Tag: Digital Transformation

Enterprise Metaverse: Myriad Possibilities or Problems for the Hybrid Workplace? | Blog

November 3, 2021

The future of work in the post-pandemic world will increasingly incorporate elements of the metaverse where virtual reality permeates physical workspaces, creating a truly immersive employee experience. This can create exciting opportunities for organizations that embrace this new work environment that goes “beyond universe.” Continuing our coverage of metaverse, let’s take a look at the challenges and four essential elements needed for metaverse to succeed in enterprise workplaces.   

As the world debates return to work, hybrid work, public workspace, private workspace, and a myriad of other employee engagement models, the virtual workplace deserves more attention. This emerging workplace goes beyond merely adopting next-gen collaboration platforms to help employees, but fundamentally rethinks building workplaces where real employees, virtual employee personas, and other people work together.

Technology vendors such as Sophya, Cluster, VirBELA, and Teeoh, who have been active in this space, got a shot in the arm when Big Tech players Microsoft introduced Mesh and Facebook launched Horizon Workrooms. Enterprise adoption of Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR) into training, employee onboarding, remote diagnostics in industrial sectors, and virtual events are already seeing traction. However, enterprises have struggled with seamlessly blending the virtual world and building a truly immersive workplace. With the pandemic making remote and distributed work more acceptable and workable, enterprises will become more audacious in experimenting with leveraging the building blocks of metaverse.

Four elements needed to make metaverse take off in the workplace  

  • Technology maturity and cost of ownership: The fundamental building blocks of metaverse that create mixed or augmented reality experiences are primitive in nature and expensive. However, make no mistake, the development happening in this space is more rapid than we can fathom. As the consumer world evolves with better hardware, software, and experience, it will influence the enterprise world as well. Most hardware vendors such as LG and Nvidia are focusing on building more affordable AR/VR headsets. While at some point of time in the future customized hardware (e.g., glasses or headsets) may not be required to function in the enterprise workplace metaverse, that world is very far off. Until that time, vendors need to build affordable technology solutions

 

  • Bold enterprise thinking: Disruption does not bring clarity. Change is difficult, and that scares enterprises. Enterprises will need to think boldly if they have to transform the employee experience, especially in the post-pandemic world. If they keep rethinking their workplace only in terms of deploying different types of collaboration suites, making things like policy more accessible to employees, and giving employees the best technology to work with, they will be missing the point. This is the time to fundamentally rethink the workplace by layering in metaverse. Many enterprises built virtual lounges for leadership during the pandemic and plan to continue with that. However, this needs to be scaled for everyone in the organization. Build a workplace that provides a common platform for all employees regardless of where they are based

 

  • CEO-driven change: If left to IT or HR teams, metaverse will not see the day of light in the enterprise workplace largely because CIOs do not have the incentive or vision to be so bold when their average tenure is only three years. CIOs can push for better laptops, phones, collaboration suites, etc., but rarely rethink an employee experience that needs metaverse adoption. The HR team generally views employee engagement from a policy rather than a technology adoption perspective. If the CEO believes talent strategy, seamless collaboration, and brand value are all important, they need to lead the enterprise metaverse charge within the workplace

 

  • User education: In addition to the typical user education needed with any change, virtual offices will need specialized attention to avatar definitions. Given the focus is having the virtual and real-world fuse seamlessly, an effective avatar is a key requirement to succeed. Therefore, enterprises may need to hire avatar builders rather than burden users with creating them. Policy guidelines around acceptable avatars also may be needed. By partnering with retail vendors to sell offerings for these avatars, enterprises can improve the employee experience and also potentially gain share with the provider to improve the return on these investments

Next steps in enterprise metaverse for the workplace

Enterprises need to understand the vendor landscape in this area, which includes suppliers offering meetings, training, onboarding, virtual events, remote support, and avatar-based workplaces. Providers are approaching this space from different angles and philosophies. Some require headsets and customized hardware to enter the metaverse, while others do not.  As this space evolves, the vendor offerings will expand, and other new segments are rapidly emerging. Given the dynamic nature, enterprises will need dedicated teams to track this landscape and keep up with the developments.

