Fine Tuning the Services Agenda

Amidst the carnage of disappointing earnings, plummeting stock prices, and widespread lay-offs, one would think that IT professional services and consulting are on their last legs. It simply isnt so.

The technology assimilation gap that fuels the demand for IT services will continue to widen. The need to integrate business strategy with technology is stronger than ever. In-house IT staffs still lack skilled resources. Billions of R&D dollars are still pouring into communications and wireless technology. Organizations will continue to need help navigating the new technology landscape.

Notwithstanding daily references to the “r” word, the industry remains fundamentally sound, and prospects are still bright for firms agile enough to respond to the short-term changes.

What’s Really Going On?

Clients and prospects have indeed put projects on hold as their sense of urgency has abated and their own businesses have slowed. They are taking advantage of the competitive and economic lull to reassess their strategic objectives and rethink their tactics. The obvious result is a slowdown in major new technology implementation initiatives. Perhaps less obvious, from the perspective of struggling IT services providers, is a healthy refocusing by clients on operational efficiencies and the bottom line.

Clients have three main objectives driving their purchases of IT services:

• Managing and operating existing IT assets and processes for high availability
• Enhancing existing IT assets and processes to improve IT and business performance
• Implementing major new IT assets and processes to solve business problems and leverage new opportunities

For the past few years IT consulting and services companies approached the market with a view toward business transformation: Let’s help clients use technology to implement new business models and tap new sources of revenue. The priority for clients now is managing, operating, and enhancing existing assets. Their focus has switched from top line revenue to bottom line profits, from business transformation to fine-tuning.

Fine-Tuning Your Agenda

To survive the transition, IT services providers need to take a fast, hard look at their offering portfolios and marketing and sales strategies. Does your current portfolio map to the immediate needs of your target client base? Do your marketing messages and value propositions address the pain that is being felt now (as opposed to last year or even last quarter)? Is your sales organization promoting the most appropriate services? How long will it take you to adapt?

We all preach the importance of speed; we all say we can transform our clients’ business on Internet time. But how quickly can we change our own approach?

The ingredients are most likely in place already. The challenge is mostly a matter of fine-tuning the portfolio, intensifying internal communication and training, sharpening value propositions, and redesigning sales incentives. Doing all this while also battening the hatches to weather the storm (quite literally today in New England!), won’t be simple. But it’s not rocket science either. Marketing focus and execution, as always, will carry the day.

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