This past Monday at the Boston FinTech Showcase over 300 people gathered to talk shop around emerging Financial Technology (fintech) and see demos from several hot startups in the space. There’s a lot of activity in fintech right now, demonstrated by the excitement around the event, which was at capacity with a waitlist.
There were startups for asset management, payments, analytics, and risk management, among others. And each startup had a point of view about how to transform fintech. There were also several incubators, investors, and corporate innovation groups. But what wasn’t? Blockchain. (Author Note: Check out my colleague Reetika Joshi’s blog for a broader perspective on the technologies and solutions that were highlighted at the Boston FinTech Showcase.)
Last Fall, we looked at what’s happening with blockchain services in BFSI and found that the market was mostly still in the proof-of-concept (POC) stage. At the showcase, we talked to several innovation teams at big financial services corporations about their progress on blockchain and found that they’ve gotten past the research stage and are in development in some specific areas like payments/settlements (something that was also big in our research) and derivatives. They all pointed out that they picked areas where they saw ROI. In other areas, they decided that blockchain was not better than current or alternative solutions.
Investors echoed this perspective. Network costs, interoperability and switching costs, and first-mover costs of picking a platform that might not wind up as the industry standard were among some of the reasons they felt that adoption hadn’t progressed faster and why the business cases were stronger in specific areas like cross-border payments.
Bottom Line: Blockchain and fintech tend to get used together a lot as if blockchain was the major trend in fintech, but in fact, the two markets aren’t as intertwined as we’d expected.Instead, fintech is developing quickly in areas unrelated to blockchain, like analytics and automation. Meanwhile, blockchain is finding a foothold in some specific areas but isn’t the driving force in fintech.
We also think that this shows some further evidence that other applications like provenance (proving the origin and chain of custody of materials through a supply chain,) anti-counterfeiting efforts and compliance reporting will overtake financial applications as the “killer apps” for blockchain, as HfS has written before. In fact, a recent study from Deloitte recently found this as well: it recently published results that showed 58% of consumer goods and manufacturing companies had already deployed or would deploy blockchain this year, compared to only 36% of financial services firms.provenance
We’re going to keep digging further, as my colleague Reetika Joshi and I research blockchain’s evolution in BFSI and I kick off reports in supply chain-related blockchain applications. Stay tuned.
Last week, HfS had the opportunity to meet with the NTT DATA leadership team at the service provider’s first major analyst summit in Dallas Texas, since its acquisition of Dell Services last year. So can the firm live up to its new billing as one of the major tier 1 global service providers?
Making sense of a complex fast growing entity
Analyzing NTT DATA is by no means an easy undertaking, given its complex organizational structure and lower visibility due to its reluctance to invest in marketing.
The CEO of NTT DATA Inc., John McCain, tackled those perceptions head on and vowed to change direction. Much of the purpose of this event was to present the “new” NTT DATA. Building on the acquisition of Dell Services, he pointed to branding campaigns that include TV and broadsheets. This is reflecting that the company has evolved, not least through acquisitions, into one of the largest global service providers. And with these significant investments come higher expectations. So, how should we look at NTT DATA and how does the company stack up in the competitive landscape?
The strategy framework that McCain outlined appeared sound and offers a platform for further expansion. In particular, (re-)packaging the portfolio and industrializing delivery. In the context of the portfolio pillar, McCain was pointing to the aim of deriving greater value from NTT DATA investments and of leveraging the “NTT Group power”. Yet, throughout the two days, we actually did hear very little about the Japanese capabilities and activities that the broader NTT Group brings to the table. When executives actually touched on those capabilities, the differentiation to the broader market appeared at least in contours. NTT DoCoMo, DiData, discussions on how Quantum Computing and Cognitive Computing could solve mankind’s more pressing issues, were providing a glimpse of highly differentiated capabilities. Invariably, the discussion of cognitive evoked strong memories of IBM. However, in contrast, NTT DATA is crucially not constrained by the many legacy deals with which IBM is still struggling. If anything, NTT DATA had hitherto focused on specific project-centric business but is now keen to trade up to larger and broader sourcing deals across multiple domains.
