What are Great Eastern Lifes IT priorities over the next 12 months?
Ng: There are two levels of priorities. One is at the Great Eastern Life (GEL) group level, and the other is at a local level, and I’ll talk about it from the perspective of the Singapore business. At the group level, the key business priority next year and the years ahead is to expand our presence in the Asian region. This is expected to leverage the capabilities we have in the mature parts of the business in Singapore and Malaysia. IT will be part of the business franchise that GEL will bring to each of the emerging markets we enter. As a result, the IT department will have to build the capability and capacity to support this expansion strategy. At the same time, the expansion also presents an opportunity for our IT department to transform itself to run differently in the future. Besides the larger scale of operation, the business expansion will be giving us new opportunities to make IT a shared service across the whole group.
