INTERVIEW:
JULIE O'HARA
Julie O'Hara is Managing Director, Group Managed Services at Computacenter. We sat with Julie to talk about what she does, what’s new in the world of managed services and how our customers will benefit.
Hi Julie - can you give us a very high-level view of who you are and what you do at Computacenter.
I’d be delighted to and thanks for inviting me. Like many, I’ve been at Computacenter for a long time – nearly 25 years in fact (though I had a 2-year break in the middle).
In that time, I have held a variety of roles, starting in new business sales (having joined from IBM), progressing to run several different Sales Sectors as Sector Director. I then took a different career direction, heading up Global Service Management & Global Service Take-On and most recently, people will have recognised me as heading up Group Delivery. Early this year, my role expanded to become Managing Director, Group Managed Services, incorporating everything needed to deliver unsurpassed Managed Services to our customers.
Congratulations on your expanded role heading up Computacenter’s end to end Managed Services business. Can you tell us a bit more about this?
Absolutely! I have to say that I have never been more excited about the future and direction of the services that we deliver to customers.
We have recently launched our operating model, which seeks to explain what we mean by ‘end-to-end’ Managed Services. Essentially, it is now mine and my team’s responsibility to ensure that we enable both top and bottom line growth of our Managed Service business globally.
If I dive into this a bit more, our Portfolio Innovation & Management team respond to market and customer needs to develop, refine, and bring to market new services that enable us to grow. The portfolio needs to remain competitive both from a service and commercial perspective, ensuring that we are leveraging automation, tools and processes to remain competitive. A critical new area for this function is to enable our sales and service management colleagues to position and sell our offerings in the market.
Following on from that, our Customer Service Design function ensures that what we sell fits with the needs of customers and is tailored where necessary to ensure compelling and engaging service design, leveraging the skills and capability we have across the Group.
Our Transition and Transformation team establishes the services through transfer, transition, or transformation practices – and then our Field Services (FLS) and Remote Service Operations ensure the efficient delivery and management of the services through the life of the contract, with a focus on quality of service.
All this is underpinned by a program of Continual Service Excellence to ensure the services are kept reliable, efficient, effective, and responsive to drive ongoing high levels of customer satisfaction and advocacy.
Last, but by no means least, we have a proactive customer interface through our Delivery Leadership team – many of whom your readers will know. This team ensure that services are delivered seamlessly to the customer, driving both quality and cost of service to our customers day in day out.
Thanks for that Julie, it all sounds extremely comprehensive. How will this benefit our customers?
Having everything related to Managed Services under one roof, and under my direction, means we are simpler to deal with and can act with greater pace and agility to ensure that we both win more, and retain clients for the long term.
I know, having worked at Computacenter for many years, that this hasn’t always been the case and it’s an issue many large companies struggle with. But, with this new, simplified operating model, customers will see a difference – in fact, I hear it already in interactions with customers over the last few months. That said, we are driving a lot of change at the moment, and so the real benefits will take a short while to realise whilst we implement new ways of working and roles.
In addition, my job is to ensure that Computacenter Managed Services continue to evolve to meet and exceed customer demands. My focus is on ensuring the highest quality, innovative and best value services that proactively leverage our location and partner strategy, analytics, AI and automation in order to remain competitive.
With this new operating model, we can do that because me and my leadership team have end to end visibility and can ensure all the right levers are pulled.
You mention all the ‘A’s – Analytics, AI and Automation – these are real buzzwords and high on everyone’s agenda. How is Group Managed Services leveraging these tools?
We have an Automation Centre of Excellence that focuses on both our own internal systems and processes, and our managed services, to deliver what we call our ‘Automation Anywhere’ programme. This automation is often informed by analytics and AI.
Having this dedicated team of experts in place, empowering our operations teams through self service automation toolkits and constantly reviewing our systems and processes, means our customers can rest assured that we are always striving for ways to streamline, increase efficiency and improve the quality of their service.
A notable example of the use of analytics is with the evolvement of our Service Desk. Our analysts are now enabled by analytics to deliver a more proactive omni channel Service Desk experience to suit today’s workplace. Instead of just reacting to requests and issues, Service Desk analysts have the potential to now see where issues might arise or have arisen before the employee does.
You can see how this becomes a hugely different, more rewarding, and empathetic interaction with an employee. And, through getting ahead of issues, ensures more productivity in our customers businesses.
We already have many customers adopting this new Service Desk approach and a healthy pipeline of interest.
However, this is just a small part of what we are doing within the business and we are constantly looking at ways to further drive both use and adoption of ‘AAA.
Sounds brilliant! So, what other new or evolving services do our customers need to know about? And what’s driving the evolution.
I am delighted to say that our first, global customer has gone live with our Device as a Service (DaaS) offering.
This exploits the power of bringing together our technology sourcing business with our field and lifecycle services to give the customer procurement, deployment, maintenance, and disposal of 125,000 end user devices, workplace, and meeting room equipment in 46 countries.
Customers want less contracts, a more seamless service and visibility of assets throughout the device lifecycle. Computacenter is in a unique position in the market to offer this as it’s one of few organisations with capability to both source the product and manage it throughout the lifecycle. Suffice to say we have a lot of interest in this new DaaS offering so watch this space!