The challenge of bringing together the existing Japanese business units with the newly-acquired international businesses
The marginalization of NTT DATA’s Japanese business points to another crucial issue. The integration of the various business units, including the many acquisitions, is a work in progress. One can point positively to the long-term focus of the Japanese business culture that has seen acquisitions being very carefully integrated over a longer period of time. Yet, I couldn’t help feeling that the cultures of Keane and Dell Services appear to be the dominant reference points in many discussions. Thus, there appears to be a healthy tension between the Japanese core business and the “Global Business” i.e. the multiple acquisitions outside Japan. However, if HfS’ contention that organizations are moving toward to the Digital OneOffice™ (download our POV for a full definition of the Digital OneOffice), where connecting back, middle and front-office is corroborated, then NTT DATA has to eat its own dog food and move toward being a more connected global organization – you can’t deliver true Digital OneOffice capability if you haven’t become a true Digital organization yourself at your core.
NTT Data has real potential to align to the Digital OneOffice
From what we are learning, the seeds for that are already being sown. Around its Digital Services, NTT DATA is suggesting the first focus is through its customer’s eyes. And, similar to our suggestion of a Digital Underbelly, NTT DATA is pointing to the fundamental shift that automation is creating. However, the boldest initiative is to wrap the needs of the customer directly around its delivery priorities through its CUE2, continuous customer experience engineering program.
Let’s start with NTT DATA stance on automation. The prominence in which executives were talking about automation was tangible. Yet, the specifics of the various initiatives might have been lost to many in the audience. Below the radar screen, NTT DATA is running the largest deployments of IPsoft’s IPcenter globally. Tellingly, the Global Management One platform is helping clients with onboarding to NTT DATA’s cloud platform. A task that has been challenged by the many acquisitions that we have called out. Furthermore, the company is helping to adapt IPsoft’s Amelia to the Japanese language and executives were suggesting strong traction. Around more mundane matters, the strategy around RPA was a trifle blurred. While NTT DATA’s BPO business is focused on its proprietary AFTE solution, as executives suggested the solution to be more efficient than any third-party tools, the consulting arm, largely representing the Carlisle & Gallagher acquisition, was pointing to third party tools as the preferred way of engagement. Beyond the nuances of the automation strategy, what really stood out for us at the event, was NTT DATA’s ambitious plan to integrate customers directly into their delivery strategy with the CUE2, continuous customer experience engineering program. This program is not only adapting Agile and DevOps to the requirements of Managed Services but putting the user center stage. In all but name, here it is where the connection to the HfS Digital OneOffice concept is the strongest. Suffice it to say, NTT DATA is still very early in rolling this out across its engagements, but the strategic intent could evolve into one of its strongest differentiators.
Bottom-line: NTT DATA has to eat its own digital dog food to progress toward the OneOffice
As bold as the CUE2 initiative is, in order to catch up with the leading global service providers and to demonstrate its Digital OneOffice credentials, NTT DATA has to advance significantly the integration of its various business units. Only by finding and leveraging commonality across its global delivery units, NTT DATA’s many innovative forays will lead to repeatability and thus margin improvement. In order to reach new clients, NTT DATA should make a virtue of the achievements of the broader NTT Group. While culturally not always accessible, NTT DATA’s strong innovation credentials, often emanating from the Japanese market, provide a platform for a clear differentiation in a market that has been notoriously difficult to achieve a meaningful differentiation. Deep networking and mobile capabilities that can be leveraged in IoT scenarios are jumping to mind. To succeed with the ambitions for the “new” NTT DATA, a broader mix of accents might go a long way, not least Japanese. Then we will start to look at NTT DATA as a truly global heavyweight.
Finally! We’ve just saved you hours upon hours of mind-numbingly dull hangouts trying to figure out all your fancy new digital job titles and reporting lines… now time to get combatting all that disruption to make your firm a true transformative digital pioneer in this emerging quantum era, where you can be a digital Michael Phelps diving into your own datalake:
There is a staggering gap between C-level executives and middle managers when it comes to dealing with the change digital-enabled business models and new services paradigms force upon us. The journey to the As-a-Service Economy is met with enthusiasm by the C-Suite (see Exhibit 1). But their middle management has a different take: shying away from big transformational initiatives and focusing on more tactical interventions. Are you all living in the same world?
We should not blame middle management for the inertia we witness in many industries, including the business and IT services industry.
Anxiety and resistance are logical reactions to change. People don’t like change, as it threatens the status quo, what they know and worked hard for. This is the playground of the sunk cost fallacy. “We worked so hard to get to where we are: we can’t throw that away. We need to keep going to maintain what we have”. C-Suite respondents in our large surveys show they’re not willing to throw good money at keeping the status quo. That is the big point: change is inevitable. The way a company deals with change will increasingly be a deciding factor for survival and competitive advantage.
