From The Editor | October 17, 2017

Where Is Your Company On The Digital Transformation Continuum?

Sarah Nicastro

By Sarah Nicastro, publisher/editor in chief, Field Technologies
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At the end of September, I had the pleasure of attending WBR’s Field Service Fall event in Amelia Island, Florida. I hosted a panel on digital transformation that included Cisco Technical Services, Diebold Nixdorf, UTC Climate, Controls & Security, and AmTrust Financial. The panelists each shared insights on where their respective companies are at on the digital transformation journey. Digital transformation was surely one of the key themes discussed at the conference.

As summarized by Bill Pollock, president and principal consulting analyst at Strategies For Growth, in his post-even “Analyst’s Take,” the other key themes were connected service/IoT, Augmented Reality/Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, outcome-based service, and dealing with a changing workforce/leveraging a contingent workforce.

For more of a show re-cap, check out Bill’s summary – but on the topic of digital transformation, one of the panelists, John Bunney of Cisco Technical Services, also did his own session on “The Death of Reactive Support.” In this session, he spoke about exactly how digital transformation is poised to address complexity and customer expectations.

Bunney discussed the fact that quality is harder for field service organizations to achieve each year with increased product complexity, convergence, and solution level dependencies; as well as the fact that customer’s expectations are increasing to “cloud-level availability.” He also spoke about the fact that the perception of quality can be influenced by reducing the impact of issues through automation and preemptive support – a key opportunity of digital transformation.

Bunney outlined how Cisco Technician Services views digital transformation – as a continuum. That continuum consists of the following points:

  • Reactive service – monitor, troubleshoot, and fix
  • Proactive service – maintain health, look for known issues, and fix
  • Predictive service – looking for potential future problems
  • Preemptive service – make changes to prevent a problem from occurring
  • Autonomous service – Machine Learning makes changes to prevent a problem from occurring

I thought this continuum was helpful for any service organization to review and consider a few different points:

  • Where is your organization currently at on this continuum?
  • How does that compare with where your competitors are at on this continuum?
  • How does that align with what your customers expect from you?
  • What will it take for you to get to the next level of the continuum, and what steps are in place to enable that progression?
  • Is everyone in your service organization bought in to the fact that your service operations needs to be progressing through this continuum?
  • Are you having regular communications with all relevant stakeholder’s on what needs to happen to get you to your company’s ideal end goal on this continuum?

The digital transformation journey will look different for every field service organization. What’s important is ensuring that the topic is top of mind across your company, and that there is continuous progress being made. It was clear to me from my participation in the event that while each organization on the panel is at different points in this continuum and has different paths to their end goals, digital transformation is a key objective for their companies – and most others at the event. It should be for your organization as well.

If you think you could benefit from seeing your peers speak about their journeys, check out WBR’s Field Service USA happening in April. I’d love to see you there!