20 Years of Digital with Jim Stevenson at Techstrong Con 2024

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Techstrong. I am James Stevenson.

Just to give you a bit of a idea of who I am, um, well, first of all, thanks for joining this session. It is great to be here and share some of my experiences with digital, um, over the last 20 years, although probably more than that, to be fair. Um, so a bit of background on me, just so you know who you're, who's talking to you and why.

Um, I'm Jim Stevenson. Um, I wrote my first computer program in 1980, way back in the days of the Sin ZX spectrum in the BBC, um, B computer in schools. Um, the first program I wrote that went into production was back in the 1990s, in the days of Super Calp, dBase and Lotus 1, 2, 3.

Um, I think it was actually a, a super calp macro program that the local council I was working for at the time, started to use to manage their, um, finances. Um, and then on top of that, uh, that kinda led me from changing careers into technology in 2000 when I created Bletchley Group. Um, Bletchley Group I think is quite relevant here.

And the, the, the reason I, um, called my company, Bletchley Group was after the, the work at Bletchley Park and Alan Turing, Tommy Flowers and those guys. And the ethos was very much one of technology is cool, but it needs to serve a purpose. And as we're moving into the world of ai, I think that is more and more relevant.

Today, AI is really, really cool, but, um, having some weird graphics created from it, I'm not quite sure that there's a purpose for that just yet. Probably a stepping stone onto something more exciting. But now what I do is, um, and now what Bleckley Group does is we are strategic advisors and consultants, and we focus on helping companies to grow and to transform, to take advantage of all of these new cool technologies.

If you want to reach out to me afterwards, my details are there, the website, email, and my LinkedIn. So, um, feel free to reach out and I'm happy to chat with anyone about anything really. Um, cool.

Let's move on. Oh, um, here's some of the clients that I've worked with previously. Um, some big names in there.

I've worked with a ton of small companies as well, but you won't recognize those logos, so those don't get a slide for them. Um, so let's start 20 years of digital. I'm gonna start off with what was the original promise of, of digital?

Um, why was it so exciting at the time? And like I say, it's, it is probably 25, maybe even 30 years that we should really be talking about. Um, but the, the true promise of, of digital was disruption.

It was fundamentally disruption. Um, it's a word that is overused today, but it's a very vital word in this, this presentation. Um, the promise was very much moving away from old fashioned analog businesses and moving into a much more efficient, fast connected digital one.

Um, it was more than just e-commerce, although e-commerce was, was being created there. And email, I think email is so ingrained in the world these days that we forget about it. Um, so it was an entire business transformation, entire business wide disruption.

But let me explain as we go through in more detail, um, where I'm coming from and, and why the, uh, I'm presenting this to you today and what I'm hoping you're gonna take away from this today. Um, so is digital still relevant today to establish that? I think we need to understand better what digital truly is and how we've got to where we are today.

Um, and for me, we start off with e-business. Um, and the re the reason I'm starting there is, I think fundamentally e-business is a better term than digital. Um, e-business was originally, um, uh, term.

The, the term was originally coined rather by IBM in a marketing strategy. They had, um, 1997, I think it was, where they did a $500 million marketing campaign. They recognized in the early nine, early 1990s that this digital technology digi, whatever we want to call it, e-business thing, was going to be a, a big change of the big disruptor in in the world.

Um, and indeed, their, their, um, revenues grew through the nineties from 64 billion to 88 billion. So they made a ton of money from it early on in advising, consulting, and moving this forward. Um, but what they, they defined, um, e-business was as, um, conducting business activities and processes over digital networks, essentially the internet as we we'd know it today.

Um, but it's the business activities and processes, that's the important part. That's what we're going to focus on. Um, but somewhere, and I don't know where in the early two thousands, e-business fell out of favor, and we started talking about digital.

Um, and the challenge with digital was very much, um, the, the term is really badly defined. Everyone defines it in their own way. Everyone says what they think it is, everyone has their own view of what it should be.

For some people, it's a website. For other people, it is pay-per-click advertising. For others, it's digital products and Gmail and things like that.

