Shanthi Chandrasekar: Spearheading Teams to Facilitate Successful Digital Transformation with Innovation & Strategy

In this technology-driven world, digital transformation is fuelling organizations with the power of disruptive technologies. Not only will digital transformation help companies leverage modern techniques, but will also elevate the market edge and give them a chance to innovate better and faster. To accelerate digital transformation initiatives, Bahwan Cybertek offers diverse powerful IP products and a gamut of digital solutions, ranging from cloud services, enterprise data services, integration services, UI/UX services, to digital apps and managed services. The person heading the innovative team at BCT APAC is Shanthi Chandrasekar, an inspirational leader charging teams to achieve more.  

Holistic Digital Transformation Services

Bahwan CyberTek (BCT) is a multinational IT Technology Group with 3000+ associates, serving 1000+ customers (including Fortune 500 companies) across 20+ countries on 4 continents. It holds 9 subsidiaries, 3 joint ventures, and 20+ strategic partnerships worldwide. With strong capabilities in digital technologies, the company delivers innovation through outcome-based business models, powerful IP solutions, and value-driven enterprise and digital services. BCT has created products and solutions that cater to the unique needs of targeted industry segments, such as Oil & Gas, Energy & Utilities, BFSI, Government, SCM & Logistics, Telecom, and Retail. Bahwan CyberTek offers digital transformation solutions in the areas of predictive analytics, digital experience, and digital supply chain management across North America, the Middle East, the Far East, Africa, and Asia. Its flagship IP products include retina360 (an AI-powered Predictive Analytics Platform); rt360 (a credit risk management suite); drop thought (a Digital Experience Management Platform); CueTrans (an Integrated Logistics Management Platform); FuelTrans (an Integrated Secondary Supply Chain Tower for Fuel Marketing); and Geodatafy (a digital Exploration & Production Platform).  

Creating a Mark for Herself

Shanthi Chandrasekar is the Executive VP and Head of the Strategic Business Operations for BCT APAC. She’s a Director, Board of Directors in Comquest and BCT entities across Singapore, Qatar, and Taiwan. Over the past 23+ years, her repertoire of skills has centered on strategy, data analytics, artificial intelligence, governance, program management, and digital transformation. Shanthi works closely with the Group CEO on corporate strategy—acquisitions, new business lines, and quality assurance of large business transformation programs. Prior to joining BCT, Shanthi worked in KPMG Advisory for nearly 14 years across the Middle East and Singapore in the capacity of Director. She was the only woman Director in KPMG IT advisory practice in Qatar and has been the trusted advisor to steering committees for many large clients across different countries. She specializes in executing large-scale IT-enabled business transformation projects, with different degrees of complexities for global clients. She is also actively mentoring several tech start-ups and aspiring young female leaders. Shanthi is an engineer by qualification with certification in PMP, CISA, and CGEIT, to name a few. Having witnessed the lack of equal representation in the workspace, one of her passions outside of her day job is to share her experiences at the intersection of leadership, change management, and women’s rights in the workplace as a speaker at professional panels and forums.  

Making Her Voice Heard

Shanthi affirms that a woman needs to have grit and determination to climb up the corporate ladder. At KPMG, she was the only woman Director in IT Advisory in Qatar. Managing large-scale global projects among a bastion of male leaders is not an easy task, one encounters challenges from every quarter. Sometimes, the opposition is authentic, but often it may just be to delay the progress. One should have the courage to stand up against all such odds. According to Shanthi, regardless of gender, hard work and resilience are key to success. She is very detail-oriented in whatever she does. Shanthi chalks out a plan and makes sure to see it through the end. She ensures her team works towards achieving the agreed-upon goal by cultivating a culture of collaboration. Ultimately, she wants her team to have the tools to operate on their own while knowing that they can lean on her for major decisions. Innovation is another key ingredient for growth. Shanthi says that one must be a forward-looking thinker. She recently spearheaded the development of the product dtSmartWorks360, an end-to-end suite of products for the monitoring and management of the workplace and workforce. Tailored to meet the needs of a post-COVID workplace, the product has gained a lot of traction. Upskilling oneself is also important in the technology space. Shanthi consistently makes time to benefit from new learning opportunities, particularly around cutting-edge technologies. Currently, she is enrolled as a student in the Stanford LEAD program, a highly selective one-year Executive Leadership Program for C-Suite personnel. To build on her technical knowledge, she recently completed the ‘AI Strategies for Business Transformation Program offered by Kellogg School of Management. As far as achievements are concerned, Shanthi is proud to have nurtured the APAC business from a representative office to full-fledged operations across Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, and Taiwan. In a matter of few years, the company has transformed the representative office in Singapore to a thriving regional headquarters, doubled revenue from the region, and increased staff count up to 300-plus in the region. Shanthi also prides herself in the relationships she can build, having helped acquire a number of marquee customers for the company—these include some of the largest government bodies and agencies, ministries, port operators and shipping corporations, drilling companies, contact centers, and banks. BCT APAC currently supports mission-critical applications to ensure smooth delivery of essential services in Singapore and the APAC region. In recognition of these efforts, Shanthi has been awarded by several industry groups and most recently received the Stevie Gold and Bronze Awards for Women in Business as well as the Asia Pacific Enterprise Award (APEA) for Corporate Excellence. She is also a strong advocate of women’s rights and encourages women to take up leadership positions. Of her 300-plus staff, 30% are women. She looks forward to growing the number and building a culture of inclusiveness and equality.  

