Understand the Data and Analytics Landscape

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  • The data and analytics landscape comprises many disciplines and components; organizations may find themselves unsure of where to start or what data topic or area they should be addressing.
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Understand the Data and Analytics Landscape Research & Tools

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Understand the data and analytics landscape

Get an overview of the core disciplines of the data and analytics landscape.

  • Understand the Data and Analytics Landscape Storyboard

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Improve Security Governance With a Security Steering Committee

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  • Security is still seen as an IT problem rather than a business risk, resulting in security governance being relegated to the existing IT steering committee.
  • Security is also often positioned in the organization where they are not privy to the details of the organization’s overall strategy. Security leaders struggle to get the full enterprise picture.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Work to separate the Information Security Steering Committee (ISSC) from the IT Steering Committee (ITSC). Security transcends the boundaries of IT and needs an independent, eclectic approach to make strategic decisions.
  • Be the lawyer, not the cop. Ground your communications in business terminology to facilitate a solution that makes sense to the entire organization.
  • Develop and stick to the agenda. Continued engagement from business stakeholders requires sticking to a strategic level-focused agenda. Dilution of purpose will lead to dilution in attendance.

Impact and Result

  • Define a clear scope of purpose and responsibilities for the ISSC to gain buy-in and consensus for security governance receiving independent agenda time from the broader IT organization.
  • Model the information flows necessary to provide the steering committee with the intelligence to make strategic decisions for the enterprise.
  • Determine membership and responsibilities that shift with the evolving security landscape to ensure participation reflects interested parties and that money being spent on security mitigates risk across the enterprise.
  • Create clear presentation material and strategically oriented meeting agendas to drive continued participation from business stakeholders and executive management.

Improve Security Governance With a Security Steering Committee Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out how to improve your security governance with a security steering committee, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the ways we can support you in completing this project.

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Define committee purpose and responsibilities

Identify the purpose of your committee, determine the capabilities of the committee, and define roles and responsibilities.

  • Improve Security Governance With a Security Steering Committee – Phase 1: Define Committee Purpose and Responsibilities
  • Information Security Steering Committee Charter

2. Determine information flows, membership & accountabilities

Determine how information will flow and the process behind that.

  • Improve Security Governance With a Security Steering Committee – Phase 2: Determine Information Flows, Membership & Accountabilities

3. Operate the Information Security Steering Committee

Define your meeting agendas and the procedures to support those meetings. Hold your kick-off meeting. Identify metrics to measure the committee’s success.

  • Improve Security Governance With a Security Steering Committee – Phase 3: Operate the Information Security Steering Committee
  • Security Metrics Summary Document
  • Information Security Steering Committee Stakeholder Presentation
[infographic]

Further reading

Improve Security Governance With a Security Steering Committee

Build an inclusive committee to enable holistic strategic decision making.

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

"Having your security organization’s steering committee subsumed under the IT steering committee is an anachronistic framework for today’s security challenges. Conflicts in perspective and interest prevent holistic solutions from being reached while the two permanently share a center stage.

At the end of the day, security is about existential risks to the business, not just information technology risk. This focus requires its own set of business considerations, information requirements, and delegated authorities. Without an objective and independent security governance body, organizations are doomed to miss the enterprise-wide nature of their security problems."

– Daniel Black, Research Manager, Security Practice, Info-Tech Research Group

Our understanding of the problem

This Research Is Designed For:

  • CIOs
  • CISOs
  • IT/Security Leaders

This Research Will Help You:

  • Develop an effective information security steering committee (ISSC) that ensures the right people are involved in critical decision making.
  • Ensure that business and IT strategic direction are incorporated into security decisions.

This Research Will Also Assist:

  • Information Security Steering Committee (ISSC) members

This Research Will Help Them:

  • Formalize roles and responsibilities.
  • Define effective security metrics.
  • Develop a communication plan to engage executive management in the organization’s security planning.

Executive summary

Situation

  • Successful information security governance requires a venue to address security concerns with participation from across the entire business.
  • Without access to requisite details of the organization – where we are going, what we are trying to do, how the business expects to use its technology – security can not govern its strategic direction.

Complication

  • Security is still seen as an IT problem rather than a business risk, resulting in security governance being relegated to the existing IT steering committee.
  • Security is also often positioned in the organization where they are not privy to the details of the organization’s overall strategy. Security leaders struggle to get the full enterprise picture.

Resolution

  • Define a clear scope of purpose and responsibilities for the Information Security Steering Committee to gain buy-in and consensus for security governance receiving independent agenda time from the broader IT organization.
  • Model the information flows necessary to provide the steering committee with the intelligence to make strategic decisions for the enterprise.
  • Determine membership and responsibilities that shift with the evolving security landscape to ensure participation reflects interested parties and that money being spent on security mitigates risk across the enterprise.
  • Create security metrics that are aligned with committee members’ operational goals to incentivize participation.
  • Create clear presentation material and strategically oriented meeting agendas to drive continued participation from business stakeholders and executive management.

Info-Tech Insight

  1. Work to separate the ISSC from the IT Steering Committee (ITSC). Security transcends the boundaries of IT and needs an independent, eclectic approach to make strategic decisions.
  2. Be the lawyer, not the cop. Ground your communications in business terminology to facilitate a solution that make sense to the entire organization.
  3. Develop and stick to the agenda. Continued engagement from business stakeholders requires sticking to a strategic level-focused agenda. Dilution of purpose will lead to dilution in attendance.

Empower your security team to act strategically with an ISSC

Establishing an Information Security Steering Committee (ISSC)

Even though security is a vital consideration of any IT governance program, information security has increasingly become an important component of the business, moving beyond the boundaries of just the IT department.

This requires security to have its own form of steering, beyond the existing IT Steering Committee, that ensures continual alignment of the organization’s security strategy with both IT and business strategy.

An ISSC should have three primary objectives:

  • Direct Strategic Planning The ISSC formalizes organizational commitments to strategic planning, bringing visibility to key issues and facilitating the integration of security controls that align with IT and business strategy.
  • Institute Clear Accountability The ISSC facilitates the involvement and commitment of executive management through clearly defined roles and accountabilities for security decisions, ensuring consistency in participation as the organization’s strategies evolve.
  • Optimize Security Resourcing The ISSC maximizes security by monitoring the implementation of the security strategic plan, making recommendations on prioritization of effort, and securing necessary resources through the planning and budgeting processes, as necessary.

What does the typical ISSC do?

Ensuring proper governance over your security program is a complex task that requires ongoing care and feeding from executive management to succeed.

Your ISSC should aim to provide the following core governance functions for your security program:

  1. Define Clarity of Intent and Direction How does the organization’s security strategy support the attainment of the business and IT strategies? The ISSC should clearly define and communicate strategic linkage and provide direction for aligning security initiatives with desired outcomes.
  2. Establish Clear Lines of Authority Security programs contain many important elements that need to be coordinated. There needs to be clear and unambiguous authority, accountability, and responsibility defined for each element so lines of reporting/escalation are clear and conflicting objectives can be mediated.
  3. Provide Unbiased Oversight The ISSC should vet the organization’s systematic monitoring processes to make certain there is adherence to defined risk tolerance levels and ensure that monitoring is appropriately independent from the personnel responsible for implementing and managing the security program.
  4. Optimize Security Value Delivery Optimized value delivery occurs when strategic objectives for security are achieved and the organization’s acceptable risk posture is attained at the lowest possible cost. This requires constant attention to ensure controls are commensurate with any changes in risk level or appetite.

Formalize the most important governance functions for your organization

Creation of an ISSC is deemed the most important governance and oversight practice that a CISO can implement, based on polling of IT security leaders analyzing the evolving role of the CISO.

Relatedly, other key governance practices reported – status updates, upstream communications, and executive-level sponsorship – are within the scope of what organizations traditionally formalize when establishing their ISSC.

Vertical bar chart highlighting the most important governance functions according to respondents. The y axis is labelled 'Percentage of Respondents' with the values 0%-60%, and the x axis is labelled 'Governance and Oversight Practices'. Bars are organized from highest percentage to lowest with 'Creation of cross-functional committee to oversee security strategy' at 56%, 'Regularly scheduled reporting on the state of security to stakeholders' at 55%, 'Upstream communication channel from security leadership to CEO' at 46%, and 'Creation of program charter approved by executive-level sponsor' at 37%. Source: Ponemon Institute, 2017; N=184 organizations; 660 respondents.

Despite the clear benefits of an ISSC, organizations are still falling short

83% of organizations have not established formal steering committees to evaluate the business impact and risks associated with security decisions. (Source: 2017 State of Cybersecurity Metrics Report)

70% of organizations have delegated cybersecurity oversight to other existing committees, providing security limited agenda time. (Source: PwC 2017 Annual Corporate Director Survey)

"This is a group of risk managers an institution would bring together to deal with a response anyway. Having them in place to do preventive discussions and formulate policy to mitigate the liability sets and understand compliance obligations is just powerful." (Kirk Bailey, CISO, University of Washington)

Prevent the missteps that make 9 out of 10 steering committees unsuccessful

Why Do Steering Committees Fail?

  1. A lack of appetite for a steering committee from business partners. An effective ISSC requires participation from core members of the organization’s leadership team. The challenge is that most business partners don’t understand the benefits of an ISSC and the responsibilities aren’t tailored to participants’ needs or interests. It’s the CISO’s (or senior IT/security leader’s) responsibility to make this case to stakeholders and right-size the committee responsibilities and membership.
  2. ISSC committees are given inappropriate responsibilities. The steering committee is fundamentally about decision making; it’s not a working committee. Security leadership typically struggles with clarifying these responsibilities on two fronts: either the responsibilities are too vague and there is no clear way to execute on them within a meeting or responsibilities are too tactical and require knowledge that participants do not have. Responsibilities should determine who is on the ISSC, not the other way around.
  3. Lack of process around execution. An ISSC is only valuable if members are able to successfully execute on its mandate. Without well-defined processes it becomes nearly impossible for the ISSC to be actionable. As a result, participants lack the information they need to make critical decisions, agendas are unmet, and meetings are seen as a waste of time.

Use these icons to help direct you as you navigate this research

Use these icons to help guide you through each step of the blueprint and direct you to content related to the recommended activities.

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This icon denotes a slide where a supporting Info-Tech tool or template will help you perform the activity or step associated with the slide. Refer to the supporting tool or template to get the best results and proceed to the next step of the project.

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This icon denotes a slide with an associated activity. The activity can be performed either as part of your project or with the support of Info-Tech team members, who will come onsite to facilitate a workshop for your organization.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

Guided Implementation

Workshop

Consulting

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful." "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track." "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place." "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Improve Security Governance With a Security Steering Committee – project overview

1. Define Committee Purpose and Responsibilities

2. Determine Information Flows, Membership & Accountabilities

3. Operate the Information Security Steering Committee

Supporting Tool icon

Best-Practice Toolkit

1.1 Tailor Info-Tech’s Information Security Steering Committee Charter Template to define terms of reference for the ISSC

1.2 Conduct a SWOT analysis of your information security governance capabilities

1.3 Identify the responsibilities and duties of the ISSC

1.4 Draft the committee purpose statement of your ISSC

2.1 Define your SIPOC model for each of the ISSC responsibilities

2.2 Identify committee participants and responsibility cadence

2.3 Define ISSC participant RACI for each of the responsibilities

3.1 Define the ISSC meeting agendas and procedures

3.2 Define which metrics you will report to the ISSC

3.3 Hold a kick-off meeting with your ISSC members to explain the process, responsibilities, and goals

3.4 Tailor the Information Security Steering Committee Stakeholder Presentation template

3.5 Present the information to the security leadership team

3.6 Schedule your first meeting of the ISSC

Guided Implementations

  • Identify the responsibilities and duties of the ISSC.
  • Draft the committee purpose of the ISSC.
  • Determine SIPOC modeling of information flows.
  • Determine accountabilities and responsibilities.
  • Set operational standards.
  • Determine effectiveness metrics.
  • Steering committee best practices.
Associated Activity icon

Onsite Workshop

This blueprint can be combined with other content for onsite engagements, but is not a standalone workshop.
Phase 1 Outcome:
  • Determine the purpose and responsibilities of your information security steering committee.
Phase 2 Outcome:
  • Determine membership, accountabilities, and information flows to enable operational excellence.
Phase 3 Outcome:
  • Define agendas and standard procedures to operate your committee.
  • Design an impactful stakeholder presentation.

Improve Security Governance With a Security Steering Committee

PHASE 1

Define Committee Purpose and Responsibilities

Phase 1: Define Committee Purpose and Responsibilities

ACTIVITIES:

  • 1.1 Tailor Info-Tech’s Information Security Steering Committee Charter Template to define terms of reference for the ISSC
  • 1.2 Conduct a SWOT analysis of your information security governance capabilities
  • 1.3 Identify the responsibilities and duties of the ISSC
  • 1.4 Draft the committee purpose statement for your ISSC

OUTCOMES:

  • Conduct an analysis of your current information security governance capabilities and identify opportunities and weaknesses.
  • Define a clear scope of purpose and responsibilities for your ISSC.
  • Begin to customize your ISSC charter.

Info-Tech Insight

Balance vision with direction. Purpose and responsibilities should be defined so that they encompass your mission and objectives to the enterprise in clear terms, but provide enough detail that you can translate the charter into operational plans for the security team.

Tailor Info-Tech’s Information Security Steering Committee Charter Template to define terms of reference for the ISSC

Supporting Tool icon 1.1

A charter is the organizational mandate that outlines the purpose, scope, and authority of the ISSC. Without a charter, the steering committee’s value, scope, and success criteria are unclear to participants, resulting in unrealistic stakeholder expectations and poor organizational acceptance.

Start by reviewing Info-Tech’s template. Throughout the next two sections we will help you to tailor its contents.

  • Committee Purpose: The rationale, benefits of, and overall function of the committee.
  • Organization and Membership: Who is on the committee and how is participation measured against organizational need.
  • Responsibilities and Duties: What tasks/decisions the accountable committee is making.
  • RACI: Who is accountable, responsible, consulted, and informed regarding each responsibility.
  • Committee Procedures and Agendas: Includes how the committee will be organized and how the committee will interact and communicate with interested parties.
Sample of the Info-Tech deliverable 'Information Security Steering Committee Charter Template'.

Download the Information Security Steering Committee Charter to customize your organization’s charter

Conduct a SWOT analysis of your information security governance capabilities

Associated Activity icon 1.2

INPUT: Survey outcomes, Governance overview handouts

OUTPUT: SWOT analysis, Top identified challenges and opportunities

  1. Hold a meeting with your IT leadership team to conduct a SWOT analysis on your current information security governance capabilities.
  2. In small groups, or individually, have each group complete a SWOT analysis for one of the governance areas. For each consider:
    • Strengths: What is currently working well in this area?
    • Weaknesses: What could you improve? What are some of the challenges you’re experiencing?
    • Opportunities: What are some organizational trends that you can leverage? Consider whether your strengths or weaknesses could create opportunities.
    • Threats: What are some key obstacles across people, process, and technology?
  3. Have each team or individual rotate until each person has contributed to each SWOT. Add comments from the stakeholder survey to the SWOT.
  4. As a group, rank the inputs from each group and highlight the top five challenges and the top five opportunities you see for improvement.

Identify the responsibilities and duties of the ISSC

Associated Activity icon 1.3

INPUT: SWOT analysis, Survey reports

OUTPUT: Defined ISSC responsibilities

  1. With your security leadership team, review the typical responsibilities of the ISSC on the following slides (also included in the templated text of the charter linked below).
  2. Print off the following two slides, and in small teams or individually, identify which responsibilities the ISSC should have in your organization, brainstorm any additional responsibilities, and document reasoning.
  3. Have each team present to the larger group, track the similarities and differences between each of the groups, and come to consensus on the list of categories and responsibilities.
  4. Complete a sanity check: review your SWOT analysis. Do the responsibilities you’ve identified resolve the critical challenges or weaknesses?
  5. As a group, consider the responsibilities and whether you can reasonably implement those in one year or if there are any that will need to wait until year two of the committee.

Add or modify responsibilities in Info-Tech’s Information Security Steering Committee Charter.

Typical ISSC responsibilities and duties

Use the following list of responsibilities to customize the list of responsibilities your ISSC may take on. These should link directly to the Responsibilities and Duties section of your ISSC charter.

Strategic Oversight

  • Provide oversight and ensure alignment between information security strategy and company objectives.
  • Assess the adequacy of resources and funding to sustain and advance successful security programs and practices for identifying, assessing, and mitigating cybersecurity risks across all business functions.
  • Review controls to prevent, detect, and respond to cyber-attacks or information or data breaches involving company electronic information, intellectual property, data, or connected devices.
  • Review the company’s cyberinsurance policies to ensure appropriate coverage.
  • Provide recommendations, based on security best practices, for significant technology investments.

Policy Governance

  • Review company policies pertaining to information security and cyberthreats, taking into account the potential for external threats, internal threats, and threats arising from transactions with trusted third parties and vendors.
  • Review privacy and information security policies and standards and the ramifications of updates to policies and standards.
  • Establish standards and procedures for escalating significant security incidents to the ISSC, board, other steering committees, government agencies, and law enforcement, as appropriate.

Typical ISSC responsibilities and duties (continued)

Use the following list of responsibilities to customize the list of responsibilities your ISSC may take on. These should link directly to the Responsibilities and Duties section of your ISSC charter.

Risk Governance

  • Review and approve the company’s information risk governance structure and key risk management processes and capabilities.
  • Assess the company’s high-risk information assets and coordinate planning to address information privacy and security needs.
  • Provide input to executive management regarding the enterprise’s information risk appetite and tolerance.
  • Review the company’s cyber-response preparedness, incident response plans, and disaster recovery capabilities as applicable to the organization’s information security strategy.
  • Promote an open discussion regarding information risk and integrate information risk management into the enterprise’s objectives.

Monitoring & Reporting

  • Receive periodic reports and coordinate with management on the metrics used to measure, monitor, and manage cyber and IT risks posed to the company and to review periodic reports on selected risk topics as the Committee deems appropriate.
  • Review reports provided by the IT organization regarding the status of and plans for the security of the company’s data stored on internal resources and with third-party providers.
  • Monitor and evaluate the quality and effectiveness of the company’s technology security, capabilities for disaster recovery, data protection, cyberthreat detection and cyber incident response, and management of technology-related compliance risks.

Review the organization’s security strategy to solidify understanding of the ISSC’s purpose

The ISSC should consistently evolve to reflect the strategic purpose of the security program. If you completed Info-Tech’s Security Strategy methodology, review the results to inform the scope of your committee. If you have not completed Info-Tech’s methodology, determining these details should be achieved through iterative stakeholder consultations.

Strategy Components

ISSC Considerations

Security Pressure Analysis

Review the ten security domains and your organization’s pressure levels to review the requisite maturity level of your security program. Consider how this may impact the focus of your ISSC.

Security Drivers/Obligations

Review how your security program supports the attainment of the organization’s business objectives. By what means should the ISSC support these objectives? This should inform the rationale, benefits, and overall function of the committee.

Security Strategy Scope and Boundaries

Consider the scope and boundaries of your security program to reflect on what the program is responsible for securing. Is this reflected adequately in the language of the committee’s purpose? Should components be added or redacted?

Draft the committee purpose statement of your ISSC

Associated Activity icon 1.4

INPUT: SWOT Analysis, Security Strategy

OUTPUT: ISSC Committee Purpose

  1. In a meeting with your IT leadership team – and considering the organization’s security strategy, defined responsibilities, and opportunities and threats identified – review the example goal statement in the Information Security Steering Committee Charter, and identify whether any of these statements apply to your organization. Select the statements that apply and collaboratively make any changes needed.
  2. Define unique goal statements by considering the following questions:
    • What three things would you realistically list for the ISSC to achieve?
    • If you were to accomplish three things in the next year, what would those be?
  3. With those goal statements in mind, consider the overall purpose of the committee. The purpose statement should be a reflection of what the committee does, why, and the goals.
  4. Have each individual review the example purpose statement and draft what they think a good purpose statement would be.
  5. Present each statement, and work together to determine a best-of-breed statement.

Alter the Committee Purpose section in the Information Security Steering Committee Charter.

Info-Tech Quarterly Research Agenda Outcomes Q2-Q3 2023

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At Info-Tech, we take pride in our research and have established the most rigorous publication standards in the industry. However, we understand that engaging with all our analysts to gauge the future may not always be possible. Hence, we have curated some compelling recently published research along with forthcoming research insights to assist you in navigating the next quarter.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

We offer a quarterly Research Agenda Outcomes deck that thoroughly summarizes our recently published research, supplying decision makers with valuable insights and best practices to make informed and effective decisions. Our research is supported by our team of seasoned analysts with decades of experience in the IT industry.

By leveraging our research, you can stay updated with the latest trends and technologies, giving you an edge over the competition and ensuring the optimal performance of your IT department. This way, you can make confident decisions that lead to remarkable success and improved outcomes.

Impact and Result

  • Enhance preparedness for future market trends and developments: Keep up to date with the newest trends and advancements in the IT sector to be better prepared for the future.
  • Enhance your decision making: Acquire valuable information and insights to make better-informed, confident decisions.
  • Promote innovation: Foster creativity, explore novel perspectives, drive innovation, and create new products or services.

Info-Tech Quarterly Research Agenda Outcomes Q2/Q3 2023 Research & Tools

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Info-Tech Quarterly Research Agenda Q3 2023 Deck – An overview of our Research Agenda Outcome for Q2 and Q3 of 2023.

A guide to our top research published to date for 2023 (Q2/Q3).

  • Info-Tech Quarterly Research Agenda Outcomes for Q2/Q3 2023
[infographic]

Further reading

Featured Research Projects 2023 (Q2/Q3)

“Here are my selections for the top research projects of the last quarter.”

Photo of Gord Harrison, Head of Research & Advisory, Info-Tech Research Group.

Gord Harrison
Head of Research & Advisory
Info-Tech Research Group

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Manage Requirements in an Agile Environment

Agile and requirements management are complementary, not competitors.

Security

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Assess Your Cybersecurity Insurance Policy

Adapt to changes in the cyber insurance market.

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Design and Implement a Business-Aligned Security Program

Focus first on business value.

Infrastructure & Operations

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Wholesale Industry Business Reference Architecture

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CIO Priorities 2023

Engage cross-functional leadership to seize opportunity while protecting the organization from volatility.

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Navigate the Digital ID Ecosystem to Enhance Customer Experience

Beyond the hype: How it can help you become more customer-focused?

CIO
Strategy & Governance

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Manish Jain
Principal Research Director

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Sample of the 'Navigate the Digital ID Ecosystem to Enhance Customer Experience' research.

Sample of the 'Navigate the Digital ID Ecosystem to Enhance Customer Experience' research.

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Effective IT Communications

Empower IT employees to communicate well with any stakeholder across the organization.

CIO
People & Leadership

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Brittany Lutes
Research Director

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Diana MacPherson
Senior Research Analyst

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Effective IT Communications' research.

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Develop a Targeted Flexible Work Program for IT

Select flexible work options that balance organizational and employee needs to drive engagement and improve attraction and retention.

CIO
People & Leadership

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Jane Kouptsova
Research Director

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Sample of the 'Develop a Targeted Flexible Work Program for IT' research.

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Effectively Manage CxO Relations

Make relationship management a daily habit with a personalized action plan.

CIO
Value & Performance

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Mike Tweedle
Practice Lead

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Sample of the 'Effectively Manage CxO Relations' research.

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Establish High-Value IT Performance Dashboards and Metrics

Spend less time struggling with visuals and more time communicating about what matters to your executives.

CIO
Value & Performance

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Diana MacPherson
Senior Research Analyst

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Sample of the 'Establish High-Value IT Performance Dashboards and Metrics' research.

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Build Your Enterprise Application Implementation Playbook

Your implementation doesn't start with technology but with an effective plan that the team can align on.

Applications
Business Processes

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Ricardo de Oliveira
Research Director

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Sample of the 'Build Your Enterprise Application Implementation Playbook' research.

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Develop Your Value-First Business Process Automation Strategy

As you scale your business automations, focus on what matters most.

Applications
Business Processes

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Andrew Kum-Seun
Research Director

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Sample of the 'Develop Your Value-First Business Process Automation Strategy' research.

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Manage Requirements in an Agile Environment

Agile and requirements management are complementary, not competitors.

Applications
Application Development

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Vincent Mirabelli
Principal Research Director

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Sample of the 'Manage Requirements in an Agile Environment' research.

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Assess Your Cybersecurity Insurance Policy

Adapt to changes in the cyber insurance market.

Security
Security Risk, Strategy & Governance

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Logan Rohde
Senior Research Analyst

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Sample of the 'Assess Your Cybersecurity Insurance Policy' research.

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Design and Implement a Business-Aligned Security Program

Focus first on business value.

Security
Security Risk, Strategy & Governance

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Michel Hébert
Research Director

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Sample of the 'Design and Implement a Business-Aligned Security Program' research.

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Automate IT Asset Data Collection

Acquire and use discovery tools wisely to populate, update, and validate the data in your ITAM database.

Infrastructure & Operations
I&O Process Management

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Andrew Sharp
Research Director

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Sample of the 'Automate IT Asset Data Collection' research.

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Leveraging AI to Create Meaningful Insights and Visibility in Retail

AI prominence across the enterprise value chain.

Industry Coverage
Retail

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Rahul Jaiswal
Principal Research Director

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Understand the Implications of Generative AI in Education

Bans aren't the answer, but what is?

Industry Coverage
Education

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Mark Maby
Research Director

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Sample of the 'Understand the Implications of Generative AI in Education' research.

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Wholesale Industry Business Reference Architecture

Business capability maps, value streams, and strategy maps for the wholesale industry.

Industry Coverage
Wholesale

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Rahul Jaiswal
Principal Research Director

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Sample of the 'Wholesale Industry Business Reference Architecture' research.

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Mainframe Modernization for Retail Banking

A strategy for modernizing mainframe systems to meet the needs of modern retail banking.

Industry Coverage
Retail Banking

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David Tomljenovic
Principal Research Director

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Sample of the 'Mainframe Modernization for Retail Banking' research.

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Data Analytics Use Cases for Utilities

Building upon the collective wisdom for the art of the possible.

Industry Coverage
Utilities

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Jing Wu
Principal Research Director

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Sample of the 'Data Analytics Use Cases for Utilities' research.

Sneak Peaks: Research coming in next quarter!

“Next quarter we have a big lineup of reports and some great new research!”

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Gord Harrison
Head of Research & Advisory
Info-Tech Research Group

  1. Build MLOps and Engineering for AI and ML

    Enabling you to develop your Engineering and ML Operations to support your current & planned use cases for AI and ML.
  2. Leverage Gen AI to Improve Your Test Automation Strategy

    Enabling you to embed Gen AI to assist your team during testing broader than Gen AI compiling code.
  3. Make Your IT Financial Data Accessible, Reliable, and Usable

    This project will provide a recipe for bringing IT's financial data to a usable state through a series of discovery, standardization, and policy-setting actions.
  4. Implement Integrated AI Governance

    Enabling you to implement best-practice governance principles when implementing Gen AI.
  5. Develop Exponential IT Capabilities

    Enabling you to understand and develop your strategic Exponential IT capabilities.
  6. Build Your AI Strategy and Roadmap

    This project will provide step-by-step guidance in development of your AI strategy with an AI strategy exemplar.
  7. Priorities for Data Leaders in 2024 and Beyond

    This report will detail the top five challenges expected in the upcoming year and how you as the CDAO can tackle them.
  8. Deploy AIOps More Effectively

    This research is designed to assess the process maturity of your IT operations and help identify pain pains and opportunities for AI deployment within your IT operations.
  9. Design Your Edge Computing Architecture

    This research will provide deployment guidelines and roadmap to address your edge computing needs.
  10. Manage Change in the AI-Enabled Enterprise

    Managing change is complex with the disruptive nature of emerging tech like AI. This research will assist you from an organizational change perspective.
  11. Assess the Security and Privacy Impacts of Your AI Vendors

    This research will allow you to enhance transparency, improve risk management, and ensure the security and privacy of data when working with AI vendors.
  12. Prepare Your Board for AI Disruption

    This research will arm you with tools to educate your board on the impact of Gen AI, addressing the potential risks and the potential benefits.

Info-Tech Research Leadership Team

“We have a world-class team of experts focused on providing practical, cutting-edge IT research and advice.”

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Info-Tech Research Group

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Senior Vice President
Research Development

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Industry Research

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Nora Fisher
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Shared Services

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Becca Mackey
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Workshops

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Global Market Programs

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Global Public Sector

About Info-Tech Research Group

Info-Tech Research Group produces unbiased and highly relevant research to help leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with your teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for the organization.

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Our world-class leadership team is continually focused on building disruptive research and products that drive measurable results and save money.

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Our team of experts is composed of the optimal mix of former CIOs, CISOs, PMOs, and other IT leaders and IT and management consultants as well as academic researchers and statisticians.

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We enable over 30,000 members to share their insights and best practices that you can use by having direct access to over 100 analysts as an extension of your team.

Become an Info-Tech influencer:

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We interview hundreds of experts and practitioners to help ensure our research is practical and focused on key member challenges.

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Agile Enterprise Architecture Operating Model

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  • Parent Category Name: Strategy & Operating Model
  • Parent Category Link: /strategy-and-operating-model

Establish an enterprise architecture practice that:

  • Leverages an operating model that promotes/supports agility within the organization.
  • Embraces business, data, application, and technology architectures in an optimal mix.
  • Is Agile in itself and will be sustainable and reactive to business needs, staying relevant and “profitable” – continuously delivering business value.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Use your business and EA strategy and design principles to right-size standardized operating models to fit your EA organization’s needs.
  • You need to define a sound set of design principles before commencing with the design of your EA organization.
  • The EA operating model structure should be rigid but pliable enough to fit the needs of the stakeholders it provides services to.
  • A phased approach and a good communication strategy is key to the success of the new EA organization.
  • Start with one group and work out the hurdles before rolling it out organization-wide.
  • Make sure that you communicate regularly on wins but also on hurdles and how to overcome them.

Impact and Result

  • The organization design approach proposed will aim to provide twofold agility: the ability to stretch and shrink depending on business requirements and the promotion of agility in architecture delivery.
  • By recognizing that agility comes in different flavors, organizations using more traditional design patterns will also benefit from the approach advocated by this blueprint.

Agile Enterprise Architecture Operating Model Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out create an Agile EA operating model to execute the EA function, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Design your EA operating model

You need to define a sound set of design principles before commencing with the design of your EA organization.

  • Agile EA Operating Model Communication Deck
  • Agile EA Operating Model Workbook
  • Business Architect
  • Application Architect
  • Data Architect
  • Enterprise Architect

2. Define your EA organizational structure

The EA operating model structure should be rigid but pliable enough to fit the needs of the stakeholders it provide services to.

  • EA Views Taxonomy
  • EA Operating Model Template
  • Architecture Board Charter Template
  • EA Policy Template
  • EA Compliance Waiver Form Template

3. Implement the EA operating model

A phased approach and a good communications strategy are key to the success of the new EA organization.

  • EA Roadmap
  • EA Communication Plan Template
[infographic]

Workshop: Agile Enterprise Architecture Operating Model

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

1 EA Function Design

The Purpose

Identify how EA looks within the organization and ensure all the necessary skills are accounted for within the function.

Key Benefits Achieved

EA is designed to be the most appropriately placed and structured for the organization.

Activities

1.1 Place the EA department.

1.2 Define roles for each team member.

1.3 Find internal and external talent.

1.4 Create job descriptions with required proficiencies.

Outputs

EA organization design

Role-based skills and competencies

Talent acquisition strategy

Job descriptions

2 EA Engagement Model

The Purpose

Create a thorough engagement model to interact with stakeholders.

Key Benefits Achieved

An understanding of each process within the engagement model.

Create stakeholder interaction cards to plan your conversations.

Activities

2.1 Define each engagement process for your organization.

2.2 Document stakeholder interactions.

Outputs

EA Operating Model Template

EA Stakeholder Engagement Model Template

3 EA Governance

The Purpose

Develop EA boards, alongside a charter and policies to effectively govern the function.

Key Benefits Achieved

Governance that aids the EA function instead of being a bureaucratic obstacle.

Adherence to governace.

Activities

3.1 Outline the architecture review process.

3.2 Position the architecture review board.

3.3 Create a committee charter.

3.4 Make effective governance policy.

Outputs

Architecture Board Charter Template

EA Policy Template

4 Architecture Development Framework

The Purpose

Create an operating model that is influenced by universal standards including TOGAF, Zachmans, and DoDAF.

Key Benefits Achieved

A thoroughly articulated development framework.

Understanding of the views that influence each domain.

Activities

4.1 Tailor an architecture development framework to your organizational context.

Outputs

EA Operating Model Template

Enterprise Architecture Views Taxonomy

5 Operational Plan

The Purpose

Create a change management and communication plan or roadmap to execute the operating model.

Key Benefits Achieved

Build a plan that takes change management and communication into consideration to achieve the wanted benefits of an EA program.

Effectively execute the roadmap.

Activities

5.1 Create a sponsorship action plan.

5.2 Outline a communication plan.

5.3 Execute a communication roadmap.

Outputs

Sponsorship Action Plan

EA Communication Plan Template

EA Roadmap

Identify and Manage Regulatory and Compliance Risk Impacts on Your Organization

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  • Parent Category Name: Vendor Management
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More than at any other time, our world is changing. As a result, organizations – and their vendors – need to be able to adapt their plans to accommodate risk on an unprecedented level.

It is increasingly likely that one of your vendors, or their n-party support vendors, will fall out of regulatory compliance. Therefore, organizations must protect themselves by creating better mechanisms to hold their n-party vendors accountable and validate that they comply.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Identifying and managing a vendor’s potential regulatory impact on your organization requires multiple people in the organization across several functions. Those people all need coaching on the potential changes in the market and how these changes may affect operations.
  • Organizational leadership is often taken unaware by changes, and their plans lack the flexibility to adjust to significant regulatory upheavals.

Impact and Result

Vendor management practices educate organizations on the different potential risks from vendors in your market and suggest creative and alternative ways to avoid and help manage them.

  • Prioritize and classify your vendors with quantifiable, standardized rankings.
  • Prioritize focus on your high-risk vendors.
  • Standardize your processes for identifying and monitoring vendor risks with our Regulatory Risk Impact Tool to manage potential impacts.

Identify and Manage Regulatory and Compliance Risk Impacts on Your Organization Research & Tools

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Identify and Manage Regulatory and Compliance Risk Impacts to Your Organization Storyboard – Use the research to better understand the negative impacts of vendor actions to your brand reputation.

Use this research to identify and quantify the potential regulatory impacts caused by vendors. Use Info-Tech's approach to look at the regulatory impact from various perspectives to better prepare for issues that may arise.

  • Identify and Manage Regulatory and Compliance Risk Impacts on Your Organization Storyboard

2. Regulatory Risk Impact Tool – Use this tool to help identify and quantify the operational impacts of negative vendor actions.

By playing the “what if” game and asking probing questions to draw out – or eliminate – possible negative outcomes, everyone involved adds their insight into parts of the organization to gather a comprehensive picture of potential impacts.

  • Regulatory Risk Impact Tool
[infographic]

Further reading

Identify and Manage Risk Impacts on Your Organization

It is easier for prospective clients to find out what you did wrong than that you fixed the issue.

Analyst perspective

Organizations must understand the regulatory damage vendors may cause from lack of compliance.

Frank Sewell.

The sheer number of regulations on the international market is immense, ever-changing, and make it almost impossible for any organization to consistently keep up with compliance.

As regulatory enforcement increases, organizations must hold their vendors accountable for compliance through ongoing monitoring and validation of regulatory compliance to the relevant standards in their industries, or face increasing penalties for non-compliance.

Frank Sewell,

Research Director, Vendor Management

Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Common Obstacles

Info-Tech’s Approach

More than at any previous time, our world is changing rapidly. As a result, organizations – and their vendors – need to be able to adapt their plans to accommodate risk on an unprecedented level.

It is increasingly likely that one of your vendors, or their n-party support vendors, will fall out of regulatory compliance. Organizations must protect themselves by creating better mechanisms to hold their n-party vendors accountable and validate that they comply.

Identifying and managing a vendor’s potential regulatory impact on your organization requires multiple people in the organization across several functions. Those people all need coaching on the potential changes in the market and how these changes may affect operations.

Organizational leadership is often taken unaware by changes, and their plans lack the flexibility to adjust to significant regulatory upheavals.

Vendor management practices educate organizations on the different potential risks from vendors in your market and suggest creative and alternative ways to avoid and help manage them.

Prioritize and classify your vendors with quantifiable, standardized rankings.

Prioritize focus on your high-risk vendors.

Standardize your processes for identifying and monitoring vendor risks with our Regulatory Risk Impact Tool to manage potential impacts.

Info-Tech Insight

Organizations must evolve their risk assessments to be more adaptive to respond to regulatory changes in the global market. Ongoing monitoring of the vendors who must comply with industry and governmental regulations is crucial to avoiding penalties and maintaining your regulatory compliance.

Info-Tech’s multi-blueprint series on vendor risk assessment

There are many individual components of vendor risk beyond cybersecurity.

The image contains a cube that is divided into 6 asymmetrical to highlight the six components of vendor risk. Strategic, Security, Regulatory & Compliance, Financial, Reputational, Operational.

This series will focus on the individual components of vendor risk and how vendor management practices can facilitate organizations’ understanding of those risks.

Out of Scope:

This series will not tackle risk governance, determining overall risk tolerance and appetite, or quantifying inherent risk.

Regulatory and Compliance risk impacts

Potential losses to the organization due regulatory and compliance incidents.

  • In this blueprint we’ll:
    • Explore regulatory and compliance risks and their impacts.
    • Identify potentially disruptive events to assess the overall impact on organizations and implement adaptive measures to identify, manage, and monitor vendor performance.

The image contains a cube that is divided into 6 asymmetrical to highlight the six components of vendor risk. Strategic, Security, Regulatory & Compliance, Financial, Reputational, Operational. Regulatory & Compliance is highlighted on the cube.

The world is constantly changing

The IT market is constantly reacting to global influences. By anticipating changes, leaders can set expectations and work with their vendors to accommodate them and avoid penalties.

When the unexpected happens, being able to adapt quickly to new priorities and regulations ensures continued long-term business success.

Below are some things no one expected to happen in the last few years:

45%

Have no visibility into their upstream supply chain, or they can only see as far as their first-tier suppliers.

2022 McKinsey

61%

Of compliance officers expect to increase investment in their compliance function over the next two years.

2022 Accenture

$770k+

Breaches involving third-party vendors cost more on average.

2022 HIT Consultant.net

Regulatory Compliance

Consider implementing vendor management initiatives and practices in your organization to help gain compliance with your expanding vendor landscape.

Your organizational risks may be monitored but are your n-party vendors?

The image contains a cube that is divided into 6 asymmetrical to highlight the six components of vendor risk. Strategic, Security, Regulatory & Compliance, Financial, Reputational, Operational.

Review your expectations with your vendors and hold them accountable.

Regulatory entities are looking beyond your organization’s internal compliance these days. More and more they are diving into your third-party and downstream relationships, particularly as awareness of downstream breaches increases globally.

  • Are you assessing your vendors regularly?
  • Are you validating those assessments?
  • Do your vendors have a map of their downstream support vendors?
  • Do they have the mechanisms to hold those downstream vendors accountable to your standards?

Regulatory Guidance and Industry Standards

Are you confident your vendors meet your standards?

Identify and manage regulatory and compliance risks

Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG)
Regulatory agencies are putting more enforcement on ESG practices across the globe. As a result, organizations will need to monitor the changing regulations and validate that their vendors and n-party support vendors are adhering to these regulations, or face penalties for non-compliance.

Data Protection
Data Protection remains an issue in the world. Organizations should ensure that the data their vendors obtain remains protected throughout the vendor’s lifecycle, including post-termination. Otherwise, they could be monitoring for a data breach in perpetuity.

Mergers and Acquisitions
More prominent vendors continuously buy smaller companies to control the market in the IT industry. Therefore, organizations should put protections in their contracts to ensure that an IT vendor’s acquisition does not put them in a relationship with someone that could cause them an issue.

What to look for

Identify regulatory and compliance risk impacts.

  • Is there a record of complaints against the vendor from their employees or customers?
  • Has the vendor been cited for regulatory compliance issues in the past?
  • Does the vendor have a comprehensive list of their n-party vendor partners?
    • Are they willing to accept appropriate contractual protections regarding them?
  • Does the vendor self-audit, or do they use a vetted third-party audit firm to issue a SOC report annually?
  • Does the vendor operate in regions known for regulatory violations?
  • Is the vendor willing to make concessions on contractual protections, or are they only offering “one-sided” agreements with “as-is” warranties?

Prepare your vendor risk management for success

Due diligence will enable successful outcomes.

  1. Obtain top-level buy-in; it is critical to success.
  2. Build enterprise risk management (ERM) through incremental improvement.
  3. Focus initial efforts on the “big wins” to prove the process works.
  4. Use existing resources.
  5. Build on any risk management activities that already exist in the organization.
  6. Socialize ERM throughout the organization to gain additional buy‑in.
  7. Normalize the process long term, with ongoing updates and continuing education for the organization.

(Adapted from COSO)

How to assess third-party risk

  1. Review Organizational Regulations
  2. Understand the organization’s regulatory risks to prepare for the “What If” game exercise.

  3. Identify & Understand Potential Regulatory-Compliance Risks
  4. Play the “What If” game with the right people at the table.

  5. Create a Risk Profile Packet for Leadership
  6. Pull all the information together in a presentation document.

  7. Validate the Risks
  8. Work with leadership to ensure that the proposed risks are in line with their thoughts.

  9. Plan to Manage the Risks
  10. Lower the overall risk potential by putting mitigations in place.

  11. Communicate the Plan
  12. It is important not only to have a plan but also to socialize it in the organization for awareness.

  13. Enact the Plan
  14. Once the plan is finalized and socialized, put it in place with continued monitoring for success.

Adapted from Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance

Insight summary

Regulatory risk impacts often come from unexpected places and have significant consequences. Knowing who your vendors are using for their support and supply chain could be crucial in eliminating the risk of non-compliance for your organization. Having a plan to identify and validate the regulatory compliance of your vendors is a must for any organization, to avoid penalties.

Insight 1

Organizations fail to plan for vendor acquisitions appropriately.

Vendors routinely get acquired in the IT space. Does your organization have appropriate safeguards from inadvertently entering a negative relationship? Do you have plans around replacing critical vendors purchased in such a manner?

Insight 2

Organizations often fail to understand how n-party vendors could place them in non-compliance.

Even if you know your complete third-party vendor landscape, you may not be aware of the downstream vendors in play. Ensure that you get visibility into this space as well and hold your direct vendors accountable for the actions of their vendors.

Insight 3

Organizations need to know where their data lives and ensure it is protected.

Make sure you know which vendors are accessing/storing your data, where they are keeping it, and that you can get it back and have the vendors destroy it when the relationship is over. Without adequate protection throughout the lifecycle of the vendor, you could be monitoring for breaches in perpetuity.

Identifying regulatory and compliance risks

Who should be included in the discussion.

  • While it is true that executive-level leadership defines the strategy for an organization, it is vital for those making decisions to make informed decisions.
  • Getting input from regulatory risk experts within your organization will enhance your long-term potential for successful compliance.
  • Involving those who not only directly manage vendors but also understand your regulatory requirements will aid in determining the path forward for relationships with your current vendors, and identifying new emerging potential partners.

See the blueprint Build an IT Risk Management Program

Review your risk management plans for new risks on a regular basis.

Keep in mind Risk = Likelihood x Impact (R=L*I).

Impact (I) tends to remain the same, while Likelihood (L) is becoming closer to 100% as threat actors become more prevalent

Managing vendor regulatory and compliance risk impacts

How could your vendors fall out of compliance?

  • Review vendors’ downstream connections to understand thoroughly with whom you are in business.
    • Monitor their regulatory stance as it could reflect on your organization.
  • Institute proper vendor lifecycle management.
    • Make sure to follow corporate due diligence and risk assessment policies and procedures.
    • Failure to consistently do so is a recipe for disaster.
  • Develop IT risk governance and change control.
  • Introduce continual risk assessment to monitor the relevant vendor markets.
    • Regularly review your regulatory requirements for new and changing risks.
  • Be adaptable and allow for innovations that arise from the current needs.
    • Capture lessons learned from prior incidents to improve over time, and adjust your plans accordingly.

Organizations must review their regulatory risk appetite and tolerance levels, considering their complete landscape.

Changing regulations, acquisitions, and events that affect global supply chains are current realities, not unlikely scenarios.

Ongoing Improvement

Incorporating lessons learned.

  • Over time, despite everyone’s best observations and plans, incidents will catch us off guard.
  • When it happens, follow your incident response plans and act accordingly.
  • An essential step is to document what worked and what did not – collectively known as the “lessons learned.”
  • Use the lessons learned document to devise, incorporate, and enact a better risk management process.

Sometimes disasters occur despite our best plans to manage them.

When this happens, it is important to document the lessons learned and update our plans.

The “what if” game

1-3 hours

Vendor management professionals are in an excellent position to help senior leadership identify and pull together resources across the organization to determine potential risks. By playing the "what if" game and asking probing questions to draw out – or eliminate – possible adverse outcomes, everyone involved adds their insight into parts of the organization to gather a comprehensive picture of potential impacts.

  1. Break into smaller groups (or if too small, continue as a single group).
  2. Use the Regulatory Risk Impact Tool to prompt discussion on potential risks. Keep this discussion flowing organically to explore all potentials but manage the overall process to keep the discussion pertinent and on track.
  3. Collect the outputs and ask the subject matter experts (SMEs) for management options for each one in order to present a comprehensive risk strategy. You will use this to educate senior leadership so that they can make an informed decision to accept or reject the solution.
Input Output
  • List of identified potential risk scenarios scored by regulatory-compliance impact
  • List of potential mitigations of the scenarios to reduce the risk
  • Comprehensive regulatory risk profile on the specific vendor solution
Materials Participants
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Regulatory Risk Impact Tool to help drive discussion
  • Vendor Management – Coordinator
  • Organizational Leadership
  • Operations Experts (SMEs)
  • Legal/Compliance/Risk Manager

High risk example from tool

The image contains a screenshot demonstrating high risk example from the tool.

How to mitigate:

Contractually insist that the vendor have a third-party security audit performed annually, with the stipulation that they will not denigrate below your acceptable standards.

Note: Even though a few items are “scored” they have not been added to the overall weight, signaling that the company has noted but does not necessarily hold them against the vendor.

Low risk example from tool

The image contains a screenshot demonstrating low risk example from the tool.

Summary

Seek to understand all regulatory requirements to obtain compliance.

  • Organizations need to understand and map out their entire vendor landscape.
  • Understand where all your data lives and how you can control it throughout the vendor lifecycle.
  • Those organizations that consistently follow their established risk assessment and due diligence processes are better positioned to avoid penalties.
  • Bring the right people to the table to outline potential risks in the market and your organization.
  • Incorporate “lessons learned” from prior incidents into your risk management process to build better plans for future issues.

Keeping up with the ever-changing regulations can make compliance a difficult task.

Organizations should increase the resources dedicated to monitoring these regulations as agencies continue to hold them more accountable.

Related Info-Tech Research

Identify and Manage Financial Risk Impacts on Your Organization

  • Vendor management practices educate organizations on potential financial impacts that vendors may incur and suggest systems to help manage them.
  • Standardize your processes for identifying and monitoring vendor risks to manage financial impacts with our Financial Risk Impact Tool.

Identify and Manage Reputational Risk Impacts on Your Organization

  • Vendor management practices educate organizations on potential risks to vendors in your market and suggest creative and alternative ways to avoid and help manage them.
  • Standardize your processes for identifying and monitoring vendor risks to manage potential impacts on your reputation and brand with our Reputational Risk Impact Tool.

Identify and Manage Strategic Risk Impacts on Your Organization

  • Vendor management practices educate organizations on potential risks to vendors in your market and suggest creative and alternative ways to avoid and help manage them.
  • Standardize your processes for identifying and monitoring vendor risks to manage potential impacts on your strategic plan with our Strategic Risk Impact Tool.

Info-Tech Insight

It is easier for prospective clients to find out what you did wrong than that you fixed the issue.


Bibliography

Alicke, Knut, et al. "Taking the pulse of shifting supply chains", McKinsey & Company, August 26th 2022. Accessed October 31st
Regan, Samantha, et al. "Can compliance keep up with warp-speed Change?", accenture, May 18th 2022. Accessed Oct 31st 2022.
Feria, Nathalie, and Rosenberg, Daniel. "Mitigating Healthcare Cyber Risk Through Vendor Management", HIT Consultant, October 17th 2022. Accessed Oct 31st 2022.
Tonello, Matteo. “Strategic Risk Management: A Primer for Directors.” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, 23 Aug. 2012.
Frigo, Mark L., and Richard J. Anderson. “Embracing Enterprise Risk Management: Practical Approaches for Getting Started.” COSO, 2011.

Select an EA Tool Based on Business and User Need

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  • Parent Category Name: Architecture Domains
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  • A mature EA function is increasingly becoming an organizational priority to drive innovation, provide insight, and define digital capabilities.
  • Proliferation of digital technology has increased complexity, straining the EA function to deliver insights.
  • An EA tool increases the efficiency with which the EA function can deliver insights, but a large number of organizations have not a selected an EA tool that suits their needs.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • EA tool value largely comes from tying organizational context and requirements to the selection process.
  • Organizations that have selected an EA tool often fail to have it adopted and show its true value. To ensure successful adoption and value delivery, the EA tool selection process must account for the needs of business stakeholders and tool users.

Impact and Result

  • Link the need for the EA tool to your organization’s EA value proposition. The connection enables the EA tool to address the future needs of stakeholders and the design style of the EA team.
  • Use Info-Tech’s EA Solution Recommendation Tool to create a shortlist of EA tools that is suited to the preferences of the organization.
  • Gather additional information on the shortlist of EA tool vendors to narrow down the selection using the EA Tool Request for Information Template.

Select an EA Tool Based on Business and User Need Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should procure an EA tool in the digital age, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

  • Select an EA Tool Based on Business and User Need – Executive Brief
  • Select an EA Tool Based on Business and User Need – Phases 1-3

1. Make the case

Decide if an EA tool is needed in your organization and define the requirements of EA tool users.

  • Select an EA Tool Based on Business and User Need – Phase 1: Make the Case
  • EA Value Proposition Template
  • EA Tool User Requirements Template

2. Shortlist EA tools

Determine your organization’s preferences in terms of product capabilities and vendor characteristics.

  • Select an EA Tool Based on Business and User Need – Phase 2: Shortlist EA Tools
  • EA Solution Recommendation Tool

3. Select and communicate the process

Gather information on shortlisted vendors and make your final decision.

  • Select an EA Tool Based on Business and User Need – Phase 3: Select and Communicate the Process
  • EA Tool Request for Information Template
  • EA Tool Demo Script Template
  • Request for Proposal (RFP) Template
  • EA Tool Selection Process Template
[infographic]

Get Started With IT Project Portfolio Management

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  • Parent Category Name: Portfolio Management
  • Parent Category Link: /portfolio-management
  • Most companies are struggling to get their project work done. This is due in part to the fact that many prescribed remedies are confusing, disruptive, costly, or ineffective.
  • While struggling to find a solution, within the organization, project requests never stop and all projects continue to all be treated the same. Resources are requested for multiple projects without any visibility into their project capacity. Projects lack proper handoffs from closure to ongoing operational work. And the benefits are never tracked.
  • If you have too many projects, limited resources, ineffective communications, or low post-project adoption, keep reading. Perhaps you should spend a bit more on project, portfolio, and organizational change management.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Successful project outcomes are not built by rigorous project processes: Projects may be the problem, but project management rigor is not the solution.
  • Don’t fall into the common trap of thinking high-rigor project management should be every organization’s end goal.
  • Instead, understand that it is better to spend time assessing the portfolio to determine what projects should be prioritized.

Impact and Result

Begin by establishing a few foundational practices that will work to drive project throughput.

  • Capacity Estimation: Understand what your capacity is to do projects by determining how much time is allocated to doing other things.
  • Book of Record: Establish a basic but sustainable book of record so there is an official list of projects in flight and those waiting in a backlog or funnel.
  • Simple Project Management Processes: Align the rigor of your project management process with what is required, not what is prescribed by the PMP designation.
  • Impact Assessment: Address the impact of change at the beginning of the project and prepare stakeholders with the right level of communication.

Get Started With IT Project Portfolio Management Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Begin by establishing a few foundational practices that will work to drive project throughput. Most project management problems are resolved with portfolio level solutions. This blueprint will address the eco-system of project, portfolio, and organizational change management.

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Project portfolio management

Estimate project capacity, determine what needs to be tracked on an ongoing basis, and determine what criteria is necessary for prioritizing projects.

  • Project Portfolio Supply-Demand Analysis Tool
  • Project Value Scorecard Development Tool
  • Project Portfolio Book of Record

2. Project management

Develop a process to inform the portfolio of the project status, create a plan that can be maintained throughout the project lifecycle, and manage the scope through a change request process.

  • Light Project Change Request Form Template

3. Organizational change management

Perform a change impact assessment and identify the obvious and non-obvious stakeholders to develop a message canvas accordingly.

  • Organizational Change Management Triage Tool

4. Develop an action plan

Develop a roadmap for how to move from the current state to the target state.

  • PPM Wireframe
  • Project Portfolio Management Foundations Stakeholder Communication Deck
[infographic]

Workshop: Get Started With IT Project Portfolio Management

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

1 Project Portfolio Management

The Purpose

Establish the current state of the portfolio.

Organize the portfolio requirements.

Determine how projects are prioritized.

Key Benefits Achieved

Understand project capacity supply-demand.

Build a portfolio book of record.

Create a project value scorecard.

Activities

1.1 Conduct capacity supply-demand estimation.

1.2 Determine requirements for portfolio book of record.

1.3 Develop project value criteria.

Outputs

Clear project capacity

Draft portfolio book of record

Project value scorecard

2 Project Management

The Purpose

Feed the portfolio with the project status.

Plan the project work with a sustainable level of granularity.

Manage the project as conditions change.

Key Benefits Achieved

Develop a process to inform the portfolio of the project status.

Create a plan that can be maintained throughout the project lifecycle and manage the scope through a change request process.

Activities

2.1 Determine necessary reporting metrics.

2.2 Create a work structure breakdown.

2.3 Document your project change request process.

Outputs

Feed the portfolio with the project status

Plan the project work with a sustainable level of granularity

Manage the project as conditions change

3 Organizational Change Management

The Purpose

Discuss change accountability.

Complete a change impact assessment.

Create a communication plan for stakeholders.

Key Benefits Achieved

Complete a change impact assessment.

Identify the obvious and non-obvious stakeholders and develop a message canvas accordingly.

Activities

3.1 Discuss change accountability.

3.2 Complete a change impact assessment.

3.3 Create a communication plan for stakeholders.

Outputs

Assign accountability for the change

Assess the change impact

Communicate the change

4 Develop an Action Plan

The Purpose

Summarize current state.

Determine target state.

Create a roadmap.

Key Benefits Achieved

Develop a roadmap for how to move from the current state to the target state.

Activities

4.1 Summarize current state and target state.

4.2 Create a roadmap.

Outputs

Stakeholder Communication Deck

MS Project Wireframe

Create a Transparent and Defensible IT Budget

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  • Parent Category Name: Cost & Budget Management
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  • IT struggles to gain budget approval year after year, largely driven by a few key factors:
    • For a long time, IT has been viewed as a cost center whose efficiency needs to be increasingly optimized over time. IT’s relationship to strategy is not yet understood or established in many organizations.
    • IT is one of the biggest areas of cost for many organizations. Often, executives don’t understand or even believe that all that IT spending is necessary to advance the organization’s objectives, let alone keep it up and running.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Internal and external obstacles beyond IT’s control make these challenges with gaining IT budget approval even harder to overcome:

  • Economic pressures can quickly drive IT’s budgetary focus from strategic back to tactical.
  • Corporate-driven categorizations of expenditure, plus disconnected approval mechanisms for capital vs. operational spend, hide key interdependencies and other aspects of IT’s financial reality.
  • Connecting the dots between IT activities and business benefits rarely forms a straight line.

Impact and Result

  • CIOs need a straightforward way to create and present an approval-ready budget.
    • Info-Tech recognizes that connecting the dots to demonstrate value is key to budgetary approval.
    • Info-Tech also recognizes that key stakeholders require different perspectives on the IT budget.
    • This blueprint provides a framework, method, and templated exemplars for creating and presenting an IT budget to stakeholders that will speed up the approval process and ensure more of it is approved.

Create a Transparent and Defensible IT Budget Research & Tools

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Create a Transparent and Defensible IT Budget Storyboard – A step-by-step guide to developing a proposed IT budget that’s sensitive to stakeholder perspectives and ready to approve.

This deck applies Info-Tech’s proven ITFM Cost Model to the IT budgeting process and offers five phases that cover the purpose of your IT budget and what it means to your stakeholders, key budgeting resources, forecasting, selecting and fine-tuning your budget message, and delivering your IT budget executive presentation for approval.

  • Create a Transparent and Defensible IT Budget Storyboard

2. IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook – A structured Excel tool that allows you to forecast your IT budget for next fiscal year across four key stakeholder views, analyze it in the context of past expenditure, and generate high-impact visualizations.

This Excel workbook offers a step-by-step approach for mapping your historical and forecasted IT expenditure and creating visualizations you can use to populate your IT budget executive presentation.

  • IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook

3. Sample: IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook – A completed IT Cost Forecasting & Budgeting Workbook to review and use as an example.

This sample workbook offers a completed example of the “IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook” that accompanies the Create a Transparent & Defensible IT Budget blueprint.

  • Sample: IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook

4. IT Budget Executive Presentation – A PowerPoint template and full example for pulling together your proposed IT budget presentation.

This presentation template offers a recommended structure for presenting your proposed IT budget for next fiscal year to your executive stakeholders for approval. 

  • IT Budget Executive Presentation
[infographic]

Workshop: Create a Transparent and Defensible IT Budget

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

1 Get into budget-starting position

The Purpose

Understand your IT budget in the context of your organization and key stakeholders, as well as gather your budgeting data and review previous years’ financial performance.

Key Benefits Achieved

Understand your organization’s budget process and culture.

Understand your stakeholders’ priorities and perspectives regarding your IT budget.

Gain insight into your historical IT expenditure.

Set next fiscal year’s IT budget targets.

Activities

1.1 Review budget purpose. 

1.2 Understand stakeholders and approvers.

1.3 Gather your data.

1.4 Map and review historical financial performance.

1.5 Rationalize last year’s variances and set next year's budget targets.

Outputs

Budget process and culture assessment.

Stakeholder alignment assessment and pre-selling strategy.

Data prepared for next steps.

Mapped historical expenditure.

Next fiscal year’s budget targets.

2 Forecast project CapEx

The Purpose

Develop a forecast of next fiscal year’s proposed capital IT expenditure driven by your organization’s strategic projects.

Key Benefits Achieved

Develop project CapEx forecast according to the four different stakeholder views of Info-Tech’s ITFM Cost Model.

Ensure that no business projects that have IT implications (and their true costs) are missed.

Activities

2.1 Review the ITFM cost model

2.2 List projects.

2.3 Review project proposals and costs.

2.4 Map and tally total project CapEx.

2.5 Develop and/or confirm project-business alignment, ROI, and cost-benefit statements.

Outputs

Confirmed ITFM cost mdel.

A list of projects.

Confirmed list of project proposals and costs.

Forecasted project-based capital expenditure mapped against the four views of the ITFM Cost Model.

Projects financials in line.

3 Forecast non-project CapEx and OpEx

The Purpose

Develop a forecast of next fiscal year’s proposed “business as usual” non-project capital and operating IT expenditure.

Key Benefits Achieved

Develop non-project CapEx and non-project OpEx forecasts according to the four different stakeholder views of Info-Tech’s ITFM Cost Model.

Make “business as usual” costs fully transparent and rationalized.

Activities

3.1 Review non-project capital and costs. 

3.2 Review non-project operations and costs.

3.3 Map and tally total non-project CapEx and OpEx.

3.4 Develop and/or confirm proposed expenditure rationales.

Outputs

Confirmation of non-project capital and costs.

Confirmation of non-project operations and costs.

Forecasted non-project-based capital expenditure and operating expenditure against the four views of the ITFM Cost Model.

Proposed expenditure rationales.

4 Finalize budget and develop presentation

The Purpose

Aggregate and sanity-check your forecasts, harden your rationales, and plan/develop the content for your IT budget executive presentation.

Key Benefits Achieved

Create a finalized proposed IT budget for next fiscal year that offers different views on your budget for different stakeholders.

Select content for your IT budget executive presentation that will resonate with your stakeholders and streamline approval.

Activities

4.1 Aggregate forecast totals and sanity check.

4.2 Generate graphical outputs and select content to include in presentation.

4.3 Fine-tune rationales.

4.4 Develop presentation and write commentary.

Outputs

Final proposed IT budget for next fiscal year.

Graphic outputs selected for presentation.

Rationales for budget.

Content for IT Budget Executive Presentation.

5 Next steps and wrap-up (offsite)

The Purpose

Finalize and polish the IT budget executive presentation.

Key Benefits Achieved

An approval-ready presentation that showcases your business-aligned proposed IT budget backed up with rigorous rationales.

Activities

5.1 Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days.

5.2 Set up review time for workshop deliverables and to discuss next steps.

Outputs

Completed IT Budget Executive Presentation.

Review scheduled.

Further reading

Create a Transparent and Defensible IT Budget

Build in approvability from the start.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst Perspective

A budget’s approvability is about transparency and rationale, not the size of the numbers.

Jennifer Perrier.

It’s that time of year again – budgeting. Most organizations invest a lot of time and effort in a capital project selection process, tack a few percentage points onto last year’s OpEx, do a round of trimming, and call it a day. However, if you want to improve IT financial transparency and get your business stakeholders and the CFO to see the true value of IT, you need to do more than this.

Yourcrea IT budget is more than a once-a-year administrative exercise. It’s an opportunity to educate, create partnerships, eliminate nasty surprises, and build trust. The key to doing these things rests in offering a range of budget perspectives that engage and make sense to your stakeholders, as well as providing iron-clad rationales that tie directly to organizational objectives.

The work of setting and managing a budget never stops – it’s a series of interactions, conversations, and decisions that happen throughout the year. If you take this approach to budgeting, you’ll greatly enhance your chances of creating and presenting a defensible annual budget that gets approved the first time around.

Jennifer Perrier
Principal Research Director
IT Financial Management Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Common Obstacles

Info-Tech’s Approach

IT struggles to gain budget approval year after year, largely driven by a few key factors:

  • For a long time, IT has been viewed as a cost center whose efficiency needs to be increasingly optimized over time. IT’s relationship to strategy is not yet understood or established in many organizations.
  • IT is one of the biggest areas of cost for many organizations. Often, executives don’t understand, or even believe, that all that IT spending is necessary to advance the organization’s objectives, let alone keep it running.

Internal and external obstacles beyond IT’s control make these challenges even harder to overcome:

  • Economic pressures can quickly drive IT’s budgetary focus from strategic back to tactical.
  • Corporate-driven categorizations of expenditure, plus disconnected approval mechanisms for capital vs. operational spend, hide key interdependencies and other aspects of IT’s financial reality.
  • Connecting the dots between IT activities and business benefits rarely forms a straight line.

CIOs need a straightforward way to create and present an approval-ready budget.

  • Info-Tech recognizes that connecting the dots to demonstrate value is key to budgetary approval.
  • Info-Tech also recognizes that key stakeholders require different perspectives on the IT budget.
  • This blueprint provides a framework, method, and templated exemplars for creating and presenting an IT budget to stakeholders. It will speed the approval process and ensure more of it is approved.

Info-Tech Insight
CIOs need a straightforward way to create and present an approval-ready IT budget that demonstrates the value IT is delivering to the business and speaks directly to different stakeholder priorities.

IT struggles to get budgets approved due to low transparency and failure to engage

Capability challenges

Administrative challenges

Operating challenges

Visibility challenges

Relationship challenges

IT is seen as a cost center, not an enabler or driver of business strategy.

IT leaders are not seen as business leaders.

Economic pressures drive knee-jerk redirection of IT’s budgetary focus from strategic initiatives back to operational tactics.

The vast majority of IT’s
real-life expenditure is in the form of operating expenses i.e. keeping the lights on.

Most business leaders don’t know how many IT resources their business units are really consuming.

Other departments in the organization see IT as a competitor for funding, not a business partner.

Lack of transparency

IT and the business aren’t speaking the same language.

IT leaders don’t have sufficient access to information about, or involvement in, business decisions and objectives.

Outmoded finance department expenditure categorizations don’t accommodate IT’s real cost categories.

IT absorbs unplanned spend because business leaders don’t realize or consider the impact of their decisions on IT.

The business doesn’t understand what IT is, what it does, or what it can offer.

IT and the business don’t have meaningful conversations about IT costs, opportunities, or investments.

Defining and demonstrating the value of IT and its investments isn’t straightforward.

IT leaders may not have the financial literacy or acumen needed to translate IT activities and needs into business terms.

CapEx and OpEx approval and tracking mechanisms are handled separately when, in reality, they’re highly interdependent.

IT activities usually have an indirect relationship with revenue, making value calculations more complicated.

Much of IT, especially infrastructure, is invisible to the business and is only noticed if it’s not working.

The relationship between IT spending and how it supports achievement of business objectives is not clear.

Reflect on the numbers…

The image contains a screenshot of five graphs. The graphs depict Cost and budget management, Cost optimization, Business value, perception of improvement, and intensity of business frustration.

To move forward, first you need to get unstuck

Today’s IT budgeting challenges have been growing for a long time. Overcoming these challenges means untangling yourself from the grip of the root causes.

Principle 1:
IT and the business are fighting diverging forces. Technology has changed monumentally, while financial management hasn’t changed much at all.

Principle 2:
Different stakeholders have different perspectives on your IT budget. Learn and acknowledge what’s important to them so that you can potentially deliver it.

Principle 3:
Connecting the dots to clearly demonstrate IT’s value to the organization is the key to budgetary approval. But those connected dots don’t always result in a straight line.

The three principles above are all about IT’s changing relationship to the business. IT leaders need a systematic and repeatable approach to budgeting that addresses these principles by:

  • Clearly illustrating the alignment between the IT budget and business objectives.
  • Showing stakeholders the overall value that IT investment will bring them.
  • Demonstrating where IT is already realizing efficiencies and economies of scale.
  • Gaining consensus on the IT budget from all parties affected by it.

“The culture of the organization will drive your success with IT financial management.”

– Dave Kish, Practice Lead, IT Financial Management Practice, Info-Tech Research Group

Info-Tech’s approach

CIOs need a straightforward way to convince approval-granting CFOs, CEOs, boards, and committees to spend money on IT to advance the organization’s strategies.

IT budget approval cycle

The image contains a screenshot of the IT budget approval cycle.

The Info-Tech difference:

This blueprint provides a framework, method, and templated exemplars for building and presenting your IT budget to different stakeholders. These will speed the approval process and ensure that a higher percentage of your proposed spend is approved.

Info-Tech’s methodology for how to create a transparent and defensible it budget

1. Lay Your Foundation

2. Get Into Budget-Starting Position

3. Develop Your Forecasts

4. Build Your Proposed Budget

5. Create and Deliver Your Budget Presentation

Phase steps

  1. Understand budget purpose
  2. Know your stakeholders
  3. Continuously pre-sell your budget
  1. Gather your data
  2. Review historical performance
  3. Set budget goals
  1. Develop alternate scenarios
  2. Develop project CapEx forecasts
  3. Develop non-project CapEx and OpEx forecasts
  1. Aggregate your forecasts
  2. Stress-test your forecasts
  3. Challenge and perfect your rationales
  1. Plan your presentation content
  2. Build your budget presentation
  3. Present, finalize, and submit your budget

Phase outcomes

An understanding of your stakeholders and what your IT budget means to them.

Information and goals for planning next fiscal year’s IT budget.

Completed forecasts for project and non-project CapEx and OpEx.

A final IT budget for proposal including scenario-based alternatives.

An IT budget presentation.

Insight summary

Overarching insight: Create a transparent and defensible IT budget

CIOs need a straightforward way to create and present an approval-ready IT budget that demonstrates the value IT is delivering to the business and speaks directly to different stakeholder priorities.

Phase 1 insight: Lay your foundation

IT needs to step back and look at it’s budget-creation process by first understanding exactly what a budget is intended to do and learning what the IT budget means to IT’s various business stakeholders.

Phase 2 Insight: Get into budget-starting position

Presenting your proposed IT budget in the context of past IT expenditure demonstrates a pattern of spend behavior that is fundamental to next year’s expenditure rationale.

Phase 3 insight: Develop your forecasts

Forecasting costs according to a range of views, including CapEx vs. OpEx and project vs. non-project, and then positioning it according to different stakeholder perspectives, is key to creating a transparent budget.

Phase 4 insight: Build your proposed budget

Fine-tuning and hardening the rationales behind every aspect of your proposed budget is one of the most important steps for facilitating the budgetary approval process and increasing the amount of your budget that is ultimately approved.

Phase 5 insight: Create and deliver your budget presentation

Selecting the right content to present to your various stakeholders at the right level of granularity ensures that they see their priorities reflected in IT’s budget, driving their interest and engagement in IT financial concerns.

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook

This Excel tool allows you to capture and work through all elements of your IT forecasting from the perspective of multiple key stakeholders and generates compelling visuals to choose from to populate your final executive presentation.

The image contains a screenshot of the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.

Also download this completed sample:

Sample: IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook

Key deliverable

IT Budget Executive Presentation Template

Phase 5: Create a focused presentation for your proposed IT budget that will engage your audience and facilitate approval.

The image contains a screenshot of the IT Budget Executive Presentation Template.

Blueprint benefits

IT benefits

Business benefits

  • Improve IT’s overall financial management capability.
  • Streamline the administration of annual IT budget development.
  • Legitimize the true purpose and value of IT operations and associated expenditure.
  • Create visibility on the part of both IT and the business into IT’s mandate, what needs to be in place, and what it costs to fund it.
  • Foster better relationships with business stakeholders by demonstrating IT’s business and financial competency, working in partnership with business leaders on IT investment decisions, and building mutual trust.
  • Better understand the different types of expenditure occurring in IT, including project CapEx, non-project CapEx, and non-project OpEx.
  • Gain insight into the relationship between one-time CapEx on ongoing OpEx and its ramifications.
  • See business priorities and concerns clearly reflected in IT’s budget down to the business-unit level.
  • Receive thorough return on investment calculations and cost-benefit analyses for all aspects of IT expenditure.
  • Understand the direct relationship between IT expenditure and the depth, breadth, and quality of IT service delivery to the business.

Measure the value of this blueprint

Ease budgetary approval and improve its accuracy.

Near-term goals

  • Percentage of budget approved: Target 95%
  • Percentage of IT-driven projects approved: Target 100%
  • Number of iterations/re-drafts required to proposed budget: One iteration

Long-term goal

  • Variance in budget vs. actuals: Actuals less than budget and within 2%

In Phases 1 and 2 of this blueprint, we will help you understand what your approvers are looking for and gather the right data and information.

In Phase 3, we will help you forecast your IT costs it terms of four stakeholder views so you can craft a more meaningful IT budget narrative.

In Phases 4 and 5, we will help you build a targeted presentation for your proposed IT budget.

Value you will receive:

  1. Increased forecast accuracy through using a sound cost-forecasting methodology.
  2. Improved budget accuracy by applying more thorough and transparent techniques.
  3. Increased budget transparency and completeness by soliciting input earlier and validating budgeting information.
  4. Stronger alignment between IT and enterprise goals through building a better understanding of the business values and using language they understand.
  5. A more compelling budget presentation by offering targeted, engaging, and rationalized information.
  6. A faster budgeting rework process by addressing business stakeholder concerns the first time.

An analogy…

“A budget isn’t like a horse and cart – you can’t get in front of it or behind it like that. It’s more like a river…

When developing an annual budget, you have a good idea of what the OpEx will be – last year’s with an annual bump. You know what that boat is like and if the river can handle it.

But sometimes you want to float bigger boats, like capital projects. But these boats don’t start at the same place at the same time. Some are full of holes. And does your river even have the capacity to handle a boat of that size?

Some organizations force project charters by a certain date and only these are included in the following year’s budget. The project doesn’t start until 8-12 months later and the charter goes stale. The river just can’t float all these boats! It’s a failed model. You have to have a great governance processes and clear prioritization so that you can dynamically approve and get boats on the river throughout the year.”

– Mark Roman, Managing Partner, Executive Services,
Info-Tech Research Group and Former Higher Education CIO

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Guided Implementation

Phase 1: Lay Your Foundation

Phase 2: Get Into Budget-Starting Position

Phase 3: Develop Your Forecasts

Phase 4: Build Your Proposed Budget

Phase 5: Create and Deliver Your Budget Presentation

Call #1: Discuss the IT budget, processes, and stakeholders in the context of your unique organization.

Call #2: Review data requirements for transparent budgeting.

Call #3: Set budget goals and process improvement metrics.

Call #4: Review project CapEx forecasts.

Call #5: Review non-project CapEx and OpEx forecasts.

Call #6: Review proposed budget logic and rationales.

Call #7: Identify presentation inclusions and exclusions.

Call #8: Review final budget presentation.

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

Workshop Overview

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5

Get into budget-starting position

Forecast project CapEx

Forecast non-project CapEx and OpEx

Finalize budget and develop presentation

Next Steps and
Wrap-Up (offsite)

Activities

1.1 Review budget purpose.

1.2 Understand stakeholders and approvers.

1.3 Gather your data.

1.4 Map and review historical financial performance.

1.5 Rationalize last year’s variances.

1.5 Set next year’s budget targets.

2.1 Review the ITFM Cost Model.

2.2 List projects.

2.3 Review project proposals and costs.

2.4 Map and tally total project CapEx.

2.5 Develop and/or confirm project-business alignment, ROI, and cost-benefit statements.

3.1 Review non-project capital and costs.

3.2 Review non-project operations and costs.

3.3 Map and tally total non-project CapEx and OpEx.

3.4 Develop and/or confirm proposed expenditure rationales.

4.1 Aggregate forecast totals and sanity check.

4.2 Generate graphical outputs and select content to include in presentation.

4.3 Fine-tune rationales.

4.4 Develop presentation and write commentary.

5.1 Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days.

5.2 Set up review time for workshop deliverables and to discuss next steps.

Deliverables

  1. Budget process and culture assessment.
  2. Stakeholder alignment assessment and pre-selling strategy.
  3. Mapped historical expenditure.
  4. Next fiscal year’s budget targets.
  1. Forecasted project-based capital expenditure mapped against the four views of the ITFM Cost Model.
  1. Forecasted non-project-based capital expenditure and operating expenditure against the four views of the ITFM Cost Model.
  1. Final proposed IT budget for next fiscal year.
  2. Plan and build content for IT Budget Executive Presentation.
  1. Completed IT Budget Executive Presentation.

Phase 1

Lay Your Foundation

Lay Your
Foundation

Get Into Budget-Starting Position

Develop Your
Forecasts

Build Your
Proposed Budget

Create and Deliver Your Presentation

1.1 Understand what your budget is
and does

1.2 Know your stakeholders

1.3 Continuously pre-sell your budget

2.1 Assemble your resources

2.2 Understand the four views of the ITFM Cost Model

2.3 Review last year’s budget vs.
actuals and five-year historical trends

2.4 Set your high-level goals

3.1 Develop assumptions and
alternative scenarios

3.2 Forecast your project CapEx

3.3 Forecast your non-project CapEx and OpEx

4.1 Aggregate your numbers

4.2 Stress test your forecasts

4.3 Challenge and perfect your
rationales

5.1 Plan your content

5.2 Build your presentation

5.3 Present to stakeholders

5.4 Make final adjustments and submit your IT budget

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

  • Seeing your budget as a living governance tool
  • Understanding the point of view of different stakeholders
  • Gaining tactics for setting future IT spend expectations

This phase involves the following participants:

  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Lay Your Foundation

Before starting any process, you need to understand exactly why you’re doing it.

This phase is about understanding the what, why, and who of your IT budget.

  • Understand what your budget is and does. A budget isn’t just an annual administrative event – it’s an important governance tool. Understand exactly what a budget is and your budgetary accountabilities as an IT leader.
  • Know your stakeholders. The CFO, CEO, and CXOs in your organization have their own priorities, interests, and professional mandates. Get to know what their objectives are and what IT’s budget means to them.
  • Continuously pre-sell your budget. Identifying, creating, and capitalizing on opportunities to discuss your budget well in advance of its formal presentation will get influential stakeholders and approvers on side, foster collaborations, and avoid unpleasant surprises on all fronts.

“IT finance is more than budgeting. It’s about building trust and credibility in where we’re spending money, how we’re spending money. It’s about relationships. It’s about financial responsibility, financial accountability. I rely on my entire leadership team to all understand what their spend is. We are a steward of other people’s money.”

– Rick Hopfer, CIO, Hawaii Medical Service Association

What does your budget actually do?

A budget is not just a painful administrative exercise that you go through once a year.

Most people know what a budget is, but it’s important to understand its true purpose and how it’s used in your organization before you engage in any activity or dialogue about it.

In strictly objective terms:

  • A budget is a calculated estimate of income vs. expenditure for a period in the future, often one year. Basically, it’s an educated guess about how much money will come into a business entity or unit and how much money will go out of it.
  • A balanced budget is where income and expenditure amounts are equal.
  • The goal in most organizations is for the income component of the budget to match or exceed the expenditure component.
    If it doesn’t, this results in a deficit that may lead to debt.

Simply put, a budget’s fundamental purpose is to plan and communicate how an organization will avoid deficit and debt and remain financially viable while meeting its various accountabilities and responsibilities to its internal and external stakeholders.

“CFOs are not thinking that they want to shut down IT spend. Nobody wants to do that. I always looked at things in terms of revenue streams – where the cash inflow is coming from, where it’s going to, and if I can align my cash outflows to my revenue stream. Where I always got suspicious as a CFO is if somebody can’t articulate spending in terms of a revenue stream. I think that’s how most CFOs operate.”

– Carol Carr, Technical Counselor,
Info-Tech Research Group and Former CFO

Put your IT budget in context

Your IT budget is just one of several budgets across your organization that, when combined, create an organization-wide budget. In this context, IT’s in a tough spot.

It’s a competition: The various units in your organization are competing for the biggest piece they can get of the limited projected income pie. It’s a zero-sum game. The organization’s strategic and operational priorities will determine how this projected income is divvied up.

Direct-to-revenue units win: Business units that directly generate revenue often get bigger relative percentages of the organizational budget since they’re integral to bringing in the projected income part of the budget that allows the expenditure across all business units to happen in the first place.

Indirect-to-revenue units lose: Unlike sales units, for example, IT’s relationship to projected income tends to be indirect, which means that IT must connect a lot more dots to illustrate its positive impact on projected income generation.

In financial jargon, IT really is a cost center: This indirect relationship to revenue also explains why the focus of IT budget conversations is usually on the expenditure side of the equation, meaning it doesn’t have a clear positive impact on income.

Contextual metrics like IT spend as a percentage of revenue, IT OpEx as a percentage of organizational OpEx, and IT spend per organizational employee are important baseline metrics to track around your budget, internally benchmark over time, and share, in order to illustrate exactly where IT fits into the broader organizational picture.

Budgeting isn’t a once-a-year thing

Yet, many organizations treat it like a “one and done” point of annual administration. This is a mistake that misses out on the real benefits of budgeting.

Many organizations have an annual budgeting and planning event that takes place during the back half of the fiscal year. This is where all formal documentation around planned projects and proposed spend for the upcoming year is consolidated, culminating in final presentation, adjustment, and approval. It’s basically a consolidation and ranking of organization-wide priorities at the highest level.

If things are running well, this culmination point in the overall budget development and management process is just a formality, not the beginning, middle, and end of the real work. Ideally:

  • Budgets are actually used: The whole organization uses budgets as tools to actively manage day-to-day operations and guide decision making throughout the year in alignment with priorities as opposed to something that’s put on a shelf or becomes obsolete within a few months.
  • Interdependencies are evident: No discrete area of spend focus is an island – it’s connected directly or indirectly with other areas of spend, both within IT and across the organization. For example, one server interacts with multiple business applications, IT and business processes, multiple IT staff, and even vendors or external managed service providers. Cost-related decisions about that one server – maintain, repurpose, consolidate, replace, discard – will drive other areas of spend up or down.
  • There are no surprises: While this does happen, your budget presentation isn’t a great time to bring up a new point of significant spend for the first time. The items in next year’s proposed budget should be priorities that are already known, vetted, supported, and funded.

"A well developed and presented budget should be the numeric manifestation of your IT strategy that’s well communicated and understood by your peers. When done right, budgets should merely affirm what’s already been understood and should get approved with minimal pushback.“

– Patrick Gray, TechRepublic, 2020

Understand your budgetary responsibilities as the IT leader

It’s in your job description. For some stakeholders, it’s the most important part of it.

While not a contract per se, your IT budget is an objective and transparent statement made in good faith that shows:

  • You know what it takes to keep the organization viable.
  • You understand the organization’s accountabilities and responsibilities as well as those of its leaders.
  • You’re willing and able to do your part to meet these accountabilities and responsibilities.
  • You know what your part of this equation is, as well as what parts should and must be played by others.

When it comes to your budget (and all things financial), your job is to be ethical, careful, and wise:

  1. Be honest. Business ethics matter.
  2. Be as accurate as possible. Your expenditure predictions won’t be perfect, but they need to be best-effort and defensible.
  3. Respect the other players. They have their own roles, motivations, and mandates. Accept and respect these by being a supporter of their success instead of an obstacle to them achieving it.
  4. Connect the dots to income. Always keep the demonstration of business value in your sights. Often, IT can’t draw a straight line to income, but demonstrating how IT expenditure supports and benefits future, current, and past (but still relevant) business goals and strategies, which in turn affect income, is the best course.
  5. Provide alternatives. There are only so many financial levers your organization can pull. An action on one lever will have wanted and unwanted consequences on another. Aim to put financial discussions in terms of risk-focused “what if” stories and let your business partners decide if those risks are satisfactory.

Budgeting processes tend to be similar – it’s budgeting cultures that drive differences

The basic rules of good budgeting are the same everywhere. Bad budgeting processes, however, are usually caused by cultural factors and can be changed.

What’s the same everywhere…

What’s unchangeable…

What’s changeable…

For right or wrong, most budgeting processes follow these general steps:

There are usually only three things about an organization’s budgeting process that are untouchable and can’t be changed:

Budgeting processes are rarely questioned. It never occurs to most people to challenge this system, even if it doesn’t work. Who wants to challenge the CFO? No one.

Review your organization’s budgeting culture to discover the negotiable and non-negotiable constraints. Specifically, look at these potentially-negotiable factors if they’re obstacles to IT budgeting success:

  1. Capital project vetting and selection for the next fiscal year starts three-to-six months before the end of the current fiscal year.
  2. Operational expenditure, including salaries, is looked at later with much less formality and scrutiny with an aim to cut.
  3. Each business unit does a budget presentation and makes directed amendments (usually trimming).
  4. The approved budget numbers are plugged into a standard, sub-optimal budget template provided by Finance.
  1. The legal and regulatory mandates that govern financial funding, accounting, and reporting practices. These are often specific to industries and spend types.
  2. The accounting rules your organization follows, such as GAAP, or IFRS. These too may be legally mandated for government entities and publicly-traded companies.
  3. Hard limits on the projected available income the CFO has to distribute.
  • Timeframes and deadlines
  • Order of operations
  • Areas of focus (CapEx vs. OpEx)
  • Funding sources and ownership
  • Review/approval mechanisms
  • Templates and tools

1.1 Review your budgeting process and culture

1 hour

  1. Review the following components of your budget process using the questions provided for each as a guideline.
    1. Legal and regulatory mandates. What are the external rules that govern how we do financial tracking and reporting? How do they manifest in our processes?
    2. Accounting rules used. What rules does our finance department use and why? Do these rules allow for more meaningful representations of IT spend? Are there policies or practices in place that don’t appear to be backed by any external standards?
    3. Timeframes and deadlines. Are we starting the budgeting process too late? Do we have enough time to do proper due diligence? Will expenditures approved now be out of date when we go to execute? Are there mechanisms to update spend plans mid-cycle?
    4. Order of operations. What areas of spend do we always look at first, such as CapEx? Are there any benefits to changing the order in which we do things, such as examining OpEx first?
    5. Areas of focus. Is CapEx taking up most of our budgeting cycle time? Are we spending enough time examining OpEx? Is IT getting enough time from the CFO compared to other units?
    6. Funding sources and ownership. Is IT footing most of the technology bills? Are business unit leaders fronting any technology business case pitches? Is IT appropriately included in business case development? Is there any benefit to implementing show-back or charge-back?
    7. Review/approval mechanisms. Are strategies and priorities used to rank proposed spend clear and well communicated? Are spend approvers objective in their decision making? Do different approvers apply the same standards and tools?
    8. Templates and tools. Are the ones provided by Finance, the PMO, and other groups sufficient to document what we need to document? Are they accessible and easy to use? Are they automated and integrated so we only have to enter data once?
  2. On the slide following these activity instructions, rate how effective each of the above is on a scale of 1-10 (where 10 is very effective) in supporting the budgeting process. Note specific areas of challenge and opportunity for change.

1.1 Review your budgeting process and culture

Input Output Materials Participants
  • Organizational knowledge of typical budgeting processes
  • Copies of budgeting policies, procedures, and tools
  • Rated assessment of your organization’s budget process and culture, as well as major areas of challenge and opportunity for change
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Budget process and culture assessment

Document the outcomes of your assessment. Examples are provided below.

Budgeting area of assessment

Rating

1 = very ineffective

10 = very effective

Challenges

Opportunities for change

Legal and regulatory mandates

7

Significant regulation but compliance steps not clear or supported within departments.

Create, communicate, and train management on compliance procedures and align the financial management tools accordingly.

Accounting rules

6

IT not very familiar with them.

Learn more about them and their provisions to see if IT spend can be better represented.

Timeframes and deadlines

5

Finalize capital project plans for next fiscal four months before end of current fiscal.

Explore flexible funding models that allow changes to budget closer to project execution.

Order of operations

3

Setting CapEx before OpEx leads to paring of necessary OpEx based on CapEx commitments.

Establish OpEx first as a baseline and then top up to target budget with CapEx.

Areas of focus

6

Lack of focus on OpEx means incremental budgeting – we don’t know what’s in there.

Perform zero-based budgeting on OpEx every few years to re-rationalize this spend.

Funding sources and ownership

4

IT absorbing unplanned mid-cycle spend due to impact of unknown business actions.

Implement a show-back mechanism to change behavior or as precursor to limited charge-back.

Review/approval mechanisms

8

CFO is fair and objective with information presented but could demand more evidence.

Improve business sponsorship/fronting of new initiative business cases and IT partnership.

Templates and tools

2

Finance budget template largely irrelevant and unreflective of IT: only two relevant categories.

Adjust account buckets over a period of time, starting with SW/HW and cloud breakouts.

Receptive audiences make communication a lot easier

To successfully communicate anything, you need to be heard and understood.

The key to being heard and understood is first to hear and understand the perspective of the people with whom you’re trying to communicate – your stakeholders. This means asking some questions:

  • What context are they operating in?
  • What are their goals and responsibilities?
  • What are their pressures and stresses?
  • How do they deal with novelty and uncertainty?
  • How do they best take in information and learn?

The next step of this blueprint shows the perspectives of IT’s key stakeholders and how they’re best able to absorb and accept the important information contained in your IT budget. You will:

  • Learn a process for discovering these stakeholders’ IT budget information needs within the context of your organization’s industry, goals, culture, organizational structure, personalities, opportunities, and constraints.
  • Document key objectives and messages when communicating with these various key stakeholders.

There are certain principles, mandates, and priorities that drive your stakeholders; they’ll want to see these reflected in you, your work, and your budget.

Your IT budget means different things to different stakeholders

Info-Tech’s ITFM Cost Model lays out what matters most from various points of view.

The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's ITFM Cost Model.

The CFO: Understand their role

The CFO is the first person that comes to mind in dealing with budgets. They’re personally and professionally on the line if anything runs amiss with the corporate purse.

What are the CFO’s role and responsibilities?

  • Tracking cash flow and balancing income with expenditures.
  • Ensuring fiscal reporting and legal/regulatory compliance.
  • Working with the CEO to ensure financial-strategic alignment.
  • Working with business unit heads to set aligned budgets.
  • Seeing the big picture.

What’s important to the CFO?

  • Costs
  • Benefits
  • Value
  • Analysis
  • Compliance
  • Risk Management
  • Strategic alignment
  • Control
  • Efficiency
  • Effectiveness
  • Reason
  • Rationale
  • Clarity
  • Objectivity
  • Return on investment

“Often, the CFO sees IT requests as overhead rather than a need. And they hate increasing overhead.”

– Larry Clark, Executive Counselor, Info-Tech Research Group and Former CIO

The CFO carries big responsibilities focused on mitigating organizational risks. It’s not their job to be generous or flexible when so much is at stake. While the CEO appears higher on the organizational chart than the CFO, in many ways the CFO’s accountabilities and responsibilities are on par with, and in some cases greater than, those of the CEO.

The CFO: What they want from the IT budget

What they need should look familiar, so do your homework and be an open book.

Your CFO’s IT budget to-do list:

Remember to:

  • A review of the previous year financial performance. This demonstrates to the CFO your awareness, savvy, and overall competence in the financial management realm. This is also your opportunity to start laying out the real-life context within which IT has been operating. Information to show includes:
    • Budget vs. actuals, including an overview of factors that led to major variances.
    • Percentage difference in proposed budget versus previous year’s budget, and major contributing factors to those differences (i.e. unanticipated projects, changes, or events).
  • Presentation of information according to Finance’s existing categories. This makes it as easy as possible for them to plug your numbers into their system.
  • Separate views of overall workforce vs. overall vendor spending. This is a traditional view.
  • Separate views of capital expenditure (CapEx) and operating expenditure (OpEx). This also includes information on expected lifespan of proposed new capital assets to inform depreciation/amortization decisions.
  • Explanation of anticipated sources of funding. Specifically, indicate whether the funding required is a brand-new net increase or a reallocation from the existing pool.
  • Details (upon request). Have these available for every aspect of your proposed budget.
  • Avoid being flashy. Exclude proposed expenditures with a lot of bells and whistles that don’t directly tie to concrete business objectives.
  • Be a conservationist. Show how you plan to re-use or extend assets that you already have.
  • Act like a business leader. Demonstrate your understanding of near-term (12-month) realities, priorities, and goals.
  • Think like them. Present reliable and defensible calculations of benefits versus risks as well as projected ROI for major areas of new or different spending.

The CFO: Budget challenges and opportunities

Budget season is a great time to start changing the conversation and building trust.

Potential challenges

Low trust

Poor financial literacy and historical sloppiness among business unit leaders means that a CFO may come into budget conversations with skepticism. This can put them on the offensive and put you on the defensive. You have to prove yourself.

Competition

You’re not the only department the CFO is dealing with. Everyone is competing for their piece of the pie, and some business unit leaders are persistent. A good CFO will stay out of the politics and not be swayed by sweet talk, but it can be an exhausting experience for them.

Mismatched buckets

IT’s spend classes and categories probably won’t match what’s in Finance’s budget template or general ledger. Annual budgeting isn’t the best time to bring this up. Respect Finance’s categories, but plan to tackle permanent changes at a less busy time.

Potential opportunities

Build confidence

Engaging in the budgeting process is your best chance to demonstrate your knowledge about the business and your financial acumen. The more that the CFO sees that you get it and are taking it seriously, the more confidence and trust they’ll have in you.

Educate

The CFO will not know as much as you about the role technology could and should play in the organization. Introduce new language around technology focused on capabilities and benefits. This will start to shift the conversation away from costs and toward value.

Initiate alignment

An important governance objective is to change the way IT expenditure is categorized and tracked to better reveal and understand what’s really happening. This process should be done gradually over time, but definitely communicate what you want to do and why.

The CXO: Understand their role

CXOs are a diverse group who lead a range of business functions including admin, operations, HR, legal, production, sales and service, and marketing, to name a few.

What are the CXO’s role and responsibilities?

Like you, the CXO’s job is to help the organization realize its goals and objectives. How each CXO does this is specific to the domain they lead. Variations in roles and responsibilities typically revolve around:

  • Law and regulation. Some functions have compliance as a core mandate, including legal, HR, finance, and corporate risk groups.
  • Finance and efficiency. Other functions prioritize time, money, and process such as finance, sales, customer service, marketing, production, operations, and logistics units.
  • Quality. These functions prioritize consistency, reliability, relationship, and brand such as production, customer service, and marketing.

What’s important to the CXO?

  • Staffing
  • Skills
  • Reporting
  • Funding
  • Planning
  • Performance
  • Predictability
  • Customers
  • Visibility
  • Inclusion
  • Collaboration
  • Reliability
  • Information
  • Knowledge
  • Acknowledgement

Disagreement is common between business-function leaders – they have different primary focus areas, and conflict and misalignment are natural by-products of that fact. It’s also hard to make someone care as much about your priorities as you do. Focus your efforts on sharing and partnering, not converting.

The CXO: What they want from the IT budget

Focus on their unique part of the organization and show that you see them.

Your CXO’s IT budget to-do list:

Remember to:

  • A review of the previous year’s IT expenditure on the business function. This includes:
    • Budget vs. actuals (if available) for the business function, and overview of any situations or factors that led to major variances.
    • Percentage difference in proposed budget for that business function vs. the previous year’s spend, and major contributing factors to those differences, i.e. unanticipated projects, changes, or events.
    • Last year’s IT expenditure per business function employee vs. proposed IT expenditure per business function employee (if available). This is a good metric to use going forward as it’s a fair comparative internal benchmark.
  • Separate views of proposed IT workforce vs. proposed IT vendor spending for the business function. Do a specific breakout of proposed expenditure for the major applications that business unit explicitly uses.
  • Separate views of proposed IT capital expenditure (CapEx) and proposed IT operating expenditure (OpEx) for the business function. Show breakdowns for each capital project,
    as well as summaries for their core applications and portion of shared IT services.
  • Celebrate any collaborative wins from last year. You want to reinforce that working together is in both of your best interests and you’d like to keep it going.
  • Get to the apps fast. Apps are visible, concrete, and relatable – this is what the CXO cares about. Core IT infrastructure, on the other hand, is technobabble about something that’s invisible, boring, and disengaging for most CXOs.
  • Focus on the business function’s actual technology needs and consumption. Show them where they stand in relation to others. This will get their attention and serve as an opportunity to provide some education.

The CXO: Budget challenges and opportunities

Seek out your common ground and be the solution for their real problems.

Potential challenges

Different priorities

Other business unit leaders will have bigger concerns than your IT budget. They have their own budget to figure out plus other in-flight issues. The head of sales, for instance, is going to be more concerned with hitting sales goals for this fiscal year than planning for next.

Perceived irrelevance

Some business unit leaders may be completely unaware of how they use IT, how much they use, and how they could use it more or differently to improve their performance. They may have a learning curve to tackle before they can start to see your relationship as collaborative.

Bad track record

If a business unit has had friction with IT in the past or has historically been underserved, they may be hesitant to let you in, may be married to their own solutions, or perhaps do not know how to express what they need.

Potential opportunities

Start collaborating

You and other business unit leaders have a lot in common. You all share the objective of helping the organization succeed. Focus in on your shared concerns and how you can make progress on them together before digging into your unique challenges.

Practice perspective taking

Be genuinely curious about the business unit, how it works, and how they overcome obstacles. See the organization from their point of view. For now, keep your technologies completely out of the discussion – that will come later on.

Build relationships

You only need to solve one problem for a business unit to change how they think of you. Just one. Find that one thing that will make a real difference – ideally small but impactful – and work it into your budget.

The CEO: Understand their role

A CEO sets the tone for an organization, from its overall direction and priorities to its values and culture. What’s possible and what’s not is usually determined by them.

What are the CEO’s role and responsibilities?

  • Assemble an effective team of executives and advisors.
  • Establish, communicate, and exemplify the organizations core values.
  • Study the ecosystem within which the organization exists.
  • Identify and evaluate opportunities.
  • Set long-term directions, priorities, goals, and strategies.
  • Ensure ongoing organizational performance, profitability, and growth.
  • Connect the inside organization to the outside world.
  • Make the big decisions no one else can make.

What’s important to the CEO?

  • Strategy
  • Leadership
  • Vision
  • Values
  • Goals
  • Priorities
  • Performance
  • Metrics
  • Accountability
  • Stakeholders
  • Results
  • Insight
  • Growth
  • Cohesion
  • Context

Unlike the CFO and CXOs, the CEO is responsible for seeing the big picture. That means they’re operating in the realm of big problems and big ideas – they need to stay out of the weeds. IT is just one piece of that big picture, and your problems and ideas are sometimes small in comparison. Use any time you get with them wisely.

The CEO: What they want from the IT budget

The CEO wants what the CFO wants, but at a higher level and with longer-term vision.

Your CEO’s IT budget to-do list:

Remember to:

  • A review of the previous year’s financial performance. In addition to last year’s budget vs. actuals vs. proposed budget and any rationales for variances, the CEO’s interest is in seeing numbers in terms of strategic delivery. Focus on performance against last year’s goals and concrete benefits realized.
  • A review of initiatives undertaken to optimize/reduce operating costs. Note overall gains with a specific look at initiatives that had a substantial positive financial impact.
  • A specific summary of the cost landscape for new strategic or capital projects. Ideally, these projects have already been committed to at the executive level. A more fine-tuned analysis of anticipated costs and variables may be required, including high-level projects with long-term impact on operational expenditure. Categorize these expenditures as investments in innovation, growth, or keeping the lights on.
  • Details (upon request). Have these available for every aspect of your proposed budget.
  • Be brief. Hopefully, the CEO is already well versed on the strategic spend plans. Stay high-level, reserve the deep dive for your documentation, and let the CEO decide if they want to hash anything out in more detail.
  • Be strategic. If you can’t tie it to a strategic objective, don’t showcase it.
  • Use performance language. This means citing goals, metrics, and progress made against them.
  • Ensure the CFO can translate. You may not get a direct audience with the CEO – the CFO may be your proxy for that. Ensure that everything is crystal clear so that the CFO can summarize your budget on your behalf.

The CEO: Budget challenges and opportunities

Strategically address the big issues, but don’t count on their direct assistance.

Potential challenges

Lack of interest

Your CEO may just not be enthusiastic about technology. For them, IT is strictly a cost center operating on the margins. If they don’t have a strategic vision that includes technology, IT’s budget will always be about efficiency and cost control and not investment.

Deep hierarchy

The executive-level CIO role isn’t yet pervasive in every industry. There may be one or more non-IT senior management layers between IT and the office of the CEO, as well as other bureaucratic hurdles, which prohibit your direct access.

Uncertainty

What’s happening on the outside will affect what needs to be done on the inside. The CEO has to assess and respond quickly, changing priorities and plans in an instant. An indecisive CEO that’s built an inflexible organization will make it difficult to pivot as needed.

Potential opportunities

Grow competency

Sometimes, IT just needs to wait it out. The biggest shifts in technology interest often come with an outright change in the organization’s leadership. In the meantime, fine-tune your operational excellence, brush up on business skills, and draft out your best ideas on paper.

Build partnerships

Other business-function executives may need to be IT’s voice. Investment proposals may be more compelling coming from them anyway. Behind-the-scenes partnerships and high-profile champions are something you want regardless of your degree of CEO access.

Bake in resilience

Regardless of who’s at the helm, systematic investment in agile and flexible solutions that can be readily scaled, decoupled, redeployed, or decommissioned is a good strategy. Use recent crises to help make the strategic case for a more resilient posture.

What about the CIO view on the IT budget?

IT leaders tend to approach budgeting from an IT services perspective. After all, that’s how their departments are typically organized.

The CFO expense view, CXO business view, and CEO innovation view represent IT’s stakeholders. The CIO service view, however, represents you, the IT budget creator. This means that the CIO service view plays a slightly different role in developing your IT budget communications.

An IT team effort…

A logical starting point

A supporting view

Most budget drafts start with internal IT management discussion. These managers are differentially responsible for apps dev and maintenance, service desk and user support, networks and data center, security, data and analytics, and so forth.

These common organizational units and their managers tend to represent discrete IT service verticals. This means the CIO service view is a natural structural starting point for your budget-building process. Stakeholder views of your budget will be derived from this first view.

You probably don’t want to lead your budget presentation with IT’s perspective – it won’t make sense to your stakeholders. Instead, select certain impactful pieces of your view to drop in where they provide valued information and augment the IT budget story.

Things to bring forward…

Things to hold back…

  • All major application costs
  • Security/compliance costs
  • Strategic project costs
  • End-user support and enablement costs
  • Data and BI initiative costs
  • Minor applications costs
  • Day-to-day network and data center costs
  • Other infrastructure costs
  • IT management and administration costs

1.2 Assess your stakeholders

1 hour

  1. Use the “Stakeholder alignment assessment” template slide following this one to document the outcomes of this activity.
  2. As an IT management team, identify your key budget stakeholders and specifically those in an approval position.
  3. Use the information provided in this blueprint about various stakeholder responsibilities, areas of focus, and what’s typically important to them to determine each key stakeholder’s needs regarding the information contained in your IT budget. Note their stated needs, any idiosyncrasies, and IT’s current relationship status with the stakeholder (positive, neutral, or negative).
  4. Assess previous years’ IT budgets to determine how well they targeted each different stakeholder’s needs. Note any gaps or areas for future improvement.
  5. Develop a high-level list of items or elements to stop, start, or continue during your next budgeting cycle.
Input Output
  • Organizational awareness of key stakeholders and budget approvers
  • Previous years’ budgets
  • Assessment of key stakeholder needs and a list of potential changes or additions to the IT budget/budget process
Materials Participants
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Stakeholder alignment assessment template (following slide)
  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Stakeholder alignment assessment

Document the outcomes of your assessment below. Examples are provided below.

Stakeholder

Relationship status

Understanding of needs

Budget changes/additions

CFO

Positive

Wants at least 30% of budget to be CapEx. Needs more detail concerning benefits and tracking of realization.

Do more detailed breakouts of CapEx vs. OpEx as 30% CapEx not realistic – pre-meet. Talk to Enterprise PMO about improving project benefits statement template.

VP of Sales

Negative

Only concerned with hitting sales targets. Needs to respond/act quickly based on reliable data.

Break out sales consumption of IT resources in detail focusing on CRM and SFA tool costs. Propose business intelligence enhancement project.

Director of Marketing

Neutral

Multiple manual processes – would benefit from increased automation of campaign management and social media posting.

Break out marketing consumption of IT resources and publicly share/compare to generate awareness/support for tech investment. Work together to build ROI statements

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Set your IT budget pre-selling strategy

Pre-selling is all about ongoing communication with your stakeholders. This is the most game-changing thing you can do to advance a proposed IT budget’s success.

When IT works well, nobody notices. When it doesn’t, the persistent criticism about IT not delivering value will pop up, translating directly into less funding. Cut this off at the pass with an ongoing communications strategy based on facts, transparency, and perspective taking.

  1. Know your channels
  2. Identify all the communication channels you can leverage including meetings, committees, reporting cycles, and bulletins. Set up new channels if they don’t exist.

  3. Identify partners
  4. Nothing’s better than having a team of supporters when pitch day comes. Quietly get them on board early and be direct about the role each of you will play.

  5. Always be prepared
  6. Have information and materials about proposed initiatives at-the-ready. You never know when you’ll get your chance. But if your facts are still fuzzy, do more homework first.

  7. Don’t be annoying
  8. Talking about IT all the time will turn people off. Plan chats that don’t mention IT at all. Ask questions about their world and really listen. Empathy’s a powerful tool.

  9. Communicate IT initiatives at launch
  10. Describe what you will be doing and how it will benefit the business in language that makes sense to the beneficiaries of the initiative.

  11. Communicate IT successes
  12. Carry the same narrative forward through to the end and tell the whole story. Include comments from stakeholders and beneficiaries about the value they’re receiving.

Pre-selling with partners

The thing with pre-selling to partners is not to take a selling approach. Take a collaborative approach instead.

A partner is an influencer, advocate, or beneficiary of the expenditure or investment you’re proposing. Partners can:

  • Advise you on real business impacts.
  • Voice their support for your funding request.
  • Present the initial business case for funding approval themselves.
  • Agree to fund all or part of an initiative from their own budget.

When partners agree to pitch or fund an initiative, IT can lose control of it. Make sure you set specific expectations about what IT will help with or do on an ongoing basis, such as:

  • Calculating the upfront and ongoing technology maintenance/support costs of the initiative.
  • Leading the technology vetting and selection process, including negotiating with vendors, setting service-level agreements, and finalizing contracts.
  • Implementing selected technologies and training users.
  • Maintaining and managing the technology, including usage metering.
  • Making sure the bills get paid.

A collaborative approach tends to result in a higher level of commitment than a selling approach.

Put yourself in their shoes using their language. Asking “How will this affect you?” focuses on what’s in it for them.

Example:

CIO: “We’re thinking of investing in technology that marketing can use to automate posting content to social media. Is that something you could use?”

CMO: “Yes, we currently pay two employees to post on Facebook and Twitter, so if it could make that more efficient, then there would be cost savings there.”

Pre-selling with approvers

The key here is to avoid surprises and ensure the big questions are answered well in advance of decision day.

An approver is the CFO, CEO, board, council, or committee that formally commits funding support to a program or initiative. Approvers can:

  • Point out factors that could derail realization of intended benefits.
  • Know that a formal request is coming and factor it into their planning.
  • Connect your idea with others to create synergies and efficiencies.
  • Become active advocates.

When approvers cool to an idea, it’s hard to warm them up again. Gradually socializing an idea well in advance of the formal pitch gives you the chance to isolate and address those cooling factors while they’re still minor. Things you can address if you get an early start with future approvers include:

  • Identify and prepare for administrative, regulatory, or bureaucratic hurdles.
  • Incorporate approvers’ insights about organizational realities and context.
  • Further reduce the technical jargon in your language.
  • Fine tune the relevance and specificity of your business benefits statements.
  • Get a better sense of the most compelling elements to focus on.

Blindsiding approvers with a major request at a budget presentation could trigger an emotional response, not the rational and objective one you want.

Make approvers part of the solution by soliciting their advice and setting their expectations well in advance.

Example:

CIO: “The underwriting team and I think there’s a way to cut new policyholder approval turnaround from 8 to 10 days down to 3 or 4 using an online intake form. Do you see any obstacles?”

CFO: “How do the agents feel about it? They submit to underwriting differently and might not want to change. They’d all need to agree on it. Exactly how does this impact sales?”

1.3 Set your budget pre-selling strategy

1 hour

  1. Use the “Stakeholder pre-selling strategy” template slide following this instruction slide to document the outcomes of this activity.
  2. Carry forward your previously-generated stakeholder alignment assessment from Step 1.2. As a management team, discuss the following for each stakeholder:
    1. Forums and methods of contact and interaction.
    2. Frequency of interaction.
    3. Content or topics typically addressed during interactions.
  3. Discuss what the outcomes of an ideal interaction would look like with each stakeholder.
  4. List opportunities to change or improve the nature of interactions and specific actions you plan to take.
InputOutput
  • Stakeholder Alignment Assessment (in-deck template)
  • Stakeholder Pre-selling Strategy
MaterialsParticipants
  • Stakeholder Pre-selling Strategy (in-deck template)
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Stakeholder pre-selling strategy

Document the outcomes of your discussion. Examples are provided below.

Stakeholder

Current interactions

Opportunities and actions

Forum

Frequency

Content

CFO

One-on-one meeting

Monthly

IT expenditure updates and tracking toward budgeted amount.

Increase one-on-one meeting to weekly. Alternate focus – retrospective update one week, future-looking case development the next. Invite one business unit head to future-looking sessions to discuss their IT needs.

VP of Sales

Executive meeting

Quarterly

General business update - dominates.

Set up bi-weekly one-on-one meeting – initially focus on what sales does/needs, not tech. Later, when the relationship has stabilized, bring data that shows Sales’ consumption of IT resources.

Director of Marketing

Executive meeting

Quarterly

General business update - quiet.

Set up monthly one-on-one meeting. Temporarily embed BA to better discover/understand staff processes and needs.

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Phase recap: Lay your foundation

Build in the elements from the start that you need to facilitate budgetary approval.

You should now have a deeper understanding of the what, why, and who of your IT budget. These elements are foundational to streamlining the budget process, getting aligned with peers and the executive, and increasing your chances of winning budgetary approval in the end.

In this phase, you have:

  • Reviewed what your budget is and does. Your budget is an important governance and communication tool that reflects organizational priorities and objectives and IT’s understanding of them.
  • Taken a closer look at your stakeholders. The CFO, CEO, and CXOs in your organization have accountabilities of their own to meet and need IT and its budget to help them succeed.
  • Developed a strategy for continuously pre-selling your budget. Identifying opportunities and approaches for building relationships, collaborating, and talking meaningfully about IT and IT expenditure throughout the year is one of the leading things you can do to get on the same page and pave the way for budget approval.

“Many departments have mostly labor for their costs. They’re not buying a million and a half or two million dollars’ worth of software every year or fixing things that break. They don’t share IT’s operations mindset and I think they get frustrated.”

– Matt Johnson, IT Director Governance and Business Solutions, Milwaukee County

Phase 2

Get Into Budget-Starting Position

Lay Your
Foundation

Get Into Budget-Starting Position

Develop Your
Forecasts

Build Your
Proposed Budget

Create and Deliver Your Presentation

1.1 Understand what your budget is
and does

1.2 Know your stakeholders

1.3 Continuously pre-sell your budget

2.1 Assemble your resources

2.2 Understand the four views of the ITFM Cost Model

2.3 Review last year’s budget vs.
actuals and five-year historical trends

2.4 Set your high-level goals

3.1 Develop assumptions and
alternative scenarios

3.2 Forecast your project CapEx

3.3 Forecast your non-project CapEx and OpEx

4.1 Aggregate your numbers

4.2 Stress test your forecasts

4.3 Challenge and perfect your
rationales

5.1 Plan your content

5.2 Build your presentation

5.3 Present to stakeholders

5.4 Make final adjustments and submit your IT budget

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

  • Putting together your budget team and gather your data.
  • Selecting which views of the ITFM Cost Model you’ll use.
  • Mapping and analyzing IT’s historical expenditure.
  • Setting goals and metrics for the next budgetary cycle.

This phase involves the following participants:

  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Get into budget-starting position

Now’s the time to pull together your budgeting resources and decision-making reference points.

This phase is about clarifying your context and defining your boundaries.

  • Assemble your resources. This includes the people, data, and other information you’ll need to maximize insight into future spend requirements.
  • Understand the four views of the IT Cost Model. Firm up your understanding of the CFO expense view, CIO service view, CXO business view, and CEO innovation view and decide which ones you’ll use in your analysis and forecasting.
  • Review last year’s budget versus actuals. You need last year’s context to inform next year’s numbers as well as demonstrate any cost efficiencies you successfully executed.
  • Review five-year historical trends. This long-term context gives stakeholders and approvers important information about where IT fits into the business big picture and reminds them how you got to where you are today.
  • Set your high-level goals. You need to decide if you’re increasing, decreasing, or holding steady on your budget and whether you can realistically meet any mandates you’ve been handed on this front. Set a target as a reference point to guide your decisions and flag areas where you might need to have some tough conversations.

“A lot of the preparation is education for our IT managers so that they understand what’s in their budgets and all the moving parts. They can actually help you keep it within bounds.”

– Trisha Goya, Director, IT Governance & Administration, Hawaii Medical Service Association

Gather your budget-building team

In addition to your CFO, CXOs, and CEO, there are other people who will provide important information, insight, and skill in identifying IT budget priorities and costs.

Role

Skill set

Responsibilities

IT Finance Lead

  • Financial acumen, specifically with cost forecasting and budgeting.
  • Understanding of actual IT costs and service-based costing methods.

IT finance personnel will guide the building of cost forecasting methodologies for operating and capital costs, help manage IT cash flows, help identify cost reduction options, and work directly with the finance department to ensure they get what they need.

IT Domain Managers

  • Knowledge of services and their outputs.
  • Understanding of cost drivers for the services they manage.

They will be active participants in budgeting for their specific domains, act as a second set of eyes, assist with and manage their domain budgets, and engage with stakeholders.

Project Managers

  • Knowledge of project requirements.
  • Project budgeting.
  • Understanding of project IT-specific costs.

Project managers will assist in capital and operational forecasting and will review project budgets to ensure accuracy. They will also assist in forecasting the operational impacts of capital projects.

As the head of IT, your role is as the budgeting team lead. You understand both the business and IT strategies, and have relationships with key business partners. Your primary responsibilities are to guide and approve all budget components and act as a liaison between finance, business units, and IT.

Set expectations with your budgeting team

Be clear on your goals and ensure everyone has what they need to succeed.

Your responsibilities and accountabilities.

  • Budget team lead.
  • Strategic direction.
  • Primary liaison with business stakeholders.
  • Pre-presentation approver and final decision maker.

Goals and requirements.

  • Idea generation for investment and cost optimization.
  • Cost prioritization and rationale.
  • Skills requirements and sourcing options.
  • Risk assessment and operational impact.
  • Data format and level of granularity.

Budgeting fundamentals.

  • Review of key finance concepts – CapEx, OpEx, cashflow, income, depreciation, etc.
  • What a budget is, and its component parts.
  • How the budget will be used by IT and the organization.
  • How to calculate cost forecasts.

Their responsibilities and accountabilities.

  • Data/information collection.
  • Operational knowledge of their services, projects, and staff.
  • Cost forecast development for their respective domains/projects.
  • Review and sanity checking of their peers’ cost forecasts.

Timeframes and deadlines.

  • Budgeting stages/phases and their deliverables.
  • Internal IT deadlines.
  • External business deadlines.
  • Goals and cadence of future working sessions and meetings.

Available resources.

  • Internal and external sources of data and information.
  • Tools and templates for tracking information and performing calculations.
  • Individuals who can provide finance concept guidance and support.
  • Repositories for in-progress and final work.

2.1 Brief and mobilize your IT budgeting team

2 hours

  1. Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook
  2. Organize a meeting with your IT department management team, team leaders, and project managers.
  3. Review their general financial management accountabilities and responsibilities.
  4. Discuss the purpose and context of the budgeting exercise, different budget components, and the organization’s milestones/deadlines.
  5. Identify specific tasks and activities that each member of the team must complete in support of the budgeting exercise.
  6. Set up additional checkpoints, working sessions, or meetings that will take you through to final budget submission.
  7. Document your budget team members, responsibilities, deliverables, and due dates on the “Planning Variables” tab in the IT Cost Forecasting & Budgeting Workbook.

Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook

InputOutput
  • The organization’s budgeting process and procedures
  • Assignment of IT budgeting team responsibilities
  • A budgeting schedule
MaterialsParticipants
  • IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Leverage the ITFM Cost Model

Each of the four views breaks down IT costs into a different array of categories so you and your stakeholders can see expenditure in a way that’s meaningful for them.

You may decide not to use all four views based on your goals, audience, and available time. However, let’s start with how you can use the first two views, the CFO expense view and the CIO service view.

The image contains a screenshot of the CFO expense view.

The CFO expense view is fairly traditional – workforce and vendor. However, Info-Tech’s approach breaks down the vendor software and hardware buckets into on-premises and cloud. Making this distinction is increasingly critical given key differences in CapEx vs. OpEx treatment.

Forecasting this view is mandatory

These two views provide information that will help you optimize IT costs. They’re designed to allow the CFO and CIO to find a common language that will allow them to collaboratively make decisions about managing IT expenditure effectively.

The image contains a screenshot of the CIO service view.

The CIO service view is your view, i.e. it’s how IT tends to organize and manage itself and is often the logical starting point for expenditure planning and analysis. Sub-categories in this view, such as security and data & BI, can also resonate strongly with business stakeholders and their priorities.

Forecasting this view is recommended

Extend your dialogue to the business

Applying the business optimization views of the ITFM Cost Model can bring a level of sophistication to your IT cost analysis and forecasting efforts.

Some views take a bit more work to map out, but they can be powerful tools for communicating the value of IT to the business. Let’s look at the last two views, the CXO business view and the CEO innovation view.

The CXO business view looks at IT expenditure business unit by business unit so that each can understand their true consumption of IT resources. This view relies on having a fair and reliable cost allocation formula, such as one based on relative headcount, so it runs the risk of inaccuracy.

Forecasting this view is recommended

The image contains a screenshot of the CXO business view.

These two views provide information that will help you optimize IT support to the business. These views also have a collaborative goal in mind, enabling IT to talk about IT spend in terms that will promote transparency and engage business stakeholders.

The CEO innovation view is one of the hardest to analyze and forecast since a single spend item may apply to innovation, growth, and keeping the lights on. However, if you have an audience with the CEO and they want IT to play a more strategic or innovative role, then this view is worth mapping.

Forecasting this view is optional

The image contains a screenshot of the CEO innovation view.

2.2 Select the ITFM Cost Model views you plan to complete based on your goals

30 minutes

The IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook contains standalone sections for each view, as well as rows for each lowest-tier sub-category in a view, so each view can be analyzed and forecasted independently.

  1. Review Info-Tech’s ITFM Cost Model and the expenditure categories and sub-categories each view contains.
  2. Revisit your stakeholder analysis for the budgeting exercise. Plan to:
    1. Complete the CFO expense view regardless.
    2. Complete the CIO service view – consider doing this one first for forecasting purposes as it may be most familiar to you and serve as an easier entry point into the forecasting process.
    3. Complete the CXO business view – consider doing this only for select business units if you have the objective of enhancing awareness of their true consumption of IT resources or if you have (or plan to have) a show-back/chargeback mechanism.
    4. Complete the CEO innovation view only if your data allows it and there’s a compelling reason to discuss the strategic or innovative role of IT in the organization.
Input Output
  • Stakeholder analysis
  • Info-Tech’s ITFM Cost Model
  • Decision on which views in the ITFM Cost Model you’ll use for historical expenditure analysis and forecasting purposes
Materials Participants
  • Info-Tech’s ITFM Cost Model
  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Gather your budget-building data

Your data not only forms the content of your budget but also serves as the supporting evidence for the decisions you’ve made.

Ensure you have the following data and information available to you and your budgeting team before diving in:

Past data

  • Last fiscal year’s budget.
  • Actuals for the past five fiscal years.
  • Pre-set capital depreciation/amortization amounts to be applied to next fiscal year’s budget.

Current data

  • Current-year IT positions and salaries.
  • Active vendor contracts with payment schedules and amounts (including active multi-year agreements).
  • Cost projections for remainder of any projects that are committed or in-progress, including projected OpEx for ongoing maintenance and support.

Future data

  • Estimated market value for any IT positions to be filled next year (both backfill of current vacancies and proposed net-new positions).
  • Pricing data on proposed vendor purchases or contracts.
  • Cost estimates for any capital/strategic projects that are being proposed but not yet committed, including resulting maintenance/support OpEx.
  • Any known pending credits to be received or applied in the next fiscal year.

If you’re just getting started building a repeatable budgeting process, treat it like any other project, complete with a formal plan/ charter and a central repository for all related data, information, and in-progress and final documents.

Once you’ve identified a repeatable approach that works for you, transition the budgeting project to a regular operational process complete with policies, procedures, and tools.

Review last year’s budget vs. actuals

This is the starting point for building your high-level rationale around what you’re proposing for next fiscal year.

But first, some quick definitions:

  • Budgeted: What you planned to spend when you started the fiscal year.
  • Actual: What you ended up spending in real life by the end of the fiscal year.
  • Variance: The difference between budgeted expenditure and actual expenditure.

For last fiscal year, pinpoint the following metrics and information:

Budgeted and actual IT expenditure overall and by major cost category.

Categories will include workforce (employees/contractors) and vendors (hardware, software, contracted services) at a minimum.

Actual IT expenditure as a percentage of organizational revenue.

This is a widely-used benchmark that your CFO will expect to see.

The known and likely drivers behind budgeted vs. actual variances.

Your rationales will affect your perceived credibility. Be straightforward, avoid defending or making excuses, and just show the facts.

Ask your CFO what they consider acceptable variance thresholds for different cost categories to guide your variance analysis, such as 1% for overall IT expenditure.

Actual IT CapEx and OpEx.

CapEx is often more variable than OpEx over time. Separate them so you can see the real trends for each. Consider:

  • Sub-dividing CapEx by strategic projects and non-strategic “business as usual” spend (e.g. laptops, network maintenance gear).
  • Showing overall CapEx and OpEx as percentages of their organization-wide counterparts if that information is available.

Next, review your five-year historical expenditure trends

The longer-term pattern of IT expenditure can help you craft a narrative about the overarching story of IT.

For the previous five fiscal years, focus on the following:

Actual IT expenditure as a percentage of organizational revenue.

Again, for historical years 2-5, you can break this down into granular cost categories like workforce, software, and infrastructure like you did for last fiscal year. Avoid getting bogged down and focusing on the past – you ultimately want to redirect stakeholders to the future.

Percentage expenditure increase/decrease year to year.

You may choose to show overall IT expenditure amounts, breakdowns by CapEx and OpEx, as well as high-level cost categories.

As you go back in time, some data may not be available to you, may be unreliable or incomplete, or employ the same cost categories you’re using today. Use your judgement on the level of granularity you want to and can apply when going back two to five years in the past.

So, what’s the trend? Consider these questions:

  • Is the year-over-year trend on a steady trajectory or are there notable dips and spikes?
  • Are there any one-time capital projects that significantly inflated CapEx and overall spend in a given year or that forced maintenance-and support-oriented OpEx commitments in subsequent years?
  • Does there seem to be an overall change in the CapEx-to-OpEx ratio due to factors like increased use of cloud services, outsourcing, or contract-based staff?

Take a close look at financial data showcasing the cost-control measures you’ve taken

Your CFO will look for evidence that you’re gaining efficiencies by controlling costs, which is often a prerequisite for them approving any new funding requests.

Your objective here is threefold:

  1. Demonstrate IT’s track record of fiscal responsibility and responsiveness to business priorities.
  2. Acknowledge and celebrate your IT-as-cost-center efficiency gains to clear the way for more strategic discussions.
  3. Identify areas where you can potentially source and reallocate recouped funds to bolster other initiatives or business cases for net-new spend.

This step is about establishing credibility, demonstrating IT value, building trust, and showing the CFO you’re on their team.

Do the following:

  • List any specific cost-control initiatives and their initial objectives and targets.
  • Identify any changes made to those targets and your approaches due to changing conditions, with rationales for the decisions made. For example:
    • Mid-year, the business decided to allow approximately half the workforce to work from home on a permanent basis.
    • As a result, remote-worker demand on the service desk remained high and actually increased in some areas. You were unable to reduce service desk staff headcount as originally planned.
    • You’re now exploring ways to streamline ticket intake and assignment to increase throughput and speed resolution.
  • Report on completed cost-control initiatives first, including targets, actuals, and related impacts. Include select feedback from business stakeholders and users about the impact of your cost-control measure on them.
  • For in-progress initiatives, report progress made to-date, benefits realized to date, and plans for continuation next fiscal year.

“Eliminate the things you don’t need. People will give you what you need when you need it if you’re being responsible with what you already have.”

– Angela Hintz, VP of PMO & Integrated Services,
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana

2.3 Review your historical IT expenditure

8 hours

  1. Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.
  2. On Tab 1, “Historical Events & Projects,” note the cost-driving and cost-saving events that occurred last fiscal year that drove any variance between budgeted and actual expenditure. Describe the nature of their impact and current status (ongoing, resolved – temporary impact, or resolved – permanent impact).
  3. Also on Tab 1, “Historical Events & Projects”, summarize the work done on capital or strategic projects, expenditures, and status (in progress, deferred, canceled, or complete).
  4. On Tab 2, “Historical Expenditure”:
    1. Enter the budgeted and actuals data for last fiscal year in columns D-H for the views of the ITFM Cost Model you’re opted to do, i.e. CFO expense view, CIO service view, CXO business view, and CEO innovation view.
    2. Enter a brief rationale for any notable budgeted-versus-actuals variances or other interesting items in column K.
    3. Enter actuals data for the remaining past five fiscal years in columns L-O. Year-over-year comparative metrics will be calculated for you.
    4. Enter FTEs by business function in columns R-AA, rows 34-43.
      Expenditure per FTE and year-over year comparative metrics will be
      calculated for you.
  5. Using Tabs 2, “Historical Expenditure” and 3, “Historical Analysis”, review and analyze the resulting data sets and graphs to identify overall patterns, specifically notable increases or decreases in a particular category of expenditure or where rationales are repeated across categories or views (these are significant).
  6. Finally, flag any data points that help demonstrate achievement of, or progress toward, any cost-control measures you implemented.

2.3 Review your historical IT expenditure

InputOutputMaterialsParticipants
  • Budgeted data for the previous fiscal year and actuals data for the previous five fiscal years
  • Mapped budgeted for last fiscal year, mapped actuals for the past five fiscal years, and variance metrics and rationales
  • IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Pull historical trends into a present-day context when setting your high-level goals

What’s happening to your organization and the ecosystem within which it’s operating right now? Review current business concerns, priorities, and strategies.

Knowing what happened in the past can provide good insights and give you a chance to show stakeholders your money-management track record. However, what stakeholders really care about is “now” and “next”. For them, it’s all about current business context.

Ask these questions about your current context to assess the relevance of your historical trend data:

What’s the state of
the economy and how is
it affecting your organization?

What are the
organization’s stated
strategic goals and objectives?

What has the business
explicitly communicated
about finance-related targets?

What’s the business
executive’s attitude on
budget increase requests?

Some industries are very sensitive to economic cycles, causing wild budget fluctuations year to year. This uncertainty can reduce the volume of spend you automatically carry over one year to the next, making past spend patterns less relevant to your current budgeting effort.

These can change year to year as well, and often manifest on the CapEx side in the form of strategic projects selected. Since this is so variable, using previous years’ CapEx to determine next fiscal’s CapEx isn’t always useful except in regard to multi-year, ongoing capital projects.

Do your best to honor mandates. However, if cuts are suggested that could jeopardize core service delivery, tread cautiously, and pick your battles. You may be able to halt new capital spend to generate cuts, but these projects may get approved anyway, with IT expected to make cuts to OpEx.

If the CFO and others rail against even the most necessary inflation-driven increases, you’ll need to take a conservative approach, focus on cost-saving initiatives, and plan to redirect last year’s expenditures instead of pursuing net-new spend.

Set metrics and targets for some broader budget effectiveness improvement efforts

Budget goalsetting isn’t limited to CapEx and OpEx targets. There are several effectiveness metrics to track overall improvement in your budgeting process.

Step back and think about other budget and expenditure goals you have.
Do you want to:

  • Better align the budget with organizational objectives?
  • Increase cost forecasting accuracy?
  • Increase budget transparency and completeness?
  • Improve the effectiveness of your budget presentation?
  • Reduce the amount of budget rework?
  • Increase the percentage of the budget that’s approved?
  • Reduce variance between what was budgeted and actuals?

Establish appropriate metrics and targets that will allow you to define success, track progress, and communicate achievement on these higher-level goals.

Check out some example metrics in the table below.

Budgeting metric

Improvement driver

Current value

Future target

Percentage of spend directly tied to an organizational goal.

Better alignment via increased communication and partnership with the business.

72%

90%

Number of changes to budget prior to final acceptance.

Better accuracy and transparency via use of zero-based budgeting and enhanced stakeholder views.

8

2

Percentage variance between budgeted vs. actuals.

Improved forecasting through better understanding of business plans and in-cycle show-back.

+4%

+/-2%

Percentage of budget approved after first presentation.

Improved business rationales and direct mapping of expenditure to org priorities.

76%

95%

Percentage of IT-driven project budget approved.

More rigor around benefits, ROI calculation, and quantifying value delivered.

80%

100%

Set your high-level OpEx budget targets

The high-level targets you set now don’t need to be perfect. Think of them as reference points or guardrails to sanity-check the cost forecasting exercise to come.

First things first: Zero-based or incremental for OpEx?

Set your OpEx targets

Incremental budgeting is the addition of a few percentage onto next year’s budget, assuming the previous year’s OpEx is all re-occurring. The percentage often aligns with rates of inflation.

  • Most organizations take this approach because it’s faster and easier.
  • However, incremental budgeting is less accurate. Non-recurring items are often overlooked and get included in the forecast, resulting in budget bloat. Also, redundant or wasteful items can be entirely missed, undermining any cost optimization efforts.

Zero-based budgeting involves rebuilding your budget from scratch, i.e. zero. It doesn’t assume that any of last year’s costs are recurring or consistent year to year.

  • This approach is harder because all relevant historical spend data needs to be collected and reviewed, which not only takes time but the data you need may be unlocatable.
  • Every item needs to be re-examined, re-justified, and tied to an asset, service, or project, which means it’s a far more comprehensive and accurate approach.

Pick a range of percentage change based on your business context and past spend.

  • If economic prospects are negative, start with a 0-3% increase to balance inflation with potential cuts. Don’t set concrete reduction targets at this point, to avoid tunnel vision in the forecasting exercise.
  • If economic prospects are positive, target 3-5% increases for stable scenarios and 6-10% increases for growth scenarios.
  • If CapEx from previous-year projects is switching to steady-state OpEx, then account for these bumps in OpEx.
  • If the benefits from any previous-year efficiency measures will be realized next fiscal year, then account for these as OpEx reductions.

If cost-cutting or optimization is a priority, then a zero-based approach is the right decision. If doing this every year is too onerous, plan to do it for your OpEx at least every few years to examine what’s actually in there, clean house, and re-set.

Set your high-level CapEx budget targets

A lot of IT CapEx is conceived in business projects, so your proposed expenditure here may not be up to you. Exercise as much influence as you can.

First things first: Is it project CapEx, or “business as usual” CapEx?

Project CapEx is tied to one-time strategic projects requiring investment in new assets.

  • This CapEx will probably be variable year to year, going up or down depending on the organization’s circumstances or goals.
  • This area of spend is driven largely by the business and not IT. Plan to set project CapEx targets in close partnership with the business and function as a steward of these funds instead of as an owner.

User-driven “business as usual” CapEx manifests via changes (often increases) in organizational headcount due to growth.

  • Costs here focus on end-user hardware like desktops, laptops, and peripherals.
  • Any new capital software acquisitions you have planned will also be affected in terms of number of licenses required.
  • Get reliable estimates of department-by-department hiring plans for next fiscal year to better account for these in your budget.

Network/data center-driven “business-as-usual” CapEx is about core infrastructure maintenance.

  • Costs here focus on the purchase of network and data center hardware and other equipment to maintain existing infrastructure services and performance.
  • Increased outsourcing often drives down this area of “business as usual” CapEx by reducing the purchase of new on-premises solutions and eliminating network and data center maintenance requirements.

Unanticipated hiring and the need to buy end-user hardware is cited as a top cause of budget grief by IT leaders – get ahead of this. Project CapEx, however, is usually determined via business-based capital project approval mechanisms well in advance. And don’t forget to factor in pre-established capital asset depreciation amounts generated by all the above!

2.4 Set your high-level IT budget targets and metrics

8 hours

  1. Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook to document the outcomes of this activity.
  2. Review the context in which your organization is currently operating and expects to operate in the next fiscal year. Specifically, look at:
    1. The state of the economy.
    2. Stated goals, objectives, and targets.
    3. The executive’s point of view on budget increase requests.
    Document your factors, assessment, rationale, and considerations in the “Business Context Assessment” table on the “Planning Variables” tab in the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.
  3. Based on the business context, anticipated flips of former CapEx to OpEx, and realization of previous years’ efficiency measures, set a general non-project OpEx target as a percentage increase or decrease for next fiscal year to serve as a guideline in the cost forecasting guideline. Document this in the “Budget Targets & Metrics” table on the “Planning Variables” tab in the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook. sed on known capital projects, changes in headcount, typical “business as usual” equipment expenditure, and pre-established capital asset depreciation amounts, set general project CapEx and non-project CapEx targets. Document these in the “Budget Targets & Metrics” table on the “Planning Variables” tab in the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.
  4. Finally, set your overarching IT budget process success metrics. Also document these in the “Budget Targets & Metrics” table on the “Planning Variables” tab in the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.

Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook

2.4 Set your high-level IT budget targets and metrics

InputOutputMaterialsParticipants
  • Knowledge of current business context and probable context next fiscal year
  • Analysis of historical IT expenditure patterns
  • High-level project CapEx and non-project CapEx and OpEx targets for the next fiscal year
  • IT budget process success metrics
  • IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Phase recap: Get into budget-starting position

Now you’re ready to do the deep dive into forecasting your IT budget for next year.

In this phase, you clarified your business context and defined your budgetary goals, including:

  • Assembling your resources. You’ve built and organized your IT budgeting team, as well as gathered the data and information you’ll need to do your historical expenditure analysis and future forecasting
  • Understanding the four views of the IT Cost Model. You’ve become familiar with the four views of the model and have selected which ones you’ll map for historical analysis and forecasting purposes.
  • Reviewing last year’s budget versus actuals and five-year historical trends. You now have the critical rationale-building context to inform next year’s numbers and demonstrate any cost efficiencies you’ve successfully executed.
  • Setting your high-level goals. You’ve established high-level targets for project and non-project CapEx and OpEx, as well as set some IT budget process improvement goals.

“We only have one dollar but five things. Help us understand how to spend that dollar.”

– Trisha Goya, Director, IT Governance & Administration, Hawaii Medical Service Association

Phase 3

Develop Your Forecasts

Lay Your
Foundation

Get Into Budget-Starting Position

Develop Your
Forecasts

Build Your
Proposed Budget

Create and Deliver Your Presentation

1.1 Understand what your budget is
and does

1.2 Know your stakeholders

1.3 Continuously pre-sell your budget

2.1 Assemble your resources

2.2 Understand the four views of the ITFM Cost Model

2.3 Review last year’s budget vs.
actuals and five-year historical trends

2.4 Set your high-level goals

3.1 Develop assumptions and
alternative scenarios

3.2 Forecast your project CapEx

3.3 Forecast your non-project CapEx and OpEx

4.1 Aggregate your numbers

4.2 Stress test your forecasts

4.3 Challenge and perfect your
rationales

5.1 Plan your content

5.2 Build your presentation

5.3 Present to stakeholders

5.4 Make final adjustments and submit your IT budget

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

  • Documenting the assumptions behind your proposed budget and develop alternative scenarios.
  • Forecasting your project CapEx.
  • Forecasting your non-project CapEx and OpEx.

This phase involves the following participants:

  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Develop your forecasts

Start making some decisions.

This phase focuses on putting real numbers on paper based on the research and data you’ve collected. Here, you will:

  • Develop assumptions and alternative scenarios. The assumptions you make are the logical foundation for your decisions, and your primary and alternative scenarios focus your thinking and demonstrate that you’ve thoroughly examined your organization’s current and future context.
  • Forecast your project CapEx costs. These costs are comprised of all the project-related capital expenditures for strategic or capital projects, including in-house labor.
  • Forecast your non-project CapEx and OpEx costs. These costs are the ongoing “business as usual” expenditures incurred via the day-to-day operations of IT and delivery of IT services.

“Our April forecast is what really sets the bar for what our increase is going to be next fiscal year. We realized that we couldn’t change it later, so we needed to do more upfront to get that forecast right.

If we know that IT projects have been delayed, if we know we pulled some things forward, if we know that a project isn’t starting until next year, let’s be really clear on those things so that we’re starting from a better forecast because that’s the basis of deciding two percent, three percent, whatever it’s going to be.”

– Kristen Thurber, IT Director, Office of the CIO, Donaldson Company

When pinning down assumptions, start with negotiable and non-negotiable constraints

Assumptions are things you hold to be true. They may not actually be true, but they are your logical foundation and must be shared with stakeholders so they can follow your thinking.

Start with understanding your constraints. These are either negotiable (adjustable) or non-negotiable (non-adjustable). However, what is non-negotiable for IT may be negotiable for the organization as a whole, such as its strategic objectives. Consider each of the constraints below, determine how it relates to IT expenditure options, and decide if it’s ultimately negotiable or non-negotiable.

Organizational

Legal and Regulatory

IT/Other

Example:
  • Strategic goals and priorities
  • Financial and market performance
  • Governance style and methods
  • Organizational policies
  • Organizational culture
  • Regulatory compliance and reporting
  • Data residency and privacy laws
  • Vendor contract terms and conditions
  • Health and safety
  • Compensation and collective bargaining
  • IT funding and fund allocation flexibility
  • Staff/skills availability and capacity
  • Business continuity and IT performance requirements
  • Time and timeframes
You’re in year one of a three-year vendor contract. All contracts are negotiable, but this one isn’t for two years. This contact should be considered a non-negotiable for current budget-planning purposes.

Identifying your negotiable and non-negotiable constraints is about knowing what levers you can pull. Government entities have more non-negotiable constraints than private companies, which means IT and the organization as a whole have fewer budgetary levers to pull and a lot less flexibility.

An un-pullable lever and a pullable lever (and how much you can pull it) have one important thing in common – they are all fundamental assumptions that influence your decisions.

Brainstorm your assumptions even further

The tricky thing about assumptions is that they’re taken for granted – you don’t always realize you’ve made them. Consider these common assumptions and test them for validity.

My current employees will still be here 18 months from now.

My current vendors aren’t going to discontinue the products we have.

My organization’s executive team will be the same 18 months from now. My current key vendors will be around for years to come.

My organization’s departments, divisions, and general structure will be the same 18 months from now.

IT has to be an innovation leader.

We won’t be involved in any merger/acquisition activity next fiscal year.

IT has always played the same role here and that won’t change.

There won’t be a major natural disaster that takes us offline for days or even weeks.

We must move everything we can to the cloud.

We won’t be launching any new products or services next fiscal year.

Most of our IT expenditure has to be CapEx, as usual.

You won’t put some of these assumptions into your final budget presentation. It’s simply worthwhile knowing what they are so you can challenge them when forecasting.

Based on your assumptions, define the primary scenario that will frame your budget

Your primary scenario is the one you believe is most likely to happen and upon which you’ll build your IT cost forecasts.

Now it’s time to outline your primary scenario.

  • A scenario is created by identifying the variable factors embedded in your assumptions and manipulating them across the range of possibilities. This manipulation of variables will result in different scenarios, some more likely or feasible than others.
  • Your primary scenario is the one you believe is the most feasible and/or likely to happen (i.e. most probable). This is based on:
    • Your understanding of past events and patterns.
    • Your understanding of your organization’s current context.
    • Your understanding of IT’s current context.
    • Your understanding of the organization’s objectives.
    • Your assessment of negotiable and non-negotiable constraints and other assumptions for both IT and the organization.

A note on probability…

  • A non-negotiable constraint doesn’t have any variables to manipulate. It’s a 100% probability that must be rigidly accommodated and protected in your scenario. An example is a long-standing industry regulation that shows no signs of being updated or altered and must be complied with in its current state.
  • A negotiable constraint has many more variables in play. Your goal is to identify the different potential values of the variables and determine the degree of probability that one value is more likely to be true or feasible than another. An example is that you’re directed to cut costs, but the amount could be as little as 3% or as much as 20%.
  • And then there are the unknowns. These are circumstances, events, or initiatives that inevitably happen, but you can’t predict when, what, or how much. This is what contingency planning and insurance are for. Examples include a natural disaster, a pandemic, a supply chain crisis, or the CEO simply changing their mind. Its safe to assume something is going to happen, so if you’re able to establish a contingency fund or mechanisms that let you respond, then do it.

What could or will be your organization’s new current state at the end of next fiscal year?

Next, explore alternative scenarios, even those that may seem a bit outrageous

Offering alternatives demonstrates that you weighed all the pertinent factors and that you’ve thought broadly about the organization’s future and how best to support it.

Primary scenario approval can be helped by putting that scenario alongside alternatives that are less attractive due to their cost, priority, or feasibility. Alternative scenarios are created by manipulating or eliminating your negotiable constraints or treating specific unknowns as knowns. Here are some common alternative scenarios.

The high-cost scenario: Assumes very positive economic prospects. Characterized by more of everything – people and skills, new or more sophisticated technologies, projects, growth, and innovation. Remember to consider the long-term impact on OpEx that higher capital spend may bring in subsequent years.

Target 10-20% more expenditure than your primary scenario

The low-cost scenario: Assumes negative economic prospects or cost-control objectives. Characterized by less of everything, specifically capital project investment, other CapEx, and OpEx. Must assume that business service-level expectations will be down-graded and other sacrifices will be made.

Target 5-15% less expenditure than your primary scenario

The dark horse scenario: This is a more radical proposition that challenges the status quo. For example, what would the budget look like if all data specialists in the organization were centralized under IT? What if IT ran the corporate PMO? What if the entire IT function was 100% outsourced?

No specific target

Case Study

INDUSTRY: Manufacturing

SOURCE: Anonymous

A manufacturing IT Director gets budgetary approval by showing what the business would have to sacrifice to get the cheap option.

Challenge

Solution

Results

A manufacturing business had been cutting costs endlessly across the organization, but specifically in IT.

IT was down to the bone. The IT Director had already been doing zero-based budgeting to rationalize all expenditure, stretching asset lifecycles as long as possible, and letting maintenance work slide.

There were no obvious options left to reduce costs based on what the business wanted to do.

The IT Director got creative. He put together three complete budgets:

  1. The budget he wanted.
  2. A budget where everything was entirely outsourced and there would be zero in-house IT staff.
  3. A budget that was not as extreme as the second one, but still tilted toward outsourcing.

In the budget presentation, he led with the “super cheap” budget where IT was 100% outsourced.

He proceeded to review the things they wouldn’t have under the extreme outsourced scenario, including the losses in service levels that would be necessary to make it happen.

The executive was shocked by what the IT Director showed them.

The executive immediately approved the IT Director’s preferred budget. He was able to defend the best budget for the business by showing them what they stood to lose.

3.1 Document your assumptions and alternative scenarios

2 hours

  1. Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook and document the outcomes of this activity on Tab 9, “Alternative Scenarios.”
  2. As a management team, identify and discuss your non-negotiable and negotiable constraints. Document these in rows 4 and 5 respectively in the Workbook.
  3. Brainstorm, list, and challenge any other assumptions being made by IT or the organization’s executive in terms of what can and cannot be done.
  4. Identify the most likely or feasible scenario (primary) and associated assumptions. You will base your initial forecasting on this scenario.
  5. Identify alternative scenarios. Document each scenario’s name, description, and key assumptions, and major opportunities in columns B-D on Tab 9, “Alternative Scenarios.” You will do any calculations for these scenarios after you have completed the forecast for your primary scenario.

Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook

InputOutput
  • Knowledge of organization’s context, culture, and operations
  • A list of assumptions that will form the logical foundation of your forecasting decisions
  • Identification of the primary budget scenario and alternatives
MaterialsParticipants
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Before diving into actual forecasting, get clear on project and non-project CapEx and OpEx

Traditional, binary “CapEx vs. OpEx” distinctions don’t seem adequate for showing where expenditure is really going. We’ve added a new facet to help further differentiate one-time project costs from recurring “business as usual” expenses.

Project CapEx
Includes all workforce and vendor costs associated with planning and execution of projects largely focused on the acquisition or creation of new capital assets.

Non-project CapEx
Includes “business as usual” capital asset acquisition in the interest of managing, maintaining, or supporting ongoing performance of existing infrastructure or services, such as replacement network equipment, end-user hardware (e.g. laptops), or disaster recovery/business continuity redundancies. Also includes ongoing asset depreciation amounts.

Non-project OpEx
Includes all recurring, non-CapEx “business as usual” costs such as labor compensation and training, cloud-based software fees, outsourcing costs, managed services fees, subscriptions, and other discretionary spend.

Depreciation is technically CapEx. However, for practical purposes, most organizations list it under OpEx, which can cause it to get lost in the noise. Here, depreciation is under non-project CapEx to keep its true CapEx nature visible and in the company of other “business as usual” capital purchases that will ultimately join the depreciation ranks.

Forecast your project CapEx costs

This process can be simple as far as overall budget forecasting is concerned. If it isn’t simple now, plan to make it simpler next time around.

What to expect…

  • Ideally, the costs for all projects should have been thoroughly estimated, reviewed, and accepted by a steering committee, your CFO, or other approving entity at the start of the budgeting season, and funding already committed to. In a nutshell, forecasting your project costs should already have been done and will only require plugging in those numbers.
  • If projects have yet to be pitched and rubber stamped, know that your work is cut out for you. Doing things in a rush or without proper due diligence will result in certain costs being missed. This means that you risk going far over budget in terms of actuals next year, or having to borrow from other areas in your budget to cover unplanned or underestimated project costs.

Key forecasting principles…

Develop rigorous business cases
Secure funding approval well in advance
Tie back costs benefitting business units
Consider the longer-term OpEx impact

For more information about putting together sound business cases for different projects and circumstances, see the following Info-Tech blueprints:

Build a Comprehensive Business Case

Fund Innovation with a Minimum Viable Business Case

Reduce Time to Consensus with an Accelerated Business Case

Apply these project CapEx forecasting tips

A good project CapEx forecast requires steady legwork, not last-minute fast thinking.

Tip #1: Don’t surprise your approvers. Springing a capital project on approvers at your formal presentation isn’t a good idea and stands a good chance of rejection, so do whatever you can to lock these costs down well in advance.

Tip #2: Project costs should be entirely comprised of CapEx if possible. Keep in mind that some of these costs will convert to depreciated non-project CapEx and non-project OpEx as they transition from project costs to ongoing “business as usual” costs, usually in the fiscal year following the year of expenditure. Creating projections for the longer-term impacts of these project CapEx costs on future types of expenditure is a good idea. Remember that a one-time project is not the same thing as a one-time cost.

Tip #3: Capitalize any employee labor costs on capital projects. This ensures the true costs of projects are not underestimated and that operational staff aren’t being used for free at the expense of their regular duties.

Tip #4: Capitalizing cloud costs in year one of a formal implementation project is usually acceptable. It’s possible to continue treating cloud costs as CapEx with some vendors via something called reserved instances, but organizations report that this is a lot of work to set up. In the end, most capitalized cloud will convert into non-project OpEx in years two and beyond.

Tip #5: Build in some leeway. By the time a project is initiated, circumstances may have changed dramatically from when it was first pitched and approved, including business priorities and needs, vendor pricing, and skillset availability. Your costing may become completely out of date. It’s a good practice to work within more general cost ranges than with specific numbers, to give you the flexibility to respond and adapt during actual execution.

3.2 Forecast your project CapEx

Time: Depends on size of project portfolio

  1. Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook and navigate to Tab 5, “Project CapEx Forecast”. Add more columns as required. Enter the following for all projects:
    • Row 5 – Its name and/or unique identifier.
    • Row 6 – Its known or estimated project start/end dates.
    • Row 7 – Its status (in proposal, committed, or in progress).
  2. Distribute each project’s costs across the categories listed for each view you’ve selected to map. Do not include any OpEx here – it will be mapped separately under non-project OpEx.
  3. Rationalize your values. A running per-project total for each view, as well as totals for all projects combined, are in rows 16, 28, 39, and 43. Ensure these totals match or are very close across all the views you are mapping. If they don’t match, review the views that are lower-end outliers as there’s a good chance something has been overlooked.

Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook

InputOutput
  • Project proposals and plans, including cost estimations
  • A project CapEx forecast for next fiscal year
MaterialsParticipants
  • IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Forecast your non-project OpEx

Most of your budget will be non-project OpEx, so plan to spend most of your forecasting effort here.

What to expect…

Central to the definition of OpEx is the fact that it’s ongoing. It rarely stops, and tends to steadily increase over time due to factors like inflation, rising vendor prices, growing organizational growth, increases in the salary expectations of employees, and other factors.

The only certain ways to reduce OpEx are to convert it to capitalizable expenditure, decrease staffing costs, not pursue cloud technologies, or for the organization to simply not grow. For most organizations, none of these approaches are feasible. Smaller scale efficiencies and optimizations can keep OpEx from running amok, but they won’t change its overall upward trajectory over time. Expect it to increase.

Key forecasting principles…

Focus on optimization and efficiency.
Aim for full spend transparency.
Think about appropriate chargeback options.
Give it the time it deserves.

For more information about how to make the most out of your IT OpEx, see the following Info-Tech blueprints:

Develop Your Cost Optimization Roadmap

Achieve IT Spend & Staffing Transparency

Discover the Hidden Costs of Outsourcing

Apply these non-project OpEx forecasting tips

A good forecast is in the details, so take a very close look to see what’s really there.

Tip #1: Consider zero-based budgeting. You don’t have to do this every year, but re-rationalizing your OpEx every few years, or a just a segment of it on a rotational basis, will not only help you readily justify the expenditure but also find waste and inefficiencies you didn’t know existed.

Tip #2: Capitalize your employee capital project work. While some organizations aren’t allowed to do this, others who can simply don’t bother. Unfortunately, this act can bloat the OpEx side of the equation substantially. Many regular employees spend a significant amount of their time working on capital projects, but this fact is invisible to the business. This is why the business keeps asking why it takes so many people to run IT.

Tip #3: Break out your cloud vs. on-premises costs. Burying cloud apps costs in a generic software bucket works against any transparency ambitions you may have. If you have anything resembling a cloud strategy, you need to track, report, and plan for these costs separately in order to measure benefits realization. This goes for cloud infrastructure costs, too.

Tip #4: Spend time on your CIO service view forecast. Completing this view counts as a first step toward service-based costing and is a good starting point for setting up an accurate service catalog. If looking for cost reductions, you’ll want to examine your forecasts in this view as there will likely be service-level reductions you’ll need to propose to hit your cost-cutting goals.

Tip #5: Budget with consideration for chargeback. chargeback mechanisms for OpEx can be challenging to manage and have political repercussions, but they do shift accountability back to the business, guarantee that the IT bills get paid, and reduce IT’s OpEx burden. Selectively charging business units for applications that only they use may be a good entry point into chargeback. It may also be as far as you want to go with it. Doing the CXO business view forecast will provide insight into your opportunities here.

Forecast your non-project CapEx

These costs are often the smallest percentage of overall expenditure but one of the biggest sources of financial grief for IT.

What to expect…

  • These costs can be hard to predict. Anticipating expenditure on end-user hardware such as laptops depends on knowing how many new staff will be hired by the organization next year. Predicting the need to buy networking hardware depends on knowing if, and when, a critical piece of equipment is going to spontaneously fail. You can never be completely sure.
  • IT often must reallocate funds from other areas of its budget to cover non-project CapEx costs. Unfortunately, keeping the network running and ensuring employees have access to that network is seen exclusively as an IT problem, not a business problem. Plan to change this mindset.

Key forecasting principles…

Discuss hiring plans with the business.
Pay close attention to your asset lifecycles.
Prepare to advise about depreciation schedules.
Build in contingency for the unexpected.

For more information about ensuring IT isn’t left in the lurch when it comes to non-project CapEx, see the following Info-Tech blueprints:

Manage End-User Devices

Develop an Availability and Capacity Management Plan

Modernize the Network

Apply these non-project CapEx forecasting tips

A good forecast relies on your ability to accurately predict the future.

Tip #1: Top up new hire estimations: Talk to every business unit leader about their concrete hiring plans, not their aspirations. Get a number, increase that number by 25% or 20 FTEs (whichever is less), and use this new number to calculate your end-user non-project CapEx.

Tip #2: Make an arrangement for who’s paying for operational technology (OT) devices and equipment. OT involves specialized devices such as in-the-field sensors, scanners, meters, and other networkable equipment. Historically, operational units have handled this themselves, but this has created security problems and they still rely on IT for support. Sort the financials out now, including whose budget device and equipment purchases appear on, as well as what accommodations IT will need to make in its own budget to support them.

Tip #3: Evaluate cloud infrastructure and managed services. These can dramatically reduce your non-project CapEx, particularly on the network and data center fronts. However, these solutions aren’t necessarily less expensive and will drive up OpEx, so tread cautiously.

Tip #4: Definitely do an inventory. If you haven’t invested in IT asset management, put it on your project and budgetary agenda. You can’t manage what you don’t know you have, so asset discovery should be your first order of business. From there, start gathering asset lifecycle information and build in alerting to aid your spend planning.

Tip #5: Think about retirement: What assets are nearing end of life or the end of their depreciation schedule? What impact is this having on non-project OpEx in terms of maintenance and support? Deciding to retire, replace, or extend an IT operational asset will change your non-project CapEx outlook and will affect costs in other areas.

Tip #6: Create a contingency fund: You need one to deal with surprises and emergencies, so why wait?

Document the organization’s projected FTEs by business function

This data point is usually missing from IT’s budget forecasting data set. Try to get it.

A powerful metric to share with business stakeholders is expenditure per employee or FTE. It’s powerful because:

  • It’s one of the few metrics that’s intuitively understood by most people
  • It can show changes in IT expenditure over time at both granular and general levels.

This metric is one of the simplest to calculate. The challenge is in getting your hands on the data in the first place.

  • Most business unit leaders struggle to pin down this number in terms of actuals as they have difficulty determining what an FTE actually is. Does it include contract staff? Part-time staff? Seasonal workers? Volunteers and interns? And if the business unit has high turnover, this number can fluctuate significantly.
  • Encourage your business peers to produce a rational estimate. Unlike the headcount number you’re seeking to forecast for non-project capital expenditure for end-user hardware, this FTE number should strive to be more in the ballpark, as you’re not using it to ensure sufficient funds but comparatively track expenditure year to year.
  • Depending on your industry, employees or FTEs may not be the best measurement. Use what works best for you. Number of unique users is a common one. Other industry-specific examples include per student, per bed, per patient, per account, and per resident.

Start to build in long-term and short-term forecasting into your budgeting process

These are growing practices in mature IT organizations that afford significant flexibility.

Short-term forecasting:

Long-term forecasting:

  • At Donaldson Company, budgeting is a once-a-year event, but they’ve started formalizing a forecast review three times a year.
  • These mini-forecasts are not as full blown as the annual forecasting process. Rather, they look at specific parts of the budget and update it based on changing realities.

“It’s a great step in the right direction. We look at
the current, and then the future. What we’re really pushing is how to keep that outyear spend more in discussion. The biggest thing we’re trying to do when we approve projects is look at what does that approval do to outyear spend? Is it going to increase? Is it going to decrease? Will we be spending more on licensing? On people?”

– Kristen Thurber, IT Director, Office of the CIO,
Donaldson Company

  • In 2017, the Hawaii Medical Service Association accepted the fact that they were very challenged with legacy systems. They needed to modernize.
  • They created a multi-year strategic budget -- a five-year investment plan. This plan was a success. They were able to gain approval for a five-year horizon with variable allocations per year, as required.

“This approach was much better. We now
have a “guarantee” of funding for five years now – they’ve conceptually agreed. Now we don’t have
to make that request for new money every time
if we need more. We can vary the amount every
year – it doesn’t have to be the same.”

– Trisha Goya, Director, IT Governance & Administration,
Hawaii Medical Service Association

3.4 Forecast your non-project OpEx and CapEx

Time: Depends on size of vendor portfolio and workforce

  1. Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook and navigate to Tab 4, “Business as Usual Forecast”. This tab assumes an incremental budgeting approach. Last year’s actuals have been carried forward for you to build upon.
  2. Enter expected percentage-based cost increases/decreases for next fiscal year for each of the following variables (columns E-I): inflation, vendor pricing, labor costs, service levels, and depreciation. Do this for all sub-categories for the ITFM cost model views you’ve opted to map. Provide rationales for your percentage values in column K.
  3. In columns M and N, enter the anticipated percentage allocation of cost to non-project CapEx versus non-project OpEx.
  4. In column O, rows 29-38, enter the projected FTEs for each business function (if available).
  5. If you choose, make longer-term, high-level forecasts for 2-3 years in the future in columns P-U. Performing longer-term forecasts for at least the CFO expense view categories is recommended.

Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook

Input Output
  • Last fiscal year’s actuals
  • Knowledge of likely inflation, vendor cost, and salary expectations for next fiscal year
  • Depreciation amounts
  • A non-project OpEx and CapEx forecast for next fiscal year
Materials Participants
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Case Study

INDUSTRY: Insurance

SOURCE: Anonymous

Challenge

Solution

Results

In his first run at the annual budgeting process, a new CIO received delivery dates from Finance and spent the next three months building the budget for the next fiscal year.

He discovered that the organization had been underinvesting in IT for a long time. There were platforms without support, no accounting for currency exchange rates on purchases, components that had not be upgraded in 16 years, big cybersecurity risks, and 20 critical incidences a month.

In his budget, the CIO requested a 22-24% increase in IT expenditure to deal with the critical gaps, and provided a detailed defense of his proposal

But the new CIO’s team and Finance were frustrated with him. He asked his IT finance leader why. She said she didn’t understand what his direction was and why the budgeting process was taking so long – his predecessor did the budget in only two days. He would add up the contracts, add 10% for inflation, and that’s it.

Simply put, the organization hadn’t taken budgeting seriously. By doing it right, the new CIO had inadvertently challenged the status quo.

The CIO ended up under-executing his first budget by 12% but is tracking closer to plan this year. Significantly, he’s been able cut critical incidences from 20 down to only 2-3 per month.

Some friction persists with the CFO, who sees him as a “big spender,” but he believes that this friction has forced him to be even better.

Phase recap: Develop your forecasts

The hard math is done. Now it’s time to step back and craft your final proposed budget and its key messages.

This phase focused on developing your forecasts and proposed budget for next fiscal year. It included:

  • Developing assumptions and alternative scenarios. These will showcase your understanding of business context as well as what’s most likely to happen (or should happen) next year.
  • Forecasting your project CapEx costs. If these costs weren’t laid out already in formal, approved project proposals or plans, now you know why it’s the better approach for developing a budget.
  • Forecasting your non-project CapEx and OpEx costs. Now you should have more clarity and transparency concerning where these costs are going and exactly why they need to go there.

“Ninety percent of your projects will get started but a good 10% will never get off the ground because of capacity or the business changes their mind or other priorities are thrown in. There are always these sorts of challenges that come up.”

– Theresa Hughes, Executive Counselor,
Info-Tech Research Group
and Former IT Executive

Phase 4

Build Your Proposed Budget

Lay Your
Foundation

Get Into Budget-Starting Position

Develop Your
Forecasts

Build Your
Proposed Budget

Create and Deliver Your Presentation

1.1 Understand what your budget is
and does

1.2 Know your stakeholders

1.3 Continuously pre-sell your budget

2.1 Assemble your resources

2.2 Understand the four views of the ITFM Cost Model

2.3 Review last year’s budget vs.
actuals and five-year historical trends

2.4 Set your high-level goals

3.1 Develop assumptions and
alternative scenarios

3.2 Forecast your project CapEx

3.3 Forecast your non-project CapEx and OpEx

4.1 Aggregate your numbers

4.2 Stress test your forecasts

4.3 Challenge and perfect your
rationales

5.1 Plan your content

5.2 Build your presentation

5.3 Present to stakeholders

5.4 Make final adjustments and submit your IT budget

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

  • Pulling your forecasts together into a comprehensive IT budget for next fiscal year.
  • Double checking your forecasts to ensure they’re accurate.
  • Fine tuning the rationales behind your proposals.

This phase involves the following participants:

  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Build your proposed budget

Triple check your numbers and put the finishing touches on your approval-winning rationales.

This phase is where your analysis and decision making finally come together into a coherent budget proposal. Key steps include:

  • Aggregating your numbers. This step involves pulling together your project CapEx, non-project CapEx, and non-project OpEx forecasts into a comprehensive whole and sanity-checking your expenditure-type ratios.
  • Stress-testing your forecasts. Do some detailed checks to ensure everything’s accounted for and you haven’t overlooked any significant information or factors that could affect your forecasted costs.
  • Challenging and perfecting your rationales. Your ability to present hard evidence and rational explanations in support of your proposed budget is often the difference between a yes or a no. Look at your proposals from different stakeholder perspectives and ask yourself, “Would I say yes to this if I were them?”

“We don’t buy servers and licenses because we want to. We buy them because we have to. IT doesn’t need those servers out at our data center provider, network connections, et cetera. Only a fraction of these costs are to support us in the IT department. IT doesn’t have control over these costs because we’re not the consumers.”

– Matt Johnson, IT Director Governance and Business Solutions, Milwaukee County

Great rationales do more than set you up for streamlined budgetary approval

Rationales build credibility and trust in your business capabilities. They can also help stop the same conversations happening year after year.

Any item in your proposed budget can send you down a rabbit hole if not thoroughly defensible.

You probably won’t need to defend every item, but it’s best to be prepared to do so. Ask yourself:

  • What areas of spend does the CFO come back to year after year? Is it some aspect of OpEx, such as workforce costs or cloud software fees? Is it the relationship between proposed project spend and business benefits? Provide detailed and transparent rationales for these items to start re-directing long-term conversations to more strategic issues.
  • What areas of spend seem to be recurring points of conflict with business unit leaders? Is it surprise spend that comes from business decisions that didn’t include IT? Is it business-unit leaders railing against chargeback? Have frank, information-sharing conversations focused on business applications, service-level requirements, and true IT costs to support them.
  • What’s on the CEO’s mind? Are they focused on entering a new overseas market, which will require capital investment? Are they interested in the potential of a new technology because competitors are adopting it? It may not be the same focus as last year, so ensure you have fresh rationales that show how IT will help deliver on these business goals.

“Budgets get out of control when one department fails to care for the implications of change within another department's budget. This wastes time, reduces accuracy and causes conflict.”

– Tara Kinney, Atomic Revenue, LLC.

Rationalizing costs depends on the intention of the spend

Not all spending serves the same purpose. Some types require deeper or different justifications than others.

For the business, there are two main purposes for spend:

  1. Spending that drives revenues or the customer experience. Think in terms of return on investment (ROI), i.e. when will the expenditure pay for itself via the revenue gains it helps create?
  2. Spending that mitigates and manages risk. Think in terms of cost-benefit, i.e. what are the costs of doing something versus doing nothing at all?
Source: Kris Blackmon, NetSuite Brainyard.

“Approval came down to ROI and the ability to show benefits realization for years one, two, and three through five.”

– Duane Cooney, Executive Counselor, Info-Tech Research Group, and Former Healthcare CIO

Regardless of its ultimate purpose, all expenditure needs statements of assumptions, obstacles, and likelihood of goals being realized behind it.

  • What are the assumptions that went into the calculation?
  • Is the spend new or a reallocation (and from where)?
  • What’s the likelihood of realizing returns or benefits?
  • What are potential obstacles to realizing returns or benefits?

Rationales aren’t only for capital projects – they can and should be applied to all proposed OpEx and CapEx. Business project rationales tend to drive revenue and the customer experience, demanding ROI calculations. Internal IT-projects and non-project expenditure are often focused on mitigating and managing risk, requiring cost-benefit analysis.

First, make sure your numbers add up

There are a lot of numbers flying around during a budgeting process. Now’s the time to get out of the weeds, look at the big picture, and ensure everything lines up.

Overall

Non-Project OpEx

Non-Project CapEx

Project CapEx

  • Is your proposed budget consistent with previous IT expenditure patterns?
  • Did you account for major known anomalies or events?
  • Is your final total in line with your CFO’s communicated targets and expectations?
  • Are your alternative scenarios realistic and reflective of viable economic contexts that your organization could find itself in in the near term?
  • Are the OpEx-to-CapEx ratios sensible?
  • Does it pass your gut check?
  • Did you research and verify market rates for employees and skill sets?
  • Did you research and verify likely vendor pricing and potential increases?
  • Are cost categories with variances greater than +5% backed up by defensible IT hiring plans or documented operational growth or improvement initiatives?
  • Have you accounted for the absorption of previous capital project costs into day-to-day management, maintenance, and support operations?
  • Do you have accurate depreciation amounts and timeframes for their discontinuation?
  • Are any variances driven by confirmed business plans to increase headcount, necessitating purchase of end-user hardware and on-premises software licenses?
  • Are any variances due to net-new planned/contingency purchases or the retirement of depreciable on-premises equipment?
  • Is funding for all capital projects represented reliable, i.e. has it been approved?
  • Are all in-progress, proposed, or committed project CapEx costs backed up with reliable estimates and full project documentation?
  • Do capital project costs include the capitalizable costs of employees working on those projects, and were these amounts deducted from non-project OpEx?
  • Have you estimated the longer-term OpEx impact of your current capital projects?

4.1 Aggregate your proposed budget numbers and stress test your forecasts

2 hours

  1. Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook for this activity. If you have been using it thus far, the Workbook will have calculated your numbers for you across the four views of the ITFM Cost Model on Tab 7, “Proposed Budget”, including:
    1. Forecasted non-project OpEx, non-project CapEx (including depreciation values), project CapEx, and total values.
    2. Numerical and percentage variances from the previous year.
  2. Test and finalize your forecasts by applying the questions on the previous slide.
  3. Flag cost categories where large variances from the previous year or large numbers in general appear – you will need to ensure your rationales for these variances are rigorous in the next step.
  4. Make amendments if needed to Tabs 4, “Business as Usual Forecast” and 5, “Project CapEx Forecast” in the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.

Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook

InputOutputMaterialsParticipants
  • Final drafts of all IT cost forecasts
  • A final proposed IT budget
  • IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Case Study

INDUSTRY: Healthcare

SOURCE: Anonymous

Challenge

Solution

Results

A senior nursing systems director needed the CIO’s help. She wanted to get a project off the ground, but it wasn’t getting priority or funding.

Nurses were burning out. Many were staying one to two hours late per shift to catch up on patient notes. Their EHR platform had two problematic workflows, each taking up to about 15 minutes per nurse per patient to complete. These workflows were complex, of no value, and just not getting done. She needed a few million dollars to make the fix.

The CIO worked with the director to do the math. In only a few hours, they realized that the savings from rewriting the workflows would allow them to hire over 500 full-time nurses.

The benefits realized would not only help reduce nurse workload and generate savings, but also increase the amount of time spent with patients and number of patients seen overall. They redid the math several times to ensure they were right.

The senior nursing systems director presented to her peers and leadership, and eventually to the Board of Directors. The Board immediately saw the benefits and promoted the project to first on the list ahead of all other projects.

This collaborative approach to generating project benefits statements helped the CIO gain trust and pave the way for future budgets.

The strength of your rationales will determine how readily your budget is approved

When proposing expenditure, you need to thoroughly consider the organization’s goals, its governance culture, and the overall feasibility of what’s being asked.

First, recall what budgets are really about.

The completeness, accuracy, and granularity of your numbers and thorough ROI calculations for projects are essential. They will serve you well in getting the CFO’s attention. However, the numbers will only get you halfway there. Despite what some people think, the work in setting a budget is more about the what, how, and why – that is, the rationale – than about the how much.

Next, revisit Phase 1 of this blueprint and review:

  • Your organization’s budgeting culture and processes.
  • The typical accountabilities, priorities, challenges, opportunities, and expectations associated with your CFO, CEO, and CXO IT budget stakeholders.
  • Your budgetary mandate as the head of IT.

Then, look at each component of your proposed budget through each of these three rationale-building lenses.

Business goals
What are the organization’s strategic priorities?

Governance culture
How constrained is the decision-making process?

Feasibility
Can we make it happen?

Linking proposed spend to strategic goals isn’t just for strategic project CapEx

Tie in your “business as usual” non-project OpEx and CapEx, as well.

Business goals

What are the organization’s strategic priorities?

Context

This is all about external factors, namely the broader economic, political, and industry contexts in which the organization operates.

Lifecycle position

The stage the organization is at in terms of growth, stability, or decline will drive decisions, priorities, and the ability to spend or invest.

Opportunities

Context and lifecycle position determine opportunities, which are often defined in terms of potential cost savings
or ROI.

Tie every element in your proposed budget to an organizational goal.

Non-project OpEx

  • Remember that OpEx is what comes from the realization of past strategic goals. If that past goal is still valid, then the OpEx that keeps that goal alive is, too.
  • Business viability and continuity are often unexpressed goals. OpEx directly supports these goals.
  • Periodically apply zero-based budgeting to OpEx to re-rationalize and identify waste.

Non-project CapEx

  • Know the impact of any business growth goals on future headcount – this is essential to rationalize laptop/desktop and other end-user hardware spend.
  • Position infrastructure equipment spend in terms of having sufficient capacity to support growth goals as well as ensuring network/system reliability and continuity.
  • Leverage depreciation schedules as backup.

Project CapEx

  • Challenge business-driven CapEx projects if they don’t directly support stated goals.
  • Ideally, the goal-supporting rationales for software, hardware, and workforce CapEx have been laid out in an already-approved project proposal. Refer to these plans.
  • If pitching a capital project at the last minute, especially an IT-driven one, expect a “no” regardless of how well it ties to goals.

Your governance culture will determine what you need to show and when you show it

The rigor of your rationales is entirely driven by “how things are done around here.”

Governance Culture

How rigorous/ constrained
is decision-making?

Risk tolerance

This is the organization’s willingness to be flexible, take chances, make change, and innovate. It is often driven by legal and regulatory mandates.

Control

Control manifests in the number and nature of rules and how authority and accountability are centralized or distributed in the organization.

Speed to action

How quickly decisions are made and executed upon is determined by the amount of consultation and number of approval steps.

Ensure all parts of your proposed budget align with what’s tolerated and allowed.

Non-project OpEx

  • Don’t hide OpEx. If it’s a dirty word, put it front and center to start normalizing it.
  • As with business goals, position OpEx as necessary for business continuity and risk mitigation, as well as the thing that keeps long-term strategic goals alive.
  • Focus on efficiency and cost control, both in terms of past and future initiatives, regardless of the governance culture.

Non-project CapEx

  • Treat non-project CapEx in the same way as you would non-project OpEx.
  • IT must make purchases quickly in this area of spend, but drawn-out procurement processes can make this impossible. Consider including a separate proposal to establish a policy that gives IT the control to make end-user and network/data center equipment purchases faster and easier.

Project CapEx

  • If your organization is risk-averse, highly centralized, or slow to act, don’t expect IT to win approval for innovative capital projects. Let the business make any pitches and have IT serve in a supporting role.
  • Capital projects are often committed to 6-12 months in advance and can’t be completed within a fiscal year. Nudge the organization toward longer-term, flexible funding.

No matter which way your goals and culture lean, ground all your rationales in reality

Objective, unapologetic facts are your strongest rationale-building tool.

Feasibility

Can we do it, and what sacrifices will we have to make?

Funding

The ultimate determinant of feasibility is the availability, quantity, and reliability of funding next fiscal year and over the long term to support investment.

Capabilities

Success hinges on both the availability and accessibility of required skills and knowledge to execute on a spend plan in the required timeframe.

Risk

Risk is not just about obstacles to success and what could happen if you do something – it’s also about what could happen if you do nothing at all.

Vet every part of your proposed budget to ensure what you’re asking for is both realistic and possible.

Non-project OpEx

  • Point out your operational waste-reduction and efficiency-gaining efforts in hard, numerical terms.
  • Clearly demonstrate that OpEx cannot be reduced without sacrifices on the business side, specifically in terms of service levels.
  • Define OpEx impacts for all CapEx proposals to ensure funding commitments include long-term maintenance and support.

Non-project CapEx

  • This is a common source of surprise budget overage, and IT often sacrifices parts of its OpEx budget to cover it. Shed light on this problem and define IT’s boundaries.
  • A core infrastructure equipment contingency fund and a policy mandating business units pay for unbudgeted end-user tech due to unplanned or uncommunicated headcount increases are worth pursuing.

Project CapEx

  • Be sure IT is involved with every capital project proposal that has a technological implication (which is usually all of them).
  • Specifically, IT should take on responsibility for tech vendor evaluation and negotiation. Never leave this up to the business.
  • Ensure IT gains funding for supporting any technologies acquired via a capital planning process, including hiring if necessary.

Double-check to ensure your bases are covered

Detailed data and information checklist:

  • I have the following data and information for each item of proposed expenditure:
  • Sponsors, owners, and/or managers from IT and the business.
  • CapEx and OpEx costs broken down by workforce (employees/contract) and vendor (software, hardware, services) at a minimum for both last fiscal year (if continuing spend) and next fiscal year to demonstrate any changes.
  • Projected annual costs for the above, extending two to five years into the future, with dates when new spending will start, known depreciations will end, and CapEx will transition to OpEx.
  • Descriptions of any tradeoffs or potential obstacles.
  • Lifespan information for new, proposed assets informing depreciation scheduling.
  • Sources of funding (especially if new, transferred, or changed).
  • Copies of any research used to inform any of the above.

High-level rationale checklist:

  • I have done the following thinking and analysis for each item of proposed expenditure:
  • Considered it in the context of my organization’s broader operating environment and the constraints and opportunities this creates.
  • Tied it – directly or indirectly – to the achievement or sustainment of current or past (but still relevant) organizational goals.
  • Understood my organization’s tolerances, how things get done, and whether I can win any battles that I need to fight given these realities.
  • Worked with business unit leaders to fully understand their plans and how IT can support them.
  • Obtained current, verifiable data and information and have a good idea if, when, and how this information may change next year.
  • Assessed benefits, risks, dependencies, and overall feasibility, as well as created ROI statements where needed.
  • Stuck to the facts and am confident they can speak for themselves.

For more on creating detailed business cases for projects and investments, see Info-Tech’s comprehensive blueprint, Build a Comprehensive Business Case.

4.2 Challenge and perfect your rationales

2 hours

  1. Based on your analysis in Phase 1, review your organization’s current and near-term business goals (context, lifecycle position, opportunities), governance culture (risk tolerance, control, speed to action), and feasibility (funding, capabilities, risk) to understand what’s possible, what’s not, and your general boundaries.
  2. Review your proposed budget in its current form and flag items that may be difficult or impossible to sell, given the above.
  3. Systematically go through each item in you proposed budget and apply the detailed data and information and high-level rationale checklists on the previous slide to ensure you have considered it from every angle and have all the information you need to defend it.
  4. Track down any additional information needed to fill gaps and fine-tune your budget based on any discoveries, including eliminating or adding elements if needed.

Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook

InputOutput
  • Final drafts of all IT cost forecasts, including rationales
  • Fully rationalized proposed IT budget for next fiscal year
MaterialsParticipants
  • IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Phase recap: Build your proposed budget

You can officially say your proposed IT budget is done. Now for the communications part.

This phase is where everything came together into a coherent budget proposal. You were able to:

  • Aggregate your numbers. This involved pulling for project and non-project CapEx and OpEx forecasts into a single proposed IT budget total.
  • Stress-test your forecasts. Here, you ensured that all your numbers were accurate and made sense.
  • Challenge and perfect your rationales. Finally, you made sure you have all your evidence in place and can defend every component in your proposed IT budget regardless of who’s looking at it.

“Current OpEx is about supporting and aligning with past business strategies. That’s alignment. If the business wants to give up on those past business strategies, that’s up to them.”

– Darin Stahl, Distinguished Analyst and Research Fellow, Info-Tech Research Group

Phase 5

Create and Deliver Your Presentation

Lay Your
Foundation

Get Into Budget-Starting Position

Develop Your
Forecasts

Build Your
Proposed Budget

Create and Deliver Your Presentation

1.1 Understand what your budget is
and does

1.2 Know your stakeholders

1.3 Continuously pre-sell your budget

2.1 Assemble your resources

2.2 Understand the four views of the ITFM Cost Model

2.3 Review last year’s budget vs.
actuals and five-year historical trends

2.4 Set your high-level goals

3.1 Develop assumptions and
alternative scenarios

3.2 Forecast your project CapEx

3.3 Forecast your non-project CapEx and OpEx

4.1 Aggregate your numbers

4.2 Stress test your forecasts

4.3 Challenge and perfect your
rationales

5.1 Plan your content

5.2 Build your presentation

5.3 Present to stakeholders

5.4 Make final adjustments and submit your IT budget

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

  • Planning the content you’ll include in your budget presentation.
  • Pulling together your formal presentation.
  • Presenting, finalizing, and submitting your budget.

This phase involves the following participants:

  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Create and deliver your presentation

Pull it all together into something you can show your approvers and stakeholders and win IT budgetary approval.

This phase focuses on developing your final proposed budget presentation for delivery to your various stakeholders. Here you will:

  • Plan your final content. Decide the narrative you want to tell and select the visualizations and words you want to include in your presentation (or presentations) depending on the makeup of your target audience.
  • Build your presentation. Pull together all the key elements in a PowerPoint template in a way that best tells the IT budget story.
  • Present to stakeholders. Deliver your IT budgetary message.
  • Make final adjustments and submit your budget. Address any questions, make final changes, and deconstruct your budget into the account categories mandated by your Finance Department to plug into the budget template they’ve provided.

“I could have put the numbers together in a week. The process of talking through what the divisions need and spending time with them is more time consuming than the budget itself.”

– Jay Gnuse, IT Director, Chief Industries

The content you select to present depends on your objectives and constraints

Info-Tech classifies potential content according to three basic types: mandatory, recommended, and optional. What’s the difference?

Mandatory: Just about every CFO or approving body will expect to see this information. Often high level in nature, it includes:

  • A review of last year’s performance.
  • A comparison of proposed budget totals to last year’s actuals.
  • A breakdown of CapEx vs. OpEx.
  • A breakdown of proposed expenditure according to traditional workforce and vendor costs.

Recommended: This information builds on the mandatory elements, providing more depth and detail. Inclusion of recommended content depends on:

  • Availability of the information.
  • Relevance to a current strategic focus or overarching initiative in the organization.
  • Known business interest in the topic, or the topic’s ability to generate interest in IT budgetary concerns in general.

Optional: This is very detailed information that provides alternative views and serves as reinforcement of your key messages. Consider including it if:

  • You need to bring fuller transparency to a murky IT spending situation.
  • Your audience is open to it, i.e. it wouldn’t be seen as irrelevant, wasting their time, or a cause of discord.
  • You have ample time during your presentation to dive into it.

Deciding what to include or exclude depends 100% on your target audience. What will fulfill their basic information needs as well as increase their engagement in IT financial issues?

Revisit your assumptions and alternative scenarios first

These represent the contextual framework for your proposal and explain why you made the decisions you did.

Stating your assumptions and presenting at least two alternative scenarios helps in the following ways:

  1. Identifies the factors you considered when setting budget targets and proposing specific expenditures, and shows that you know what the important factors are.
  2. Lays the logical foundation for all the rationales you will be presenting.
  3. Demonstrates that you’ve thought broadly about the future of the organization and how IT is best able to support that future organization regardless of its state and circumstances.

Your assumptions and alternative scenarios may not appear back-to-back in your presentation, yet they’re intimately connected in that every unique scenario is based on adjustments to your core assumptions. These tweaks – and the resulting scenarios – reflect the different degrees of probability that a variable is likely to land on a certain value (i.e. an alternative assumption).

Your primary scenario is the one you believe is most likely to happen and is represented by the complete budget you’re recommending and presenting.

Target timeframe for presentation: 2 minutes

Key objectives: Setting context, demonstrating breadth of thought.

Potential content for section:

  • List of assumptions for the budget being presented (primary target scenario).
  • Two or more alternative scenarios.

“Things get cut when the business
doesn’t know what something is,
doesn’t recognize it, doesn’t understand it. There needs to be an education.”

– Angie Reynolds, Principal Research Director, ITFM Practice,
Info-Tech Research Group,

Select your assumptions and scenarios

See Tabs “Planning Variables” and 9, “Alternative Scenarios” in your IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook for these outputs.

Core assumptions

Primary target scenario

Alternative scenarios

Full alternative scenario budgets

List

Slide

Slide

Budget

Mandatory: This is a listing of both internal and external factors that are most likely to affect the challenges and opportunities your organization will have and how it can and will operate. This includes negotiable and non-negotiable internal and external constraints, stated priorities, and the expression of known risk factors.

Mandatory: Emanating from your core assumptions, this scenario is a high-level statement of goals, initial budget targets, and proposed budget based on your core assumptions.

Recommended: Two alternatives are typical, with one higher spend and one lower spend than your target. The state of the economy and funding availability are the assumptions usually tweaked. More radical scenarios, like the cost and implications of completely outsourcing IT, can also be explored.

Optional: This is a lot of work, but some IT leaders do it if an alternative scenario is a strong contender or is necessary to show that a proposed direction from the business is costly or not feasible.

The image contains screenshots of tab Planning Variables and Alternative Scenarios.

The first major section of your presentation will be a retrospective

Plan to kick things off with a review of last year’s results, factors that affected what transpired, and longer-term historical IT expenditure trends.

This retrospective on IT expenditure is important for three reasons:

  1. Clarifying definitions and the different categories of IT expenditure.
  2. Showing your stakeholders how, and how well you aligned IT expenditure with business objectives.
  3. Setting stakeholder expectations about what next year’s budget will look like based on past patterns.

You probably won’t have a lot of time for this section, so everything you select to share should pack a punch and perform double duty by introducing concepts you’ll need your stakeholders to have internalized when you present next year’s budget details.

Target timeframe for presentation: 7 minutes

Key objectives: Definitions, alignment, expectations-setting.

Potential content for section:

  • Last fiscal year budgeted vs. actuals
  • Expenditure by type
  • Major capital projects completed
  • Top vendor spend
  • Drivers of last year’s expenditures and efficiencies
  • Last fiscal year in in detail (expense view, service view, business view, innovation view)
  • Expenditure trends for the past five years

“If they don’t know the consequences of their actions, how are they ever going to change their actions?”

– Angela Hintz, VP of PMO & Integrated Services,
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana

Start at the highest level

See Tabs 1 “Historical Events & Projects,” 3 “Historical Analysis,” and 6 “Vendor Worksheet” in your IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook for these outputs.

Total budgeted vs. total actuals

Graph

Mandatory: Demonstrates the variance between what you budgeted for last year and what was actually spent. Explaining causes of variance is key.

l actuals by expenditure type

Graph

Mandatory: Provides a comparative breakdown of last year’s expenditure by non-project OpEx, non-project CapEx, and project CapEx. This offers an opportunity to explain different types of IT expenditure and why they’re the relative size they are.

Major capital projects completed

List

Mandatory: Illustrates progress made toward strategically important objectives.

Top vendors

List

Recommended: A list of vendors that incurred the highest costs, including their relative portion of overall expenditure. These are usually business software vendors, i.e. tools your stakeholders use every day. The number of vendors shown is up to you.

The image contains screenshots from Tabs 1, 3, and 6 of the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.

Describe drivers of costs and savings

See Tab 1, “Historical Events & Projects” in your IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook for these outputs.

Cost drivers

List

Mandatory: A list of major events, circumstances, business decisions, or non-negotiable factors that necessitated expenditure. Be sure to focus on the unplanned or unexpected situations that caused upward variance.

Savings drivers

List

Mandatory: A list of key initiatives pursued, or circumstances that resulted in efficiencies or savings. Include any deferred or canceled projects.

The image contains screenshots from Tab 1 of the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.

Also calculate and list the magnitude of costs incurred or savings realized in hard financial terms so that the full impact of these events is truly understood by your stakeholders.

“What is that ongoing cost?
If we brought in a new platform, what
does that do to our operating costs?”

– Kristen Thurber, IT Director, Office of the CIO, Donaldson Company

End with longer-term five-year trends

See Tab 3 “Historical Analysis” in your IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook for these outputs.

IT actual expenditure
year over year

Graph

Mandatory: This is crucial for showing overall IT expenditure patterns, particularly percentage changes up or down year to year, and what the drivers of those changes were.

IT actuals as a % of organizational revenue

Graph

Mandatory: You need to set the stage for the proposed percentage of organizational revenue to come. The CFO will be looking for consistency and an overall decreasing pattern over time.

IT expenditure per FTE year over year

Graph

Optional: This can be a powerful metric as it’s simple and easily to understand.

The image contains screenshots from Tab 3 of the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.

The historical analysis you can do is endless. You can generate many more cuts of the data or go back even further – it’s up to you.

Keep in mind that you won’t have a lot of time during your presentation, so stick to the high-level, high-impact graphs that demonstrate overarching trends or themes.

Show different views of the details

See Tab 3 “Historical Analysis” in your IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook for these outputs.

Budgeted vs. actuals CFO expense view

Graph

Mandatory: Showing different types of workforce expenditure compared to different types of vendor expenditure will be important to the CFO.

Budgeted vs. actuals CIO services view

Graph

Optional: Showing the expenditure of some IT services will clarify the true total costs of delivering and supporting these services if misunderstandings exist.

Budgeted vs. actuals CXO business view

Graph

Optional: A good way to show true consumption levels and the relative IT haves and have-nots. Potentially political, so consider sharing one-on-one with relevant business unit leaders instead of doing a big public reveal.

Budgeted vs. actual CEO innovation view

Graph

Optional: Clarifies how much the organization is investing in innovation or growth versus keeping the lights on. Of most interest to the CEO and possibly the CFO, and good for starting conversations about how well funding is aligned with strategic directions.

The image contains screenshots from Tab 3 of the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.

5.1a Select your retrospective content

30 minutes

  1. Open your copy of the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.
  2. From Tabs 1, “Historical Events & Projects, 3 “Historical Analysis”, and 6, “Vendor Worksheet,” select the visual outputs (graphs and lists) you plan to include in the retrospective section of your presentation. Consider the following when determining what to include or exclude:
    1. Fundamentals: Elements such as budgeted vs. actual, distribution across expenditure types, and drivers of variance are mandatory.
    2. Key clarifications: What expectations need to be set or common misunderstandings cleared up? Strategically insert visuals that introduce and explain important concepts early.
    3. Your time allowance. Plan for a maximum of seven minutes for every half hour of total presentation time.
  3. Note what you plan to include in your presentation and set aside.

Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook

InputOutput
  • Data and graphs from the completed IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook
  • Selected content and visuals for the historical/ retrospective section of the IT Budget Executive Presentation
MaterialsParticipants
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Next, transition from past expenditure to your proposal for the future

Build a logical bridge between what happened in the past to what’s coming up next year using a comparative approach and feature major highlights.

This transitional phase between the past and the future is important for the following reasons:

  1. It illustrates any consistent patterns of IT expenditure that may exist and be relevant in the near term.
  2. It sets the stage for explaining any deviations from historical patterns that you’re about to propose.
  3. It grounds proposed IT expenditure within the context of commitments made in previous years.

Consider this the essential core of your presentation – this is the key message and what your audience came to hear.

Target timeframe for presentation: 10 minutes

Key objectives: Transition, reveal proposed budget.

Potential content for section:

  • Last year’s actuals vs. next year’s proposed.
  • Next year’s proposed budget in context of the past five years’ year-over-year actuals.
  • Last year’s actual expenditure type distribution vs. next year’s proposed budget distribution.
  • Major projects to be started next year.

“The companies...that invest the most in IT aren’t necessarily the best performers.
On average, the most successful small and medium companies are more frugal when it comes to
company spend on IT (as long as they do it judiciously).”

– Source: Techvera, 2023

Compare next year to last year

See Tab 8, “Proposed Budget Analysis” in your IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook for these outputs.

Last year’s total actuals vs. next year’s total forecast

Proposed budget in context: Year-over-year expenditure

Last year’s actuals vs. next year’s proposed by expenditure type

Last year’s expenditure per FTE vs. next year’s proposed

Graph

Graph

Graph

Graph

Mandatory: This is the most important graph for connecting the past with the future and is also the first meaningful view your audience will have of your proposed budget for next year.

Mandatory: Here, you will continue the long-term view introduced in your historical data by adding on next year’s projections to your existing five-year historical trend. The percentage change from last year to next year will be the focus.

Recommended: A double-comparative breakdown of last year vs. next year by non-project OpEx, non-project CapEx, and project CapEx illustrates where major events, decisions, and changes are having their impact.

Optional: This graph is particularly useful in demonstrating the success of cost-control if the actual proposed budget is higher that the previous year but the IT cost per employee has gone down.

The image contains screenshots from Tab 8 of the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.

Select business projects to profile

See Tab 5, “Project CapEx Forecast” in your IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook for the data and information to create these outputs.

Major project profile

Slide

Mandatory: Focus on projects for which funding is already committed and lean toward those that are strategic or clearly support business goal attainment. How many you profile is up to you, but three to five is suggested.

Minor project overview

List

Optional: List other projects on IT’s agenda to communicate the scope of IT’s project-related responsibilities and required expenditure to be successful. Include in-progress projects that will be completed next year and net-new projects on the roster.

The image contains screenshots from Tab 5 of the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.

You can’t profile every project on the list, but it’s important that your stakeholders see their priorities clearly reflected in your budget; projects are the best way to do this.

If you’ve successfully pre-sold your budget and partnered with business-unit leaders to define IT initiatives, your stakeholders should already be very familiar with the project summaries you put in front of them in your presentation.

5.1b Select your transitional past-to-future content

30 minutes

  1. Open your copy of the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.
  2. From Tabs 5, “Project CapEx Forecast” and 7, “Proposed Budget Analysis”, select the visual outputs (graphs and lists) you plan to include in the transitional section of your presentation. Consider the following when determining what to include or exclude:
    1. Shift from CapEx to OpEx: If this has been a point of contention or confusion with your CFO in the past, or if your organization has actively committed to greater cloud or outsourcing intensity, you’ll want to show this year-to-year shift in expenditure type.
    2. Strategic priorities: Profile major capital projects that reflect stakeholder priorities. If your audience is already very familiar with these projects, you may be able to skip detailed profiles and simply list them.
    3. Your time allowance. Plan for a maximum of 10 minutes for every half hour of total presentation time.
  3. Note what you plan to include in your presentation and set aside.

Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook

InputOutput
  • Data and graphs from the completed IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook
  • Selected content and visuals for the past-to-future transitional section of the IT Budget Executive Presentation
MaterialsParticipants
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Finally, carefully select detailed drill-downs that add clarity and depth to your proposed budget

The graphs you select here will be specific to your audience and any particular message you need to send.

This detailed phase of your presentation is important because it allows you to:

  1. Highlight specific areas of IT expenditure that often get buried under generalities.
  2. View your proposed budget from different perspectives that are most meaningful to your audience, such as traditional workforce vs. vendor allocations, expenditure by IT service, business-unit consumption, and the allocation of funds to innovation and growth versus daily IT operations.
  3. Get stakeholder attention. For example, laying out exactly how much money will be spent next year in support of the Sales Department compared to other units will get the VP of Sales’ attention…and everyone else’s, for that matter. This kind of transparency is invaluable for enabling meaningful conversations and thoughtful decision-making about IT spend.

Target timeframe for presentation: 7 minutes, but this phase of the presentation may naturally segue into the final Q&A.

Key objectives: Transparency, dialogue, buy-in.

Potential content for section:

  • Allocation across workforce vs. vendors
  • Top vendors by expenditure
  • Allocation across on-premises vs. cloud
  • Allocation across core IT services
  • Allocation across core business units
  • Allocation across business focus area

“A budget is a quantified version of
your service-level agreements.”

– Darin Stahl, Distinguished Analysis & Research Fellow,
Info-Tech Research Group,

Start with the expense view details

See Tab 8, “Proposed Budget Analysis” in your IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook for these outputs.

Proposed budget: Workforce and vendors by expenditure type

Graph

Mandatory: This is the traditional CFO’s view, so definitely show it. The compelling twist here is showing it by expenditure type, i.e. non-project OpEx, non-project CapEx, and project CapEx.

Proposed budget: Cloud vs. on-premises vendor expenditure

Graph

Optional: If this is a point of contention or if an active transition to cloud solutions is underway, then show it.

Top vendors

Graph

Recommended: As with last year’s actuals, showing who the top vendors are slated to be next year speaks volumes to stakeholders about exactly where much of their money is going.

If you have a diverse audience with diverse interests, be very selective – you don’t want to bore them with things they don’t care about.

The image contains screenshots from Tab 8 of the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.

Offer choice details on the other views

See Tab 8, “Proposed Budget Analysis” in your IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook for these outputs.

Proposed budget: IT services by expenditure type

Graph

Optional: Business unit leaders will be most interested in the application services. Proposed expenditure on security and data and BI services may be of particular interest given business priorities. Don’t linger on infrastructure spend unless chargeback is in play.

Proposed budget: Business units by expenditure type

Graph

Optional: The purpose of this data is to show varying business units where they stand in terms of consumption. It may be more appropriate to show this graph in a one-on-one meeting or other context.

Proposed budget: Business focus by expenditure type

Graph

Optional: The CEO will care most about this data. If they’re not in the room, then consider bypassing it and discuss it separately with the CFO.

Inclusion of these graphs really depends on the makeup of your audience. It’s a good decision to show all of them to your CFO at some point before the formal presentation. Consider getting their advice on what to include and exclude.

The image contains screenshots from Tab 8 of the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.

5.1c Select next year’s expenditure sub-category details

30 minutes

  1. Open your copy of the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook.
  2. From Tab 8, “Proposed Budget Analysis,” select the visual outputs (graphs) you plan to include in the targeted expenditure sub-category details section of your presentation. Consider the following when determining what to include or exclude:
    1. The presence of important fence-sitters. If there are key individuals who require more convincing, this is where you show them the reality of what it costs to deliver their most business-critical IT services to them.
    2. The degree to which you’ve already gone over the numbers previously with your audience. Again, if you’ve done your pre-selling, this data may be old news and not worth going over again.
    3. Your time allowance. Plan for a maximum of seven minutes for every half hour of total presentation time.
  3. Note what you plan to include in your presentation and set aside.

Download the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook

InputOutput
  • Data and graphs from the completed IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook
  • Selected content and visuals for the expenditure category details section of the IT Budget Executive Presentation
MaterialsParticipants
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Head of IT
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Finalize your line-up and put your selected content into a presentation template

This step is about nailing down the horizontal logic of the story you want to tell. Start by ordering and loading the visualizations of your budget data.

Download Info-Tech’s IT Budget Executive Presentation Template

The image contains a screenshot of the IT Budget Executive Presentation Template.

If you prefer, use your own internal presentation standard template instead and Info-Tech’s template as a structural guide.

Regardless of the template you use, Info-Tech recommends the following structure:

  1. Summary: An overview of your decision-making assumptions, initial targets given the business context, and the total proposed IT budget amount.
  2. Retrospective: An overview of previous years’ performance, with a specific focus on last fiscal year.
  3. Proposed budget overview: A high-level view of the proposed budget for next fiscal year in the context of last year’s performance (i.e. the bridge from past to future), including alternative scenarios considered and capital projects on the roster.
  4. Proposed budget details by category: Detailed views of the proposed budget by expense type, IT service, business unit, and business focus category.
  5. Next steps: Include question-and-answer and itemization of your next actions through to submitting your final budget to the CFO.

Draft the commentary that describes and highlights your data’s key messages

This is where the rationales that you perfected earlier come into play.

Leave the details for the speaker’s notes.
Remember that this is an executive presentation. Use tags, pointers, and very brief sentences in the body of the presentation itself. Avoid walls of text. You want your audience to be listening to your words, not reading a slide.

Speak to everything that represents an increase or decrease of more than 5% or that simply looks odd.
Being transparent is essential. Don’t hide anything. Acknowledge the elephant in the room before your audience does to quickly stop suspicious or doubtful thoughts

Identify causes and rationales.
This is why your numbers are as they are. However, if you’re not 100% sure what all driving factors are, don’t make them up. Also, if the line between cause and effect isn’t straight, craft in advance a very simple way of explaining it that you can offer whenever needed.

Be neutral and objective in your language.
You need to park strong feelings at the door. You’re presenting rational facts and thoroughly vetted recommendations. The best defense is not to be defensive, or even offensive for that matter. You don’t need to argue, plead, or apologize – let your information speak for itself and allow the audience to arrive at their own logical conclusions.

Re-emphasize your core themes to create connections.
If a single strategic project is driving cost increases across multiple cost categories, point it out multiple times if needed to reinforce its importance. If an increase in one area is made possible by a significant offset in another, say so to demonstrate your ongoing commitment to efficiencies. If a single event from last year will continue having cost impacts on several IT services next year, spell this out.

5.2 Develop an executive presentation

Duration: 2 hours

  1. Download the IT Budget Executive Presentation PowerPoint template.
  2. Open your working version of the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook and copy and paste your selected graphs and tables into the template. Note: Pasting as an image will preserve graph formatting.
  3. Incorporate observations and insights about your proposed budget and other analysis into the template where indicated.
  4. Conduct an internal review of the final presentation to ensure it includes all the elements you need and is error-free.

Note: Refer to your organization’s standards and norms for executive-level presentations and either adapt the Info-Tech template accordingly or use your own.

Download the IT Budget Executive Presentation template

Input Output
  • Tabular and graphical data outputs in the IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook
  • Interpretive commentary based on your analysis
  • Executive presentation summarizing your proposed IT budget
Materials Participants
  • IT Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Workbook
  • IT Budget Executive Presentation template
  • CIO/IT Directors
  • IT Financial Lead
  • Other IT Management

Now it’s time to present your proposed IT budget for next fiscal year

If you’ve done your homework and pre-sold your budget, the presentation itself should be a mere formality with no surprises for anyone, including you.

Some final advice on presenting your proposed budget…

Partner up

If something big in your budget is an initiative that’s for a specific business unit, let that business unit’s leader be the face of it and have IT play the role of supporting partner.

Use your champions

Let your advocates know in advance that you’d appreciate hearing their voice during the presentation if you encounter any pushback, or just to reinforce your main messages.

Focus on the CFO

The CFO is the most important stakeholder in the room at the end of the day, even more than the CEO in some cases. Their interests should take priority if you’re pressed for time.

Avoid judgment

Let the numbers speak for themselves. Do point out highlights and areas of interest but hold off on offering emotion-driven opinions. Let your audience draw their own conclusions.

Solicit questions

You do want dialogue. However, keep your answers short and to the point. What does come up in discussion is a good indication of where you’ll need to spend more time in the future.

The only other thing that can boost your chances is if you’re lucky enough to be scheduled to present between 10:00 and 11:00 on a Thursday morning when people are most agreeable. Beyond that, apply the standard rules of good presentations to optimize your success.

Your presentation is done – now re-focus on budget finalization and submission

This final stage tends to be very administrative. Follow the rules and get it done.

  • Incorporate feedback: Follow up on comments from your first presentation and reflect them in your budget if appropriate. This may include:
    • Having follow-up conversations with stakeholders.
    • Further clarifying the ROI projections or business benefits.
    • Adjusting proposed expenditure amounts based on new information or a shift in priorities.
    • Adding details or increasing granularity around specific issues of interest.
  • Trim: Almost every business unit leader will need to make cuts to their initial budget proposal. After all, the CFO has a finite pool of money to allocate. If all’s gone well, it may only be a few percent. Resurrect your less-costly alternative scenario and selectively apply the options you laid out there. Focus on downsizing or deferring capital projects if possible. If you must trim OpEx, remind the CFO about any service-level adjustments that will need to happen to make the less expensive alternatives work.
  • Re-present: It’s not unusual to have to present your budget one more time after you’ve made your adjustments. In some organizations, the first presentation is to an internal executive group while the second one is to a governing board. The same rules apply to this second presentation as to your first one.
  • Submit: Slot your final budget into the list of accounts prescribed in the budget template provided by Finance. These templates often don’t align with IT’s budget categories, but you’ll have to make do.

Phase recap: Create and deliver your presentation

You’ve reached the end of the budget creation and approval process. Now you can refocus on using your budget as a living governance tool.

This phase focused on developing your final proposed budget presentation for delivery to your various stakeholders. Here, you:

  • Planned your final content. You selected the data and visuals to include and highlight.
  • Built your presentation. You pulled everything together into a PowerPoint template and crafted commentary to tell a cohesive IT budget story.
  • Presented to stakeholders. You delivered your proposed IT budget and solicited their comments and feedback.
  • Made final adjustments and submitted your budget. You applied final tweaks, deconstructed your budget to fit Finance’s template, and submitted it for entry into Finance’s system.

“Everyone understands that there’s never enough money. The challenge is prioritizing the right work and funding it.”

– Trisha Goya, Director, IT Governance & Administration, Hawaii Medical Service Association

Next Steps

“Keep that conversation going throughout the year so that at budgeting time no one is surprised…Make sure that you’re telling your story all year long and keep track of that story.”

– Angela Hintz, VP of PMO & Integrated Services,
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana

This final section will provide you with:

  • An overall summary of accomplishment.
  • Recommended next steps.
  • A list of contributors to this research.
  • Some related Info-Tech resources.

Summary of Accomplishment

You’ve successfully created a transparent IT budget and gotten it approved.

By following the phases and steps in this blueprint, you have:

  1. Learned more about what an IT budget does and what it means to your key stakeholders.
  2. Assembled your budgeting team and critical data needed for forecasting and budgeting, as well as set expenditure goals for next fiscal year, and metrics for improving the budgeting process overall.
  3. Forecasted your project and non-project CapEx and OpEx for next fiscal year and beyond.
  4. Fine-tuned your proposed expenditure rationales.
  5. Crafted and delivered an executive presentation and got your budget approved.

What’s next?

Use your approved budget as an ongoing IT financial management governance tool and track your budget process improvement metrics.

If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through an Info-Tech full-service engagement or Guided Implementation.

Contact your account representative for more information.

1-888-670-8889

Research Contributors and Experts

Monica Braun

Research Director, ITFM Practice

Info-Tech Research Group

Carol Carr

Technical Counselor (Finance)

Info-Tech Research Group

Larry Clark

Executive Counselor

Info-Tech Research Group

Duane Cooney

Executive Counselor

Info-Tech Research Group

Lynn Fyhrlund

Former Chief Information Officer

Milwaukee County

Jay Gnuse

Information Technology Director

Chief Industries

Trisha Goya

Director, IS Client Services

Hawaii Medical Service Association

Angela Hintz

VP of PMO & Integrated Services

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana

Rick Hopfer

Chief Information Officer

Hawaii Medical Service Association

Theresa Hughes

Executive Counselor

Info-Tech Research Group

Research Contributors and Experts

Dave Kish

Practice Lead, IT Financial Management Practice

Info-Tech Research Group

Matt Johnson

IT Director Governance and Business Solutions

Milwaukee County

Titus Moore

Executive Counselor

Info-Tech Research Group

Angie Reynolds

Principal Research Director, IT Financial Management Practice

Info-Tech Research Group

Mark Roman

Managing Partner, Executive Services

Info-Tech Research Group

Darin Stahl

Distinguished Analyst & Research Fellow

Info-Tech Research Group

Miguel Suarez

Head of Technology

Seguros Monterrey New York Life

Kristen Thurber

IT Director, Office of the CIO

Donaldson Company

Related Info-Tech Research & Services

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Bibliography

“How Much Should a Company Spend on IT?” Techvera, no date. Accessed 3 Mar. 2023.
“State of the CIO Study 2023.” Foundry, 25 Jan. 2023. Accessed 3 Mar. 2023.
Aberdeen Strategy & Research. “The State of IT 2023.” Spiceworks. Ziff Davis, 2022. Accessed 28 Feb. 2023.
Ainsworth, Paul. “Responsibilities of the Modern CFO - A Function in Transition.” TopTal, LLC., no date. Accessed 15 Feb. 2023.
Balasaygun, Kaitlin. “For the first time in a long time, CFOs can say no to tech spending.” CNBC CFO Council, 19 Jan. 2023. Accessed 17 Feb. 2023.
Bashir, Ahmad. “Objectives of Capital Budgeting and factors affecting Capital Budget Decisions.” LinkedIn, 27 May 2017. Accessed 14 Apr. 2023.
Blackmon, Kris. “Building a Data-Driven Budget Pitch the C-Suite Can't Refuse.” NetSuite Brainyard, 21 Sep. 2021. Accessed 17 Feb. 2023
Butcher, Daniel. “CFO to CFO: Budgeting to Fund Strategic Plans.” Strategic Finance Magazine/Institute of Management Accountants, 1 Dec. 2021. Accessed 17 Feb. 2023
Gray, Patrick. “IT Budgeting: A Cheat Sheet.” TechRepublic, 29 Jul. 2020. Accessed 28 Feb. 2023.
Greenbaum, David. “Budget vs. Actuals: Budget Variance Analysis & Guide.” OnPlan, 15 Mar. 2022. Accessed 22 Mar. 2023.
Huber, Michael and Joan Rundle. “How to Budget for IT Like a CFO.” Huber & Associates, no date. Accessed 15 Feb. 2023.
Kinney, Tara. “Executing Your Department Budget Like a CFO.” Atomic Revenue, LLC., no date. Accessed 15 Feb. 2023.
Lafley, A.G. “What Only the CFO Can Do.” Harvard Business Review, May 2009. Accessed 15 Mar. 2009.
Moore, Peter D. “IN THE DIGITAL WORLD, IT should be run as a profit center, not a cost center.” Wild Oak Enterprise, 26 Feb. 2020. Accessed 3 Mar. 2023.
Nordmeyer, Bille. “What Factors Are Going to Influence Your Budgeting Decisions?” bizfluent, 8 May 2019. Accessed 14 Apr. 2023
Ryan, Vincent. “IT Spending and 2023 Budgets Under Close Scrutiny.” CFO, 5 Dec. 2022. Accessed 3 Mar. 2023.
Stackpole, Beth. “State of the CIO, 2022: Focus turns to IT fundamentals.” CIO Magazine, 21 Mar. 2022. Accessed 3 Mar. 2023.

2020 Security Priorities Report

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  • Parent Category Name: Security Strategy & Budgeting
  • Parent Category Link: /security-strategy-and-budgeting

Use this deck to learn what projects security practitioners are prioritizing for 2020. Based on a survey of 460 IT security professionals, this report explains what you need to know about the top five priorities, including:

  • Signals and drivers
  • Benefits
  • Critical uncertainties
  • Case study
  • Implications

While the priorities should in no way be read as prescriptive, this research study provides a high-level guide to understand that priorities drive the initiatives, projects, and responsibilities that make up organizations' security strategies.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

There is always more to do, and if IT leaders are to grow with the business, provide meaningful value, and ascend the ladder to achieve true business partner and innovator status, aggressive prioritization is necessary. Clearly, security has become a priority across organizations, as security budgets have continued to increase over the course of 2019. 2020’s priorities highlight that data security has become the thread that runs through all other security priorities, as data is now the currency of the modern digital economy. As a result, data security has reshaped organizations’ priorities to ensure that data is always protected.

Impact and Result

Ultimately, understanding how changes in technology and patterns of work stand to impact the day-to-day lives of IT staff across seniority and industries will allow you to evaluate what your priorities should be for 2020. Ensure that you’re spending your time right. Use data to validate. Prioritize and implement.

