Should Government Regulate Ride-Hailing?

#LKminiblog - Should Government Regulate Ride-Hailing?

Indonesia is planning to regulate ride-hailing rates, amid pressure and protest from driver groups. Both Grab and Go Jek depended on low price offers to passengers in the past for initial growth and expansion, but prices have always surged as business matures. Plus, the ride hailing firms subsidises drivers during discount campaigns. 

Low price is just an entry strategy....

The low price was just an opportunistic route to break into new grounds and get customers accustomed to a new alternative. Over time, reliable and consistent service quality became the foundation to sustaining the massive success of these unicorns. 

Ride-hailing businesses run on leading edge technologies, not an easy feat to replicate...

Unlike traditional transportation service providers, ride-hailing companies built their business capabilities by adopting various leading edge technologies (AI, ML, DL, Augmented Reality, Mobile app, bigdata and IOT) for operational automation, service delivery, prediction and planning. User data is collected through mobile app and harnessed to innovate faster, improve services and maximise values to the whole business eco system. 

A well functioning alternative service to riders.....

The arrival of ride-hailing companies in Southeast Asia were welcomed, as for once passengers had a choice to abandon conventional transportation service providers, that mistreated clients for decades (all of which were regulated businesses). Since the arrival of ride-hailing companies, more passengers comfortably leave their vehicles at home and use the ride-hailing services. After all, passengers can easily book a ride via their mobile app and get served within 7 to 10 minutes, as opposed to the old call booking system where getting through is extremely difficult.

The solution to driver economics problem is dynamic in nature...

Question is, why would we need government intervention to solve a problem already resolved? Secondly, there are two methods to solve this driver economics issue - one by increasing passenger prices, the other is by streamlining the large number of drivers according to current demand. Both are dynamic elements and neither strategies can be executed by the government efficiently without realtime data, reliable predictive capabilities and the backing of a credible data science team.

Let's not get politics in the way of good business....

Finally, driver groups involved in protests may carry other hidden agendas (speculative but that's the popular trend) than just preserving their economic interests. Government intervention here might end up protecting business interest of politically linked individuals or groups that destroyed service quality, encouraged business monopoly without competition and frustrated consumers in the past.

Are Superapps Draining our Money Pots?

#LKminiblog - Are Superapps Draining our Money Pots?

Superapps and ecommerce startups snatched a big chunk of startup funding for Southeast Asia last year, especially those endorsed or lead by Softbank and BAT (Baidu, Ali, Tencent). 

Capturing the sizable Southeast Asian consumer market...

In 2017/2018, investors were particularly focused on startups with standardised platforms to engage with Southeast Asian consumers mainly via mobile devices. This trend is expected to continue this year, but with more coverage areas by ride hailing companies and new value added services including to businesses.

The 10 or so well backed Unicorns will continue to grow and prosper...

Plenty of capital reserve will enable companies like Grab, Go-Jek, Zalo, Bukalapak, Tokopedia, Lazada, Shoppee and others to continue improving their applications, interfaces, technology stack, talent pool and market reach. These startups can become a critical gateway to new eco systems in health, retail, and finance, not reachable by conventional businesses.

What about the B2B tech startups?

However, this strategic focus by major investors certainly affected tech startups on the B2B segment, especially those developing and innovating vertical solutions. Most investors, including regional financiers, simply followed the footsteps of larger investors with their bets in the past years. This drained the money pot and left thousands of B2B folks to battle it out for the leftovers.

Driving the change we want...!

Hopefully investor tone will change this year with promising startups emerging for applied AI and AR in various sectors, fintech that blends several techs, healthcare innovation and smart city solutions. 

As for regional and corporate MNC investors, the former will continue to invest opportunistically or for nationalistic reasons and the later will align investment to scale the size of the community on their platform. The rigour of activities here will depend heavily on economic growth and the entrepreneurial community.

In the end, the challenge for Southeast Asian B2B startups in 2019 remains the same as the previous years. Changing the perception of stakeholders and our entrepreneurial community to break the heuristics that we are incapable of creating scalable world class solutions.  Instead, we should be driving harder for excellence, up skilling, team building, task completion, coaching and envision business solutions fitting for global markets and scale. 

Are we up for it?

