Accenture Technology Vision 2014

From Digitally Disrupted

to Digital Disrupter

A Malaysia Perspective

Every Business Is a Digital Business: The Evolution

ACCENTURE

Introduction
As the pace of technological change accelerates, we are seeing a
profound shift taking place. Start-ups are no longer the only ones
disrupting their markets. Instead, larger enterprises are now taking
advantage of their size, knowledge and position as leaders in their
physical markets to transform into truly digital businesses.
For Malaysia to remain competitive, we need to ensure this
change is occurring here as quickly as it is in other markets.
The theme of this years Accenture Technology Vision is that
every business is now a digital business, which is seeing many
organisations going from being disrupted by digital to becoming
the new digital disrupters.

Our challenge is to move beyond conducting transactions with

customers to building relationships with them as the line between
the physical and digital world becomes more and more blurred.
We must also relentlessly pursue the right mix of solutions to
understand big data and make the most of the opportunities
presented by enterprise mobility. Finally, with digital business,
there is also higher susceptibility to technology-related risk.
Therefore, it is important to remain resilient and plan to ensure
business continuity.
Globally, we see companies using the strategies described in the
Accenture Technology Vision 2014 to differentiate themselves,
surpass their competitors and enter new markets. We hope you
find this report useful in developing strategies to make your
organisation even more successful as a digital business.

This is especially the case in Malaysia, where internet and mobile

usage continues to surge and the country is positioning itself as
a regional technology leader. This report focuses on the findings
of the Accenture Technology Vision 2014 that are most pertinent
to Malaysia and our business sector. We also highlight examples Janet Yap
of these trends in action.
Country Managing Director and Technology Lead
Accenture Malaysia
Business is changing fast as technology becomes more deeply
ingrained in everyones day-to-day lives. Consumers are no
longer passive shoppers; huge amounts of data are being
collected by companies; and new marketing channels are
constantly being created.
These changes present both great risks and great opportunities
to reap rewards. We are already witnessing the impact of digital
technologies on conventional business models in every sector of
the economy here in Malaysia and around the world. And while
companies are embracing digital technology, theres still more to do.

Big Is The Next Big Thing

The Accenture Technology Vision 2014 Malaysia Perspective,
details how companies can use cutting-edge digital technology to
create sustainable platforms for growth.
Our research shows that many Malaysian companies already
understand the power of technology in enhancing their
operations. They see the benefits of an increasingly tech savvy,
mobile workforce and the increased productivity and cost
savings that come with adopting big data technologies and
digital solutions.

However, some Malaysian companies have only implemented

these solutions to a limited degree. They have the opportunity
to deploy technology in more widespread and integrated ways
across their operations to boost customer satisfaction and drive
expansion strategies.
In this report, we focus on six emerging technology trends and
how Malaysian businesses can harness them to succeed.

T E C H N O L O G Y V I S I O N 2 01 4

TREND 1

Digitalphysical blur:
Extending intelligence to the edge

The physical world is coming online. Smart objects,

devices and machines are revolutionising the
way business is conducted globally. This includes
everything from intelligent personal fitness devices
to advertising that responds to a consumers identity
and location. Were also seeing technology become
embedded in our everyday lives. Every business
is now a digital business, with the opportunity to
reinvent itself in the digital world.

Telekom Malaysia is also developing data mining,

analytics and visualization solutions, applying
artificial intelligence to data generated by smart
appliances to provide what it describes as sensible
and sense-able information. As the company
says, The challenge is to investigate how the data
made available from our day-to-day living can be
presented in a simple and distributed manner to
make meaningful living decisions.2

Consumers are also empowered with a vast array of

choices as the line between the digital and physical
world continues to blur. On the other side, enterprises
have unprecedented opportunities to leverage their
physical assets to leapfrog online competitors,
creating immersive real-world digital experiences for
customers to increase their market share.

MyTeksi, a Malaysian social startup, has successfully

deployed a taxi-dispatch service with GPSenhancements. The application allows users to
make bookings powered by Maxis M2M SIM to
communicate wirelessly in real-time. Drivers listed
under the MyTeksi system are equipped with
smartphones with GPS technology, while customers
simply download the app and register on the MyTeksi
website. When they turn on the app, the system
pinpoints their location using the MyTeksi software.

