Build Strong Digital Transformation Partnerships

GM of Professional Services Jim Sargent explains why you should find partners to help plan and execute digital transformation initiatives. Find out the ideal traits of a partnership and learn how Micro Focus Professional Services can help with your transformation. 

It’s a people thing

I met my wife in the early 90s at the same time I became one of the first partner managers for a large tech company. As I began building the relationship with my future wife, I was also building relationships with new business partners.  Looking back, it’s striking how similar the process of building these strong partnerships  really was. Of course, the evolution of my relationship with my wife was less structured than my business plans to build relationships with my business partners, but the process of Identifying and aligning fundamental values are essential when beginning any partnership.  Ultimately You must have trust, commitment, and a desire to make each other successful. 

Since then, the tech industry has experienced seismic shifts. And we can expect even more change as catalysts, such as Digital Natives, cause organizations to accelerate digital transformation. Building strong, high-value, long lasting partnerships is even more critical now than ever.

Why build partnerships for digital transformation?

Some 70 percent of organizations are involved in some type of digital transformation. They know digital transformation isn’t simple. It happens through the culmination of smaller projects that overlap—projects that involve many people with differing priorities. Wrangling these moving parts without help is daunting.

Digital transformation requires a broad set of expertise and intellectual property (IP), much of which typically doesn’t reside in-house. According to a 2021 report, many leaders report “insufficient internal skills” as their main challenge. To overcome these skills gaps, IT leaders need to form partnerships that bring new points of view and offer proven, methodical, and secure approaches. But you’ll need to carefully select who can help, because your requirements are unique, your transformational objectives significant, and your business is constantly changing. Tackling that dilemma is not easy.

What to look for in partnerships

The scope and scale of any transformational journey means partnership selection is critical. Build partnerships that include these values:

• Customer-focused: Your partners’ solutions should align with your business goals.
• Comprehensive: Deep knowledge and hands-on experience are musts.
• Flexible: Partners should support your strategic decisions, not lock you into a one-size-fits-all solution.

Partner with Micro Focus Professional Services

We’re ready to start a digital transformation partnership with you. Our Professional Services experts can work with you to validate strategies, implement solutions, and realize the value of digital transformation. Let’s look at how we nurture strong partnerships through our services.

Customer-Focused

Our Strategy and Value Discovery workshops focus on your business needs and are technology agnostic. Together, we assess and visualize business use cases using journey maps. These activities show the manual, integrated, automated, or autonomous interactions and timelines between customers and IT for today, tomorrow, and the day after.

Comprehensive

We bring expertise and experience so you can be confident in our joint results and their impact on your business. Our digital transformation use cases, methodologies, and accelerators are the basis for streamlining your IT factory. Most of them meet the industry standard from The Open Group’s IT4IT™ reference architecture. Using journey maps supports your digital transformation and increases the value of IT in incremental steps.

Next, we prioritize these use cases and journey maps with you. We then compose a roadmap in different maturity levels, separated into features with prescriptive items. Features define how you’ll manage organizational change, grounding technology, functionality, data, and enablement.

Flexible You can choose to implement these features with our Professional Services delivery organization, your own IT team, or one of our providers. This level of flexibility gives you control over your value-adding investments and initiatives.

Let us join your journey

Fast forward 30 years, I’m still happily married to the same wonderful lady, and I’ve been part of some of the most successful long-term partnerships in the technology industry. Partnerships are not always easy. But when done correctly, they can be the difference between success and failure.

Whether you need help getting your transformation journey started or are looking for managed services to support your team, Micro Focus Professional Services can help.

Learn more about our full range of Advisory, Solution Realization, and Optimization services.

This post was first first published on Home | Micro Focus Blog website by Jim Sargent. You can view it by clicking here