Forgive a little invective after so many weeks in lockdown. This article is all about getting on and actually doing stuff. As many of you will know, Supl was born with a mission to make businesses more flexible. In times of rapid, internet-driven change, the ability for a business to keep up is the key to sustainable margins and a relevant brand - much more important than the old Henry Ford stuff about driving down the unit cost of a widget.
With that in mind, I see the business challenge primarily through a digital lens. Yes, it needs to get its people strategy right, and of course it ought not to get over-leveraged. But those were challenges that existed before the digital revolution, and have become simply a necessary baseline. What's changed, and changing rapidly with the pandemic, is the need to drench the business in digital, leaving nothing untouched.
What do I mean? So often when I go to see a business and ask about digital, people refer to their website, as if that piece of digital lipstick will disguise the analogue pig underneath. To drench a business in digital means so many things: first it means the collection, maintenance and dissemination of a clean and uniform set of information that is independent of the business structures that consume that information. With that in place, that businesses can change quickly without going blind. I've banged on about that for long enough, so I won't flog a dead horse....except to make the obvious point that by reducing the firm's dependence on emails to get things done, you make the firm less vulnerable to socially engineered phishing attacks.
What other weakness does a business need to address? In short, it needs to stop talking, and start doing. Because the historic costs of technology were so high, with each project essentially unique, it paid to plan very carefully before the first virtual shovel broke the ground. And thus a whole industry was given a shot in the arm: the world of key deliverables, timelines, Gantt charts and critical paths. Indeed, bizarrely, if you ask the average analogue business person what the key indications of IT investment success were, they would invariably say "on budget, on time". Not a word as to whether it had actually brought the company forward. It has also led to the point where the majority of the project cost is spent to monitor the project cost: most would prefer to spend £100k with a £5k overspend (5%), than £20k with the same overspend (25% overspend).
This attachment to the due process rather than the outcome is due, I think, to two things. First, most people and businesses struggle to articulate and value any benefits that are qualitative. Thus, just as economic historians have always struggled to quantify the benefits of brighter light to nineteenth century factory productivity, so businesses now get indigestion when asked to accept something as simply "better". Cue silly exercises to put numbers on it. The ROI of cleaner client data? Hmm. Let's concentrate on something more quantifiable instead, and wrap it into a "project" with a cost code and some deliciously (and spuriously) accurate reporting. Second (and it is, sadly, a particularly English disease), people seem much happier talking, thinking and writing to actually doing anything. Snobbery is never far from the surface on this Island, and it is always interesting to see the reaction I get from some people when I say that I spend my time building stuff in the Cloud: they give me the look that they reserve for the person they've called out to fix the boiler.
This has produced a ruling class with no sense of the practical. Faced with the operational reality of being able to do only a handful of COVID tests a week at the start of the crisis, the Government wonks used their expensively acquired syntax to fit a beautifully eloquent strategy around those operational shortcomings. It did not seem to occur to anyone that we needed a better operational capability. If around these days, Lord Beaverbrook would have had a spell at one of the big five, then gone into private equity and made a packet from balance sheet optimisation, rejoicing in a witty and clever twitter feed.
Businesses need to digitise, and the tools to do so are lying around all over the place. What they need is the courage just to pick a couple up and embrace them. Will it require some three point turns? Probably, but keeping bureaucracy away from them means that the impact is limited to having to recognise you were wrong. Maybe that's why it never happens.