LIVE FROM OPERATIONS TRANSFORMATION FORUM 2017, HONG KONG: The Open ROADS Community (OPRC) has grown quickly since it was initiated two years ago, as more operators realise that true cross-sector collaboration is required to transform their operations and services.

Trevor Cheung, COO of Open ROADS Community, a forum dedicated to accelerating digital business transformation, noted that operators need to operate a business and run marketing and customer service, not just focus on improving their infrastructure.

“So to perform digital transformation we need different stakeholders to come together,” he said.

Operators are starting to understand that many stakeholders need to be involved. That includes people in the C-suite, marketing, customer service, HR and ultimately technology.

“We need to get all these people to talk, then it’s really a digital transformation. There’s no single community that can work on that.”

Jerry Smith, COO and Asia chairman for OgilvyRED Consulting in Asia, said one of the main reason the group is seeing growth is that across industries about 90 of companies are on some form of digital transformation.

But only about 15 per cent to 17 per cent say they have a reasonability good idea of the direction in which they need to go.

Growing fears
Smith said many businesses are showing interest because they are worried about being distributed, about competitors taking an innovative lead, and about keeping up with the way customers are changing.

Consumers are adopting OTT-type services which improve the customer experience, and many businesses fear being left behind.

“By pulling together not just the technology but the customers and the human aspects to this, we’re seeing interest in this model because it attacks the business problem from all the dynamics that are playing out,” Smith said.

“The time is right. Most people are worried that if they don’t understand the customer, their customer will leave.”

Cheung said that OPRC opened up a number of new committees and “embraced a give-and-take attitude, which encourages people to bring their problems as well as their thinking, and we work together to document those and make it a kind of best practice”.

HKT, the largest telecoms operator in Hong Kong, is on the advisory board, and the OPRC is “leveraging the HKT environment to validate these practices”, he said.

He continued:  “A major deliverable this year was publishing the Digital Mastermind. Co-created with a diverse group across industries, the Digital Mastermind is the holistic framework I’ve mentioned we require. It provides a digestible way of navigating the complex, and often times, overwhelming, digital transformation journey. The Digital Mastermind is a set of tools that takes you from goal setting to assessment and on to actions.”

“Our objective for 2017 has been to put this theory into practice. This brings me to another output. Within the Digital Mastermind is our robust assessment tool known as the Open Digital Maturity Model. We have had the opportunity to put this into practice with regional telcos such as HKT and Telkom Indonesia.”

The number of OPRC committee members increased from 32 to 51 since the end of December 2017. It has 625 online members.