6 Foundational Growth Hacking Tips for e-commerce Sites

There are thousands of e-commerce sites both linear (single branded store) and platform (marketplaces) business models emerging from the region. Ambitious merchants everywhere are hustling to setup stores and take a slice of the currently US50 billion market (projected to grow to US$ 200 billion by 2025 as per market research by Google and Temasek)

Though the journey to even secure a mere 1% or 2 % of the market share is arduous as this is far from just a business of cloistering products on a web page. Traffic similar to foot traffic in physical stores must be generated, the hullabaloo traffic had to be converted to real deals, product qualities must be safeguarded and customers must be retained for a positive lifetime value in order to extract satisfactory returns on various customer acquisition investments. This includes resources pumped into sales, marketing, loyalty programs and customer experience.

There are many aspects to growth hacking that needs to be considered from the technological architecture that supports the business to strategy and execution method. Though there are some foundational measures that can be adopted, practised, improvised and assessed universally for most business models.

Here are some growth hacking tricks and channels to consider when running an e-commerce site, especially B2C sites.

SEO

Try and visualise how your audience are searching for your products or services on Google. The objective is to get the relevant page/s  ranked at the top of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).  Attempt at creating dedicated landing page for each of the critical search results. Ensure to use the right text and keywords in page headers, sub headers and descriptions as these will be used by the search engines to rank the pages. Pack the site with good referable content and build backlinks through collaboration with other relevant sites and businesses. (This article from Forbes provides detail on some excellent backlinks tactics )

PPC

Pay-per-click search advertising is a great way to attract the right traffic to your site. Entrepreneurs has the flexibility to decide on how much cash really gets burned in the process, as some advertising campaigns may take time to divert the expected traffic towards the business. However, it is highly recommended to pre-allocate budget according to timeline aligned with major campaign outcomes. Assess results routinely so that future campaigns can be adjusted for extracting more values from ad investments.

TV COMMERCIAL ADS

For businesses with VC or PE funding take advantage of the financial freedom and execute brand strategies through TV ads or even YouTube channels especially during a seasonal event. While not mandatory, this helps to accelerate and strengthen branding and outreach programs to a broader audience.

PROMOTIONAl CAMPAIGNS and Business DIFFERENTIATION

Asian shoppers are great bargain hunters and love to shop during special campaigns with great deals, products and experiences. Build partnerships with major credit cards, e-wallets, partners or supplier companies to compose campaign buzz that lifts customer experience with your brand. For instance if you are selling cakes and other bake goods, complement it with party pack services. Sell customers a party experience which includes your bake products and differentiate the business from rivals.

FOCUS ON ONE VERTICAL

Focusing in one vertical such as beauty, education, electronics or healthcare refines customer offerings while standardising backroom processes such as inventory, order fulfillments and etc. Streamlining specialisation enables the business to amass customer base faster and optimise operation in primary segments prior to expansion.

A GREAT SITE with GREAT PRODUCTS

The UI must be simple, slick and easy to use. It should help customers to search, find, bookmark, share, cart, buy or review products seamlessly. Products must be presented with crisp pictures, accurate descriptions, impartial reviews, references and ranking based on past sales. Payment process must be glitch free from any backend data/API connections that verifies, scrape, process, analyse data during transactions. It's all about making it look easy, simple and ergonomically sophisticated - all at the same time.

Finally tracking site performance using sites such as Similarweb and SERP can provide sufficient visibility to traffic performance and isolate SEO measures with highest or lowest impact. In addition, the data gathered is a great asset when having conversations with digital marketing or web design vendors.

If you have a cool tip on how to improve site  traffic – you are welcome to share it with us!

Come Not Between the Dragon Riders, Rise of Asian Platforms

The Asian Platform business scene is worth over a trillion dollars in market value and is only the second most prominent after North America. The region’s thirty over publicly traded platform companies and thousand other startups is enough to make any investor exuberant over growth opportunities for expansion, acquisitions, investments and joint ventures.

Uneven Business Landscape, Full of Opportunities

Market conditions does differ from country to country, hence the contrasting maturity levels. Overall, favourable economic condition, trade policies, maturing infrastructure, growing middle class and an upswing in GDP, is paving way for incredible growth unattainable in developed markets of North America and Europe.

