government officials as their advisors. We represented Huawei professionally, focused on our innovations and thought leadership, led them from future use cases to data strategy to digital platform. Thereafter more experts were sent there to help build up our business, and we even set up an office there. Since then our business there has hit $xxM.

?

During my four months’ travel to eight countries in 2021, I took the initiative to meet local employees to see how they were coping with COVID-19 and the trade war, and also to boost their morale. I also addressed some of the top concerns by the local employees, such as media attacks, the unique Huawei Certification & Qualification system, and the seemingly lack in planning on career development.

Three Years’ Appointment

One reason why some local employees felt there is a lack in planning on career development is seeing our Chinese colleagues changing their appointments every three years, a policy with good reasons behind. This is why I have been explaining to my fellow local colleagues that we are an important foundation for the business especially in maintaining trust with the public sector customers. I also shared my 16 years’ experience in US MNC; there was no proactive career development planning too and as employees, we needed to take the initiative to speak to our managers on our career path.

?

Having said that, as the longest serving senior staff of the Global Public Sector business unit, sometimes I look at my fellow colleagues moving to another position with envy. But I do understand that the company had hired me precisely because of my knowledge, experience, and future thinking on public sector, so I guess I will continue to be on this position until I am too weak, whether physically or mentally, to create value for Huawei. In early 2022 when the late Mr. Ryan Ding was appointed as the President of Enterprise Business, I was very honored that he reached out to me directly for my opinion and recommendations on our global public sector business. I first met Mr. Ryan Ding in Singapore in 2016 soon after I joined Huawei. I was tasked to facilitate a 3-day voice-of-customer roundtable between some Singapore Government officials and the Huawei management: R&D under Mr. Ryan Ding, and Enterprise Business under Mr. Yan Lida. That roundtable actually led to some new technologies in Huawei.

?

From R&D, Mr. Ryan Ding moved to Carrier Business, and then to Enterprise Business. We had the chance to meet a couple of times, and also stayed in contact. I was in Cairo when I received the shocking and very sad news about Mr. Ryan Ding’s passing in October 2022. A couple of months before that, Mr. Ryan Ding had spoken to me about the various integrated business units and the roles of experts.

Integrated Business Units

To overcome internal silos and better serve the frontline colleagues, and ultimately made the company more agile and competitive in the market, Huawei introduced Integrated Business Units by industry. Some segments of the wider public sector were assigned to couple of Integrated Business Units. It was about this separation of public sector businesses that Mr. Ryan Ding last spoke to me. He felt that some industry experts like myself could be positioned to support multiple integrated business units. One reason behind this is that with businesses being split across different integrated business units, each unit’s budget gets smaller and the ability to maintain more senior experts diminishes.

?

While I am familiar with the overall public sector, including digital government, public safety, education, healthcare, social security, taxation, customs, road transport, traffic enforcement, public utility, and smart city, I am definitely not a master in all. Personally, when I was working for the Singapore Government, my direct knowledge and experience were in public safety and digital government. And, most significantly, I started my MNC career after completing the Singapore Government’s first-generation people-centric platform project in 2000: “Public Services Online”. Around the same time, Estonia had also developed a similar national project, and even open sourced the software platform as X-Road.

One Size Does Not Fit All

After being in the market for 20 years, only a handful of countries have adopted X-Road for their people-centric systems even though it is “free”. After decades in this industry, I conclude the reasons as:

• Bureaucracy and politics – Due to “information is power” mentality, there are still government agencies in some countries who refuse to share information to provide people-centric services, and worse still, in some countries, different ministries are “influenced” by different political parties.
• Proprietary legacy IT systems – In most countries, agencies are not entirely without IT systems, and some of them are still using very old and proprietary systems and databases. Software like X-Road or one that is purpose-built for a government, cannot be just installed and work with these legacy systems. One needs to do a lot of customizations to interface them.
• Lack of data standards – Even if we overcome the physical connectivity and systems interface problems, many countries do not adopt national data standards. We need to overcome the data quality and governance challenges when sharing data across databases.
• Complexity in processes – Typically when a person transacts with a government, it involves processes from different agencies, and he has to do it sequentially. For example, if a person wants to open a restaurant, he needs the business registration to be approved first before applying for a license to sell alcohol.

This is why we need different experts (HQ, regional and representative office) to work together for the success of our customers and for our own business success, anywhere we operate. While our aim is to come up with repeatable solutions or a product portfolio, we need to understand that globally and in fact even across cities in one country, one size does not fit all.

?

I have been doing international business for 20+ years. I also learnt many things on the job, such as great differences in governments globally. Earlier this year, I was extremely honored to be invited to share my experience with Huawei’s Board of Directors – each month two staff will be invited to share their experience during the Board meeting. I started the session by saying that only when customers are successful can we be successful. While we have various experts to come up with the best technical architecture, we also need to look into ways to make our customers successful. Only then will our customers issue us the purchase order. After so many years, I have summarized customer’s critical success factors in digital transformation into eight areas: Vision & Leadership; Governance & Structure; Law & Regulation; People & Culture; Operating Model; Security & Sovereignty; Data Strategy; and Technology Ecosystem.

Public Sector: One Network, One Cloud, Numerous Use Cases

The 8th critical success factor I mentioned earlier is Technology Ecosystem. This is definitely the most important one for Huawei from our business perspective, even though some of us, especially the industry experts, have to help customers with their other success factors. Public sector is different from other industries in that the different agencies in a country or region do not offer similar services to their customers. They do not compete for customers, but they compete for budget and resources. In view of the vastly different services and production systems, public sector business appears very scattered and cluttered. But it is precisely such vast differences that public sector agencies (national or regional) require all the ICT products that Huawei can offer. Optical, datacom, storage, compute, eLTE, 5G, cloud software, cloud services, AI, video conference, digital power, data center, devices, integration platform, data governance, etc. are all required by public sector customers.

