The COVID-19 outbreak will transform the world and shake every industry, including IT and business services. While many providers operate on multi-year contracts and can be confident of some continuing revenue, this commitment will likely leave many enterprises reluctant to sign new agreements. Service providers must ensure they have a deep understanding of their market, and they must adapt if they hope to survive. Accenture posts its results early, and because of its impressive size and status in the market, its results are often a good indicator state of the market, which means its recently announced Q2 2020 earnings could help its peers understand the market after the initial shock of COVID-19.

Accenture reported $10,991.3 million revenue in Q2 2020 —its first decline (albeit a small one!) since Q2 2012

In recent years, Accenture’s growth has been 5% to 10% YoY, as Exhibit 1 shows. This is impressive because it consistently posts revenues exceeding $1 billion per quarter. However, in Q2 2020, the firm posted a -1.0% YoY decline. While management advises earnings were affected by a foreign exchange headwind, COVID-19 has significantly impacted Accenture’s revenue. However, one positive is the firm’s operating margin, which rose to 15.6% in the quarter thanks to an operating income of $1,712.7 million.

Exhibit 1: Accenture’s YoY revenue growth and operating margin, and the decline in Q2 2020 is clear to see.

 Source: HFS Research, 2020

It’s worth noting that Accenture’s project-based services business was hit worse than its managed services business in the short-term; consulting revenue dropped -3.8% YoY, and outsourcing grew 2.7% YoY. This is unsurprising given the long-term nature of outsourcing contracts, but because Accenture is split approximately 60:40 between consulting and outsourcing, the firm is particularly vulnerable to any fluctuations in consulting spending. We expect professional services to take the biggest hit in 2020, with any impact on outsourcing caused by a slowing of contract signings showing more clearly toward the end of 2020 and in 2021. Also notable is that while most public companies mirror the calendar quarters, Accenture reports March–May, meaning revenue will be less affected by COVID-19 than its competitors. For many enterprises, the crisis phase was in March, and they had yet to address their IT spending.

Accenture’s health and public services group was the only industry group to post YoY growth in the quarter, although sequentially, there was growth elsewhere

Exhibit 2 shows the YoY growth of Accenture’s five industry groups, and a glance at the broad drop in Q2 2020 confirms that COVID-19 impacted every industry, although health and public services continued to post double-digit growth. Interestingly, if you look at sequential growth, while the rest posted a decline, health and public services and financial services both posted growth of 3.5% QoQ and 2.5% QoQ, respectively, indicating a relatively smaller impact of COVID-19. There are countless possible explanations for this. For example, health and public services clients are arming themselves with the latest technology to help them in the battle against COVID-19, while financial services clients are turning to their service providers for support to deliver the latest stimulus packages while preparing them for the economic downturn.

Exhibit 2: Accenture’s YoY growth by industry group.

Source: HFS Research, 2020

For the service providers digging into the industry and looking for pockets of growth, this data proves that while the inevitable drop in revenues did occur, some industries were hit harder than others, and there are some industries where providers should double-down on their investment if they hope to thrive throughout this pandemic. However, they must not neglect lagging industries.

All geographies felt COVID-19’s impact, particularly Europe, which reported a -5.1% YoY decline

We all know that COVID-19 has spanned the globe, and responses varied by. For example, while New Zealand introduced lockdown early and is now returning to normality, countries such as the UK continue to battle the virus and are still enforcing lockdowns. The worldwide differences result in different levels of business continuity, and they impact service providers’ revenue regionally. Exhibit 3 outlines Accenture’s YoY revenue growth by geography, and the broad drop in Q2 2020 is clear.

Exhibit 3: Accenture’s YoY revenue growth by region

Source: HFS Research, 2020

However, while revenue growth from Europe was already low, in this quarter it dipped to a  -5.2% YoY decline. The existing struggle in Europe could be attributed to the uncertainty surrounding Brexit, but COVID-19 has added to the troubles. The difference in Accenture’s reporting quarters could be a significant factor here, as Spain and Italy were two of the earliest countries to suffer from the pandemic, and they were forced into strict lockdowns in March, which ground business to a halt. While every other provider will have reported the impact of March in their Q1 2020 earnings, Accenture reported it in Q2 2020, which means in the months to follow, we could see a sharper decline for the firm in North America. For Accenture’s peers, however, this proves that while there is an overall trend of decline, there are still opportunities if they target regions that remain relatively free of the coronavirus.

The Bottom Line: Service providers must constantly monitor the market and identify growth areas to focus their investments, and the market can use Accenture’s earnings as a roadmap.

As we’re teetering on the edge of the worst recession of our lifetime, every provider will be impacted significantly, and Accenture’s Q2 2020 earnings prove it. However, while the results show plenty of negatives, there were glimmers of hope as industries such as healthcare and financial services continue to provide pockets of growth, while regional opportunities emerge as countries battle the coronavirus in their own way. It’s crucial to their survival that service providers examine these results, their own, and their peers’ to identify investment targets which will help them survive these uncertain times.

Cardinal Health shows how finance is becoming more customer-focused, predictive, and strategic

HFS analysts recently conducted a webinar with senior executives from Genpact and Cardinal Health to explore how finance organizations are reinventing their functions. As leadership teams expect finance to drive transformation across the wider business, CFOs must rethink the talent, skillsets, partnerships, culture, methodologies, and technologies at play.

CX and analytics are top among finance’s new priorities

With advances in technology and changing competitive environments, many businesses have new, higher expectations from their finance functions. Chief among them is the need to enhance the user and customer experience and generate actionable insight.

Becoming a strategic partner means CFOs must enable their teams with data-driven approaches that deliver more accurate, predictive insight and support enterprise-wide decision making. The finance function also needs to make better connections across the organization, including supply chain and customer operations, and externally across the larger ecosystem of partners.

At HFS, we refer to these capabilities as the critical success factors that will get us to the promised land of “invisible finance,” where accounting transactions run like water and finance professionals focus on driving strategic objectives. Invisible finance will deliver continuous accounting, effortless payables and receivables with near-zero cycle time, and real-time analytics that enable predictive decisions.

Exhibit 1: HFS webinar poll shows business leaders expect finance to drive wide transformation

Q: What is the key expectation for finance from your business leaders in the coming two years? [Pick 1)

Source: HFS Research, 2020, n= Participating executives in the HFS webinar

To get to invisible finance, CFOs will require tremendous coordination across the organization and will need to build a wide-ranging set of new capabilities and methodologies. Our poll uncovered the biggest expectations for finance among attendees in the next two years. The results echoed our observations: enterprises expect finance to drive transformation across the wider business (see Exhibit 1).

Exhibit 2: Four emerging roles for finance

Source: Genpact, 2020

Amaresh Tripathy, Analytics Business Leader at Genpact, concurred with the poll finding, stating, “We see four themes coming out of our discussions with finance leaders, and F&A leading the digital transformation agenda is a big theme.” He also outlined the role of finance as a connector, insight generator, digital transformation leader, and new talent nurturer (see Exhibit 2).

With the help of Genpact, Cardinal Health is focusing on finance’s role as an insight generator

Eric Johnson, VP Channel Finance at Cardinal Health, shared his organization’s journey to evolve the role of finance. Cardinal Health’s analysis identified that it had an unsustainable cost structure due to complexities in its processes and systems. It had also not fully integrated many of its acquisitions into Cardinal Health’s financial processes or invested substantially in tools and capabilities within the finance function.

The healthcare market was changing quickly, and the business had increasing demands for new insights from the finance team. But the percentage of manual rework and data manipulation Cardinal Health’s finance organization had to perform impacted its ability to deliver. Eric’s group wanted to free up the team’s time to perform more forward-looking analytics, but they were overburdened by complex nonstandard processes and didn’t have the tools to execute this effectively.

As Eric said, “We identified our guidelines as transform, optimize, and innovate, allowing us to leapfrog from our current state. This put an emphasis on speed, end-to-end ownership, and a partnership that we believed would keep us on the cutting edge of capabilities now and into the future.” It was critical that Cardinal Health created a forum for senior finance leadership to stay fully engaged. The company used Genpact and other outside experts to help drive this alignment, focusing on change management and honest communication.

Cardinal Health’s day-one focus was on removing internal complexities by taking a fresh view of its operations and how partnerships could challenge its thinking and provide digital capabilities. Commenting on new approaches to talent, Eric said, “One of the more complex situations we had is ‘co-mingled’ finance roles. This would include finance employees that are executing financial planning and analysis, order-to-cash, and record-to-report activities. By standardizing these core processes across the segments and businesses, we could centralize and then automate this activity while freeing up our employees’ time for more business partnering.”

Following these priorities, Cardinal Health has established an automation, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AAA) hub in Columbus, Ohio, for its FPA work and certain analytics capabilities. By transferring many of its FP&A employees to Genpact, Cardinal Health’s former employees were partnered with data scientists and analytic experts to better utilize AAA capabilities and drive process improvements.

This partnership creates a powerful, mutually beneficial finance and analytics center while minimizing business disruption. As Eric said, “We are early in the journey, but we are very pleased with the initial results… our former employees have embraced the vision and their new employer. They are also energized by the ‘art of the possible’ and the commitment from both companies to our future success.”

The Bottom Line: Finance has a larger role to play with digital transformation.

One of the key takeaways was that finance needs to take a leadership role in the organization for certain transformation efforts, such as becoming the custodian of data. Amaresh pointed out the gap between business and IT today: “I see large data programs becoming tech-led efforts in many organizations, and they don’t always end well. It is finance’s responsibility to become the enterprise’s data custodians.

“The reason why this is not happening as fast as it should is because of the talent gap. I recently saw a large industrial conglomerate client, where the CDO [Chief Data Officer] actually became its new FP&A lead. This is a sign of the times to come.”

