Milestone Technologies:Employee-first culture drives success
Milestone Technologies has been providing IT Managed Services to leading technology, media, telecom, finance, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies for over two decades and has demonstrated a long history of winning and growing category-defining enterprise clients that are growing ahead of the market.
As a provider of technology solutions and automation enabled IT Managed Services, Milestone is partnering with enterprises and helping them innovate, automate and accelerate their digital transformation journey to achieve business outcomes at scale.
Employee-first culture the key to successes
It is the Employee-First culture of Milestone that sets them apart in the world of enterprise IT service providers, with a deeply ingrained agility, flexibility and purpose-driven attentiveness to its people, process, and technology.
The company has valued diversity since its inception, believing that it should be visible, valued and sustained throughout the entire organisation, generating a highly inclusive workplace that nurtures its own workforce and attracts the best talent.
Milestone lived its values throughout the uncertainty of the global pandemic, while maintaining 24/7 business operations and providing seamless digital experience to a hybrid workplace.
By taking care of its people, Milestone ensures a more authentic experience for its clients which emerged from a four-year vision that unfolded before the pandemic began.
Strategic visioning led by President & CEO, Sameer Kishore
When President & CEO Sameer Kishore, a former general manager within a multi-billion-dollar business segment of IBM’s Global Technology Services division, came on board in January 2020, he and his management team undertook Milestone's strategic-visioning exercise.
Equipped with world class industry experience from the likes of IBM, Accenture, Wipro, Atos, Dell, and other tech giants, the leadership team shaped the vision into something truly exciting.
Kishore as well as his senior leaders set the strategic direction and goals that Milestone needed to strive towards as an organisation. After 20 hours of Zoom calls over three long weeks, and consulting with various industry analysts and advisory firms, they generated answers to three core questions at the dawn of a four-year horizon:
What did they want prospective employees to think of Milestone when considering joining?
What did they want prospective clients to think of Milestone when considering a partnership?
What did they want Milestone to become over the next four years, their winning aspirations, where will they play and how will they win?
The outcome of this exercise was 'Strategy 2023', which outlined plans to continue being a global managed services partner that innovates and accelerates IT and digital transformation journeys by re-imagining people-driven technology solutions, resulting in an environment where employees, clients and partners thrive.
Staying true to the Employee First culture, a focused set of employee engagement initiatives and programmes were devised.
“This exercise was conducted pre-COVID, but I think even with all the changes — the strategy has stayed the same. I've got such an amazing management team and it is a privilege to work with them, to see how they are empowering and enabling the organisation and employees to execute on the agreed strategy.” said Kishore.
He further adds: “We must continue to build an organisational culture that reflects our values and connects employees to Milestone. It is my job to ensure that all employees have what they need to execute and continue to drive success for themselves, their clients and coworkers. Our philosophy aims to bring all employees together under one mission to maximise value for all stakeholders.”
The cultural values at the heart of Milestone Technologies
Arlene LaBorde is Milestone’s Chief People Officer, leading the People Experience team, and overseeing all employee programmes and HR operations globally. It’s her job to ensure that the company is staying true to its values.
“People are our greatest asset. Our value proposition is rooted in driving high employee engagement and satisfaction through our employee-first culture. Our culture is built to provide a collaborative, inclusive environment that supports employees and empowers them to reach their full potential,” said LaBorde.
The company places significant focus on employee growth and development and offers a wide variety of learning and development opportunities. These include technical and business skills development, leadership development, in-house proprietary training, wellness programmes,
and excellence recognition programmes.
Milestone is committed to providing an inclusive environment with initiatives such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) Employee Resource Groups. It also supports external DE&I endeavours like Opportunity@Work and SkillBridge, a Department of Defense (DOD) programme. Opportunity@Work, is a non-profit that supports IT professionals through alternative pathways to fulfill their potential. Through its partnership with ServiceNow and Department of Defence, Milestone works with skilled US Veterans who are nearing demobilisation, providing them with the necessary training and on-the-job experience that bridges their military disciplines with IT and the necessary consulting skills to work in the private sector.
The continued growth of Milestone is a testament to its focus on addressing the needs of employees, clients, and partners, with agility, integrity, and empathy.
The Milestone culture is built around three pillars:
1.
Respect and inclusion
Building relationships with employees, clients, partners, and the community based on trust, respect, integrity and accountability.
