Customer Focus Differentiates IT Leaders From The Rest

According to new research from Unisys Corporation, information technology (IT) organisations that are most innovative in adopting best practices for IT services delivery – whether developed from within the organisation or with partners – are more effective than others in achieving desired business results. The research shows that such organisations consistently focus on multiple value-based outcomes affecting service, reputation and growth in addition to traditional operational considerations such as efficiency and cost reduction.

The research was based on interviews with 550 IT executives worldwide.

Of the survey respondents, 139 companies – 25 percent of those surveyed – emerged as leaders based on their effectiveness at managing IT resources to achieve key business objectives. Not surprisingly, the survey sample showed significant differences between leaders and others in the way they applied IT practices and used outsourcing relationships for continuous improvement, which can be the key in delivering IT services to advance business goals.

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The study shows that leading organisations focus their priorities beyond cost-cutting, which is conventionally viewed as the primary business driver of IT best practices. They create service delivery models that employ a balanced mix of practices involving people, process and automation to execute, adjust and innovate in achieving multiple important business objectives. Leaders are also more likely to look outside the organisation and draw from outsourcing partners to improve their best practices.

“These survey results indicate IT executives’ growing realisation that the greatest benefits come when they focus on innovation in IT service management to achieve business results,” said Bart De Maertelaere, vice president, IT Outsourcing Strategy, Unisys Global Outsourcing and Infrastructure Services. “To be leaders, IT executives must adopt proven best practices that enable truly collaborative innovation between their organisation and the businesses they serve.”

Business Priorities and IT Best Practices Correlate to Success

Overall, survey respondents ranked business outcomes such as cost reduction, customer satisfaction, customer retention, increased business agility, improved productivity, and profit growth as the most desirable for their organisations.

The 139 respondents who emerged as leaders in IT best practices consistently placed a significantly higher premium on customer-focussed outcomes than the entire survey population. While all companies ranked cost reduction as an important outcome, the leaders chose value-based outcomes such as customer satisfaction/up sell, customer loyalty/retention and increased business agility as more important. Those are the outcomes affecting the organisation’s service, reputation and growth.

Understandably, the IT leaders also saw stimulating innovation and creativity as a more important business outcome than the rest of the sample: 81 percent of them ranked it as very important, compared to only 52 percent of the others.

Leaders Best at Integrating IT and Business and Leveraging Relationships

The leaders in the survey – more widely than other organisations in the study – embraced three key best practices they considered most effective for using IT to further business objectives. These include knowledge management techniques and tools; use of modeling methodologies to manage solutions development; and innovative delivery models, such as software as a service (SaaS), which automate service delivery to end users. In combination, these practices balance people, process and technology, fostering collaboration between the IT organisation and the business it serves.

The IT leaders’ tendency to focus more on relationships – apparent in their high ranking of customer satisfaction and retention as key business outcomes – extends to how the organisation delivers services. While the leaders were no more likely to use outsourcing as a means of IT services delivery than non-leaders, they employ a different style when they do outsource. They said that they build partnerships with outside providers so they can draw on the partners’ expertise to improve service delivery, rather than just treat them as vendors of a service.

Among the IT leaders, 48 percent said that their outsourcing partners improve best practices, compared to 39 percent among the other companies. “Best-practices improvements are critical over the life of an outsourcing relationship,” said De Maertelaere. “By forging a strategic partnership with outsourcers, CIOs can work with providers to help ensure that infrastructure and applications remain innovative and keep pace with changing business needs.”

The above research was conducted online in late 2007 by IDG Research Services Group for Unisys.