Tag: cloud

As organisations demand more industry-ready and localised services, global technology companies feel an active need to re-evaluate their capabilities and bridge gaps through partnerships and acquisitions. Ecosystm has been helping global technology companies evolve their partner strategies to remain relevant to the Asia Pacific market.

Our analysis of the tech acquisition landscape in Asia Pacific over the last three years shows that:

• While global tech providers are expanding their presence in Australia and Singapore, emerging markets in Southeast Asia are receiving a fair share of attention. 17% of tech acquisitions by global tech companies between 2020-22 have been in these markets.
• A quarter of the acquisitions were for product and platform capabilities. The rest were all done to bolster services portfolios – such as managed technology, business process, implementation & integration and consulting services.
• A large percentage of the acquisitions are to bolster industry capabilities through transformative technologies such as AI/ML, cloud and cybersecurity.

Here is the analysis of more than 100 acquisitions made by large global tech companies in Asia Pacific between 2020-2022.

Organisations will continue their quest to become digital and data-first in 2023. Business process automation will be a priority for the majority; but many will look at their data strategically to derive better business value. 

As per Ecosystm’s Digital Digital Enterprise Study 2022, organisations will focus equally on Automation and Strategic AI in 2023.

Organisations are aware that they must reinvent themselves continually to remain relevant to their customers, engage their employees and be profitable – and yet they find it challenging to live with the present pace of change.

Achieving a new equilibrium requires organisations to have the right skills; execute effectively every day; drive the best priorities for change; and refresh and renew their capabilities. Organisations will require adaptable people, processes, technologies and data to position themselves to harness the future.

Here are 5 insights that will help you shape your change strategy.

• Productivity persists as a priority. Recruit, train and retain essential skills and look for partners who are leaders in their sphere to provide the other, less differentiating capabilities.
• Digital debt is not only technical. Continuous reinvention requires the identification of an organisation’s digital debt, and evolution of the processes, technology and data to reduce legacy constraints. This will support the reuse and refactoring of existing capabilities in new ways and the introduction of new capabilities.
• Both operations and the customer matter. Investment in both the customer experience and operational efficiency needs to be balanced keeping in mind organisations’ limited available resources.
• Technology must be adaptive. Establishing isolation zones between components to minimise the impact of changing components is becoming key to the rapid delivery of value.
• Tomorrow’s excellence will be driven by iterative reinvention. Iterative innovation will become easier with the adoption of intelligent automation and adaptive AI/ machine learning. However, not only will this require a debt-free technical environment, it will also need an adaptive and scalable infrastructure. 

More insights are below.

The-Future-of-Business-5-Ways-to-Shape-Your-Change-Strategy-1

The-Future-of-Business-5-Ways-to-Shape-Your-Change-Strategy-2

The-Future-of-Business-5-Ways-to-Shape-Your-Change-Strategy-3

The-Future-of-Business-5-Ways-to-Shape-Your-Change-Strategy-4

The-Future-of-Business-5-Ways-to-Shape-Your-Change-Strategy-5

The-Future-of-Business-5-Ways-to-Shape-Your-Change-Strategy-6

The-Future-of-Business-5-Ways-to-Shape-Your-Change-Strategy-7

The-Future-of-Business-5-Ways-to-Shape-Your-Change-Strategy-8

The-Future-of-Business-5-Ways-to-Shape-Your-Change-Strategy-9

Organisations have had to transform and innovate to survive over the last two years. However, now when they look at their competitors, they see that everyone has innovated at about the same pace. The 7-year innovation cycle is history in today’s world – organisations need the right strategy and technologies to bring the time to market for innovations down to 1-2 years.

As they continue to innovate to stay ahead of the competition, here are 5 things organisations in India should keep in mind:

• The drivers of innovation will shift rapidly and industry trends need to be monitored continually to adapt to these shifts.
• Their biggest challenge in deploying Data & AI solutions will be identification of the right data for the right purpose – this will require a robust data architecture.
• While customer experience gives them immediate and tangible benefits, employee experience is almost equally – if not more – important.
• Cloud investments have helped build distributed enterprises – but streamlining investments needs a lot of focus now.
• There is a misalignment between organisations’ overall awareness of growing cyber threats and risks and their responses to them. A new cyber approach is urgently needed.

More insights into the India tech market are below.

Future-of-the-Digital-Enterprise-India-1

Future-of-the-Digital-Enterprise-India-2

Future-of-the-Digital-Enterprise-India-3

Future-of-the-Digital-Enterprise-India-4

Future-of-the-Digital-Enterprise-India-5

Future-of-the-Digital-Enterprise-India-6

Future-of-the-Digital-Enterprise-India-7

Southeast Asia has evolved into an innovation hub with Singapore at the centre. The entrepreneurial and startup ecosystem has grown significantly across the region – for example, Indonesia now has the 5^th largest number of startups in the world.  

Organisations in the region are demonstrating a strong desire for tech-led innovation, innovation in experience delivery, and in evolving their business models to bring innovative products and services to market.    

Here are 5 insights on the patterns of technology adoption in Southeast Asia, based on the findings of the Ecosystm Digital Enterprise Study, 2022.

