Xerox Makes Innovation a Part of its Reorganized Services Portfolio

HfS Research has focused its research in the last few years around the growing importance of innovation in IT and business services engagements. Cost reduction and process standardization are now “table stakes” for providers, and the onus in 2014 has shifted significantly to providers having more innovative capabilities, such as the investments being made in Digital technologies such as analytics and mobility, automation and cloud. We believe that the conversation between buyers, advisors and service providers is moving towards greater innovation and genuine value creation, where our research has noted that the buyers are losing patience with service providers who are not working proactively with them to provide more value than the basic terms of the original contract. Ultimately, this change has resulted in a profound increase in the importance of weightings across buyers (contribute 40%), advisors (10%), providers (30%) and HfS analysts (20%) towards Innovation-centric elements and a compensating decrease in the importance of many of the Execution-oriented weightings in our proprietary Blueprint market assessment methodology (more here). HfS recently spent time with Xerox’s services executives to explore the new approach that the service provider is taking to grow its BPO business and the role that innovation plays in this strategy.