If there is one thing 2020 has made clear it’s that we could all use a bit more simplicity in our lives. The competition for customer attention has reached a fever-pitch—and this was before the pandemic, political polarity, and civil unrest.
Edward Tufte, an American statistician and professor emeritus at Yale University once said, “Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.” In 2021, we will continue to see reductive brands create value for their customers by using simplicity to create efficiencies for brands by design. Simplicity reduces waste. Simplicity saves time. Simplicity builds loyalty. Simplicity is scalable.
As we create visual identities, the spirit of simplicity guides us to be more conservative with our palette and acknowledge the environment our designs are living within. As a marketing message and copywriting exercise, simplicity means being more directional, with clear, actionable, steps—removing the fluff. From a production and implementation perspective we are creating solutions that can be flat-packed, shipped, and easily assembled by employees in the field. From an internal communication and process point-of-view simplicity means picking up the phone and talking a problem through.
“Simplicity at scale” has been our team’s rallying cry as we meet the challenges of today’s constantly changing retail landscape. We are actively reducing our work down to the bare essentials to identify what is truly needed.
With Walmart, this meant creating a design system that could scale quickly. It meant studying airports—learning how to efficiently move people through massive spaces. We developed a reproducible material palette that complimented large, industrial buildings and that met our sustainability standards. Walmart’s remodel schedule made us reconsider the role of lifestyle photography to offset the cost of replacing tired images over time. It meant blending channels with an app-led store navigation system guided by the simple insight that, today, we live in a mobile-first world. Customers are the ultimate beneficiary of this line of thinking. If we make their lives easier, simpler—we will cut through the noise and continue to earn their loyalty.
Cybersecurity ecosystem
The Data Security Council of India has forecast that the cybersecurity ecosystem will expand up to a point where nearly one million professionals will be required by 2025. Additionally, the demand for cloud security skills is estimated to grow by 115% between 2020 and 2025, representing almost 20,000 job openings, Narayan added.
An extensive exercise in reskilling and/or upskilling the existing workforce, believe staffing experts, is one of the ways that telcos can future proof their work.
Indian mobile phone operators are expected to at least double their investments on network security with the 5G roll out expected to spark a surge in network vulnerabilities, which assume critical importance especially for enterprises.
However, it is already proving to be a challenge for telcos to have robust security teams.
“Even if we do not talk about 5G (specifically), the security talent in general in the country is very sparse at the moment. We need to get more (security) professionals in the system”
Bharti Airtel, for example, has been preparing for 5G roll out by upskilling its professionals and offering them certification courses such as CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) and CCNP (Cisco Certified Network Professional). The courses are offered based on skill and eligibility level free of cost.
We didn’t invent the term “fools with tools.” Still, it’s a perfect definition for the practice of buying a stack of sophisticated cybersecurity technology that’s impossible to manage without an MSP or the budget of a Fortune 500 IT department.