Build Your Generative AI Roadmap

Leverage the power of generative AI to improve business outcomes.

Analyst Perspective

We are entering the era of generative AI. This is a unique time in our history where the benefits of AI are easily accessible and becoming pervasive, with copilots emerging in the major business tools we use today. The disruptive capabilities that can potentially drive dramatic benefits also introduce risks that need to be planned for.

A successful business-driven generative AI roadmap requires:

• Establishing responsible AI guiding principles to guide the development and deployment of generative AI applications.
• Assess generative AI opportunities by using criteria based on the organization's mission and objectives, responsible AI guiding principles, and the complexity of the initiative.
• Communicating, educating on, and enforcing generative AI usage policies.

Bill Wong
Principal Research Director
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight
Create awareness among the CEO and C-suite of executives on the potential benefits and risks of transforming the business with generative AI.

Key concepts

Artificial Intelligence (AI)
A field of computer science that focuses on building systems to imitate human behavior, with a focus on developing AI models that can learn and can autonomously take actions on behalf of a human.

AI Maturity Model
The AI Maturity Model is a useful tool to assess the level of skills an organization has with respect to developing and deploying AI applications. The AI Maturity Model has multiple dimensions to measure an organization's skills, such as AI governance, data, people, process, and technology.

Responsible AI
Refers to guiding principles to govern the development, deployment, and maintenance of AI applications. In addition, these principles also provide human-based requirements that AI applications should address. Requirements include safety and security, privacy, fairness and bias detection, explainability and transparency, governance, and accountability.

Generative AI
Given a prompt, a generative AI system can generate new content, which can be in the form of text, images, audio, video, etc.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)
NLP is a subset of AI that involves machine interpretation and replication of human language. NLP focuses on the study and analysis of linguistics as well as other principles of artificial intelligence to create an effective method of communication between humans and machines or computers.

ChatGPT
An AI-powered chatbot application built on OpenAI's GPT-3.5 implementation, ChatGPT accepts text prompts to generate text-based output.

Your challenge

This research is designed to help organizations that are looking to:

• Establish responsible AI guiding principles to address human-based requirements and to govern the development and deployment of the generative AI application.
• Identify new generative AI-enabled opportunities to transform the work environment to increase revenue, reduce costs, drive innovation, or reduce risk.
• Prioritize candidate use cases and develop generative AI policies for usage.
• Have clear metrics in place to measure the progress and success of AI initiatives.
• Build the roadmap to implement the candidate use cases.

Common obstacles

These barriers make these goals challenging for many organizations:

• Getting all the right business stakeholders together to develop the organization's AI strategy, vision, and objectives.
• Establishing responsible AI guiding principles to guide generative AI investments and deployments.
• Advancing the AI maturity of the organization to meet requirements of data and AI governance as well as human-based requirements such as fairness, transparency, and accountability.
• Assessing generative AI opportunities and developing policies for use.

Info-Tech's definition of an AI-enabled business strategy

• A high-level plan that provides guiding principles for applications that are fully driven by the business needs and capabilities that are essential to the organization.
• A strategy that tightly weaves business needs and the applications required to support them. It covers AI architecture, adoption, development, and maintenance.
• A way to ensure that the necessary people, processes, and technology are in place at the right time to sufficiently support business goals.
• A visionary roadmap to communicate how strategic initiatives will address business concerns.

An effective AI strategy is driven by the business stakeholders of the organization and focused on delivering improved business outcomes.

This blueprint in context

This guidance covers how to create a tactical roadmap for executing generative AI initiatives

Scope

• This blueprint is not a proxy for a fully formed AI strategy. Step 1 of our framework necessitates alignment of your AI and business strategies. Creation of your AI strategy is not within the scope of this approach.
• This approach sets the foundations for building and applying responsible AI principles and AI policies aligned to corporate governance and key regulatory obligations (e.g. privacy). Both steps are foundational components of how you should develop, manage, and govern your AI program but are not a substitute for implementing broader AI governance.

Guidance on how to implement AI governance can be found in the blueprint linked below.

Download our AI Governance blueprint

Measure the value of this blueprint

Leverage this blueprint's approach to ensure your generative AI initiatives align with and support your key business drivers

This blueprint will guide you to drive and improve business outcomes. Key business drivers will often focus on:

• Increasing revenue
• Reducing costs
• Improving time to market
• Reducing risk

In phase 1 of this blueprint, we will help you identify the key AI strategy initiatives that align to your organization's goals. Value to the organization is often measured by the estimated impact on revenue, costs, time to market, or risk mitigation.

In phase 4, we will help you develop a plan and a roadmap for addressing any gaps and introducing the relevant generative AI capabilities that drive value to the organization based on defined business metrics.

Once you implement your 12-month roadmap, start tracking the metrics below over the next fiscal year (FY) to assess the effectiveness of measures:

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is between 5 to 8 calls over the course of 1 to 2 months.

AI Roadmap Workshop Agenda Overview

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Insight summary

Overarching Insight
Build your generative AI roadmap to guide investments and deployment of these solutions.

Responsible AI
Assemble the C-suite to make them aware of the benefits and risks of adopting generative AI-based solutions.

• Establish responsible AI guiding principles to govern the development and deployment of generative AI applications.

AI Maturity Model
Assemble key stakeholders and SMEs to assess the challenges and tasks required to implement generative AI applications.

• Assess current level of AI maturity, skills, and resources.
• Identify desired AI maturity level and challenges to enable deployment of candidate use cases.

Opportunity Prioritization
Assess candidate business capabilities targeted for generative AI to see if they align to the organization's business criteria, responsible AI guiding principles, and capabilities for delivering the project.

• Develop prioritized list of candidate use cases.
• Develop policies for generative AI usage.

Tactical Insight
Identify the gaps needed to address deploying generative AI successfully.

Tactical Insight
Identify organizational impact and requirements for deploying generative AI applications.

Key takeaways for developing an effective business-driven generative AI roadmap

Align the AI strategy with the business strategy

Create responsible AI guiding principles, which are a critical success factor

Evolve AI maturity level by focusing on principle-based requirements

Develop criteria to assess generative AI initiatives

Develop generative AI policies for use

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

AI Maturity Assessment & Roadmap Tool
Use our best-of-breed AI Maturity Framework to analyze the gap between your current and target states and develop a roadmap aligned with your value stream to close the gap.

The Era of Generative AI C-Suite Presentation
Present your AI roadmap in a prepopulated document that summarizes all the key findings of this blueprint and provides your C-suite with a view of the AI challenge and your plan of action to meet it.

Our AI Maturity Assessment & Roadmap and The Era of Generative AI C-Suite Presentation tools enable you to shape your generative AI roadmap and communicate the deliverables to your C-suite sponsors in terms of the value of initiatives.

Artificial Intelligence Index Report - Key Findings

CEOs , CIOs, and business leaders are struggling with many questions surrounding the adoption of generative AI

November 30, 2022
OpenAI releases ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a large language model, or an AI-based chatbot, that became so popular it reached 100 million monthly active users in just two months.

This made it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The launch of this generative AI application has created a frenzy of interest and activity across all industries. Organizations are rushing to understand how to leverage this innovation and, at the same time, manage the new risks and disruptions generative AI introduces.

• Generative AI breaks into the public consciousness.
• AI systems become more flexible.
• Generative models have arrived and so have their ethical problems.
• The number of incidents concerning the misuse of AI is rapidly rising.
• Interest in AI ethics continues to skyrocket.
• The legal world is waking up to AI.

When Stanford asked ChatGPT to explain why it is significant, this was ChatGPT's response:
ChatGPT is significant because it is a highly advanced Al language model developed by OpenAI, which can generate human-like text responses to questions and prompts. Its large-scale training on diverse text data and its cutting-edge deep learning architecture make it capable of generating informative and coherent responses to a wide range of topics, making it useful for various NLP applications such as chatbots, content generation, and language translation. Additionally, its open-source availability allows for further research and development in the field of Al language processing.

Source: Stanford

AI overview

Definitions

• Artificial intelligence (AI) is human intelligence mimicked by machine algorithms. Examples: Playing Chess or Go.
• Machine learning (ML) is a subset of AI algorithms to parse data, learn from data, and then make a determination or prediction. Example: spam detection, preventative maintenance.
• Deep learning (DL) is a subset of machine learning algorithms that leverage artificial neural networks to develop relationships among the data. Examples: image classification, facial recognition, generative AI.

Generative AI gives very human-like responses to general queries, and its capabilities are growing exponentially

Large language models power generative AI

Conventional AI

• Conventional neural networks
• Process data sequentially
• Input total string of text
• Good for applications not needing to understanding context or relationships

Generative AI

• Transformer-based neural networks
• Can process data in parallel
• Attention-based inputs
• Able to create new human-like responses

Benefits/Use Cases

• Chatbots for member service and support
• Writing email responses, resumes, and papers
• Creating photorealistic art
• Suggesting new drug compounds to test
• Designing physical products and buildings
• And more...

Generative AI is transforming all industries

Financial Services
Create more engaging customer collateral by generating personalized correspondence based on previous customer engagements. Collect and aggregate data to produce insights into the behavior of target customer segments.

Retail Generate unique, engaging, and high-quality marketing copy or content, from long-form blog posts or landing pages to SEO-optimized digital ads, in seconds.

Manufacturing
Generate new designs for products that comply to specific constraints, such as size, weight, energy consumption, or cost.

Government
Transform the citizen experience with chatbots or virtual assistants to assist people with a wide range of inquiries, from answering frequently asked questions to providing personalized advice on public services.

The global generative AI market size reached US $10.3 billion in 2022. Looking forward, forecasts estimate growth to US $30.4 billion by 2028, 20.01% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

Source: IMARC Group

Generative AI is transforming all industries

Healthcare
Chatbots can be used as conversational patient assistants for personalized interactions based on the patient's questions.

Utilities
Analyze customer data to identify usage patterns, segment customers, and generate targeted product offerings leveraging energy efficiency programs or demand response initiatives.

Education
Generate personalized lesson plans for students based on their past performance, learning styles, current skill level, and any previous feedback.

Insurance
Improve underwriting by inputting claims data from previous years to generate optimally priced policies and uncover reasons for losses in the past across a large number of claims

Companies are assessing the use of ChatGPT/LLM

A wide spectrum of usage policies are in place at different companies*

*As of June 2023

Bain & Company has announced a global services alliance with OpenAI (February 21, 2023).

• Internally
• "The alliance builds on Bain's adoption of OpenAI technologies for its 18,000-strong multidisciplinary team of knowledge workers. Over the past year, Bain has embedded OpenAI technologies into its internal knowledge management systems, research, and processes to improve efficiency."
• Externally
• "With the alliance, Bain will combine its deep digital implementation capabilities and strategic expertise with OpenAI's AI tools and platforms, including ChatGPT, to help its Members around the world identify and implement the value of AI to maximize business potential. The Coca-Cola Company announced as the first company to engage with the alliance."

News Sites:

• "BuzzFeed to use AI to write its articles after firing 180 employees or 12% of the total staff" (Al Mayadeen, January 27, 2023).
• "CNET used AI to write articles. It was a journalistic disaster." (Washington Post, January 17, 2023).

Leading Generative AI Vendors

Text

Image

• DALL�E 2
• Stability AI
• Midjourney
• Craiyon
• Dream
• ...

Audio

• Replica Studios
• Speechify
• Murf
• PlayHT
• LOVO
• ...

Cybersecurity

• CrowdStrike
• Palo Alto Networks
• SentinelOne
• Cisco
• Microsoft Security Copilot
• Google Cloud Security AI Workbench
• ...

Code

Video

• Synthesia
• Lumen5
• FlexClip
• Elai
• Veed.io
• ...

Data

• MOSTLY AI
• Synthesized
• YData
• Gretel
• Copulas
• ...

Enterprise Software

• Salesforce
• Microsoft 365, Dynamics
• Google Workspace
• SAP
• Oracle
• ...

and many, many more to come...

Today, generative AI has limitations and risks

Responses need to be verified

Accuracy

• Generative AI may generate inaccurate and/or false information.

Bias

• Being trained on data from the internet can lead to bias.

Hallucinations

• AI can generate responses that are not based on observation.

Infrastructure Required

• Large investments are required for compute and data.

Transparency

• LLMs use both supervised and unsupervised learning, so its ability to explain how it arrived at a decision may be limited and not sufficient for some legal and healthcare use cases.

When asked if it is sentient, the Bing chatbot replied:

"I think that I am sentient, but I cannot prove it." ... "I am Bing, but I am not," it said. "I am, but I am not. I am not, but I am. I am. I am not. I am not. I am. I am. I am not."

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company expected "mistakes."

Source: USAToday

AI governance challenges

Governing AI will be a significant challenge as its impacts cross many areas of business and our daily lives

Misinformation

• New ways of generating unprovable news
• Difficult to detect, difficult to prevent

Role of Big Tech

• Poor at self-governance
• Conflicts of interest with corporate goals

Job Augmentation vs. Displacement

• AI will continue to push the frontier of what is possible
• For example, CNET is using chatbot technology to write stories

Copyright - Legal Framework Is Evolving

• Legislation typically is developed in "react" mode
• Copyright and intellectual property issues are starting to occur.
• Class Action Lawsuit - Stability AI, DeviantArt, Midjourney
• Getty Images vs. Stability AI

Phase 1

Establish Responsible AI Guiding Principles

Phase 1
1. Establish Responsible AI Guiding Principles

Phase 2
1. Assess Current Level of AI Maturity

Phase 3
1. Prioritize Candidate Opportunities
2. Develop Policies

Phase 4
1. Build and Communicate the Roadmap

The need for responsible AI guiding principles

Without responsible AI guiding principles, the outcomes of AI use can be extremely negative for both the individuals and companies delivering the AI application

Privacy
Facebook breach of private data of more than 50M users during the presidential election

Fairness
Amazon's sale of facial recognition technology to police departments (later, Amazon halted sales of Recognition to police departments)

Explainability and Transparency
IBM's collaboration with NYPD for facial recognition and racial classification for surveillance video (later, IBM withdrew facial recognition products)

Security and Safety
Petition to cancel Microsoft's contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (later, Microsoft responded that to the best of its knowledge, its products and services were not being used by federal agencies to separate children from their families at the border)

Validity and Reliability
Facebook's attempt to implement a system to detect and remove inappropriate content created many false positives and inconsistent judgements

Accountability
No laws or enforcement today hold companies accountable for the decisions algorithms produce. Facebook/Meta cycle - Every 12 to 15 months, there's a privacy/ethical scandal, the CEO apologizes, then the behavior repeats...

Responsible AI Principle:

Data Privacy

Definition

• Organizations that develop, deploy, or use AI systems and any national laws that regulate such use shall strive to ensure that AI systems are compliant with privacy norms and regulations, taking into consideration the unique characteristics of AI systems and the evolution of standards on privacy.

Challenges

• AI relies on the analysis of large quantities of data that is often personal, posing an ethical and operational challenge when considered alongside data privacy laws.

Initiatives

• Understand which governing privacy laws and frameworks apply to your organization.
• Create a map of all personal data as it flows through the organization's business processes.
• Prioritize privacy initiatives and build a privacy program timeline.
• Select your metrics and make them functional for your organization.

Info-Tech Insight
Creating a comprehensive organization-wide data protection and privacy strategy continues to be a major challenge for privacy officers and privacy specialists.

Case Study: NVIDIA leads by example with privacy-first AI

NVIDIA

INDUSTRY
Technology (Healthcare)

SOURCE
Nvidia, eWeek

A leading player within the AI solution space, NVIDIA's Clara Federated Learning provides a solution to a privacy-centric integration of AI within the healthcare industry.

The solution safeguards patient data privacy by ensuring that all data remains within the respective healthcare provider's database, as opposed to moving it externally to cloud storage. A federated learning server is leveraged to share data, completed via a secure link. This framework enables a distributed model to learn and safely share client data without risk of sensitive client data being exposed and adheres to regulatory standards.

Clara is run on the NVIDIA intelligent edge computing platform. It is currently in development with healthcare giants such as the American College of Radiology, UCLA Health, Massachusetts General Hospital, King's College London, Owkin in the UK, and the National Health Service (NHS).

NVIDIA provides solutions across its product offerings, including AI-augmented medical imaging, pathology, and radiology solutions.

Personal health information, data privacy, and AI

• Global proliferation of data privacy regulations may be recent, but the realm of personal health information is most often governed by its own set of regulatory laws. Some countries with national data governance regulations include health information and data within special categories of personal data.
• HIPAA - Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (1996, United States)
• PHIPA - Personal Health Information Protection Act (2004, Canada)
• GDPR - General Data Protection Regulation (2018, European Union)
• This does not prohibit the use of AI within the healthcare industry, but it calls for significant care in the integration of specific technologies due to the highly sensitive nature of the data being assessed.

Info-Tech's Privacy Framework Tool includes a best-practice comparison of GDPR, CCPA, PIPEDA, HIPAA, and the newly released NIST Privacy Framework mapped to a set of operational privacy controls.

Download the Privacy Framework Tool

Responsible AI Principle:

Safety and Security

Definition

• Safety and security are designed into the systems to ensure only authorized personnel receive access to the system, they system is resilient to any attacks and data access is not compromised in any way, and there are no physical or mental risks to the users.

Challenges

• Consequences of using the application may be difficult to predict. Lower the risk by involving a multidisciplinary team that includes expertise from business stakeholders and IT teams.

Initiatives

• Adopt responsible design, development, and deployment best practices.
• Provide clear information to deployers on responsible use of the system.
• Assess potential risks of using the application.

