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I believe that the professional service firms have reached an inflection point where dramatic, even knee-jerk, change is required to survive, let alone grow. It’s time for them to embrace “disrupt or die” mantra like no tomorrow. They must shake off the "shackles" of traditional corporate structures to be more agile and exploit the possibilities of digital era whose dawn upon is no longer imminent. We are in the midst of one!

With the exponential rate of change, led by technological innovation, I predict that 2015 will alter the face of the professional services companies forever. Companies that embark on the path of disruption will survive and, indeed, grow. Others will quickly (within 2 – 3 years) become part of also-ran statistics.

Below are my Top 5 recommendations for organizations offering professional services to survive and thrive in the era of digital disruption. Indeed, some of the recommendation may seem clichéd but even these take on a new color when looked through digital lens. The recommendations are:

Embrace disruption: The world is indeed flat and the digital disruption has made it even more flat, smaller and dynamic. With practically non-existent barrier to entry, new entrants are challenging / disrupting the existing business models across most sectors. The list of companies in search of new identity is endless and counting; and it cuts across sectors and regions.

I believe that the days are over for stable business models. Actually, successful digital organizations will embrace disruption and be willing to disrupt themselves many times over– they will have dynamically changing business models.

Innovate: Build capability to enable client organizations’ to capture fleeting opportunities, adjust quickly to rapid changes in the external environment or to be first to market – grow and transform.

The innovation capability will offer clients an ecosystem consisting of practical expertise of ALL emerging technologies; an established and robust network of thought leaders; and a community of innovators. Clients’ will use this either as an extension of their internal innovation lab or they will “loan” it to plug into the ecosystem.

Think Customer: Let us again make customer the center of corporate strategy. But, with a twist!. It is the end-users who need to be the focus. The professional services companies should embark on an exercise to understand the customers-of-customer like never before. The changing profile of the end-users due to digital exposure and, thus, proficiency has created a yawning gap between the solution designers and the solution users. Whilst services firms should develop understanding of the customers’ expectations through multiple PoC’s in future technologies, they must also try and bridge the developer-user gap through focused training and hiring strategies. Gen Z and Gen Y developers are likely to think more like the users!

Build UI/UX capability: 91% of the business leaders believe that customer experience will be the ONLY competitive factor in 2-3 years’ time that will drive customer loyalty. In an era where the average attention span of users in about 7 seconds, UI/UX capability will be a critical value-add for services companies to improve customer engagement. Translating business requirements into digital solutions (not just technical solutions) is the Achilles’ heel of digitization for most services companies.

I predict that this gap will be filled either through partnerships with regional UI/UX specialists OR sprouting of regional UI/UX teams in global services companies.

Do more with less – utilize bench: Traditionally services firms operate at 70% - 80% utilization. I believe this presents an unique opportunity to build a community model to utilize the bench for creating PoC’s in emerging technologies. Turbo charged by passion, this will improve the firm’s capability in the emerging technologies and spread innovation within the firm to include every employee.

Hopefully these tips will help you to better your business’ ability to not only to deal