TSIA 2015 Technology Heatmap

Yesterday at Technology Services World, my Power Hour presentation was on the results of my 2015 Global Technology Survey. To show the high level findings, each year I create the Technology Heatmap, which is color coded to show adoption levels of various technologies. Here’s a look at the Heatmap:

The following categories all had adoption gains higher than 10% compared to 2014:

• Consumption analytics. 2014 was the first year this technology appeared in the survey, reflecting the emerging interest in customer success. These tools, which monitor how well customers adopt and consume technology, are now used by 26% of companies, nearly doubling last year’s adoption rate of 14%, and moving this category from Blue to Yellow in the Heatmap.
• Contract and entitlement management. Without accurate entitlement information, companies give away services for free to expired customers, and may not provide premium service levels to customers who have paid for faster response times. Adoption of tools to automate contract and entitlement tracking rose 12% to 66% in 2015.
• Field service scheduling and dispatch. The mobile revolution is having big impacts on field services, with field techs armed with mobile devices able to be more flexible with appointment scheduling. This is creating an opportunity for companies to upgrade their scheduling and dispatch platform to take full advantage of mobile capabilities. Adoption of field service scheduling automation grew to 54% in 2015, updating the category from Yellow to Orange in the Heatmap.
• Learning management systems (LMS). Automating learning can boost employee productivity, as well as help customers adopt technology and realize value faster. The shift to online learning means more companies are investing in automation for learning, with adoption of learning management systems growing to 70% this year.
• Mobility and video. Companies continue to invest in mobile and video solutions, not only enabling employees to be more productive, but also improving mobile access to corporate information by customers. Adoption of mobile and video solutions grew from 42% in 2014 to 56% in 2015, moving this category from Yellow to Orange in the Heatmap.
• Professional Services Automation (PSA). For the first time, PSA became a Red category on the Heatmap in 2015, with adoption by 76% of companies—up from 57% last year. This illustrates that more professional services organizations are moving off spreadsheets to manage their businesses with more sophisticated resource management and executive dashboards.
• Recurring revenue management. These tools, which automate the renewal process, first appeared in the Global Technology Survey last year, and this year saw the highest adoption gain of any category of the survey, increasing from 13% in 2014 to 46% in 2015—a full 33% rise year over year. However, the largest percentage of adopters are using home-grown solutions, which are unlikely to contain the sophisticated capabilities included in best-of-breed solutions, such as proactive alerts and trend analysis.
• Support scheduling/Workforce Optimization. These tools, which automate support schedules according to historic volume patterns, have not been well adoption by B2B companies, leaving managers to create schedules manually. Inquiries around these tools has been rising over the last year, and that interest has translated to higher adoption. For 2015, 43% of support organizations are now using some type of scheduling automation, up from 29% in 2014.

For additional information from the 2015 Global Services Technology Survey, including the full Heatmap report, top installed products or planned spending for 2015, see the individual adoption and planned spending reports for each service discipline, as well as the report listing top installed products in each category, on TSIA.com.

And as always, thanks for reading!

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