Special Award for Resiliency

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is committed to achieving a prosperous, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable Asia/Pacific while sustaining its efforts to eradicate extreme poverty. With developing countries reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic‘s impact, ADB relied on its effective remote work and knowledge–sharing capabilities to commit a US$20 billion COVID-19 assistance package for the poor and vulnerable. The reliability of ADB IT infrastructure and services was crucial throughout the rapid transition to remote work caused by the pandemic. For ADB, resiliency means being prepared and responsive to disruption-related risks and strengthening adaptability to complex and changing circumstances without compromising the ability to fulfill the bank’s core mission. To continue its operations and resiliency efforts, ADB rolled out the Real-Time ADB (RTA) IT Reform Program. This enabled its Manila-based headquarters and 23 field offices to continue operating remotely and seamlessly even as the pandemic escalated. Key benefits of RTA include secure and remote access to applications, greater collaboration through productivity tools, stronger cybersecurity measures, and 24/7 IT support. 

The Government-Linked Companies and Government-Linked Investment Companies Disaster Response Network (GDRN) is made up of corporate members that seek to coordinate humanitarian and emergency responses to disasters in Malaysia. Following the COVID-19 outbreak, Malaysia faced challenges in supplying the required medical equipment to hospitals and doctors. The speed and scale of the pandemic led to a demand for donations that needed to be accurately allocated to the appropriate hospitals and general practitioners. In March 2020, 29 GDRN members came together to streamline its medical-related support to assist the Ministry of Health and direct humanitarian aid to vulnerable communities. The GDRN launched GDRN Bantu, a one-stop, cloud-based solution that aided in recording, tracking, and matching medical donations. GDRN Bantu was instrumental in the accounting and coordination of pledges and the deployment of supplies, ventilators, and personal protective equipment (PPE) to hospitals as well as other health-related organizations under the Ministry of Health. Moreover, the app improved credibility, transparency, and governance as the system tracked the dispatch and receipt of supplies by the requesting organizations. GDRN Bantu has partially contributed toward GDRN’s total contribution of MYR20.2 million for ventilators and PPE and has assisted in tracking a large sum of pledges to requests.

Hanwha Total Petrochemical is a global chemical and energy leader, offering differentiated products and services through cutting-edge chemistry based on different technologies. With COVID-19 movement restrictions, the company struggled with managing the entrance of overseas technology experts providing large-scale regular maintenance services. To solve this issue, the company adopted a smart glass remote support system, enabling real-time communication between onsite
engineers and overseas supervisors or domestic employees in a noncontact environment. With this system, Hanwha Total Petrochemical recorded remarkable time and cost improvements in regular maintenance work. The smart glass remote
support system facilitated more efficient maintenance work (reducing the original 17 days to one day) and reduced costs (from KRW200 million to KRW20 million). With this, the system clearly demonstrates effective COVID-19 risk response by utilizing digital transformation (DX) technologies, thus resulting in financial gains while also responding to generational shifts through knowledge capitalization by leveraging onsite video recording and improving regular response systems. In the future, the project is positioned to evolve and possess the key features to find facility anomalies via data analytics, create value through optimized yields, and conduct more tasks through a digital workplace. 

Jabar Digital Service aims to narrow the digital divide, improve the efficiency and accuracy of policy making based on data and technology, and revolutionize governance and citizen livelihoods in West Java. It launched the Pikobar platform in March 2020, shortly after the governor declared a COVID-19 emergency status in the province following the first two confirmed local cases. The platform includes a website and mobile application in which citizens can access real-time case updates and data analytics, COVID-19 response information, and hotlines for general inquiries and medical emergencies. The mobile app also serves as a public–private partnership hub for COVID-19 responses. Through the app, citizens may contribute to the province’s pandemic response by joining a volunteer program, making logistics or cash donations, or participating in public discussions to correct COVID-19 misinformation. The Pikobar app further champions public participation as Jabar Digital Service collaborates with IT community volunteers and digital start–ups to develop its features. A self-diagnosis function has been developed with Prixa, a start-up that offers an artificial intelligence (AI)–based diagnostic engine that helps identify COVID-19 symptoms. The Pikobar app will soon include contact tracing support and a daily reporting feature for self-isolating patients. The app has been installed more than 1 million times, pooled 3,428 medical and logistical data, and collected 55,514 citizen reports. 

