Three ways TMT companies can simplify to improve profits and scale

Abstract 1
Three ways TMT companies can simplify to improve profits and scale
Barak Ravid, Ray Anderson, Lukas HoebarthSource: https://www.ey.com/en_us/strategy/three-ways-tmt-companies-can-simplify-to-improve-profits-and-scale
For the past decade many TMT companies deployed a grow-at-all-costs strategy. They fueled this strategy with acquisitions, new product lines and new business capabilities. They expanded into new geographies and customer segments. The reduction in revenue across certain segments exposed a high fixed cost structure driven by complex and inefficient operating models that have evolved at many TMT companies. TMT companies can leverage the current crisis as the impetus to reduce complexity in their organizations and lay the foundation for sustained profitability.
Efforts focused on aligning and streamlining critical product development processes to advance future initiatives. This simplification in operations and increased focus helped the company realize a more than 10% increase in operating margin and the company stock price more than doubled over five years.
In the current environment, companies have an opportunity to make targeted capital investments to advance strategic priorities. Implementing a top-down sustainable approach to cost reduction provides fuel to accelerate strategic investments during this period of uncertainty.
Companies often have highly complex portfolios and struggle to maintain focus across the entirety of the portfolio to deliver sustainable results. Increasingly complex portfolio size and scope can make it difficult to achieve business objectives and enable sustainable growth.
As many high-growth TMT companies are beginning their first large-scale cost reduction effort, they can approach it as an opportunity to demonstrate to stakeholders that they can reduce costs and develop an efficient and scalable platform for the future.
Abstract 2
Functional programming. Does it work in real life?
Iaroslav KarkunovSource: https://bulldogjob.com/articles/792-functional-programming-does-it-work-in-real-lifeFunctional programming is compared to working “backwards” and some complain that it’s more about solving puzzles rather than working with code. One of the biggest FP advantages is its ability to perform higher-level abstractions that conceal details of routine operations such as iterations. The code turns out to be shorter, so it guarantees a smaller number of mistakes you can possibly make. FP also contains less language primitives. Well-known classes are simply not used in FP.
There is a pressing issue with parallel processing and work related to large data streams, or in other words, Big Data. By paralleling the data processing, you can achieve results within a fraction of a second, which is critical in real world situations.
In the last years functional programming was used only for solving some specific tasks, but now people use it even for classic projects. We can say for sure that major IT companies should not hesitate to use functional programming.
The project ‘the Intetics’ is about developing a system of adaptive education for a broad audience, from educational establishments to various non-academic courses like wine making. Another part of the project is corporate education, which means developing an educational course for the specific needs of a company or an organization.
It was a flow enabling quick UI creation for various platforms. It made the process much easier because he could quickly implement changes and solve tasks related to the project. In addition, there still aren't many cross-platform functional languages, so the project really stands out.
Abstract 3
Why Business IT Innovation is so DifficultMaggie StarvishSource: https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-business-it-innovation-is-so-difficult
Harvard Business School professor Kristina Steffenson McElheran studies the effect of information technology on business process innovation.
McElheran believes IT has the potential to completely transform the supply side of business by flattening hierarchies, shrinking supply chains, and speeding communications. McElheran explored the characteristics of firms that engage in radical business process innovation versus incremental change. It's widely understood that when it comes to product innovation, market-leading firms are often more likely than laggards to pursue product improvements in a very incremental way – a practice that protects short-term competitive advantage but that makes firms vulnerable to innovative upstarts over the long haul.
She was also struck by how the reality of e-business innovation portrayed in the census data differed from what she had read in the press. The e-business that was being done among survey participants matched the original theory: larger firms, market leaders, were more likely to adopt the incremental change of e-buying, while smaller firms were more likely to adopt the radical change of e-selling. E-selling is harder to adopt because it's a complicated process, which is naturally made more complex when it has to be implemented across a large, distributed organization.
McElheran measured how long small- to medium-sized US companies took to respond to an online sales lead. A companion study shows that companies that respond to queries from potential customers within an hour are 7 times more likely to connect with a key decision maker than those that wait more than an hour, and 60 times more likely than those that wait more than 24 hours. It would of course be impossible for one manager to do all that in a larger organization, and McElheran can't say for sure which part matters most. "Is it the flatness of the organization? Is it a process where the IT output is evaluated every day? Is it because the company invested heavily in customizing the IT?" Future research is aimed at answering these questions.
Abstract 4
IT Job Wages Are No Longer 'Exceptional'
Rachel Layne
Source: https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/it-jobs-are-no-longer-exceptional
In all but the largest cities, wage growth in IT jobs has become relatively moderate following the dot-com boom, coming to resemble wage patterns seen in the broader STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) labor market trends. And in geographic regions where competition is fiercest for IT talent, superstar performers do not earn the same high premium they once did over their average-performing peers.
IT wages, while still high relative to many other occupations, have lost their “exceptional” luster. IT wage premiums today have more to do with where a job is practiced than with rewarding specific skills.
Beginning with the invention of the personal computer in the 1980s, IT wages commanded a premium over other STEM salaries. This trend continued with the expansion of the internet, especially in high-tech clusters. Two distinct and competing forces changed IT wages starting around the year 2000. Digital wage inequality widened almost entirely due to rising local premiums in a few urban metropolises, where wage spreads became narrower than elsewhere.
Wages likely are higher in those five cities compared with the rest of the nation because of a higher concentration of college-educated workers and competition for talent is fierce, the researchers point out. Whether further education, such as a master's degree, would help IT professionals boost salaries both in the top competitive areas and outside them needs further study. When evaluating wage levels, corporate compensation experts and managers may want to consider that IT wages are trending toward other STEM professions in most parts of the country.
Abstract 5
Principles that Matter: Sustaining Software
Innovation from the Client to the Web
Marco IansitiSource: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/09-142_02c0224f-fa84-4e5e-9e01-b16495b10974.pdf
Economic analysis often reviews the role of principles—such as respect for intellectual property rights—in driving innovation. Given the interdependent nature of innovation in information technology, three core principles have emerged that work together to ensure that complementary, interconnected products coexist and compete. These core principles are particularly important when applied to platforms, which have played a central role in enabling the development and distribution of the variety of applications and services that drive the popularity of software.
The first principle focuses on enabling choice: firms should allow consumers and partners to have a real choice between complementary products and services from otherwise competing firms (e.g., a browser should enable a consumer to choose a home page provided by a competitor).
The second principle focuses on opportunity: specifically, opportunity that is facilitated by giving developers platform access and the ability to innovate and build on platform technologies to create new products and services.
The third principle focuses on interoperability: vendors should enable products to work together so customers can realize the full benefit of complementary products offered by competing vendors. Following this principle enables products to connect to each other in appropriately defined ways, and ensures that users can port their data between products securely and reliably.
This paper reviews the rationale for these principles and examines their impact on competition in the cloud computing ("internet software") environment.