Resource Regions: Western Europe

Next week I am attending the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona. I’ve have been an attendee, exhibitor and speaker at this annual gathering for many years now, and it’s great to see that in the past couple of years there has been a growing focus on inclusion.

Gone are the days when speaking about bright and shiny new tech toys was enough. Cities are eager to understand how to become truly people centric, including for people with disabilities. On the inclusion front, one topic that I’d like to hear more about at the Expo, in 2022 and beyond, is how to make cities autism friendly.

A Global Phenomenon

According to the World Health Organization, one in every 100 children has autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The US Center for Disease Control estimates it is one in every 44 in the US. If we consider a conservative estimate of one in every 100, then of the 4 billion people worldwide that live in urban areas, 40 million would have ASD. UN projections indicate that we’ll have 7 billion urban dwellers by 2050, meaning 70 million with ASD, assuming the prevalence of ASD does not change.

Autism is a challenging neurodevelopmental disorder. It’s a broad spectrum that includes people with cognitive, speech and motion disabilities, people with milder challenges but that still have a hard time speaking and socialising, and people with high-functioning autism (such as Asperger’s Syndrome), who can be like the genius “good doctor” in the TV series of the same name, but with the crying, screaming and lashing out when overwhelmed by stress, shiny lights, loud noise or unexpected events — stress that can be caused by hypersensitivity to noise, light, smell, touch and an inability to comprehend social interactions. Coping with ASD in a hyper stimulating environment like a city is like trying to share a file between a Mac and a PC in 1985. I know this because I have a beautiful eight-year-old son who has ASD.

Making the Urban Space and the Community Liveable

Making cities liveable for the millions of people that have ASD is a global inclusion imperative. Cities such as Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Liverpool and Glasgow in the UK; Phoenix, Mesa and Austin in the US; Prato in Italy; and tiny villages such as Clonakilty, in Ireland, are exploring how they can reimagine urban spaces and community services to become more autism friendly.

When it comes to urban spaces — both indoor, such as shops, theatres, cinemas, restaurants, museums, public transport, and outdoors, such as streets and parks — unpredictable noises, lights, smells and queues may cause sensory distress to people with autism. Adjusting ventilation, acoustics, heating, lighting, creating quiet spaces to recalibrate after a stressful moment, deploying visual signage that combines words with images, making available sensory guides and social stories to reduce the unexpected and making available small kits with “stim” toys can go a long way to improve liveability for people with autism.

When it comes to the community, lack of awareness about autism can lead to judgements. Autistic people talking to themselves in a library, for instance, can get unfriendly looks. As a result, people with autism and their families tend to isolate from social life.

It’s essential to educate people working in shops, restaurants, cinemas, museums, libraries, schools and healthcare facilities. Business owners need to understand how they can leverage the great skills that many autistic people can bring to the workplace, such as declarative memory.

Government institutions have a role to play to provide coordinated support across family allowance programmes, mental health services, job training and placement, and schools, without requiring people with autism and their families to explain their condition and needs at every point of interaction with the public administration.

How Technology Can Help

Technology is not a silver bullet. Cities have had enough smart techno solutionism. Autism is the least suitable area for cookie-cutter approaches because every person with autism is at a different place on the “spectrum”, with their own special characteristics and needs. But technology can help.

When it comes to urban spaces, using location-based intelligence, digital twins and other tools can help map areas of the city that are the least liveable for people with autism and plan alternative designs. Apps can be used to offer people autism-friendly sensory and navigation maps.

When it comes to the community, online training can help increase awareness. Apps can help communicate with people with autism who are not verbal.

Online services can be used to pre-book fast-tracking entry at certain facilities to avoid the stress of queueing. And public administrations across the city ecosystem should scale trusted data sharing to do a better job of coordinating public services that support people with autism and their families.

I look forward to hearing and learning more about autism-friendly cities at the Smart City Expo and beyond. My son and the tens of millions of people with autism deserve to be included.

Retail has undergone a huge transformation in the past few years. It’s also still under pressure from external forces and changing buyer behaviour. With buyers changing how they shop and why they shop, retailers need to ensure that their brand purpose aligns with their customers and enhances their internal operations. At the recent IDC Retail Summit, IDC analysts and industry leaders got together to discuss how retailers can operate in a purpose-led world.

Watch IDC’s 2022 Retail Summit on demand here.

The Need to Bridge the Gap Between Online and Offline Retail Experience

The pandemic has forced many changes in retail and now, with offline beginning to expand again, retailers need to bridge the gap between expectations created by online experiences.

