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October 07, 2021

Digital Workplace Transformation Live - SPEAKER SPOTLIGHT: Mapping your digital workforce ROI

Courtesy of USNC's Stephen Apps below is a transcript of his speaking session on 'Mapping your digital workforce ROI' to Build a Thriving Enterprise that took place at Digital Workplace Transformation Live.

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Session Information:

Mapping your digital workforce ROI

The world is undergoing significant turmoil and disruption creating a challenging and unpredictable environment for employees and organizations in both the developing and developed world. The availability and take-up of digital technologies has enabled industries and the workplace to rapidly change in order to remain viable.

  • The global disruption and impact
  • Digital technologies mitigating disruption
  • The increasing value and usage of data
  • Threats and risks to the digital workplace
  • Changing skills and capabilities with the workforce

Session Transcript:

Indirectly, from Pretoria in South Africa. And I'm talking about Steve Apps. Mister Apps is with us. He is a professional engineer with more than 30 years experience with digital technology and innovation. He's currently the Chief Advisor to the ultra safe nuclear Company for researching, designing, and implementing all the digital technology for designing, building, and running a fleet of micro, modular nuclear reactors. And his previous role he was both a CTO and Chief digital transformation officers for YA enterprises for Southern Africa, where he worked extensively on Smart Cities, Smart Grids, and Internet of Things.

Steve, what a pleasure to have you directly from Pretoria and to our global audience, sharing your experiences with digital transformation, especially in this as part of the industry, the energy industry that is going for a tremendous transition. And then you layer digital transformations on top of that very, very eager and Churchill here, the, What your experiences have been in this journey? And, again, thank you for sharing with our global audience.

Thank you.

Aye.

OK, so, hello, everybody, I'm pleased to be here and I'm here to talk about the digital workforce return on investment with the perspective of how we've approached it within an industry, my previous experience.

So, you know, we always start off with how, what, what our experiences and what our careers are.

We've progressed and I've always found it very difficult to explain where I've been and what I've done and what my experience is across the years.

So put together this kind of framework with all the experience, exposure, industries, knowledge gained over the time.

So, so I've been an executive for quite a long time.

And if you saw my taught as earlier, a European professional engineer, chartered engineer, as well as what can we run while we are extensively on smart cities, the research?

But we're here to talk about ultra safe nuclear company, USMC.

So this is the generation for nuclear reactors.

It's all new technology that's coming about.

And this is a really innovative approach to the reactors.

So, said, the Wallace, the company of building sized 15 megawatts, so they're nice and small.

They're there to work in remote locations or to businesses, or to provide smaller solutions wherever you require.

It's designed so that the reactor itself is very much a standalone component and shown the lorries are.

So, what are the lorry has got to do with the reactor is the case of these things are modular.

Because we can just drive in, it's built on these, react to these containers.

You just drive it and put it together. Within six weeks. You can build the entire site.

It's just 20 meters underground grounded.

But then on the back of a lorry is taken in there, put it in, and off you go, it doesn't need refueling.

So for 20 years, it can run, it's, like, a big battery for 20 years, and everything is enclosed. So there's no radiation. There nothing. You can just stay close to it and work with it, so it needs very little.

monitoring or maintaining is incredibly safe. And the physics are such that it's been proven over the last 40 years but it's impossible for it to overheat is caught by the laws of physics are self regulating, but it cools down.

So therefore, we get the approvals of these reactors. And then it's the case that it becomes a mass produced, battery built commodity, which can be rolled out whatever your blog.

Now, when it comes to renewable energies, the interesting thing about this is it separated.

If you look at the bottom left diagram, what we have is adjacent plants. So, they react. We have standalone to prove this. Then we can connect anything. We want to the reactor.

Typically, if it's electricity, we use January the technology, which is used in concentrated solar plants.

So we have the molten salt, which creates steam, which drives a turbine, so it's well known and we'll use technology that we move forward with that.

Well, we can use it for heating.

So therefore, it's a lot more efficient when you can do a lot of wonderful eating and other stuff.

Oh you can work with greenhouses, Desalinization farms and other stuff so it's got A huge potential, incredibly cheap and incredibly well worth it.

