Canada’s recovery hinges on its digital acceleration

“In the new world, it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it’s the fast fish which eats the slow fish.”

This quote from Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum, is even more resonant than ever given how the current pandemic has shone a light on the digitization of our society.

Canada is dealing with a daunting, rapid and massive shift in where we work, how we work and what is expected of us. While some of this shift may be temporary, I would argue much of it will live on beyond the pandemic. Ultimately what’s changed is that while we have been talking about digital transformation for a decade, this pandemic has accelerated the urgency to act; for many businesses it really is “evolve or die.”

While we may naturally miss the “good old days,” the digital acceleration ushered in by COVID-19 provides an opportunity for enterprises to finally commit to new engagement models and realize the potential of entering new markets.

Businesses and services are rapidly implementing meaningful change, spurred by the pressure to modernize and adapt to this new reality. This is especially true in health care, education, retail and telecommunications.

As exciting as this future sounds, Canadian organizations face a roadblock: a nearly 60-year-old legacy technology infrastructure that was never designed for the speed, volume and flexibility demanded by today’s digital age.

This technical debt is most visible when you look at the data requirements associated with the build out of modern “systems of innovation.” Modern applications simply don’t conform to the rigid standards of our traditional databases. Specifically, the volume of semi and unstructured data (photos, video, audio, social media and streaming analytics) has exploded and analyzing that data in real-time requires a modern data architecture.

Ultimately the source of the issue here is that most technology architectures were not built from scratch. Instead, they have been built over time, project by project, with many Band-aids and compromises along the way. This makes their data models slow, fragmented and not very agile. Evolving these architectures and building a foundation for digital growth is critical.

There are incredible Canadian examples of this transformation all around us. Post pandemic, risk identification and contact tracing are front and centre.

Crater Labs, a Canadian Ai/machine learning lab, began detecting emerging pandemic risks back in December 2019, and is now helping identify threat triggers in supply chains and helping health care providers recommend proper interventions.

At Mcmaster University, a renowned genomics research lab is in a race against time to fight the pandemic using next-generation technology. As superbug resistance and the growing global scourge of COVID-19 places modern medicine under siege, the Mcarthur Lab has been able to speed drug discovery by analyzing select data sets 24times faster than before. Lab leader Andrew Mcarthur was part of the team that isolated the live virus this year.

Let’s face it, none of us had a pandemic in our business plans for 2020 and the COVID-19. That being said, the pandemic has also provided a watershed moment to jump-start our digital future and with it an economic recovery. Let’s seize this moment and the urgency around it to think beyond “which vendor we are going to buy from” and instead think about “how we are going to consume and architect technology to enable us to compete in this new economy.” The future is counting on us.