I have been fortunate to have worked as part of Marketing in pure digital roles and as part of IT when I was called on to lead a replatforming or transformation effort. I have worked as a consultant and worked client-side. My senior colleagues at Korio have similar profiles.
We have collectively gained a unique perspective on what we see as a troubling trend.
We believe that the relationship between IT and other parts of the business needs to be rethought. We aren't speaking here about, for instance, the technology professionals in a small startup or digital pure-play. We think those folks get it. They have to. Their ability to draw a paycheque depends on it quite directly. The "it", in this case, is the ability to quickly translate customer needs into a digital solution that can be brought to market and be actively optimized with limited fuss.
This, we find, is less true in companies that are moderately mature, might be mid-sized but that want to or need to begin to win in digital channels. Unlike startups and digital pure-plays who don't even have an IT department, we depend on IT for all things technical. It is worth keeping in mind that these startups and digital-first players are your future competitors.
The dependency on IT isn't, in itself, a bad thing. The problem is that IT has simply not evolved under the perfect pressure of serving your end customer or hitting revenue targets. Sure, they have a stake in it - but they simply don't feel the same pressures as accutely. They have their own pressures, most notably a brutal sellers-market for talent and deep complexity inherent in modern technology. This complexity is made worse - far worse - if your IT department is trying to build solutions on top of an existing platform that wasn't architected well in the first place.
To summarize: we have marketers, product teams, operations teams and other customer-facing groups looking over the wall at IT wondering how to get stuff done. If they ask, they worry IT will simply put up the proverbial stop sign or that the conversation will devolve into confusing discussions on the scalability, resilience and security of systems. Ultimately, you give up on your IT team and encourage them to simply license something off the shelf or "in the cloud". Who needs to build it? (hold that thought).
Having spent most of my career in IT, I can empathize with the situation on that side of the divide. They are saddled with a very challenging labor market. IT leaders depend on talent that is incredibly hard to keep - if they can get it in the first place. At risk of stereotyping, our technology teams seem to operate in a different kind of market and one that is somewhat mercenary.
Whith this as the backdrop, how do we get better at digital? How do we fend off those smaller startups that, by virtue of their size, have technologists that are more likely closer to customer problems?
Acknowledge The Gap
First, we need to acknowledge that this gap exists. It may exist as a contentious division between IT and the rest of the business or it may exist as what might be perceived as a hole in your IT department. Suffice it to say that you feel squeezed when it comes to your technology depth and, so, you either defer any ambitious work in this area or you just purchase non-differentiating off-the-shelf solutions.
We've had clients go as far as to acknowledge that, at best, they can only get and keep technologists that are "maintainers". To them, the thought of building something new and differentiating seems well beyond reach. Fair enough. We can make this work. Read on. We don't need engineering geniuses. I hope this is refereshing to hear: the most critical commodity for your business won't be the technology, it will be the knowledge of your customer and what delights them. This feels like a good thing to worry about. Keeping great engineering talent, on the other hand, is way outside our control and seems like it won't be a lot of fun.
Don't Throw In The Towel
It would be easy, at this point, to give up because it seems it is just a matter of time before the pure-play digital players edge us out.
Not so fast. Startups that encroach on our space usually have the technology side nailed but, frankly, that is the easy part. The hard part is the part incumbents usually have in-hand: knowledge of the market, an established set of channels and a support team, amongst other things.
In this day and age, the innovations and advancements that move our business forward and that come purely from technology are few and far between. Whether it is AI, blockchain or something equally daunting, we simply aren't seeing the kind of disruptive impact that should intimidate us. In fact, the most notable trend in technology is what I would call "plugability". I'm hard pressed to think of a single important new technology that wasn't designed, from the start, to be easy to integrate. In other words, new technologies simply integrate with what we have. This is and will continue to be true for the recent innovations like AI and blockchain. They will be plugged into the platforms we have or the platforms we are in the process of building.
The asset that is most undervalued in this situation is the depth of knowledge we have of our market and the customer base we have worked so hard to build. We are so needlessly fixated on the technical challenges we associate with going digital, that we lose sight of the things that are much harder to build: established channels, understanding of the nuances of operating in a market and the base of customers themselves. Sometimes we even have substantial brand equity.
In summary: what you have accomplished already as an incumbent in your maket is the hard part. The technology should be the easy part.
Getting to a Differentiating Digital Platform - The Missteps
- off the shelf
- integrations
Why You Must Build Your Own Platform
- it isn't that hard
- integrationg is, ultimately, harder
