Tag efficiency

Tag efficiency

When To Fix The Process, Not The Break

Tags: , , Advice, Business, Process Design, Strategy, Uncategorized
photo credit: Hamed Saber via photopin cc

photo credit: ralphbijker via photopin cc

There are many ways to deal with ineffective and inefficient process. You can create workarounds. You can bubble-wrap it with additional processes as a form of assurance. You can always do nothing, especially if you don’t care enough about the results at stake. And sometimes – if you are serious about long-term value of the process – you can fix the root cause itself.

cibsys has recently conducted a process efficiency review for one of our clients. Within that assessment, weidentifiedactivities in the operational process that were a form of assurance rather than value-adding activities. Effort-intensive manual intervention was used to assure that system errors were caught before appearing to customers. Such manual intervention, of course, did not address the root cause of the problem. Neither did it guarantee timely and appropriate fixes. Siyabuswa Read More

Ten Questions To Ask Your IT Department

Tags: , , , , , Business, CIO, Strategy
photo credit: Defence Images via photopin cc

photo credit: Defence Images via photopin cc

Following on from my previous blog about a near disaster, the following are ten questions to ask your IT department about how they run their finances, and may come in useful when planning an IT strategy.

IT managers hate finances. Ask any IT person what they think about accountants and accounting and you will probably get a very rude answer.  Let’s face it, technical people do not like to ask questions about money, they just want to get on with projects, solutions and technology.  In many firms the CIO or CTO is promoted to a level where they have control over significant spend but the promotion is often based on their technical knowledge as much as management capability.  Maybe 30 per cent of any spend in a firm can be concentrated directly and indirectly these days in IT or systems related service – so ignoring money is not an option. Not having strong governance over how money is spent on IT is a risk to the firms bottom line.

can i buy Pregabalin online in uk Read More

An Approach to IT Costs

Tags: , , , Assess, Business, Strategy

One of the most compelling arguments for a transition to the cloud is transparency of pricing. The move from complicated internal charges for costs ranging from hardware depreciation to software license shares to the time of system admins all makes the simplicity of buying compute time direct off the network very compelling to a business consumer. The definition of a true cloud service being pay-as-you-go (PAYG in mobile phone industry jargon), buy what you need when you need it, gives the consumer scalability and choice at the best price…..at least in theory.

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The Challenges of Establishing the Financials for a Cloud Project

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Assess, Business, CIO
photo credit: wwarby via photopin cc

photo credit: wwarby via photopin cc

All the technical cloud evangelists are going to hate me for dwelling on the practical financial matters of establishing a cloud project but I am afraid these issues cannot be ignored. If organisations cannot break the deadlock on the problem of first man in or last man out with an sensible approach to managing allocation of costs, then the organisation will be in danger of missing out this critical technology revolution.

In case you have not read my earlier posts, or in case it was not clear, then let us take a real worked example of the challenges faced by a typical organisation in transition to the cloud. Smaller, more nimble organisations may not face this issue so starkly, but certainly the medium to larger ones will.

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Structuring IT Project Costs

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Assess, Cloud, Strategy
photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc

photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc

In my last post I hinted at the dilemma of who covers the costs for a cloud project. There would appear to be few issues and some major advantages to scaling out to the Public Cloud, as you can pay as you go or pay for what you use. But is this really the case? The problem with transitions to any shared platform is that nasty subject of who pays. Typically organisations will allocate shared service costs with an allocation key for the costs to various groups using the shared service. This allocation key will determine how much each person pays. It is obvious that as the shared service grows the unit price will trend downwards and will eventually level to a free market unit price but the first or last user may for an interim period pay much higher prices.  This “first man in” or “last man out” problem causes all sorts of grief for projects in the real world, not only for cloud but for many wider IT projects.

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Private Cloud – Is it Worth the Effort?

Tags: , , , , , Cloud, Data Centre, Strategy
photo credit: ell brown via photopin cc

photo credit: ell brown via photopin cc

There is a lot of discussion in the big companies out there of the benefits of creating their own private clouds using their own server farms; whether it is worthwhile versus the full move to use external shared Public Cloud environments. Of course, SMEs don’t have this dilemma: they do not own as much hardware, generally do not have the internal expertise to even consider a private version, and so just use externally available services with no other option. Cheaper, more scalable, more efficient – let us watch some of the leading medium-sized firms leverage the technology to jump ahead of their bigger, less nimble peers.

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Leveraging Your IT Strategy

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Cloud, Data Centre, Strategy
photo credit: Trucker Dan via photopin cc

photo credit: Trucker Dan via photopin cc

Over recent years we have seen a number of trends among large corporations trying to get clarity on their real IT costs and squeeze efficiency from their resources. It is interesting to compare some of the approaches, and how they restrict the value that can be gained.

Some companies tried to ring-fence their IT by creating a management services company, forcing financial rigour on the supply of services. Great idea… or was it? Clearly there were some benefits from the transparency on what was being purchased (at least in theory), but there were also management overheads and investments needed to gain this rigour; it is unclear whether or not these were ever compensated for in efficient savings.

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