2021 Technology Trends
2020 saw tremendous adoption of technology in all sectors of the economy. Enterprise tools such as Zoom and Teams became part of common parlance. They found a place in unexpected areas such as education, religious meetings and governance. Businesses that had underinvested in technology where caught out in the cold and startups that had been working on the last mile problem of retail experienced explosive growth and acquisition.
Businesses appear to have continued to spend planned budgets for 2020 wherever possible because of the uncertainty of when the pandemic would subside. 2021 presents a fork in the road for many business decision-makers in organisations of all sizes.
For Full Stack in 2020, we continued our retail, financial, and mobility sectors work, coupled with large scale data. We saw a rush to health and safety as a sector and unsurprisingly e-commerce. We saw the demand for new software development shift from startups and speculative enterprise plays. Instead, we saw far more strategic enterprise transformation for large companies and long-delayed investment into SMEs' digital systems. We see these trends continuing in 2021.
So here are our predictions for 2021. Please comment and share with your network.
Trend Insight 1 - Internal teams recognising that operations are their forte, and it is better to partner during construction
Full Stack works with internal software teams on more than 80% of our projects. In 2021, we see that trend remaining, and we also know that model will become further entrenched in enterprise software.
Two models have been prominent in the past, outsourcing and culture change collaborative models. In 2020 we saw outsourcing models come under strain with clients looking to cost control, and who then had the challenge of not owning their stacks or their tech. Full Stack doesn't offer to outsource, so this was a challenge for both outsourced vendors and clients we observed from the sidelines.
Collaborative models, fuelled mainly by a desire for agile development methodologies within the enterprise, are under strain in our view. The needed emulsion of differing development cultures between clients and vendors are often tricky. Speed and paces of work are not always aligned. There is an intrinsic conflict between cost-centre internal technical staff and profit-centre external teams.
In 2021, we see the collaborative model maturing into an exciting phase. More enterprises (having now adopted Agile methods more fully) can let businesses such as Full Stack lead in the build and construction phase (while remaining involved actively in technical decision making as a client) and then taking over the lead in the operation and BAU phase. From an efforting perspective, we see this akin to an 80/20 to 20/80 switch. The innovation/construction capability takes the lead in development and then down-gears for torque and power in the BAU phase.
This is the shift we see accelerating in enterprise software in 2021, which will create the most significant value for the businesses that adopt it. Commercial operating frames have to widen to make this model work, from traditional phases of 6-12 months, to longer elapsed but more variant effort time frames of 9-24 months.
Trend Insight 2 - SMBs embracing self-owned e-commerce, either for the first time or to disintermediate marketplace players such as Takealot, Shopify and Amazon
Many businesses, especially those in the specialised or B2B space, saw footfall and in-store contact crater in 2020. But the demand for goods and services remained. Businesses which pivoted quickly to online sales and e-commerce platforms won. Some in the South African context like Bottles saw themselves acquired by the likes of Pick n Pay.
Outside of the pandemic concerns, a menace remains to all businesses which look to buy and sell online – the rise of the marketplace oligarchies such as Takealot, Shopify and Amazon. There are others, but all these businesses blend a model of facilitating the sale of goods on their platforms, charging rents and share of till for small businesses through a 'marketplace fee'.
This, in and of itself, is nothing new. Retail landlords and market makers have done so since the dawn of time. Many sellers are finding themselves being eaten by the marketplaces they have helped diversify. This happens because the marketplace providers can decide which of their SKUs are promoted and shown above those who may be marketplace participants.
We've seen a resurgence in the desire for self-owned and self-maintained e-commerce stores. It was something that had been on the wane for about half a decade with the rise of Shopify and similar platforms.
Merchants not only want, but need their own control of their brands, their stocks, and their value propositions. In 2020, Full Stack saw growth in this area. Businesses are looking to have more end to end integration with their inventory, finance and marketing systems. We expect to see this continue to be the case. And not only with businesses looking to move off the marketplace platforms with their ruinous percentages. It can also be seen with disrupted industries like dark kitchens and restaurant food delivery and traditional brick and mortar businesses that modify their operating models. They see more and more of their sales being directed online.
Trend Insight 3 - Content may no longer be king, but it is no joker
The rise of user-generated content, through platforms like the Facebook eco-system, YouTube and TikTok had its complete parity moment in 2020. With professional content production reduced to Skype and Zoom calls recorded for entertainment and news, the differences between professional and personal content creation narrowed.
The rise of streaming services continued to occur, and cord-cutting in South Africa accelerated. This raises concerns over Netflix and their ilk's impact on local content production and TV licence fees. Simultaneously, shows like HBO Max's Raised by Wolves used the local film production industry to significant effect.
