Accelerate digital transformation with professional services

Digital transformation is the process of implementing technology changes to facilitate a desired future state. Done well, it enables organizations to achieve new outcomes to support business initiatives, increase efficiency, and better serve customers. But done poorly, it can disrupt operations, create inefficiencies, and drive away customers and employees.

According to a global study, digital transformation has been the leading priority for IT initiatives since 2020. This is not surprising when you consider the business-altering impacts brought on by COVID-19. According to a McKinsey report, the pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital technologies by years as businesses quickly adapted to changed circumstances.

COVID-19 aside, digital transformation remains a critical initiative to meet a variety of business needs. It can involve new cloud adoptions and migrations, new workload placements, enhanced network connectivity, updated disaster recovery (DR) strategies, expanded hybrid IT landscapes, and updated security and compliance initiatives. Yet, large-scale IT changes are complex, risk-laden, and exponentially more challenging than in the past because of the breadth and complexity of available technologies. The broad range of IT options also makes it unfeasible for IT teams to be experts in everything.

Effectively planning and executing a successful transformation requires not only strong technical expertise in new platforms, but also project management, change management, cybersecurity maturity, and user training. Before the transformation begins, an organization must conduct an in-depth discovery process to understand the current state, solution requirements, technical interdependencies, and challenges posed by its legacy infrastructure. Without the right skill set and experience to conduct discovery, plan, and then execute the transformation, an organization can introduce unnecessary risk to an already complicated process.

Achieving this high level of expertise and knowledge requires ongoing, hands-on experience. However, internal teams have rarely performed similar transformations and have not had the learning opportunities those experiences provide. This lack of experience makes internal teams more susceptible to gaps, errors, and the resulting risks and business disruptions that may occur as they work through a transformation.

Professional services can bridge the gap

Gathering the skill sets and deep-seated expertise to perform a digital transformation is difficult and expensive to achieve internally. IT leaders understand this, as 89% increasingly lean on advisors to guide them through new technologies, processes, and methodologies. A third-party professional services organization can help organizations navigate and successfully complete their digital transformations faster and with less disruption..

Leverage expertise

Professional services organizations offer access to IT professionals with expert-level certifications, training, and experience across multiple IT disciplines. Professional services teams also conduct hundreds, or even thousands, of transformations across many businesses and industries each year. By aligning experienced experts with specific transformation needs, professional services organizations can deliver the precise skill set and expertise to achieve the desired outcomes.

While professional services may carry a premium cost relative to internal labor, the cost of hiring and retaining an IT team with deep and diverse expertise is expensive to achieve internally, especially if that experience is not needed long term.

Define success

A professional services engagement lets organizations add specialized resources as needed throughout the project. This is more than adding additional people to a project; it means purposefully mapping proficiencies with specific needs to deliver results and accelerate change. Most importantly, an engagement that can be defined within a statement of work outlines clear success criteria so all parties can agree on a “definition of done.”

Reduce risk

Over years of conducting various transformations, professional services teams have developed the needed experience, methodologies, tools and change processes to mitigate transformation risks and ensure a project’s success. These capabilities are especially critical for large, sweeping change with multiple variables and interdependencies that require a well-defined strategy and a network of change plans. Reducing risk and “getting it right the first time” also offers cost and efficiency benefits by avoiding unplanned disruptions and expensive downtime. 

Improve confidence

Independent third parties add the benefit of fresh, experienced eyes to help validate assumptions, envision future-state, build plans, and determine IT strategy. This can strengthen an organization’s confidence in both the approach and the resulting solution, minimizing indecisiveness and delays, while ensuring the intended outcomes.

Build a roadmap

Staying ahead of the IT curve is critical for continually expanding organizational capabilities and building competitive advantage. Professional services can provide a strategic and visionary mindset with expertise in cutting-edge solutions that an internal team may not possess.

Professional services with a consultative approach

Finding the right partner for your digital transformation is key. Flexential is a highly certified and experienced Professional Services organization that has provided expertise in IT architecture and strategy, cloud migrations and optimization, DevOps, cybersecurity, and compliance and IT resiliency since 2001. Flexential Professional Services helps organizations plan and implement their digital transformations. We understand that digital transformation is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. That is why we partner with customers, acting as an extension of their internal IT teams, to offer a broad portfolio of IT consulting services. Our consultative approach gets to the heart of an organization’s transformational needs and allows us to create strategic roadmaps that address customer challenges and facilitate success.

As business landscapes and needs continue to evolve, digital transformation will remain a driving force in helping organizations move forward and adapt how they manage and modernize their technology. Flexential provides the breadth and depth of expertise that supports organizations to take the necessary next steps in their digital evolutions to accelerate transformation success, reduce risks, and improve their transformation outcomes.

Learn more, or contact us today to see how we can help elevate your hybrid IT infrastructure.