To drive adoption, enterprises need to bet on simpler use cases such as attending virtual forums, meetings, and fun events. Once users are comfortable in engaging on these metaverse forums, the use cases can be expanded to day-to-day work with specific personas. Technically advanced users can be the first users, followed by other enterprise functions.

Eventually, enterprises will need to realize and appreciate that metaverses will not be a replacement of their real workplace environment but used to enhance employee engagement and experience. As the world moves towards a mix of on-premise and remote models, fancy collaboration platforms will not suffice. Enterprises will have to bite the metaverse bullet, if not now, in the coming years.

Has your organization adopted any metaverse concepts in the workplace? Please let me know your experience at [email protected].

Product Management Is Essential for Increasing IT Productivity and Effectiveness | Blog

October 18, 2021

The Agile manifesto, created 20 years ago, radically changed the software development process, introducing new principles and emphasizing breaking tasks down into bite-sized pieces to achieve more innovation and greater productivity. Although some companies improve productivity by 100-200% in a year in application development and maintenance, most still complain that their IT teams do not operate quickly enough and fail to meet business needs. What makes the difference? An essential factor that must be in place in Agile methods to improve productivity is product management, but it has not been introduced into most companies’ IT departments.

Read more in my blog on Forbes

If IT Is from Mars, Procurement Is from Venus: 5 Steps to Break the Chasm between IT and Procurement for IT Sourcing

October 14, 2021

It may seem at times that the IT and procurement departments can be on different planets when it comes to IT sourcing services spend. But it doesn’t have to be “us” versus “them.” Read on to learn how to counteract differences in communication styles and behavior patterns, so your entire organization wins.

For a complimentary analysis of your IT sourcing practices, take our IT Sourcing Pinnacle Model® survey to see how you compare against best-in-class or IT sourcing Pinnacle Enterprises™ across leading global organizations.

Take our Survey

How their stars align

Anyone who has set up a new procurement department at a firm with large volumes of untracked indirect spend knows they first need to target the IT department and get involved in their sourcing projects. The reasons are simple – IT has large volumes of spend, generally adopts procurement practices the earliest, and can become the greatest support system in the long-term. The CIO’s office consists of the visionaries who are willing to take high risks of trying something new and are the least process-sensitive of all business units. Often, IT category managers end up closely collaborating with their functional leads, and certain organizations centralize procurement departments in IT. Further, as early adopters, IT prefers to rely on their own intuition and vision and also are willing to serve as highly visible references to other adopter groups in the population (i.e., other business units). Thus, IT is the stepping stone for procurement if they want to establish their foothold in the organization and increase spend under their influence, which is still abysmally low. The typical procurement team is not involved in nearly half of their company’s services spend, as can be seen in the exhibit below.

Procurement influence across indirect spend in Pinnacle Enterprises™ (best-in-class organizations that lead the services sourcing journey) and other enterprises

Source: Services Sourcing Organizational Maturity | Pinnacle Model® Analysis (Everest Group 2020)

Image 1

Colliding orbits 

However, at the same time, the IT function can be highly demanding.  IT is always in upheaval, beset on one side by users and the other by budgets. As in any relationship, IT and procurement tackle multiple such chasms, but their problems range across the same old partnership concerns that exist in modern-day relationships – stonewalling, unsolicited criticism, and the atypical “you never listen to me!” argument. Multiple examples can help prove this analogy: IT and procurement do not have regular meetings (in most organizations, they do not even meet monthly), do not involve each other across stages in sourcing engagements (IT is known to invite procurement late in the sourcing journey, whereas procurement is known to keep IT out of negotiations), and still treat each other as separate entities, instead of working towards a shared goal.