So, why am I required to work with this amazing technology?

So, so obviously, the idea is to roll it out, many of these, many, many, tens, to hundreds to thousands, if possible.

And they want to monitor and control and managing with all the data and everything else.

Which means we need to move towards automation, high speed Dataflow, digital twins, data analytics, and the like to make it work.

So, the next slide is showing you a kind of a brief overview of what we're playing with, what the drivers are.

So on the left, we're a global workforce, therefore, we need to have a digital economy and a digital workforce to work together all over the world.

So we call employees in Korea, London, South Africa, Canada, America, and other places. So therefore, that works as well.

We're doing a lot of R&D and design work.

So, so experimenting, and looking at what are the best technologies and how they can love employ that, but the amount of data we're going to move is massive.

I mean, if you consider it, we're looking at how the neutrons within the atoms flow, and what they do, and how they perform over a 20 year period, huge amount of data.

We need to be able to do this, remotely.

We need to deal with knowledge retention.

This is incredibly difficult area.

Not many people know this we're not going to generate enough engineers, know how to do this fast too automate a lot of stuff with digitalization.

one of the aspects, which I found challenging, and I think, my team do, is getting our engineers to work together with, as software developers, who work within the digital industry.

Screenshot - 2021-07-31T185011.472We're going from a highly constrained, managed industry, where everything is, you know, project managed by the roles requirements.

Working with agile.

Teams are used to agile development, working with the horizontal structure, making decisions. So, it's a very different way of working, is that it needs to meld and work together by a challenge.

The generational gap, I don't know how many people have come across a generational gap, But I find the different generations, and how they're approaching this, and how they're looking at, it is quite different than we have teeth.

But just allow for this.

So, you know, to go through some of the technologies we're working with here, one of the big areas that I believe it's being presented to certainly degree here, is Digital twins.

This is quite a difficult area, and it's quite complex.

It's quite a bit harder than one would tend to expect, because the ability to get the data and move it into Digital Twin to visualize it is quite complex.

You would use CAD drawings, for example.

You think that, based on the marketing, You can get your ... or import them into digital twins, and you can visualize it. Or, in fact, the hierarchies in the meshing? And how these constructed quite different?

It takes an awful lot of effort.

And we're working hard to a couple of ways, around essence, looking to be quite a complex task, that we're not too sure, how we're going to progress. See whether we have to manually build instead.

This is tying into simulation.

The simulation is requiring us to work with massive, massive data from lots of different data stores in different areas.

And the integration of that data, and making sure the data is the right dataset to work with, is very challenging, because most systems are not designed to work so well that way.

So, and then the other thing is mainly here is the virtualization moving to the cloud environment.

So moving to cloud environment is exciting.

Allows you to go to the topics model, and how to scale massively, enables you to spin up servers and solutions very fast and work with them.

But on the downside, is very complex and very technical. The learning curve has been extremely high.

And we find, there are a lot of restrictions on how it can use a technology, which you would not expect.

So, know, we can talk a lot about this for a long time, but I shall move on.

So a lot of what we're talking about with this digital workplace, and everything else related to, is the fourth industrial revolution that's driving the fourth industrial revolution.

So based on what we're having with what content form, it's, it's a case of here what we're saying.

My apologies were saying here that it's about who evokes the fastest, not who's the biggest.

So therefore, you know, we've seen a lot of Uber coming along.

Then they'd come up with a whole different way of working in a move fast and it made a huge difference.

During this current epidemic we found that those companies are gone online.

Being able to provide that service online to provide you the service you need to grow and flourish lot better than their chicken.

But, the interesting thing is, this is, talk about the integration of using the physical, digital, and biological world, which is pretty massive number. As you see, we're only just starting on the journey.

Um, we're still look at it.

People are already talking about the best Industrial Revolution is, to me, quite interesting.

So, a lot of things we have to think about, and I did some work advising for the United Nations as well for awhile.

When we talk about ethics and identity, so a lot of what we're looking at is about the ethics behind what we're doing here.

Btog CTAMachine learning and artificial intelligence, also, how we actually make digital technology available moving forward.

