Interview with Jason Briscoe, Chief Operating Officer at Arrow

Jason Briscoe reveals details of how ARO (formerly Arrow Business Communications) is transforming the company's operations by leveraging the POPX MSP Platform to integrate acquisitions and prepare for continued growth

Why did you choose to work with POPX as your ServiceNow partner?

Having run digital transformation projects many times before, using both internal and Professional Services (PS) teams, I have an acute understanding of how difficult the endeavour is and have the battle scars to prove it. You can usually tell when an IT service provider is struggling with their internal IT systems or failing to transform them because it’s not unusual for their financial performance to suffer as a result. I didn’t want that type of distraction for our business. The way we look at transformation at Arrow is with a strategic vision for the future that encapsulates all our people, processes and the underlying systems and tooling that support them. It is an investment into every aspect of our organisation and is manifested in continuous improvements in everything we do; from the career development we offer our staff, the services we offer our customers, as well as the way we serve and support them.

This strategic vision meant we had a bias away from the usual route to transformation, which typically puts the full risk and accountability on our internal team, even if we commission the assistance of a Professional Services (PS) firm. The problem I see with this is, the subject matter experts at the PS company only stick around long enough to get a solution implemented and then their work is either done or they are just too expensive to retain any longer, so they move on to the next project. Also, everything is costed in time and materials, so you go into a project without ever knowing what the full price is really going to be, unless you get the scoping work done up front down to the last millimetre, which would take many months and we would probably still be doing that work now. We did speak to PS organisations about implementing ServiceNow, but the full scoping exercise doesn’t start until they are engaged and working for you, so any idea of cost can quickly spiral out of control after you start.

From the very beginning, I had determined that this approach had significant limitations but there aren’t many alternatives. The idea I had in my head was a long-term managed services partner, that would share the risk and responsibility of the project and then work with us over the years to continuously optimise our operations and create value. People in the industry were talking about POPX because they have a very different approach that addresses many of the issues I’d experienced in the past and wanted to avoid. When I spoke to the team at POPX it was clear to me they understood our business and our needs, and they very quickly ticked the boxes of what I was looking for. Their ability to de-risk our investment and the all-inclusive fixed price made the final decision an easy one and sealed the deal.

You said: "Too much work in our industry is delivered by committed people using manual, isolated processes and aged tooling." Why do you think this has happened in the industry?

It’s not unusual for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to focus first and foremost on the needs of the customer and each department will then invest in point solutions to solve specific internal issues. When growing a business, this is probably the right thing to do. However, this has its limitations and there will always come a point in the growth of an MSP where the internal systems and processes become so fragmented and chaotic that they struggle to keep up and scale with the changing demands of the business. This negatively impacts the cost to serve and, if left unchecked, will ultimately reduce both the quality of service and profitability. You cannot just throw more people at a problem and expect it to go away when what you really need is smarter ways of working, supported by streamlined processes that are always accurate and require less resources to scale, not more.

The key is to find a way to support accelerated growth without exponentially increasing costs and to do that effectively you must embrace service automation. Growth and investment are often the trigger points to address many of these issues and at Arrow, we are lucky that we have had both positive influences. This brings us to the point today where we can invest in multiple transformation initiatives that will future-proof our business, including the adoption of a company-wide service management platform. Working with POPX, we can now set operational standards across all our acquired businesses, and that can also be adopted by any assets we acquire in the future.

How quickly do you expect the integration to happen?

We have pushed aggressive timescales to get things done with minimum delay and expect to complete the final integrations during Q2 of 2023. There is little chance we could have achieved this without working with a partner like POPX, who can accelerate the process by combining their MSP-ready Platform with the sector expertise of their team.

How will POPX enable you to scale?

It’s not about scaling at any cost, but rather about scaling while better controlling our costs. To do this we must put the right processes in place and the right tools in the hands of our employees. By improving the employee experience with advanced service management techniques, we directly improve the customer experience, as it is one single value chain that connects everything. Again, service automation takes a leading role, allowing us to work accurately and efficiently. In this way, we can serve our clients quicker and better with minimal manual intervention, which mitigates errors that require rework.

The more any IT service provider can get things right the first time the happier the customer will be, and the less resource is then required to go back and fix costly mistakes. By standardising operations across all our acquisitions, we can continuously optimise them and increase efficiency. In addition, we constantly review our product catalogue to develop new services and solutions, and because we have better control of our cost base, we will deliver those new services at the right price for the customer and our business.

How has Arrow grown so much in recent years?

Arrow has grown significantly through multiple acquisitions over a short number of years, but we also have healthy organic growth. We are in the advanced stages of integrating these acquired businesses into one organisation with a common operational standard. We have been fortunate to be associated with private equity firms that have seen the opportunity in our business model and invested in it.