OutSystems' country manager shares the trends in the digital landscape

He’ll be speaking at the upcoming Accelerating Digital Innovation and Resilience during the New Normal and Beyond webinar.

Leonard Tan, country manager of OutSystems in Singapore, has over 8 years of experience in working with enterprise customers in the APAC region, focusing mainly on the IT industry. As a thought leader in leveraging technologies to drive deep culture change in organizations, he takes pride in ensuring he tailor a solution that is relevant and crucial to all clients to help them achieve their business goals. As an advocate in relationship selling, he believes in nurture rather than touch, empathy rather than apathy.

Leonard has helmed projects to drive the adoption of OutSystems in the ecosystem, whilst ensuring he penetrates into the market to ensure customers understand the value of how low code can truly help lower barrier to entry, cost and deployment times and set organisations free from maintenance burdens.

As one of the speakers in the Accelerating Digital Innovation and Resilience during the New Normal and Beyond webinar, Singapore Business Review spoke with Leonard as he shared the trends in the digital landscape and how enterprises can improve their strategies in the new normal.

What are the trends and shifts in Asia-Pacific’s digital landscape in recent months? What changes have you observed since the pandemic?

First of all, we are seeing that employees/customer interactions have significantly changed and the uptick in the use of digital services is here to stay, even after COVID. The changes that have happened in the last 10 months are probably more than what we have seen in the past 10 years and this is really a true testament to how digital adoption has accelerated today. I have personally seen how companies have emerged stronger with the use of digital platforms to increase customer experience, whilst others focused on consolidating their many workflows that are either very paper-based, manual, or in fact, ineffective. Remote working has inevitably forced the CXOs to relook and rethink their digital strategies to ensure maximum productivity and safety of all workers. Of course in all things, is about cost control; The ability to do more, yet spend the same, if not lesser.

Secondly, the shift in technology and circumstances has caused a seismic shift in the mix of skills that is required to sustain/succeed in the labor market today. People are not just SMEs today but also take on the responsibility to innovate and re-engineer processes within their own scope of work. The Singapore government has actively pushed out initiatives to allow citizens to reskill/upskill their current skill sets, in an attempt to improve marketability and relativity in today's landscape.

How do you think businesses can develop new strategies for enterprise success? What challenges should they need to prepare for and how can they address these?

I think organisations today need to be able to understand/revisit the value chains that propel their business forward; Enhance Customer Experience, Ensuring Continual Delivery, Evaluating their current Architecture, Expand Talent Pool. Digital strategies today should never be deemed as a means to an end, rather a continual improvement and journey to achieve maximum yield and results. As a leader in the low code space, our customers understand that applications built today are not just a coding project, but a business service to all stakeholders involved. This has evolved our customers to not just being agile, but one that embraces change every step of the way.

The biggest challenge that exists today and even evident in our daily lives is managing Change; Getting comfortable in the uncomfortable. When implementing a new digital strategy or framework that fundamentally disrupts the day-to-day business, CXOs need to create a plan and buy-in from the executive team unify the organisation behind a common strategic direction and translate downwards in an effective manner to ensure effective implementation.