The key differences that we’ve pointed out between Leaders and Followers at thought leadership provide a roadmap for improvement. We don’t, however, believe an IT services firm can go from a Follower to a Leader in a matter of months. It is likely to take a concerted effort at assembling the right talent, high-functioning research processes, effective
marketing and selling, strong connections to sales and service innovation, and other pieces that we laid out in the IMPACTS acronym.
Many IT services firms today (especially the big ones) have management consulting businesses, which in turn came with thought leadership groups. In these IT services firms, the question is less about how to launch one and more about how to improve one that exists. We believe a good way to start is to assess where your thought leadership group is today. We lay out four stages in which we’ve seen thought leadership operate in IT services and other companies for years: from “window dressing” to “mastery.” (See Exhibit 55.)
Moving from left to right requires greater investment and established processes in research, publishing, and marketing – especially in conducting primary, original research. It means shifting performance measures from web-based ones (downloads, views, social media mentions/likes) to inquiries and leads (requests for proposals, win rates, billing rates, etc.). The table below provides a rough range of the magnitude of the investment. The key changes in processes are (in research) moving from capturing subject experts’ field experience to rigorously collecting best practices in the marketplace (clients and other companies).
The shift in advocacy – where the mandate for thought leadership emanates from – is one from the middle to the top. At the mastery stage, the CEO and practice line heads are advocating for thought leadership, as well as heads of marketing, sales, and service innovation. Moving from left to right in the table also requires a thought leadership group to establish strong working relationships with heads of marketing, sales, and service innovation. Thought leadership research reports produce door openers for business developers: diagnostic tools and sales research debriefing presentations, for example.
The talent model to go from “window dressing” to “mastery” also changes significantly. First, thought leadership professionals are hired: in research, writing, social media, and editing to move to the “intensive” model. You need a sizable thought leadership research team, and a sizable publishing team (editors, writers, graphic artists), although many on the publishing team can be contract workers. The “mastery” model requires a deep team of researchers, writers/editors, graphics, multiclient-funded research team, salesperson(s) to sell the research, social media marketing, and marketing events managers.
Where do the “intensive” and “mastery” models of thought leadership report to? Either the head of strategy or the CEO/COO — not to marketing, sales, or service innovation. You don’t want your thought leadership team to become captive to the demands of marketing (where the brand marketing budget can crowd out the thought leadership budget), sales (thought leadership content turned into sales decks and brochures), or service innovation (which can focus thought leadership professionals on codifying the firm’s existing but uncodified practices, and away from collecting best practices outside the firm’s client base). Thought leadership must serve all three internal clients. But its activities can’t be shifted to please one function at the expense of the other three.
Having the CEO support thought leadership goes a long way. Catrinel Bartolomeu, who until recently was director of editorial and thought leadership content strategy at Cognizant, credits Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar for his strong support of research-based thought leadership. When the company published a study on generative AI’s impact on jobs, Kumar was quick to act, Bartolomeu told us. (She is now director of content strategy and thought leadership at BetterUp.) As soon as the report (“New Work, New World”) was published, Kumar asked the thought leadership group to build a client workshop around it and use it in Cognizant’s own assessment of corporate functions.
More competition is ahead in IT services over the rest of this decade. Clients will have many more IT services firms to choose from – if they know who they are and are convinced they have superior expertise at solving their specific needs.
Says Euan Davis, head of thought leadership as VP of growth markets at midsized tech services firm Virtusa: “For the last five years or so, minimizing the importance of thought leadership hasn’t worked at IT services firms. The pace of change has accelerated, and clients and prospects want to understand their suppliers’ headspace. You have to proactively go to a client or prospect with a point of view on how things are changing,” he told us. “If you don’t have one, you’re going to get a short shrift from your customers and prospects because you can’t satisfy them. … Thought leadership is more important than ever.”
“You have to say, ‘This is how we think you could be using AI technologies in all their forms,’” Davis added. “‘This is how we think your industry will look in the next two years, three years, or even five years.’ You have to have that context before you even enter the room … otherwise, your firm is just a commodity at the end of the table that’s never going to be listened to.”
To do this, IT services firms need to reposition themselves as strategic thinkers — not mere implementers.“They tend to be so dependent on tools — SAP, OpenAI. The flavor changes, but it’s where they can make money by implementing that technology,” noted long-time IT services and enterprise software industry analyst Vinnie Mirchandani. As a result, he believes, thought leadership becomes an afterthought because strategic thinking tends to result from working with a multitude of technologies that deliver unique benefits across numerous business processes. IT services firms need thought leadership to articulate how their services deliver unparalleled outcomes. Those that can do this “start to dominate a category that previously no other company had done.”
IT services firms that move up the thought leadership mastery curve will have a big advantage in creating demand and supply of superior expertise. Those that aren’t there yet have big opportunities – and work – ahead.
Learn More
Using Generative AI to Conduct Research: Leaders are More Cautious Than Followers (Sidebar)
Outthinking the Competition 