Strategy Alignment solutions

Strategy alignment - aligning IT with business

Our recipe for success, developed over many years of trials, demands three essential ingredients, These are that the people involved: exhibit creativity under pressure balanced with the capacity to select and apply the best methods; have significant practical experience in both strategy development and strategy execution; and have the skills to engage effectively with stakeholders at all levels within an organisation.

Following a regimented methodology may not recognise or suit a client's circumstances.

Our approach to aligning IT strategy to business strategy is based on these three beliefs.

Our solutions are multi-faceted and draw our experience, our evidence, our research and our study.

• Business and IT strategy development and review:
  we assist our clients to draft, implement and evaluate cross-functional decisions that will enable them to achieve long-term objectives
• Business / IT engagement and alignment:
  we assist our clients to make better decisions that take into account both business and IT disciplines. Our clients establish inter-departmental processes for decision-making and control map them to decisions on which IT projects are funded and which are not.
• Enterprise architecture:
  described as the organising logic for business processes and IT infrastructure and standardisation that supports of the firm's operating model ^[1]. We assist our clients to assess and evaluate the elements of enterprise architecture asking questions such as, How is the business structured? What is the quality and timeliness of the information? What is the value of the IT spend?

Strategy translation

Rather than let your IT strategy documents gather dust on a bookshelf, our strategy translation solution will convert an unfortunate neglect into a practical solution.

Our methodology aligns to appropriate standards such as COBIT, which connects business and IT goals, and is regularly updated to benefit from ongoing research and client experience.

Our solution includes:

• Technology roadmapping:
  while connecting business needs with the technology solutions to meet them, a technology roadmap also offers a mechanism for forecasting developments in technology, and a framework for planning and coordinating technology developments.
• IT organisational review and development roadmapping:
  determining the people, structure and process capability required to support the business needs, and assessing the current state against those needs and addressing the gaps. An important element is looking to the future - an essential in any planning process.
• IT portfolio reviews and value management:
  examining the portfolio of IT projects to see the value they are creating and how they align with the business.

Strategy execution

Irrespective of the scale and reputation of an advisory firm, the value of IT strategy advisory services is based on the capability, knowledge and experience of the individual practitioners.

Our practice is based on leading practitioners, each with more than 20 years experience in IT management and a proven track record.

We have the ability to deliver assignments with small teams of highly qualified practitioners - we limit our engagements to those where our team has a strong cultural affinity with the client team, and a deep understanding of the business context.

Our solutions includes:

• IT governance and project / program establishment:
  we can't think of a better way to describe IT governance than to say it is, "Specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behaviour in the use of IT." ^[2]
  And again we agree that project / program establishment is, "... the leadership, organisational structures and processes that ensure that the organisation's IT sustains and extends the organisation's strategies and objectives." ^[3]
• IT policy, audit and risk reviews:
  we collect and evaluate evidence of an organisation's information systems, practices, and operations. Evaluating the evidence determines if the information systems are safeguarding assets, maintaining data integrity, and operating effectively and efficiently to achieve the organisation's goals or objectives.
• Project / program intervention and remediation:
  we assist clients to regain control of the outcomes required from an IT strategy implementation.

Strategic Sourcing solutions

Our Strategic Sourcing solutions fit into five groups:

• Decide whether to make or buy, renegotiate or competitively source
• Develop requirements
• Develop a sourcing or renegotiation strategy
• End-to-end sourcing or renegotiation transactions, and
• Transform in-house strategic sourcing capabilities.

Decide whether to make or buy, renegotiate or competitively source

The popular belief is that deciding whether to make or buy is simple: stick to your core business. But the decision is not simple, it's complex.

The decision is complex because, at a minimum, it should take into account:

• The strategic importance of the functions you are evaluating
• The impact of each option on your stakeholder groups and any consequential impact on your business
• Your capability, and your experience to perform the functions, as assessed against an internationally recognised capability and maturity scale, and
• A comparison, when practicable, of your capability and experience compared with those of your main competitors.

We have refined an analytical procedure over many years that analyses all of these complex factors and, more importantly, presents the results in an understandable way that helps you to decide.

Deciding to renegotiate or competitively source a new solution when an agreement is about to expire is another complex decision.

When a contract approaches its term, organisations often think they could have done better, "if we only knew then what we know now". They also are inclined to think they can do better by returning to the market to competitively source their new or changing needs.

Our approach, evolved over many years of experience, assists our clients make the decision whether to renegotiate or to source competitively.

We assess our client's options by taking business, operational, financial and supply-side perspectives into account. We consider many factors, even ones that are apparently simple, but often hidden - for example, switching costs. We make our clients aware that, just as there is a transaction, or switching, cost when selling a house to buy a new one, there is switching cost when going to the market, then transitioning the incumbent supplier out while transitioning-in a new supplier.

Develop requirements

Research into IT projects conducted in the UK ^[4] shows that one of the root causes of troubles in technology projects is the oganisation's poor definition of its requirements.

Our consultants are experienced in using internationally recognised frameworks for developing requirements. When making or buying IT, or telecommunications assets or services, we help you determine which framework best suits your needs, then assist you to analyse and document your requirements.