To maximise these opportunities, however, business

and technology leaders must rethink how they
engage customers in the new digitalphysical world.
For global giants like Cisco, which predicts the
industrial internet market will be worth US$14.4
trillion by the end of this decade,1 this means
focusing on the Internet of Things, or as Cisco
describes it, bringing together people, process, data,
and things to make networked connections more
relevant and valuable than ever before.
In Malaysia, telecommunications giant Telekom
Malaysia is a strong proponent of the Internet
of Things concept and is heavily involved with
initiatives such as internet-ready television with
high-speed connectivity (IPTV). With the ageing
of Malaysias population and increased urban
migration, Telekom Malaysia is also investigating
ways to provide better medical support and
enhanced security to internet-ready homes.2

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Banks such as CIMB are also unveiling initiatives

enabling state-of-the-art mobility for internet
banking such as a mobile card reader for credit and
debit cards.
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia
Commission (MCMC), the regulator for the
converging communications and multimedia
industries, has set a goal of establishing Malaysia
as a major global hub for multimedia information
and content services by 2020.3 Part of this initiative
revolves around nurturing local IT resources in a
ubiquitous national infrastructure which includes an
abundance of robust applications for all Malaysians.

TREND 2

From workforce to crowdsource:

The rise of the borderless enterprise
Around the world, organisations can access
vast pools of human resources like never
before, thanks to advances in cloud, social and
collaborative internet technologies.
New digital platforms are making it possible to
connect to what Accenture calls the expanded
workforce. While many organisations are enjoying
the benefits of digitally enabled forums such as
innovation exchanges and crowdsourcing platforms,
few executives fully grasp the idea of being able
to access a truly liquid workforce where pools of
premier talent are gathered in virtual communities
working on specific business problems and
initiatives. The tasks may be as simple as data entry
or as complex as industrial design.
In addition, localised online communities are
creating opportunities across the cloud for
collaborative business and social initiatives
through crowdsourcing. Technology is also
making it possible to engage with customers and
prospects in new ways changing both the way
businesses should engage with those customers
and build their own teams.
Communities of shared interest have organically
formed around almost every product, service
and idea imaginable and there is no shortage
of people willing to participate in online
experiments, contests and challenges. Companies
should no longer rely on a group of in-house
individuals to drive market research, innovation
and product-development activities. Digital

technology has brought a global voice to those

functions and is pushing the boundaries that
previously defined the enterprise workforce.
However, relatively few organisations in Malaysia
are involved in crowdsourcing initiatives at the
present time. In September last year, Khoo Kar
Khoon, the president of the Malaysian Advertisers
Association (MAA), said local marketers werent
doing enough crowdsourcing to benefit their
brands.4 Khoo, who is also Nestl Malaysias
Communications Director, said his company had
successfully used crowdsourcing to accompany
the Nestl 100 Year Celebration, which invited
consumers to discuss their most memorable
interactions with the brand, which was then
incorporated into a television ad campaign.

Charities and community-based organisations,

however, are leading the way with crowdsourcing
initiatives designed to not only raise money
but raise awareness of causes. Socialsharity,
a charitable crowdfunding website service,
uses social networking to engage businesses
and citizens in projects to support a range of
causes including helping children, the elderly,
those with disabilities, the environment and
animals.5 Another Malaysian website, pitchIN,
uses crowdsourcing to raise funds to support
community-based projects in the arts.

T E C H N O L O G Y V I S I O N 2 01 4

TREND 3

Data supply chain:

Putting information into circulation
Data technologies are evolving rapidly but most
have been adopted in a piecemeal fashion and
enterprise data is greatly underutilised. To unlock
the true potential of data, companies need to start
treating it more as a supply chain, enabling its easy
and useful flow through their organisations and
ecosystems of partners and customers.
For that to happen, the data needs to be made
visible and accessible to those who need it when
they need it, which requires a data services
platform. Fast data access is also essential, as quick
access to information means analyses and actions
can be performed in the often small window of
opportunity businesses have to be first to market
with a new product or service.
As the volume and variety of data grows, so
does the scale and complexity of the data supply
chain, making it increasingly difficult to derive
value from that information. However, with the
rise of machine-learning technologies, businesses
can enhance their supply chains by teaching
computers, with little guidance, what to do with
data and where to store it. Cognitive computing
technology builds on that by incorporating
components of artificial intelligence to seamlessly
convey insights to help people and machines
accomplish things they couldnt on their own.

In 2006, Telekom Malaysia initiated a major

transformation of its supply chain as part of its
strategy to accelerate the growth of its broadband
business, at a time when broadband penetration
in Malaysia was at about 1 percent.6 What the
company needed to do was consolidate and retire

ACCENTURE

seven legacy systems in two years; map between

the requirements of new commercial products
and the capabilities of the deployed technologies;
and establish, maintain and enhance an accurate
baseline of network inventory at nearly 1,000 sites.
In addition, the telco had to support the aggressive
rollout of new technologies across its network.
The complete supply chain overhaul also involved
massive amounts of data migration while
consolidating inventory systems and file-based
stores into one centrally maintained database. The
successful integration of all these processes helped
Malaysian broadband penetration reach 11 percent
by late 2007.
Malaysian organisations can also benefit from
the work being done by the Malaysia Institute for
Supply Chain Innovation (MISI), which focuses
on identifying and solving the practical problems
associated with global digital supply chains.7
It brings faculty members, graduate students
and research staff together with prominent
global companies and organisations to engage
in research. Its primary objective is to help firms
gain and sustain a competitive advantage by
investing in their supply chains. The institution,
which offers masters and doctoral programs in
effective supply chains and logistics, also conducts
research and outreach activities for global and
local organisations that operate in the SoutheastAsian region.

