According to Gartner, the IT services segment is among the top three highest growth areas in the U.S. technology industry this year.
This increase in IT spending may not sound that surprising—as companies quickly pivoted to focus on expediting digital initiatives in the wake of Covid-19, implementing nimble systems became more essential than ever.
Through this unprecedented growth, the IT services segment is forecasted to total to a whopping $1.2 trillion in 2021, an increase of 9.8% from 2020. “Digital transformation can no longer be purchased overnight, and global IT spending projections reflect that,” says John-David Lovelock, a research vice president at Gartner. “As the world continues to open back up, enterprises will invest in tools that support innovation, anywhere operations, and employee productivity and trust.”
So how are businesses leveraging IT across every function of the business? Here are four use cases that illustrate the strategic, top-to-bottom impact IT can make within an organization:
Make data-driven decisions using an enterprise data sharing hub.
Lydia Clougherty Jones, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, states that, “Data sharing is the way to optimize higher-relevant data, generating more robust data and analytics to solve business challenges and meet enterprise goals.”
By centralizing and enabling immediate access to critical data, an enterprise data hub helps break down business silos that impede effective collaboration and strategy development. As data becomes increasingly critical to achieving business goals, IT can provide crucial support through the creation of an enterprise data hub. This unified data source can quickly provide a variety of business users with the information they need to do their jobs.
Drive stronger marketing-qualified leads to increase your ROI.
According to the Harvard Business Review, your potential customers are seven times more likely to purchase from you if you respond within an hour of them taking some sort of action.
24% of companies take more than 24 hours to respond to customers, while 24% don’t bother responding at all. That’s a lot of potential revenue going to waste.
Enter IT: 82% of marketers reported a positive return on investment (ROI) from implementing marketing automations and have said that it increases their efficiency. Top marketers using artificial intelligence and SaaS solutions (which are often supported by IT or BT teams) are moving towards tasks that result in a stronger financial impact, including improving the hand-off of marketing-qualified leads to sales and retaining existing customers.
Streamline your Order to Cash process to improve relationships with customers.
Order to Cash (O2C) is a critical business process that includes everything from invoicing a new client to performing reconciliation and revenue recognition—essentially everything that goes into collecting revenue.
On a macro level, optimizing O2C is especially crucial because it impacts the organization’s cash flow. Delayed invoicing or slow accounts receivable processes can make it harder for other teams like accounts payable, payroll, and other functions that rely on liquidity. O2C can support an organization’s success—or destroy it.
But you don’t have to take my word for it: The proof is in the numbers. A study by Boston Consulting Group found that companies that deploy O2C platforms in order to optimize the process boost their revenues by 1% to 3% a year, achieve 15% to 30% savings in cost, and reduce their number of days’ sales outstanding by up to 30%. Smooth O2C operations are critical to success, and IT is your partner in creating processes that diminish pain points and increase efficiency.
Revolutionize IT through AI Operations.
The demands of today’s digital economy—coupled with the increasing complexity of modern applications—has made the role of IT and BT teams more challenging.
With new challenges related to the always-evolving application ecosystem becoming more prevalent, AI Ops has emerged as a means to relieve some of the manual intervention required to reestablish connection between apps or mend broken automations.
A survey conducted by CA technologies revealed that 97% of IT professionals believe that AI Ops will deliver actionable insights to help automate and enhance overall IT operations functions.
So what is AI Ops, and why are IT and BT professionals eager to start leveraging this powerful new technology?
In 2017, Gartner defined AI Ops as a combination of big data and machine learning that can help automate IT processes, including event correlation, anomaly detection, and causality determination.
AI Ops increases a business’s agility to accommodate easy adoption of new tools and processes effortlessly, which is a critical need at this time. By implementing AI Ops, IT can maximize operational efficiency, optimize digital experiences, and enhance infrastructure monitoring with intelligent recommendations and automated remediation capabilities.
If you want to learn more about how other nearly 5,000 IT and BT teams are transforming their organizations, you can request to join the Systematic community to join the conversation.
