Harvey Nash's Tech Survey

Last night was the London Launch Event for the Harvey Nash Global Tech Survey Report - Race for Your Life.

The Report itself contains some obvious points, e.g. Younger Companies tend to be more innovative than established ones. However there were some surprising findings Construction and Engineering is the leading sector for innovation, with twice the preportion of respondents claiming their organisation is innovative than say Finance (which is investing heavily in FinTech). The FMCG  and Consumer led sector came bottom with less than 5% claiming any innovation.

Encouragingly enough the proportion of respondents who claimed that their organisation is innovative had also grown since the previous survey. Happily enough CTOs came out as more innovative than CIOs (which they should be, as its part of the job description), but CEOs also came a nose ahead of CIOs too.

As the survey is run by a recruitment specialist there is a focus on a number of recruitment centric issues. There are stong sentiments that Ageism dominates recruitment with adverse impact from your 40s onward. People still beleive that a human recruiter is far better than a machine at matching people with the right jobs. There is an increasing emphasis on completely refreshing skills every 5 years with many people investing personally in their skills.

In fact a lot of the panel discussion focussed on how organisations look at people, culture and mixed / diverse teams when building them. It seems that there is a frustration that older people cannot seem to get their CVs past recruitment consultants to the hiring manager. So what is the bottleneck there?

Close to 40% of people felt that automation would affect their jobs. Whilst this is quite high, considering that the last 30 years have been spent trying to automate IT people out of their jobs (without much success), it is probably quite necessary as there is a worldwide shortage of talent.

Two things struck me from the panel discussion however. One was positive, given that the panelists were from Tech start ups and Digital Model based companies; they all considered themselves to be the guardians of their business's appraoch to ethics. 

The negative was how much they failed to convey an understanding of innovation. They were seduced by the acquisition of technologies (by one means or another), but none of them mentioned how they empathised with customers to get at their real needs. There was no discussion of design thinking.

The other issue which came alongside this was how all of them were only just getting to grips with the idea of designing and operating to avoid technical debt. Previously, they had all been in too much of a hurry to just deliver something.

So in terms of how mature is the average operator in the new Digital As Usual (DAU) world. It's looking like 5 out of 10 to me.