The pandemic has been a catalyst for speeding up the digital transformation process in family businesses.
With an increased focus on customer experience, most family businesses have taken significant measures to update their existing legacy systems and are already reaping the benefits of a digitally efficient operating model, discussed experts at the inaugural Family Business Summit held recently.
The panelists consisted of influential family business leaders from a diverse mix of industries from around the region. The Forbes Middle East Family Business Summit facilitated conversation on the increasing focus for a digitally driven business and explored the latest trends, challenges and opportunities for family business groups in the region.
Dr. Sheikha Aisha bint Faleh Al Thani, Founder and Chairperson of Al Faleh Educational Holding, the first woman-led Qatari company to go public and is the first Qatari educational institution to list on the stock market, said “Indeed, we had to follow some changes in past 12 to 18 months within the business by adopting the technology.” A lot of family businesses shy away from adopting digitisation and technological solutions because of the cost and security, noting what gave us a better position in the market was the fact that we invested heavily in the IT infrastructure a year before all this happened.
Speaking on shifting the entire customer interaction to a different medium she said, “When we decided to go public it was a year before pandemic and we were rated by top ten agencies like KPMG and Ernst & Young and we scored highly in corporate governance practices and processes however, we felt short when it came to digitization and data protection.”
She said, “We were reluctant to adopt to new technologies and digitisation solutions that we were offered and then the pandemic happened, and we had no choice but to move forward. I think the pandemic was a blessing as it accelerated our journey through that road. Since then, we have adopted to the new solutions and the benefit that we reaped was employee empowerment, for example the lectures were online. Now digitisation is embedded in our corporate strategies.”
“Our students and teaching body have learned to utilise the online platforms optimally and hence have benefited from this experience. As such we will continue to use online learning methods and tools within the teaching and learning experience even after this pandemic is over, she added.’’
“The transformation going forward has to do a lot with digitisation. Since then, we have contacted other companies to offer state-of-the-art platform for learning systems and we have implemented it.”, she noted. Dr. Aisha raised the point about collaboration between different stakeholders to push the ESG agenda on top of the priority for family businesses.
She said, ESG is part of our long-term planning and for these practices to be achieved there has to be collaborative effort between, investors, businesses and communities.
Ayman Maamoun Tamer, Chairman and Managing Partner at Tamer Group, Saudi Arabia who has been leading the business for last 35 years and is a third-generation member of his family business, said “For us the biggest single change we had during the pandemic in last 18 months was that we prioritized people and we accelerated our pace of change. Our transformation journey started more than ten years ago.”
The year 2010 was the first phase where we focused internally on the company to do business excellence which was to run efficiency. Once we run the entire platform on an efficient platform, then during mid 2015 the second phase where the company embarked on becoming customer centric. All the programs, applications, processes were focused on how to better serve the customer. In the third phase we invested outside by looking at acquisition of the business in the e-commerce field, he added.
Rashid Khalaf Al Habtoor, CEO and President of Al Habtoor Trading Enterprises and RKH Investments UAE Holding Company said, “We focused on three things – efficiency, technology and having to be multi-purpose. We learned and we adapted in the last one year to be productive and efficient and to invest in people productivity.
Navin M Valrani, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Al Shirawi Group, the diversified Dubai-headquartered conglomerate said, we have always been a group that has recognised the fact that our people are our biggest asset and COVID just reinforced that and took it to an entire new level. With family businesses and leaders, you have to create a culture and an environment where the right set of values foster themselves. Although we live in a technology age, the human element is still important.