2.
Learning
Employees consistently challenge themselves to develop personally and professionally.
3.
Results
Not winning at all costs, but
through relationships and collaboration; anticipating
customer needs and being able
to continuously elevate services.
Go-to-market strategy designed to bring business outcomes
Arjun Nagar is Milestone’s Chief Revenue Officer, responsible for the sales and marketing strategy and performance for all of Milestone’s go-to-market activities.
“We enable our clients to harness the power of their technology investments and achieve maximum performance to meet the demands of a rapidly changing digital world,” said Nagar.
Nagar’s strategic priorities are to accelerate the speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of the client’s digital transformation, while continually investing in employees and company culture. He has built a high-performing, passionate team that focuses on doing the right things for colleagues, clients, and partners.
Milestone enables the following business outcomes for its clients to accelerate their digital journey, which allows them to focus on their employees, and empowers them with the right technology and processes:
Improved operational agility and efficiency via automation and innovation
Exceptional customer service and end-user employee experience
An “always on” infrastructure and secure private cloud operations
Service Portfolio & Capabilities
Milestone Technologies’ core offerings are split into Digital Workplace Services, Application Services and Consulting and Private Cloud Services, via their automation-enabled Managed Services and ServiceNow platform. These solutions are delivered through project-based services and end-to-end Managed Services.
In addition, Milestone has been working closely with its clients and partner ecosystem to implement Intelligent Automation (IA) leveraging the power of AI, ML and NLP to support clients’ ability to be agile in integrating new technologies.
IA adapts to changing business needs and enables scalability without impacting performance or incurring high costs. Through virtual agents and digital assistants, Milestone’s IA also complements and augments the human workforce, including sales, IT service desks, HR, healthcare and more.
ServiceNow partnership and creating value-add for clients
As a ServiceNow Elite partner, Milestone implements ServiceNow solutions for all stages of business transformation. This helps their clients remove downtime or service interruptions and is part of Milestone’s commitment to ensuring business continuity while minimising breakdown and disruption of clients’ IT infrastructure.
“ServiceNow projects are not just technology implementations, they're the foundation of successful organisational change and long-term scalability through sound development practices,” said Scott Jacocks,Vice President and Head of ServiceNow Center of Excellence.
Strategic technology partnerships are vital for innovation, as Bala Ramakrishna, CTO of Milestone explains “By working closely with our technology partners and our clients, we bring in Milestone’s integrated solutions embedded with automation, to solve business challenges and accelerate digital transformation for our clients.”
Demonstrating performance through service excellence
Milestone’s unique service methodology is the secret sauce that allows them to deliver differentiated services to their clients. This methodology is the framework used to collaborate with their clients to validate requirements, test implementations, deliver high-quality services, and provide value through continuous improvement. By leveraging its blended approach of people, process and technology, Milestone collaborates with its clients to deliver a differentiated and customised service.
Milestone values transparency and to demonstrate this approach, utilises service excellence, and XLAs (experience level agreements), to consistently deliver above and beyond clients’ expectations.
Olivier Crene, SVP & GM of Customer Experience & Infrastructure Services,
adds: “You can learn how to monitor customer satisfaction and provide delivery success from the watermelon analogy. The green on the surface is the SLA, indicating good performance, but there’s still a big chunk of red below the surface, which is XLA and potentially indicates poor employee experience.”
Several solutions are aimed at achieving operational and customer service excellence. Milestone has been implementing digital workplace solutions and private cloud operations using 24/7 monitoring, coupled with application services and consulting. This ensures that Milestone’s clients experience round-the-clock support to respond to all events and incidents at an enterprise scale.
Mike Riep, SVP & GM of Business Delivery, explains: “We deliver an experience to our clients that exceeds expectations and is aligned to their business outcomes so that we’re always driving long-term success through true partnership.”
To fully meet expectations and associated challenges, Milestone’s account management team works very closely with client’s stakeholders to ensure they have a 360-degree view of their business needs, allowing clients to serve their end users better.
Natalie Heroux, SVP & GM of Professional Services says: “Clients reach out to us to solve their complex or time-sensitive business problems. Regardless of the client's ask, our teams have stepped up repeatedly and have shown the creativity, flexibility, and professionalism that our clients have come to expect of Milestone.”
