Organisations must develop and deploy applications and services quickly if they want to ensure customer experience remains a key differentiator.
This is according to managed services provider (MSP) Claranet who states that the faster an organisation can improve its applications, the better chance they have of meeting customer demands and gaining a competitive advantage.
According to Gartner, 89% of marketers expect customer experience to be their primary differentiator in 2017. For Michel Robert, managing director at Claranet UK, IT leaders have an important role to play with many starting to focus their efforts on developing team capability around application development and data management.
He commented: “Applications and data are critical differentiators for businesses to gain a competitive advantage. The best IT teams demonstrate an outward-facing mindset and have moved closer to the frontline of the business, with an emphasis on how they can contribute to customer experience improvement.
Despite this, research from Claranet reveals that IT departments in the UK only spend 8% of their time on innovation, with the vast majority still concentrating their efforts on operational projects and maintenance tasks.
Michel Robert added: “A key priority for companies today is to build flexibility, agility and the right security into their IT environments and so that their IT teams can drive innovation to respond to changing customer behaviour and requirements.
But this can only be achieved if the IT department is able to offload tasks. Vitally, this approach enables companies to rapidly develop new applications and services that meet customers’ demands as quickly as they shift, ultimately allowing for a seamless customer experience.
“To ensure the maximum benefits for customers are achieved, it’s time for organisations to review where their applications and data are located, whether that’s public cloud, private cloud, or on-premise. Having applications and data managed in the right location enables organisations to continually optimise availability, performance, security, scalability and cost.
“But for IT teams to fully support the business to their full capability, they need a way to handle the day-to-day technical management and infrastructure maintenance with less time and effort. To this end, working with trusted third parties who have deep expertise in designing, deploying and managing both public cloud and hosted platforms, can help reduce the burden of these tasks.
Firstly, by freeing up the IT department to be proactive and contribute directly to the business’s future objectives. And secondly, by architecting the best possible solution for their applications.
“Ultimately, winning businesses will be the ones who are focused on making amazing applications that deliver the optimal customer experience. This is achieved through continuous improvement to ensure these applications are hosted in the correct environment,” concluded Mr Robert.
Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @ VanillaPlus OR @jcvplus
