Adopting a “Shift Left” strategy addresses these needs. It works best when automation is balanced with – not blocking or inhibiting – the human factor to provide a personalized customer experience.

What is Shift Left and What Does it Mean in Technology Support Services?

Shift Left is a practice that originated in software delivery. In traditional software development, requirements live on the left side of the plan and delivery/testing requirements live on the right side. The aim of Shifting Left is to improve quality and cost-effectiveness by moving critical activities as early as possible in the development lifecycle of a product, process, etc.¹

Definition: For technology support services, the Shift Left approach is built on the concept of moving a person, process, or technology closer to the customer, resulting in a faster, more efficient, and more effective resolution.

More than just self-service or web submission (automation), it makes experts and knowledge more readily available to customers. Its adoption provides enterprises with better service and better business results.

In this context, Shifting Left seeks to optimize the customer experience by combining the efficiency and speed of technology with the intelligence of human expertise and the warmth and personalization of exceptional customer service to resolve issues or accomplish tasks with the highest possible customer satisfaction.

This transformational approach positions technology support providers to better meet the new customer demands for services. A goal of Shifting Left is to break down organizational silos in order to allow providers and customers to co-create value.

A Shift Left approach can include a technology focus, a human focus, or combined focus:

Technology Focus

Some IT support service providers are shifting knowledge through technology – putting organizational and product expertise in an information warehouse that is front-ended with automated self-service. Although this can lower the cost to deliver support services, an automated Shift Left decreases the level of personal service by increasing the level of self-service. This may hide the true service cost because customers spend extra time and money that would otherwise be expended by the service department.

Human Focus

When the experts and their deep knowledge are moved closer to customers seeking assistance, it is a human-focused Shift Left. This creates an avenue for two-way communication where services and support are powered by people – the experts with the answers. Addressing the need for expert knowledge of an issue, deep analyses of a unique problem, or a consumer demand for personalized attention is a human approach to co-creating value.

A Combined Shift Left

Here, technology support services are powered by people and enabled by technology. This approach recognizes that, while technology has a place in service delivery, it isn’t the primary interface between the human needing help and the organization obligated to provide it.

This hybrid Shift Left approach recognizes that human experts need technical agility and prowess to resolve complex issues.

Why is a Shift Left Needed in Technology Support Services?

Technology support services are being disrupted by digital transformation: automated response systems have replaced help desks, chatbots are used instead of call centers, and software is leveraged to analyze business instead of simply being used as a system of record. As digitization occurs and matures, enterprises can lose the human touch.

At the same time, personalization is becoming a differentiator, as customers demand excellence in the services they receive. For many, this includes a higher degree of human service, coupled with technology that empowers them to self-help when desired.

Changes in technology are also affecting support services. As hybrid IT has enabled vendor and platform proliferation, the need for support services has increased. This seems to contradict a broadly assumed benefit of digital transformation: a reduction in the need for support.

The current barriers between traditional levels (or tiers) of support make providing a seamless experience challenging. When issues are escalated between tiers, it takes too long to solve a customer’s problem, and the quality of service generally decreases. From a service provider’s point of view, service costs are increasing while the ability to deliver knowledge and assistance to customers in an innovative way is becoming more challenging.

How Shifting Left Helps Improve Technology Support Services

Considering a provider’s goal for delivering technology support services, and a customer’s goal for receiving them, adopting a Shift Left strategy provides mutual benefits:

Knowledge and expertise are moved closer to customers: When issues and their resolutions are generally clear-cut and occur frequently across a large base of customers, an automated Shift Left via self-service excels when customers simply require access to information to consume on their own. This approach delivers faster access to answers, reduced time and effort, less downtime, and frees man-hours to address other issues or initiatives.

Improved customer experience/better customer service: With a technology-enabled Shift Left, the easy access can lead to happier customers. With a human-powered or combined Shift Left, experts on the front line provide the personalization and extra care that digital-savvy customers demand.

Lower service costs through automation: Strategic uses of technology – such as AI-powered self-service or AI as a tool helping engineers perform with higher quality, greater efficiency, and better scalability – can reduce service costs for providers, translating to lower support costs for customers. Note: beware of over-reliance on technology to reduce costs at the expense of the customer service experience.

