Planning for 2023 with MACH Technology
Posted by Amanda McLaughlin on Sep 27, 2022
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MACH architecture is the new rising standard in modern retail technology. Wherever you look, it is bleeding into the front office of companies as they look ahead to 2023.
In fact, the MACH Alliance’s recent study, ‘Enterprise MACHified,’ shows MACH system adoption is high on the agenda for many tech leaders. At present, Germany sits ahead of the pack with 60% MACH prevalence in the front office, followed by the U.K. (53%) and the U.S. (34%).
What this tells us is retail brands across the globe are giving MACH their attention. In the past year, 19% more companies have moved away from monolithic architectures to best-of-breed systems. Additionally, 79% of tech leaders across the U.S., U.K., and Germany intend to invest more in MACH in the next 12 months. Driving this shift is a lack of satisfaction in over half of businesses in how they’re currently able to deliver customer experience (CX) improvements. It’s just not fast enough.
In this article, we share insights and tips from the 2022 MACH One event to help you understand where and how to focus your digital transformation efforts in 2023.
First, let’s talk about the elephant in the boardroom: stakeholders. Research from McKinsey supports that up to 70% of transformation projects fail, and stakeholder management is a contributing factor.
Securing firm commitments from C-suite and board stakeholders for any tech investment is difficult. But the complexity of MACH makes it uniquely challenging – especially for those leaders who aren’t IT savvy. Your stakeholders probably won’t ‘get’ it at first (and they definitely won’t if you’re already halfway on your journey).
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean securing their buy-in will be a marathon. Refreshingly, much of the recent conversation around MACH has focused on how to capture stakeholder buy-in and uncover the path of least resistance.
Complex topics like new IT architecture may dissuade you from sharing your ideas until you have them fully fleshed out. While this might seem like the most logical approach, most MACH changemakers agree that bringing stakeholders along from day one will improve their attitude toward any project. By including the board on your journey of discovery and planning, they will be more invested in the success of the project and will develop a personal attachment to it.
Nat Gross, MACH Alliance advisory board member and Vice President of Brand and Marketing for EPAM, says, “There is no MACH without business adoption. And that has been heard very loud and very clear.”
Technology talk doesn’t light a fire under stakeholders in the same way it does project teams. Advice from those who were at MACH One is to avoid getting too technical. Table the talk about which API is better and avoid getting into the minute details of microservices. These kinds of discussions can quickly lose non-IT executives.
Sonja Keerl, co-founder of the MACH Alliance, has straightforward advice for communicating with business stakeholders: “Zoom out to the outcomes, and focus on the art of the possibility.”
“You have to talk about outcomes and business value, not technology,” echoes Niall Edwards, Vice President of Technology at LEGO. “That’s what people get wrong.”
Getting into the heads of your stakeholders early is crucial. They likely have different challenges and goals, affecting how they think about technology. Your sensitivity towards these will impact how much support they offer you.
There’s a lot to be said for flipping the narrative. Joe Cicman of Forrester suggests, “Instead of thinking of board-level IT literacy, how about approaching this from the reverse; IT-level board literacy.” How you approach your board members significantly influences their attitude towards transformation.
The takeaway: Including business stakeholders in your MACH journey at an early stage will do wonders for securing their support later on in the project. When doing so, approach them in ways that respect their challenges and goals – which will likely differ from your own (but are no less critical).
Technology shouldn’t be the driving force behind the decision to ‘go MACH.’ Go figure!
The MACH acronym is a techy set of words – Microservices, API-first, Cloud-based, and Headless. It doesn’t stand for ‘increase sales’ or ‘make it easier for the business user.’ (Although, those probably are your main arguments for going down the MACH path in 2023.)
Mark Elliot, Chief Architect at Boohoo, grounds this point with his observations of the brand’s journey towards composability: “It’s not a techy decision to do this. You’ve got to put the tools in place that the business wants to use – they’re the ones merchandising on the site.”
It’s a sentiment Screwfix’s Chief Product Officer, Scott Fraser, shares. Fraser points out that the end-users for MACH tech aren’t solely tech people. “We have our colleagues in-store who are using the digital front-end, and they also have demands. Our business and commercial teams want to be able to pull the levers – to better merchandise, trade, and drive the digital estate.” He is of the mindset that viewing business and commercial teams as additional customers from a product perspective can be helpful and that ‘going MACH’ should be based on whether you can better fulfill their demands.
