Digital Trust - Building Truly Collaborative Networks

So good afternoon everyone, and welcome to this session on Digital trust, on how to build truly collaborative networks. My name is Mi Singh. I work at thas as the product adoption manager for the Im business line. I have been in the identity space for close to a decade now. So first of all, I want to thank you for being here on a Friday afternoon. I understand it's been intense three days, so pretty much everybody is, you know, quite brain fried with all the content. So I promise you I'm gonna keep it very light.

And so I'm not starting with any kind of, you know, any kind of slide about agenda or summary or what I'm talking about, but a light puzzle so that I can deliver the same content and the same message in a more lighter way. I help, I need your help to put this puzzle together that consists of two pictures. The first picture is of a drought in Taiwan from a few years ago to be precise, 2021 and 2022. The second picture is me attending a virtual teams meeting. As you can see, I'm at my home and it's a bit of a mess.

So you can see things covered in plastic, you know, items all across the table, which just indicates that I'm some sort of renovation. And if you focus a bit more closely, you can also see quite some extra kilos around my belly. So my question is, what is the connection between a drought in Taiwan and more than 10,000 kilometers away? My troubles in Netherlands, which are two different cities and countries in different continents to make it a bit more motivating, anybody that gets it right, I'm willing to hand out some protein bars so that you head into the weekend with more energy.

Anyone, sorry, Drought. Drought.

Close, close by microchips. Perfect. You're getting a protein bar. So the answer is Indian microchips.

Now, how are the two related? Let me just spend a minute for that. The drought in Taiwan led to a global shortage of microchips and unluckily for me. At the very same time on the advice of my wife, I intended to get into a renovating my kitchen and the two most important appliances for my kitchen, which is a dishwasher and refrigerator were delayed by over five months because of the microchip shortage, which meant that practically I was ordering out every day and that explains all the extra curves around my belly. Now why am I sharing this personal story, right?

That's for two important reasons. The first most important one is to let you know that I've lost those extra kilos and fit again, as you can see. The second one is to bring to your attention the fact that manufacturing is a complex and interconnected ecosystem. Anything that happens in one part of the chain impacts the whole chain. Now why is it exactly? So typically, if you look at the manufacturing ecosystem, you'll find that you have a company that is manufacturing some sort of goods, and on one side of the chain you have suppliers.

On the other side, you can have distributors, and at the end of the chain you have customers. If you want to put some names to these different entities, the suppliers could be raw material providers, component manufacturers. The distributors can be your go-to market partners, resellers, wholesalers and customers. Could be other manufacturing companies, corporate clients or government institutions.

Now, if that is not proof enough, let me give you some more tangible examples. Help me answer a couple of questions with a show of hands.

Now, how many of you have taken a flight to come to Berlin for this conference? Pretty much a lot of us, we take flights pretty much every you know, month or, or for some of us, every few weeks for work, for leisure. But have you ever thought of the fact that 80% of the activities which are involved in manufacturing and aircraft is actually outsourced? It doesn't matter if it's Boeing or if it's Airbus that is making it. So it needs collaboration of more than 1200 different supplies and partners to actually build one aircraft.

Coming to my second question again, with the show of fans, how many of you love going to ski vacation or love skiing in winters? Again, quite a lot of us. Next time when you take that cable car to go to the top, do keep in mind that that cable car has been built in collaboration with more than 110 partners and is running and being operated at more than 3000 ski results in the world. So this goes on to explain that things that we use around us are actually, you know, so much more complex when it comes to the manufacturing line.

And naturally, when you have such a large ecosystem of collaboration, there are challenges. Some of the challenges that I want to talk about is first, what I call control collaboration. You can't escape these partnerships. You have to have this ecosystem to be able to manufacture, right? But at the same time, at the end of the day, these are your services and your data. So you also want to protect them.

So you have this paradoxical requirement where on one hand you want to collaborate, you know, quickly and seamlessly, but you also want to protect, which is what I call fluid yet control, collaboration. The second challenge is of trust and authorization. Going back to my example about building of aircraft, you can imagine that a person could be working on the infotainment system whereas somebody else could be working on the cockpit.

Now, both these different users have different level of entitlements on which part of the aircraft they can access and what they can do. So in this whole ecosystem, you have thousands of user personas that do not belong to your own company. They are belonging to external companies, each with a different level of entitlements and trust in their identities. The third challenge is of throughput. If you talk to most of the manufacturing companies right now, their challenge is not necessarily sales.

In fact, their sales order books are pretty good for the quite few years. The challenge is throughput, meaning delivering the products on time without compromising on quality. The fact that we still work with, you know, old school methods of a partner creating a ticket and then waiting for weeks to get access because the companies haven't really invested in digitalizing their collaboration process is what leads to overall delay in the delivery, right? As if this organic challenges were not enough, right?

In this whole ecosystem, the recent happenings in the world, which I call global crisis, is making it far more worse. So think of things like geopolitical tensions in the last couple of years from this whole mindset of the whole world being, you know, one world with globalization, open boundaries. Companies are more moving towards the fact that they do want to collaborate, but also want to protect their sovereignty, right? On the other hand, things like climate change with droughts and floods, which are unprecedented are making it even worse.

So we have two options in front of us, you know, to solve this. One is we chuck this whole ecosystem, right? Every company goes silos in building the whole chain, which is, I can tell you, impossible. Or on the other side, try to solve these challenges.

Now, to solve these challenges, do we actually have to build things from ground up, but not necessarily. We can also look at other verticals and see how they have or what they have done to go through this and navigate through this challenge. So let's look at our neighbors in BFS and what they have been doing because they also operate in kind of a complex systems with corporate customers and distributors in between and technology providers. But why B-F-S-I-U might ask?

