Hello there! It's my pleasure to warmly welcome you to our official TM Blog!
The world today grows and thrives on borderless, unlimited knowledge, and this blog sets out to mirror these rapidly-evolving times by providing an avenue for fresh insights into all things TM – from your perceptions about us, to helping us improve as an organisation, and our reflections about where the world is headed. This is an opportunity for us to share our thoughts directly with you; whether you are a consumer who stumbled upon this page, or a new employee who is curious about TM’s plans, or an investor wanting to know how our company is progressing. Whoever you may be, this blog is for you.
In this first conversation, I want to address a question that I most commonly receive as a CEO: what is your vision for TM?
My answer: TM is evolving to become a human-centred tech company. However, the journey in defining this vision has taken a while.
My vision for TM came into focus quite recently - after witnessing the ordeal that SPM students across Malaysia had to go through during the COVID-19 pandemic, and appreciating the role that TM played in helping them cope through those unprecedented times. This vision for TM didn’t arise from my corporate experience, or by wearing my “head of a tech company” hat. What truly helped me define the new TM vision and purpose was an honest review of a common Malaysian experience across generations.
When I was an SPM student, my experiences of sitting for the exam and receiving my results were very different. I would study my textbooks, pen my essays on paper, and use a pencil to write down my answers on exam papers. After a blissful post-exam break, I returned to school for a day to reunite with my classmates; all of us jittery with nervous excitement in anticipation of the piece of paper that would determine the next chapter of our lives. Once I received my exam results, I rushed home in jubilation to my parents. At the time, the only piece of technology involved in the entire process was the landline, used by my parents to call every one of my numerous uncles and aunts to spread the good news.
When COVID-19 made its unwelcome entry into our lives, SPM students, teachers and officials within the Ministry of Education found themselves in an entirely new and unexpected predicament. How could students sit for their exams when no one was allowed to leave their homes? How would they receive their exam results, the biggest event in their young lives, when they weren’t allowed to step into school or hug their friends?
The answer lay in the power of technology. As a result of the pandemic, an entire national education system needed to be brought online, enabled by the likes of cloud services, built on the backs of connectivity infrastructure, and powered almost entirely by TM. In 2021, the results of the SPM examination, taken by 401,125 students across the country, needed to be accessible online for the first time in history. At the time, we anticipated that there were more than three (3) million simultaneous requests to access the Ministry of Education’s servers. Every one of these requests required a flawless experience to facilitate what was a milestone event for each student and their families.
The same definitive life experience that I had decades ago, now needed to be hosted virtually. And TM stepped up to deliver this experience!
It was this predicament that truly opened my eyes to the core purpose, importance and influence of a telecommunications and technology company in enhancing the key moments in our everyday life.
Put People at the Core of Everything
TM must now evolve beyond delivering base connectivity infrastructure. Our solutions need to facilitate the experiences and services that shape who we are, as individuals living day-to-day and as an interconnected society.
TM’s services and solutions are now being used in incredibly wide-ranging ways. They play a role even in the little things such as allowing you to order dinner online when you’re tired from working late. It also expands to unfathomable scales; hosting cloud servers capable of storing data from thousands of schools, delivering internet connections stable enough to host gaming tournaments with thousands of viewers, and creating solutions using IoT to monitor and improve the crops that feed us.
TM’s businesses and solutions are evolving to put people at the core of everything. Being a human-centred technology company is to anchor our business decisions on the daily experiences lived by you and me. Be it 5G, cloud services, IoT or edge computing, TM is committed to innovating and implementing technologies that have the potential to enhance our lives and experiences, in big ways and small, every single day. That is the true meaning and purpose behind TM becoming a human-centred technology company.
Embodying our new purpose will not come easily. It will require an entirely new compass, charting a new course, and a total re-evaluation of the services we offer our customers.
To do this effectively, we must first look inwards, and change the way TM itself functions. Several initiatives have already begun across verticals; from revamping our internal company culture, to redefining the way our teams function and collaborate, to rethinking our corporate and social responsibilities. Becoming a human-centred tech company will only be truly effective if TM as a whole champions this vision of prioritising the 'human within technology’, and by adopting the behaviours that enable this purpose to flourish throughout the company.
TM’s transformation will subsequently impact the offerings we deliver to our customers, from large-scale industries down to everyday consumers. We have made great strides in revamping our home entertainment offerings, boosted our efforts in growing our local gaming scene, along with scaling up our digital transformation and Private 5G solutions for enterprises. By anchoring our business decisions on delivering and enabling life moments, we are breaking through barriers and discovering the myriad of opportunities available for TM to scale up as an organisation.
There are massive opportunities that still lie ahead for TM, and by realising our purpose of being a human-centred technology company, we acknowledge that this is a mission that’s much bigger than just TM alone.
We are at the cusp of transforming the daily lives and experiences of every Malaysian. From the humble paddy farmer, to the government school teacher, to the engineers on Sarawakian oil rigs, all the way up to CEOs of multi-national corporations, TM’s renewed purpose, and concordant solutions delivering human-centred technology, will transform the way we live, work, connect with each other, and evolve!
Defining TM’s new vision and purpose did not arise from my corporate experience or by wearing my “head of a tech company” hat. After comparing my own experience of receiving my SPM results against the experience of SPM students who endured the COVID19 pandemic and received their exam results online, I realized the real role that TM plays in the lives of everyday Malaysians.
The usage of TM’s solutions and services are now incredibly vast. It expands to huge scales, such as enabling servers that has the capacity to deliver the SPM results of 401,125 students across the country, as we did in 2021 for the first time in history. But the connectivity and infrastructure we provide also plays a role in the little things in life, such as ordering a late-night food delivery online.
TM now needs to deliver solutions that are capable of facilitating the experiences and services that shape who we are, as people making it day-to-day and as a society. In shaping our solutions around serving the human experience, we are discovering the many opportunities for TM to grow as a company. But more importantly, by aligning our purpose to being human centred, we are now dedicated to improving, innovating and implementing tools which can tangibly enhance the lives of each Malaysian through the power of technology.
