NEWS

Feb 2010

IT Industry Trends 2010

2010 will be an exciting year for CIO’s to prove the worth of IT. Market analysts such as Gartner and the IT press are indicating the following trends:

“A surge in Public Sector Outsourcing”

The public sector is on tender hooks waiting for the inevitable cost cutting process that will follow the General election. This will no doubt lead to reviews of IT spend, a drive for more shared services and there is even early evidence of some off-shore outsourcing. An example of this is the Lancashire Council £1.9bn shared services project.

“Green shoots of recovery leading to an expansion of capacity”

In the private sector the main focus for the last year, during the recession, has been the ‘bottom line’. Cost has been king, there has been an emphasis on savings in all cost including IT and improved margins. However, as we move forward into the year, and the promise of an easing of the recession, there will be a focus on expansion of capacity to support growth and the ‘top line’ sales. The extraordinary short term measures taken to reduce costs in 2009 will need to be replaced by sustainable measure so that businesses do not get left behind.

“Why it pays to go green”

There is a lot of talk in the press about the carbon reduction commitment regulations and the impact on business. The bottom line is that it makes sense to consider the initiatives that can reduce energy usage as a way of saving cost. The solutions also fit well with other initiatives CIO’s will be reviewing as part of the 2010 innovation agenda, such as cloud computing and virtualisation.

“CIO’s to focus on innovation and the customer experience”

From our experience, given the above trends for 2010, the CIO will need to focus on innovation and the customer experience. Initiatives, such as cloud computing and social computing in the workplace to reduce customer engagement costs, are examples that will need to be considered. These, by their nature cannot be internal services and the first consideration will be to find the right supplier. It is key to get the right relationship and governance in place and to keep the service lean.

With this backdrop, CIO’s will need to measure the true value of IT via benchmarking and quality reviews such as customer satisfaction surveys to enable budgets to be defended.

The Recession – How Grange helped customers to succeed…

Within the last 6 months Grange has been focused on the challenges that our customers have faced as part of the recession. Here is a summary of what we have helped our customers to achieve:

● Utility Company – recommended a number of key actions to improve the value for money & fit to business requirements of IT.
● Healthcare Company – provided a structure and evaluation framework to ensure IT decisions are aligned with business needs and affordability.
● Food Industry – improved IT service delivery and mentoring of key staff including IT Director to ensure they achieve their goals.
● Automotive Industry – carried out an outsourcing procurement & transition implementation that has provided a more business focused helpdesk and infrastructure service.

IT industry Update

With the HP takeover of EDS starting to show encouraging results, there will be further convergence in the industry. In fact Gartner has predicted that 20% of businesses will own no IT assets by 2012.

Gartner has made 2 recent acquisitions to widen its grip on the market
● Burton Group – targeting IT Managers and operational staff.
● AMR Research – supply chain.

Useful Link

The economist published a good high level step by step guide to outsourcing process. Click on the link below:
‘Your guide to outsourcing and offshoring in a recession’ by Lyonsdown Media – http://www.noa.co.uk/index.php/site/portal/
 

Jan 2009

‘Reality is nothing, perception is everything!’

 As an IT department you’re delivering to your Service Level Agreement, you have reduced your headcount and you have driven costs down whilst improving the resilience of the IT infrastructure. A recent benchmark of IT performance showed you are well within industry norms. Regular helpdesk feedback indicates that perception of how you deal with calls is running well above satisfactory. You believe the applications suite is aligned with business requirements and supports the business processes of your company. What more do you have to do?

All of the above is excellent but ultimately futile if the Board and key senior management’s perception of IT is poor, or perhaps, more importantly, out of line with your own perception.

So how do you find out what senior management perception is of IT?

Well it’s simple, you ask them or more precisely you get an independent company to ask them for you.

An independent survey is far more likely to extract the open honest critical feedback which an internal IT department led survey is unable to deliver. This is because feedback on another department is always tempered by the need to work together and hence internal feedback isn’t always open. People have no such qualms about telling an independent company exactly what they think with the option to remain anonymous. You may not like the results and you may think the results are unfair but they will reflect perception.

Another benefit of using an external company to carry out the survey is that they are able to benchmark the results against their own anonymous survey data so that you can see how you compare with other IT departments. So, not only do you get a true perception of what your customers think, but also how you compare with your peers.

No matter what the results, good or bad you have a clear starting point for improving senior management perception of the service you deliver. You are able to compare with other IT departments and develop a plan to close the gaps where perception needs to improve. You now have an agenda to bring you closer to what senior management is looking for. That is the key to adding real value to your business.