2020 Security Priorities Report Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

This storyboard will help you understand what projects security practitioners are prioritizing for 2020.

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Data security

Data security often rubs against other organizational priorities like data quality, but organizations need to understand that the way they store, handle, and dispose of data is now under regulatory oversight.

  • 2020 Security Priorities Report – Priority 1: Data Security

2. Cloud security

Cloud security means that organizations can take advantage of automation tools not only for patching and patch management but also to secure code throughout the SDLC. It is clear that cloud will transform how security is performed.

  • 2020 Security Priorities Report – Priority 2: Cloud Security

3. Email security

Email security is critical, since email continues to be one of the top points of ingress for cyberattacks from ransomware to business email compromise.

  • 2020 Security Priorities Report – Priority 3: Email Security

4. Security risk management

Security risk management requires organizations to make decisions based on their individual risk tolerance on such things as machine learning and IoT devices.

  • 2020 Security Priorities Report – Priority 4: Security Risk Management

5. Security awareness and training

Human error continues to be a security issue. In 2020, organizations should tailor their security awareness and training to their people so that they are more secure not only at work but also in life.

  • 2020 Security Priorities Report – Priority 5: Security Awareness and Training
[infographic]

Drive Successful Sourcing Outcomes With a Robust RFP Process

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  • Parent Category Name: Vendor Management
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  • Most IT organizations do not have standard RFP templates and tools.
  • Many RFPs lack sufficient requirements.
  • Most RFP team members are not adequately trained on RFP best practices.
  • Most IT departments underestimate the amount of time that is required to perform an effective RFP.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Vendors generally do not like RFPs
    Vendors view RFPs as time consuming and costly to respond to and believe that the decision is already made.
  • Dont ignore the benefits of an RFI
    An RFI is too often overlooked as a tool for collecting information from vendors about their product offerings and services.
  • Leverage a pre-proposal conference to maintain an equal and level playing field
    Pre-proposal conference is a convenient and effective way to respond to vendors’ questions ensuring all vendors have the same information to provide a quality response.

Impact and Result

  • A bad or incomplete RFP results in confusing and incomplete vendor RFP responses which consume time and resources.
  • Incomplete or misunderstood requirements add cost to your project due to the change orders required to complete the project.

Drive Successful Sourcing Outcomes With a Robust RFP Process Research & Tools

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Storyboard – Leverage your vendor sourcing process to get better results

Discover a proven process for your RFPs. Review Info-Tech’s process and understand how you can prevent your organization from leaking negotiation leverage while preventing vendors from taking control of your RFP. Our 7-phase process prevents a bad RFP from taking your time, money, and resources.

  • Drive Successful Sourcing Outcomes With a Robust RFP Process Storyboard

2. Define your RFP Requirements Tool – A convenient tool to gather your requirements and align them to your negotiation strategy.

Use this tool to assist you and your team in documenting the requirements for your RFP. Use the results of this tool to populate the requirements section of your RFP.

  • RFP Requirements Worksheet

3. RFP Development Suite of Tools – Use Info-Tech’s RFP, pricing, and vendor response tools and templates to increase your efficiency in your RFP process.

Configure this time-saving suite of tools to your organizational culture, needs, and most importantly the desired outcome of your RFP initiative. This suite contains four unique RFP templates. Evaluate which template is appropriate for your RFP. Also included in this suite are a response evaluation guidebook and several evaluation scoring tools along with a template to report the RFP results to stakeholders.

  • RFP Calendar and Key Date Tool
  • Vendor Pricing Tool
  • Lean RFP Template
  • Short-Form RFP Template
  • Long-Form RFP Template
  • Excel Form RFP Tool
  • RFP Evaluation Guidebook
  • RFP Evaluation Tool
  • Vendor TCO Tool
  • Consolidated Vendor RFP Response Evaluation Summary
  • Vendor Recommendation Presentation

Infographic

Workshop: Drive Successful Sourcing Outcomes With a Robust RFP Process

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

1 Foundation for Creating Requirements

The Purpose

Problem Identification

Key Benefits Achieved

Current process mapped and requirements template configured

Activities

1.1 Overview and level-setting

1.2 Identify needs and drivers

1.3 Define and prioritize requirements

1.4 Gain business authorization and ensure internal alignment

Outputs

Map Your Process With Gap Identification

Requirements Template

Map Your Process With Gap Identification

Requirements Template

Map Your Process With Gap Identification

Requirements Template

Map Your Process With Gap Identification

Requirements Template

2 Creating a Sourcing Process

The Purpose

Define Success Target

Key Benefits Achieved

Baseline RFP and evaluation templates

Activities

2.1 Create and issue RFP

2.2 Evaluate responses/proposals and negotiate the agreement

2.3 Purchase goods and services

Outputs

RFP Calendar Tool

RFP Evaluation Guidebook

RFP Respondent Evaluation Tool

3 Configure Templates

The Purpose

Configure Templates

Key Benefits Achieved

Configured Templates

Activities

3.1 Assess and measure

3.2 Review templates

Outputs

Long-Form RFP Template

Short-Form RFP Template

Excel-Based RFP Template

Further reading

Drive Successful Sourcing Outcomes With a Robust RFP Process

Leverage your vendor sourcing process to get better results.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Drive Successful Sourcing Outcomes with a Robust RFP Process

Lack of RFP Process Causes...
  • Stress
  • Confusion
  • Frustration
  • Directionless
  • Exhaustion
  • Uncertainty
  • Disappointment
Solution: RFP Process
Steps in an RFP Process, 'Identify Need', 'Define Business Requirements', 'Gain Business Authorization', 'Perform RFI/RFP', 'Negotiate Agreement', 'Purchase Good and Services', and 'Assess and Measure Performance'.
  • Best value solutions
  • Right-sized solutions
  • Competitive Negotiations
  • Better requirements that feed negotiations
  • Internal alignment on requirements and solutions
  • Vendor Management Governance Plan
Requirements
  • Risk
  • Legal
  • Support
  • Security
  • Technical
  • Commercial
  • Operational
  • Vendor Management Governance
Templates, Tools, Governance
  • RFP Template
  • Your Contracts
  • RFP Procedures
  • Pricing Template
  • Evaluation Guide
  • Evaluation Matrix
Vendor Management
  • Scorecards
  • Classification
  • Business Review Meetings
  • Key Performance Indicators
  • Contract Management
  • Satisfaction Survey

Analyst Perspective

Consequences of a bad RFP

Photo of Steven Jeffery, Principal Research Director, Vendor Management, Co-Author: The Art of Creating a Quality RFP, Info-Tech Research Group

“A bad request for proposal (RFP) is the gift that keeps on taking – your time, your resources, your energy, and your ability to accomplish your goal. A bad RFP is ineffective and incomplete, it creates more questions than it answers, and, perhaps most importantly, it does not meet your organization’s expectations.”

Steven Jeffery
Principal Research Director, Vendor Management
Co-Author: The Art of Creating a Quality RFP
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

  • Most IT organizations are absent of standard RFP templates, tools, and processes.
  • Many RFPs lack sufficient requirements from across the business (Legal, Finance, Security, Risk, Procurement, VMO).
  • Most RFP team members are not adequately trained on RFP best practices.
  • Most IT departments underestimate the amount of time required to perform an effective RFP.
  • An ad hoc sourcing process is a common recipe for vendor performance failure.

Common Obstacles

  • Lack of time
  • Lack of resources
  • Right team members not engaged
  • Poorly defined requirements
  • Too difficult to change supplier
  • Lack of a process
  • Lack of adequate tools/processes
  • Lack of a vendor communications plan that includes all business stakeholders.
  • Lack of consensus as to what the ideal result should look like.

Info-Tech’s Approach

  • Establish a repeatable, consistent RFP process that maintains negotiation leverage and includes all key components.
  • Create reusable templates to expedite the RFP evaluation and selection process.
  • Maximize the competition by creating an equal and level playing field that encourages all the vendors to respond to your RFP.
  • Create a process that is clear and understandable for both the business unit and the vendor to follow.
  • Include Vendor Management concepts in the process.

Info-Tech Insight

A well planned and executed sourcing strategy that focuses on solid requirements, evaluation criteria, and vendor management will improve vendor performance.

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Your challenge is to determine the best sourcing tool to obtain vendor information on capabilities, solution(s), pricing and contracting: RFI, RFP, eRFX.

Depending on your organization’s knowledge of the market, your available funding, and where you are in the sourcing process, there are several approaches to getting the information you need.

An additional challenge is to answer the question “What is the purpose of our RFX?”

If you do not have in-depth knowledge of the market, available solutions, and viable vendors, you may want to perform an RFI to provide available market information to guide your RFP strategy.

If you have defined requirements, approved funding, and enough time, you can issue a detailed, concise RFP.

If you have “the basics” about the solution to be acquired and are on a tight timeframe, an “enhanced RFI” may fit your needs.

This blueprint will provide you with the tools and processes and insights to affect the best possible outcome.

Executive Summary

Common Obstacles

  • Lack of process/tools
  • Lack of input from stakeholders
  • Stakeholders circumventing the process to vendors
  • Vendors circumventing the process to key stakeholders
  • Lack of clear, concise, and thoroughly articulated requirements
  • Waiting until the vendor is selected to start contract negotiations
  • Waiting until the RFP responses are back to consider vendor management requirements
  • Lack of clear communication strategy to the vendor community that the team adheres to

Many organizations underestimate the time commitment for an RFP

70 Days is the average duration of an IT RFP.

The average number of evaluators is 5-6

4 Is the average number of vendor submissions, each requiring an average of two to three hours to review. (Source: Bonfire, 2019. Note: The 2019 Bonfire report on the “State of the RFP” is the most recent published.)

“IT RFPs take the longest from posting to award and have the most evaluators. This may be because IT is regarded as a complex subject requiring complex evaluation. Certainly, of all categories, IT offers the most alternative solutions. The technology is also changing rapidly, as are the requirements of IT users – the half-life of an IT requirement is less than six months (half the requirements specified now will be invalid six months from now). And when the RFP process takes up two of those months, vendors may be unable to meet changed requirements when the time to implement arrives. This is why IT RFPs should specify the problem to be resolved rather than the solution to be provided. If the problem resolution is the goal, vendors are free to implement the latest technologies to meet that need.” (Bonfire, “2019 State of the RFP”)

Why Vendors Don’t Like RFPs

Vendors’ win rate

44%

Vendors only win an average of 44% of the RFPs they respond to (Loopio, 2022).
High cost to respond

3-5%

Vendors budget 3-5% of the anticipated contract value to respond (LinkedIn, 2017, Note: LinkedIn source is the latest information available).
Time spent writing response

23.8 hours

Vendors spend on average 23.8 hours to write or respond to your RFP (Marketingprofs, 2021).

Negative effects on your organization from a lack of RFP process

Visualization titled 'Lack of RFP Process Causes' with the following seven items listed.

Stress, because roles and responsibilities aren’t clearly defined and communication is haphazard, resulting in strained relationships.

Confusion, because you don’t know what the expected or desired results are.

Directionless, because you don’t know where the team is going.

Uncertainty, with many questions of your own and many more from other team members.

Frustration, because of all the questions the vendors ask as a result of unclear or incomplete requirements.

Exhaustion, because reviewing RFP responses of insufficient quality is tedious.

Disappointment in the results your company realizes.

(Source: The Art of Creating a Quality RFP)

Info-Tech’s approach

Develop an inclusive and thorough approach to the RFP Process

Steps in an RFP Process, 'Identify Need', 'Define Business Requirements', 'Gain Business Authorization', 'Perform RFI/RFP', 'Negotiate Agreement', 'Purchase Good and Services', and 'Assess and Measure Performance'.

The Info-Tech difference:

  1. The secret to managing an RFP is to make it as manageable and as thorough as possible. The RFP process should be like any other aspect of business – by developing a standard process. With a process in place, you are better able to handle whatever comes your way, because you know the steps you need to follow to produce a top-notch RFP.
  2. The business then identifies the need for more information about a product/service or determines that a purchase is required.
  3. A team of stakeholders from each area impacted gather all business, technical, legal, and risk requirements. What are the expectations of the vendor relationship post-RFP? How will the vendors be evaluated?
  4. Based on the predetermined requirements, either an RFI or an RFP is issued to vendors with a predetermined due date.

Insight Summary

Overarching insight

Without a well defined, consistent RFP process, with input from all key stakeholders, the organization will not achieve the best possible results from its sourcing efforts.

Phase 1 insight

Vendors are choosing to not respond to RFPs due to their length and lack of complete requirements.

Phase 2 insight

Be clear and concise in stating your requirements and include, in addition to IT requirements, procurement, security, legal, and risk requirements.

Phase 3 insight

Consider adding vendor management requirements to manage the ongoing relationship post contract.

Tactical insight

Consider the RFP Evaluation Process as you draft the RFP, including weighting the RFP components. Don’t underestimate the level of effort required to effectively evaluate responses – write the RFP with this in mind.

Tactical insight

Provide strict, prescriptive instructions detailing how the vendor should submit their responses. Controlling vendor responses will increase your team’s efficiency in evaluations while providing ease of reference responses across multiple vendors.

Key deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

Key deliverables:

Info-Tech provides you with the tools you need to go to market in the most efficient manner possible, with guidance on how to achieve your goals.

Sample of

Long-Form RFP Template
For when you have complete requirements and time to develop a thorough RFP.
Sample of the Long-Form RFP Template deliverable. Short-Form RFP Template
When the requirements are not as extensive, time is short, and you are familiar with the market.
Sample of the Short-Form RFP Template deliverable.
Lean RFP Template
When you have limited time and some knowledge of the market and wish to include only a few vendors.
Sample of the Lean RFP Template deliverable. Excel-Form RFP Template
When there are many requirements, many options, multiple vendors, and a broad evaluation team.
Sample of the Excel-Form RFP Template deliverable.

Blueprint benefits

IT Benefits
  • Side-by-side comparison of vendor capabilities
  • Pricing alternatives
  • No surprises
  • Competitive solutions to deliver the best results
Mutual IT and Business Benefits
  • Reduced time to implement
  • Improved alignment between IT /Business
  • Improved vendor performance
  • Improved vendor relations
Business Benefits
  • Budget alignment, reduced cost
  • Best value
  • Risk mitigation
  • Legal and risk protections

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

Guided Implementation

Workshop

Consulting

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful." "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track." "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place." "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Guided Implementation

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is seven to twelve calls over the course of four to six months.

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Phase 4

Phase 5

Phase 6

Phase 7

Call #1: Identify the need Call #3: Gain business authorization Call #5: Negotiate agreement strategy Call #7: Assess and measure performance
Call #2: Define business requirements Call #4: Review and perform the RFX or RFP Call #6: Purchase goods and services

Workshop Overview

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com1-888-670-8889

Day 1 Day 2 Day 3
Activities
Answer “What problem do we need to solve?”

1.1 Overview and level-setting

1.2 Identify needs and drivers

1.3 Define and prioritize requirements

1.4 Gain business authorization and ensure internal alignment

Define what success looks like?

2.1 Create and issue RFP

2.2 Evaluate responses/ proposals and negotiate the agreement.

2.3 Purchase goods and services

Configure Templates

3.1 Assess and measure

3.2 Review tools

Deliverables
  1. Map your process with gap identification
  2. RFP Requirements Worksheet
  1. RFP Calendar and Key Date Tool
  2. RFP Evaluation Guidebook
  3. RFP Evaluation Tool
  1. Long-form RFP Template
  2. Short-form RFP Template
  3. Excel-based RFP Tool
  4. Lean RFP Template

Phase 1

Identify Need

Steps

1.1 Establish the need to either purchase goods/services (RFP) or acquire additional information from the market (RFI).

Steps in an RFP Process with the first step, 'Identify Need', highlighted.

This phase involves the following participants:

  • Business stakeholders
  • IT
  • Sourcing/Procurement
  • Finance

Identify the need based on business requirements, changing technology, increasing vendor costs, expiring contracts, and changing regulatory requirements.

Outcomes of this phase

Agreement on the need to go to market to make a purchase (RFP) or to acquire additional information (RFI) along with a high-level agreement on requirements, rough schedule (is there time to do a full blown RFP or are you time constrained, which may result in an eRFP) and the RFP team is identified.

Identify Need
Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5 Phase 6 Phase 7

Identify the Need for Your RFP

  • An RFP is issued to the market when you are certain that you intend to purchase a product/service and have identified an adequate vendor base from which to choose as a result of:

    • IT Strategy
    • Changes in technology
    • Marketplace assessment
    • Contract expiration/renewal
    • Changes in regulatory requirements
    • Changes in the business’ requirements
  • An RFI is issued to the market when you are uncertain as to available technologies or supplier capabilities and need budgetary costs for planning purposes.
  • Be sure to choose the right RFx tool for your situation!
Stock photo of a pen circling the word 'needs' on a printed document.

Phase 2

Define Your RFP Requirements

Steps

2.1 Define and classify the technical, business, financial, legal, and support and security requirements for your business.

Steps in an RFP Process with the second step, 'Define Business Requirements', highlighted.

This phase involves the following participants:

  • IT
  • Legal
  • Finance
  • Risk management
  • Sourcing/Procurement
  • Business stakeholders

Outcomes of this phase

A detailed list of required business, technical, legal and procurement requirements classified as to absolute need(s), bargaining and concession need(s), and “nice to haves.”

Define Business Requirements

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5 Phase 6 Phase 7

Define RFP Requirements

Key things to consider when defining requirements

  • Must be inclusive of the needs of all stakeholders: business, technical, financial, and legal
  • Strive for clarity and completeness in each area of consideration.
  • Begin defining your “absolute,” “bargaining,” “concession,” and ‘”dropped/out of scope” requirements to streamline the evaluation process.
  • Keep the requirements identified as “absolute” to a minimum, because vendors that do not meet absolute requirements will be removed from consideration.
  • Do you have a standard contract that can be included or do you want to review the vendor’s contract?
  • Don’t forget Data Security!
  • Begin defining your vendor selection criteria.
  • What do you want the end result to look like?
  • How will you manage the selected vendor after the contract? Include key VM requirements.
  • Defining requirements can’t be rushed or you’ll find yourself answering many questions, which may create confusion.
  • Collect all your current spend and budget considerations regarding the needed product(s) and service(s).

“Concentrate on the needs of the organization and not the wants of the individuals when creating requirements to avoid scope creep.” (Donna Glidden, ITRG Research Director)

Leverage the “ABCD” approach found in our Prepare for Negotiations More Effectively blueprint:
https://tymansgrpup.com/research/ss/prepare-for-negotiations-more-effectively

2.1 Prioritize your requirements

1 hr to several days

Input: List of all requirements from IT and IT Security, Business, Sourcing/Procurement, Risk Management, and Legal

Output: Prioritized list of RFP requirements approved by the stakeholder team

Materials: The RFP Requirements Worksheet

Participants: All stakeholders impacted by the RFP: IT, IT Security, the Business, Sourcing/ Procurement, Risk Management, Legal

  1. Use this tool to assist you and your team in documenting the requirements for your RFP. Leverage it to collect and categorize your requirements in preparation for negotiations. Use the results of this tool to populate the requirements section of your RFP.
  2. As a group, review each of the requirements and determine their priority as they will ultimately relate to the negotiations.
    • Prioritizing your requirements will set up your negotiation strategy and streamline the process.
    • By establishing the priority of each requirement upfront, you will save time and effort in the selection process.
  3. Review RFP requirements with stakeholders for approval.

Download the RFP Requirements Worksheet

Phase 3

Gain Business Authorization

Steps

3.1 Obtain business authorization from the business, technology, finance and Sourcing/Procurement

Steps in an RFP Process with the third step, 'Gain Business Authorization', highlighted.

This phase involves the following participants:

  • Business stakeholders
  • Technology and finance (depending upon the business)
  • Sourcing/Procurement

Outcomes of this phase

Approval by all key stakeholders to proceed with the issuing of the RFP and to make a purchase as a result.

Gain Business Authorization

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5 Phase 6 Phase 7

Gain Business Authorization

Gain authorization for your RFP from all relevant stakeholders
  • Alignment of stakeholders
  • Agreement on final requirements
  • Financial authorization
  • Commitment of resources
  • Agreement on what constitutes vendor qualification
  • Finalization of selection criteria and their prioritization

Obtaining cross-function alignment will clear the way for contract, SOW, and budget approvals and not waste any of your and your vendor’s resources in performing an RFP that your organization is not ready to implement or invest financial and human resources in.

Stock photo of the word 'AUTHORIZED' stamped onto a white background with a much smaller stamp laying beside it.

Phase 4

Create and Issue

Steps

4.1 Build your RFP

4.2 Decide RFI or not

4.3 Create your RFP

4.4 Receive & answer questions

4.5 Perform Pre-Proposal Conference

4.6 Evaluate responses

Steps in an RFP Process with the fourth step, 'Perform RFI/RFP', highlighted.

This phase involves the following participants:

  • The RFP owner
  • IT
  • Business SMEs/stakeholders

Outcomes of this phase

RFP package is issued to vendors and includes the date of the Pre-Proposal Conference, which should be held shortly after RFP release and includes all parties.

SME’s/stakeholders participate in providing answers to RFP contact for response to vendors.

Create and Issue Your RFP/RFI

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5 Phase 6 Phase 7

Six Steps to Perform RFI/RFP

Step 1

  • Build your RFP with evaluation in mind.

Step 2

  • RFI or no RFI
  • Consider a Lean RFP

Step 3

  • Create your RFP
  • Establish your RFP dates
  • Decide on RFP template
    • Short
    • Long
    • Excel
  • Create a template for vendors’ response
  • Create your Pricing Template

Step 4

  • Receive RFP questions from vendors
  • Review and prepare answers to questions for the Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 5

  • Conduct a Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 6

  • Receive vendors’ proposals
  • Review for compliance and completion
  • Team evaluates vendors’ proposals.
  • Prepare TCO
  • Draft executive recommendation report

Build your RFP with evaluation in mind

Easing evaluation frustrations

At the beginning of your RFP creation process consider how your requirements will impact the vendor’s response. Concentrate on the instructions you provide the vendors and how you wish to receive their responses. View the RFP through the lens of the vendors and envision how they are going to respond to the proposal.

Limiting the number of requirements included in the RFP will increase the evaluation team’s speed when reviewing vendors’ responses. This is accomplished by not asking questions for common features and functionality that all vendors provide. Don’t ask multiple questions within a question. Avoid “lifting” vendor-specific language to copy into the RFP as this will signal to vendors who their competition might be and may deter their participation. Concentrate your requirement questions to those areas that are unique to your solution to reduce the amount of time required to evaluate the vendors’ response.

Things to Consider When Creating Your RFP:

  • Consistency is the foundation for ease of evaluation.
  • Provide templates, such as an Excel worksheet, for the vendor’s pricing submissions and for its responses to close-ended questions.
  • Give detailed instructions on how the vendor should organize their response.
  • Limit the number of open-ended questions requiring a long narrative response to must-have requirements.
  • Organize your requirements and objectives in a numerical outline and have the vendor respond in the same manner, such as the following:
    • 1
    • 1.1
    • 1.1.1

Increase your response quality

Inconsistent formatting of vendor responses prevents an apples-to-apples evaluation between vendor responses. Evaluation teams are frequently challenged and are unable to evaluate vendors’ responses equally against each other for the following reasons:

Challenges
  • Vendor responses are submitted with different and confusing nomenclature
  • Inconsistent format in response
  • Disparate order of sections in the vendors responses
  • Different style of outlining their responses, e.g. 1.1 vs. I.(i)
  • Pricing proposal included throughout their response
  • Responses are comingled with marketing messages
  • Vendor answers to requirements or objectives are not consolidated in a uniform manner
  • Disparate descriptions for response subsections
Prevention
  • Provide specific instructions as to how the vendor is to organize their response:
    • How to format and outline the response
    • No marketing material
    • No pricing in the body of the response
  • Provide templates for pricing, technical, operational, and legal aspects.

Six Steps to Perform RFI/RFP

Step 1

  • Build your RFP with evaluation in mind.

Step 2

  • RFI or no RFI
  • Consider a Lean RFP

Step 3

  • Create your RFP
  • Establish your RFP dates
  • Decide on RFP template
    • Short
    • Long
    • Excel
  • Create a template for vendors’ response
  • Create your Pricing Template

Step 4

  • Receive RFP questions from vendors
  • Review and prepare answers to questions for the Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 5

  • Conduct a Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 6

  • Receive vendors’ proposals
  • Review for compliance and completion
  • Team evaluates vendors’ proposals.
  • Prepare TCO
  • Draft executive recommendation report

Perform Request for Information

Don’t underestimate the importance of the RFI

As the name implies, a request for information (RFI) is a tool for collecting information from vendors about the companies, their products, and their services. We find RFIs useful when faced with a lot of vendors that we don’t know much about, when we want to benchmark the marketplace for products and services, including budgetary information, and when we have identified more potential vendors than we care to commit a full RFP to.

RFIs are simpler and less time-consuming than RFPs to prepare and evaluate, so it can make a lot of sense to start with an RFI. Eliminating unqualified vendors from further consideration will save your team from weeding through RFP responses that do not meet your objectives. For their part, your vendors will appreciate your efforts to determine up-front which of them are the best bets before asking them to spend resources and money producing a costly proposal.

While many organizations rarely use RFIs, they can be an effective tool in the vendor manager’s toolbox when used at the right time in the right way. RFIs can be deployed in competitive targeted negotiations.

A Lean RFP is a two-stage strategy that speeds up the typical RFP process. The first stage is like an RFI on steroids, and the second stage is targeted competitive negotiation.

Don’t rely solely on the internet to qualify vendors; use an RFI to acquire additional information before finalizing an RFP.

4.2.1 In a hurry? Consider a Lean RFP instead of an RFP

Several days
  1. Create an RFI with all of the normal and customary components. Next, add a few additional RFP-like requirements (e.g. operational, technical, and legal requirements). Make sure you include a request for budgetary pricing and provide any significant features and functionality requirements so that the vendors have enough information to propose solutions. In addition, allow the vendors to ask questions through your single point of coordination and share answers with all of the vendors. Finally, notify the vendors that you will not be doing an RFP.
  2. Review the vendors’ proposals and evaluate their proposals against your requirements along with their notional or budgetary pricing.
  3. Have the evaluators utilize the Lean RFP Template to record their scores accordingly.
  4. After collecting the scores from the evaluators, consolidate the scores together to discuss which vendors – we recommend two or three – you want to present demos.
  5. Based on the vendors’ demos, the team selects at least two vendors to negotiate contract and pricing terms with intent of selecting the best-value vendor.
  6. The Lean RFP shortens the typical RFP process, maintains leverage for your organization, and works great with low- to medium-spend items (however your organization defines them). You’ll get clarification on vendors’ competencies and capabilities, obtain a fair market price, and meet your internal clients’ aggressive timelines while still taking steps to protect your organization.

Download the Lean RFP Template

Download the RFP Evaluation Tool

4.2.1 In a hurry? Consider a Lean RFP instead of an RFP continued

Input

  • List of technical, operational, business, and legal requirements
  • Budgetary pricing ask

Output

  • A Lean RFP document that includes the primary components of an RFP
  • Lean RFP vendors response evaluation

Materials

  • Lean RFP Template
  • RFP Evaluation Tool
  • Contracting requirements
  • Pricing

Participants

  • IT
  • Business
  • Finance
  • Sourcing/Procurement

Case Study

A Lean RFP saves time
INDUSTRY: Pharmaceutical
SOURCE: Guided Implementation
Challenge
  • The vendor manager (VM) was experiencing pressure to shorten the expected five-month duration to perform an RFP for software that planned, coordinated, and submitted regulatory documents to the US Food and Drug Administration.
  • The VM team was not completely familiar with the qualified vendors and their solutions.
  • The organization wanted to capitalize on this opportunity to enhance its current processes with the intent of improving efficiencies in documentation submissions.
Solution
  • Leveraging the Lean RFP process, the team reduced the 200+ RFP questionnaire into a more manageable list of 34 significant questions to evaluate vendor responses.
  • The team issued the Lean RFP and requested the vendors’ responses in three weeks instead of the five weeks planned for the RFP process.
  • The team modified the scoring process to utilize a simple weighted-scoring methodology, using a scale of 1-5.
Results
  • The Lean RFP scaled back the complexity of a large RFP.
  • The customer received three vendor responses ranging from 19 to 43 pages and 60-80% shorter than expected if the RFP had been used. This allowed the team to reduce the evaluation period by three weeks.
  • The duration of the RFx process was reduced by more than two months – from five months to just under three months.

Six Steps to Perform RFI/RFP

Step 1

  • Build your RFP with evaluation in mind.

Step 2

  • RFI or no RFI
  • Consider a Lean RFP

Step 3

  • Create your RFP
  • Establish your RFP dates
  • Decide on RFP template
    • Short
    • Long
    • Excel
  • Create a template for vendors’ response
  • Create your Pricing Template

Step 4

  • Receive RFP questions from vendors
  • Review and prepare answers to questions for the Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 5

  • Conduct a Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 6

  • Receive vendors’ proposals
  • Review for compliance and completion
  • Team evaluates vendors’ proposals.
  • Prepare TCO
  • Draft executive recommendation report

4.3.1 RFP Calendar

1 hour

Input: List duration in days of key activities, RFP Calendar and Key Date Tool, For all vendor-inclusive meetings, include the dates on your RFP calendar and reference them in the RFP

Output: A timeline to complete the RFP that has the support of each stakeholder involved in the process and that allows for a complete and thorough vendor response.

Materials: RFP Calendar and Key Date Tool

Participants: IT management, Business stakeholder(s), Legal (as required), Risk management (as required), Sourcing/Procurement, Vendor management

  1. As a group, identify the key activities to be accomplished and the amount of time estimated to complete each task:
    1. Identify who is ultimately accountable for the completion of each task
    2. Determine the length of time required to complete each task
  2. Use the RFP Calendar and Key Date Tool to build the calendar specific to your needs.
  3. Include vendor-related dates in the RFP, i.e., Pre-Proposal Conference, deadline for RFP questions as well as response.

Download the RFP Calendar and Key Date Tool

Draft your RFP

Create and issue your RFP, which should contain at least the following:
  • The ability for the vendors to ask clarifying questions (in writing, sent to the predetermined RFP contact)
  • Pre-Proposal/Pre-Bid Conference schedule where vendors can receive the same answer to all clarifying written questions
  • A calendar of events (block the time on stakeholder calendars – see template).
  • Instructions to potential vendors on how they should construct and return their response to enable effective and timely evaluation of each offer.
  • Requirements; for example: Functional, Operational, Technical, and Legal.
  • Specification drawings as if applicable.
  • Consider adding vendor management requirements – how do you want to manage the relationship after the deal is done?
  • A pricing template for vendors to complete that facilitates comparison across multiple vendors.
  • Contract terms required by your legal team (or your standard contract for vendors to redline as part of their response and rated/ranked accordingly).
  • Create your RFP with the evaluation process and team in mind to ensure efficiency and timeliness in the process. Be clear, concise, and complete in the document.
  • Consistency and completeness is the foundation for ease of evaluation.
  • Give vendors detailed instruction on how to structure and organize their response.
  • Limit the number of open-ended questions requiring a long narrative response.
  • Be sure to leverage Info-Tech’s proven and field-tested Short-Form, Long-Form, and Lean RFP Templates provided in this blueprint.

Create a template for the vendors’ response

Dictating to the vendors the format of their response will increase your evaluation efficiency
Narrative Response:

Create either a Word or Excel document that provides the vendor with an easy vehicle for their response. This template should include the question identifier that ties the response back to the requirement in the RFP. Instruct vendors to include the question number on any ancillary materials they wish to include.

Pricing Response:

Create a separate Excel template that the vendors must use to provide their financial offer. This template should include pricing for hardware, software, training, implementation, and professional services, as well as placeholders for any additional fees.

Always be flexible in accepting alternative proposals after the vendor has responded with the information you requested in the format you require.

Stock image of a paper checklist in front of a laptop computer's screen.

4.3.2 Vendor Pricing Tool

1 hour

Input: Identify pricing components for hardware, software, training, consulting/services, support, and additional licenses (if needed)

Output: Vendor Pricing Tool

Materials: RFP Requirements Worksheet, Pricing template

Participants: IT, Finance, Business stakeholders, Sourcing/Procurement, Vendor management

  1. Using a good pricing template will prevent vendors from providing pricing offers that create a strategic advantage designed to prevent you from performing an apples-to-apples comparison.
  2. Provide specific instructions as to how the vendor is to organize their pricing response, which should be submitted separate from the RFP response.
  3. Configure and tailor pricing templates that are specific to the product and/or services.
  4. Upon receipt of all the vendor’s responses, simply cut and paste their total response to your base template for an easy side-by-side pricing comparison.
  5. Do not allow vendors to submit financial proposals outside of your template.

Download the Vendor Pricing Tool

Three RFP Templates

Choose the right template for the right sourcing initiative

  • Short-Form
  • Use the Short-Form RFP Template for simple, non-complex solutions that are medium to low dollar amounts that do not require numerous requirements.

  • Long-Form
  • We recommend the Long-Form RFP Template for highly technical and complex solutions that are high dollar and have long implementation duration.

  • Excel-Form
  • Leverage the Excel-Form RFP Tool for requirements that are more specific in nature to evaluate a vendor’s capability for their solution. This template is designed to be complete and inclusive of the RFP process, e.g., requirements, vendor response, and vendor response evaluation scoring.

Like tools in a carpenters’ tool box or truck, there is no right or wrong template for any job. Take into account your organization culture, resources available, time frame, policies, and procedures to pick the right tool for the job. (Steve Jeffery, Principal Research Director, Vendor Management, Co-Author: The Art of Creating a Quality RFP, Info-Tech Research Group)

4.3.3 Short-Form RFP Template

1-2 hours

Input: List of technical, legal, business, and data security requirements

Output: Full set of requirements, prioritized, that all participants agree to

Materials: Short-Form RFP Template, Vendor Pricing Tool, Supporting exhibits

Participants: IT management, Business stakeholder(s), Legal (as required), Risk management (as required), Sourcing/Procurement, Vendor management

  • This is a less complex RFP that has relatively basic requirements and perhaps a small window in which the vendors can respond. As with the long-form RFP, exhibits are placed at the end of the RFP, an arrangement that saves both your team and the vendors time. Of course, the short-form RFP contains less-specific instructions, guidelines, and rules for vendors’ proposal submissions.
  • We find that short-form RFPs are a good choice when you need to use something more than a request for quote (RFQ) but less than an RFP running 20 or more pages. It’s ideal, for example, when you want to send an RFP to only one vendor or to acquire items such as office supplies, contingent labor, or commodity items that don’t require significant vendor risk assessment.

Download the Short-Form RFP Template

4.3.4 Long-Form RFP Template

1-3 hours

Input: List of technical, legal, business, and data security requirements

Output: Full set of requirements, prioritized, that all stakeholders agree to

Materials: Long-Form RFP Template, Vendor Pricing Tool, Supporting exhibits

Participants: IT management, Business stakeholder(s), Legal (as required), Risk management (as required), Sourcing/Procurement, Vendor management

  • A long-form or major RFP is an excellent tool for more complex and complicated requirements. This template is for a baseline RFP.
  • It starts with best-in-class RFP terms and conditions that are essential to maintaining your control throughout the RFP process. The specific requirements for the business, functional, technical, legal, and pricing areas should be included in the exhibits at the end of the template. That makes it easier to tailor the RFP for each deal, since you and your team can quickly identify specific areas that need modification. Grouping the exhibits together also makes it convenient for both your team to review and the vendors to respond.
  • You can use this sample RFP as the basis for your template RFP, taking it all as is or picking and choosing the sections that best meet the mission and objectives of the RFP and your organization.

Download the Long-Form RFP Template

4.3.5 Excel-Form RFP Tool

Several weeks

Input: List of technical, legal, business, and data security requirements

Output: Full set of requirements, prioritized, that all stakeholders agree to

Materials: Excel-Form RFP Template, Vendor Pricing Tool, Supporting exhibits

Participants: IT management, Business stakeholder(s), Legal (as required), Risk management (as required), Sourcing/Procurement, Vendor management

  • The Excel-Form RFP Tool is used as an alternative to the other RFP toolsets if you have multiple requirements and have multiple vendors to choose from.
  • Requirements are written as a “statement” and the vendor can select from five answers as to their ability to meet the requirements, with the ability to provide additional context and materials to augment their answers, as needed.
  • Requirements are listed separately in each tab, for example, Business, Legal, Technical, Security, Support, Professional Services, etc.

Download the Excel-Form RFP Template

Six Steps to Perform RFI/RFP

Step 1

  • Build your RFP with evaluation in mind.

Step 2

  • RFI or no RFI
  • Consider a Lean RFP

Step 3

  • Create your RFP
  • Establish your RFP dates
  • Decide on RFP template
    • Short
    • Long
    • Excel
  • Create a template for vendors’ response
  • Create your Pricing Template

Step 4

  • Receive RFP questions from vendors
  • Review and prepare answers to questions for the Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 5

  • Conduct a Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 6

  • Receive vendors’ proposals
  • Review for compliance and completion
  • Team evaluates vendors’ proposals.
  • Prepare TCO
  • Draft executive recommendation report

Answer Vendor Questions

Maintaining your equal and level playing field among vendors

  • Provide an adequate amount of time from the RFP issue date to the deadline for vendor questions. There may be multiple vendor staff/departments that need to read the RFP and then discuss their response approach and gather any clarifying questions, so we generally recommend three to five business days.
  • There should be one point of contact for all Q&A, which should be submitted in writing via email only. Be sure to plan for enough time to get the answers back from the RFP stakeholders.
  • After the deadline, collect all Q&A and begin the process of consolidating into one document.
Large silver question mark.
  • Be sure to anonymize both vendor questions and your responses, so as not to reveal who asked or answered the question.
  • Send the document to all RFP respondents via your sourcing tool or BCC in an email to the point of contact, with read receipt requested. That way, you can track who has received and opened the correspondence.
  • Provide the answers a few days prior to the Pre-Proposal Conference to allow all respondents time to review the document and prepare any additional questions.
  • Begin the preparation for the Pre-Proposal Conference.

Six Steps to Perform RFI/RFP

Step 1

  • Build your RFP with evaluation in mind.

Step 2

  • RFI or no RFI
  • Consider a Lean RFP

Step 3

  • Create your RFP
  • Establish your RFP dates
  • Decide on RFP template
    • Short
    • Long
    • Excel
  • Create a template for vendors’ response
  • Create your Pricing Template

Step 4

  • Receive RFP questions from vendors
  • Review and prepare answers to questions for the Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 5

  • Conduct a Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 6

  • Receive vendors’ proposals
  • Review for compliance and completion
  • Team evaluates vendors’ proposals.
  • Prepare TCO
  • Draft executive recommendation report

Conduct Pre-Proposal Conference

Maintain an equal and level playing field

  • Consolidate all Q&A to be presented to all vendors during the Pre-Proposal Conference.
  • If the Pre-Proposal Conference is conducted via conference call, be sure to record the session and advise all participants at the beginning of the call.
  • Be sure to have key stakeholders present on the call to answer questions.
  • Read each question and answer, after which ask if there are any follow up questions. Be sure to capture them and then add them to the Q&A document.
  • Remind respondents that no further questions will be entertained during the remainder of the RFP response period.
  • Send the updated and completed document to all vendors (even if circumstances prevented their attending the Pre-Proposal Conference). Use the same process as when you sent out the initial answers: via email, blind copy the respondents and request read/receipt.

“Using a Pre-Proposal Conference allows you to reinforce that there is a level playing field for all of the vendors…that each vendor has an equal chance to earn your business. This encourages and maximizes competition, and when that happens, the customer wins.” (Phil Bode, Principal Research Director, Co-Author: The Art of Creating a Quality RFP, Info-Tech Research Group)

Pre-Proposal Conference Agenda

Modify this agenda for your specific organization’s culture
  1. Opening Remarks & Welcome – RFP Manager
    1. Agenda review
    2. Purpose of the Pre-Proposal Conference
  2. Review Agenda
    1. Introduction of your (customer) attendees
  3. Participating Vendor Introduction (company name)
  4. Executive or Sr. Leadership Comments (limit to five minutes)
    1. Importance of the RFP
    2. High-level business objective or definition of success
  5. Review Key Dates in the RFP

(Source: The Art of Creating a Quality RFP, Jeffery et al., 2019)
  1. Review of any Technical Drawings or Information
    1. Key technical requirements and constraints
    2. Key infrastructure requirements and constraints
  2. Review of any complex RFP Issues
    1. Project scope/out of scope
  3. Question &Answer
    1. Vendors’ questions in alphabetical order
  4. Review of Any Specific Instructions for the Respondents
  5. Conclusion/Closing
    1. Review how to submit additional questions
    2. Remind vendors of the single point of contact

Allow your executive or leadership sponsor to leave the Pre-Proposal Conference after they provide their comments to allow them to continue their day while demonstrating to the vendors the importance of the project.

Six Steps to Perform RFI/RFP

Step 1

  • Build your RFP with evaluation in mind.

Step 2

  • RFI or no RFI
  • Consider a Lean RFP

Step 3

  • Create your RFP
  • Establish your RFP dates
  • Decide on RFP template
    • Short
    • Long
    • Excel
  • Create a template for vendors’ response
  • Create your Pricing Template

Step 4

  • Receive RFP questions from vendors
  • Review and prepare answers to questions for the Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 5

  • Conduct a Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 6

  • Receive vendors’ proposals
  • Review for compliance and completion
  • Team evaluates vendors’ proposals.
  • Prepare TCO
  • Draft executive recommendation report

Evaluate Responses

Other important information

  • Consider separating the pricing component from the RFP responses before sending them to reviewers to maintain objectivity until after you have received all ratings on the proposals themselves.
  • Each reviewer should set aside focused time to carefully read each vendor’s response
  • Read the entire vendor proposal – they spent a lot time and money responding to your request, so please read everything.
  • Remind reviewers that they should route any questions to the vendor through the RFP manager.
  • Using the predetermined ranking system for each section, rate each section of the response, capturing any notes, questions, or concerns as you proceed through the document(s).
Stock photo of a 'Rating' meter with values 'Very Bad to 'Excellent'.

Use a proven evaluation method

Two proven methods to reviewing vendors’ proposals are by response and by objective

The first, by response, is when the evaluator reviews each vendor’s response in its entirety.

The second, reviewing by objective, is when the evaluator reviews each vendor’s response to a single objective before moving on to the next.

By Response

Two-way arrow with '+ Pros' in green on the left and 'Cons -' in red on the right.

By Objective

Two-way arrow with '+ Pros' in green on the left and 'Cons -' in red on the right.

  • Each response is thoroughly read all the way through.
  • Response inconsistencies are easily noticed.
  • Evaluators obtain a good feel for the vendor's response.
  • Evaluators will lose interest as they move from one response to another.
  • Evaluation will be biased if the beginning of response is subpar, influencing the rest of the evaluation.
  • Deficiencies of the perceived favorite vendor are overlooked.
  • Evaluators concentrate on how each objective is addressed.
  • Evaluators better understand the responses, resulting in identifying the best response for the objective.
  • Evaluators are less susceptible to supplier bias.
  • Electronic format of the response hampers response review per objective.
  • If a hard copy is necessary, converting electronic responses to hard copy is costly and cumbersome.
  • Discipline is required to score each vendor's response as they go.

Maintain evaluation objectivity by reducing response evaluation biases

Evaluation teams can be naturally biased during their review of the vendors’ responses.

You cannot eliminate bias completely – the best you can do is manage it by identifying these biases with the team and mitigating their influence in the evaluation process.

Vendor

The evaluator only trusts a certain vendor and is uncomfortable with any other vendor.
  • Evaluate the responses blind of vendor names, if possible.
Centerpiece for this table, titled 'BIAS' and surrounding by iconized representations of the four types listed.

Account Representatives

Relationships extend beyond business, and an evaluator doesn't want to jeopardize them.
  • Craft RFP objectives that are vendor neutral.

Technical

A vendor is the only technical solution the evaluator is looking for, and they will not consider anything else.
  • Conduct fair and open solution demonstrations.

Price

As humans, we can justify anything at a good price.
  • Evaluate proposals without awareness of price.

Additional insights when evaluating RFPs

When your evaluation team includes a member of the C-suite or senior leadership, ensure you give them extra time to sufficiently review the vendor's responses. When your questions require a definitive “Yes”/“True” or “No”/“False” responses, we recommend giving the maximum score for “Yes”/“True” and the minimum score for “No”/“False”.
Increase your efficiency and speed of evaluation by evaluating the mandatory requirements first. If a vendor's response doesn't meet the minimum requirements, save time by not reviewing the remainder of the response. Group your RFP questions with a high-level qualifying question, then the supporting detailed requirements. The evaluation team can save time by not evaluating a response that does not meet a high-level qualifying requirement.

Establish your evaluation scoring scale

Define your ranking scale to ensure consistency in ratings

Within each section of your RFP are objectives, each of which should be given its own score. Our recommended approach is to award on a scale of 0 to 5. With such a scale, you need to define every level. Below are the recommended definitions for a 0 to 5 scoring scale.

Score Criteria for Rating
5 Outstanding – Complete understanding of current and future needs; solution addresses current and future needs
4 Competent – Complete understanding and adequate solution
3 Average – Average understanding and adequate solution
2 Questionable – Average understanding; proposal questionable
1 Poor – Minimal understanding
0 Not acceptable – Lacks understanding
Stock photo of judges holding up their ratings.

Weigh the sections of your RFP on how important or critical they are to the RFP

Obtain Alignment on Weighting the Scores of Each Section
  • There are many ways to score responses, ranging from extremely simple to highly complicated. The most important thing is that everyone responsible for completing scorecards is in total agreement about how the scoring system should work. Otherwise, the scorecards will lose their value, since different weighting and scoring templates were used to arrive at their scores.
  • You can start by weighting the scores by section, with all sections adding up to 100%.
Example RFP Section Weights
Pie chart of example RFP section weights, 'Operational, 20%', 'Service-Level Agreements, 20%', 'Financial, 20%', 'Legal/Contractual, 15%', 'Technical, 10%' 'Functional, 15%'.
(Source: The Art of Creating a Quality RFP, Jeffery et al., 2019)

Protect your negotiation leverage with these best practices

Protect your organization's reputation within the vendor community with a fair and balanced process.
  • Unless you regularly have the evaluators on your evaluation team, always assume that the team members are not familiar nor experienced with your process and procedures.
  • Do not underestimate the amount of preparations required to ensure that your evaluation team has everything they need to evaluate vendors’ responses without bias.
  • Be very specific about the expectations and time commitment required for the evaluation team to evaluate the responses.
  • Explain to the team members the importance of evaluating responses without conflicts of interest, including the fact that information contained within the responses and all discussions within the team are considered company owned and confidential.
  • Include examples of the evaluation and scoring processes to help the evaluators understand what they should be doing.
  • Finally – don’t forget to the thank the evaluation team and their managers for their time and commitment in contributing to this essential decision.
Stock photo of a cork board with 'best practice' spelled out by tacked bits of paper, each with a letter in a different font.

Evaluation teams must balance commercial vs. technical requirements

Do not alter the evaluation weights after responses are submitted.
  • Evaluation teams are always challenged by weighing the importance of price, budget, and value against the technical requirements of “must-haves” and super cool “nice-to-haves.”
  • Encouraging the evaluation team not to inadvertently convert the nice-to-haves to must-haves will prevent scope creep and budget pressure. The evaluation team must concentrate on the vendors’ responses that drive the best value when balancing both commercial and technical requirements.
Two blocks labelled 'Commercial Requirements' and 'Technical Requirements' balancing on either end of a flat sheet, which is balancing on a silver ball.

4.6.1 Evaluation Guidebook

1 hour

Input: RFP responses, Weighted Scoring Matrix, Vendor Response Scorecard

Output: One or two finalists for which negotiations will proceed

Materials: RFP Evaluation Guidebook

Participants: IT, Finance, Business stakeholders, Sourcing/Procurement, Vendor management

  1. Info-Tech provides an excellent resource for your evaluation team to better understand the process of evaluating vendor response. The guidebook is designed to be configured to the specifics of your RFP, with guidance and instructions to the team.
  2. Use this guidebook to provide instruction to the evaluation team as to how best to score and rate the RFP responses.
  3. Specific definitions are provided for applying the numerical scores to the RFP objectives will ensure consistency among the appropriate numerical score.

Download the RFP Evaluation Guidebook

4.6.2 RFP Vendor Proposal Scoring Tool

1-4 hours

Input: Each vendor’s RFP response, A copy of the RFP (less pricing), A list of the weighted criteria incorporated into a vendor response scorecard

Output: A consolidated ranked and weighted comparison of the vendor responses with pricing

Materials: Vendor responses, RFP Evaluation Tool

Participants: Sourcing/Procurement, Vendor management

  1. Using the RFP outline as a base, develop a scorecard to evaluate and rate each section of the vendor response, based on the criteria predetermined by the team.
  2. Provide each stakeholder with the scorecard when you provide the vendor responses for them to review and provide the team with adequate time to review each response thoroughly and completely.
  3. Do not, at this stage, provide the pricing. Allow stakeholders to review the responses based on the technical, business, operational criteria without prejudice as to pricing.
  4. Evaluators should always be reminded that they are evaluating each vendor’s response against the objectives and requirements of the RFP. The evaluators should not be evaluating each vendor’s response against one another.
  5. While the team is reviewing and scoring responses, review and consolidate the vendor pricing submissions into one document for a side-by-side comparison.

Download the RFP Evaluation Tool

4.6.3 Total Cost of Owners (TCO)

1-2 hours

Input: Consolidated vendor pricing responses, Consolidated vendor RFP responses, Current spend within your organization for the product/service, if available, Budget

Output: A completed TCO model summarizing the financial results of the RFP showing the anticipated costs over the term of the agreement, taking into consideration the impact of renewals.

Materials: Vendor TCO Tool, Vendor pricing responses

Participants: IT, Finance, Business stakeholders, Sourcing/Procurement

  • Use Info-Tech’s Vendor TCO Tool to normalize each vendor’s pricing proposal and account for the lifetime cost of the product.
  • Fill in pricing information (the total of all annual costs) from each vendor's returned Pricing Proposal.
  • The tool will summarize the net present value of the TCO for each vendor proposal.
  • The tool will also provide the rank of each pricing proposal.

Download the Vendor TCO Tool

Conduct an evaluation team results meeting

Follow the checklist below to ensure an effective evaluation results meeting

  • Schedule the evaluation team’s review meeting well in advance to ensure there are no scheduling conflicts.
  • Collect the evaluation team’s scores in advance.
  • Collate scores and provide an initial ranking.
  • Do not reveal the pricing evaluation results until after initial discussions and review of the scoring results.
  • Examine both high and low scores to understand why the team members scored the response as they did.
  • Allow the team to discuss, debate, and arrive at consensus on the ranking.
  • After consensus, reveal the pricing to examine if or how it changes the ranking.
  • Align the team on the next steps with the applicable vendors.

4.6.4 Consolidated RFP Response Scoring

1-2 hours

Input: Vendor Response Scorecard from each stakeholder, Consolidated RFP responses and pricing, Any follow up questions or items requiring further vendor clarification.

Output: An RFP Response Evaluation Summary that identifies the finalists based on pre-determined criteria.

Materials: RFP Evaluation Tool from each stakeholder, Consolidated RFP responses and pricing.

Participants: IT, Finance, Business stakeholders, Sourcing/Procurement, Vendor management

  1. Collect from the evaluation team all scorecards and any associated questions requiring further clarification from the vendor(s). Consolidate the scorecards into one for presentation to the team and key decision makers.
  2. Present the final scores to the team, with the pricing evaluation, to determine, based on your needs, two or three finalists that will move forward to the next steps of negotiations.
  3. Discuss any scores that are have large gaps, e.g., a requirement with a score of one from one evaluator and the same requirement with a score five from different evaluator.
  4. Arrive at a consensus of your top one or two potential vendors.
  5. Determine any required follow-up actions with the vendors and include them in the Evaluation Summary.

Download the Consolidated Vender RFP Response Evaluation Summary

4.6.5 Vendor Recommendation Presentation

1-3 hours
  1. Use the Vendor Recommendation Presentation to present your finalist and obtain final approval to negotiate and execute any agreements.
  2. The Vendor Recommendation Presentation provides leadership with:
    1. An overview of the RFP, its primary goals, and key requirements
    2. A summary of the vendors invited to participate and why
    3. A summary of each component of the RFP
    4. A side-by-side comparison of key vendor responses to each of the key/primary requirements, with ranking/weighting results
    5. A summary of the vendor’s responses to key legal terms
    6. A consolidated summary of the vendors’ pricing, augmented by the TCO calculations for the finalist(s).
    7. The RFP team’s vendor recommendations based on its findings
    8. A summary of next steps with dates
    9. Request approval to proceed to next steps of negotiations with the primary and secondary vendor

Download the Vendor Recommendation Presentation

4.6.5 Vendor Recommendation Presentation

Input

  • Consolidated RFP responses, with a focus on key RFP goals
  • Consolidated pricing responses
  • TCO Model completed, approved by Finance, stakeholders

Output

  • Presentation deck summarizing the key findings of the RFP results, cost estimates and TCO and the recommendation for approval to move to contract negotiations with the finalists

Materials

  • Consolidated RFP responses, including legal requirements
  • Consolidated pricing
  • TCO Model
  • Evaluators scoring results

Participants

  • IT
  • Finance
  • Business stakeholders
  • Legal
  • Sourcing/Procurement

Caution: Configure templates and tools to align with RFP objectives

Templates and tools are invaluable assets to any RFP process

  • Leveraging templates and tools saves time and provides consistency to your vendors.
  • Maintain a common repository of your templates and tools with different versions and variations. Include a few sentences with instructions on how to use the template and tools for team members who might not be familiar with them.

Templates/Tools

RFP templates and tools are found in a variety of places, such as previous projects, your favorite search engine, or by asking a colleague.

Sourcing

Regardless of the source of these documents, you must take great care and consideration to sanitize any reference to another vendor, company, or name of the deal.

Review

Then you must carefully examine the components of the deal before creating your final documents.

Popular RFP templates include:

  • RFP documents
  • Pricing templates
  • Evaluation and scoring templates
  • RFP requirements
  • Info-Tech research

Phase 5

Negotiate Agreement(s)

Steps

5.1 Perform negotiation process

Steps in an RFP Process with the fifth step, 'Negotiate Agreement', highlighted.

This phase involves the following participants:

  • Procurement
  • Vendor management
  • Legal
  • IT stakeholders
  • Finance

Outcomes of this phase

A negotiated agreement or agreements that are a result of competitive negotiations.

Negotiate Agreement(s)

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5 Phase 6 Phase 7

Negotiate Agreement

You should evaluate your RFP responses first to see if they are complete and the vendor followed your instructions.


Then you should:

  • Plan negotiation(s) with one or more vendors based on your questions and opportunities identified during evaluation.
  • Select finalist(s).
  • Apply selection criteria.
  • Resolve vendors’ exceptions.

Info-Tech Insight

Be certain to include any commitments made in the RFP, presentations, and proposals in the agreement – dovetails to underperforming vendor.

Centerpiece of the table, titled 'Negotiation Process'.

Leverage Info-Tech's negotiation process research for additional information

Negotiate before you select your vendor:
  • Negotiating with two or more vendors will maintain your competitive leverage while decreasing the time it takes to negotiate the deal.
  • Perform legal reviews as necessary.
  • Use sound competitive negotiations principles.

Info-Tech Insight

Providing contract terms in an RFP can dramatically reduce time for this step by understanding the vendor’s initial contractual position for negotiation.

Phase 6

Purchase Goods and Services

Steps

6.1 Purchase Goods & Services

Steps in an RFP Process with the sixth step, 'Purchase Goods and Services', highlighted.

This phase involves the following participants:

  • Procurement
  • Vendor management
  • IT stakeholders

Outcomes of this phase

A purchase order that completes the RFP process.

The beginning of the vendor management process.

Purchase Goods and Services

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5 Phase 6 Phase 7

Purchase Goods and Services

Prepare to purchase goods and services

Prepare to purchase goods and services by completing all items on your organization’s onboarding checklist.
  • Have the vendor complete applicable tax forms.
  • Set up the vendor in accounts payable for electronic payment (ACH) set-up.
Then transact day-to-day business:
  • Provide purchasing forecasts.
  • Complete applicable purchase requisition and purchase orders. Be sure to reference the agreement in the PO.
Stock image of a computer monitor with a full grocery cart shown on the screen.

Info-Tech Insight

As a customer, honoring your contractual obligations and commitments will ensure that your organization is not only well respected but considered a customer of choice.

Phase 7

Assess and Measure Performance

Steps

7.1 Assess and measure performance against the agreement

Steps in an RFP Process with the seventh step, 'Assess and Measure Performance', highlighted.

This phase involves the following participants:

  • Vendor management
  • Business stakeholders
  • Senior leadership (as needed)
  • IT stakeholders
  • Vendor representatives & senior management

Outcomes of this phase

A list of what went well during the period – it’s important to recognize successes

A list of areas needing improvement that includes:

  • A timeline for each item to be completed
  • The team member(s) responsible

Purchase Goods and Services

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5 Phase 6 Phase 7

Assess and Measure Performance

Measure to manage: the job doesn’t end when the contract is signed.

  • Classify vendor
  • Assess vendor performance
  • Manage improvement
  • Conduct periodic vendor performance reviews or quarterly business reviews
  • Ensure contract compliance for both the vendor and your organization
  • Build knowledgebase for future
  • Re-evaluate and improve appropriately your RFP processes

Info-Tech Insight

To be an objective vendor manager, you should also assess and measure your company’s performance along with the vendor’s performance.

Summary of Accomplishment

Problem Solved

Upon completion of this blueprint, guided implementation, or workshop, your team should have a comprehensive, well-defined end-to-end approach to performing a quality sourcing event. Leverage Info-Tech’s industry-proven tools and templates to provide your organization with an effective approach to maintain your negotiation leverage, improve the ease with which you evaluate vendor proposals, and reduce your risk while obtaining the best market value for your goods and services.

Additionally, your team will have a foundation to execute your vendor management principles. These principles will assist your organization in ensuring you receive the perceived value from the vendor as a result of your competitive negotiations.

If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

Contact your account representative for more information.

workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Final Thoughts: RFP Do’s and Don’ts

DO

  • Leverage your team’s knowledge
  • Document and explain your RFP process to stakeholders and vendors
  • Include contract terms in your RFP
  • Consider vendor management requirements up front
  • Plan to measure and manage performance after contract award leveraging RFP objectives
  • Seek feedback from the RFP team for process improvements

DON'T

  • Reveal your budget
  • Do an RFP in a vacuum
  • Send an RFP to a vendor your team is not willing to award the business to
  • Hold separate conversations with candidate vendors during your RFP process
  • Skimp on the requirements definition to speed the process
  • Tell the vendor they are selected before negotiating

Bibliography

“2022 RFP Response Trends & Benchmarks.” Loopio, 2022. Web.

Corrigan, Tony. “How Much Does it Cost to Respond to an RFP?” LinkedIn, March 2017. Accessed 10 Dec. 2019

“Death by RFP:7 Reasons Not to Respond.” Inc. Magazine, 2013. Web.

Jeffery, Steven, George Bordon, and Phil Bode. The Art of Creating a Quality RFP, 3rd ed. Info-Tech Research Group, 2019.

“RFP Benchmarks: How Much Time and Staff Firms Devote to Proposals.” MarketingProfs, 2020. Web.

“State of the RFP 2019.” Bonfire, 2019. Web.

“What Vendors Want (in RFPs).” Vendorful, 2020. Web.

Related Info-Tech Research

Stock photo of two people looking at a tablet. Prepare for Negotiations More Effectively
  • Negotiations are about allocating risk and money – how much risk is a party willing to accept at what price point?
  • Using a cross-functional/cross-insight team structure for negotiation preparation yields better results.
  • Soft skills aren’t enough and theatrical negotiation tactics aren’t effective.
Stock photo of two people in suits shaking hands. Understand Common IT Contract Provisions to Negotiate More Effectively
  • Focus on the terms and conditions, not just the price. Too often, organizations focus on the price contained within their contracts, neglecting to address core terms and conditions that can end up costing multiples of the initial price.
  • Lawyers can’t ensure you get the best business deal. Lawyers tend to look at general terms and conditions for legal risk and may not understand IT-specific components and business needs.
Stock photo of three people gathered around a computer. Jump Start Your Vendor Management Initiative
  • Vendor management must be an IT strategy. Solid vendor management is an imperative – IT organizations must develop capabilities to ensure that services are delivered by vendors according to service-level objectives and that risks are mitigated according to the organization's risk tolerance.
  • Visibility into your IT vendor community. Understand how much you spend with each vendor and rank their criticality and risk to focus on the vendors you should be concentrating on for innovative solutions.

How to build a Service Desk Chatbot POC

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  • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 9.7/10
  • member rating average dollars saved: 11,197
  • member rating average days saved: 8
  • Parent Category Name: Service Desk
  • Parent Category Link: /service-desk

The challenge

Build a chatbot that creates value for your business

 

  • Ensure your chatbot meets your business needs.
  • Bring scalability to your customer service delivery in a cost-effective manner.
  • Measure your chatbot objectives with clear metrics.
  • Pre-determine your ticket categories to use during the proof of concept.

Our advice

Insight

  • Build your chatbot to create business value. Whether increasing service or resource efficiency, keep value creation in mind when making decisions with your proof of concept.

Impact and results 

  • When implemented effectively, chatbots can help save costs, generate new revenue, and ultimately increase customer satisfaction for external and internal-facing customers.

The roadmap

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you building a chatbot proof of concept is a good idea, review our methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you to successfully complete this project. Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

Start here

Form your chatbot strategy.

Build the right metrics to measure the success of your chatbot POC

  • Chatbot ROI Calculator (xls)
  • Chatbot POC Metrics Tool (xls)

Build the foundation for your chatbot.

Architect the chatbot to maximize business value

  • Chatbot Conversation Tree Library

Continue to improve your chatbot.

Now take your chatbot proof of concept to production

  • Chatbot POC RACI (doc)
  • Chatbot POC Implementation Roadmap (xls)
  • Chatbot POC Communication Plan (doc)Chatbot ROI Calculator (xls)

Explore the Secrets of Oracle Cloud Licensing

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  • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 9.5/10 Overall Impact
  • member rating average dollars saved: 5 Average Days Saved
  • member rating average days saved: After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve.
  • Parent Category Name: Licensing
  • Parent Category Link: /licensing
  • Organizations are considering moving workloads to the cloud; however, they often struggle to understand Oracle's licensing and services models.
  • Complexity of licensing and high price tags can make the renewal process an overwhelming experience.
  • Oracle’s SaaS applications are the most mature, but Oracle’s on-premises E-Business Suite still has functionality gaps in comparison to Oracle’s cloud apps.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Understand the Oracle agenda. Oracle has established a unique approach to their cloud offerings – they want all of your workloads on the Red Stack.
  • Communicate effectively. Be aware that Oracle will reach out to members at your organization at various levels. Having your executives on the same page is critical to successfully managing Oracle.
  • Negotiate hard. Oracle needs the deal more than the customer. Oracle's top leaders are heavily incentivized to drive massive cloud adoption and increase Oracle's share price. Use this to your advantage.

Impact and Result

  • Conducting business with Oracle is not typical compared to other vendors. To emerge successfully from a commercial transaction with Oracle, customers must learn the “Oracle way” of conducting business, which includes a best-in-class sales structure, highly unique contracts, and license use policies coupled with a hyper-aggressive compliance function.
  • Leverage cloud spend to retire support on shelf-ware licenses, or gain virtualization rights for an on-premises environment.
  • Map out the process of how to negotiate from a position of strength, examining terms and conditions, discount percentages, and agreement pitfalls.
  • Carefully review key clauses in the Oracle Cloud Services Agreement to avoid additional spend and compliance risks.

Explore the Secrets of Oracle Cloud Licensing Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should explore the secrets of Oracle Cloud licensing, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Evaluate licensing requirements

Review current licensing options and models to determine which cloud products will most appropriately fit the organization's environment.

  • Oracle Cloud Services Agreement Terms and Conditions Evaluation Tool
[infographic]

Master Contract Review and Negotiation for Software Agreements

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  • Parent Category Name: Vendor Management
  • Parent Category Link: /vendor-management
  • Internal stakeholders usually have different – and often conflicting – needs and expectations that require careful facilitation and management.
  • Vendors have well-honed negotiating strategies. Without understanding your own position and leverage points, it’s difficult to withstand their persuasive – and sometimes pushy – tactics.
  • Software – and software licensing – is constantly changing, making it difficult to acquire and retain subject matter expertise.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Conservatively, it’s possible to save 5% of the overall IT budget through comprehensive software contract review.
  • Focus on the terms and conditions, not just the price.
  • Learning to negotiate is crucial.

Impact and Result

  • Look at your contract holistically to find cost savings.
  • Guide communication between vendors and your organization for the duration of contract negotiations.
  • Redline the terms and conditions of your software contract.
  • Prioritize crucial terms and conditions to negotiate.

Master Contract Review and Negotiation for Software Agreements Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out how to redline and negotiate your software agreement, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Gather requirements

Build and manage your stakeholder team, then document your business use case.

  • Master Contract Review and Negotiation for Software Agreements – Phase 1: Gather Requirements
  • RASCI Chart
  • Vendor Communication Management Plan
  • Software Business Use Case Template
  • SaaS TCO Calculator

2. Redline contract

Redline your proposed software contract.

  • Master Contract Review and Negotiation for Software Agreements – Phase 2: Redline Contract
  • Software Terms & Conditions Evaluation Tool
  • Software Buyer's Checklist

3. Negotiate contract

Create a thorough negotiation plan.

  • Master Contract Review and Negotiation for Software Agreements – Phase 3: Negotiate Contract
  • Controlled Vendor Communications Letter
  • Key Vendor Fiscal Year End Calendar
  • Contract Negotiation Tactics Playbook
[infographic]

Workshop: Master Contract Review and Negotiation for Software Agreements

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

1 Collect and Review Data

The Purpose

Assemble documentation.

Key Benefits Achieved

Understand current position before going forward.

Activities

1.1 Assemble existing contracts.

1.2 Document their strategic and tactical objectives.

1.3 Identify current status of the vendor relationship and any historical context.

1.4 Clarify goals for ideal future state.

Outputs

Business Use Case

2 Define Business Use Case and Build Stakeholder Team

The Purpose

Define business use case and build stakeholder team.

Key Benefits Achieved

Create business use case to document functional and nonfunctional requirements.

Build internal cross-functional stakeholder team to negotiate contract.

Activities

2.1 Establish negotiation team and define roles.

2.2 Write communication plan.

2.3 Complete business use case.

Outputs

RASCI Chart

Vendor Communication Management Plan

SaaS TCO Calculator

Software Business Use Case

3 Redline Contract

The Purpose

Examine terms and conditions and prioritize for negotiation.

Key Benefits Achieved

Discover cost savings.

Improve agreement terms.

Prioritize terms for negotiation.

Activities

3.1 Review general terms and conditions.

3.2 Review license- and application-specific terms and conditions.

3.3 Match to business and technical requirements.

3.4 Redline agreement.

Outputs

Software Terms & Conditions Evaluation Tool

Software Buyer’s Checklist

4 Build Negotiation Strategy

The Purpose

Create a negotiation strategy.

Key Benefits Achieved

Establish controlled communication.

Choose negotiation tactics.

Plot negotiation timeline.

Activities

4.1 Review vendor- and application-specific negotiation tactics.

4.2 Build negotiation strategy.

Outputs

Contract Negotiation Tactics Playbook

Controlled Vendor Communications Letter

Key Vendor Fiscal Year End Calendar

Mitigate the Risk of Cloud Downtime and Data Loss

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  • Parent Category Name: DR and Business Continuity
  • Parent Category Link: /business-continuity
  • Senior leadership is asking difficult questions about the organization’s dependency on third-party cloud services and the risk that poses.
  • IT leaders have limited control over third-party incidents and that includes cloud services. Yet they are on the hot seat when cloud services go down.
  • While vendors have swooped in to provide resilience options for the more-common SaaS solutions, it is not the case for all cloud services.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • No control over the software does not mean no recovery options. Solutions range from designing an IT workaround using alternate technologies to pre-defined third-party service continuity options (e.g. see options for O365) to business workarounds.
  • Even where there is limited control, you can at least define an incident response plan to streamline notification, assessment, and implementation of workarounds. Leadership wants more options than simply waiting for the service to come back online.
  • At a minimum, IT’s responsibility is to identify and communicate risk to senior leadership. That starts with a vendor review to identify SLA issues and overall resilience gaps.

Impact and Result

  • Follow a structured process to assess cloud resilience risk.
  • Identify opportunities to mitigate risk – at the very least, ensure critical data is protected.
  • Summarize cloud services risk, mitigation options, and incident response for senior leadership.

Mitigate the Risk of Cloud Downtime and Data Loss Research & Tools

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Mitigate the Risk of Cloud Downtime and Data Loss – Step-by-step guide to assess risk, identify risk mitigation options, and create an incident response plan.

Even where there is limited control, you can define an incident response plan to streamline notification, assessment, and implementation of workarounds.

  • Mitigate the Risk of Cloud Downtime and Data Loss Storyboard

2. Cloud Services Incident Risk and Mitigation Review – Review your key cloud vendors’ SLAs, incident preparedness, and data protection strategy.

At a minimum, IT’s responsibility is to identify and communicate risk to senior leadership. That starts with a vendor review to identify SLA and overall resilience gaps.

  • Cloud Services Incident Risk and Mitigation Review Tool

3. SaaS Incident Response Workflows – Use these examples to guide your efforts to create cloud incident response workflows.

The examples illustrate different approaches to incident response depending on the criticality of the service and options available.

  • SaaS Incident Response Workflows (Visio)
  • SaaS Incident Response Workflows (PDF)

4. Cloud Services Resilience Summary – Use this template to capture your results.

Summarize cloud services risk, mitigation options, and incident response for senior leadership.

  • Cloud Services Resilience Summary
[infographic]

Further reading

Mitigate the Risk of Cloud Downtime and Data Loss

Resilience and disaster recovery in an increasingly Cloudy and SaaSy world.

Analyst Perspective

If you think cloud means you don’t need a response plan, then get your resume ready.

Frank Trovato

Most organizations are now recognizing that they can’t ignore the risk of a cloud outage or data loss, and the challenge is “what can I do about it?” since there is limited control.

If you still think “it’s in the cloud, so I don’t need to worry about it,” then get your resume ready. When O365 goes down, your executives are calling IT, not Microsoft, for an answer of what’s being done and what can they do in the meantime to get the business up and running again.

The key is to recognize what you can control and what actions you can take to evaluate and mitigate risk. At a minimum, you can ensure senior leadership is aware of the risk and define a plan for how you will respond to an incident, even if that is limited to monitoring and communicating status.

Often you can do more, including defining IT workarounds, backing up your SaaS data for additional protection, and using business process workarounds to bridge the gap, as illustrated in the case studies in this blueprint.

Frank Trovato
Research Director, Infrastructure & Operations

Info-Tech Research Group

Use this blueprint to expand your DRP and BCP to account for cloud services

As more applications are migrated to cloud-based services, disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plans (BCP) must include an understanding of cloud risks and actions to mitigate those risks. This includes evaluating vendor and service reliability and resilience, security measures, data protection capabilities, and technology and business workarounds if there is a cloud outage or incident.

Use the risk assessments and cloud service incident response plans developed through this blueprint to supplement your DRP and BCP as well as further inform your crisis management plans (e.g. account for cloud risks in your crisis communication planning).

Overall Business Continuity Plan

IT Disaster Recovery Plan

A plan to restore IT application and infrastructure services following a disruption.

Info-Tech’s Disaster Recovery Planning blueprint provides a methodology for creating the IT DRP. Leverage this blueprint to validate and provide inputs for your IT DRP.

BCP for Each Business Unit

A set of plans to resume business processes for each business unit.

Info-Tech’s Develop a Business Continuity Plan blueprint provides a methodology for creating business unit BCPs as part of an overall BCP for the organization.

Crisis Management Plan

A plan to manage a wide range of crises, from health and safety incidents to business disruptions to reputational damage.

Info-Tech’s Implement Crisis Management Best Practices blueprint provides a framework for planning a response to any crisis, from health and safety incidents to reputational damage.

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Common Obstacles

Info-Tech’s Approach

  • Senior leadership is asking difficult questions about the organization’s dependency on third-party cloud services and the risk that poses.
  • Migrating to cloud services transfers much of the responsibility for day-to-day platform maintenance but not accountability for resilience.
  • IT leaders are often responsible for not just the organization’s IT DRP but also BCP and other elements of overall resilience. Cloud risk adds another element IT leaders need to consider.
  • IT leaders have limited control over third-party incidents and that includes cloud services. With SaaS services in particular, recovery or continuity options may be limited.
  • While vendors have swooped in to provide resilience options for the more common SaaS solutions, that is not the case for all cloud services.
  • Part of the solution is defining business process workarounds and that depends on cooperation from business leaders.
  • At a minimum, IT’s responsibility is to identify and communicate risk to senior leadership. That starts with a vendor review to identify SLA and overall resilience gaps.
  • Adapt how you approach downtime and data loss risk, particularly for SaaS solutions where there is limited or no control over the system.
  • Even where there is limited control, you can define an incident response plan to streamline notification, assessment, and implementation of workarounds. Leadership wants more options than simply waiting for the service to come back online.

Info-Tech Insight

Asking vendors about their DRP, BCP, and overall resilience has become commonplace. Expect your vendors to provide answers so you can assess risk. Furthermore, your vendor may have additional offerings to increase resilience or recommendations for third parties who can further assist your goals of improving cloud service resilience.

Key deliverable

Cloud Services Resilience Summary

Provide leadership with a summary of cloud risk, downtime workarounds implemented, and additional data protection.

The image contains a screenshot of the Cloud Services Resilience Summary.

Additional tools and templates in this blueprint

Cloud Services Incident Risk and Mitigation Review Tool

Use this tool to gather vendor input, evaluate vendor SLAs and overall resilience, and track your own risk mitigation efforts.

The image contains a screenshot of the Cloud Services Incident Risk and Mitigation Review Tool.

SaaS Incident Response Workflows

Use the examples in this document as a model to develop your own incident response workflows for cloud outages or data loss.

The image contains a screenshot of the SaaS Incident Response Workflows.

This blueprint will step you through the following actions to evaluate and mitigate cloud services risk

  1. Assess your cloud risk
  • Review your cloud services to determine potential impact of downtime/data loss, vendor SLA gaps, and vendor’s current resilience.
  • Identify options to mitigate risk
    • Explore your cloud vendor’s resilience offerings, third-party solutions, DIY recovery options, and business workarounds.
  • Create an incident response plan
    • Document your cloud risk mitigation strategy and incident response plan, which might include a failover strategy, data protection, and/or business continuity.

    Cloud Risk Mitigation

    Identify options to mitigate risk

    Create an incident response plan

    Assess risk

    Phase 1: Assess your cloud risk

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    Assess your cloud risk

    Identify options to mitigate risk

    Create an incident response plan

    Cloud does not guarantee uptime

    Public cloud services (e.g. Azure, GCP, AWS) and popular SaaS solutions experience downtime every year.

    A few cloud outage examples:

    • Microsoft Azure AD outage, March 15, 2022:
      Many users could not log into O365, Dynamics, or the Azure Portal.
      Cause: software change.
    • Three AWS outages in December 2021: December 7 (Netflix and others impacted), December 15 (Duo, Zoom, Slack, others), December 20 (Slack, Epic Games, others). Cause: network issues, power outage.
    • Salesforce outage, May 12, 2022: Users could not access the Lightning platform. Cause: expired certificate.

    Cloud availability

    • Migrating to cloud services can improve availability, as they typically offer more resilience than most organizations can afford to implement themselves.
    • However, having multiple data centers, zones, and regions doesn’t prevent all outages, as we see every year with even the largest cloud vendors.

    DR challenges for IaaS, PaaS, and cloud-native

    While there are limits to what you control, often traditional “failover” DR strategy can apply.

    High-level challenges and resilience options:

    • IaaS: No control over the hardware, but you can failover to another region. This is fairly similar to traditional DR.
    • PaaS: No control over the software platform (e.g. SQL server as a service), but you can back up your data and explore vendor options to replicate your environment.
    • Cloud-native applications: As with PaaS, you can back up your data and explore vendor options to replicate your environment.

    Plan for resilience

    • Include DR requirements when designing cloud service implementation. For example, for IaaS solutions, identify what data would need to be replicated and what services may need to be “always on” (e.g. database services where high-availability is demanded).
    • Similarly, for PaaS and cloud-native solutions, consult your vendor regarding options to build in resilience options (e.g. ability to failover to another environment).

    DR challenges for SaaS solutions

    SaaS is the biggest challenge because you have no control over any part of the base application stack.

    High-level challenges and resilience options:

    • No control over the hardware (or the facility, maintenance processes, and so on).
    • No control over the base application (control is limited to configuration settings and add-on customizations or integrations).
    • Options to back up your data will depend on the service.

    Note: The rest of this blueprint is focused primarily on SaaS resilience due to the challenges listed here. For other cloud services, leverage traditional DR strategies and vendor management to mitigate risk (as summarized on the previous slides).

    Focus on what you can control

    • For SaaS solutions in particular, you must toss out traditional DR. If Salesforce has an outage, you won’t be involved in recovering the system.
    • Instead, DR for SaaS needs to focus on improving resilience where you do have control and implementing business workarounds to bridge the gap.

    Evaluate your cloud services to clarify your specific risks

    Time and money is limited, so focus first on cloud services that are most critical and evaluate the vendors’ SLA and existing resilience capabilities.

    The activities on the next two slides will evaluate risk through two approaches:

    Activity 1: Estimate potential impact of downtime and data loss to quantify the risk and determine which cloud services are most critical and need to be prioritized. This is done through a business impact analysis that assesses:

    • Impact on revenue or costs (if applicable).
    • Impact on reputation (e.g. customer impact).
    • Impact on regulatory compliance and health and safety (if applicable).

    Activity 2: Review the vendor to identify risks and gaps. Specifically, evaluate the following:

    • Incident Management SLAs (e.g. does the SLA include RTO/RPO commitments? Do they meet your requirements?)
    • Incident Response Preparedness (e.g. does the vendor have a DRP, BCP, and security incident response plan?)
    • Data Protection (e.g. does their backup strategy and data security meet your standards?)

    Activity 1: Quantify potential impact and prioritize cloud services using a business impact analysis (BIA)

    1-3 hours

    1. Download the latest version of our DRP BIA: DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool. The tool includes instructions.
    2. Include the cloud services you want to assess in the list of applications/systems (see the tool excerpt below), and follow the BIA methodology outlined in the Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan blueprint.
    3. Use the results to quantify potential impact and prioritize your efforts on the most-critical cloud services.

    The image contains a screenshot of the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool.

    Materials
    • DRP BIA Tool
    Participants
    • Core group of IT management and staff who can provide a well-rounded perspective on potential impact. They will create the first draft of the BIA.
    • Review the draft BIA with relevant business leaders to refine and validate the results.

    Activity 2: Review your key cloud vendors’ SLAs, incident preparedness, and data protection strategy

    1-3 hours

    Use the Cloud Services Incident Risk and Mitigation Review Tool as follows:

    1. Send the Vendor Questionnaire tab to your cloud vendors to gather input, and review your existing agreements.
    2. Copy the vendor responses into the tool (see the instructions in the tool) and evaluate. See the example excerpt below.
    3. Identify action items to clarify gaps or address risks. Some action items might not be defined yet and will need to wait until you have had a chance to further explore risk mitigation options.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Cloud Services Incident Risk and Mitigation Review Tool.

    Materials
    • Cloud Services Incident Risk and Mitigation Review Tool
    Participants
    • Core group of IT management and staff tasked with evaluating and improving cloud services’ resilience.

    Phase 2: Identify options to mitigate risk

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    Assess your cloud risk

    Identify options to mitigate risk

    Create an incident response plan

    Consult your vendor to identify options to improve resilience, as a starting point

    Your vendor might also be able to suggest third parties that offer additional support, backup, or service continuity options.

    • The Vendor Questionnaire tab in the Cloud Services Incident Risk and Mitigation Review Tool includes a section at the bottom where your vendor can name additional options to improve resilience (e.g. premium support packages, potentially their own DR services).
    • If your vendor has not completed that part of the questionnaire, meet with them to discuss this. Asking service vendors about resilience has become commonplace, so they should be prepared to answer questions about their own offerings and potentially can name trusted third-party vendors who can further assist you.
    • Leverage Info-Tech’s advisory services to evaluate options outlined by your vendor and potential third-party options (e.g. enterprise backup solutions that support backing up SaaS data).

    Some SaaS solutions have plenty of resilience options; others not so much

    • The pervasiveness of O365 has led vendors to close the service continuity gap, with options to send and receive email during an outage and back up your data.
    • With many SaaS solutions, there isn’t going to be a third-party service continuity option, but you might still be able to at least back up your data and implement business process workarounds to close the service gap.

    Example SaaS risk and mitigation: O365

    Risk

    • Several outages every year (e.g. MS Teams July 20, 2022).
    • SLA exceptions include “Scheduled Downtime,” which can occur with just five days’ notice.
    • The Recycling Bin is your data backup, depending on your setup.

    Options to mitigate risk (not an exhaustive list):

    • Third-party solutions for email service continuity.
    • Several backup vendors (e.g. Veeam, Rubrik) can protect most of your O365 suite.
    • Business continuity workarounds leveraging synced OneDrive, SharePoint, and Outlook (access to calendar invites).

    Example SaaS risk and mitigation: Salesforce

    Risk

    • Downtime has been infrequent, but Salesforce did have a major outage in May 2021 (DNS issue) and May 2022 (expired certificate).
    • At the time of this writing, the Main Services Agreement does not commit to a specific uptime value and specifies the usual exclusions.
    • Similarly, there are limited commitments regarding data protection.

    Options to mitigate risk (not an exhaustive list):

    • Salesforce provides a backup and restore service offering.
    • In addition, some third-party vendors support backing up Salesforce data for additional protection against data corruption or data loss.
    • Business continuity workarounds can further reduce the impact of downtime (e.g. record updates in MS Word and leverage Outlook for contact info until Salesforce is recovered).

    Establish a baseline standard for risk mitigation, regardless of cloud service

    At a minimum, set a goal to review vendor risk at least annually, define standard processes for monitoring outages, and review options to back up your SaaS data.

    Example baseline standard for cloud risk mitigation

    • Review vendor risk at least annually. This includes reviewing SLAs, vendor’s incident preparedness (e.g. do they have a current DRP, BCP, and Security IRP?), and the vendor’s data protection strategy.
    • Incident response plans must include, at a minimum, steps to monitor vendor outage and communicate status to relevant stakeholders. Where possible, business process workarounds are defined to bridge the service gap.
    • For critical data (based on your BIA and an evaluation of risk), maintain your own backups of SaaS data for additional protection.

    Embed risk mitigation standards into existing IT operations

    • Include specific SLA requirements, including incident management processes, in your RFP process and annual vendor review.
    • Define cloud incident response in your incident management procedures.
    • Include cloud data considerations in your backup strategy reviews.

    Phase 3: Create an incident response plan

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    Assess your cloud risk

    Identify options to mitigate risk

    Create an incident response plan

    Activity 1: Review the example incident response workflows and case studies as a starting point

    1-3 hours

    1. Review the SaaS Incident Response Workflows examples. The examples illustrate different approaches to incident response depending on the criticality of the service and options available.
    2. Review the case studies on the next few slides, which further illustrate the resilience and incident response solutions implemented.
    3. Note the key elements:
    • Detection
    • Assessment
    • Monitoring status / contacting the vendor
    • Communication with key stakeholders
    • Invoking workarounds, if applicable

    Example SaaS Incident Response Workflow Excerpt

    The image contains a screenshot of an example of the SaaS Incident Response Workflow Excerpt.
    Materials
    • SaaS Incident Response Workflows examples
    Participants
    • Core group of IT management and staff tasked with evaluating and improving cloud services’ resilience.
    • Relevant business process owners to provide input and define business workarounds, where applicable.

    Case Study 1: Recovery plan for critical fundraising event

    If either critical SaaS dependency fails, the following plan is executed:

    1. Donors are redirected to a predefined alternate donation page hosted by a different service. The alternate page connects to the backup payment processing service (with predefined integrations).
    2. Marketing communications support the redirect.
    3. While the backup solution doesn’t gather as much data, the payment details provide enough information to follow up with donors where necessary.

    Criticality justified a failover option

    The Annual Day of Giving generates over 50% of fundraising for the year. It’s critically dependent on two SaaS solutions that host the donation page and payment processing.

    To mitigate the risk, the organization implemented the ability to failover to an alternate “environment” – much like a traditional DR solution – supported by workarounds to manage data collection.

    Case Study 2: Protecting customer data

    Daily exports from a SaaS-hosted donations site reduce potential data loss:

    1. Daily exports to a CRM support donor profile updates and follow-ups (tax receipts, thank-you letters, etc.).
    2. The exports also mitigate the risk of data loss due to an incident with the SaaS-hosted donation site.
    3. This company is exploring more-frequent exports to further reduce the risk of data loss.

    Protecting your data gives you options

    For critical data, do you want to rely solely on the vendor’s default backup strategy?

    If your SaaS vendor is hit by ransomware or if their backup frequency doesn’t meet your needs, having your own data backup gives you options.

    It can also support business process workarounds that need to access that data while waiting for SaaS recovery.

    Case Study 3: Recovery plan for payroll

    To enable a more accurate payroll workaround, the following is done:

    1. After each payroll run, export the payroll data from the SaaS solution to a secure location.
    2. If there is a SaaS outage when payroll must be submitted, the exported data can be modified and converted to an ACH file.
    3. The ACH file is submitted to the bank, which has preapproved this workaround.

    BCP can bridge the gap

    When leadership looks to IT to mitigate cloud risk, include BCP in the discussion.

    Payroll is a good example where the best recovery option might be a business continuity workaround.

    IT often still has a role in business continuity workarounds, as in this case study: specifically, providing a solution to modify and convert the payroll data to an ACH file.

    Activity 2: Run tabletop planning exercises as a starting point to build your incident response plan

    1-3 hours

    1. Follow the tabletop planning instructions provided in the Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan blueprint.
    2. Run the exercise for each cloud service. Keep the scenario generic at first (e.g. cloud service is down with no reported root cause) so you can focus on your response. Capture response steps and gaps.
    3. Add complexity in subsequent exercises (e.g. data loss plus downtime), and use that to expand and refine the workflow as needed.
    4. Use the resulting workflows as the core piece of your incident response plan.
    5. Supplement the workflow with relevant checklists or procedures. At this point you can choose to incorporate this into your DRP or BCP or maintain these documents as supplements to those plans.
      See the DRP Case Study and BCP Case Study for an example of DRP-BCP documentation.

    Example tabletop planning results excerpt with gaps identified

    The image contains an example tabletop planning results excerpt with gaps identified.

    Materials
    • SaaS Incident Response Workflows examples
    Participants
    • Core group of IT management and staff tasked with evaluating and improving cloud services’ resilience.
    • Review results with relevant business process owners to provide input and define business workarounds where applicable.

    Activity 3: Summarize cloud services resilience to inform senior leadership of current risks and mitigation efforts

    1-3 hours

    1. Use the Cloud Services Resilience Summary example as a template to capture the following:
    • The results of your vendor review (i.e. incident management SLAs, incident response preparedness, data protections strategy).
    • The current state of your downtime workarounds and additional data loss protection.
    • Your baseline standard for cloud services risk mitigation.
    • Summary of resilience, risks, workarounds, and data loss protection for each individual cloud service that you have reviewed.
  • Present the results to senior leadership to:
    • Highlight risks to inform business decisions to mitigate or accept those risks.
    • Summarize actions already taken to mitigate risks.
    • Communicate next steps (e.g. action items to address remaining risks).

    Cloud Services Resilience Summary – Table of Contents

    The image contains a screenshot of Cloud Services Resilience Summary – Table of Contents.
    Materials
    • Cloud Services Resilience Summary
    Participants
    • Core group of IT management and staff tasked with evaluating and improving cloud services’ resilience.
    • Review results with relevant business process owners to provide input and define business workarounds where applicable.

    Summary: For cloud services, after evaluating risk, IT must adapt how they approach risk mitigation

    1. Identify failover options where possible
    • A failover strategy is possible for many cloud services (e.g. IaaS replication to another region, or failing over SaaS to an alternate solution as in case study 1).
  • At least protect your data
    • Explore supplementary backup options to protect against ransomware, data corruption, or data loss and support business continuity workarounds (see case study 2).
  • Leverage BCP to close the gap
    • This doesn’t absolve IT of its role in mitigating cloud incident risk, but business process workarounds can bridge the gap where IT options are limited (see case study 3).

    Related Info-Tech Research

    IT DRP Maturity Assessment

    Get an objective assessment of your DRP program and recommendations for improvement.

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

    Close the gap between your DR capabilities and service continuity requirements.

    Develop a Business Continuity Plan

    Streamline the traditional approach to make BCP development manageable and repeatable.

    Implement Crisis Management Best Practices

    Don’t be another example of what not to do. Implement an effective crisis response plan to minimize the impact on business continuity, reputation, and profitability.

    M&A Runbook for Infrastructure and Operations

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    • Parent Category Name: Strategy and Organizational Design
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    • I&O is often the last to be informed of an impending M&A deal.
    • The business doesn’t understand the necessary requirements or timeline for integration.
    • It’s hard to prioritize when you’re buried under a mountain of work.
    • Documentation may be lacking or nonexistent, and members of the target organization may be uncooperative.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Manage expectations. The business often expects integration in days or weeks, not months or years. You need to set them straight.
    • Open your checkbook and prepare to hire. Integration will require a temporary increase in resources.
    • Tackle organizational and cultural change. People are harder to integrate than technology. Culture change is the hardest part, and the integration plan should address it.

    Impact and Result

    • Tailor your approach based on the business objectives of the merger or acquisition.
    • Separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves.
    • Ensure adequate personnel and budget.
    • Plan for the integration into normal operations.

    M&A Runbook for Infrastructure and Operations Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out how to partner with the business to conquer the challenges in your next merger or acquisition.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Establish goals

    Partner with the business to determine goals and establish high-level scope.

    • M&A Runbook for Infrastructure and Operations – Phase 1: Establish Goals
    • I&O M&A Project Napkin

    2. Conduct discovery

    Find out what the target organization’s I&O looks like.

    • M&A Runbook for Infrastructure and Operations – Phase 2: Conduct Discovery
    • I&O M&A Discovery Letter Template
    • I&O M&A Discovery Template
    • I&O M&A Workbook
    • I&O M&A Risk Assessment Tool

    3. Plan short-term integration

    Build a plan to achieve a day 1 MVP.

    • M&A Runbook for Infrastructure and Operations – Phase 3: Plan Short-Term Integration
    • I&O M&A Short-Term Integration Capacity Assessment Tool

    4. Map long-term integration

    Chart a roadmap for long-term integration.

    • M&A Runbook for Infrastructure and Operations – Phase 4: Map Long-Term Integration
    • I&O M&A Long-Term Integration Portfolio Planning Tool
    [infographic]

    Workshop: M&A Runbook for Infrastructure and Operations

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 High-Level Scope

    The Purpose

    Establish goals and conduct discovery.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Alignment with business goals

    Documentation of target organization’s current state

    Activities

    0.1 Consult with stakeholders.

    0.2 Establish M&A business goals.

    0.3 Conduct target discovery.

    0.4 Document own environment.

    0.5 Clarify goals.

    Outputs

    Stakeholder communication plan

    M&A business goals

    I&O M&A Discovery Template

    Current state of organization

    2 Target Assessment

    The Purpose

    Assess risk and value of target organization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Accurate scope of I&O integration

    Risk mitigation plans

    Value realization strategies

    Activities

    1.1 Scope I&O M&A project.

    1.2 Assess risks.

    1.3 Assess value.

    Outputs

    I&O M&A Project Napkin

    Risk assessment

    Value assessment

    3 Day 1 Integration Project Plan

    The Purpose

    Establish day 1 integration project plan.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Smoother day 1 integration

    Activities

    2.1 Determine Day 1 minimum viable operating model post M&A.

    2.2 Identify gaps.

    2.3 Build day 1 project plan.

    2.4 Estimate required resources.

    Outputs

    Day 1 project plan

    4 Long-Term Project Plan

    The Purpose

    Draw long-term integration roadmap.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Improved alignment with M&A goals

    Greater realization of the deal’s value

    Activities

    3.1 Set long-term future state goals.

    3.2 Create a long-term project plan.

    3.3 Consult with business stakeholders on the long-term plan.

    Outputs

    Long-term integration project plan

    5 Change Management and Continual Improvement

    The Purpose

    Prepare for organization and culture change.

    Refine M&A I&O integration process.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Smoother change management

    Improved M&A integration process

    Activities

    4.1 Complete a change management plan.

    4.2 Conduct a process post-mortem.

    Outputs

    Change management plan

    Process improvements action items

    Adding the Right Value: Building Cloud Brokerages That Enable

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    • Parent Category Name: Strategy and Organizational Design
    • Parent Category Link: /strategy-and-organizational-design

    In many cases, the answer is to develop a cloud brokerage to manage the complexity. But what should your cloud broker be delivering, and how?

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • To avoid failure, you need to provide security and compliance, but basic user satisfaction means becoming a frictionless intermediary.
    • Enabling brokers provide knowledge and guidance for the best usage of cloud.
    • While GCBs fill a critical role as a control point for IT consumption, they can easily turn into a friction point for IT projects. It’s important to find the right balance between enabling compliance and providing frictionless usability.

    Impact and Result

    • Avoid disintermediation.
    • Maintain compliance.
    • Leverage economies of scale.
    • Ensure architecture discipline.

    Adding the Right Value: Building Cloud Brokerages That Enable Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Build a Cloud Brokerage Deck – A guide to help you start designing a cloud brokerage that delivers value beyond gatekeeping.

    Define the value, ecosystem, and metrics required to add value as a brokerage. Develop a brokerage value proposition that aligns with your audience and capabilities. Define and rationalize the ecosystem of partners and value-add activities for your brokerage. Define KPIs that allow you to maximize and balance both usability and compliance.

    • Adding the Right Value: Building Cloud Brokerages That Enable Storyboard
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Adding the Right Value: Building Cloud Brokerages That Enable

    Considerations for implementing an institutional-focused cloud brokerage.

    Your Challenge

    Increasingly, large institutions and governments are adopting cloud-first postures for delivering IT resources. Combined with the growth of cloud offerings that are able to meet the certifications and requirements of this segment that has been driven by federal initiatives like Cloud-First in Canada and Cloud Smart in the United States, these two factors have left institutions (and the businesses that serve them) with the challenge of delivering cloud services to their users while maintaining compliance, control, and IT sanity.

    In many cases, the answer is to develop a cloud brokerage to manage the complexity. But what should your cloud broker be delivering and how?

    Navigating the Problem

    Not all cloud brokerages are the same. And while they can be an answer to cloud complexity, an ineffective brokerage can drain value and complicate operations even further. Cloud brokerages need to be designed:

    1. To deliver the right type of value to its users.
    2. To strike the balance between effective governance & security and flexibility & ease of use.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    By defining your end goals, framing solutions based on the type of value and rigor your brokerage needs to deliver, and focusing on the right balance of security and flexibility, you can deliver a brokerage that delivers the best of all worlds.

    1. Define the brokerage value you want to deliver.
    2. Build the catalog and partner ecosystem.
    3. Understand how to maximize adoption and minimize disintermediation while maintaining architectural discipline and compliance.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Sometimes a brokerage delivery model makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t! Understanding the value addition you want your brokerage to provide before creating it allows you to not only avoid pitfalls and maximize benefits but also understand when a brokerage model does and doesn’t make sense in the first place.

    Project Overview

    Understand what value you want your brokerage to deliver

    Different institutions want brokerage delivery for different reasons. It’s important to define up front why your users need to work through a brokerage and what value that brokerage needs to deliver.

    What’s in the catalog? Is it there to consolidate and simplify billing and consumption? Or does it add value further up the technology stack or value chain? If so, how does that change the capabilities you need internally and from partners?

    Security and compliance are usually the highest priority

    Among institutions adopting cloud, a broker that can help deliver their defined security and compliance standards is an almost universal requirement. Especially in government institutions, this can mean the need to meet a high standard in both implementation and validation.

    The good news is that even if you lack the complete set of skills in-house, the high certification levels available from hyperscale providers combined with a growing ecosystem of service providers working on these platforms means you can usually find the right partner(s) to make it possible.

    The real goal: frictionless intermediation and enablement

    Ultimately, if end users can’t get what they need from you, they will go around you to get it. This challenge, which has always existed in IT, is further amplified in a cloud service world that offers users a cornucopia of options outside the brokerage. Furthermore, cloud users expect to be able to consume IT seamlessly. Without frictionless satisfaction of user demand your brokerage will become disintermediated, which risks your highest priorities of security and compliance.

    Understand the evolution: Info-Tech thought model

    While initial adoption of cloud brokerages in institutions was focused on ensuring the ability of IT to extend its traditional role as gatekeeper to the realm of cloud services, the focus has now shifted upstream to enabling ease of use and smart adoption of cloud services. This is evidenced clearly in examples like the US government’s renaming of its digital strategy from “Cloud First” to “Cloud Smart” and has been mirrored in other regions and institutions.

    Info-Tech Insights

    To avoid failure, you need to provide security and compliance.

    Basic user satisfaction means becoming a frictionless intermediary.

    Exceed expectations! Enabling brokers provide knowledge and guidance for the best usage of cloud.

    • Security & Compliance
    • Frictionless Intermediation
    • Cloud-Enabling Brokerage

    Define the role of a cloud broker

    Where do brokers fit in the cloud model?

    • NIST Definition: An entity that manages the use, performance, and delivery of cloud services and negotiates relationships between cloud providers and cloud consumers.
    • Similar to a telecom master agent, a cloud broker acts as the middle-person and end-user point of contact, consolidating the management of underlying providers.
    • A government or institutional cloud broker (GCB) is responsible for the delivery of all cloud services consumed by the departments or agencies it supports or that are mandated to use it.

    Balancing governance and agility

    Info-Tech Insight

    While GCBs fill a critical role as a control point for IT consumption, they can easily turn into a friction point for IT projects. It’s important to find the right balance between enabling compliance and providing frictionless usability.

    Model brokerage drivers and benefits

    Reduced costs: Security through standardization: Frictionless consumption: Avoid disinter-mediation; Maintain compliance; Leverage economies of scale; Ensure architecture discipline

    Maintain compliance and ensure architecture discipline: Brokerages can be an effective gating point for ensuring properly governed and managed IT consumption that meets the specific regulations and compliances required for an institution. It can also be a strong catalyst and enabler for moving to even more effective cloud consumption through automation.

    Avoid disintermediation: Especially in institutions, cloud brokers are a key tool in the fight against disintermediation – that is, end users circumventing your IT department’s procurement and governance by consuming an ad hoc cloud service.

    Leverage economies of scale: Simply put, consolidation of your cloud consumption drives effectiveness by making the most of your buying power.

    Info-Tech Insights

    Understanding the importance of each benefit type to your brokerage audience will help you define the type of brokerage you need to build and what skills and partners will be required to deliver the right value.

    The brokerage landscape

    The past ten years have seen governments and institutions evolve from basic acceptance of cloud services to the usage of cloud as the core of most IT initiatives.

    • As part of this evolution, many organizations now have well-defined standards and guidance for the implementation, procurement, and regulation of cloud services for their use.
    • Both Canada (Strategic Plan for Information Management and Information Technology) and the United States (Cloud Smart – formerly known as Cloud First) have recently updated their guidance on adoption of cloud services. The Australian Government has also recently updated its Cloud Computing Policy.
    • AWS and Azure both now claim Full FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) certification.
    • This has not only enabled easy adoption of these core hyperscale cloud service by government but also driven the proliferation of a large ecosystem of FedRAMP-authorized cloud service providers.
    • This trend started with government at the federal level but has cascaded downstream to provincial and municipal governments globally, and the same model seems likely to be adopted by other governments and other institution types over time.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The ecosystem of platforms and tools has grown significantly and examples of best practices, especially in government, are readily available. Once you’ve defined your brokerage’s value stance, the building blocks you need to deliver often don’t need to be built from scratch.

    Address the unique challenges of business-led IT in institutions

    With the business taking more accountability and management of their own technology, brokers must learn how to evolve from being gatekeepers to enablers.

    This image This lists the Cons of IT acting as a gatekeeper providing oversight, and the Pros of IT acting as an Enabler in an IT Partnership.  the Cons are: Restrict System Access; Deliver & Monitor Applications; Own Organizational Risk; Train the Business.  The Pros are: Manage Role-Based Access; Deliver & Monitor Platforms; Share Organizational Risk; Coach & Mentor the Business

    Turn brokerage pitfalls into opportunities

    The greatest risks in using a cloud broker come from its nature as a single point of distribution for service and support. Without resources (or automation) to enable scale, as well as responsive processes for supporting users in finding the right services and making those services available through the brokerage, you will lose alignment with your users’ needs, which inevitably leads to disintermediation, loss of IT control, and broken compliance

    Info-Tech Insights

    Standardization and automation are your friend when building a cloud brokerage! Sometimes this means having a flexible catalog of options and configurations, but great brokerages can deliver value by helping their users redefine and evolve their workloads to work more effectively in the cloud. This means providing guidance and facilitating the landing/transformation of users’ workloads in the cloud, the right way.

    Challenges Impact
    • Single point of failure
    • Managing capacity
    • Alignment of brokerage with underlying agencies
    • Additional layer of complexity
    • Inability to deliver service
    • Disintermediation
    • Broken security/compliance
    • Loss of cost control/purchasing power

    Validate your cloud brokerage strategy using Info-Tech’s approach

    Value Definition

    • Define your brokerage type and value addition

    Capabilities Mapping

    • Understand the partners and capabilities you need to be able to deliver

    Measuring Value

    • Define KPIs for both compliant delivery and frictionless intermediation

    Provide Cloud Excellence

    • Move from intermediation to enablement and help users land on the cloud the right way

    Define the categories for your brokerage’s benefit and value

    Depending on the type of brokerage, the value delivered may be as simple as billing consolidation, but many brokerages go much deeper in their value proposition.

    This image depicts a funnel, where the following inputs make up the Broker Value: Integration, Interface and Management Enhancement; User Identity and Risk Management/ Security & Compliance; Cost & Workload Efficiency, Service Aggregation

    Define the categories of brokerage value to add

    • Purchasing Agents save the purchaser time by researching services from different vendors and providing the customer with information about how to use cloud computing to support business goals.
    • Contract Managers may also be assigned power to negotiate contracts with cloud providers on behalf of the customer. In this scenario, the broker may distribute services across multiple vendors to achieve cost-effectiveness, while managing the technical and procurement complexity of dealing with multiple vendors.
      • The broker may provide users with an application program interface (API) and user interface (UI) that hides any complexity and allows the customer to work with their cloud services as if they were being purchased from a single vendor. This type of broker is sometimes referred to as a cloud aggregator.
    • Cloud Enablers can also provide the customer with additional services, such as managing the deduplication, encryption, and cloud data transfer and assisting with data lifecycle management and other activities.
    • Cloud Customizers integrate various underlying cloud services for customers to provide a custom offering under a white label or its own brand.
    • Cloud Agents are essentially the software version of a Contract Manager and act by automating and facilitating the distribution of work between different cloud service providers.

    Info-Tech Insights

    Remember that these categories are general guidelines! Depending on the requirements and value a brokerage needs to deliver, it may fit more than one category of broker type.

    Brokerage types and value addition

    Info-Tech Insights

    Each value addition your brokerage invests in delivering should tie to reinforcing efficiency, compliance, frictionlessness, or enablement.

    Value Addition Purchasing Agent Contract Manager Cloud Enabler Cloud Customizer Cloud Agent
    Underlying service selection

    Standard Activity

    Standard Activity Standard Activity Standard Activity Common Activity
    Support and info Standard Activity

    Common Activity

    Standard Activity Standard Activity Common Activity
    Contract lifecycle (pricing/negotiation) Standard Activity Common Activity Standard Activity
    Workload distribution (to underlying services) (aggregation) Common Activity Standard Activity Standard Activity Standard Activity
    Value-add or layered on services Standard Activity Common Activity
    Customization/integration of underlying services Standard Activity
    Automated workload distribution (i.e. software) Standard Activity

    Start by delivering value in these common brokerage service categories

    Security & Compliance

    • Reporting & Auditing
    • SIEM & SOC Services
    • Patching & Monitoring

    Cost Management

    • Right-Sizing
    • Billing Analysis
    • Anomaly Detection & Change Recommendations

    Data Management

    • Data Tiering
    • Localization Management
    • Data Warehouse/Lake Services

    Resilience & Reliability

    • Backup & Archive
    • Replication & Sync
    • DR & HA Management
    • Ransomware Prevention/Mitigation

    Cloud-Native & DevOps Enablement

    • Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
    • DevOps Tools & Processes
    • SDLC Automation Tools

    Design, Transformation, and Integration

    • CDN Integration
    • AI Tools Integration
    • SaaS Customizations

    Activity: Brokerage value design

    Who are you and who are you building this for?

    • Internal brokerage (i.e. you are a department in an organization that is tasked with providing IT resources to other internal groups)
      • No profit motivation
      • Primary goal is to maintain compliance and avoid disintermediation
    • Third-party brokerage (i.e. you are an MSP that needs to build a brokerage to provide a variety of downstream services and act as the single point of consumption for an organization)
      • Focus on value-addition to the downstream services you facilitate for your client
      • Increased requirement to quickly add new partners/services from downstream as required by your client

    What requirements and pains do you need to address?

    • Remember that in the world of cloud, users ultimately can go around IT to find the resources and tools they want to use. In short, if you don’t provide ease and value, they will get it somewhere else.
    • Assess the different types of cloud brokerages out there as a guide to what sort of value you want to deliver.

    Why are you creating a brokerage? There are several categories of driver and more than one may apply.

    • Compliance and security gating/validation
    • Cost consolidation and governance
    • Value-add or feature enhancement of raw/downstream services being consumed

    It’s important to clearly understand how best you can deliver unique value to ensure that they want to consume from you.

    This is an image of a Venn diagram between the following: Who are you trying to serve?; Why and how are you uniquely positioned to deliver?; What requirements do they have and what pain points can you help solve?.  Where all three circles overlap is the Brokerage Value Proposition.

    Understand the ecosystem you’ll require to deliver value

    GCB

    • Enabling Effectiveness
    • Cost Governance
    • Adoption and User Satisfaction
    • Security & Compliance

    Whatever value proposition and associated services your brokerage has defined, either internal resources or additional partners will be required to run the platform and processes you want to offer on top of the defined base cloud platforms.

    Info-Tech Insights

    Remember to always align your value adds and activities to the four key themes:

    • Efficiency
    • Compliance
    • Frictionlessness
    • Cloud Enablement

    Delivering value may require an ecosystem

    The additional value your broker delivers will depend on the tools and services you can layer on top of the base cloud platform(s) you support.

    In many cases, you may require different partners to fulfil similar functions across different base platforms. Although this increases complexity for the brokerage, it’s also a place where additional value can be delivered to end users by your role as a frictionless intermediary.

    Base Partner/Platform

    • Third-party software & platforms
    • Third-party automations & integrations
    • Third-party service partners
    • Internal value-add functions

    Build the ecosystem you need for your value proposition

    Leverage partners and automation to bake compliance in.

    Different value-add types (based on the category/categories of broker you’re targeting) require different additional platforms and partners to augment the base cloud service you’re brokering.

    Security & Config

    • IaC Tools
    • Cloud Resource Configuration Validation
    • Templating Tools
    • Security Platforms
    • SDN and Networking Platforms
    • Resilience (Backup/Replication/DR/HA) Platforms
    • Data & Storage Management
    • Compliance and Validation Platforms & Partners

    Cost Management

    • Subscription Hierarchy Management
    • Showback and Chargeback Logic
    • Cost Dashboarding and Thresholding
    • Governance and Intervention

    Adoption & User Satisfaction

    • Service Delivery SLAs
    • Support Process & Tools
    • Capacity/Availability Management
    • Portal Usability/UX

    Speed of Evolution

    • Partner and Catalog/Service Additions
    • Broker Catalog Roadmapping
    • User Request Capture (new services)
    • User Request Capture (exceptions)

    Build your features and services lists

    Incorporate your end user, business, and IT perspectives in defining the list of mandatory and desired features of your target solution.

    See our Implement a Proactive and Consistent Vendor Selection Process blueprint for information on procurement practices, including RFP templates.

    End User

    • Visual, drag-and-drop models to define data models, business logic, and user interfaces
    • One-click deployment
    • Self-healing application
    • Vendor-managed infrastructure
    • Active community and marketplace
    • Prebuilt templates and libraries
    • Optical character recognition and natural language processing

    Business

    • Audit and change logs
    • Theme and template builder
    • Template management
    • Knowledgebase and document management
    • Role-based access
    • Business value, operational costs, and other KPI monitoring
    • Regulatory compliance
    • Consistent design and user experience across applications
    • Business workflow automation

    IT

    • Application and system performance monitoring
    • Versioning and code management
    • Automatic application and system refactoring and recovery
    • Exception and error handling
    • Scalability (e.g. load balancing) and infrastructure management
    • Real-time debugging
    • Testing capabilities
    • Security management
    • Application integration management

    Understand the stakeholders

    Hyperscale Platform/Base Platform: Security; Compliance and Validation;Portal/Front-End; Cost Governance; Broker Value Add(s)

    Depending on the value-add(s) you are trying to deliver, as well as the requirements from your institution(s), you will have a different delineation of responsibilities for each of the value-add dimensions. Typically, there will be at least three stakeholders whose role needs to be considered for each dimension:

    • Base Cloud Provider
    • Third-Party Platforms/Service Providers
    • Internal Resources

    Info-Tech Insights

    It’s important to remember that the ecosystem of third-party options available to you in each case will likely be dependent on if a given partner operates or supports your chosen base provider.

    Define the value added by each stakeholder in your value chain

    Value Addition Cost Governance Security & Compliance Adoption and User Satisfaction New Service Addition Speed End-User Cloud Effectiveness
    Base platform(s)
    Third party
    Internal

    A basic table of the stakeholders and platforms involved in your value stream is a critical tool for aligning activities and partners with brokerage value.

    Remember to tie each value-add category you’re embarking on to at least one of the key themes!

    Cost Governance → Efficiency

    Security & Compliance → Compliance

    Adoption & User Satisfaction → Frictionlessness

    New Service Addition Responsiveness → Frictionlessness, Enablement

    End-User Cloud Effectiveness → Enablement

    Info-Tech Insights

    The expectations for how applications are consumed and what a user experience should look like is increasingly being guided by the business and by the disintermediating power of the cloud-app ecosystem.

    “Enabling brokers” help embrace business-led IT

    In environments where compliance and security are a must, the challenges of handing off application management to the business are even more complex. Great brokers learn to act not just as a gatekeeper but an enabler of business-led IT.

    Business Empowerment

    Organizations are looking to enhance their Agile and BizDevOps practices by shifting traditional IT practices left and toward the business.

    Changing Business Needs

    Organizational priorities are constantly changing. Cost reduction opportunities and competitive advantages are lost because of delayed delivery of features.

    Low Barrier to Entry

    Low- and no-code development tools, full-stack solutions, and plug-and-play architectures allow non-technical users to easily build and implement applications without significant internal technical support or expertise.

    Democratization of IT

    A wide range of digital applications, services, and information are readily available and continuously updated through vendor and public marketplaces and open-source communities.

    Technology-Savvy Business

    The business is motivated to learn more about the technology they use so that they can better integrate it into their processes.

    Balance usability and compliance: accelerate cloud effectiveness

    Move to being an accelerator and an enabler! Rather than creating an additional layer of complexity, we can use the abstraction of a cloud brokerage to bring a wide variety of value-adds and partners into the ecosystem without increasing complexity for end users.

    Manage the user experience

    • Your portal is a great source of data for optimizing user adoption and satisfaction.
    • Understand the KPIs that matter to your clients or client groups from both a technical and a service perspective.

    Be proactive and responsive in meeting changing needs

    • Determine dashboard consumption by partner view.
    • Regularly review and address the gaps in your catalog.
    • Provide an easy mechanism for adding user-demanded services.

    Think like a service provider

    • You do need to be able to communicate and even market internally new services and capabilities as you add them or people won't know to come to you to use them.
    • It's also critical in helping people move along the path to enablement and knowing what might be possible that they hadn't considered.

    Provide cloud excellence functions

    Enablement Broker

    • Mentorship & Training
      • Build the skills, knowledge, and experiences of application owners and managers with internal and external expertise.
    • Organizational Change Leadership
      • Facilitate cultural, governance, and other organizational changes through strong relationships with business and IT leadership.
    • Good Delivery Practices & Thinking
      • Develop, share, and maintain a toolkit of good software development lifecycle (SDLC) practices and techniques.
    • Knowledge Sharing
      • Centralize a knowledgebase of up-to-date and accurate documentation and develop community forums to facilitate knowledge transfer.
    • Technology Governance & Leadership
      • Implement the organizational standards, policies, and rules for all applications and platforms and coordinate growth and sprawl.
    • Shared Services & Integrations
      • Provide critical services and integrations to support end users with internal resources or approved third-party providers and partners.

    Gauge value with the right metrics

    Focus your effort on measuring key metrics.

    Category

    Purpose

    Examples

    Business Value – The amount of value and benefits delivered. Justify the investment and impact of the brokerage and its optimization to business operations. ROI, user productivity, end-user satisfaction, business operational costs, error rate
    Application Quality – Satisfaction of application quality standards. Evaluate organizational effort to address and maximize user satisfaction and adoption rates. Adoption rate, usage friction metrics, user satisfaction metrics
    Delivery Effectiveness – The delivery efficiency of changes. Enable members to increase their speed to effective deployment, operation, and innovation on cloud platforms. Speed of deployment, landing/migration success metrics

    Determine measures that demonstrate the value of your brokerage by aligning it with your quality definition, value drivers, and users’ goals and objectives. Recognize that your journey will require constant monitoring and refinement to adjust to situations that may arise as you adopt new products, standards, strategies, tactics, processes, and tools.

    Activity Output

    Ultimately, the goal is designing a brokerage that can evolve from gatekeeping to frictionless intermediation to cloud enablement.

    Maintain focus on the value proposition, your brokerage ecosystem, and the metrics that represent enablement for your users and avoid pitfalls and challenges from the beginning.

    Activity: Define your brokerage type and value addition; Understand the partners and capabilities you need to be able to deliver; Define KPIs for both delivery (compliance) and adoption (frictionlessness); Output: GCB Strategy Plan; Addresses: Why and when you should build a GCB; How to avoid pitfalls; How to maximize benefits; How to maximize responsiveness and user satisfaction; How to roadmap and add services with agility.

    Appendix

    Related blueprints and tools

    Document Your Cloud Strategy

    This blueprint covers aligning your value proposition with general cloud requirements.

    Define Your Digital Business Strategy

    Phase 1 of this research covers identifying value chains to be transformed.

    Embrace Business-Managed Applications

    Phase 1 of this research covers understanding the business-managed applications as a factor in developing a frictionless intermediary model.

    Implement a Proactive and Consistent Vendor Selection Process

    This blueprint provides information on partner selection and procurement practices, including RFP templates.

    Bibliography

    “3 Types of Cloud Brokers That Can Save the Cloud.” Cloud Computing Topics, n.d. Web.

    Australian Government Cloud Computing Policy. Government of Australia, October 2014. Web.

    “Cloud Smart Policy Overview.” CIO.gov, n.d. Web.

    “From Cloud First to Cloud Smart.” CIO.gov, n.d. Web.

    Gardner, Dana. “Cloud brokering: Building a cloud of clouds.” ZDNet, 22 April 2011. Web.

    Narcisi, Gina. “Cloud, Next-Gen Services Help Master Agents Grow Quickly And Beat 'The Squeeze' “As Connectivity Commissions Decline.” CRN, 14 June 2017. Web.

    Smith, Spencer. “Asigra calls out the perils of cloud brokerage model.” TechTarget, 28 June 2019. Web.

    Tan, Aaron. “Australia issues new cloud computing guidelines.” TechTarget, 27 July 2020. Web.

    The European Commission Cloud Strategy. ec.europa.eu, 16 May 2019. Web.

    “TrustRadius Review: Cloud Brokers 2022.” TrustRadius, 2022. Web.

    Yedlin, Debbie. “Pros and Cons of Using a Cloud Broker.” Technology & Business Integrators, 17 April 2015. Web.

    Key Metrics for Every CIO

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}119|cart{/j2store}
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    • Parent Category Name: Performance Measurement
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    • As a CIO, you are inundated with data and information about how your IT organization is performing based on the various IT metrics that exist.
    • The information we receive from metrics is often just that – information. Rarely is it used as a tool to drive the organization forward.
    • CIO metrics need to consider the goals of key stakeholders in the organization.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The top metrics for CIOs don’t have anything to do with IT.
    • CIOs should measure and monitor metrics that have a direct impact on the business.
    • Be intentional with the metric and number of metrics that you monitor on a regular basis.
    • Be transparent with your stakeholders on what and why you are measuring those specific metrics.

    Impact and Result

    • Measure fewer metrics, but measure those that will have a significant impact on how your deliver value to your organization.
    • Focus on the metrics that you can take action against, rather than simply monitor.
    • Ensure your metrics tie to your top priorities as a CIO.

    Key Metrics for Every CIO Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Key Metrics for Every CIO deck – The top metrics every CIO should measure and act on

    Leverage the top metrics for every CIO to help focus your attention and provide insight into actionable steps.

    • Key Metrics for Every CIO Storyboard
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Key Metrics for Every CIO

    The top six metrics for CIOs – and they have very little to do with IT

    Analyst Perspective

    Measure with intention

    Be the strategic CIO who monitors the right metrics relevant to their priorities – regardless of industry or organization. When CIOs provide a laundry list of metrics they are consistently measuring and monitoring, it demonstrates a few things.

    First, they are probably measuring more metrics than they truly care about or could action. These “standardized” metrics become something measured out of expectation, not intention; therefore, they lose their meaning and value to you as a CIO. Stop spending time on these metrics you will be unable or unwilling to address.

    Secondly, it indicates a lack of trust in the IT leadership team, who can and should be monitoring these commonplace operational measures. An empowered IT leader will understand the responsibility they have to inform the CIO should a metric be derailing from the desired outcome.

    Photo of Brittany Lutes, Senior Research Analyst, Organizational Transformation Practice, Info-Tech Research Group. Brittany Lutes
    Senior Research Analyst
    Organizational Transformation Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    CIOs need to measure a set of specific metrics that:

    • Will support the organization’s vision, their career, and the IT function all in one.
    • Can be used as a tool to make informed decisions and take appropriate actions that will improve the IT function’s ability to deliver value.
    • Consider the influence of critical stakeholders, especially the end customer.
    • Are easily measured at any point in time.
    Common Obstacles

    CIOs often cannot define these metrics because:

    • We confuse the operational metrics IT leaders need to monitor with strategic metrics CIOs need to monitor.
    • Previously monitored metrics did not deliver value.
    • It is hard to decide on a metric that will prove both insightful and easily measurable.
    • We measure metrics without any method or insight on how to take actionable steps forward.
    Info-Tech’s Approach

    For every CIO, there are six areas that should be a focus, no matter your organization or industry. These six priorities will inform the metrics worth measuring:

    • Risk management
    • Delivering on business objectives
    • Customer satisfaction
    • Employee engagement
    • Business leadership relations
    • Managing to a budget

    Info-Tech Insight

    The top metrics for a CIO to measure and monitor have very little to do with IT and everything to do with ensuring the success of the business.

    Your challenge

    CIOs are not using metrics as a personal tool to advance the organization:
    • Metrics should be used as a tool by the CIO to help inform the future actions that will be taken to reach the organization’s strategic vision.
    • As a CIO, you need to have a defined set of metrics that will support your career, the organization, and the IT function you are accountable for.
    • CIO metrics must consider the most important stakeholders across the entire ecosystem of the organization – especially the end customer.
    • The metrics for a CIO are distinctly different from the metrics you use to measure the operational effectiveness of the different IT functions.
    “CIOs are businesspeople first and technology people second.” (Myles Suer, Source: CIO, 2019.)

    Common obstacles

    These barriers make this challenge difficult to address for many CIOs:
    • CIOs often do not measure metrics because they are not aware of what should or needs to be measured.
    • As a result of not wanting to measure the wrong thing, CIOs can often choose to measure nothing at all.
    • Or they get too focused on the operational metrics of their IT organization, leaving the strategic business metrics forgotten.
    • Moreover, narrowing the number of metrics that are being measured down to an actionable number is very difficult.
    • We rely only on physical data sets to help inform the measurements, not considering the qualitative feedback received.
    CIO priorities are business priorities

    46% of CIOs are transforming operations, focused on customer experiences and employee productivity. (Source: Foundry, 2022.)

    Finances (41.3%) and customers (28.1%) remain the top two focuses for CIOs when measuring IT effectiveness. All other focuses combine for the remaining 30.6%. (Source: Journal of Informational Technology Management, 2018.)

    Info-Tech’s approach

    Organizational goals inform CIO metrics

    Diagram with 'CIO Metrics' at the center surrounded by 'Directive Goals', 'Product/Service Goals', 'IT Goals', and 'Operations Goals', each of which are connected to eachother by 'Customers'.

    The Info-Tech difference:
    1. Every CIO has the same set of priorities regardless of their organization or industry given that these metrics are influenced by similar goals of organizations.
    2. CIO metrics are a tool to help inform the actions that will support each core area in reaching their desired goals.
    3. Be mindful of the goals different business units are using to reach the organization’s strategic vision – this includes your own IT goals.
    4. Directly or indirectly, you will always influence the ability to acquire and retain customers for the organization.

    CIO priorities

    MANAGING TO A BUDGET
    Reducing operational costs and increasing strategic IT spend.
    Table centerpiece for CIO Priorities. DELIVERING ON BUSINESS OBJECTIVES
    Aligning IT initiatives to the vision of the organization.
    CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
    Directly and indirectly impacting customer experience.
    EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
    Creating an IT workforce of engaged and purpose-driven people.
    RISK MANAGEMENT
    Actively knowing and mitigating threats to the organization.
    BUSINESS LEADERSHIP RELATONS
    Establishing a network of influential business leaders.

    High-level process flow

    How do we use the CIO metrics?
    Process flow that starts at 'Consider - Identify and analyze CIO priorities', and is followed by 'Select priorities - Identify the top priorities for CIOs (see previous slide)', 'Create a measure - Determine a measure that aligns to each priority', 'Make changes & improvements - Take action to improve the measure and reach the goal you are trying to achieve', 'Demonstrate progress - Use the metrics to demonstrate progress against priorities'. Using priority-based metrics allows you to make incremental improvements that can be measured and reported on, which makes program maturation a natural process.

    Example CIO dashboard

    Example CIO dashboard.
    * Arrow indicates month-over-month trend

    Harness the value of metric data

    Metrics are rarely used accurately as a tool
    • When you have good metrics, you can:
      • Ensure employees are focused on the priorities of the organization
      • Have insight to make better decisions
      • Communicate with the business using language that resonates with each stakeholder
      • Increase the performance of your IT function
      • Continually adapt to meet changing business demands
    • Metrics are tools that quantifiably indicate whether a goal is on track to being achieved (proactive) or if the goal was successfully achieved (retroactive)
    • This is often reflected through two metric types:
      • Leading Metrics: The metric indicates if there are actions that should be taken in the process of achieving a desired outcome.
      • Lagging Metrics: Based on the desired outcome, the metric can indicate where there were successes or failures that supported or prevented the outcome from being achieved.
    • Use the data from the metrics to inform your actions. Do not collect this data if your intent is simply to know the data point. You must be willing to act.
    "The way to make a metric successful is by understanding why you are measuring it." (Jeff Neyland CIO)

    CIOs measure strategic business metrics

    Keep the IT leadership accountable for operational metrics
    • Leveraging the IT leadership team, empower and hold each leader accountable for the operational metrics specific to their functional area
    • As a CIO, focus on the metrics that are going to impact the business. These are often tied to people or stakeholders:
      • The customers who will purchase the product or service
      • The decision makers who will fund IT initiatives
      • The champions of IT value
      • The IT employees who will be driven to succeed
      • The owner of an IT risk event
    • By focusing on these priority areas, you can regularly monitor aspects that will have major business impacts – and be able to address those impacts.
    As a CIO, avoid spending time on operational metrics such as:
    • Time to deliver
    • Time to resolve
    • Project delivery (scope, time, money)
    • Application usage
    • User experiences
    • SLAs
    • Uptime/downtime
    • Resource costs
    • Ticket resolution
    • Number of phishing attempts
    Info-Tech Insight

    While operational metrics are important to your organization, IT leaders should be empowered and responsible for their management.

    SECTION 1

    Actively Managing IT Risks

    Actively manage IT risks

    The impact of IT risks to your organization cannot be ignored any further
    • Few individuals in an organization understand IT risks and can proactively plan for the prevention of those threats, making the CIO the responsible and accountable individual when it comes to IT risks – especially the components that tie into cybersecurity.
    • When the negative impacts of an IT threat event are translated into terms that can be understood and actioned by all in the organization, it increases the likelihood of receiving the sponsorship and funding support necessary.
    • Moreover, risk management can be used as a tool to drive the organization toward its vision state, enabling informed risk decisions.

    Risk management metric:

    Number of critical IT threats that were detected and prevented before impact to the organization.

    Beyond risk prevention
    Organizations that have a clear risk tolerance can use their risk assessments to better inform their decisions.
    Specifically, taking risks that could lead to a high return on investment or other key organizational drivers.

    Protect the organization from more than just cyber threats

    Other risk-related metrics:
    • Percentage of IT risks integrated into the organization’s risk management approach.
    • Number of risk management incidents that were not identified by your organization (and the potential financial impact of those risks).
    • Business satisfaction with IT actions to reduce impact of negative IT risk events.
    • Number of redundant systems removed from the organizations portfolio.
    Action steps to take:
    • Create a risk-aware culture, not just with IT folks. The entire organization needs to understand how IT risks are preventable.
    • Clearly demonstrate the financial and reputational impact of potential IT risks and ensure that this is communicated with decision-makers in the organization.
    • Have a single source of truth to document possible risk events and report prevention tactics to minimize the impact of risks.
    • Use this information to recommend budget changes and help make risk-informed decisions.

    49%

    Investing in Risk

    Heads of IT “cited increasing cybersecurity protections as the top business initiative driving IT investments this year” (Source: Foundry, 2022.)

    SECTION 2

    Delivering on Business Objectives

    Delivering on business objectives

    Deliver on initiatives that bring value to your organization and stop benchmarking
    • CIOs often want to know how they are performing in comparison to their competitors (aka where do you compare in the benchmarking?)
    • While this is a nice to know, it adds zero value in demonstrating that you understand your business, let alone the goals of your business
    • Every organization will have a different set of goals it is striving toward, despite being in the same industry, sector, or market.
    • Measuring your performance against the objectives of the organization prevents CIOs from being more technical than it would do them good.

    Business Objective Alignment Metric:

    Percentage of IT metrics have a direct line of impact to the business goals

    Stop using benchmarks to validate yourself against other organizations. Benchmarking does not provide:
    • Insight into how well that organization performed against their goals.
    • That other organizations goals are likely very different from your own organization's goals.
    • It often aggregates the scores so much; good and bad performers stop being clearly identified.

    Provide a clear line of sight from IT metrics to business goals

    Other business alignment metrics:
    • Number of IT initiatives that have a significant impact on the success of the organization's goals.
    • Number of IT initiatives that exceed the expected value.
    • Positive impact ($) of IT initiatives on driving business innovation.
    Action steps to take:
    • Establish a library or dashboard of all the metrics you are currently measuring as an IT organization, and align each of them to one or more of the business objectives your organization has.
    • Leverage the members of the organization’s executive team to validate they understand how your metric ties to the business objective.
    • Any metric that does not have a clear line of sight should be reconsidered.
    • IT metrics should continue to speak in business terms, not IT terms.

    50%

    CIOs drive the business

    The percentage of CEOs that recognize the CIO as the main driver of the business strategy in the next 2-3 years. (Source: Deloitte, 2020.)

    SECTION 3

    Impact on Customer Satisfaction

    Influencing end-customer satisfaction

    Directly or indirectly, IT influences how satisfied the customer is with their product or service
    • Now more than ever before, IT can positively influence the end-customer’s satisfaction with the product or service they purchase.
    • From operational redundancies to the customer’s interaction with the organization, IT can and should be positively impacting the customer experience.
    • IT leaders who take an interest in the customer demonstrate that they are business-focused individuals and understand the intention of what the organization is seeking to achieve.
    • With the CIO role becoming a strategic one, understanding why a customer would or would not purchase your organization’s product or service stops being a “nice to have.”

    Customer satisfaction metric:

    What is the positive impact ($ or %) of IT initiatives on customer satisfaction?

    Info-Tech Insight

    Be the one to suggest new IT initiatives that will impact the customer experience – stop waiting for other business leaders to make the recommendation.

    Enhance the end-customer experience with I&T

    Other customer satisfaction metrics:
    • Amount of time CIO spends interacting directly with customers.
    • Customer retention rate.
    • Customer attraction rate.
    Action steps to take:
    • Identify the core IT capabilities that support customer experience. Automation? Mobile application? Personal information secured?
    • Suggest an IT-supported or-led initiative that will enhance the customer experience and meet the business goals. Retention? Acquisition? Growth in spend?
    • This is where operational metrics or dashboards can have a real influence on the customer experience. Be mindful of how IT impacts the customer journey.

    41%

    Direct CX interaction

    In 2022, 41% of IT heads were directly interacting with the end customer. (Source: Foundry, 2022.)

    SECTION 4

    Keeping Employees Engaged

    Keeping employees engaged

    This is about more than just an annual engagement survey
    • As a leader, you should always have a finger on the pulse of how engaged your employees are
    • Employee engagement is high when:
      • Employees have a positive disposition to their place of work
      • Employees are committed and willing to contribute to the organization's success
    • Employee engagement comprises three types of drivers: organizational, job, and retention. As CIO, you have a direct impact on all three drivers.
    • Providing employees with a positive work environment where they are empowered to complete activities in line with their desired skillset and tied to a clear purpose can significantly increase employee engagement.

    Employee engagement metric:

    Number of employees who feel empowered to complete purposeful activities related to their job each day

    Engagement leads to increases in:
    • Innovation
    • Productivity
    • Performance
    • Teamwork
    While reducing costs associated with high turnover.

    Employees daily tasks need to have purpose

    Other employee engagement metrics:
    • Tenure of IT employees at the organization.
    • Number of employees who seek out or use a training budget to enhance their knowledge/skills.
    • Degree of autonomy employees feel they have in their work on a daily basis.
    • Number of collaboration tools provided to enable cross-organizational work.
    Action steps to take:
    • If you are not willing to take actionable steps to address engagement, don’t bother asking employees about it.
    • Identify the blockers to empowerment. Common blockers include insufficient team collaboration, bureaucracy, inflexibility, and feeling unsupported and judged.
    • Ensure there is a consistent understanding of what “purposeful” means. Are you talking about “purposeful” to the organization or the individual?
    • Provide more clarity on what the organization’s purpose is and the vision it is driving toward. Just because you understand does not mean the employees do.

    26%

    Act on engagement

    Only 26% of leaders actually think about and act on engagement every single day. (Source: SHRM, 2022.)

    SECTION 5

    Establishing Trusted Business Relationships

    Establishing trusted business partnerships

    Leverage your relationships with other C-suite executives to demonstrate IT’s value
    • Your relationship with other business peers is critical – and, funny enough, it is impacted by the use of good metrics and data.
    • The performance of your IT team will be recognized by other members of the executive leadership team (ELT) and is a direct reflection of you as a leader.
    • A good relationship with the ELT can alleviate issues if concerns about IT staff surface.
      • Of the 85% of IT leaders working on transformational initiatives, only 30% are trying to cultivate an IT/business partnership (Foundry, 2022).
    • Don’t let other members of the organizations ELT overlook you or the value IT has. Build the key relationships that will drive trust and partnerships.

    Business leadership relationship metric:

    Ability to influence business decisions with trusted partners.

    Some key relationships that are worth forming with other C-suite executives right now include:
    • Chief Sustainability Officer
    • Chief Revenue Officer
    • Chief Marketing Officer
    • Chief Data Officer

    Influence business decisions with trusted partners

    Other business relations metrics:
    • The frequency with which peers on the ELT complain about the IT organization to other ELT peers.
    • Percentage of business leaders who trust IT to make the right choices for their accountable areas.
    • Number of projects that are initiated with a desired solution versus problems with no desired solution.
    Action steps to take:
    • From lunch to the boardroom, it is important you make an effort to cultivate relationships with the other members of the ELT.
    • Identify who the most influential members of the ELT are and what their primary goals or objectives are.
    • Follow through on what you promise you will deliver – if you do not know, do not promise it!
    • What will work for one member of the ELT will not work for another – personalize your approach.

    60%

    Enterprise-wide collaboration

    “By 2023, 60% of CIOs will be primarily measured for their ability to co-create new business models and outcomes through extensive enterprise and ecosystem-wide collaboration.” (Source: IDC, 2021.)

    SECTION 6

    Managing to a Budget

    Managing to a budget

    Every CIO needs to be able to spend within budget while increasing their strategic impact
    • From security, to cloud, to innovating the organization's products and services, IT has a lot of initiatives that demand funds and improve the organization.
    • Continuing to demonstrate good use of the budget and driving value for the organization will ensure ongoing recognition in the form of increased money.
    • 29% of CIOs indicated that controlling costs and expense management was a key duty of a functional CIO (Foundry, 2022).
    • Demonstrating the ability to spend within a defined budget is a key way to ensure the business trusts you.
    • Demonstrating an ability to spend within a defined budget and reducing the cost of operational expenses while increasing spend on strategic initiatives ensures the business sees the value in IT.

    Budget management metric:

    Proportion of IT budget that is strategic versus operational.

    Info-Tech Insight

    CIOs need to see their IT function as its own business – budget and spend like a CEO.

    Demonstrate IT’s ability to spend strategically

    Other budget management metrics:
    • Cost required to lead the organization through a digital transformation.
    • Reduction in operational spend due to retiring legacy solutions.
    • Percentage of budget in the run, grow, and transform categories.
    • Amount of money spent keeping the lights on versus investing in new capabilities.

    Action steps to take:

    • Consider opportunities to automate processes and reduce the time/talent required to spend.
    • Identify opportunities and create the time for resources to modernize or even digitize the organization to enable a better delivery of the products or services to the end customer.
    • Review the previous metrics and tie it back to running the business. If customer satisfaction will increase or risk-related threats decrease through an initiative IT is suggesting, you can make the case for increased strategic spend.

    90%

    Direct CX interaction

    Ninety percent of CIOs expect their budget to increase or remain the same in their next fiscal year. (Source: Foundry, 2022.)

    Research contributors and experts

    Photo of Jeff Neyland. Jeff Neyland
    Chief Information Officer – University of Texas at Arlington
    Photo of Brett Trelfa. Brett Trelfa
    SVP and CIO – Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield
    Blank photo template. Lynn Fyhrlund
    Chief Information Officer – Milwaukee County Department of Administrative Services

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Vicki Van Alphen Executive Counselor Ibrahim Abdel-Kader Research Analyst
    Mary Van Leer Executive Counselor Graham Price Executive Counselor
    Jack Hakimian Vice President Research Valence Howden Principal Research Director
    Mike Tweedie CIO Practice Lead Tony Denford Organization Transformation Practice Lead

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Sample of the 'IT Metrics Library'. IT Metrics Library
    • Use this tool to review commonly used KPIs for each practice area
    • Identify KPI owners, data sources, baselines, and targets. It also suggests action and research for low-performing KPIs.
    • Use the "Action Plan" tab to keep track of progress on actions that were identified as part of your KPI review.
    Sample of 'Define Service Desk Metrics That Matter'. Define Service Desk Metrics That Matter
    • Consolidate your metrics and assign context and actions to those currently tracked.
    • Establish tension metrics to see and tell the whole story.
    • Split your metrics for each stakeholder group. Assign proper cadences for measurements as a first step to building an effective dashboard.
    Sample of 'CIO Priorities 2022'. CIO Priorities 2022
    • Understand how to respond to trends affecting your organization.
    • Determine your priorities based on current state and relevant internal factors.
    • Assign the right resources to accomplish your vision.
    • Consider what new challenges outside of your control will demand a response.

    Bibliography

    “Developing and Sustaining Employee Engagement.” SHRM, 2022.

    Dopson, Elise. “KPIs Vs. Metrics: What’s the Difference & How Do You Measure Both?” Databox, 23 Jun. 2021.

    Shirer, Michael, and Sarah Murray. “IDC Unveils Worldwide CIO Agenda 2022 Predictions.” IDC, 27 Oct. 2021.

    Suer, Myles. “The Most Important Metrics to Drive IT as a Business.” CIO, 19 Mar. 2019.

    “The new CIO: Business Savvy.” Deloitte Insights. Deloitte, 2020.

    “2022 State of the CIO: Rebalancing Act: CIO’s Operational Pandemic-Era Innovation.” Foundry, 2022.

    “Why Employee Engagement Matters for Leadership at all Levels.” Walden University, 20 Dec. 2019.

    Zhang, Xihui, et al. “How to Measure IT Effectiveness: The CIO’s Perspective.” Journal of Informational Technology Management, 29(4). 2018.

    Master the Secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize Your Investment

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}138|cart{/j2store}
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    • Parent Category Name: Licensing
    • Parent Category Link: /licensing
    • A lack of understanding around VMware’s licensing models, bundles, and negotiation tactics makes it difficult to negotiate from a position of strength.
    • Unfriendly commercial practices combined with hyperlink-ridden agreements have left organizations vulnerable to audits and large shortfall payments.
    • Enterprise license agreements (ELAs) come in several purchasing models and do not contain the EULA or various VMware product guide documentation that governs license usage rules and can change monthly.
    • Without a detailed understanding of VMware’s various purchasing models, shelfware often occurs.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Contracts are typically overweighted with a discount at the expense of contractual T&Cs that can restrict license usage and expose you to unpleasant financial surprises and compliance risk.
    • VMware customers almost always have incomplete price information from which to effectively negotiate a “best in class” ELA.
    • VMware has a large lead in being first to market and it realizes that running dual virtualization stacks is complex, unwieldy, and expensive. To further complicate the issues, most skill sets in the industry are skewed towards VMware.

    Impact and Result

    • Negotiate desired terms and conditions at the start of the agreement, and prioritize which use rights may be more important than an additional discount percentage.
    • Gather data points and speak with licensing partners to determine if the deal being offered is in fact as great as VMware says it is.
    • Beware of out-year pricing and ELA optimization reviews that may provide undesirable surprises and more spend than was planned.

    Master the Secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize Your Investment Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Manage Your VMware Agreements – Use the Info-Tech tools capture your existing licenses and prepare for your renewal bids.

    Use Info-Tech’s licensing best practices to avoid shelfware with VMware licensing and remain compliant in case of an audit.

    • Master the Secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize Your Investment Storyboard

    2. Manage your VMware agreements

    Use Info-Tech’s licensing best practices to avoid shelfware with VMware licensing and remain compliant in case of an audit.

    • VMware Business as Usual – Install Base SnS Renewal Only Tool
    • VMware ELA RFQ Template

    3. Transition to the VMWare Cloud – Use these tools to evaluate your ELA and vShpere requirements and make an informed choice.

    Manage your renewals and transition to the cloud subscription model.

    • VPP Transactional Purchase Tool
    • VMware ELA Analysis Tool
    • vSphere Edition 7 Features List

    Infographic

    Further reading

    Master the Secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize Your Investment

    Learn the essential steps to avoid overspending and to maximize negotiation leverage with VMware.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Master the Secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize Your Investment.

    The image contains a picture of Scott Bickley.

    The mechanics of negotiating a deal with VMware may seem simple at first as the vendor is willing to provide a heavy discount on an enterprise license agreement (ELA). However, come renewal time, when a reduction in spend or shelfware is needed, or to exit the ELA altogether, the process can be exceedingly frustrating as VMware holds the balance of power in the negotiation.

    Negotiating a complete agreement with VMware from the start can save you from an immense headache and unforeseen expenditures. Many VMware customers do not realize that the terms and conditions in the Volume Purchasing Program (VPP) and Enterprise Purchasing Program (EPP) agreements limit how and where they are able to use their licenses.

    Furthermore, after the renewal is complete, organizations must still worry about the management of various license types, accurate discovery of what has been deployed, visibility into license key assignments, and over and under use of licenses.

    Preventive and proactive measures enclosed within this blueprint will help VMware clients mitigate this minefield of challenges.

    Scott Bickley
    Practice Lead, Vendor Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Common Obstacles

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    VMware's dominant position in the virtualization space can create uncertainty to your options in the long term as well as the need to understand:

    • The hybrid cloud model.
    • Hybrid VM security and management.
    • New subscription license model and how it affects renewals.

    Make an informed decision with your VMware investments to allow for continued ROI.

    There are several hurdles that are presented when considering a VMware ELA:

    • Evolving licensing and purchasing models
    • Understanding potential ROI in the cloud landscape
    • Evolving door of corporate ownership

    Overcoming these and other obstacles are key to long-term satisfaction with your VMware infrastructure.

    Info-Tech has a two-phase approach:

    • Manage your VMware agreements.
    • Plan a transition to the cloud.

    A tactical roadmap approach to VMware ELA and the cloud will ensure long-term success and savings.

    Info-Tech Insight

    VMware customers almost always have incomplete price information from which to effectively negotiate a “best in class” ELA.

    Your challenge

    VMware's dominant position in the virtualization space can create uncertainty to your options in the long term driven by:

    • VMware’s dominant market position and ownership of the virtualization market, which is forcing customers to focus on managing capacity demand to ensure a positive ROI on every license.
    • The trend toward a hybrid cloud for many organizations, especially those considering using VMware in public clouds, resulting in confusion regarding licensing and compliance scenarios.

    ELAs and EPPs are generally the only way to get a deep discount from VMware.

    The image contains a pie chart to demonstrate that 85% have answered yes to being audited by VMware for software license compliance.

    Common obstacles

    There are several hurdles that are presented when considering a VMware ELA.

    • A lack of understanding around VMware’s licensing models, bundles, and negotiation tactics makes it difficult to negotiate from a position of strength.
    • Unfriendly commercial practices combined with hyperlink-ridden agreements have left organizations vulnerable to audits and large shortfall payments.
    • ELAs come in several purchasing models and do not contain the EULA or various VMware product guide documentation that govern license usage rules and can change monthly.

    Competition is a key driver of price

    The image contains a screenshot of a bar graph to demonstrate virtualization market share % 2022.

    Source: Datanyze

    Master the Secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize your Investment

    The image contains a screenshot of the Thought model on Master the secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize your Investment.

    Info-Tech’s methodology for Master the Secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize Your Investment

    1. Manage Your VMware Agreements

    2. Transition to the VMware Cloud

    Phase Steps

    1.1 Establish licensing requirements

    1.2 Evaluate licensing options

    1.3 Evaluate agreement options

    1.4 Purchase and manage licenses

    1.5 Understand SnS renewal management

    2.1 Understand the VMware subscription model

    2.2 Migrate workloads and licenses

    2.3 Manage SnS and cloud subscriptions

    Phase Outcomes

    Understanding of your licensing requirements and what agreement option best fits your needs for now and the future.

    Knowledge of VMware’s sales model and how to negotiate the best deal.

    Knowledge of the evolving cloud subscription model and how to plan your cloud migration and transition to the new licensing.

    Insight summary

    Overarching insight

    With the introduction of the subscription licensing model, VMware licensing and renewals are becoming more complex and require a deeper understanding of the license program options to best manage renewals and cloud deployments as well as to maximize legacy ROI.

    Phase 1 insight

    Contracts are typically overweighted with a discount at the expense of contractual T&Cs that can restrict license usage and expose you to unpleasant financial surprises and compliance risk.

    Phase 1 insight

    VMware has a large lead in being first to market and it realizes running dual virtualization stacks is complex, unwieldy, and expensive. To further complicate the issues, most skill sets in the industry are skewed toward VMware.

    Phase 2 insight

    VMware has purposefully reduced a focus on the actual license terms and conditions; most customers focus on the transactional purchase or the ELA document, but the rules governing usage are on a website and can be changed by VMware regularly.

    Tactical insight

    Beware of out-year pricing and ELA optimization reviews that may provide undesirable surprises and more spend than was planned.

    Tactical insight

    Negotiate desired terms and conditions at the start of the agreement, and prioritize which use rights may be more important than an additional discount percentage.

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    VMware ELA Analysis Tool

    VMware ELA RFQ Template Tool

    VPP Transaction Purchase Tool

    VMware ELA Analysis Tool

    Use this tool as a template for an RFQ with VMware ELA contracts.

    Use this tool to analyze cost breakdown and discount based on your volume purchasing program (VPP) level.

    The image contains screenshots of the VMware ELA Analysis Tool. The image contains a screenshot of the VMware ELA RFQ template tool. The image contains a screenshot of the VPP Transaction Purchase Tool.

    Key deliverable:

    VMware Business as Usual SnS Renewal Only Tool

    Use this tool to analyze discounts from a multi-year agreement vs. prepay. See how you can get the best discount.

    The image contains screenshots of the VMware Business as Usual SnS Renewal Only Tool.

    Blueprint Objectives

    The aim of this blueprint is to provide a foundational understanding of VMware’s licensing agreement and best practices to manage them.

    Why VMware

    What to Know

    The Future

    VMware is the leader in OS virtualization, however, this is a saturated market, which is being pressured by public and hybrid cloud as a competitive force taking market share.

    There are few viable alternatives to VMware for virtualization due to vendor lock-in of existing IT infrastructure footprint. It is too difficult and cost prohibitive to make a shift away from VMware even when alternative solutions are available.

    ELAs are the preferred method of contracting as it sets the stage for a land-and-expand product strategy; once locked into the ELA model, customers must examine VMware alternatives with preference or risk having Support and Subscription Services (SnS) re-priced at retail.

    VMware does not provide a great deal of publicly available information regarding its enterprise license agreement (ELA) options, leaving a knowledge gap that allows the sales team to steer the customer.

    VMware is taking countermeasures against increasing competition.

    Recent contract terms changed to eliminate perpetual caps on SnS renewals; they are now tied to a single year of discounted SnS, then they go to list price.

    Migration of list pricing to a website versus contract, where pricing can now be changed, reducing discount percentage effectiveness.

    Increased audits of customers, especially those electing to not renew an ELA.


    Examining VMware’s vendor profile

    Turbonomics conducted a vendor profile on major vendors, focusing on licensing and compliance. It illustrated the following results:

    The image contains a pie graph to demonstrate that the majority of companies say yes to using license enterprise software from VMware.

    The image contains a bar graph to demonstrate what license products organizations use of VMware products.

    Source: Turbonomics
    N-sample size

    Case Study

    The image contains a logo for ADP.

    INDUSTRY: Finance

    SOURCE: VMware.com

    “We’ll have network engineers, storage engineers, computer engineers, database engineers, and systems engineers all working together as one intact team developing and delivering goals on specific outcomes.” – Vipul Nagrath, CIO, ADP

    Improving developer capital management

    Constant innovation helped ADP keep ahead of customer needs in the human resources space, but it also brought constant changes to the IT environment. Internally, the company found it was spending too long working on delivering the required infrastructure and system updates. IT staff wanted to improve velocity for refreshes to better match the needs of ADP developers and encourage continued development innovation.

    Business needs

    • Improve turnaround time on infrastructure refreshes to better meet developer roadmaps.
    • Establish an IT culture that works at the global scale of ADP and empowers individual team members.
    • Streamline approach toward infrastructure resource delivery to reduce need for manual management.

    Impact

    • Infrastructure resource delivery reduced from 100+ days to minutes, improving ADP developer efficiency.
    • VMware Cloud™ on AWS establishes seamless private and public cloud workflows, fostering agility and innovation.
    • Automating IT management redirects resources to R&D, boosting time to market for new services.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    Guided Implementation

    Workshop

    Consulting

    “Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.” “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.” “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.” “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3

    Call #1: Discuss scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.

    Call #2: Assess the current state.

    Determine licensing position.

    Call #3: Complete a deployment count, needs analysis, and internal audit.

    Call #4: Review findings with analyst:

    • Review licensing options.
    • Review licensing rules.
    • Review contract option types.

    Call #5: Select licensing option. Document forecasted costs and benefits.

    Call #6: Review final contract:

    • Discuss negotiation points.
    • Plan a roadmap for SAM.

    Call #7: Negotiate final contract. Evaluate and develop a roadmap for SAM.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is between 2 to 6 calls over the course of 1 to 2 months.

    Phase # 1

    Manage Your VMware Agreements

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    1.1 Establish licensing requirements

    1.2 Evaluate licensing options

    1.3 Evaluate agreement options

    1.4 Purchase and manage licenses

    2.1 Understand the VMware subscription model

    2.2 Migrate workloads and licenses

    2.3 Discuss the VMware sales approach

    2.4 Manage SnS and cloud subscriptions

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Understanding the VMware licensing model
    • Understanding the license agreement options
    • Understanding the VMware sales approach

    This phase will take you thorough:

    • The new VMware subscription movement to the cloud
    • How to prepare and migrate
    • Manage your subscriptions efficiently

    1.1 Establish licensing requirements

    VMware has greatly improved the features of vSphere over time.

    vSphere Main Editions Overview

    • vSphere Standard – Provides the basic features for server consolidation. A support and subscription contract (SnS) is mandatory when purchasing the vSphere Standard.
    • vSphere Enterprise Plus – Provides the full range of vSphere features. A support and subscription contract (SnS) is mandatory when purchasing the Enterprise Plus editions.
    • vSphere Essentials kit – The Essentials kit is an all-in-one solution for small environments with up to three hosts (2 CPUs on each host). Support is optional when purchasing the Essentials kit and is available on a per-incident basis.
    • vSphere Essentials Plus kit – This is similar to the Essentials kit and provides additional features such as vSphere vMotion, vSphere HA, and vSphere replication. A support and subscription contract (SnS) is sold separately, and a minimum of one year of SnS is required.

    Review vSphere Edition Features

    The image contains a screenshot to review the vSphere Edition Features.

    Download the vSphere Edition 7 Features List

    1.2 Evaluate licensing options

    VMware agreement types

    Review purchase options to align with your requirements.

    Transactional VPP EPP ELA

    Transactional

    Entry-level volume license purchasing program

    Mid-level purchasing program

    Highest-level purchasing program

    • Purchasing in this model is not recommended for business purposes unless very infrequent and low quantities.
    • 250 points minimum
    • Four tiers of discounts
    • Rolling eight-quarter points accumulation period
    • Discounts on license only

    Deal size of initial purchase typically is:

    • US$250K MSRP License + SnS (2,500 tokens)
    • Exceptions do exist with purchase volume

    Minimum deal size of top-up purchase:

    • US$50K MSRP License + SnS (500 tokens)
    • Initial purchase determines token level
    • Three-year term

    Minimum deal size of initial purchase:

    • US$150K-$250K
    • Discounted licenses and SnS through term of contract
    • Single volume license key
    • No final true-up
    • Global deployment rights and consolidation of multiple agreements

    1.2.1 The Volume Purchasing Program (VPP)

    This is the entry-level purchasing program aimed at small/mid-sized organizations.

    How the program works

    • The threshold to be able to purchase from the VPP program is 250 points minimum, equivalent to $25,000.
    • Discounts attained can only be applied to license purchases. They do not apply to service and support/renewals. Discounts range from 4% to 12%.
    • For the large majority of products 1 VPP point = ~$100.
      • Point values will be the same globally.
      • Point ratios may vary over time as SKUs are changed.
      • Points are valid for two years.

    Benefits

    • Budget predictability for two years.
    • Simple license purchase process.
    • Receive points on qualifying purchases that accumulate over a rolling eight-quarter period.
    • Online portal for tracking purchases and eligible discounts.
    • Global program where affiliates can purchase from existing contract.

    VPP Point & Discount Table

    Level

    Point Range

    Discount

    1

    250-599

    4%

    2

    600-999

    6%

    3

    1,000-1,749

    9%

    4

    1,750+

    12%

    Source: VMware Volume Purchasing Program

    1.2.2 Activity VPP Transactional Purchase Tool

    1-3 hours

    Instructions:

    1. Use the tool to analyze the cost breakdown and discount based on your Volume Purchasing Program level.
    2. On tab 1, Enter SnS install base renewal units and or new license details.
    3. Review tab 2 for Purchase summary.

    The image contains a screenshot of the VPP Transactional Purchase Tool.

    Input Output
    • SnS renewal details
    • New license requirements and pricing
    • Transaction purchase summary
    • Estimated VPP purchase level
    Materials Participants
    • Current VMware purchase orders
    • Any SnS renewal requirements
    • Transaction Purchase Tool
    • Procurement
    • Vendor Management
    • Licensing Admin

    Download the VPP Transactional Purchase Tool

    1.3 Evaluate agreement options

    Introduction to EPP and ELA

    What to know when using a token/credit-based agreement.

    Token/credit-based agreements carry high risk as customers are purchasing a set number of tokens/credits to be redeemed during the ELA term for licenses.

    • Tokens/credits that are not used during the ELA term expire and become worthless.
    • By default in most agreements (negotiation dependent), tokens/credits are tied to pricing maintained by VMware on its website that is subject to change (increase usually), resulting in a reduced value for the tokens/credits.
      • Therefore, it is necessary to negotiate to have current list prices for all products/versions included in the ELA to prevent price increases while in the current ELA term.
    • Token-based agreements may come with a lower overall discount level as VMware is granting more flexibility in terms of the wider product selection offered, vendor cost of overhead to manage the redemption program, currency exchange risks, and more complex revenue recognition headaches.

    1.3.1 The Enterprise Purchasing Program (EPP)

    This is aimed at mid-tier customers looking for flexibility with deeper discounting.

    How the program works

    • Token-based program in which tokens are redeemed for licenses and/or SnS.
      • Tokens can be added at any time to active fund.
      • Token usage is automatically tracked and reported.
    • Minimum order of 2,500 tokens, equivalent to $250,000 (1 token=$100).
      • Exceptions have been made, allowing for lower minimum spends.
    • Restricted to specific regions, not a global agreement.
    • Self-service portal for access to license keys and support entitlements.
    • Deeper discounting than the VMware Volume Purchase Program.
    • EPP initial purchase gets VPP L4 for four years.

    Benefits

    • Able to mix and match VMware products, manage licenses, and adjust deployment strategy.
    • Prices are protected for term of the EPP agreement.
    • Number of tokens needed to obtain a product or SnS are negotiated at the start of the contract and fixed for the term.
    • SnS is co-termed to the EPP term.
    • Ability to purchase new products that become available at a future date and are listed on the EPP Eligibility Matrix.

    EPP Level & Point Table

    Level

    Point Range

    7

    2,500-3,499

    8

    3,500-4,499

    9

    4,500-5,999

    10

    6,000+

    Source: VMware Volume Purchasing Program

    1.3.2 The ELA is aimed at large global organizations, offering the deepest discounts with operational benefits and flexibility

    What is an ELA?

    • The ELA agreement provides the best vehicle for global enterprises to obtain maximum discounts and price-hold protection for a set period of time. Discounts and price holds are removed once an ELA has expired.
    • The ELA minimum spend previously was $500,000. Purchase volume now generally starts at $250K total spend with exceptions and, depending on VMware, it may be possible to attain for $150K in net-new license spend.

    Key things to know

    • Customers pay up front for license and SnS rights, but depending on the deployment plans, the value of the licenses is not realized and/or recognized for up to two years after point of purchase.
    • License and SnS is paid up front for a three-year period in most ELAs, although a one- or two-year term can be negotiated.
    • Licenses not deployed in year one should be discounted in value and drive a re-evaluation of the ELA ROI, as even heavily discounted licenses that are not used until year three may not be such a great deal in retrospect.
      • Use a time value of money calculation to arrive at a realistic ROI.
      • Partner with Finance and Accounting to ensure the ROI also clears any Internal Hurdle Rate (IHR).
      • Share and strategically position your IHR with VMware and resellers to ensure they understand the minimum value an ELA deal must bring to the table.
    • Organizational changes, such as merger, acquisition, and divestiture (MAD) activities, may result in the customer paying for license rights that can no longer be used and/or require a renegotiated ELA.

    Info-Tech Insight

    If a legacy ELA exists that has “deploy or lose” language, engage VMware to recapture any lost license rights as VMware has changed this language effective with 2016 agreements and there is an “appeals” process for affected customers.

    1.3.3 Select the best ELA variant to match your specific demand profile and financial needs

    The advantages of an ELA are:

    • Maximum discount level + price protection
    • SnS discounted at % of net license fee
    • Sole option for global use territory rights

    General disadvantages are:

    • Term lock-in with SnS for three years
    • Pay up front and if defer usage, ROI drops
    • Territory rights priced at a premium versus domestic use rights

    Type of ELAs

    ELA Type

    Description

    Pros and Cons

    Capped (max quantities)

    Used to purchase a specific quantity and type of license.

    Pro – Clarity on what will be purchased

    Pro – Lower risk of over licensing

    Con – Requires accurate forecasting

    All you can eat or unlimited

    Used to purchase access to specified products that can be deployed in unlimited quantities during the ELA term.

    Pro – Acquire large quantity of licenses

    Pro – Accurate forecasting not critical

    Con – Deployment can easily exceed forecast, leading to high renewal costs

    Burn-down

    A form of capped ELA purchase that uses prepaid tokens that can be used more flexibly to acquire a variety of licenses or services. This can include the hybrid purchasing program (HPP) credits. However, the percentage redeemable for VMware subscription services may be limited to 10% of the MSRP value of the HPP credit.

    Pro – Accurate demand forecast not critical

    Pro – Can be used for products and services

    Con – Unused tokens or credits are forfeited

    True-up

    Allows for additional purchases during the ELA term on a determined schedule based on the established ELA pricing.

    Pro – Consumption payments matched after initial purchase

    Pro – Accurate demand forecast not critical

    Con – Potentially requires transaction throughout term

    1.4 Purchase and manage licenses

    Negotiating ELA terms and conditions

    Editable copies of VMware’s license and governance documentation are a requirement to initiate the dialogue and negotiation process over T&Cs.

    VMware’s licensing is complex and although documentation is publicly available, it is often hidden on VMware’s website.

    Many VMware customers often overlook reviewing the license T&Cs, leaving them open to compliance risks.

    It is imperative for customers to understand:

    • Product definition for licensing of each acquired product
    • Products included by bundle
    • Use restrictions:
      • The VMware Product Guide, which includes information about:
        • ELA Order Forms, Amendments, Exhibits, EULA, Support T&Cs, and other policies that add dozens of pages to a contractual agreement.
        • All of these documents are web based and can change monthly; URL links in the contract do not take the user to the actual document but a landing page from which customers must find the applicable documents.
      • Obtain copies of ALL current documents at the time of your order and keep as a reference in the CLM and SAM systems.

    Build in time to obtain, review, and negotiate these documents (easily weeks to months).

    1.4.1 Negotiating ELA terms and conditions specifics

    License and Deployment

    • Review perpetual use rights for all licenses purchased under the ELA (exception being subscription services).
    • Carefully scrutinize contract language for clearly defined deployment rights.
      • Some agreements contain language that terminates the use rights for licenses not deployed by the end of the ELA term.
    • While older contracts would frequently contain clearly defined token values and product prices for the ELA term, VMware has moved away from this process and now refers to URL links for current MSRP pricing.

    Use Rights

    • The customer’s legal entities and territories listed in the contract are hard limits on the license usage via the VMware Product Guide definitions. Global use rights are not a standard license grant with VMware license agreement by default. Global rights are usually tied to an ELA.
    • VMware audits most aggressively against violations of territory use rights and will use the non-compliance events to resolve the issue via a commercial transaction.
      • Negotiate for assignment rights with no strings attached in terms of fees or multi-party consent by future affiliates or successors to a surviving entity.
    • Extraordinary Corporate Transaction clause: VMware’s standard language prevents customers from using licenses within the ELA for any third party that becomes part of customer’s business by way of acquisition, merger, consolidation, change of control, reorganization, or other similar transaction.
      • Request VMware to drop this language.
    • Include any required language pertaining to MAD events as default language will not allow for transfer or assignment of license rights.

    Checklist of necessary information to negotiate the best deal

    Product details that go beyond the sales pitch

    • Product family
    • Unique product SKU for license renewal
    • Part description
    • Current regional or global price list
    • One and three-year proposal for SnS renewals including new license and SnS detail
    • SnS term dates
    • Discount or offered prices for all line items (global pricing is generally ~20% higher than US pricing)

    Different support levels (e.g. basic, enterprise, per incident)

    • Standard pricing:
      • Basic Support = 21% of current list price (12x5)
      • Production Support = 25% of current list price (24x7 for severity 1 issues) – defined in VMware Support and Subscription Services T&Cs; non-severity 1 issues are 12x5

    Details to ensure the product being purchased matches the business needs

    • Realizing after the fact the product is insufficient with respect to functional requirements or that extra spend is required can be frustrating and extend expected timelines

    SnS renewals pricing is based on the (1) year SnS list price

    • This can be bundled for a multi-year discounted SnS rate (can result in 12%+ under VPP)

    Governing agreements, VPP program details

    • Have a printed copy of documents that are URL links, which VMware can change, allowing for surprises or unexpected changes in rules

    1.4.2 Activity VMware ELA Analysis Tool

    2-4 hours

    Instructions:

    1. As a group, review the various RFQ responses. Identify top three proposals and start to enter proposal details into the VPP Prepay or ELA tabs of the analysis tool.
    2. Review savings in the ELA Offer Analysis tab.

    The image contains screenshots of the VMware ELA Analysis Tool.

    Input Output
    • RFQ requirements data
    • RFQ response data
    • Analysis of ELA proposals
    • ELA savings analysis
    Materials Participants
    • RFQ response documents
    • ELA Analysis Tool
    • IT Leadership
    • Procurement
    • Vendor Management

    Download the VMware ELA Analysis Tool

    1.4.3 Negotiating ELA terms and conditions specifics: pricing, renewal, and exit

    VMware does not offer price protection on future license consumption by default.

    Securing “out years” pricing for SnS or the cost of SnS is critical or it will default to a set percentage (25%) of MSRP, removing the ELA discount.

    Typically, the out year is one year; maximum is two years.

    Negotiate the “go forward” SnS pricing post-ELA term as part of the ELA negotiations when you have some leverage.

    Default after (1) out year is to rise to 25% of current MSRP versus as low as 20% of net license price within the ELA.

    Carefully incorporate the desired installed-base licenses that were acquired pre-ELA into the agreement, but ensure unwanted licenses are removed.

    Ancillary but binding support policies, online terms and conditions, and other hyperlinked documentation should be negotiated and incorporated as part of the agreement whenever possible.

    1.4.4 Find the best reseller partner

    Seek out a qualified VMware partner that will work with you and with your interest as a priority:

    1. Resellers, at minimum, should have achieved an enterprise-level rating, as these partners can offer the deepest discounts and have more clout with VMware.
    2. Select your reseller prior to engaging in any RFX acquisition steps. Verify they are enterprise level or higher AND secure their written commitment to maximum pass-through of the discounting provided to them by VMware.
    3. Document and prioritize key T&Cs for your ELA and submit to your sales team along with a requirement and timeline for their formal response. Essentially, this escalates outside of the VMware process and disrupts the status quo. Ideally this will occur in advance of being presented a contract by VMware and be pre-emptive in nature.
    4. If applicable and of benefit or a high priority, seek out a reseller that is willing to finance the VMware upfront payment cost at a low or no interest rate.
    5. It will be important to have ELA-level deals escalated to higher levels of authority to obtain “best in class” discount levels, above and beyond those prescribed in the VMware sales playbook.
    6. VMware’s standard process is to “route” customers through a pre-defined channel and “deal desk” process. Preferred pricing of up to an additional 10% discount is reserved for the first reseller that registers the deal with VMware, with larger discounts reserved for the Enterprise and Premium partners. Additional discounts can be earned if the deal closes within specified time periods (First Deal Registration).

    1.4.5 Activity VMware ELA RFQ Template

    1-3 hours

    Use this tool for as a template for an RFQ with VMware ELA contracts.

    1. For SnS renewals that contain no new licenses, state that the requirement for award consideration is the provisioning of all details for each itemized SnS renewal product code corresponding to all the licenses of your installed base. The details for the renewals are to be placed in Section 1 of the template.
    2. SnS Renewal Options: Info-Tech recommends that you ask for one- and three-year SnS renewal proposals, assuming these terms are realistic for your business requirements. Then compare your SnS BAU costs for these two options against ELA offers to determine the best choice for your renewal.

    The image contains a screenshot of the VMware ELA RFQ Template.

    Input Output
    • Renewing SnS data
    • Agreement type options
    • Detailed list of required licenses
    • Summary list of SnS requirements
    Materials Participants
    • RFQ Template
    • SnS renewal summary
    • New license/subscription details
    • IT Leadership
    • Vendor Management
    • Procurement

    Download the VMware ELA RFQ Template

    1.4.6 Consider your path forward

    Consider your route forward as contract commitments, license compliance, and terms and conditions differ in structure to perpetual models previously used.

    • Are you able to accurately discover VMware licensing within your environment?
    • Is licensing managed for compliance? Are internal audits conducted so you have accurate results?
    • Have the product use rights been examined for terms and conditions such as geographic rights? Some T&Cs may change over time due to hyperlinked references within commercial documents.
    • How are Oracle and SQL being used within your VMware environment? This may affect license compliance with Oracle and Microsoft in virtualized environments.
    • Prepare for the Subscription model; it’s here now and will be the lead discussion with all VMware reps going forward.

    Shift to Subscription

    1. With the $64bn takeover by Broadcom, there will be a significant shift and pressure to the subscription model.
    2. Broadcom has significant growth targets for its VMware acquisition that can only be achieved through a strong press to a SaaS model.

    Info-Tech Insight

    VMware has a license cost calculator and additional licensing documents that can be used to help determine what spend should be.

    Phase # 2

    Transition to the VMware Cloud

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    1.1 Establish licensing requirements

    1.2 Evaluate licensing options

    1.3 Evaluate agreement options

    1.4 Purchase and manage licenses

    2.1 Understand the VMware subscription model

    2.2 Migrate workloads and licenses

    2.3 Discuss the VMware sales approach

    2.4 Manage SnS and cloud subscriptions

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Understand the VMware licensing model
    • Understand the license agreement options
    • Understand the VMware sales approach

    This phase will take you thorough:

    • The new VMware subscription movement to the cloud
    • How to prepare and migrate
    • Manage your subscriptions efficiently

    2.1 Understand the VMware subscription model

    VMware Cloud Universal

    • VMware Cloud Universal unifies compute, network, and storage capabilities across infrastructures, management, and applications.
    • Take advantage of financial and cloud management flexibility by combining on-premises and SaaS capabilities for automation, operations, log analytics, and network visibility across your infrastructure.
    • Capitalize on VMware knowledge by integrating proven migration methods and plans across your transformation journey such as consumption strategies, business outcome workshops, and more.
    • Determine your eligibility to earn a one-time discount with this exclusive benefit designed to offset the value of your current unamortized VMware on-premises license investments and then reallocate toward your multi-cloud initiatives.

    2.2 Migrate workloads and licenses to the cloud

    There are several cloud migration options and solutions to consider.

    • VMware Cloud offers solutions that can provide a low-cost path to the cloud that will help accelerate modernization.
    • There are also many third-party solution providers who can be engaged to migrate workloads and other infrastructure to VMware Cloud and into other public cloud providers.
    • VMware Cloud can be deployed on many IaaS providers such as AWS, Azure, Google, Dell, and IBM.

    VMware Cloud Assist

    1. Leverage all available transition funding opportunities and any IaaS migration incentives from VMware.
    2. Learn and understand the value and capabilities of VMware vRealize Cloud Universal to help you transition and manage hybrid infrastructure.

    2.2.1 Manage your VMware cloud subscriptions

    Use VMware vRealize to manage private, public, and local environments.

    Combine SaaS and on-premises capabilities for automation, operations, log analytics, network visibility, security, and compliance into one license.

    The image contains a screenshot of a diagram to demonstrate VMware cloud subscriptions.

    2.3 The VMware sales approach

    Understand the pitch before entering the discussion

    1. VMware will present a PowerPoint presentation proposal comparing a Business-as-Usual (BAU) scenario versus the ELA model.
    2. Critical factors to consider if considering the proposed ELA are growth rate projections, deployment schedule, cost of non-ELA products/options, shelf-ware, and non-ELA discounts (e.g. VPP, multi-year, or pre-paid).
    3. Involving VMware’s direct account team along with your reseller in the negotiations can be beneficial. Keep in mind that VMware ultimately decides on the final price in terms of the discount that is passed through. Ensure you have a clear line of sight into how pricing is determined.
    4. Explore reseller incentives and promotional programs that may provide for deeper than normal discount opportunities.

    INFO-TECH TIP: Create your own assumptions as inputs into the BAU model and then evaluate the ELA value proposition instead of depending on VMware’s model.

    2.4 Manage SnS and cloud subscriptions

    The new subscription model is making SnS renewal more complex.

    • Start renewal planning four to six months prior to anniversary.
    • Work closely with your reseller on your SnS renewal options.
    • Request “as is” versus subscription renewal proposal from reseller or VMware with a “savings” component.
    • Consider and review multi-year versus annual renewal; savings will differ.
    • For the Subscription transition renewal model, ensure that credits for legacy licensing is provided.
    • Negotiate cloud transition investments and incentives from VMware.

    What information to collect and how to analyze it

    • Negotiating toward preferred terms on SnS is critical, more so than when new license purchases are made, as approximately 75-80% of server virtualization are at x86 workloads, where maintenance revenue is a larger source of revenue for VMware than new license sales.
    • All relevant license and SnS details must be obtained from VMware to include Product Family, Part Description, Product Code (SKU), Regional/Global List Price, SnS Term Dates, and Discount Price for all new licenses.
    • VMware has all costs tied to the US dollar; you must calculate currency conversion into ROI models as VMware does not adjust token values of products across geographies or currency of purchase. The token to dollar value by product SKU is locked for the three-year term. This translates into a variable cost model depending on how local currency fluctuates against the US dollar; time the initial purchase to take this into consideration, if applicable.
    • Products purchased based on MSRP price with each token contains a value of US$100. Under the Hybrid Purchasing Program (HPP) credit values and associated buying power will fluctuate over the term as VMware reserves the right to adjust current list prices. Consider locking in a set product list and pricing versus HPP.
    • Take a structured approach to discover true discounts via the use of a tailored RFQ template and options model to compare and contrast VMware ELA proposals.

    Use Info-Tech Research Group’s customized RFQ template to discover true discount levels and model various purchase options for VMware ELA proposals.

    The image contains a screenshot of the VMware RFQ Template Tool.

    Summary of accomplishment

    Knowledge Gained

    • The key pieces of licensing information that should be gathered about the current state of your own organization.
    • An in-depth understanding of the required licenses across all of your products.
    • Clear methodology for selecting the most effective contract type.
    • Development of measurable, relevant metrics to help track future project success and identify areas of strength and weakness within your licensing program.

    Processes Optimized

    • Senior leaders in IT now have a clear understanding of the importance of licensing in relation to business objectives.
    • Understanding of the various licensing considerations that need to be made.
    • Contract negotiation.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Prepare for Negotiations More Effectively

    • IT budgets are increasing, but many CIOs feel their budgets are inadequate to accomplish what is being asked of them.
    • Eighty percent of organizations don’t have a mature, repeatable, scalable negotiation process.
    • Training dollars on negotiations are often wasted or ineffective.

    Price Benchmarking & Negotiation

    You need to achieve an objective assessment of vendor pricing in your IT contracts, but you have limited knowledge about:

    • Current price benchmarking on the vendor.
    • Pricing and negotiation intelligence.
    • How to secure a market-competitive price.
    • Vendor pricing tiers, models, and negotiation tactics.

    VMware vRealize Cloud Management

    VMware vCloud Suite is an integrated offering that brings together VMware’s industry-leading vSphere hypervisor and VMware vRealize Suite multi-vendor hybrid cloud management platform. VMware’s new portable licensing units allow vCloud Suite to build and manage both vSphere-based private clouds and multi-vendor hybrid clouds.

    Bibliography

    Barrett, Alex. “vSphere and vCenter licensing and pricing explained -- a VMware license guide.” TechTarget, July 2010. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Bateman, Kayleigh. “VMware licensing, pricing and features mini guide.” Computer Weekly, May 2011. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Blaisdell, Rick. “What Are The Common Business Challenges The VMware Sector Faces At This Point In Time?” CIO Review, n.d. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    COMPAREX. “VMware Licensing Program.” COMPAREX, n.d. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Couesbot, Erwann. “Using VMware? Oracle customers hate this licensing pitfall.” UpperEdge, 17 October 2016. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Crayon. “VMware Licensing Programs.” Crayon, n.d. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Datanyze." Virtualization Software Market Share.” Datanyze, n.d. Web.
    Demers, Tom. “Top 18 Tips & Quotes on the Challenges & Future of VMware Licensing.” ProfitBricks, 1 September 2015. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Fenech, J. “A quick look at VMware vSphere Editions and Licensing.” VMware Hub by Altaro, 17 May 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Flexera. “Challenges of VMware Licensing.” Flexera, n.d. Accessed 5 February 2018.
    Fraser, Paris. “A Guide for VMware Licensing.” Sovereign, 11 October 2016. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Haag, Michael. “IDC Data Shows vSAN is the Largest Share of Total HCI Spending.” VMware Blogs, 1 December 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Kealy, Victoria. “VMware Licensing Quick Guide 2015.” The ITAM Review, 17 December 2015. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Kirsch, Brian. “A VMware licensing guide to expanding your environment.” TechTarget, August 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Kirupananthan, Arun. “5 reasons to get VMware licensing right.” Softchoice, 16 April 2018. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Knorr, Eric. “VMware on AWS: A one-way ticket to the cloud.” InfoWorld, 17 October 2016. Accessed 7 May 2018
    Leipzig. “Help, an audit! License audits by VMware. Are you ready?” COMPAREX Group, 2 May 2016. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Mackie, Kurt. “VMware Rips Microsoft for Azure “Bare Metal” Migration Solution.” Redmond Magazine, 27 November 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Micromail. “VMware vSphere Software Licensing.” Micromail, n.d. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Microsoft Corportation. “Migrating VMware to Microsoft Azure” Microsoft Azure, November 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Peter. “Server Virtualization and OS Trends.” Spiceworks, 30 August 2016. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Rich. “VMware running on Azure.” The ITAM Review, 28 November 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Robb, Drew. “Everything you need to know about VMware’s licensing shake up.” Softchoice, 4 March 2016. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Rose, Brendan. “How to determine which VMware licensing option is best.” Softchoice, 28 July 2015. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Scholten, Eric. “New VMware licensing explained.” VMGuru, 12 July 2011. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Sharwood, Simon. “Microsoft to run VMware on Azure, on bare metal. Repeat. Microsoft to run VMware on Azure.” The Register, 22 November 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Siebert, Eric. “Top 7 VMware Management Challenges.” Veeam, n.d. Web.
    Smith, Greg. “Will The Real HCI Market Leader Please Stand Up?” Nutanix, 29 September 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Spithoven, Richard. “Licensing Oracle software in VMware vCenter 6.0.” LinkedIn, 2 May 2016. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    VMTurbo, Inc. “Licensing, Compliance & Audits in the Cloud Era.” Turbonomics, November 2015. Web.
    VMware. “Aug 1st – Dec 31st 2016 Solution Provider Program Requirements & Incentives & Rewards.” VMware, n.d. Web.
    VMware. “Global Support and Subscription Services “SnS” Renewals Policy.” VMware, n.d. Web.
    VMware. “Support Policies.” VMware, n.d. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    VMware. “VMware Cloud Community.” VMware Cloud, n.d. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    VMware. “VMware Cloud on AWS” VMware Cloud, n.d. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    VMware. “VMware Enterprise Purchasing Program.” VMware, 2013. Web.
    VMware. “VMware Product Guide.” VMware, May 2018. Web.
    VMware. “VMware Volume Purchasing Program.” VMware, April 2019. Web.
    VMware. "VMware Case Studies." VMware, n.d. Web.
    Wiens, Rob. “VMware Enterprise Licensing – What You Need To Know. House of Brick, 14 April 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018

    Explore the Secrets of SAP Software Contracts to Optimize Spend and Reduce Compliance Risk

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}140|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 9.8/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: $73,994 Average $ Saved
    • member rating average days saved: 9 Average Days Saved
    • Parent Category Name: Licensing
    • Parent Category Link: /licensing
    • SAP has strict audit practices, which, in combination with 50+ types of user classifications and manual accounting for some licenses, make maintaining compliance difficult.
    • Mapping and matching SAP products to the environment can be highly complex, leading to overspending and an inability to reduce spend later.
    • Beware of indirect access to SAP applications from third-party applications (e.g. Salesforce).
    • Products that have been acquired by SAP may have altered licensing terms that are innocuously referred to in support renewal documents.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Focus on needs first. Conduct a thorough requirements assessment and document the results. Well-documented license needs will be your core asset in navigating SAP licensing and negotiating your agreement.
    • Examine indirect access possibilities. Understanding how in-house or third-party applications may be accessing the SAP software is critical.
    • Know whats in the contract. Each customer agreement is different and there may be terms that are beneficial. Older agreements may provide both benefits and challenges when evaluating your SAP license position.

    Impact and Result

    • Conduct an analysis to remove inactive and duplicate users as multiple logins may exist and could end up costing the organization license fees when audited.
    • Adopt a cyclical approach to reviewing your SAP licensing and create a reference document to track your software needs, planned licensing, and purchase negotiation points.
    • Learn the “SAP way” of conducting business, which includes a best-in-class sales structure, unique contracts and license use policies, and a hyper-aggressive compliance function. Conducting business with SAP is not typical compared to other vendors, and you will need different tools to emerge successfully from a commercial transaction.
    • Manage SAP support and maintenance spend and policies. Once an agreement has been signed, it can be very difficult to decrease spend, as SAP will reprice products if support is dropped.

    Explore the Secrets of SAP Software Contracts to Optimize Spend and Reduce Compliance Risk Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you need to understand and document your SAP licensing strategy, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Establish licensing requirements

    Begin your proactive SAP licensing journey by understanding which information to gather and assessing the current state and gaps.

    • Explore the Secrets of SAP Software Contracts to Optimize Spend and Reduce Compliance Risk – Phase 1: Establish Licensing Requirements
    • SAP License Summary and Analysis Tool

    2. Evaluate licensing options

    Review current licensing models and determine which licensing models will most appropriately fit your environment.

    • Explore the Secrets of SAP Software Contracts to Optimize Spend and Reduce Compliance Risk – Phase 2: Evaluate Licensing Options

    3. Evaluate agreement options

    Review SAP’s contract types and assess which best fit the organization’s licensing needs.

    • Explore the Secrets of SAP Software Contracts to Optimize Spend and Reduce Compliance Risk – Phase 3: Evaluate Agreement Options

    4. Purchase and manage licenses

    Conduct negotiations, purchase licensing, and finalize a licensing management strategy.

    • Explore the Secrets of SAP Software Contracts to Optimize Spend and Reduce Compliance Risk – Phase 4: Purchase and Manage Licenses
    [infographic]

    Ensure Cloud Security in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS Environments

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    • Parent Category Name: Secure Cloud & Network Architecture
    • Parent Category Link: /secure-cloud-network-architecture
    • Security remains a large impediment to realizing cloud benefits. Numerous concerns still exist around the ability for data privacy, confidentiality, and integrity to be maintained in a cloud environment.
    • Even if adoption is agreed upon, it becomes hard to evaluate vendors that have strong security offerings and even harder to utilize security controls that are internally deployed in the cloud environment.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The cloud can be secure despite unique security threats.
    • Securing a cloud environment is a balancing act of who is responsible for meeting specific security requirements.
    • Most security challenges and concerns can be minimized through our structured process (CAGI) of selecting a trusted cloud security provider (CSP) partner.

    Impact and Result

    • The business is adopting a cloud environment and it must be secured, which includes:
      • Ensuring business data cannot be leaked or stolen.
      • Maintaining privacy of data and other information.
      • Securing the network connection points.
    • Determine your balancing act between yourself and your CSP; through contractual and configuration requirements, determine what security requirements your CSP can meet and cover the rest through internal deployment.
    • This blueprint and associated tools are scalable for all types of organizations within various industry sectors.

    Ensure Cloud Security in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS Environments Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should prioritize security in the cloud, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Determine your cloud risk profile

    Determine your organization’s rationale for cloud adoption and what that means for your security obligations.

    • Ensure Cloud Security in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS Environments – Phase 1: Determine Your Cloud Risk Profile
    • Secure Cloud Usage Policy

    2. Identify your cloud security requirements

    Use the Cloud Security CAGI Tool to perform four unique assessments that will be used to identify secure cloud vendors.

    • Ensure Cloud Security in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS Environments – Phase 2: Identify Your Cloud Security Requirements
    • Cloud Security CAGI Tool

    3. Evaluate vendors from a security perspective

    Learn how to assess and communicate with cloud vendors with security in mind.

    • Ensure Cloud Security in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS Environments – Phase 3: Evaluate Vendors From a Security Perspective
    • IaaS and PaaS Service Level Agreement Template
    • SaaS Service Level Agreement Template
    • Cloud Security Communication Deck

    4. Implement your secure cloud program

    Turn your security requirements into specific tasks and develop your implementation roadmap.

    • Ensure Cloud Security in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS Environments – Phase 4: Implement Your Secure Cloud Program
    • Cloud Security Roadmap Tool

    5. Build a cloud security governance program

    Build the organizational structure of your cloud security governance program.

    • Ensure Cloud Security in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS Environments – Phase 5: Build a Cloud Security Governance Program
    • Cloud Security Governance Program Template
    [infographic]

    Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market

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    • Parent Category Name: Marketing Solutions
    • Parent Category Link: /marketing-solutions

    Your challenge:

    • Rising supplier costs and inflation are eroding margins and impacting customers' budgets.
    • There is pressure from management to make a gut-feeling decision because of time, lack of skills, and process limitations.
    • You must navigate competing pricing-related priorities among product, sales, and finance teams.
    • Product price increases fail because discovery lacks understanding of costs, price/value equation, and competitive price points.
    • Customers can react negatively, and results are seen much later (more than 12 months) after the price decision.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Product leaders will price products based on a deep understanding of the buyer price/value equation and alignment with financial and competitive pricing strategies, and make ongoing adjustments based on an ability to monitor buyer, competitor, and product cost changes.

    Impact and Result

    • Success for many SaaS product managers requires a reorganization and modernization of pricing tools, techniques, and assumptions. Leaders will develop the science of tailored price changes versus across-the-board price actions and account for inflation exposure and the customers’ willingness to pay.
    • This will build skills on how to price new products or adjust pricing for existing products. The disciplines using our pricing strategy methodology will strengthen efforts to develop repeatable pricing models and processes and build credibility with senior management.

    Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Executive Brief - A deck to build your skills on how to price new products or adjust pricing for existing products.

    This Executive Brief will build your skills on how to price new products or adjust pricing for existing products.

    • Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Executive Brief

    2. Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Storyboard – A deck that provides key steps to complete the project.

    This blueprint will build your skills on how to price new products or adjust pricing for existing products with documented key steps to complete the pricing project and use the Excel workbook and customer presentation.

    • Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market – Phases 1-3

    3. Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook – A tool that enables product managers to simplify the organization and collection of customer and competitor information for pricing decisions.

    These five organizational workbooks for product pricing priorities, interview tracking, sample questions, and critical competitive information will enable the price team to validate price change data through researching the three pricing schemes (competitor, customer, and cost-based).

    • Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook

    4. Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template – A template that serves as a guide to communicating the Optimize Pricing Strategy team's results for a product or product line.

    This template includes the business case to justify product repricing, contract modifications, and packaging rebuild or removal for launch. This template calls for the critical summarized results from the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market blueprint and the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook to complete.

    • Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

    Infographic

    Further reading

    SoftwareReviews — A Division of INFO~TECH RESEARCH GROUP

    Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market

    Leading SaaS product managers align pricing strategy to company financial goals and refresh the customer price/value equation to avoid leaving revenues uncaptured.

    Table of Contents

    Section Title Section Title
    1 Executive Brief 2 Key Steps
    3 Concluding Slides

    Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market

    Leading SaaS product managers align pricing strategy to company financial goals and refresh the customer price/value equation to avoid leaving revenues uncaptured.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Optimized Pricing Strategy

    Product managers without well-documented and repeatable pricing management processes often experience pressure from “Agile” management to make gut-feel pricing decisions, resulting in poor product revenue results. When combined with a lack of customer, competitor, and internal cost understanding, these process and timing limitations drive most product managers into suboptimal software pricing decisions. And, adding insult to injury, the poor financial results from bad pricing decisions aren’t fully measured for months, which further compounds the negative effects of poor decision making.

    A successful product pricing strategy aligns finance, marketing, product management, and sales to optimize pricing using a solid understanding of the customer perception of price/value, competitive pricing, and software production costs.

    Success for many SaaS product managers requires a reorganization and modernization of pricing tools, techniques, and data. Leaders will develop the science of tailored price changes versus across-the-board price actions and account for inflation exposure and the customers’ willingness to pay.

    This blueprint will build your skills on how to price new products or adjust pricing for existing products. The discipline you build using our pricing strategy methodology will strengthen your team’s ability to develop repeatable pricing and will build credibility with senior management and colleagues in marketing and sales.

    Photo of Joanne Morin Correia, Principal Research Director, SoftwareReviews.

    Joanne Morin Correia
    Principal Research Director
    SoftwareReviews

    Executive Summary

    Organizations struggle to build repeatable pricing processes:
    • A lack of alignment and collaboration among finance, marketing, product development, and sales.
    • A lack of understanding of customers, competitors, and market pricing.
    • Inability to stay ahead of complex and shifting software pricing models.
    • Time is wasted without a deep understanding of pricing issues and opportunities, and revenue opportunities go unrealized.
    Obstacles add friction to the pricing management process:
    • Pressure from management to make quick decisions results in a gut-driven approach to pricing.
    • A lack of pricing skills and management processes limits sound decision making.
    • Price changes fail because discovery often lacks competitive intelligence and buyer value to price point understanding. Customers’ reactions are often observed much later, after the decision is made.
    • Economic disruptions, supplier price hikes, and higher employee salaries/benefits are driving costs higher.
    Use SoftwareReviews’ approach for more successful pricing:
    • Organize for a more effective pricing project including roles & responsibilities as well as an aligned pricing approach.
    • Work with CFO/finance partner to establish target price based on margins and key factors affecting costs.
    • Perform a competitive price assessment and understand the buyer price/value equation.
    • Arrive at a target price based on the above and seek buy-in and approvals.

    SoftwareReviews Insight

    Product leaders will price products based on a deep understanding of the buyer price/value equation and alignment with financial and competitive pricing strategies, and they will make ongoing adjustments based on an ability to monitor buyers, competitors, and product cost changes.

    What is an optimized price strategy?

    “Customer discovery interviews help reduce the chance of failure by testing your hypotheses. Quality customer interviews go beyond answering product development and pricing questions.” (Pricing Strategies, Growth Ramp, March 2022)

    Most product managers just research their direct competitors when launching a new SaaS product. While this is essential, competitive pricing intel is insufficient to create a long-term optimized pricing strategy. Leaders will also understand buyer TCO.

    Your customers are constantly comparing prices and weighing the total cost of ownership as they consider your competition. Why?

    Implementing a SaaS solution creates a significant time burden as buyers spend days learning new software, making sure tools communicate with each other, configuring settings, contacting support, etc. It is not just the cost of the product or service.

    Optimized Price Strategy Is…
    • An integral part of any product plan and business strategy.
    • Essential to improving and maintaining high levels of margins and customer satisfaction.
    • Focused on delivering the product price to your customer’s business value.
    • Understanding customer price-value for your software segment.
    • Monitoring your product pricing with real-time data to ensure support for competitive strategy.
    Price Strategy Is Not…
    • Increasing or decreasing price on a gut feeling.
    • Changing price for short-term gain.
    • Being wary of asking customers pricing-related questions.
    • Haphazardly focusing entirely on profit.
    • Just covering product costs.
    • Only researching direct competitors.
    • Focusing on yourself or company satisfaction but your target customers.
    • Picking the first strategy you see.

    SoftwareReviews Insight

    An optimized pricing strategy establishes the “best” price for a product or service that maximizes profits and shareholder value while considering customer business value vs. the cost to purchase and implement – the total cost of ownership (TCO).

    Challenging environment

    Product managers are currently experiencing the following:
    • Supplier costs and inflation are rising, eroding product margins and impacting customers’ budgets.
    • Pressure from management to make a gut-feeling decision because of time, lack of skills, and process limitations.
    • Navigating competing pricing-related priorities among product, sales, and finance.
    • Product price increases that fail because discovery lacks understanding of costs, price/value equation, and competitive price points.
    • Slowing customer demand due to poorly priced offerings may not be fully measured for many months following the price decision.
    Doing nothing is NOT an option!
    Offense Double Down

    Benefit: Leverage long-term financial and market assets

    Risk: Market may not value those assets in the future
    Fight Back

    Benefit: Move quickly

    Risk: Hard to execute and easy to get pricing wrong
    Defense Retrench

    Benefit: Reduce threats from new entrants through scale and marketing

    Risk: Causes managed decline and is hard to sell to leadership
    Move Away

    Benefit: Seize opportunities for new revenue sources

    Risk: Diversification is challenging to pull off
    Existing Markets and Customers New Markets and Customers

    Pricing skills are declining

    Among product managers, limited pricing skills are big obstacles that make pricing difficult and under-optimized.

    Visual of a bar chart with descending values, each bar has written on it: 'Limited - Limits in understanding of engineering, marketing, and sales expectations or few processes for pricing and/or cost', 'Inexperienced - Inexperience in pricing project skills and corporate training', 'Lagging - Financial lag indicators (marketing ROI, revenue, profitability, COGs)', 'Lacking - Lack of relevant competitive pricing/packaging information', 'Shifting - Shift to cloud subscription-based revenue models is challenging'.

    The top three weakest product management skills have remained constant over the past five years:
    • Competitive analysis
    • Pricing
    • End of life
    Pricing is the weakest skill and has been declining the most among surveyed product professionals every year. (Adapted from 280 Group, 2022)

    Key considerations for more effective pricing decisions

    Pricing teams can improve software product profitability by:
    • Optimizing software profit with four critical elements: properly pricing your product, giving complete and accurate quotations, choosing the terms of the sale, and selecting the payment method.
    • Implementing tailored price changes (versus across-the-board price actions) to help account for inflation exposure, customer willingness to pay, and product attribute changes.
    • Accelerating ongoing pricing decision-making with a dedicated cross-functional team ready to act quickly.
    • Resetting discounting and promotion, and revisiting service-level agreements.
    Software pricing leaders will regularly assess:

    Has it been over a year since prices were updated?

    Have customers told you to raise your prices?

    Do you have the right mix of customers in each pricing plan?

    Do 40% of your customers say they would be very disappointed if your product disappeared? (Adapted from Growth Ramp, 2021)

    Case Study

    Middleware Vendor

    INDUSTRY
    Technology Middleware
    SOURCE
    SoftwareReviews Custom Pricing Strategy Project
    A large middleware vendor, who is running on Microsoft Azure, known for quality development and website tools, needed to react strategically to the March 2022 Microsoft price increase.

    Key Initiative: Optimize New Pricing Strategy

    The program’s core objective was to determine if the vendor should implement a price increase and how the product should be packaged within the new pricing model.

    For this initiative, the company interviewed buyers using three key questions: What are the core capabilities to focus on building/selling? What are the optimal features and capabilities valued by customers that should be sold together? And should they be charging more for their products?

    Results
    This middleware vendor saw buyer support for a 10% price increase to their product line and restructuring of vertical contract terms. This enabled them to retain customers over multi-year subscription contracts, and the price increase enabled them to protect margins after the Microsoft price increase.

    The Optimize New Pricing Strategy included the following components:

    Components: 'Product Feature Importance & Satisfaction', 'Correlation of Features and Value Drivers', 'Fair Cost to Value Average for Category', 'Average Discounting for Category', 'Customer Value Is an Acceptable Multiple of Price'. First four: 'Component fails into the scope of optimizing price strategy to value'; last one: 'They are optimizing their price strategy decisions'.

    New product price approach

    As a collaborative team across product management, marketing, and finance, we see leaders taking a simple yet well-researched approach when setting product pricing.

    Iterating to a final price point is best done with research into how product pricing:

    • Delivers target margins.
    • Is positioned vs. key competitors.
    • Delivers customer value at a fair price/value ratio.
    To arrive at our new product price, we suggest iterating among 3 different views:

    New Target Price:

    • Buyer Price vs. Value
    • Cost - Plus
    • Vs. Key Competitors
    We analyzed:
    • Customer price/value equation interviews
    • Impacts of Supplier cost increases
    • Competitive pricing research
    • How product pricing delivers target margins

    Who should care about optimized pricing?

    Product managers and marketers who:

    • Support the mandate for optimizing pricing and revenue generation.
    • Need a more scientific way to plan and implement new pricing processes and methods to optimize revenues and profits.
    • Want a way to better apply customer and competitive insights to product pricing.
    • Are evaluating current pricing and cost control to support a refreshed pricing strategy.

    Finance, sales, and marketing professionals who are pricing stakeholders in:

    • Finding alternatives to current pricing and packaging approaches.
    • Looking for ways to optimize price within the shifting market momentum.

    How will they benefit from this research?

    • Refine the ability to effectively target pricing to specific market demands and customer segments.
    • Strengthen product team’s reputation for reliable and repeatable price-management capabilities among senior leadership.
    • Recognize and plan for new revenue opportunities or cost increases.
    • Allow for faster, more accurate intake of customer and competitive data. 
    • Improve pricing skills for professional development and business outcomes.
    • Create new product price, packaging, or market opportunities. 
    • Reduce financial costs and mistakes associated with manual efforts and uneducated guessing.
    • Price software products that better achieve financial goals optimizing revenue, margins, or market share.
    • Enhance the product development and sales processes with real competitive and customer expectations.

    Is Your Pricing Strategy Optimized?

    With the right pricing strategy, you can invest more money into your product, service, or growth. A 1% price increase will improv revenues by:

    Three bars: 'Customer acquisition, 3.32%', 'Customer retention, 6.71%', 'Price monetization, 12.7%'.

    Price monetization will almost double the revenue increases over customer acquisition and retention. (Pricing Strategies, Growth Ramp, March 2022)

    DIAGNOSE PRICE CHALLENGES

    Prices of today's cloud-based services/products are often misaligned against competition and customers' perceived value, leaving more revenues on the table.
    • Do you struggle to price new products with confidence?
    • Do you really know your SaaS product's costs?
    • Have you lost pricing power to stronger competitors?
    • Has cost focus eclipsed customer value focus?
    If so, you are likely skipping steps and missing key outputs in your pricing strategy.

    OPTIMIZE THESE STEPS

    ALIGNMENT
    1. Assign Team Responsibilities
    2. Set Timing for Project Deliverables
    3. Clarify Financial Expectations
    4. Collect Customer Contacts
    5. Determine Competitors
    6. BEFORE RESEARCH, HAVE YOU
      Documented your executive's financial expectations? If "No," return.

    RESEARCH & VALIDATE
    1. Research Competitors
    2. Interview Customers
    3. Test Pricing vs. Financials
    4. Create Pricing Presentation
    5. BEFORE PRESENTING, HAVE YOU:
      Clarified your customer and competitive positioning to validate pricing? If "No," return.

    BUY-IN
    1. Executive Pricing Presentation
    2. Post-Mortem of Presentation
    3. Document New Processes
    4. Monitor the Pricing Changes
    5. BEFORE RESEARCH, HAVE YOU:
      Documented your executive's financial expectations? If "No," return.

    DELIVER KEY OUTPUTS

    Sponsoring executive(s) signs-offs require a well-articulated pricing plan and business case for investment that includes:
    • Competitive features and pricing financial templates
    • Customer validation of price value
    • Optimized price presentation
    • Repeatable pricing processes to monitor changes

    REAP THE REWARDS

    • Product pricing is better aligned to achieve financial goals
    • Improved pricing skills or professional development
    • Stronger team reputation for reliable price management

    Key Insights

    1. Gain a competitive edge by using market and customer information to optimize product financials, refine pricing, and speed up decisions.
    2. Product leaders will best set software product price based on a deep understanding of buyer/price value equation, alignment with financial strategy, and an ongoing ability to monitor buyer, competitor, and product costs.

    SoftwareReviews’ methodology for optimizing your pricing strategy

    Steps

    1.1 Establish the Team and Responsibilities
    1.2 Educate/Align Team on Pricing Strategy
    1.2 Document Portfolio & Target Product(s) for Pricing Updates
    1.3 Clarify Product Target Margins
    1.4 Establish Customer Price/Value
    1.5 Identify Competitive Pricing
    1.6 Establish New Price and Gain Buy-In

    Outcomes

    1. Well-organized project
    2. Clarified product pricing strategy
    3. Customer value vs. price equation
    4. Competitive price points
    5. Approvals

    Insight summary

    Modernize your price planning

    Product leaders will price products based on a deep understanding of the buyer price/value equation and alignment with financial and competitive pricing strategies, and make ongoing adjustments based on an ability to monitor buyer, competitor, and product cost changes.

    Ground pricing against financials

    Meet and align with financial stakeholders.
    • Give finance a heads-up that you want to work with them.
    • Find out the CFO’s expectations for pricing and margins.
    • Ask for a dedicated finance team member.

    Align on pricing strategy

    Lead stakeholders in SaaS product pricing decisions to optimize pricing based on four drivers:
    • Customer’s price/value
    • Competitive strategy
    • Reflective of costs
    • Alignment with financial goals

    Decrease time for approval

    Drive price decisions, with the support of the CFO, to the business value of the suggested change:
    • Reference current product pricing guidelines
    • Compare to the competition and our strategy and weigh results against our customer’s price/value
    • Compare against the equation to business value for the suggested change
    Develop the skill of pricing products

    Increase product revenues and margins by enhancing modern processes and data monetization. Shift from intuitive to information-based pricing decisions.

    Look at other options for revenue

    Adjust product design, features, packaging, and contract terms while maintaining the functionality customers find valuable to their business.

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:
    Key deliverable:

    New Pricing Strategy Presentation Template

    Capture key findings for your price strategy with the Optimize Your Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Strategy Presentation Template

    Sample of the 'Acme Corp New Product Pricing' blueprint.

    Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Executive Brief

    This executive brief will build your knowledge on how to price new products or adjust pricing for existing products.

    Sample of the 'Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market' blueprint.

    Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook

    This workbook will help you prioritize which products require repricing, hold customer interviews, and capture competitive insights.

    Sample of the 'Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market' workbook.

    Guided Implementation

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with a SoftwareReviews analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is 4 to 8 calls over the course of 2 to 4 months.

    What does a typical GI on optimizing software pricing look like?

    Alignment

    Research & Reprice

    Buy-in

    Call #1: Share the pricing team vision and outline activities for the pricing strategy process. Plan next call – 1 week.

    Call #2: Outline products that require a new pricing approach and steps with finance. Plan next call – 1 week.

    Call #3: Discuss the customer interview process. Plan next call – 1 week.

    Call #4 Outline competitive analysis. Plan next call – 1 week.

    Call #5: Review customer and competitive results for initial new pricing business case with finance for alignment. Plan next call – 3 weeks.

    Call #6: Review the initial business case against financial plans across marketing, sales, and product development. Plan next call – 1 week.

    Call #7 Review the draft executive pricing presentation. Plan next call – 1 week.

    Call #8: Discuss gaps in executive presentation. Plan next call – 3 days.

    SoftwareReviews Offers Various Levels of Support to Meet Your Needs

    Included in Advisory Membership Optional add-ons

    DIY Toolkit

    Guided Implementation

    Workshop

    Consulting

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful." "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track." "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place." "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Desire a Guided Implementation?

    • A GI is where your SoftwareReviews engagement manager and executive advisor/counselor will work with SoftwareReviews research team members to craft with you a Custom Key Initiative Plan (CKIP).
    • A CKIP guides your team through each of the major steps, outlines responsibilities between members of your team and SoftwareReviews, describes expected outcomes, and captures actual value delivered.
    • A CKIP also provides you and your team with analyst/advisor/counselor feedback on project outputs, helps you communicate key principles and concepts to your team, and helps you stay on project timelines.
    • If Guided Implementation assistance is desired, contact your engagement manager.

    Workshop overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com1-888-670-8889
    Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5
    Align Team, Identify Customers, and Document Current Knowledge
    Validate Initial Insights and Identify Competitors and Market View
    Schedule and Hold Buyer Interviews
    Summarize Findings and Provide Actionable Guidance to Stakeholders
    Present, Go Forward, and Measure Impact and Results
    Activities

    1.1 Identify Team Members, roles, and responsibilities

    1.2 Establish timelines and project workflow

    1.3 Gather current product and future financial margin expectations

    1.4 Review the Optimize Software Executive Brief and Workbook Templates

    1.4 Build prioritized pricing candidates hypothesis

    2.1 Identify customer interviewee types by segment, region, etc.

    2.2 Hear from industry analysts their perspectives on the competitors, buyer expectations, and price trends

    2.3 Research competitors for pricing, contract type, and product attributes

    3.2 Review pricing and attributes survey and interview questionnaires

    3.2 Hold interviews and use interview guides (over four weeks)

    A gap of up to 4 weeks for scheduling of interviews.

    3.3 Hold review session after initial 3-4 interviews to make adjustments

    4.1 Review all draft price findings against the market view

    4.2 Review Draft Executive Presentation

    5.1 Review finalized pricing strategy plan with analyst for market view

    5.2 Review for comments on the final implementation plan

    Deliverables
    1. Documented steering committee and working team
    2. Current and initial new pricing targets for strategy
    3. Documented team knowledge
    1. Understanding of market and potential target interviewee types
    2. Objective competitive research
    1. Initial review – “Are we going in the right direction with surveys?”
    2. Validate or adjust the pricing surveys to what you hear in the market
    1. Complete findings and compare to the market
    2. Review and finish drafting the Optimize Software Pricing Strategy presentation
    1. Final impute on strategy
    2. Review of suggested next steps and implementation plan

    Our process

    Align team, perform research, and gain executive buy-in on updated price points

    1. Establish the team and responsibilities
    2. Educate/align team on pricing strategy
    3. Document portfolio & target product(s) for pricing updates
    4. Clarify product target margins
    5. Establish customer price/value
    6. Identify competitive pricing
    7. Establish new price and gain buy-in

    Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market

    Our process will help you deliver the following outcomes:

    • Well-organized project
    • Clarified product pricing strategy
    • Customer value vs. price equation
    • Competitive price points
    • Approvals

    This project involves the following participants:

    • Product management
    • Program leadership
    • Product marketing
    • CFO or finance representative/partner
    • Others
    • Representative(s) from Sales

    1.0 Assign team responsibilities

    Input: Steering committee roles and responsibilities, Steering committee interest and role

    Output: List of new pricing strategy steering committee and workstream members, roles, and timelines, Updated Software Pricing Strategy presentation

    Materials: Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

    Participants: CFO, sponsoring executive, Functional leads – development, product marketing, product management, marketing, sales, customer success/support

    1-2 hours
    1. The product manager/member running this pricing/repricing program should review the entire Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market blueprint and each blueprint attachment.
    2. The product manager should also refer to slide 19 of the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market blueprint and decide if help via a Guided Implementation (GI) is of value. If desired, alert your SoftwareReviews engagement manager.
    1-2 hours
    1. The product manager should meet with the chief product officer/CPO and functional leaders, and set the meeting agenda to:
      1. Nominate steering committee members.
      2. Nominate work-stream leads.
      3. Establish key pricing project milestones.
      4. Schedule both the steering committee (suggest monthly) and workstream lead meetings (suggest weekly) through the duration of the project.
      5. Ask the CPO to craft, outside this meeting, his/her version of the "Message from the chief product officer.”
      6. If a Guided Implementation is selected, inform the meeting attendees that a SoftwareReviews analyst will join the next meeting to share his/her Executive Brief on Pricing Strategy.
    2. Record all above findings in the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template.

    Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    Pricing steering committees are needed to steer overall product, pricing, and packaging decisions. Some companies include the CEO and CFO on this committee and designate it as a permanent body that meets monthly to give go/no-go decisions to “all things product and pricing related” across all products and business units.

    2.0 Educate the team

    1 hour

    Input: Typically, a joint recognition that pricing strategies need upgrading and have not been fully documented, Steering committee and working team members

    Output: Communication of team members involved and the makeup of the steering committee and working team, Alignment of team members on a shared vision of “why a new price strategy is critical” and what key attributes define both the need and impact on business

    Materials: Optimize Your Software Strategy Executive Brief PowerPoint presentation

    Participants: Initiative manager – individual leading the new pricing strategy, CFO/sponsoring executive, Working team – typically representatives in product marketing, product management, and sales, SoftwareReviews marketing analyst (optional)

    1. Walk the team through the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Executive Brief PowerPoint presentation.
    2. Optional – Have the SoftwareReviews Advisory (SRA) analyst walk the team through the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Executive Brief PowerPoint presentation as part of your session. Contact your engagement manager to schedule.
    3. Walk the team through the current version of the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template outlining project goals, steering committee and workstream make-up and responsibilities, project timeline and key milestones, and approach to arriving at new product pricing.
    4. Set expectations among team members of their specific roles and responsibilities for this project, review the frequency of steering committee and workstream meetings to set expectations of key milestones and deliverable due dates.

    Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Executive Brief

    3.0 Document portfolio and target products for pricing update

    1-3 Hours

    Input: List of entire product portfolio

    Output: Prioritized list of product candidates that should be repriced

    Materials: Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Executive Brief presentation, Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook

    Participants: Initiative manager – individual leading the new pricing strategy, CFO/sponsoring executive, Working team – typically representatives in product marketing, product management, and sales

    1. Walk the team through the current version of Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market workbook, tab 2: “Product Portfolio Organizer.” Modify sample attributes to match your product line where necessary.
    2. As a group, record the product attributes for your entire portfolio.
    3. Prioritize the product price optimization candidates for repricing with the understanding that it might change after meeting with finance.

    Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook

    4.0 Clarify product target margins

    2-3 sessions of 1 Hour each

    Input: Finance partner/CFO knowledge of target product current and future margins, Finance partner/CFO who has information on underlying costs with details that illustrate supplier contributions

    Output: Product finance markup target percentage margins and revenues

    Materials: Finance data on the product family, Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

    Participants: Initiative manager, Finance partner/CFO

    1. Schedule a meeting with your finance partner/CFO to validate expectations for product margins. The goal is to understand the detail of underlying costs/margins and if the impacts of supplier costs affect the product family. The information will be placed into the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook on tab 2, Product Portfolio Organizer under the “Unit Margins” heading.
    2. Arrive at a final “Cost-Plus New Price” based on underlying costs and target margins for each of the products. Record results in the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, tab 2, under the “Cost-Plus New Price” heading.
    3. Record product target finance markup price under “Cost-Plus” in Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template, slide 9, and details in Appendix, “Cost-Plus Analysis,” slide 11.
    4. Repeat this process for any other products to be repriced.

    Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook

    Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

    5.0 Establish customer price to value

    1-4 weeks

    Input: Identify segments within which you require price-to-value information, Understand your persona insight gaps, Review Sample Interview Guide using the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile, Competitive Market Workbook, Tab 4. Interview Guide.

    Output: List of interviewees, Updated Interview Guide

    Materials: Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

    Participants: Initiative manager, Customer success to help identify interviewees, Customers, prospects

    1. Identify a list of customers and prospects that best represent your target persona when interviewed. Choose interviewees who will inform key differences among key segments (geographies, company size, a mix of customers and prospects, etc.) and who are decision makers and can best inform insights on price/value and competitors.
    2. Recruit interviewees and schedule 30-minute interviews.
    3. Keep track of interviewees using the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, tab 3: “Interviewee Tracking.”
    4. Review the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, tab 4: “Interview Guide,” and modify/update it where appropriate.
    5. Record interviewee perspectives on the “price they are willing to pay for the value received” (price/value equation) using the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, tab 4: “Interview Guide.”
    6. Summarize findings to result in an average “customer’s value price.” Record product target ”customer’s value price” in Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template, slide 9 and supporting details in Appendix, “Customer Pricing Analysis,” slide 12.

    Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook

    Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

    6.0 Identify competitive pricing

    1-2 weeks

    Input: Identify price candidate competitors, Your product pricing, contract type, and product attribute information to compare against, Knowledge of existing competitor information, websites, and technology research sites to guide questions

    Output: Competitive product average pricing

    Materials: Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

    Participants: Initiative manager, Customers, prospects

    1. Identify the top 3-5 competitors’ products that you most frequently compete against with your selected product.
    2. Perform competitive intelligence research on deals won or lost that contain competitive pricing insights by speaking with your sales force.
    3. Use the interviews with key customers to also inform competitive pricing insights. Include companies which you may have lost to a competitor in your customer interviewee list.
    4. Modify and add key competitive pricing, contract, or product attributes in the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, tab 5: “Competitive Information.”
    5. Place your product’s information into the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, tab 5: “Competitive Information.”
    6. Research your competitors’ summarized pricing and product attribute insights into the workbook.
    7. Record research in the Summarize research on competitors to arrive at an average “Competitors Avg. Price”. Record in ”Customer’s Value Price” in Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template, slide 9, and details in Appendix, “Competitor Pricing Analysis,” slide 13.

    Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook

    Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

    7.0 Establish new price and gain buy-in

    2-3 hours

    Input: Findings from competitive, cost-plus, and customer price/value analysis

    Output: Approvals for price change

    Materials: Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

    Participants: Initiative manager, Steering committee, Working team – typically representatives in product marketing, product management, sales

    1. Using prior recorded findings of Customer’s Value Price, Competitors’ Avg. Price, and Finance Markup Price, arrive at a recommended “New Price” and record in Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template, slide 9 and the Appendix for Project Analysis Details.
    2. Present findings to steering committee. Be prepared to show customer interviews and competitive analysis results to support your recommendation.
    3. Plan internal and external communications and discuss the timing of when to “go live” with new pricing. Discuss issues related to migration to a new price, how to handle currently low-priced customers, and how to migrate them over time to the new pricing.
    4. Identify if it makes sense to target a date to launch the new pricing in the future, so customers can be alerted in advance and therefore take advantage of “current pricing” to drive added revenues.
    5. Confer with IT to assess times required to implement within CPQ systems and with product marketing for time to change sales proposals, slide decks, and any other affected assets and systems.

    Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Problem Solved

    With the help of this blueprint, you have deepened your and your company’s understanding of how to look at new pricing opportunities and what the market and the buyer will pay for your product. You are among the minority of product and marketing leaders that have thoroughly documented their new pricing strategy and processes – congratulations!

    The benefits of having led your team through the process are significant and include the following:

    • Allow for faster, more accurate intake of customer and competitive data 
    • Refine the ability to effectively target pricing to specific market demands and customer segments 
    • Understand the association between the value proposition of products and services
    • Reduce financial costs and mistakes associated with manual efforts & uneducated guessing
    • Recognize and plan for new revenue opportunities or cost increases
    • Create new market or product packaging opportunities
    And finally, by bringing your team along with you in this process, you have also led your team to become more customer-focused while pricing your products – a strategic shift that all organizations should pursue.

    If you would like additional support, contact us and we’ll make sure you get the professional expertise you need.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    info@softwarereviews.com
    1-888-670-8889

    Bibliography

    “Chapter 4 Reasons for Project Failure.” Kissflow's Guide to Project Management. Kissflow, n.d. Web.

    Edie, Naomi. “Microsoft Is Raising SaaS Prices, and Other Vendors Will, Too.” CIO Dive, 8 December 2021. Web.

    Gruman, Galen, Alan S. Morrison, and Terril A. Retter. “Software Pricing Trends.” PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2018. Web.

    Hargrave, Marshall. “Example of Economic Exposure.” Investopedia, 12 April 2022. Web.

    Heaslip, Emily. “7 Smart Pricing Strategies to Attract Customers.” CO—, 17 November 2021. Web.

    Higgins, Sean. “How to Price a Product That Your Sales Team Can Sell.” HubSpot, 4 April 2022. Web.

    “Pricing Strategies.” Growth Ramp, March 2022. Web.

    “Product Management Skills Benchmark Report 2021.” 280 Group, 9 November 2021. Web.

    Quey, Jason. “Price Increase: How to Do a SaaS Pricing Change in 8 Steps.” Growth Ramp, 22 March 2021. Web.

    Steenburg, Thomas, and Jill Avery. “Marketing Analysis Toolkit: Pricing and Profitability Analysis.” Harvard Business School, 16 July 2010. Web.

    “2021 State of Competitive Intelligence.” Crayon and SCIO, n.d. Web.

    Valchev, Konstantin. “Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Business.” OpenView Venture Partners, OV Blog, 20 April 2020. Web.

    “What Is Price Elasticity?” Market Business News, n.d. Web.

    Stabilize Release and Deployment Management

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    Lack of control over the release process, poor collaboration between teams, and manual deployments lead to poor quality releases at a cost to the business.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Manage risk. Release management should stabilize the IT environment. A poorly designed release can take down the whole business. Rushing releases out the door leads to increased risk for the business.
    • Quality processes are key. Standardized process will enable your release and deployment management teams to have a framework to deploy new releases with minimal chance of costly downtime further down the production chain.
    • Business must own the process. Release managers need oversight of the business to remain good stewards of the release management process.

    Impact and Result

    • Be prepared with a release management policy. With vulnerabilities discovered and published at an alarming pace, organizations have to build a plan to address and fix them quickly. A detailed release and patch policy should map out all the logistics of the deployment in advance, so that when necessary, teams can handle rollouts like a well-oiled machine.
    • Automate your software deployment and patch management strategy. Replace tedious and time-consuming manual processes with the use of automated release and patch management tools. Some organizations have a variety of release tools for various tasks and processes to ensure all or most of the required processes are covered across a diverse development environment.
    • Test deployments and monitor your releases. Larger organizations may have the luxury of a test environment prior to deployment, but that may be cost prohibitive for smaller organizations. If resources are a constraint, roll out the patch gradually and closely monitor performance to be able to quickly revert in the event of an issue.

    Stabilize Release and Deployment Management Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should control and stabilize your release and deployment management practice while improving the quality of releases and deployments, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Analyze current state

    Begin improving release management by assessing the current state and gaining a solid understanding of how core operational processes are actually functioning within the organization.

    • Stabilize Release and Deployment Management – Phase 1: Analyze Current State
    • Release Management Maturity Assessment
    • Release Management Project Roadmap Tool
    • Release Management Workflow Library (Visio)
    • Release Management Workflow Library (PDF)
    • Release Management Standard Operating Procedure
    • Patch Management Policy
    • Release Management Policy
    • Release Management Deployment Tracker
    • Release Management Build Procedure Template

    2. Plan releases and deployments

    Plan releases to gather all the pieces in one place and define what, why, when, and how a release will happen.

    • Stabilize Release and Deployment Management – Phase 2: Release and Deployment Planning

    3. Build, test, deploy

    Take a holistic and comprehensive approach to effectively designing and building releases. Get everything right the first time.

    • Stabilize Release and Deployment Management – Phase 3: Build, Test, Deploy

    4. Measure, manage, improve

    Determine desired goals for release management to ensure both IT and the business see the benefits of implementation.

    • Stabilize Release and Deployment Management – Phase 4: Measure, Manage, Improve
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Stabilize Release and Deployment Management

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Analyze Current State

    The Purpose

    Release management improvement begins with assessment of the current state.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A solid understanding of how core operational processes are actually functioning within the organization.

    Activities

    1.1 Evaluate process maturity.

    1.2 Assess release management challenges.

    1.3 Define roles and responsibilities.

    1.4 Review and rightsize existing policy suite.

    Outputs

    Maturity Assessment

    Release Management Policy

    Release Management Standard Operating Procedure

    Patch Management Policy

    2 Release Management Planning

    The Purpose

    In simple terms, release planning puts all the pertinent pieces in one place.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    It defines the what, why, when, and how a release will happen.

    Activities

    2.1 Design target state release planning process.

    2.2 Define, bundle, and categorize releases.

    2.3 Standardize deployment plans and models.

    Outputs

    Release Planning Workflow

    Categorization and prioritization schemes

    Deployment models aligned to release types

    3 Build, Test, and Deploy

    The Purpose

    Take a holistic and comprehensive approach to effectively designing and building releases.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Standardize build and test procedures to begin to drive consistency.

    Activities

    3.1 Standardize build procedures for deployments.

    3.2 Standardize test plans aligned to release types.

    Outputs

    Build procedure for hardware and software releases

    Test models aligned to deployment models

    4 Measure, Manage, and Improve

    The Purpose

    Determine and define the desired goals for release management as a whole.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Agree to key metrics and success criteria to start tracking progress and establish a post-deployment review process to promote continual improvement.

    Activities

    4.1 Determine key metrics to track progress.

    4.2 Establish a post-deployment review process.

    4.3 Understand and define continual improvement drivers.

    Outputs

    List of metrics and goals

    Post-deployment validation checklist

    Project roadmap

    2021 CIO Priorities Report

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    • Parent Category Name: IT Strategy
    • Parent Category Link: /it-strategy
    • It is a new year, but the challenges of 2020 remain: COVID-19 infection rates continue to climb, governments continue to enforce lockdown measures, we continue to find ourselves in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and civil unrest grows in many democratic societies.
    • At the start of 2020, no business leader predicted the disruption that was to come. This left IT in a reactive but critical role as the health crisis hit. It was core to delivering the organization’s products and services, as it drove the radical shift to work-from-home.
    • For the year ahead, IT will continue to serve a critical function in uncertain times. However, unlike last year, CIOs can better prepare for 2021. That said, in the face of the uncertainty and volatility of the year ahead, what they need to prepare for is still largely undefined.
    • But despite the lack of confidence on knowing specifically what is to come, most business leaders will admit they need to get ready for it. This year’s priority report will help.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • “Resilience” is the theme for this year’s CIO Priorities Report. In this context, resilience is about building up the capacity and the capabilities to effectively respond to emergent and unforeseen needs.
    • Early in 2021 is a good time to develop resilience in several different areas. As we explore in this year’s Report, CIOs can best facilitate enterprise resilience through strategic financial planning, proactive risk management, effective organizational change management and capacity planning, as well as through remaining tuned into emergent technologies to capitalize on innovations to help weather the uncertainty of the year ahead.

    Impact and Result

    • Use Info-Tech’s 2021 CIO Priorities Report to prepare for the uncertainty of the year ahead. Across our five priorities we provide five avenues through which CIOs can demonstrate resilient planning, enabling the organization as a whole to better confront what’s coming in 2021.
    • Each of our priorities is backed up by a “call to action” that will help CIOs start to immediately implement the right drivers of resilience for their organization.
    • By building up resilience across our five key areas, CIOs will not only be able to better prepare for the year to come, but also strengthen business relations and staff morale in difficult times.

    2021 CIO Priorities Report Research & Tools

    Read the 2021 CIO Priorities Report

    Use Info-Tech’s 2021 CIO Priorities Report to prepare for the uncertainty of the year ahead. Across our five priorities we provide five avenues through which CIOs can demonstrate resilient planning, enabling the organization as a whole to better confront what’s coming in 2021.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Create an appropriate budget reserve

    Identifying and planning sources of financial contingency will help ensure CIOs can meet unforeseen and emergent operational and business needs throughout the year.

    • 2021 CIO Priorities Report: Priority 1 – Create an Appropriate Budget Reserve

    2. Refocus IT risk planning

    The start of 2021 is a time to refocus and redouble IT risk management and business continuity planning to bring it up to the standards of our “new normal.” Indeed, if last year taught us anything, it’s that no “black swan” should be off the table in terms of scenarios or possibilities for business disruption.

    • 2021 CIO Priorities Report: Priority 2 – Refocus IT Risk Planning

    3. Strengthen organizational change management capabilities

    At its heart, resilience is having the capacity to deal with unexpected change. Organizational change management can help build up this capacity, providing the ability to strategically plot known changes while leaving some capacity to absorb the unknowns as they present themselves.

    • 2021 CIO Priorities Report: Priority 3 – Strengthen Organizational Change Management Capabilities

    4. Establish capacity awareness

    Capacity awareness facilitates resilience by providing capital in the form of resource data. With this data, CIOs can make better decisions on what can be approved and when it can be scheduled for.

    • 2021 CIO Priorities Report: Priority 4 – Establish Capacity Awareness

    5. Keep emerging technologies in view

    Having an up-to-date view of emerging technologies will enable the resilient CIO to capitalize on and deploy leading-edge innovations as the business requires.

    • 2021 CIO Priorities Report: Priority 5 – Keep Emerging Technologies in View
    [infographic]

    Application Maintenance

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    • Parent Category Name: Applications
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    The challenge

    • If you work with application maintenance or operations teams that handle the "run" of your applications, you may find that the sheer volume and variety of requests create large backlogs.
    • Your business and product owners may want scrum or DevOps teams to work on new functionality rather than spend effort on lifecycle management.
    • Increasing complexity and increasing reliance on technology may create unrealistic expectations for your maintenance teams. Business applications must be available around the clock, and new feature roadmaps cannot be side-tracked by maintenance.

    Our advice

    Insight

    • Improving maintenance focus may mean doing less work but create more value. Your teams need to be realistic about what commitments they take—balance maintenance with business value and risk levels.
    • Treat maintenance the same as any other development practice. Use the same intake and prioritization practices. Uphold the same quality standards.

    Impact and results 

    • Justify the necessity of streamlined and regular maintenance. Understand each stakeholder's objectives and concerns, validate them against your staff's current state, processes, and technologies involved.
    • Maintenance and risk go hand in hand. And the business wants to move forward all the time as well. Strengthen your prioritization practice. Use a holistic view of the business and technical impacts, risks, urgencies across the maintenance needs and requests. That allows you to justify their respective positions in the overall development backlog. Identify opportunities to bring some requirements and features together.
    • Build a repeatable process with appropriate governance around it. Ensure that people know their roles and responsibilities and are held accountable.
    • Instill development best-practices into your maintenance processes.

    The roadmap

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    Get started.

    Read our executive brief to understand everyday struggles regarding application maintenance, the root causes, and our methodology to overcome these. We show you how we can support you.

    Understand your maintenance priorities

    Identify your stakeholders and understand their drivers.

    • Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 1: Assess the Current Maintenance Landscape (ppt)
    • Application Maintenance Operating Model Template (doc)
    • Application Maintenance Resource Capacity Assessment (xls)
    • Application Maintenance Maturity Assessment (xls)

    Define and employ maintenance governance

    Identify the right level of governance appropriate to your company and business context for your application maintenance. That ensures that people uphold standards across maintenance practices.

    • Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 2: Develop a Maintenance Release Schedule (ppt)

    Enhance your prioritization practices

    Most companies cannot do everything for all applications and systems. Build your maintenance triage and prioritization rules to safeguard your company, maximize business value generation and IT risks and requirements.

    • Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 3: Optimize Maintenance Capabilities (ppt)

    Streamline your maintenance delivery

    Define quality standards in maintenance practices. Enforce these in alignment with the governance you have set up. Show a high degree of transparency and open discussions on development challenges.

    • Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 4: Streamline Maintenance Delivery (ppt)
    • Application Maintenance Business Case Presentation Document (ppt)

     

     

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

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    • Parent Category Name: DR and Business Continuity
    • Parent Category Link: /business-continuity
    • Any time a natural disaster or major IT outage occurs, it increases executive awareness and internal pressure to create a disaster recovery plan (DRP).
    • Traditional DRP templates are onerous and result in a lengthy, dense plan that might satisfy auditors but will not be effective in a crisis.
    • The myth that a DRP is only for major disasters leaves organizations vulnerable to more common incidents.
    • The growing use of outsourced infrastructure services has increased reliance on vendors to meet recovery timeline objectives.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • At its core, disaster recovery (DR) is about ensuring service continuity. Create a plan that can be leveraged for both isolated and catastrophic events.
    • Remember Murphy’s Law. Failure happens. Focus on improving overall resiliency and recovery, rather than basing DR on risk probability analysis.
    • Cost-effective DR and service continuity starts with identifying what is truly mission critical so you can focus resources accordingly. Not all services require fast failover.

    Impact and Result

    • Define appropriate objectives for service downtime and data loss based on business impact.
    • Document an incident response plan that captures all of the steps from event detection to data center recovery.
    • Create a DR roadmap to close gaps between current DR capabilities and recovery objectives.

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) Research – A step-by-step document that helps streamline your DR planning process and build a plan that's concise, usable, and maintainable.

    Any time a major IT outage occurs, it increases executive awareness and internal pressure to create an IT DRP. This blueprint will help you develop an actionable DRP by following our four-phase methodology to define scope, current status, and dependencies; conduct a business impact analysis; identify and address gaps in the recovery workflow; and complete, extend, and maintain your DRP.

    • Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan – Phases 1-4

    2. DRP Case Studies – Examples to help you understand the governance and incident response components of a DRP and to show that your DRP project does not need to be as onerous as imagined.

    These examples include a client who leveraged the DRP blueprint to create practical, concise, and easy-to-maintain DRP governance and incident response plans and a case study based on a hospital providing a wide range of healthcare services.

    • Case Study: Practical, Right-Sized DRP
    • Case Study: Practical, Right-Sized DRP – Healthcare Example

    3. DRP Maturity Scorecard – An assessment tool to evaluate the current state of your DRP.

    Use this tool to measure your current DRP maturity and identify gaps to address. It includes a comprehensive list of requirements for your DRP program, including core and industry requirements.

    • DRP Maturity Scorecard

    4. DRP Project Charter Template – A template to communicate important details on the project purpose, scope, and parameters.

    The project charter template includes details on the project overview (description, background, drivers, and objectives); governance and management (project stakeholders/roles, budget, and dependencies); and risks, assumptions, and constraints (known and potential risks and mitigation strategy).

    • DRP Project Charter Template

    5. DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool – An evaluation tool to estimate the impact of downtime to determine appropriate, acceptable recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) and to review gaps between objectives and actuals.

    This tool enables you to identify critical applications/systems; identify dependencies; define objective scoring criteria to evaluate the impact of application/system downtime; determine the impact of downtime and establish criticality tiers; set recovery objectives (RTO/RPO) based on the impact of downtime; record recovery actuals (RTA/RPA) and identify any gaps between objectives and actuals; and identify dependencies that regularly fail (and have a significant impact when they fail) to prioritize efforts to improve resiliency.

    • DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool
    • Legacy DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool

    6. DRP BIA Scoring Context Example – A tool to record assumptions you made in the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool to explain the results and drive business engagement and feedback.

    Use this tool to specifically record assumptions made about who and what are impacted by system downtime and record assumptions made about impact severity.

    • DRP BIA Scoring Context Example

    7. DRP Recovery Workflow Template – A flowchart template to provide an at-a-glance view of the recovery workflow.

    This simple format is ideal during crisis situations, easier to maintain, and often quicker to create. Use this template to document the Notify - Assess - Declare disaster workflow, document current and planned future state recovery workflows, including gaps and risks, and review an example recovery workflow.

    • DRP Recovery Workflow Template (PDF)
    • DRP Recovery Workflow Template (Visio)

    8. DRP Roadmap Tool – A visual roadmapping tool that will help you plan, communicate, and track progress for your DRP initiatives.

    Improving DR capabilities is a marathon, not a sprint. You likely can't fund and resource all the measures for risk mitigation at once. Instead, use this tool to create a roadmap for actions, tasks, projects, and initiatives to complete in the short, medium, and long term. Prioritize high-benefit, low-cost mitigations.

    • DRP Roadmap Tool

    9. DRP Recap and Results Template – A template to summarize and present key findings from your DR planning exercises and documents.

    Use this template to present your results from the DRP Maturity Scorecard, BCP-DRP Fitness Assessment, DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool, tabletop planning exercises, DRP Recovery Workflow Template, and DRP Roadmap Tool.

    • DRP Recap and Results Template

    10. DRP Workbook – A comprehensive tool that enables you to organize information to support DR planning.

    Leverage this tool to document information regarding DRP resources (list the documents/information sources that support DR planning and where they are located) and DR teams and contacts (list the DR teams, SMEs critical to DR, and key contacts, including business continuity management team leads that would be involved in declaring a disaster and coordinating response at an organizational level).

    • DRP Workbook

    11. Appendix

    The following tools and templates are also included as part of this blueprint to use as needed to supplement the core steps above:

    • DRP Incident Response Management Tool
    • DRP Vendor Evaluation Questionnaire
    • DRP Vendor Evaluation Tool
    • Severity Definitions and Escalation Rules Template
    • BCP-DRP Fitness Assessment
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Define Parameters for Your DRP

    The Purpose

    Identify key applications and dependencies based on business needs.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understand the entire IT “footprint” that needs to be recovered for key applications. 

    Activities

    1.1 Assess current DR maturity.

    1.2 Determine critical business operations.

    1.3 Identify key applications and dependencies.

    Outputs

    Current challenges identified through a DRP Maturity Scorecard.

    Key applications and dependencies documented in the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) Tool.

    2 Determine the Desired Recovery Timeline

    The Purpose

    Quantify application criticality based on business impact.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Appropriate recovery time and recovery point objectives defined (RTOs/RPOs).

    Activities

    2.1 Define an objective scoring scale to indicate different levels of impact.

    2.2 Estimate the impact of downtime.

    2.3 Determine desired RTO/RPO targets for applications based on business impact.

    Outputs

    Business impact analysis scoring criteria defined.

    Application criticality validated.

    RTOs/RPOs defined for applications and dependencies.

    3 Determine the Current Recovery Timeline and DR Gaps

    The Purpose

    Determine your baseline DR capabilities (your current state).

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Gaps between current and desired DR capability are quantified.

    Activities

    3.1 Conduct a tabletop exercise to determine current recovery procedures.

    3.2 Identify gaps between current and desired capabilities.

    3.3 Estimate likelihood and impact of failure of individual dependencies.

    Outputs

    Current achievable recovery timeline defined (i.e. the current state).

    RTO/RPO gaps identified.

    Critical single points of failure identified.

    4 Create a Project Roadmap to Close DR Gaps

    The Purpose

    Identify and prioritize projects to close DR gaps.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    DRP project roadmap defined that will reduce downtime and data loss to acceptable levels.

    Activities

    4.1 Determine what projects are required to close the gap between current and desired DR capability.

    4.2 Prioritize projects based on cost, effort, and impact on RTO/RPO reduction.

    4.3 Validate that the suggested projects will achieve the desired DR capability.

    Outputs

    Potential DR projects identified.

    DRP project roadmap defined.

    Desired-state incident response plan defined, and project roadmap validated.

    5 Establish a Framework for Documenting Your DRP, and Summarize Next Steps

    The Purpose

    Outline how to create concise, usable DRP documentation.

    Summarize workshop results. 

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A realistic and practical approach to documenting your DRP.

    Next steps documented. 

    Activities

    5.1 Outline a strategy for using flowcharts and checklists to create concise, usable documentation.

    5.2 Review Info-Tech’s DRP templates for creating system recovery procedures and a DRP summary document.

    5.3 Summarize the workshop results, including current potential downtime and action items to close gaps.

    Outputs

    Current-state and desired-state incident response plan flowcharts.

    Templates to create more detailed documentation where necessary.

    Executive communication deck that outlines current DR gaps, how to close those gaps, and recommended next steps.

    Further reading

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

    Close the gap between your DR capabilities and service continuity requirements.

    ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

    An effective disaster recovery plan (DRP) is not just an insurance policy.

    "An effective DRP addresses common outages such as hardware and software failures, as well as regional events, to provide day-to-day service continuity. It’s not just insurance you might never cash in. Customers are also demanding evidence of an effective DRP, so organizations without a DRP risk business impact not only from extended outages but also from lost sales. If you are fortunate enough to have executive buy-in, whether it’s due to customer pressure or concern over potential downtime, you still have the challenge of limited time to dedicate to disaster recovery (DR) planning. Organizations need a practical but structured approach that enables IT leaders to create a DRP without it becoming their full-time job."

    Frank Trovato,

    Research Director, Infrastructure

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Is this research for you?

    This Research Is Designed For:

    • Senior IT management responsible for executing DR.
    • Organizations seeking to formalize, optimize, or validate an existing DRP.
    • Business continuity management (BCM) professionals leading DRP development.

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Create a DRP that is aligned with business requirements.
    • Prioritize technology enhancements based on DR requirements and risk-impact analysis.
    • Identify and address process and technology gaps that impact DR capabilities and day-to-day service continuity.

    This Research Will Also Assist:

    • Executives who want to understand the time and resource commitment required for DRP.
    • Members of BCM and crisis management teams who need to understand the key elements of an IT DRP.

    This Research Will Help Them:

    • Scope the time and effort required to develop a DRP.
    • Align business continuity, DR, and crisis management plans.

    Executive summary

    Situation

    • Any time a natural disaster or major IT outage occurs, it increases executive awareness and internal pressure to create a DRP.
    • Industry standards and government regulations are driving external pressure to develop business continuity and IT DR plans.
    • Customers are asking suppliers and partners to provide evidence that they have a workable DRP before agreeing to do business.

    Complication

    • Traditional DRP templates are onerous and result in a lengthy, dense plan that might satisfy auditors, but will not be effective in a crisis.
    • The myth that a DRP is only for major disasters leaves organizations vulnerable to more common incidents.
    • The growing use of outsourced infrastructure services has increased reliance on vendors to meet recovery timeline objectives.

    Resolution

    • Create an effective DRP by following a structured process to discover current capabilities and define business requirements for continuity:
      • Define appropriate objectives for service downtime and data loss based on business impact.
      • Document an incident response plan that captures all of the steps from event detection to data center recovery.
      • Create a DR roadmap to close gaps between current DR capabilities and recovery objectives.

    Info-Tech Insight

    1. At its core, DR is about ensuring service continuity. Create a plan that can be leveraged for both isolated and catastrophic events.
    2. Remember Murphy’s Law. Failure happens. Focus on improving overall resiliency and recovery, rather than basing DR on risk probability analysis.
    3. Cost-effective DR and service continuity starts with identifying what is truly mission critical so you can focus resources accordingly. Not all services require fast failover.

    An effective DRP is critical to reducing the cost of downtime

    If you don’t have an effective DRP when failure occurs, expect to face extended downtime and exponentially rising costs due to confusion and lack of documented processes.

    Image displayed is a graph that shows that delay in recovery causes exponential revenue loss.

    Potential Lost Revenue

    The impact of downtime tends to increase exponentially as systems remain unavailable (graph at left). A current, tested DRP will significantly improve your ability to execute systems recovery, minimizing downtime and business impact. Without a DRP, IT is gambling on its ability to define and implement a recovery strategy during a time of crisis. At the very least, this means extended downtime – potentially weeks or months – and substantial business impact.

    Adapted from: Philip Jan Rothstein, 2007

    Cost of Downtime for the Fortune 1000

    Cost of unplanned apps downtime per year: $1.25B to $2.5B.

    Cost of critical apps failure per hour: $500,000 to $1M.

    Cost of infrastructure failure per hour: $100,000.

    35% reported to have recovered within 12 hours.

    17% of infrastructure failures took more than 24 hours to recover.

    13% of application failures took more than 24 hours to recover.

    Source: Stephen Elliot, 2015

    Info-Tech Insight

    The cost of downtime is rising across the board, and not just for organizations that traditionally depend on IT (e.g. e-commerce). Downtime cost increase since 2010:

    Hospitality: 129% increase

    Transportation: 108% increase

    Media organizations: 104% increase

    An effective DRP also sets clear recovery objectives that align with system criticality to optimize spend

    The image displays a disaster recovery plan example, where different tiers are in place to support recovery in relation to time.

    Take a practical approach that creates a more concise and actionable DRP

    DR planning is not your full-time job, so it can’t be a resource- and time-intensive process.

    The Traditional Approach Info-Tech’s Approach

    Start with extensive risk and probability analysis.

    Challenge: You can’t predict every event that can occur, and this delays work on your actual recovery procedures.

    Focus on how to recover regardless of the incident.

    We know failure will happen. Focus on improving your ability to failover to a DR environment so you are protected regardless of what causes primary site failure.

    Build a plan for major events such as natural disasters.

    Challenge: Major destructive events only account for 12% of incidents while software/hardware issues account for 45%. The vast majority of incidents are isolated local events.

    An effective DRP improves day-to-day service continuity, and is not just for major events.

    Leverage DR planning to address both common (e.g. power/network outage or hardware failure) as well as major events. It must be documentation you can use, not shelfware.

    Create a DRP manual that provides step-by-step instructions that anyone could follow.

    Challenge: The result is lengthy, dense manuals that are difficult to maintain and hard to use in a crisis. The usability of DR documents has a direct impact on DR success.

    Create concise documentation written for technical experts.

    Use flowcharts, checklists, and diagrams. They are more usable in a crisis and easier to maintain. You aren’t going to ask a business user to recover your SQL Server databases, so you can afford to be concise.

    DR must be integrated with day-to-day incident management to ensure service continuity

    When a tornado takes out your data center, it’s an obvious DR scenario and the escalation towards declaring a disaster is straightforward.

    The challenge is to be just as decisive in less-obvious (and more common) DR scenarios such as a critical system hardware/software failure, and knowing when to move from incident management to DR. Don’t get stuck troubleshooting for days when you could have failed over in hours.

    Bridge the gap with clearly-defined escalation rules and criteria for when to treat an incident as a disaster.

    Image displays two graphs. The graph on the left measures the extent that service management processes account for disasters by the success meeting RTO and RPO. The graph on the right is a double bar graph that shows DRP being integrated and not integrated in the following categories: Incident Classifications, Severity Definitions, Incident Models, Escalation Procedures. These are measured based on the success meeting RTO and RPO.

    Source: Info-Tech Research Group; N=92

    Myth busted: The DRP is separate from day-to-day ops and incident management.

    The most common threats to service continuity are hardware and software failures, network outages, and power outages

    The image displayed is a bar graph that shows the common threats to service continuity. There are two areas of interest that have labels. The first is: 45% of service interruptions that went beyond maximum downtime guidelines set by the business were caused by software and hardware issues. The second label is: Only 12% of incidents were caused by major destructive events.

    Source: Info-Tech Research Group; N=87

    Info-Tech Insight

    Does this mean I don’t need to worry about natural disasters? No. It means DR planning needs to focus on overall service continuity, not just major disasters. If you ignore the more common but less dramatic causes of service interruptions, you are diminishing the business value of a DRP.

    Myth busted: DRPs are just for destructive events – fires, floods, and natural disasters.

    DR isn’t about identifying risks; it’s about ensuring service continuity

    The traditional approach to DR starts with an in-depth exercise to identify risks to IT service continuity and the probability that those risks will occur.

    Here’s why starting with a risk register is ineffective:

    • Odds are, you won’t think of every incident that might occur. If you think of twenty risks, it’ll be the twenty-first that gets you. If you try to guard against that twenty-first risk, you can quickly get into cartoonish scenarios and much more costly solutions.
    • The ability to failover to another site mitigates the risk of most (if not all) incidents (fire, flood, hardware failure, tornado, etc.). A risk and probability analysis doesn’t change the need for a plan that includes a failover procedure.

    Where risk is incorporated in this methodology:

    • Use known risks to further refine your strategy (e.g. if you are prone to hurricanes, plan for greater geographic separation between sites; ensure you have backups, in addition to replication, to mitigate the risk of ransomware).
    • Identify risks to your ability to execute DR (e.g. lack of cross-training, backups that are not tested) and take steps to mitigate those risks.

    Myth busted: A risk register is the critical first step to creating an effective DR plan.

    You can’t outsource accountability and you can’t assume your vendor’s DR capabilities meet your needs

    Outsourcing infrastructure services – to a cloud provider, co-location provider, or managed service provider (MSP) – can improve your DR and service continuity capabilities. For example, a large public cloud provider will generally have:

    • Redundant telecoms service providers, network infrastructure, power feeds, and standby power.
    • Round-the-clock infrastructure and security monitoring.
    • Multiple data centers in a given region, and options to replicate data and services across regions.

    Still, failure is inevitable – it’s been demonstrated multiple times1 through high-profile outages. When you surrender direct control of the systems themselves, it’s your responsibility to ensure the vendor can meet your DR requirements, including:

    • A DR site and acceptable recovery times for systems at that site.
    • An acceptable replication/backup schedule.

    Sources: Kyle York, 2016; Shaun Nichols, 2017; Stephen Burke, 2017

    Myth busted: I outsource infrastructure services so I don’t have to worry about DR. That’s my vendor’s responsibility.

    Choose flowcharts over process guides, checklists over procedures, and diagrams over descriptions

    IT DR is not an airplane disaster movie. You aren’t going to ask a business user to execute a system recovery, just like you wouldn’t really want a passenger with no flying experience to land a plane.

    In reality, you write a DR plan for knowledgeable technical staff, which allows you to summarize key details your staff already know. Concise, visual documentation is:

    • Quicker to create.
    • Easier to use.
    • Simpler to maintain.

    "Without question, 300-page DRPs are not effective. I mean, auditors love them because of the detail, but give me a 10-page DRP with contact lists, process flows, diagrams, and recovery checklists that are easy to follow."

    – Bernard Jones, MBCI, CBCP, CORP, Manager Disaster Recovery/BCP, ActiveHealth Management

    A graph is displayed. It shows a line graph where the DR success is higher by using flowcharts, checklists, and diagrams.

    Source: Info-Tech Research Group; N=95

    *DR Success is based on stated ability to meet recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs), and reported confidence in ability to consistently meet targets.

    Myth busted: A DRP must include every detail so anyone can execute recovery.

    A DRP is part of an overall business continuity plan

    A DRP is the set of procedures and supporting documentation that enables an organization to restore its core IT services (i.e. applications and infrastructure) as part of an overall business continuity plan (BCP), as described below. Use the templates, tools, and activities in this blueprint to create your DRP.

    Overall BCP
    IT DRP BCP for Each Business Unit Crisis Management Plan
    A plan to restore IT services (e.g. applications and infrastructure) following a disruption. This includes:
    • Identifying critical applications and dependencies.
    • Defining an appropriate (desired) recovery timeline based on a business impact analysis (BIA).
    • Creating a step-by-step incident response plan.
    A set of plans to resume business processes for each business unit. Info-Tech’s Develop a Business Continuity Plan blueprint provides a methodology for creating business unit BCPs as part of an overall BCP for the organization. A set of processes to manage a wide range of crises, from health and safety incidents to business disruptions to reputational damage. This includes emergency response plans, crisis communication plans, and the steps to invoke BC/DR plans when applicable. Info-Tech’s Implement Crisis Management Best Practices blueprint provides a structured approach to develop a crisis management process.

    Note: For DRP, we focus on business-facing IT services (as opposed to the underlying infrastructure), and then identify required infrastructure as dependencies (e.g. servers, databases, network).

    Take a practical but structured approach to creating a concise and effective DRP

    Image displayed shows the structure of this blueprint. It shows the structure of phases 1-4 and the related tools and templates for each phase.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

    Guided Implementation

    “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

    Workshop

    “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

    Consulting

    “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Info-Tech advisory services deliver measurable value

    Info-Tech members save an average of $22,983 and 22 days by working with an Info-Tech analyst on DRP (based on client response data from Info-Tech Research Group’s Measured Value Survey, following analyst advisory on this blueprint).

    Why do members report value from analyst engagement?

    1. Expert advice on your specific situation to overcome obstacles and speed bumps.
    2. Structured project and guidance to stay on track.
    3. Project deliverables review to ensure the process is applied properly.

    Guided implementation overview

    Your trusted advisor is just a call away.

    Define DRP scope (Call 1)

    Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges. Identify applications/ systems to focus on first.

    Define current status and system dependencies (Calls 2-3)

    Assess current DRP maturity. Identify system dependencies.

    Conduct a BIA (Calls 4-6)

    Create an impact scoring scale and conduct a BIA. Identify RTO and RPO for each system.

    Recovery workflow (Calls 7-8)

    Create a recovery workflow based on tabletop planning. Identify gaps in recovery capabilities.

    Projects and action items (Calls 9-10)

    Identify and prioritize improvements. Summarize results and plan next steps.

    Your guided implementations will pair you with an advisor from our analyst team for the duration of your DRP project.

    Workshop overview

    Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Image displays the workshop overview for this blueprint. It is a workshop that runs for 4 days and covers various activities and produces many deliverables.

    End-user complaints distract from serious IT-based risks to business continuity

    Case Study

    Industry: Manufacturing
    Source: Info-Tech Research Group Client Engagement

    A global manufacturer with annual sales over $1B worked with Info-Tech to improve DR capabilities.

    DRP BIA

    Conversations with the IT team and business units identified the following impact of downtime over 24 hours:

    • Email: Direct Cost: $100k; Goodwill Impact Score: 8.5/16
    • ERP: Direct Cost: $1.35mm; Goodwill Impact Score: 12.5/16

    Tabletop Testing and Recovery Capabilities

    Reviewing the organization’s current systems recovery workflow identified the following capabilities:

    • Email: RTO: minutes, RPO: minutes
    • ERP: RTO: 14 hours, RPO: 24 hours

    Findings

    Because of end-user complaints, IT had invested heavily in email resiliency though email downtime had a relatively minimal impact on the business. After working through the methodology, it was clear that the business needed to provide additional support for critical systems.

    Insights at each step:

    Identify DR Maturity and System Dependencies

    Conduct a BIA

    Outline Incident Response and Recovery Workflow With Tabletop Exercises

    Mitigate Gaps and Risks

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

    Phase 1

    Define DRP Scope, Current Status, and Dependencies

    Step 1.1: Set Scope, Kick-Off the DRP Project, and Create a Charter

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Establish a team for DR planning.
    • Retrieve and review existing, relevant documentation.
    • Create a project charter.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • DRP Team (Key IT SMEs)
    • IT Managers

    Results and Insights

    • Set scope for the first iteration of the DRP methodology.
    • Don’t try to complete your DR and BCPs all at once.
    • Don’t bite off too much at once.

    Kick-off your DRP project

    You’re ready to start your DR project.

    This could be an annual review – but more likely, this is the first time you’ve reviewed the DR plan in years.* Maybe a failed audit might have provided a mandate for DR planning, or a real disaster might have highlighted gaps in DR capabilities. First, set appropriate expectations for what the project is and isn’t, in terms of scope, outputs, and resource commitments. Very few organizations can afford to hire a full-time DR planner, so it’s likely this won’t be your full-time job. Set objectives and timelines accordingly.

    Gather a team

    • Often, DR efforts are led by the infrastructure and operations leader. This person can act as the DRP coordinator or may delegate this role.
    • Key infrastructure subject-matter experts (SMEs) are usually part of the team and involved through the project.

    Find and review existing documentation

    • An existing DRP may have information you can re-purpose rather than re-create.
    • High-level architecture diagrams and network diagrams can help set scope (and will become part of your DR kit).
    • Current business-centric continuity of operations plans (COOPs) or BCPs are important to understand.

    Set specific, realistic objectives

    • Create a project charter (see next slide) to record objectives, timelines, and assumptions.
    *Only 20% of respondents to an Info-Tech Research Group survey (N=165) had a complete DRP; only 38% of respondents with a complete or mostly complete DRP felt it would be effective in a crisis.

    List DRP drivers and challenges

    1(a) Drivers and roadblocks

    Estimated Time: 30 minutes

    Identify the drivers and challenges to completing a functional DRP plan with the core DR team.

    DRP Drivers

    • Past outages (be specific):
      • Hardware and software failures
      • External network and power outages
      • Building damage
      • Natural disaster(s)
    • Audit findings
    • Events in the news
    • Other?

    DRP Challenges

    • Lack of time
    • Insufficient DR budget
    • Lack of executive support
    • No internal DRP expertise
    • Challenges making the case for DRP
    • Other?

    Write down insights from the meeting on flip-chart paper or a whiteboard and use the findings to inform your DRP project (e.g. challenges to address).

    Clarify expectations with a project charter

    1(b) DRP Project Charter Template

    DRP Project Charter Template components:

    Define project parameters, roles, and objectives, and clarify expectations with the executive team. Specific subsections are listed below and described in more detail in the remainder of this phase.

    • Project Overview: Includes objectives, deliverables, and scope. Leverage relevant notes from the “Project Drivers” brainstorming exercise (e.g. past outages and near misses which help make the case).
    • Governance and Management: Includes roles, responsibilities, and resource requirements.
    • Project Risks, Assumptions, and Constraints: Includes risks and mitigation strategies, as well as any assumptions and constraints.
    • Project Sign-Off: Includes IT and executive sign-off (if required).

    Note: Identify the initial team roles and responsibilities first so they can assist in defining the project charter.

    The image is a screenshot of the first page of the DRP Project Charter Template.

    Step 1.2: Assess Current State DRP Maturity

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Complete Info-Tech’s DRP Maturity Scorecard.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • IT SMEs

    Results and Insights

    • Identify the current state of the organization’s DRP and continuity management. Set a baseline for improvement.
    • Discover where improvement is most needed to create an effective plan.

    Only 38% of IT departments believe their DRPs would be effective in a real crisis

    Even organizations with documented DRPs struggle to make them actionable.

    • Even when a DRP does become a priority (e.g. due to regulatory or customer drivers), the challenge is knowing where to start and having a methodical step-by-step process for doing the work. With no guide to plan and resource the project, it becomes work that you complete piecemeal when you aren’t working on other projects, or at night after the kids go to bed.
    • Far too many organizations create a document to satisfy auditors rather than creating a usable plan. People in this group often just want a fill-in-the-blanks template. What they will typically find is a template for the traditional 300-page manual that goes in a binder that sits on a shelf, is difficult to maintain, and is not effective in a crisis.
    Two bar graphs are displayed. The graph on the left shows that only 20% of survey respondents indicate they have a complete DRP. The graph on the right shows that 38% of those who have a mostly completed or full DRP actually feel it would be effective in a crisis.

    Use the DRP Maturity Scorecard to assess the current state of your DRP and identify areas to improve

    1(c) DRP Maturity Scorecard

    Info-Tech’s DRP Maturity Scorecard evaluates completion status and process maturity for a comprehensive yet practical assessment across three aspects of an effective DRP program – Defining Requirements, Implementation, and Maintenance.

    Image has three boxes. One is labelled Completion status, another below it is labelled Process Maturity. There is an addition sign in between them. With an arrow leading from both boxes is another box that is labelled DRP Maturity Assessment

    Completion Status: Reflects the progress made with each component of your DRP Program.

    Process Maturity: Reflects the consistency and quality of the steps executed to achieve your completion status.

    DRP Maturity Assessment: Each component (e.g. BIA) of your DRP Program is evaluated based on completion status and process maturity to provide an accurate holistic assessment. For example, if your BIA completion status is 4 out of 5, but process maturity is a 2, then requirements were not derived from a consistent defined process. The risk is inconsistent application prioritization and misalignment with actual business requirements.

    Step 1.3: Identify Applications, Systems, and Dependencies

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify systems, applications, and services, and the business units that use them.
    • Document applications, systems, and their dependencies in the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • DRP Team

    Results and Insights

    • Identify core services and the applications that depend on them.
    • Add applications and dependencies to the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool.

    Select 5-10 services to get started on the DRP methodology

    1(d) High-level prioritization

    Estimated Time: 30 minutes

    Working through the planning process the first time can be challenging. If losing momentum is a concern, limit the BIA to a few critical systems to start.

    Run this exercise if you need a structured exercise to decide where to focus first and identify the business users you should ask for input on the impact of system downtime.

    1. On a whiteboard or flip-chart paper, list business units in a column on the left. List key applications/systems in a row at the top. Draw a grid.
    2. At a high level, review how applications are used by each unit. Take notes to keep track of any assumptions you make.
      • Add a ✓ if members of the unit use the application or system.
      • Add an ✱ if members of the unit are heavy users of the application or system and/or use it for time sensitive tasks.
      • Leave the box blank if the app isn’t used by this unit.
    3. Use the chart to prioritize systems to include in the BIA (e.g. systems marked with an *) but also include a few less-critical systems to illustrate DRP requirements for a range of systems.

    Image is an example of what one could complete from step 1(d). There is a table shown. In the column on the left lists sales, marketing, R&D, and Finance. In the top row, there is listed: dialer, ERP. CRM, Internet, analytics, intranet

    Application Notes
    CRM
    • Supports time-critical sales and billing processes.
    Dialer
    • Used for driving the sales-call queue, integration with CRM.

    Draw a high-level sketch of your environment

    1(e) Sketch your environment

    Estimated Time: 1-2 hours

    A high-level topology or architectural diagram is an effective way to identify dependencies, application ownership, outsourced services, hardware redundancies, and more.

    Note:

    • Network diagrams or high-level architecture diagrams help to identify dependencies and redundancies. Even a rough sketch is a useful reference tool for participants, and will be valuable documentation in the final DR plan.
    • Keep the drawings tidy. Visualize the final diagram before you start to draw on the whiteboard to help with spacing and placement.
    • Collaborate with relevant SMEs to identify dependencies. Keep the drawing high-level.
    • Illustrate connections between applications or components with lines. Use color coding to illustrate where applications are hosted (e.g. in-house, at a co-lo, in a cloud or MSP environment).
    Example of a high-level topology or architectural diagram

    Document systems and dependencies

    Collaborate with system SMEs to identify dependencies for each application or system. Document the dependencies in the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool (see image below)

    • When listing applications, focus on business-facing systems or services that business users will recognize and use terminology they’ll understand.
    • Group infrastructure components that support all other services as a single core infrastructure service to simplify dependency mapping (e.g. core router, virtual hosts, ID management, and DNS).
    • In general, each data center will have its own core infrastructure components. List each data center separately – especially if different services are hosted at each data center.
    • Be specific when documenting dependencies. Use existing asset tracking tables, discovery tools, asset management records, or configuration management tools to identify specific server names.
    • Core infrastructure dependencies, such as the network infrastructure, power supply, and centralized storage, will be a common set of dependencies for most applications, so group these into a separate category called “Core Infrastructure” to minimize repetition in your DR planning.
    • Document production components in the BIA tool. Capture in-production, redundant components performing the same work on a single dependency line. List standby systems in the notes.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    In general, visual documentation is easier to use in a crisis and easier to maintain over time. Use Info-Tech’s research to help build your own visual SOPs.

    Document systems and dependencies

    1(f) DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool – Record systems and dependencies

    A screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool.

    Stories from the field: Info-Tech clients find value in Phase 1 in the following ways

    An organization uncovers a key dependency that needed to be treated as a Tier 1 system

    Reviewing the entire ecosystem for applications identified key dependencies that were previously considered non-critical. For example, a system used to facilitate secure data transfers was identified as a key dependency for payroll and other critical business processes, and elevated to Tier 1.

    A picture’s worth a thousand words (and 1600 servers)

    Drawing a simple architectural diagram was an invaluable tool to identify key dependencies and critical systems, and to understand how systems and dependencies were interconnected. The drawing was an aha moment for IT and business stakeholders trying to make sense of their 1600-server environment.

    Make the case for DRP

    A member of the S&P 500 used Info-Tech’s DRP Maturity Scorecard to provide a reliable objective assessment and make the case for improvements to the board of directors.

    State government agency initiates a DRP project to complement an existing COOP

    Info-Tech's DRP Project Charter enabled the CIO to clarify their DRP project scope and where it fit into their overall COOP. The project charter example provided much of the standard copy – objectives, scope, project roles, methodology, etc. – required to outline the project.

    Phase 1: Insights and accomplishments

    Image has two screenshots from Info-Tech's Phase 1 tools and templates.

    Created a charter and identified current maturity

    Image has two screenshots. One is from Info-Tech's DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool and the other is from the example in step 1(d).

    Identified systems and dependencies for the BIA

    Summary of Accomplishments:

    • Created a DRP project charter.
    • Completed the DRP Maturity Scorecard and identified current DRP maturity.
    • Prioritized applications/systems for a first pass through DR planning.
    • Identified dependencies for each application and system.

    Up Next: Conduct a BIA to establish recovery requirements

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

    Phase 2

    Conduct a BIA to Determine Acceptable RTOs and RPOs

    Step 2.1: Define an Objective Impact Scoring Scale

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Create a scoring scale to measure the business impact of application and system downtime.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • DRP Team

    Results and Insights

    • Use a scoring scale tied to multiple categories of real business impact to develop a more objective assessment of application and system criticality.

    Align capabilities to appropriate and acceptable RTOs and RPOs with a BIA

    Too many organizations avoid a BIA because they perceive it as onerous or unneeded. A well-managed BIA is straightforward and the benefits are tangible.

    A BIA enables you to identify appropriate spend levels, maintain executive support, and prioritize DR planning for a more successful outcome. Info-Tech has found that a BIA has a measurable impact on the organization’s ability to set appropriate objectives and investment goals.

    Two bar graphs are depicted. The one on the left shows 93% BIA impact on appropriate RTOs. The graph on the right shows that with BIA, there is 86% on BIA impact on appropriate spending.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Business input is important, but don’t let a lack of it delay a draft BIA. Complete a draft based on your knowledge of the business. Create a draft within IT, and use it to get input from business leaders. It’s easier to edit estimates than to start from scratch; even weak estimates are far better than a blank sheet.

    Pick impact categories that are relevant to your business to develop a holistic view of business impact

    Direct Cost Impact Categories

    • Revenue: permanently lost revenue.
      • Example: one third of daily sales are lost due to a website failure.
    • Productivity: lost productivity.
      • Example: finance staff can’t work without the accounting system.
    • Operating costs: additional operating costs.
      • Example: temporary staff are needed to re-key data.
    • Financial penalties: fines/penalties that could be incurred due to downtime.
      • Example: failure to meet contractual service-level agreements (SLAs) for uptime results in financial penalties.

    Goodwill, Compliance, and Health and Safety Categories

    • Stakeholder goodwill: lost customer, staff, or business partner goodwill due to harm, frustration, etc.
      • Example: customers can’t access needed services because the website is down.
      • Example: a payroll system outage delays paychecks for all staff.
      • Example: suppliers are paid late because the purchasing system is down.
    • Compliance, health, and safety:
      • Example: financial system downtime results in a missed tax filing.
      • Example: network downtime disconnects security cameras.

    Info-Tech Insight

    You don’t have to include every impact category in your BIA. Include categories that could affect your business. Defer or exclude other categories. For example, the bulk of revenue for governmental organizations comes from taxes, which won’t be permanently lost if IT systems fail.

    Modify scoring criteria to help you measure the impact of downtime

    The scoring scales define different types of business impact (e.g. costs, lost goodwill) using a common four-point scale and 24-hour timeframe to simplify BIA exercises and documentation.

    Use the suggestions below as a guide as you modify scoring criteria in the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool:

    • All the direct cost categories (revenue, productivity, operating costs, financial penalties) require the user to define only a maximum value; the tool will populate the rest of the criteria for that category. Use the suggestions below to find the maximum scores for each of the direct cost categories:
      • Revenue: Divide total revenue for the previous year by 365 to estimate daily revenue. Assume this is the most revenue you could lose in a day, and use this number as the top score.
      • Loss of Productivity: Divide fully-loaded labor costs for the organization by 365 to estimate daily productivity costs. Use this as a proxy measure for the work lost if all business stopped for one day.
      • Increased Operating Costs: Isolate this to known additional costs that result from a disruption (e.g. costs for overtime or temporary staff). Estimate the maximum cost for the organization.
      • Financial Penalties: Isolate this to known financial penalties (e.g. due to failure to meet SLAs or compliance requirements). Use the estimated maximum penalty as the highest value on the scale.
    • Impact on Goodwill: Use an estimate of the percentage of all stakeholders impacted to assess goodwill impact.
    • Impact on Compliance; Impact on Health and Safety: The BIA tool contains default scoring criteria that account for the severity of the impact, the likelihood of occurrence, and in the case of compliance, whether a grace period is available. Use this scale as-is, or adapt this scale to suit your needs.

    Modify the default scoring scale in the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool to reflect your organization

    2(a) DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool – Scoring criteria


    A screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool's scoring criteria

    Step 2.2: Estimate the Impact of Downtime

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify the business impact of service/system/application downtime.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • DRP Team
    • IT Service SMEs
    • Business-Side Technology Owners (optional)

    Results and Insights

    • Apply the scoring scale to develop a more objective assessment of the business impact of downtime.
    • Create criticality tiers based on the business impact of downtime.

    Estimate the impact of downtime for each system and application

    2(b) Estimate the impact of systems downtime

    Estimated Time: 3 hours

    On tab 3 of the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool indicate the costs of downtime, as described below:

    1. Have a copy of the “Scoring Criteria” tab available to use as a reference (e.g. printed or on a second display). In tab 3 use the drop-down menu to assign a score of 0 to 4 based on levels of impact defined in the “Scoring Criteria” tab.
    2. Work horizontally across all categories for a single system or application. This will familiarize you with your scoring scales for all impact categories, and allow you to modify the scoring scales if needed before you proceed much further.
    3. For example, if a core call center phone system was down:

    • Loss of Revenue would be the portion of sales revenue generated through the call center. This might score a 1 or 2 depending on the percent of sales that are processed by the call center.
    • The Impact on Customers might be a 2 or 3 depending on the extent that some customers might be using the call center to receive support or purchase new products or services.
    • The Legal/Regulatory Compliance and Health or Safety Risk might be a 0, as the call center has no impact in either area.
  • Next, work vertically across all applications or systems within a single impact category. This will allow you to compare scores within the category as you create them to ensure internal consistency.
  • Add impact scores to the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool

    2(c) DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool

    Record business reasons and assumptions that drive BIA scores

    2(d) DRP BIA Scoring Context Example

    Info-Tech suggests that IT leadership and staff identify the impact of downtime first to create a version that you can then validate with relevant business owners. As you work through the BIA as a team, have a notetaker record assumptions you make to help you explain the results and drive business engagement and feedback.

    Some common assumptions:

    • You can’t schedule a disaster, so Info-Tech suggests you assume the worst possible timing for downtime. Base the impact of downtime on the worst day for a disaster (e.g. year-end close, payroll run).
    • Record assumptions made about who and what are impacted by system downtime.
    • Record assumptions made about impact severity.
    • If you deviate from the scoring scale, or if a particular impact doesn’t fit well into the defined scoring scale, document the exception.

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP BIA Scoring Context Example

    Use Info-Tech’s DRP BIA Scoring Context Example as a note-taking template.

    Info-Tech Insight

    You can’t build a perfect scoring scale. It’s fine to make reasonable assumptions based on your judgment and knowledge of the business. Just write down your assumptions. If you don’t write them down, you’ll forget how you arrived at that conclusion.

    Assign a criticality rating based on total direct and indirect costs of downtime

    2(e) DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool – Assign criticality tiers

    Once you’ve finished estimating the impact of downtime, use the following rough guideline to create an initial sort of applications into Tiers 1, 2, and 3.

    1. In general, sort applications based on the Total Impact on Goodwill, Compliance, and Safety first.
      • An effective tactic for a quick sort: assign a Tier 1 rating where scores are 50% or more of the highest total score, Tier 2 where scores are between 25% and 50%, and Tier 3 where scores are below 25%. Some organizations will also include a Tier 0 for the highest-scoring systems.
      • Then review and validate these scores and assignments.
    2. Next, consider the Total Cost of Downtime.
      • The Total Cost is calculated by the tool based on the Scoring Criteria in tab 2 and the impact scores on tab 3.
      • Decide if the total cost impact justifies increasing the criticality rating (e.g. from Tier 2 to Tier 1 due to high cost impact).
    3. Review the assigned impact scores and tiers to check that they’re in alignment. If you need to make an exception, document why. Keep exceptions to a minimum.

    Example: Highest total score is 12

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool

    Step 2.3: Determine Acceptable RTO/RPO Targets

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Review the “Debate Space” approach to setting RTO and RPO (recovery targets).
    • Set preliminary RTOs and RPOs by criticality tier.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • DRP Team

    Results and Insights

    • Align recovery targets with the business impact of downtime and data loss.

    Use the “Debate Space” approach to align RTOs and RPOs with the impact of downtime

    The business must validate acceptable and appropriate RTOs and RPOs, but IT can use the guidelines below to set an initial estimate.

    Right-size recovery.

    A shorter RTO typically requires higher investment. If a short period of downtime has minimal impact, setting a low RTO may not be justifiable. As downtime continues, impact begins to increase exponentially to a point where downtime is intolerable – an acceptable RTO must be shorter than this. Apply the same thinking to RPOs – how much data loss is unnoticeable? How much is intolerable?

    A diagram to show the debate space in relation to RTOs and RPOs

    The “Debate Space” is between minimal impact and maximum tolerance for downtime.

    Estimate appropriate, acceptable RTOs and RPOs for each tier

    2(f) Set recovery targets

    Estimated Time: 30 minutes

    RTO and RPO tiers simplify management by setting similar recovery goals for systems and applications with similar criticality.

    Use the “Debate Space” approach to set appropriate and acceptable targets.

    1. For RTO, establish a recovery time range that is appropriate based on impact.
      • Overall, the RTO tiers might be 0-4 hours for gold, 4-24 hours for silver, and 24-48 hours for bronze.
    2. RPOs reflect target data protection measures.
      • Identify the lowest RPO within a tier and make that the standard.
      • For example, RPO for gold data might be five minutes, silver might be four hours, and bronze might be one day.
      • Use this as a guideline. RPO doesn’t always align perfectly with RTO tiers.
    3. Review RTOs and RPOs and make sure they accurately reflect criticality.

    Info-Tech Insight

    In general, the more critical the system, the shorter the RPO. But that’s not always the case. For example, a service bus might be Tier 1, but if it doesn’t store any data, RPO might be longer than other Tier 1 systems. Some systems may have a different RPO than most other systems in that tier. As long as the targets are acceptable to the business and appropriate given the impact, that’s okay.

    Add recovery targets to the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool

    2(g) DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool – Document recovery objectives

    A screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool – Document recovery objectives

    Stories from the field: Info-Tech clients find value in Phase 2 in the following ways

    Most organizations discover something new about key applications, or the way stakeholders use them, when they work through the BIA and review the results with stakeholders. For example:

    Why complete a BIA? There could be a million reasons

    • A global manufacturer completed the DRP BIA exercise. When email went down, Service Desk phones lit up until it was resolved. That grief led to a high availability implementation for email. However, the BIA illustrated that ERP downtime was far more impactful.
    • ERP downtime would stop production lines, delay customer orders, and ultimately cost the business a million dollars a day.
    • The BIA results clearly showed that the ERP needed to be prioritized higher, and required business support for investment.

    Move from airing grievances to making informed decisions

    The DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool helped structure stakeholder consultations on DR requirements for a large university IT department. Past consultations had become an airing of grievances. Using objective impact scores helped stakeholders stay focused and make informed decisions around appropriate RTOs and RPOs.

    Phase 2: Insights and accomplishments

    Screenshots of the tools and templates from this phase.

    Estimated the business impact of downtime

    Screenshot of a tools from this phase

    Set recovery targets

    Summary of Accomplishments

    • Created a scoring scale tied to different categories of business impact.
    • Applied the scoring scale to estimate the business impact of system downtime.
    • Identified appropriate, acceptable RTOs and RPOs.

    Up Next:Conduct a tabletop planning exercise to establish current recovery capabilities

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

    Phase 3

    Identify and Address Gaps in the Recovery Workflow

    Step 3.1: Determine Current Recovery Workflow

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Run a tabletop exercise.
    • Outline the steps for the initial response (notification, assessment, disaster declaration) and systems recovery (i.e. document your recovery workflow).
    • Identify any gaps and risks in your initial response and systems recovery.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • IT Infrastructure SMEs (for systems in scope)
    • Application SMEs (for systems in scope)

    Results and Insights

    • Use a repeatable practical exercise to outline and document the steps you would use to recover systems in the event of a disaster, as well as identify gaps and risks to address.
    • This is also a knowledge-sharing opportunity for your team, and a practical means to get their insights, suggestions, and recovery knowledge down on paper.

    Tabletop planning: an effective way to test and document your recovery workflow

    In a tabletop planning exercise, the DRP team walks through a disaster scenario to map out what should happen at each stage, and effectively defines a high-level incident response plan (i.e. recovery workflow).

    Tabletop planning had the greatest impact on meeting recovery objectives (RTOs/RPOs) among survey respondents.

    A bar graph is displayed that shows that tabletop planning has the greatest impact on meeting recovery objectives (RTOs/RPOs) among survey respondents.

    *Note: Relative importance indicates the contribution an individual testing methodology, conducted at least annually, had on predicting success meeting recovery objectives, when controlling for all other types of tests in a regression model. The relative-importance values have been standardized to sum to 100%.

    Success was based on the following items:

    • RTOs are consistently met.
    • IT has confidence in the ongoing ability to meet RTOs.
    • RPOs are consistently met.
    • IT has confidence in the ongoing ability to meet RPOs.

    Why is tabletop planning so effective?

    • It enables you to play out a wider range of scenarios than technology-based testing (e.g. full-scale, parallel) due to cost and complexity factors.
    • It is non-intrusive, so it can be executed more frequently than other testing methodologies.
    • It easily translates into the backbone of your recovery documentation, as it allows you to review all aspects of your recovery plan.

    Focus first on IT DR

    Your DRP is IT contingency planning. It is not crisis management or BCP.

    The goal is to define a plan to restore applications and systems following a disruption. For your first tabletop exercise, Info-Tech recommends you use a non-life-threatening scenario that requires at least a temporary relocation of your data center (i.e. failing over to a DR site/environment). Assume a gas leak or burst water pipe renders the data center inaccessible. Power is shut off and IT must failover systems to another location. Once you create the master procedure, review the plan to ensure it addresses other scenarios.

    Info-Tech Insight

    When systems fail, you are faced with two high-level options: failover or recover in place. If you document the plan to failover systems to another location, you’ll have documented the core of your DR procedures. This differs from traditional scenario planning where you define separate plans for different what-if scenarios. The goal is one plan that can be adapted to different scenarios, which reduces the effort to build and maintain your DRP.

    Conduct a tabletop planning exercise to outline DR procedures in your current environment

    3(a) Tabletop planning

    Estimated Time: 2-3 hours

    For each high-level recovery step, do the following:

    1. On white cue cards:
      • Record the step.
      • Indicate the task owner (if required for clarity).
      • Note time required to complete the step. After the exercise, use this to build a running recovery time where 00:00 is when the incident occurred.
    2. On yellow cue cards, document gaps in people, process, and technology requirements to complete the step.
    3. On red cue cards, indicate risks (e.g. no backup person for a key staff member).
    An example is shown on what can be done during step 3(a). Three cue cards are showing in white, yellow, and red.

    Do:

    • Review the complete workflow from notification all the way to user acceptance testing.
    • Keep focused; stay on task and on time.
    • Revisit each step and record gaps and risks (and known solutions, but don’t dwell on this).
    • Revise and improve the plan with task owners.

    Don't:

    • Get weighed down by tools.
    • Document the details right away – stick to the high-level plan for the first exercise.
    • Try to find solutions to every gap/risk as you go. Save in-depth research/discussion for later.

    Flowchart the current-state incident response plan (i.e. document the recovery workflow)

    3(b) DRP Recovery Workflow Template and Case Study: Practical, Right-Sized DRP

    Why use flowcharts?

    • Flowcharts provide an at-a-glance view, ideal for disaster scenarios where pressure is high and quick upward communication is necessary.
    • For experienced staff, a high-level reminder of key steps is sufficient.

    Use the completed tabletop planning exercise results to build this workflow.

    "We use flowcharts for our declaration procedures. Flowcharts are more effective when you have to explain status and next steps to upper management." – Assistant Director, IT Operations, Healthcare Industry

    Source: Info-Tech Research Group Interview

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Recovery Workflow Template

    For a formatted template you can use to capture your plan, see Info-Tech’s DRP Recovery Workflow Template.

    For a completed example of tabletop planning results, review Info-Tech’s Case Study: Practical, Right-Sized DRP.

    Identify RPA

    What’s my RPA? Consider the following case:

    • Once a week, a full backup is taken of the complete ERP system and is transferred over the WAN to a secondary site 250 miles away, where it is stored on disk.
    • Overnight, an incremental backup is taken of the day’s changes, and is transferred to the same secondary site, and also stored on disk.
    • During office hours, the SAN takes a snapshot of changes which are kept on local storage (information on the accounting system usually only changes during office hours).
    • So what’s the RPA? One hour (snapshots), one day (incrementals), or one week (full backups)?

    When identifying RPA, remember the following:

    You are planning for a disaster scenario, where on-site systems may be inaccessible and any copies of data taken during the disaster may fail, be corrupt, or never make it out of the data center (e.g. if the network fails before the backup file ships). In the scenario above, it seems likely that off-site incremental backups could be restored, leading to a 24-hour RPA. However, if there were serious concerns about the reliability of the daily incrementals, the RPA could arguably be based on the weekly full backups.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    The RPA is a commitment to the maximum data you would lose in a DR scenario with current capabilities (people, process, and technology). Pick a number you can likely achieve. List any situations where you couldn’t meet this RPA, and identify those for a risk tolerance discussion. In the example above, complete loss of the primary SAN would also mean losing the snapshots, so the last good copy of the data could be up to 24-hours old.

    Add recovery actuals (RTA/RPA) to your copy of the BIA

    3(c) DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool– Recovery actuals

    On the “Impact Analysis” tab in the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool, enter the estimated maximum downtime and data loss in the RTA and RPA columns.

    1. Estimate the RTA based on the required time for complete recovery. Review your recovery workflow to identify this timeline. For example, if the notification, assessment, and declaration process takes two hours, and systems recovery requires most of a day, the estimated RTA could be 24 hours.
    2. Estimate the RPA based on the longest interval between copies of the data being shipped offsite. For example, if data on a particular system is backed up offsite once per day, and the onsite system was destroyed just before that backup began, the entire day’s data could be lost and estimated RPA could be 24 hours. Note: Enter 9999 to indicate that data is unrecoverable.

    A screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool – Recovery actuals

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    It’s okay to round numbers to the nearest shift, day, or week for simplicity (e.g. 24 hours rather than 22.5 hours, or 8 hours rather than 7.25 hours).

    Test the recovery workflow against additional scenarios

    3(d) Workflow review

    Estimated Time: 1 hour

    Review your recovery workflow with a different scenario in mind.

    • Work from and update the soft copy of your recovery workflow.
    • Would any steps be different if the scenario changes? If yes, capture the different flow with a decision diamond. Identify any new gaps or risks you encounter with red and yellow cards. Use as few decision diamonds as possible.

    Screenshot of testing the workflow against the additional scenarios

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    As you start to consider scenarios where injuries or loss of life are a possibility, remember that health and safety risks are the top priority in a crisis. If there’s a fire in the data center, evacuating the building is the first priority, even if that means foregoing a graceful shut down. For more details on emergency response and crisis management, see Implement Crisis Management Best Practices.

    Consider additional IT disaster scenarios

    3(e) Thought experiment – Review additional scenarios

    Walk through your recovery workflow in the context of additional, different scenarios to ensure there are no gaps. Collaborate with your DR team to identify changes that might be required, and incorporate these changes in the plan.

    Scenario Type Considerations
    Isolated hardware/software failure
    • Failover to the DR site may not be necessary (or only for affected systems).
    Power outage or network outage
    • Do you have standby power? Do you have network redundancy?
    Local hazard (e.g. chemical leak, police incident)
    • Systems might be accessible remotely, but hands-on maintenance will be required eventually.
    • An alternate site is required for service continuity.
    Equipment/building damage (e.g. fire, roof collapse)
    • Staff injuries or loss of life are a possibility.
    • Equipment may need repair or replacement (vendor involvement).
    • An alternate site is required for service continuity.
    Regional natural disasters
    • Staff injuries or loss of life are a possibility.
    • Utilities may be affected (power, running water, etc.).
    • Expect staff to take care of their families first before work.
    • A geographically distant alternate site may be required for service continuity.

    Step 3.2: Identify and Prioritize Projects to Close Gaps

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Analyze the gaps that were identified from the maturity scorecard, tabletop planning exercise, and the RTO/RPO gaps analysis.
    • Brainstorm solutions to close gaps and mitigate risks.
    • Determine a course of action to close these gaps. Prioritize each project. Create a project implementation timeline.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • IT Infrastructure SMEs

    Results and Insights

    • Prioritized list of projects and action items that can improve DR capabilities.
    • Often low-cost, low-effort quick wins are identified to mitigate at least some gaps/risks. Higher-cost, higher-effort projects can be part of a longer-term IT strategy. Improving service continuity is an ongoing commitment.

    Brainstorm solutions to address gaps and risk

    3(f) Solutioning

    Estimated Time: 1.5 hours

    1. Review each of the risk and gap cards from the tabletop exercise.
    2. As a group, brainstorm ideas to address gaps, mitigate risks, and improve resiliency. Write the list of ideas on a whiteboard or flip-chart paper. The solutions can range from quick-wins and action items to major capital investments.
    3. Try to avoid debates about feasibility at this point – that should happen later. The goal is to get all ideas on the board.

    An example of how to complete Activity 3(f). Three cue cards showing various steps are attached by arrows to steps on a whiteboard.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    It’s about finding ways to solve the problem, not about solving the problem. When you’re brainstorming solutions to problems, don’t stop with the first idea, even if the solution seems obvious. The first idea isn’t always the best or only solution; other ideas can expand on and improve that first idea.

    Select an optimal DR deployment model from a world of choice

    There are many options for a DR deployment. What makes sense for you?

    • Sifting through the options for a DR site can be overwhelming. Simplify by eliminating deployment models that aren’t a good fit for your requirements or organization using Info-Tech’s research.
    • Someone will ask you about DR in the cloud. Cut to the chase and evaluate cloud for fit with your organization’s current capabilities and requirements. Read about the 10 Secrets for Successful DR in the Cloud.
    • Selecting and deploying a DR site is an exercise in risk mitigation. IT’s role is to advise the business on options to address the risk of not having a DR site, including cost and effort estimates. The business must then decide how to manage risk. Build total cost of ownership (TCO) estimates and evaluate possible challenges and risks for each option.

    Is it practical to invest in greater geo-redundancy that meets RTOs and RPOs during a widespread event?

    Info-Tech suggests you consider events that impact both sites, and your risk tolerance for that impact. Outline the impact of downtime at a high level if both the primary and secondary site were affected. Research how often events severe enough to have impacted both your primary and secondary sites have occurred in the past. What’s the business tolerance for this type of event?

    A common strategy: have a primary and DR site that are close enough to support low RPO/RTO, but far enough away to mitigate the impact of known regional events. Back up data to a remote third location as protection against a catastrophic event.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Approach site selection as a project. Leverage Select an Optimal Disaster Recovery Deployment Model to structure your own site-selection project.

    Set up the DRP Roadmap Tool

    3(g) DRP Roadmap Tool – Set up tool

    Use the DRP Roadmap Tool to create a high-level roadmap to plan and communicate DR action items and initiatives. Determine the data you’ll use to define roadmap items.

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Roadmap Tool

    Plan next steps by estimating timeline, effort, priority, and more

    3(h) DRP Roadmap Tool – Describe roadmap items

    A screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Roadmap Tool to show how to describe roadmap items

    Review and communicate the DRP Roadmap Tool

    3(i) DRP Roadmap Tool – View roadmap chart

    A screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Roadmap Tool's Roadmap tab

    Step 3.3: Review the Future State Recovery Process

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Update the recovery workflow to outline your future recovery procedure.
    • Summarize findings from DR exercises and present the results to the project sponsor and other interested executives.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • IT SMEs (Future State Recovery Flow)
    • DR Project Sponsor

    Results and Insights

    • Summarize results from DR planning exercises to make the case for needed DR investment.

    Outline your future state recovery flow

    3(j) Update the recovery workflow to outline response and recovery in the future

    Estimated Time: 30 minutes

    Outline your expected future state recovery flow to demonstrate improvements once projects and action items have been completed.

    1. Create a copy of your DRP recovery workflow in a new tab in Visio.
    2. Delete gap and risk cards that are addressed by proposed projects. Consolidate or eliminate steps that would be simplified or streamlined in the future if projects are implemented.
    3. Create a short-, medium-, and long-term review of changes to illustrate improvements over time to the project roadmap.
    4. Update this workflow as you implement and improve DR capabilities.

    Screenshot of the recovery workflow

    Validate recovery targets and communicate actual recovery capabilities

    3(k) Validate findings, present recommendations, secure budget

    Estimated Time: time required will vary

    1. Interview managers or process owners to validate RTO, RPO, and business impact scores.Use your assessment of “heavy users” of particular applications (picture at right) to remind you which business users you should include in the interview process.
    2. Present an overview of your findings to the management team.Use Info-Tech’s DRP Recap and Results Template to summarize your findings.
    3. Take projects into the budget process.With the management team aware of the rationale for investment in DRP, build the business case and secure budget where needed.

    Present DRP findings and make the case for needed investment

    3(I) DRP Recap and Results Template

    Create a communication deck to recap key findings for stakeholders.

    • Write a clear problem statement. Identify why you did this project (what problem you’re solving).
    • Clearly state key findings, insights, and recommendations.
    • Leverage the completed tools and templates to populate the deck. Callouts throughout the template presentation will direct you to take and populate screenshots throughout the document.
    • Use the presentation to communicate key findings to, and gather feedback from, business unit managers, executives, and IT staff.
    Screenshots of Info-Tech's DRP Recap and Results Template

    Stories from the field: Info-Tech clients find value in Phase 3 in the following ways

    Tabletop planning is an effective way to discover gaps in recovery capabilities. Identify issues in the tabletop exercise so you can manage them before disaster strikes. For example:

    Back up a second…

    A client started to back up application data offsite. To minimize data transfer and storage costs, the systems themselves weren’t backed up. Working through the restore process at the DR site, the DBA realized 30 years of COBOL and SQR code – critical business functionality – wasn’t backed up offsite.

    Net… work?

    A 500-employee professional services firm realized its internet connection could be a significant roadblock to recovery. Without internet, no one at head office could access critical cloud systems. The tabletop exercise identified this recovery bottleneck and helped prioritize the fix on the roadmap.

    Someone call a doctor!

    Hospitals rely on their phone systems for system downtime procedures. A tabletop exercise with a hospital client highlighted that if the data center were damaged, the phone system would likely be damaged as well. Identifying this provided more urgency to the ongoing VOIP migration.

    The test of time

    A small municipality relied on a local MSP to perform systems restore, but realized it had never tested the restore procedure to identify RTA. Contacting the MSP to review capabilities became a roadmap item to address this risk.

    Phase 3: Insights and accomplishments

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP recovery workflow template

    Outlined the DRP response and risks to recovery

    Screenshots of activities completed related to brainstorming risk mitigation measures.

    Brainstormed risk mitigation measures

    Summary of Accomplishments

    • Planned and documented your DR incident response and systems recovery workflow.
    • Identified gaps and risks to recovery and incident management.
    • Brainstormed and identified projects and action items to mitigate risks and close gaps.

    Up Next: Leverage the core deliverables to complete, extend, and maintain your DRP

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

    Phase 4

    Complete, Extend, and Maintain Your DRP

    Phase 4: Complete, Extend, and Maintain Your DRP

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify progress made on your DRP by reassessing your DRP maturity.
    • Prioritize the highest value major initiatives to complete, extend, and maintain your DRP.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • Executive Sponsor

    Results and Insights

    • Communicate the value of your DRP by demonstrating progress against items in the DRP Maturity Scorecard.
    • Identify and prioritize future major initiatives to support the DRP, and the larger BCP.

    Celebrate accomplishments, plan for the future

    Congratulations! You’ve completed the core DRP deliverables and made the case for investment in DR capabilities. Take a moment to celebrate your accomplishments.

    This milestone is an opportunity to look back and look forward.

    • Look back: measure your progress since you started to build your DRP. Revisit the assessments completed in phase 1, and assess the change in your overall DRP maturity.
    • Look forward: prioritize future initiatives to complete, extend, and maintain your DRP. Prioritize initiatives that are the highest impact for the least requirement of effort and resources.

    We have completed the core DRP methodology for key systems:

    • BIA, recovery objectives, high-level recovery workflow, and recovery actuals.
    • Identify key tasks to meet recovery objectives.

    What could we do next?

    • Repeat the core methodology for additional systems.
    • Identify a DR site to meet recovery requirements, and review vendor DR capabilities.
    • Create a summary DRP document including requirements, capabilities, and change procedures.
    • Create a test plan and detailed recovery documentation.
    • Coordinate the creation of BCPs.
    • Integrate DR in other key operational processes.

    Revisit the DRP Maturity Scorecard to measure progress and identify remaining areas to improve

    4(a) DRP Maturity Scorecard – Reassess your DRP program maturity

    1. Find the copy of the DRP Maturity Scorecard you completed previously. Save a second copy of the completed scorecard in the same folder.
    2. Update scoring where you have improved your DRP documentation or capabilities.
    3. Review the new scores on tab 3. Compare the new scores to the original scores.

    Screenshot of DRP Maturity Assessment Results

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Use the completed, updated DRP Maturity Scorecard to demonstrate the value of your continuity program, and to help you decide where to focus next.

    Prioritize major initiatives to complete, extend, and maintain the DRP

    4(b) Prioritize major initiatives

    Estimated Time: 2 hours

    Prioritize major initiatives that mitigate significant risk with the least cost and effort.

    1. Use the scoring criteria below to evaluate risk, effort, and cost for potential initiatives. Modify the criteria if required for your organization. Write this out on a whiteboard or flip-chart paper.
    2. Assign a score from 1 to 3. Multiply the scores for each initiative together for an aggregate score. In general, prioritize initiatives with higher scores.
    Score A: How significant are the risks this initiative will mitigate? B: How easily can we complete this initiative? C: How cost-effective is this initiative?
    3: High Critical impact on +50% of stakeholders, or major impact to compliance posture, or significant health/safety risk. One sprint, can be completed by a few individuals with minor supervision. Within the IT discretionary budget.
    2: Medium Impacts <50% of stakeholders, or minor impact on compliance, or degradation to health or safety controls. One quarter, and/or some increased effort required, some risk to completion. Requires budget approval from finance.
    1: Low Impacts limited to <25% of stakeholders, no impact on compliance posture or health/safety. One year, and/or major vendor or organizational challenges. Requires budget approval from the board of directors.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    You can use a similar scoring exercise to prioritize and schedule high-benefit, low-effort, low-cost items identified in the roadmap in phase 3.

    Example: Prioritize major initiatives

    4(b) Prioritize major initiatives continued

    Write out the table on a whiteboard (record the results in a spreadsheet for reference). In the case below, IT might decide to work on repeating the core methodology first as they create the active testing plans, and tackle process changes later.

    Initiative A: How significant are the risks this initiative will mitigate? B: How easily can we complete this initiative? C: How cost-effective is this initiative? Aggregate score (A x B x C)
    Repeat the core methodology for all systems 2 – will impact some stakeholders, no compliance or safety impact. 2 – will require about 3 months, no significant complications. 3 – No cost. 12
    Add DR to project mgmt. and change mgmt. 1 – Mitigates some recovery risks over the long term. 1 – Requires extensive consultation and process review. 3 – No cost. 3
    Active failover testing on plan 2 – Mitigates some risks; documentation and cross training is already in place. 2 – Requires 3-4 months of occasional effort to prepare for test. 2 – May need to purchase some equipment before testing. 8

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Find a pace that allows you to keep momentum going, but also leaves enough time to act on the initial findings, projects, and action items identified in the DRP Roadmap Tool. Include these initiatives in the Roadmap tool to visualize how identified initiatives fit with other tasks identified to improve your recovery capabilities.

    Repeat the core DR methodology for additional systems and applications


    You have created a DR plan for your most critical systems. Now, add the rest:

    • Build on the work you’ve already done. Re-use the BIA scoring scale. Update your existing recovery workflows, rather than creating and formatting an entirely new document. A number of steps in the recovery will be shared with, or similar to, the recovery procedures for your Tier 1 systems.

    Risks and Challenges Mitigated

    • DR requirements and capabilities for less-critical systems have not been evaluated.
    • Gaps in the recovery process for less critical systems have not been evaluated or addressed.
    • DR capabilities for less critical systems may not meet business requirements.
    Sample Outputs
    Add Tier 2 & 3 systems to the BIA.
    Complete another tabletop exercise for Tier 2 & 3 systems recovery, and add the results to the recovery workflow.
    Identify projects to close additional gaps in the recovery process. Add projects to the project roadmap.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Use this example of a complete, practical, right-size DR plan to drive and guide your efforts.

    Extend your core DRP deliverables

    You’ve completed the core DRP deliverables. Continue to create DRP documentation to support recovery procedures and governance processes:

    • DR documentation efforts fail when organizations try to boil the ocean with an all-in-one plan aimed at auditors, business leaders, and IT. It’s long, hard to maintain, and ends up as shelfware.
    • Create documentation in layers to keep it manageable. Build supporting documentation over time to support your high-level recovery workflow.

    Risks and Challenges Mitigated

    • Key contact information, escalation, and disaster declaration responsibilities are not identified or formalized.
    • DRP requirements and capabilities aren’t centralized. Key DRP findings are in multiple documents, complicating governance and oversight by auditors, executives, and board members.
    • Detailed recovery procedures and peripheral information (e.g. network diagrams) are not documented.
    Sample Outputs
    Three to five detailed systems recovery flowcharts/checklists.
    Documented team roles, succession plans, and contact information.
    Notification, assessment, and disaster declaration plan.
    DRP summary.
    Layer 1, 2 & 3 network diagrams.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Use this example of a complete, practical, right-size DR plan to drive and guide your efforts.

    Select an optimal DR deployment model and deployment site

    Your DR site has been identified as inadequate:

    • Begin with the end in mind. Commit to mastering the selected model and leverage your vendor relationship for effective DR.
    • Cut to the chase and evaluate the feasibility of cloud first. Gauge your organization’s current capabilities for DR in the cloud before becoming infatuated with the idea.
    • A mixed model gives you the best of both worlds. Diversify your strategy by identifying fit for purpose and balancing the work required to maintain various models.

    Risks and Challenges Mitigated

    • Without an identified DR site, you’ll be scrambling when a disaster hits to find and contract for a location to restore IT services.
    • Without systems and application data backed up offsite, you stand to lose critical business data and logic if all copies of the data at your primary site were lost.
    Sample Outputs
    Application assessment for cloud DR.
    TCO tool for different environments.
    Solution decision and executive presentation.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Use Info-Tech’s blueprint, Select the Optimal Disaster Recovery Deployment Model, to help you make sense of a world of choice for your DR site.

    Extend DRP findings to business process resiliency with a BCP pilot

    Integrate your findings from DRP into the overall BCP:

    • As an IT leader you have the skillset and organizational knowledge to lead a BCP project, but ultimately business leaders need to own the BCP – they know their processes and requirements to resume business operations better than anyone else.
    • The traditional approach to BCP is a massive project that most organizations can’t execute without hiring a consultant. To execute BCP in-house, carve up the task into manageable pieces.

    Risks and Challenges Mitigated

    • No formal plan exists to recover from a disruption to critical business processes.
    • Business requirements for IT systems recovery may change following a comprehensive review of business continuity requirements.
    • Outside of core systems recovery, IT could be involved in relocating staff, imaging and issuing new end-user equipment, etc. Identifying these requirements is part of BCP.
    Sample Outputs
    Business process-focused BIA for one business unit.
    Recovery workflows for one business unit.
    Provisioning list for one business unit.
    BCP project roadmap.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Use Info-Tech’s blueprint, Develop a Business Continuity Plan, to develop and deploy a repeatable BCP methodology.

    Test the plan to validate capabilities and cross-train staff on recovery procedures

    You don’t have a program to regularly test the DR plan:

    • Most DR tests are focused solely on the technology and not the DR management process – which is where most plans fail.
    • Be proactive – establish an annual test cycle and identify and coordinate resources well in advance.
    • Update DRP documentation with findings from the plan, and track the changes you make over time.

    Risks and Challenges Mitigated

    • Gaps likely still exist in the plan that are hard to find without some form of testing.
    • Customers and auditors may ask for some form of DR testing.
    • Staff may not be familiar with DR documentation or how they can use it.
    • No formal cycle to validate and update the DRP.
    Sample Outputs
    DR testing readiness assessment.
    Testing handbooks.
    Test plan summary template.
    DR test issue log and analysis tool.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Uncover deficiencies in your recovery procedures by using Info-Tech’s blueprint Reduce Costly Downtime Through DR Testing.

    “Operationalize” DRP management

    Inject DR planning in key operational processes to support plan maintenance:

    • Major changes, or multiple routine changes, can materially alter DR capabilities and requirements. It’s not feasible to update the DR plan after every routine change, so leverage criticality tiers in the BIA to focus your change management efforts. Critical systems require more rigorous change procedures.
    • Likewise, you can build criticality tiers into more focused project management and performance measurement processes.
    • Schedule regular tasks in your ticketing system to verify capabilities and cross-train staff on key recovery procedures (e.g. backup and restore).

    Risks and Challenges Mitigated

    • DRP is not updated “as needed” – as requirements and capabilities change due to business and technology changes.
    • The DRP is disconnected from day-to-day operations.
    Sample Outputs
    Reviewed and updated change, project, and performance management processes.
    Reviewed and updated internal SLAs.
    Reviewed and updated data protection and backup procedures.

    Review infrastructure service provider DR capabilities

    Insert DR planning in key operational processes to support plan maintenance:

    • Reviewing vendor DR capabilities is a core IT vendor management competency.
    • As your DR requirements change year-to-year, ensure your vendors’ service commitments still meet your DR requirements.
    • Identify changes in the vendor’s service offerings and DR capabilities, e.g. higher costs for additional DR support, new offerings to reduce potential downtime, or conversely, a degradation in DR capabilities.

    Risks and Challenges Mitigated

    • Vendor capabilities haven’t been measured against business requirements.
    • No internal capability exists currently to assess vendor ability to meet promised SLAs.
    • No internal capability exists to track vendor performance on recoverability.
    Sample Outputs
    A customized vendor DRP questionnaire.
    Reviewed vendor SLAs.
    Choose to keep or change service levels or vendor offerings based on findings.

    Phase 4: Insights and accomplishments

    Screenshot of DRP Maturity Assessment Results

    Identified progress against targets

    Screenshot of prioritized further initiatives.

    Prioritized further initiatives

    Screenshot of DRP Planning Roadmap

    Added initiatives to the roadmap

    Summary of Accomplishments

    • Developed a list of high-priority initiatives that can support the extension and maintenance of the DR plan over the long term.
    • Reviewed and update maturity assessments to establish progress and communicate the value of the DR program.

    Summary of accomplishment

    Knowledge Gained

    • Conduct a BIA to determine appropriate targets for RTOs and RPOs.
    • Identify DR projects required to close RTO/RPO gaps and mitigate risks.
    • Use tabletop planning to create and validate an incident response plan.

    Processes Optimized

    • Your DRP process was optimized, from BIA to documenting an incident response plan.
    • Your vendor evaluation process was optimized to identify and assess a vendor’s ability to meet your DR requirements, and to repeat this evaluation on an annual basis.

    Deliverables Completed

    • DRP Maturity Scorecard
    • DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool
    • DRP Roadmap Tool
    • Incident response plan and systems recovery workflow
    • Executive presentation

    Info-Tech’s insights bust the most obstinate myths of DRP

    Myth #1: DRPs need to focus on major events such as natural disasters and other highly destructive incidents such as fire and flood.

    Reality: The most common threats to service continuity are hardware and software failures, network outages, and power outages.

    Myth #2: Effective DRPs start with identifying and evaluating potential risks.

    Reality: DR isn’t about identifying risks; it’s about ensuring service continuity.

    Myth #3: DRPs are separate from day-to-day operations and incident management.

    Reality: DR must be integrated with service management to ensure service continuity.

    Myth #4: I use a co-lo or cloud services so I don’t have to worry about DR. That’s my vendor’s responsibility.

    Reality: You can’t outsource accountability. You can’t just assume your vendor’s DR capabilities will meet your needs.

    Myth #5: A DRP must include every detail so anyone can execute the recovery.

    Reality: IT DR is not an airplane disaster movie. You aren’t going to ask a business user to execute a system recovery, just like you wouldn’t really want a passenger with no flying experience to land a plane.

    Supplement the core documentation with these tools and templates

    • An Excel workbook workbook to track key roles on DR, business continuity, and emergency response teams. Can also track DR documentation location and any hardware purchases required for DR.
    • A questionnaire template and a response tracking tool to structure your investigation of vendor DR capabilities.
    • Integrate escalation with your DR plan by defining incident severity and escalation rules . Use this example as a template or integrate ideas into your own severity definitions and escalation rules in your incident management procedures.
    • A minute-by-minute time-tracking tool to capture progress in a DR or testing scenario. Monitor progress against objectives in real time as recovery tasks are started and completed.

    Next steps: Related Info-Tech research

    Select the Optimal Disaster Recovery Deployment Model Evaluate cloud, co-lo, and on-premises disaster recovery deployment models.

    Develop a Business Continuity Plan Streamline the traditional approach to make BCP development manageable and repeatable.

    Prepare for a DRP Audit Assess your current DRP maturity, identify required improvements, and complete an audit-ready DRP summary document.

    Document and Maintain Your Disaster Recovery Plan Put your DRP on a diet: keep it fit, trim, and ready for action.

    Reduce Costly Downtime Through DR Testing Improve your DR plan and your team’s ability to execute on it.

    Implement Crisis Management Best Practices An effective crisis response minimizes the impact of a crisis on reputation, profitability, and continuity.

    Research contributors and experts

    • Alan Byrum, Director of Business Continuity, Intellitech
    • Bernard Jones (MBCI, CBCP, CORP, ITILv3), Owner/Principal, B Jones BCP Consulting, LLC
    • Paul Beaudry, Assistant Vice-President, Technical Services, MIS, Richardson International Limited
    • Yogi Schulz, President, Corvelle Consulting

    Glossary

    • Business Continuity Management (BCM) Program: Ongoing management and governance process supported by top management and appropriately resourced to implement and maintain business continuity management. (Source: ISO 22301:2012)
    • Business Continuity Plan (BCP): Documented procedures that guide organizations to respond, recover, resume, and restore to a pre-defined level of operation following disruption. The BCP is not necessarily one document, but a collection of procedures and information.
    • Crisis: A situation with a high level of uncertainty that disrupts the core activities and/or credibility of an organization and requires urgent action. (Source: ISO 22300)
    • Crisis Management Team (CMT): A group of individuals responsible for developing and implementing a comprehensive plan for responding to a disruptive incident. The team consists of a core group of decision makers trained in incident management and prepared to respond to any situation.
    • Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP): The activities associated with the continuing availability and restoration of the IT infrastructure.
    • Incident: An event that has the capacity to lead to loss of, or a disruption to, an organization’s operations, services, or functions – which, if not managed, can escalate into an emergency, crisis, or disaster.
    • BCI Editor’s Note: In most countries “incident” and “crisis” are used interchangeably, but in the UK the term “crisis” has been generally reserved for dealing with wide-area incidents involving Emergency Services. The BCI prefers the use of “incident” for normal BCM purposes. (Source: The Business Continuity Institute)

    • Incident Management Plan: A clearly defined and documented plan of action for use at the time of an incident, typically covering the key personnel, resources, services, and actions needed to implement the incident management process.
    • IT Disaster: A service interruption requiring IT to rebuild a service, restore from backups, or activate redundancy at the backup site.
    • Recovery Point: Time elapsed between the last good copy of the data being taken and failure/corruption on the production environment; think of this as data loss.
    • Recovery Point Actual (RPA): The currently achievable recovery point after a disaster event, given existing people, processes, and technology. This reflects expected maximum data loss that could actually occur in a disaster scenario.
    • Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The target recovery point after a disaster event, usually calculated in hours, on a given system, application, or service. Think of this as acceptable and appropriate data loss. RPO should be based on a business impact analysis (BIA) to identify an acceptable and appropriate recovery target.
    • Recovery Time: Time required to restore a system, application, or service to a functional state; think of this as downtime.
    • Recovery Time Actual (RTA): The currently achievable recovery time after a disaster event, given existing people, processes, and technology. This reflects expected maximum downtime that could actually occur in a disaster scenario.
    • Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The target recovery time after a disaster event for a given system, application, or service. RTO should be based on a business impact analysis (BIA) to identify acceptable and appropriate downtime.

    Bibliography

    BCMpedia. “Recovery Objectives: RTO, RPO, and MTPD.” BCMpedia, n.d. Web.

    Burke, Stephen. “Public Cloud Pitfalls: Microsoft Azure Storage Cluster Loses Power, Puts Spotlight On Private, Hybrid Cloud Advantages.” CRN, 16 Mar. 2017. Web.

    Elliot, Stephen. “DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified.” IDC, 2015. Web.

    FEMA. Planning & Templates. FEMA, 2015. Web.

    FINRA. “Business Continuity Plans and Emergency Contact Information.” FINRA, 2015. Web.

    FINRA. “FINRA, the SEC and CFTC Issue Joint Advisory on Business Continuity Planning.” FINRA, 2013. Web.

    Gosling, Mel, and Andrew Hiles. “Business Continuity Statistics: Where Myth Meets Fact.” Continuity Central, 2009. Web.

    Hanwacker, Linda. “COOP Templates for Success Workbook.” The LSH Group, n.d. Web.

    Homeland Security. Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). Homeland Security, 2015. Web.

    Nichols, Shaun. “AWS's S3 Outage Was So Bad Amazon Couldn't Get Into Its Own Dashboard to Warn the World.” The Register, 1 Mar. 2017. Web.

    Potter, Patrick. “BCM Regulatory Alphabet Soup.” RSA Archer Organization, 2012. Web.

    Rothstein, Philip Jan. “Disaster Recovery Testing: Exercising Your Contingency Plan.” Rothstein Associates Inc., 2007. Web.

    The Business Continuity Institute. “The Good Practice Guidelines.” The Business Continuity Institute, 2013. Web.

    The Disaster Recovery Journal. “Disaster Resource Guide.” The Disaster Recovery Journal, 2015. Web.

    The Disaster Recovery Journal. “DR Rules & Regulations.” The Disaster Recovery Journal, 2015. Web.

    The Federal Financial Institution Examination Council (FFIEC). Business Continuity Planning. IT Examination Handbook InfoBase, 2015. Web.

    York, Kyle. “Read Dyn’s Statement on the 10/21/2016 DNS DDoS Attack.” Oracle, 22 Oct. 2016. Web.

    Prepare Your Application for PaaS

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}181|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
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    • Parent Category Name: Architecture & Strategy
    • Parent Category Link: /architecture-and-strategy
    • The application may have been written a long time ago, and have source code, knowledge base, or design principles misplaced or lacking, which makes it difficult to understand the design and build.
    • The development team does not have a standardized practice for assessing cloud benefits and architecture, design principles for redesigning an application, or performing capacity for planning activities.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • An infrastructure-driven cloud strategy overlooks application specific complexities. Ensure that an application portfolio strategy is a precursor to determining the business value gained from an application perspective, not just an infrastructure perspective.
    • Business value assessment must be the core of your decision to migrate and justify the development effort.
    • Right-size your application to predict future usage and minimize unplanned expenses. This ensures that you are truly benefiting from the tier costing model that vendors offer.

    Impact and Result

    • Identify and evaluate what cloud benefits your application can leverage and the business value generated as a result of migrating your application to the cloud.
    • Use Info-Tech’s approach to building a robust application that can leverage scalability, availability, and performance benefits while maintaining the functions and features that the application currently supports for the business.
    • Standardize and strengthen your performance testing practices and capacity planning activities to build a strong current state assessment.
    • Use Info-Tech’s elaboration of the 12-factor app to build a clear and robust cloud profile and target state for your application.
    • Leverage Info-Tech’s cloud requirements model to assess the impact of cloud on different requirements patterns.

    Prepare Your Application for PaaS Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should build a right-sized, design-driven approach to moving your application to a PaaS platform, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Create your cloud application profile

    Bring the business into the room, align your objectives for choosing certain cloud capabilities, and characterize your ideal PaaS environment as a result of your understanding of what the business is trying to achieve. Understand how to right-size your application in the cloud to maintain or improve its performance.

    • Prepare Your Application for PaaS – Phase 1: Create Your Cloud Application Profile
    • Cloud Profile Tool

    2. Evaluate design changes for your application

    Assess the application against Info-Tech’s design scorecard to evaluate the right design approach to migrating the application to PaaS. Pick the appropriate cloud path and begin the first step to migrating your app – gathering your requirements.

    • Prepare Your Application for PaaS – Phase 2: Evaluate Design Changes for Your Application
    • Cloud Design Scorecard Tool
    [infographic]

    Migrate to Office 365 Now

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}292|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 9.3/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: $19,928 Average $ Saved
    • member rating average days saved: 9 Average Days Saved
    • Parent Category Name: End-User Computing Applications
    • Parent Category Link: /end-user-computing-applications
    • As Microsoft continues to push Office 365, the transition to Office 365 has likely already been decided, but uncertainty surrounds the starting point and the best path forward.
    • The lack of a clear migration process that considers all the relevant risks and opportunities creates significant ambiguity around an Office 365 migration.
    • As organizations migrate to Office 365, the change in Office’s licensing structure presents obscurity in spending that could cost the business tens of thousands of unnecessary dollars spent if not approached strategically.
    • The fear of overlooking risks regarding the cloud, data, and existing infrastructure threatens to place IT in a position of project paralysis.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Many businesses are opting for a one-size-fits-all licensing strategy. Without selecting licensing to suit actual user needs, you will oversupply users and overspend on licensing.
    • Jumping into an Office 365 migration project without careful thought of the risks of a cloud migration will lead to project halt and interruption. Intentionally plan in order to expose risk to develop project foresight for a smooth migration.
    • A migration to Office 365 represents a significant change in the way users interact with Office. Be careful not to forget about the user as you take on the project. Engage the users consistently for a smooth transition.

    Impact and Result

    • Start by evaluating the business, users, and infrastructure requirements to ensure that all needs are clearly defined and the best fit-for-purpose migration plan can be decided on.
    • Assess the underlying risk associated with a migration to the cloud and build mitigation strategies to counter risk or impending issues and identify project interruptions before they happen.
    • Build a roadmap through a logical step-by-step process to outline major milestones and develop a communication plan to engage users throughout the migration. Demonstrate IT’s due diligence by relaying the project findings and results back to the business using Info-Tech’s Office 365 migration plan.

    Migrate to Office 365 Now Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should migrate to Office 365 now, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Evaluate requirements and licensing

    Evaluate the business, user, and infrastructure requirements to ensure that all needs are clearly defined and the best fit-for-purpose migration plan can be decided on.

    • Migrate to Office 365 Now – Phase 1: Evaluate Requirements and Licensing
    • Office 365 Migration Plan Report
    • Office 365 Migration Workbook

    2. Mitigate key risks of the cloud

    Expose key cloud risks across five major areas and build mitigation strategies to counter risk and gain foresight for migration.

    • Migrate to Office 365 Now – Phase 2: Mitigate Key Risks of the Cloud

    3. Build the roadmap

    Outline major milestones of migration and build the communication plan to transition users smoothly. Complete the Office 365 migration plan report to present to business stakeholders.

    • Migrate to Office 365 Now – Phase 3: Build the Roadmap
    • End-User Engagement Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Migrate to Office 365 Now

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Evaluate Office 365 License Needs

    The Purpose

    Review corporate and project goals.

    Review and prioritize relevant services and applications to shape the migration path.

    Review Office 365 license models.

    Profile end users to rightsize licensing.

    Estimate dollar impact of new licensing model.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Corporate goals for Office 365.

    Prioritized migration path of applications.

    Decision on user licensing structure.

    Projected cost of licensing.

    Activities

    1.1 Outline corporate and project goals to paint the starting line.

    1.2 Review and prioritize services.

    1.3 Rightsize licensing.

    Outputs

    Clear goals and metrics for migration

    Prioritized list of applications

    Effective licensing structure

    2 Assess Value, Readiness, and Risks

    The Purpose

    Conduct value and readiness assessment of current on-premises services.

    Identify and evaluate risks and challenges.

    Assess IT’s readiness to own and manage Office 365.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Completed value and readiness assessment.

    Current targets for service and deployment models.

    List of perceived risks according to five major risk areas.

    Assessed IT’s readiness to own and manage Office 365.

    Established go/caution/stop for elected Office 365 services.

    Activities

    2.1 Assess value and readiness.

    2.2 Identify key risks.

    2.3 Identify changes in IT skills and roles.

    Outputs

    Cloud service appropriateness assessment

    Completed risk register

    Reorganization of IT roles

    3 Mitigate Risks

    The Purpose

    Review Office 365 risks and discuss mitigation strategies.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Completed risks and mitigation strategies report.

    Activities

    3.1 Build mitigation strategies.

    3.2 Identify key service requests.

    3.3 Build workflows.

    Outputs

    Defined roles and responsibilities

    Assigned decision rights

    List of staffing gaps

    4 Build the Roadmap

    The Purpose

    Build a timeline of major milestones.

    Plan and prioritize projects to bridge gaps.

    Build a communication plan.

    Review Office 365 strategy and roadmap.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Milestone roadmap.

    Critical path of milestone actions.

    Communication plan.

    Executive report.

    Activities

    4.1 Outline major milestones.

    4.2 Finalize roadmap.

    4.3 Build and refine the communication plan.

    Outputs

    Roadmap plotted projects, decisions, mitigations, and user engagements

    Finalized roadmap across timeline

    Communication and training plan

    Take Action on Service Desk Customer Feedback

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    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 10.0/10 Overall Impact
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    • Parent Category Name: Service Desk
    • Parent Category Link: /service-desk
    • IT leaders lack information to help inform and prioritize where improvements are most needed.
    • The service desk relies only on traditional metrics such as time to respond or percentage of SLAs met, but no measures of customer satisfaction with the service they receive.
    • There are signs of dissatisfied users, but no mechanism in place to formally capture those perceptions in order to address them.
    • Even if transactional (ticket) surveys are in use, often nothing is done with the data collected or there is a low response rate, and no broader satisfaction survey is in place.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • If customer satisfaction is not being measured, it’s often because service desk leaders don’t know how to design customer satisfaction surveys, don’t have a mechanism in place to collect feedback, or lack the resources to take accountability for a customer feedback program.
    • If customer satisfaction surveys are in place, it can be difficult to get full value out of them if there is a low response rate due to poor survey design or administration, or if leadership doesn’t understand the value of / know how to analyze the data.
    • It can actually be worse to ask your customers for feedback and do nothing with it than not asking for feedback at all. Customers may end up more dissatisfied if they take the time to provide value then see nothing done with it.

    Impact and Result

    • Understand how to ask the right questions to avoid survey fatigue.
    • Design and implement two complementary satisfaction surveys: a transactional survey to capture satisfaction with individual ticket experiences and inform immediate improvements, and a relationship survey to capture broader satisfaction among the entire user base and inform longer-term improvements.
    • Build a plan and assign accountability for customer feedback management, including analyzing feedback, prioritizing customer satisfaction insights and using them to improve performance, and communicating the results back to your users and stakeholders.

    Take Action on Service Desk Customer Feedback Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Take Action on Service Desk Customer Feedback Deck – A step-by-step document that walks you through how to measure customer satisfaction, design and implement transactional and relationship surveys, and analyze and act on user feedback.

    Whether you have no Service Desk customer feedback program in place or you need to improve your existing process for gathering and responding to feedback, this deck will help you design your surveys and act on their results to improve CSAT scores.

    • Take Action on Service Desk Customer Feedback Storyboard

    2. Transactional Service Desk Survey Template – A template to design a ticket satisfaction survey.

    This template provides a sample transactional (ticket) satisfaction survey. If your ITSM tool or other survey mechanism allows you to design or write your own survey, use this template as a starting point.

    • Transactional Service Desk Survey Template

    3. Sample Size Calculator – A tool to calculate the sample size needed for your survey.

    Use the Sample Size Calculator to calculate your ideal sample size for your relationship surveys.

  • Desired confidence level
  • Acceptable margin of error
  • Company population size
  • Ideal sample size
    • Sample Size Calculator

    4. End-User Satisfaction Survey Review Workflows – Visio templates to map your review process for both transactional and relationship surveys

    This template will help you map out the step-by-step process to review collected feedback from your end-user satisfaction surveys, analyze the data, and act on it.

    • End-User Satisfaction Survey Review Workflows

    Infographic

    Further reading

    Take Action on Service Desk Customer Feedback

    Drive up CSAT scores by asking the right questions and effectively responding to user feedback.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Collecting feedback is only half the equation.

    The image contains a picture of Natalie Sansone.

    Natalie Sansone, PhD


    Research Director, Infrastructure & Operations

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Often when we ask service desk leaders where they need to improve and if they’re measuring customer satisfaction, they either aren’t measuring it at all, or their ticket surveys are turned on but they get very few responses (or only positive responses). They fail to see the value of collecting feedback when this is their experience with it.

    Feedback is important because traditional service desk metrics can only tell us so much. We often see what’s called the “watermelon effect”: metrics appear “green”, but under the surface they’re “red” because customers are in fact dissatisfied for reasons unmeasured by standard internal IT metrics. Customer satisfaction should always be the goal of service delivery, and directly measuring satisfaction in addition to traditional metrics will help you get a clearer picture of your strengths and weaknesses, and where to prioritize improvements.

    It’s not as simple as asking customers if they were satisfied with their ticket, however. There are two steps necessary for success. The first is collecting feedback, which should be done purposefully, with clear goals in mind in order to maximize the response rate and value of responses received. The second – and most critical – is acting on that feedback. Use it to inform improvements and communicate those improvements. Doing so will not only make your service desk better, increasing satisfaction through better service delivery, but also will make your customers feel heard and valued, which alone increases satisfaction.

    The image contains a picture of Emily Sugerman.

    Emily Sugerman, PhD


    Research Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Common Obstacles

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    • The service desk relies only on traditional metrics such as time to respond, or percentage of SLAs met, but not on measures of customer satisfaction with the service they receive.
    • There are signs of dissatisfied users (e.g. shadow IT, users avoid the service desk, go only to their favorite technician) but no mechanism in place to formally capture those perceptions.
    • Transactional ticket surveys were turned on when the ITSM tool was implemented, but either nobody responds to them, or nobody does anything with the data received.
    • IT leaders lack information to help inform and prioritize where improvements are most needed.
    • Service desk leaders don’t know how to design survey questions to ask their users for feedback and/or they don’t have a mechanism in place to survey users.
    • If customer satisfaction surveys are in place, nothing is done with the results because service desk leaders either don’t understand the value of analyzing the data or don’t know how to analyze the data.
    • Executives only want a single satisfaction number to track and don’t understand the value of collecting more detailed feedback.
    • IT lacks the resources to take accountability for the feedback program, or existing resources don’t have time to do anything with the feedback they receive.
    • Understand how to ask the right questions to avoid survey fatigue (where users get overwhelmed and stop responding).
    • Design and implement a transactional survey to capture satisfaction with individual ticket experiences and use the results to inform immediate improvements.
    • Design and implement a relationship survey to capture broader satisfaction among the entire user base and use the results to inform longer-term improvements.
    • Build a plan and assign accountability for analyzing feedback, using it to prioritize and make actionable improvements to address feedback, and communicating the results back to your users and stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Asking your customers for feedback then doing nothing with it is worse than not asking for feedback at all. Your customers may end up more dissatisfied than they were before, if their opinion is sought out and then ignored. It’s valuable to collect feedback, but the true value for both IT and its customers comes from acting on that feedback and communicating those actions back to your users.

    Traditional service desk metrics can be misleading

    The watermelon effect

    When a service desk appears to hit all its targets according to the metrics it tracks, but service delivery is poor and customer satisfaction is low, this is known as the “watermelon effect”. Service metrics appear green on the outside, but under the surface (unmeasured), they’re red because customers are dissatisfied.

    Traditional SLAs and service desk metrics (such as time to respond, average resolution time, percentage of SLAs met) can help you understand service desk performance internally to prioritize your work and identify process improvements. However, they don’t tell you how customers perceive the service or how satisfied they are.

    Providing good service to your customers should be your end goal. Failing to measure, monitor, and act on customer feedback means you don’t have the whole picture of how your service desk is performing and whether or where improvements are needed to maximize satisfaction.

    There is a shift in ITSM to focus more on customer experience metrics over traditional ones

    The Service Desk Institute (SDI) suggests that customer satisfaction is the most important indicator of service desk success, and that traditional metrics around SLA targets – currently the most common way to measure service desk performance – may become less valuable or even obsolete in the future as customer experience-focused targets become more popular. (Service Desk Institute, 2021)

    SDI conducted a Customer Experience survey of service desk professionals from a range of organizations, both public and private, from January to March 2018. The majority of respondents said that customer experience is more important than other metrics such as speed of service or adherence to SLAs, and that customer satisfaction is more valuable than traditional metrics. (SDI, 2018).

    The image contains a screenshot of two pie graphs. The graph on the left is labelled: which of these is most important to your service desk? Customer experience is first with 54%. The graph on the right is labelled: Which measures do you find more value in? Customer satisfaction is first with 65%.

    However, many service desk leaders aren’t effectively measuring customer feedback

    Not only is it important to measure customer experience and satisfaction levels, but it’s equally important to act on that data and feed it into a service improvement program. However, many IT leaders are neglecting either one or both of those components.

    Obstacles to collecting feedback

    Obstacles to acting on collected feedback

    • Don’t understand the value of measuring customer feedback.
    • Don’t have a good mechanism in place to collect feedback.
    • Don’t think that users would respond to a survey (either generally unresponsive or already inundated with surveys).
    • Worried that results would be negative or misleading.
    • Don’t know what questions to ask or how to design a survey.
    • Don’t understand the importance of analyzing and acting on feedback collected.
    • Don’t know how to analyze survey data.
    • Lack of resources to take accountability over customer feedback (including analyzing data, monitoring trends, communicating results).
    • Executives or stakeholders only want a satisfaction score.

    A strong customer feedback program brings many benefits to IT and the business

    Insight into customer experience

    Gather insight into both the overall customer relationship with the service desk and individual transactions to get a holistic picture of the customer experience.

    Data to inform decisions

    Collect data to inform decisions about where to spend limited resources or time on improvement, rather than guessing or wasting effort on the wrong thing.

    Identification of areas for improvement

    Better understand your strengths and weaknesses from the customer’s point of view to help you identify gaps and priorities for improvement.

    Customers feel valued

    Make customers feel heard and valued; this will improve your relationship and their satisfaction.

    Ability to monitor trends over time

    Use the same annual relationship survey to be able to monitor trends and progress in making improvements by comparing data year over year.

    Foresight to prevent problems from occurring

    Understand where potential problems may occur so you can address and prevent them, or who is at risk of becoming a detractor so you can repair the relationship.

    IT staff coaching and engagement opportunities

    Turn negative survey feedback into coaching and improvement opportunities and use positive feedback to boost morale and engagement.

    Take Action on Service Desk Customer Feedback

    The image contains a screenshot of a Thought Model titled: Take Action on Service Desk Customer Feedback.

    Info-Tech’s methodology for measuring and acting on service desk customer feedback

    Phase

    1. Understand how to measure customer satisfaction

    2. Design and implement transactional surveys

    3. Design and implement relationship surveys

    4. Analyze and act on feedback

    Phase outcomes

    Understand the main types of customer satisfaction surveys, principles for survey design, and best practices for surveying your users.

    Learn why and how to design a simple survey to assess satisfaction with individual service desk transactions (tickets) and a methodology for survey delivery that will improve response rates.

    Understand why and how to design a survey to assess overall satisfaction with the service desk across your organization, or use Info-Tech’s diagnostic.

    Measure and analyze the results of both surveys and build a plan to act on both positive and negative feedback and communicate the results with the organization.

    Insight Summary

    Key Insight:

    Asking your customers for feedback then doing nothing with it is worse than not asking for feedback at all. Your customers may end up more dissatisfied than they were before if they’re asked for their opinion then see nothing done with it. It’s valuable to collect feedback, but the true value for both IT and its customers comes from acting on that feedback and communicating those actions back to your users.

    Additional insights:

    Insight 1

    Take the time to define the goals of your transactional survey program before launching it – it’s not as simple as just deploying the default survey of your ITSM tool out of the box. The objectives of the survey – including whether you want to keep a pulse on average satisfaction or immediately act on any negative experiences – will influence a range of key decisions about the survey configuration.

    Insight 2

    While transactional surveys provide useful indicators of customer satisfaction with specific tickets and interactions, they tend to have low response rates and can leave out many users who may rarely or never contact the service desk, but still have helpful feedback. Include a relationship survey in your customer feedback program to capture a more holistic picture of what your overall user base thinks about the service desk and where you most need to improve.

    Insight 3

    Satisfaction scores provide valuable data about how your customers feel, but don’t tell you why they feel that way. Don’t neglect the qualitative data you can gather from open-ended comments and questions in both types of satisfaction surveys. Take the time to read through these responses and categorize them in at least a basic way to gain deeper insight and determine where to prioritize your efforts.

    Understand how to measure customer satisfaction

    Phase 1

    Understand the main types of customer satisfaction surveys, principles for survey design, and best practices for surveying your users.

    Phase 1:

    Phase 2:

    Phase 3:

    Phase 4:

    Understand how to measure customer satisfaction

    Design and implement transactional surveys

    Design and implement relationship surveys

    Analyze and act on feedback

    Three methods of surveying your customers

    Transactional

    Relationship

    One-off

    Also known as

    Ticket surveys, incident follow-up surveys, on-going surveys

    Annual, semi-annual, periodic, comprehensive, relational

    One-time, single, targeted

    Definition

    • Survey that is tied to a specific customer interaction with the service desk (i.e. a ticket).
    • Assesses how satisfied customers are with how the ticket was handled and resolved.
    • Sent immediately after ticket is closed.
    • Short – usually 1 to 3 questions.
    • Survey that is sent periodically (i.e. semi-annually or annually) to the entire customer base to measure overall relationship with the service desk.
    • Assesses customer satisfaction with their overall service experience over a longer time period.
    • Longer – around 15-20 questions.
    • One-time survey sent at a specific, targeted point in time to either all customers or a subset.
    • Often event-driven or project-related.
    • Assesses satisfaction at one time point, or about a specific change that was implemented, or to inform a specific initiative that will be implemented.

    Pros and cons of the three methods

    Transactional

    Relationship

    One-off

    Pros

    • Immediate feedback
    • Actionable insights to immediately improve service or experience
    • Feeds into team coaching
    • Multiple touchpoints allow for trending and monitoring
    • Comprehensive insight from broad user base to improve overall satisfaction
    • Reach users who don’t contact the service desk often or respond to ticket surveys
    • Identify unhappy customers and reasons for dissatisfaction
    • Monitor broader trends over time
    • Targeted insights to measure the impact of a specific change or perception at a specific point of time

    Cons

    • Customer may become frustrated being asked to fill out too many surveys
    • Can lead to survey fatigue and low response rates
    • Tend to only see responses for very positive or negative experiences
    • High volume of data to analyze
    • Feedback is at a high-level
    • Covers the entire customer journey, not a specific interaction
    • Users may not remember past interactions accurately
    • A lot of detailed data to analyze and more difficult to turn into immediate action
    • Not as valuable without multiple surveys to see trends or change

    Which survey method should you choose?

    Only relying on one type of survey will leave gaps in your understanding of customer satisfaction. Include both transactional and relationship surveys to provide a holistic picture of customer satisfaction with the service desk.

    If you can only start with one type, choose the type that best aligns with your goals and priorities:

    If your priority is to identify larger improvement initiatives the service desk can take to improve overall customer satisfaction and trust in the service desk:

    If your priority is to provide customers with the opportunity to let you know when transactions do not go well so you can take immediate action to make improvements:

    Start with a relationship survey

    Start with a transactional survey

    The image contains a screenshot of a bar graph on SDI's 2018 Customer Experience in ITSM report.

    Info-Tech Insight

    One-off surveys can be useful to assess whether a specific change has impacted satisfaction, or to inform a planned change/initiative. However, as they aren’t typically part of an on-going customer feedback program, the focus of this research will be on transactional and relationship surveys.

    3 common customer satisfaction measures

    The three most utilized measures of customer satisfaction include CSAT, CES, and NPS.

    CSAT CES NPS
    Name Customer Satisfaction Customer Effort Score Net Promoter score
    What it measures Customer happiness Customer effort Customer loyalty
    Description Measures satisfaction with a company overall, or a specific offering or interaction Measures how much effort a customer feels they need to put forth in order to accomplish what they wanted Single question that asks consumers how likely they are to recommend your product, service, or company to other people
    Survey question How satisfied are/were you with [company/service/interaction/product]? How easy was it to [solve your problem/interact with company/handle my issue]? Or: The [company] made it easy for me to handle my issue How likely are you to recommend [company/service/product] to a friend?
    Scale 5, 7, or 10 pt scale, or using images/emojis 5, 7, or 10 pt scale 10-pt scale from highly unlikely to highly likely
    Scoring Result is usually expressed as a percentage of satisfaction Result usually expressed as an average Responses are divided into 3 groups where 0-6 are detractors, 7-8 are passives, 9-10 are promoters
    Pros
    • Well-suited for specific transactions
    • Simple and able to compare scores
    • Simple number, easy to analyze
    • Effort tends to predict future behavior
    • Actionable data
    • Simple to run and analyze
    • Widely used and can compare to other organizations
    • Allows for targeting customer segments
    Cons
    • Need high response rate to have representative numberEasy to ask the wrong questions
    • Not as useful without qualitative questions
    • Only measures a small aspect of the interaction
    • Only useful for transactions
    • Not useful for improvement without qualitative follow-up questions
    • Not as applicable to a service desk as it measures brand loyalty

    When to use each satisfaction measure

    The image contains a screenshot of a diagram that demonstrates which measure to use based off of what you would like to access, and which surveys it aligns with.

    How to choose which measure(s) to incorporate in your surveys

    The best measures are the ones that align with your specific goals for collecting feedback.

    • Most companies will use multiple satisfaction measures. For example, NPS can be tracked to monitor the overall customer sentiment, and CSAT used for more targeted feedback.
    • For internal-facing IT departments, CSAT is the most popular of the three methods, and NPS may not be as useful.
    • Choose your measure and survey types based on what you are trying to achieve and what kind of information you need to make improvements.
    • Remember that one measure alone isn’t going to give you actionable feedback; you’ll need to follow up with additional measures (especially for NPS and CES).
    • For CSAT surveys, customize the satisfaction measures in as many ways as you need to target the questions toward the areas you’re most interested in.
    • Don’t stick to just these three measures or types of surveys – there are other ways to collect feedback. Experiment to find what works for you.
    • If you’re designing your own survey, keep in mind the principles on the next slide.

    Info-Tech Insight

    While we focus mainly on traditional survey-based approaches to measuring customer satisfaction in this blueprint, there’s no need to limit yourselves to surveys as your only method. Consider multiple techniques to capture a wider audience, including:

    • Customer journey mapping
    • Focus groups with stakeholders
    • Lunch and learns or workshop sessions
    • Interviews – phone, chat, in-person
    • Kiosks

    Principles for survey design

    As you design your satisfaction survey – whether transactional or relational – follow these guidelines to ensure the survey delivers value and gets responses.

    1. Focus on your goal
    2. Don’t include unnecessary questions that won’t give you actionable information; it will only waste respondents’ time.

    3. Be brief
    4. Keep each question as short as possible and limit the total number of survey questions to avoid survey fatigue.

    5. Include open-ended questions
    6. Most of your measures will be close-ended, but include at least one comment box to allow for qualitative feedback.

    7. Keep questions clear and concise
    8. Ensure that question wording is clear and specific so that all respondents interpret it the same way.

    9. Avoid biased or leading questions
    10. You won’t get accurate results if your question leads respondents into thinking or answering a certain way.

    11. Avoid double-barreled questions
    12. Don’t ask about two different things in the same question – it will confuse respondents and make your data hard to interpret.

    13. Don’t restrict responses
    14. Response options should include all possible opinions (including “don’t know”) to avoid frustrating respondents.

    15. Make the survey easy to complete
    16. Pre-populate information where possible (e.g. name, department) and ensure the survey is responsive on mobile devices.

    17. Keep questions optional
    18. If every question is mandatory, respondents may leave the survey altogether if they can’t or don’t want to answer one question.

    19. Test your survey
    20. Test your survey with your target audience before launching, and incorporate feedback - they may catch issues you didn’t notice.

    Prevent survey fatigue to increase response rates

    If it takes too much time or effort to complete your survey – whether transactional or relational – your respondents won’t bother. Balance your need to collect relevant data with users’ needs for a simple and worthwhile task in order to get the most value out of your surveys.

    There are two types of survey fatigue:

    1. Survey response fatigue
    2. Occurs when users are overwhelmed by too many requests for feedback and stop responding.

    3. Survey taking fatigue
    4. Occurs when the survey is too long or irrelevant to users, so they grow tired and abandon the survey.

    Fight survey fatigue:

    • Make it as easy as possible to answer your survey:
      • Keep the survey as short as possible.
      • For transactional surveys, allow respondents to answer directly from email without having to click a separate link if possible.
      • Don’t make all questions mandatory or users may abandon it if they get to a difficult or unapplicable question.
      • Test the survey experience across devices for mobile users.
    • Communicate the survey’s value so users will be more likely to donate their time.
    • Act on feedback: follow up on both positive and negative responses so users see the value in responding.
    • Consider attaching an incentive to responding (e.g. name entered in a monthly draw).

    Design and implement transactional surveys

    Phase 2

    Learn why and how to design a simple survey to assess satisfaction with individual service desk transactions (tickets) and a methodology for survey delivery that will improve response rates.

    Phase 1:

    Phase 2:

    Phase 3:

    Phase 4:

    Understand how to measure customer satisfaction

    Design and implement transactional surveys

    Design and implement relationship surveys

    Analyze and act on feedback

    Use transactional surveys to collect immediate and actionable feedback

    Recall the definition of a transactional survey:

    • Survey that is tied to a specific customer interaction with the service desk (i.e. a ticket).
    • Assesses how satisfied customers are with how the ticket was handled and resolved.
    • Sent immediately after ticket is closed.
    • Short – usually 1 to 3 questions.

    Info-Tech Insight

    While feedback on transactional surveys is specific to a single transaction, even one negative experience can impact the overall perception of the service desk. Pair your transactional surveys with an annual relationship survey to capture broader sentiment toward the service desk.

    Transactional surveys serve several purposes:

    • Gives end users a mechanism to provide feedback when they want to.
    • Provides continual insight into customer satisfaction throughout the year to monitor for trends or issues in between broader surveys.
    • Provides IT leaders with actionable insights into areas for improvement in their processes, knowledge and skills, or customer service.
    • Gives the service desk the opportunity to address any negative experiences or perceptions with customers, to repair the relationship.
    • Feeds into individual or team coaching for service desk staff.

    Make key decisions ahead of launching your transactional surveys

    If you want to get the most of your surveys, you need to do more than just click a button to enable out-of-the-box surveys through your ITSM tool. Make these decisions ahead of time:

    Decision Considerations For more guidance, see
    What are the goals of your survey? Are you hoping to get an accurate pulse of customer sentiment (if so, you may want to randomly send surveys) or give customers the ability to provide feedback any time they have some (if so, send a survey after every ticket)? Slide 25
    How many questions will you ask? Keep the survey as short as possible – ideally only one mandatory question. Slide 26
    What questions will you ask? Do you want a measure of NPS, CES, or CSAT? Do you want to measure overall satisfaction with the interaction or something more specific about the interaction? Slide 27
    What will be the response options/scale? Keep it simple and think about how you will use the data after. Slide 28
    How often will you send the survey? Will it be sent after every ticket, every third ticket, or randomly to a select percentage of tickets, etc.? Slide 29
    What conditions would apply? For example, is there a subset of users who you never want to receive a survey or who you always want to receive a survey? Slide 30
    What mechanism/tool will you use to send the survey? Will your ITSM tool allow you to make all the configurations you need, or will you need to use a separate survey tool? If so, can it integrate to your ITSM solution? Slide 30

    Key decisions, continued

    Decision Considerations For more guidance, see
    What will trigger the survey? Typically, marking the ticket as either ‘resolved’ or ‘closed’ will trigger the survey. Slide 31
    How long after the ticket is closed will you send the survey? You’ll want to leave enough time for the user to respond if the ticket wasn’t resolved properly before completing a survey, but not so much time that they don’t remember the ticket. Slide 31
    Will the survey be sent in a separate email or as part of the ticket resolution email? A separate email might feel like too many emails for the user, but a link within the ticket closure email may be less noticeable. Slide 32
    Will the survey be embedded in email or accessed through a link? If the survey can be embedded into the email, users will be more likely to respond. Slide 32
    How long will the survey link remain active, and will you send any reminders? Leave enough time for the user to respond if they are busy or away, but not so much time that the data would be irrelevant. Balance the need to remind busy end users with the possibility of overwhelming them with survey fatigue. Slide 32
    What other text will be in the main body of the survey email and/or thank you page? Keep messaging short and straightforward and remind users of the benefit to them. Slide 33
    Where will completed surveys be sent/who will have access? Will the technician assigned to the ticket have access or only the manager? What email address/DL will surveys be sent to? Slide 33

    Define the goals of your transactional survey program

    Every survey should have a goal in mind to ensure only relevant and useful data is collected.

    • Your survey program must be backed by clear and actionable goals that will inform all decisions about the survey.
    • Survey questions should be structured around that goal, with every question serving a distinct purpose.
    • If you don’t have a clear plan for how you will action the data from a particular question, exclude it.
    • Don’t run a survey just for the sake of it; wait until you have a clear plan. If customers respond and then see nothing is done with the data, they will learn to avoid your surveys.

    Your survey objectives will also determine how often to send the survey:

    If your objective is:

    Keep a continual pulse on average customer satisfaction

    Gain the opportunity to act on negative feedback for any poor experience

    Then:

    Send survey randomly

    Send survey after every ticket

    Rationale:

    Sending a survey less often will help avoid survey fatigue and increase the chances of users responding whether they have good, bad, or neutral feedback

    Always having a survey available means users can provide feedback every time they want to, including for any poor experience – giving you the chance to act on it.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Service Managers often get caught up in running a transactional survey program because they think it’s standard practice, or they need to report a satisfaction metric. If that’s your only objective, you will fail to derive value from the data and will only turn customers away from responding.

    Design survey content and length

    As you design your survey, keep in mind the following principles:

    1. Keep it short. Your customers won’t bother responding if they see a survey with multiple questions or long questions that require a lot of reading, effort, or time.
    2. Make it simple. This not only makes it easier for your customers to complete, but easier for you to track and monitor.
    3. Tie your survey to your goals. Remember that every question should have a clear and actionable purpose.
    4. Don’t measure anything you can’t control. If you won’t be able to make changes based on the feedback, there’s no value asking about it.
    5. Include an (optional) open-ended question. This will allow customers to provide more detailed feedback or suggestions.

    Q: How many questions should the survey contain?

    A: Ideally, your survey will have only one mandatory question that captures overall satisfaction with the interaction.

    This question can be followed up with an optional open-ended question prompting the respondent for more details. This will provide a lot more context to the overall rating.

    If there are additional questions you need to ask based on your goals, clearly make these questions optional so they don’t deter respondents from completing the survey. For example, they can appear only after the respondent has submitted their overall satisfaction response (i.e. on a separate, thank you page).

    Additional (optional) measures may include:

    • Customer effort score (how easy or difficult was it to get your issue resolved?)
    • Customer service skills of the service desk
    • Technical skills/knowledge of the agents
    • Speed or response or resolution

    Design question wording

    Tips for writing survey questions:

    • Be clear and concise
    • Keep questions as short as possible
    • Cut out any unnecessary words or phrasing
    • Avoid biasing, or leading respondents to select a certain answer
    • Don’t attempt to measure multiple constructs in a single question.

    Sample question wording:

    How satisfied are you with this support experience?

    How would you rate your support experience?

    Please rate your overall satisfaction with the way your issue was handled.

    Instead of this….

    Ask this….

    “We strive to provide excellent service with every interaction. Please rate how satisfied you are with this interaction.”

    “How satisfied were you with this interaction?”

    “How satisfied were you with the customer service skills, knowledge, and responsiveness of the technicians?”

    Choose only one to ask about.

    “How much do you agree that the service you received was excellent?”

    “Please rate the service you received.”

    “On a scale of 1-10, thinking about your most recent experience, how satisfied would you say that you were overall with the way that your ticket was resolved?”

    “How satisfied were you with your ticket resolution?”

    Choose response options

    Once you’ve written your survey question, you need to design the response options for the question. Put careful thought into balancing ease of responding for the user with what will give you the actionable data you need to meet your goals. Keep the following in mind:

    When planning your response options, remember to keep the survey as easy to respond to as possible – this means allowing a one-click response and a scale that’s intuitive and simple to interpret.

    Think about how you will use the responses and interpret the data. If you choose a 10-point scale, for example, what would you classify as a negative vs positive response? Would a 5-point scale suffice to get the same data?

    Again, use your goals to inform your response options. If you need a satisfaction metric, you may need a numerical scale. If your goal is just to capture negative responses, you may only need two response options: good vs bad.

    Common response options:

    • Numerical scale (e.g. very dissatisfied to very satisfied on a 5-point scale)
    • Star rating (E.g. rate the experience out of 5 stars)
    • Smiley face scale
    • 2 response options: Good vs Bad (or Satisfied vs Dissatisfied)

    Investigate the capabilities of your ITSM tool. It may only allow one built-in response option style. But if you have the choice, choose the simplest option that aligns with your goals.

    Decide how often to send surveys

    There are two common choices for when to send ticket satisfaction surveys:

    After random tickets

    After every ticket

    Pros

    • May increase response rate by avoiding survey fatigue.
    • May be more likely to capture a range of responses that more accurately reflect sentiment (versus only negative).
    • Gives you the opportunity to receive feedback whenever users have it.
    • If your goal is to act on negative feedback whenever it arises, that’s only possible if you send a survey after every ticket.

    Cons

    • Overrepresents frequent service desk users and underrepresents infrequent users.
    • Users who have feedback to give may not get the chance to give it/service desk can’t act on it.
    • Customers who frequently contact the service desk will be overwhelmed by surveys and may stop responding.
    • Customers may only reply if they have very negative or positive feedback.

    SDI’s 2018 Customer Experience in ITSM survey of service desk professionals found:

    Almost two-thirds (65%) send surveys after every ticket.

    One-third (33%) send surveys after randomly selected tickets are closed.

    Info-Tech Recommendation:

    Send a survey after every ticket so that anyone who has feedback gets the opportunity to provide it – and you always get the chance to act on negative feedback. But, limit how often any one customer receives a ticket to avoid over-surveying them – restrict to anywhere between one survey a week to one per month per customer.

    Plan detailed survey logistics

    Decision #1

    Decision #2

    What tool will you use to deliver the survey?

    What (if any) conditions apply to your survey?

    Considerations

    • How much configuration does your ITSM tool allow? Will it allow you to configure the survey according to your decisions? Many ITSM tools, especially mid-market, do not allow you to change the response options or how often the survey is sent.
    • How does the survey look and act on mobile devices? If a customer receives the survey on their phone, they need to be able to easily respond from there or they won’t bother at all.
    • If you wish to use a different survey tool, does it integrate with your ITSM solution? Would agents have to manually send the survey? If so, how would they choose who to send the survey to, and when?

    Considerations

    Is there a subset of users who you never want to receive a survey (e.g. a specific department, location, role, or title)?

    Is there a subset of users who you always want to receive a survey, no matter how often they contact the service desk (e.g. VIP users, a department that scored low on the annual satisfaction survey, etc.)?

    Are there certain times of the year that you don’t want surveys to go out (e.g. fiscal year end, holidays)?

    Are there times of the day that you don’t want surveys to be sent (e.g. only during business hours; not at the end of the day)?

    Recommendations

    The built-in functionality of your ITSM tool’s surveys will be easiest to send and track; use it if possible. However, if your tool’s survey module is limited and won’t give you the value you need, consider a third-party solution or survey tool that integrates with your ITSM solution and won’t require significant manual effort to send or review the surveys.

    Recommendations

    If your survey module allows you to apply conditions, think about whether any are necessary to apply to either maximize your response rate (e.g. don’t send a survey on a holiday), avoid annoying certain users, or seek extra feedback from dissatisfied users.

    Plan detailed survey logistics

    Decision #2

    Decision #1

    What will trigger the survey?

    When will the survey be sent?

    Considerations

    • Usually a change of ticket status triggers the survey, but you may have the option to send it after the ticket is marked ‘resolved’ or ‘closed’. The risk of sending the survey after the ticket is ‘resolved’ is the issue may not actually be resolved yet, but waiting until it’s ‘closed’ means the user may be less likely to respond as more time has passed.
    • Some tools allow for a survey to be sent after every agent reply.
    • Some have the option to manually generate a survey, which may be useful in some cases; those cases would need to be well defined.

    Considerations

    • Once you’ve decided the trigger for the survey, decide how much time should pass after that trigger before the survey is sent.
    • The amount of time you choose will be highly dependent on the trigger you choose. For example, if you want the ‘resolved’ status to send a survey, you may want to wait 24h to send the survey in case the user responds that their issue hasn’t been properly resolved.
    • If you choose ‘closed’ as your trigger, you may want the survey to be sent immediately, as waiting any longer could further reduce the response rate.
    • Your average resolution time may also impact the survey wait time.

    Recommendations

    Only send the survey once you’re sure the issue has actually been resolved; you could further upset the customer if you ask them how happy they are with the resolution if resolution wasn’t achieved. This means sending the survey once the user confirms resolution (which closes ticket) or the agent closes the ticket.

    Recommendations

    If you are sending the survey upon ticket status moving to ‘resolved’, wait at least 24 hours before sending the survey in case the user responds that their issue wasn’t actually resolved. However, if you are sending the survey after the ticket has been verified resolved and closed, you can send the survey immediately while the experience is still fresh in their memory.

    Plan detailed survey logistics

    Decision #1

    Decision #2

    How will the survey appear in email?

    How long will the survey remain active?

    Considerations

    • If the survey link is included within the ticket resolution email, it’s one less email to fatigue users, but users may not notice there is a survey in the email.
    • If the survey link is included in its own separate email, it will be more noticeable to users, but could risk overwhelming users with too many emails.
    • Can users view the entire survey in the email and respond directly within the email, or do they need to click on a link and respond to the survey elsewhere?

    Considerations

    • Leaving the survey open at least a week will give users who are out of office or busy more time to respond.
    • However, if users respond to the survey too long after their ticket was resolved, they may not remember the interaction well enough to give any meaningful response.
    • Will you send any reminders to users to complete the survey? It may improve response rate, or may lead to survey fatigue from reaching out too often.

    Recommendations

    Send the survey separately from the ticket resolution email or users will never notice it. However, if possible, have the entire survey embedded within the email so users can click to respond directly from their email without having to open a separate link. Reduce effort, to make users more likely to respond.

    Recommendations

    Leave enough time for the user to respond if they are busy or away, but not so much time that the data will be irrelevant. Balance the need to remind busy end users, with the possibility of overwhelming them with survey fatigue. About a week is typical.

    Plan detailed survey logistics

    Decision #1

    Decision #2

    What will the body of the email/messaging say?

    Where will completed surveys be sent?

    Considerations

    • Communicate the value of responding to the survey.
    • Remember, the survey should be as short and concise as possible. A lengthy body of text before the actual survey can deter respondents.
    • Depending on your survey configuration, you may have a ‘thank you’ page that appears after respondents complete the survey. Think about what messaging you can save for that page and what needs to be up front.
    • Ensure there is a clear reference to which ticket the survey is referencing (with the subject of the ticket, not just ticket number).

    Considerations

    • Depending on the complexity of your ITSM tool, you may designate email addresses to receive completed surveys, or configure entire dashboards to display results.
    • Decide who needs to receive all completed surveys in order to take action.
    • Decide whether the agent who resolved the ticket will have access to the full survey response. Note that if they see negative feedback, it may affect morale.
    • Are there any other stakeholders who should receive the immediate completed surveys, or can they view summary reports and dashboards of the results?

    Recommendations

    Most users won’t read a long message, especially if they see it multiple times, so keep the email short and simple. Tell users you value their feedback, indicate which interaction you’re asking about, and say how long the survey should take. Thank them after they submit and tell them you will act on their feedback.

    Recommendations

    Survey results should be sent to the Service Manager, Customer Experience Lead, or whoever is the person responsible for managing the survey feedback. They can choose how to share feedback with specific agents and the service desk team.

    Response rates for transactional surveys are typically low…

    Most IT organizations see transactional survey response rates of less than 20%.

    The image contains a screenshot of a SDI survey taken to demonstrate customer satisfaction respond rate.

    Source: SDI, 2018

    SDI’s 2018 Customer Experience in ITSM survey of service desk professionals found that 69% of respondents had survey response rates of 20% or less. However, they did not distinguish between transactional and relationship surveys.

    Reasons for low response rates:

    • Users tend to only respond if they had a very positive or very negative experience worth writing about, but don’t typically respond for interactions that go as expected or were average.
    • Survey is too long or complicated.
    • Users receive too many requests for feedback.
    • Too much time has passed since the ticket was submitted/resolved and the user doesn’t remember the interaction.
    • Users think their responses disappear into a black hole or aren’t acted upon so they don’t see the value in taking the time to respond. Or, they don’t trust the confidentiality of their responses.

    “In my experience, single digits are a sign of a problem. And a downward trend in response rate is also a sign of a problem. World-class survey response rates for brands with highly engaged customers can be as high as 60%. But I’ve never seen it that high for internal support teams. In my experience, if you get a response rate of 15-20% from your internal customers then you’re doing okay. That’s not to say you should be content with the status quo, you should always be looking for ways to increase it.”

    – David O’Reardon, Founder & CEO of Silversix

    … but there are steps you can take to maximize your response rate

    It is still difficult to achieve high response rates to transactional surveys, but you can at least increase your response rate with these strategies:

    1. Reduce frequency
    2. Don’t over-survey any one user or they will start to ignore the surveys.

    3. Send immediately
    4. Ask for feedback soon after the ticket was resolved so it’s fresh in the user’s memory.

    5. Make it short and simple
    6. Keep the survey short, concise, and simple to respond to.

    7. Make it easy to complete
    8. Minimize effort involved as much as possible. Allow users to respond directly from email and from any device.

    9. Change email messaging
    10. Experiment with your subject line or email messaging to draw more attention.

    11. Respond to feedback
    12. Respond to customers who provide feedback – especially negative – so they know you’re listening.

    13. Act on feedback
    14. Demonstrate that you are acting on feedback so users see the value in responding.

    Use Info-Tech’s survey template as a starting point

    Once you’ve worked through all the decisions in this step, you’re ready to configure your transactional survey in your ITSM solution or survey tool.

    As a starting point, you can leverage Info-Tech’s Transactional Service Desk Survey Templatee to design your templates and wording.

    Make adjustments to match your decisions or your configuration limitations as needed.

    Refer to the key decisions tables on slides 24 and 25 to ensure you’ve made all the configurations necessary as you set up your survey.

    The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's survey templates.

    Design and implement relationship surveys

    Phase 3

    Understand why and how to design a survey to assess overall satisfaction with the service desk across your organization, or use Info-Tech’s diagnostic.

    Phase 1:

    Phase 2:

    Phase 3:

    Phase 4:

    Understand how to measure customer satisfaction

    Design and implement transactional surveys

    Design and implement relationship surveys

    Analyze and act on feedback

    How can we evaluate overall Service Desk service quality?

    Evaluating service quality in any industry is challenging for both those seeking feedback and those consuming the service: “service quality is more difficult for the consumer to evaluate than goods quality.”

    You are in the position of trying to measure something intangible: customer perception, which “result[s] from a comparison of consumer expectations with actual service performance,” which includes both the service outcome and also “the process of service delivery”

    (Source: Parasuraman et al, 1985, 42).

    Your mission is to design a relationship survey that is:

    • Comprehensive but not too long.
    • Easy to understand but complex enough to capture enough detail.
    • Able to capture satisfaction with both the outcome and the experience of receiving the service.

    Use relationship surveys to measure overall service desk service quality

    Recall the definition of a relationship survey:

    • Survey that is sent periodically (i.e. semi-annually or annually) to the entire customer base to measure the overall relationship with the service desk.
    • Shows you where your customer experience is doing well and where it needs improving.
    • Asks customers to rate you based on their overall experience rather than on a specific product or interaction.
    • Longer and more comprehensive than transactional surveys, covering multiple dimensions/ topics.

    Relationship surveys serve several purposes:

    • Gives end users an opportunity to provide overall feedback on a wider range of experiences with IT.
    • Gives IT the opportunity to respond to feedback and show users their voices are heard.
    • Provides insight into year-over-year trends and customer satisfaction.
    • Provides IT leaders the opportunity to segment the results by demographic (e.g. by department, location, or seniority) and target improvements where needed most.
    • Feeds into strategic planning and annual reports on user experience and satisfaction

    Info-Tech Insight

    Annual relationship surveys provide great value in the form of year-over-year internal benchmarking data, which you can use to track improvements and validate the impact of your service improvement efforts.

    Understand the gaps that decrease service quality

    The Service Quality Model (Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry, 1985) shows how perceived service quality is negatively impacted by the gap between expectations for quality service and the perceptions of actual service delivery:

    Gap 1: Consumer expectation – Management perception gap:

    Are there differences between your assumptions about what users want from a service and what those users expect?

    Gap 2: Management perception – Service quality specification gap:

    Do you have challenges translating user expectations for service into standardized processes and guidelines that can meet those expectations?

    Gap 3: Service quality specifications – Service delivery gap:

    Do staff members struggle to carry out the service quality processes when delivering service?

    Gap 4: Service delivery – External communications gap:

    Have users been led to expect more than you can deliver? Alternatively, are users unaware of how the organization ensures quality service, and therefore unable to appreciate the quality of service they receive?

    Gap 5: Expected service – Perceived service gap:

    Is there a discrepancy between users’ expectations and their perception of the service they received (regardless of any user misunderstanding)?

    The image contains a screenshot of the Service Quality Model to demonstrate the consumer and consumers.

    Your survey questions about service and support should provide insight into where these gaps exist in your organization

    Make key decisions ahead of launch

    Decision/step Considerations
    Align the relationship survey with your goals Align what is motivating you to launch the survey at this time and the outcomes it is intended to feed into.
    Identify what you’re measuring Clarify the purpose of the questions. Are you measuring feedback on your service desk, specifically? On all of IT? Are you trying to capture user effort? User satisfaction? These decisions will affect how you word your questions.
    Determine a framework for your survey Reporting on results and tracking year-over-year changes will be easier if you design a basic framework that your survey questions fall into. Consider drawing on an existing service quality framework to match best practices in other industries.
    Cover logistical details Designing a relationship survey requires attention to many details that may initially be overlooked: the survey’s length and timing, who it should be sent to and how, what demographic info you need to collect to slice and dice the results, and if it will be possible to conduct the survey anonymously.
    Design question wording It is important to keep questions clear and concise and to avoid overly lengthy surveys.
    Select answer scales The answer scales you select will depend on how you have worded the questions. There is a wide range of answer scales available to you; decide which ones will produce the most meaningful data.
    Test the survey Testing the survey before widely distributing it is key. When collecting feedback, conduct at least a few in person observations of someone taking the survey to get their unvarnished first impressions.
    Monitor and maximize your response rate Ensure success by staying on top of the survey during the period it is open.

    Align the relationship survey with your goals

    What is motivating you to launch the survey at this time?

    Is there a renewed focus on customer service satisfaction? If so, this survey will track the initiative’s success, so its questions must align with the sponsors’ expectations.

    Are you surveying customer satisfaction in order to comply with legislation, or directives to measure customer service quality?

    What objectives/outcomes will this survey feed into?

    What do you need to report on to your stakeholders? Have they communicated any expectations regarding the data they expect to see?

    Does the CIO want the annual survey to measure end-user satisfaction with all of IT?

    • Or do you only want to measure satisfaction with one set of processes (e.g. Service Desk)?
    • Are you seeking feedback on a project (e.g. implementation of new ERP)?
    • Are you seeking feedback on the application portfolio?

    In 1993 the U.S. president issued an Executive Order requiring executive agencies to “survey customers to determine the kind and quality of services they want and their level of satisfaction with existing services” and “post service standards and measure results against them.” (Clinton, 1993)

    Identify what you’re measuring

    Examples of Measures

    Clarify the purpose of the questions

    Each question should measure something specific you want to track and be phrased accordingly.

    Are you measuring feedback on the service desk?

    Service desk professionalism

    Are you measuring user satisfaction?

    Service desk timeliness

    Your customers’ happiness with aspects of IT’s service offerings and customer service

    Trust in agents’ knowledge

    Users’ preferred ticket intake channel (e.g. portal vs phone)

    Satisfaction with self-serve features

    Are you measuring user effort?

    Are you measuring feedback on IT overall?

    Satisfaction with IT’s ability to enable the business

    How much effort your customer needs to put forth to accomplish what they wanted/how much friction your service causes or alleviates

    Satisfaction with company-issued devices

    Satisfaction with network/Wi-Fi

    Satisfaction with applications

    Info-Tech Insight

    As you compose survey questions, decide whether they are intended to capture user satisfaction or effort: this will influence how the question is worded. Include a mix of both.

    Determine a framework for your survey

    If your relationship survey covers satisfaction with service support, ensure the questions cover the major aspects of service quality. You may wish to align your questions on support with existing frameworks: for example, the SERVQUAL service quality measurement instrument identifies 5 dimensions of service quality: Reliability, Assurance, Tangibles, Empathy, and Responsiveness (see below). As you design the survey, consider if the questions relate to these five dimensions. If you have overlooked any of the dimensions, consider if you need to revise or add questions.

    Service dimension

    Definition

    Sample questions

    Reliability

    “Ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately”1

    • How satisfied are you with the effectiveness of Service Desk’s ability to resolve reported issues?

    Assurance

    “Knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to convey trust and confidence”2

    • How satisfied are you with the technical knowledge of the Service Desk staff?
    • When you have an IT issue, how likely are you to contact Service Desk by phone?

    Tangibles

    “Appearance of physical facilities, equipment, personnel, and communication materials”3

    • How satisfied are you that employees in your department have all the necessary technology to ensure optimal job performance?
    • How satisfied are you with IT’s ability to communicate to you regarding the information you need to perform your job effectively?

    Empathy

    “Caring, individualized attention the firm provides its customers”4

    • How satisfied are you that IT staff interact with end users in a respectful and professional manner?

    Responsiveness

    “Willingness to help customers and provide prompt service”5

    • How satisfied are you with the timeliness of Service Desk’s resolution to reported issues?
    1-5. Arlen, Chris,2022. Paraphrasing Zeithaml, Parasuraman, and Berry, 1990.

    Cover logistical details of the survey

    Identify who you will send it to

    Will you survey your entire user base or a specific subsection? For example, a higher education institution may choose to survey students separately from staff and faculty. If you are gathering data on customer satisfaction with a specific implementation, only survey the affected stakeholders.

    Determine timing

    Avoid sending out the survey during known periods of time pressure or absence (e.g. financial year-end, summer vacation).

    Decide upon its length

    Consider what survey length your users can tolerate. Configure the survey to show the respondents’ progression or their percentage complete.

    Clearly introduce the survey

    The survey should begin with an introduction that thanks users for completing the survey, indicates its length and anonymity status, and conveys how the data will be used, along with who the participants should contact with any questions about the survey.

    Decide upon incentives

    Will you incentivize participation (e.g. by entering the participants in a draw or rewarding highest-participating department)?

    Collect demographic information

    Ensure your data can be “sliced and diced” to give you more granular insights into the results. Ask respondents for information such as department, location, seniority, and tenure to help with your trend analysis later.

    Clarify if anonymous

    Users may be more comfortable participating if they can do so anonymously (Quantisoft, n.d.). If you promise anonymity, ensure your survey software/ partner can support this claim. Note the difference between anonymity (identity of participant is not collected) and confidentiality (identifying data is collected but removed from the reported results).

    Decide how to deliver the survey

    Will you be distributing the survey yourself through your own licensed software (e.g. through Microsoft Forms if you are an MS shop)? Or, will you be partnering with a third-party provider? Is the survey optimized for mobile? Some find up to 1/3 of participants use mobile devices for their surveys (O’Reardon, 2018).

    Use the Sample Size Calculator to determine your ideal sample size

    Use Info-Tech’s Sample Size Calculator to calculate the number of people you need to complete your survey to have statistically representative results.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Sample Size Calculator.

    In the example above, the service desk supports 1000 total users (and sent the survey to each one). To be 95% confident that the survey results fall within 5% of the true value (if every user responded), they would need 278 respondents to complete their survey. In other words, to have a sample that is representative of the whole population, they would need 278 completed surveys.

    Explanation of terms:

    Confidence Level: A measure of how reliable your survey is. It represents the probability that your sample accurately reflects the true population (e.g. your entire user base). The industry standard is typically 95%. This means that 95 times out of 100, the true data value that you would get if you surveyed the entire population would fall within the margin of error.

    Margin of Error: A measure of how accurate the data is, also known as the confidence interval. It represents the degree of error around the data point, or the range of values above and below the actual results from a survey. A typical margin of error is 5%. This means that if your survey sample had a score of 70%, the true value if you sampled the entire population would be between 65% and 75%. To narrow the margin of error, you would need a bigger sample size.

    Population Size: The total set of people you want to study with your survey. For example, the total number of users you support.

    Sample Size: The number of people who participate in your survey (i.e. complete the survey) out of the total population.

    Info-Tech’s End-User Satisfaction Diagnostics

    If you choose to leverage a third-party partner, an Info-Tech satisfaction survey may already be part of your membership. There are two options, depending on your needs:

    I need to measure and report customer satisfaction with all of IT:

    • IT’s ability to enable the organization to meet its existing goals, innovate, adapt to business needs, and provide the necessary technology.
    • IT’s ability to provide training, respond to feedback, and behave professionally.
    • Satisfaction with IT services and applications.

    Both products measure end-user satisfaction

    One is more general to IT

    One is more specific to service desk

    I need to measure and report more granularly on Service Desk customer satisfaction:

    • Efficacy and timeliness of resolutions
    • Technical and communication skills
    • Ease of contacting the service desk
    • Effectiveness of portal/ website
    • Ability to collect and apply user feedback

    Choose Info-Tech's End User Satisfaction Survey

    Choose Info-Tech’s Service Desk Satisfaction Survey

    Design question wording

    Write accessible questions:

    Instead of this….

    Ask this….

    48% of US adults meet or exceed PIACC literacy level 3 and thus able to deal with texts that are “often dense or lengthy.”

    52% of US adults meet level 2 or lower.

    Keep questions clear and concise. Avoid overly lengthy surveys.

    Source: Highlights of the 2017 U.S. PIAAC Results Web Report
    1. How satisfied are you with the response times of the service desk?
    2. How satisfied are you with the timeliness of the service desk?

    Users will have difficulty perceiving the difference between these two questions.

    1. How satisfied are you with the time we take to acknowledge receipt of your ticket?
    2. How satisfied are you with the time we take to completely resolve your ticket?

    Tips for writing survey questions:

    “How satisfied are you with the customer service skills, knowledge, and responsiveness of the technicians?”

    This question measures too many things and the data will not be useful.

    Choose only one to ask about.

    • Cut out any unnecessary words or phrasing. Highlight/bold key words or phrases.
    • Avoid biasing or leading respondents to select a certain answer.
    • Don’t attempt to measure multiple constructs in a single question.

    “On a scale of 1-10, thinking about the past year, how satisfied would you say that you were overall with the way that your tickets were resolved?”

    This question is too wordy.

    “How satisfied were you with your ticket resolution?”

    Choose answer scales that best fit your questions and reporting needs

    Likert scale

    Respondents select from a range of statements the position with which they most agree:

    E.g. How satisfied are you with how long it generally takes to resolve your issue completely?

    E.g. Very dissatisfied/Somewhat dissatisfied/ Neutral/ Somewhat satisfied/ Very satisfied/ NA

    Frequency scale

    How often does the respondent have to do something, or how often do they encounter something?

    E.g. How frequently do you need to re-open tickets that have been closed without being satisfactorily resolved?

    E.g. Never/ Rarely/ Sometimes/ Often/ Always/ NA

    Numeric scale

    By asking users to rate their satisfaction on a numeric scale (e.g., 1-5, 1-10), you can facilitate reporting on averages:

    E.g. How satisfied are you with IS’s ability to provide services to allow the organization to meet its goals?

    E.g. 1 – Not at all Satisfied to 10 – Fully Satisfied / NA

    Forced ranking

    Learn more about your users’ priorities by asking them to rank answers from most to least important, or selecting their top choices (Sauro, 2018):

    E.g. From the following list, drag and drop the 3 aspects of our service that are most important to you into the box on the right.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Always include an optional open-ended question, which allows customers to provide more feedback or suggestions.

    Test the survey before launching

    Review your questions for repetition and ask for feedback on your survey draft to discover if readers interpret the questions differently than you intended.

    Test the survey with different stakeholder groups:

    • IT staff: To discover overlooked topics.
    • Representatives of your end-user population: To discover whether they understand the intention of the questions.
    • Executives: To validate whether you are capturing the data they are interested in reporting on.

    Testing methodology:

    • Ask your test subjects to take the survey in your presence so you can monitor their experience as they take it.
    • Ask them to narrate their experience as they take the survey.
    • Watch for:
      • The time it takes to complete the survey.
      • Moments when they struggle or are uncertain with the survey’s wording.
      • Questions they find repetitive or pointless.

    Info-Tech Insight

    In the survey testing phase, try to capture at least a few real-time responses to the survey. If you collect survey feedback only once the test is over, you may miss some key insights into the user experience of navigating the survey.

    “Follow the golden rule: think of your audience and what they may or may not know. Think about what kinds of outside pressures they may bring to the work you’re giving them. What time constraints do they have?”

    – Sally Colwell, Project Officer, Government of Canada Pension Centre

    Monitor and maximize your response rate

    Ensure success by staying on top of the survey during the period it is open.

    • When will your users complete the survey? You know your own organization’s culture best, but SurveyMonkey found that weekday survey responses peaked at mid-morning and mid-afternoon (Wronski). Ensure you send the communication at a time it will not be overlooked. For example, some studies found Mondays to have higher response rates; however, the data is not consistent (Amaresan, 2021). Send the survey at a time you believe your users are least likely to be inundated with other notifications.
    • Have a trusted leader send out the first communication informing the end-user base of the survey. Ensure the recipient understands your motivation and how their responses will be used to benefit them (O’Reardon, 2016). Remind them that participating in the survey benefits them: since IT is taking actions based on their feedback, it’s their chance to improve their employee experience of the IT services and tools they use to do their job.
    • In the introductory communication, test different email subject lines and email body content to learn which versions increase respondents’ rates of opening the survey link, and “keep it short and clear” (O’Reardon, 2016).
    • If your users tend to mistrust emailed links due to security training, tell them how to confirm the legitimacy of the survey.

    “[Send] one reminder to those who haven’t completed the survey after a few days. Don’t use the word ‘reminder’ because that’ll go straight in the bin, better to say something like, ‘Another chance to provide your feedback’”

    – David O’Reardon, Founder & CEO of Silversix

    Analyze and act on feedback

    Phase 4

    Measure and analyze the results of both surveys and build a plan to act on both positive and negative feedback and communicate the results with the organization.

    Phase 1:

    Phase 2:

    Phase 3:

    Phase 4:

    Understand how to measure customer satisfaction

    Design and implement transactional surveys

    Design and implement relationship surveys

    Analyze and act on feedback

    Leverage the service recovery paradox to improve customer satisfaction

    The image contains a screenshot of a graph to demonstrate the service recovery paradox.

    A service failure or a poor experience isn’t what determines customer satisfaction – it’s how you respond to the issue and take steps to fix it that really matters.

    This means one poor experience with the service desk doesn’t necessarily lead to an unhappy user; if you quickly and effectively respond to negative feedback to repair the relationship, the customer may be even happier afterwards because you demonstrated that you value them.

    “Every complaint becomes an opportunity to turn a bad IT customer experience into a great one.”

    – David O’Reardon, Founder & CEO of Silversix

    Collecting feedback is only the first step in the customer feedback loop

    Closing the feedback loop is one of the most important yet forgotten steps in the process.

    1. Collect Feedback
    • Send transactional surveys after every ticket is resolved.
    • Send a broader annual relationship survey to all users.
  • Analyze Feedback
    • Calculate satisfaction scores.
    • Read open-ended comments.
    • Analyze for trends, categories, common issues and priorities.
  • Act on Feedback
    • Respond to users who provided feedback.
    • Make improvements based on feedback.
  • Communicate Results
    • Communicate feedback results and improvements made to respondents and to service desk staff.
    • Summarize results and actions to key stakeholders and business leaders.

    Act on feedback to get the true value of your satisfaction program

    • SDI (2018) survey data shows that the majority of service desk professionals are using their customer satisfaction data to feed into service improvements. However, 30% still aren’t doing anything with the feedback they collect.
    • Collecting feedback is only one half of a good customer feedback program. Acting on that feedback is critical to the success of the program.
    • Using feedback to make improvements not only benefits the service desk but shows users the value of responding and will increase future response rates.
    The image contains a screenshot of a bar graph that demonstrates SDI: What do service desk professionals do with customer satisfaction data?

    “Your IT service desk’s CSAT survey should be the means of improving your service (and the employee experience), and something that encourages people to provide even more feedback, not just the means for understanding how well it’s doing”

    – Joe the IT Guy, SysAid

    Assign responsibility for acting on feedback

    If collecting and analyzing customer feedback is something that happens off the side of your desk, it either won’t get done or won’t get done well.

    • Formalize the customer satisfaction program. It’s not a one-time task, but an ongoing initiative that requires significant time and dedication.
    • Be clear on who is accountable for the program and who is responsible for all the tasks involved for both transactional and relationship survey data collection, analysis, and communication.

    Assign accountability for the customer feedback program to one person (i.e. Service Desk Manager, Service Manager, Infrastructure & Operations Lead, IT Director), who may take on or assign responsibilities such as:

    • Designing surveys, including survey questions and response options.
    • Configuring survey(s) in ITSM or survey tool.
    • Sending relationship surveys and subsequent reminders to the organization.
    • Communicating results of both surveys to internal staff, business leaders, and end users.
    • Analyzing results.
    • Feeding results into improvement plans, coaching, and training.
    • Creating reports and dashboards to monitor scores and trends.

    Info-Tech Insight

    While feedback can feed into internal coaching and training, the goal should never be to place blame or use metrics to punish agents with poor results. The focus should always be on improving the experience for end users.

    Determine how and how often to analyze feedback data

    • Analyze and report scores from both transactional and relationship surveys to get a more holistic picture of satisfaction across the organization.
    • Determine how you will calculate and present satisfaction ratings/scores, both overall and for individual questions. See tips on the right for calculating and presenting NPS and CSAT scores.
    • A single satisfaction score doesn’t tell the full story; calculate satisfaction scores at multiple levels to determine where improvements are most needed.
      • For example, satisfaction by service desk tier, team or location, by business department or location, by customer group, etc.
    • Analyze survey data regularly to ensure you communicate and act on feedback promptly and avoid further alienating dissatisfied users. Transactional survey feedback should be reviewed at least weekly, but ideally in real time, as resources allow.

    Calculating NPS Scores

    Categorize respondents into 3 groups:

    • 9-10 = Promoters, 7-8 = Neutral, 1-6 = Detractors

    Calculate overall NPS score:

    • % Promoters - % Detractors

    Calculating CSAT Scores

    • CSAT is usually presented as a percentage representing the average score.
    • To calculate, take the total of all scores, divide by the maximum possible score, then multiply by 100. For example, a satisfaction rating of 80% means on average, users gave a rating of 4/5 or 8/10.
    • Note that some organizations present CSAT as the percentage of “satisfied” users, with satisfied being defined as either “yes” on a two-point scale or a score of 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale. Be clear how you are defining your satisfaction rating.

    Don’t neglect qualitative feedback

    While it may be more difficult and time-consuming to analyze, the reward is also greater in terms of value derived from the data.

    Why analyze qualitative data

    How to analyze qualitative data

    • Quantitative data (i.e. numerical satisfaction scores) tells you how many people are satisfied vs dissatisfied, but it doesn’t tell you why they feel that way.
    • If you limit your data analysis to only reporting numerical scores, you will miss out on key insights that can be derived from open-ended feedback.
    • Qualitative data from open-ended survey questions provides:
      • Explanations for the numbers
      • More detailed insight into why respondents feel a certain way
      • More honest and open feedback
      • Insight into areas you may not have thought to ask about
      • New ideas and recommendations

    Methods range in sophistication; choose a technique depending on your tools available and goals of your program.

    1. Manual 2. Semi-automated 3. AI & Analysis Tools
    • Read all comments.
    • Sort into positive vs negative groups.
    • Add tags to categorize comments (e.g. by theme, keyword, service).
    • Look for trends and priorities, differences across groups.
    • Run a script to search for specific keywords.
    • Use a word cloud generator to visualize the most commonly mentioned words (e.g. laptop, email).
    • Due to limitations, manual analysis will still be necessary.
    • Use a feedback analysis/text analysis tool to mine feedback.
    • Software will present reports and data visualizations of common themes.
    • AI-powered tools can automatically detect sentiment or emotion in comments or run a topic analysis.

    Define a process to respond to both negative and positive feedback

    Successful customer satisfaction programs respond effectively to both positive and negative outcomes. Late or lack of responses to negative comments may increase customer frustration, while not responding at all to the positive comments may give the perception of indifference.

    1. Define what qualifies as a positive vs negative score
    2. E.g. Scores of 1 to 2 out of 5 are negative, scores of 4 to 5 out of 5 are positive.

    3. Define process to respond to negative feedback
    • Negative responses should go directly to the Service Desk Manager or whoever is accountable for feedback.
    • Set an SLO for when the user will be contacted. It should be within 24h but ideally much sooner.
    • Investigate the issue to understand exactly what happened and get to the root cause.
    • Identify remediation steps to ensure the issue does not occur again.
    • Communicate to the customer the action you have taken to improve.
  • Define process to respond to positive feedback
    • Positive responses should also be reviewed by the person accountable for feedback, but the timeline to respond may be longer.
    • Show respondents that you value their time by thanking them for responding. Showing appreciate helps to build a long-term relationship with the user.
    • Share positive results with the team to improve morale, and as a coaching/training mechanism.
    • Consider how to use positive feedback as an incentive or reward.

    Build a plan to communicate results to various stakeholders

    Regular communication about your feedback results and action plan tied to those results is critical to the success of your feedback program. Build your communication plan around these questions:

    1. Who should receive communication?

    Each audience will require different messaging, so start by identifying who those audiences are. At a minimum, you should communicate to your end users who provided feedback, your service desk/IT team, and business leaders or stakeholders.

    2. What information do they need?

    End users: Thank them for providing feedback. Demonstrate what you will do with that feedback.

    IT team: Share results and what you need them to do differently as a result.

    Business leaders: Share results, highlight successes, share action plan for improvement.

    3. Who is responsible for communication?

    Typically, this will be the person who is accountable for the customer feedback program, but you may have different people responsible for communicating to different audiences.

    4. When will you communicate?

    Frequency of communication will depend on the survey type – relationship or transactional – as well as the audience, with internal communication being much more frequent than end-user communication.

    5. How will you communicate?

    Again, cater your approach to the audience and choose a method that will resonate with them. End users may view an email, an update on the portal, a video, or update in a company meeting; your internal IT team can view results on a dashboard and have regular meetings.

    Communication to your users impacts both response rates and satisfaction

    Based on the Customer Communication Cycle by David O’Reardon, 2018
    1. Ask users to provide feedback through transactional and relationship surveys.
    2. Thank them for completing the survey – show that you value their time, regardless of the type of feedback they submitted.
    3. Be transparent and summarize the results of the survey(s). Make it easy to digest with simple satisfaction scores and a summary of the main insights or priorities revealed.
    4. Before asking for feedback, explain how you will use feedback to improve the service. After collecting feedback, share your plan for making improvements based on what the data told you.
    5. After you’ve made changes, communicate again to share the results with respondents. Make it clear that their feedback had a direct result on the service they receive. Communicating this before running another survey will also increase the likelihood of respondents providing feedback again.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Focus your communications to users around them, not you. Demonstrate that you need feedback to improve their experience, not just for you to collect data.

    Translate feedback into actionable improvements

    Taking action on feedback is arguably the most important step of the whole customer feedback program.

    Prioritize improvements

    Prioritize improvements based on low scores and most commonly received feedback, then build into an action plan.

    Take immediate action on negative feedback

    Investigate the issue, diagnose the root cause, and repair both the relationship and issue – just like you would an incident.

    Apply lessons learned from positive feedback

    Don’t neglect actions you can take from positive feedback – identify how you can expand upon or leverage the things you’re doing well.

    Use feedback in coaching and training

    Share positive experiences with the team as lessons learned, and use negative feedback as an input to coaching and training.

    Make the change stick

    After making a change, train and communicate it to your team to ensure the change sticks and any negative experiences don’t happen again.

    “Without converting feedback into actions, surveys can become just a pointless exercise in number watching.”

    – David O’Reardon, Founder & CEO of Silversix

    Info-Tech Insight

    Outline exactly what you plan to do to address customer feedback in an action plan, and regularly review that action plan to select and prioritize initiatives and monitor progress.

    For more guidance on tracking and prioritizing ongoing improvement initiatives, see the blueprints Optimize the Service Desk with a Shift Left Strategy and Build a Continual Improvement Plan for the Service Desk.

    Leverage Info-Tech resources to guide your improvement efforts

    Map your identified improvements to the relevant resource that can help:

    Improve service desk processes:

    Improve end-user self-service options:

    Assess and optimize service desk staffing:

    Improve ease of contacting the service desk:

    Standardize the Service Desk Optimize the Service Desk With a Shift-Left Strategy Staff the Service Desk to Meet Demand Improve Service Desk Ticket Intake

    Improve service desk processes:

    Improve end-user self-service options:

    Assess and optimize service desk staffing:

    Improve ease of contacting the service desk::

    Improve Incident and Problem Management Improve Incident and Problem Management Deliver a Customer Service Training Program to Your IT Department Modernize and Transform Your End-User Computing Strategy

    Map process for acting on relationship survey feedback

    Use Info-Tech’s Relationship Satisfaction Survey Review Process workflow as a template to define your own process.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Relationship Satisfaction Survey Review Process.

    Map process for acting on transactional survey feedback

    Use Info-Tech’s Transactional Satisfaction Survey Review Process workflow as a template to define your own process.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Transactional Satisfaction Survey Review Process.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Standardize the Service Desk

    This project will help you build and improve essential service desk processes, including incident management, request fulfillment, and knowledge management to create a sustainable service desk.

    Optimize the Service Desk With a Shift-Left Strategy

    This project will help you build a strategy to shift service support left to optimize your service desk operations and increase end-user satisfaction.

    Build a Continual Improvement Plan

    This project will help you build a continual improvement plan for the service desk to review key processes and services and manage the progress of improvement initiatives.

    Deliver a Customer Service Training Program to Your IT Department

    This project will help you deliver a targeted customer service training program to your IT team to enhance their customer service skills when dealing with end users, improve overall service delivery and increase customer satisfaction.

    Sources Cited

    Amaresan, Swetha. “The best time to send a survey, according to 5 studies.” Hubspot. 15 Jun 2021. Accessed October 2022.
    Arlen, Chris. “The 5 Service Dimensions All Customers Care About.” Service Performance Inc. n.d. Accessed October 2022.
    Clinton, William Jefferson. “Setting Customer Service Standards.” (1993). Federal Register, 58(176).
    “Understanding Confidentiality and Anonymity.” The Evergreen State College. 2022. Accessed October 2022.
    "Highlights of the 2017 U.S. PIAAC Results Web Report" (NCES 2020-777). U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics.
    Joe the IT Guy. “Are IT Support’s Customer Satisfaction Surveys Their Own Worst Enemy?” Joe the IT Guy. 29 August 2018. Accessed October 2022.
    O’Reardon, David. “10 Ways to Get the Most out of your ITSM Ticket Surveys.” LinkedIn. 2 July 2019. Accessed October 2022.
    O'Reardon, David. "13 Ways to increase the response rate of your Service Desk surveys".LinkedIn. 8 June 2016. Accessed October 2022.
    O’Reardon, David. “IT Customer Feedback Management – A Why & How Q&A with an Expert.” LinkedIn. 13 March 2018. Accessed October 2022.
    Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Berry, L. L. (1985). "A Conceptual Model of Service Quality and Its Implications for Future Research." Journal of Marketing, 49(4), 41–50.
    Quantisoft. "How to Increase IT Help Desk Customer Satisfaction and IT Help Desk Performance.“ Quantisoft. n.d. Accessed November 2022.
    Rumberg, Jeff. “Metric of the Month: Customer Effort.” HDI. 26 Mar 2020. Accessed September 2022.
    Sauro, Jeff. “15 Common Rating Scales Explained.” MeasuringU. 15 August 2018. Accessed October 2022.
    SDI. “Customer Experience in ITSM.” SDI. 2018. Accessed October 2022.
    SDI. “CX: Delivering Happiness – The Series, Part 1.” SDI. 12 January 2021. Accessed October 2022.
    Wronski, Laura. “Who responds to online surveys at each hour of the day?” SurveyMonkey. n.d. Accessed October 2022.

    Research contributors

    Sally Colwell

    Project Officer

    Government of Canada Pension Centre

    Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence

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    • Parent Category Name: Development
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    • Your organization is looking to create consistency across all Agile teams to drive greater business results and alignment.
    • You are seeking to organically grow Agile capabilities within the organization through a set of support structures and facilitated through shared learning and capabilities.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Social capital can be an enabler, but also a barrier. People can only manage a finite number of relationships; ensure that the connections the Center of Excellence (CoE) facilitates are purposeful.
    • Don’t over govern. Empowerment is critical to enable improvements; set boundaries and let teams work inside them with autonomy.
    • Legitimize through listening. A CoE will not be leveraged unless it aligns with the needs of its users. Invest the time to align with the functional expectations of your Agile teams.

    Impact and Result

    • Create a set of service offerings aligned with both corporate objectives and the functional expectations of its customers to ensure broad support and utility of the invested resources.
    • Understand some of the cultural and processual challenges you will face when forming a center of excellence, and address them using Info-Tech’s Agile adoption model.

    Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should build an Agile Center of Excellence, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Strategically align the Center of Excellence

    Create strategic alignment between the CoE and the organization’s goals, objectives, and vision.

    • Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence – Phase 1: Strategically Align the Center of Excellence

    2. Standardize the Center of Excellence’s service offerings

    Build an engagement plan based on a standardized adoption model to ensure your CoE service offerings are accessible and consistent across the organization.

    • Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence – Phase 2: Standardize the Center of Excellence’s Service Offerings

    3. Operate the Center of Excellence

    Operate the CoE to provide service offerings to Agile teams, identify improvements to optimize the function of your Agile teams, and effectively manage and communicate change.

    • Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence – Phase 3: Operationalize Your Agile Center of Excellence
    • ACE Satisfaction Survey
    • CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool
    • ACE Benefits Tracking Tool
    • ACE Communications Deck
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Determine Vision of CoE

    The Purpose

    Create strategic alignment between the CoE and the organization’s goals, objectives, and vision.

    Understand how your key stakeholders will impact the longevity of your CoE.

    Determine your CoE structure and staff.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Top-down alignment with strategic aims of the organization.

    A set of high-level use cases to form the CoE’s service offerings around.

    Visualization of key stakeholders, with their current and desired power and involvement documented.

    Activities

    1.1 Identify and prioritize organizational business objectives.

    1.2 Form use cases for the points of alignment between your Agile Center of Excellence (ACE) and business objectives.

    1.3 Prioritize your ACE stakeholders.

    Outputs

    Prioritized business objectives

    Business-aligned use cases to form CoE’s service offerings

    Stakeholder map of key influencers

    2 Define Service Offerings of CoE

    The Purpose

    Document the functional expectations of the Agile teams.

    Refine your business-aligned use cases with your collected data to achieve both business and functional alignment.

    Create a capability map that visualizes and prioritizes your key service offerings.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding of some of the identified concerns, pain points, and potential opportunities from your stakeholders.

    Refined use cases that define the service offerings the CoE provides to its customers.

    Prioritization for the creation of service offerings with a capability map.

    Activities

    2.1 Classified pains and opportunities.

    2.2 Refine your use cases to identify your ACE functions and services.

    2.3 Visualize your ACE functions and service offerings with a capability map.

    Outputs

    Classified pains and opportunities

    Refined use cases based on pains and opportunities identified during ACE requirements gathering

    ACE Capability Map

    3 Define Engagement Plans

    The Purpose

    Align service offerings with an Agile adoption model so that teams have a structured way to build their skills.

    Standardize the way your organization will interact with the Center of Excellence to ensure consistency in best practices.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Mechanisms put in place for continual improvement and personal development for your Agile teams.

    Interaction with the CoE is standardized via engagement plans to ensure consistency in best practices and predictability for resourcing purposes.

    Activities

    3.1 Further categorize your use cases within the Agile adoption model.

    3.2 Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption.

    Outputs

    Adoption-aligned service offerings

    Role-based engagement plans

    4 Define Metrics and Plan Communications

    The Purpose

    Develop a set of metrics for the CoE to monitor business-aligned outcomes with.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    The foundations of continuous improvement are established with a robust set of Agile metrics.

    Activities

    4.1 Define metrics that align with your Agile business objectives.

    4.2 Define target ACE performance metrics.

    4.3 Define Agile adoption metrics.

    4.4 Assess the interaction and communication points of your Agile team.

    4.5 Create a communication plan for change.

    Outputs

    Business objective-aligned metrics

    CoE performance metrics

    Agile adoption metrics

    Assessment of organizational design

    CoE communication plan

    Further reading

    Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence

    Achieve ongoing alignment between Agile teams and the business with a set of targeted service offerings.

    ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

    "Inconsistent processes and practices used across Agile teams is frequently cited as a challenge to adopting and scaling Agile within organizations. (VersionOne’s 13th Annual State of Agile Report [N=1,319]) Creating an Agile Center of Excellence (ACE) is a popular way to try to impose structure and improve performance. However, simply establishing an ACE does not guarantee you will be successful with Agile. When setting up an ACE you must: Define ACE services based on identified stakeholder needs. Staff the ACE with respected, “hands on” people, who deliver identifiable value to your Agile teams. Continuously evolve ACE service offerings to maximize stakeholder satisfaction and value delivered."

    Alex Ciraco, Research Director, Applications Practice Info-Tech Research Group

    Our understanding of the problem

    This Research Is Designed For:

    • A CIO who is looking for a way to optimize their Agile capabilities and ensure ongoing alignment with business objectives.
    • An applications director who is looking for mechanisms to inject continuous improvement into organization-wide Agile practices.

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Align your Agile support structure with business objectives and the functional expectations of its users.
    • Standardize the ways in which Agile teams develop and learn to create consistency in purpose and execution.
    • Track and communicate successes to ensure the long-term viability of an Agile Center of Excellence (ACE).

    This Research Will Also Assist

    • Project managers who are tasked with managing Agile projects.
    • Application development managers who are struggling with establishing consistency, transparency, and collaboration across their teams.

    This Research Will Help Them:

    • Provide service offerings to their team members that will help them personally and collectively to develop desired skills.
    • Provide oversight and transparency into Agile projects and outcomes through ongoing monitoring.

    Executive summary

    Situation

    • Your organization has had some success with Agile, but needs to drive consistency across Agile teams for better business results and alignment.
    • You are seeking to organically grow Agile capabilities within the organization through a set of support services and facilitated through shared learning and capabilities.

    Complication

    • Organizational constraints, culture clash, and lack of continuous top-down support are hampering your Agile growth and maturity.
    • Attempts to create consistency across Agile teams and processes fail to account for the expectations of users and stakeholders, leaving them detached from projects and creating resistance.

    Resolution

    • Align the service offerings of your ACE with both corporate objectives and the functional expectations of its stakeholders to ensure broad support and utilization of the invested resources.
    • Understand some of the culture and process challenges you will face when forming an ACE, and address them using Info-Tech’s Agile adoption journey model.
    • Track the progress of the ACE and your Agile teams. Use this data to find root causes for issues, and ideate to implement solutions for challenges as they arise over time.
    • Effectively define and propagate improvements to your Agile teams in order to drive business-valued results.
    • Communicate progress to interested stakeholders to ensure long-term viability of the Center of Excellence (CoE).

    Info-Tech Insight

    1. Define ACE services based on stakeholder needs.Don’t assume you know what your stakeholders need without talking to them.
    2. Staff the ACE strategically. Choose those who are thought leaders and proven change agents.
    3. Continuously improve based on metrics and feedback.Constantly monitor how your ACE is performing and adjust to feedback.

    Info-Tech’s Agile Journey related Blueprints

    1. Stabilize

    Implement Agile Practices That Work

    Begin your Agile transformation with a comprehensive readiness assessment and a pilot project to adopt Agile development practices and behaviors that fit.

    2. Sustain

    YOU ARE HERE

    Spread Best Practices with an Agile Center of Excellence

    Form an ACE to support Agile development at all levels of the organization with thought leadership, strategic development support & process innovation.

    3. Scale

    Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile

    Extend the benefits of your Agile pilot project into your organization by strategically scaling Agile initiatives that will meet stakeholders’ needs.

    4. Satisfy

    Transition to Product Delivery Introduce product-centric delivery practices to drive greater benefits and better delivery outcomes.

    1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE

    1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE

    2.1 Define an adoption plan for Agile teams

    2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan

    2.3 Define metrics to measure success

    3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE

    3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives

    3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives

    Supporting Capabilities and Practices

    Modernize Your SDLC

    Remodel the stages of your lifecycle to standardize your definition of a successful product.

    Build a Strong Foundation for Quality

    Instill quality assurance practices and principles in each stage of your software development lifecycle.

    Implement DevOps Practices That Work

    Fix, deploy, and support applications quicker though development and operations collaboration.

    What is an Agile Center of Excellence?

    NOTE: Organizational change is hard and prone to failure. Determine your organization’s level of readiness for Agile transformation (and recommended actions) by completing Info-Tech’s Agile Transformation Readiness Tool.

    An ACE amplifies good practices that have been successfully employed within your organization, effectively allowing you to extend the benefits obtained from your Agile pilot(s) to a wider audience.

    From the viewpoint of the business, members of the ACE provide expertise and insights to the entire organization in order to facilitate Agile transformation and ensure standard application of Agile good practices.

    From the viewpoint of your Agile teams, it provides a community of individuals that share experiences and lessons learned, propagate new ideas, and raise questions or concerns so that delivering business value is always top of mind.

    An ACE provides the following:

    1. A mechanism to gather thought leadership to maximize the accessibility and reach of your Agile investment.
    2. A mechanism to share innovations and ideas to facilitate knowledge transfer and ensure broadly applicable innovations do not go to waste.
    3. Strategic alignment to ensure that Agile practices are driving value towards business objectives.
    4. Purposeful good practices to ensure that the service offerings provided align with expectations of both your Agile practitioners and stakeholders.

    SIDEBAR: What is a Community of Practice? (And how does it differ from a CoE?)

    Some organizations prefer Communities of Practice (CoP) to Centers of Excellence (CoE). CoPs are different from CoEs:

    A CoP is an affiliation of people who share a common practice and who have a desire to further the practice itself … and of course to share knowledge, refine best practices, and introduce standards. CoPs are defined by their domain of interest, but the membership is a social structure comprised of volunteer practitioners

    – Wenger, E., R. A. McDermott, et al. (2002) Cultivating communities of practice: A guide to managing knowledge, Harvard Business Press.

    CoPs differ from a CoE mainly in that they tend to have no geographical boundaries, they hold no hierarchical power within a firm, and they definitely can never have structure determined by the company. However, one of the most obvious and telling differences lies in the stated motive of members – CoPs exist because they have active practitioner members who are passionate about a specific practice, and the goals of a CoP are to refine and improve their chosen domain of practice – and the members provide discretionary effort that is not paid for by the employer

    – Matthew Loxton (June 1, 2011) CoP vs CoE – What’s the difference, and Why Should You Care?, Wordpress.com

    What to know about CoPs:

    1. Less formal than a CoE
      • Loosely organized by volunteer practitioners who are interested in advancing the practice.
    2. Not the Authoritative Voice
      • Stakeholders engage the CoP voluntarily, and are not bound by them.
    3. Not funded by Organization
      • CoP members are typically volunteers who provide support in addition to their daily responsibilities.
    4. Not covered in this Blueprint
      • In depth analysis on CoPs is outside the scope of this Blueprint.

    What does an ACE do? Six main functions derived from Info-Tech’s CLAIM+G Framework

    1. Learning
    • Provide training and development and enable engagement based on identified interaction points to foster organizational growth.
  • Tooling
    • Promote the use of standardized tooling to improve efficiency and consistency throughout the organization.
  • Supporting
    • Enable your Agile teams to access subject-matter expertise by facilitating knowledge transfer and documenting good practices.
  • Governing
    • Create operational boundaries for Agile teams, and monitor their progress and ability to meet business objectives within these boundaries.
  • Monitoring
    • Demonstrate the value the CoE is providing through effective metric setting and ongoing monitoring of Agile’s effectiveness.
  • Guiding
    • Provide guidance, methodology, and knowledge for teams to leverage to effectively meet organizational business objectives.
  • Many organizations encounter challenges to scaling Agile

    Tackle the following barriers to Agile adoption with a business-aligned ACE.

    List based on reported impediments from VersionOne’s 13th Annual State of Agile Report (N=1,319)

    1. Organizational culture at odds with Agile values
    • The ACE identifies and measures the value of Agile to build support from senior business leaders for shifting the organizational culture and achieving tangible business benefits.
  • General organizational resistance to change
    • Resistance comes from a lack of trust. Optimized value delivery from Info-Tech’s Agile adoption model will build the necessary social capital to drive cultural change.
  • Inadequate management support and sponsorship
    • Establishing an ACE will require senior management support and sponsorship. Its formation sends a strong signal to the organizational leadership that Agile is here to stay.
  • Lack of skills/experience with Agile methods
    • The ACE provides a vehicle to absorb external training into an internal development program so that Agile capabilities can be grown organically within the organization.
  • Inconsistent processes and practices across teams
    • The ACE provides support to individual Agile teams and will guide them to adopt consistent processes and practices which have a proven track record in the organization.
  • Insufficient training and education
    • The ACE will assist teams with obtaining the Agile skills training they need to be effective in the organization, and support a culture of continuous learning.
  • Overcome your Agile scaling challenges with a business aligned ACE

    An ACE drives consistency and transparency without sacrificing the ability to innovate. It can build on the success of your Agile pilot(s) by encouraging practices known to work in your organization.

    Support Agile Teams

    Provide services designed to inject evolving good practices into workflows and remove impediments or roadblocks from your Agile team’s ability to deliver value.

    Maintain Business Alignment

    Maintain alignment with corporate objectives without impeding business agility in the long term. The ACE functions as an interface layer so that changing expectations can be adapted without negatively impacting Agile teams.

    Facilitate Learning Events

    Avoid the risk of innovation and subject-matter expertise being lost or siloed by facilitating knowledge transfer and fostering a continuous learning environment.

    Govern Improvements

    Set baselines, monitor metrics, and run retrospectives to help govern process improvements and ensure that Agile teams are delivering expected benefits.

    Shift Culture

    Instill Agile thinking and behavior into the organization. The ACE must encourage innovation and be an effective agent for change.

    Use your ACE to go from “doing” Agile to “being” Agile

    Organizations that do Agile without embracing the changes in behavior will not reap the benefits.

    Doing what was done before

    • Processes and Tools
    • Comprehensive Documentation
    • Contract Negotiation
    • Following a Plan

    Being Prescriptive

    Going through the motions

    • Uses SCRUM and tools such as Jira
    • Plans multiple sprints in detail
    • Talks to stakeholders once in a release
    • Works off a fixed scope BRD

    Doing Agile

    Living the principles

    • Individuals and Interactions
    • Working Software
    • Customer Collaboration
    • Responding to Change

    Being Agile

    “(‘Doing Agile’ is) just some rituals but without significant change to support the real Agile approach as end-to-end, business integration, value focus, and team empowerment.” - Arie van Bennekum

    Establishing a CoE does not guarantee success

    Simply establishing a Center of Excellence for any discipline does not guarantee its success:

    The 2019 State of DevOps Report found that organizations which had established DevOps CoEs underperformed compared to organizations which adopted other approaches for driving DevOps transformation. (Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2019 [N=~1,000])

    Still, Agile Centers of Excellence can and do successfully drive Agile adoption in organizations. So what sets the successful examples apart from the others? Here’s what some have to say:

    The ACE must be staffed with qualified people with delivery experience! … [It is] effectively a consulting practice, that can evolve and continuously improve its services … These services are collectively about ‘enablement’ as an output, more than pure training … and above all, the ability to empirically measure the progress” – Paul Blaney, TD Bank

    “When leaders haven’t themselves understood and adopted Agile approaches, they may try to scale up Agile the way they have attacked other change initiatives: through top-down plans and directives. The track record is better when they behave like an Agile team. That means viewing various parts of the organization as their customers.” – HBR, “Agile at Scale”

    “the Agile CoE… is truly meant to be measured by the success of all the other groups, not their own…[it] is meant to be serving the teams and helping them improve, not by telling them what to do, but rather by listening, understanding and helping them adapt.” - Bart Gerardi, PMI

    The CoE must also avoid becoming static, as it’s crucial the team can adjust as quickly as business and customer needs change, and evolve the technology as necessary to remain competitive.” – Forbes, “RPA CoE (what you need to know)”

    "The best CoEs are formed from thought leaders and change agents within the CoE domain. They are the process and team innovators who will influence your CoE roadmap and success. Select individuals who feel passionate about Agile." – Hans Eckman, InfoTech

    To be successful with your ACE, do the following…

    Info-Tech Insight

    Simply establishing an Agile Center of Excellence does not guarantee its success. When setting up your ACE, optimize its impact on the organization by doing the following 3 things:

    1. Define ACE services based on stakeholder needs. Be sure to broadly survey your stakeholders and identify the ACE functions and services which will best meet their needs. ACE services must clearly deliver business value to the organization and the Agile teams it supports.
    2. Staff the ACE strategically. Select ACE team members who have real world, hands-on delivery experience, and are well respected by the Agile teams they will serve. Where possible, select internal thought leaders in your organization who have the credibility needed to effect positive change.
    3. Continuously improve ACE services based on metrics and feedback. The value your ACE brings to the organization must be clear and measurable, and do not assume that your functions and services will remain static. You must regularly monitor both your metrics and feedback from your Agile teams, and adjust ACE behavior to improve/maximize these over time.

    Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence

    This blueprint will walk you through the steps needed to build the foundations for operational excellence within an Agile Center of Excellence.

    Phase 1 - Strategically Align the CoE

    Create strategic alignment between the CoE and the organization’s goals, objectives, and vision. This alignment translates into the CoE mandate intended to enhance the way Agile will enable teams to meet business objectives.

    Phase 2 - Standardize the CoEs Service Offerings

    Build an engagement plan based on a standardized adoption model to ensure your CoE service offerings are accessible and consistent across the organization. Create and consolidate key performance indicators to measure the CoEs utility and whether or not the expected value is being translated to tangible results.

    Phase 3 - Operate the CoE

    Operate the CoE to provide service offerings to Agile teams, identify improvements to optimize the function of your Agile teams, and effectively manage and communicate change so that teams can grow within the Agile adoption model and optimize value delivery both within your Agile environment and across functions.

    Info-Tech’s Practice Adoption Journey

    Use Info-Tech’s Practice Adoption Journey model to establish your ACE. Building social capital (stakeholders’ trust in your ability to deliver positive outcomes) incrementally is vital to ensure that everyone is aligned to new mindsets and culture as your Agile practices scale.

    Trust & Competency ↓

    DEFINE

    Begin to document your development workflow or value chain, implement a tracking system for KPIs, and start gathering metrics and reporting them transparently to the appropriate stakeholders.

    ITERATE

    Use collected metrics and retrospectives to stabilize team performance by reducing areas of variability in your workflow and increasing the consistency at which targets are met.

    COLLABORATE

    Use information to support changes and adopt appropriate practices to make incremental improvements to the existing environment.

    EMPOWER

    Drive behavioral and cultural changes that will empower teams to be accountable for their own success and learning.

    INNOVATE

    Use your built-up trust and support practice innovation, driving the definition and adoption of new practices.

    Align your ACE with your organization’s strategy

    This research set will assist you with aligning your ACEs services to the objectives of the business in order to justify the resources and funding required by your Agile program.

    Business Objectives → Alignment ←ACE Functions

    Business justification to continue to fund a Center of Excellence can be a challenge, especially with traditional thinking and rigid stakeholders. Hit the ground running and show value to your key influencers through business alignment and metrics that will ensure that the ACE is worth continuous investment.

    Alignment leads to competitive advantage

    The pace of change in customer expectations, competitive landscapes, and business strategy is continuously increasing. It is critical to develop a method to facilitate ongoing alignment to shifting business and development expectations seamlessly and ensure that your Agile teams are able to deliver expected business value.

    Use Info-Tech’s CoE Operating Model to define the service offerings of your ACE

    Understand where your inputs and outputs lie to create an accessible set of service offerings for your Agile teams.

    The image shows a graphic of the COE Operating Model, showing the inputs and outputs, including Other CoEs (at top); Stakeholder Needs (at left); Metrics and Feedback (at bottom); and ACE Functions and Services (at right)

    Continuously improve the ACE to ensure long-term viability

    Improvement involves the continuous evaluation of the performance of your teams, using well-defined metrics and reasonable benchmarks that are supplemented by analogies and root-cause analysis in retrospectives.

    Monitor

    Monitor your metrics to ensure desired benefits are being realized. The ACE is responsible for ensuring that expected Agile benefits are achievable and on track. Monitor against your defined baselines to create transparency and accountability for desired outcomes.

    Iterate

    Run retrospectives to drive improvements and fixes into Agile projects and processes. Metrics falling short of expectations must be diagnosed and their root causes found, and fixes need to be communicated and injected back into the larger organization.

    Define

    Define metrics and set targets that align with the goals of the ACE. These metrics represent the ACEs expected value to the organization and must be measured against on a regular basis to demonstrate value to your key stakeholders.

    Beware the common risks of implementing your ACE

    Culture clash between Agile teams and larger organization

    Agile leverages empowered teams, meritocracy, and broad collaboration for success, but typical organizations are siloed and hierarchical with top down decision making. There needs to be a plan to enable a smooth transition from the current state towards the Agile target state.

    Persistence of tribal knowledge

    Agile relies on easy and open knowledge sharing, but organizational knowledge can sit in siloes. Employees may also try to protect their expertise for job security. It is important to foster knowledge sharing to ensure that critical know-how is accessible and doesn’t leave the organization with the individual.

    Rigid management structures

    Rigidity in how managers operate (performance reviews, human resource management, etc.) can result in cultural rejection of Agile. People need to be assessed on how they enable their teams rather than as individual contributors. This can help ensure that they are given sufficient opportunities to succeed. More support and less strict governance is key.

    Breakdown due to distributed teams

    When face-to-face interactions are challenging, ensure that you invest in the right communication technologies and remove cultural and process impediments to facilitate organization-wide collaboration. Alternative approaches like using documentation or email will not provide the same experience and value as a face-to-face conversation.

    The State of Maine used an ACE to foster positive cultural change

    CASE STUDY

    Industry - Government

    Source - Cathy Novak, Agile Government Leadership

    The State of Maine’s Agile Center of Excellence

    “The Agile CoE in the State of Maine is completely focused on the discipline of the methodology. Every person who works with Agile, or wants to work with Agile, belongs to the CoE. Every member of the CoE tells the same story, approaches the methodology the same way, and uses the same tools. The CoE also functions as an Agile research lab, experimenting with different standards and tools.

    The usual tools of project management – mission, goals, roles, and a high-level definition of done – can be found in Maine’s Agile CoE. For story mapping, teams use sticky notes on a large wall or whiteboard. Demonstrating progress this way provides for positive team dynamics and a psychological bang. The State of Maine uses a project management framework that serves as its single source of truth. Everyone knows what’s going on at all times and understands the purpose of what they are doing. The Agile team is continually looking for components that can be reused across other agencies and programs.”

    Results:

    • Realized positive culture change, leading to more collaborative and supportive teams.
    • Increased visibility of Agile benefits across functional groups.
    • Standardized methodology across Agile teams and increased innovation and experimentation with new standards and tools.
    • Improved traceability of projects.
    • Increased visibility and ability to determine root causes of problems and right the course when outcomes are not meeting expectations.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    “Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

    Guided Implementation

    “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

    Workshop

    “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

    Consulting

    “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence – project overview

    1. Strategically align the Center of Excellence 2. Standardize the CoEs service offerings 3. Operate the Center of Excellence
    Best-Practice Toolkit

    1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE.

    1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE.

    2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams.

    2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan.

    2.3 Define metrics to measure success.

    3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE.

    3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives.

    3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE.

    Guided Implementations
    • Align your ACE with the business.
    • Align your ACE with its users.
    • Dissect the key attributes of Agile adoption.
    • Form engagement plans for your Agile teams.
    • Discuss effective ACE metrics.
    • Conduct a baseline assessment of your Agile environment.
    • Interface ACE with your change management function.
    • Build a communications deck for key stakeholders.
    Onsite Workshop Module 1: Strategically align the ACE Module 2: Standardize the offerings of the ACE Module 3: Prepare for organizational change
    Phase 1 Outcome: Create strategic alignment between the CoE and organizational goals.

    Phase 2 Outcome: Build engagement plans and key performance indicators based on a standardized Agile adoption plan.

    Phase 3 Outcome: Operate the CoEs monitoring function, identify improvements, and manage the change needed to continuously improve.

    Workshop overview

    Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Workshop Module 1 Workshop Module 2 Workshop Module 3 Workshop Module 4
    Activities

    Determine vision of CoE

    1.1 Identify and prioritize organizational business objectives.

    1.2 Form use cases for the points of alignment between your ACE and business objectives.

    1.3 Prioritize your ACE stakeholders.

    Define service offerings of CoE

    2.1 Form a solution matrix to organize your pain points and opportunities.

    2.2 Refine your use cases to identify your ACE functions and services.

    2.3 Visualize your ACE functions and service offerings with a capability map.

    Define engagement plans

    3.1 Further categorize your use cases within the Agile adoption model.

    3.2 Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption.

    Define metrics and plan communications

    4.1 Define metrics that align with your Agile business objectives.

    4.2 Define target ACE performance metrics.

    4.3 Define Agile adoption metrics.

    4.4 Assess the interaction and communication points of your Agile team.

    4.5 Create a communication plan for change.

    Deliverables
    1. Prioritized business objectives
    2. Business-aligned use cases to form CoEs service offerings
    3. Prioritized list of stakeholders
    1. Classified pains and opportunities
    2. Refined use cases based on pains and opportunities identified during ACE requirements gathering
    3. ACE capability map
    1. Adoption-aligned service offerings
    2. Role-specific engagement plans
    1. Business objective-aligned metrics
    2. ACE performance metrics
    3. Agile adoption metrics
    4. Assessment of organization design
    5. ACE Communication Plan

    Phase 1

    Strategically Align the Center of Excellence

    Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence

    Begin by strategically aligning your Center of Excellence

    The first step to creating a high-functioning ACE is to create alignment and consensus amongst your key stakeholders regarding its purpose. Engage in a set of activities to drill down into the organization’s goals and objectives in order to create a set of high-level use cases that will evolve into the service offerings of the ACE.

    Phase 1 - Strategically Align the CoE

    Create strategic alignment between the CoE and the organization’s goals, objectives, and vision. This alignment translates into the CoE mandate intended to enhance the way Agile will enable teams to meet business objectives.

    Phase 2 - Standardize the CoEs Service Offerings

    Build an engagement plan based on a standardized adoption model to ensure your CoE service offerings are accessible and consistent across the organization. Create and consolidate key performance indicators to measure the CoEs utility and whether or not the expected value is being translated to tangible results.

    Phase 3 - Operate the CoE

    Operate the CoE to provide service offerings to Agile teams, identify improvements to optimize the function of your Agile teams, and effectively manage and communicate change so that teams can grow within the Agile adoption model and optimize value delivery both within your Agile environment and across functions.

    Phase 1 outline

    Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

    Guided Implementation 1: Strategically align the ACE

    Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 1

    Step 1.1: Determine the vision of your ACE

    Start with an analyst kick off call:

    • Align your ACE with the business.

    Then complete these activities…

    1.1.1 Optional: Baseline your ACE maturity.

    1.1.2 Identify and prioritize organizational business objectives.

    1.1.3 Form use cases for the points of alignment between your ACE and business objectives.

    1.1.4 Prioritize your ACE stakeholders.

    1.1.5 Select a centralized or decentralized model for your ACE.

    1.1.6 Staff your ACE strategically.

    Step 1.2: Define the service offerings of your ACE

    Start with an analyst kick off call:

    • Align your ACE with its users.

    Then complete these activities…

    1.2.1 Form the Center of Excellence.

    1.2.2 Gather and document your existing Agile practices for the CoE.

    1.2.3 Interview stakeholders to align ACE requirements with functional expectations.

    1.2.4 Form a solution matrix to organize your pain points and opportunities.

    1.2.5 Refine your use cases to identify your ACE functions and services.

    1.2.6 Visualize your ACE functions and service offerings with a capability map.

    Phase 1 Results & Insights:

    • Aligning your ACE with the functional expectations of its users is just as critical as aligning with the business. Invest the time to understand how the ACE fits at all levels of the organization to ensure its highest effectiveness.

    Phase 1, Step 1: Determine the vision of your ACE

    Phase 1

    1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE

    1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE

    Phase 2

    2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams

    2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan

    2.3 Define metrics to measure success

    Phase 3

    3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE

    3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives

    3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE

    Activities:

    1.1.1 Optional: Baseline your ACE maturity.

    1.1.2 Identify and prioritize organizational business objectives.

    1.1.3 Form use cases for the points of alignment between your ACE and business objectives.

    1.1.4 Prioritize your ACE stakeholders.

    1.1.5 Select a centralized or decentralized model for your ACE.

    1.1.6 Staff your ACE strategically.

    Outcomes:

    • Gather your leadership to position the ACE and align it with business priorities.
    • Form a set of high-level use cases for services that will support the enablement of business priorities.
    • Map the stakeholders of the ACE to visualize expected influence and current support levels for your initiative.

    What does an ACE do? Six main functions derived from Info-Tech’s CLAIM+G Framework

    1. Learning
    • Provide training and development and enable engagement based on identified interaction points to foster organizational growth.
  • Tooling
    • Promote the use of standardized tooling to improve efficiency and consistency throughout the organization.
  • Supporting
    • Enable your Agile teams to access subject-matter expertise by facilitating knowledge transfer and documenting good practices.
  • Governing
    • Create operational boundaries for Agile teams, and monitor their progress and ability to meet business objectives within these boundaries.
  • Monitoring
    • Demonstrate the value the CoE is providing through effective metric setting and ongoing monitoring of Agile’s effectiveness.
  • Guiding
    • Provide guidance, methodology, and knowledge for teams to leverage to effectively meet organizational business objectives.
  • OPTIONAL: If you have an existing ACE, use Info-Tech’s CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool to baseline current practices

    1.1.1 Existing CoE Maturity Assessment

    Purpose

    If you already have established an ACE, use Info-Tech’s CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool to baseline its current maturity level (this will act as a baseline for comparison after you complete this Blueprint). Assessing your ACEs maturity lets you know where you currently are, and where to look for improvements.

    Steps

    1. Download the CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool to assess the maturity of your ACE.
    2. Complete the assessment tool with all members of your ACE team to determine your current Maturity score.
    3. Document the results in the ACE Communications Deck.

    Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.

    INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

    The image is a screen capture of the CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool

    Download the CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool.

    Get your Agile leadership together and position the ACE

    Stakeholder Role Why they are essential players
    CIO/ Head of IT Program sponsor: Champion and set the tone for the Agile program. Critical in gaining and maintaining buy-in and momentum for the spread of Agile service offerings. The head of IT has insight and influence to drive buy-in from executive stakeholders and ensure the long-term viability of the ACE.
    Applications Director Program executor: Responsible for the formation of the CoE and will ensure the viability of the initial CoE objectives, use cases, and service offerings. Having a coordinator who is responsible for collating performance data, tracking results, and building data-driven action plans is essential to ensuring continuous success.
    Agile Subject-Matter Experts Program contributor: Provide information on the viability of Agile practices and help build capabilities on existing best practices. Agile’s success relies on adoption. Leverage the insights of people who have implemented and evangelized Agile within your organization to build on top of a working foundation.
    Functional Group Experts Program contributor: Provide information on the functional group’s typical processes and how Agile can achieve expected benefits. Agile’s primary function is to drive value to the business – it needs to align with the expected capabilities of existing functional groups in order to enhance them for the better.

    Align your ACE with your organization’s strategy

    This research set will assist you with aligning your ACEs services to the objectives of the business in order to justify the resources and funding required by your Agile program.

    Business Objectives → Alignment ←ACE Functions

    Business justification to continue to fund a Center of Excellence can be a challenge, especially with traditional thinking and rigid stakeholders. Hit the ground running and show value to your key influencers through business alignment and metrics that will ensure that the ACE is worth continuous investment.

    Alignment leads to competitive advantage

    The pace of change in customer expectations, competitive landscapes, and business strategy is continuously increasing. It is critical to develop a method to facilitate ongoing alignment to shifting business and development expectations seamlessly and ensure that your Agile teams are able to deliver expected business value.

    Activity: Identify and prioritize organizational business objectives

    1.1.2 2 Hours

    Input

    • Organizational business objectives

    Output

    • Prioritized business objectives

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Agile leadership group
    1. List the primary high-level business objectives that your organization aims to achieve over the course of the following year (focusing on those that ACE can impact/support).
    2. Prioritize these business objectives while considering the following:
    • Criticality of completion: How critical is the initiative in enabling the business to achieve its goals?
    • Transformational impact: To what degree is the foundational structure of the business affected by the initiative (rationale: Agile can support impact on transformational issues)?
  • Document the hypothesized role of Agile in supporting these business objectives. Take the top three prioritized objectives forward for the establishment of your ACE. While in future years or iterations you can inject more offerings, it is important to target your service offerings to specific critical business objectives to gain buy-in for long-term viability of the CoE.
  • Sample Business Objectives:

    • Increase customer satisfaction.
    • Reduce time-to-market of product releases.
    • Foster a strong organizational culture.
    • Innovate new feature sets to differentiate product. Increase utilization rates of services.
    • Reduce product delivery costs.
    • Effectively integrate teams from a merger.
    • Offer more training programs for personal development.
    • Undergo a digital transformation.

    Understand potential hurdles when attempting to align with business objectives

    While there is tremendous pressure to align IT functions and the business due to the accelerating pace of change and technology innovation, you need to be aware that there are limitations in achieving this goal. Keep these challenges at the top of mind as you bring together your stakeholders to position the service offerings of your ACE. It is beneficial to make your stakeholders self-aware of these biases as well, so they come to the table with an open mind and are willing to find common ground.

    The search for total alignment

    There are a plethora of moving pieces within an organization and total alignment is not a plausible outcome.

    The aim of a group should not be to achieve total alignment, but rather reframe and consider ways to ensure that stakeholders are content with the ways they interact and that misalignment does not occur due to transparency or communication issues.

    “The business” implies unity

    While it may seem like the business is one unified body, the reality is that the business can include individuals or groups (CEO, CFO, IT, etc.) with conflicting priorities. While there are shared business goals, these entities may all have competing visions of how to achieve them. Alignment means compromise and agreement more than it means accommodating all competing views.

    Cost vs. reputation

    There is a political component to alignment, and sometimes individual aspirations can impede collective gain.

    While the business side may be concerned with cost, those on the IT side of things can be concerned with taking on career-defining projects to bolster their own credentials. This conflict can lead to serious breakdowns in alignment.

    Panera Bread used Agile to adapt to changing business needs

    CASE STUDY

    Industry Food Services

    Source Scott Ambler and Associates, Case Study

    Challenge

    Being in an industry with high competition, Panera Bread needed to improve its ability to quickly deliver desired features to end customers and adapt to changing business demands from high internal growth.

    Solution

    Panera Bread engaged in an Agile transformation through a mixture of Agile coaching and workshops, absorbing best practices from these engagements to drive Agile delivery frameworks across the enterprise.

    Results

    Adopting Agile delivery practices resulted in increased frequency of solution delivery, improving the relationship between IT and the business. Business satisfaction increased both with the development process and the outcomes from delivery.

