February 10, 2025

Inews Fit

Innovation that Serves, Quality that is Trusted

VTI Group’s CTO Chinh Dinh on intangible leadership and tech skills for today’s IT leaders, ET CIO SEA

VTI Group’s CTO Chinh Dinh on intangible leadership and tech skills for today’s IT leaders, ET CIO SEA

Chinh Dinh leads technology for Viet Thai International (VTI) group as Group CTO, the number one player in coffee retail in Vietnam. With more than 20 years of experience in the IT industry, he has been involved in many IT projects in various industries such as securities and financial services, manufacturing, FMCG, retail, real estate, and technology outsourcing. Chinh also plays the role of Director Technology Program for the community group representing the CIO/CTO community in Vietnam.

In an exclusive interaction with us, Chinh shared his thoughts on today’s intangible leadership and tech skills for today’s CIOs/ CTOs and his advice for tech leaders to become effective executive leaders in their organisation.

What do you think are today’s intangible leadership and tech skills for today’s CIOs/ CTOs?

First and foremost, while CIOs/CTOs are majorly viewed as tech leaders, but today, like any other CXO, they need to imbibe leadership skills in business as an intangible skill. At the end of the day, every tech implementation or tech innovation is all about business outcomes and achieving business goals in line with the organisation’s strategic direction. Hence aligning tech with business outcomes is highly critical.

Second comes the focus on customer and product service. Tech leaders not only need to understand the technology but also the application of that tech for improving customer value or customer engagement. After all, at the end of the day, every business’s products are meant for customers.

Another intangible skill is being well versed in operations, especially people management. No new technology can undermine the importance of human resources in any organisation. Hence it’s critical for tech leaders to have the knowledge as to how to encourage their people to be efficient and smarter in order to achieve business outcomes.

Lastly, business analytics is another intangible skill. In order to help the business achieve their goals, it is important for tech leaders to gain a complete understanding of the business; only then can they advocate the right solutions for the business.

What has been your biggest priority as VTI Group’s CTO this year? What has been your biggest focus area when it comes to your organisation’s IT strategy in 2024?

As the number one player in coffee retail in Vietnam, at the moment, we are in the journey to standardise our business operations, make them more efficient, more nimble in order to be able to react quicker to market and business changes. Hence for the next 18 months, our priority is his digital transformation across all of the business units and business operations.

We are in the midst of reviewing our entire tech stack in order to zero down on the standards for every single business unit so that we implement a uniform tech architecture throughout the whole group. This will ensure that every single layer of our business is aligned with the overall group level strategic business direction and goals, and is digitalised to achieve greater effectiveness and efficiency.

To this effect, we are adopting a plethora of technologies for a lot of organisational needs- Microsoft 365, for productivity, Microsoft Azure data stack to build our own data platform, and also implementing CRM/ CDP to enhance marketing and customer engagement. Another key initiative is revising our front end technology like ecommerce web apps, leveraging ChatGPT for providing better customer support, as well as implementing RPA solutions to improve the effectiveness in our invoicing operations.

To become effective executive leaders, what is something that today’s CIOs/CTOs should steer clear of?

One thing I would advocate to today’s tech executives is to avoid the tendency to deep dive into tech and tech alone as a part of their roles. Of course, as tech leaders we are naturally drawn to details at the engineering level or at the coding/programming level, but what we also need to focus on besides machine and tech is remembering the real purpose of that tech.

And the real purpose of all that tech is to become an enabler for the business and help it move in its strategic direction. Hence tech leaders need to avoid being just tech focused only; one can spend a lot of money on R&D for a very fancy technology but if it does not bring any value to the customer or the business, then it’s simply a burn for nothing.

Your one piece of leadership advice for tech leaders to become effective executive leaders in their organisation?

From my perspective, the most important thing is alignment. If tech leaders can align with all the other executives or stakeholders, they know exactly what are the desired outcomes expected from them rather than being derailed by inconsequential projects.

And for this, one needs to understand the language of all the other stakeholders- be it business, HR, supply chains or finance. Tech leaders need to know their language. I firmly believe that only people who can speak the same language can stay together in a room. So as a tech leader, if you are conversing in a different language, you are out of sync. You will be unable to fathom what the business is trying to achieve in the short, medium or long term. Hence in order to be an effective leader in tech and also in the organisation, alignment is the most important thing.

  • Published On Dec 9, 2024 at 05:00 AM IST

Get updates on your preferred social platform

Follow us for the latest news, insider access to events and more.

link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Copyright © All rights reserved. | Newsphere by AF themes.