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Digital Transformation Technology

If the UK wants to achieve its digital ambitions, it needs to get to work on hardware

By Peter Moody, managing director

April 3, 2017 | 4 min read

It needs to get harder.

London

Let’s be clear, that isn’t a euphemism.

I spent over 16 years in Asia, predominantly in Japan but with stints in South Korea and China. It has been a year since returning with my family to the sunny shores of the UK, and re-engaging with this market and the wonderful world of digital has been inspiring – but with some frustrations too.

A major positive is how rapidly software and services are being developed and rolled out in the mobile space. Getting paid (and paying others!), ordering food, navigating public transport and most importantly setting up the recording on my Sky box for Crystal Palace games – everything can be done on the phone to make my life that little bit lazier (or to make more time for other things, as the blurb should say.)

What worries me, though, is that innovation and connectivity and software cannot exist without the hardware, and this is where the UK – and countries in Europe – would do well to look at Asia and the serious investment many of those governments are making to ensure they get ahead and stay there.

I remember sitting in a basement Tokyo restaurant, three floors underground with a few visiting friends getting incredibly frustrated that I could only get 3G. While my friends struggled to understand what was wrong, the fact that 4G was not available deep underground drove me to write a formal complaint to NTT. That was in 2012.

Now I have become acquainted once again with my old foe 3G, as well as 'E' and 'GPRS'. Surely these letters should have been consigned to the last century?

That's not to say Japan has no cause for concern. Certainly its software developers – particularly in the consumer space – have missed opportunities that its technical dominance should have given it. The likes of Sharp and Sony have lost ground to Apple and Samsung in many areas because on the user end their software developers didn't adapt fast enough. But Japan is still investing heavily in infrastructure – there are few, if any, 4G blind spots, and it's building a 600km/h magnetic levitation train from Tokyo to Osaka. (HS2 is basically what Japan had in the 1960s!) For every Line or Kakao (in Korea), there are of course many failures – but at least their developers are not hamstrung by infrastructure bottlenecks.

The importance of this is so often overlooked by governments and companies. There's an emphasis on immediate profit, on the need to ensure dividend growth and healthy quarterly balance sheets, but that can come at the risk of long-term health. At times too risk averse, at times perhaps too quick to give up when returns look too far away, this just stifles longer-term hardware investments that will truly create the digital transformation our industries need in tomorrow’s economy.

So let’s give hardware more attention and hold the government to its promises on 5G and broadband. It had better get to work on HS2 too!

Peter Moody is managing director at MullenLowe Profero, the digital transformation specialist arm of MullenLowe London, and a member of the IPA's Brand Tech Group which provides an industry view on the impact technology is having on brands, consumers and agencies

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