As this relates to software development, a new wave of content management technologies is starting to break on the shore in 2021. The headless CMS for larger organisations is finally taking hold. Traditional dominant players such as Adobe, EPiServer and WordPress are finally seeing their stranglehold being loosened. The cause of this is content has stopped being "a happening" as much as it is a stream to be consumed as publishers see fit.
While custom publishing continues to leave customers underwhelmed with its advertorial nature, product placement and in-experience advertising and endorsements pioneered in podcasts and YouTube have become accepted parts of life to most modern content consumers.
In 2020, Full Stack saw content management initiatives and re-platforms succeed by driving relevant content; the old rules still apply – people engage with relevant content. In 2021 we can see that businesses who invest in refining and optimising their content platforms will continue to a significant return on their investment.
When we look back at one of our first projects when we were founded in 2014, we see a custom CMS still operating. This reminds us that content management systems have long usage horizons. When coupled with high class enduring design, it can bring about meaningful value for all content creators and users for many years. We expect 2021 to continue this need and trend.
Trend Insight 4 - Mobile technologies continue their drive into a vital commodity and an 'in-place' assistant to user-intent
It seems strange to think that mobility and mobile software have become even more relevant when so many of us are locked down. For years, Full Stack has seen mobile software as a multi-context environment. It is as likely to be used on the couch in the evening, like first thing in the morning. 2020 drove that home, as mobile app usage continued to soar. Many productivity apps saw blended-use between their desktop, web and app clients.
The convergence of apps and applications on the Mac/iOS platform is still be seen. Apple's development experience remains a complete mess. Apple has been an unignorable juggernaut globally, their disdain and dismissing of app store developers remains a concern. Businesses who wish to place their products on the store remains a concern of ours as well.
We'd want to say that this will eventually catch up with Apple, but that seems to be a losing bet. Full Stack recommends that those businesses targeting the Apple Store test their business model and plans with what is possible under the App Store guidelines.
The difficulty with which apps are developed has diminished in the last 12-24 months. Still, challenges remain, particularly in the way users have changed their usage patterns. They expect them to assist them as necessary, and are less a 'channel' the tune into on their phones, and more like a background tool to be pulled as needed.
Progressive apps have not taken off as we expected they wouldn't. However, semi-native tooling for apps have made some progress, but are still not as performant as pure native apps.
Even as technology has improved, apps remain a high analysis and consultancy endeavour. The app development sector remains riven with the problem of 'an uber of …" or "an app that does…". This is similar to the way websites were seen a magical before their commodification in the mid to late 2000s.
In 2021, we believe the apps that win will be the apps that place the user-intent at their heart. Winning apps won't try to overload users with functions better handled over the web or other contexts. With sensors and features of phones largely stabilised, this year will provide a time for improvement of existing mobile investments, and for the first time a mature platform environment for late adopting businesses who are looking to build their first mobile software with an experienced development partner.
Trend Insight 5 - Data refining is becoming industrialised
2020 was in many ways as the years before were – continued hype in overdrive around machine learning, AI, IoT and a word salad of acronyms. They continue for the most part to be augmentative at best, and indeed not extracting the deep insights they claim.
Despite every BI tool on earth being thrown at COVID-19 data sets, they proved their futility once and for all as active agents. They visualise and represent the past. Models trained on data are often inaccurate and occasionally wrong.
Weather forecasting became less accurate for the first time in many decades. The cause is that much of global supercomputing orientated towards work on COVID research. This was exacerbated by increasingly chaotic weather patterns,.
The deterministic dream of data being equivalent to knowledge remains precisely that – a dream deferred.
That being said, we believe that many excellent and vital data sets can and should be operationalised within businesses great and small. To do so, we can see companies moving towards a greater understanding and refinement of the data they actually have at hand. Not the mystical data sources they would like to have.
The analogy of big data to big oil is a tried and true one. So much technological air is expended currently on the future of data. Still, the present remains the dirty, messy and often speculative work of refining data within the enterprise. Enterprises remain hamstrung. They have few ways to achieve this needed industrialisation of data. By management consultancies selling panaceas, internal teams with entrenched positions, often paired with revolving-door relationships with database and analysis tool vendors.
2021 will see those businesses investing in data refining continuing to win. They will do this by having humble and realistic ambitions for data. Data can be used to make meaningful, incremental and daily inspection and adaption improvements within their organisations. Those who continue to believe the magic angels of ML and AI will grant them competitive advantage will find themselves with little more than large bills to cloud providers like AWS and Azure.