Um, so it's a really badly defined term, and I think that's part of the problem of why we don't really leverage the benefit of it, because it's so different to so many different people. Uh, I remember, and this was a while ago, this was 2000 or something, uh, I, I worked with a, a consultancy firm that was working on the Bank of Scotland's very first website where they brought all four divisions of the bank together in one website. And for them at that time, and it's probably fair, at that time, that was a huge, um, digital transformation piece.

That was a huge evolution in their, their working. They had a one website where four different divisions were, were, um, ENC place, but it's not exactly, um, business activities or processes. It was a marketing channel.

It was a brand channel, it was a website at the time. I think it was even brochureware. They didn't have anything else on there.

Um, so not really fulfilling on that promise at all. Um, so the promise very much is business activities and processes. Um, it's that disruption across the entire business.

And that's what I want to focus on really today. Um, and that's why I'm talking to you today. While this is all about ai, I think there's an awful lot that we can learn from the confusion, the lack of deliverability, of the promise of digital as we move into this new world, world of ai.

Um, so is digital still relevant today? Yeah, absolutely. Probably more so today than it ever has been, um, because the stakes are so high.

Um, as we move forward, um, especially when we've now talking about in the post covid world, um, digital nomads, the gig economy, freelancers, contractors, the, the world is changing in so many different ways. That is only by doing this digital, um, transformation, this digital disruption across the entire organization, that organizations are gonna be able to move forward and actually leverage the benefits and, and to keep going. Some companies will feel other ones will, will struggle as they move forward.

So, um, I'll run through quickly some of the lessons that I personally learned, um, over 20 years of doing transformation projects, um, and give you some of the background before we move on to how, how do we actually leverage this in, into this new world. So for me, the first thing to, to run through is very much any digital, um, transformation piece. It should have been, and it probably still needs to be 'cause the vast majority of companies aren't quite doing it yet.

It needs to be company-wide. Um, it's not something that happens within technology. It's not something that happens within product.

It's not something that happens in marketing. It needs to be business wide. It's all about the business strategy.

It's the marketing, it's the sales, it's the CRM systems, it's the finance systems, it's customer service, it's the supply chain. It has to be customer wide, and they have to all be connected to get the speed, to get the value from them. Um, along with that though, there also has to be a change in mindset.

Um, you have to have a growth mindset, which was something that Carol Dweck, um, wrote about, I dunno, 10, 15 years ago now, to be honest. Um, but you need that, that growth mindset, otherwise you're not going to get there. And that's a cultural shift.

And there's more in your mindset that needs to change rather than just the growth mindset. But it's a cultural change in there. Um, I've delivered so many, um, digital transformation, agile transformation organization restructures, but culture has always been the key element for it, and it needs to happen.

Otherwise, your, your initiative will fail. And a huge part of that is educating the business. Um, the business themselves don't understand what these terms are.

Um, they don't understand technology. They don't understand, um, how you leverage these things. Whereas in technology and product we do, we've been living them for 20 years.

If someone in the business wanted to understand these concepts, chances are that they've got a job within a technology company or a technology team or department, they don't. We need to educate 'em in what all of these things are. And just as I'm talking about culture, um, I'm a huge proponent of agile, both within technology teams and across businesses, but the number of times I see big organizations using safe as a a process, and it, it just, uh, I'm sorry.

Um, it just doesn't do it. It, it, it's a hybrid, um, of the old fashioned legacy systems with the words and some of the processes of a new Agile environment. So I, I don't think personally that's a, a good, um, culture.

It's a good process to implement along here if you're trying to do company-wide transformation. Um, also, it's more than just email and, and, um, e-commerce, and I know you, you, they're thinking email is so embedded in our systems now. It's not even a question mark.

Um, and I agree with you, but just as an example of how we can't be, um, uh, uh, lazy in our thinking, lazy is probably the wrong word, my apologies, but we can't be lazy in the thinking. I, I did have a, a, a friend of mine who worked for one of the big auction houses, and the CEO used to fly regularly between London and New York, and he was old school, so he had his PA in London print off all of his emails. He'd write replies on the piece of paper on the flight, and his PA in London would respond to all of his emails.

