Ibrahim Gedeon CTO of TELUS in Canada, jumped at the opportunity to join myself and Monica Paolini to discuss how his organisation and the telco as a whole is building towards a more inclusive future. You can watch the webinar here and listen the podcast here.
In the past diversity was something we were told we had to deal with and suck up the cost. Today it becomes a way of building more all-embracing solutions and actually provides significant commercial return on the investment because it is all connected and not done in isolation. DEI doesn’t drive it, but DEI awareness shapes the outcome.
The fact that the TELUS CTO is talking about these issues shows both his passion for the subject but also that it brings together the technology organisation and the HR elements of the company. But there is an education and skills issue that permeates all the way from educating children, re-educating the workforce and helping educate the elderly population as to how they can get the best out of being connected. Some aspects of inclusion are cultural, some are societal, some are business organisational and some are technological.
What TELUS has done is to ensure that it isn’t about any individual diversity but embracing gender, ethnicity, age, disability and skillsets. This is embedded into TELUS with grassroots as well as executive support.
Ibrahim said:
“We have traditionally designed our offerings in a messy technology way. Not thinking of the incredibly diverse set of customers using our services. We have to build this inclusion into everything from job specs to customer interfaces. Otherwise the 90% rule will kick in and it will be designed for the greatest return rather than the greater goal of DEI.
This is not a one-person job. Not about championing it but getting senior management trained across the topic and re-educating the workforce. As new talent comes into the organisation it should get easier, with a more diverse workforce but it needs kick-starting with everyone contributing now. As a global telco industry, we should make things more openly available, through APIs, to allow all of these excluded groups to benefit.”
This was an incredibly wide-ranging discussion with Ibrahim. You can enjoy the full video and read the summary documents by going to the #Inclusively site.