Kai Konola is the President and CEO of Halton Group, Finnish family-owned company specialized in good indoor environments. Before Halton, he has worked as a leader and executive at Vaisala Plc and Nokia Corporation.
“When looking at what are the foundational stones underneath the growth – the growth is coming from business opportunities – but underneath there is going to be a strong digital capability. Partially it’s about tools and software, but a big part of it is the organizational capability that we need to put in place and strengthen in order to succeed in our strategy.”
“We have split digital transformation into three areas in our strategy. The first area is the digital customer journey, the second one is our digital offering and support for the offering, and the third one is how we run the enterprise utilizing digital capabilities.”
“I don’t believe in disintegrated digital viewpoints, that’s why we don’t a separate digital strategy. The digital transformation is inside our business as a strong element of our capability strategy in all three strategic areas. We want to integrate and facilitate the utilization of the digital capabilities that are increasingly available from different partners and based on our own development.”
“The big theme for 2019 is going to our next generation IoT platform. We want to go the next level in IoT capabilities. Service types of offerings that are sensoring the environment and analyzing it. It’s about AI and machine learning capabilities to be smarter and understand what are the demanding indoor environmental conditions. I’m looking for the partners and investigating how we could integrate their capabilities in our own IoT approach.”
“My advice for other companies – Try to build a big picture to be able to understand all those things that are neighbouring you and make some choices what to do in which order. There are many opportunities, you have to make some choices and orchestrate the progress.”
“Another recommendation is to think what we do by ourselves and what does your partners? It’s crucial to develop the partnering capability for your company. In this world, you don’t need to do so many things by your own anymore.”
The third tip is that let’s not make digital to be an elephant in our room. It’s a good asset but it shouldn’t become an overwhelming theme. All value creation starts from the customer – understanding what is the benefit you can leverage to the customer and your business. So, try to make sure that your business and customer strategies are including digital elements.”
