Love this presentation from Benedict Evans on macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. Thank you, Ben. It raises the trillion-dollar question – what is the next big wave in tech? I think tech being systemically important to society ( with tech regulation) is a given and is already happening.
My 2c: I think (and hope) that the next big wave will be the purpose-driven tech companies that solve some of the biggest problems facing humankind than mere convenience. The next big wave of companies will be society, nature, and universe obsessed!
Digital and business transformation are enterprise-wide initiatives and done right, it is teamwork at its best as there are multiple cross-functional teams involved and hierarchies within those teams. Think of a matrix web structure. What would it take to move so many people, especially if things have to be delivered fast? It is no wonder then that many digital transformations fail or fall way short.
How does one know the transformation is not going well? They maybe just one person amongst tens or hundreds or even thousands. There will be signs all over if you pay close attention. You do NOT even need to look at a status report, just look at these signs for yourself:
You are unclear about your role and responsibilities or your team’s roles and responsibilities
You simply don’t know or vaguely know how you’re making a difference. You’ve been asked to do certain things
You see consultants brought in to mediate or align teams (particularly, business and IT)
There is a business case, vision, objectives but only available to “higher-ups”
You spend the majority of your time explaining or defending your work, not doing your work
You worry too much about failure and the repercussions carry a heavy price
The chart below substantiates how much tech is disrupting the traditional sectors. You’d have qualitatively heard that software is eating the world etc. etc., but this graph (though not perfect) shows HOW much.
Simply put, Technology is a) eating into other sectors b) gaining market share, and c) revenue is leaking from other sectors (for e.g. Financials) into Technology.
If your company is in the traditional sector, this threat from Technology should pretty much define the business strategy. Covid is only going to accelerate this trend. How should non-tech companies defend? Stay tuned!
Blissfully report is a gold mine of data for technology teams and leaders interested in SaaS trends and spend. One thing is clear, SaaS apps are proliferating in organizations and have to be proactively managed from a cost and experience perspective. Here is a snapshot of the 2019 SaaS trends from the report.
“I really became a robot,” a manager at an accounting firm explained. She and her colleagues worked extraordinarily long hours, but, she said, “I thought it was normal. It’s like brainwashing. You are in a kind of mental system where you are under increasing demands, and you say to yourself that it doesn’t matter, that you will rest afterwards, but that moment never comes.”
Through my research, I’ve heard stories like this over and over again from people in accounting firms, law firms, consulting firms, and other white-collar jobs. We all know that chronic overwork is bad for our mental and physical health and can seriously jeopardize the quality of our work. We wish we could change the way we work, but we don’t really know how.
Over the course of the past two weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to discuss with 20+ technology leaders the state of Digital and Technology, especially the impact of the global pandemic on Digital and Technology priorities. Organizations all over the world will be revisiting their 2020 priorities and we felt it will be good for us to evaluate the impact and prepare ourselves for the road ahead. In order to do that, we’ve to answer the following question:
What areas of digital and technology will organizations focus in the coming two years?
The answer to the above question is the objective of this article. Some feel that digital and tech has been a big help – for business continuity as well as connecting people – during these trying times and we will turn out okay. Some even feel that Big Tech will weather through these trying times and emerge stronger. For those working in Digital and Technology, those high-level sentiments alone may not be sufficient as we need to be better prepared for what is to come. For us to be better prepared, it is very important that the above question gets answered in two parts:
Industry-specific impact on digital and technology – To assess the impact on a specific industry, one can analyze research coming from various financial institutions, trade groups or government agencies (Please message me if you don’t know where to look).
Cross-industry impact on digital and technology – This will be the focus of this article and we will dive deeper into what I believe are the top 10 digital and technology focus areas.
Before we go further, I’d like to call out a few things. If not anything, this article is a place to collect my thoughts and synthesize the various viewpoints; I do hope some can benefit from the collective experience and viewpoint provided. To remain agnostic, I’ve avoided naming organizations or products. All mistakes are mine.
Summary of Impact
Top 10 Digital & Technology focus areas for organizations have been identified and listed. The following chart summarizes those focus areas and a gauge of the likely 2020 and 2021 priority – investment and interest – in those areas. The priorities are categorized into low, medium and high. The priorities are relative to each other in the list. My take on 2019 priorities are also provided to serve as a baseline.
Commentary on Focus Areas
Let us dig into all of the focus areas as they need an explanation. Some focus areas may be controversial and hence additional commentary for those:
Business Continuity – #1 High priority in 2020. The first and foremost thing on every executive’s mind will be to ensure that their organization does business (if they can) without any disruption. The organization’s business continuity plans will be thoroughly tested and many weaknesses will arise that organizations will fix as soon as they possibly can.
Digitalization – High priority in 2020. Digitalization will be a tale of two worlds, with digitalization actually increasing for use cases that support business continuity and mobility vs. digitalization decreasing for use cases with poor business cases and large budgets. Overall, new or existing initiatives to address #1 above will keep digitalization a high priority this year.