So, yeah, um, email is definitely embedded in most people's minds, but it's not embedded in everyone's mind just yet. We've got a little bit of work there to go the, the, the laggards are still coming. Um, but we also need to then go beyond just the, the classic email, e-commerce, online storage, um, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Teams, Google, whatever, whatever the tool set is that you're using into VoIP, into, um, slack.

There's more than enough opportunities now, um, where we need to start looking at other tool sets that can help us. Um, Microsoft have brought out co-pilot for ai, um, for their Microsoft Suite and their AI AI tool, and that's great, but it, it kind of helps you become slightly more efficient. And we need to even go beyond that into things like, um, beacons and IOT, and so far there's some companies using them, but the vast majority of companies do not.

Lots of 'em have no need. That's fine. Lots of 'em do have a need, but just haven't explored the technology or haven't explored how to leverage the technology because it's technology in a box.

They're just looking at what the technology can do. They're not looking at how they can leverage it for their business and actually improve not just the business processes, but the customer experience as they go. Um, so we need to be thinking beyond just the, the typical toolkit that we have to make all of these, these things work.

Um, for, I mean, just as an example, when was the last time you bought something online and you, you got the tracking advice and the tracking order says, um, it's been packed. It's been, it's in transit and it's out for delivery. I mean, that's not really tracking in my mind.

Um, I, I've gotta stay in my house until 10:00 PM one one day just to wait for a, a, a parcel to be delivered because they need to knock the door and, and have me deliver it. Um, have me accept it rather. Um, we're not taking advantage of that.

Imagine your supply chain being connected to your, um, marketing systems, to your customer service systems, to your emailing systems so that you're getting real life, um, uh, tracking. I do remember Amazon, obviously Amazon, um, I think this was in London. Um, they used to give me a, a note that I was, um, the fourth in line to be delivered.

So you'd actually get a little tracker when, when they got close to the, the home, and they would tell you that there's four other people being delivered to first, that the guy will be with you in 23 minutes or something like that. That's true technology integration, but it's Amazon. They've got the money to spend in this and the, the, the mindset to achieve it.

Um, but there's also machine learning. Um, lots of companies aren't yet exploring machine learning. And the, the, the example that I always give, um, here is, um, everyone's got excited about large la large language models, but we've had machine learning algorithms for years now.

We, we've been working in this area for 10, 15 years, if not longer. Um, going back to Alan Turing's day, um, when, when he, he was thinking conceptually about what these things could do and how we would test them. Um, the reality is that we've been here for a while and most companies are not using them.

Um, I did work for a large retailer and who were trying to create a data, data science, AI type team together. And it was a challenge every day, getting things in place to, to make things work for them. But they were trying, they, they were trying.

Um, um, one of the challenges that we had there actually was, um, moving the data to the right location. We had lots of data, but moving data around the organization was a real challenge. We, we seemed to be incapable of putting it in the right place first time.

So we constantly had to move it, which was very expensive and time consuming, time consuming. Um, the next thing then that I've learned is we need leadership. Um, and at the moment, most organizations struggle with leadership.

Um, and I think it's an unfair, um, challenge because it's more situational than it is personalities. But my experience is most leadership teams don't understand what technology teams can deliver for them. Um, and most technology teams don't get a seat at the table to actually start explaining and, and sharing the knowledge of what we can do.

Um, but any transformation piece needs to be top down objectives and bottom up, um, change. Um, but within that, um, what we absolutely need is the technology team to step up. Um, at the moment, in my experience, technology is in a box.

It's a support function as a cost center in the vast majority of organizations. Um, and that means that it's, is viewed as a problem, is viewed as, um, something that is there is viewed as a commodity almost. Um, and what we really need is a strategic IT team, a strategic technology team, whatever you wanna call it, um, that will break out of that.

It'll make it easier for the business to understand the benefits that can be delivered. It'll make it easier for, um, transformations to actually start to be progressed and worked on. Um, it'll make it much easier for businesses to move forward and get the benefits of digital transformation and digital change.

This disruption that I was talking about. Um, uh, for example, um, yeah, uh, uh, um, there, there was one digital transformation program that I was involved in, um, and to try and explain to the business and show the business the benefits of it. Um, I took six of the, the company's technology team.

