by Jenny Boronyak | Apr 23, 2015 | Collaboration, ITIL and Service Design |
“In this Age of the Customer, the only sustainable competitive advantage is knowledge of and engagement with customers.” – David M. Cooperstein, “Competitive Strategy In The Age Of The Customer,” October 10, 2013. According to Forrester Research, the Age of Information is over and we are now firmly in the Age of the Customer, a time when a strategic focus on the customer matters more than any other imperative. In two insightful reports, The CIO and CMO’s Blueprint For Strategy In The Age Of The Customer, Forrester Research lists the four key strategic imperatives that are necessary to establish a competitive advantage in today’s customer-driven marketplace. Every service organization should be following these four imperatives: Focus on the customer experience. In the Age of the Customer, if we’re not strategically focused on designing and continuously improving a valuable customer experience, it is impossible to compete with the top companies in the industry. With all of the digital technologies and disruptions, today’s customer is more empowered than ever. The only way we can anticipate the needs of today’s customer and develop valuable service experiences that excite and delight is to become “customer-obsessed.” The definition of being “customer-obsessed,” according to Forrester Research: “A customer-obsessed enterprise focuses its strategy, its energy, and its budget on processes that enhance knowledge of and engagement with customers and prioritizes these over maintaining traditional competitive barriers.” – Kyle McNabb and Josh Bernoff, “The CMO’s Blueprint For Strategy In The Age Of The Customer,” September 12, 2014. To become customer-obsessed and successfully create excellent customer experiences, we need to improve the way we design all aspects of...
by Jenny Boronyak | Feb 11, 2015 | ITIL and Service Design, Product Development |
When we’re designing new solutions for our customers, it can be easy to get caught up in the products and features we create and neglect to ensure that what we are building actually ends up delivering value to our customers. It can be challenging to acquire the necessary deep understanding of what our customers consider valuable. Value Proposition Design, described in the book of the same name written by Alexander Osterwalder, et. al., is great for organizations who are overwhelmed by the task of creating value for customers, a task which can be incredibly difficult without the proper guidance. According to the authors of this useful method, value proposition design helps people “successfully understand the patterns of value creation” by making them easily visible. Following this method, we don’t just end up designing products, but rather entire value propositions that directly effectively target our customers’ jobs, pains, and gains. In the book, the authors describe tools that can be used to continuously create and improve value propositions that meet customer expectations. One of the most useful tools that can be applied to discover value propositions is the Value Proposition Canvas. The Value Proposition Canvas is made up of two sides: Customer Profile—This part clarifies our customer understanding Value Map—This part describes how we intend to create value for our customer The goal is to achieve “Fit” between the two sides of the canvas by ensuring one agrees with the other. The Customer Profile, or Customer Segment Profile, describes a specific customer segment by breaking it down into customer jobs, pains, and gains. Identify these three items to create a...
by Jenny Boronyak | Dec 29, 2014 | Business Analysis, ITIL and Service Design |
As organizations search for new ways to deliver solutions and increase customer satisfaction, many have turned to the discipline of IT service design. But still, many organizations haven’t made the transformation yet—big mistake! Don’t take our word for it; hear what the experts have to say about what exactly service design is, and why it is so important to the success of the company: What is service design? “The objective of ITIL Service Design is to design new IT services. The scope of Service Design includes the design of new services, as well as changes and improvements to existing ones… Service Design identifies service requirements and devises new service offerings as well as changes and improvements to existing ones.” – IT Infrastructure Library “Service design is sometimes easiest to grasp when contrasted with product design. Product designers create tangible things such as bikes, cars, coffee machines, MP3 players, and laptops. Service designers create intangible experiences, such as the series of interactions that you have as you book a flight, pay a bill, get a driver’s license, or visit a doctor. Service designers also design the behind-the-scenes activities that enable those experiences to be delivered as planned.” – Kristina Dervojeda, et. al., Design for Innovation: Service design as a means to advance business models “Service design applies design methods and craft to the definition and orchestration of service experiences. Service design examines the operations, culture, and structure of an organization for impact on service experience.” – Jamin Hegeman, 5 Things I Wish I Knew: A Service Design Journey “Service design is a relatively new discipline that asks some fundamental questions:...
