Tag: IT innovation

“Innovation is critical to the future well-being of society and to driving economic growth.”

                                                    – The World Economic Forum, 

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, several organizations were reluctant to consider digital innovation as a cornerstone of their business strategy. A sea of overnight changes forced them to try and implement a digital-first strategy, without even knowing how they can effectively choose and adopt digital tools. Data shows that 94% of executives are unhappy with their firms’ innovation performance, despite spending heavily on incubators, accelerators, and internal venture capital. These businesses are unable to create any impact because their efforts are stifled by some of the biggest barriers to innovation, such as lack of organizational support, inability to foresee the long-term rewards offered by customized solutions, and poor process and data management, among others.

In this post, we’ll briefly examine five major innovation hurdles faced by business leaders today and how these challenges can be busted.

Read more: Top 5 Organizational Imperatives for Business Leaders to Become Winners in the New Normal

1. Organizational Resistance

True digital innovation embraces an organization’s leadership, work culture, technology, and business practices. Many business leaders struggle with digital innovation because it appears to oppose their established ways of working, which they have been practicing for decades. It’s hard to get innovation right within a rigid organizational structure where mistakes cannot be tolerated. At the same time, every organization cannot afford to engage in costly and time-consuming experiments that will intervene their daily show.

Overcome Resistance Through Outsourcing

By strategically outsourcing innovation, business leaders can reduce the experimental cycle times and lower the associated risks and costs. Consider the insurance law industry that processes massive amounts of legal documents and insurance data on a daily basis. A typical employee compensation claim would take nearly three years for final settlement, after all the paper sifting, consulting, probing, and finalization. The average case settlement time costs a carrier close to $85k. Sapra & Navarra, a leading Californian attorney wanted to put an end to this enigma. They outsourced their technology requirements and developed an AI and Machine Learning program that enhanced and accelerated the activities involved in processing workers’ compensation claims.

The result: 50% decrease in average total claim costs, claim cycle time, and associated personnel costs.

Outsourcing your digital innovation project gives you access to top-rated specialists in various technologies such as AR, VR, IoT, automation, blockchain, mobility, enterprise content management, data analytics, and business intelligence. Outsourcing saves your cost and time and makes your business scalable for future needs.

2. Disorganized Innovation Process

Several organizations fail to formulate a process to guide sustainable innovation. Companies rely on serendipity instead of formally analyzing their strengths and weaknesses around innovation, thereby failing to understand and define their expectations. This prevents business leaders from broaching innovation as an enterprise-wide responsibility. Innovation thrives in an open and supportive environment where employees are assured of recognition and professional growth.

Ways To Adopt A Systematic Innovation Process

Business leaders and managers can assist with the process of innovation by:

• Understanding the operational details of innovation projects and keeping a close eye on the project performance.
• Establishing a learning-focused environment that encourages employees to speak up and try new ideas.
• Ensuring the selected ideas are well-evaluated and are based on their organization’s protocols.
• Responding to opinions and queries and motivating employees to ask the right questions.
• Paying rapt attention to customers’ needs and specifications and utilizing technology creatively to lessen their woes.

To put it simply, a systematic innovation process should have three components: a worthy problem to solve, a technology that helps develop the solution, and a business model that generates ROI from it.

Read more: Prepare For The Future of Digital Innovation with Fingent

3. The Rift Between B2B And B2C Tech

Just like how B2C customers rely on Amazon to buy their household essentials, B2B customers are also switching to digital tools for researching and buying products. Several factors, such as decision-makers, influencers, higher price points, competing sales channels, and a growing range of product lines and specifications come in the way of B2B purchasing decisions. This has caught B2B sellers in a maze of innovation challenges. More than anything else, B2B companies need to become more customer-centric to stay ahead of the competition.

How B2B Companies Can Apply Innovation

• Have a solid omnichannel strategy, with a specific focus on improving mobility. This will put better tools in the hands of B2B sales teams.
• Evolve from legacy organizational structures. The leadership should bring more clarity to digital roles and define the ownership of digital initiatives.
• Outsource digital capability building requirements to a trusted offshore software vendor. Migrate to the latest technologies like the cloud and update your legacy enterprise software to drive your innovation efforts.

Read more: Cloud Migration – Essentials to Know Before Jumping the Bandwagon

4. Too Much Focus On Short Term Gains

Building the gap between digital innovation leaders and laggards is a time-consuming endeavor, which can pay off in the long term when done rightly. Several enterprises go for ready-made, canned technology solutions in a race to become digital. Such businesses tend to lose out big as they fail to prioritize the long-term gains such as scalability and adaptability that are more crucial in their growth journey. Custom software, that is purpose-built for your business, is the best digital innovation solution that can stabilize and scale your business growth.

Reaping Long Term Rewards With Custom Software 

With a solution tailored to your industry’s requirements, it becomes easy to integrate software into your organization’s daily routine. Off-the-shelf software meets only 60% of your operational business needs.

