For the third time the Kulturzentrum Kampnagel in Hamburg opened its doors for solutions.hamburg, Germany’s largest digitization congress. In the past, huge harbor cranes were produced there, which can still be found in ports around the world. Today Kampnagel stands for modern culture and innovative technology. An ideal place to discuss digitization and its opportunities and challenges.
From September 12th to 14th, digitization enthusiasts and doubters, experienced and newcomers met to discuss a broad spectrum of digitization aspects in the already proven format. In several hundred lectures, workshops and networking events with top-class speakers, more than 5000 visitors were able to experience the topic of digitisation in its entire breadth and depth and to be inspired in a variety of ways.
Each of the three days was dedicated to a specific topic. On Wednesday, “Strategy Day” focused on how digital key technologies affect business strategies. Completely new business models are emerging, while established business models are significantly influenced by digitization. The business processes have to adapt to customer wishes, the customer journey comes to the fore. Customer wishes and customer benefits play the central role. In addition, organizational forms change radically, we say goodbye to silo thinking and turn to network thinking.
Modern forms of work such as design thinking were topics of the “Collaboration Day” on Thursday. When it comes to digitization, everyone first thinks of IT, but how revolutionary the power of digitization is also for the world of work can hardly be underestimated. The speed of innovation is already enormous, but it will continue to increase. For the employee, this means that it is no longer enough to learn a profession once in a lifetime. Today, he must continue to educate himself – not only from a technical point of view, but also from a methodological point of view. The Collaboration Day offered a wide range of exciting ideas.
The “Technology Day” on Friday focused entirely on the actual technology of digitization. The handling as well as secure and fast interpretation of large amounts of data, cloud solutions, but again the interaction with the customer were in the foreground. How can AI support the personal approach the customer expects? When will hotlines be replaced by artificial intelligence? By now the computer can generate decision aids, with which humans find their way better in the jungle of possibilities.
mgm as Gold Partner
mgm consulting partners decided for the Strategy Day with its theme track “Embracing Digital Transformation”. However, our central presence in the area of solutions exactly began one day earlier, at the Corporate Innovation Park, the recruiting fair belonging to solutions.hamburg, in which we participated for the first time. 12 participating companies courted 400 interested pupils and students in numerous workshops and gave an introduction to the world of technology and consulting. In times when the search for qualified specialists has become one of the central factors for the success of a company, this is an ideal opportunity to talk to potential future employees. As you can read in the separate report about this event, it was a complete success!
Afterwards we had invited to the Speakers Dinner in the evening. All our next day’s speakers should have the opportunity to get to know each other in a relaxed atmosphere and discuss their experiences, successes and challenges with digitization and beyond over excellent food. The experienced consultants, who had acted as the speakers’ advisors in the run-up to the fair, were also present. Of course, since we had placed great emphasis on ensuring that our speakers covered a wide range of industries, company sizes and areas of responsibility, lively and fruitful conversations quickly relaxed into the late evening.
The next day, everyone was back on time to hear Ranga Yogeshwar’s central keynote “Man or machine – who programs whom? With vivid and sometimes slightly scary examples, he took us into a future digital world. Afterwards a substantial part of the audience went into our room. Prof. Weinberg explained in an entertaining but convincing way why we have to develop in organizations from the silo thinking – called by him catchy “Brockhausstruktur” (structure of encyclopedia) – to network thinking and what hinders us so far: first and foremost our single fighter mentality. Afterwards our theme track remained well attended, often listeners stood next to the grandstand and between the lectures there were personal conversations with the presenters, but also between listeners. This is exactly how we had imagined “our” solutions! In the evening, a cheerful, relaxed closing ceremony with speakers, participants, colleagues and customers rounded off the successful event. We are looking forward to the fourth edition next year – save the date: 11th to 13th September 2019!
