Industry Insights
2021: Hybrid Everything — and the Analysis Gap
If 2020 was the year of crisis response, 2021 was the year of cautious recalibration. The vaccine rollout brought optimism, but the world didn’t snap back. Offices reopened at half capacity, then closed again, then reopened with rules nobody could quite remember. The phrase of the year was “hybrid” — hybrid work, hybrid meetings, hybrid delivery.
And in that hybrid reality, a gap I’d been writing about since 2019 didn’t close. It widened.
Ambition Outpaced Analysis
With COVID survival mode behind them, organisations got ambitious again. But the ambitions had changed. Every client conversation in 2021 started with the same aspiration: they didn’t want a tool or a system anymore. They wanted a platform. A portal. An ecosystem.
The scope of projects expanded dramatically. Digital transformation, which had been departmental, became enterprise-wide. Integration requirements multiplied. Stakeholder maps grew more complex. And the discovery and requirements work that was already struggling pre-COVID didn’t scale to match.
I kept seeing the same pattern: teams moving fast, shipping features, hitting sprint velocities that looked impressive on a dashboard — but building the wrong thing. Not because the developers were poor, but because the analysis that should have preceded development was either rushed, skipped, or conducted by people who didn’t have the skills to bridge business need and solution design.
The Supply Chain Wake-Up
2021 also brought supply chain disruptions that forced manufacturers and logistics companies to rethink decades of assumptions. Just-in-time became just-in-case. Demand forecasting models broke. And every one of these organisations needed technology solutions — fast.
The problem was that “fast” usually meant skipping the analysis phase entirely. I watched several programmes jump straight from a board-level directive to a development backlog, with nothing in between except a few PowerPoint slides and a lot of assumptions. The resulting solutions were technically sound but operationally misaligned. They solved a problem that the business had already moved past by the time the solution went live.
Cloud-First by Default
Cloud migration went from strategy to default in 2021. The question was no longer whether to move to the cloud but how fast. This created its own analysis challenges. Cloud architecture decisions that should have been driven by business requirements were instead driven by technical preference or vendor relationships. The technology tail wagged the business dog.
I found myself spending more time in 2021 helping organisations step back and articulate what they actually needed from their cloud investments before the architects and engineers took over. The best migrations were the ones where someone had done the unglamorous work of mapping business processes to technical capabilities. The worst were the ones that treated cloud as a destination rather than an enabler.
Moonbase
This was also the year I co-founded Moonbase. The trigger was straightforward: after years of seeing the same delivery anti-patterns across different industries and organisations, it became clear that the market needed more than individual consulting engagements. It needed a consistent approach — a way to embed structured analysis into delivery without slowing it down.
Moonbase was built around that conviction. Not another agile consultancy. Not another transformation practice. A delivery partner that treated the analysis-to-design bridge as the highest-leverage point in any programme.
The Gap Persists
Looking back at my 2019 post, the observation was that the gap between business intent and solution delivery was widening. Two years and a pandemic later, the gap hadn’t changed shape — it had just become harder to ignore. Organisations were spending more, delivering more, and yet the ratio of rework to useful output hadn’t improved.
The industry was still arguing about methodologies when the real issue was the quality of thinking that connected problem to solution. That conviction — the one that had been forming since 2019 — was getting sharper. And it was starting to look less like an observation and more like something that needed to be built.