As expectations change for what the finance organization must deliver to its business partners, so must the talent, skillsets, and culture around co-owning technology programs with IT to drive success.

At a time when enterprise investment plans have come screeching to a halt, the appetite for cloud services has - in contrast - increased significantly. The growth, primarily fuelled by a desperate need to pivot enterprise infrastructure to enable remote and decentralized working, has put an already strained talent market under even more pressure.

It's no surprise then to see one of the most acquisitive IT firms on the planet loosen the purse strings again to bolster its cloud services practice. With Gekko, which Accenture has just finalized acquiring, clients can look forward to the addition of another 100 AWS certified delivery professionals to help them meet their strategic ambitions—supplementing Accenture's sizeable pool of more than 8000 AWS trained professionals, who hold over 5,500 AWS certifications globally. Gekko, based in France, has a strong track record of delivering services to French businesses, boasts clients including BNP Paribas, Spie, and Invoxis.

Aside from the insatiable appetite of enterprise leaders for cloud services, there is also a growing demand for localized talent as businesses shift sourcing models towards onshore and nearshore for high-value activities. The acquisition of Gekko helps further cement Accenture's position in Western Europe, particularly in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, where the firm already has a large client base.

Bottom Line: Building out local cloud talent pools is an essential step to cornering key markets

With a punishingly competitive talent war in the cloud space continuing to rattle the delivery capabilities of services firms, inorganic growth is an essential investment for those firms keen to keep up with enterprise demand. Combined with the growing demand for onshore and nearshore talent, Accenture's acquisition of Gekko is a smart move, helping the firm to gain more traction in an essential and rapidly growing market in France and Benelux.

It's likely we’ll see more firms in the space loosen the purse strings to bolster their cloud capabilities as the services market continues to grow at break-neck speed.

A connected employee experience is the fundamental building block of the organization, but how do you solve for perceived gaps in experience and establish quantifiable value along the way?  PwC is placing big bets that with a data-driven strategy, the firm can help clients accomplish both. 

Organizational transformation of any kind is underpinned by employee experience and the ability for the evolving workforce, to connect across the organization, the customers and partners up and down the supply chain. It is also key to undertand how they engage and interface with technology, how their behavior relates to the organizational culture, and the values that are important to them which the company can embrace. 

How PwC links analytics and insight to return on experience (RoX) 

PwC has invested significantly in experience consulting and in developing a unique framework for measuring and quantifying experience initiatives, with $3M allocated to developing digital assets specifically for HR transformation in FY20 alone. The two foundational components to PwC’s approach include the BxT methodology and the EX Platform to unpack the data that sits under employee experience.  

• BxT: The BxT methodology aims to bring together business, experience and technology to deliver an agile aproach to HR transformation through three specific lenses: the needed business change, the technology required to embed a new solution, and the human-technology interface to support the experience. The methodology is then applied by bringing multi-disciplinary talent together in agile teams to co-create new experiences with clients, ultimately helping clients to embed the approach for continuous utilization within their organization.  
• EXP: the EX Platform placing employees at the center to understand gaps and opportunities. The EX Platform leverages three modules which can be approached individually or in concert as an end-to-end solution: Personas and Journeys provide empirical evidence on perceived gaps in experience with AI-driven Nudges to drive positive change. Underlying data combined with predictive modelling enables measurement and insight to identify the highest value EX initiatives for which an organization needs to solve.   

PwC considers these expressions of value as RoX, return on experience, combining the platform with its EX methodology to drive insights to actions for primary EX investment levers.  

Bottom Line: PwC’s EX Platform enables organizations to make targeted investments to deliver value in employee experience at scale 

In “normal” times, many organizations struggle to couple the impact of investments in employee experience with measurable expressions of value, from those that drive operational data to those that drive real, human connection with core values, culture, and purpose. In the current environment, where the digital transformation agenda has been rapidly accelerated and where the way we work has fundamentally changed, the essential need to connect employees to customers has never been greater. Employee experience must be embedded across the organization, and PwC is positioned with the platform, methodology, and data-driven insights to articulate the value of the journey.   

Over the next 12 months we can expect enterprise investment in cybersecurity services and solutions to increase sharply, in contrast to decreased spending in core IT and technology spending as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Enterprise leaders across the globe are coping with the growing risk of running businesses across decentralised operating models reliant on working-from-home practices.

In anticipation of this new threat landscape and an increase in demand for services, Atos has recently announced an agreement to acquire Paladion, a US-Based global provider of Managed Security Services. Bolstering its overall cybersecurity capabilities, while also bringing the firm into a developing Managed Detection and Response (MDR) market. Paladion supplements Atos sprawling network of Security Operations Centers with over 800 employees spread across delivery centers in the US, Middle East and India.

The core of Paladion's capabilities sit with its AI-Driven MDR service, which aims to help enterprises respond to evolving threat landscapes faster, and secure vulnerabilities with its large pool of cyber experts that follow-up with high-touch 24/7 support services. According to Paladion, the firm's platform combs through over 100 terabytes of threat data a day to find the new threats and assess their impact within the context of the business assets and infrastructure of their clients. Among the firm's clients are large healthcare firms, manufacturing giants, eCommerce business, and oil and gas firms. 

According to executives at both firms, the intention is to combine the unique technology and business knowledge developed at Paladion with Atos broader delivery capabilities - with a particular emphasis on supporting businesses as they adopt more hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities, another area where HFS Research anticipates significant future investment.

Bottom Line: Building AI technologies into CyberSecurity is an essential step to tackling a rapidly expanding threat landscape

Undoubtedly, we will see more investment and development across the major IT Services firms as they look to support clients in managing and securing their infrastructure. Atos' intention to acquire Paladion is likely to be one of many announcements we see in the industry over the next 12 months, particularly as the new post-COVID threat landscape evolves. Increasingly, cybersecurity businesses are deploying AI capabilities as a way to boost speed and drive improved responses to threats. 

The modern enterprise faces a raft of threats, and to tackle them must find new and innovative ways of combing through ever-increasing pools of data to understand how the risks are evolving within the specific context of their enterprise. Paladion and Atos combined offer enterprises a valuable new toolset for doing this vital activity.

COVID-19 hit the global manufacturing sector hard as factory production halted across geographies. Manufacturers are forced to provision remote operations, virtual workforces, and supply chain transparency among others due to the pandemic. As factory output stalled, suppliers and manufacturers begin to struggle with cash flow, resulting in layoffs and a frenzy of supplier consolidation, etc. So manufacturers are under pressure to simultaneously reboot operations and alleviate the immediate cash flow pressure.

Through technology and business levers, Infosys has prioritized its 4R approach to support the manufacturing enterprises to overcome the COVID-19 crisis. The 4Rs are:

• Remote Workforce: Solutions for managing distributed workforce enabling collaboration, governance, and enterprise security
• Resilient Systems: Enterprise risk management ensuring business continuity
• Reduce Costs and Risks: Operational cost efficiency through asset and infrastructure management among others
• Reimagine Experience: Virtual environment and infrastructure development for collaboration among stakeholders, partners, and customers

Infosys also developed a return to workplace solution (for contact tracing, sanitization, social distancing, etc.) to ensure the return to normalcy for its clients.

Infosys ensured smooth BCP transition during the pandemic for its manufacturing clients

HFS published manufacturing operations continuity plan article in which we argued that employees and technology infrastructure are the critical success factors for the continuity plan. Infosys also followed the same path to initiate BCP for its manufacturing clients with minimum disruption in the light of COVID-19. Some of its examples include

• For an industrial manufacturer, Infosys ensured remote working (virtual workforce collaboration and secure VPN access) virtually overnight. Infosys also provided support by quickly developing solutions to track personnel and inventory amidst the widespread disruptions
• Infosys collaborated with a large automobile company to finalize the BCP planning at the individual level (to overcome cybersecurity challenges without disruption) and seamlessly enable distributed collaborative, agile delivery for enterprise applications management

Infosys is leveraging its Live Enterprise Suite to build organization resilience

In September 2019, Infosys launched Live Enterprise Suite that enables organizations to drive process agility, deliver customer delight, and enhance ecosystem value. As COVID-19 has accelerated the digital transformation journey of the enterprises, so Infosys is leveraging this platform to enable enterprise digital innovation journey including the COVID-19 response.

Some of the key capabilities of Live Enterprise Suite include

• Enterprise talent transformation journey with Infosys Wingspan: Learning solution that supports continuous learning in a digital environment to prepare existing talent for future needs
• Hyper personalized and cognitive user experience with the Experience Configurator: Captures human behavior and renders contextual content
• Cloud agnostic application stack through the Infosys Polycloud Platform: Enables a common interface and catalog to manage platform and application services workloads across the enterprise
• Organizational knowledge and intelligence for the enterprise through the Infosys Digital Brain Solution: Capturing and analyzing enterprise ecosystem data to orchestrate intelligent responses to emerging events
• Employee onboarding through a one-stop Launchpad app: Enables a paperless onboarding experience and guides new hires from the pre-joining stage until they onboard

Bottom Line: Take advantage of the crisis to build agility and resilience - Infosys leverages BCP as a stepping stone for future transformation rather than an emergency business continuity plan

To date, BCP in manufacturing was focused on short term failure in production, supply chain, or technology infrastructure. But COVID-19 has shown that the disruption can persist and manufacturers need more robust planning and risk management practices for business continuity Many of the pandemic’s changes are here to stay for the long term, thus have strong implications for the impending digital transformation. Overall, BCP has evolved from a “hygiene factor” to “critical importance”. Infosys is leveraging its digital innovation and transformation related solutions and frameworks to support BCP planning so that some of the transformation tenets can be adopted beforehand and embedded in organizations on a permanent basis.

Attaining success and scale with automation is a challenge for many enterprises. HFS is working with Pega to profile integrated automation journeys and the importance of a holistic approach to process automation where RPA is one of the tools in the toolbox. Part of the challenge is knowing which tool to use when, or which combination of tools will get the best result.