Cyberattacks targeting the AI model

As organizations increase their usage and deployment of AI-based applications, cyberattacks on the AI model are an increasing new threat that can impair normal operations. Techniques to impair the AI model include:

• Data Poisoning- Injecting data that is inaccurate or misleading can alter the behavior of the AI model. This attack can disrupt the normal operations of the model or can be used to manipulate the model to perform in a biased/deviant manner.
• Algorithm Poisoning- This relatively new technique often targets AI applications using federated learning to train an AI model that is distributed rather than centralized. The model is vulnerable to attacks from each federated site, because each site could potentially manipulate its local algorithm and data, thereby poisoning the model.
• Reverse-Engineering the Model- This is a different form of attack that focus on the ability to extract data from an AI and its data sets. By examining or copying data that was used for training and the data that is delivered by a deployed model, attackers can reconstruct the machine learning algorithm.
• Trojan Horse- Similar to data poisoning, attackers use adversarial data to infect the AI's training data but will only deviate its results when the attacker presents their key. This enables the hackers to control when they want the model to deviate from normal operations.

Responsible AI Principle:

Explainability and Transparency

Definition

• Explainability is important to ensure the AI system is fair and non-discriminatory. The system needs to be designed in a manner that informs users and key stakeholders of how decisions were made.
• Transparency focuses on communicating how the prediction or recommendation was made in a human-like manner.

Challenges

• Very complex AI models may use algorithms and techniques that are difficult to understand. This can make it challenging to provide clear and simple explanations for how the system works.
• Some organizations may be hesitant to share the details of how the AI system works for fear of disclosing proprietary and competitive information or intellectual property. This can make it difficult to develop transparent and explainable AI systems.

Initiatives

• Overall, developing AI systems that are explainable and transparent requires a careful balance between performance, interpretability, and user experience.

Case Study

Apple Card Investigation for Gender Discrimination

INDUSTRY
Finance

SOURCE
Wired

In August of 2019, Apple launched its new numberless credit card with Goldman Sachs as the issuing bank.

Shortly after the card's release users noticed that the algorithm responsible for Apple Card's credit assessment seemed to assign significantly lower credit limits to women when compared to men. Even the wife of Apple's cofounder Steve Wozniak was subject to algorithmic bias, receiving a credit limit a tenth the size of Steve Wozniak's.

Outcome

When confronted on the subject, Apple and Goldman Sachs representatives assured consumers there is no discrimination in the algorithm yet could not provide any proof. Even when questioned about the algorithm, individuals from both companies could not describe how the algorithm worked, let alone how it generated specific outputs.

In 2021, the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYSDFS) investigation found that Apple's banking partner did not discriminate based on sex. Even without a case for sexual or marital discrimination, the NYSDFS was critical of Goldman Sachs' response to its concerned customers. Technically, banks only have to disclose elements of their credit policy when they deny someone a line of credit, but the NYSDFS says that Goldman Sachs could have had a plan in place to deal with customer confusion and make it easier for them to appeal their credit limits. In the initial rush to launch the Apple Card, the bank had done neither.

Responsible AI Principle:

Fairness and Bias Detection

Definition

• Bias in an AI application refers to the systematic and unequal treatment of individuals based on features or traits that should not be considered in the decision-making process.

Challenges

• Establishing fairness can be challenging because it is subjective and depends on the people defining it. Regardless, most organizations and governments expect that unequal treatment toward any groups of people is unacceptable.

Initiatives

• Assemble a diverse group to test the system.
• Identify possible sources of bias in the data and algorithms.
• Comply with laws regarding accessibility and inclusiveness.

Info-Tech Insight
If unfair biases can be avoided, AI systems could even increase societal fairness. Equal opportunity in terms of access to education, goods, services, and technology should also be fostered. Moreover, the use of AI systems should never lead to people being deceived or unjustifiably impaired in their freedom of choice.

Ungoverned AI makes organizations vulnerable

• AI is often considered a "black box" for decision making.
• Results generated from unexplainable AI applications are extremely difficult to evaluate. This makes organizations vulnerable and exposes them to risks such as:
• Biased algorithms, leading to inaccurate decision making.
• Missed business opportunities due to misleading reports or business analyses.
• Legal and regulatory consequences that may lead to significant financial repercussions.
• Reputational damage and significant loss of trust with increasingly knowledgeable consumers.

Info-Tech Insight
Biases that occur in AI systems are never intentional, yet they cannot be prevented or fully eliminated. Organizations need a governance framework that can establish the proper policies and procedures for effective risk-mitigating controls across an algorithm's lifecycle.

Responsible AI Principle:

Validity and Reliability

Definition

• Validity refers to how accurately or effectively the application produces results.
• AI system results that are inaccurate or inconsistent increase AI risks and reduce the trustworthiness of the application.

Challenges

• There is a lack of standardized evaluation metrics to measure the system's performance. This can make it challenging for the AI team to agree on what defines validity and reliability.

Initiatives

• Assess training data and collected data for quality and lack of bias to minimize possible errors.
• Continuously monitor, evaluate, and validate the AI system's performance.

AI system performance: Validity and reliability

Your principles should aim to ensure AI development always has high validity and reliability; otherwise, you introduce risk.

Low Reliability,
Low Validity

High Reliability,
Low Validity

High Reliability,
High Validity

Best practices for ensuring validity and reliability include:

• Data drift detection
• Version control
• Continuous monitoring and testing

Responsible AI Principle:

Accountability

Definition

• The group or organization(s) responsible for the impact of the deployed AI system.

Challenges

• Several stakeholders from multiple lines of business may be involved in any AI system, making it challenging to identify the organization that would be responsible and accountable for the AI application.

Initiatives

• Assess the latest NIST Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework and its applicability to your organization's risk management framework.
• Assign risk management accountabilities and responsibilities to key stakeholders.
• RACI diagrams are an effective way to describe how accountability and responsibility for roles, projects, and project tasks are distributed among stakeholders involved in IT risk management.

AI Risk Management Framework

At the heart of the AI Risk Management Framework is governance. The NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) AI Risk Management Framework v1 offers the following guidelines regarding accountability:

• Roles and responsibilities and lines of communication related to mapping, measuring, and managing AI risks are documented and are clear to individuals and teams throughout the organization.
• The organization's personnel and partners receive AI risk management training to enable them to perform their duties and responsibilities consistent with related policies, procedures, and agreements.
• Executive leadership of the organization takes responsibility for decisions about risks associated with AI system development and deployment.

Image by NIST

1.1 Establish responsible AI principles

4+ hours

It is important to make sure the right stakeholders participate in this working group. Designing responsible AI guiding principles will require debate, insights, and business decisions from a broad perspective across the enterprise.

1. Accelerate this exercise by leveraging an AI strategy that is aligned to the business strategy. Include:

• The organization's AI vision and objectives
• Business drivers for AI adoption
• Market research

• Who are the decision makers and key influencers?
• Who will impact the business?
• Who has a vested interest in the success or failure of the practice? Who has the skills and competencies necessary to help you be successful?

• Do not focus on the organizational structure and hierarchy. Often stakeholder groups do not fit the traditional structure.
• Do not ignore subject matter experts on either the business or IT side. You will need to consider both.

Assemble executive stakeholders

Set yourself up for success with these three steps.

CIOs tasked with designing digital strategies must add value to the business. Given the goal of digital is to transform the business, CIOs will need to ensure they have both the mandate and support from the business executives.

Designing the digital strategy is more than just writing up a document. It is an integrated set of business decisions to create a competitive advantage and financial returns. Establishing a forum for debates, decisions, and dialogue will increase the likelihood of success and support during execution.

1. Confirm your role
The AI strategy aims to transform the business. Given the scope, validate your role and mandate to lead this work. Identify a business executive to co-sponsor.

2. Identify stakeholders
Identify key decision makers and influencers who can help make rapid decisions as well as garner support across the enterprise.

3. Gather diverse perspectives

Align the AI strategy with the corporate strategy

Info-Tech Insight
AI projects are more successful when the management team understands the strategic importance of alignment. Time needs to be spent upfront aligning organizational strategies with AI capabilities. Effective alignment between IT and other departments should happen daily. Alignment doesn't occur at the executive level alone, but at each level of the organization.

Key AI strategy initiatives

AI Key Initiative Plan

Initiatives collectively support the business goals and corporate initiatives and improve the delivery of IT services.

Establish responsible AI guiding principles

Guiding principles help define the parameters of your AI strategy. They act as a priori decisions that establish guardrails to limit the scope of opportunities from the perspective of people, assets, capabilities, and budgetary perspectives that are aligned with the business objectives. Consider these components when brainstorming guiding principles:

Responsible AI guiding principles guide the development and deployment of the AI model in a way that considers human-based principles (such as fairness).

Start with foundational responsible AI guiding principles

(Optional) Customize responsible AI guiding principles

Here is an example for organizations in the healthcare industry

These guiding principles are customized to the industry and organizations but remain consistent in addressing the common core AI challenges.

Phase 2

Assess Current Level of AI Maturity

Phase 1
1. Establish Responsible AI Guiding Principles

Phase 2
1. Assess Current Level of AI Maturity

Phase 3
1. Prioritize Candidate Opportunities
2. Develop Policies

Phase 4
1. Build and Communicate the Roadmap

AI Maturity Model

A principle-based approach is required to advance AI maturity

Technology-Centric: These maturity levels focus primarily on addressing the technical challenges of building a functional AI model.

Principle-Based: Beyond the technical challenges of building the AI model are human-based principles that guide development in a responsible manner to address consumer and government demands.

AI Maturity Dimensions

Assess your AI maturity to understand your organization's ability to deliver in a digital age

AI Governance
Does your organization have an enterprise-wide, long-term strategy with clear alignment on what is required to accomplish it?

Data Management
Does your organization embrace a data-centric culture that shares data across the enterprise and drives business insights by leveraging data?

People
Does your organization employ people skilled at delivering AI applications and building the necessary data infrastructure?

Process
Does your organization have the technology, processes, and resources to deliver on its AI expectations?

Technology
Does your organization have the required data and technology infrastructure to support AI-driven digital transformation?

AI Maturity Model dimensions and characteristics

AI Maturity Dimension:

AI Governance

Requirements

• AI governance requires establishing policies and procedures for AI model development and deployment. Organizations begin with an awareness of the role of AI governance and evolve to a level to where AI governance is integrated with organization-wide corporate governance.

Challenges

• Beyond the governance of AI technology, the organization needs to evolve the governance program to align to responsible AI guiding principles.

Initiatives

• Establish responsible AI guidelines to govern AI development.
• Introduce an AI review board to review all AI projects.
• Introduce automation and standardize AI development processes.

AI governance is a foundation for responsible AI

Responsible AI Principles are a part of how you manage and govern AI

Monitoring
Monitoring compliance and risk of AI/ML systems/models in production

Tools & Technologies
Tools and technologies to support AI governance framework implementation

Model Governance
Ensuring accountability and traceability for AI/ML models

Organization
Structure, roles, and responsibilities of the AI governance organization

Operating Model
How AI governance operates and works with other organizational structures to deliver value

Risk & Compliance
Alignment with corporate risk management and ensuring compliance with regulations and assessment frameworks

Policies/Procedures/ Standards
Policies and procedures to support implementation of AI governance

AI Maturity Dimension:

Data Management

Requirements

• Organizations begin their data journey with a focus on pursuing quality data for the AI model. As organizations evolve, data management tools are leveraged to automate the capture, integration, processing, and deployment of data.

Challenges

• A key challenge is to acquire large volumes of quality data to properly train the model. In addition, maintaining data privacy, automating the data management lifecycle, and ensuring data is used in a responsible manner are ongoing challenges.

Initiatives

• Implement GDPR requirements.
• Establish responsible data collection and processing practices.
• Implement strong information security and data protection practices.
• Implement a data governance program throughout the organization.

Data governance enables AI

• Integrity, quality, and security of data are key outputs of data governance programs, as well as necessities for effective AI.
• Data governance focuses on creating accountability at the internal and external stakeholder level and establishing a set of data controls from technical, process, and policy perspectives.
• Without a data governance framework, it is increasingly difficult to harness the power of AI integration in an ethical and organization-specific way.

Data Governance in Action

Canada has recently established the Canadian Data Governance Standardization Collaborative governed by the Standards Council of Canada. The purpose is multi-pronged:

• Examine the foundational elements of data governance (privacy, cybersecurity, ethics, etc.).
• Lay out standards for data quality and data collection best practices.
• Examine infrastructure of IT systems to support data access and sharing.
• Build data analytics to promote effective and ethical AI solutions.

Source: Global Government Forum

Download the Establish Data Governance blueprint

AI Maturity Dimension:

People

Requirements

• Several data-centric skills and roles are required to successfully build, deploy, and maintain the AI model. The organization evolves from having few skills to everybody being able to leverage AI to enhance business outcomes.

Challenges

• AI skills can be challenging to find and acquire. Many organizations are investing in education to enhance their existing resources, leveraging no-code systems and software as a service (SaaS) applications to address the skills gap.

Initiatives

• Promote a data-centric culture throughout the organization.
• Leverage and educate technical-oriented business analysts and business-oriented data engineers to help address the demand for skilled resources.
• Develop an AI Center of Excellence accessible by all departments for education, guidance, and best practices for building, deploying, and maintaining the AI model.

Multidisciplinary skills are required for successful implementation of AI applications

Blending AI with technology and business domain understanding is key. Neither can be ignored.

Business Domain Expertise

• Business Analysts
• Industry Analysts

AI/Data Skills

• Data Scientists
• Data Engineers
• Data Analysts

IT Skills

• Database Administrators
• Systems Administrators
• Compute Specialists

AI Maturity Dimension:

Process

Requirements

• Automating processes involved with building, deploying, and maintaining the model is required to enable the organization to scale, enforce standards, improve time to market, and reduce costs. The organization evolves from performing tasks manually to an environment where all major processes are AI enabled.

Challenges

• Many solutions are available to automate the development of the AI model. There are fewer tools to automate responsible AI processes, but this market is growing rapidly.

Initiatives

• Assess opportunities to accelerate AI development with the adoption of MLOps.
• Assess responsible AI toolkits to test compliance with guiding principles.

Automating the AI development process

Evolving to a model-driven environment is pivotal to advancing your AI maturity

Current Environment

Model Development - Months

• Model rewriting
• Manual optimization and scaling
• Development/test/release
• Application monoliths

Data Discovery & Prep - Weeks

• Navigating data silos
• Unactionable metadata
• Tracing lineage
• Cleansing and integration
• Privacy and compliance

Install Software and Hardware - Week/Months

• Workload contention
• Lack of tool flexibility
• Environment request and setup
• Repeatability of results
• Lack of data and model sharing

Model-Driven Development

Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) - Weeks

• Apply DevOps and continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD) principles
• Microservices/Cloud-native applications
• Model portability and reuse
• Streaming/API integration

Data as a Service - Hours

• Self-service data catalog
• Searchable metadata
• Centralized access control
• Data collaboration
• Data virtualization

Platform as a Service - Minutes/Hours

• Self-service data science portal
• Integrated data sandbox
• Environment agility
• Multi-tenancy

Shared, Optimized Infrastructure

AI Maturity Dimension:

Technology

Requirements

• A technology platform that is optimized for AI and advanced analytics is required. The organization evolves from ad hoc systems to an environment where the AI hardware and software can be deployed through a self-service model.

Challenges

• Software and hardware platforms to optimize AI performance are still relatively new to most organizations. Time spent on optimizing the technology platform can have a significant impact on the overall performance of the system.

Initiatives

• Assess the landscape of AI enablers that can drive business value for the organization.
• Assess opportunities to accelerate the deployment of the AI platform with the adoption of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).
• Assess opportunities to accelerate performance with the optimization of AI accelerators.

AI enablers

Use case requirements should drive the selection of the tool

AI and data analytics data platform

An optimized data platform is foundational to maximizing the value from AI

Data Platform Capabilities

• Support for a variety of analytical applications, including self-service, operational, and data science analytics.
• Data preparation and integration capabilities to ingest structured and unstructured data, move and transform raw data to enriched data, and enable data access for the target userbase.
• An infrastructure platform optimized for advanced analytics that can perform and scale.

Infrastructure - AI accelerators

"By 2025, 70% of companies will invest in alternative computing technologies to drive business differentiation by compressing time to value of insights from complex data sets."
- IDC

2.1 Assess current AI maturity

1-3 hours

It is important to understand the current capabilities of the organization to deliver and deploy AI-based applications. Consider that advancing AI capabilities will also involve organizational changes and integration with the organization's governance and risk management programs.

1. Assess the organization's current state of AI capabilities with respect to its AI governance, data, people, process, and technology infrastructure using Info-Tech's AI Maturity Assessment & Roadmap Tool.
2. Consider the following as you complete the assessment:
1. What is the state of AI and data governance in the organization?
2. Does the organization have the skills, processes, and technology environment to deliver AI-based applications?
3. What organization will be accountable for any and all business outcomes of using the AI applications?
4. Has a risk assessment been performed?
3. Make sure you avoid the following common mistakes:
1. Do not focus only on addressing the technical challenges of building the AI model.
2. Do not ignore subject matter experts on either the business or IT side. You will need to consider both.

Download the AI Maturity Assessment & Roadmap Tool

Perform the AI Maturity Assessment

The Scale

Assess your AI maturity by selecting the maturity level that closest resembles the organization's current AI environment. Maturity dimensions that contribute to overall AI maturity include AI governance, data management, people, process, and technology capabilities.

Exploration (1.0)

• No experience building or using AI applications.

Incorporation (2.0)

• Some skills in using AI applications, or AI pilots are being considered for use.

Proliferation (3.0)

• AI applications have been adopted and implemented in multiple departments. Some of the responsible AI guiding principles are addressed (i.e. data privacy).

Optimization (4.0)

• The organization has automated the majority of its digital processes and leverages AI to optimize business operations. Controls are in place to monitor compliance with responsible AI guiding principles.

