At Everest Group we’ve noticed a growing trend in our client base. As I’ve blogged before, business stakeholders have become increasingly independent and make independent decisions. Mostly they have adopted point solutions, standing up functionalities and making decisions to use SaaS products and developing their own skunk works, agile teams to develop fast functionality. The implications for the services industry are interesting.
We’re now seeing that, as these point solutions embed themselves, they flourish and become more ubiquitous. They then need to stretch and integrate into legacy systems as well as affect multiple stakeholder groups.
At the same time, we see the CIOs upping their game. They no longer resist these new technologies and are willing to embrace them.
Here’s the growing trend: increasingly organizations make decisions in a collaborative group with business stakeholders and CIO groups working together to initiate, plan and execute these activities.
Using a skiing analogy, as point solutions grow beyond the capability of business stakeholders to appropriately manage, they get in over their skis, which opens the door for partnering with IT. We see IT eager to take advantage of this opening and forging effective partnerships going forward.
This is an encouraging trend, but it presents a more complicated selling picture for service providers. They can be easily confused as to buyers’ decision-making rights, which necessitates reaching out to each stakeholder to make sure they leave no one out. That’s the downside – increased selling costs and complexity.
But there’s also an upside: as these collaborative partnering opportunities grow, we observe they are well worth a provider’s sales effort.
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