UK-based NBS, “Nationwide”, the world’s largest mutual financial institution, uses Pega Infinity, a platform for customer engagement and intelligent automation to automate workflows passing between colleagues. NBS wanted to embed automation as a standard business capability, across functional silos. This was not the first attempt to automate processes and previous efforts resulted in varying success.

Integrated Automation means pulling on more than one lever to effect lasting change

HFS advocates a toolbox approach rather than attempting to pull a single technology lever in isolation.  Integrated automation as introduced in HFS blog - long live integrated automation platforms is automation (including RPA) and AI and analytics. By integrated automation we also mean automation integrated at the platform level including business process management (BPM) / case management, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM). And we extend this to integration across people, process and technology supported by focused objectives and change management. Integrated Automation is how businesses can transform and achieve an end-to-end Digital OneOffice. Many automation attempts get stuck in the proof of concept stage and struggle to get to scale (Exhibit 1), when asked about intelligent automation technologies, the C-suite responses indicate varying levels of success with intelligent automation technologies at scale, RPA shows as the least scaled technology at 13%.

Exhibit 1: Getting over the hump from pilot into production at scale proves challenging for many

Source: HFS Research 2020

BPM is the center of orchestration, accompanied by RPA for hard to reach areas

After conducting a technology strategy review in 2017-18, NBS concluded that it needed low code business process management (BPM) software to handle workflows between colleagues. Past attempts to resolve bottlenecks with other tools did not impact workflow pain points sufficiently. As it went through the BPM software selection process for a Nationwide society-wide BPM implementation, NBS set three main objectives:- to handle exceptions better, to establish a robust audit trail and to put comprehensive workflow and case management in place. The aim is to remove human intervention for lower level tasks wherever possible, using BPM and a combination of robotic process automation (RPA), optical character recognition (OCR) and text understanding.

NBS has used Pega’s RPA since 2015 to reduce human error and keying time

Pega BPM was selected from a scored shortlist of three; IBM and Appian were the other final contenders. NBS had been using Pega RPA (formerly OpenSpan), beginning in 2015, for attended automation of front and back office tasks which required a lot of keying between different legacy applications.

Get more power from an integrated automation approach

The previous start with RPA, before BPM was implemented, addressed short-term problems but was not in itself transformative. It simply automated existing tasks. There was little scope for optimization as the business logic in the underlying applications was the limiting factor. The RPA software was stuck with what human colleagues were stuck with, although RPA could manipulate tasks in a different order. Repetitive tasks were automated, but not full processes. In the front office, some customer facing applications were automated using Pega attended RPA. Front office staff were using multiple systems and frequently rekeying data from one system into another. RPA cut down keying time, driving process turnaround times as fast as screen response times could permit, faster than humans and with no errors.

NBS’s integrated automation approach is using RPA as an API

BPM came into the picture after RPA and swiftly took the central role. NBS deployed Pega Infinity for Intelligent Automation with a combination of Pega low-code application development and Pega RPA. The intention is that Pega’s BPM handles the bulk of the automated workflows and sometimes uses unattended RPA as an integration point between BPM and legacy applications. For example, for establishing workflows with mainframe systems where a digital front end is not tied into the back end and there were no application programming interfaces (APIs), RPA will be used to create a work queue, or to allocate work to humans (or software robots).

Another scenario where RPA proves useful is when on-premise APIs are not accessible from BPM in the cloud.  Despite the technical simplicity of pointing the BPM directly at the API with straightforward visual mapping of data, on-premise APIs may not have been exposed to the cloud.  On-premise RPA presents a viable alternative, exposing the target application’s data or experience handling capability so it can be called from within a workflow.

Unattended RPA, on physical computers using their own credentials, carry out “happy path” process scenarios (default rules-based scenarios with no exceptional or error conditions) where the majority can be completed without colleague intervention for e.g. Personal Protection Insurance (PPI) remediations etc. RPA manages workflows, allocating them to the right people, with the right permissions, with an audit trail in a low code environment with visual modelling.

Balance efficiency of business users and IT discipline

In introducing Pega’s BPM at the centre of workflow management, NBS sought to empower citizen developers, which it describes as a configuration team. Pega enabled successful results through no-code citizen development. NBS was also mindful of the downsides of ungoverned end user computing (EUC). It wanted a manageable balance of efficiency without impacting IT discipline and rigor. This is handled at the process prioritization stage. NBS’ business units (BUs) identify opportunities for automation and prioritize automation opportunities according to a combination of expected savings, FTEs employed, and criticality of business process.

People come from the BUs with proposed processes e.g. Refer a Friend, that could be automated.  This is where the guardrails kick in, the IT department is a part of the process prioritization team and guides the choice of tool to be used by the business unit citizen developers. Process simplification is the first port of call, with representatives of different silos working as one team across the business from mortgages to current accounts. Collaborating with colleagues, this process simplification team go out looking for process improvement opportunities, using a master process list as a starting point for workflow and case management applications. Where the team encounters niche processes and products – e.g. complaint handling, the initial effort is invested in simplifying and configuring the process itself, then working with the Pega BPM software, coupled with RPA, where needed.

The right skills were already there and easy to find in the business

Talent is a commonly cited barrier to progress with process automation. There are two main challenges: grappling with resources displaced by automation and how to cultivate the necessary skills to pursue the integrated automation strategy. In NBS’ view, the key competencies that are needed was likened to a skill level of excel macro creation and maintenance. NBS was successful in finding this core competence in its own people who picked the new technology up quickly, recruited more people to work with it from within business units, not IT developers, people from operational units able to learn it fast.  Configuration has also been devolved to the Finance team who are now expanding BPM and RPA to other parts of business along with the IT department. NBS was successful recruiting and giving (short) training to internal colleagues from business units here. RPA is visual configuration rather than code, with generic application integration already built in.

A steady pattern emerged. Time savings are achieved; business units use the time people save to enable more interesting work.  For high volume processes with simple business logic, time savings can be made easily.

RPA alone is not transformative and NBS gradually realized it needed an RPA exit strategy

NBS did not initially engage with RPA with an exit strategy in mind; it didn’t think it needed one at first. NBS formed the view over time that if RPA only automated the keying of data into applications, this was non-transformative, and in fact served to enforce legacy systems and processes. Considering RPA’s reputation of serving as a stop gap, it is not low cost. The quotes NBS received from big RPA vendors were not cheap. But there are circumstances where RPA is useful such as to point at applications or to record a macro. As Jim Knight, Senior Enterprise Architect, NBS says ““You’ve got to take a holistic approach to process automation, figuring out which automation treatment to apply to which process problems.”

NBS thinking is in line with HFS research that shows multiple lever pulls of complementary technologies gives rise to more impactful results. In Exhibit 2, 36% of respondents saw an integrated approach as more likely to enable the movement from task based automation to tackling end-to-end  processes, while 34% said it enabled scale across the enterprise.

Exhibit 2: Integrated automation delivers more benefits than approaching with a single tool

Source: HFS Research 2020

Other tools in the toolbox are intelligent automation and email bots (intelligent virtual assistants)

In the concerted efforts to get unnecessary human effort out of processes, unstructured data must be ingested to feed processes.  NBS has started using the Pega Email Bot to interpret and route emails into automated processes in BPM.  This is likely to extend to image interpretation in the future.

During the Covid-19 pandemic many turned to RPA to handle sudden spikes in processing, or to handle new or rapidly changing processes as governments around the world put measures in place to support and protect businesses and individuals.  NBS sought short term help from RPA to cover members’ payment holidays and  credit card holidays. Members apply for payment holidays through a digitally accessed form, then colleagues process the digital request. A short-term fix was created using RPA to reduce the burden of back-office keying the queued requests into legacy applications.

The bottom line: NBS is leveraging the power of “and” to drive integrated automation and enhanced business results beyond what RPA alone could ever produce

It was convenient for NBS that Pega integrated RPA into its product suite because as NBS transitioned to a BPM-centered approach, it benefitted from the additional integrated automation tools and pathways to optimizing automation opportunities. NBS’ longer term vision and investment focus seeks to embed case management in the center of as many business processes as is practicable. The possibility of not using colleague facing applications, a blend of end user computing and homegrown legacy applications) is under exploration, perhaps putting that knowledge and logic into BPM to handle interactions (e.g. processes interacting with the customer relationship management (CRM) systems for lost and stolen cards, change name etc). Accepting that it’s hard to change that business process where it’s embedded in the underlying application, by moving to BPM as the central point of orchestration, the business logic will be housed in the BPM and NBS is confident this will deliver an ability to scale process automation across the organization, more than RPA alone could.

One of the hardest things to do as an IT service provider is to differentiate. HFS analysts sit in on hundreds of briefing calls a year in which we hear about a supplier’s services. The remarkable thing is how undifferentiated some of these presentations are. Many spokespeople say the differentiator is their people, which we hear pretty much on every call we attend. We have to try not to roll our eyes if the call is on Zoom. The important part is that providers—and by extension, their spokespeople—must clearly understand their identity. They need to know which deals they’ll take, which they’ll turn down, where their people excel, and where they leave the work to partners. Once they have their identity pegged, they can work on embedding it in their culture.

Undoubtedly, people play an important role. As much as we like to talk about automation and leverage, we know the services business is 100% about people. Regardless of how much automation is embedded and how optimized the enterprise platform is, getting a solution to work requires people, which means unfortunately for analysts having to pick through the bones of undifferentiated calls, the differentiator is people. So how do we unpick this Gordian knot?

