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Regardless of the size of the company, efficiency challenges in IT management have always been about “doing more with less.” There is always increased budget and expense pressure; there is always new technology to get deployed and customers to satisfy. We find that our customers are continually tasked with hitting multiple targets simultaneously: reducing IT costs, improving system performance, eliminating problems, meeting internal and external SLAs, implementing new solutions and technology, updating application and infrastructure strategy in support of evolving business goals, staying current on technology trends, all while keeping both eyes on the state of the economy. And of course, companies always wish to have a strategic plan to address these challenges and not handle things piecemeal or always be in a firefighting mode. But often they find that that’s what consumes their day.
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Too often we hear business executives complain that the IT function is overly expensive and does not give the business what it needs. When we hear these types of comments, we know it’s time to do some more digging. When we do, we sometimes find that budgets are consistently exceeded project to project. However, we usually find that organizations do not set clearly defined financial objectives for specific IT initiatives, measure the progress of those initiatives at pre-defined intervals, or compare financial results against goals at the end of the project and over the following quarters. Frequently we discover hidden costs, such as very substantial staffing expenses, often in the multiple millions of dollars annually, to manage broken business processes.
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On occasion we are called into an organization to help address technology project success rates. Usually these calls are precipitated by projects delivering far lower levels of value and performance to their organization than what is expected at the beginning of the project. In some instances, end-users have simply refused to use a service once in production because it does not meet their expectations. In others we find that a technology product functions so differently from how users are accustomed, that they find a way to work around it, essentially nullifying the solution.
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When business leaders complain that the technology function cannot support them quickly enough to respond to new market opportunities, CIOs often call us for an assessment. In these situations, we often find that mergers & acquisitions were fraught with technology issues that were never fully resolved or that new technologies rolled out to support new business initiatives didn’t fully integrate with existing systems. We also see systems that were sometimes created and deployed without enough insight into how they would impact other areas of the architecture. Legacy technology systems, often heavily invested in, are frequently not compatible with desirable emerging technologies that could help a company exploit new business opportunities.
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Data management is a critical part of the success of every business. When companies engage with us to create data management solutions, it is usually because of one or more of the following issues: Data gets trapped inside “data jails” where only intensive and expensive manual processes allow the data to be shared or reconciled. Acquisitions of other businesses lead to incompatible, highly expensive systems that do not share data in the same way. Duplicate and conflicting instances of the same data exist in multiple systems. Business leaders are forced to make decisions without correct, up-to-date and complete data. Third-party services and providers, which could enhance products & services, are not able to access and add value to data.
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On some occasions we are engaged by an organization to substantially reconfigure their technology function. In these instances, we usually see significant people, process and technology issues. Some of those issues include:
- Operating infrastructure, systems, and applications fail or simply do not support users the way they need to be supported.
- Technology environments are unreliable or under-performing.
- Legacy environments are not current and operationally functional.
- Work-flow or processes embedded into applications do not reflect the actual operations requirements of the business.
- The process of defining requirements and approving technology investments may not satisfy the needs of the business.
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