If the two could solve a couple of key issues in this troubled relationship, the IT-procurement partnership can create great profitability for the firm in the long haul. Here are five ways to help strengthen the bonds between these crucial areas:

  1. Support each other’s growth and development: The basic rule of a relationship is that when one is growing at a rapid pace, the other needs to ramp up to provide support. Organizations are being driven to rapidly undertake digital transformation by recent market trends such as migration to cloud services, servitization, and cybersecurity measures becoming the new norm. IT spend is spearheading the growth of an organization, with IT services spend itself expected to reach about US $721 billion by 2025.

 

Global IT services market spend (in US$ billion)
Source: Everest Group’s Application Services State of the Market Report (2021)

Global IT services market spend

This increase in IT services spend requires procurement to rewire their own agendas from being cost-focused towards becoming more value-focused, and also reshaping outsourcing contracts to ensure long-term success in today’s changed outsourcing environment. Further, at this point of rapid growth, it is imperative for procurement to up its IT sourcing game by becoming more agile and reducing sourcing turnaround time, gaining more category intelligence in emerging technology areas such as blockchain and cybersecurity, getting used to negotiating complex licensing agreements, and adjusting contracts to incorporate recent rate increases requested by suppliers due to the current scramble for IT talent

  1. Stay involved throughout the journey: At the onset of any relationship lies trust, and both parties must build trust and loop each other in all aspects related to the sourcing journey. IT can implement this by undertaking steps such as including procurement at the requirements gathering    phase in a sourcing engagement, keeping them abreast about business requirements that can drive supplier capabilities, giving a transparent picture about supplier performance in oral presentations, and ensuring procurement is involved in all conversations about sourcing selection. This deal goes both ways. It is essential for procurement to keep IT onboard for actual negotiation talks and decisions, help price and right-size contracts for deals, and bring category and sourcing intelligence from past successful deals and supplier partnerships

 

  1. Back each other in times of crisis: While risk management has become key in today’s day and age, occasionally, there are crises that no one can predict. Smart strategies help in such scenarios, for instance, during the coronavirus crisis, many IT and procurement leaders worked together to keep their small- and medium-sized suppliers afloat with early payments and by identifying new areas of cost optimization (e.g., creating negotiation opportunities through internal demand management without harming suppliers)

 

  1. Listen to each other: Regular communication is key as each party brings in specific skillsets and typically, IT and procurement should have a monthly cadence at the minimum. The results of proper communication can be seen through an example in sourcing risk mitigation – IT brings a better understanding of the contractual risks, such as the possibility of software license audits, while procurement has the experience within contract risk management to ensure suppliers establish appropriate controls and provide contingency plans. In this scenario, IT and procurement can leverage each other’s skillsets to ensure end-to-end risk coverage

 

  1. Finally, act as partners, and not as boss-subordinates: Traditionally, procurement treats category departments as their end customer and becomes driven towards serving all their needs. However, it is crucial to treat this relationship as a partnership over a boss-subordinate model (where IT is the client and procurement is the department serving them). Procurement should confidently bring in their expertise from strategic sourcing and spend analysis to contracting, benchmarking, and spend management to deliver value within IT. Procurement also should provide constructive criticism towards IT decisions, even if it involves redesigning their buying process

 

This point is key – but it involves a fundamental shift in the way these two departments view themselves. In my last role in procurement consulting driving value in the IT category at a US-based consumer packaged goods firm, I observed that while procurement worked closely with the IT team (with the procurement team even sitting within the IT office), they were often at loggerheads. Being the subordinate department in this case, procurement frequently had to go the extra mile to ensure the IT department did not make destructive moves, such as revealing the baseline to the supplier at an early stage, or unconsciously leaking to selected suppliers that they would definitely be awarded the contract (and thereby sabotaging procurement’s negotiation strategy in the engagement). Being on the procurement side, I did not understand how IT was suffering due to procurement’s clear invasion into their territory. I can imagine that the IT audience reading this blog can talk in detail about procurement’s insufferable demeanor and uninvited settlement on their home ground. By better understanding their differences, IT and procurement can find common ground and realize they can effectively operate in the same universe after all.

