Alex Wilmot of Redcentric On How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level

Data collection — Migrating away from pen and paper in order to organize notes or specific action related details not only allows you to save valuable time on rekeying them later but also allows businesses to apply digital processes to them immediately on entering the system, whether that’s driving an action, protecting the information in a specified or governed manner. Do you really need to collect the data yourself or can you utilize an automated response to collect data, translate it into your systems and make it available to a skilled person to make use of?

As part of our series about “How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alex Wilmot.

Alex Wilmot was appointed Solutions Director at Redcentric in October 2018 following 15 years of senior management appointments across the UK Managed Service Provider market. Alex has held multiple positions throughout this period advising customers on the digital transformation of their business with a view to achieving tangible business outcomes.

Currently responsible for technical architecture and service design in a pre sales capacity, Alex is also responsible for translating & developing customer and market requirements into Redcentric’s product & service portfolio and aligning our go to market messaging in tandem with the sales & marketing leadership.

Previously Pre Sales Director at ICM Computer Group Ltd and then Phoenix IT Services Plc; Alex assisted in its growth & direction until its purchase by Daisy Group in 2015 and continued on in that capacity in the wider group until his move to Redcentric.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I don’t know whether this is classic genetics at work but I’m actually a twin and my sister was the ‘arty’ one and I was exactly the opposite! I had a strong interest in technology from an early age so it made my educational choices very straightforward through school. There was a fork in the road in my late teens, civil engineering lay one way, computing the other, but the latter was far more ‘me’, and so began years of higher education study and then my first job with a service provider in Leeds. That was a truly formative period as I was able to start seeing technology from a business perspective for the first time, and not just as a consumer user. Working progressively from first line support through to third line provided an exceptional grounding in the realities and potential of IT, through technical, operational, business and even cultural lenses. I really immersed myself in it, working long shifts, studying for my Microsoft qualifications in any free time, I was this happy sponge and just absorbed as much as I could! Looking back I think this appetite was noticed and I was certainly encouraged to push on by my bosses. I moved into more consultative customer-facing work around their strategic direction, which in turn led to a switch into service design, then solutions architect and pre-sales consultancy roles — and every bit of learning from every one of those roles has stayed with me and supports me in my work today.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

It was one of my first ever customer visits and I was pretty nervous but I’d been planning both the approach and the presentation and was really happy and excited to be out and about visiting a customer. I’d gotten up early, suit on, breakfast and coffee and set off with plenty of time to spare. I got to the customer’s car park with about 30 mins to spare and called the account manager to let him know we could meet early since he was local to them. He was delighted to hear I was early… a full day early… I’d misread my diary and the account manager was graceful enough not to mention it to the customer. Lessons learned? Always doublecheck your diary — and be discreet about your colleagues’ ‘mistakes’ !

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

There are two notable ones, one that helped shape the early part of my career, and another the later part. So the first was Martin O’Donnell, who brought me across into the solution architecture/pre-sales world. Martin was the MD of a business unit in the company I was then working in, and we were sat in the same meeting with a key client. He approached me afterwards and asked whether I had ever thought about moving to pre-sales consultancy. It was very gratifying to hear how he’d been impressed with my knowledge and how I’d handled the customer, and when you’re still really finding your way, that sort of affirmation from a senior colleague was an amazing feeling. I made the move and that really was the catalyst for my career in digital transformation, coming just as it did in those early days of data centres and infrastructure as a service hosting and giving me so much exposure to change and opportunity.

The second was David Jones, who similar to Martin, spotted something in me and gave me not just more belief in my abilities but new challenges too, which I’ve always been hungry for. And while I know I’m a driven person, I know too the value of a sound and sage guide and David was a brilliant mentor. He exposed me to so much and that really helped round me out as a manager as well as an advisor, and ultimately he helped shape me as a person. In particular, he equipped me with an invaluable understanding of risk — how to evaluate it, how not to be afraid of it, how to factor it into decision-making, and why you should be comfortable with the idea of ‘failing fast’. It resonated so much that I just absorbed it into my way of working and that legacy can be seen in pretty much every engagement and project I do.

Extensive research suggests that “purpose driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?