by Jenny Boronyak | May 2, 2014 | ITIL and Service Design, Uncategorized |
When we attended Knowledge14 in San Francisco earlier this week, one thing we noticed is how amazingly far organizations have gotten in adopting IT Service Management (ITSM). But while it does seem organizations have caught onto the fact that moving towards ITSM provides a lot of value, many have still not yet adopted or placed enough emphasis on the ITIL practices of Service Strategy and Service Design. This is a huge mistake, as ITIL offers valuable guidelines to service providers on the best ways to design and maintain services for the business. Image from ITIL Service Design One of those guidelines is to create a Service Design Package (SDP). It seems that many new service providers either neglect the SDP or create one that’s lacking in all the necessary elements. However, creating an SDP ensures your services are designed well, and according to the authors of ITIL Service Design “the better and more careful the design, the better the solution taken into live operation,” so creating a SDP is not a step you want to skip The Service Design Package (SDP) follows a service through its lifecycle from initial proposal to retirement. It contains all the information required to manage an IT service. The SDP specifies the requirements from the viewpoint of the client (not IT) and defines how these are actually fulfilled from a technical and organizational point of view. When created properly, SDPs bring a lot of value to the business. A SDP… Improves the quality of services Improves decision-making Makes implementation of new or changed services easier Improves alignment of services to the business Makes service...
by Enfocus Solutions | Apr 17, 2014 | Agile, ITIL and Service Design, Uncategorized |
Join us for two of the newest webinars in our Enfocus Solutions webinar series! Agile Business Transformation May 15th 2014 at 12 PM Eastern Standard Time (US & Canada) Agile has become mainstream for developing software. Organizations that have adopted agile have seen improvements in quality, cycle time, and customer satisfaction. Standish Group research shows that agile projects are three times more successful than traditional plan driven projects. However using Agile Development practices does not make an agile organization. Frequent delivery of software provides little value if the software cannot be deployed because of rigid release and change management processes. Another significant challenge facing enterprises is how to coordinate agile teams across multiple projects in multi-disciplined environments. Companies are appointing agile coaches to individual projects, but there is little or no company-wide coordination. In addition, little has been done to help transform the business to be able to respond more rapidly to change. Agile transformation requires focus on four key areas: Agile Discovery Agile Delivery DevOps Agile Business Change In this webinar, John Parker will address these four topics with heavy emphasis on Agile Discovery and Agile Business Change. He will also discuss how BAs and PMs will need to transform to operate in the agile environment. Target Audience: PMOs, Agile Project Managers, Agile Business Analysts, Enterprise Portfolio Managers, and Product Owners Agile & ITIL June 10th 2014 at 12 PM Eastern Standard Time (US & Canada) At first Agile and ITIL seem at odds because of the rigid release and change management process of ITIL and the rapid delivery of software in agile. However, the two frameworks are actually...
by John Parker | Mar 19, 2014 | Business Analysis, ITIL and Service Design, Project Management, Uncategorized |
Lately, Marketing has been purchasing a significant amount more of marketing-related technology and services using their own capital and expense budgets. Some of this purchasing is being done outside the control of the internal IT organization and some is being done in conjunction with IT. Gartner has made the bold prediction that by 2017, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. Let’s look at some of the facts from the Gartner 2013 US Marketing Spend Survey: The average percentage of revenue spent on marketing is 10.4 % Digital Marketing represents 1/3 of Total Marketing Spend Up to Half of all Digital Marketing is Outsourced Search Marketing topped the CMO’s list of Outsourced Activities Over 40% claim that the keys to Marketing success are 1) Corporate Web Site, 2)Social Marketing, and 3)Digital Advertising Now, let’s look at some trends of why marketing is spending more and more on technology. First, we are living in the age of the customer. Customers now have real-time information about pricing, product features and competitors. As a result, they hold the advantages, and one of the few competitive advantages remaining for businesses is to concentrate on the knowledge of and engagement with customers. Josh Bernoff, a Forrester Research analyst stated in a recent report that companies must not only be customer focused, they must be customer obsessed, focusing their strategy, energy, and budget on processes that enhance knowledge of engagement with customers. Implementing a customer based strategy falls under marketing for most companies. For the last 10 years, many organizations focused on Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Now the focus is on marketing...