Well, at Ali, earlier this year, we carried out a digital trust index to check and carry out a survey on what are the industries that consumers and customers trust the most. Not surprisingly, there are two industries from the BFSI that are in the top five, the banking and insurance, which means that they have been doing something right about, you know, being able to build this ecosystem with the digital trust at speed and still deliver on time.

Also, BFSI has a lot of incidents in the last, you know, many years. So think of the 2008 global crisis or the Eurozone crisis, or more recently the COVID-19 pandemic. And all these disruptions have led to innovation in technology due to cost reduction, improving efficiency, and so on. The most recent, recent example being that we all know how digital banking got a push because of, you know, the fact that COVID-19 was there allowing us to today where we can open, you know, bank accounts from the comfort of our couches.

So what transformative approach BSFI has, BF SI has taken, it's actually not that complex. It's all about getting access to a digital service.

You know, if I look at the two major parts of the identity life cycle, you have the onboarding and you have the access. The onboarding is more about user onboarding, enrollment and access is more about authentication and interaction. The four key innovations or the four key features that BFSI has actually adopted on the onboarding side, it has been identity proofing and what I call delegated user management. Meaning being able to verify the fact that it is indeed the same person that has been invited in a fully digital manner in real time with delegated user management.

Instead of the company being responsible for the lifecycle management of all those thousands of external business users, you can delegate that closer to your partner or supplier. On the access side, we delegated access management. Not only you can allow your partners to onboard their employees, but also allow and empower them to be able to provide access on what applications they can, they can access and what they can do. But defining what I call fine-grained authorization.

You can have policies and thus put a boundary on what these external users are allowed to do, allowed to access under what conditions, and to make it frictionless for the end user because these are still users. You have the orchestration layer, you know, so that you can build different kinds of journeys to go from one point to the other.

Now going back to my previous diagram of the whole ecosystem, if I try to map that into the context of BFSI, the suppliers could be data providers, consulting firms, the partners could be brokers and agents, and the customers could be your corporate clients and governments, et cetera. So let's focus at a small piece of this whole chain. So instead of the suppliers customers, let's focus at just the insurance company and the brokers.

In today's times, the insurance company has really adopted these four key capabilities that allows them to invite an external broker and verify the fact that it is indeed the same person that they can delegate this user management capability to their broker partners, right? So that it can scale up. They can delegate the access management capability also to their partners so that they can in real time provide access, deprovision access to their, to their employees.

And people when they get onboarded and they leave or they change departments and with the help of policies, they can still control what exactly these users can do even when they have access to a certain application or resource. Perfect, right? So far it can tell me that, okay, I've been able to establish the correlation between BFSI and manufacturing and how they have similar problems and so on. And I can give you quite some examples about the BFSI industries and insurance companies.

But a fair question could be, well, I get it, but is there something closer to manufacturing that I can talk about? Any example in manufacturing that has adopted these and is on the same path to this journey?

Well, luckily the answer is yes. To refresh your memory a bit, if you don't recollect, HTI group on day one was one of the companies that won an award for the best B2B project implementation in the identity fabric category. And it's not surprising. The previous example that I gave you of a cable or a RFI car that you take to go to the top of the mountain is actually what they built the built transportation system for high altitudes, which is used by multiple ski resorts in the world.

Now these ski resorts have their own operators, which are responsible for operating these machines and maintaining them. HDI group not only provides them with the actual tool, which is the, which is the cable car or the rope, but also different kinds of analytical dashboards so that they can see how these machines are operating, what is the snow expectations and so on.

So they are, they have adopted all these capabilities to be able to, you know, scale this whole ecosystem where they can empower the ski resorts to be able to onboard their operators and go through the lifecycle, even in peak season to deal with the load. And with that, I want to leave you with something or let's flop. Not that I indicate that this session is a flop. The fact that you are present here is already sign of that. But with flop, what I mean is Friday low on patients, it's Friday afternoon, it's end of the week. You're low on patients.

So I should cut the chase and just give you the summary. Unlike my previous colleagues who presented, they started with the summary slide, but I, I choose not to do that because if this was the first slide, then you all would've left by now because it's Friday afternoon. The summary is manufacturing is complex and it's interconnected. There is no escape, right? You have to collaborate, you have to partner with other players in the ecosystem to deliver quality, to deliver throughput on time. Manufacturing companies have so far not invested in digitalizing their collaboration processes.

So we are still dealing with old age ways where you can take a phone call, create a ticket, and wait for weeks before that is resolved. Instead of solving these challenges and trying to build things from scratch, we can look at trite and test IT solutions that have worked in similar problems in different verticals. The hint is the BFSI industry. So that's a summary. The second one being I want to leave you with some recommendation.

Now, normally I would have left you with at least three recommendation, but again, because it's Friday, I'm being a bit more lenient and just one recommendation that you can take away, which is don't try to change the whole ecosystem. In one go look at your ecosystem of who your suppliers, partners and customer, ours, and at least try to choose one single group of external users. That could be the fact that you start with your partners or suppliers or customers.

But focus on one single external user group and try to see what the challenges are and how you can digitalize the collaboration at scale. So that was all. Thank you for being part of this session. If there are any questions, happy to answer them now. Or you can also reach out to me on other forums. Thank you very much, miton. This was a great presentation, especially for Friday afternoon. So that was a good one. Thank you very much. Thank you. I have no questions online, other questions in the room? I think you summarized it very, very well. Any questions?

Otherwise I let you go into your well deserved Friday afternoon. Thank you.