The Ball is in the C-Suite’s Court
Having a vision is one thing, enabling implementation and executing the vision is significantly different. Middle management’s lukewarm reaction to change is understandable and frankly not surprising. There is a lot of uncertainty about new technologies such as autonomics, robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, and cognitive computing. There are wild predictions about robots destroying people’s jobs. People are wondering how they will be impacted; what do the changes mean, what will my job look like in this As-a-Service economy, do I have the skills to be successful?
Uncertainty is the enemy of the ability to embrace change.
The answer? Educate, show results and impact. Also, are people incentivized in the right way to lead sweeping change? Or are they incentivized to drive incremental improvement? Aligning incentives to the ultimate goal is paramount.
“Beam me up, Scotty”
Wouldn’t we all want to just be there, at the destination? Counting the times, you would love to say, “Beam me up, Scotty” … But alas, if you need to go somewhere, you must endure the journey.
It is a journey to change, and all road warriors know making a journey is not always fun, it is pretty exhausting, and you often have to deal with unpleasant adversity.
Investing in disruptive technologies is one thing. Successfully implementing them and going through the change process as a business is another. C-Suite respondents are likely to bring in external help in the form of transformational leadership or change agents to redesign the operations. However, to be successful, they need to inspire, motivate, and properly measure and provide associated incentives and rewards for the team.
Often when a sports team is dysfunctional, the leadership tries to shake things up by firing the coach and bringing in new blood. On the one hand, a new perspective can change the dynamics of the team for the better. On the contrary, there is an entirely pragmatic reason to fire coaches; it is much easier and cheaper to fire one coach than to fire all players. This logic holds true for enterprises as well. An external stimulus is good, but getting rid of the middle management is impossible and threatens the going concern (aka the revenue generating machine). See here the dilemma for the large incumbent with legacy operations trying to fight off the nimble new entrants, who simply don’t have to drag all the baggage with them.
A Plan is as Good as its Implementation
Leadership is critical; don’t let there be any doubt about the destination, the Northern Star. But, involve the rest of the company to map out the journey. Let them be a part of the solution. Our research shows the gap between C-Suite and middle management is significantly smaller when asked about using creative problem solving (Design Thinking) to reach the As-a-Service end-state. 54% of C-Suite and 43% of middle management think Design Thinking will have a significant impact on the journey.
Unleash the Knowledge and Creativity of the Company
Years of operational excellence, Lean and Six Sigma have beaten all creativity out of operations and middle management. You get what you pay for. So if you pay for hundreds of green KPI’s, you get hundreds of micro-managed green KPI’s.
C-level leadership has to set creativity free, unleash the innovative power of the workforce. Granted, corporate Japan is not the prime example of free-spirited creativity, but they have a thorough understanding of the power of expert knowledge. Toyota’s concept of the Creative Idea Suggestion System brought them a lot of good (and paradoxically they copied it from the American firms they tried to beat). For service providers, a big challenge will be to integrate the innovation labs and all the beauty created there into the legacy beast. Innovation labs can quickly become ivory towers. And no-one likes the people shouting from ivory towers.
Revamp Imagination by Creating a Culture Capable of Dealing with Constant Change
Our take on change? Use the old concepts of Total Participation and Employee Engagement and focus it on creative, lateral problem solving and Design Thinking (instead of operational excellence and Lean Six Sigma) in an era of increasing volatility, uncertainty and technology driven change. Bring in academics, analysts, practitioners, other ‘thinkers’, but most of all the company’s own brain trust.
We are not arguing everyone will be a good fit in the new era, or that the goal is to keep everybody on board and happy. But an inclusive strategy to alter the culture is ultimately the most promising trajectory for change.
Technology was first and foremost on the minds of the over 42,000 people who gathered in Orlando for HIMSS2017 last week – or was it? And should it be? There is a groundswell rising at HIMSS for not just talking but acting when it comes to putting the individual—the person—at the center of healthcare. In a word: empathy. How does what you do with IT, or as an IT professional impact the way a person experiences healthcare throughout their lives? There is a lot of attention on security, cognitive computing, analytics, and so forth – the enablers of how healthcare can better serve its constituents. But at the end of the day, it’s about the people for whom you are designing these systems because if they can’t or won’t use them, it won’t impact health, medical, and financial outcomes. So an undercurrent of themes is swelling around social, behavioral, and environmental aspects of healthcare.