The real spokespeople of a provider are its clients; bring references to the market that best articulate your cultural values

As HFS analysts, the other type of call we conduct is reference calls. Essentially, we call on a service provider’s clients to talk about how well the provider delivered services, which gives us good perspective on which providers deliver contractual promises and give customers value for money, and it provides an assessment of service quality. Additionally, we can ask customers what they want from providers, how providers are achieving against this desire, and what the most common failings are.

The number one desire expressed by customers from these calls is culture, which differs from the answer we get from the quantitative surveys we conduct. Quantitative survey results tend to skew toward cost when you ask companies what they want from providers—largely because the respondent picks an answer from a list, and reducing cost is an easy first choice. It’s like getting CIOs to pick from a set of priorities—security is always going to be one of the first choices on a list. Customers knee-deep in contracts tend to focus away from cost, which is still a big factor, and toward delivery. The focus is on the customer relationship and, most often, on “cultural fit.”

What does “cultural fit” mean? What identity should providers adopt?

Cultural fit is an oft-abused term, and it can mean many different things—which is probably why it isn’t a single category in a drop-down list of challenges. However, if we analyze the responses more deeply, cultural fit often boils down to two main things:

• Flexibility: It’s not so much about having similar cultures; instead, it’s having an adaptable culture that puts the clients’ needs first and foremost. In one agile engagement, a provider demonstrated its flexibility by letting a buyer “choose and interview the staff for the engagement; that way, we knew we were getting the right people for us.” When pushed about what made a provider flexible, another client said, “they are always genuinely asking for feedback, and they always listen.”
• Integrity: Integrity is a wide area, but customers often talk about wanting honesty from their service providers. In particular, they want people who push back and then work with the customer to achieve the desired goal. One client reference said their pet hate in this area is “the ‘yes man’ who agrees with everything, but nothing material happens,” and the salesmen that “constantly ask for more money.”

The Bottom Line: If you want cultural fit, you need to have flexibility and integrity as part of your corporate identity.

Usually, when we give advice, it’s an either-or situation—there are options to choose from. But, really, service providers have no choice unless they are competing purely on price and customers are willing to compromise for delivery, which seems rare for long-term engagements. Our advice to suppliers is to stop saying “yes” to everything. Train all levels of staff to effectively push back and listen to your customers. Wrap this embedded integrity with the freedom to be flexible, enabling your teams to always do the very best for their client, even when they don’t realize it.

The reality is that many enterprises genuinely believe they live and breathe these values, but from what we hear from their clients and the broader community, we can crudely segment the real market sentiment as:

• 10% of you are doing a superb job.
• 20% of you are good, but you could do more.
• 50% of you are adequate (barely), but you think you are doing great. It may be that you are embedding these values into many accounts, but not consistently. This group of providers has the highest disconnect from reality. They have a higher propensity to arrogantly push back on our ratings and demand rebuttals.
• And the final 20%? You need to seriously overhaul the way your staff interacts with customers.

As a final thought, it’s fair to say to anyone reading this list and switching-off believing they’re in the 10% doing well: It’s almost certainly a sign you’re not.

Cloud computing enabled businesses across the globe to rapidly switch to remote and decentralized operating models. While the switch was easier for some than others, the transition has settled a major enterprise conundrum: to migrate or not to migrate? The reality for many enterprises is the answer has become more of a foregone conclusion over the last six months, fueling a major war for talent and capability as businesses race to the cloud, particularly the public cloud. For service providers, this talent war—if they can get ahead of it—heralds the promise of biting a big chunk out of a cloud services market soon worth hundreds of billions.

In a recent report, we discussed how enterprises and service providers anticipate increased spending on cloud computing, potential migration, and re-platforming opportunities in post-pandemic environments. While many organizations anticipate deploying private clouds to expand their capacity and improve security, a greater number are looking toward hybrid and multi-cloud models, where the hyperscale, public-cloud giants are a vital building block of their strategies. Service providers must arm themselves to support the massive demand for cloud adoption or get ready to lose their share of global cloud services market, which we anticipate will reach $305+ billion revenue by 2021.

In recent conversations with industry leaders as part of our ongoing hyper-scale public cloud services study, we saw the confirmation of cloud computing’s rapid adoption. Further, we observed that cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud) are pushing hiring programs harder as they try to bring on cloud engineers to support engagements, and they are pushing service providers to pick up the pace of their cloud training programs. In short, all of these factors are fueling one of the largest talent wars the industry has ever seen.

2020: The year cloud computing vacancies surged to punishing levels

As cloud computing demand finds a new peak, the industry bears witness to an enormous spike in cloud vacancies. As per the recent data from IT jobs watch, AWS’s and Azure’s job opportunities trending ever upwards in the UK—an increasingly important market for cloud services. In total, 28,930 permanent cloud computing job openings were posted as of June 22, 2020. For the talent pool, this heralds good news. While the industry announces layoffs and hiring freezes across the board, the cloud talent pool is exceptionally buoyant—providers are hiring to align with the rising demand.

Similarly, both the demand for services and the corresponding pull of talented cloud professionals are impacting the US market. A study from Burning Glass on skills shows that, skills related to cloud computing jobs witnessed one of the highest demand spikes in recent history. Some factors unique to the circumstances of the COVID-19 virus have fueled growth in specific cloud-based technology, including communication platforms, virtual machine access, and SaaS-based applications that help enterprises run their business and remain connected with their clients, employees, and partners without any interruptions. Some enterprises and industries rely entirely on cloud services to operate in remote environments, such as gaming and e-commerce, fueling ever-greater demand for top talent.

For most enterprises, the cloud offers significant opportunities. While the technology has swiftly become the savior of enterprise operations throughout the pandemic, as the business environment returns to normal, we’ll see pandemic-based requirements such as increased use of conferencing solutions subside. Then the real work begins, with many enterprises left sorely exposed to traditional models and business platforms that will be hard to ignore once the crisis is over. A recent survey of business leaders revealed that more than 50% of the respondents plan to shift more applications to the cloud, while a more bullish 39% say they expect to move to the cloud entirely.

The Bottom Line: Smart providers will build their talent pools to service the immediate demand for cloud services and the inevitable rush for business re-platforming in the future

The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique environment for cloud services, where even the most skeptical leaders had to choose between migrating and being left out in the cold. The smart providers will be building talent pools to handle current increased workloads, but they also have an eye to the future. As we find the new normal, the cloud will undoubtedly be a major part of every enterprise’s infrastructure strategy. Many enterprise leaders say that they are already analyzing how they can bolster their cloud strategy and find the right partners to meet the next generation of cloud services. Providers must seize this significant opportunity by building out capabilities with right cloud partners, investments, tools, accelerators, and a fresh go-to-market strategy to ensure enterprises know they have the arsenal to help them re-platform.

HFS expects the US mortgage market to be worth nearly $3 trillion in 2020, the second-largest annual volume in US history. Over 43% of processed mortgages flow through Ellie Mae, a cloud-based mortgage technology company that servers lenders, and is focused on automating and streamlining, originating, and funding new mortgages while ensuring regulatory compliance. Ellie Mae’s success is rooted in a simple philosophy: Automate everything automatable in the residential mortgage industry. To do this, the firm needed a partner that was aligned with their mission and had the technical expertise to bring viable solutions to the table. Business, data, and analytics leaders will find great value in Ellie Mae’s example of data modernization.

Automating in the mortgage industry means coming to grips with complex processes and mining mountains of data

Ellie Mae’s mantra is straightforward enough, but behind it sits a profoundly complex world. Many of us don’t realize how these complicated financial instruments are processed from origination to funding. The average mortgage application, for example, can have over 20,000 fields in it that range from financial and property information to details on regulatory compliance. Regulatory compliance in the US has hundreds of variations, with different flavors by state, county, and city thrown into the mix. What is left for Ellie Mae is a very rich but complex data pool.

At HFS, our industry research has pointed to the biggest challenge in mortgage origination revolving around data and documents (see Exhibit 1). Loan applications have gone digital, and buyers submit most of the required documentation electronically. However, lenders must still move documentation through the origination process life cycle, which is fraught with complications, including the quality, validation, and verification of borrower-submitted documents. This document data challenge is an emerging opportunity for automation to improve services and different ecosystem partners to offer enhanced data and analytics-based services. Ellie Mae’s example is exactly where we see the industry going.

If you’re satisfied with incremental advances in mortgage processing, read no further. Earlier this year, HFS wrote about how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and process automation help the mortgage industry digitize processes and streamline cost and cycle times. While lenders are making notable progress in how they originate mortgages, especially in the realm of cognitive document processing, our overarching conclusion is that lenders are using emerging technologies to modify existing processes rather than create new ones. Emerging technologies such as cognitive document processing are becoming the duct tape of mortgage transformation.

To best explore the mortgage industry’s future, we went to the experts and spoke with various lenders and service providers supporting the mortgage industry. From these conversations, we have identified three key areas that hold significant potential for mortgage processing:

1. Consent-based permissions: Lender validation and verification of borrower information through consent-based permissions.
2. Data-based real-time decisions: The future is in corralling the data and leveraging it to make more real-time decisions, similar to the credit card industry.
3. Tokenization and the expanded potential of a digital wallet: The new pre-qualification becomes tokenized verification of a borrower’s risk-worthiness that lives in an upgraded digital wallet.

Consent-based permissions are the first step toward a streamlined mortgage origination process

We already know that mortgage origination is a document-intensive process, with a dual and repetitive burden firstly on the borrower to provide myriad documents attempting to prove their loan-worthiness. In an equally arduous, lender-led process, the lender validates the data it received and verifies its authenticity. While many lenders focus on automating the validation and verification steps, the CEO of a leading BPO firm explained there is an alternative:

“The future is verifying loan application information directly from employers, financial institutions, credit agencies, IRS, etc., to match early and create trusted, verified information that allows lenders to be confident the information is legitimate. This is cost-effective because the lenders are already going to these third parties anyway to verify the documents provided by the borrower.”

