“Digital Transformation has become vital to many enterprise CIOs. It’s all about the adoption of emerging technologies in helping the companies to reimagine their business model and improve their business performance. Be it to generate more revenue or to optimize their operational effectiveness and efficiency in order to stay competitive and sustainable in this fast-changing digital era.” Ted Suen, Chief Information Officer, MTR Corporation
In this first episode of Business on Air, we are delighted to invite Ted Suen, CIO of MTR Corporation to share the company’s digital transformation strategy, and what it has meant for its 40,000 dedicated staff globally. In a world of constant change and disruption, the MTR understands that technology is key to its advancement.
As Hong Kong’s key railway operator and one of the International leading railway operations, the MTR has always been a technological pioneer. Its innovations stretch from the early use of air conditioning and electricity in trains to the implementation of the Octopus payment system. Innovation is in the company’s DNA.
Learn about how to:
- Unleash flexible innovation in a safe environment
- Empower employees through virtual communication
- Improve customer experience with proactive innovations
In this episode, Ted tells us more about MTR’s Digital Workplace Initiative and how it has played an important role in empowering their employees and supporting their corporate digital transformation strategy.
In our podcast interview, he shared MTR’s approach to digital transformation:
“If we look at how we start the digital transformation initiatives. Actually, we can look into different dimensions. First of all, we look into how we can help our employees to have, or to run, more effective meetings or events by using different emerging technologies. Secondly, how we can provide an environment to help us and employees to create a much better innovative environment. Thirdly, it’s how we can provide a flexible working environment. Lastly, it’s providing a SMART I.T. support environment to our users, or even to our customers.”
Challenges usually come with Opportunities
“Whatever changes you make to an organization there are always challenges. People say it could be roadblocks, but I don’t think that is roadblocks. Challenges always come with opportunities. So, in MTR when we launched the Digital Workplace Initiative back in 2019, it’s a new challenge because you are rolling out something totally different, totally new to our organizations. In MTR Hong Kong, we’re talking about 18,000 to 19,000 employees, it’s definitely not an easy task to roll out something totally different. But because of the COVID-19, it gave us a golden opportunity to launch the Digital Workplace Initiatives.”
From the start, executive leadership and a change program were identified as keys to success:
“In MTR we have a program that engages. First, our senior executive, executive support is crucial to any major changes to the organizations. Executive will be the role model, so when we roll out something new, they should be the first group of people to use the new technology to adopt or embrace the changes and be the role model. Second, we also have to engage our users and ask them to get involved.
When we implement this at the very beginning, we know that we have to have a change program. But Digital Technologies is also a new thing, right? So, we look at the change program, then we think about ‘Are we going to use the traditional change program, just like user training forum?’ No, that is not the perfect change program, so we worked with consultants to implement a new change program which includes like gamification, and design thinking workshop, because we also need to understand what they really want to use, or what they really want to get from the digital initiatives.”
Listen to our podcast for the full interview.
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