Digital Transformation - The Granularisation of Technology

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: https://www.aibl.global/blog/digital-transformation-the-granularisation-of-technology

Estimated Reading time: 15 minutes, 29 seconds. Contains 3,099 words

Introduction

The market, no matter your industry, is being saturated by the explosion of granular technology solutions available, today.

There is nuance in my opening statement which can easily be missed and I feel is, in fact, being missed by many. If I’d opened by stating the explosion of tech, you’d typically respond; “yes, we know that, such sentiments have been common currency for many years now.” The explosion of tech narrative as I understand it, stems from an analogy linked to the Cambrian Explosion in Technology[1]. However, the nuance is the explosion of granular technology and while the difference is subtle, it is important and is reshaping the entire business landscape.

What’s playing out, though not yet widely nor well recognised, is the inherent trust organisations place in external advisors presumed to be across these subtle market changes. The ramification is that the pain organisations are feeling is often not appropriately understood. Pain such as the fragmentation between siloes within the organisation and challenges with out-of-date systems and processes. The net result is deployed solutions masking front-end problems, often doing very little, if anything to solve the actual pain behind these surface issues.

“Yesterday’s knowledge, and worse, yesterday’s solutions are still being proposed to solve tomorrow’s problems.

Yet, the reality is that no one can keep up with all the changes, and it’s potentially impossible for a single organisation to not only be able to provide all the required advice, but to also have the necessary skills for delivering the solutions.

These conclusions should be worrying for anyone in a decision-making capacity, especially anyone looking to use technology to transform their organisation. Competitive advantage is often linked to advancements in technology and no one wants to be the person who made the wrong choice.

This blog article aims to illustrate the problem with examples and talk about the challenges posed. Finally, I’ll offer some thoughts on how we can each start working towards meaningful solutions for our unique circumstances.

The Problem – Fragmentation of Technology

Thinking about the mainstream internet - it only came to the fore in the early 90’s[2] and by the end of the 90’s we were worrying about Y2K. Moving into the early 2000’s we were deep into the PC era, and left the 2000’s with the iPhone, mobile computing and cloud computing rapidly rising. From 2000 to about 2016 there was massive growth in cloud computing and especially in the area of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). Since 2016’ish[3] - which I believe was an epoch year - until now, there has been a massive growth in both granular technology and platform-based solutions.

Not singling out a vertical market, technology fragmentation is perhaps best illustrated by the marketing industry. This excellent website - chiefmartec.com - has been publishing the Martech 5000[4] for many years. The two images below, display;

(a) the growth of marketing solutions from 2011 until now;

CREDIT: chiefmartech.com

(b) a poster showing just 2019:

CREDIT: chiefmartech.com

The results speak for themselves whereby the data shows ~150 marketing solutions in 2011 and ~7,040 solutions in 2019, which is when the last analysis was completed.

As a decision-maker, no doubt you’ll recognise the inherent problem this poses for choosing a marketing solution. In light of Digital Transformation, we know that Customer Experience is where the current battle is being played out. Furthermore, we understand that building great customer experiences usually involves the website, potentially a CRM solution, email marketing, content marketing, social media, events, advocacy…and the list goes on.

With that in mind, the problem is not just choosing technology solutions to the above problems, but selecting well-integrated technology solutions, allowing easy data extraction and offering timely support. Whether you have external contractors or internal staff handling your marketing, they need to understand how all these tools fit together and be able to drive their capabilities.

On top of all this, how do we know if we even have the right tools? Are there better tools? Better integrated solutions? Or even: who are these new companies and will they be around tomorrow?

This problem is absolutely not limited to marketers in the marketing industry. While Martech is the buzz phrase in this instance, there are many more where that came from. How about Insurtech (Insurance technology, HRTech (HR technology), Fintech (Financial technology), Proptech (Property technology), Regtech (Regulatory technology), you get the picture. Everyone is a whatever[tech] these days.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Every industry is experiencing massive fragmentation, or granularisation of technology. One advantage is that there is probably a tool for your problem, but the issue – as ever - is trusting where you can get unbiased advice from.

The Problem – How it has developed

Earlier, I mentioned the PC era during the 2000’s of which on-site server computing was the predominant mainstream solution. Although this model does still exist, significant changes to the operational environment mean it is no longer the standard solution.

Considering this period of time, computing was a lot simpler to understand; we largely had PC’s, Servers, Storage, Networks, Applications and Security. These were the main buckets and, for the most part, everything came in a box, had a manual and a team of specialists to support it. Upgrades happened every few years and the run-up to each new release had plenty of fanfare, documentation and communities devoted to these points in time.

As a decision-maker, you could turn to a single company, person or a small group of people to get your answers. There was plenty of breathing space between upgrades which gave you the necessary time to think.