Purpose – Medium priority in 2020. There will be an awakening of sorts and people (and hence organizations) will clamor to incorporate ESG – Environmental, Social, and Governance – in their business. Technology will enable businesses to be more purpose-driven, particularly the social impact part (the S in ESG). It remains to be seen what shape or form it will take, but the debates and discussions will happen.
Customer Experience (CX) – Medium priority in 2020. Organizations can be expected to continue the customer focus, but with two changes. First, there will be less tolerance for big spending on customer acquisition, retention, and CX delivery. Pragmatism will creep in and key tenets of CX – Reliability, Trust, etc. – will be prioritized. Second, expect some significant rethinking on how CX will coexist with social impact i.e #4 above.
Data, Analytics, and Machine Learning – High priority in 2020. The importance of data will only grow, but the appetite for big data initiatives with big budgets will reduce. Cheap analytics (mostly cloud-based) will lead the way and will get the job done. Expect AI and ML to be bundled along with Analytics or other products/services.
Cloud – High priority in 2020. Public cloud adoption and the automation of infrastructure and deployment will only accelerate as organizations focus on bottom-line and efficiency. Cloud-native architecture and deployment will see a big uptick. Another factor is that cloud providers have better reliability and security than many organizations and can enable business continuity. Cloud will be a high priority.
SaaS – Medium priority in 2020. Cross-industry horizontal SaaS (for e.g. human capital management, CRM) are well entrenched in many organizations and that is not going to change. But, expect competitive pricing from nimbler but reliable SaaS providers and a lot of consolidation. Industry-specific SaaS adoption (for e.g. wealth management) will accelerate and consolidate around the leaders.
Infrastructure & Automation – High priority in 2020. Workloads are increasingly moving to cloud and SaaS, but a significant amount of on-premise infrastructure needs to run smoothly to enable business continuity. Some Automation areas will see an increase (for e.g. CI/CD), whereas some areas may plateau (for e.g. Robotic Process Automation) as it will be difficult to show return on investment.
Rationalization – Medium priority in 2020. The need for cost-savings and efficiency will result in many organizations streamlining their tech stack and sunsetting software and infrastructure that have been kept around. This effort may go by a new catchy name, but we should expect organizations to undertake this during tough times.
Cybersecurity – Medium priority in 2020. The importance of cybersecurity will remain, but we should expect more scrutiny of investments and results. Cybersecurity was probably the #1 issue for many organizations in 2019, but survival (i.e. keep business running) will be #1 issue in 2020.
Conclusion
Organizations will prioritize business continuity, cloud, data and rethink social impact in 2020!
What other areas will get impacted in digital and technology in the next few years that we can prepare ourselves for? It is tough to keep the list of focus areas to Top 10. I had to drop a few areas like compliance/controls, API, and open source to keep the list to the top 10.
Time-to-value and ROI. Today, companies continue to deal with cumbersome internal applications that have been stitched together, often with legacy code and/or 3rd party vendors in the Trading and Risk Management space which are “black box” and difficult, if not impossible, to alter.
Beacon’s entire code base is flexible and transparent (i.e. the code is made available to customers) and seamlessly integrates with existing software and other 3rd party solutions (like Murex and Calypso), or in-house proprietary solutions, which helps drive quick time-to-value and high utility.
In a fraction of the time and cost of alternative solutions, Beacon has helped customers achieve objectives such as migrating workloads to the cloud, expanding into new markets, upgrading legacy code by placing it within a modern developer wrapper and extending analytics and applications to customers’ end-users.
This may sound like an advertisement for Beacon ( I have nothing to do with it), but this is an example of where capital markets technology is heading… Vertical SaaS or cloud industry solutions instead of legacy or proprietary inhouse solutions
Nice summary of product lifecycle management, product-market fit and other product management areas. I’d recommend this for companies of all types and sizes. Here is one of the pictures:
June is diversity month. What a way to celebrate! Congrats to all! All humans are equal in dignity and rights – everywhere!
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that existing federal law forbids job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender status, a major victory for advocates of gay rights and for the nascent transgender rights movement — and a surprising one from an increasingly conservative court.
By a vote of 6-3, the court said Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which makes it illegal for employers to discriminate because of a person’s sex, among other factors, also covers sexual orientation and transgender status. It upheld rulings from lower courts that said sexual orientation discrimination was a form of sex discrimination.
Here are the key takeaways from our research into why platforms fail:
First, since many things can go wrong in a platform market, managers and entrepreneurs need to make concerted efforts to learn from failures.
Second, since platforms are ultimately driven by network effects, getting the prices right and identifying which sides to subsidize remain the biggest challenges.
Third, it is important to put trust front and center. Asking customers or suppliers to take a leap of faith, without history and without prior connections to the other side of a market, is usually asking too much of any platform business.
Fourth, although it may sound obvious, timing is crucial.
Finally, hubris can lead to disaster. Dismissing the competition, even when you have a formidable lead, is inexcusable. If you cannot stay competitive, no market position is safe.