Leaders of the Pack – China, Japan and Korea

Growth is mostly fuelled by China, Japan and Korea where there is high domestic demand for online services, concentration of capital, available talent, a frenzy of innovation projects surrounding core technologies aimed to realise full business potential, enhance services and user experience. Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Softbank, Yahoo Japan and Kakao is clearly taking the lead in diversifying their businesses into multi-platform conglomerates, through series of acquisitions, investments and joint ventures.

Pioneers In Challenging Environment

India and Southeast Asia’s best performing platforms such Flipkart, Snapdeal, InMobi, PayTM, OYO, Lazada, Olacab, Garena and Grab on the contrary, are focusing on becoming profitable on well tested e-commerce, gaming, payment, ride sharing, transportation and advertisement models. They are making way for other players by addressing the region’s weak investment landscape, antique trade regulatory policies, uneven access and speed of Internet services. Though, the region is never short of startups. Arrival of newcomers such as Omise (Fintech), and TripAlly (Travel Platform) based out of Thailand, are just two examples reflecting the region's ongoing commitment to platform economy.

Noteworthy Observations on Business Model

The platform business model of the Asian region is centred on consumers and SMBs, unlike American platforms that evolve around enterprises mostly.

Online marketplaces for buying and selling goods, financial services, communication, gaming, transportation and travel are some examples of where good response is tracked in Asia. As such, Asian Platforms generate a significant share of revenue from transactions and trade as opposed to American platforms (e.g. Facebook and Google) which depend on advertising.

A massive population which is learning quickly to adopt consumer technologies for various lifestyle reasons, is a huge encouragement to the sector to digitise existing and create new innovative services.

Innovations centred on Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Robotics

China, Japan and Korea is pumping tons of cash on developing capabilities in artificial intelligence, blockchain architecture, virtual reality, augmented reality, Internet of things, cloud computing and robotics.

The breakthroughs are expected to help:
• Automate search ranking, recommendations, image classifications, image character recognition, speech recognition, natural language translation
• Improve experience for Asian customers whose native language characters are complex and cumbersome to type
• Last mile delivery automation with drone (e.g. Alibaba, JD.com)
• Build virtual assistants to enhance shopping, education and gaming (e.g. Baidu)
• Develop a Broader payment solution (e.g. Tencent and Alibaba)
• Establish transparency of supply chain (e.g. Alibaba)
• Ensure food safety (e.g. Tencent, Alibaba)
• Development of humanoids (e.g. Pepper, Softbank)
• Development of autonomous vehicles (e.g. Apollo, Baidu)
• Blockchain e-commerce (e.g. TripAlly)

Research and development centers are scattered between China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. Government initiatives to utilise upcoming technologies to upgrade industries further aggregates efforts between public, private and government affiliates.

Investments in Stakes and Acquisitions

There is no doubt that Asian Platforms are stepping up their game in the international arena to compete with the likes of Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook.

Softbank's $100 Billion Vision Fund

The $100 Billion Vision Fund's recent investment track record probably is the best evidence to point out how critical platform businesses are to generate expected return. The largest tech investment portfolio ever to be created, the investment dollars are spread to both international and many promising Asian Platforms such as Flipkart, OYO, Ant Financial and Didi Chuxing. Softbank is also aggressively pursuing stakes outside the scope of this fund in Asian Platforms such as online insurer Zhong An, Grab, OLA Cabs and Snapdeal.

Tencent versus Alibaba Race in Southeast Asia

Just before the arrival of Amazon in Southeast Asia, Rakuten shutdown operation in the region. This was later followed by Rocket Internet’s (operator of Zalora and Lazada) exit, selling most businesses it operated. But, what seemed like a drawback of key players from the region very swiftly started a healthy regeneration with close to $3 Billion in investment from Chinese players.

Some notable acquisition and investment news since then are;
• Softbank and Didi Chuxing took a large stake in Grab
• Redmart was acquired by Lazada at price point lower than initially raised
• Lazada was acquired by Alibaba
• Ant Financial acquired Hello Pay
• Ant Financial invested in Ascend Money, Mynt, M-Daq
• Tencent acquired Sanook
• Tencent invested in ABC 360, Go-Jek, Ookabee

The arrival of large Chinese players in the e-commerce, fintech and logistic space is certainly driving more pressure on regional groups such as Orami and Ascend Group that has been fighting for a clear marketshare for sometime. Nevertheless, this development can benefit the region by driving maturity of the sector, underlying infrastructure and regulatory designs.

