This commentary appeared in the print edition of the Jan. 6, 2020, Journal of Commerce Annual Review and Outlook.
It’s been an exciting and somewhat haphazard year for logistics, with new products and capabilities appearing daily. For many, the pace of change and opportunity has been overwhelming, leaving digital transformation projects paralyzed by overchoice and incompatible technology.
A few tech solutions applied well have delivered ROI in specific areas of business for most logistics players, but the typical cargo ecosystem is a barrier to new technology adoption and true transformation. This complex, fragmented, siloed IT landscape with legacy at its core is a source of poor data quality, integration challenges, and complexity, making adoption of any new technology slow and hard to do.
Open platforms that support the rapid integration of internal and external services and service providers are the solution. Leveraging these types of platforms reduces the time and risk to introduce all the great new technology available, reuses what you already have, enables automation, and transforms your IT landscape.
This technology will enable quick development of smart and flexible APIs to integrate different data sources, whether they are third-party systems, in-house systems, or various database technologies, and deliver new value fast.
You’ll need the tools to rapidly build apps, and because those apps will sit on open APIs that have abstracted away your cargo ecosystem, you’ll continue to deliver a consistent user experience, even as the underlying IT landscape evolves over time.
Finally, a “big data” platform will help with the large volume of duplication and events happening at any given time, providing a single source of truth without changing the master of record. This insight will help you to automate decision making on a case-by-case basis, while still leaving important decisions to the end user.
The right open platform opens doors to all the new technology coming at you in 2020 and beyond.