E-commerce, Technology Evolution, Business Adaptation

Welcome to building better developers, the developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of interviews and we're starting a new one. This episode, we're going to be speaking with Chris Davidson and we're going to get back into the technical side of stuff. If you've been itching to hear a little bit more about how technology has evolved in the last few decades, like maybe three or four of them, this is the episode for you. He's got a great British accent, which always makes anybody sound smarter. If you don't believe it, you're probably not from this side of the pond. That being said, it's a really interesting conversation about how technology has grown, evolved and where he sees it going. Be ready to take notes. This is going to be one of those. It'll be an excellent interview for you to use as reference and maybe to help you see where you want to take your project, your company, your job moving forward. All right. Today we're talking with Chris Davidson. He has got a couple of years under his belt in the technology world, and we're going to talk about those. And when I say a couple of years, I mean a couple of decades actually. So it's going to be a real fun conversation. We're going to talk about a lot about websites and particularly the progression of those over the last couple of decades. It's very different if you look at a website today, if you were old enough and went back and look at a website from 1990 or something like that and how things have changed. But it's rare to be able to get somebody that's had this kind of a longevity in the technology world. And I think you guys will find it really interesting to hear how things have progressed and how he views the modern world of technology. So from there, I think we'll go ahead and toss it over you. If you want to give us a little of your background, tell us a little bit about yourself. Rob, thank you very much for having me on your show. So, yeah, a couple of decades. Actually, it's over four decades. I started in IT. Can you believe this? Before the IBM personal computer existed, it was that long ago. I remember IBM announcing the personal computer and Alan Sugar coming in with his copies of the PC and all of that. Yeah, that was that was an amazing time. And the PC, it kind of was announced and. Companies didn't quite know what to do with it because the Internet didn't exist. It was another decade before the Internet came along. So the only communication game in town was IBM's SNA long since disappeared. There was no TCPIP. There was none of that. So there was this personal computer that was literally personal because it couldn't really be connected to much unless it was an IBM mainframe. So, yeah, it's amazing to see how all of that really developed. And then, yeah, the Internet comes along in 1990 and then it's just this explosion. This acceleration of technology, which is just incredible once you get all these machines connected and productivity just goes skywards. You know, we all think that it's going to last like this forever. And it doesn't, of course, things get more and more complex and people get more and more confused and yeah. So it's been quite a ride. It has been it's been absolutely amazing. So, yeah, I spent four decades in IT. Some of those years were spent working at IBM's Communication Laboratory in the South of France. I helped put together the IBM consulting methodology there and then set up my own company just over 20 years ago. So that's the that's the couple of decades that you you're referring to. I set up Active Presence in 2002. And I've been interested really, the the focus for Active Presence is not so much a raw technology company, but helping people use technology to communicate. That's what I'm really interested in. And I think as as the 21st century has come in and we're what we are now comfortably in the third decade of the 21st century. It's unbelievable, isn't it? But we are, you know, and we've seen this use of technology for communication is becoming more and more and more. And then we have this global pandemic that we're hopefully just on the other side of and and putting to one side all the personal tragedies involved in that. I think what has been fascinating just from a business perspective, how I think that pretty much everything that happened in those crazy. 18 months, two years of the pandemic, even though the whole thing has been three years, but that really, I think, compressed everything that was going to happen this decade anyway, and it just kind of squeezed it all into 24 months or whatever you want to say. And some people came out better than others, you know. So it's been a fascinating ride. Fascinating. That's that's interesting that you you mentioned that, because that was one of the first things I was going to ask as you stepped into it is how especially now, because you've seen the growth and you've seen where there have been those big steps. Like, yeah, I remember when you went from PCs and suddenly it's like, wow, you've got a network card and you can actually talk to other ones in the same building. And then eventually you can you have WANs and you can talk to somebody, you know, on the other side of the country or the globe. And in those past steps, how was how really different was it in this in this sort of this covid push? Because it did seem like there was a lot of things that advanced quickly. But I wonder, sir, your point of view of how much of it was almost like a watershed moment, because you had to have a certain amount of infrastructure and technology to get to the point where everybody said, hey, we can do Zoom meetings and we can be remote. And how much and so I guess sort of a two part question is how much do you think that was really compressed because business was forced to and how much of it was actually technology being forced to? Or is it more like the technology was there and business, the business that may have normally lagged was like, oh, wait, we got to get on this train because we don't have a choice. Yeah, it's a really great question that Rob, I think it was I think it was business led because let's let's just look at this, for example, two stories, two quick stories. The first one you might not be aware of on your side of the pond, but it made quite a splash over here, which is that when covid hit and everybody discovered this Zoom thing, that is to say a lot of