I’ve been the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Unit4 for around three years, but I joined as Chief Architect in our innovation labs closer to eight years ago. When I arrived, many of the questions my team was seeking to answer revolved around the cloud. At the time, many were taking a ‘lift and shift’ approach, but we became obsessed with the idea of starting from scratch and building a cloud-native platform.
After many late-night eureka moments and plenty of trial and error, we were able to bring a unique, ultra-scalable solution to the market – and I’m now in the somewhat interesting but rewarding position of having to run what I have built!
As of 2022, we are a mid-size software company with markets worldwide and around 3,000 employees. Our clients tend to be small or medium people-centric businesses in sectors including higher education, IT, construction, and the public sector.
As Chief Technology Officer, I am responsible for anything to do with engineering, including (but not limited to) code, processes, and operations. I love my role because I get to see what the world looks like for our customers as well as what it looks like for our people, and draw fascinating comparisons between the two in relation to key trends. Over the past five years, in particular, I have been tracking the evolution of the ‘gratification’, ‘sharing’, or ‘on-demand’ economy.
The rise of the on-demand economy
Over the past decade, our burgeoning access to on-demand services such as lift share apps, streaming services, and in one extreme example, drone deliveries. Globally, the on-demand food delivery market alone is expected to hit $161.74bn by 2025.
The nature of the on-demand economy is closely tied to what we do here at Unit4; the demand for always-on, seamless access to cloud-based software is the lynchpin of our offering. For our clients, the best user interface (UI) is someone else’s! Thus, we have been focused on developing our Enterprise Resource Planning software (ERP) so that, for example, forms are prepopulated, meaning our clients (and indeed their clients), can access what they need, as soon as they need it. But my interest in the changing economy goes far beyond the products that we sell.
It’s no secret that this trend has transformed the world of work in the broadest sense, as clients interact with businesses and the all-but-self-employed workers they employ on a transaction-by-transaction basis. But the question that fuels my thoughts on an everyday basis is? What does it mean to be in business during the coming-of-age of the on-demand economy?
In terms of how we connect with and engage our staff, this notion is inextricably linked with some of the other key existential questions faced by businesses over the past few years: the value of a clear company culture in the face of a global skills shortage and the challenge of remote working, to name just two. Ultimately, all of these come down to providing the best possible experience, no matter whom you are dealing with.
The expectation that customer experience is seamless, innate, perfectly personalized, and yet wholly invisible is an immediate challenge for all businesses to resolve for their colleagues, customers, and clients. Even with all the inside knowledge I have of the tech industry, I never anticipated how quickly this gratification mindset would accelerate in the wake of the pandemic. With expectation and delivery forever changed, failing to recognize its importance is fast becoming a non-negotiable for service providers and employers alike.
There are a lot of parallels between the experience we provide for our clients and the experience we provide for our colleagues.
The new employee experience
Like today’s customers, today’s talent expects a seamless, personalized journey. Having this ingrained so deeply in the Unit4 mindset is what is helping us provide a better experience for everyone. Best of all? It’s a mutually-beneficial enterprise; the acceleration of tech is helping us empower people to focus and spend more time on high-value work.
A large part of our response to the pandemic has been adapting as quickly as we can, creating a different infrastructure and harnessing increasingly powerful tech to help us automate tasks, reduce inefficiencies and make our people and our business more productive. We know, for example, that office work is not going to be our predominant way of working going forward. By embracing technology, we are now able to take care of everything from the big things such as tracking how and where our people do their best work and so streamlining business processes, down to the small things that clear the deck for great thinking, helpful little tasks like automatic expense forms. Cloud-based technology is core to helping us work in new and dynamic ways. But there has also been a huge cultural shift for everyone involved – especially as our business has become more global.
No matter where people are located, they can now communicate effectively via different channels created specifically to help them navigate their working lives. I have been particularly interested to see how people have responded to our partnership with LinkedIn Learning. This allows them not only to upskill and train in line with the needs of the business on a global scale but also to zoom in on their needs as individuals, again on an on-demand basis. After a successful pilot among our engineers, we are now rolling out the platform company-wide. Depending on their interests, role, and level of seniority, people can access the learning pathways needed to help them grow. We have already seen amazing results – with 63% of staff logging in monthly (72% of them more than once), spending an average of 1.7 hours learning at a time. I’m told by LinkedIn that Unit4 has consistently been above the 75th percentile for all benchmarks since our launch. It makes me happy to see our people happy, focused, and engaged in what they are doing.
We know that having the right tech in place can be powerful in helping people stay focused and, importantly, engaged. In essence, by employing tech to respond to the pace of the on-demand economy, our people can now focus on what is meaningful for them and their work. My message to other CTOs? Consider the on-demand economy in every step of every innovation, within your business and without. In this fast-changing economy, cloud companies should always be thinking one step ahead with their features to stay successful. Just ask your people!