TREND 4

Harnessing hyperscale:
Hardware is back
(and never really went away)
IT hardware technology has emerged from the
shadows of software innovation to once again
become a hotbed of innovation and development
as demand soars for bigger, faster, lower-cost
data centres.
Across industries, the demand for processing
data at scale is surging and businesses are more
reliant than ever on hardware supporting the
unprecedented amounts of data they need to
process in order to manage transactions and gain
new insights from that information.
Advances in storage, power consumption,
processors and server architecture have all
combined to pave the way for faster, cheaper and
bigger hardware solutions. As a result, companies
can reap the rewards of hyperscale systems,
which offer the physical infrastructure of giant
distributed systems and the computing power to
support the data centres that allow companies
like Google and Facebook to deal with vast
volumes of data.
Hyperscale systems also give enterprises the ability
to scale computing tasks to achieve performance
that is orders of magnitude better than their
current systems. These new data centres consume
storage, bandwidth, memory, and computing cycles
on a scale unimaginable to most.

In this new paradigm, hardware matters more

than ever in transforming enterprises into digital
businesses with access to unlimited computing
power. Every company will see the benefits of
hyperscale innovation trickle into data centres
in the form of cost reduction, but as companies
digitalize, more and more we will see these
systems as essential to enabling their next wave
of growth.
Malaysia is making a concerted push into the big
data market with the national Big Data Analytics
(BDA) initiative through the Product Development
& Commercialisation Fund (PCF) as as part of a
government initiative to become a regional hub
for IT and digital innovation by 2020. Under the
terms of the programme, the government will
work with partners across four projects to see
how data can be most effectively analysed and
harvested. The development of the National
BDA framework will be overseen by a taskforce
chaired by the Ministry of Communications and
Multimedia.
Accompanying this push into big data, spending
on Malaysian data centres has surged. In 201213,
total Malaysian data centre investment was
US$700 million,8 compared to US$665 million
spent the year before. According to Malaysias
2013 Malaysia Data Census study figures, one
of the most important investment drivers for
the Malaysian data centre community is a need
to increase IT capacity and to meet a growing
number of corporate and technical requirements.

T E C H N O L O G Y V I S I O N 2 01 4

TREND 5

The business of applications:

Software as a core competency in
a digital world
Software development is changing in ways which
mimic the shift in the consumer world, where
organisations are rapidly moving from enterprise
applications to applications. There will always
be big, complex enterprise software systems
providing updates, patches and more. But now, as
organisations push for greater operational agility,
there is a sharp shift toward simpler, more modular
apps for IT leaders and business leaders alike. They
will soon have to decide not only who plays what
application development role in their new digital
organisations, but how to transform the nature of
application development itself.
IT applications have become the primary driver
for growth and differentiation for enterprises. The
increasing push to rapidly deploy new technology
is increasing pressure on IT departments to provide
a faster way to develop and deploy the applications
that are driving corporate digital strategies.
Customers and employees are looking for consumergrade experiences everywhere. They are pressing IT
to give them the kinds of low-cost, accessible and
often intelligent applications they use on their own
mobile devices in the workplace.

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In Malaysia, Molpay.com, a multi-currency

payments gateway, has developed a suite of
e-commerce products that accept cash payments
for online purchases through physical outlets
such as convenience stores and bookstores. It also
offers payment solutions from online payment
acceptance and processing to fraud management
to payment security.
Mobile marketplace app Duriana provides a platform
to buy and sell used items, and currently has several
thousand listings across beauty, fashion, sport,
arts, technology and gadgets. The location-based
technology allows users to find buyers and sellers
near them. Some of the early adopters include
online boutiques and instashops (users who buy
and sell items via Instagram). Duriana plans to
become more involved with online buyer and seller
communities inside Malaysia.

