An interview with James Spence, Business Process Manager in Computacenter’s Services business. James has been with Computacenter for more than ten years, and led a strategic initiative to deploy standard processes and methods for the past five years.
MG: Can we start please with a quick overview on Computacenter Services?
James Spence: we deliver IT Services and Solutions to clients predominantly across EMEA, and via a partner network throughout the world. Over a period of thirty years, Computacenter has grown to 10,000 people with revenues of around $4bn – and Managed Services is at its heart. Our Group annual services contract base grew over 9 per cent to £503 million last year despite the paralysis following the Lehman collapse.
We are rapidly shifting from being EMEA-centric to being global - in the clients we are serving and the geographies we are present. We deliver Managed Services from locations in Spain, Germany, France, Benelux, Malaysia, UK and via partners in the USA.
MG: What’s the outlook for IT managed services?
James Spence: Very encouraging. We are seeing bigger deals with bigger clients, in an expanding marketplace. And clients’ expectations are shifting. They are increasingly looking for ‘utility computing’ solutions but within a collaborative relationship with a trusted partner. They are looking for an IT Operations partner that can deliver service excellence at the right price – but with innovation as well.
MG: Why is it so important to standardise processes and methods?
James Spence: It’s fundamental to our success. Clients want consistency across everything we deliver. They want services that are globally seamless across all our delivery locations. But they also want customisation. There will always be aspects of any managed service that they will want to tailor.
Standardization is the key. It is the only way that we can deliver service excellence within a cost structure that makes sense for us and our clients.
I often use the car industry as an example: As you drive down the motorway it’s rare to see two identical cars, irrespective of the length of journey. When you look beyond their basic appearance, and start to think about how they are built, many of them share underpinning components, engines, chassis etc. As a result car companies can drive down cost of manufacture to create low cost, reliable, efficient vehicles, which customers can tailor - within limits - to meet their individual requirements, and all sold at a price that customers find attractive.
When the new Fiat 500 was launched a couple of years ago, the website configurator boasted that, via a series of standard options, a prospective customer could create in the region of half a million different versions of the car. All of which would be built in the same factory, using the same process.
This is very similar to the conflicts I see customers for IT outsourcing go through. They have a business case to acquire low-cost, reliable, efficient, ITIL-aligned best practice standards, but they still want them to be completely tailored to meet their requirements.
In automotive, it’s called mass customisation. When we started on this journey five years ago, we called it the Shared Services Factory. At its heart are similar concepts of reliable, efficient, configurable standard services, which we nowadays refer to as 'Industrialisation'.
MG: In practical terms - how do you do Industrialization?
James Spence: the cornerstone is ‘Knowhow’ which is the process repository we use to support activities right across the lifecycle. Built on Nimbus Control, it is the single source of truth for sales people, service designers, Business Take-On (BTO) Project Managers and service delivery teams.
‘Knowhow’ provides visibility of the end-to-end processes used across our business. So it shows, for instance, how we get from an initial customer enquiry through to a customer “Going Live” with a new service. It also contains our Services Portfolio and our ITIL services Blueprints.
These Blueprints are our standard ITIL offerings, which are customised in workshops with each customer during the BTO process. Going back to the automotive example, the ‘Knowhow’ service Blueprints are like the standard car that the client configures to their exact requirements.
MG: How does it work for the prospective client?
James Spence: customers these days are well educated about ITIL – we all read the same books. But they usually sense a tension between needing ‘vanilla’ ITIL best practices and wanting a bespoke solution.
With our approach, there is no conflict. From the ‘Knowhow’ ITIL aligned service Blueprints we can easily develop lower level processes, with customer specific documents and Storyboards attached, reflecting the detail of their particular circumstances, but within the boundaries of the Blueprints.
Once the final version of the Blueprint is complete, customised to the client’s exact requirements, it is that client’s service manual – published and managed in ‘Knowhow’.
It works well for clients. They don’t want a bulky Word document for a service manual. They want secure online access to an agreed definition of exactly who is doing what, and within a joint governance framework for managing change.
MG: What has been the client feedback?
James Spence: extremely positive. We won a very competitive bid last year in part because we were able to differentiate ourselves by demonstrating with ‘Knowhow’ exactly how we would deliver the customer requirement and ITIL Best Practice concurrently.
Customers like the consultative approach of the Blueprint customisation, and they like the service manual being online and interactive.
And I know all this because my sales colleagues keep asking me to present! Even just two years ago, this was still seen as the domain of the process geek. Now its value is appreciated by customers, so it’s competitive advantage.
MG: So what have been the challenges?
James Spence: it was difficult to explain the ‘Knowhow’ vision at first, so it was hard to generate excitement and progress was slow. Now that people can see the benefits for customers, it is more like a whirlwind. Everything is moving, and at pace. It’s become more like changing the oil in an engine while the car is in fast lane.
One of my current challenges, for instance, is ensuring that the benefits of our ongoing Industrialisation innovations in ‘Knowhow’ are made available quickly to our existing client base, not just to our newest clients.
MG: What are your priorities for this year?
James Spence: I’ve got three priorities this year. First, to make customer access to ‘Knowhow’ the new standard. We started cautiously, with some pioneering clients, and I deliberately restricted demand until we were completely comfortable that we could cope with scale. We’re now through that, and set to transform the client experience into a much more online real-time collaborative relationship.
My second priority is to tap into our increasing maturity in leveraging Sharepoint, so that ‘Knowhow’ is seamlessly integrated with Sharepoint as a single KM environment across all our geographies.
And finally, but equally important: I am working to develop our internal capabilities so that we have a federated governance model for ‘Knowhow’. As we expand our global footprint, we have to manage ‘Knowhow’ locally but always with global accountability because it underpins our consistent delivery of service.
MG: And beyond this year - what’s the future?
James Spence: coping with growth! Next year, I suspect that languages may be the focus. We want to be able to leverage Control’s multi-language support to be able to use ‘Knowhow’ in many languages – while still maintaining a robust and effective governance framework. And since we already support clients in twenty languages, it’s going to be an interesting year!
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