Effective healthcare IT systems need alignment and collaboration inside the hospital system—but need to also include what is outside of it
After the conference, on the way back from the airport, I sat next to an IT project manager. She told me how she had coordinated across five hospitals in a system to prioritize a list of IT projects that would enable these hospitals to create an interoperable network to exchange data more effectively and enable communications. After the agreement, one hospital came back and said, no, we have a different priority this year. This is the real challenge in healthcare—not whether the technology will work because it can and it will—it’s about whether the people will work together to define and achieve common goals.
Community collaboration as shown by the Value Care Alliance (VCA) in Connecticut
Earlier in the week, I attended a session about a group of hospitals in an ACO called the Value Care Alliance. They share a goal to increase quality and to build capabilities to assume and manage risk in a move to value-based care, with efforts to improve the health of the local community, reduce ER instances, and to reduce the number of attributed ACO members who go outside their community and their provider network for healthcare services.
To be successful, the alliance knew they needed to have a shared view of the community members – in technical terms, a population health platform with a data repository that would bring in data from disparate systems. However, each member of the alliance had a different platform; and they didn’t know each other’s platforms. They had started the alliance with a governing body that over time had saved money through shared services and group purchasing, thereby funding the investment in infrastructure needed for the population health initiative.
How has VCA approached it?
The VCA aggregated claims and electronic health record data, the hospital and physician practice medical records. The group then cross-referenced medical data with geographic data, looking at maps in the neighborhood: what is the health of the community when looking at, for example, a group of people with high HbA1Cs… is there local access to clinical care; what are the community activities offered; where are the grocery stores; can they see physical elements and conditions of buildings. They started reaching out to other community organizations such as the YMCA and a local parish nurse program to conduct health education, screenings, and other outreach activity. They also applied to CMS for a community health grant that will help them fund activities for further identifying high-risk individuals and connecting them to resources.
Back to the IT: the local hospitals all had legacy population health IT and didn’t know each others’ systems, and getting them to abandon what was already in place was complex. They brought in a facilitator to assist with defining shared goals and IT decisions; and every organization had one vote, regardless of size, to show commitment to the collective. The group also defined the value of the data to each and to the collective, to come to an agreement on multi-stakeholder data sharing. The underlying theme throughout, is how to get to a community health program – where the hospitals are enabling greater health in the community, where people locally come to their hospitals for treatment as needed, and have local support for being healthier, staying healthier, and receiving the right care at the right time and right (local) place.
To strategically use Health IT to drive health, medical, and financial outcomes, you need to balance internal and external efforts in coordinating care with shared community goals.
While walking the halls at HIMSS, I saw an endless variety of technology offerings—and among them, people—physicians, EMTs, nurses, patients, caregivers—all of whom want a healthier society. We need to not only connect the systems for interoperability, we need to connect the individuals. IT professionals need to be just as excited as doctors, nurses, and caregivers about truly changing people’s lives through healthcare, in order to really have an impact. We need to get our security experts, IT project managers, coders, consultants, and data scientists all thinking about the impact they can have on helping the people in their community live healthier, and therefore less expensive, lives. Because when we care, we make a difference.
“I’m putting more money behind women-run businesses because of return of capital and performance; this is what matters,” said self-made millionaire Kevin O’Leary, in the closing keynote at HIMSS2017 last week. When it comes to growing a business, Kevin has a proven track record you can easily find online if you don’t already know it from the U.S. hit show, Shark Tank. He has invested millions in startups over eight seasons of the show that hosts entrepreneurs pitching businesses and requesting support.
When taking a look at the returns in his portfolio, Kevin O’Leary noticed the ones with the greatest returns are owned or run by women. And what he called out about their management style is universally applicable in business.
It may also be a reason why we’ve seen in our research at HfS that the #1 thing that executives would change about the outsourcing services industry – per 25% of respondents – “more women in executive roles.” What we can learn from women-run businesses that are realizing higher results:
Allocation of Time: “If you want something done, give it to a busy mother.” This is about focusing on what you know needs to get done first to impact the outcomes that matter; and about delegation, not trying to “do it all.” As an example, Kevin pointed to Honeyfund, which is approaching ~$500 million. He describes CEO and co-founder Sara Margulis’ approach with her team as: you have goals to achieve on a monthly or quarterly basis, period. It’s not about “how” or watching to see it done. It is closely linked, however to #2…
Achievable Targets: In the companies run by women, the teams achieve revenue targets over 90% of the time, in Kevin’s experience with his portfolio. He claims this is because women tend to set realistic goals and motivate productivity. When individuals and teams achieve goals, there is a feeling of satisfaction, turnover is lower, and productivity is higher. In some circles, it’s called employee engagement. The opposite approach is to set goals that are too high to be achieved … leading more often to higher staff turnover, lower morale, and lower return on capital.