Redcentric has had a defining purpose for many years and it’s been a brilliantly effective way of orienting the business to deliver more effectively. It has changed once over the past 15 years: initially we ran with a ‘Business Technology. Managed’ position which suited the early days of data centre hosting and XaaS when organisations were dealing with a lot that was new and uncertain. But in recent years we’ve enshrined everything we do in an ‘Agile. Available. Assured’ statement, that even sits as part of our corporate identity now. We wanted to really home in on what mattered to our customers, and what we needed our tech offer to be to deliver for all their desired outcomes. That ‘A’ trinity is our touchstone or yardstick that everyone understands — if what we propose or what we do doesn’t meet one or more of those qualities, then we have to question it. It helps make us a really tightly focused, very value-driven service provider.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

The Phoenix Project. I’ve read it a few times now and always take something from it. It charts a company’s move to agile and there are all the characters and personality types that you can see reflected in not just your own business but in client organizations too: from those with an instinctive fear of change or defensiveness of their fiefdoms to those whose limited experience makes them hesitant. Given that project success is only partly about the tech and mainly about clearing the hurdles of organizational culture and individual psychology, it’s proved a brilliant ‘handbook’ on quite a few occasions as it’s given me actionable insights and strategies that I deploy to good effect.

Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?

Technology has had a good pandemic. It’s been people’s friend and enabler, it’s kept organizations functioning at a pretty high level considering the dislocation that went on. And as a result, there seems an even keener appetite now for hyper automation to create more efficiencies and a better utilization of resources and staff. By forcing organizations into an element of change, to adopt solutions at speed, this has shifted a change in their business and mindset on digital transformation. For example, we are working closely with a number of health organizations who want to get more for the budget buck by reducing the time taken for their GP consultations — without any patient compromise. If a doctor could save, say, 20 minutes at each consult, that’s a lot of cumulative time to put back into patient care. So we have projects looking at how technology, data and process can come together to deliver those savings: equipping doctors with the connectivity, the device and the single record at the bedside that allows them to manage every clinical action and administrative function in one frictionless environment.

For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly Digital Transformation means? On a practical level what does it look like to engage in a Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is the adoption of technology or services to replace non-digital or manual processes in order to achieve a more efficient replicable outcome whilst mitigating risk. Organizations typically take something they have done or the capability to do and implement or supplement it with technology or other services in order to automate or make it more efficient to remove human error and quicken the response.

It would be easy to see digital transformation at a practical level viewed purely through a tech lens but for me it starts way, way before the first tech element. The work starts with conversation and collaboration, all the associated stakeholders coming together to own the situation, to acknowledge and accept the problems but then identify and embrace the opportunities — and above all to be able to articulate all that persuasively to the wider business and keep them engaged in the process. I mentioned earlier a natural resistance to change and emotional defensiveness militating against progress and you have to have a pragmatic plan for dealing with a human-centred transformation, just as much as you need a detailed roadmap for a technological one.

Which companies can most benefit from a Digital Transformation?

All businesses can potentially benefit from digital transformation; it varies depending on the amount of transformation they can undertake. The question really should be: how will you benefit from it? There has to be a positive outcome from the endeavour, either an efficiency or cost reward, a value or tangible outcome such as speed, quality, security, capability or continuity; understanding which processes may be improved from implementing a change and then understanding the costs associated with that. Digital transformation is predicated on that cost vs value equation. If you can do something quicker to a higher level of quality, that is replicable, it adds an edge into your business in terms of continuity.

In your experience, how has Digital Transformation helped improve operations, processes and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.

I’ve got a couple of examples. One harks back to the early days of digital transformation and we were working with a medium sized pensions business who had an ambition to merge with or be acquired by a much larger partner. They had some unique IP and an interesting approach to the sector — but the way their infrastructure was set up, the way they handled data and ran a lot of their processes, all of it was quite deeply flawed and the scale of inefficiency certainly made them a less attractive proposition. We started a three-year project to address the fundamental issues, which resulted in a double whammy — a modernized, reengineered backend and a client IT team liberated to focus on higher value, front end initiatives that were all geared around optimization — how do we do x and y better? Halfway through year three they had a really performant environment and super slick processes in play — and an offer to merge from the Prudential, which they duly did.

The second is more recent and is a reminder that companies were making massive online bets and digital shifts way before Covid arrived. This was a motor vehicle trader that sold stock via conventional physical auctions all across the UK — but decided to completely remodel and transform its whole operating model. In effect, it mapped out and mirrored online everything that a buyer could do in person — register interest, look at the vehicle, compare vehicles, make bids, make payments etc. No-one had to travel, no auction space needed to be paid for, auctions themselves didn’t have to play out in real time, and of course, come lockdown, they’re one of the few traders that have been able to stay trading throughout. I don’t think they had ‘pandemic protection’ on their business case for digital transformation but it was a perfect inoculation against the commercial ravages of Covid, that’s for sure.

Has integrating Digital Transformation been a challenging process for some companies? What are the challenges? How do you help resolve them?

