- Hello, and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm Aley Hammer,
and today we're joined with Jacqui Visch,
the Chief Digital and Information Officer at PWC.
Jacqui, welcome to the show.
As both a partner in the financial services
consulting practice at PWC,
and the chief digital and information officer,
you hold a dual remit.
So can you give us some insights
into what digitization means for you at PWC?
- Thanks, Aley, for having me on the show.
Love the variety of topics you've covered,
and so thanks for having me today.
So what does digitization mean?
Well, you know, that's a really big question,
and the way I look at it with PWC
is the world is changing faster than ever
and bringing the unimagined new challenges,
but new opportunities.
So wearing my consulting hat,
it's really about looking at the world
from many different angles,
new ways of working, new approaches,
and new solutions for a new day.
So thinking about the future of work and what does it mean,
the work types, the workforce, the workplaces,
and the integrated nature of all of those things.
Digital acumen, digital literacy,
and those digital communities,
which I know is such a big passion of AWS
as well as our own.
And then trust in society
and those data driven decision making concepts.
And it's all encompassing in automation,
shift left, artificial intelligence,
and so much around both the ways of working,
but then the approaches.
Agile, integrated solutions,
and really about driving standardization
in your operating model
and the way you do your work.
So, you know, some would say standardization is your friend
and complexity is your enemy.
How do you bring that into the thoughts
and the behaviors of your workforce?
And then ultimately, solutions.
Those solutions are what brings digital
into an organization.
So human led, but tech powered solutions
is what it's all about.
And I can go on for a long time
around all the different options there,
whether it's digital humans, digital twins,
artificial intelligence,
but it's how you think about those strategically
to line up to your business strategy
and bring the best of both digital
and human into your organization.
The other element I just touched on briefly
is as wearing my chief digital information officer hat
within the PWC firm,
it's fundamentally about delivering
those secure tech enabled services
to enable all of our employees to really innovate,
solve client problems,
and really deliver those amazing digital experiences.
So we've got a great foundation in which to build upon.
You start where you are
and really mapping out your journey from where you are.
And one of the backdrops
of sort of really creating that ecosystem
is getting the ground roots up
and forming what we call a people counselor
or a technology people counselor
who've been really instrumental
in driving both the foresight in digital,
the ways of working,
and that employee experience.
So broad church,
but hopefully that gathered up quite a bit for you.
- Thanks, Jacqui.
So many different threads there.
And I'm so interested in your digital skilling program
and your digital communities, as you mentioned.
So what mechanisms does PWC use
to leverage skills across the globe,
across lines of business,
and also just for your customers?
- Yeah, no, that's a great question.
And I think one of the things at the heart of PWC
is really around the citizen-led.
Everything is really how do we get the tools
in the hands of all of our employees
to do the best they can with those digital tools?
And so some of the examples that we have is a digital lab
where people can go and and create solutions
and then share those assets,
whether there's visualizations, automations,
and ways in which to do the work.
And that's really been built upon a program
called our digital accelerators.
So these people are across all of our lines of service
and they're given the tools, and the skills,
and the kit bag in order to move both their own skilling,
but also that of the firm,
and really create a step change for the organization.
And we create these little communities.
Like just recently,
I created the data village within PWC Australia,
which are bringing together all of our data experts
in the firm.
You know, think assurance, think financial advisory,
think consulting and all those brilliant minds
that we have both in Australia and globally.
And then we curate and share ideas,
and make sure that it's really around collaboration
and community.
And then I couldn't go past without saying skilling,
whether it's deep tech skilling through, say,
cloud certifications,
or whether it's more the human centered
ways of working in interpretation,
those things are really core and center to our strategy
and to the evolution of making ourselves
future fit employees,
and being ready for what's next.
- Well, as the community lead at AWS,
I just love all these communities
and villages that you created.
So it's really incredible.
Well done.
And earlier, you mentioned the digital operation models,
so I'm curious to understand what this means
and the new delivery models within the cloud for you guys.
- Yes, yes.
And, oh, thanks for that question.
Now, you know,
I'm sometimes called a cloud nerd
and my experience with cloud started back in 2014
in financial services.
And if I think back to those days,
it was much more of private clouds
and all these overlays of security tooling.
And it took you like seven,
12 months to get anything stood up,
like a platform stood up before you deployed workloads.
Fast forward 2017, public cloud is the norm.
AWS has got all of those services integrated into its,
natively into its platform.
And we are talking three to five months
to deploy a robust platform for highly protected workloads.
'21, '22, you know,
we're talking weeks to deploy a fully fledged platform
with all those services.
So if I just took back those three horizons
that I've personally been through,
the operating model,
and what are the people, processes, tools, technology,
and governance that's required
within those different horizons was very different.
And so my guidance to everybody
that I talked to around cloud operating models
is being really clear on what is your headquarters,
what is the thing that you wanna be known for?
You know, is it adoption?
Is it consumption?
Is it secure by design?
What are the things that are really gonna stand you apart
to get really accelerated delivery
of your infrastructure or your platforms?
And then it's also being conscious of the processes
in order to build a memory muscle,
and that sort of digital spine in your organization
so that you continually evolve with the pace
that companies like AWS are going at
with all of their new tech cloud features.
So just top of mind is the service design processes,
the workload placement processes,
privacy by design, controlled self assessments,
and all of those things.
So again, it's about the people,
those humans, those roles
that are in your target operating model,
the processes that underpin a really mature
and native public cloud platform,
the tools, the technology,
and then the governance to make sure
you've got the right workloads in the right place,
doing the right thing for the right time.
- Jacqui, thank you so much for sharing.
And as we wrap up for today,
are there any final thoughts that you'd like to share
in your journey in the cloud?
- Look, executive sponsorship and alignment, number one.
Gotta get everyone to understand the why.
Define and demonstrate that culture you desire.
You as the leader need to demonstrate that culture.
And then democratize as much as you can do
within guardrails to keep the trains on the track
at the end of the day.
Our engineers are king and we need to give them the tools,
the capabilities to do fantastic work,
but keeping those trains on the track.
Keep learning, evolving, and adopting,
and celebrate your successes.
So again, you know, the world is our oyster
as we think about cloud, cloud operating models,
digital, digital acumen,
but it's really making sure
that we're not creating a digital divide,
that we're really helping our whole society understand,
and work towards,
and to get the best use
out of all these amazing technologies.
- Jacqui, thank you so much.
It is such an honor to speak with you.
I mean, the partnership between AWS
and PWC is such a special one.
We really value your input and thank you so much.
If anyone has any questions,
please pop them in the comments section below
and we'll get back to you.
Thanks so much, Jacqui.