    The transparency that was needed to achieve alignment to rapidly changing business needs resulted in improved communication and broad-scale reduced risk for the organization.

    "Agile delivery changed perception entirely by building a level of transparency and accountability into not just our software development projects, but also in our everyday working relationships with our business stakeholders. The credibility gains this has provided our IT team has been immeasurable and immediate."

    – Mike Nettles, VP IT Process and Architecture, Panera Bread

    Use Info-Tech’s CoE Operating Model to define the service offerings of your ACE

    Understand where your inputs and outputs lie to create an accessible set of service offerings for your Agile teams.

    Functional Input

    • Application Development
    • Project Management
    • CIO
    • Enterprise Architecture
    • Data Management
    • Security
    • Infrastructure & Operations
    • Who else?

    The image shows a graphic of the COE Operating Model, showing the inputs and outputs, including Other CoEs (at top); Stakeholder Needs (at left); Metrics and Feedback (at bottom); and ACE Functions and Services (at right)

    Input arrows represent functional group needs, feedback from Agile teams, and collaboration with other CoEs and CoPs

    Output arrows represent the services the CoE delivers and the benefits realized across the organization.

    ACE Operating Model: Governance & Metrics

    Governance & Metrics involves enabling success through the management of the ACEs resources and services, and ensuring that organizational structures evolve in concert with Agile growth and maturity. Your focus should be on governing, measuring, implementing, and empowering improvements.

    Effective governance will function to ensure the long-term effectiveness and viability of your ACE. Changes and improvements will happen continuously and you need a way to decide which to adopt as best practices.

    "Organizations have lengthy policies and procedures (e.g. code deployment, systems design, how requirements are gathered in a traditional setting) that need to be addressed when starting to implement an Agile Center of Excellence. Legacy ideas that end up having legacy policy are the ones that are going to create bottlenecks, waste resources, and disrupt your progress." – Doug Birgfeld, Senior Partner, Agile Wave

    Governance & Metrics

    • Manage organizational Agile standards, policies, and procedures.
    • Define organizational boundaries based on regulatory, compliance, and cultural requirements.
    • Ensure ongoing alignment of service offerings with business objectives.
    • Adapt organizational change management policies to reflect Agile practices.
    • CoE governance functions include:
      • Policy Management
      • Change Management
      • Risk Management
      • Stakeholder Management
      • Metrics/Feedback Monitoring

    ACE Operating Model: Services

    Services refers to the ability to deliver resourcing, guidance, and assistance across all Agile teams. By creating a set of shared services, you enable broad access to specialized resources, knowledge, and insights that will effectively scale to more teams and departments as Agile matures in your organization.

    A Services model:

    • Supports the organization by standardizing and centralizing service offerings, ensuring consistency of service delivery and accessibility across functional groups.
    • Provides a mechanism for efficient knowledge transfer and on-demand support.
    • Helps to drive productivity and project efficiencies through the organization by disseminating best practices.

    Services

    • Provide reference, support, and re-assurance to implement and adapt organizational best practices.
    • Interface relevant parties and facilitate knowledge transfer through shared learning and communities of practice.
    • Enable agreed-upon service levels through standardized support structures.
    • Shared services functions include:
      • Engagement Planning
      • Knowledge Management
      • Subject-Matter Expertise
      • Agile Team Evaluation

    ACE Operating Model: Technology

    Technology refers to a broad range of supporting tools to enable employees to complete their day-to-day tasks and effectively report on their outcomes. The key to technological support is to strike the right balance between flexibility and control based on your organization's internal and external constraints (policy, equipment, people, regulatory, etc.).

    "We sometimes forget the obvious truth that technology provides no value of its own; it is the application of technology to business opportunities that produces return on investment." – Robert McDowell, Author, In Search of Business Value

    Technology

    • Provide common software tools to enable alignment to organizational best practices.
    • Enable access to locally desired tools while considering organizational, technical, and scaling constraints.
    • Enable communication with a technical subject matter expert (SME).
    • Enable reporting consistency through training and maintenance of reporting mechanisms.
    • Technology functions can include:
      • Vendor Management
      • Application Support
      • Tooling Standards
      • Tooling Use Cases

    ACE Operating Model: Staff

    Staff is all about empowerment. The ACE should support and facilitate the sharing of ideas and knowledge sharing. Create processes and spaces where people are encouraged to come together, learn from, and share with each other. This setting will bring up new ideas to enhance productivity and efficiency in day-to-day activities while maintaining alignment with business objectives.

    "An Agile CoE is legitimized by its ability to create a space where people can come together, share, and learn from one another. By empowering teams to grow by themselves and then re-connect with each other you allow the creativity of your employees to flow back into the CoE." – Anonymous, Founder, Agile consultancy group

    Staff

    • Develop and provide training and day-to-day coaching that are aligned with organizational engagement and growth plans.
    • Include workflow change management to assist traditional roles with accommodating Agile practices.
    • Support the facilitation of knowledge transfer from localized Agile teams into other areas of the organization.
    • Achieve team buy-in and engagement with ACE services and capabilities. Provide a forum for collaboration and innovation.
    • People functions can include:
      • Onboarding
      • Coaching
      • Learning Facilitation

    Form use cases to align your ACE with business objectives

    What is a use case?

    A use case tells a story about how a system will be used to achieve a goal from the perspective of a user of that system. The people or other systems that interact with the use case are called “actors.” Use cases describe what a system must be able to do, not how it will do it.

    How does a use case play a role in building your ACE?

    Use cases are used to guide design by allowing you to highlight the intended function of a service provided by the Center of Excellence while maintaining a business focus. Jumping too quickly to a solution without fully understanding user and business needs leads to the loss of stakeholder buy-in and the Centers of Excellence rejection by teams.

    Hypothesized ACE user needs →Use Case←Business objective

    Activity: Form use cases for the points of alignment between your ACE and business objectives

    1.1.3 2 Hours

    Input

    • Prioritized business objectives
    • ACE functions

    Output

    • ACE use cases

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Agile leadership group
    1. Using your prioritized business objectives and the six functions of a CoE, create high-level use cases for each point of alignment that describe how the Center of Excellence will better facilitate the realization of that business objective.
    2. For each use case, define the following:
      • Name: Generalized title for the use case.
      • Description: A high-level description of the expected CoE action.
    AGILE CENTER OF EXCELLENCE FUNCTIONS:
    Guiding Learning Tooling Supporting Governing Monitoring
    BUSINESS OBJECTIVES Reduce time-to-market of product releases
    Reduce product delivery costs
    Effectively integrate teams from a merger

    Activity: Form use cases for the points of alignment between your ACE and business objectives (continued)

    1.1.3 2 Hours

    The image shows the Reduce time-to-market of product releases row from the table in the previous section, filled in with sample information.

    Your goal should be to keep these as high level and generally applicable as possible as they provide an initial framework to further develop your service offerings. Begin to talk about the ways in which the ACE can support the realization of your business objectives and what those interactions may look like to customers of the ACE.

    Involve all relevant stakeholders to discuss the organizational goals and objectives of your ACE

    Avoid the rifts in stakeholder representation by ensuring you involve the relevant parties. Without representation and buy-in from all interested parties, your ACE may omit and fail to meet long-term organizational goals.

    By ensuring every group receives representation, your service offerings will speak for the broad organization and in turn meet the needs of the organization as a whole.

    • Business Units: Any functional groups that will be expected to engage with the ACE in order to achieve their business objectives.
    • Team Leads: Representation from the internal Agile community who is aware of the backgrounds, capabilities, and environments of their respective Agile teams.
    • Executive Sponsors: Those expected to evangelize and set the tone and direction for the ACE within the executive ranks of the organization. These roles are critical in gaining buy-in and maintaining momentum for ACE initiatives.

    Organization

    • ACE
      • Executive Sponsors
      • Team Leads
      • Business Units

    Activity: Prioritize your ACE stakeholders

    1.1.4 1 Hour

    Input

    • Prioritized business objectives

    Output

    • Prioritized list of stakeholders

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Agile leadership group
    1. Using your prioritized business objectives, brainstorm, as a group, the potential list of stakeholders (representatives from business units, team leads, and executive sponsors) that would need to be involved in setting the tone and direction of your ACE.
    2. Evaluate each stakeholder in terms of power, involvement, impact, and support.
    • Power: How much influence does the stakeholder have? Enough to drive the CoE forward or into the ground?
    • Involvement: How interested is the stakeholder? How involved is the stakeholder in the project already?
    • Impact: To what degree will the stakeholder be impacted? Will this significantly change how they do their job?
    • Support: Is the stakeholder a supporter of the project? Neutral? A resister?
  • Map each stakeholder to an area on the power map on the next slide based on his or her level of power and involvement.
  • Vary the size of the circle to distinguish stakeholders that are highly impacted by the ACE from those who are not. Color each circle to show each stakeholder’s estimated or gauged level of support for the project.
  • Prioritize your ACE stakeholders (continued)

    1.1.4 1 Hour

    The image shows a matrix on the left, and a legend on the right. The matrix is labelled with Involvement at the bottom, and Power on the left side, and has the upper left quadrant labelled Keep Satisfied, the upper right quadrant labelled Key players, the lower right quadrant labelled Keep informed, and the lower left quadrant labelled Minimal effort.

    Should your ACE be Centralized or Decentralized?

    An ACE can be organized differently depending on your organization’s specific needs and culture.

    The SAFe Model:©

    “For smaller enterprises, a single centralized [ACE] can balance speed with economies of scale. However, in larger enterprises—typically those with more than 500 – 1,000 practitioners—it’s useful to consider employing either a decentralized model or a hub-and-spoke model.”

    The image shows 3 models: centralized, represented by a single large circle; decentralized, represented by 5 smaller circles; and hub-and-spoke, represented by a central circle, connected to 5 surrounding circles.

    © Scaled Agile, Inc.

    The Spotify Model:

    Spotify avoids using an ACE and instead spreads agile practices using Squads, Tribes, Chapters, Guilds, etc.

    It can be a challenging model to adopt because it is constantly changing, and must be fundamentally supported by your organization’s culture. (Linders, Ben. “Don't Copy the Spotify Model.” InfoQ.com. 6 Oct. 2016.)

    Detailed analysis of The Spotify Model is out of scope for this Blueprint.

    The image shows the Spotify model, with two sections, each labelled Tribe, and members from within each Tribe gathered together in a section labelled Guild.

    Activity: Select a Centralized or Decentralized ACE Model

    1.1.5 30 minutes

    Input

    • Prioritized business objectives
    • Use Cases
    • Organization qualities

    Output

    • Centralized or decentralized ACE model

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Agile leadership group
    1. Using your prioritized business objectives, your ACE use cases, your organization size, structure, and culture, brainstorm the relative pros and cons of a centralized vs decentralized ACE model.
    2. Consider this: to improve understanding and acceptance, ask participants who prefer a centralized model to brainstorm the pros and cons of a decentralized model, and vice-versa.
    3. Collectively decide whether your ACE should be centralized, decentralized or hub-and-spoke and document it.
    Centralized ACE Decentralized ACE
    Pros Cons Pros Cons
    Centralize Vs De-centralize Considerations Prioritized Business Objectives
    • Neutral (objectives don’t favor either model)
    • Neutral (objectives don’t favor either model)
    ACE Use Cases
    • Neutral (use cases don’t favor either model)
    • Neutral (use cases don’t favor either model)
    Organization Size
    • Org. is small enough for centralized ACE
    • Overkill for a small org. like ours
    Organization Structure
    • All development done in one location
    • Not all locations do development
    Organization Culture
    • All development done in one location
    • Decentralized ACE may have yield more buy-in

    SELECTED MODEL: Centralized ACE

    Activity: Staff your ACE strategically

    1.1.6 1 Hour

    Input

    • List of potential ACE staff

    Output

    • Rated list of ACE staff

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Agile leadership group
    1. Identify your list of potential ACE staff (this may be a combination of full time and contract staff).
    2. Add/modify/delete the rating criteria to meet your specific needs.
    3. Discuss and adjust the relative weightings of the rating criteria to best suit your organization’s needs.
    4. Rate each potential staff member and compare results to determine the best suited staff for your ACE.
    Candidate: Jane Doe
    Rating Criteria Criteria Weighting Candidate's Score (1-5)
    Candidate has strong theoretical knowledge of Agile. 8% 4
    Candidate has strong hands on experience with Agile. 18% 5
    Candidate has strong hands on experience with Agile. 10% 4
    Candidate is highly respected by the Agile teams. 18% 5
    Candidate is seen as a thought leader in the organization. 18% 5
    Candidate is seen as a change agent in the organization. 18% 5
    Candidate has strong desire to be member of ACE staff. 10% 3
    Total Weighted Score 4.6

    Phase 1, Step 2: Define the service offerings of your ACE

    Phase 1

    1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE

    1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE

    Phase 2

    2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams

    2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan

    2.3 Define metrics to measure success

    Phase 3

    3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE

    3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives

    3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE

    Activities:

    1.2.1 Form the Center of Excellence.

    1.2.2 Gather and document your existing Agile practices for the CoE.

    1.2.3 Interview stakeholders to align ACE requirements with functional expectations.

    1.2.4 Form a solution matrix to organize your pain points and opportunities.

    1.2.5 Refine your use cases to identify your ACE functions and services.

    1.2.6 Visualize your ACE functions and service offerings with a capability map.

    Outcomes:

    • Collect data regarding the functional expectations of the Agile teams.
    • Refine your business-aligned use cases with your collected data to achieve both business and functional alignment.
    • Create a capability map that visualizes and prioritizes your key service offerings.

    Structure your ACE with representation from all of your key stakeholders

    Now that you have a prioritized list of stakeholders, use their influence to position the ACE to ensure maximum representation with minimal bottlenecks.

    By operating within a group of your key players, you can legitimize your Center of Excellence by propagating the needs and interests of those who interface and evangelize the CoE within the larger organization.

    The group of key stakeholders will extend the business alignment you achieved earlier by refining your service offerings to meet the needs of the ACEs customers. Multiple representations at the table will generate a wide arrangement of valuable insights and perspectives.

    Info-Tech Insight

    While holistic representation is necessary, ensure that the list is not too comprehensive and will not lead to progress roadblocks. The goal is to ensure that all factors relevant to the organization are represented; too many conflicting opinions may create an obstruction moving forward.

    ACE

    • Executive Sponsors
    • Team Leads
    • Business Units

    Determine how you will fund your ACE

    Choose the ACE funding model which is most aligned to your current system based on the scenarios provided below. Both models will offer the necessary support to ensure the success of your Agile program going forward.

    Funding Model Funding Scenario I Funding Scenario II
    Funded by the CIO Funded by the CIO office and a stated item within the general IT budget. Charged back to supported functional groups with all costs allocated to each functional group’s budget.
    Funded by the PMO Charged back to supported functional groups with all costs allocated to each functional group’s budget. Charged back to supported functional groups with all costs allocated to each functional group’s budget.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your funding model may add additional key influencers into the mix. After you choose your funding model, ensure that you review your stakeholder map and add anyone who will have a direct impact in the viability and stability of your ACE.

    Determine how you will govern your ACE

    An Agile Center of Excellence is unique in the way you must govern the actions of its customers. Enable “flexible governance” to ensure that Agile teams have the ability to locally optimize and innovate while still operating within expected boundaries.

    ACE Governing Body

    ↑ Agile Team → ACE ← Agile Team ↑

    Who should take on the governance role?

    The governing body can be the existing executive or standing committees, or a newly formed committee involving your key ACE influencers and stakeholders.

    Flexible governance means that your ACE set boundaries based on your cultural, regulatory, and compliance requirements, and your governance group monitors your Agile teams’ adherence to these boundaries.

    Governing Body Responsibilities

    • Review and approve ACE strategy annually and ensure that it is aligned with current business strategy.
    • Provide detailed quality information for board members.
    • Ensure that the ACE is adequately resourced and that the organization has the capacity to deliver the service offerings.
    • Assure that the ACE is delivering benefits and achieving targets.
    • Assure that the record keeping and reporting systems are capable of providing the information needed to properly assess the quality of service.

    Modify your resourcing strategy based on organizational need

    Your Agile Center of Excellence can be organized either in a dedicated or a virtual configuration, depending on your company’s organizational structure and complexity.

    There is no right answer to how your Center of Excellence should be resourced. Consider your existing organizational structure and culture, the quality of relationships between functional groups, and the typical budgetary factors that would weigh on choosing between a virtual and dedicated CoE structure.

    COE Advantages Disadvantages
    Virtual
    • No change in organization structure required, just additional task delegation to your Agile manager or program manager.
    • Less effort and cost to implement.
    • Investment in quality is proportional to return.
    • Resources are shared between practice areas, and initiatives will take longer to implement.
    • Development and enhancement of best practices can become difficult without a centralized knowledge repository.
    Dedicated
    • Demonstrates a commitment to the ACEs long-term existence.
    • Allows for dedicated maintenance of best practices.
    • Clear lines of accountability for Agile processes.
    • Ability to develop highly skilled employees as their responsibilities are not shared.
    • Requires dedicated resources that can in turn be more costly.
    • Requires strong relationships with the functional groups that interface with the ACE.

    Staffing the ACE: Understand virtual versus dedicated ACE organizational models

    Virtual CoE

    The image shows an organizational chart titled Virtual CoE, with Head of IT at the top, then PMO and CoE Lead/Apps Director at the next level. The chart shows that there is crossover between the CoE Lead's reports, and the PMO's, indicated through dotted lines that connect them.

    • Responsibilities for CoE are split and distributed throughout departments on a part-time basis.
    • CoE members from the PMO report to apps director who also functions as the CoE lead on a part-time basis.

    The image shows a organizational chart titled Dedicated CoE, with all CoE members under the CoE.

    • Requires re-organization and dedicated full-time staff to run the CoE with clear lines of responsibility and accountability.
    • Hiring or developing highly skilled employees who have a sole function to facilitate and monitor quality best practices within the IT department may be necessary.

    Activity: Form the Center of Excellence

    1.2.1 1 Hour

    Input

    • N/A

    Output

    • ACE governance and resourcing plan

    Materials

    • Whiteboard

    Participants

    • Agile leadership group
    1. As a group, discuss if there is an existing body that would be able to govern the Center of Excellence. This body will monitor progress on an ongoing basis and assess any change requests that would impact the CoEs operation or goals.
    • List current governing bodies that are closely aligned with your current Agile environment and determine if the group could take on additional responsibilities.
    • Alternatively, identify individuals who could form a new ACE governing body.
  • Using the results of Exercise 1.1.6 in Step 1, select the individuals who will participate in the Center of Excellence. As a rough rule of thumb for sizing, an ACE staffed with 3-5 people can support 8-12 Agile Teams.
  • Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.

    Leverage your existing Agile practices and SMEs when establishing the ACE

    The synergy between Agile and CoE relies on its ability to build on existing best practices. Agile cannot grow without a solid foundation. ACE gives you the way to disseminate these practices and facilitate knowledge transfer from a centralized sharing environment. As part of defining your service offerings, engage with stakeholders across the organization to evaluate what is already documented so that it can be accommodated in the ACE.

    Documentation

    • Are there any existing templates that can be leveraged (e.g. resource planning, sprint planning)?
    • Are there any existing process documents that can be leveraged (e.g. SIPOC, program frameworks)?
    • Are there any existing standards documents the CoE can incorporate (e.g. policies, procedures, guidelines)?

    SMEs

    • Interview existing subject-matter experts that can give you an idea of your current pains and opportunities.
    • You already have feedback from those in your workshop group, so think about the rest of the organization:
      • Agile practitioners
      • Business stakeholders
      • Operations
      • Any other parties not represented in the workshop group

    Metrics

    • What are the current metrics being used to measure the success of Agile teams?
    • What metrics are currently being used to measure the completion of business objectives?
    • What tools or mediums are currently used for recording and communicating metrics?

    Info-Tech Insight

    When considering existing practices, it is important to evaluate the level of adherence to these practices. If they have been efficiently utilized, injecting them into ACE becomes an obvious decision. If they have been underutilized, however, it is important to understand why this occurred and discuss how you can drive higher adherence.

    Examples of existing documents to leverage

    People

    • Agile onboarding planning documents
    • Agile training documents
    • Organizational Agile manifesto
    • Team performance metrics dashboard
    • Stakeholder engagement and communication plan
    • Development team engagement plan
    • Organizational design and structure
    • Roles and responsibilities chart (i.e. RACI)
    • Compensation plan Resourcing plan

    Process

    • Tailored Scrum process
    • Requirements gathering process
    • Quality stage-gate checklist (including definitions of ready and done)
    • Business requirements document
    • Use case document
    • Business process diagrams
    • Entity relationship diagrams
    • Data flow diagrams
    • Solution or system architecture
    • Application documentation for deployment
    • Organizational and user change management plan
    • Disaster recovery and rollback process
    • Test case templates

    Technology

    • Code review policies and procedures
    • Systems design policies
    • Build, test, deploy, and rollback scripts
    • Coding guidelines
    • Data governance and management policies
    • Data definition and glossary
    • Request for proposals (RFPs)
    • Development tool standards and licensing agreements
    • Permission to development, testing, staging, and production environments
    • Application, system, and data integration policies

    Build upon the lessons learned from your Agile pilots

    The success of your Center of Excellence relies on the ability to build sound best practices within your organization’s context. Use your previous lessons learned and growing pains as shared knowledge of past Agile implementations within the ACE.

    Implement Agile Practices That Work

    Draw on the experiences of your initial pilot where you learned how to adapt the Agile manifesto and practices to your specific context. These lessons will help onboard new teams to Agile since they will likely experience some of the same challenges.

    Download

    Documents for review include:

    • Tailored Scrum Process
    • Agile Pilot Metrics
    • Info-Tech’s Agile Pilot Playbook

    Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile

    Draw on previous scaling Agile experiences to help understand how to interface, facilitate, and orchestrate cross-functional teams and stakeholders for large and complex projects. These lessons will help your ACE teams develop collaboration and problem-solving techniques involving roles with different priorities and lines of thinking.

    Download

    Documents for review include:

    • Agile Program Framework
    • Agile Pilot Program Metrics
    • Scaled Agile Development Process
    • Info-Tech’s Scaling Agile Playbook

    Activity: Gather and document your existing Agile practices for the CoE

    1.2.2 Variable time commitment based on current documentation state

    Input

    • Existing practices

    Output

    • Practices categorized within operating model

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • ACE team
    1. Compile a list of existing practices that will be shared by the Center of Excellence. Consider any documents, templates, or tools that are used regularly by Agile teams.
    2. Evaluate the level of adherence to use of the practices (whether the practice is complied with regularly or not) with a high, medium, or low. Low compliance will need a root-cause analysis to understand why and how to remedy the situation.
    3. Determine the best fit for each practice under the ACE operational model.
    Name Type Adherence Level CoE Best Fit Source
    1 Tailored Scrum process Process High Shared Services Internal Wiki
    2
    3

    Activity: Interview stakeholders to understand the ACE functional expectations

    1.2.3 30-60 Minutes per interview

    Interview Stakeholders (from both Agile teams and functional areas) on their needs from the ACE. Ensure you capture both pain points and opportunities. Capture these as either Common Agile needs or Functional needs. Document using the tables below:

    Common Agile Needs
    Common Agile Needs
    • Each Agile Team interprets Agile differently
    • Need common approach to Agile with a proven track record within the organization
    • Making sure all Team members have a good understanding of Agile
    • Common set of tool(s) with a proven track record, along with a strong understanding of how to use the tool(s) efficiently and effectively
    • Help troubleshooting process related questions
    • Assistance with addressing the individual short comings of each Agile Team
    • Determining what sort of help each Agile Team needs most
    • Better understanding of the role played by Scrum Master and associated good practices
    • When and how do security/privacy/regulatory requirements get incorporated into Agile projects
    Functional Needs Ent Arch Needs
    • How do we ensure Ent Arch has insight and influence on Agile software design
    • Better understanding of Agile process
    • How to measure compliance with reference architectures

    PMO Needs

    • Better understanding of Agile process
    • Understanding role of PM in Agile
    • Project status reports that determine current level of project risk
    • How does project governance apply on Agile projects
    • What deliverables/artifacts are produced by Agile projects and when are they completed

    Operations Needs

    • Alignment on approaches for doing releases
    • Impact of Agile on change management and support desk processes
    • How and when will installation and operation instructions be available in Agile

    Activity: Form a solution matrix to organize your pain points and opportunities

    1.2.4 Half day

    Input

    • Identified requirements

    Output

    • Classified pains and opportunities

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • ACE team
    1. Review the listed pain points from the data gathering process. Sort the pain points on sticky notes into technology, governance, people, and shared services.
    2. Consider opportunities under each defining element based on the identified business requirements.
    3. Document your findings.
    4. Discuss the results with the project team and prioritize the opportunities.
      • Where do the most pains occur?
      • What opportunities exist to alleviate pains?
    Governance Shared Services Technology People
    Pain Points
    Opportunities

    Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.

    Activity: Refine your use cases to identify your ACE functions and services

    1.2.5 1 Hour

    Input

    • Use cases from activity 1.1.2

    Output

    • Refined use cases based on data collection

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • ACE team
    1. Refine your initial use cases for the points of alignment between your ACE and business objectives using your classified pain points and opportunities.
    2. Add use cases to address newly realized pain points.
    3. Determine the functions and services the CoE can offer to address the identified requirements.
    4. Evaluate the outputs in the form of realized benefits and extracted inefficiencies.

    Possible ACE use cases:

    • Policy Management
    • Change Management
    • Risk Management
    • Stakeholder Management
    • Engagement Planning
    • Knowledge Management
    • Subject-Matter Expertise
    • Agile Team Evaluation
    • Operations Support
    • Onboarding
    • Coaching
    • Learning Facilitation
    • Communications Training
    • Vendor Management
    • Application Support
    • Tooling Standards

    Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.

    Activity: Visualize your ACE functions and service offerings with a capability map

    1.2.6 1 Hour

    Input

    • Use cases from activity 1.2.4

    Output

    • ACE capability map

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • ACE team
    1. Review the refined and categorized list of service offerings.
    2. Determine how these new capabilities will add, remove, or enhance your existing service and capabilities.
    3. Categorize the capabilities into the following groups:
    • Governance and Metrics
    • Services
    • Staff
    • Technology
  • Label the estimated impact of the service offering based on your business priorities for the year. This will guide your strategy for implementing your Agile Center of Excellence moving forward.
  • Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.

    Activity: Visualize your ACE functions and service offerings with a capability map (continued)

    Governance

    Policy Management (Medium Potential)

    Change Management (High Potential)

    Risk Management (High Potential)

    Stakeholder Management (High Potential)

    Metrics/Feedback Monitoring (High Potential)

    Shared Services

    Engagement Planning (High Potential)

    Knowledge Management (High Potential)

    Subject-Matter Expertise (High Potential)

    Agile Team Evaluation (High Potential)

    Operations Support (High Potential)

    People

    Onboarding (Medium Potential)

    Coaching (High Potential)

    Learning Facilitation (High Potential)

    Internal Certification Program (Low Potential)

    Communications Training (Medium Potential)

    Technology

    Vendor Management (Medium Potential)

    Application Support (Low Potential)

    Tooling Standards (High Potential)

    Checkpoint: Are you ready to standardize your CoEs service offerings?

    Phase 1

    1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE

    1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE

    Phase 2

    2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams

    2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan

    2.3 Define metrics to measure success

    Self-Auditing Guidelines

    • Have you identified and prioritized the key business objectives for the upcoming year that the ACE will align with?
    • Do you have a high-level set of use cases for points of alignment between your ACE and business objectives?
    • Have you mapped your stakeholders and identified the key players that will have an influence over the future success of your ACE?
    • Have you identified how your organization will fund, resource, and govern the ACE?
    • Have you collected data to understand the functional expectations of the users the ACE is intended to serve?
    • Have you refined your use cases to align with both business objectives and functional expectations?

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

    1.1.2 Identify and prioritize organizational business objectives

    Our analyst team will help you organize and prioritize your business objectives for the year in order to ensure that the service offerings the ACE offers are delivering consistent business value.

    1.1.3 Form use cases for the points of alignment between your ACE and business objectives

    Our analyst team will help you turn your prioritized business objectives into a set of high-level use cases that will provide the foundation for defining user-aligned services.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    1.1.4 Prioritize your ACE stakeholders

    Our analysts will walk you through an exercise of mapping and prioritizing your Centers of Excellence stakeholders based on impact and power within so you can ensure appropriate presentation of interests within the organization.

    1.2.4 Form a solution matrix to organize your pain points and opportunities

    Our analyst team will help you solidify the direction of your Center of Excellence by overlaying your identified needs, pain points, and potential opportunities in a matrix guided by Info-Tech’s CoE operating model.

    1.2.5 Refine your use cases to identify your ACE functions and services

    Our analyst team will help you further refine your business-aligned use cases with the functional expectations from your Agile teams and stakeholders, ensuring the ACEs long-term utility.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    1.2.6 Visualize your ACE functions and service offerings with a capability map

    Our analysts will walk you through creating your Agile Centers of Excellence capability map and help you to prioritize which service offerings are critical to the success of your Agile teams in meeting their objectives.

    Phase 2

    Standardize the Centers of Excellence Service Offerings

    Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence

    The ACE needs to ensure consistency in service delivery

    Now that you have aligned the CoE to the business and functional expectations, you need to ensure its service offerings are consistently accessible. To effectively ensure accessibility and delegation of shared services in an efficient way, the CoE needs to have a consistent framework to deliver its services.

    Phase 1 - Strategically Align the CoE

    Create strategic alignment between the CoE and the organization’s goals, objectives, and vision. This alignment translates into the CoE mandate intended to enhance the way Agile will enable teams to meet business objectives.

    Phase 2 - Standardize the CoEs Service Offerings

    Build an engagement plan based on a standardized adoption model to ensure your CoE service offerings are accessible and consistent across the organization. Create and consolidate key performance indicators to measure the CoEs utility and whether or not the expected value is being translated to tangible results.

    Phase 3 - Operate the CoE

    Operate the CoE to provide service offerings to Agile teams, identify improvements to optimize the function of your Agile teams, and effectively manage and communicate change so that teams can grow within the Agile adoption model and optimize value delivery both within your Agile environment and across functions.

    Phase 2 outline

    Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

    Guided Implementation 2: Standardize the CoEs Service Offerings

    Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 2

    Step 2.1: Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams

    Start with an analyst kick off call:

    • Dissect the key attributes of Agile adoption.

    Then complete these activities…

    2.1.1 Further categorize your use cases within the Agile adoption model.

    Step 2.2: Create an ACE engagement plan

    Start with an analyst kick off call:

    • Form engagement plans for your Agile teams.

    Then complete these activities…

    2.2.1 Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption.

    Step 2.3: Define metrics to measure success

    Finalize phase deliverable:

    • Discuss effective ACE metrics.

    Then complete these activities…

    2.3.1 Collect existing team-level metrics.

    2.3.2 Define metrics that align with your Agile business objectives.

    2.3.3 Define target ACE performance metrics.

    2.3.4 Define Agile adoption metrics.

    2.3.5 Consolidate metrics for stakeholder impact.

    2.3.6 Use Info-Tech’s ACE Benefits Tracking Tool to monitor, evaluate, refine, and ensure continued business value.

    Phase 2 Results & Insights:

    • Standardizing your service offerings allows you to have direct influence on the dissemination of best practices.

    Phase 2, Step 1: Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams

    Phase 1

    1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE

    1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE

    Phase 2

    2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams

    2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan

    2.3 Define metrics to measure success

    Phase 3

    3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE

    3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives

    3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE

    Activities:

    2.1.1 Further categorize your use cases within the Agile adoption model.

    Outcomes:

    • Refine your previously determined use cases within the Agile adoption model to ensure that teams can be assisted at any level of Agile adoption.
    • Understand the key attributes of Agile adoption and how they impact success.

    Understand the implementation challenges that the ACE may face

    Culture clash between ACE and larger organization

    It is important to carefully consider the compatibility between the current organizational culture and Agile moving forward. Agile compels empowered teams, meritocracy, and broad collaboration for success; while typical organizational structures are siloed and hierarchical and decisions are delegated from the top down.

    This is not to say that the culture of the ACE has to match the larger organizational culture; part of the overarching aim of the ACE is to evolve the current organizational culture for the better. The point is to ensure you enable a smooth transition with sufficient management support and a team of Agile champions.

    The changing role of middle management

    Very similar to the culture clash challenge, cultural rigidity in how middle managers operate (performance review, human resource management, etc.) can cause cultural rejection. They need to become enablers for high performance and give their teams the sufficient tools, skills, and opportunities to succeed and excel.

    What impedes Agile adoption?

    Based on a global survey of Agile practitioners (N=1,319)*:

    52% Organizational culture at odds with agile values

    44% Inadequate management support and sponsorship

    48% General organization resistance to change

    *Respondents were able to make multiple selections

    (13th Annual State of Agile Report, VersionOne, 2019)

    Build competency and trust through a structured Agile adoption plan

    The reality of cultural incompatibility between Agile and traditional organization structures necessitates a structured adoption plan. Systematically build competency so teams can consistently achieve project success and solidify trust in your teams’ ability to meet business needs with Agile.

    By incrementally gaining the trust of management as you build up your Agile capabilities, you enable a smooth cultural transition to an environment where teams are empowered, adapt quickly to changing needs, and are trusted to innovate and make successes out of their failures.

    Optimized value delivery occurs when there is a direct relationship between competency and trust. There will be unrealized value when competency or trust outweigh the other. That value loss increases as either dimension of adoption continues to grow faster than the other.

    The image shows a graph with Competency on the x-axis and Trust on the y-axis. There are 3 sections: Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3, in subsequently larger arches in the background of the graph. The graph shows two diagonal arrows, the bottom one labelled Current Value Delivery and the top one labelled Optimized Value Delivery. The space between the two arrows is labelled Value Loss.

    Use Info-Tech’s Practice Adoption Optimization Model to systematically increase your teams’ ability to deliver

    Using Info-Tech’s Practice adoption optimization model will ensure you incrementally build competency and trust to optimize your value delivery.

    Agile adoption at its core, is about building social capital. Your level of trust with key influencers increases as you continuously enhance your capabilities, enabling the necessary cultural changes away from traditional organizational structures.

    Trust & Competency ↓

    DEFINE

    Begin to document your development workflow or value chain, implement a tracking system for KPIs, and start gathering metrics and reporting them transparently to the appropriate stakeholders.

    ITERATE

    Use collected metrics and retrospectives to stabilize team performance by reducing areas of variability in your workflow and increasing the consistency at which targets are met.

    COLLABORATE

    Use information to support changes and adopt appropriate practices to make incremental improvements to the existing environment.

    EMPOWER

    Drive behavioral and cultural changes that will empower teams to be accountable for their own success and learning.

    INNOVATE

    Use your built-up trust and support practice innovation, driving the definition and adoption of new practices.

    Review these key attributes of Agile adoption

    Agile adoption is unique to every organization. Consider these key attributes within your own organizational context when thinking about levels of Agile adoption.

    Adoption Attributes

    Team Organization

    Considers the degree to which teams are able to self-organize based on internal organizational structures (hierarchy vs. meritocracy) and inter-team capabilities.

    Team Coordination

    Considers the degree to which teams can coordinate, both within and across functions.

    Business Alignment

    Considers the degree to which teams can understand and/or map to business objectives.

    Coaching

    Considers what kind of coaching/training is offered and how accessible the training is.

    Empowerment

    Considers the degree to which teams are able and capable to address project, process, and technical challenges without significant burden from process controls and bureaucracy.

    Failure Tolerance

    Considers the degree to which stakeholders are risk tolerant and if teams are capable of turning failures into learning outcomes.

    Why are these important?

    These key attributes function as qualities or characteristics that, when improved, will successively increase the degree to which the business trusts your Agile teams’ ability to meet their objectives.

    Systematically improving these attributes as you graduate levels of the adoption model allows the business to acclimatize to the increased capability the Agile team is offering, and the risk of culture clash with the larger organization decreases.

    Start to consider at what level of adoption each of your service offerings become useful. This will allow you to standardize the way your Agile teams interact with the CoE.

    Activity: Further categorize your use cases within the Agile adoption model

    2.1.1 1.5 Hours

    Input

    • List of service offerings

    Output

    • Service offerings categorized within adoption model

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • Team
    1. Gather the list of your categorized use cases.
    2. Based on Info-Tech’s Agile adoption model, categorize which use cases would be useful to help the Agile team graduate to the next level of adoption.
      • Conceptualize: Begin to document your workflow or value chain, implement a tracking system for KPIs, and gather metrics and report them transparently to the appropriate stakeholders.
      • Iterate: Use collected metrics to stabilize team performance by reducing areas of variability in your workflow and increasing the consistency at which targets are met.
      • Collaborate: Use information to drive changes and adopt appropriate Agile practices to make incremental improvements to the existing environment.
      • Empower: Drive behavioral and cultural changes that will empower teams to be accountable for their own successes given the appropriate resources.
      • Innovate: Use your built-up trust to begin to make calculated risks and innovate more, driving new best practices into the CoE.

    The same service offering could be offered at different levels of adoption. In these cases, you will need to re-visit the use case and differentiate how the service (if at all) will be delivered at different levels of adoption.

    1. Use this opportunity to brainstorm alternative or new use cases for any gaps identified. It is the CoEs goal to assist teams at every level of adoption to meet their business objectives. Use a different colored sticky note for these so you can re-visit and map out their inputs, outputs, metrics, etc.

    Activity: Further categorize your use cases within the Agile adoption model (continued)

    2.1.1 1.5 Hours

    Input

    • List of service offerings

    Output

    • Service offerings categorized within adoption model

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • Team

    Example:

    Service Offerings
    Level 5: Innovate
    Level 4: Empower
    Level 3: Collaborate Coaching -- Communications Training
    Level 2: Iterate Tooling Standards
    Level 1: Conceptualize

    Learning Facilitation

    Draw on the service offerings identified in activity 1.2.4

    Phase 2, Step 2: Create an ACE engagement plan

    Phase 1

    1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE

    1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE

    Phase 2

    2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams

    2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan

    2.3 Define metrics to measure success

    Phase 3

    3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE

    3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives

    3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE

    Activities:

    2.2.1 Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption.

    Outcomes:

    • Understand the importance of aligning with the functional expectations of your ACE customers.
    • Understand the relationship between engagement and continuous improvement.
    • Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption to standardize the way customers interact with the ACE.

    Enable Agile teams to interface with ACE service offerings to meet their business objectives

    A Center of Excellence aligned with your service offerings is only valuable if your CoEs customers can effectively access those services. At this stage, you have invested in ensuring that your CoE aligns to your business objectives and that your service offerings align to its customers. Now you need to ensure that these services are accessible in the day-to-day operation of your Agile teams.

    Engagement Process → Service Offering

    Use backwards induction from your delivery method to the service offering. This is an effective method to determine the optimal engagement action for the CoE, as it considers the end customer as the driver for best action for every possible situation.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your engagement process should be largely informed by your ACE users. Teams have constraints as well as in-the-trenches concerns and issues. If your service offerings don’t account for these, it can lead to rejection of the culture you are trying to inspire.

    Show the way, do not dictate

    Do not fix problems for your Agile teams, give them the tools and knowledge to fix the problems themselves.

    Facilitate learning to drive success

    A primary function of your ACE is to transfer knowledge to Agile teams to increase their capability to achieve desired outcomes.

    While this can take the form of coaching, training sessions, libraries, and wikis, a critical component of ACE is creating interactions where individuals from Agile teams can come together and share their knowledge.

    Ideas come from different experiences. By creating communities of practice (CoP) around topics that the ACE is tasked with supporting (e.g. Agile business analysts), you foster social learning and decrease the likelihood that change will result in some sort of cultural rejection.

    Consider whether creating CoPs would be beneficial in your organization’s context.

    "Communities of practice are a practical way to frame the task of managing knowledge. They provide a concrete organizational infrastructure for realizing the dream of a learning organization." – Etienne Wenger, Digital Habitats: Stewarding technology for communities

    A lack of top-down support will result in your ACE being underutilized

    Top-down support is critical to validate the CoE to its customers and ensure they feel compelled to engage with its services. Relevancy is a real concern for the long-term viability of a CoE and championing its use from a position of authority will legitimize its function and deter its fading from relevancy of day-to-day use for Agile teams.

    Although you are aligning your engagement processes to the customers of your Agile Center of Excellence, you still need your key influencers to champion its lasting organizational relevancy. Don’t let your employees think the ACE is just a coordinating body or a committee that is convenient but non-essential – make sure they know that it drives their own personal growth and makes everyone better as a collective.

    "Even if a CoE is positioned to meet a real organizational need, without some measure of top-down support, it faces an uphill battle to remain relevant and avoid becoming simply one more committee in the eyes of the wider organization. Support from the highest levels of the organization help fight the tendency of the larger organization to view the CoE as a committee with no teeth and tip the scales toward relevancy for the CoE." – Joe Shepley, VP and Practice Lead, Doculabs

    Info-Tech Insight

    Stimulate top-down support with internal certifications. This allows your employees to gain accreditation while at the same time encouraging top-down support and creating a compliance check for the continual delivery and acknowledgement of your evolving best practices.

    Ensure that best practices and lessons learned are injected back into the ACE

    For your employees to continuously improve, so must the Center of Excellence. Ensure the ACE has the appropriate mechanisms to absorb and disseminate best practices that emerge from knowledge transfer facilitation events.

    Facilitated Learning Session →Was the localized adaption well received by others in similar roles? →Document Localized Adaptation →Is there broad applicability and benefit to the proposed innovation? →CoE Absorbs as Best Practice

    Continuous improvement starts with the CoE

    While facilitating knowledge transfer is key, it is even more important that the Center of Excellence can take localized adaptations from Agile teams and standardize them as best practices when well received. If an individual were to leave without sharing their knowledge, the CoE and the larger organization will lose that knowledge and potential innovation opportunities.

    Experience matters

    To organically grow your ACE and be cost effective, you want your teams to continuously improve and to share that knowledge. As individual team members develop and climb the adoption model, they should participate as coaches and champions for less experienced groups so that their knowledge is reaching the widest audience possible.

    Case study: Agile learning at Spotify

    CASE STUDY

    Industry Digital Media

    Source Henrik Kniberg & Anders Ivarsson, 2012

    Methods of Agile learning at Spotify

    Spotify has continuously introduced innovative techniques to facilitate learning and ensure that that knowledge gets injected back into the organization. Some examples are the following:

    • Hack days: Self-organizing teams, referred to as squads, come together, try new ideas, and share them with their co-workers. This facilitates a way to stay up to date with new tools and techniques and land new product innovations.
    • Coaching: Every squad has access to an Agile coach to help inject best practices into their workflow – coaches run retrospectives, sprint planning meetings, facilitate one-on-one coaching, etc.
    • Tribes: Collections of squads that hold regular gatherings to show the rest of the tribe what they’ve been working on so others can learn from what they are doing.
    • Chapters: People with similar skills within a tribe come together to discuss their area of expertise and their specific challenges.
    • Guilds: A wide-reaching community of interest where members from different tribes can come together to share knowledge, tools, and codes, and practice (e.g. a tester guild, an Agile coaching guild).

    The image shows the Spotify model, with two sections, each labelled Tribe, and members from within each Tribe gathered together in a section labelled Guild.

    "As an example of guild work, we recently had a ‘Web Guild Unconference,’ an open space event where all web developers at Spotify gathered up in Stockholm to discuss challenges and solutions within their field."

    Activity: Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption

    2.2.1 30 Minutes per role

    Input

    • Categorized use cases

    Output

    • Role-based engagement plans

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • Team
    1. On the top bar, define the role you are developing the engagement plan for. This will give you the ability to standardize service delivery across all individuals in similar roles.
    2. Import your categorized service offerings for each level of adoption that you think are applicable to the given role.
    3. Using backwards induction, determine the engagement processes that will ensure that those service offerings are accessible and fit the day-to-day operations of the role.
    4. Fill in the template available on the next slide with each role’s engagement plan.

    Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.

    Example engagement plan: Developer

    2.2.1 30 Minutes per role

    Role: Developer
    Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 4 Level 5
    Service Offering
    1. Onboarding
    2. Coaching
    3. Learning Facilitation
    1. Tooling Standards
    2. Learning Facilitation
    1. Communications Training
    2. Learning Facilitation
    1. Subject-Matter Expertise
    2. Coaching
    1. Knowledge Management
    Engagement Process
    1. Based on service request or need identified by dev. manager.
    2. Based on service request or need identified by dev. manager.
    3. Weekly mandatory community of practice meetings.
    1. When determined to have graduated to level 2, receive standard Agile tooling standards training.
    2. Weekly mandatory community of practice meetings.
    1. When determined to have graduated to level 3, receive standard Agile communications training.
    2. Weekly mandatory community of practice meetings
    1. Peer-based training on how to effectively self-organize.
    2. Based on service request or need identified by dev. manager.
    1. Review captured key learnings from last and have CoE review KPIs related to any area changed.

    Example engagement plan: Tester

    2.2.1 30 Minutes per role

    Role: Tester
    Level 1Level 2Level 3Level 4Level 5
    Service Offering
    1. Onboarding
    2. Coaching
    1. Product Training
    2. Communications Training
    1. Communications Training
    2. Learning Facilitation
    1. Subject-Matter Expertise
    2. Coaching
    1. Tooling Standards
    2. Training
    3. Coaching
    Engagement Process
    1. Based on service request or need identified by dev. manager.
    1. Weekly mandatory community of practice meetings.
    2. Provide training on effective methods for communicating with development teams based on organizational best practices.
    1. When determined to have graduated to level 3, receive standard training based on organizational testing best practices. Weekly mandatory community of practice meetings.
    1. Peer-to-peer training with level 5 certified coach.
    2. Based on service request or need identified by dev. manager. .
    1. Periodic updates of organizational tooling standards based on community of practice results.
    2. Automation training.
    3. Provide coaching to level 1 developers on a rotating basis to develop facilitation skills.

    Example engagement plan: Product Owner

    2.2.1 30 Minutes per role

    Role: Product Owner
    Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 4 Level 5
    Service Offering
    1. Onboarding
    2. Coaching
    1. Coaching
    2. Learning Facilitation
    1. Coaching
    2. Communications Training
    3. Learning Facilitation
    1. Coaching
    2. Learning Facilitation
    1. Coaching
    2. Learning Facilitation
    Engagement Process
    1. Provide onboarding materials for Agile product owners.
    2. Provide bi-weekly reviews and subsequent guidance at the end of retrospective processes.
    1. Provide monthly reviews and subsequent guidance based on retrospective results.
    2. Bi-weekly mandatory community of practice meetings
    1. When determined to have graduated to level 3, receive standard training based on organizational testing best practices.
    2. Bi-weekly mandatory community of practice meetings.
    1. Provide monthly reviews and subsequent guidance based on retrospective results.
    2. Bi-weekly mandatory community of practice meetings
    1. Provide quarterly reviews and subsequent guidance based on retrospective results.
    2. Bi-weekly mandatory community of practice meetings

    Phase 2, Step 3: Define metrics to measure success

    Phase 1

    1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE

    1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE

    Phase 2

    2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams

    2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan

    2.3 Define metrics to measure success

    Phase 3

    3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE

    3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives

    3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE

    Activities:

    2.3.1 Define existing team-level metrics.

    2.3.2 Define metrics that align with your Agile business objectives.

    2.3.3 Define target ACE performance metrics.

    2.3.4 Define Agile adoption metrics.

    2.3.5 Consolidate your metrics for stakeholder impact.

    2.3.6 Use Info-Tech’s ACE Benefits Tracking Tool to monitor, evaluate, refine, and ensure continued business value.

    Outcomes:

    • Understand the importance of aligning with the functional expectations of your ACE customers.
    • Understand the relationship between engagement and continuous improvement.
    • Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption to standardize the way customers interact with the ACE.

    Craft metrics that will measure the success of your Agile teams

    Quantify measures that demonstrate the effectiveness of your ACE by establishing distinct metrics for each of your service offerings. This will ensure that you have full transparency over the outputs of your CoE and that your service offerings maintain relevance and are utilized.

    Questions to Ask

    1. What are leading indicators of improvements that directly affect the mandate of the CoE?
    2. How do you measure process efficiency and effectiveness?

    Creating meaningful metrics

    Specific

    Measureable

    Achievable

    Realistic

    Time-bound

    Follow the SMART framework when developing metrics for each service offering.

    Adhering to this methodology is a key component of the lean management methodology. This framework will help you avoid establishing general metrics that aren’t relevant.

    "It’s not about telling people what they are doing wrong. It’s about constantly steering everyone on the team in the direction of success, and never letting any individual compromise the progress of the team toward success." – Mary Poppendieck, qtd. in “Questioning Servant Leadership”

    For important advice on how to avoid the many risks associated with metrics, refer to Info-Tech’s Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively.

    Ensure your metrics are addressing criteria from different levels of stakeholders and enterprise context

    There will be a degree of overlap between the metrics from your business objectives, service offerings, and existing Agile teams. This is a positive thing. If a metric can speak to multiple benefits it is that much more powerful in commuting successes to your key stakeholders.

    Existing metrics

    Business objective metrics

    Service offering metrics

    Agile adoption metrics

    Finding points of overlap means that you have multiple stakeholders with a vested interest in the positive trend of a specific metric. These consolidated metrics will be fundamental for your CoE as they will help build consensus through communicating the success of the ACE in a common language for a diverse audience.

    Activity: Define existing team-level metrics

    2.3.1 1 Hour

    Input

    • Current metrics

    Output

    • Service offerings categorized within adoption model

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • Team
    1. Gather any metrics related documentation that you collected during your requirements gathering in Phase 1.
    2. Collect team-level metrics for your existing Agile teams:
      • Examine outputs from any feedback mechanisms you have (satisfaction surveys, emails, existing SLAs, burndown charts, resourcing costs, licensing costs per sprint, etc.).
      • Look at historical trends and figures when available. Be careful of frequent anomalies as these may indicate a root cause that needs to be addressed.
      • Explore the definition of specific metrics across different functional teams to ensure consistency of measurement and reporting.
    Team Objective Expected Benefits Metrics
    Improve productivity
    • Improve transparency with business decisions
    • Team burndown and velocity
    • Number of releases per milestone
    Increase team morale and motivation
    • Teams are engaged and motivated to develop new opportunities to deliver more value quicker.
    • Team satisfaction with Agile environment
    • Degree of engagement in ceremonies
    Improve transparency with business decisions
    • Teams are engaged and motivated to develop new opportunities to deliver more value quicker.
    • Stakeholder satisfaction with completed product
    • Number of revisions to products in demonstrations

    Activity: Define metrics that align with your Agile business objectives

    2.3.2 1 Hour

    Input

    • Organizational business objectives from Phase 1

    Output

    • Metrics aligned to organizational business objectives

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • ACE
    1. List the business objectives that you determined in 1.1.2.
    2. Create a shortlist of expected benefits from those business objectives. These will help to drive metrics that align with the intended purpose of completing those business objectives, and affirm they are aligned to realizable benefits.
    3. Define metrics that speak to the benefits of your business objectives. While engaging in this process, ensure to document the collection method for each metrics.
    Business Objectives Expected Benefits Metrics
    Decrease time-to-market of product releases
    • Faster feedback from customers.
    • Increased customer satisfaction.
    • Competitive advantage.
    Decrease time-to-market of product releases
    • Alignment to organizational best practices.
    • Improved team productivity.
    • Greater collaboration across functional teams.
    • Policy and practice adherence and acknowledgement
    • Number of requests for ACE services
    • Number of suggestions to improve Agile best practices and ACE operations

    Activity: Define target ACE performance metrics

    2.3.3 1 Hour

    Input

    • Service offerings
    • Satisfaction surveys
    • Usage rates

    Output

    • CoE performance metrics

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • ACE
    1. Define metrics to measure the success of each of your service offerings.
    2. Create a shortlist of expected benefits from those business objectives. These will help to drive metrics that align with the intended purpose of those service offerings, and affirm they are aligned to realizable benefits.
    3. Define metrics that speak to the benefits of your service offerings.
    4. Compare these to your team performance metrics.
    Service Offering Expected Benefits Metrics
    Knowledge management
    • Comprehensive knowledgebase that accommodates various company products and office locations.
    • Easily accessible resources.
    • Number of practices extracted from ACE and utilized
    • Frequency of updates to knowledgebase
    Tooling standards
    • Tools adhere to company policies, security guidelines, and regulations.
    • Improved support of tools and technologies.
    • Tools integrate and function well with enterprise systems.
    • Number of teams and functional groups using standardized tools
    • Number of supported standardized tools
    • Number of new tools added to the standards list
    • Number of tools removed from standards list

    Activity: Define Agile adoption metrics

    2.3.4 1 Hour

    Input

    • Agile adoption model

    Output

    • Agile adoption metrics
    1. Define metrics to measure the success of each of your service offerings.
    2. Create a shortlist of expected benefits from those business objectives. These will help to drive metrics that align with the intended purpose of those service offerings, and affirm they are aligned to realizable benefits.
    3. Define metrics that speak to the benefits of your service offerings.
    4. It is possible that you will need to adjust these metrics after baselines are established when you begin to operate the ACE. Keep this in mind moving forward.
    Adoption attributes Expected Benefits Metrics
    Team organization
    • Acquisition of the appropriate roles and skills to successfully deliver products.
    • Degree of flexibility to adjust team compositions on a per project basis
    Team coordination
    • Ability to successfully undertake large and complex projects involving multiple functional groups.
    • Number of ceremonies involving teams across functional groups
    Business alignment
    • Increased delivery of business value from process optimizations.
    • Number of business-objective metrics surpassing targets
    Coaching
    • Teams are regularly trained with new and better best practices.
    • Number of coaching and training requests
    Empowerment
    • Teams can easily and quickly modify processes to improve productivity without following a formal, rigorous process.
    • Number of implemented changes from team retrospectives
    Failure tolerance
    • Stakeholders trust teams will adjust when failures occur during a project.
    • Degree of stakeholder trust to address project issues quickly and effectively

    Activity: Consolidate your metrics for stakeholder impact

    2.3.5 30 Minutes

    Input

    • New and existing Agile metrics

    Output

    • Consolidated Agile metrics

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • ACE
    1. Take all the metrics defined from the previous activities and compare them as a group.
    2. If there are overlapping metrics that are measuring similar outcomes or providing similar benefits, see if there is a way to merge them together so that a single metric can report outcomes to multiple stakeholders. This reduces the amount of resources invested in metrics gathering and helps to show consensus or alignment between multiple stakeholder interests.
    3. Compare these to your existing Agile metrics, and explore ways to consolidate existing metrics that are established with some of your new metrics. Established metrics are trusted and if they can be continued it can be viewed as beneficial from a consensus and consistency perspective to your stakeholders.

    Activity: Use Info-Tech’s ACE Benefits Tracking Tool to monitor, evaluate, refine, and ensure continued business value

    2.3.6 1 Hour

    Purpose

    The CoE governance team can use this tool to take ownership of the project’s benefits, track progress, and act on any necessary changes to address gaps. In the long term, it can be used to identify whether the team is ahead, on track, or lagging in terms of benefits realization.

    Steps

    1. Enter your identified metrics from the following activities into the ACE Benefits Tracking Tool.
    2. Input your baselines from your data collection (Phase 3) and a goal value for each metric.
    3. Document the results at key intervals as defined by the tool.
    4. Use the summary report to identify metrics that are not tracking well for root cause analysis and communicate with key stakeholders the outcomes of your Agile Center of Excellence based on your communication schedule from Phase 3, Step 3.

    INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

    Download the ACE Benefits Tracking Tool.

    Checkpoint: Are you ready to operate your ACE?

    Phase 2

    2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams

    2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan

    2.3 Define metrics to measure success

    Phase 3

    3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE

    3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives

    3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE

    Self Auditing Guidelines

    • Have you categorized your ACE service offerings within Info-Tech’s Agile adoption model?
    • Have you formalized engagement plans to standardize the access to your service offerings?
    • Do you understand the function of learning events and their criticality to the function of the ACE?
    • Do you understand the key attributes of Agile adoption and how social capital leads to optimized value delivery?
    • Have you defined metrics for different goals (adoption, effective service offerings, business objectives) of the ACE?
    • Do your defined metrics align to the SMART framework?

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

    2.1.1 Further categorize your use cases within the Agile adoption model

    Our analyst team will help you categorize the Centers of Excellence service offerings within Info-Tech’s Agile adoption model to help standardize the way your organization engages with the Center of Excellence.

    2.2.1 Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption

    Our analyst team will help you structure engagement plans for each role within your Agile environment to provide a standardized pathway to personal development and consistency in practice.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    2.3.2 Define metrics that align with your Agile business objectives

    Our analysts will walk you through defining a set of metrics that align with your Agile business objectives identified in Phase 1 of the blueprint so the CoEs monitoring function can ensure ongoing alignment during operation.

    2.3.3 Define target ACE performance metrics

    Our analysts will walk you through defining a set of metrics that monitors how successful the ACE has been at providing its services so that business and IT stakeholders can ensure the effectiveness of the ACE.

    2.3.4 Define Agile adoption metrics

    Our analyst team will help you through defining a set of metrics that aligns with your organization’s fit of the Agile adoption model in order to provide a mechanism to track the progress of Agile teams maturing in capability and organizational trust.

    Phase 3

    Operationalize Your Agile Center of Excellence

    Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence

    Operate your ACE to drive optimized value from your Agile teams

    The final step is to engage in monitoring of your metrics program to identify areas for improvement. Using metrics as a driver for operating your ACE will allow you to identify and effectively manage needed change, as well as provide you with the data necessary to promote outcomes to your stakeholders to ensure the long-term viability of the ACE within your organization.

    Phase 1 - Strategically Align the CoE

    Create strategic alignment between the CoE and the organization’s goals, objectives, and vision. This alignment translates into the CoE mandate intended to enhance the way Agile will enable teams to meet business objectives.

    Phase 2 - Standardize the CoEs Service Offerings

    Build an engagement plan based on a standardized adoption model to ensure your CoE service offerings are accessible and consistent across the organization. Create and consolidate key performance indicators to measure the CoEs utility and whether or not the expected value is being translated to tangible results.

    Phase 3 - Operate the CoE

    Operate the CoE to provide service offerings to Agile teams, identify improvements to optimize the function of your Agile teams, and effectively manage and communicate change so that teams can grow within the Agile adoption model and optimize value delivery both within your Agile environment and across functions.

    Phase 3 outline

    Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

    Guided Implementation 3: Operate the CoE

    Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): Variable depending on communication plan

    Step 3.1: Optimize the success of your ACE

    Start with an analyst kick off call:

    • Conduct a baseline assessment of your Agile environment.

    Then complete these activities…

    3.1.1 Use Info-Tech’s ACE Satisfaction Survey to help establish your baseline.

    3.1.2 Use Info-Tech’s CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool to measure the maturity level of your ACE.

    3.1.3 Prioritize ACE actions by monitoring your metrics.

    Step 3.2: Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives

    Start with an analyst kick off call:

    • Interface with the ACE with your change management function.

    Then complete these activities…

    3.2.1 Assess the interaction and communication points of your Agile teams.

    3.2.2 Determine the root cause of each metric falling short of expectations.

    3.2.3 Brainstorm solutions to identified issues.

    3.2.4 Review your metrics program.

    3.2.5 Create a communication plan for change.

    Step 3.3: Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE

    Finalize phase deliverable:

    • Build a communications deck for key stakeholders.

    Then complete these activities…

    3.3.1 Use the outputs from your metrics tracking tool to communicate progress.

    3.3.2 Summarize adjustments in areas where the ACE fell short.

    3.3.3 Review the effectiveness of your service offerings.

    3.3.4 Evaluate your ACE Maturity.

    3.3.5 Use Info-Tech’s ACE Communications Deck to deliver your outcomes to the key stakeholders.

    Phase 3 Results & Insights:

    Inject improvements into your Agile environment with operational excellence. Plan changes and communicate them effectively, monitor outcomes on a regular basis, and keep stakeholders in the loop to ensure that their interests are being looked after to ensure long-term viability of the CoE.

    Phase 3, Step 1: Optimize the success of your ACE

    Phase 1

    1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE

    1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE

    Phase 2

    2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams

    2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan

    2.3 Define metrics to measure success

    Phase 3

    3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE

    3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives

    3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE

    Tools:

    3.1.1 Use Info-Tech’s ACE Satisfaction Survey to help establish your baseline.

    3.1.2 Use Info-Tech’s CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool to measure the maturity level of your ACE.

    3.1.3 Prioritize ACE actions by monitoring your metrics.

    Outcomes:

    • Conduct a baseline assessment of your ACE to measure against using a variety of data sources, including interviews, satisfaction surveys, and historical data.
    • Use the Benefits Tracking Tool to start monitoring the outcomes of the ACE and to keep track of trends.

    Ensure the CoE is able to collect the necessary data to measure success

    Establish your collection process to ensure that the CoE has the necessary resources to collect metrics and monitor progress, that there is alignment on what data sources are to be used when collecting data, and that you know which stakeholder is interested in the outcomes of that metric.

    Responsibility

    • Does the CoE have enough manpower to collect the metrics and monitor them?
    • If automated through technology, is it clear who is responsible for its function?

    Source of metric

    • Is the method of data collection standardized so that multiple people could collect the data in the same way?

    Impacted stakeholder

    • Do you know which stakeholder is interested in this metric?
    • How often should the interested stakeholder be informed of progress?

    Intended function

    • What is the expected benefit of increasing this metric?
    • What does the metric intend to communicate to the stakeholder?

    Conduct a baseline assessment of your ACE to measure success

    Establishing the baseline performance of the ACE allows you to have a reasonable understanding of the impact it is having on meeting business objectives. Use user satisfaction surveys, stakeholder interviews, and any current metrics to establish a concept of how you are performing now. Setting new metrics can be a difficult task so it is important to collect as much current data as possible. After the metrics have been established and monitored for a period of time, you can revisit the targets you have set to ensure they are realistic and usable.

    Without a baseline, you cannot effectively:

    • Establish reasonable target metrics that reflect the performance of your Center of Excellence.
    • Identify, diagnose, and resolve any data that deviates from expected outcomes.
    • Measure ongoing business satisfaction given the level of service.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Invest the needed time to baseline your activities. These data points are critical to diagnose successes and failures of the CoE moving forward, and you will need them to be able to refine your service offerings as business conditions or user expectations change. While it may seem like something you can breeze past, the investment is critical.

    Use a variety of sources to get the best picture of your current state; a combination of methods provides the richest insight

    Interviews

    What to do:

    • Conduct interviews (or focus groups) with key influencers and Agile team members.

    Benefits:

    • Data comes from key business decision makers.
    • Identify what is top of mind for your top-level stakeholders.
    • Ask follow-up questions for detail.

    Challenges:

    • This will only provide a very high-level view.
    • Interviewer biases may skew the results.

    Surveys

    What to do:

    • Distribute an Agile-specific stakeholder satisfaction survey. The survey should be specific to identify factors of your current environment.

    Benefits:

    • Every end user/business stakeholder will be able to provide feedback.
    • The survey will be simple to develop and distribute.

    Challenges:

    • Response rates can be low if stakeholders do not understand the value in their opinions.

    Historical Data

    What to do:

    • Collect and analyze existing Agile data such as past retrospectives, Agile team metrics, etc.

    Benefits:

    • Get a full overview of current service offerings, past issues, and current service delivery.
    • Allows you to get an objective view of what is really going on within your Agile teams.

    Challenges:

    • Requires a significant time investment and analytical skills to analyze the data and generate insights on business satisfaction and needs.

    Use Info-Tech’s ACE Satisfaction Survey to help establish your baseline

    3.1.1 Baseline satisfaction survey

    Purpose

    Conduct a user satisfaction survey prior to setting your baseline for your ACE. This will include high-level questions addressing your overall Agile environment and questions addressing teams’ current satisfaction with their processes and technology.

    Steps

    1. Modify the satisfaction survey template to suit your organization and the service offerings you have defined for the Agile Center of Excellence.
    2. Distribute the satisfaction survey to any users who are expected to interface with the ACE.
    3. Document the results and communicate them with the relevant key stakeholders.
    4. Combine these results with historical data points (if available) and stakeholder interviews to get a holistic picture of your current state.

    INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

    Download the ACE Satisfaction Survey.

    Use Info-Tech’s CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool to measure the maturity level of your ACE

    3.1.2 CoE maturity assessment

    Purpose

    Assessing your ACEs maturity lets you know where they currently are and what to track to get them to the next step. This will help ensure your ACE is following good practices and has the appropriate mechanisms in place to serve your stakeholders.

    Steps

    1. Download the CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool to assess the maturity of your ACE.
    2. Complete the assessment tool with all members of your ACE team to determine your maturity score.
    3. Document the results and communicate them with the relevant key stakeholders.
    4. Combine these results with historical data points (if available) and stakeholder interviews to get a holistic picture of your ACE maturity level.

    Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.

    INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

    Download the CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool.

    Activity: Prioritize ACE actions by monitoring your metrics

    3.1.3 Variable time commitment

    Input

    • Metrics from ACE Benefits Tracking Tool

    Output

    • Prioritized actions for the ACE

    Materials

    • ACE Benefits Tracking Tool

    Participants

    • ACE team
    1. Review your ACE Benefits Tracking Tool periodically (at the end of sprint cycles, quarterly, etc.) and document metrics that are trending or actively falling short of goals or expectations.
    2. Take the documented list and have the ACE staff consider what actions or decisions can be prioritized to help mend the identified gaps. Look for any trends that could potentially speak to a larger problem or a specific aspect of the ACE or the organizational Agile environment that is not functioning as expected.
    3. Take the opportunity to review metrics that are also tracking above expected value to see if there are any lessons learned that can be extended to other ACE service offerings (e.g. effective engagement or communication strategies) so that the organization can start to learn what is effective and what is not based on their internal struggles and challenges. Spreading successes is just as important as identifying challenges in a CoE model.

    Phase 3, Step 2: Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives

    Phase 1

    1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE

    1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE

    Phase 2

    2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams

    2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan

    2.3 Define metrics to measure success

    Phase 3

    3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE

    3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives

    3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE

    Activities:

    3.2.1 Assess the interaction and communication points of your Agile teams.

    3.2.2 Determine the root cause of each metric falling short of expectations.

    3.2.3 Brainstorm solutions to identified issues

    3.2.4 Review your metrics program.

    3.2.5 Create a communication plan for change.

    Outcomes:

    • Understand how your existing change management process interfaces with the Center of Excellence.
    • Identify issues and ideate solutions to metrics falling short of expectations.
    • Create a communication plan to prepare groups for any necessary change.

    Manage the adaptation of teams as they adopt Agile capabilities

    As Agile spreads, be cognizant of your cultural tolerance to change and its ability to deliver on such change. Change will happen more frequently and continuously, and there may be conceptual (change tolerance) or capability (delivery tolerance) roadblocks along the way that will need to be addressed.

    The Agile adoption model will help to graduate both the tolerance to change and tolerance to deliver over time. As your level of competency to deliver change increases, organizational tolerance to change, especially amongst management, will increase as well. Remember that optimized value delivery comes from this careful balance of aptitude and trust.

    Tolerance to change

    Tolerance to change refers to the conceptual capacity of your people to consume and adopt change. Change tolerance may become a barrier to success because teams might be too engrained with current structures and processes and find any changes too disruptive and uncomfortable.

    Tolerance to deliver

    Tolerance to deliver refers to the capability to deliver on expected change. While teams may be tolerant, they may not have the necessary capacity, skills, or resources to deliver the necessary changes successfully. The ACE can help solve this problem with training and coaching, or possibly by obtaining outside help where necessary.

    Understand how the ACE interfaces with your current change management process

    As the ACE absorbs best practices and identifies areas for improvement, a change management process should be established to address the implementation and sustainability of change without introducing significant disruptions and costs.

    To manage a continuously changing environment, your ACE will need to align and coordinate with organizational change management processes. This process should be capable of evaluating and incorporating multiple change initiatives continuously.

    Desired changes will need to be validated, and localized adaptations will need to be disseminated to the larger organization, and current state policy and procedures will need to be amended as the adoption of Agile spreads and capabilities increase.

    The goal here is to have the ACE governance group identify and interface with parties relevant to successfully implementing any specific change.

    INFO-TECH RELATED RESEARCH:

    Strategy and Leadership: Optimize Change Management

    Optimize your stakeholder management process to identify, prioritize, and effectively manage key stakeholders.

    Where should your Agile change requests come from?

    Changes to the services, structure, or engagement model of your ACE can be triggered from various sources in your organization. You will see that proposed changes may be requested with the best intentions; however, the potential impacts they may have to other areas of the organization can be significant. Consult all sources of ACE change requests to obtain a consensus that your change requests will not deteriorate the ACEs performance and use.

    ACE Governance

    • Sources of ACE Change Requests
      • ACE Policies/Stakeholders
        • Triggers for Change:
          • Changes in business and functional group objectives.
          • Dependencies and legacy policies and procedures.
      • ACE Customers
        • Triggers for Change:
          • Retrospectives and post-mortems.
          • Poor fit of best practices to projects.
      • Metrics
        • Triggers for Change:
          • Performance falling short of expectations.
          • Lack of alignment with changing objectives.
      • Tools and Technologies
        • Triggers for Change:
          • New or enhanced tools and technologies.
          • Changes in development and technology standards.

    Note: Each source of ACE change requests may require a different change management process to evaluate and implement the change.

    Activity: Assess the interaction and communication points of your Agile teams

    3.2.1 1.5 Hours

    Input

    • Understanding of team and organization structure

    Output

    • Current assessment of organizational design

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • Development team
    1. Identify everyone who is directly or indirectly involved in projects completed by Agile teams. This can include those that are:
    • Informed of a project’s progress.
    • Expected to interface with the Agile team for solution delivery (e.g. DevOps).
    • Impacted by the success of the delivered solutions.
    • Responsible for the removal of impediments faced by the Agile team.
  • Indicate how each role interacts with the others and how frequently these interactions occur for a typical project. Do this by drawing a diagram on a whiteboard using labelled arrows to indicate types and frequency of interactions.
  • Identify the possible communication, collaboration, and alignment challenges the team will face when working with other groups.
  • Agile Team n
    Group Type of Interaction Potential challenges
    Operations
    • Release management
    • Past challenges transitioning to DevOps.
    • Communication barrier as an impediment.
    PMO
    • Planning
    • Product owner not located with team in organization.
    • PMO still primarily waterfall; need Agile training/coaching

    Activity: Determine the root cause of each metric falling short of expectations

    3.2.2 30 Minutes per metric

    Input

    • Metrics from Benefits Tracking Tool

    Output

    • Root causes to issues

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • ACE team
    1. Take each metric from the ACE Benefits Tracking Tool that is lagging behind or has missed expectations and conduct an analysis of why it is performing that way.
    2. Conduct individual webbing sessions to clarify the issues. The goal is to drive out the reasons why these issues are present or why scaling Agile may introduce additional challenges.
    3. Share and discuss these findings with the entire team.

    Example:

    • Lack of best-practice documentation
      • Why?
        • Knowledge siloed within teams
        • No centralized repository for best practices
          • Why?
            • No mechanisms to share between teams
              • Why? Root causes
                • Teams are not sharing localized adaptations
                • CoE is not effectively monitoring team communications
            • Access issues at team level to wiki
              • Why? Root causes
                • Administration issues with best-practice wiki
                • Lack of ACE visibility into wiki access

    Activity: Brainstorm solutions to identified issues

    3.2.3 30 Minutes per metric

    Input

    • Root causes of issues

    Output

    • Fixes and solutions to scaling Agile issues

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • Development team
    1. Using the results from your root-cause analysis, brainstorm potential solutions to the identified problems. Frame your brainstorming within the following perspectives: people, process, and technology. Map these solutions using the matrix below.
    2. Synthesize your ideas to create a consolidated list of initiatives.
      1. Highlight the solutions that can address multiple issues.
      2. Collaborate on how solutions can be consolidated into a single initiative.
    3. Write your synthesized solutions on sticky notes.
    SOLUTION CATEGORY
    People Process Technology
    ISSUES Poor face-to-face communication
    Lack of best-practice documentation

    Engage those teams affected by change early to ensure they are prepared

    Strategically managing change is an essential component to ensure that the ACE achieves its desired function. If the change that comes with adopting Agile best practices is going to impact other functions and change their expected workflows, ensure they are well prepared and the benefits for said changes are clearly communicated to them.

    Necessary change may be identified proactively (dependency assessments, system integrity, SME indicates need, etc.) or reactively (through retrospectives, discussions, completing root-cause analyses, etc.), but both types need to be handled the same way – through proper planning and communication with the affected parties.

    Plan any necessary change

    Understand the points where other groups will be affected by the adoption of Agile practices and recognize the potential challenges they may face. Plan changes to accommodate interactions between these groups without roadblocks or impediments.

    Communicate the change

    Structure a communication plan based on your identified challenges and proposed changes so that groups are well prepared to make the necessary adjustments to accommodate Agile workflows.

    Review and modify your metrics and baselines to ensure they are achievable in changing environments

    Consider the possible limitations that will exist from environmental complexities when measuring your Agile teams. Dependencies and legacy policies and procedures that pose a bottleneck to desired outcomes will need to be changed before teams can be measured justifiably. Take the time to ensure the metrics you crafted earlier are plausible in your current environment and there is not a need for transitional metrics.

    Are your metrics achievable?

    Specific

    Measureable

    Achievable

    • Adopting Agile is a journey, not just a destination. Ensure that the metrics a team is measured against reflect expectations for the team’s current level of Agile adoption and consider external dependencies that may limit their ability to achieve intended results.

    Realistic

    Time-bound

    Info-Tech Insight

    Use metrics as diagnostics, not as motivation. Teams will find ways to meet metrics they are measured by making sacrifices and taking unneeded risk to do so. To avoid dysfunction in your monitoring, use metrics as analytical tools to inform decision making, not as a yardstick for judgement.

    Activity: Review your metrics program

    3.2.4 Variable time commitment

    Input

    • Identified gaps
    • Agile team interaction points

    Output

    • ACE baselines
    • Past measurements

    Materials

    • ACE Benefits Tracking Tool

    Participants

    • ACE
    1. Now that you have identified gaps in your current state, see if those will have any impact on the achievability of your current metrics program.
    2. Review your root-cause analyses and brainstormed solutions, and hypothesize whether or not they will have any downstream impact to goal attainment. It is possible that there is no impact, but as cross-functional collaboration increases, the likelihood that groups will act as bottlenecks or impediments to expected performance will increase.
    3. Consider how any changes will impact the interaction points between teams based on the results from activity 3.2.1: Assess the interaction and communication points of your Agile teams. If there are too many negative impacts it may be a sign to re-consider the hypothesized solution to the problem and consider alternatives.
    4. In any cases where a metric has been altered, adjust its goal measurement to reflect its changes in the ACE Benefits Tracking Tool.

    Case study: Agile change at the GSA

    CASE STUDY

    Industry Government

    Source Navin Vembar, Agile Government Leadership

    Challenge

    The GSA is tasked with completed management of the Integrated Award Environment (IAE).

    • The IAE manages ten federal information technology systems that enable registering, searching, and applying for federal awards, as well as tracking them.
    • The IAE also manages the Federal Service Desk.

    The IAE staff had to find a way to break down the problem of modernization into manageable chunks that would demonstrate progress, but also had to be sure to capture a wide variety of user needs with the ability to respond to those needs throughout development.

    Had to work out the logistics of executing Agile change within the GSA, an agency that relies heavily on telework. In the case of modernization, they had a product owner in Florida while the development team was spread across the metro Washington, DC area.

    Solution

    Agile provided the ability to build incremental successes that allowed teams successful releases and built enthusiasm around the potential of adopting Agile practices offered.

    • GSA put in place an organization framework that allowed for planning of change at the portfolio level to enable the change necessary to allow for teams to execute tasks at the project level.
    • A four-year plan with incremental integration points allowed for larger changes on a quarterly basis while maintaining a bi-weekly sprint cycle.
    • They adopted IBM’s RTC tool for a Scrum board and on Adobe Connect for daily Scrum sessions to ensure transparency and effectiveness of outcomes across their collocated teams.

    Create a clear, concise communication plan

    Communication is key to avoid surprises and lost productivity created by the implementation of changes.

    User groups and the business need to be given sufficient notice of an impending change. Be concise, be comprehensive, and ensure that the message is reaching the right audience so that no one is blindsided and unable to deliver what is needed. This will allow them to make appropriate plans to accept the change, minimizing the impact of the change on productivity.

    Key Aspects of a Communication Plan

    • The method of communication (email, meetings, workshops, etc.).
    • The delivery strategy (who will deliver the message?).
    • The communication responsibility structure.
    • The communication frequency.
    • A feedback mechanism that allows you to review the effectiveness of your plan.
    • The message that you need to present.

    Communicating change

    • What is the change?
    • Why are we doing it?
    • How are we going to go about it?
    • What are we trying to achieve?
    • How often will we be updated?

    (Cornelius & Associates, The Qualities of Leadership: Leading Change)

    Apply the following principles to enhance the clarity of your message

    1. Be Consistent
    • "This is important because..."
      • The core message must be consistent regardless of audience, channel, or medium.
      • Test your communication and obtain feedback before delivering your message.
      • A lack of consistency can be perceived as deception.
  • Be Clear
    • "This means..."
      • Say what you mean and mean what you say.
      • Choice of language is important.
      • Don’t use jargon.
  • Be Relevant
    • "This affects you because..."
      • Talk about what matters to the audience.
      • Talk about what matters to the change initiative.
      • Tailor the details of the message to each audience’s specific concerns.
      • Communicate truthfully; do not make false promises or hide bad news.
  • Be Concise
    • "In summary..."
      • Keep communication short and to the point so key messages are not lost in the noise.
  • Activity: Create a communication plan for change

    3.2.5 1.5 Hours

    Input

    • Desired messages
    • Stakeholder list

    Output

    • Communication plan

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • CoE
    1. Define the audience(s) for your communications. Consider who needs to be the audience of your different communication events and how it will impact them.
    2. Identify who the messenger will be to deliver the message.
    3. Identify your communication methods. Decide on the methods you will use to deliver each communication event. Your delivery method may vary depending on the audience it is targeting.
    4. Establish a timeline for communication releases. Set dates for your communication events. This can be recurring (weekly, monthly, etc.) or one-time events.
    5. Determine what the content of the message must include. Use the guidelines on the following slide to ensure the message is concise and impactful.

    Note: It is important to establish a feedback mechanism to ensure that the communication has been effective in communicating the change to the intended audiences. This can be incorporated into your ACE satisfaction surveys.

    Audience Messenger Format Timing Message
    Operations Development team Email
    • Monthly (major release)
    • Ad hoc (minor release and fixes)
    Build ready for release
    Key stakeholders CIO Meeting
    • Monthly unless dictated otherwise
    Updates on outcomes from past two sprint cycles

    Phase 3, Step 3: Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE

    Phase 1

    1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE

    1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE

    Phase 2

    2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams

    2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan

    2.3 Define metrics to measure success

    Phase 3

    3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE

    3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives

    3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE

    Activities/Tools:

    3.3.1 Use the outputs from your metrics tracking tool to communicate progress.

    3.3.2 Summarize adjustments in areas where the ACE fell short.

    3.3.3 Re-conduct satisfaction surveys and compare against your baseline.

    3.3.4 Use Info-Tech’s CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool to baseline current practices

    3.3.5 Use Info-Tech’s ACE Communications Deck to deliver your outcomes to the key stakeholders.

    Outcomes:

    • Conduct a retrospective of your ACE to enable the continuous improvement of your Agile program.
    • Structure a communications deck to communicate with stakeholders the outcomes from introducing the ACE to the organization.

    Reflect on your ACEs performance to lead the way to enterprise agility

    After functioning for a period of time, it is imperative to review the function of your ACE to ensure its continual alignment and see in what ways it can improve.

    At the end of the year, take the time to deliberately review and discuss:

    1. The effectiveness and use of your ACEs service offerings.
    2. What went well or wrong during the ACEs operation.
    3. What can be done differently to improve reach, usability, and effectiveness.
    4. Bring together Agile teams and discuss the processes they follow and inquire about suggestions for improvement.

    What is involved?

    • Use your metrics program to diagnose areas of issue and success. The diagnostic value of your metrics can help lead conversations with your Agile teams when attempting to inquire about suggestions for improvement.
    • Leverage your satisfaction surveys from the creation of your ACE and compare them against satisfaction surveys run after a year of operation. What are the lessons learned between then and now?
    • While it is primarily conducted by the ACE team, keep in mind it is a collaborative function and should involve all members, including Agile teams, product owners, Scrum masters, etc.

    Communicating with your key influencers is vital to ensure long-term operation of the ACE

    To ensure the long-term viability of your ACE and that your key influencers will continue funding, you need to demonstrate the ROI the Center of Excellence has provided.

    The overlying purpose of your ACE is to effectively align your Agile teams with corporate objectives. This means that there have to be communicable benefits that point to the effort and resources invested being valuable to the organization. Re-visit your prioritized stakeholder list and get ready to show them the impact the ACE has had on business outcomes.

    Communication with stakeholders is the primary method of building and developing a lasting relationship. Correct messaging can build bridges and tear down barriers, as well as soften opposition and bolster support.

    This section will help you to prepare an effective communication piece that summarizes the metrics stakeholders are interested in, as well as some success stories or benefits that are not communicable through metrics to provide extra context to ongoing successes of the ACE.

    INFO-TECH RELATED RESEARCH:

    Strategy and Leadership: Manage Stakeholder Relations

    Optimize your stakeholder management process to identify, prioritize, and effectively manage key stakeholders.

    Involve key stakeholders in your retrospectives to justify the funding for your ACE

    Those who fund the ACE have a large influence on the long-term success of your ACE. If you have not yet involved your stakeholders, you need to re-visit your organizational funding model for the ACE and ensure that your key stakeholders include the key decision makers for your funding. While they may have varying levels of interest and desires for granularity of data reporting, they need to at least be informed on a high level and kept as champions of the ACE so that there are no roadblocks to the long-term viability of this program.

    Keep this in mind as the ACE begins to demonstrate success, as it is not uncommon to have additional members added to your funding model as your service scales, especially in the chargeback models.

    As new key influencers are included, the ACEs governing group must ensure that collective interests may align and that more priorities don’t lead to derailment.

    The image shows a matrix. The matrix is labelled with Involvement at the bottom, and Power on the left side, and has the upper left quadrant labelled Keep Satisfied, the upper right quadrant labelled Key players, the lower right quadrant labelled Keep informed, and the lower left quadrant labelled Minimal effort. In the matric, there are several roles shown, with roles such as CFO, Apps Director, Funding Group, and CIO highlighted in the Key players section.

    Use the outputs from your metrics tracking tool to communicate progress

    3.3.1 1 Hour

    Use the ACE Benefits Tracking Tool to track the progress of your Agile environment to monitor whether or not the ACE is having a positive impact on the business’ ability to meet its objectives. The outputs will allow you to communicate incremental benefits that have been realized and point towards positive trends that will ensure the long-term buy-in of your key influencers.

    For communication purposes, use this tool to:

    • Re-visit who the impacted or interested stakeholders are so you can tailor your communications to be as impactful as possible for each key influencer of the ACE.

    The image shows a screen capture of the Agile CoE Metrics Tracking sheet.

    • Collate the benefits of the current projects undertaken by the Center of Excellence to give an overall recap of the ACEs impact.

    The image is a screen capture of the Summary Report sheet.

    Communicate where the ACE fell short

    Part of communicating the effectiveness of your ACE is to demonstrate that it is able to remedy projects and processes when they fall short of expectations and brainstorm solutions that effectively address these challenges. Take the opportunity to summarize where results were not as expected, and the ways in which the ACE used its influence or services to drive a positive outcome from a problem diagnosis. Stakeholders do not want a sugar-coated story – they want to see tangible results based on real scenarios.

    Summarizing failures will demonstrate to key influencers that:

    • You are not cherry-picking positive metrics to report and that the ACE faced challenges that it was able to overcome to drive positive business outcomes.
    • You are being transparent with the successes and challenges faced by the ACE, fostering increased trust within your stakeholders regarding the capabilities of Agile.
    • Resolution mechanisms are working as intended, successfully building failure tolerance and trust in change management policies and procedures.

    Activity: Summarize adjustments in areas where the ACE fell short

    3.3.2 15 Minutes per metric

    Input

    • Diagnosed problems from tracking tool
    • Root-cause analyses

    Output

    • Summary of change management successes

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • ACE
    1. Create a list of items from the ACE Benefits Tracking Tool that fell short of expectations or set goals.
    2. For each point, create a brief synopsis of the root-cause analysis completed and summarize the brainstormed solution and its success in remedying the issue. If this process is not complete, create a to-date summary of any progress.
    3. Choose two to three pointed success stories from this list that will communicate broad success to your set of stakeholders.
    Name of metric that fell short
    Baseline measurement 65% of users satisfied with ACE services.
    Goal measurement 80% of users satisfied with ACE services.
    Actual measurement 70% of users satisfied with ACE services.
    Results of root-cause analysis Onboarding was not extensive enough; teams were unaware of some of the services offered, rendering them unsatisfied.
    Proposed solution Revamp onboarding process to include capability map of service offered.
    Summary of success TBD

    Re-conduct surveys with the ACE Satisfaction Survey to review the effectiveness of your service offerings

    3.3.3 Re-conduct satisfaction surveys and compare against your baseline

    Purpose

    This satisfaction survey will give you a template to follow to monitor the effectiveness of your ACEs defined service offerings. The goal is to understand what worked, and what did not, so you can add, retract, or modify service offerings where necessary.

    Steps

    1. Re-use the satisfaction survey to measure the effectiveness of the service offerings. Add questions regarding specific service offerings where necessary.
    2. Cross-analyze your satisfaction survey with metrics tied to your service offerings to help understand the root cause of the issues.
    3. Use the root-cause analysis exercises from step 3.2 to find the root causes of issues.
    4. Create a set of recommendations to add, amend, or improve any existing service offerings.

    INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

    Download the ACE Satisfaction Survey.

    Use Info-Tech’s CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool to baseline current practices

    3.3.4 ACE Maturity Assessment

    Purpose

    Assess your ACEs maturity by using Info-Tech’s CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool. Assessing your ACEs maturity lets you know where you currently are, and where to look for improvements. Note that your optimal Maturity Level will depend on organizational specifics (e.g. a small organization with a handful of Agile Teams can be less mature than a large organization with hundreds of Agile Teams).

    Steps

    1. Download the CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool to assess the maturity of your ACE.
    2. Complete the assessment tool with all members of your ACE team to determine your current Maturity score.
    3. Document the results in the ACE Communications Deck.

    Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.

    INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

    Download the CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool.

    Use Info-Tech’s ACE Communications Deck to deliver your outcomes to the key stakeholders

    3.3.5 Structure communications to each of your key stakeholders

    Purpose

    The ACE Communications Deck will give you a template to follow to effectively communicate with your stakeholders and ensure the long-term viability of your Agile Center of Excellence. Fill in the slides as instructed and provide each stakeholder with a targeted view of the successes of the ACE.

    Steps

    1. Determine who your target audience is for the Communications Deck – you may desire to create one for each of your key stakeholders as they may have different sets of interests.
    2. Fill out the ACE Communications Deck with the suggested inputs from the exercises you have completed during this research set.
    3. Review communications with members of the ACE to ensure that there are no communicable benefits that have been missed or omitted in the deck.

    INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

    Download the ACE Communications Deck.

    Summary of accomplishment

    Knowledge Gained

    • An understanding of social capital as the key driver for organizational Agile success, and how it optimizes the value delivery of your Agile teams.
    • Importance of flexible governance to balance the benefits of localized adaptation and centralized control.
    • Alignment of service offerings with both business objectives and functional expectations as critical to ensuring long-term engagement with service offerings.

    Processes Optimized

    • Knowledge management and transfer of Agile best practices to new or existing Agile teams.
    • Optimization of service offerings for Agile teams based on organizational culture and objectives.
    • Change request optimization via interfacing ACE functions with existing change management processes.
    • Communication planning to ensure transparency during cross-functional collaboration.

    Deliverables Completed

    • A set of service offerings offered by the Center of Excellence that are aligned with the business, Agile teams, and related stakeholders.
    • Engagement plans for Agile team members based on a standardized adoption model to access the ACEs service offerings.
    • A suite of Agile metrics to measure effectiveness of Agile teams, the ACE itself, and its ability to deliver positive outcomes.
    • A communications plan to help create cross-functional transparency over pending changes as Agile spreads.
    • A communications deck to communicate Agile goals, actions, and outcomes to key stakeholders to ensure long-term viability of the CoE.

    Research contributors and experts

    Paul Blaney, Technology Delivery Executive, Thought Leader and passionate Agile Advocate

    Paul has been an Agile practitioner since the manifesto emerged some 20 years ago, applying and refining his views through real life experience at several organizations from startups to large enterprises. He has recently completed the successful build out of the inaugural Agile Delivery Centre of Excellence at TD bank in Toronto.

    John Munro, President Scrum Masters Inc.

    John Munro is the President of Scrum Masters Inc., a software optimization professional services firm using Agile, Scrum, and Lean to help North American firms “up skill” their software delivery people and processes. Scrum Masters’ unique, highly collaborative “Master Mind” consulting model leverages Agile/Lean experts on a biweekly basis to solve clients’ technical and process challenges.

    Doug Birgfeld, Senior Partner Agile Wave

    Doug has been a leader in building great teams, Agile project management, and business process innovation for over 20 years. As Senior Partner and Chief Evangelist at Agile Wave, his mission is to educate and to learn from all those who care about effective government delivery, nationally.

    Related Info-Tech research

    Implement Agile Practices That Work

    Agile is a cultural shift. Don't just do Agile, be Agile.

    Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile

    Execute a disciplined approach to rolling out Agile methods in the organization.

    Improve Application Development Throughput

    Drive down your delivery time by eliminating development inefficiencies and bottlenecks while maintaining high quality.

    Implement DevOps Practices That Work

    Accelerate software deployment through Dev and Ops collaboration.

    Related Info-Tech research (continued)

    Maximize the Benefits from Enterprise Applications with a Center of Excellence

    Optimize your organization’s enterprise application capabilities with a refined and scalable methodology.

    Drive Efficiency and Agility with a Fit-for-Purpose Quality Management Program

    Be proactive; it costs exponentially more to fix a problem the longer it goes unnoticed.

    Optimize the Change Management Process

    Right-size your change management process.

    Improve Requirements Gathering

    Back to basics: great products are built on great requirements.

    Bibliography

    Ambler, Scott. “Agile Requirements Change Management.” Agile Modeling. Scott Amber + Associates, 2014. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.

    Ambler, Scott. “Center of Excellence (CoEs).” Disciplined Agile 2.0: A Process Decision Framework for Enterprise I.T. Scott Amber + Associates. Web. 01 Apr. 2016.

    Ambler, Scott. “Transforming From Traditional to Disciplined Agile Delivery.” Case Study: Disciplined Agile Delivery Adoption. Scott Amber + Associates, 2013. Web.

    Beers, Rick. “IT – Business Alignment Why We Stumble and the Path Forward.” Oracle Corporation, July 2013. Web.

    Cornelius & Associates. “The Qualities of Leadership: Leading Change.” Cornelius & Associates, n.d. Web.

    Craig, William et al. “Generalized Criteria and Evaluation Method for Center of Excellence: A Preliminary Report.” Carnegie Mellon University Research Showcase @ CMU – Software Engineering Institute. Dec. 2009. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

    Forsgren, Dr. Nicole et al (2019), Accelerate: State of DevOps 2019, Google, https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/state-of-devops-2019.pdf

    Gerardi, Bart (2017), Agile Centers of Excellence, PMI Projectmanagement.com, https://www.projectmanagement.com/articles/405819/Agile-Centers-of-Excellence

    Gerardi, Bart (2017), Champions of Agile Adoption, PMI Projectmanagement.com, https://www.projectmanagement.com/articles/418151/Champions-of-Agile-Adoption

    Gerardi, Bart (2017), The Roles of an Agile COE, PMI Projectmanagement.com, https://www.projectmanagement.com/articles/413346/The-Roles-of-an-Agile-COE

    Hohl, P. et al. “Back to the future: origins and directions of the ‘Agile Manifesto’ – views of the originators.” Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development, vol. 6, no. 15, 2018. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40411-0...

    Kaltenecker, Sigi and Hundermark, Peter. “What Are Self-Organising Teams?” InfoQ. 18 July 2014. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.

    Kniberg, Henrik and Anderson Ivarsson. “Scaling Agile @ Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters & Guilds.” Oct. 2012. Web. 30 Apr. 2016.

    Kumar, Alok et al. “Enterprise Agile Adoption: Challenges and Considerations.” Scrum Alliance. 30 Oct. 2014. Web. 30 May 2016.

    Levison, Mark. “Questioning Servant Leadership.” InfoQ, 4 Sept. 2008. Web. https://www.infoq.com/news/2008/09/servant_leadership/

    Linders, Ben. “Don't Copy the Spotify Model.” InfoQ.com. 6 Oct. 2016.

    Loxton, Matthew (June 1, 2011), CoP vs CoE – What’s the difference, and Why Should You Care?, Wordpress.com

    McDowell, Robert, and Bill Simon. In Search of Business Value: Ensuring a Return on Your Technology Investment. SelectBooks, 2010

    Novak, Cathy. “Case Study: Agile Government and the State of Maine.” Agile Government Leadership, n.d. Web.

    Pal, Nirmal and Daniel Pantaleo. “Services are the Language and Building Blocks of an Agile Enterprise.” The Agile Enterprise: Reinventing your Organization for Success in an On-Demand World. 6 Dec. 2015. Springer Science & Business Media.

    Rigby, Darrell K. et al (2018), Agile at Scale, Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2018/05/agile-at-scale

    Scaledagileframework.com, Create a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence, Scaled Agile, Inc, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/lace/

    Shepley, Joe. “8 reasons COEs fail (Part 2).” Agile Ramblings, 22 Feb. 2010. https://joeshepley.com/2010/02/22/8-reasons-coes-fail-part-2/

    Stafford, Jan. “How upper management misconceptions foster Agile failures.” TechTarget. Web. 07 Mar. 2016.

    Taulli, Tom (2020), RPA Center Of Excellence (CoE): What You Need To Know For Success, Forbes.com, https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2020/01/25/rpa-center-of-excellence-coe-what-you-need-to-know-for-success/#24364620287a

    Telang, Mukta. “The CMMI Agile Adoption Model.” ScrumAlliance. 29 May 2015. Web. 15 Apr. 2016.

    VersionOne. “13th Annual State of Agile Report.” VersionOne. 2019. Web.

    Vembar, Navin. “Case Study: Agile Government and the General Services Administration (Integrated Award Environment).” Agile Government Leadership, n.d. Web.

    Wenger, E., R. A. McDermott, et al. (2002), Cultivating communities of practice: A guide to managing knowledge, Harvard Business Press.

    Wenger, E., White, N., Smith, J.D. Digital Habitats; Stewarding Technology for Communities. Cpsquare (2009).

    Build a Software Quality Assurance Program

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    • Today’s rapidly scaling and increasingly complex products create mounting pressure on delivery teams to release new systems and changes quickly and with sufficient quality.
    • Many organizations lack the critical capabilities and resources needed to satisfy their growing testing backlog, risking product success.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Testing is often viewed as a support capability rather than an enabler of business growth. It receives focus and investment only when it becomes a visible problem.
    • The rise in security risks, aggressive performance standards, constantly evolving priorities, and misunderstood quality policies further complicate QA as it drives higher expectations for effective practices.
    • QA starts with good requirements. Tests are only as valuable as the requirements they are validating and verifying. Early QA improves the accuracy of downstream tests and reduces costs of fixing defects late in delivery.
    • Quality is an organization-wide accountability. Upstream work can have extensive ramifications if all roles are not accountable for the decisions they make.
    • Quality must account for both business and technical requirements. Valuable change delivery is cemented in a clear understanding of quality from both business and IT perspectives.

    Impact and Result

    • Standardize your definition of a product. Come to an organizational agreement of what attributes define a high-quality product. Accommodate both business and IT perspectives in your definition.
    • Clarify the role of QA throughout your delivery pipeline. Indicate where and how QA is involved throughout product delivery. Instill quality-first thinking in each stage of your pipeline to catch defects and issues early.
    • Structure your test design, planning, execution, and communication practices to better support your quality definition and business and IT environments and priorities. Adopt QA good practices to ensure your tests satisfy your criteria for a high-quality and successful product.

    Build a Software Quality Assurance Program Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should build a strong foundation for quality, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Define your QA process

    Standardize your product quality definition and your QA roles, processes, and guidelines according to your business and IT priorities.

    • Build a Strong Foundation for Quality – Phase 1: Define Your QA Process
    • Test Strategy Template

    2. Adopt QA good practices

    Build a solid set of good practices to define your defect tolerances, recognize the appropriate test coverage, and communicate your test results.

    • Build a Strong Foundation for Quality – Phase 2: Adopt QA Good Practices
    • Test Plan Template
    • Test Case Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Build a Software Quality Assurance Program

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Define Your QA Process

    The Purpose

    Discuss your quality definition and how quality is interpreted from both business and IT perspectives.

    Review your case for strengthening your QA practice.

    Review the standardization of QA roles, processes, and guidelines in your organization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Grounded understanding of quality that is accepted across IT and between the business and IT.

    Clear QA roles and responsibilities.

    A repeatable QA process that is applicable across the delivery pipeline.

    Activities

    1.1 List your QA objectives and metrics.

    1.2 Adopt your foundational QA process.

    Outputs

    Quality definition and QA objectives and metrics.

    QA guiding principles, process, and roles and responsibilities.

    2 Adopt QA Good Practices

    The Purpose

    Discuss the practices to reveal the sufficient degree of test coverage to meet your acceptance criteria, defect tolerance, and quality definition.

    Review the technologies and tools to support the execution and reporting of your tests.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    QA practices aligned to industry good practices supporting your quality definition.

    Defect tolerance and acceptance criteria defined against stakeholder priorities.

    Identification of test scenarios to meet test coverage expectations.

    Activities

    2.1 Define your defect tolerance.

    2.2 Model and prioritize your tests.

    2.3 Develop and execute your QA activities.

    2.4 Communicate your QA activities.

    Outputs

    Defect tolerance levels and courses of action.

    List of test cases and scenarios that meet test coverage expectations.

    Defined test types, environment and data requirements, and testing toolchain.

    Test dashboard and communication flow.

    Configuration management

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    Configuration management is all about being able to manage your assets within the support processes. That means to record what you need. Not less than that, and not more either.

    Asset Management, Configuration Management, Lifecycle Management

    Data and Analytics Trends 2023

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    • Parent Category Name: Business Intelligence Strategy
    • Parent Category Link: /business-intelligence-strategy

    Data is a unique resource that keeps growing, presenting opportunities along the way. CIOs and IT leaders can use rapidly evolving technologies and capabilities to harness this data and its value for the organization.

    IT leaders must prepare their teams and operations with the right knowledge, capabilities, and strategies to make sure they remain competitive in 2023 and beyond. Nine trends that expand on the three common Vs of data – volume, velocity, and variety – can help guide the way.

    Focus on trends that align with your opportunities and challenges

    The path to becoming more competitive in a data-driven economy differs from one company to the next. IT leaders should use the data and analytics trends that align most with their organizational goals and can lead to positive business outcomes.

    1. Prioritize your investments: Conduct market analysis and prioritize the data and analytics investments that will be critical to your business.
    2. Build a robust strategy: Identify a clear path between your data vision and business outcomes to build a strategy that’s a good fit for your organization.
    3. Inspire practical innovation: Follow a pragmatic approach to implementing trends that range from data gravity and democratization to data monetization and augmented analytics.

    Data and Analytics Trends 2023 Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Data and Analytics Trends Report 2023 – A report that explores nine data use cases for emerging technologies that can improve on capabilities needed to compete in the data-driven economy.

    Data technologies are rapidly evolving. Understanding data's art of the possible is critical. However, to adapt to these upcoming data trends, a solid data management foundation is required. This report explores nine data trends based on the proven framework of data V's: Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity, Value, Virtue, Visualization, Virality, and Viscosity.

    • Data and Analytics Trends Report 2023
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Data and Analytics Trends Report 2023

    SOONER OR LATER, YOU WILL BE IN THE DATA BUSINESS!

    Nine Data Trends for 2023

    In this report, we explore nine data use cases for emerging technologies that can improve on capabilities needed to compete in the data-driven economy. Use cases combine emerging data trends and modernization of existing capabilities.

    1. VOLUME
      • Data Gravity
    2. VELOCITY
    • Democratizing Real-Time Data
  • VARIETY
    • Augmented Data Management
  • VERACITY
    • Identity Authenticity
  • VALUE
    • Data Monetization
  • VIRTUE
    • Adaptive Data Governance
  • VISUALIZATION
    • AI-Driven Storytelling & Augmented Analytics
  • VIRALITY
    • Data Marketplace
  • VISCOSITY
    • DevOps – DataOps – XOps

    VOLUME

    Data Gravity

    Trend 01 Demand for storage and bandwidth continues to grow

    When organizations begin to prioritize data, they first consider the sheer volume of data, which will influence data system design. Your data systems must consider the existing and growing volume of data by assessing industry initiatives such as digital transformation, Industry 4.0, IoT, consumer digital footprint, etc.

    The largest data center in the world is a citadel in Reno, Nevada, that stretches over 7.2 million square feet!

    Source: Cloudwards, 2022

    IoT devices will generate 79.4 zettabytes of data
    by 2025.

    Source: IDC, 2019

    There were about 97
    zettabytes of data generated worldwide in 2022.

    Source: “Volume of Data,” Statista, 2022

    VOLUME

    Data Gravity

    Data attracts more data and an ecosystem of applications and services

    SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox offer APIs and integration opportunities for developers to enhance their products.

    Social media platforms thought about this early by allowing for an ecosystem of filters, apps, games, and effects that engage their users with little to no additional effort from internal resources.

    The image contains four logos. SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox.

    VOLUME

    Data Gravity

    Focus on data gravity and avoid cloud repatriation

    Data gravity is the tendency of data to attract applications, services, and other data. A growing number of cloud migration decisions will be made based on the data gravity concept. It will become increasingly important in data strategies, with failure potentially resulting in costly cloud repatriations.

    Emerging technologies and capabilities:

    Data Lakehouse, Data Mesh, Data Fabric, Hybrid Data, Cloud Data, Edge Computing

    47%

    Centralized cloud storage going down in 2 years

    22%
    25%

    Hybrid storage (centralized + edge) going up in 2 years

    47%

    Source: CIO, 2022

    VOLUME

    Data Gravity

    What worked for terabytes is ineffective for petabytes

    When compared to on-premises infrastructure, cloud computing is less expensive and easier to implement. However, poor data replication and data gravity can significantly increase cloud costs to the point of failure. Data gravity will help organizations make better cloud migration decisions.

    It is also critical to recognize changes in the industry landscape. The goal of data processing and analytics is to generate the right data for users to act on. In most cases, the user is a human being, but in the case of autonomous driving (AD), the car takes on the role of the user (DXC Technology).

    To avoid cloud repatriation, it will become prudent for all organizations to consider data gravity and the timing of cloud migration.

    The image contains a diagram on data gravity.

    VELOCITY

    Democratizing Real-Time Data

    Trend 02 Real-time analytics presents an important differentiator

    The velocity element of data can be assessed from two standpoints: the speed at which data is being generated and how fast the organization needs to respond to the incoming information through capture, analysis, and use. Traditionally data was processed in a batch format (all at once or in incremental nightly data loads). There is a growing demand to process data continuously using streaming data-processing techniques.

    Emerging technologies and capabilities:

    Edge Computing

    Google announced it has a quantum computer that is 100 million times faster than any classical computer in its lab.

    Source: Science Alert, 2015

    The number of qubits in quantum computers has been increasing dramatically, from 2 qubits in 1998 to 128 qubits in 2019.

    Source: Statista, 2019

    IBM released a 433-qubit quantum chip named Osprey in 2022 and expects to surpass 1,000 qubits with its next chip, Condor, in 2023.

    Source: Nature, 2023

    VELOCITY

    Democratizing Real-Time Data

    Make data accessible to everyone in real time

    • 90% of an organization’s data is replicated or redundant.
    • Build API and web services that allow for live access to data.
    • Most social media platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, have APIs that offer access to incredible amounts of data and insights.

    VELOCITY

    Democratizing Real-Time Data

    Trend in Data Velocity

    Data democratization means data is widely accessible to all stakeholders without bottlenecks or barriers. Success in data democratization comes with ubiquitous real-time analytics. Google highlights a need to address democratization in two different frames:

    1. Democratizing stream analytics for all businesses to ensure real-time data at the company level.
    2. Democratizing stream analytics for all personas and the ability of all users to generate real-time insights.

    Emerging technologies and capabilities:

    Data Lakehouse, Streaming API Ecosystem, Industry 4.0, Zero-Copy Cloning

    Nearly 70% of all new vehicles globally will be connected to the internet by 2023.

    Source: “Connected light-duty vehicles,” Statista, 2022

    VELOCITY

    Democratizing Real-Time Data

    Enable real-time processing with API

    In the past, data democratization has largely translated into a free data set and open data portals. This has allowed the government to freely share data with the public. Also, the data science community has embraced the availability of large data sets such as weather data, stock data, etc. In the future, more focus will be on the combination of IoT and steaming analytics, which will provide better responsiveness and agility.

    Many researchers, media companies, and organizations now have easy access to the Twitter/Facebook API platform to study various aspects of human behavior and sentiments. Large technology companies have already democratized their data using real-time APIs.

    Thousands of sources for open data are available at your local municipalities alone.

    6G will push Wi-Fi connectivity to 1 terabyte per second! This is expected to become commercially available by 2030.

    VARIETY

    Augmented Data Management

    Trend 03 Need to manage unstructured data

    The variety of data types is increasingly diverse. Structured data often comes from relational databases, while unstructured data comes from several sources such as photos, video, text documents, cell phones, etc. The variety of data is where technology can drive business value. However, unstructured data also poses a risk, especially for external data.

    The number of IoT devices could rise to 30.9 billion by 2025.

    Source: “IoT and Non-IoT Connections Worldwide,” Statista, 2022

    The global edge computing market is expected to reach $250.6 billion by 2024.

    Source: “Edge Computing,” Statista, 2022

    Genomics research is expected to generate between 2 and 40 exabytes of data within the next decade.

    Source: NIH, 2022

    VARIETY

    Augmented Data Management

    Employ AI to automate data management

    New tools will enhance many aspects of data management:

    • Data preparation, integration, cataloging, and quality
    • Metadata management
    • Master data management

    Enabling AI-assisted decision-making tools

    The image contains logos of the AI-assisted decision-making tools. Informatica, collibra, OCTOPAI.

    VARIETY

    Augmented Data Management

    Trend in Data Variety

    Augmented data management will enhance or automate data management capabilities by leveraging AI and related advanced techniques. It is quite possible to leverage existing data management tools and techniques, but most experts have recognized that more work and advanced patterns are needed to solve many complex data problems.

    Emerging technologies and capabilities:

    Data Factory, Data Mesh, Data Fabric, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning

    VARIETY

    Augmented Data Management

    Data Fabric vs. Data Mesh: The Data Journey continues at an accelerated pace

    Data Fabric

    Data Mesh

    Data fabric is an architecture that facilitates the end-to-end integration of various data pipelines and cloud environments using intelligent and automated systems. It’s a data integration pattern to unify disparate data systems, embed governance, strengthen security and privacy measures, and provide more data accessibility to workers and particularly to business users.

    The data mesh architecture is an approach that aligns data sources by business domains, or functions, with data owners. With data ownership decentralization, data owners can create data products for their respective domains, meaning data consumers, both data scientists and business users, can use a combination of these data products for data analytics and data science.

    More Unstructured Data

    95% of businesses cite the need to manage unstructured data as a problem for their business.

    VERACITY

    Identity Authenticity

    Trend 04 Veracity of data is a true test of your data capabilities

    Data veracity is defined as the accuracy or truthfulness of a data set. More and more data is created in semi-structured and unstructured formats and originates from largely uncontrolled sources (e.g. social media platforms, external sources). The reliability and quality of the data being integrated should be a top concern. The veracity of data is imperative when looking to use data for predictive purposes. For example, energy companies rely heavily on weather patterns to optimize their service outputs, but weather patterns have an element of unpredictability.

    Data quality affects overall labor productivity by as much as 20%, and 30% of operating expenses are due to insufficient data.

    Source: Pragmatic Works, 2017

    Bad data costs up to
    15% to 25% of revenue.

    Source: MIT Sloan Management Review, 2017

    VERACITY

    Identity Authenticity

    Veracity of data is a true test of your data capabilities

    • Stop creating your own identity architectures and instead integrate a tried-and-true platform.
    • Aim for a single source of truth for digital identity.
    • Establish data governance that can withstand scrutiny.
    • Imagine a day in the future where verified accounts on social media platforms are available.
    • Zero-trust architecture should be used.

    VERACITY

    Identity Authenticity

    Trend in Data Veracity

    Veracity is a concept deeply linked to identity. As the value of the data increases, a greater degree of veracity is required: We must provide more proof to open a bank account than to make friends on Facebook. As a result, there is more trust in bank data than in Facebook data. There is also a growing need to protect marginalized communities.

    Emerging technologies and capabilities:

    Zero Trust, Blockchain, Data Governance, IoT, Cybersecurity

    The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's blueprint slide on Zero Trust.

    VERACITY

    Identity Authenticity

    The identity discussion is no longer limited to people or organizations. The development of new technologies, such as the IoT phenomenon, will lead to an explosion of objects, from refrigerators to shipping containers, coming online as well. If all these entities start communicating with each other, standards will be needed to establish who or what they are.

    IDENTITY
    IS

    Age

    Gender

    Address

    Fingerprint

    Face

    Voice

    Irises

    IDENTITY
    KNOWS

    Password

    Passphrase

    PIN

    Sequence

    IDENTITY
    HAS

    Access badge

    Smartcard

    Security token

    Mobile phone

    ID document

    IDENTITY
    DOES

    Motor skills

    Handwriting

    Gestures

    Keystrokes

    Applications use

    The IoT market is expected to grow 18% to 14.4 billion in 2022 and 27 billion by 2025.

    Source: IoT Analytics, 2022

    VALUE

    Data Monetization

    Trend 05 Not Many organization know the true value of their data

    Data can be valuable if used effectively or dangerous if mishandled. The rise of the data economy has created significant opportunities but also has its challenges. It has become urgent to understand the value of data, which may vary for stakeholders based on their business model and strategy. Organizations first need to understand ownership of their data by establishing a data strategy, then they must improve data maturity by developing a deeper understanding of data value.

    94% of enterprises say data is essential to business growth.

    Source: Find stack, 2021

    VALUE

    Data Monetization

    Start developing your data business

    • Blockbuster ran its business well, but Netflix transformed the video rental industry overnight!
    • Big players with data are catching up fast.
    • You don’t have to be a giant to monetize data.
    • Data monetization is probably closer than you think.
    • You simply need to find it, catalog it, and deliver it.

    The image contains logos of companies related to data monetization as described in the text above. The companies are Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney Plus, Blockbuster, and Apple TV.

    VALUE

    Data Monetization

    Trend in Data Value

    Data monetization is the transformation of data into financial value. However, this does not imply selling data alone. Monetary value is produced by using data to improve and upgrade existing and new products and services. Data monetization demands an organization-wide strategy for value development.

    Emerging technologies and capabilities:

    Data Strategy, Data Monetization Strategy, Data Products

    Netflix uses big data to save $1 billion per year on customer retention.

    Source: Logidots, 2021

    VALUE

    Data Monetization

    Data is a strategic asset

    Data is beyond currency, assets, or commodities and needs to be a category
    of its own.

    • Data always outlives people, processes, and technology. They all come and go while data remains.
    • Oil is a limited resource. Data is not. Unlike oil, data is likely to grow over time.
    • Data is likely to outlast all other current popular financial instruments, including currency, assets, or commodities.
    • Data is used internally and externally and can easily be replicated or combined.

    Data monetization is currently in the speculative territory, which is unacceptable. It should instead be guided by sound data management theory.

    VIRTUE

    Adaptive Data Governance

    Trend 06 Five Core Virtues: Resilience, Humility, Grit, Liberal Education, Empathy (Forbes, 2020)

    We have become more and more dependent on data, analytics, and organizational protection policies. Data virtue is about leveraging data securely and ethically. This topic has become more critical with the advent of GDPR, the right to be forgotten, and related regulations. Data governance, which seeks to establish an oversight framework that manages the creation, acquisition, integrity, security, compliance, and quality of data, is essential for any organization that makes decisions about data.

    Cultural obstacles are the greatest barrier to becoming data-driven, according to 91.9% of executives.

    Source: Harvard Business Review, 2022

    Fifty million Facebook profiles were harvested for Cambridge Analytica in a major data breach.

    Source: The Guardian, 2018

    VIRTUE

    Adaptive Data Governance

    Encourage noninvasive and automated data governance

    • Data governance affects the entire organization, not just data.
    • The old model for data governance was slow and clumsy.
    • Adaptive data governance encourages faster decision making and a more collaborative approach to governance.
    • Agile data governance allows for faster and more flexible decision making.
    • Automated data governance will simplify execution across the organization.
    • It is great for compliance, quality, impact tracking, and cross-referencing and offers independence to data users.

    VIRTUE

    Adaptive Data Governance

    Trend in Data Virtue

    Adaptive data governance encourages a flexible approach that allows an organization to employ multiple data governance strategies depending on changing business situations. The other aspect of adaptive data governance is moving away from manual (and often slow) data governance and toward aggressive automation.

    Emerging technologies and capabilities:

    AI-Powered Data Catalog and Metadata Management,
    Automated Data Policy Enforcement

    “To effectively meet the needs and velocity of digital organizations and modern practices, IT governance must be embedded and automated where possible to drive success and value.”

    Source: Valence Howden, Info-Tech Research Group

    “Research reveals that the combination of AI and big data technologies can automate almost 80% of all physical work, 70% of data processing, and 64% of data collection tasks.”

    Source: Forbes, 2021

    VIRTUE

    Data Governance Automation

    Simple and easy Data Governance

    Tools are not the ultimate answer to implementing data governance. You will still need to secure stakeholders' buy-in and engagement in the data process. Data governance automation should be about simplifying the execution of roles and responsibilities.

    “When you can see where your data governance strategy can be improved, it’s time to put in place automation that help to streamline processes.”

    Source: Nintex, 2021

    VISUALIZATION

    AI-Driven Storytelling & Augmented Analytics

    Trend 07 Automated and augmented data storytelling is not that far away

    Today, data storytelling is led by the user. It’s the manual practice of combining narrative with data to deliver insights in a compelling form to assist decision makers in engaging with data and analytics. A story backed by data is more easily consumed and understood than a dashboard, which can be overwhelming. However, manual data storytelling has some major shortcomings.

    Problem # 1: Telling stories on more than just the insights noticed by people

    Problem # 2: Poor data literacy and the limitations of manual self-service

    Problem # 3: Scaling data storytelling across the business

    VISUALIZATION

    AI-Driven Storytelling & Augmented Analytics

    Use AI to enhance data storytelling

    • Tableau, Power BI, and many other applications already use
      AI-driven analytics.
    • Power BI and SharePoint can use AI to generate visuals for any SharePoint list in a matter of seconds.

    VISUALIZATION

    AI-Driven Storytelling & Augmented Analytics

    Trend in Data Visualization

    AI and natural language processing will drive future visualization and data storytelling. These tools and techniques are improving rapidly and are now designed in a streamlined way to guide people in understanding what their data means and how to act on it instead of expecting them to do self-service analysis with dashboards and charts and know what to do next. Ultimately, being able to understand how to translate emotion, tropes, personal interpretation, and experience and how to tell what’s most relevant to each user is the next frontier for augmented and automated analytics

    Emerging technologies and capabilities:

    AI-Powered Data Catalog and Metadata Management,
    Automated Data Policy Enforcement

    VISUALIZATION

    Data Storytelling

    Augmented data storytelling is not that far away

    Emotions are a cornerstone of human intelligence and decision making. Mastering the art of storytelling is not easy.

    Industry experts predict the combination of data storytelling with augmented and automated techniques; these capabilities are more than capable of generating and automating parts of a data story’s creation for end users.

    The next challenge for AI is translating emotion, tropes, personal interpretation, and experience into what is most essential to end users.

    Source: Yellowfin, 2021

    VIRALITY

    Data Marketplace

    Trend 08 Missing data marketplace

    Data virality measures data spread and popularity. However, for data virality to occur, an ecosystem comparable to that of traditional or modern digital marketplaces is required. Organizations must reevaluate their data strategies to ensure investment in appropriate data domains by understanding data virality. Data virality is the exact opposite of dark data.

    Dark data is “all the information companies collect in their regular business processes, don’t use, have no plans to use, but will never throw out.”

    Source: Forbes, 2019

    VIRALITY

    Data Marketplace

    Make data easily accessible

    • Making data accessible to a broader audience is the key to successful virality.
    • Data marketplaces provide a location for you to make your data public.
    • Why do this? Contributing to public data marketplaces builds credibility, just like contributing to public GitHub projects.
    • Big players like Microsoft, Amazon, and Snowflake already do this!
    • Snowflake introduced zero-copy cloning, which allows users to interact with source data without compromising the integrity of the original source.

    The image contains the logos of Microsoft, Amazon, and Snowflake.

    VIRALITY

    Data Marketplace

    Trend in Data Virality

    The data marketplace can be defined as a dynamic marketplace where users decide what has the most value. Companies can gauge which data is most popular based on usage and decide where to invest. Users can shop for data products within the marketplace and then join these products with other ones they’ve created to launch truly powerful data-driven projects.

    Emerging technologies and capabilities:

    AI-Powered Data Catalog and Metadata Management,
    Automated Data Policy Enforcement

    The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) Framework.

    “Data is like garbage. You’d better know what you are going to do with it before you collect it.”

    – Mark Twain

    VIRALITY

    Data Marketplace

    Journey from siloed data platforms to dynamic data marketplaces

    Data remains a complex topic due to many missing foundational components and infrastructure. Interoperability, security, quality, discoverability, speed, and ease are some of those missing foundational components that most organizations face daily.

    Data lacks an ecosystem that is comparable to those of traditional assets or commodities. Data must be available in open or closed data marketplaces to measure its value. These data marketplaces are still in their infancy.

    “Data markets are an important component of the data economy that could unleash the full potential of data generated by the digital economy and human activity in general.”

    Source: ITU Journal, 2018

    VISCOSITY

    DevOps – DataOps – XOps

    Trend 09 Increase efficiency by removing bottlenecks

    Compared to water, a fluid with a high viscosity flows more slowly, like honey. Data viscosity measures the resistance to flow in a volume of data. The data resistance may come from other Vs (variety, velocity, etc.).

    VISCOSITY

    DevOps – DataOps – XOps

    Increase efficiency by removing bottlenecks

    Consider XOps for a second. It makes no difference what X is. What's important is matching operational requirements to enterprise capabilities.

    • For example, Operations must meet the demands of Sales – hence SalesOps
      or S&Op.
    • Development resources must meet the demands of Operations – hence DevOps.
    • Finally, Data must also meet the demand of Operations.

    These Operations guys are demanding!!

    VISCOSITY

    DevOps – DataOps – XOps

    Trend in Data Viscosity

    The merger of development (Dev) and IT Operations (Ops) started in software development with the concept of DevOps. Since then, new Ops terms have formed rapidly (AIOps, MLOps, ModelOps, PlatformOps, SalesOps, SecOps, etc.). All these methodologies come from Lean manufacturing principles, which seek to identify waste by focusing on eliminating errors, cycle time, collaboration, and measurement. Buzzwords are distractions, and the focus must be on the underlying goals and principles. XOps goals should include the elimination of errors and improving efficiencies.

    Emerging technologies and capabilities:

    Collaborative Data Management, Automation Tools

    VISCOSITY

    DataOps → Data Observability

    Data observability, a subcomponent of DataOps, is a set of technical practices, cultural norms, and architecture that enables low error rates. Data observability focuses on error rates instead of only measuring data quality at a single point in time.

    Data Quality Dimensions

    • Uniqueness
    • Timeliness
    • Validity
    • Accuracy
    • Consistency

    ERROR RATES

    Lateness: Missing Your SLA

    System Processing Issues

    Code Change That Broke Something

    Data Quality

    What’s next? Go beyond the buzzwords.

    Avoid following trends solely for the sake of following them. It is critical to comprehend the concept and apply it to your industry. Every industry has its own set of problems and opportunities.

    Highlight the data trends (or lack thereof) that have been most beneficial to you in your organizations. Follow Info-Tech’s approach to building a data practice and platform to develop your data capabilities through the establishment of data goals.

    The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's Build Your Data Pracrice and Platform.

    Research Authors

    Rajesh Parab Chris Dyck

    Rajesh Parab

    Director, Research & Advisory

    Data and Analytics

    Chris Dyck

    Research Lead

    Data and Analytics

    “Data technologies are rapidly evolving. Understanding what’s possible is critical. Adapting to these upcoming data trends requires a solid data management foundation.”

    – Rajesh Parab

    Contributing Experts

    Carlos Thomas John Walsh

    Carlos Thomas

    Executive Counselor

    Info-Tech Research Group

    John Walsh

    Executive Counselor

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Bibliography

    Bean, Randy. “Why Becoming a Data-Driven Organization Is So Hard.” Harvard Business Review, 24 Feb. 2022. Accessed Oct. 2022.
    Brown, Annie. “Utilizing AI And Big Data To Reduce Costs And Increase Profits In Departments Across An Organization.” Forbes, 13 April 2021.
    Accessed Oct. 2022.
    Burciaga, Aaron. “Five Core Virtues For Data Science And Artificial Intelligence.” Forbes, 27 Feb. 2020. Accessed Aug. 2022.
    Cadwalladr, Carole, and Emma Graham-Harrison. “Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach.”
    The Guardian, 17 March 2018. Accessed Aug. 2022.
    Carlier, Mathilde. “Connected light-duty vehicles as a share of total vehicles in 2023.” Statista, 31 Mar. 2021. Accessed Oct. 2022.
    Carter, Rebekah. “The Ultimate List of Big Data Statistics for 2022.” Findstack, 22 May 2021. Accessed Oct. 2022.
    Castelvecchi, Davide. “Underdog technologies gain ground in quantum-computing race.” Nature, 6 Nov. 2023. Accessed Feb. 2023.
    Clark-Jones, Anthony, et al. “Digital Identity:” UBS, 2016. Accessed Aug 2022.
    “The Cost of Bad Data Infographic.” Pragmatic Works, 25 May 2017. Accessed Oct. 2022.
    Demchenko, Yuri, et al. “Data as Economic Goods: Definitions, Properties, Challenges, Enabling Technologies for Future Data Markets.“ ITU Journal: ICT Discoveries, Special Issue, no. 2, vol. 23, Nov. 2018. Accessed Aug 2022.
    Feldman, Sarah. ”20 Years of Quantum Computing Growth.” Statista, 6 May 2019. Accessed Oct. 2022.
    “Genomic Data Science.” NIH, National Human Genome Research Institute, 5 April 2022. Accessed Oct. 2022.

    Bibliography

    Hasbe, Sudhir, and Ryan Lippert. “The democratization of data and insights: making real-time analytics ubiquitous.” Google Cloud, 15 Jan. 2021.
    Accessed Aug. 2022.
    Helmenstine, Anne. “Viscosity Definition and Examples.” Science Notes, 3 Aug. 2021. Accessed Aug. 2022.
    “How data storytelling and augmented analytics are shaping the future of BI together.” Yellowfin, 19 Aug. 2021. Accessed Aug. 2022.
    “How Netflix Saves $1B Annually using AI?” Logidots, 24 Sept. 2021. Accessed Oct. 2022
    Hui, Kenneth. “The AWS Love/Hate Relationship with Data Gravity.” Cloud Architect Musings, 30 Jan. 2017. Accessed Aug 2022.
    ICD. “The Growth in Connected IoT Devices Is Expected to Generate 79.4ZB of Data in 2025, According to a New IDC Forecast.” Business Wire, 18 June 2019. Accessed Oct 2022.
    Internet of Things (IoT) and non-IoT active device connections worldwide from 2010 to 2025” Statista, 27 Nov. 2022. Accessed Nov. 2022.
    Koch, Gunter. “The critical role of data management for autonomous driving development.” DXC Technology, 2021. Accessed Aug. 2022.
    Morris, John. “The Pull of Data Gravity.” CIO, 23 Feb. 2022. Accessed Aug. 2022.
    Nield, David. “Google's Quantum Computer Is 100 Million Times Faster Than Your Laptop.” ScienceAlert, 9 Dec. 2015. Accessed Oct. 2022.
    Redman, Thomas C. “Seizing Opportunity in Data Quality.” MIT Sloan Management Review, 27 Nov. 2017. Accessed Oct. 2022.
    Segovia Domingo, Ana I., and Álvaro Martín Enríquez. “Digital Identity: the current state of affairs.” BBVA Research, 2018. Accessed Aug. 2022.

    Bibliography

    “State of IoT 2022: Number of connected IoT devices growing 18% to 14.4 billion globally.” IOT Analytics, 18 May 2022. Accessed. 14 Nov. 2022.
    Strod, Eran. “Data Observability and Monitoring with DataOps.” DataKitchen, 10 May 2021. Accessed Aug. 2022.
    Sujay Vailshery, Lionel. “Edge computing market value worldwide 2019-2025.” Statista, 25 Feb. 2022. Accessed Oct 2022.
    Sujay Vailshery, Lionel. “IoT and non-IoT connections worldwide 2010-2025.” Statista, 6 Sept. 2022. Accessed Oct. 2022.
    Sumina, Vladimir. “26 Cloud Computing Statistics, Facts & Trends for 2022.” Cloudwards, 7 June 2022. Accessed Oct. 2022.
    Taulli, Tom. “What You Need To Know About Dark Data.” Forbes, 27 Oct. 2019. Accessed Oct. 2022.
    Taylor, Linnet. “What is data justice? The case for connecting digital rights and freedoms globally.“ Big Data & Society, July-Dec 2017. Accessed Aug 2022.
    “Twitter: Data Collection With API Research Paper.” IvyPanda, 28 April 2022. Accessed Aug. 2022.
    “Using governance automation to reduce data risk.” Nintex, 15 Nov. 2021. Accessed Oct. 2022
    “Volume of data/information created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide from 2010 to 2020, with forecasts from 2021 to 2025.” Statista, 8 Sept. 2022. Accessed Oct 2022.
    Wang, R. “Monday's Musings: Beyond The Three V's of Big Data – Viscosity and Virality.” Forbes, 27 Feb. 2012. Accessed Aug 2022.
    “What is a data fabric?” IBM, n.d. Accessed Aug 2022.
    Yego, Kip. “Augmented data management: Data fabric versus data mesh.” IBM, 27 April 2022. Accessed Aug 2022.

    IT Diversity & Inclusion Tactics

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    • Although inclusion is key to the success of a diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategy, the complexity of the concept makes it a daunting pursuit.
    • This is further complicated by the fact that creating inclusion is not a one-and-done exercise. Rather, it requires the ongoing commitment of employees and managers to reassess their own behaviors and to drive a cultural shift.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Realize the benefits of a diverse workforce by embedding inclusion into work practices, behaviors, and values, ensuring accountability throughout the department.

    Impact and Result

    Understand what it means to be inclusive: reassess work practices and learn how to apply leadership behaviors to create an inclusive environment

    IT Diversity & Inclusion Tactics Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Mobilize inclusion efforts

    Learn, evaluate, and understand what it means to be inclusive, examine biases, and apply inclusive leadership behaviors.

    • Diversity & Inclusion Initiatives Catalog
    • Inclusive IT Work Practices Examples
    • Inclusive Work Practices Template
    • Equip Managers to Adopt Inclusive Leadership Behaviors
    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Adopt Inclusive Leadership Behaviors
    • Standard Focus Group Guide
    [infographic]

    Define Service Desk Metrics That Matter

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    • Consolidate your metrics and assign context and actions to ones currently tracked.
    • Establish tension metrics to see and tell the whole story.
    • Split your metrics for each stakeholder group. Assign proper cadences for measurements as a first step to building an effective dashboard.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Identify the metrics that serve a real purpose and eliminate the rest. Establish a formal review process to ensure metrics are still valid, continue to provide the answers needed, and are at a manageable and usable level.

    Impact and Result

    • Tracking goal- and action-based metrics allows you to make meaningful, data-driven decisions for your service desk. You can establish internal benchmarks to set your own baselines.
    • Predefining the audience and cadence of each metric allows you to construct targeted dashboards to aid your metrics analysis.

    Define Service Desk Metrics That Matter Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Define Service Desk Metrics That Matter Storyboard – A deck that shows you how to look beyond benchmarks and rely on internal metrics to drive success.

    Deciding which service desk metrics to track and how to analyze them can be daunting. Use this deck to narrow down your goal-oriented metrics as a starting point and set your own benchmarks.

    • Define Service Desk Metrics That Matter Storyboard

    2. Service Desk Metrics Workbook – A tool to organize your service desk metrics.

    For each metric, consider adding the relevant overall goal, audience, cadence, and action. Use the audience and cadence of the metric to split your tracked metrics into various dashboards. Your final list of metrics and reports can be added to your service desk SOP.

    • Service Desk Metrics Workbook
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Define Service Desk Metrics That Matter

    Look beyond benchmarks and rely on internal metrics to drive success.

    Analyst Perspective

    Don’t get paralyzed by benchmarks when establishing metrics

    When establishing a suite of metrics to track, it’s tempting to start with the metrics measured by other organizations. Naturally, benchmarking will enter the conversation. While benchmarking is useful, measuring you organization against others with a lack of context will only highlight your failures. Furthermore, benchmarks will highlight the norm or common practice. It does not necessarily highlight best practice.

    Keeping the limitations of benchmarking in mind, establish your own metrics suite with action-based metrics. Define the audience, cadence, and actions for each metric you track and pair them with business goals. Measure only what you need to.

    Slowly improve your metrics process over time and analyze your environment using your own data as your benchmark.

    Benedict Chang

    Research Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    • Measure the business value provided by the service desk.
    • Consolidate your metrics and assign context and actions to ones currently tracked.
    • Establish tension metrics to see and tell the whole story.
    • Split your metrics for each stakeholder group. Assign proper cadences for measurements as a first step to building an effective dashboard or effective dashboards.

    Common Obstacles

    • Becoming too focused on benchmarks or unidimensional metrics (e.g. cost, first-contact resolution, time to resolve) can lead to misinterpretation of the data and poorly informed actions.
    • Sifting through the many sources of data post hoc can lead to stalling in data analysis or slow reaction times to poor metrics.
    • Dashboards can quickly become cluttered with uninformative metrics, thus reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of meaningful data.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    • Use metrics that drive productive change and improvement. Track only what you need to report on.
    • Ensure each metric aligns with the desired business goal, is action-based, and includes the answers to what, why, how, and who.
    • Establish internal benchmarks by analyzing the trends from your own data to set baselines.
    • Act on the results of your metrics by adjusting targets and measuring success.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Identify the metrics that serve a real purpose and eliminate the rest. Establish a formal review process to ensure metrics are still valid, continue to provide the answers needed, and are at a manageable and usable level.

    Improve your metrics to align IT with strategic business goals

    The right metrics can tell the business how hard IT works and how well they perform.

    • Only 19% of CXOs feel that their organization is effective at measuring the success of IT projects with their current metrics.
    • Implementing the proper metrics can facilitate communication between the business division and IT practice.
    • The proper metrics can help IT know what issues the business has and how the CEO and CIO should tackle them.
    • If the goals above resonate with your organization, our blueprint Take Control of Infrastructure and Operations Metrics will take you through the right steps.

    Current Metrics Suite

    19% Effective

    36% Some Improvement Necessary

    45% Significant Improvement Necessary

    Source: Info-Tech Research Group’s CEO/CIO Alignment Diagnostic, 2019; N=622

    CXOs stress that value is the most critical area for IT to improve in reporting

    • You most likely have to improve your metrics suite by addressing business value.
    • Over 80% of organizations say they need improvement to their business value metrics, with 32% of organizations reporting that significant improvement is needed.
    • Of course, measuring metrics for service desk operations is important, but don’t forget business-oriented metrics such as measuring knowledgebase articles written for shift-left enablement, cost (time and money) of service desk tickets, and overall end-user satisfaction.

    The image shows a bar graph with percentages on the Y-Acis, and the following categories on the X-Axis: Business value metrics; Stakeholder satisfaction reporting; Risk metrics; Technology performance & operating metrics; Cost & Salary metrics; and Ad hoc feedback from executives and staff. Each bar is split into two sections, with the blue section marked a Significant Improvement Necessary, and the purple section labelled Some Improvement necessary. Two sections are highlighted with red circles: Business Value metrics--32% blue; 52% purple; and Technology performance & operating metrics--23% blue and 51% purple.

    Source: Info-Tech Research Group’s CEO/CIO Alignment Diagnostic, 2019; N=622

    Benchmarking used in isolation will not tell the whole story

    Benchmarks can be used as a step in the metrics process

    They can be the first step to reach an end goal, but if benchmarks are observed in isolation, it will only highlight your failures.

    Benchmarking relies on standardized models

    This does not account for all the unique variables that make up an IT organization.

    For example, benchmarks that include cost and revenue may include organizations that prioritize first-call resolution (FCR), but the variables that make up this benchmark model will be quite different within your own organization.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Benchmarks reflect the norm and common practice, not best practice.

    Benchmarks are open to interpretation

    Taking the time to establish proper metrics is often more valuable time spent than going down the benchmark rabbit hole.

    Being above or below the norm is neither a good nor a bad thing.

    Determining what the results mean for you depends on what’s being measured and the unique factors, characteristics, and priorities in your organization.

    If benchmark data is a priority within your IT organization, you may look up organizations like MetricNet, but keep the following in mind:

    Review the collected benchmark data

    See where IT organizations in your industry typically stand in relation to the overall benchmark.

    Assess the gaps

    Large gaps between yourself and the overall benchmark could indicate areas for improvement or celebration. Use the data to focus your analysis, develop deeper self-awareness, and prioritize areas for potential concern.

    Benchmarks are only guidelines

    The benchmark source data may not come from true peers in every sense. Each organization is different, so always explore your unique context when interpreting any findings.

    Rely on internal metrics to measure and improve performance

    Measure internal metrics over time to define goals and drive real improvement

    • Internally measured metrics are more reliable because they provide information about your actual performance over time. This allows for targeted improvements and objective measurements of your milestones.
    • Whether a given metric is the right one for your service desk will depend on several different factors, including:
      • The maturity and capability of your service desk processes
      • The volume of service requests and incidents
      • The complexity of your environment when resolving tickets
      • The degree to which your end users are comfortable with self-service

    Take Info-Tech’s approach to metrics management

    Use metrics that drive productive change and improvement. Track only what you need to report on.

    Ensure each metric aligns with the desired business goal, is action-based, and includes the answers to what, why, how, and who.

    Establish internal benchmarks by analyzing the trends from your own data to set baselines.

    Act on the results of your metrics by adjusting targets and measuring success.

    Define action-based metrics to cut down on analysis paralysis

    Every metric needs to be backed with the following criteria:

    • Defining audience, cadence, goal, and action for each metric allows you to keep your tracked metrics to a minimum while maximizing the value.
    • The audience and cadence of each metric may allow you to define targeted dashboards.

    Audience - Who is this metric tracked for?

    Goal - Why are you tracking this metric? This can be defined along with the CSFs and KPIs.

    Cadence - How often are you going to view, analyze, and action this metric?

    Action - What will you do if this metric spikes, dips, trends up, or trends down?

    Activity 1. Define your critical success factors and key performance indicators

    Critical success factors (CSFs) are high-level goals that help you define the direction of your service desk. Key performance indicators (KPIs) can be treated as the trend of metrics that will indicate that you are moving in the direction of your CSFs. These will help narrow the data you have to track and action (metrics).

    CSFs, or your overall goals, typically revolve around three aspects of the service desk: time spent on tickets, resources spent on tickets, and the quality of service provided.

    1. As a group, brainstorm the CSFs and the KPIs that will help narrow your metrics. Use the Service Desk Metrics Workbook to record the results.
    2. Look at the example to the right as a starting point.

    Example metrics:

    Critical success factor Key performance indicator
    High End-User Satisfaction Increasing CSAT score on transactional surveys
    High end-user satisfaction score
    Proper resolution of tickets
    Low time to resolve
    Low Cost per Ticket Decreasing cost per ticket (due to efficient resolution, FCR, automation, self-service, etc.)
    Improve Access to Self-Service (tangential to improve customer service) High utilization of knowledgebase
    High utilization of portal

    Download the Service Desk Metrics Workbook

    Activity 2. Define action-based metrics that align with your KPIs and CSFs

    1. Now that you have defined your goals, continue to fill the workbook by choosing metrics that align with those goals.
    2. Use the chart below as a guide. For every metric, define the cadence of measurement, audience of the metric, and action associated with the metric. There may be multiple metrics for each KPI.
    3. If you find you are unable to define the cadence, audience, or action associated with a metric, you may not need to track the metric in the first place. Alternatively, if you find that you may action a metric in the future, you can decide to start gathering data now.

    Example metrics:

    Critical success factor Key performance indicator Metric Cadence Audience Action
    High End-User Satisfaction Increasing CSAT score on transactional surveys Monthly average of ticket satisfaction scores Monthly Management Action low scores immediately, view long-term trends
    High end-user satisfaction score Average end-user satisfaction score from annual survey Annually IT Leadership View IT satisfaction trends to align IT with business direction
    Proper resolution of tickets Number of tickets reopened Weekly Service Desk Technicians Action reopened tickets, look for training opportunities
    SLA breach rate Daily Service Desk Technicians Action reopened tickets, look for training opportunities
    Low time to resolve Average TTR (incidents) Weekly Management Look for trends to monitor resources
    Average TTR by priority Weekly Management Look for TTR solve rates to align with SLA
    Average TTR by tier Weekly Management Look for improperly escalated tickets or shift-left opportunities

    Download the Service Desk Metrics Workbook

    Activity 3. Define the data ownership, metric viability, and dashboards

    1. For each metric, define where the data is housed. Ideally, the data is directly in the ticketing tool or ITSM tool. This will make it easy to pull and analyze.
    2. Determine how difficult the metric will be to pull or track. If the effort is high, decide if the value of tracking the metric is worth the hassle of gathering it.
    3. Lastly, for each metric, use the cadence and audience to place the metric in a reporting dashboard. This will help divide your metrics and make them easier to report and action.
    4. You may use the output of this exercise to add your tracked metrics to your service desk SOP.
    5. A full suite of metrics can be found in our Infrastructure & Operations Metrics Library in the Take Control of Infrastructure Metrics Storyboard. The metrics have been categorized by low, medium, and advanced capabilities for you.

    Example metrics:

    Metric Who Owns the Data? Efforts to Track? Dashboards
    Monthly average of ticket satisfaction scores Service Desk Low Monthly Management Meeting
    Average end-user satisfaction score Service Desk Low Leadership Meeting
    Number of tickets reopened Service Desk Low Weekly Technician Standup
    SLA breach rate Service Desk Low Daily Technician Standup
    Average TTR (incidents) Service Desk Low Weekly Technician Standup
    Average TTR by priority Service Desk Low Weekly Technician Standup
    Average TTR by tier Service Desk Low Weekly Technician Standup
    Average TTR (SRs) Service Desk Low Weekly Technician Standup
    Number of tickets reopened Service Desk Low Daily Technician Standup

    Download the Service Desk Metrics Workbook

    Keep the following considerations in mind when defining which metrics matter

    Keep the customer in mind

    Metrics are typically focused on transactional efficiency and process effectiveness and not what was achieved against the customers’ need and satisfaction.

    Understand the relationships between performance and metrics management to provide the end-to-end service delivery picture you are aiming to achieve.

    Don’t settle for tool defaults

    ITSM solutions offer an abundance of metrics to choose from. The most common ones are typically built into the reporting modules of the tool suite.

    Do not start tracking everything. Choose metrics that are specifically aligned to your organization’s desired business outcomes.

    Establish tension metrics to achieve balance

    Don’t ignore the correlation and context between the suites of metrics chosen and how one interacts and affects the other.

    Measuring metrics in isolation may lead to an incomplete picture or undesired technician behavior. Tension metrics help complete the picture and lead to proper actions.

    Adjust those targets

    An arbitrary target on a metric that is consistently met month over month is useless. Each metric should inform the overall performance by combining capable service level management and customer experience programs to prove the value IT is providing to the organization.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Standardize the Service Desk

    This project will help you build and improve essential service desk processes, including incident management, request fulfillment, and knowledge management, to create a sustainable service desk.

    Take Control of Infrastructure and Operations Metrics

    Make faster decisions and improve service delivery by using the right metrics for the job.

    Analyze Your Service Desk Ticket Data

    Take a data-driven approach to service desk optimization.

    IT Diagnostics: Build a Data-Driven IT Strategy

    Our data-driven programs ask business and IT stakeholders the right questions to ensure you have the inputs necessary to build an effective IT strategy.

    Gain Real Insights with a Social Analytics Program

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    • Social media is wildly popular with consumers and as a result, many businesses are starting to develop a presence on social media services like Facebook and Twitter. However, many businesses still struggle with understanding how to leverage consumer insights from these services to drive business decisions. They’re intimidated by the sheer volume of social data, and aren’t sure what to do about it.
    • Companies that do have an analytics program are often operating it on an ad-hoc basis rather than making an effort to integrate social insights with existing sourcing of consumer data. In doing this, they’re failing to make holistic decisions and missing out on valuable consumer and competitive insights.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Social analytics are indispensable in gaining real-time insights across marketing, sales, and customer service. SMBs can use social analytics to gain valuable consumer insights at a significantly lower expense than traditional forms of market research.
    • The greatest value from social analytics comes when organizations marry social data sources with other forms of customer information, such as point-of-sale data, customer surveys, focus groups, and psychographic profiles.
    • Social analytics must be integrated with your broader BI program for maximum effect. Consider creating a Customer Insights Center of Excellence (CICOE) to serve as a one-stop shop for both traditional and social customer analytics.
    • IT has an invaluable role to play in helping to govern and manage the analytics program. A best-of-breed Social Media Management Platform is the key enabling technology for conducting analytics, and IT must assist with selection, implementation and operation of this solution.
    • Internal social analytics is an emerging field that allows you to gauge the sentiment of your employees, while turbocharging ideation and feedback processes. Social networking analysis is particularly valuable for internal analysis.

    Impact and Result

    • Understand the value of a social analytics program and the various departmental use cases – how social analytics improves decision making and boosts critical KPIs like revenue attainment and customer satisfaction.
    • Determine the different social metrics (such as sentiment and frequency analysis) your business should be tracking and how to turn metrics into deep consumer insights.
    • Follow a step-by-step guide for successfully executing a social analytics program across your organization.
    • Roll out an internal analytics program to gauge the sentiment of your employees, improve engagement, and understand informal influencer networks.

    Gain Real Insights with a Social Analytics Program Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Determine the organization’s use cases

    Decide which functional areas in the organization will benefit the most from using social data, and create use cases accordingly.

    • Storyboard: Gain Real Insights with a Social Analytics Program

    2. Define and interpret metrics

    Identify and evaluate key social analytics metrics and understand the importance of combining multiple metrics to get the most out of the analytics program.

    • Social Analytics Maturity Assessment

    3. Execute the social analytics program

    Leverage a cross-departmental Social Media Steering Committee and evaluate SMMPs and other social analytics tools.

    • Social Analytics Specialist
    • Social Analytics Business Plan

    4. Leverage internal social analytics

    Identify specific uses of internal social analytics: crowd-sourcing ideation, harvesting employee feedback, and rewarding internal brand advocates.

    [infographic]

    Drive Efficiency and Agility with a Fit-for-Purpose Quality Management Program

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    • Parent Category Name: Performance Measurement
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    • According to Info-Tech research, 74% of our clients feel that IT quality management is an important process, however, only 15% said they actually had effective quality management.
    • IT is required to deliver high quality projects and services, but if CIOs are ineffective at quality management, how can IT deliver?
    • Rather than disturb the status quo with holistic quality initiatives, heads of IT leave quality in the hands of process owners, functional areas, and other segmented facets of the department.
    • CIOs are facing greater pressures to be innovative, agile, and cost-effective, but cannot do so without stable operations, an accountable staff base, and business support; all of which are achieved by high IT quality.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Quality management needs more attention that it’s typically getting. It’s not going to happen randomly; you must take action to see results.
    • Quality must be holistic. Centralized accountability will align inconsistencies in quality and refocus IT towards a common goal.
    • Accountability is the key to quality. Clearly defined roles and responsibilities will put your staff on the hook for quality outcomes.

    Impact and Result

    • Shift your mindset to the positive implications of high quality. Info-Tech’s quality management methodology will promote innovation, agility, lower costs, and improved operations.
    • We will help you develop a fully functional quality management program in four easy steps:
      • Position your program as a group to encourage buy-in and unite IT around a common quality vision. Enact a center of excellence to build, support, and monitor the program.
      • Build flexible program requirements that will be adapted for a fit-to-purpose solution.
      • Implement the program using change management techniques to alleviate challenges and improve adoption.
      • Operate the program with a focus on continual improvement to ensure that your IT department continues to deliver high quality projects and services as stakeholder needs change.

    Drive Efficiency and Agility with a Fit-for-Purpose Quality Management Program Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Understand why Info-Tech’s unique approach to quality management can fix a variety of IT issues and understand the four ways we can support you in building a quality management program designed just for you.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Position the program

    Hold a positioning working session to focus the program around business needs, create solid targets, and create quality champions to get the job done.

    • Drive Efficiency and Agility with a Fit-for-Purpose Quality Management Program – Phase 1: Position the Quality Program
    • Quality Management Program Charter
    • Quality Management Capability Assessment and Planning Tool
    • Quality Management Roadmap

    2. Build the program

    Build program requirements and design standard templates that will unite IT quality.

    • Drive Efficiency and Agility with a Fit-for-Purpose Quality Management Program – Phase 2: Build a Quality Program
    • Quality Management Quality Plan Template
    • Quality Management Review Template
    • Quality Management Dashboard Template

    3. Implement the program

    Evaluate the readiness of the department for change and launch the program at the right time and in the right way to transform IT quality.

    • Drive Efficiency and Agility with a Fit-for-Purpose Quality Management Program – Phase 3: Implement the Quality Program
    • Quality Management Communication Plan Template
    • Quality Management Readiness Assessment Template

    4. Operate the program

    Facilitate the success of key IT practice areas by operating the Center of Excellence to support the key IT practice areas’ quality initiatives.

    • Drive Efficiency and Agility with a Fit-for-Purpose Quality Management Program – Phase 4: Operate the Quality Program
    • Quality Management User Satisfaction Survey
    • Quality Management Practice Area Assessment and Planning Tool
    • Quality Management Capability Improvement Plan
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Drive Efficiency and Agility with a Fit-for-Purpose Quality Management Program

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Position Your Program

    The Purpose

    Create a quality center of excellence to lead and support quality initiatives.

    Position your quality program to meet the needs of your business.

    Develop clear targets and create a roadmap to achieve your vision. 

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Defined Center of Excellence roles & responsibilities.

    A firm vision for your program with clearly outlined targets.

    A plan for improvements to show dedication to the program and create accountability. 

    Activities

    1.1 Identify current quality maturity.

    1.2 Craft vision and mission.

    1.3 Define scope.

    1.4 Determine goals and objectives.

    1.5 Specify metrics and critical success factors.

    1.6 Develop quality principles.

    1.7 Create action plan.

    Outputs

    Completed Maturity Assessment

    Completed Project Charter

    Completed Quality Roadmap

    2 Build Your Program

    The Purpose

    Build the requirements for the quality program, including outputs for quality planning, quality assurance, quality control, and quality improvement.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Defined standards for the quality program.

    General templates to be used to unify quality throughout IT. 

    Activities

    2.1 Define quality policy, procedures, and guidelines.

    2.2 Define your standard Quality Plan.

    2.3 Define your standard Quality Review Document.

    2.4 Develop your Standard Quality Management Dashboard.

    Outputs

    Quality Policy

    Standard Quality Plan Template

    Standard Quality Review Template

    Standard Quality Dashboard

    3 Implement Your Program

    The Purpose

    Launch the program and begin quality improvement.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Perform a readiness assessment to ensure your organization is ready to launch its quality program.

    Create a communication plan to ensure constant and consistent communication throughout implementation. 

    Activities

    3.1 Assess organizational readiness.

    3.2 Create a communication plan.

    Outputs

    Completed Readiness Assessment

    Completed Communication Plan

    4 Operate Your Program

    The Purpose

    Have the Center of Excellence facilitate the roll-out of the quality program in your key practice areas.

    Initiate ongoing monitoring and reporting processes to enable continuous improvement.  

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Quality plans for each practice area aligned with the overall quality program.

    Periodic quality reviews to ensure plans are being acted upon.

    Methodology for implementing corrective measures to ensure quality expectations are met.

    Activities

    4.1 Perform a quality management satisfaction survey.

    4.2 Complete a practice area assessment.

    4.3 Facilitate the creation of practice area quality plans.

    4.4 Populate quality dashboards.

    4.5 Perform quality review(s).

    4.6 Address issues with corrective and preventative measures.

    4.7 Devise a plan for improvement.

    4.8 Report on quality outcomes.

    Outputs

    Completed Satisfaction Surveys

    Practice Area Assessments

    Quality Plans (for each practice area)

    Quality Reviews (for each practice area)

    Quality Improvement Plan

    Mentoring for Agile Teams

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    • Parent Category Name: Development
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    • Today’s realities are driving organizations to digitize faster and become more Agile.
    • Most hierarchical, command and control–style organizations are not yet well adapted to using Agile.
    • So-called textbook Agile practices often clash with traditional processes and practices.
    • Members must adapt their Agile practices to accommodate their organizational realities.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • There is no one-size-fits-all approach to Agile. Agile practices need to be adjusted to work in your organization based on a thoughtful diagnosis of the challenges and solutions tailored to the nature of your organization.

    Impact and Result

    • Identify your Agile challenges and success factors (both organization-wide and team-specific).
    • Leverage the power of research and experience to solve key Agile challenges and gain immediate benefits for your project.
    • Your Agile playbook will capture your findings so future projects can benefit from them.

    Mentoring for Agile Teams Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read this Executive Brief to understand how a Agile Mentoring can help your organization to successfully establish Agile practices within your context.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Take the Info-Tech Agile Challenges and Success Factors Survey

    This tool will help you identify where your Agile teams are experiencing the most pain so you can create your Agile challenges hit list.

    • Agile Challenges and Success Factors Survey

    2. Review typical challenges and findings

    While each organization/team will struggle with its own individual challenges, many members find they face similar organizational/systemic challenges when adopting Agile. Review these typical challenges and learn from what other members have discovered.

    • Mentoring for Agile Teams – Typical Findings

    Infographic

    Workshop: Mentoring for Agile Teams

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Take the Agile Challenges and Success Factors Survey

    The Purpose

    Determine whether an Agile playbook is right for you.

    Broadly survey your teams to identify Agile challenges and success factors in your organization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Better understanding of common Agile challenges and success factors

    Identification of common Agile challenges and success factors are prevalent in your organization

    Activities

    1.1 Distribute survey and gather results.

    1.2 Consolidate survey results.

    Outputs

    Completed survey responses from across teams/organization

    Consolidated heat map of your Agile challenges and success factors

    2 Identify Your Agile Challenges Hit List

    The Purpose

    Examine consolidated survey results.

    Identify your most pressing challenges.

    Create a hit list of challenges to be resolved.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identification of the most serious challenges to your Agile transformation

    Attention focused on those challenge areas that are most impacting your Agile teams

    Activities

    2.1 Analyze and discuss your consolidated heat map.

    2.2 Prioritize identified challenges.

    2.3 Select your hit list of challenges to address.

    Outputs

    Your Agile challenges hit list

    3 Problem Solve

    The Purpose

    Address each challenge in your hit list to eliminate or improve it.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Better Agile team performance and effectiveness

    Activities

    3.1 Work with Agile mentor to problem solve each challenge in your hit list.

    3.2 Apply these to your project in real time.

    Outputs

    4 Create Your Agile Playbook

    The Purpose

    Capture the findings and lessons learned while problem solving your hit list.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Strategies and tactics for being successful with Agile in your organization which can be applied to future projects

    Activities

    4.1 For each hit list item, capture the findings and lessons learned in Module 3.

    4.2 Document these in your Agile Playbook.

    Outputs

    Your Agile Playbook deliverable

    Enable Omnichannel Commerce That Delights Your Customers

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    • Parent Category Name: Customer Relationship Management
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    • Today’s customers expect to be able to transact with you in the channels of their choice. The proliferation of e-commerce, innovations in brick-and-mortar retail, and developments in mobile commerce and social media selling mean that IT organizations are managing added complexity in drafting a strategy for commerce enablement.
    • The right technology stack is critical in order to support world-class e-commerce and brick-and-mortar interactions with customers.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Support the right transactional channels for the right customers: there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to commerce enablement – understand your customers to drive selection of the right transactional channels.
    • Don’t assume that “traditional” commerce channels have stagnated: IoT, customer analytics, and blended retail are reinvigorating brick-and-mortar selling.
    • Don’t buy best-of-breed; buy best-for-you. Base commerce vendor selection on your requirements and use cases, not on the vendor’s overall performance.

    Impact and Result

    • Leverage Info-Tech’s proven, road-tested approach to using personas and scenarios to build strong business drivers for your commerce strategy.
    • Before selecting and deploying technology solutions, create a cohesive channel matrix outlining which channels your organization will support with transactional capabilities.
    • Understand evolving trends in the commerce solution space, such as AI-driven product recommendations and integration with other essential enterprise applications (i.e. CRM and marketing automation platforms).
    • Understand and apply operational best practices such as content optimization and dynamic personalization to improve the conversion rate via your e-commerce channels.

    Enable Omnichannel Commerce That Delights Your Customers Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Enable Omnichannel Commerce Deck – A deck outlining the importance of creating a cohesive omnichannel framework to improve your customer experience.

    E-commerce channels have proliferated, and traditional brick-and-mortar commerce is undergoing reinvention. In order to provide your customers with a strong experience, it's imperative to create a strategy – and to deploy the right enabling technologies – that allow for robust multi-channel commerce. This storyboard provides a concise overview of how to do just that.

    • Enable Omnichannel Commerce That Delights Your Customers – Phases 1-2

    2. Create Personas to Drive Omnichannel Requirements Template – A template to identify key customer personas for e-commerce and other channels.

    Customer personas are archetypal representations of your key audience segments. This template (and populated examples) will help you construct personas for your omnichannel commerce project.

    • Create Personas to Drive Omnichannel Requirements Template
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Enable Omnichannel Commerce That Delights Your Customers

    Create a cohesive, omnichannel framework that supports the right transactions through the right channels for the right customers.

    Analyst Perspective

    A clearly outlined commerce strategy is a necessary component of a broader customer experience strategy.

    This is a picture of Ben Dickie, Research Lead, Research – Applications at Info-Tech Research Group

    Ben Dickie
    Research Lead, Research – Applications
    Info-Tech Research Group

    “Your commerce strategy is where the rubber hits the road, converting your prospects into paying customers. To maximize revenue (and provide a great customer experience), it’s essential to have a clearly defined commerce strategy in place.

    A strong commerce strategy seeks to understand your target customer personas and commerce journey maps and pair these with the right channels and enabling technologies. There is not a “one-size-fits-all” approach to selecting the right commerce channels: while many organizations are making a heavy push into e-commerce and mobile commerce, others are seeking to differentiate themselves by innovating in traditional brick-and-mortar sales. Hybrid channel design now dominates many commerce strategies – using a blend of e-commerce and other channels to deliver the best-possible customer experience.

    IT leaders must work with the business to create a succinct commerce strategy that defines personas and scenarios, outlines the right channel matrix, and puts in place the right enabling technologies (for example, point-of-sale and e-commerce platforms).”

    Stop! Are you ready for this project?

    This Research Is Designed For:

    • IT leaders and business analysts supporting their commercial and marketing organizations in developing and executing a technology enablement strategy for e-commerce or brick-and-mortar commerce.
    • Any organization looking to develop a persona-based approach to identifying the right channels for their commerce strategy.

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Identify key personas and customer journeys for a brick-and-mortar and/or e-commerce strategy.
    • Select the right channels for your commerce strategy and build a commerce channel matrix to codify the results.
    • Review the “art of the possible” and new developments in brick-and-mortar and e-commerce execution.

    This Research Will Also Assist:

    • Sales managers, brand managers, and any marketing professional looking to build a cohesive commerce strategy.
    • E-commerce or POS project teams or working groups tasked with managing an RFP process for vendor selection.

    This Research Will Help Them:

    • Build a persona-centric commerce strategy.
    • Understand key technology trends in the brick-and-mortar and e-commerce space.

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Today’s customers expect to be able to transact with you in the channels of their choice.

    The proliferation of e-commerce, innovations in brick-and-mortar retail, and developments in mobile commerce and social media selling mean that IT organizations are managing added complexity in drafting a strategy for commerce enablement.

    The right technology stack is critical to support world-class e-commerce and brick-and-mortar interactions with customers.

    Common Obstacles

    Many organizations do not define strong, customer-centric drivers for dictating which channels they should be investing in for transactional capabilities.

    As many retailers look to move shopping experiences online during the pandemic, the impetus for having a strong e-commerce suite has markedly increased. The proliferation of commerce vendors has made it difficult to identify and shortlist the right solution, while the pandemic has also highlighted the importance of adopting new vendors quickly and efficiently: companies need to understand the top players in different commerce market landscapes.

    IT is receiving a growing number of commerce platform requests and must be prepared to speak intelligently about requirements and the “art of the possible.”

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    • Leverage Info-Tech’s proven, road-tested approach to using personas and scenarios to build strong business drivers for your commerce strategy.
    • Before selecting and deploying technology solutions, create a cohesive channel matrix outlining which channels your organization will support with transactional capabilities.
    • Understand evolving trends in the commerce solution space, such as AI-driven product recommendations and integration with other essential enterprise applications (i.e. customer relationship management [CRM] and marketing automation platforms).
    • Understand and apply operational best practices such as content optimization and dynamic personalization to improve the conversion rate via your e-commerce channels.

    Info-Tech Insight

    • Support the right transactional channels for the right customers: there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to commerce enablement – understand your customers to drive selection of the right transactional channels.
    • Don’t assume that “traditional” commerce channels have stagnated: IoT, customer analytics, and blended retail are reinvigorating brick-and-mortar selling.
    • Don’t buy best-of-breed; buy best-for-you: base commerce vendor selection on your requirements and use cases, not on the vendor’s overall performance.

    A strong commerce strategy is an essential component of a savvy approach to customer experience management

    A commerce strategy outlines an organization’s approach to selling its products and services. A strong commerce strategy identifies target customers’ personas, commerce journeys that the organization wants to support, and the channels that the organization will use to transact with customers.

    Many commerce strategies encompass two distinct but complementary branches: a commerce strategy for transacting through traditional channels and an e-commerce strategy. While the latter often receives more attention from IT, it still falls on IT leaders to provide the appropriate enabling technologies to support traditional brick-and-mortar channels as well. Traditional channels have also undergone a digital renaissance in recent years, with forward-looking companies capitalizing on new technology to enhance customer experiences in their stores.

    Traditional Channels

    • Physical Stores (Brick and Mortar)
    • Kiosks or Pop-Up Stores
    • Telesales
    • Mail Orders
    • EDI Transactions

    E-Commerce Channels

    • E-Commerce Websites
    • Mobile Commerce Apps
    • Embedded Social Shopping
    • Customer Portals
    • Configure Price Quote Tool Sets (CPQ)
    • Hybrid Retail

    Info-Tech Insight

    To better serve their customers, many companies position themselves as “click-and-mortar” shops – allowing customers to transact at a store or online.

    Customers’ expectations are on the rise: meet them!

    Today’s consumers expect speed, convenience, and tailored experiences at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Successful organizations strive to support these expectations.

    58%
    of retail customers admitted that their expectations now are higher than they were a year ago (FinancesOnline).

    70%
    of consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 have increasing customer expectations year after year (FinancesOnline).

    69%
    of consumers now expect store associates to be armed with a mobile device to deliver value-added services, such as looking up product information and checking inventory (V12).

    73%
    of support leaders agree that customer expectations are increasing, but only…

    42%
    of support leaders are confident that they’re actually meeting those expectations.

    How can you be sure that you are meeting your customers’ expectations?

    1. Offer more personalization throughout the entire customer journey
    2. Practice quality customer service – ensure staff have up-to-date knowledge and offer quick resolution time for complaints
    3. Focus on offering low-effort experiences and easy-to-use platforms (i.e. “one-click buying”)
    4. Ensure your products and services perform well and do what they’re meant to do
    5. Ensure omnichannel availability – 9 in 10 consumers want a seamless omnichannel experience

    Info-Tech Insight

    Customers expect to interact with organizations through the channels of their choice. Now more than ever, you must enable your organization to provide tailored commerce and transactional experiences.

    Omnichannel commerce is the way of the future

    Create a strategy that embraces this reality with the right tools!

    Get ahead of the competition by doing omnichannel right! Devise a strategy that allows you to create and maintain a consistent, seamless commerce experience by optimizing operations with an omnichannel framework. Customers want to interact with you on their own terms, and it falls to IT to ensure that applications are in place to support and manage both traditional and e-commerce channels. There must also be consistency of copy, collateral, offers, and pricing between commerce channels.

    71%
    of consumers want a consistent experience across all channels, but only…

    29%
    say that they actually get it.

    (Source: Business 2 Community, 2020)

    Omnichannel is a “multichannel approach that aims to provide customers with a personalized, integrated, and seamless shopping experience across diverse touchpoints and devices.”
    Source: RingCentral, 2021

    IT is responsible for providing technology enablement of the commerce strategy: e-commerce platforms are a cornerstone

    An e-commerce platform is an enterprise application that provides end-to-end capabilities for allowing customers to purchase products or services from your company via an online channel (e.g. a traditional website, a mobile application, or an embedded link in a social media post). Modern e-commerce platforms are essential for delivering a frictionless customer journey when it comes to purchasing online.

    $6.388
    trillion dollars worth of sales will be conducted online by 2024 (eMarketer, 14 Jan. 2021).

    44%
    of all e-commerce transactions are expected to be completed via a mobile device by 2024 (Insider).

    21.8%
    of all sales will be made from online purchases by 2024 (eMarketer, 14 Jan. 2021).

    Strong E-Commerce Platforms Enable a Wide Range of Functional Areas:

    • Product Catalog Management
    • Web Content Delivery
    • Product Search Engine
    • Inventory Management
    • Shopping Cart Management
    • Discount and Coupon Management
    • Return Management and Reverse Logistics
    • Dynamic Personalization
    • Dynamic Promotions
    • Predictive Re-Targeting
    • Predictive Product Recommendations
    • Transaction Processing
    • Compliance Management
    • Commerce Workflow Management
    • Loyalty Program Management
    • Reporting and Analytics

    An e-commerce solution boosts the effectiveness and efficiency of your operations and drives top-line growth

    Take time to learn the capabilities of modern e-commerce applications. Understanding the “art of the possible” will help you to get the most out of your e-commerce platform.

    An e-commerce platform helps marketers and sales staff in three primary ways:

    1. It allows the organization to effectively and efficiently operate e-commerce operations at scale.
    2. It allows commercial staff to have a single system for managing and monitoring all commercial activity through online channels.
    3. It allows the organization to improve the customer-facing e-commerce experience, boosting conversions and top-line sales.

    A dedicated e-commerce platform improves the efficiency of customer-commerce operations

    • Workflow automation reduces the amount of time spent executing dynamic e-commerce campaigns.
    • The use of internal or third-party data increases conversion effectiveness from customer databases across the organization.

    Info-Tech Insight

    A strong e-commerce provides marketers with the data they need to produce actionable insights about their customers.

    Case Study

    INDUSTRY - Retail
    SOURCE - Salesforce (a)

    PetSmart improves customer experience by leveraging a new commerce platform in the Salesforce ecosystem

    PetSmart

    PetSmart is a leading retailer of pet products, with a heavy footprint across North America. Historically, PetSmart was a brick-and-mortar retailer, but it has placed a heavy emphasis on being a true multi-channel “click-and-mortar” retailer to ensure it maintains relevance against competitors like Amazon.

    E-Commerce Overhaul Initiative

    To improve its e-commerce capabilities, PetSmart recognized that it needed to consolidate to a single, unified e-commerce platform to realize a 360-degree view of its customers. A new platform was also required to power dynamic and engaging experiences, with appropriate product recommendations and tailored content. To pursue this initiative, the company settled on Salesforce.com’s Commerce Cloud product after an exhaustive requirements definition effort and rigorous vendor selection approach.

    Results

    After platform implementation, PetSmart was able to effortlessly handle the massive transaction volumes associated with Black Friday and Cyber Monday and deliver 1:1 experiences that boosted conversion rates.

    PetSmart standardized on the Commerce Cloud from Salesforce to great effect.

    This is an image of the journey from Discover & Engage to Retain & Advocate.

    Case Study

    Icebreaker exceeds customer expectations by using AI to power product recommendations

    INDUSTRY - Retail
    SOURCE - Salesforce (b)

    Icebreaker

    Icebreaker is a leading outerwear and lifestyle clothing company, operating six global websites and owning over 5,000 stores across 50 countries. Icebreaker is focused on providing its shoppers with accurate, real-time product suggestions to ensure it remains relevant in an increasingly competitive online market.

    E-Commerce Overhaul Initiative

    To improve its e-commerce capabilities, Icebreaker recognized that it needed to adopt a predictive recommendation engine that would offer its customers a more personalized shopping experience. This new system would need to leverage relevant data to provide both known and anonymous shoppers with product suggestions that are of interest to them. To pursue this initiative, Icebreaker settled on using Salesforce.com’s Commerce Cloud Einstein, a fully integrated AI.

    Results

    After integrating Commerce Cloud Einstein on all its global sites, Icebreaker was able to cross-sell and up-sell its merchandise more effectively by providing its shoppers with accurate product recommendations, ultimately increasing average order value.

    IT must also provide technology enablement for other channels, such as point-of-sale systems for brick-and-mortar

    Point-of-sale systems are the “real world” complement to e-commerce platforms. They provide functional capabilities for selling products in a physical store, including basic inventory management, cash register management, payment processing, and retail analytics. Many firms struggle with legacy POS environments that inhibit a modern customer experience.

    $27.338
    trillion dollars in retail sales are expected to be made globally in 2022 (eMarketer, 2022).

    84%
    of consumers believe that retailers should be doing more to integrate their online and offline channels (Invoca).

    39%
    of consumers are unlikely or very unlikely to visit a retailer’s store if the online store doesn’t provide physical store inventory information (V12).

    Strong Point-of-Sale Platforms Enable a Wide Range of Functional Areas:

    • Product Catalog Management
    • Discount Management
    • Coupon Management and Administration
    • Cash Management
    • Cash Register Reconciliation
    • Product Identification (Barcode Management)
    • Payment Processing
    • Compliance Management
    • Basic Inventory Management
    • Commerce Workflow Management
    • Exception Reporting and Overrides
    • Loyalty Program Management
    • Reporting and Analytics

    E-commerce and POS don’t live in isolation

    They’re key components of a well-oiled customer experience ecosystem!

    Integrate commerce solutions with other customer experience applications – and with ERP or logistics systems – to handoff transactions for order fulfilment.

    Having a customer master database – the central place where all up-to-the-minute data on a customer profile is stored – is essential for traditional and e-commerce success. Typically, the POS or e-commerce platform is not the system of record for the master customer profile: this information lives in a CRM platform or customer data warehouse. Conceptually, this system is at the center of the customer-experience ecosystem.

    Strong POS and e-commerce solutions orchestrate transactions but typically do not do the heavy lifting in terms of order fulfilment, shipping logistics, economic inventory management, and reverse logistics (returns). In an enterprise-grade environment, these activities are executed by an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution – integrating your commerce systems with a back-end ERP solution is a crucial step from an application architecture point of view.

    This is an example of a customer experience ecosystem.  Core Apps (CRM, ERP): MMS Suite; E-Commerce; POS; Web CMS; Data Marts/BI Tools; Social Media Platforms

    Case Study

    INDUSTRY - Retail
    SOURCES - Amazon, n.d. CNET, 2020

    Amazon is creating a hybrid omnichannel experience for retail by introducing innovative brick-and-mortar stores

    Amazon

    Amazon began as an online retailer of books in the mid-1990s, and rapidly expanded its product portfolio to nearly every category imaginable. Often hailed as the foremost success story in online commerce, the firm has driven customer loyalty via consistently strong product recommendations and a well-designed site.

    Bringing Physical Retail Into the Digital Age

    Beginning in 2016 (and expanding in 2018), Amazon introduced Amazon Go, a next-generation grocery retailer, to the Seattle market. While most firms that pursue an e-commerce strategy traditionally come from a brick-and-mortar background, Amazon upended the usual narrative: the world’s largest online retailer opening physical stores to become a true omnichannel, “click-and-mortar” vendor. From the get-go, Amazon Go focused on innovating the physical retail experience – using cameras, IoT capabilities, and mobile technologies to offer “checkout-free” virtual shopping carts that automatically know what products customers take off the shelves and bill their Amazon accounts accordingly.

    Results

    Amazon received a variety of industry and press accolades for re-inventing the physical store experience and it now owns and operates seven separate store brands, with more still on the horizon.

    Case Study

    INDUSTRY - Retail
    SOURCES - Glossy, 2020

    Old Navy

    Old Navy is a clothing and accessories retail company that owns and operates over 1,200 stores across North America and China. Typically, Old Navy has relied on using traditional marketing approaches, but recently it has shifted to producing more digitally focused campaigns to drive revenue.

    Bringing Physical Retail Into the Digital Age

    To overcome pandemic-related difficulties, including temporary store closures, Old Navy knew that it had to have strong holiday sales in 2020. With the goal of stimulating retail sales growth and maximizing its pre-existing omnichannel capabilities, Old Navy decided to focus more of its holiday campaign efforts online than in years past. With this campaign centered on connected TV platforms, such as Hulu, and social media channels including Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, Old Navy was able to take a more unique, fun, and good-humored approach to marketing.

    Results

    Old Navy’s digitally focused campaign was a success. When compared with third quarter sales figures from 2019, third quarter net sales for 2020 increased by 15% and comparable sales increased by 17%.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

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    Consulting

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    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5

    Call #1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.

    Call #2: Assess current maturity.

    Call #4: Identify relationship between current initiatives and capabilities.

    Call #6: Identify strategy risks.

    Call #8: Identify and prioritize improvements.

    Call #3: Identify target-state capabilities.

    Call #5: Create initiative profiles.

    Call #7: Identify required budget.

    Call #9: Summarize results and plan next steps.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is between 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

    Enable Omnichannel Commerce That Delights Your Customers – Project Overview

    1. Identify Critical Drivers for Your Omnichannel Commerce Strategy 2. Map Drivers to the Right Channels and Technologies
    Best Practice Toolkit

    1.1 Assess Personas and Scenarios

    1.2 Create Key Drivers and Metrics

    2.1 Build the Commerce Channel Matrix

    2.2 Review Technology and Trends Primer

    Guided Implementations
    • Validate customer personas.
    • Validate commerce scenarios.
    • Review key drivers and metrics.
    • Build the channel matrix.
    • Discuss technology and trends.
    Onsite Workshop

    Module 1:

    Module 2:

    Identify Critical Drivers for Your Omnichannel Commerce Strategy

    Map Drivers to the Right Channels and Technologies

    Phase 1 Outcome:

    Phase 2 Outcome:

    An initial shortlist of customer-centric drivers for your channel strategy and supporting metrics.

    A completed commerce channel matrix tailored to your organization, and a snapshot of enabling technologies and trends.

    Phase 1

    Identify Critical Drivers for Your Omnichannel Commerce Strategy

    1.1 Assess Personas and Scenarios

    1.2 Create Key Drivers and Metrics

    Enable Omnichannel Commerce That Delights Your Customers

    Step 1.1

    Assess Personas and Scenarios

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    1.1.1 Build key customer personas for your commerce strategy.

    1.1.2 Create commerce scenarios (journey maps) that you need to enable.

    Identify Critical Drivers for Your Omnichannel Commerce Strategy

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business stakeholders (Sales, Marketing)
    • IT project team

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Critical customer personas
    • Key traditional and e-commerce scenarios

    Use customer personas to picture who will be using your commerce channels and guide scenario design and key drivers

    What Are Personas?

    Personas are detailed descriptions of the targeted audience of your e-commerce presence. Effective personas:

    • Express and focus on the major needs and expectations of the most important user groups.
    • Give a clear picture of the typical user’s behavior.
    • Aid in uncovering universal features and functionality.
    • Describe real people with backgrounds, goals, and values.

    Source: Usability.gov, n.d.

    Why Are Personas Important?

    Personas help:

    • Focus the development of commerce platform features on the immediate needs of the intended audience.
    • Detail the level of customization needed to ensure content is valuable to the user.
    • Describe how users may behave when certain audio and visual stimulus are triggered from the website.
    • Outline the special design considerations required to meet user accessibility needs.

    Key Elements of a Persona:

    • Persona Group (e.g. executives)
    • Demographics (e.g. nationality, age, language spoken)
    • Purpose of Using Commerce Channels (e.g. product search versus ready to transact)
    • Typical Behaviors and Tendencies (e.g. goes to different websites when cannot find products in 20 seconds)
    • Technological Environment of User (e.g. devices, browsers, network connection)
    • Professional and Technical Skills and Experiences (e.g. knowledge of websites, area of expertise)

    Use Info-Tech’s guidelines to assist in the creation of personas

    How many personas should I create?

    The number of personas that should be created is based on the organizational coverage of your commerce strategy. Here are some questions you should ask:

    • Do the personas cover a majority of your revenues or product lines?
    • Is the number manageable for your project team to map out?

    How do I prioritize which personas to create?

    The identified personas should generate the most revenue – or provide a significant opportunity – for your business. Here are some questions that you should ask:

    • Are the personas prioritized based on the revenue they generate for the business?
    • Is the persona prioritization process considering both the present and future revenues the persona is generating?

    Sample: persona for e-commerce platform

    Example

    Persona quote: “After I call the company about the widget, I would usually go onto the company’s website and look at further details about the product. How am I supposed to do so when it is so hard to find the company’s website on everyday search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing?”

    Michael is a middle-aged manager working in the financial district. He wants to buy the company’s widgets for use in his home, but since he is distrusting of online shopping, he prefers to call the company’s call center first. Afterwards, if Michael is convinced by the call center representative, he will look at the company’s website for further research before making his purchase.

    Michael does not have a lot of free time on his hands, and tries to make his free time as relaxing as possible. Due to most of his work being client-facing, he is not in front of a computer most of the time during his work. As such, Michael does not consider himself to be skilled with technology. Once he makes the decision to purchase, Michael will conduct online transactions and pay most delivery costs due to his shortage of time.

    Needs:

    • Easy-to-find website and widget information.
    • Online purchasing and delivery services.
    • Answer to his questions about the widget.
    • To maintain contact post-purchase for easy future transactions.

    Info-Tech Tip

    The quote attached to a persona should be from actual quotes that your customers have used when you reviewed your voice of the customer (VoC) surveys or focus groups to drive home the impact of their issues with your company.

    1.1.1 Activity: Build personas for your key customers that you’ll need to support via traditional and e-commerce channels

    1 hour

    1. In two to four groups, list all the major, target customer personas that need to be built. In doing so, consider the people who interact with your e-commerce site (or other channels) most often.
    2. Build a demographic profile for each customer persona. Include information such as age, geographic location, occupation, and annual income.
    3. Augment the persona with a psychographic profile. Consider the goals and objectives of each customer persona and how these might inform buyer behaviors.
    4. Introduce your group’s personas to the entire group, in a round-robin fashion, as if you are introducing your persona at a party.
    5. Summarize the personas in a persona map. Rank your personas according to importance and remove any duplicates.
    6. Use Info-Tech’s Create Personas to Drive Omnichannel Requirements Template to assist.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Persona building is typically used for understanding the external customer; however, if you need to gain a better understanding of the organization’s internal customers (those who will be interacting with the e-commerce platform), personas can also be built for this purpose. Examples of useful internal personas are sales managers, brand managers, and customer service directors.

    1.1.1 Activity: Build personas for your key customers that you’ll need to support via traditional and e-commerce channels (continued)

    Input

    • Customer demographics and psychographics

    Output

    • List of prioritized customer personas

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project team

    Build use-case scenarios to model the transactional customer journey and inform drivers for your commerce strategy

    A use-case scenario is a story or narrative that helps explore the set of interactions that a customer has with an organization. Scenario mapping will help identify key business and technology drivers as well as more granular functional requirements for POS or e-commerce platform selection.

    A GOOD SCENARIO…

    • Describes specific task(s) that need to be accomplished.
    • Describes user goals and motivations.
    • Describes interactions with a compelling but not overwhelming amount of detail.
    • Can be rough, as long as it provokes ideas and discussion.

    SCENARIOS ARE USED TO...

    • Provide a shared understanding about what a user might want to do and how they might want to do it.
    • Help construct the sequence of events that are necessary to address in your user interface(s).

    TO CREATE GOOD SCENARIOS…

    • Keep scenarios high level, not granular, in nature.
    • Identify as many scenarios as possible. If you’re time constrained, try to develop two to three key scenarios per persona.
    • Sketch each scenario out so that stakeholders understand the goal of the scenario.

    1.1.2 Exercise: Build commerce user scenarios to understand what you want your customers to do from a transactional viewpoint

    1 hour

    Example

    Simplified E-Commerce Workflow Purchase Products

    This image contains an example of a Simplified E-Commerce Workflow Purchase Products

    Step 1.2

    Create Key Drivers and Metrics

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Create the business drivers you need to enable with your commerce strategy.
    • Enumerate metrics to track the efficacy of your commerce strategy.

    Identify Critical Drivers for Your Omnichannel Commerce Strategy

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business stakeholders (Sales, Marketing)
    • IT project team

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Business drivers for the commerce strategy
    • Metrics and key performance indicators for the commerce strategy

    1.2 Finish elaboration of your scenarios and map them to your personas: identify core business drivers for commerce

    1.5 hours

    1. List all commerce scenarios required to satisfy the immediate needs of your personas.
      1. Does the use-case scenario address commonly felt user challenges?
      2. Can the scenario be used by those with changing behaviors and tendencies?
    2. Look for recurring themes in use-case scenarios (for example, increasing average transaction cost through better product recommendations) and identify business drivers: drivers are common thematic elements that can be found across multiple scenarios. These are the key principles for your commerce strategy.
    3. Prioritize your use cases by leveraging the priorities of your business drivers.

    Example

    This is an example of how step 1.2 can help you identify business drivers

    1.2 Finish elaboration of your scenarios and map them to your personas: identify core business drivers for commerce (continuation)

    Input

    • User personas

    Output

    • List of use cases
    • Alignment of use cases to business objectives

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Business Analyst
    • Developer
    • Designer

    Show the benefits of commerce solution deployment with metrics aimed at both overall efficacy and platform adoption

    The ROI and perceived value of the organization’s e-commerce and POS solutions will be a critical indication of the success of the suite’s selection and implementation.

    Commerce Strategy and Technology Adoption Metrics

    EXAMPLE METRICS

    Commerce Performance Metrics

    Average revenue per unique transaction

    Quantity and quality of commerce insights

    Aggregate revenue by channel

    Unique customers per channel

    Savings from automated processes

    Repeat customers per channel

    User Adoption and Business Feedback Metrics

    User satisfaction feedback

    User satisfaction survey with technology

    Business adoption rates

    Application overhead cost reduction

    Info-Tech Insight

    Even if e-commerce metrics are difficult to track right now, the implementation of a dedicated e-commerce platform brings access to valuable customer intelligence from data that was once kept in silos.

    Phase 2

    Map Drivers to the Right Channels and Technologies

    2.1 Build the Commerce Channel Matrix

    2.2 Review Technology and Trends Primer

    Enable Omnichannel Commerce That Delights Your Customers

    Step 2.1

    Build the Commerce Channel Matrix

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Based on your business drivers, create a blended mix of e-commerce channels that will suit your organization’s and customers’ needs.

    Map Drivers to the Right Channels and Technologies

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business stakeholders (Sales, Marketing)
    • IT project team

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Commerce channel map

    Pick the transactional channels that align with your customer personas and enable your target scenarios and drivers

    Traditional Channels

    E-Commerce Channels

    Hybrid Channels

    Physical stores (brick and mortar) are the mainstay of retailers selling tangible goods – some now also offer intangible service delivery.

    E-commerce websites as exemplified by services like Amazon are accessible by a browser and deliver both goods and services.

    Online ordering/in-store fulfilment is a model whereby customers can place orders online but pick the product up in store.

    Telesales allows customers to place orders over the phone. This channel has declined in favor of mobile commerce via smartphone apps.

    Mobile commerce allows customers to shop through a dedicated, native mobile application on a smartphone or tablet.

    IoT-enabled smart carts/bags allow customers to shop in store, but check-out payments are handled by a mobile application.

    Mail order allows customers to send (”snail”) mail orders. A related channel is fax orders. Both have diminished in favor of e-commerce.

    Social media embedded shopping allows customers to order products directly through services such as Facebook.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your channel selections should be driven by customer personas and scenarios. For example, social media may be extensively employed by some persona types (i.e. millennials) but see limited adoption in other demographics or use cases (i.e. B2B).

    2.1 Activity: Build your commerce channel matrix

    30 minutes

    1. Inventory which transactional channels are currently used by your firm (segment by product lines if variation exists).
    2. Interview product leaders, sales leaders, and marketing managers to determine if channels support transactional capabilities or are used for marketing and service delivery.
    3. Review your customer personas, scenarios, and drivers and assess which of the channels you will use in the future to sell products and services. Document below.

    Example: Commerce Channel Map

    Product Line A Product Line B Product Line C
    Currently Used? Future Use? Currently Used? Future Use? Currently Used? Future Use?
    Store Yes Yes No No No No
    Kiosk Yes No No No No No
    E-Commerce Site/Portal No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
    Mobile App No No Yes Yes No Yes
    Embedded Social Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

    Input

    • Personas, scenarios, and driver

    Output

    • Channel map

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project team

    Step 2.2

    Review Technology and Trends Primer

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Review the scope of e-commerce and POS solutions and understand key drivers impacting e-commerce and traditional commerce.

    Map Drivers to the Right Channels and Technologies

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business stakeholders (Sales, Marketing)
    • IT project team

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Understanding of key technologies
    • Understanding of key trends

    Application spotlight: e-commerce platforms

    How It Enables Your Strategy

    • Modern e-commerce platforms provide capabilities for end-to-end orchestration of online commerce experiences, from product site deployment to payment processing.
    • Some e-commerce platforms are purpose-built for business-to-business (B2B) commerce, emphasizing customer portals and EDI features. Other e-commerce vendors place more emphasis on business-to-consumer (B2C) capabilities, such as product catalog management and executing transactions at scale.
    • There has been an increasing degree of overlap between traditional web experience management solutions and the e-commerce market; for example, in 2018, Adobe acquired Magento to augment its overall web experience offering within Adobe Experience Manager.
    • E-commerce platforms typically fall short when it comes to order fulfilment and logistics; this piece of the puzzle is typically orchestrated via an ERP system or logistics management module.
    • This research provides a starting place for defining e-commerce requirements and selection artefacts.

    Key Trends

    • E-commerce vendors are rapidly supporting a variety of form factors and integration with other channels such as social media. Mobile is sufficiently popular that some vendors and industry commentators refer to it as “m-commerce” to differentiate app-based shopping experiences from those accessed through a traditional browser.
    • Hybrid commerce is driving more interplay between e-commerce solutions and POS.

    E-Commerce KPIs

    Strong e-commerce applications can improve:

    • Bounce Rates
    • Exit Rates
    • Lead Conversion Rates
    • Cart Abandonment Rates
    • Re-Targeting Efficacy
    • Average Cart Size
    • Average Cart Value
    • Customer Lifetime Value
    • Aggregate Reach/Impressions

    Familiarize yourself with the e-commerce market

    How it got here

    Initial Traction as the Dot-Com Era Came to Fruition

    Unlike some enterprise application markets, such as CRM, the e-commerce market appeared almost overnight during the mid-to-late nineties as the dot-com explosion fueled the need to have reliable solutions for executing transactions online.

    Early e-commerce solutions were less full-fledged suites than they were mediums for payment processing and basic product list management. PayPal and other services like Digital River were pioneers in the space, but their functionality was limited vis-à-vis tools such as web content management platforms, and their ability to amalgamate and analyze the data necessary for dynamic personalization and re-targeting was virtually non-existent.

    Rapidly Expanding Scope of Functional Capabilities as the Market Matured

    As marketers became more sophisticated and companies put an increased focus on customer experience and omnichannel interaction, the need arose for platforms that were significantly more feature rich than their early contemporaries. In this context, vendors such as Shopify and Demandware stepped into the limelight, offering far richer functionality and analytics than previous offerings, such as asset management, dynamic personalization, and the ability to re-target customers who abandoned their carts.

    As the market has matured, there has also been a series of acquisitions of some players (for example, Demandware by Salesforce) and IPOs of others (i.e. Shopify). Traditional payment-oriented services like PayPal still fill an important niche, while newer entrants like Square seek to disrupt both the e-commerce market and point-of-sale solutions to boot.

    Familiarize yourself with the e-commerce market

    Where it’s going

    Support for a Proliferation of Form Factors and Channels

    Modern e-commerce solutions are expanding the number of form factors (smartphones, tablets) they support via both responsive design and in-app capabilities. Many platforms now also support embedded purchasing options in non-owned channels (for example, social media). With the pandemic leading to a heightened affinity for online shopping, the importance of fully using these capabilities has been further emphasized.

    AI and Machine Learning

    E-commerce is another customer experience domain ripe for transformation via the potential of artificial intelligence. Machine learning algorithms are being used to enhance the effectiveness of dynamic personalization of product collateral, improve the accuracy of product recommendations, and allow for more effective re-targeting campaigns of customers who did not make a purchase.

    Merger of Online Commerce and Traditional Point-of-Sale

    Many e-commerce vendors – particularly the large players – are now going beyond traditional e-commerce and making plays into brick-and-mortar environments, offering point-of-sale capabilities and the ability to display product assets and customizations via augmented reality – truly blending the physical and virtual shopping experience.

    Emphasis on Integration with the Broader Customer Experience Ecosystem

    The big names in e-commerce recognize they don’t live on an island: out-of-the-box integrations with popular CRM, web experience, and marketing automation platforms have been increasing at a breakneck pace. Support for digital wallets has also become increasingly popular, with many vendors integrating contactless payment technology (i.e. Apple Pay) directly into their applications.

    E-Commerce Vendor Snapshot: Part 1

    Mid-Market E-Commerce Solutions

    This image contains the logos for the following Companies: Magento; Spryker; Bigcommerce; Woo Commerce; Shopify

    E-Commerce Vendor Snapshot: Part 2

    Large Enterprise and Full-Suite E-Commerce Platforms

    This image contains the logos for the following Companies: Salesforce commerce cloud; Oracle Commerce Cloud; Adobe Commerce Cloud; Sitecore; Sap Hybris Commerce

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    Evaluate software category leaders through vendor rankings and awards

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    This is an image of the data quarant report

    The Data Quadrant is a thorough evaluation and ranking of all software in an individual category to compare platforms across multiple dimensions.

    This is an image of the data quarant report chart

    Vendors are ranked by their Composite Score, based on individual feature evaluations, user satisfaction rankings, vendor capability comparisons, and likeliness to recommend the platform.

    This is a image of the Emotional Footprint Report

    The Emotional Footprint is a powerful indicator of overall user sentiment toward the relationship with the vendor, capturing data across five dimensions.

    This is a image of the Emotional Footprint Report chart

    Vendors are ranked by their Customer Experience (CX) Score, which combines the overall Emotional Footprint rating with a measure of the value delivered by the solution.

    Leading B2B E-Commerce Platforms

    As of February 2022

    Data Quadrant

    This image contains a screenshot of the Data Quadrant chart for B2B E-commerce

    Emotional Footprint

    This image contains a screenshot of the Emotional Footprint chart for B2B E-commerce

    Leading B2C E-Commerce Platforms

    As of February 2022

    Data Quadrant

    This image contains a screenshot of the Data Quadrant chart for B2C E-commerce

    Emotional Footprint

    This image contains a screenshot of the Emotional Footprint chart for B2C E-commerce

    Application spotlight: point-of-sale solutions

    How It Enables Your Strategy

    • Point-of-sale solutions provide capabilities for cash register/terminal management, transaction processing, and lightweight inventory management.
    • Many POS vendors also offer products that have the ability to create orders from EDI, phone, or fax channels.
    • An increasing emphasis has been placed on retail analytics by POS vendors – providing reporting and analysis tools to help with inventory planning, promotion management, and product recommendations.
    • Integration of POS systems with a central customer data warehouse or other system of record for customer information allows for the ability to build richer customer profiles and compare shopping habits in physical stores against other transactional channels that are offered.
    • POS vendors often offer (or integrate with) loyalty management solutions to track, manage, and redeem loyalty points. See this note on loyalty management systems.
    • Legacy and/or homegrown POS systems tend to be an area of frustration for customer experience management modernization.

    Key Trends

    • POS solutions are moving from “cash-register-only” solutions to encompass mobile POS form factors like smartphones and tablets. Vendors such as Square have experienced tremendous growth in opening up the market via “mPOS” platforms that have lower costs to entry than the traditional hardware needed to support full-fledged POS solutions.
    • This development puts robust POS toolsets in the hands of small and medium businesses that otherwise would be priced out of the market.

    POS KPIs

    Strong POS applications can improve:

    • Customer Data Collection
    • Inventory or Cash Shrinkage
    • Cost per Transaction
    • Loyalty Program Administration Costs
    • Cycle Time for Transaction Execution

    Point-of-Sales Vendor Snapshot: Part 1

    Mid-Market POS Solutions

    This image contains the following company Logos: Square; Shopify; Vend; Heartland|Retail

    Point-of-Sales Vendor Snapshot: Part 2

    Large Enterprise POS Platforms

    This image contains the following Logos: Clover; Oracle Netsuite; RQ Retail Management; Salesforce Commerce Cloud; Korona

    Leading Retail POS Systems

    As of February 2022

    Data Quadrant

    This is an image of the Data Quadrant Chart for the Leading Retail Pos Systems

    Emotional Footprint

    This is an image of the Emotional Footprint chart for the Leading Retail POS Systems

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Knowledge Gained

    • Commerce channel framework
    • Customer affinities
    • Commerce channel overview
    • Commerce-enabling technologies

    Processes Optimized

    • Persona definition for commerce strategy
    • Persona channel shortlist

    Deliverables Completed

    • Customer personas
    • Commerce user scenarios
    • Business drivers for traditional commerce and e-commerce
    • Channel matrix for omnichannel commerce

    Bibliography

    “25 Amazing Omnichannel Statistics Every Marketer Should Know (Updated for 2021).” V12, 29 June 2021. Accessed 12 Jan. 2022.

    “Amazon Go.” Amazon, n.d. Web.

    Andersen, Derek. “33 Statistics Retail Marketers Need to Know in 2021.” Invoca, 19 July 2021. Accessed 12 Jan. 2022.

    Andre, Louie. “115 Critical Customer Support Software Statistics: 2022 Market Share Analysis & Data.” FinancesOnline, 14 Jan. 2022. Accessed 25 Jan. 2022.

    Chuang, Courtney. “The future of support: 5 key trends that will shape customer care in 2022.” Intercom, 10 Jan. 2022. Accessed 11 Jan. 2022.

    Cramer-Flood, Ethan. “Global Ecommerce Update 2021.” eMarketer, 13 Jan. 2021. Accessed 12 Jan. 2022.

    Cramer-Flood, Ethan. “Spotlight on total global retail: Brick-and-mortar returns with a vengeance.” eMarketer, 3 Feb. 2022. Accessed 12 Apr. 2022.

    Fox Rubin, Ben. “Amazon now operates seven different kinds of physical stores. Here's why.” CNET, 28 Feb. 2020. Accessed 12 Jan. 2022.

    Krajewski, Laura. “16 Statistics on Why Omnichannel is the Future of Your Contact Center and the Foundation for a Top-Notch Competitive Customer Experience.” Business 2 Community, 10 July 2020. Accessed 11 Jan. 2022.

    Manoff, Jill. “Fun and convenience: CEO Nany Green on Old Navy’s priorities for holiday.” Glossy, 8 Dec. 2020. Accessed 12 Jan. 2022.

    Meola, Andrew. “Rise of M-Commerce: Mobile Ecommerce Shopping Stats & Trends in 2021.” Insider, 30 Dec. 2020. Accessed 12 Jan. 2022.

    “Outdoor apparel retailer Icebreaker uses AI to exceed shopper expectations.” Salesforce, n.d.(a). Accessed 20 Jan. 2022.

    “Personas.” Usability.gov., n.d. Web. 28 Aug. 2018.

    “PetSmart – Why Commerce Cloud?” Salesforce, n.d.(b). Web. 30 April 2018.

    Toor, Meena. “Customer expectations: 7 Types all exceptional researchers must understand.” Qualtrics, 3 Dec. 2020. Accessed 11 Jan. 2022.

    Westfall, Leigh. “Omnichannel vs. multichannel: What's the difference?” RingCentral, 10 Sept. 2021. Accessed 11 Jan. 2022.

    “Worldwide ecommerce will approach $5 trillion this year.” eMarketer, 14 Jan. 2021. Accessed 12 Jan. 2022.

    Tech Trend Update: If Digital Ethics Then Data Equity

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    COVID-19 is driving the need for quick technology solutions, including some that require personal data collection. Organizations are uncertain about the right thing to do.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Data equity approaches personal data like money, putting the owner in control and helping to protect against unethical systems.

    Impact and Result

    There are some key considerations for businesses grappling with digital ethics:

    1. If partnering, set expectations.
    2. If building, invite criticism.
    3. If imbuing authority, consider the most vulnerable.

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    Understand how to use data equity as an ethical guidepost to create technology that will benefit everyone.

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    • Parent Category Name: Marketing Solutions
    • Parent Category Link: /marketing-solutions
    • Prospective buyer traffic into digital marketing platforms has exploded.
    • Many freemium/low-cost digital marketing platforms lack lead scoring and nurturing functionality.
    • As a result, the volume of unqualified leads being delivered to outbound sellers has increased dramatically.
    • This has reduced sales productivity, frustrated prospective buyers, and raised the costs of lead generation.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Lead scoring is a must-have capability for high-tech marketers.
    • Without lead scoring, marketers will see increased costs of lead generation and decreased SQL-to-opportunity conversion rates.
    • Lead scoring increases sales productivity and shortens sales cycles.

    Impact and Result

    • Align Marketing, Sales, and Inside Sales on your ideal customer profile.
    • Re-evaluate the assets and activities that compose your current lead generation engine.
    • Develop a documented methodology to ignore, nurture, or contact right away the leads in your marketing pipeline.
    • Deliver more qualified leads to sellers, raising sales productivity and marketing/lead-gen ROI.

    Optimize Lead Generation With Lead Scoring Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should optimize lead generation with lead scoring, review SoftwareReviews Advisory’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Drive aligned vision for lead scoring

    Outline your plan, form your team, and plan marketing tech stack support.

    • Optimize Lead Generation With Lead Scoring – Phase 1: Drive an Aligned Vision for Lead Scoring

    2. Build and test your lead scoring model

    Set lead flow thresholds, define your ideal customer profile and lead generation engine components, and weight, score, test, and refine them.

    • Optimize Lead Generation With Lead Scoring – Phase 2: Build and Test Your Lead Scoring Model
    • Lead Scoring Workbook

    3. Apply your model to marketing apps and go live with better qualified leads

    Apply your lead scoring model to your lead management app, test it, validate the results with sellers, apply advanced methods, and refine.

    • Optimize Lead Generation With Lead Scoring – Phase 3: Apply Your Model to Marketing Apps and Go Live With Better Qualified Leads
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Optimize Lead Generation With Lead Scoring

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Drive Aligned Vision for Lead Scoring

    The Purpose

    Drive an aligned vision for lead scoring.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Attain an aligned vision for lead scoring.

    Identify the steering committee and project team and clarify their roles and responsibilities.

    Provide your team with an understanding of how leads score through the marketing funnel.

    Activities

    1.1 Outline a vision for lead scoring.

    1.2 Identify steering committee and project team members.

    1.3 Assess your tech stack for lead scoring and seek advice from Info-Tech analysts to modernize where needed.

    1.4 Align on marketing pipeline terminology.

    Outputs

    Steering committee and project team make-up

    Direction on tech stack to support lead generation

    Marketing pipeline definitions alignment

    2 Buyer Journey and Lead Generation Engine Mapping

    The Purpose

    Define the buyer journey and map the lead generation engine.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Align the vision for your target buyer and their buying journey.

    Identify the assets and activities that need to compose your lead generation engine.

    Activities

    2.1 Establish a buyer persona.

    2.2 Map your buyer journey.

    2.3 Document the activities and assets of your lead generation engine.

    Outputs

    Buyer persona

    Buyer journey map

    Lead gen engine assets and activities documented

    3 Build and Test Your Lead Scoring Model

    The Purpose

    Build and test your lead scoring model.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Gain team alignment on how leads score and, most importantly, what constitutes a sales-accepted lead.

    Develop a scoring model from which future iterations can be tested.

    Activities

    3.1 Understand the Lead Scoring Grid and set your thresholds.

    3.2 Identify your ideal customer profile, attributes, and subattribute weightings – run tests.

    Outputs

    Lead scoring thresholds

    Ideal customer profile, weightings, and tested scores

    Test profile scoring

    4 Align on Engagement Attributes

    The Purpose

    Align on engagement attributes.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Develop a scoring model from which future iterations can be tested.

    Activities

    4.1 Weight the attributes of your lead generation engagement model and run tests.

    4.2 Apply weightings to activities and assets.

    4.3 Test engagement and profile scenarios together and make any adjustments to weightings or thresholds.

    Outputs

    Engagement attributes and weightings tested and complete

    Final lead scoring model

    5 Apply Model to Your Tech Platform

    The Purpose

    Apply the model to your tech platform.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Deliver better qualified leads to Sales.

    Activities

    5.1 Apply model to your marketing management/campaign management software and test the quality of sales-accepted leads in the hands of sellers.

    5.2 Measure overall lead flow and conversion rates through your marketing pipeline.

    5.3 Apply lead nurturing and other advanced methods.

    Outputs

    Model applied to software

    Better qualified leads in the hands of sellers

    Further reading

    Optimize Lead Generation With Lead Scoring

    In today’s competitive environment, optimizing Sales’ resources by giving them qualified leads is key to B2B marketing success.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Improve B2B seller win rates with a lead scoring methodology as part of your modern lead generation engine.

    The image contains a picture of Jeff Golterman.

    As B2B organizations emerge from the lowered demands brought on by COVID-19, they are eager to convert marketing contacts to sales-qualified leads with even the slightest signal of intent, but many sales cycles are wasted when sellers receive unqualified leads. Delivering highly qualified leads to sellers is still more art than science, and it is especially challenging without a way to score a contact profile and engagement. While most marketers capture some profile data from contacts, many will pass a contact over to Sales without any engagement data or schedule a demo with a contact without any qualifying profile data. Passing unqualified leads to Sales suboptimizes Sales’ resources, raises the costs per lead, and often results in lost opportunities. Marketers need to develop a lead scoring methodology that delivers better qualified leads to Field Sales scored against both the ideal customer profile (ICP) and engagement that signals lower-funnel buyer interest. To be successful in building a compelling lead scoring solution, marketers must work closely with key stakeholders to align the ICP asset/activity with the buyer journey. Additionally, working early in the design process with IT/Marketing Operations to implement lead management and analytical tools in support will drive results to maximize lead conversion rates and sales wins.

    Jeff Golterman

    Managing Director

    SoftwareReviews Advisory

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    The affordability and ease of implementation of digital marketing tools have driven global adoption to record levels. While many marketers are fine-tuning the lead generation engine components of email, social media, and web-based advertising to increase lead volumes, just 32% of companies pass well-qualified leads over to outbound marketers or sales development reps (SDRs). At best, lead gen costs stay high, and marketing-influenced win rates remain suboptimized. At worst, marketing reputation suffers when poorly qualified leads are passed along to sellers.

    Common Obstacles

    Most marketers lack a methodology for lead scoring, and some lack alignment among Marketing, Product, and Sales on what defines a qualified lead. In their rush to drive lead generation, marketers often fail to “define and align” on the ICP with stakeholders, creating confusion and wasted time and resources. In the rush to adopt B2B marketing and sales automation tools, many marketers have also skipped the important steps to 1) define the buyer journey and map content types to support, and 2) invest in a consistent content creation and sourcing strategy. The wrong content can leave prospects unmotivated to engage further and cause them to seek alternatives.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    To employ lead scoring effectively, marketers need to align Sales, Marketing, and Product teams on the definition of the ICP and what constitutes a Sales-accepted lead. The buyer journey needs to be mapped in order to identify the engagement that will move a lead through the marketing lead generation engine. Then the project team can score prospect engagement and the prospect profile attributes against the ICP to arrive at a lead score. The marketing tech stack needs to be validated to support lead scoring, and finally Sales needs to sign off on results.

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    Lead scoring is a must-have capability for high-tech marketers. Without lead scoring, marketers will see increased costs of lead gen, decreased SQL to opportunity conversion rates, decreased sales productivity, and longer sales cycles.

    Who benefits from a lead scoring project?

    This Research Is Designed for:

    • Marketers and especially campaign managers who are:
      • Looking for a more precise way to score leads and deploy outbound marketing resources to optimize contacts-to-MQL conversion rates.
      • Looking for a more effective way to profile contacts raised by your lead gen engine.
      • Looking to use their lead management software to optimize lead scoring.
      • Starting anew to strengthen their lead generation engine and want examples of a typical engine, ways to identify buyer journey, and perform lead nurturing.

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Explain why having a lead scoring methodology is important.
    • Identify a methodology that will call for identifying an ICP against which to score prospect profiles behind each contact that engages your lead generation engine.
    • Create a process of applying weightings to score activities during contact engagement with your lead generation engine. Apply both scores to arrive at a contact/lead score.
    • Compare your current lead gen engine to a best-in-class example in order to identify gaps and areas for improvement and exploration.

    This Research Will Also Assist:

    • CMOs, Marketing Operations leaders, heads of Product Marketing, and regional Marketing leads who are stakeholders in:
      • Finding alternatives to current lead scoring approaches.
        • Altering current or evaluating new marketing technologies to support a refreshed lead scoring approaches.

    This Research Will Help Them:

    • Align stakeholders on an overall program of identifying target customers, building common understanding of what constitutes a qualified lead, and determining when to use higher-cost outbound marketing resources.
    • Deploy high-value applications that will improve core marketing metrics.

    Insight summary

    Continuous adjustment and improvement of your lead scoring methodology is critical for long-term lead generation engine success.

    • Building a highly functioning lead generation engine is an ongoing process and one that requires continual testing of new asset types, asset design, and copy variations. Buyer profiles change over time as you launch new products and target new markets.
    • Pass better qualified leads to Field Sales and improve sales win rates by taking these crucial steps to implement a better lead generation engine and a lead scoring methodology:
      • Make the case for lead scoring in your organization.
      • Establish trigger points that separate leads to ignore, nurture, qualify, or outreach/contact.
      • Identify your buyer journey and ICP through collaboration among Sales, Marketing, and Product.
      • Assess each asset and activity type across your lead generation engine and apply a weighting for each.
      • Test lead scenarios within our supplied toolkit and with stakeholders. Adjust weightings and triggers that deliver lead scores that make sense.
      • Work with IT/Marketing Operations to emulate your lead scoring methodology within your marketing automation/campaign management application.
      • Explore advanced methods including nurturing.
    • Use the Lead Scoring Workbook collaboratively with other stakeholders to design your own methodology, test lead scenarios, and build alignment across the team.

    Leading marketers who successfully implement a lead scoring methodology develop it collaboratively with stakeholders across Marketing, Sales, and Product Management. Leaders will engage Marketing Operations, Sales Operations, and IT early to gain support for the evaluation and implementation of a supporting campaign management application and for analytics to track lead progress throughout the Marketing and Sales funnels. Leverage the Marketing Lead Scoring Toolkit to build out your version of the model and to test various scenarios. Use the slides contained within this storyboard and the accompanying toolkit as a means to align key stakeholders on the ICP and to weight assets and activities across your marketing lead generation engine.

    What is lead scoring?

    Lead scoring weighs the value of a prospect’s profile against the ICP and renders a profile score. The process then weighs the value of the prospects activities against the ideal call to action (CTA) and renders an activity score. Combining the profile and activity scores delivers an overall score for the value of the lead to drive the next step along the overall buyer journey.

    EXAMPLE: SALES MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

    • For a company that markets sales management software the ideal buyer is the head of Sales Operations. While the ICP is made up of many attributes, we’ll just score one – the buyer’s role.
    • If the prospect/lead that we wish to score has an executive title, the lead’s profile scores “High.” Other roles will score lower based on your ICP. Alongside role, you will also score other profile attributes (e.g. company size, location).
    • With engagement, if the prospect/lead clicked on our ideal CTA, which is “request a proposal,” our engagement would score high. Other CTAs would score lower.
    The image contains a screenshot of two examples of lead scoring. One example demonstrates. Profile Scoring with Lead Profile, and the second image demonstrates Activity Scoring and Lead Engagement.

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    A significant obstacle to quality lead production is disagreement on or lack of a documented definition of the ideal customer profile. Marketers successful in lead scoring will align key stakeholders on a documented definition of the ICP as a first step in improving lead scoring.

    Use of lead scoring is in the minority among marketers

    The majority of businesses are not practicing lead scoring!

    Up to 66% of businesses don’t practice any type of lead scoring.

    Source: LeadSquared, 2014

    “ With lead scoring, you don’t waste loads of time on unworthy prospects, and you don’t ignore people on the edge of buying.”

    Source: BigCommerce

    “The benefits of lead scoring number in the dozens. Having a deeper understanding of which leads meet the qualifications of your highest converters and then systematically communicating with them accordingly increases both ongoing engagement and saves your internal team time chasing down inopportune leads.”

