“Luxembourg industries still miss the idea and skills to leverage the technology disruption,” says Thomas Musiolik (Accenture Luxembourg).

Accenture , the Irish consulting and service processing multinational company, has recently released its survey Accenture Technology Vision 2021, entitled “Leaders Wanted: Masters of Change at a Moment of Truth”

According to the document, the pace of exponential technology change has tremendously increased and will continue over the coming years. And to remain competitive in the post-pandemic world, companies must capitalize on this moment of truth”.

The survey identifies five key trends that companies will have to tackle in the three next years:

  • Stack Strategically: Architecting a Better Future through a new mindset that considers business and technology strategies indistinguishable.
  • Mirrored World: The Power of Massive, Intelligent, Digital Twins that brings together data and intelligence in order to unlock new opportunities to operate, collaborate, and innovate.
  • I, Technologist: The Democratization of Technology making every employee an innovator to keep the business in lockstep with new and changing needs.
  • Anywhere, Everywhere: Bring Your Own Environment and  transform remote work from an accommodation to a competitive advantage.
  • From Me to We: A Multiparty System’s Path Through Chaos that can help businesses gain greater resilience and adaptability and unlock new ways to approach the market.

According to the survey, the pace of exponential technology change is only increasing: “Leaders have to continue investing to stay ahead, and laggards must act NOW to close a gap that for them is widening every day,” the document warns.

Thomas Musiolik, Lead Technology Luxembourg, Accenture (photo: LinkedIn).
Thomas Musiolik, Lead Technology Luxembourg, Accenture (photo: LinkedIn).

Thomas Musiolik, more generally, what organizations are already leading in these trends?
Larger firms, who understood that both the business and the IT strategy could not operate separately anymore, and who have been able to adapt and take action rapidly are now ahead; They had a clear strategy and are very well connected globally. On the contrary, smaller companies (with > 1bln revenue) continue struggling.

How does Luxembourg position on these key trends?
On “Architecture”, the telecom companies were the first to adopt the mindset, followed by the financial industry services. Big organizations are well positioned to adapt and implement such strategy, whereas SMEs are still struggling to take the step forward.

Furthermore, the logistics market is not leveraging cloud sufficiently yet. The industry still misses the idea and skills to leverage the business opportunity of cloud native applications.

Thomas Musiolik, Lead Technology Luxembourg at Accenture put trends in Luxembourg’s context. And explains why the country is far from being ready to master the disruption.

“Twin mirror” is more likely inexistent in Luxembourg. Take for instance the energy and the metal industries who operate machines and applications that use sensors; they use those for their production processes only, but they are not leveraging the technology to collect data and turn them into strategic and decision-making assets.

Typically here, a CIO could help the business to assess the technology and make the collected data a relevant information that the company could leverage with the aim to improve or bring new services to its customers and increase in competitivity. Therefore, I think that companies in Luxembourg, especially big organizations, should explore these opportunities.

With the “Democratization of Technology”, people don’t need to be experts in computer sciences anymore. They can collaborate with the business by using the tools that can bridge the gap between complex technology and workers at every level of the organization. And this in order to create something, which will serve the company’s business. In Luxembourg, financial services have well adapted to this mindset. The other industries are not that far yet.

On the “Bring Your Own Environment”: Once again, in Luxembourg, I think that most companies in the finance industry – especially banking and payment services companies – have onboarded this trend.

The shift requires however trust and leadership from the top and not just compliance.

“Multiparty system” is all about blockchain and distributed ledger. Luxembourg is here very well positioned, with big players in financial services such as data distribution. For instance Fund DLT positions in forefront in Europe with distributed ledger technology-based solutions on security settlement services.

What do organizations require in order to adopt these trends?
These changes are significant and require therefore significant effort and money.

However, the strategy should be IT and business driven, for instance on issues such as connecting sustainability and technology, or on digitizing all departments, machines, features and assets of the organization.

It is also a matter of entrepreneurial culture; organizations should allow their staff to be creative, to try out new ideas, to work flexibly and be creative. More importantly, they should instill a sense of belonging to the organization and to achieve joint goals.

How can startups help companies adopt these trends?
On architecture for example, they can come up with specific tools and solutions that will bring the right Lego at the right place in the architecture.

The same applies to digital Twins, where startups might have already developed the specific tools that will fit the monitoring solution.

Furthermore, startups have developed an important know-how in AI and cloud technologies.

They can definitely help companies to leverage these technologies with dedicated solutions. And if big companies refuse to onboard startups in their business models, they might miss this moment of truth.