Transformation is meaningful when we focus on Business Outcomes

As our CMO, Jeff had pointed out in a recent blog, Altimetrik is a great story and our work has resonated with our clients, fueling double-digit growth year after year.

As we continue to evolve rapidly and take on new challenges helping clients get unstuck in their transformation efforts, I felt it is time to take a step back and look at what has made us so successful. And a large part of that has to do with the way we focus relentlessly on business outcomes.

The Four Key Areas of Investment in Technology and Digital Business

In my observation, any time a company chooses to make an investment in technology or business transformation, they are looking at reaping benefits in one of these 4 areas: revenue growth, operational efficiency, customer experience, and competitive differentiation (see figure).

Even as we work with our clients on incremental improvements and prove out ideas, we focus on customer experience and outcomes. We pay attention to how the work we do matters to the customers of our clients and how these lead to tangible business outcomes.
We need to remember that any transformation initiative could impact a business in a number of ways and consider how they could manifest into outcomes.

For example, we were engaged by a Leader in Digital Payments to migrate their Risk database to a newer version of the product to ensure that the software vendor would continue to support it. This seems like straight-forward effort with support cost reduction as the likely business outcome. However, we took a broader persperstive and looked at outcomes in a more holistic manner.

We ended up delivering comprehensive outcomes including an scalable platform supporting 7x their payment volume eliminating future investment costs (Operational Efficiency), smarter methods for critical deployments that eliminate customer down-times – now adopted across the enterprise (Customer Experience) and the ability to launch payment products faster by significantly reducing dependency on the Risk systems for testing (Competitive Differentiation). These outcomes were in addition to the goal of a $5 million reduction in the original total cost of ownership (TCO) that was achieved midway thorugh the project.

Also read:  Digital Business vs. Digital Transformation: Understanding the Key Differences

Driving Business Impact: Incremental Improvement Approach Unveiled

While having a focus on business outcomes is what makes such results possible, our philosophy of taking an incremental improvement approach is equally important. This is what allows us to ensure that we consistently focus on the next small win. Added together these small wins lead to a much greater impact to our client’s bottom line. Each stage of this process ends with a successful business benefit while simultaneously keeping our eyes open to the potential for broader, better business outcomes delivered in a safe, secure, and timely manner.

As each incremental outcome opens the door to the next, the velocity and the magnitude of change also increases with improved certainty and higher efficiency. This in turn catalyzes cultural change as these incremental, but tangible wins become a greater influence for companies to deliver what their customers want – better products and service experience.

We have invested extensively in Innovation and Transformation Platforms, Digital Talent Connects, Engineering Environments, Digital Culture Clubs and Innovation Labs. As an organization, our success is largely predicated on our continued ability to parlay all of these eventually into tangible business outcomes for our clients (and in turn, their customers) in a predictable, repeatable manner.