SKILL BUILDER

IBM Asia Pacific chief Harriet Green wants to help ensure no one is left behind in the new digital future.

For a person with a world-class list of accomplishments and awards, Harriet Green is refreshingly humble. And on hearing the passion in her voice when she talks about education, I could not help but be inspired by her words. “There aren’t too many things, I think, that each citizen, each individual, should have a right to but protection, a job and certainly, skills,” the head of IBM in Asia Pacific tells Asia Focus.

Much of Ms Green’s focus since joining IBM in 2015 has been on ensuring that the people who work for the multinational technology company have the skills they need for the new world of work. At the same time, IBM is working with other businesses around the world to create opportunities for their people to learn more.

One of her first roles at IBM was as head of the company’s Internet of Things and education businesses. She approached the task with the belief that as individuals, “we should try and get the skills that the world needs”.

“They don’t all have to be high-tech,” she says, while acknowledging the challenges involved in reskilling to create opportunities for everyone in an era dominated by digital transformation.

“Governments, boards really have to link skills and inclusion. You cannot have, in this new era of technology, this new era of disruption, those who have and those who have not.”

Here in Thailand, IBM has joined forces with two major employers — Advanced Info Service and Minor International — to build a “new collar” workforce through its P-TECH school model (Pathways in Technology Early College High School).

The aim of the project is to collaborate to ease shortages in the information technology (IT) and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) workforce, and prepare students for new job opportunities in the telecoms and hospitality industries. Apart from Thailand, IBM also has P-TECH schools in Australia and New Zealand.

But education is not the only passion of the British-born executive, who has led business transformations on four continents across various industries including technology, logistics, travel and consumer goods.

SOLVING PROBLEMS

Even though Ms Green was inducted into the Women in IT Hall of Fame in 2016 and was awarded first place on the Onaltytica list of the Top Female IoT Influencers of 2017, the educational path she originally pursued — mediaeval studies — was about as far from the world of technology as it is possible to get.

“The British educational system, right or wrong, encourages you to study what you might have a passion for, not what you might necessarily get a job at,” she says.

“You have a lot of people who studied what they are interested in, and mediaeval history in Britain, and in Europe, means there is a lot of original documentation.”

She enjoyed studying Latin in school, which she describes as “slightly forensic and interesting”. But she came to realise that her passion for the past had not prepared her much for future endeavours, except for teaching or work for the BBC, which she did not believe she would be very good at. She needed skills that the world needed, she concluded.

“I didn’t think the world would need that many mediaeval historians” she says with a smile.

With that in mind, Ms Green enrolled in the London School of Economics and Political Science for post-graduate studies in business psychology, and then followed up at Harvard Business School with various courses including strategy, leadership and finance.

Upon graduating, she joined UK-based Arrow Electronics, where she undertook various roles on four continents. What she learned from her 13 years of experience there was the value of pursuing solutions.

“The things that are helping to solve the world’s problems, new ways of thinking about old issues, are strategy, technology and people, who play a huge part in that,” she believes.

As an example, she points to the way businesses are becoming overwhelmed by data, and need better ways to store and access it. They can store it in the cloud but many worry about security. They can improve security by creating more storage in-house, but the cost could be prohibitive.

That’s where the hybrid cloud comes it. It is a platform for applications and infrastructure, built on two or more components from the public cloud, the private cloud and on-premises IT infrastructure.

According to IBM, hybrid cloud allows businesses to move away from a “onecloud-fits-all” model and toward a model that selects the right service based on each business unit’s needs.

For example, developers in one business unit may find a public cloud service that is a good match for the task at hand. Another unit may have experience with a different public cloud.

Blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) are other areas where IBM is looking for more applications that solve real-world needs.

“AI is beginning to scale their experiments, particularly into HR (human resources) with some of the financial services businesses here [in Asia Pacific],” says Ms Green.

“These are all a combination of technology with people, with very smart solutions but with good tech. There are way too many technologies that aren’t good that the world is talking about, so how we put good tech to work is very exciting.”

THE SHIFT

Throughout her years in the electronics and technology industries, Ms Green has observed an “extraordinary shift” brought on by the semiconductor revolution and the exponential growth in computing power.

“Looking at Moore’s Law and what that’s done for the transformation of industries, and then you see Metcalfe’s Law with some of the early collaboration and networking capabilities through some of those early e-commerce businesses and networking businesses, has that been good for society? Has that benefitted more than just a few companies that are involved?” she asks rhetorically.

“And now with Watson’s Law and how AI can really scale to do good, everyone’s role, every single role will be affected by AI.”

