InsightFuel Thoughts on the market from the Amdocs Market Insight & Strategy Team

BLOGGER: RUTH WASSERMAN

A caterpillar never thinks about whether he should or shouldn’t transform. Nature takes its course and the world is rewarded with a beautiful butterfly.

Unlike caterpillars, many of today’s service providers are actively considering whether they should transform. Why transform? When planned and executed correctly, transformation generates great business agility and frees service providers to concentrate on their business strategies. The benefits of transformation depend on the transformation trigger, but can include reducing cost, maximizing a strength or opportunity of the organization, improving customer experience and reducing time to market of new products/services.

Caterpillar, why did you transform?

Significant cost reduction is certainly a motivator, but customer service is a crucial success factor for today’s service providers and reduction in churn is a key performance indicator (KPI). Many service providers cite the need to reduce the time to development of new services and time to market as a key driver for a transformation program.   Today’s service providers are transforming their customer-facing channels to provide customers with a unified, multi-channel experience across the Web, retail store and contact center.

So what form should a successful transformation take? This is one of the central questions behind Coleman Parkes Research’s white paper, Transformation: Governance, Benefits and How to Get it Right. Ensuring that the program has a champion within the organization is crucial. While this is often the same office or individual as the initiator of the transformation program, a clear and active leader throughout the lifecycle of the entire transformation process is important.

Hand-in-hand with this vocal and visible leadership is governance of the entire process. A successful transformation is greatly dependent on how well the governance of the program is enacted. The research has shown that shortcomings in governance are prevalent between leaders and enactors. Since this is a critical aspect of the transformation program, organizations should be seeking help in terms of governance.

Having a defined strategy, roadmap and communication are all essential elements of ensuring good governance and a successful transformation process. To achieve this, service providers are engaging third party expertise at the planning stage to draw upon significant expertise that helps aid their strategy from the beginning. Indeed, the vast majority of service providers currently under-going transformation program believe that their program would benefit from outsourcing at least some of its aspects to third party experts. Engaging third party experts early is part of the recipe for success, but keeping them involved throughout the process seems equally vital.

The causes of failure of transformation include logistical factors and difficulties in delivering the project (such as not understanding the impact on the business and not having enough quality resources) and how the program is communicated across the business. Third party expertise married to in-house resources represents the right blend for success. The extraordinary importance of transformation programs means that failure, or even delay, in full delivery of the program can be costly for service providers. Those who have been there recommend communicating effectively, sticking to the plan and mitigating risks during a transformation project by using third party expertise and consulting.

Edited by Eric Danis