A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives: a curated forum reserved for leaders nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the Construction Tech Review Advisory Board.
2020, which has been described as a chaotic year has also been a good indicator of companies' digital maturity and innovation capabilities in such an inevitable context.
2021 will be the year of mutations and metamorphoses. The COVID-19 pandemic has definitively confirmed the need for change in digital ecosystems, particularly concerning the exploitation of customers’ personal data. It has endorsed the fact that digital transformation is a condition for survival, with e-commerce, drive, click & collect and omnicanality. But not only those Digitalization must now pervade all levels of the company. This will require new skills, investment and above all, awareness that we all need to work in new ways.
First, companies will have to work smarter to be more flexible, more resilient and thus focus on sustainable business models. This approach must be applied at the information system level, as it is the latter that enables them to benefit from increased productivity and, consequently, better business results. This inclusion in a sustainability model is also a growing demand from customers and employees who will undoubtedly find salvation in the centralization of applications and migration of a greater part of IT infrastructure to the cloud, public or not.
Black Tigers is also convinced that the best way to answer tomorrows’ challenges around Internet of Things and Internet of Behaviors; total experience which combines customer, employee and user experience to transform business outcome; cybersecurity enhancement; AI engineering and hyperautomation of organization will require the implementation of solutions that are global, unified and integrated. The market will finally end with sandboxes trend, where people enjoy assembling and integrating technologies that will not meet requirements, nor the evolutions of the company, markets and consumers - and which has high impact on cost. Cash has always been king and is even more after this crise.
Faced with these business challenges, which are inseparable from technology and which for the most part have ethical and societal considerations in the data usage, the individual, the consumer, is also undergoing major changes.
The evolution from traditional to digital commerce had already changed consumer habits. The consumer is no longer a simple buyer, but a real expert, demanding, interested, hyper-connected and zapper. His expectations fluctuate and his choices are increasingly clear-cut and irreversible!
For manufacturers and distributors alike, the challenge is now to tackle all these issues at once, to understand that it is not a choice nor an option to be taken. The solution to that lies in the future of data sharing and the ability to process the terabytes of unstructured data generated by each player in the value chain. We need to be aware that proprietary data, seen as a competitive advantage, is only valuable if we know how to exploit it and accept that sharing it with other value chain players can leverage its potential.
Data sharing goes hand in hand with trust. From manufacturers to retailers and vice versa but especially from consumers to brands.
2021 will be the dawn of solutions enabling privacy-enhancing computation, that protect data while being processed. Trusted environments in which data can be processed, in a decentralized way, will become mandatory. Public clouds sovereignty is likely to be called into question with regards to privacy. Independent integrated solution that are flexible and adaptable to the moving constraints of the companies, easily integrable and especially providing personal data expertise, all within the law, will rise. It is Black Tigers’ visions, convictions and innovative paths that we pioneer.