Um, we worked on a small skunk works effectively team, um, but over, uh, four sprints, four, two weeks sprints. So eight weeks. Um, we fundamentally changed their I iPad experience.

Um, and the team, we, we did user testing before. We did user testing afterwards, and we could show that that small team working in this way, we deliver 6 million in annual value to the company. Suddenly we were demonstrating to the business the value of technology being strategic technology, delivering technology, having a commercial understanding of what was happening.

And that was hugely, hugely valuable to everyone involved as we, as we went through. Um, so technology, there's need to break out the support function box and start driving the business. Um, there needs to be more commercial thinking within technology to drive business change, to understand the business objectives and not just accept the fact that we're in this technology as enabler for the business that supports the business.

Um, and as a cost center. Um, and that can be scary sometimes. You, you're stepping into the plate of, of saying, you'll be responsible for driving revenue, and if you don't drive revenue, then that adds pressure to everyone's day, which isn't good.

But to achieve the objectives that we're looking for, I think we need to do that. Um, there needs to be a whole new capability, and I would argue a whole new team structure within technology and partially across the business. Um, we're looking at driving capabilities, um, and the capabilities we're driving, you don't get those capabilities going to a three or four year university degree anymore.

They're just not fit for purpose. Um, it's a constant learning process. So what you learn in, in university five years ago, 10 years ago, is probably not the skills that you're using today.

So we need new capabilities, new team structures and new attitudes within the teams, new mindsets within the teams of constantly learning, going out there, figuring out how things work. Um, we've had DevOps, which most companies still don't or, um, organize themselves around, um, or leverage the value from we, we've had, um, ML ops, which is still a challenge in most organizations to get in place and, and to work correctly. Um, but those are different structures to the typical ones you'd expect to see in product and engineering teams.

Um, 3, 4, 5 years ago, um, as I said, I worked with a, a, a large retailer, um, previously on their data, data science and, and AI team. And the challenge we had there was that the data was always in the wrong place. Um, to put context into that though, um, we had one machine learning algorithm that was recommending products to a, a, a customer every 24 hours.

But it took us 28 hours to move the data to the right location for the machine learning, um, uh, algorithm to pick up on the data to give the recommendation. And moving that data was so costly. I think it was costing us a million dollars a month just to move the data for that one recommendation engine.

Um, fundamentally new capabilities, new structures, um, for teams. Um, equally, we've had search engine optimization now for 25 years since essentially the birth of Google. Um, but a new skill that I believe I've been writing about it quite a lot actually, um, recently is, uh, AI optimization.

Um, as AI starts to take over more and more areas of our life, um, companies are gonna have to understand how do we optimize AI in order to get the best results for our products, our services as a company, um, to move forward. So a whole new discipline will be, will be created, um, and that will be an ongoing fight as the AI gets smarter. Um, optimizing for it will be more of a challenge 'cause the AI will work round the optimization, but it will come.

Um, and then lastly, and this is not a, a mind and blowing concept at all. Um, lastly, data is vital. Um, it always has been.

We recognize that it was vital 15 years, 20 years ago within businesses as part of this digital revolution that we've gone through. Um, but it's more so now one, no business can work without data being in place, whether that's metrics, KPIs, OKRs, and dashboards to monitor all of these things across the marketing acquisition funnels, across your sales, across supply chain, um, in-house, efficiencies with finance and things like that. Um, but it goes way, way beyond all of that.

Um, your data is also driving your machine learning and your ai. Um, we, we've very much moved from, um, the digital transformation area into the data, uh, era. And we're moving towards AI very, very quickly.

Um, so to move from the data, um, into the AI eras, what we are experiencing is you need to have your data in place. It needs to be set up for success. And companies, a lot of companies out there are still struggling with the basics of digital transformation.

They've started playing with the data transformation, but they're nowhere near set up for this AI transformation. Um, and we know that AI is coming quickly. So the, the more and more that we, um, procrastinate around, um, not putting in place everything that we need, the more and more of a challenge all of this is gonna be for us as a company moving forward.