    – Joey Strawn, Integrated Marketing Director, in IndustrialMarketer.com

    Key benefit: sales resource optimization

    Many marketing organizations send Sales too many unqualified leads

    • Leads – or, more accurately, contacts – are not all qualified. Some are actually nothing more than time-wasters for sellers.
    • Leading marketers peel apart a contact into at least two dimensions – “who” and “how interested.”
      • The “who” is compared to the ICP and given a score.
      • The “how interested” measures contact activity – or engagement – within our lead gen engine and gives it a score.
    • Scores are combined; a contact with a low score is ignored, medium is nurtured, and high is sent to sellers.
    • A robust ICP, together with engagement scoring and when housed within your lead management software, prioritizes for marketers which contacts to nurture and gets hot leads to sellers more quickly.

    Optimizing Sales Resources Using Lead Scoring

    The image contains a screenshot of a graph to demonstrate optimizing sales resources with lead scoring.

    Lead scoring drives greater sales effectiveness

    When contacts are scored as “qualified leads” and sent to sellers, sales win rates and ROI climb

    • Contacts can be scored properly once marketers align with Sales on the ICP and work closely with colleagues in areas like product marketing and field marketing to assign weightings to lead gen activities.
    • When more qualified leads get into the hands of the salesforce, their win rates improve.
    • As win rates improve, and sellers are producing more wins from the same volume of leads, sales productivity improves and ROI on the marketing investment increases.

    “On average, organizations that currently use lead scoring experience a 77% lift in lead generation ROI, over organizations that do not currently use lead scoring.”

    – MarketingSherpa, 2012

    Average Lead Generation ROI by Use of Lead Scoring

    The image contains a screenshot of a graph to demonstrate the average lead generation ROI by using of lead scoring. 138% are currenting using lead scoring, and 78% are not using lead scoring.
    Source: 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey, MarketingSherpa
    Methodology: Fielded June 2011, N=326 CMOs

    SoftwareReviews’ Lead Scoring Approach

    1. Drive Aligned Vision for Lead Scoring

    2. Build and Test Your Lead Scoring Model

    3. Apply to Your Tech Platform and Validate, Nurture, and Grow

    Phase
    Steps

    1. Outline a vision for lead scoring and identify stakeholders.
    2. Assess your tech stack for lead scoring and seek advice from Info-Tech analysts to modernize where needed.
    3. Align on marketing pipeline terminology, buyer persona and journey, and lead gen engine components.
    1. Understand the Lead Scoring Grid and establish thresholds.
    2. Collaborate with stakeholders on your ICP, apply weightings to profile attributes and values, and test your model.
    3. Identify the key activities and assets of your lead gen engine, weight attributes, and run tests.
    1. Apply model to your marketing management software.
    2. Test quality of sales-accepted leads by sellers and measure conversion rates through your marketing pipeline.
    3. Apply advanced methods such as lead nurturing.

    Phase Outcomes

    1. Steering committee and stakeholder selection
    2. Stakeholder alignment
    3. Team alignment on terminology
    4. Buyer journey map
    5. Lead gen engine components and asset types documented
    1. Initial lead-stage threshold scores
    2. Ideal customer profile, weightings, and tested scores
    3. Documented activities/assets across your lead generation engine
    4. Test results to drive adjusted weightings for profile attributes and engagement
    5. Final model to apply to marketing application
    1. Better qualified leads in the hands of sellers
    2. Advanced methods to nurture leads

    Key Deliverable: Lead Scoring Workbook

    The workbook walks you through a step-by-step process to:

    • Identify your team.
    • Identify the lead scoring thresholds.
    • Define your IPC.
    • Weight the activities within your lead generation engine.
    • Run tests using lead scenarios.

    Tab 1: Team Composition

    Consider core functions and form a cross-functional lead scoring team. Document the team’s details here.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Lead Scoring Workbook, Tab 1.

    Tab 2: Threshold Setting

    Set your initial threshold weightings for profile and engagement scores.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Lead Scoring Workbook, Tab 2.

    Tab 3:

    Establish Your Ideal Customer Profile

    Identify major attributes and attribute values and the weightings of both. You’ll eventually score your leads against this ICP.

    Record and Weight Lead Gen Engine Activities

    Identify the major activities that compose prospect engagement with your lead gen engine. Weight them together as a team.

    Test Lead Profile Scenarios

    Test actual lead profiles to see how they score against where you believe they should score. Adjust threshold settings in Tab 2.

    Test Activity Engagement Scores

    Test scenarios of how contacts navigate your lead gen engine. See how they score against where you believe they should score. Adjust thresholds on Tab 2 as needed.

    Review Combined Profile and Activity Score

    Review the combined scores to see where on your lead scoring matrix the lead falls. Make any final adjustments to thresholds accordingly.

    The image contains screenshots of the Lead Scoring Workbook, Tab 3.

    Several ways we help you build your lead scoring methodology

    DIY Toolkit Guided Implementation Workshop Consulting

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

    "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

    "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

    "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    • Begin your project using the step-by-step process outlined in this blueprint.
    • Leverage the accompanying workbook.
    • Launch inquiries with the analyst who wrote the research.
    • Kick off your project with an inquiry with the authoring analyst and your engagement manager.
    • Additional inquiries will guide you through each step.
    • Leverage the blueprint and toolkit.
    • Reach out to your engagement manager.
    • During a half-day workshop the authoring analyst will guide you and your team to complete your lead scoring methodology.
    • Reach out to your engagement manager.
    • We’ll lead the engagement to structure the process, gather data, interview stakeholders, craft outputs, and organize feedback and final review.

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    Call #1: Collaborate on vision for lead scoring and the overall project.

    Call #2: Identify the steering committee and the rest of the team.

    Call #3: Discuss app/tech stack support for lead scoring. Understand key marketing pipeline terminology and the buyer journey.

    Call #4: Discuss your ICP, apply weightings, and run test scenarios.

    Call #5: Discuss and record lead generation engine components.

    Call #6: Understand the Lead Scoring Grid and set thresholds for your model.

    Call #7: Identify your ICP, apply weightings to attributes, and run tests.

    Call #8: Weight the attributes of engagement activities and run tests. Review the application of the scoring model on lead management software.

    Call #9: Test quality of sales-accepted leads in the hands of sellers. Measure lead flow and conversion rates through your marketing pipeline.

    Call #10: Review progress and discuss nurturing and other advanced topics.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is series of calls with a SoftwareReviews Advisory analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization. For guidance on marketing applications, we can arrange a discussion with an Info-Tech analyst. Your engagement managers will work with you to schedule analyst calls.

    Workshop Overview

    Accelerate your project with our facilitated SoftwareReviews Advisory workshops

    Day 1

    Day 2

    Day 3

    Day 4

    Day 5

    Drive Aligned Vision for Lead Scoring

    Buyer Journey and Lead Gen Engine Mapping

    Build and Test Your Lead Scoring Model

    Align on Engagement Attributes

    Apply to Your Tech Platform

    Activities

    1.1 Outline a vision for lead scoring.

    1.2 Identify steering committee and project team members.

    1.3 Assess your tech stack for lead scoring and seek advice from Info-Tech analysts to modernize where needed.

    1.4 Align on marketing pipeline terminology.

    2.1 Establish a buyer persona (if not done already).

    2.2 Map your buyer journey.

    2.3 Document the activities and assets of your lead gen engine.

    3.1 Understand Lead Scoring Grid and set your thresholds.

    3.2 Identify ICP attribute and sub-attribute weightings. Run tests.

    4.1 Weight the attributes of your lead gen engagement model and run tests.

    4.2 Apply weightings to activities and assets.

    4.3 Test engagement and profile scenarios together and adjust weightings and thresholds as needed.

    5.1 Apply model to your campaign management software and test quality of sales-accepted leads in the hands of sellers.

    5.2. Measure overall lead flow and conversion rates through your marketing pipeline.

    5.3 Apply lead nurturing and other advanced methods.

    Deliverables

    1. Steering committee & project team composition
    2. Direction on tech stack to support lead gen
    3. Alignment on marketing pipeline definitions
    1. Buyer (persona if needed) journey map
    2. Lead gen engine assets and activities documented
    1. Lead scoring thresholds
    2. ICP, weightings, and tested scores
    3. Test profile scoring
    1. Engagement attributes and weightings tested and complete
    2. Final lead scoring model
    1. Model applied to your marketing management/ campaign management software
    2. Better qualified leads in the hands of sellers

    Phase 1

    Drive an Aligned Vision for Lead Scoring

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    1.1 Establish a cross-functional vision for lead scoring

    1.2 Asses your tech stack for lead scoring (optional)

    1.3 Catalog your buyer journey and lead gen engine assets

    2.1 Start building your lead scoring model

    2.2 Identify and verify your IPC and weightings

    2.3 Establish key lead generation activities and assets

    3.1 Apply model to your marketing management software

    3.2 Test the quality of sales-accepted leads

    3.3 Apply advanced methods

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Solidify your vision for lead scoring.
    • Achieve stakeholder alignment.
    • Assess your tech stack.

    This phase involves the following stakeholders:

    • Field Marketing/Campaign Manager
    • CMO
    • Product Marketing
    • Product Management
    • Sales Leadership/Sales Operations
    • Inside Sales leadership
    • Marketing Operations/IT
    • Digital Platform leadership

    Step 1.1

    Establish a Cross-Functional Vision for Lead Scoring

    Activities

    1.1.1 Identify stakeholders critical to success

    1.1.2 Outline the vision for lead scoring

    1.1.3 Select your lead scoring team

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Discuss the reasons why lead scoring is important.
    • Review program process.
    • Identify stakeholders and team.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Stakeholders
    • Project sponsors and leaders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Stakeholder alignment on vision of lead scoring
    • Stakeholders described and team members recorded
    • A documented buyer journey and map of your current lead gen engine

    1.1.1 Identify stakeholders critical to success

    1 hour

    1. Meet to identify the stakeholders that should be included in the project’s steering committee.
    2. Finalize selection of steering committee members.
    3. Contact members to ensure their willingness to participate.
    4. Document the steering committee members and the milestone/presentation expectations for reporting project progress and results
    Input Output
    • Stakeholder interviews
    • List of business process owners (lead management, inside sales lead qualification, sales opportunity management, marketing funnel metric measurement/analytics)
    • Lead generation/scoring stakeholders
    • Steering committee members
    Materials Participants
    • N/A
    • Initiative Manager
    • CMO, Sponsoring Executive
    • Departmental Leads – Sales, Marketing, Product Marketing, Product Management (and others)
    • Marketing Applications Director
    • Senior Digital Business Analyst

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    B2B marketers that lack agreement among Marketing, Sales, Inside Sales, and lead management supporting staff of what constitutes a qualified lead will squander precious time and resources throughout the customer acquisition process.

    1.1.2 Outline the vision for lead scoring

    1 hour

    1. Convene a meeting of the steering committee and initiative team members who will be involved in the lead scoring project.
    • Using slides from this blueprint, understand the definition of lead scoring, the value of lead scoring to the organization, and the overall lead scoring process.
    • Understand the teams’ roles and responsibilities and help your Marketing Operations/IT colleagues understand some of the technical requirements needed to support lead scoring.
    • This is important because as the business members of the team are developing the lead scoring approach on paper, the technical team can begin to evaluate lead management apps within which your lead scoring model will be brought to life.
    Input Output
    • Slides to explain lead scoring and the lead scoring program
    • An understanding of the project among key stakeholders
    Materials Participants
    • Slides taken from this blueprint. We suggest slides from the Executive Brief (slides 3-16) and any others depending on the team’s level of familiarity.
    • Initiative Manager
    • CMO, Sponsoring Executive
    • Departmental leads from Sales, Marketing, Product Marketing, Product Management (and others)
    • Marketing Applications Director
    • Senior Digital Business Analyst

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    While SMBs can implement some form of lead scoring when volume is very low and leads can be scored by hand, lead scoring and effective lead management cannot be performed without investment in digital platforms and lead management software and integration with customer relationship management (CRM) applications in the hands of inside and field sales staff. Marketers should plan and budget for the right combination of applications and tools to be in place for proper lead management.

    Lead scoring stakeholders

    Developing a common stakeholder understanding of the ICP, the way contact profiles are scored, and the way activities and asset engagement in your lead generation engine are scored will strengthen alignment between Marketing, Sales and Product Management.

    Title

    Key Stakeholders Within a Lead Generation/Scoring Initiative

    Lead Scoring Sponsor

    • Owns the project at the management/C-suite level
    • Responsible for breaking down barriers and ensuring alignment with organizational strategy
    • CMO, VP of Marketing, CEO (in SMB providers)

    Lead Scoring Initiative Manager

    • Typically a senior member of the marketing team
    • Responsible for preparing and managing the project plan and monitoring the project team’s progress
    • Marketing Manager or a field marketing team member who has strong program management skills, has run large-scale B2B generation campaigns, and is familiar with the stakeholder roles and enabling technologies

    Business Leads

    • Works alongside the lead scoring initiative manager to ensure that the strategy is aligned with business needs
    • In this case, likely to be a marketing lead
    • Marketing Director

    Digital, Marketing/Sales Ops/IT Team

    • Composed of individuals whose application and technology tools knowledge and skills are crucial to lead generation success
    • Responsible for understanding the business requirements behind lead generation and the requirements in particular to support lead scoring and the evaluation, selection, and implementation of the supporting tech stack – apps, website, analytics, etc.
    • Project Manager, Business Lead, CRM Manager, Integration Manager, Marketing Application SMEs, Sales Application

    Steering Committee

    • Composed of C-suite/management-level individuals who act as the lead generation process decision makers
    • Responsible for validating goals and priorities, defining the scope, enabling adequate resourcing, and managing change especially among C-level leaders in Sales & Product
    • Executive Sponsor, Project Sponsor, CMO, Business Unit SMEs

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    Marketers managing the lead scoring initiative must include Product Marketing, Sales, Inside Sales, and Product Management. And given that world-class B2B lead generation engines cannot run without technology enablement, Marketing Operations/IT – those that are charged with enabling marketing and sales – must also be part of the decision making and implementation process of lead scoring and lead generation.

    1.1.3 Select your lead scoring team

    30 minutes

    1. The CMO and other key stakeholders should discuss and determine who will be involved in the lead scoring project.
    • Business leaders in key areas – Product Marketing, Field Marketing, Digital Marketing, Inside Sales, Sales, Marketing Ops, Product Management, and IT – should be involved.
  • Document the members of your lead scoring team in tab 1 of the Lead Scoring Workbook.
    • The size of the team will vary depending on your initiative and size of your organization.
    InputOutput
    • Stakeholders
    • List of lead scoring team members
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Lead Scoring Workbook
    • Initiative Manager
    • CMO, Sponsoring Executive
    • Departmental Leads – Sales, Marketing, Product Marketing, Product Management (and others)
    • Marketing Applications Director
    • Senior Digital Business Analyst

    Download the Lead Scoring Workbook

    Lead scoring team

    Consider the core team functions when composing the lead scoring team. Form a cross-functional team (i.e. across IT, Marketing, Sales, Service, Operations) to create a well-aligned lead management/scoring strategy. Don’t let your core team become too large when trying to include all relevant stakeholders. Carefully limit the size of the team to enable effective decision making while still including functional business units.

    Required Skills/Knowledge

    Suggested Team Members

    Business

    • Understanding of the customer
    • Understanding of brand
    • Understanding of multichannel marketing: email, events, social
    • Understanding of lead qualification
    • Field Marketing/Campaign Lead
    • Product Marketing
    • Sales Manager
    • Inside Sales Manager
    • Content Marketer/Copywriter

    IT

    • Campaign management application capabilities
    • Digital marketing
    • Marketing and sales funnel Reporting/metrics
    • Marketing Application Owners
    • CRM/Sales Application Owners
    • Marketing Analytics Owners
    • Digital Platform Owners

    Other

    • Branding/creative
    • Social
    • Change management
    • Creative Director
    • Social Media Marketer

    Step 1.2 (Optional)

    Assess Your Tech Stack for Lead Scoring

    Our model assumes you have:

    1.2.1 A marketing application/campaign management application in place that accommodates lead scoring.

    1.2.2 Lead management software integrated with the sales automation/CRM tool in the hands of Field Sales.

    1.2.3 Reporting/analytics that spans the entire lead generation pipeline/funnel.

    Refer to the following three slides if you need guidance in these areas.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Confirm that you have your tech stack in place.
    • Set up an inquiry with an Info-Tech analyst should you require guidance on evaluating lead pipeline reporting, CRM, or analytics applications.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Stakeholders
    • Project sponsors and leaders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Understanding of what new application and technology support is required to support lead scoring.

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    Marketers that collaborate closely with Marketing Ops/IT early in the process of lead scoring design will be best able to assess whether current marketing applications and tools can support a full lead scoring capability.

    1.2.1 Plan technology support for marketing management apps

    Work with Marketing Ops and IT early to evaluate application enablement for lead management, including scoring

    A thorough evaluation takes months – start early

    • Work closely with Marketing Operations (or the team that manages the marketing apps and digital platforms) as early as possible to socialize your approach to lead scoring.
    • Work with them on a set of updated requirements for selecting a marketing management suite or for changes to existing apps and tools to support your lead scoring approach that includes lead tracking and marketing funnel analytics.
    • Access the Info-Tech blueprint Select a Marketing Management Suite, along with analyst inquiry support during the requirements definition, vendor evaluation, and vendor selection phases. Use the SoftwareReviews Marketing Management Data Quadrant during vendor evaluation and selection.

    SoftwareReviews Marketing Management Data Quadrant

    The image contains a screenshot of the Marketing Management Data Quadrant.

    1.2.2 Plan technology support for sales opportunity management

    Work with Marketing Ops and IT early to evaluate applications for sales opportunity management

    A thorough evaluation takes months – start early

    • Work closely with Sales Operations as early as possible to socialize your approach to lead scoring and how lead management must integrate with sales opportunity management to manage the entire marketing and sales funnel management process.
    • Work with them on a set of updated requirements for selecting a sales opportunity management application that integrates with your marketing management suite or for changes to existing apps and tools to support your lead management and scoring approach that support the entire marketing and sales pipeline with analytics.

    Access the Info-Tech blueprint Select and Implement a CRM Platform, along with analyst inquiry support during the requirements definition, vendor evaluation, and vendor selection phases. Use the SoftwareReviews CRM Data Quadrant during vendor evaluation and selection.

    SoftwareReviews Customer Relationship Management Data Quadrant

    The image contains a screenshot of the SoftwareReviews Customer Relationship Management Data Quadrant.

    1.2.3 Plan analytics support for marketing pipeline analysis

    Work with Marketing Ops early to evaluate analytics tools to measure marketing and sales pipeline conversions

    A thorough evaluation takes weeks – start early

    • Work closely with Marketing and Sales Operations as early as possible to socialize your approach to measuring the lifecycle of contacts through to wins across the entire marketing and sales funnel management process.
    • Work with them on a set of updated requirements for selecting tools that can support the measurement of conversion ratios from contact to MQL, SQL, and opportunity to wins. Having this data enables you to measure improvement in component parts to your lead generation engine.
    • Access the Info-Tech blueprint Select and Implement a Reporting and Analytics Solution, along with analyst inquiry support during the requirements definition, vendor evaluation and vendor selection phases. Use the SoftwareReviews Best Business intelligence & Analytics Software Data Quadrant as well during vendor evaluation and selection.

    SoftwareReviews Business Intelligence Data Quadrant

    The image contains a screenshot of the Software Reviews Business Intelligent Quadrant.

    Step 1.3

    Catalog Your Buyer Journey and Lead Gen Engine Assets

    Activities

    1.3.1 Review marketing pipeline terminology

    1.3.2 Describe your buyer journey

    1.3.3 Describe your awareness and lead generation engine

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Discuss marketing funnel terminology.
    • Describe your buyer journey.
    • Catalog the elements of your lead generation engine.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Stakeholders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Stakeholder alignment on terminology, your buyer journey, and elements of your lead generation engine

    1.3.1 Review marketing pipeline terminology

    30 minutes

    1. We assume for this model the following:
      1. Our primary objective is to deliver more, and more-highly qualified, sales-qualified leads (SQLs) to our salesforce. The salesforce will accept SQLs and after further qualification turn them into opportunities. Sellers work opportunities and turn them into wins. Wins that had first/last touch attribution within the lead gen engine are considered marketing-influenced wins.
      2. This model assumes the existence of sales development reps (SDRs) whose mission it is to take marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) from the lead generation engine and further qualify them into SQLs.
      3. The lead generation engine takes contacts – visitors to activities, website, etc. – and scores them based on their profile and engagement. If the contact scores at or above the designated threshold, the lead generation engine rates it as an MQL and passes it along to Inside Sales/SDRs. If the contact scores above a certain threshold and shows promise, it is further nurtured. If the contact score is low, it is ignored.
    2. If an organization does not possess a team of SDRs or Inside Sales, you would adjust your version of the model to, for example, raise the threshold for MQLs, and when the threshold is reached the lead generation engine would pass the lead to Field Sales for further qualification.

    Stage

    Characteristics

    Actions

    Contact

    • Unqualified
    • No/low activity

    Nurture

    SDR Qualify

    Send to Sales

    Close

    MQL

    • Profile scores high
    • Engagement strong

    SQL

    • Profile strengthened
    • Demo/quote/next step confirmed

    Oppt’y

    • Sales acceptance
    • Sales opportunity management

    Win

    • Deal closed

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    Score leads in a way that makes it crystal clear whether they should be ignored, further nurtured, further qualified, or go right into a sellers’ hands as a super hot lead.

    1.3.2 Describe your buyer journey

    1. Understand the concept of the buyer journey:
      1. Typically Product Marketing is charged with establishing deep understanding of the target buyer for each product or solution through a complete buyer persona and buyer journey map. The details of how to craft both are covered in the upcoming SoftwareReviews Advisory blueprint Craft a More Comprehensive Go-to-Market Strategy. However, we share our Buyer Journey Template here (on the next slide) to illustrate the connection between the buyer journey and the lead generation and scoring processes.
      2. Marketers and campaigners developing the lead scoring methodology will work closely with Product Marketing, asking them to document the buyer journey.
      3. The value of the buyer journey is to guide asset/content creation, nurturing strategy and therefore elements of the lead generation engine such as web experience, email, and social content and other elements of engagement.
      4. The additional value of having a buyer persona is to also inform the ICP, which is an essential element of lead scoring.
      5. For the purposes of lead scoring, use the template on the next slide to create a simple form of the buyer journey. This will guide lead generation engine design and the scoring of activities later in our blueprint.

    2 hours

    On the following slide:

    1. Tailor this template to suit your buyer journey. Text in green is yours to modify. Text in black is instructional.
    2. Your objective is to use the buyer journey to identify asset types and a delivery channel that once constructed/sourced and activated within your lead gen engine will support the buyer journey.
    3. Keep your buyer journey updated based on actual journeys of sales wins.
    4. Complete different buyer journeys for different product areas. Complete these collaboratively with stakeholders for alignment.

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    Establishing a buyer journey is one of the most valuable tools that, typically, Product Marketing produces. Its use helps campaigners, product managers, and Inside and Field Sales. Leading marketers keep journeys updated based on live deals and characteristics of wins.

    Buyer Journey Template

    Personas: [Title] e.g. “BI Director”

    The image contains a screenshot of the describe persona level as an example.

    [Persona name] ([levels it includes from arrows above]) Buyer’s Journey for [solution type] Vendor Selection

    The image contains a screenshot of the Personas Type example to demonstrate a specific IT role, end use in a relevant department.

    1.3.3 Describe Your Awareness and Lead Gen Engine

    1. Understand the workings of a typical awareness and lead generation engine. Reference the image of a lead gen engine on the following slide when reviewing our guidance below:
      1. In our lead scoring example found in the Lead Scoring Workbook, tab 3, “Weight and Test,” we use a software company selling a sales automation solution, and the engagement activities match with the Typical Awareness and Lead Gen Engine found on the following slide. Our goal is to match a visual representation of a lead gen and awareness engine with the activity scoring portion of lead scoring.
      2. At the top of the Typical Awareness and Lead Generation Engine image, the activities are activated by a team of various roles: digital manager (new web pages), campaign manager (emails and paid media), social media marketer (organic and paid social), and events marketing manager (webinars).
      3. “Awareness” – On the right, the slide shows additional awareness activities driven by the PR/Corporate Comms and Analyst Relations teams.*
      4. The calls to action (CTAs) found in the outreach activities are illustrated below the timeline. The CTAs are grouped and are designed to 1) drive profile capture data via a main sales form fill, and 2) drive engagement that corresponds to the Education, Solution, and Selection buyer journey phases outlined on the prior slide. Ensure you have fast paths to get a hot lead – request a demo – directly to Field Sales when profiles score high.

    * For guidance on best practices in engaging industry analysts, contact your engagement manager to schedule an inquiry with our expert in this area. during that inquiry, we will share best practices and recommended analyst engagement models.

    Lead Scoring Workbook

    2 hours

    On the following slide:

    1. Tailor the slide to describe your lead generation engine as you will use it when you get to latter steps to describe the activities in your lead gen engine and weight them for lead scoring.
    2. Use the template to see what makes up a typical lead gen and awareness building engine. Record your current engine parts and see what you may be missing.
    3. Note: The “Goal” image in the upper right of the slide is meant as a reminder that marketers should establish a goal for SQLs delivered to Field Sales for each campaign.

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    Marketing’s primary mission is to deliver marketing-influenced wins (MIWs) to the company. Building a compelling awareness and lead gen engine must be done with that goal in mind. Leaders are ruthless in testing – copy, email subjects, website navigation, etc. – to fine-tune the engine and staying highly collaborative with sellers to ensure high value lead delivery.

    Typical Awareness and Lead Gen Engine

    Understand how a typical lead generation engine works. Awareness activities are included as a reference. Use as a template for campaigns.

    The image contains a screenshot of a diagram to demonstrate how a lead generation engine works.

    Phase 2

    Build and Test Your Lead Scoring Model

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    1.1 Establish a cross-functional vision for lead scoring

    1.2 Asses your tech stack for lead scoring (optional)

    1.3 Catalog your buyer journey and lead gen engine assets

    2.1 Start building your lead scoring model

    2.2 Identify and verify your IPC and weightings

    2.3 Establish key lead generation activities and assets

    3.1 Apply model to your marketing management software

    3.2 Test the quality of sales-accepted leads

    3.3 Apply advanced methods

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    1. Understand the Lead Scoring Grid and establish thresholds.
    2. Collaborate with stakeholders on your ICP, apply weightings to profile attributes and values, and test.
    3. Identify the key activities and assets of your lead gen engine, weight attributes, and run tests.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Field Marketing/Campaign Manager
    • Product Marketing
    • Sales Leadership/Sales Operations
    • Inside Sales leadership
    • Marketing Operations/IT
    • Digital Platform leadership

    Step 2.1

    Start Building Your Lead Scoring Model

    Activities

    2.1.1 Understand the Lead Scoring Grid

    2.1.2 Identify thresholds

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Discuss the concept of the thresholds for scoring leads in each of the various states – “ignore,” “nurture,” “qualify,” “send to sales.”
    • Open the Lead Scoring Workbook and validate your own states to suit your organization.
    • Arrive at an initial set of threshold scores.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Stakeholders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Stakeholder alignment on stages
    • Stakeholder alignment on initial set of thresholds

    2.1.1 Understand the Lead Scoring Grid

    30 minutes

    1. Understand how lead scoring works and our grid is constructed.
    2. Understand the two important areas of the grid and the concept of how the contact’s scores will increase as follows:
      1. Profile – as the profile attributes of the contact approaches that of the ICP we want to score the contact/prospect higher. Note: Step 1.3 walks you through creating your ICP.
      2. Engagement – as the contact/prospect engages with the activities (e.g. webinars, videos, events, emails) and assets (e.g. website, whitepapers, blogs, infographics) in our lead generation engine, we want to score the contact/prospect higher. Note: You will describe your engagement activities in this step.
    3. Understand how thresholds work:
      1. Threshold percentages, when reached, trigger movement of the contact from one state to the next – “ignore,” “nurture,” “qualify with Inside Sales,” and “send to sales.”
    The image contains a screenshot of an example of the lead scoring grid, as described in the text above.

    2.1.2 Identify thresholds

    30 minutes

    We have set up a model Lead Scoring Grid – see Lead Scoring Workbook, tab 2, “Identify Thresholds.”

    Set your thresholds within the Lead Scoring Workbook:

    • Set your threshold percentages for ”Profile” and “Engagement.”
    • You will run test scenarios for each in later steps.
    • We suggest you start with the example percentages given in the Lead Scoring Workbook and plan to adjust them during testing in later steps.
    • Define the “Send to Sales,” “Qualify With Inside Sales,” “Nurture,” and “Ignore” zones.

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    Clarify that all-important threshold for when a lead passes to your expensive and time-starved outbound sellers.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Lead Scoring Workbook, tab 2 demonstrating the Lead Scoring Grid.

    Lead Scoring Workbook

    Step 2.2

    Identify and Verify Your Ideal Customer Profile and Weightings

    Activities

    2.2.1 Identify your ideal customer profile

    2.2.2 Run tests to validate profile weightings

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify the attributes that compose the ICP.
    • Identify the values of each attribute and their weightings.
    • Test different contact profile scenarios against what actually makes sense.
    • Adjust weightings if needed.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Stakeholders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Stakeholder alignment on ICP
    • Stakeholder alignment on weightings given to attributes
    • Tested results to verify thresholds and cores

    2.2.1 Identify your ideal customer profile

    Collaborate with stakeholders to understand what attributes best describe your ICP. Assign weightings and subratings.

    2 hours

    1. Choose attributes such as job role, organization type, number of employees/potential seat holders, geographical location, interest area, etc., that describe the ideal profile of a target buyer. Best practice sees marketers choosing attributes based on real wins.
    2. Some marketers compare the email domain of the contact to a target list of domains. In the Lead Scoring Workbook, tab 3, “Weight and Test,” we provide an example profile for a “Sales Automation Software” ICP.
    3. Use the workbook as a template, remove our example, and create your own ICP attributes. Then weight the attributes to add up to 100%. Add in the attribute values and weight them. In the next step you will test scenarios.

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    Marketers who align with colleagues in areas such as Product Marketing, Sales, Inside Sales, Sales Training/Enablement, and Product Managers and document the ICP give their organizations a greater probability of lead generation success.

    The image contains a screenshot of tab 3, demonstrating the weight and test with the example profile.

    Lead Scoring Workbook

    2.2.2 Run tests to validate profile weightings

    Collaborate with stakeholders to run different profile scenarios. Validate your model including thresholds.

    The image contains a screenshot of tab 3 to demonstrate the next step of running tests to validate profile weightings.

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    Keep your model simple in the interest of fast implementation and to drive early learnings. The goal is not to be perfect but to start iterating toward success. You will update your scoring model even after going into production.

    2 hours

    1. Choose scenarios of contact/lead profile attributes by placing a “1” in the “Attribute” box shown at left.
    2. Place your estimate of how you believe the profile should score in the box to the right of “Estimated Profile State.” How does the calculated state, beneath, compare to the estimated state?
    3. In cases where the calculated state differs from your estimated state, consider weighting the profile attribute differently to match.
    4. If you find estimates and calculated states off dramatically, consider changing previously determined thresholds in tab 2, “Identify Thresholds.” Test multiple scenarios with your team.

    Lead Scoring Workbook

    Step 2.3

    Establish Key Lead Generation Activities and Assets

    Activities

    2.3.1 Establish activities, attribute values, and weights

    2.3.2 Run tests to evaluate activity ratings

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify the activities/asset types in your lead gen engine.
    • Weight each attribute and define values to score for each one.
    • Run tests to ensure your model makes sense.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Stakeholders
    • Project sponsors and leaders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Final stakeholder alignment on which assets compose your lead generation engine
    • Scoring model tested

    2.3.1 Establish activities, attribute values, and weights

    2 hours

    1. Catalog the assets and activities that compose your lead generation engine outlined in Activity 1.3.3. Identify their attribute values and weight them accordingly.
    2. Consider weighting attributes and values according to how close that asset gets to conveying your ideal call to action. For example, if your ideal CTA is “schedule a demo” and the “click” was submitted in the last seven days, it scores 100%. Take time decay into consideration. If that same click was 60 days ago, it scores less – maybe 60%.
    3. Different assets convey different intent and therefore command different weightings; a video comparing your offering against the competition, considered a down funnel asset, scores higher than the company video, considered a top-of-the-funnel activity and “awareness.”
    The image contains a screenshot of the next step of establishing activities, attribute values, and weights.

    Lead Scoring Workbook

    2.3.2 Run tests to validate activity weightings

    Collaborate with stakeholders to run different engagement scenarios. Validate your model including thresholds.

    The image contains a screenshot of activity 2.3.2: run tests to validate activity weightings.

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    Use data from actual closed deals and the underlying activities to build your model – nothing like using facts to inform your key decisions. Use common sense and keep things simple. Then update further when data from new wins appears.

    2 hours

    1. Test scenarios of contact engagement by placing a “1” in the “Attribute” box shown at left.
    2. Place your estimate of how you believe the engagement should score in the box to the right of “Estimated Engagement State.” How does the calculated state, beneath, compare to the estimated state?
    3. In cases where the calculated state differs from your estimated state, consider weighting the activity attribute differently to match.
    4. If you find that the estimates and calculated states are off dramatically, consider changing previously determined thresholds in tab 2, “Identify Thresholds.” Test multiple scenarios with your team.

    Lead Scoring Workbook

    Phase 3

    Apply Your Model to Marketing Apps and Go Live With Better Qualified Leads

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    1.1 Establish a cross-functional vision for lead scoring

    1.2 Asses your tech stack for lead scoring (optional)

    1.3 Catalog your buyer journey and lead gen engine assets

    2.1 Start building your lead scoring model

    2.2 Identify and verify your IPC and weightings

    2.3 Establish key lead generation activities and assets

    3.1 Apply model to your marketing management software

    3.2 Test the quality of sales-accepted leads

    3.3 Apply advanced methods

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    1. Apply model to your marketing management/campaign management software.
    2. Get better qualified leads in the hands of sellers.
    3. Apply lead nurturing and other advanced methods.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Field Marketing/Campaign Manager
    • Sales Leadership/Sales Operations
    • Inside Sales leadership
    • Marketing Operations/IT
    • Digital Platform leadership

    Step 3.1

    Apply Model to Your Marketing Management Software

    Activities

    3.1.1 Apply final model to your lead management software

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Apply the details of your scoring model to the lead management software.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Stakeholders
    • Project sponsors and leaders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Marketing management software or campaign management application is now set up/updated with your lead scoring approach.

    3.1.1 Apply final model to your lead management software

    Now that your model is complete and ready to go into production, input your lead scoring parameters into your lead management software.

    The image contains a screenshot of activity 3.1.1 demonstrating tab 4 of the Lead Scoring Workbook.

    3 hours

    1. Go to the Lead Scoring Workbook, tab 4, “Model Summary” for a formatted version of your lead scoring model. Double-check print formatting and print off a copy.
    2. Use the copy of your model to show to prospective technology providers when asking them to demonstrate their lead scoring capabilities.
    3. Once you have finalized your model, use the printed output from this tab to ease your process of transposing the corresponding model elements into your lead management software.

    Lead Scoring Workbook

    Step 3.2

    Test the Quality of Sales-Accepted Leads

    Activities

    3.2.1 Achieve sales lead acceptance

    3.2.2 Measure and optimize

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Suggest that the Inside Sales and Field Sales teams should assess whether to sign off on quality of leads received.
    • Campaign managers and stakeholders should now be able to track lead status more effectively.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Stakeholders
    • Project sponsors and leaders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Sales leadership should be able to sign off that leads are better qualified.
    • With marketing pipeline analytics in place, campaigners can start to measure lead flow and conversion rates.

    3.2.1 Achieve sales lead acceptance

    Collaborate with sellers to validate your lead scoring approach.

    1 hour

    1. Gather a set of SQLs – leads that have been qualified by Inside Sales and delivered to Field Sales. Have Field Sales team members convey whether these leads were properly qualified.
    2. Where leads are deemed not properly qualified, determine if the issue was a) a lack of proper qualification by the Inside Sales team, or b) the lead generation engine, which should have further nurtured the lead or ignored it outright.
    3. Work collaboratively with Inside Sales to update your lead scoring model and/or Inside Sales practice.

    Stage

    Characteristics

    Actions

    Contact

    • Unqualified
    • No/low activity

    Nurture

    SDR Qualify

    Send to Sales

    Close

    MQL

    • Profile scores high
    • Engagement strong

    SQL

    • Profile strengthened
    • Demo/quote/next step confirmed

    Oppt’y

    • Sales acceptance
    • Sales opportunity management

    Win

    • Deal closed

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    Marketers that collaborate with Sales – and in this case, a group of sellers as a sales advisory team – well in advance of sales acceptance to design lead scoring will save time during this stage, build trust with sellers, and make faster decisions related to lead management/scoring.

    3.2.2 Measure and optimize

    Leverage analytics that help you optimize your lead scoring methodology.

    Ongoing

    1. Work with Marketing Ops/IT team to design and implement analytics that enable you to:
    2. Meet frequently with your stakeholder team to review results.
    3. Learn from the wins: see how they actually scored and adjust thresholds and/or asset/activity weightings.
    4. Learn from losses: fix ineffective scoring, activities, assets, form-fill strategies, and engagement paths.
    5. Test from both wins and losses if demographic weightings are delivering accurate scores.
    6. Analyze those high scoring leads that went right to sellers but did not close. This could point to a sales training or enablement challenge.
    The image contains a screenshot of the lead scoring dashboard.

    Analytics will also drive additional key insights across your lead gen engine:

    • Are volumes increasing or decreasing? What percentage of leads are in what status (A1-D4)?
    • What nurturing will re-engage stalled leads that score high in profile but low in engagement (A3, B3)?
    • Will additional profile data capture further qualify leads with high engagement (C1, C2)?
    • And beyond all of the above, what leads move to Inside Sales and convert to SQLs, opportunities, and eventually marketing-influenced wins?

    Step 3.3

    Apply Advanced Methods

    Activities

    3.3.1 Employ lead nurturing strategies

    3.3.2 Adjust your model over time to accommodate more advanced methods

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Apply lead nurturing to your lead gen engine.
    • Adjust your engine over time with more advanced methods.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Stakeholders
    • Project sponsors and leaders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Marketers can begin to test lead nurturing strategies and other advanced methods.

    3.3.1 Employ lead nurturing strategies

    A robust content marketing competence with compelling assets and the capture of additional profile data for qualification are key elements of your nurturing strategy.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Lead Scoring Grid with a focus on Nurture.

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    Nurturing success combines the art of crafting engaging copy/experiences and the science of knowing just where a prospect is within your lead gen engine. Great B2B marketers demonstrate the discipline of knowing when to drive engagement and/or additional profile attribute capture using intent while not losing the prospect to over-profiling.

    Ongoing

    1. The goal of lead nurturing is to move the collection of contacts/leads that are scoring, for example, in the A3, B3, C1, C2, and C3 cells into A2, B2, and B1 cells.
    2. How is this best done? To nurture leads that are A3 and B3, entice the prospect with engagement that leads to the bottom of funnel – e.g. “schedule a demo” or “schedule a consultation” via a compelling asset. See the example on the following slide.
    3. To nurture C1 and C2, we need to qualify them further, so entice with an asset that leads to deeper profile knowledge.
    4. For C3 leads, we need both profile and activity nurturing.

    Lead nurturing example

    The image contains an example of a lead nurturing example.

    SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

    When nurturing, choose/design content as to what “intent” it satisfies. For example, a head-to-head comparison with a key competitor signals “Selection” phase of the buyer journey. Content that helps determine what app-type to buy signals “Solution”. A company video, or a webinar replay, may mean your buyer is “educating themselves.

    3.3.2 Adjust your model over time to accommodate more advanced methods

    When getting started or within a smaller marketing team, focus on the basics outlined thus far in this blueprint. Larger and/or more experienced teams are able to employ more advanced methods.

    Ongoing

    Advanced Methods

    • Invest in technologies that interpret lead scores and trigger next-step actions, especially outreach by Inside and/or Field Sales.
    • Use the above to route into nurturing environments where additional engagement will raise scores and trigger action.
    • Recognize that lead value decays with time to time additional outreach/activities and to reduce lead scores over time.
    • Always be testing different engagement, copy, and subsequent activities to optimize lead velocity through your lead gen engine.
    • Build intent sensitivity into engagement activities; e.g. test if longer demo video engagement times imply ”contact me for a demo” via a qualification outreach. Update scores manually to drive learnings.
    • Vary engagement paths by demographics to deliver unique digital experiences. Use firmographics/email domain to drive leads through a more tailored account-based marketing (ABM) experience.
    • Reapply learnings from closed opportunities/wins to drive updates to buyer journey mapping and your ICP.

    Frequently used acronyms

    ABM

    Account-Based Marketing

    B2B

    Business to Business

    CMO

    Chief Marketing Officer

    CRM

    Customer Relationship Management

    ICP

    Ideal Customer Profile

    MIW

    Marketing-Influenced Win

    MQL

    Marketing-Qualified Lead

    SDR

    Sales Development Representative

    SQL

    Sales-Qualified Lead

    Works cited

    Arora, Rajat. “Mining the Real Gems from you Data – Lead Scoring and Engagement Scoring.” LeadSquared, 27 Sept. 2014. Web.

    Doyle, Jen. “2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report: Research and insights on attracting and converting the modern B2B buyer.” MarketingSherpa, 2012. Web.

    Doyle, Jen, and Sergio Balegno. “2011 MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey: Research and Insights on Elevating Marketing Effectiveness from Lead Generation to Sales Conversion.” MarketingSherpa, 2011.

    Kirkpatrick, David. “Lead Scoring: CMOs realize a 138% lead gen ROI … and so can you.” marketingsherpa blog, 26 Jan 2012. Web.

    Moser, Jeremy. “Lead Scoring Is Important for Your Business: Here’s How to Create Scoring Model and Hand-Off Strategy.” BigCommerce, 25 Feb. 2019. Web.

    Strawn, Joey. “Why Lead Scoring Is Important for B2Bs (and How You Can Implement It for Your Company.” IndustrialMarketer.com, 17 Aug. 2016. Web.

    Diagnose and Optimize Your Lead Gen Engine

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}567|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
    • member rating average days saved: N/A
    • Parent Category Name: Marketing Solutions
    • Parent Category Link: /marketing-solutions

    88% of marketing professionals are unsatisfied with their ability to convert leads (Convince & Convert), but poor lead conversion is just a symptom of much deeper problems.

    Globally, B2B SaaS marketers without a well-running lead gen engine will experience:

    • A low volume of quality leads from their website.
    • A low conversion rate from their website visitors.
    • A long lead conversion time compared to competitors.
    • A low volume of organic website visitors.

    If treated without a root cause analysis, these symptoms often result in higher-than-average marketing spend and wasted resources. Without an accurate lead gen engine diagnostic tool and a strategy to fix the misfires, marketers will continue to waste valuable time and resources.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    The lead gen engine is foundational in building profitable long-term customer relationships. It is the process through which marketers build awareness, trust, and loyalty. Without the ability to continually diagnose lead gen engine flaws, marketers will fail to optimize new customer relationship creation and long-term satisfaction and loyalty.

    Impact and Result

    With a targeted set of diagnostic tools and an optimization strategy, you will:

    • Uncover the critical weakness in your lead generation engine.
    • Develop a best-in-class lead gen engine optimization strategy that builds relationships, creates awareness, and establishes trust and loyalty with prospects.
    • Build profitable long-term customer relationships.

    Organizations who activate the findings from their lead generation diagnostic and optimization strategy will decrease the time and budget spent on lead generation by 25% to 50%. They will quickly uncover inefficiencies in their lead gen engine and develop a proven lead generation optimization strategy based on the diagnostic findings.

    Diagnose and Optimize Your Lead Gen Engine Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Diagnose and Optimize Your Lead Gen Engine Deck – A deck to help you diagnose what’s not working in your lead gen engine so that you can remedy issues and get back on track, building new customer relationships and driving loyalty.

    Organizations who activate the findings from their lead generation diagnostic and optimization strategy will decrease the time and budget spent on lead generation by 25% to 50%. They will quickly uncover inefficiencies in their lead gen engine and develop a proven lead generation optimization strategy based on the diagnostic findings.

    • Diagnose and Optimize Your Lead Gen Engine Storyboard

    2. Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic Tool – An easy-to-use diagnostic tool that will help you pinpoint weakness within your lead gen engine.

    The diagnostic tool allows digital marketers to quickly and easily diagnose weakness within your lead gen engine.

    • Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic Tool

    3. Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template – A step-by-step document that walks you through how to properly optimize the performance of your lead gen engine.

    Develop a best-in-class lead gen engine optimization strategy that builds relationships, creates awareness, and establishes trust and loyalty with prospects.

    • Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template

    Infographic

    Further reading

    Diagnose and Optimize Your Lead Gen Engine

    Quickly and easily pinpoint any weakness in your lead gen engine so that you stop wasting money and effort on ineffective advertising and marketing.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Quickly and easily pinpoint any weakness in your lead gen engine so that you stop wasting money and effort on ineffective advertising and marketing.

    The image contains a photo of Terra Higginson.

    Senior digital marketing leaders are accountable for building relationships, creating awareness, and developing trust and loyalty with website visitors, thereby delivering high-quality, high-value leads that Sales can easily convert to wins. Unfortunately, many marketing leaders report that their website visitors are low-quality and either disengage quickly or, when they engage further with lead gen engine components, they just don’t convert. These marketing leaders urgently need to diagnose what’s not working in three key areas in their lead gen engine to quickly remedy the issue and get back on track, building new customer relationships and driving loyalty. This blueprint will provide you with a tool to quickly and easily diagnose weakness within your lead gen engine. You can use the results to create a strategy that builds relationships, creates awareness, and establishes trust and loyalty with prospects.

    Terra Higginson

    Marketing Research Director

    SoftwareReviews

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Globally, business-to-business (B2B) software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketers without a well-running lead gen engine will experience:

    • A low volume of quality leads from their website.
    • A low conversion rate from their website visitors.
    • A long lead conversion time compared to competitors.
    • A low volume of organic website visitors.

    88% of marketing professionals are unsatisfied with their ability to convert leads (Convince & Convert), but poor lead conversion is just a symptom of a much larger problem with the lead gen engine. Without an accurate lead gen engine diagnostic tool and a strategy to fix the leaks, marketers will continue to waste valuable time and resources.

    Common Obstacles

    Even though lead generation is a critical element of marketing success, marketers struggle to fix the problems with their lead gen engine due to:

    • A lack of resources.
    • A lack of budget.
    • A lack of experience in implementing effective lead generation strategies.

    Most marketers spend too much on acquiring leads and not enough on converting and keeping them. For every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them (Econsultancy, cited in Outgrow). Marketers are increasingly under pressure to deliver high-quality leads to sales but work under tight budgets with inadequate or inexperienced staff who don’t understand the importance of optimizing the lead generation process.

    SoftwareReviews’ Approach

    With a targeted set of diagnostic tools and an optimization strategy, you will:

    • Uncover the critical weakness in your lead generation engine.
    • Develop a best-in-class lead gen engine optimization strategy that builds relationships, creates awareness, and establishes trust and loyalty with prospects.
    • Build profitable long-term customer relationships.

    Organizations who activate the findings from their lead generation diagnostic and optimization strategy will decrease the time and budget spent on lead generation by 25% to 50%. They will quickly uncover inefficiencies in their lead gen engine and develop a proven lead generation optimization strategy based on the diagnostic findings.

    SoftwareReviews Insight

    The lead gen engine is foundational in building profitable long-term customer relationships. It is the process through which marketers build awareness, trust, and loyalty. Without the ability to continually diagnose lead gen engine flaws, marketers will fail to optimize new customer relationship creation and long-term satisfaction and loyalty.

    Your Challenge

    88% of marketing professionals are unsatisfied with their ability to convert leads, but poor lead conversion is just a symptom of much deeper problems.

    Globally, B2B SaaS marketers without a well-running lead gen engine will experience:

    • A low volume of organic website visitors.
    • A low volume of quality leads from their website.
    • A low conversion rate from their website visitors.
    • A longer lead conversion time than competitors in the same space.

    If treated without a root-cause analysis, these symptoms often result in higher-than-average marketing spend and wasted resources. Without an accurate lead gen engine diagnostic tool and a strategy to fix the misfires, marketers will continue to waste valuable time and resources.

    88% of marketers are unsatisfied with lead conversion (Convince & Convert).

    The image contains a diagram that demonstrates a flowchart of the areas where visitors fail to convert. It incorporates observations, benchmarks, and uses a flowchart to diagnose the root causes.

    Benchmarks

    Compare your lead gen engine metrics to industry benchmarks.

    For every 10,000 people that visit your website, 210 will become leads.

    For every 210 leads, 101 will become marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

    For every 101 MQLs, 47 will become sales qualified leads (SQLs).

    For every 47 SQLs, 23 will become opportunities.

    For every 23 opportunities, nine will become customers.

    .9% to 2.1%

    36% to 48%

    28% to 46%

    39% to 48%

    32% to 40%

    Leads Benchmark

    MQL Benchmark

    SQL Benchmark

    Opportunity Benchmark

    Closing Benchmark

    The percentage of website visitors that convert to leads.

    The percentage of leads that convert to marketing qualified leads.

    The percentage of MQLs that convert to sales qualified leads.

    The percentage of SQLs that convert to opportunities.

    The percentage of opportunities that are closed.

    Midmarket B2B SaaS Industry

    Source: “B2B SaaS Marketing KPIs,” First Page Sage, 2021

    Common obstacles

    Why do most organizations improperly diagnose a misfiring lead gen engine?

    Lack of Clear Starting Point

    The lead gen engine is complex, with many moving parts, and marketers and marketing ops are often overwhelmed about where to begin diagnosis.

    Lack of Benchmarks

    Marketers often call out metrics such as increasing website visitors, contact-to-lead conversions, numbers of qualified leads delivered to Sales, etc., without a proven benchmark to compare their results against.

    Lack of Alignment Between Marketing and Sales

    Definitions of a contact, a marketing qualified lead, a sales qualified lead, and a marketing influenced win often vary.

    Lack of Measurement Tools

    Integration gaps between the website, marketing automation, sales enablement, and analytics exist within some 70% of enterprises. The elements of the marketing (and sales) tech stack change constantly. It’s hard to keep up.

    Lack of Understanding of Marketing ROI

    This drives many marketers to push the “more” button – more assets, more emails, more ad spend – without first focusing on optimization and effectiveness.

    Lack of Resources

    Marketers have an endless list of to-dos that drive them to produce daily results. Especially among software startups and mid-sized companies, there are just not enough staff with the right skills to diagnose and fix today’s sophisticated lead gen engines.

    Implications of poor diagnostics

    Without proper lead gen engine diagnostics, marketing performs poorly

    • The lead gen engine builds relationships and trust. When a broken lead gen engine goes unoptimized, customer relationships are at risk.
    • When the lead gen engine isn’t working well, customer acquisition costs rise as more expensive sales resources are charged with prospect qualification.
    • Without a well-functioning lead gen engine, marketers lack the foundation they need to create awareness among prospects – growth suffers.
    • Marketers will throw money at content or ads to generate more leads without any real understanding of engine leakage and misfires – your cost per lead climbs and reduces marketing profitability.

    Most marketers are spending too much on acquiring leads and not enough on converting and keeping them. For every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them.

    Source: Econsultancy, cited in Outgrow

    Lead gen engine optimization increases the efficiency of your marketing efforts and has a 223% ROI.

    Source: WordStream

    Benefits of lead gen engine diagnostics

    Diagnosing your lead gen engine delivers key benefits:

    • Pinpoint weakness quickly. A quick and accurate lead gen engine diagnostic tool saves Marketing 50% of the effort spent uncovering the reason for low conversion and low-quality leads.
    • Optimize more easily. Marketing executives will save 70% of the time spent creating a lead gen optimization marketing strategy based upon the diagnostic findings.
    • Maximize marketing ROI. Build toward and maintain the golden 3:1 LTV:CAC (lifetime value to customer acquisition cost) ratio for B2B SaaS marketing.
    • Stop wasting money on ineffective advertising and marketing. Up to 75% of your marketing budget is being inefficiently spent if you are running on a broken lead gen engine.

    “It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic. Correct targeting and testing methods can increase conversion rates up to 300 percent.” – Jeff Eisenberg, IterateStudio

    Source: Lift Division

    True benefits of fixing the lead gen engine

    These numbers add up to a significant increase in marketing influenced wins.

    175%
    Buyer Personas Increase Revenue
    Source: Illumin8

    202%
    Personalized CTAs Increase Conversions
    Source: HubSpot

    50%
    Lead Magnets Increase Conversions
    Source: ClickyDrip

    79%
    Lead Scoring Increases Conversions
    Source: Bloominari

    50%
    Lead Nurturing Increases Conversions
    Source: KevinTPayne.com

    80%
    Personalized Landing Pages Increase Conversions
    Source: HubSpot

    Who benefits from an optimized lead gen engine?

    This Research Is Designed for:

    • Senior digital marketing leaders who are:
      • Looking to increase conversions.
      • Looking to increase the quality of leads.
      • Looking to increase the value of leads.

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Diagnose issues with your lead gen engine.
    • Create a lead gen optimization strategy and a roadmap.

    This Research Will Also Assist:

    • Digital marketing leaders and product marketing leaders who are:
      • Looking to decrease the effort needed by Sales to close leads.
      • Looking to increase leadership’s faith in Marketing’s ability to generate high-quality leads and conversions.

    This Research Will Help Them:

    • Align the Sales and Marketing teams.
    • Receive the necessary buy-in from management to increase marketing spend and headcount.
    • Avoid product failure.
    The image contains a screenshot of the thought model that is titled: Diagnose and Optimize your Lead Gen Engine. The image contains the screenshot of the previous image shown on Where Lead Gen Engines Fails, and includes new information. The flowchart connects to a box that says: STOP, Your engine is broken. It then explains phase 1, the diagnostic, and then phase 2 Optimization strategy.

    SoftwareReviews’ approach

    1. Diagnose Misfires in the Lead Gen Engine
    2. Identifying any areas of weakness within your lead gen engine is a fundamental first step in improving conversions, ROI, and lead quality.

    3. Create a Lead Gen Optimization Strategy
    4. Optimize your lead gen strategy with an easily customizable template that will provide your roadmap for future growth.

    The SoftwareReviews Methodology to Diagnose and Optimize Your Lead Gen Engine

    1. Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic

    2. Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy

    Phase Steps

    1. Select lead gen engine optimization steering committee & working team
    2. Gather baseline metrics
    3. Run the lead gen engine diagnostic
    4. Identify low-scoring areas & prioritize lead gen engine fixes
    1. Define the roadmap
    2. Create lead gen engine optimization strategy
    3. Present strategy to steering committee

    Phase Outcomes

    • Identify weakness within the lead gen engine.
    • Prioritize the most important fixes within the lead gen engine.
    • Create a best-in-class lead gen engine optimization strategy and roadmap that builds relationships, creates awareness, and develops trust and loyalty with website visitors.
    • Increase leadership’s faith in Marketing’s ability to generate high-quality leads and conversions.

    Insight Summary

    The lead gen engine is the foundation of marketing

    The lead gen engine is critical to building relationships. It is the foundation upon which marketers build awareness, trust, and loyalty.

    Misalignment between Sales and Marketing is costly

    Digital marketing leaders need to ensure agreement with Sales on the definition of a marketing qualified lead (MQL), as it is the most essential element of stakeholder alignment.

    Prioritization is necessary for today’s marketer

    By prioritizing the fixes within the lead gen engine that have the highest impact, a marketing leader will be able to focus their optimization efforts in the right place.

    Stop, your engine is broken

    Any advertising or effort expended while running marketing on a broken lead gen engine is time and money wasted. It is only once the lead gen engine is fixed that marketers will see the true results of their efforts.

    Tactical insight

    Without a well-functioning lead gen engine, marketers risk wasting valuable time and money because they aren’t creating relationships with prospects that will increase the quality of leads, conversion rate, and lifetime value.

    Tactical insight

    The foundational lead relationship must be built at the marketing level, or else Sales will be entirely responsible for creating these relationships with low-quality leads, risking product failure.

    Blueprint Deliverable:

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic

    An efficient and easy-to-use diagnostic tool that uncovers weakness in your lead gen engine.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic is shown.

    Key Deliverable:

    Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template

    The image contains a screenshot of the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy.

    A comprehensive strategy for optimizing conversions and increasing the quality of leads.

    SoftwareReviews Offers Various Levels of Support to Meet Your Needs

    Included within Advisory Membership:

    DIY Toolkit

    “Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

    Guided Implementation

    “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

    Optional add-ons:

    Workshop

    “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

    Consulting

    “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on lead gen engine diagnostics look like?

    Diagnose Your Lead Gen Engine

    Call #1: Scope requirements, objectives, and specific challenges with your lead gen engine.

    Call #2: Gather baseline metrics and discuss the steering committee and working team.

    Call #3: Review results from baseline metrics and answer questions.

    Call #4: Discuss the lead gen engine diagnostic tool and your steering committee.

    Call #5: Review results from the diagnostic tool and answer questions.

    Develop Your Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy

    Call #6: Identify components to include in the lead gen engine optimization strategy.

    Call #7: Discuss the roadmap for continued optimization.

    Call #8: Review final lead gen engine optimization strategy.

    Call #9: (optional) Follow-up quarterly to check in on progress and answer questions.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is series of calls with a SoftwareReviews Advisory analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization. For guidance on marketing applications, we can arrange a discussion with an Info-Tech analyst. Your engagement managers will work with you to schedule analyst calls.

    Workshop Overview

    Day 1

    Day 2

    Activities

    Complete Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic

    1.1 Identify the previously selected lead gen engine steering committee and working team.

    1.2 Share the baseline metrics that were gathered in preparation for the workshop.

    1.3 Run the lead gen engine diagnostic.

    1.4 Identify low-scoring areas and prioritize lead gen engine fixes.

    Create Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy

    2.1 Define the roadmap.

    2.2 Create a lead gen engine optimization strategy.

    2.3 Present the strategy to the steering committee.

    Deliverables

    1. Lead gen engine diagnostic scorecard

    1. Lead gen engine optimization strategy

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com1-888-670-8889

    Phase 1

    Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    1.1 Select lead gen engine steering committee & working team

    1.2 Gather baseline metrics

    1.3 Run the lead gen engine diagnostic

    1.4 Identify & prioritize low-scoring areas

    2.1 Define the roadmap

    2.2 Create lead gen engine optimization strategy

    2.3 Present strategy to steering committee

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    The diagnostic tool will allow you to quickly and easily identify the areas of weakness in the lead gen engine by answering some simple questions. The steps include:

    • Select the lead gen engine optimization committee and team.
    • Gather baseline metrics.
    • Run the lead gen engine diagnostic.
    • Identify and prioritize low-scoring areas.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Marketing lead
    • Lead gen engine steering committee

    Step 1.1

    Identify Lead Gen Engine Optimization Steering Committee & Working Team

    Activities

    1.1.1 Identify the lead gen engine optimization steering committee and document in the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template

    1.1.2 Identify the lead gen engine optimization working team document in the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Identify the lead gen engine optimization steering committee.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Marketing director
    • Leadership

    Outcomes of this step

    An understanding of who will be responsible and who will be accountable for accomplishing the lead gen engine diagnostic and optimization strategy.

    1.1.1 Identify the lead gen engine optimization steering committee

    1-2 hours

    1. The marketing lead should meet with leadership to determine who will make up the steering committee for the lead gen engine optimization.
    2. Document the steering committee members in the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template slide entitled “The Steering Committee.”

    Input

    Output

    • Stakeholders and leaders across the various functions outlined on the next slide
    • List of the lead gen engine optimization strategy steering committee members

    Materials

    Participants

    • Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template
    • Marketing director
    • Executive leadership

    Download the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template

    Lead gen engine optimization steering committee

    Consider the skills and knowledge required for the diagnostic and the implementation of the strategy. Constructing a cross-functional steering committee will be essential for the optimization of the lead gen engine. At least one stakeholder from each relevant department should be included in the steering committee.

    Required Skills/Knowledge

    Suggested Functions

    • Target Buyer
    • Product Roadmap
    • Brand
    • Competitors
    • Campaigns/Lead Gen
    • Sales Enablement
    • Media/Analysts
    • Customer Satisfaction
    • Data Analytics
    • Ad Campaigns
    • Competitive Intelligence
    • Product Marketing
    • Product Management
    • Creative Director
    • Competitive Intelligence
    • Field Marketing
    • Sales
    • PR/AR/Corporate Comms
    • Customer Success
    • Analytics Executive
    • Campaign Manager

    For small and mid-sized businesses (SMB), because employees wear many different hats, assign people that have the requisite skills and knowledge, not the role title.

    The image contains examples of small and mid-sized businesses, and the different employee recommendations.

    1.1.2 Identify the lead gen engine optimization working team

    1-2 hours

    1. The marketing director should meet with leadership to determine who will make up the working team for the lead gen engine optimization.
    2. Finalize selection of team members and fill out the slide entitled “The Working Team” in the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template.

    Input

    Output

    • Executives and analysts responsible for execution of tasks across Marketing, Product, Sales, and IT
    • The lead gen engine optimization working team

    Materials

    Participants

    • The Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template
    • Marketing director
    • Executive leadership

    Download the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template

    Lead gen engine working team

    Consider the working skills required for the diagnostic and implementation of the strategy and assign the working team.

    Required Skills/Knowledge

    Suggested Titles

    • SEO
    • Inbound Marketing
    • Paid Advertising
    • Website Development
    • Content Creation
    • Lead Scoring
    • Landing Pages
    • A/B Testing
    • Email Campaigns
    • Marketing and Sales Automation
    • SEO Analyst
    • Content Marketing Manager
    • Product Marketing Manager
    • Website Manager
    • Website Developer
    • Sales Manager
    • PR
    • Customer Success Manager
    • Analytics Executive
    • Campaign Manager

    Step 1.2

    Gather Baseline Metrics

    Activities

    1.2.1 Gather baseline metrics and document in the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Gather baseline metrics.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Marketing director
    • Analytics lead

    Outcomes of this step

    Understand and document baseline marketing metrics.

    1.2.1 Gather baseline metrics and document in the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template

    1-2 hours

    1. Use the example on the next slide to learn about the B2B SaaS industry-standard baseline metrics.
    2. Meet with the analytics lead to analyze and record the data within the “Baseline Metrics” slide of the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template. The baseline metrics will include:
      • Unique monthly website visitors
      • Visitor to lead conversion rate
      • Lead to MQL conversion rate
      • Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
      • Lifetime customer value to customer acquisition cost (LTV to CAC) ratio
      • Campaign ROI

    Recording the baseline data allows you to measure the impact your lead gen engine optimization strategy has over the baseline.

    Input

    Output
    • Marketing and analytics data
    • Documentation of baseline marketing metrics

    Materials

    Participants

    • The lead gen engine optimization strategy
    • Marketing director
    • Analytics lead

    B2B SaaS baseline metrics

    Industry standard metrics for B2B SaaS in 2022

    Unique Monthly Visitors

    Industry standard is 5% to 10% growth month over month.

    Visitor to Lead Conversion

    Industry standard is between 0.9% to 2.1%.

    Lead to MQL Conversion

    Industry standard is between 36% to 48%.

    CAC

    Industry standard is a cost of $400 to $850 per customer acquired.

    LTV to CAC Ratio

    Industry standard is an LTV:CAC ratio between 3 to 6.

    Campaign ROI

    Email: 201%

    Pay-Per-Click (PPC): 36%

    LinkedIn Ads: 94%

    Source: “B2B SaaS Marketing KPIs,” First Page Sage, 2021

    Update the Lead Gen Optimization Strategy Template with your company’s baseline metrics.

    Download the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template

    Step 1.3

    Run the Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic

    Activities

    1.3.1 Gather steering committee and working team to complete the Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic Tool

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Gather the steering committee and answer the questions within the Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic Tool.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Lead gen engine optimization working team
    • Lead gen engine optimization steering committee

    Outcomes of this step

    Lead gen engine diagnostic and scorecard

    1.3.1 Gather the committee and team to complete the Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic Tool

    2-3 hours

    1. Schedule a two-hour meeting with the steering committee and working team to complete the Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic Tool. To ensure the alignment of all departments and the quality of results, all steering committee members must participate.
    2. Answer the questions within the tool and then review your company’s results in the Results tab.

    Input

    Output

    • Marketing and analytics data
    • Diagnostic scorecard for the lead gen engine

    Materials

    Participants

    • Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic Tool
    • Marketing director
    • Analytics lead

    Download the Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic Tool

    Step 1.4

    Identify & Prioritize Low-Scoring Areas

    Activities

    1.4.1 Identify and prioritize low-scoring areas from the diagnostic scorecard

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Identify and prioritize the low-scoring areas from the diagnostic scorecard.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Marketing director

    Outcomes of this step

    A prioritized list of the lead gen engine problems to include in the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template

    1.4.1 Identify and prioritize low-scoring areas from the diagnostic scorecard

    1 hour

    1. Transfer the results from the Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic Scorecard Results tab to the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template slide entitled “Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic Scorecard.”
      • Results between 0 and 2 should be listed as high-priority fixes on the “Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic Scorecard” slide. You will use these areas for your strategy.
      • Results between 2 and 3 should be listed as medium-priority fixes on “Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic Scorecard” slide. You will use these areas for your strategy.
      • Results between 3 and 4 are within the industry standard and will require no fixes or only small adjustments.

    Input

    Output

    • Marketing and analytics data
    • Documentation of baseline marketing metrics

    Materials

    Participants

    • Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template
    • Marketing director
    • Analytics lead

    Download the Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic Tool

    Phase 2

    Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    1.1 Select lead gen engine steering committee & working team

    1.2 Gather baseline metrics

    1.3 Run the lead gen engine diagnostic

    1.4 Identify & prioritize low-scoring areas

    2.1 Define the roadmap

    2.2 Create lead gen engine optimization strategy

    2.3 Present strategy to steering committee

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    Create a best-in-class lead gen optimization strategy and roadmap based on the weaknesses found in the diagnostic tool. The steps include:

    • Define the roadmap.
    • Create a lead gen engine optimization strategy.
    • Present the strategy to the steering committee.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Marketing director

    Step 2.1

    Define the Roadmap

    Activities

    2.1.1 Create the roadmap for the lead gen optimization strategy

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Create the optimization roadmap for your lead gen engine strategy.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Marketing director

    Outcomes of this step

    Strategy roadmap

    2.1.1 Create the roadmap for the lead gen optimization strategy

    1 hour

    1. Copy the results from "The Lead Gen Engine Diagnostic Scorecard" slide to the "Value, Resources & Roadmap Matrix" slide in the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template. Adjust the Roadmap Quarter column after evaluating the internal resources of your company and expected value generated.
    2. Using these results, create your strategy roadmap by updating the slide entitled “The Strategy Roadmap” in the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template.

    Input

    Output

    • Diagnostic scorecard
    • Strategy roadmap

    Materials

    Participants

    • Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template
    • Marketing Director

    Download the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template

    Step 2.2

    Create the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy

    Activities

    2.2.1 Customize your lead gen engine optimization strategy using the template

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Create a lead gen engine optimization strategy based on the results of your diagnostic scorecard.

    This step involves the following participants:

    Marketing director

    Outcomes of this step

    A leadership-facing lead gen optimization strategy

    2.2.1 Customize your lead gen engine optimization strategy using the template

    2-3 hours

    Review the strategy template:

    1. Use "The Strategy Roadmap" slide to organize the remaining slides from the Q1, Q2, and Q3 sections.
      1. Fixes listed in "The Strategy Roadmap" under Q1 should be placed within the Q1 section.
      2. Fixes listed in "The Strategy Roadmap" under Q2 should be placed within the Q2 section.
      3. Fixes listed in "The Strategy Roadmap" under Q3 should be placed within the Q3 section.

    Input

    Output

    • The strategy roadmap
    • Your new lead gen engine optimization strategy

    Materials

    Participants

    • Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template
    • Marketing director

    Download the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template

    Step 2.3

    Present the strategy to the steering committee

    Activities

    2.3.1 Present the findings of the diagnostic and the lead gen optimization strategy to the steering committee.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Get executive buy-in on the lead gen engine optimization strategy.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Marketing director
    • Steering committee

    Outcomes of this step

    • Buy-in from leadership on the strategy

    2.3.1 Present findings of diagnostic and lead gen optimization strategy to steering committee

    1-2 hours

    1. Schedule a presentation to present the findings of the diagnostic, the lead gen engine optimization strategy, and the roadmap to the steering committee.
    InputOutput
    • Your company’s lead gen engine optimization strategy
    • Official outline of strategy and buy-in from executive leadership

    Materials

    Participants

    • Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template
    • Marketing director
    • Executive leadership
    • Steering committee

    Download the Lead Gen Engine Optimization Strategy Template

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    In today’s competitive environment, optimizing Sales’ resources by giving them qualified leads is key to B2B marketing success.

    • Lead scoring is a must-have capability for high-tech marketers.
    • Without lead scoring, marketers will see increased costs of lead generation and decreased SQL-to-opportunity conversion rates.
    • Lead scoring increases sales productivity and shortens sales cycles.

    Build a More Effective Go-to-Market Strategy

    Creating a compelling go-to-market strategy and keeping it current is a critical software company function – as important as financial strategy, sales operations, and even corporate business development – given its huge impact on the many drivers of sustainable growth.

    • Align stakeholders on a common vision and execution plan.
    • Build a foundation of buyer and competitive understanding.
    • Deliver a team-aligned launch plan that enables commercial success.

    Bibliography

    “11 Lead Magnet Statistics That Might Surprise You.” ClickyDrip, 28 Dec. 2020. Accessed April 2022.

    “45 Conversion Rate Optimization Statistics Every Marketer Should Know.” Outgrow, n.d. Accessed April 2022.

    Bailyn, Evan. “B2B SaaS Funnel Conversion Benchmarks.” First Page Sage, 24 Feb. 2021. Accessed April 2022.

    Bailyn, Evan. “B2B SaaS Marketing KPIs: Behind the Numbers.” First Page Sage, 1 Sept. 2021. Accessed April 2022.

    Conversion Optimization.” Lift Division, n.d. Accessed April 2022.

    Corson, Sean. “LTV:CAC Ratio [2022 Guide] | Benchmarks, Formula, Tactics.” Daasity, 3 Nov. 2021. Accessed April 2022.

    Dudley, Carrie. “What are personas?” Illumin8, 26 Jan. 2018. Accessed April 2022.

    Godin, Seth. “Permission Marketing.” Accenture, Oct. 2009. Accessed April 2022.

    Lebo, T. “Lead Conversion Statistics All B2B Marketers Need to Know.” Convince & Convert, n.d. Accessed April 2022.

    Lister, Mary. “33 CRO & Landing Page Optimization Stats to Fuel Your Strategy.” WordStream, 24 Nov. 2021. [Accessed April 2022].

    Nacach, Jamie. “How to Determine How Much Money to Spend on Lead Generation Software Per Month.” Bloominari, 18 Sept. 2018. Accessed April 2022.

    Needle, Flori. “11 Stats That Make a Case for Landing Pages.” HubSpot, 10 June 2021. Accessed April 2022.

    Payne, Kevin. “10 Effective Lead Nurturing Tactics to Boost Your Sales.” Kevintpayne.com, n.d. Accessed April 2022.

    Tam, Edwin. “ROI in Marketing: Lifetime Value (LTV) & Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).” Construct Digital, 19 Jan. 2016. Accessed April 2022.

    Leverage Big Data by Starting Small

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    • Parent Category Name: Big Data
    • Parent Category Link: /big-data
    • The desire for rapid decision making is increasing and the complexity of data sources is growing; business users want access to several new data sources, but in a way that is controlled and easily consumable.
    • Organizations may understand the transformative potential of a big data initiative, but struggle to make the transition from the awareness of its importance to identifying a concrete use case for a pilot project.
    • The big data ecosystem is crowded and confusing, and a lack of understanding of that ecosystem may cause a paralysis for organizations.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Big data is simply data. With technological advances, what was once considered big data is now more approachable for all organizations irrespective of size.
    • The variety element is the key to unlocking big data value. Drill down into your specific use cases more effectively by focusing on what kind of data you should use.
    • Big data is about deep analytics. Deep doesn’t mean difficult. Visualization of data, integrating new data, and understanding associations are ways to deepen your analytics.

    Impact and Result

    • Establish a foundational understanding of what big data entails and what the implications of its different elements are for your organization.
    • Confirm your current maturity for taking on a big data initiative, and make considerations for core data management practices in the context of incorporating big data.
    • Avoid boiling the ocean by pinpointing use cases by industry and functional unit, followed by identifying the most essential data sources and elements that will enable the initiative.
    • Leverage a repeatable pilot project framework to build out a successful first initiative and implement future projects en-route to evolving a big data program.

    Leverage Big Data by Starting Small Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should leverage big data, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Undergo big data education

    Build a foundational understanding of the current big data landscape.

    • Leverage Big Data by Starting Small – Phase 1: Undergo Big Data Education

    2. Assess big data readiness

    Appraise current capabilities for handling a big data initiative and revisit the key data management practices that will enable big data success.

    • Leverage Big Data by Starting Small – Phase 2: Assess Big Data Readiness
    • Big Data Maturity Assessment Tool

    3. Pinpoint a killer big data use case

    Armed with Info-Tech’s variety dimension framework, identify the top use cases and the data sources/elements that will power the initiative.

    • Leverage Big Data by Starting Small – Phase 3: Pinpoint a Killer Big Data Use Case
    • Big Data Use-Case Suggestion Tool

    4. Structure a big data proof-of-concept project

    Leverage a repeatable framework to detail the core components of the pilot project.

    • Leverage Big Data by Starting Small – Phase 4: Structure a Big Data Proof-of-Concept Project
    • Big Data Work Breakdown Structure Template
    • Data Scientist
    • Big Data Cost/Benefit Tool
    • Big Data Stakeholder Presentation Template
    • Big Data Communication Tracking Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Leverage Big Data by Starting Small

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Undergo Big Data Education

    The Purpose

    Understand the basic elements of big data and its relationship to traditional business intelligence.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Common, foundational knowledge of what big data entails.

    Activities

    1.1 Determine which of the four Vs is most important to your organization.

    1.2 Explore new data through a social lens.

    1.3 Brainstorm new opportunities for enhancing current reporting assets with big data sources.

    Outputs

    Relative importance of the four Vs from IT and business perspectives

    High-level improvement ideas to report artifacts using new data sources

    2 Assess Your Big Data Readiness

    The Purpose

    Establish an understanding of current maturity for taking on big data, as well as revisiting essential data management practices.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Concrete idea of current capabilities.

    Recommended actions for developing big data maturity.

    Activities

    2.1 Determine your organization’s current big data maturity level.

    2.2 Plan for big data management.

    Outputs

    Established current state maturity

    Foundational understanding of data management practices in the context of a big data initiative

    3 Pinpoint Your Killer Big Data Use Case

    The Purpose

    Explore a plethora of potential use cases at the industry and business unit level, followed by using the variety element of big data to identify the highest value initiative(s) within your organization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    In-depth characterization of a pilot big data initiative that is thoroughly informed by the business context.

    Activities

    3.1 Identify big data use cases at the industry and/or departmental levels.

    3.2 Conduct big data brainstorming sessions in collaboration with business stakeholders to refine use cases.

    3.3 Revisit the variety dimension framework to scope your big data initiative in further detail.

    3.4 Create an organizational 4-column data flow model with your big data sources/elements.

    3.5 Evaluate data sources by considering business value and risk.

    3.6 Perform a value-effort assessment to prioritize your initiatives.

    Outputs

    Potential big data use cases

    Potential initiatives rooted in the business context and identification of valuable data sources

    Identification of specific data sources and data elements

    Characterization of data sources/elements by value and risk

    Prioritization of big data use cases

    4 Structure a Big Data Proof-of-Concept Project

    The Purpose

    Put together the core components of the pilot project and set the stage for enterprise-wide support.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A repeatable framework for implementing subsequent big data initiatives.

    Activities

    4.1 Construct a work breakdown structure for the pilot project.

    4.2 Determine your project’s need for a data scientist.

    4.3 Establish the staffing model for your pilot project.

    4.4 Perform a detailed cost/benefit analysis.

    4.5 Make architectural considerations for supporting the big data initiative.

    Outputs

    Comprehensive list of tasks for implementing the pilot project

    Decision on whether or not a data scientist is needed, and where data science capabilities will be sourced

    RACI chart for the project

    Big data pilot cost/benefit summary

    Customized, high-level architectural model that incorporates technologies that support big data

    Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT

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    • Parent Category Name: Engage
    • Parent Category Link: /engage
    • Organizations have been trying to promote equality for many years. Diversity and inclusion strategies and a myriad of programs have been implemented in companies across the world. Despite the attempts, many organizations still struggle to ensure that their workforce is representative of the populations they support or want to support.
    • IT brings another twist. Many IT companies and departments are based on the culture of white males, and underrepresented ethnic communities find it more of a challenge to fit in.
    • This sometimes means that talented minorities are less incentivized to join or stay in technology.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Diversity and inclusion cannot be a one-time campaign or a one-off initiative.
    • For real change to happen, every leader needs to internalize the value of creating and retaining diverse teams.

    Impact and Result

    • To stay competitive, IT leaders need to be more involved and commit to a plan to recruit and retain people of color in their departments and organizations. A diverse team is an answer to innovation that can differentiate your company.
    • Treat recruiting and retaining a diverse team as a business challenge that requires full engagement. Info-Tech offers a targeted solution that will help IT leaders build a plan to attract, recruit, engage, and retain people of color.

    Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should recruit and retain people of color in your IT department or organization, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the ways we can support you in this endeavor.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Recruit people of color in IT

    Diverse teams are necessary to foster creativity and guide business strategies. Overcome limitations by recruiting people of color and creating a diverse workforce.

    • Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT – Phase 1: Recruit People of Color in IT
    • Support Plan
    • IT Behavioral Interview Question Library

    2. Retain people of color in IT

    Underrepresented employees benefit from an expansive culture. Create an inclusive environment and retain people of color and promote value within your organization.

    • Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT – Phase 2: Retain People of Color in IT

    Infographic

    Workshop: Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Setting the Stage

    The Purpose

    Introduce challenges and concerns around recruiting and retaining people of color.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Gain a sense of direction.

    Activities

    1.1 Introduction to diversity conversations.

    1.2 Assess areas to focus on and determine what is right, wrong, missing, and confusing.

    1.3 Obtain feedback from your team about the benefits of working at your organization.

    1.4 Establish your employee value proposition (EVP).

    1.5 Discuss and establish your recruitment goals.

    Outputs

    Current State Analysis

    Right, Wrong, Missing, Confusing Quadrant

    Draft EVP

    Recruitment Goals

    2 Refine Your Recruitment Process

    The Purpose

    Identify areas in your current recruitment process that are preventing you from hiring people of color.

    Establish a plan to make improvements.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Optimized recruitment process

    Activities

    2.1 Brainstorm and research community partners.

    2.2 Review current job descriptions and equity statement.

    2.3 Update job description template and equity statement.

    2.4 Set team structure for interview and assessment.

    2.5 Identify decision-making structure.

    Outputs

    List of community partners

    Updated job description template

    Updated equity statement

    Interview and assessment structure

    Behavioral Question Library

    3 Culture and Management

    The Purpose

    Create a plan for an inclusive culture where your managers are supported.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Awareness of how to better support employees of color.

    Activities

    3.1 Discuss engagement and belonging.

    3.2 Augment your onboarding materials.

    3.3 Create an inclusive culture plan.

    3.4 Determine how to support your management team.

    Outputs

    List of onboarding content

    Inclusive culture plan

    Management support plan

    4 Close the Loop

    The Purpose

    Establish mechanisms to gain feedback from your employees and act on them.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Finalize the plan to create your diverse and inclusive workforce.

    Activities

    4.1 Ask and listen: determine what to ask your employees.

    4.2 Create your roadmap.

    4.3 Wrap-up and next steps.

    Outputs

    List of survey questions

    Roadmap

    Completed support plan

    Operations management

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    • Parent Category Name: Infra and Operations
    • Parent Category Link: /infra-and-operations
    IT Operations is all about effectiveness. We make sure that you deliver reliable services to the clients and users within the company.

    Build Your Data Practice and Platform

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    • Parent Category Name: Data Management
    • Parent Category Link: /data-management

    The complex nature of data investment leads to de-scoping and delivery of data services that do not meet business needs or give value to the business. Subject matter experts are hired to resolve the problem, but their success is impacted by absent architecture, technology, and organizational alignment.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Walking through a book of architecture building plans with a personal guide is cheaper and faster than employing an architect to build and design your home.

    Impact and Result

    Info-Tech's approach provides a proven methodology that includes the following:

    • Business-aligned data initiatives and capabilities that address data challenges and realize business strategic objectives.
    • Comprehensive data practice designed based on the required business and data capabilities.
    • Data platform design based on Info-Tech data architecture reference patterns and prioritized data initiatives and capabilities.

    Build Your Data Practice and Platform Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Build Your Data Practice and Platform Storyboard – A step-by-step document that leverages road-tested patterns and frameworks to properly build your data practice and pattern in continuous alignment with the business landscape.

    Info-Tech's approach provides a proven methodology that includes following:   

  • Business-aligned data initiatives and capabilities that address data challenges and realize business strategic objectives.
  • Comprehensive data practices designed based on the required business and data capabilities.
    • Build Your Data Practice and Platform Storyboard

    2. Data Practice and Platform Models – Leveraging best-of-breed frameworks to help you build a clear, concise, and compelling data practice and platform.

    Data practice & platform pre-build pattern templates based on Info-Tech data reference patterns and data platform design best practices.

    • Data Practice and Platform Models

    Infographic

    Workshop: Build Your Data Practice and Platform

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Establish Business Context and Value

    The Purpose

    Establish business context and value.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Business context and strategic driver.

    Activities

    1.1 Understand/confirm the organization's strategic goals

    1.2 Classify the strategic goals and map to business drivers

    1.3 Identify the business capabilities that the strategy focuses on

    1.4 Identify the business processes realizing the strategy

    Outputs

    Business context and strategic drivers

    Prioritized business capabilities and processes

    Data culture survey results analysis

    2 Identify Your Top Initiatives

    The Purpose

    Identify your top initiatives.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    High-value business-aligned data initiative.

    Activities

    2.1 Highlight data-related outcomes/goals to realize to fulfill the business goal

    2.2 Map business data initiatives to the business strategic goals

    2.3 Prioritize data initiatives

    Outputs

    High-value, business-aligned data initiatives

    3 Analyze Data Challenges

    The Purpose

    Analyze data challenges.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Clear understanding of the data challenges.

    Activities

    3.1 Map data challenges to Info-Tech data challenges

    3.2 Review Info-Tech data capabilities based on prioritized initiatives

    3.3 Discuss data platform and practice next steps

    Outputs

    List of data challenges preventing data maturation with the organization

    4 Map Data Capability

    The Purpose

    Map data capability.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Prioritized data capability.

    Activities

    4.1 Map data challenges to Info-Tech data challenges

    4.2 Review Info-Tech data capabilities based on prioritized initiatives

    4.3 Discuss data platform and practice next steps

    Outputs

    Required data capabilities

    Data platform and practice – plan

    Initialized data management RACI 

    Further reading

    Build Your Data Practice and Platform

    Construct a scalable data foundation

    Analyst Perspective

    Build a data practice and platform that delivers value to your organization.

    The build or optimization of your data practice and data platform must be predicated on a thorough understanding of the organization’s goals, objectives, and priorities and the business capabilities and process they are meant to support and enable.

    Formalizing your practice or constructing your platform just for the sake of doing so often results in an initiative that is lengthy, costly, fizzles out, does not deliver business value, and ends up being considered a failure.

    Leverage Info-Tech’s approach and incorporate our pre-built models and patterns to effectively navigate that crucial and often difficult phase upfront of comprehensively defining business data needs so you can ultimately realize faster time-to-delivery of your overall data practice and platform.

    Photo of Rajesh Parab, Director, Research & Advisory, Data & Analytics Practice, Info-Tech Research Group.

    Rajesh Parab
    Director, Research & Advisory, Data & Analytics Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Photo of Crystal Singh, Director, Research & Advisory, Data & Analytics Practice, Info-Tech Research Group.

    Crystal Singh
    Director, Research & Advisory, Data & Analytics Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Attempting to Solve Data Problems?

    Situation
    • Lack of data centric leadership results in downstream issues such as integration, quality, and accessibility.
    • The complex nature of the data and lack of understanding leads to de-scoping delivery of data services that does not meet business needs or add value.
    • Poorly designed practice and siloed platforms result in an initiative that is lengthy, costly, fizzles out, does not deliver business value, and ends up being considered a failure.
    Complication
    • Data problem: When the data problem is diagnosed, the organization adopts a tactical approach.
    • Confirmation bias: Subject matter experts (SME) are hired to resolve the poorly defined problem, but the success of the SME is impacted by lack of architecture, technology, and organizational alignment.
    • Still no value: The selected tactical approach does not provide a solid foundation or solve your data problem.
    • Strategy for sake of strategy: Implementing a strategic approach for the sake of being strategic but this becomes overwhelming.
    • Fall back to tactical and operational: The data services are now potentially exposed and vulnerable, which strains business continuity and increases data debt.
    • Increased complexity and risk: Data silos, poor understanding, and high complexity results in an unmanageable data environment.
    Resolution
    • Requirements: Define and align your data requirement to business.
    • Capabilities: Discover data, identify data capabilities, and map your requirements.
    • Practices: Design and select fit-for-purpose data practices.
    • Platform: Optimize your data platform investments though sound architecture.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The true value of data comes from defining intentional relationships between the business and the data through a well thought out data platform and practice.

    Situation – Perpetual Data Problem

    Diagram of a head with gears around it and speech bubbles with notes titled 'Data Problem'. The surrounding gears, clockwise from bottom left, say 'Accessibility', 'Trust', 'Data Breach', 'Ambiguity', 'Ownership', 'Duplication', 'System Failure', and 'Manual Manipulation'. The speech bubbles notes, clockwise from bottom left, say 'Value-Add: How do I translate business needs to data capabilities?', 'Practice Organization: How do I organize resources and roles assignment challenges?', 'Platform: How do I organize data flows with no conceptual view of the environment?', and 'Break Down Silos: How do I break down silos?'
    I can’t access the data.
    I don’t trust the data in the report.
    It takes too long to get to the data for decision making
    • Lack of data-centric leadership results in downstream issues: integration, quality, accessibility
    • The organization’s data is too complex to manage without a cohesive plan.
    • The complex nature of the data and a lack of understanding leads to de-scoping delivery of data services that does not meet business needs or add value.
    • Poorly designed practice and siloed platforms result in an initiative that is lengthy, costly, fizzles out, does not deliver business value, and ends up being considered a failure.

    Complication – Data Initiative Fizzles Out

    • Data problem: When the data problem is diagnosed the organization adopts a tactical approach.
    • Confirmation bias: Subject matter experts (SME) are hired to resolve the poorly defined problem, but the success of the SME is impacted by lack of architecture, technology, and organizational alignment.
    • Still no value: the selected tactical approach does not provide a solid foundation or solve your data problem.
    • Strategy for sake of strategy: Implementing a strategic approach for sake of being strategic but this becomes overwhelming.
    • Fall back to tactical and operational: The data services are now potentially exposed and vulnerable, which strains business continuity and increases data debt.
    • Increased complexity and risk: Data silos, poor understanding, and high complexity result in an unmanageable data environment.
    Flowchart beginning with 'Data Symptom Exhibited' and 'Data Problem Diagnosed', then splitting into two paths 'Solve Data Problem as a point solution' or 'Attempt Strategic approach without culture, capacity, and business leadership'. Each approach ends with 'Data too complex, and initiative fizzles out...' and cycles back to the beginning.
    Use the road-tested patterns and frameworks in our blueprint to break the perpetual data solution cycle. Focus on the value that a data and analytics platform will bring rather than focusing on the data problems alone.

    Build Your Data Practice and Platform

    Bring Your Data Strategy to Life

    Logo for Info-Tech.
    Logo for #iTRG.
    CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

    Attempting to Solve Your Data Problems

    DATA SYMPTOM EXHIBITED

    Mismatch report, data quality issue, or similar symptom of a data problem.

    DATA PROBLEM DIAGNOSED

    Data expert identifies it as a data problem.

    COMPLEX STRATEGIC APPROACH ATTEMPTED

    Recognized need to attempt it strategically, but don't have capacity or culture to execute.

    Cycle diagram titled 'Data Problems' with numbers connected to surrounding steps, and a break after Step 3 where one can 'BREAK THE CYCLE'. In the middle are a list of data problems: 'Accessibility’, ‘Data Breach', 'Manual Manipulation', 'System Failure', 'Ambiguity', 'Duplication', 'Ownership', and 'Trust'.
    SOLUTION FAILS

    The tactical solution fails to solve the root cause of the data problem, and the data symptoms persist.

    TACTICAL SOLUTION FALLBACK

    A quick and dirty solution is attempted in order to fix the data problem.

    THE COMPLEX APPROACH FIZZLES OUT

    Attempted strategic approach takes too long, fizzles out.

    BREAK THE CYCLE

    Solving Your Data Problems

    1. DEFINE YOUR DATA REQUIREMENTS Incorporate a Business to Data Approach by utilizing Info-Tech's business capability templates for identifying data needs. BUSINESS-ALIGNED DATA REQUIREMENTS
    2. CONDUCT YOUR DATA DISCOVERY Understand the data behind your business problem. Identify the required data capabilities and domains as required by your business processes. RECOMMENDED DATA CAPABILITIES
    3. DESIGN YOUR DATA PRACTICES Build your custom data practices based on the predefined reusable models. CUSTOMIZED DATA PRACTICE
    4. ARCHITECT YOUR DATA PLATFORM Build your custom data platform based on the redefined reusable architecture patterns. CUSTOMIZED DATA PLATFORM
    CONTINUOUS PHASE: ROADMAP, SPONSORSHIP FEEDBACK AND DELIVERY

    Develop a roadmap to establish the practice and implement the architecture as designed. Ensure continuous alignment of the practice and architecture with the business landscape.

    Phase-by-Phase Approach to Build Your Data Practice and Platform

    Flowchart detailing the path to take through the four phases of this blueprint beginning with the 'Inputs' and 'People' involved and incorporating 'Deliverables' along the way. Phase-by-Phase Approach
    • Phase 1: Step 1 – Define Your Data Requirement
    • Phase 1: Step 2 – Conduct Your Data Discovery
    • Phase 2 – Design Your Data Practice
    • Phase 3 – Architect Your Data Platform

    Measure value when building your data practice and platform

    Sample Data Management Metrics

    Lists of data management metrics in different categories.

    • Refine the metrics for the overall Data Management practice and every initiative therein.
    • Refine the metrics at each platform and practice component to show business value against implementation effort.

    Understand and Build Data Culture

    See your Info-Tech Account Representative for more details on our Data Culture Diagnostic

    Only 14.29% of Transportation and Logistics respondents agree BI and Analytics Process and Technology are sufficient What is a diagnostic?

    Our diagnostics are the simplest way to collect the data you need, turn it into actionable insights, and communicate with stakeholders across the organization.

    52.54% of respondents from the healthcare industry are unaware of their organization’s data security policy
    Ask the Right Questions

    Use our low-effort surveys to get the data you need from stakeholders across the organization.

    Use Our Diagnostic Engine

    Our diagnostic engine does all the heavy lifting and analysis, turning your data into usable information.

    Communicate & Take Action

    Wow your executives with the incredible insights you've uncovered. Then, get to action: make IT better.

    On average only 40% agree that they have the reporting when needed


    (Source: Info-Tech’s Data Culture Diagnostic, 53 Organizations, 3138 Responses)

    35% of respondents feel that a governance body is in place looking at strategic data

    Build a Data-Driven Strategy Using Info-Tech Diagnostic Programs

    Make informed IT decisions by starting your diagnostic program today. Your account manager is waiting to help you.
    Sample of Info-Tech's 'Data Culture Scorecard'.

    Use Our Predefined Data and Analytics Patterns to Build Your DnA Landscape

    Walking through a book of architecture building plans with a personal guide is cheaper and faster than employing an architect to build and design your home

    Two books titled 'The Everything Homebuilding Book' and 'Architecture 101'. An open book with a finger pointing to a diagram.

    The first step is to align business strategy with data strategy and then start building your data practice and data platform

    Flowchart starting with business strategy focuses, then to data strategy focuses, and eventually to 'Data Metrics'.

    Insights

    The true value of data comes from defining intentional relationships between the business and the data through a well-thought-out data platform and practice.

    • Phase 1
      • Some organizations are low maturity so using the traditional Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) would not make sense. A great alternative is to leverage existing models and methodologies to get going off the bat.
      • The Data Strategy is an input into the platform and practice. This is considered the Why; Data Practice and Platform is the How.
    • Phase 2
      • Info-Tech’s approach is business-goal driven and it leverages patterns, which enable the implementation of critical and foundational components and subsequently facilitates the evolution and development of the practice over time.
      • Systems should not be designed in isolation. Cross-functional collaboration throughout the design is critical to ensure all types of issues are revealed early. Otherwise, crucial tests are omitted, deployments fail, and end-users are dissatisfied.
    • Phase 3
      • Build your conceptual data architecture based on well-thought-out formulated patterns that align with your organization’s needs and environment.
      • Functional needs often take precedence over quality architecture. Quality must be baked into design, execution, and decision-making practices to ensure the right trade-offs are made.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    Guided Implementation

    Workshop

    Consulting

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful." "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track." "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place." "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Info-Tech’s Methodology for Building Your Data Practice and Platform

    Phase 1 –
    Define Your Data Requirements and Conduct Your Data Discovery
    Phase 2 –
    Design Your Data Practices
    Phase 3 –
    Architect Your Data Platform
    Phase Steps
    1. Identify your top initiatives
    2. Map your data initiatives to data capabilities
    1. Understand the practices value statement
    2. Review the Info-Tech practice pattern
    3. Initiate your practice design and setup
    1. Identify your data component
    2. Refine your data platform architecture
    3. Design your data platform
    4. Identify your new components and capabilities
    5. Initiative platform build and rollout
    Phase Outcomes Business-aligned data initiatives and capabilities that address data challenges and realize business strategic objectives Comprehensive data practice design based on the required business and data capabilities Data platform design based on Info-Tech data architecture reference pattern and prioritized data initiatives and capabilities

    Data Platform and Practice Implementation Plan

    Example timeline for data platform and practice implementation plan with 'Fiscal Years' across the top, and below they're broken down into quarters. Along the left side 'Phase 1: Step 1...', 'Phase 1: Step 2...', 'Phase 2...' and 'Phase 3'. Tasks are mapped onto the timeline in each phase with a short explanation.

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889
    Info-Tech’s Workshop support for Build Your Data Practice and Platform. 'Build Your Data Practice and Platform' slide from earlier.
    Workshop

    "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

    Workshop 1

    Data Needs and Discovery

    Workshop 2

    Data Practice Design

    Workshop 3

    Data Platform Design

    Workshop 1:
    Data Needs and Discovery

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889
    Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4
    Establish Business Context and Value
    Identify Your Top Initiatives
    Analyze Data Challenges
    Map Data Capability
    Activities

    1.1 Understand/confirm your organization’s strategic goals

    1.2 Classify the strategic goals and map to business drivers

    1.3 Identify the business capabilities that the strategy focus is on

    1.4 Identify the business processes realizing the strategy

    2.1 Highlight data-related outcomes /goals to realize to fulfill the business goal

    2.2 Map business data initiatives to the business strategic goals

    2.3 Prioritize Data initiatives

    3.1 Understand data management capabilities and framework

    3.2 Classify business data requirements using Info-Tech’s classification approach

    3.3 Highlight data challenges in your current environment

    4.1 Map data challenges to Info-Tech data challenges

    4.2 Review Info-Tech data capabilities based on prioritized initiative

    4.3 Discuss Data Platform and Practice Next Steps

    Deliverables
    • Business context and strategic drivers
    • Prioritized business capabilities and processes
    • Data Culture Survey results analysis
    • High-value business-aligned data initiative
    • List of data challenges preventing data maturation with the organization
    • Required data capabilities
    • Data platform and practice – plan
    • Initialized data management RACI
    Participants Business stakeholder, Business leader Business Subject Matter Expert, Data IT sponsor (CIO), Head of Data, Data Architect Business stakeholder, Business leader Business Subject Matter Expert, Data IT sponsor (CIO), Head of Data, Data Architect Data experts, Business Subject Matter Expert, Head of Data, Data Architect Data experts, Business Subject Matter Expert, Head of Data, Data Architect

    Workshop 2:
    Data Practice Design

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889
    Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4
    Plan Your Data Practices
    Design Your Data Practices 1
    Design Your Data Practices 2
    Design Your Data Practices 3
    Activities

    Prerequisite: Business context, business data requirement, and data capabilities

    1.1 Understand data practice framework

    1.2 Define your practice implementation approach

    1.3 Review and update data management RACI

    2.1 Understand Info-Tech data practice patterns for each prioritized practice

    2.2 Define your practice setup for each prioritized practice

    2.3 Highlight critical processes for each practice

    3.1 Understand Info-Tech data practice patterns for each prioritized practice

    3.2 Define your practice setup for each prioritized practice

    3.3 Highlight critical processes for each practice

    4.1 Understand Info-Tech data practice patterns for each prioritized practice

    4.2 Define your practice setup for each prioritized practice

    4.3 Highlight critical processes for each practice

    4.4 Discuss data platform and practice next steps

    Deliverables
    • Data practice implementation approach
    • Data management RACI
    • Data practice setup pattern for your organization
    • Data practice process pattern for your organization
    • Data practice setup pattern for your organization
    • Data practice process pattern for your organization
    • Data practice setup pattern for your organization
    • Data practice process pattern for your organization
    • Data platform and practice – plan
    Participants Data experts, Business Subject Matter Expert, Head of Data, Data Architect Data experts, Business Subject Matter Expert, Head of Data, Data Architect Data experts, Business Subject Matter Expert, Head of Data, Data Architect Data experts, Business Subject Matter Expert, Head of Data, Data Architect

    Workshop 3:
    Data Platform Design

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889
    Day 1Day 2Day 3Day 4
    Data Platform Overview
    Update Data Platform Reference Architecture
    Design Your Data Platform
    Design Your Data Practices 4
    Activities

    Prerequisite: Business context, business data requirement, and data capabilities

    1.1 Understand data platform framework and data capabilities

    1.2 Understand key data architecture principles and best practices

    1.3 Shortlist data platform patterns

    2.1 Map and identify data capabilities to data platform components

    2.2 Build data platform architecture using Info-Tech data platform reference architecture

    2.3 Highlight critical processes for each practice

    3.1 Design your target data platform using Info-Tech’s data platform template

    3.2 Identify new capabilities and components in your platform design

    4.1 Identify new capabilities and component in your platform design

    4.2 Discuss data platform initiatives

    Deliverables
    • Shortlisted data platform patterns
    • Data platform reference architecture for your organization
    • Data platform design for your organization
    • Data platform plan
    ParticipantsData experts, Business Subject Matter Expert, Head of Data, Data ArchitectData experts, Business Subject Matter Expert, Head of Data, Data ArchitectData experts, Business Subject Matter Expert, Head of Data, Data ArchitectData experts, Business Subject Matter Expert, Head of Data, Data Architect

    Build Your Data Practice and Platform

    Phase 1

    Phase 1: Step 1 – Define Your Data Requirements
    Phase 1: Step 2 – Conduct Your Data Discovery

    Phase 1

    1.1 Define Your Data Requirements
    1.2 Conduct Your Data Discovery

    Phase 2 Phase 3

    Phase 1: Step 1 – Define Your Data Requirements will walk you through the following activities:

    • Confirm the organizational strategic goals, business drivers, business capabilities, and processes driving the Data Practice and Platform effort.
    • Identify the data related outcomes, goals, and ideal environment needed to fulfill the business goals.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    A blend of business leaders and business SMEs together with the Data Strategy team.

    Phase 1: Step 2 – Conduct Your Data Discovery will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify and highlight the data challenges faced in achieving the desired outcome.
    • Map the data challenges to the data capabilities required to realize the desired data outcome.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    Key personnel from IT/Data team: (Data Architect, Data Engineers, Head of Head of Reporting and Analytics)

    Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}298|cart{/j2store}
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    • Parent Category Name: Disruptive & Emerging Technologies
    • Parent Category Link: /disruptive-emerging-technologies
    • New technology can hit like a meteor. Not only disruptive to IT, technology provides opportunities for organization-wide advantage.
    • Your role is endangered. If you don’t prepare for the most disruptive technologies, you could be overshadowed. Don’t let the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) set the technological innovation agenda
    • Predicting the future isn’t easy. Most IT leaders fail to realize how quickly technology increases in capability. Even for the tech savvy, predicting which specific technologies will become disruptive is difficult.
    • Communication is difficult when the sky is falling. Even forward-looking IT leaders struggle with convincing others to devote time and resources to monitoring technologies with a formal process.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Establish the core working group, select a leader, and select a group of visionaries to help brainstorm emerging technologies.
    • Brainstorm about creating a better future, begin brainstorming an initial longlist.
    • Train the group to think like futurists.
    • Evaluate the shortlist.
    • Define your PoC list and schedule.
    • Finalize, present the plan to stakeholders and repeat.

    Impact and Result

    • Create a disruptive technology working group.
    • Produce a longlist of disruptive technologies.
    • Evaluate the longlist to produce a shortlist of disruptive technologies.
    • Develop a plan for a proof-of-concept project for each shortlisted technology.

    Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology – A guide to help IT leaders make the most of disruptive impacts.

    As a CIO, there is a need to move beyond day-to-day technology management with an ever-increasing need to forecast technology impacts. Not just from a technical perspective but to map out the technical understandings aligned to potential business impacts and improvements. Technology transformation and innovation is moving more quickly than ever before and as an innovation champion, the CIO or CTO should have foresight in specific technologies with the understanding of how the company could be disrupted in the near future.

    • Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology – Phases 1-3

    2. Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template – A guide to develop the plan for exploiting disruptive technology.

    The Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template acts as an implementation plan for developing a long-term strategy for monitoring and implementing disruptive technologies.

    • Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template

    3. Disruptive Technology Look to the Past Tool – A tool to keep track of the missed technology disruption from previous opportunities.

    The Disruptive Technology Look to the Past Tool will assist you to collect reasonability test notes when evaluating potential disruptive technologies.

    • Disruptive Technology Look to the Past Tool

    4. Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool – A tool to keep track of the research conducted by members of the working group.

    The Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool will help you to keep track of the independent research that is conducted by members of the disruptive technology exploitation working group.

    • Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool

    5. Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool

    The Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool will help you to codify the results of the disruptive technology working group's longlist winnowing process.

    • Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool

    6. Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool – A tool to systematize notional evaluations of the value and readiness of potential disruptive technologies.

    The Disruptive Technology Value Readiness & SWOT Analysis Tool will assist you to systematize notional evaluations of the value and readiness of potential disruptive technologies.

    • Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    7. Proof of Concept Template – A handbook to serve as a reference when deciding how to proceed with your proposed solution.

    The Proof of Concept Template will guide you through the creation of a minimum-viable proof-of-concept project.

    • Proof of Concept Template

    8. Disruptive Technology Executive Presentation Template – A template to help you create a brief progress report presentation summarizing your project and program progress.

    The Disruptive Technology Executive Presentation Template will assist you to present an overview of the disruptive technology process, outlining the value to your company.

    • Disruptive Technology Executive Presentation Template

    Infographic

    Workshop: Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Pre-work: Establish the Disruptive Tech Process

    The Purpose

    Discuss the general overview of the disruptive technology exploitation process.

    Develop an initial disruptive technology exploitation plan.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Stakeholders are on board, the project’s goals are outlined, and the working group is selected.

    Activities

    1.1 Get execs and stakeholders on board.

    1.2 Review the process of analyzing disruptive tech.

    1.3 Select members for the working group.

    1.4 Choose a schedule and time commitment.

    1.5 Select a group of visionaries.

    Outputs

    Initialized disruptive tech exploitation plan

    Meeting agenda, schedule, and participants

    2 Hold the Initial Meeting

    The Purpose

    Understand how disruption will affect the organization, and develop an initial list of technologies to explore.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Knowledge of how to think like a futurist.

    Understanding of organizational processes vulnerable to disruption.

    Outline of potentially disruptive technologies.

    Activities

    2.1 Start the meeting with introductions.

    2.2 Train the group to think like futurists.

    2.3 Brainstorm about disruptive processes.

    2.4 Brainstorm a longlist.

    2.5 Research and brainstorm separate longlists.

    Outputs

    List of disruptive organizational processes

    Initial longlist of disruptive tech

    3 Create a Longlist and Assess Shortlist

    The Purpose

    Evaluate the specific value of longlisted technologies to the organization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Defined list of the disruptive technologies worth escalating to the proof of concept stage.

    Activities

    3.1 Converge the longlists developed by the team.

    3.2 Narrow the longlist to a shortlist.

    3.3 Assess readiness and value.

    3.4 Perform a SWOT analysis.

    Outputs

    Finalized longlist of disruptive tech

    Shortlist of disruptive tech

    Value-readiness analysis

    SWOT analysis

    Candidate(s) for proof of concept charter

    4 Create an Action Plan

    The Purpose

    Understand how the technologies in question will impact the organization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding of the specific effects of the new technology on the business processes it is intended to disrupt.

    Business case for the proof-of-concept project.

    Activities

    4.1 Build a problem canvas.

    4.2 Identify affected business units.

    4.3 Outline and map the business processes likely to be disrupted.

    4.4 Map disrupted business processes.

    4.5 Recognize how the new technology will impact business processes.

    4.6 Make the case.

    Outputs

    Problem canvas

    Map of business processes: current state

    Map of disrupted business processes

    Business case for each technology

    Further reading

    Analyst Perspective

    The key is in anticipation.

    “We all encounter unexpected changes and our responses are often determined by how we perceive and understand those changes. We react according to the unexpected occurrence. Business organizations are no different.

    When a company faces a major technology disruption in its markets – one that could fundamentally change the business or impact its processes and technology – the way its management perceive and understand the disruption influences how they describe and plan for it. In other words, the way management sets the context of a disruption – the way they frame it – shapes the strategy they adopt. Technology leaders can vastly influence business strategy by adopting a proactive approach to understanding disruptive and innovative technologies by simply adopting a process to review and evaluate technology impacts to the company’s lines of business.”

    This is a picture of Troy Cheeseman

    Troy Cheeseman
    Practice Lead, Infrastructure & Operations Research
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    • New technology can hit like a meteor. Not only disruptive to IT, technology provides opportunities for organization-wide advantage.
    • Your role is endangered. If you don’t prepare for the most disruptive technologies, you could be overshadowed. Don’t let the chief marketing officer (CMO) set the technological innovation agenda.

    Common Obstacles

    • Predicting the future isn’t easy. Most IT leaders fail to realize how quickly technology increases in capability. Even for the tech savvy, predicting which specific technologies will become disruptive is difficult.
    • Communication is difficult when the sky is falling. Even forward-looking IT leaders struggle with convincing others to devote time and resources to monitoring technologies with a formal process.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    • Identify, resolve, and evaluate. Use an annual process as described in this blueprint: a formal evaluation of new technology that turns analysis into action.
    • Lead the analysis from IT. Establish a team to carry out the annual process as a cure for the causes of “airline magazine syndrome” and to prevent it from happening in the future.
    • Train your team on the patterns of progress, track technology over time in a central database, and read Info-Tech’s analysis of upcoming technology.
    • Create your KPIs. Establish your success indicators to create measurable value when presenting to your executive.
    • Produce a comprehensive proof-of-concept plan that will allow your company to minimize risk and maximize reward when engaging with new technology.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Proactively monitoring, evaluating, and exploiting disruptive tech isn’t optional.
    This will protect your role, IT’s role, and the future of the organization.

    A diverse working group maximizes the insight brought to bear.
    An IT background is not a prerequisite.

    The best technology is only the best when it brings immediate value.
    Good technology might not be ready; ready technology might not be good.

    Review

    We help IT leaders make the most of disruptive impacts.

    This research is designed for:

    Target Audience: CIO, CTO, Head of Infrastructure

    This research will help you:

    • Develop a process for anticipating, analyzing, and exploiting disruptive technology.
    • Communicate the business case for investing in disruptive technology.
    • Categorize emerging technologies to decide what to do with them.
    • Develop a plan for taking action to exploit the technology that will most affect your organization.

    Problem statement:

    As a CIO, there is a need to move beyond day-to-day technology management with an ever-increasing need to forecast technology impacts. Not just from a technical perspective but to map out the technical understandings aligned to potential business impacts and improvements. Technology transformation and innovation is moving more quickly than ever before and as an innovation champion, the CIO or CTO should have foresight in specific technologies with the understanding of how the company could be disrupted in the near future. Foresight + Current Technology + Business Understanding = Understanding the Business Disruption. This should be a repeatable process, not an exception or reactionary response.

    Insight Summary

    Establish the core working group, select a leader, and select a group of visionaries to help brainstorm emerging technologies.

    The right team matters. A core working group will keep focus through the process and a leader will keep everyone accountable. Visionaries are out-of-the-box thinkers and once they understand how to think like a "futurists," they will drive the longlist and shortlist actions.

    Train the group to think like futurists

    To keep up with exponential technology growth you need to take a multi-threaded approach.

    Brainstorm about creating a better future; begin brainstorming an initial longlist

    Establish the longlist. The longlist helps create a holistic view of most technologies that could impact the business. Assigning values and quadrant scoring will shortlist the options and focus your PoC option.

    Converge everyone’s longlists

    Long to short...that's the short of it. Using SWOT, value readiness, and quadrant mapping review sessions will focus the longlist, creating a shortlist of potential POC candidates to review and consider.

    Evaluate the shortlist

    There is no such thing as a risk-free endeavor. Use a systematic process to ensure that the risks your organization takes have the potential to produce significant rewards.

    Define your PoC list and schedule

    Don’t be afraid to fail! Inevitably, some proof-of-concept projects will not benefit the organization. The projects that are successful will more than cover the costs of the failed projects. Roll out small scale and minimize losses.

    Finalize, present the plan to stakeholders, and repeat!

    Don't forget the C-suite. Effectively communicate and present the working group’s finding with a well-defined and succinct presentation. Start the process again!

    This is a screenshot of the Thought map for Exploit disruptive infrastructure Technology.
    1. Identify
      • Establish the core working group and select a leader; select a group of visionaries
      • Train the group to think like futurists
      • Hold your initial meeting
    2. Resolve
    • Create and winnow a longlist
    • Assess and create the shortlist
  • Evaluate
    • Create process maps
    • Develop proof of concept charter
  • The Key Is in Anticipation!

    Use Info-Tech’s approach for analyzing disruptive technology in your own disruptive tech working group

    Phase 1: Identify Phase 2: Resolve Phase 3: Evaluate

    Phase Steps

    1. Establish the disruptive technology working group
    2. Think like a futurist (Training)
    3. Hold initial meeting or create an agenda for the meeting
    1. Create and winnow a longlist
    2. Assess shortlist
    1. Create process maps
    2. Develop proof of concept charter

    Phase Outcomes

    • Establish a team of subject matter experts that will evaluate new, emerging, and potentially disruptive technologies.
    • Establish a process for including visionaries from outside of the working group who will provide insight and direction.
    • Introduce the core working group members.
    • Gain a better understanding of how technology advances.
    • Brainstorm a list of organizational processes.
    • Brainstorm an initial longlist.
    • Finalized longlist
    • Finalized shortlist
    • Initial analysis of each technology on the shortlist
    • Finalized shortlist
    • Initial analysis of each technology on the shortlist
    • Business process maps before and after disruption
    • Proof of concept charter
    • Key performance indicators
    • Estimation of required resources
    • Executive presentation

    Four key challenges make it essential for you to become a champion for exploiting disruptive technology

    1. New technology can hit like a meteor. It doesn’t only disrupt IT; technology provides opportunities for organization-wide advantage.
    2. Your role is endangered. If you don’t prepare for the most disruptive technologies, you could be overshadowed. Don’t let the CMO rule technological innovation.
    3. Predicting the future isn’t easy. Most IT leaders fail to realize how quickly technology increases in capability. Even for the tech savvy, predicting which specific technologies will become disruptive is difficult.
    4. Communication is difficult when the sky is falling. Even forward-looking IT leaders struggle with convincing others to devote time and resources to monitoring emerging technologies with a formal process.

    “Look, you have never had this amount of opportunity for innovation. Don’t forget to capitalize on it. If you do not capitalize on it, you will go the way of the dinosaur.”
    – Dave Evans, Co-Founder and CTO, Stringify

    Technology can hit like a meteor

    “ By 2025:

    • 38.6 billion smart devices will be collecting, analyzing, and sharing data.
    • The web hosting services market is to reach $77.8 billion in 2025.
    • 70% of all tech spending is expected to go for cloud solutions.
    • There are 1.35 million tech startups.
    • Global AI market is expected to reach $89.8 billion.”

    – Nick Gabov

    IT Disruption

    Technology disrupts IT by:

    • Affecting the infrastructure and applications that IT needs to use internally.
    • Affecting the technology of end users that IT needs to support and deploy, especially for technologies with a consumer focus.
    • Allowing IT to run more efficiently and to increase the efficiency of other business units.
    • Example: The rise of the smartphone required many organizations to rethink endpoint devices.

    Business Disruption

    Technology disrupts the business by:

    • Affecting the viability of the business.
    • Affecting the business’ standing in relation to competitors that better deal with disruptive technology.
    • Affecting efficiency and business strategy. IT should have a role in technology-related business decisions.
    • Example: BlackBerry failed to anticipate the rise of the apps ecosystem. The company struggled as it was unable to react with competitive products.

    Senior IT leaders are expected to predict disruptions to IT and the business, while tending to today’s needs

    You are expected to be both a firefighter and a forecaster

    • Anticipating upcoming disruptions is part of your job, and you will be blamed if you fail to anticipate future business disruptions because you are focusing on the present.
    • However, keeping IT running smoothly is also part of your job, and you will be blamed if today’s IT environment breaks down because you are focusing on the future.

    You’re caught between the present and the future

    • You don’t have a process that anticipates future disruptions but runs alongside and integrates with operations in the present.
    • You can’t do it alone. Tending to both the present and the future will require a team that can help you keep the process running.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Be prepared when disruptions start coming down, even though it isn’t easy. Use this research to reduce the effort to a simple process that can be performed alongside everyday firefighting.

    Make disruptive tech analysis and exploitation part of your innovation agenda

    A scatter plot graph is depicted, plotting IT Innovative Leadership (X axis), and Satisfaction with IT(Y axis). IT innovative leadership explains 75% of variation in satisfaction with IT

    Organizations without high satisfaction with IT innovation leadership are only 20% likely to be highly satisfied with IT

    “You rarely see a real-world correlation of .86!”
    – Mike Battista, Staff Scientist, Cambridge Brain Sciences, PhD in Measurement

    There is a clear relationship between satisfaction with IT and the IT department’s innovation leadership.

    Prevent “airline magazine syndrome” by proactively analyzing disruptive technologies

    “The last thing the CIO needs is an executive saying ‘I don’t what it is or what it does…but I want two of them!”
    – Tim Lalonde

    Airline magazine syndrome happens to IT leaders caught between the business and IT. It usually occurs in this manner:

    1. While on a flight, a senior executive reads about an emerging technology that has exciting implications for the business in an airline magazine.
    2. The executive returns and approaches IT, demanding that action be taken to address the disruptive technology – and that it should have been (ideally) completed already.

    Without a Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan:

    “I don’t know”

    With a Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan:

    “Here in IT, we have already considered that technology and decided it was overhyped. Let me show you our analysis and invite you to join our working group.”

    OR

    “We have already considered that technology and have started testing it. Let me show you our testing lab and invite you to join our working group.”

    Info-Tech Insight

    Airline magazine syndrome is a symptom of a wider problem: poor CEO-CIO alignment. Solve this problem with improved communication and documentation. Info-Tech’s disruptive tech iterative process will make airline magazine syndrome a thing of the past!

    IT leaders who do not keep up with disruptive technology will find their roles diminished

    “Today’s CIO dominion is in a decaying orbit with CIOs in existential threat mode.”
    – Ken Magee

    Protect your role within IT

    • IT is threatened by disruptive technology:
      • Trends like cloud services, increased automation, and consumerization reduce the need for IT to be involved in every aspect of deploying and using technology.
      • In the long term, machines will replace even intellectually demanding IT jobs, such as infrastructure admin and high-level planning.
    • Protect your role in IT by:
      • Anticipating new technology that will disrupt the IT department and your place within it.
      • Defining new IT roles and responsibilities that accurately reflect the reality of technology today.
      • Having a process for the above that does not diminish your ability to keep up with everyday operations that remain a priority today.

    Protect your role against other departments

    • Your role in the business is threatened by disruptive technology:
      • The trends that make IT less involved with technology allow other executives – such as the CMO – to make IT investments.
      • As the CMO gains the power and data necessary to embrace new trends, the CIO and IT managers have less pull.
    • Protect your role in the business by:
      • Being the individual to consult about new technology. It isn’t just a power play; IT leaders should be the ones who know technology thoroughly.
      • Becoming an indispensable part of the entire business’ innovation strategy through proposing and executing a process for exploiting disruptive technology.

    IT leaders who do keep up have an opportunity to solidify their roles as experts and aggregators

    “The IT department plays a critical role in [innovation]. What they can do is identify a technology that potentially might introduce improvements to the organization, whether it be through efficiency, or through additional services to constituents.”
    – Michael Maguire, Management Consultant

    The contemporary CIO is a conductor, ensuring that IT works in harmony with the rest of the business.

    The new CIO is a conductor, not a musician. The CIO is taking on the role of a business engineer, working with other executives to enable business innovation.

    The new CIO is an expert and an aggregator. Conductor CIOs increasingly need to keep up on the latest technologies. They will rely on experts in each area and provide strategic synthesis to decide if, and how, developments are relevant in order to tune their IT infrastructure.

    The pace of technological advances makes progress difficult to predict

    “An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century – it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).”
    – Ray Kurzweil

    Technology advances exponentially. Rather than improving by the same amount of capability each year, it multiplies in capability each year.

    Think like a futurist to anticipate technology before it goes mainstream.

    Exponential growth happens much faster than linear growth, especially when it hits the knee of the curve. Even those who acknowledge exponential growth underestimate how capabilities can improve.

    To predict new advances, turn innovation into a process

    “We spend 70 percent of our time on core search and ads. We spend 20 percent on adjacent businesses, ones related to the core businesses in some interesting way. Examples of that would be Google News, Google Earth, and Google Local. And then 10 percent of our time should be on things that are truly new.”
    – Eric Schmidt, Google

    • Don’t get caught in the trap of refining your core processes to the exclusion of innovation. You should always be looking for new processes to improve, new technology to pilot, and where possible, new businesses to get into.
    • Devote about 10% of your time and resources to exploring new technology: the potential rewards are huge.

    You and your team need to analyze technology every year to predict where it’s going.

    A bar graph is shown which depicts the proportion of technology use from 2018-2022. the included devices are: Tablets; PCs; TVs; Non-smartphones; Smartphones; M2M
    • Foundational technologies, such as computing power, storage, and networks, are improving exponentially.
    • Disruptive technologies are specific manifestations of foundational advancements. Advancements of greater magnitude give rise to more manifestations; therefore, there will be more disruptive technologies every year.
    • There is a lot of noise to cut through. Remember Google Glasses? As technology becomes ubiquitous and consumerization reigns, everybody is a technology expert. How do you decide which technologies to focus on?

    Protect IT and the business from disruption by implementing a simple, repeatable disruptive technology exploitation process

    “One of the most consistent patterns in business is the failure of leading companies to stay at the top of their industries when technologies or markets change […] Managers must beware of ignoring new technologies that can’t initially meet the needs of their mainstream customers.”
    – Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen

    Challenge

    Solution

    New technology can hit like a meteor, but it doesn’t have to leave a crater:

    Use the annual process described in this blueprint to create a formal evaluation of new technology that turns analysis into action.

    Predicting the future isn’t easy, but it can be done:

    Lead the analysis from the office of the CIO. Establish a team to carry out the annual process as a cure for airline magazine syndrome.

    Your role is endangered, but you can survive:

    Train your team on the patterns of progress, track technology over time in a central database, and read Info-Tech’s analysis of upcoming technology.

    Communication is difficult when the sky is falling, so have a simple way to get the message across:

    Track metrics that communicate your progress, and summarize the results in a single, easy-to-read exploitation plan.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Use Info-Tech’s tools and templates, along with this storyboard, to walk you through creating and executing an exploitation process in six steps.

    Create measurable value by using Info-Tech’s process for evaluating the disruptive potential of technology

    This image contains a bar graph with the following Title: Which are the primary benefits you've either realized or expect to realize by deploying hyperconverged infrastructure in the near term.

    No business process is perfect.

    • Use Info-Tech’s Proof of Concept Template to create a disruptive technology proof of concept implementation plan.
    • Harness your company’s internal wisdom to systematically vet new technology. Engage only in calculated risk and maximize potential benefit.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Inevitably, some proof of concept projects will not benefit the organization. The projects that are successful will more than cover the costs of the failed projects. Roll out small scale and minimize losses.

    Establish your key performance indicators (KPIs)

    Key performance indicators allow for rigorous analysis, which generates insight into utilization by platform and consumption by business activity.

    • Brainstorm metrics that indicate when process improvement is actually taking place.
    • Have members of the group pitch KPIs; the facilitator should record each suggestion on a whiteboard.
    • Make sure to have everyone justify the inclusion of each metric: how does it relate to the improvement that the proof of concept project is intended to drive? How does it relate to the overall goals of the business?
    • Include a list of KPIs, along with a description and a target (ensuring that it aligns with SMART metrics).
    Key Performance Indicator Description Target Result

    Number of Longlist technologies

    Establish a range of Longlist technologies to evaluate 10-15
    Number of Shortlist technologies Establish a range of Shortlist technologies to evaluate 5-10
    number of "look to the past" likes/dislikes Minimum number of testing characteristics 6
    Number of POCs Total number of POCs Approved 3-5

    Communicate your plan with the Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template

    Use the Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template to summarize everything that the group does. Update the report continuously and use it to show others what is happening in the world of disruptive technology.

    Section Title Description
    1 Rationale and Summary of Exploitation Plan A summary of the current efforts that exist for exploring disruptive technology. A summary of the process for exploiting disruptive technology, the resources required, the team members, meeting schedules, and executive approval.
    2 Longlist of Potentially Disruptive Technologies A summary of the longlist of identified disruptive technologies that could affect the organization, shortened to six or less that have the largest potential impact based on Info-Tech’s Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool.
    3 Analysis of Shortlist Individually analyze each technology placed on the shortlist using Info-Tech’s Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool.
    4 Proof of Concept Plan Use the results from Section 3 to establish a plan for moving forward with the technologies on the shortlist. Determine the tasks required to implement the technologies and decide who will complete them and when.
    5 Hand-off Pass the project along to identified stakeholders with significant interest in its success. Continue to track metrics and prepare to repeat the disruptive technology exploitation process annually.

    Whether you need a process for exploiting disruptive technology, or an analysis of current trends, Info-Tech can help

    Two sets of research make up Info-Tech’s disruptive technology coverage:

    This image contains four screenshots from each of the following Info-Tech Blueprints: Exploit disruptive Infrastructure Technology; Infrastructure & operations priorities 2022

    This storyboard, and the associated tools and templates, will walk you through creating a disruptive technology working group of your own.

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    Key deliverable:

    Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template

    The Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template acts as an implementation plan for developing a long-term strategy for monitoring and implementing disruptive technologies.

    Proof of Concept Template

    The Proof of Concept Template will guide you through the creation of a minimum-viable proof-of-concept project.

    Executive Presentation

    The Disruptive Technology Executive Presentation Template will assist you to present an overview of the disruptive technology process, outlining the value to your company.

    Disruptive Technology Value Readiness & SWOT Analysis Tool

    The Disruptive Technology Value Readiness & SWOT Analysis Tool will assist you to systematize notional evaluations of the value and readiness of potential disruptive technologies.

    Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool

    The Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool will help you to keep track of the independent research that is conducted by members of the disruptive technology exploitation working group.

    Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool

    The Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool will help you to codify the results of the disruptive technology working group's longlist winnowing process.

    Disruptive Technology Look to the Past Tool

    The Disruptive Technology Look to the Past Tool will assist you to collect reasonability test notes when evaluating potential disruptive technologies.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    “Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

    Guided Implementation

    “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

    Workshop

    “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

    Consulting

    “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3

    Call #1: Explore the need for a disruptive technology working group.

    Call #3: Review the agenda for the initial meeting.

    Call #5: Review how you’re brainstorming and your sources of information.

    Call #7: Review the final shortlist and assessment.

    Call #9: Review the progress of your team.

    Call #2: Review the team name, participants, and timeline.

    Call #4: Assess the results of the initial meeting.

    Call #6: Review the final longlist and begin narrowing it down.

    Call #8: Review the next steps.

    Call #10: Review the communication plan.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Pre-Work Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4
    Establish the Disruptive Tech Process Hold Your Initial Meeting Create a Longlist and Assess Shortlist Create Process Maps Develop a Proof of Concept Charter

    Activities

    1.1.a Get executives and stakeholders on board.

    1.1.b Review the process of analyzing disruptive tech.

    1.1.c Select members for the working group.

    1.1.d Choose a schedule and time commitment.

    1.1.e Select a group of visionaries.

    1.2.a Start the meeting with introductions.

    1.2.b Train the group to think like futurists.

    1.2.c Brainstorm about disruptable processes.

    1.2.d Brainstorm a longlist.

    1.2.e Research and brainstorm separate longlists.

    2.1.a Converge the longlists developed by the team.

    2.2.b Narrow the longlist to a shortlist.

    2.2.c Assess readiness and value.

    2.2.d Perform a SWOT analysis.

    3.1.a Build a problem canvas.

    3.1.b Identify affected business units.

    3.1.c Outline and map the business processes likely to be disrupted.

    3.1.d Map disrupted business processes.

    3.1.e Recognize how the new technology will impact business processes.

    3.1.f Make the case.

    3.2.a Develop key performance indicators (KPIs).

    3.2.b Identify key success factors.

    3.2.c Outline project scope.

    3.2.d Identify responsible team.

    3.2.e Complete resource estimation.

    Deliverables

    1. Initialized Disruptive Tech Exploitation Plan
    1. List of Disruptable Organizational Processes
    2. Initial Longlist of Disruptive Tech
    1. Finalized Longlist of Disruptive Tech
    2. Shortlist of Disruptive Tech
    3. Value-Readiness Analysis
    4. SWOT Analysis
    5. Candidate(s) for Proof of Concept Charter
    1. Problem Canvas
    2. Map of Business Processes: Current State
    3. Map of Disrupted Business Processes
    4. Business Case for Each Technology
    1. Completed Proof of Concept Charter

    Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology

    Disrupt or be disrupted.

    Identify

    Create your working group.

    PHASE 1

    Use Info-Tech’s approach for analyzing disruptive technology in your own disruptive tech working group

    1. Identify
      1. Establish the core working group and select a leader; select a group of visionaries
      2. Train the group to think like futurists
      3. Hold your initial meeting
    2. Resolve
      1. Create and winnow a longlist
      2. Assess and create the shortlist
    3. Evaluate
      1. Create process maps
      2. Develop proof of concept charter

    The Key Is in Anticipation!

    Phase 1: Identify

    Create your working group.

    Activities:

    Step 1.1: Establish the core working group and select a leader; select a group of visionaries
    Step 1.2: Train the group to think like futurists
    Step 1.3: Hold the initial meeting

    This step involves the following participants:

    IT Infrastructure Manager

    CIO or CTO

    Potential members and visionaries of the working group

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Establish a team of subject matter experts that will evaluate new, emerging, and potentially disruptive technologies.
    • Establish a process for including visionaries from outside of the working group who will provide insight and direction.
    • Introduce the core working group members.
    • Gain a better understanding of how technology advances.
    • Brainstorm a list of organizational processes.
    • Brainstorm an initial longlist.

    Step 1.1

    Establish the core working group and select a leader; select a group of visionaries.

    Activities:

    • Articulate the long- and short-term benefits and costs to the entire organization
    • Gain support by articulating the long- and short-term benefits and costs to the IT department
    • Gain commitment from key stakeholders and executives
    • Help stakeholders understand what goes into formally exploiting disruptive tech by reviewing this process
    • Establish the core working group and select a leader
    • Create a schedule with a time commitment appropriate to your organization’s size; it doesn’t need to take long
    • Select a group of visionaries external to IT to help the working group brainstorm disruptive technologies

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Infrastructure Manager
    • CIO or CTO
    • Potential members and visionaries of the working group

    Outcomes of this step

    • Establish a team of subject matter experts that will evaluate new, emerging, and potentially disruptive technologies.
    • Establish a process for including visionaries from outside of the working group that will provide insight and direction.

    1.1.A Articulate the long- and short-term benefits and costs to the entire organization

    A cost/benefit analysis will give stakeholders a picture of how disruptive technology could affect the business. Use the chart as a starting point and customize it based on your organization.

    Disruptive Technology Affects the Organization

    Benefits Costs

    Short Term

    • First-mover advantage from implementing new technology in the business before competitors – and before start-ups.
    • Better brand image as an organization focused on innovation.
    • Increased overall employee satisfaction by implementing new technology that increases employee capabilities or lowers effort.
    • Possibility of increased IT budget for integrating new technology.
    • Potential for employees to reject wide-scale use of unfamiliar technology.
    • Potential for technology to fail in the organization if it is not sufficiently tested.
    • Executive time required for making decisions about technology recommended by the team.

    Long Term

    • Increased internal business efficiencies from the integration of new technology (e.g. energy efficiency, fewer employees needed due to automation).
    • Better services or products for customers, resulting in increased long-term revenue.
    • Lowered costs of services or products and potential to grow market share.
    • Continued relevance of established organizations in a world changed by disruptive technologies.
    • Technology may not reach the capabilities initially expected, requiring waiting for increased value or readiness.
    • Potential for customers to reject new products resulting from technology.
    • Lack of focus on current core capabilities if technology is massively disruptive.

    1.1.B Gain support by articulating the long- and short-term benefits and costs to the IT department

    A cost/benefit analysis will give stakeholders a picture of how disruptive technology could affect the business. Use the chart as a starting point and customize it based on your organization.

    Disruptive Technology Affects IT

    BenefitsCosts

    Short Term

    • Perception of IT as a core component of business practices.
    • Increase IT’s capabilities to better serve employees (e.g. faster network speeds, better uptime, and storage and compute capacity that meet demands).
    • Cost for acquiring or implementing new technology and updating infrastructure to integrate with it.
    • Cost for training IT staff and end users on new IT technology and processes.
    • Minor costs for initial setup of disruptive technology exploitation process and time taken by members.

    Long Term

    • More efficient and powerful IT infrastructure that capitalizes on emerging trends at the right time.
    • Lower help desk load due to self-service and automation technology.
    • Increased satisfaction with IT due to implementation of improved enterprise technology and visible IT influence on improvements.
    • Increased end-user satisfaction with IT due to understanding and support of consumer technology that affects their lives.
    • New technology may result in lower need for specific IT roles. Cultural disruptions due to changing role of IT.
    • Perception of failure if technology is tested and never implemented.
    • Expectation that IT will continue to implement the newest technology available, even when it has been dismissed as not having value.

    1.1.C Gain commitment from key stakeholders and executives

    Gaining approval from executives and key stakeholders is the final obstacle. Ensure that you cover the following items to have the best chance for project approval.

    • Use a sample deck similar to this section for gaining buy-in, ensuring that you add/remove information to make it specific to your organization. Cover this section, including:
      • Who: Who will lead the team and who will be on it (working group)?
      • What: What resources will be required by the team (costs)?
      • Where/When: How often and where will the team meet (meeting schedule)?
      • Why: Why is there a need to exploit disruptive technology (benefits and examples)?
      • How: How is the team going to exploit disruptive technology (the process)?
    • Go through this blueprint prior to presenting the plan to stakeholders so that you have a strong understanding of the details behind each process and tool.
    • Frame the first iteration of the cycle as a pilot program. Use the completed results of the pilot to establish exploiting disruptive technology as a necessary company initiative.

    Insert the resources required by the disruptive tech exploitation team into Section 1.5 of the Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template. Have executives sign-off on the project in Section 1.6.

    Disruption has undermined some of the most successful tech companies

    “The IT department plays a critical role in [innovation]. What they can do is identify a technology that potentially might introduce improvements to the organization, whether it be through efficiency or through additional services to constituents.”
    - Michael Maguire, Management Consultant

    VoIP’s transformative effects

    Disruptive technology:
    Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a modern means of making phone calls through the internet by sending voice packets using data, as opposed to the traditional circuit transmissions of the PSTN.

    Who won:
    Organizations that realized the cost savings that VoIP provided for businesses with a steady internet connection saved as much as 60% on telephony expenses. Even in the early stages, with a few more limitations, organizations were able to save a significant amount of money and the technology has continued to improve.

    Who lost?
    Telecom-related companies that failed to realize VoIP was a potential threat to their market, and organizations that lacked the ability to explore and implement the disruptive technology early.

    Digital photography — the new norm

    Disruptive technology:
    Digital photography refers to the storing of photographs in a digital format, as opposed to traditional photography, which exposes light to sensitive photographic film.

    Who won:
    Photography companies and new players that exploited the evolution of data storage and applied it to photography succeeded. Those that were able to balance providing traditional photography and exploiting and introducing digital photography, such as Nikon, left competitors behind. Smartphone manufacturers also benefited by integrating digital cameras.

    Who lost?
    Photography companies, such as Kodak, that failed to respond to the digital revolution found themselves outcompeted and insolvent.

    1.1.D Help stakeholders understand what goes into formally exploiting disruptive tech by reviewing this process

    There are five steps to formally exploiting disruptive technology, each with its own individual outputs and tools to take analysis to the next level.

    Step 1.2:
    Hold Initial Meeting

    Output:

    • Initial list of disruptable processes;
    • Initial longlist

    Step 2.1:

    Brainstorm Longlist

    Output:

    • Finalized longlist;
    • Shortlist

    Step 2.2:

    Assess Shortlist

    Output:

    • Final shortlist;
    • SWOT analysis;
    • Tech categorization

    Step 3.1:
    Create Process Maps

    Output:

    • Completed process maps

    Step 3.2:
    Develop a proof of concept charter

    Output:

    • Proof-of-concept template with KPIs

    Info-Tech Insight

    Before going to stakeholders, complete the entire blueprint to better understand the tools and outputs of the process.

    1.1.E Establish the core working group and select a leader

    • Selecting your core membership for the working group is a critical step to the group’s success. Ensure that you satisfy the following criteria:
      • This is a team of subject matter experts. They will be overseeing the learning and piloting of disruptive technologies. Their input will also be valuable for senior executives and for implementing these technologies.
      • Choose members that can take time away from firefighting tasks to dedicate time to meetings.
      • It may be necessary to reach outside of the organization now or in the future for expertise on certain technologies. Use Info-Tech as a source of information.
    Organization Size Working Group Size
    Small 02-Jan
    Medium 05-Mar
    Large 10-May
    • Once the team is established, you must decide who will lead the group. Ensure that you satisfy the following criteria:
      • A leader should be credible, creative, and savvy in both technology and business.
      • The leader should facilitate, acting as both an expert and an aggregator of the information gathered by the team.

    Choose a compelling name

    The working group needs a name. Be sure to select one with a positive connotation within your organization.

    Section 1.3 of the Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template

    1.1.F Create a schedule with a time commitment appropriate to your organization’s size; it doesn’t need to take long

    Time the disruptive technology working group’s meetings to coincide and integrate with your organization’s strategic planning — at least annually.

    Size Meeting Frequency Time per Meeting Example Meeting Activities
    Small Annually One day A one-day meeting to run through phase 2 of the project (SWOT analysis and shortlist analysis).
    Medium Two days A two-day meeting to run through the project. The additional meeting involves phase 3 of this deck, developing a proof-of-concept plan.
    Large Two+ days Two meetings, each two days. Two days to create and winnow the longlist (phase 2), and two further days to develop a proof of concept plan.

    “Regardless of size, it’s incumbent upon every organization to have some familiarity of what’s happening over the next few years, [and to try] to anticipate what some of those trends may be. […] These trends are going to accelerate IT’s importance in terms of driving business strategy.”
    – Vern Brownell, CEO, D-Wave

    Section 1.4 of the Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template

    1.1.G Select a group of visionaries external to IT to help the working group brainstorm disruptive technologies

    Selecting advisors for your group is an ongoing step, and the roster can change.

    Ensure that you satisfy the following criteria:

    • Look beyond IT to select a team representing several business units.
    • Check for self-professed “geeks” and fans of science fiction that may be happy to join.
    • Membership can be a reward for good performance.

    This group does not have to meet as regularly as the core working group. Input from external advisors can occur between meetings. You can also include them on every second or third iteration of the entire process.

    However, the more input you can get into the group, the more innovative it can become.

    “It is … important to develop design fictions based on engagement with directly or indirectly implicated publics and not to be designed by experts alone.”
    – Emmanuel Tsekleves, Senior Lecturer in Design Interactions, University of Lancaster

    Section 1.3 of the Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template

    The following case study illustrates the innovative potential that is created when you include a diverse group of people

    INDUSTRY - Chip Manufacturing
    SOURCE - Clayton Christensen, Intel

    To achieve insight, you need to collaborate with people from outside of your department.

    Challenge

    • Headquartered in California, through the 1990s, Intel was the largest microprocessor chip manufacturer in the world, with revenue of $25 billion in 1997.
    • All was not perfect, however. Intel faced a challenge from Cyrix, a manufacturer of low-end chips. In 18 months, Cyrix’s share of the low-margin entry-level chip manufacturing business mushroomed from 10% to 70%.

    Solution

    • Troubled by the potential for significant disruption of the microprocessor market, Intel brought in external consultants to hold workshops to educate managers about disruptive innovation.
    • Managers would break into groups and discuss ways Intel could facilitate the disruption of its competitors. In one year, Intel hosted 18 workshops, and 2,000 managers went through the process.

    Results

    • Intel launched the Celeron chip to serve the lower end of the PC market and win market share back from Cyrix (which no longer exists as an independent company) and other competitors like AMD.
    • Within one year, Intel had captured 35% of the market.

    “[The models presented in the workshops] gave us a common language and a common way to frame the problem so that we could reach a consensus around a counterintuitive course of action.” – Andy Grove, then-CEO, Intel Corporation

    Phase 1: Identify

    Create your working group.

    Activities:

    Step 1.1: Establish the core working group and select a leader; select a group of visionaries
    Step 1.2: Train the group to think like futurists
    Step 1.3: Hold the initial meeting

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Infrastructure Manager
    • CIO or CTO
    • Potential members and visionaries of the working group

    Outcomes of this phase:

    • Establish a team of subject matter experts that will evaluate new, emerging, and potentially disruptive technologies.
    • Establish a process for including visionaries from outside of the working group who will provide insight and direction.
    • Introduce the core working group members.
    • Gain a better understanding of how technology advances.
    • Brainstorm a list of organizational processes.
    • Brainstorm an initial longlist.

    Step 1.2

    Train the group to think like futurists

    Activities:

    1. Look to the past to predict the future:
      • Step 1: Review the technology opportunities you missed
      • Step 2: Review and record what you liked about the tech
      • Step 3: Review and record your dislikes
      • Step 4: Record and test the reasonability
    2. Crash course on futurology principles
    3. Peek into the future

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Infrastructure Manager
    • CIO or CTO
    • Core working group members
    • Visionaries

    Outcomes of this step

    • Team members thinking like futurists
    • Better understanding of how technology advances
    • List of past examples and characteristics

    Info-Tech Insight

    Business buy-in is essential. Manage your business partners by providing a summary of the EDIT methodology and process. Validate the process value, which will allow you create a team of IT and business representatives.

    1.2 Train the group to think like futurists

    1 hour

    Ensure the team understands how technology advances and how they can identify patterns in upcoming technologies.

    1. Lead the group through a brainstorming session.
    2. Follow the next phases and steps.
    3. This session should be led by someone who can facilitate a thought-provoking discussion.
    4. This training deck finishes with a video.

    Input

    • Facilitated creativity
    • Training deck [following slides]

    Output

    • Inspiration
    • Anonymous ideas

    Materials

    • Futurist training “steps”
    • Pen and paper

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Visionaries
    • Facilitator

    1.2.A Look to the past to predict the future

    30 minutes

    Step 1

    Step 2 Step 3 Step 4

    Review what you missed.

    What did you like?

    What did you dislike?

    Test the reasonability.

    Think about a time you missed a technical disruptive opportunity.

    Start with a list of technologies that changed your business and processes.

    Consider those specifically you could have identified with a repeatable process.

    What were the most impactful points about the technology?

    Define a list of “characteristics” you liked.

    Create a shortlist of items.

    Itemize the impact to process, people, and technology.

    Why did you pass on the tech?

    Define a list of “characteristics” you did not like.

    Create a shortlist of items.

    Itemize the impact to process, people, and technology.

    Avoid the “arm chair quarterback” view.

    Refer to the six positive and negative points.

    Check against your data points at the end of each phase.

    Record the list of missed opportunities

    Record 6 characteristics

    Record 6 characteristics

    Completed “Think like a Futurists” tool

    Use the Disruptive Technology Research Look to the Past Tool to record your output.

    Input

    • Facilitated creativity
    • Speaker’s notes

    Output

    • Inspiration
    • Anonymous ideas
    • Recorded missed opportunities
    • Recorded positive points
    • Recorded dislikes
    • Reasonability test list

    Materials

    • Futurist training “steps”
    • Pen and paper
    • “Look to the Past” tool

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Visionaries
    • Facilitator

    Understand how the difference between linear and exponential growth will completely transform many organizations in the next decade

    “The last ten years have seen exponential growth in research on disruptive technologies and their impact on industries, supply chains, resources, training, education and employment markets … The debate is still open on who will be the winners and losers of future industries, but what is certain is that change has picked up pace and we are now in a new technology revolution whose impact is potentially greater than the industrial revolution.”
    – Gary L. Evans

    Exponential advancement will ensure that life in the next decade will be very different from life today.

    • Linear growth happens one step at a time.
    • The difference between linear and exponential is hard to notice, at first.
    • We are now at the knee of the curve.

    What about email?

    • Consider the amount of email you get daily
    • Double it
    • Triple it

    Exponential growth happens much faster than linear growth, especially when it hits the knee of the curve. Technology grows exponentially, and we are approaching the knee of the curve.

    This graph is adapted from research by Ray Kurzweil.

    Growth: Linear vs. Exponential

    This image contains a graph demonstrating examples of exponential and linear trends.

    1.2.B Crash course on futurology principles

    1 hour

    “An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).”
    - Ray Kurzweil

    Review the differences between exponential and linear growth

    The pace of technological advances makes progress difficult to predict.

    Technology advances exponentially. Rather than improving by the same amount of capability each year, it multiplies in capability each year.

    Think like a futurist to anticipate technology before it goes mainstream.

    Exponential growth happens much faster than linear growth, especially when it hits the knee of the curve. Even those who acknowledge exponential growth underestimate how capabilities can improve.

    The following case study illustrates the rise of social media providers

    “There are 7.7 billion people in the world, with at least 3.5 billion of us online. This means social media platforms are used by one in three people in the world and more than two-thirds of all internet users.”
    – Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

    This graph depicts the trend of the number of people using social media platforms between 2005 and 2019

    The following case study illustrates the rapid growth of Machine to Machine (M2M) connections

    A bar graph is shown which depicts the proportion of technology use from 2018-2022. the included devices are: Tablets; PCs; TVs; Non-smartphones; Smartphones; M2M

    Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns

    “Ray Kurzweil has been described as ‘the restless genius’ by The Wall Street Journal, and ‘the ultimate thinking machine’ by Forbes. He was ranked #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States by Inc Magazine, calling him the ‘rightful heir to Thomas Edison,’ and PBS included Ray as one of 16 ‘revolutionaries who made America,’ along with other inventors of the past two centuries.”
    Source: KurzweilAI.net

    Growth is linear?

    “Information technology is growing exponentially. That’s really my main thesis, and our intuition about the future is not exponential, it’s really linear. People think things will go at the current pace …1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 30 steps later, you’re at 30.”

    Better IT strategy enables future business innovation

    “The reality of information technology like computers, like biological technologies now, is it goes exponentially … 2, 4, 8, 16. At step 30, you’re at a billion, and this is not an idle speculation about the future.” [emphasis added]

    “When I was a student at MIT, we all shared a computer that cost tens of millions of dollars. This computer [pulling his smartphone out of his pocket] is a million times cheaper, a thousand times more powerful — that’s a billion-fold increase in MIPS per dollar, bits per dollar… and we’ll do it again in 25 years.”
    Source: “IT growth and global change: A conversation with Ray Kurzweil,” McKinsey & Company

    1.2.C Peak into the future

    1 hour

    Leverage industry roundtables and trend reports to understand the art of the possible

    • Uncover important business and industry trends that can inform possibilities for technology disruption.
    • Market research is critical in identifying factors external to your organization and identifying technology innovation that will provide a competitive edge. It’s important to evaluate the impact each trend or opportunity will have in your organization and market.

    Visit Info-Tech’s Trends & Priorities Research Center

    Visit Info-Tech’s Industry Coverage Research to get started.

    Phase 1: Identify

    Create your working group

    Activities:

    Step 1.1: Establish the core working group and select a leader; select a group of visionaries
    Step 1.2: Train the group to think like futurists
    Step 1.3: Hold the initial meeting

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Infrastructure Manager
    • CIO or CTO
    • Potential members and visionaries of the working group

    Outcomes of this phase:

    • Establish a team of subject matter experts that will evaluate new, emerging, and potentially disruptive technologies.
    • Establish a process for including visionaries from outside of the working group who will provide insight and direction.
    • Introduce the core working group members.
    • Gain a better understanding of how technology advances.
    • Brainstorm a list of organizational processes.
    • Brainstorm an initial longlist.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Establish the longlist. The longlist help create a holistic view of most technologies that could impact the business. Assigning values and quadrant scoring will shortlist the options and focus your PoC option.

    Step 1.3

    Hold the initial meeting

    Activities:

    1. Create an agenda for the meeting
    2. Start the kick-off meeting with introductions and a recap
    3. Brainstorm about creating a better future
    4. Begin brainstorming an initial longlist
    5. Have team members develop separate longlists for their next meeting

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Infrastructure Manager
    • CIO or CTO
    • Core working group members
    • Visionaries

    Outcomes of this step

    • Introduce the core working group members
    • Gain a better understanding of how technology advances
    • Brainstorm a list of organizational processes
    • Brainstorm an initial longlist

    1.3.A Create an agenda for the meeting

    1 hour

    Kick-off this cycle of the disruptive technology process by welcoming your visionaries and introducing your core working group.

    The purpose of the initial meeting is to brainstorm where new technology will be the most disruptive within the organization. You’ll develop two longlists: one of business processes and one of disruptive technology. These longlists are in addition to the independent research your core working group will perform before Phase 2.

    • Find an outgoing facilitator. Sitting back will let you focus more on ideating, and an engaging presenter will help bring out ideas from your visionaries.
    • The training deck (see step 1.2c) includes presenting a video. We’ve included some of our top choices for you to choose from.
      • Feel free to find your own video or bring in a keynote speaker.
      • The object of the video is to get the group thinking about the future.
      • Customize the training deck as needed.
    • If a cycle has been completed, present your findings and all of the group’s completed deliverables in the first section.
    • This session is the only time you have with your visionaries. Get their ideas on what technologies will be disruptive to start forming a longlist.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The disruptive tech team is prestigious. If your organization is large enough or has the resources, consider having this meeting in an offsite location. This will drive excitement to join the working group if the opportunity arises and incentivize good work.

    Meeting Agenda (Sample)

    Time

    Activity

    8:00am-8:30am Introductions and previous meeting recap
    8:30am-9:30am Training deck
    9:30 AM-10:00am Brainstorming
    10:00am-10:15am Break
    10:15am-10:45am Develop good research techniques
    10:45am-12:00pm Begin compiling your longlist

    Info-Tech Insight

    The disruptive tech team is prestigious. If your organization is large enough or has the resources, consider having this meeting in an offsite location. This will drive excitement to join the working group if the opportunity arises and incentivize good work.

    1.3.B Start the kick-off meeting with introductions and a summary of what work has been done so far

    30 minutes

    1. Start the meeting off with an icebreaker activity. This isn’t an ordinary business meeting – or even group – so we recommend starting off with an activity that will emphasize this unique nature. To get the group in the right mindset, try this activity:
      1. Go around the group and have people present:
      2. Their names and roles
      3. Pose some or all of the following questions/prompts to the group:
        • “Tell me about something you have created.”
        • “Tell me about a time you created a process or program considered risky.”
        • “Tell me about a situation in which you had to come up with several new ideas in a hurry. Were they accepted? Were they successful?”
        • “Tell me about a time you took a risk.”
        • “Tell me about one of your greatest failures and what you learned from it.”
    2. Once everyone has been introduced, present any work that has already been completed.
      1. If you have already completed a cycle, give a summary of each technology that you investigated and the results from any piloting.
      2. If this is the first cycle for the working group, present the information decided in Step 1.1.

    Input

    • Disruptive technology exploitation plan

    Output

    • Networking
    • Brainstorming

    Materials

    • Meeting agenda

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Visionaries
    • Facilitator

    1.3.C Brainstorm about creating a better future for the company, the stakeholders, and the employees

    30 minutes

    Three sticky notes are depicted, at the top of each note are the following titles: What can we do better; How can we make a better future; How can we continue being successful

    1. Have everyone put up at least two ideas for each chart paper.
    2. Go around the room and discuss their ideas. You may generate some new ideas here.

    These generated ideas are organizational processes that can be improved or disrupted with emerging technologies. This list will be referenced throughout Phases 2 and 3.

    Input

    • Inspiration
    • Anonymous ideas

    Output

    • List of processes

    Materials

    • Chart paper and markers
    • Pen and paper

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Visionaries

    1.3.D Begin brainstorming a longlist of future technology, and discuss how these technologies will impact the business

    30 minutes

    • Use the Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool to organize technologies and ideas. Longstanding working groups can track technologies here over the course of several years, updating the tool between meetings.
    • Guide the discussion with the following questions, and make sure to focus on the processes generated from Step 1.2.d.

    Focus on

    The Technology

    • What is the technology and what does it do?
    • What processes can it support?

    Experts and Other Organizations

    • What are the vendors saying about the technology?
    • Are similar organizations implementing the technology?

    Your Organization

    • Is the technology ready for wide-scale distribution?
    • Can the technology be tested and implemented now?

    The Technology’s Value

    • Is there any indication of the cost of the technology?
    • How much value will the technology bring?

    Download the Disruptive Technology Database Tool

    Input

    • Inspiration
    • List of processes

    Output

    • Initial longlist

    Materials

    • Chart paper and markers
    • Pen and paper
    • Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Visionaries

    1.3.E Explore these sources to generate your disruptive technology longlist for the next meeting

    30 Minutes

    There are many sources of information on new and emerging technology. Explore as many sources as you can.

    Science fiction is a valid source of learning. It drives and is influenced by disruptive technology.

    “…the inventor of the first liquid-fuelled rocket … was inspired by H.G. Wells’ science fiction novel War of the Worlds (1898). More recent examples include the 3D gesture-based user interface used by Tom Cruise’s character in Minority Report (2002), which is found today in most touch screens and the motion sensing capability of Microsoft’s Kinect. Similarly, the tablet computer actually first appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the communicator – which we’ve come to refer today as the mobile phone – was first used by Captain Kirk in Star Trek (1966).”
    – Emmanuel Tsekleves, senior lecturer, University of Lancaster

    Right sources: blogs, tech news sites, tech magazines, the tech section of business sites, popular science books about technology, conferences, trade publications, and vendor announcements

    Quantity over quality: early research is not the time to dismiss ideas.

    Discuss with your peers: spark new and innovative ideas

    Insert a brief summary of how independent research is conducted in Section 2.1 of the Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template.

    1.3.E (Cont.) Explore these sources to generate your disruptive technology longlist for the next meeting

    30 Minutes

    There are many sources of information on new and emerging technology. Use this list to kick-start your search.

    Connect with practitioners that are worth their weight in Reddit gold. Check out topic-based LinkedIn groups and subreddits such as r/sysadmin and r/tech. People experienced with technology frequent these groups.

    YouTube is for more than cat videos. Many vendors use YouTube for distributing their previous webinars. There are also videos showcasing various technologies that are uploaded by lecturers, geeks, researchers, and other technology enthusiasts.

    Test your reasonability. Check your “Think Like a Futurist” Tool

    Resolve

    Evaluate Disruptive Technologies

    PHASE 2

    Phase 2: Resolve

    Evaluate disrupted technologies

    Activities:

    Step 2.1: Create and Winnow a Longlist
    Step 2.2: Assess Shortlist

    Info-Tech Insight

    Long to short … that’s the short of it. Using SWOT, value readiness, and quadrant mapping review sessions will focus the longlist, creating a shortlist of potential PoC candidates to review and consider.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group
    • Infrastructure Management

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Finalized longlist
    • Finalized shortlist
    • Initial analysis of each technology on the shortlist

    Step 2.1

    Create and winnow a longlist

    Activities:

    1. Converge everyone’s longlists
    2. Narrow technologies from the longlist down to a shortlist using Info-Tech’s Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool
    3. Use the shortlisting tool to help participants visualize the potential
    4. Input the technologies on your longlist into the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool to produce a shortlist

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group members

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Finalized longlist
    • Finalized shortlist
    • Initial analysis of each technology on the shortlist

    2.1 Organize a meeting with the core working group to combine your longlists and create a shortlist

    1 hour

    Plan enough time to talk about each technology on the list. Each technology was included for a reason.

    • Start with the longlist. Review the longlist compiled at the initial meeting, and then have everyone present the lists that they independently researched.
    • Focus on the company’s context. Make sure that the working group analyzes these disruptive technologies in the context of the organization.
    • Start to compile the shortlist. Begin narrowing down the longlist by excluding technologies that are not relevant.

    Meeting Agenda (Sample)

    TimeActivity
    8:00am-9:30amConverge longlists
    9:30am-10:00amBreak
    10:00am-10:45amDiscuss tech in organizational context
    10:45am-11:15amBegin compiling the shortlist

    Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template

    2.1.A Converge the longlists developed by your team

    90 minutes

    • Start with the longlist developed at the initial meeting. Write this list on the whiteboard.
    • If applicable, have a member present the longlist that was created in the last cycle. Remove technologies that:
      • Are no longer disruptive (e.g. have been implemented or rejected).
      • Have become foundational.
    • Eliminate redundancy: remove items that are very similar.
    • Have members “pitch” items on their lists:
      • Explain why their technologies will be disruptive (2-5 minutes maximum)
      • Add new technologies to the whiteboard
    • Record the following for metrics:
      • Each presented technology
      • Reasons the technology could be disruptive
      • Source of the information
    • Use Info-Tech’s Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool as a starting point.

    Insert the final longlist into Section 2.2 of your Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template.

    Input

    • Longlist developed at first meeting
    • Independent research
    • Previous longlist

    Output

    • Finalized longlist

    Materials

    • Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool
    • Whiteboard and markers
    • Virtual whiteboard

    Participants

    • Core working group

    Review the list of processes that were brainstormed by the visionary group, and ask for input from others

    • IT innovation is most highly valued by the C-suite when it improves business processes, reduces costs, and improves core products and services.
    • By incorporating this insight into your working group’s analysis, you help to attract the attention of senior management and reinforce the group’s necessity.
    • Any input you can get from outside of IT will help your group understand how technology can be disruptive.
      • Visionaries consulted in Phase 1 are a great source for this insight.
    • The list of processes that they helped to brainstorm in Step 1.2 reflects processes that can be impacted by technology.
    • Info-Tech’s research has shown time and again that both CEOs and CIOs want IT to innovate around:
      • Improving business processes
      • Improving core products and services
      • Reducing costs

    Improved business processes

    80%

    Core product and service improvement

    48%

    Reduced costs

    48%

    Increased revenues

    23%

    Penetration into new markets

    21%

    N=364 CXOs & CIOs from the CEO-CIO Alignment Diagnostic Questions were asked on a 7-point scale of 1 = Not at all to 7 = Very strongly. Results are displayed as percentage of respondents selecting 6 or 7.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The disruptive tech team is prestigious. If your organization is large enough or has the resources, consider having this meeting in an offsite location. This will drive excitement to join the working group if the opportunity arises and incentivize good work.

    2.1.B Narrow technologies from the longlist down to a shortlist using Info-Tech’s Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool

    90 minutes

    To decide which technology has potential for your organization, have the working group or workshop participants evaluate each technology:

    1. Record each potentially disruptive technology in the longlist on a whiteboard.
    2. Making sure to carefully consider the meaning of the terms, have each member of the group evaluate each technology as “high” or “low” along each of the axes, innovation and transformation, on a piece of paper.
    3. The facilitator collects each piece of paper and inputs the results by technology into the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool.
    Technology Innovation Transformation
    Conversational Commerce High High

    Insert the final shortlist into Section 2.2 of your Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template.

    Input

    • Longlist
    • Futurist brainstorming

    Output

    • Shortlist

    Materials

    • Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool
    • Whiteboard and markers
    • Virtual whiteboard

    Participants

    • Core working group

    Disruptive technologies are innovative and transformational

    Innovation

    Transformation

    • Elements:
      • Creative solution to a problem that is relatively new on the scene.
      • It is different, counterintuitive, or insightful or has any combination of these qualities.
    • Questions to Ask:
      • How new is the technology?
      • How different is the technology?
      • Have you seen anything like it before? Is it counterintuitive?
      • Does it offer an insightful solution to a persistent problem?
    • Example:
      • The sharing economy: Today, simple platforms allow people to share rides and lodgings cheaply and have disrupted traditional services.
    • Elements:
      • Positive change to the business process.
      • Highly impactful: impacts a wide variety of roles in a company in a nontrivial way or impacts a smaller number of roles more significantly.
    • Questions to Ask:
      • Will this technology have a big impact on business operations?
      • Will it add substantial value? Will it change the structure of the company?
      • Will it impact a significant number of employees in the organization?
    • Example:
      • Flash memory improved storage technology incrementally by building on an existing foundation.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Technology can be transformational but not innovative. Not every new technology is disruptive. Even where technology has improved the efficiency of the business, if it does this in an incremental way, it might not be worth exploring using this storyboard.

    2.1.C Use the shortlisting tool to help participants visualize the potential

    1 hour

    Use the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool, tabs 2 and 3.

    Assign quadrants

    • Input group members’ names and the entire longlist (up to 30 technologies) into tab 2 of the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool.
    • On tab 3 of the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool, input the quadrant number that corresponds to the innovation and transformation scores each participant has assigned to each technology.

    Note

    This is an assessment meant to serve as a guide. Use discretion when moving forward with a proof-of-concept project for any potentially disruptive technology.

    Participant Evaluation Quadrant
    High Innovation, High Transformation 1
    High Innovation, Low Transformation 2
    Low Innovation, Low Transformation 3
    Low Innovation, High Transformation 4

    four quadrants are depicted, labeled 1-4. The quadrants are coloured as follows: 1- green; 2- yellow; 3; red; 4; yellow

    2.1.D Use the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool to produce a shortlist

    1 hour

    Use the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool, tabs 3 and 4.

    Use the populated matrix and the discussion list to arrive at a shortlist of four to six potentially disruptive technologies.

    • The tool populates each quadrant based on how many votes it received in the voting exercise.
    • Technologies selected for a particular quadrant by a majority of participants are placed in the quadrant on the graph. Where there was no consensus, the technology is placed in the discussion list.
    • Technologies in the upper right quadrant – high transformation and high innovation – are more likely to be good candidates for a proof-of-concept project. Those in the bottom left are likely to be poor candidates, while those in the remaining quadrants are strong on one of the axes and are unlikely candidates for further systematic evaluation.

    This image contains a screenshot from tab 3 of the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool.

    Input the results of the vote into tab 3 of the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool.

    This image contains a screenshot from tab 4 of the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool.

    View the results on tab 4.

    Phase 2: Resolve

    Evaluate disrupted technologies

    Activities:

    Step 2.1: Create and Winnow a Longlist
    Step 2.2:- Assess Shortlist

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group
    • Infrastructure Management

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Finalized longlist
    • Finalized shortlist
    • Initial analysis of each technology on the shortlist

    Assess Shortlist

    Activities:

    1. Assess the value of each technology to your organization by breaking it down into quality and cost
    2. Investigate the overall readiness of the technologies on the shortlist
    3. Interpret each technology’s value score
    4. Conduct a SWOT analysis for each technology on the shortlist
    5. Use Info-Tech’s disruptive technology shortlist analysis to visualize the tool’s outputs
    6. Select the shortlisted technologies you would like to move forward with

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group members
    • IT Management

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Finalized shortlist
    • Initial analysis of each technology on the shortlist

    2.2 Evaluate technologies based on their value and readiness, and conduct a SWOT analysis for each one

    Use the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    • A technology monitor diagram prioritizes investment in technology by analyzing its readiness and value.
      • Readiness: how close the technology is to being practical and implementable in your industry and organization.
      • Value: how worthwhile the technology is, in terms of its quality and its cost.
    • Value and readiness questionnaires are included in the tool to help determine current and future values for each, and the next four slides explain the ratings further.
    • Categorize technology by its value-readiness score, and evaluate how much potential value each technology has and how soon your company can realize that value.
    • Use a SWOT analysis to qualitatively evaluate the potential that each technology has for your organization in each of the four categories (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats).

    The technology monitor diagram appears in tab 9 of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    This image depicts tab 9 of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    2.2.A Assess the value of each technology to your organization by breaking it down into quality and cost

    1 hour

    Update the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool, tab 4.

    Populate the chart to produce a score for each technology’s overall value to the company conceptualized as the interaction of quality and cost.

    Overall Value

    Quality Cost

    Each technology, if it has a product associated with it, can be evaluated along eight dimensions of quality. Consider how well the product performs, its features, its reliability, its conformance, its durability, its serviceability, its aesthetics, and its perceived quality.

    IT budgets are broken down into capital and operating expenditures. A technology that requires a significant investment along either of these lines is unlikely to produce a positive return. Also consider how much time it will take to implement and operate each technology.

    The value assessment is part of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    This image contains a screenshot from tab 4 of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Watch your costs: Technology that seems cheap at first can actually be expensive over time. Be sure to account for operational and opportunity costs as well.

    2.2.B Investigate the overall readiness of the technologies on the shortlist

    1 hour

    Update the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool, tab 4.

    Overall Readiness

    Age

    How much time has the technology had to mature? Older technology is more likely to be ready for adoption.

    Venture Capital

    The amount of venture capital gathered by important firms in the space is an indicator of market faith.

    Market Size

    How big is the market for the technology? It is more difficult to break into a giant market than a niche market.

    Market Players

    Have any established vendors (Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc.) thrown their weight behind the technology?

    Fragmentation

    A large number of small companies in the space indicates that the market has yet to reach equilibrium.

    The readiness assessment is part of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    This image contains a screenshot of the Readiness Scoring tab of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool.

    Use a variety of sources to populate the chart

    Google is your friend: search each shortlisted technology to find details about its development and important vendors.

    Websites like Crunchbase, VentureBeat, and Mashable are useful sources for information on the companies involved in a space and the amount of money they have each raised.

    2.2.C Interpret each technology’s value score

    1 hour

    Insert the result of the SWOT analysis into tab 7 of Info-Tech’s Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool.

    Visualize the results of the quality-cost analysis

    • Quality and cost are independently significant; it is essential to understand how each technology stacks up on the axes.
    • Use tab 6 of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool for an illustration of how quality and cost interact to produce each technology’s final position on the tech monitor graph.
    • Remember: the score is notional and reflects the values that you have assigned. Be sure to treat it accordingly.

    This image contains a screenshot of the Value Analysis tab of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    Green represents a technology that scores extremely high on one axis or the other, or quite high on both. These technologies are the best candidates for proof-of-concept projects from a value perspective.

    Red represents a technology that has scored very low on both axes. These technologies will be expensive, time consuming, and of poor quality.

    Yellow represents the fuzzy middle ground. These technologies score moderately on both axes. Be especially careful when considering the SWOT analysis of these technologies.

    2.2.D Conduct a SWOT analysis for each technology on the shortlist

    1 hour

    Use tab 6 of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool.

    A formal process for analyzing disruptive technology is the only way to ensure that it is taken seriously.

    Write each technology as a heading on a whiteboard. Spend 10-15 minutes on each technology conducting a SWOT analysis together.

    Consider four categories for each technology:

    • Strengths: Current uses of the technology or supporting technology and ways in which it helps your organization.
    • Weaknesses: Current limitations of the technology and challenges or barriers to adopting it in your organization.
    • Opportunities: Potential uses of the technology, especially as it advances or improves.
    • Threats: Potential negative disruptions resulting from the technology, especially as it advances or improves.

    The list of processes generated at the cycle’s initial meeting is a great source for opportunities and threats.

    Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    This image contains screenshots of the technology tab of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool.

    2.2.E Use Info-Tech’s disruptive technology shortlist analysis to visualize the tool’s outputs

    1 hour

    Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool, tab 9

    The tool’s final tab displays the results of the value-readiness analysis and the SWOT analysis in a single location.

    This image contains a screenshot from tab 9 of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    Insert the shortlist analysis report into Section 3 of your Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template.

    2.2.F Select the shortlisted technologies you would like to move forward with

    1 hour

    Present your findings to the working group.

    • The Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool aggregates your inputs in an easy-to-read, consistent way.
    • Present the tool’s outputs to members of the core working group.
    • Explain the scoring and present the graphic to the group. Go over each technology’s strengths and weaknesses as well as the opportunities and threats it presents/poses to the organization.
    • Go through the proof-of-concept planning phase before striking any technologies from the list.

    This image contains a screenshot of the disruptive technology shortlist analysis from the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    Info-Tech Insight

    A technology’s exceptional value and immediate usability make it the best. A technology can be promising and compelling, but it is unsuitable unless it can bring immediate and exceptional value to your organization. Don’t get caught up in the hype.

    Evaluate

    Create an Action Plan to Exploit Disruptive Technologies

    PHASE 3

    Phase 3: Evaluate

    Create an Action Plan to Exploit Disruptive Technologies

    Activities:

    Step 3.1: Create Process Maps
    Step 3.2: Develop Proof of Concept Charter

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group
    • Infrastructure Management
    • Working group leader
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Business process maps before and after disruption
    • Proof of concept charter
    • Key performance indicators
    • Estimation of required resources

    Step 3.1

    Create Process Maps

    Activities:

    1. Creating a problem canvas by identifying stakeholders, jobs, pains, and gains
    2. Clarify the problem the proof-of-concept project will solve
    3. Identify jobs and stakeholders
    4. Outline how disruptive technology will solve the problem
    5. Map business processes
    6. Identify affected business units
    7. Outline and map the business processes likely to be disrupted
    8. Recognize how the new technology will impact business processes
    9. Make the case: Outline why the new business process is superior to the old

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Working group leader
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Business process maps before and after disruption

    3.1 Create an action plan to exploit disruptive technologies

    Clarify the problem in order to make the case. Fill in section 1.1 of Info-Tech’s Proof of Concept Template to clearly outline the problem each proof of concept is designed to solve.

    Establish roles and responsibilities. Use section 1.2 of the template to outline the roles and responsibilities that fall to each member of the team. Ensure that clear lines of authority are delineated and that the list of stakeholders is exhaustive: include the executives whose input will be required for project approval, all the way to the technicians on the frontline responsible for implementing it.

    Outline the solution to the problem. Demonstrate how each proof-of-concept project provides a solution to the problem outlined in section 1.1. Be sure to clarify what makes the particular technology under investigation a potential solution and record the results in section 1.3.

    This image contains a screenshot of the Proof of concept project template

    Use the Proof of Concept Project Template to track the information you gather throughout Phase 3.

    3.1.A Creating a problem canvas by identifying stakeholders, jobs, pains, and gains

    2 hours

    Instructions:

    1. On a whiteboard, draw the visual canvas supplied below.
    2. Select your issue area, and list jobs, pains, and gains in the associated sections.
    3. Record the pains, jobs, and gains in sections 1.1-1.3 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    Gains

    1. More revenue

    2. Job security

    3. ……

    Jobs

    1. Moving product

    2. Per sale value

    3. ……

    Pains

    1. Clunky website

    2. Bad site navigation

    3. ……

    Input

    • Inspiration
    • Anonymous ideas

    Output

    • List of processes

    Materials

    • Chart paper and markers
    • Pen and paper

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Visionaries

    3.1.B Clarify the problem the proof-of-concept project will solve

    2 hours

    What is the problem?

    • Every technology is designed to solve a problem faced by somebody somewhere. For each technology that your team has decided to move forward with, identify and clearly state the problem it would solve.
    • A clear problem statement is a crucial part of a new technology’s business case. It is impossible to earn buy-in from the rest of the organization without demonstrating the necessity of a solution.
    • Perfection is impossible to achieve: during the course of their work, everyone encounters pain points. Identify those pain points to arrive at the problem that needs to be solved.

    Example:

    List of pains addressed by conversational commerce:

    • Search functions can be clunky and unresponsive.
    • Corporate websites can be difficult to navigate.
    • Customers are uncomfortable in unfamiliar internet environments.
    • Customers do not like waiting in a long queue to engage with customer service representatives when they have concerns.

    “If I were given one hour to solve a problem, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.”
    – Albert Einstein

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 1.1 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.1.C Identify jobs and stakeholders

    1 hour

    Jobs

    Job: Anything that the “customer” (the target of the solution) needs to get done but that is complicated by a pain.

    Examples:
    The job of the conversational commerce interface is to make selling products easier for the company.
    From the customer perspective, the job of the conversational interface is to make the act of purchasing a product simpler and easier.

    Stakeholders

    Stakeholder: Anyone who is impacted by the new technology and who will end up using, approving, or implementing it.

    Examples:
    The executive is responsible for changing the company’s direction and approving investment in a new sales platform.
    The IT team is responsible for implementing the new technology.
    Marketing will be responsible for selling the change to customers.
    Customers, the end users, will be the ones using the conversational commerce user interface.

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 1.2 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Process deconstruction reveals strengths and weaknesses. Promising technology should improve stakeholders’ abilities to do jobs.

    3.1.D Outline how disruptive technology will solve the problem

    1 hour

    How will the technology in question make jobs easier?

    • How will the disruptive technology you have elected to move forward with create gains for the organization?
    • First, identify the gains that are supposed to come with the project. Consider the benefits that the various stakeholders expect to derive from the jobs identified.
    • Second, make note of how the technology in question facilitates the gains you have noted. Be sure to articulate the exclusive features of the new technology that make it an improvement over the current state.

    Note: The goal of this exercise is to make the case for a particular technology. Sell it!

    Expected Gain: Increase in sales.

    Conversational Commerce’s Contribution: Customers are more likely to purchase products using interfaces they are comfortable with.

    Expected Gain: Decrease in costs.

    Conversational Commerce’s Contribution: Customers who are satisfied with the conversational interface are less likely to interact with live agents, saving labor costs.

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 1.3 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.1.E Map business processes

    1 hour

    Map the specific business processes the new technology will impact.

    • Disruptive technologies will impact a wide variety of business processes.
    • Map business processes to visualize what parts of your organization (departments, silos, divisions) will be impacted by the new technology, should it be adopted after the proof of concept.
    • Identify how the disruption will take place.
    • Demonstrate the value of each technology by including the results of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool with your process map.

    This image contains a screenshot of the Proof of concept project template

    Use the Proof of Concept Project Template to track the information you gather throughout Phase 3.

    3.1.F Identify affected business units

    30 minutes per technology

    Disruptive technology will impact business units.

    • Using the stakeholders identified earlier in the project, map each technology to the business units that will be affected.
    • Make your list exhaustive. While some technologies will have a limited impact on the business as a whole, others will have ripple effects throughout the organization.
    • Examine affected units at all scales: How will the technology impact operations at the team level? The department level? The division level?

    “The disruption is not just in the technology. Sometimes a good business model can be the disruptor.”
    – Jason Hong, Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon

    Example:

    • Customer service teams: Conversational commerce will replace some of the duties of the customer service representative. They will have to reorganize to account for this development.
    • IT department: The IT department will be responsible for building/maintaining the conversational interface (or, more likely, they will be responsible for managing the contract with the vendor).
    • Sales analytics: New data from customers in natural language might provide a unique opportunity for the analytics team to develop new initiatives to drive sales growth.

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 2.1 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.1.G Outline and map the business processes likely to be disrupted

    15 minutes per technology

    Leverage the insights of the diverse working group.

    • Processes are designed to transform inputs into outputs. All business activities can be mapped into processes.
    • A process map illustrates the sequence of actions and decisions that transform an input into an output.
    • Effective mapping gives managers an “aerial” view of the company’s processes, making it easier to identify inefficiencies, reduce waste, and ultimately, streamline operations.
    • To identify business processes, have group members familiar with the affected business units identify how jobs are typically accomplished within those units.

    “To truly understand a business process, we need information from both the top-down and bottom-up points of view. Informants higher in the organizational hierarchy with a strategic focus are less likely to know process details or problems. But they might advocate and clearly articulate an end-to-end, customer-oriented philosophy that describes the process in an idealized form. Conversely, the salespeople, customer service representatives, order processors, shipping clerks, and others who actually carry out the processes will be experts about the processes, their associated documents, and problems or exception cases they encounter.”
    – Robert J. Glushko, Professor at UC Berkeley and Tim McGrath, Business Consultant

    Info-Tech Insight

    Opinions gathered from a group that reflect the process in question are far more likely to align with your organization’s reality. If you have any questions about a particular process, do not be afraid to go outside of the working group to ask someone who might know.

    3.1.G Outline and map the business processes likely to be disrupted (continued)

    15 minutes per technology

    Create a simple diagram of identified processes.

    • Use different shapes to identify different points in the process.
    • Rectangles represent actions, diamonds represent decisions.
    • On a whiteboard, map out the actions and decisions that take place to transform an input into an output.
    • Input the result into section 2.2 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    This image contains a screenshot of the Software Service Cross-Function Process tab from Edraw Visualization Solutions.

    Source: Edraw Visualization Solutions

    Example: simplified process map

    1. User: visits company website
    2. User: engages search function or browses links
    3. User: selects and purchases product from a menu
    4. Company: ships product to customer

    3.1.H Recognize how the new technology will impact business processes

    15 minutes per technology

    Using the information gleaned from the previous activities, develop a new process map that takes the new technology into account.

    Identify the new actions or decisions that the new technology will affect.

    User: visits company website; User: engages conversational; commerce platform; User: engages search function or browses links; User: makes a natural language query; User: selects and purchases product from a menu</p data-verified=

    User: selects and purchases product from a menu; Company: ships product to customer; Company: ships product to customer">

    Info-Tech Insight

    It’s ok to fail! The only way to know you’re getting close to the “knee of curve" is from multiple failed PoC tests. The more PoC options you have, the more likely it will be that you will have two to three successful results.

    3.1.I Make the case: Outline why the new business process is superior to the old

    15 minutes per technology

    Articulate the main benefits of the new process.

    • Using the revised process map, make the case for each new action.
    • Questions to consider: How does the new technology relieve end-user/customer pains? How does the new technology contribute to the streamlining of the business process? Who will benefit from the new action? What are the implications of those benefits?
    • Record the results of this exercise in section 2.4 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    This image contains an example of an outline comparing the benefits of new and the old business processes.

    Info-Tech Insight

    If you cannot articulate how a new technology will benefit a business process, reconsider moving forward with the proof-of-concept project.

    Phase 3: Evaluate

    Create an Action Plan to Exploit Disruptive Technologies

    Activities:

    Step 3.1: Create Process Maps
    Step 3.2: Develop Proof of Concept Charter

    Develop Proof of Concept Charter

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group
    • Infrastructure Management
    • Working group leader
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Business process maps before and after disruption
    • Proof of concept charter
    • Key performance indicators
    • Estimation of required resources

    Step 3.2

    Develop Proof of Concept Charter

    Activities:

    1. Use SMART success metrics to define your objectives
    2. Develop key performance indicators (KPIs)
    3. Identify key success factors for the project
    4. Outline the project’s scope
    5. Identify the structure of the team responsible for the proof-of-concept project
    6. Estimate the resources required by the project
    7. Be aware of common IT project concerns
    8. Communicate your working group’s findings and successes to a wide audience
    9. Hand off the completed proof-of-concept project plan
    10. Disruption is constant: Repeat the evaluation process regularly to protect the business

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Working group leader
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Proof of concept charter
    • Key performance indicators
    • Estimation of required resources

    3.2 Develop a proof of concept charter

    Keep your proof of concept on track by defining five key dimensions.

    1. Objective: Giving an overview of the planned proof of concept will help to focus and clarify the rest of this section. What must the proof of concept achieve? Objectives should be: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound. Outline and track key performance indicators.
    2. Key Success Factors: These are conditions that will positively impact the proof of concept’s success.
    3. Scope: High-level statement of scope. More specifically, state what is in scope and what is out of scope.
    4. Project Team: Identify the team’s structure, e.g. sponsors, subject-matter experts.
    5. Resource Estimation: Identify what resources (time, materials, space, tools, expertise, etc.) will be needed to build and socialize your prototype. How will they be secured?

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 3.0 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.2.A Use SMART success metrics to define your objectives

    Specific

    Measurable

    Actionable

    Realistic

    Time Bound

    Make sure the objective is clear and detailed.

    Objectives are measurable if there are specific metrics assigned to measure success. Metrics should be objective.

    Objectives become actionable when specific initiatives designed to achieve the objective are identified.

    Objectives must be achievable given your current resources or known available resources.

    An objective without a timeline can be put off indefinitely. Furthermore, measuring success is challenging without a timeline.

    Who, what, where, why?

    How will you measure the extent to which the goal is met?

    What is the action-oriented verb?

    Is this within my capabilities?

    By when: deadline, frequency?

    Examples:

    1. Increase in sales by $40,000 per month by the end of next quarter.
    2. Immediate increase in web traffic by 600 unique page views per day.
    3. Number of pilots approved per year.
    4. Number of successfully deployed solutions per year.

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 3.0 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.2.B Develop key performance indicators (KPIs)

    30 minutes per technology

    Key performance indicators allow for rigorous analysis, which generates insight into utilization by platform and consumption by business activity.

    • Use the process improvements identified in step 3.1 to brainstorm metrics that indicate when process improvement is actually taking place.
    • Have members of the group pitch KPIs; the facilitator should record each suggestion on a whiteboard.
    • Make sure to have everyone justify the inclusion of each metric: How does it relate to the improvement that the proof of concept project is intended to drive? How does it relate to the overall goals of the business?
    • Include a list of KPIs, along with a description and a target (ensuring that it aligns with SMART metrics) in section 3.1 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    “An estimated 70% of performance measurement systems fail after implementation. Carefully select your KPIs and avoid this trap!”
    Source: Collins et al. 2016

    Key Performance Indicator Description Target

    Result

    Conversion rate What percentage of customers who visit the site/open the conversational interface continue on to make a purchase? 40%
    Average order value

    How much does each customer spend per visit to the website?

    $212
    Repeat customer rate What percentage of customers have made more than one purchase over time? 65%
    Lifetime customer value Over the course of their interaction with the company, what is the typical value each customer brings? $1566

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 3.1 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.2.C Identify key success factors for the project

    30 minutes per technology

    Effective project management involves optimizing four key success factors (Clarke, 1999)

    • Communication: Communicate the expected changes to stakeholders, making sure that everyone who needs to know does know. Example: Make sure customer service representatives know their duties will be impacted by the conversational UI well before the proof-of-concept project begins.
    • Clarity: All involved in the project should be apprised of what the project is intended to accomplish and what the project is not intended to accomplish. Example: The conversational commerce project is not intended to be rolled out to the entire customer base all at once; it is not intended to disrupt normal online sales.
    • Compartmentalization: The working group should suggest some ways that the project can be broken down to facilitate its effective implementation. Example: Sales provides details of customers who might be amenable to a trial, IT secures a vendor, customer service writes a script.
    • Flexibility: The working group’s final output should not be treated as gospel. Ensure that the document can be altered to account for unexpected events. Example: The conversational commerce platform might drive sales of a particular product more than others, necessitating adjustments at the warehouse and shipping level.

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 3.0 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.2.D Outline the project’s scope

    10 minutes per technology

    Create a high-level outline of the project’s scope.

    • Questions to consider: Broadly speaking, what are the project’s goals? What is the desired future state? Where in the company will the project be rolled out? What are some of the company’s goals that the project is not designed to cover?
    • Be sure to avoid scope creep! Remember: The goal of the proof-of-concept project is to produce a minimum case for viability in a carefully defined area. Reserve a detailed accounting of costs and benefits for the post-proof-of-concept stage.
    • Example: The conversational user interface will only be rolled out in an e-commerce setting. Other business units (HR, for example) are beyond the scope of this particular project.

    “Although scope creep is not the only nemesis a project can have, it does tend to have the farthest reach. Without a properly defined project and/or allowing numerous changes along the way, a project can easily go over budget, miss the deadline, and wreak havoc on project success.”
    – University Alliance, Villanova University

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 3.0 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.2.E Identify the structure of the team responsible for the proof-of-concept project

    10 minutes per technology

    Brainstorm who will be involved in project implementation.

    • Refer back to the list of stakeholders identified in 3.1.a. Which stakeholders should be involved in implementing the proof-of-concept plan?
    • What business units do they represent?
    • Who should be accountable for the project? At a high level, sketch the roles of each of the participants. Who will be responsible for doing the work? Who will approve it? Who needs to be informed at every stage? Who are the company’s internal subject matter experts?

    Example

    Name/Title Role
    IT Manager Negotiate the contract for the software with vendor
    CMO Promote the conversational interface to customers

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 3.0 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.2.F Estimate the resources required by the project

    10 minutes per technology

    Time and Money

    • Recall: Costs can be operational, capital, or opportunity.
    • Revisit the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool. Record the capital and operational expenses expected to be associated with each technology, and add detail where possible (use exact figures from particular vendors instead of percentages).
    • Write the names and titles of each expected participant in the project on a whiteboard. Next to each name, write the number of hours they are expected to devote to the project and include a rough estimate of the cost of their participation to the company. Use full-time employee equivalent (FTE measures) as a base.
    • Outline how other necessary resources (space, tools, expertise, etc.) will be secured.

    Example: Conversational Commerce

    • OpEx: $149/month + 2.9¢/transaction* (2,000 estimated transactions)
    • CapEx: $0!
    • IT Manager: 5 hours at $100/hour
    • IT Technician: 40 hours at $45/hour
    • CMO: 1 hour at $300/hour
    • Customer Service Representative: 10 hours at $35/hour
    • *Estimated total cost for a one-month proof-of-concept project: $3,157

    *This number is a sample taken from the vendor Rhombus

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 3.0 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.2.G Be aware of common IT project concerns

    Of projects that did not meet business expectations or were cancelled, how significant were the following issues?

    A bar graph is depicted, comparing small, medium, and large businesses for the following datasets: Over budget; Project failed to be delivered on time; Breach of scope; Low quality; Failed to deliver expected benefit or value

    This survey data did not specifically address innovation projects.

    • Disruptive technology projects will be under increased scrutiny in comparison to other projects.
    • Be sure to meet deadlines and stay within budget.
    • Be cognizant that your projects can go out of scope, and there will be projects that may have to be cancelled due to low quality. Remember: Even a failed test is a learning opportunity!

    Info-Tech’s CIO-CEO Alignment Survey, N=225

    Organization size was determined by the number of IT employees within the organization

    Small = 10 or fewer IT staff, medium = 11 to 25 IT staff, and large/enterprise = 26 or greater IT staff

    3.2.H Communicate your working group’s findings and successes to a wide audience

    Advertise the group’s successes and help prevent airline magazine syndrome from occurring.

    • Share your group’s results internally:
      • Run your own analysis by senior management and then share it across the organization.
      • Maintain a list of technologies that the working group has analyzed and solicit feedback from the wider organization.
      • Post summaries of the technologies in a publicly available repository. The C-suite may not read it right away, but it will be easy to provide when they ask.
      • If senior management has declined to proceed with a certain technology, avoid wasting time and resources on it. However, include notes about why the technology was rejected.
    • These postings will also act as an advertisement for the group. Use the garnered interest to attract visionaries for the next cycle.
    • These postings will help to reiterate the innovative value of the IT department and help bring you to the decision-making table.

    “Some CIOs will have to battle the bias that they belong in the back office and shouldn’t be included in product architecture planning. CIOs must ‘sell’ IT’s strength in information architecture.”
    – Chris Curran, Chief Technologist, PwC (Curran, 2014)

    Info-Tech Insight

    Cast a wide net. By sharing your results with as many people as possible within your organization, you’ll not only attract more attention to your working group, but you will also get more feedback and ideas.

    3.2.I Hand off the completed proof-of-concept project plan

    The proof of concept template is filled out – now what?

    • The core working group is responsible for producing a vision of the future and outlining new technology’s disruptive potential. The actual implementation of the proof of concept (purchasing the hardware, negotiating the SLA with the vendor) is beyond the working group’s responsibilities.
    • If the proof of concept goes ahead, the facilitator should block some time to evaluate the completed project against the key performance indicators identified in the initial plan.
    • A cure for airline magazine syndrome: Be prepared when executives ask about new technology. Present them with the results of the shortlist analysis and the proof-of-concept plan. A clear accounting of the value, readiness, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats posed by each technology, along with its impact on business processes, is an invaluable weapon against poor technology choices.

    Use section 3.2.b to identify the decision-making stakeholder who has the most to gain from a successful proof-of-concept project. Self-interest is a powerful motivator – the project is more likely to succeed in the hands of a passionate champion.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Set a date for the first meeting of the new iteration of the disruptive technology working group before the last meeting is done. Don’t risk pushing it back indefinitely.

    3.2.J Hand off the completed proof-of-concept project plan

    Record the results of the proof of concept. Keep track of what worked and what didn’t.

    Repeat the process regularly.

    • Finalize the proof of concept template, but don’t stop there: Keep your ear to the ground; follow tech developments using the sources identified in step 1.2.
    • Continue expanding the potential longlist with independent research: Be prepared to expand your longlist. Remember, the more technologies you have on the longlist, the more potential airline magazine syndrome cures you have access to.
    • Have the results of the previous session’s proof of concept plan on hand: At the start of each new iteration, conduct a review. What technologies were successful beyond the proof of concept phase? Which parts of the process worked? Which parts did not? How could they be improved?

    Info-Tech Insight

    The key is in anticipation. This is not a one-and-done exercise. Technology innovation operates at a faster pace than ever before, well below the Moores Law "18 month" timeline as an example. Success is in making EDIT a repeatable process.

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    Research contributors and experts

    Nitin Babel

    Nitin Babel, Co-Founder, niki.ai

    Nitin Babel, MSc, co-created conversational commerce platform niki.ai in early 2015. Since then, the technology has been featured on the front page of the Economic Times, and has secured the backing of Ratan Tata, former chairman of the Tata Group, one of the largest companies in the world.

    Mark Hubbard

    Mark Hubbard, Senior Vice President, FirstOnSite

    Mark is the SVP for Information Technology in Canada with FirstOnSite, a full service disaster recovery and property restoration company. Mark has over 25 years of technology leadership guiding global organizations through the development of strategic and tactical plans to strengthen their technology platforms and implement business aligned technology strategies.

    Chris Green

    Chris Green, Enterprise Architect, Boston Private
    Chris is an IT architect with over 15 years’ experience designing, building, and implementing solutions. He is a results-driven leader and contributor, skilled in a broad set of methods, tools, and platforms. He is experienced with mobile, web, enterprise application integration, business process, and data design.

    Andrew Kope

    Andrew Kope, Head of Data Analytics
    Big Blue Bubble
    Andrew Kope, MSc, oversees a team that develops and maintains a user acquisition tracking solution and a real-time metrics dashboard. He also provides actionable recommendations to the executive leadership of Big Blue Bubble – one of Canada’s largest independent mobile game development studios.

    Jason Hong

    Jason Hong, Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

    Jason Hong is a member of the faculty at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. His research focus lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction, privacy and security, and systems. He is a New America National Cyber Security Fellow (2015-2017) and is widely published in academic and industry journals.

    Tim Lalonde

    Tim Lalonde, Vice President, Mid-Range

    Tim Lalonde is the VP of Technical Operations at Mid-Range. He works with leading-edge companies to be more competitive and effective in their industries. He specializes in developing business roadmaps leveraging technology that create and support change from within — with a focus on business process re-engineering, architecture and design, business case development and problem-solving. With over 30 years of experience in IT, Tim’s guiding principle remains simple: See a problem, fix a problem.

    Jon Mavor

    Jon Mavor, Co-Founder and CTO, Envelop VR
    Jon Mavor is a programmer and entrepreneur, whose past work includes writing the graphics engine for the PC game Total Annihilation. As Chief Technology Officer of Envelop VR, a virtual reality start-up focused on software for the enterprise, Jon has overseen the launch of Envelop for Windows’s first public beta.

    Dan Pitt

    Dan Pitt, President, Palo Alto Innovation Advisors
    Dan Pitt is a network architect who has extensive experience in both the academy and industry. Over the course of his career, Dan has served as Executive Director of the Open Networking Foundation, Dean of Engineering at Santa Clara University, Vice President of Technology and Academic Partnerships at Nortel, Vice President of the Architecture Lab at Bay Networks, and, currently, as President of Palo Alto Innovation Advisors, where he advises and serves as an executive for technology start-ups in the Palo Alto area and around the world.

    Courtney Smith

    Courtney Smith, Co-Founder, Executive Creative Director
    PureMatter

    Courtney Smith is an accomplished creative strategist, storyteller, writer, and designer. Under her leadership, PureMatter has earned hundreds of creative awards and been featured in the PRINT International Design Annual. Courtney has juried over 30 creative competitions, including Creativity International. She is an invited member of the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts.

    Emmanuel Tsekleves

    Emmanuel Tsekleves, Senior Lecturer in Design Interactions, University of Lancaster
    Dr. Emmanuel Tsekleves is a senior lecturer and writer based out of the United Kingdom. Emmanuel designs interactions between people, places, and products by forging creative design methods along with digital technology. His design-led research in the areas of health, ageing, well-being, and defence has generated public interest and attracted media attention by the national press, such as the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Times, the Daily Mail, Discovery News, and several other international online media outlets.

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    Knight, Will. “Conversational Interfaces Powerful speech technology from China’s leading Internet company makes it much easier to use a smartphone.” MIT Technology Review, n.d. Web.

    Kostoff, Ronald N., Robert Boylan, and Gene R. Simons. “Disruptive Technology Roadmaps.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2004. Vol. 71. Web.

    Kurzweil, Ray. “The Accelerating Power of Technology.” TED, Feb. 2005. Web.

    Kurzweil, Ray. Kurzweil: Accelerating Intelligence, 2015. Web.

    MacFarquhar, Larissa. “When Giants Fall: What Business Has Learned From Clayton Christensen,” New Yorker, 14 May 2012. Web.

    McClintock, Cat. “2016: The Year for Augmented Reality in the Enterprise.” PTC, n.d. Web.

    McKinsey & Company. IT Growth and Global Change: A Conversation with Ray Kurzweil. 29 Feb. 2012, YouTube. Web.

    Messina, Chris. “2016 Will be the Year of Conversational Commerce.” Medium, 19 Jan 2016. Web.

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    O’Reilly, Charles, and Andrew J. M. Binns, “The Three Stages of Disruptive Innovation: Idea Generation, Incubation, and Scaling”. Sage Journals, n.d. Web.

    Pew Research Center. AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs: Experts Envision Automation and Intelligent Digital Agents Permeating Vast Areas of Our Work and Personal Lives by 2025, but they are Divided on Whether these Advances will Displace More Jobs than they Create. Aug. 2014. Web.

    Ramiller, Neil. “Airline Magazine Syndrome: Reading a Myth of Mismanagement.” Information Technology & People, Sept 2001. Print.

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    The MVP Major Incident Manager

    The time has come to hire a new major incident manager. How do you go about that? How do you choose the right candidate? Major incident managers must have several typically conflicting traits, so how do you pick the right person? Let's dive into that.

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    Develop a Web Experience Management Strategy

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    • Parent Category Name: Marketing Solutions
    • Parent Category Link: /marketing-solutions
    • Web Experience Management (WEM) solutions have emerged as applications that provide marketers and other customer experience professionals with a complete set of tools for web content management, delivery, campaign execution, and site analytics.
    • However, many organizations are unsure of how to leverage these new technologies to enhance their customer interaction strategy.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • WEM products are not a one-size-fits-all investment: unique evaluations and customization is required in order to deploy a solution that fits your organization.
    • WEM technology often complements core CRM and marketing management products – it does not supplant it, and must augment the rest of your customer experience management portfolio.
    • WEM provides benefits by giving web visitors a better experience – leveraging tools such as web analytics gives the customer a tailored experience. Marketing can then monitor their behavior and use this information to warm leads.

    Impact and Result

    • Deploy a WEM platform and execute initiatives that will strengthen the web-facing customer experience, improving customer satisfaction and unlocking new revenue opportunities.
    • Avoid making unnecessary new WEM investments.
    • Make informed decisions about the types of technologies and initiatives that are necessary to support WEM.

    Develop a Web Experience Management Strategy Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should develop a WEM strategy, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Harness the value of web experience management

    Make the case for a web experience management suite and structure the WEM strategy project.

    • Develop a Web Experience Management Strategy Phase 1: Harness the Value of Web Experience Management
    • Web Experience Management Strategy Summary Template
    • WEM Project Charter Template

    2. Create the vision for web experience management

    Identify the target state WEM strategy, assess current state, and identify gaps.

    • Develop a Web Experience Management Strategy Phase 2: Create the Vision for Web Experience Management

    3. Execute initiatives for WEM deployment

    Build the WEM technology stack and create a web strategy initiatives roadmap.

    • Develop a Web Experience Management Strategy Phase 3: Execute Initiatives for WEM Deployment
    • Web Process Automation Investment Appropriateness Assessment Tool
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Develop a Web Experience Management Strategy

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Launch the WEM Selection Project

    The Purpose

    Discuss the general project overview for the WEM selection.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Launch of your WEM selection project.

    Development of your organization’s WEM requirements. 

    Activities

    1.1 Facilitation of activities from the Launch the WEM Project and Collect Requirements phase, including project scoping and resource planning.

    1.2 Conduct overview of the WEM market landscape, trends, and vendors.

    1.3 Conduct process mapping for selected marketing processes.

    1.4 Interview business stakeholders.

    1.5 Prioritize WEM functional requirements.

    Outputs

    WEM Procurement Project Charter

    WEM Use-Case Fit Assessment

    2 Plan the Procurement and Implementation Process

    The Purpose

    Plan the procurement and the implementation of the WEM solution.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Selection of a WEM solution.

    A plan for implementing the selected WEM solution. 

    Activities

    2.1 Complete marketing process mapping with business stakeholders.

    2.2 Interview IT staff and project team, identify technical requirements for the WEM suite, and document high-level solution requirements.

    2.3 Perform a use-case scenario assessment, review use-case scenario results, identify use-case alignment, and review the WEM Vendor Landscape vendor profiles and performance.

    2.4 Create a custom vendor shortlist and investigate additional vendors for exploration in the marketplace.

    2.5 Meet with project manager to discuss results and action items.

    Outputs

    Vendor Shortlist

    WEM RFP

    Vendor Evaluations

    Selection of a WEM Solution

    WEM projected work break-down

    Implementation plan

    Framework for WEM deployment and CRM/Marketing Management Suite Integration

    Develop a Use Case for Smart Contracts

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    • Parent Category Name: Innovation
    • Parent Category Link: /innovation
    • Organizations today continue to use traditional and often archaic methods of manual processing with physical paper documents.
    • These error-prone methods introduce cumbersome administrative work, causing businesses to struggle with payments and contract disputes.
    • The increasing scale and complexity of business processes has led to many third parties, middlemen, and paper hand-offs.
    • Companies remain bogged down by expensive and inefficient processes while losing sight of their ultimate stakeholder: the customer. A failure to focus on the customer is a failure to do business.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Simplify, automate, secure. Smart contracts enable businesses to simplify, automate, and secure traditionally complex transactions.
    • Focus on the customer. Smart contracts provide a frictionless experience for customers by removing unnecessary middlemen and increasing the speed of transactions.
    • New business models. Smart contracts enable the redesign of your organization and business-to-business relationships and transactions.

    Impact and Result

    • Simplify and optimize your business processes by using Info-Tech’s methodology to select processes with inefficient transactions, unnecessary middlemen, and excessive manual paperwork.
    • Use Info-Tech’s template to generate a smart contract use case customized for your business.
    • Customize Info-Tech’s stakeholder presentation template to articulate the goals and benefits of the project and get buy-in from business executives.

    Develop a Use Case for Smart Contracts Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should leverage smart contracts in your business, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Understand smart contracts

    Understand the fundamental concepts of smart contract technology and get buy-in from stakeholders.

    • Develop a Use Case for Smart Contracts – Phase 1: Understand Smart Contracts
    • Smart Contracts Executive Buy-in Presentation Template

    2. Develop a smart contract use case

    Select a business process, create a smart contract logic diagram, and complete a smart contract use-case deliverable.

    • Develop a Use Case for Smart Contracts – Phase 2: Develop the Smart Contract Use Case
    • Smart Contracts Use-Case Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Develop a Use Case for Smart Contracts

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Understand Smart Contracts

    The Purpose

    Review blockchain basics.

    Understand the fundamental concepts of smart contracts.

    Develop smart contract use-case executive buy-in presentation.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding of blockchain basics.

    Understanding the fundamentals of smart contracts.

    Development of an executive buy-in presentation.

    Activities

    1.1 Review blockchain basics.

    1.2 Understand smart contract fundamentals.

    1.3 Identify business challenges and smart contract benefits.

    1.4 Create executive buy-in presentation.

    Outputs

    Executive buy-in presentation

    2 Smart Contract Logic Diagram

    The Purpose

    Brainstorm and select a business process to develop a smart contract use case around.

    Generate a smart contract logic diagram.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Selected a business process.

    Developed a smart contract logic diagram for the selected business process.

    Activities

    2.1 Brainstorm candidate business processes.

    2.2 Select a business process.

    2.3 Identify phases, actors, events, and transactions.

    2.4 Create the smart contract logic diagram.

    Outputs

    Smart contract logic diagram

    3 Smart Contract Use Case

    The Purpose

    Develop smart contract use-case diagrams for each business process phase.

    Complete a smart contract use-case deliverable.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Smart contract use-case diagrams.

    Smart contract use-case deliverable.

    Activities

    3.1 Build smart contract use-case diagrams for each phase of the business process.

    3.2 Create a smart contract use-case summary diagram.

    3.3 Complete smart contract use-case deliverable.

    Outputs

    Smart contract use case

    4 Next Steps and Action Plan

    The Purpose

    Review workshop week and lessons learned.

    Develop an action plan to follow through with next steps for the project.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Reviewed workshop week with common understanding of lessons learned.

    Completed an action plan for the project.

    Activities

    4.1 Review workshop deliverables.

    4.2 Create action plan.

    Outputs

    Smart contract action plan

    Define Your Cloud Vision

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    • Parent Category Name: Cloud Strategy
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    The cloud permeates the enterprise technology discussion. It can be difficult to separate the hype from the value. Should everything go to the cloud, or is that sentiment stoked by vendors looking to boost their bottom lines? Not everything should go to the cloud, but coming up with a systematic way to determine what belongs where is increasingly difficult as offerings get more complex.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Don’t think about the cloud as an inevitable next step for all workloads. The cloud is merely another tool in the toolbox, ready to be used when appropriate and put away when it’s not needed. Cloud-first isn’t always the way to go.

    Impact and Result

    • Evaluate workloads’ suitability for the cloud using Info-Tech’s methodology to select the optimal migration (or non-migration) path based on the value of cloud characteristics.
    • Codify risks tied to workloads’ cloud suitability and plan mitigations.
    • Build a roadmap of initiatives for actions by workload and risk mitigation.
    • Define a cloud vision to share with stakeholders.

    Define Your Cloud Vision Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Define Your Cloud Vision – A step-by-step guide to generating, validating, and formalizing your cloud vision.

    The cloud vision storyboard walks readers through the process of generating, validating and formalizing a cloud vision, providing a framework and tools to assess workloads for their cloud suitability and risk.

    • Define Your Cloud Vision – Phases 1-4

    2. Cloud Vision Executive Presentation – A document that captures the results of the exercises, articulating use cases for cloud/non-cloud, risks, challenges, and high-level initiative items.

    The executive summary captures the results of the vision exercise, including decision criteria for moving to the cloud, risks, roadblocks, and mitigations.

    • Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    3. Cloud Vision Workbook – A tool that facilitates the assessment of workloads for appropriate service model, delivery model, support model, and risks and roadblocks.

    The cloud vision workbook comprises several assessments that will help you understand what service model, delivery model, support model, and risks and roadblocks you can expect to encounter at the workload level.

    • Cloud Vision Workbook
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Define Your Cloud Vision

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Understand the Cloud

    The Purpose

    Align organizational goals to cloud characteristics.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An understanding of how the characteristics particular to cloud can support organizational goals.

    Activities

    1.1 Generate corporate goals and cloud drivers.

    1.2 Identify success indicators.

    1.3 Explore cloud characteristics.

    1.4 Explore cloud service and delivery models.

    1.5 Define cloud support models and strategy components.

    1.6 Create state summaries for the different service and delivery models.

    1.7 Select workloads for further analysis.

    Outputs

    Corporate cloud goals and drivers

    Success indicators

    Current state summaries

    List of workloads for further analysis

    2 Assess Workloads

    The Purpose

    Evaluate workloads for cloud value and action plan.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Action plan for each workload.

    Activities

    2.1 Conduct workload assessment using the Cloud Strategy Workbook tool.

    2.2 Discuss assessments and make preliminary determinations about the workloads.

    Outputs

    Completed workload assessments

    Workload summary statements

    3 Identify and Mitigate Risks

    The Purpose

    Identify and plan to mitigate potential risks in the cloud project.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A list of potential risks and plans to mitigate them.

    Activities

    3.1 Generate a list of risks and potential roadblocks associated with the cloud.

    3.2 Sort risks and roadblocks and define categories.

    3.3 Identify mitigations for each identified risk and roadblock

    3.4 Generate initiatives from the mitigations.

    Outputs

    List of risks and roadblocks, categorized

    List of mitigations

    List of initiatives

    4 Bridge the Gap and Create the Strategy

    The Purpose

    Clarify your vision of how the organization can best make use of cloud and build a project roadmap.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A clear vision and a concrete action plan to move forward with the project.

    Activities

    4.1 Review and assign work items.

    4.2 Finalize the decision framework for each of the following areas: service model, delivery model, and support model.

    4.3 Create a cloud vision statement

    Outputs

    Cloud roadmap

    Finalized task list

    Formal cloud decision rubric

    Cloud vision statement

    5 Next Steps and Wrap-Up

    The Purpose

    Complete your cloud vision by building a compelling executive-facing presentation.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Simple, straightforward communication of your cloud vision to key stakeholders.

    Activities

    5.1 Build the Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    Outputs

    Completed cloud strategy executive presentation

    Completed Cloud Vision Workbook.

    Further reading

    Define Your Cloud Vision

    Define your cloud vision before it defines you

    Analyst perspective

    Use the cloud’s strengths. Mitigate its weaknesses.

    The cloud isn’t magic. It’s not necessarily cheaper, better, or even available for the thing you want it to do. It’s not mysterious or a cure-all, and it does take a bit of effort to systematize your approach and make consistent, defensible decisions about your cloud services. That’s where this blueprint comes in.

    Your cloud vision is the culmination of this effort all boiled down into a single statement: “This is how we want to use the cloud.” That simple statement should, of course, be representative of – and built from – a broader, contextual strategy discussion that answers the following questions: What should go to the cloud? What kind of cloud makes sense? Should the cloud deployment be public, private, or hybrid? What does a migration look like? What risks and roadblocks need to be considered when exploring your cloud migration options? What are the “day 2” activities that you will need to undertake after you’ve gotten the ball rolling?

    Taken as a whole, answering these questions is difficult task. But with the framework provided here, it’s as easy as – well, let’s just say it’s easier.

    Jeremy Roberts

    Research Director, Infrastructure and Operations

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    • You are both extrinsically motivated to move to the cloud (e.g. by vendors) and intrinsically motivated by internal digital transformation initiatives.
    • You need to define the cloud’s true value proposition for your organization without assuming it is an outsourcing opportunity or will save you money.
    • Your industry, once cloud-averse, is now normalizing the use of cloud services, but you have not established a basic cloud vision from which to develop a strategy at a later point.

    Common Obstacles

    • Organizations jump to the cloud before defining their cloud vision and without any clear plan for realizing the cloud’s benefits.
    • Many organizations have a foot in the cloud already, but these decisions have been made in an ad hoc rather than systematic fashion.
    • You lack a consistent framework to assess your workloads’ suitability for the cloud.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    • Evaluate workloads’ suitability for the cloud using Info-Tech’s methodology to select the optimal migration (or non-migration) path based on the value of cloud characteristics.
    • Codify risks tied to workloads’ cloud suitability and plan mitigations.
    • Build a roadmap of initiatives for actions by workload and risk mitigation.
    • Define a cloud vision to share with stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Insight: 1) Base migration decisions on cloud characteristics. If your justification for the migration is simply getting your workload out of the data center, think again. 2) Address the risks up front in your migration plan. 3) The cloud changes roles and calls for different skill sets, but Ops is here to stay.

    Your challenge

    This research is designed to help organizations who need to:

    • Identify workloads that are good candidates for the cloud.
    • Develop a consistent, cost-effective approach to cloud services.
    • Outline and mitigate risks.
    • Define your organization’s cloud archetype.
    • Map initiatives on a roadmap.
    • Communicate your cloud vision to stakeholders so they can understand the reasons behind a cloud decision and differentiate between different cloud service and deployment models.
    • Understand the risks, roadblocks, and limitations of the cloud.

