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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"Acknowledging the limits of machine learning during AI-enabled transformation" IBRS, 2019-01-06 22:29:52

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

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

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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Related Articles:

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

"Prepare to manage the “evolution” of AI-based solutions with “DataOps”" IBRS, 2018-03-31 06:43:42

"Preparing for the shift from digital to AI-enabled transformation" IBRS, 2018-06-01 04:10:21

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

"Running IT-as-a-Service Part 47: IT value creation accelerated approach – phase 1" IBRS, 2018-10-04 13:01:03

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

Conclusion: During the last two decades, service desks delivery had the following shortcomings:

• The service desk voice communication channel was characterised by a long waiting time to connect with service desk staff.
• Service desk staff with limited skills minimised the number of issues resolved at the first point of contact.
• There was a lack of online channels and limited self-service offerings, e.g. password reset.
• The service charges were based on the number of incidents that discouraged providers to reduce the number of incidents.

To address these shortcomings, IT organisations should transform to Service Desk-as-a-Service. It should be powered by self-service virtual agents that can identify most of the solutions without the need to connect with service desk officers. The charges should be based on the number of users instead of outages to encourage providers to address outages’ root causes. Online services covering reporting on issues and following up progress should be favoured over voice communication.

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"Can IBRS identify what Service Desk software is most prevalent in Australia?" IBRS, 2017-04-30 11:16:50

"Running IT-as-a-Service Part 25: Understanding the cost drivers of Application-as-a-Service" IBRS, 2016-12-03 02:41:03

"Running IT-as-a-Service Part 43: Service level penalties and incentives for hybrid Cloud" IBRS, 2018-07-05 03:11:03

Conclusion: Given that multi-Cloud is a combination of public/private Cloud and customised systems governed by in-house and/or outsourced arrangements, end-to-end service level management becomes a critical success factor. IT organisations should implement a complete set of service level practices covering people, processes and systems that allow IT organisations to efficiently deliver services in accordance with service level agreements (SLAs).

The SLAs should span across the full service lifecycle. Service level foundation requires defining the:

• services provided
• metrics associated with these services
• acceptable and unacceptable service levels
• liabilities on the part of the service providers and the buyer, and
• actions to be taken in specific circumstances.

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"Running IT-as-a-Service Part 38: Successful hybrid Cloud requires multi-provider governance framework" IBRS, 2018-02-01 10:08:33

"Running IT-as-a-Service Part 42: Incident and problem management integration is critical for hybrid Cloud" IBRS, 2018-06-01 04:14:55