Conclusion: External Cloud services can realise cost reduction up to 50 % p. a. and promise no set-up or exit fees. While the ongoing cost reduction is realistic, there are significant other costs related to third-party services that should be considered to calculate the overall cost saving of Cloud migration. They are:

• Transition-in cost due to the use of external consulting services to set up the new environment (up to $2.5 million for 7,000 users), as well as procurement cost to prepare tenders, select vendors and negotiate contracts (up to $300,000)
• Transition-out fees to migrate the current service to another service provider (similar to transition-in cost)
• Hardware depreciation related to private Cloud exit
• Governance fees to ensure Cloud consumption remains within budget and the desired service levels are tracked and met (up to 7 % of the annual cost)
• Risk mitigation strategies to ensure the Cloud service remains secure.

The purpose of this research note is to provide a step-by-step approach to determine the ongoing cost-saving opportunities needed for Cloud migration business case¹ preparation.

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Conclusion: The current Business Relationship Managers mostly act as a service desk to manage the implementation of business stakeholders’ service requests. While this is an important business relationship function, the current incumbents are not engaging with business stakeholders’ strategic discussions that require the selection and implementation of new technology that can improve the business presence and performance in the market. As a result, Business Relationship Managers are not earning a “trusted advisor” status. The Business Relationship Manager’s job focus and skills should expand to promote the value of IT services that contribute to business value creation, measurement and communication. This should allow the IT organisation to become the service provider of choice.

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Conclusion: IT organisations responding to mergers & acquisitions or migrating to multi-sourced environments of Cloud and service contracts should establish service providers governance frameworks that favour federated organisations’ principles. It requires maintaining central consistency (e. g. policymaking) whilst allowing local autonomy in certain areas (e. g. hardware purchases). This will leverage the economy of scale, allow the acquisition of local services and products more efficiently, and permit the introduction of new geographies whenever needed in a consistent manner.

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Conclusion: Some ICT strategies are technology-centric while others are business-centric. The technology-centric strategies are usually developed without business stakeholders’ involvement resulting in limited business buy-in. Business-centric strategies are based on business strategies but have a short life-span. This is because market forces require business strategies to change frequently. IBRS recommends that ICT strategies be derived from business and IT guiding principles.
The rationale is that guiding principles have a longer life-span than business strategies and can deliver the desired outcome such as:

• leveraging new technology
• involving business stakeholders in the development process
• realising business value in a timely and cost-effective manner.

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Conclusion: Public Cloud is not the solution to all IT organisations’ technology and services problems. This is because most IT organisations use a portfolio of environments such as legacy systems, in-house and outsourced services, customised IT service management tools and standard applications (e. g. email) that cannot be all retrofitted in a public Cloud architecture without major rework. As a result, hybrid Cloud has become the preferred direction because it allows the multiple environments to co-exist in a cost-effective manner. However, a convincing business case is needed to gain business and IT senior executives’ sponsorship to adopt hybrid Cloud. While Cloud migration benefits and risk mitigation are critical success factors, the deployment-hidden cost is a major contributor to failure. The objectives of this research note are to provide a framework¹ to develop the business case and to ensure its cost includes the following:

• Hybrid Cloud strategy development,
• Risks identification and mitigation,
• Go-to-market strategy, providers’ selection and contract negotiation, and
• Ongoing governance to realise the desired business benefits. This can reach up to 7 % of the yearly cost.

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Conclusion: While the current artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives are data-driven, there are instances whereby the current data is insufficient to predict the future. For example, answering the following questions might be challenging if the available data is only of a historical nature irrelevant for forecasting purposes:

• Q1: What will be the effect on sales if the price is increased by 10 % as of the next quarter?
• Q2: What would have happened to sales had we increased the price by 10 % six months ago?

The purpose of this note is to provide a framework that can be used to derive sales principles to answer the above questions. The same approach can be used to derive other business processes principles such as procurement, customer service and client complaints tracking.

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"Analytics artificial intelligence maturity model" IBRS, 2018-12-03 09:44:43

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Conclusion: Artificial intelligence technologies are available in various places such as robotic process automation (RPA), virtual agents and analytics. The purpose of this paper is to provide an AI maturity model in the analytics space. The proposed maturity model can be applied to any type of industry. It provides a roadmap to help improve business performance in the following areas:

• Running the business (RTB): Provide executives with sufficient information to make informed decisions about running the business and staying competitive.
• Growing the business (GTB): Provides information about growing the business in various geographies without changing the current services and products.
• Transforming the business (TTB): Provides information to develop and release new products and services ahead of competitors.

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"Machine learning will displace “extract, transform and load” in business intelligence and data integration" IBRS, 2018-02-01 10:03:37

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Conclusion: IT organisations wishing to create value should initiate selling processes to define business needs, establish SLAs for mission-critical systems and provide IT solutions to key business issues. This will result in boosting IT staff confidence and managing business lines’ expectations more effectively.

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Conclusion: IT organisations wishing to create value are challenged by long implementation time-scales and inability to change the business perception of IT capability. To address these challenges, IT organisations should adopt an accelerated approach by deploying key processes within a six-month period, to demonstrate service quality and commitment to meet business needs in a rational fashion. Failure to do so will brand IT as a support function, and will make IT desire to earn strategic partner status virtually unachievable.

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"Benefits management: Keeping it real" IBRS, 2018-07-05 03:02:17

"Importance of a balanced ICT investment portfolio" IBRS, 2018-09-04 13:42:25

"SNAPSHOT: Agile services spectrum" IBRS, 2018-05-04 19:10:01

Conclusion: IT organisations revisiting their service contracts as a result of mergers and acquisitions should establish a federated vendor management arrangement. The rationale is to ensure central consistency while retaining local autonomy to address tactical matters. For example, the central consistency demands leveraging the economy of scale to reduce cost, whilst the local autonomy allows the extension of services scope to cover local requirements without the need to change the local vendor management arrangements. However, the local autonomy should be governed by verifiable policies.

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Related Articles:

"Delivering IT-as-a-Service requires an Enterprise Architecture for IT" IBRS, 2017-09-02 01:42:22

"Mergers, Acquisitions and Divestitures: What does it mean to your business?" IBRS, 2017-01-01 10:35:33

"Running IT as a Service Part 1: Prerequisite Building Blocks" IBRS, 2014-10-01 18:33:12

"What to do when your vendor gets acquired" IBRS, 2003-07-28 00:00:00