corporate people did. I mean, in the SME community, we've been using Zoom for years. It's like standard for us, you know, but a lot of these corporate people kind of, you know, discovered Zoom and governments discovered Zoom because they had to function. Even if even if the only job of government at the time was sorting out covid, all other all other government stuff stopped, covid became the number one job of all governments. And so the UK government in particular started holding meetings, cabinet meetings and what have you by Zoom. Perfectly reasonable. Why not? Until the prime minister of the day, then Boris Johnson, known for being very expansive in his communication or what have you, talks about using Zoom for holding cabinet meetings. And he's wanting to make a positive point. And so he's he's holding up his phone like this in a photograph and what have you. Only his phone is open and people can read the screen. And at that point in time, it then becomes absolutely completely obvious in Zoom headquarters and everywhere else in the world that he has just broadcast the link to the Zoom meeting. And so everybody can Zoom bomb the UK cabinet meetings. It's like, holy smoke. And so in Zoom headquarters, they go, oh, no, I think we have a security problem here. So there's a there's a really good example of a business, if you like, government, you know, deciding, OK, we need to do something, picking up the tools that were there. And the people who were running those tools going, oh, we've just been caught out here, folks, you know, that that's one story. And another one that was illustrates the kind of the business led approach. When when covid hit, we had many countries, we had a national lockdown, we had several. But the first national lockdown was the really serious one where everything stopped. The entire economy just ground to a halt and all construction sites were closed. Now, you stop all construction sites and just think of the knock on effect on the entire logistics chain behind construction. You know, all of those builders, merchants, we call them in the UK, building supplies companies, but all of the places where they hire all their cranes and their diggers and all the rest of it, you're talking about millions of people involved in all of this. If you go down long enough. Now, I know a builders merchant, a building supply company, his firm was closed like everybody else. And he used his he took use of the government scheme to to lay staff off so that people could at least keep their jobs and what have you. Then and this is when his company was earning like no money at all, not a single cent. And nobody knew when the economy would open up again. He got in touch with one of my colleagues who's also in the UK, and he said, well, one of my colleagues who's also in web design and he poured thousands and thousands of pounds into his web, his website. What was he doing? Well, he had a really good website in terms of the back end inventory. So he he he was using the website to control inventory, had a good database there, but he didn't have much of an e-commerce function. So he spent thousands, many tens of thousands, putting e-commerce into his website when eventually the economy did open up again. Construction sites went bananas because all of their projects were way behind schedule. All of their contracts had to be renegotiated because they all have closed dates. And after that, there are penalties if you're late and all the rest of it. It's a big hoo-ha on all of the construction. Construction world goes mad. Nobody has time to drive a vehicle to the building supplies depot to pick up spares. These builders are on the mobile phone. On his website, ordering directly for delivery straight to site, they never leave the site. Within a short time after the economy opened, he was running 80 percent of his pre-COVID turnover with 20 percent of the staff. The the the nobody goes to the shop at the front of the yard. Now it's like a morgue. It's completely empty. He's expanded the office to do vehicle routing. He's bought a couple more vehicles and drivers and they just deliver everything. So that whole business has just completely reinvented itself. In fact, the whole sector has, but he was canny enough to see it coming. And that's a that's actually another interesting thing that I've seen as well as that you had you had some things died during COVID. There are certain things that just sort of disappear. And some may still, you know, they're in their their death throes. Who knows, like like big public theaters and some of those kinds of things that now people changed what they did. And then things changed, like, you know, streaming became big in that world or in a lot of areas, delivery became part of it as opposed to like people. A lot of times they'd rather just bring me my food. I'm not going to go to a restaurant anymore. There's things like that that change. That changed. And. I'm wondering, just your thoughts on this is how much of that do you think is as we're coming out and maybe even as you're seeing it, because now you're seeing because you are if you're in the website world, we'll talk a little more, but you're in a little bit of like a leading edge indicator of where business is going. Do you think that these businesses that downsized and got away from big buildings and don't have people come into the office, do you think that's really going to continue or do you think this is something that's sort of going to it's going to start to reverse and we'll go back to maybe where we were 10, 15 years ago? It won't go back. Of that, I am absolutely sure. So so covid has changed the workplace forever. Now, I'm not saying that it's going to stay the same as it is now, but it ain't going to go back to how it was. I live about 250 miles away from London, away from the capital city, and I've been up and down to London twice during January, during the past month. I normally I normally take the train up and down there, but on this occasion for various regions, I drove. So I drove twice to London within the space of a month. The roads were empty. London was empty. There's just nobody there. You know, it's just incredible. This is this was during January when we would normally have. The big January sales where the retail stores in the in the the big shopping street in London called Oxford Street, you know, when I was in my 20s, the January sales in Oxford Street were crazy. People would