To demonstrate, here is a Lego analogy that I frequently use to explain the problem:

The Lego Analogy

Imagine that up until about 2016-ish, you could go to the shops and buy a new Lego set as a present. You would choose the type of Lego set you want and simply buy it. The recipient of the new Lego set (age 2 to 99-years) would be ecstatic, open it and use the instructions to build what they saw on the cover of the box.

Now consider the new world since 2016-ish, where you go to the shops and are given several buckets of Lego. Buckets so massive they contain every piece of Lego, meaning you can now make whatever you want - the only limitation being your imagination.

You take these buckets of Lego and give them to the recipient of the Lego (age 2 to 99-years) then sit there eagerly awaiting the smile on their face. Hesitatingly, opening the buckets of Lego and, while being excited at the amount of Lego, an awkwardness begins and a look of bewilderment creeps across their face.

What does this mean?

In using the Lego example, I’m stretching the point a little far by stating that instructions are no longer available. However, what I’m illustrating is the granularisation of technology. Pointing out that there are so many technology solutions available today, and ways of approaching technology, the answer to your particular problem will likely no longer come in a box. Achieving results requires us to now think outside the box, using all the available parts to come up with a solution ourselves.

The answer may be the blending of multiple solutions, multiple clouds (Multi-Cloud) or it may be engaging an integrator specialising in writing Cloud-Native[5] software, serverless or API driven microservice oriented architectures.

An alternate analogy: The Supermarket Analogy

Perhaps another example is going to your local supermarket (Coles, Woolworths, Aldi or Costco here in Australia) and buying the food you want to cook. Before making a purchase, you define what you want to cook and decide on which ingredients you want in your recipe. There being many ways to bake a chocolate cake, ingredients you buy will likely be different to those I buy, based on our personal preferences.

That is the core of what I’m bringing to the surface: while out-of-the-box products still exist today, there are multitudes of cloud providers and solutions available making just about anything possible. There are many paths to the answer, many possible recipes for you to design and bring together solutions for.

“The new challenge of this decade as we enter 2020 will be integration of disparate solutions, solving specific problems and being easily manageable. Ultimately, we are entering a new age of platforms and putting real meat on the bones of the old eco-system[6] story.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Solutions no longer come in a box, and there are many possible ways to use technology to solve business problems.

The Challenge – In Whom can we Trust?

Back in the early 2000’s everyone had an ’IT Guy (or Gal)’ - a person, department or organisation hereafter referred to as your Tech Person. You relied on this Tech Person as your Trusted Advisor. Whatever your need or requirement, a call to your Tech Person got the answers you needed. Whether it was some new tech or a problem needing to be solved, your Tech Person would quote you and have a new solution implemented.

Life, in some respects, was a lot simpler and you didn’t need a team of experts to provide the right answers you sought.

According to Wikipedia (Jan 2020), Microsoft has over 600 solutions available in their Azure cloud, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) has around 165 solutions. Consider this plethora of solutions alongside the fact that entire companies exist around just a single solution. Furthermore, there are technical people who’ve built whole careers and completed intensive certifications in a single or small portion of these available solutions. That’s just for Microsoft and AWS solutions, without mentioning the many potential solutions from Google Cloud, Alibaba, Adobe Cloud, VMWare Cloud, IBM Cloud, Rackspace, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Red Hat, private Cloud Hosting providers and so on.

Today’s granularisation of technology mirrors the Lego example. There are so many solutions and possible approaches to technology available that all tenets of the past are being torn down. Product evolution cycles have reduced from years to days, services are now personal, tailored to your needs with answers coming from multiple integrators and the growing number of cloud providers.

Complex new challenges are not limited to knowing what technology or set of technologies could exist today that can solve the business need. Rather, the most pressing point is: who can I trust to help give me the right advice on what solutions, providers or vendors exist that can help solve my business need?

Simply being able to call your Tech Person may no longer be an option.

Questions you must now ask yourself regarding your long-time Trusted Advisor, include:

• Are they aligned to a particular set of technologies or vendor?
• Are they really business consultants, do they really understand our business need and have they clearly defined the problem they’re meant to be solving?
• Are they canvassing the market, with no alliances or backend commissions, and bringing to the table unlikely solutions with potential to exponentially move the organisation forward?
• Are you really getting unbiased advice?
• Who are the people that work for my Trusted Advisor’s organisation, how are they receiving ongoing training and are they really up to date on all the latest trends?
• When was the last time your Trusted Advisor explained to you what I’m outlining in this article? Do they talk to you about the industry, developments and where the market is moving? Have they invited you to any roadshows or events applicable to your industry?

