Resetting Partner Relationships For Continuous Transformation
Organisations looking to renew a managed service contract with a service provider or a colocation agreement with a data centre will inevitably find themselves evaluating the engagement through a different lens. What made sense in the past might not work as well in the present. The pace of change is now at a velocity that demands every service agreement is revisited, because fast-evolving technology options present opportunities for competitive advantage that organisation’s must be able to explore.
The cloud changed everything. And whatever point a company is at on its cloud journey, I guarantee it will have shifted how the CEO thinks about IT, opened the CTO’s mind to the idea of ‘anything-as-a-service’, and encouraged the CFO to question the wisdom of any more capital investment in hardware stacks.
Lockdown only served to persuade even the most sceptical board members of the wisdom of having cloud services that enable people to work from anywhere. It has made ‘opex’ a preference over ‘capex’ and even challenged assumptions around office real estate, the idea that you have to have a place where everybody goes to work.
As we head into the ‘new normal’ of hybrid working – where employees divide their time between home and office – sticking with IT services based around old ways of working makes even less sense.
Future-Proof Partnerships
So how do you devise a long-term technology strategy that delivers on the flexibility that businesses need? The answer is carefully, with lots of expert consultation. You will need contracted advisory services that are every bit as agile as the solutions they deliver.
At Ergo, we are already having engagements with customers that start with lots of listening. For us to form a future-proof partnership with clients, we have to understand their long-term goals. We have always taken time to get to know our clients’ businesses before we talk about technology, but it’s moved to a whole other level because of cloud and new ways in which IT is delivered and consumed.
We take more time analysing a client’s business goals, because we want to forge a partnership where we share the ambition of realising them. Strategic goals will stay broadly the same, but the means of achieving them will change all the time. Speed is of the essence, leveraging the scale and agility of cloud services to ‘flex’ existing services or trying new ones as needed.
Peer-to-Peer Relationships
When organisations moved ‘test and development’ to the cloud a decade ago, the benefit was that you could afford to fail fast before getting it right.Some of the same ethos can be applied to wider enterprise solutions today. Compared to old days of IT hardware investment, it’s low risk to try a pay-as-you-go service and switch to something else if it doesn’t deliver what was expected. And because the barrier for entry is so much less, the opportunity for fast wins is much greater.
The destination of a business transformation journey will stay roughly the same, but Ergo can help change the way you get there at key inflection points. We focus on sustained, continuous transformation, using a partnership framework that avoids fragmented engagements, point solutions and quick fixes. Bumps on the road are safely navigated and never distract from the direction of travel.
When we engage with clients now about a managed service, we talk about a peer-to-peer partnership around a programme of work. We help organisations enter new markets more quickly, achieve competitive advantage through greater efficiencies, or pivot to react to the unexpected – like a pandemic or economic instability.
What hasn’t changed is Ergo principles around meticulous execution and continuous improvement. What we have added is an ongoing opportunity in our managed services framework to take advantage of leading-edge solutions and fast changing market opportunities.
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