Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

The CxO Five for Five is Disruptive Tech Asia’s (DTA) exclusive interview series where we ask Chief Executives around the ASEAN region to answer rapid-fire questions on everything technology-related.

This week’s Five for Five features an interview with Ng May Ching, Chief Information Officer at Maxis Berhad. May Ching is in charge of Maxis’ Digital, Data and Analytics, Cybersecurity, and the development, implementation, and operation of IT function, Digital, and Business IT transformation programmes.

Since joining Maxis in 2013, she has made significant contributions to business IT delivery, where she was responsible for driving product and channel development, delivering across company-wide information systems support, business support system transformation, establishing Centers of Excellence for Digital, Big Data, and Advanced Analytics, and launching Maxis’ Robotics Process Automation and Cloud practises.

Here are her takes on the questions:

1. (Crystal Ball) – Top technology that you think will transform your business in the coming years? Why?

Cloud, Edge Computing, 5G and Applied AI, enabled on software-driven networks, will allow us to provide businesses and individuals with highly personalised services and digital platforms for their day-to-day living and communications requirements.

As Malaysia’s leading converged solutions provider, we are already enabling real-time networks and services that are differentiated through these technologies. This is why we have transformed into operating as a digital-first organisation, across the IT stack and in our business processes as well as our way of work.

The delivery of these capabilities and outcomes will be in agile, digital factories where employees will collaborate and innovate using open platforms and open APIs to enable new product development and platforms to serve our customers.

2. (Out to pasture) – Technology that you think you will phase out of your business? Why?

Old technology, physical office technology and wired technology – for example, copper, 3G, cables, USBs, printers, meeting rooms and filing cabinets will likely phase out in a digital-first environment.  The legacy way of work and technology such as monolithic platforms, costly enterprise data warehouses, physical backup tapes, long development cycles will be replaced by the disruption of cloud-first, digital and mobile-first approach.

COVID-19 had also accelerated digitalisation and innovations as well as time to market, supported by the cloud and AI. The need for permanent physical spaces will also progressively be reduced with more people embracing the ability to work remotely or in a virtual or hybrid environment.

3. (Chatter Box) – Best Collaboration Tool? Why?

There are many great collaboration tools out there. Microsoft O365 suite, for example, has become the de-facto tool for us at work after the extended lockdown phases of working from home. It is a holistic tool that meets the needs of all our interactions – from meetings, file sharing and collaboration. For the first time ever, we closed our physical 24×7 network operations centre and moved online, thanks to this platform which supports our remote monitoring capabilities.

There are other good platforms like Jira and Confluence which enable an end-to-end collaboration environment with integrated dev-ops automation for our agile and development teams.

4. (Be Safe) – Biggest Cyber Security Concern? Why?

Ransomware – as much as we try to establish a cyber defence strategy, drive awareness and manage vulnerabilities, we will continue to compete with cyber threat actors. Cybersecurity is about always being on the move to counter the threats and mitigate the risks and hence needs to be job zero of every C-suite.

5. (When I grow up) – If you hadn’t gone into Tech – what would you do instead?

I always wanted to go into robotics – creating, building and developing a robot that could do all the work at home and at work, whilst I take a vacation on an island somewhere.

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