The ‘Alibaba versus Tencent’ race may not necessarily create a conflict as many analyst cite. Close scrutiny may reveal that both companies are establishing dominance in different segments based on strengths. However, together the giants may impact advertising revenue for product search as consumers shift to their platform to conduct such searches.

Flow of Investments from China to India

Despite a large pool of skilled programmers, proficiency in English, and strong business ties with US and Europe, India’s platform startups continue to struggle to expand with uneven infrastructure, poor internet access, suboptimal government regulatory policies and lacklustre interest by other successful tech related public groups such as Reliance, Future Group, Aditya Birla, and Appollo.

But the potential of platform companies such Flipkart, Snapdeal, Ola and OYO is too good to be ignored by the Chinese giants, notably Alibaba, Tencent and Chinese Internet Plus Holdings who are constantly competing to get a stake in the countries platform scene. There is no mistake that these platform giants are building a ingrained presence in India at the moment.

Fuelling the Startup Eco-system

Programs such as SuSS by Alibaba and others by Tencent is quickly becoming a platform for entrepreneurs to connect and build business support structure. By encouraging platform startups in Asia, larger platform companies are able to cherry pick suitable acquisition targets.

Regulatory Challenges

Regulation over platform and online businesses remains a challenging area for governments in the region due to the border less nature of the business. Exposure to security and privacy matters, impact to local industries, government trade and taxation policies, flow of investments, and the overall economy are some of the factors which stifles effort to harmonise governance.  Self-governance may be helpful for some policy concerns, but deeper cross border regulatory challenges  require collective government effort to codify through regional and international trade  agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which provisions for e-commerce and other digital trade.

Superior Service or Protectionism is Driving Success?

Many experts argue that some of the largest Asian Platforms are perhaps growing out of government protectionism and inability of foreign platforms to operate freely from unfair data, trade, compliance and other domestic policies. Often the region is target for criticism and accusations over inability to innovate effectively, espionage activities, poor privacy and security control.

Inbound and Outbound Trade Gateway

Even if there is truth to this, it’s extremely hard to dismiss the fact that millions of people and thousands of businesses are still transacting over Asian Platforms. In fact, their reach is starting to grow beyond the region. For instance many of the sellers on Amazon and eBay place orders in Alibaba for their stocks. Alibaba acts as a trade exchange to connect Chinese businesses to global consumers and global businesses to Chinese consumers. For small businesses, this is a valuable and cost effective service which includes handling of cross border transaction.

Exceeding Customer Expectations

Similarly Yue Bao an online money market fund owned by Alibaba offers a annualised seven day yield of 3.4% to customers who wish to save their leftover money from transactions. Over 60% of holders in this fund have less than $1000 in their accounts. This fund is currently sized at $165 Billion, performs better and is larger than the JPMorgan Chase US Government Market Fund ($150 Billion).

Not All Strategies Work in Asia

Asian Platforms understand that superiority in technology stack alone is not sufficient for success in diverse Asia. Aligning technology, innovations, investments, and consumerism to address netizens’ needs and SMB growth challenges in buying, selling, conducting secure payment and managing the cross border processes are key to their success.

Criticism, both ill intended and constructive, was taken to build a better business. For instance Alibaba and Tencent took market advice to further improve platform transparency by launching blockchain and artificial intelligence intersects to address issues around unsustainable supply chain and food safety. They are on a journey to debunk all disapproving claims over effectiveness of Asian Platforms.

5 Levers to Optimise Learning

“Nothing is ever Achieved without Enthusiasm”, Emerson

Ever wondered how Uber, ANT Financial (Alipay), Xiaomi, DiDi Chuxing, or Airbnb turned into world's largest unicorns in 2017 (and yes, please note that 3 out of 5 are actually from China) ?

Perhaps it was the early market lead, a disruptive technology, platform inspired business model, successful fund raising rounds or simply favourable government policies. Each firm hacked growth based on different mix of factors but shared one similarity. Their leadership and workforce was able to keep pace with the supersonic growth and recalibrate repeatedly to the next future state.

