Nearshore Americas
Nick van der Meulen

MIT Digital Transformation Expert Set to Keynote Nexus 2019

Nick van der Meulen, a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been announced as the keynote speaker at the Nexus 2019 conference on Latin America’s burgeoning IT/BPO industry.

Van der Meulen has extensively studied the effects of digital transformation and collaborative work culture in the digital environment.

During recent years he has been advocating for greater autonomy for employees, arguing that arming workers with digital tools and allowing them to work wherever and however they want holds the key to building a successful digital workplace.

He currently works for the MIT Sloan’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), and his work on digital workplaces and the employee experience has resulted in a range of academic and industry publications.

“If you take good care of your employees, they will in turn take good care of your customers,” he said at last year’s European Facility Management Conference in Madrid.

He says that business owners should empower employees to make decisions in the best interests of customer experience.

“We no longer need to look at customer satisfaction. That’s an outdated concept. We need to look at customer experience, which is the grand total of all the interactions that the customer has throughout his entire relations with the brand.”

To improve customer experience, you need to change the way you care for your employees, he says.

Van der Meulen formed part of MIT’s recent study on the digital transformation journeys of large firms, and which revealed that companies that were 50% transformed digitally were found to have achieved 32% higher net margins and 67% higher revenue growth than their competitors that had not begun a digital transformation.

The Nexus conference, which takes place May 15-16 at 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, will feature a series of panel discussions and presentations from some of the leading minds in North American outsourcing, enterprise ICT procurement, and vendor management industries.

There will also be discussions exploring how processes are being transformed and how intelligent automation ultimately enhances and deepens the experience of the end-customer.

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Other speakers at the conference include Fabiano Rosa, Consultant, PwC Canada;  Alejandro Zarate, Senior Vice President, Marsh; Steven Serra, VP of Product and Innovation, United Technologies; Harold Bolton, Director of IT Vendor Management, UPS;  Rajeev Gupta, Regional Vice President TCS Latin America; Frank Zimmerman, Global Head of Partnerships, Nosto;  Julie Casteel, Chief Strategic Accounts Officer, IBEX;  Tim Norton, Founder, VMO Benchmark;  Hank Birkdale, Vice President of Software Engineer, LendKey;  Anurag Kumar, Co-Founder and CEO, ITexico; and Omar Sultan-Khan, CEO, Trinidad and Tobago IFC.

Narayan Ammachchi

News Editor for Nearshore Americas, Narayan Ammachchi is a career journalist with a decade of experience in politics and international business. He works out of his base in the Indian Silicon City of Bangalore.

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