Differentiating service quality in a crowded technology services market
By Jayant Gundewar, Vice President, Services, NTT Ltd. in India
The technology services market is constantly changing. As the COVID-19 pandemic showed us, the technology services players who were ready to adapt their business models, were ultimately better prepared. Remote working became the norm and overnight technology service providers became ready to change their processes and created new ways of collaborative working.
As the pandemic and many countless disasters or challenges in the past have shown us, change is the only constant, and it is vital to differentiate in what is clearly a crowded technology services market.
We will look at some of the emerging core skills and competencies that can help technology service providers differentiate themselves:
Observability
With soaring IT complexity, it is increasingly becoming important for technology service providers to have a deep understanding of their highly distributed application topologies and dependencies. Expertise in observability platforms gives service providers the ability to easily access, explore and search huge volumes of data and correlate application performance to business outcomes. Armed with actionable insights, they can prioritize what matters most and provide customers and employees with the flawless digital experiences they demand. Observability also fills in the blind spots and provides enterprise IT teams with the visibility they need across an application’s components, dependencies and performance metrics.
Automation
Automation can help technology service providers introduce higher levels of Service Assurance, Service Reliability, and Observability to the IT infrastructure. By using AI, technology service providers can generate accelerated actionable insights through agnostic data source ingestion techniques. By using automation, technology service providers can intelligently and quickly determine root cause of service-related issues and reduce the number of performance related issues significantly. Additionally, tested and tried automation use cases can not only reduce ticket volumes, but can also conserve time and skills wasted on repetitive tasks.
Platformisation
Technology service providers can create more value by allowing participants to build applications or services on top of the platforms that they create. This allows service providers to take advantage of the network effect as more participants join and benefit from the scalability and greater reach. A successful platform play by incumbent technology service firms can yield significant gains due to network and scale effects. These platforms can draw a bigger base of customers across countries and use the base to offer their solutions at a significantly lower cost.
Geography independent models
Technology service firms have to ensure that their processes are designed to have a truly geographic independent model. This model must ensure that technology service firms have the capability to fuse together a global team that can operate from anywhere and can have team members in different geographies. At times, this may even necessitate a completely virtual model, with no onsite team members required. The core objective, as the pandemic has taught us, that the delivery model must be able to function without any disruption, irrespective of any situation. The technology service provider must be able to skill its workforce at scale and use effective automation, wherever required, to ensure that the delivery model can scale up or down, as per business requirements.
In conclusion, in an era of constant change, technology service providers have to continuously re-imagine their delivery models and must invest and take advantage of the latest emerging technologies to create an agile, flexible and resilient delivery model that clients need to compete successfully.
