As any experienced services supplier will tell you: selling a service is one thing, but delivering that service is quite another. And delivering on the business promise of a service is an even greater challenge, I might add. Still, when it comes to managing and modernising applications, I feel fairly confident we have everything it takes at Sopra Steria to make good on our promise of delivering tangible business value and clear financial benefits to our customers.
“Everything it takes”, to be clear, is based on our very own set of capacities for Smart Application Modernisation (SAM). It is through these SAM Capacities, as diverse as they are comprehensive, that we are able to create or bring out the business value and financial benefits of application modernisation for our customers. (You can read more about that customer promise here.)
SAM Capacities
In future posts I will take a closer look at some, if not all, of our SAM Capacities. Let me start, however, by providing a quick overview of these Capacity building blocks that are so central to our value proposition.
Vision
We are continuously shaping and developing our vision on the future of application modernisation, development, and maintenance (ADM), so that we can better anticipate upcoming changes in market trends as well as new ADM practices. That future vision is firmly grounded in our intelligence base of 2,000 projects we’ve delivered for no less than 600 customers – and counting. That base is part of our unique approach for collective intelligence, both internally and with our partners.
Methodology: Business Capability Portfolio Management (BCPM)
Building and capitalising on over forty years of experience, we have developed a proven approach or methodology for Smart Application Modernisation. That approach will allow you and your IT team(s) to assess your business and technology drivers, to visualise the business value of your applications and, last but not least, to draft and prioritise the transformation of your business. This is also where the various assessment services come in that are part of our Business Capability Portfolio Management (BCPM). You can read more about these services in a previous in a previous post.
Digital Innovation Factory
To speed up our customers’ move to a digital way of working, relying on Agile, DevSecOps, SRE and AIOps practices, we offer them a Digital Innovation Factory. Functioning as a jump-start for our customers, it also enables us to deliver business value to them from day one and accelerate the process by upskilling their teams. This innovation factory enables and integrates the governance, innovations, human resources, processes, technologies and operations necessary for the digital transformation and application modernisation.
SAM Store
Again, to speed up the application modernisation process for our customers in the context of a broader digital transformation process, we are putting our entire SAM Store at their disposal. Holding more than 150 reusable IT assets or levers, it epitomises an approach to application modernisation and development that can be best summed up as “Build to reuse and reuse to build”.
Tuned X-shore Delivery Model
Thanks to our strong and wide presence in Europe and our delivery centres located nearshore (Bulgaria, Poland, Spain) as well as offshore (India), we can offer our customers an extremely flexible, finely tuned mix of delivery models. “One Project, One Team” acts as the major principle driving a common governance model for our SAM services delivery.
Partnership Model supporting output- or performance-based engagement
Another SAM Capacity is our willingness to adopt or evolve towards more business outcome-based commitment models, engaging our customers more deeply as partners in these projects. We are basically looking to convert our promise on business results into a “skin-in-the-game” type of collaboration.
HR Change Management for IT
Last but not least, there is the human aspect of any transformation project to take into account. Specifically, for our customers’ IT team(s), application modernization requires most of the times a change in both their skills set and their mindset. One example here is our SAM Academy, which supports and stimulates the knowledge transfer from us to our clients. Another example is the close collaboration of a client’s internal IT team(s) with our global delivery team as well as our highly-skilled onsite capabilities.
Check out my next blog post when we take a closer look on one of the SAM Capacities.