Customer service as a differentiator: Even though a service can be provided via technology, customer expectations of service are sufficient to drive a human-powered Shift Left. Sometimes, technology isn’t enough to meet the need. When more human involvement is demanded, or human experience is critical, Shift Left personalization can provide competitive advantage.

The Impact of Shifting Left on the Technology Support Service Model

As Shifting Left moves services closer to the customer, it provides access to better people, delivers a better service model, and creates better outcomes. In order to achieve this, a new strategy must be embraced.

A traditional technology support service model often sees experts applying trial and error—or at least some analysis—to identify and fix the root cause of a problem. This is typically done “behind the scenes” before presenting an answer or delivering a service. When the barriers come down between the service expert and the customer, the issue-resolution/problem-solving activity becomes transparent.

In a Shift Left approach, the experts are not focused on just closing cases – they are solving problems. Ideally, case count goes down when the root cause of the problem is identified and addressed. End users also need to embrace this change to problem solving – the addressing of root causes for long-term solutions. Education and reinforcement may be required to ensure that providers and customers adapt to the new model.

IT service providers will be best served by walking the fine line between leveraging digital investments (such as AI-powered self-service) that put information right at the customer’s fingertips and delivering personalized assistance from enabled and empowered experts.

Moving Forward

When transforming a technology services model, best practices note that technology can be isolating. A balance must be struck between convenience and connection. Allow industry expertise and customer profiles to guide which legacy processes to preserve and which to evolve. Identify where the human element in services can improve overall outcomes. Consider a Shift Left approach that includes value-driven experts utilizing thoughtful innovation to provide a reliable and personalized experience to customers.  Purchasing professionals seeking enterprise software support should consider providers that integrate technology with a human connection. Seek partners that have the wisdom to balance digitization with personalization – those who have Shifted Left.

Pat Phelan, VP, Market Research, Rimini Street

Pat Phelan is responsible for research across the enterprise software market including applications and technology strategies, software vendor support and third-party support, providing quantitative and qualitative strategic insights. Prior to joining Rimini Street, Ms. Phelan spent 18 years with worldwide analyst firm Gartner where she served as research vice president for enterprise software and ERP products, and was the leading analyst covering third-party enterprise software support. During her time at Gartner, Phelan provided thousands of CIOs and IT leaders with research and advice on strategies and options for managing the business application life-cycle and costs, and published nearly 300 research reports.

Renee Wells, VP, Product Strategy, Rimini Street

Ms. Wells is a 27-year veteran of IT and enterprise software with extensive experience in network engineering, management consulting, product marketing, and product management. She is responsible for leading the product strategy of Rimini Street’s comprehensive suite of services specifically designed to enable Oracle and SAP licensees to address new opportunities and challenges across today’s dynamic IT landscape. Previously, Ms. Wells held leadership roles in product marketing, product management, strategy, and consulting at AT&T. She also held roles in Technology Solutions Co, Advanced Computer Systems, Eclipse Computer System, and IBM.

¹ BMC Software, Inc., “What is ‘Shift Left?’ Shift Left Testing Explained,” July 31, 2017. https://www.bmc.com/blogs/what-is-shift-left-shift-left-testing-explained/

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Working with Welch’s, the Massachusetts–based maker of grape juice and jelly, Rimini Street helped squeeze more value out of an Oracle EBS enterprise resource planning system.

Finding a more cost-effective alternative source of enterprise software support was important to Welch’s CIO Dave Jackson. “The Oracle maintenance contract had grown to be the biggest single item in the IT budget, excluding salaries, so dropping it made a huge difference,” he says.

As an agricultural cooperative that represents grape farmers, Welch’s is continuously looking at new markets to sell into and new products it can make from grapes. Since the goal of the cooperative is to produce profits for the farmers, the central organization needs to stay lean. The IT team is very much in the mode of finding ways to do more with less – and has been for several years.

“The year we made this change, IT cuts accounted for at least a quarter of the company’s net income,” Jackson says. “That year our net income was only $4 million. We cut over $1 million out of the IT budget, and a lot of that was IT maintenance and DBA support.” The total IT budget is only about $8.5 million – compared with about $20 million when Jackson joined eight years ago – so finding new ways to make ever dollar stretch is critical.