Along with the management style, Kevin also pointed out that successful business (and project) pitches have three characteristics: (1) Articulation: Ability to articulate an opportunity in 90 seconds or less; (2) Uniqueness: Why you are the right person or the right team to execute; (3) Numbers: Know the numbers on the size of the market/opportunity, margin, etc. Altogether, these three, with the passion of a leader for her cause, can take a pitch from a spark to a sizzle to an explosion.
While Kevin’s observation comes from a review of his portfolio of start-ups that survive the explosion to move into operations, these two “T” characteristics can be universally applied to management in current business as well.
Bottom line: Today’s businesses need this type of outcomes-focused performance management with meaningful and achievable targets in this day and age when so many businesses that have been in existence for years are having to undergo transformation to become more customer-focused, interactive, and flexible.
The IoT hype in insurance continues unabated, with new research by NTT DATA suggesting that 3 out of 4 insurance carriers believe IoT will strongly influence their future products and services. Titled “IoT: Disruption & Opportunity In The Insurance Industry,” this U.S. based study surveyed end consumers and decision makers in carrier organizations on the subject of IoT devices in the home (thermostats, smoke alarms, garage door openers, door locks and bells). A few research findings for the two groups stood out to us.
Consumers are divided on their readiness to change
Two cohorts emerged from the consumer research, which also reflects in their views about smart home technologies. 64% of consumers surveyed, or the “Seekers” are younger, less loyal to their carrier, price-sensitive and want more personalized products and service. Unsurprisingly, the Seekers want their carriers to be more innovative and are more willing to share varying degrees of smart home data in exchange. The remaining 36% are the “Keepers,” older policyholders that feel protected by their current policies and are unlikely to make sudden switches. Overall, 50% of the consumers expected to buy smart home devices in the future despite privacy and security concerns, but the majority find current products to be expensive and complex: I still haven’t rigged up my “smart bulbs,” gifted over Christmas by a tech-savvy relative!
Insurance carriers get the importance of IoT
87% believe IoT will improve customer relationships, 83% see it as an opportunity to attract new customers, and 74% see IoT as having a significant influence on products and service. Already, 77% are ramping up IoT initiatives, with customer service and technology use cases at the outset. The major challenges for carriers are the inability to get smart home data (68%), building analytics into underwriting processes (62%) and the expenses of the carrier or customer buying and installing smart home devices (55%).
In my conversation with Normand Lepine, NTT DATA Consulting’s Sr. Director of Insurance Data and Analytics, he pointed out, “Carriers recognize the opportunity to expand their value proposition with clients through IoT. In the next year, pilots, strategy and lab work around smart home technologies will help carriers create new products and services.” We believe each carrier that is experimenting with smart devices will go through a calibration process with customers, all centered around one factor – data and how to use it to create meaningful products and services. NTT’s survey data hints at this as well, with the lack of data being a carrier challenge, and consumer responses suggesting that they are willing to share only certain types of data, depending on their demographics and lifestyles.
Implementing connected insurance solutions requires carriers to rethink major business functions towards becoming digital organizations.
Let’s consider the customer lifecycle as an example. Carriers will need strong, mobile-first, sales and marketing channels to attract and transact with the “Seekers.” They can leverage smart home device technology to offer two key benefits to customers – a more personalized service experience, and cost savings in the form of usage-based risk and premium determination (an “As-a-Service” offering). This customer acquisition effort will need to have straight-through processing, with smart underwriting powered by real-time profitability analysis. When it comes to customer service experiences, smart devices again play a few roles, such as providing insights (e.g. smoke alarm data) that can be made accessible to customers with recommendations on usage. If a carrier is interested in smart home technology to drive new customer experiences, customer interaction touchpoints can be reimagined with the help of interactive personal assistants (e.g. Amazon Echo). These at-home assistants can intelligently converse with policyholders for simple service requests throughout the customer lifecycle (as Nationwide, Grange Insurance and Safeco have started to do).
