Deep Integration Drives Business Outcomes

How Deep Integration in Strategy Drives Business Success

By Tara McGeehan, President of CGI UK and Australia

Today, in light of the global pandemic, many are looking for innovative ways to perfect their digital strategy; but what does the perfect strategy look like? In my mind, an effective digital strategy is designed to prioritise your customer and employees needs from end-to-end, seamlessly and with no disruption.

Implementing a smooth digital journey as described can be a daunting task, and it isn’t easy to know where to begin, but with the right team and a carefully curated system, you can create a bespoke strategy fit for your needs and wants. Your team should be persistent and driven, and by utilising strong, durable partnerships, it will also be able to weather any future storms. In my experience, I’ve seen that the best-positioned companies have existing, scalable IT partnerships in place that act as a competitive differentiator in the digital world. They use managed services to focus on outcomes to link cost and quality, enable agility, simplify ecosystems, and leverage technology for quick returns.

Digital resilience in the post-pandemic world

Throughout the pandemic, we have witnessed companies that did not have robust and resilient IT supply chains unable to respond to their customers and employees rapidly evolving digital needs, leading to lost market share, among other impacts.

From a consumer’s perspective, the pandemic also highlighted the importance of choosing a provider with a ‘best-shore’ approach to ensure continuity in a seamless and resilient manner despite possible shutdowns.

Bearing this in mind, we at CGI developed a global delivery model dedicated to supporting our partners’ evolving business interests. It is designed to respect data sovereignty and residency requirement and provides the services and scale that allow businesses to increase or decrease the capability to match demand. This allows our clients to increase or decrease the capability to match consumer demand and pivot depending on the current business environment.

The greatest benefit of a deeply integrated partner is that a team of experts is dedicated entirely to supporting your company’s stability and growth goals – regardless of how often this might pivot during the process.

Why the partnership approach?

While early generations of outsourcing focused on improving efficiencies and lowering costs, executives are now looking for a trusted and capable managed services partner that can also drive forward their digital strategy and enable greater business agility.

However, despite a clear need for outsourced solutions and expertise, as clients adjust to a post-pandemic world, they’re procuring more services from fewer providers. According to an Everest Group survey, 30% of companies are consolidating their service provider portfolios in 2021, up 19% from last year. This means outsourcing partners must now play a critical role across their clients’ business modelling, strategic planning, and execution.

As we see it, complexity and diversity will continue to increase, and companies need partners to help them simplify. Industry leaders seek managed services partners that can help them connect their front and back-end systems and processes and roll out new innovative products and services to achieve outcomes quickly across all customer and employee touchpoints.

What does a successful partnership look like? 

From my experience, a successful partnership is built upon; open communication, accessibility – this includes frequent and supportive engagements from both parties, flexibility, mutual benefits and measurable results.

Ultimately, for the partnership approach to succeed, it must go beyond cost and quality goals to build greater agility, elasticity, security, and resilience in organisations.

When all of these are met, partnerships provide long-term value, and they continue to pivot and innovate even in a crisis.

Meeting future needs

Insights from our 2021 Voice of Our Clients programme point to a continuing demand to outsource in the coming years.

We believe the continuing demand for outsourcing will be high as long as managed services meet the key criteria required for business outcomes:

• Alignment between business and IT strategy and priorities
• A systemic approach to managing IT supply chains in line with business value chains
• Partners disciplined in operational excellence, cost management, regulatory and security compliance, and adept at bridging mission-critical systems with modern technology drivers, such as cloud, machine learning, automation and other emerging technologies.

Ultimately a successful partnership is exactly that, a partnership. It’s a collaboration seeking to drive harmony and support, working to enhance your operations and support the varying need of your employees. Selecting the right partner should help build your IT supply chain in a way that enables your company’s business priorities while optimising operations and meeting customer and employee expectations.