Rajan Nair, CEO Indecomm Global Services

Describing consent-based permissions, Nair hopes to facilitate an improved user experience for borrowers and significant time-savings for lenders with a streamlined collection process. By verifying information directly from the necessary third parties, document origin and validity are fundamentally guaranteed, which removes the need for the verification stage. Glimmers of this potential have been baked into Fannie Mae’s Day 1 Certainty program for income, asset, and employment verification. Many of the systems that are accessed for validation are suboptimal, though, so there is an opportunity for credit agencies and other third parties to help streamline the data for the validation process. Additionally, this approach does not adequately consider exceptions such as self-employment or the very current reality of mass furloughs during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it does begin making documents irrelevant.

Leveraging data to facilitate real-time decisioning will make mortgage origination invisible, much like a credit card application

Ultimately, both the lender and borrower want the mortgage origination process to be as seamless as possible—even invisible—so both parties can benefit from cost and time savings. While removing the need to collect, verify, and process documents would undeniably streamline the process, many lenders are calling for mortgage origination to be invisible, with instant decisions, much like the credit card application process. One lender explained:

“Why are we going to such great lengths to verify if somebody can afford a loan? We should be able to pull mortgage information like you can for a consumer loan or credit card. The data is available today. If a borrower has a two year non-self- employed work and earnings history, we should on a more consistent basis be able to automatically validate the essentials and move more quickly from application to funding.”

Sherri Calcut, Mortgage President, BOK Financial Mortgage

Most borrowers tend not to have their data organized, which has led to the advent of digital mortgage applications, as popularized by Rocket Mortgage, Blend, and Roostify. These systems step borrowers through the loan application process, specifically calling out what information the loan requires and verifying the information as customers load it. While these systems help borrowers curate the necessary information, they are not changing the process. The real change potential lies with real-time data. In the same way credit reports can garner enough information to grant approval for credit cards for tens of thousands of dollars in minutes, a lender using existing electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) information or other existing personal digital financial profile information should be able to process an application in the same fashion. Millions of similar lending transactions executed in the past should form the basis for a massive catalog of training data to support and generate machine learning algorithms to drive approvals and help manage fraud. But as data privacy and regulatory rules forbid the creation of a big happy shared stockpile of information, we continue to chip away using the public data we can access and the data we can obtain via consent.

The future digital wallet should include mortgage pre-qualification

Financial services firms, perpetually product-minded, should consider an expanded concept of a digital wallet—one that corrals and pre-qualifies relevant credit-worthiness information such as tax returns, income, assets, employment, and debt in a digital wallet. For the US, it could be sanctioned by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae as pre-approved tokens, meaning prospective borrowers’ information has already been processed through automated underwriting systems and approved. These tokens would act as certificates of eligibility streamlining the mortgage origination process while driving consistency and minimizing risk and repetitive audits while improving borrower experience and potentially increasing borrower intelligence around what their borrowing potential and reasonable risk thresholds are. One of the experts we interviewed suggests there is a massive opportunity to leverage current mortgage transactions as the gateway to the future tokenized digital wallet:

“The digital wallet can be administered during the initial sales transaction process or as a leave-behind after closing a transaction. As a token-based subscription, the wallet can be a gateway to pre-process the lending transaction. Borrowers who have organized their tokenized data might be able to garner better rates from lenders because of the lower processing burden. Post-transaction, the application can live as a communication portal for a variety of service offerings related to home ownership and personal financial management. Borrowers who consent can refresh credit eligibility information so they can maintain just-in-time credit eligibility for refinance or re-purchase scenarios. The sponsor of the wallet will serve the long-term housing finance needs of the borrower, generating brand loyalty from first time home buyers, millennials, and low-to-moderate income segments.”

Henry Santos, Mortgage CIO and Global Director of Real Estate Finance Solutions, Infosys

The Bottom Line: Addressing inefficiencies in the existing mortgage model can only go so far; sometimes, a complete overhaul is needed. Lenders and their partners must contemplate new models, or their clients will look elsewhere.

If the ongoing pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that every single process is ready for disruption. Lenders are looking toward a more direct approach to mortgage origination to introduce even more efficiency. However, that’s not the only benefit; this approach will also completely transform the borrower’s experience. Service providers must be prepared to support lenders overhauling their existing mortgage origination processes if they hope to thrive in the post-pandemic world.

With cybersecurity pegged to sit high on C-Level agendas over the next 24 months, providers are working hard to buy in the capability they need to deliver against new market demand. The trick for enterprise leaders, then, is to carefully scrutinize the latest wave of investments from major IT services giants like Accenture to make sure their partner has the greatest chance of securing their business.

Accenture, a firm that isn’t shy about splurging on acquisitions, has spent the first part of 2020 bulking out its overall cybersecurity capabilities with a series of significant bang acquisitions. That’s after a focused five-year investment roadmap that’s seen the firm supplement delivery capability with over 10 additions—supplementing specific verticals, such as with the 2017 acquisition of Endgame Federal Services, and adding cyber threat hunting services for government and commercial clients. It also added solution-focused services, such as the 2019 purchase of Déjà vu Security, which offers a full range of services boosting the cyber resilience of digital platforms.

It’s only halfway through 2020, and Accenture has bolstered its arsenal with three significant cyber acquisitions

Accenture’s overarching go-to-market strategy in the cybersecurity space is to offer clients a one-stop-shop portfolio to rival the disparate and pointed solutions provided by its competitors. In the cybersecurity space, enterprise leaders want a blend of outcome, capability, assurance, compliance, resilience, and, in an intensely complex and dynamic market, a degree of simplicity. Locating a partner with the full range of managed services, products, and capability is now higher on the agenda than ever before.

To an extent, Accenture’s strategy makes a lot of sense. Enterprise leaders may approach some of their competitors for a specific service, such as pulling in the Big Four for strategy or the IT services heavies and systems integrators (Sis) for technical delivery, but there are relatively few players offering the full suite of services. Unlike the broader market, Accenture has both the consulting heft to go head-to-head with the consulting giants and the technical bench to give the SIs and IT majors a run for their money.

The proof is in the pudding. Accenture’s revenues specific to its cybersecurity practice have more than doubled over four years, and it is now a multi-billion-dollar unit in its own right. It’s supported, of course, by its innate ability to grow inorganically where organic development doesn’t match its ambitious roadmap, which has seen the firm plug in three significant acquisitions in 2020 already: Symantec’s Cyber Security Services business, Context Information Security, and Revolutionary Security. Let’s examine how each of these acquisitions supports Accenture’s vision of becoming the go-to end-to-end security services firm.

Context Information Security adds cyber expertise and boosts UK presence

Context Information Security was a smart buy that brings in a broad spectrum of cyber capabilities, including managed services, cyber defense, and offensive expertise to help clients understand their vulnerabilities. One of the acquisition’s least touted benefits is the large quantity of localized talent the firm brings—particularly in the UK. Based in Cheltenham, the home of GCHQ, Context adds over 250 security professionals spread across the UK, Germany, the US, and Australia—all markets where cyber talent comes at a significant premium—helping the firm power an ambitious growth strategy in key markets, mainly the UK.

Revolutionary Security supports IT and OT estates to secure complex business environments

Revolutionary Security has an extensive heritage supporting complex infrastructure environments that focuses on covering both IT and OT (operational technology) estates. As digital technologies push valuable data and, by extension, vulnerabilities outside of enterprise headquarters, the need for a suite of services and solutions to combat threats in IT and OT environments will become more critical. Specific industries, such as oil and gas, are already facing myriad threats pushing outside of the remit of traditional cybersecurity solutions. For Accenture, Revolutionary Security may be one of the least-discussed acquisitions of 2020, but it could quickly become the most valuable as Accenture pushes harder into OT on its mission to deliver end-to-end cyber services.

Symantec CSS brand cache and customer bring a scalable platform and industry leading data set to Accenture’s arsenal

Buying Symantec’s sprawling CSS business may look to some like a scale play—but that’s only half of the story. The acquisition does add another 300 security professionals spread around the globe and the brand cache that comes with bringing in expertise from one of the best-known cyber firms in the commercial and consumer market. It also has a platform capability that includes one of the largest log collections of any market solution, offering a wealth of threat intelligence data alongside a talented team that knows how to mine it for contextual insights for clients. Accenture also benefits from a loyal Symantec customer base that will be eager to stick with their trusted cyber team, but the new customers also present a valuable cross-selling opportunity for the firm’s now sprawling solution portfolio.

The Bottom Line: Accenture's goal to be THE end-to-end security firm is a bold target, but given its willingness to invest, enterprises would be foolish not to take a more in-depth look at its growing capabilities

After a candid conversation with Accenture’s security executives, it becomes clear that the firm is on a mission to bring clients what they need in the cybersecurity market—specifically a single portal to assurance, compliance, resilience, and simplicity. This strategy is an ambitious one, and many of Accenture’s competitors also want to pursue it as the cyber market evolves to become a source of significant enterprise investment. If Accenture continues to build out its roadmap, it could become a reliable lighthouse in the choppy cybersecurity waters—a welcome beacon when many enterprises already find themselves struggling to keep afloat in a deluge of new services and solutions and a rapidly evolving threat landscape. This approach isn’t without its challenges. Bedding in these investments and retaining talent in a competitive labor market must be high on the agenda for the foreseeable future.

Over the past three months, we’ve conducted plenty of client reference calls to understand how the agile software services market is evolving and what “good” looks like from a client’s perspective. While vendors spend billions investing in new tools, technologies, and approaches, it seems most clients hold a simpler vision for the ideal outcome—a careful balancing act between cost and quality. To succeed in this market, then, providers must ensure that innovative cost models and commercial flexibility are at the very core of their offerings as they develop their agile development practices, alongside a crystal-clear narrative about how their tools and talent are uniquely positioned to bring better business outcomes.

