Creatively pivot to the future

It has been said that this pandemic sped up transformation projects

The Covid 19 pandemic and resulting lockdown forced people to interact and buy from businesses online, which poses some exciting challenges and opportunities. 

A lot of businesses discovered that they were not geared up to handle all the things that can go wrong. Not just stuff in their control, but external factors - like the overloaded courier network. 

Which meant that their customers called and emailed them, adding even more to the workload. Many of their customers got frustrated, creating cascading effects. Is there a better way to deal with this? 

At the Foundry, we spend a lot of time #valuehacking. Mostly this is about finding new and innovative ways of delivering customer experiences. 

To deliver on that mission, it pays to have an intimate understanding of the structural challenges and pitfalls that plague transformation efforts. 

Here's a list of typical challenges, especially when your IT infrastructure is 10 - 20 years old

• Business processes don't scale for new transactional volumes and issues that happen when service isn't delivered to end customers time expectation
• systems designed for in house use, can't scale for Internet level demand
• user interfaces are complex, and often repeat data entry unnecessarily
• authentication and authorisation infrastructure does not provide granular enough control
• as a result, there can be severe concerns about data protection, privacy and sovereignty

These are well-understood challenges, and pre-COVID19, there was more time to transition systems. That isn't true anymore, and as the economic impacts of the pandemic take hold, organisations are going to run out of runway much faster. 

When I earnt a living as a programmer, my mentors always talked about "hacking value". The idea that creatively solving complex problems, seemingly constrained by system limits, was the best place to play. 

To do this effectively, you had to anticipate where tech is going, and more importantly, understand what folks would find useful and entertaining. 

Creatively pivot to the future

We know that websites are useful, but people find conversational UI is better if the adoption of voice search is anything to go by. This is even more true for the aged, who are having to learn new ways of accessing essential services. 

For them, it's not natural to use keyboards, mouse or touch screens. Also, the graphical UI is fast becoming out of date - floppy disc icon anybody? Do any of you even remember using one?

Conversational UI will become mainstream in the next three years. That's because it's personalised and contextual. And it's more than chatbots and voice assistants. It's wearables, image recognition, NLP and ...

Recognising this future, there are many opportunities for #valuehacking. Allowing companies to move early, decisively and adopt a continuous improvement mindset. 

Conversational assistants https://uxdesign.cc/conversational-assistants-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-3d5cd1d5bba

Great guides to conversational design https://www.conversocial.com/audio/conversations-with-conversocial-cathy-pearl

In the next post, we're going to talk about aikido and technical debt https://www.leadingagile.com/2017/11/planning-technical-debt/

Technical debt vs aikido

Pre-COVID19, it was customary to discuss software projects in terms of their features and technical debt. I think it's time for us to change the conversation. Post-COVID, we have to aikido into eliminating technical debt.

It is a topic we've been discussing with our enterprise and public sector teams, where the most significant demands and need for transformation are emerging.

For business continuity, it's best practise not to modify legacy systems. The aikido version of this would be to eliminate technical debt, by co-locating data in a more cloud-friendly system so that over time legacy systems can be replaced. 

We have not seen the end of the crisis, and the future isn't what it used to be. There's no playbook, but organisations that prepare themselves for a digital future have a brighter chance of helping to shape it.