    “We’re moving from a world where companies like Oracle and Microsoft and HP and Dell were all critically important to a world where Microsoft is still important, but Amazon is now really important, and Google also matters. The technology has changed, but most of the major vendors they’re betting their business on have also changed. And that’s super hard for people..” –David Chappell, Author and Speaker

    Common obstacles

    These barriers make this challenge difficult to address for many organizations:

    • Organizations jump to the cloud before defining their cloud vision and without any clear plan for realizing the cloud’s benefits.
    • Many organizations already have a foot in the cloud, but the choice to explore these solutions was made in an ad hoc rather than systematic fashion. The cloud just sort of happened.
    • The lack of a consistent assessment framework means that some workloads that probably belong in the cloud are kept on premises or with hosted services providers – and vice versa.
    • Securing cloud expertise is remarkably difficult – especially in a labor market roiled by the global pandemic and the increasing importance of cloud services.

    Standard cloud challenges

    30% of all cloud spend is self-reported as waste. Many workloads that end up in the cloud don’t belong there. Many workloads that do belong in the cloud aren’t properly migrated. (Flexera, 2021)

    44% of respondents report themselves as under-skilled in the cloud management space. (Pluralsight, 2021)

    Info-Tech’s approach

    Goals and drivers

    • Service model
      • What type of cloud makes the most sense for workload archetypes? When does it make sense to pick SaaS over IaaS, for example?
    • Delivery model
      • Will services be delivered over the public cloud, a private cloud, or a hybrid cloud? What challenges accompany this decision?
    • Migration Path
      • What does the migration path look like? What does the transition to the cloud look like, and how much effort will be required? Amazon’s 6Rs framework captures migration options: rehosting, repurchasing, replatforming, and refactoring, along with retaining and retiring. Each workload should be assessed for its suitability for one or more of these paths.
    • Support model
      • How will services be provided? Will staff be trained, new staff hired, a service provider retained for ongoing operations, or will a consultant with cloud expertise be brought on board for a defined period? The appropriate support model is highly dependent on goals along with expected outcomes for different workloads.

    Highlight risks and roadblocks

    Formalize cloud vision

    Document your cloud strategy

    The Info-Tech difference:

    1. Determine the hypothesized value of cloud for your organization.
    2. Evaluate workloads with 6Rs framework.
    3. Identify and mitigate risks.
    4. Identify cloud archetype.
    5. Plot initiatives on a roadmap.
    6. Write action plan statement and goal statement.

    What is the cloud, how is it deployed, and how is service provided?

    Cloud Characteristics

    1. On-demand self-service: the ability to access reosurces instantly without vendor interaction
    2. Broad network access: all services delivered over the network
    3. Resource pooling: multi-tenant environment (shared)
    4. Rapid elasticity: the ability to expand and retract capabilities as needed
    5. Measured service: transparent metering

    Service Model:

    1. Software-as-a-Service: all but the most minor configuration is done by the vendor
    2. Platform-as-a-Service: customer builds the application using tools provided by the provider
    3. Infrastructure-as-a-Service: the customer manages OS, storage, and the application

    Delivery Model

    1. Public cloud: accessible to anyone over the internet; multi-tenant environment
    2. Private cloud: provisioned for a single organization with multiple units
    3. Hybrid cloud: two or more connected clouds; data is portage across them
    4. Community cloud: provisioned for a specific group of organizations

    (National Institute of Standards and Technology)

    A workload-first approach will allow you to take full advantage of the cloud’s strengths

    • Under all but the most exceptional circumstances, good cloud strategies will incorporate different service models. Very few organizations are “IaaS shops” or “SaaS shops,” even if they lean heavily in one direction.
    • These different service models (including non-cloud options like colocation and on-premises infrastructure) each have different strengths. Part of your cloud strategy should involve determining which of the services makes the most sense for you.
    • Own the cloud by understanding which cloud (or non-cloud!) offering makes the most sense for you given your unique context.

    Migration paths

    In a 2016 blog post, Amazon introduced a framework for understanding cloud migration strategies. The framework presented here is slightly modified – including a “relocate” component rather than a “retire” component – but otherwise hews close to the standard.

    These migration paths reflect organizational capabilities and desired outcomes in terms of service models – cloud or otherwise. Retention means keeping the workload where it is, in a datacenter or a colocation service, or relocating to a colocation or hosted software environment. These represent the “non-cloud” migration paths.

    In the graphic on the right, the paths within the red box lead to the cloud. Rehosting means lifting and shifting to an infrastructure environment. Migrating a virtual machine from your VMware environment on premises to Azure Virtual machines is a quick way to realize some benefits from the cloud. Migrating from SQL Server on premises to a cloud-based SQL solution looks a bit more like changing platforms (replatforming). It involves basic infrastructure modification without a substantial architectural component.

    Refactoring is the most expensive of the options and involves engaging the software development lifecycle to build a custom solution, fundamentally rewriting the solution to be cloud native and take advantage of cloud-native architectures. This can result in a PaaS or an IaaS solution.

    Finally, repurchasing means simply going to market and procuring a new solution. This may involve migrating data, but it does not require the migration of components.

    Migration Paths

    Retain (Revisit)

    • Keep the application in its current form, at least for now. This doesn’t preclude revisiting it in the future.

    Relocate

    • Move the workload between datacenters or to a hosted software/colocation provider.

    Rehost

    • Move the application to the cloud (IaaS) and continue to run it in more or less the same form as it currently runs.

    Replatform

    • Move the application to the cloud and perform a few changes for cloud optimizations.

    Refactor

    • Rewrite the application, taking advantage of cloud-native architectures.

    Repurchase

    • Replace with an alternative, cloud-native application and migrate the data.

    Support model

    Support models by characteristic

    Duration of engagement Specialization Flexibility
    Internal IT Indefinite Varies based on nature of business Fixed, permanent staff
    Managed Service Provider Contractually defined General, some specialization Standard offering
    Consultant Project-based Specific, domain-based Entirely negotiable

    IT services, including cloud services, can be delivered and managed in multiple ways depending on the nature of the workload and the organization’s intended path forward. Three high-level options are presented here and may be more or less valuable based on the duration of the expected engagement with the service (temporary or permanent), the skills specialization required, and the flexibility necessary to complete the job.

    By way of example, a highly technical, short-term project with significant flexibility requirements might be a good fit for an expensive consultant, whereas post-implementation maintenance of a cloud email system requires relatively little specialization and flexibility and would therefore be a better fit for internal management.

    There is no universally applicable rule here, but there are some workloads that are generally a good fit for the cloud and others that are not as effective, with that fit being conditional on the appropriate support model being employed.

    Risks, roadblocks, and strategy components

    No two cloud strategies are exactly alike, but all should address 14 key areas. A key step in defining your cloud vision is an assessment of these strategy components. Lower maturity does not preclude an aggressive cloud strategy, but it does indicate that higher effort will be required to make the transition.

    Component Description Component Description
    Monitoring What will system owners/administrators need visibility into? How will they achieve this? Vendor Management What practices must change to ensure effective management of cloud vendors?
    Provisioning Who will be responsible for deploying cloud workloads? What governance will this process be subject to? Finance Management How will costs be managed with the transition away from capital expenditure?
    Migration How will cloud migrations be conducted? What best practices/standards must be employed? Security What steps must be taken to ensure that cloud services meet security requirements?
    Operations management What is the process for managing operations as they change in the cloud? Data Controls How will data residency, compliance, and protection requirements be met in the cloud?
    Architecture What general principles must apply in the cloud environment? Skills and roles What skills become necessary in the cloud? What steps must be taken to acquire those skills?
    Integration and interoperability How will services be integrated? What standards must apply? Culture and adoption Is there a cultural aversion to the cloud? What steps must be taken to ensure broad cloud acceptance?
    Portfolio Management Who will be responsible for managing the growth of the cloud portfolio? Governing bodies What formal governance must be put in place? Who will be responsible for setting standards?

    Cloud archetypes – a cloud vision component

    Once you understand the value of the cloud, your workloads’ general suitability for cloud, and your proposed risks and mitigations, the next step is to define your cloud archetype.

    Your organization’s cloud archetype is the strategic posture that IT adopts to best support the organization’s goals. Info-Tech’s model recognizes seven archetypes, divided into three high-level archetypes.

    After consultation with your stakeholders, and based on the results of the suitability and risk assessment activities, define your archetype. The archetype feeds into the overall cloud vision and provides simple insight into the cloud future state for all stakeholders.

    The cloud vision itself is captured in a “vision statement,” a short summary of the overall approach that includes the overall cloud archetype.

    We can best support the organization's goals by:

    More Cloud

    Less Cloud

    Cloud Focused Cloud-Centric Providing all workloads through cloud delivery.
    Cloud-First Using the cloud as our default deployment model. For each workload, we should ask “why NOT cloud?”
    Cloud Opportunistic Hybrid Enabling the ability to transition seamlessly between on-premises and cloud resources for many workloads.
    Integrated Combining cloud and traditional infrastructure resources, integrating data and applications through APIs or middleware.
    Split Using the cloud for some workloads and traditional infrastructure resources for others.
    Cloud Averse Cloud-Light Using traditional infrastructure resources and limiting our use of the cloud to when it is absolutely necessary.
    Anti-Cloud Using traditional infrastructure resources and avoiding use of the cloud wherever possible.

    Info-Tech’s methodology for defining your cloud vision

    1. Understand the Cloud 2. Assess Workloads 3. Identify and Mitigate Risks 4. Bridge the Gap and Create the Vision
    Phase Steps
    1. Generate goals and drivers
    2. Explore cloud characteristics
    3. Create a current state summary
    4. Select workloads for analysis
    1. Conduct workload assessments
    2. Determine workload future state
    1. Generate risks and roadblocks
    2. Mitigate risks and roadblocks
    3. Define roadmap initiatives
    1. Review and assign work items
    2. Finalize cloud decision framework
    3. Create cloud vision
    Phase Outcomes
    1. List of goals and drivers
    2. Shared understanding of cloud terms
    3. Current state of cloud in the organization
    4. List of workloads to be assessed
    1. Completed workload assessments
    2. Defined workload future state
    1. List of risks and roadblocks
    2. List of mitigations
    3. Defined roadmap initiatives
    1. Cloud roadmap
    2. Cloud decision framework
    3. Completed Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    Insight summary

    The cloud may not be right for you – and that’s okay!

    Don’t think about the cloud as an inevitable next step for all workloads. The cloud is merely another tool in the toolbox, ready to be used when appropriate and put away when it’s not needed. Cloud first isn’t always the way to go.

    Not all clouds are equal

    It’s not “should I go to the cloud?” but “what service and delivery models make sense based on my needs and risk tolerance?” Thinking about the cloud as a binary can force workloads into the cloud that don’t belong (and vice versa).

    Bottom-up is best

    A workload assessment is the only way to truly understand the cloud’s value. Work from the bottom up, not the top down, understand what characteristics make a workload cloud suitable, and strategize on that basis.

    Your accountability doesn’t change

    You are still accountable for maintaining available, secure, functional applications and services. Cloud providers share some responsibility, but the buck stops where it always has: with you.

    Don’t customize for the sake of customization

    SaaS providers make money selling the same thing to everyone. When migrating a workload to SaaS, work with stakeholders to pursue standardization around a selected platform and avoid customization where possible.

    Best of both worlds, worst of both worlds

    Hybrid clouds are in fashion, but true hybridity comes with additional cost, administration, and other constraints. A convoy moves at the speed of its slowest member.

    The journey matters as much as the destination

    How you get there is as important as what “there” actually is. Any strategy that focuses solely on the destination misses out on a key part of the value conversation: the migration strategy.

    Blueprint benefits

    Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    This presentation captures the results of the exercises and presents a complete vision to stakeholders including a desired target state, a rubric for decision making, the results of the workload assessments, and an overall risk profile.

    Cloud Vision Workbook

    This workbook includes the standard cloud workload assessment questionnaire along with the results of the assessment. It also includes the milestone timeline for the implementation of the cloud vision.

    Blueprint benefits

    IT Benefits

    • A consistent approach to the cloud takes the guesswork out of deployment decisions and makes it easier for IT to move on to the execution stage.
    • When properly incorporated, cloud services come with many benefits, including automation, elasticity, and alternative architectures (micro-services, containers). The cloud vision project will help IT readers articulate expected benefits and work towards achieving them.
    • A clear framework for incorporating organizational goals into cloud plans.

    Business benefits

    • Simple, well-governed access to high-quality IT resources.
    • Access to the latest and greatest in technology to facilitate remote work.
    • Framework for cost management in the cloud that incorporates OpEx and chargebacks/showbacks. A clear understanding of expected changes to cost modeling is also a benefit of a cloud vision.
    • Clarity for stakeholders about IT’s response (and contribution to) IT strategic initiatives.

    Measure the value of this blueprint

    Don’t take our word for it:

    • The cloud vision material in various forms has been offered for several years, and members have generally benefited substantially, both from cloud vision workshops and from guided implementations led by analysts.
    • After each engagement, we send a survey that asks members how they benefited from the experience. Of 30 responses, the cloud vision research has received an average score of 9.8/10. Real members have found significant value in the process.
    • Additionally, members reported saving between 2 and 120 days (for an average of 17), and financial savings ranged from $1,920 all the way up to $1.27 million, for an average of $170,577.90! If we drop outliers on both ends, the average reported value of a cloud vision engagement is $37, 613.
    • Measure the value by calculating the time saved from using Info-Tech’s framework vs. a home-brewed cloud strategy alternative and by comparing the overall cost of a guided implementation or workshop with the equivalent offering from another firm. We’re confident you’ll come out ahead.

    9.8/10 Average reported satisfaction

    17 Days Average reported time savings

    $37, 613 Average cost savings (adj.)

    Executive Brief Case Study

    Industry: Financial

    Source: Info-Tech workshop

    Anonymous financial institution

    A small East Coast financial institution was required to develop a cloud strategy. This strategy had to meet several important requirements, including alignment with strategic priorities and best practices, along with regulatory compliance, including with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

    The bank already had a significant cloud footprint and was looking to organize and formalize the strategy going forward.

    Leadership needed a comprehensive strategy that touched on key areas including the delivery model, service models, individual workload assessments, cost management, risk management and governance. The output had to be consumable by a variety of audiences with varying levels of technical expertise and had to speak to IT’s role in the broader strategic goals articulated earlier in the year.

    Results

    The bank engaged Info-Tech for a cloud vision workshop and worked through four days of exercises with various IT team members. The bank ultimately decided on a multi-cloud strategy that prioritized SaaS while also allowing for PaaS and IaaS solutions, along with some non-cloud hosted solutions, based on organizational circumstances.

    Bank cloud vision

    [Bank] will provide innovative financial and related services by taking advantage of the multiplicity of best-of-breed solutions available in the cloud. These solutions make it possible to benefit from industry-level innovations, while ensuring efficiency, redundancy, and enhanced security.

    Bank cloud decision workflow

    • SaaS
      • Platform?
        • Yes
          • PaaS
        • No
          • Hosted
        • IaaS
          • Other

    Non-cloud

    Cloud

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    "Our team has already made this crticial project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

    Guided Implementation

    "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

    Workshop

    "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off imediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

    Consulting

    "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge the take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is between 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

    Phase 1

    • Call #1: Discuss current state, challenges, etc.
    • Call #2: Goals, drivers, and current state.

    Phase 2

    • Call #3: Conduct cloud suitability assessment for selected workloads.

    Phase 3

    • Call #4: Generate and categorize risks.
    • Call #5: Begin the risk mitigation conversation.

    Phase 4

    • Call #6: Complete the risk mitigation process
    • Call #7: Finalize vision statement and cloud decision framework.

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Offsite day
    Understand the cloud Assess workloads Identify and mitigate risks Bridge the gap and create the strategy Next steps and wrap-up (offsite)
    Activities

    1.1 Introduction

    1.2 Generate corporate goals and cloud drivers

    1.3 Identify success indicators

    1.4 Explore cloud characteristics

    1.5 Explore cloud service and delivery models

    1.6 Define cloud support models and strategy components

    1.7 Create current state summaries for the different service and delivery models

    1.8 Select workloads for further analysis

    2.1 Conduct workload assessments using the cloud strategy workbook tool

    2.2 Discuss assessments and make preliminary determinations about workloads

    3.1 Generate a list of risks and potential roadblocks associated with the cloud

    3.2 Sort risks and roadblocks and define categories

    3.3 Identify mitigations for each identified risk and roadblock

    3.4 Generate initiatives from the mitigations

    4.1 Review and assign work items

    4.2 Finalize the decision framework for each of the following areas:

    • Service model
    • Delivery model
    • Support model

    4.3 Create a cloud vision statement

    5.1 Build the Cloud Vision Executive Presentation
    Deliverables
    1. Corporate goals and cloud drivers
    2. Success indicators
    3. Current state summaries
    4. List of workloads for further analysis
    1. Completed workload assessments
    2. Workload summary statements
    1. List of risks and roadblocks, categorized
    2. List of mitigations
    3. List of initiatives
    1. Finalized task list
    2. Formal cloud decision rubric
    3. Cloud vision statement
    1. Completed cloud strategy executive presentation
    2. Completed cloud vision workbook

    Understand the cloud

    Build the foundations of your cloud vision

    Phase 1

    Phase 1

    Understand the Cloud

    Phase 1

    1.1 Generate goals and drivers

    1.2 Explore cloud characteristics

    1.3 Create a current state summary

    1.4 Select workloads for analysis

    Phase 2

    2.1 Conduct workload assessments

    2.2 Determine workload future states

    Phase 3

    3.1 Generate risks and roadblocks

    3.2 Mitigate risks and roadblocks

    3.3 Define roadmap initiatives

    Phase 4

    4.1 Review and assign work items

    4.2 Finalize cloud decision framework

    4.3 Create cloud vision

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    1.1.1 Generate organizational goals

    1.1.2 Define cloud drivers

    1.1.3 Define success indicators

    1.3.1 Record your current state

    1.4.1 Select workloads for further assessment

    This phase involves the following participants:

    IT management, the core working group, security, infrastructure, operations, architecture, engineering, applications, non-IT stakeholders.

    It starts with shared understanding

    Stakeholders must agree on overall goals and what “cloud” means

    The cloud is a nebulous term that can reasonably describe services ranging from infrastructure as a service as delivered by providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft through its Azure platform, right up to software as a service solutions like Jira or Salesforce. These solutions solve different problems – just because your CRM would be a good fit for a migration to Salesforce doesn’t mean the same system would make sense in Azure or AWS.

    This is important because the language we use to talk about the cloud can color our approach to cloud services. A “cloud-first” strategy will mean something different to a CEO with a concept of the cloud rooted in Salesforce than it will to a system administrator who interprets it to mean a transition to cloud-hosted virtual machines.

    Add to this the fact that not all cloud services are hosted externally by providers (public clouds) and the fact that multiple delivery models can be engaged at once through hybrid or multi-cloud approaches, and it’s apparent that a shared understanding of the cloud is necessary for a coherent strategy to take form.

    This phase proceeds in four steps, each governed by the principle of shared understanding. The first requires a shared understanding of corporate goals and drivers. Step 2 involves coming to a shared understanding of the cloud’s unique characteristics. Step 3 requires a review of the current state. Finally, in Step 4, participants will identify workloads that are suitable for analysis as candidates for the cloud.

    Step 1.1

    Generate goals and drivers

    Activities

    1.1.1 Define organizational goals

    1.1.2 Define cloud drivers

    1.1.3 Define success indicators

    Generate goals and drivers

    Explore cloud characteristics

    Create a current state summary

    Select workloads for analysis

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT management
    • Core working group
    • Security
    • Applications
    • Infrastructure
    • Service management
    • Leadership

    Outcomes of this step

    • List of organizational goals
    • List of cloud drivers
    • Defined success indicators

    What can the cloud do for you?

    The cloud is not valuable for its own sake, and not all users derive the same value

    • The cloud is characterized by on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service. Any or all of those characteristics might be enough to make the cloud appealing, but in most cases, there is an overriding driver.
    • Multiple paths may lead to the cloud. Consider an organization with a need to control costs by showing back to business units, or perhaps by reducing capital expenditure – the cloud may be the most appropriate way to effect these changes. Conversely, an organization expanding rapidly and with a need to access the latest and greatest technology might benefit from the elasticity and pooled resources that major cloud providers can offer.
    • In these cases, the destination might be the same (a cloud solution) but the delivery model – public, private, or hybrid – and the decisions made around the key strategy components, including architecture, provisioning, and cost management, will almost certainly be different.
    • Defining goals, understanding cloud drivers, and – crucially – understanding what success means, are all therefore essential elements of the cloud vision process.

    1.1.1 Generate organizational goals

    1-3 hours

    Input

    • Strategy documentation

    Output

    • Organizational goals

    Materials

    • Whiteboard (digital/physical)

    Participants

    • IT leadership
    • Infrastructure
    • Applications
    • Security
    1. As a group, brainstorm organizational goals, ideally based on existing documentation
      • Review relevant corporate and IT strategies.
      • If you do not have access to internal documentation, review the standard goals on the next slide and select those that are most relevant for you.
    2. Record the most important business goals in the Cloud Vision Executive Presentation. Include descriptions where possible to ensure wide readability.
    3. Make note of these goals. They should inform the answers to prompts offered in the Cloud Vision Workbook and should be a consistent presence in the remainder of the visioning exercise. If you’re conducting the session in person, leave the goals up on a whiteboard and make reference to them throughout the workshop.

    Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    Standard COBIT 19 enterprise goals

    1. Portfolio of competitive products and services
    2. Managed business risk
    3. Compliance with external laws and regulations
    4. Quality of financial information
    5. Customer-oriented service culture
    6. Business service continuity and availability
    7. Quality of management information
    8. Optimization of internal business process functionality
    9. Optimization of business process costs
    10. Staff skills, motivation, and productivity
    11. Compliance with internal policies
    12. Managed digital transformation programs
    13. Product and business innovation

    1.1.2 Define cloud drivers

    30-60 minutes

    Input

    • Organizational goals
    • Strategy documentation
    • Management/staff perspective

    Output

    • List of cloud drivers

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • IT leadership
    • Infrastructure
    • Applications
    • Security
    1. Cloud drivers sit at a level of abstraction below organizational goals. Keeping your organizational goals in mind, have each participant in the session write down how they expect to benefit from the cloud on a sticky note.
    2. Solicit input one at a time and group similar responses. Encourage participants to bring forward their cloud goals even if similar goals have been mentioned previously. The number of mentions is a useful way to gauge the relative weight of the drivers.
    3. Once this is done, you should have a few groups of similar drivers. Work with the group to name each category. This name will be the driver reported in the documentation.
    4. Input the results of the exercise into the Cloud Vision Executive Presentation, and include descriptions based on the constituent drivers. For example, if a driver is titled “do more valuable work,” the constituent drivers might be “build cloud skills,” “focus on core products,” and “avoid administration work where possible.” The description would be based on these components.

    Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    1.1.3 Define success indicators

    1 hour

    Input

    • Cloud drivers
    • Organizational goals

    Output

    • List of cloud driver success indicators

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • IT leadership
    • Infrastructure
    • Applications
    • Security
    1. On a whiteboard, draw a table with each of the cloud drivers (identified in 1.1.2) across the top.
    2. Work collectively to generate success indicators for each cloud driver. In this case, a success indicator is some way you can report your progress with the stated driver. It is a real-world proxy for the sometimes abstract phenomena that make up your drivers. Think about what would be true if your driver was realized.
      1. For example, if your driver is “faster access to resources,” you might consider indicators like developer satisfaction, project completion time, average time to provision, etc.
    3. Once you are satisfied with your list of indicators, populate the slide in the Cloud Vision Executive Presentation for validation from stakeholders.

    Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    Step 1.2

    Explore cloud characteristics

    Activities

    Understand the value of the cloud:

    • Review delivery models
    • Review support models
    • Review service models
    • Review migration paths

    Understand the Cloud

    Generate goals and drivers

    Explore cloud characteristics

    Create a current state summary

    Select workloads for analysis

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group
    • Architecture
    • Engineering
    • Security

    Outcomes of this step

    • Understanding of cloud service models and value

    Defining the cloud

    Per NIST, the cloud has five fundamental characteristics. All clouds have these characteristics, even if they are executed in somewhat different ways between delivery models, service models, and even individual providers.

    Cloud characteristics

    On-demand self-service

    Cloud customers are capable of provisioning cloud resources without human interaction (e.g. contacting sales), generally through a web console.

    Broad network access

    Capabilities are designed to be delivered over a network and are generally intended for access by a wide variety of platform types (cloud services are generally device-agnostic).

    Resource pooling

    Multiple customers (internal, in the case of private clouds) make use of a highly abstracted shared infrastructure managed by the cloud provider.

    Rapid elasticity

    Customers are capable of provisioning additional resources as required, pulling from a functionally infinite pool of capacity. Cloud resources can be spun-down when no longer needed.

    Measured service

    Consumption is metered based on an appropriate unit of analysis (number of licenses, storage used, compute cycles, etc.) and billing is transparent and granular.

    Cloud delivery models

    The NIST definition of cloud computing outlines four cloud delivery models: public, private, hybrid, and community clouds. A community cloud is like a private cloud, but it is provisioned for the exclusive use of a like-minded group of organizations, usually in a mutually beneficial, non-competitive arrangement. Universities and hospitals are examples of organizations that can pool their resources in this way without impacting competitiveness. The Info-Tech model covers three key delivery models – public, private, and hybrid, and an overarching model (multi-cloud) that can comprise more than one of the other models – public + public, public + hybrid, etc.

    Public

    The cloud service is provisioned for access by the general public (customers).

    Private

    A private cloud has the five key characteristics, but is provisioned for use by a single entity, like a company or organization.

    Hybrid

    Hybridity essentially refers to interoperability between multiple cloud delivery models (public +private).

    Multi

    A multi-cloud deployment requires only that multiple clouds are used without any necessary interoperability (Nutanix, 2019).

    Public cloud

    This is what people generally think about when they talk about cloud

    • The public cloud is, well, public! Anyone can make use of its resources, and in the case of the major providers, capacity is functionally unlimited. Need to store exabytes of data in the cloud? No problem! Amazon will drive a modified shipping container to your datacenter, load it up, and “migrate” it to a datacenter.
    • Public clouds offer significant variety on the infrastructure side. Major IaaS providers, like Microsoft and Amazon, offer dozens of services across many different categories including compute, networking, and storage, but also identity, containers, machine learning, virtual desktops, and much, much more. (See a list from Microsoft here, and Amazon here)
    • There are undoubtedly strengths to the public cloud model. Providers offer the “latest and greatest” and customers need not worry about the details, including managing infrastructure and physical locations. Providers offer built-in redundancy, multi-regional deployments, automation tools, management and governance solutions, and a variety of leading-edge technologies that would not be feasible for organizations to run in-house, like high performance compute, blockchain, or quantum computing.
    • Of course, the public cloud is not all sunshine and rainbows – there are downsides as well. It can be expensive; it can introduce regulatory complications to have to trust another entity with your key information. Additionally, there can be performance hiccups, and with SaaS products, it can be difficult to monitor at the appropriate (per-transaction) level.

    Prominent examples include:

    AWS

    Microsoft

    Azure

    Salesforce.com

    Workday

    SAP

    Private cloud

    A lower-risk cloud for cloud-averse customers?

    • A cloud is a cloud, no matter how small. Some IT shops deploy private clouds that make use of the five key cloud characteristics but provisioned for the exclusive use of a single entity, like a corporation.
    • Private clouds have numerous benefits. Some potential cloud customers might be uncomfortable with the shared responsibility that is inherent in the public cloud. Private clouds allow customers to deliver flexible, measured services without having to surrender control, but they require significant overhead, capital expenditure, administrative effort, and technical expertise.
    • According to the 2021 State of the Cloud Report, private cloud use is common, and the most frequently cited toolset is VMware vSphere, followed by Azure Stack, OpenStack, and AWS Outposts. Private cloud deployments are more common in larger organizations, which makes sense given the overhead required to manage such an environment.

    Private cloud adoption

    The images shows a graph titled Private Cloud Adoption for Enterprises. It is a horizontal bar graph, with three segments in each bar: dark blue marking currently use; mid blue marking experimenting; and light blue marking plan to use.

    VMware and Microsoft lead the pack among private cloud customers, with Amazon and Red Hat also substantially present across private cloud environments.

    Hybrid cloud

    The best of both worlds?

    Hybrid cloud architectures combine multiple cloud delivery models and facilitate some level of interoperability. NIST suggests bursting and load balancing as examples of hybrid cloud use cases. Note: it is not sufficient to simply have multiple clouds running in parallel – there must be a toolset that allows for an element of cross-cloud functionality.

    This delivery model is attractive because it allows users to take advantage of the strengths of multiple service models using a single management pane. Bursting across clouds to take advantage of additional capacity or disaster recovery capabilities are two obvious use cases that appeal to hybrid cloud users.

    But while hybridity is all the rage (especially given the impact Covid-19 has had on the workplace), the reality is that any hybrid cloud user must take the good with the bad. Multiple clouds and a management layer can be technically complex, expensive, and require maintaining a physical infrastructure that is not especially valuable (“I thought we were moving to the cloud to get out of the datacenter!”).

    Before selecting a hybrid approach through services like VMware Cloud on AWS or Microsoft’s Azure Stack, consider the cost, complexity, and actual expected benefit.

    Amazon, Microsoft, and Google dominate public cloud IaaS, but IBM is betting big on hybrid cloud:

    The image is a screencap of a tweet from IBM News. The tweet reads: IBM CEO Ginni Rometty: Hybrid cloud is a trillion dollar market and we'll be number one #Think2019.

    With its acquisition of Red Hat in 2019 for $34 billion, Big Blue put its money where its mouth is and acquired a substantial hybrid cloud business. At the time of the acquisition, Red Hat’s CEO, Jim Whitehurst, spoke about the benefit IBM expected to receive:

    “Joining forces with IBM gives Red Hat the opportunity to bring more open source innovation to an even broader range of organizations and will enable us to scale to meet the need for hybrid cloud solutions that deliver true choice and agility” (Red Hat, 2019).

    Multi-cloud

    For most organizations, the multi-cloud is the most realistic option.

    Multi-cloud is popular!

    The image shows a graph titled Multi-Cloud Architectures Used, % of all Respondents. The largest percentage is Apps siloed on different clouds, followed by DAta integration between clouds.

    Multi-cloud solutions exist at a different layer of abstraction from public, private, and even hybrid cloud delivery models. A multi-cloud architecture, as the name suggests, requires the user to be a customer of more than one cloud provider, and it can certainly include a hybrid cloud deployment, but it is not bound by the same rules of interoperability.

    Many organizations – especially those with fewer resources or a lack of a use case for a private cloud – rely on a multi-cloud architecture to build applications where they belong, and they manage each environment separately (or occasionally with the help of cloud management platforms).

    If your data team wants to work in AWS and your enterprise services run on basic virtual machines in Azure, that might be the most effective architecture. As the Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report suggests, this architecture is far more common than the more complicated bursting or brokering architectures characteristic of hybrid clouds.

    NIST cloud service models

    Software as a service

    SaaS has exploded in popularity with consumers who wish to avail themselves of the cloud’s benefits without having to manage underlying infrastructure components. SaaS is simple, generally billed per-user per-month, and is almost entirely provider-managed.

    Platform as a service

    PaaS providers offer a toolset for their customers to run custom applications and services without the requirement to manage underlying infrastructure components. This service model is ideal for custom applications/services that don’t benefit from highly granular infrastructure control.

    Infrastructure as a service

    IaaS represents the sale of components. Instead of a service, IaaS providers sell access to components, like compute, storage, and networking, allowing for customers to build anything they want on top of the providers’ infrastructure.

    Cloud service models

    • This research focuses on five key service models, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses. Moving right from “on-prem,” customers gradually give up more control over their environments to cloud service providers.
    • An entirely premises-based environment means that the customer is responsible for everything ranging from the dirt under the datacenter to application-level configurations. Conversely, in a SaaS environment, the provider is responsible for everything but those top-level application configurations.
    • A managed service provider or other third party can manage any or of the components of the infrastructure stack. A service provider may, for example, build a SaaS solution on top of another provider’s IaaS, or might offer configuration assistance with a commercially available SaaS.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Not all workloads fit well in the cloud. Many environments will mix service models (e.g. SaaS for some workloads, some in IaaS, some on-premises), and this can be perfectly effective. It must be consistent and intentional, however.

    On-prem Co-Lo IaaS PaaS SaaS
    Application Application Application Application Application
    Database Database Database Database Database
    Runtime/ Middleware Runtime/ Middleware Runtime/ Middleware Runtime/ Middleware Runtime/ Middleware
    OS OS OS OS OS
    Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervisor
    Server Network Storage Server Network Storage Server Network Storage Server Network Storage Server Network Storage
    Facilities Facilities Facilities Facilities Facilities

    Organization has control

    Organization or vendor may control

    Vendor has control

    Analytics folly

    SaaS is good, but it’s not a panacea

    Industry: Healthcare

    Source: Info-Tech workshop

    Situation

    A healthcare analytics provider had already moved a significant number of “non-core workloads” to the cloud, including email, HRIS, and related services.

    The company CEO was satisfied with the reduced effort required by IT to manage SaaS-based workloads and sought to extend the same benefits to the core analytics platform where there was an opportunity to reduce overhead.

    Complication

    Many components of the health analytics service were designed to run specifically in a datacenter and were not ready to be migrated to the cloud without significant effort/refactoring. SaaS was not an option because this was a core platform – a SaaS provider would have been the competition.

    That left IaaS, which was expensive and would not bring the expected benefits (reduced overhead).

    Results

    The organization determined that there were no short-term gains from migrating to the cloud. Due to the nature of the application (its extensive customization, the fact that it was a core product sold by the company) any steps to reduce operational overhead were not feasible.

    The CEO recognized that the analytics platform was not a good candidate for the cloud and what distinguished the analytics platform from more suitable workloads.

    Migration paths

    In a 2016 blog post, Amazon Web Services articulated a framework for cloud migration that incorporates elements of the journey as well as the destination. If workload owners do not choose to retain or retire their workloads, there are four alternatives. These alternatives all stack up differently along five key dimensions:

    1. Value: does the workload stand to benefit from unique cloud characteristics? To what degree?
    2. Effort: how much work would be required to make the transition?
    3. Cost: how much money is the migration expected to cost?
    4. Time: how long will the migration take?
    5. Skills: what skills must be brought to bear to complete the migration?

    Not all migration paths can lead to all destinations. Rehosting generally means IaaS, while repurchasing leads to SaaS. Refactoring and replatforming have some variety of outcomes, and it becomes possible to take advantage of new IaaS architectures or migrate workloads over fully to SaaS.

    As part of the workload assessment process, use the five dimensions (expanded upon on the next slide) to determine what migration path makes sense. Preferred migration paths form an important part of the overall cloud vision process.

    Retain (Revisit)

    • Keep the application in its current form, at least for now. This doesn’t preclude revisiting it in the future.

    Retire

    • Get rid of the application completely.

    Rehost

    • Move the application to the cloud (IaaS) and continue to run it in more or less the same form as it currently runs.

    Replatform

    • Move the application to the cloud and perform a few changes for cloud optimizations.

    Refactor

    • Rewrite the application, taking advantage of cloud native architectures.

    Repurchase

    • Replace with an alternative, cloud-native application and migrate the data.

    Migration paths – relative value

    Migration path Value Effort Cost Time Skills
    Retain No real change in the absolute value of the workload if it is retained. No effort beyond ongoing workload maintenance. No immediate hard dollar costs, but opportunity costs and technical debt abound. No time required! (At least not right away…) Retaining requires the same skills it has always required (which may be more difficult to acquire in the future).
    Rehire A retired workload can provide no value, but it is not a drain! Spinning a service down requires engaging that part of the lifecycle. N/A Retiring the service may be simple or complicated depending on its current role. N/A
    Rehost Some value comes with rehosting, but generally components stay the same (VM here vs. a VM there). Minimal effort required, especially with automated tools. The effort will depend on the environment being migrated. Relatively cheap compared to other options. Rehosting infrastructure is the simplest cloud migration path and is useful for anyone in a hurry. Rehosting is the simplest cloud migration path for most workloads, but it does require basic familiarity with cloud IaaS.

    Replatform

    Replatformed workloads can take advantage of cloud-native services (SQL vs. SQLaaS). Replatforming is more effortful than rehosting, but less effortful than refactoring. Moderate cost – does not require fundamental rearchitecture, just some tweaking. Relatively more complicated than a simple rehost, but less demanding than a refactor. Platform and workload expertise is required; more substantial than a simple rehost.
    Refactor A fully formed, customized cloud-based workload that can take advantage of cloud-native architectures is generally quite valuable. Significant effort required based on the requirement to engage the full SDLC. Significant cost required to engage SDLC and rebuild the application/service. The most complicated and time-consuming. The most complicated and time-consuming.
    Repurchase Repurchasing is the quickest way to achieve cloud-native value. There are compromises, however (high cost, vendor-lock-in). Repurchasing is the quickest way to achieve cloud-native value. There are compromises, however (high cost, vendor-lock-in). Repurchasing is the quickest way to achieve cloud-native value. There are compromises, however (high cost, vendor-lock-in). Configuration – especially for massive projects – can be time consuming, but in general repurchasing can be quite fast. Buying software does require knowledge of requirements and integrations, but is otherwise quite simple.

    Where should you get your cloud skills?

    Cloud skills are certainly top of mind right now. With the great upheaval in both work patterns and in the labor market more generally, expertise in cloud-related areas is simultaneously more valuable and more difficult to procure. According to Pluralsight’s 2021 “State of Upskilling” report, 44% of respondents report themselves under-skilled in the cloud management area, making cloud management the most significant skill gap reported on the survey.

    Everyone left the office. Work as we know it is fundamentally altered for a generation or more. Cloud services shot up in popularity by enabling the transition. And yet there is a gap – a prominent gap – in skilling up for this critically important future. What is the cloud manager to do?

    Per the framework presented here, that manager has three essential options. They may take somewhat different forms depending on specific requirements and the quirks of the local market, but the options are:

    1. Train or hire internal resources: This might be easier said than done, especially for more niche skills, but makes sense for workloads that are critical to operations for the long term.
    2. Engage a managed service provider: MSPs are often engaged to manage services where internal IT lacks bandwidth or expertise.
    3. Hire a consultant: Consultants are great for time-bound implementation projects where highly specific expertise is required, such as a migration or implementation project.

    Each model makes sense to some degree. When evaluating individual workloads for cloud suitability, it is critical to consider the support model – both immediate and long term. What makes sense from a value perspective?

    Cloud decisions – summary

    A key component of the Info-Tech cloud vision model is that it is multi-layered. Not every decision must be made at every level. At the workload level, it makes sense to select service models that make sense, but each workload does not need its own defined vision. Workload-level decisions should be guided by an overall strategy but applied tactically, based on individual workload characteristics and circumstances.

    Conversely, some decisions will inevitably be applied at the environment level. With some exceptions, it is unlikely that cloud customers will build an entire private/hybrid cloud environment around a single solution; instead, they will define a broader strategy and fit individual workloads into that strategy.

    Some considerations exist at both the workload and environment levels. Risks and roadblocks, as well as the preferred support model, are concerns that exist at both the environment level and at the workload level.

    The image is a Venn diagram, with the left side titled Workload level, and the right side titled Environment Level. In the left section are: service model and migration path. On the right section are: Overall vision and Delivery model. In the centre section are: support model and Risks and roadblocks.

    Step 1.3

    Create a current state summary

    Activities

    1.3.1 Record your current state

    Understand the Cloud

    Generate goals and drivers

    Explore cloud characteristics

    Create a current state summary

    Select workloads for analysis

    This step involves the following participants: Core working group

    Outcomes of this step

    • Current state summary of cloud solutions

    1.3.1 Record your current state

    30 minutes

    Input

    • Knowledge of existing cloud workloads

    Output

    • Current state cloud summary for service, delivery, and support models

    Materials

    • Whiteboard

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Infrastructure team
    • Service owners
    1. On a whiteboard (real or virtual) draw a table with each of the cloud service models across the top. Leave a cell below each to list examples.
    2. Under each service model, record examples present in your environment. The purpose of the exercise is to illustrate the existence of cloud services in your environment or the lack thereof, so there is no need to be exhaustive. Complete this in turn for each service model until you are satisfied that you have created an effective picture of your current cloud SaaS state, IaaS state, etc.
    3. Input the results into their own slide titled “current state summary” in the Cloud Vision Executive Presentation.
    4. Repeat for the cloud delivery models and support models and include the results of those exercises as well.
    5. Create a short summary statement (“We are primarily a public cloud consumer with a large SaaS footprint and minimal presence in PaaS and IaaS. We retain an MSP to manage our hosted telephony solution; otherwise, everything is handled in house.”

    Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    Step 1.4

    Select workloads for current analysis

    Activities

    1.4.1 Select workloads for assessment

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group

    Outcomes of this step

    • List of workloads for assessment

    Understand the cloud

    Generate goals and drivers

    Explore cloud characteristics

    Create a current state summary

    Select workloads for analysis

    1.4.1 Select workloads for assessment

    30 minutes

    Input

    • Knowledge of existing cloud workloads

    Output

    • List of workloads to be assessed

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Cloud Vision Workbook

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • IT management
    1. In many cases, the cloud project is inspired by a desire to move a particular workload or set of workloads. Solicit feedback from the core working group about what these workloads might be. Ask everyone in the meeting to suggest a workload and record each one on a sticky note or white board (virtual or physical).
    2. Discuss the results with the group and begin grouping similar workloads together. They will be subject to the assessments in the Cloud Vision Workbook, so try to avoid selecting too many workloads that will produce similar answers. It might not be obvious, but try to think about workloads that have similar usage patterns, risk levels, and performance requirements, and select a representative group.
    3. You should embrace counterintuition by selecting a workload that you think is unlikely to be a good fit for the cloud if you can and subjecting it to the assessment as well for validation purposes.
    4. When you have a list of 4-6 workloads, record them on tab 2 of the Cloud Vision Workbook.

    Cloud Vision Workbook

    Assess your cloud workloads

    Build the foundations of your cloud vision

    Phase 2

    Phase 2

    Evaluate Cloud Workloads

    Phase 1

    1.1 Generate goals and drivers

    1.2 Explore cloud characteristics

    1.3 Create a current state summary

    1.4 Select workloads for analysis

    Phase 2

    2.1 Conduct workload assessments

    2.2 Determine workload future states

    Phase 3

    3.1 Generate risks and roadblocks

    3.2 Mitigate risks and roadblocks

    3.3 Define roadmap initiatives

    Phase 4

    4.1 Review and assign work items

    4.2 Finalize cloud decision framework

    4.3 Create cloud vision

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Conduct workload assessments
    • Determine workload future state

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Subject matter experts
    • Core working group
    • IT management

    Define Your Cloud Vision

    Work from the bottom up and assess your workloads

    A workload-first approach will help you create a realistic vision.

    The concept of a cloud vision should unquestionably be informed by the nature of the workloads that IT is expected to provide for the wider organization. The overall cloud vision is no greater than the sum of its parts. You cannot migrate to the cloud in the abstract. Workloads need to go – and not all workloads are equally suitable for the transition.

    It is therefore imperative to understand which workloads are a good fit for the cloud, which cloud service models make the most sense, how to execute the migration, what support should look like, and what risks and roadblocks you are likely to encounter as part of the process.

    That’s where the Cloud Vision Workbook comes into play. You can use this tool to assess as many workloads as you’d like – most people get the idea after about four – and by the end of the exercise, you should have a pretty good idea about where your workloads belong, and you’ll have a tool to assess any net new or previously unconsidered workloads.

    It’s not so much about the results of the assessment – though these are undeniably important – but about the learnings gleaned from the collaborative assessment exercise. While you can certainly fill out the assessment without any additional input, this exercise is most effective when completed as part of a group.

    Introducing the Cloud Vision Workbook

    • The Cloud Vision Workbook is an Excel tool that answers the age old question: “What should I do with my workloads?”
    • It is divided into eight tabs, each of which offers unique value. Start by reading the introduction and inputting your list of workloads. Work your way through tabs 3-6, completing the suitability, migration, management, and risk and roadblock assessments, and review the results on tab 7.
    • If you choose to go through the full battery of assessments for each workload, expect to answer and weight 111 unique questions across the four assessments. This is an intensive exercise, so carefully consider which assessments are valuable to you, and what workloads you have time to assess.
    • Tab 8 hosts the milestone timeline and captures the results of the phase 3 risk and mitigation exercise.

    Understand Cloud Vision Workbook outputs

    The image shows a graphic with several graphs and lists on it, with sections highlighted with notes. At the top, there's the title Database with the note Workload title (populated from tab 2). Below that, there is a graph with the note Relative suitability of the five service models. The Risks and roadblocks section includes the note: The strategy components – the risks and roadblocks – are captured relative to one another to highlight key focus areas. To the left of that, there is a Notes section with the note Notes populated based on post-assessment discussion. At the bottom, there is a section titled Where should skills be procured?, with the note The radar diagram captures the recommended support model relative to the others (MSP, consultant, internal IT). To the right of that, there is a section titled Migration path, with the note that Ordered list of migration paths. Note: a disconnect here with the suggested service model may indicate an unrealistic goal state.

    Step 2.1

    Conduct workload assessments

    Activities

    2.1.1 Conduct workload assessments

    2.1.2 Interpret your results

    Phase Title

    Conduct workload assessments

    Determine workload future state

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group
    • Workload subject matter experts

    Outcomes of this step

    • Completed workload assessments

    2.1.1 Conduct workload assessments

    2 hours per workload

    Input

    • List of workloads to be assessed

    Output

    • Completed cloud vision assessments

    Materials

    • Cloud Vision Workbook

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Service owners/workload SMEs
    1. The Cloud Vision Workbook is your one stop shop for all things workload assessment. Open the tool to tab 2 and review the workloads you identified at the end of phase 1. Ensure that these are correct. Once satisfied, project the tool (virtually, if necessary) so that all participants can see the assessment questions.
    2. Work through tabs 3-6, answering the questions and assigning a multiplier for each one. A higher multiplier increases the relative weight of the question, giving it a greater impact on the overall outcome.
    3. Do your best to induce participants to offer opinions. Consensus is not absolutely necessary, but it is a good goal. Ask your participants if they agree with initial responses and occasionally take the opposite position (“I’m surprised you said agree – I would have thought we didn’t care about CapEx vs. OpEx”). Stimulate discussion.
    4. Highlight any questions that you will need to return to or run by someone not present. Include a placeholder answer, as the tool requires all cells to be filled for computation.

    Cloud Vision Workbook

    2.1.2 Interpret your results

    10 minutes

    Input

    • Completed cloud vision assessments

    Output

    • Shared understanding of implications

    Materials

    • Cloud Vision Workbook

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Service owners/workload SMEs
    1. Once you’ve completed all 111 questions for each workload, you can review your results on tab 7. On tab 7, you will see four populated graphics: cloud suitability, migration path, “where should skills be procured?”, and risks and roadblocks. These represent the components of the overall cloud vision that you will present to stakeholders.
    2. The “cloud suitability” chart captures the service model that the assessment judges to be most suitable for the workload. Ask those present if any are surprised by the output. If there is any disagreement, discuss the source of the surprise and what a more realistic outcome would be. Revisit the assessment if necessary.
    3. Conduct a similar exercise with each of the other outputs. Does it make sense to refactor the workload based on its cloud suitability? Does the fact that we scored so highly on the “consultant” support model indicate something about how we handle upskilling internally? Does the profile of risks and roadblocks identified here align with expectations? What should be ranked higher? What about lower?
    4. Once everyone is generally satisfied with the results, close the tool and take a break! You’ve earned it.

    Cloud Vision Workbook

    Understand the cloud strategy components

    Each cloud strategy will take a slightly different form, but all should contain echoes of each of these components. This process will help you define your vision and direction, but you will need to take steps to execute on that vision. The remainder of the cloud strategy, covered in the related blueprint Document Your Cloud Strategy comprises these fourteen topics divided across three categories: people, governance, and technology. The workload assessment covers these under risks and roadblocks and highlights areas that may require specific additional attention. When interpreting the results, think of these areas as comprising things that you will need to do to make your vision a reality.

    People

    • Skills and roles
    • Culture and adoption
    • Governing bodies

    Governance

    • Architecture
    • Integration and interoperability
    • Operations management
    • Cloud portfolio management
    • Cloud vendor management
    • Finance management
    • Security
    • Data controls

    Technology

    • Monitoring
    • Provisioning
    • Migration

    Strategy component: People

    People form the core of any good strategy. As part of your cloud vision, you will need to understand the implications a cloud transition will have on your staff and users, whether those users are internal or external.

    Component Description Challenges
    Skills and roles The move to the cloud will require staff to learn how to handle new technology and new operational processes. The cloud is a different way of procuring IT resources and may require the definition of new roles to handle things like cost management and provisioning. Staff may not have the necessary experience to migrate to a cloud environment or to effectively manage resources once the cloud transition is made. Cloud skills are difficult to hire for, and with the ever-changing nature of the platforms themselves, this shows no sign of abating. Redefining roles can also be politically challenging and should be done with due care and consideration.
    Culture and adoption If you build it, they will come…right? It is not always the case that a new service immediately attracts users. Ensuring that organizational culture aligns with the cloud vision is a critical success factor. Equally important is ensuring that cloud resources are used as intended. Those unfamiliar with cloud resources may be less willing to learn to use them. If alternatives exist (e.g. a legacy service that has not been shut down), or if those detractors are influential, this resistance may impede your cloud execution. Also, if the cloud transition involves significant effort or a fundamental rework (e.g. a DevOps transition) this role redefinition could cause some internal turmoil.
    Governing bodies A large-scale cloud deployment requires formal governance. Formal governance requires a governing body that is ultimately responsible for designing the said governance. This could take the form of a “center of excellence” or may rest with a single cloud architect in a smaller, less complicated environment. Governance is difficult. Defining responsibilities in a way that includes all relevant stakeholders without paralyzing the decision-making process is difficult. Implementing suggestions is a challenge. Navigating the changing nature of service provision (who can provision their own instances or assign licenses?) can be difficult as well. All these concerns must be addressed in a cloud strategy.

    Strategy component: Governance

    Without guardrails, the cloud deployment will grow organically. This has strengths (people tend to adopt solutions that they select and deploy themselves), but these are more than balanced out by the drawbacks that come with inconsistency, poor administration, duplication of services, suboptimal costing, and any number of other unique challenges. The solution is to develop and deploy governance. The following list captures some of the necessary governance-related components of a cloud strategy.

    Component Description Challenges
    Architecture Enterprise architecture is an important function in any environment with more than one interacting workload component (read: any environment). The cloud strategy should include an approach to defining and implementing a standard cloud architecture and should assign responsibility to an individual or group. Sometimes the cloud transition is inspired by the desire to rearchitect. The necessary skills and knowledge may not be readily available to design and transition to a microservices-based environment, for example, vs. a traditional monolithic application architecture. The appropriateness of a serverless environment may not be well understood, and it may be the case that architects are unfamiliar with cloud best practices and reference architectures.
    Integration and interoperability Many services are only highly functional when integrated with other services. What is a database without its front-end? What is an analytics platform without its data lake? For the cloud vision to be properly implemented, a strategy for handling integration and interoperability must be developed. It may be as simple as “all SaaS apps must be compatible with Okta” but it must be there. Migration to the cloud may require a fundamentally new approach to integration, moving away from a point-to-point integrations and towards an ESB or data lake. In many cases, this is easier said than done. Centralization of management may be appealing, but legacy applications – or those acquired informally in a one-off fashion – might not be so easy to integrate into a central management platform.
    Operations management Service management (ITIL processes) must be aligned with your overall cloud strategy. Migrating to the cloud (where applicable) will require refining these processes, including incident, problem, request, change, and configuration management, to make them more suitable for the cloud environment. Operations management doesn’t go away in the cloud, but it does change in line with the transition to shared responsibility. Responding to incidents may be more difficult on the cloud when troubleshooting is a vendor’s responsibility. Change management in a SaaS environment may be more receptive than staff are used to as cloud providers push changes out that cannot be rolled back.

    Strategy component: Governance (cont.)

    Component Description Challenges
    Cloud portfolio management This component refers to the act of managing the portfolio of cloud services that is available to IT and to business users. What requirements must a SaaS service meet to be onboarded into the environment? How do we account for exceptions to our IaaS policy? What about services that are only available from a certain provider? Rationalizing services offers administrative benefits, but may make some tasks more difficult for end users who have learned things a certain way or rely on niche toolsets. Managing access through a service catalog can also be challenging based on buy-in and ongoing administration. It is necessary to develop and implement policy.
    Cloud vendor management Who owns the vendor management function, and what do their duties entail? What contract language must be standard? What does due diligence look like? How should negotiations be conducted? What does a severing of the relationship look like? Cloud service models are generally different from traditional hosted software and even from each other (e.g. SaaS vs. PaaS). There is a bit of a learning curve when it comes to dealing with vendors. Also relevant: the skills that it takes to build and maintain a system are not necessarily the same as those required to coherently interact with a cloud vendor.
    Finance management Cloud services are, by definition, subject to a kind of granular, operational billing that many shops might not be used to. Someone will need to accurately project and allocate costs, while ensuring that services are monitored for cost abnormalities. Cloud cost challenges often relate to overall expense (“the cloud is more expensive than an alternative solution”), expense variability (“I don’t know what my budget needs to be this quarter”), and cost complexity (“I don’t understand what I’m paying for – what’s an Elastic Beanstalk?”).
    Security The cloud is not inherently more or less secure than a premises-based alternative, though the risk profile can be different. Applying appropriate security governance to ensure workloads are compliant with security requirements is an essential component of the strategy.

    Technical security architecture can be a challenge, as well as navigating the shared responsibility that comes with a cloud transition. There are also a plethora of cloud-specific security tools like cloud access security brokers (CASBs), cloud security posture management (CSPM) solutions, and even secure access services edge (SASE) technology.

    Data controls Data residency, classification, quality, and protection are important considerations for any cloud strategy. With cloud providers taking on outsized responsibility, understanding and governing data is essential. Cloud providers like to abstract away from the end user, and while some may be able to guarantee residency, others may not. Additionally, regulations may prevent some data from going to the cloud, and you may need to develop a new organizational backup strategy to account for the cloud.

    Strategy component: Technology

    Good technology will never replace good people and effective process, but it remains important in its own right. A migration that neglects the undeniable technical components of a solid cloud strategy is doomed to mediocrity at best and failure at worst. Understanding the technical implications of the cloud vision – particularly in terms of monitoring, provisioning, and migration – makes all the difference. You can interpret the results of the cloud workload assessments by reviewing the details presented here.

    Component Description Challenges
    Monitoring The cloud must be monitored in line with performance requirements. Staff must ensure that appropriate tools are in place to properly monitor cloud workloads and that they are capturing adequate and relevant data. Defining requirements for monitoring a potentially unfamiliar environment can be difficult, as can consolidating on a monitoring solution that both meets requirements and covers all relevant areas. There may be some upskilling and integration work required to ensure that monitoring works as required.
    Provisioning How will provisioning be done? Who will be responsible for ensuring the right people have access to the right resources? What tooling must be deployed to support provisioning goals? What technical steps must be taken to ensure that the provisioning is as seamless as possible? There is the inevitable challenge of assigning responsibility and accountability in a changing infrastructure and operations environment, especially if the changes are substantial (e.g. a fundamental operating model shift, reoriented around the cloud). Staff may also need to familiarize themselves with cloud-based provisioning tools like Ansible, Terraform, or even CloudFormation.
    Migration The act of migrating is important as well. In some cases, the migration is as simple as configuring the new environment and turning it up (e.g. with a net new SaaS service). In other cases, the migration itself can be a substantial undertaking, involving large amounts of data, a complicated replatforming/refactoring, and/or a significant configuration exercise.

    Not all migration journeys are created equal, and challenges include a general lack of understanding of the requirements of a migration, the techniques that might be necessary to migrate to a particular cloud (there are many) and the disruption/risk associated with moving large amounts of data. All of these challenges must be considered as part of the overall cloud strategy, whether in terms of architectural principles or skill acquisition (or both!).

    Step 2.2

    Determine workload future state

    Activities

    2.2.1 Determine workload future state

    Conduct workload assessments

    Determine workload future state

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT management
    • Core working group

    Outcomes of this step

    • Completed workload assessments
    • Defined workload future state

    2.2.1 Determine workload future state

    1-3 hours

    Input

    • Completed workload assessments

    Output

    • Preliminary future state outputs

    Materials

    • Cloud Vision Workbook
    • Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Service owners
    • IT management
    1. After you’ve had a chance to validate your results, refer to tab 7 of the tool, where you will find a blank notes section.
    2. With the working group, capture your answers to each of the following questions:
      1. What service model is the most suitable for the workload? Why?
      2. How will we conduct the migration? Which of the six models makes the most sense? Do we have a backup plan if our primary plan doesn’t work out?
      3. What should the support model look like?
      4. What are some workload-specific risks and considerations that must be taken into account for the workload?
    3. Once you’ve got answers to each of these questions for each of the workloads, include your summary in the “notes” section of tab 7.

    Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    Paste the output into the Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    • The Cloud Vision Workbook output is a compact, consumable summary of each workload’s planned future state. Paste each assessment in as necessary.
    • There is no absolutely correct way to present the information, but the output is a good place to start. Do note that, while the presentation is designed to lead with the vision statement, because the process is workload-first, the assessments are populated prior to the overall vision in a bottom-up manner.
    • Be sure to anticipate the questions you are likely to receive from any stakeholders. You may consider preparing for questions like: “What other workloads fit this profile?” “What do we expect the impact on the budget to be?” “How long will this take?” Keep these and other questions in mind as you progress through the vision definition process.

    The image shows the Cloud Vision Workbook output, which was described in an annotated version in an earlier section.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Keep your audience in mind. You may want to include some additional context in the presentation if the results are going to be presented to non-technical stakeholders or those who are not familiar with the terms or how to interpret the outputs.

    Identify and Mitigate Risks

    Build the foundations of your cloud vision

    PHASE 3

    Phase 3

    Identify and Mitigate Risks

    Phase 1

    1.1 Generate goals and drivers

    1.2 Explore cloud characteristics

    1.3 Create a current state summary

    1.4 Select workloads for analysis

    Phase 2

    2.1 Conduct workload assessments

    2.2 Determine workload future states

    Phase 3

    3.1 Generate risks and roadblocks

    3.2 Mitigate risks and roadblocks

    3.3 Define roadmap initiatives

    Phase 4

    4.1 Review and assign work items

    4.2 Finalize cloud decision framework

    4.3 Create cloud vision

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Generate risks and roadblocks
    • Mitigate risks and roadblocks
    • Define roadmap initiatives

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Core working group
    • Workload subject matter experts

    You know what you want to do, but what do you have to do?

    What questions remain unanswered?

    There are workload-level risks and roadblocks, and there are environment-level risks. This phase is focused primarily on environment-level risks and roadblocks, or those that are likely to span multiple workloads (but this is not hard and fast rule – anything that you deem worth discussing is worth discussing). The framework here calls for an open forum where all stakeholders – technical and non-technical, pro-cloud and anti-cloud, management and individual contributor – have an opportunity to articulate their concerns, however specific or general, and receive feedback and possible mitigation.

    Start by soliciting feedback. You can do this over time or in a single session. Encourage anyone with an opinion to share it. Focus on those who are likely to have a perspective that will become relevant at some point during the creation of the cloud strategy and the execution of any migration. Explain the preliminary direction; highlight any major changes that you foresee. Remind participants that you are not looking for solutions (yet), but that you want to make sure you hear any and every concern as early as possible. You will get feedback and it will all be valuable.

    Before cutting your participants loose, remind them that, as with all business decisions, the cloud comes with trade-offs. Not everyone will have every wish fulfilled, and in some cases, significant effort may be needed to get around a roadblock, risks may need to be accepted, and workloads that looked like promising candidates for one service model or another may not be able to realize that potential. This is a normal and expected part of the cloud vision process.

    Once the risks and roadblocks conversation is complete, it is the core working group’s job to propose and validate mitigations. Not every risk can be completely resolved, but the cloud has been around for decades – chances are someone else has faced a similar challenge and made it through relatively unscathed. That work will inevitably result in initiatives for immediate execution. Those initiatives will form the core of the initiative roadmap that accompanies the completed Cloud Vision Executive Presentation.

    Step 3.1

    Generate risks and roadblocks

    Activities

    3.1.1 Generate risks and roadblocks

    3.1.2 Generate mitigations

    Identify and mitigate risks

    Generate risks and roadblocks

    Mitigate risks and roadblocks

    Define roadmap initiatives

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group
    • IT management
    • Infrastructure
    • Applications
    • Security
    • Architecture

    Outcomes of this step

    • List of risks and roadblocks

    Understand risks and roadblocks

    Risk

    • Something that could potentially go wrong.
    • You can respond to risks by mitigating them:
      • Eliminate: take action to prevent the risk from causing issues.
      • Reduce: take action to minimize the likelihood/severity of the risk.
      • Transfer: shift responsibility for the risk away from IT, towards another division of the company.
      • Accept: where the likelihood or severity is low, it may be prudent to accept that the risk could come to fruition.

    Roadblock

    • There are things that aren’t “risks” that we care about when migrating to the cloud.
    • We know, for example, that a complicated integration situation will create work items for any migration – this is not an “unknown.”
    • We respond to roadblocks by generating work items.

    3.1.1 Generate risks and roadblocks

    1.5 hours

    Input

    • Completed cloud vision assessments

    Output

    • List of risks and roadblocks

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Service owners/workload SMEs
    • Anyone with concerns about the cloud
    1. Gather your core working group – and really anyone with an intelligent opinion on the cloud – into a single meeting space. Give the group 5-10 minutes to list anything they think could present a difficulty in transitioning workloads to the cloud. Write each risk/roadblock on its own sticky note. You will never be 100% exhaustive, but don’t let anything your users care about go unaddressed.
    2. Once everyone has had time to write down their risks and roadblocks, have everyone share one by one. Make sure you get them all. Overlap in risks and roadblocks is okay! Group similar concerns together to give a sort of heat map of what your participants are concerned about. (This is called “affinity diagramming.”)
    3. Assign names to these categories. Many of these categories will align with the strategy components discussed in the previous phase (governance, security, etc.) but some will be specific whether by nature or by degree.
    4. Sort each of the individual risks into its respective category, collapsing any exact duplicates, and leaving room for notes and mitigations (see the next slide for a visual).

    Understand risks and roadblocks

    The image is two columns--on the left, the column is titled Affinity Diagramming. Below the title, there are many colored blocks, randomly arranged. There is an arrow pointing right, to the same coloured blocks, now sorted by colour. In the right column--titled Categorization--each colour has been assigned a category, with subcategories.

    Step 3.2

    Mitigate risks and roadblocks

    Activities

    3.2.1 Generate mitigations

    Identify and mitigate risks

    Generate risks and roadblocks

    Mitigate risks and roadblocks

    Define roadmap initiatives

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group

    Outcomes of this step

    • List of mitigations

    Is the public cloud less secure?

    This is the key risk-related question that most cloud customers will have to answer at some point: does migrating to the cloud for some services increase their exposure and create a security problem?

    As with all good questions, the answer is “it depends.” But what does it depend on? Consider these cloud risks and potential mitigations:

    1. Misconfiguration: An error grants access to unauthorized parties (as happened to Capital One in 2019). This can be mitigated by careful configuration management and third-party tooling.
    2. Unauthorized access by cloud provider/partner employees: Though rare, it is possible that a cloud provider or partner can be a vector for a breach. Careful contract language, choosing to own your own encryption keys, and a hybrid approach (storing data on-premises) are some possible ways to address this problem.
    3. Unauthorized access to systems: Cloud services are designed to be accessed from anywhere and may be accessed by malicious actors. Possible mitigations include risk-based conditional access, careful identity access management, and logging and detection.

    “The cloud is definitely more secure in that you have much more control, you have much more security tooling, much more visibility, and much more automation. So it is more secure. The caveat is that there is more risk. It is easier to accidentally expose data in the cloud than it is on-premises, but, especially for security, the amount of tooling and visibility you get in cloud is much more than anything we’ve had in our careers on-premises, and that’s why I think cloud in general is more secure.” –Abdul Kittana, Founder, ASecureCloud

    Breach bests bank

    No cloud provider can protect against every misconfiguration

    Industry: Finance

    Source: The New York Times, CNET

    Background

    Capital One is a major Amazon Web Services customer and is even featured on Amazon’s site as a case study. That case study emphasizes the bank’s commitment to the cloud and highlights how central security and compliance were. From the CTO: “Before we moved a single workload, we engaged groups from across the company to build a risk framework for the cloud that met the same high bar for security and compliance that we meet in our on-premises environments. AWS worked with us every step of the way.”

    Complication

    The cloud migration was humming along until July 2019, when the bank suffered a serious breach at the hands of a hacker. That hacker was able to steal millions of credit card applications and hundreds of thousands of Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, and Canadian social insurance numbers.

    According to investigators and to AWS, the breach was caused by an open reverse proxy attack against a misconfigured web app firewall, not by an underlying vulnerability in the cloud infrastructure.

    Results

    Capital One reported that the breach was expected to cost it $150 million, and AWS fervently denied any blame. The US Senate got involved, as did national media, and Capital One’s CEO issued a public apology, writing, “I sincerely apologize for the understandable worry this incident must be causing those affected, and I am committed to making it right.”

    It was a bad few months for IT at Capital One.

    3.2.1 Generate mitigations

    3-4.5 hours

    Input

    • Completed cloud vision assessments

    Output

    • List of risks and roadblocks

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Service owners/workload SMEs
    • Anyone with concerns about the cloud
    1. Recall the four mitigation strategies: eliminate, reduce, transfer, or accept. Keep these in mind as you work through the list of risks and roadblocks with the core working group. For every individual risk or roadblock raised in the initial generation session, suggest a specific mitigation. If the concern is “SaaS providers having access to confidential information,” a mitigation might be encryption, specific contract language, or proof of certifications (or all the above).
    2. Work through this for each of the risks and roadblocks, identifying the steps you need to take that would satisfy your requirements as you understand them.
    3. Once you have gone through the whole list – ideally with input from SMEs in particular areas like security, engineering, and compliance/legal – populate the Cloud Vision Workbook (tab 8) with the risks, roadblocks, and mitigations (sorted by category). Review tab 8 for an example of the output of this exercise.

    Cloud Vision Workbook

    Cloud Vision Workbook – mitigations

    The image shows a large chart titled Risks, roadblocks, and mitigations, which has been annotated with notes.

    Step 3.3

    Define roadmap initiatives

    Activities

    3.3.1 Generate roadmap initiatives

    Identify and mitigate risks

    Generate risks and roadblocks

    Mitigate risks and roadblocks

    Define roadmap initiatives

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group

    Outcomes of this step

    • Defined roadmap initiatives

    3.3.1 Generate roadmap initiatives

    1 hour

    Input

    • List of risk and roadblock mitigations

    Output

    • List of cloud initiatives

    Materials

    • Cloud Vision Workbook

    Participants

    • Core working group
    1. Executing on your cloud vision will likely require you to undertake some key initiatives, many of which have already been identified as part of your mitigation exercise. On tab 8 of the Cloud Vision Workbook, review the mitigations you created in response to the risks and roadblocks identified. Initiatives should generally be assignable to a party and should have a defined scope/duration. For example, “assess all net new applications for cloud suitability” might not be counted as an initiative, but “design a cloud application assessment” would likely be.
    2. Design a timeline appropriate for your specific needs. Generally short-term (less than 3 months), medium-term (3-6 months), and long-term (greater than 6 months) will work, but this is entirely based on preference.
    3. Review and validate the parameters with the working group. Consider creating additional color-coding (highlighting certain tasks that might be dependent on a decision or have ongoing components).

    Cloud Vision Workbook

    Bridge the gap and create the vision

    Build the foundations of your cloud vision

    Phase 4

    Phase 4

    Bridge the Gap and Create the Vision

    Phase 1

    1.1 Generate goals and drivers

    1.2 Explore cloud characteristics

    1.3 Create a current state summary

    1.4 Select workloads for analysis

    Phase 2

    2.1 Conduct workload assessments

    2.2 Determine workload future states

    Phase 3

    3.1 Generate risks and roadblocks

    3.2 Mitigate risks and roadblocks

    3.3 Define roadmap initiatives

    Phase 4

    4.1 Review and assign work items

    4.2 Finalize cloud decision framework

    4.3 Create cloud vision

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Assign initiatives and propose timelines
    • Build a delivery model rubric
    • Build a service model rubric
    • Built a support model rubric
    • Create a cloud vision statement
    • Map cloud workloads
    • Complete the Cloud Vision presentation

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT management, the core working group, security, infrastructure, operations, architecture, engineering, applications, non-IT stakeholders

    Step 4.1

    Review and assign work items

    Activities

    4.1.1 Assign initiatives and propose timelines

    Bridge the gap and create the vision

    Review and assign work items

    Finalize cloud decision framework

    Create cloud vision

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group
    • IT management

    Outcomes of this step

    • Populated cloud vision roadmap

    4.1.1 Assign initiatives and propose timelines

    1 hour

    Input

    • List of cloud initiatives

    Output

    • Initiatives assigned by responsibility and timeline

    Materials

    • Cloud Vision Workbook

    Participants

    • Core working group
    1. Once the list is populated, begin assigning responsibility for execution. This is not a RACI exercise, so focus on the functional responsibility. Once you have determined who is responsible, assign a timeline and include any notes. This will form the basis of a more formal project plan.
    2. To assign the initiative to a party, consider 1) who will be responsible for execution and 2) if that responsibility will be shared. Be as specific as possible, but be sure to be consistent to make it easier for you to sort responsibility later on.
    3. When assigning timelines, we suggest including the end date (when you expect the project to be complete) rather than the start date, though whatever you choose, be sure to be consistent. Make use of the notes column to record anything that you think any other readers will need to be aware of in the future, or details that may not be possible to commit to memory.

    Cloud Vision Workbook

    Step 4.2

    Finalize cloud decision framework

    Activities

    4.2.1 Build a delivery model rubric

    4.2.2 Build a service model rubric

    4.2.3 Build a support model rubric

    Bridge the gap and create the vision

    Review and assign work items

    Finalize cloud decision framework

    Create cloud vision

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group

    Outcomes of this step

    • Cloud decision framework

    4.2.1 Build a delivery model rubric

    1 hour

    Input

    • List of cloud initiatives

    Output

    • Initiatives assigned by responsibility and timeline

    Materials

    Participants

    • Core working group
    1. Now that we have a good understanding of the cloud’s key characteristics, the relative suitability of different workloads for the cloud, and a good understanding of some of the risks and roadblocks that may need to be overcome if a cloud transition is to take place, it is time to formalize a delivery model rubric. Start by listing the delivery models on a white board vertically – public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud. Include a community cloud option as well if that is feasible for you. Strike any models that do not figure into your vision.
    2. Create a table style rubric for each delivery model. Confer with the working group to determine what characteristics best define workloads suitable for each model. If you have a hybrid cloud option, you may consider workloads that are highly dynamic; a private cloud hosted on-premises may be more suitable for workloads that have extensive regulatory requirements.
    3. Once the table is complete, include it in the Cloud Vision Executive Presentation.

    Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    Vision for the cloud future state (example)

    Delivery model Decision criteria
    Public cloud
    • Public cloud is the primary destination for all workloads as the goal is to eliminate facilities and infrastructure management
    • Offers features, broad accessibility, and managed updates along with provider-managed facilities and hardware
    Legacy datacenter
    • Any workload that is not a good fit for the public cloud
    • Dependency (like a USB key for license validation)
    • Performance requirements (e.g. workloads highly sensitive to transaction thresholds)
    • Local infrastructure components (firewall, switches, NVR)

    Summary statement: Everything must go! Public cloud is a top priority. Anything that is not compatible (for whatever reason) with a public cloud deployment will be retained in a premises-based server closet (downgraded from a full datacenter). The private cloud does not align with the overall organizational vision, nor does a hybrid solution.

    4.2.2 Build a service model rubric

    1 hour

    Input

    • Output of workload assessments
    • Output of risk and mitigation exercise

    Output

    • Service model rubric

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    Participants

    • Core working group
    1. This next activity is like the delivery model activity, but covers the relevant cloud service models. On a whiteboard, make a vertical list of the cloud service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) that will be considered for workloads. If you have an order of preference, place your most preferred at the top, your least preferred at the bottom.
    2. Describe the circumstances under which you would select each service model. Do your best to focus on differentiators. If a decision criterion appears for multiple service models, consider refining or excluding it. (For additional information, check out Info-Tech’s Reimagine IT Operations for a Cloud-First World blueprint.)
    3. Create a summary statement to capture your overall service model position. See the next slide for an example. Note: this can be incorporated into your cloud vision statement, so be sure that it reflects your genuine cloud preferences.
    4. Record the results in the Cloud Vision Executive Presentation.

    Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    Vision for the cloud future state (example)

    Service model Decision criteria
    SaaS

    SaaS first; opt for SaaS when:

    • A SaaS option exists that meets all key business requirements
    • There is a strong desire to have someone else (the vendor) manage infrastructure components/the platform
    • Not particularly sensitive to performance thresholds
    • The goal is to transition management of the workload outside of IT
    • SaaS is the only feasible way to consume the desired service
    PaaS
    • Highly customized service/workload – SaaS not feasible
    • Still preferable to offload as much management as possible to third parties
    • Customization required, but not at the platform level
    • The workload is built using a standard framework
    • We have the time/resources to replatform
    IaaS
    • Service needs to be lifted and shifted out of the datacenter quickly
    • Customization is required at the platform level/there is value in managing components
    • There is no need to manage facilities
    • Performance is not impacted by hosting the workload offsite
    • There is value in right-sizing the workload over time
    On-premises Anything that does not fit in the cloud for performance or other reasons (e.g. licensing key)

    Summary statement: SaaS will be the primary service model. All workloads will migrate to the public cloud where possible. Anything that cannot be migrated to SaaS will be migrated to PaaS. IaaS is a transitory step.

    4.2.3 Build a support model rubric

    1 hour

    Input

    • Results of the cloud workload assessments

    Output

    • Support model rubric

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    Participants

    • Core working group
    1. The final rubric covered here is that for the support model. Where will you procure the skills necessary to ensure the vision’s proper execution? Much like the other rubric activities, write the three support models vertically (in order of preference, if you have one) on a whiteboard.
    2. Next to each model, describe the circumstances under which you would select each support model. Focus on the dimensions: the duration of the engagement, specialization required, and flexibility required. If you have existing rules/practices around hiring consultants/MSPs, consider those as well.
    3. Once you have a good list of decision criteria, form a summary statement. This should encapsulate your position on support models and should mention any notable criteria that will contribute to most decisions.
    4. Record the results in the Cloud Vision Executive Presentation.

    Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    Vision for the cloud future state (example)

    Support model Decision criteria
    Internal IT

    The primary support model will be internal IT going forward

    • Chosen where the primary work required is administrative
    • Where existing staff can manage the service in the cloud easily and effectively
    • Where the chosen solution fits the SaaS service model
    Consultant
    • Where the work required is time-bound (e.g. a migration/refactoring exercise)
    • Where the skills do not exist in house, and where the skills cannot easily be procured (specific technical expertise required in areas of the cloud unfamiliar to staff)
    • Where opportunities for staff to learn from consultant SMEs are valuable
    • Where ongoing management and maintenance can be handled in house
    MSP
    • Where an ongoing relationship is valued
    • Where ongoing administration and maintenance are disproportionately burdensome on IT staff (or where this administration and maintenance is likely to be burdensome)
    • Where the managed services model has already been proven out
    • Where specific expertise in an area of technology is required but this does not rise to the need to hire an FTE (e.g. telephony)

    Summary statement: Most workloads will be managed in house. A consultant will be employed to facilitate the transition to micro-services in a cloud container environment, but this will be transitioned to in-house staff. An MSP will continue to manage backups and telephony.

    Step 4.3

    Create cloud vision

    Activities

    4.3.1 Create a cloud vision statement

    4.3.2 Map cloud workloads

    4.3.3 Complete the Cloud Vision Presentation

    Review and assign work items

    Finalize cloud decision framework

    Create cloud vision

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group
    • IT management

    Outcomes of this step

    Completed Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    4.3.1 Create a cloud vision statement

    1 hour

    Input

    • List of cloud initiatives

    Output

    • Initiatives assigned by responsibility and timeline

    Materials

    • Cloud Vision Workbook

    Participants

    • Core working group
    1. Now that you know what service models are appropriate, it’s time to summarize your cloud vision in a succinct, consumable way. A good vision statement should have three components:
      • Scope: Which parts of the organization will the strategy impact?
      • Goal: What is the strategy intended to accomplish?
      • Key differentiator: What makes the new strategy special?
    2. On a whiteboard, make a chart with three columns (one column for each of the features of a good mission statement). Have the group generate a list of words to describe each of the categories. Ideally, the group will produce multiple answers for each category.
    3. Once you’ve gathered a few different responses for each category, have the team put their heads down and generate pithy mission statements that capture the sentiments underlying each category.
    4. Have participants read their vision statements in front of the group. Use the rest of the session to produce a final statement. Record the results in the Cloud Strategy Executive Presentation.

    Example vision statement outputs

    “IT at ACME Corp. hereby commits to providing clients and end users with an unparalleled, productivity-enabling technology experience, leveraging, insofar as it is possible and practical, cloud-based services.”

    “At ACME Corp. our employees and customers are our first priority. Using new, agile cloud services, IT is devoted to eliminating inefficiency, providing cutting-edge solutions for a fast-paced world, and making a positive difference in the lives of our colleagues and the people we serve.”

    As a global leader in technology, ACME Corp. is committed to taking full advantage of new cloud services, looking first to agile cloud options to optimize internal processes wherever efficiency gaps exist. Improved efficiency will allow associates to spend more time on ACME’s core mission: providing an unrivalled customer experience.”

    Scope

    Goal

    Key differentiator

    4.3.2 Map cloud workloads

    1 hour

    Input

    • List of workloads
    • List of acceptable service models
    • List of acceptable migration paths

    Output

    • Workloads mapped by service model/migration path

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • Core working group
    1. Now that you have defined your overall cloud vision as well as your service model options, consider aligning your service model preferences with your migration path preferences. Draw a table with your expected migration strategies across the top (retain, retire, rehost, replatform, refactor, repurchase, or some of these) and your expected service models across the side.
    2. On individual sticky notes, write a list of workloads in your environment. In a smaller environment, this list can be exhaustive. Otherwise take advantage of the list you created as part of phase 1 along with any additional workloads that warrant discussion.
    3. As a group, go through the list, placing the sticky notes first in the appropriate row based on their characteristics and the decision criteria that have already been defined, and then in the appropriate column based on the appropriate migration path. (See the next slide for an example of what this looks like.)
    4. Record the results in the Cloud Vision Executive Presentation. Note: not every cell will be filled; some migration path/service model combinations are impossible or otherwise undesirable.

    Cloud Vision Executive Presentation

    Example cloud workload map

    Repurchase Replatform Rehost Retain
    SaaS

    Office suite

    AD

    PaaS SQL Database
    IaaS File Storage DR environment
    Other

    CCTV

    Door access

    4.3.3 Complete the Cloud Vision Presentation

    1 hour

    Input

    • List of cloud initiatives

    Output

    • Initiatives assigned by responsibility and timeline

    Materials

    • Cloud Vision Workbook

    Participants

    • Core working group
    1. Open the Cloud Vision Executive Presentation to the second slide and review the templated executive brief. This comprises several sections (see the next slide). Populate each one:
      • Summary of the exercise
      • The cloud vision statement
      • Key cloud drivers
      • Risks and roadblocks
      • Top initiatives and next steps
    2. Review the remainder of the presentation. Be sure to elaborate on any significant initiatives and changes (where applicable) and to delete any slides that you no longer require.

    Cloud Vision Workbook

    Sample cloud vision executive summary

    • From [date to date], a cross-functional group representing IT and its constituents met to discuss the cloud.
    • Over the course of the week, the group identified drivers for cloud computing and developed a shared vision, evaluated several workloads through an assessment framework, identified risks, roadblocks, and mitigations, and finally generated initiatives and next steps.
    • From the process, the group produced a summary and a cloud suitability assessment framework that can be applied at the level of the workload.

    Cloud Vision Statement

    [Organization] will leverage public cloud solutions and retire existing datacenter and colocation facilities. This transition will simplify infrastructure administration, support, and security, while modernizing legacy infrastructure and reducing the need for additional capital expenditure.

    Cloud Drivers Retire the datacenter Do more valuable work
    Right-size the environment Reduce CapEx
    Facilitate ease of mgmt. Work from anywhere
    Reduce capital expenditure Take advantage of elasticity
    Performance and availability Governance Risks and roadblocks
    Security Rationalization
    Cost Skills
    Migration Remaining premises resources
    BC, backup, and DR Control

    Initiatives and next steps

    • Close the datacenter and colocation site in favor of a SaaS-first cloud approach.
    • Some workloads will migrate to infrastructure-as-a-service in the short term with the assistance of third-party consultants.

    Document your cloud strategy

    You did it!

    Congratulations! If you’ve made it this far, you’ve successfully articulated a cloud vision, assessed workloads, developed an understanding (shared with your team and stakeholders) of cloud concepts, and mitigated risks and roadblocks that you may encounter along your cloud journey. From this exercise, you should understand your mission and vision, how your cloud plans will interact with any other relevant strategic plans, and what successful execution looks like, as well as developing a good understanding of overall guiding principles. These are several components of your overall strategy, but they do not comprise the strategy in its entirety.

    How do you fix this?

    First, validate the results of the vision exercise with your stakeholders. Socialize it and collect feedback. Make changes where you think changes should be made. This will become a key foundational piece. The next step is to formally document your cloud strategy. This is a separate project and is covered in the Info-Tech blueprint Document Your Cloud Strategy.

    The vision exercise tells you where you want to go and offers some clues as to how to get there. The formal strategy exercise is a formal documentation of the target state, but also captures in detail the steps you’ll need to take, the processes you’ll need to refine, and the people you’ll need to hire.

    A cloud strategy should comprise your organizational stance on how the cloud will change your approach to people and human resources, technology, and governance. Once you are confident that you can make and enforce decisions in these areas, you should consider moving on to Document Your Cloud Strategy. This blueprint, Define Your Cloud Vision, often serves as a prerequisite for the strategy documentation conversation(s).

    Appendix

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Additional Support

    Research Contributors

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Vendor Resources

    Bibliography

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Problem Solved

    You have now documented what you want from the cloud, what you mean when you say “cloud,” and some preliminary steps you can take to make your vision a reality.

    You now have at your disposal a framework for identifying and evaluating candidates for their cloud suitability, as well as a series of techniques for generating risks and mitigations associated with your cloud journey. The next step is to formalize your cloud strategy using the takeaways from this exercise. You’re well on your way to a completed cloud strategy!

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com

    1-888-670-8889

    Additional Support

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech Workshop.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.

    Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.

    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

    Generate drivers for cloud adoption

    Work with stakeholders to understand the expected benefits of the cloud migration and how these drivers will impact the overall vision.

    Conduct workload assessments

    Assess your individual cloud workloads for their suitability as candidates for the cloud migration.

    Bibliography

    “2021 State of the Cloud Report.” Flexera, 2021. Web.

    “2021 State of Upskilling Report.” Pluralsight, 2021. Web.

    “AWS Snowmobile.” Amazon Web Services, n.d. Web.

    “Azure products.” Microsoft, n.d. Web.

    “Azure Migrate Documentation.” Microsoft, n.d. Web.

    Bell, Harold. “Multi-Cloud vs. Hybrid Cloud: What’s the Difference?” Nutanix, 2019. Web.

    “Cloud Products.” Amazon Web Services, n.d. Web.

    “COBIT 2019 Framework: Introduction and Methodology.” ISACA, 2019. Web.

    Edmead, Mark T. “Using COBIT 2019 to Plan and Execute an Organization’s Transformation Strategy.” ISACA, 2020. Web.

    Flitter, Emily, and Karen Weise. “Capital One Data Breach Compromises Data of Over 100 Million.” The New York Times, 29 July 2019. Web.

    Gillis, Alexander S. “Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM).” TechTarget, 2021. Web.

    “’How to Cloud’ with Capital One.” Amazon Web Services, n.d. Web.

    “IBM Closes Landmark Acquisition of Red Hat for $34 Billion; Defines Open, Hybrid Cloud Future.” Red Hat, 9 July 2019. Web.

    Mell, Peter, and Timothy Grance. “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing.” National Institute of Standards and Technology, Sept. 2011. Web.

    Ng, Alfred. “Amazon Tells Senators it Isn't to Blame for Capital One Breach.” CNET, 2019. Web.

    Orban, Stephen. “6 Strategies for Migrating Applications to the Cloud.” Amazon Web Services, 2016. Web.

    Sullivan, Dan. “Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB).” TechTarget, 2021. Web.

    “What Is Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)?” Cisco, n.d. Web.

    Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}600|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 9.7/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: $20,240 Average $ Saved
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    • Parent Category Name: Manage & Coach
    • Parent Category Link: /manage-coach
    • Virtual team members must rely upon collaboration technology to communicate and collaborate.
    • Management practices and approaches that work face to face do not always translate effectively in virtual contexts.
    • Managers cannot rely upon spontaneous social interactions that happen organically when people are colocated to build meaningful and trusting relationships. Space and time need to be created in a virtual environment for this to happen.
    • Observing an employee’s performance or development can be more difficult, and relying on others’ feedback becomes more critical for managing performance and development.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Managing virtual teams does not require developing new manager competencies. Instead, managers need to “dial up” competencies they already have and adjust their approaches.
    • Setting clear expectations with virtual teams creates the foundation needed to manage them effectively.
    • Virtual employees crave more meaningful interactions about performance and development with their managers.

    Impact and Result

    • Create a solid foundation for managing virtual teams by setting clear expectations and taking a more planful approach to managing performance and employee development.
    • Dial up key management competencies that you already have. Managers do not need to develop new competencies; they just need to adjust and refocus their approaches.

    Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Equip managers to effectively manage virtual teams

    Equip managers to become more effective with managing remote teams.

    The workbook serves as a reference guide participants will use to support formal training.

    • Training Deck: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams
    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams
    • Standard Participant Training Session Evaluation Template

    2. Additional Resources

    Many organizations are developing plans to allow employees more flexible work options, including remote work. Use these resources to help managers and employees make the most of remote work arrangements.

    • Work-From-Home Tips for Managers
    • Work-From-Home Tips for Employees
    • Health & Safety at Home Infographic
    • Wellness and Working From Home
    • Ergonomic Workspaces Infographic
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Learning objectives

    Describe the benefits of virtual teams.

    Create a plan for adopting effective management practices and setting clear expectations with virtual teams.

    Identify potential solutions to the challenges of managing performance and developing members of virtual teams.

    Create an action plan to increase effectiveness in managing virtual teams.

    Target audience

    People managers who manage or plan to manage virtual teams.

    Training length

    Two three-hour sessions

    Training material

    • Use the speaker’s notes in the notes pane section of each slide to plan and practice the training session.
    • Activity slides are scattered throughout this training deck and are clearly numbered in the slide title.
    • Notes in italics are written to the facilitator and are not meant to be read aloud.
    • Download the Workbook for participants to use.

    Suggested materials for activities:

    • Index cards or sticky notes
    • Markers
    • Whiteboard/large table space/flip chart

    Agenda & activities

    Section 1

    Section 2

    10 min

    Welcome: Overview & Introductions

    • Introductions
    10 min

    Welcome: Overview & Introductions

    • Session 1 Review
    • Session 2 Overview
    50 min

    1.1 Introduction to virtual teams

    • What kind of virtual team do you lead?
    • Virtual team benefits and challenges
    55 min

    2.1 Managing wellbeing in a virtual team context

    • Share current practices and challenges regarding wellbeing in virtual teams
    • Identify and discuss proposed solutions
    • Develop draft action plan for managing wellbeing in a virtual team context
    5 min

    Break

    5 min Break
    45 min

    1.2 Laying the foundation for a virtual team

    • Identify behaviors to better inform, interact with, and involve team members
    60 min

    2.2 Managing performance in a virtual team context

    • Share current performance management practices for virtual teams
    • Identify challenges of current practices and propose solutions
    • Develop draft action plan for managing performance in a virtual team context
    10 min

    Break

    10 min Break
    55 min

    1.2 Laying the foundation for a virtual team

    • Identify and share ways you prefer to communicate for different activities
    • Develop draft action plan for laying the foundation for a virtual team
    40 min

    Action planning & conclusion

    • Refine consolidated action plan (three parts) and commit to implementing it
    • Key takeaways
    5 min

    Session 1 Wrap-Up

    Recommended Customization

    Review all slides and adjust the language or content as needed to suit your organizational context and culture.

    The pencil icon to the left denotes slides requiring customization of the slide and/or the speaker’s notes, e.g. adding in an organization-specific process.

    Customization instructions are found in the notes pane.

    Tips

    • Adjust the speaker’s notes on the slides before (or after) any slides you modify or delete to ensure logical transitions between slides.
    • Update the agenda to reflect new timings if major modifications are made.
    • Even seasoned leaders need to be reminded of the basics now and again. Rather than delete more basic slides, cut back on the amount of time spent covering them and frame the content as a refresher.
    • Participant Workbooks
    • Relevant organization-specific documents (see side panel)
    • Training Session Feedback Form

    Required Information

    • Communication guidelines for managers (e.g. cadence of manager interactions)
    • Performance management process and guidelines
    • Employee development guidelines
    • List of available resources (e.g. social collaboration tools)

    Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Section 1.1

    Practical foundations for managing teams in a remote environment

    Feasibility of virtual IT teams

    Most organizations are planning some combination of remote and onsite work in 2022.

    This is an image of a bar graph demonstrating the percentage of companies who have the following plans for return to work: Full work-from-home (All employees WFH permanently) - 4% ; No work-from-home permitted	9% ; Partial work-from-home team (Eligible employees can WFH for a certain portion of their work week)	23% ; Balanced work-from-home team (All employees can WFH for a certain portion of their work week)	28% ; Hybrid work-from-home team (Eligible employees WFH on a full-time basis)	37%

    Source: IT Talent Trends, 2022; n=199

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Most organizations are planning some combination of remote and onsite work in 2022 – the highest reported plans for WFH were hybrid, balanced, and partial work-from-home. This builds on our findings in the IT Talent Trends 2022 report.

    Feasibility of virtual IT teams

    What percentage of roles in IT are capable of being performed remotely permanently?

    Approximately what percentage of roles in IT are capable of being performed remotely permanently?

    0% to less than 10%: 3%; 10% to less than 25%: 5%; 25% to less than 50%: 12%; 50% to less than 75%: 30%; 75% to 100%L 50%.

    IT Talent Trends, 2022; n=207

    Speaker’s Notes:

    80% of respondents estimated that 50 to 100% of IT roles can be performed remotely.

    Virtual teams take all kinds of forms

    A virtual team is any team that has members that are not colocated and relies on technology for communications.

    This image depicts the three levels of virtual teams, Municipal; National; Global.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Before we start, it will be useful to review what we mean by the term “virtual team.” For our purposes we will be defining a virtual team as any team that has members that are not colocated and relies on technology for communications.

    There are a wide variety of virtual work arrangements and a variety of terms used to describe them. For example, some common terms include:

    • “Flexible work arrangements”: Employees have the option to work where they see fit (within certain constraints). They may choose to work from the office, home, a shared office space, the road, etc.
    • “Remote work,” “work from home,” and “telecommuting”: These are just various ways of describing how or where people are working virtually. They all share the idea that these kinds of employees are not colocated.
    • “Multi-office team”: the team members all work in office environments, but they may not always be in the same office as their team members or manager.

    Our definition of virtual work covers all of these terms. It is also distance neutral, meaning that it applies equally to teams that are dispersed globally or regionally or even those working in the same cities but dispersed throughout different buildings. Our definition also applies whether virtual employees work full time or part time.

    The challenges facing managers arise as soon as some team members are not colocated and have to rely on technology to communicate and coordinate work. Greater distances between employees can complicate challenges (e.g. time zone coordination), but the core challenges of managing virtual teams are the same whether those workers are merely located in different buildings in the same city or in different buildings on different continents.

    1.1 What kind of virtual team do you lead?

    15 Minutes

    Working on your own, take five minutes to figure out what kind of virtual team you lead.

    1. How many people on your team work virtually (all, most, or a small percentage)?
    2. How often and how regularly do they tend to work virtually (full time, part time regularly, or part time as needed)?
    3. What kinds of virtual work arrangements are there on your team (multi-site, work from home, mobile employees)?
    4. Where do your workers tend to be physically located (different offices but in the same city/region or globally dispersed)?
    5. Record this information in your workbook.
    6. Discuss as a group.

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Size of virtual team
    • Current remote work practices

    Output

    • Documented list of current state of remote work

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Advantages

    Benefits to the organization

    Benefits to employees

    Operational continuity in disaster situations that prevent employees from coming into the office.

    Cost savings: Employees who WFH half the time can save $2,500 to $4,000 per year (Global Workplace Analytics, 2021).

    Cost savings: Organizations save ~$11,000 annually per employee working from home half the time (Global Workplace Analytics, 2021).

    Time savings: Employees who WFH half the time save on average 11 workdays per year (Global Workplace Analytics, 2021).

    Increased attraction: 71% of employees would likely choose one employer over another based on WFH offerings (Owl Labs, 2021).

    Improved wellbeing:

    83% employees agree that WFH would make them happier.

    80% agree that WFH would decrease their stress.

    81% agree that WFH would improve their ability to manage their work-life balance.

    (Owl Labs, 2021)

    Increased retention: 74% of employees would be less likely to leave their employer if they could WFH (Owl Labs, 2021).

    Increased flexibility: 32% of employees rated the “ability to have a flexible schedule” as the biggest benefit of WFH (OWL Labs, 2021).

    Increased productivity: 50% of employees report they would maintain or increase their productivity while working from home (Glassdoor Team, 2020).

    Increased engagement: Offsite employees tend to have higher overall engagement than onsite employees (McLean & Company Engagement Survey, 2020).

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Remote work arrangements are becoming more and more common, and for good reason: there are a lot of benefits to the organization – and to employees.

    #1: Save Money

    Perhaps one of the most common reasons for opting for remote-work arrangements is the potential cost savings. One study found that organizations could save about $11,000 per employee working from home half the time (Global Workplace Analytics, 2021).

    #2 Increased Attraction

    In addition, supporting remote-work arrangements can attract employees. One study found that 71% of employees would likely choose one employer over another based on WFH offerings (Owl Labs, 2019).

    #3 Improve productivity.

    There are also improvements to productivity. Fifty percent of employees report they would maintain or increase their productivity while working from home (Glassdoor Team, 2020).

    Remote work also has benefits to employees.

    #1: Save Money

    As with organizations, employees also benefit financially from remote work arrangements, saving between $2,500 and $4,000 and on average 11 working days while working from home half of the time.

    #2: Improved Wellbeing

    Most employees agree that working from home makes them happier, reduces stress, and provides an improved work-life balance through increased flexibility.

    Challenges

    Organizations

    • Concerns that WFH may stifle innovation (Scientific American, 2021), likely due to the potential lack of collaboration and knowledge sharing.
    • Fewer organic opportunities for informal interaction between employees working from home means active efforts are required to foster organizational culture.

    Leaders

    • 42% of managers believe that monitoring the productivity of their direct reports is a top challenge of WFH (Ultimate Software, 2019).
    • The lack of in-person supervision compounded with a lack of trust in employees leads many leaders to believe that WFH will result in a drop in productivity.

    Employees

    • 20% of employees report collaboration/communication as their top struggle with WFH (Owl Labs, 2021).
    • Employees often experience burnout from working longer hours due to the lack of commute, blurring of work and home life, and the perceived need to prove their productivity.

    Many of these barriers can be addressed by changing traditional mindsets and finding alternative ways of working, but the traditional approach to work is so entrenched that it has been hard to make the shift.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Many organizations are still grappling with the challenges of remote work. Some are just perceived challenges, while others are quite real.

    Limited innovation and a lack of informal interaction are a potential consequence of failing to properly adapt to the remote-work environment.

    Leaders also face challenges with remote work. Losing in-person supervision has led to the lack of trust and a perceived drop in productivity.

    A study conducted 2021 asked remote workers to identify their biggest struggle with working remotely. The top three struggles remote workers report facing are unplugging after work, loneliness, and collaborating and/or communicating.

    Seeing the struggles remote workers identify is a good reminder that these employees have a unique set of challenges. They need their managers to help them set boundaries around their work; create feelings of connectedness to the organization, culture, and team; and be expert communicators.

    1.2 Virtual teams: benefits and challenges

    20 Minutes

    1. Discuss and list:
      1. Any positives you’ve experienced since managing virtual employees.
      2. Any challenges you’ve had to manage connected to managing virtual employees.
    2. Record information in the workbook.

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Personal experiences managing remote teams

    Output

    • List of benefits and challenges of remote work

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Section 1.2

    Laying the foundations for a virtual team

    The 3i’s: Inform, interact, and involve your way to effective management:

    Inform

    Interact Involve

    ↓ Down

    Connect

    ↑ Up

    Tell employees the whys

    Get to know employees

    Solicit input from employees

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Effectively managing a virtual team really comes down to adopting management approaches that will engage virtual employees.

    Managing a virtual team does not actually require a new management style. The basics of effective management are the same in both colocated and virtual teams; however, the emphasis on certain behaviors and actions we take often differs. Managing a virtual team requires much more thoughtfulness and planning in our everyday interactions with our teams as we cannot rely on the relative ease of face-to-face interactions available to colocated teams.

    The 3i’s Engaging Management Model is useful when interacting with all employees and provides a handy framework for more planful interactions with virtual employees.

    Think of your management responsibilities in these three buckets – they are the most important components of being an effective manager. We’re first going to look at inform and involve before moving on to interact.

    Inform: Relay information down from senior management and leaders to employees. Communicate the rationale behind decisions and priorities, and always explain how they will directly affect employees.

    Why is this important? According to McLean & Company’s Engagement Survey data, employees who say their managers keep them well informed about decisions that affect them are 3.4 times more likely to be engaged (Source: McLean & Company, 2020; N=77,363). Your first reaction to this might be “I already do this,” which may very well be the case. Keep in mind, though, we sometimes tend to communicate on a “need-to-know basis,” especially when we are stressed or short on time. Engaging employees takes more. Always focus on explaining the “why?” or the rationale behind business decisions.

    It might seem like this domain should be the least affected, since important company announcements probably continue in a remote environment. But remember that information like that also flows informally. And even in formal settings, there are question-and-answer opportunities. Or maybe your employee might come to your office to ask for more details. Virtual team members can’t gather around the watercooler. They don’t have the same opportunities to hear information in passing as people who are colocated do, so managers need to make a concerted effort to share information with virtual team members in a clear and timely way.

    Swinging over to the other end, we have involve: Involve your employees. Solicit information and feedback from employees and collaborate with them.

    However, it’s not enough to just solicit their feedback and input; you also need to act on it.

    Make sure you involve your employees in a meaningful way. Such collaboration makes employees feel like a valued part of the team. Not to mention that they often have information and perspectives that can help make your decisions stronger!

    Employees who say their department leaders act on feedback from them are 3.9 times more likely to be engaged than those whose leaders don’t. (Source: McLean & Company, 2020; N=59,779). That is a huge difference!

    Keeping virtual employees engaged and feeling connected and committed to the organization requires planful and regular application of the 3i’s model.

    Finally, Interact: Connect with employees on a personal level; get to know them and understand who they are on a personal and professional level.

    Why? Well, over and above the fact that it can be rewarding for you to build stronger relationships with your team, our data shows that human connection makes a significant difference with employees. Employees who believe their managers care about them as a person are 3.8 times more likely to be engaged than those who do not (Source: McLean & Company, 2017; N=70,927).

    And you might find that in a remote environment, this is the area that suffers the most, since a lot of these interactions tend to be unscripted, unscheduled, and face to face.

    Typically, if we weren’t in the midst of a pandemic, we’d emphasize the importance of allocating some budget to travel and get some face-to-face time with your staff. Meeting and interacting with team members face to face is crucial to building trusting relationships, and ultimately, an effective team, so given the context of our current circumstances, we recommend the use of video when interacting with your employees who are remote.

    Relay information down from senior management to employees.

    Ensure they’ve seen and understand any organization-wide communication.

    Share any updates in a timely manner.

    Connect with employees on a personal level.
    Ask how they’re doing with the new work arrangement.
    Express empathy for challenges (sick family member, COVID-19 diagnosis, etc.).
    Ask how you can support them.
    Schedule informal virtual coffee breaks a couple of times a week and talk about non-work topics.

    Get information from employees and collaborate with them.
    Invite their input (e.g. have a “winning remotely” brainstorming session).
    Escalate any challenges you can’t address to your VP.
    Give them as much autonomy over their work as possible – don’t micromanage.

    1.3 Identify behaviors to inform, interact with, and involve team members

    20 Minutes

    Individually:

    1. Identify one behavior for each of Inform, Interact, and Involve to improve.
    2. Record information in the workbook.

    As a group:

    1. Discuss behaviors to improve for each of Inform, Interact, and Involve and record new ideas to incorporate into your leadership practice.

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • 3i's Model
    • Current leadership behaviors to improve

    Output

    • List of behaviors to better inform, interact, and involve team members

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Laying the foundation: Set clear expectations

    Tasks

    • What are the daily and weekly team activities? How do they affect one another?

    Goals

    • Clarify any adjustments to strategy based on the situation; clarify metrics.

    Communication

    • How often and when will you check in? What should they come to you for? What modalities will you use and when?

    Roadblocks

    • Involve your team in deciding how to handle roadblocks and challenges.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Clear expectations are important in any environment, remote or not. But it is much harder to do in a remote environment. The barrier to seeking clarification is so much higher (For example, email vs. catching someone in hallway, or you can’t notice that a colleague is struggling without them asking).

    Communication – This is one area where the importance actually changes in a remote context. We’ve been talking about a lot of practices that are the same in importance whether you’re in an office or remote, and maybe you just enact them differently. But clarity around communication processes is actually tremendously more important in a remote environment.

    Adopt a five-step process to set specific and documented expectations

    1. Check in with how your team member is doing on a daily basis. Don’t forget to ask how they are doing personally.
    2. Follow up on previously set expectations. Ask how things are going. Discuss if priorities or expectations have changed and update expectations accordingly.
    3. Ask if they are experiencing any roadblocks and collaborate to find solutions.
    4. Provide feedback and recognition as appropriate.
    5. Document newly set expectations – either through a collaboration tool or through email.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Suggested best practices: Hold daily team check-ins and hold separate individual check-ins. Increase frequency of these.

    During Check-in
    1. Set up a running Teams chat for your team.
    • This is your community. You must be the biggest cheerleader and keep the team feeling like they are contributing. Make sure everyone is involved.
  • Start each workday with a video scrum to discuss what’s coming today for your team.
    • Ask: What are you planning to work on today? Are there any roadblocks I can help with? Technology working OK?
  • Right after your team meeting, set up an “every morning video call” one-on-one meeting with each team member (5-10 minutes max).
    • Ask: What are you working on today? What will your momentum metrics be? What do you need from me?
  • Set up a separate video call at the end of the afternoon to review what everyone did (5 minutes max).
    • Ask: What went well? What went poorly? How can we improve?
  • After a Check-in
    1. Be accessible:
      • Ensure your team knows the best way to get in touch with you.
      • Email is not ideal for informal, frequent contact – use messaging instead.
    2. Be available:
      • Keep a running conversation going in Teams.
      • Respond in a timely manner; address issues quickly so that your team has what they need to succeed.
      • Let your team know if you’ll be away/offline for longer than an hour during the workday and ask them to do the same (e.g. for an appointment).
      • Help address roadblocks, answer questions, clarify priorities, etc.

    Define communication requirements

    • Set up an ongoing communication with your team.
      • E.g. a running conversation on Slack or Teams
    • Schedule daily virtual meetings and check-ins.
      • This can help to maintain a sense of normalcy and conduct a pulse check on your team.
    • Use video for important conversations.
      • Video chat creates better rapport, shows body language, and lessens feelings of isolation, but it can be taxing.
    • Set expectations about communication.
      • Differentiate between day-to-day communication and updates on the state of events.
    • Clearly communicate the collaboration toolkit.
      • What do we have available? What is the purpose of each?

    Speaker’s Notes:

    With organizational expectations set, we need to establish team expectations around how we collaborate and communicate.

    Today there is no lack of technology available to support our virtual communication. We can use the phone, conference calls, videoconferencing, Skype, instant messaging, [insert organization-specific technological tools.], etc.

    However, it is important to have a common understanding of which tools are most appropriate when and for what.

    What are some of the communication channel techniques you’ve found useful in your informal interactions with employees or that you’ve seen work well between employees?

    [Have participants share any technological tools they find useful and why.]

    Check in with your team on communication requirements

    • Should we share our calendars, hours of availability, and/or IM status?
    • How often should we meet as a team and one on one? Should we institute a time when we should not communicate virtually?
    • Which communication channel should we use in what context? How should we decide which communication method to use?
    • Should I share guidelines for email and meeting etiquette (or any other communication methods)?
    • Should we establish a new team charter?
    • What feedback does the team have regarding how we’ve been communicating?

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Whenever we interact, we make the following kinds of social exchanges. We exchange:

    • Information: Data or opinions
    • Emotions: Feelings and evaluations about the data or opinions
    • Motivations: What we feel like doing in response to data or opinions

    We need to make sure that these exchanges are happening as each team member intends. To do this, we have to be sensitive to what information is being conveyed, what emotions are involved in the interaction, and how we are motivating each other to act through the interaction. Every interaction will have intended and unintended effects on others. No one can pay attention to all of these aspects of communication all the time, but if we develop habits that are conducive to successful exchanges in all three areas, we can become more effective.

    In addition to being mindful of the exchange in our communication, as managers it is critical to build trusting relationships and rapport with employees as we saw in the 3i's model. However, in virtual teams we cannot rely on running into someone in the kitchen or hallway to have an informal conversation. We need to be thoughtful and deliberate in our interactions with employees. We need to find alternative ways to build these relationships with and between employees that are both easy and accepted by ourselves and employees. Because of that, it is important to set communication norms and really understand each other’s preferences. For example:

    • Timing of responses. Set the expectation that emails should be responded to within X hours/days unless otherwise noted in the actual email.
    • When it’s appropriate to send an email vs. using instant messaging.
    • A team charter – the team’s objectives, individual roles and responsibilities, and communication and collaboration guidelines.

    1.4 Identify and share ways you prefer to communicate for different activities

    20 Minutes

    1. Brainstorm and list the different types of exchanges you have with your virtual employees and they have with each other.
    2. List the various communication tools in use on your team.
    3. Assign a preferred communication method for each type of exchange

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Current types of exchanges on team
    • Communication methods used

    Output

    • Defined ways to communicate for each communication method

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Section 2.1
    Balancing wellbeing and performance in a virtual team context

    The pandemic has taken a significant toll on employees’ mental wellbeing

    44% of employees reported declined mental wellbeing since the start of the pandemic.

    • 44% of those who work from home.
    • 34% of those who have other work arrangements (i.e. onsite).
      (Qualtrics, 2020)

    "If one of our colleagues were to fall, break their leg, and get a cast, colleagues would probably rally around that person signing their cast. But, really, we don’t view the health of our brain the same as we do the health of our body."
    – Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) Employee

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Despite being over two years into the pandemic, we are still seeing its effect on the physical and mental health of employees.

    The mental health aspect has been often overlooked by organizations, but in order to have a safe, happy, and productive team, you need to give mental health the same level of focus as physical heath. This requires a change in mindset in order for you as a leader to support your team's mental wellbeing during the pandemic and beyond.

    Employees are reporting several key mental wellbeing challenges

    Stress: 67%

    Employees report increasingly high levels of stress from the onset of COVID-19, stating that it has been the most stressful time in their careers.
    (Qualtrics, 2020)

    Anxiety: 57%

    Similarly, employees’ anxiety levels have peaked because of the pandemic and the uncertainty it brings.
    (Qualtrics, 2020)

    Four main themes surrounding stress & anxiety

    • Fear of contracting COVID-19
    • Financial pressures
    • Job security and uncertainty
    • Loneliness caused by social isolation

    Speaker’s Notes:

    The stress and uncertainty about the future caused by the pandemic and its fallout are posing the biggest challenges to employees.

    Organizations shutting down operations, moving to fully remote, or requiring some of their employees to be on site based on the current situation causes a lot of anxiety as employees are not able to plan for what is coming next.

    Adding in the loss of social networks and in-person interactions exacerbates the problem employees are facing. As leaders, it is your job to understand and mitigate these challenges wherever possible.

    Re-examine your workplace barriers to mental wellbeing

    New Barriers

    Old Barriers

    • Childcare/eldercare responsibilities
    • Fear of workplace health risks
    • Work location
    • Lost support networks
    • Changed work schedules
    • Social distancing
    • Workload
    • Fear of stigma
    • Benefits limits
    • Limits to paid time off
    • Lack of manager knowledge

    Key considerations:

    • Work Environment
      • Accessibility of mental wellbeing programs and initiatives
    • Organizational Culture
      • Modeling of wellbeing
      • Paid time off
      • Discussions around mental wellbeing
    • Total Rewards
      • Benefits coverage
      • Employee assistance programs (EAPs)
      • Manager knowledge

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Organizational barriers to mental wellbeing are sadly not new. Workloads, stigma around mental health, lack of sick days, and limits to benefits for mental health supports were challenges before the pandemic. Adding in the new barriers can very easily result in a tipping point for many employees who are simply not equipped to deal with or supported in dealing with the added burden of remote work in a post-pandemic world.

    To provide the needed support to your employees, it’s important to be mindful of the key considerations.

    Holistic employee wellbeing has never been more critical than it is right now

    Employee Wellbeing

    Physical

    The physical body; ensuring a person has the freedom, opportunities, and resources needed to sustainably maintain bodily health.

    Mental

    The psychological ability to cope with information, emotions, desires, and stressors (e.g. change, threats, etc.) in a healthy and balanced way. Essential for day-to-day living and functioning.

    Social

    The state of personal and professional relationships, including personal and community engagement. The capability for genuine, authentic, and mutually affirming interactions with others.

    Financial

    The state of a person’s finances; ensuring that a person feels capable to handle their financial situation and behaviors. The ability to live productively without the weight of financial stress.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    As a manager, you need to be mindful of all of these. Create an atmosphere where people are able to come to you for help if they are struggling in one of these areas. For example, some people might be more comfortable raising physical safety or comfort concerns (personal protective equipment, ergonomics) than concerns about mental health. Or they might feel like their feelings of loneliness are not appropriate to bring into their professional life.

    Wellbeing is a delicate subject, and most of the time, people are reluctant to talk about it. It requires vulnerability. And here’s the thing about it: Your staff will not drive a change in your team around making these topics more acceptable. It has to be the manager. You have to be the one to not just tell but show them that it’s OK to talk about this

    Encourage human-centered workplace behaviors

    Promote empathy as a focus value

    • Listen and show compassion.
    • Allow room for emotions.

    Encourage social connection

    • Leverage networks.
    • Infuse fun where possible.
    • Encourage community and sense of joint purpose.

    Cultivate a growth mindset

    • Encourage mindfulness and resilience.
    • Express gratitude.

    Empower others

    • Ask employees what they need and co-create solutions.
    • Integrate needs of personal and family life with work life.
    • Be clear on accountability.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    As a leader, your focus should be on encouraging the right behaviors on your team and in yourself.
    Show empathy; allowing room for emotion and showing you are willing and able to listen goes a long way to establishing trust.

    A growth mindset applies to resilience too. A person with a growth mindset is more likely to believe that even though they’re struggling now, they will get through it.

    Infuse fun – schedule social check-ins. This is not wasted time, or time off work – it is an integral part of the workday. We have less of it now organically, so you must bring it back deliberately. Remember that theme? We are deliberately reinfusing important organic elements into the workday.

    The last item, empowerment, is interesting – being clear on accountability. Have clear performance expectations. It might sound like telling people what to do would be disempowering, but it’s the opposite. By clarifying the goals of what they need to achieve, you empower them to invent their own “how,” because you and they are both sure they will arrive at the place that you agreed on. We will talk more about this in performance management.

    Emphasize the importance of wellbeing by setting the tone for the team

    Managers must…

    • LEAD BY EXAMPLE
      • Employees look to their managers for cues about how to react in a crisis. If the manager reacts with stress and fear, the team will follow.
    • ENCOURAGE OPEN COMMUNICATION
      • Frequent check-ins and transparent communication are essential during a time of crisis, especially when working remotely.
    • ACKNOWLEDGE THE SITUATION
      • Recognizing the stress that teams may be facing and expressing confidence in them goes a long way.
    • PROMOTE WELLBEING
      • Managers who take care of themselves can better support their teams and encourage them to practice good self-care too.
    • REDUCE STIGMA
      • Reducing stigma around mental health encourages people to come forward with their struggles and get the support they need.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Emphasize the importance of wellbeing with what you do. If you do not model self-care behavior, people will follow what you do, not what you say.

    Lead by example – Live the behaviors you want to see in your employees. If you show confidence, positivity, and resiliency, it will filter down to your team.

    Encourage open communication – Have regular meetings where your team is able to set the agenda, or allow one-on-ones to be guided by the employee. Make sure these are scheduled and keep them a priority.

    Acknowledge the situation – Pretending things are normal doesn’t help the situation. Talk about the stress that the team is facing and express confidence that you will get through it together.

    Promote wellbeing – Take time off, don’t work when you’re sick, and you will be better able to support your team!

    Reduce stigma – Call it out when you see it and be sure to remind people of and provide access to any supports that the organization has.

    Conduct dedicated conversations around wellbeing

    1. Check in with how each team member is doing frequently and ask how they are doing personally.
    2. Discuss how things are going. Ask: “How is your work situation working out for you so far? Do you feel supported? How are you taking care of yourself in these circumstances?”
    3. Ask if there are any stressors or roadblocks that they have experienced and collaborate to find solutions.
    4. Provide reassurance of your support and confidence in them.
    5. Document the plan for managing stressors and roadblocks – either through a collaboration tool or through email.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Going back to the idea of a growth mindset – this may be uncomfortable for you as a manager. So here’s a step-by-step guide that over time you can morph into your own style.

    With your team – be prepared to share first and to show it is OK to be vulnerable and address wellbeing seriously.

    1. Make sure you make time for the personal. Ask about their lives and show compassion.
    2. Give opportunities for them to bring up things that might stay hidden otherwise. Ask questions that show you care.
    3. Help identify areas they are struggling with and work with them to move past those areas.
    4. Make sure they feel supported in what they are going through and reassured of their place on the team.
    5. Roll wellbeing into your planning process. This signals to team that you see wellbeing as important, not just a checklist to cover during a team meeting, and are ready to follow through on it.

    Recognize when professional help is needed

    SIGNS OF BURNOUT: Overwhelmed; Frequent personal disclosure; Trouble sleeping and focusing; Frequent time off; Strained relationships; Substance abuse; Poor work performance

    Speaker’s Notes:

    As a leader, it is important to be on the lookout for warning signs of burnout and know when to step in and direct individuals to professional help.

    Poor work performance – They struggle to maintain work performance, even after you’ve worked with them to create coping strategies.

    Overwhelmed – They repeatedly tell you that they feel overwhelmed, very stressed, or physically unwell.

    Frequent personal disclosure – They want to discuss their personal struggles at length on a regular basis.

    Trouble sleeping and focusing – They tell you that they are not sleeping properly and are unable to focus on work.

    Frequent time off – They feel the need to take time off more frequently.

    Strained relationships – They have difficulty communicating effectively with coworkers; relationships are strained.

    Substance abuse – They show signs of substance abuse (e.g. drunk/high while working, social media posts about drinking during the day).

    Keeping an eye out for these signs and being able to step in before they become unmanageable can mean the difference between keeping and losing an employee experiencing burnout.

    Remember: Managers also need support

    • Added burden
    • Lead by example
    • Self-care

    Speaker’s Notes:

    If you’ve got managers under you, be mindful of their unique stressors. Don’t forget to check in with them, too.

    If you are a manager, remember to take care of yourself and check in with your own manager about your own wellbeing.

    2.1 Balance wellbeing and performance in a virtual team context

    30 Minutes

    1. Brainstorm and list current practices and challenges connected to wellbeing on your teams.
    2. Choose one or two wellbeing challenges that are most relevant for your team.
    3. Discuss as a group and identify one solution for each challenge that you can put into action with your own virtual team. Document this under “Action plan to move forward” on the workbook slide “2.1 Balancing wellbeing and performance in a virtual team context.”

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Current practices and challenges connected to wellbeing

    Output

    • Action plan for each challenge listed

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Section 2.2

    Managing performance in a virtual team context

    Virtual employees are craving more meaningful interactions with their managers

    A survey indicated that, overall, remote employees showed less satisfaction with manager interactions compared to other non-remote employees.

    1. 16% less likely to strongly agree their manager involves them in setting goals at work.
    2. 28% less likely to strongly agree they continually work with their manager to clarify work priorities.
    3. 29% less likely to strongly agree they have reviewed their greatest successes with their manager in the last six months.
    4. 30% less likely to strongly agree they have talked with their manager about progress toward goals in the last six months.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    In many cases, we have put people into virtual roles because they are self-directed and self-motivated workers who can thrive with the kind of autonomy and flexibility that comes with virtual work. As managers, we should expect many of these workers to be proactively interested in how they are performing and in developing their careers.

    It would be a mistake to take a hands-off approach when managing virtual workers. A recent survey indicated that, overall, remote employees showed less satisfaction with manager interactions compared to other non-remote employees. It was also one of the aspects of their work experience they were least satisfied with overall (Gallup, State of the American Workplace, 2017). Simply put, virtual employees are craving more meaningful conversations with their managers.

    While conversations about performance and development are important for all employees (virtual or non-virtual), managers of remote teams can have a significant positive impact on their virtual employees’ experience and engagement at work by making efforts to improve their involvement and support in these areas.

    During this module we will work together to identify ways that each of us can improve how we manage the performance of our virtual employees. At the end of the module everyone will create an action plan that they can put in place with their own teams. In the next module, we go through a similar set of activities to create an action plan for our interactions with employees about their development.

    Building blocks of performance management

    • Goal Setting

    • Setting Expectations

    • Measuring Progress

    • Feedback & Coaching

    Speaker’s Notes:

    [Include a visualization of your existing performance management process in the slide. Walk the participants through the process to remind them of what is expected. While the managers participating in the training should know this, there may be different understandings of it, or it might just be the case that it’s been a while since people looked at the official process. The intention here is merely to ensure everyone is on the same page for the purposes of the activities that follow.]

    Now that we’ve reviewed performance management at a high level, let’s dive into what is currently happening with the performance management of virtual teams.

    I know that you have some fairly extensive material at your organization around how to manage performance. This is fantastic. And we’re going to focus mainly on how things change in a virtual context.

    When measuring progress, how do you as a manager make sure that you are comfortable not seeing your team physically at their desks? This is the biggest challenge for remote managers.

    2.2 Share current performance management practices for virtual teams

    30 Minutes

    1. Brainstorm and list current high-level performance management practices connected to each building block. Record in your workbook.
    2. Discuss current challenges connected to implementing the building blocks with virtual employees.

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Current performance management practices
    • Challenges surrounding performance management

    Output

    • Current state of virtual performance management defined

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Communicate the “why”: Cascade organizational goals

    This image depicts the Cascade of Why- organizational goals. Organizational Mission; Organizational Values; Organizational Goals; Department Goals; Team Goals; Individual Goals

    Speaker’s Notes:

    When assisting your employees with their goals, think about the organization’s overall mission and goals to help you determine team and individual goals.

    • Organizational goals: Employee goals should align with organizational goals. Goals may cascade down through the organization.
    • Department or team goals: Create a clear strategy based on high-level goals for the year so employees can link short-term goals to the larger picture.
    • Individual goals: Employees should draw on their individual development plan to help set performance goals.

    Sometimes it’s difficult to get employees thinking about goals and they need assistance from managers. It’s also important to be clear on team goals to help guide employees in setting individual ones.

    The basic idea is to show people how their individual day-to-day work contributes to the overall success of the organization. It gives them a sense of purpose and a rationale, which translates to motivation. And also helps them problem solve with more autonomy.

    You’re giving people a sense of the importance of their own contribution.

    How to set clear expectations for job performance

    Ensure employees have a clear understanding of what’s expected for their role:

    1. Review their metrics so they understand how they’re being evaluated.
    2. Outline daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals.
    3. If needed, help them plan when and how each part of their job should be done and what to prioritize.
    4. Ask them to come to you early if they experience a roadblock so that you can help rather than having them flounder on their own.
    5. Document instances where employees aren’t meeting role or performance expectations.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Tailor performance goals to address any root causes of poor performance.

    For example:

    • If personal factors are getting in the way, work with the employee (and HR if necessary) to create a strategy to address any impediments to performing in the role.

    Tips for managing performance remotely

    • Reflect on one key question: What needs to happen for my direct reports to continue their work while working remotely?
    • Manage for results – not employee visibility at the office.
    • Use metrics to measure performance. If you don’t have any, define tasks and deliverables as clearly as possible and conduct regular check-ins.
    • Work with the employee to set goals and metrics to measure progress.

    Focus on results: Be flexible about how and when work gets done, as long as team members are hitting their targets.

    • For example, if they have childcare duties from 3 to 5pm during school closures and want to work later in the evening to make up the time, that’s fine – as long as the work gets done.
    • Set clear expectations about which work must be done during normal work hours (e.g. attend team meetings, client calls) and which can be done at other hours.
    • Team members must arrange with you any nonstandard working hours before they start using an altered schedule. It is your responsibility to keep track of hours and any alternate arrangements.
    • Don’t make team members feel constantly monitored (i.e. “Where were you from 10 to 11am?”); trust them until you have reason not to.

    Encourage your team members to unplug: If they’re sending you emails late at night and they haven’t made an alternate work hours agreement with you, encourage them to take time away from work.

    • It’s harder to unplug when working at home, and everyone needs a break to stay productive.

    Avoid micromanagement with holistic performance measures

    Quality

    How well tasks are accomplished

    Behavior

    Related to specific employee actions, skills, or attitudes

    Quantity

    How much work gets done

    Holistic measures demonstrate all the components required for optimal performance. This is the biggest driver in having comfort as a manager of a remote team and avoiding micromanagement. Typically these are set at the organizational level. You may need to adjust for individual roles, etc.

    Speaker's Notes:

    Metrics come in different types. One way to ensure your metrics capture the full picture is to use a mix of different kinds of metrics.

    Some metrics are quantitative: they describe quantifiable or numerical aspects of the goal. This includes timeliness. On the other hand, qualitative metrics have to do with the final outcome or product. And behavioral metrics have to do with employees' actions, skills, or attitudes. Using different kinds of metrics together helps you set holistic measures, which capture all the components of optimal performance toward your goal and prevent gaming the system.

    Let's take an example:

    A courier might have an objective to do a good job delivering packages. An example of a quantitative measure might be that the courier is required to deliver X number of packages per day on time. The accompanying metrics would be the number of packages delivered per day and the ratio of packages delivered on time vs. late.

    Can you see a problem if we use only these quantitative measures to evaluate the courier's performance?

    Wait to see if anyone volunteers an answer. Discuss suggestions.

    That's right, if the courier's only goal is to deliver more packages, they might start to rush, may ruin the packages, and may offer poor customer service. We can help to guard against this by implementing qualitative and behavioral measures as well. For example, a qualitative measure might be that the courier is required to deliver the packages in mint condition. And the metric would be the number of customer complaints about damaged packages or ratings on a satisfaction survey related to package condition.

    For the behavioral aspect, the courier might be required to provide customer-centric service with a positive attitude. The metrics could be ratings on customer satisfaction surveys related to the courier's demeanor or observations by the manager.

    Managing poor performance virtually: Look for key signs

    It’s crucial to acknowledge that an employee might have an “off week” or need time to balance work and life – things that can be addressed with performance management (PM) techniques. Managers should move into the process for performance improvement when:

    1. Performance fluctuates frequently or significantly.
    2. Performance has dropped for an extended period of time.
    3. Expectations are consistently not being met.

    Key signs to look for:

    • PM data/performance-related assessments
    • Continual absences
    • Decreased quality or quantity of output
    • Frequent excuses (e.g. repeated internet outages)
    • Lack of effort or follow-through
    • Missed deadlines
    • Poor communication or lack of responsiveness
    • Failure to improve

    Speaker’s notes:

    • Let’s talk more about identifying low performance.
    • Everybody has off days or weeks. And what if they are new to the role or new to working remotely? Their performance may be low because they need time to adjust. These sort of situations should be managed, but they don’t require moving into the process for performance improvement.
    • When managing employees who are remote or working in a hybrid situation, it is important to be alert to these signs and check in with your employees on a regular basis. Aim to identify and work with employees on addressing performance issues as they arise rather than waiting until it’s too late. Depending on your availability, the needs of the employee, and the complexity of their role, check-ins could occur daily, weekly, and/or monthly. As I mentioned, for remote employees, it’s often better to check-in more frequently but for a shorter period of time.
    • You want to be present in their work life and available to help them manage through roadblocks and stay on track, but try to avoid over-monitoring employees. Micromanaging can impact the manager-employee relationship and lead to the employee feeling that there is a lack of trust. Remember, the employee needs to be responsible for their own performance and improvement.
    • Check-ins should not just be about the work either. Take some time to check in personally. This is particularly important when managing remotely. It enables you to build a personal relationship with the employee and also keeps you aware if there are other personal issues at play that are impacting their work.
    • So, how do you know what does require performance improvement? There are three key things that you should look for that are clear signals that performance improvement is necessary:
      1. Their performance is fluctuating frequently or significantly.
      2. Their performance has dropped for an extended period of time.
      3. Expectations are consistently not being met.
    • What do you think are some key signs to look for that indicate a performance issue is occurring?

    Managing poor performance virtually: Conducting remote performance conversations

    Video calling

    Always use video calls instead of phone calls when possible so that you don’t lose physical cues and body language.

    Meeting invitations

    Adding HR/your leader to a meeting invite about performance may cause undue stress. Think through who needs to participate and whether they need to be included in the invite itself.

    Communication

    Ensure there are no misunderstandings by setting context for each discussion and having the employee reiterate the takeaways back to you.

    Focus on behavior

    Don’t assume the intent behind the behavior(s) being discussed. Instead, just focus on the behavior itself.

    Policies

    Be sure to adhere to any relevant HR policies and support systems. Working with HR throughout the process will ensure none are overlooked.

    Speaker’s notes:

    There are a few best practices you should follow when having performance conversations:

    • First, if you are in a different work environment than your employee, always use video calls instead of phone calls whenever possible so that you don’t miss out on physical cues and body language. If videoconferencing isn’t the norm, encourage them to turn on their video. Be empathic that it can feel awkward but explain the benefits, and you will both have an easier time communicating and understanding each other.
    • As I’ve mentioned, be considerate of the environment they are in. If they are in the office and you are working remotely, be sure to book a private meeting room for them to go to for the conversation. If they are working from home, be sure to check that they are prepared and able to focus on the conversation.
    • Next, carefully consider who you are adding to the meeting invite and whether it’s necessary for them to be there. Adding HR or your leader to a meeting invite may cause undue stress for the employee.
    • Consider the timing of the invite. Don’t send it out weeks in advance. When a performance problem exists, you’ll want to address it as soon as possible. A day or two of notice would be an ideal approach because it gives them a heads up but will not cause them extended stress or worrying.
    • Be considerate about the timing of the meeting and what else they may have scheduled. For example, a Friday afternoon before they are heading off on vacation or right before they are leading an important client call would not be appropriate timing.
    • As we just mentioned clear communication is critical. Ensure there are no misunderstandings by setting context for each discussion and having the employee reiterate takeaways back to you.
    • Focus on the behavior and don’t assume their intent. It can be tempting to say, “I know you didn’t mean to miss the deadline,” but you don’t know what they intended. Often people are not aware of the impact their behavior can have on others.
    • Lastly, be sure to adhere to any relevant HR policies and support systems. Working with HR throughout the process will ensure nothing is overlooked.

    2.3 Identify challenges of current practices and propose solutions

    30 Minutes

    1. Select one or two challenges from the previous activity.
    2. Identify one solution for each challenge that you can put into action with your own virtual team. Document in the workbook.

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Current performance management practices
    • Challenges surrounding performance management

    Output

    • Action plan to move forward

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Optional Section

    Employee development in a virtual team setting

    There are three main development approaches for both colocated and virtual employees

    Formal Training; Relational Learning; Experimental Learning

    Speaker’s Notes:

    As we have seen, our virtual employees crave more meaningful interactions with their managers. In addition to performance conversations, managers should also be having regular discussions with their employees about their employee development plans. One key component of these discussions is career planning. Whether you are thinking shorter term – how to become better at their current role – or longer term – how to advance beyond their current role – discussions about employee development are a great way to engage employees. Employees are ultimately responsible for creating and executing their own development plans, but managers are responsible for making sure that employees have thought through these plans and helping employees identify opportunities for executing those plans.

    To help us think about our own employee development practices, identify challenges they pose when working with virtual employees, and create solutions to these challenges, it is useful to think about employee development opportunities according to three types:

    1. The first kind of development opportunity is formal training. Formal training is organized and has a clearly defined curriculum and desired outcome. It usually takes the form of a group training session (like this one) or training videos or materials that employees can watch individually and on their own time. These opportunities usually end with a test or assignment that can be used to evaluate the degree to which the participant achieved the desired learning outcomes.
    2. The second kind of development opportunity is relational learning. Perhaps the most common form of this type of learning is coaching or mentoring. By establishing a long-term work relationship, checking in with employees about their daily work and development goals, and sharing their own experiences and knowledge, mentors help employees reflect and draw out learning from everyday, on-the-job development activities. Other examples include a peer support group or communities of practice. In these group settings peers share best practices and work together to overcome challenges.
    3. The third kind of development opportunity is experiential learning. This kind of opportunity provides employees the chance to work on real work problems, and the output of the development work can directly benefit the organization. Most people learn best by doing. On-the-job experiences that are challenging or new can force people to use and develop new skills and knowledge based on what worked effectively and what failed. Examples of experiential learning are on-the-job learning for new hires, stretch assignments, or special projects that take the employee beyond their daily routine and allow them to try new activities and develop competencies that they would not have the chance to develop as part of their regular job.

    According to McLean & Company, organizations should use the “70-20-10” rule as a rough guideline when working with employees to create their development plans: 10% of the plan should be dedicated to formal training opportunities, 20% to relational learning, and 70% to experiential learning. Managers should work with employees to identify their performance and career goals, ensure that their development plans are aligned with these goals, and include an appropriate mixture of all three kinds of development opportunities.

    To help identify challenges and solutions, think about how virtual work arrangements will impact the employee’s ability to leverage each type of opportunity at our organization.

    Here are some examples that can help us start thinking about the kinds of challenges virtual employees on our team face:

    Career Planning

    • One challenge can be identifying a career path that is consistent with working virtually. If switching from a virtual arrangement to an onsite arrangement is not a viable option for an employee, some career paths may not feasibly be open to them (at least as the company is currently organized). For example, if an employee would eventually like to be promoted to a senior leadership role in their business function but all senior leaders are required to work onsite at corporate headquarters, the employee will need to consider whether such a move is possible for them. In some cases employees may be willing to do this, but in others they may not. The important thing is to have these conversations with virtual employees and avoid the assumption that all career paths can be done virtually, since that might not be the case

    Formal Training

    • This is probably the least problematic form of employee development for virtual employees. In many cases this kind of training is scheduled well in advance, so virtual employees may be able to join non-virtual employees in person for some group training. When this is not possible (due to distance, budget, or time zone), many forms of group training can be recorded and watched by virtual employees later. Training videos and training materials can also easily be shared with virtual employees using existing collaboration software.

    Relational Learning

    • One major challenge here is developing a mentoring relationship virtually. As we discussed in the module on performance management, developing relationships virtually can be challenging because people cannot rely upon the kind of informal and spontaneous interactions that occur when people are located in the same office. Mentors and mentees will have to put in more effort and planning to get to know each other and they will have to schedule frequent check-ins so that employees can reflect upon their progress and experience (with the help of their mentors) more often.
    • Time zones and technology may pose potential barriers for certain candidates to be mentors. In some cases, employees that are best qualified to be mentors may not be as comfortable with collaborative software as other mentors or their mentees. If there are large time zone differences, some people who would otherwise be interested in acting as a mentor may be dissuaded. Managers need to take this into consideration if they are connecting employees with mentors or if they are thinking of taking on the mentor role themselves.

    Experiential Learning

    • Virtual employees risk being overlooked for special projects due to the “out of sight, out of mind” bias: When special projects come up, the temptation is to look around the room and see who is the best fit. The problem is, however, that in some cases the highest performers or best fit may not physically be in the room. In these cases it is important for managers to take on an advocate role for their employees and remind other managers that they have good virtual employees on their team that should be included or contacted. It is also important for managers to keep their team informed about these opportunities as often as possible.
    • Sometimes certain projects or certain kinds of work just cannot be done virtually in a company for a variety of reasons. The experiential learning opportunities will not be open to virtual employees. If such opportunities are open to the majority of other workers in this role (potentially putting virtual employees’ career development at a disadvantage relative to their peers), managers should work with their virtual employees to identify alternative experiences. Managers may also want to consider advocating for more or for higher quality experiential learning opportunities at the organization.

    Now that we have considered some general examples of challenges and solutions, let’s look at our own employee development practices and think about the practical steps we can take as managers to improve employee development for our virtual employees.

    Employee development basics

    • Career planning & performance improvement
    • Formal training
    • Relational learning
    • Experiential learning

    Speaker’s Notes:

    [Customize this slide according to your organization’s own policies and processes for employee development. Provide useful images that outline this on the slide, and in these notes describe the processes/policies that are in place. Note: In some cases policies or processes may not be designed with virtual employees or virtual teams in mind. That is okay for the purposes of this training module. In the following activities participants will discuss how they apply these policies and processes with their virtual teams. If your organization is interested in adapting its policies/processes to better support virtual workers, it may be useful to record those conversations to supplement existing policies later.]

    Now that we have considered some general examples of challenges and solutions, let’s look at our own employee development practices and think about the practical steps we can take as managers to improve employee development for our virtual employees.

    2.4 Share current practices for developing employees on a virtual team

    30 Minutes

    1. Brainstorm and list current high-level employee development practices. Record in your workbook.
    2. Discuss current challenges connected to developing virtual employees. Record in your workbook.
    3. Identify one solution for each challenge that you can put into action with your own virtual team.
    4. Discuss as a group.

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Current employee development practices
    • Challenges surrounding employee development

    Output

    • Action plan to move forward

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Refine Action Plans

    2.5 Refine your action plan and commit to implementing it

    30 Minutes

    1. Review your action plans for consistency and overlap. Highlight any parts you may struggle to complete.
    2. Meeting with your group, summarize your plans to each other. Provide feedback and discuss each other’s action plans.
    3. Discuss how you can hold each other accountable.

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Action items from previous activities.

    Output

    • Action plan to move forward

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Summary of Accomplishment

    • We do not need to go out and learn a new set of manager responsibilities to better manage our virtual teams; rather, we have to “dial up” certain responsibilities we already have or adjust certain approaches that we already take.
    • It is important to set clear expectations. While managers are ultimately responsible for making sure expectations are set and are clearly communicated, they are not the only ones with responsibilities. Employees and managers need to work together to overcome the challenges that virtual work involves.
    • Virtual employees crave meaningful interactions with their managers and team. Managers must take charge in fostering an atmosphere of openness around wellbeing and establish effective performance management strategies. By being proactive with our virtual teams’ wellness and mindful of our performance management habits, we can take significant steps toward keeping these employees engaged and productive.
    • Effective management in virtual contexts requires being more deliberate than is typical in non-virtual contexts. By working as a group to identify challenges and propose solutions, we have helped each other create action plans that we can use going forward to continually improve our management practices.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through an info-tech workshop or guided implementation.

    Contact your account representative for more information

    workshops@infotech.com

    1-888-670-8889

    Speaker’s Notes:

    First, let’s take a moment to summarize the key things we have learned today:

    1. We do not need to go out and learn a new set of manager competencies to better manage our virtual teams; rather, we have to “dial up” certain competencies we already have or adjust certain approaches that we already take. In many cases we just need to be more aware of the challenges that virtual communication poses and be more planful in our approaches.
    2. It is important to set clear expectations. While managers are ultimately responsible for making sure expectations are set and clearly communicated, they are not the only ones with responsibilities. Employees and managers need to work together to overcome the challenges that virtual work involves. Making sure that teams have meaningful conversations about expectations, come to a shared understanding of them, and record them will create a firm foundation for all other interactions on the virtual team.
    3. Virtual employees crave meaningful interactions with their managers related to performance and employee development. By creating action plans for improving these kinds of interactions with our teams, we can take significant steps toward keeping these employees engaged and productive.
    4. Effective performance management and employee development in virtual contexts require more planfulness than is required in non-virtual contexts. By working as a group to identify challenges and propose solutions, we have helped each other create action plans that we can use going forward to continually improve our management practices.

    Is there anything that anyone has learned that is not on this list and that they would like to share with the group?

    Finally, were there any challenges identified today that were not addressed?

    [Note to facilitator: Take note of any challenges not addressed and commit to getting back to the participants with some suggested solutions.]

    Additional resources

    Manager Training: Lead Through Change

    Train managers to navigate the interpersonal challenges associated with change management and develop their communication and leadership skills. Upload this LMS module into your learning management system to enable online training.

    Manager Training: Build a Better Manager: Manage Your People

    Management skills training is needed, but organizations are struggling to provide training that makes a long-term difference in the skills managers use in their day to day.

    Many training programs are ineffective because they offer the wrong content, deliver it in a way that is not memorable, and are not aligned with the IT department’s business objectives.

    Blueprint: Manage Poor Performance While Working From Home

    Assess and improve remote work performance with our ready-to-use tools.

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    Knight, Rebecca. “How to manage remote direct reports.” Harvard Business Review, 2015. Web.

    “Rewards and Recognition: 5 ways to show remote worker appreciation.” FurstPerson, 2019. Web.

    Palay, Jonathan. "How to build your sales management cadence." CommercialTribe, 22 March 2018. Web.

    “Sales Activity Management Matrix.” Asian Sales Guru, 2019. Web.

    Smith, Simone. “9 Things to Consider When Recognizing Remote Employees.” hppy, 2018. Web.

    “State of Remote Work 2017.” OWL Labs, 2021. Web.

    “State of the American Workplace.” Gallup, 2017. Web.

    “Telework Savings Potential.” Global Workplace Analytics, June 2021. Web.

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    Zenger, Jack, and Joe Folkman. “Feedback: The Leadership Conundrum.” Talent Quarterly: The Feedback Issue, 2015.

    Contributors

    Anonymous CAMH Employee

    Reduce Time to Consensus With an Accelerated Business Case

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    • Parent Category Name: Business Analysis
    • Parent Category Link: /business-analysis
    • Enterprise application initiatives are complex, expensive, and require a significant amount of planning before initiation.
    • A financial business case is sometimes used to justify these initiatives.
    • Once the business case (and benefits therein) are approved, the case is forgotten, eliminating a critical check and balance of benefit realization.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    1. Frame the conversation.

    Understand the audience and forum for the business case to best frame the conversation.

    2. Time-box the process of building the case.

    More time should be spent on performing the action rather than building the case.

    3. The business case is a living document.

    The business case creates the basis for review of the realization of the proposed business benefits once the procurement is complete.

    Impact and Result

    • Understand the drivers for decision making in your organization, and the way initiatives are evaluated.
    • Compile a compelling business case that provides decision makers with sufficient information to make decisions confidently.
    • Evaluate proposed enterprise application initiatives “apples-to-apples” using a standardized and repeatable methodology.
    • Provide a mechanism for tracking initiative performance during and after implementation.

    Reduce Time to Consensus With an Accelerated Business Case Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should build a business case for enterprise application investments, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand how we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Gather the required information

    Complete the necessary preceding tasks to building the business case. Rationalize the initiative under consideration, determine the organizational decision flow following a stakeholder assessment, and conduct market research to understand the options.

    • Reduce Time to Consensus With an Accelerated Business Case – Phase 1: Gather the Required Information
    • Business Case Readiness Checklist
    • Business Case Workbook
    • Request for Information Template
    • Request for Quotation Template

    2. Conduct the business case analysis

    Conduct a thorough assessment of the initiative in question. Define the alternatives under consideration, identify tangible and intangible benefits for each, aggregate the costs, and highlight any risks.

    • Reduce Time to Consensus With an Accelerated Business Case – Phase 2: Conduct the Business Case Analysis

    3. Make the case

    Finalize the recommendation based on the analysis and create a business case presentation to frame the conversation for key stakeholders.

    • Reduce Time to Consensus With an Accelerated Business Case – Phase 3: Make the Case
    • Full-Form Business Case Presentation Template
    • Summary Business Case Presentation Template
    • Business Case Change Log
    • Business Case Close-Out Form
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Reduce Time to Consensus With an Accelerated Business Case

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Plan for Business Case Development

    The Purpose

    Complete the necessary preceding tasks to building a strong business case.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Alignment with business objectives.

    Stakeholder buy-in.

    Activities

    1.1 Map the decision flow in your organization.

    1.2 Define the proposed initiative.

    1.3 Define the problem/opportunity statement.

    1.4 Clarify goals and objectives expected from the initiative.

    Outputs

    Decision traceability

    Initiative summary

    Problem/opportunity statement

    Business objectives

    2 Build the Business Case Model

    The Purpose

    Put together the key elements of the business case including alternatives, benefits, and costs.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Rationalize the business case.

    Activities

    2.1 Design viable alternatives.

    2.2 Identify the tangible and intangible benefits.

    2.3 Assess current and future costs.

    2.4 Create the financial business case model.

    Outputs

    Shortlisted alternatives

    Benefits tracking model

    Total cost of ownership

    Impact analysis

    3 Enhance the Business Case

    The Purpose

    Determine more integral factors in the business case such as ramp-up time for benefits realization as well as risk assessment.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Complete a comprehensive case.

    Activities

    3.1 Determine ramp-up times for costs and benefits.

    3.2 Identify performance measures and tracking.

    3.3 Assess initiative risk.

    Outputs

    Benefits realization schedule

    Performance tracking framework

    Risk register

    4 Prepare the Business Case

    The Purpose

    Finalize the recommendation and formulate the business case summary and presentation.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Prepare the business case presentation.

    Activities

    4.1 Choose the alternative to be recommended.

    4.2 Create the detailed and summary business case presentations.

    4.3 Present and incorporate feedback.

    4.4 Monitor and close out.

    Outputs

    Final recommendation

    Business case presentation

    Final sign-off

    Build a Continual Improvement Program

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    • Parent Category Name: Operations Management
    • Parent Category Link: /i-and-o-process-management
    • IT managers must work hard to maintain and improve service quality or risk performance deterioration over time.
    • Leadership may feel lost about what to do next and which initiatives have higher priority for improvement.
    • The backlog of improvement initiatives makes the work even harder. Managers should involve the right people in the process and build a team that is responsible to monitor, measure, prioritize, implement, and test improvements.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Without continual improvement, sustained service quality will be temporary. Organizations need to put in place an ongoing process to detect potential services, enhance their procedures, and sustain their performance, whatever the process maturity is.

    Impact and Result

    • Set strategic vision for the continual improvement program.
    • Build a team to set regulations, processes, and audits for the program.
    • Set measurable targets for the program.
    • Identify and prioritize improvement initiatives.
    • Measure and monitor progress to ensure initiatives achieve the desired outcome.
    • Apply lessons learned to the next initiatives.

    Build a Continual Improvement Program Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Build a Continual Improvement Program – A step-by-step document to walk you through building a plan for efficient IT continual improvement.

    This storyboard will help you craft a continual improvement register and a workflow to ensure sustained service improvements that fulfill ongoing increases in stakeholder expectations.

    • Build a Continual Improvement Program Storyboard

    2. Continual Improvement Register and Workflow – Structured documents to help you outline improvement initiatives, prioritize them, and build a dashboard to streamline tracking.

    Use the Continual Improvement Register and Continual Improvement Workflow to help you brainstorm improvement items, get a better visibility into the items, and plan to execute improvements.

    • Continual Improvement Register
    • Continual Improvement Workflow (Visio)
    • Continual Improvement Workflow (PDF)
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Build a Continual Improvement Program

    Don’t stop with process standardization; plan to continually improve and help those improvements stick.

    Analyst Perspective

    Go beyond standardizing basics

    IT managers often learn how to standardize IT services. Where they usually fail is in keeping these improvements sustainable. It’s one thing to build a quality process, but it’s another challenge entirely to keep momentum and know what to do next.

    To fill the gap, build a continual improvement plan to continuously increase value for stakeholders. This plan will help connect services, products, and practices with changing business needs.

    Without a continual improvement plan, managers may find themselves lost and wonder what’s next. This will lead to misalignment between ongoing and increasingly high stakeholder expectations and your ability to fulfill these requirements.

    Build a continual improvement program to engage executives, leaders, and subject matter experts (SMEs) to go beyond break fixes, enable proactive enhancements, and sustain process changes.

    Photo of Mahmoud Ramin, Ph.D., Senior Research Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations, Info-Tech Research Group. Mahmoud Ramin, Ph.D.
    Senior Research Analyst
    Infrastructure and Operations
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    • Even high-quality services and products need to be aligned with rising stakeholder expectations to sustain operational excellence.
    • Without the right leadership, commitment, and processes, improvements in service quality can be difficult to sustain.
    • Continual improvement is not only a development plan but also an organizational culture shift, which makes stakeholder buy-in even challenging.

    Common Obstacles

    • IT managers must work hard to maintain and improve service quality or risk performance deterioration over time.
    • Leadership feels lost about what to do next and which initiatives have higher priority for improvement.
    • A backlog of improvement initiatives makes the work even harder. Managers should involve the right people in the process and build a team that is responsible for monitoring, measuring, prioritizing, implementing, and testing improvements.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    • Set a strategic vision for the continual improvement program.
    • Build a team to set regulations, processes, and audits for the program.
    • Set measurable targets for the program.
    • Identify and prioritize improvement initiatives.
    • Measure and monitor progress to ensure initiatives achieve the desired outcome.
    • Apply lessons learned to the next initiatives.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Without continual improvement, any process maturity achieved around service quality will not be sustained. Organizations need to put in place an ongoing program to maintain their current maturity and continue to grow and improve by identifying new services and enhancing existing processes.

    Purpose of continual improvement

    There should be alignment between ongoing improvements of business products and services and management of these products and services. Continual improvement helps service providers adapt to changing environments. No matter how critical the service is to the business, failure to continually improve reduces the service value.

    Image of a notebook with an illustration titled 'Continuous Improvement'.

    Continual improvement is one of the five elements of ITIL’s Service Value System (SVS).

    Continual improvement should be documented in an improvement register to record and manage improvement initiatives.

    Continual improvement is a proactive approach to service management. It involves measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of people, processes, and technology to:

    • Identify areas for improvement.
    • Adapt to changes in the business environment.
    • Align the IT strategy to organizational goals.

    A continual improvement process helps service management move away from a reactive approach that focuses only on fixing problems as they occur.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Make sure the basics are in place before you embark on a continual improvement initiative.

    Benefits of embedding a cross-organizational continual improvement approach

    Icon of a computer screen. Encourage end users to provide feedback on service quality. Icon of a crossed pencil and wrench.

    Provide an opportunity to stakeholders to define requirements and raise their concerns.

    Icon of a storefront.

    Embed continual improvement in all service delivery procedures.

    Icon of chevrons moving backward.

    Turn failures into improvement opportunities rather than contributing to a blame culture.

    Icon of a telescope.

    Improve practice effectiveness that enhances IT efficiency.

    Icon of a thumbs up in a speech bubble.

    Improve end-user satisfaction that positively impacts brand reputation.

    Icon of shopping bags.

    Improve operational costs while maintaining a high level of satisfaction.

    Icon of a magnifying glass over a map marker.

    Help the business become more proactive by identifying and improving services.

    Info-Tech Insight

    It’s the responsibility of the organization’s leaders to develop and promote a continual improvement culture. Work with the business unit leads and communicate the benefits of continual improvement to get their buy-in for the practice and achieve the long-term impact.

    Build a feedback program to get input into where improvement initiatives are needed

    A well-maintained continual improvement process creates a proper feedback mechanism for the following stakeholder groups:
    • Users
    • Suppliers
    • Service delivery team members
    • Service owners
    • Sponsors
    An efficient feedback mechanism should be constructed around the following initiatives:
    Target with an arrow in the bullseye. The arrow has four flags: 'Perceived value by users', 'Service effectiveness', 'Service governance', and 'Service demand'.
    Stakeholders who participate in feedback activities should feel comfortable providing suggestions for improvement.

    Work closely with the service desk team to build communication channels to conduct surveys. Avoid formal bureaucratic communications and enforce openness in communicating the value of feedback the stakeholders can provide.

    Info-Tech Insight

    When conducting feedback activities with users, keep surveys anonymous and ensure users’ information is kept confidential. Make sure everyone else is comfortable providing feedback in a constructive way so that you can seek clarification and create a feedback loop.

    Implement an iterative continual improvement model and ensure that your services align with your organizational vision

    Build a six-step process for your continual improvement plan. Make it a loop, in which each step becomes an input for the next step. A cycle around a dartboard with numbered steps: '01 Determine your goals', '02 Define the process team', '03 Determine initiatives', '04 Prioritize initiatives', '05 Execute improvement', '06 Establish a learning culture'.

    1. Determine your goals

    A vision statement communicates your desired future state of the IT organization.

    Your IT goals should always support your organizational goals. IT goals are high-level objectives that the IT organization needs to achieve to reach a target state.
    A cycle of the bolded statements on the right surrounding a dartboard with two bullseyes.

    Understand the high-level business objectives to set the vision for continual improvement in a way that will align IT strategies with business strategies.

    Obtaining a clear picture of your organization’s goals and overall corporate strategy is one of the crucial first steps to continual improvement and will set the stage for the metrics you select. Document your continual improvement program goals and objectives.

    Knowing what your business is doing and understanding the impact of IT on the business will help you ensure that any metrics you collect will be business focused.

    Understanding the long-term vision of the business and its appetite for commitment and sponsorship will also inform your IT strategy and continual improvement goals.

    Assess the future state

    At this stage, you need to visualize improvement, considering your critical success factors.

    Critical success factors (CSFs) are higher-level goals or requirements for success, such as improving end-user satisfaction. They’re factors that must be met in order to reach your IT and business strategic vision.

    Select key performance indicators (KPIs) that will identify useful information for the initiative: Define KPIs for each CSF. These will usually involve a trend, as an increase or decrease in something. If KPIs already exist for your IT processes, re-evaluate them to assess their relevance to current strategy and redefine if necessary. Selected KPIs should provide a full picture of the health of targeted practice.

    KPIs should cover these four vectors of practice performance:

    1. Quantity
      How many continual improvement initiatives are in progress
    2. Quality
      How well you implemented improvements
    3. Timeliness
      How long it took to get continual improvement initiatives done
    4. Compliance
      How well processes and controls are being executed, such as system availability
    Cross-section of a head split into sections with icons in the middle sections.

    Examples of key CSFs and KPIs for continual improvement

    CSF

    KPI

    Adopt and maintain an effective approach for continual improvement Improve stakeholder satisfaction due to implementation of improvement initiatives.
    Enhance stakeholder awareness about continual improvement plan and initiatives.
    Increase continual improvement adoption across the organization.
    Commit to effective continual improvement across the business Improve the return on investment.
    Increase the impact of the improvement initiatives on process maturity.
    Increase the rate of successful improvement initiatives.

    Prepare a vision statement to communicate the improvement strategy

    IT Implications + Business Context –› IT Goals
    • IT implications are derived from the business context and inform goals by aligning the IT goals with the business context.
    • Business context encompasses an understanding of the factors impacting the business from various perspectives, how the business makes decisions, and what it is trying to achieve.
    • IT goals are high-level, specific objectives that the IT organization needs to achieve to reach the target state. IT goals begin a process of framing what IT as an organization needs to be able to do in the target state.

    IT goals will help identify the target state, IT capabilities, and the initiatives that will need to be implemented to enable those capabilities.

    The vision statement is expressed in the present tense. It seeks to articulate the desired role of IT and how IT will be perceived.

    Strong IT vision statements have the following characteristics:
    Arrow pointing right. Describe a desired future
    Arrow pointing right. Focus on ends, not means
    Arrow pointing right. Communicate promise
    Arrow pointing right. Work as an elevator pitch:
    • Concise; no unnecessary words
    • Compelling
    • Achievable
    • Inspirational
    • Memorable

    2. Define the process team

    The structure of each continual improvement team depends on resource availability and competency levels.

    Make sure to allocate continual improvement activities to the available resources and assess the requirement to bring in others to fulfill all tasks.

    Brainstorm what steps should be included in a continual improvement program:

    • Who is responsible for identifying, logging, and prioritizing improvement opportunities?
    • Who makes the business case for improvement initiatives?
    • Who is the owner of the register, responsible for documenting initiatives and updating their status?
    • Who executes implementation?
    • Who evaluates implementation success?
    Match stakeholder skill sets with available resources to ensure continual improvement processes are handled properly. Brainstorm skills specific to the program:
    • Knowledge of provided products and services.
    • Good understanding of organization’s goals and objectives.
    • Efficiency in collecting and measuring metrics, understanding company standards and policies, and presenting them to impacted stakeholders.
    • Competency in strategic thinking and aligning the organization’s goals with improvement initiatives.

    Enable the continual improvement program by clarifying responsibilities

    Determine roles and responsibilities to ensure accountability

    The continual improvement activities will only be successful if specific roles and responsibilities are clearly identified.

    Depending on available staff and resources, you may be able to have full-time continual improvement roles, or you may include continual improvement activities in individuals’ job descriptions.

    Each improvement action that you identify should have clear ownership and accountability to ensure that it is completed within the specified timeframe.

    Roles and responsibilities can be reassigned throughout the continual improvement process.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Create cross-functional teams to improve perspective and not focus on only one small group when trying to problem solve. Having other teams hear and reframe the issue or talk about how they can help to solve issues as a team can create bigger solutions that will help the entire IT team, not just one group.

    Consider assigning dedicated continual improvement roles

    Silhouette of a business person.
    CI Coordinator

    Continual improvement coordinators are responsible for moving projects to the implementation phase and monitoring all continual improvement roles.

    Silhouette of a business person.
    Business Owner

    Business owners are accountable for business governance, compliance, and ROI analysis. They are responsible for operational and monetary aspects of the business.

    Silhouette of a business person.
    IT Owner

    IT owners are responsible for developing the action plan and ensuring success of the initiatives. They are usually the subject matter experts, focusing on technical aspects.

    3. Determine improvement initiatives

    Businesses usually make the mistake of focusing too much on making existing processes better while missing gaps in their practices.

    Gather stakeholder feedback to help you evaluate the maturity levels of IT practices Sample of the End User Satisfaction Survey.

    You need to understand the current state of service operations to understand how you can provide value through continual improvement. Give everyone an opportunity to provide feedback on IT services.

    Use Info-Tech’s End User Satisfaction Survey to define the state of your core IT services.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Become proactive to improve satisfaction. Continual improvement is not only about identifying pain points and improving them. It enables you to proactively identify initiatives for further service improvement using both practice functionality and technology enablement.

    Understand the current state of your IT practices

    Determine the maturity level of your IT areas to help you understand which processes need improvement. Involve the practice team in maturity assessment activities to get ideas and input from them. This will also help you get their buy-in and engagement for improvement.

    Leverage performance metrics to analyze performance level. Metrics play a key role in understanding what needs improvement. After you implement metrics, have an impact report regularly generated to monitor them.

    Use problem management to identify root causes for the identified gaps. Potential sources of problems can be:

    • Recurring issues that may be an indicator of an underlying problem.
    • Business processes or service issues that are not IT related, such as inefficient business process or service design issues.

    Establish an improvement roadmap and execute initiatives

    Build a continual improvement register (CIR) for your target initiatives

    A CIR is a document used for recording your action plan from the beginning to the end of the improvement project.

    If you just sit and plan for improvements without acting on them, nothing will improve. CIR helps you create an action plan and allows you to manage, track, and prioritize improvement suggestions.

    Consider tracking the following information in your CIR, adjusted to meet the needs of your organization:

    Information

    Description

    Business value impact Identify approved themes or goals that each initiative should apply to. These can and should change over time based on changing business needs.
    Effort/cost Identify the expected effort or cost the improvement initiative will require.
    Priority How urgent is the improvement? Categorize based on effort, cost, and risk levels.
    Status Ensure each initiative has a status assigned that reflects its current state.
    Timeline List the timeframe to start the improvement initiative based on the priority level.
    CI functional groups Customize the functional groups in your CI program

    Populate your register with ideas that come from your first round of assessments and use this document to continually add and track new ideas as they emerge.

    You can also consider using the register to track the outcomes and benefits of improvement initiatives after they have been completed.

    Activity: Use the Continual Improvement Register template to brainstorm responsibilities, generate improvement initiatives, and action plan

    1-3 hours
    1. Open the Continual Improvement Register template and navigate to tab 2, Setup.
    2. Brainstorm your definitions for the following items to get a clear understanding of these items when completing the CIR. The more quantification you apply to the criteria, the more tangible evaluation you will do:
      • Business value impact categories
      • Effort/cost
      • Priority
      • Status
      • Timeline
    3. Discuss the teams that the upcoming initiatives will belong to and update them under CI Functional Groups.
    1. Analyze the assessment data collected throughout stakeholder feedback and your current-state evaluation.
    2. Use this data to generate a list of initiatives that should be undertaken to improve the performance of the targeted processes.
    3. Use sticky notes to record identified CI initiatives.
    4. Record each initiative in tab 3, CI Register, along with associated information:
      • A unique ID number for the initiative
      • The individual who submitted the idea
      • The team the initiative belongs to
      • A description of the initiative

    Download the Continual Improvement Register template

    Activity: Use the Continual Improvement Register template to brainstorm responsibilities, generate improvement initiatives, and action plan

    Input

    • List of key stakeholders for continual improvement
    • Current state of services and processes

    Output

    • Continual improvement register setup
    • List of initiatives for continual improvement

    Materials

    • Continual improvement register
    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Markers
    • Laptops

    Participant

    • CIO
    • IT managers
    • Project managers
    • Continual improvement manager/coordinator

    4. Prioritize initiatives

    Prioritization should be transparent and available to stakeholders.

    Some initiatives are more critical than others to achieve and should be prioritized accordingly. Some improvements require large investments and need an equally large effort, while some are relatively low-cost, low-effort improvements. Focus on low-hanging fruit and prioritize low-cost, low-effort improvements to help the organization with rapid growth. This will also help you get stakeholder buy-in for the rest of your continual improvement program.

    Prioritize improvement initiatives in your CIR to increase visibility and ensure larger improvement initiatives are done the next cycle. As one improvement cycle ends, the next cycle begins, which allows the continual improvement team to keep pace with changing business requirements.

    Stock image of a person on a ladder leaning against a bookshelf.

    Identify “quick wins” that can provide immediate improvement

    Prioritize these quick wins to immediately demonstrate the success of the continual service improvement effort to the business.

    01

    Keep the scope of the continual improvement process manageable at the beginning by focusing on a few key areas that you want to improve.
    • If you have identified pain points, addressing these will demonstrate the value of the project to the business to gain their support.
    • Choose the services or processes that continue to disrupt or threaten service – focus on where pain points are evident and where there is a need for improvement.
    • Critical services to improve should emerge from the current-state assessments.

    02

    From your list of proposed improvements, focus on a few of the top pain points and plan to address those.

    03

    Choose the right services to improve at the first stage of continual improvement to ensure that the continual improvement process delivers value to the business.

    Activity: Prioritize improvement initiatives

    2-3 hours

    Input: List of initiatives for continual improvement

    Output: Prioritized list of initiatives

    Materials: Continual improvement register, Whiteboard/flip charts, Markers, Laptops

    Participants: CIO, IT managers, Project managers, Continual improvement manager

    1. In the CI Register tab of the Continual Improvement Register template, define the status, priority, effort/cost, and timeline according to the definition of each in the data entry tab.
    2. Review improvement initiatives from the previous activity.
    3. Record the CI coordinator, business owner, and IT owner for each initiative.
    4. Fill out submission date to track when the initiative was added to the register.
    5. According to the updated items, you will get a dashboard of items based on their categories, effort, priority, status, and timeline. You will also get a visibility into the total number of improvement initiatives.
    6. Focus on the short-term initiatives that are higher priority and require less effort.
    7. Refer to the Continual Improvement Workflow template and update the steps.

    Download the Continual Improvement Register template

    Download the Continual Improvement Workflow template

    5. Execute improvement

    Develop a plan for improvement

    Determine how you want to reach your improvement objectives. Define how to make processes work better.
    Icons representing steps. Descriptions below.
    Make a business case for your action plan Determine budget for implementing the improvement and move to execution. Find out how long it takes to build the improvement in the practice. Confirm the resources and skill sets you require for the improvement. Communicate the improvement plan across the business for better visibility and for seamless organizational change management, if needed. Lean into incremental improvements to ensure practice quality is sustained, not temporary. Put in place an ongoing process to audit, enhance, and sustain the performance of the target practice.

    Create a specific action plan to guide your improvement activities

    As part of the continual improvement plan, identify specific actions to be completed, along with ownership for each action.

    The continual improvement process must:

    • Define activities to be completed.
    • Create roles and assign ownership to complete activities.
    • Provide training and awareness about the initiative.
    • Define inputs and outputs.
    • Include reporting.

    For each action, identify:

    • The problem.
    • Who will be responsible and accountable.
    • Metric(s) for assessment.
    • Baseline and target metrics.
    • Action to be taken to achieve improvement (training, new templates, etc.).

    Choose timelines:

    • Firm timelines are important to keep the project on track.
    • One to two months for an initiative is an ideal length of time to maintain interest and enthusiasm for the specific project and achieve a result.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Every organization is unique in terms of its services, processes, strengths, weaknesses, and needs, as well as the expectations of its end users. There is no single action plan that will work for everyone. The improvement plan will vary from organization to organization, but the key elements of the plan (i.e. specific priorities, timelines, targets, and responsibilities) should always be in place.

    Build a communication plan to ensure the implementation of continual improvement stakeholder buy-in

    1. Throughout the improvement process, share information about both the status of the project and the impact of the improvement initiatives.
    Icon of a group of people. Encourage a collaborative environment across all members of the practice team.
    Icon of an ascending graph. Motivate every individual to continue moving upward and taking ownership over their roles.
    Icon of overlapping speech bubbles. Communication among team members ensures that everyone is on the same page working together toward a common goal.
    Icon of a handshake. The most important thing is to get the support of your team. Unless you have their support, you won’t be able to deliver any of the solutions you draw up.
    2. The end users should be kept in the loop so they can feel that their contribution is valued.
    Icon of an arrow pointing right. When improvements happen and only a small group of people are involved in the results and action plan, misconceptions will arise.
    Icon of a thumbs up in a speech bubble. If communication is lacking, end users will provide less feedback on the practice improvements.
    Icon of a cone made of stacked layers. For end users to feel their concerns are being considered, you must communicate the findings in a way that conveys the impact of their contribution.

    Info-Tech Insight

    To be effective, continual improvement requires open and honest feedback from IT staff. Debriefings work well for capturing information about lessons learned. Break down the debriefings into smaller, individual activities completed within each phase of the project to better capture the large amount of data and lessons learned within that phase.

    Measure the success of your improvement program

    Continual improvement is everybody’s job within the organization.

    Determine how improvements impacted stakeholders. Build a relationship pyramid to analyze how improvements impacted external users and narrow down to the internal users, implementing team, and leaders.
    1. How did we make improvements with our partners and suppliers? –› Look into your contracts and measure the SLAs and commitments.
    2. How could improvement initiatives impact the organization? –› Involve everybody to provide feedback. Rerun the end-user satisfaction survey and compare with the baseline that you obtained before improvement implementation.
    3. How does the improvement team feel about the whole process? –› What were the lessons learned, and can the team apply the lessons in the next improvement initiatives?
    4. How did the leaders manage and lead improvements? –› Were they able to provide proper vision to guide the improvement team through the process?
    A relationship pyramid with the initial questions on the left starting from '1' at the bottom to '4' at the 2nd highest level.

    Measure changes in selected metrics to evaluate success

    Measuring and reporting are key components in the improvement process.

    Adjust improvement priority based on updated objectives. Justify the reason. Refer to your CIR to document it.

    Did you get there?

    Part of the measurement should include a review of CSFs and KPIs determined in step 1 (assess the future state). Some may need to be replaced.

    • After an improvement has been implemented, it is important to regularly monitor and evaluate the CSFs and KPIs you chose and run reports to evaluate whether the implemented improvement has actually resolved the service/process issues or helped you achieve your objectives.
    • Establish a schedule for regularly reviewing key metrics that were identified in Step 1 and assessing change in those metrics and progress toward reaching objectives.
    • In addition to reviewing CSFs, KPIs, and metrics, check in with the IT organization and end users to measure their perceptions of the change once an appropriate amount of time has passed.
    • Ensure that metrics are telling the whole story and that reporting is honest in order to be informative.
    Outcomes of the continual improvement process should include:
    • Improved efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of processes and services.
    • Processes and services more aligned with the business needs and strategy.
    • Maturity of processes and services.

    For a guideline to determine a list of metrics, refer to Info-Tech’s blueprints:

    Info-Tech Insight

    Make sure you’re measuring the right things and considering all sources of information. Don’t rely on a single or very few metrics. Instead, consider a group of metrics to help you get a better holistic view of improvement initiatives and their impact on IT operations.

    6. Establish a learning culture and apply it to other practices

    Reflect on lessons learned to drive change forward

    What did you learn?
    Icon of a checklist and pencil. Ultimately, continual improvement is an ongoing educational program.
    Icon of a brain with a lighting bolt.
    Icon of a wrench in a speech bubble. By teaching your team how to learn better and identify sources of new knowledge that can be applied going forward, you maximize the efficacy of your team and improvement plan effort.
    What obstacles prevented you from reaching your target condition?
    Icon of a map marker. If you did not reach your target goals, reflect as a team on what obstacles prevented you from reaching that target.
    Icon of a wrench in a gear. Focus on the obstacles that are preventing your team from reaching the target state.
    Icon of a sun behind clouds. As obstacles are removed, new ones will appear, and old ones will disappear.

    Compare expectations versus reality

    Compare the EC (expected change) to the AC (actual change)
    Arrow pointing down.
    Arrow pointing left and down labelled 'Small'. Evaluate the differences: how large is the difference from what you expected? Arrow pointing right and down labelled 'Large'.
    Things are on track and the issue could have simply been an issue with timing of the improvement. More reflection is needed. Perhaps it is a gap in understanding the goal or a poor execution of the action plan.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Regardless of the cause, large differences between the EC and the AC provide great learning opportunities about how to approach change in the future.

    A cycle around a dartboard with numbered steps: '01 Determine your goals', '02 Define the process team', '03 Determine initiatives', '04 Prioritize initiatives', '05 Execute improvement', '06 Establish a learning culture'.

    Think long-term to sustain changes

    The continual improvement process is ongoing. When one improvement cycle ends, the next should begin in order to continually measure and evaluate processes.

    The goal of any framework is steady and continual improvement over time that resets the baseline to the current (and hopefully improved) level at the end of each cycle.

    Have processes in place to ensure that the improvements made will remain in place after the change is implemented. Each completed cycle is just another step toward your target state.
    Icon of a group of people. Ensure that there is a continual commitment from management.
    Icon of a bar chart. Regularly monitor metrics as well as stakeholder feedback after the initial improvement period has ended. Use this information to plan the next improvement.
    Icon of gears. Continual improvement is a combination of attitudes, behavior, and culture.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Sample of 'Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy'. Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy

    Success depends on IT initiatives clearly aligned to business goals, IT excellence, and driving technology innovation.

    Sample of 'Develop Meaningful Service Metrics'. Develop Meaningful Service Metrics

    Reinforce service orientation in your IT organization by ensuring your IT metrics generate value-driven resource behavior.

    Sample of 'Common Challenges to incident management success'. Improve Incident and Problem Management

    Rise above firefighter mode with structured incident management to enable effective problem management.

    Works Cited

    “Continual Improvement ITIL4 Practice Guide.” AXELOS, 2020. Accessed August 2022.

    “5 Tips for Adopting ITIL 4’s Continual Improvement Management Practice.” SysAid, 2021. Accessed August 2022.

    Jacob Gillingham. “ITIL Continual Service Improvement And 7-Step Improvement Process” Invensis Global Learning Services, 2022. Accessed August 2022.

    Assess the Viability of M365-O365 Security Add-Ons

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    • Parent Category Name: Security Strategy & Budgeting
    • Parent Category Link: /security-strategy-and-budgeting

    The technical side of IT security demands the best security possible, but the business side of running IT demands that you determine what is cost-effective and can still do the job. You likely shrugged off the early iterations of Microsoft’s security efforts, but you may have heard that things have changed. Where do you start in evaluating Microsoft’s security products in terms of effectiveness? The value proposition sounds tremendous to the CFO, “free” security as part of your corporate license, but how does it truly measure up and how do you articulate your findings to the business?

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Microsoft’s security products have improved to the point where they are often ranked competitively with mainstream security products. Depending on your organization’s licensing of Office 365/Microsoft 365, some of these products are included in what you’re already paying for. That value proposition is hard to deny.

    Impact and Result

    Determine what is important to the business, and in what order of priority.

    Take a close look at your current solution and determine what are table stakes, what features you would like to have in its replacement, and what your current solution is missing.

    Consider Microsoft’s security solutions using an objective methodology. Sentiment will still be a factor, but it shouldn’t dictate the decision you make for the good of the business.

    Assess the Viability of M365/O365 Security Add-Ons Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to assess the viability of M365/O365 security add-ons. Review Info-Tech’s methodology and understand the four key steps to completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Review your current state

    Examine what you are licensed for, what you are paying, what you need, and what your constraints are.

    • Microsoft 365/Office 365 Security Add-Ons Assessment Tool

    2. Assess your needs

    Determine what is “good enough” security and assess the needs of your organization.

    3. Select your path

    Decide what you will go with and start planning your next steps.

    [infographic]

    Infrastructure & Operations Priorities 2022

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    • Parent Category Name: Disruptive & Emerging Technologies
    • Parent Category Link: /disruptive-emerging-technologies
    • The expectation amongst IT professionals for permanent transformational change has gone up 30% year over year. Further, 47% expect a lot of permanent change in 2022.
    • We are experiencing a great rate of change concurrent with a low degree of predictability.
    • How do you translate a general trend into a specific priority you can work on?

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Trends don’t matter but pressure does: Trends can be analyzed based on the pressure they exert (or not) on your I&O practice. Organizing trends into categories based on source makes for a more successful and contextual analysis.
    • Different prioritization is being demanded in 2022. For the foreseeable future prioritization is about drawing a line, below which you can ignore items with a clean conscience.
    • The priorities you choose to advocate for will be how your leadership is evaluated in the upcoming year.

    Impact and Result

    • By reading through this publication, you will begin to address the age-old problem “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
    • More importantly you will have a framework to dive deeper into the trends most relevant to you and your organization.
    • Info-Tech can help you turn your strong opinion into a compelling case for your stakeholders.

    Infrastructure & Operations Priorities 2022 Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Infrastructure & Operations Priorities 2022 – A framework to dive deeper into the trends most relevant to you and your organization

    Discover Info-Tech's four trends for Infrastructure & Operations leaders.

    • Infrastructure & Operations Priorities Report for 2022

    Infographic

    Develop a COVID-19 Pandemic Response Plan

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    • Parent Category Name: DR and Business Continuity
    • Parent Category Link: /business-continuity
    • IT departments are being asked to rapidly ramp up work-from-home capabilities and other business process workarounds.
    • Crisis managers are experiencing a pandemic more severe than what they’ve managed in the past.
    • Organizations are scrambling to determine how they can keep their businesses running through this pandemic.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Obstacles to working from home go beyond internet speed and needing a laptop. Business input is critical to uncover unexpected obstacles.
    • IT needs to address a range of issues from security risk to increased service desk demand from users who don’t normally work from home.
    • Resist the temptation to bypass IT processes – your future-self will thank you for tracking all those assets about to go out the door.

    Impact and Result

    • Start with crisis management fundamentals – identify crisis management roles and exercise appropriate crisis communication.
    • Prioritize business processes and work-from-home requirements. Not everyone can be set up on day one.
    • Don’t over-complicate your work-from-home deployment plan. A simple spreadsheet (see the Work-from-Home Requirements Tool) to track requirements can be very effective.

    Develop a COVID-19 Pandemic Response Plan Research & Tools

    Start here

    Stay up to date on COVID-19 and the resources available to you.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    • Develop a COVID-19 Pandemic Response Plan Storyboard

    1. Manage the pandemic crisis

    Identify key roles and immediate steps to manage this crisis.

    • Pandemic Response Plan Example

    2. Create IT’s plan to support the pandemic response plan

    Plan the deployment of a work-from-home initiative.

    • Work-From-Home Requirements Tool
    [infographic]

    Kick-Start IT-Led Business Innovation

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    • Parent Category Name: Innovation
    • Parent Category Link: /innovation
    • The CIO is not considered a strategic partner. The business may be satisfied with IT services, but no one is looking to IT to solve business problems or drive the enterprise forward.
    • Even if IT staff do generate ideas that will improve operational efficiency or enable the business, few are ever assessed or executed upon.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Business demand for new technology is creating added pressure to innovate and executive stakeholders expect more from IT. If IT is not viewed as a source of innovation, its perceived value will decrease and the threat of shadow IT will grow. Do not wait to start finding and capitalizing on opportunities for IT-led innovation.

    Impact and Result

    • Start innovating right away. All you need are business pains and people willing to ideate around them.
    • Assemble a small team and arm them with proven techniques for identifying unique opportunities for innovation, developing impactful solutions, and prototyping quickly and effectively. Incubate a reservoir of ideas, both big and small, so that you are ready to execute on innovative projects when the timing is right.
    • Once you have demonstrated IT’s ability to innovate, mature your capability with a permanent innovation process and program.

    Kick-Start IT-Led Business Innovation Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should create innovation processes, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Launch innovation

    Sponsor a mandate for innovation and assemble a small team to start sourcing ideas with IT staff.

    • Kick-Start IT-Led Business Innovation – Phase 1: Launch Innovation
    • Innovation Working Group Charter

    2. Ideate

    Identify critical opportunities for innovation and brainstorm effective solutions.

    • Kick-Start IT-Led Business Innovation – Phase 2: Ideate
    • Idea Document
    • Idea Reservoir Tool

    3. Prototype

    Prototype ideas rapidly to gain user feedback, refine solutions, and make a compelling case for project investment.

    • Kick-Start IT-Led Business Innovation – Phase 3: Prototype
    • Prototyping Workbook
    • Prototype Assessment

    4. Mature innovation capability

    Formalize the innovation process and implement a program to create a strong culture of innovation in IT.

    • Kick-Start IT-Led Business Innovation – Phase 4: Mature Innovation Capability

    Infographic

    Workshop: Kick-Start IT-Led Business Innovation

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Launch Innovation

    The Purpose

    Introduce innovation.

    Assess overall IT maturity to understand what you want to achieve with innovation.

    Define the innovation mandate.

    Introduce ideation.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A set of shared objectives for innovation will be defined.

    A mandate will be created to help focus innovation efforts on what is most critical to the advancement of IT's maturity.

    The group will be introduced to ideation and prepared to begin addressing critical IT or business pains.

    Activities

    1.1 Define workshop goals and objectives.

    1.2 Introduce innovation.

    1.3 Assess IT maturity.

    1.4 Define the innovation mandate.

    1.5 Introduce ideation.

    Outputs

    Workshop goals and objectives.

    An understanding of innovation.

    IT maturity assessment.

    Sponsored innovation mandate.

    An understanding of ideation.

    2 Ideate, Part I

    The Purpose

    Identify and prioritize opportunities for IT-led innovation.

    Map critical processes to identify the pains that should be ideated around.

    Brainstorm potential solutions.

    Assess, pitch, and prioritize ideas that should be investigated further.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    The team will learn best practices for ideation.

    Critical pain points that might be addressed through innovation will be identified and well understood.

    A number of ideas will be generated that can solve identified pains and potentially feed the project pipeline.

    The team will prioritize the ideas that should be investigated further and prototyped after the workshop.

    Activities

    2.1 Identify processes that present opportunities for IT-led innovation.

    2.2 Map selected processes.

    2.3 Finalize problem statements.

    2.4 Generate ideas.

    2.5 Assess ideas.

    2.6 Pitch and prioritize ideas.

    Outputs

    A list of processes with high opportunity for IT-enablement.

    Detailed process maps that highlight pain points and stakeholder needs.

    Problem statements to ideate around.

    A long list of ideas to address pain points.

    Detailed idea documents.

    A shortlist of prioritized ideas to investigate further.

    3 Ideate, Part II

    The Purpose

    Ideate around a more complex problem that presents opportunity for IT-led innovation.

    Map the associated process to define pain points and stakeholder needs in detail.

    Brainstorm potential solutions.

    Assess, pitch, and prioritize ideas that should be investigated further.

    Introduce prototyping.

    Map the user journey for prioritized ideas.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    The team will be ready to facilitate ideation independently with other staff after the workshop.

    A critical problem that might be addressed through innovation will be defined and well understood.

    A number of innovative ideas will be generated that can solve this problem and help IT position itself as a source of innovative projects.

    Ideas will be assessed and prioritized for further investigation and prototyping after the workshop.

    The team will learn best practices for prototyping.

    The team will identify the assumptions that need to be tested when top ideas are prototyped.

    Activities

    3.1 Select an urgent opportunity for IT-led innovation.

    3.2 Map the associated process.

    3.3 Finalize the problem statement.

    3.4 Generate ideas.

    3.5 Assess ideas.

    3.6 Pitch and prioritize ideas.

    3.7 Introduce prototyping.

    3.8 Map the user journey for top ideas.

    Outputs

    Selection of a process which presents a critical opportunity for IT-enablement.

    Detailed process map that highlights pain points and stakeholder needs.

    Problem statement to ideate around.

    A long list of ideas to solve the problem.

    Detailed idea documents.

    A shortlist of prioritized ideas to investigate further.

    An understanding of effective prototyping techniques.

    A user journey for at least one of the top ideas.

    4 Implement an Innovation Process and Program

    The Purpose

    Establish a process for generating, managing, prototyping, prioritizing, and approving new ideas.

    Create an action plan to operationalize your new process.

    Develop a program to help support the innovation process and nurture your innovators.

    Create an action plan to implement your innovation program.

    Decide how innovation success will be measured.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    The team will learn best practices for managing innovation.

    The team will be ready to operationalize an effective process for IT-led innovation. You can start scheduling ideation sessions as soon as the workshop is complete.

    The team will understand the current innovation ecosystem: drivers, barriers, and enablers.

    The team will be ready to roll out an innovation program that will help generate wider engagement with IT-led innovation.

    You will be ready to measure and report on the success of your program.

    Activities

    4.1 Design an IT-led innovation process.

    4.2 Assign roles and responsibilities.

    4.3 Generate an action plan to roll out the process.

    4.4 Determine critical process metrics to track.

    4.5 Identify innovation drivers, enablers, and barriers.

    4.6 Develop a program to nurture a culture of innovation.

    4.7 Create an action plan to jumpstart each of your program components.

    4.8 Determine critical metrics to track.

    4.9 Summarize findings and gather feedback.

    Outputs

    A process for IT-led innovation.

    Defined process roles and responsibilities.

    An action plan for operationalizing the process.

    Critical process metrics to measure success.

    A list of innovation drivers, enablers, and barriers.

    A program for innovation that will leverage enablers and minimize barriers.

    An action plan to roll out your innovation program.

    Critical program metrics to track.

    Overview of workshop results and feedback.

    Help Managers Inform, Interact, and Involve on the Way to Team Engagement

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    • Parent Category Name: Employee Development
    • Parent Category Link: /train-and-develop
    • Employee engagement impacts a company’s bottom line as well as the quality of work life for employees.
    • Employee engagement surveys often fail to provide the value you are hoping for because they are treated like an annual project that quickly loses steam.
    • The responsibility for fixing the issues identified falls to HR, and ultimately HR has very little control over an employee’s concerns with their day-to-day role.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • HR and the executive team have been exclusively responsible for engagement for too long. Since managers have the greatest impact on employees, they should also be primarily responsible for employee engagement.
    • In most organizations, managers underestimate the impact they can have on employee engagement, and assume that the broader organization will take more meaningful action.
    • Improving employee engagement may be as simple as improving the frequency and quality of the “3Is”: informing employees about the why behind decisions, interacting with them on a personal level, and involving them in decisions that affect them.

    Impact and Result

    • Managers have the greatest impact on employee engagement as they are in a unique situation to better understand what makes employees tick.
    • If employees have a good relationship with their manager, they are much more likely to be engaged at work which ultimately leads to increases in revenue, profit, and shareholder return.

    Help Managers Inform, Interact, and Involve on the Way to Team Engagement Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Get more involved in analyzing and improving team engagement

    Improve employee engagement and ultimately the organization’s bottom line.

    • Storyboard: Help Managers Inform, Interact, and Involve on the Way to Team Engagement

    2. Gather feedback from employees

    Have a productive engagement feedback discussion with teams.

    • Engagement Feedback Session Agenda Template

    3. Engage teams to improve engagement

    Facilitate effective team engagement action planning.

    • Action Planning Worksheet

    4. Gain insight into what engages and disengages employees

    Solicit employee pain points that could potentially hinder their engagement.

    • Stay Interview Guide

    5. Get to know new hires on a more personal level

    Develop a stronger relationship with employees to drive engagement.

    • New Hire Conversation Guide
    [infographic]

    Structure the Role of the DBA

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    • Parent Category Name: Business Intelligence Strategy
    • Parent Category Link: /business-intelligence-strategy
    • The traditional role of Database Administrators (DBAs) is shifting due to a variety of changes such as cloud databases, increased automation, close relations with development, and the need for more integration with the business at large. All this means that organizations will have to adapt to integrate a new type of DBA into IT.
    • Organizations often have difficulty establishing a refined and effective DBA structure based on repeatable and well-grounded processes.
    • The relationship between DBAs and the rest of IT (especially development) can often be problematic due to a lack of mutual co-operation and clear communication.
    • There is often confusion in organizations as how to approach staffing DBAs.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • An organization’s relative focus on operations or development is essential in determining many DBA related decisions. This focus can determine what kinds of DBAs to hire, what staffing ratios to use, the viability of outsourcing, and the appropriate reporting structure for DBAs.
    • Utilizing technological strategies such as database automation, effective auditing, and database consolidation to bolster the DBA team helps make efficient use of DBA staff and can turn a reactive environment into a proactive one.
    • Ensuring refined and regularly assessed processes are in place for change and incident management is essential for maintaining effective and structured database administration.

    Impact and Result

    • Right-size, support, and structure your DBA team for increased cost effectiveness and optimal productivity.
    • Develop a superior level of co-operation between DBAs and the rest of IT as well as the business at large.
    • Build an environment in which DBAs will be motivated and flourish.

    Structure the Role of the DBA Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Understand how Database Administrators are evolving

    Develop an effective structure for managing and supporting Database Administrators.

    • Storyboard: Structure the Role of the DBA

    2. Create the right Database Administrator roles to meet organizational needs

    Build a team that is relevant to the focus of the organization.

    • System Database Administrator
    • Application Database Administrator
    [infographic]

    Adopt Design Thinking in Your Organization

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    • Parent Category Name: Innovation
    • Parent Category Link: /innovation
    • End users often have a disjointed experience while interacting with your organization in using its products and services.
    • You have been asked by your senior leadership to start a new or revive an existing design or innovation function within your organization. However, your organization has dismissed design thinking as the latest “management fad” and does not buy into the depth and rigor that design thinking brings.
    • The design or innovation function lives on the fringes of your organization due to its apathy towards design thinking or tumultuous internal politics.
    • You, as a CIO, want to improve the user satisfaction with the IT services your team provides to both internal and external users.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • A user’s perspective while interacting with the products and services is very different from the organization’s internal perspective while implementing and provisioning those. A design-based organization balances the two perspectives to drive user-satisfaction over end-to-end journeys.
    • Top management must have a design thinker – the guardian angel of the balance between exploration (i.e. discovering new business models) and exploitation (i.e. leveraging existing business models).
    • Your approach to adopt design thinking must consider your organization’s specific goals and culture. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach.

    Impact and Result

    • User satisfaction, with the end-to-end journeys orchestrated by your organization, will significantly increase.
    • Design-centric organizations enjoy disproportionate financial rewards.

    Adopt Design Thinking in Your Organization Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should adopt design thinking in your organization, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. What is design thinking?

    The focus of this phase is on revealing what designers do during the activity of designing, and on building an understanding of the nature of design ability. We will formally examine the many definitions of design thinking from experts in this field. At the core of this phase are several case studies that illuminate the various aspects of design thinking.

    • Adopt Design Thinking in Your Organization – Phase 1: What Is Design Thinking?
    • Victor Scheinman's Experiment for Design

    2. How does an organization benefit from design thinking?

    This phase will illustrate the relevance of design in strategy formulation and in service-design. At the core of this phase are several case studies that illuminate these aspects of design thinking. We will also identify the trends impacting your organization and establish a baseline of user-experience with the journeys orchestrated by your organization.

    • Adopt Design Thinking in Your Organization – Phase 2: How Does an Organization Benefit From Design Thinking?
    • Trends Matrix (Sample)

    3. How do you build a design organization?

    The focus of this phase is to:

  • Measure the design-centricity of your organization and subsequently, identify the areas for improvement.
  • Define an approach for a design program that suites your organization’s specific goals and culture.
    • Adopt Design Thinking in Your Organization – Phase 3: How Do You Build a Design Organization?
    • Report on How Design-Centric Is Your Organization (Sample)
    • Approach for the Design Program (Sample)
    • Interview With David Dunne on Design Thinking
    • Interview With David Dunne on Design Thinking (mp3)
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Adopt Design Thinking in Your Organization

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 What Is Design Thinking?

    The Purpose

    The focus of this module is on revealing what designers do during the activity of designing, and on building an understanding of the nature of design ability. We will also review the report on the design-centricity of your organization and subsequently, earmark the areas for improvement.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An intimate understanding of the design thinking

    An assessment of design-centricity of your organization and identification of areas for improvement

    Activities

    1.1 Discuss case studies on how designers think and work

    1.2 Define design thinking

    1.3 Review report from Info-Tech’s diagnostic: How design-centric is your organization?

    1.4 Earmark areas for improvement to raise the design-centricity of your organization

    Outputs

    Report from Info-Tech’s diagnostic: ‘How design-centric is your organization?’ with identified areas for improvement.

    2 How Does an Organization Benefit From Design Thinking?

    The Purpose

    In this module, we will discuss the relevance of design in strategy formulation and service design. At the core of this module are several case studies that illuminate these aspects of design thinking. We will also identify the trends impacting your organization. We will establish a baseline of user experience with the journeys orchestrated by your organization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An in-depth understanding of the relevance of design in strategy formulation and service design

    An understanding of the trends that impact your organization

    A taxonomy of critical customer journeys and a baseline of customers’ satisfaction with those

    Activities

    2.1 Discuss relevance of design in strategy through case studies

    2.2 Articulate trends that impact your organization

    2.3 Discuss service design through case studies

    2.4 Identify critical customer journeys and baseline customers’ satisfaction with those

    2.5 Run a simulation of design in practice

    Outputs

    Trends that impact your organization.

    Taxonomy of critical customer journeys and a baseline of customers’ satisfaction with those.

    3 How to Build a Design Organization

    The Purpose

    The focus of this module is to define an approach for a design program that suits your organization’s specific goals and culture.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An approach for the design program in your organization. This includes aspects of the design program such as its objectives and measures, its model (one of the five archetypes or a hybrid one), and its governance.

    Activities

    3.1 Identify objectives and key measures for your design thinking program

    3.2 Structure your program after reviewing five main archetypes of a design program

    3.3 Balance between incremental and disruptive innovation

    3.4 Review best practices of a design organization

    Outputs

    An approach for your design thinking program: objectives and key measures; structure of the program, etc.

    Manage Requirements in an Agile Environment

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    The process of navigating from waterfall to Agile can be incredibly challenging. Even more problematic; how do you operate your requirements management practices once there? There traditionally isn’t a role for a business analyst, the traditional keeper of requirements. It isn’t like switching on a light.

    You likely find yourself struggling to deliver high quality solutions and requirements in Agile. This is a challenge for many organizations, regardless of how long they’ve leveraged Agile.

    But you aren’t here for assurances. You’re here for answers and help.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Agile and requirements management are complementary, not competitors.

    Impact and Result

    Info-Tech’s advice? Why choose? Why have to pick between traditional waterfall and Agile delivery? If Agile without analysis is a recipe for disaster, Agile with analysis is the solution. How can you leverage the Info-Tech approach to align your Agile and requirements management efforts into a powerful combination?

    Manage Requirements in an Agile Environment is your guide.

    Use the contents and exercises of this blueprint to gain a shared understanding of the two disciplines, to find your balance in your approach, to define your thresholds, and ultimately, to prepare for new ways of working.

    Manage Requirements in an Agile Environment Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Manage Requirements in an Agile Environment Blueprint – Agile and Requirements Management are complementary, not competitors

    Provides support and guidance for organizations struggling with their requirements management practices in Agile environments.

    • Manage Requirements in an Agile Environment Storyboard

    2. Agile Requirements Playbook – A practical playbook for aligning your teams, and articulating the guidelines for managing your requirements in Agile.

    The Agile Requirements Playbook becomes THE artifact for your Agile requirements practices. Great for onboarding, reviewing progress, and ensuring a shared understanding of your ways of working.

    • Agile Requirements Playbook

    3. Documentation Calculator – A tool for determining the right level of documentation for your organization, and whether you’re spending too much, or even not enough, on Agile Requirements documentation.

    The Documentation Calculator can inform your documentation decison making, ensuring you're investing just the right amount of time, money, and effort.

    • Documentation Calculator

    4. Agile Requirements Workbook – Supporting tools and templates in advancing your Agile Requirements practice, to be used in conjunction with the Agile Requirements Blueprint, and the Playbook.

    This workbook is designed to capture the results of your exercises in the Manage Requirements in an Agile Environment Storyboard. Each worksheet corresponds to an exercise in the storyboard. This is a tool for you, so customize the content and layout to best suit your product. The workbook is also a living artifact that should be updated periodically as the needs of your team and organization change.

    • Agile Requirements Workbook

    5. Agile Requirements Assessment – Establishes your current Agile requirements maturity, defines your target maturity, and supports planning to get there.

    The Agile Requirements Assessment is a great tool for determining your current capabilities and maturity in Agile and Business Analysis. You can also articulate your target state, which enables the identification of capability gaps, the creation of improvement goals, and a roadmap for maturing your Agile Requirements practice.

    • Agile Requirements Assessment

    Infographic

    Workshop: Manage Requirements in an Agile Environment

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Framing Agile and Business Analysis

    The Purpose

    Sets the context for the organization, to ensure a shared understanding of the benefits of both Agile and business analysis/requirements management.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Have a shared definition of Agile and business analysis / requirements.

    Understand the current state of Agile and business analysis in your organization.

    Activities

    1.1 Define what Agile and business analysis mean in your organization.

    1.2 Agile requirements assessment.

    Outputs

    Alignment on Agile and business analysis / requirements in your organization.

    A current and target state assessment of Agile and business analysis in your organization.

    2 Tailoring Your Approach

    The Purpose

    Confirm you’re going the right way for effective solution delivery.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Confirm the appropriate delivery methodology.

    Activities

    2.1 Confirm your selected methodology.

    Outputs

    Confidence in your selected project delivery methodology.

    3 Defining Your Requirements Thresholds

    The Purpose

    Provides the guardrails for your Agile requirements practice, to define a high-level process, roles and responsibilities, governance and decision-making, and how to deal with change.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Clearly defined interactions between the BA and their partners

    Define a plan for management and governance at the project team level

    Activities

    3.1 Define your agile requirements process.

    3.2 Define your agile requirements RACI.

    3.3 Define your governance.

    3.4 Define your change and backlog refinement plan.

    Outputs

    Agile requirements process.

    Agile requirements RACI.

    A governance and documentation plan.

    A change and backlog refinement approach.

    4 Planning Your Next Steps

    The Purpose

    Provides the action plan to achieve your target state maturity

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Recognize and prepare for the new ways of working for communication, stakeholder engagement, within the team, and across the organization.

    Establish a roadmap for next steps to mature your Agile requirements practice.

    Activities

    4.1 Define your stakeholder communication plan.

    4.2 Identify your capability gaps.

    4.3 Plan your agile requirements roadmap.

    Outputs

    A stakeholder communication plan.

    A list of capability gaps to achieve your desired target state.

    A prioritized roadmap to achieve the target state.

    5 Agile Requirements Techniques (Optional)

    The Purpose

    To provide practical guidance on technique usage, which can enable an improved experience with technical elements of the blueprint.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An opportunity to learn new tools to support your Agile requirements practice.

    Activities

    5.1 Managing requirements' traceability.

    5.2 Creating and managing user stories.

    5.3 Managing your requirements backlog.

    5.4 Maintaining a requirements library.

    Outputs

    Support and advice for leveraging a given tool or technique.

    Support and advice for leveraging a given tool or technique.

    Support and advice for leveraging a given tool or technique.

    Support and advice for leveraging a given tool or technique.

    Further reading

    Manage Requirements in an Agile Environment

    Agile and requirements management are complementary, not competitors

    Analyst's Perspective

    The temptation when moving to Agile is to deemphasize good requirements practices in favor of perceived speed. If you're not delivering on the needs of the business then you have failed, regardless of how fast you've gone.

    Delivery in Agile doesn't mean you stop needing solid business analysis. In fact, it's even more critical, to ensure your products and projects are adding value. With the rise of Agile, the role of the business analyst has been misunderstood.

    As a result, we often throw out the analysis with the bathwater, thinking we'll be just fine without analysis, documentation, and deliberate action, as the speed and dexterity of Agile is enough.

    Consequently, what we get is wasted time, money, and effort, with solutions that fail to deliver value, or need to be re-worked to get it right.

    The best organizations find balance between these two forces, to align, and gain the benefits of both Agile and business analysis, working in tandem to manage requirements that bring solutions that are "just right".

    This is a picture of Vincent Mirabelli

    Vincent Mirabelli
    Principal Research Director, Applications Delivery and Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    The process of navigating from waterfall to Agile can be incredibly challenging. And even more problematic; how do you operate your requirements management practices once there? Since there traditionally isn't a role for a business analyst; the traditional keeper of requirements. it isn't like switching on a light.

    You likely find yourself struggling to deliver high quality solutions and requirements in Agile. This is a challenge for many organizations, regardless of how long they've leveraged Agile.

    But you aren't here for assurances. You're here for answers and help.

    Common Obstacles

    many organizations and teams face is that there are so busy doing Agile that they fail to be Agile.

    Agile was supposed to be the saving grace of project delivery but is misguided in taking the short-term view of "going quickly" at the expense of important elements, such as team formation and interaction, stakeholder engagement and communication, the timing and sequencing of analysis work, decision-making, documentation, and dealing with change.

    The idea that good requirements just happen because you have user stories is wrong. So, requirements remain superficial, as you "can iterate later"…but sometimes later never comes, or doesn't come fast enough.

    Organizations need to be very deliberate when aligning their Agile and requirements management practices. The work is the same. How the work is done is what changes.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    Infotech's advice? Why choose? Why have to pick between traditional waterfall and Agile delivery? If Agile without analysis is a recipe for disaster, Agile with analysis is the solution. And how can you leverage the Info-Tech approach to align your Agile and requirements management efforts into a powerful combination?

    Manage Requirements in an Agile Environment is your guide.

    Use the contents and exercises of this blueprint to gain a shared understanding of the two disciplines, to find your balance in your approach, to define your thresholds, and ultimately, to prepare for new ways of working.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Agile and requirements management are complementary, not competitors.

    The temptation when moving to Agile is to deemphasize good requirements practices in favor of perceived speed. If you're not delivering on the needs of the business, then you have failed, regardless of how fast you've gone.

    Insight summary

    Overarching insight

    Agile and requirements management are complementary, not competitors.

    The temptation when moving to Agile is to deemphasize good requirements practices in favor of perceived speed. If you're not delivering on the needs of the business, then you have failed, regardless of how fast you've gone

    Phase 1 insight

    • The purpose of requirements in waterfall is for approval. The purpose in Agile is for knowledge management, as Agile has no memory.
    • When it comes to the Agile manifesto, "over" does not mean "instead of".
    • In Agile, the what of business analysis does doesn't change. What does change is the how and when that work happens.

    Phase 2 insight

    • Understand your uncertainties; it's a great way to decide what level of Agile (if any) is needed.
    • Finding your "Goldilocks" zone will take time. Be patient.

    Phase 3 insight

    • Right-size your governance, based on team dynamics and project complexity. A good referee knows when to step in, and when to let the game flow.
    • Agile creates a social contract amongst the team, and with their leaders and organization.
    • Documentation needs to be valuable. Do what is acceptable and necessary to move work to future steps. Not documenting also comes with a cost, but one you pay in the future. And that bill will come due, with interest (aka, technical debt, operational inefficiencies, etc.).
    • A lack of acceptable documentation makes it more difficult to have agility. You're constantly revalidating your current state (processes, practices and structure) and re-arguing decisions already made. This slows you down more than maintaining documentation ever would.

    Phase 4 insight

    • Making Agile predictable is hard, because people are not predictable; people are prone to chaos.

    There have been many challenges with waterfall delivery

    It turns out waterfall is not that great at reducing risk and ensuring value delivery after all

    • Lack of flexibility
    • Difficulty in measuring progress
    • Difficulties with scope creep
    • Limited stakeholder involvement
    • Long feedback loops

    48%
    Had project deadlines more than double

    85%
    Exceeded their original budget by at least 20%

    25%
    At least doubled their original budget

    This is an image of the waterfall project results

    Source: PPM Express.

    Agile was meant to address the shortcomings of waterfall

    The wait for solutions was too long for our business partners. The idea of investing significant time, money, and resources upfront, building an exhaustive and complete vision of the desired state, and then waiting months or even years to get that solution, became unpalatable for them. And rightfully so. Once we cast a light on the pains, it became difficult to stay with the status quo. Given that organizations evolve at a rapid pace, what was a pain at the beginning of an initiative may not be so even 6 months later.

    Agile became the answer.

    Since its' first appearance nearly 20 years ago, Agile has become the methodology of choice for a many of organizations. According to the 15th Annual State of Agile report, Agile adoption within software development teams increased from 37% in 2020 to 86% in 2021.

    Adopting Agile led to challenges with requirements

    Requirements analysis, design maturity, and management are critical for a successful Agile transformation.

    "One of the largest sources of failure we have seen on large projects is an immature Agile implementation in the context of poorly defined requirements."
    – "Large Scale IT Projects – From Nightmare to Value Creation"

    "Requirements maturity is more important to project outcomes than methodology."
    – "Business Analysis Benchmark: Full Report"

    "Mature Agile practices spend 28% of their time on analysis and design."
    – "Quantitative Analysis of Agile Methods Study (2017): Twelve Major Findings"

    "There exists a Requirements Premium… organizations using poor practices spent 62% more on similarly sized projects than organizations using the best requirements practices."
    – "The Business Case for Agile Business Analysis" - Requirements Engineering Magazine

    Strong stakeholder satisfaction with requirements results in higher satisfaction in other areas

    This is an image of a bar graph comparing the percentage of respondents with high stakeholder satisfaction, to the percentage of respondents with low stakeholder satisfaction for four different categories.  these include: Availability of IT Capacity to Complete Projects; Overall IT Projects; IT Projects Meet Business Needs; Overall IT Satisfaction

    N= 324 small organizations from Info-Tech Research Group's CIO Business Vision diagnostic.

    Note: High satisfaction was classified as organizations with a score greater or equal to eight and low satisfaction was every organization that scored below eight on the same questions.

    Info-Tech's Agile requirements framework

    This is an image of Info-Tech's Agile requirements framework.  The three main categories are: Sprint N(-1); Sprint N; Sprint N(+1)

    Agile requirements are a balancing act

    Collaboration

    Many subject matter experts are necessary to create accurate requirements, but their time is limited too.

    Communication

    Stakeholders should be kept informed throughout the requirements gathering process, but you need to get the right information to the right people.

    Documentation

    Recording, organizing, and presenting requirements are essential, but excessive documentation will slow time to delivery.

    Control

    Establishing control points in your requirements gathering process can help confirm, verify, and approve requirements accurately, but stage gates limit delivery.

    What changes for the business analyst?

    In Agile, the what of business analysis does not change.

    What does change is the how and when that work happens.

    Business analysts need to focus on six key elements when managing requirements in Agile.

    • Team formation and interaction
    • Stakeholder engagement and communication
    • The timing and sequencing of their work
    • Decision-making
    • Documentation
    • Dealing with change

    Where does the business analysis function fit on an Agile team?

    Team formation is key, as Agile is a team sport

    A business analyst in an Agile team typically interacts with several different roles, including:

    • The product owner,
    • The Sponsor or Executive
    • The development team,
    • Other stakeholders such as customers, end-users, and subject matter experts
    • The Design team,
    • Security,
    • Testing,
    • Deployment.

    This is an image the roles who typically interact with a Business Analyst.

    How we do our requirements work will change

    • Team formation and interaction
    • Stakeholder engagement and communication
    • The timing and sequencing of their work
    • Decision-making
    • Documentation
    • Dealing with change

    As a result, you'll need to focus on;

    • Emphasizing flexibility
    • Enabling continuous delivery
    • Enhancing collaboration and communication
    • Developing a user-centered approach

    Get stakeholders on board with Agile requirements

    1. Stakeholder feedback and management support are key components of a successful Agile Requirements.
    2. Stakeholders can see a project's progression and provide critical feedback about its success at critical milestones.
    3. Management helps teams succeed by trusting them to complete projects with business value at top of mind and by removing impediments that are inhibiting their productivity.
    4. Agile will bring a new mindset and significant numbers of people, process, and technology changes that stakeholders and management may not be accustomed to. Working through these issues in requirements management enables a smoother rollout.
    5. Management will play a key role in ensuring long-term Agile requirements success and ultimately rolling it out to the rest of the organization.
    6. The value of leadership involvement has not changed even though responsibilities will. The day-to-day involvement in projects will change but continual feedback will ultimately dictate the success or failure of a project.

    Measuring your success

    Tracking metrics and measuring your progress

    As you implement the actions from this Blueprint, you should see measurable improvements in;

    • Team and stakeholder satisfaction
    • Requirements quality
    • Documentation cost

    Without sacrificing time to delivery

    Metric Description and motivation
    Team satisfaction (%) Expect team satisfaction to increase as a result of clearer role delineation and value contribution.
    Stakeholder satisfaction (%) Expect Stakeholder satisfaction to similarly increase, as requirements quality increases, bringing increased value
    Requirements rework Measures the quality of requirements from your Agile Projects. Expect that the Requirements Rework will decrease, in terms of volume/frequency.
    Cost of documentation Quantifies the cost of documentation, including Elicitation, Analysis, Validation, Presentation, and Management
    Time to delivery Balancing Metric. We don't want improvements in other at the expense of time to delivery

    Info-Tech's methodology for Agile requirements

    1. Framing Agile and Business Analysis

    2. Tailoring Your Approach

    3. Defining Your Requirements Thresholds

    4. Planning Your Next Steps

    Phase Activities

    1.1 Understand the benefits and limitations of Agile and business analysis

    1.2 Align Agile and business analysis within your organization

    2.1 Decide the best-fit approach for delivery

    2.2 Manage your requirements backlog

    3.1 Define project roles and responsibilities

    3.2 Define your level of acceptable documentation

    3.3 Manage requirements as an asset

    3.4 Define your requirements change management plan

    4.1 Preparing new ways of working

    4.2 Develop a roadmap for next steps

    Phase Outcomes

    Recognize the benefits and detriments of both Agile and BA.

    Understand the current state of Agile and business analysis in your organization.

    Confirm the appropriate delivery methodology.

    Manage your requirements backlog.

    Connect the business need to user story.

    Clearly defined interactions between the BA and their partners.

    Define a plan for management and governance at the project team level.

    Documentation and tactics that are right-sized for the need.

    Recognize and prepare for the new ways of working for communication, stakeholder engagement, within the team, and across the organization.

    Establish a roadmap for next steps to mature your Agile requirements practice.

    Blueprint tools and templates

    Key deliverable:

    This is a screenshot from the Agile Requirements Playbook

    Agile Requirements Playbook

    A practical playbook for aligning your teams and articulating the guidelines for managing your requirements in Agile

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    This is a screenshot from the Documentation Calculator

    Documentation Calculator

    A tool to help you answer the question: What is the right level of Agile requirements documentation for my organization?

    This is a screenshot from the Agile Requirements Assessment

    Agile Requirements Assessment

    Establishes your current maturity level, defines your target state, and supports planning to get there.

    This is a screenshot from the Agile Requirements Workbook

    Agile Requirements Workbook

    Supporting tools and templates in advancing your Agile requirements practice, to be used with the Agile Requirements Blueprint and Playbook.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

    Guided Implementation

    "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

    Workshop

    "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

    Consulting

    "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5
    1. Framing Agile and Business Analysis / 2. Tailoring Your Approach 3. Defining Your Requirements
    Thresholds
    3. Defining Your Requirements Thresholds / 4. Planning Your Next Steps (OPTIONAL) Agile Requirements Techniques (a la carte) Next Steps and Wrap-Up (Offsite)

    Activities

    What does Agile mean in your organization? What do requirements mean in your organization?

    Agile Requirements Assessment

    Confirm your selected methodology

    Define your Agile requirements process

    Define your Agile requirements RACI (Optional)

    Define your Agile requirements governance

    Defining your change management plan

    Define your

    communication plan

    Capability gap list

    Planning your Agile requirements roadmap

    Managing requirements traceability

    Creating and managing user stories

    Managing your requirements backlog

    Maintaining a requirements library

    Develop Agile Requirements Playbook

    Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days.

    Set up review time for workshop deliverables and next steps

    Outcomes

    Shared definition of Agile and business analysis / requirements

    Understand the current state of Agile and business analysis in your organization

    Agile requirements process

    Agile requirements RACI (Optional)

    Defined Agile requirements governance and documentation plan

    Change and backlog refinement plan

    Stakeholder communication plan

    Action plan and roadmap for maturing your Agile requirements practice

    Practical knowledge and practice about various tactics and techniques in support of your Agile requirements efforts

    Completed Agile Requirements Playbook

    Guided Implementation

    Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4

    Call #1: Scope objectives, and your specific challenges.

    Call #4: Define your approach to project delivery.