TREND 6

Architecting resilience:
Built to survive failure becomes
the mantra of the non-stop business
Transforming to a digital business will always include
technology-related risk. As more business processes
become interconnected and automated by using IT,
they become new potential points of failure.
In the digital era, businesses must support wideranging demands for non-stop processes, services,
and systems. This has particular resonance in the
office of the CIO, where the need for always-on IT
infrastructure, security, and resilient practices can
mean the difference between business-as-usual and
an erosion in brand value.
The upshot is that IT departments must adopt a
new mindset to ensure that systems are dynamic,
accessible and continuous for resilience under
failure and attack. Transforming to a digital business
implicitly increases a companys exposure to risk
through IT failures. More business processes are
interconnected and automated, all of which become
potential points of risk and system failure.
Cyber criminals are not just trying to gain access
to systems, they are trying to bring them down.
Globally, the number of denial-of-service attacks
rose by 58 percent in the past year.9
In Malaysia, myCert received only 76 intrusion
attempt reports in 2013 compared to 258 for the
first five months of 2014. However, the actual
attempts could be significantly higher as declaration
of intrusion attempts are voluntary and most
enterprises do not report such attempts. This
correlates to Accentures own internal findings that
about 45 percent of global CIOs admit they are
under-investing in IT security.

More systems are being integrated and continuous

improvement is becoming the norm in IT. But
constant change to increasingly complex systems
is introducing more risk than ever before and, in a
digital world, the expectation is that your system
will always be working.
For example, on 8 April 2014, the Malaysian
Communications and Multimedia Commission
(MCMC) alerted all internet service providers, the
Government Emergency Response Team and other
regulators and banks about the threat posed by the
discovery of Heartbleed, a cryptographic library
used to secure much of the internets global traffic.
MCMC said at the time that it would continue to
monitor and advise those who are vulnerable.

CyberSecurity Malaysia, the national cyber security

government agency, has been given the task of
preventing or minimising disruptions to critical
information infrastructure to protect the public, the
economy and government services.10 To this end, it
has developed specialised cyber security solutions
which provide access to a wide variety of tools
and education to assist in proactive or forensic
investigations. One of the bodys key goals is to
convince companies that increasing security is as
vital in todays digital economy as locking the doors
at night has always been in the old economy and
not an investment black hole.
The Information Security Professional Association
of Malaysia is also at the forefront of educating
businesses and members of the public about
the benefits of security with the support of the
Malaysian IT community, higher education centres
and CyberSecurity Malaysia.

T E C H N O L O G Y V I S I O N 2 01 4

CONCLUSION

Whilst examples of each trend can

be seen in Malaysia, very few are
embedding these concepts into
their organizations DNA to become
truly digital and competitive.
Telecommunications and information technology
companies are leading the charge, but other sectors
need to jump on board the digital train before they
find themselves falling behind their competitors.
For leading enterprises, 2014 will see a turning
point in relation to innovation, change and growth
centered on the uptake of digital technology. As a
fast-emerging regional economy with ambitions
of becoming a regional IT hub in the near future,
Malaysian organisations have an unprecedented
opportunity to gain a competitive advantage both
locally and internationally by driving the adoption of
digital technologies.

10

Now is the time for the digitally disrupted to

become the new disrupters, especially at the
enterprise level.

ACCENTURE

Notes
1

Technology Vision 2014, Accenture, 2014.

Telekom Malaysia R&D: The Internet of Things is fast

becoming a reality, telecoms.com, March 26, 2012.

Ubiquitous Malaysia and the Internet of Things, skmm.gov.

my, September 9, 2010.

Crowdsourcing can benefit marketers, The Star Malaysia,

September 28, 2013.

http://www.socialsharity.com/

Telekom Malaysia case study, clarity.com, September 6, 2011.

http://www.misi.edu.my/

Malaysian DCD Censuses, 20112014.

Technology vision 2014, Accenture, 2014

http://www.cybersecurity.my/en/about_us/corporate_
overview/main/detail/2065/index.html
10

11

T E C H N O L O G Y V I S I O N 2 01 4

About the Contributors

About Accenture

Adrian Lim is a Senior Manager and leads the Infrastructure Services

and Security practice with Accenture Technology Malaysia.

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services

and outsourcing company, with approximately 289,000 people
serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled
experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and
business functions, and extensive research on the worlds most
successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help
them become high-performance businesses and governments. The
company generated net revenues of US$28.6 billion for the fiscal
year ended Aug. 31, 2013. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

adrian.lim@accenture.com
Noor Hafizah Yusof is a Manager in the Emerging Technology
practice with Accenture Technology Malaysia.
noor.hafizah.yusof@accenture.com

Contact Us
Visit www.accenture.com/malaysiantechvision or email us at
klworkplace@accenture.com to find out how your organisation can
benefit from applying the six trends of the Technology Vision 2014.

Copyright 2014 Accenture

All rights reserved.
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High Performance Delivered
are trademarks of Accenture.

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