Business Continuity & Productivity

The COVID-19 global pandemic is the black swan event of epic proportions, even the traditionally recession proof industry of higher learning institutions, many with nearly one hundred-year histories, are now severely disrupted and potentially existentially challenged.

However, with great disruption also comes great opportunity for innovation, for positive change, and even opportunities on democratisation of education. In this session, Professor Annie Koh of Singapore Management University and Dr Tianyi (TJ) Jiang of AvePoint will discuss major challenges and real examples of innovation and creativity with major IHLs in Singapore and beyond.

Professor Annie Koh is a renowned conference speaker, panel moderator, and commentator. Professor Koh is Vice President for Business Development, V3 Group Professor of Family Entrepreneurship, and Professor of Finance (practice) at the Singapore Management University (SMU). She is also the Academic Director of the Business Families Institute and International Trading Institute. She has previously held the positions of Associate Dean, Lee Kong Chian School of Business, and Dean, Office of Executive and Professional Education, at SMU.

Dr. Jiang is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of AvePoint. He is now spearheading the AvePoint EduTech initiative, a new SaaS Education Software company founded and headquartered in Singapore.

As a global organisation, GroupM and its various subsidiaries leverage modern communication technology to ensure effective inter-company and inter-country collaboration and communication. As part of this, GroupM embarked on a journey this year to upgrade the existing Skype for Business setup to Microsoft Teams. Not just being a technical upgrade of 40,000+ accounts, one of the goals of this project was to ensure that GroupM’s employees will also be able to fully utilise the new technology and leverage its capabilities.

In this session, Rene Modery, APAC Office 365 Project Manager and Microsoft Office Apps & Services MVP, will share details of this journey, including how the change was managed and communicated to ensure maximum transparency for all stakeholders, and how it was executed in an accelerated timeframe due to this year's Covid-19 situation.

The ability to digitise organisational processes is paramount to increased efficiency. How can you leverage Microsoft Teams as a platform to achieve this effectively?

Learn how your organisation can leverage application extensibility in Microsoft Teams to integrate line of business applications, and meet your users where they're already working! Then hear how Telstra has streamlined their business processes for their field teams by enabling PowerApps integrations into Microsoft Teams, and transformed their workforce productivity.

Starting in 2015, Airways NZ started its move from an aging on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. Although the cloud environment provided Airways NZ with a challenge to ensure electronic records were compliant and meeting Archive New Zealand’s Mandatory Standards for Public Records, they have found a way to achieve it.

In this session, Jenny Ryan, Digital Information Analyst from Airways NZ will share a great deal of what they have learned in their journey towards PRA (Public Records Act 2005) compliance in Microsoft Office 365 and how they managed to craft a solution that met all the ‘must have’ records compliance requirements.

Eric Lam, ACS Engineer from AvePoint will also talk about his experiences working collaboratively with Airways NZ and how he helped translate all their business classification scheme, retention and disposal rules into a solution that is not just “compliant by stealth” but also requires minimal to no user input.

The global pandemic (COVID-19) has presented unprecedented challenges for federal, state and local governments, who quickly realised that they were not well-equipped with the technology and knowledge to enable a strong digital workforce. Devonport City Council was not one of these organisations thanks to a two-year digital transformation journey they had undertaken.

Jeff Griffith, Deputy General Manager at Devonport City Council will share the story of their journey and what they did to drive digital and cultural transformation. Jeff will also share his insights and learnings about the change required across every aspect of the organisation as they initiated their cloud first strategy.

Alyssa Blackburn, AvePoint's Director of Records and Information Management Strategy will also share actionable recommendations on how to simplify and digitalise records and information management processes for public sector organisations based on an in-depth study of 100+ RM professionals that she commissioned.

In a dynamic world predisposed by uncertainties and disruptions, it is more important than ever for successful organisations to deliver trustworthy and easy-to-find information and knowledge to their employees as and when they most need it.

Join Lawrence Ang in this session as he shares his perspectives on effective knowledge management (KM) to the wider business, and what you should consider when developing a KM strategy that is fit-for-purpose for your organisations.

He will also discuss how to develop a corporate culture of knowledge-sharing and collaboration to improve your organisational capabilities for agile and effective decision-making and policy-making.

With over 30 years’ working experience across regions and industries, Lawrence will also share real-life examples of how effective KM programs have contributed to riding waves of business disruptions, ensuring business continuity and mitigating risks.