When LiquidHub started it was an advisory services firm with an emphasis on enterprise architecture. Over time, the focus shifted to digital integration.
“We’re a client-driven organization. Many of our clients, who represent global 1,000 firms in the health care and financial services industries, really helped shape and drive the demand for IT services or digital integration services,” Brassington says.
Digital customer engagement in particular was a sub-specialization that made sense for the rapidly growing firm.
“The focus on digital customer engagement encompasses many of the high-growth areas, including mobile computing adoption, big data and analytics, and social interaction.
We looked at ways we could bring all of those technology trends from a convergence point of view and apply them to solve customer engagement challenges that our clients in financial services and health care had or were experiencing,” Brassington says.
Although LiquidHub services clients in a broad spectrum of industries, 90 percent are in health care and financial services. Originally “industry agnostic,” Brassington says LiquidHub recognized that specialization to provide deep expertise in certain industries could provide advantages in the marketplace and give value to customers.
“We found that bringing industry domain knowledge into the conversation of technology and everything around customer engagement, the intersection of those three things — industry competency, technology capabilities and business capabilities around customer engagement and marketing — were ultimately differentiating,” Brassington says.
For example, understanding the dynamics of health care reform is critical when addressing digital integration needs of a health care insurer.
“It’s important to understand the impact of health care reform on health information exchanges and how consumerism is changing the way individuals buy insurance,”
Brassington says. “Those types of market or industry concepts change the whole technology strategy of the leading players in that sector. So having that context was important, rather than just being generic at a technology level.”
Invest in human capital
Rapid growth presents challenges to manage scale and take care of associates. Brassington says that has been one of the more difficult areas LiquidHub has had to address.
“We’re in a human capital business. Market demand is given a lot of credit for driving our growth. But as we look at scaling the business, we are making sure we have the right human capital infrastructure where we can engage our associates, retain our associates, cultivate them with the right thinking and on-board them into our approach around visual customer engagement,” Brassington says.
From its start in Philadelphia, LiquidHub has expanded into a highly distributed workforce.
“Many of our client engagements span multiple competencies, so leveraging technology to build highly integrated, physically distributed teams is something we spend a lot of energy on and we recognize it as both a challenge and an opportunity,” Brassington says.
As associates are added, LiquidHub works to utilize their experience while knitting everyone together in a common culture, vision and set of operating principles.
