Business Priorities in Central and Eastern Europe

…and how to achieve them

How many times have you already heard that for achieving success in a competitive business environment one needs to be innovative? Theoretically, it is obvious, but I have a bit of a problem with it.

Firstly, what does it mean to be innovative? Does it mean that you need to introduce new products or services to the market every half a year? Or, even better, every three months? I do not think so. There are many companies whose flagship products have not changed too much over the years, and despite that, they remain market leaders.

A few words on innovativeness

In my career so far, I have been talking about innovations in all kinds of contexts. On the one hand, I was fortunate to work in innovative companies such as Oracle. On the other hand, I participated in the implementation of many innovative projects. At present, I sell very innovative solutions. Thus, I think that my experience so far gives me the right to speak about innovativeness.

I believe that to be innovative is to be ready to make changes. Or, to be more precise, to introduce innovations in one's activity. To adjust it, especially in terms of technological aspects, to what the times require and what the clients need. There lies the key to achieving business success, and very often also to surviving through difficult times. Even more so now that Central and Eastern Europe faces challenges that may threaten the competitiveness of the region and, as a result, of the companies and organizations operating there. Their fate will depend on how they tackle these challenges.

Cooperation of giants and a report from it

The two preceding sentences are one of the conclusions of a fascinating report that I had an opportunity to become familiar with recently. IDC, a renowned analytics company, prepared it. At the request of Oracle, it studied companies' current priorities, focusing on organisations from the CEE region and the barriers ahead of them. The study included respondents from Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Greece, Croatia, and Serbia. They represented entities from both the public and commercial sectors. As it turns out, there is a whole lot to do in both these spheres. As IDC underlines, in times of the global digital economy and new EU priorities, the organizations from that region have to work out completely new development possibilities for themselves. A significant part of this process will depend on how they will use their IT resources and which new applications they will implement. In other words, it will depend on how innovative they dare to be.

There is ample scope for that, as there is much catching up for them to do in this respect. First of all, they need to adapt to operating in an era of the economy dominated by online platforms. This means having to make up for their technological arrears, which IDC refers to quite directly as their “technical debt”.

 Overcoming it should become their top priority. In a perfect scenario, it will solve another problem encountered by many companies from this region, namely, how to effectively use the possibilities provided by data that they collect every day. So, how to do it? The answer to that question will probably not come as too much of a surprise to you. It requires using cutting-edge technologies and business applications. The problem is that such solutions are costly, and in these difficult times, it is a good idea to save money. Or, at the very least, give a closer look at the expenses.

Technology vs. business priorities

And here is where we arrive at the heart of the matter. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the companies were quite eager to invest their funds in technological development, replacing somewhat obsolete infrastructural or software solutions with new technologies, either installed on-premises or (here somewhat tentatively) in the cloud. Once the pandemic appeared, all the organizations started cutting expenditures, which was entirely understandable. Nowadays, any investments in IT are subjected to increased scrutiny. Their initiators need to prove that they constitute valuable support for a given organization's strategic and business objectives. Meanwhile, what matters the most to organizations (72%) is an improvement in business performance. Cost reduction comes second, unsurprisingly, and better catering to customer needs comes third. 

In the end, although enterprises are usually perfectly aware of how important it is to them to develop their IT infrastructure or software used in business purposes, they end up abandoning such plans. At best, they limit them to the minimum, forced to choose between short-term objectives, aiming at securing the company, and investments in, e.g., technologies or applications that would improve the standing of a given organization only in the long run. I have no doubts that it is a tough choice to make. Unfortunately, it has to be made. The good news is that in this particular case, there are ways to eat the proverbial cake and still have it.

What kind of ways are these, you ask? I will write more about them in my next article. I intend to devote it to the issue of effective use of data, among others. Do not worry; you will not have to wait for it too long. Duties permitting, I will write down and publish my reflections next week. But already today I would like to invite you to read them.

p.s. You can find the above-mentioned IDC report that inspired this and the following article at the Oracle blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/poland/idc-technology-spotlight-remixing-your-business-priorities