28 Oct 2020

Future-proofing your tech stack

We recently completed a piece of digital consulting to help a global technology company understand best practices in terms of tech stacks for B2B organisations, upcoming consolidations in marketing software tools, and how their current tech stack needed to adapt to support their business goals.

Our work was organised into three parts:

1. Outlining of what the future technology stack of an advanced B2B company will look like, with a particular focus on CRM and Webshop items

2. Presenting an overview of what kind of developments and market consolidation of tools to expect in the coming years

3. Providing personalised recommendations on technology to integrate into the organisation's existing tech stack

Within the space of tech-enabled transformation, and its potential to positively impact B2B organisations, there are three main factors you should consider when adopting new digital tools. 

  1. The impact of a rapidly changing workforce

    • As the millennial workforce grows, the ability to adopt new tech and not shy away from automating tasks is more important than ever in attracting and retaining talent.

  2. Faster moving ecosystems of customers and suppliers

    • Adopting new tech is not only a factor among your potential workforce, but also among your users (expectations for high quality UX) and partners (“...they will prefer to engage and partner with innovative organisations”).

  3. Digital disruptors and the need to reimagine operations

    • The potential for an economic slowdown is a factor in favor of embracing new tech that supports your future business objectives and sets you apart from the competition.

Estimates suggest that B2B organisations could generate over $1 Trillion in value through embedding the use of digital technologies, analytics, and the Internet of Things into their operations. Simply put, the impact of smart investing should be considered by organisations who aim to be competitive in the market as more people are being convinced of its benefits.

Estimates suggest that B2B organisations could generate over $1 Trillion in value through embedding the use of digital technologies, analytics, and the Internet of Things into their operations.

Now, where to start? There are five main areas where digital transformation can be applied to enhance your organisation's productivity.

  1. Running the corporation
    1. Modernising finance function
    2. Optimising workforce (HR)
    3. Building scalable tech infrastructure (data security)
  2. Innovating and Developing Products/Services
    1. Updating business models with data 
    2. Enhancing R&D processes
  3. Making and Delivering
    1. Optimising procurement
    2. Improving forecasting capabilities
    3. Improving manufacturing and distribution outlets
  4. Selling
    1. Improving digital marketing performance
    2. Optimising the UX
    3. Adopting IoT updates at dealers and retailers
  5. Servicing 
    1. Managing customer demand
    2. Optimising and managing production
    3. Delivering high quality UX

While these areas have been isolated into five sections, and your needs as an organisation may not encompass all of these, studies have shown that 50% more value was generated by companies that took a comprehensive approach to transformation as opposed to those who focused solely on single technology improvements.

This means getting down to the core of your business needs. For example, mapping how the results of the technology, more than the technology itself, supports your overarching business strategy. 

And there’s no better time then now.

The above graph, taken from a McKinsey study entitled “Tech-enabled Transformation: A CEO’s guide to maximizing impact in industrials,” reveals a correlation between an updated and efficient tech stack and an increase in revenue, gross margin, and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization), relevant to the speed in which organisations adopted new technology.

Source: McKinsey Report, Tech-enabled transformation

Ultimately, an effective tech stack is in line with both business and user goals. Not just about what it can do for internal processes, but also how it can support the user. Bringing a user experience perspective to your strategy will help improve both sales and marketing performance

Below are three main areas where Catch can help guide you in this process:

1. Take inventory of your current tech-stack and identify opportunities for improvement

  • We’ve created an outline to walk clients through that includes a series of questions organisations must ask themselves if they want to find the best way to incorporate new technology into their processes. 

2. Mapping out both internal (employee experience) and external (user experience) user journeys to isolate areas for consolidation or addition of tools/services 

  • We bring an objective outlook to the table, which is key to unlocking the full potential of your digital transformation project. 

3. Securing buy-in across your organisation by showing examples of proven success

  • Digital transformation is as much about the technology as it is about the people who support and use it every day. A digital transformation project without securing buy-in from all levels of the organisation will not succeed. 

Get in touch to learn how Catch can facilitate an online workshop to help finalise your tech stack decisions and provide support with performance monitoring through custom reporting.

25 Oct 2019

Goodbye Sketch...