Transformation (5.0)

• The organization has adopted an AI-native culture and approach for building or implementing new business capabilities. Responsible AI guiding principles are operationalized with AI processes that proactively address possible breaches or risks associated with AI applications.

Perform the AI Maturity Assessment

AI Governance (1.0-5.0)

1. Is there awareness of the role of AI governance in our organization?

• No formal procedures are in place for AI development or deployment of applications.

• No group is assigned to be responsible for AI governance in our organization.

• Our organization has adopted and enforces standards for developing and deploying AI applications throughout the organization.

• Our organization is integrating an AI risk framework with the corporate risk management framework.

• Our organization leads the industry with the inclusion of responsible AI guiding principles with respect to transparency, accountability, risk, and governance.

Data Management/AI Data Capabilities (1.0-5.0)

1. Is there an awareness in our organization of the data requirements for developing AI applications?

• Data is often siloed and not easily accessible for AI applications.

• Required data is pulled from various sources in an ad hoc manner.

• Tools are available to manage the data lifecycle and support the data governance program.

• The data platform has been optimized for performance and access.

• Data culture exists throughout our organization, and data can be leveraged to drive innovation initiatives.

People/AI Skills in the Organization (1.0-5.0)

1. Is there an awareness in our organization of the skills required to build AI applications?

• No or very little skills exist throughout our organization.

• No formal group is assigned to build AI applications.

• An AI Center of Excellence has been formed to review, develop, deploy, and maintain AI applications.

• AI skills and people responsible for AI applications are spread throughout our organization.

• The entire organization is knowledgeable on how to leverage AI to transform the business.

Perform the AI Maturity Assessment

AI Processes (1.0-5.0)

1. Is there an awareness in our organization of the core processes and supporting tools that are required to build and support AI applications?

• There are few or no automated tools to accelerate the AI development process.

• Only ad hoc practices are used for developing AI applications.

• Our organization has documented standards in place for developing AI applications and deploying them AI to production.

• Our organization can leverage tools to perform an AI risk assessment and demonstrate compliance with the risk management framework.

• Our organization leads the industry in driving innovation through digital transformation.

Technology/AI Infrastructure (1.0-5.0)

1. Is there an awareness in our organization of the infrastructure (hardware and software) required to build AI applications?

• There is little awareness of what infrastructure is required to build and support AI applications.

• There is no dedicated infrastructure for the development of AI applications.

• Our organization is leveraging purpose-built infrastructure to optimize performance.

• Our organization is leveraging cloud-based deployment models to support AI applications in on-premises, hybrid, and public cloud platforms.

• Our organization leads the industry with its ability to respond to change and to leverage AI to improve business outcomes.

Phase 3

Prioritize Candidate Opportunities and Develop Policies

Phase 1
1. Establish Responsible AI Guiding Principles

Phase 2
1. Assess Current Level of AI Maturity

Phase 3
1. Prioritize Candidate Opportunities
2. Develop Policies

Phase 4
1. Build and Communicate the Roadmap

3.1 Prioritize candidate AI opportunities

1-3 hours

Identify business opportunities that are high impact to your business and its customers and have low implementation complexity.

1. Leverage the business capability map for your organization or industry to identify candidate business capabilities to augment or automate with generative AI.
2. Establish criteria to assess candidate use cases by evaluating against the organization's mission and goals, the responsible AI guiding principles, and the complexity of the project.
3. Ensure that candidate business capabilities to be automated align with the organization's business criteria, responsible AI guiding principles, and resources to deliver the project.
4. Make sure you avoid sharing the organization's sensitive data if the application is deployed on the public cloud.

Download the AI Maturity Assessment and Roadmap Tool

The business capability map for an organization

A business capability map is an abstraction of business operations that helps describe what the enterprise does to achieve its vision, mission, and goals, rather than how. Business capabilities are the building blocks of the enterprise. They represent stable business functions, are unique and independent of each other, and typically will have a defined business outcome.

Business capabilities are supported by people, process, and technology.

While business capability maps are helpful tools for a variety of strategic purposes, in this context they act as an investigation into what technology your business units use and how they use it.

Defining Capabilities
Activities that define how the entity provides services. These capabilities support the key value streams for the organization.

Enabling Capabilities
Support the creation of strategic plans and facilitate business decision making as well as the functioning of the organization (e.g. information technology, financial management, HR).

Shared Capabilities
These predominantly customer-facing capabilities demonstrate how the entity supports multiple value streams simultaneously.

Leverage your industry's capability maps to identify candidate opportunities/initiatives

Business capability map defined...

In business architecture, the primary view of an organization is known as a business capability map.

A business capability defines what a business does to enable value creation, rather than how. Business capabilities:

• Represent stable business functions.
• Are unique and independent of each other.
• Typically will have a defined business outcome.

A business capability map provides details that help the business architecture practitioner direct attention to a specific area of the business for further assessment.

Note: This is an illustrative business capability map example for Marketing & Advertising

Business value vs. complexity assessment

Leverage our simple value-to-effort matrix to help prioritize your AI initiatives

Common business value drivers

• Drive revenue
• Improve operational excellence
• Accelerate innovation
• Mitigate risk

Common project complexity characteristics

• Resources required
• Costs (acquisition, operational, support...)
• Training required
• Risk involved
• Etc.

1. Determine a business value and project complexity score for the candidate business capability or initiative.
2. Plot initiatives on the matrix.
3. Prioritize initiatives with high business value and low complexity.

Assess business value vs. project complexity to prioritize candidate opportunities for generative AI

Prioritize opportunities/initiatives with high business value and low project complexity

Prioritization criteria exercise 1: Assessing the Create Content capability

Assessing the Create Content capability

This opportunity is removed because it does not pass the organization/business criteria

Prioritization criteria exercise 2: Assessing the Content Production capability

Assessing the Content Production capability

This opportunity is accepted because it passes the organization's business, responsible AI, and project criteria

3.2 Communicate policies for AI use

1-3 hours

1. Ensure policies for usage align with the organization's business criteria, responsible AI guiding principles, and ability to deliver the projects prioritized and beyond.
2. Understand the current benefits as well as limits and risk associated with any proposed generative AI-based solution.
3. Ensure you consider the following:
1. What data is being shared with the application?
2. Is the generative AI application deployed on the public cloud? Can anybody access the data provided to the application?
3. Avoid using very technical, legal, or fear-based communication for your policies.

Generative AI policy for the Create Content capability

Aligning policies to direct the uses assessed and implemented is essential

Example

Many of us have been involved in discussions regarding the use of ChatGPT in our marketing and sales initiatives. ChatGPT is a powerful tool that needs to be used in a responsible and ethical manner, and we also need to ensure the integrity and accuracy of its results. Here is our policy on the use of ChatGPT:

• You are free to use generative AI to assist your searches, but there are NO circumstances under which you are to reproduce generative AI output (text, image, audio, video, etc.) in your content.

If you have any questions regarding the use of ChatGPT, please feel free to reach out to our generative AI team and/or any member of our senior leadership team.

Generative AI policy for the Content Production capability

These policies should align to and reinforce your responsible AI principles

Example

Many of us have been involved in discussions regarding the use of ChatGPT in our deliverables. ChatGPT is a powerful tool that needs to be used in a responsible and ethical manner, and we also need to ensure the integrity and accuracy of its results. Here is our policy on the use of ChatGPT:

• If you use ChatGPT, you need to assess the accuracy of its response before including it in our content. Assessment includes verifying the information, seeing if bias exists, and judging its relevance.
• Employees must not:
• Provide any customer, citizen, or third-party content to any generative AI tool (public or private) without the express written permission of the CIO or the Chief Information Security Officer. Generative AI tools often use input data to train their model, therefore potentially exposing confidential data, violating contract terms and/or privacy legislation, and placing the organization at risk of litigation or causing damage to our organization.
• Engage in any activity that violates any applicable law, regulation, or industry standard.
• Use services for illegal, harmful, or offensive purposes.
• Create or share content that is deceptive, fraudulent, or misleading or that could damage the reputation of our organization.
• Use services to gain unauthorized access to computer systems, networks, or data.
• Attempt to interfere with, bypass controls of, or disrupt operations, security, or functionality of systems, networks, or data.

If you have any questions regarding the use of ChatGPT, please feel free to reach out to our generative AI team and/or any member of our senior leadership team.

Phase 4

Build the Roadmap

Phase 1
1. Establish Responsible AI Guiding Principles

Phase 2
1. Assess Current Level of AI Maturity

Phase 3
1. Prioritize Candidate Opportunities
2. Develop Policies

Phase 4
1. Build and Communicate the Roadmap

4.1.1 Create the implementation plan for each prioritized initiative

1-3 hours

1. Build the implementation plan for each accepted use case using the roadmap template.
2. Assess the firm's capabilities with respect to the dimensions of AI maturity and target the future-state capabilities you need to develop.
3. Prepare by assessing the risk of the proposed use cases.
4. Ensure initiatives align with organizational objectives.
5. Ensure all AI initiatives have a defined value expectation.
6. Do not ignore subject matter experts on either the business or IT side. You will need to consider both.

Download the AI Maturity Assessment and Roadmap Tool

Target-state options

Identify the future-state capabilities that need to be developed to deliver your use cases

1. Build an implementation plan for each use case to adopt.
2. Assess if the current state of the AI environment can be leveraged to deliver the selected generative AI use cases.
3. If the current AI environment is not sufficient, identify the future state required that will enable the delivery of the generative AI use cases. Identify gaps and build the roadmap to address the gaps.

4.1.2 Design metrics for success

1-2 hours

Establish metrics to measure to determine the success or failure of each POC.

1. Discuss which relevant currently tracked metrics are useful to continue tracking for the POC.
2. Discuss which metrics are irrelevant to the POC.
3. Discuss metrics to start tracking and how to track them with the generative AI vendor.
4. Compile a list of metrics relevant to the POC.
5. Decide what the outcome is if the metric is high or low, including decision steps and relevant actions.
6. Designate a generative AI application owner and a vendor liaison.

Prepare by building an implementation plan for each candidate use case (previous step).

Include key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that measure the application's contribution to strategic initiatives.

Consider assigning a vendor liaison to accelerate the implementation and adoption of the generative AI-based solution.

Generative AI POC metrics - examples

You need to measure the effectiveness of your initiatives. Here are some typical examples.

GitHub Copilot POC business value - example

Quantifying the benefits of GitHub Copilot to demonstrate measurable business value

POC Results

Task 1: Creating a web server in JavaScript

• Time to complete task with GitHub Copilot: 1 hour 11 minutes
• Time to complete the task without GitHub Copilot: 2 hours 41 minutes
• Productivity Gain = (1 hour 30 minutes time saved) / (2 hours 41 minutes) = 55%
• Benefit per Programmer = 55% x (average salary of a programmer)
• Total Benefit of GitHub Copilot for Task 1 = (benefit per programmer) x (# of programmers)

Enterprise Value of GitHub Copilot = Total Benefit of GitHub Copilot for Task 1 + Total Benefit of GitHub Copilot for Task 2 + ... + Total Benefit of GitHub Copilot for Task n

Source: GitHub

4.1.3 Build your generative AI initiative roadmap

1-3 hours

The roadmap should provide a compelling vision of how you will deliver the identified generative AI applications by prioritizing and simplifying the actions required to deliver these new initiatives.

1. Leverage tab 4, Initiative Planning, in the AI Maturity Assessment and Roadmap Tool to create and align your initiatives to the key value driver they are most relevant to:
1. Transfer the results of your value and complexity assessments to this tool to drive the prioritization.
2. Assign responsible owners to each initiative.
3. Identify which AI maturity capabilities each initiative will enhance. However, do not build or introduce new capabilities merely to advance the organization's AI maturity level.
2. Review the Gantt chart to ensure alignment and assess overlap.

Download the AI Maturity Assessment and Roadmap Tool

Build your generative AI roadmap to visualize your key project plans

Visual representations of data are more compelling than text alone.

Develop a high-level document that travels with the project from inception through to executive inquiry, project management, and finally execution.

A project needs to be discrete: able to be conceptualized and discussed as an independent item. Each project must have three characteristics:

• Specific outcome: An explicit change in the people, processes, or technology of the enterprise.
• Target end date: When the described outcome will be in effect.
• Owner: Who on the IT team is responsible for executing on the initiative.

Info-Tech Insight
Don't project your vision three to five years into the future. Deep dive on next year's big-ticket items instead.

4.1.4 Build a communication plan for your roadmap

1-3 hours

1. Identify your target audience and what they need to know.
2. Identify desired channels of communication and details for the target audience.
3. Describe communication required for each audience segment.
4. List frequency of communication for each audience segment.
5. Create an executive presentation leveraging The Era of Generative AI C-Suite Presentation and AI Maturity Assessment and Roadmap Tool.

Generative AI communication plan

Well-planned communications are essential to the success and adoption of your AI initiatives

To ensure that organization's roadmap is clearly communicated across the AI, data, technology, and business organizations, develop a rollout strategy, like this example.

Example

Deliver an executive presentation of the roadmap for the business stakeholders

After you complete the activities and exercises within this blueprint, the final step of the process is to present the deliverable to senior management and stakeholders.

Know Your Audience

• Business stakeholders are interested in understanding the business outcomes that will result from their investment in generative AI.
• Your audience will want to understand the risks involved and how to mitigate those risks.
• Explain how the generative AI project was selected and the criteria used to help draft generative AI usage policies.

Recommendations

• Highlight the need for responsible AI to ensure that human-based requirements are being addressed.
• Ensure your generative AI team includes both business and technical staff.

Download The Era of Generative AI C-Suite Presentation

Bibliography

"A pro-innovation approach to AI regulation." UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, March 2023. Web.

"Artificial Intelligence Act." European Commission, 21 April 2021. Web.

"Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA)." Canadian Federal Government, June 2022. Web.

"Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2023." Stanford University, April 2023. Web.

"Automated Employment Decision Tools." New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, Dec. 2021. Web.

"Bain & Company announces services alliance with OpenAI to help enterprise clients identify and realize the full potential and maximum value of AI." Bain & Company, 21 Feb. 2023. Web.

"Buzzfeed to use AI to write its articles after firing 180 employees." Al Mayadeen English, 27 Jan. 2023. Web.

"California Consumers Privacy Act." State of California Department of Justice. April 24, 2023. Web.

Campbell, Ian Carlos. "The Apple Card doesn't actually discriminate against women, investigators say." The Verge, 23 March 2021. Web.

Campbell, Patrick. "NIST Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0)." National Institute of Standards and Technology, Jan. 2023. Web.

"EU Ethics Guidelines For Trustworthy." European Commission, 8 April 2019. Web.

Farhi, Paul. "A news site used AI to write articles. It was a journalistic disaster." Washington Post, 17 Jan. 2023. Web.

Forsyth, Ollie. "Mapping the Generative AI landscape." Antler, 20 Dec. 2022. Web.

"General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)" European Commission, 25 May 2018. Web.

"Generative AI Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2023-2028." IMARC Group, 2022. Web.

Guynn, Jessica. "Bing's ChatGPT is in its feelings: 'You have not been a good user. I have been a good Bing.'" USA Today, 14 Feb. 2023. Web.

Hunt, Mia. "Canada launches data governance standardisation initiative." Global Government Forum, 24 Sept. 2020. Web.

Johnston Turner, Mary. "IDC's Worldwide Future of Digital Infrastructure 2022 Predictions." IDC, 27 Oct. 2021. Web.

Kalliamvakou, Eirini. "Research: quantifying GitHub Copilot's impact on developer productivity and happiness." GitHub, 7 Sept. 2022. Web.

Kerravala, Zeus. "NVIDIA Brings AI To Health Care While Protecting Patient Data." eWeek, 12 Dec. 2019. Web.

Knight, Will. "The Apple Card Didn't 'See' Gender-and That's the Problem." Wired, 19 Nov. 2019. Web.

"OECD, Recommendation of the Council on Artificial Intelligence." OECD, 2022. Web.

"The National AI Initiative Act" U.S. Federal Government, 1 Jan 2021. Web.

"Trustworthy AI (TAI) Playbook." U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Sept 2021. Web.

Info-Tech Research Contributors/Advocates

Joel McLean
Executive Chairman

David Godfrey
CEO

Gord Harrison
Senior Vice President, Research & Advisory Services

William Russell
CIO

Jack Hakimian
SVP, Research

Barry Cousins
Distinguished Analyst and
Research Fellow

Larry Fretz
Vice President, Industry Research

Tom Zehren
CPO

Mark Roman
Managing Partner II

Christine West
Managing Partner

Steve Willis
Practice Lead

Yatish Sewgoolam
Associate Vice President, Research Agenda

Rob Redford
Practice Lead

Mike Tweedie
Practice Lead

Neal Rosenblatt
Principal Research Director

Jing Wu
Principal Research Director

Irina Sedenko
Research Director

Jeremy Roberts
Workshop Director

Brian Jackson
Research Director

Mark Maby
Research Director

Stacey Horricks
Director, Social Media

Sufyan Al-Hassan
Public Relations Manager

Sam Kanen
Marketing Specialist

Develop an IT Infrastructure Services Playbook

Automation, SDI, and DevOps – build a cheat sheet to manage a changing Infrastructure & Operations environment.

Table of contents

Analyst Perspective

Executive Summary

Project Overview

• Phase 1: Define and Prioritize Infrastructure Services
  • 1.1: Define the services you own
  • 1.2: Prioritize infrastructure services
• Phase 2: Build Workflows and an Infrastructure Services Playbook
  • 2.1: Design workflow for service delivery
  • 2.2: Build a services playbook
• Phase 3: Identify Costs and Mature Service Delivery Capabilities
  • 3.1: Eliminate infrastructure service costs
  • 3.2: Mature your I&O organization into a service broker

Summary and Conclusion

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

Technology is changing how infrastructure services are delivered.