Our customers reveal the long-term benefits of adopting custom software:

• 93% of our clients saw a decline in inefficient tasks after implementing custom software
• 91% agree that tailored software solutions have increased their productivity
• 77% could reduce manual data entry errors after replacing their off-the-shelf software with custom applications
• 76% of our clients reported increased ROI

Read more: Ensuring small business success with custom software

5. Innovation Has To Be Managed Only By C-Level Execs

More than technology, the success of the digital transformation is determined by the attitude of people across the organization. According to Harvard Business Review, “when leaders think about investing in technology, they should first think about investing in the people who can make that technology useful.” This is where the main implication lies. Digital innovation success depends on your ability to adapt to the changes rather than the technology itself.

Driving Innovation Forward

In these times of change, it’s important to count diverse perspectives, talents, thoughts, and ideas to drive innovation forward. Business leaders should invest in raising new skills, think cloud and mobile-first, build personalized experiences using data, and tie all the digital channels to offer customers a unified experience.

Read more: Future-proof your business with 5G, Edge Computing, and Cloud

Start Your Digital Innovation Journey With Fingent!

Have you started your digital transformation journey yet? If not, there’s no better time than now. We’re helping businesses build robust custom solutions that can sustain their innovation model and boost their customer experience even in the wake of a black swan event. The way each business looks at innovation could be different, but what ultimately matters is how your innovation model integrates with your business strategy, long-term growth plans, team culture, ROI, budgeting, market value, and above all the impact on your customer. Are you ready to take a free assessment?

Drop us a line and our sales team will contact you shortly. 

All That You Need to Know about Managed Services for IT!

IT requirements evolve continually as the technology undergoes rapid changes. This has led to increased security threats to data and downtimes which can disarm any business. Before you panic however, let’s begin by saying that many companies have been able to successfully handle these challenges. The solution – a good partnership with the right managed IT services provider.

Managed services for IT play an integral role in the modern business field as it is nearly impossible to venture into contemporary services without some form of IT support. Managed IT services can help you smoothen different processes on the cloud while managing security and finance challenges efficiently in a continuous manner. That isn’t all. This article will help you see why managed services for IT is important and how you can implement it to improve your business operations. 

Read more: What Is IT Consulting? How Can It Revitalize Your Business? 

What do you mean by Managed Services for IT?

Managed services for IT are services that are outsourced to an external IT service provider. That service provider is completely responsible for the day-to-day operations of your specialized applications and business equipment. This allows your in-house IT team to focus on more strategic IT programs and frees up your team to focus on your business’s core competencies. 

What is the importance of Managed Services for IT?

Traditionally, IT-related maintenance was done only through the “break-fix” methodology. This meant that a business would call a maintenance expert only when something broke down. This would completely halt all business operations until the problem is fixed. The more your system stays down, the more will be your organization’s money drain. Unresolved IT issues such as security breaches that compromise your data could prove to be costlier than you think. Such data security breaches are devastating for your business. 

Thankfully, as the name suggests, Managed services for IT allows smooth management of a business without disrupting the flow of business operations. On your behalf, your IT service provider will manage, monitor, and resolve the problems of your IT systems and functions. Such a partnership allows you to focus on your core business process without any hindrance caused by IT issues. 

Read more: Software Development Outsourcing –  Why software development outsourcing is a smart move now?

The most important advantages of Managed IT Services

1. Get the expertise you need

New technology might bring in new problems that your IT team may not have the knowledge or experience to solve. Then there is the issue of management. Fortunately, both these problems can be resolved by your managed service provider. A key advantage of the managed service model is that it allows you to either hire an entire team of IT professionals or choose specialists depending on the demands of each project. 

2. Cost-effective

Managed services for IT lowers labor costs. Also, it can completely eliminate the cost of hiring and training new IT staff. The best upside is that you won’t ever have to worry about unexpected service costs. This means your organization can now shift from a capital expense model to an operating expense model. 

3. Scale your system as needed

Your technology decides whether you need to scale up or down. Managed IT service providers can respond to such changes in real-time.

4. Downtime reduction and recovery

Managed services for IT provide backup solutions to protect critical information. In the event of a disaster, they can also provide avenues for service continuations. For smaller businesses, this can be a lifesaver. 

How can you leverage Managed IT Services to improve your business? 

Leveraging managed services for IT cannot be done in a one-size-fits-all way because most companies use different options to meet their overall goal. Though the services offered by each provider may vary, they can still be useful when handled properly. There are businesses that use three or more types of IT functions. If yours is one of those businesses these tips below will help you take the most advantage of managed services. 