Um, they're pretty much the lessons. I don't think there's anything rocket science in any of those lessons. Um, I think everyone has experienced them.

I think they're fairly, um, broad. Um, but I think it's also worth calling out because I think we've got into a position whereby we're already accepting that this is where we are. Technology is a, um, a, a cost center.

Um, engineering should never be a cost center. Product should never be a cost center. These guys, these guys in these teams should be driving the revenue within your business.

So I'll move on to what's next. Um, and what's next is very much, um, a summary of what we've learned and how we can start overcoming those so that we can catch up on where we should be to set ourselves up for success within this AI era that, that I've spoken about. So, um, AI is coming and it's coming very, very, very quickly.

I think it's coming way more quickly than most people realize. Um, Ellen Musk is very bullish about it. Um, I think he may be a little bit too bullish about it, but I don't think he's far off.

Um, I, I wrote a piece, um, a couple of days ago, I think actually, um, on how, uh, when will AI be useful? And, and I, um, equated it against Muer Law, which is speeding up anyway. Um, but I equated that against Moore's Law, and I think probably for AI to start being useful, proactively useful in our life.

So not just doing things that we ask it to do, but to recommend things to remind you that you've run out milk and you're passing the grocery store and you need to go and buy some, um, to actually be really useful within our lives. I think we're probably one or two cycles through MO'S Law before we get to there. So that's a year and a half, two years, maybe three.

Um, and suddenly what we'll find is if your company isn't already set up running and organized in this way, you are really, really going to struggle, um, because there will be competitors out there, or we'll all just start going to Amazon and everyone else will just be an afterthought. Um, which is kinda where we're kinda heading to be honest, until something else comes along. Um, like I say, most companies are not ready.

They don't have the basics of the digital transformation properly in place. Their, um, sales still aren't really talking to their e-commerce systems. ERPs are, are remote from other systems, supply chains coming in.

And yes, don't get me wrong, there, there are absolutely companies out there that are doing this. There are companies out there that are working in these ways, but it's not the massive companies, um, that you would expect by this time. It is not, I'm gonna say commonplace.

Um, and it needs to be, it needs to be commonplace that every company is looking at these things, connecting your data through different, um, systems, making it all look up. Um, at the moment we still run organizations whereby the finance team do monthly management accounts. There's really nothing to stop us at this point, having that in real time.

Um, yet it may be a day or two out. It might be an invoice hasn't come through because the supplier's being slow. Um, but you can get trends.

You can get ideas, you can get moving forward on, um, key aspects of your business and management decisions as you go. Um, and yet we're not even trying, we're, we're not even looking at that as a, as a, an ambition that we would want our supply chain connected, then we would want our sales to be connected, then we would want to understand things. Um, I remember once working with, again, a, a UK retailer around a US one this time.

Um, we were trying to do a bit of a transformation piece, and by and large it was successful. But one of the challenges that we noticed was if there was a product that wasn't in the warehouse, we couldn't sell it on online. So what we would tell the customer online that we didn't have any in stock when the reality was, chances are there was one of that product in a store that was a mile away.

But because the in-store, um, stock management system didn't speak to the, in, in a certain way, didn't speak to the warehousing management system and didn't speak to the website in a certain way, it all wasn't all joined up rather than going back to the customer and saying, we don't have any in store to send to you, um, in, in the warehouse, rather to send to you, but we do have some in, in the store that's a mile away and we lost the sale or the, the customer went away and did something else. So those joining up of systems is, is going to be vital. It is vital in in today's world, but the vast majority of companies haven't got there yet.

Um, it's just a fundamental of setting yourself up for business and being efficient as you go forward. Um, technology has to be a driver for businesses. Um, it can no longer be this cost center.

It has to be front and foremost. Um, people say they're a retail business, they're a media business, they're a marketplace business, whatever type of business they are. The reality is every business today is a technology business.

And technology is still very much viewed as an add-on, uh, cost center. Like I've said before, um, that has to change. Um, and the only way that is gonna change is if the technology leaders step up, they move forward, they start putting their neck on the line for revenue challenges.

