Peter Bendor-Samuel

I recently blogged about three stories of the way business is unfolding in the Indian services arena due to dramatic changes driven by automation and digital technologies. Here’s another page-turner from NASSCOM’s February conference: there are three possible or probable business models for moving forward. The first model is the existing labor-based model in

I recently returned from NASSCOM 2016 and, on the long plane ride, reflected on what I heard and observed. I think what I learned can be told through the metaphor of storytelling. While I was at NASSCOM, a beautiful romance story unfolded. That romance is all around the digital marketplace and the potential it

  “Design thinking” is basically a methodology for innovation activities. It came out of Silicon Valley, nurtured in the Stanford Business School, and was designed for product manufacturing, not for services. So why has Infosys adopted it for services? Why is Infosys training over 40,000 of its employees in design thinking? Vishal Sikka, CEO

Microsoft has gone all in on DevOps. I’ve been talking with Microsoft’s engineering team that builds Azure, and there are several things we can learn from them. Microsoft has structured its entire development of Azure along DevOps principles. They made the requisite investments in automating testing and automating provisioning. Of course, Azure is, in

The hottest thing out there is digital, and a lot of projects are being spun up in an attempt to start moving companies into digital. The problem is that many of these initiatives quickly lose momentum, then lose funding, and end up with less work for the service providers than they anticipated. Hence, the

I’ve blogged before about the trap for service providers that listen to their salespeople and where that purchasing-oriented perspective takes a provider – to undifferentiated offerings, lower pricing, lower margins, standard offerings and low value. But there is a significant part of the market that is dictated by procurement/purchasing departments and, as a provider,

As we work with service providers developing new offers, we see a very common issue. A provider develops an innovative offering for one of its customers. Often that customer will have led the provider into it and then they evolve it over time. An executive shows up from the provider company and says, “Wow,

So often, clients tell their providers, “If you help us save money, we will spend that money on your services in other areas.” But what often happens when the service provider saves the money is that no funding for new initiatives is forthcoming. Instead, they are asked to do more initiatives to achieve more

In the services industry, the watchword is to listen to the customer. Providers tend to believe what their salespeople say about what the customer wants. However, salespeople really don’t understand the voice of the customer. As evidence, think of what the salespeople relate back to management about an RFP. Things like “We lost on

There has been tremendous discussion around the “gig economy.” You need look no further than Uber or Airbnb to see the successful use of this labor model and understand why its popularity is growing among entrepreneurs, employees, and employers alike. Here’s the real news: major service providers are starting to experiment with the model.