Take our survey to get a complimentary analysis of your IT sourcing practices and learn how you compare against best-in-class, or IT sourcing Pinnacle Enterprises™ across leading global organizations. For further details on how we can support sourcing and vendor management leaders, contact Bhanushee Malhotra, Practice Director, at [email protected].

 

Metaverse: Opportunities and Key Success Factors for Technology Services Providers | Blog

October 6, 2021

While the metaverse may seem way out there, the opportunities for technology service providers in this next evolution are very real. While sci-fi movies such as Ready Player One introduced this concept of an interactive virtual reality (VR) world, leading technology giants including Facebook, Nvidia, and Microsoft are investing in this future. What will it take for tech service companies to seize a stake in this alternative universe that could be coming very soon? To learn more about the five factors providers will need to succeed in the metaverse, read on.

With digital technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the cloud, buildings and other physical locations have become “smart spaces,” as we recently wrote about in this Viewpoint. The metaverse – a confluence where people live a seamless life across the real and virtual universe – can be thought of as the “mega smart space.” Google trends analysis of the word “metaverse” below suggests a growing interest in it.

Picture2

As the underlying powerhouse running the metaverse, the internet is expected to evolve to this next-generation model. Driven by the growing acceptance of virtual models as a standard way of living during the pandemic, many evangelists believe the metaverse may become a reality sooner than expected.

News such as a Gucci virtual bag selling for more than its physical value is grabbing attention. Virtual avatars are already attending corporate meetings and large audience forums with real people. The physical motion of body parts is being replicated in the digital world and vice versa, as witnessed at the recent SIGGRAPH 2021 conference. Even if we discount the hyperbole of vendors, there is merit in evaluating what this means for the technology services industry.

Opportunities to build a new world

Interestingly, the metaverse has no standard building blocks. Since it’s a parallel universe, things that exist in the real world are imitated. Therefore, blockchain-driven non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and payments, computing power to run the universe, connectivity through 5G and edge, cyber security, interactive applications, Augmented Reality (AR) and VR, digital twins, and 3D/4D models of the real world all become important. Of course, integrating these seamlessly with enterprise technology will be a demand to cater to.

The entire metaverse is based on technology. And with more technology spend comes more technology services spend. Although some of these enabling technologies, such as AR/VR, are still in their infancy, but technology vendors are accelerating their development, which will only help technology service providers.

Five factors needed for tech service providers to succeed in the metaverse

  1. Innovative client engagement: Gaming companies may end up taking a lead in this area given their inherent capabilities to build engaging life-like content. Unfortunately, few technology services work meaningfully with gaming companies. Vendors who can build product development competence for this set of clients will benefit from the metaverse. Service providers also will need to scale their existing engagements with BigTech and other technology vendors. The current work focused on maintaining their products or providing end-of-life support must change. Service providers will need to engage technology vendors upstream in ideating and designing products and not only developing and supporting them. The traditional client base in segments such as Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI), retail, manufacturing, and travel will continue to be important. These industries will build their version of the metaverse for consumers for specific business use cases or participate in/rent out others. Technology service providers will need access to business owner spend in these organizations. Other industries such as education, which do not currently provide large technology service opportunities, may also take the lead in the metaverse adoption. The takeaway is service providers will need to expand their client coverage and rely less on their traditional client base
  2. Capabilities to work with “unknown” partners: Most service providers have a very long list of 200-300 technology partners they work with. However, they usually prioritize five or six as strategic partners who influence 70-80% of their channel revenue. This will need to change for the metaverse. With its complexity, the metaverse will require service providers to not only work with other peers but also innumerable smaller companies. Niche partners could be manufacturing smart glasses, tracking technologies, or virtual interfaces, etc. Building viable Go-to-Market (GTM) and technical capabilities will be critical
  3. Product envisioning and user experience capabilities: While many service providers now have interactive businesses, their predominant revenue comes from building mobile apps, next-gen websites, or commerce platforms. Most have very limited true interactive or product envisioning capabilities. The metaverse will reduce the inherent need for “screens,” and the experience will be seamless. Most enterprises rely on specialist providers to brainstorm with and push their thinking to envision newer products. Other service providers are still catching up and are bucketed as “technical partners.”  Envisioning capabilities will become critical. Therefore, service providers who are yet to get to even product design opportunities have a big road to traverse. Although these technology service providers can continue to focus on the downstream work of core technology, they will soon be sidelined and become irrelevant
  4. Infinite platform competence: The metaverse will need service providers to closely work with cloud, edge, 5G, carriers, and other vendors. However, the boundless infrastructure and platform capabilities needed will change. Service providers have already tasted success in cloud. However, the metaverse infrastructure will stress their capabilities to envision, design, and operate limitless infrastructure platforms. Their tools, operating processes, partners, and talent model will completely transform
  5. Monetization model: Service providers will need to bring and build innovative commercial models for their clients to monetize the metaverse. Much like the internet, no one will own the metaverse. However, every company will try to be its guardian to maximize their business. Service providers will need to understand the deep working of the metaverse and advise clients on potential monetization. To do this, they will not only need traditional capabilities such as consulting and industry knowledge but also breakthrough thinking around potential revenue streams. For example, a bank or telecom company will want its metaverse to influence growth and not just become one more channel of customer experience

