IT ecosystems have the ability to drive innovation for an organization and enhance value creation, while also contributing to the public good through sustainability. Collaboration on IT ecosystems can help drive sustainability since these ecosystems bring multiple participants together.
As organizations and different industries prioritize sustainability goals, ecosystem collaboration can drive sustainable results while cutting costs, attaining new customers and driving innovation through learning and sharing information.
Why drive ecosystem collaboration
Every industry has been evolving to cater to an extremely demanding range of products and features over a significant time-to-market reduction. When looking at sustainability in such complex value chains today, there is a need for highly coordinated efforts to enhance sustainability. These efforts and interconnectivity help both sides make holistic advancements in sustainability.
“The technology itself is not enough to deliver sustainability that necessarily drives collaboration in ecosystems,” said Vijayanand Gejji, Practice Head - Sustainability Engineering and Cost Management CoEs at HCLTech. “Delivering ESG and sustainability strategies together will be the essential part to drive the ecosystem collaboration.”
What drives collaboration for IT ecosystems takes vision beyond looking at the technical parts of collaboration. Looking at things like reputation and branding is also very important, according to Senior Sustainability Manager at HCLTech James Trebilco, in enhancing your general structure and your image and reputation by having collaborative IT.
“[Accounting for reputation and branding] can position yourself as a market leader, making it easier to achieve any environmental goals and become more efficient,” said Trebilco. “Also, it helps reduce costs in the long run.”
Both IT ecosystems and IT systems work together and drive the acceleration of holistic sustainability when there’s collaboration on these assets.
Creating value for the organization
While ecosystem collaboration helps meet sustainability goals, there’s also value to be had for the organization that enacts collaborative IT ecosystem practices. Among the benefits of ecosystem collaboration and sustainability are cost reduction and efficiency, enhanced innovation, access to new customers, markets and avenues of revenue, and risk mitigation.
“It becomes more fluid to be able to see where certain areas desire innovation and collaboration and knowledge sharing helps drive that innovation by getting fresh ideas and different experiences,” said Trebilco.
The value created by getting new customers and reaching new markets is another benefit of ecosystem collaboration as shared information on products and services that were previously siloed can widen a company’s reach.
Further, ecosystem collaboration and sustainability can bring in accelerated learning, as well as implementation possibilities to address climate change or create sustainable products in a fast-paced manner.
Challenges facing ecosystem collaboration
Data interoperability is a major challenge and bringing that into real-time visibility will make it more complex. Everybody across various levels of personnel—from CTO to CEO or field staff to engineer—will use data in different forms, making it complex for data transmission.
“It further gets complicated when you bring in the communication of sustainability goals and achievements and interventions needed to the external world as well, including regulatory bodies and governments,” said Gejji.
This alignment of industry actors and regulatory actors, with their own KPIs and moving in the same direction, needs to happen across the entire chain at the same time, Trebilco says.
“If one person is counting apples and one person is counting oranges, then when it comes to putting them together, it’s difficult to do so,” said Trebilco. “It’s difficult to align it, so it’s important to make sure that the right things are designed into the system at the very beginning.”
Another challenge facing collaboration is the kind of data being shared, included what might be considered sensitive information. Getting the right level of detail that’s important throughout the entire chain and incentivizing people to utilizing the chain remains challenging.
Prioritizing ecosystem collaboration and sustainability
At the moment, ecosystem collaboration and sustainability should be a very top priority for organizations since “quite a significant shift has happened between the way industries and the world used to work,” says Vijayanand.
While definitely a priority, the difficulty comes with collaboration being a large project, so ecosystem collaboration can’t be put into place overnight.
“It’s not something that can easily be retrofitted. It’s something that would really need to be designed from scratch so that all the parts fit together nicely,” said Trebilco. “There are things that need to be taken into account at the beginning, like regulatory compliance.”
More and more companies are prioritizing ecosystem collaboration to improve efficiency and modernize. Recently HCLTech announced an ecosystem collaboration with Dell Technologies to accelerate end-to-end modernization of telecom networks. Through Dell’s telecom multi-cloud capabilities and expanded services combined with HCLTech’s system integration expertise, network operators will be helped with simplifying and accelerating modern network deployments to deliver differentiated, revenue-generating services to customers.
There isn’t one overall ecosystem or standard to be enhanced. There are various different IT ecosystems which are being put into place by different companies. Experts are still learning so there may be different versions that come out, each with a different iteration, new benefits and additional learnings.
It’s an iterative process when it comes to the ecosystem and structure of how it fits together and while we’re not there yet, we are learning with each new version.