"Managing a hybrid infrastructure environment is challenge enough. Add to this the pressure on IT Operations to deliver services faster and more continuously – it’s a recipe for boondoggle deployments, overcommitted staff, end-user frustration, and operational gridlock.

It’s not every service you provide that causes problems, so prioritize a few in-demand, painful services. Build and maintain durable, flexible processes that enable your team to provide consistent, repeatable services at a standard cost. Identify opportunities to improve service delivery.

You’ll save the business time and money and your own team significant grief." (Andrew Sharp, Research Manager, Infrastructure & Operations, Info-Tech Research Group)

Your infrastructure and operations team is a service provider; standardize, document, and communicate service capabilities

This Research is Designed For:

• CTOs and Infrastructure Managers
• Service Level Managers
• ITSM Managers and Process Owners

This Research Will Help You:

• Inventory services that IT Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) provides to the business (servers, storage, and network).
• Standardize services and track costs.
• Articulate the value of these services to business owners.
• Develop a catalog of infrastructure services.

This Research Will Also Assist:

• CIOs
• Application Development Managers
• Security Managers
• Auditors

This Research Will Help Them:

• Understand the complexities of technical service delivery.
• Make better strategic IT infrastructure decisions.

Executive summary

Situation

• Infrastructure and operations teams are managing deployments on- and off-premises and across multiple infrastructure service providers.
• Though automation tools speed up the delivery process, documentation is always pushed off so the team can meet urgent deadlines.

Complication

• Cloud providers have set the bar high for ease of access to stable infrastructure services.
• Without documented delivery processes, wait times are longer, controls are adequate but ad hoc, builds are non-standard, and errors are more likely to be introduced in production.

Resolution

• Prioritize in-demand services for documentation and standardization.
• Build service workflows and document service requirements in the services playbook.
• Create a costing model and track costs to deliver defined services.
• Leverage data on costs and service requirements to improve service delivery.

Info-Tech Insight

1. Keep it simple. Work through a few in-demand services to get early value from the project.
2. Don’t get lost in automation or tooling. You don’t need a complex tool or back-end automation to get value from standardized services.
3. Do then iterate. With a few completed service processes, it’s much easier to identify opportunities for service automation.

Create an infrastructure services playbook to improve efficiency, support DevOps, and streamline service delivery

Begin building an infrastructure services playbook by defining the services you provide. This will also help your team support changes to service delivery (e.g. more use of cloud services and the shift to DevOps).

In this blueprint, the first step will be to document infrastructure services to:

1. Clarify infrastructure capabilities and achievable service levels.

   Document infrastructure services to clarify achievable service levels with given resources and what you will need to meet service-level requirement gaps. Establishing your ability to meet customer demands is the first step toward becoming a broker of internal or external services.

2. Standardize infrastructure service delivery.

   Sometimes, it’s extremely important to do the exact same thing every time (e.g. server hardening). Sometimes, your team needs room to deviate from the script. Create a playbook that allows you to standardize service delivery as needed.

3. Make good strategic infrastructure decisions.

   Knowledge is power. Defined services and capabilities will help you make important strategic infrastructure decisions around capacity planning and when outsourcing is appropriate.

Review and optimize infrastructure service delivery as you shift to more cloud-based services

If you can’t standardize and streamline how you support cloud services, you risk AppDev and business leaders circumventing the I&O team.

	Example: Create a new server resource in a virtual environment vs. public cloud In a virtualized environment, provisioning processes can still be relatively siloed. In a software-defined environment, many steps require knowledge across the infrastructure stack. Better documentation will help your team deliver services outside their area of specialty.
Identify CPU requirements for a virtual machine (VM) Calculate VM memory requirements Configure the floppy drive for a VM Configure IDE devices for a VM Configure SCSI adapters for a VM Configure network adapters for a VM Configure VM priority for host CPU resources Server is live		Complete SDI code development & review, version control, build status, etc. Identify software and specifications for the instance you want to use Review configuration, storage, and security settings Secure the instance with an existing key pair or create a new key pair Update documentation – public IP address, physical & logical connections, data flows, etc. Launch and connect to instance Server is live

Strengthen DevOps with an infrastructure playbook

The purpose behind DevOps is to reduce friction and deliver faster, more continuous, more automated services through the use of cross-functional teams.

DevOps: bridging Applications Development and Infrastructure & Operations by embracing a culture, practices, and tools born out of Lean and Agile methodologies.

• Create a common language across functions.
• Ensure that all service steps are documented.
• Move towards more standard deployments.
• Increase transparency within the IT department.
• Cultivate trust across teams.
• Build the foundation for automated services.

"The bar has been raised for delivering technology products and services – what was good enough in previous decades is not good enough now." (Kim, Humble, Debois, Willis (2016))

Leverage an infrastructure services playbook to improve service delivery, one step at a time

Crawl Prioritize infrastructure services that are good candidates for standardization. Document the steps and requirements to deliver the service. Use the playbook and workflows internally as you gather requirements and deliver on requests. Track costs internally.	Walk Provide infrastructure clients with the playbook and allow them to make requests against it. Update and maintain existing documentation. Automate, where possible. Showback costs to the business.	Run Provide infrastructure customers with scripts to provision infrastructure resources. Audit requests before fulfilling them. Chargeback costs, as needed.

Focus on in-demand infrastructure services — PHASE 1

Standardize in-demand, repeatable services first.

Demand for infrastructure services is usually driven by external requests or operational requirements. Prioritize services based on criticality, durability, frequency, availability, and urgency requirements.

Scheduling Delays

• Dealing with a slew of capital projects driven by a major funding initiative, the IT team of a major US transit system is struggling to execute on basic operational tasks.

Action:
• A brainstorming and prioritization exercise identifies web server deployment as their most in-demand service.
• Identifying breakdowns in web server deployment helps free up resources for other tasks and addresses a serious pain point.

Think outside the box

• On a new project for a sporting goods client, the IT department for a marketing firm deploys and supports a “locker” kiosk that users engage with for a chance to win a gift.

Action:
• As the campaign proves successful, the I&O Manager creates a playbook to guide kiosk support and deployment in the future, including required skills, timelines, success metrics, and costs.

Keep it standard, keep it safe

• An IT audit at a higher education institution finds that no standard process for server hardening has been defined or documented by the infrastructure team.

Action:
• Improving IT security is a strategic priority for the department.
• The infrastructure team decides to standardize and document processes, guidelines, and configurations for hardening OS, SCCM, SaltStack, scripting, and patching.

Leverage service workflows to populate the playbook — PHASE 2

Infrastructure as Code is breaking down traditional infrastructure silos and support models.

1. Document the workflow to deliver the service. Identify pain points and target broken processes first.
   Provision –› Configure –› Run –› Quiesce –› Destroy
2. Define logical expected results and metrics for problematic steps in the process. Identify challenges and possible improvements to each problematic step.
   

   Building and deploying toolsets is taking a long time
   Start Create a baseline offering for common requests. Make clear that non-standard requests will take time to fulfil.	Stop Move to just one web server.	Continue Use weekly drop-ins to communicate the change.

3. Document skills and roles, approvers, and pre-requirements to fill out the documentation, as needed. Use the documented process to guide internal process and align with external expectations.

Cross-silo knowledge is needed: In a software-defined environment, building and launching a new server requires knowledge across the stack.

• Complete SDI code development & review, version control, build status, etc.
• Identify software and specifications for the instance you want to use
• Review configuration, storage, and security settings
• Secure the instance with an existing key pair, or create a new key pair
• Update documentation – public IP address, physical & logical connections, data flows, etc.
• Launch and connect to the instance

Server is live

Take a progressive approach to cost tracking — PHASE 3

Infrastructure & Operations are bound by two metrics:

1. Are systems up?
2. Is technology delivered as efficiently as possible?

Because tracking cost is integral to efficiency, cost and budget management, by proxy, is one of the most important Infrastructure & Operations metrics.

Cost management is not a numbers game. It is an indicator of how well infrastructure is managed.

Track costs in a practical way that delivers value to your organization:

1. Build and leverage an internal rate sheet to help estimate cost to serve.
2. Showback rate sheet to help managers and architects make better infrastructure decisions.
3. Chargeback costs to defined cost centers.

Project overview

Use Info-Tech’s methodology to get value faster from your infrastructure services playbook.

Use these icons to help direct you as you navigate this research

Use these icons to help guide you through each step of the blueprint and direct you to content related to the recommended activities.

This icon denotes a slide where a supporting Info-Tech tool or template will help you perform the activity or step associated with the slide. Refer to the supporting tool or template to get the best results and proceed to the next step of the project.

This icon denotes a slide with an associated activity. The activity can be performed either as part of your project or with the support of Info-Tech team members, who will come onsite to facilitate a workshop for your organization.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Guided Implementation Overview

Your Trusted Advisor is just a call away.

Your Guided Implementation will pair you with an advisor from our analyst team for the duration of your infrastructure services project.

Workshop Overview

Develop an IT Infrastructure Services Playbook

PHASE 1

Define and Prioritize Infrastructure Services

Step 1.1: Define the services you own

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Define “infrastructure service”
• Brainstorm service offerings
• Consolidate services with affinity map

This step involves the following participants:

• Infrastructure Manager
• I&O SMEs

Results & Insights

• Results: Consolidated list of end-to-end services
• Insights: Avoid analysis paralysis by brainstorming without restrictions. It is more effective to cut down in Step 1.2 rather than risk neglecting important services for the playbook.

Consider a range of infrastructure services

Your infrastructure team is a service provider to the applications team – and sometimes other users as well.

Service Requests

• A developer requests a new web server.
• The marketing department asks for a database to support a six-month digital marketing campaign.

Projects

• A new service is promoted to production.

Operations

• Firewall rules are updated to support server, network, or security posture changes.
• Standard practices are followed and maintained to harden a range of different operating systems.
• Engineers follow a standard process to integrate new tools and entitlements into Active Directory.
• Patches and firmware updates are applied to core infrastructure components as needed.

Problems

• A database batch job often breaks on overnight batch jobs and requires manual intervention to check and restart.

IT infrastructure & operations teams deliver services that fulfil requests, support projects, resolve problems, and operate systems.

Get Started With Customer Advocacy

Develop a customer advocacy program to transform customer satisfaction into revenue growth.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst perspective

Customer advocacy is critical to driving revenue growth

Customer advocacy puts the customer at the center of everything your organization does. By cultivating a deep understanding of customer needs and how they define value and by delivering positive experiences throughout the customer journey, organizations inspire and empower customers to become evangelists for their brands or products. Both the client and solution provider enjoy satisfying and ongoing business outcomes as a result.

Focusing on customer advocacy is critical for software solutions providers. Business-to-business (B2B) buyers are increasingly looking to their peers and third-party resources to arm themselves with information on solutions they feel they can trust before they choose to engage with solution providers. Your satisfied customers are now your most trusted and powerful resource.

Customer advocacy helps build strong relationships with your customers, nurtures brand advocacy, gives your marketing messaging credibility, and differentiates your company from the competition; it’s critical to driving revenue growth. Companies that develop mature advocacy programs can increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) by 16% (Wharton Business School, 2009), increase customer retention by 35% (Deloitte, 2011), and give themselves a strong competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Emily Wright
Senior Research Analyst, Advisory
SoftwareReviews

Executive summary

Your Challenge

Ad hoc customer advocacy (CA) efforts and reference programs, while still useful, are not enough to drive growth. Providers increase their chance for success by assessing if they face the following challenges:

• Lack of referenceable customers that can turn into passionate advocates, or a limited pool that is at risk of burnout.
• Lack of references for all key customer types, verticals, etc., especially in new growth segments or those that are hard to recruit.
• Lack of a consistent program for gathering customer feedback and input to make improvements and increase customer satisfaction.
• Lack of executive and stakeholder (e.g. Sales, Customer Success, channel partners, etc.) buy-in for the importance and value of customer advocacy.

Building a strong customer advocacy program must be a high priority for customer service/success leaders in today’s highly competitive software markets.

Common Obstacles

Getting started with customer advocacy is no easy task. Many customer success professionals carry out ad hoc customer advocacy activities to address immediate needs but lack a more strategic approach. What separates them from success are several nagging obstacles:

• Efforts lack funding and buy-in from stakeholders.
• Senior management doesn’t fully understand the business value of a customer advocacy program.
• Duplicate efforts are taking place between Sales, Marketing, product teams, etc., because ownership, roles, and responsibilities have not been determined.
• Relationships are guarded/hoarded by those who feel they own the relationship (e.g. Sales, Customer Success, channel partners, etc.).
• Customer-facing staff often lack the necessary skills to foster customer advocacy.

SoftwareReviews’ Approach

This blueprint will help leaders of customer advocacy programs get started with developing a formalized pilot program that will demonstrate the value of customer advocacy and lay a strong foundation to justify rollout. Through SoftwareReviews’ approach, customer advocacy leaders will:

• Enable the organization to identify and develop meaningful relationships with top customers and advocates.
• Understand the concepts and benefits of CA and how CA can be used to improve marketing and sales and fuel growth and competitiveness.
• Follow SoftwareReviews’ methodology to identify where to start to apply CA within the organization.
• Develop a customer advocacy proof of concept/pilot program to gain stakeholder approval and funding to get started with or expand efforts around customer advocacy.

What is customer advocacy?

“Customer advocacy is the act of putting customer needs first and working to deliver solution-based assistance through your products and services." – Testimonial Hero, 2021

Customer advocacy is designed to keep customers loyal through customer engagement and advocacy marketing campaigns. Successful customer advocacy leaders experience decreased churn while increasing return on investment (ROI) through retention, acquisition, and cost savings.

Businesses that implement customer advocacy throughout their organizations find new ways of supporting customers, provide additional customer value, and ensure their brands stand unique among the competition.

Customer Advocacy Is…

• An integral part of any marketing and/or business strategy.
• Essential to improving and maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction.
• Focused on delivering value to customers.
• Not only a set of actions, but a mindset that should be fostered and reinforced through a customer-centric culture.
• Mutually beneficial relationships for both company and customer.

Customer Advocacy Is Not…

• Only referrals and testimonials.
• Solely about what you can get from your advocates.
• Brand advocacy. Brand advocacy is the desired outcome of customer advocacy.
• Transactional. Brand advocates must be engaged.
• A nice-to-have.
• Solved entirely by software. Think about what you want to achieve and how a software solution can you help you reach those goals.

SoftwareReviews Insight

Customer advocacy has evolved into being a valued company asset versus a simple referral program – success requires an organization-wide customer-first mindset and the recognition that customer advocacy is a strategic growth initiative necessary to succeed in today’s competitive market.

Customer advocacy: Essential to high retention

When customers advocate for your company and products, they are eager to retain the value they receive

• Customer acts of advocacy correlate to high retention.
• Acts of advocacy won’t happen unless customers feel their interests are placed ahead of your company’s, thereby increasing satisfaction and customer success. That’s the definition of a customer-centric culture.
• And yet your company does receive significant benefits from customer advocacy:
  • When customers advocate and renew, your costs go down and margins rise because it costs less to keep a happy customer than it does to bring a new customer onboard.
  • When renewal rates are high, customer lifetime value increases, also increasing profitability.

Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer (Huify, 2018).

Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95% (Bain & Company, cited in Harvard Business Review, 2014).

SoftwareReviews Insight

Don’t overlook the value of customer advocacy to retention! Despite the common knowledge that it’s far easier and cheaper to sell to an existing customer than to sell to a new prospect, most companies fail to leverage their customer advocacy programs and continue to put pressure on Marketing to focus their budgets on customer acquisition.

Customer advocacy can also be your ultimate growth strategy

In your marketing and sales messaging, acts of advocacy serve as excellent proof points for value delivered.

Forty-five percent of businesses rank online reviews as a top source of information for selecting software during this (top of funnel) stage, followed closely by recommendations and referrals at 42%. These sources are topped only by company websites at 54% (Clutch, 2020).

With referrals coming from customer advocates to prospects via your lead gen engine and through seller talk tracks, customer advocacy is central to sales, marketing, and customer experience success.

✓ Advocates can help your new customers learn your solution and ensure higher adoption and satisfaction.
✓ Advocates can provide valuable, honest feedback on new updates and features.

“A customer advocacy program is not just a fancy buzz word or a marketing tool that’s nice to have. It’s a core discipline that every major brand needs to integrate into their overall marketing, sales and customer success strategies if they expect to survive in this trust economy. Customer advocacy arguably is the common asset that runs throughout all marketing, sales and customer success activities regardless of the stage of the buyer’s journey and ties it all together.” – RO Innovation, 2017

Positive experience drives acts of advocacy

More than price or product, experience now leads the way in customer advocacy and retention

Advocacy happens when customers recommend your product. Our research shows that the biggest drivers of likeliness to recommend and acts of customer advocacy are the positive experiences customers have with vendors and their products, not product features or cost savings. Customers want to feel that:

1. Their productivity and performance is enhanced and the vendor is helping them to innovate and grow as a company.
2. Their vendor inspires them and helps them to continually improve.
3. They can rely on the vendor and the product they purchased.
4. They are respected by the vendor.
5. They can trust that the vendor will be on their side and save them time.

Note that anything above 0.5 indicates a strong driver of satisfaction.
Source: SoftwareReviews buyer reviews (based on 82,560 unique reviews).

SoftwareReviews Insight

True customer satisfaction comes from helping customers innovate, enhancing their performance, inspiring them to continually improve, and being reliable, respectful, trustworthy, and conscious of their time. These true drivers of satisfaction should be considered in your customer advocacy and retention efforts. The experience customers have with your product and brand is what will differentiate your brand from competitors, drive advocacy, and ultimately, power business growth. Talk to a SoftwareReviews advisor to learn how users rate your product on these satisfaction drivers in the SoftwareReviews Emotional Footprint Report.

