2022 – The Opportunity of a New Adventure

2020 and the debut of the pandemic era have generated unprecedented financial, social, and economical challenges that have escalated in 2021 and have forced businesses & governments to accelerate the digitization process and to positively transform competitive industries. As author David Weinberger pointed out in 2021 Harvard Business Review’s Year in Tech, the internet and post-pandemic era have “disrupted not only our old ways of doing things but even our idea of how progress works.”.

My personal take is that 2021 has created a positive disruption not just in our way of perceiving technology, but also in our way of handling our day-to-day work, generating positive impact and challenging the status quo.

In consequence, I believe that, although the pandemic has changed how we work and interact, people centricity has been RIA’s heart and center of our operating philosophy. The COVID-19 era has evolved our organization’s mindsets from relying on predominantly physically-centered operational structures to enabling location independence and hybrid working set-ups supported by agile processes and adaptive technology. Agility in the way of working and the adoption of lean operation management have helped our team to Make IT Happen. As an organization, we have become more resilient in our delivery and ready to pivot and adapt to macroeconomic conditions and to our customer’s changing “business climates” to weather all types of disruptions.

Looking back, I think 2021 has been for RIA a year of organic growth, positive momentum, and capturing opportunities, a period for expanding and consolidating business relationships and for further developing our IT expertise. I am proud that our RIA team has been able to evolve our technological expertise:

• in the  Distributed Hybrid Cloud by mashing private infrastructures (i.e. with Openshift) with public cloud services (i.e. Azure Identity Management) in the scalable context of transportation & logistics

• in enabling Hyperconnectivity for one of our customer’s CRM platform with various financial custodians through a robust Microservices’ architecture

• in using the Internet of Behaviors (IoB) to enhance one of our customer’s fleet operations by using various data points and telematics to improve driver performance, routing, and safety

According to McKinsey’s Top 10 tech trends that will shape the coming decade, besides Process automation and Virtualization, Applied AI, and Trust Architecture, in the years to come organizations will still put a lot of emphasis on building solid Distributed Infrastructures/Enterprises crafting a Total Multifaceted Experience and Connectivity to transform their business outcome. My personal belief is that these 2 trends will play a fundamental role in 2022 and this is also the reason why our strategy at RIA will be to focus on them as a key tactic to accelerate change and propagate the digital modernization process more effectively. Hence, 2022 is for RIA a year of expanding the strategic technological initiatives that we have explored in 2021 and of landing new technological trends.

As a reliable technology partner, we have planned to actively support one of our transportation and logistics customers in consolidating a Distributed Enterprise approach through a digital-first, remote-first model meant to improve employee experiences, digitalize consumer and partner touchpoints, and build out better product experiences. This involves the further development of a Hybrid Cloud environment where sensitive data is stored in the Private Cloud, while scalable services are exposed in Azure to improve speed and agility, reduce complexity while still strengthening security. 

Another relevant thread we will be pursuing with one of our enterprise customers is further connecting data, applications, and devices into one end-to-end fleet intelligence platform meant to generate a Total Multifaceted Experience. With this paradigm in mind, the objective is to enable end-customers, organizations, users, and, in the end, industries to work together to impact business outcomes faster. A particular example is creating an agile modern driver experience through easy-to-use applications that work together from a single source of truth to improve driver workflow, data and document submission, communications, and vehicle inspection reporting. This in turn will influence how delivery and service fleets offer optimized route planning to continuously improve customer service while keeping costs down and staying competitive.

Enhancing connectivity will still be a good theme of this year since one of our customer’s main objectives is to expand two-way integrations with multiple financial custodians and maximize the value add to end-user services. Integrating with 25+ portfolio custodians and financial providers allows the exchange of data to reduce time and effort. Such providers have included in the past Docupace, Envestnet, MoneyGuidePro, OrionAdvisor Tech, Riskalyze, Schwab and many others will be planned in 2022. By consolidating the existing Microservices’ architecture in the Cloud and adding new integration points, we will be able to generate a CRM that thinks like an advisor, a platform that is focused on financial planning and on allowing advisors to manage relationships with simplified, streamlined workflows.  

2022 will be a great year for new challenges. As an agile organization, we at RIA plan to accompany our customers in their modernization journeys, to be an active contributor in their digital evolution, and embrace innovative ideas & technologies along the way. And I truly believe that this will be made possible with the great contribution of our people.

It is my personal belief that an organization’s success is generated by the energy of the people, their drive & motivation, and their thirst for development. Hence, this is also the reason why we at RIA will continue to dedicate our efforts & main energy to nurturing our company culture and helping our people shine & develop professionally because, an organization, no matter how well-designed, is only as good as the people who live and work in it.