In addition to home insurance, we also see examples of carriers exploring IoT- enabled auto insurance, and large-ticket opportunities in areas like commercial insurance. What will be interesting to watch is the role that technology and business service providers play in this evolving market. From IoT infrastructure services to the design, development and running of the related data and analytics infrastructure and services, IT services such as IoT app development, platform migrations, and micro-services, consulting/advisory on new product development and rapid prototyping/testing of IoT offerings, partnering with device manufacturers (particularly niche, insurance-related startups), we see several new opportunities for service providers.
While IT and business services providers are investing in IoT offerings as a horizontal capability, carriers will need to find the ones that are doubling down on insurance, with the appetite to invest in the industry specifically. The survey data makes this much clear – both consumers and carriers are getting ready for IoT-led change. The question is—will the service providers be able to embed themselves as “As-a-Service” partners to the emerging “connected insurance” economy?
As the market for enabling and supporting the digital organization reaches fever pitch, HfS’ analyst team has run a detailed assessment of service provider capability to deliver the Digital OneOffice™ experience across the five pillars that align the front, middle and back offices. We believe it essential to evaluate how service providers’ emerging capabilities are stacking up, not just in each distinct category, but how they align to the holistic Digital OneOffice Framework across these five key pillars:
Pillar 1) The Digital Customer Engagement (Weighing 25%)
Pillar 2) Design Thinking: Designing Digital Outcomes (Weighting 15%)
Pillar 3) The Digital Underbelly (Weighting 20%)
Pillar 4) Intelligent Digital Support Functions (Weighting 20%)
Pillar 5) Intelligent Digital Processes (Weighing 20%)
This is HfS’ very first Digital OneOffice Premier League ranking exercise. We have taken the 5 key components of the Digital OneOffice described above, and scored each service provider on each category and subcategories as applicable (see the Digital OneOffice Organization illustration below). Using materials from recent research projects, namely Blueprint reports and many client reference discussions, we leveraged our broad analyst team’s collective knowledge of the industry to perform this analysis, involving analysts Phil Fersht, Melissa O’Brien, Barbra McGann, Jamie Snowdon, Tom Reuner, Derk Erbé, Reetika Joshi, Pareekh Jain, Khalda de Souza and Steve Goldberg.
The result below is the ranking of the top 25 service providers and how comprehensively each is aligned to the Digital OneOffice framework overall and enabling its clients to become more intelligent organizations that ultimately improve customer experience.
Why The Digital OneOffice is the Future of Outsourcing
The Digital OneOffice Framework is all about the design and implementation of the organizational digital experience and the creation of an intelligent, single office to execute and support it. In a few months, we won’t be talking nearly as much about intelligent automation and digital technology as the critical “value levers” for operations, as they become an embedded part of the fabric of the future operations platform for new generation organizations. Instead, we will be talking about an integrated support operation having the digital prowess to enable its organization to meet customer demand – as and when that demand happens. Everything about the digital organization is about engaging people by responding to their needs instantaneously, giving people their choice of medium to interact with it, be it voice, chat box, text, Facebook messenger, email, virtual agent, etc.
In this context, “Digital” describes the interactive channels that drive customer engagement, such as cognitive agents, interactive tools, mobile, social, text and chat. “OneOffice” describes the enabling technologies, such as unified analytics and cognitive automation, that enable real-time predictive capabilities and an engaging digital experience that unifies all the stakeholders across the organization: the customers, partners and employees. In short, the Digital OneOffice is where the organization’s people, intelligence, processes and the infrastructure come together as one integrated unit, with one set of unified business outcomes tied to exceeding expectations.
The Bottom-line: The Winning Service Providers are those who can become Digital OneOffice Organizations themselves
The bottom line is that digital is all about realigning the organization to the customer; even those processes and roles which aren’t even remotely customer facing still play a critical role in supporting the digital customer experience. The service providers we have evaluated all play different roles in enabling that for clients. Those which scored well in the rankings are doing the best at bringing together the cross-organizational Digital OneOffice concepts for clients, but in the age of frequent and abrupt disruption, things can change. In 2017, we’ll continue to see service providers making moves to invest in and build out more comprehensive Digital OneOffice capabilities as well as those which will double down in the pillars of The Digital OneOffice where they excel. These are still early days, and we anticipate the next iteration of the Digital OneOffice Premier League will produce winners which have proven they can integrate the pieces most effectively, driving transformation across the pillars leveraging their strategy, consulting, Design Thinking and operational enablement prowess.
