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13/02/2020

2020 marks the beginning of a new chapter for msg - the previous "Agenda 2020" strategy will be successfully completed one year ahead of schedule, a new management board team will take over, and the target of one billion in sales will be exceeded. In addition, there are massive changes in the market driven by digitisation. How does this affect msg's strategy? A conversation with Dr. Stephan Frohnhoff, Chairman of msg.

Stephan, as part of the msg strategy conference, you presented the corporate strategy "Roadmap 2025" to the management team. What do you consider to be the biggest challenges for msg that you are facing with your roadmap?

Dr. Stephan Frohnhoff: Dr. Stephan Frohnhoff: "With Roadmap 2025, which we have developed with the broad involvement of management, we are focusing on the development areas that are most important for the further development of msg in the digital transformation. How are we investing and innovating in the group? What are the roles played by ecosystems and platforms? How do we shape our image as a holistic consulting and solution provider? How do we serve our customers internationally? These are all questions which we want to answer with Roadmap 2025. In terms of content, this strategy underscores our ambition to lead customers to successful outcomes while keeping people at the centre of our solutions - whether they're customers, employees or users of our solutions.

Doesn't this further development also mean huge changes for msg itself?

Continuous adaptation to changing market requirements has always been a strength of msg. Beyond external factors however, the needs of the team also play a role. The exceptional culture of msg remains the basis for our success and this will also continue to develop. Despite our decentralized structure, which provides the necessary level of freedom, it will be important to bring different areas of expertise together as a cohesive whole and create new cooperation models in order to fully develop the power of the msg group.

What kind of benefits can you promise from this continued development? What does this change mean for your customers in concrete terms?

Our ambition is to support our customers as a pioneer in a world of information and help them take advantage of their individual opportunities for digitisation. Our combination of IT and industry expertise continues to be a strength of ours and a key factor setting us apart from our competitors. We are developing our service portfolio towards providing full service, with processes designed in an end-to-end approach. In Business Consulting, we are growing at a faster-than-average rate, and in the future we will be taking this expertise to market with the "msg advisors" brand.

How does the further development within the roadmap differ from the strategy of the competition? Will the USP of msg be diluted as a result of further development?

Our deep industry knowledge continues to be one of msg's great strengths. This expertise is immensely important because the major trends in digitisation are at different levels of maturity and have different implications for each industry. The trend of platforms and ecosystems makes it increasingly important to combine these areas of industry expertise. Given that there is a lot of business potential for our customers in the platform economy, it is important that we are also optimally positioned in this area.

Have there been any initial successes to report thanks to the roadmap?

The roadmap is an iterative development process which covers different topics. Of course, we have already taken the first steps in some areas. In the area of platforms, for example, we have already been able to prove that we are capable of developing platforms that are well accepted on the market with two technically-oriented platforms, DIPKO and edith.care. In addition, we have been running our internal cultural program "People in Focus" for some time - the excellent score of 77% in the Great Place to Work culture audit shows that we are certainly on the right track there.

At the same time, the roadmap also contains goals where we are still at the very beginning, such as investment control. As msg, we must learn to invest specifically in new, cross-industry business and think outside the box in terms of how we do business currently.

Dr. Stephan Frohnhoff has been Chairman of the executive board of msg systems ag since January 1, 2020. In this function, he is responsible for the Banking sector and Public Sector business as well as the cross-industry areas of Business Intelligence, Information Security and Test & Quality Management. In addition, he coordinates the work of the central divisions and is responsible for Corporate IT, Organization and Human Resources. Furthermore, he is responsible for Corporate Social Responsibility within the Group.