Ms Green’s comments echo those of IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, who said in May last year that AI will provide the world with a third moment of “exponential impact” to rival that of Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law.

Moore’s Law posits that processing speeds would double every 18 months, which has led to the automation of everything that we now know. Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system, which gave rise to platform companies such as Facebook and Google.

But Ms Green believes there is another “exponential impact” coming, as data combined with AI will enable “exponential learning” that allows companies and people to “outlearn” other companies and people. Ms Rometty dubbed this “Watson’s Law”, named for the visionary IBM executive Thomas Watson, exemplifying how AI developed by the company was being used to help companies and society “outlearn” others.

As these new waves of change gather momentum, Ms Green believes it is now more important than ever to help educate people about what is coming and how they can prepare to grow and even thrive.

“We need to educate, retrain, reskill and recreate these blue-collar roles, which is the responsibility of all of us, so that … there are more haves than have-nots of technology,” she says.

In Asia, examples of companies that are using new technology to outlearn others are FreshTurf in Singapore, which is creating trust and reducing friction in the final mile of delivery by making use of delivery and pickup lockers where customers can retrieve packages ordered online. It worked with IBM to create a secure way of making the lockers available to any delivery company wishing to use them. It is basically the Uber of delivery lockers.

In Australia, Westpac is the first major bank globally to implement a fully integrated hybrid cloud. In Thailand, the sugar producer Mitr Phol has piloted a dashboard and mobile application to enable experts to monitor crop health, soil moisture, pest and disease infestation risk, expected yields and the commercial cane sugar index. This is all obtained by analysing weather data from The Weather Company and using industry-leading AI, IoT and analytics capabilities.

“One of my favourites is Pacific International Lines adopting a blockchain so that the bills of lading when all the ships come in are all connected to technologies, so that something which used to take 28 days to process, now takes seconds,” says Ms Green.

Looking at the bigger picture, Ms Green believes the IT industry has a crucial role to play in ensuring that countries and economies can take maximum advantage of the technologies and talents available.

“Since the IT market here [in Asia Pacific] is kind of rich, the challenge is how do we skill people so that countries like Thailand continue to be competitive,” she says.

‘COGNITIVE BUILD’

One approach IBM uses to scale AI experimentation and to reskill an entire workforce is called the “cognitive build”. Essentially, everyone inside the company can form any kind of team they want, in order to come up with a cognitive capability that they can subsequently scale up and apply more broadly.

“It is our cognitive platform where all of us can learn the skills to be able to help clients with their cognitive enterprise, which in simple terms means, how do they digitise?” she explains.

“How do they help their people become digitally enabled? How do they make processes more efficient? And how do they match and develop skills since not all of us can become machine learning engineers.”

One major Asian market that excites Ms Green is India, which has experienced “extraordinary disruption” in financial services through digital warehousing and very advanced analytics.

From 1965 to 2014, India added 14 new banks while in last three years, it has added 21 new banks and many more non-banking players. As a result, 80% of Indians today have at least one bank account compared to only 50% in 2014.

“India is providing agri-loans and microloans for farmers so that they can quickly and effectively borrow, not necessarily using a smartphone, to stop the loan sharks that had crippled certain regions, and we could be using that here in Thailand,” she observes.

Today, there are at least 10 banks in India where people can open a savings account in less than 5 minutes.

Then there is YONO (You Only Need One), the super-app offered by State Bank of India, which offers access to a variety of financial and other services including taxi bookings, online shopping or medical bill payments. People can open a YONO account digitally, buy mutual funds, car insurance and even fashion products thanks to more than 100 partners that are linked to the app.

India holds a special place in Ms Green’s heart since it was the first Asian country she ever visited. The colour and diversity left a lasting impression. Since then she has lived in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taiwan and now she is a resident of Singapore.

“I think there are more similarities than there are differences in Asia — the energy, the can-do spirit, it’s like an entire family of extraordinary teenagers,” she says.

Having also had a house in Phuket since 2005, acquired not long after the tsunami, Ms Green has seen the very best of people on display at times of crisis in Thailand, Sri Lanka and India. She and her family are looking to be in Asia for a long time as she pursues her professional mission to help convert the region’s “positivity” into “skills and competitiveness”.

I think there are more similarities than there are differences in Asia — the energy, the can-do spirit — it’s like an entire family of extraordinary teenagers

We need to educate, retrain, reskill and recreate these blue-collar roles, which is the responsibility of all of us, so that … there are more haves than have-nots of technology