BCG: Digital transformation in IT services – Rates of success, goals, and future priorities

Information technology (IT) services companies are doing a lot of things right in terms of digital transformation – but not as much as their peers in other sectors of the IT industry.  So says Boston Consulting Group* (BCG) in its recent study on “The Rates of Success, Goals, and Future Priorities of Digital Transformations, by Sector”.

The good news is IT services companies as a group are ahead of BCG’s cross-industry average in the percent of organizations objectively succeeding with their digital transformation strategies – what BCG calls the “win zone”.   BCG’s study found that 45% of IT services companies met or exceeded their digital transformation target value and created sustainable change, a figure 1.3 times greater than BCG’s cross-industry average.  Still, that’s a considerably “lower percentage than other [tech industry] segments, such as internet-based companies (58%) and hardware and devices companies (52%), have achieved.”

BCG reports “the transformation priorities for IT services have been customer experience and journeys, growth and business model innovation, and cybersecurity.”  But where the leading organizations – companies in the “win zone” – separate themselves from the rest is by also focusing their digital transformation efforts on sales and marketing, partnerships, and support functions.  In fact, 20% more IT services companies in BCG’s “win zone” say they are digitizing support functions than the rest of the bunch.

“Win-zone companies are starting to shift focus from customer-oriented activities to topics related to digital operations and innovation” in part, presumably, because they’ve already achieved their digital transformation goals in customer-facing functions.  Having accomplished job #1, they can move on to digitizing other areas of the business.

Among these is market and competitive intelligence.  Northern Light understands that information driven enterprises, such as IT services companies, need to provide their employees with ready access to market and competitive intelligence content from an array of internal and external sources.  That’s why Northern Light SinglePoint, a knowledge management solution optimized for market and competitive intelligence, is built on powerful content management and search functionality, enhanced by AI-driven machine learning, that enables integrated search from all sources indexed in the system.

BCG’s study lists “digital tools to identify potential areas of automation and focus” as one of the top nine emphases for future digitization efforts at IT services companies.  That sounds to us like an initiative for which SinglePoint is tailor made.

The expanding focus among “win zone” IT services organizations on digitizing support functions within the enterprise suggests other companies in the sector will follow suit once they have addressed their customer-facing functions.  Northern Light SinglePoint will be there to help them realize their vision.

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* BCG is one of dozens of authoritative sources contained in Northern Light’s Thought Leaders Content Collection, available to SinglePoint subscribers directly from Northern Light, and to individuals and companies through Amazon’s AWS Marketplace and the Amazon Data Exchange.