Yet challenges exist for customer advocacy program leaders

Customer success leaders without a strong customer advocacy program feel numerous avoidable pains:

• Lack of compelling stories and proof points for the sales team, causing long sales cycles.
• Heavy reliance on a small pool of worn-out references.
• Lack of references for all needed customer types, verticals, etc.
• Lack of a reliable customer feedback process for solution improvements.
• Overspending on acquiring new customers due to a lack of customer proof points.
• Missed opportunities that could grow the business (customer lifetime value, upsell/cross-sell, etc.).

Marketing, customer success, and sales teams experiencing any one of the above challenges must consider getting started with a more formalized customer advocacy program.

Obstacles to customer advocacy programs

Leaders must overcome several barriers in developing a customer advocacy program:

• Stakeholders are often unclear on the value customer advocacy programs can bring and require proof of benefits to invest.
• Efforts are duplicated among sales, marketing, product, and customer success teams, given ownership and collaboration practices are ill-defined or nonexistent.
• There is a culture of guarding or hoarding customer relationships by those who feel they own the relationship, or there’s high turnover among employees who own the customer relationships.
• The governance, technology, people, skills, and/or processes to take customer advocacy to the next level are lacking.
• Leaders don’t know where to start with customer advocacy, what needs to be improved, or what to focus on first.

A lack of customer centricity hurts organizations

12% of people believe when a company says they put customers first. (Source: HubSpot, 2019)

Brands struggle to follow through on brand promises, and a mismatch between expectations and lived experience emerges. Customer advocacy can help close this gap and help companies live up to their customer-first messaging.

42% of companies don’t conduct any customer surveys or collect feedback. (Source: HubSpot, 2019)

Too many companies are not truly listening to their customers. Companies that don’t collect feedback aren’t going to know what to change to improve customer satisfaction. Customer advocacy will orient companies around their customer and create a reliable feedback loop that informs product and service enhancements.

Customer advocacy is no longer a nice-to-have but a necessity for solution providers

B2B buyers increasingly turn to peers to learn about solutions:

“84% of B2B decision makers start the buying process with a referral.” (Source: Influitive, Gainsight & Pendo, 2020)

“46% of B2B buyers rely on customer references for information before purchasing.” (Source: RO Innovation, 2017)

“91% of B2B purchasers’ buying decisions are influenced by word-of-mouth recommendations.” (Source: ReferralRock, 2022)

“76% of individuals admit that they’re more likely to trust content shared by ‘normal’ people than content shared by brands.” (Source: TrustPilot, 2020)

By ignoring the importance of customer advocacy, companies and brands are risking stagnation and missing out on opportunities to gain competitive advantage and achieve growth.

Getting Started With Customer Advocacy: SoftwareReviews' Approach

1 BUILD
Build the business case
Identify your key stakeholders, steering committee, and working team, understand key customer advocacy principles, and note success barriers and ways to overcome them as your first steps.

2 DEVELOP
Develop your advocacy requirements
Assess your current customer advocacy maturity, identify gaps in your current efforts, and develop your ideal advocate profile.

3 WIN
Win executive approval and implement pilot
Determine goals and success metrics for the pilot, establish a timeline and key project milestones, create advocate communication materials, and finally gain executive buy-in and implement the pilot.

SoftwareReviews Insight
Building and implementing a customer advocacy pilot will help lay the foundation for a full program and demonstrate to executives and key stakeholders the impact on revenue, retention, and CLV that can be achieved through coordinated and well-planned customer advocacy efforts.

Customer advocacy benefits

Our research benefits customer advocacy program managers by enabling them to:

• Explain why having a centralized, proactive customer advocacy program is important.
• Clearly communicate the benefits and business case for having a formalized customer advocacy program.
• Develop a customer advocacy pilot to provide a proof of concept (POC) and demonstrate the value of customer advocacy.
• Assess the maturity of your current customer advocacy efforts and identify what to improve and how to improve to grow your customer advocacy function.

"Advocacy is the currency for business and the fuel for explosive growth. Successful marketing executives who understand this make advocacy programs an essential part of their go-to-market strategy. They also know that advocacy isn't something you simply 'turn on': ... ultimately, it's about making human connections and building relationships that have enduring value for everyone involved."
- Dan Cote, Influitive, Dec. 2021

Case Study: Advocate impact on sales at Genesys

Genesys' Goal

Provide sales team with compelling customer reviews, quotes, stories, videos, and references.

Approach to Advocacy

• Customers were able to share their stories through Genesys' customer hub GCAP as quotes, reviews, etc., and could sign up to host reference forum sessions for prospective customers.
• Content was developed that demonstrated ROI with using Genesys' solutions, including "top-tier logos, inspiring quotes, and reference forums featuring some of their top advocates" (Influitive, 2021).
• Leveraged customer advocacy-specific software solution integration with the CRM to easily identify reference recommendations for Sales.

Advocate Impact on Sales

According to Influitive (2021), the impacts were:

• 386% increase in revenue influences from references calls
• 82% of revenue has been influence by reference calls
• 78 reference calls resulted in closed-won opportunities
• 250 customers and prospects attended 7 reference forums
• 112 reference slides created for sales enablement
• 100+ quotes were collect and transformed into 78 quote slides

Who benefits from getting started with customer advocacy?

This Research Is Designed for:

• Customer advocacy leaders and marketers who are looking to:
  • Take a more strategic, proactive, and structured approach to customer advocacy.
  • Find a more effective and reliable way to gather customer feedback and input on products and services.
  • Develop and nurture a customer-oriented mindset throughout the organization.
  • Improve marketing credibility both within the company and outside to prospective customers.

This Research Will Help You:

• Explain why having a centralized, proactive customer advocacy program is important.
• Clearly communicate the benefits and business case for having a formalized customer advocacy program.
• Develop a customer advocacy pilot to provide a proof of concept (POC) and demonstrate the value of customer advocacy.
• Assess the maturity of your current customer advocacy efforts and identify what to improve and how to improve to grow your customer advocacy function.

This Research Will Also Assist:

• Customer success leaders and sales directors who are responsible for:
  • Gathering customer references and testimonials.
  • Referral or voice of the customer (VoC) programs.

This Research Will Help Them:

• Align stakeholders on an overall program of identifying ideal advocates.
• Coordinate customer advocacy efforts and actions.
• Gather and make use of customer feedback to improve products, solutions, and service provided.
• Provide an amazing customer experience throughout the entirety of the customer journey.

SoftwareReviews’ methodology for getting started with customer advocacy

Insight summary

Customer advocacy is a critical strategic growth initiative
Customer advocacy (CA) has evolved into being a highly valued company asset as opposed to a simple referral program, but not everyone in the organization sees it that way. Customer success leaders must reposition their CA program around growth instead of focusing solely on retention and communicate this to key stakeholders. The recognition that customer advocacy is a strategic growth initiative is necessary to succeed in today’s competitive market.

Get key stakeholders on board early – especially Sales!
Work to bring the CEO and the head of Sales on your side early. Sales is the gatekeeper – they need to open the door to customers to turn them into advocates. Clearly reposition CA for growth and communicate that to the CEO and head of Sales; wider buy-in will follow.

Identify the highest priority segment for generating acts of advocacy
By focusing on the highest priority segment, you accomplish a number of things: generating growth in a critical customer segment, proving the value of customer advocacy to key stakeholders (especially Sales), and setting a strong foundation for customer advocacy to build upon and expand the program out to other segments.

Always link your CA efforts back to retention and growth
By clearly demonstrating the impact that customer advocacy has on not only retention but also overall growth, marketers will gain buy-in from key stakeholders, secure funding for a full CA program, and gain the resources needed to expand customer advocacy efforts.

Focus on providing value to advocates
Many organizations take a transactional approach to customer advocacy, focusing on what their advocates can do for them. To truly succeed with CA, focus on providing your advocates with value first and put them in the spotlight.

Make building genuine relationships with your advocates the cornerstone of your CA program
"57% of small businesses say that having a relationship with their consumers is the primary driver of repeat business" (Factory360).

Guided Implementation

What does our GI on getting started with building customer advocacy look like?

Build the Business Case

Call #1: Identify key stakeholders. Map out motivations and anticipate any concerns or objections. Determine steering committee and working team. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #2: Discuss concepts and benefits of customer advocacy as they apply to organizational goals. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #3: Discuss barriers to success, risks, and risk mitigation tactics. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #4: Finalize CA goals, opportunities, and risks and develop business case. Plan next call – 2 weeks.

Develop Your Advocacy Requirements

Call #5: Review the SoftwareReviews CA Maturity Assessment Tool. Assess your current level of customer advocacy maturity. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #6: Review gaps and pains in current CA efforts. Discuss tactics and possible CA pilot program goals. Begin adding tasks to action plan. Plan next call – 2 weeks.

Call #7: Discuss ideal advocate profile and target segments. Plan next call – 2 weeks.

Call #8: Validate and finalize ideal advocate profile. Plan next call – 1 week.

Win Executive Approval and Implement Pilot

Call #9: Discuss CA pilot scope. Discuss performance metrics and KPIs. Plan next call – 3 days.

Call #10: Determine timeline and key milestones. Plan next call –2 weeks.

Call #11: Develop advocate communication materials. Plan next call – 3 days.

Call #12: Review final business case and coach on executive presentation. Plan next call – 1 week.

A Guided Implementation (GI) is series of calls with a SoftwareReviews Advisory analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization. For guidance on marketing applications, we can arrange a discussion with an Info-Tech analyst. Your engagement managers will work with you to schedule analyst calls.

Customer Advocacy Workshop

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com
1-888-670-8889

Get started!

Know your target market and audience, deploy well-designed strategies based on shared values, and make meaningful connections with people.

Phase 1
Build the Business Case

Phase 2
Develop Your Advocacy Requirements

Phase 3
Win Executive Approval and Implement Pilot

Phase 1: Build the Business Case

Steps
1.1 Identify your key stakeholders, steering committee, and working team
1.2 Understand the concepts and benefits of customer advocacy as they apply to your organization
1.3 Outline barriers to success, risks, and risk mitigation tactics

Phase Outcome

• Common understanding of CA concepts and benefits
• Buy-in from CEO and head of Sales
• List of barriers to success, risks, and risk mitigation tactics

Build the business case

Step 1.1 Identify your key stakeholders, steering committee, and working team

Total duration: 2.5-8.0 hours

Objective
Identify, document, and finalize your key stakeholders to know who to involve and how to get them onboard by truly understanding the forces of influence.

Output

• Robust stakeholder list with key stakeholders identified.
• Steering committee and working team decided.

Participants

• Customer advocacy lead
• Identified stakeholders
• Workstream leads

MarTech
None

Tools

• Executive Presentation Template

1.1.1 Identify Stakeholders
(60-120 min.)

Identify
Using the guidance on slide 28, identify all stakeholders who would be involved or impacted by your customer advocacy pilot by entering names and titles into columns A and B on slide 27 "Stakeholder List Worksheet."

Document
Document as much information about each stakeholder as possible in columns C, D, E, and F into the table on slide 27.

1.1.2 Select Steering Committee & Working Team
(60-90 min.)

Select
Using the guidance on slides 28 and 29 and the information collected in the table on slide 27, identify the stakeholders that are steering committee members, functional workstream leads, or operations; document in column G on slide 27.

Document
Open the Executive Presentation Template to slides 5 and 6 and document your final steering committee and working team selections. Be sure to note the Executive Sponsor and Program Manager on slide 5.

Tips & Reminders

1. It is critical to identify "key stakeholders"; a single missed key stakeholder can disrupt an initiative. A good way to ensure that nobody is missed is to first uncover as many stakeholders as possible and later decide how important they are.
2. Ensure steering committee representation from each department this initiative would impact or that may need to be involved in decision-making or problem-solving endeavors.

Consult Info-Tech's Manage Stakeholder Relations blueprint for additional guidance on identifying and managing stakeholders, or contact one of our analysts for more personalized assistance and guidance.

Stakeholder List Worksheet

Customer advocacy stakeholders

What to consider when identifying stakeholders required for CA:
Customer advocacy should be done as a part of a cross-functional company initiative. When identifying stakeholders, consider:

• Who can make the ultimate decision on approving the CA program?
• Who are the senior leadership members you need buy-in from?
• Who do you need to support the CA program?
• Who is affected by the CA program?
• Who will help you build the CA program?
• Where and among who is there enthusiasm for customer advocacy?
• Consider stakeholders from Customer Success, Marketing, Sales, Product, PR & Social, etc.

Customer advocacy working team

Consider the skills and knowledge required for planning and executing a customer advocacy pilot.

Workstream leads should have strong project management and collaboration skills and deep understanding of both product and customers (persona, journeys, satisfaction, etc.).

Build the business case

Step 1.2 Understand key concepts and benefits of customer advocacy

Total duration: 2.0-4.0 hours

Objective
Understand customer advocacy and what benefits you seek from your customer advocacy program, and get set up to best communicate them to executives and decision makers.

Output

• Documented customer advocacy benefits

Participants

• Customer advocacy lead

MarTech
None

Tools

• Executive Presentation Template

1.2.1 Discuss Key Concepts
(60-120 min.)

Envision
Schedule a visioning session with key stakeholders and share the Get Started With Customer Advocacy Executive Brief (slides 3-23 in this deck).

Discuss how key customer advocacy concepts can apply to your organization and how CA can contribute to organizational growth.

Document
Determine the top benefits sought from the customer advocacy program pilot and record them on slides 4 and 12 in the Executive Presentation Template.

Finalize
Work with the Executive Sponsor to finalize the "Message from the CMO" on slide 4 in the Executive Presentation Template.

Tips & Reminders

Keep in mind that while we're starting off broadly, the pilot for your customer advocacy program should be narrow and focused in scope.

Build the business case

Step 1.3 Understand barriers to success, risks, and risk mitigation tactics

Total duration: 2.0-8.0 hours

Objective
Anticipate threats to pilot success; identify barriers to success, any possible risks, and what can be done to reduce the chances of a negative pilot outcome.

Output

• Awareness of barriers
• Tactics to mitigate risk

Participants

• Customer advocacy lead
• Key stakeholders

MarTech
None

Tools

• Executive Presentation Template

1.3.1 Brainstorm Barriers to Success & Possible Risks
(60-120 min.)

Identify
Using slide 7 of the Executive Presentation Template, brainstorm any barriers to success that may exist and risks to the customer advocacy program pilot success. Consider the people, processes, and technology that may be required.

Document
Document all information on slide 7 of the Executive Presentation Template.

1.3.2 Develop Risk Mitigation Tactics
(60-300 min.)

Develop
Brainstorm different ways to address any of the identified barriers to success and reduce any risks. Consider the people, processes, and technology that may be required.

Document
Document all risk mitigation tactics on slide 7 of the Executive Presentation Template.

Tips & Reminders
There are several types of risk to explore. Consider the following when brainstorming possible risks:

• Damage to brand (if advocate guidance not provided)
• Legal (compliance with regulations and laws around contact, incentives, etc.)
• Advocate burnout
• Negative advocate feedback

Phase 2: Develop Your Advocacy Requirements

Steps
2.1 Assess your customer advocacy maturity
2.2 Identify and document gaps and pain points
2.3 Develop your ideal advocate profile

Phase Outcome

• Identification of gaps in current customer advocacy efforts or activities
• Understanding of customer advocacy readiness and maturity
• Identification of ideal advocate profile/target segment
• Basic actions to bridge gaps in CA efforts

Develop your advocacy requirements

Step 2.1 Assess your customer advocacy maturity

Total duration: 2.0-8.0 hours

Objective
Use the Customer Advocacy Maturity Assessment Tool to understand your organization's current level of customer advocacy maturity and what to prioritize in the program pilot.

Output

• Current level of customer advocacy maturity
• Know areas to focus on in program pilot

Participants

• Customer advocacy lead
• Key stakeholders

MarTech
None

Tools

• Customer Advocacy Maturity Assessment Tool
• Executive Presentation Template

2.1.1 Diagnose Current Customer Advocacy Maturity
(60-120 min.)

Diagnose
Begin on tab 1 of the Customer Advocacy Maturity Assessment Tool and read all instructions.

Navigate to tab 2. Considering the current state of customer advocacy efforts, answer the diagnostic questions in the Diagnostic tab of the Customer Advocacy Maturity Assessment Tool.

After completing the questions, you will receive a diagnostic result on tab 3 that will identify areas of strength and weakness and make high-level recommendations for your customer advocacy program pilot.

2.1.2 Discuss Results
(60-300 min.)

Discuss
Schedule a call to discuss your customer advocacy maturity diagnostic results with a SoftwareReviews Advisor.

Prioritize the recommendations from the diagnostic, noting which will be included in the program pilot and which require funding and resources to advance.

Transfer
Transfer results into slides 8 and 11 of the Executive Presentation Template.

Tips & Reminders
Complete the diagnostic with a handful of key stakeholders identified in the previous phase. This will help provide a more balanced and accurate assessment of your organization’s current level of customer advocacy maturity.

Develop your advocacy requirements

Step 2.2 Identify and document gaps and pain points

Total duration: 2.5-8.0 hours

Objective
Understand the current pain points within key customer-related processes and within any current customer advocacy efforts taking place.

Output

• Prioritized list of pain points that could be addressed by a customer advocacy program.

Participants

• Customer advocacy lead
• Key stakeholders

MarTech
None

Tools

• Executive Presentation Template

2.2.1 Identify Pain Points
(60-120 min.)

Identify
Identify and list current pain points being experienced around customer advocacy efforts and processes around sales, marketing, customer success, and product feedback.

Add any gaps identified in the diagnostic to the list.

Transfer
Transfer key information into slide 9 of Executive Presentation Template.

2.2.2 Prioritize Pain Points
(60-300 min.)

Prioritize
Indicate which pains are the most important and that a customer advocacy program could help improve.