Climbing the Ladder of Obstacles

“It has been a very interesting journey from where I started as a software quality analyst to the present position of leadership that I am in”, said Shanthi. Despite being a girl child in a conservative family, Shanthi consistently challenged every social norm that was a hindrance to her progress. She fought to be an engineer and had to convince her family to pursue a career. Her marriage took her overseas to Bahrain in the late nineties when it was extremely difficult for a woman to get a work permit. Instead of being pessimistic, Shanthi believed in her abilities and kept applying for IT jobs without losing hope in spite of the rejections due to her gender. After about a year, she finally managed to get a job as a Software Quality Analyst and since then, there was no looking back. She joined KPMG Bahrain in their Management Consulting division at a time when many women did not opt for a consulting career due to work-life imbalance and frequent need to travel overseas. Managing the demands of consulting life coupled with frequent travel was challenging, especially when her children were young. The fire to prove herself and razor-sharp focus to climb up the corporate ladder helped her to adapt to the consulting career. Though she did face some unconscious gender biases, Shanthi Chandrasekar was able to grow in her career, gain acceptance and respect due to her knowledge, hard work, resilience, and assertiveness. “Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal,” said Henry Ford, and she strongly resonates with his view.  

What Makes a Good Leader?

Shanthi is a strong advocate of transformational leadership. While ‘transactional’ leaders get things done faster, it is transformational leadership that helps companies grow big and excel in the long term. According to Shanthi, transformational leaders should be visionaries, ready to explore, take risks and innovate. They should have the curiosity to learn and adopt new trends, technologies, and work cultures. They should be more inclusive and accept people from different backgrounds and entertain new ideas and strategies. Being a good communicator is another key trait. Most important of all, they should be inspiring and build a motivational work environment, without any vested interest. Transformational leaders are unimposing people who don the cloak of leadership only when necessary. Left alone, they are like any other employee, going about their day-to-day work without much fanfare.  

Innovation First!

Any innovation should be focused on solving a serious customer problem or addressing a critical challenge. There is no point in innovating for the sake of innovation, in the business context. At BCT, all the innovations address major industry challenges. For instance, its latest innovation for the post-COVID scenario is dtSmartWorks360. It is an end-to-end digital technology suite that helps businesses manage and monitor the workplace and workforce in real-time. The suite comes with a control tower to monitor real-time safe distancing, contact tracing app, crowd management, helpline, feedback management, reporting of health parameters, and alerts for sanitization of the workplace in case of a positive COVID-19 case. This is a much-needed innovation for businesses looking to maintain safety protocols in the new normal. drop thought, BCT’s flagship digital experience product, helps businesses achieve the highest levels of customer experience. Through its NLP analytics engine, drop thought is able to instantaneously identify the sentiment of a customer or employee pulse and comes out with actionable insights on a real-time basis. The company recently launched FanXP, a unique solution for digitally gauging the experience of fans, right from the time they book their tickets to a sporting event till the time they exit the stadium. FuelTrans, another flagship product, helps fuel marketing companies automate their retail fuel outlets and gives complete visibility over their secondary supply chain operations. CueTrans, on the other hand, is a digital supply chain management product that emphasizes the concept of ‘Internet of Behaviours’, leverages AI-powered Driver-Assistance and In-Vehicle Monitoring Systems to monitor, track and influence driver behaviors in real-time, easing the burden of logistics companies and fleet operators. As a company, BCT offers what they call ‘Connected Innovation’ with an outcome-focused approach. It bundles the IP with partner solutions and its gamut of services to provide a comprehensive suite of innovative solutions.  

Leveraging Technology’s Might

In the new normal, businesses are looking for a digital-first, location-agnostic ‘Anywhere Operations’. To achieve this, they need to invest in AI/ML platforms, advanced analytics, RPAs, blockchain, and cloud technologies and build a secure and accessible ecosystem. Going by the stats, there will be a huge demand for these disruptive technologies. Every digital platform nowadays leverages AI/ML models. IDC predicts that AI revenues will grow by 16.4% year on year in 2021. By 2024, the AI market will break the US$500 billion mark and reach a record CAGR of 17.5%. As an organization, BCT is far ahead in the disruptive technologies space. It has two award-winning flagship products in the predictive analytics domain—retina360 for the energy industry and rt360 for the fintech sector. Both the products use advanced AI and deep learning models to analyze data in real-time and provide actionable decision intelligence. The company has forged exclusive partnerships in the digital procurement space where it leverages AI-driven engines to help companies gain complete visibility into their spend data. “Gone are the days when a leader can be content with knowing what is happening within their own industry. Today’s leaders need to be on the watch out for new trends and cross-cutting technologies to get the first-mover advantage”, Shanthi adds.  

Talking about the Future

Shanthi believes digital is the way forward. As an organization providing digital transformation solutions, BCT is in high demand within the APAC, Americas, and MENA markets across clean energy, risk management, supply chain, and digital experience management domains. Being first-movers in most of its areas of operations, BCT has deep domain knowledge and strong technical expertise. Many industry leaders within the APAC region as well as the Americas have shown interest in strategic partnerships and investments in its IP. The company looks forward to leveraging this and leapfrog into the next stage of evolution in the digital technology space. BCT’s strategy is to continue to invest and innovate using its IP products, forge new relationships while strengthening existing partnerships, and explore new markets.  

Encouraging Women to Step Up

“Work hard, keep upskilling yourself and cultivate a culture of diversity and inclusivity. Do not feel afraid to raise your hand when a suitable opportunity arises”, says Shanthi.  She urges women to believe in themselves. Surround yourself with a support system or community that shares and supports your aspirations. Nurture teams that are highly motivated and have the openness and integrity to adapt, learn from and embrace new ideas from each other. Be a transformational leader who has the vision to steer the company ahead of its peers. Aspire to grow up the ladder and make your voice heard. Never allow any conscious/unconscious biases to affect your leadership aspirations. And always remember that glass ceilings exist to be broken. Shanthi remembers this quote by Chris Bradford “Anyone can give up; it is the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone would expect you to fall apart, now that is true strength.”