Many organisations have traditionally developed IT solutions internally, but few make the change from make to buy, and do it painlessly. Even fewer assess their in-house capabilities for analysing and developing their requirements, let alone achieve an internationally certified or accredited level of capability to do so, but many commercial providers of ICT services do have internationally recognised certification or accreditation.

The gap between an organisation's poor understanding of its own capabilities and the commercial providers' internationally recognised certification or accreditation places the organisation at risk. What this means is that a poorly specified ‘garbage in' built by an accredited service provider can produce a perfectly built ‘garbage out', albeit with flawed specifications so that will not do the job it was designed to do.

Our consultants help you define your requirements, and our approach has two constants:

• First, we always start the requirements analysis and development processes from a business perspective, and
• Second, we develop three additional sets of information in parallel with developing the requirements: the information we seek from respondents so that we can evaluate the merits of their respective solutions; a method for evaluating responses to ensure an equitable process and an unambiguous result; and a method for reviewing the supplier's performance and contractual compliance during delivery.

For example, when developing a telecommunications solution, you will want to maximise the benefits of your telecommunications spend - especially in the Australian environment with an evolving supply side.

We begin by forming a detailed view of telecommunications requirements - we analyse usage and billing, current and future business demands, and your commercial and technical operational needs.

We complete the job by ensuring that the services are, and remain, relevant. We do this by continually applying the strategic business objectives as a backdrop to the services requirements to ensure relevance for the potential life of the services.

Develop a sourcing or renegotiation strategy

Your sourcing or renegotiation strategy must support your key decisions and business objectives, so we take a business-oriented and outcomes-focused approach to developing it.

Selecting and buying ICT assets and services is a demanding exercise, especially in a market that is tiered into organisations that specialise in components of an integrated solution - so the likelihood of you finding an integrated solution in a one-stop-shop is not at all high.

Many customer organisations have not adapted to the changes in the supply side of the market. They continue to use pro forma documents - often developed for procuring commodity goods and services - to conduct competitive sourcing of the ICT solutions on which the organisation depends for its business success.

We believe that a suitable sourcing strategy must be informed by an organisation's business objectives and the business benefits it wants from the transaction. We also believe that, in a commercial environment, a risk-reward scheme can encourage a supplier to over-perform, so we assess an organisation's appetite for sharing risks and rewards with its supplier. We also recognise the importance of how the organisation will use, adapt and support the assets and services it wishes to procure. Organisations are vulnerable to supply-side marketing rhetoric if they neglect these practical considerations.

We believe that a suitable renegotiation strategy must develop leverage in renegotiation by diligent preparation, because the customer organisation cannot rely on developing leverage through competition among respondents.

End-to-end sourcing or renegotiation transactions

Making a decision to source competitively or renegotiate does not mean you are ready, or capable of doing it.

As you move through our states of readiness so your preparedness for end-to-end competitive sourcing or renegotiation will improve through each stage in our process.

Our states of readiness are analogous to the stage-gates that many organisations use for assessing their investment decisions.

The early states of readiness take our client on a journey of questioning, developing, refining and validating the transaction outcomes our client aims to deliver, what benefits are needed to declare the transaction a success, and how our client proposes to operate and manage the assets and services that the transaction delivers.

Our pre-contract states of readiness aim to ensure that the transaction stands up to scrutiny against factors such as requirements analysis and development, evaluation of offers, selection of a suitable solution at an acceptable level of risk, evaluation of the commercial attractiveness of an offer, probity and competitive neutrality, diligent negotiation, and execution of a suitable agreement.

Our post-contract states of readiness focus on our client progressively gaining assurances, from vendor performance, that the project or program is producing results that meet our client’s requirements such as the benefits, quality and performance standards set out in the agreement.

The rigour required for an end-to-end process for renegotiation is greater than for an end-to-end process for competitive sourcing because, in a renegotiation, leverage cannot be developed through competition.

Transform in-house strategic sourcing capabilities

Arguably the most demanding and challenging engagement that we face is transforming or constructing a client’s existing in-house strategic sourcing capability.

We thrive under such a challenge because most transformations or construction engagements also include competitive sourcing transactions, therefore we must demonstrate in real transactions the applicability, the quality and the usefulness of knowledge transfer.

Transformation and construction engagements include two dimensions that transactions do not: organisation change management, and competition for resources between business-as-usual duties and the transformation or construction.

We can develop transformation solutions that combine our capabilities with those of two of our coalition partners in which:

• Leadership Initiatives Worldwide will provide expertise in organisation change management and leadership development, and
• Terranovate will augment any staff for business-as-usual activities while our client’s staff focus on the transformation to, or the construction of the new capabilities.

Service Optimisation solutions

Our Service Optimisation practice area has developed a series of solutions to help you establish where you are (Measure and Prioritise), consider people and technology capabilities (Transform and Automate), make change stick (Imbed and Coach), articulate the benefits of improvements (Benchmark and Improve), and assist our clients (Operate and Support).

One or more of these solutions is your solution.

