Key Findings & Highlights:

Sopra Steria is a France headquartered IT services company primarily focused on delivering IT services within the European market. In CY 2017, Sopra Steria had revenues of €3.9bn, its headcount at the end of June 2018 was 42,779.

Sopra Steria has a federal organizational structure, and its operations (countries and its various software product units) have prime P&L responsibility. Within major Sopra Steria geographies, Consulting and Systems Integration (C&SI) has structured its delivery organization by major vertical. In addition to services, Sopra Steria also offers software products, primarily in Banking, HR and Real Estate. Its organizational structure is aimed at supporting Sopra Steria’s objectives of: 1. empowering personnel at the operations level, and 2. driving client intimacy through a largely onshore presence.

Sopra Steria initiated its UX design services in approximately 2011, as an outgrowth of supporting Spanish banks that were pursuing digital transformation initiatives. This drove southern Europe as an early focal point of Sopra Steria's UX design and development services. The company made the strategic decision to not acquire capabilities, but rather build them in-house. This led to three individual business units becoming the core of the company's capabilities, located in Oslo, Paris, and Madrid.

While the three locations evolved in parallel to focus on clients in proximity, the company has made an investment to standardize methods, processes and tools across each.

In CY 2017, Sopra Steria had revenues of ~€3.9bn (~$4.6bn). NelsonHall estimates that ~1.75% of these revenues are made up of UX services (~€67.2m / $80.6m).

Sopra Steria positions its digital transformation work as engagements that move beyond the digitization of existing processes to reimagine how to achieve business outcomes. It works with its clients to shape digital transformation by employing three complementary functions:

• Digital champions with industry vertical knowledge
• Technology champions with a focus on specific digital solution areas
• Design thinking/UX capabilities.

Sopra Steria focuses its UX and design services on helping clients in two key areas: the design of all services impacting user - business interactions and the impacts of new and emerging technologies on user experience.

Sopra Steria has a total headcount of ~42k currently, with ~60% of these located in France and U.K. and the remaining 40% spread across Europe and in India as a remote delivery capability.

NelsonHall estimates that ~200 designers are dedicated to delivering UX design and development, all of which are located in Europe, primarily across the three core UX centers of Oslo, Paris and Madrid.

Sopra Steria has built its UX design and development services organically, building out capabilities derived from early adopting client bases. This has led to strong capabilities and footprints in geographies such as France, Spain and Norway, which make up the core of its capabilities. This provides an advantage in these geographies, bringing experience, knowledge and a collaborative network to add value. Sopra Steria's challenge is to ensure that these capabilities are shared across the rest of the group in any location for any project.  Sopra Steria's DigiLabs & digital factory network helps alleviate the need for client proximate locations but doesn't help address the limited capacity and limited experience working with each culture.

Sopra Steria is building a strong focus on transforming its internal culture to indoctrinate design thinking further across the organization as well as addressing emerging technology and evolving customer needs. Going forward, the incorporation of these new technologies and service design principles position it to respond as client demands for UX design services evolve.