To Standardize or not

I had written about this issue a few years back, and I am sorry to bring this
up again. I think most of our solution providers, who have the aspiration as
well as capability have still not been able to work on this. At a recent small
talk with a small business CEO, I was again reminded that one of the biggest
challenges he faces from his SP is consistency in delivery.

Customers, even if they are small businesses, want the same experience from
their SP whether a network is being setup in Hyderabad or Indore. That is
because the customers' customers want to have the same experience whether they
are accessing services in Chennai or Raipur.

Productization or standardization of IT service offerings is the new mantra
that is likely to be taken up by entry and mid-level solution providers. There
is no dearth of examples to show that even small time players actually ensured
that consistency in quality and delivery is achieved before they started growing
and some became even big. I remember an IDC report that I read a few years ago,
this even if 75 percent standardization (consistency in repetition) is achieved
it is a good benchmark.

Clearly, solution providers looking for an edge, and keen on beating
competition, will now have to strive to productize. The next phase, where
customers will be looking for more managed services and opex model based IT
infrastructure, the success mantra will be productization and standardization.
Those successful at that, will bag more new as well as repeat orders,
profitably. Pundits believe that service-level agreements (SLAs) between the
vendors, solution providers and the customer, is likely to be the order of the
day in near future. And SLAs will not work without standardization.

Surely, challenges on solution providers, which are already undress pressure,
will go up. Standardization would require higher levels of expertise from
partners to implement and maintain the solutions. But we must not forget that
while the small players try to win big customers, the big players are now
increasing focus on SMBs, who increasingly want 'productized services' and fast
implementations.

Ibrahim ahmad

ibrahima@cybermedia.co.in