Entrepreneurs whom are in constant pursuit of new knowledge and finds a thrill in the perils of solving difficult business problems are effective learners. They promote sharing of information, inferences and team collaboration for optimal execution of every business function. Making optimising learning capacity of individuals and teams in organisations an imperative measure in driving and sustaining growth. A metrics closely observed by leaderships and funding ventures alike.

Technology to Assist and Augment 

Businesses operate in an extremely fast environment today, where advancements in consumer gadgets and enterprise technologies have enabled us with massive computing power capable of deciphering quintillion bytes of data in nano seconds. Artificial intelligence and machine learning is further sophisticating automation of softwares, machines, neural networks, robots and humanoids.

Ignoring such developments and their benefits in assisting and augmenting work in sectors such as health, legal, high tech, retail and financial will only leave the business irrelevant to market over time. Instead every technology disruption provides a purposeful learning opportunity to move higher in the work chain that should be embraced.

Make Sense of Data

Similarly online business models, platforms and devices are flooding us with data and information. Researching a customer or partner, means pulling and collating information from various sources internal and external (e.g. within the enterprise walls, certified agencies and what is available publicly).

Using analytics to make sense of the different data sets and correlation to business helps to build better reasoning for business cases, speedily scratch the surface of critical operational issues, dive deeper into situations, or anticipate an upcoming threat (or avoid the ‘boiling frog’ phenomenon). It expands cumulative ability to uncover answers to inherent business questions and expose unchartered frontiers for seeking new understandings. This improve resources allocation and focus for all the right business activities in product innovation, sales, marketing and support.

Practice Problem Solving

Growing startups exposes entrepreneurs to various types of business constraints. Some problems are clearly defined with goals, while others are inhibited by vagueness, thrusting us into a panic zone. The iterative process of identifying, classifying, defining, diagnosing, understanding and breaking down the problem, results in expansive mental progress that improves strategies and methodologies in problem-solving over time.

However, exhausting teams with repetitive problems (which is a target for complete automation anyway) will only erode this cognitive exercise to an inertia. Instead refocus them to address complex challenges, where the process of active revealing and listening in search of a solution mechanism takes place. It is here, where many startups stumbles over a lead, growth engine, untapped market, or a golden opportunity to gauge market share from conventional players.  Riding back on the iceberg parable illustrated in the previous point, the deeper you dwell into business inhibitors, the more questions you will uncover. The journey to answer these questions will lead to breakthroughs.

Failures multiply Worth of Lessons

It's bizarre but success and failure lies in the same direction. Success is reiteration of adjustments made from failure to failure without ever loosing the excitement for the venture.

If Abraham Linchon would have shied away from numerous disappointments and feared the angst that may arise, it would have taken a lot longer to abolish slavery and build a modern America. If Nelson Mandela would have stopped fighting apartheid in South Africa at the thought of being imprisoned for life, South Africa will still be torn in civil wars and severe human rights crisis.

Failure teaches value of resilience, focus, reflection and to bounce back stronger each time a pursuit hits a dead end. Only by apprehending the lessons of defeat, one can gain clarity to amend path forward and avoid repeating mistakes. In fact, no one successful is ever reserved from having to confront calamities, criticism, and temporary standstills. After all, success is sweet when you can tell a story that can inspire others.

Performance Support Tools

Performance support tools, such as collaboration platforms, portals, advance analytics (including bigdata), case and content management solutions (e.g.  JIRA, G Suite, Slack, Asana, and other SMB SaaS Services) that are integrated across the various business functions in the organisation is a great way to distribute and update team members of newly available learning assets. In addition, the design and representation of these tools across functions can influence how quickly complications in process or product can be resolved.

The Act of Perfecting the Game

Using the levers mentioned above will speed learning pace and get us quickly to the deeper composite nature of any business riddle. This creates more room to effectively piece personal mastery with cumulative learning assets garnered from others in a collaborative manner. Pushing teams to increase adoption of core capabilities to understand complexities, prioritising what matters most and develop effective conversations to perfecting the game.

