4 Technology Takeaways for Businesses from ITPalooza 2019

Nearly 1,500 technology-focused professionals from a wide range of industries came together for ITPalooza 2019 in Fort Lauderdale to discuss the latest tech trends shaping the growth of businesses in all sectors of the economy.

From healthcare to banking to retail and beyond, advances in areas such as facial recognition and robotic process automation are changing the way companies do business, which makes having a clearly defined IT strategy and a focus on innovation more important than ever.

This year’s speakers included IT leaders, executives and entrepreneurs from Royal Caribbean, City Furniture, Miami International Airport, Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance, TechLauderdale, local governments and educators, in addition to South Florida tech power players like Citrix, Ultimate Software, Modernizing Medicine and Magic Leap.

Here are four takeaways for your business from ITPalooza 2019.

1. Embrace failure to create a culture of innovation

How can you foster a culture of innovation within your company? It starts with embracing failure.

Large companies often choose to focus on projects that show the lowest risk relative to the potential reward. That may make sense for 80% of decisions, said panelists on the “Corporate Innovation” panel at ITPalooza. However, the panelists encouraged the audience to allow some flexibility in the other 20% for choosing projects and initiatives that have a higher potential reward — and higher risk. These are the innovative solutions and technologies that have the potential to be disruptive.

The panelists also encouraged business leaders to empower their employees to take some risks. If they succeed, the company will benefit; if they fail, the employees will benefit from valuable learning opportunities. Creating a culture of innovation means creating a culture of permission to take risks and fail – and this comes from the top.

“For us, it’s about pushing decision-making down as far as we can and giving people the safety net to be wrong,” said Charlie Ward, VP of Technology at Ultimate Software.

2. RPA adoption increasing across industries

Kaufman Rossin shared how organizations—small, medium, and large—are currently deploying digital robots using robotic process automation (RPA) software. Industries using this technology include financial services, the public sector, retail, real estate, technology, energy and travel and leisure.

The primary use cases often include data gathering, compiling, and entry for accounting, sales, and human resources processes. Some organizations are exploring the use of bots to support cybersecurity processes, as well to address challenges in hiring skilled cybersecurity professionals, by leveraging automation.

RPA platforms continue to expand their toolsets, and many now include machine learning capabilities, so the outlook for the future is that automation and artificial intelligence tools will become more integrated, more accessible and more rapidly deployable.

3. New technology introduces new privacy compliance challenges

As technology such as facial recognition and machine learning start to enable businesses to collect and track more data about their customers, privacy compliance also becomes more of a concern.

With the passage of global data privacy regulations such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), privacy issues are becoming increasingly important to organizations managing personal data. Penalties for non-compliance with privacy regulations potentially range from thousands to millions of dollars, and organizations can no longer afford to be lax about protecting their customers’ personal data.

John Fitts, CEO and founder of data analytics firm Fairfax Intel, said he is taking a more cautious approach to data collection for his clients in light of the new privacy regulations. In some cases, he said his team will go back to the client and rework the business question to find out if what the client is trying to accomplish could be done with fewer protected data points or with anonymized data. After they have agreed to which data points are actually necessary to collect for their clients, they can then use technology solutions to address privacy compliance requirements for that data.

Kaufman Rossin’s Global Data Privacy Compliance team offers these tips for addressing data privacy:

• Create a data inventory. Know what data you collect, and where it is stored. Categorize it.
• Review internal privacy policies, procedures, and controls for information collection and sharing.
• Identify your information sharing practices for affiliates and non-affiliated third parties. How do you treat non-public, personal information? How do you acquire consent and administer opt-outs?
• Review privacy notices (initial, annual, revised, opt-out).
• Create or review your data retention schedule.
• Build a response and monitoring plan in case you receive requests.
• Train employees.

4. Should you buy it or build it? It depends.

Deciding whether to buy new software or develop it in-house is an equation of time, cost and business value. And different companies have different approaches.

If buying a new solution would significantly cut their go-to-market time, both Chris Fleck, VP of Citrix, and Martha Poulter, CIO of Royal Caribbean, said they would consider buying instead of building in-house. Poulter shared the example of facial recognition software, which the cruise line chose to purchase instead of investing in building from scratch.

Andy Hill, VP of Digital of City Furniture, said his company typically buys new software first, so the team can learn while applying the new solution, and then they consider building their own solution in the future. It’s all about ROI, he stressed.

Ultimate Software concentrates 100% of their innovation efforts on the customer. “We want to focus our building efforts on high-value areas,” said Ward. Everything else they can buy, he said.

If you are considering whether to buy or build a new platform, ask yourself the following questions:

• How valuable is this to our customers?
• How valuable is this for our business?
• Is it adding a differentiator for us?
• What is the expected ROI for this platform?
• How long will it take to get up and running if we buy it versus if we build it?
• If we buy it now, can we learn and then build a custom solution in the future if needed?

No matter what you decide, the panelists caution to keep in mind that adopting new technology is almost always more expensive and time consuming than you think. Don’t forget to account for time and costs related to integration and training.

To learn more about how new technologies like RPA and new regulations like data privacy may affect your business, contact me or another Kaufman Rossin professional.