Let's start by busting some myths: Bringing the best tools and talent to engagements is a good best strategy, but it must be combined with a crystal-clear narrative

First, we hate to break it to you, but a fancy toolkit alone doesn’t guarantee success. A well-outfitted toolkit is sufficient for provider success in some markets, but hyper-cynical agile project managers and IT experts on the buy side shine a punishingly bright spotlight on provider marketing collateral. One of our clients relayed that their experience includes working with multiple providers, and, to paraphrase their observation, all services firms have nearly identical arsenals of IP, tools, and accelerators. Entering engagements talking about having the best automated testing platform or DevOps approach simply doesn’t work. Instead, it’s more compelling and effective to articulate how combining your tools, approach, and talent will deliver better outcomes.

“Everyone has the same solutions and tools—and the very nature of the market means approaches and frameworks are similar. So, we have to pick a partner that’s really clear about how they can deliver something better than their competitors.”

—Anonymized client reference

The second myth we need to bust is that thought leadership is enough evidence to convince buyers of your expertise. Of course, buyers like to hear new, innovative ideas from vendors. But they expect you to back those stories with real-life delivery examples. Buyers want to hear from existing clients, analysts, and observers that your bright ideas extend beyond marketing collateral. In a hyper-competitive market with a cynical buy side, the impartial third-party is king.

“We picked our partner because, from the RFP process onwards, they brought something real to show us. No PowerPoint—just real, pragmatic solutions.”

—Anonymized client reference

Indeed, as the agile services market has evolved, the buy side’s justifiable cynicism has evolved with it. For some providers, catering to this demand for proven solutions instead of smooth sales pitches presents a considerable opportunity. In particular, mid-tier firms seem to have developed a knack for winning over PowerPoint-weary selection committees with their pragmatic approaches, which often involve an abundance of proof-of-delivery and clear solution examples. One client remarked that the provider they picked did an appalling job of presenting glitzy marketing collateral, but that was part of their charm. Instead of a meeting room packed with sales professionals and consultants, the team pitching the provider’s wares included the technical architects that would be running the show once the dotted line was signed.

All of these factors combined boil down to one core trend in the evolving buyer market: cost sensitivity. Across our IT services coverage, the agile software market emerged as one of the most cost-focused buyer groups. Many clients described ambitious roadmaps and an appetite for innovation, only to summarize that the reason they selected their provider is that they were the cheapest. Cost sensitivity, however, is a broad church. Absolute pricing takes up the bulk of mindshare, but flexibility also has a role to play. Several clients advised that while the ticket price of the solution they selected wasn’t the cheapest, innovative commercial models and examples of structural flexibility won their partner the deal. The smart providers, then, strike the right balance across their commercial approaches in the agile services market—pricing is important, but so are the commercial model and evidence that ensure it incentivizes the right quality and business outcomes.

The Bottom Line: The smart providers will cater to the increasing cynicism of the agile services market with innovative pricing models that drive down cost while incentivizing improved quality and business outcomes. Customers expect you to justify your price.

Agile development is leveling the playing field for service providers; smaller, mid-tier firms can compete effectively with the global players. Delivering scale to agile projects won’t necessarily improve service delivery; the quality depends on the team’s talent and how well it is managed within the agile framework. Customers are asking themselves why they are paying 20% more to a global major when a mid-tier firm can deliver the same thing or better? What’s the ultimate proof point for tools, methodology, and IP? Better ROI.

The agile software development services buyer community’s healthy skepticism is the natural result of a marketplace populated with grandiose claims for innovation business outcomes and failed ROI, combined with the need for service leaders to drive more cost out of IT projects. The smart providers rise to meet new client expectations with an effective and provable story about how their unique assets, talent, and approach can bring compelling pricing, better ROI, and proof of delivery to engagements.

Increasingly, barriers to cloud adoption don’t come from an absence of enterprise appetite. Instead, there are specific industry challenges that must be overcome before businesses can see ROI. To support their industry clients in adopting cloud services, IBM and Persistent have announced a new collaboration to help accelerate IBM Cloud Pak deployments to speed clients' enterprise modernization and their move to the cloud. Persistent now has more than 2,000 engineers and technical professionals trained on containerization skillsets – to help clients recognize more value from multi-cloud environments. Candid conversations with executives from both IBM and Persistent show that this collaboration is part of a broader push from IBM to breakdown multi-cloud barriers across industry verticals, and for Persistent to continue to grow its expertise and verticalized cloud solutions. So let’s take a look at the detail of the lengthy partnership.

Partnered for 17 years, Persistent brings expertise in solution development to supplement IBM's Cloud Pak Portfolio 

Persistent and IBM have teamed up for over 17 years – working to help clients overcome major barriers in cloud adoption. The latest advancement of the collaboration focuses on both firms pooling their combined capabilities with a particular focus on building solutions around IBM’s Cloud Pak capabilities. In line with the announcement, Persistent noted they are launching a new IBM Cloud Park deployment practice to support growing client demand for services.

Since the acquisition of Red Hat, IBM has solidified its position as both a high-value cloud services player, coupled with hyperscale capabilities that places the firm’s public cloud offerings in a position to compete directly with the likes of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. This, combined with the growing importance of containerization as a tool for greater IT modernization, has placed IBM as a vital partner for any firms looking to grow their business in the cloud services space – and with an already deep relationship in place, Persistent is positioned to benefit considerably from the ongoing collaboration.

Persistent has particular strengths in certain industries and with a strong track-record of verticalized solution development in areas including BFSI, Industrial, Healthcare and High-Tech, uniquely positions the firm to bring cloud solutions that overcome specific barriers-to-adoption for clients, utilizing a rapidly evolving suite of tools and technologies from IBM.

The Bottom Line: Industry barriers, rather than a lack of client appetite, is what's restricting greater cloud migration. Persistent and IBM's collaboration will help clients overcome many of the restrictions.

The partnership is an example of both firm's doubling down on an ecosystem approach to match the insatiable enterprise demand for hybrid and multi-cloud services and solutions. As the space has evolved, enterprise appetite has swiftly overtaken any immediate concerns about migrating to the cloud, but in their place, specific barriers to entry have blocked progress across specific industries. IBM’s growing arsenal of cloud capability combined with Persistent System’s knack for solving industry challenges with clever solutions will undoubtedly help enterprises tack barriers head-on and reach their cloud ambitions.

How Sun Life uses RDA to eliminate customer service agents’ mundane work and improve CX

Your employees’ and customers’ experiences are inherently linked, whether or not you’ve made efforts to align them. Today’s automation leaders must know that integrated automation can be a fundamental tool to connect those experiences in pursuit of a common goal. In this POV, we look at Sun Life’s approach to using Pega Attended RPA (robotic desktop automation or RDA) as a tool for eliminating customer service agents’ mundane work to support customer experiences better, starting in the contact center. Seeing these efficiencies pay off in the front office, Sun Life is now expanding its use of “integrated automation” (at the intersection of process automation, analytics, and AI) to become a more connected, decisive company that supports its customers and employees.

Through its automation journey, Sun Life has found that focusing on change management and understanding the impact automation has on employees’ experience are critical elements of success. By testing, measuring, and understanding your employees’ experiences, you can ensure continuous improvement and be better equipped to expand and design further automation. This focus empowers employees to serve the customer better, and it improves experiences all around.

OneOffice Experiences require connecting employee and customer experience

The HFS OneOffice Experience (Exhibit 1) is a framework for illustrating how customer (CX), partner, and employee (EX) experiences come together to drive unified mindsets, goals, and business outcomes. Organizations need to balance a robust business case using emerging technology to improve CX with getting the right information flows in place for efficiency and transparency. Ultimately, the impact is on business outcomes; ensuring exceptional EX and CX will drive loyalty and growth.

Exhibit 1: The HFS Digital OneOffice Experience connects stakeholders across the enterprise ecosystem

The OneOffice connects front and back offices, makes the enterprise more intelligent and connected, and supports the employees’ and customers’ experiences. OneOffice is about making customer, employee, and partner experiences the centerpiece of the strategy by supporting customers and anticipating needs. It is native to the entire organization, and brings customers and employees together with a common purpose and common outcomes. The new duality between who is servicing the customer and who is the customer is a lynchpin of the Sun Life Financial story. It started with giving its customer service agents access to the right information at the right time, and it is now expanding across the organization to more intelligent and impactful solutions.

Automation is a critical element to improving customer experience

Sun Life got curious about all the buzz around automation in 2017 after an executive in the contact center became interested in sponsoring a proof of concept to automate some of the mundane work most frequently taking up agents’ time. After doing due diligence in the competitive landscape, Sun Life selected Pega for the strength of its attended RPA capability to enable decision making for the agents. Many companies are similarly finding a lot of “low hanging fruit” ripe for automation in its customer service processes, where agents spend much of their time trying to find the information they need to support the customer they’re interacting with. When enterprise leaders are asked about intelligent automation (IA) strategy objectives, streamlining and improving customer service effectiveness and improving quality are ranked at the top (Exhibit 2).

Exhibit 2: Customer service is top of mind for IA strategy

Source: HFS Research supported by KPMG, 2019, n= 355 Global 2000 Enterprise Leaders

RPA can be the glue that helps connect employees and customers

Success in the contact center is about obtaining information quickly and accurately to support the customer. Agents rifling through numerous systems to identify accurate information for customers is a source of frustration on both ends of a transaction. Sun Life’s implementation of attended RPA ultimately serves to help process customer requests faster. RPA now performs many customer service processes that used to be heavily manual, such as checking claim eligibility or status, processing benefit withdrawals, or assigning leads to a sales team. These processes interact with multiple legacy mainframe systems and a stack of web-based tools to extract a client request. For example, a contact center representative may have to refer to five different applications before they can share the status of a claim in progress.