With our global approach and ability to scale, we are also able to offer services that were once only available in a specific region to any region around the world. A good example of this is our Networking services, both traditional and SDN. We’re seeing massive traction within the UK and can leverage our expertise gained in the German market to address this need. I am really excited about where we can take our Network managed Service Business, and we have strategic partners, like Cisco who are committed to supporting us…watch this space!
What trends are you observing in the managed services market and how are you responding at Computacenter?
I talked already about AI, analytics, and automation – that is obviously an ongoing trend.
But perhaps even more prevalent than that is a focus on User Experience to drive productivity. For our customers, it is more than just a productivity drive, it is about retaining highly skilled talent. Whether it be the onboarding process or ability to resolve issues quickly, driving Employee Experience to retain key skills is critical.
Another trend is companies looking for services delivered through the right mix of on, near and offshore to suit their business and be able to accommodate specific security or jurisdiction needs. Reflecting this, our India offshore headcount grew significantly in 2022, a key source of skills and competitive advantage in the years ahead. Our location and partner strategy enables what we call ‘right shoring’ which is designed to ensure that we can address customer needs and deliver on our promises of value, quality. innovation and excellence.
We have, like many of our customers, a huge focus on sustainability – both in our own business and the services we deliver and support. This is a trend (or maybe the better word is a necessity) that will only increase in terms of focus, and I am proud to say that Computacenter achieved its goal of becoming carbon neutral in 2022 for Scope 1 and 2 emissions, supporting our journey to Net Zero by 2040.
What do customers talk to you about most?
As you can imagine, when talking to our customers (who are generally large, multi-national companies) there are common themes I hear repeated in conversations, although of course there are always unique aspects to each one.
Some of the things I routinely hear is that they want help delivering strategic modernisation of their technology. They are looking for guidance and input as to where to start, how to start and what to prioritise first. As well as the expertise to manage it through.
Customers are also looking for efficiency gains through technology strategy and digitisation of management processes. Often the desire is for overall cost reductions, but it goes wider than that as quality and employee satisfaction are right up there too in terms of goals. It is not new to hear that clients are trying to drive operational costs down to free up spend to enable the business.
Aggregation of services and solutions is high on many agendas both from a practical and technological perspective and of course everyone wants to maximise the cost of service and bring innovation to their business.
And of course, sustainability which I mentioned previously as a key focus area.
What is critical for us, is to ensure that we are engaged at senior levels in our customers, to ensure that we do understand their strategic goals and direction to ensure we align with them. They are often more prepared to make bold decisions to effect change and so this alignment is critical, as well as continuing to deliver great quality of service at an operational level (to enable us to meet the senior execs!)
Are there any key attributes that you want to get across to a customer that might not be a managed services customer?
Firstly, if you’re not a managed services customer, I’d love to talk to you about what we do in this area. I am always available to chat, advise or just hear your thoughts.
As to what makes us unique – where do I start?
We have the largest service capability of any value-added reseller in the world, with over 14,000 people delivering services to our customers, whether that be at their locations, or through one of our near and offshore locations. This allows us to support our customers to transform and manage their digital technology at scale.
The breadth and depth of our technology vendor partnerships allows us to help our customers navigate the complexity and speed of change in the current market.
We are a people business, and I have had direct feedback from customers, who tell me, that no matter what location they visit across the globe, from India to Capetown, they see, feel, and hear the same Computacenter culture. Our customer proximity, focus and passion is evident to them. When I meet our global teams, they are proud of what they do for clients, and value the support we provide in supporting their career development and growth through initiatives like ‘Create Your Own Story’, the personal support available and feel valued, underpinned by our ‘Bravo’ recognition platform. As a result, our attrition rates are often way below average for the region, which means that more people want to join us, stay with us, and grow with us which, as a service company is so important as our customers depend on us to underpin their own businesses.
Add to that our location and partner strategy that I mentioned before and this gives us an unrivalled ability to provide the best experiences for our customers and their employees – whether that’s in workplace, infrastructure, networking or cloud.
Do you predict any big changes for our customers within the next few years?
Given all the press coverage, one would have to say AI but we shouldn’t forget the ongoing impact of the financial climate. Our customers will continue to look for efficiencies and access to skills that enable them to stay competitive. Our customers are each on a different journey and start point to enable their business, and ours is to understand how we can support them. This presents a great opportunity for us to help our customers by leveraging our capability, skills and scale.
On a more personal level, how do you cope with and handle change?
It would be too easy to answer this as ‘I enjoy change’, when in fact, leading change is very different to being impacted by it. In my role, I am constantly evaluating how and what we can do to enable us to continue to grow and be more effective in our Managed Service Business. To that end, there are always things that you can do, but you must evaluate the impact (short and medium term) and the unintended consequences of not changing, and then prioritise. I enjoy this part of my role immensely and could write a lot about this. However, I am very conscious about the impact at a personal level because we can all share examples of where we have struggled with change, adapting, even if we know it is in the best interests of others. I try and apply this to work in what we do, which is why I use a model called Kotter, it helps anchor me in the reality of ‘what is the problem we are trying to solve and the importance of that, and then ensure we support as best we can, people effected through change. This may be through communication, training, and adoption etc. What I do know is that if you stand still, you go backwards. Whether it is in work or our personal lives, change is constant.