Written by Andrew on September 29, 2009 – 10:12 pm
I spent some time over the past few days reviewing our recent service management research in preparation for Aberdeen’s 4th Annual Chief Service Officer’s Summit on October 8&9. Like most business functions, the service management landscape has evolved considerably over the past year. Not surprisingly, the economy has impacted service budgets and the subsequent purchase of enabling service technology. In a June 2009 Aberdeen Group study, 28% of responding service professionals indicated that current economic conditions had no impact on budget. Nonetheless, the majority of respondents had delayed purchases in the short-term (32%), delayed deployment (16%), looked for low cost alternatives (12%) or had abandonded projects altogether (7%). However, interestingly, comparatively few organizations actually decreased budget for service related applications (17%) or hardware (18%). In fact, a quarter to a third of the respondents indicated no year-over-year change of budget (34% apps and 28% hardware), 31% actually increased budget for applications (16% by more than 10%) and 23% increased budget for hardware (10% by more than 10%).
Across the last three Service Management studies conducted by Aberdeen, we’ve consistently observed that the Chief Service Officer is challenged by three primary pressures: 1) productivity, 2) faster service issue resolution and 3) cost reduction. Interestingly, customer satisfaction was rated a top three pressure in only one of the studies.
| Mobile Field Service (June 09) | Service Benchmarking (June 09) | Service Contact Center (Sept 09) |
| 1. Drive Productivity (60%) 2. Faster Service Resolution (41%) 3. Reduce Service Costs (32%) |
1. More Effective Service Performance [Productivity] (52%) 2. Improve Customer Satisfaction (32%) 3. Service Costs (26%) |
1. Faster Service Issue Resolution (70%) 2. Reduce costs (57%) 3. Drive Productivity (45%) |
With this backdrop of budget uncertainty and increasing competitive pressures among service professionals, the service vendor landscape has been actively consolidating, partnering, geographically expanding and evolving technologically (particularly with the adoption of SaaS). For example, in the past year we’ve observed the following activity in the service vendor community:
Consolidation
- Antenna Acquires Dexterra
- Servigistics & Click Commerce Unite
- Axeda Acquires Questra
- ClickSoftware Acquires Manchitra
Partnerships
Geograhic Expansion
No doubt, these are interesting and challenging times for both service management professionals and the vendors that serve them. Over the next week or so, I’ll continue to showcase some of our service management research as I prepare for my opening remarks at the summit. If you are a qualified service management professional and would like a complimentary pass to the summit, please let me know. I hope to see you there! Contact me @andrew_boyd or andrewdotboydataberdeendotcom.
