2023 was a hard year for Facet. We felt the crunch of many of our current and prospective partners get squeezed by real economic factors — internal restructuring, and downsizing. We’ve seen projects that were eagerly awaited in 2022 get wiped off the map in 2023, and some departments completely removed (for the time being).

These economic realities are the harness which innovation must ride — and as strategic partners to digital endeavors, Facet ambled along, sometimes blind to the next challenge around the corner.

2024 Outlook

At Facet, we’ve been incubating new strategies and service offerings for our clients this past year. While some have already taken root with our clients, others are still waiting in the wings for capital expenditures and strategic investment to resurface.

We’re most excited about a few areas and our offerings, including:

Enterprise AI Strategy

Many of our clients and prospects are still trying to figure out what they want to do with AI. Some know what they want to do, but don’t have the technical means nor the budgets to start implementing properly. There is a gamut of reasons many of these horses have stayed in their stalls in 2023, but we see a few breaking out of the gates soon.

1. Enterprise AI Policy for Usage
   1. Equipping departments or members of their workforce with the means to safely use AI for permissible purposes.
   2. Providing guard rails for information security.
   3. Development educational materials such as trainings and handbooks for staff on how to purposefully use AI in meaningful ways without the bounds of the organization’s digital operating model and security posture.
2. LLM Development
   1. We’ve been in a holistic research and discovery phase as leaders within enterprises have developer their own opinions on LLM-based AI solutions from experience.
   2. The silver lining of these clouds has started to shine through, and projects began to take form in 2023Q4.
   3. Some enterprises we work with are now seeking proprietary means to manage their own intellectual property interfacing with LLMs — securely leveraging RAGs and other AI deployment architectures to drive value for the organization.
3. Process Delivery Acceleration
   1. Business Process Automation serves as the cornerstone to Facet’s leading conversations with enterprise clients looking to explore AI.
   2. While we can’t say AI-driven solutions will soon dependably overtake business process automation, we know that AI serves as an acceleration mechanism for process development and delivery.
   3. We believe that 2024 will see many new entrants to the market with LLM/AI-driven interfaces for more no-code / low-code solutions, thereby driving incremental innovation that is well-structured and not open to re-interpretation as new large language models (LLMs) are published.

IT Managed Services — going AYCE

Facet made a significant investment into growing our IT services team in 2023, and with the foundational restructuring of our practice nearing completion, we’re rolling out new packages for All-You-Can-Eat (AYCE) IT support priced per user per month.

Without going into much detail as to our service offering with the IT Managed Services, our investment underlines a key tenet of Facet’s philosophy:

Be invested partners, and treat each client’s business as our own.

We strive to understand the ins and outs of our client’s businesses, and while the Digital division has historically lead many long term partnerships through web managed services, data managed services, and growth projects over the years — we find that IT managed services delivers a clear insight into the business’ operating model, risk profile, and more clearly provides insight to opportunities to streamline the business operations with automation, monitoring, and higher standards.

Staffing and Staff Augmentation

For clients and prospects who are looking for significant cost savings in 2024 — especially those who are still fighting off challenging economic realities — we’ve expanded our engagement models to offer Staffing solutions at significant discounts compared to our standard Time and Materials and Staff Augmentation engagement strategies.

Our reasoning is simple, the less management you need the more you can save on our rates:

• Staffing - Unmanaged Resources
• Staff Augmentation - Managed Resources
• Projects / Retainers - Managed Delivery
• Time and Materials - Bespoke Delivery

Conversely, the more management and oversight you need — the more we will drive a conversation towards the appropriate engagement.

Clients who are in a maintenance and low budget year can opt for the clear cost savings from dedicated resources in staffing.

Boutique Systems Integrator

We have learned in 2023 that our clients see our value as a boutique systems integrator. We are generally a smaller operation compared to other systems integrators, but our work quality, holistic perspective, and diverse set of services set us aside as a partner for many enterprises.

We are committed to further positioning ourselves with our clients and our partners and future prospects as a boutique systems integrator. Our track record over the past 10 years shows our recurring investment into complex, integrated systems — and the standout success of our strategy advisory and delivery.

Building Trust with our Client and Referral Partners

Facet celebrates 10 years of business this January 1st, 2024. Each year brings more opportunity, challenges, and learnings. We look purposefully towards building stable, scalable business systems that drive economic opportunity and protect the vested interests of our partners, our staff, and our future.

While the future may sometimes be uncertain, we remain committed to our goal of bringing every facet of perspective to our client’s unique business outlook, problem space, and operating models. We have no secret sauce, except our experience and ability to identify patterns for challenges we’ve previously overcome.

We appreciate our clients who have believed in us over the years, and who continue to invest in partnership with us. Special thanks to our referral partners who have been responsible for more than 50% of Facet’s growth over the past few years. Without our partner’s word of mouth referrals we’d be in a very different place!

On to bigger and brighter things in 2024!