So this is a huge amount of technologies, and a huge amount of things to consider.

But all of these are pretty critical to think about moving forward, and it's, I think it's a whole, massive session, important so.

So, I said, I'd talk a little bit about, you know, what are the drivers moving forward.

So, we've been in the fourth Industrial Revolution for years or so, I'd say, I'll be working, digitizing, and doing digital transformation for like maybe as long as 20 years ago. We've been doing a lot of work in this space.

A lot of mobility a lot of moving forward, a lot of God.

And a lot of that is based on, the technology is improving and moving forward and we're like, getting there.

We're celebrating that a lot because of the Caribbean epidemic, which is forcing us to accelerate ickes of these technologies.

But, also, we're finding that, based on these global goals, we have got identified, this, this is speaking a lot to, you know, what is driving us and how we need to think about moving forward with our using the digital technologies, which smart cities, Obviously sustainable cities and communities, is critical.

We have to be able to see how we can employ an user that ties in with renewable energy.

The renewable energy is extremely challenging itself too lengthy about that and how it works.

But it's it's the case of renewable energy, some renewable energy is probably less helpful.

The environment then bleed like biomass, other technologies of those thought.

But, we also find that when you're using solar and wind powered energy is very great, is a peak load, a great, great good for, like, lowering the anything on top of what you require.

But, you need your base load to keep the sustainability so that you have inertia in the grid so that the pockets flow.

So, I did an analysis for one of the islands of the African coast recently on how they can transform or become a digital player globally communism. gateway nation.

one of the things, which was in their favor, which I noticed against the rest of, say, the African continent essentially have electricity.

So one of the important things about Digital Workspace is having electricity in BC.

Crazy things say, I must admit.

But when you've got like.

I took about Pretoria here.

As an example Last week for over a week, we had no electricity because a substation blew up because it hadn't been maintained.

Now, this is not really very good for business is not good for working.

And we've had a lot of our people move to different countries, which is currently working.

So, in a lot of the world, we need to look at how the sustainability of electricity works.

So, so, onto that with a different technology.

And I came across this, this morning as it happened.

Readings from my engineer, door journals, let's talk about the Digital Twin Earth, which to me is like fantastic concept, which all of us are working with.

Digital technologies, moving forward, is to look at how we can enhance and use this information, provide information to it, to understand our impact on the world, and how it can react, how it can deal with it. Whether it's about how we can provide.

That is services.

If we're a charity or government, or if we're like a private enterprise, how he could, you know, provide better ways to market our services that make a huge difference and make things better?

And an area, which I really enjoy.

Quantum computing, it's an area where quantum computing rarely can get moving. You start making a lot of work in calculations for since gotten there can be different.

So this is pretty much maybe the ultimate Digital Twin.

I think it's very exciting.

So, in our workplace, we've started looking at how we can work there.

one of the things, and I must admit, I initially found it quite challenging to get into the mood of it is the Agile and Agile sprints.

But in the digital workplace, in the current technology, we have to move to an agile way of working.

Following the old multiple based project management, or some monolithic projects, and spending two years delivering, a technology is just not going to work anymore.

By the time you finish the project, everything's out of date your company, your your competition has raced ahead of you and you've know, you've locked out and you've got my business.

I believe the Agile sprints to be innovative and be able to move fast and keep up competition which comes down to digital dexterity. Use cases have.

In your workforce, PH adjust and work with this changing technology. Change fast and go to work faster, learning new things.

Jerry, far too much for anybody to learn if you'd like to send them a course, or trying to give them something to look at.

So you need to go for micro training mockery short courses and analyze, worked, and keep them like spending a little bit of fun every day or every week, you know, learning and seeing how they can keep up with it.

Not to get overloaded or bogged down with the technology, because it is truly overwhelming, and a lot of people.

Do you struggle with it?

Another concept is design thinking.

It's very different because everybody's used to having the same predecessors the same systems the same way of working.

Now, is the case that everybody has to stop thinkin concave and how digitization solutions can improve their work. Make it more efficient and make them more flexible and available.

