Think like a start-up. Be nimble. Fail fast. We hear aspirational instructions like these virtually every day, and they’re usually directed at enterprise organizations with global infrastructure, thousands of employees and complex legacy systems. As our physical and digital worlds collide, and more consumers make the shift to becoming tech natives, the ability to pivot, flex and react quickly becomes vital to success.
In theory and on a small scale, those kinds of aspirational bon mots can work, even at the enterprise level. Certainly there are pockets within large organizations that act more like fintech firms – the innovation labs, perhaps, or maybe the digital and mobile teams.
But the million-dollar question remains: how can companies scale that approach? How can they trickle it down into every layer of the organization?
It requires a shift in priorities, underpinned and enabled by a strategic managed services partnership. In a series of posts, I’ll address three questions I often hear from our clients:
1.Why should I consider managed services?
2. How can I ensure a successful managed services implementation?
3. What benefits can I expect?
Today, I’m going to answer the first and most common question I get asked:
Why should my organization consider managed services? The answer is simple. When you enter a managed services agreement, you’re buying results.
Let me explain.
The challenge of a non-managed relationship is typically the staff, the full-time-equivalent (FTE) individuals. With a staff augmentation model, you’re really just paying for manpower. Often, there’s not a clean line of delineation between responsibilities. On the other hand, if you go with a managed services model, in which you actually have a defined scope of work (SOW) that an outsourcer or partner is providing for you, then you’re not buying a number of FTE or person hours; you’re buying some sort of result.
Think about that: you’re buying results – results your teams may have originally been goaled on in-house. Once those results are outsourced, are there more strategic or ambitious initiatives those employees can focus on? Organizations no longer need to focus on “how” services are delivered, but rather “what” services they need to deliver; the “how” is a technical question that they no longer need to worry about.
And when more workstreams in your organization are able to focus less on technical, day-in day-out deliverables, and more on the “what,” they can begin to migrate toward a leaner, more aggressive model that favors those key fintech attributes: flexibility, speed and innovation.
In the next post, I’ll talk about how you can ensure success when your organization moves to a managed services model. Have questions?
Let’s start a conversation today.
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