To conclude, people simply want to operate digitally these days, whether they are an employee, customer or partner. They want to use interactive technology, mobile apps, social media, text, online chat, etc. to get things done. We are used to using sophisticated digital technologies in our personal lives, and now expect to use them in our professional lives. Whether we are buying products, groceries, renting accommodation, ordering Starbucks, takeout, applying for mortgages, insurances policies etc., digital technology is the new language of business. The issues facing many traditional businesses today is the fact that while the consumer is increasingly digitally sophisticated, many organizations are still beholden to legacy technologies and processes that are fast sinking into obsolescence. In addition, many have employees in the “back office” who are so steeped in the legacy way of doing things, they are facing a double-edged issue: how do they drag their operations kicking and screaming out of the dark ages to support their digital customers? The answer, believe it or not, is quite simple: break down the barriers between departments, involve the digital customer experiences into all the business processes and practices, by creating a Digital OneOffice where an organization’s customers, partners and employees are all entwined together to deliver the end customers the ultimate experience, and the operations function a genuine connection with the true running of the business from back to front.
Net-net – every touch point of the modern business needs to be digital – and to achieve that you need to be a digital business right at your core, where the most rudimentary of processes are automated to enable the building blocks of the digital experience. The winning service providers will be those which are true digital organizations that can partner with their clients to feed off their DNA and culture.
Salesforce remains one of the most important and established enterprise SaaS products in the market, with a vast ecosystem of service partners from the smallest consulting firms to large global integrators. This makes the choice of service partners increasingly complicated and ever more vital as the competitive landscape for these services grows. This is especially important for enterprise organizations that are looking to SaaS projects as more than just IT initiatives, but as catalysts of wider business innovation and to drive business value throughout their lines of business.
HfS concentrated its recently published HfS Blueprint Report: Salesforce Services 2017, on the large enterprise service providers, the winners being those that are able to add the most value to a large scale adoption of Salesforce. This report outlines trends in service delivery and profiles twelve of the leading service providers in this increasingly dynamic market segment. It identified key selection criteria which included the ability to understand enterprise clients’ business imperatives and provide timely and flexible services. In addition, buyers need to look at providers who invest in Salesforce tools, on achieving specific Salesforce certifications, have relevant experience and the requisite geographical scale. These were the main considerations to ascertain service providers’ capabilities and commitment in the Salesforce services market.
In the Blueprint report, we positioned Persistent Systems in the High Potential category. Compared with the other service providers in the Blueprint, Persistent Systems has a relatively small Salesforce services practice, focused on US enterprise clients. However, its Salesforce services business is in high growth, and the service provider is investing in all the right areas to achieve success. Although Persistent Systems serves clients in several industry sectors, it is primarily focused on Healthcare. This is reflected in its investment in tools, including a healthcare accelerator tool, and the Physician and Patient Relationship Management, which has Fullforce Industry Solution certification. Moreover, healthcare clients commend Persistent Systems for its understanding of their business specifics – one commented that their chief architect’s understanding of their business was “outstanding”. In addition, Persistent Systems achieved high customer satisfaction scores from its client references, who were mostly impressed by the strength of its resources, and their ability to provide both business and technical advice. This is also backed by a flexible and cost-effective offshore delivery model. Moreover, Persistent Systems helps drive innovation within the Salesforce development community, where it helps software vendors, App Innovation Partners, to develop SaaS products using the Salesforce App Cloud.
HfS believes that Persistent Systems (www.persistent.com) is a great fit for enterprises needing strong resources, with offshore delivery capability, particularly in the US healthcare market.
Persistent Systems was rated highly in the Blueprint for the following criteria:
Quality of account management
Strong resources
Incorporate client feedback
Vision for Salesforce effectiveness
(HfS Soundbite snapshot of service provider capability on Horsesforsources.com is part of the HfS Blueprint™ Digital License agreement)
HfS is about to publish our quarterly analysis of the service provider and shared service center location announcements by Hema Santosh. As a taster, we would like to post the highlights and the infographic from this work.
Highlights for the quarter:
We see expansion of jobs in both the US and India – of the estimated 9,000 jobs that these new locations will house, 4,350 will be in the US and 4,300 will be in India.
Industry specific BPO drives expansion with 3 new BPO sites in the US in Q4 2016.
Downsizing – we saw some down sizing of in-house centers with eBay, Standard Chartered and Verizon all shrinking some centers.
