20 for ‘20 – What a Difference a Year Makes!

As many of you will already be aware, we recently published the 2020 edition of our 20 for ’20 white paper.  Just as we did a year ago, we sat down with another 20 senior executives to get their perspectives on the outlook for the immediate future. Of course, the interviews took place before the coronavirus disrupted our 2020 plans, but the findings tell us a lot about what companies are working on from a technology perspective. As we shall summarize in this post, the industry has experienced a significant year over year shift. 
In our new 2020 paper, we have identified a new set of trends and observations about current projects and priorities, some of which we will highlight on this blog in the coming weeks. But below, we will recap the five big findings from last year and see what’s changed in the interim.
1. No more “One Big Project” dynamic
A year ago, we were struck by the number of respondents (a half) who reported having spent 2018 focusing on a single project that had dominated their year, effectively consuming all IT delivery capacity other than business as usual. Seven of the ten had been PMS switches or major upgrades, in itself an anomaly.
In this year’s research, nobody reported the dominance of a single project. In fact, we got a much stronger impression of a group of operators who were “back on offense” in 2019, adding capabilities to their technology platforms. That 70% of respondents reported increased tech spending ……