    Call #6: Define your Agile requirements process.

    Call #9: Identify gaps from current to target state maturity.

    Call #2: Assess current maturity.

    Call #5: Managing your requirements backlog.

    Call #7: Define roles and responsibilities.

    Call #10: Pprioritize next steps to mature your Agile requirements practice.

    Call #3: Identify target-state capabilities.

    Call #8: Define your change and backlog refinement approach.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is 10 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

    Framing Agile and Business Analysis

    Phase 1

    Framing Agile and Business Analysis

    Phase 1Phase 2Phase 3Phase 4

    1.1 Understand the benefits and limitations of Agile and business analysis

    1.2 Align Agile and business analysis within your organization

    2.1 Confirm the best-fit approach for delivery

    2.2 manage your requirements backlog

    3.1 Define project roles and responsibilities

    3.2 define your level of acceptable documentation

    3.3 Manage requirements as an asset

    3.4 Define your requirements change management plan

    4.1 Preparing new ways of working

    4.2 Develop a roadmap for next steps

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • EXERCISE: What do Agile and requirements mean in your organization?
    • ASSESSMENT: Agile requirements assessment
    • KEY DELIVERABLE: Agile Requirements Playbook

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Business analyst and project team
    • Stakeholders
    • Sponsor/Executive

    Managing Requirements in an Agile Environment

    Step 1.1

    Understand the benefits and limitations of Agile and business analysis

    Activities

    1.1.1 Define what Agile and business analysis mean in your organization

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business analyst and project team
    • Sponsor/Executive

    Outcomes of this step

    • Recognize the benefits and detriments of both Agile and business analysis

    Framing Agile and Business Analysis

    There have been many challenges with waterfall delivery

    It turns out waterfall is not that great at reducing risk and ensuring value delivery after all

    • Lack of flexibility
    • Difficulty in measuring progress
    • Difficulties with scope creep
    • Limited stakeholder involvement
    • Long feedback loops

    48%
    Had project deadlines more than double

    85%
    Exceeded their original budget by at least 20%

    25%
    At least doubled their original budget

    This is an image of the Waterfall Project Results

    Source: PPM Express.

    Business analysis had a clear home in waterfall

    Business analysts had historically been aligned to specific lines of business, in support of their partners in their respective domains. Somewhere along the way, the function was moved to IT. Conceptually this made sense, in that it allowed BAs to provide technical solutions to complex business problems. This had the unintended result of lost domain knowledge, and connection to the business.

    It all starts with the business. IT enables business goals. The closer you can get to the business, the better.

    Business analysts were the main drivers of helping to define the business requirements, or needs, and then decompose those into solution requirements, to develop the best option to solve those problems, or address those needs. And the case for good analysis was clear. The later a poor requirement was caught, the more expensive it was to fix. And if requirements were poor, there was no way to know until much later in the project lifecycle, when the cost to correct them was exponentially higher, to the tune of 10-100x the initial cost.

    This is an image of a graph showing the cost multiplier for Formulating Requirements, Architecture Design, Development, Testing and, Operations

    Adapted from PPM Express. "Why Projects Fail: Business Analysis is the Key".

    Agile was meant to address the shortcomings of waterfall

    The wait for solutions was too long for our business partners. The idea of investing significant time, money, and resources upfront, building an exhaustive and complete vision of the desired state, and then waiting months or even years to get that solution became unpalatable for them. And rightfully so. Once we cast a light on the pains, it became difficult to stand pat in the current state. And besides, organizations evolve at a rapid pace. What was a pain at the beginning of an initiative may not be so even six months later.

    Agile became the answer.

    Since its first appearance nearly 20 years ago, Agile has become the methodology of choice for a huge swathe of organizations. According to the 15th Annual State of Agile report, Agile adoption within software development teams increased from 37% in 2020 to 86% in 2021.

    To say that's significant is an understatement.

    The four core values of Agile helped shift focus

    According to the Agile manifesto, "We value. . ."

    This is an image of what is valued according to the Agile Manifesto.

    "…while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."

    Source: Agilemanifesto, 2001

    Agile has made significant inroads in IT and beyond

    94% of respondents report using Agile practices in their organization

    according to Digital.AI's "The 15th State of Agile Report"

    That same report notes a steady expansion of Agile outside of IT, as other areas of the organization seek to benefit from increased agility and responsiveness, including Human Resources, Finance and Marketing.

    While it addressed some problems…

    This is an image of the Waterfall Project Results, compared to Agile Product Results.

    "Agile projects are 37% faster to market than [the] industry average"

    (Requirements Engineering Magazine, 2017)

    • Business requirements documents are massive and unreadable
    • Waterfall erects barriers and bottlenecks between the business and the development team
    • It's hard to define the solution at the outset of a project
    • There's a long turnaround between requirements work and solution delivery
    • Locking in requirements dictates an often-inflexible solution. And the costs to make changes tend to add up.

    …Implementing Agile led to other challenges

    This is an image of a series of thought bubbles, each containing a unique challenge resulting from implementing Agile.

    Adopting Agile led to challenges with requirements

    Requirements analysis, design maturity, and management are critical for a successful Agile transformation.

    "One of the largest sources of failure we have seen on large projects is an immature Agile implementation in the context of poorly defined requirements."
    – BCG, 2015

    "Requirements maturity is more important to project outcomes than methodology."
    – IAG Consulting, 2009.

    "Mature Agile practices spend 28% of their time on analysis and design."
    – InfoQ, 2017."

    "There exists a Requirements Premium… organizations using poor practices spent 62% more on similarly sized projects than organizations using the best requirements practices."
    – Requirements Engineering Magazine, 2017

    Strong stakeholder satisfaction with requirements results in higher satisfaction in other areas

    This is an image of a bar graph comparing the percentage of respondents with high stakeholder satisfaction, to the percentage of respondents with low stakeholder satisfaction for four different categories.  these include: Availability of IT Capacity to Complete Projects; Overall IT Projects; IT Projects Meet Business Needs; Overall IT Satisfaction

    N= 324 small organizations from Info-Tech Research Group's CIO Business Vision diagnostic.

    Note: High satisfaction was classified as organizations with a score greater or equal to eight and low satisfaction was every organization that scored below eight on the same questions.

    Agile is being misinterpreted as an opportunity to bypass planning and analysis activities

    Agile is a highly effective tool.

    This isn't about discarding Agile. It is being used for things completely outside of what was originally intended. When developing products or code, it is in its element. However, outside of that realm, its being used to bypass business analysis activities, which help define the true customer and business need.

    Business analysts were forced to adapt and shift focus. Overnight they morphed into product owners, or no longer had a place on the team. Requirements and analysis took a backseat.

    The result?

    Increased rework, decreased stakeholder satisfaction, and a lot of wasted money and effort.

    "Too often, the process of two-week sprints becomes the thing, and the team never gets the time and space to step back and obsess over what is truly needed to delight customers."
    Harvard Business Review, 9 April 2021.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Requirements in Agile are the same, but the purpose of requirements changes.

    • The purpose of requirements in waterfall is for stakeholder approval.
    • The purpose of requirements in Agile is knowledge management; to maintain a record of the current state.

    Many have misinterpreted the spirit of Agile and waterfall

    The stated principles of waterfall say nothing of how work is to be linear.

    This is an image of a comparison between using Agile and Being Prescriptive.This is an image of Royce's 5 principles for success.

    Source: Royce, Dr. Winston W., 1970.

    For more on Agile methodology, check out Info-Tech's Agile Research Centre

    How did the pendulum swing so far?

    Shorter cycles of work made requirements management more difficult. But the answer isn't to stop doing it.

    Organizations went from engaging business stakeholders up front, and then not until solution delivery, to forcing those partners to give up their resources to the project. From taking years to deliver a massive solution (which may or may not even still fit the need) to delivering in rapid cycles called sprints.

    This tug-of-war is costing organizations significant time, money, and effort.

    Your approach to requirements management needs to be centered. We can start to make that shift by better aligning our Agile and business analysis practices. Outside of the product space, Agile needs to be combined with other disciplines (Harvard Business Review, 2021) to be effective.

    Agility is important. Though it is not a replacement for approach or strategy (RCG Global Services, 2022). In Agile, team constraints are leveraged because of time. There is a failure to develop new capabilities to address the business needs Harvard Business Review, 2021).

    Agility needs analysis.

    Agile requirements are a balancing act

    Collaboration

    Many subject matter experts are necessary to create accurate requirements, but their time is limited too.

    Communication

    Stakeholders should be kept informed throughout the requirements gathering process, but you need to get the right information to the right people.

    Documentation

    Recording, organizing, and presenting requirements are essential, but excessive documentation will slow time to delivery.

    Control

    Establishing control points in your requirements gathering process can help confirm, verify, and approve requirements accurately, but stage gates limit delivery.

    Start by defining what the terms mean in your organization

    We do this because there isn't even agreement by the experts on what the terms "Agile" and "business analysis" mean, so let's establish a definition within the context of your organization.

    1.1.1 What do Agile and business analysis mean in your organization?

    Estimated time: 30 Minutes

    1. Explore the motivations behind the need for aligning Agile with business analysis. Are there any current challenges related to outputs, outcomes, quality? How can the team and organization align the two more effectively for the purposes of requirements management?
    2. Gather the appropriate stakeholders to discuss their definition of the terms "Agile" and "business analysis" It can be related to their experience, practice, or things they've read or heard.
    3. Brainstorm and document all shared thoughts and perspectives.
    4. Synthesize those thoughts and perspectives into a shared definition of each term, of a sentence or two.
    5. Revisit this definition as needed, and as your Agile requirements efforts evolve.

    Input

    • Challenges and experiences/perspectives related to Agile and business requirements

    Output

    • A shared definition of Agile and business analysis, to help guide alignment on Agile requirements management

    Materials

    • Agile Requirements Workbook

    Participants

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Sponsor/Executive
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Build your Agile Requirements Playbook

    Keep the outcomes of this blueprint in a single document

    Share at the beginning of a new project, as part of team member onboarding, and revisit as your practice matures.

    This is a series of three screenshots from the Agile Requirements Playbook.

    Your Agile Requirements Playbook will include

    • Your shared definition of Agile and business analysis for your organization
    • The Agile Requirements Maturity Assessment
    • A Methodology Selection Matrix
    • Agile requirements RACI
    • A defined Agile requirements process
    • Documentation Calculator
    • Your Requirements Repository Information
    • Capability Gap List (from current to target state)
    • Target State Improvement Roadmap and Action Plan

    Step 1.2

    Align Agile and Business Analysis Within Your Organization

    Activities

    1.2.1 Assess your Agile requirements maturity

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business Analyst and Project Team
    • Stakeholders
    • Sponsor/Executive

    Outcomes of this step

    • Complete the Agile Requirements Maturity Assessment to establish your current and target states

    Framing Agile and Business Analysis

    Consider the question: "Why Agile?"

    What is the driving force behind that decision?

    There are many reasons to leverage the power of Agile within your organization, and specifically as part of your requirements management efforts. And it shouldn't just be to improve productivity. That's only one aspect.
    Begin by asking, "Why Agile?" Are you looking to improve:

    • Time to market
    • Team engagement
    • Product quality
    • Customer satisfaction
    • Stakeholder engagement
    • Employee satisfaction
    • Consistency in delivery of value
    • Predictably of your releases

    Or a combination of the above?

    Info-Tech Insight

    Project delivery methodologies aren't either/or. You don't have to be 100% waterfall or 100% Agile. Select the right approach for your project, product, or service.

    In the end, your business partners don't want projects delivered faster, they want value faster!

    For more on understanding Agile, check out the Implement Agile Practices That Work Blueprint

    Responses to a 2019 KPMG survey:

    13% said that their top management fully supports Agile transformation.

    76% of organizations did not agree that their organization supports Agile culture.

    62% of top management believe Agile has no implications for them.

    What changes for the business analyst?

    Business analysts need to focus on six key elements when managing requirements in Agile.

    • Team formation and interaction
    • Stakeholder engagement and communication
    • The timing and sequencing of their work
    • Decision-making
    • Documentation
    • Dealing with change

    In Agile, the what of business analysis does not change.

    What does change is the how and when that work happens.

    1.2.1 Assess your Agile requirements maturity

    This is a series of screenshots from the Agile Requirements Maturity Assessment.

    1.2.1 Assess your Agile requirements maturity

    Estimated time: 30 Minutes

      1. Using the Agile Requirements Maturity Assessment, gather all appropriate stakeholders, and discuss and score the current state of your practice. Scoring can be done by:
        1. Consensus: Generally better with a smaller group, where the group agrees the score and documents the result
        2. Average: Have everyone score individually, and aggregate the results into an average, which is then entered.
        3. Weighted Average: As above, but weight the individual scores by individual or line of business to get a weighted average.
      2. When current state is complete, revisit to establish target state (or hold as a separate session) using the same scoring approach as in current state.
        1. Recognize that there is a cost to maturity, so don't default to the highest score by default.
        2. Resist the urge at this early stage to generate ideas to navigate from current to target state. We will re-visit this exercise in Phase 4, once we've defined other pieces of our process and practice.

    Input

    • Participant knowledge and experience

    Output

    • A current and target state assessment of your Agile requirements practice

    Materials

    • Agile Requirements Maturity Assessment

    Participants

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Sponsor/Executive
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Tailoring Your Approach

    Phase 2

    Phase 1Phase 2Phase 3Phase 4

    1.1 Understand the benefits and limitations of Agile and business analysis

    1.2 Align Agile and business analysis within your organization

    2.1 Confirm the best-fit approach for delivery

    2.2 manage your requirements backlog

    3.1 Define project roles and responsibilities

    3.2 define your level of acceptable documentation

    3.3 Manage requirements as an asset

    3.4 Define your requirements change management plan

    4.1 Preparing new ways of working

    4.2 Develop a roadmap for next steps

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Selecting the appropriate delivery methodology
    • Managing your requirements backlog
    • Tracing from business need to user story

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Sponsor/Executive
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Managing Requirements in an Agile Environment

    Step 2.1

    Confirm the Best-fit Approach for Delivery

    Activities

    2.1.1 Confirm your methodology

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Sponsor/Executive
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Outcomes of this step

    • A review of potential delivery methodologies to select the appropriate, best-fit approach to your projects

    Confirming you're using the best approach doesn't have be tricky

    Selecting the right approach (or confirming you're on the right track) is easier when you assess two key inputs to your project; your level of certainty about the solution, and the level of complexity among the different variables and inputs to your project, such as team experience and training, the number of impacted stakeholders or context. lines of business, and the organizational

    Solution certainty refers to the level of understanding of the problem and the solution at the start of the project. In projects with high solution certainty, the requirements and solutions are well defined, and the project scope is clear. In contrast, projects with low solution certainty have vague or changing requirements, and the solutions are not well understood.

    Project complexity refers to the level of complexity of the project, including the number of stakeholders, the number of deliverables, and the level of technical complexity. In projects with high complexity, there are many stakeholders with different priorities, many deliverables, and high technical complexity. In contrast, projects with low complexity have fewer stakeholders, fewer deliverables, and lower technical complexity.

    "Agile is a fantastic approach when you have no clue how you're going to solve a problem"

    • Ryan Folster, Consulting Services Manager, Business Analysis, Dimension Data

    Use Info-Tech's methodology selection matrix

    Waterfall methodology is best suited for projects with high solution certainty and high complexity. This is because the waterfall model follows a linear and sequential approach, where each phase of the project is completed before moving on to the next. This makes it ideal for projects where the requirements and solutions are well-defined, and the project scope is clear.

    On the other hand, Agile methodology is best suited for projects with low solution certainty. Agile follows an iterative and incremental approach, where the requirements and solutions are detailed and refined throughout the project. This makes it ideal for projects where the requirements and solutions are vague or changing.

    Note that there are other models that exist for determining which path to take, should this approach not fit within your organization.

    Use info-tech's-methodology-selection-matrix

    This is an image of Info-Tech’s methodology selection matrix

    Adapted from The Chaos Report, 2015 (The Standish Group)

    Download the Agile Requirements Workbook

    2.1.1 Confirm your methodology

    Estimated time: 30 Minutes

    1. Using the Agile Requirements Workbook, find the tab labelled "Methodology Assessment" and answer the questions to establish your complexity and certainty scores, where;

    1 = Strongly disagree
    2 = Disagree
    3 = Neutral
    4 = Agree
    5 = Strongly agree.

    1. In the same workbook, plot the results in the grid on the tab labelled "Methodology Matrix".
    2. Projects falling into Green are good fits for Agile. Yellow are viable. And Red may not be a great fit for Agile.
    3. Note: Ultimately, the choice of methodology is yours. Recognize there may be additional challenges when a project is too complex, or uncertainty is high.

    Input

    • Current project complexity and solution certainty

    Output

    • A clear choice of delivery methodology

    Materials

    • Agile Requirements Workbook

    Participants

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Sponsor/Executive
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Step 2.2

    Manage Your Requirements Backlog

    Activities

    2.2.1 Create your user stories

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Sponsor/Executive
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Understand how to convert requirements into user stories, which populate the Requirements Backlog.

    Tailoring Your Approach

    There is a hierarchy to requirements

    This is a pyramid, with the base being: Solution Requirements; The middle being: Stakeholder Requirements; and the Apex being: Business Requirements.
    • Higher-level statements of the goals, objectives, or needs of the enterprise.
    • Business requirements focus on the needs of the organization, and not the stakeholders within it.

    Defines

    Intended benefits and outcomes

    • Statements of the needs of a particular stakeholder or class of stakeholders, and how that stakeholder will interact with a solution.

    Why it is needed, and by who

    • Describes the characteristics of a solution that meets business requirements and stakeholder requirements. Functional describes the behavior and information that the solution will manage. They describe capabilities the system will be able to perform in terms of behaviors or operations. Non-functional represents constraints on the ultimate solution and tends to be less negotiable.

    What is needed, and how its going to be achieved

    Connect the dots with a traceability matrix

    Business requirements describe what a company needs in order to achieve its goals and objectives. Solution requirements describe how those needs will be met. User stories are a way to express the functionality that a solution will provide from the perspective of an end user.

    A traceability matrix helps clearly connect and maintain your requirements.

    To connect business requirements to solution requirements, you can start by identifying the specific needs that the business has and then determining how those needs can be met through technology or other solutions; or what the solution needs to do to meet the business need. So, if the business requirement is to increase online sales, a solution requirement might include implementing a shopping cart feature on your company website.

    Once you have identified the solution requirements, you can then use those to create user stories. A user story describes a specific piece of functionality that the solution will provide from the perspective of a user.

    For example, "As a customer, I want to be able to add items to my shopping cart so that I can purchase them." This user story is directly tied to the solution requirement of implementing a shopping cart feature.

    Tracing from User Story back up to Business Requirement is essential in ensuring your solutions support your organization's strategic vison and objectives.

    This is an image of a traceability matrix for Business Requirements.

    Download the Info-Tech Requirements Traceability Matrix

    Improve the quality of your solution requirements

    A solution requirement is a statement that clearly outlines the functional capability that the business needs from a system or application.

    There are several attributes to look for in requirements:

    Verifiable

    Unambiguous

    Complete

    Consistent

    Achievable

    Traceable

    Unitary

    Agnostic

    Stated in a way that can be easily tested

    Free of subjective terms and can only be interpreted in one way

    Contains all relevant information

    Does not conflict with other requirements

    Possible to accomplish with budgetary and technological constraints

    Trackable from inception through to testing

    Addresses only one thing and cannot be decomposed into multiple requirements

    Doesn't pre-suppose a specific vendor or product

    For more on developing high quality requirements, check out the Improve Requirements Gathering Blueprint

    Prioritize your requirements

    When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

    Prioritization is the process of ranking each requirement based on its importance to project success. Each requirement should be assigned a priority level. The delivery team will use these priority levels to ensure efforts are targeted toward the proper requirements as well as to plan features available on each release. Use the MoSCoW Model of Prioritization to effectively order your requirements.

    The MoSCoW Model of Prioritization

    This is an image of The MoSCoW Model of Prioritization

    The MoSCoW model was introduced by Dai Clegg of Oracle UK in 1994

    (Source: ProductPlan).

    Base your prioritization on the right set of criteria

    Criteria Description
    Regulatory and legal compliance These requirements will be considered mandatory.
    Policy compliance Unless an internal policy can be altered or an exception can be made, these requirements will be considered mandatory.
    Business value significance Give a higher priority to high-value requirements.
    Business risk Any requirement with the potential to jeopardize the entire project should be given a high priority and implemented early.
    Likelihood of success Especially in proof-of-concept projects, it is recommended that requirements have good odds.
    Implementation complexity Give a higher priority to low implementation difficulty requirements.
    Alignment with strategy Give a higher priority to requirements that enable the corporate strategy.
    Urgency Prioritize requirements based on time sensitivity.
    Dependencies A requirement on its own may be low priority, but if it supports a high-priority requirement, then its priority must match it.

    Info-Tech Insight

    It is easier to prioritize requirements if they have already been collapsed, resolved, and rewritten. There is no point in prioritizing every requirement that is elicited up front when some of them will eventually be eliminated.

    Manage solution requirements in a Product backlog

    What is a backlog?

    Agile teams are familiar with the use of a Sprint Backlog, but in Requirements Management, a Product Backlog is a more appropriate choice.

    A product backlog and a Sprint backlog are similar in that they are both lists of items that need to be completed in order to deliver a product or project, but there are some key differences between the two.

    A product backlog is a list of all the features, user stories, and requirements that are needed for a product or project. It is typically created and maintained by the business analyst or product owner and is used to prioritize and guide the development of the product.

    A Sprint backlog, on the other hand, is a list of items specifically for an upcoming sprint, which is an iteration of work in Scrum. The Sprint backlog is created by the development team and is used to plan and guide the work that will be done during the sprint. The items in the Sprint backlog are typically taken from the product backlog and are prioritized based on their importance and readiness.

    For more on building effective product backlogs, visit Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision

    A backlog stores and organizes requirements at various stages

    Your backlog must give you a holistic understanding of demand for change in the product.

    A well-formed backlog can be thought of as a DEEP backlog

    Detailed appropriately: Requirements are broken down and refined as necessary

    Emergent: The backlog grows and evolves over time as requirements are added and removed.

    Estimated: The effort to deliver a requirement is estimated at each tier.

    Prioritized: A requirement's value and priority are determined at each tier.

    This is an image of an inverted funnel, with the top being labeled: Ideas; The middle being labeled: Qualified; and the bottom being labeled: Ready.

    Adapted from Essential Scrum

    Ensure requests and requirements are ready for development

    Clearly define what it means for a requirement, change, or maintenance request to be ready for development.

    This will help ensure the value and scope of each functionality and change are clear and well understood by both developers and stakeholders before the start of the sprint. The definition of ready should be two-fold: ready for the backlog, and ready for coding.

    1. Create a checklist that indicates when a requirement or request is ready for the development backlog. Consider the following questions:
      1. Is the requirement or request in the correct format?
      2. Does the desired functionality or change have significant business value?
      3. Can the requirement or request be reasonably completed within defined release timelines under the current context?
      4. Does the development team agree with the budget and points estimates?
      5. Is there an understanding of what the requirement or request means from the stakeholder or user perspective?
    2. Create a checklist that indicates when a requirement or request is ready for development. Consider the following questions:
      1. Have the requirements and requests been prioritized in the backlog?
      2. Has the team sufficiently collaborated on how the desired functionality or change can be completed?
      3. Do the tasks in each requirement or request contain sufficient detail and direction to begin development?
      4. Can the requirement or request be broken down into smaller pieces?

    Converting solution requirements into user stories

    Define the user

    Who will be interacting with the product or feature being developed? This will help to focus the user story on the user's needs and goals.

    Create the story

    Create the user story using the following template: "As a [user], I want [feature] so that [benefit]."
    This helps articulate the user's need and the value that the requirement will provide.

    Decompose

    User stories are typically too large to be implemented in a single sprint, so they should be broken down into smaller, more manageable tasks.

    Prioritize

    User stories are typically too large to be implemented in a single sprint, so they should be broken down into smaller, more manageable tasks.

    2.2.1 Create your user stories

    Estimated time: 60 Minutes

    1. Gather the project team and relevant stakeholders. Have access to your current list of solution requirements.
    2. Leverage the approach on previous slide "Converting Solution Requirements into User Stories" to generate a collection of user stories.

    NOTE: There is not a 1:1 relationship between requirements and user stories.
    It is possible that a single requirement will have multiple user stories, and similarly, that a single user story will apply to multiple solution requirements.

    Input

    • Requirements
    • Use Case Template

    Output

    • A collection of user stories

    Materials

    • Current Requirements

    Participants

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Use the INVEST model to create good user stories

    At this point your requirements should be high-level stories. The goal is to refine your backlog items, so they are . . .

    A vertical image of the Acronym: INVEST, taken from the first letter of each bolded word in the column to the right of the image.

    Independent: Ideally your user stories can be built in any order (i.e. independent from each other). This allows you to prioritize based on value and not get caught up in sequencing and prerequisites.
    Negotiable: As per the Agile principle, collaboration over contracts. Your user stories are meant to facilitate collaboration between the developer and the business. Therefore, they should be built to allow negotiation between all parties.
    Valuable: A user story needs to state the value so it can be effectively prioritized, but also so developers know what they are building.
    Estimable: As opposed to higher-level approximation given to epics, user stories need more accuracy in their estimates in order to, again, be effectively prioritized, but also so teams can know what can fit into a sprint or release plans.
    Small: User stories should be small enough for a number of them to fit into a sprint. However, team size and velocity will impact how many can be completed. A general guideline is that your teams should be able to deliver multiple stories in a sprint.
    Testable: Your stories need to be testable, which means they must have defined acceptance criteria and any related test cases as defined in your product quality standards.
    Source: Agile For All

    Defining Your Requirements Thresholds

    Phase 3

    Defining Your Requirements Thresholds

    Phase 1Phase 2Phase 3Phase 4

    1.1 Understand the benefits and limitations of Agile and business analysis

    1.2 Align Agile and business analysis within your organization

    2.1 Confirm the best-fit approach for delivery

    2.2 manage your requirements backlog

    3.1 Define project roles and responsibilities

    3.2 define your level of acceptable documentation

    3.3 Manage requirements as an asset

    3.4 Define your requirements change management plan

    4.1 Preparing new ways of working

    4.2 Develop a roadmap for next steps

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Assigning roles and responsibilities optional (Tool: RACI)
    • Define your Agile requirements process
    • Calculate the cost of your documentation (Tool: Documentation Calculator)
    • Define your backlog refinement plan

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Sponsor/Executive
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Managing Requirements in an Agile Environment

    Step 3.1

    Define Project Roles and Responsibilities

    Activities

    3.1.1 Define your Agile requirements RACI (optional)

    3.1.2 Define your Agile requirements process

    Defining Your Requirements Thresholds

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Sponsor/Executive
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Outcomes of this step

    • A defined register of roles and responsibilities, along with a defined process for how Agile requirements work is to be done.

    Defining Your Requirements Thresholds

    Where does the BA function fit on an Agile team?

    Team formation is key, as Agile is a team sport

    A business analyst in an Agile team typically interacts with several different roles, including the product owner, development team, and many other stakeholders throughout the organization.

    This is an image the roles who typically interact with a Business Analyst.

    • The product owner, to set the priorities and direction of the project, and to gather requirements and ensure they are being met. Often, but not always, the BA and product owner are the same individual.
    • The development team, to provide clear and concise requirements that they can use to build and test the product.
    • Other stakeholders, such as customers, end-users, and subject matter experts to gather their requirements, feedback and validate the solution.
      • Design, to ensure that the product meets user needs. They may provide feedback and ensure that the design is aligned with requirements.
      • Security, to ensure that the solution meets all necessary security requirements and to identify potential risks and appropriate use of controls.
      • Testing, to ensure that the solution is thoroughly tested before it is deployed. They may create test cases or user scenarios that validate that everything is working as intended.
      • Deployment, to ensure that the necessary preparations have been made, including testing, security, and user acceptance.

    Additionally, during the sprint retrospectives, the team will review their performance and find ways to improve for the next sprint. As a team member, the business analyst helps to identify areas where the team could improve how they are working with requirements and understand how the team can improve communication with stakeholders.

    3.1.1 (Optional) Define Your Agile Requirements RACI

    Estimated Time: 60 Minutes

    1. Identify the project deliverables: The first step is to understand the project deliverables and the tasks that are required to complete them. This will help you to identify the different roles and responsibilities that need to be assigned.
    2. Define the roles and responsibilities: Identify the different roles that will be involved in the project and their associated responsibilities. These roles may include project manager, product owner, development team, stakeholders, and any other relevant parties.
    3. Assign RACI roles: Assign a RACI role to each of the identified tasks. The RACI roles are:
      1. Responsible: the person or team who is responsible for completing the task
      2. Accountable: the person who is accountable for the task being completed on time and to the required standard
      3. Consulted: the people or teams who need to be consulted to ensure the task is completed successfully
      4. Informed: the people or teams who need to be informed of the task's progress and outcome
    4. Create the RACI chart: Use the information gathered in the previous steps to create a matrix or chart that shows the tasks, the roles, and the RACI roles assigned to each task.
    5. Review and refine: Review the RACI chart with the project team and stakeholders to ensure that it accurately reflects the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved. Make any necessary revisions and ensure that all parties understand their roles and responsibilities.
    6. Communicate and implement: Communicate the RACI chart to all relevant parties and ensure that it is used as a reference throughout the project. This will help to ensure that everyone understands their role and that tasks are completed on time and to the required standard.

    Input

    • A list of required tasks and activities
    • A list of stakeholders

    Output

    • A list of defined roles and responsibilities for your project

    Materials

    • Agile Requirements Workbook

    Participants

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Sponsor/Executive
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    A Case Study in Team Formation

    Industry: Anonymous Organization in the Energy sector
    Source: Interview

    Challenge

    Agile teams were struggling to deliver within a defined sprint, as there were consistent delays in requirements meeting the definition of ready for development. As such, sprints were often delayed, or key requirements were descoped and deferred to a future sprint.

    During a given two-week sprint cycle, the business analyst assigned to the team would be working along multiple horizons, completing elicitation, analysis, and validation, while concurrently supporting the sprint and dealing with stakeholder changes.

    Solution

    As a part of addressing this ongoing pain, a pilot program was run to add a second business analyst to the team.

    The intent was, as one is engaged preparing requirements through elicitation, analysis, and validation for a future sprint, the second is supporting the current sprint cycle, and gaining insights from stakeholders to refine the requirements backlog.

    Essentially, these two were leap-frogging each other in time. At all times, one BA was focused on the present, and one on the future.

    Result

    A happier team, more satisfied stakeholders, and consistent delivery of features and functions by the Agile teams. The pilot team outperformed all other Agile teams in the organization, and the "2 BA" approach was made the new standard.

    Understanding the Agile requirements process

    Shorter cycles make effective requirements management more necessary, not less

    Short development cycles can make requirements management more difficult because they often result in a higher rate of change to the requirements. In a shorter timeframe, there is less time to gather and verify requirements, leading to a higher likelihood of poor or incomplete requirements. Additionally, there may be more pressure to make decisions quickly, which can lead to less thorough analysis and validation of requirements. This can make it more challenging to ensure that the final solution meets the needs of the stakeholders.
    When planning your requirements cycles, it's important to consider;

    • Your sprint logistics (how long?)
    • Your release plan (at the end of every sprint, monthly, quarterly?)
    • How the backlog will be managed (as tickets, on a visual medium, such as a Kanban board?)
    • How will you manage communication?
    • How will you monitor progress?
    • How will future sprint planning happen?

    Info-Tech's Agile requirements framework

    Sprint N(-1)

    Sprint N

    Sprint N(+1)

    An image of Sprint N(-1) An image of Sprint N An image of Sprint N(+1)

    Changes from waterfall to Agile

    Gathering and documenting requirements: Requirements are discovered and refined throughout the project, rather than being gathered and documented up front. This can be difficult for business analysts who are used to working in a waterfall environment where all requirements are gathered and documented before development begins.
    Prioritization of requirements: Requirements are prioritized based on their value to the customer and the team's ability to deliver them. This can be difficult for business analysts who are used to prioritizing requirements based on the client's needs or their own understanding of what is important.

    Defining acceptance criteria: Acceptance criteria are defined for each user story to ensure that the team understands what needs to be delivered. Business analysts need to understand how to write effective acceptance criteria and how to use them to ensure that the team delivers what the customer needs.
    Supporting Testing and QA: The business analyst plays a role in ensuring that testing (and test cases) are completed and of proper quality, as defined in the requirements.

    Managing changing requirements: It is expected that requirements will change throughout the project. Business analysts need to be able to adapt quickly to changing requirements and ensure that the team is aware of the changes and how they will impact the project.
    Collaboration with stakeholders: Requirements are gathered from a variety of stakeholders, including customers, users, and team members. Business analysts need to be able to work effectively with all stakeholders to gather and refine requirements and ensure that the team is building the right product.

    3.1.2 Define your Agile requirements process

    Estimated time: 60 Minutes

    1. Gather all relevant stakeholders to discuss and define your process for requirements management.
    2. Have a team member facilitate the session to define the process. The sample in the Agile Requirements Workbook can be used optionally as a starting point. You can also use any existing processes and procedures as a baseline.
    3. Gain agreement on the process from all involved stakeholders.
    4. Revisit the process periodically to review its performance and make adjustments as needed.

    NOTE: The process is intended to be at a high enough level to leave space and flexibility for team members to adapt and adjust, but at a sufficient depth that everyone understands the process and workflows. In other words, the process will be both flexible and rigid, and the two are not mutually exclusive.

    Input

    • Project team and RACI
    • Existing Process (if available)

    Output

    • A process for Agile requirements that is flexible yet rigid

    Materials

    • Agile Requirements Workbook

    Participants

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Sponsor/Executive
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Establish the right level of governance and decision-making

    Establishing the right level of governance and decision making is important in Agile requirements because there is a cost to decision making, as time plays an important factor. Even the failure to decide can have significant impacts.

    Good governance and decision-making practices can help to minimize risks, ensure that requirements are well understood and managed, and that project progress is tracked and reported effectively.

    In Agile environments, this often involves establishing clear roles and responsibilities, implementing effective communication and collaboration practices, and ensuring that decision-making processes are efficient and effective.

    Good requirements management practices can help to ensure that projects are aligned with organizational goals and strategy, that stakeholders' needs are understood and addressed, and that deliverables are of high quality and meet the needs of the business.

    By ensuring that governance and decision-making is effective, organizations can improve the chances of project success, and deliver value to the business. Risks and costs can be mitigated by staying small and nimble.

    Check out Make Your IT Governance Adaptable

    Develop an adaptive governance process

    A pyramid, with the number 4 at the apex, and the number 1 at the base.  In order from base-apex, the following titles are found to the right of the pyramid: Ad-Hoc governance; Controlled Governance; Agile Governance; Embedded/Automated governance.

    Maturing governance is a journey

    Organizations should look to progress in their governance stages. Ad-hoc and controlled governance tends to be slow, expensive, and a poor fit for modern practices.

    The goal as you progress through your stages is to delegate governance and empower teams to make optimal decisions in real-time, knowing that they are aligned with the understood best interests of the organization.

    Automate governance for optimal velocity, while mitigating risks and driving value.

    This puts your organization in the best position to be adaptive and able to react effectively to volatility and uncertainty.

    A graph charting Trust and empowerment on the x-axis, and Progress Integration on the Y axis.

    Five key principles for building an adaptive governance framework

    Delegate and empower

    Decision making must be delegated down within the organization, and all resources must be empowered and supported to make effective decisions.

    Define outcomes

    Outcomes and goals must be clearly articulated and understood across the organization to ensure decisions are in line and stay within reasonable boundaries.

    Make risk- informed decisions

    Integrated risk information must be available with sufficient data to support decision making and design approaches at all levels of the organization.

    Embed / automate

    Governance standards and activities need to be embedded in processes and practices. Optimal governance reduces its manual footprint while remaining viable. This also allows for more dynamic adaptation.

    Establish standards and behavior

    Standards and policies need to be defined as the foundation for embedding governance practices organizationally. These guardrails will create boundaries to reinforce delegated decision making.

    Sufficient decision-making power should be given to your Agile teams

    Push the decision-making process down to your pilot teams.

    • Bring your business stakeholders and subject matter experts together to identify the potential high-level risks.
    • Bring your business stakeholders and subject matter experts together to identify the potential high-level risks.
    • Discuss with the business the level of risk they are willing to accept.
    • Define the level of authority project teams have in making critical decisions.

    "Push the decision making down as far as possible, down to the point where sprint teams completely coordinate all the integration, development, and design. What I push up the management chain is risk taking. [Management] decides what level of risk they are willing to take and [they] demonstrate that by the amount of decision making you push down."
    – Senior Manager, Canadian P&C Insurance Company, Info-Tech Interview

    Step 3.2

    Define Your Level of Acceptable Documentation

    Activities

    3.2.1 Calculate the cost of documentation

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Quantified cost of documentation produced for your Agile project.

    Defining Your Requirements Thresholds

    Right-size Your Documentation

    Why do we need it, and what purpose does it serve?

    Before creating any documentation, consider why; why are you creating documentation, and what purpose is it expected to serve?
    Is it:

    • … to gain approval?
    • … to facilitate decision-making?
    • .. to allow the team to think through a challenge or compare solution options?

    Next, consider what level of documentation would be acceptable and 'enough' for your stakeholders. Recognize that 'enough' will depend on your stakeholder's personal definition and perspective.
    There may also be considerations for maintaining documentation for the purposes of compliance, and auditability in some contexts and industries.
    The point is not to eliminate all documentation, but rather, to question why we're producing it, so that we can create just enough to deliver value.

    "What does the next person need to do their work well, to gain or create a shared understanding?"
    - Filip Hendrickx, Innovating BA and Founder, altershape

    Documentation comes at a cost

    We need to quantify the cost of documentation, against the expected benefit

    All things take time, and that would imply that all things have an inherent cost. We often don't think in these terms, as it's just the work we do, and costs are only associated with activities requiring additional capital expenditure. Documentation of requirements can come at a cost in terms of time and resources. Creating and maintaining detailed documentation requires effort from project team members, which could be spent on other aspects of the project such as development or testing. Additionally, there may be costs associated with storing and distributing the documentation.

    When creating documentation, we are making a decision. There is an opportunity cost of investing time to create, and concurrently, not working on other activities. Documentation of requirements can come at a cost in terms of time and resources. Creating and maintaining detailed documentation requires effort from project team members, which could be spent on other aspects of the project such as development or testing. Additionally, there may be costs associated with storing and distributing the documentation.

    In order to make better informed decisions about the types, quantity and even quality of the documentation we are producing, we need to capture that data. To ensure we are receiving good value for our documentation, we should compare the expected costs to the expected benefits of a sprint or project.

    3.2.1 Calculate the cost of documentation

    Estimated time: as needed

    1. Use this tool to quantify the cost of creating and maintaining current state documentation for your Agile requirements team. It provides an indication, via the Documentation Cost Index, of when your project is documenting excessively, relative to the expected benefits of the sprint or project.
    2. In Step 1, enter the hourly rate for the person (or persons) completing the business analysis function for your Agile team. NB: This does not have to be a person with the title of business analyst. If there are multiple people fulfilling this role, enter the average rate (if their rates are same or similar) or a weighted average (if there is a significant range in the hourly rate)
    3. In Step 2, enter the expected benefit (in $) for the sprint or project.
    4. In Step 3, enter the total number of hours spent on each task/activity during the sprint or project. Use blank spaces as needed to add tasks and activities not listed.
    5. In Step 4, you'll find the Documentation Cost Index, which compares your total documentation cost to the expected benefits. The cell will show green when the value is < 0.8, yellow between 0.8 and 1, and red when >1.
    6. Use the information to plan future sprints and documentation needs, identify opportunities for improvement in your requirements practice, and find balance in "just enough" documentation.

    Input

    • Project team and RACI
    • Existing Process (if available)

    Output

    • A process for Agile requirements that is flexible yet rigid

    Materials

    • Agile Requirements Workbook

    Participants

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Sponsor/Executive
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Lack of documentation also comes at a cost

    Lack of documentation can bring costs to Agile projects in a few different ways.

    • Onboarding new team members
    • Improving efficiency
    • Knowledge management
    • Auditing and compliance
    • Project visibility
    • Maintaining code

    Info-Tech Insight

    Re-using deliverables (documentation, process, product, etc.) is important in maintaining the velocity of work. If you find yourself constantly recreating your current state documentation at the start of a project, it's hard to deliver with agility.

    Step 3.3

    Manage Requirements as an Asset

    Activities

    3.3.1 Discuss your current perspectives on requirements as assets

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Awareness of the value in, and tactics for enabling effective management of requirements as assets

    Defining Your Requirements Thresholds

    What do we mean by "assets"?

    And when do requirements become assets?

    In order to delivery with agility, you need to maximize the re-usability of artifacts. These artifacts could take the form of current state documentation, user stories, test cases, and yes, even requirements for re-use.
    Think of it like a library for understanding where your organization is today. Understanding the people, processes, and technology, in one convenient location. These artifacts become assets when we choose to retain them, rather than discard them at the end of a project, when we think they'll no longer be needed.
    And just like finding a single book in a vast library, we need to ensure our assets can be found when we need them. And this means making them searchable.
    We can do this by establishing criteria for requirements and artifact reuse;

    • What business need and benefit is it aligned to?
    • What metadata needs to be attached, related to source, status, subject, author, permissions, type, etc.?
    • Where will it be stored for ease of retrieval?

    Info-Tech Insight

    When writing requirements for products or services, write them for the need first, and not simply for what is changing.

    The benefits of managing requirements as assets

    Retention of knowledge in a knowledge base that allows the team to retain current business requirements, process documentation, business rules, and any other relevant information.
    A clearly defined scope to reduce stakeholder, business, and compliance conflicts.
    Impact analysis of changes to the current organizational assets.

    Source: Requirement Engineering Magazine, 2017.

    A case study in creating an asset repository

    Industry: Anonymous Organization in the Government sector
    Source: Interview

    Challenge

    A large government organization faced a challenge with managing requirements, processes, and project artifacts with any consistency.

    Historically, their documentation was lacking, with multiple versions existing in email sent folders and manila folders no one could find. Confirming the current state at any given time meant the heavy lift of re-documenting and validating, so that effort was avoided for an excessive period.

    Then there was a request for audit and compliance, to review their existing documentation practices. With nothing concrete to show, drastic recommendations were made to ensure this practice would end.

    Solution

    A small but effective team was created to compile and (if not available) document all existing project and product documentation, including processes, requirements, artifacts, business cases, etc.

    A single repository was built and demonstrated to key stakeholders to ensure it would satisfy the needs of the audit and compliance group.

    Result

    A single source of truth for the organization, which was;

    • Accessible (view access to the entire organization).
    • Transparent (anyone could see and understand the process and requirements as intended).
    • A baseline for continuous improvement, as it was clear what the one defined "best way" was.
    • Current, where no one retained current documentation outside of this library.

    3.3.1 Discuss your current perspectives on requirements as assets

    Estimated time: 30 Minutes

    1. Gather all relevant stakeholder to share perspectives on the use of requirements as assets, historically in the organization.
    2. Have a team member facilitate the session. It is optional to document the findings.
    3. After looking at the historical use of requirements as assets, discuss the potential uses, benefits, and drawbacks of managing as assets in the target state.

    Input

    • Participant knowledge and experience

    Output

    • A shared perspective and history on requirements as assets

    Materials

    • A method for data capture (optional)

    Participants

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Sponsor/Executive
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Apply changes to baseline documentation

    Baseline + Release Changes = New Baseline

    • Start from baseline documentation dramatically to reduce cost and risk
    • Treat all scope as changes to baseline requirements
    • Sum of changes in the release scope
    • Sum of changes and original baseline becomes the new baseline
    • May take additional time and effort to maintain accurate baseline

    What is the right tool?

    While an Excel spreadsheet is great to start off, its limitations will become apparent as your product delivery process becomes more complex. Look at these solutions to continue your journey in managing your Agile requirements:

    Step 3.4

    Define Your Requirements Change Management Plan

    Activities

    3.4.1 Triage your requirements

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Outcomes of this step

    • An approach for determining the appropriate level of governance over changes to requirements.

    Expect and embrace change

    In Agile development, change is expected and embraced. Instead of trying to rigidly follow a plan that may become outdated, Agile teams focus on regularly reassessing their priorities and adapting their plans accordingly. This means that the requirements can change often, and it's important for the team to have a process in place for managing these changes.

    A common approach to managing change in Agile is to use a technique called "backlog refinement." Where previously we populated our backlog with requirements to get them ready for development and deployment, this involves regularly reviewing and updating the list of work to be done. The team will prioritize the items on the evolving backlog, and the prioritized items will be worked on during the next sprint. This allows the team to quickly respond to changes in requirements and stay focused on the most important work.

    Another key aspect of managing change in Agile is effective communication. The team should have regular meetings, such as daily stand-up meetings or weekly sprint planning meetings, to discuss any changes in requirements and ensure that everyone is on the same page.

    Best practices in change and backlog refinement

    Communicate

    Clearly communicate your change process, criteria, and any techniques, tools, and templates that are part of your approach.

    Understand impacts/risks

    Maintain consistent control and communication and ensure that an impact assessment is completed. This is key to managing risks.

    Leverage tools

    Leverage tools when you have them available. This could be a Requirements Management system, a defect/change log, or even by turning on "track changes" in your documents.

    Cross-reference

    For every change, define the source of the change, the reason for the change, key dates for decisions, and any supporting documentation.

    Communicate the reason, and stay on message throughout the change

    Leaders of successful change spend considerable time developing a powerful change message: a compelling narrative that articulates the desired end state and makes the change concrete and meaningful to staff. They create the change vision with staff to build ownership and commitment.

    • The change message should:
    • Explain why the change is needed.
    • Summarize the things that will stay the same.
    • Highlight the things that will be left behind.
    • Emphasize the things that are being changed.
    • Explain how the change will be implemented.
    • Address how the change will affect the various roles in the organization.
    • Discuss staff's role in making the change successful.

    The five elements of communicating the reason for the change:

    An image of a cycle, including the five elements for communicating the reason for change.  these include: What will the role be for each department and individual?; What is the change?; Why are we doing it?; How are we going to go about it?; How long will it take us?

    How to make the management of changes more effective

    Key decisions and considerations

    How will changes to requirements be codified?
    How will intake happen?

    • What is the submission process?
    • Who has approval to submit?
    • What information is needed to submit a request?

    How will potential changes be triaged and evaluated?

    • What criteria will be used to assess the impact and urgency of the potential change?
    • How will you treat material and non-material changes?

    What is the review and approval process?

    • How will acceptance or rejection status be communicated to the submitter?

    3.4.1 Triage Your requirements

    An image of an inverted triangle, with the top being labeled: No Material Impact, the middle being labeled: Material impact; and the bottom being labeled: Governance Impact.  To the right of the image, are text boxes elaborating on each heading.

    If there's no material impact, update and move on

    An image of an inverted triangle, with the top being labeled: No Material Impact, the middle being labeled: Material impact; and the bottom being labeled: Governance Impact. To the right of the image, is a cycle including the following terms: Validate change; Update requirements; Track change (log); Package and communicate

    Material changes require oversight and approval

    An image of an inverted triangle, with the top being labeled: No Material Impact, the middle being labeled: Material impact; and the bottom being labeled: Governance Impact. To the right of the image, is a cycle including the following terms: Define impact; Revise; Change control needed?; Implement change.

    Planning Your Next Steps

    Phase 4

    Planning Your Next Steps

    Phase 1Phase 2Phase 3Phase 4

    1.1 Understand the benefits and limitations of Agile and business analysis

    1.2 Align Agile and business analysis within your organization

    2.1 Confirm the best-fit approach for delivery

    2.2 manage your requirements backlog

    3.1 Define project roles and responsibilities

    3.2 define your level of acceptable documentation

    3.3 Manage requirements as an asset

    3.4 Define your requirements change management plan

    4.1 Preparing new ways of working

    4.2 Develop a roadmap for next steps

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Completing Your Agile Requirements Playbook
    • EXERCISE: Capability Gap List

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Sponsor/Executive
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Managing Requirements in an Agile Environment

    Step 4.1

    Preparing New Ways of Working

    Activities

    4.1.1 Define your communication plan

    Planning Your Next Steps

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Sponsor/Executive
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Recognize the changes required on the team and within the broader organization, to bring stakeholders on board.

    How we do requirements work will change

    • Team formation and interaction
    • Stakeholder engagement and communication
    • The timing and sequencing of their work
    • Decision-making
    • Documentation
    • Dealing with change

    As a result, you'll need to focus on;

    Emphasizing flexibility: In Agile organizations, there is a greater emphasis on flexibility and the ability to adapt to change. This means that requirements may evolve over time and may not be fully defined at the beginning of the project.
    Enabling continuous delivery: Agile organizations often use continuous delivery methods, which means that new features and functionality are delivered to users on a regular basis. This requires a more iterative approach to requirements management, as new requirements may be identified and prioritized during the delivery process.
    Enhancing collaboration and communication: Agile organizations place a greater emphasis on collaboration and communication between team members, stakeholders, and customers.
    Developing a user-centered approach: Agile organizations often take a user-centered approach to requirements gathering, which means that the needs and goals of the end-user are prioritized.

    Change within the team, and in the broader organization

    How to build an effective blend Agile and requirements management

    Within the team

    • Meetings should happen as needed
    • Handoffs should be clear and concise
    • Interactions should add value
    • Stand-ups should similarly add value, and shouldn't be for status updates

    Within the organization

    • PMO inclusion, to ensure alignment across the organization
    • Business/Operating areas, to recognize what they are committing to for time, resources, etc.
    • Finance, for how your project or product is funded
    • Governance and oversight, to ensure velocity is maintained

    "Whether in an Agile environment or not, collaboration and relationships are still required and important…how you collaborate, communicate, and how you build relationships are key."
    - Paula Bell, CEO, Paula A. Bell Consulting

    Get stakeholders on board with Agile requirements

    1. Stakeholder feedback and management support are key components of successful Agile requirements.
    2. Stakeholders can see a project's progression and provide critical feedback about its success at critical milestones.
    3. Management helps teams succeed by trusting them to complete projects with business value at top of mind and by removing impediments that are inhibiting their productivity.
    4. Agile will bring a new mindset and significant amounts of people, process, and technology changes that stakeholders and management may not be accustomed to. Working through these issues in requirements management enables a smoother rollout.
    5. Management will play a key role in ensuring long-term Agile requirements success and ultimately rolling it out to the rest of the organization.
    6. The value of leadership involvement has not changed even though responsibilities will. The day-to-day involvement in projects will change but continual feedback will ultimately dictate the success or failure of a project.

    4.1.1 Define your communication plan

    Estimated time: 60 Minutes

      1. Gather all relevant stakeholder to create a communication plan for project or product stakeholders.
      2. Have a team member facilitate the session.
      3. Identify
      4. ;
        1. Each stakeholder
        2. The nature of information they are interested in
        3. The channel or medium best to communicate with them
        4. The frequency of communication
      5. (Optional) Consider validating the results with the stakeholders, if not present.
      6. Document the results in the Agile Requirements Workbook and include in Agile Requirements Playbook.
      7. Revisit as needed, whether at the beginning of a new initiative, or over time, to ensure the content is still valid.

    Input

    • Participant knowledge and experience

    Output

    • A plan for communicating with stakeholders

    Materials

    • Agile Requirements Workbook

    Participants

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team

    Step 4.2

    Develop a Roadmap for Next Steps

    Activities

    4.2.1 Develop your Agile requirements action plan

    4.2.2 Prioritize with now, next, later

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business Analyst(s)
    • Project Team
    • Sponsor/Executive
    • Relevant Stakeholders

    Outcomes of this step

    • A comprehensive and prioritized list of opportunities and improvements to be made to mature the Agile requirements practice.

    Planning Your Next Steps

    Identify opportunities to improve and close gaps

    Maturing at multiple levels

    With a mindset of continuous improvement, there is always some way we can get better.

    As you mature your Agile requirements practice, recognize that those gaps for improvement can come from multiple levels, from the organizational down to the individual.

    Each level will bring challenges and opportunities.

    The organization

    • Organizational culture
    • Organizational behavior
    • Political will
    • Unsupportive stakeholders

    The team

    • Current ways of working
    • Team standards, norms and values

    The individual

    • Practitioner skills
    • Practitioner experience
    • Level of training received

    Make sure your organization is ready to transition to Agile requirements management

    A cycle is depicted, with the following Terms: Learning; Automation; Integrated teams; Metrics and governance; Culture.

    Learning:

    Agile is a radical change in how people work
    and think. Structured, facilitated learning is required throughout the transformation to
    help leaders and practitioners go from

    doing Agile to being Agile.

    Automation:

    While Agile is tool-agnostic at its roots, Agile work management tools and DevOps inspired SDLC tools that have become a key part of Agile practices.

    Integrated Teams:


    While temporary project teams can get some benefits from Agile, standing, self-organizing teams that cross business, delivery, and operations are essential to gain the full benefits of Agile.

    Metrics and Governance:

    Successful Agile implementations
    require the disciplined use

    of delivery and operations
    metrics that support governance focused on developing better teams.

    Culture:

    Agile teams believe that value is best created by standing, self-organizing cross-functional teams who deliver sustainably in frequent,
    short increments supported by leaders
    who coach them through challenges.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Agile gaps may only have a short-term, perceived benefit. For example, coding without a team mindset can allow for maximum speed to market for a seasoned developer. Post-deployment maintenance initiatives, however, often lock the single developer as no one else understands the rationale for the decisions that were made.

    4.2.1 Develop your Agile requirements action plan

    Estimated time: 60 Minutes

    1. Gather all relevant stakeholder to create a road map and action plan for requirements management.
    2. Have a team member facilitate the session using the results of the Agile Requirements Maturity Assessment.
    3. Identify gaps from current to future state and brainstorm possible actions that can be taken to address those gaps. Resist the urge to analyze or discuss the feasibility of each idea at this stage. The intent is idea generation.
    4. When the group has exhausted all ideas, the facilitator should group like ideas together, with support from participants. Discuss any ideas that are unclear or ambiguous.
    5. Document the results in the Agile Requirements Workbook.

    Note: the feasibility and timing of the ideas will happen in the following "Now, Next, Later" exercise.

    Prioritize your roadmap

    Taking steps to mature your Agile requirements practice.

    An image of the Now; Next; Later technique.

    The "Now, Next, Later" technique is a method for prioritizing and planning improvements or tasks. This involves breaking down a list of tasks or improvements into three categories:

    • "Now" tasks are those that must be completed immediately. These tasks are usually urgent or critical, and they must be completed to keep the project or organization running smoothly.
    • "Next" tasks are those that should be completed soon. These tasks are not as critical as "now" tasks, but they are still important and should be tackled relatively soon.
    • "Later" tasks are those that can be completed later. These tasks are less critical and can be deferred without causing major problems.

    By using this technique, you can prioritize and plan the most important tasks first, while also allowing for flexibility and the ability to adjust plans as necessary.
    This process also helps you get a clear picture on what needs to be done first and what can be done later. This way you can work on the most important things first, and keep track of what you need to do next, for keeping the development/improvement process smooth and efficient.

    Monitor your progress

    Monitoring progress is important in achieving your target state. Be deliberate with your actions, to continue to mature your Agile requirements practice.

    As you navigate toward your target state, continue to monitor your progress, your successes, and your challenges. As your Agile requirements practice matures, you should see improvements in the stated metrics below.

    Establish a cadence to review these metrics, as well as how you are progressing on your roadmap, against the plan.

    This is not about adding work, but rather, about ensuring you're heading in the right direction; finding the balance in your Agile requirements practice.

    Metric
    Team satisfaction (%) Expect team satisfaction to increase as a result of clearer role delineation and value contribution.
    Stakeholder satisfaction (%) Expect stakeholder satisfaction to similarly increase, as requirements quality increases, bringing increased value.
    Requirements rework Measures the quality of requirements from your Agile projects. Expect that the requirements rework will decrease, in terms of volume/frequency.
    Cost of documentation Quantifies the cost of documentation, including elicitation, analysis, validation, presentation, and management.
    Time to delivery Balancing metric. We don't want improvements in other at the expense of time to delivery.

    Appendix

    Research Contributors and Experts

    This is a picture of Emal Bariali

    Emal Bariali
    Business Architect & Business Analyst
    Bariali Consulting

    Emal Bariali is a Senior Business Analyst and Business Architect with 17 years of experience, executing nearly 20 projects. He has experience in both waterfall and Agile methodologies and has delivered solutions in a variety of forms, including custom builds and turnkey projects. He holds a Master's degree in Information Systems from the University of Toronto, a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology from York University, and a post-diploma in Software & Database Development from Seneca College.

    This is a picture of Paula Bell

    Paula Bell
    Paula A. Bell Consulting, LLC

    Paula Bell is the CEO of Paula A Bell Consulting, LLC. She is a Business Analyst, Leadership and Career Development coach, consultant, speaker, and author with 21+ years of experience in corporate America in project roles including business analyst, requirements manager, business initiatives manager, business process quality manager, technical writer, project manager, developer, test lead, and implementation lead. Paula has experience in a variety of industries including media, courts, manufacturing, and financial. Paula has led multiple highly-visible multi-million-dollar technology and business projects to create solutions to transform businesses as either a consultant, senior business analyst, or manager.

    Currently she is Director of Operations for Bridging the Gap, where she oversees the entire operation and their main flagship certification program.

    This is a picture of Ryan Folster

    Ryan Folster
    Consulting Services Manager, Business Analysis
    Dimension Data

    Ryan Folster is a Business Analyst Lead and Product Professional from Johannesburg, South Africa. His strong focus on innovation and his involvement in the business analysis community have seen Ryan develop professionally from a small company, serving a small number of users, to large multi-national organizations. Having merged into business analysis through the business domain, Ryan has developed a firm grounding and provides context to the methodologies applied to clients and projects he is working on. Ryan has gained exposure to the Human Resources, Asset Management, and Financial Services sectors, working on projects that span from Enterprise Line of Business Software to BI and Compliance.

    Ryan is also heavily involved in the local chapter of IIBA®; having previously served as the chapter president, he currently serves as a non-executive board member. Ryan is passionate about the role a Business Analyst plays within an organization and is a firm believer that the role will develop further in the future and become a crucial aspect of any successful business.

    This is a picture of Filip Hendrickx

    Filip Hendrickx
    Innovating BA, Visiting Professor @ VUB
    altershape

    Filip loves bridging business analysis and innovation and mixes both in his work as speaker, trainer, coach, and consultant.

    As co-founder of the BA & Beyond Conference and IIBA Brussels Chapter president, Filip helps support the BA profession and grow the BA community in and around Belgium. For these activities, Filip received the 2022 IIBA® EMEA Region Volunteer of the Year Award.

    Together with Ian Richards, Filip is the author ofBrainy Glue, a business novel on business analysis, innovation and change. Filip is also co-author of the BCS book Digital Product Management and Cycles, a book, method and toolkit enabling faster innovation.

    This is a picture of Fabricio Laguna

    Fabricio Laguna
    Professional Speaker, Consultant, and Trainer
    TheBrazilianBA.com

    Fabrício Laguna, aka The Brazilian BA, is the main reference on business analysis in Brazil. Author and producer of videos, articles, classes, lectures, and playful content, he can explain complex things in a simple and easy-to-understand way. IIBA Brazil Chapter president between 2012-2022. CBAP, AAC, CPOA, PMP, MBA. Consultant and instructor for more than 25 years working with business analysis, methodology, solution development, systems analysis, project management, business architecture, and systems architecture. His online courses are approved by students from 65 countries.

    This is a picture of Ryland Leyton

    Ryland Leyton
    Business Analyst and Agile Coach
    Independent Consultant

    Ryland Leyton, CBAP, PMP, CSM, is an avid Agile advocate and coach, business analyst, author, speaker, and educator. He has worked in the technology sector since 1998, starting off with database and web programming, gradually moving through project management and finding his passion in the BA and Agile fields. He has been a core team member of the IIBA Extension to the BABOK and the IIBA Agile Analysis Certification. Ryland has written popular books on agility, business analysis, and career. He can be reached at www.RylandLeyton.com.

    This is a picture of Steve Jones

    Steve Jones
    Supervisor, Market Support Business Analysis
    ISO New England

    Steve is a passionate analyst and BA manager with more than 20 years of experience in improving processes, services and software, working across all areas of software development lifecycle, business change and business analysis. He rejoices in solving complex business problems and increasing process reproducibility and compliance through the application of business analysis tools and techniques.

    Steve is currently serving as VP of Education for IIBA Hartford. He is a CBAP, certified SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager, Six Sigma Green Belt, and holds an MS in Information Management and Communications.

    This is a picture of Angela Wick

    Angela Wick
    Founder
    BA-Squared and BA-Cube

    Founder of BA-Squared and BA-Cube.com, Angela is passionate about teaching practical, modern product ownership and BA skills. With over 20 years' experience she takes BA skills to the next level and into the future!
    Angela is also a LinkedIn Learning instructor on Agile product ownership and business analysis, an IC-Agile Authorized Trainer, Product Owner and BA highly-rated trainer, highly-rated speaker, sought-after workshop facilitator, and contributor to many industry publications, including:

    • IIBA BABOK v3 Core Team, leading author on the BABOK v3
    • Expert Reviewer, IIBA Agile Extension to the BABOK
    • PMI BA Practice Guide – Expert Reviewer
    • PMI Requirements Management Practice Guide – Expert Reviewer
    • IIBA Competency Model – Lead Author and Team Lead, V1, V2, and V3.

    This is a picture of Rachael Wilterdink

    Rachael Wilterdink
    Principal Consultant
    Infotech Enterprises

    Rachael Wilterdink is a Principal Consultant with Infotech Enterprises. With over 25 years of IT experience, she holds multiple business analysis and Agile certifications. As a consultant, Rachael has served clients in the financial, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, government, non-profit, and insurance industries. Giving back to the professional community, Ms. Wilterdink served on the boards of her local IIBA® and PMI® chapters. As a passionate public speaker, Rachael presents various topics at conferences and user groups across the country and the world. Rachael is also the author of the popular eBook "40 Agile Transformation Pain Points (and how to avoid or manage them)."

    Bibliography

    "2021 Business Agility Report: Rising to the Challenge." Business Agility, 2021. Accessed 13 June 2022.
    Axure. "The Pitfalls of Agile and How We Got Here". Axure. Accessed 14 November 2022.
    Beck, Kent, et al. "Manifesto for Agile Software Development." Agilemanifesto. 2001.
    Brock, Jon, et al. "Large-Scale IT Projects: From Nightmare to Value Creation." BCG, 25 May 2015.
    Bryar, Colin and Bill Carr. "Have We Taken Agile Too Far?" Harvard Business Review, 9 April 2021. Accessed 11 November, 2022.
    Clarke, Thomas. "When Agile Isn't Responsive to Business Goals" RCG Global Services, Accessed 14 November 2022.
    Digital.ai "The 15th State of Agile Report". Digital.ai. Accessed 21 November 2022.
    Hackshall, Robin. "Product Backlog Refinement." Scrum Alliance. 9 Oct. 2014.
    Hartman, Bob. "New to Agile? INVEST in good user stories." Agile For All.
    IAG Consulting. "Business Analysis Benchmark: Full Report." IAG Consulting, 2009.
    Karlsson, Johan. "Backlog Grooming: Must-Know Tips for High-Value Products." Perforce. 18 May 2018
    KPMG. Agile Transformation (2019 Survey on Agility). KPMG. Accessed November 29.
    Laguna, Fabricio "REQM guidance matrix: A framework to drive requirements management", Requirements Engineering Magazine. 12 September 2017. Accessed 10 November 2022.
    Miller, G. J. (2013). Agile problems, challenges, & failures. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2013—North America, New Orleans, LA. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.
    Product Management: MoSCoW Prioritization." ProductPlan, n.d. Web.
    Podeswa, Howard "The Business Case for Agile Business Analysis" Requirements Engineering Magazine. 21 February 2017. Accessed 7 November 2022.
    PPM Express. "Why Projects Fail: Business Analysis is the Key". PPM Express. Accessed 16 November 2022.
    Reifer, Donald J. "Quantitative Analysis of Agile Methods Study: Twelve Major Findings." InfoQ, 6 February, 2017.
    Royce, Dr. Winston W. "Managing the Development of Large Software Systems." Scf.usc.edu. 1970. (royce1970.pdf (usc.edu))
    Rubin, Kenneth S. Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process. Pearson Education. 2012.
    Singer, Michael. "15+ Surprising Agile Statistics: Everything You Need To Know About Agile Management". Enterprise Apps Today. 22 August 2022.
    The Standish Group. The Chaos Report, 2015. The Standish Group.

    Where do I go next?

    Improve Requirements Gathering

    Back to basics: great products are built on great requirements.

    Make the Case for Product Delivery

    Align your organization on the practices to deliver what matters most.

    Requirements for Small and Medium Enterprises

    Right-size the guidelines of your requirements gathering process.

    Implement Agile Practices that Work

    Improve collaboration and transparency with the business to minimize project failure.

    Create an Agile-Friendly Gating and Governance Model

    Use Info-Tech's Agile Gating Framework as a guide to gating your Agile projects following a "trust but verify" approach.

    Make Your IT Governance Adaptable

    Governance isn't optional, so keep it simple and make it flexible.

    Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision

    Build a product vision your organization can take from strategy through execution.

    Execute an Emergency Remote Work Plan

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    • Parent Category Name: DR and Business Continuity
    • Parent Category Link: /business-continuity
    • Many organizations do not have developed plans for how to turn on-premises employees into remote workers in an emergency.
    • In an emergency situation, such as a pandemic, sending employees home to work remotely without time to prepare presents daunting challenges, such as trying to comprehend and prioritize the myriad of tasks that need accomplishing for human resources, the business, and IT in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world.
    • Security issues may arise from employees not used to working remotely. Indeed, employees sent home to work remotely in an emergency may not have been eligible otherwise. This creates security risks, including the proliferation of shadow IT.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The emergency will restructure the business: make sure it’s done right. While your organization may need quick fixes for day one of an emergency remote work plan, these are not viable long-term solutions. The emergency will vividly reinforce to the business side that more resources need to be directed to IT to enable strong business continuity and employee safety. Make sure the right plan is put in place during the crucial first weeks. The next emergency is just around the corner.
    • Prioritize key business processes. Before getting into the details of a work from home policy, identify which crucial business processes need to continue for the company to survive. Build the remote work policy around supporting those workflows.
    • Where the “carrot” is not possible, emergencies may require the “stick.” To ensure secure endpoints and prevent proliferation of shadow IT, you may need to enforce certain rules through policy. However, disenfranchising employees is not a long-term solution: once the emergency subsides, use this basis to explore end-user requirements properly and ensure employee-driven adoption plans. Where possible, for this latter scenario, always use the carrot.

    Impact and Result

    • A prioritized plan for IT processes through Info-Tech’s cascading responsibility checklists for emergency remote work.
    • A codified emergency remote work policy document to better prepare for future emergencies.

    Execute an Emergency Remote Work Plan Research & Tools

    Start here

    Read our concise Executive Brief for why you need prioritized emergency remote work checklists and an accompanying policy document and review Info-Tech’s methodology.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    • Execute an Emergency Remote Work Plan Storyboard

    1. Day one preparations

    Prioritize key action items on day one of sending your employees home to remotely work during an emergency.

    • Emergency Remote Work Plan Checklists
    • Home Office Survey
    • Checklist for Securing Remote Workers
    • None
    • Remote Access Policy
    • Equipment Loan Policy
    • None
    • Develop a Security Awareness and Training Program That Empowers End Users – Phases 1-2
    • Remote Work Assignment Log
    • Wiki Collection for Collaboration Tools
    • Pandemic Preparation: The People Playbook

    2. One-to-two weeks preparations

    Address key action items in the one-to-two weeks following an emergency that forced your employees to work remotely.

    • None

    3. Codify an emergency remote work policy

    Turn your emergency remote work checklists into policy.

    • Emergency Remote Work Policy
    • Execute an Emergency Remote Work Plan Executive Presentation
    [infographic]

    Demystify Oracle Licensing and Optimize Spend

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    • Parent Category Name: Licensing
    • Parent Category Link: /licensing
    • License keys are not needed with optional features accessible upon install. Conducting quarterly checks of the Oracle environment is critical because if products or features are installed, even if they are not actively in use, it constitutes use by Oracle and requires a license.
    • Ambiguous license models and definitions abound: terminology and licensing rules can be vague, making it difficult to purchase licensing even with the best of intentions to keep compliant.
    • Oracle has aggressively started to force new Oracle License and Service Agreements (OLSA) on customers that slightly modify language and remove pre-existing allowances to tilt the contract terms in Oracle's favor.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Focus on needs first. Conduct a thorough requirements assessment and document the results. Well-documented license needs will be your core asset in navigating Oracle licensing and negotiating your agreement.
    • Communicate effectively. Be aware that Oracle will reach out to employees at your organization at various levels. Having your executives on the same page will help send a strong message.
    • Manage the relationship. If Oracle is managing you, there is a high probability you are over paying or providing information that may result in an audit.

    Impact and Result

    • Conducting business with Oracle is not typical compared to other vendors. To emerge successfully from a commercial transaction with Oracle, customers must learn the "Oracle way" of conducting business, which includes a best-in-class sales structure, highly unique contracts and license use policies, and a hyper-aggressive compliance function.
    • Map out the process of how to negotiate from a position of strength, examining terms and conditions, discount percentages, and agreement pitfalls.
    • Develop a strategy that leverages and utilizes an experienced Oracle DBA to gather accurate information, and then optimizes it to mitigate and meet the top challenges.

    Demystify Oracle Licensing and Optimize Spend Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you need to understand and document your Oracle licensing strategy, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Establish licensing requirements

    Begin your proactive Oracle licensing journey by understanding which information to gather and assessing the current state and gaps.

    • Demystify Oracle Licensing and Optimize Spend – Phase 1: Establish Licensing Requirements
    • Oracle Licensing Purchase Reference Guide
    • Oracle Database Inventory Tool
    • Effective Licensing Position Tool
    • RASCI Chart

    2. Evaluate licensing options

    Review current licensing models and determine which licensing models will most appropriately fit your environment.

    • Demystify Oracle Licensing and Optimize Spend – Phase 2: Evaluate Licensing Options

    3. Evaluate agreement options

    Review Oracle’s contract types and assess which best fit the organization’s licensing needs.

    • Demystify Oracle Licensing and Optimize Spend – Phase 3: Evaluate Agreement Options
    • Oracle TCO Calculator

    4. Purchase and manage licenses

    Conduct negotiations, purchase licensing, and finalize a licensing management strategy.

    • Demystify Oracle Licensing and Optimize Spend – Phase 4: Purchase and Manage Licenses
    • Oracle Terms & Conditions Evaluation Tool
    • Controlled Vendor Communications Letter
    • Vendor Communication Management Plan
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Demystify Oracle Licensing and Optimize Spend

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Establish Licensing Requirements

    The Purpose

    Assess current state and align goals; review business feedback

    Interview key stakeholders to define business objectives and drivers

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Have a baseline for requirements

    Assess the current state

    Determine licensing position

    Examine cloud options

    Activities

    1.1 Gather software licensing data

    1.2 Conduct a software inventory

    1.3 Perform manual checks

    1.4 Reconcile licenses

    1.5 Create your Oracle licensing team

    1.6 Meet with stakeholders to discuss the licensing position, cloud offerings, and budget allocation

    Outputs

    Copy of your Oracle License Statement

    Software inventory report from software asset management (SAM) tool

    Oracle Database Inventory Tool

    RASCI Chart

    Oracle Licensing Effective License Position (ELP) Template

    Oracle Licensing Purchase Reference Guide

    2 Evaluate Licensing Options

    The Purpose

    Review licensing options

    Review licensing rules

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understand how licensing works

    Determine if you need software assurance

    Discuss licensing rules, application to current environment.

    Examine cloud licensing

    Understand the importance of documenting changes

    Meet with desktop product owners to determine product strategies

    Activities

    2.1 Review full, limited, restricted, and AST use licenses

    2.2 Calculate license costs

    2.3 Determine which database platform to use

    2.4 Evaluate moving to the cloud

    2.5 Examine disaster recovery strategies

    2.6 Understand purchasing support

    2.7 Meet with stakeholders to discuss the licensing position, cloud offerings, and budget allocation

    Outputs

    Oracle TCO Calculator

    Oracle Licensing Purchase Reference Guide

    3 Evaluate Agreement Options

    The Purpose

    Review contract option types

    Review vendors

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understand why a type of contract is best for you

    Determine if ULA or term agreement is best

    The benefits of other types and when you should change

    Activities

    3.1 Prepare to sign or renew your ULA

    3.2 Decide on an agreement type that nets the maximum benefit

    Outputs

    Type of contract to be used

    Oracle TCO Calculator

    Oracle Licensing Purchase Reference Guide

    4 Purchase and Manage Licenses

    The Purpose

    Finalize the contract

    Prepare negotiation points

    Discuss license management

    Evaluate and develop a roadmap for future licensing

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Negotiation strategies

    Licensing management

    Introduction of SAM

    Leverage the work done on Oracle licensing to get started on SAM

    Activities

    4.1 Control the flow of communication terms and conditions

    4.2 Use Info-Tech’s readiness assessment in preparation for the audit

    4.3 Assign the right people to manage the environment

    4.4 Meet with stakeholders to discuss the licensing position, cloud offerings, and budget allocation

    Outputs

    Controlled Vendor Communications Letter

    Vendor Communication Management Plan

    Oracle Terms & Conditions Evaluation Tool

    RASCI Chart

    Oracle Licensing Purchase Reference Guide

    Manage Your Chromebooks and MacBooks

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    • Parent Category Name: End-User Computing Devices
    • Parent Category Link: /end-user-computing-devices

    Windows is no longer the only option. MacBooks and Chromebooks are justified, but now you have to manage them.

    • If you have modernized your end-user computing strategy, you may have Windows 10 devices as well as MacBooks.
    • Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and desktop as a service (DaaS) are becoming popular. Chromebooks may be ideal as a low-cost interface into DaaS for your employees.
    • Managing Chromebooks can be particularly challenging as they grow in popularity in the education sector.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Managing end-user devices may be accomplished with a variety of solutions, but many of those solutions advocate integration with a Microsoft-friendly solution to take advantage of features such as conditional access, security functionality, and data governance.

    Impact and Result

    • Many solutions are available to manage end-user devices, and they come with a long list of options and features. Clarify your needs and define your requirements before you purchase another endpoint management tool. Don’t purchase capabilities that you may never use.
    • Use the associated Endpoint Management Selection Tool spreadsheet to identify your desired endpoint solution features and compare vendor solution functionality based on your desired features.

    Manage Your Chromebooks and MacBooks Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Manage Your Chromebooks and MacBooks deck – MacBooks and Chromebooks are growing in popularity in enterprise and education environments, and now you have to manage them.

    Explore options, guidance and some best practices related to the management of Chromebooks and MacBooks in the enterprise environment and educational institutions. Our guidance will help you understand features and options available in a variety of solutions. We also provide guidance on selecting the best endpoint management solution for your own environment.

    • Manage Your Chromebooks and MacBooks Storyboard

    2. Endpoint Management Selection Tool – Select the best endpoint management tool for your environment. Build a table to compare endpoint management offerings in relation to the features and options desired by your organization.

    This tool will help you determine the features and options you want or need in an endpoint management solution.

    • Endpoint Management Selection Tool
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Manage Your Chromebooks and MacBooks

    Financial constraints, strategy, and your user base dictate the need for Chromebooks and MacBooks – now you have to manage them in your environment.

    Analyst Perspective

    Managing MacBooks and Chromebooks is similar to managing Windows devices in many ways and different in others. The tools have many common features, yet they struggle to achieve the same goals.

    Until recently, Windows devices dominated the workplace globally. Computing devices were also rare in many industries such as education. Administrators and administrative staff may have used Windows-based devices, but Chromebooks were not yet in use. Most universities and colleges were Windows-based in offices with some flavor of Unix in other areas, and Apple devices were gaining some popularity in certain circles.

    That is a stark contrast compared to today, where Chromebooks dominate the classrooms and MacBooks and Chromebooks are making significant inroads into the enterprise environment. MacBooks are also a common sight on many university campuses. There is no doubt that while Windows may still be the dominant player, it is far from the only one in town.

    Now that Chromebooks and MacBooks are a notable, if not significant, part of the education and enterprise environments, they must be afforded the same considerations as Windows devices in those environments when it comes to management. The good news is that there is no lack of available solutions for managing these devices, and the endpoint management landscape is continually evolving and improving.

    This is a picture of P.J. Ryan, Research Director, Infrastructure & Operations, Info-Tech Research Group

    P.J. Ryan
    Research Director, Infrastructure & Operations
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    • You modernized your end-user computing strategy and now have Windows 10 devices as well as MacBooks.
    • Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and desktop as a service (DaaS) are becoming popular. Chromebooks would be ideal as a low-cost interface into DaaS for your employees.
    • You are responsible for the management of all the new Chromebooks in your educational district.
    • Windows is no longer the only option. MacBooks and Chromebooks are justified, but now you have to manage them.

    Common Obstacles

    • Endpoint management solutions typically do a great job at managing one category of devices, like Windows or MacBooks, but they struggle to fully manage alternative endpoints.
    • Multiple solutions to manage multiple devices will result in multiple dashboards. A single view would be better.
    • One solution may not fit all, but multiple solutions is not desirable either, especially if you have Windows devices, MacBooks, and Chromebooks.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    • Use the tools at your disposal first – don't needlessly spend money if you don't have to. Many solutions can already manage other types of devices to some degree.
    • Use the integration capabilities of endpoint management tools. Many of them can integrate with each other to give you a single interface to manage multiple types of devices while taking advantage of additional functionality.
    • Don't purchase capabilities you will never use. Using 80% of a less expensive tool is economically smarter than using 10% of a more expensive tool.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Managing end-user devices may be accomplished with a variety of solutions, but many of those solutions advocate integration with a Microsoft-friendly solution to take advantage of features such as conditional access, security functionality, and data governance.

    Insight Summary

    Insight 1

    Google Admin Console is necessary to manage Chromebooks, but it can be paired with other tools. Implementation partnerships provide solutions to track the device lifecycle, track the repair lifecycle, sync with Google Admin Console as well as PowerSchool to provide a more complete picture of the user and device, and facilitate reminders to return the device, pay fees if necessary, pick up a device when a repair is complete, and more.

    Insight 2

    The Google Admin Console allows admins to follow an organizational unit (OU) structure very similar to what they may have used in Microsoft's Active Directory environment. This familiarity makes the task of administering Chromebooks easier for admins.

    Insight 3

    Chromebook management goes beyond securing and manipulating the device. Controls to protect the students while online, such as Safe Search and Safe Browsing, should also be implemented.

    Insight 4

    Most companies choose to use a dedicated MacBook management tool. Many unified endpoint management (UEM) tools can manage MacBooks to some extent, but admins tend to agree that a MacBook-focused endpoint management tool is best for MacBooks while a Windows-based endpoint management tool is best for Windows devices.

    Insight 5

    Some MacBook management solutions advocate integration with Windows UEM solutions to take advantage of Microsoft features such as conditional access, security functionality, and data governance. This approach can also be applied to Chromebooks.

    Chromebooks

    Chromebooks had a respectable share of the education market before 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic turbocharged the penetration of Chromebooks in the education industry.

    Chromebooks are also catching the attention of some decision makers in the enterprise environment.

    "In 2018, Chromebooks represented an incredible 60 percent of all laptop or tablet devices in K-12 -- up from zero percent when the first Chromebook launched during the summer break in 2011."
    – "Will Chromebooks Rule the Enterprise?" Computerworld

    "Chromebooks were the best performing PC products in Q3 2020, with shipment volume increasing to a record-high 9.4 million units, up a whopping 122% year-on-year."
    – Android Police

    "Until the pandemic, Chrome OS' success was largely limited to U.S. schools. Demand in 2020 appears to have expanded beyond that small but critical part of the U.S. PC market."
    – Geekwire

    "In addition to running a huge number of Chrome Extensions and Apps at once, Chromebooks also run Android, Linux and Windows apps."
    – "Will Chromebooks Rule the Enterprise?" Computerworld

    Managing Chromebooks

    Start with the Google Admin Console (GAC)

    GAC is necessary to initially manage Chrome OS devices.

    GAC gives you a centralized console that will allow you to:

    • Create organizational units
    • Add your Chromebook devices
    • Add users
    • Assign users to devices
    • Create groups
    • Create and assign policies
    • Plus more

    GAC can facilitate device management with features such as:

    • Control admin permissions
    • Encryption and update settings
    • App deployment, screen timeout settings
    • Perform a device wipe if required
    • Audit user activity on a device
    • Plus more

    Device and user addition, group and organizational unit creation and administration, applying policies to devices and users – does all this remind you of your Active Directory environment?

    GAC lets you administer users and devices with a similar approach.

    Managing Chromebooks

    Use Active Directory to manage Chromebooks.

    • Enable Active Directory (AD) management from within GAC and you will be able to integrate your Chromebook devices with your AD environment.
    • Devices will be visible in both the GAC and AD environment.
    • Use Windows Group Policy to manage devices and to push policies to users and devices.
    • Users can use their AD username and password to sign into Chromebook devices.
    • GAC can still be used for devices that are not synced with AD.

    Chromebooks can also be managed through these approved partners:

    • Cisco Meraki
    • Citrix XenMobile
    • IBM MaaS360
    • ManageEngine Mobile Device Manager Plus
    • VMware Workspace ONE

    Source: Google

    You must be running the Chrome Enterprise Upgrade and have any licenses required by the approved partner to take advantage of this management option. The partner admin policies supersede GAC.

    If you stop using the approved partner admin console to manage your devices, the polices and settings in GAC will immediately take over the devices.

    Microsoft still has the market share when it comes to device sales, and many administrators are already familiar with Microsoft's Active Directory. Google took advantage of that familiarity when it designed the Google Admin Console structure for users, groups, and organizational units.

    Chromebook Deployment

    Chromebook deployment becomes a challenge when device quantities grow. The enrollment process can be time consuming, and every device must be enrolled before it can be used by an employee or a student. Many admins enlist their full IT teams to assist in the short term. Some vendor partners may assist with distribution options if staffing levels permit. Recent developments from Google have opened additional options for device enrollment beyond the manual enrollment approach.

    Enrolling Chromebooks comes down to one of two approaches:

    1. Manually enrolling one device at a time
      • Users can assist by entering some identifying details during the enrollment if permitted.
      • Some third-party solutions exist, such as USB drives to reduce repetitive keystrokes or hubs to facilitate manually enrolling multiple Chromebooks simultaneously.
    2. Google's Chrome Enterprise Upgrade or the Chrome Education Upgrade
      • This allows you to let your users enroll devices after they accept the end-user license agreement.
      • You can take advantage of Google's vendor partner program and use a zero-touch deployment method where the Chromebook devices automatically receive the assigned policies, apps, and settings as soon as the device is powered on and an authorized user signs in.
      • The Enterprise Upgrade and the Education Upgrade do come with an annual cost per device, which is currently less than US$50.
      • The Enterprise and Education Upgrades come with other features as well, such as enhanced security.

    Chromebooks are automatically assigned to the top-level organizational unit (OU) when enrolled. Devices can be manually moved to another OU, but admins can also create enrollment policies to place newly enrolled devices in a specific OU or have the device locate itself in the same OU as the user.

    Chromebooks in Education

    GAC is also used with Education-licensed devices

    Most of the settings and features previously mentioned are also available for Education-licensed devices and users. Enterprise-specific features will not be available to Education licenses. (Active Directory integration with Education licenses, for example, is accomplished using a different approach)

    • Groups, policies, administrative controls, app deployment and management, adding devices and users, creating organizational units, and more features are all available to Education Admins to use.

    Education device policies and settings tend to focus more on protecting the students with controls such as:

    • Disable incognito mode
    • Disable location tracking
    • Disable external storage devices
    • Browser based protections such as Safe Search or Safe Browsing
    • URL blocking
    • Video input disable for websites
    • App installation prevention, auto re-install, and app blocking
    • Forced re-enrollment to your domain after a device is wiped
    • Disable Guest Mode
    • Restrict who can sign in
    • Audit user activity on a device

    When a student takes home a Chromebook assigned to them, that Chromebook may be the only computer in the household. Administrative polices and settings must take into account the fact that the device may have multiple users accessing many different sites and applications when the device is outside of the school environment.

    Chromebook Management Extended

    An online search for Chromebook management solutions will reveal several software solutions that augment the capabilities of the Google Admin Console. Many of these solutions are focused on the education sector and classroom and student options, although the features would be beneficial to enterprises and educational organizations alike.

    These solutions assist or augment Chromebook management with features such as:

    • Ability to sync with Google Admin Console
    • Ability to sync with student information systems, such as PowerSchool
    • Financial management, purchase details, and chargeback
    • Asset lifecycle management
    • 1:1 Chromebook distribution management
    • Repair programs and repair process management
    • Check-out/loan program management
    • Device distribution/allocation management, including barcode reader integration
    • Simple learning material distribution to the classroom for teachers
    • Facilitate GAC bulk operations
    • Manage inventory of non-IT assets such as projectors, TVs, and other educational assets
    • Plus more

    "There are many components to managing Chromebooks. Schools need to know which student has which device, which school has which device, and costs relating to repairs. Chromebook Management Software … facilitates these processes."
    – VIZOR

    MacBooks

    • MacBooks are gaining popularity in the Enterprise world.
    • Some admins claim MacBooks are less expensive in the long run over Windows-based PCs.
    • Users claim less issues when using a MacBook, and overall, companies report increased retention rates when users are using MacBooks.

    "Macs now make up 23% of endpoints in enterprises."
    – ComputerWeekly.com

    "When given the choice, no less than 72% of employees choose Macs over PCs."
    – "5 Reasons Mac is a must," Jamf

    "IBM says it is 3X more expensive to manage PCs than Macs."
    – Computerworld

    "74% of those who previously used a PC for work experienced fewer issues now that they use a Mac"
    – "Global Survey: Mac in the Enterprise," Jamf

    "When enterprise moves to Mac, staff retention rates improve by 20%. That's quite a boost! "
    – "5 Reasons Mac is a must," Jamf

    Managing MacBooks

    Can your existing UEM keep up?

    Many Windows unified endpoint management (UEM) tools can manage MacBooks, but most companies choose to use a dedicated MacBook management tool.

    • UEM tools that are primarily Windows focused do not typically go deep enough into the management capabilities of non-Windows devices.
    • Admins have noted limitations when it comes to using Windows UEM tools, and reasons they prefer a dedicated MacBook management solution include:
      • Easier to use
      • Faster response times when deploying settings and policies
      • Better control over notification settings and lock screen settings.
      • Easier Apple Business Manager (ABM) integration and provisioning.
    • Note that not every UEM will have the same limitations or advantages. Functionality is different between vendor products.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Most Windows UEM tools are constantly improving, and it is only a matter of time before they rival many of the dedicated MacBook management tools out there.

    Admins tend to agree that a Windows UEM is best for Windows while an Apple-based UEM is best for Apple devices.

    Managing MacBooks

    The market for "MacBook-first" management solutions includes a variety of players of varying ages such as:

    • Jamf
    • Kandji
    • Mosyle
    • SimpleMDM
    • Others

    MacBook-focused management tools can provide features such as:

    • Encryption and update settings
    • App deployment and lifecycle management
    • Remote device wipe, scan, shutdown, restart, and lock
    • Zero touch deployment and support
    • Location tracking
    • Browser content filtering
    • Enable, hide/block, or disable built-in features
    • Configure Wi-Fi, VPN, and certificate-based settings
    • Centralized dashboard with device and app listings as well as individual details
    • Data restrictions
    • Plus more

    Unified endpoint management (UEM) solutions that can provide MacBook management to some degree include (but are not limited to):

    • Intune
    • Ivanti
    • Endpoint Central
    • WorkspaceOne

    Dedicated solutions advocate integration with UEM solutions to take advantage of conditional access, security functionality, and data governance features.

    Jamf and Microsoft entered into a collaboration several years ago with the intention of making the MacBook management process easier and more secure.

    Microsoft Intune and Jamf Pro: Better together to manage and secure Macs
    Microsoft Conditional Access with Jamf Pro ensures that company data is only accessed by trusted users, on trusted devices, using trusted apps. Jamf extends this Enterprise Mobile + Security (EMS) functionality to Mac, iPhone and iPad.
    – "Microsoft Intune and Jamf Pro," Jamf

    Endpoint Management Selection Tool
    Activity

    There are many solutions available to manage end-user devices, and they come with a long list of options and features. Clarify your needs and define your requirements before you purchase another endpoint management tool. Don't purchase capabilities that you may never use.

    Use the Endpoint Management Selection Tool to identify your desired endpoint solution features and compare vendor solution functionality based on your desired features.

    1. List out the desired features you want in an endpoint solution for your devices and record those features in the first column. Use the features provided, or add your own and edit or delete the existing ones if necessary.
    2. List your selected endpoint management solution vendors in each of the columns in place of "Vendor 1," "Vendor 2," etc.
    3. Fill out the spreadsheet by changing the corresponding desired feature cell under each vendor to a "yes" or "no" based on your findings while investigating each vendor solution.
    4. When you have finished your investigation, review your spreadsheet to compare the various offerings and pros and cons of each vendor.
    5. Select your endpoint management solution.

    Endpoint Management Selection Tool

    In the first column, list out the desired features you want in an endpoint solution for your devices. Use the features provided if desired, or add your own and edit or delete the existing ones if necessary. As you look into various endpoint management solution vendors, list them in the columns in place of "Vendor 1," "Vendor 2," etc. Use the "Desired Feature" list as a checklist and change the values to "yes" or "no" in the corresponding box under the vendors' names. When complete, you will be able to look at all the features and compare vendors in a single table.

    Desired Feature Vendor 1 Vendor 2 Vendor 3
    Organizational unit creation Yes No Yes
    Group creation Yes Yes Yes
    Ability to assign users to devices No Yes Yes
    Control of administrative permissions Yes Yes Yes
    Conditional access No Yes Yes
    Security policies enforced Yes No Yes
    Asset management No Yes No
    Single sign-on Yes Yes Yes
    Auto-deployment No Yes No
    Repair lifecycle tracking No Yes No
    Application deployment Yes Yes No
    Device tracking Yes Yes Yes
    Ability to enable encryption Yes No Yes
    Device wipe Yes No Yes
    Ability to enable/disable device tracking No No Yes
    User activity audit No No No

    Related Info-Tech Research

    this is a screenshot from Info-Tech's Modernize and Transform Your End-User Computing Strategy.

    Modernize and Transform Your End-User Computing Strategy
    This project helps support the workforce of the future by answering the following questions: What types of computing devices, provisioning models, and operating systems should be offered to end users? How will IT support devices? What are the policies and governance surrounding how devices are used? What actions are we taking and when? How do end-user devices support larger corporate priorities and strategies?

    Best Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) Software 2022 | SoftwareReviews
    Compare and evaluate unified endpoint management vendors using the most in-depth and unbiased buyer reports available. Download free comprehensive 40+ page reports to select the best unified endpoint management software for your organization.

    Best Enterprise Mobile Management (EMM) Software 2022 | (softwarereviews.com)
    Compare and evaluate enterprise mobile management vendors using the most in-depth and unbiased buyer reports available. Download free comprehensive 40+ page reports to select the best enterprise mobile management software for your organization.

    Bibliography

    Bridge, Tom. "Macs in the enterprise – what you need to know". Computerweekly.com, TechTarget. 27 May 2022. Accessed 12 Aug. 2022.
    Copley-Woods, Haddayr. "5 reasons Mac is a must in the enterprise". Jamf.com, Jamf. 28 June 2022. Accessed 16 Aug. 2022.
    Duke, Kent. "Chromebook sales skyrocketed in Q3 2020 with online education fueling demand." androidpolice.com, Android Police. 16 Nov 2020. Accessed 10 Aug. 2022.
    Elgin, Mike. "Will Chromebooks Rule the Enterprise? (5 Reasons They May)". Computerworld.com, Computerworld. 30 Aug 2019. Accessed 10 Aug. 2022.
    Evans, Jonny. "IBM says it is 3X more expensive to manage PCs than Macs". Computerworld.com, Computerworld. 19 Oct 2016. Accessed 23 Aug. 2022.
    "Global Survey: Mac in the Enterprise". Jamf.com, Jamf. Accessed 16 Aug. 2022.
    "How to Manage Chromebooks Like a Pro." Vizor.cloud, VIZOR. Accessed 10 Aug. 2022.
    "Manage Chrome OS Devices with EMM Console". support.google.com, Google. Accessed 16 Aug. 2022.
    Protalinski, Emil. "Chromebooks outsold Macs worldwide in 2020, cutting into Windows market share". Geekwire.com, Geekwire. 16 Feb 2021. Accessed 22 Aug. 2022.
    Smith, Sean. "Microsoft Intune and Jamf Pro: Better together to manage and secure Macs". Jamf.com, Jamf. 20 April 2022. Accessed 16 Aug. 2022.

    Secure IT-OT Convergence

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    • Parent Category Name: Security Processes & Operations
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    IT and OT are both very different complex systems. However, significant benefits have driven OT to be converged to IT. This results in IT security leaders, OT leaders and their teams' facing challenges in:

    • Governing and managing IT and OT security and accountabilities.
    • Converging security architecture and controls between IT and OT environments.
    • Compliance with regulations and standards.
    • Metrics for OT security effectiveness and efficiency.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Returning to isolated OT is not beneficial for the organization, therefore IT and OT need to learn to collaborate starting with communication to build trust and to overcome differences between IT and OT. Next, negotiation is needed on components such as governance and management, security controls on OT environments, compliance with regulations and standards, and metrics for OT security.
    • Most OT incidents start with attacks against IT networks and then move laterally into the OT environment. Therefore, converging IT and OT security will help protect the entire organization.
    • OT interfaces with the physical world while IT system concerns more on cyber world. Thus, the two systems have different properties. The challenge is how to create strategic collaboration between IT-OT based on negotiation and this needs top-down support.

    Impact and Result

    Info-Tech’s approach in preparing for IT/OT convergence in the planning phase is coordination and collaboration of IT and OT to

    • initiate communication to define roles and responsibilities.
    • establish governance and build cross-functional team.
    • identify convergence components and compliance obligations.
    • assess readiness.

    Secure IT/OT Convergence Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Secure IT/OT Convergence Storyboard – A step-by-step document that walks you through how to secure IT-OT convergence.

    Info-Tech provides a three-phase framework of secure IT/OT convergence, namely Plan, Enhance, and Monitor & Optimize. The essential steps in Plan are to:

  • Initiate communication to define roles and responsibilities.
  • Establish governance and build a cross-functional team.
  • Identify convergence components and compliance obligations.
  • Assess readiness.
    • Secure IT/OT Convergence Storyboard

    2. Secure IT/OT Convergence Requirements Gathering Tool – A tool to map organizational goals to secure IT-OT goals.

    This tool serves as a repository for information about the organization, compliance, and other factors that will influence your IT/OT convergence.

    • Secure IT/OT Convergence Requirements Gathering Tool

    3. Secure IT/OT Convergence RACI Chart Tool – A tool to identify and understand the owners of various IT/OT convergence across the organization.

    A critical step in secure IT/OT convergence is populating a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) chart. The chart assists you in organizing roles for carrying out convergence steps and ensures that there are definite roles that different individuals in the organization must have. Complete this tool to assign tasks to suitable roles.

    • Secure IT/OT Convergence RACI Chart Tool
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Secure IT/OT Convergence

    Create a holistic IT/OT security culture.

    Analyst Perspective

    Are you ready for secure IT/OT convergence?

    IT/OT convergence is less of a convergence and more of a migration. The previously entirely separate OT ecosystem is migrating into the IT ecosystem, primarily to improve access via connectivity and to leverage other standard IT capabilities for economic benefit.

    In the past, OT systems were engineered to be air gapped, relying on physical protection and with little or no security in design, (e.g. OT protocols without confidentiality properties). However, now, OT has become dependent on the IT capabilities of the organization, thus OT inherits IT’s security issues, that is, OT is becoming more vulnerable to attack from outside the system. IT/OT convergence is complex because the culture, policies, and rules of IT are quite foreign to OT processes such as change management, and the culture, policies, and rules of OT are likewise foreign to IT processes.

    A secure IT/OT convergence can be conceived of as a negotiation of a strong treaty between two systems: IT and OT. The essential initial step is to begin with communication between IT and OT, followed by necessary components such as governing and managing OT security priorities and accountabilities, converging security controls between IT and OT environments, assuring compliance with regulations and standards, and establishing metrics for OT security.

    Photo of Ida Siahaan, Research Director, Security and Privacy Practice, Info-Tech Research Group. Ida Siahaan
    Research Director, Security and Privacy Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    IT and OT are both very different complex systems. However, significant benefits have driven OT to converge with IT. This results in IT security leaders, OT leaders, and their teams facing challenges with:

    • Governing and managing IT and OT security and accountabilities.
    • Converging security architecture and controls between IT and OT environments.
    • Compliance with regulations and standards.
    • Metrics for OT security effectiveness and efficiency.
    Common Obstacles
    • IT/OT network segmentation and remote access issues, as most OT incidents indicate that the attackers gained access through the IT network, followed by infiltration into OT networks.
    • OT proprietary devices and unsecure protocols use outdated systems which may be insecure by design.
    • Different requirements of OT and IT security – i.e. IT (confidentiality, integrity, and availability) vs. OT (safety, reliability, and availability).
    Info-Tech’s Approach

    Info-Tech’s approach in preparing for IT/OT convergence (i.e. the Plan phase) is coordination and collaboration of IT and OT to:

    • Initiate communication to define roles and responsibilities.
    • Establish governance and build a cross-functional team.
    • Identify convergence components and compliance obligations.
    • Assess readiness.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Returning to isolated OT is not beneficial for the organization, so IT and OT need to learn to collaborate, starting with communication to build trust and to overcome their differences. Next, negotiation is needed on components such as governance and management, security controls on OT environments, compliance with regulations and standards, and establishing metrics for OT security.

    Consequences of unsecure IT/OT convergence

    OT systems were built with no or little security design

    90% of organizations that use OT experienced a security incident. (Fortinet, 2021. Ponemon, 2019.)

    Bar graph comparing three years, 2019-2021, of four different OT security incidents: 'Ransomeware', 'Insider breaches', 'Phishing', and 'Malware'.
    (Source: Fortinet, 2021.)
    Lack of visibility

    86% of OT security-related service engagements lack complete visibility of OT network in 2021 (90% in 2020, 81% in 2019). (Source: “Cybersecurity Year In Review” Dragos, 2022.)

    The need for secure IT/OT convergence

    Important Industrial Control System (ICS) cyber incidents

    2000
    Target: Australian sewage plant. Method: Insider attack. Impact: 265,000 gallons of untreated sewage released.
    2012
    Target: Middle East energy companies. Method: Shamoon. Impact: Overwritten Windows-based systems files.
    2014
    Target: German Steel Mill. Method: Spear-phishing. Impact: Blast furnace failed to shut down.
    2017
    Target: Middle East safety instrumented system (SIS). Method: TRISIS/TRITON. Impact: Modified SIS ladder logic.
    2022
    Target: Viasat’s KA-SAT network. Method: AcidRain. Impact: Significant loss of communication for the Ukrainian military, which relied on Viasat’s services.
    Timeline of Important Industrial Control System (ICS) cyber incidents.
    1903
    Target: Marconi wireless telegraph presentation. Method: Morse code. Impact: Fake message sent “Rats, rats, rats, rats. There was a young fellow of Italy, Who diddled the public quite prettily.”
    2010
    Target: Iranian uranium enrichment plant. Method: Stuxnet. Impact: Compromised programmable logic controllers (PLCs).
    2013
    Target: ICS supply chain. Method: Havex. Impact: Remote Access Trojan (RAT) collected information and uploaded data to command-and-control (C&C) servers
    2016
    Target: Ukrainian power grid. Method: BlackEnergy. Impact: For 1-6 hours, power outages for 230,000 consumers.
    2021
    Target: Colonial Pipeline. Method: DarkSide ransomware. Impact: Compromised billing infrastructure halted the pipeline operation.

    (Source: US Department of Energy, 2018.


    ”Significant Cyber Incidents,” CSIS, 2022


    MIT Technology Review, 2022.)

    Info-Tech Insight

    Most OT incidents start with attacks against IT networks and then move laterally into the OT environment. Therefore, converging IT and OT security will help protect the entire organization.

    Case Study

    Horizon Power
    Logo for Horizon Power.
    INDUSTRY
    Utilities
    SOURCE
    Interview

    Horizon Power is the regional power provider in Western Australia and stands out as a leader not only in the innovative delivery of sustainable power, but also in digital transformation. Horizon Power is quite mature in distributed energy resource management; moving away from centralized generation to decentralized, community-led generation, which reflects in its maturity in converging IT and OT.

    Horizon Power’s IT/OT convergence journey started over six years ago when advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) was installed across its entire service area – an area covering more than one quarter of the Australian continent.

    In these early days of the journey, the focus was on leveraging matured IT approaches such as adoption of cloud services to the OT environment, rather than converging the two. Many years later, Horizon Power has enabled OT data to be more accessible to derive business benefits such as customer usage data using data analytics with the objective of improving the collection and management of the OT data to improve business performance and decision making.

    The IT/OT convergence meets legislation such as the Australian Energy Sector Cyber Security Framework (AESCSF), which has impacts on the architectural layer of cybersecurity that support delivery of the site services.

    Results

    The lessons learned in converging IT and OT from Horizon Power were:

    • Start with forming relationships to build trust and overcome any divide between IT and OT.
    • Collaborate with IT and OT teams to successfully implement solutions, such as vulnerability management and discovery tools for OT assets.
    • Switch the focus from confidentiality and integrity to availability in solutions evaluation
    • Develop training and awareness programs for all levels of the organization.
    • Actively encourage visible sponsorship across management by providing regular updates and consistent messaging.
    • Monitor cybersecurity metrics such as vulnerabilities, mean time to treat vulnerabilities, and intrusion attempts.
    • Manage third-party vendors using a platform which not only performs external monitoring but provides third-party vendors with visibility or potential threats in their organization.

    The Secure IT/OT Convergence Framework

    IT/OT convergence is less of a convergence and more of a migration. The previously entirely separate OT ecosystem is migrating onto the IT ecosystem, to improve access via the internet and to leverage other standard IT capabilities. However, IT and OT are historically very different, and without careful calculation, simply connecting the two systems will result in a problem. Therefore, IT and OT need to learn to live together starting with communication to build trust and to overcome differences between IT and OT.
    Convergence Elements
    • Process convergence
    • Software and data convergence
    • Network and infrastructure convergence
    Target Groups
    • OT leader and teams
    • IT leader and teams
    • Security leader and teams
    Security Components
    • Governance and compliance
    • Security strategy
    • Risk management
    • Security policies
    • IR, DR, BCP
    • Security awareness and training
    • Security architecture and controls

    Plan

    • Initiate communication
    • Define roles and responsibilities
    • Establish governance and build a cross-functional team
    • Identify convergence elements and compliance obligations
    • Assess readiness

    Governance

    Compliance

    Enhance

    • Update security strategy for IT/OT convergence
    • Update risk-management framework for IT/OT convergence
    • Update security policies and procedures for IT/OT convergence
    • Update incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity plan for IT/OT convergence

    Security strategy

    Risk management

    Security policies and procedures

    IR, DR, and BCP

    Monitor &
    Optimize

    • Implement awareness, induction, and cross-training program
    • Design and deploy converging security architecture and controls
    • Establish and monitor IT/OT security metrics on effectiveness and efficiency
    • Red-team followed by blue-team activity for cross-functional team building

    Awareness and cross-training

    Architecture and controls

    Phases
    Color-coded phases with arrows looping back up from the bottom to top phase.
    • Plan
    • Enhance
    • Monitor & Optimize
    Plan Outcomes
    • Mapping business goals to IT/OT security goals
    • RACI chart for priorities and accountabilities
    • Compliance obligations register
    • Readiness checklist
    Enhance Outcomes
    • Security strategy for IT/OT convergence
    • Risk management framework
    • Security policies & procedures
    • IR, DR, BCP
    Monitor & Optimize Outcomes
    • Security awareness and training
    • Security architecture and controls
    Plan Benefits
    • Improved flexibility and less divided IT/OT
    • Improved compliance
    Enhance Benefits
    • Increased strategic common goals
    • Increased efficiency and versatility
    Monitor & Optimize Benefits
    • Enhanced security
    • Reduced costs

    Plan

    Initiate communication

    To initiate communication between the IT and OT teams, it is important to understand how the two groups are different and to build trust to find a holistic approach which overcomes those differences.
    IT OT
    Remote Access Well-defined access control Usually single-level access control
    Interfaces Human Machine, equipment
    Software ERP, CRM, HRIS, payroll SCADA, DCS
    Hardware Servers, switches, PCs PLC, HMI, sensors, motors
    Networks Ethernet Fieldbus
    Focus Reporting, communication Up-time, precision, safety
    Change management Frequent updates and patches Infrequent updates and patches
    Security Confidentiality, integrity, availability Safety, reliability, availability
    Time requirement Normally not time critical Real time

    Info-Tech Insight

    OT interfaces with the physical world while IT system concerns more on cyber world. Thus, the two systems have different properties. The challenge is how to create strategic collaboration between IT and OT based on negotiation, and this needs top-down support.

    Identifying organization goals is the first step in aligning your secure IT/OT convergence with your organization’s vision.

    • Security leaders need to understand the direction the organization is headed in.
    • Wise security investments depend on aligning your security initiatives to the organization.
    • Secure IT/OT convergence should contribute to your organization’s objectives by supporting operational performance and ensuring brand protection and shareholder value.

    Map organizational goals to IT/OT security goals

    Input: Corporate, IT, and OT strategies

    Output: Your goals for the security strategy

    Materials: Secure IT/OT Convergence Requirements Gathering Tool

    Participants: Executive leadership, OT leader, IT leader, Security leader, Compliance, Legal, Risk management

    1. As a group, brainstorm organization goals.
      1. Review relevant corporate, IT, and OT strategies.
    2. Record the most important business goals in the Secure IT/OT Convergence Requirements Gathering Tool. Try to limit the number of business goals to no more than 10 goals. This limitation will be critical to helping focus on your secure IT/OT convergence.
    3. For each goal, identify one to two security alignment goals. These should be objectives for the security strategy that will support the identified organization goals.

    Download the Secure IT/OT Convergence Requirements Gathering Tool

    Record organizational goals

    Sample of the definitions table with columns numbered 1-4.

    Refer to the Secure IT/OT Convergence Framework when filling in the following elements.

    1. Record your identified organization goals in the Goals Cascade tab of the Secure IT/OT Convergence Requirements Gathering Tool.
    2. For each of your organizational goals, identify IT alignment goals.
    3. For each of your organizational goals, identify OT alignment goals.
    4. For each of your organizational goals, select one to two IT/OT security alignment goals from the drop-down lists.

    Establish scope and boundaries

    It is important to know at the outset of the strategy: What are we trying to secure in IT/OT convergence ?
    This includes physical areas we are responsible for, types of data we care about, and departments or IT/OT systems we are responsible for.

    This also includes what is not in scope. For some outsourced services or locations, you may not be responsible for their security. In some business departments, you may not have control of security processes. Ensure that it is made explicit at the outset what will be included and what will be excluded from security considerations.

    Physical Scope and Boundaries

    • How many offices and locations does your organization have?
    • Which locations/offices will be covered by your information security management system (ISMS)?
    • How sensitive is the data residing at each location?
    • You may have many physical locations, and it is not necessary to list each one. Rather, list exceptional cases that are specifically in or out of scope.

    IT Systems Scope and Boundaries

    • There may be hundreds of applications that are run and maintained in your organization. Some of these may be legacy applications. Do you need to secure all your programs or only a select few?
    • Is the system owned or outsourced?
    • Where are you accountable for security?
    • How sensitive is the data that each system handles?

    Organizational Scope and Boundaries

    • Will your ISMS cover all departments within your organization? For example, do certain departments (e.g. operations) not need any security coverage?
    • Do you have the ability to make security decisions for each department?
    • Who are the key stakeholders/data owners for each department?

    OT Systems Scope and Boundaries

    • There may be hundreds of OT systems that are run and maintained in your organization. Do you need to secure all OT or a select subset?
    • Is the system owned or outsourced?
    • Where are you accountable for safety and security?
    • What reliability requirements does each system handle?

    Record scope and boundaries

    Sample Scope and Boundaries table. Refer to the Secure IT/OT Convergence Framework when filling in the following elements:
    • Record your security-related organizational scope, physical location scope, IT systems scope, and OT systems scope in the Scope tab of the Secure IT/OT Convergence Requirements Gathering Tool.
    • For each item scoped, give the rationale for including it in the comments column. Careful attention should be paid to any elements that are not in scope.

    Plan

    Define roles and responsibilities

    Input: List of relevant stakeholders

    Output: Roles and responsibilities for the secure IT/OT convergence program

    Materials: Secure IT/OT Convergence RACI Chart Tool

    Participants: Executive leadership, OT leader, IT leader, Security leader

    There are many factors that impact an organization’s level of effectiveness as it relates to IT/OT convergence. How the two groups interact, what skill sets exist, the level of clarity around roles and responsibilities, and the degree of executive support and alignment are only a few. Thus, it is imperative in the planning phase to identify stakeholders who are:

    • Responsible: The people who do the work to accomplish the activity; they have been tasked with completing the activity and/or getting a decision made.
    • Accountable: The person who is accountable for the completion of the activity. Ideally, this is a single person and will often be an executive or program sponsor.
    • Consulted: The people who provide information. This is usually several people, typically called subject matter experts (SMEs).
    • Informed: The people who are updated on progress. These are resources that are affected by the outcome of the activities and need to be kept up to date.

    Download the Secure IT/OT Convergence RACI Chart Tool

    Define RACI Chart

    Sample RACI chart with only the 'Plan' section enlarged.

    Define responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed (RACI) stakeholders.
    1. Customize the "work units" to best reflect your operation with applicable stakeholders.
    2. Customize the "action“ rows as required.
    Info-Tech Insight

    The roles and responsibilities should be clearly defined. For example, IT network should be responsible for the communication and configuration of all access points and devices from the remote client to the control system DMZ, and controls engineering should be responsible from the control system DMZ to the control system.

    Plan

    Establish governance and build cross-functional team

    To establish governance and build an IT/OT cross-functional team, it is important to understand the operation of OT systems and their interactions with IT within the organization, e.g. ad hoc, centralized, decentralized.

    The maturity ladder with levels 'Fully Converged', 'Collaborative Partners', 'Trusted Resources', 'Affiliated Entities', and 'Siloed' at the bottom. Each level has four maturity indicators listed.

    Info-Tech Insight

    To determine IT/OT convergence maturity level, Info-Tech provides the IT/OT Convergence Self-Evaluation Tool.

    Centralized security governance model example

    Example of a centralized security governance model.

    Plan

    Identify convergence elements and compliance obligations

    To switch the focus from confidentiality and integrity to safety and availability for OT system, it is important to have a common language such as the Purdue model for technical communication.
    • A lot of OT compliance standards are technically focused and do not address governance and management, e.g. IT standards like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. For example, OT system modeling with Purdue model will help IT teams to understand assets, networking, and controls. This understanding is needed to know the possible security solutions and where these solutions could be embedded to the OT system with respect to safety, reliability, and availability.
    • However, deployment of technical solutions or patches to OT system may nullify warranty, so arrangements should be made to manage this with the vendor or manufacturer prior to modification.
    • Finally, OT modernizations such as smart grid together with the advent of IIoT where data flow is becoming less hierarchical have encouraged the birth of a hybrid Purdue model, which maintains segmentation with flexibility for communications.

    Level 5: Enterprise Network

    Level 4: Site Business

    Level 3.5: DMZ
    Example: Patch Management Server, Application Server, Remote Access Server

    Level 3: Site Operations
    Example: SCADA Server, Engineering Workstation, Historian

    Level 2: Area Supervisory Control
    Example: SCADA Client, HMI

    Level 1: Basic Control
    Example: Batch Controls, Discrete Controls, Continuous Process Controls, Safety Controls, e.g. PLCs, RTUs

    Level 0: Process
    Example: Sensors, Actuators, Field Devices

    (Source: “Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture (PERA) Model,” ISA-99.)

    Identify compliance obligations

    To manage compliance obligations, it is important to use a platform which not only performs internal and external monitoring, but also provides third-party vendors with visibility on potential threats in their organization.
    Example table of compliance obligations standards. Example tables of compliance obligations regulations and guidelines.

    Source:
    ENISA, 2013
    DHS, 2009.

    • OT system has compliance obligations with industry regulations and security standards/regulations/guidelines. See the lists given. The lists are not exhaustive.
    • OT system owner can use the standards/regulations/guidelines as a benchmark to determine and manage the security level provided by third parties.
    • It is important to understand the various frameworks and to adhere to the appropriate compliance obligations, e.g. IEC/ISA 62443 - Security for Industrial Automation and Control Systems Series.

    IEC/ISA 62443 - Security for Industrial Automation and Control Systems Series

    International series of standards for asset owners, system integrators, and product manufacturers.
    Diagram of the international series of standards for asset owners.
    (Source: Cooksley, 2021)
    • IEC/ISA 62443 is a comprehensive international series of standards covering security for ICS systems, which recognizes three roles, namely: asset owner, system integrator, and product manufacturer.
    • In IEC/ISA 62443, requirements flow from the asset owner to the product manufacturer, while solutions flow in the opposite direction.
    • For the asset owner who owns and operates a system, IEC 62443-2 enables defining target security level with reference to a threat level and using the standard as a benchmark to determine the current security level.
    • For the system integrator, IEC 62443-3 assists to evaluate the asset owner’s requirements to create a system design. IEC 62443-3 also provides a method for verification that components provided by the product manufacturer are securely developed and support the functionality required.

    Record your compliance obligations

    Refer to the “Goals Cascade” tab of the Secure IT/OT Convergence Requirements Gathering Tool.
    1. Identify your compliance obligations. Most organizations have compliance obligations that must be adhered to. These can include both mandatory and voluntary obligations. Mandatory obligations include:
      1. Laws
      2. Government regulations
      3. Industry standards
      4. Contractual agreements
      Voluntary obligations include standards that the organization has chosen to follow for best practices and any obligations that are required to maintain certifications. Organizations will have many different compliance obligations. For the purposes of your secure IT/OT convergence, include only those that have OT security requirements.
    2. Record your compliance obligations, along with any notes, in your copy of the Secure IT/OT Convergence Requirements Gathering Tool.
    3. Refer to the “Compliance DB” tab for lists of standards/regulations/guidelines.
    Table of mandatory and voluntary security compliance obligations.

    Plan

    Assess readiness

    Readiness checklist for secure IT/OT convergence

    People

    • Define roles and responsibilities on interaction based on skill sets and the degree of support and alignment.
    • Adopt well-established security governance practices for cross-functional teams.
    • Analyze and develop skills required by implementing awareness, induction, and cross-training program.

    Process

    • Conduct a maturity assessment of key processes and highlight interdependencies.
    • Redesign cybersecurity processes for your secure IT/OT convergence program.
    • Develop a baseline and periodically review on risks, security policies and procedures, incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity plan.

    Technology

    • Conduct a maturity assessment and identify convergence elements and compliance obligations.
    • Develop a roadmap and deploy converging security architecture and controls step by step, working with trusted technology partners.
    • Monitor security metrics on effectiveness and efficiency and conduct continuous testing by red-team and blue-team activities.

    (Source: “Grid Modernization: Optimize Opportunities And Minimize Risks,” Info-Tech)

    Enhance

    Update security strategy

    To update security strategy, it is important to actively encourage visible sponsorship across management and to provide regular updates.

    Cycle for updating security strategy: 'Architecture design', 'Procurement', 'Installation', 'Maintenance', 'Decommissioning'.
    (Source: NIST SP 800-82 Rev.3, “Guide to Operational Technology (OT) Security,” NIST, 2022.)
    • OT system life cycle is like the IT system life cycle, starting with architectural design and ending with decommissioning.
    • Currently, IT only gets involved from installation or maintenance, so they may not fully understand the OT system. Therefore, if OT security is compromised, the same personnel who commissioned the OT system (e.g. engineering, electrical, and maintenance specialists) must be involved. Thus, it is important to have the IT team collaborate with the OT team in each stage of the OT system’s life cycle.
    • Finally, it is necessary to have propositional sharing of responsibilities between IT leaders, security leaders, and OT leaders who have broader responsibilities.

    Enhance

    Update risk management framework

    The need for asset and threat taxonomy

    • One of issues in IT/OT convergence is that OT systems focus on production, so IT solutions like security patching or updates may deteriorate a machine or take a machine offline and may not be applicable. For example, some facilities run with reliability of 99.999%, which only allows maximum of 5 minutes and 35 seconds or less of downtime per year.
    • Managing risks requires an understanding of the assets and threats for IT/OT systems. Having a taxonomy of the assets and the threats cand help.
    • Applying normal IT solutions to mitigate security risks may not be applicable in an OT environment, e.g. running an antivirus tool on OT system may remove essential OT operations files. Thus, this approach must be avoided; instead, systems must be rebuilt from golden images.
    Risk management framework.
    (Source: ENISA, 2018.)

    Enhance

    Update security policies and procedures

    • Policy is the link between people, process, and technology for any size of organization. Small organizations may think that having formal policies in place is not necessary for their operations, but compliance is applicable to all organizations, and vulnerabilities affect organizations of all sizes as well. Small organizations partnering with clients or other organizations are sometimes viewed as ideal proxies for attackers.
    • Updating security policies to align with the OT system so that there is a uniform approach to securing both IT and OT environments has several benefits. For example, enhancing the overall security posture as issues are pre-emptively avoided, being better prepared for auditing and compliance requirements, and improving governance especially when OT governance is weak.
    • In updating security policies, it is important to redefine the policy framework to include the OT framework and to prioritize the development of security policies. For example, entities that own or manage US and Canadian electric power grids must comply with North American Electric Reliability Corporation Critical Infrastructure Protection (NERC CIP) standards, specifically CIP-003 for Policy and Governance. This can be achieved by understanding the current state of policies and by right-sizing the policy suite based on a policy hierarchy.
    The White House released an Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity (EO 14028) in 2021 that establishes new requirements on the scope of protection and security policy such that it must include both IT and OT.

    Policy hierarchy example

    This example of a policy hierarchy features templates from Info-Tech’s Develop and Deploy Security Policies and Identify the Best Framework for Your Security Policies research.

    Example policy hierarchy with four levels, from top-down: 'Governance', 'Process-based policies', 'Prescriptive/ technical (for IT including OT elements)', 'Prescriptive/ technical (for users)'.

    Enhance

    Update IR, DR, and BCP

    A proactive approach to security is important, so actions such as updating and testing the incident response plan for OT are a must. (“Cybersecurity Year In Review” Dragos, 2022.)

    1. Customize organizational chart for IT/OT IR, DR, BCP based on governance and management model.
      E.g. ad hoc, internal distributed, internal centralized, combined distributed, and decentralized. (Software Engineering Institute, 2003)
    2. Adjust the authority of the new organizational chart and decide if it requires additional staffing.
      E.g. full authority, shared authority. (Software Engineering Institute, 2003)
    3. Update IR plan, DR plan, and BCP for IT/OT convergence.
      E.g. incorporate zero trust principles for converge network
    4. Testing updated IR plan, DR plan, and BCP.

    Optimize

    Implement awareness, induction, and cross-training

    To develop training and awareness programs for all levels of the organization, it is important to understand the common challenges in IT security that also affect secure IT/OT convergence and how to overcome those challenges.

    Alert Fatigue

    Too many false alarms, too many events to process, and an evolving threat landscape that wastes analysts’ valuable time on mundane tasks such as evidence collection. Meanwhile, only limited time is given for decision and conclusion, which results in fear of missing an incident and alert fatigue.

    Skill Shortages

    Obtaining and retaining cybersecurity-skilled talent is challenging. Organizations need to invest in the people, but not all organizations will be able to invest sufficiently to have their own dedicated security team.

    Lack of Insight

    To report progress, clear metrics are needed. However, cybersecurity still falls short in this area, as the system itself is complex, and much work is siloed. Furthermore, lessons learned are not yet distilled into insights yet for improving future accuracy.

    Lack of Visibility

    Ensuring complete visibility of the threat landscape, risks, and assets requires system integration and consistent workflow across the organization, and the convergence of OT, IoT, and IT enhances this challenge (e.g. machines cannot be scanned during operational uptime).
    (Source: Security Intelligence, 2020.)
    “Cybersecurity staff are feeling burnout and stressed to the extent that many are considering leaving their jobs.” (Danny Palmer, ZDNET News, 2022)

    Awareness may not correspond to readiness

    • An issue with IT/OT convergence training and awareness happens when awareness exists, but the personnel are trained only for IT security and are not trained for OT-specific security. For example, some organizations still use generic topics such as not opening email attachments, when the personnel do not even operate using email nor in a web browsing environment. (“Assessing Operational Readiness,” Dragos, 2022)
    • Meanwhile, as is the case with IT, OT security training topics are broad, such as OT threat intelligence, OT-specific incident response, and tabletop exercises.
    • Hence, it requires the creation of a training program development plan that considers the various audiences and topics and maps them accordingly.
    • Moreover, roles are also evolving due to convergence and modernization. These new roles require an integrative skill set. For example, the grid security & ops team might consist of an IT security specialist, SCADA technician/engineer, and OT/IIOT security specialist where OT/IIOT security specialist is a new role. (Grid Modernization: Optimize Opportunities and Minimize Risks,” Info-Tech)
    • In conclusion, it is important to approach talent development with an open mind. The ability to learn and flexibility in the face of change are important attributes, and technical skill sets can be improved with certifications and training.
    “One area regularly observed by Dragos is a weakness in overall cyber readiness and training tailored specific to the OT environment.” (“Assessing Operational Technology,” Dragos, 2022.)

    Certifications

    What are the options?
    • One of issues in certification is the complexity on relevancy in topics with respect to roles and levels.
    • An example solution is the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA)’s approach to analyzing existing certifications by orientation, scope, and supporting bodies, grouped into specific certifications, relevant certifications, and safety certifications.

    Specific cybersecurity certification of ICS/SCADA
    Example: ISA-99/IEC 62443 Cybersecurity Certificate Program, GIAC Global Industrial Cyber Security Professional (GICSP), Certified SCADA Security Architect (CSSA), EC-Council ICS/SCADA Cybersecurity Training Course.

    Other relevant certification schemes
    Example: Network and Information Security (NIS) Driving License, ISA Certified Automation Professional (CAP), Industrial Security Professional Certification (NCMS-ISP).

    Safety Certifications
    Example: Board of Certified Safety Professionals (BCSP), European Network of Safety and Health Professional Organisations (ENSHPO).

    Order of certifications with 'Orientation' at the top, 'Scope', then 'Support'.(Source: ENISA, 2015.)

    Optimize

    Design and deploy converging security architecture and controls

    • IT/OT convergence architecture can be modeled as a layered structure based on security. In this structure, the bottom layer is referred as “OT High-Security Zone” and the topmost layer is “IT Low-Security Zone.” In this model, each layer has its own set of controls configured and acts like an additional layer of security for the zone underneath it.
    • The data flows from the “OT High-Security Zone” to the topmost layer, the “IT Low-Security Zone,” and the traffic must be verified to pass to another zone based on the need-to-know principle.
    • In the normal control flow within the “OT High-Security Zone” from level 3 to level 0, the traffic must be verified to pass to another level based on the principle of least privilege.
    • Remote access (dotted arrow) is allowed under strict access control and change control based on the zero-trust principle with clear segmentation and a point for disconnection between the “OT High-Security Zone” and the “OT Low-Security Zone”
    • This model simplifies the security process, as if the lower layers have been compromised, then the compromise can be confined on that layer, and it also prevents lateral movement as access is always verified.
    Diagram for the deployments of converging security architecture.(Source: “Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture (PERA) model,” ISA-99.)

    Off-the-shelf solutions

    Getting the right recipe: What criteria to consider?

    Image of a shopping cart with the four headlines on the right listed in order from top to bottom.
    Icon of an eye crossed out. Visibility and Asset Management

    Passive data monitoring using various protocol layers, active queries to devices, or parsing configuration files of OT, IoT, and IT environments on assets, processes, and connectivity paths.

    Icon of gears. Threat Detection, Mitigation, and Response (+ Hunting)

    Automation of threat analysis (signature-based, specification-based, anomaly-based, sandboxing) not only in IT but also in relevant environments, e.g. IoT, IIoT, and OT on assets, data, network, and orchestration with threat intelligence sharing and analytics.

    Icon of a check and pen. Risk Assessment and Vulnerability Management

    Risk scoring approach (qualitative, quantitative) based on variables such as behavioral patterns and geolocation. Patching and vulnerability management.

    Icon of a wallet. Usability, Architecture, Cost

    The user and administrative experience, multiple deployment options and extensive integration capabilities, and affordability.

    Optimize

    Establish and monitor IT/OT security metrics for effectiveness and efficiency

    Role of security metrics in a cybersecurity program (EPRI, 2017.)
    • Requirements for secure IT/OT are derived from mandatory or voluntary compliance, e.g. NERC CIP, NIST SP 800-53.
    • Frameworks for secure IT/OT are used to build and implement security, e.g. NIST CSF, AESCSF.
    • Maturity of secure IT/OT is used to measure the state of security, e.g. C2M2, CMMC.
    • Security metrics have the role of measuring effectiveness and efficiency.

    Icon of a person ascending stairs.
    Safety

    OT interfaces with the physical world. Thus, metrics based on risks related with life, health, and safety are crucial. These metrics motivate personnel by making clear why they should care about security. (EPRI, 2017.)

    Icon of a person ascending stairs.
    Business Performance

    The impact of security on the business can be measured in various metrics such as operational metrics, service level agreements (SLAs), and financial metrics. (BMC, 2022.)

    Icon of a person ascending stairs.
    Technology Performance

    Early detection will lead to faster remediation and less damage. Therefore, metrics such as maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) and mean time to recovery (MTR) indicate system reliability. (Dark Reading, 2022)

    Icon of a person ascending stairs.
    Security Culture

    The metrics for the overall quality of security culture with indicators such as compliance and audit, vulnerability management, and training and awareness.

    Further information

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Sample of 'Build an Information Security Strategy'.

    Build an Information Security Strategy

    Info-Tech has developed a highly effective approach to building an information security strategy – an approach that has been successfully tested and refined for over seven years with hundreds of organizations.

    This unique approach includes tools for ensuring alignment with business objectives, assessing organizational risk and stakeholder expectations, enabling a comprehensive current-state assessment, prioritizing initiatives, and building a security roadmap.

    Sample of 'Preparing for Technology Convergence in Manufacturing'.

    Preparing for Technology Convergence in Manufacturing

    Information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) teams have a long history of misalignment and poor communication.

    Stakeholder expectations and technology convergence create the need to leave the past behind and build a culture of collaboration.

    Sample of 'Implement a Security Governance and Management Program'.

    Implement a Security Governance and Management Program

    Your security governance and management program needs to be aligned with business goals to be effective.

    This approach also helps provide a starting point to develop a realistic governance and management program.

    This project will guide you through the process of implementing and monitoring a security governance and management program that prioritizes security while keeping costs to a minimum.

    Bibliography

    Assante, Michael J. and Robert M. Lee. “The Industrial Control System Cyber Kill Chain.” SANS Institute, 2015.

    “Certification of Cyber Security Skills of ICS/SCADA Professionals.” European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), 2015. Web.

    Cooksley, Mark. “The IEC 62443 Series of Standards: A Product Manufacturer‘s Perspective.” YouTube, uploaded by Plainly Explained, 27 Apr. 2021. Accessed 26 Aug. 2022.

    “Cyber Security Metrics for the Electric Sector: Volume 3.” Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), 2017.

    “Cybersecurity and Physical Security Convergence.” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Accessed 19 May 2022.

    “Cybersecurity in Operational Technology: 7 Insights You Need to Know,” Ponemon, 2019. Web.

    “Developing an Operational Technology and Information Technology Incident Response Plan.” Public Safety Canada, 2020. Accessed 6 Sep. 2022.

    Gilsinn, Jim. “Assessing Operational Technology (OT) Cybersecurity Maturity.” Dragos, 2021. Accessed 02 Sep. 2022.

    “Good Practices for Security of Internet of Things.” European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), 2018. Web.

    Greenfield, David. “Is the Purdue Model Still Relevant?” AutomationWorld. Accessed 1 Sep. 2022

    Hemsley, Kevin E., and Dr. Robert E. Fisher. “History of Industrial Control System Cyber Incidents.” US Department of Energy (DOE), 2018. Accessed 29 Aug. 2022.

    “ICS Security Related Working Groups, Standards and Initiatives.” European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), 2013.

    Killcrece, Georgia, et al. “Organizational Models for Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs).” Software Engineering Institute, CMU, 2003.

    Liebig, Edward. “Security Culture: An OT Survival Story.” Dark Reading, 30 Aug. 2022. Accessed 29 Aug. 2022.

    Bibliography

    O'Neill, Patrick. “Russia Hacked an American Satellite Company One Hour Before the Ukraine Invasion.” MIT Technology Review, 10 May 2022. Accessed 26 Aug. 2022.

    Palmer, Danny. “Your Cybersecurity Staff Are Burned Out – And Many Have Thought About Quitting.” Zdnet, 08 Aug. 2022. Accessed 19 Aug. 2022.

    Pathak, Parag. “What Is Threat Management? Common Challenges and Best Practices.” SecurityIntelligence, 23 Jan. 2020. Web.

    Raza, Muhammad. “Introduction To IT Metrics & KPIs.” BMC, 5 May 2022. Accessed 12 Sep. 2022.

    “Recommended Practice: Developing an Industrial Control Systems Cybersecurity Incident Response Capability.” Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Oct. 2009. Web.

    Sharma, Ax. “Sigma Rules Explained: When and How to Use Them to Log Events.” CSO Online, 16 Jun. 2018. Accessed 15 Aug. 2022.

    “Significant Cyber Incidents.” Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Accessed 1 Sep. 2022.

    Tom, Steven, et al. “Recommended Practice for Patch Management of Control Systems.” Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 2008. Web.

    “2021 ICS/OT Cybersecurity Year In Review.” Dragos, 2022. Accessed 6 Sep. 2022.

    “2021 State of Operational Technology and Cybersecurity Report,” Fortinet, 2021. Web.

    Zetter, Kim. “Pre-Stuxnet, Post-Stuxnet: Everything Has Changed, Nothing Has Changed.” Black Hat USA, 08 Aug. 2022. Accessed 19 Aug. 2022.

    Research Contributors and Experts

    Photo of Jeff Campbell, Manager, Technology Shared Services, Horizon Power, AU. Jeff Campbell
    Manager, Technology Shared Services
    Horizon Power, AU

    Jeff Campbell has more than 20 years' experience in information security, having worked in both private and government organizations in education, finance, and utilities sectors.

    Having focused on developing and implementing information security programs and controls, Jeff is tasked with enabling Horizon Power to capitalize on IoT opportunities while maintaining the core security basics of confidentiality, integrity and availability.

    As Horizon Power leads the energy transition and moves to become a digital utility, Jeff ensures the security architecture that supports these services provides safer and more reliable automation infrastructures.

    Christopher Harrington
    Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
    Carolinas Telco Federal Credit Union

    Frank DePaola
    Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)
    Enpro

    Kwasi Boakye-Boateng
    Cybersecurity Researcher
    Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity

    Domino – Maintain, Commit to, or Vacate?

    If you have a Domino/Notes footprint that is embedded within your business units and business processes and is taxing your support organization, you may have met resistance from the business and been asked to help the organization migrate away from the Lotus Notes platform. The Lotus Notes platform was long used by technology and businesses and a multipurpose solution that, over the years, became embedded within core business applications and processes.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    For organizations that are struggling to understand their options for the Domino platform, the depth of business process usage is typically the biggest operational obstacle. Migrating off the Domino platform is a difficult option for most organizations due to business process and application complexity. In addition, migrating clients have to resolve the challenges with more than one replaceable solution.

    Impact and Result

    The most common tactic is for the organization to better understand their Domino migration options and adopt an application rationalization strategy for the Domino applications entrenched within the business. Options include retiring, replatforming, migrating, or staying with your Domino platform.

    Domino – Maintain, Commit to, or Vacate? Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Domino – Maintain, Commit to, or Vacate? – A brief deck that outlines key migration options for HCL Domino platforms.

    This blueprint will help you assess the fit, purpose, and price of Domino options; develop strategies for overcoming potential challenges; and determine the future of Domino for your organization.

    • Domino – Maintain, Commit to, or Vacate? Storyboard

    2. Application Rationalization Tool – A tool to understand your business-developed applications, their importance to business process, and the potential underlying financial impact.

    Use this tool to input the outcomes of your various application assessments.

    • Application Rationalization Tool

    Infographic

    Further reading

    Domino – Maintain, Commit to, or Vacate?

    Lotus Domino still lives, and you have options for migrating away from or remaining with the platform.

    Executive Summary

    Info-Tech Insight

    “HCL announced that they have somewhere in the region of 15,000 Domino customers worldwide, and also claimed that that number is growing. They also said that 42% of their customers are already on v11 of Domino, and that in the year or so since that version was released, it’s been downloaded 78,000 times. All of which suggests that the Domino platform is, in fact, alive and well.”
    – Nigel Cheshire in Team Studio

    Your Challenge

    You have a Domino/Notes footprint embedded within your business units and business processes. This is taxing your support organization; you are meeting resistance from the business, and you are now asked to help the organization migrate away from the Lotus Notes platform. The Lotus Notes platform was long used by technology and businesses as a multipurpose solution that, over the years, became embedded within core business applications and processes.

    Common Obstacles

    For organizations that are struggling to understand their options for the Domino platform, the depth of business process usage is typically the biggest operational obstacle. Migrating off the Domino platform is a difficult option for most organizations due to business process and application complexity. In addition, migrating clients have to resolve the challenges with more than one replaceable solution.

    Info-Tech Approach

    The most common tactic is for the organization to better understand their Domino migration options and adopt an application rationalization strategy for the Domino applications entrenched within the business. Options include retiring, replatforming, migrating, or staying with your Domino platform.

    Review

    Is “Lotus” Domino still alive?

    Problem statement

    The number of member engagements with customers regarding the Domino platform has, as you might imagine, dwindled in the past couple of years. While many members have exited the platform, there are still many members and organizations that have entered a long exit program, but with how embedded Domino is in business processes, the migration has slowed and been met with resistance. Some organizations had replatformed the applications but found that the replacement target state was inadequate and introduced friction because the new solution was not a low-code/business-user-driven environment. This resulted in returning the Domino platform to production and working through a strategy to maintain the environment.

    This research is designed for:

    • IT strategic direction decision-makers
    • IT managers responsible for an existing Domino platform
    • Organizations evaluating migration options for mission-critical applications running on Domino

    This research will help you:

    1. Evaluate migration options.
    2. Assess the fit and purpose.
    3. Consider strategies for overcoming potential challenges.
    4. Determine the future of this platform for your organization.

    The “everything may work” scenario

    Adopt and expand

    Believe it or not, Domino and Notes are still options to consider when determining a migration strategy. With HCL still committed to the platform, there are options organizations should seek to better understand rather than assuming SharePoint will solve all. In our research, we consider:

    Importance to current business processes

    • Importance of use
    • Complexity in migrations
    • Choosing a new platform

    Available tools to facilitate

    • Talent/access to skills
    • Economies of scale/lower cost at scale
    • Access to technology

    Info-Tech Insight

    With multiple options to consider, take the time to clearly understand the application rationalization process within your decision making.

    • Archive/retire
    • Application migration
    • Application replatform
    • Stay right where you are

    Eliminate your bias – consider the advantages

    “There is a lot of bias toward Domino; decisions are being made by individuals who know very little about Domino and more importantly, they do not know how it impacts business environment.”

    – Rob Salerno, Founder & CTO, Rivet Technology Partners

    Domino advantages include:

    Modern Cloud & Application

    • No-code/low-code technology

    Business-Managed Application

    • Business written and supported
    • Embrace the business support model
    • Enterprise class application

    Leverage the Application Taxonomy & Build

    • A rapid application development platform
    • Develop skill with HCL training

    HCL Domino is a supported and developed platform

    Why consider HCL?

    • Consider scheduling a Roadmap Session with HCL. This is an opportunity to leverage any value in the mission and brand of your organization to gain insights or support from HCL.
    • Existing Domino customers are not the only entities seeking certainty with the platform. Software solution providers that support enterprise IT infrastructure ecosystems (backup, for example) will also be seeking clarity for the future of the platform. HCL will be managing these relationships through the channel/partner management programs, but our observations indicate that Domino integrations are scarce.
    • HCL Domino should be well positioned feature-wise to support low-code/NoSQL demands for enterprises and citizen developers.

    Visualize Your Application Roadmap

    1. Focus on the application portfolio and crafting a roadmap for rationalization.
      • The process is intended to help you determine each application’s functional and technical adequacy for the business process that it supports.
    2. Document your findings on respective application capability heatmaps.
      • This drives your organization to a determination of application dispositions and provides a tool to output various dispositions for you as a roadmap.
    3. Sort the application portfolio into a disposition status (keep, replatform, retire, consolidate, etc.)
      • This information will be an input into any cloud migration or modernization as well as consolidation of the infrastructure, licenses, and support for them.

    Our external support perspective

    by Darin Stahl

    Member Feedback

    • Some members who have remaining Domino applications in production – while the retire, replatform, consolidate, or stay strategy is playing out – have concerns about the challenges with ongoing support and resources required for the platform. In those cases, some have engaged external services providers to augment staff or take over as managed services.
    • While there could be existing support resources (in house or on retainer), the member might consider approaching an external provider who could help backstop the single resource or even provide some help with the exit strategies. At this point, the conversation would be helpful in any case. One of our members engaged an external provider in a Statement of Work for IBM Domino Administration focused on one-time events, Tier 1/Tier 2 support, and custom ad hoc requests.
    • The augmentation with the managed services enabled the member to shift key internal resources to a focus on executing the exit strategies (replatform, retire, consolidate), since the business knowledge was key to that success.
    • The member also very aggressively governed the Domino environment support needs to truly technical issues/maintenance of known and supported functionality rather than coding new features (and increasing risk and cost in a migration down the road) – in short, freezing new features and functionality unless required for legal compliance or health and safety.
    • There obviously are other providers, but at this point Info-Tech no longer maintains a market view or scan of those related to Domino due to low member demand.

    Domino database assessments

    Consider the database.

    • Domino database assessments should be informed through the lens of a multi-value database, like jBase, or an object system.
    • The assessment of the databases, often led by relational database subject matter experts grounded in normalized databases, can be a struggle since Notes databases must be denormalized.
    Key/Value Column

    Use case: Heavily accessed, rarely updated, large amounts of data
    Data Model: Values are stored in a hash table of keys.
    Fast access to small data values, but querying is slow
    Processor friendly
    Based on amazon's Dynamo paper
    Example: Project Voldemort used by LinkedIn

    this is a Key/Value example

    Use case: High availability, multiple data centers
    Data Model: Storage blocks of data are contained in columns
    Handles size well
    Based on Google's BigTable
    Example: Hadoop/Hbase used by Facebook and Yahoo

    This is a Column Example
    Document Graph

    Use case: Rapid development, Web and programmer friendly
    Data Model: Stores documents made up of tagged elements. Uses Key/Value collections
    Better query abilities than Key/Value databases.
    Inspired by Lotus Notes.
    Example: CouchDB used by BBC

    This is a Document Example

    Use case: Best at dealing with complexity and relationships/networks
    Data model: Nodes and relationships.
    Data is processed quickly
    Inspired by Euler and graph theory
    Can easily evolve schemas
    Example: Neo4j

    This is a Graph Example

    Understand your options

    Archive/Retire

    Store the application data in a long-term repository with the means to locate and read it for regulatory and compliance purposes.

    Migrate

    Migrate to a new version of the application, facilitating the process of moving software applications from one computing environment to another.

    Replatform

    Replatforming is an option for transitioning an existing Domino application to a new modern platform (i.e. cloud) to leverage the benefits of a modern deployment model.

    Stay

    Review the current Domino platform roadmap and understand HCL’s support model. Keep the application within the Domino platform.

    Archive/retire

    Retire the application, storing the application data in a long-term repository.

    Abstract

    The most common approach is to build the required functionality in whatever new application/solution is selected, then archive the old data in PDFs and documents.

    Typically this involves archiving the data and leveraging Microsoft SharePoint and the new collaborative solutions, likely in conjunction with other software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.

    Advantages

    • Reduce support cost.
    • Consolidate applications.
    • Reduce risk.
    • Reduce compliance and security concerns.
    • Improve business processes.

    Considerations

    • Application transformation
    • eDiscovery costs
    • Legal implications
    • Compliance implications
    • Business process dependencies

    Info-Tech Insights

    Be aware of the costs associated with archiving. The more you archive, the more it will cost you.

    Application migration

    Migrate to a new version of the application

    Abstract

    An application migration is the managed process of migrating or moving applications (software) from one infrastructure environment to another.

    This can include migrating applications from one data center to another data center, from a data center to a cloud provider, or from a company’s on-premises system to a cloud provider’s infrastructure.

    Advantages

    • Reduce hardware costs.
    • Leverage cloud technologies.
    • Improve scalability.
    • Improve disaster recovery.
    • Improve application security.

    Considerations

    • Data extraction, starting from the document databases in NSF format and including security settings about users and groups granted to read and write single documents, which is a powerful feature of Lotus Domino documents.
    • File extraction, starting from the document databases in NSF format, which can contain attachments and RTF documents and embedded files.
    • Design of the final relational database structure; this activity should be carried out without taking into account the original structure of the data in Domino files or the data conversion and loading, from the extracted format to the final model.
    • Design and development of the target-state custom applications based on the new data model and the new selected development platform.

    Application replatform

    Transition an existing Domino application to a new modern platform

    Abstract

    This type of arrangement is typically part of an application migration or transformation. In this model, client can “replatform” the application into an off-premises hosted provider platform. This would yield many benefits of cloud but in a different scaling capacity as experienced with commodity workloads (e.g. Windows, Linux) and the associated application.

    Two challenges are particularly significant when migrating or replatforming Domino applications:

    • The application functionality/value must be reproduced/replaced with not one but many applications, either through custom coding or a commercial-off-the-shelf/SaaS solution.
    • Notes “databases” are not relational databases and will not migrate simply to an SQL database while retaining the same business value. Notes databases are essentially NoSQL repositories and are difficult to normalize.

    Advantages

    • Leverage cloud technologies.
    • Improve scalability.
    • Align to a SharePoint platform.
    • Improve disaster recovery.
    • Improve application security.

    Considerations

    • Application replatform resource effort
    • Network bandwidth
    • New platform terms and conditions
    • Secure connectivity and communication
    • New platform security and compliance
    • Degree of complexity

    Info-Tech Insights

    There is a difference between a migration and a replatform application strategy. Determine which solution aligns to the application requirements.

    Stay with HCL

    Stay with HCL, understanding its future commitment to the platform.

    Abstract

    Following the announced acquisition of IBM Domino and up until around December 2019, HCL had published no future roadmap for the platform. The public-facing information/website at the time stated that HCL acquired “the product family and key lab services to deliver professional services.” Again, there was no mention or emphasis on upcoming new features for the platform. The product offering on their website at the time stated that HCL would leverage its services expertise to advise clients and push applications into four buckets:

    1. Replatform
    2. Retire
    3. Move to cloud
    4. Modernize

    That public-facing messaging changed with release 11.0, which had references to IBM rebranded to HCL for the Notes and Domino product – along with fixes already inflight. More information can be found on HCL’s FAQ page.

    Advantages

    • Known environment
    • Domino is a supported platform
    • Domino is a developed platform
    • No-code/low-code optimization
    • Business developed applications
    • Rapid application framework

    This is the HCL Domino Logo

    Understand your tools

    Many tools are available to help evaluate or migrate your Domino Platform. Here are a few common tools for you to consider.

    Notes Archiving & Notes to SharePoint

    Summary of Vendor

    “SWING Software delivers content transformation and archiving software to over 1,000 organizations worldwide. Our solutions uniquely combine key collaborative platforms and standard document formats, making document production, publishing, and archiving processes more efficient.”*

    Tools

    Lotus Notes Data Migration and Archiving: Preserve historical data outside of Notes and Domino

    Lotus Note Migration: Replacing Lotus Notes. Boost your migration by detaching historical data from Lotus Notes and Domino.

    Headquarters

    Croatia

    Best fit

    • Application archive and retire
    • Migration to SharePoint

    This is an image of the SwingSoftware Logo

    * swingsoftware.com

    Domino Migration to SharePoint

    Summary of Vendor

    “Providing leading solutions, resources, and expertise to help your organization transform its collaborative environment.”*

    Tools

    Notes Domino Migration Solutions: Rivit’s industry-leading solutions and hardened migration practice will help you eliminate Notes Domino once and for all.

    Rivive Me: Migrate Notes Domino applications to an enterprise web application

    Headquarters

    Canada

    Best fit

    • Application Archive & Retire
    • Migration to SharePoint

    This is an image of the RiVit Logo

    * rivit.ca

    Lotus Notes to M365

    Summary of Vendor

    “More than 300 organizations across 40+ countries trust skybow to build no-code/no-compromise business applications & processes, and skybow’s community of customers, partners, and experts grows every day.”*

    Tools

    SkyBow Studio: The low-code platform fully integrated into Microsoft 365

    Headquarters:

    Switzerland

    Best fit

    • Application Archive & Retire
    • Migration to SharePoint

    This is an image of the SkyBow Logo

    * skybow.com | About skybow

    Notes to SharePoint Migration

    Summary of Vendor

    “CIMtrek is a global software company headquartered in the UK. Our mission is to develop user-friendly, cost-effective technology solutions and services to help companies modernize their HCL Domino/Notes® application landscape and support their legacy COBOL applications.”*

    Tools

    CIMtrek SharePoint Migrator: Reduce the time and cost of migrating your IBM® Lotus Notes® applications to Office 365, SharePoint online, and SharePoint on premises.

    Headquarters

    United Kingdom

    Best fit

    • Application replatform
    • Migration to SharePoint

    This is an image of the CIMtrek Logo

    * cimtrek.com | About CIMtrek

    Domino replatform/Rapid application selection framework

    Summary of Vendor

    “4WS.Platform is a rapid application development tool used to quickly create multi-channel applications including web and mobile applications.”*

    Tools

    4WS.Platform is available in two editions: Community and Enterprise.
    The Platform Enterprise Edition, allows access with an optional support pack.

    4WS.Platform’s technical support provides support services to the users through support contracts and agreements.

    The platform is a subscription support services for companies using the product which will allow customers to benefit from the knowledge of 4WS.Platform’s technical experts.

    Headquarters

    Italy

    Best fit

    • Application replatform

    This is an image of the 4WS PLATFORM Logo

    * 4wsplatform.org

    Activity

    Understand your Domino options

    Application Rationalization Exercise

    Info-Tech Insight

    Application rationalization is the perfect exercise to fully understand your business-developed applications, their importance to business process, and the potential underlying financial impact.

    This activity involves the following participants:

    • IT strategic direction decision-makers.
    • IT managers responsible for an existing Domino platform
    • Organizations evaluating platforms for mission-critical applications.

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Completed Application Rationalization Tool

    Application rationalization exercise

    Use this Application Rationalization Tool to input the outcomes of your various application assessments

    In the Application Entry tab:

    • Input your application inventory or subset of apps you intend to rationalize, along with some basic information for your apps.

    In the Business Value & TCO Comparison tab, determine rationalization priorities.

    • Input your business value scores and total cost of ownership (TCO) of applications.
    • Review the results of this analysis to determine which apps should require additional analysis and which dispositions should be prioritized.

    In the Disposition Selection tab:

    • Add to or adapt our list of dispositions as appropriate.

    In the Rationalization Inputs tab:

    • Add or adapt the disposition criteria of your application rationalization framework as appropriate.
    • Input the results of your various assessments for each application.

    In the Disposition Settings tab:

    • Add or adapt settings that generate recommended dispositions based on your rationalization inputs.

    In the Disposition Recommendations tab:

    • Review and compare the rationalization results and confirm if dispositions are appropriate for your strategy.

    In the Timeline Considerations tab:

    • Enter the estimated timeline for when you execute your dispositions.

    In the Portfolio Roadmap tab:

    • Review and present your roadmap and rationalization results.

    Follow the instructions to generate recommended dispositions and populate an application portfolio roadmap.

    This image depicts a scatter plot graph where the X axis is labeled Business Value, and the Y Axis is labeled Cost. On the graph, the following datapoints are displayed: SF; HRIS; ERP; ALM; B; A; C; ODP; SAS

    Info-Tech Insight

    Watch out for misleading scores that result from poorly designed criteria weightings.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Build an Application Rationalization Framework

    Manage your application portfolio to minimize risk and maximize value.

    Embrace Business-Managed Applications

    Empower the business to implement their own applications with a trusted business-IT relationship.

    Satisfy Digital End Users With Low- and No-Code

    Extend IT, automation, and digital capabilities to the business with the right tools, good governance, and trusted organizational relationships.

    Maximize the Benefits from Enterprise Applications with a Center of Excellence

    Optimize your organization’s enterprise application capabilities with a refined and scalable methodology.

    Drive Successful Sourcing Outcomes With a Robust RFP Process

    Leverage your vendor sourcing process to get better results.

    Research Authors

    Darin Stahl, Principal Research Advisor, Info-Tech Research Group

    Darin Stahl, Principal Research Advisor,
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Darin is a Principal Research Advisor within the Infrastructure practice, leveraging 38+ years of experience. His areas of focus include IT operations management, service desk, infrastructure outsourcing, managed services, cloud infrastructure, DRP/BCP, printer management, managed print services, application performance monitoring, managed FTP, and non-commodity servers (zSeries, mainframe, IBM i, AIX, Power PC).

    Troy Cheeseman, Practice Lead, Info-Tech Research Group

    Troy Cheeseman, Practice Lead,
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Troy has over 24 years of experience and has championed large enterprise-wide technology transformation programs, remote/home office collaboration and remote work strategies, BCP, IT DRP, IT operations and expense management programs, international right placement initiatives, and large technology transformation initiatives (M&A). Additionally, he has deep experience working with IT solution providers and technology (cloud) startups.

    Research Contributors

    Rob Salerno, Founder & CTO, Rivit Technology Partners

    Rob Salerno, Founder & CTO, Rivit Technology Partners

    Rob is the Founder and Chief Technology Strategist for Rivit Technology Partners. Rivit is a system integrator that delivers unique IT solutions. Rivit is known for its REVIVE migration strategy which helps companies leave legacy platforms (such as Domino) or move between versions of software. Rivit is the developer of the DCOM Application Archiving solution.

    Bibliography

    Cheshire, Nigel. “Domino v12 Launch Keeps HCL Product Strategy On Track.” Team Studio, 19 July 2021. Web.

    “Is LowCode/NoCode the best platform for you?” Rivit Technology Partners, 15 July 2021. Web.

    McCracken, Harry. “Lotus: Farewell to a Once-Great Tech Brand.” TIME, 20 Nov. 2012. Web.

    Sharwood, Simon. “Lotus Notes refuses to die, again, as HCL debuts Domino 12.” The Register, 8 June 2021. Web.

    Woodie, Alex. “Domino 12 Comes to IBM i.” IT Jungle, 16 Aug. 2021. Web.

    Service Desk

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}11|cart{/j2store}
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    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 9.4/10
    • member rating average dollars saved: $22,900
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    • Parent Category Name: Infra and Operations
    • Parent Category Link: /infra-and-operations
    The service desk is typically the first point of contact for clients and staff who need something. Make sure your team is engaged, involved, knowledgeable, and gives excellent customer service.

    Standardize the Service Desk

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}477|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 9.5/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: $24,155 Average $ Saved
    • member rating average days saved: 24 Average Days Saved
    • Parent Category Name: Service Desk
    • Parent Category Link: /service-desk
    • Not everyone embraces their role in service support. Specialists would rather work on projects than provide service support.
    • The Service Desk lacks processes and workflows to provide consistent service. Service desk managers struggle to set and meet service-level expectations, which further compromises end-user satisfaction.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Service desk improvement is an exercise in organizational change. Engage specialists across the IT organization in building the solution. Establish a single service-support team across the IT group and enforce it with a cooperative, customer-focused culture.
    • Don’t be fooled by a tool that’s new. A new service desk tool alone won’t solve the problem. Service desk maturity improvements depend on putting in place the right people and processes to support the technology.

    Impact and Result

    • Create a consistent customer service experience for service desk patrons, and increase efficiency, first-call resolution, and end-user satisfaction with the Service Desk.
    • Decrease time and cost to resolve service desk tickets.
    • Understand and address reporting needs to address root causes and measure success and build a solid foundation for future IT service improvements.

    Standardize the Service Desk Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Standardize the Service Desk Research – A step-by-step document that helps you improve customer service by driving consistency in your support approach and meet SLAs.

    Use this blueprint to standardize your service desk by assessing your current capability and laying the foundations for your service desk, design an effective incident management workflow, design a request fulfillment process, and apply the discussions and activities to make an actionable plan for improving your service desk.

    • Standardize the Service Desk – Phases 1-4

    2. Service Desk Maturity Assessment – An assessment tool to help guide process improvement efforts and track progress.

    This tool is designed to assess your service desk process maturity, identify gaps, guide improvement efforts, and measure your progress.

    • Service Desk Maturity Assessment

    3. Service Desk Project Summary – A template to help you organize process improvement initiatives using examples.

    Use this template to organize information about the service desk challenges that the organization is facing, make the case to build a right-sized service desk to address those challenges, and outline the recommended process changes.

    • Service Desk Project Summary

    4. Service Desk Roles and Responsibilities Guide – An analysis tool to determine the right roles and build ownership.

    Use the RACI template to determine roles for your service desk initiatives and to build ownership around them. Use the template and replace it with your organization's information.

    • Service Desk Roles and Responsibilities Guide

    5. Incident Management and Service Desk Standard Operating Procedure – A template designed to help service managers kick-start the standardization of service desk processes.

    The template will help you identify service desk roles and responsibilities, build ticket management processes, put in place sustainable knowledgebase practices, document ticket prioritization scheme and SLO, and document ticket workflows.

    • Incident Management and Service Desk SOP

    6. Ticket and Call Quality Assessment Tool – An assessment tool to check in on ticket and call quality quarterly and improve the quality of service desk data.

    Use this tool to help review the quality of tickets handled by agents and discuss each technician's technical capabilities to handle tickets.

    • Ticket and Call Quality Assessment Tool

    7. Workflow Library – A repository of typical workflows.

    The Workflow Library provides examples of typical workflows that make up the bulk of the incident management and request fulfillment processes at the service desk.

    • Incident Management and Service Desk Workflows (Visio)
    • Incident Management and Service Desk Workflows (PDF)

    8. Service Desk Ticket Categorization Schemes – A repository of ticket categories.

    The Ticket Categorization Schemes provide examples of ticket categories to organize the data in the service desk tool and produce reports that help managers manage the service desk and meet business requirements.

    • Service Desk Ticket Categorization Schemes

    9. Knowledge Manager – A job description template that includes a detailed explication of the responsibilities and expectations of a Knowledge Manager role.

    The Knowledge Manager's role is to collect, synthesize, organize, and manage corporate information in support of business units across the enterprise.

    • Knowledge Manager

    10. Knowledgebase Article Template – A comprehensive record of the incident management process.

    An accurate and comprehensive record of the incident management process, including a description of the incident, any workarounds identified, the root cause (if available), and the profile of the incident's source, will improve incident resolution time.

    • Knowledgebase Article Template

    11. Sample Communication Plan – A sample template to guide your communications around the integration and implementation of your overall service desk improvement initiatives.

    Use this template to develop a communication plan that outlines what stakeholders can expect as the process improvements recommended in the Standardize the Service Desk blueprint are implemented.

    • Sample Communication Plan

    12. Service Desk Roadmap – A structured roadmap tool to help build your service desk initiatives timeline.

    The Service Desk Roadmap helps track outstanding implementation activities from your service desk standardization project. Use the roadmap tool to define service desk project tasks, their owners, priorities, and timeline.

    • Service Desk Roadmap
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Standardize the Service Desk

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Lay Service Desk Foundations

    The Purpose

    Discover your challenges and understand what roles, metrics, and ticket handling procedures are needed to tackle the challenges.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Set a clear understanding about the importance of service desk to your organization and service desk best practices.

    Activities

    1.1 Assess current state of the service desk.

    1.2 Review service desk and shift-left strategy.

    1.3 Identify service desk metrics and reports.

    1.4 Identify ticket handling procedures

    Outputs

    Current state assessment

    Shift-left strategy and implications

    Service desk metrics and reports

    Ticket handling procedures

    2 Design Incident Management

    The Purpose

    Build workflows for incident and critical incident tickets.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Distinguish incidents from service requests.

    Ticket categorization facilitates ticket. routing and reporting.

    Develop an SLA for your service desk team for a consistent service delivery.

    Activities

    2.1 Build incident and critical incident management workflows.

    2.2 Design ticket categorization scheme and proper ticket handling guidelines.

    2.3 Design incident escalation and prioritization guidelines.

    Outputs

    Incident and critical incident management workflows

    Ticket categorization scheme

    Ticket escalation and prioritization guidelines

    3 Design Request Fulfilment

    The Purpose

    Build service request workflows and prepare self-service portal.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Standardize request fulfilment processes.

    Prepare for better knowledge management and leverage self-service portal to facilitate shift-left strategy.

    Activities

    3.1 Build service request workflows.

    3.2 Build a targeted knowledgebase.

    3.3 Prepare for a self-serve portal project.

    Outputs

    Distinguishing criteria for requests and projects

    Service request workflows and SLAs

    Knowledgebase article template, processes, and workflows

    4 Build Project Implementation Plan

    The Purpose

    Now that you have laid the foundation of your service desk, put all the initiatives into an action plan.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Discuss priorities, set timeline, and identify effort for your service desk.

    Identify the benefits and impacts of communicating service desk initiatives to stakeholders and define channels to communicate service desk changes.

    Activities

    4.1 Build an implementation roadmap.

    4.2 Build a communication plan

    Outputs

    Project implementation and task list with associated owners

    Project communication plan and workshop summary presentation

    Further reading

    Analyst Perspective

    "Customer service issues are rarely based on personality but are almost always a symptom of poor and inconsistent process. When service desk managers are looking to hire to resolve customer service issues and executives are pushing back, it’s time to look at improving process and the support strategy to make the best use of technicians’ time, tools, and knowledge sharing. Once improvements have been made, it’s easier to make the case to add people or introduce automation.

    Replacing service desk solutions will also highlight issues around poor process. Without fixing the baseline services, the new solution will simply wrap your issues in a prettier package.

    Ultimately, the service desk needs to be the entry point for users to get help and the rest of IT needs to provide the appropriate support to ensure the first line of interaction has the knowledge and tools they need to resolve quickly and preferably on first contact. If your plans include optimization to self-serve or automation, you’ll have a hard time getting there without standardizing first."

    Sandi Conrad

    Principal Research Director, Infrastructure & Operations Practice

    Info-Tech Research Group

    A method for getting your service desk out of firefighter mode

    This Research Is Designed For:

    • The CIO and senior IT management who need to increase service desk effectiveness and timeliness and improve end-user satisfaction.
    • The service desk manager who wants to lead the team from firefighting mode to providing consistent and proactive support.

    This Research Will Also Assist:

    • Service desk teams who want to increase their own effectiveness and move from a help desk to a service desk.
    • Infrastructure and applications managers who want to decrease reactive support activities and increase strategic project productivity by shifting repetitive and low-value work left.

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Create a consistent customer service experience for service desk patrons.
    • Increase efficiency, first-call resolution, and end-user satisfaction with the Service Desk.
    • Decrease time and cost to resolve service desk tickets.
    • Understand and address reporting needs to address root causes and measure success.
    • Build a solid foundation for future IT service improvements.

    Executive Summary

    Situation

    • The CIO and senior IT management who need to increase service desk effectiveness and timeliness and improve end-user satisfaction.
    • If only the phone could stop ringing, the Service Desk could become proactive, address service levels, and improve end-user IT satisfaction.

    Complication

    • Not everyone embraces their role in service support. Specialists would rather work on projects than provide service support.
    • The Service Desk lacks processes and workflows to provide consistent service. Service desk managers struggle to set and meet service-level expectations, which further compromises end-user satisfaction.

    Resolution

    • Go beyond the blind adoption of best-practice frameworks. No simple formula exists for improving service desk maturity. Use diagnostic tools to assess the current state of the Service Desk. Identify service support challenges and draw on best-practice frameworks intelligently to build a structured response to those challenges.
    • An effective service desk must be built on the right foundations. Understand how:
      • Service desk structure affects cost and ticket volume capacity.
      • Incident management workflows can improve ticket handling, prioritization, and escalation.
      • Request fulfillment processes create opportunities for streamlining and automating services.
      • Knowledge sharing supports the processes and workflows essential to effective service support.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Service desk improvement is an exercise in organizational change. Engage specialists across the IT organization in building the solution. Establish a single service-support team across the IT group and enforce it with a cooperative, customer-focused culture. Don’t be fooled by a tool that’s new. A new service desk tool alone won’t solve the problem. Service desk maturity improvements depend on putting in place the right people and processes to support the technology

    Directors and executives understand the importance of the service desk and believe IT can do better

    A double bar graph is depicted. The blue bars represent Effectiveness and the green bars represent Importance in terms of service desk at different seniority levels, which include frontline, manager, director, and executive.

    Source: Info-Tech, 2019 Responses (N=189 organizations)

    Service Desk Importance Scores

      No Importance: 1.0-6.9
      Limited Importance: 7.0-7.9
      Significant Importance: 8.0-8.9
      Critical Importance: 9.0-10.0

    Service Desk Effectiveness Scores

      Not in Place: N/A
      Not Effective: 0.0-4.9
      Somewhat Ineffective: 5.0-5.9
      Somewhat Effective: 6.0-6.9
      Very Effective: 7.0-10.0

    Info-Tech Research Group’s IT Management and Governance Diagnostic (MGD) program assesses the importance and effectiveness of core IT processes. Since its inception, the MGD has consistently identified the service desk as an area to leverage.

    Business stakeholders consistently rank the service desk as one of the top five most important services that IT provides

    Since 2013, Info-Tech has surveyed over 40,000 business stakeholders as part of our CIO Business Vision program.

    Business stakeholders ranked the following 12 core IT services in terms of importance:

    Learn more about the CIO Business Vision Program.
    *Note: IT Security was added to CIO Business Vision 2.0 in 2019

    Top IT Services for Business Stakeholders

    1. Network Infrastructure
    2. IT Security*
    3. Data Quality
    4. Service Desk
    5. Business Applications
    6. Devices
    7. Client-Facing Technology
    8. Analytical Capability
    9. IT Innovation Leadership
    10. Projects
    11. Work Orders
    12. IT Policies
    13. Requirements Gathering
    Source: Info-Tech Research Group, 2019 (N=224 organizations)

    Having an effective and timely service desk correlates with higher end-user satisfaction with all other IT services

    A double bar graph is depicted. The blue bar represents dissatisfied ender user, and the green bar represents satisfied end user. The bars show the average of dissatisfied and satisfied end users for service desk effectiveness and service desk timeliness.

    On average, organizations that were satisfied with service desk effectiveness rated all other IT processes 46% higher than dissatisfied end users.

    Organizations that were satisfied with service desk timeliness rated all other IT processes 37% higher than dissatisfied end users.
    “Satisfied” organizations had average scores =8.“Dissatisfied" organizations had average scores “Dissatisfied" organizations had average scores =6. Source: Info-Tech Research Group, 2019 (N=18,500+ respondents from 75 organizations)

    Standardize the service desk the Info-Tech way to get measurable results

    More than one hundred organizations engaged with Info-Tech, through advisory calls and workshops, for their service desk projects in 2016. Their goal was either to improve an existing service desk or build one from scratch.

    Organizations that estimate the business impact of each project phase help us shed light on the average measured value of the engagements.

    "The analysts are an amazing resource for this project. Their approach is very methodical, and they have the ability to fill in the big picture with detailed, actionable steps. There is a real opportunity for us to get off the treadmill and make real IT service management improvements"

    - Rod Gula, IT Director

    American Realty Advisors

    Three circles are depicted. The top circle shows the sum of measured value dollar impact which is US$1,659,493.37. The middle circle shows the average measured value dollar impact which is US$19,755.87. The bottom circle shows the average measured value time saved which is 27 days.

    Info-Tech’s approach to service desk standardization focuses on building service management essentials

    This image depicts all of the phases and steps in this blueprint.

    Info-Tech draws on the COBIT framework, which focuses on consistent delivery of IT services across the organization

    This image depicts research that can be used to improve IT processes. Service Desk is circled to demonstrate which research is being used.

    The service desk is the foundation of all other service management processes.

    The image shows how the service desk is a foundation for other service management processes.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    “Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

    Guided Implementation

    “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

    Workshop

    “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

    Consulting

    “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Standardize the Service Desk – project overview

    This image shows the project overview of this blueprint.

    Info-Tech delivers: Use our tools and templates to accelerate your project to completion

    Project Summary

    Image of template.

    Service Desk Standard Operating Procedures

    Image of tool.

    Service Desk Maturity Assessment Tool

    Image of tool.

    Service Desk Implementation Roadmap

    Image of tool Incident, knowledge, and request management workflows

    Incident, knowledge, and request management workflows

    The project’s key deliverable is a service desk standard operating procedure

    Benefits of documented SOPs:

    Improved training and knowledge transfer: Routine tasks can be delegated to junior staff (freeing senior staff to work on higher priority tasks).

    IT automation, process optimization, and consistent operations: Defining, documenting, and then optimizing processes enables IT automation to be built on sound processes, so consistent positive results can be achieved.

    Compliance: Compliance audits are more manageable because the documentation is already in place.

    Transparency: Visually documented processes answer the common business question of “why does that take so long?”

    Cost savings: Work solved at first contact or with a minimal number of escalations will result in greater efficiency and more cost-effective support. This will also lead to better customer service.

    Impact of undocumented/undefined SOPs:

    Tasks will be difficult to delegate, key staff become a bottleneck, knowledge transfer is inconsistent, and there is a longer onboarding process for new staff

    IT automation built on poorly defined, unoptimized processes leads to inconsistent results.

    Documenting SOPs to prepare for an audit becomes a major time-intensive project.

    Other areas of the organization may not understand how IT operates, which can lead to confusion and unrealistic expectations.

    Support costs are highest through inefficient processes, and proactive work becomes more difficult to schedule, making the organization vulnerable to costly disruptions.

    Workshop Overview

    Image depicts workshop overview occurring over four days.

    Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Phase 1

    Lay Service Desk Foundations

    Step 1.1:Assess current state

    Image shows the steps in phase 1. Highlight is on step 1.1

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • 1.1.1 Outline service desk challenges
    • 1.1.2 Assess the service desk maturity

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Project Sponsor
    • IT Director, CIO
    • IT Managers and Service Desk Manager(s)
    • Representation from tier 2 and tier 3 specialists

    Outcomes

    Alignment on the challenges that the service desk faces, an assessment of the current state of service desk processes and technologies, and baseline metrics against which to measure improvements.

    Deliverables

    • Service Desk Maturity Assessment

    Standardizing the service desk benefits the whole business

    The image depicts 3 circles to represent the service desk foundations.

    Embrace standardization

    • Standardization prevents wasted energy on reinventing solutions to recurring issues.
    • Standardized processes are scalable so that process maturity increases with the size of your organization.

    Increase business satisfaction

    • Improve confidence that the service desk can meet service levels.
    • Create a single point of contact for incidents and requests and escalate quickly.
    • Analyze trends to forecast and meet shifting business requirements.

    Reduce recurring issues

    • Create tickets for every task and categorize them accurately.
    • Generate reliable data to support root-cause analysis.

    Increase efficiency and lower operating costs

    • Empower end users and technicians with a targeted knowledgebase (KB).
    • Cross-train to improve service consistency.

    Case Study: The CIO of Westminster College took stock of existing processes before moving to empower the “helpless desk”

    Scott Lowe helped a small staff of eight IT professionals formalize service desk processes and increase the amount of time available for projects.

    When he joined Westminster College as CIO in 2006, the department faced several infrastructure challenges, including:

    • An unreliable network
    • Aging server replacements and no replacement plan
    • IT was the “department of no”
    • A help desk known as the “helpless desk”
    • A lack of wireless connectivity
    • Internet connection speed that was much too slow

    As the CIO investigated how to address the infrastructure challenges, he realized people cared deeply about how IT spent its time.

    The project load of IT staff increased, with new projects coming in every day.

    With a long project list, it became increasingly important to improve the transparency of project request and prioritization.

    Some weeks, staff spent 80% of their time working on projects. Other weeks, support requirements might leave only 10% for project work.

    He addressed the infrastructure challenges in part by analyzing IT’s routine processes.

    Internally, IT had inefficient support processes that reduced the amount of time they could spend on projects.

    They undertook an internal process analysis effort to identify processes that would have a return on investment if they were improved. The goal was to reduce operational support time so that project time could be increased.

    Five years later, they had a better understanding of the organization's operational support time needs and were able to shift workloads to accommodate projects without compromising support.

    Common challenges experienced by service desk teams

    Unresolved issues

    • Tickets are not created for all incidents.
    • Tickets are lost or escalated to the wrong technicians.
    • Poor data impedes root-cause analysis of incidents.

    Lost resources/accountability

    • Lack of cross-training and knowledge sharing.
    • Lack of skills coverage for critical applications and services.
    • Time is wasted troubleshooting recurring issues.
    • Reports unavailable due to lack of data and poor categorization.

    High cost to resolve

    • Tier 2/3 resolve issues that should be resolved at tier 1.
    • Tier 2/3 often interrupt projects to focus on service support.

    Poor planning

    • Lack of data for effective trend analysis leads to poor demand planning.
    • Lack of data leads to lost opportunities for templating and automation.

    Low business satisfaction

    • Users are unable to get assistance with IT services quickly.
    • Users go to their favorite technician instead of using the service desk.

    Outline the organization’s service desk challenges

    1.1.1 Brainstorm service desk challenges

    Estimated Time: 45 minutes

    A. As a group, outline the areas where you think the service desk is experiencing challenges or weaknesses. Use sticky notes or a whiteboard to separate the challenges into People, Process, and Technology so you have a wholistic view of the constraints across the department.

    B. Think about the following:

    • What have you heard from users? (e.g. slow response time)
    • What have you heard from executives? (e.g. poor communication)
    • What should you start doing? (e.g. documenting processes)
    • What should you stop doing? (e.g. work that is not being entered as tickets)

    C. Document challenges in the Service Desk Project Summary.

    Participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Agents

    Assess current service desk maturity to establish a baseline and create a plan for service desk improvement

    A current-state assessment will help you build a foundation for process improvements. Current-state assessments follow a basic formula:

    1. Determine the current state of the service desk.
    2. Determine the desired state of the service desk.
    3. Build a practical path from current to desired state.
    Image depicts 2 circles and a box. The circle on the 1. left has assess current state. The circle on the right has 2. assess target state. The box has 3. build a roadmap.

    Ideally, the current-state assessment should align the delivery of IT services with organizational needs. The assessment should achieve the following goals:

    1. Identify service desk pain points.
    2. Map each pain point to business services.
    3. Assign a broad business value to the resolution of each pain point.
    4. Map each pain point to a process.

    Expert Insight

    Image of expert.

    “How do you know if you aren’t mature enough? Nothing – or everything – is recorded and tracked, customer satisfaction is low, frustration is high, and there are multiple requests and incidents that nobody ever bothers to address.”

    Rob England

    IT Consultant & Commentator

    Owner Two Hills

    Also known as The IT Skeptic

    Assess the process maturity of the service desk to determine which project phase and steps will bring the most value

    1.1.2 Measure which activity will have the greatest impact

    The Service Desk Maturity Assessmenttool helps organizations assess their service desk process maturity and focus the project on the activities that matter most.

    The tool will help guide improvement efforts and measure your progress.

    • The second tab of the tool walks through a qualitative assessment of your service desk practices. Questions will prompt you to evaluate how you are executing key activities. Select the answer in the drop-down menus that most closely aligns with your current state.
    • The third tab displays your rate of process completeness and maturity. You will receive a score for each phase, an overall score, and advice based on your performance.
    • Document the results of the efficiency assessment in the Service Desk Project Summary.

    The tool is intended for periodic use. Review your answers each year and devise initiatives to improve the process performance where you need it most.

    Where do I find the data?

    Consult:

    • Service Manager
    • Service Desk Tools
    Image is the service desk tools.

    Step 1.2:Review service support best practices

    Image shows the steps in phase 1. Highlight is on step 1.2.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    1. 1.2.1 Identify roles and responsibilities in your organization
    2. 1.2.2 Map out the current and target structure of the service desk

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Project Sponsor
    • IT Director, CIO
    • IT Managers and Service Desk Manager(s)
    • Representation from tier 2 and tier 3 specialists

    Outcomes

    Identifying who is accountable for different support practices in the service desk will allow workload to be distributed effectively between functional teams and individuals. Closing the gaps in responsibilities will enable the execution of a shift-left strategy.

    Deliverables

    • Roles & responsibilities guide
    • Service desk structure

    Everyone in IT contributes to the success of service support

    Regardless of the service desk structure chosen to meet an organization’s service support requirements, IT staff should not doubt the role they play in service support.

    If you try to standardize service desk processes without engaging specialists in other parts of the IT organization, you will fail. Everyone in IT has a role to play in providing service support and meeting service-level agreements.

    Service Support Engagement Plan

    • Identify who is accountable for different service support processes.
    • Outline the different responsibilities of service desk agents at tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 in meeting service-level agreements for service support.
    • Draft operational-level agreements between specialty groups and the service desk to improve accountability.
    • Configure the service desk tool to ensure ticket visibility and ownership across queues.
    • Engage tier 2 and tier 3 resources in building workflows for incident management, request fulfilment, and writing knowledgebase articles.
    • Emphasize the benefits of cooperation across IT silos:
      • Better customer service and end-user satisfaction.
      • Shorter time to resolve incidents and implement requests.
      • A higher tier 1 resolution rate, more efficient escalations, and fewer interruptions from project work.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Specialists tend to distance themselves from service support as they progress through their career to focus on projects.

    However, their cooperation is critical to the success of the new service desk. Not only do they contribute to the knowledgebase, but they also handle escalations from tiers 1 and 2.

    Clear project complications by leveraging roles and responsibilities

    R

    Responsible: This person is the staff member who completes the work. Assign at least one Responsible for each task, but this could be more than one.

    A

    Accountable: This team member delegates a task and is the last person to review deliverables and/or task. Sometimes Responsible and Accountable can be the same staff. Make sure that you always assign only one Accountable for each task and not more.

    C

    Consulted: People who do not carry out the task but need to be consulted. Typically, these people are subject matter experts or stakeholders.

    I

    Informed: People who receive information about process execution and quality and need to stay informed regarding the task.

    A RACI analysis is helpful with the following:

    • Workload Balancing: Allowing responsibilities to be distributed effectively between functional teams and individuals.
    • Change Management: Ensuring key functions and processes are not overlooked during organizational changes.
    • Onboarding: New employees can identify their own roles and responsibilities.

    A RACI chart outlines which positions are Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed

    Image shows example of RACI chart

    Create a list of roles and responsibilities in your organization

    1.2.1 Create RACI matrix to define responsibilities

    1. Use the Service Desk Roles and Responsibilities Guidefor a better understanding of the roles and responsibilities of different service desk tiers.
    2. In the RACI chart, replace the top row with specific roles in your organization.
    3. Modify or expand the process tasks, as needed, in the left column.
    4. For each role, identify the responsibility values that the person brings to the service desk. Fill out each column.
    5. Document in the Service Desk SOP. Schedule a time to share the results with organization leads.
    6. Distribute the chart between all teams in your organization.

    Notes:

    • Assign one Accountable for each task.
    • Have at least one Responsible for each task.
    • Avoid generic responsibilities, such as “team meetings.”
    • Keep your RACI definitions in your documents, as they are sometimes tough to remember.

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Agents

    What You'll Need

    • Service Desk SOP
    • Roles and Responsibilities Guide
    • Flip Chart
    • Whiteboard

    Build a single point of contact for the service desk

    Regardless of the service desk structure chosen to meet your service support requirements, end users should be in no doubt about how to access the service.

    Provide end users with:

    • A single phone number.
    • A single email address.
    • A single web portal for all incidents and requests.

    A single point of contact will ensure:

    • An agent is available to field incidents and requests.
    • Incidents and requests are prioritized according to impact and urgency.
    • Work is tracked to completion.

    This prevents ad hoc ticket channels such as shoulder grabs or direct emails, chats, or calls to a technician from interrupting work.

    A single point of contact does not mean the service desk is only accessible through one intake channel, but rather all tickets are directed to the service desk (i.e. tier 1) to be resolved or redirected appropriately.

    Image depicts 2 boxes. The smaller box labelled users and the larger box labelled Service Desk Tier 1. There are four double-sided arrows. The top is labelled email, the second is walk-in, the third is phone, the fourth is web portal.

    Directors and executives understand the importance of the service desk and believe IT can do better

    A double bar graph is depicted. The blue bars represent Effectiveness and the green bars represent Importance in terms of service desk at different seniority levels, which include frontline, manager, director, and executive.

    Source: Info-Tech, 2019 Responses (N=189 organizations)

    Service Desk Importance Scores

      No Importance: 1.0-6.9
      Limited Importance: 7.0-7.9
      Significant Importance: 8.0-8.9
      Critical Importance: 9.0-10.0

    Service Desk Effectiveness Scores

      Not in Place: N/A
      Not Effective: 0.0-4.9
      Somewhat Ineffective: 5.0-5.9
      Somewhat Effective: 6.0-6.9
      Very Effective: 7.0-10.0

    Info-Tech Research Group’s IT Management and Governance Diagnostic (MGD) program assesses the importance and effectiveness of core IT processes. Since its inception, the MGD has consistently identified the service desk as an area to leverage.

    Business stakeholders consistently rank the service desk as one of the top five most important services that IT provides

    Since 2013, Info-Tech has surveyed over 40,000 business stakeholders as part of our CIO Business Vision program.

    Business stakeholders ranked the following 12 core IT services in terms of importance:

    Learn more about the CIO Business Vision Program.
    *Note: IT Security was added to CIO Business Vision 2.0 in 2019

    Top IT Services for Business Stakeholders

    1. Network Infrastructure
    2. IT Security*
    3. Data Quality
    4. Service Desk
    5. Business Applications
    6. Devices
    7. Client-Facing Technology
    8. Analytical Capability
    9. IT Innovation Leadership
    10. Projects
    11. Work Orders
    12. IT Policies
    13. Requirements Gathering
    Source: Info-Tech Research Group, 2019 (N=224 organizations)

    Having an effective and timely service desk correlates with higher end-user satisfaction with all other IT services

    A double bar graph is depicted. The blue bar represents dissatisfied ender user, and the green bar represents satisfied end user. The bars show the average of dissatisfied and satisfied end users for service desk effectiveness and service desk timeliness.

    On average, organizations that were satisfied with service desk effectiveness rated all other IT processes 46% higher than dissatisfied end users.

    Organizations that were satisfied with service desk timeliness rated all other IT processes 37% higher than dissatisfied end users.
    “Satisfied” organizations had average scores =8.“Dissatisfied" organizations had average scores “Dissatisfied" organizations had average scores =6. Source: Info-Tech Research Group, 2019 (N=18,500+ respondents from 75 organizations)

    Standardize the service desk the Info-Tech way to get measurable results

    More than one hundred organizations engaged with Info-Tech, through advisory calls and workshops, for their service desk projects in 2016. Their goal was either to improve an existing service desk or build one from scratch.

    Organizations that estimate the business impact of each project phase help us shed light on the average measured value of the engagements.

    "The analysts are an amazing resource for this project. Their approach is very methodical, and they have the ability to fill in the big picture with detailed, actionable steps. There is a real opportunity for us to get off the treadmill and make real IT service management improvements"

    - Rod Gula, IT Director

    American Realty Advisors

    Three circles are depicted. The top circle shows the sum of measured value dollar impact which is US$1,659,493.37. The middle circle shows the average measured value dollar impact which is US$19,755.87. The bottom circle shows the average measured value time saved which is 27 days.

    Info-Tech’s approach to service desk standardization focuses on building service management essentials

    This image depicts all of the phases and steps in this blueprint.

    Info-Tech draws on the COBIT framework, which focuses on consistent delivery of IT services across the organization

    This image depicts research that can be used to improve IT processes. Service Desk is circled to demonstrate which research is being used.

    The service desk is the foundation of all other service management processes.

    The image shows how the service desk is a foundation for other service management processes.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    “Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

    Guided Implementation

    “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

    Workshop

    “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

    Consulting

    “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Standardize the Service Desk – project overview

    This image shows the project overview of this blueprint.

    Info-Tech delivers: Use our tools and templates to accelerate your project to completion

    Project Summary

    Image of template.

    Service Desk Standard Operating Procedures

    Image of tool.

    Service Desk Maturity Assessment Tool

    Image of tool.

    Service Desk Implementation Roadmap

    Image of tool Incident, knowledge, and request management workflows

    Incident, knowledge, and request management workflows

    The project’s key deliverable is a service desk standard operating procedure

    Benefits of documented SOPs:

    Improved training and knowledge transfer: Routine tasks can be delegated to junior staff (freeing senior staff to work on higher priority tasks).

    IT automation, process optimization, and consistent operations: Defining, documenting, and then optimizing processes enables IT automation to be built on sound processes, so consistent positive results can be achieved.

    Compliance: Compliance audits are more manageable because the documentation is already in place.

    Transparency: Visually documented processes answer the common business question of “why does that take so long?”

    Cost savings: Work solved at first contact or with a minimal number of escalations will result in greater efficiency and more cost-effective support. This will also lead to better customer service.

    Impact of undocumented/undefined SOPs:

    Tasks will be difficult to delegate, key staff become a bottleneck, knowledge transfer is inconsistent, and there is a longer onboarding process for new staff

    IT automation built on poorly defined, unoptimized processes leads to inconsistent results.

    Documenting SOPs to prepare for an audit becomes a major time-intensive project.

    Other areas of the organization may not understand how IT operates, which can lead to confusion and unrealistic expectations.

    Support costs are highest through inefficient processes, and proactive work becomes more difficult to schedule, making the organization vulnerable to costly disruptions.

    Workshop Overview

    Image depicts workshop overview occurring over four days.

    Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Phase 1

    Lay Service Desk Foundations

    Step 1.1:Assess current state

    Image shows the steps in phase 1. Highlight is on step 1.1

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • 1.1.1 Outline service desk challenges
    • 1.1.2 Assess the service desk maturity

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Project Sponsor
    • IT Director, CIO
    • IT Managers and Service Desk Manager(s)
    • Representation from tier 2 and tier 3 specialists

    Outcomes

    Alignment on the challenges that the service desk faces, an assessment of the current state of service desk processes and technologies, and baseline metrics against which to measure improvements.

    Deliverables

    • Service Desk Maturity Assessment

    Standardizing the service desk benefits the whole business

    The image depicts 3 circles to represent the service desk foundations.

    Embrace standardization

    • Standardization prevents wasted energy on reinventing solutions to recurring issues.
    • Standardized processes are scalable so that process maturity increases with the size of your organization.

    Increase business satisfaction

    • Improve confidence that the service desk can meet service levels.
    • Create a single point of contact for incidents and requests and escalate quickly.
    • Analyze trends to forecast and meet shifting business requirements.

    Reduce recurring issues

    • Create tickets for every task and categorize them accurately.
    • Generate reliable data to support root-cause analysis.

    Increase efficiency and lower operating costs

    • Empower end users and technicians with a targeted knowledgebase (KB).
    • Cross-train to improve service consistency.

    Case Study: The CIO of Westminster College took stock of existing processes before moving to empower the “helpless desk”

    Scott Lowe helped a small staff of eight IT professionals formalize service desk processes and increase the amount of time available for projects.

    When he joined Westminster College as CIO in 2006, the department faced several infrastructure challenges, including:

    • An unreliable network
    • Aging server replacements and no replacement plan
    • IT was the “department of no”
    • A help desk known as the “helpless desk”
    • A lack of wireless connectivity
    • Internet connection speed that was much too slow

    As the CIO investigated how to address the infrastructure challenges, he realized people cared deeply about how IT spent its time.

    The project load of IT staff increased, with new projects coming in every day.

    With a long project list, it became increasingly important to improve the transparency of project request and prioritization.

    Some weeks, staff spent 80% of their time working on projects. Other weeks, support requirements might leave only 10% for project work.

    He addressed the infrastructure challenges in part by analyzing IT’s routine processes.

    Internally, IT had inefficient support processes that reduced the amount of time they could spend on projects.

    They undertook an internal process analysis effort to identify processes that would have a return on investment if they were improved. The goal was to reduce operational support time so that project time could be increased.

    Five years later, they had a better understanding of the organization's operational support time needs and were able to shift workloads to accommodate projects without compromising support.

    Common challenges experienced by service desk teams

    Unresolved issues

    • Tickets are not created for all incidents.
    • Tickets are lost or escalated to the wrong technicians.
    • Poor data impedes root-cause analysis of incidents.

    Lost resources/accountability

    • Lack of cross-training and knowledge sharing.
    • Lack of skills coverage for critical applications and services.
    • Time is wasted troubleshooting recurring issues.
    • Reports unavailable due to lack of data and poor categorization.

    High cost to resolve

    • Tier 2/3 resolve issues that should be resolved at tier 1.
    • Tier 2/3 often interrupt projects to focus on service support.

    Poor planning

    • Lack of data for effective trend analysis leads to poor demand planning.
    • Lack of data leads to lost opportunities for templating and automation.

    Low business satisfaction

    • Users are unable to get assistance with IT services quickly.
    • Users go to their favorite technician instead of using the service desk.

    Outline the organization’s service desk challenges

    1.1.1 Brainstorm service desk challenges

    Estimated Time: 45 minutes

    A. As a group, outline the areas where you think the service desk is experiencing challenges or weaknesses. Use sticky notes or a whiteboard to separate the challenges into People, Process, and Technology so you have a wholistic view of the constraints across the department.

    B. Think about the following:

    • What have you heard from users? (e.g. slow response time)
    • What have you heard from executives? (e.g. poor communication)
    • What should you start doing? (e.g. documenting processes)
    • What should you stop doing? (e.g. work that is not being entered as tickets)

    C. Document challenges in the Service Desk Project Summary.

    Participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Agents

    Assess current service desk maturity to establish a baseline and create a plan for service desk improvement

    A current-state assessment will help you build a foundation for process improvements. Current-state assessments follow a basic formula:

    1. Determine the current state of the service desk.
    2. Determine the desired state of the service desk.
    3. Build a practical path from current to desired state.
    Image depicts 2 circles and a box. The circle on the 1. left has assess current state. The circle on the right has 2. assess target state. The box has 3. build a roadmap.

    Ideally, the current-state assessment should align the delivery of IT services with organizational needs. The assessment should achieve the following goals:

    1. Identify service desk pain points.
    2. Map each pain point to business services.
    3. Assign a broad business value to the resolution of each pain point.
    4. Map each pain point to a process.

    Expert Insight

    Image of expert.

    “How do you know if you aren’t mature enough? Nothing – or everything – is recorded and tracked, customer satisfaction is low, frustration is high, and there are multiple requests and incidents that nobody ever bothers to address.”

    Rob England

    IT Consultant & Commentator

    Owner Two Hills

    Also known as The IT Skeptic

    Assess the process maturity of the service desk to determine which project phase and steps will bring the most value

    1.1.2 Measure which activity will have the greatest impact

    The Service Desk Maturity Assessmenttool helps organizations assess their service desk process maturity and focus the project on the activities that matter most.

    The tool will help guide improvement efforts and measure your progress.

    • The second tab of the tool walks through a qualitative assessment of your service desk practices. Questions will prompt you to evaluate how you are executing key activities. Select the answer in the drop-down menus that most closely aligns with your current state.
    • The third tab displays your rate of process completeness and maturity. You will receive a score for each phase, an overall score, and advice based on your performance.
    • Document the results of the efficiency assessment in the Service Desk Project Summary.

    The tool is intended for periodic use. Review your answers each year and devise initiatives to improve the process performance where you need it most.

    Where do I find the data?

    Consult:

    • Service Manager
    • Service Desk Tools
    Image is the service desk tools.

    Step 1.2:Review service support best practices

    Image shows the steps in phase 1. Highlight is on step 1.2.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    1. 1.2.1 Identify roles and responsibilities in your organization
    2. 1.2.2 Map out the current and target structure of the service desk

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Project Sponsor
    • IT Director, CIO
    • IT Managers and Service Desk Manager(s)
    • Representation from tier 2 and tier 3 specialists

    Outcomes

    Identifying who is accountable for different support practices in the service desk will allow workload to be distributed effectively between functional teams and individuals. Closing the gaps in responsibilities will enable the execution of a shift-left strategy.

    Deliverables

    • Roles & responsibilities guide
    • Service desk structure

    Everyone in IT contributes to the success of service support

    Regardless of the service desk structure chosen to meet an organization’s service support requirements, IT staff should not doubt the role they play in service support.

    If you try to standardize service desk processes without engaging specialists in other parts of the IT organization, you will fail. Everyone in IT has a role to play in providing service support and meeting service-level agreements.

    Service Support Engagement Plan

    • Identify who is accountable for different service support processes.
    • Outline the different responsibilities of service desk agents at tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 in meeting service-level agreements for service support.
    • Draft operational-level agreements between specialty groups and the service desk to improve accountability.
    • Configure the service desk tool to ensure ticket visibility and ownership across queues.
    • Engage tier 2 and tier 3 resources in building workflows for incident management, request fulfilment, and writing knowledgebase articles.
    • Emphasize the benefits of cooperation across IT silos:
      • Better customer service and end-user satisfaction.
      • Shorter time to resolve incidents and implement requests.
      • A higher tier 1 resolution rate, more efficient escalations, and fewer interruptions from project work.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Specialists tend to distance themselves from service support as they progress through their career to focus on projects.

    However, their cooperation is critical to the success of the new service desk. Not only do they contribute to the knowledgebase, but they also handle escalations from tiers 1 and 2.

    Clear project complications by leveraging roles and responsibilities

    R

    Responsible: This person is the staff member who completes the work. Assign at least one Responsible for each task, but this could be more than one.

    A

    Accountable: This team member delegates a task and is the last person to review deliverables and/or task. Sometimes Responsible and Accountable can be the same staff. Make sure that you always assign only one Accountable for each task and not more.

    C

    Consulted: People who do not carry out the task but need to be consulted. Typically, these people are subject matter experts or stakeholders.

    I

    Informed: People who receive information about process execution and quality and need to stay informed regarding the task.

    A RACI analysis is helpful with the following:

    • Workload Balancing: Allowing responsibilities to be distributed effectively between functional teams and individuals.
    • Change Management: Ensuring key functions and processes are not overlooked during organizational changes.
    • Onboarding: New employees can identify their own roles and responsibilities.

    A RACI chart outlines which positions are Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed

    Image shows example of RACI chart

    Create a list of roles and responsibilities in your organization

    1.2.1 Create RACI matrix to define responsibilities

    1. Use the Service Desk Roles and Responsibilities Guidefor a better understanding of the roles and responsibilities of different service desk tiers.
    2. In the RACI chart, replace the top row with specific roles in your organization.
    3. Modify or expand the process tasks, as needed, in the left column.
    4. For each role, identify the responsibility values that the person brings to the service desk. Fill out each column.
    5. Document in the Service Desk SOP. Schedule a time to share the results with organization leads.
    6. Distribute the chart between all teams in your organization.

    Notes:

    • Assign one Accountable for each task.
    • Have at least one Responsible for each task.
    • Avoid generic responsibilities, such as “team meetings.”
    • Keep your RACI definitions in your documents, as they are sometimes tough to remember.

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Agents

    What You'll Need

    • Service Desk SOP
    • Roles and Responsibilities Guide
    • Flip Chart
    • Whiteboard

    Build a tiered generalist service desk to optimize costs

    A tiered generalist service desk with a first-tier resolution rate greater than 60% has the best operating cost and customer satisfaction of all competing service desk structural models.

    Image depicts a tiered generalist service desk example. It shows a flow from users to tier 1 and to tiers 2 and 3.

    The success of a tiered generalist model depends on standardized, defined processes

    Image lists the processes and benefits of a successful tiered generalist service desk.

    Define the structure of the service desk

    1.2.2 Map out the current and target structure of the service desk

    Estimated Time: 45 minutes

    Instructions:

    1. Using the model from the previous slides as a guide, discuss how closely it matches the current service desk structure.
    2. Map out a similar diagram of your existing service desk structure, intake channels, and escalation paths.
    3. Review the structure and discuss any changes that could be made to improve efficiency. Revise as needed.
    4. Document the outcome in the Service Desk Project Summary.

    Image depicts a tiered generalist service desk example. It shows a flow from users to tier 1 and to tiers 2 and 3.

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Agents

    Use a shift-left strategy to lower service support costs, reduce time to resolve, and improve end-user satisfaction

    Shift-left strategy:

    • Shift service support tasks from specialists to generalists.
    • Implement self-service.
    • Automate incident resolution.
    Image shows the incident and service request resolution in a graph. It includes metrics of cost per ticket, average time to resolve, and end-user satisfaction.

    Work through the implications of adopting a shift-left strategy

    Overview:

    Identify process gaps that you need to fill to support the shift-left strategy and discuss how you could adopt or improve the shift-left strategy, using the discussion questions below as a guide.

    Which process gaps do you need to fill to identify ticket trends?

    • What are your most common incidents and service requests?
    • Which tickets could be resolved at tier 1?
    • Which tickets could be resolved as self-service tickets?
    • Which tickets could be automated?

    Which processes do you most need to improve to support a shift-left strategy?

    • Which incident and request processes are well documented?
    • Do you have recurring tickets that could be automated?
    • What is the state of your knowledgebase maintenance process?
    • Which articles do you most need to support tier 1 resolution?
    • What is the state of your web portal? How could it be improved to support self-service?

    Document in the Project Summary

    Step 1.3: Identify service desk metrics and reports

    Image shows the steps in phase 1. Highlight is on step 1.3.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • 1.3 Create a list of required reports to identify relevant metrics

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Project Sponsor
    • IT Managers and Service Desk Manager(s)
    • Representation from tier 2 and tier 3 specialists

    Outcomes

    Managers and analysts will have service desk metrics and reports that help set expectations and communicate service desk performance.

    Deliverables

    • A list of service desk performance metrics and reports

    Engage business unit leaders with data to appreciate needs

    Service desk reports are an opportunity to communicate the story of IT and collect stakeholder feedback. Interview business unit leaders and look for opportunities to improve IT services.

    Start with the following questions:

    • What are you hearing from your team about working with IT?
    • What are the issues that are contributing to productivity losses?
    • What are the workarounds your team does because something isn’t working?
    • Are you able to access the information you need?

    Work with business unit leaders to develop an action plan.

    Remember to communicate what you do to address stakeholder grievances.

    The service recovery paradox is a situation in which end users think more highly of IT after the organization has corrected a problem with their service compared to how they would regard the company if the service had not been faulty in the first place.

    The point is that addressing issues (and being seen to address issues) will significantly improve end-user satisfaction. Communicate that you’re listening and acting, and you should see satisfaction improve.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Presentation is everything:

    If you are presenting outside of IT, or using operational metrics to create strategic information, be prepared to:

    • Discuss trends.
    • Identify organizational and departmental impacts.
    • Assess IT costs and productivity.

    For example, “Number of incidents with ERP system has decreased by 5% after our last patch release. We are working on the next set of changes and expect the issues to continue to decrease.”

    Engage technicians to ensure they input quality data in the service desk tool

    You need better data to address problems. Communicate to the technical team what you need from them and how their efforts contribute to the usefulness of reports.

    Tickets MUST:

    • Be created for all incidents and service requests.
    • Be categorized correctly, and categories updated when the ticket is resolved.
    • Be closed after the incidents and service requests are resolved or implemented.

    Emphasize that reports are analyzed regularly and used to manage costs, improve services, and request more resources.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Service Desk Manager: Technical staff can help themselves analyze the backlog and improve service metrics if they’re looking at the right information. Ensure their service desk dashboards are helping them identify high-priority and quick-win tickets and anticipate potential SLA breaches.

    Produce service desk reports targeted to improve IT services

    Use metrics and reports to tell the story of IT.

    Metrics should be tied to business requirements and show how well IT is meeting those requirements and where obstacles exist.

    Tailor metrics and reports to specific stakeholders.

    Technicians require mostly real-time information in the form of a dashboard, providing visibility into a prioritized list of tickets for which they are responsible.

    Supervisors need tactical information to manage the team and set client expectations as well as track and meet strategic goals.

    Managers and executives need summary information that supports strategic goals. Start by looking at executive goals for the support team and then working through some of the more tactical data that will help support those goals.

    One metric doesn’t give you the whole picture

    • Don’t put too much emphasis on a single metric. At best, it will give you a distorted picture of your service desk performance. At worst, it will distort the behavior of your agents as they may adopt poor practices to meet the metric.
    • The solution is to use tension metrics: metrics that work together to give you a better sense of the state of operations.
    • Tension metrics ensure a balanced focus toward shared goals.

    Example:

    First-call resolution (FCR), end-user satisfaction, and number of tickets reopened all work together to give you a complete picture. As FCR goes up, so should end-user satisfaction, as number of tickets re-opened stays steady or declines. If the three metrics are heading in different directions, then you know you have a problem.

    Rely on internal metrics to measure and improve performance

    External metrics provide useful context, but they represent broad generalizations across different industries and organizations of different sizes. Internal metrics measured annually are more reliable.

    Internal metrics provide you with information about your actual performance. With the right continual improvement process, you can improve those metrics year over year, which is a better measure of the performance of your service desk.

    Whether a given metric is the right one for your service desk will depend on several different factors, not the least of which include:

    • The maturity of your service desk processes.
    • Your ticket volume.
    • The complexity of your tickets.
    • The degree to which your end users are comfortable with self-service.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Take external metrics with a grain of salt. Most benchmarks represent what service desks do across different industries, not what they should do. There also might be significant differences between different industries in terms of the kinds of tickets they deal with, differences which the overall average obscures.

    Use key service desk metrics to build a business case for service support improvements

    The right metrics can tell the business how hard IT works and how many resources it needs to perform:

    1. End-User Satisfactions:
      • The most important metric for measuring the perceived value of the service desk. Determine this based on a robust annual satisfaction survey of end users and transactional satisfaction surveys sent with a percentage of tickets.
    2. Ticket Volume and Cost per Ticket:
      • A key indicator of service desk efficiency, computed as the monthly operating expense divided by the average ticket volume per month.
    3. First-Contact Resolution Rate:
      • The biggest driver of end-user satisfaction. Depending on the kind of tickets you deal with, you can measure first-contact, first-tier, or first-day resolution.
    4. Average Time to Resolve (Incident) or Fulfill (Service Requests):
      • An assessment of the service desk's ability to resolve tickets effectively, measuring the time elapsed between the moment the ticket status is set to “open” and the moment it is set to “resolved.”

    Info-Tech Insight

    Metrics should be tied to business requirements. They tell the story of how well IT is meeting those requirements and help identify when obstacles get in the way. The latter can be done by pointing to discrepancies between the internal metrics you expected to reach but didn’t and external metrics you trust.

    Use service desk metrics to track progress toward strategic, operational, and tactical goals

    Image depicts a chart to show the various metrics in terms of strategic goals, tactical goals, and operational goals.

    Cost per ticket and customer satisfaction are the foundation metrics of service support

    Ultimately, everything boils down to cost containment (measured by cost per ticket) and quality of service (measured by customer satisfaction).

    Cost per ticket is a measure of the efficiency of service support:

    • A higher than average cost per ticket is not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if accompanied by higher-than-average quality levels.
    • Conversely, a low cost per ticket is not necessarily good, particularly if the low cost is achieved by sacrificing quality of service.

    Cost per ticket is the total monthly operating expense of the service desk divided by the monthly ticket volume. Operating expense includes the following components:

    • Salaries and benefits for desktop support technicians
    • Salaries and benefits for indirect personnel (team leads, supervisors, workforce schedulers, dispatchers, QA/QC personnel, trainers, and managers)
    • Technology expense (e.g. computers, software licensing fees)
    • Telecommunications expenses
    • Facilities expenses (e.g. office space, utilities, insurance)
    • Travel, training, and office supplies
    Image displays a pie chart that shows the various service desk costs.

    Create a list of required reports to identify metrics to track

    1.3.1 Start by identifying the reports you need, then identify the metrics that produce them

    1. Answer the following questions to determine the data your reports require:
      • What strategic initiatives do you need to track?
        • Example: reducing mean time to resolve, meeting SLAs
      • What operational areas need attention?
        • Example: recurring issues that need a permanent resolution
      • What kind of issues do you want to solve?
        • Example: automate tasks such as password reset or software distribution
      • What decisions or processes are held up due to lack of information?
        • Example: need to build a business case to justify infrastructure upgrades
      • How can the data be used to improve services to the business?
        • Example: recurring issues by department
    2. Document report and metrics requirements in Service Desk SOP.
    3. Provide the list to your tool administrator to create reports with auto-distribution.

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Agents

    What You'll Need

    • Service Desk SOP
    • Flip Chart
    • Whiteboard

    Step 1.4: Review ticket handling procedures

    Image shows the steps in phase 1. Highlight is on step 1.4.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • 1.4.1 Review ticket handling practices
    • 1.4.2 Identify opportunities to automate ticket creation and reduce recurring tickets

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Project Sponsor
    • IT Managers and Service Desk Manager(s)
    • Representation from tier 2 and tier 3 specialists

    Outcomes

    Managers and analysts will have best practices for ticket handling and troubleshooting to support ITSM data quality and improve first-tier resolution.

    DELIVERABLES

    • List of ticket templates and recurring tickets
    • Ticket and Call QA Template and ticket handling best practices

    Start by reviewing the incident intake process to find opportunities for improvement

    If end users are avoiding your service desk, you may have an intake problem. Create alternative ways for users to seek help to manage the volume; keep in mind not every request is an emergency.

    Image shows the various intake channels and the recommendation.

    Identify opportunities for improvement in your ticket channels

    The two most efficient intake channels should be encouraged for the majority of tickets.

    • Build a self-service portal.
      • Do users know where to find the portal?
      • How many tickets are created through the portal?
      • Is the interface easy to use?
    • Deal efficiently with email.
      • How quickly are messages picked up?
      • Are they manually transferred to a ticket or does the service desk tool automatically create a ticket?

    The two most traditional and fastest methods to get help must deal with emergencies and escalation effectively.

    • Phone should be the fastest way to get help for emergencies.
      • Are enough agents answering calls?
      • Are voicemails picked up on time?
      • Are the automated call routing prompts clear and concise?
    • Are walk-ins permitted and formalized?
      • Do you always have someone at the desk?
      • Is your equipment secure?
      • Are walk-ins common because no one picks up the phone or is the traffic as you’d expect?

    Ensure technicians create tickets for all incidents and requests

    Why Collect Ticket Data?

    If many tickets are missing, help service support staff understand the need to collect the data. Reports will be inaccurate and meaningless if quality data isn’t entered into the ticketing system.

    Image shows example of ticket data

    Set ticket handling expectations to drive a consistent process

    Set expectations:

    • Create and update tickets, but not at the expense of good customer service. Agents can start the ticket but shouldn’t spend five minutes creating the ticket when they should be troubleshooting the problem.
    • Update the ticket when the issue is resolved or needs to be escalated. If agents are escalating, they should make sure all relevant information is passed along to the next technician.
    • Update user of ETA if issue cannot be resolved quickly.
    • Ticket templates for common incidents can lead to fast creation, data input, and categorizations. Templates can reduce the time it takes to create tickets from two minutes to 30 seconds.
    • Update categories to reflect the actual issue and resolution.
    • Reference or link to the knowledgebase article as the documented steps taken to resolve the incident.
    • Validate incident is resolved with client; automate this process with ticket closure after a certain time.
    • Close or resolve the ticket on time.

    Use the Ticket and Call Quality Assessment Tool to improve the quality of service desk data

    Build a process to check-in on ticket and call quality monthly

    Better data leads to better decisions. Use the Ticket and Call Quality Assessment Toolto check-in on the ticket and call quality monthly for each technician and improve service desk data quality.

    1. Fill tab 1 with technician’s name.
    2. Use either tab 2 (auto-scoring) or tab 3 (manual scoring) to score the agent. The assessment includes ticket evaluation, call evaluation, and overall metric.
    3. Record the results of each review in the score summary of tab 1.
    Image shows tool.

    Use ticket templates to make ticket creation, updating, and resolution more efficient

    A screenshot of the Ticket and Call Quality Assessment Tool

    Implement measures to improve ticket handling and identify ticket template candidates

    1.4.1 Identify opportunities to automate ticket creation

    1. Poll the team and discuss.
      • How many members of the team are not creating tickets? Why?
      • How can we address those barriers?
      • What are the expectations of management?
    2. Brainstorm five to ten good candidates for ticket templates.
      • What data can auto-fill?
      • What will help process the ticket faster?
      • What automations can we build to ensure a fast, consistent service?
      • Note:
        • Ticket template name
        • Information that will auto-fill from AD and other applications
        • Categories and resolution codes
        • Automated routing and email responses
    3. Document ticket template candidates in the Service Desk Roadmap to capture the actions.

    Participants

    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Agents

    What You'll Needs

    • Flip Chart
    • Whiteboard

    Phase 2

    Design Incident Management Processes

    Step 2.1: Build incident management workflows

    Image shows the steps in phase 2. Highlight is on step 2.1.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • 2.1.1 Review incident management challenges
    • 2.1.2 Define the incident management workflow
    • 2.1.3 Define the critical incident management workflow
    • 2.1.4 Design critical incident communication plan

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager(s)
    • Representation from tier 2 and tier 3 specialists

    Outcomes

    Workflows for incident management and critical incident management will improve the consistency and quality of service delivery and prepare the service desk to negotiate reliable service levels with the organization.

    DELIVERABLES

    • Incident management workflows
    • Critical incident management workflows
    • Critical incident communication plan

    Communicate the great incident resolution work that you do to improve end-user satisfaction

    End users think more highly of IT after the organization has corrected a problem with their service than they would have had the service not been faulty in the first place.

