As Chief Digital Officer for KPMG UK, Lisa Heneghan is charged with main enterprise-wide transformation for the auditor and tax large, delivering higher shopper experiences and making certain that KPMG is “match for the digital age”.
“I’m accountable for all issues know-how associated within the agency,” Heneghan says. “Once you break that down in KPMG, that truly means I’ve all of our [2,000] client-facing technologists, our inside know-how organisation, and I’m additionally accountable for the digital transformation of our enterprise.”
A CDO’s concentrate on shopper outcomes
Heneghan has been at KPMG since 2011 however took on the CDO position three years in the past, overseeing the know-how perform throughout the audit, advisory, offers, and tax departments. She says the position has modified over time, from establishing the suitable know-how foundations to constructing the fitting crew; Heneghan has just lately constructed out a CTO crew to assist develop KPMG’s three-year transformation plan.
Lisa Heneghan, CDO of KPMG UK
KPMG
“After I began the job, it was extra about setting up robust foundations by way of functionality, structure and safety,” she says. “This concerned understanding the panorama and figuring out a path to the cloud and constructing an IT organisation to assist the long run and, critically, setting up construction and governance to drive sustainable change.”
“Stage two was extra about rolling out the instruments to assist our individuals to do their jobs – bodily instruments, collaboration instruments – and set up new methods of working. Now, we’re in a position to concentrate on our built-in worth chain and the way we simplify and optimise.”
Her focus now could be firmly on enhancing experiences for KPMG employees and purchasers.
“I all the time preserve that concentrate on the purchasers: what our purchasers want and the way we work with them,” says Heneghan, who equally acknowledges KPMG’s auditing challenges in latest months.
“A giant a part of what I’ve obtained is our client-facing technologists. So, I spend most likely half of my week working with them and dealing on the massive transformation programmes that we’ve obtained for purchasers. The opposite half of my time is the place I’m linking into world… to ensure we’re linked, and that we will carry the worth from world.”
Digital ninjas and hybrid innovation centres
KPMG’s digital transformation journey has 4 pillars, Heneghan says: creating the digital model, constructing digital tradition, making certain the organisation has robust know-how foundations and putting in instruments and applied sciences.
Sturdy know-how foundations boil right down to enhancing structure, safety and functionality, and embedding the know-how perform inside the enterprise via KPMG’s crew of CTOs, who’ve constructed the roadmaps for transformation. Constructing a digital tradition, in the meantime, depends closely on KPMG’s “digital ninjas” programme to drive the adoption and use of know-how put in place.
KPMG’s Digital Ninjas are consultants who supply one-on-one classes, displays, and reply to advert hoc IT enquiries
KPMG
For the reason that onset of the worldwide pandemic, and the introduction of hybrid and distant working, KPMG rolled out Microsoft Floor gadgets and Microsoft Groups for company-wide communication – however it rapidly realised that there have been differing ranges of technical literacy. The auditor turned to its digital ninjas for assist.
Focusing explicitly on Microsoft abilities, digital ninjas supply one-on-one classes, displays, and a response to advert hoc enquiries on the whole lot from tips on how to use Groups to OneDrive and OneNote, in addition to SAP’s Concur and Pointprogress’s MyTime cell timesheets.
“We’ve now obtained practically 1,000 Ninjas inside the agency…in all workplaces within the UK. It actually builds into the demographic of our organisation, the place we have now a mean age of 28.”
“They’re individuals who have a day job to do, they usually’re studying inside these companies, however they’re digital natives; they perceive and are obsessed with know-how. They need their expertise right here to be nearly as good as their expertise at house,” Heneghan says.
Outcomes from the Digital Ninjas programme embrace:
- Serving to to drive 100% adoption of Microsoft Groups (equalling greater than 15,000 KPMG UK colleagues utilizing the device). All employees now use Groups as their go-to collaboration device.
- Coaching greater than 5,000 KPMG employees in Microsoft Groups in March 2020, when the pandemic first hit and the corporate moved to digital working.
- Coaching greater than 500 NSPCC employees on utilizing Microsoft merchandise – enabling their employees to attach and assist kids and households who most want their assist throughout COVID-19.
- Digital Ninjas are serving to outline and enhance hybrid working tradition. As one such instance, in hybrid conferences, Ninjas have discovered it feels extra inclusive if these attending nearly converse first.
KPMG has additionally skilled 30,000 individuals within the programming language Python, whereas the skilled companies agency is experimenting with new methods of working via Ignition, its know-how innovation, insights, and collaboration hub at its headquarters in Canary Wharf, London.
The Ignition centre facilitates sprints and innovation classes and aids employees and companions in brainstorming extra vital “complicated working mannequin kind points”, Heneghan says.
Profession development for ladies in tech, plus abilities gaps
Encouraging girls to pursue tech careers is near Heneghan’s coronary heart and maybe unsurprisingly so, given virtually half of KPMGs know-how workforce is now feminine, thanks largely to the agency’s IT’s Her Future initiative.
“We’ve had a large enhance,” she says. “We began off specializing in bringing in individuals as females on the graduate stage, after which constructing that up, after which we began to concentrate on how will we assist them to progress? As a result of it’s extremely vital that you simply hold constructing that pipeline.”
“As of July 2021, 43% of the general know-how groups are feminine. Girls span an entire array of know-how roles at KPMG, together with knowledge engineers, knowledge analysts, synthetic intelligence consultants, builders, software program testers, data safety analysts, cloud engineers…the listing goes on.”
IT’s Her Future initiative is now trickling into universities and faculties, too.
“We’ve got devoted streams which work to encourage ladies from universities into know-how apprentices and graduate programmes. We additionally maintain exterior occasions for younger girls trying to embark on a profession in STEM to allow them to see the choices out there to them at KPMG.”
The agency is now exploring different methods of working with greater training. For instance, its relationship with the College of Nottingham focuses on advancing native knowledge analytics abilities and capabilities.
Specialists from the college’s Knowledge-Pushed Discovery Initiative (3Di) and KPMG are working collectively to develop new analysis and supply perception that may improve knowledge and analytics companies for companies, and the partnership will maintain occasions to assist the modern concepts of small and medium sized enterprises within the East Midlands Area and supply knowledge abilities coaching to assist shut the digital abilities hole.
The collaboration between KPMG and the College of Nottingham kinds a part of the college’s new programme, Digital Nottingham, which has ambitions to rework the East Midlands metropolis via knowledge science, know-how and innovation.
