Market Intelligence Service Launch

By Michel Janssen and Anthony Snowball
December 20, 2022
Season 3, Episode 44

A spotlight on The Hackett Group’s newly-launched Market Intelligence Service, which evaluates and ranks solution providers, quantifying the business value realized. With Principal Michel Janssen, and Global IP Practice Leader Anthony Snowball.

Show Notes

Welcome to The Hackett Group’s “Business Excelleration Podcast,” where week after week we hear from experts on how to avoid obstacles, manage detours and celebrate milestones on the journey to world-class performance. This episode is hosted by Gary Baker, Group Global Communications director at The Hackett Group. Today’s episode will discuss The Hackett Group’s newly launched Market Intelligence Service, which evaluates and ranks software and service providers quantifying their ability to deliver actual business value. His guests are Principal Michel Janssen and Global IP Practice Leader Anthony Snowball from The Hackett Group.

To begin, Michel shares that The Hackett Group has accumulated a powerful point of view on what performance leadership really looks like. They help companies chart how to get there by providing benchmarks, knowledge of Digital World Class®, playbooks and other facts, data, and models of what really works. From Anthony’s experience, the most common information clients want to know is in regard to benchmarking execution and if they are getting the returns they should expect. Ultimately, they want to know if they are gaining value from their spend. When making big-ticket investments, they deeply value a fact-based point of view on what they should anticipate in their returns. Executives do not want to invest their careers without a firm understanding of what capabilities they will receive.

Market intelligence, Michel explains, refers to looking at the marketplace and gathering intellect on what is going on outside the four walls of your organization. This includes understanding what is available in the marketplace and the experiences peers are seeing as a result of these interactions. It is vital for leaders to know what others who have engaged with the same providers before have realized in the way of benefits and improvements. The Hackett Group is all about providing data and market intelligence for both buyer and seller to understand what is expected in the marketplace. With this information, buyers will have a better idea of what both the supply and demand sides will look like.

Next, hear how The Hackett Group’s new Market Intelligence Service is different from the benchmarking and transformation work they have been doing for decades. Their focus is looking at solution providers in a broad context of both software and services. They see the marketplace through the functional process lens and have a keen understanding of the next generation of finance and operations of world-class organizations. At the end of the day, this service is not just about being “big.” Rather, more of an emphasis is placed on understanding geographic and industry capabilities, and how the results impact the end client.

Then, Anthony shares how the impact of solution providers can be measured. The Hackett Group has a three-decade heritage of evaluating client performance focused on their outputs. Meanwhile, they were gathering incredible performance information about company execution and the tools they were leveraging. It all boils down to if organizations are receiving value, which can be received in multiple different ways, including cost savings, cash liberations and service improvement. Returns are being evaluated through our heritage as a firm, the data possessed and interactions with solution providers. It is not just about efficiency and cost, but also about automation impact, insight, experience, and value generation.

Michel then offers insight into the kinds of conclusions these analyses will lead to and how clients can use the insights. As seen in the results of the customer-to-cash (C2C) study, there is a 43% improvement across a range of metrics, including automation, performance times, debt and more. Right now, the service is focused on determining which solution providers are having an impact and bringing in the best results industrywide. Aside from C2C, market intelligence will focus their concentration on the areas in which companies are spending the most money, where The Hackett Group can have the biggest impact, and where they have permission to provide guidance and advice. They also want to stay focused on transactional areas to start before fanning out afterwards. Next, they will turn their attention outside of the software realm to examine outsourcing and the service provider segment. Finally, hear how the Market Intelligence Service is expected to evolve in the coming years.

Timestamps:

  • 0:56 – Welcome to this episode hosted by Gary Baker.
  • 1:29 – How The Hackett Group has historically helped large companies with their transformation efforts.
  • 2:21 – The types of information companies want to see to inform their investments.
  • 3:55 – What is meant by market intelligence.
  • 6:13 – How the new Market Intelligence Service is different from benchmarking.
  • 8:18 – How to measure the impact of solution providers.
  • 10:59 – What kinds of conclusions will this service lead to?
  • 12:37 – Where else will the Market Intelligence Service concentrate first?
  • 16:00 – How the Market Intelligence Service will evolve in the coming years.