Managing Partner,
Intellyx
Nov 8, 2023 | 3 mins read
The blistering pace of technology change in the developed world can be difficult to keep up with – but it pales in comparison to the rate of such change across developing countries around the globe.
This counterintuitive phenomenon is the result of technology leapfrogging, where a nation bypasses an entire generation of technology entirely, instead jumping ahead to the latest and greatest, thus reaching par with its wealthier cousins.
Mobile telephony is the most familiar example of this leapfrogging. Africa, India, and many other developing regions struggled to provide landlines to their populations. Instead, they jumped to the latest mobile technology, rolling out phones to hundreds of millions of customers in a short span of years.
While this leapfrog in communications infrastructure is remarkable, it is only part of the story. The more important jumps in technology modernization concern applications and data.
The developed world should take notice. Not only are leading enterprises in the developing world rolling out globally competitive offerings to billions of people, but they are also establishing new ways of doing business that more traditional enterprises must understand to remain competitive.
Mobile telephony leapfrogging is an example of ‘stage-skipping,’ as the deployed technology infrastructure skips an entire generation, for example, wired land lines or perhaps 2G or 3G.
The other type of leapfrogging is ‘path-creating.’ With path-creating, innovative enterprises explore alternative paths of technology development that leverage emerging technologies with new opportunities and business benefits.
These two types of leapfrogging typically go hand-in-hand, while from the technology perspective, focus on different architectural domains.
Take, for example, mobile payment systems. Banks and other financial service providers first leverage stage-skipping to mobile phone infrastructure that supports mobile applications and the bandwidth they require (typically to 4G but now increasingly to 5G).
But mobile connectivity is merely an enabler. These enterprises must also build the applications on top of the connectivity infrastructure following massively scalable, real-time architectural principles.
In addition to this application infrastructure, service providers must also implement in parallel the requisite data infrastructure.
On the one hand, the connectivity and application infrastructure must support the collection, transmission, and security of data between every user endpoint and back-end service. On the other hand, the data infrastructure itself poses architectural challenges that these service providers must address.
The application and data infrastructure necessary to deploy mobile-based banking at scale are prime examples of path-creating leapfrogging efforts. Mobile banking depends upon stage-skipping mobile infrastructure, but such enterprises depend upon the additional innovations in application and data technology to drive business value.
Enterprises in developed countries can certainly take a page out of the technology and data infrastructure playbooks of path-creating leapfrogging companies – but there is more to this story.
As such path-creators scale, they will necessarily cross national boundaries. As international enterprises, they must deal with complex data-centric regulations.
Data sovereignty, therefore, becomes a primary concern of any path-creator. Different regulations in different jurisdictions constrain organizations’ use, storage, and transmission of customer data, creating a complex tangle of architectural complexity for any such enterprise.
The sovereignty issues these companies face, however, go beyond the data themselves. They must also deal with operational sovereignty, where the visibility and control over operations may vary from one jurisdiction to another; and software sovereignty, where individual workloads must be able to run without a dependence upon the company’s particular software infrastructure in one geography or another.
For the path-creating enterprises building international businesses based upon leapfrogging, such complex sovereignty challenges come with the territory. For traditional enterprises in developed countries, however, such murky regulatory challenges may present roadblocks to global innovation and growth.
For such traditional enterprises, learning the lessons of the path-creators and thus rising to the global competitive challenge they present becomes an essential enabler for global success.
There are five core principles that such organizations must follow when implementing their application and data infrastructure to rise to such challenges:
To keep up with the path creators, enterprises must build global, hybrid, multi-cloud applications that follow these patterns to compete in the modern world.
Mobile banking is the stereotypical example of how path-creators in the developing world drive innovation among competing enterprises in the developed world, but this phenomenon crosses many different industries.
Mobile healthcare is a global trend that parallels the growth of mobile banking, with even more stringent data sovereignty requirements. Modern agriculture is also becoming a path-creator success story around the world. The list goes on.
The core lesson here is that all this global innovation is driving new types of applications – global, hybrid, multi-cloud applications that are fully distributed and real-time.
Few enterprise technologies on the market support this full vision. To keep up with the path-creators, be sure to work with vendors who do.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Fiorano is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. No AI was used to write this article.