Though, that is a whole new way of thinking. And it's, it's, it's, it's a change management exercise work with everybody.

Automation of routine work.

We accelerated this recently because we had one of our data scientists.

We're trying to push through a procurement for our contractor, is crazy, because we're kind of form of best practice reports.

Now, in this week, we use low, low code to automate this. Now, we could do probably about an hour.

So you can do this fairly quick. Current is stuff, but it's, it makes a huge difference, SHH, sensitive Resources, tied up in a dissolution.

Event Email Graphic Virtual Conferences (17)-1And you want the flexibility of getting on demand workforce. A lot of these skills are not available very much for expensive and you get get them in short notice using what you need to move on elsewhere.

So, what is it, challenges? These, these are pretty important to look at.

Got the matrix. Add, we measure, how do we know?

What we're doing is making a difference is improving.

I'm going to talk about this some more.

But, we have culture shock: move into this digital world is a huge culture shock.

It's very hard to work with the different technologies, the speed of their working.

A lot of the workforce may not even have IT experience and knowledge may just about the EITC Microsoft Word e-mail, So it's important to help along with that, because it's not easy.

Whatever anybody says is truly not easy to keep up and get to grips with.

Burnout, you tend to have your high performers and your high flyers.

They tend to work so hard that your home and your digital. And they don't turn the machines often mixing in working 20 hours a day, because they're looking for the next e-mail. Because we've got a global company, you're getting e-mails all the time going to work the time they're responding to what time the kinetic burnt out.

That's happened with great frequency seniors.

Talent deficiency.

A lot of this is new solutions and new technologies that we're working with, the workforce hasn't caught up.

Machine learning is extremely advanced, statistical mathematics is very complex and difficult, and you need to be very achieving the net worth thinking to be able to do that kind of work.

Data scientist as well is also there to understand a lot of experience that data in your area where industry.

But, actually, the calculations analytics related to it.

It's, it's a unique skill, they need to be nurtured.

We have to like work forward to find these siloes, now, I've come across silos quite a lot. It's a case of different departments and different areas.

Don't necessarily want to work, which, are they going to share the way they do business, and how the government works, or like, how they communicate.

In the, in our current area, we've got us on the software side, and we have what we think is important. We were born in. Brazil Engine is a whole different viewpoint.

And the information sharing and what we're asking each other, there's a missing.

Communication is sometimes because what we think is important, and they don't, Or vice versa, and the information doesn't come through. So it takes quite a lot, too.

Get over that.

Business processes, you have to do a huge change in your business processes.

This condition, each term of the organizations. changing roles and responsibilities, you get an uncomfortable workforce.

If unions are involved, they can stop complaining because people don't change very delicate process.

It's important as you buy it.

Management structure, you gotta work, move away from your, the top-down hierarchical structure more far is onto structure so that the workforce is empowered.

Neither, the management is more of a guide and a coach, rather, than giving you instructions on what to do.

You have to be self driven in the self self started, and the big one, which I guess we will talking about, is security in cybersecurity, and how it works.

I'm not necessarily going to talk about too much now, because there is a whole topic on itself. And this is basically a case of being aware, and safe, and being careful in additional effects that everybody's got training programs, too.

I'm curious and worked with this So we're talking about Matrix.

Whenever we're doing business or moving forward, you have simple business metrics, which are designed at a strategic level by the organization.

And simple ones that we look at, revenue generation, You want to increase your revenue generation of, your money make more money for the shareholders.

Cost reduction is another way to improve the business, great, greater efficiencies create.

Let's cut to spend, or make better stuff, and obligation to stop other aspects.

So that is important to measure.

improvements to customer satisfaction.

So that is important.

So therefore, you improve your customer satisfaction, which you can measure, then you get more business, which, then, by accounts, improves your revenue generation.

Employee attraction, you want to employ the best and retain them.

You want the desktop these days because of additional work base place involved.

It's necessary to make sure they have this workforce on hand is happy to work.

The reputation of the organization is important.

Now, is social media to speak that information.

Travel.

You know, it's very easy for your reputation. Your organization be rapidly damaged.

Does it cause you a serious loss of revenue?

