technical leverage

Can (Digital) Transformation Be Measured?

A sextant is an optical navigation device used by sailors starting around 1730. With practice, it can prove quite accurate in plotting courses. Though the contemporary digital equivalent - a global positioning system (GPS) - has become the mainstream tool for navigation, sextants are still in use today among a small but avid group of yachtsman, survivalists and cognoscenti. Keep this migration in mind as we walk through today's question: Can (digital) transformation be measured? Our answer to this, of course, is yes - however, as in most cases, the specificity of measurement is data dependent. So, the qualified "yes" to this question, for now, relates to measuring transformation at the enterprise level. This is because the necessary enterprise data is relatively easy to find in the financial disclosures of the companies in our initial target sample. There is also rhyme and reason to starting at enterprise level because it plays squarely into our long term vision to define the total value of technology spending in the financial services ecosystem - [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:08:42-04:00September 20th, 2016|Open|
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#Launchpad: Introducing the New Alphacution Website and Content

Our team has largely been on hiatus for the past couple months developing several new assets, including most notably our new Alphacution "content storage, distribution and promotion application" - er - website, and a bunch of new content to go in it which begins to showcase our research methodologies and initial modeling output. For the attention-deficit crowd (and those who are not already reading this on the site), you can skip the following shout-outs and contextual comments by hopping to www.alphacution.com now. In addition to our Feed section (for commentaries, videos, press coverage and company news), you will find a lot of "freemium" content accessible in the Open Exhibits Library and the Document Library. A short - and FREE - registration process will open access to those components and add your details to our newsletter distribution list. Please don't skip that part - and for extra credit, send us your feedback (info@alphacution.com) no matter the temperature... For the rest of you, here's some of the context behind these latest developments: [...]

By |2020-12-03T21:30:50-05:00July 19th, 2016|News|
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#DigitalMythology: The Searing Truth of Context

The primary goals of this ongoing series of research are to quantify - in increasing detail - what the members of the financial services industry (FSI) ecosystem spend on technology (including hardware, software, data and IT human capital) – which is sometimes referred to as (enterprise) total cost of ownership (TCO); develop benchmarks and analytics that help describe the absolute and relative nature of these spending patterns; and then, use the findings to confirm, deny, expand the prevailing (or introduce new) narratives in the space. The first phase of modeling has focused on the largest IT solution buyers, a selection of over 50 of the world’s largest banks – plus a few others whose purpose, for now, is to help us place this initial sample of FSI players in proper context. (More on this shortly.) Subsequent phases of modeling will incrementally build upon this foundation with the addition of other constituencies in the FSI ecosystem until a comprehensive view is maximized. With this as a backdrop, we have been focusing on [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:04:45-04:00December 6th, 2015|Open|
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#DigitalFrontier: Guiding Lights for the Analog Galaxy

Before everyone heads off to worship at the Altar of Tryptophan for a few days, I wanted to share some updated analysis: (I promise to keep it as short as possible, but unfortunately no less dense than usual.) In a recent post, #Technical Leverage: Can You Defy Your Scale?, I added Google’s (and Virtu Financial’s) RPE (revenue per employee) analytics to our core assembly of the 51 largest global banks. Given Google’s stand-out RPE of US$ 1.23 million (2014), I developed a hypothesis that this was a common theme among similar Dot.com / Internet-related leaders; that perhaps there was a pattern that would help us better describe and understand the nature of the digital revolution. Before we go to the visual, it is often the case in the search for meaning in new mega-drivers that there is a refinement of language and labeling exercise that needs to take place. After all, if we are too cavalier about the definition of new mega-drivers – if “digital” is in fact new at [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:04:38-04:00November 24th, 2015|Open|
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#Technical Leverage: Can You Defy Your Scale?

If you believe the latest bromides, “IT strategy is business strategy”, then the success of any business is predicated on the deployment of technology – which includes the perpetual coordination of hardware, software, data and IT-related personnel (or human capital). Alphacution has applied this hypothesis to the financial services industry (FSI), first by modeling the technology-related spending of 51 of the largest global banks – arguably among the biggest buyers of technology in the FSI ecosystem – and then generating a series of benchmarks, analytics (many of which fall under the label, “T-Greeks”), visuals and narratives to describe how each market actor is performing in that ecosystem. Off the back of this first version of the Alphacution Composite Model, regional and global industry patterns also emerge, in addition to entity-specific metrics. Focus on Revenue per Employee One of the most fascinating pictures we have been able to generate in these early stages of the modeling is a normalized ranking of the sample banks by revenue per employee (RPE), where “employee” [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:04:20-04:00November 12th, 2015|Open|
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#humanlatency

Though you may have fully gorged yourself on tales of latency over the past few years, I’m here to tell you that that overall story is far from over. Reason being, there is more than one form of latency – and the value (or cost – depending on your perspective) of at least one of the other types of latency will make the first narrative – the super-sexy knocking-on-the-door-of-the-speed-of-light version – seem like the Leda moon orbiting Jupiter. This is where human latency enters the vernacular. From where I sit – and though the nuances can be hotly debated beyond this short essay - there are actually three primary forms of latency - and a couple hybrid versions of those. These primary forms include “network / proximity latency”, “compute latency”, and “collaboration latency”. (Of course, the technology arms race of the past decade dealt almost exclusively with minimizing network / proximity latency.) Each of these general forms is a mix of native technical and human latencies, as follows (see Exhibit 1): With this rudimentary [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:03:14-04:00October 22nd, 2015|Open|
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