We’ve been publishing our IT Services Enterprise Pulse Report for four years and have never before seen a 21 percent jump in enterprises’ satisfaction with their IT service providers, but that’s exactly what happened in 2020. Despite – or rather because of – the enormous uncertainty and multitude of challenges enterprises faced with the global pandemic, the participants in our IT Services Enterprise Pulse Report 2021 approvingly recognized that their IT services partners understood their pain points and proactively supported them in adopting a digital-first operating model through their investments in cloud, security, and data. These investments have proven to help fill the supply-demand gap for next-generation digital technologies in the IT services industry.
What are enterprises’ future priorities?
As we move ahead into the post-pandemic environment, enterprises are mainly aim to fuel their investments in technology to reduce their costs, grow their revenue, and enhance their risk management and regulatory compliance measures.
Just over 80 percent of the enterprises cited cost reduction as their key focus as they start embracing the shift to a digital-first business model, consisting of increased automation initiatives, accelerated cloud adoption, modernization initiatives, and rationalization of their infrastructure, applications, and platforms landscape.
About 46 percent stated they are looking at innovative ways to grow their revenue channels, mainly through improving customer experience, delivering hyper-personalization, pushing newer products into the market, and expanding into new territories.
What do they expect from their IT service providers?
The pandemic has created a need for service providers to up the ante and adopt a partnership mindset towards their clients. Enterprises want their service providers to stand beside, not behind them. That means IT service providers need to align their technical decision making with their clients’ strategic interests. They also need to be able to sell the business outcomes of their technology investments to their clients’ senior leadership.
With the increasing number of uncertainties created by the pandemic, enterprises stated that they prefer service providers who adopt a proactive, rather than reactive, approach towards monitoring potential challenges and are highly responsive to changes in the status quo. They want them to bring new and innovative ideas to the table and be up-to-date on the latest technologies and what their competitors are doing.
Businesses around the world struggled with managing onshore attrition and offshore productivity during the pandemic. To ease their talent management woes, the participants in this study made it clear they want their IT service providers to invest in local talent and resources so they can have feet on the street with better understanding of the regional regulations of their business.
The shift in value proposition and expectations
In a separate study we conducted – Recalibrating for Resiliency – 2021 Key Issues in Global Sourcing – Enterprise IT Perspective – we found that the top priorities enterprises expect from their IT service providers are productivity and service quality, followed by flexibility, ability to adapt to new business models, and the ability to bring innovative ideas to the engagement. These all map back to what enterprises stated in the various IT Services PEAK Matrix® reports in our IT Services Enterprise Pulse Report 2021.
Interestingly, more than 70 percent of the participants in our Key Issues study stated that they are optimistic about meeting or exceeding their 2020 targets, and about 70 percent of the participants in our 2021 Pulse Report expressed their satisfaction with their IT service providers.
To sum up, the pandemic has pushed the pace for adopting a digital-first and, in some cases, a digital-only working model for global enterprises. Service providers have made the right investments in cloud, security, and data, which helped fill the supply-demand gap for next-generation digital technologies in the IT services industry. This has led to an increase in enterprises’ satisfaction with their service providers who have fared well in fulfilling the sudden upshift in demand but has also set newer expectations going forward.
To take a deep dive into the specifics of enterprises’ priorities, how the demand is shifting, and how IT service providers need to adapt to changing expectations, read our report, IT Services Enterprise Pulse Report 2021, or reach out to us at [email protected] and [email protected].
