How Technology Vendors Drive Business Value
If the pandemic has proven what is possible to achieve through C-level alignment, the focus narrowed to specific activities, quick decision-making, and budget allocation; now the hardest left for CIOs, and C-suite, is the strategy.
Vendors on the other side, navigate in a subscription-based world, a blue ocean cloud market full of competitors, where software shelf life can be as short as two months, and only 1 Digital Transformation initiative vs 4 succeed.
How technology vendors can drive value?
On a general note, cloud platforms drive value as long as they are able to change people’s behavior, by continuously providing new features and keeping alive the inspiring vision about what can be achieved in the long run.
In addition to that, there are many pandemic-related factors, technology vendors should take into account.
1- Vendors should take into account CIOs new role within the enterprise. New CIOs dynamics need strategic support. If strategy, objectives, and metrics do not come from a cross-functional C-suite alignment, chances are, customers won’t find value from services not aligned to that. Along with the technology, tech vendors should provide advisory services accordingly, focused on strategy and program management, on top of customer success.
Often, vendor’s differentiation doesn’t come from the software itself, but rather from the relationship established with the customer, training, and market thought leadership provided, apart from many other factors.
2- Tech vendors have a great opportunity to fill the IT gap for the business and the business gap for the IT, helping build the right culture and change management from within the organization. Rather than outsourcing those services to system integrators or analyst firms, they should establish themself as trusted agnostic advisors for outperforming their cloud competitors, and increase CLTV customers’ Lifetime Value.
To be successful a tech vendor should help customers with internal transformation at some level. Addressing skills gaps, training their resources, and helping out to orchestrate different vendors, including coopetition between competitors.
METRICS
3- Tech vendors have the opportunity to export from the outside a lean startup way of working, leveraging solutions that allow quick experimentation, shortened development lead time, and product time to market. Spreading a scientific mindset of achieving goals throughout small increments, changing strategies but lowering risks.
How long it takes to deploy, change, upgrade, and easily integrate different solutions currently within the enterprise estate, or planned for future adoption? platforms, modular solutions, and being able to bring tangible results with a short lead time will win against more complex software.
4- Being able to create a growing community of organizations with the same challenges, use cases, and needs, prove the maturity of a solution here to stay, removing doubts on the vendor’s reliability in the long term. Being the drivers of cooperation with other organizations as well as competitors from the same industry, or geographies, will also open customers to new markets.
CONCLUSION
The most important starting point to deliver value to customers is to ask the stakeholders their definition of value and how they would measure it. Usually, different stakeholders have different expectations, especially without a proper cross-functional alignment at C-level.
Bringing cases that have worked for other organizations will show what is possible and under which conditions.