be buying all sorts of deals. Oxford Street's empty. You could walk down the middle of the road. You know, there were a few taxis, a few buses, but it wasn't packed. And and so now with that, how are you where are you seeing the trends? Because or maybe they've just accelerated, but there was definitely this push for e-commerce like, you know, like your friend there. People are I know a lot of business were seeing that there were ways to expand out of just their physical location through e-commerce. And then some some have reasons that they want to not do that because they do want people to come into their physical locations. But have you seen a change in the e-commerce focus as people are are now sort of getting into, I would say, and you can maybe add to this, we're getting beyond like sort of a phase one first generation of e-commerce. There's a lot of companies now that they've been in it a little bit or they've got people that have done it before. And I'm starting to see that people are coming in and doing more. They're starting to get a little more advanced. They're saying, hey, it's not just putting a product on the website out on the web. It's like your friend. It's like we've got to be able to have all of the delivery and, you know, how do we get this stuff to them and all of that back end stuff that goes on that gets a product from that web page to, you know, to your mailbox or wherever happens to be. Yeah, I think. I think this is going to be increasingly increasingly complex. So I like to to we step backwards just a little bit. I like to think of this this concept of the I.T. pendulum. You've got a pendulum swinging from side to side. And in the 1980s, when I, you know, I joined the I.T. world, what in 1980, I think it was. So, you know, then I.T. was incredibly complex, incredibly expensive. And the the preserve of young engineers like me who spoke a language that nobody understood. And the only thing that I.T. did really was it was in a back room somewhere. Nobody really knew where it was. Lots of air conditioning and stuff involved. And they did the monthly accounts, I think. I think that's what they did anyway. That was that was kind of the impact of I.T. In other words, there was an idea that the company, whatever it was, could kind of carry on without I.T. because I.T. just looked after the finance. And when I joined I.T., the I.T. department, there wasn't really in fact, it wasn't even called I.T. It was called DP, data processing. I.T. hadn't even been invented. The idea that you might have information technology. Putting those two words together was bizarre, which is called data processing. So data processing belonged to the finance director. It didn't have any independent representation to the board outside of finance, because all it did was crunch numbers for finance. And then the pendulum swings through to 1990s, when suddenly, quite quickly anyway, over that decade. It becomes cheap. Available to all relatively easy to use. And you see that pendulum has swung and everybody kind of thinks that the pendulum is still over there, but it isn't. It started swinging back towards where it was in the 1980s, because it's now incredibly complex and it's everywhere in the business. That guy's building supplies company. Completely runs on his e-commerce site. He can't afford for that to be offline for half an hour. You know, so I.T. has has moved from the back office to a central function. It's pretty much integrated itself into every little nook and cranny and department in a business, even in small businesses. And because it's done that. It's become more complex. So this notion of, oh, yeah, I.T. is simple nowadays. Well, it sort of is simple compared to where it was in the 1980s. But because it's got everywhere in your business, it's actually more complex. So even if you're not an international bank, if you're in quotes, you're not an international bank, in quotes, just a little SME, you're still going to have a really complex environment and you're going to need other people to help you run it because you can't do it all yourself for sure. So even small businesses are needing other people to be involved. And this is one of the problems that I talk about, is that they don't know who to get involved. And you'll know this, as will your listeners, you know, they'll kind of go to their website designer and say, can you do this for me? And the website designs, yeah, sure, sure. Not sure I can actually, but I'm sure I'll find the answers on Google. And, you know, that's when things start all going wrong. So it's like we need to have a mini, a mini version. Of what the large international banks take for granted, where they have business analysts and systems architects and developers and UI people and UX people and all. We need all of that skill for SME nowadays, but we don't need it all the time. So no SME is going to need all of those skills all the time, but they are going to need all of those skills some of the time. And the IT sector has to find a way of delivering that in a way that SMEs can access it, understand it, know who they should be speaking to. So there's a big educational thing that needs to be done with business owners in small to medium sized sector to say, look, this is how it all works. And I think that that's something that really our IT sector could help with. You know, we could help educate our smaller SME clients so that they know who they should be reaching out to, who they should be looking for. You know, maybe I need a business analyst to come in and look at all these business flows before I try and implement e-commerce. Because if I just go and ask an e-commerce specialist, that person's going to say, you should definitely use Shopify. Now, maybe you should use Shopify, or maybe Shopify is the only system they know. So they're going to say, you should definitely use Shopify. You know, you don't really know unless you've done all the research. See what I'm saying? Yeah, that's what I like, because you mentioned early on that you guys use, you don't use technology really for your company. It's not to use technology for technology. It's more about, and this is how I usually phrase it, it's leveraging that technology to communicate. And I think that's key. And I think that leads into how do you, because I know you run into this, because you've just probably explained, you know, the last 10 customers maybe you've run into where they said, hey, we