Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Old "Voice of Customer" Model is Dead, Tech Provider Success in 2021 Will be Determined by CIO's Relationship with Customers' C-team
By Van Richardson,CIO,
iManage
2020 has been the year where IT
departments have shone bright, enabling their enterprises to switch almost
overnight to a remote and dispersed work environment. With many of the
challenges due to the pandemic still persisting in its aftermath in 2021, IT
leaders will find that their roles will also become externally facing. In
addition to their primary audience, i.e., the enterprises employees, they will
need to actively engage with customers.
Against this backdrop, I believe
the following three trends will emerge in 2021:
- Beyond agile. Flexibility and speed
of delivery are key, but tech provider CIOs will need to have more
involvement with customer CIOs or C-team to ensure buy-in and partnering
to maintain CIO perception of value, and ongoing support. The customer CIO
needs to see the value of the product and the product CIO can provide
insight into what's happening, and the value being delivered. Expect
success in 2021 to increasingly be judged not just on the product doing
what it says it will do, but on the relationships between the CIOs and
other leaders.
- The old VOC model is
dead.
The old "voice of the customer" model? It's dead. Those quarterly meetings
where the vendor meets with the customer to run through a PPT presentation
aren't going to cut it anymore. Instead, the conversation needs to be flipped
to the value that was brought - and this value should not be presented at
a quarterly board review: it should be a shared value that organisations
will be able to say "Yes, we did these things together."
- Tech explosion. As the phenomenon of
increased remote working has taken hold during the COVID-19 pandemic, the
number of new tools, software, and capabilities has skyrocketed to meet
the demand of users. People working from home might see an application or
tool that their spouse or college-aged child is using and think to
themselves: "I could definitely use that for my own day to day work." IT
teams will need to strike a careful balance of looking at ways for team
members to be more efficient via tools that may not be available within
the traditional corporate environment while still maintaining a level of
appropriate enterprise security.
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About
the Author
Van Richardson is Chief
Information Officer for iManage globally, leading IT teams across multiple
disciplines and geographies. With expertise including infrastructure
management, enterprise applications, and cloud technologies, Van focuses on
providing IT value to the business by forging key relationships with
stakeholders through-out the organisation.