Doing More With Less

Besides charging twice the cost of a Rimini Street support contract, an Oracle maintenance contract mandates that customers regularly upgrade to remain supported. A big part of the savings Welch’s achieved came from getting off that upgrade treadmill, since implementation and testing costs can outweigh the marginal benefit of new releases.

Given that Welch’s runs a fully integrated suite of Oracle software – 35 to 40 modules, including financials, payroll, order management and process manufacturing – Jackson estimates the total cost of upgrading to the latest release of EBS was at least $4 million to $5 million.

Jackson doesn’t have a bad word to say about the quality of Oracle EBS, which brought new efficiencies when the company began implementing it in the early 2000s. He just hasn’t found a business case for the upgrade path Oracle prescribes, either in his own data center or in the cloud.

For now, Welch’s current EBS implementation meets its needs. In five to seven years, Jackson figures Welch’s may make a big change. “By then, if we do need to buy the software again or we decide we need to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of EBS at that time – we’ll have saved enough money that we could have bought it twice,” he says.

Cloud First – But Not for ERP, Not Yet

In general, Jackson’s strategy on IT innovation is “cloud first” – wherever cloud makes sense. That means giving preference to Software as a Service models whenever he is in the market for new software.

Replacing existing enterprise software is a different story. Oracle’s Software as a Service ERP is too immature to support Welch’s business and would not save money, Jackson says. He estimates even just moving to the Oracle HCM Cloud, the human capital management piece, would have a systems conversion price tag of about $500,000.

Given that most of the innovation in cloud native software is coming from companies that were born in the cloud, it makes sense to “innovate around the edges” by adopting novel capabilities they offer and integrating them with the core ERP system, Jackson says.

An alternate way of taking advantage of the cloud is with Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS – taking advantage of hosting on cloud products like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Velocity to lower the operational cost of an ERP or other traditionally licensed software. However, so far Jackson hasn’t found a cloud host that would save money for his operating environment, which is based on AIX.

“If it makes operational sense to move to the cloud, we will do it,” he says. “But we run a pretty frugal and efficient data center, so we haven’t found much that’s economical to move to the cloud.”

Support for the Business of IT

Even on the tightest of budgets, enterprise systems in general and ERP in particular must grow and change to support new business requirements. At Welch’s, that means that if demand for its traditional products is weak, it needs to find new ways “to reinvigorate grape demand in the marketplace,” Jackson says. Welch’s is looking to branch out into selling grape juice as an ingredient for wine, which  may require the development of new grape processing techniques.

Although Oracle EBS requires all the base capabilities Welch’s could ever need, sometimes it is necessary to layer customizations on top. One example of a new process that required in-house development was supporting new co-manufacturing arrangements, including drop ship logistics where Welch’s takes the order but a partner is responsible for shipping.

Meanwhile, technology standards like operating systems, middleware, web browsers, and other elements of the IT environment are always evolving. So are security threats. One way Jackson is reinvesting his savings with Rimini Street is by hiring a security analyst and adding security software to “reduce the risk profile of the company.”

Staying ahead of these challenges is one reason enterprise software support is so necessary, even for an organization like Welch’s that is basically happy with the ERP it has in place today.

Having dedicated and tenured support from Rimini Street gives Jackson and his staff someone to rely on to solve problems and, better yet, anticipate issues before they arise. Rimini Street helps the Welch’s IT team keep EBS stable and secure, as well as assisting with integrations with other software and cloud services. Rimini Street’s support is much broader than what Oracle provided, including customizations to EBS that Oracle considers outside the bounds of its maintenance contract, Jackson says. “It’s hard to compare the two because what Rimini Street does is truly premium support without the premium fees/costs.”

Meanwhile, Welch’s has continued to add to its Oracle platform where it makes sense to do so. “If Oracle had a solution we needed, particularly a cloud solution, we would certainly consider that, Jackson says. “We try to keep the relationship as positive as possible.” While the vendor would prefer that Welch’s had kept its maintenance contract, working with Rimini Street “has not prevented us from moving forward in any way, shape, or form,” Jackson says.

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