Customers are used to a certain experience online, and this can cause friction between their online experience and their experience in brick-and-mortar stores. Technology can help bridge this gap, bringing aspects of the online experience such as personalisation, rewards and speed into the offline experience.

A huge part of bridging this gap is identity management. Identity management isn’t just about security. As digital shopping experiences pick up, retailers can gather more and more data on buyer behaviour. Customers and the way they buy are changing quickly. Understanding who your customers are and how they are buying is important to ensure your company can adapt to a changing buyer.

Digital Transformation Needs to be Practical

Digital transformation is a key part of retailers’ development, and is key to bridging the gap between offline and online experiences and communicating and demonstrating brand purpose. But with all change, it must be effective. Technology that is implemented must be useable and easy to adopt, for employees and customers. Incremental changes that bring value without too much disruption are ideal.

Technology can be a bridge between stores, HQ and employees. Implementing technology as part of digital transformation can help break silos in retail organisations and drive innovation and collaboration by streamlining processes. It can empower teams in stores by giving them information and connecting them to the wider team. It can provide HQ with real-time store data and ensure that teams that work in all parts of the retailer work together effectively and efficiently. Collaboration and communication are vital. When introducing new programmes, tech or functionality, being able to communicate why is important across the organisation. Retailers’ key personas and employees need to understand business priorities but also feel that changes are there to help them and build towards achieving their goals and brand purpose.

Brand Purpose Impacts Everything from Buying Decisions to Employee Productivity

Purpose is becoming increasingly important to brands, but especially those in the retail sector. Customers are becoming more conscious of the social, ethical and environmental impact of the products they buy, and purpose is now part of many customers’ buying decisions.

Customers have expectations for a brand or company experience, not just for the retailer itself but for the whole supply chain. While some of those expectations might not be realistic, retailers have to ensure that their brand purpose is as much a part of their messaging as product information.

Brand purpose is also important for employees. A clear brand purpose that aligns with the products sold is effective in both recruitment and in creating a strong company culture. A strong company culture impacts productivity and improves the customer experience. A company purpose that reflects the core values of your staff and products is now crucial.

Purpose connects value for retail optimisation. It defines the what, the why and the how of a retailer’s business, and it is one of the most influential connectors for retail proceedings and a powerful facilitator of operation and process optimisation.

Retailers are operating in a shifting environment. Purpose is key to ensuring they continue to align with their customers. It also promotes internal coordination and the drive towards an aligned and connected organisation that delivers value. It enhances performance and creates value. This is why, of all the topics discussed at IDC’s 2022 Retail Summit, purpose stood out.

For more information, please watch IDC’s 2022 Retail Summit on demand here. For more insights and key takeaways from the summit from IDC Retail Insights analysts, see Retail Operations in a Purpose-Led World: Key Insights from the IDC European Retail Executive Digital Summit 2022.

For more on our coverage of the retail sector, please visit our website.

Agile development empowers teams with many benefits but also presents challenges around managing and measuring its effectiveness. The way to resolve these is Function Point Analysis.

From business impediment to business enabler, IT development has come a long way since Agile has become the favored practice. Now empowered with speed and responsiveness, organizations have left the days of slow, cumbersome, inflexible, and unresponsive practices behind in the dust. Instead they’re able to support business needs and experience better alignment with changing business environments better than ever before.

It’s easy to understand why Agile is experiencing a strong increase in adoption; as companies become more nimble to embrace the pressures they’re facing in digital transformation, IT development is able to respond aggressively to evolving competitors and exploit markets more easily. But these benefits rival the frustrations on the management side of Agile teams. The nature of Agile makes it so that IT has lost visibility and scope control while the business has lost predictability. While Agile might make teams fast and responsive, businesses don’t know when projects will be delivered, and quality of delivery is often poor.

This is due to story points. Story points is a relative and subjective effort measurement that allows teams to estimate how much work of a certain item is required compared to a certain reference story with a fixed number of points. Story points can be used as an assessment method within a team. But how do these points happen? In an Agile Scrum environment, productivity is often associated with delivered story points, often expressed in Velocity as an estimation unit. The problem is that story points are not standardized, and productivity based on story points means nothing outside of a team itself. Even within a team, story point deflation is always lurking.

Is it even possible to objectively measure productivity? This blog will show that using a ratio scale is the way to objectively measure productivity as proven by IDC Metri’s years of helping clients turn around this common challenge. Management information can be established through a ‘unit of measurement’, bringing answers to long-sought after questions such as which teams are performing well, which teams are not performing so well and when is which functionality ready at what cost?