• Data and AI investments are closely linked to business outcomes. There is a clear alignment between technology and business.
• Technology teams want better control of their infrastructure. Technology modernisation also focuses on data centre consolidation and cloud strategy
• Organisations are opting for a hybrid multicloud approach. They are not necessarily doing away with a ‘cloud first’ approach – but they have become more agnostic to where data is hosted.
• Cybersecurity underpins tech investments. Many organisations in the region do not have the maturity to handle the evolving threat landscape – and they are aware of it. 
• Sustainability is an emerging focus area. While more effort needs to go in to formalise these initiatives, organisations are responding to market drivers.

More insights into the Southeast Asia tech market below.

The-Future-of-the-Digital-Enterprise-Southeast-Asia-1

The-Future-of-the-Digital-Enterprise-Southeast-Asia-2

The-Future-of-the-Digital-Enterprise-Southeast-Asia-3

The-Future-of-the-Digital-Enterprise-Southeast-Asia-4

The-Future-of-the-Digital-Enterprise-Southeast-Asia-5

The-Future-of-the-Digital-Enterprise-Southeast-Asia-6

The-Future-of-the-Digital-Enterprise-Southeast-Asia-7

The-Future-of-the-Digital-Enterprise-Southeast-Asia-8

It is an incredible time of change for the city and regional governments where every strategic activity – especially in these globally challenging times – presents a significant opportunity for transformation. To continue to meet the changing needs of the communities they serve, every modern city government’s technology story is a work in progress. While this is the mantra for successful continuous improvement it also describes the best strategic approach for how municipalities should manage their corporate application replacement programs.

Unfortunately, significant systems upgrade and replacement programs are regularly approached as complex, multi-tasking activities that have a hard start, a defined program, and a date-stamped end. In taking this traditional project implementation approach, intuitively, many organisations believe that doing as much as possible, in as quick a time as possible, ultimately helps to achieve twice as much within the same time. The result is more likely to be half as much, and at lower levels of quality and enjoyment for all involved. This manifests as project scope creep and budget overruns.

Aside from these big bang approaches, thanks to large implementation costs and stringent regulatory oversight, local governments are also forced to think upfront about the potential future value created by a significant core system technology change. The pressure of moving at high speed, and with a dominant technology focus, can obscure both the true organisational cost and ultimate value of the program. This mentality prevails even when it is acknowledged that activities associated with a transformation program will eventually usher in a period of significant change – that is not limited to the changing core corporate applications environment itself.

The 4-Part ERP Transformation Trap is All Too Common in City Government

An over-reliance on technology to deliver business transformation outcomes. Local governments everywhere continue to pursue strategic plans that are either wholly defined or implicitly reliant on world-class customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), and digital transformation (DX) capabilities. Despite these being business-oriented strategies, organisations then pursue an over-reliance on technology – usually winner-take-all ERP led procurements – to achieve them.

Choosing an industry solution focused on the wrong business model. The chance of achieving these digital transformation outcomes is further obscured when the customer is not central to the data model. The core corporate application technology underpinning the sector’s leading ERP programs is largely based on a property-centric model – where the customer is a subordinate attribute of a property, and the property asset defines the business process and individual.  It is a challenge for any council to deliver contemporary customer-first digital transformation with a property-centric approach. To realise customer and employee-centric outcomes, councils must therefore rethink their project’s business methodology and ask themselves, “what is our primary focus here?”. This is never more important than when replacing legacy systems.

Inability to realise that a winner-take-all ERP solution is not an architectural choice. ERP is important but it is not everything. The traditional council ERP is just one important part of an overall capability that allows authorities to longitudinally manage the impacts and opportunities of change across their organisation, communities, and stakeholder ecosystems. Having chosen a sector specific ERP solution, city governments realise too late that no single technology vendor has a best-of-breed solution to achieve the desired DX outcomes. That requires a more sophisticated architectural approach.

Failure to acknowledge there is no finish line to transformation. Like many worthwhile activities, the prize in DX is in the journey, not in the cup. While there can be an end to “project scope”, there should be no “end point” for an ERP transformation program. Only once these challenges are acknowledged and accepted, can transformation be assimilated into the organisation to ensure the council is technically capable of delivering the implicit outcome for the organisation. This could simply be defined as ‘a contemporary business approach to managing the money, the assets, the community, the customers, and the staff of regional government.’

A Better Way: Re-Architecting for Project Success

Where opportunities to meet increasing CX and EX demands arise, especially through ERP and corporate application renewal programs, successful projects in contemporary councils require a service-oriented architecture not found in contemporary or legacy ERP systems alone.

Beyond the property-centric challenges already outlined, even contemporary systems and suppliers can be among the least flexible to the changing data management requirements of many organisations which call for significantly more robust data, integration and application friendly infrastructure management environments. 

Customer centricity, data management, integration and software infrastructure capabilities must take precedent over an aging view of single-vendor dominance in the city government sector, especially in middle- and back-office functions, which are typically void of true differentiation opportunities and prone to confining organisations to technology-led and locked projects.

Rather than tendering for a single software provider or platform, contemporary city governments must ditch the old approach to procuring a winning ERP vendor and take steps to establish the following Big 5 platform capabilities (Figure 1). And then foster the contemporary workforce to support them.

For several decades now many organisations have attempted to short-circuit the city government ERP challenge. Fundamentally, technology transformation is not possible without technology change. A non-negotiable part of that change is a shift away from the psychology of brand-based procurement towards a new architectural approach which, like all businesses, is adaptable to change over a long period of time.