Third year in a row writing one of these. The pattern is becoming clear: January optimism, twelve months of reality, December reflection. This year the mood is different. Not the frantic adaptation of 2020, not the cautious expansion of 2021. Something closer to consolidation. We've built a lot. Now we need to make it all work together properly.
The Shape of 2022
The team has earned a year where we're not constantly reacting. We've got strong ongoing relationships with the Mental Health Foundation, we're winding down Edison Health in a way that respects both the platform and the people who use it, Oceania Football is growing, Trev continues to tick along, and Real Groovy's digital work keeps surprising us. It's a good portfolio. Diverse enough to be interesting, stable enough to plan around.
Our priorities this year come down to three things.
Consolidation Over Expansion
We added a lot of capability in the last two years. New integrations, new platforms, new domains. The honest assessment is that some of it was done quickly out of necessity and could be better. Not broken, but not as clean as we'd like.
This year we're investing in the boring work. Tightening up codebases. Improving monitoring. Writing the documentation that we skipped when we were in survival mode. Making the systems we've already built more resilient rather than building new ones.
The best thing about consolidation years is that they make the next expansion year faster. The worst thing is that nobody gets excited about them in a planning meeting.
Isaac Rolfe
Managing Director
Integration Depth
Last year we flagged integration architecture as a growing problem. That hasn't changed. If anything, it's intensified. Every client we work with has added two or three more tools since 2020 and none of them were bought with integration in mind.
91%
of enterprise IT leaders say integration complexity is slowing down new initiatives
Source: MuleSoft Connectivity Benchmark Report, 2022
We're going deeper on integration patterns this year. Not just connecting systems but building integration layers that can handle change, because the one thing we know for certain is that every client's tool stack will look different in eighteen months.
Keeping Good People
The talent market in NZ tech is brutal right now. Everyone is hiring, salaries are climbing, and remote work means our people can work for Australian or US companies without leaving their house. We've lost a couple of good people in the last year. Not because they were unhappy, but because the offers were too good to ignore.
Our response isn't to get into a bidding war we can't win. It's to be the kind of place where people do interesting work with people they respect. That's always been our advantage and it matters more than ever when the market is this competitive.
What I'm Watching
Beyond client work, a few things have my attention. The NLP space is moving quickly. GPT-3 has been out for over a year now and the applications are getting more practical. Image generation is getting surprisingly good. None of it is enterprise-ready in any meaningful way, but the pace of improvement is worth paying attention to.
Cloud costs are also something we're watching. The promise of cloud was cost flexibility, but the reality for most of our clients is that costs have quietly crept up as usage has grown. There's a reckoning coming on cloud spending.
The Year Ahead
Honestly, I'd be happy if 2022 was a year where we did the same things we've been doing, just better. Not every year needs to be transformational. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is make your existing work excellent and keep your team together.
That's the plan. Check back in December to see how it went.