The New Peter Principle, Part II - Quartet Service

The New Peter Principle, Part II

The New Peter Principle, Part II

In an earlier letter called The New Peter Principle, I talked about how our clients can’t keep up with IT’s expanding role and how that’s changing the industry. Technical expectations have grown, and IT is now an integral part of the functioning of many departments – not just a silo of nerds maintaining servers.

Organizations who have not partnered well and adopted a modern IT approach, have suffered. This might sound a little self-serving coming from an IT service company, but it’s true. It’s also why I sold Quartet and it’s critical to the future of your organization.

A unit of IT functionality is cheaper now than ever and that’s driving digital transformation. Digital transformation is all about IT shaking up an industry and changing how businesses operate. Products unbundle, supply chains disintermediate, prices surge or collapse, security threats morph, customer and competitors change, and regulators ask for more. The list goes on and on.

Internal IT resources are overwhelmed as their responsibilities creep into other corporate functions. It’s tough for IT to keep up, even with good IT service partnerships. It’s also changing the nature of those partnerships. We’re asked by you to do more things than ever, and a lot of it is non-technical. Business transformation may be driven by technology, but the challenges extend far beyond IT. Organization design, change management, training, pricing, product design and competitive intelligence are examples.

Our development costs for these new services are spread over multiple clients. We leverage this investment efficiency to generate economies of skill and scale faster and cheaper than any one client can. We’ve been doing this for years and its core to our value proposition.

But this time it’s different. The large number of new services, the required investment size, and the fact that many services are outside our comfort zone spooked us. Our clients need more than what we have now, and they don’t have time for us to develop it.

So, we searched for partners with the required scale, skills, and investment appetite, but we also wanted to make a difference to them. We wanted a good home for our clients and our staff. Comprehensive stewardship for the entire Quartet community was our goal. We found that and more in Fully Managed.

At Fully Managed we’re developing the “next generation” digital platform to lead our customers through their unique digital transformation journeys. At the core of this effort is a multi-tenant deployment of the Service Now workflow automation tool suite. Service Now tools extend beyond traditional IT to help manage comprehensive organizational change. In addition, Fully Managed has 400+ staff, offices throughout Canada, visionary leadership, a fun and disciplined culture, and a strong balance sheet. We’ve found a good home for our staff, and for you.

I’m excited by what we’re doing at Fully Managed and expect you will be too as we roll out our new capabilities. Digital transformation is an intimidating imperative for most organizations, and we’ll bring it to you closer and faster than we ever thought possible with Fully Managed.

As the Quartet journey closes, an even more exciting one starts with Fully Managed. I can hardly wait for what’s next.

Stay tuned. More to come.

Rob

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