July 2013: The Tail Wagging the Dog

Incisive Media in London recently entered an interesting phase in its history: The majority of the firm’s London-based staff members are currently based in its Soho office, having steadily relocated there from Haymarket House, half a mile down the road, over the past three years. Now, that entire process is set to be reversed, and everyone will, sooner or later, once again be housed in the Haymarket office. This transitional period has provided the firm’s management team with a rare opportunity to undertake a technology and operational audit that is likely to result in everyone changing the way they work. Technology, naturally, plays the key role in enabling people to work more efficiently and flexibly, to the extent that now more and more employees are coming around to the way my colleague, Jake Thomases, recently described the concept of work: “Work is something you do, not a place you go to,” Jake explained. That pretty much hits the nail on the head, right?

But, like just about everything in life, there’s a catch—a number of employees, including me, have been testing out a range of new technologies, designed to free us from Incisive Media’s current model—where every employee has their own designated desk—in favor of a flexible, “hot-desking” set-up. As previously mentioned, technology plays the pivotal role in this new model, acting as the catalyst for change. But, as Sod’s law—or Murphy’s law, as it is known across the pond—would have it, the technology we’re trialing is acting as an inhibitor to change, although perhaps this is to be expected, considering that the bulk of it is cutting-edge and we’re mostly unfamiliar with it. However, given that the technology has been selected for us by our technology team rather than by us, the end-users, I can’t help but feel that in this instance, the tail is definitely wagging the dog, a scenario not unfamiliar to capital markets end-users. But I suppose that is the point of trial periods and user-acceptance testing.  

A decade ago, it wasn’t uncommon to hear stories from end-users at buy-side and sell-side firms complaining that the systems they were using were forced on them by their technology teams, and that if they had been consulted regarding the functionality that they felt was essential for them to do their jobs to the best of their abilities, the technology would look a whole lot different. Of course, those conversations have become fewer and farther between, thanks to financial services firms learning from their mistakes. Now, when it comes to new technologies, especially those that impact end-users’ day-to-day lives, the standard operating model involves the business—the end-users themselves—dictating the look, feel and functionality of the system they require, while the technology team focuses on building or buying the application with the required ingredients.