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Digitizing the Enterprise

Lessons from the Trenches – Digitally Transforming a Hundred-Year-Old Telecommunications Company

Innovation is a buzz word that’s thrown around a lot. Everyone is trying to cultivate a culture of innovation and bring new practices into their business – but they often don’t understand that it’s not all about the innovation, but the outcomes it delivers.

By definition, innovating is the act of introducing new ways to do business. To do this successfully within a large organization there are a number of elements necessary, and you need to be prepared to run a marathon every day.

Using a lean approach, we built, measured, learned to fail fast and make changes to our digital experience quickly. Within 80 days, starting from scratch, we re-platformed and re-launched the new telus.com beta site – a website we built with our customers, based on their feedback and suggestions. Not only did we launch a new website, but we leveraged this approach to reengineer our culture, skills and rebuild our entire way of working.

Incubating the team wasn’t just about giving them a ‘sandbox’ to play in. It involved creating a dedicated space where they were protected from organizational pressures and norms. It allowed them to experiment, make choices rapidly, evolve processes and, most importantly, make decisions based on customer needs – all without having to ask permission. We empowered them.

Shawn serves as Chief Digital Officer at TELUS, driving the digitization strategy for the enterprise across all core lines of business. His team is responsible for delivering a best-in-class experience supporting customers, team members and prospects that accelerates TELUS' competitive advantage, delivers on our customer-first commitment, and our goal of becoming the most recommended company globally.

As part of TELUS’s digital transformation, Shawn is using lean startup principles, agile techniques and platform thinking to generate ongoing customer feedback to bring an industry-leading customer experience.

Shawn has been a leader at TELUS since 2008, joining the Tech Strategy team to spearhead the deployment of TELUS' national HSPA+ network and first iPhone launch. Two years later, he joined the TELUS Customer Solutions team as Director, Strategy and Planning. In this role, Shawn was responsible for the consumer products and services roadmap and the delivery of large complex programs including the launch of LTE, the next generation of TELUS' industry-leading wireless network.

Shawn has a storied history in strategy, product and program development spanning over 17 years, he lives in Toronto with his wife Jennifer and their 2 children.