It’s a cliché, but I’ll say it anyway. Lots of businesses are at a crossroads in their technology decisions right now. They are reacting to competitive pressures, to economic risk and to consumer demand in re-thinking their business models, and that always influences technology requirements. At the same time, their technology teams are threading their way through the rapidly-changing market for cloud software and services, wrestling with the strategies of their application vendors and trying to second-guess the next ask from the customer via the sales team.
With such an incredibly dynamic market for such services and tools, it’s easy to become paralysed and not take that decision. But of course, that’s not an option, at least not for long. You either get on with the job and invest in the tech, or you will be forced to down the line in order to stay competitive or relevant.
Recently I was reflecting on the fact that contactless payment has become a standard way for people to pay in shops and the fear, uncertainty and doubt that came when it hit the high street around ten years ago. Muggers would be able to steal from you simply by walking past, and you might pay twice if you don’t have a lead-lined wallet etc. Despite these concerns, contactless quickly became a natural way to pay. In 2014 contactless bank cards became accepted by the London underground. By 2015 one in 10 transactions was contactless. If you were a customer of the UK supermarket Sainsbury’s however, this method wasn’t available. Although they were reticent to discuss the reasons for the delay, Sainsbury’s finally rolled out contactless at the end of 2016. At that time they stated that they needed to upgrade their point-of-sale technology.
My understanding is that when contactless became an option around 2005-2006, Sainsbury’s decided that it wasn’t worth including it in their payment systems. This isn’t unusual, sometimes features are seen as a nice-to-have and left out for cost and/or complexity reasons. I’m certainly not going to blame Sainsbury’s for making such a decision (let’s not forget that Steve Jobs didn’t want the early Macs to have more than 128kb of memory but his engineers built the capability for expansion without telling him) – but I am guessing that the final cost of catching up with the rest of the market was higher than if they had included that tech in their roadmap at an early stage.
How do you beat this technology trap and invest in the right capabilities? Well, there are no perfect answers. But you can improve your odds. Most businesses now are dealing in data more than ever before. Their technology is not just critical to their operation, it is their operation. But they have no technology representation on their board. They have no Non-Exec Director dedicated to technology. They simply have to take their CIOs opinion on trust, which puts a lot of pressure on that person and their team to get it right.
My recommendation? Get independent advice, get it often and get it fast. Of course, being an Executive Adviser for IDC I have a natural bias, but I spend a fair amount of time reading our research and the things I find out surprise even me. Assumptions that I would have been comfortable with 18 months ago are now highly debatable. Technologies I thought would take 5 years to come to market are here and becoming standards.
Talking to industry experts and impartial advisers can help you to build a roadmap for your business that reduces the risk of taking the wrong path. Because yes, in the end, you are going to spend serious money on technology. If you try to hide from that inevitability you run a high risk of paying over the odds to catch up, or worse – finding yourself dead in the water.