New world. New skills.
Human-led and tech-powered
Bringing together our better selves with the greatest aspects of technology to turn today’s ideas into tomorrow’s solutions.
Digital transformation continues to be a key strategic area for PwC. The New Equation talks to human ingenuity combined with technology innovation and experience to deliver faster, more intelligent, and better outcomes while building trust for our people, our clients, and the communities we serve.
Vision and strategy
Guided by The New Equation and our Africa 5+1 Reimagined strategy, we’ve placed a focus on leveraging digital knowledge, skills and tools to permeate all areas of our business. Against this backdrop, and building on our experience of cloud-based operating solutions and foundational digital upskilling, our digital transformation strategy focuses on:
- embedding digital technology products in our solutions that combine traditional human problem-solving with innovative products;
- continuously upskilling our workforce to more advanced levels, to embrace and grow the success of applied data analytics and everyday innovation;
- sharing digital assets; and
- upskilling communities for the digital world.
The lead-up to the current strategy was our digital transformation journey, through the Our Tomorrow programme. We invested in foundational upskilling of our people in data analysis, processing, automation, and visualisation technologies such as Alteryx and Power BI, and discovered the potential of emerging technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA), chatbots, artificial intelligence (AI), drones and blockchain.
Through continued digital upskilling and investment in emerging technology, we have a renewed focus on building sustained outcomes from commercial technologies to which we already have access. These include Power BI, Excel and Alteryx. We’ve also rolled out and are driving the adoption of our PwC Data Platform (Workbench) and the data services provided on the platform, as well as our sharing platform called Digital Lab, where PwC-developed digital assets are shared and scaled.
Agile cloud operating businessEfforts to continuously improve and integrate the firm’s cloud-based operating solutions (BOS), which include Google Workspace, Oracle Finance and Projects, Salesforce CRM, and Workday HRM, remain an ongoing area of focus as these systems, together with the new technological solutions we’re incorporating, form the bedrock of our digital approach.
Digital technology solutions that combine traditional human problem-solving with innovative products
This year saw us evolving to bring our data analytics skills and capabilities to the fore to deliver sustained business outcomes and grow the firm as a data business. By building a culture that embraces data analytics, recognising digital leaders, and granting our people access to citizen-led innovation tools, we’re bringing the value of data insights to our business and our clients. With tools such as Power BI and its assisted AI and AutoML capabilities, we’re starting to find new value in analysing and predicting data.
Read our thought leadership article on the adoption of artificial intelligence and/or automated machine learning capabilities within technologies like Power BI: Intelligence beyond the pie chart
A culture of community builders
Our ever-expanding digital communities enable us to harness the collective knowledge of our network as we share and collaborate on topics of interest. Real-time engagement on platforms such as Google Chat Spaces and Google Currents enables our people to connect and share knowledge with like-minded colleagues across the network on a diverse range of topics such as data analytics, artificial intelligence and automation.
Expanding our collaboration and productivity offering
The introduction of Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint to our collaboration and productivity tools has enabled us to offer an improved user experience to our non-audit clients. This addition to our existing and primary collaboration and productivity platform, Google Workspace, offers a complementary set of tools to support teams to identify new opportunities for ourselves, our clients, and our communities.
Global Innovation Challenge (GIC)
The GIC is our annual network-wide challenge that celebrates innovative solutions that solve important problems for our clients and society. It has proven to be an indicator of the shift to digital innovation thinking across our business. This year’s challenge had more than 470 entries from over 100 countries, with the final winning innovators rising above the rest for their solutions that drive carbon footprint insights, produce smart Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) analytics, and bring government incentives to your fingertips.
Continuous upskilling to embrace and grow the success of applied data analytics and everyday innovation
Our attention to digital upskilling continues, but with a renewed focus on advanced data extraction, transformation, and visualisation skills, with some elements of advanced topics like AI and machine learning (ML) being introduced. We initially launched our digital upskilling programme with digital e-learns and digital academies for intermediate upskilling in Alteryx, Power BI, and UiPath. Our digital upskilling programme has grown over the last year to include a variety of training platforms and curricula to cater to the various digital personas we’ve identified as making up our workforce.
Academies
While the Digital Academies continue to be available for our new joiners, this year has seen the development and introduction of Advanced Digital Academies:
- Power BI - Advanced Data Visualisation Academy
- Excel - Intermediate Data Transformation Academy
- Alteryx - Advanced Data Transformation Academy
Digital Accelerator Programme
This advanced upskilling programme offers intense digital development and ancillary skills such as change leadership, design thinking and user experience. It equips nominated candidates to drive digital transformation in their teams and in the business. This quarterly programme comprises an intense four-month digital upskilling journey that includes the completion of a Udacity nanodegree and culminates in the completion of a project that supports our Africa strategy. To date, the programme has seen 96 technology-minded change leaders realising new value for the firm and its clients.
Digital Fitness Application
Our cloud-based, real-time learning application, the Digital Fitness Application, has continued to support the digital upskilling of our workforce. Through bite-sized content that’s offered via a gamified mobile app, our teams and people can access curated videos, articles, and podcasts that cover various topics on emerging technologies, anytime and anywhere.
Developing and sharing digital assets
Reimagining how we work is being realised through the application of our digital skills and our access to technologies. As we continue to expand our data extraction, transformation and visualisation services, we’re experiencing citizen-led development and innovation that’s enabling teams to work smarter with data to deliver trusted analytics and insights to our clients. Coupled with cloud-based platforms such as Azure and Google Cloud Platform, collaboration and sharing of data and digital assets have enabled us to leverage the digital intellect of our network.
Workbench
The Data Platform provides data analytics and visualisation services via the easy-to-use interface, Workbench. Offering a secure, cloud-based space for engagements and project teams where they can analyse, develop and experiment, we’re able to connect advanced technologies with clients, the firm, and third-party data to deliver data insights. Richer analytics can also be gained through access to a variety of data and artificial intelligence services to automate manual processes, process large datasets faster, build and share interactive dashboards, and access third-party datasets.
Digital Lab
PwC’s Digital Lab is an online, technology-sharing platform for finding, running and sharing valuable digital assets, such as Alteryx workflows and Power BI visualisations developed in Workbench. With over 1,390 assets created by and for colleagues across Africa on the Digital Lab, we’re able to share and collaborate around digital assets across the network.
Explore our Integrated Report 2021 and related content here
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