With a new decade upon us, what will be keeping CIOs up at night?
I believe there are several areas due to technology’s rapid evolution and the need for the business to keep pace. Our market is consistently flooded with new, innovative offerings, and consumers are demanding a seamless digital experience across all channels. This consistent need creates a massive challenge for CIOs.
CIOs must be looking at the competitive advantages that can be found by integrating new technologies like multi-cloud, microservices and DevOps to quickly create unique, timely offerings – and then being the first to get them to market. The challenge then moves to finding innovative ways to add new capabilities and infrastructure to ensure they remain consistently ahead of competitors. But with new technologies also come integration-related complexities, which must be overcome.
How are your teams equipped to help with this?
Our experienced development teams combined with our industry-specific DevOps and agile approach to transformation represent some of our biggest strengths and have made us the market leader. Our experience comes from transforming our organization, including reskilling over 7,000 employees around DevOps.
We’re working hard to develop our microservices capabilities, with a wide-reaching retraining program for existing employees, as well as conducting a continual search for new talent with new skills. With the cloud too, we’re taking significant strides with several hundred employees now either certified or in the process of being certified with AWS and/or Microsoft Azure.
What are the challenges and opportunities in managing a multi-organizational company?
At Amdocs, we take pride in the many diverse cultures that make up our workforce, comprising people all around the globe. This also includes different “generations” of employees. We learn a lot from each other, and this becomes a driving force for inspiration and innovation across teams.
With 80 projects running in parallel, it can sometimes be a challenge to have a worldwide workforce. That’s why we try to enable each team to sit together at the same site and have a local manager who can empower them to succeed with whatever they need in their part of the project.
As we try and stay one step ahead of our customers, we’ve found Generation Y and Z to be the perfect partners. These employees are always seeking out new challenges and demand a strong purpose in what they do. As a result, they’re becoming an increasingly important part of our workforce.
Are there any secrets for successfully managing the next-generation workforce?
I believe the secret lies in not micro-managing and giving them space to create. Also, ensuring they are working on something that gives them a sense of meaning, as they want to contribute to a wider purpose. We’re all about helping people connect by making the world feel smaller by bringing people together.
I strongly connect to this purpose in life, and corporate social responsibility is fundamental at Amdocs. We were selected for the 2019 S&P Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI), which ranks corporate environmental, social and governance practices. DJSI noted our high performance for environmental and social policies, including operational efficiencies, corporate social responsibility and employment practices.
How do you keep your talents happy?
Our commitment to our talent is to provide challenges that ensure they can grow professionally, and back them up with a wide range of quality learning programs as well as diverse professional experience.
Our successes can be seen in new technologies like microservices, where 70 percent of our team are veterans who upskilled from other parts of the business. We also provide learning modules in hot topics such as AI to keep our employees interested and up to date. Another part of our philosophy is to encourage employees to think beyond their current role and build a long-term career path.
Much of our success is attributed to having experienced employees who are willing to evolve as technology does. We’re here for the long term, and I believe this is a win-win for both organizations and employees.
Learn more about careers at Amdocs.