Welcome to the age of the customer!

To quickly recap: this is the age where digitally empowered customers are driving firms to become customer-obsessed, digital businesses that apply customer-led, insights-driven, fast, and connected technology. You may be asking “What does this have to do with me and my responsibility in Infrastructure and Operations?” To answer in brief, your CIO and technology management organization play central roles in making your firm customer obsessed because:

  • Technology enables dramatic business transformation.Customer-obsessed digital businesses exploit digital technologies to create new customer value and increase operational agility in service of customers. Companies that understand how to master these challenges are driving digital transformation to become digital predators. Forrester predicts that by 2020, every business will be either a digital predator or digital prey.
  • Customerled business value drives technology investments. Tech management organizations must understand, manage, and communicate technology’s role in delivering customer-obsessed outcomes like digital customer experience. Technology executives responsible for service design and delivery must minimize the cost of MOOSE (spending to maintain and operate the tech organization, systems, and equipment) for ongoing operations, deliver the agreed quality of service, and shift investments to customer-obsessed innovation. Only 14% of budgets for new IT initiatives and projects support sell-side business operations.
  • Tech organizations must manage the customerobsessed digital transformation. To transform to a customer-obsessed business, the CIO needs a road map for focusing technology investments on the four customer-obsessed operating model principles. To help organizations in this transformation, the CIO and other C-level executives must intentionally apply these principles to technology investments, creating better customer outcomes and profitable growth.

Are you and your team able to analyze, optimize, and plan technology costs? Can you do this around your data center, cloud resources, application resources, maintenance, and outsourcers? Do you have the right data? Can you share your knowledge of the costs with others? Can you discuss shifts in spend and plan for end-of-life for assets? Is it easy to produce a Bill of IT? If you answered “no” to any of these questions, see my latest research around the vendors who are able to automate many of these tasks and, most importantly, can help your tech management group optimize technology resources against strategic value.

This report explains technology business management (TBM), the benefits, and 11 vendor solutions that support it.