OPERATIONS
This practice offers significant potential for operating cost efficiency through adoption of best practices including benchmarking, technology and services standardisation, applications minimisation, effective procurement, rigorous IT assets management and restricted service catalogue with defined service level commitments.
Effective governance of the technology becomes critical so as to avoid proliferation of technology systems and services developed within user departments using social media, end user development tools and cloud services. This has the potential for added complexity, data integrity issues, maintainability issues, security and controls exposures and ultimately increased costs in the longer term.
Infrastructure components including networks, data centres, end user computing and support services often represent a large majority of IT operating costs. Rigorous asset management and control are essential. There are several industry service management offerings that are advisable to deploy. IT functions are frequently under invested in this area not unlike the cobblers’ children. Typically IT as a function is the largest cost component in G&A expense but has historically under invested in itself, contributing to both cost and performance issues.
Information has become a growing focus with attention on master data management, data integration services, data warehousing and big data analytics. This is supported by an impressive array of new technologies and management disciplines that we are intimately familiar with.
Change management and testing disciplines are critical as the rate of change increases. Our practice brings necessary rigor, experience and methodologies.