12 istotnych zagadnień prawnych 2022 roku
Nowe regulacje prawne silnie oddziałują na działalność biznesową każdego przedsiębiorcy. Poznaj 12 kluczowych zagadnień, które będą kształtować otoczenie biznesowe w 2022 roku.
How do you assess the quality of Polish IT experts and the Polish IT market?
Can I answer by telling you a story? I entered the PwC partnership seven years ago, and my first client engaged me to support them to design and deliver their digital transformation. We effectively supported the client in completely digitizing their entire business. It was a UK business, over 100 years old, with great heritage and a very important role in education. Their systems and processes were antiquated and they needed to modernise and move to the cloud – unlocking productivity improvements, data driven marketing and better customer experience. I started working with them seven years ago and brought onboard our technology team from Warsaw to help me do that. Seven years on, they are still a client of PwC and operating as a modern digital business. That shows you the quality of PwC's IT professionals in Warsaw. It is a testament to the skills of the IT professionals I work with in Poland. They are increasingly at the forefront of innovation. The Polish IT specialists that I have worked with have excellent discipline and standards around quality and risk management. And the relationships and ways of doing business are also exemplary. When we deliver projects out of the UK, working with our IT professionals here in Warsaw, there is always a good working relationship. To give you an example, One of our solution architects, who is based in the south of Poland is the first person I call when I need specific technical advice.
Let’s go back to Microsoft. What impact on Europe and Poland could such significant investments by Microsoft have?
I believe the opportunity is significant for Poland and the CEE region. I will break it down into three areas. Firstly, the Microsoft investment unlocks tremendous potential to accelerate digital skills. It will give entrepreneurs, startups and government institutions access to cloud technologies, reduce latency and bring all the benefits that come with the cloud. Secondly, it will really unlock and unleash innovation. There will be far more opportunities for Polish businesses, Polish government institutions, and also more broadly across CEE an opportunity to innovate. With that come benefits to the economy in terms of productivity and better access to services for the public. And it will allow new and innovative businesses to spring up, thrive and grow. A few years ago, I was working in the UK with a government organisation which was looking to migrate their services onto the cloud. They selected a particular SaaS technology to enable them to do that. It transpired that we could not deliver the project on that particular bit of technology because the SaaS software, the application we were looking to migrate to did not have a UK data centre so the data would be resided off UK shores. And in the UK, you cannot reside health data outside UK borders. So we had to switch solution, therefore slowing the programme down... GDPR is always a big issue in terms of data residency. I am also very excited about GenAI at the moment and the benefits it will unlock. You cannot actually do GenAI unless you have your data in the cloud. Data centres in Poland will bring many benefits, and will also have an impact on how we get on with the GenAI opportunity in a safe and ethical way.
How do you assess the scale of this investment? Is it a regular investment for Microsoft? Or is it a big deal for Poland and a big promotion for us?
It is a massive investment. What it demonstrates to me is the importance that Microsoft places on Poland as a region. Right now, Microsoft operates in 59 regions, so it is a real signal of intent, and the importance of Poland. It signals how important this region is, and not just as Poland but the importance of Poland as a digital centre for the broader CEE region. I talked about it last week at the Microsoft Envision event; it is an important point. We talk about PwC as building the world within a New Equation - our strategy. And the new equation highlights two interconnecting needs that every business and organisation has in the digital age. One is the need to build trust with a much broader spectrum of stakeholders than ever before. The importance of trust in an organisation is paramount. And the second of those is the need to deliver sustained outcomes in a world where competition has never been more fierce and societal expectations are higher than ever before. So when you think about this New Equation and this interconnecting need of trust and sustained outcomes, that’s the benefit that this investment is going to unlock for Poland and the wider region.
From London's point of view, for UK and Western companies, is it safe to invest now in Poland? We have a war across our eastern border. How do Western companies look right now at the Polish IT market?
Clearly, we are facing a lot of headwinds: geopolitical pressure, declining growth and climate risk. These are significant challenges, there is no doubt about it. Because of that, investing in partners like Poland is even more important. We’re not going to succeed against those pressures unless we invest in digital and cloud technologies and use them as a force for good. On a personal level, and I speak for many of my colleagues back in London and the UK, both work colleagues and personal friends, everyone has been quite taken by how Poland has responded to the challenges in Ukraine. During the early stage of the invasion into Ukraine we, in the UK, were astounded by how well Poland responded. My colleagues in the PwC Warsaw office opened their doors to strangers and offered support and places to stay. Everyone I spoke to in this office did something amazing. I've got colleagues in the Warsaw office that are Ukrainian and suffered during the war. Poland’s response to the specific issues in Ukraine has been nothing short of amazing, and it shows how fantastic a country it is. Personally, I do not think there’s a risk to invest in Poland. Actually, there’s a risk not to invest in Poland. We won’t get through this unless we have the right investment, the right innovation in some of these technologies.
Stewart Wilson
Local Public Services Consulting Partner
Microsoft Practice Leader
PwC UK
You mentioned AI; how will AI change the balance of power in the economy, and how will it change our future? During the last few months everyone has been talking about ChatGPT.
We are in the age of the next digital revolution with generative AI. For Microsoft it's a big moment, and it will have a massive impact. Of course, we are at the inflection point as well where there is a strong debate around the ethics of AI and how we embrace this technology and deploy it responsibly. What will it mean for us? It will unlock new opportunities and efficiencies through scalable solutions. It will allow us to differentiate existing services and offer new ones. It can integrate with the existing services and it should allow all of us to focus on proper human-centric tasks, which is super important. I am so excited about the opportunities that AI presents for us. Within PwC, we announced a one billion dollar investment in generative AI across investment skills and new services. It brings us into new areas; like all organisations we have to understand what this technology means and how we operate internally, how we can become more efficient and deploy this new technology to help us work smarter.
