Research

SPI Research conducts research in a variety of areas that impact professional services performance. Many of our research initiatives also provide insight and guidance for product-driven organizations that desire to improve organizational performance of their white-collar employees.

Service Performance Pillars

SPI Research continues to conduct groundbreaking research into improving operational efficiency and effectiveness in services-driven organizations. To Click here to lean more about this effort can help your organization. You can also download the Service Performance Pillar questionnaire, complete it (usually in less than one-hour) and send it back to SPI Research for a comparison of your organization to those already benchmarked.

Workforce Productivity

Changes in the economic dynamics of the Professional Services sector mandate improvements across talent and client (acquisition and retention), service delivery, and financial management. Fortunately, information technology has become a key enabler of those organizational improvements. Competitive pressures keep increasing Tools to enable a more productive workforce

Business Software Solutions

Globally there are hundreds of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that provide software applications to the services sector. Over the past 3-4 years there have been a number of acquisitions’ in this space as large ISVs have seen the benefits of supplying integrated solutions to meet the demands of the services sector, as well as to meet the demands of services organizations within product based enterprises.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Figuring prominently in professional services organizations (PSOs) ability to optimize operational effectiveness is the increased integration of information systems that comes through implementation of Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) systems and processes.

ERP solutions bring a range and depth of benefits to PSOs, some of which include: streamlined opportunity management, increased project and service delivery, enhanced collaboration, and improved financial management and governance. The secret sauce here is the integration itself. ERP’s ability to manage all core business processes and do it from one standardized application makes it less expensive to implement and support over the long-term, than several non-integrated, disparate applications — and much more effective in the bargain.

There are many ERP solution providers for the Professional Services sector. While each differentiates itself in its own way, what they all offer is integration, visibility, and transparency into the operational processes of the organization. With this integration comes the ability to see and manage disparate functions with specificity and the PSO enterprise as a unified economic organism.

Professional Services Automation (PSA)

SPI Research defines Professional Services Automation as:

An integrated suite of applications used to increase operational visibility
and improve process efficiency in professional services organizations

Perhaps the key differentiator for this market is the integration of people, process and capital. Professional Services Automation provides organizations with a solution to efficiently plan, sell, execute and charge for work. PSA gives team members the tools to collaborate and collect knowledge that can be further used to optimize business processes. The net effect of PSA is a more productive and profitable business, as well as improved levels of predictably and client satisfaction.

Independent Software Vendors

Following the "dot.com" bust of 2001-2003 a number of ISVs focused their efforts on selling solutions to meet the needs of internal IT organizations. These solutions, dubbed “Project Portfolio Management” or PPM by some, have made significant inroads over the past few years, but still have not reached critical mass. Below is a list of ISVs covered by SPI Research.

ERP

PSA

PPM