1. Choose your provider wisely

Each business has its own specific requirements. Identifying that requirement will make it easier to choose the right managed services provider. Often, most businesses need a minimum of three IT services (eg: cloud, IT consulting, and data and network security). But you will need to assess your business needs and come to the exact number. Once you have your requirements down, you can go about researching the credentials of the IT partner. Previous clients and case studies is the best place to start. The best way to find a capable managed service provider is through referrals, work colleagues, and reviews on online platforms.

2. Develop a business relationship

The best collaboration is when your managed IT services provider partners with your existing IT team in a seamless way. With that in mind, it is important to build a good working relationship with your provider. This will ensure that your skills complement each other, and resources are effectively used leading to better business outcomes. It will also give your team the opportunity to learn as much as possible from them.

3. Device a reliable data backup and recovery strategy

The most important objective of hiring managed services for IT is to protect data. Your data is under tremendous risk during a virus attack, machine error, unexpected hacking, or improper handling. During such instances, it is critical to have a good back-up strategy. Such a strategy will ensure that your business does not grind to a halt due to lost data. Fortunately, hiring good managed services for IT makes it easier for your company to develop a strategy that can protect existing data and retrieve lost data. 

Read more: Digital Innovation – 10 Services Offered by Fingent to Prepare Your Business for the Future of Digital Innovation

What does the future hold for Managed IT Services?

According to Gartner, 56% of business leaders engage with service providers for long-term development and maintenance. This will result in 63% of global managed service providers gaining their revenue through digital business infrastructure operations by 2023. Managed services for IT have kept the business world running and will continue to do so in the future. Are you keeping pace with it?

Survive and thrive 

In our current state of extraordinary upheaval brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, managed services for IT may be your company’s greatest hope for surviving and thriving during and after these unprecedented times. Partner with us and see for yourself! First though, take a look at our case studies and feel free to check our credentials. We want you to be sure we are the right fit for you. 

Up until recent times, small businesses had often struggled to grow and scale their operations. This was mainly because it involved heavy investments in IT, and small businesses couldn’t really afford it.
Large businesses always used IT to their advantage – to run as well as maintain day-to-day business operations.
Hence, there has always been a huge difference in the way IT is used for growth and daily operations by small and large businesses.

Thanks to new innovations in IT, this huge gap is now much smaller. Small businesses now have better opportunities to improve and scale more effectively, without being tied down by the past constraints.

Here are some ways in which IT innovations are changing the game for businesses these days:

• Faster revenue generation – Business enterprises can generate more revenue and grow in a number of ways. They could consider introducing new products and earning new opportunities or they could use their already existing client base to tap new clients. Both of these methods call for an effective and timely socialization or onboarding process for their new clients and partners. Inefficient onboarding processes are often one of the main reasons that keep small businesses from scaling effectively.
  With new IT innovations like cloud computing, onboarding processes are no longer the burden of IT. As a matter of fact, an organization’s IT team can enable their business managers to set up their own secure connections easily. Such fast and easy data connections can literally shorten the duration of onboarding processes to a matter of a few days. This in turn, leads to shorter time for conversion of a new client into solid revenue. Thus, it facilitates faster growth of the business as well.
• Easier advertising – Traditional ways of advertising often involved the television, newspapers, the radio and even magazines. These demanded pretty large sums of money, not to mention the hours spent in brainstorming ideas as well. All of these had their own limitations in reach too. Now with the latest social media outlets, businesses can get their sales in front of potential customers, in a matter of minutes, that too without burning a hole in their wallets. Social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest can really help businesses in establishing their names out there effectively without having to rely on bulky advertisements. Businesses can even have mobile applications to get their products in the hands of their possible customers directly. Put together with interactive promotional offers and contests, they can have their sales shooting up in no time.
• Better business networks – Large businesses used to have their networks built around other large businesses as well as a number of established vendors and suppliers so as to make their products available to a large mass. However, small businesses often had their networks limited to other small businesses alone.
  Such limited networks hinder an organization’s ability to scale effectively. Thanks to the latest technology innovations, this is not the case anymore. With the right software solutions, any business entrepreneur can collaborate with any supplier – big or small, and integrate them into the supply chain, even if the suppliers do not have the necessary technology for it. Finding and building connections can be entirely automated these days, making the business networks much wider.
• Increased ROI – Growth for small business always meant heavy investments in IT. In order to keep up with their competing big players, they simply had to make IT investment a priority. But they could never afford it.
  With cloud-based technologies these days, this problem is solved to a great extent. Small businesses can now have access to advanced IT capabilities without making any huge investments in IT infrastructure or hiring an entire IT department. Scaling with the help of cloud technologies can also eliminate the costs involved in maintenance and hardware, while allowing them to sustain their improvements, without getting broke. This helps them bring up their ROI and grow effectively too.

Growth is no more a pain point for small businesses. IT has literally changed the game for them and has almost leveled their playground with large businesses, equipping them with a number of opportunities and tools to compete and win.

In what other ways do you think IT is changing the game for small businesses? Share with us in the comments below.