The second thing is more outward facing: how generative AI can help us be more effective in how we service clients. It is super interesting when you start to see how we can augment existing content or even generate new content. Personally, I think about the time I spend with proposals and preparing all these documents to win work, so the opportunities here are massive. And the third area I am most excited about is how we can develop new services in industry sectors. That is why we bring our industry sector teams to look at the specific use cases of AI and how we can use generative AI to deliver better outcomes. Back to my point about trust and sustained outcomes, in the UK, for example, the healthcare system is under tremendous pressure. We have to look at how we can offer care in a more efficient and effective way. We have to start thinking about how generative AI can support some care workers to provide information, to provide access to data, to enable them to do their jobs more effectively. We could have a massive benefit when you think how you proliferate it across the whole healthcare system.
So how about the cloud? How do you see the future of the cloud and the role it will play?
Since Covid, the cloud has played a massive role. It enabled us to enter Covid and rebound after the pandemic with new ways of working and more efficient ways of operating. It enabled us to have an increased focus on being lean and efficient. It allows us to innovate rapidly and respond to new market conditions far quicker that we’ve ever done before. This ability to really respond at a pace we couldn’t do without the cloud. You asked a question about ChatGPT and generative AI. You can only do ChatGPT and generative AI once you have all your data in the cloud. I had an excellent conversation with a Microsoft executive yesterday at the conference. And he told me: “Let’s start by getting simple things like data and applications into the cloud, and then we can really start to innovate.” It offers us a great opportunity for businesses to be far more flexible. We can provision and compute data services at pace.
The final area for us in the cloud is security. This is especially important today when we are facing geopolitical challenges. Since we have a data centre region here in Poland, data residency will no longer be an issue for certain services and sectors that require it. It will help accelerate innovation and enable more digital services here in Poland. I think about what we've done in the UK working alongside Polish engineers and IT professionals. In the last 6-7 years, we've delivered some of the most innovative business changes I have ever seen, and we could not have done it without the cloud. I have one client that used to employ small armies of temporary staff at particular seasonal points to do a lot of manual tasks around scheduling appointments and running big events. That is all now automated thanks to the cloud. We use a machine learning technique which helps us predict demand and which allows the client to deploy staff based on those algorithms. This level of innovation could not have happened without the cloud so it is game-changing.
I will add some Polish examples because we have some fantastic examples here in Poland. For instance, at Bank Pocztowy. We also helped Raiffeisen Bank International with cloud investment. Żabka in the retail sector. Financial services, retail, and many industries are moving to the cloud, thinking about the cloud. But there are a lot of vendors in the cloud, and now the challenge is how to assess which is better. We are working as a facilitator of the strategy and implementation and choosing the best vendors.
So you work with a lot of companies. In your opinion, what is the most important in the digital transformation of companies? Is flexibility the most important factor?
The number one from the private sector perspective is the ability to stay competitive. Given the cloud and the digital world we live in today, we can no longer spend a year writing a strategy, and then another year designing a solution and another year deploying a big IT system. We have to be very quick to stay competitive. Żabka is an excellent example. What they are doing is fantastic, placing the customer at the heart of their digital transformation. Providing an in-store experience that is customer-centric, but then harvesting data, things like AI, real-time data and analytics that predict demand and adapt the store accordingly. That is staying competitive, and that is super important. The second thing, the human element of digital, is super important. We all get very excited about digital, cloud, data and AI, but those projects that leverage those technologies would not be successful unless you have the engagement of all key stakeholders. You have buy-in, you consider change management, and you understand it from that specific industry perspective. I believe that the human element is so important. In PwC, when we embark on digital transformation programs, we take an industry-led approach. We bring in industry experts, and those industry experts are underpinned by designers that know how to design experiences, solution architects, business architects, technology teams, and partners on some occasions. It is an industry-led approach and it is always human-led. It is so important. You can’t lose sight of the outcomes you are trying to achieve. Remember when I talked about two interconnecting needs, trust and sustainable outcomes? When you start building cloud solutions without understanding why you are doing it, you very quickly realise that the result is not what you intended. Agility and staying competitive is key, and then to make sure you have the human element first and foremost in everything you do. The third element is trust as well. Trust is imperative in terms of what is essential in digital transformation programs.
Finally, when we talk about any transformation of any kind there are always three ingredients required for success. You will not be successful unless you have leadership alignment. Leadership must be aligned and know what they are doing. The second thing is clarity in the business case. What this is going to save, or what this is going to do in terms of growth. And the final point is engagement. You must have the right engagement model. And here I mean engagement with staff, with end users. Whether digital or not, these three things remain critical to any program.
You mentioned Żabka. How, in general, do you perceive Polish companies in the area of digital transformation? Maybe there is something that they could learn from Western companies?
Żabka, in terms of retail, is right up there. We are building a retail experience centre in our Manchester office to showcase to clients in the UK what the retailer of the future will look like. And a lot of that has been delivered by Żabka. So really, a lot of great innovation is happening here at our doorstep in Poland. However, the statistics show that there is a lot to be done in terms of digitalisation in Poland. According to our Annual Global CEO Survey, only 10% of Polish business leaders are happy with the current levels of digital maturity. We have got talent here, and we've got investment from Microsoft. The future is bright. There is space for excellent cooperation. As soon as you have this cross-border collaboration, you’re always innovating, you’re always first to the next new thing. Poland is completely connected to the wider PwC network, so we are well placed here in Poland to be at the forefront of innovation. We've only just launched the data centre region in Poland. Having a data centre for all the points I made regarding data residency, security and latency issues, we haven’t had that, so it will have a massive impact in terms of lowering some of the barriers to cloud options and innovation.
This interview was originally published in Polish on the Business Insider Polska website:
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