Part 1: Millennial Thinking

Hi guys,

Recently we had a very interesting brainstorming session at our company, initiated by one of our exec. VPs. We were to form teams that brainstormed millennial solutions to business problems. This exercise was aimed at fostering millennial thinking within our company while brainstorming for innovative ideas.

Our team comprised of 3 people: Me, the millennial and two senior managers who were experts in the Insurance domain. Therefore we chose Insurance as our domain and ABC as our hypothetical client.

Millenial thinking, consists of a 2 points we need to look upon:

1. What do millenial customers want?

And by customers I mean the end customer and not our client. To put it in very simple terms, at the end of the day, what our client expects from an IT services company is a solution that is developed with properly managed triple constraints. We can complicate this to our heart's content but at the end of the day, our clients want is a solution within budget, conforming to requirements and quality standards that is delivered on time. This makes this triangle our Business As Usual (BAU). If we can't deliver on BAU, i.e.- the triple constraints, we won't have clients.

The question we need to ask is can we really satisfy our clients with mere BAU? If we equal client delight to our triangle we are putting ourselves in par with our competition. If we equal our client delight to triangle plus innovation, then we can truly achieve client delight. BAU is what the client requires and expects from us. Innovation should be what the client doesn't expect. It is the extra value addition that we give to our clients. We should go to our clients with innovative solutions that will put our client ahead of his/her competition. In order to do this is one should position oneself in places quoting our GM "where the puck will land" and go to clients with unique business solutions driven by technology as opposed to professing expertise in technology to solve business problems. What this will do is convert clients into partners, which would obviously provide a littany of benefits for the service provider.

So the question we need to ask here is how do we come about with this necessary innovation as an organization?. Will the method we came up with innovative solutions in the past hold water, today? The first step in millennial thinking is thinking of the end customer's satisfaction (relating to this case, the end customer of ABC is me. What do I want as a millenial? To do everything online. ZPI. Mobility. Zero Effort. Transformative Services, Market research assistance) as opposed to what our client wants. What the client wants is BAU. What the client's customer wants is to solve his/her problems via our client. What we should do is enable our clients with the ability to satisfy their millennial customers. We can do this via innovations born out of millennial thinking.

When thinking in terms of end customers it is important that we think of the end to end holistic journey of this end customer. Each use case should have a corresponding end customer journey. For each of these end customer journeys we can then brainstorm the various methods in which we can harness millennial technologies to come up with millenial solutions to our client's customer's pain points.

2. The second thing we need to consider in millenial thinking is how we can combine all the possible millenial technologies in order to come up with innovative solutions for our clients.

 In this example we combine emergent technologies such as big data, mobility, heuristics, cloud and social media to come up with 3 KVPs for ABC. The 3 KVPs being automated policy population, paperless-mobile policy administration and a transformative service for claims. A truly millennial solution will combine two or more millennial technologies in a single solution. The reason why we should look along the lines of millennial technologies is twofold:

1. Cost effectiveness
2. Relevance (for the time period)


The advantages of millennial thinking would be:

1. We will be able to ensure customer delight by providing them innovative millennial solutions.

2. We will place ourselves ahead of the technology curve, thereby providing us with ample business consulting opportunities and better billing. (able to bid for bigger clients because of our domain expertise)

3. Develop a rep as a company that caters to the requirements of millennial customers.

4. Forge partnerships with clients as opposed to being a vendor for clients.

5. Develop three silos of competencies that we can take to our clients: millenial technology expertise, millenial business consultancy and millenial innovation.

6. We will have with us at the end of the day, a culture that embraces disruptive innovation.



There were 2 takeaways we had at the end of this exercise:

1. The basic millenial thinking process:
a) Think in terms of work flows with the perspective of the client's end customer in mind.
b) Think of a combined millennial technology solution.

2. A method of fostering innovative thinking:

 Someone who knows technology + Someone who knows domain + someone who doesn't know anything = Innovative solutions.