M1, Singapore's first digital network operator, has made personalization the cornerstone of its digital transformation, but first it had to retool its infrastructure.

We caught up with Cetkovic Marko, Chief Digital Officer at M1, to talk about the company's Supernova Award for Customer Experience, application consolidation and moving 90% of its systems to the cloud.

M1's approach set up a business model where it can personalize wireless plans at scale.

Here's a look at some of the takeaways.

The project. In 2019, M1 had a new leadership team and it was clear that the Singapore market needed digital offerings and expectations for personalization. "M1 has a very competitive market with four large operators and dozens of national broadband networks for about 6 million people," said Marko. "Internally we realized that we needed faster time to market and reaction time. Our legacy systems had data scattered across multiple databases. Our vision was to have hyperpersonalized plans."

Personalization. Today, M1 can have a personalized plan for each customer. That personalization allows M1 to micro segment customers using data from a data lake and its customer data platform. "We can provide hyper personalized content and offerings to the customer when they are interacting with us," said Marko.

Legacy systems and tech debt. Marko said in M1 decided to adopt a cloud-first vision with microservices and applications based on API connections.

"We really completely changed the delivery paradigm that was more like a design, deliver and manage to something that was more agile based on discovering a solution and based on the best of breed products stitched together. Doing all of that was really brand new to us, but also to our partners. It required a lot of learning, a lot of cultural shift as well, and persistent leadership."

The data strategy. M1 adopted the data lake as it switched to its best-of-breed model across channels. "As we were developing the solution, we were developing our data capabilities and ingesting loads that were most critical and hen enriching them," said Marko. "We also are reaching for our AI/ML capabilities to fuel our personalization engine. It was evolutionary and also revolutionary with a fresh outlook."

GenAI. Marko said that M1's cloud strategy and data lake sets it up for generative AI. He said:

"The other part of our innovation journey is also partnering (with Infosys and others) in terms of capabilities and investments in innovation with pilots and proof of concepts. We are exploring together with partners to actually hit that kind of a secret formula for the future when it comes to Gen AI. This year is about awareness and learning and raising the capabilities internally. 2025 will be more about the specific use cases and outcomes."

Build vs. buy. M1's approach is to partner with strategic vendors like Infosys, Nokia and Salesforce to evolve products. From there, M1 tailors applications and develops applications. "We really had to integrate and continually develop this solution over 30 releases. Nothing was really ready made and delivered," said Marko, who added that the customization and build approach is focused on competitive advantage.

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Business Research Themes

Next-Generation Customer Experience

Roles

Chief Information Officer

Tags

digital transformation, #Cloud