There are many reasons why tech companies are increasingly relying on the services of consultants, the most important being that working with tech consultants helps create an ecosystem of capabilities. Accenture transformation report of 2019 shows that 75 percent of businesses do not feel confident in their capacity to implement digital transformation, hereas
50 percent of customers demand hyper-personalisation. Successfully filling this gap requires tapping into a broader knowledge base.
A broader and rounded perspective
With the right consultant partner, tech companies are able to maintain focus on their core value proposition, while taking advantage of broader transformational capabilities such partnership brings. This could mean merging technology and process with other fields such as design thinking, behavioural economics, social psychology, environmental science, semiotics, learning development, etc.
To build a sustainable business it is no longer enough to develop something cool. Tech consultants help companies think broadly about their products and services and develop product roadmaps that can deliver value to consumers across value chains of various industry ecosystems. As the nature of technology is constant evolution, having a trusted innovation
advisor on the side of an SME is vital, as they would be able to have a personalised strategy that would help them uncover the optimal solution for their toughest business problems.
Beyond pure tech
While technology is ubiquitous, value is not. The gap between investments in tech innovation and the achieved value could be disastrous for an SME. It is a contributing factor to the death of young companies. This insight is the reason many large tech companies, including Croatian Infobip, use experts in specialised non-technology areas such as financial management, wellness, personal development, operations, strategy, etc., both in-house and externally, to drive cohesion and growth. Such consultants help tech SMEs to provide value to their customers and increase the speed of adoption of their products.
Keep up with changing times
The Silicon Valley mentality of “move fast and break things” famously articulated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is shown to have created and amplified many societal problems. Despite how attractive the financial opportunities provided by such hypergrowth might seem, that era is over.
With the global focus now on sustainability, inclusivity and social responsibility, innovation is both an opportunity and a threat. The question becomes how technology companies must plan for the long-term and still maintain their agility? Intech Ventures supports innovative product/service offerings in ways that include testing for potential effect on stakeholders, and built-in safeguards against potential harmful impacts. This is because keeping companies accountable while they scale up, mitigates future sustainability risks.
For example, an innovative digital company should have a framework for responsibly leveraging data and AI. To counteract the potentially damaging impact of AI bias, such businesses should not create black-box AI if they would like to maintain adoption rate, cooperation of regulators, and consumer trust. Innovators should also be able to clearly explain in lay terms, why their complex algorithms tend to reach the conclusions that they do. The increasing cases of consumer outrage regarding unforeseen personal data collection and usage by companies is a clear indicator of the accountability trend.
Creating value while maintaining the trust of consumers is critical. Only companies that can think in terms of broader, integrated systems, as opposed to short-term or point-solutions, will be in a position to outperform their competitors and achieve sustainable growth. And for that, they need the right consultant partner at their side.
