ASTRO is just getting warmed up

ASTRO is just getting warmed up

Date Released:05 May 2017

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This is the first in a series of 12 monthly blogs by Phuah Aik Chong, Astro Chief Technology Officer

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change - Charles Darwin

Along with Amazon partners, we have recently embarked upon a 3-year digital transformation journey. The driver for this transformation is you! You, meaning everyone that consumes media content today.

Today, technology is evolving at a pace never seen before, enabling rapid shifts in consumer behaviour and trends at speeds that were unthinkable just a few years back. Take last year's Pokemon craze for example. If you had told me the world would be gripped by pointing their smart phones at augmented reality characters a few years back, I would have said you need to get out more!

Part of our roles in the media and entertainment industry is to find new and creative ways to bring you content, on any type of device, at any time. We want to get closer to our customers than ever before. To that end, we are reinventing the way we work. While we will continue to improve and enhance our existing offerings and services, we are also developing new capabilities to introduce new products that will delight and surprise our customers.

We are doing this through adopting Lean Enterprise techniques, as used by some of the most innovative companies in the world such as Amazon, Boeing and GE. Lean Enterprise is an approach born out of the 1980's where Toyota first looked at how they could improve the efficiency of their manufacturing plants, it then evolved into Lean Six Sigma for process improvement, then start-ups figured out they could use a variation of it to experiment with what their customers did and didn't want. Fast forward to today and the most innovative companies in the world underpin their product development functions with Lean Enterprise concepts.

It all starts with our people. We aim to train over 1,000 of our staffs on Lean Enterprise and encourage them to constantly experiment and collaborate with their peers.

We are also investing in leading technologies and development methodologies to enable businesses to deliver the best content and services to you at startup speed. We aim to enhance how we interact with you in terms of support, using the latest artificial intelligence and analytics techniques, so that you as the consumer can have a great user experience every time.

To make that possible we need to change a lot of things that you as the consumer doesn't typically get to see behind the scenes so to this end we are being relentless in challenging ourselves in everything we do, from internal processes to how we do product development.

We are going to learn a lot of lessons along the way and we are going to learn how not to do things for sure, but the key is from every experiment we will learn a little bit more each time, and get better each time.

We need to build muscle memory around a new way of working. I personally am very excited about this new chapter in our journey, I am excited about the opportunities for our customers, I am excited about the opportunities for our talent and for the future of Astro. I look forward to sharing with you our learnings as we go along this transformation.

We are just getting warmed up.

Next month's blog will focus on the innovation methodology we are rolling out to the whole company.

LINK:	http://www.astro.com.my/mediaroom/articledetails.aspx?id=2287&title=as...
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