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A Model and for All Christine Chiang, Senior Director (IT & Business) at Popular Singapore, was a capable and committed leader. In her 18 years of service with POPULAR, she achieved many milestones with the company and inspired many to take up the new challenges with an open mind. Working Behind the Scenes Christine led Popular Singapore’s Information & Technology (IT) Department, a division that continues to play a pivotal role in POPULAR. Under her watch, the IT Department implemented numerous customised systems to support POPULAR’s growing business needs, while streamlining our operations and processes to improve productivity and maintaining a stable and dependable infrastructure. This was no easy task. However, the important contributions of Christine’s team have often gone unnoticed. For many, the IT Department only comes to mind when we encounter network issues or technical difficulties with the office hardware. Perhaps IT staff are more often thought of as wizards who possess magical powers that can resolve all issues pertaining to computers, software, websites, systems, internet access, and virus protection. In fact, the importance of the work done by Christine’s team is as real as it gets. As the largest bookstore chain in Singapore, POPULAR needs real-time access to sales data and analyses to stay ahead of the competition. Without this information, our retail operations would essentially be dashing around blindfolded. Sheer Tenacity and Determination Former Popular Singapore Retail Director Jo Lee can still recall how Christine played a key role in swiftly arresting the plunge of the business during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in Singapore in 2003. Much like what is happening in today’s COVID-19 pandemic, POPULAR’s retail operations in Singapore came to a standstill. To reach out to our customers after the crisis, Jo decided to take up 30,000 square feet of space at the Singapore Expo Convention & Exhibition Centre for a mega roadshow. This was unprecedented as no other company had used the Singapore Expo, an exhibition hall in the remote eastern part of Singapore, for a sales event of such a large scale hitherto. This visionary strategy required meticulous planning and close cooperation with every department within POPULAR. Jo asked for a point-of-sale (POS) solution from the IT Department, but the revolutionary sales terminal system had not yet been widely adopted by retailers in Singapore, and POPULAR had yet to implement the system then. Having just joined POPULAR for barely a year, Christine and her team swung into action, tackling the various obstacles head on and setting the new system up in time. The roadshow was a huge success, and 24 - popularnews 131 众之楷模 Popular News dedicates this issue’s “Popular Personality’ to the la who touched the lives of everyone she worked with in POPULA 《大众资讯》谨以本期“风云众人”悼念新加坡大众同事蒋美金 By Ruth Cao 文:曹蓉 ，