Practise does make us perfect (or at least better) but equally important is to break away from bad habits of not seeing the big picture quick enough, getting stuck in management myths, or living in a delusion that learning comes with experience (The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge). As they say, you can’t gain without pain or by being oblivious.

Cost , When IT Advisory Breaks Down

No Enemy is Worst than ‘Bad Advice’

When the financial books are closed each year, we meticulously measure the profits; growth of assets;  intellectual property and patent portfolios; accumulated liabilities to employees, suppliers, service providers, regulatory bodies, investors and owners. Subsequently a lesser portion of entrepreneurs, submit further to observe number of unexpected business turns, mishaps or even anomalous increase in operational cost, which consumed significant part of the already tight resource allocations. In other words, the discovery of a series of cash burners that lead to the flushing of valuable resources which could have otherwise deployed

for growth engines. 

For instance, If a small business is operating on a budget of $50 million and is incurring 5% unexpected expenses on average per year, that translates into $2.5 million in financial losses alone. In addition, let’s say that 50% (25 million) of your operational budget is allocated for production which incurred an overrun of 10% of the forecast which translates into another $2.25 million. That is still a total of $5 million over the budget (assuming that no buffer allocation was made for unexpected expenses). Reflecting carefully a little deeper, every one of the drawbacks, may lead us to a point when we received ‘bad advice’ or even worst ‘no advice’ (withholding information intentionally is also a form of ‘no advice’) from a cadre of expert and specialist consultants that we retain as financial, legal, marketing, advertising or technology advisors, among others. According to a survey conducted in the U.K small businesses loss over £6 billion due to misdirections from experts with IT consultants leading the pack (44% followed by management and marketing consultants at 34% and 32% respectively) causing the most damage to businesses.

The common theme here is to take every advice with discretion. As such, investigating IT projects that are currently squandering resources and yet hindering the business from its goals, is a necessary step to identify sources of specialist misrepresentations. 

The Alluring Appeal of the Third Platform Infrastructure and Services

Asian SMBs are pouring billions of dollars (3rd in spending after North America and Europe) into technology with the hope to increase their competitiveness and success rate against larger businesses by adopting more and more of third platform infrastructure solutions (e.g. mobile, cloud, big data, analytics, Blockchain, social tech and collaboration tools) and services (e.g.  AI/cognitive, virtual /Augmented Reality, IOT, 3D, Security, Robotics). Choosing the obvious ‘cloud’ path (both private and public) may have reduced the conventional risks associated with IT projects but even then, there are questions to be asked and answers to be probed to avoid mistakes. Matching the software or services that links best with business operation; choosing the right cloud technology (often to be align with the existing tech eco system); picking the right development platform for mobile or IOT applications and even understanding the various direct and indirect licensing estates, is crucial in realising the returns of investments channeled into automation, optimisation, waste and redundancy elimination. In short, pretty much any decisions on solutions to business challenges depend on sound IT advice.

When Reputed Automation Projects turns into Drawbacks

When strategic IT initiatives get derailed they turn into impediments that weigh on the business forming waste, sluggish business processes, redundant workloads and prone to manual interventions to produce – the very same elements that we are trying to abolish for a much error free and productive business environment. For instance, in 2004 HP stated that is suffered a shortfall of $400 million in quarterly revenue due to a failed ERP migration of its ordering and supply chain systems. The breakdown caused a 12 weeks business interruption with order process and resulted in manual intervention to conduct day to day business, not the least three key executives fired by the CEO Carly Fiorina, at the time for the costly affair. Closer to home, AirAsia was sued by the Australian regulators in 2010 for breaching consumer law by not displaying the total ticket prices on their 
reservation systems. AirAsia later admitted that this was due to a poor localisation of their system for
the Australian market. However, this incident caused them $200,000 in fines. In 2006, CPF took action on a leading global IT Services provider for a failed IT project it contracted in 2001. It was cited that communication breakdown within the parties along with complacency has caused the project to collapse.

Such is the price to pay when IT projects goes awry. While they may not impact the business severely as isolated incidents, a plague can form collectively if not addressed in timely fashion resulting in overrun of budget, miss delivery dates, suboptimal applications that leak revenue, threat from various non-compliance (industry, consumer, data privacy, security, tax, accounting, software licensing), wasted computing resources (comatose VMs, equipment), damage to brand reputation and overall workforce productivity.

