Introducing the 2024 SPI Professional Services Maturity Benchmark
From Ken Ringdahl, Chief Technology Officer, Kantata
This is an excerpt of Kantata’s introduction to SPI’s 2023 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark report. Click here to download the full report for free.
As we enter a new year, we are excited to share insights from the 2024 edition of the annual Service Performance Insight (SPI) Professional Services Maturity™ Benchmark. This esteemed benchmark offers a comprehensive look at professional services organizations’ (PSOs) performance against a set of industry standards and practices, with valuable insights on how key performance indicators (KPIs) are changing year over year.
At Kantata, we use the Professional Services Maturity Benchmark frequently in our work with our customers and prospective customers – it serves as a critical yardstick and strategic tool for PS executives, providing a clear perspective on how their organizations stack up against their peers. It’s not only a benchmark but also a guide for continuous improvement and strategic alignment, helping business leaders gauge their market standing, operational effectiveness, and readiness to tackle emerging trends and challenges
This year’s benchmark reinforces many of the themes I’ve been hearing about in my conversations with PS leaders. For many businesses 2023 was a tumultuous year that brought a dip in profitability and revenue growth after a promising post-pandemic recovery in 2022. This is underscored by a continued decline across numerous KPIs like billable utilization, project margin, and on-time service delivery.
Interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a means of curbing these trends is at an all-time high, but many leaders are still working out practical applications that will provide meaningful support to their intricate processes and workflows. The path from experimentation to activation will go through vertical SaaS practitioners that weave generative AI into proven, pre-built applications specifically designed for the unique intricacies of the professional services project lifecycle.
The findings of this benchmark clearly highlight the importance of leveraging advanced, purpose-built technology to enhance service delivery, efficiency, and overall business outcomes. The results in Chapter 5 vividly illustrate the transformative impact solutions like the Kantata Professional Services Cloud can have on the operational performance of PSOs, notably in areas such as revenue growth and profitability. The gap between businesses using a solution in SPI’s professional services automation (PSA) category and those that are not is stark – from billable utilization (10% higher), to project margin (24% higher), to EBITDA (28% higher), these solutions are arming PS firms to optimize performance.
Notably, nearly 90% of the firms that SPI has identified as high-performance organizations (HPOs) have adopted a PSA solution, making HPOs 27% more likely to use a PSA than the rest of the field. Chapter 4 of this benchmark delves into the characteristics and achievements of these HPOs, which represent the benchmark’s elite 20%, and breaks down what sets them apart. These firms have excelled across the five critical dimensions of the SPI Professional Services Maturity Model™: leadership, client relationships, talent management, service execution, and financial health.
We’re honored to report that 48 of the top 115 high-performing firms are Kantata customers. This achievement underscores the effectiveness of our solutions in supporting PSOs to reach and maintain industry-leading performance levels. Across the entire benchmark, Kantata’s technology solutions were the clear top choice among the participating professional services firms, with 200 out of the 575 surveyed firms implementing our purpose-built Professional Services Cloud to drive their success.
Learn More
Download the 2024 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark to learn how your professional services organization stacks up against your peers in the industry. As a preface to the benchmark, we demonstrate some of the many ways the Kantata Cloud is driving transformational outcomes for our customers.