Thought Leadership Archive

Like most businesses today, your company is probably looking at the possible cost and productivity improvements achievable through digital technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and analytics. If so, it’s important to understand that digital transformation is a journey of very deep and broad, company-wide change. Through our Pinnacle Model™ research on digital journeys, we

A business model change often overwhelms transformation initiatives. As I blogged previously, digital transformation collapses business processes into data. When organizations start looking at their business through the lens of data instead of the lens of a business process, serious issues arise. How the people in a company use the data and make decisions about

I believe we’re on the doorstep of very important changes in IT market conditions. IT groups have experimented with hybrid cloud, agile and DevOps, and businesses have experimented with analytics and increasingly experiment with AI. Companies are confident they can now move some pilot experiments into programs, knowing they will support the weight of

The effects digital transformation reminds me of the beginning words in Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” – it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, … it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair …. One of the interesting aspects of digital transformation is

As the third-party services industry pivots away from the factory model of labor arbitrage-based work toward digital work, having local delivery centers becomes increasingly important to service providers. Firms such as EPAM and Luxoft are investing in Eastern European operations (Bratislava, Krakow, Prague and Sofia, for instance). And Wipro has invested in a delivery

I recently visited with senior executives at Exela Technologies to discuss the interesting strategy their company undertook to succeed in the digital world. Exela’s success is like a caterpillar that goes into a cocoon and emerges as something completely different. The “caterpillar” was stodgy, low-margin, traditional BPO services – uninteresting work in a very

The possibilities promised in taking full advantage of the new digital IT environment characterized especially by agile, DevOps, automation and cloud, are exciting. However, service providers struggle to deliver digital services at their customary profit levels, and customers aren’t prepared to buy the new digital environment because they’re stuck with their existing purchasing/contracting vehicle.

Increasingly, there has been a push by firms purchasing services to move towards consumption-based pricing. Accompanying this move is an additional desire to reduce the length of contracts. Ideally, you should only pay for what you use; and when you stop using it, you stop paying for it. Although this is what traditional contracts

In digital transformation, it’s an undeniable fact that many companies end up getting nowhere close to hitting their goal. But a major US retail bank undertook a highly strategic project to build the back-end support system for a digital payments transaction platform, and it achieved outstanding results. A compelling high level of productivity. A

As legacy service providers excelling in the labor arbitrage-factory model look to participate in the digital world of cloud, automation, agile, DevOps and AI technologies, they are basing their prices on flawed mathematics assumptions. They expect that they not only will be able keep the same margin structure they now have but also that