In this use case, Pega’s RPA solution being “attended” is important. The agents are still making decisions, but they use the information the RPA finds and presents through a UI rather than fetching it themselves. For example, if someone calls and asks a question about their policy, the agent directs the RPA to go to the systems and find information, and the bot returns an answer and asks the agent to confirm the correct policy. In this sense, the bot plays the role of assistant to Sun Life agents. Now, more than 2,500 people across Sun Life Canada (40% of all operations staff) are using some form of the Pega bot. All 1,000 Sun Life Canada contact center agents are using the attended RPA described earlier. The RPA solution resulted in both cost and quality improvements, and they’re doing better than anticipated. Originally, the primary goal was to save agents time and service the customer better, but Sun Life is also finding significant cost savings.

RPA provided the gateway to integrated automation

Pega developers ran the initial proof of concept with Sun Life, and it pulled in EY with a small consulting engagement to help set up a Center of Excellence (CoE). Now, Sun Life Canada has four internal scrum teams dedicated to building new automation, supporting production, and installing upgrades. The team spends 70% of its time building new automations and 30% on maintenance and continuous improvement. The CoE has created a playbook for the Sun Life Financial organization; its goal is to examine automation opportunities and continuous improvements, not just with RPA, but also holistically across integrated automation. In this regard, Sun Life is following the path of many enterprises that have found RPA to be a gateway to embracing machine learning, data ingestion, and advanced analytics to achieve real artificial intelligence.

So, what’s next up on the IA roadmap? Sun Life is implementing a chatbot-style intelligent virtual assistant to use directly with customers. In this case, the automation is already built, but Sun Life needs to make it customer-facing. In addition, Sun Life is sunsetting its homegrown customer service workbench, which is siloed by insurance lines, and replacing it with Pega Customer Service for Insurance to further reduce siloes

The automation and data analytics teams are exploring more intelligent solutions, showcasing why it is important to keep the automation CoE from being siloed from other IA elements. RPA alone does not make something “intelligent,” but it can be a lever for bringing in the data science team to create predictive models for greater complexity and intelligence potential. The CoE doesn’t just identify opportunities for automation; it also identifies how to bring in other technologies, perform cost/benefit analysis, and manage expectations for the balance between business outcomes and technology implementations. “The two most important things are change management and knowing your ROI. If either of those fails, you can’t sustain long term,” said Bhuwan Singla, Director of Business Process Automation at Sun Life.

Change management was a critical success factor for Sun Life Financial

Technology that works really well and that was designed with human experiences in mind should be easily adoptable. Even so, change is one of the more difficult elements organizations struggle with in new technology implementations. “Change management concerns over the effect on employees” is one of the top inhibitors that keep business leaders from achieving their operational and strategic goals with IA (see Exhibit 3). Even when a company develops a solution specifically to aid employees and improve their experiences, it must address the elements of trust, transparency, and communication to succeed.

Exhibit 3: Change management is a major inhibitor to achieving IA goals

Source: HFS Research supported by KPMG, 2019, n= 355 Global 2000 Enterprise Leaders

With RDA, it’s harder to manage change than with RPA because instead of offloading a task from an employee, you’re asking the employee to use a new tool, so the adoption curve is steeper. “Getting people to trust the automation is the key,” said Bhuwan Singla, Director of Business Process Automation at Sun Life. When Sun Life put its attended RPA tool into action in the contact center, the agents initially wanted to double-check the tool by performing the same manual process they normally would. Once they came to see that the bot was providing accurate information, they started trusting it, and the efficiencies followed. Using agile development also helps with change management because it involves end users and sponsors from the beginning to the end of the development cycle. Agile gives an opportunity to pilot in small increments to get end user feedback, which paves the path for better adoption. Sun Life has been proactive about addressing trust and transparency by promoting a culture of continuous change. People want to adopt tools when tools help them become more efficient and eliminate frustrating tasks. Increases in transaction volumes and the need for more value-added services for clients means that people are not being eliminated as a result of the automation.  The lack of the threat of job loss helps the adoption of automation.

“The two most important things are change management and knowing your ROI. If either of those fails, you can’t sustain long term.”

Bhuwan Singla, Director, Business Process Automation, Sun Life

The Bottom Line: With well-executed change management, RPA can provide the gateway to integrated automation for connecting OneOffice experiences.

The path toward integrated automation is a winding one, and it looks different for each organization. For companies like Sun Life, RPA not only provides a gateway into the world of integrated automation, it is also one of the key elements for aligning customer and employee experiences. As Sun Life Financial continues on its integration journey, it is pursuing capabilities that do more than create connections and efficiencies. It seeks those that will give the company a competitive advantage by making it more intelligent and anticipatory for customer and employee experiences.

It’s often said that money makes the world go round. In which case trade finance is the oil that keeps that money merry go round moving. According to the WTO, over 80% of international trade is underpinned by trade finance. 

Trade finance is the term for a set of products and financial instruments that enable companies who trade internationally to do business with each other in a structured way with reduced risk. 

Given the complexity of trade finance, with its many parties, cross border transactions, process-driven transactions and, a huge volume of paper-based documents to be processed, starting on the right foot is key. According to the WTO, it is estimated that the trade finance gap (the amount of trade finance requested by importers and exporters but rejected) could reach $2.5trillion by 2025.  The lack of global standards adds complexity and therefore the risk of finance requests being rejected.  

Kofax has leveraged its experience as a leader in cognitive document capture and its work with trade finance organizations to launch a trade finance framework that sits on its low code platform. The benefit of this is that you have a ready-built solution that can easily connect to your downstream processing systems via API calls. It also means the solution can be customized to meet your particular requirements without the need for a huge amount of development effort. Finally, as it’s modular you can choose which bit of functionality you want to use and integrate with your existing systems. As confidence grows it is relatively straight forward to bring more functions on-line. 

Accuracy is everything in trade finance and the Kofax solutions greatly improves document capture and validation against process rules. Artificial intelligence and natural language process (NLP) help to massively speed up the rate at which the Kofax system understands new document types and any exceptions they may throw. Added to this is Kofax’s patented image perfection technology that irons out any imperfections inherited from a poorly scanned document and you have a solution that has the potential to greatly improve the success rate of transactions. 

The Bottom Line: Trade finance needs to take a cue from other document-heavy industries and go digital  

The trade finance process is typically very paper-heavy with shipping orders, bills of landing, commercial invoices, delivery notes, packaging lists, etc. all needing to be accurately scanned and fed into the system and decisions taken based on the information to move to the next stage. The more accurately this can be done using AI, ML, and NLP the fewer mistakes will be made. Agents can then focus on more complicated tasks and the processing of more orders as the human in the loop, whose work rate is increased by enhanced automation. Although this does not remove the need for paper-based documentation altogether, it does mean more accurate processing of it. This will result in goods and finance being released on time spending less time in expensive transit or storage if something goes wrong or even worse being rejected altogether. It’s clear that distributed ledger technology (DLT) is the future of trade finance. However, a full ecosystem based on it is still some way off.  In the meantime, business must go on and those involved need faster and more accurate solutions that are available now, and that reduces the risk of trade finance gaps. 

Infosys won a landmark deal with Vanguard, a global asset management firm for technology, operations management and optimization, and digital transformation of Vanguard’s defined contribution (DC) retirement record-keeping business. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, HFS estimates this to be a multi-year and billion-plus dollar deal reportedly competed by many firms.

HFS views this win as notable for the following reasons:

1. Disruption of retirement record-keeping business. Retirement record-keeping has been manual for a long time and challenged with adopting digital capabilities for far too long due to legacy platforms. Vanguard is at the forefront of technology adoption, is doubling down to take a commanding position in the record-keeping business, driven by innovation leveraging data and analytics for delivering self-servicing capabilities. This goes beyond modernization of Mainframe with a focus to drive differentiation through experience. While the end game is to modernize the record-keeping platform, built by Infosys, there are multiple interim enhancements to areas such as customer service and experience backed by automation of operations and application of technology.
2. A broad-spectrum value showcase for Infosys. The engagement highlights Infosys’ technology expertise, Digital Transformation capabilities, operations enhancement, design and build skills, and domain expertise – all enabled by their localization strategy. Infosys is committed to investing in a local delivery center in Pennsylvania, which will also serve as Infosys Retirements Center of Excellence.
3. Level of Vanguard partnership. While role transitions are typical, Vanguard is putting real skin in the game with notable senior execs going to Infosys. This not only drives cohesion for employees but also ensures continuity for Vanguard clients.
4. It is a landmark deal and the timing during the pandemic is notable. While the deal cycle pre-dated the pandemic, the need for resilient digital experiences has been front and center during the pandemic underscoring Vanguard's decision to go digital for the future of its defined contribution record-keeping business. The deal will also support Infosys’s growth plans in the US through its planned PA innovation hub.
5. Weathering the downturn. As we’re nearing the midway point of earnings season, we clearly see that most of the service providers have been equally impacted by the outbreak of COVID-19, but there are a few that are impacted less so than others. Infosys, for example, experienced a small -0.3% YoY decline in Q2 2020 (Does not include any revenue from Vanguard as the deal was signed in Q3 CY 2020), which compared to some of its peers, is quite good, considering many have reported declines to the tune of 2 % to 5 % for the same period. This also means that the addition of this latest partnership with Vanguard, described by Infosys’ CEO Salil Parekh during their quarterly announcements, should definitely help weather the storm.

Bottom Line: Digital is not dead in BFSI! You just need to know where to look.

In this macroeconomic environment, service providers need to dig deep and go hunting for disruptive deals to help their clients survive and thrive post-pandemic. In its new partnership with Vanguard, Infosys has done exactly that; identified an area that was ripe for digital disruption and worked hard to develop a multi-faceted approach that could completely transform the market and deliver iterative business results in parallel to big bang transformation efforts.

