The pandemic is now fully normalised in most people's lives. No matter where people work or how they work, they expect a frictionless digital experience. The stakes are even higher since the pandemic has waned and it has given rise to the great resignation, with a huge surge in people exploring new opportunities.
Companies are desperate not to lose critical talent so it is crucial for IT leaders to easily tackle user challenges, strive to reduce digital blind spots, and enhance productivity as quickly as possible – particularly in this hybrid climate.
Second to this, the digital channels that were created almost in a hurry during the early stages of the pandemic are not going to be competitive in a digital first marketplace. New solutions must be frictionless but more importantly they must meet the changing appetites of customers driven largely by the forces of environment, social and governance.

•How have both the employee & customer experience changed now that the pandemic has waned?
•How has IT’s responsibility changed in leading this experience?
•What challenges are you facing in gaining visibility across your IT estate?
•How can we enhance the ‘total experience’ and reduce digital friction, making the workforce more productive, and keeping customers happy?
•What are the main factors driving the need to become more operationally agile? How are you tackling the challenges that come with remote onboarding?
•How is ESG going to influence the future experience landscape for users, customers, and employees?

Forrester anticipates that ‘leading tech executives will leap from digital to human-centred transformation’. Gartner suggests that organisations providing a total experience will outperform competitors by 25% in all key performance metrics. Total Experience or TX represents the combined experience of users, employees and customers on the various multi-touchpoints through which they engage with the business.
Ultimately, poor employee experience and siloed processes will be painfully clear all the way to the customer. Customer and employee experience are closely intertwined – if one suffers, so does the other. Why should IT leaders be excited about this? The revelation is at the core of total experience. Traditionally siloed activities are now being tied together with technology as the golden thread, and this has huge implications for IT as it seeks to be a strategic enabler across functions.
This roundtable explores how CIO’s are increasingly being called on to take responsibility to provide a frictionless experience now that workplaces, digital channels, and post-pandemic operating processes become more standardised. One thing is for sure, the pandemic can no longer be used as an excuse for a poor experience.

This roundtable will explore questions including:
•What does it mean to go from digital to human led transformation?
•Where does IT feel pressure to deliver a frictionless experience and in what ways is TX going to become a key part of IT strategy?
•How does IT take responsibility for TX in the face of shadow IT and the democratisation of IT?
•Does your customer journey mapping reflect a digital first environment?
•How can emerging technologies remove friction for both customers and employees?

The abundance of data has transformed the way organizations conduct business in today’s digital world. Harnessing information so that you can become data-driven is no simple task. To capitalize on the true potential of data at our fingertips, organizations must fundamentally change how they view and use data. We sit on mounds of customer information, which is often siloed, and whilst many have worked hard to break down these silos, the ever-increasing surge of data in our modern world will create them all over again, unless your environment is prepared to cope with it.
Democratizing data starts at the top and unlocking its power requires elevating it to the status of a strategic asset. There are still many challenges that organizations face here, including unclear rules of engagement among key technology leaders, data fluency, lengthy data curation cycles, and complex system architectures across organizations.

This roundtable will explore questions including:
• How is technology enabling companies to overcome silo, data quality and enablement issues?
• How do you create frictionless collaboration within your data ecosystem - people, tools, and data?
• Ensuring every business decision is data-driven - how do we enable data as a service?
• Where can the use of AI and machine automation help with cutting costs?
• How can you embed a data and analytics culture across the entire organization?
• How can you better manage providers and make data actionable?
• How do you streamline cloud decisions while saving money?

Securing capabilities to deliver new business models should be top of mind for any IT leader. The talent shortage facing CIO’s is well known along with the need to scale automation effectively. These two sources of capabilities have their own challenges in isolation, yet they must be developed in harmony as they rely on one other as much as they can be in competition.
A Korn Ferry study suggests that the biggest issue isn’t in fact that 'robots are taking all the jobs' – it’s that there aren’t enough humans to take them. The study finds that by 2030, there will be a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people.
Finding the balance between the reskilling the workforce and scaling automation is one of biggest strategic challenges facing IT leaders as it impacts long term innovation capability, employee engagement, ESG credentials and overall digital transformation efforts.

This roundtable will explore questions including:
•What does the future of work and the automation innovation landscape look like so that CIO’s can develop empowering narratives?
•How do CIO’s need to nurture their IT and wider company cultures to drive the collaboration and embrace cooperation with AI and machine learning?
•How can emerging technologies remove friction for both customers and employees?
•What leadership innovation needs to take place to ensure successful integration of emerging technologies whilst ensuring attraction, retention, digital empathy, and employee engagement?

Data is sustaining new business models and transforming how companies organize, operate, manage talent, and create value. Thus, data is seen as a double-edged sword for leaders. The ability to seize the potential of advanced analytics, while simultaneously avoiding its hazards, is becoming harder.

This panel will explore the following key questions:
•What opportunities will upskilling non-tech employees in data and analytics bring and are there any challenges that will also arise?
•How can we obtain a strong, unified commitment from all levels of management?
•In what way can we empower the front lines to make analytics- driven decisions?
•How has the role of data within your organization changed as a result of the global pandemic?

Driving technology transformation is a strategic imperative in the Banking Industry. However, evolving from legacy systems and hierarchical waterfall working structures is by no means a simple challenge. Tenacity, relentlessness, and ruthless execution are required to establish a new IT world of cloud-based stacks, digitalized capabilities, and agile ways of working. Meanwhile, the unfavorable macro context of volatility, pandemia, negative interest rates, etc puts any plan and delivery certainties at risk. Furthermore, financial services business disruption and profits erosion have forced CIOs to additionally confront brutal cost reduction and efficiency challenges.
After +3 years in the Company, and still being in the middle of the journey, the CIO of Santander Bank will share lessons learned in leadership and insights from execution experience in transforming the Bank.