How to survive as an IT Consultancy firm

The impact of Digital Transformation on IT consultancies and how Service Design can help you serve your clients better

Introduction

Digital Transformation and Service Design both seem to be just buzzwords. Especially Digital Transformation is used by more and more companies to indicate that they are changing services, adding webshops, doing whatever they can to become "digital".

There is a huge difference though between simply adding some digital interfaces for others to interact with, and becoming truly digital at your core.

As IT consultancies, we are not excempt of this transformation. Even though we might think we are. Our customers are the companies that are struggling to become digital, to survive the disruptive nature of digital transformation, and to keep themselves afloat whatever it takes.

This means that we need to think beyond our current service model, and that's where Service Design comes in.

What is Digital Transformation?

Before we go any further, let's dig a little deeper into Digital Transformation and what that means today.

Digital Transformation refers to the cultural, economical, and societal changes caused by a few new players who throw out the standard rules of a market and break with convention. While most are not even making profit, they change the way consumers act towards your market. This causes huge disruptions.

Think about players like Zalando, Bol.com, and Amazon who are disrupting the retail sector, players like Netflix who disrupted the video rental market, iTunes for purchasing music, Spotify who started challenging iTunes on their turn, …

I think we can safely assume that these disruptions have only just started and, at this point, it's hard to predict just how much our current way of doing things and current business models will still change.

Therefore, the goal right now is not to find the best service offering for clients in today's market, but the goal is to start preparing your business for a fast-changing environment where you will need to be able to change at a moment's notice.

How does this impact IT consultancy companies?

As IT consultancy companies, we are digital at our core, and we know better than anyone just how much our solutions can help our customers grow their business from a technical perspective.

However, our job doesn't end there.

As mentioned in the intro of this post, our customers are the very ones that are struggling to stay afloat while their entire market changes at a rapid pace.

Sure, we could simply make them a new website, a mobile application, we can even help them implement personalised marketing campaigns and a personalised experience on their website, … This will help them bring a more digital experience to their customers, but it doesn't help them to become digital at their core.

That's where Service Design comes in

Service Design is all about offering your customers what they really need, going beyond simply offering them the product they requested, and creating a service for them that will truly help them move forward.

This fits perfectly into the situation explained above.

As our customers are struggling to simply stay afloat in their changing markets, offering a technical solution is not always enough. I strongly believe there is a huge benefit to be gained when you start helping your customers to completely transform their businesses, helping them to become digital at their core.

It may seem like a tough sell, but let's be real here. Not many companies are going to stay afloat in the coming years with ever-changing business rules and the constant threat of start-up companies who can offer what they do way simpler and cheaper.

The question is not if a company will go under if they don't change anything, it's when.

As IT consultants, we need to broaden our range of services to support our clients on a business level too, if we really want to help our customers survive their market disruptions.

What do you think will help your customers more? Creating a new web interface that will give them the idea that they are embracing Digital Transformation, or giving them insights into what Digital Transformation really is and helping them come up with a new business model structure that can help them pivot in the next few years, indirectly also binding this customer to you for years to come?