The Aditya Birla Group is a global conglomerate operating throughout 36 countries in North and South America, Africa, and Asia, supported by a workforce of 120,000 employees in the metals, pulp and fiber, chemicals, textiles, carbon black, cement, and even telecommunication industries. The conglomerate has adopted the New Digital Normal initiative in its subsidiary, Grasim Industries, in which various technologies and capabilities were introduced in pulp and fiber manufacturing facilities to support remote operations and employees. With organizational resiliency and infrastructure scalability essential to business continuity, Aditya Birla Group‘s initiative involved work-on-the-go programs for increased technology awareness and training for the entire workforce, cloud-based collaboration models for remote work capabilities, and improved data availability for faster decision making. Robotic process automation (RPA) and Internet of Things (IoT) implementation also reduced onsite workforce to support unmanned operations, remote manufacturing, and video analytics to increase security and safely monitor plants while also observing social distancing protocols. Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, Aditya Birla Group used productivity, manpower optimization, and remote monitoring as its key drivers, fast-tracking its digital transformation (DX) and building resiliency lasting beyond the pandemic.  

Faced with the challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic, Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) has, with collective efforts of various departments and its management, increased preventive and control measures to safeguard the health and safety of the university community. Spearheaded by the Office of Information Technology (ITO), HKBU is the first university in Hong Kong to introduce a daily health declaration policy and an integrated real-time health declaration system (HDS). Based on the self-declared data collected, the HDS can keep track of any COVID-19–related symptom and relevant travel history of staff, students, and registered visitors, control their access into the campus, and provide real-time data to a dashboard for actionable insights to support risk management and resource planning concerning campus returnees. With pragmatic and innovative leveraging and prompt interoperability enablement, different existing technical components, such as user data download services, the HKBU mobile app supporting secure user authentication, and the Smartcard Readers System, the HDS has been realized as envisaged — a rapid rollout and 100% smooth usage adoption by students and staff, which are major key performance indicators (KPIs) targeted for this project. Since its launch, the system has already processed around 400,000 health declaration responses. With key stakeholders realizing the importance of digital transformation, a detailed direction on–campus routine that banks heavily on technology for the upcoming academic year has been determined.  

AIA is the largest independent publicly listed pan-Asia life insurance group. Headquartered in Hong Kong, its focus is on the Asia/Pacific market, with its footprint across 18 markets, serving more than 36 million individual policies and over 16 million participating members of group insurance schemes. AIA focuses heavily on improving customer experiences and enabling customer accessibility. Today, more than 80% of customer interactions across all markets can be performed digitally. Equally, AIA aims to provide digital tools and data insights to agents and staff to provide market-leading services. The core pillars of AIA digital transformation are technology, digital, and analytics, and artificial intelligence (TDA): technology to ensure cybersecurity is a top priority, with the ongoing deployment of hybrid multicloud strategy to provide scalable, secure, and agile infrastructures; digital to equip customers and agents with the best user-centric digital tools with enhanced capabilities to ensure customers’ needs and expectations are met at all times, including extraordinary events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic; and analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to leverage vast amounts of data to challenge the status quo. Fusion, AIA’s first-in-market homegrown AI underwriting engine, revamps automation and reduces costs significantly. With it, customers enjoy a shorter application processing time, whereas AIA’s underwriters are upskilled by working with AI. 

Established in 1984, Haier Group Corporation is a world-leading provider of solutions to a better life. It has penetrated the technical fields of artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, cloud computing, data technology, edge computing, facial recognition, and 5G (ABCDEFG), digitized all business processes, and repeatedly attained increased user, enterprise, and ecosystem value through its COSMOPlat industrial internet platform. Through this platform, Haier Group has upgraded its seven major nodes comprehensively and implemented a mass customization model with the successful participation of users in the processes of its 15 intelligent interconnected factories. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, Haier COSMOPlat has shown its full capabilities as an industrial internet platform to empower the fight against the epidemic and allow the resumption of work. Relying on the platform, Haier has also provided support for more than 2,100 SMEs by maximizing the platform’s functions in resource aggregation, element interconnection, and ecosystem coupling. After the outbreak, it took Haier only 48 hours to launch China’s first medical materials supply-demand matchmaking platform online, which played a huge role in information pooling, precise matchmaking, optimal scheduling, distributed collaboration, and remote empowering for epidemic prevention materials

The City of Port Phillip is a local government area in Victoria, Australia located in the northern shores of Port Phillip, south of Melbourne’s central business district. It is responsible for delivering more than 100 programs and services to its residents, businesses, and visitors. The City of Port Phillip has embarked on a massive digital transformation (DX) journey to move from being a property-centric organization to being a customer-centric organization. One of the outcomes of the city’s transformation journey is revamping its digital reach to the community not just within the council boundaries but also beyond. One such initiative is the St. Kilda Film Festival, which promotes the arts and culture of the community across the world to support local talent and create opportunities for aspiring artists. The St. Kilda Film Festival would typically attract over 13,000 attendees annually. However, on its 37th year in 2020, the event shifted to a completely virtual film festival because of the COVID-19 pandemic. With a scalable cloud architecture, the City of Port Phillip successfully held the film festival with a viewership of 47,000 because users were able to access the nine-day event on any device and platform. The festival’s success, because of its underpinning digital architecture, has opened new opportunities in future hybrid event formats and festival attendee engagements.