It's really, quite important to manage data control that and keep that on board.

Screenshot (4)Managing that area is very important. And, then, we go, say, for example, looking at more physical reduction, safeties, safety incidents.

So, even a digital workplace relates to unsafe environments as well.

Measure.

So, potential matrix, which you can use to help work with those things, if you're looking at the people side, you know, you can look at employee resignations compared to what you have, how much internal recruitment do you manage to get employees to stay out of it promoted?

How many people are doing a training?

Develop and getting new skills, how they growing in their roles, employee engagement, you have you have your online or in your online wikis stuff, and it's like, how many employees are going on there Sharing information.

Having the discussions in groups to actually share knowledge together, doing new projects and everything else is pretty good indicator of where the energy is going, and how that's tied into wet and muddy generations.

So, then, you want to look at your, uh, cost savings.

So, you want to look at IT costs, IT costs. We're moving towards digital workplaces.

It's going to be very hard to producers, cost, by the very nature of activity, that you can stop, optimizing those costs, based on the balance between using the online technology and moving away from on premise.

There's a huge shift towards online technologies these days, but you have to be careful of how you use it, because you can suddenly find your costs are, excessive.

I did not expect and would come down the line from your use, So therefore, this has to be managed, OK.

Now, we can look at training and travel costs.

I think it's been seen hugely during this period of travel costs.

Massively reduced, despite what everybody says about this New Way of Working, where we're online, we're working from home, travel, no, we're humans, you know, we like physical contact, not working together.

So, I don't somehow see myself, that can ever be.

LLP.

Coming tomorrow, I'm an executive. Working at this level isn't getting excited tomorrow. I'm going to go help.

What am I workforce to install servers and configure them?

Ability with OpenStack cloud environment testing. I'm gonna, just because I want to get out and she spends time with someone, do something interesting.

So, is still there. And I think we're going to find the energy and excitement moving on.

So, seem to look at, and it's where I've seen as a big challenge, and I've seen it fall down quite a lot in addition to workplaces and other places, I've worked in its base, and these are very difficult.

These are very good things we're talking about here, is you need to have clear team objectives and alignment, The team needs to be critically clear what they need to do, what decision making I can do with flexibility they have, and how they can go about going and achieving them.

This is critical.

And even though I had discussions with my team today, where there was not quite enough clarity Management, know quite how to get better at the windmill.

Putting together workshops, to address that, it's, it's, you have to work with it all the time.

Candidates can think, like, told them at the beginning of the year, and thinking the stick things change.

Next, and it's something which I found extensively.

The truth is, the way things work is measuring productivity against time, and that ties in with the following one, which is, identify important metrics.

So companies that work with VC, who work 12, 18 hour days and they're working long days, and they're getting huge, Madison praise, and they're getting like recognition bonuses, and there are some other e-mails, I do. All this stuff that they can actually do.

Anything that is keeping busy doing nothing.

They're taking 10 times longer to job, which you can do yourself.

So I find I could do a job in four hours, so, eight hours and leave. They can do the same driving two days. But there's any overtime. Or recognition based on how things are measured.

This is not exactly the best way to proceed or progress, and it's this, this has caused a lot of them, frustration with myself and his work bases.

Also, to identify that you need to have a relaxed mind, a fresh mind, and a happy workforce, to be able to effectively work.

You tie your brain now to works very well, and we have to trust what it's important to gain that trust, So, then we woke up data.

Data is the single most important thing in school gardens, but what about all the stitch toward we're working with?

We have to make sure we have the right data to work with, know how to work with it, I'll deal with it.

But there's no point getting all the data in the world because you've got to have sprawl.

If you have sprawl of data, we get so much data.

What are you going to do with that data?

You know, psych to analyze is going to be huge. The how clean is updated. How many different sources is that data?

What is the value of that data?

It's, it's, it's, it's a need to actually collect, Dictates your requirement.

I was working with one utility. That's quite a number.

Screenshot - 2021-07-31T185011.472Lot of what we need to work with then is, hopefully you're reading a lot of that, is, working with the quality, the data, bad data coming in, Machine learning, is the case you can load your data if the data skew or bad.

