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The level of technology adoption across the professional services industry varies dramatically, from IT consultancies making full use of advanced systems and applications to small law practices running on paper-based systems.
Yet replacing postal services with email and computerising customer records does not guarantee better quality, or even faster, collaboration between companies, customers and employees.
Implementing a truly collaborative environment requires several areas to be addressed and issues to be overcome. IDC surveyed professional services companies across Europe, and found that their top priorities in terms of business initiatives and ICT strategies included several aspects of collaboration.
Around a third of professional services CIOs say that intrinsically collaborative items such as the improvement of their ICT organization's responsiveness, the increased efficiency of their supply chain, and the enablement of an ever-mobile workforce are their leading business initiatives (Figure 1).
These initiatives underline the urgent need professional services companies have to develop effective collaborative applications, along with suitable underlying systems and networks.
Achieving the benefits of collaboration in the professional services industry is affected by several factors, including the following.
- Real-time interaction — Interacting with customers, partners and a range of stakeholders in real-time is now a basic requirement to retain competitive positioning in the professional services industry. Yet the growing number of stakeholders in a typical professional services project, their increasing geographic diversity, and the speed with which partnerships are formed and dissolved, all pose challenges to a collaboration system. As a consequence of this increasing complexity, it is imperative that CIOs keep on top of advances in technology and related services.
Knowledge-intensive business — Knowledge sharing and knowledge management are key issues for the industry and therefore the reliance on person-to-person communication is an essential issue.
- Developing talent — Highly people-intensive professional services organisations need to attract and retain talent, and also train staff in-house. In the context of an increasing shortage of skilled professionals, collaborative solutions are essential to ensure that knowledge and experience are widely spread among junior professionals. In addition, highly competitive, technologically advanced firms tend to retain their most talented professionals, mitigating the need for expensive staff hiring and training.
- Security — Security is of prime importance and boundaries need to be put in place. In particular, policies need to strictly regulate access to data and information. This is due to the changing nature of the modern security threat, where the main risks now come from within the organisation itself rather than from any external threat such as viruses or malicious code.
- Workforce mobility — Professional services organisations need to connect their mobile workforce — engineers on site, lawyers in court, consultants with customers, and so on. In all segments of professional services mobility is a reality and support for them is only growing in importance.
The ICT Perspective
IDC interviewed CIOs and ICT managers in European professional services organisations to identify their top-of-mind ICT priorities and future investment plans (Figure 2).
Security is the top concern, as is the case in most other sectors. Investment in security is not discretionary and usually cannot be delayed because of strict regulatory deadlines. The second priority is industry-specific applications, crucial for services companies as the unique, specialist nature of most professional services segments often requires dedicated technology solutions. In addition, the fact that many ICT vendors have enlarged their offering with applications developed for the specific needs of these companies has helped their widespread adoption.
The next priorities are rated similarly — document and content management, business performance management, CRM and collaborative technologies. The implementation of solutions in these areas is a priority because companies need to improve efficiency and flexibility, to develop control over projects and resource usage, to enhance information sharing within the organisation, and overall to enhance collaboration and consequently the quality of their customer services.
When we look at individual segments in the professional services industry, we see that consulting firms, architects, engineering businesses and IT services companies place collaboration particularly high on their list of priorities.
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