Q&A: Avanade President On Innovation And The Changing Balance of Power In IT

Keeping Up With A Changing World

With the pace of change for technology accelerating rapidly, the importance of continuing innovation and an evolving go-to-market strategy is crucial for solution providers, Avanade North American President Aziz Virani said in an interview with CRN. Virani said that Avanade, No. 34 on CRN's SP500 list, sees a changing world for both clients and solution providers. This means the company is facing both a massive opportunity and a huge challenge as it works to keep pace. Virani outlined Avanade's approach and answered questions about best practices and what the solution provider sees as the future of the industry.

What exactly is the IT Without Boundaries push by Avanade?

I think the whole concept behind IT Without Boundaries is that more and more companies today are really challenged to innovate at an unprecedented rate. Every client that we talk to these days, one of the top three things that's on their mind -- whether you talk to the business or whether you talk to IT -- is around are we innovating enough? Or are we caught in the maintenance cycle endlessly? You combine that with some mega trends in the industry that we are all living daily now, things like mobility, cloud, big data, social collaboration. All these mega trends are really putting a lot of pressure, both on the business as well as IT. I think what IT Without Boundaries is all about is really to say that these pressures are really changing the balance in most corporations in terms of what IT does and what business units do.

How do you see the balance changing for IT in your clients?

The research that we did under this piece came out and said [close to 40] percent of technology spending is now controlled by departments outside of IT.... So what does that mean in terms of where innovation is happening?... More and more business unit innovation is happening in the IT space. More business units are driving the kinds of things they want to do. The reason they can do it is because, unlike older days where if you wanted to get something done you had to submit a request to IT, they would put it in his list of things to do, and would tell you when it might be done. These days, with the advent of cloud and Software-as-a-Service, it takes a lot less to implement something without getting IT involved. That is nothing that is good or bad, but it gives rise to a whole set of governance issues for the IT executives.

Does this client switch affect how Avanade takes its solutions to market?

I think it is definitely changing how Avanade is approaching its clients. We are obviously getting a lot more savvy about not just talking to the IT, which we have historically done and that's sort of our sweet spot, but also getting more engaged with the business units in terms of what they want to do and how they think about things and advising them because they're not IT professionals. I think Avanade also plays the bridge a little bit between the business units and IT and how they then connect.

How are clients responding?

I think it depends upon the company. I think there are companies where the shift is being managed very well and there are companies where the IT departments are struggling because some of this is happening without their permission or without their approval or doesn't follow their guidelines... I would say that there is a great high degree of recognition by most IT executives that the shift is happening. I think most of them are adopting and making the changes that they need to make, to understand that this shift is happening, that the business units are much more ... empowered to make decisions based on new technologies that are available. For the most part, there's clearly a recognition. Depending upon the company and the culture, the execution of the shift varies.

How do changing technologies and BYOD play into the equation?

One of the things that is really underpinning this motion around IT Without Boundaries is really the advent of the digital transformation that's really going on. That's a transformation that's going on, not just in the enterprise, but really quite frankly at the society level, in terms of how we live and things we do and how we talk to each other even now -- how we buy, how we shop, how we evaluate things, how we hire people. You think about all the things that are getting transformed from a digital point of view.

How do you present that to clients?

While a lot of companies are paying pretty good attention to how they make themselves more digitally accessible to their customer, I think they are probably paying less attention to their digital worker.... When we talk to our clients about digital, that's how we frame it: things to do to make sure you are digitally accessible to your customer base and how you can innovate and show leadership in that climate. And then what are you doing to digitally transform yourself internally via your employees.... Employees are getting much more savvy and they have a certain expectation about being digital when they come to work, just like they are in their private lives.

Will more Millennials entering the workforce accelerate this change?

Absolutely. I think it is and it will. The newer generation that is entering the work force really has a very different expectation in terms of the kind of technology and the kind of tools that would be available to them at work. I think you would expect that to happen and I would argue that it is happening now. Even if you look a few years ago what the expectation was, in terms of the kinds of things that are available to you, now the younger generation is joining the workforce already having such tremendous access to technology in all its different shapes. There's a mobility aspect. There's a social media aspect. There's a collaboration aspect. They've already experienced such a rich technology environment that when they come to work, or when they enter the professional workforce, their expectations are very different.

How does innovation within Avanade tie into this? Can you explain the company's "inside out" approach?

The notion around innovation from inside out is really about how the things that we do inside of Avanade, to continuously encourage, motivate, reward, recognize innovation -- that our people are thriving. It usually comes in two ways. One is innovation that Avanade is doing at a client [level].... What we are encouraging our people to do is really, as appropriate.... How do we share and propagate that innovation so we can take that innovation to other clients and make it better? I think that's one thing that we are very, very focused on, is encouraging the Avanade employees to be more creative, be more innovative in front of a client but then also bring back and share appropriately what we do inside the company. The other aspect of innovation are things that we encourage internally for people to innovate.

How do clients respond to the "inside out" innovation approach?

So long as the innovation happens in the context of a specific issue or a problem or something that the client wants to do differently or better, I think most clients are extremely open and want to try it and actually are appreciative that Avanade is putting newer ideas on the table.... We try to often think about that from the perspective of what can we put in our solution that would be innovative, or that would be considered innovative and considered groundbreaking. To me, that's not just something that we should do and clients appreciate it. Quite frankly, I think that is a market differentiator.

What do you see as your biggest challenge and biggest opportunity right now?

Quite frankly, in many ways the opportunity and the challenge is in some ways the same thing. I say that in the sense that the opportunities in the market are absolutely tremendous. As a service provider to large enterprises, there are so many technologies and trends in the industry right now that the opportunity is phenomenal.... It does create a huge opportunity for Avanade, for other service providers, and quite frankly for our clients because it's opening up new opportunities for them in terms of how they interact with their customers, how they reach their customers. I think all of this is extremely positive, but I think it's also a challenge. These new technologies, these new trends really require us as service providers to constantly be on our toes, to be constantly looking at the skills our people have to ensure that we are constantly being relevant to our clients.