It's not fully correct or clean.

You can come back, results, bad information skews. So that is quite important.

And I could give quite a lot of examples in the book.

We've got to deal with the confidential data confidentiality of the data, as well, so.

So, I will hopefully, uh.

Wrap up here with my connection.

So, we have two, when we're working with this stuff, Panda would have to look very closely at business architecture.

The business architecture is important to make sure that we can actually deal with the digital workplace Technology selection is important.

Con, choose the best technology to come across resourcing is incredibly key.

And then we deal with Rob, that data needs the organization.

So hopefully this is getting through, and because of the connection challenges.

Steve, yes, you're kinda through, well now, yeah, I don't know how long hours alpo Africa, we just miss your audio there momentarily towards the end. and it was just the one slide before this one, your audio was broken out.

Yeah, I apologize, my screen went crazy. and I, each message is very confusing.

I wasn't sure how much I was coming across, so apologies for my, um, confusion on the presentation was quite Quite difficult.

It's the joy of living in Africa.

I think that you, your message came across well, and that that did not affect the flow. So that was very good.

And you know, what I like about it is that you are, you know, you're broadcasting, of course, directly from Pretoria and in South Africa. And you know, we are here off course of a global community participating in this conference.

And and D I had some time in Johannesburg in South Africa where we're having rolling blackouts because of energy issues that were happening in that area. And you probably can talk a lot more about that, especially being the energy industry. And that's the first question that I have for you.

How do you see the digital transformation impact on, on your industry, and the and I will say, more broadly, the energy industry. But there's very small, very interesting work. You're doing the small nuclear reactors here. How is digital transformation impacting your work directly?

So, so I've been doing a lot of work for a long time on Smart grids, lot of work with some of the larger utilities on how to developing a build a spot grid, but in their technologies together, using IOT.

I've been advising some African countries even this year, now to approach revenue collection, how to manage and monitor that energy.

So, the big impact coming along, which is outside of Africa, is electric vehicles.

That's a huge impact as a grid can sustain that.

The renewable energies it's, we're moving away from grids which needs centralized energy management.

Teams like power stations to a lot smaller, power energy generation closer to the sort of use, which means we can generate a lot less.

As, for example, in South Africa, we generate three times the amount of energy than what we use, because of the amount of energy lost in transmission.

So, we can actually generate a lot less switch.

But for the country, we need to have a lot more automation, management of the courage to stable. Otherwise, we're going to find out what advice is lower.

It's exciting area.

For.

Sure, And as you mention, as we have more and more distributed sources of power, the danger gration of that, in the.

Now, not only in this traditional grid, but, you know, in smart grids, become becomes increasingly important, that, tell us a little bit more about the ultra safety nuclear, Which is, which is an awesome, by the way, name, because you want to say, right off the bat, the name of the company.

And this is ultra safe, because a lot of people will have Unfortunately, misguided perceptions about the nuclear industry. They think about Fukushima. They think about, you know, three mile island Chernobyl. And they don't realize how safe nuclear power plants really are and I assume that you're doing something even at the next level that it's ultra safe. Tell us a little bit more about that Project, Canada, and that what that looks like.

So, apart from the third case, nuclear reactions, the technology and the approach is extremely different.

So your traditional nuclear reactors are huge.

The basically uranium sitting inside your graphite reactor, it's cooled by water, such a huge thing called by pumping water to cool, The reactors we're looking at.

Exactly a lot smarter energy production.

But the sort of reactor where voting is known as a, uh, I temperature gas cooled reactor, which is using here.

So helium is like a lot safer.

And it allows for better cooling.

But the amazing thing is this reactor is so safe that if you lose the helium helium disappears, you lose your cool and you lose control, you lose anything, the heat dissipate through the Earth around it.

So it gets cooled by the ground and it gets cool.

The amazing thing is that if the reaction gets cheaper E, the neutrons if I talk about the neutrons which causes the splitting of the atoms, they go too fast and I actually have too much energy and I actually saw missing the other uranium, 235 atoms. And therefore it's less cooling because you got less reaction.