Who will take the lead?

Without adding to the ongoing debate on the metaverse and its social impact, it is safe to assume that it can create significant opportunities for technology service providers that will continue to grow as this nascent concept evolves further. These service providers already have many technical building blocks that will be needed to succeed.

However, given the metaverse conversations are not even at infancy in their client landscape, service providers are not proactively thinking along this dimension. Since the metaverse will initially be dominated by technology vendors, who outsource a lot less than their enterprise counterparts, service providers will struggle unless they proactively strategize, and their traditional client base will need a significant push to think along these lines to create opportunities.

Currently, this all may appear too farfetched or futuristic. Indeed, there are too many “unknown unknowns.” Unlike technology vendors, technology service providers do not proactively invest until they size up the market opportunity. However, as enterprise-class technology vendors such as Microsoft launch offerings like Mesh, it is quite apparent that the metaverse, in some shape or form, will become enterprise-ready sooner than we expect.

What has your experience been with metaverse-related opportunities? Please share your thoughts with me at [email protected].

Should CIOs Run Engineering Teams as a Parallel Organization to IT? | Blog

October 4, 2021

The engineering services market is now disrupting the IT services marketplace. The move to technology platforms and the requisite number of engineers causes a dilemma for CIOs. The need for engineering skills is growing faster than IT skills, and companies are investing more in the engineering function, somewhat at the expense of IT. CIOs cannot ignore this phenomenon. Should a CIO create an engineering organization that runs parallel to the IT organization, or should engineers be part of the IT organization and perform some IT functions?

Read more in my blog on Forbes

Why Companies Are Considering Small Tech Firms for Cloud Services | Blog

September 29, 2021

Cloud as a concept and then as a reality swept through businesses over the past ten years, and most companies moved a lot of their applications to public cloud platforms. AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft’s Azure (the hyperscale service providers) are now powerful influencers in business today. They turned IT into a commodity and then put an as-a-service layer on it, thus influencing business thinking as well as IT. But companies are now competing in a different way.

Read more in my blog on Forbes

Cloud Transformation: How Much Is Enough? | Blog

September 15, 2021

With today’s business transformation led by cloud, migration frenzy remains at a fever pitch. Even though most cloud vendors are now witnessing slower growth, it will still be years before this juggernaut halts. But can you have too much cloud? The question of how far enterprises should go in their cloud transformation journey is rarely thought of. Read on to learn when it may be time for your enterprise to stop and reexamine its cloud strategy.  

Enterprises believe cloud will continue to be critical but only one part of their landscape, according to our recently published Cloud State of the Market 2021. Once enterprises commit to the cloud, the next question is: How far should they go?  This runs deeper and far beyond asking how much of their workloads should run on cloud, when is the opportune time to repatriate workloads from cloud, and whether workloads should be moved between clouds.