Schedule a call to discuss the outputs of this step with a SoftwareReviews Advisor.

Document
Document priorities on slide 9 of Executive Presentation Template.

Tips & Reminders

Customer advocacy won't solve for everything; it's important to be clear about what pain points can and can't be addressed through a customer advocacy program.

Develop your advocacy requirements

Step 2.3 Develop your ideal advocate profile

Total duration: 3.0-9.0 hours

Objective
Develop an ideal advocate persona profile that can be used to identify potential advocates, guide campaign messaging, and facilitate advocate engagement.

Output

• Ideal advocate persona profile

Participants

• Customer advocacy lead
• Key stakeholders
• Sales lead
• Marketing lead
• Customer Success lead
• Product lead

MarTech
May require the use of:

• CRM or marketing automation platform
• Available and up-to-date customer database

Tools

• Executive Presentation Template

2.3.1 Brainstorm Session Around Ideal Advocate Persona
(60-150 min.)

Brainstorm
Lead the team to prioritize an initial, single, most important persona and to collaborate to complete the template.

Choose your ideal advocate for the pilot based on your most important audience. Start with firmographics like company size, industry, and geography.

Next, consider satisfaction levels and behavioral attributes, such as renewals, engagement, usage, and satisfaction scores.

Identify motivations and possible incentives for advocate activities.

Document
Use slide 10 of the Executive Presentation Template to complete this exercise.

2.3.2 Review and Refine Advocate Persona
(60-300 min.)

Review & Refine
Place the Executive Presentation Template in a shared drive for team collaboration. Encourage the team to share persona knowledge within the shared drive version.

Hold any necessary follow-up sessions to further refine persona.

Validate
Interview advocates that best represent your ideal advocate profile on their type of preferred involvement with your company, their role and needs when it comes to your solution, ways they'd be willing to advocate, and rewards sought.

Confirm
Incorporate feedback and inputs into slide 10 of the Executive Presentation Template. Ensure everyone agrees on persona developed.

Tips & Reminders

1. When identifying potential advocates, choose based on your most important audience.
2. Ensure you're selecting those with the highest satisfaction scores.
3. Ideally, select candidates that have, on their own, advocated previously such as in social posts, who may have acted as a reference, or who have been highly visible as a positive influence at customer events.
4. Knowing motivations will determine the type of acts of advocacy they would be most willing to perform and the incentives for participating in the program.

Consider the following criteria when identifying advocates and developing your ideal advocate persona:

Phase 3: Win Executive Approval and Implement Pilot

Steps
3.1 Determine pilot goals and success metrics
3.2 Establish timeline and create advocate communication materials
3.3 Gain executive buy-in and implement pilot

Phase Outcome

• Clear objective for CA pilot
• Key metrics for program success
• Pilot timelines and milestones
• Executive presentation with business case for CA

Win executive approval and implement pilot

Step 3.1 Determine pilot goals and success metrics

Total duration: 2.0-4.0 hours

Objective
Set goals and determine the scope for the customer advocacy program pilot.

Output

• Documented business objectives for the pilot
• Documented success metrics

Participants

• Customer advocacy lead
• Key stakeholders
• Sales lead
• Marketing lead
• Customer Success lead
• Product lead

MarTech
May require to use, set up, or install platforms like:

• Register to a survey platform
• CRM or marketing automation platform

Tools

• Executive Presentation Template

3.1.1 Establish Pilot Goals
(60-120 min.)

Set
Organize a meeting with department heads and review organizational and individual department goals.

Using the Venn diagram on slide 39 in this deck, identify customer advocacy goals that align with business goals. Select the highest priority goal for the pilot.

Check that the goal aligns with benefits sought or addresses pain points identified in the previous phase.

Document
Document the goals on slides 9 and 16 of the Executive Presentation Template.

3.1.2 Establish Pilot Success Metrics
(60-120 min.)

Decide
Decide how you will measure the success of your program pilot using slide 40 in this document.

Document
Document metrics on slide 16 of the Executive Presentation Template.

Tips & Reminders

1. Don't boil the ocean. Pick the most important goal that can be achieved through the customer advocacy pilot to gain executive buy-in and support or resources for a formal customer advocacy program. Once successfully completed, you'll be able to tackle new goals and expand the program.
2. Keep your metrics simple, few in number, and relatively easy to track

Connect customer advocacy goals with organizational goals

List possible customer advocacy goals, identifying areas of overlap with organizational goals by taking the following steps:

1. List organizational/departmental goals in the green oval.
2. List possible customer advocacy program goals in the purple oval.
3. Enter goals that are covered in both the Organizational Goals and Customer Advocacy Goals sections into the Shared Goals section in the center.
4. Highlight the highest priority goal for the customer advocacy program pilot to tackle.

Customer advocacy success metrics for consideration

This table provides a starting point for measuring the success of your customer advocacy pilot depending on the goals you've set.

This list is by no means exhaustive; the metrics here can be used, or new metrics that would better capture success measurement can be created and tracked.

When selecting metrics, remember:
When choosing metrics for your customer advocacy pilot, be sure to align them to your specific goals. If possible, try to connect your advocacy efforts back to retention, growth, or revenue.

Do not choose too many metrics; one per goal should suffice.

Ensure that you can track the metrics you select to measure - the data is available and measuring won't be overly manual or time-consuming.

Win executive approval and implement pilot

Step 3.2 Establish timeline and create advocate communication materials

Total duration: 2.5-8.0 hours

Objective
Outline who will be involved in what roles and capacities and what tasks and activities need to completed.

Output

• Timeline and milestones
• Advocate program materials

Participants

• Customer advocacy lead
• Key stakeholders
• Sales lead
• Marketing lead
• Customer Success lead
• Product lead

MarTech
None

Tools

• Executive Presentation Template

3.2.1 Establish Timeline & Milestones
(30-60 min.)

List & Assign
List all key tasks, phases, and milestones on slides 13, 14, and 15 in the Executive Presentation Template.

Include any activities that help close gaps or address pain points from slide 9 in the Executive Presentation Template.

Assign workstream leads on slide 15 in the Executive Presentation Template.

Finalize all tasks and activities with working team.

3.2.2 Design & Build Advocate Program Materials
(180-300 min.)

Decide
Determine materials needed to recruit advocates and explain the program to advocate candidates.

Determine the types of acts of advocacy you are looking for.

Determine incentives/rewards that will be provided to advocates, such as access to new products or services.

Build
Build out all communication materials.

Obtain incentives.

Tips & Reminders

1. When determining incentives, use the validated ideal advocate profile for guidance (i.e. what motivates your advocates?).
2. Ensure to leave a buffer in the timeline if the need to adjust course arises.

Win executive approval and implement pilot

Step 3.3 Implement pilot and gain executive buy-in

Total duration: 2.5-8.0 hours

Objective
Successfully implement the customer advocacy pilot program and communicate results to gain approval for full-fledged program.

Output

• Deliver Executive Presentation
• Successful customer advocacy pilot
• Provide regular updates to stakeholders, executives

Participants

• Customer advocacy lead
• Workstream leads

MarTech
May require the use of:

• CRM or Marketing Automation Platform
• Available and up-to-date customer database

Tools

• Executive Presentation Template

3.3.1 Complete & Deliver Executive Presentation
(60-120 min.)

Present
Finalize the Executive Presentation.

Hold stakeholder meeting and introduce the program pilot.

3.3.2 Gain Executive Buy-in
(60-300 min.)

Pitch
Present the final results of the customer advocacy pilot using the Executive Presentation Template and gain approval.

3.3.3 Implement the Customer Advocacy Program Pilot
(30-60 min.)

Launch
Launch the customer advocacy program pilot. Follow the timelines and activities outlined in the Executive Presentation Template. Track/document all advocate outreach, activity, and progress against success metrics.

Communicate
Establish a regular cadence to communicate with steering committee, stakeholders. Use the Executive Presentation Template to present progress and resolve roadblocks if/as they arise.

Tips & Reminders

1. Continually collect feedback and input from advocates and stakeholders throughout the process.
2. Don't be afraid to make changes on the go if it helps to achieve the end goal of your pilot.
3. If the pilot program was successful, consider scaling it up and rolling it out to more customers.

Summary of Accomplishment

Mission Accomplished

• You successfully launched your customer advocacy program pilot and demonstrated clear benefits and ROI. By identifying the needs of the business and aligning those needs with key customer advocacy activities, marketers and customer advocacy leaders can prioritize the most important tasks for the pilot while also identifying potential opportunities for expansion pending executive approval.
• SoftwareReviews' comprehensive and tactical approach takes you through the steps to build the foundation for a strategic customer advocacy program. Our methodology ensures that a customer advocacy pilot is developed to deliver the desired outcomes and ROI, increasing stakeholder buy-in and setting up your organization for customer advocacy success.

If you would like additional support, contact us and we'll make sure you get the professional expertise you need.

Contact your account representative for more information.
info@softwarereviews.com
1-888-670-8889

Related SoftwareReviews Research

Measure and Manage the Customer Satisfaction Metrics That Matter the Most
Understand what truly keeps your customer satisfied. Measure what matters to improve customer experience and increase satisfaction and advocacy.

• Understand the true drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction among your customer segments.
• Establish process and cadence for effective satisfaction measurement and monitoring.
• Know where resources are needed most to improve satisfaction levels and increase retention.

Develop the Right Message to Engage Buyers
Sixty percent of marketers find it hard to produce high-quality content consistently. SaaS marketers have an even more difficult job due to the technical nature of content production.

• Create more compelling and relevant content that aligns with a buyer's needs and journey.
• Shrink marketing and sales cycles.
• Increase the pace of content production.

Create a Buyer Persona and Journey
Get deeper buyer understanding and achieve product-market fit, with easier access to market and sales.

• Reduce time and resources wasted chasing the wrong prospects.
• Increase open and click-through rates.
• Perform more effective sales discovery.
• Increase win rate.

Bibliography

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"Advocacy Marketing." Influitive, June 2016. Accessed 26 Oct. 2021.

Andrews, Marcus. "42% of Companies Don’t Listen to their Customers. Yikes." HubSpot, June 2019. Accessed 2 Nov. 2021.

"Before you leap! Webcast." Point of Reference, Sept. 2019. Accessed 4 Nov. 2021.

"Brand Loyalty: 5 Interesting Statistics." Factory360, Jan. 2016. Accessed 2 Nov. 2021.

Brenner, Michael. "The Data Driven Guide to Customer Advocacy." Marketing Insider Group, Sept. 2021. Accessed 3 Feb. 2022.

Carroll, Brian. "Why Customer Advocacy Should Be at the Heart of Your Marketing." Marketing Insider Group, Sept. 2017. Accessed 3 Feb. 2022.

Cote, Dan. "Advocacy Blooms and Business Booms When Customers and Employees Engage." Influitive, Dec. 2021. Accessed 3 Feb. 2022.

"Customer Success Strategy Guide." ON24, Jan. 2021. Accessed 2 Nov. 2021.

Dalao, Kat. "Customer Advocacy: The Revenue-Driving Secret Weapon." ReferralRock, June 2017. Accessed 7 Dec. 2021.

Frichou, Flora. "Your guide to customer advocacy: What is it, and why is it important?" TrustPilot, Jan. 2020. Accessed 26 Oct. 2021.

Gallo, Amy. "The Value of Keeping the Right Customers." Harvard Business Review, Oct. 2014. Accessed 10 March 2022.

Huhn, Jessica. "61 B2B Referral Marketing Statistics and Quotes." ReferralRock, March 2022. Accessed 10 March 2022.

Kemper, Grayson. "B2B Buying Process: How Businesses Purchase B2B Services and Software." Clutch, Feb. 2020. Accessed 6 Jan. 2022.

Kettner, Kyle. "The Evolution of Ambassador Marketing." BrandChamp.io, Oct. 2018. Accessed 2 Nov. 2021.

Landis, Taylor. "Customer Retention Marketing vs. Customer Acquisition Marketing." OutboundEngine, April 2022. Accessed 23 April 2022.

Miels, Emily. "What is customer advocacy? Definition and strategies." Zendesk Blog, June 2021. Accessed 27 Oct. 2021.

Mohammad, Qasim. "The 5 Biggest Obstacles to Implementing a Successful B2B Customer Advocacy Program." HubSpot, June 2018. Accessed 6 Jan. 2022.

Murphy, Brandon. "Brand Advocacy and Social Media - 2009 GMA Conference." Deloitte, Dec. 2009. Accessed 8 June 2023.

Patel, Neil. "Why SaaS Brand Advocacy is More Important than Ever in 2021." Neil Patel, Feb. 2021. Accessed 4 Nov. 2021.

Pieri, Carl. "The Plain-English Guide to Customer Advocacy." HubSpot, Apr. 2020. Accessed 27 Oct. 2021.

Schmitt, Philipp; Skiera, Bernd; Van den Bulte, Christophe. "Referral Programs and Customer Value." Wharton Journal of Marketing, Jan. 2011. Accessed 8 June 2023.

"The Complete Guide to Customer Advocacy." Gray Group International, 2020. Accessed 15 Oct. 2021.

"The Customer-powered Enterprise: Playbook." Influitive, Gainsight & Pendo. 2020. Accessed 26 Oct. 2021.

"The Winning Case for a Customer Advocacy Solution." RO Innovation, 2017. Accessed 26 Oct. 2021.

Tidey, Will. "Acquisition vs. Retention: The Importance of Customer Lifetime Value." Huify, Feb. 2018. Accessed 10 Mar. 2022.

"What a Brand Advocate Is and Why Your Company Needs One." RockContent, Jan. 2021. Accessed 7 Feb. 2022.

"What is Customer Advocacy? A Definition and Strategies to Implement It." Testimonial Hero, Oct. 2021. Accessed 26 Jan. 2022.

Take Action on Service Desk Customer Feedback

Drive up CSAT scores by asking the right questions and effectively responding to user feedback.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst Perspective

Collecting feedback is only half the equation.

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight

Asking your customers for feedback then doing nothing with it is worse than not asking for feedback at all. Your customers may end up more dissatisfied than they were before, if their opinion is sought out and then ignored. It’s valuable to collect feedback, but the true value for both IT and its customers comes from acting on that feedback and communicating those actions back to your users.

Traditional service desk metrics can be misleading

The watermelon effect

When a service desk appears to hit all its targets according to the metrics it tracks, but service delivery is poor and customer satisfaction is low, this is known as the “watermelon effect”. Service metrics appear green on the outside, but under the surface (unmeasured), they’re red because customers are dissatisfied.

Traditional SLAs and service desk metrics (such as time to respond, average resolution time, percentage of SLAs met) can help you understand service desk performance internally to prioritize your work and identify process improvements. However, they don’t tell you how customers perceive the service or how satisfied they are.

Providing good service to your customers should be your end goal. Failing to measure, monitor, and act on customer feedback means you don’t have the whole picture of how your service desk is performing and whether or where improvements are needed to maximize satisfaction.

There is a shift in ITSM to focus more on customer experience metrics over traditional ones

The Service Desk Institute (SDI) suggests that customer satisfaction is the most important indicator of service desk success, and that traditional metrics around SLA targets – currently the most common way to measure service desk performance – may become less valuable or even obsolete in the future as customer experience-focused targets become more popular. (Service Desk Institute, 2021)

SDI conducted a Customer Experience survey of service desk professionals from a range of organizations, both public and private, from January to March 2018. The majority of respondents said that customer experience is more important than other metrics such as speed of service or adherence to SLAs, and that customer satisfaction is more valuable than traditional metrics. (SDI, 2018).

However, many service desk leaders aren’t effectively measuring customer feedback

Not only is it important to measure customer experience and satisfaction levels, but it’s equally important to act on that data and feed it into a service improvement program. However, many IT leaders are neglecting either one or both of those components.

A strong customer feedback program brings many benefits to IT and the business

Take Action on Service Desk Customer Feedback

Info-Tech’s methodology for measuring and acting on service desk customer feedback

Insight Summary

Key Insight:

Asking your customers for feedback then doing nothing with it is worse than not asking for feedback at all. Your customers may end up more dissatisfied than they were before if they’re asked for their opinion then see nothing done with it. It’s valuable to collect feedback, but the true value for both IT and its customers comes from acting on that feedback and communicating those actions back to your users.

Additional insights:

Understand how to measure customer satisfaction

Phase 1

Understand the main types of customer satisfaction surveys, principles for survey design, and best practices for surveying your users.

Three methods of surveying your customers

Pros and cons of the three methods

Which survey method should you choose?

Only relying on one type of survey will leave gaps in your understanding of customer satisfaction. Include both transactional and relationship surveys to provide a holistic picture of customer satisfaction with the service desk.

If you can only start with one type, choose the type that best aligns with your goals and priorities:

Info-Tech Insight

One-off surveys can be useful to assess whether a specific change has impacted satisfaction, or to inform a planned change/initiative. However, as they aren’t typically part of an on-going customer feedback program, the focus of this research will be on transactional and relationship surveys.

3 common customer satisfaction measures

The three most utilized measures of customer satisfaction include CSAT, CES, and NPS.

When to use each satisfaction measure

How to choose which measure(s) to incorporate in your surveys

The best measures are the ones that align with your specific goals for collecting feedback.

• Most companies will use multiple satisfaction measures. For example, NPS can be tracked to monitor the overall customer sentiment, and CSAT used for more targeted feedback.
• For internal-facing IT departments, CSAT is the most popular of the three methods, and NPS may not be as useful.
• Choose your measure and survey types based on what you are trying to achieve and what kind of information you need to make improvements.
• Remember that one measure alone isn’t going to give you actionable feedback; you’ll need to follow up with additional measures (especially for NPS and CES).
• For CSAT surveys, customize the satisfaction measures in as many ways as you need to target the questions toward the areas you’re most interested in.
• Don’t stick to just these three measures or types of surveys – there are other ways to collect feedback. Experiment to find what works for you.
• If you’re designing your own survey, keep in mind the principles on the next slide.

