Digital Service Model — Service Blueprint for Digital Age
Rising above the storm — Accelerate Digital, Enhance outcomes (10x impact) and Reduce costs through a new operating model . Our research paper to digitize Enterprise Service delivery & help your Business emerge stronger from this crisis.
The crisis we are facing now, is the beginning of a structural shift in many industries.We saw, in our previous blog, how Market leaders have, in the past, turned such crisis to their advantage by out-innovating the competition and redefining their industry operating models. Enterprise Service Delivery is at the cusp of a major shift now.
Our quest for the next realm in Enterprise Service Delivery started more than three years ago. Digital Service Model is a culmination of 25+ yrs experience in IT services industry with Tier-1 Providers and 3+ yrs research in this area.
Managed services was designed for people-centric delivery world. The focus was to provide process & structure for a scalable and predictable delivery. We are now in a world where your users want flexibility & choice to order what they want and get them delivered here and now. This calls for a complete overhaul of the current delivery model.
Enhancing Business Agility, Speed and User Experience are core priorities for Enterprise IT in Digital Age.
We researched Digital Native Companies like Amazon, Uber, Netflix, AirBnb etc., on how they are enabling consumer grade experience. We found a common pattern in the way they delivered services to their users. This enabled them to transform their industries and emerge as world leaders. This pattern is what we call ‘Digital Service Model’. We believe that Enterprise IT could benefit significantly by adopting this blueprint. It will help them to successfully navigate through the current crisis and emerge stronger.
What is Digital Service Model?
A NexGen delivery model that is highly productized, service centric, fully automated and enables consumer grade user experience.
Here are the key attributes of Digital Service Model.
Productization :
Catalog is the center of the digital world .
The first step in your digitization journey is to productize your services and adopt a service centric delivery model. Each service is packaged in the form of a product with clearly defined specs, so it can be offered to users for easy consumption. Any service that your user wants is productized and offered as a catalog. These catalogs can be transacted through a Service Exchange, enabling service subscriptions.
Consumer Grade experience:
In digital world, a person with little-to-no-knowledge can encounter a product and is able to use it without any training. Ordering a movie on Netflix or a product on Amazon is literally a child’s play . Enterprises need to enable a similar intuitive experience for their users through an omni-channel strategy. It gives their users flexibility to consume services at a click on a channel of their choice.
Personalization:
Service delivery needs to be standardized &templatized at the backend and personalized at the point of consumption.
Empower users through flexibilty and choice. Users should be able to customize services easily to suit their individual specific needs. As an example, when ordering a pizza or a booking a vacation online, you are able to customize the order to your needs. Enterprises need to extend similar flexibilty and choice to their users to enhance experience.
Direct to user:
Digital Transformation is all about disintermediation and enabling self-service. You rarely ever interact with a person in a Digital native company
Enterprises need to disintermediate service delivery and offer their services directly to their end users. Say good bye to ticketing systems and multi-layered complex support teams. Each layer adds complexity and delay to your service delivery. By automating and disintermediating, you significantly enhance user-experience.
On-demand:
Any service, Any where, Any time — delivered instantly
Enable on-demand service delivery. Your users should be able to order any service, any where, any time through self-service. Most digital providers enable this for their users. You can book hotel or flight any time from the comfort of your home. The concept of support-windows, SLAs etc., are fast losing relevance in digital world.
Outcome focused:
Enterprises today are highly siloed and inward focussed. Users have to run around to different groups and functions to get things done. In digital world, Enterprises need to break the silos and focus on delivering outcomes to enhance user productivity and experience.
Subscription:
People want ride not the car, music not the CD, milk not the cows. The age of subscription is here.
The traditional ‘buy-build-operate’ model will not scale in the Digital world. Digital has unleashed a revolution where industry is moving towards asset-lite subscription models. To enhance business agility and speed, Enterprises need to move to a new age model, where they can subscribe to services-at-a-click, very similar to how they can subscribe to infra from AWS/Azure or Apps from Sales Force. Service subscriptions unleash Enterprise agility.
Pay-as-you-go (Variabilized cost):
Enterprise services today are stuck in a fixed cost structure and they are not able to adapt to rapidly evolving market demands. The current crisis is one such example. One of the core features of digital world is variabilization of cost structure, where you are able to tune up or down the spend in line with your business needs and pay only for what you use. It provides you the flexibility to manage costs more effectively and protect shareholder interests.
Zero-touch:
Band-aid automated solutions can no longer be an excuse. Enterprise need to elevate their game and enable zero-touch delivery for their users
Automations today are applied on legacy processes and traditional ways of working. Most automations have been predominantly back-end focused . To unleash the true potential of automation, enterprises need to reimagine the way they deliver services and bring automation to front end — close to users. They need to move beyond automation and digitize their service delivery through productization, componentization and virtualization.
Automation is not Digitization
Zero-wait:
Speed is key to survival in Digital World.
The pace of business has signficantly shifted in the last few decades. One of the key traits of successful companies is their ability to adapt rapidly to market needs. Your users and business can no longer afford to wait and they want everything here and now. If Enterprise IT can not meet their demands, they have choices now to look elsewhere. Services have to delivered instantly. SLAs are reactive metrics and cannot be a measure of success anymore.
A combination of these attributes is what we call as ‘Digital Service Model’, It is a user centric delivery approach that accelerates digitization, enhances experience and enables dimensional improvements in outcomes through an operating model shift.
How does Digital Service Model differ from Managed Service model?
To help customers, get more clarity on how the new model changes their day today operations, we did a side-by-side comparison . Here is a brief summary
How does Digital Service Model benefit Customers?
To survive and to emerge stronger from this crisis, businesses are looking to Enteprise IT to significantly enhance Business Agility , Speed and Experience. Digital Service Model is one of the ways that will help Enteprise IT raise their game, stay relevant and enable their business to be successful in the long run. This is a proven model that has propelled companies like AWS, Microsoft, SalesForce, Adobe etc. to reach market leadership position in their respective fields.
Are you able to meet your rapidly changing businees needs? Does your business look at Enterprise IT as an effective change-agent? Do you think this model could help you? Please chime in with your views.