Unfortunately, most enterprises are too busy with migration to consider it. Cloud vendors certainly aren’t bringing this question up because they are driving consumption to their platform. Service partners are not talking about this either, as they have plenty of revenue to make from cloud migration.

When should enterprises rethink the cloud transformation strategy?

The challenge in cloud transformation can manifest in multiple ways depending on the enterprise context. However, our work with enterprises indicates three major common obstacles. It’s time to relook at your cloud journey if your enterprise experiences any of the following:

  • Cloud costs can’t be explained: Cloud cost has become a major issue as enterprises realize they did not plan their journeys well enough or account for the many unknowns to start. However, after that ship has sailed, the focus changes to micromanaging cloud costs and justifying the business case. It is not uncommon for enterprises to see the total cost of ownership going up by 20% post cloud migration and the rising costs are difficult for technology teams to defend
  • Cloud value is not being met: Our research indicates 67% of enterprises do not get value out of their cloud journey. When this occurs, it is a good point to reexamine cloud. Many times, the issue is poor understanding of cloud at the offset and the workloads chosen. During migration frenzy, shortcuts are often taken and modern debt gets created, diluting the impact cloud transformation can have for enterprises
  • Cloud makes your operations more complex: With the fundamental cloud journey and architectural input at the beginning more focused on finding the best technology fits, downstream operational issues are almost always ignored. Our research suggests 40-50% of cloud spend is on operations and yet enterprises do not think through this upfront. With the inherent complexity in cloud landscape, accountability may become a challenge. As teams collapse their operating structure, this problem is exacerbated

What should enterprises do when they’ve gone too far in the cloud?

This question may appear strange given enterprises are still scaling their cloud initiatives. However, some mature enterprises are also struggling with deciding the next steps in their cloud journey. Each enterprise and business unit within them should evaluate the extent of their cloud journey. If any of the points mentioned above are becoming red flags, they must act immediately.

Operating models also should be examined. Cloud value depends on the way of working and the internal structure of an enterprise. Centralization, federation, autonomy, talent, and sourcing models can influence cloud value. However, changing operating models in pursuit of cloud value should not become putting the cart before the horse.

Enterprises always struggle with the question of where to stop. This challenge is only made worse by the rapid pace of change in cloud. As enterprises go deeper into cloud stacks of different vendors, it will become increasingly difficult to tweak the cloud transformation journey.

Despite these pressures, enterprises should periodically evaluate their cloud journeys. Cloud vendors, system integrators, and other partners will keep pushing more cloud at enterprises. Strong enterprise leadership that can ask and understand the larger question from a commercial, technical, and strategic viewpoint is needed to determine when enough cloud is enough. Therefore, from journey to the cloud, to journey in the cloud, enterprises should now also focus on the journey’s relevance and value.

If you would like to talk about your cloud journey, please reach out to Yugal Joshi at [email protected].

For more insights, visit our Market Insights™ exploring the cloud infrastructure model. Learn more

Key to Productivity and Agility Is Persistent Teams | Blog

August 25, 2021

Many companies now experience dramatic improvements in productivity – measured by the effectiveness and efficiency of work. They achieve these improvements because of implementing the new operating models and agile methodologies. However, companies still looking to achieve productivity improvements find a fundamental dilemma in trying to implement necessary changes associated with the new operating models.

EG with tagline Neg
Linkedin-in Facebook-f Play Instagram
Better Decisions Powered by Tenacious Research    

Contact Us

Who We Are

About Us

Newsroom

Office Locations

Partners & Affiliations

What We Offer

Memberships

Custom Decision Support

Published Research

Careers

Why Everest Group

Explore Openings

Equal Opportunity Employer

Resources

Access Reports

Citation Policy

Everest Group Market Intelligence (EGMI)

Legal

Using the Reports Portal

©2023 Everest Global, Inc.         Privacy Notice          Terms of Use        Do Not Sell My Information

How can we engage?

Please let us know how we can help you on your journey.

Contact Us

"*" indicates required fields

Please review our Privacy Notice and check the box below to consent to the use of Personal Data that you provide.
Consent*