BrazilDeloitte assists Singapore ITC and media authority with Services 4.0 agenda
Deloitte’s strategy consulting wing Monitor Deloitte has supported Singapore’s Info-communications Media Development Authority with its Services 4.0 strategy roadmap.
Singapore’s Info-communications Media Development Authority (IMDA) is a statutory board of the Singaporean government tasked with developing and regulating the local and converging information communications and media sectors, both promoting enterprise and safeguarding consumer interests, especially with respect to the growing issue of personal data protection.
As part of the agency’s mandate, the IMDA aims to develop the nation’s services sector through the embrace of rapidly emerging technologies, otherwise known as Services 4.0 and seen as a key driver for growth in Singapore’s digital economy. To support its transformation efforts, the IMDA has enlisted the help of Deloitte’s strategy consulting wing Monitor Deloitte, since releasing a future of services roadmap.
“We are honoured to support IMDA in this important and ambitious agenda,” said Mohit Mehrotra, Strategy Consulting Co-Leader for Deloitte Asia Pacific. “Emerging technologies and their associated trends can bring about new value creation in the economy, and cause disruption to current businesses. It is, therefore, becoming necessary for organisations to reimagine the way they deliver services, conduct their business and interact with their customers.”
The Services and Digital Economy Technology Roadmap (SDE TRM) identifies nine key technological trends and their expected impact in the coming three to five years, with the services sector – according to the agency accounting for 72 percent of Singapore’s GDP and 74 percent of its national employment in 2016 – seen as both the most heavily impacted and greatest potential growth engine.
The ‘next step’ in the evolution of the services industry, the concept of Services 4.0 is one of digital-supported seamless delivery – ‘services that are end-to-end, frictionless, anticipatory, and empathic’ – moving on from the current mobile-enable 3.0 model of self-service, and the earlier developments and incarnations of service surrounding internet-driven efficiency and a prior manual-based system enabled by tools.
As part of its support as an IMDA knowledge partner to assist the agency in envisioning a Services 4.0 concept and strategy, Monitor Deloitte conducted a study of the role of emerging technologies in the services economy landscape on changing customer needs, service delivery models and the ICM ecosystem, recommending that the latter work together with service providers “to create a new paradigm of technology development, deployment and adoption based on the principles of Cloud Native Architecture.”
This new paradigm, the firm says, will be able to leverage new technologies with more flexibility and ease and at lower cost while enabling new products to be brought to market and scale faster. Here, Services 4.0 concerns not just business to consumer services, but business to business transactions such as logistics, intra-business functions such as in human resources and finance, as well as the workers themselves.
“It envisions an ecosystem that allows machines to augment workers’ performance by automating certain repetitive parts of the tasks and enables, via intelligent machines, workers to focus on more ‘human’ aspects such as creativity, critical and analytical thinking, emotional intelligence and innovation,” the firm states. “This will in turn encourage workers to adopt new skills, to work with emerging technologies seamlessly and to focus on jobs that generate higher value.”
Mehrotra concludes: “In an increasingly technology enabled world, the big shifts in the client, regulatory and capability ecosystems are creating interesting opportunities and challenges for businesses. Singapore, through its Services 4.0 vision, has recognised the associated opportunities and risks. This move will help Singapore strengthen the ecosystem, accelerate the transformation of businesses and workforce, and deliver the ambition towards becoming a leading services and digital economy.”
