Barry Whelan has spent his career talking to C-suite executives, helping them deliver large-scale business transformation projects. For the most part, those projects have been powered by technology.

Whelan has spent 26 years working in the tech industry, engaging with global and local clients across a range of sectors – from aviation to utilities, from healthcare to consumer products.

Now, he has re-joined PwC, the professional services firm, as a Tech Consulting Partner.  

The more Whelan talks to corporate leaders, the more he can see the increasing pressures and demands being placed upon them. 

Businesses have always had to evolve and change to remain relevant.  However, driven by huge technological advancements and societal changes, the pace of that disruption is accelerating and deepening like never before.

“CEOs are under pressure,” says Whelan. “Yes, they are optimistic about their growth prospects here in Ireland. But at the same time, they are always concerned about keeping their businesses resilient and dealing with fragility over a long-term horizon.”

Whelan’s view is backed up by the data. A recent survey by PwC found that 28 per cent of Irish CEOs do not believe that their business will be viable in a decade without reinvention, while 73 per cent believe that their organisation is being significantly impacted by business model disruption.

Whelan argues that most business leaders know they have to embrace cutting-edge new technologies such as Generative AI (GenAI), automation and digitalisation. 

However, he also understands the strain that these changes place upon organisations, particularly the people who work within them.

“Organisations have to continually reinvent themselves,” says Whelan, “and that is not an easy thing to do.” 

So just how can business leaders drive technological transformation and instil a culture of reinvention within their organisations? And, in an ever-changing world, how can they ensure they are moving in the right direction at the right time?

Understanding the digital core

When Barry Whelan sits down with a company for the first time, he attempts to unlock two separate, but related, things: the company’s vision and its digital core. 

Before a project can begin, Whelan wants to ensure that the company has a firm idea of what the destination is. 

Likewise, he needs to understand the company’s digital strengths and weaknesses – from the robustness of its technology to the skillset of the people operating it. 

“We interact with CEOs around their vision,” he says. “What are the external drivers and megatrends affecting the business? We need to know what their vision means for their customer proposition, for their markets, for their competition, and for their operating model.”

The strategic vision, he said, needs to be “crystal clear” if the project is to succeed. Likewise, he argued that companies need to be ambitious when they identify what they want to achieve.

“People should not be afraid of aiming too high and not being able to fully achieve their goals. The danger is aiming too low and succeeding,” Whelan says.

“If you aim too low, are you really doing enough to transform the organisation and make it stick for another four or five years before you have to transform again?” 

Once the vision has been clearly identified and articulated, Whelan said he then works with companies to understand its “digital core” – this involves an assessment of everything from a company’s legacy technology systems to the quality of its data to the applications used to employees and customers. 

“We have to know if the digital core is healthy,” he says. “Does it need to be reinvented, upgraded or improved to enable you to deliver the strategy of the business?

“From a business perspective, it goes back to the question, why do you need to reinvent? You need to reinvent to be agile, to be innovative, to service customers and to get to where you want to be. You then need to ask if your digital core is stopping you from achieving that. That is crucial.”

Another crucial factor is buy-in from all levels of the organisation – from senior management to rank-and-file-employees. 

Whelan says he understands that many workers feel fearful and nervous about how a major tech transformation project might impact their role. 

“For generations, as new technologies have come in, there have always been fears that it might replace someone’s job,” Whelan says. “But effectively, it creates new types of jobs, new types of work because it frees up time to do things more efficiently. So, you can generate new offerings and new products and spend more time in front of the client.”

Whelan said that there will, of course, be efficiencies and savings from new technologies but that those efficiencies will allow employees to be more creative and move away from so-called “grunt work”.

Whelan said that full and open communication with staff is crucial to allaying fears about transformation and the role of new technologies. 

“At the very start, you have to set out to employees how this will improve the colleague experience – in terms of doing their job on a day-to-day basis and in terms of opening up new opportunities,” he says. 

The way Whelan sees it, a major transformation project can only succeed if every employee across the organisation is on board, and understands the vision that the company is trying to achieve.

“It’s about understanding from a technology perspective, that in implementing the strategy and implementing new technology, what will be the change impacts the organisation. And then knowing what that change impact is end to end across the different roles, the different functions within the organisation, and how they need to adapt to get the most from the technology. It’s about communicating upfront, and continuously with people, it’s about adoption” Whelan says.

Reinvention never stops

Earlier this year, PwC released its Irish Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2024. Now in its fifth year, the survey polled the views of 1,000 Irish workers across eight industries. 

The survey stated that Irish workers are willing to embrace change, but it also found that Irish respondents are likely to underestimate its pace and impact, with just over a third believing that technological change, including AI and GenAI, will impact their jobs to a large or very large extent in the next three years.

Two-thirds said the pace of change at work has accelerated over the same time, while 73 per cent said that the decision to stay – or leave the organisation – would be influenced by opportunities to learn new skills.

Overall, the survey highlighted the willingness and eagerness of employees to upskill and adopt new ways of working. 

This is something that Whelan has experienced throughout his career. In his view, companies need to invest in their staff if the transformation project is to be successful. 

“You have to invest in up-skilling your people to do the new roles, to ensure they are more productive using the technology. Because new technology and old ways of working means expensive technology,” he says.

“You need to invest in the people, you need to invest in the training and you need to invest in the rewards as well. But that’s a continuous thing and that has to be there.”

Whelan said that too many programmes fail because they invest in the technology and not in a new operating model or in people. 

“It is like putting a person who is not a Formula One driver in a Formula One car. Unless you invest in the people to actually get the most of those technologies, you really won’t get the performance results that you need,” he says.

Whelan said that investing heavily in employees will help make reinvention the new normal.

He said that customers and markets change faster than companies, so the CEO or CFO always need to be looking ahead and future-proofing the company for the next five years. 

“Organisations want to be able to be efficient. But that doesn’t mean that you automate everything. At the end of the day, you always need to have a human in the loop – somebody who is setting out the rules of how work gets done,” he says, adding that it frees the capacity for management to think about the strategic development and opportunities of the business. 

“The promise of automation is, at one level, giving people time to do the higher value stuff.”

Whelan said all companies, regardless of their sector or business, need to evolve, not just companies in the tech space.

“Tech companies are setting the bar,” he says. “They are introducing disruptive services and technologies. Most of us are not disruptive. We are the people who need to transform.”

He added that this could be transforming any aspect of the business – from sales to HR to finance. 

“Are we transforming at an enterprise level to be more productive, or are we reinventing our business model to deliver new products or services with great customer experiences, to create new markets or to develop new platform ecosystems to connect stakeholders? Or is it actually about how we are transforming specific functional domains? It goes back to the same question -is our technological or digital core an inhibitor or enabler of us being able to achieve our goals,” according to Whelan.

A key part of the project is selecting the right partner – PwC has recently worked with the likes of Microsoft, Salesforce and SAP on successful technology transformation journeys.

“Organisations are brilliant at what they do. Nobody will know how they run their business better than themselves. But when technology comes into play, they generally need to realise quite early, that they need to partner to deliver that aspect to it. So that’s about picking the right partner who understands their industry, can look at their vision and respectfully challenge it as well. And that partner will understand what technologies are required to develop the digital core,” Whelan says.

Whelan summed up the transformation process as one of continuous reinvention: “If you are doing continuous reinvention, you need to create a culture of continuous reinvention. Otherwise, you are just replacing pieces of technology.”

This article is partner content and has been produced in association with PwC.