outsourcing | cibsys

30/04/2012

Changing Paradigms in Banking – Cloud Computing

Tags: banking, business, cloud, data security, financial services, IaaS, outsourcing, PaaS, sourcing Business, CIO

photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc

It was interesting to see the announcement that BBVA are moving their mail and office services to the cloud. I have been debating with a number of colleagues from the banking industry the future of the cloud in banking.

In the wider services and financial services world, that is less tightly regulated than the big banks, it is clear that they are already making the journey to cloud based computing. Whether they have made the move to cloud based PaaS services such as Salesforce for CRM, or on Google or similar for document sharing and mail, or on an IaaS service for comprehensive corporate computing.

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16/04/2012

Structuring IT Project Costs

Tags: decisions, efficiency, inertia, money, offshore, organisation, outsourcing, Private Cloud, ringfence, risk, transparency, trends Assess, Cloud, Strategy

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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20/03/2012

Leveraging Your IT Strategy

Tags: business, cloud, decisions, efficiency, IT, leverage, offshore, outsourcing, Private Cloud, ringfence, risk, services, transparency Cloud, Data Centre, Strategy

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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11/01/2012

Aligning Your IT Strategic Decisions to Business Objectives

Tags: aligning IT, business objectives, cloud, CRM, IT strategy, outsourcing, Strategy Business, Strategy

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Watching the outsourcing decision of some organisations, I sometimes wonder if they really understand what really adds value to their business. Stepping back and looking at them from the outside, I doubt they can genuinely justify their choices for the target of their cost saving exercises.

Which one of these adds more value to the business: a major development project to implement a CRM system to generate more revenue, or keeping the day-to-day running of the racks of servers in the machine room? Time and again I watch, as the supposedly easy and risk free outsourcing targets are chosen, especially the value-adding development projects, whereas the question of real “day to day” IT is avoided because it is seen as too risky or too difficult to change. Ask yourself, is this really the case?