Listening to your in-store colleagues’ demands is perhaps most important. After all, they’re pretty close to your consumers. What consumers want from store associates continues to evolve. Ensuring your technology decisions align with these demands (such as modern mobile store experiences, seamless checkout experiences, enhanced loyalty capabilities, and easy returns) has never been more critical — a fact you can’t overlook when preparing for 2023.
The takeaway: Before going MACH, understand what your end customers and your colleagues using the technology want. And as importantly, what your retail teams need. Building out functionality is excellent, but if that functionality doesn’t result in a superior digital shopping experience, it’s all for nothing.
The old guard of vendors, the ‘til death do us part sort, are no longer the norm. Similar to how going MACH is not a techy decision, there is now more emphasis placed on what a new vendor brings to your business beyond tech. For example, many (78%) vendors and systems integrators (SIs) understand their vital role in enabling customers to meet challenges head-on with strategic support.
Talk at the MACH One event centered around looking for a partner, not a vendor. It may sound like semantics, but the distinction is important. Most brands today are thinking about MACH in the context of a broader transformation program. This means there are many people and processes that stand to be impacted. Therefore, the role of the vendor has morphed to become collaborator, steward, and educator, as well. It’s no longer merely about the solution.
For vendors and SIs, this means adopting a new business model that instills trust at each stage of the customer journey and presents solutions (not just products) time and time again.
Choosing a vendor or SI partner that connects to and elevates your brand’s core mission is crucial for delivering experiences that inspire what you’re all about – whether that’s maintaining the local, neighborhood touch or scaling to the enterprise.
The takeaway: Business and technology are the same. In 2023, a technology partner that ‘gets’ your brand and wants to help you improve it is just as important as what technical capabilities they offer.
Buzzwords like ‘co-innovation,’ ‘generative partnering,’ and ‘co-creation’ have begun to enter the lexicon of technology leaders. Each has a different shade of meaning, but they sprout from the same issues faced by brands everywhere:
So, what about a MACH-certified solution makes it possible for brands to innovate at a fast clip despite these challenges?
Bettina Donmez, Senior Manager of Ecommerce Platform Development at PUMA, believes MACH changes how you can approach your backlog. “In many ways, it [MACH] makes things easier. I have one team working on a backlog where we deliver something and then we move on to the next sprint. What has changed is that you cannot stop learning! Every single day I’m learning a new technology, something new that we may need to integrate.”
Momentum like this is challenging to keep up with, and there’s a danger of stalling out. “You can have the best back-end set up in the whole market, but if there’s no adaptation to it, maintaining innovation is hard,” says Niall Edwards of LEGO.
To progress your brand in 2023, consider leveraging your technology partners as a source of innovation. The best partners will bring you suggestions for innovation, helping feed your backlog with ideas on how you can improve together. Accelerating innovation with MACH technology in 2023 requires a vendor that enables you to get ideas done in ways you want to get them done.
The takeaway: Choose a partner that actively brings ideas to bear for innovation specific to your brand’s goals. Prioritize a push relationship with your technology partners instead of a pull one. You want them to constantly egg you on to improve versus being ok with things going idle.
MACH technology encourages conversations about speed and flexibility. These are good things. However, it can come at a quality cost if you’re not managing the amount of work you do.
The flexibility of MACH technology means that going slow may sometimes be the better way. Niall Edwards puts it into sparkling clarity: “Put it [MACH] where it makes sense, not everywhere. It comes back to value.”
There’s a misconception that you must do MACH at a high velocity. In reality, it’s ok to reign in the releases a little. Bettina Donmez says that “when the pace of change becomes so fast that even the product owners say, ‘ok now that’s too much!’ it’s ok to slow down.”
The takeaway: Just because you can go fast with MACH doesn’t mean you have to. Apply MACH technologies where it makes sense, and ensure that there will always be a positive return on your investment.
In short, MACH is here to stay. Kelly Goetsch, Chairperson of the MACH Alliance, aptly believes, “[MACH] is just the standard now – and it will be for quite a few more decades.”
As for beyond that? All anyone can say for sure is that something will eclipse MACH eventually, and we will be talking about that something when that time comes. But for now, MACH technology is changing the game. It allows brands to finally focus on business outcomes and people rather than technology and a signature on a dotted line.
So, as you plan to transform towards a MACH architecture in 2023, consider the following:
The NewStore Omnichannel Platform has been vetted and is confirmed to offer fully compliant MACH services. More than that, we care about making your brand as successful as possible.
Want to learn how we can support your digital transformation in 2023? Reach out!
