The Change Paradox: How Legacy Service Providers Are Hindering Digital Transformation

My experience is that:

“The rate of change inside of organizations exceeds the rate of change of their service providers.”

Digital transformation is not new and has long been a priority for many organizations. Despite the widespread adoption of transformation initiatives, many organizations have still not been able to achieve their intended business outcomes. ?

This is partly due to a paradoxical situation in which the rate and pace of change inside their own organization exceeds the rate and pace of change within their service providers. The inability of service providers to transform themselves leads to a significant impediment for organizations to acheive their own digital transformation objectives.

For years, business leaders have been heeding the advice of Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, who famously stated that:

"if the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near."

This warning, often at the prompting of legacy service providers, has been the impetus for many organizations to invest in digital transformation initiatives. The truth is that traditional service providers, which organizations depend on to execute transformation projects, have not undergone their own transformation and have not adopted new ways of working.

Legacy service providers are those that have been around for a long time and have entrenched themselves as "trusted partners" for organizations.

• These providers often have obsolete structures, operating models, and ways of working.
• They lack the capability, agility, and velocity required to keep up with the rapidly changing business and technology landscape.

This leads to delays, increased costs, and ultimately, failure to achieve the desired outcomes of digital transformation initiatives.

It’s not that these legacy service providers do not have great people. They do!

Their structures and operating models are just too complex and cumbersome to unlock the full potential of their people.

To overcome the change paradox, organizations need to seek out service providers that embrace modern ways of working, and have deep expertise in cloud native technologies, with an operating model that accelerates time to value.

These are adaptive organizations that are nimble to the ever changing business and technology landscape.

Modern services providers are fiercely human, outcome focused, data driven, product centric, and can operate with agility and velocity at scale.?

They understand how to use new ways of working that accelerate time to value by unifying design, product, and engineering through a human first lens.

If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got.?– Henry Ford.

Is it time for your organization to transition away from legacy service providers, and embrace a new way or working?

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Conversations with Myself - A Blog Series

We are the sum of our life’s experiences. Throughout my life, I have been fortunate to have learned some lessons about humanity, and I have applied those lessons to leadership. I am sharing them with the hope that it can make a positive impact on someone, somewhere—starting with my two daughters.

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