Forrester To Honor Winners Of Its 2024 Technology Awards At Technology & Innovation Summit APAC

Macquarie Banking and Financial Services and Contact Energy will be recognized for aligning their technology and business strategies to drive growth

On October 14, Forrester (Nasdaq: FORR) announced that Macquarie Banking and Financial Services group (Macquarie BFS) and Contact Energy are the 2024 recipients of its Technology Strategy Impact Award and Enterprise Architecture (EA) Award for Asia Pacific respectively. These awards, which will be presented at Technology & Innovation Summit APAC, taking place in Sydney, Australia, and digitally, October 29, 2024, will recognize both organizations for aligning their technology strategy with the dynamic needs of their businesses.

The winners will share their success stories at Technology & Innovation Summit APAC, a leading event for chief information, technology, data, analytics, and AI officers and their respective leadership teams to learn best practices and tools to achieve high-performance IT, embrace AI, and deliver business outcomes rapidly.

“The award recipients highlight how organizations can enhance their business outcomes through their IT capabilities,” said Frederic Giron, VP and senior research director at Forrester. “Both winners are doing an exemplary job of aligning their tech strategy with their organization’s goals to deliver trusted, secure, and resilient technology solutions. As a result, their companies have the flexibility to adapt to evolving market conditions and customer demands. We look forward to celebrating these winners at Technology & Innovation Summit APAC.”

Information about Forrester’s 2024 Technology Strategy Impact Award winner and finalists:

• Macquarie BFS (winner), the Australian retail banking and wealth management business of Macquarie Group, keeps technology at the core of everything it does to deliver the best digital banking experience to its customers. The team uses business objectives in its objectives and key results (OKRs) to drive strong alignment with the business and has a focus on cocreation, made possible by smart investments in capabilities such as continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD), site reliability engineering (SRE), quality, cloud, and security operations.

• Singtel and Tabcorp are the finalists for Forrester’s 2024 Technology Strategy Impact Award for APAC.

Information about Forrester’s 2024 Enterprise Architecture Award winner and finalists, presented in partnership with The Open Group:

• Contact Energy (winner), a New Zealand-based electricity generator and retailer and provider of broadband and mobile services, transformed its retail, corporate, and energy generation businesses by building a superior EA foundation that has become a strategic pillar of its technology strategy. This transformation has played a key role in enabling the organization to drive the decarbonization of New Zealand for a renewable energy future.

• Bank of Singapore and FWD Group are finalists for Forrester’s 2024 Enterprise Architecture Award for APAC.

Forrester’s Technology Strategy Impact Award seeks to recognize technology teams that have adopted high-performance technology strategies, enabling their firms to deliver on business outcomes through technology. The winner and finalists for the 2024 Technology Strategy Impact Award in APAC have built the right technology capabilities that align with their business capability needs and have done so in a highly trusted and adaptive manner.

Congratulations to Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services group (Macquarie BFS), this year’s winner, and the two finalists: Singtel and Tabcorp.

Macquarie BFS: Delivering Business Outcomes With A High-Performance IT Strategy

Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services group (BFS) is the retail banking and wealth management business of Macquarie Group and serves approximately 1.85 million customers in Australia, with total deposits of $A145.3 billion and a home loan portfolio of $A123.7 billion, as of June 30, 2024.

Macquarie BFS is bringing the culture of technology companies to financial services and intends to keep technology at the core of everything to deliver the best digital experience to its customers and drive alignment to that business vision. Macquarie BFS’s key tenets of its high-performance technology strategy that underpins this success are:

• Scoring high on alignment, trust, and adaptivity. Macquarie BFS follows the tenets of “always on” and the “speed of now,” just like big tech. Its BFS control-tower approach, as well as the technology team using business objectives in their OKRs, drives strong alignment with the business. Its software development platform follows agile enterprise practices, leveraging a flexible architecture that helps them deliver business apps at high speed to drive adaptivity. Its 96% cloud adoption, following site reliability engineering (SRE) standards, drives trust inside-out. There is much more to be impressed with in terms of Macquarie BFS’s tech capabilities.

• Focusing on just the right style. Macquarie BFS has a strong focus on cocreation. This is extremely difficult to achieve but is what banking business typically needs. Macquarie BFS’s investment in the right tools and practices allows it to cocreate fast, but this is only possible because it has optimized investment on enabling activities, thanks to smart investments in a set of capabilities such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), SRE, quality, cloud, and SecOps. It also has just the right focus on amplification through its investments in AI and automation.

Singtel: IT Becomes A Strategic Business Enabler

Singtel’s story of transformation is utterly impressive. It was dealing with a legacy core, had surging business enablement demand, and was working in an overly complex organization to boot, but it was able to turn around and transition from just a connectivity provider to a trusted business-technology enabler:

• Singtel is experiencing improved alignment and trust. Singtel identified and prioritized initiatives in order to boost alignment between the business and IT teams. It adopted and enhanced its practices around project management, change advisory, and architecture/solution review, introducing transparent reporting to drive greater synergies. It drove adaptivity in the way it skilled, hired, and deployed the right talent flexibly across its requirements.

• Singtel is enabling and amplifying business capabilities. It has done extensive work in remediating tech obsolescence, improving service resiliency, and building intelligent operations and cybersecurity practices. It has also been investing in tech to improve customer experience (CX) to amplify and scale its customer-facing services through chatbots, call summarization, and post-call analysis, among other things. The better alignment between the teams has significantly improved its time to market on new initiatives such as the new iPhone launch across various markets, new eSim launch, and the launch of a B2B marketplace. As a result, Singtel has won many accolades in recognition of improved digital experience.

Overall, this is a fascinating story of change in terms of the way Singtel’s consumer and enterprise businesses work closely with their technology teams while still being part of the agile squads.

Tabcorp: Leading The Industry With A Data Acceleration Initiative

Melbourne-based Tabcorp is Australia’s largest gambling and gaming services provider. It has more than 800,000 active customers and covers more than 4,000 venues. Tabcorp embarked upon what it calls a data acceleration initiative in early 2024 to enable omnichannel, connected CX, and real-time business insights powered by data as a service. Tabcorp’s main focus areas in this regard were as follows:

• Driving trust and resilience. This data initiative centers around creating a single view of customers, building AI-led personalization at scale, and using a resilient architecture to build trust across customers, the business, and external partners. In the process, it simplified the architecture and significantly reduced legacy reporting, driving down the total cost of ownership. Business and IT worked together to identify the metrics that matter and built pipelines from trusted sources of data into an information model that it co-created with the business.

• Amplifying business outcomes. Tabcorp’s data acceleration initiative is a wonderful example of how the right application of data, AI, and personalization at scale can amplify your business outcomes. Tabcorp is powering several use cases around personalization, recommendation, the next best action, discovery, campaigns, and conversations. On the other side, this initiative is driving Tabcorp to build a highly resilient, automated, and efficient infrastructure to enable scale. These lessons, combined with other initiatives, are leading to an all-around improvement in IT performance.

There is so much more to talk about in terms of how Tabcorp is building a highly adaptive IT organization running on agile practices, leveraging a strong enterprise architecture framework that allows it to reorient itself to new priorities swiftly and deliver to business outcomes.