Innovation Vista keeps our past clients and partnerships confidential. Unless you choose to publicize our joint work, the public – and specifically your competitors – will not know you are working with us, or planning anything new or different. Sun Tzu said it well:
All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. — Sun Tzu, The Art of War
It is often useful for new and potential clients, though, who are envisioning possible innovation and digital projects, to consider how our approach has benefitted other companies, even just in broad anonymized strokes…
One recent example was a financial intermediary involved in connecting counterparties with specific investment needs and criteria together for beneficial transactions. The firm had been in business for several decades and had solidified a position as a profitable midsize player in their industry.
Innovation Vista’s expertise was brought to bear as the company decided to make Digital Transformation a strategic initiative. We worked with the leadership team and IT department to identify several projects promising significant ROI…
- Implementing a CRM system to enable efficient and mobile data gathering and collaboration
- Initiating a Data Quality initiative to maximize the accuracy and value of the firm’s data
- Designing Analytics in the form of reports and dashboards to visualize business insights from data
- Developing a Natural Language AI model to abstract usable data from freeform comments in the system
- Creating a Machine Learning AI model to predict the level of interest of counterparties for specific transactions
These were significant projects with costs totaling approximately 30% of the company’s previous “lights-on” IT budget level. Initiating the transformation and funding these projects took real courage from the executive team. But the payoff was immediate and significant:
- First year incremental revenue to the client reached 4x (400%) of the project costs. Payback in the first quarter!
- These revenues were sufficient to transform IT from a pure cost center to a profit center – in the first year
- Future year revenues promise to grow even further from this program, with post-launch costs reduced significantly
These results were achieved without a full transformation of the client’s business model – this is really more of a Digital Optimization than Transformation – which also provides the benefit of secrecy with the client’s competitors. They didn’t have to create a new service offering, or direct their customers to a new portal or mobile app, etc. They harvested this additional revenue and saw significant market-share gains without needing to attribute it or give their competitors any kind of bread-crumb trail to follow.
Would you like to turn your IT group into a profit center? These kinds of results are possible for companies of all sizes in all kinds of industries! Please contact us to start a dialogue about how we can help your organization identify and implement this kind of innovative strategy.