They start being more commercial in their thinking. They start being more strategic in how they can help, what they can do, how they can improve other parts of the business, and how they can connect the business, the supply chain, and the customers all together predominantly in real time if we can, so that the customer gets a much better service as opposed to, um, fixing a product that's legacy that someone has to manually type details into to then send, uh, an email report to someone else to make it all happen. All of these things should be automated as we go.

Um, so that the business is getting the true value of the transformation of digital technologies, of the data and going forward into the AI world of the AI improving all of these things for us and helping us in our decision making. Um, the last one here, and I've touched on it already, is the leaders need to step up. Um, I can't kinda express this enough.

Um, it's easy to be in a technology department in a big company and hide. Um, and that is great if that's what your motivation is. But it's not driving the business forward.

It's not driving the technology forward. It is not changing their customer's experience. It's not making life better for anyone.

Um, and the technology already exists to do all of these things. We as a technology team are just not being given the opportunity to achieve all of these things. It's kinda like we're being asked to, to, to move the, the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Let's stop worrying about the deck chairs and let's go and try and figure out how we save the lives or how we plug the hole. Um, leaders need to step up. They need to become more strategic.

They need to become more commercial, they need to become more forceful. And a huge part of the leader stepping up is they need to, they need to become educators. Um, I remember once talking to a client whose biggest challenge was, how do we get the business to understand what technology is?

And I said to him, you never will. The challenge is how do you get your technology people to understand what your business is? And that's a mindset shift that is just gonna be so vital going forward.

Your, your business. People aren't interested in the technology, like I said before, um, if they were, they'd have a job within technology. So it's for the technology team to go away and actually start to educate, inspire, um, the business going forward so that actually the technology team becomes a strategic advisor, advisors strategic partner to the business, um, so that we can start driving all of these technologies through the business effectively.

We've got two or three years to do it. Um, otherwise AI will start to take over and we won't be then in a position to leverage any of those true, true, um, benefits that, that we'd hope to see. Um, at this point, normally, um, I would go into a summary of all the key points and the key takeaways, but um, you can go through the, the video.

You can go through the deck, um, and, and pick those up yourself. So rather going through a, a summary of the key takeaway points I wanted to focus on. The one takeaway that I would like everyone to take from, from this and that one takeaway is, um, the disruption is real.

The need for technology to step up and start being strategic within organizations to start driving organizations, to start getting their, their, um, house in order so that the business starts to take them seriously, to see the value that they can be add is very, very real. So my challenge to everyone here is, um, the disruption is needed, but you are the disruptor. No one else is gonna disrupt your organization.

You work in technology, you understand technology, you understand your business. You're in a place that is far better to disrupt your company, move it forward, be far more strategic in, in the thinking to achieve all the objectives that the company needs. It's you, you are the disruptor.

Um, don't wait for the business to come and ask you to do something. Don't wait for the business to come and say, we've had an idea. The business is great.

And they, they will do things like that and they will ask you for estimates to deliver and all these, these great things. But you guys are the ones that knows what the technology can do. You can show the business the art of the possible.

You can inspire them and drive them, educate them, and then start to deliver this real change. So the one thing that I would like you to take away from a tech conference, um, on AI is the business aspects of it. Technology is great.

Um, it's fantastic. But technology that doesn't have a business outcome, you have to question where the value is. But you guys are the ones that will drive that.

You guys are the ones that are in the position to drive the AI revolution within your organization. But you need to start now. You need to set your company up to be successful.

You need to start putting in place all the benefits of digital transformation that you've not realized yet. You need to start working on your, your data, um, so that you have the right data in the right place, that you can leverage it so that when you start moving into your ai, um, you have all the key elements to your fingertips that AI becomes just a another part of the process that is easy. But your business isn't going to do that.

Your business doesn't know enough about the technology, it doesn't know about what's possible, what can happen, what could happen in the future. That's you guys. You guys are the disruptors.

You guys are the ones that will drive this forward. So thanks for listening. Um, I hope you got something out of that.

Um, it was a bit of a whirlwind, but, um, hopefully it was good. Um, and as I said, if you have any questions or you want to chat to me afterwards, feel free to reach out.