Video transcript: Putting power back in the hands of customers

Transcript

As a business, we're spending a lot of time looking at different ways to interact with our customers, using digital and technology and disrupting what are very traditional supply chains.

We're trying to drive efficiency and more interaction with our customers, allowing them to choose what they want, when they want and how it should be delivered.

The biggest challenge in technology investment is choosing where to put your money that will make the biggest value difference for the business. And value has changed a lot, I think, in the last sort of 20 years when it gets back to technology investment.

In the old days, you would have spent a lot of time trying to standardise your processes and standardise your operations, whereas I think most value questions today are around how you actually support business growth, how you access new markets, access new propositions.

Legacy is not the barrier it used to be as long as you can get access to your data you can build whatever products and services you need off the top of that.

The skills and technology pieces is interesting because you obviously have to have the right skills and technical capabilities to be able to leverage the technology that we're talking about here. So whilst there's a technical piece to this around making sure that you get access to the right resources and capability, there's a business mindset change that needs to happen.

You've got to change the whole workforce effectively to be digitally minded, not just the technology functions to be digitally minded. And that's a big challenge, I think. Financial value isn't the be all and end all these days.

Most customers stay with you because of convenience, service you deliver, and consistent delivery on the promise. The things I'm most proud of are the way that we're starting to disrupt the traditional construction industry.

I mean, that is the biggest change that we're trying to drive within the industry, which is not necessarily all about our business, but looking at how you do things in a different way.