Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast I'm Mike Parsons, the CEO of Qualitance. And I want to welcome you to our hundredth episode. Woo. And it is the appropriate that we are discussing our trends report, which we have just released. And the previous episodes, you would have heard a little bit about that, but today we're talking about a huge insight and it is about the implementation.

With new technology into your stack, into your solutions architecture that drives the production, the creation of your new digital product. Maybe it's some software, maybe it's a mobile app. We're talking about how we tackle this crazy difficult issue of implementing new technology. Now to remind you, we went and talked to a lot of people [00:01:00] over a hundred people all around the world, all sorts of product and business experts about the challenges they face with digital products, and simply put the act of bringing outside technology inside the company is the single biggest technology challenge.

It must be said that there are quite a few challenges with technology, but this was the big one, but it's not all doom and gloom because what we also discovered. Is that leadership plays a real key in actually the successful adoption of new technology. So let's jump into our next trend, uh, from our emerging trends report, let's get into implementation.

Now, the curious thing about implementation is we found it was really, really hard, but it has some good company. We also found that the next biggest two challenges was aligning. The organization around a technology technology [00:02:00] solution and making sure that it actually speaks to the goals of the business and not far behind it researching potential technology solutions.

Ain't that easy. But I think if we zoom out here, obviously whenever you're considering something new, You're in sort of foreign territory. You're not really sure. And, uh, the thing that struck me having done so much customer research in my time is that there was just an overall sense of when people were ranking the difficulties, everything kind of came in pretty hard and there was no clear part of the technology adoption process.

That was really easy when compared to the others. So let's talk about why it's so hard. And another thing that we discovered from our report is that. You've got the challenge with a particular technology in itself. So let's just isolate it. You've drawn up a long list of potential [00:03:00] technology solutions for whatever you need to do.

And we discovered that, you know, there's a pretty strong and clear, consistent line from that consideration to choice implementation and then support. Everybody seemed very clear on that. But here is where implementation gets really hard. Yes. There are challenges with every new technology, particularly if it's a pretty emergent, but far greater is the fact.

And this is the big bit is where it becomes part of a larger system inside of the organization. It becomes another product, another platform in the overall solution. Or technology stack. And this is where the complexity is organizations before they know it. They look around and they look at the tech department and they're supporting 10, 12 different technologies.

If you're in banking or finance many, many more, and it's all [00:04:00] glued together. And it's that gluing together does something. It creates interdependency between systems and a lot of, uh, I'm I'm almost going to say they're almost like bandaid fixes get made on this fragile collection, this fragile stack, uh, of technology.

It's all glued together over years and years and years people come and people go and this leads. To the next insight we have from the report around implementation is that the complexity is not only the platform alone, it's the platforms, but it's not just this whole concept of platforms, it's platforms and people.

This is where the real challenges, because what's really fascinating is when you look at the people side of things, getting people like really aligned on the technology people. Finding people that have the skills to design new [00:05:00] solution, architectures really hard, really scarce person to find, making sure that the engineering, the web services, the API APIs and so forth are all integrated in a scalable way, documented way.

This. Is where the challenge really is. There's not only lots of platforms and products all glued together. It's the people that run them. And here's the thing. If you're a designer, developer, creator, engineer, business leader, you come along to your engine and technology team and say, let's do something. I think new and boy, they look at you and go.

Oh, no. And the reason that they're like, Oh, no is because they've built. All of these products and platforms and glued them together in a very sort of precarious stack and it, and it just works. Okay. It's, it's actually working right now. And then you say, let's add something new [00:06:00] and they're like, Oh my gosh, I don't know how to do that.

We'd have to undo a couple of things. Is it going to create some issues? We don't have the people, the bandwidth, the resources, this ladies and gentlemen, this is why implementation is so hard. Because it's not only what you have and keeping that going. As soon as you introduce something new, it reveals deficiencies in the stack in that system, in that multi-platforms, that you've glued together.

This could be gluing, ERP, CRM, CMS, all together, all these sorts of things have been glued together. So you've got very unusual, unexpected relationships between data, applications and interfaces. Oh, my gosh. It is. It's really tough. And then when you want to add something new on that, it's always like, we don't know exactly what's going to happen when we add a whole new product platform or even sometimes just new features can be quite a drama to entertain.

Now don't worry. [00:07:00] There's some light here in the tunnel. And one of the interesting things is that we found that the reality is you will constantly need. To at least entertain new technologies, new products and platforms in order to build out your offering. Particularly as you know, you've got employees that want to work from home.

You've got customers who want omni-channel direct to customer experiences. You're going to have to entertain the new. So here's the thing. We found some successful case studies and it comes down to this simple idea that. This is one of those rare occasions that actually tucked down as essential. If you want to bring a new technology into your organization in order to enable a new product or service, be that for an employee or a customer, it is crucial that leadership truly gets on board.

And that is far beyond just saying, Hey yeah, good idea. Go do it. [00:08:00] There was a very strong case for that. If you want to unblock all those challenges you will have inside the organization, leadership must be all in and they must support throughout the strategy phase, right through, into execution and support because if the leadership of the company doesn't come in and mobilize and open up opportunity, engage the organization, convince people in the organization about the vision behind this new technology.

It will die. So remember that bringing a new technology from the outside, in get top leadership involved and they need to be ready to go the whole journey, the entire ride with you as a product owner, you need to get that support because you won't survive without it because organizations have so many priorities...