Tuomas Syrjänen’s digital journey using data to find sustainable solutions

BIM Academy’s Managing Director, Dr Graham Kelly recently invited Tuomas Syrjänen to be a guest on our Digital Climate podcast, as part of our latest series entitled “Don’t fear the future”. Tuomas has worked for clients such as Vodafone, Nokia, Amazon/Audible and Tallink, and has a special interest in building international organisations based on agility, transparency and trust. In this podcast Graham and Tuomas discuss the need to change mindsets rather than just changing technology and how AI is monopolising the tech-space globally.

Futurice is a company built on transparency, systems thinking and working lean. Over the last two decades it has evolved from a product house into a versatile agency that advises major corporations on how to change the way they work to enable true digital transformation. Tuomas says culture and people are the key, that is what Futurice has striven to put first in building an organisation that supports both customers and employees.

Graham asked Tuomas if he found that organisations know what they want to do but do not know how to achieve it? Or does he think work needs to be done around breaking the shackles of current ways of thinking in order to think differently?

Tuomas replied: “I would say that the biggest bottleneck is the ability to challenge the way that we’ve done business for last 30 years. But at the same time, I’m not recommending anyone to jump directly from, let’s say maturity level zero to let’s redesign end to end processes. I think that we need to first bring technology to existing ways of working so that we learn the technology.

“But that is not enough. I think everybody should have the ambition level that we need to redefine the workflows minimum or end to end processes. And sometimes what I see is that we need to choose even certain use cases so that we get into these end to end processes and start thinking about them differently. I would also say that blockers are not always in technology. Of course technology is not easy. Data is always broken, there’s always challenges with data, but blockers come from how we might rethink, how we might get response times from one month to maybe two days for clients and what kind of nontraditional thinking is needed to achieve this.

“I highly encourage people to go on a digital journey – for most it’s not going to be easy, but I see more and more people with high ambition level and willingness to withstand the messiness of change!”.

Listen to the full conversation with Graham and Tuomas in Series 6, Episode 3 of the Digital Climate Podcast and hear more about how Tuomas focusing specifically on data, and how he is applying what data is teaching us to be more sustainable.