Technology Trends for Businesses in Finland with the TechnoVision Report

As a business leader, you always have to keep one eye on what is coming next. You can’t let the future wash over you. Instead, it’s essential to prepare your staff and organisation for coming changes and take advantage of their opportunities. However, amongst the vast range of digital developments constantly taking place, the challenge lies in identifying what’s essential and what will impact your business. You may also have to consider this on a global scale and locally specific to Finland.

This is where the TechnoVision report from Capgemini comes in. It takes advantage of our global knowledge and resources to gather together the opinions and understanding of hundreds of technology experts to identify the most important trends. Over 14 annual editions, it’s proven to be an important resource to guide and direct thinking around technology decisions.

As the Head of Digital Customer Experience (DCX) Offering at Capgemini in Finland, I wanted to share some insight into how these trends apply to the Finnish market. While there’s a deeper focus on those related to DCX, I will also touch on other areas. All taken together, it gives you an insight into how these identified trends apply specifically to Finland, with a view to how they may impact your business and planning for the year ahead.

If you want to dive even deeper into the full report, read it here.

The You Experience

This refers to how digital technology creates personal user experiences across a whole range of locations. It isn’t simply about being “customer-first” but also, for example, “employee-first”.

What we see in Finland is a lot of discussions around customer data platforms for marketing departments. This platform contains all the relevant data stored about a  customer to create their personal experience. More than that, you can also take that data and interrogate and combine it to make it actionable. The challenge remains that when collecting customer data from many different sources, you may not always get it  in the format you need and to sort this out data literacy is needed.

“All tech can now provide you with real-time capabilities, making it possible to be seamless. We can pull relevant customer data and make decisions based on that as soon as they interact with you. Next best action thinking is there.”

Jukka Tuominen, Head of Digital Customer Experience (DCX) Offering, Capgemini Finland

This is a booming opportunity at the moment and applies across B2C and B2B spaces, even if the use-cases aren’t identical. The key trend is identifying the right tech stack since so many excellent solutions are available. Rather than implementing one platform technology to cover everything, businesses are looking to combine a series of best of breed options in conjunction with it.

As with everything in this area, it ultimately comes down to the availability and quality of the data. Understanding and identifying that data and finding the best way to collect and interrogate it is precisely where my team, or my colleagues in our Insights & Data team, can help.

Thriving On Data

In a world where it’s sometimes claimed that every business is a data business, it’s no surprise to see data come up again. This time it is addressed directly as the trend, rather than the enabler as part of The You Experience. Data as a corporate asset that can drive everything from sustainability to product optimizations is why it should be at the forefront of your business decision making.

Thinking about how this impacts the Finnish market, it’s simple to say data is always a topic of conversation with customers. The discussions run across the whole business and revolve around improving data collection and enriching what is available using multiple sources.

Companies in Finland aren’t only constantly working on how to make data actionable, but they’re also looking at strategies to collect on a structural and ongoing basis to ensure the availability of data for immediate and emerging needs.  There’s a clear focus on a company’s own data instead of data collected by 3rd parties.

Process On The Fly

Intelligent automation looks set to be more widely adopted and help the decision making process using data points to monitor status and identify potential ways to improve efficiencies. Heads of data departments to overall business leaders will be sitting up and taking notice of the advantages this can bring.

At DCX, we see a continuous desire to automate activities and thereby gain business efficiencies. E.g. fact-based decision making with sufficient data available is always a good candidate for automation. Seen from a broader perspective, whenever a process can be identified, it may be possible to automate some steps.

“A few years ago there was a lot of talk about Robotic Process Automation. Now Intelligent Automation and Hyperautomation have remarkably broadened the scope and enabled end-to-end process transformation”

Jukka Tuominen, Head of Digital Customer Experience (DCX) Offering, Capgemini Finland

There are also use-cases for Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which can help take the pain out of integrations when running a platform integration for a CRM. This is especially useful where legacy applications might be replaced, meaning it doesn’t make sense to build an integration manually.

Applications Unleashed

The idea of monolithic applications that get irregular updates is being challenged by having a portfolio of smaller applications that change and adapt quickly to business requirements.

Finnish companies have been strongly driving a move to the cloud, and as part of that process, they are modernizing their applications. At the same time, businesses here are creating a series of micro-services to deliver outcomes previously supplied by a single monolithic solution.

There is also a lot of interest in Finland in low-code applications as companies invest in low-code platforms. The more significant opportunity lies in maximising the potential of such a platform, rather than buying it for a single purpose, considering and discovering all the things it can do and places it could be used. That’s the true value of making that investment, and I believe more and more business leaders and IT departments in Finland will be investigating this.

Invisible Infostructure

The march towards the cloud seems almost unstoppable, with IT infrastructure now able to adjust to a business’s needs as the whole chain matures into the standard solution. The reach and impact of IT are greater than that alone though, hence the term ‘infostructure’.

On a general level, in Finland cloud is where customers want to go. It provides the benefits of scalability and is cost-efficient to scale up and down, and it’s also a convenient way to get faster infrastructure, and the applications built on top, needed for a particular purpose.

There is a broader story here, though, as Finnish companies look to adopt more sustainable ways of doing business, and the cloud creates opportunities to help them achieve this. The Cloud team at Capgemini Finland can give more details on this and other related solutions.

We Collaborate

It’s been a unique couple of years in business, as leaders have grappled with running remotely and understanding the changes that brought for the organization and its employees. We’re now in a place where expectations have shifted, with consumers and staff now looking for different ways to interact and collaborate.

The approach to working in Finland was strongly adopted, and there’s now an expectation that people have the expertise to use the tools required. Whether it’s Teams, Google Meet, Slack or something else, these have become a part of daily working life and businesses should prepare for that to remain the case even as offices become more populated. We aren’t going back to how things were!

As a leader, it’s essential to see how best to serve your employees given that demand. For example, Slack integrates exceptionally well with Salesforce, and so what may have been a necessity brought about by the pandemic can become an opportunity. Equally, I’m seeing more visual collaboration tools like Miro or Mural being used effectively by Finnish organizations.

TechnoVision and Finland

Taking an in-depth worldwide research report created by Capgemini experts across the globe to analyse key technology trends for business leaders and seeing how they align with the Finnish market is interesting. There are a lot of places where you can see the national mimics the international. However, the detail of where the differences or precise focus lies is vital. That’s why partnering with a company like Capgemini that brings understanding from both perspectives to the table is essential. Helping you to make the right decisions to drive your company’s technological changes and helping to implement them is why we’re here. For Finland and for the rest of the world.