While we are hearing about terms #GreatResignation and Scarcity of trained technology workforce” in the industry, there is also a parallel area to explore how modern organisations attaining growth and leapfrogging the competition. Whether it’s the new age hyperscalers or the rapidly growing domain centric solution driven firms, common theme among all is the collaboration and partner driven focus.

Interestingly, recently published HBR article comes up with a term called ‘Inverted firms’ highlighting how firms are creating value with the ecosystem beyond their organisational boundaries. Article also talk about the paradigm shift from automation and optimisation to partner ecosystem bringing maximum revenue per employee. Look at the staggering numbers

§ Amazon – $300K per employee (Source)

§ Biogen –  $795K per employee (Source)

§ Visa –       $619K per employee (Source)

§ Apple –    $ 413K per employee (Source)

Coming to technology world, leading IT Service provider Accenture recently reported staggering $15Bn+ quarter with a 674K+ workforce recently. What it reflects that COVID has broken the utopia of working at onsite to get the best results and open-up the plethora of opportunities of taking the best of the breed solutions from the niche providers, irrespective of their location. Language barriers are also broken up with conversational AI technologies. Many companies are coming up solution to persona based conversational solution so that language cannot be a barrier. European Union itself has come up such solution to break the barriers. Check out European Union Language Tools for more information. Similarly various new-age companies are also coming up to break the barriers as – Kore.ai, shain.ai

 

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To summarise this, we can clearly witness, partner creating mutual value is the secret sauce of growth and as language barriers are breaking, more options are in place to select the right partner. Modern cloud native technologies with API centricity helping think, try, and rapidly evolve as never before. It’s like core business is moving steadily as a Cargo ship in the tried and tested path focusses on efficiencies to attain bottom-line benefits. To test the new water, a speed boat quickly launched to validate the outcomes.

From partnership standpoint especially in IT Service space, where we belong to, different engagement models are evolving. It’s no more cost discussions per resource in Time and Material basis but more of outcome based managed services, carve outs, captive centricity which are bringing best ROIs. To give some perspective, think about a company is in Healthcare Instrumentation or Wealth management, the RoI will be how instruments or wealth plans giving value to the end customers rather than focussing on minimising lowest possible cost engineers working at the background to make it happen.

https://accountable2you.com/blog/accountability-partner/

Moreover, as per inverted firm’s ecosystem concept, success comes with finding the right partner which is suitable for respective business priority and current technology landscape rather than choosing the most cost-effective leading product as per Gartner or any other matrix. Considering all of this, role of System Integration companies is key. It also elevates the Product Engineering practices at enterprises.

When I say Product engineering, is nothing but looking at the problem to solve rather processes to follow to engineer. To elaborate it further – Traditional enterprises work in projectized manner with clearly define requirements and then development testing followed by implementation and job done. Product engineering practice makes it a level up playing field where the outcome is important not the requirements at the start. Implementing the change is not the end but optimizing the impact will be the focus. That’s how products evolve. Classic example is Ms-Office, newer versions are kept on coming, sometimes changes are radical, sometimes minuscules but the most important focus is to maximize user base and thus revenue while keeping existing customers happy. Can we co-relate this with a retail banking mobile app or trade finance systems – why not?

To summarize, inverted firms are those who have the right mindset, management focus to choose the right partners and have the right partnership engagement. At technology front, going beyond traditional barriers, evaluating partners for the value they may bring in, commitment to outcome and more importantly how well they can amalgamate product engineering practices, working with the larger partner ecosystem would be the key to success.

P.S. – Same article was published at my LinkedIn account for better reach. Link for the same is Link

 

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