TECHNOLOGY MAKES THE DIFFERENCE
NEARLY EVERY COMPANY has a story about trying to transform its operations as a result of opportunity or crisis. In either case, leadership must admit that the current way of doing things is in danger of irrelevancy or, in its most severe form, disruption.
Boards and CEOs expect technology to be at the heart of these changes. The old IT operating model focused on sustainable competitive advantages. The new IT operating model employs transient competitive advantages that depend on agility — the ability to jump into a window of opportunity, seize the market and deftly move onto the next opportunity.
Companies of any size can exploit transient competitive advantage using technology’s speed, ubiquity and cost models — as long as they’re unencumbered by valueless IT assets.
Unless you’re leading a brand-new company, your organization has history. IT investments served their purpose supporting that history but likely miss the mark today.
Technology originally supported systems of record, longtime legacy systems, running in “shrines to technology devices” called data centers. No one imagined employees swiping personal credit cards to set up a collaboration site or a sales leader loading customer data into a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) tool — all while IT was busy keeping the lights on.
Business leaders have gotten smarter about what they want from technology. They expect new digital capabilities and value-chains. If IT fails to offer these new business capabilities — better targeting, data analytics, a more agile business, just to name a few — it’s simply acknowledging irrelevance.
These new business expectations place IT in an unprecedented land of opportunity. Yet indecision, unwillingness or ignorance about changing the old IT operating model could create a crisis of survival. Business leaders know what new capabilities they need to compete and win, but to pursue the new IT operating model, IT needs help discriminating between valuable and valueless assets.
An IT operating model at its core should provide more business capabilities (value) at an optimal cost. IT costs, themselves, are not the enemy — valueless IT costs are the enemy. At minimum, a unit of business capabilities should always be greater or equal to a unit of cost.
Activities that “keep the lights on” consume precious resources. Eliminating valueless assets gives IT new-found time and capital to keep pace or even lead business innovation. Data-driven buy-hold-sell management helps companies weed out unnecessary assets and focus on what furthers the business.
DISCRIMINATING BETWEEN THE VALUABLE AND VALUELESS
Digital capabilities offer nearly limitless promise. However, the funds and talent to deliver them do have limits. Some IT organizations allocate more than 80 percent of their budgets and talent to simply maintaining the status quo. It’s easy to see why there isn’t the bandwidth to support business innovation through technology.
Business owes it to IT to identify what is no longer needed or valuable. Through a systematic, fact-based approach, an organization can use business and IT metrics to categorize existing IT assets into a buy-hold-sell portfolio.
“Buy” refers to applications needed to grow the business; “hold” reflects necessary applications that don’t require investment beyond their value; and “sell” points to apps that deplete resources and budgets without contributing to the organization.
At minimum, business and IT must unify around the things that matter most which from our perspective are ESTABLISHING REALTIME CONNECTIONS WITH CUSTOMERS, and going EVERYTHING digital. To achieve the above, two steps are required; CREATION OF A RADICAL IT STRATEGY and continuous IT BENCHMARKING to ensure capital, talent and projects are allocated to buy while IT can starve the sells through enterprise-wide prioritization and transparency.
Build Realtime Connections
talking to customers 24/7/365
Connecting with your customers is more complex than ever before. Your customers interact with your brand in many different ways and for different reasons at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Through multiple devices, they interact with you through your website, social media, mobile sites and apps, in-store, and more. And while it’s great that there are so many new ways for your customers to reach you, taking advantage of all these connection opportunities in a relevant and meaningful way is more challenging than ever.
Let us work with you to develop an end-to-end, real-time engagement platform, empowering your business to get the most out of its existing digital assets by intelligently engaging with customers based on a real-time understanding of their needs. Create meaning multi-channel interactions with your customers by seamlessly integrating chat, voice, content, and video chat. We can help you leverage sophisticated technology with real-time business analytics to produce compelling, measurable results. Let us help you create meaningful connections between you and your customers, in ways never before envisioned.
Everything Digital
efficiency and accuracy
Companies are now forced to think about ways they can leverage digital technologies across all elements of the media mix to make their message personal and contextually relevant. Regardless of what product or service you deliver, your brand must be accessible, and the purchase easy.
Mobile devices have become the dominant screen for 65% of those who have them globally. They are ubiquitous, personal and an incredibly powerful way to engage with customers.
The question is how ready is your company to address the faced paced demands for customers once they connect with you digitally. As an example, how streamlined are your supply-chain, finance processes? How prepared are you to have meaningful realtime customer support interactions and what media will you use?
Its one thing to have a cool mobile app, its something different to make sure that every click results in a meaningful customer interaction which ensures your customers become your greatest advocates.
Lets help you figure out the organizational and process gaps to ensure you succeed in the digital world.
Create a Radical IT Strategy
Breaking with tradition
Creating radical innovation in a company is very different from incremental innovation. However, it is perhaps the most critical success factor in today’s fast moving competitive environment.
Unfortunately, research has also shown that it is often difficult to get support for radical projects in large companies where internal cultures and pressures often push efforts toward more low risk, immediate reward, incremental projects.
Traditional IT strategies focus on people, process and technology as critical ingredients of the company’s overall technology vision and direction. However taking into account close interaction that customers now demand, several other factors need to be evaluated.
A critical focus area is understanding customer behaviour and interaction. Our IT strategy approach leverages interviews, surveys and workshops to identify how customers perceive their interaction with the company – what works today and what doesn’t. The second area focuses on identifying market drivers and technology competencies that must be in place to make innovation a reality. By focusing on competency management we can help you identify strategic challenges that emerge as your company stretches itself into new and unfamiliar territory.
The final focus area relates to the people issues that emerge as both individuals and project teams themselves try to move radical projects forward in organizations that are not necessarily designed to support such uncertainty.
From these three core focus areas we derive an integrated IT strategy supported by a high-level business case that helps ensures the company meets its long-term objectives.
Realtime IT Benchmarking
How good are you?
Our IT benchmarking delivers unbiased comparisons of IT performance relative to peer organizations and those considered best-in-class.
Focus areas include:
- Operations
- Technology architecture
- Infrastructure models
- Online strategy
- Organization
- Standards
