We are going through exciting times in the market and environment around us with global economic recovery on the anvil and plenty of hope and optimism in the offing.
I was reading a study from IBM, giving insights from World’s top CEOs, which says that ‘rapid escalation of complexity’ is the biggest challenge confronting the CEOs the world over and today’s enterprises are not equipped to deal with this complexity. It goes on to say that ‘creativity’, ’dexterity’ and ‘reinventing customer relationships’ are the levers which will help tackle this complexity.
A similar study giving insights from the World’s top CIOs says that key drivers for growth this year will be projects in the areas that add real business value/real competitive advantage to the customers and the projects that show tangible cost benefits and operational efficiencies.
The point in question is as to what needs to be done by the employees in an IT Services organization in the wake of these challenges facing them. I believe that the employees need to be more innovative and also acquire additional competencies which are multi-disciplinary in nature to tackle the complex situations arising in their day to day life. The first thing that they all need to be doing is ‘sharpening the saw’. They need to adopt a multi-pronged approach to learn new competencies, skills, technologies, domains as the case may be. This could comprise of self learning, taking informal coaching from seniors in the projects, attending formal training programs, taking industry and technical certifications, reading blogs and articles from thought leaders and so on.
The employees of all hues need to come out of their respective 'technology shells' and start developing a broader level understanding of the business issues and the business pain points/ challenges being faced by their customers. They must adopt a wholistic approach to solving customer issues driven by understanding of the customer business processes and providing business solutions rather than placing technology at the center of their universe. Technology is a mere enabler/tool for solving business issues and is a means to an end rather than the end in itself.
The employees are expected to play a vital role in "realizing" the client's IT strategies and enable these to come to fruition. The alignment of corporate strategies with IT strategies must be ensured and all endeavours must be focussed on making this "one big thing" happen.
Unless the employees invest adequate time and effort in ‘sharpening the saw’ they will become irrelevant in today’s world and will cease adding value to their customers. Customers need to see constant value from the firm and this will be possible only if the employees first add value to themselves in terms of acquiring additional knowledge and competencies and keeping abreast of the happenings in the industry from time to time.
I think at an organization level, companies will need to look at a business model where they put their skin in the game.. putting their fees at risk.. value based deals... getting paid for delivering real value... this is a great model from a customer's perspective..as it potentially reduces risk... this will require a whole lot of industry / domain / business expertise..and all the competency building you mentioned and from a senior management perspective, a new apetite for risk.
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