had a web designer and they said they could do e-commerce. And then usually what happens is they start doing it and they do some searching and they find, you know, we'll just pick on Shopify. They find Shopify. They say, hey, I can do that. I can design. I can script a couple things. And then you get into it and they realize that, no, it doesn't do this and this and this and this. These things that are critical to our business, it doesn't do it. So how do we fix this? So when you come into those conversations, I guess it's sort of two of them, is two points is, how do you tackle it when you walk in after the fact, after they've started? And how do you walk in when they do come to you right away? And they say, hey, I'm thinking about e-commerce. I need to go find somebody that I can talk to that will, that knows about that, that can actually inform me. Okay. So second question first, how do we deal with it before the fact? So in about 2015, I kind of got an inkling that people were having a lot of difficulties with their websites. 2017, I thought I need to see if this really is true. And so I started an annual survey of websites. And I've done that for five years, thousands of websites a year. And so I kind of know where the problems are and know what's going on. That helped me build a tool called the Product Client Alignment Matrix, PCAM. PCAM is a multi-tab spreadsheet that processes text, basically. And I built a user manual behind all of that. And I run with clients through that, just interviewing them, asking them questions, getting clarity from them on their, normally, their perfect client. Frequently, it's a long time since they've thought or rethought or clarified who their perfect client is. They knew it 10 years ago. Maybe they knew it five years ago. But a lot's changed in the last five years. So let's just go through that and make sure that it is actually all correct. And going through that whole PCAM process documents everything. So finally, we have everything written down in one place. And then we can start making decisions. So that's kind of before the fact. That's really a sort of a BA type role, really. That's a bit of documented process-driven BA type work. I wouldn't say that too strongly in front of a real business analyst because they would say, no, it isn't, Chris. BA's don't do that. But it's good enough to give us some approximation. It's sort of a quasi-BA type thing. And in that process, going through that, I'd actually start looking at what their business processes are. So they might say, oh, this is how we do discounting. This is how we discount all our products. OK, that's fine. Now you're going to put e-commerce in. Yeah, OK. So is your discounting the way that you discount, your discounting formula, is that going to survive e-commerce? You know, because maybe your discounting formula has some involvement in something that is triggered on postage and packaging fees. Well, if your postage and packaging is now going to be international because e-commerce is completely international, does that alter the formula at all? Do you actually have to change your business process before we even talk about implementing any technology? Frequently, and this brings us on to your first question, what happens after the fact? And after the fact, what frequently has happened is that technology gets implemented. And you then get developers, through no fault of their own, being stuck with kind of having to make decisions that really aren't technology decisions. They're business decisions. And they're going, oh, we're not quite sure what we should do here, really, because sometimes they plow on through and don't even think about it too closely. Other times they go, hang on a minute, we need to speak to the boss about this. And then the project stops because insufficient thought was put into it in the first place. So if we get called in after the fact, then really it's a question of saying, okay, what's the project about? And then what is identifying every business process that impacts on that project and running through an audit of all the business processes to make sure we've cleared it all up? First point. Second point, documentation. That is to say, documentation about products. That is to say, documentation about products being sold. And frequently, the biggest issue there using documentation in the loosest possible context, the biggest problem there is lack of photography. Believe it or not. I'm going to put up e-commerce when people are selling physical products. I'm going to put up e-commerce and I'm going to sell my t-shirts or my coffee mugs or whatever it is. Okay, where are the photographs of the products? Where are they? Oh, well, I've got a camera at home. No, no, no, no. You need to go and spend a lot of money on good professional photography. Well, nobody told me that. You know, and you've only to know that all you need do is go and look on any watch website, for example, because watches are this combination of something that everybody likes to have around their wrist to do a useful job, but also jewelry. So you go and look on a watch website and all the good watch websites, men or women, all have fantastic photography. Every individual watch has about eight photographs with it, with videos in, with, you know, you roll your mouse over it, it expands and all the rest of it. Now, all of that has to be done before you even dream about writing any code or getting close to Shopify. Just doing all the photography for all the products is going to take you months if you've got thousands of products, you know, depending on what your SKUs are and what have you. And we will pause there. I know quite the cliffhanger, but we continue right in the next episode talking about the importance of simple things like images, taking pictures, product pictures. These are things that if you've done a site like this, they are critical. If you haven't, these are kinds of things that may be missed. Once again, where experience does help us quite a bit and somebody like Chris has quite a bit of experience. So that's a good match. And we will continue next episode talking to him about his thoughts and some of the experiences and some of the things that he's come up against over the years. That being said, it's time for you to go out and experience life. Add to your own story. Go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. 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