Change is always going to be challenging — we’re hard wired as humans not to be great with change. And so often success or failure in digital transformation projects is nothing to do with the technology or process elements and everything to do with the culture, group dynamics and individual attitudes. For every change agent, someone who is happy to take a sacred cow and ask ‘yes, but can we make it even better?’, there’ll be several blockers happy to exonerate themselves with a ‘If it’s not broken, why fix it?’ attitude. To be able to push on and be better, achieve more, you need to ensure three things at the very least. First, that the project is a top-down endeavour, not just with main board sponsorship but championed by the CEO. Theirs should be the unifying voice, the one that cuts across and breaks down working silos, the one that everyone is answerable to. Secondly, that you communicate, keep communicating and communicate some more. Projects can often be a test of endurance so make sure you’re sharing quick wins, get that positive reinforcement early on — and keep the dialogue going, listen as well as broadcast. Thirdly, that you align the targeted mission outcomes with people’s success objectives ie there’s got to be something in it for them. If delivering Project A gets them ticks on their scorecard — and consequential financial or career development benefits — then you have a better chance of forging that united collective that will bring the project home successfully.

Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Use Digital Transformation To Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.

1) Data collection — Migrating away from pen and paper in order to organize notes or specific action related details not only allows you to save valuable time on rekeying them later but also allows businesses to apply digital processes to them immediately on entering the system, whether that’s driving an action, protecting the information in a specified or governed manner. Do you really need to collect the data yourself or can you utilize an automated response to collect data, translate it into your systems and make it available to a skilled person to make use of?

2) Application Integration — Disparate systems only drive inefficiency. Getting application B to speak to application A can save time on repeatable engagements. Recently we worked with a local clinical commissioning group (CCG) to connect their patient record system to their phone system. Upon receipt of a call the records are automatically retrieved based on the incoming number stored in them. It doesn’t sound a lot but marginal gains add up across hundreds of appointment across hundreds of clinicians to a significant overall time saving, increasing efficiency across the CCG.

3) Cost efficiency — Why pay for something you don’t use? We work with customers every day who have previously purchased dedicated hardware for building and developing their products. Virtualising the workloads and applications, understanding usage periods and automating availability and scale of the platform can drastically change its cost profile and alter the return on the investment you make. If you only have 20% of your workforce working in a different time zone or out of hours, do you need to run the platform to cater for the other 80%? If you develop different products do you need all the different environments running for it all the time at 100% of the resources allocated or can you scale as demand requires it? Working in Public Cloud with our customers we’ve been able to automate these processes to enable more cost-effective application access, furthering that with platform-based services where you only pay for what you need rather that everything an application offers.

4) Automate Processes — The most general use case available for Digital Transformation is to take a manual, labour intensive process and automate it. This generally starts by documenting the process and understanding the manual repeatable elements of it and any variables along the way. That step-by-step process is digitized one step at a time utilizing code or functions to take inputs and deliver the output for the next step. You might flavour each process to deliver a certain size or type of output and essentially collate multiple versions of the same process as runbooks. In our business this is applied to building customer environments and has reduced manual input by as much as 70% to build customer network or server infrastructure.

5) Data Analysis — Fluidly being able to connect data sets together and apply analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning to it is much easier if your infrastructure is transformed. Taking data from your CRM, geographic voice records, AI driven emotive analytics on your voice calls and sales campaign data can drive specific insights which were very cost-prohibitive previously to achieve, for example, showing what demographic per geographic regions responded most or least positively to a sales calling campaign from your teams.

In your opinion, how can companies best create a “culture of innovation” in order to create new competitive advantages?

I go back to something I mentioned earlier and that’s the importance of linking reward mechanisms to suggesting, championing and driving through innovation. You need to help people to break out of the known, the safe, the comfortable; to make it known that good ideas are not the preserve of senior leadership but can come from anywhere; that you are receptive to everything and there are no bad ideas. From a pure tech perspective, you have younger generations using IT in their personal lives that far outstrips most business IT and that’s creating a wellspring of fresh thinking that can flow back into an organization. Temper that with the experience of older generations around implementations and broader business knowhow and you have a good basis for making a success of innovation. Plus, don’t be afraid to try stuff — if you fail, fail fast, move on, learn from it but don’t obsess about it. In the same way we’re not good with change, we don’t do failure well either, but you have to be willing to experiment. Failing doesn’t mean we did something wrong, it just wasn’t right at that time or in that situation — there’s a difference.

Can you please give us your favourite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

George Bernard Shaw said this but for me I’ve lived it, if you fight change you will be crushed eventually by the weight of it, if you can learn and adapt then it’s much easier to progress. Working with large teams of people I’ve always concentrated on the cultural aspect of change and understanding why people don’t want to change a process, a system or a business. Moving those people from blocker to enabler has always contributed to the success of what I’m trying to deliver or achieve which in turn helps me succeed.

Thank you for these great insights.