Measure and Prioritise

To plan the way forward, first you need to know where you stand and you need to be clear what your priorities are.

Depending on your need, we typically establish your current state in one of two ways:

• Whole of IT Review - this is best if you are not sure where to start or you need a new set of eyes to independently calibrate your IT organisation, and
• Individual Process Assessments - these provide a detailed understanding and insight into the current state of one or more existing processes.

We have developed tools for these analyses that are founded on the industry standard frameworks of COBIT, ITIL and CMMI, and when necessary we have extended these frameworks to make them more precise, more reliable and easier to use.

The next stage is developing a roadmap. When we know your current state of maturity, we conduct further analysis incorporating benchmark data and input from within your organisation to determine where you need to be (your target state) and when you need to get there (your urgency or value). This analysis enables us to help you develop a roadmap that includes timing and sequencing for improvement.

The outcome is an improvement plan that is focused on the highest value transformation opportunities. Through the process we apply proprietary tools such as ITSO-specific Likert items and pair-wise comparison of factors.

Transform and Automate

While we focus strongly on process in our Measure and Prioritise methods, transforming your service management environment must also consider people and technology capabilities.

We typically address people and organisational capabilities in a number ways. For example, we have adapted the Cameron and Quinn organisational culture assessment instrument (OCAI) ^[5] so we can distil the current and target culture of the organisation and develop transformational strategies. We use a range of change readiness tools, including a Jeannie Duck's Ready Willing Able (RWA) instrument ^[6], in conjunction with the OCAI to target and respond to impediments to change.

On the technology front we have adapted the Enterprise Unified Process ( EUP) for IT solution development and integration into a tailored method for Service Optimisation which we call IDIOM. The IDIOM method provides specific tools for accelerating and improving the key steps of requirements analysis and design, and reflects many years of practical experience in implementing vendor tools. In some cases we will also use methods and tools from our Strategic Sourcing practice to select a suitable ITSM vendor platform.

Imbed and Coach

While many change initiatives will start with a flourish and show promising results, change inevitably is a long journey rather than a sprint. For this reason, we have developed a multi-faceted approach to "making it stick".

The first stage is one-on-one coaching with process leaders and key process participants. This may involve providing specific tools to address how to deal with a specific issue (such as how to manage the response to a major incident or run a change advisory board meeting) or it may take the broader form of providing direction, validation, motivation and encouragement.

The second stage is the need to improve using "baby steps". This expands on conventional planning and may involve:

• Capability Dependency Analysis which allows the proper identification of dependencies and enables the development of a well balanced and realistic roadmap. (Too often targets for improvement in areas such as change management are hamstrung by capability constraints in related areas processes such as configuration management), and
• Analysis of process handoffs and cross-functional handovers to ensure that functional groups are tightly aligned to process accountabilities wherever feasible and appropriate, and subsequently supported by RACI analysis to minimise ambiguity at handover points.

Benchmark and Improve

Optimising IT services is an obvious goal but articulating the benefits and securing funding for the improvements can be difficult, particularly if IT is regarded as a funding black hole.

Benchmarking can help demonstrate how well your organisation's IT services are delivered when compared with those of peer organisations. Measuring key service metrics before and after the improvements can also help quantify the value that improvement initiatives deliver.

Critical to our benchmarking work is our reference database of performance metrics which we use to distil a core of key indicators that will form the basis of your scorecard for service management and integrate with your overall IT balanced scorecard. We combine conventional scorecarding methods with our proprietary outcomes analysis technique to help you maximise the extent to which your measurement system drives the desired behaviours of all process participants.

In partnership with several leading benchmarking organisations, we can also provide an assessment of the cost and efficiency of IT service delivery. When combined with Transpire's other methodologies, benchmarking can give you an understanding of how your IT dollar is being spent, demonstrate the return on investment of improvement, and help establish the means by which you can manage the performance of your outsourced service providers,

We have also developed a rapid analysis tool called Service Desk Analytics (SDA). Using SDA we examine data from your service management systems in order to rapidly uncover and pinpoint the people, process and technology issues that are inhibiting your IT organisation and services. The process typically takes 10 days. We are also finding more and more that SDA can identify issues that would have been difficult to pin down by any other means.

Operate and Support

Our clients often ask us to assist with the on-going operations, support and continuous improvement of their IT service delivery processes. Although we do not provide an outsourced managed service for IT service delivery (well, not yet anyway) we have the experience to assist our clients in two important ways.

• We develop a Concept of Operations for our client. This is an important step because, as we move through the development stages, we assist our client to critically consider their options for operating, supporting and continually improving their IT service delivery. Next, we help our client analyse these options so that they can choose the one that is most likely to deliver the results they require, at an acceptable and manageable level of risk.
• If our client wishes, we can also help them run a competitive sourcing process to find a suitable third party to operate and support their IT service delivery and/or automated IT service delivery tools. Some clients seek this assistance from us because we are uniquely positioned to do so. Firstly, we know the client's requirements intimately because we helped developed them. Secondly, we do not provide an outsourced managed service for IT service delivery so we are totally and unequivocally vendor neutral.