Digital leadership

By Mark Newton, Vice President – Applications, UK and Ireland Commercial Industries, Oracle.

Digital technologies such as social, mobile, cloud & analytics are changing the way in which businesses operate. They are creating blended experiences, where the value of each technology increases because it leverages one or more of the others.

Digital leaders set themselves apart by delivering more interconnected experiences to their customers, which means they also need to open up the exchange of information between their own employees. From back-office developers to the customer-facing teams, everyone has a role to play in helping the business come up with genuinely transformational services.

Oracle has long been helping businesses to undertake the digital transformation they need to take advantage of new technologies and communications channels. Central to this endeavour is our series of Digital Transformation Experiences, a series of co-located conferences for CX, HCM, Finance, Supply Chain and IT, which comes to London for the first time this February.

Attending our UK event will be more than 2,000 attendees from a wide range of industries, and every conceivable line of business. They will come together to hear from industry experts and organizations, large and small that have undertaken their own successful digital transformation initiatives. Customer and industry speakers will include Baxters, Cabinet Office, CCA, Co-operative, CIPD, CIMA, Kenya Airways, LinkedIn, LV=, Nationwide, Panasonic, RBS, RWG, Standard Life and Three.

Among the keynote speakers will be UK not-for-profit The Prince's Trust, which works with young and disadvantaged people to help them access work, education, and training. The charity has recently undertaken a digital transformation initiative that incorporates a new website together with the latest reporting, communications and business intelligence tools.

This transformation is enabling The Prince's Trust to have much more meaningful relationships with the young people it helps, including the ability to engage effectively with them through mobile and other digital channels. The Prince's Trust's digital transformation initiative will make them more relevant and reactive to an audience that expects to engage through mobile and digital channels.

No line of business can afford to ignore the opportunities that digital promises, which is why Oracle's Digital Transformation London event will have experts from finance, supply chain, human resources, customer experience and IT backgrounds –. Through a mixture of keynote speakers, workshops, and panel discussions, attendees will gain valuable insight into how they can overcome the challenges of digital transformation, and learn from the best practices of those that have pioneered digital change in their organisations.

Businesses need to be much more aware that digital transformation is not simply a matter of bolting new digital services onto existing infrastructure, or incorporating new ways of working into existing processes. It's about embedding digital in every aspect of an organisation. Those that wish to build a business that's truly fit for the digital age cannot afford to miss Oracle's latest Digital Transformation event.

About the author

Mark Newton is the Vice President – Applications, UK and Ireland Commercial Industries for Oracle. In this role, he has overall responsibility for Oracle's application sales, marketing and customer services operations and execution in this important region. Mark is driving the company's delivery of On Premise and Cloud based business solutions to corporate customers across a wide range of industries.

Mark has more than 25 years' experience in the IT industry, almost all of which has been in enterprise software. Mark has held a number of senior leadership roles, most recently as Regional Director UK & Ireland at VMware. His prior roles include European Vice President for IBS, an application provider for wholesale and distribution companies and Regional Director, Northern Europe at BMC Software where Mark was responsible for leading BMC's growth in Business Service Management. Earlier, Mark was at Oracle Corporation for 7 years where he held several senior sales leadership roles, latterly as Vice President, UK Technology Sales. Prior to his time at Oracle, Mark was responsible for worldwide field sales at The Dodge Group, a provider of financial software to the finance industry.