NOW is the time to make sure your IT Service Delivery is functioning at its best.
Why now?
According to Gartner’s forecast, the worldwide IT services market will grow to nearly $914 billion this year and considering that outsourcing will contribute over half of market growth, Gartner expects the market to reach $1.1 trillion by 2019. That’s just over three years away! With such rapidly increasing size and scope – IT service delivery and management could provide a real difference to your organisation’s business strategy.
To yield these potential benefits, get your IT Service Management and Delivery processes into peak fitness. And do it NOW!
Furthermore, in this landscape of increased external services, to stay relevant, agile and competitive, business leaders and IT departments must join forces and work toward a common business goal that delivers faster, cheaper and better quality customer outcomes.
There are several ways that you can get this right for your organisation.
Here are my Top 5.
1 – Align Your Business Strategy and IT Services Delivery. When both are customer-facing you become a critical partner in the solution of your clients’ greatest business challenges. Remember the old adage “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”? Create that kind of perception for your firm by harnessing the potential of Gartner’s forecasted $1.1tn IT Services Market and deliver it to your customer better than anyone else. Of course it’s easier said than done – get great advice, complete a gap analysis, refocus, refine and redesign your supply chain lifecycle capabilities.
2 – Initiate an introspective Service Delivery Assessment to optimise your Service Management and Delivery. You can do this yourself, but as with most assessments an external pair of eyes, benchmarking against best practice and knowledge of the whole of market, will deliver better insights into gaps in your service offer. A Service Delivery assessment can quickly help you optimise your IT Delivery and Service Management to meet your business demands and your customer’s needs.
3 – Carry out a Service Delivery Assessment on your suppliers. As with #2, which looked inwardly at your IT service capability, benchmarking your vendors and external services portfolio against best practice can shine a light on weak links in your service chain. Examining performance of external service providers against a supplier matrix gives you insights into service standards, availability, service continuity and capacity, quality of service provision, continual improvement, innovation, geographical coverage, flexibility, ROI, service catalogue, value for money, customer satisfaction and more. Crucial data that will inevitably improve your service delivery.
4 – Develop great system integration skills. IT Business delivery services are increasingly made up of internal systems combined with external third party components. Customer focussed use of external services like multisourcing, diverse software application components in SOA, cloud services, etc integrated well with internal service components really gives your organisation a competitive edge. Outsourcing this integration and management function ‘as a Service’ can sharpen your offer way beyond the confines of your knowledge base.
5 – Empower all your employees to innovate and imagine creative, customer led IT solutions to common business challenges. Have you ever been on hold with the bank or a telecoms provider and the call handler has apologised for the delay because the ‘system’ is a bit slow today? Next time, ask them what input they have in the process and the system and how they will report today’s slowness to prevent similar issues in the future. Whenever I do this their answer is usually pretty non-committal – they have no emotional investment in the process, no personal desire to make your experience better. Encourage customer facing staff to contribute to the process with which they deliver your business strategy on the front line and you will be amazed at the creative resource that you instantly tap into.
Ironically, it seems, the future for IT Service Delivery is to mentally drop the “IT” and refocus on the Business Service Delivery aspect as part of a customer oriented approach.
So it’s simple…
A specialist Service Delivery Management ‘as a Service’ Provider and IT Advisory Practice are best placed to understand both the changing dynamics of the Service Delivery market and the technology required to deliver your business results – it would serve you well to seek out such a partner who will take time to understand you first. Combine that with specialist Multisourcing expertise, business acumen, commercial experience, technical know-how and effective governance and you will be in the best shape possible to leverage the increasing IT Service Delivery market for your customers.
OK. So not that simple!
If these aren’t all strings currently in your bow, get a partner who does have these skills NOW because, while you read this, 2019 just got five minutes closer.
Contact us to find out more about how your business could benefit from a Service Delivery Assessment.
Find out more about Service Delivery Assessments from Stoneseed
Source: Gartner, Forecast: IT Services, Worldwide, 2013-2019, 2Q15 Update, June 15, 2015
