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Category Archives: technology

Digital Trends & Digital Leadership

What are the key digital trends of 2019, and what are the key traits of successful “digital leaders”?

Digital Trends

Research recently released by Harvey Nash/KPMG, Info-Tech, Gartner and Deloitte have highlighted a mostly shared view of of current and future technology focused trends. The research demonstrates that organisations are changing their product/service offerings or business models in a fundamental way, predominantly driven by digital disruption and the need to get closer to the consumer.

The combined research demonstrated an increased investment in cyber security, data analytics, AI/automation and transformation. Organisations not investing in AI and automation can expect, over time, for their cost base to be relatively higher than their AI-investing competitors.

The combined summarised view of digital trends is shown in the table below:

*Digital trends where 2 or more trends were featured across the four sources*

Digital transformation is becoming business as usual as enterprises look to stay ahead of the game. It has been recognized that digital transformation should and can be handled within existing budgets and without extra investment.

Digital transformations should be business led rather than IT led, to ensure business leaders are fully engaged with how their operations should be optimized for automation and digital change.

2. Digital Leadership

Leading organisations who demonstrate strong digital leadership experience improved time to market, superior customer experience and high operational efficiency. As a result, both revenue growth and profitability are higher too. Today, there is no longer business strategy and technology strategy. There is just strategy, and technology is driving it.

Digital leaders, as opposed to the Digital Management mainstream, have several traits that set them and their organisations apart from the rest. Digital Leaders distinguish themselves as being more outward-looking, using technology as a means of breaking into new markets, engaging with customers and gaining market share. They also tend to have different operating models that focus on the business owning and leading aspects of technology delivery in collaboration with IT.

Digital leaders:

Implement new technologies end-to-end across functions and geographies and change the ways of working to maximise value from technology. They use cross-functional teams (IT and business staff) and ensure business leaders work collaboratively to deliver technology change
Report business outcome-based metrics for technology projects, and scale up projects quickly if the project is successful or stop quickly if it isn’t.
Integrate core business systems with newer digital solutions and bring a long-term ‘product’ rather than a short-term ‘project’ mindset to technology implementation. They employ automation in software development and maintenance, and use methodologies such as agile and DevOps to speed up project delivery
Ensure that non-IT staff have the right technology skills, and use both internal and external resources to access the right skills
Maximise value from the data they hold and maintain an enterprise-wide data management strategy
Identify and manage the key security and privacy issues across technology development and operations, and build customer trust through the service delivered to customers and end user

In essence, digital leadership is about prioritizing value creation over efficiency generation, with a focus on speed and agility. The role is that of influence and partnering with the business rather than about control.

According to Harvey Nash / KPMG, the top 5 Board Priorities for digital leaders are:

Developing innovative new products and services
Delivering consistent and stable IT performance to the business
Enhancing the customer experience
Improving business processes
Increasing operational efficiencies

Customer Experience & Technology

11 Mar

Every organisation has a different array of stakeholders, whether it be customers, staff, consumers, suppliers, the Board, shareholders, clients or owners. Each of these stakeholders have different needs and expectations. For example, customers may want great service or excellent value, staff may want certainty and to be paid well for what they do, and shareholders may seek a solid return on their investment. As professionals, we are there to help balance the needs of these stakeholder groups. At the end of the day, none of these groups would exist without the need for the service or product in the first place, and no business would survive without these consumers paying for (or being funded for) these products and services.

So, why would consumers spend money with your organisation, and keep on coming back?

Customer Experience

Happy customers receive a perceived value or benefit from purchasing a product or service. A core component of receiving value and benefits is through having a positive customer experience.

Positive customer experiences drive positive emotions, brand loyalty and referrals. For companies it is also shown to increase stock prices. You enable trust in your brand by providing products and services which are timely, consistent, easy/simple, are of great value and meet needs of customers. Customer intimacy is also an important sustainable differentiator.

Two thirds of companies now compete on the basis of customer experience (and that figure is projected to increase).

So, how do we improve customer experience?

There are many ways to improve customer experience, some of which involve technology, all of which involve process change, people and leadership.

Technology is a significant enabler of customer experience but is certainly not the magic pill to address all customer experience challenges. For the perspective of the IT department and IT leader there is a need to reprioritise technology projects towards those that are geared towards providing better customer experiences. The technology department must work very closely with other areas of the organisation (such as HR, Marketing, PMO, etc) to make this happen and to ensure alignment of change.

The Approach

I believe the best approach is simply talk with people. Talk and (more importantly) listen to as many stakeholders as possible to find out what they do, how they do it, and what their challenges and pain points are.

Synthesize this information, along with research, experience and best practice to devise a plan, ensuring that the end goals and objectives were well defined and aligned to Corporate Strategy.

This should be broken into phases and prioritised based on costs, value for money, effort, complexity and risk.

In Summary

Identify the end goals & objectives. What are the problems you are trying to solve?
Liaise with key internal and external stakeholders
Develop a plan (aligned with corporate strategy) that includes:
- An integrated approach to encompass people, process and technology
- Customer experience (mostly external) and operational excellence (mostly internal)
- Prioritisation of initiatives based on value, cost, risk, complexity, effort.
- Identify low hanging fruit, quick wins, etc. Celebrate the wins. Be agile. Fail/learn fast.
Leadership, leadership, leadership (plus teamwork and accountability)
“Sell” the plan. It’s all about the people. Communicate as one with simplicity and meaning.
Change management. Answer the “what’s in it for me” question to improve change acceptance
Measure benefits and success. Reassess the plan and priorities regularly.

“Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to“
Richard Branson

2017 Strategy Considerations

15 Dec

This post explores some key innovations and technologies that are worthy of consideration for strategy planning in 2017 and beyond. Whilst each of the technology innovations are at different stages of maturity, hype and utilisation in the market, each should be considered for their potential uses and applicability as part of blue-sky innovation and strategic planning processes.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning include systems that appear to learn, understand, predict and operate with minimal (or no) human guidance. These characteristics make machines appear intelligent. Smart machines intelligent applications can change their future behaviour through learning. Real world examples include robots, autonomous vehicles, drones and virtual personal assistants, intelligent sensors, smart appliances and smart tools (such as a digital stethoscope).

The New “Realities” – Virtual and Augmented

Virtual reality (VR) is essentially technology that generates a virtual environment, and simulates a user’s physical presence in this environment through interaction. The virtual environment is separate from the real-world environment, and headwear is typically used to shut-out the immediate surroundings from the virtual world. In a work environment VR can be very beneficial for training, where staff can develop skills in the virtual world without the real-world consequences of failing.

Augmented reality (AR) overlays virtual objects with the environment around you. Unlike virtual reality, which creates a totally artificial environment, augmented reality uses the existing environment and overlays new information on top of it. The most well-known real-world example is Pokomon Go. Other examples include the Topshop AR dressing rooms which allows shoppers to virtually try on new clothes. There is also the Shisedio makeup mirror, the IKEA AR catalogue (to visualise how various furniture would look inside your home) and the IBM shopping app, which provides personalised information whilst browsing the shelves.

Mobile Wallet

The use of mobile wallets is continuing to go mainstream, and fully integrated mobile wallets are starting to become a reality. Mobile wallets store payment credentials to enable users to authenticate themselves and/or make transactions from a mobile device. The credentials can be payment-related, such as a bank card, bank account or prepaid card, or non-payment-related, such as a loyalty card or mileage card. There are also closed wallets that allow use at specific merchants and open wallets that allow use at many other merchants. Businesses, retailers and organisations need to embrace this change, and identify the opportunities and risks of the technology.

Natural Language Question Answering

Natural-language question answering (NLQA) technology is a type of natural-language processing technology, composed of applications that provide users with a means of asking a question in plain language. A computer or service can answer it meaningfully, while maintaining the flow of interaction.

Unlike information retrieval systems such as search engines, NLQA aims to supply users with “just the right information” instead of merely providing a list of hits. NLQA technology is improving at a rapid pace. Current day examples include SIRI, Cortana and GoogleNow, however they are more like voice assistants and text analysers than true NLQA systems. Future uses in business include the use of NLQA in answering customer queries, contact centre applications and staff training.

Analytics

Analytics comes in many variants. Some examples are predictive, prescriptive, real-time, graph, personal and embedded analytics. It is no secret that the use of analytics and business intelligence in helping make and shape business decisions is critical for all organisations. Analytics can be used to transition organisations from a reactive to a proactive mode of operations and must be considered a core enabler of strategic and operational development.

Geospatial and location intelligence

Geospatial and location intelligence (GLI) includes applications, infrastructure and tools that enable access to, and utilisation of, geospatial and location data of people, things and information for location-referenced information analysis.

It is estimated that 80% of all business data contains a location component. It is therefore critical to understand how location affects business. Properly analysing location can provide insights that support and improve decision making in virtually anything, including marketing and supply chain logistics and operations. Location intelligence involves layering multiple data sets spatially and/or chronologically, for easy reference on a map.

Location intelligence complements business intelligence – where business intelligence may find one-dimensional relationships between customer demographics or store and warehouse locations, location intelligence enables much deeper dives into the relationships between geography and customer data.

Blockchain

Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology where transactions are sequentially grouped into blocks. Blockchain is used to track the ownership of assets without the need for a central authority, which speeds up transactions and cuts costs whilst lowering the chance of fraud. Blockchain is widely known as the technology that underpins the digital currency bitcoin. Whilst blockchain is still a relatively new and experimental technology, the ecosystem is growing rapidly and includes start-ups to major technology vendors.

Blockchain comes with cautions however. Considerations include potential lack of transparency, limitations concerning consumption of resources, operational risk from unintended centralisation of resources; and lack of alignment to existing legal and accounting frameworks. There are also potential adoption challenges, including the lack of standards, robust platforms, scalable distributed consensus systems and interoperability mechanisms.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s)

UAV’s include miniature helicopters, airplanes and multirotors that can be remotely controlled by human pilots on the ground or outfitted for autonomous navigation and used to perform aerial surveillance. UAVs typically incorporate GNSS, camera, sonar sensors and navigation systems that guide them for imaging, thermal and spectral analysis. Memory caches and communications links allow UAVs to collect and transmit datasets, as well as transfer them to the cloud for record or instance calculation.

More and more commercial applications for UAV’s are emerging, and there is an increasing number of investments made in UAV start-ups and big companies. Practical examples of commercial UAV applications include parcel delivery, pipeline inspection, disaster inspection, security inspection, and agriculture inspection.

Ben Ward