If you want to use productivity to compare teams, departments, organizations and/or suppliers, or the market, it’s a necessity to use a standard measure of output. Even when this data is about trends on your teams, this insight creates a unified and common view.

For years IDC Metri has been offering function points to create this factual view to clients. Function point analysis was developed in the 1970s to determine the productivity of development teams when it was impossible to do this by counting lines of code. By making function point analysis independent of the technical implementation (programming language, architecture, etc.) and the development method (Waterfall, Agile, etc.), it’s also relevant today and fits into the solution that Agile teams and management need to resolve the challenges that story points create. In short function points are the de-facto standard to express the amount of functionality in a standardized size unit.

Several manual standards are available and one international ISO standard is available for automated function point analysis: ‘Automated Function Points (AFP)’. IDC Metri prefers to use automated measuring of functional size but also employs certified analysts who can manually measure when automated measuring is not possible for whatever reason.

To measure the size of the output of a team, it is also important to not only look at the added functionality but also at the changed and removed functionality. IDC Metri uses automated measuring of ‘Enhancement Function Points (EFP)’ to measure how much functionality has been added, changed and/or removed during a sprint, release or project. This gives the ‘Project Size’ in EFP, a standardized method to measure the output of a sprint or release.

While Agile is hard to measure and manage for full value, the IDC Metri proven approach of using function points transforms a team-driven, fast-moving, rapid iteration process that evaluates progress on qualitative measures into something that can be quantified and predicted.

Governments have never been in a storm like the one we’re in today, and national and local administrations need to reinvent themselves as a new era is about to start.

In these unprecedented times, European governments are aiming to improve their ability to withstand long-term volatility and uncertainty, particularly through digital trust and operational resilience programmes.

In doing so, new business models will emerge to fulfil current and future challenges:

• Allocating the Recovery and Resilience Funds to the right priorities and purposes
• Selecting the right technologies to achieve short-term efficiency and long-term resilience
• Improving the citizen and civil servant experience by making the most of technology but also implementing deep cultural and organisational transformation to enable them to reimagine service delivery

IDC conducted an in-depth survey, including 230 senior executives and directors, to investigate the strategic business priorities and key action plans for European governments. The survey looked at the technology solutions that governments are investing in to execute their strategy and action plans, and the challenges they face in their strategic technology innovation investments.

European Government Business Transformation and Technology Priorities

According to the 230 European government decision makers that IDC interviewed:

• Their main purpose is to improve citizen experience and quality of life. By keeping this in mind, they might also facilitate other short-term initiatives. This goal must become a state-of-mind for every civil servant and government decision maker.
• The main barriers to innovation are not only budget (with RFFs impacted by fast-growing inflation) but also citizen trust and outdated IT. Again, both technical and cultural changes should occur simultaneously to regain trust.
• Redesigning services and business processes around the needs of citizens are key steps to achieve resilience. Technology is a critical part of this transformation, but it should go hand in hand with innovative approaches and a greater focus on change. European governments believe that governance, risk and compliance and data management tools are critical to execute digital trust programmes. Digital sovereignty is frequently discussed by European policymakers, but our survey shows that only civil servants in some countries, such as France and Germany, are already prioritising it to increase digital trust.
• Emerging technologies such as 5G, AR/VR and edge computing are key areas of investment to imagine new ways of delivering public services.
• European governments that want to master a citizen-centric approach are adjusting their KPIs accordingly and aggregating data to build a holistic view of citizen needs and implement the once-only principle.
• Long-term challenges — especially sustainability — can’t be fought alone. Governments’ ability to work closely with an ecosystem, through data sharing and massive investments in data capabilities, will be key.

What Are the Key Components of a Disruptive Approach?

Check out the following IDC European government “PRIME” survey studies (subscription required) to learn more about how European governments are aligning technology investment to societal Purposes, strengthening Resilience, Imagining new service delivery models, Mastering citizen and employee centricity, and opening up to the Ecosystem:

• European Governments’ Purpose Programs: The Role of Technology in Improving Citizen Experience and Setting Up New KPIs
• European Government Resilience Programs: Digital Trust, Operational Redesign, and IT Architecture Transformation Must Converge to Achieve Resilience
• European Government Technology Innovation Strategies: Reimagining Public Sector Services and Operations
• What European Governments Need to Master Their Future: Citizen Experience, Employee Experience, and Environmental Sustainability Goals and Capabilities for the Future
• European Government Ecosystem Strategies: Accelerating Digital Transformation Through Ecosystem Collaboration