Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer, ENERSYS
#DAS2020 - Leveraging Intelligent Automation by Michalsky Philipp, EnerSys | SuneraTech
IntelligentAutomation #EnerSys #SuneraTech In this DAS2020 virtual session, Philipp Michalsky, Director of IT EMEA, EnerSys, ...
About Philipp Michalsky
Philipp Michalsky, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at EnerSys, has discussed the company's IT strategy, which he described as driven by the need to consolidate and harmonize a historically distributed and heterogeneous IT landscape. He stated that the role of IT has shifted from enabling business processes to automating them, with a focus on using digital assistants and AI to handle complex requests and extend services 24/7. Michalsky noted that prioritization is a key challenge and that getting a clear view on return on investment before starting initiatives has become more critical due to economic uncertainties. Michalsky said EnerSys is moving toward outcome-based engagements with partners to reduce upfront investments and ensure success through aligned goals. He mentioned that the company has worked with SuneraTech to implement digital assistants in IT service management and to reduce manual workload in areas such as regression testing. Michalsky also observed that concepts common in B2C settings, such as self-service portals, are making their way into B2B scenarios and that the current situation presents an opportunity to readjust and accelerate strategy.
Transcript (9 segments)
V
Vinay Vadi0:10
Hello everybody, welcome back to the fourth segment on the panel on leveraging intelligent automation to fundamentally change how enterprises operate and deliver value to customers. I am Vinay Vadi, CTO at Cenatech. In this segment, we will focus on IT service management transformation using intelligent automation, so let's get started. Post the pandemic, IT service ops teams and their leaders are in the middle of one of their busiest times in their careers. IT teams have been hard at work to help many first-time work from home employees get securely connected to the enterprise network. The unprecedented scale of enabling remote work and access to systems remotely has resulted in IT systems being parked down under the weight of workloads that they weren't designed for. The new normal incident queues are seeing thousands of requests being locked in across many companies waiting for resolution and response. Assuming that this would continue to be the new normal, the need for ITSM departments to transform into a proactive and resilient function has become more critical and accelerated than ever before. The use of technologies like digital assistants to promote self-service and AIOps are rapidly becoming the mainstream. However, often ITSM departments natively find themselves short when it comes to expertise required to implement and extract value out of some of these radical new technologies. So then the most important question becomes: how do we navigate these automation initiatives and what steps should we take to gain the most benefit out of that? Joining us to share some perspectives and strategies around this topic is Philip Mikalski from Enersis Corporation. Enersis is a global leader in stored energy solutions for industrial applications. Philip heads their entire IT operations across the EMEA region for Enersis. For more than 15 years, Philip has been leading IT-enabled business transformation programs across large enterprises like Accenture, Jacob Holmes, and now at Enersis, being the key influencer, the thought leader in identification and development of business process improvement opportunities using cost-effective solutions like intelligent automation using digital assistants and AIOps to address some of these opportunities. Welcome, Philip. Thank you and very glad to have you on the show.
P
Philipp Michalsky3:03
Hello, Vinay. Thanks for having me. As you said, I'm heading IT across EMEA for Enersis, but my background really is in IT-enabled business transformation, especially in the ERP and CRM space. I'm happy to be part of this conference and this new format. I hope we can have some good discussion and I'm happy to share some thoughts as part of that conversation here at the Digital X.
V
Vinay Vadi3:31
Thanks, Philip. It's always a pleasure to have a conversation with you. They are consistently power-packed with valuable insights and learning for us to take away. So let's get started with a broader question for you, Philip. Enersis, with its worldwide operations, must be running a very complex IT operation, especially when it comes to providing IT support to employees across different countries, time zones, speaking different languages. Can you introduce your company and share some insight into the complex IT shared services and support organization that you help run today?
P
Philipp Michalsky4:09
Of course. So as you mentioned, Enersis is a global manufacturer of stored energy solutions for industrial applications, and our footprint is global in terms of engineering, manufacturing, and distribution capabilities, but that of course also involves IT. Our IT is historically grown and is very distributed and heterogeneous. The systems that we have have followed local markets in the past, and that drives the need now more than ever for more harmonization and automation. It also makes it a key enabler to support business across these traditional boundaries, and topics as you have mentioned around automation and bringing more capabilities to the business, especially given the new normal that we're all living through at the moment, as a key part of this.
V
Vinay Vadi5:03
Thank you for those insights, Philip. Very useful. As a segue to the earlier topic that we were discussing, especially among today's energy and utility companies, they are facing unprecedented levels of disruption across the value chain as a result of the rapidly changing business models. Despite this dramatically changing environment, I'm sure Enersis would see a critical need to continue to apply innovative approaches and technologies more actively to transform some of the business processes and make their workforce more efficient while reducing cost in their core business operations. Given this scenario, how do you see the strategic role of IT changing, and where do you see intelligent automation technologies like digital assistants and AIOps playing a key role to rapidly enable this transformation?
P
Philipp Michalsky6:05
So the role of IT, as we see it, is certainly changing. It has already changed from enabling business processes through applications and infrastructure to utilizing technology to automate these same processes. Initially, the focus was very much on repetitive processes and steps, but this is developing now fast into a direction where we're trying to handle ever more complex business processes and requests through the deployment of digital assistants. We're using new technology like AI to further increase the efficiency of employees and also to extend these services 24/7. Due to the nature of these assistants and the fact that they handle requests in a very similar way that humans would, the new services can be introduced pretty much immediately, don't require much change management at all, and also drive immediate business value. So that is certainly where we see that IT is changing from a more long-term focus into a more agile setup of delivering innovation quickly, and that also delivers quick returns.
V
Vinay Vadi7:24
Thanks for that, Philip. Very useful insights and perspectives there. Just one more point before I let you go. Like you were saying earlier in the conversation, given Enersis's critical need for accelerating some of these digital initiatives especially across the IT service management function, you talked about quite a lot of the initiatives that you're looking at. Can you talk about your strategy around how do you prioritize some of these initiatives, that's number one, and then how do you make sure that you execute this initiative successfully so that we meet the targeted outcomes? If you can share some thoughts around that, that will be very useful for the audience to take away.
P
Philipp Michalsky9:14
Sure. So the key challenge still remains around prioritization. I think that hasn't really changed, with or without the pandemic, but it's gotten harder because obviously many companies are currently facing constraints on investment and there's a general uncertainty around business, especially the next few months. Getting a clear view on the return on any investment and the benefits before starting any new initiative is really critical, probably more critical than it was in the past. What we are trying to do is, on the one hand, we're trying to develop and utilize automation opportunities to help us free up resources so that we can focus on some longer-term strategic initiatives. And we're also looking at outcome-based engagements with our partners to ensure that the success of these initiatives is clear from the start and can be ensured, and also to avoid high initial investments. This is something that is probably new for us, it's a new normal that we're going through, so that's certainly changed over the last few months and will probably intensify as we go through the next few months as well.
Thank you for having me here at the Cenatech Digital Acceleration Summit. It's a great opportunity for discussions and networking, and also to keep in touch, share experiences, and learn from each other as well going through these difficult times. So thanks again to Cenatech for inviting us and for giving us this opportunity. We have been working together with Cenatech to implement digital assistants, especially in the ITSM space, to bring additional services to our users that are available immediately and help them address common requests and also more complex inquiries. Also, we've been working together on reducing manual workload for the IT teams, especially in the area of regression testing, and in general speaking about a lot of different ways to accelerate the digital transformation here at Enersis.