Sivan Umapathy, Telekom Malaysia's CIO, highlights the company's vision of a "lean, mean and clean" Group IT & Digital organization and his role in helping to achieve that via “simple, standard and stable” principles. How would you describe your organization’s enterprise-wide digital transformation strategy?
Telekom Malaysia (TM)’s long term strategy is to become a fully converged national telecommunications infrastructure provider for 5G. From 2020 to 2022, we will be going back to basics to fix issues in IT, network, processes and go-to-market plans, while increasing revenue and sales. We have to get our foundation right and strong as we build a better TM, working towards our aspiration of enabling a ‘Digital Malaysia’.
What targets does your organization have to guide this strategy?
Over the next three years, our focus will be on having the right tech talent, having the right products and portfolio, and establishing a modern network & IT system. Ultimately, this will enable to us to provide the best customer experience to our customers from all segments.
How does TM Forum help you to achieve your digital transformation objectives?
We look to TM Forum as a trusted partner and reference point in providing a collaborative environment to support our transformation in business operations, IT systems and ecosystems. Recently we collaborated on the Single Network Inventory project, part of our operating support system transformation.
What’s the biggest ‘win’ you’ve achieved so far?
We have successfully transformed our Group IT & Digital organization in TM to become a data-driven service house with strong pillars of Innovation, Digital, Analytics and Process. The transformation is aimed towards being "lean, mean and clean" via "simple, standard and stable" principles.
What are the biggest challenges you face in achieving your digital transformation aims?
- Laggard and legacy systems and business models
- Data deluge and analytics capabilities
- Omnichannel adaptation
Digital transformation is not just about changing processes and technology; it also involves a shift in organizational culture. How is your teamwork changing and what’s your role as a team leader?
Through enhanced efficiency, we successfully completed the internal transformation of Group IT & Digital within 90 days with the new leadership. This involved the taking over of major IT platforms, including the big data
Hadoop data lake and contact centre platform with 20 resources. As we envision a “lean, mean and clean” IT & Digital organization via “simple, standard and stable” principles, this has been internalized in the company culture and part of my role is to instill this shift in mindset and motivate the team to achieve their goals.
A diverse workforce is defined as one that is made up of individuals with a wide range of characteristics and experiences, such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, ability and sexual orientation. What initiatives does your company have to become a more diverse and inclusive workforce?
Collaboration is highly encouraged to bring additional innovation and maintain business momentum. We create and open opportunities for all. I practice an “open door” policy where anyone is free to discuss, throw around ideas etc. We also instil a culture of crowdsourcing of ideas and problem solving, which is then channeled through to IT demand management and centralized IT & Digital DevOps.
What are the 3 biggest changes in digital technology that the next decade will bring?
- Cloud technologies
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning
- Extended reality through IoT
What are you most looking forward to?
We look forward to fully embracing digital technology, moving towards microservices and service brokerage, as well as automating processes through robotic process automation. Transformation is a continuous cycle, it is never complete, and we need to continually evolve programs to meet customers’ dynamic and changing expectations.
What are you most concerned about?
The ares of most concern when dealing with IT and digital technology will always be risks in exposure – in terms of financial, project delivery, vendor management and cybersecurity risks.
Read our full series of interviews with digital transformation leaders from around the world, and learn more about their stories and experiences. 
