Willie Tan on how enterprises can develop strategies in the new normal

The senior solution architect in OutSystems is one of the speakers at the Accelerating Digital Innovation and Resilience during the New Normal and Beyond webinar.

Willie Tan, senior solution architect in OutSystems, is an experienced IT practitioner, has been working in the IT industry for more than 15 years. In addition, Willie has vast experience in the IT software business, and in-depth knowledge of the Asia Pacific IT landscape.

As an Enterprise Architects for large organisations such as GovTech Singapore, DBS, NCS, Accenture & Fujitsu, it has provided Willie with solid IT foundation and professional practice in the government, insurance, banking and finance industries.

Today, Willie plays an important role in OutSystems as a Solution Architect. He works closely with Customers to ensure that OutSystems aligns with the roadmaps established by the enterprise architecture teams, and that it adheres to the best enterprise architecture principles.

Often, the patterns and guidance he develops become reusable in a broader enterprise architecture context by various enterprises.

Willie is one of the speakers in the Accelerating Digital Innovation and Resilience during the New Normal and Beyond webinar. In an interview with Singapore Business Review, he shares his insights on how businesses can develop new strategies for enterprise success.

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

The organisations are in 2 really obvious spectrum:

- Survival State- Digitally Transform to derive new business models to keep pace with the digital footprint expected from partners and customers. This is not effective to differentiate amongst competitors who are more evolved, but that will do for now.

- Opportunistic Mode - For larger and more agile digital enterprises, they would already be on BAU and thus now focused on investment, driving to execute new capabilities that are into the future. whilst other business try to become digital, they strive to differentiate when things pick up

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 can't say much for business strategies, but from the technical footprint point of view, it's always important to focus on customer and organisational adaptability. Driving product and services to cater to Customers is always important, but typical challenges come from flicker minded market demand and competitive landscape that drives stiff competition for organisations to follow, and differentiate. These both demand organisational agility and would benefit from building the technical architecture right to reduce technical debts you start to accumulate. Choosing the right platform, to give you all that technical insights and architectural flexibility would be critical, but we should not forget that we too cannot spend too much time dwelling in that too otherwise the need would have passed and you would start to fall behind. So we are looking at a low code with enterprise grade qualities that gives you full control on the right architectural design too.