TBI’s Golden Nuggets: Tactical Planning

TBI Golden Nuggets – Executive Sponsorship

The reality is that this has proven very hard to do. The major reason for that difficulty has been the vast investment in large infrastructure and applications that are in place to run the corporation’s day-to-day business. Those structures tend to age rapidly; often being held together by a series of tactical practices. Most companies understand these challenges but are reluctant to commit to the time and expense of a significant re-engineering of their infrastructure or application groups.

Over the past decade a series of Best Practices methodologies; ITIL for infrastructure and CMMI for applications have gained intellectual acceptance. However, most companies have trouble understanding how to leverage them to foster better practices, faster & better customer response time, increased information on internal quality of effort, reduced operating costs, slimmer staffs, reduced hardware/software inventory and increased productivity.

A further Best Practice subset is the use of Application Portfolio Rationalization, (APR). Simply put, this refers to the analysis, categorization, prioritization and consolidation of your software and tools inventory. It leads to a reduction of applications to manage, as well as a consequential reduction of staff and related hardware, software and software tools.

Both ITIL and ARP take time and require senior buy-in. However, if done meticulously they almost always produce faster service, utilize a smaller staff using Best Practices; allowing companies to be more cost competitive; as well as closer to their internal customers.

Transformation Strategy

Most companies shy away from organized and large long term transformation efforts, despite the obvious benefits. They are costly; require senior sponsorship, consensus building, external thought leadership and a willingness to change. IT departments are more likely to get involved in a series of large tactical efforts. They include the exploration of using “Cloud Computing”, Software as a service, Infrastructure as a service; as well as large server and application virtualization efforts.

Companies are involved with or exploring every one of these areas to lower costs and improve productivity i.e. “to do more with less funding”. At TBI we contend that a coordinated strategy of employing these tactical practices is, in effect, a large IT Transformation effort. Wouldn’t it make sense to plan all this out in advance i.e. to set a strategy; rather than piecemeal large individual efforts, such as these, and simply react to what each effort can produce. In this case, the sum of the parts; well strategized in advance, could well exceed the whole.

Transitional efforts require front end assessments to analyze and discover organizational problems and to create a good baseline of foundation data. The results are then analyzed in relation to both the IT & Business Strategy. We then compare any gaps against Best Practices, develop a risk/benefit matrix and present a possible transformation plan of action for consideration. This becomes the point when the tactical application of Cloud Computing, SaaS, IaaS and Virtualization can proceed more strategically.

Any of today’s leading edge tactics can best proceed more strategically; in a coordinated and leveraged manner, by employing them within a structured transformational process.

TBI’s Golden Nuggets: Change Management