Event Email Graphic Virtual Conferences (17)-1Then it starts cooling, encoding intense, cool enough to actually stop binding them again.

And then the reaction starts off again.

But then it's kind of like a gentle way with a time series, pretty much impossible to have a meltdown situation, and it's pretty amazing.

And it's a proven technology for 30 or 40 years, and now it's coming to light produced, because now cost, so that the technology is getting it to what that, what type of lifetime you will have for a small unit like that.

So, the one we're building is designed for 20 years.

But, the thing is, we say it's 20 years because, if you're putting in a turbine, a turbine last 20 years, a generator last 20 years, know you're teasing pinners.

So, all the other stuff you need is about 20 years, but figuring if you need to take those out and replace them, No, you can take out the reactor as well, put it in the back of a lorry and take it away.

The thing is it's designed such that when 20 years you could take it all away, put it into Harlem, need to start bombing.

Or if you want, you can just get another reactor on the back of a lorry, well, in competent and off you go.

It's pretty, pretty flexible, amazing.

Now, we're looking in one country to put in 100 of these side by side, Credit became powerful, but amazing.

So it's the fact that we couldn't lost touch for 20 years, we'll need almost no manpower to maintain it or monitor it, That's incredibly useful.

This is a great example of nano technologies that have existed for a period of time, and then they have a resurgence for a number of different reasons and technical improvements and opportunities that that happened. It says, Our production scale. Now that the small reactors are happening at a production scale and not yet.

So we're not a production scale because there are quite a number of companies, not the same as us developing these reactors in all of them are like have a different purpose.

Like you have an off road car racing car, they assemble different things, so there are quite a few companies out there you might have heard of like tariff power, Rolls Royce, that building, similar for different purpose.

But with this digital technology, in its fourth industrial revolution, in the way we work, and it's such a huge innovatively, huge job for is taking a lot of time for the industry to shift from the Ultra safe thinking of how do not have the experts.

Like, you know, Uh, Fukushima and that and to actually allow us to use our technologies to build, we're going to build so a lot of what is coming to demonstrate that so, one of the things I'm doing is building on my site one of the first of a kind or engineering simulation of a target action and getting the full digital model stimulated.

This is incredibly complicated and difficult.

I think quite a lot of us in the industry are trying to work on the same problem, us, so that we can actually burn that it's safe, leave things alone.

So, whoops, we're pretty much going to start putting these things in within the next year or two.

Then, for these trials, hopefully, to happiness, which I've seen rolling out a lot over the years.

Very interesting, and now if I, if I think about, and you already discussed some of this, digital technologist, an impact on, on, on this type of business model in the energy industry, small nuclear reactor may be distributed energy. Some potential installations, or remote locations, what are some of the most useful for digital technologies that you may be, may be using here? I can see some level of remote monitoring, and for security, and performance, C, and maybe artificial intelligence, to some of those things. But, I'm curious about what's actually happening. What are some of the technologies that you feel right now are ready? It's not hype, but it's really ready for adding value, should this type of business model.

So, so, one of the technologies, which I really like, that we're making a lot of use of, now, is containerization in the cloud.

So going online and using the containers, and he's talking about containers and the ability to work with Kubernetes and other message, just instruction get high speed transmission of data.

Yeah, let's do our calculations.

Work is enough a matter of seconds, a thousand servers started calculations for us and now, I can call it like a written back tag in a high performance computing cluster and other stuff.

So we're still experimented with it but it's like the cost and effort to build ourselves a data center, but to go and use a supercomputer is horrendous.

This relishes us from all of that allows us to actually suddenly do this easily.

Spanish specialist. Fantastic.

No, that's great. If the, if you go by just saying that necessity is the mother of invention, I think the African continent has many great examples where you have use the latest technologies, to really leapfrog, you know, The stages of development, right? You can talk about telecommunications and how that happened. And I think you provided some interesting examples here on how that may be happening to a certain extent on this, on the on this business segment.

Yeah, because we got some of the best designers of nuclear reactors in the country.

So, so we're pretty lucky to have them here, and I'll feel humbled to have the opportunity to work with these amazing people, like, for you, on it, for me.

