Matthew Bertram: The Biggest Mistakes Companies Make with Digital Initiatives

We were delighted to feature Matthew Bertram, senior consultant at Future Point of View, at a recent session, Digital Transformation: Charting the Course for Sustainable Success vs. A Temporary Fix. In this exclusive Q&A session, Bertram shares expert insights on pressing topics such as digital investments and emerging technologies, as well as advice on how to overcome talent shortages and improve company culture.  

 

The Digital Transformation Journey

 

What are the biggest mistakes companies make when it comes to digital initiatives?

Failure to invest! You need to be taking 1% of your revenue to invest in research. I see so many companies put in 0% because they have so many operational issues. They then get caught by surprise by something that they should have seen coming. It really doesn’t have to be that expensive. You can buy two VR headsets for less than $1,000 and give them to people in your organization. Ask them to take a couple of hours a week to set up a remote VR meeting and see how it goes. This does not have to be rocket science. 

 

How should different forms of automation be considered in a company’s digital journey?

My favorite is robotic process automation, which is what you do when there’s no computer interface or API available. It’s not a technology question but a business question. What metrics do you want to move? Do you want to increase profitability? Do you want to increase time to value? Do you want to reduce the error rate? First, start with the measures that are affecting your business that you want to improve, then move in with process mapping. Work backward to find out what needs changing. Once you know what to change, then it’s simply a matter of what’s the best technology.  

 

Do you think companies will keep investing heavily in digital projects?

I think it will be a mix. There’s this great desire to go back to the way it was before. I think that the further we get away from another black swan event, the greater the draw is for people to maintain the status quo and go back to business as usual. That’s why this is always a great opportunity for any company that’s willing to invest and maintain the discipline of consistent intentional investing. 

 

How do we improve employee engagement around cybersecurity to protect our assets?

One of the trends I foresee is that cyberattacks are going to get worse. I personally believe in Incident Response playbooks. For example, a ransomware attack has just occurred in your organization. What are you going to do? Being able to help them work out not just a checklist, but a playbook of what is going to happen is very useful. Not only does it prepare you when an incident happens, but it also helps with prevention. Playbooks are a great training tool for cybersecurity in your organization. 

 

Emerging Tech: Metaverse, Blockchain, and More 

 

How will the Metaverse affect businesses moving forward?

The Metaverse is three-dimensional, it moves from screens to spaces. We’ve already seen the gaming and entertainment industries move into the Metaverse. Where this is going to work well in business is with near-term opportunities like training simulations. For example, engaging customers throughout the sales cycle by walking them through a building versus just showing them pictures. Also, product design — think of remote engineering teams working on the same components together in three dimensions versus screen to screen. 

 

Is blockchain technology still relevant?

Absolutely. Back in 2018, it was at the peak of the hype cycle but now it’s going through a trough of disillusionment. The big problem is scalability because being able to scale up to real-world numbers of transactions is hard for blockchain as it’s so processor intensive. My projection is that over the next three years, blockchain is going to emerge out of the trough of disillusionment. We’re going to begin seeing industry-wide products that are built on top of blockchain. There are some early ones now with NFTs and cryptocurrencies. But we haven’t seen anything that’s really moved into wide-scale adoption yet. 

 

Are there any other technologies that are up and coming like blockchain?

Absolutely. Augmented reality is taking digital content and putting it on top of the physical world. Augmented reality blends the virtual and the real world together. Over the next several years, you’re going to see growth in this area, especially in enterprise applications, where you’ll be able to interact with objects and get an overlaid human interface. For example, this is going to change the way we interact with banks. 

 

What are you most excited and afraid of when it comes to technology?

Losing freedom of speech. When we moved into Web 2.0 and the social web, there were a handful of companies moderating all the dialogue on the Internet. They can turn people on or off as they wish. History proves to us that we need contrarian views. I’m concerned that private technology companies are going to effectively cause us to lose our freedom of speech. 

 

Talent Shortage and Company Culture 

 

What impact will the hybrid working model have on attracting talent?

I see my clients struggling with this, especially with HR policy. I know one organization with 900 employees where the HR department tried to put in an organization-wide policy on work-from-home unsuccessfully. They’re just trying to be fair, but the reality is that the work-from-home model has to match the particular job function. It is going to be a huge requirement to capture talent because the model you choose determines where you’ll be able to go look for talent, whether locally or around the world. 

 

How can organizations build teamwork and nurture company culture in a work from home environment?

That’s a tough one since every culture within an organization is different. Remote companies need to clearly articulate their branding in writing. It works very well for them to maintain their culture. If there’s a human-to-human connection, one simple thing I do is start weekly staff meetings five minutes earlier to catch up with everyone and see how they’re doing. It’s a great way of maintaining that personal connection. Something else that works well for us is scheduling physical meetups a couple of times a year so we can maintain those relationships. 

 

Do you have any advice on how to work around the current talent shortage?

Whenever it’s practical, buy rather than build, and offload the burden of finding talent to someone else. When it’s not practical, I would invest in tooling and look at how we can reduce the human workload as much as possible. Finally, there’s this idea of IT decentralization, moving a lot of functions that are curling into IT into self-serve out into the organization. It’s been very effective at being able to balance workloads within the organization. 

*The answers have been edited for length and clarity.