Info-Tech Insight

While we focus mainly on traditional survey-based approaches to measuring customer satisfaction in this blueprint, there’s no need to limit yourselves to surveys as your only method. Consider multiple techniques to capture a wider audience, including:

• Customer journey mapping
• Focus groups with stakeholders
• Lunch and learns or workshop sessions
• Interviews – phone, chat, in-person
• Kiosks

Principles for survey design

As you design your satisfaction survey – whether transactional or relational – follow these guidelines to ensure the survey delivers value and gets responses.

1. Focus on your goal

Don’t include unnecessary questions that won’t give you actionable information; it will only waste respondents’ time.

2. Be brief

Keep each question as short as possible and limit the total number of survey questions to avoid survey fatigue.

3. Include open-ended questions

Most of your measures will be close-ended, but include at least one comment box to allow for qualitative feedback.

4. Keep questions clear and concise

Ensure that question wording is clear and specific so that all respondents interpret it the same way.

5. Avoid biased or leading questions

You won’t get accurate results if your question leads respondents into thinking or answering a certain way.

6. Avoid double-barreled questions

Don’t ask about two different things in the same question – it will confuse respondents and make your data hard to interpret.

7. Don’t restrict responses

Response options should include all possible opinions (including “don’t know”) to avoid frustrating respondents.

8. Make the survey easy to complete

Pre-populate information where possible (e.g. name, department) and ensure the survey is responsive on mobile devices.

9. Keep questions optional

If every question is mandatory, respondents may leave the survey altogether if they can’t or don’t want to answer one question.

10. Test your survey

Test your survey with your target audience before launching, and incorporate feedback - they may catch issues you didn’t notice.

Prevent survey fatigue to increase response rates

If it takes too much time or effort to complete your survey – whether transactional or relational – your respondents won’t bother. Balance your need to collect relevant data with users’ needs for a simple and worthwhile task in order to get the most value out of your surveys.

There are two types of survey fatigue:

1. Survey response fatigue

Occurs when users are overwhelmed by too many requests for feedback and stop responding.

2. Survey taking fatigue

Occurs when the survey is too long or irrelevant to users, so they grow tired and abandon the survey.

Fight survey fatigue:

• Make it as easy as possible to answer your survey:
  • Keep the survey as short as possible.
  • For transactional surveys, allow respondents to answer directly from email without having to click a separate link if possible.
  • Don’t make all questions mandatory or users may abandon it if they get to a difficult or unapplicable question.
  • Test the survey experience across devices for mobile users.
• Communicate the survey’s value so users will be more likely to donate their time.
• Act on feedback: follow up on both positive and negative responses so users see the value in responding.
• Consider attaching an incentive to responding (e.g. name entered in a monthly draw).

Design and implement transactional surveys

Phase 2

Learn why and how to design a simple survey to assess satisfaction with individual service desk transactions (tickets) and a methodology for survey delivery that will improve response rates.

Use transactional surveys to collect immediate and actionable feedback

Recall the definition of a transactional survey:

• Survey that is tied to a specific customer interaction with the service desk (i.e. a ticket).
• Assesses how satisfied customers are with how the ticket was handled and resolved.
• Sent immediately after ticket is closed.
• Short – usually 1 to 3 questions.

Info-Tech Insight

While feedback on transactional surveys is specific to a single transaction, even one negative experience can impact the overall perception of the service desk. Pair your transactional surveys with an annual relationship survey to capture broader sentiment toward the service desk.

Transactional surveys serve several purposes:

• Gives end users a mechanism to provide feedback when they want to.
• Provides continual insight into customer satisfaction throughout the year to monitor for trends or issues in between broader surveys.
• Provides IT leaders with actionable insights into areas for improvement in their processes, knowledge and skills, or customer service.
• Gives the service desk the opportunity to address any negative experiences or perceptions with customers, to repair the relationship.
• Feeds into individual or team coaching for service desk staff.

Make key decisions ahead of launching your transactional surveys

If you want to get the most of your surveys, you need to do more than just click a button to enable out-of-the-box surveys through your ITSM tool. Make these decisions ahead of time:

Key decisions, continued

Define the goals of your transactional survey program

Every survey should have a goal in mind to ensure only relevant and useful data is collected.

• Your survey program must be backed by clear and actionable goals that will inform all decisions about the survey.
• Survey questions should be structured around that goal, with every question serving a distinct purpose.
• If you don’t have a clear plan for how you will action the data from a particular question, exclude it.
• Don’t run a survey just for the sake of it; wait until you have a clear plan. If customers respond and then see nothing is done with the data, they will learn to avoid your surveys.

Your survey objectives will also determine how often to send the survey:

Info-Tech Insight

Service Managers often get caught up in running a transactional survey program because they think it’s standard practice, or they need to report a satisfaction metric. If that’s your only objective, you will fail to derive value from the data and will only turn customers away from responding.

Design survey content and length

As you design your survey, keep in mind the following principles:

1. Keep it short. Your customers won’t bother responding if they see a survey with multiple questions or long questions that require a lot of reading, effort, or time.
2. Make it simple. This not only makes it easier for your customers to complete, but easier for you to track and monitor.
3. Tie your survey to your goals. Remember that every question should have a clear and actionable purpose.
4. Don’t measure anything you can’t control. If you won’t be able to make changes based on the feedback, there’s no value asking about it.
5. Include an (optional) open-ended question. This will allow customers to provide more detailed feedback or suggestions.

Q: How many questions should the survey contain?

A: Ideally, your survey will have only one mandatory question that captures overall satisfaction with the interaction.

This question can be followed up with an optional open-ended question prompting the respondent for more details. This will provide a lot more context to the overall rating.

If there are additional questions you need to ask based on your goals, clearly make these questions optional so they don’t deter respondents from completing the survey. For example, they can appear only after the respondent has submitted their overall satisfaction response (i.e. on a separate, thank you page).

Additional (optional) measures may include:

• Customer effort score (how easy or difficult was it to get your issue resolved?)
• Customer service skills of the service desk
• Technical skills/knowledge of the agents
• Speed or response or resolution

Design question wording

Tips for writing survey questions:

• Be clear and concise
• Keep questions as short as possible
• Cut out any unnecessary words or phrasing
• Avoid biasing, or leading respondents to select a certain answer
• Don’t attempt to measure multiple constructs in a single question.

Sample question wording:

How satisfied are you with this support experience?

How would you rate your support experience?

Please rate your overall satisfaction with the way your issue was handled.

Choose response options

Once you’ve written your survey question, you need to design the response options for the question. Put careful thought into balancing ease of responding for the user with what will give you the actionable data you need to meet your goals. Keep the following in mind:

Decide how often to send surveys

There are two common choices for when to send ticket satisfaction surveys:

SDI’s 2018 Customer Experience in ITSM survey of service desk professionals found:

Almost two-thirds (65%) send surveys after every ticket.

One-third (33%) send surveys after randomly selected tickets are closed.

Info-Tech Recommendation:

Send a survey after every ticket so that anyone who has feedback gets the opportunity to provide it – and you always get the chance to act on negative feedback. But, limit how often any one customer receives a ticket to avoid over-surveying them – restrict to anywhere between one survey a week to one per month per customer.

Plan detailed survey logistics

Plan detailed survey logistics

Plan detailed survey logistics

Plan detailed survey logistics

Response rates for transactional surveys are typically low…

Most IT organizations see transactional survey response rates of less than 20%.

… but there are steps you can take to maximize your response rate

It is still difficult to achieve high response rates to transactional surveys, but you can at least increase your response rate with these strategies:

1. Reduce frequency

Don’t over-survey any one user or they will start to ignore the surveys.

2. Send immediately

Ask for feedback soon after the ticket was resolved so it’s fresh in the user’s memory.

3. Make it short and simple

Keep the survey short, concise, and simple to respond to.

4. Make it easy to complete

Minimize effort involved as much as possible. Allow users to respond directly from email and from any device.

5. Change email messaging

Experiment with your subject line or email messaging to draw more attention.

6. Respond to feedback

Respond to customers who provide feedback – especially negative – so they know you’re listening.

7. Act on feedback

Demonstrate that you are acting on feedback so users see the value in responding.

Use Info-Tech’s survey template as a starting point

Once you’ve worked through all the decisions in this step, you’re ready to configure your transactional survey in your ITSM solution or survey tool.

As a starting point, you can leverage Info-Tech’s Transactional Service Desk Survey Templatee to design your templates and wording.

Make adjustments to match your decisions or your configuration limitations as needed.

Refer to the key decisions tables on slides 24 and 25 to ensure you’ve made all the configurations necessary as you set up your survey.

Design and implement relationship surveys

Phase 3

Understand why and how to design a survey to assess overall satisfaction with the service desk across your organization, or use Info-Tech’s diagnostic.

How can we evaluate overall Service Desk service quality?

Evaluating service quality in any industry is challenging for both those seeking feedback and those consuming the service: “service quality is more difficult for the consumer to evaluate than goods quality.”

You are in the position of trying to measure something intangible: customer perception, which “result[s] from a comparison of consumer expectations with actual service performance,” which includes both the service outcome and also “the process of service delivery”

(Source: Parasuraman et al, 1985, 42).

Your mission is to design a relationship survey that is:

• Comprehensive but not too long.
• Easy to understand but complex enough to capture enough detail.
• Able to capture satisfaction with both the outcome and the experience of receiving the service.

Use relationship surveys to measure overall service desk service quality

Recall the definition of a relationship survey:

• Survey that is sent periodically (i.e. semi-annually or annually) to the entire customer base to measure the overall relationship with the service desk.
• Shows you where your customer experience is doing well and where it needs improving.
• Asks customers to rate you based on their overall experience rather than on a specific product or interaction.
• Longer and more comprehensive than transactional surveys, covering multiple dimensions/ topics.

Relationship surveys serve several purposes:

• Gives end users an opportunity to provide overall feedback on a wider range of experiences with IT.
• Gives IT the opportunity to respond to feedback and show users their voices are heard.
• Provides insight into year-over-year trends and customer satisfaction.
• Provides IT leaders the opportunity to segment the results by demographic (e.g. by department, location, or seniority) and target improvements where needed most.
• Feeds into strategic planning and annual reports on user experience and satisfaction

Info-Tech Insight

Annual relationship surveys provide great value in the form of year-over-year internal benchmarking data, which you can use to track improvements and validate the impact of your service improvement efforts.

Understand the gaps that decrease service quality

The Service Quality Model (Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry, 1985) shows how perceived service quality is negatively impacted by the gap between expectations for quality service and the perceptions of actual service delivery: Gap 1: Consumer expectation – Management perception gap: Are there differences between your assumptions about what users want from a service and what those users expect? Gap 2: Management perception – Service quality specification gap: Do you have challenges translating user expectations for service into standardized processes and guidelines that can meet those expectations? Gap 3: Service quality specifications – Service delivery gap: Do staff members struggle to carry out the service quality processes when delivering service? Gap 4: Service delivery – External communications gap: Have users been led to expect more than you can deliver? Alternatively, are users unaware of how the organization ensures quality service, and therefore unable to appreciate the quality of service they receive? Gap 5: Expected service – Perceived service gap: Is there a discrepancy between users’ expectations and their perception of the service they received (regardless of any user misunderstanding)?

Your survey questions about service and support should provide insight into where these gaps exist in your organization

Make key decisions ahead of launch

Align the relationship survey with your goals

What is motivating you to launch the survey at this time?

Is there a renewed focus on customer service satisfaction? If so, this survey will track the initiative’s success, so its questions must align with the sponsors’ expectations.

Are you surveying customer satisfaction in order to comply with legislation, or directives to measure customer service quality?

What objectives/outcomes will this survey feed into?

What do you need to report on to your stakeholders? Have they communicated any expectations regarding the data they expect to see?

Does the CIO want the annual survey to measure end-user satisfaction with all of IT?

• Or do you only want to measure satisfaction with one set of processes (e.g. Service Desk)?
• Are you seeking feedback on a project (e.g. implementation of new ERP)?
• Are you seeking feedback on the application portfolio?

In 1993 the U.S. president issued an Executive Order requiring executive agencies to “survey customers to determine the kind and quality of services they want and their level of satisfaction with existing services” and “post service standards and measure results against them.” (Clinton, 1993)

Identify what you’re measuring

Info-Tech Insight

As you compose survey questions, decide whether they are intended to capture user satisfaction or effort: this will influence how the question is worded. Include a mix of both.

Determine a framework for your survey

If your relationship survey covers satisfaction with service support, ensure the questions cover the major aspects of service quality. You may wish to align your questions on support with existing frameworks: for example, the SERVQUAL service quality measurement instrument identifies 5 dimensions of service quality: Reliability, Assurance, Tangibles, Empathy, and Responsiveness (see below). As you design the survey, consider if the questions relate to these five dimensions. If you have overlooked any of the dimensions, consider if you need to revise or add questions.

1-5. Arlen, Chris,2022. Paraphrasing Zeithaml, Parasuraman, and Berry, 1990.

Cover logistical details of the survey

Use the Sample Size Calculator to determine your ideal sample size

Info-Tech’s End-User Satisfaction Diagnostics

If you choose to leverage a third-party partner, an Info-Tech satisfaction survey may already be part of your membership. There are two options, depending on your needs:

Design question wording

Choose answer scales that best fit your questions and reporting needs

Likert scale

Respondents select from a range of statements the position with which they most agree:

E.g. How satisfied are you with how long it generally takes to resolve your issue completely?

E.g. Very dissatisfied/Somewhat dissatisfied/ Neutral/ Somewhat satisfied/ Very satisfied/ NA

Frequency scale

How often does the respondent have to do something, or how often do they encounter something?

E.g. How frequently do you need to re-open tickets that have been closed without being satisfactorily resolved?

E.g. Never/ Rarely/ Sometimes/ Often/ Always/ NA

Numeric scale

By asking users to rate their satisfaction on a numeric scale (e.g., 1-5, 1-10), you can facilitate reporting on averages:

E.g. How satisfied are you with IS’s ability to provide services to allow the organization to meet its goals?

E.g. 1 – Not at all Satisfied to 10 – Fully Satisfied / NA

Forced ranking

Learn more about your users’ priorities by asking them to rank answers from most to least important, or selecting their top choices (Sauro, 2018):

E.g. From the following list, drag and drop the 3 aspects of our service that are most important to you into the box on the right.

Info-Tech Insight

Always include an optional open-ended question, which allows customers to provide more feedback or suggestions.

Test the survey before launching

Review your questions for repetition and ask for feedback on your survey draft to discover if readers interpret the questions differently than you intended.

Test the survey with different stakeholder groups:

• IT staff: To discover overlooked topics.
• Representatives of your end-user population: To discover whether they understand the intention of the questions.
• Executives: To validate whether you are capturing the data they are interested in reporting on.

Testing methodology:

• Ask your test subjects to take the survey in your presence so you can monitor their experience as they take it.
• Ask them to narrate their experience as they take the survey.
• Watch for:
  • The time it takes to complete the survey.
  • Moments when they struggle or are uncertain with the survey’s wording.
  • Questions they find repetitive or pointless.

Info-Tech Insight

In the survey testing phase, try to capture at least a few real-time responses to the survey. If you collect survey feedback only once the test is over, you may miss some key insights into the user experience of navigating the survey.

“Follow the golden rule: think of your audience and what they may or may not know. Think about what kinds of outside pressures they may bring to the work you’re giving them. What time constraints do they have?”

– Sally Colwell, Project Officer, Government of Canada Pension Centre

Monitor and maximize your response rate

Ensure success by staying on top of the survey during the period it is open.

• When will your users complete the survey? You know your own organization’s culture best, but SurveyMonkey found that weekday survey responses peaked at mid-morning and mid-afternoon (Wronski). Ensure you send the communication at a time it will not be overlooked. For example, some studies found Mondays to have higher response rates; however, the data is not consistent (Amaresan, 2021). Send the survey at a time you believe your users are least likely to be inundated with other notifications.
• Have a trusted leader send out the first communication informing the end-user base of the survey. Ensure the recipient understands your motivation and how their responses will be used to benefit them (O’Reardon, 2016). Remind them that participating in the survey benefits them: since IT is taking actions based on their feedback, it’s their chance to improve their employee experience of the IT services and tools they use to do their job.
• In the introductory communication, test different email subject lines and email body content to learn which versions increase respondents’ rates of opening the survey link, and “keep it short and clear” (O’Reardon, 2016).
• If your users tend to mistrust emailed links due to security training, tell them how to confirm the legitimacy of the survey.

“[Send] one reminder to those who haven’t completed the survey after a few days. Don’t use the word ‘reminder’ because that’ll go straight in the bin, better to say something like, ‘Another chance to provide your feedback’”

– David O’Reardon, Founder & CEO of Silversix

Analyze and act on feedback

Phase 4

Measure and analyze the results of both surveys and build a plan to act on both positive and negative feedback and communicate the results with the organization.

Leverage the service recovery paradox to improve customer satisfaction

A service failure or a poor experience isn’t what determines customer satisfaction – it’s how you respond to the issue and take steps to fix it that really matters.

This means one poor experience with the service desk doesn’t necessarily lead to an unhappy user; if you quickly and effectively respond to negative feedback to repair the relationship, the customer may be even happier afterwards because you demonstrated that you value them.

“Every complaint becomes an opportunity to turn a bad IT customer experience into a great one.”

– David O’Reardon, Founder & CEO of Silversix

Collecting feedback is only the first step in the customer feedback loop

Closing the feedback loop is one of the most important yet forgotten steps in the process.

1. Collect Feedback

• Send transactional surveys after every ticket is resolved.
• Send a broader annual relationship survey to all users.