Today’s food and beverage service enterprise leaders seek support for maximizing business outcomes and taking advantage of opportunities within their deeply connected and complex ecosystem. Yet services for companies across the value chain are typically siloed, and horizontal services wear a vertical mask and lack the required connectivity. When it comes to food services—the sales and provisioning of food and beverages across CPG, logistics, retail, and hospitality—there are interdependencies and common goals that most providers don’t understand well enough to help clients seize opportunities. Cognizant is using its digital assets and depth of food services expertise to help clients take advantage of industry subsegment-specific opportunities.

The food services ecosystem has been underserved and disconnected

Food services sector companies have industry-specific problems and opportunities, and few service providers understand and address them. The players in this ecosystem overlap, and in this sweet spot, they share common issues and interconnected business outcomes (Exhibit 1). For example, CPG companies seek customer management competency, specifically for new operating models (e.g., direct to consumer channels), and they crave the ability to quickly react to ecosystem changes. Distributors need a partner with the knowledge, tools, and assets to manage processes such as out-of-stocks, shorting orders, and re-routing. These problems do not exist solely within each industry segment’s silo; they are connected across a value chain, which, until today, the service provider landscape has not been prepared to address.

Exhibit 1: The niche food services ecosystem is interconnected

Source: HFS Research, 2020

The pandemic business environment has created a burning platform for change in food services

On top of the inherent disjointedness that plagues the food services ecosystem, the COVID-19 pandemic thrust each of these industries into extreme disruption. The resulting mutating business environment has accelerated some imminent changes and fired up new trends and ideas. With $9 billion in revenue and 300,000 food outlets and operators in its client portfolio, Cognizant relies on its deep domain expertise to help these companies combat disruption, change strategies, and pivot to survive and thrive in the oncoming pandemic realization phase. It tailored its portfolio of digital assets and analytics capabilities (Exhibit 2) to each industry subsegment, which helps clients focus on business metrics that matter, such as revenue, sales, product placement, and customer acquisition, instead of standard provider SLAs.

Exhibit 2: Cognizant’s rich portfolio of digital assets and analytics targets food services sector outcomes

Source: Cognizant, 2020

Core to the offering capability is how Cognizant uses its expertise and knowledge of these industries’ interconnected nuances. For example, using its insight into how distributors work to help retailers add new products, Cognizant provides analytics based on algorithms that analyze similar businesses, identify which products should be added, and estimate the revenue lift based on SKU analysis. In another example, Cognizant set up a customized digital ordering platform for a major CPG firm where one of the core benefits is a deep knowledge of the restaurant and retail landscape. The platform led to a significant improvement in acquisition rates and increased sales in digital ordering. For each of these use cases, there is a common goal of selling more products to customers and improving experiences; Cognizant aligns these shared goals and accelerates them using emerging technology.

Aligning shared objectives to unlock new sources of value is the vision of the hyperconnected enterprise

Food services represent a prime example of an industry ecosystem ripe for a shift to hyperconnectivity. HFS sees the hyperconnected enterprise as the next step beyond the HFS OneOffice Infinite Experience—a company breaks down the barriers between the front, middle, and back offices, ecosystems align to common values, and outcomes emerge. Collaboration will drive these networks across multiple organizations with common objectives for generating completely new sources of value. Enterprises will need to be as hyperconnected and autonomous as possible within their disrupted business environments to pinpoint disruption sources and opportunities and discover how to keep reinventing themselves in response. The food services space is an example of how these connected ecosystems and networks of organizations can align to common objectives for business outcomes. Emerging technologies are making this vision of a shared economy with distributed and trustworthy information a reality.

The Bottom Line: Hyperconnectivity is the future of the agile, anticipatory food services value chain.

Cognizant is coming to the table with a breadth of expertise across this ecosystem that presents a compelling case for sharing goals across the value chain and accelerating the shift to hyperconnectivity. Its aim is right in line with our view of the next generation of the hyperconnected economy, which enables businesses to become as seamless, touchless, and intuitive as possible. The impact on the food services ecosystem could be significant; becoming more anticipatory and interactive will help companies across the ecosystem unlock new sources of value and create growth opportunities.

Low-Code/ No-Code (LCNC) services are rapid visual application development services that enable developers to easily and quickly create new applications that meet business needs. LCNC is transforming traditional application development methods, and its speed and agility are gaining momentum among service providers and enterprises alike. We have seen examples of a 50% reduction in developer work, and significant simplification of processes and operations in a number of weeks. Not surprisingly, LCNC development is a rare gem seeing growth in the current COVID environment. While tech-savvy business users can access drag-and-drop component functionality to create applications relatively easily, successful LCNC development requires IT support and additional expertise that IT services providers can offer. It is important to note that LCNC software and related services are an approach to application development, not a functional category of software.

Use the right LCNC platform for your needs

There are several different LCNC platforms; some are better known than others. The list of established platform providers includes Microsoft, Salesforce, and ServiceNow, all of which use LCNC to expand their offerings to support customers’ business processes. Specialist LCNC platform providers include Appian, Mendix, Outsystems, and Pega, each of which brings a different skill set to the table. Enterprises are taking two main approaches to adopting LCNC services:

1. Technology-led: An enterprise has invested in an LCNC platform and then asks a service provider to use it to meet specific business needs. Adapting an existing platform is a sensible approach if the enterprise uses Microsoft O365, for example, and would like to explore LCNC development capabilities on the Microsoft platform.
2. Services-Led: An enterprise engages in an advisory engagement with a service provider to identify business problems. The service provider suggests the best-fit LCNC platform to meet business needs.

In both cases, we see enterprises using more than one LCNC platform. While this may be a CIOs nightmare, it is important to use the right tool. It’s also worth highlighting that another big advantage of using LCNC platforms is their API integration capability. We expect a multiple-LCNC-platform approach to continue, although you should try to standardize on a very small number of main platforms.

Know that you need IT support

LCNC platform providers, much like SaaS providers in general, have done a good job of promoting the simplicity of developing on their platforms, especially for citizen or business developers with little to no coding experience. For example there are pre-built templates and automation built into the LCNC platforms. However, if business developers were to create applications in isolation from their IT departments with no regard for enterprise governance requirements or enterprise-wide process strategy, they may create the same application environment complexity that enterprises have been trying to shun in the past decade. Any meaningful business solution will likely require something more complicated and, therefore, at least some level of coding expertise.

Use LCNC to deliver enterprise transformation

Generally speaking, there are two main categories of LCNC development solution examples:

1. Net new applications that improve a specific process. Examples include automating a process or creating an intuitive user interface (UI). Most examples of LCNC development fall here. It’s worth noting that while using LCNC for RPA (robotic process automation) and AI (artificial intelligence) is an important part of the market, as we highlighted here, it is only one example of the capabilities of LCNC development. Examples of net new application development include automating contact centers and improving HR planning and forecasting. Recent examples include the ability to quickly develop applications to help enterprises manage their employees during the COVID pandemic. For example, the Salesforce AppExchange website, which presents a collection of available proprietary assets for customers, currently highlights COVID-relevant applications on its front page.
2. Complete modernization of your enterprise application environment. LCNC enables you to integrate with your legacy systems. Most enterprises do not realize this, but as awareness increases, we expect the LCNC development market to explode. Examples include IBM’s Pega services practice, which aims to assist clients in achieving true transformations.

Get advice from a service provider to maximize your investment in LCNC

Service providers have been steadily ramping up their LCNC services capabilities and proprietary solution investments in the past few years to meet the increasing enterprise demand. Service providers can help you to achieve your desired business results in a long-term sustainable model. Examples of the value they can deliver include:

• Providing Design Thinking sessions to help you identify business requirements and the best platform for creating the solution.
• Positioning LCNC development in the context of a wider transformation initiative, such as enterprise-wide HR transformation.
• Ensuring that your business and IT teams work together to create applications that align with enterprise imperatives; these include important integrations with other applications and security.
• Providing additional technical skills as required.
• Offering proprietary technologies, such as industry sector templates and development platforms, to help maximize your LCNC development investments.
• Managing ongoing support services for your enterprise, including how to implement regular LCNC releases and updates.

The Bottom Line: LCNC is a fast-growing approach that could deliver real transformation

You need to consider LCNC development; it is the new way to quickly and effectively meet business needs—it’s automation for application development. Use it to automate processes, create intuitive user interfaces, develop mobile-enabled modern applications in 2 to 6 weeks, and support your digital transformation efforts. Get expert advice from service providers for best practices and discuss legacy modernization possibilities.

LCNC is still an evolving market, and LCNC platform providers continue to develop their capabilities. We expect new entrants to continue to emerge. HFS has spoken with several leading service providers to understand their take on this market. Over the next few months, we will publish individual service provider profiles to highlight their capabilities, investments, and vision for this space.

WHAT THIS TOP TEN REPORT COVERS

This Travel, Hospitality and Logistics (THL) Top Ten 2020 examines the services landscape for how the leading 20 providers are supporting and enabling THL companies. We analyzed the capabilities of 20 service providers across the THL value chain to develop a comprehensive analysis of industry-specific services and solutions for the THL industries.

WHAT YOU’LL KNOW AFTER READING

Readers will gain insight into:

• An understanding of provider capabilities across the THL value chain via heatmaps
• Knowledge of recent provider developments that impact their ability to support THL clients
• Profiles on the capabilities of 20 service providers across the value chain, their global resources and operations, and insight into the strengths and development opportunities of each
• Ranking of the 20 service providers overall, and by seven subcategories across execution, innovation, and voice of the customer

SERVICE PROVIDERS WE DISCUSS

Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, Concentrix, EPAM, EXL, Genpact, HCL, Hexaware, IBM, Infosys, NIIT, Sitel, Sutherland, SYKES, TCS, Teleperformance, Telus International, Wipro, and WNS