Dear Friends of HKBN

Why HKBN’s Digital Transformation is Like Building a Bridge

At HKBN, we see our digital transformation as if we are building a large bridge. In an interview with HR Digital Trends, Samuel Hui, our Co-Owner and Head of Digital Transformation explained, “The best way to construct a bridge and make sure it is safe, is to let the architect, the builders and their families live under that bridge. This way, it is not going to collapse because the people involved in building have so much more skin-in-the-game."

At HKBN, we have our cross functional teams committed to our unique “pain/GAIN” initiative, whereby our Talents typically put 1-3 months of our salaries to underwrite agreed key performance indicators (KPIs). If the KPIs are met or exceeded, Talents are rewarded 1-6x multiple of our investment, but if we fall short, then our investment is given to a charity of our choice.

To ensure there is full buy-in for the digital transformation, project teams consist of cross-functional ‘squads’ based on business outcome KPIs. In these squads it is essential to include Talents from different areas of the business, especially the end users, so as to ensure this initiative is outcome-led rather than technology-pushed. All key team leaders sign off on the same pain/GAIN contract. Once the project is completed, they return to their regular areas within the organisation, bringing to their “old” team a transformed perspective in doing things the digital way.

In the past, a Talent might be multi-tasking 10 different projects at once and be responsible for none, but we found it far better to have 10 Talents focused on one project unified by common skin-in-the-game and then sequentially deliver initiative after initiative.

Under legacy practices, business and IT sides would be very separate silos. IT would be talking about what percentage of applications are being pushed into the Cloud, but business owners didn’t care about these statistics. What business owners are interested about is whether the increased agility moving to the Cloud will be brought into the group so we can iterate our products faster against customer feedback and gain profitable market share. Working in squads means our 6,000 Talents are now starting to speak the same language, and this is the basis of our Legal Unfair Competitive Advantage (LUCA).

Click here for the full interview.