But Should Technology Advisors Condemned?

Pointing the fingers never helps anyone. In majority of cases, relationship breakdown between business and IT advisors over accountability and delivery of outcomes, or dissensions arising of it, are the true causes of project failures. The agency theory problem perhaps is best to explain why either party might get derailed from accomplishing project goals in the process of aligning and creating values for their employers (sometimes may involve several business units), partners, customers and their ownself. What’s important to know though, is that most IT advisors (technical and business) are earnest and perform credibly to stay in repute. Nevertheless, provisions should be allocated by both parties to take action in the event of negligence, complacency or breach of contractual agreements, that likely to emanate losses.

In addition, it’s crucial to tap into this rich pool of experience, knowledge and technology mastery in scoping and deliberating on what makes an IT project successful. What a cognitive waste it would be, to just ask this group of plans and recommendations but to never dive in the ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘when’ such recommendations takes full effect to benefit business. Here are some notable areas to heed in navigating conversation with your IT advisors.

Firstly, understand who your IT Advisors are, what they represent, aims and areas of conflicting interests. In any one project, it is common to have several IT advisors with slightly different agendas and strength. On the vendor’s part, sales and consulting has a responsibility to promote, position and sell their solution as the best fit for your requirements. An independent or in-house IT champion may maintain a neutral position to assess what's the best for the organisation but tend to build assumptions and loyalty with certain providers from past experiences, creating a blind side to their judgement. Sizing these advisors and their leverage in key initiative, is the first code to crack. It is also advisable to adjust compensation model if necessary to suit the dynamics of the relationships, their interests and priorities (E.g instead of hourly rate to delivered functions).

Secondly, align expert recommendations and proposals with business, strantegy, users and its automation needs. Don’t underestimate the power of isolated units, their fiefdoms and current workarounds to complete order processing, procuring supplies, making payments or even connecting with other third party providers such as logistics to ensure business runs as usual. Bring together owners of processes to communicate the automation plans and why it is important to the business. Early involvement of all stakeholderst of the respective processes, aids in uncovering challenges that would be otherwise missed.

Thirdly, request your IT advisor to help you visualise a best case and worst case scenarios of success, with current resources, work culture, best practices, governance mechanisms, process methodologies and existing technology environment. This should help match risk areas during implementation, triage of business interruption, impact to productivity and regulatory compliance among others. This information will enable further adjustment to budget, timeline and drive the necessary changes (e.g. skills upgrade for workforce, upgrade of relevant tools and applications, inducing suitable best practices, familiarisation of the futuristic workplace notion) which in creases the success rate and contain risk exposures.

Technology Advisors turns into Priceless Assets

Recognising a reliable and credible technology advisor is somewhat facile. They are ‘rebels’ and ‘masters’ of their field, constantly contending the constraints of modern technology in a value creating business, even though they are not entirely immune to defeat. A good advisor will ensure you invest in the right business areas; choose the right technology solution; lead technology benefit analysis; help define a suitable integration strategy for best inter operability of tools, systems and applications; promotes acculturation of the right skills and best practises; outlines risk exposure; and is never without a mitigation and disaster recovery plan. 

Much importantly, they stick around wielding their prescience and immaculate social intelligence, when a project is hit with unanticipated calamities or additional requirements to include ongoing changes from regulatory, compliance, technology landscape, integration, operation, customer and market behaviour perspective. 


But these traits can only be an asset if the idea to manage failure, change and challenges is premeditated in the governance of IT initiatives. Expecting everything to go exactly as planned is a ‘mortal sin’ in this practise, as much as surrendering to stultifying statements claiming all application projects are headed for Armageddon (as stated by Gartner) which is both highly disturbing and questions the very constituent of IT advisory.

Third party platform may have intensified complications notably in areas of integration, security, data privacy, intellectual property, access to services, and multiple clouds; but instantaneously this also made way for much efficient delivery, flexibility and agility to the business. Exercising sufficient control on bodies of work according to timeline and extracting values as you go, is the new norm of the tech world. If this is understood correctly, than we know which part of our conventional wisdom should be relinquished for the future of a democratised technology environment