Making sense of changes to strategize for the future
Kathleen Galvin , Vice-President, Consulting Services, shares the value of the Voice of Our Clients (VOC) program and early insights from client conversations this year, including how the human side of change continues to remain a top focus as organizations retrench and regroup to navigate uncertain times ahead.
We often turn our attention to macro-economic and social conditions impacting business - whether it’s the war in Ukraine and ensuing energy crisis, a flattening demand curve in China, broader recessionary indicators for the second half, capital drying up as companies wait out uncertainty on the sidelines or continuing spotty supply chain recovery.?
Still, as I engage C-level executives during my share of CGI’s broader Voice of Our Clients (VOC) conversations, the human and organizational dimensions are once again center-stage. Comments about tensions and pivots - stresses on the operation itself - came up numerous times this year.?
Every year, as part of VOC conversations and subsequent findings, we seek out parallels across industries, public sector to private, to identify trends and patterns. CGI looks for anomalies and standouts across close to 2,000 one-on-one executive conversations, where we work to understand how our clients contend with challenges, new and old - what success looks like and how they are getting there, including with our help.
Invariably, frontline business implications are playing out.?
My clients speak of renewed attention to “frictionless” engagement, particularly to mitigate staffing challenges. They talk about services “beyond the four walls,” whether in post-discharge healthcare or food delivery. They even point to anti-patterns: a perplexing reticence to embrace digitization among buyers of more traditional goods (home renovations, for example) - even among Millennials and GenZ; or they speak of a flood of willing and able candidate hires hailing from the likes of Meta, Alphabet and Amazon.
But what they all circle back to this year, just as they did last year, is closer to home: governance, accountability and well-being.?
Three years in – retrenchment and regrouping
One of my clients, a public sector CIO, shared a striking perspective. Speaking of the pandemic and rapid-fire digitization, he said, “We grew 10 years in two.” Then he drew an analogy with his son, who stands 6’6”. “He grew a foot in a year,” my client said, “and it was painful for his body.”?
“Our growth has been painful for us.”?
For this organization, as for many, changes that might have spanned years happened over a matter of weeks. Resources were stretched. New responsibilities, risks, exposures and new ways of working materialized overnight.
Today, in the endemic period of COVID, we recall the transformative impact of its early disruptions; and what I hear in the after-period is a level of retrenchment and regrouping. “We’re making sure,” one client said, “we understand the business we’re in.”?
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Rethinking people management and ways of working
Most still speak of competition for talent and broader resource constraints due to demographic shifts and retirements:?
Some clients are shifting focus from business-to-business (B2B) to blended B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) engagement. They’re changing how they use (and bill for) employees - selling discrete services versus blanket fees. They’re organizing by focus areas rather than by departments. They’re exploring new ways of working and collaborating.
Making sense of the changes
From January to April, when we conduct the annual VOC interviews, we’re deliberate and structured in how we invite feedback, so we can compare insights year-over-year. With a baseline and years of data in hand, we focus on how digital leaders are behaving and try to understand the position of those with a long road of modernization still ahead.?
CGI synthesizes what we learn by industry and region, playing back trends at the global and regional levels and within business and technology. What we learn helps us and our clients make sense of changes to trends and priorities and better anticipate and strategize our next moves.
I look forward to sharing this year’s VOC insights. Please reach out if you’d like to engage in our global dialogue.
Learn more about how the VOC program can help you gain insights you can act on
Every year, CGI leaders meet with business and IT executives to gather their perspectives on the trends affecting their enterprises. These industry insights - including the attributes of digital leaders - lead to actions to best satisfy the needs of your customers and citizens.
Voice of Our Clients gathers our clients’ perspectives on the trends affecting their enterprises. Learn more about the?VOC program .
More insights from leaders around the world
Several CGI leaders and experts around the world share the value the VOC program brings to their clients in this article series: