Delivering Exceptional Experience by Providing Services with Product Mindset

Abstract

Rapidly changing customer expectations coupled with a shift in the market landscape toward digitization forces IT service providers to alter their operating model. The clients today are looking at providers who can not only work along with them as strategic partners and guide them through the changes but also enable them to grow their organization by aligning speed of deployment and ability to scale at business priorities.

Need for Digital Delivery

In the past two decades, IT industry has witnessed significant changes. It has shifted from monolithic, centralized computing in the late 1990s and distributed technologies in the 2000s to disruptive digital technologies today. During these changing times, mergers and acquisitions came to the fore. It is therefore pertinent to understand why the shift happened and what did the organizations do to handle this change? Companies who did not reinvent themselves with the changes struggled, missing time and losing the battle to achieve competitive edge. With the advent of disruptive technologies, IT industry is on a crossroad witnessing a multitude of changes from traditional delivery to digital delivery.

Implications for Service Provider

The shift in the market landscape toward digital delivery has broadened the spectrum of delivery ask from the IT service providers. Customers want schedule, cost, quality, and reduced time-to-market at one end of the spectrum and agility, creativity, flexibility, and experience to meet the rapidly changing requirements at the other end of the spectrum.

Digital Delivery Model

The vision of the digital delivery model is to bring a cultural change in the organization to address the needs of digital delivery and changing the focus of the market. The digital delivery model for us is grounded in delivering "Services with Product Mindset.” The main driver for delivering services with a product mindset is the co-creation of requirements around the customer and delivering service with smaller empowered teams who will help evolve service as the business priorities change.

Services with Product Mindset

"Services with Product Mindset" takes the development and maintenance of new services to a different level. IT service companies should focus on drilling down the co-created requirements and treating each smaller independent requirement as a product with the empowered team having all roles within it to deliver that requirement. This cannot be achieved until the current operating model is altered. For us, delivering “Services with Product Mindset” requires reinventing the operating model. The levers include moving toward the digital factory, investment in automation, aligning IT with client’s business objectives, a change of mindset, and orienting the workforce to support the new shift.

• Digital Factory

  With reduced time-to-market, faster product launches, and enhanced competition, the customers are looking at driving value from IT service vendors as partners who can guide them in the digital shift. Coforge has a dedicated practice to constantly adapt, develop, and leverage digital for our clients. Achieving quality at the highest velocity levels and innovation requires setting up a digital factory to support clients with digital initiatives. The digital factory has a lean startup mindset to achieve speed, scale, and continuous delivery through cross-functional teams working together with niche partners to generate value for customers.
  
  

• Business Aligned IT

  The boundaries of application, infrastructure, and operations teams are getting converged through the use of cloud environments and SaaS products. Today, IT can no longer work in silos, and it is imperative that operations are aligned to business for higher returns. Below are the key areas where Coforge is working to bridge the gap between IT and business goals for the clients:
  • Solve business problems using the latest technologies and shifting focus to customer experience.
  • New-age commercial models, which are business linked, output- and outcome-based.
  • Newer ways of working which are beyond SLAs, like measuring satisfaction of end-user at the incident level.
  • Service provider organization structure alignment to achieve business goals.
  • Lean IT to optimize the process, eliminate waste, and increase the productivity of resources.
    
    

• Holistic Automation
  
  The importance of automation is ever increasing with business requirements of faster, cheaper, and better service. In this digital age, automation is vital to match the pace of the changing requirements. Coforge has invested to create an integrated smart automation framework covering nine components of the IT lifecycle. These include development, test, service desk, maintenance, infrastructure, business processes, monitoring and performance management, robotic process automation, and artificial intelligence. The framework embeds best-in-class technologies/IPs, autonomics, and their orchestration in business with an objective to increase automation and/or set an incremental automation path for creating superior customer experiences and agile outcomes. A maturity model across people, process, architecture, tools, and infrastructure is in place to understand the automation maturity of an organization. Coforge has also invested in partnerships with platforms like Microsoft, AppDynamics, HP, PegaSystems, and ServiceNow to name a few to make automation a reality.

• Talent Development

  To enable services with product mindset, it is imperative to orient resources for the mindset change. There is a need to recognize that talent management has a very important role to play in embracing a product mindset. The strength lies in the workforce that is equipped to handle new roles, wider technology areas, and business insights. There is a constant need to develop skills on all fronts. Coforge runs some key initiatives to keep the workforce abreast with industry needs and new trends. Some of the key programs include:
  • TechLeap program to develop skills as a full stack developer
  • DONE program to reinforce product quality ownership with the development team
  • Digital 1000 program to develop skills on newest digital technologies
  • Automation
  • Partner certifications
    
    

• Mindset Change

  A mindset change is essentially moving from green SLAs to delightful customer experiences. Coforge believes that service culture is an important dimension for any company if they want to move towards a newer way of working. We have built innovation in our culture through a service vision “New Ideas, More Value.” We have adopted industry-leading standards through programs like “Up Your Service “, “Ignite”, and “Inspire.” Co-innovation workshops with customers for product innovation and digital roadmaps are also a key initiative. Coforge has invested in design studios and innovation labs to surface new ideas and create prototypes aimed at generating business value. Using this value-laden approach, we help clients reduce cost and generate more revenue out of engagements, helping us move to the role of a strategic partner.
  
  

Taking the Leap

In today's digital era, companies are not only trying to innovate products but also bring innovation at each and every touchpoint of the customer journey. There is a need for a fundamental shift in the way IT companies operate to manage the expectations of customers who are amidst digital transformation themselves and are looking at IT partners to guide the change. IT service providers must reinvent their operating model to lead and sustain this change. Services with a product mindset by managing each of the customer requirements as a product is a new mantra for being successful in this digital era. Coforge is successfully embracing this mantra to lead this journey.