How Service Providers Can Illuminate Clients’ Path to Transformation

One of the biggest issues facing executives today is that they see the need to change their organization through automation, analytics, or other big ideas that are clearly vetted, but they struggle to drive the change. Their organization is reluctant or frightened to change, much like horses in a steeplechase race that shy at jumping the fences. Consequently, service providers are frustrated. They see potential for their business, but they’re unable to move from project to program. How can a provider help clients to jump the obstacles instead of shying away from them?

How can a provider illuminate the path forward to transformation and get the client on board for change? Let’s start by talking about what doesn’t work – white papers. No executive these days reads white papers. It just doesn’t happen. As I’ve blogged before, they’re too dense, too theoretical and too preachy.  And they’re nakedly self-interested.

So what are the tools that enable clients to jump the fence? At Everest Group we’ve been thinking about and researching this. Executives need simple yet rigorous, relentlessly objective instruments that they can use to challenge their organization. And once they examine an instrument, a clear path forward opens up behind it.

What would such an instrument look like? It might be a maturity index showing competitors’ degree of progress in the field. Everest Group’s PEAK Matrix™ is another example of a first step in instrumentation; it illuminates providers’ capabilities in the marketplace.

Every organization is unique, and they struggle with how to apply transformation or disruptive technologies to their uniqueness. A set of objective instruments allows executives to have a conversation in their organization and challenge their organization. The organization can then ask for help and imagine a roadmap – without a provider telling them what the roadmap should be.

Simple but rigorous instruments will illuminate the way to transformation and assist in the organization internalizing the path forward through the challenges.


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