Why ADM done right means more for your business – in every way

Given that in any large enterprise, the business value from IT is delivered largely through applications, there’s immense pressure on ADM teams to deliver value that’s measurable to the business. Pace layering of applications based on Gartner’s model can help teams cope with this pressure and yield some interesting results.

Traditional applications will continue to exist, but at the lowest level of the IT stack as systems of record. While newer age applications that make real functional sense, add real business value, and create real competitive advantage will function as the systems of engagement and innovation that will occupy the top of the stack. These could be applications that provide insights and data, or AI/ML-based or IoT/Cloud orchestration applications. They could also include vertical-specific, function-specific, mobile, commerce, or consumer experience-focused applications. Over a five-year horizon, these applications could see exponential growth – both in terms of spend and user adaption.

Given that these are new applications, the skill sets that are required by ADM suppliers to manage, maintain, and support them are completely different when compared to traditional applications. For example, applications in the analytics space require service providers to have knowledge of the complete IT stack in the analytics area. This means starting from the lowest level of gathering data from structured and unstructured sources, data integration, data ingestion to a lake, the analytics engine, and all the way to final data representation using dashboards and rich visualization techniques.

Today, this is a super specialized skill set. But a decade ago, it was almost unthinkable for ADM teams to possess a skill set around the complete IT stack. The areas identified above were always considered specialized areas with niche skills, premium billing, and scarce resources. Similarly, ten years ago, mobile applications were literally nonexistent in the IT stacks of large enterprises. While today, any large enterprise will have hundreds of mobile applications spanning B2B, B2C, B2E, B2S, and a host of different permutations and combinations around suppliers, employees, customers, consumers, governments, and citizens, etc.

Again, the skill sets that are required to manage these mobile applications are broad – they require ADM teams to have solid knowledge of both server-side technologies (OS, webserver, web framework, and database and programming languages) and client-side technologies (native code development, Angular JS, CSS, etc.).

The above examples, which only represent the tip of the iceberg, give a good perspective on ADM’s expanded role within the enterprise. As service providers, solely convincing clients on the potential of offshoring, low cost, or bench strength won’t cut it anymore. New-age applications are the future here – and require new thinking, a new mindset, and value-based discussions.

In the context of services, value can only be manifested in the form of credible IPs that can help customers save costs or add revenue. Capgemini has built a huge set of these value IPs, which are represented in the periodic table of ADMnext’s portfolio. The elements in this table have proven themselves as credible tools and have placed Capgemini in a different league of service providers. In this new apps-driven world, we see ourselves more of a “technology services provider,” rather than an “IT services provider.”

To summarize, the ADM portfolio of an enterprise is always growing. This entails newer technologies that require updated knowledge of the fresh IT stack – and this means that service providers must shift from a “IT services” mindset to a “technology services” one.

This blog is authored by Pavan Prabhakar, Senior Director – Solution Architect for AMS deals.