DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Barry Duncan

Amid what feels like increasingly uncertain times, demonstrated by growing numbers of extreme weather events, destabilising political changes, unexpected and unnecessary armed conflicts and the occasional global pandemic to contend with, it is hardly surprising that global economic growth took a bit of a hit over the course of 2022 and that hit looks to continue into 2023. As with earlier periods of low growth, that manifests itself by reduced M&A activity and other forms of investment for businesses. At least for a time.

INVESTMENT ACTIVITY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH DECLINES IN 2022

At the end of 2022, The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) predicted the UK economy would likely not return to growth until late 2023. On the back of recent falls in business confidence, they also forecast that business investment will fall by 3.0% in 2023, a substantial revision to a previously anticipated modest growth.

Part of the problem is that significant unanticipated disruption seems to have become somewhat normal, rather than occasional – war, social unrest, blocked supply chains, pandemic, financial and economic crisis, one after the other have all contributed, in the last few years, to make the UK an increasingly difficult environment for many UK businesses.

All UK operators have had to contend with an ongoing Cost of Living Crisis which has added to manufactures, retailers and service providers’ cost burdens in terms of rising materials and energy prices, wages and pensions costs, business rates and regulatory compliance. The House of Commons states the annual rate of inflation peaked at 11.1% in October 2022, a 41-year high, and confidently predicts it will reduce substantially across 2023 but this may provide insufficient comfort for those businesses that are already struggling.

To be clear, the current headwinds faced by businesses in the UK is not a unique phenomenon. Recently, Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the IMF predicted more than one third of economies likely to go into recession over the course of 2023, which will make it harder still for UK businesses.

Many company owners and manager have endured economic slowdowns in the past, with many of the longer-tenured having had to weather multiple ‘crisis’ over two or three decades. Those that came out stronger from those crisis-testing experiences learned how to concentrate upon operational improvements to their businesses in order to help them through those downturns and in anticipation of market upturn and renewed consumer confidence. That sort of operational focus has traditionally concentrated upon fairly standard value creation opportunities along the lines of improving salesforce efficiencies in order to grow revenue, fundamental cost management exercises, including supply chain efficiencies, improvement to working capital efficiency and talent enhancements.

Enter your details below to continue reading the article and learn more about the Digital Dozen technology-related opportunities for COO’s and Other C-Suite Executives to Consider during this period of reduced investment activity.

Enter your details below and we will send the PDF article on Digital IT Value Levers for Actively Evolving Companies straight to your inbox.

DO YOU NEED TO DIGITALLY OPTIMISE YOUR BUSINESS?

WE’RE EXPERTS
IN OUR FIELD

We are experts in what we do. Committed professionals who are at the leading edge of our specialised field.

LATEST

POSTS

All the elements of recovering a failing IT project that we’ve previously described are important and can become critical when things start to go wrong. They all need to be attended to but if we had to emphasise any particular factors, it would be Inclusion, Communication and Culture – from the outset and throughout. Get this wrong, and your project is far more likely to fail.

Let me be clear up front - automation alone won’t directly reduce your tickets resolution time by 95%, but its wider application across your business functions potentially will. Why do we recommend Automation of business IT tasks? Well because it reduces the number and seriousness of mistakes introduced by employees still carrying out tasks manually. It also reduces the number of tasks sat in someone’s inbox waiting to be completed. Automation can introduce efficiencies where manual tasks were previously reliably encouraging human error and contributing to your IT Services’ mountain of tickets needing resolution. Automation can help streamline processes, improve accuracy and achieve a new level of reliability to those manual tasks inevitably prone to human error. 

The UK apparel market and its customers were as shocked by the changes forced upon it by the pandemic as were retailers and their customers in other consumer sub-sectors. The fortitude and innovation exhibited by apparel retail and manufacturers, and their respective consumers is nothing short of impressive. As a whole, those groups have adapted to changing technology to rapidly execute revised strategies that serve and sell to consumers with similarly revised aspirations. Yet, as we itemised in our opening post, challenges persist for all those participants.Â