Hi, I'm Sam Hainsworth, Design Lead at Catch, and I want to tell you about our Creative Team's recent move from Sketch to Figma and the benefits it has brought us in creating a more collaborative and efficient work process.

It wasn’t so long since that if you asked a designer what software they used to create just about anything, the answer would more likely have included the word ‘Adobe’.

Today, there are so many options to bring creativity to life, that a big question more often than not is: what’s the best design software out there right now? And the answer for a while was Sketch, but not anymore. 

Our hearts have been stolen by Figma.

What’s Figma you ask? In many ways, it’s exactly like Sketch…Invision, Principle, Craft, Google Drive, and Dropbox. It may sound like a Frankenstein's mess of a platform, but it’s possibly the greatest design eco-system ever built to date (my own views here...!)

Figma at heart is a web app - yes, no software needed other than a web browser - that allows Designers, Developers, and Clients to collaborate together to make beautiful creations of any kind. It's the first piece of software that has managed to combine a design tool, prototyping, and animation that allows teams to be able to work together with ease.

For the sake of this article, I’ve split it into 2 key areas (designing and prototyping ) on why we think Figma is the king.


Designing with Figma

As a design tool, Figma is A LOT like Sketch. They’ve certainly done a great job at making the transition from Sketch to Figma easy for us: the interface feels the same, we still have symbols, artboards, etc. But there are some pretty important differences.

Real-time collaboration 

Remember the first time you opened Google Docs and saw someone else typing in real-time, deep down thinking “wow, we really are in the future”, well Figma has taken the idea of real-time collaboration and applied it within their software, allowing multiple people to work on one project at once.

It might sound like you could have the classic hovering Creative Director watching your every movement from the comfort of their own seat, but it becomes such a useful tool. No more do you have 2 Designers working on multiple files and then merging their creative 2 hours later to find they’ve used different fonts weights or having to export assets for each other. This real-time collaboration lets designers have a single source of truth for each project and collaborate in tandem, rather than in silos.

Connected design systems

With many concurrent projects in an agency, one thing that can be a real struggle to keep is consistency. Over the years, projects grow and with that so do the components and styles that build these websites, apps, platforms, etc. Design systems within Sketch (or any other design tool for that matter) are static files that can often get forgotten about or duplicated along the way, creating chaos.

These systems, within Figma, act as your hymn sheet for each client; letting you store reusable assets that can be shared across the design team and projects. Figma transforms these static design systems into live breathing sources of truth (sounds a big deal, well it really is!) that can be worked on together and pulled across many different projects.

 

File management 

Now, this may sound boring, but this truly is such a game-changer: How many times have you been looking for the final creative you worked on 3 months ago, only to find 4 files all with the word ‘FINAL’ at the end of it. Or to not even be able to find where it was saved in the first place?

With Figma, all files are saved within their own cloud eco-system; allowing you to access all your files anywhere, at any time; and with their neat interface, ways of organising and sorting, it's so much easier to access the whole teams’ files.

 

Version history

Last, but by no means least, we have version history: which is again a real lifesaver and means you don’t need to create hundreds of duplicate files anymore. Figma allows you to go back in time and see how your designs have progressed, giving you the option to create key milestones in the project. 

 

Prototyping with Figma

This is where Figma gets really interesting. In the past, prototyping meant uploading your designs to Invision, Marvel, etc. and then adding interactions and repeating every time you got feedback. Figma takes that pain away and lets you prototype and present directly. Essentially, letting you create a clickable prototype and show off fully animated interactions.

Inline commenting

This feature allows anyone to comment inline with the designs you're working on, which sounds like both a blessing and a curse, but it takes the pain out of amends. Now being able to read a comment directly in your design means no more missing feedback and once the amend is done, that’s it: no need to re-upload your prototype, it’s all right there.

Animation

If prototyping wasn’t enough, Figma has recently added ‘Smart Animation’ to the mix, allowing you to quickly create smooth animations and transitions giving your prototypes that extra layer of finish and finesse.

Goodbye Sketch, it’s been emotional

Ok, we still like Sketch and it does still do a few things better than Figma, but right now Figma is in its early days and rolling out features like no tomorrow and we couldn’t be happier with where they’re taking this amazing tool.

So, for now, goodbye Sketch, it’s been emotional.

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