?

This is why we need to look for common denominators so that we can increase our ROI in working on public sector business globally. For a start, every public sector agency manages cases. From child birth, school entry, tax payment, getting married, car purchase, crime reporting, starting a business, hospitalization, social welfare, and even death registration, they are all cases managed by different public sector agencies. The common denominator is that each agency collects and processes data to meet specific regulatory requirements, and to make decisions. And more frequently, these days, each agency uses big data and even AI to help with their decision making. This common denominator means that from ICT perspective, the agency requires devices, people/machine interaction, connectivity (from WAN to LAN), compute, data management, and even big data/AI. Unfortunately, each agency typically starts with its silo ICT infrastructure. Government generally has the vision to want different agencies to share connectivity, data centers, and even cloud platforms. This is why we need the “One Network, One Cloud” strategy for a government, either at the national or regional level. Different agencies will then have the numerous use cases and applications on such platforms to fulfil their missions.

?

The second common denominator is that most public sector agencies are departmental-centric, and not people-centric. This is another reason we need the cloud platform, not just for ICT sharing as stated earlier, but also for one agency and even multiple agencies to offer people-centric services, just like what Singapore and Estonia started 20+ years ago. To achieve that, we need cloud services such as data ingestion, data exchange, data governance, and even workflow interoperability. Of course, we need to address data and cyber security requirements since at times agencies do not want to expose their data to other agencies.

?

The third common denominator is that the public sector is probably the largest collector of data across industries, but a poor user of data. The data is usually used specifically for the case, but not for wider purposes to provide proactive and personalized services to the people. For example, if a person reports to the police because he was robbed, the police could have transmitted such information to the banks that the victim’s credit cards were stolen. If a businessman conveniently gets all the necessary permits to open a restaurant through a people-centric platform, why not go beyond that and suggest to him graduating students that he can hire, and also the best location available for him to open the restaurant? This is where big data and AI come into the picture.

?

But the basics, especially for developing countries, are “One Network, One Cloud”. One Network covers national/regional backbone, metropolitan area network and campus network. It should even include inclusive connectivity to bring the Internet to rural areas neglected by service providers. Increasingly, governments also realize the importance of private broadband wireless network to support public safety, smart city, utilities, and even robot/drone operation.

?

One Cloud does not literally mean one cloud platform. Since 10 over years ago, I have already observed that a government requires more than one cloud platform, after all, one size does not fit all. Let's take Country U as an example. The country has a law called the U++ law, of which all public sector agencies must use the connectivity, data center, and cloud services provided by the U++ organization. After the law was rigorously debated in the parliament, it comes with three exceptions. An agency is allowed to not use U++’s services if U++ cannot meet the deadline, does not have the experts, or does not support the specific technology.

?

Originally U++ only wanted to have one cloud platform and required all other agencies to use this common platform. This was of course rejected by most agencies. I did a few rounds of engagements and workshops with U++ to convince them that a government typically needs three cloud platforms: Public Services, Administration and Security. Where the data and services reside depends on the data security, privacy and sovereignty. And who to build and operate the three cloud platforms depend on the requirements on the data center's physical security, physical isolation, personnel's security clearance, etc.

?

U++ agreed with my concept, recognized itself as the Administration Cloud provider, and more importantly gave other agencies the choice to use Public Services Cloud, and even build and operate their own Security Cloud. The Department of Labor of this country is now using Huawei Cloud (we have an availability zone in this country) as its Public Services Cloud. Last year, the National Police of this country also contracted us to implement its Security Cloud, and chose U++ to build and operate the cloud, of course independently from the Administration Cloud. Clearly, all these successes were only possible by various experts, both from the Enterprise Business and Cloud business unit.

Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man to Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime

While knowledge can be learnt, experience has to be earned by oneself. In life, for every new thing, we have to go through this process: we do not know what we do not know; we know what we do not know; and we know what we know. Operating in a very competitive world environment, we need to move through this process quickly. This is why internal enablement, especially strategic reserve training (this is a structured program where staff are put through an intensive reskilling period to get him or her ready for the next appointment), is crucial for our business. We need a systematic structure to enable all kinds of experts at all levels quickly. While experienced experts may not be able to pass down all his knowledge, and especially experience, to the younger experts, we can at least let the younger experts realize what they do not know, and guide them to seek their own answers, especially when the public sector business in two different countries may be very different.

In this real world, an academic-driven training is not sufficient. We need to throw in scenarios with realistic problems for different experts to work out their approach and solutions. Their final output may even be applicable to the real business scenarios they are dealing with. Such trainings and simulations also allow the experts to network with one another, to realize each other’s strengths, to respect their differences, and to be a formidable team! The title of this article is “The Strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the Strength of the Wolf is the Pack”; even the wolves in a pack play different roles: Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Omega.

?

Thank you for taking your precious time to read this 8th anniversary article. Whatever I said is purely my personal opinion and is based on my nearly four decades of experience in the public sector, from an end user to a vendor in the global markets. I would like to leave behind two quotes:

“I can do things you cannot, you can do things I cannot; together we can do great things.” ~ Mother Teresa        

“Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.” ~ Stephen Covey        

(Huawei employee can view a fuller article on internal 3MS)