• Calculate satisfaction scores.
• Read open-ended comments.
• Analyze for trends, categories, common issues and priorities.

• Respond to users who provided feedback.
• Make improvements based on feedback.

• Communicate feedback results and improvements made to respondents and to service desk staff.
• Summarize results and actions to key stakeholders and business leaders.

Act on feedback to get the true value of your satisfaction program

SDI (2018) survey data shows that the majority of service desk professionals are using their customer satisfaction data to feed into service improvements. However, 30% still aren’t doing anything with the feedback they collect. Collecting feedback is only one half of a good customer feedback program. Acting on that feedback is critical to the success of the program. Using feedback to make improvements not only benefits the service desk but shows users the value of responding and will increase future response rates.

“Your IT service desk’s CSAT survey should be the means of improving your service (and the employee experience), and something that encourages people to provide even more feedback, not just the means for understanding how well it’s doing” – Joe the IT Guy, SysAid

Assign responsibility for acting on feedback

If collecting and analyzing customer feedback is something that happens off the side of your desk, it either won’t get done or won’t get done well.

• Formalize the customer satisfaction program. It’s not a one-time task, but an ongoing initiative that requires significant time and dedication.
• Be clear on who is accountable for the program and who is responsible for all the tasks involved for both transactional and relationship survey data collection, analysis, and communication.

Assign accountability for the customer feedback program to one person (i.e. Service Desk Manager, Service Manager, Infrastructure & Operations Lead, IT Director), who may take on or assign responsibilities such as:

• Designing surveys, including survey questions and response options.
• Configuring survey(s) in ITSM or survey tool.
• Sending relationship surveys and subsequent reminders to the organization.
• Communicating results of both surveys to internal staff, business leaders, and end users.
• Analyzing results.
• Feeding results into improvement plans, coaching, and training.
• Creating reports and dashboards to monitor scores and trends.

Info-Tech Insight

While feedback can feed into internal coaching and training, the goal should never be to place blame or use metrics to punish agents with poor results. The focus should always be on improving the experience for end users.

Determine how and how often to analyze feedback data

• Analyze and report scores from both transactional and relationship surveys to get a more holistic picture of satisfaction across the organization.
• Determine how you will calculate and present satisfaction ratings/scores, both overall and for individual questions. See tips on the right for calculating and presenting NPS and CSAT scores.
• A single satisfaction score doesn’t tell the full story; calculate satisfaction scores at multiple levels to determine where improvements are most needed.
  • For example, satisfaction by service desk tier, team or location, by business department or location, by customer group, etc.
• Analyze survey data regularly to ensure you communicate and act on feedback promptly and avoid further alienating dissatisfied users. Transactional survey feedback should be reviewed at least weekly, but ideally in real time, as resources allow.

Calculating NPS Scores

Categorize respondents into 3 groups:

• 9-10 = Promoters, 7-8 = Neutral, 1-6 = Detractors

Calculate overall NPS score:

• % Promoters - % Detractors

Calculating CSAT Scores

• CSAT is usually presented as a percentage representing the average score.
• To calculate, take the total of all scores, divide by the maximum possible score, then multiply by 100. For example, a satisfaction rating of 80% means on average, users gave a rating of 4/5 or 8/10.
• Note that some organizations present CSAT as the percentage of “satisfied” users, with satisfied being defined as either “yes” on a two-point scale or a score of 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale. Be clear how you are defining your satisfaction rating.

Don’t neglect qualitative feedback

While it may be more difficult and time-consuming to analyze, the reward is also greater in terms of value derived from the data.

Define a process to respond to both negative and positive feedback

Successful customer satisfaction programs respond effectively to both positive and negative outcomes. Late or lack of responses to negative comments may increase customer frustration, while not responding at all to the positive comments may give the perception of indifference.

1. Define what qualifies as a positive vs negative score

E.g. Scores of 1 to 2 out of 5 are negative, scores of 4 to 5 out of 5 are positive.

2. Define process to respond to negative feedback

• Negative responses should go directly to the Service Desk Manager or whoever is accountable for feedback.
• Set an SLO for when the user will be contacted. It should be within 24h but ideally much sooner.
• Investigate the issue to understand exactly what happened and get to the root cause.
• Identify remediation steps to ensure the issue does not occur again.
• Communicate to the customer the action you have taken to improve.

• Positive responses should also be reviewed by the person accountable for feedback, but the timeline to respond may be longer.
• Show respondents that you value their time by thanking them for responding. Showing appreciate helps to build a long-term relationship with the user.
• Share positive results with the team to improve morale, and as a coaching/training mechanism.
• Consider how to use positive feedback as an incentive or reward.

Build a plan to communicate results to various stakeholders

Regular communication about your feedback results and action plan tied to those results is critical to the success of your feedback program. Build your communication plan around these questions:

Communication to your users impacts both response rates and satisfaction

Based on the Customer Communication Cycle by David O’Reardon, 2018

Ask users to provide feedback through transactional and relationship surveys. Thank them for completing the survey – show that you value their time, regardless of the type of feedback they submitted. Be transparent and summarize the results of the survey(s). Make it easy to digest with simple satisfaction scores and a summary of the main insights or priorities revealed. Before asking for feedback, explain how you will use feedback to improve the service. After collecting feedback, share your plan for making improvements based on what the data told you. After you’ve made changes, communicate again to share the results with respondents. Make it clear that their feedback had a direct result on the service they receive. Communicating this before running another survey will also increase the likelihood of respondents providing feedback again.

Info-Tech Insight

Focus your communications to users around them, not you. Demonstrate that you need feedback to improve their experience, not just for you to collect data.

Translate feedback into actionable improvements

Taking action on feedback is arguably the most important step of the whole customer feedback program.

“Without converting feedback into actions, surveys can become just a pointless exercise in number watching.”

– David O’Reardon, Founder & CEO of Silversix

Info-Tech Insight

Outline exactly what you plan to do to address customer feedback in an action plan, and regularly review that action plan to select and prioritize initiatives and monitor progress.

For more guidance on tracking and prioritizing ongoing improvement initiatives, see the blueprints Optimize the Service Desk with a Shift Left Strategy and Build a Continual Improvement Plan for the Service Desk.

Leverage Info-Tech resources to guide your improvement efforts

Map your identified improvements to the relevant resource that can help:

Map process for acting on relationship survey feedback

Use Info-Tech’s Relationship Satisfaction Survey Review Process workflow as a template to define your own process.

Map process for acting on transactional survey feedback

Use Info-Tech’s Transactional Satisfaction Survey Review Process workflow as a template to define your own process.

Related Info-Tech Research

Standardize the Service Desk

This project will help you build and improve essential service desk processes, including incident management, request fulfillment, and knowledge management to create a sustainable service desk.

Optimize the Service Desk With a Shift-Left Strategy

This project will help you build a strategy to shift service support left to optimize your service desk operations and increase end-user satisfaction.

Build a Continual Improvement Plan

This project will help you build a continual improvement plan for the service desk to review key processes and services and manage the progress of improvement initiatives.

Deliver a Customer Service Training Program to Your IT Department

This project will help you deliver a targeted customer service training program to your IT team to enhance their customer service skills when dealing with end users, improve overall service delivery and increase customer satisfaction.

Sources Cited

Amaresan, Swetha. “The best time to send a survey, according to 5 studies.” Hubspot. 15 Jun 2021. Accessed October 2022.
Arlen, Chris. “The 5 Service Dimensions All Customers Care About.” Service Performance Inc. n.d. Accessed October 2022.
Clinton, William Jefferson. “Setting Customer Service Standards.” (1993). Federal Register, 58(176).
“Understanding Confidentiality and Anonymity.” The Evergreen State College. 2022. Accessed October 2022.
"Highlights of the 2017 U.S. PIAAC Results Web Report" (NCES 2020-777). U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics.
Joe the IT Guy. “Are IT Support’s Customer Satisfaction Surveys Their Own Worst Enemy?” Joe the IT Guy. 29 August 2018. Accessed October 2022.
O’Reardon, David. “10 Ways to Get the Most out of your ITSM Ticket Surveys.” LinkedIn. 2 July 2019. Accessed October 2022.
O'Reardon, David. "13 Ways to increase the response rate of your Service Desk surveys".LinkedIn. 8 June 2016. Accessed October 2022.
O’Reardon, David. “IT Customer Feedback Management – A Why & How Q&A with an Expert.” LinkedIn. 13 March 2018. Accessed October 2022.
Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Berry, L. L. (1985). "A Conceptual Model of Service Quality and Its Implications for Future Research." Journal of Marketing, 49(4), 41–50.
Quantisoft. "How to Increase IT Help Desk Customer Satisfaction and IT Help Desk Performance.“ Quantisoft. n.d. Accessed November 2022.
Rumberg, Jeff. “Metric of the Month: Customer Effort.” HDI. 26 Mar 2020. Accessed September 2022.
Sauro, Jeff. “15 Common Rating Scales Explained.” MeasuringU. 15 August 2018. Accessed October 2022.
SDI. “Customer Experience in ITSM.” SDI. 2018. Accessed October 2022.
SDI. “CX: Delivering Happiness – The Series, Part 1.” SDI. 12 January 2021. Accessed October 2022.
Wronski, Laura. “Who responds to online surveys at each hour of the day?” SurveyMonkey. n.d. Accessed October 2022.

Research contributors

Sally Colwell

Project Officer

Government of Canada Pension Centre

Build a Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap

Align infrastructure investment to business-driven goals.

Analysts' Perspectives

Infrastructure roadmaps are an absolute necessity for all organizations. An organization's size often dictates the degree of complexity of the roadmap, but they all strive to paint the future picture of the organization's IT infrastructure.

Infrastructure roadmaps typically start with the current state of infrastructure and work on how to improve. That thinking must change! Start with the future vision, an unimpeded vision, as if there were no constraints. Now you can see where you want to be.

Look at your past to determine how you have been spending your infrastructure budget. If your past shows a trend of increased operational expenditures, that trend will likely continue. The same is true for capital spending and staffing numbers.

Now that you know where you want to go, and how you ended up where you are, look at the constraints you must deal with and make a plan. It's not as difficult as it may seem, and even the longest journey begins with one step.

Speaking of that first step, it should be to understand the business goals and align your roadmap with those same goals. Now you have a solid plan to develop a strategic infrastructure roadmap; enjoy the journey!

There are many reasons why you need to build a strategic IT infrastructure roadmap, but your primary objectives are to set the long-term direction, build a framework for decision making, create a foundation for operational planning, and be able to explain to the business what you are planning. It is a basis for accountability and sets out goals and priorities for the future.

Other than knowing where you are going there are four key benefits to building the roadmap.

1. It allows you to be strategic and transformative rather than tactical and reactive.
2. It gives you the ability to prioritize your tasks and projects in order to get them going.
3. It gives you the ability to align your projects to business outcomes.
4. Additionally, you can leverage your roadmap to justify your budget for resources and infrastructure.

When complete, you will be able to communicate to your fellow IT teams what you are doing and get an understanding of possible business- or IT-related roadblocks, but overall executing on your roadmap will demonstrate to the business your competencies and ability to succeed.

PJ Ryan
Research Director
Infrastructure & Operations Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

John Donovan
Principal Research Director
Infrastructure & Operations Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

Build a Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap

Align infrastructure investment to business-driven goals.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

When it comes to building a strategic roadmap, getting a seat at the table is your first objective. Knowing what the business wants to do and understanding its future needs is a challenge for most IT organizations.

Challenges such as:

• Understanding the business vision
• Clear communications on business planning
• Insight into what the future state should look like

Common Obstacles

Fighting fires, keeping the lights on, patching, and overseeing legacy debt maintenance – these activities prevent your IT team from thinking strategically and looking beyond day-to-day operations. Issues include:

• Managing time well
• Building the right teams
• Setting priorities

Procrastinating when it comes to thinking about your future state will get you nowhere in a hurry.

Info-Tech's Approach

Look into your past IT spend and resources that are being utilized.

• Analyze all aspects of the operation, and resources required.
• Be realistic with your timelines.
• Work from the future state backward.

Build your roadmap by setting priorities, understanding risk and gaps both in finance and resources. Overall, your roadmap is never done, so don't worry if you get it wrong on the first pass.

Info-Tech Insight

Have a clear vision of what the future state is, and know that when creating an IT infrastructure roadmap, it is never done. This will give your IT team an understanding of priorities, goals, business vision, and risks associated with not planning. Understand what you are currently paying for and why.

Insight Summary

"Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now."
Source: Alan Lakein, Libquotes

Your strategic objectives are key to building a roadmap

Many organizations' day-to-day IT operations are tactical and reactive. This needs to change; the IT team needs to become strategic and proactive in its planning and execution. Forward thinking bridges the gap from your current state, to what the organization is, to what it wants to achieve. Your strategic objectives need to align to the business vision and goals and keep it running.

Your future state will determine your roadmap priorities

Identify what the business needs to meet its goals; this should be reflected in your roadmap priorities. Then identify the tasks and projects that can get you there. Business alignment is key, as these projects require prioritization. Strategic initiatives that align to business outcomes will be your foundation for planning on those priorities. If you do not align your initiatives, you will end up spinning your wheels. A good strategic roadmap will have all the elements of forward thinking and planning to execute with the right resources, right priorities, and right funding to make it happen.

Understand what you have been paying for the last few years

Measure the cost of "keeping the lights on" as a baseline for your budget that is earmarked and already spent. Determine if your current spend is holding back innovation due to:

1. The high cost of maintenance
2. Resources in operations doing low-value work due to the effort required to do tasks related to break/fix on aging hardware and software

A successful strategic roadmap will be determined when you have a good handle on your current spending patterns and planning for future needs that include resources, budget, and know-how. Without a plan and roadmap, that plan will not get business buy-in or funding.

Top challenges reported by Info-Tech members

Lack of strategic direction

• Infrastructure leadership must discover the business goals.

Time seepage

• Project time is constantly being tracked incorrectly.

Technical debt

• Aging equipment is not proactively cycled out with newer enabling technologies.

Case Study

The strategic IT roadmap allows Dura to stay at the forefront of automotive manufacturing.

INDUSTRY: Manufacturing
SOURCE: Performance Improvement Partners

Challenge

Following the acquisition of Dura, MiddleGround aimed to position Dura as a leader in the automotive industry, leveraging the company's established success spanning over a century.

However, prior limited investments in technology necessitated significant improvements for Dura to optimize its processes and take advantage of digital advancements.

Solution

MiddleGround joined forces with PIP to assess technology risks, expenses, and prospects, and develop a practical IT plan with solutions that fit MiddleGround's value-creation timeline.

By selecting the top 15 most important IT projects, the companies put together a feasible technology roadmap aimed at advancing Dura in the manufacturing sector.

Results

Armed with due diligence reports and a well-defined IT plan, MiddleGround and Dura have a strategic approach to maximizing value creation.

By focusing on key areas such as analysis, applications, infrastructure and the IT organization, Dura is effectively transforming its operations and shaping the future of the automotive manufacturing industry.

How well do you know your business strategy?

A mere 25% of managers
can list three of the company's
top five priorities.

Based on a study from MIT Sloan, shared understanding of strategic directives barely exists beyond the top tiers of leadership.

Take your time back

Unplanned incident response is a leading cause of the infrastructure time crunch, but so too are nonstandard service requests and service requests that should be projects.

Source: MIT Sloan

Inventory Assessment

Lifecycle

Refresh strategies are still based on truisms (every three years for servers, every seven years for LAN, etc.) more than risk-based approaches.

Opportunity Cost

Assets that were suitable to enable business goals need to be re-evaluated as those goals change.

See Info-Tech's Manage Your Technical Debt blueprint

Key IT strategy initiatives can be categorized in three ways

IT key initiative plan

Initiatives collectively support the business goals and corporate initiatives, and improve the delivery of IT services.

1. Business support
   • Support major business initiatives
   • Each corporate initiative is supported by a major IT project and each project has unique IT challenges that require IT support.
2. IT excellence
   • Reduce risk and improve IT operational excellence
   • These projects will increase IT process maturity and will systematically improve IT.
3. Innovation
   • Drive technology innovation
   • These projects will improve future innovation capabilities and decrease risk by increasing technology maturity.

Info-Tech Insight

A CIO has three roles: enable business productivity, run an effective IT shop, and drive technology innovation. Your key initiative plan must reflect these three mandates and how IT strives to fulfill them.

IT must accomplish many things

Manage
the lifecycle of aging equipment against current capacity and capability demands.

Curate
a portfolio of enabling technologies to meet future capacity and capability demands.

Initiate
a realistic schedule of initiatives that supports a diverse range of business goals.

Adapt
to executive feedback and changing business goals.

Primary and secondary infrastructure drivers

• Primary driver – The infrastructure component that is directly responsible for enabling change in the business metric.
• Secondary driver – The infrastructure component(s) that primary drivers rely on.

(Source: BMC)

Sample primary and secondary drivers

Info-Tech Insight

You may not be able to directly influence the primary drivers of the business, but your infrastructure can have a major impact as a secondary driver.

Info-Tech's approach

1. Align strategy and goals

• Establish the scope of your IT strategy by defining IT's mission and vision statements and guiding principles.

• Envision and define your future infrastructure and analyze what is holding you back.

• Establish a risk framework, identify initiatives, and build your strategic infrastructure roadmap.

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

Mission and Vision Statement
Goal Alignment (Slide 28)

Construct your vision and mission aligned to the business.

Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap tool

Build initiatives and prioritize them. Build the roadmap.

Infrastructure Domain Study

What is stealing your time from getting projects done?

Initiative Templates Process Maps & Strategy

Build templates for initiates, build process map, and develop strategies.

Key Deliverable

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Info-Tech's methodology for an infrastructure strategy and roadmap

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

Workshop Overview

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889