Over the past few months, I’ve had more than a dozen conversations with Executive and Board Members on this topic. When getting to the core of the matter, everyone concedes they’ve long had that gut feeling or instinctual feeling that perhaps they’ve not been receiving helpful advice or education.

The challenge has not been limited to internal recognition of the problem, but also not knowing what to do next, who to speak to or what to do about it.

KEY TAKEAWAY: There is no logic or reason to suggest that a supplier that has been engaged previously to provide one service is the right supplier to provide a totally different service or solution just because they work in the same industry i.e. IT.

The Solution - Being Right in a Direction

It’s fair to say that there is no silver bullet.

One recent conversation I enjoyed was with a friend who heads up innovation at a very large Australian corporation. When discussing collaboration and the modern-day workforce, we talked about the skills required – a future blog topic in itself - and the basic premise is that they are hiring people in full knowledge that candidates will not possess all of the required answers. The corporation has recognised the speed of change and that no individual, any longer, is capable of having all the answers. Being in innovation, this is quite strange on one hand. However, the beauty is that my friend recognised the fact that they are hiring flexible people capable of being collaborators, team learners and who can be right in a direction.

Being right in a direction is only possible if you are de-coupled, unlinked and not aligned to a single vendor. To make a truly unbiased decision and keep an open mind, the team of experts at this corporation bring many people or advisors to the table. As a team, with a clear mission, they go on a learning journey together, investigating unique ways of solving traditional problems.

Being a very large corporation, they have teams of people and resources to throw at their problems, and this approach works for 2% of Australian companies (the big end of town). For the other 98% with limited resources, this method is still possible. There are ways and approaches to being right in a direction and being innovative in your respective context.

“With the new decade, comes a new currency - the technical business advisors. Independent, able to not only talk at a Board and Commercial level, but also interface multiple providers who can bring the best and most supportable solution to the table.

End-to-end digital strategies are required along with the Right talent who can execute.

KEY TAKEAWAY: Leadership is foundational to change, and different approaches must be embraced from those of yesterday. While strategies are often set-and-forget, today’s leadership calls for continual evaluation and encouraging people to work together in new ways.

Conclusion

The general mantra of IT companies of today is the notion of business solutions backed by technology. These words are paraphrased in many ways, shapes and forms.

Fundamentally, however, Digital Innovation utilises available granular technology for improving services, enhancing processes and procedures, and optimising the current organisation. Digital Transformation goes beyond this, extracting assets, skills and organisational capabilities, lifting them into a whole new context.

Our digital future relies on rapid iteration, boundless creativity and implementing frictionless journeys for not only the internal environment, but most importantly, our valued customers.

The question is how well is the context of your organisation understood by your current trusted advisors? Are they just reacting to your content and requests or really understanding your context and providing accurate, holistic and meaningful insights?

How are you currently thinking about your digital strategy and does it connect to your organisation’s overall strategy? Is there a roadmap for embracing future technology? Does the team understand where you are today and where you need to be tomorrow?

The speed of change is only going to increase, and the theme of providing a great customer experience is not going away any time soon. Having a good service or product is foundational, and no amount of digital will make up for a subpar product. However, if you possess a great service or solutions, leveraging digital will help make a unique and unforgettable experience.

Digging into your organisation and mapping the current status is a great starting place. Identifying the quick wins in your organisation is a helpful way to fix all the basics. Whilst this is happening, a new vision and roadmap can be created. Complex parts of the organisation’s processes and systems needs to be understood, documented and appropriately budgeted for. Ordering solutions by magnitude and impact helps decide priority.

In the world of oversaturation and increasing granularisation, only those who have a plan and are ready to act decisively will win.

#DigitalTransformation #Innovation #Martech #Advisory #Granularisation

REFERENCES

[1] Cambrian Explosion of Technology has been widely referenced by many articles over the last ~15 years. Potentially, the original source of linking this scientific term to technology as a way of explaining the exponential growth was Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_the_accelerating_power_of_technology/transcript?language=en

[2] Yes, the internet started in 1969, but I am referring to when the World Wide Web went live and really opened up the internet to the average punter. Here is another helpful article with easy to read timelines.

[3] My personal view of watching the market, and using my experience to make this call.

[4] Martech is simply the merging of Marketing and Technology. Whenever you hear about [whatever]tech, it will usually refer to the blending of the said vertical with technology i.e. Marketing Technology, or Martech for short.

[5] For a helpful definition of Cloud-Native and Micro Services, this article may help; https://www.infoworld.com/article/3281046/what-is-cloud-native-the-modern-way-to-develop-software.html

[6] Read more on eco-systems here; https://cio-wiki.org/wiki/IT_Ecosystem

IMAGE CREDITS

• Lego Image: Kelly Sikkema
• Supermarket Image: Free To Use Sounds
• Question Mark: Jon Tyson