2021 Predictions: Applications Development and Maintenance

In a conversation on how business has been disrupted in 2020 and what trends will rule in 2021, Gary James responsible for Offer Development and Market engagement for Capgemini’s ADMnext Services in the UK & Europe, shared his view of this dynamic market.

Gary feels strongly that three different areas will define the business landscape for IT providers in 2021: Smart Sourcing, the quest for Business Insights and the drive for simplification of IT.

This is what each one means.

Smart sourcing of IT services

As a reaction to the impact of COVID-19, client organisations have been pushing to drive better cost efficiencies in their IT. The immediate reaction to the crisis was more of a smart supply approach where immediate cost savings were crudely based on reduced rates and charges.

Moving forward, organisations will need to adopt a smarter approach to the whole sourcing process, and this will emerge as a prevalent trend in 2021. Further efficiencies will be sought with a longer-term business view and the ability to introduce business agility to respond to market trends flexibly and quickly. In this scenario, a holistic smart sourcing approach plays a crucial role reducing costs of operations through better resourcing, portfolio optimisation and more efficient IT delivery.

From insights to actions

While the latest technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation, have been a top priority for businesses in 2020, the success of these solutions and platforms depends on real-world implementation. To further prove their value in 2021, and to deliver better return on investment, IT providers and vendors must work to ensure that solutions can provide better business outcomes for their clients.

As an example, the Automation platforms that exist in the market can now help understand the ‘actions’ that organisations must take but unless they know where and how to implement these actions, these platforms are sub-optimal. To address this, insights like business process insights, process efficiency, application availability etc. need to be surfaced far more effectively so that organisations can decide where to apply Automation. This approach can then help organisations to strategically target investment and implement the latest technologies to improve business processes.

It’s clear that with the challenges caused by COVID-19 in 2020, 2021 will see a greater thrust on the creation of insights from the services delivered so that clients can clearly understand benefits and drive actions accordingly.

A drive towards simplification

Over the recent past, we have seen an increase in the “As a Service” markets across software, platforms and infrastructure where technologies are consolidated down into easier to consume capabilities for clients. This simplification will now spread into the services part of the IT sector.

The consolation of traditional business & IT services into business-centric apps services that help organisations drive process improvement right across the technology estate will accelerate. In addition, consolidation of third-party vendors will allow the creation of economies of scale as well as freeing up the time for the retained IT organisation to focus on exploiting the latest new technologies. This trend of simplification across different areas is going to be a big driver for change in 2021. Essentially, as IT gets more complex, & CXOs want to focus on delivering value from it rather than just managing it or supporting it, the simplification agenda will be at the core to ensure a successful 2021.

Capgemini’s ADMnext is a business-centric, applications development and maintenance (ADM) services portfolio that is dynamic and flexible to suit your IT requirements – an approach that can help you seamlessly make the move to the cloud and adopt Agile and DevOps methodologies across your business.

Gary James