It's truly exciting enough to learn an awful lot.

Excitement I never expected after working for ..., which I'll look for it.

This is fine, that's fantastic. Steve, thank you so much for your leadership. I mean, you have global cross industry experiences, there are so relevant to this discussion on digital transformation.

Thank you so much for your presentation, for sharing your expertise with our global audience today, and we're very much better off by learning this perspectives that you have share with us, and thank you for allowing me to present and afford my experiences.

Screenshot (4)Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen. That Steve Apps, again, Chief Advisor on Digital Transformation for U S and C directly from Pretoria in South Africa, sharing his expertise on a on a very interesting area of energy and small nuclear reactors. And the and the ability that that they to scale the digital technologies in that market segment. Now, this concludes, they chew off digital workplace transformation live. We had a little bit of digital twins to start today and we've talked about robotics process automation. We had to have a pharma soda giving kind of the biopharma veal of digital transformation, and we'll wrap up with small nuclear reactors in South Africa. What about that? Huh, a true global coverage of all of the richness of digital transformations there are taking place Should they, around the world now for tomorrow.

I want to give you a bit of a preview of what we're going to have. We're going to start with the next part in process risk analysis. He comes from Silver Missed and he's going to talk about process risk analysis as a framework for starting a meaningful digital transformation. After his session, we're going to welcome, Ah, How Dean, who is the director of Digital Transformation for electrolux, and he's going to talk about the human side of transformation. I mean, we are going to have dislocations caused by technology here. We look at the presentation from UI path on RPA and there's tremendous value that's created, but there's a need for upskilling and re skilling of professionals whole whose jobs will be automated. And he, how Dean is going to talk about the human side of transfer of digital transformation.

And, and how some organizations like electrolux are building that human side and the, and the making human capital a priority as they go digital and transform their businesses.

That will be followed up by the Chief Digital Innovation Officer from the city of Westminster, in the UK.

And this is ..., who's going to be with us and Horse Session will be future proofing your workplace. And there's going to provide a bit of this public, you know, veal off when I mean public coming, communities, public, you know, the city's veal of the, of the of this hybrid workforce that we're having. These transformations are taking place in series, and the, and. She's going to share her expertise directly with us. And then, we're going to have a tremendous session with the Senior Director of Operations Solutions for J Bell, who is a large manufacturer and, and that he's going to talk about the customer experience in the dish. So, Remote Workplace, I mean, JBL has well factories all over the world.

Not just factories but operations and back office operations all over the world and, and serving customers in multiple markets set market segments, and that he's going to talk about a disciplined approach to addressing those customer needs and that customer experience by leveraging digital technologies but also a digital remote workplace and the and workforce. So, excited about what comes on tomorrow. Again, thank you for your engagement. Throughout the day to day, we had some terrific questions. As a result of your interactions, we appreciate that you reach every one of the sessions with your engagement and with your insights. If you could, please follow up and check our post on digital workplace transformation, under my name on LinkedIn. You'll see many comments from other presenters and participants. If you have questions, you may ask those there. If you have.

If you want to say thanks to our sponsors, UI Path and Cape Town for making this all helpful happen, please do. Because they appreciate hearing from you.

And of course, our speakers, as well, like to hear your feedback on how the sessions are going and how they're adding value to you. So, for now, wherever you are in the world, have a great rest of your day, and I look forward to seeing you all back here at the same channel at the same time tomorrow. Have a great rest of your they, Again, and Be safe.

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About the Author

Stephen Apps-1Stephen Apps,
Chief Advisor Digital Transformation,
Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC).

 

Steve is a UK Chartered, South African and European Professional Engineer with over 30 years industry experience across multiple domains and industries. Steve has deep skills in smart grids, public safety, telecommunications, network security, systems engineering, smart cities, IoT and power engineering. Steve has also gained extensive skills in IT solution and IT architecture in both the operational and business domains. Steve has had the pleasure to work for Northrop Grumman, Accenture, Huawei as Chief digital Transformation Officer and CTO for Southern Africa Openlab and is currently a Chief Advisor on digital technology to Ultra Safe Nuclear Company.

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