The fourth post in the Partnering with Intent™ series explains why most web application development organizations will partner to access the digital skills they need. Partnering offers IT organization an opportunity to tap into needed digital talent in a fluid, non-restrictive way. This flexibility is extremely important in the digital age when business initiatives and project priorities can shift endlessly.
Partnering with Intent (PWI), a new approach to digital workforce creation, follows a business model proven with leading companies in a variety of market segments. PWI answers companies’ needs for the digital talent they don’t have, allowing them to take established products into new market segments, appeal to new groups of customers in a proven market and introduce new products and services. Businesses competing in the digital age require nimble IT organizations that partner to offer the rich, deep proficiencies needed to tap new opportunities with confidence.
At its core, PWI allows companies, through their robust digitally prepared IT organizations, to enable innovation unhampered by technical limits. Access to the right digital talent at the right time, bypasses the need to recruit, retrain and manage current staff, gives IT departments the flexibility they need to respond to the shifting needs of the business with precision and speed.
For example, when General Electric and Intel partnered to aggregate more than 6.8 million patient data points, they were able to provide healthcare leaders with the insights required to improve care delivery, reduce costs and motivate changes in behavior.
In addition to supporting unbridled innovation, PWI delivers the digital talent needed to create human-centered experiences that solve user problems and push the business-user experience to a higher, more strategic relationship. When customers see a company as responsive to their needs, brand loyalty takes hold, making it difficult for competitors to lure satisfied customers away. A leading provider of streaming video devices and channels learned that lesson when it partnered with a consumer electronics manufacturer to build a simplified “smart TV” centered on the user device’s operating system. In this example, the device provider disrupted the “upstream” supply chain to simplify the user experience and create a partnered “win-win” for itself and the electronics manufacturer.
Finally, IT leaders need to remember that concentrating on a select group of trusted partners is vitally important to nurturing high-value, high-reward relationships. To keep these business-critical relationships functioning at a high level, astute IT organizations regularly update their software development partners on corporate direction, short-term and long-range business initiatives, and pivoting priorities. Effectively applying PWI principles to these relationships dissolves boundaries and enables the two sides to operate as a blended composite team.
IT organizations that use PWI’s operational transparency and open communication to unite previously siloed IT groups create the high-performance composite teams needed to pivot when the digital business environment demands it.
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