Digital is the rage at the moment. Digital is in the news everywhere and everyone is talking about how it is changing the way we live and do business. We can easily see the impact of Digital in Media, Telecom, Hi-tech and even FMCG, Utilities, Automotive and other industries…Smart-grids, Digital Oil Fields, Smart Cars…SMAC, IoT, Growth Hacking, AI have all become part of our vocabulary.
IT Service Companies have started building Digital Practices and are gearing up to meet the demand for Digital Services.
But has your IT Service Company turned the digital mirror inwards and revamped its operating model to make it digital ready?
Here are my views on some of the key changes impacting the IT Service Company that would disrupt the traditional operating model of IT Service Companies:
#1. Extension of Service & Support Model to an Analytics & Insight model - Providing excellent maintenance and support is just not going to cut it. Customers demand more and with the coming of age of the digital tools, customers will expect not just up-time & reliability but also extend it to trends and patterns from the data. Actionable Insight could be one of the biggest differentiators that companies could possess.
#2. Cloud impact on the Delivery Model - With cloud based solutions gaining popularity and larger companies looking to adopt them, there will be an increase in light-touch services, often on annuity subscriptions. This means increase in smaller, lighter projects and smaller chunks of revenues. Delivery effort would reduce, teams would become smaller, and there would be blending of implementation and support teams.
#3. Management approach and Mindset Mobility - With the technology savvy, digital generation of Gen Y and Gen Z coming into the workforce, a shift in organization dynamics is taking place. They expect the organization to connect & engage with them and their notion of selfhood is high. Accordingly, managers need to take a more collaborative, open and collective approach. The mindset would have to change from a driver to a collaborator.
#4. BYOD would become a reality - BYOD has been talked about for a while now but has not been implemented in its true sense yet. With the security concerns of connecting and working on the cloud being allayed to a large extent, employers would have to start weighing up the large CAPEX investments they make on procuring employee work devices with the OPEX benefits of BYOD.
#5. Increased leverage of Employee Social Ecosystem - Traditionally HR folks would engage employees and drive initiatives for employees. With social emerging as a critical component of future systems of engagement, internal communities & groups would be created. Crowd-sourcing through various social media tools would gain prominence and drive employee social engagement.
#6. Importance of Digital Brand creation & management - There is a lot of chatter happening in the digital world about your organization and people. Curbing employee access & restricting their activities in the digital world will fail miserably. In addition, Client interactions with Employees on social media will bring in a totally different set of challenges.
Organizations should recognize, leverage, manage and take control of the content in the digital world to shape brand & create a positive influence about the company.
Change is inevitable. The speed and nature of change will determine the rate and level of success of IT Service Companies as they brace themselves to get on-board the Digital revolution.