As you gorge yourself on the latest curated fire hose of content today, this post may waft onto your cognitive taste buds like a shameless plug. Fine. Like a herd of squirrels, here comes the next and the next and the next tweet anyways, just right for your canine attention span. It’s all good, and no hard feelings. We will aspire to catch you with the next tidbit or on a different modality…

But for those of you who care to pause and consider the deeper value here  – I offer this reminder and some inside baseball for your own creative purposes: In parallel with the mission to deliver uncommon and data-driven intelligence for the financial services (FSI) ecosystem, Alphacution was also founded to eat at its own kitchen – which is a practice that we have discovered over many years is rarely the case with research and advisory platforms. (By the way, not pointing any fingers – its not necessarily anyone’s fault. Convention is a gravitational bitch.) Translation: If we are to offer our clients credible and impactful counsel for their unique digital transformation, we must also be struggling with and overcoming similar challenges as they are (scale issues notwithstanding, of course). A relatively blank slate is often the optimal Petri dish for creativity and innovation.

The list of challenges for digital-era transformation are likely to include the struggle to adopt tools and methods such as crowd-sourcing, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), virtualization, collaboration and partnering (the “sharing economy”), open source solutions, information design (aka data visualization), and perhaps most of all process re-engineering – just to name a few. Let’s focus on collaboration here – a key to being successful in the new economy,  in our opinion…

Since the first macro phase of Alphacution’s development mission is admittedly ambitious (i.e. – the pursuit of a quantitative, 360° composite model of technology spending patterns in global FSI – a mission that appears so far to be without peer or proxy according to our business development efforts to date), we are breaking a lot of new ground, sharing a lot of new insights, debunking some prevailing mythology, and creating a significant amount of new language. Maybe someday, universities across the globe will be offering courses in the emerging field of  “technology economics” much like they did with computational finance over the past few years. Anyway, I digress…

This “newness” can be uncomfortable at first; may have a tendency to be perceived as excess complexity, and therefore, bounce off the bone-helmet without sinking into the grey matter. I mean, at first glance, our T-Greeks Analytics Framework seems totally un-intimidating and intuitive, no? The fact is that there actually is a ton of complexity involved in getting to this kind of output (and managing that complexity is a big part of our secret sauce), but the output itself is rather simple to interpret and utilize with a little practice – improving support for which is a key part of our product development roadmap, just to be sure.

Well, it turns out that many of the earliest devotees of what we are cooking here are other, typically larger, well-established research and advisory platforms. Better than most, these players understand the key challenges that face major firms in the space – as well as what may be temporarily missing in their own offerings. In other words, what we are building here seems to be earning the attention of developed, long-tenured research platforms because they understand how important providing navigational tools around tech spending and digital transformation are to banks, asset managers and many others. And, furthermore, a standardized framework for measuring enterprise transformation and benchmarking ever more specific tech spending patterns is, frankly, pretty rare from what we can determine so far.

With this as our backdrop, I’d like to personally thank my long-time friend and Alphacution advisory board member Sang Lee and his team at Aite Group for possessing the vision, courage and persistence to collaborate to the point of first fruit – the full press release for which can be found below. Though these arrangements are not easy to execute, we anticipate more / better tools and content to be developed as a result of this alliance. Furthermore, the success of this collaboration puts a stamp of validation on the work, and amps timely awareness and access to these new tools and concepts to those firms who need it most. Meaning, we are motivated. Moreover, I expect that it will expedite our growth trajectory so we can move that much closer to completing our initial modeling mission, improving our processing efficiency, and begin executing on some other fascinating ideas sooner.

This is a sample of the power of collaboration, full stop. The digital era is not about change, it’s about radical change.  It’s about re-inventing fewer and fewer “wheels” in the traditional workflow, and homing ever more precisely in on your specific value proposition so that you can adapt to a new pace with ever more agility. At Alphacution, our value proposition is not about building the optimal marketing or distribution engine. Our value proposition is about providing new navigational intelligence in an era where the balance of technical and human capital prowess is critical to effective transformation and competitive success. In Aite Group, we have found a key complement to this mission. In us, we believe that they have aligned with a product that no one else seems to be offering, and at a time when the needs for it are rising…