    Image displays a graph to show the service recovery paradox

    Info-Tech Insight

    Use the service recovery paradox to your advantage. Address service desk challenges explicitly, develop incident management processes that get services back online quickly, and communicate the changes.

    If you show that the service desk recovered well from the challenges end users raised, you will get greater loyalty from them.

    Assign incident roles and responsibilities to promote accountability

    The role of an incident coordinator or manager can be assigned to anyone inside the service desk that has a strong knowledge of incident resolution, attention to detail, and knows how to herd cats.

    In organizations with high ticket volumes, a separate role may be necessary.

    Everyone must recognize that incident management is a cross-IT organization process and it does not have to be a unique service desk process.

    An incident coordinator is responsible for:

    • Improving incident management processes.
    • Tracking metrics and producing reports.
    • Developing and maintaining the incident management system.
    • Developing and maintaining critical incident processes.
    • Ensuring the service support team follows the incident management process.
    • Gathering post-mortem information from the various technical resources on root cause for critical or severity 1 incidents.

    The Director of IT Services invested in incident management to improve responsiveness and set end-user expectations

    Practitioner Insight

    Ben Rodrigues developed a progressive plan to create a responsive, service-oriented culture for the service support organization.

    "When I joined the organization, there wasn’t a service desk. People just phoned, emailed, maybe left [sticky] notes for who they thought in IT would resolve it. There wasn’t a lot of investment in developing clear processes. It was ‘Let’s call somebody in IT.’

    I set up the service desk to clarify what we would do for end users and to establish some SLAs.

    I didn’t commit to service levels right away. I needed to see how many resources and what skill sets I would need. I started by drafting some SLA targets and plugging them into our tracking application. I then monitored how we did on certain things and established if we needed other skill sets. Then I communicated those SOPs to the business, so that ‘if you have an issue, this is where you go, and this is how you do it,’ and then shared those KPIs with them.

    I had monthly meetings with different function heads to say, ‘this is what I see your guys calling me about,’ and we worked on something together to make some of the pain disappear."

    -Ben Rodrigues

    Director, IT Services

    Gamma Dynacare

    Sketch out incident management challenges to focus improvements

    Common Incident Management Challenges

    End Users

    • No faith in the service desk beyond speaking with their favorite technician.
    • No expectations for response or resolution time.
    • Non-IT staff are disrupted as people ask their colleagues for IT advice.

    Technicians

    • No one manages and escalates incidents.
    • Incidents are unnecessarily urgent and more likely to have a greater impact.
    • Agents are flooded with requests to do routine tasks during desk visits.
    • Specialist support staff are subject to constant interruptions.
    • Tickets are lost, incomplete, or escalated incorrectly.
    • Incidents are resolved from scratch rather than referring to existing solutions.

    Managers

    • Tickets are incomplete or lack historical information to address complaints.
    • Tickets in system don’t match the perceived workload.
    • Unable to gather data for budgeting or business analysis.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Consistent incident management processes will improve end-user satisfaction with all other IT services.

    However, be prepared to overcome these common obstacles as you put the process in place, including:

    • Absence of management or staff commitment.
    • Lack of clarity on organizational needs.
    • Outdated work practices.
    • Poorly defined service desk goals and responsibilities.
    • Lack of a reliable knowledgebase.
    • Inadequate training.
    • Resistance to change.

    Prepare to implement or improve incident management

    2.1.1 Review incident management challenges and metrics

    1. Review your incident management challenges and the benefits of addressing them.
    2. Review the level of service you are providing with the current resources. Define clear goals and deliverables for the improvement initiative.
    3. Decide how the incident management process will interface with the service desk. Who will take on the responsibility for resolving incidents? Specifically, who will:
      • Log incidents.
      • Perform initial incident troubleshooting.
      • Own and monitor tickets.
      • Communicate with end users.
      • Update records with the resolution.
      • Close incidents.
      • Implement next steps (e.g. initiate problem management).
    4. Document recommendations and the incident management process requirements in the Service Desk SOP.

    Participants

    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Agents

    What You’ll Need

    • Service Desk SOP
    • Flip Chart
    • Whiteboard

    Distinguish between different kinds of tickets for better SLAs

    Different ticket types are associated with radically different prioritization, routing, and service levels. For instance, most incidents are resolved within a business day, but requests take longer to implement.

    If you fail to distinguish between ticket types, your metrics will obscure service desk performance.

    Common Service Desk Tickets

    • Incidents
      • An unanticipated interruption of a service.
        • The goal of incident management is to restore the service as soon as possible, even if the resolution involves a workaround.
    • Problems
      • The root cause of several incidents.
        • The goal of problem management is to detect the root cause and provide long-term resolution and prevention.
    • Requests
      • A generic description for small changes or service access
        • Requests are small, frequent, and low risk. They are best handled by a process distinct from incident, change, and project management.
    • Changes
      • Modification or removal of anything that could influence IT services.
        • The scope includes significant changes to architectures, processes, tools, metrics, and documentation.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Organizations sometimes mistakenly classify small projects as service requests, which can compromise your data, resulting in a negative impact to the perceived value of the service desk.

    Separate incidents and service requests for increased customer service and better-defined SLAs

    Defining the differences between service requests and incidents is not just for reporting purposes. It also has a major impact on how service is delivered.

    Incidents are unexpected disruptions to normal business processes and require attempts to restore services as soon as possible (e.g. the printer is not working).

    Service requests are tasks that don’t involve something that is broken or has an immediate impact on services. They do not require immediate resolution and can typically be scheduled (e.g. new software).

    Image shows a chart on incidents and service requests.

    Focus on the big picture first to capture and streamline how your organization resolves incidents

    Image displays a flow chart to show how to organize resolving incidents.

    Document your incident management workflow to identify opportunities for improvement

    Image shows a flow cart on how to organize incident management.

    Workflow should include:

    • Ticket creation and closure
    • Triage
    • Troubleshooting
    • Escalations
    • Communications
    • Change management
    • Documentation
    • Vendor escalations

    Notes:

    • Notification and alerts should be used to set or reset expectations on delivery or resolution
    • Identify all the steps where a customer is informed and ensure we are not over or under communicating

    Collaborate to define each step of the incident management workflow

    2.1.2 Define the incident management workflow

    Estimated Time: 60 minutes

    Option 1: Whiteboard

    1. Discuss the workflow and draw it on the whiteboard.
    2. Assess whether you are using the best workflow. Modify it if necessary.
    3. Engage the team in refining the process workflow.
    4. Transfer data to Visio and add to the SOP.

    Option 2: Tabletop Exercise

    1. Distribute index cards to each member of the team.
    2. Have each person write a single task they perform on the index card. Be granular. Include the title or the name of the person responsible.
    3. Mark cards that are decision points. Use a card of a different color or use a marker to make a colored dot.
    4. Arrange the index cards in order, removing duplicates.
    5. Assess whether you are using the best workflow. Engage the team to refine it if necessary.
    6. Transfer data to Visio and add to the Service Desk SOP.

    Participants

    • Service Manager
    • Service Desk Support
    • Applications or Infrastructure Support

    What You’ll Need

    • Flip Chart Paper
    • Sticky Notes
    • Pens
    • Service Desk SOP
    • Project Summary

    Formalize the process for critical incident management to reduce organizational impact

    Discuss these elements to see how the organization will handle them.

    • Communication plan:
      • Who communicates with end users?
      • Who communicates with the executive team?
    • It’s important to separate the role of the technician trying to solve a problem with the need to communicate progress.
    • Change management:
    • Define a separate process for regular and emergency change management to ensure changes are timely and appropriate.
    • Business continuity plan:
    • Identify criteria to decide when a business continuity plan (BCP) must be implemented during a critical incident to minimize the business impact of the incident.
    • Post-mortems:
    • Formalize the process of discussing and documenting lessons learned, understanding outstanding issues, and addressing the root cause of incidents.
    • Source of incident notification:
    • Does the process change if users notify the service desk of an issue or if the systems management tools alert technicians?

    Critical incidents are high-impact, high-urgency events that put the effectiveness and timeliness of the service desk center stage.

    Build a workflow that focuses on quickly bringing together the right people to resolve the incident and reduces the chances of recurrence.

    Document your critical incident management workflow to identify opportunities for improvement

    Image shows a flow cart on how to organize critical incident management.

    Workflow should include:

    • Ticket creation and closure
    • Triage
    • Troubleshooting
    • Escalations
    • Communications plan
    • Change management
    • Disaster recovery or business continuity plan
    • Documentation
    • Vendor escalations
    • Post-mortem

    Collaborate to define each step of the critical incident management workflow

    2.1.3 Define the critical incident management workflow

    Estimated Time: 60 minutes

    Option 1: Whiteboard

    1. Discuss the workflow and draw it on the whiteboard.
    2. Assess whether you are using the best workflow. Modify it if necessary.
    3. Engage the team in refining the process workflow.
    4. Transfer data to Visio and add to the SOP.

    Option 2: Tabletop Exercise

    1. Distribute index cards to each member of the team.
    2. Have each person write a single task they perform on the index card. Be granular. Include the title or the name of the person responsible.
    3. Mark cards that are decision points. Use a card of a different color or use a marker to make a colored dot.
    4. Arrange the index cards in order, removing duplicates.
    5. Assess whether you are using the best workflow. Engage the team to refine it if necessary.
    6. Transfer data to Visio and add to the Service Desk SOP.

    Participants

    • Service Manager
    • Service Desk Support
    • Applications or Infrastructure Support

    What You’ll Need

    • Flip Chart Paper
    • Sticky Notes
    • Pens
    • Service Desk SOP

    Establish a critical incident management communication plan

    When it comes to communicating during major incidents, it’s important to get the information just right. Users don’t want too little, they don’t want too much, they just want what’s relevant to them, and they want that information at the right time.

    As an IT professional, you may not have a background in communications, but it becomes an important part of your job. Broad guidelines for good communication during a critical incident are:

    1. Communicate as broadly as the impact of your incident requires.
    2. Communicate as much detail as a specific audience requires, but no more than necessary.
    3. Communicate as far ahead of impact as possible.

    Why does communication matter?

    Sending the wrong message, at the wrong time, to the wrong stakeholders, can result in:

    • Drop in customer satisfaction.
    • Wasted time and resources from multiple customers contacting you with the same issue.
    • Dissatisfied executives kept in the dark.
    • Increased resolution time if the relevant providers and IT staff are not informed soon enough to help.

    Info-Tech Insight

    End users understand that sometimes things break. What’s important to them is that (1) you don’t repeatedly have the same problem, (2) you keep them informed, and (3) you give them enough notice when their systems will be impacted and when service will be returned.

    Automate communication to save time and deliver consistent messaging to the right stakeholders

    In the middle of resolving a critical incident, the last thing you have time for is worrying about crafting a good message. Create a series of templates to save time by providing automated, tailored messages for each stage of the process that can be quickly altered and sent out to the right stakeholders.

    Once templates are in place, when the incident occurs, it’s simply a matter of:

    1. Choosing the relevant template.
    2. Updating recipients and messaging if necessary.
    3. Adding specific, relevant data and fields.
    4. Sending the message.

    When to communicate?

    Tell users the information they need to know when they need to know it. If a user is directly impacted, tell them that. If the incident does not directly affect the user, the communication may lead to decreased customer satisfaction or failure to pay attention to future relevant messaging.

    What to say?

    • Keep messaging short and to the point.
    • Only say what you know for sure.
    • Provide only the details the audience needs to know to take any necessary action or steps on their side and no more. There’s no need to provide details on the reason for the failure before it’s resolved, though this can be done after resolution and restoration of service.

    You’ll need distinct messages for distinct audiences. For example:

    • To incident resolvers: “Servers X through Y in ABC Location are failing intermittently. Please test the servers and all the connections to determine the exact cause so we can take corrective action ASAP.”
    • To the IT department head: “Servers X through Y in ABC Location are failing intermittently. We are beginning tests. We will let you know when we have determined the exact cause and can give you an estimated completion time.”
    • To executives: “We’re having an issue with some servers at ABC Location. We are testing to determine the cause and will let you know the estimated completion time as soon as possible.”
    • To end users: “We are experience some service issues. We are working on a resolution diligently and will restore service as soon as possible.”

    Map out who will need to be contacted in the event of a critical incident

    2.1.4 Design the critical incident communication plan

    • Identify critical incidents that require communication.
    • Identify stakeholders who will need to be informed about each incident.
    • For each audience, determine:
      1. Frequency of communication
      2. Content of communication
    Use the sample template to the right as an example.

    Some questions to assist you:

    • Whose work will be interrupted, either by their services going down or by their workers having to drop everything to solve the incident?
    • What would happen if we didn’t notify this person?
    • What level of detail do they need?
    • How often would they want to be updated?
    Document outcomes in the Service Desk SOP. Image shows template of unplanned service outage.

    Measure and improve customer satisfaction with the use of relationship and transactional surveys

    Customer experience programs with a combination of relationship and transactional surveys tend to be more effective. Merging the two will give a wholistic picture of the customer experience.

    Relationship Surveys

    Relationship surveys focus on obtaining feedback on the overall customer experience.

    • Inform how well you are doing or where you need improvement in the broad services provided.
    • Provide a high-level perspective on the relationship between the business and IT.
    • Help with strategic improvement decisions.
    • Should be sent over a duration of time and to the entire customer base after they’ve had time to experience all the services provided by the service desk. This can be done as frequently as per quarter or on a yearly basis.
    • E.g. An annual satisfaction survey such as Info-Tech’s End User Satisfaction Diagnostic.

    Transactional Surveys

    Transactional surveys are tied to a specific interaction or transaction your end users have with a specific product or service.

    • Help with tactical improvement decisions.
    • Questions should point to a specific interaction.
    • Usually only a few questions that are quick and easy to complete following the transaction.
    • Since transactional surveys allow you to improve individual relationships, they should be sent shortly after the interaction with the service desk has occurred.
    • E.g. How satisfied are you with the way your ticket was resolved?

    Add transactional end-user surveys at ticket close to escalate unsatisfactory results

    A simple quantitative survey at the closing of a ticket can inform the service desk manager of any issues that were not resolved to the end user’s satisfaction. Take advantage of workflows to escalate poor results immediately for quick follow-up.

    Image shows example of survey question with rating.

    If a more complex survey is required, you may wish to include some of these questions:

    Please rate your overall satisfaction with the way your issue was handled (1=unsatisfactory, 5=fantastic)

    • The professionalism of the analyst.
    • The technical skills or knowledge of the analyst.
    • The timeliness of the service provided.
    • The overall service experience.

    Add an open-ended, qualitative question to put the number in context, and solicit critical feedback:

    What could the service desk have done to improve your experience?

    Define a process to respond to both negative and positive feedback

    Successful customer satisfaction programs respond effectively to both positive and negative outcomes. Late or lack of responses to negative comments may increase customer frustration, while not responding at all to the positive comments may give the perception of indifference. If customers are taking the time to fill out the survey, good or bad, they should be followed up with

    Take these steps to handle survey feedback:

    1. Assign resources to receive, read, and track responses. The entire team doesn’t need to receive every response, while a single resource may not have capacity to respond in a timely manner. Decide what makes the most sense in your environment.
    2. Respond to negative feedback: It may not be possible to respond to every customer that fills out a survey. Set guidelines for responding to negative surveys with no details on the issue; don’t spend time guessing why they were upset, simply ask the user why they were unsatisfied. The critical piece of taking advantage of the service recovery paradox is in the follow-up to the customer.
    3. Investigate and improve: Make sure you investigate the issue to ensure that it is a justified complaint or whether the issue is a symptom of another issue’s root cause. Identify remediation steps to ensure the issue does not repeat itself, and then communicate to the customer the action you have taken to improve.
    4. Act on positive feedback as well: If it’s easy for customers to provide feedback, then make room in your process for handling the positive results. Appreciate the time and effort your customers take to give kudos and use it as a tool to build a long-term relationship with that user. Saying thank you goes a long way and when customers know their time matters, they will be encouraged to fill out those surveys. This is also a good way to show what a great job the service desk team did with the interaction.

    Analyze survey feedback month over month to complement and justify metric results already in place

    When you combine the tracking and analysis of relationship and transactional survey data you will be able to dive into specific issues, identify trends and patterns, assess impact to users, and build a plan to make improvements.

    Once the survey data is centralized, categorized, and available you can start to focus on metrics. At a minimum, for transactional surveys, consider tracking:

    • Breakdown of satisfaction scores with trends over time
    • Unsatisfactory surveys that are related to incidents and service requests
    • Total surveys that have been actioned vs pending

    For relationship surveys, consider tracking:

    • Satisfaction scores by department and seniority level
    • Satisfaction with IT services, applications, and communication
    • Satisfaction with IT’s business enablement

    Scores of overall satisfaction with IT

    Image Source: Info-Tech End User Satisfaction Report

    Prioritize company-wide improvement initiatives by those that have the biggest impact to the entire customer base first and then communicate the plan to the organization using a variety of communication channels that will draw your customers in, e.g. dashboards, newsletters, email alerts.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Consider automating or using your ITSM notification system as a direct communication method to inform the service desk manager of negative survey results.

    Step 2.2: Design ticket categorization

    Image shows the steps in phase 2. Highlight is on step 2.2

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • 2.2.1 Assess ticket categorization
    • 2.2.2 Enhance ticket categories with resolution and status codes

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager(s)
    • Representation from tier 2 and tier 3 specialists

    Outcomes

    The reviewed ticket categorization scheme will be easier to use and deploy more consistently, which will improve the categorization of data and the reliability of reports.

    DELIVERABLES

    • Optimized ticket categorization

    Design a ticket classification scheme to produce useful reports

    Reliable reports depend on an effective categorization scheme.

    Too many options cause confusion; too few options provide little value. As you build the classification scheme over the next few slides, let call routing and reporting requirements be your guide.

    Effective classification schemes are concise, easy to use correctly, and easy to maintain.

    Image shows example of a ticket classification scheme.

    Keep these guidelines in mind:

    • A good categorization scheme is exhaustive and mutually exclusive: there’s a place for every ticket and every ticket fits in only one place.
    • As you build your classification scheme, ensure the categories describe the actual asset or service involved based on final resolution, not how it was reported initially.
    • Pre-populate ticket templates with relevant categories to dramatically improve reporting and routing accuracy.
    • Use a tiered system to make the categories easier to navigate. Three tiers with 6-8 categories per tier provides up to 512 sub-categories, which should be enough for the most ambitious team.
    • Track only what you will use for reporting purposes. If you don’t need a report on individual kinds of laptops, don’t create a category beyond “laptops.”
    • Avoid “miscellaneous” categories. A large portion of your tickets will eventually end up there.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Don’t do it alone! Collaborate with managers in the specialized IT groups responsible for root-cause analysis to develop a categorization scheme that makes sense for them.

    The first approach to categorization breaks down the IT portfolio into asset types

    WHY SHOULD I START WITH ASSETS?

    Start with asset types if asset management and configuration management processes figure prominently in your practice or on your service management implementation roadmap.

    Image displays example of asset types and how to categorize them.

    Building the Categories

    Ask these questions:

    • Type: What kind of asset am I working on?
    • Category: What general asset group am I working on?
    • Subcategory: What particular asset am I working on?

    Need to make quick progress? Use Info-Tech Research Group’s Service Desk Ticket Categorization Schemes template.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Think about how you will use the data to determine which components need to be included in reports. If components won’t be used for reporting, routing, or warranty, reporting down to the component level adds little value.

    The second approach to categorization breaks down the IT portfolio into types of services

    WHY SHOULD I START WITH SERVICES?

    Start with asset services if service management generally figures prominently in your practice, especially service catalog management.

    Image displays example of service types and how to categorize them.

    Building the Categories

    Ask these questions:

    • Type: What kind of service am I working on?
    • Category: What general service group am I working on?
    • Subcategory: What particular service am I working on?

    Need to make quick progress? Use Info-Tech Research Group’s Service Desk Ticket Categorization Schemes template.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Remember, ticket categories are not your only source of reports. Enhance the classification scheme with resolution and status codes for more granular reporting.

    Improve the categorization scheme to enhance routing and reporting

    2.2.1 Assess whether the service desk can improve its ticket categorization

    1. As a group, review existing categories, looking for duplicates and designations that won’t affect ticket routing. Reconcile duplicates and remove non-essential categories.
    2. As a group, re-do the categories, ensuring that the new categorization scheme will meet the reporting requirements outlined earlier.
      • Are categories exhaustive and mutually exclusive?
      • Is the tier simple and easy to use (i.e. 3 tiers x 8 categories)?
    3. Test against recent tickets to ensure you have the right categories.
    4. Record the ticket categorization scheme in the Service Desk Ticket Categorization Schemes template.

    A screenshot of the Service Desk Ticket Categorization Schemes template.

    Participants

    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Agents

    What You’ll Need

    • Flip Chart
    • Whiteboard
    • Service Desk Ticket Categorization Scheme

    Enhance the classification scheme with resolution and status codes for more granular reporting

    Resolution codes differ from detailed resolution notes.

    • A resolution code is a field within the ticketing system that should be updated at ticket close to categorize the primary way the ticket was resolved.
    • This is important for reporting purposes as it adds another level to the categorization scheme and can help you identify knowledgebase article candidates, training needs, or problems.

    Ticket statuses are a helpful field for both IT and end users to identify the current status of the ticket and to initiate workflows.

    • The most common statuses are open, pending/in progress, resolved, and closed (note the difference between resolved and closed).
    • Waiting on user or waiting on vendor are also helpful statuses to stop the clock when awaiting further information or input.

    Common Examples:

    Resolution Codes

    • How to/training
    • Configuration change
    • Upgrade
    • Installation
    • Data import/export/change
    • Information/research
    • Reboot

    Status Fields

    • Declined
    • Open
    • Closed
    • Waiting on user
    • Waiting on vendor
    • Reopened by user

    Identify and document resolution and status codes

    2.2.2 Enhance ticket categories with resolution codes

    Discuss:

    • How can we use resolution information to enhance reporting?
    • Are current status fields telling the right story?
    • Are there other requirements like project linking?

    Draft:

    1. Write out proposed resolution codes and status fields and critically assess their value.
    2. Resolutions can be further broken down by incident and service request if desired.
    3. Test resolution codes against a few recent tickets.
    4. Record the ticket categorization scheme in the Service Desk SOP.

    Participants

    • CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Technician(s)

    What You’ll Need

    • Whiteboard or Flip Chart
    • Markers

    Step 2.3: Design incident escalation and prioritization

    Image shows the steps in phase 2. Highlight is on step 2.3.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • 2.3.1 Build a small number of rules to facilitate prioritization
    • 2.3.2 Define escalation rules
    • 2.3.3 Define automated escalations
    • 2.3.4 Provide guidance to each tier around escalation steps and times

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager(s)
    • Representation from tier 2 and tier 3 specialists

    Outcomes

    The reviewed ticket escalation and prioritization will streamline queue management, improve the quality of escalations, and ensure agents work on the right tickets at the right time.

    DELIVERABLES

    • Optimized ticket prioritization scheme
    • Guidelines for ticket escalations
    • List of automatic escalations

    Build a ticket prioritization matrix to make escalation assessment less subjective

    Most IT leaders agree that prioritization is one of the most difficult aspects of IT in general. Set priorities based on business needs first.

    Mission-critical systems or problems that affect many people should always come first (i.e. Severity Level 1).

    The bulk of reported problems, however, are often individual problems with desktop PCs (i.e. Severity Level 3 or 4).

    Some questions to consider when deciding on problem severity include:

    • How is productivity affected?
    • How many users are affected?
    • How many systems are affected?
    • How critical are the affected systems to the organization?

    Decide how many severity levels the organization needs the service desk to have. Four levels of severity are ideal for most organizations.

    Image shows example ticket prioritization matrix

    Collect the ticket prioritization scheme in one diagram to ensure service support aligns to business requirements

    Image shows example ticket prioritization matrix

    Prioritize incidents based on severity and urgency to foreground critical issues

    2.3.1 Build a clearly defined priority scheme

    Estimated Time: 60 minutes

    1. Decide how many levels of severity are appropriate for your organization.
    2. Build a prioritization matrix, breaking down priority levels by impact and urgency.
    3. Build out the definitions of impact and urgency to complete the prioritization matrix.
    4. Run through examples of each priority level to make sure everyone is on the same page.

    Image shows example ticket prioritization matrix

    Document in the SOP

    Participants

    • Service Managers
    • Service Desk Support
    • Applications or Infrastructure Support

    What You'll Need

    • Flip Chart Paper
    • Sticky Notes
    • Pens
    • Service Desk SOP

    Example of outcome from 2.3.1

    Define response and resolution targets for each priority level to establish service-level objectives for service support

    Image shows example of response and resolution targets.

    Build clear rules to help agents determine when to escalate

    2.3.2 Assign response, resolution, and escalation times to each priority level

    Estimated Time: 60 minutes

    Instructions:

    For each incident priority level, define the associated:

    1. Response time – time from when incident record is created to the time the service desk acknowledges to the customer that their ticket has been received and assigned.
    2. Resolution time – time from when the incident record is created to the time that the customer has been advised that their problem has been resolved.
    3. Escalation time – maximum amount of time that a ticket should be worked on without progress before being escalated to someone else.

    Participants

    • Service Managers
    • Service Desk Support
    • Applications or Infrastructure Support

    What You'll Need

    • Flip Chart Paper
    • Sticky Notes
    • Pens

    Image shows example of response and resolution targets

    Use the table on the previous slide as a guide.

    Discuss the possible root causes for escalation issues

    WHY IS ESCALATION IMPORTANT?

    Escalation is not about admitting defeat, but about using your resources properly.

    Defining procedures for escalation reduces the amount of time the service desk spends troubleshooting before allocating the incident to a higher service tier. This reduces the mean time to resolve and increases end-user satisfaction.

    You can correlate escalation paths to ticket categories devised in step 2.2.

    Image shows example on potential root causes for escalation issues.

    Build decision rights to help agents determine when to escalate

    2.3.3 Provide guidance to each tier around escalation steps and times

    Estimated Time: 60 minutes

    Instructions

    1. For each support tier, define escalation rules for troubleshooting (steps that each tier should take before escalation).
    2. For each support tier, define maximum escalation times (maximum amount of time to work on a ticket without progress before escalating).
    Example of outcome from step 2.3.3 to determine when to escalate issues.

    Create a list of application specialists to get the escalation right the first time

    2.3.4 Define automated escalations

    Estimated Time: 60 minutes

    1. Identify applications that will require specialists for troubleshooting or access rights.
    2. Identify primary and secondary specialists for each application.
    3. Identify vendors that will receive escalations either immediately or after troubleshooting.
    4. Set up application groups in the service desk tool.
    5. Set up workflows in the service desk tool where appropriate.
    6. Document the automated escalations in the categorization scheme developed in step 2.2 and in the Service Desk Roles and Responsibilities Guide.

    A screenshot of the Service Desk Roles and Responsibilities Guide

    Participants

    • Service Managers
    • Service Desk Support
    • Applications or Infrastructure Support

    What You'll Need

    • Flip Chart Paper
    • Sticky Notes
    • Pens

    Phase 3

    Design Request Fulfilment Processes

    Step 3.1: Build request workflows

    Image shows the steps in phase 3. Highlight is on step 3.1.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • 3.1.1 Distinguish between requests and small projects
    • 3.1.2 Define service requests with SLAs
    • 3.1.3 Build and critique request workflows

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager(s)
    • Representation from tier 2 and tier 3 specialists

    Outcomes

    Workflows for service requests will improve the consistency and quality of service delivery and prepare the service desk to negotiate reliable service levels with the organization.

    DELIVERABLES

    • Workflows for the most common service requests
    • An estimated service level for each service request
    • Request vs. project criteria

    Standardize service requests for more efficient delivery

    Definitions:

    • An incident is an unexpected disruption to normal business processes and requires attempts to restore service as soon as possible (e.g. printer not working).
    • A service request is a request where nothing is broken or impacting a service and typically can be scheduled rather than requiring immediate resolution (e.g. new software application).
    • Service requests are repeatable, predictable, and easier to commit to SLAs.
    • By committing to SLAs, expectations can be set for users and business units for service fulfillment.
    • Workflows for service requests should be documented and reviewed to ensure consistency of fulfillment.
    • Documentation should be created for service request procedures that are complex.
    • Efficiencies can be created through automation such as with software deployment.
    • All service requests can be communicated through a self-service portal or service catalog.

    PREPARE A FUTURE SERVICE CATALOG

    Standardize requests to develop a consistent offering and prepare for a future service catalog.

    Document service requests to identify time to fulfill and approvals.

    Identify which service requests can be auto-approved and which will require a workflow to gain approval.

    Document workflows and analyze them to identify ways to improve SLAs. If any approvals are interrupting technical processes, rearrange them so that approvals happen before the technical team is involved.

    Determine support levels for each service offering and ensure your team can sustain them.

    Where it makes sense, automate delivery of services such as software deployment.

    Distinguish between service requests and small projects to ensure agents and end users follow the right process

    The distinction between service requests and small projects has two use cases, which are two sides of the same resourcing issue.

    • Service desk managers need to understand the difference to ensure the right approval process is followed. Typically, projects have more stringent intake requirements than requests do.
    • PMOs need to understand the difference to ensure the right people are doing the work and that small, frequent changes are standardized, automated, and taken out of the project list.

    What’s the difference between a service request and a small project?

    • The key differences involve resource scope, frequency, and risk.
    • Requests are likely to require fewer resources than projects, be fulfilled more often, and involve less risk.
    • Requests are typically done by tier 1 and 2 employees throughout the IT organization.
    • A request can turn into a small project if the scope of the request grows beyond the bounds of a normal request.

    Example: A mid-sized organization goes on a hiring blitz and needs to onboard 150 new employees in one quarter. Submitting and scheduling 150 requests for onboarding new employees would require much more time and resources.

    Projects are different from service requests and have different criteria

    A project, by terminology, is a temporary endeavor planned around producing a specific organizational or business outcome.

    Common Characteristics of Projects:

    • Time sensitive, temporary, one-off.
    • Uncertainty around how to create the unique thing, product, or service that is the project’s goal.
    • Non-repetitive work and sizeable enough to introduce heightened risk and complexity.
    • Strategic focus, business case-informed capital funding, and execution activities driven by a charter.
    • Introduces change to the organization.
    • Multiple stakeholders involved and cross-functional resourcing.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Projects require greater risk, effort, and resources than a service request and should be redirected to the PMO.

    Standard service requests vs. non-standard service requests: criteria to make them distinct

    • If there is no differentiation between standard and non-standard requests, those tickets can easily move into the backlog, growing it very quickly.
    • Create a process to easily identify non-standard requests when they enter the ticket queue to ensure customers are made aware of any delay of service, especially if it is a product or service currently not offered. This will give time for any approvals or technical solutioning that may need to occur.
    • Take recurring non-standard requests and make them standard. This is a good way to determine if there are any gaps in services offered and another vehicle to understand what your customers want.

    Standard Requests

    • Very common requests, delivered on an on-going basis
    • Defined process
    • Measured in hours or days
    • Uses service catalog, if it exists
    • Formalized and should already be documented
    • The time to deal with the request is defined

    Non-Standard Requests

    • Higher level complexity than standard requests
    • Cannot be fulfilled via service catalog
    • No defined process
    • Not supplied by questions that Service Request Definition (SRD) offers
    • Product or service is not currently offered, and it may need time for technical review, additional approvals, and procurement processes

    The right questions can help you distinguish between standard requests, non-standard requests, and projects

    Where do we draw the line between a standard and non-standard request and a project?

    The service desk can’t and shouldn’t distinguish between requests and projects on its own. Instead, engage stakeholders to determine where to draw the line.

    Whatever criteria you choose, define them carefully.

    Be pragmatic: there is no single best set of criteria and no single best definition for each criterion. The best criteria and definitions will be the ones that work in your organizational context.

    Common distinguishing factors and thresholds:

    Image shows table of the common distinguishing factors and thresholds.

    Distinguish between standard and non-standard service requests and projects

    3.1.1 Distinguish between service requests and projects

    1. Divide the group into two small teams.
    2. Each team will brainstorm examples of service requests and small projects.
    3. Identify factors and thresholds that distinguish between the two groups of items.
    4. Bring the two groups together and discuss the two sets of criteria.
    5. Consolidate one set of criteria that will help make the distinction between projects and service requests.
    6. Capture the table in the Service Desk SOP.

    Image shows blank template of the common distinguishing factors and thresholds.

    Participants

    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Agents

    What You'll Need

    • Service Desk SOP
    • Flip Chart
    • Whiteboard

    Distinguishing factors and thresholds

    Don’t standardize request fulfilment processes alone

    Everyone in IT contributes to the fulfilment of requests, but do they know it?

    New service desk managers sometimes try to standardize request fulfilment processes on their own only to encounter either apathy or significant resistance to change.

    Moving to a tiered generalist service desk with a service-oriented culture, a high first-tier generalist resolution rate, and collaborative T2 and T3 specialists can be a big change. It is critical to get the request workflows right.

    Don’t go it alone. Engage a core team of process champions from all service support. With executive support, the right process building exercises can help you overcome resistance to change.

    Consider running the process building activities in this project phase in a working session or a workshop setting.

    Info-Tech Insight

    If they build it, they will come. Service desk improvement is an exercise in organizational change that crosses IT disciplines. Organizations that fail to engage IT specialists from other silos often encounter resistance to change that jeopardizes the process improvements they are trying to make. Overcome resistance by highlighting how process changes will benefit different groups in IT and solicit the feedback of specialists who can affect or be affected by the changes.

    Define standard service requests with SLAs and workflows

    WHY DO I NEED WORKFLOWS?

    Move approvals out of technical IT processes to make them more efficient. Evaluate all service requests to see where auto-approvals make sense. Where approvals are required, use tools and workflows to manage the process.

    Example:

    Image is an example of SLAs and workflows.

    Approvals can be the main roadblock to fulfilling service requests

    Image is example of workflow approvals.

    Review the general standard service request and inquiry fulfillment processes

    As standard service requests should follow standard, repeatable, and predictable steps to fulfill, they can be documented with workflows.

    Image is a flow chart of service and inquiry request processes.

    Review the general standard service request and inquiry fulfillment processes

    Ensure there is a standard and predictable methodology for assessing non-standard requests; inevitably those requests may still cause delay in fulfillment.

    Create a process to ensure reasonable expectations of delivery can be set with the end user and then identify what technology requests should become part of the existing standard offerings.

    Image is a flowchart of non-standard request processes

    Document service requests to ensure consistent delivery and communicate requirements to users

    3.1.2 Define service requests with SLAs

    1. On a flip chart, list standard service requests.
    2. Identify time required to fulfill, including time to schedule resources.
    3. Identify approvals required; determine if approvals can be automated through defining roles.
    4. Discuss opportunities to reduce SLAs or automate, but recognize that this may not happen right away.
    5. Discuss plans to communicate SLAs to the business units, recognizing that some users may take a bit of time to adapt to the new SLAs.
    6. Work toward improving SLAs as new opportunities for process change occur.
    7. Document SLAs in the Service Desk SOP and update as SLAs change.
    8. Build templates in the service desk tool that encapsulate workflows and routing, SLAs, categorization, and resolution.

    Participants

    • Service Desk Managers
    • Service Desk Agents

    What You'll Need

    • Service Desk SOP
    • Flip Chart
    • Whiteboard

    Info-Tech Insight

    These should all be scheduled services. Anything that is requested as a rush needs to be marked as a higher urgency or priority to track end users who need training on the process.

    Analyze service request workflows to improve service delivery

    3.1.3 Build and critique request workflows

    1. Divide the group into small teams.
    2. Each team will choose one service request from the list created in the previous module and then draw the workflow. Include decision points and approvals.
    3. Discuss availability and technical support:
      • Can the service be fulfilled during regular business hours or 24x7?
      • Is technical support and application access available during regular business hours or 24x7?
    4. Reconvene and present workflows to the group.
    5. Document workflows in Visio and add to the Service Desk SOP. Where appropriate, enter workflows in the service desk tool.

    Critique workflows for efficiencies and effectiveness:

    • Do the workflows support the SLAs identified in the previous exercise?
    • Are the workflows efficient?
    • Is the IT staff consistently following the same workflow?
    • Are approvals appropriate? Is there too much bureaucracy or can some approvals be removed? Can they be preapproved?
    • Are approvals interrupting technical processes? If so, can they be moved?

    Participants

    • Service Desk Managers
    • Service Desk Agents

    What You'll Need

    • Service Desk SOP
    • Project Summary
    • Flip Chart
    • Whiteboard

    Step 3.2: Build a targeted knowledgebase

    Image shows the steps in phase 3. Highlight is on step 3.2.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • 3.2.1 Design knowledge management processes
    • 3.2.2 Create actionable knowledgebase articles

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager(s)
    • Representation from tier 2 and tier 3 specialists

    Outcomes

    The section will introduce service catalogs and get the organization to envision what self-service tools it might include.

    DELIVERABLES

    • Knowledgebase policy and process

    A knowledgebase is an essential tool in the service management toolbox

    Knowledge Management

    Gathering, analyzing, storing & sharing knowledge to reduce the need to rediscover known solutions.

    Knowledgebase

    Organized repository of IT best practices and knowledge gained from practical experiences.

    • End-User KB
    • Give end users a chance to resolve simple issues themselves without submitting a ticket.

    • Internal KB
    • Shared resource for service desk staff and managers to share and use knowledge.

    Use the knowledgebase to document:

    • Steps for pre-escalation troubleshooting.
    • Known errors.
    • Workarounds or solutions to recurring issues.
    • Solutions that require research or complex troubleshooting.
    • Incidents that have many root causes. Start with the most frequent solution and work toward less likely issues.

    Draw on organizational goals to define the knowledge transfer target state

    Image is Info-Tech’s Knowledge Transfer Maturity Model
    *Source: McLean & Company, 2013; N=120

    It’s better to start small than to have nothing at all

    Service desk teams are often overwhelmed by the idea of building and maintaining a comprehensive integrated knowledgebase that covers an extensive amount of information.

    Don’t let this idea stop you from building a knowledgebase! It takes time to build a comprehensive knowledgebase and you must start somewhere.

    Start with existing documentation or knowledge that depends on the expertise of only a few people and is easy to document and you will already see the benefits.

    Then continue to build and improve from there. Eventually, knowledge management will be a part of the culture.

    Engage the team to build a knowledgebase targeted on your most important incidents and requests

    WHERE DO I START?

    Inventory and consolidate existing documentation, then evaluate it for audience relevancy, accuracy, and usability. Use the exercise and the next slides to develop a knowledgebase template.

    Produce a plan to improve the knowledgebase.

    • Identify the current top five or ten incidents from the service desk reports and create related knowledgebase articles.
    • Evaluate for end-user self-service or technician resolution.
    • Note any resolutions that require access rights to servers.
    • Assign documentation creation tasks for the knowledgebase to individual team members each week.
    • Apply only one incident per article.
    • Set goals for each technician to submit one or two meaningful articles per month.
    • Assign a knowledge manager to monitor creation and edit and maintain the database.
    • Set policy to drive currency of the knowledgebase. See the Service Desk SOP for an example of a workable knowledge policy.

    Use a phased approach to build a knowledgebase

    Image is an example of a phased approach to build a knowledge base

    Use a quarterly, phased approach to continue to build and maintain your knowledgebase

    Continual Knowledgebase Maintenance:

    • Once a knowledgebase is in place, future articles should be written using established templates.
    • Articles should be regularly reviewed and monitored for usage. Outdated information will be retired and archived.
    • Ticket trend analysis should be done on an ongoing basis to identify new articles.
    • A proactive approach will anticipate upcoming issues based on planned upgrades and maintenance or other changes, and document resolution steps in knowledgebase articles ahead of time.

    Every Quarter:

    1. Conduct a ticket trend analysis. Identify the most important and common tickets.
    2. Review the knowledgebase to identify relevant articles that need to be revised or written.
    3. Use data from knowledge management tool to track expiring content and lesser used articles.
    4. Assign the task of writing articles to all IT staff members.
    5. Build and revise ticket templates for incident and service requests.

    Assign a knowledge manager role to ensure accountability for knowledgebase maintenance

    Assign a knowledge manager to monitor creation and edit and maintain database.

    Knowledge Manager/Owner Role:

    • Has overall responsibility for the knowledgebase.
    • Ensures content is consistent and maintains standards.
    • Regularly monitors and updates the list of issues that should be added to the knowledgebase.
    • Regularly reviews existing knowledgebase articles to ensure KB is up to date and flags content to retire or review.
    • Assigns content creation tasks.
    • Optimizes knowledgebase structure and organization.
    • See Info-Tech’s knowledge manager role description if you need a hand defining this position.

    The knowledge manager role will likely be a role assigned to an existing resource rather than a dedicated position.

    Develop a template to ensure knowledgebase articles are easy to read and write

    A screenshot of the Knowledgebase Article Template

    QUICK TIPS

    • Use non-technical language whenever possible to help less-technical readers.
    • Identify error messages and use screenshots where it makes sense.
    • Take advantage of social features like voting buttons to increase use.
    • Use Info-Tech’s Knowledge Base Article Template to get you started.

    Analyze the necessary features for your knowledgebase and compare them against existing tools

    Service desk knowledgebases range in complexity from simple FAQs to fully integrated software suites.

    Options include:

    • Article search with negative and positive filters.
    • Tagging, with the option to have keywords generate top matches.
    • Role-based permissions (to prevent unauthorized deletions).
    • Ability to turn a ticket resolution into a knowledgebase article (typically only available if knowledgebase tool is part of the service desk tool).
    • Natural language search.
    • Partitioning so relevant articles only appear for specific audiences.
    • Editorial workflow management.
    • Ability to set alerts for scheduled article review.
    • Article reporting (most viewed, was it useful?).
    • Rich text fields for attaching screenshots.

    Determine which features your organization needs and check to see if your tools have them.

    For more information on knowledgebase improvement, refer to Info-Tech’s Optimize the Service Desk With a Shift-Left Strategy.

    Document your knowledge management maintenance workflow to identify opportunities for improvement

    Workflow should include:

    • How you will identify top articles that need to be written
    • How you will ensure articles remain relevant
    • How you will assign new articles to be written, inclusive of peer review
    Image of flowchart of knowledgebase maintenance process.

    Design knowledgebase management processes

    3.2.1 Design knowledgebase management processes

    1. Assign a knowledge manager to monitor creation and edit and maintain the database. See Info-Tech’s knowledge manager role description if you need a hand defining this position.
    2. Discuss how you can use the service desk tool to integrate the knowledgebase with incident management, request fulfilment, and self-service processes.
    3. Discuss the suitability of a quarterly process to build and edit articles for a target knowledgebase that covers your most important incidents and requests.
    4. Set knowledgebase creation targets for tier 1, 2, and 3 analysts.
    5. Identify relevant performance metrics.
    6. Brainstorm elements that might be used as an incentive program to encourage the creation of knowledgebase articles and knowledge sharing more generally.
    7. Set policy to drive currency of knowledgebase. See the Service Desk SOP for an example of a workable knowledge policy.

    Participants

    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Agents

    What You’ll Need

    • Service Desk SOP
    • Flip Chart
    • Whiteboard

    Create actionable knowledgebase articles

    3.2.2 Run a knowledgebase working group

    Write and critique knowledgebase articles.

    1. On a whiteboard, build a list of potential knowledgebase articles divided by audience: Technician or End User.
    2. Each team member chooses one topic and spends 20 minutes writing.
    3. Each team member either reads the article and has the team critique or passes to the technician to the right for peer review. If there are many participants, break into smaller groups.
    4. Set a goal with the team for how, when, and how often knowledgebase articles will be created.
    5. Capture knowledgebase processes in the Service Desk SOP.

    Audience: Technician

    • Password update
    • VPN printing
    • Active directory – policy, procedures, naming conventions
    • Cell phones
    • VPN client and creation set-up

    Audience: End users

    • Set up email account
    • Password creation policy
    • Voicemail – access, change greeting, activities
    • Best practices for virus, malware, phishing attempts
    • Windows 10 tips and tricks

    Participants

    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Agents

    What You’ll Need

    • Service Desk SOP
    • Flip Chart
    • Whiteboard

    Step 3.3: Prepare for a self-service portal project

    Image shows the steps in phase 3. Highlight is on step 3.3.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • 3.3.1 Develop self-service tools for the end user
    • 3.3.2 Make a plan for creating or improving the self-service portal

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager(s)
    • Representation from tier 2 and tier 3 specialists

    Outcomes

    The section prepares you to tackle a self-service portal project once the service desk standardization is complete.

    DELIVERABLES

    • High-level activities to create a self-service portal

    Design the self-service portal with the users’ computer skills in mind

    A study by the OECD offers a useful reminder of one of usability’s most hard-earned lessons: you are not the user.

    • There is an important difference between IT professionals and the average user that’s even more damaging to your ability to predict what will be a good self-service tool: skills in using computers, the internet, and technology in general.
    • An international research study explored the computer skills of 215,942 people aged 16-65 in 33 countries.
    • The results show that across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has strong computer-related abilities and only 33% of people can complete medium-complexity computer tasks.
    • End users are skilled, they just don’t have the same level of comfort with computers as the average IT professional. Design your self-service tools with that fact in mind.
    Image is of a graph showing the ability of computer skills from age 16-65 among various countries.

    Take an incremental and iterative approach to developing your self-service portal

    Use a web portal to offer self-serve functionality or provide FAQ information to your customers to start.

    • Don’t build from scratch. Ideally, use the functionality included with your ITSM tool.
    • If your ITSM tool doesn’t have an adequate self-service portal functionality, then harness other tools that IT already uses. Common examples include Microsoft SharePoint and Google Forms.
    • Make it as easy as possible to access the portal:
      • Deploy an app to managed devices or put the app in your app store.
      • Create a shortcut on people’s start menus or home screens.
      • Print the URL on swag such as mousepads.
    • Follow Info-Tech’s approach to developing your user facing service catalog.

    Some companies use vending machines as a form of self serve. Users can enter their purchase code and “buy” a thin client, mouse, keyboard, software, USB keys, tablet, headphones, or loaners.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Building the basics first will provide your users with immediate value. Incrementally add new features to your portal.

    Optimize the portal: self-service should be faster and more convenient than the alternative

    Design the portal by demand, not supply

    Don’t build a portal framed around current offerings and capabilities just for the sake of it. Build the portal based on what your users want and need if you want them to use it.

    Make user experience a top priority

    The portal should be designed for users to self-serve, and thus self-service must be seamless, clear, and attractive to users.

    Speak your users’ language

    Keep in mind that users may not have high technical literacy or be familiar with terminology that you find commonplace. Use terms that are easy to understand.

    Appeal to both clickers and searchers

    Ensure that users can find what they’re looking for both by browsing the site and by using search functionality.

    Use one central portal for all departments

    If multiple departments (i.e. HR, Finance) use or will use a portal, set up a shared portal so that users won’t have to guess where to go to ask for help.

    You won’t know unless you test

    You will know how to navigate the portal better than anyone, but that doesn’t mean it’s intuitive for a new user. Test the portal with users to collect and incorporate feedback.

    Self-service portal examples (1/2)

    Image is of an example of the self-service portal

    Image source: Cherwell Service Management

    Self-service examples (2/2)

    Image is of an example of the self-service portal

    Image source: Team Dynamix

    Keep the end-user facing knowledgebase relevant with workflows, multi-device access, and social features

    Workflows:

    • Easily manage peer reviews and editorial and relevance review.
    • Enable links and importing between tickets and knowledgebase articles.
    • Enable articles to appear based on ticket content.

    Multi-device access:

    • Encourage users to access self-service.
    • Enable technicians to solve problems from anywhere.

    Social features:

    • Display most popular articles first to solve trending issues.
    • Enable voting to improve usability of articles.
    • Allow collaboration on self-service.

    For more information on building self-service portal, refer to Info-Tech’s Optimize the Service Desk with a Shift-Left Strategy

    Draft a high-level project plan for a self-service portal project

    3.3.1 Draft a high-level project plan for a self-service portal project

    1. Identify stakeholders who can contribute to the project.
      • Who will help with FAQ creation?
      • Who can design the self-service portal?
      • Who needs to sign off on the project?
    2. Identify the high-level tasks that need to be done.
      • How many FAQs need to be created?
      • How will we design the service catalog’s web portal?
      • What might a phased approach look like?
      • How can we break down the project into design, build, and implementation tasks?
      • What is the rough timeline for these tasks?
    3. Capture the high-level activities in the Service Desk Roadmap.

    Participants

    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Agents

    What You’ll Need

    • Flip Chart
    • Whiteboard
    • Implementation Roadmap

    Once you have a service portal, you can review the business requirements for a service catalog

    A service catalog is a communications device that lists the IT services offered by an organization. The service catalog is designed to enable the creation of a self-service portal for the end user. The portal augments the service desk so analysts can spend time managing incidents and providing technical support.

    The big value comes from workflows:

    • Improved economics and a means to measure the costs to serve over time.
    • Incentive for adoption because things work better.
    • Abstracts delivery from offer to serve so you can outsource, insource, crowdsource, slow, speed, reassign, and cover absences without involving the end user.

    There are three types of catalogs:

    • Static:Informational only, so can be a basic website.
    • Routing and workflow: Attached to service desk tool.
    • Workflow and e-commerce: Integrated with service desk tool and ERP system.
    Image is an example of service catalog

    Image courtesy of University of Victoria

    Understand the time and effort involved in building a service catalog

    A service catalog will streamline IT service delivery, but putting one together requires a significant investment. Service desk standardization comes first.

    • Workflows and back-end services must be in place before setting up a service catalog.
    • Think of the catalog as just the delivery mechanism for service you currently provide. If they aren’t running well and delivery is not consistent, you don’t want to advertise SLAs and options.
    • Service catalogs require maintenance.
    • It’s not a one-time investment – service catalogs must be kept up to date to be useful.
    • Service catalog building requires input from VIPs.
    • Architects and wordsmiths are not the only ones that spend effort on the service catalog. Leadership from IT and the business also provide input on policy and content.

    Sample Service Catalog Efforts

    • A college with 17 IT staff spent one week on a simple service catalog.
    • A law firm with 110 IT staff spent two months on a service catalog project.
    • A municipal government with 300 IT people spent over seven months and has yet to complete the project.
    • A financial organization with 2,000 IT people has spent seven months on service catalog automation alone! The whole project has taken multiple years.

    “I would say a client with 2,000 users and an IT department with a couple of hundred, then you're looking at six months before you have the catalog there.”

    – Service Catalog Implementation Specialist,

    Health Services

    Draft a high-level project plan for a self-service portal project

    3.2.2 Make a plan for creating or improving the self-service portal

    Identify stakeholders who can contribute to the project.

    • Who will help with FAQs creation?
    • Who can design the self-service portal?
    • Who needs to sign off on the project?

    Evaluate tool options.

    • Will you stick with your existing tool or invest in a new tool?

    Identify the high-level tasks that need to be done.

    • How will we design the web portal?
    • What might a phased approach look like?
    • What is the rough timeline for these tasks?
    • How many FAQs need to be created?
    • Will we have a service catalog, and what type?

    Document the plan and tasks in the Service Desk Roadmap.

    Examples of publicly posted service catalogs:

    University of Victoria is an example of a catalog that started simple and now includes multiple divisions, notifications, systems status, communications, e-commerce, incident registration, and more.

    Indiana University is a student, faculty, and staff service catalog and self-service portal that goes beyond IT services.

    If you are ready to start building a service catalog, use Info-Tech’s Design and Build a User-Facing Service Catalog blueprint to get started.

    Phase 4

    Plan the Implementation of the Service Desk

    Step 4.1: Build communication plan

    Image shows the steps in phase 4. Highlight is on step 4.1.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • 4.1.1 Create the communication plan

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Director
    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager(s)
    • Representation from tier 2 and tier 3 specialists

    Outcomes

    The communication plan and project summary will help project managers outline recommendations and communicate their benefits.

    DELIVERABLES

    • Communication plan
    • Project summary

    Effectively communicate the game plan to IT to ensure the success of service desk improvements

    Communication is crucial to the integration and overall implementation of your service desk improvement.

    An effective communication plan will:

    • Gain support from management at the project proposal phase.
    • Create end-user buy-in once the program is set to launch.
    • Maintainthe presence of the program throughout the business.
    • Instill ownership throughout the business, from top-level management to new hires.

    Build a communication plan to:

    1. Communicate benefits to IT:
      • Share the standard operating procedures for training and feedback.
      • Train staff on policies as they relate to end users and ensure awareness of all policy changes.
      • As changes are implemented, continue to solicit feedback on what is and is not working and communicate adjustments as appropriate.
    2. Train technicians:
      • Make sure everyone is comfortable communicating changes to customers.
    3. Measure success:
      • Review SLAs and reports. Are you consistently meeting SLAs?
      • Is it safe to communicate with end users?

    Create your communication plan to anticipate challenges, remove obstacles, and secure buy-in

    Why:

    • What problems are you trying to solve?

    What:

    • What processes will it affect (that will affect me)?

    Who:

    • Who will be affected?
    • Who do I go to if I have issues with the new process?
    3 gears are depicted. The top gear is labelled managers with an arrow going clockwise. The middle gear is labelled technical staff with an arrow going counterclockwise. The bottom gear is labelled end users with an arrow going clockwise

    When:

    • When will this be happening?
    • When will it affect me?

    How:

    • How will these changes manifest themselves?

    Goal:

    • What is the final goal?
    • How will it benefit me?

    Create a communication plan to outline the project benefits

    Improved business satisfaction:

    • Improve confidence that the service desk can solve issues within the service-level agreement.
    • Channel incidents and requests through the service desk.
    • Escalate incidents quickly and accurately.

    Fewer recurring issues:

    • Tickets are created for every incident and categorized correctly.
    • Reports can be used for root-cause analysis.

    Increased efficiency or lower cost to serve:

    • Use FAQs to enable end users to self-solve.
    • Use knowledgebase to troubleshoot once, solve many times.
    • Cross-train to improve service consistency.

    Enhanced demand planning:

    • Trend analysis and reporting improve IT’s ability to forecast and address the demands of the business.

    Organize the information to manage the deployment of key messages

    Example of how to organize and manage key messages

    Create the communication plan

    4.1.1 Create the communication plan

    Estimated Time: 45 minutes

    Develop a stakeholder analysis.

    1. Identify everyone affected by the project.
    2. Assess their level of interest, value, and influence.
    3. Develop a communication strategy tailored to their level of engagement.

    Craft key messages tailored to each stakeholder group.

    Finalize the communication plan.

    1. Examine your roadmap and determine the most appropriate timing for communications.
    2. Assess when communications must happen with executives, business unit leaders, end users, and technicians.
    3. Identify any additional communication challenges that have come up.
    4. Identify who will send out the communications.
    5. Identify multiple methods for getting the messages out (newsletters, emails, posters, company meetings).
    6. For inspiration, you can refer to the Sample Communication Plan for the project.

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Agents

    Step 4.2: Build implementation roadmap

    Image shows the steps in phase 4. Highlight is on step 4.2.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • 4.2.1 Build implementation roadmap

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Director
    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Representation from tier 2 and tier 3 specialists

    Outcomes

    The implementation plan will help track and categorize the next steps and finalize the project.

    DELIVERABLES

    • Implementation roadmap

    Collaborate to create an implementation plan

    4.2.1 Create the implementation plan

    Estimated Time: 45 minutes

    Determine the sequence of improvement initiatives that have been identified throughout the project.

    The purpose of this exercise is to define a timeline and commit to initiatives to reach your goals.

    Instructions:

    1. Review the initiatives that will be taken to improve the service desk and revise tasks, as necessary.
    2. Input each of the tasks in the data entry tab and provide a description and rationale behind the task.
    3. Assign an effort, priority, and cost level to each task (high, medium, low).
    4. Assign ownership to each task.
    5. Identify the timeline for each task based on the priority, effort, and cost (short, medium, and long term).
    6. Highlight risk for each task if it will be deferred.
    7. Track the progress of each task with the status column.

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Agents

    A screenshot of the Roadmap tool.

    Document using the Roadmap tool.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Standardize the Service Desk

    ImplementHardware and Software Asset Management

    Optimize Change Management Incident and Problem Management Build a Continual Improvement Plan for the Service Desk

    The Standardize blueprint reviews service desk structures and metrics and builds essential processes and workflows for incident management, service request fulfillment, and knowledge management practices.

    Once the service desk is operational, there are three paths to basic ITSM maturity:

    • Having the incident management processes and workflows built allows you to:
      • Introduce Change Management to reduce change-related incidents.
      • Introduce Problem Management to reduce incident recurrence.
      • Introduce Asset Management to augment service management processes with reliable data.

    Solicit targeted department feedback on core IT service capabilities, IT communications, and business enablement. Use the results to assess the satisfaction of end users, with each service broken down by department and seniority level.

    Works cited

    “Help Desk Staffing Models: Simple Analysis Can Save You Money.” Giva, Inc., 2 Sept. 2009. Web.

    Marrone et al. “IT Service Management: A Cross-national Study of ITIL Adoption.” Communications of the Association for Information Systems: Vol. 34, Article 49. 2014. PDF.

    Rumburg, Jeff. “Metric of the Month: First Level Resolution Rate.” MetricNet, 2011. Web.

    “Service Recovery Paradox.” Wikipedia, n.d. Web.

    Tang, Xiaojun, and Yuki Todo. “A Study of Service Desk Setup in Implementing IT Service Management in Enterprises.” Technology and Investment: Vol. 4, pp. 190-196. 2013. PDF.

    “The Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC).” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2016. Web.

    Contributors

    • Jason Aqui, IT Director, Bellevue College
    • Kevin Sigil, IT Director, Southwest Care Centre
    • Lucas Gutierrez, Service Desk Manager, City of Santa Fe
    • Rama Dhuwaraha, CIO, University of North Texas System
    • Annelie Rugg, CIO, UCLA Humanities
    • Owen McKeith, Manager IT Infrastructure, Canpotex
    • Rod Gula, IT Director, American Realty Association
    • Rosalba Trujillo, Service Desk Manager, Northgate Markets
    • Jason Metcalfe, IT Manager, Mesalabs
    • Bradley Rodgers, IT Manager, SecureTek
    • Daun Costa, IT Manager, Pita Pit
    • Kari Petty, Service Desk Manager, Mansfield Oil
    • Denis Borka, Service Desk Manager, PennTex Midstream
    • Lateef Ashekun, IT Manager, City of Atlanta
    • Ted Zeisner, IT Manager, University of Ottawa Institut de Cardiologie

    Legacy Active Directory Environment

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}471|cart{/j2store}
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    • Parent Category Name: Cloud Strategy
    • Parent Category Link: /cloud-strategy

    You are looking to lose your dependency on Active Directory (AD), and you need to tackle infrastructure technical debt, but there are challenges:

    • Legacy apps that are in maintenance mode cannot shed their AD dependency or have hardware upgrades made.
    • You are unaware of what processes depend on AD and how integrated they are.
    • Departments invest in apps that are integrated with AD without informing you until they ask for Domain details after purchasing.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Remove your dependency on AD one application at a time. If you are a cloud-first organization, rethink your AD strategy to ask “why” when you add a new device to your Active Directory.
    • With the advent of hybrid work, AD is now a security risk. You need to shore up your security posture. Think of zero trust architecture.
    • Take inventory of your objects that depend on Kerberos and NTML and plan on removing that barrier through applications that don’t depend on AD.

    Impact and Result

    Don’t allow Active Directory services to dictate your enterprise innovation and modernization strategies. Determine if you can safely remove objects and move them to a cloud service where your Azure AD Domain Services can handle your authentication and manage users and groups.

    Legacy Active Directory Environment Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Legacy Active Directory Environment Deck – Legacy AD was never built for modern infrastructure. Understand the history and future of Active Directory and what alternatives are in the market.

    Build all new systems with cloud integration in mind. Many applications built in the past had built-in AD components for access, using Kerberos and NTLM. This dependency has prevented organizations from migrating away from AD. When assessing new technology and applications, consider SaaS or cloud-native apps rather than a Microsoft-dependent application with AD ingrained in the code.

    • Legacy Active Directory Environment Storyboard
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Legacy Active Directory Environment

    Kill the technical debt of your legacy Active Directory environment.

    Analyst Perspective

    Understand what Active Directory is and why Azure Active Directory does not replace it.

    It’s about Kerberos and New Technology LAN Manager (NTLM).

    The image contains a picture of John Donovan.

    Many organizations that want to innovate and migrate from on-premises applications to software as a service (SaaS) and cloud services are held hostage by their legacy Active Directory (AD). Microsoft did a good job taking over from Novell back in the late 90s, but its hooks into businesses are so deep that many have become dependent on AD services to manage devices and users, when in fact AD falls far short of needed capabilities, restricting innovation and progress.

    Despite Microsoft’s Azure becoming prominent in the world of cloud services, Azure AD is not a replacement for on-premises AD. While Azure AD is a secure authentication store that can contain users and groups, that is where the similarities end. In fact, Microsoft itself has an architecture to mitigate the shortcomings of Azure AD by recommending organizations migrate to a hybrid model, especially for businesses that have an in-house footprint of servers and applications.

    If you are a greenfield business and intend to take advantage of software, infrastructure, and platform as a service (SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS), as well as Microsoft 365 in Azure, then Azure AD is for you and you don’t have to worry about the need for AD.

    John Donovan
    Principal Director, I&O Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Insight Summary

    Legacy AD was never built for modern infrastructure

    When Microsoft built AD as a free component for the Windows Server environment to replace Windows NT before the demise of Novell Directory Services in 2001, it never meant Active Directory to work outside the corporate network with Microsoft apps and devices. While it began as a central managing system for users and PCs on Microsoft operating systems, with one user per PC, the IT ecosystem has changed dramatically over the last 20 years, with cloud adoption, SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, and everything as a service. To make matters worse, work-from-anywhere has become a serious security challenge.

    Build all new systems with cloud integration in mind

    Many applications built in the past had built-in AD components for access, using Kerberos and NTLM. This dependency has prevented organizations from migrating away from AD. When assessing new technology and applications, consider SaaS or cloud-native apps rather than a Microsoft-dependent application with AD ingrained in the code. Ensure you are engaged when the business is assessing new apps. Stop the practice of the business purchasing apps without IT’s involvement; for example, if your marketing department is asking you for your Domain credentials for a vendor when you were not informed of this purchase.

    Hybrid AD is a solution but not a long-term goal

    Economically, Microsoft has no interest in replacing AD anytime soon. Microsoft wants that revenue and has built components like Azure AD Connect to mitigate the AD dependency issue, which is basically holding your organization hostage. In fact, Microsoft has advised that a hybrid solution will remain because, as we will investigate, Azure AD is not legacy AD.

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Common Obstacles

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    You are looking to lose your dependency on Active Directory, and you need to tackle infrastructure technical debt, but there are challenges.

    • Legacy apps that are in maintenance mode cannot shed their AD dependency or have hardware upgrades made.
    • You are unaware of what processes depend on AD and how integrated they are.
    • Departments invest in apps that are integrated with AD without informing you until they ask for Domain details after purchasing.
    • Legacy applications can prevent you from upgrading servers or may need to be isolated due to security concerns related to inadequate patching and upgrades.
    • You do not see any return on investment in AD maintenance.
    • Mergers and acquisitions can prevent you from migrating away from AD if one company is dependent on AD and the other is fully in the cloud. This increases technical debt.
    • Remove your dependency on AD one application at a time. If you are a cloud-first organization, rethink your AD strategy to ask “why” when you add a new device to your Active Directory.
    • With the advent of hybrid work, AD is now a security risk. You need to shore up your security posture. Think of zero trust architecture.
    • Take inventory of your objects that depend on Kerberos and NTML and plan on removing that barrier through applications that don’t depend on AD.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Don’t allow Active Directory services to dictate your enterprise innovation and modernization strategies. Determine if you can safely remove objects and move them to a cloud service where your Azure AD Domain Services can handle your authentication and manage users and groups.

    The history of Active Directory

    The evolution of your infrastructure environment

    From NT to the cloud

    AD 2001 Exchange Server 2003 SharePoint 2007 Server 2008 R2 BYOD Security Risk All in Cloud 2015
    • Active Directory replaces NT and takes over from Novell as the enterprise access and control plane.
    • With slow WAN links, no cellphones, no tablets, and very few laptops, security was not a concern in AD.
    • In 2004, email becomes business critical.
    • This puts pressure on links, increases replication and domains, and creates a need for multiple identities.
    • Collaboration becomes pervasive.
    • Cross domain authentication becomes prevalent across the enterprise.
    • SharePoint sites need to be connected to multiple Domain AD accounts. More multiple identities are required.
    • Exchange resource forest rolls out, causing the new forest functional level to be a more complex environment.
    • Fine-grained password policies have impacted multiple forests, forcing them to adhere to the new password policies.
    • There are powerful Domain controllers, strong LAN and WAN connections, and an increase in smartphones and laptops.
    • Audits and compliance become a focus, and mergers and acquisitions add complexity. Security teams are working across the board.
    • Cloud technology doesn’t work well with complicated, messy AD environment. Cloud solutions need simple, flat AD architecture.
    • Technology changes after 15+ years. AD becomes the backbone of enterprise infrastructure. Managers demand to move to cloud, building complexity again.

    Organizations depend on AD

    AD is the backbone of many organizations’ IT infrastructure

    73% of organizations say their infrastructure is built on AD.

    82% say their applications depend on AD data.

    89% say AD enables authenticated access to file servers.

    90% say AD is the main source for authentication.

    Source: Dimensions research: Active Directory Modernization :

    Info-Tech Insight

    Organizations fail to move away from AD for many reasons, including:

    • Lack of time, resources, budget, and tools.
    • Difficulty understanding what has changed.
    • Migrating from AD being a low priority.

    Active Directory components

    Physical and logical structure

    Authentication, authorization, and auditing

    The image contains a screenshot of the active directory components.

    Active Directory has its hooks in!

    AD creates infrastructure technical debt and is difficult to migrate away from.

    The image contains a screenshot of an active directory diagram.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Due to the pervasive nature of Active Directory in the IT ecosystem, IT organizations are reluctant to migrate away from AD to modernize and innovate.

    Migration to Microsoft 365 in Azure has forced IT departments’ hand, and now that they have dipped their toe in the proverbial cloud “lake,” they see a way out of the mounting technical debt.

    AD security

    Security is the biggest concern with Active Directory.

    Neglecting Active Directory security

    98% of data breaches came from external sources.

    Source: Verizon, Data Breach Report 2022

    85% of data breach took weeks or even longer to discover.

    Source: Verizon Data Breach Report, 2012

    The biggest challenge for recovery after an Active Directory security breach is identifying the source of the breach, determining the extent of the breach, and creating a safe and secure environment.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Neglecting legacy Active Directory security will lead to cyberattacks. Malicious users can steal credentials and hijack data or corrupt your systems.

    What are the security risks to legacy AD architecture?

    • It's been 22 years since AD was released by Microsoft, and it has been a foundational technology for most businesses over the years. However, while there have been many innovations over those two decades, like Amazon, Facebook, iPhones, Androids, and more, Active Directory has remained mostly unchanged. There hasn’t been a security update since 2016.
    • This lack of security innovation has led to several cyberattacks over the years, causing businesses to bolt on additional security measures and added complexity. AD is not going away any time soon, but the security dilemma can be addressed with added security features.

    AD event logs

    84% of organizations that had a breach had evidence of that breach in their event logs.

    Source: Verizon Data Breach Report, 2012

    What is the business risk

    How does AD impact innovation in your business?

    It’s widely estimated that Active Directory remains at the backbone of 90% of Global Fortune 1000 companies’ business infrastructure (Lepide, 2021), and with that comes risk. The risks include:

    • Constraints of AD and growth of your digital footprint
    • Difficulty integrating modern technologies
    • Difficulty maintaining consistent security policies
    • Inflexible central domains preventing innovation and modernization
    • Inability to move to a self-service password portal
    • Vulnerability to being hacked
    • BYOD not being AD friendly

    AD is dependent on Windows Server

    1. Even though AD is compliant with LDAP, software vendors often choose optional features of LDAP that are not supported by AD. It is possible to implement Kerberos in a Unix system and establish trust with AD, but this is a difficult process and mistakes are frequent.
    2. Restricting your software selection to Windows-based systems reduces innovation and may hamper your ability to purchase best-in-class applications.

    Azure AD is not a replacement for AD

    AD was designed for an on-premises enterprise

    The image contains a screenshot of a Azure AD diagram.

    • Despite Microsoft’s Azure becoming prominent in the world of cloud services, Azure AD is not a replacement for on-premises AD.
    • In fact, Microsoft itself has an architecture to mitigate the shortcomings of Azure AD by recommending organizations migrate to a hybrid model, especially those businesses that have an in-house footprint of servers and applications.
    • If you are a greenfield business and intend to take advantage of SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS, as well as Microsoft 365 in Azure, then Azure AD is for you and you don’t have to worry about the need for AD.

    "Azure Active Directory is not designed to be the cloud version of Active Directory. It is not a domain controller or a directory in the cloud that will provide the exact same capabilities with AD. It actually provides many more capabilities in a different way.

    That’s why there is no actual ‘migration’ path from Active Directory to Azure Active Directory. You can synchronize your on-premises directories (Active Directory or other) to Azure Active Directory but not migrate your computer accounts, group policies, OU etc."

    – Gregory Hall,
    Brand Representative for Microsoft
    (Source: Spiceworks)

    The hybrid model for AD and Azure AD

    How the model works

    The image contains a screenshot of a hybrid model for AD and Azure AD.

    Note: AD Federated Services (ADFS) is not a replacement for AD. It’s a bolt-on that requires maintenance, support, and it is not a liberating service.

    Many companies are:

    • Moving to SaaS solutions for customer relationship management, HR, collaboration, voice communication, file storage, and more.
    • Managing non-Windows devices.
    • Moving to a hybrid model of work.
    • Enabling BYOD.

    Given these trends, Active Directory is becoming obsolete in terms of identity management and permissions.

    The difference between AD Domain Services and Azure AD DS

    One of the core principles of Azure AD is that the user is the security boundary, not the network.

    Kerberos is the default authentication and authorization protocol for AD. Kerberos is involved in nearly everything from the time you log on to accessing Sysvol, which is used to deliver policy and logon scripts to domain members from the Domain Controller.

    Info-Tech Insight

    If you are struggling to get away from AD, Kerberos and NTML are to blame. Working around them is difficult. Azure AD uses SAML2.0 OpenID Connect and OAuth2.0.

    Feature Azure AD DS Self-managed AD DS
    Managed service
    Secure deployments Administrator secures the deployment
    DNS server ✓ (managed service)
    Domain or Enterprise administrator privileges
    Domain join
    Domain authentication using NTLM and Kerberos
    Kerberos-constrained delegation Resource-based Resource-based and account-based
    Custom OU structure
    Group Policy
    Schema extensions
    AD domain/forest trusts ✓ (one-way outbound forest trusts only)
    Secure LDAP (LDAPS)
    LDAP read
    LDAP write ✓ (within the managed domain)
    Geo-distributed deployments

    Source: “Compare self-managed Active Directory Domain Services...” Azure documentation, 2022

    Impact of work-from-anywhere

    How AD poses issues that impact the user experience

    IT organizations are under pressure to enable work-from-home/work-from-anywhere.

    • IT teams regard legacy infrastructure, namely Active Directory, as inadequate to securely manage remote workloads.
    • While organizations previously used VPNs to access resources through Active Directory, they now have complex webs of applications that do not reside on premises, such as AWS, G-Suite, and SaaS customer relationship management and HR management systems, among others. These resources live outside the Windows ecosystem, complicating user provisioning, management, and security.
    • The work environment has changed since the start of COVID-19, with businesses scrambling to enable work-from-home. This had a huge impact on on-premises identity management tools such as AD, exposing their limitations and challenges. IT admins are all too aware that AD does not meet the needs of work-from-home.
    • As more IT organizations move infrastructure to the cloud, they have the opportunity to move their directory services to the cloud as well.
      • JumpCloud, OneLogin, Okta, Azure AD, G2, and others can be a solution for this new way of working and free up administrators from the overloaded AD environment.
      • Identity and access management (IAM) can be moved to the cloud where the modern infrastructure lives.
      • Alternatives for printers using AD include Google Cloud Print, PrinterOn, and PrinterLogic.

    How AD can impact your migration to Microsoft 365

    The beginning of your hybrid environment

    • Businesses that have a large on-premises footprint have very few choices for setting up a hybrid environment that includes their on-premises AD and Azure AD synchronization.
    • Microsoft 365 uses Azure AD in the background to manage identities.
    • Azure AD Connect will need to be installed, along with IdFix to identify errors such as duplicates and formatting problems in your AD.
    • Password hash should be implemented to synchronize passwords from on-premises AD so users can sign in to Azure without the need for additional single sign-on infrastructure.
    • Azure AD Connect synchronizes accounts every 30 minutes and passwords within two minutes.

    Alternatives to AD

    When considering retiring Active Directory from your environment, look at alternatives that can assist with those legacy application servers, handle Kerberos and NTML, and support LDAP.

    • JumpCloud: Cloud-based directory services. JumpCloud provides LDAP-as-a-Service and RADIUS-as-a-Service. It authenticates, authorizes, and manages employees, their devices, and IT applications. However, domain name changes are not supported.
    • Apache Directory Studio Pro: Written in Java, it supports LDAP v3–certified directory services. It is certified by Eclipse-based database utilities. It also supports Kerberos, which is critical for legacy Microsoft AD apps authentication.
    • Univention Corporate Server (UCS): Open-source Linux-based solution that has a friendly user interface and gets continuous security and feature updates. It supports Kerberos V5 and LDAP, works with AD, and is easy to sync. It also supports DNS server, DHCP, multifactor authentication and single sign-on, and APIs and REST APIs. However, it has a limited English knowledgebase as it is a German tool.

    What to look for

    If you are embedded in Windows systems but looking for an alternative to AD, you need a similar solution but one that is capable of working in the cloud and on premises.

    Aside from protocols and supporting utilities, also consider additional features that can help you retire your Active Directory while maintaining highly secure access control and a strong security posture.

    These are just a few examples of the many alternatives available.

    Market drivers to modernize your infrastructure

    The business is now driving your Active Directory migration

    What IT must deal with in the modern world of work:

    • Leaner footprint for evolving tech trends
    • Disaster recovery readiness
    • Dynamic compliance requirements
    • Increased security needs
    • The need to future-proof
    • Mergers and acquisitions
    • Security extending the network beyond Windows

    Organizations are making decisions that impact Active Directory, from enabling work-from-anywhere to dealing with malicious threats such as ransomware. Mergers and acquisitions also bring complexity with multiple AD domains.
    The business is putting pressure on IT to become creative with security strategies, alternative authentication and authorization, and migration to SaaS and cloud services.

    Activity

    Build a checklist to migrate off Active Directory.

    Discovery

    Assessment

    Proof of Concept

    Migration

    Cloud Operations

    ☐ Catalog your applications.

    ☐ Define your users, groups and usage.

    ☐ Identify network interdependencies and complexity.

    ☐ Know your security and compliance regulations.

    ☐ Document your disaster recovery plan and recovery point and time objectives (RPO/RTO).

    ☐ Build a methodology for migrating apps to IaaS.

    ☐ Develop a migration team using internal resources and/or outsourcing.

    ☐ Use Microsoft resources for specific skill sets.

    ☐ Map on-premises third-party solutions to determine how easily they will migrate.

    ☐ Create a plan to retire and archive legacy data.

    ☐ Test your workload: Start small and prove value with a phased approach.

    ☐ Estimate cloud costs.

    ☐ Determine the amount and size of your compute and storage requirements.

    ☐ Understand security requirements and the need for network and security controls.

    ☐ Assess network performance.

    ☐ Qualify and test the tools and solutions needed for the migration.

    ☐ Create a blueprint of your desired cloud environment.

    ☐ Establish a rollback plan.

    ☐ Identify tools for automating migration and syncing data.

    ☐ Understand the implications of the production-day data move.

    ☐ Keep up with the pace of innovation.

    ☐ Leverage 24/7 support via skilled Azure resources.

    ☐ Stay on top of system maintenance and upgrades.

    ☐ Consider service-level agreement requirements, governance, security, compliance, performance, and uptime.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Manage the Active Directory in the Service Desk

    • Build and maintain your Active Directory with good data.
    • Actively maintaining the Active Directory is a difficult task that only gets more difficult with issues like stale accounts and privilege creep.

    SoftwareReviews: Microsoft Azure Active Directory

    • The Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) enterprise identity service provides SSO and multifactor authentication to help protect your users from 99.9% of cybersecurity attacks

    Define Your Cloud Vision

    • Don’t think about the cloud as an inevitable next step for all workloads. The cloud is merely another tool in the toolbox, ready to be used when appropriate and put away when it’s not needed. Cloud-first isn’t always the way to go.

    Bibliography

    “2012 Data Breach Investigations Report.” Verizon, 2012. Web.
    “2022 Data Breach Investigations Report.” Verizon, 2012. Web.
    “22 Best Alternatives to Microsoft Active Directory.” The Geek Page, 16 Feb 2022. Accessed 12 Sept. 2022.
    Altieri, Matt. “Infrastructure Technical Debt.” Device 42, 20 May 2019. Accessed Sept 2022.
    “Are You Ready to Make the Move from ADFS to Azure AD?’” Steeves and Associates, 29 April 2021. Accessed 28 Sept. 2022.
    Blanton, Sean. “Can I Replace Active Directory with Azure AD? No, Here’s Why.” JumpCloud, 9 Mar 2021. Accessed Sept. 2022.
    Chai, Wesley, and Alexander S. Gillis. “What is Active Directory and how does it work?” TechTarget, June 2021. Accessed 10 Sept. 2022.
    Cogan, Sam. “Azure Active Directory is not Active Directory!” SamCogan.com, Oct 2020. Accessed Sept. 2022.
    “Compare Active Directory to Azure Active Directory.” Azure documentation, Microsoft Learn, 18 Aug. 2022. Accessed 12 Sept. 2022.
    "Compare self-managed Active Directory Domain Services, Azure Active Directory, and managed Azure Active Directory Domain Services." Azure documentation, Microsoft Learn, 23 Aug. 2022. Accessed Sept. 2022.
    “Dimensional Research, Active Directory Modernization: A Survey of IT Professionals.” Quest, 2017. Accessed Sept 2022.
    Grillenmeier, Guido. “Now’s the Time to Rethink Active Directory Security.“ Semperis, 4 Aug 2021. Accessed Oct. 2013.
    “How does your Active Directory align to today’s business?” Quest Software, 2017, accessed Sept 2022
    Lewis, Jack “On-Premises Active Directory: Can I remove it and go full cloud?” Softcat, Dec.2020. Accessed 15 Sept 2022.
    Loshin, Peter. “What is Kerberos?” TechTarget, Sept 2021. Accessed Sept 2022.
    Mann, Terry. “Why Cybersecurity Must Include Active Directory.” Lepide, 20 Sept. 2021. Accessed Sept. 2022.
    Roberts, Travis. “Azure AD without on-prem Windows Active Directory?” 4sysops, 25 Oct. 2021. Accessed Sept. 2022.
    “Understanding Active Directory® & its architecture.” ActiveReach, Jan 2022. Accessed Sept. 2022.
    “What is Active Directory Migration?” Quest Software Inc, 2022. Accessed Sept 2022.

    Microsoft Teams Cookbook

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    • Parent Category Name: DR and Business Continuity
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    Remote work calls for leveraging your Office 365 license to use Microsoft Teams – but IT is unsure about best practices for governance and permissions. Moreover, IT has few resources to help train end users with Teams best practices.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Microsoft Teams is not a standalone app. Successful utilization of Teams occurs when conceived in the broader context of how it integrates with Office 365. Understanding how information flows between Teams, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business, for instance, will aid governance with permissions, information storage, and file sharing.

    Impact and Result

    Use Info-Tech’s Microsoft Teams Cookbook to successfully implement and use Teams. This cookbook includes recipes for:

    • IT best practices concerning governance of the creation process and Teams rollout.
    • End-user best practices for Teams functionality and common use cases.

    Microsoft Teams Cookbook Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Learn critical insights for an effective Teams rollout.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Teams for IT

    Understand best practices for governance of the Teams creation process and Teams rollout.

    • Microsoft Teams Cookbook – Section 1: Teams for IT

    2. Teams for end users

    Get end users on board with this series of how-tos and common use cases for Teams.

    • Microsoft Teams Cookbook – Section 2: Teams for End Users
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Microsoft Teams Cookbook

    Recipes for best practices and use cases for Microsoft Teams.

    Table of contents

    Executive Brief

    Section 1: Teams for IT

    Section 2: Teams for End Users

    Executive Summary

    Situation

    Remote work calls for leveraging your Office 365 license to utilize Teams – but IT is unsure about best practices for governance and permissions.

    Without a framework or plan for governing the rollout of Teams, IT risks overlooking secure use of Teams, the phenomenon of “teams sprawl,” and not realizing how Teams integrates with Office 365 more broadly.

    Complication

    Teams needs to be rolled out quickly, but IT has few resources to help train end users with Teams best practices.

    With teams, channels, chats, meetings, and live events to choose from, end users may get frustrated with lack of guidance on how to use Teams’ many capabilities.

    Resolution

    Use Info-Tech’s Microsoft Teams Cookbook to successfully implement and utilize Teams. This cookbook includes recipes for:

    • IT best practices concerning governance of the creation process and Teams rollout.
    • End-user best practices for Teams functionality and common use cases.

    Key Insights

    Teams is not a standalone app

    Successful utilization of Teams occurs when conceived in the broader context of how it integrates with Office 365. Understanding how information flows between Teams, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business, for instance, will aid governance with permissions, information storage, and file sharing.

    IT should paint the first picture for team creation

    No initial governance for team creation can lead to “teams sprawl.” While Teams was built to allow end users’ creativity to flow in creating teams and channels, this can create problems with a cluttered interface and keeping track of information. To prevent end-user dissatisfaction here, IT’s initial Teams rollout should offer a basic structure for end users to work with first, limiting early teams sprawl.

    The Teams admin center can only take you so far with permissions

    Knowing how Teams integrates with other Office 365 apps will help with rolling out sensitivity labels to protect important information being accidentally shared in Teams. Of course, technology only does so much – proper processes to train and hold people accountable for their actions with data sharing must be implemented, too.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Establish a Communication and Collaboration System Strategy

    Don’t waste your time deploying yet another collaboration tool that won’t get used.

    Modernize Communication and Collaboration Infrastructure

    Your legacy telephony infrastructure is dragging you down – modern communications and collaboration technology will dramatically improve productivity.

    Migrate to Office 365 Now

    One small step to cloud, one big leap to Office 365. The key is to look before you leap.

    Section 1: Teams for IT

    Governance best practices and use cases for IT

    Section 1

    Teams for IT

    Section 2

    Teams for end users

    From determining prerequisites to engaging end users.

    IT fundamentals
    • Creation process
    • Teams rollout
    Use cases
    • Retain and search for legal/regulatory compliance
    • Add an external user to a team
    • Delete/archive a team

    Overview: Creation process

    IT needs to be prepared to manage other dependent services when rolling out Teams. See the figure below for how Teams integrates with these other Office 365 applications.

    A flow chart outlining how Teams integrates with other Office 365 applications. Along the side are different applications, from the top: 'Teams client', 'OneDrive for Business', 'Sharepoint Online', 'Planner (Tasks for Teams)', 'Exchange Online', and 'Stream'. Along the top are services of 'Teams client', 'Files', 'Teams', 'Chat', 'Meeting', and 'Calls'.

    Which Microsoft 365 license do I need to access Teams?

    • Microsoft 365 Business Essentials
    • Microsoft 365 Business Premium
    • Office 365 Enterprise, E1, E3, or E5
    • Office 365 Enterprise E4 (if purchased prior to its retirement)

    Please note: To appeal to the majority of Info-Tech’s members, this blueprint refers to Teams in the context of Office 365 Enterprise licenses.

    Assign admin roles

    You will already have at least one global administrator from setting up Office 365.

    Global administrators have almost unlimited access to settings and most of the data within the software, so Microsoft recommends having only two to four IT and business owners responsible for data and security.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Configure multifactor authentication for your dedicated Office 365 global administrator accounts and set up two-step verification.

    Once you have organized your global administrators, you can designate your other administrators with “just-enough” access for managing Teams. There are four administrator roles:

    Teams Service Administrator Manage the Teams service; manage and create Microsoft 365 groups.
    Teams Communications Administrator Manage calling and meetings features with Teams.
    Teams Communications Support Engineer Troubleshoot communications issues within Teams using the advanced troubleshooting toolset.
    Teams Communications Support Specialist Troubleshoot communications issues using Call Analytics.

    Prepare the network

    There are three prerequisites before Teams can be rolled out:

    • UDP ports 3478 through 3481 are opened.
    • You have a verified domain for Office 365.
    • Office 365 has been rolled out, including Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.

    Microsoft then recommends the following checklist to optimize your Teams utilization:

    • Optimize calls and performance using the Call Quality Dashboard.
    • Assess network requirements in the Network Planner in the Teams admin center.
    • Ensure all computers running Teams client can resolve external DNS queries.
    • Check adequate public IP addresses are assigned to the NAT pools to prevent port exhaustion.
    • Route to local or regional Microsoft data centers.
    • Whitelist all Office 365 URLs to move through security layers, especially IDS/IPS.
    • Split tunnel Teams traffic so it bypasses your organization’s VPN.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    For online support and walkthroughs, utilize Advisor for Teams. This assistant can be found in the Teams admin center.

    Team Creation

    You can create and manage Teams through the Teams PowerShell module and the Teams admin center. Only the global administrator and Teams service administrator have full administrative capabilities in this center.

    Governance over team creation intends to prevent “teams sprawl” – the phenomenon whereby end users create team upon team without guidance. This creates a disorganized interface, with issues over finding the correct team and sharing the right information.

    Prevent teams sprawl by painting the first picture for end users:

    1. Decide what kind of team grouping would best fit your organization: by department or by project.
    2. Start with a small number of teams before letting end users’ creativity take over. This will prevent initial death by notifications and support adoption.
    3. Add people or groups to these teams. Assign multiple owners for each team in case people move around at the start of rollout or someone leaves the organization.
    4. Each team has a general channel that cannot be removed. Use it for sharing an overview of the team’s goals, onboarding, and announcements.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    For smaller organizations that are project-driven, organize teams by projects. For larger organizations with established, siloed departments, organize by department; projects within departments can become channels.

    Integrations with SharePoint Online

    Teams does not integrate with SharePoint Server.

    Governance of Teams is important because of how tightly it integrates with other Office 365 apps, including SharePoint Online.

    A poor rollout of Teams will have ramifications in SharePoint. A good rollout will optimize these apps for the organization.

    Teams and SharePoint integrate in the following ways:

    • Each team created in Teams automatically generates a SharePoint team site behind it. All documents and chat shared through a team are stored in that team’s SharePoint document library.
    • As such, all files shared through Teams are subject to SharePoint permissions.
    • Existing SharePoint folders can be tied to a team without needing to create a new one.
    • If governance over resource sharing in Teams is poor, information can get lost, duplicated, or cluttered throughout both Teams and SharePoint.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    End users should be encouraged to integrate their teams and channels with existing SharePoint folders and, where no folder exists, to create one in SharePoint first before then attaching a team to it.

    Permissions

    Within the Teams admin center, the global or Teams service administrator can manage Teams policies.

    Typical Teams policies requiring governance include:

    • The extent end users can discover or create private teams or channels
    • Messaging policies
    • Third-party app use

    Chosen policies can be either applied globally or assigned to specific users.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    If organizations need to share sensitive information within the bounds of a certain group, private channels help protect this data. However, inviting users into that channel will enable them to see all shared history.

    External and guest access

    Within the security and compliance center, the global or Teams service administrator can set external and guest access.

    External access (federation) – turned on by default.

    • Lets you find, call, and chat with users in other domains. External users will have no access to the organization’s teams or team resources.

    Guest access – turned off by default.

    • Lets you add individual users with their own email address. You do this when you want external users to access teams and team resources. Approved guests will be added to the organization’s active directory.

    If guest access is enabled, it is subject to Azure AD and Office 365 licensing and service limits. Guests will have no access to the following, which cannot be changed:

    • OneDrive for Business
    • An organization’s calendar/meetings
    • PSTN
    • Organization’s hierarchical chart
    • The ability to create, revise, or browse a team
    • Upload files to one-on-one chat

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Within the security and compliance center, you can allow users to add sensitivity labels to their teams that can prevent external and guest access.

    Expiration and archiving

    To reduce the number of unused teams and channels, or delete information permanently, the global or Teams service administrator can implement an Office 365 group expiration and archiving policy through the Teams admin center.

    If a team has an expiration policy applied to it, the team owner will receive a notification for team renewal 30 days, 15 days, and 1 day before the expiry date. They can renew their team at any point within this time.

    • To prevent accidental deletion, auto-renewal is enabled for a team. If the team owner is unable to manually respond, any team that has one channel visit from a team member before expiry is automatically renewed.
    • A deleted Office 365 group is retained for 30 days and can be restored at any point within this time.

    Alternatively, teams and their channels (including private) can be archived. This will mean that all activity for the team ceases. However, you can still add, remove, and update roles of the members.

    Retention and data loss prevention

    Retention policies can be created and managed in the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center or the security and compliance center PowerShell cmdlets. This can be applied globally or to specific users.

    By default, information shared through Teams is retained forever.

    However, setting up retention policies ensures data is retained for a specified time regardless of what happens to that data within Teams (e.g. user deletes).

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    To prevent external or guest users accessing and deleting sensitive data, Teams is able to block this content when shared by internal users. Ensure this is configured appropriately in your organization:

    • For guest access in teams and channels
    • For external access in meetings and chat

    Please note the following limitations of Teams’ retention and data loss prevention:

    • Organization-wide retention policies will need to be manually inputted into Teams. This is because Teams requires a retention policy that is independent of other workloads.
    • As of May 2020, retention policies apply to all information in Teams except private channel messages. Files shared in private channels, though, are subject to retention policies.
    • Teams does not support advanced retention settings, such as a policy that pertains to specific keywords or sensitive information.
    • It will take three to seven days to permanently delete expired messages.

    Teams telephony

    Teams has built-in functionality to call any team member within the organization through VoIP.

    However, Teams does not automatically connect to the PSTN, meaning that calling or receiving calls from external users is not immediately possible.

    Bridging VoIP calls with the PSTN through Teams is available as an add-on that can be attached to an E3 license or as part of an E5 license.

    There are two options to enable this capability:

    • Enable Phone System. This allows for call control and PBX capabilities in Office 365.
    • Use direct routing. You can use an existing PSTN connection via a Session Border Controller that links with Teams (Amaxra).

    Steps to implement Teams telephony:

    1. Ensure Phone System and required (non-Microsoft-related) services are available in your country or region.
    2. Purchase and assign Phone System and Calling Plan licenses. If Calling Plans are not available in your country or region, Microsoft recommends using Direct Routing.
    3. Get phone numbers and/or service numbers. There are three ways to do this:
      • Get new numbers through the Teams admin center.
      • If you cannot get new numbers through the Teams admin center, you can request new numbers from Microsoft directly.
      • Port or transfer existing numbers. To do this, you need to send Microsoft a letter of authorization, giving them permission to request and transfer existing numbers on your behalf.
    4. To enable service numbers, including toll-free numbers, Microsoft recommends setting up Communications Credits for your Calling Plans and Audio Conferencing.

    Overview: Teams rollout

    1. From Skype (and Slack) to Teams
    2. Gain stakeholder purchase
    3. Employ a phased deployment
    4. Engage end users

    Skype for Business is being retired; Microsoft offers a range of transitions to Teams.

    Combine the best transition mode with Info-Tech’s adoption best practices to successfully onboard and socialize Teams.

    From Skype to Teams

    Skype for Business Online will be retired on July 31, 2021. Choose from the options below to see which transition mode is right for your organization.

    Skype for Business On-Premises will be retired in 2024. To upgrade to Teams, first configure hybrid connectivity to Skype for Business Online.

    Islands mode (default)

    • Skype for Business and Teams coexist while Teams is rolled out.
    • Recommended for phased rollouts or when Teams is ready to use for chat, calling, and meetings.
    • Interoperability is limited. Teams and Skype for Business only transfer information if an internal Teams user sends communications to an external Skype for Business user.

    Teams only mode (final)

    • All capabilities are enabled in Teams and Skype for Business is disabled.
    • Recommended when end users are ready to switch fully to Teams.
    • End users may retain Skype for Business to join meetings with non-upgraded or external parties. However, this communication is only initiated from the Skype for Business external user.

    Collaboration first mode

    • Skype for Business and Teams coexist, but only Teams’ collaboration capabilities are enabled. Teams communications capabilities are turned off.
    • Recommended to leverage Skype for Business communications yet utilize Teams for collaboration.

    Meetings first mode

    • Skype for Business and Teams coexist, but only Teams’ meetings capabilities are enabled.
    • Recommended for organizations that want to leverage their Skype for Business On-Premises’ Enterprise Voice capability but want to benefit from Teams’ meetings through VoIP.

    From Slack to Teams

    The more that’s left behind in Slack, the easier the transition. As a prerequisite, pull together the following information:

    • Usage statistics of Slack workspaces and channels
    • What apps end users utilize in Slack
    • What message history you want to export
    • A list of users whose Slack accounts can map on to required Microsoft accounts
    Test content migration

    Your Slack service plan will determine what you can and can’t migrate. By default, public channels content can be exported. However, private channels may not be exportable, and a third-party app is needed to migrate Direct Messages.

    Files migration

    Once you have set up your teams and channels in Teams, you can programmatically copy files from Slack into the target Teams channel.

    Apps migration

    Once you have a list of apps and their configurations used in Slack’s workspaces, you can search in Teams’ app store to see if they’re available for Teams.

    User identity migration

    Slack user identities may not map onto a Microsoft account. This will cause migration issues, such as problems with exporting text content posted by that user.

    Follow the migration steps to the right.

    Importantly, determine which Slack workspaces and channels should become teams and channels within Teams.

    Usage statistics from Slack can help pinpoint which workspaces and channels are redundant.

    This will help IT paint an ordered first picture for new Teams end users.

    1. Create teams and channels in Teams
    2. Copy files into Teams
    3. Install apps, configure Office 365 Connecters
    4. Import Slack history
    5. Disable Slack user accounts

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Avoid data-handling violations. Determine what privacy and compliance regulations (if any) apply to the handling, storage, and processing of data during this migration.

    Gain stakeholder purchase

    Change management is a challenging aspect of implementing a new collaboration tool. Creating a communication and adoption plan is crucial to achieving universal buy-in for Teams.

    To start, define SMART objectives and create a goals cascade.

    Specific Measurable Actionable Realistic Time Bound
    Make sure the objective is clear and detailed. Objectives are `measurable` if there are specific metrics assigned to measure success. Metrics should be objective. Objectives become actionable when specific initiatives designed to achieve the objective are identified. Objectives must be achievable given your current resources or known available resources. An objective without a timeline can be put off indefinitely. Furthermore, measuring success is challenging without a timeline.
    Who, what, where, why? How will you measure the extent to which the goal is met? What is the action-oriented verb? Is this within my capabilities? By when: deadline, frequency?

    Sample list of stakeholder-specific benefits from improving collaboration

    Stakeholder Driver Benefits
    Senior Leadership Resource optimization Increased transparency into IT operational costs.
    Better ability to forecast hardware, resourcing costs.
    All employees Increasing productivity Apps deployed faster.
    Issues fixed faster.
    Easier access to files.
    Able to work more easily offsite.
    LBU-HR, legal, finance Mitigating risk Better able to verify compliance with external regulations.
    Better understanding of IT risks.
    Service desk Resource optimization Able to resolve issues faster.
    Fewer issues stemming from updates.
    Tier 2 Increasing productivity Less time spent on routine maintenance.

    Use these activities to define what pain points stakeholders face and how Teams can directly mitigate those pain points.

    (Source: Rationalize Your Collaboration Tools (coming soon), Activities: 3.1C – 3.1D)

    Employ a phased deployment

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Deploy Teams over a series of phases. As such, if you are already using Skype for Business, choose one of the coexistence phases to start.

    1. Identify and pilot Teams with early adopters that will become your champions. These champions should be formally trained, be encouraged to help and train their colleagues, and be positively reinforced for their efforts.
    2. Iron out bugs identified with the pilot group and train middle management. Enterprise collaboration tool adoption is strongly correlated with leadership adoption.
      1. Top-level management
        Control and direct overall organization.
      2. Middle management
        Execute top-level management’s plans in accordance with organization’s norms.
      3. First-level management
        Execute day-to-day activities.
    3. Use Info-Tech’s one-pager marketing template to advertise the new tool to stakeholders. Highlight how the new tool addresses specific pain points. Address questions stemming from fear and uncertainty to avoid employees’ embarrassment or their rejection of the tool.
    4. A screenshot of Info-Tech's one-pager marketing template.
    5. Extend the pilot to other departments and continue this process for the whole organization.

    (Source: Rationalize Your Collaboration Tools (coming soon), Tools:GANTT Chart and Marketing Materials, Activities: 3.2A – 3.2B)

    Info-Tech Insight

    Be in control of setting and maintaining expectations. Aligning expectations with reality and the needs of employees will lower onboarding resistance.

    Engage end users

    Short-term best practices

    Launch day:
    • Hold a “lunch and learn” targeted training session to walk end users through common use cases.
    • Open a booth or virtual session (through Teams!) and have tool representatives available to answer questions.
    • Create a game to get users exploring the new tool – from scavenger hunts to bingo.
    Launch week:
    • Offer incentives for using the tool and helping others, including small gift cards.
    • Publicize achievements if departments hit adoption milestones.

    Long-term best practices

    • Make available additional training past launch week. End users should keep learning new features to improve familiarity.
    • Distribute frequent training clips, slowly exposing end users to more complex ways of utilizing Teams.
    • Continue to positively reinforce and recognize those who use Teams well. This could be celebrating those that help others use the tool, how active certain users are, and attendance at learning events.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Microsoft has a range of training support that can be utilized. From instructor-led training to “Coffee in the Cloud” sessions, leverage all the support you can.

    Use case #1: Retain and search data for legal/regulatory compliance

    Scenario:

    Your organization requires you to retain data and documents for a certain period of time; however, after this period, your organization wishes to delete or archive the data instead of maintaining it indefinitely. Within the timeframe of the retention policy, the admin may be asked to retrieve information that has been requested through a legal channel.

    Purpose:
    • Maintain compliance with the legal and regulatory standards to which the organization is subject.
    Jobs:
    • Ensure the data is retained for the approved time period.
    • Ensure the policy applies to all relevant data and users.
    Solution: Retention Policies
    • Ensure that your organization has an Office 365 E3 or higher license.
    • Set the desired retention policy through the Security & Compliance Center or PowerShell by deciding which teams, channels, chats, and users the policies will apply to and what will happen once the retention period ends.
    • Ensure that matching retention policies are applied to SharePoint and OneDrive, since this is where files shared in Teams are stored.
    • Be aware that Teams retention policies cannot be applied to messages in private channels.
    Solution: e-Discovery
    • If legally necessary, place users or Teams on legal hold in order to retain data that would be otherwise deleted by your organization’s retention policies.
    • Perform e-discovery on Teams messages, files, and summaries of meetings and calls through the Security & Compliance Center.
    • See Microsoft’s chart on the next slide for what is e-discoverable.

    Content subject to e-discovery

    Content type eDiscoverable Notes
    Teams chat messages Yes Chat messages from chats where guest users are the only participants in a 1:1 or 1:N chat are not e-discoverable.
    Audio recordings No
    Private channel messages Yes
    Emojis, GIFs, stickers Yes
    Code snippets No
    Chat links Yes
    Reactions (likes, hearts, etc) No
    Edited messages Yes If the user is on hold, previous versions of edited messages are preserved.
    Inline images Yes
    Tables Yes
    Subject Yes
    Quotes Yes Quoted content is searchable. However, search results don’t indicate that the content was quoted.
    Name of channel No

    E-discovery does not capture audio messages and read receipts in MS Teams.

    Since files shared in private channels are stored separately from the rest of a team, follow Microsoft’s directions for how to include private channels in e-discovery. (Source: “Conduct an eDiscovery investigation of content in Microsoft Teams,” Microsoft, 2020.)

    Use case #2: Add external person to a team

    Scenario:

    A team in your organization needs to work in an ongoing way with someone external to the company. This user needs access to the relevant team’s work environment, but they should not be privy to the goings-on in the other parts of the organization.

    Jobs:

    This external person needs to be able to:

    • Attend meetings
    • Join calls
    • Chat with individual team members
    • View and collaborate on the team’s files
    Solution:
    • If necessary, set a data loss prevention policy to prevent your users from sharing certain types of information or files with external users present in your organization’s Teams chats and public channels.
    • Ensure that your Microsoft license includes DLP protection. However:
      • DLP cannot be applied to private channel messages.
      • DLP cannot block messages from external Skype for Business users nor external users who are not in “Teams only” mode.
    • Ensure that you have a team set up for the project that you wish the external user to join. The external user will be able to see all the channels in this team, unless you create a private channel they are restricted from.
    • Complete Microsoft’s “Guest Access Checklist” to enable guest access in Teams, if it isn’t already enabled.
    • As admin, give the external user guest access through the Teams admin center or Azure AD B2B collaboration. (If given permission, team owners can also add guests through the Teams client).
    • Decide whether to set a policy to monitor and audit external user activity.

    Use case #3: Delete/archive a team

    Scenario:

    In order to avoid teams sprawl, organizations may want IT to periodically delete or archive unused teams within the Teams client in order to improve the user interface.

    Alternately, if you are using a project-based approach to organizing Teams, you may wish to formalize a process to archive a team once the project is complete.

    Delete:
    • Determine if the team owner anticipates the team will need to be restored one day.
    • Ensure that deletion does not contradict the organization’s retention policy.
    • If not, proceed with deletion. Find the team in the Teams admin center and delete.
    • Restore a deleted team within 30 days of its initial deletion through PowerShell.
    Archive:
    • Determine if the team owner anticipates the team will need to be restored one day.
    • Find the relevant team in the Teams admin center and change its status to “Archived.”
    • Restore the archived team if the workspace becomes relevant once again.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Remind end users that they can hide teams or channels they do not wish to see in their Teams interface. Knowing a team can be hidden may impact a team owner’s decision to delete it.

    Section 2: Teams for End Users

    Best practices for utilizing teams, channels, chat, meetings, and live events

    Section 1

    Teams for IT

    Section 2

    Teams for end users

    From Teams how-tos to common use cases for end users.

    End user basics
    • Teams, channels, and chat
    • Meetings and live events
    Common use cases: Workspaces
    • WS#1: Departments
    • WS#2: A cross-functional committee
    • WS#3: An innovation day event
    • WS#4: A non-work-related social event
    • WS#5: A project team with a defined end time
    Common use cases: Meetings
    • M#1: Job interview with an external candidate
    • M#2: Quarterly board meeting
    • M#3: Weekly recurring team meeting
    • M#4: Morning stand-up/scrum
    • M#5: Phone call between two people

    Overview: Teams, channels, and chat

    Teams

    • Team: A workspace for a group of collaborative individuals.
      • Public channel: A focused area where all members of a team can meet, communicate, and share ideas and content.
      • Private channel: Like a public channel but restricted to a subset of team members, defined by channel owner.

    Chat

    • Chat: Two or more users collected into a common conversation thread.
    (Source: “Overview of teams and channels in Microsoft Teams,” Microsoft, 2020.)

    For any Microsoft Teams newcomer, the differences between teams, channels, and chat can be confusing.

    Use Microsoft’s figure (left) to see how these three mediums differ in their role and function.

    Best practices: Workspaces 1/2

    Team
    A workspace for a group of collaborative individuals.
    Public Channel
    A focused area where all members of a team can meet, communicate, and share ideas and content.
    Private Channel
    Like a public channel but restricted to a subset of team members, defined by channel owner.
    Group Chat
    Two or more users collected into a common conversation thread.
    Limits and Administrative Control
    Who can create? Default setting: All users in an organization can create a team

    Maximum 500,000 teams per tenant

    Any member of a team can create a public channel within the team

    Maximum 200 public channels per team

    Any member of a team can create a private channel and define its members

    Maximum 30 private channels per team

    Anyone
    Who can add members? Team owner(s); max 5,000 members per team N/A Channel owner(s) can add up to 250 members Anyone can bring new members into the chat (and decide if they can see the previous history) up to 100 members
    Who can delete? Team owner/admin can delete Any team member Channel owner(s) Anyone can leave a chat but cannot delete chat, but they are never effectively deleted
    Social Context
    Who can see it? Public teams are indexed and searchable

    Private teams are not indexed and are visible only to joined members

    All members of the team can see all public channels. Channels may be hidden from view for the purposes of cleaning up the UI. Individuals will only see private channels for which they have membership Only participants in the group chat can see the group chat
    Who can see the content? Team members can see any content that is not otherwise part of a private channel All team members All members of the private channel Only members of the group chat

    When does a Group Chat become a Channel?

    • When it’s appropriate for the conversation to have a gallery – an audience of members who may not be actively participating in the discussion.
    • When control over who joins the conversation needs to be centrally governed and not left up to anyone in the discussion.
    • When the discussion will persist over a longer time period.
    • When the number of participants approaches 100.

    When does a Channel become a Team?

    • When a team approaches 30 private channels, many of those private channels are likely candidates to become their own team.
    • When the channel membership needs to extend beyond the boundary of the team membership.

    Best practices: Workspaces 2/2

    Team
    A workspace for a group of collaborative individuals.
    Public Channel
    A focused area where all members of a team can meet, communicate, and share ideas and content.
    Private Channel
    Like a public channel but restricted to a subset of team members, defined by channel owner.
    Group Chat
    Two or more users collected into a common conversation thread.
    Data and Applications
    Where does the content live? SharePoint: Every team resides in its own SharePoint site SharePoint: Each team (public and private) has its own folder off the root of the SharePoint site’s repository SharePoint: Each team (public and private) has its own folder off the root of the SharePoint site’s repository OneDrive: Files that are shared in a chat are stored in the OneDrive folder of the original poster and shared to the other members
    How does the data persist or be retained? If a team expires/is deleted, its corresponding SharePoint site and those artifacts are also deleted Available for 21 days after deletion. Any member of the team can delete a public channel. The team owner and private channel owner can delete/restore a private channel Chats are never effectively deleted. They can be hidden to clean up the user interface.
    Video N/A Yes, select “Meet now” in channel below text entry box Yes, select “Meet now” in channel below text entry box Yes
    Phone calls N/A Yes, select “Meet now” in channel below text entry box Yes, select “Meet now” in channel below text entry box Yes
    Shared computer audio/screen N/A Yes, select “Meet now” in channel below text entry box Yes, select “Meet now” in channel below text entry box Yes
    File-sharing Within channels Yes. Frequently used/collaborated files can be turned into discrete tab. Yes. Frequently used/collaborated files can be turned into discrete tab. Yes
    Wikis Within channels Yes Yes No
    Whiteboarding No No No No

    When does a Team become a Channel?

    • When a team’s purpose for existing can logically be subsumed by another team that has a larger scope.

    When does a Channel become a Group Chat?

    • When a conversation within a channel between select users does not pertain to that channel’s scope (or any other existing channel), they should move the conversation to a group chat.
    • However, this is until that group chat desires to form a channel of its own.

    Create a new team

    Team owner: The person who creates the team. It is possible for the team owner to then invite other members of the team to become co-owners to distribute administrative responsibilities.

    Team members: People who have accepted their invitation to be a part of the team.

    NB: Your organization can control who has permission to set up a team. If you can’t set a up a team, contact your IT department.

    Screenshots detailing how to create a new team in Microsoft Teams, steps 1 to 3. Step 1: 'Click the <Teams data-verified= tab on the left-hand side of the app'. Step 2: 'At the bottom of the app, click '. Step 3: 'Under the banner , click '.">

    Create a new team

    Screenshot detailing how to create a new team in Microsoft Teams, the step 4 starting point with an arrow pointing to the 'Build a team from scratch' button.

    Decide from these two options:

    • Building a team from scratch, which will create a new group with no prior history imported (steps 4.1–4.3).
    • Creating a team from an existing group in Office 365, including an already existing team (steps 4.4–4.6).

    NB: You cannot create a team from an existing group if:

    • That group has 5,000 members or more.
    • That group is in Yammer.

    Screenshot detailing how to create a new team in Microsoft Teams, step 4.1. There are buttons for 'Private' and 'Public'.

    Decide if you want you new team from scratch to be private or public. If you set up a private team, any internal or external user you invite into the team will have access to all team history and files shared.

    Screenshot detailing how to create a new team in Microsoft Teams, step 4.2 and 4.3. 4.2 has a space to give your team a name and another for a description. 4.3 says 'Then click <Create data-verified='.">

    Create a new team

    Screenshot detailing how to create a new team in Microsoft Teams, the step 4 starting point with an arrow pointing to the 'Create from...' button.

    Decide from these two options:

    • Building a team from scratch, which will create a new group with no prior history imported (steps 4.1–4.3).
    • Creating a team from an existing group in Office 365, including an already existing team (steps 4.4–4.6).

    NB: You cannot create a team from an existing group if:

    • That group has 5,000 members or more.
    • That group is in Yammer.

    Screenshot detailing how to create a new team in Microsoft Teams, step 4.4. It reads 'Create a new team from something you already own' with a button for 'Team'.

    Configure your new team settings, including privacy, apps, tabs, and members.

    Screenshot detailing how to create a new team in Microsoft Teams, step 4.5 and 4.6. 4.5 has a space to give your team a name, a description, choose privacy settings, and what you'd like to include from the original team. 4.6 says 'Then click <Create data-verified='.">

    Add team members

    Remove team members

    Screenshot detailing how to add team members in Microsoft Teams, step 1.

    To add a team member, on the right-hand side of the team name, click “More options.”

    Then, from the drop-down menu, click “Add member.”

    Screenshot detailing how to remove team members in Microsoft Teams, step 1.

    Only team owners can remove a team member. To do so, on the right-hand side of the team name, click “More options.”

    Then, from the drop-down menu, click “Manage team.”

    Screenshot detailing how to add team members in Microsoft Teams, step 2.

    If you’re a team owner, you can then type a name or an email address to add another member to the team.

    If you’re a team member, typing a name or an email address will send a request to the team owner to consider adding the member.

    Screenshot detailing how to remove team members in Microsoft Teams, step 2.

    Under the “Members” tab, you’ll see a list of the members in the team. Click the “X” at the far right of the member’s name to remove them.

    Team owners can only be removed if they change their role to team member first.

    Create a new channel

    Screenshot detailing how to create a new channel in Microsoft Teams, step 1.

    On the right-hand side of the team name, click “More options.”

    Then, from the drop-down menu, click “Add channel.”

    Screenshot detailing how to create a new channel in Microsoft Teams, step 2.

    Name your channel, give a description, and set your channel’s privacy.

    Screenshot detailing how to create a new channel in Microsoft Teams, step 3.

    To manage subsequent permissions, on the right-hand side of the channel name, click “More options.”

    Then, from the drop-down menu, click “Manage channel.”

    Adding and removing members from channels:

    Only members in a team can see that team’s channels. Setting channel privacy as “standard” means that the channel can be accessed by anyone in a team. Unless privacy settings for a channel are set as “private” (from which the channel creator can choose who can be in that channel), there is no current way to remove members from channels.

    It will be up to the end user to decide which channels they want to hide.

    Link team/channel to SharePoint folder

    Screenshot detailing how to link a team or channel to a SharePoint folder in Microsoft Teams, steps 1, 2, and 3. Step 1: 'Along the top of the team/channel tab bar, click the “+” symbol'. Step 2: 'Select “Document Library” to link the team/channel to a SharePoint folder'. Step 3: 'Copy and paste the SharePoint URL for the desired folder, or search in “Relevant sites” if the folder can be found there'.

    Need to find the SharePoint URL?

    Screenshot detailing how to find the SharePoint URL in Microsoft Teams. 'Locate the folder in SharePoint and click <Show actions data-verified=', 'Click to access the folder's SharePoint URL.'">

    Hide/unhide teams

    Hide/unhide channels

    Screenshot detailing how to hide and unhide teams in Microsoft Teams, step 1.

    To hide a team, on the right-hand side of the team name, click “More options.”

    Then, from the drop-down menu, click “Hide.” Hidden teams are moved to the “hidden teams” menu at the bottom of your team list.

    Screenshot detailing how to hide and unhide channels in Microsoft Teams, step 1.

    To hide a channel, on the right-hand side of the channel name, click “More options.”

    Then, from the drop-down menu, click “Hide.” Hidden channels are moved to the “hidden channels” menu at the bottom of your channel list in that team.

    Screenshot detailing how to hide and unhide teams in Microsoft Teams, step 2. Screenshot of a button that says 'Hidden teams'.

    To unhide a team, click on the “hidden teams” menu. On the right-hand side of the team name, click “More options.”

    Then, from the drop-down menu, click “Show.”

    Screenshot detailing how to hide and unhide channels in Microsoft Teams, step 2.

    To unhide a channel, click on the “hidden channels” menu at the bottom of the team. This will produce a drop-down menu of all hidden channels in that team.

    Hover over the channel you want to unhide and click “Show.”

    Find/join teams

    Leave teams

    Screenshot detailing how to find and join teams in Microsoft Teams, step 1. Click the “Teams” tab on the left-hand side of the app. Screenshot detailing how to find and join teams in Microsoft Teams, step 2.

    At the bottom of the app, click “Join or create a team.” Teams will then suggest a range of teams that you might be looking for. You can join public teams immediately. You will have to request approval to join a private team.

    Screenshot detailing how to leave teams in Microsoft Teams.

    To leave a team, on the right-hand side of the team name, click “More options.”

    Then, from the drop-down menu, click “Leave the team.”

    NB: If the owner of a private team has switched off discoverability, you will have to contact that owner to join that team. Screenshot detailing how to find and join teams in Microsoft Teams, step 3. If you can’t immediately see the team, you have two options: either search for the team or enter that team’s code under the banner “Join a team with a code.” Can I find a channel?

    No. To join a channel, you need to first join the team that channel belongs to.

    Can I leave a channel?

    No. The most you can do is hide the channel. By default, if you join a team you will have access to all the channels within that team (unless a channel is private, in which case you’ll have to request access to that channel).

    Create a chat

    Screenshots detailing how to create a chat in Microsoft Teams, steps 1 to 5. Step 1:'Click the “Chat” tab on the left hand side of the app (or keyboard shortcut Ctrl+N)'. Step 2: 'Search the name of the person you want to chat with'. Step 3: 'You’re now ready to start the chat! You can also send a chat message while working in a separate channel by typing/chat into the search bar and entering the recipient’s name'. Step 4: 'For group chat, click the “Add people” button in the top right hand corner of the app to add other persons into the existing chat'. Step 5: 'You can then rename the group chat (if there are 3+ people) by clicking the “Name group chat” option to the right of the group chat members’ names'.

    Hide a chat

    Unhide a chat

    Screenshots detailing how to hide a chat in Microsoft Teams, steps 1 to 3. Step 1:'Click the “Chat” tab on the left-hand side of the app'. Step 2: 'Search the name of the chat or group chat that you want to hide'. Step 3: In either 'Single person chat options' or 'Group chat options' Click “More options.” Then click “Hide.”' To unhide a chat, search for the hidden person or name of the group chat in the search bar. Click “More options.” Then click “Unhide.” Screenshot detailing how to unhide a chat in Microsoft Teams.

    Leave a chat

    You can only leave group chats. To do so, click “More options.” Then click “Leave.” Screenshot detailing how to leave a chat in Microsoft Teams.

    Overview: Meetings and live events

    Teams Meetings: Real-time communication and collaboration between a group, limited to 250 people.

    Teams Live Events: designed for presentations and webinars to a large audience of up to 10,000 people, in which attendees watch rather than interact.

    Office 365 and Microsoft 365 Licenses

    I want to: F1 F3 E1 E3 E5 Audio conferencing add-on
    Join a Teams meeting No license required. Any email address can participate in a Teams meeting.
    Attend a Teams meeting with a dial-in phone number No license required. Any phone number can dial into a Teams meeting. (Meeting organizers need to have an Audio Conferencing add-on license to send an invite that includes dial-in conferencing.)
    Attend a Teams live event No license required. Any phone number can dial into a Teams live event.
    Create a Teams meeting for up to 250 attendees One of these licensing plans
    Create a Teams meeting for up to 250 attendees with a dial-in phone number One of these licensing plans + Audio Conferencing (Meeting organizers need to have an Audio Conferencing add-on license to send an invite that includes dial-in conferencing.)
    Create a Teams live event for up to 10,000 attendees One of these licensing plans
    Dial out from a Teams meeting to add someone at their Call me at number One of these licensing plans + Audio Conferencing (Meeting dial out to a Call me at number requires organizers to have an E5 or Audio Conference add-in license. A dial plan may also be needed.)

    Depending on the use case, end users will have to determine whether they need to hold a meeting or a live event.

    Use Microsoft’s table (left) to see what license your organization needs to perform meetings and live events.

    (Source: “Admin quick start – Meetings and live events in Microsoft Teams,” Microsoft, 2020.)

    Best practices: Meetings

    Ad Hoc Call
    Direct audio/video call
    Scheduled Meeting Live Event
    Limits and Administrative Control
    Who can create? Anyone Anyone Anyone, unless altered by admin (permission to create MS Stream events also required if external production tools are used).
    Who can add members? Anyone in the session. The meeting organizer can add new attendees to the meeting. The event creator (the “organizer”) sets attendee permissions and assigns event group roles (“producer” and “presenter”).
    Can external stakeholders attend? Yes, through email invite. However, collaboration tools are restricted. Yes, through email invite. However, collaboration tools are restricted. Public events: yes, through shared invite link.
    Org-wide event: yes, if guest/external access granted.
    Who can delete? Anyone can leave the session. There is no artifact to delete. The meeting organizer Any attendee can leave the session.
    The organizer can cancel the event.
    Maximum attendees 100 250 10,000 attendees and 10 active presenters/producers (250 presenters and producers can be present at the event).
    Social Context
    How does the request come in? Unscheduled.
    Notification of an incoming audio or video call.
    Scheduled.
    Meeting invite, populated in the calendar, at a scheduled time.
    Meeting only auto-populated in event group’s calendars. Organizer must circulate event invite link to attendees – for instance, by pasting link into an Outlook meeting invite.
    Available Functionality
    Screen-sharing Yes Yes Producers and Presenters (through Teams, no third-party app).
    Whiteboard No Yes Yes
    OneNote (for minutes) Yes (from a member’s OneDrive) Yes, part of the meeting construct. No. A Meeting Notes tab is available instead.
    Dedicated chat space Yes. Derived from a group chat. Meeting has its own chat room. The organizer can set up a moderated Q&A (not chat) when creating the event. Only Presenters and Producers can chat.
    Recording Yes Yes Yes. Event can last up to 4 hours.

    When should an Ad Hoc Call become a Scheduled Meeting?

    • When the participants need time to prepare content for the call.
    • When an answer is not required immediately.
    • When bringing a group of people together requires logistical organizing.

    When should a Scheduled Meeting become an Ad Hoc Call?

    • When the participants can meet on short notice.
    • When a topic under discussion requires creating alignment quickly.

    When should a Live Event be created?

    • When the expected attendance exceeds 250 people.
    • If the event does not require collaboration and is mostly a presenter conveying information.

    Create a scheduled meeting

    Screenshots detailing how to create a scheduled meeting in Microsoft Teams, steps 1 to 4. Step 1:'Click the “Calendar” tab on the left-hand side of the app'. Step 2: 'On the top-right of the app, click the drop-down menu for “+ New meeting” and then “Schedule meeting.”' Step 3: 'Fill in the meeting details. When inputting internal attendees, their names will drop down without needing their email. You will need to input email addresses for external attendees'. Step 4: 'To determine internal attendees’ availability, click “Scheduling assistant” on the top left. Then click “Save” to create the meeting'.

    Create an ad hoc meeting

    Screenshots detailing how to create an ad hoc meeting in Microsoft Teams, steps 1 to 4. Step 1:'Click the “Calendar” tab on the left-hand side of the app'. Step 2: 'Along the top-right, click “Meet now.”' Step 3: 'Name your meeting, choose your audio and video settings, and click “Join now.”'. Step 4: 'To determine internal attendees’ availability, click “Scheduling assistant” on the top left. Then click “Save” to create the meeting. You’ll then be prompted to fill in the meeting details. When inputting internal attendees, their names will drop down without needing their email. You will need to input email addresses for external attendees'.

    Tip: Use existing channels to host the chatrooms for your online meetings

    When you host a meeting online with Microsoft Teams, there will always be a chatroom associated with the meeting. While this is a great place for meeting participants to interact, there is one particular downside.

    Problem: The never-ending chat. Often the activity in these chatrooms can persist long after the meeting. The chatroom itself becomes, unofficially, a channel. When end users can’t keep up with the deluge of communication, the tools have failed them.

    Solution: Adding an existing channel to the meeting. This ensures that discussion activity is already hosted in the appropriate venue for the group, during and after the meeting. Furthermore, it provides non-attendees with a means to catch up on the discussion they have missed.

    In section two of this cookbook, we will often refer to this tactic.

    A screenshot detailing how to add an existing channel to a meeting in Microsoft Teams. 'Break the habit of online booking meetings in Outlook – use the Teams Calendar View instead! In order to make use of this function, the meeting must be setup in Microsoft Teams, not Microsoft Outlook. The option to assign a channel to the meeting will then be available to the meeting organizer.'

    Don’t have a channel for the chat session of your online meeting? Perhaps you should!

    If your meeting is with a group of individuals that will be collaborating frequently, they may need a workspace that persists beyond the meeting.

    Guests can still attend the meeting, but they can’t chat!

    If there are attendees in your meeting that do not have access to the channel you select to host the chat, they will not see the chat discussion nor have any ability to use this function.

    This may be appropriate in some cases – for example, a vendor providing a briefing as part of a regular team meeting.

    However, if there are attendees outside the channel membership that need to see the meeting chat, consider another channel or simply default to not assigning one.

    Meeting settings explained

    Show device settings. For settings concerning audio, video, and whether viewing is private.

    Show meeting notes. Use to take notes throughout the meeting. The notes will stay attached to this event.

    Show meeting details. Find meeting information for: a dial-in number, conference ID, and link to join.

    Enter full screen.

    Show background effects. Choose from a range of video backgrounds to hide/blur your location.

    Turn on the captions (preview). Turn on live speech-to-text captions.

    Keypad. For dialing a number within the meeting (when enabled as an add-on with E3 or as part of E5).

    Start recording. Recorded and saved using Microsoft Stream.

    End meeting.

    Turn off incoming video. To save network bandwidth, you can decline receiving attendee’s video.

    Click “More options” to access the meetings settings.

    Screen share. In the tool tray, select “Share” to share your screen. Select particular applications if you only want to share certain information; otherwise, you can share your whole desktop.

    System audio share. To share your device’s audio while screen sharing, checkbox the “Include system audio” option upon clicking “Share.”

    If you didn’t click that option at the start but now want to share audio during screen share, click the “Include systems audio” option in the tool tray along the top of the screen.

    Give/take control of screen share. To give control, click “Give control” in the tool tray along the top of the screen when sharing content. Choose from the drop-down who you would like to give control to. In the same spot, click “Take back control” when required.

    To request control, click “Request control” in the same space when viewing someone sharing their content. Click “Release control” once finished.

    Start whiteboarding

    1. You’ll first need to enable Microsoft Whiteboard in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Ask your relevant admin to do so if Whiteboard is not already enabled.
    2. Once enabled, click “Share” in a meeting. This feature only appears if you have 3+ participants in the meeting.
    3. Under the “Whiteboard” section in the bottom right, click “Microsoft Whiteboard.”
    4. Click the pen icons to the right of the screen to begin sketching.

    NB: Anonymous, federated, or guest users are currently not supported to start, view, or ink a whiteboard in a Teams meeting.

    Will the whiteboard session be recorded if the meeting is being recorded?

    No. However, the final whiteboard will be available to all meeting attendees after the meeting, under “Board Gallery” in the Microsoft Whiteboard app. Attendees can then continue to work on the whiteboard after the meeting has ended.

    Create a live event

    Screenshots detailing how to create a live event in Microsoft Teams, steps 1 to 3. Step 1: 'Click the “Calendar” tab on the left-hand side of the app'. Step 2: 'On the top right of the app, click the drop-down menu for “+ New meeting” and then “Live event.”' Step 3: 'You will be labeled the “Event organizer.” First, fill in the live event details on the left'. Screenshot detailing how to create a live event in Microsoft Teams, step 4.

    As the organizer, you can invite other people to the event who will be the “producers” or “presenters.”

    Producers: Control the live event stream, including being able to start and stop the event, share their own and others’ video, share desktop or window, and select layout.

    Presenters: Present audio, video, or a screen.

    Screenshot detailing how to create a live event in Microsoft Teams, step 5.

    Select who your audience will be for your live event from three options: specified people and groups, the organization, or the public with no sign-in required.

    Edit the setting for whether you want recording to be available for attendees.

    Then click “Schedule” to finish.

    Live event settings explained

    When you join the live event as a producer/presenter, nothing will be immediately broadcast. You’ll be in a pre-live state. Decide what content to share and in what order. Along the bottom of the screen, you can share your video and audio, share your screen, and mute incoming attendees.

    Once your content is ready to share along the bottom of the screen, add it to the screen on the left, in order of viewing. This is your queue – your “Pre-live” state. Then, click “Send now.”

    This content will now move to the right-hand screen, ready for broadcasting. Once you’re ready to broadcast, click “Start.” Your state will change from “Pre-live” to “Live.”

    Along the top right of the app will be a tools bar.

    Screenshot listing live events settings icons in Microsoft Teams. Beside the heart monitor icon is 'Monitor health and performance of network, devices, and media sharing'. Beside the notepad icon is 'Take meeting notes'. Beside the chatbox icon is 'Chat function'. Beside the two little people with a plus sign icon is 'Invite and show participants'. Beside the gear icon is 'Device settings'. Beside the small 'i' in a circle is 'Meeting details, including schedule, meeting link, and dial-in number'.

    Workspace #1: Departments

    Scenario: Most of your organization’s communication and collaboration occurs within its pre-existing departmental divisions.

    Conventional communication channels:

    • Oral communication: Employees work in proximity to each other and communicate in person, by phone, in department meetings
    • Email: Department-wide announcements
    • Memos: Typically posted/circulated in mailboxes

    Solution: Determine the best way to organize your organization’s departments in Teams based on its size and your requirements to keep information private between departments.

    Option A:

    • Create a team for the organization/division.
    • Create channels for each department. Remember that all members of a team can view all public channels created in that team and the default General channel.
    • Create private channels if you wish to have a channel that only select members of that team can see. Remember that private channels have some limitations in functionality.

    Option B:

    • Create a new team for each department.
    • Create channels within this team for projects or topics that are recurring workflows for the department members. Only department members can view the content of these channels.

    Option C:

    • Post departmental memos and announcements in the General channel.
    • Use “Meet now” in channels for ad hoc meetings. For regular department meetings, create a recurring Teams calendar event for the specific department channel (Option A) or the General channel (Option B). Remember that all members of a team can join a public channel meeting.

    Workspace #2: A cross-functional committee

    Scenario: Your organization has struck a committee composed of members from different departments. The rest of the organization should not have access to the work done in the committee.

    Purpose: To analyze a particular organizational challenge and produce a plan or report; to confidentially develop or carry out a series of processes that affect the whole organization.

    Jobs: Committee members must be able to:

    • Attend private meetings.
    • Share files confidentially.

    Solution:

    Ingredients:

    • Private team

    Construction:

    • Create a new private team for the cross-functional committee.
    • Add only committee members to the team.
    • Create channels based on the topics likely to be the focal point of the committee work.
    • Decide how you will use the mandatory General channel. If the committee is small and the work limited in scope, this channel may be the main communication space. If the committee is larger or the work more complex, use the General channel for announcements and move discussions to new topic-related channels.
    • Schedule recurring committee meetings in the Teams calendar. Add the relevant channel to the meeting invite to keep the meeting chat attached to this team and channel (as meeting organizer, put your name in the meeting invite notes, as the channel will show as the organizer in the Outlook invite).
    • Remember that all members of this team will have access to these meetings and be able to view that they are occurring.

    Workspace #3: An innovation day event

    Scenario: The organization holds a yearly innovation day event in which employees form small groups and work on a defined, short-term problem or project.

    Purpose: To develop innovative solutions and ideas.

    Jobs:

    • Convene small groups.
    • Work toward time-sensitive goals.
    • Communicate synchronously.
    • Share files.

    Solution:

    Ingredients:

    • Public team
    • Channel tabs
    • Whiteboard
    • Planner

    Construction:

    • Create a team for the innovation day event.
    • Add channels for each project working group.
    • Communicate to participants the schedule for the day and their assigned channel.
    • Use the General channel for announcements and instructions throughout the day. Ensure someone moderates the General channel for participants’ questions.
    • Pre-populate the channel tabs with files the participants need to work with. To add a scrum board, refer to M#4 (Morning stand-up/Scrum) in this slide deck.
    • For breakouts, instruct participants to use the “meet now” feature in their channel and how to use the Whiteboard during these meetings.
    • Arrange to have your IT admin archive the team after a certain point so the material is still viewable but not editable.

    Workspace #4: A non-work-related social event

    Scenario: Employees within the organization wish to organize social events around shared interests: board game clubs, book clubs, TV show discussion groups, trivia nights, etc.

    Purpose: To encourage cohesion among coworkers and boost morale.

    Jobs:

    • Schedule the event.
    • Invite participants.
    • Prepare the activity.
    • Host and moderate the discussion.

    Solution:

    Ingredients:

    • Public team
    • Private channels
    • Screen-sharing

    Construction:

    • Create a public team for the social event so that interested people can find and join it.
    • Example: Trivia Night
      • Schedule the event in the Teams calendar.
      • Publish the link to the Trivia Night team where other employees will see it.
      • Create private channels for each trivia team so they cannot see the other competitors’ discussions. Add yourself to each private channel so you can see their answers.
      • As the host, begin a meeting in the General channel. Pose the trivia questions live or present the questions on PowerPoint via screen-sharing.
      • Ask each team to post its answers to its private channel.
    • To avoid teams sprawl, ask your IT admin to set a deletion policy for the team, as long as this request does not contradict your organization’s policies on data retention. If the team becomes moribund, it can be set to auto-delete after a certain period of time.

    Workspace #5: A project team with a defined end time

    Scenario: Within a department/workplace team, employees are assigned to projects with defined end times, after which they will be assigned to a new project.

    Purpose: To complete project-based work that fulfills business needs.

    Jobs:

    • Oral communication with team members.
    • Synchronous and asynchronous work on project files.
    • The ability to attend scheduled meetings and ad hoc meetings.
    • The ability to access shared resources related to the project.

    Solution:

    If your working group already has its own team within Teams:

    • Create a new public or private channel for the project. Remember that some functionality is not available in private channels (such as Microsoft Planner).
    • Use the channel for the project team’s meetings (scheduled in Teams calendar or through Meet Now).
    • Add a tab that links to the team’s project folder in SharePoint.

    If your workplace team does not already have its own team in Teams:

    • Determine if there is a natural fit for this project as a new channel in an existing team. Remember that all team members will be able to see the channel if it is public and that all relevant project members need to belong to the Team to participate in the channel.
    • If necessary, create a new team for the project. Add the project members.
    • Create channels based on the type of work that comprises the project.
    • Use the channel for the project team’s meetings (scheduled in Teams calendar or through Meet Now)
    • Add a tab to link to the team’s project folder in SharePoint.

    Info-tech Best Practice

    Hide the channel after the project concludes to de-clutter your Teams user interface.

    Meeting #1: Job interview with external candidate

    Scenario: The organization must interview a slate of candidates to fill an open position.

    Purpose:

    • Select the most qualified candidate for the job.

    Jobs:

    • Create a meeting, ensuring the candidate and other attendees know when and where the meeting will happen.
    • Ensure the meeting is secure to protect confidential information.
    • Ensure the meeting is accessible, allowing the candidate to present themselves through audio and/or visual means.
    • Create a professional environment for the meeting to take place.
    • Engender a space for the candidate to share their CV, research, or other relevant file.
    • The interview must be transcribed and recorded.

    Solution:

    Ingredients:

    • Private Teams meeting
    • Screen-sharing
    • Microsoft Stream

    Construction:

    • Create a Teams meeting, inviting the candidate with their email, alongside other internal attendees. The Teams meeting invite will auto-generate a link to the meeting itself.
    • The host can control who joins the meeting through settings for the “lobby.”
    • Through the Teams meeting, the attendees will be able to use the voice and video chat functionality.
    • All attendees can opt to blur their backgrounds to maintain a professional online presence.
    • The candidate can share their screen, either specific applications or their whole desktop, during the Teams meeting.
    • A Teams meeting can be recorded and transcribed through Stream. After the meeting, the transcript can be searched, edited, and shared

    NB: The external candidate does not need the Teams application. Through the meeting invite, the external candidate will join via a web browser.

    Meeting #2: Quarterly board meeting

    Scenario: Every quarter, the organization holds its regular board meeting.

    Purpose: To discuss agenda items and determine the company’s future direction.

    Jobs:

      During meeting:
    • Attendance and minutes must be taken.
    • Votes must be recorded.
    • In-camera sessions must occur.
    • External experts must be included.
    • After meeting:
    • Follow-up items must be assigned.
    • Reports must be submitted.

    Solution:

    Ingredients:

    • Teams calendar invite
    • Planner; Forms
    • Private channel
    • Microsoft Stream

    Construction:

    • Guest Invite: Invites can be sent to any non-domain-joined email address to join a private, invitation-only channel within the team controlled by the board chair.
    • SharePoint & Flow: Documents are emailed to the Team addresses, which kicks off an MS Flow routine to collect review notes.
    • Planner: Any board member can assign tasks to any employee.
    • Forms/Add-On: Chair puts down the form of the question and individual votes are tracked.
    • Teams cloud meeting recording: Recording available through Stream. Manual edits can be made to VTT caption file. Greater than acceptable transcription error rate.
    • Meeting Log: Real-time attendance is viewable but a point-in-time record needs admin access.

    NB: The external guests do not need the Teams application. Through the meeting invite, the guests will join via a web browser.

    Meeting #3: Weekly team meeting

    Scenario: A team meets for a weekly recurring meeting. The meeting is facilitated by the team lead (or manager) who addresses through agenda items and invites participation from the attendees.

    Purpose: The purpose of the meeting is to:

    • Share information verbally
    • Present content visually
    • Achieve consensus
    • Build team morale

    Jobs: The facilitator must:

    • Determine participants
    • Book room
    • Book meeting in calendar

    Solution:

    Ingredients:

    • Meeting Place: A channel in Microsoft Teams (must be public) where all members of the meeting make up the entirety of the audience.
    • Calendar Recurrence: A meeting is booked through Teams and appears in all participants’ Outlook calendar.
    • Collaboration Space: Participants join the meeting through video or audio and can share screens and contribute text, images, and links to the meeting chat.

    Construction:

    • Ensure your team already has a channel created for it. If not, create one in the appropriate team.
    • Create the meeting using the calendar view within Microsoft Teams:
      • Set the meeting’s name, attendees, time, and recurrence.
      • Add the team channel that serves as the most appropriate workplace for the meeting. (Any discussion in the meeting chat will be posted to this channel.)

    NB: Create the meeting in the Teams calendar, not Outlook, or you will not be able to add the Teams channel. As meeting organizer, put your name in the meeting invite notes, as the channel will show as the organizer in the Outlook invite.

    Meeting #4: Morning stand-up/scrum

    Scenario: Each morning, at 9am, members of the team meet online.

    Purpose: After some pleasantries, the team discusses what tasks they each plan to complete in the day.

    Jobs: The team leader (or scrum master) must:

    • Place all tasks on a scrum board, each represented by a sticky note denoting the task name and owner.
    • Move the sticky notes through the columns, adjusting assignments as needed.
    • Sort tasks into the following columns: “Not Started,” “In Progress,” and “Done.”

    Solution:

    Ingredients:

    • Meeting Place: A channel in Microsoft Teams (must be public) where all members of the meeting make up the entirety of the audience.
    • Scrum Board: A tab within that channel where a persistent scrum board has been created and is visible to all team members.

    Meeting Place Construction:

    • Create the meeting using the calendar view in Teams.
    • Set the meeting’s name, attendees, time, and work-week daily recurrence (see left).
    • Add the channel that is the most appropriate workplace for the meeting. Any meeting chat will be posted to this channel rather than a separate chat.

    Scrum Board Construction:

    • Add a tab to the channel using Microsoft Planner as the app. (You can use other task management apps such as Trello, but the identity integration of first-party Office 365 tools may be less hassle.)
    • Create a new (or import an existing) Plan to the channel. This will be used as the focal point.

    Meeting #5: Weekly team meeting

    Scenario: An audio-only conversation that could be a regularly scheduled event but is more often conducted on an ad-hoc basis.

    Purpose: To quickly share information, achieve consensus, or clarify misunderstandings.

    Jobs:

    • Dial recipient
    • See missed calls
    • Leave/check voicemail
    • Create speed-dial list
    • Conference call

    Solution:

    Ingredients:

    • Audio call begun through Teams chat.

    Construction:

    • Voice over IP calls between users in the same MS Teams tenant can begin in multiple ways:
      • A call can be initiated through any appearance of a user’s profile picture: hover over user’s profile photo in the Chat list and select the phone icon.
      • Enter your last chat with a user and click phone icon in upper-right corner.
      • Go to the Calls section and type the name in the “Make a call” text entry form.
    • Voicemail: Voicemail, missed calls, and call history are available in the Calls section.
    • Speed dial: Speed dial lists can be created in the Calls section.
    • Conference call: Other users can be added to an ongoing call.

    NB: Microsoft Teams can be configured to provide an organization’s telephony for external calls, but this requires an E5 license. Additional audio-conferencing licenses are required to call in to a Teams meeting over a phone.

    Bibliography 1/4

    Section 1: Teams for IT › Creation Process

    Overview: Creation process
    Assign admin roles
    Prepare the network
    Team creation
    Integrations with SharePoint Online
    Permissions

    Bibliography 2/4

    Section 1: Teams for IT › Creation Process (cont'd.)

    External and guest access
    Expiration and archiving
    Retention and data loss prevention
    Teams telephony

    Bibliography 3/4

    Section 1: Teams for IT › Teams Rollout

    From Skype to Teams
    From Slack to Teams
    Teams adoption

    Section 1: Teams for IT › Use Cases

    Bibliography 4/4

    Section 2: Teams for End Users › Teams, Channels, Chat

    Section 2: Teams for End Users › Meetings and Live Events

    Section 2: Teams for End Users › Use Cases

    Embrace the Inevitability of Multicloud

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}115|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): N/A
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    • Parent Category Name: Strategy and Organizational Design
    • Parent Category Link: /strategy-and-organizational-design

    It used to be easy: pick your cloud, build out your IT footprint, and get back to business. But the explosion of cloud adoption has also led to an explosion of options for cloud providers, platforms, and deployment options. And that’s just when talking about infrastructure as a service!

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Multicloud isn’t good or bad; it’s inevitable.
    • Embracing multicloud in your organization is an opportunity to gain control while enabling choice. Although it increases complexity for both IT operations and governance, with the right tools and principles in place you can reduce the IT burden and increase business agility at the same time.

    Impact and Result

    • Understand what multicloud is, what it isn’t, and why you need to accept it in your organization.
    • Keep your cloud strategy but adapt your approach and tools.
    • Leverage best practices and principles that will help you keep control of the volatility and complexity that comes with multicloud.

    Embrace the Inevitability of Multicloud Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Embrace the Inevitability of Multicloud Storyboard – A deck that helps you implement best practices for your multicloud strategy.

    Use this research to understand the risks and benefits that come with a multicloud posture.

    • Embrace the Inevitability of Multicloud Storyboard

    Infographic

    Further reading

    Embrace the Inevitability of Multicloud

    The heterogeneous ecosystem is worth it; you just need a cohesive strategy.

    Executive summary

    Your Challenge

    Common Obstacles

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    It used to be easy: pick your cloud, build out your IT footprint, and get back to business. But the explosion of cloud adoption has also led to an explosion of options for cloud providers, platforms, and deployment. And that’s just when talking about infrastructure as a service!

    For many businesses, one of the key benefits of the cloud ecosystem is enabling choice for different users, groups, and projects in the organization. But this means embracing multiple cloud platforms. Is it worth it?

    The reality is that multicloud is inevitable for most organizations, and if it’s not yet a reality for your IT team, it soon will be. This brings new challenges:

    1. How do I decide what platforms and offerings to use where? Is my old cloud strategy obsolete?
    2. How do I identify what I want out of multicloud, and what tools and best practices need to be in place to keep control?

    By defining your end goals, framing solutions based on the type of visibility and features your multicloud footprint needs to deliver, you can enable choice and improve performance, flexibility, and availability.

    1. Understand what multicloud is, what it isn’t, and why you need to accept it in your organization.
    2. Keep your cloud strategy but adapt your approach and tools.
    3. Leverage best practices and principles that will help you keep control of the volatility and complexity that comes with multicloud.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Embracing multicloud in your organization is an opportunity to gain control while enabling choice. Although it increases complexity for both IT operations and governance, with the right tools and principles in place you can reduce the IT burden and increase business agility at the same time.

    Project overview

    Multicloud isn’t good or bad; it’s inevitable

    The reality is multicloud is usually not a choice. For most organizations, the requirement to integrate with partners, subsidiaries, and parent organizations, as well as the need to access key applications in the software-as-a-service ecosystem, means that going multicloud is a matter of when, not if.

    The real question most businesses should ask is not whether to go multicloud, but rather how to land in multicloud with intent and use it to their best advantage.

    Your workloads will guide the way

    One piece of good news is that multicloud doesn’t change the basic principles of a good cloud strategy. In fact, a well-laid-out multicloud approach can make it even easier to put the right workloads in the right place – and then even move them around as needed.

    This flexibility isn’t entirely free, though. It’s important to know how and when to apply this type of portability and balance its benefits against the cost and complexity that come with it.

    Don’t fall in reactively; land on your feet

    Despite the risks that come with the increased scale and complexity of multicloud, it is possible to maintain control, realize the benefits, and even use multicloud as a springboard for leveraging cloud benefits in your business. By adopting best practices and forethought in key areas of multicloud risk, you can hit the ground running.

    Aligning the terms

    Modern organizations have multiple IT footprints. How do we classify different stances?

    01 Hybrid Cloud
    Private cloud and public cloud infrastructure managed as one entity

    02 Multicloud
    Includes multiple distinct public cloud services, or “footprints”

    03 Hybrid IT
    Putting the right workloads in the right places with an overall management framework

    Info-Tech Insight

    • Hybrid cloud is about applying the same service model across multiple deployment models (most commonly public and private clouds).
    • Multicloud is about using multiple cloud offerings irrespective of differences in service model or deployment model.

    Multicloud

    • An approach that includes multiple distinct public cloud services (e.g. AWS EC2 but also Salesforce and M365)
    • Usually defined around a steady state for each workload and footprint
    • Everything in its right place (with portability for events and disasters)
    • NOT everything everywhere all at once
    The image contains the Info-Tech thought model for multicloud.

    Multicloud is inevitable

    The SaaS ecosystem has led organizations to encourage business units to exercise the IT choices that are best for them.

    The multicloud maturity journey

    1. Move a workload to the cloud
    2. Move more workloads to the same cloud
    3. Move the right workloads to the right clouds
    4. Hybrid cloud & multicloud
    5. Integrate cloud and traditional/ on-premises footprints

    Hybrid IT: Aggregate Management, Monitoring, Optimization, Continuous Improvement

    Multicloud is about enabling choice while maintaining oversight

    The broader your footprint, the harder it becomes to manage risks across each environment.

    The image contains a screenshot of a diagram of maintaining oversight with multicloud.

    Managing multicloud risks

    The risks in multicloud are the same as in traditional cloud but amplified by the differences across footprints and providers in your ecosystem.

    • Variations across platforms include:
      • Rules
      • Security
      • Mapping corresponding products and services
    • Training and certifications by platform/provider
    • Managing cost across footprints
    • Complexity of integration
    • Managing compliance across platforms
    • Loss of standardization due to multicloud fragmentation

    Info-Tech Insight

    Don’t be afraid to ask for help! Each cloud platform you adopt in your multicloud posture requires training, knowledge, and execution. If you’re already leveraging an ecosystem of cloud providers, leverage the ecosystem of cloud enablers as needed to help you on your way.

    Despite the risks, multicloud is a springboard

    Increasing flexibility & accelerating integration

    Because multicloud increases the number of platforms and environments available to us, we can
    use it as a way to increase our agility (from both a DevOps and a resource deployment perspective) as well as to provide an answer to the problem of vendor lock-in.

    Multicloud also can be a catalyst for integrating and stitching together resources and services that were previously isolated from each other. Because of the modular design and API architecture prevalent in cloud services, they can be easily consumed and integrated from your various footprints.

    Modernizing data strategy

    While it may seem counterintuitive, a proactive multicloud approach will allow you to regain visibility and control of your entire data ecosystem. Defining your data architecture and policies with an eye to the inevitability of multicloud means you can go beyond just regaining control of data stranded in SaaS and other platforms; you can start to really understand the flows of data and how they affect your business processes for better or worse.

    Move to cloud-native IT & design

    Embracing multicloud is also a great opportunity to embrace the refactoring and digital transformation you’ve been blocked on. Instead of treading water with respect to keeping control of fragmented applications, services, and workloads, a proactive approach to multicloud allows you to embrace open standards built to deliver cloud-native power and portability and to build automations that increase reliability, performance, and cost effectiveness while reducing your total in-house work burden.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Don’t bite off more than you can chew! Especially with IaaS and PaaS services, it’s important to ensure you have the skills and bandwidth to manage and deploy services effectively. It’s better to start with one IaaS platform, master it, and then expand.

    Let your workloads guide the way

    Multicloud is a road to best-of-breed everything


    A screenshot of multiclouds.

    Stick with a workload-level approach

    The principles of cloud strategy don’t change with multicloud! The image contains a screenshot of a workload-level approach.
    If anything, a multicloud approach increases your ability to put the right workloads in the right places, wherever that may be.
    It can also (with some work and tooling) provide even broader options for portability and resilience.

    Multicloud = multiple right places

    Put everything in its right place.

    Just like with any cloud strategy, start with a workload-level approach and figure out the right migration path and landing point for your workload in cloud.

    Understand the other right places!

    Multicloud means for many workloads, especially IaaS- and PaaS-focused ones, you will have multiple footprints you can use for secondary locations as desired for portability, resilience, and high availability (with the right tooling and design).

    Info-Tech Insight

    Portability is always a matter of balancing increased flexibility, availability, and resilience against increased complexity, maintenance effort, and cost. Make sure to understand the requirement for your workloads and apply portability efforts where they make the most sense

    Your management will need to evolve

    Don’t manage multicloud with off-the-rack tools.

    The default dashboards and management tools from most cloud vendors are a great starting point when managing a single cloud. Unfortunately, most of these tools do not extend well to other platforms, which can lead to multiple dashboards for multiple footprints.

    These ultimately lead to an inability to view your multicloud portfolio in aggregate and fragmentation of metrics and management practices across your various platforms. In such a situation maintaining compliance and control of IT can become difficult, if not impossible!

    Unified standards and tools that work across your entire cloud portfolio will help keep you on track, and the best way to realize these is by applying repeatable, open standards across your various environments and usually adopting new software and tools from the ecosystem of multicloud management software platforms available in the market.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Even in multicloud, don’t forget that the raw data available from the vendor’s default dashboards is a critical source of information for optimizing performance, efficiency, and costs.

    Multicloud management tool selection

    The ecosystem is heterogeneous.

    The explosion of cloud platforms and stacks means no single multicloud management tool can provide support for every stack in the private and public cloud ecosystem. This challenge becomes even greater when moving from IaaS/PaaS to addressing the near-infinite number of offerings available in the SaaS market.

    When it comes to selecting the right multicloud management tool, it’s important to keep a few things in mind:

    1. Mapping your requirements to the feature sets for your multicloud management platform is critical.
    2. Depending on your goals and metrics, and the underlying platforms and data you need to collect from them, you may need more than one tool.
    3. Especially when it comes to integrating SaaS into your multicloud tool(s), development or partners may be required.

    Key Features

    • Portability
    • Cost management
    • Automation across vendors
    • Standardization of configuration
    • Security alignment across vendors
    • Unified provisioning and self-service

    Info-Tech Insight

    SaaS always presents a unique challenge for gathering necessary cloud management data. It’s important to understand what data is and isn’t available and how it can be accessed and made available to your multicloud management tools.

    Understand your vendors

    Define what you are looking for as a first step.

    • To best understand your options, you need to understand the focus, features, and support services for each vendor. Depending on your requirements, you may need to adopt more than one tool.
    • Remember that SaaS presents unique challenges in terms of accessing and ingesting data into your management tools. This will generally require development to leverage the provider’s API.
    • Within the following slides, you will find a defined activity with a working template that will create a vendor profile for each vendor.

    As a working example, you can review these vendors on the following slides:

    • VMware CloudHealth
    • ServiceNow ITOM
    • CloudCheckr

    Info-Tech Insight

    Creating vendor profiles will help quickly identify the management tools that meet your multicloud needs.

    Vendor Profile #1

    VMware CloudHealth

    Vendor Summary

    CloudHealth is a VMware management suite that provides visibility into VMware-based as well as public cloud platforms. CloudHealth focuses on providing visibility to costs and governance as well as applying automation and standardization of configuration and performance across cloud platforms.

    URL: cloudhealth.vmware.com

    Supported Platforms

    Supports AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, VMware

    Feature Sets

    • Portability
    • Cost management
    • Automation across platforms
    • Standardization of configuration
    • Security alignment across platforms
    • Unified provisioning and self-service

    Vendor Profile #2

    ServiceNow ITOM

    Vendor Summary

    ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) is a module for the ServiceNow platform that allows deep visibility and automated intervention/remediation for resources across multiple public and private cloud platforms. In addition to providing a platform for managing workload portability and costs across multiple cloud platforms, ServiceNow ITOM offers features focused on delivering “proactive digital operations with AIOps.”

    URL: servicenow.com/products/it-operations-management.html

    Supported Platforms

    Supports CloudFormation, ARM, GDM, and Terraform templates. Also provisions virtualized VMware environments.

    Feature Sets

    • Portability
    • Cost management
    • Automation across platforms
    • Standardization of configuration
    • Security alignment across platforms
    • Unified provisioning and self-service

    Vendor Profile #3

    CloudCheckr

    Vendor Summary

    CloudCheckr is a SaaS platform that provides end-to-end cloud management to control cost, ensure security, optimize resources, and enable services. Primarily focused on enabling management of public cloud services, CloudCheckr’s broad platform support and APIs can be used to deliver unified visibility across many multicloud postures.

    URL: cloudcheckr.com

    Supported Platforms

    Supports AWS, Azure, GCP, SAP Hana

    Feature Sets

    • Portability
    • Cost management
    • Automation across platforms
    • Standardization of configuration
    • Security alignment across platforms
    • Unified provisioning and self-service

    Activity

    Understand your vendor options

    This activity involves the following participants:

    • IT strategic direction decision makers
    • Cloud governance team
    • Cloud deployment team
    • Vendor and portfolio management

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Vendor profile template (ppt)

    Info-Tech Insight

    This checkpoint process creates transparency around agreement costs with the business and gives the business an opportunity to reevaluate its requirements for a potentially leaner agreement.

    Create your vendor profiles

    Define what you are looking for and score vendors accordingly.

    1. Create a vendor profile for every vendor of interest.
    2. Leverage our starting list and template to track and record the advantages of each vendor.

    Vendor Profile Template

    The image contains a screenshot of a Vendor Profile Template.

    Land on your feet

    Best practices to hit the ground running in multicloud

    Focus your multicloud posture on SaaS (to start)

    SaaS

    While every service model and deployment model has its place in multicloud, depending on the requirements of the workload and the business, most organizations end up in multicloud because of the wide ecosystem of options available at the SaaS level.

    Enabling the ability to adopt SaaS offerings into your multicloud footprint should be an area of focus for most IT organizations, as it’s the easiest way to deliver business impact (without taking on additional infrastructure work).

    IaaS and PaaS

    Although IaaS and PaaS also have their place in multicloud, the benefits are usually focused more on increased portability and availability rather than on enabling business-led IT.

    Additionally, multicloud at these levels can often be complex and/or costly to implement and maintain. Make sure you understand the cost-benefit for implementing multicloud at this level!

    Where the data sits matters

    With multiple SaaS workloads as well as IaaS and PaaS footprints, one of the biggest challenges to effective multicloud is understanding where any given data is, what needs access to it, and how to stitch it all together.

    In short, you need a strategy to understand how to collect and consolidate data from your multiple footprints.

    Relying solely on the built-in tools and dashboards provided by each provider inevitably leads to data fragmentation – disparate data sets that make it difficult to gain clear, unified visibility into your cloud’s data.

    To address the challenge of fragmented data, many organizations will require a multicloud-capable management platform that can provide access and visibility to data from all sources in a unified way.

    Weigh portability against nativeness

    When it comes to multicloud, cloud-native design is both your enemy and your friend. On one hand, it provides the ability to fully leverage the power and flexibility of your chosen platform to run your workload in the most on-demand, performance-efficient, utility-optimized way possible.

    But it’s important to remember that building cloud-native for one platform directly conflicts with that workload’s portability to other platforms! You need to understand the balance between portability and native effectiveness that works best for each of your workloads.

    Info-Tech Insight

    You can (sort of) have the best of both worlds! While the decision to focus on the cloud-native products, services, and functions from a given cloud platform must be weighed carefully, it’s still a good idea to leverage open standards and architectures for your workloads, as those won’t hamper your portability in the same way.

    Broaden your cost management approach

    Even on singular platforms, cloud cost management is no easy task. In multicloud, this is amplified by the increased scale and scope of providers, products, rates, and units of measure.

    There is no easy solution to this – ultimately the same accountabilities and tasks that apply to good cost management on one cloud also apply to multicloud, just at greater scale and impact.

    The image contains a screenshot of cost management approach.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Evolving your tooling applies to cost management too. While the vendor-provided tools and dashboards for cost control on any given cloud provider’s platform are a good start and a critical source for data, to get a proper holistic view you will usually require multicloud cost management software (and possibly some development work).

    Think about the sky between the clouds

    A key theme in cloud service pricing is “it’s free to come in, but it costs to leave.” This is a critical consideration when designing the inflows and outflows of data, interactions, transactions, and resources among workloads sitting on different platforms and different regions or footprints.

    When defining your multicloud posture, think about what needs to flow between your various clouds and make sure to understand how these flows will affect costs, performance, and throughput of your workloads and the business processes they support.

    • Integration and Interfaces
    • Business Process and Application Flows
    • Inter-cloud Transit Costs

    Mature your management technology

    Automation Is Your Friend

    Managing multicloud is a lot of work. It makes sense to eliminate the most burdensome and error-prone tasks. Automating these tasks also increases the ease and speed of workload portability in most cases.

    Automation and scheduling are also key enablers of standardization – which is critical to managing costs and other risks in multicloud. Create policies that manage and optimize costs, resource utilization, and asset configuration. Use these to reduce the management burden and risk profile.

    Evolve Your Tooling

    Effective multicloud management requires a clear picture of your entire cloud ecosystem across all footprints. This generally isn’t possible using the default tools for any given cloud vendor. Fortunately, there is a wide ecosystem of multicloud tools to help provide you with a unified view.

    The best cloud management tools will not only allow you to get a unified view of your IT operations regardless of where the resources lie but also help you to evaluate your multiple cloud environments in a unified way, providing a level playing field to compare and identify opportunities for improvement.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Embrace openness! Leveraging open standards and technologies doesn’t just ease portability in multicloud; it also helps rationalize telemetry and metrics across platforms, making it easier to achieve a unified management view.

    Multicloud security

    Multicloud security challenges remain focused around managing user and role complexity

    • Fragmentation of identity and access management
    • Controlling access across platforms
    • Increased complexity of roles
    • API security
    • Managing different user types and subscriptions across different service models
    • Managing security best practices across multiple platforms
    • Potential increased attack surface

    Info-Tech Insight

    Don’t reinvent the wheel! Where possible, leverage your existing identity and access management platforms and role-based access control (RBAC) discipline and extend them out to your cloud footprints.

    Don’t fall in reactively!

    1. Multicloud isn’t bad or good.
    2. Put everything the right place; understand the other right places.
    3. Know where your data goes.
    4. Automation is your friend.
    5. Strategy fundamentals don’t change.
    6. Focus on SaaS (to start).
    7. Embrace openness.
    8. Modernize your tools.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Define Your Cloud Vision
    This blueprint covers a workload-level approach to determining cloud migration paths

    10 Secrets for Successful Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
    This research set covers general cloud best practices for implement DR and resilience in the cloud.

    Bibliography

    “7 Best Practices for Multi-Cloud Management.” vmware.com, 29 April 2022. Web.
    Brown, Chalmers. “Six Best Practices For Multi-Cloud Management.” Forbes, 22 Jan. 2019. Web.
    Curless, Tim. “The Risks of Multi-Cloud Outweigh the Benefits.” AHEAD, n.d. Web.
    Tucker, Ryan. “Multicloud Security: Challenges and Solutions.” Megaport, 29 Sept 2022. Web.
    Velimirovic, Andreja. “How to Implement a Multi Cloud Strategy.” pheonixNAP, 23 June 2021. Web.
    “What is a Multi-Cloud Strategy?” vmware.com, n.d. Web.

    Optimize the IT Operations Center

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}449|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
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    • Parent Category Name: Operations Management
    • Parent Category Link: /i-and-o-process-management
    • Your team’s time is burned up by incident response.
    • Manual repetitive work uses up expensive resources.
    • You don’t have the visibility to ensure the availability the business demands.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Sell the project to the business.
    • Leverage the Operations Center to improve IT Operations.

    Impact and Result

    • Clarify lines of accountability and metrics for success.
    • Implement targeted initiatives and track key metrics for continual improvement.

    Optimize the IT Operations Center Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should Optimize the IT Operations Center, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Lightning Phase: Pluck Low-Hanging Fruit for Quick Wins

    Get quick wins to demonstrate early value for investments in IT Operations.

    • Optimize the IT Operations Center – Lightning Phase: Pluck Low-Hanging Fruit for Quick Wins

    2. Get buy-in

    Get buy-in from business stakeholders by speaking their language.

    • Optimize the IT Operations Center – Phase 1: Get Buy-In
    • IT Operations Center Prerequisites Assessment Tool
    • IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation
    • IT Operations Center Continual Improvement Tracker

    3. Define accountability and metrics

    Formalize process and task accountability and develop targeted metrics.

    • Optimize the IT Operations Center – Phase 2: Define Accountability and Metrics
    • IT Operations Center RACI Charts Template

    4. Assess gaps and prioritize initiatives

    Identify pain points and determine the top solutions.

    • Optimize the IT Operations Center – Phase 3: Assess Gaps and Prioritize Initiatives
    • IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker
    • IT Operations Center Initiative Prioritization Tool

    5. Launch initiatives and track metrics

    Lay the foundation for implementation and continual improvement.

    • Optimize the IT Operations Center – Phase 4: Launch Initiatives and Track Metrics
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Optimize the IT Operations Center

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Check Foundation

    The Purpose

    Ensure base maturity in IT Operations processes.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Verify that foundation is in place to proceed with Operations Center project.

    Activities

    1.1 Evaluate base maturity.

    Outputs

    IT Operations Center Prerequisites Assessment Tool

    2 Define Accountabilities

    The Purpose

    Define accountabilities for Operations processes and tasks.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Documented accountabilities.

    Activities

    2.1 Pluck low-hanging fruit for quick wins.

    2.2 Complete process RACI.

    2.3 Complete task RACI.

    Outputs

    Project plan

    Process RACI

    Task RACI

    3 Map the Challenge

    The Purpose

    Define metrics and identify accountabilities and gaps.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    List of initiatives to address pain points.

    Activities

    3.1 Define metrics.

    3.2 Define accountabilities.

    3.3 Identify gaps.

    Outputs

    IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker

    4 Build Action Plan

    The Purpose

    Develop an action plan to boost KPIs.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Action plan and success criteria.

    Activities

    4.1 Prioritize initiatives.

    Outputs

    IT Operations Center Initiative Prioritization Tool

    5 Map Out Implementation

    The Purpose

    Build an implementation plan for continual improvement.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Continual improvement against identified metrics and KPIs.

    Activities

    5.1 Build implementation plan.

    Outputs

    IT Operations Center Continual Improvement Tracker

    Further reading

    Optimize the IT Operations Center

    Stop burning budget on non-value-adding activities.

    ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

    The Network Operations Center is not in Kansas anymore.

    "The old-school Network Operations Center of the telecom world was heavily peopled and reactionary. Now, the IT Operations Center is about more than network monitoring. An effective Operations Center provides visibility across the entire stack, generates actionable alerts, resolves a host of different incidents, and drives continual improvement in the delivery of high-quality services.
    IT’s traditional siloed approach cannot provide the value the business demands. The modern Operations Center breaks down these silos for the end-to-end view required for a service-focused approach."

    Derek Shank,
    Research Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Our understanding of the problem

    This Research Is Designed For:

    • IT Operations Managers
    • IT Infrastructure Managers
    • CIOs

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Improve reliability of services.
    • Reduce the cost of incident response.
    • Reduce the cost of manual repetitive work (MRW).

    This Research Will Also Assist

    • Business Analysts
    • Project Managers
    • Business Relationship Managers

    This Research Will Help Them

    • Develop appropriate non-functional requirements.
    • Integrate non-functional requirements into solution design and project implementation.

    Executive Summary

    Situation

    • Your team’s time is burned up by incident response.
    • MRW burns up expensive resources.
    • You don’t have the visibility to ensure the availability the business demands.

    Complication

    • The increasing complexity of technology has resulted in siloed teams of specialists.
    • The business views IT Operations as a cost center and doesn’t want to provide resources to support improvement initiatives.

    Resolution

    • Pluck low-hanging fruit for quick wins.
    • Obtain buy-in from business stakeholders by speaking their language.
    • Clarify lines of accountability and metrics for success.
    • Implement targeted initiatives and track key metrics for continual improvement.

    Info-Tech Insight

    1. Sell the project to the business. Your first job is a sales job because executive sponsorship is key to project success.
    2. Worship the holy trinity of metrics: impact of downtime, cost of incident response, and time spent on manual repetitive work (MRW).
    3. Invest in order to profit. Improving the Operations Center takes time and money. Expect short-term pain to realize long-term gain.

    The role of the Network Operations Center has changed

    • The old approach was technology siloed and the Network Operations Center (NOC) only cared about the network.
    • The modern Operations Center is about ensuring high availability of end-user services, and requires cross-functional expertise and visibility across all the layers of the technology stack.
    A pie chart is depicted. The data displayed on the chart, in decreasing order of size, include: Applications; Servers; LAN; WAN; Security; Storage. Source: Metzler, n.d.

    Most organizations lack adequate visibility

    • The rise of hybrid cloud has made environments more complex, not less.
    • The increasing complexity makes monitoring and incident response more difficult than ever.
    • Only 31% of organizations use advanced monitoring beyond what is offered by cloud providers.
    • 69% perform no monitoring, basic monitoring, or rely entirely on the cloud provider’s monitoring tools.
    A Pie chart is depicted. Two data are represented on the chart. The first, representing 69% of the chart, is: Using no monitoring, basic monitoring, or relying only on the cloud vendor's monitoring. the second, representing 31% of the chart, is Using advanced monitoring beyond what cloud vendors provide. Source: InterOp ITX, 2018

    Siloed service level agreements cannot ensure availability

    You can meet high service level agreements (SLAs) for functional silos, but still miss the mark for service availability. The business just wants things to work!

    this image contains Info-Tech's SLA-compliance rating chart, which displays the categories: Available, behaving as expected; Slow/degraded; and Unavailable, for each of: Webserver; Database; Storage; Network; Application; and, Business Service

    The cost of downtime is massive

    Increasing reliance on IT makes downtime hurt more than ever.
    98% of enterprises lose $100,000+.
    81% of enterprises lose $300,000+ per hour of downtime.

    This is a bar graph, showing the cost per hour of downtime, against the percentage of enterprises.

    Source: ITIC, 2016

    IT is asked to do more with less

    Most IT budgets are staying flat or shrinking.

    57% of IT departments expect their budget to stay flat or to shrink from 2018 to 2019.

    This image contains a pie chart with two data, one is labeled: Increase; representing 43% of the chart. The other datum is labeled: Shrink or stay flat, and represents 57% of the chart.

    Unify and streamline IT Operations

    A well-run Operations Center ensures high availability at reasonable cost. Improving your Operations Center results in:

    • Higher availability
    • Increased reliability
    • Improved project capacity
    • Higher business satisfaction

    Measure success with the holy trinity of metrics

    Focus on reducing downtime, cost of incident response, and MRW.

    This image contains a Funnel Chart showing the inputs: Downtime; Cost of Incident Response; MRW; and the output: Reduce for continual improvement

    Start from the top and employ a targeted approach

    Analyze data to get buy-in from stakeholders, and use our tools and templates to follow the process for continual improvement in IT Operations.

    This image depicts a cycle, which includes: Data analysis; Executive Sponsorship; Success Criteria; Gap Assessment; Initiatives; Tracking & Measurement

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

    Guided Implementation

    “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

    Workshop

    "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

    Consulting

    "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Optimize the IT Operations Center – project overview

    Launch the Project

    Identify Enterprise Services

    Identify Line of Business Services

    Complete Service Definitions

    Best-Practice Toolkit

    🗲 Pluck Low-Hanging Fruit for Quick Wins

    1.1 Ensure Base Maturity Is in Place

    1.2 Make the Case

    2.1 Define Accountabilities

    2.2 Define Metrics

    3.1 Assess Gaps

    3.2 Plan Initiatives

    4.1 Lay Foundation

    4.2 Launch and Measure

    Guided Implementations

    Discuss current state.

    Review stakeholder presentation.

    Review RACIs.

    Review metrics.

    Discuss gaps.

    Discuss initiatives.

    Review plan and metric schedule.

    Onsite Workshop Module 1:

    Clear understanding of project objectives and support obtained from the business.

    Module 2:

    Enterprise services defined and categorized.

    Module 3:

    LOB services defined based on user perspective.

    Module 4:

    Service record designed according to how IT wishes to communicate to the business.

    Phase 1 Results:

    Stakeholder presentation

    Phase 2 Results:
    • RACIs
    • Metrics
    Phase 3 Results:
    • Gaps list
    • Prioritized list of initiatives
    Phase 4 Results:
    • Implementation plan
    • Continual improvement tracker

    Workshop overview

    Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Pre-Workshop Workshop Day 1 Workshop Day 2 Workshop Day 3 Workshop Day 4
    Activities

    Check Foundation

    Define Accountabilities

    Map the Challenge

    Build Action Plan

    Map Out Implementation

    1.1 Ensure base maturity.

    🗲 Pluck low-hanging fruit for quick wins.

    2.1 Complete process RACI.

    2.2 Complete task RACI.

    3.1 Define metrics.

    3.2 Define accountabilities.

    3.2 Identify gaps.

    4.1 Prioritize initiatives.

    5.1 Build implementation plan.

    Deliverables
    1. IT Operations Center Prerequisites Assessment Tool
    1. IT Operations Center RACI Charts Template
    1. IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker
    1. IT Operations Center Initiative Prioritization Tool
    1. IT Operations Center Continual Improvement Tracker

    PHASE 🗲

    Pluck Low-Hanging Fruit for Quick Wins

    Optimize the IT Operations Center

    Conduct a ticket-trend analysis

    Generate reports on tickets from your IT service management (ITSM) tool. Look for areas that consume the most resources, such as:

    • Recurring tickets.
    • Tickets that have taken a long time to resolve.
    • Tickets that could have been resolved at a lower tier.
    • Tickets that were unnecessarily or improperly escalated.

    Identify issues

    Analyze the tickets:

    • Look for recurring tickets that may indicate underlying problems.
    • Ask tier 2 and 3 technicians to flag tickets that could have been resolved at a lower tier.
    • Identify painful and/or time consuming service requests.
    • Flag any manual repetitive work.

    Write the issues on a whiteboard.

    Oil & Gas IT reduces manual repetitive maintenance work

    CASE STUDY
    Industry Oil & Gas
    Source Interview

    Challenge

    The company used a webserver to collect data from field stations for analytics. The server’s version did not clear its cache – it filled up its own memory and would not overwrite, so it would just lock up and have to be rebooted manually.

    Solution

    The team found out that the volumes and units of data would cause the memory to fill at a certain time of the month. They wrote a script to reboot the machine and set up a planned outage during the appropriate weekend each month.

    Results

    The team never had to do manual reboots again – though they did have to tweak their reboot script not to rely on their calendar, after a shift in production broke the pattern between memory consumption and the calendar.

    Rank the issues

    🗲.1.1 10 minutes

    1. Assign each participant five sticky dots to use for voting.
    2. Have each participant place any number of dots beside the issue(s) of their choice.
    3. Count the dots and rank the top three most important issues.

    INPUT

    • List of issues

    OUTPUT

    • Top three issues

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • Sticky dots

    Participants

    • Operations Manager
    • Infrastructure Manager
    • I&O team members

    Brainstorm solutions

    🗲.1.2 10 minutes

    1. Write the three issues at the top of a whiteboard, each at the head of its own column.
    2. Focusing on one issue at a time, brainstorm potential solutions for each issue. Have one person write all the proposed solutions on the board beneath the issue.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Do not censor or evaluate the proposed solutions at this time. During brainstorming, focus on coming up with as many potential solutions as possible, no matter how infeasible or outlandish.

    INPUT

    • Top three issues

    OUTPUT

    • Potential solutions

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Operations Manager
    • Infrastructure Manager
    • I&O team members

    Evaluate and rank potential solutions

    🗲.1.3 30 minutes

    1. Score the solutions from 1-5 on each of the two dimensions:
    • Attainability
    • Probable efficacy
  • Identify the top scoring solution for each issue. In the event of a tie, vote to determine the winner.
  • Info-Tech Insight

    Quick wins are the best of both worlds. To get a quick win, pick a solution that is both readily attainable and likely to have high impact.

    INPUT

    • Potential solutions

    OUTPUT

    • Ranked list of solutions

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Operations Manager
    • Infrastructure Manager
    • I&O team members

    Develop metrics to measure the effectiveness of solutions

    You should now have a top potential solution for each pain point.

    For each pain point and proposed solution, identify the metric that would indicate whether the solution had been effective or not. For example:

    • Pain point: Too many unnecessary escalations for SharePoint issues.
    • Solution: Train tier 1 staff to resolve SharePoint tickets.
    • Metric: % of SharePoint tickets resolved at tier 1.

    Design solutions

    • Some solutions explain themselves. E.g., hire an extra service desk person.
    • Others require more planning and design, as they involve a bespoke solution. E.g., improve asset management process or automate onboarding of new users.
    • For the solutions that require planning, take the time to design each solution fully before rushing to implement it.

    Build solutions

    • Build any of the solutions that require building. For example, any scripting for automations requires the writing of those scripts, and any automated ticket routing requires configuration of your ITSM tool.
    • Part of the build phase for many solutions should also involve designing the tests of those solutions.

    Test solutions – refine and iterate

    • Think about the expected outcome and results of the solutions that require testing.
    • Test each solution under production-like circumstances to see if the results and behavior are as expected.
    • Refine and iterate upon the solutions as necessary, and test again.

    Implement solutions and measure results

    • Before implementing each solution, take a baseline measurement of the metric that will measure success.
    • Implement the solutions using your change management process.
    • After implementation, measure the success of the solution using the appropriate metric.
    • Document the results and judge whether the solution has been effective.

    Use the top result as a case study to obtain buy-in

    Your most effective solution will make a great case study.

    Write up the results and input the case study into the IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation.

    This image contains a screenshot of info-tech's default format for presenting case studies.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts

    this is a picture of an Info-Tech Analyst
    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:
    🗲.1.2 This image contains a screenshot from section 🗲.1.2 of this blueprint.

    Identify issues

    Look for areas that aren’t working optimally.

    🗲.1.3 this image contains a screenshot from section 🗲.1.3 of this blueprint.

    Evaluate and rank potential solutions

    Sort the wheat from the chaff and plan for quick wins.

    PHASE 1

    Get Buy-In

    Optimize the IT Operations Center

    Step 1.1: Ensure Base Maturity Is in Place

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Assess maturity of base IT Operations processes.

    Outcomes of this step

    • Completed IT Operations Center Prerequisites Assessment Tool

    Base processes underpin the Operations Center

    • Before you optimize your Operations Center, you should have foundational ITSM processes in place: service desk, and incident, problem, and change management.
    • Attempting to optimize Operations before it rests on a solid foundation can only lead to frustration.

    IT Operations Center

    • Service Desk
    • Incident Management
    • Problem Management
    • Change Management

    Info-Tech Insight

    ITIL isn’t dead. New technology such as cloud solutions and advanced monitoring tools have transformed how ITSM processes are implemented, but have not obviated them.

    Assess maturity of prerequisite processes

    1.1.1 IT Operations Center Prerequisites Assessment Tool

    • Don’t try to prematurely optimize your Operations Center.
    • Before undertaking this project, you should already have a base level of maturity in the four foundational IT Operations processes.
    • Complete the IT Operations Center Prerequisites Assessment Tool to assess your current level in service desk, incident management, problem management, and change management.
    this image contains a screenshot from Info-Tech's IT Operations Center Prerequisite Assessment

    Make targeted improvements on prerequisite processes if necessary

    If there are deficiencies in any of your foundational processes, take the time to remedy those first before proceeding with Optimize the IT Operations Center. See Info-Tech’s other blueprints:

    Standardize the Service Desk

    Strengthen your service desk to build a strong ITSM foundation.

    Incident and Problem Management

    Don’t let persistent problems govern your department.

    Optimize Change Management

    Turn and face the change with a right-sized change management process.

    Step 1.2: Make the Case

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Estimate the impact of downtime for top five applications.
    • Estimate the cost of incident response.
    • Estimate the cost of MRW.
    • Set success metrics and estimate the ROI of the Operations Center project.
    • IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation

    Obtaining buy-in is critical

    Buy-in from top-level stakeholders is critical to the success of the project.

    Before jumping into your initiatives, take the time to make the case and bring the business on board.

    Factors that “prevent us from improving the NOC”

    This image contains a graph of factors that prevent us from improving the NOC. In decreasing order, they include: Lack of strategic guidance from our vendors; The unwillingness of our management to accept new risk; Lack of adequate software tools; Our internal processes; Lack of management vision; Lack of funding; and Lack of personnel resources. There is a red circle drawn around the last three entries, with the words: Getting Buy-in Removes the Top Three Roadblocks to Improvement!. Source: Metzier, n.d

    List your top five applications

    List your top five applications for business criticality.

    Don’t agonize over decisions at this point.

    Generally, the top applications will be customer facing, end-user facing for the most critical business units, or critical for health and safety.

    Estimate impact of downtime

    • Come up with a rough, back-of-the-napkin estimate of the hourly cost of downtime for each application.
    • Complete page two of the IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation.
    • Estimate loss of revenue per hour, loss of productivity per hour, and IT cost per incident resolution hour.
    • Pull a report on incident hours/outages in the past year from your ITSM tool. Multiply the total cost per incident hour by the incident hours per year to determine the current cost per year of service disruptions for each service.
    • Add up the cost for each of the top five services.
    • Now you can show the business a hard value number that quantifies your availability issues.

    Estimate salary cost of non-value-adding work

    Complete page three of the IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation.

    • Estimate annual wage cost of incident response: multiply incident response hours per year (take from your ITSM tool) by the average hourly wage of incident responders.
    • Estimate annual cost of MRW: multiply MRW hours per year (take from ITSM tool or from time-keeping tool, or use best guess based on talking to staff members) by the average hourly wage of IT staff performing MRW.
    • Add the two numbers together to calculate the non-value-adding IT salary cost per year.
    • Express the previous number as a percentage of total IT salary. Everything that is not incident response or MRW is value-adding work.

    Now you have the holy trinity of metrics: set some targets

    The holy trinity of metrics:

    • Cost of downtime
    • % of salary on incident response
    • % of salary on MRW

    You want to reduce the above numbers. Set some back-of-the-napkin targets for percentage reductions for each of these areas. These are high-level metrics that business stakeholders will care about.

    Take your best guess at targets. Higher maturity organizations will have less potential for reduction from a percentage point of view (eventually you hit diminishing returns), while organizations just beginning to optimize their Operations Center have the potential for huge gains.

    Calculate the potential gains of targets

    Complete page five of the IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation.

    • Multiply the targeted/estimated % reductions of the costs by your current costs to determine the potential savings/benefits.
    • Do a back-of-the napkin estimate of the cost of the Operations Center improvement project. Use reasonable numbers for cost of personnel time and cost of tools, and be sure to include ongoing personnel time costs – your time isn’t free and continual improvement takes work and effort.
    • Calculate the ROI.

    Fill out the case study

    • Complete page six of the IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation. If you completed the lightning phase, use the results of your own quick win project(s) as an example of feasibility.
    • If you did not complete the lightning phase, delete this slide, or use an example of what other organizations have achieved to demonstrate feasibility.
    This image contains a screenshot of info-tech's default format for presenting case studies.

    Present to stakeholders

    • Deliver the presentation to key stakeholders.
    • Focus on the high-level story that the current state is costing real dollars and wages, and that these losses can be minimized through process improvements.
    • Be up front that many of the numbers are based on estimates, but be prepared to defend the reasonableness of the estimates.

    Gain buy-in and identify project sponsor

    • If the business is on board with the project, determine one person to be the executive sponsor for the project. This person should have a strong desire to see the project succeed, and should have some skin in the game.

    Formalize communication with the project sponsor

    • Establish how you will communicate with the sponsor throughout the project (e.g. weekly or monthly e-mail updates, bi-weekly meetings).
    • Set up a regular/recurring cadence and stick to it, so it can be put on auto-pilot. Be clear about who is responsible for initiating communication and sticking to the reporting schedule.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Tailor communication to the sponsor. The project sponsor is not the project manager. The sponsor’s role is to drive the project forward by allocating appropriate resources and demonstrating highly visible support to the broader organization. The sponsor should be kept in the loop, but not bothered with minutiae.

    Note the starting numbers for the holy trinity

    Use the IT Operations Center Continual Improvement Tracker:

    • Enter your starting numbers for the holy trinity of metrics.
    • After planning and implementing initiatives, this tracker will be used to update against the holy trinity to assess the success of the project on an ongoing basis and to drive continual improvement.

    PHASE 2

    Define Accountability and Metrics

    Optimize the IT Operations Center

    Step 2.1: Define Accountabilities

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Formalize RACI for key processes.
    • Formalize RACI for key tasks.

    Outcomes of this step

    • Completed RACIs

    List key Operations Center processes

    Compile a list of processes that are key for the Operations Center.

    These processes should include the four foundational processes:

    • Service Desk
    • Incident Management
    • Problem Management
    • Change Management

    You may also want to include processes such as the following:

    • Event Management
    • Configuration Management

    Avoid listing processes you have yet to develop – stick with those already playing a role in your current state.

    Formalize RACI for key processes

    Use the IT Operations Center RACI Charts Template. Complete a RACI for each of the key processes involved in the IT Operations Center.

    RACI:

    • Responsible (does the work on a day-to-day basis)
    • Accountable (reviews, signs off, and is held accountable for outcomes)
    • Consulted (input is sought to feed into decision making)
    • Informed (is given notification of outcomes)

    As a best practice, no more than one person should be responsible or accountable for any given process. The same person can be both responsible and accountable for a given process, or it could be two different people.

    Avoid making someone accountable for a process if they do not have full visibility into the process for appropriate oversight, or do not have time to give the process sufficient attention.

    Formalize RACI for IT tasks

    Now think about the actual tasks or work that goes on in IT. Which roles and individuals are accountable for which tasks or pieces of work?

    In this case, more than one role/person can be listed as responsible or accountable in the RACI because we’re talking about types or categories of work. No conflict will occur because these individuals will be responsible or accountable for different pieces of work or individual tasks of the same type. (e.g. all service desk staff are responsible for answering phones and inputting tickets into the ITSM tool, but no more than one staff member is responsible for the input of any given ticket from a specific phone call).

    Step 2.2: Define Metrics

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Cascade operational metrics from the holy trinity.
    • Evaluate metrics and identify key performance indicators (KPIs).
    • Cascade performance assessment (PA) metrics to support KPIs.
    • Build feedback loop for PA metrics.

    Outcomes of this step

    • KPIs
    • PA metrics

    Metrics must span across silos for shared accountability

    To adequately support the business goals of the organization, IT metrics should span across functional silos.

    Metrics that span across silos foster shared accountability across the IT organization.

    Metrics supported by all groups

    three grain silos are depicted. below, are the words IT Groups, with arrows pointing from the words to each of the three silos.

    Cascade operational metrics from the holy trinity

    Focus on the holy trinity of metrics.

    From these, cascade down to operational metrics that contribute to the holy trinity. It is possible that an operational metric may support more than one trinity metric. For example:

    a flow chart is depicted. two input circles point toward a central circle, and two output circles point away. the input circles include: Cost of Downtime; Cost of Incident Response. The central circle reads: Mean time to restore service. the output circles include the words: Tier 1 Resolution Rate; %% of Known Errors Captured in ITSM Tool.

    Evaluate metrics and identify KPIs

      • Evaluate your operational metrics and determine which ones are likely to have the largest impact on the holy trinity of metrics.
      • Identify the ten metrics likely to have the most impact: these will be your KPIs moving forward.
      • Enter these KPIs into the IT Operations Center Continual Improvement Tracker.
      this image depicts a cycle around the term KPI. The cycle includes: Objective; Measurement; optimization; strategy; performance; evaluation

    Beware how changing variables/context can affect metrics

    • Changes in context can affect metrics drastically. It’s important to keep the overall context in mind to avoid being led astray by certain numbers taken in isolation.
    • For example, a huge hiring spree might exhaust the stock of end-user devices, requiring time to procure hardware before the onboarding tickets can be completely fulfilled. You may have improved your onboarding process through automation, but see a large increase in average time to onboard a new user. Keep an eye out for such anomalies or fluctuations, and avoid putting too much stock in any single operational KPI.
    • Remember, operational KPIs are just a heuristic tool to support the holy trinity of metrics.

    Determine accountability for KPIs

    • For each operational KPI, assign one person to be accountable for that KPI.
    • Be sure the person in charge has the necessary authority and oversight over the processes and personnel that most affect that KPI – otherwise it makes little sense to hold the individual accountable.
    • Consulting your process RACIs is a good place to start.
    • Record the accountable person for each KPI in the IT Operations Center Continual Improvement Tracker.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Match accountability with authority. The person accountable for each KPI should be the one who has the closet and most direct control over the work and processes that most heavily impact that KPI.

    Cascade PA metrics to support KPIs

    KPIs are ultimately driven by how IT does its work, and how individuals work is driven by how their performance is assessed and evaluated.

    For the top KPIs, be sure there are individual PA metrics in place that support the KPI, and if not, develop the appropriate PA metrics.

    For example:

    • KPI: Mean time to resolve incidents
    • PA metric: % of escalations that followed SOP (e.g. not holding onto a ticket longer than supposed to)
    • KPI: Number of knowledge base articles written
    • PA metric: Number of knowledge base articles written/contributed to

    Communicate key changes in PA metrics

    Any changes from the previous step will take time and effort to implement and make stick.

    Changing people’s way of working is extremely difficult.

    Build a communication and implementation plan about rolling out these changes, emphasize the benefits for everyone involved, and get buy-in from the affected staff members.

    Build feedback loops for PA metrics

    Now that PA metrics support your Operations Center’s KPIs, you should create frequent feedback loops to drive and boost those PA metrics.

    Once per year or once per quarter is not frequent enough. Managers should meet with their direct reports at least monthly and review their reports’ performance against PA metrics.

    Use a “set it and forget it” implementation, such as a recurring task or meeting in your calendar.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts

    this is a picture of an Info-Tech Analyst

    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:
    2.2.1 This image contains a screenshot from section 2.2.1 of this blueprint.

    Cascade operational metrics from the holy trinity

    Rank goals based on business impact and stakeholder pecking order.

    2.2.2 this image contains a screenshot from section 2.2.2 of this blueprint.

    Determine accountability for KPIs

    Craft a concise and compelling elevator pitch that will drive the project forward.

    PHASE 3

    Assess Gaps and Prioritize Initiatives

    Optimize the IT Operations Center

    Step 3.1: Assess Gaps

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Assess visibility provided by monitoring.
    • Assess process workflows and identify areas for automation.
    • Assess requests and identify potential for automation.
    • Assess Operations Center staff capabilities.
    • Conduct a root cause analysis on the gaps/pain points.

    Outcomes of this step

    • List of gaps
    • List of root causes

    Measure current state of KPIs and identify lagging ones

    Take a baseline measurement of each operational KPI.

    If historical data is available, compare the present state measurement to data points collected over the last year or so.

    Review the measured KPIs.

    Identify any KPIs that seem lagging or low, or that may be particularly important to influence.

    Record lagging KPIs in the IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker tool.

    Assess visibility provided by monitoring

    List the top five most critical business services supported by IT.
    Assess the current state of your monitoring tools.

    For each business service, rate the level of visibility your monitoring tools allow from the following options:

    1. We have no visibility into the service, or lack visibility into crucial elements.
    2. We have basic visibility (up/down) into all the IT components that support the service.
    3. We have basic visibility (up/down) into the end service itself, in addition to all the IT components that make it up.
    4. We have some advanced visibility into some aspects of the service and/or its IT components.
    5. We have a full, end-to-end view of performance across all the layers of the stack, as well as the end business service itself.

    Identify where more visibility may be necessary

    For most organizations it isn’t practical to have complete visibility into everything. For the areas in which visibility is lacking into key services, think about whether more visibility is actually required or not. Consider some of the following questions:

    • How great is the impact of this service being unavailable?
    • Would greater visibility into the service significantly reduce the mean time to restore the service in the event of incidents?

    Record any deficiencies in the IT Operations CenterGap and Initiative Tracker tool.

    Assess alerting

    Assess alerting for your most critical services.

    Consider whether any of the following problems occur:

    • Often receive no alert(s) in the event of critical outages of key services (we find out about critical outages from the service desk).
    • We are regularly overwhelmed with too many alerts to investigate properly.
    • Our alerts are rarely actionable.
    • We often receive many false alerts.

    Identify areas for potential improvement in the managing of alerts. Record any deficiencies in the IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker tool.

    Assess process workflows and identify areas for automation

    Review your process flows for base processes such as Service Desk, Incident Management, Problem Management, and Change Management.

    Identify areas in the workflows where there may be defects, inefficiencies, or potential for improvement or automation.

    Record any deficiencies in the IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker tool.

    See the blueprint Prepare for Cognitive Service Management for process workflows and areas to look for automation possibilities.

    Prepare for Cognitive Service Management

    Make ready for AI-assisted IT operations.

    Assess requests and identify potential for automation

    • Assess the most common work orders or requests handled by the Operations Center group (i.e. this does not include requests fulfilled by the help desk).
    • Which work orders are the most painful? That is, what common work orders involve the greatest effort or the most manual work to fulfill?
    • Fulfillment of common, recurring work orders is MRW, and should be reduced or removed if possible.
    • Consider automation of certain work orders, or self-service delivery.
    • Record any deficiencies in the IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker tool.

    Assess Operations Center staff capabilities

    • Assess the skills and expertise of your team members.
    • Consider some of the following:
      • Are there team members who could perform their job more effectively by picking up certain skills or proficiencies?
      • Are there team members who have the potential to shift into more valuable or useful roles, given the appropriate training?
      • Are there individual team members whose knowledge is crucial for operations, and whose function cannot be taken up by others?

    Record any deficiencies in the IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker tool.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Train to avoid pain. All too often organizations expose themselves to significant key person risk by relying on the specialized skills and knowledge of one team member. Use cross training to remedy such single points of failure before the risk materializes.

    Brainstorm pain points

    Brainstorm any pain points not discussed in the previous areas.

    Pain points can be specific operational issues that have not yet been considered. For example:

    • Tom is overwhelmed with tickets.
    • Our MSP often breaches SLA.
    • We don’t have a training budget.

    Record any deficiencies in the IT Operations CenterGap and Initiative Tracker tool.

    Conduct a root cause analysis on the gaps/pain points

    • Pain points can often be symptoms of other deficiencies, or somewhat removed from the actual problem.
    • Using the 5 Whys, conduct a root cause analysis on the pain points for which the causes are not obvious.
    • For each pain point, ask “why” for a sequence of five times, attempting to proceed to the root cause of the issue. This root cause is the true gap that needs to be remedied to resolve the pain point.
    • For example:
      • The Wi-Fi network often goes down in the afternoon.
        • Why?: Its bandwidth gets overloaded.
        • Why?: Many people are streaming video.
        • Why?: There’s a live broadcast of a football game at that time.
      • Possible solutions:
        • Block access to the streaming services.
        • Project the game on a screen in a large conference room and encourage everyone to watch it there.

    Step 3.2: Plan Initiatives

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Brainstorm initiatives to boost KPIs and address gaps.
    • Prioritize potential initiatives.
    • Decide which initiatives to include on the roadmap.

    Outcomes of this step

    • Targeted improvement roadmap

    Brainstorm initiatives to boost KPIs and address gaps

    Prioritize potential initiatives

    3.2.1 IT Operations Center Initiative Prioritization Tool

    • Use the IT Operations Center Initiative Prioritization Tool.
    • Enter the initiatives into the tool.
    • For each initiative, input the following ranking criteria:
      • The metric/KPI’s estimated degree of impact on the holy trinity.
      • The gap or pain point’s estimated degree of impact on the metric/KPI.
      • The initiative’s estimated degree of positive impact on the gap or pain point
      • The initiative’s attainability.
    • Estimate the resourcing capacity required for each initiative.
    • For accurate capacity assessment, input as “force include” all current in-flight projects handled by the Operations Center group (including those unrelated to the Operations Center project).

    Decide which initiatives to include on the roadmap

    • Not all initiatives will be worth pursuing – and especially not all at once.
    • Consider the results displayed on the final tab of the IT Operations CenterInitiative Prioritization Tool.
    • Based on the prioritization and taking capacity into account, decide which initiatives to include on your roadmap.
    • Sometimes, for operational or logistical reasons, it may make sense to schedule an initiative at a time other than its priority might dictate. Make such exceptions on a case-by-case basis.

    Assign an owner to each initiative, and provide resourcing

    • For each initiative, assign one person to be the owner of that initiative.
    • Be sure that person has the authority and the bandwidth necessary to drive the initiative forward.
    • Secure additional resourcing for any initiatives you want to include on your roadmap that are lacking capacity.

    Info-Tech Insight

    You must invest resources in order to reduce the time spent on non-value-adding work.

    "The SRE model of working – and all of the benefits that come with it – depends on teams having ample capacity for engineering work. If toil eats up that capacity, the SRE model can’t be launched or sustained. An SRE perpetually buried under toil isn’t an SRE, they are just a traditional long-suffering SysAdmin with a new title."– David N. Blank-Edelman

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts

    this is a picture of an Info-Tech Analyst

    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:
    3.1.1 This image contains a screenshot from section 3.1.1 of this blueprint.

    Conduct a root cause analysis on the gaps/pain points

    Find out the cause, so you can come up with solutions.

    3.2.1 this image contains a screenshot from section 3.2.1 of this blueprint.

    Prioritize potential initiatives

    Don’t try to boil the ocean. Target what’s manageable and what will have the most impact.

    PHASE 4

    Launch Initiatives and Track Metrics

    Optimize the IT Operations Center

    Step 4.1: Lay Foundation

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Build initiative communication plan.
    • Develop a testing plan for each technical initiative.

    Outcomes of this step

    • Communication plan
    • Testing plan(s)

    Expect resistance to change

    • It’s not as simple as rolling out what you’ve designed.
    • Anything that affects people’s way of working will inevitably be met with suspicion and pushback.
    • Be prepared to fight the battle.
    • "The hardest part is culture. You must get people to see the value of automation. Their first response is ‘We've been doing it this way for 10 years, why do we need to do it another way?’ It's hard to get someone out of their comfort zone to learn something new, especially when they've been at an organization for 20 years. You need to give them incentives."– Cyrus Kalatbari, Senior IT Architect, Infrastructure/Cloud

    Communicate changes in advance, along with their benefits!

    • Communicate changes well in advance of the date(s) of implementation.
    • Emphasize the benefits of the changes – not just for the organization, but for employees and staff members.
    • Advance communication of changes helps make them more palatable, and builds trust in employees by making them feel informed of what’s going on.

    Involve IT staff in design and implementation of changes

    • As you communicate the coming changes, take the opportunity to involve any affected staff members who have not yet participated in the project.
    • Solicit their feedback and get them to help design and implement the initiatives that involve significant changes to their roles.

    Develop a testing plan for each technical initiative

    • Some initiatives, such as appointing a new change manager or hiring a new staff member, do not make sense to test.
    • On the other hand, technical initiatives such as automation scripts, new monitoring tools or dashboards, and changed alert thresholds should be tested thoroughly before implementation.
    • For each technical initiative, think about the expected results and performance if it were to run in production, and build a test plan to ensure it behaves as expected and there are no corner cases.

    Test technology initiatives and iterate if necessary

    • Test each technical initiative under a variety of circumstances, with as close an environment to production as possible.
    • Try to develop corner cases or unusual or unexpected situations, and see if any of these will break the functionality or produce unintended or unexpected results.
    • Document the results of the testing, and iterate on the initiative and test again if necessary.

    "The most important things – and the things that people miss – are prerequisites and expected results. People jump out and build scripts, then the scripts go into the ditch, and they end up debugging in production." – Darin Stahl, Research Director, Infrastructure & Operations

    Step 4.2: Launch and Measure

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Launch initiatives and track adoption and effectiveness.
    • Investigate initiatives that appear ineffective.
    • Measure success with the holy trinity.

    Outcomes of this step

    • Continual improvement roadmap

    Establish a review cycle for each metric

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Don’t measure what doesn’t matter. If a metric is not going to be reviewed or reported on for informational or decision-making purposes, it should not be tracked.

    Launch initiatives and track adoption and effectiveness

    • Launch the initiatives.
    • Some initiatives will need to proceed through your change management process in order to roll out, but others will not.
    • Track the adoption of initiatives that require it.
      • Some initiatives will require tracking of adoption, whereas others will not.
      • For example, hiring a new service desk staff member does not require tracking of adoption, but implementing a new process for ticket handling does.
      • The implementation plan should include a way to measure the adoption of such initiatives, and regularly review the numbers to see if the implementation has been successful.
    • For all initiatives, measure their effectiveness by continuing to track the KPI/metric that the initiative is intended to influence.

    Assess metrics according to review cycle for continual improvement

    • Assess metrics according to the review cycle.
    • Note whether metrics are improving in the right direction or not.
    • Correlate changes in the metrics with measures of the adoption of the initiatives – see whether initiatives that have been adopted are moving the needle on the KPIs they are intended to.

    Investigate initiatives that appear ineffective

    • If the adoption of an initiative has succeeded, but the expected impact of that initiative on the KPI has not taken place, investigate further and conduct a root causes analysis to determine why this is the case.
    • Sometimes, anomalies or fluctuations will occur that cause the KPI not to move in accordance with the success of the initiative. In this case, it’s just a fluke and the initiative can still be successful in influencing the KPI over the long term.
    • Other times, the initiative may prove mostly or entirely ineffective, either due to misdesign of the initiative itself, a change of circumstances, or other compounding factors or complexities. If the initiative proves ineffective, consider iterating modifications of the initiative and continuing to measure the effect on KPIs – or perhaps killing the initiative altogether.
    • Remember that experimentation is not a bad thing – it’s okay that not every initiative will always prove worthwhile.

    Measure success with the holy trinity

    • Report to business stakeholders on the effect on the holy trinity of metrics at least annually.
    • Calculate the ROI of the project after two years and compare the results to the targeted ROI you initially presented in the IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation.
    This image contains a Funnel Chart showing the inputs: Downtime; Cost of Incident Response; MRW; and the output: Reduce for continual improvement

    Iterate on the Operations Center process for continual improvement

    This image depicts a cycle, which includes: Data analysis; Executive Sponsorship; Success Criteria; Gap Assessment; Initiatives; Tracking & Measurement

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts

    this is a picture of an Info-Tech Analyst

    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:
    4.1.1This image contains a screenshot from section 3.1.1 of this blueprint.

    Communicate changes in advance, along with their benefits!

    Rank goals based on business impact and stakeholder pecking order.

    4.1.2 this image contains a screenshot from section 3.2.1 of this blueprint.

    Develop a testing plan for each technical initiative

    Craft a concise and compelling elevator pitch that will drive the project forward.

    Research contributors and experts
    This is a picture of Cyrus Kalatbari, IT infrastructure/cloud architect

    Cyrus Kalatbari, IT Infrastructure/Cloud Architect

    Cyrus’ in-depth knowledge cutting across I&O and service delivery has enhanced the IT operations of multiple enterprise-class clients.

    This is a picture of Derek Cullen, Chief Technology Officer

    Derek Cullen, Chief Technology Officer

    Derek is a proven leader in managing enterprise-scale development, deployment, and integration of applications, platforms, and systems, with a sharp focus on organizational transformation and corporate change.

    This is a picture of Phil Webb, Senior Manager

    Phil Webb, Senior Manager – Unified Messaging and Mobility

    Phil specializes in service delivery for cloud-based and hybrid technology solutions, spanning requirements gathering, solution design, new technology introduction, development, integration, deployment, production support, change/release delivery, maintenance, and continuous improvement.

    This is a picture of Richie Mendoza, IT Services Delivery Consultant

    Richie Mendoza, IT Services Delivery Consultant

    Ritchie’s accomplishments include pioneering a cloud capacity management process and presenting to the Operations team and to higher management, while providing a high level of technical leadership in all phases of capacity management activities.

    This is a picture of Rob Thompson, Solutions Architect

    Rob Thomson, Solutions Architect

    Rob is an IT leader with a track record of creating and executing digital transformation initiatives to achieve the desired outcomes by integrating people, process, and technology into an efficient and effective operating model.

    Related Info-Tech research

    Create a Configuration Management Roadmap

    Right-size your CMDB to improve IT operations.

    Harness Configuration Management Superpowers

    Build a CMDB around the IT services that are most important to the organization.

    Develop an IT Infrastructure Services Playbook

    Automation, SDI, and DevOps – build a cheat sheet to manage a changing Infrastructure & Operations environment.

    Develop an Availability and Capacity Management Plan

    Manage capacity to increase uptime and reduce costs.

    Establish a Program to Enable Effective Performance Monitoring

    Maximize the benefits of infrastructure monitoring investments by diagnosing and assessing transaction performance, from network to server to end-user interface.

    Bibliography

    Baker, Dan, and Hal Baylor. “How Benchmarking & Streamlining NOC Operations Can Lower Costs & Boost Effectiveness.” Top Operator, Mar. 2017. Web.

    Blank-Edelman, David. Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale. O'Reilly, 2018. Web.

    CA Technologies. “IT Transformation to Next-Generation Operations Centers: Assure Business Service Reliability by Optimizing IT Operations.” CA Technologies, 2014. Web.

    Ditmore, Jim. “Improving Availability: Where to Start.” Recipes for IT, n.d. Web.

    Ennis, Shawn. “A Phased Approach for Building a Next-Generation Network Operations Center.” Monolith Software, 2009. Web.

    Faraclas, Matt. “Why Does Infrastructure Operations Still Suck?” Ideni, 25 Feb. 2016. Web.

    InterOp ITX. “2018 State of the Cloud.” InterOp ITX, Feb. 2018. Web.

    ITIC. “Cost of Hourly Downtime Soars: 81% of Enterprises Say it Exceeds $300K On Average.” ITIC, 2 Aug. 2016. Web.

    Joe the IT Guy. “Availability Management Is Harder Than it Looks.” Joe the IT Guy, 10 Feb. 2016. Web.

    ---. “Do Quick Wins Exist for Availability Management?” Joe the IT Guy, 15 May 2014. Web.

    Lawless, Steve. “11 Top Tips for Availability Management.” Purple Griffon, 4 Jan. 2019. Web.

    Metzler, Jim. “The Next Generation Network Operations Center: How the Focus on Application Delivery is Redefining the NOC.” Ashton, Metzler & Associates, n.d. Web.

    Nilekar, Shirish. “Beyond Redundancy: Improving IT Availability.” Network Computing, 28 Aug. 2015. Web.

    Slocum, Mac. “Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): A Simple Overview.” O’Reilly, 16 Aug. 2018. Web.

    Spiceworks. “The 2019 State of IT.” Spiceworks, 2019. Web

    Take the First Steps to Embrace Open-Source Software

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    Your organization is looking to invest in new software or a tool to solve key business and IT problems. They see open source as a viable option given the advertised opportunities and the popularity of many open-source projects, but they have concerns:

    • Despite the longevity and broad adoption of open-source software, stakeholders are hesitant about its long-term viability and the costs of ongoing support.
    • A clear direction and strategy are needed to align the expected value of open source to your stakeholders’ priorities and gain the funding required to select, implement, and support open-source software.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Position open source in the same light as commercial software. The continuous improvement and evolution of popular open-source software and communities have established a reputation for reliability in the industry.
    • Consider open source as another form of outsource development. Open source is externally developed software where the code is accessible and customizable. Code quality may not align to your organization’s standards, which can require extensive testing and optimization.
    • Treat open source as any internally developed solution. Configurations, integrations, customizations, and orchestrations of open-source software are often done at the code level. While some community support is provided, most of the heavy lifting is done by the applications team.

    Impact and Result

    • Outline the value you expect to gain. Discuss current business and IT priorities, use cases, and value opportunities to determine what to expect from open-source versus commercial software.
    • Define your open-source selection criteria. Clarify the driving factors in your evaluation of open-source and commercial software using your existing IT procurement practices as a starting point.
    • Assess the readiness of your team. Clarify the roles, processes, and tools needed for the implementation, use, and maintenance of open-source software.

    Take the First Steps to Embrace Open-Source Software Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Take the First Steps to Embrace Open-Source Software Storyboard – A guide to learn the fit, value, and considerations of open-source software.

    This research walks you through the misconceptions about open source, factors to consider in its selection, and initiatives to prepare your teams for its adoption.

    • Take the First Steps to Embrace Open-Source Software Storyboard

    2. Open-Source Readiness Assessment – A tool to help you evaluate your readiness to embrace open-source software in your environment.

    Use this tool to identify key gaps in the people, processes, and technologies needed to support open source in your organization. It also contains a canvas to facilitate discussions about expectations with your stakeholders and applications teams.

    • Open-Source Readiness Assessment
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Take the First Steps to Embrace Open-Source Software

    Begin to understand what is required to embrace open-source software in your organization.

    Analyst Perspective

    With great empowerment comes great responsibilities.

    Open-source software promotes enticing technology and functional opportunities to any organization looking to modernize without the headaches of traditional licensing. Many organizations see the value of open source in its ability to foster innovation, be flexible to various use cases and system configurations, and give complete control to the teams who are using and managing it.

    However, open source is not free. While the software is freely and easily accessible, its use and sharing are bound by its licenses, and its implementation requires technical expertise and infrastructure investments. Your organization must be motivated and capable of taking on the various services traditionally provided and managed by the vendor.

    Photo of Andrew Kum-Seun

    Andrew Kum-Seun
    Research Director,
    Application Delivery and Application Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Your organization is looking to invest in new software or a tool to solve key business and IT problems. They see open source as a viable option because of the advertised opportunities and the popularity of many open-source projects.

    Despite the longevity and the broad adoption of open-source software, stakeholders are hesitant about its adoption, its long-term viability, and the costs of ongoing support.

    A clear direction and strategy is needed to align the expected value of open source to your stakeholders’ priorities and gain the funding required to select, implement, and support open-source software.

    Common Obstacles

    Your stakeholders’ fears, uncertainties, and doubts about open source may be driven by misinterpretation or outdated information. This hesitancy can persist despite some projects being active longer than their proprietary counterparts.

    Certain software features, support capabilities, and costs are commonly overlooked when selecting open-source software because they are often assumed in the licensing and service costs of commercial software.

    Open-source software is often technically complicated and requires specific skill sets and knowledge. Unfortunately, current software delivery capability gaps impede successful adoption and scaling of open-source software.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    Outline the value you expect to gain. Discuss current business and IT priorities, use cases, and value opportunities to determine what to expect from open-source versus commercial software.

    Define your open-source selection criteria. Clarify the driving factors in your evaluation of open-source and commercial software using your existing IT procurement practices as a starting point.

    Assess the readiness of your team. Clarify the roles, processes, and tools needed for the implementation, use, and maintenance of open-source software.

    Insight Summary

    Overarching Info-Tech Insight

    Open source is as much about an investment in people as it is about technology. It empowers applications teams to take greater control over their technology and customize it as they see fit. However, teams need the time and funding to conduct the necessary training, management, and ongoing community engagement that open-source software and its licenses require.

    • Position open source in the same light as commercial software.
      The continuous improvement and evolution of popular open-source software and communities have established a trusting and reliable reputation in the industry. Open-source software quality and community support can rival similar vendor capabilities given the community’s maturity and contributions in the technology.
    • Consider open source another form of outsource development.
      Open source is externally developed software where the code is accessible and customizable. Code quality may not align to your organization’s standards, which can require extensive testing and optimization. A thorough analysis of change logs, code repositories, contributors, and the community is recommended – much to the same degree as one would do with prospective outsourcing partners.
    • Treat open source as any internally developed solution.
      Configurations, integrations, customizations, and orchestrations of open-source software are often done at the code level. While some community support is provided, most of the heavy lifting is done by the applications team. Teams must be properly resourced, upskilled, and equipped to meet this requirement. Otherwise, third-party partners are needed.

    What is open source?

    According to Synopsys, “Open source software (OSS) is software that is distributed with its source code, making it available for use, modification, and distribution with its original rights. … Programmers who have access to source code can change a program by adding to it, changing it, or fixing parts of it that aren’t working properly. OSS typically includes a license that allows programmers to modify the software to best fit their needs and control how the software can be distributed.”

    What are the popular use cases?

    1. Programming languages and frameworks
    2. Databases and data technologies
    3. Operating systems
    4. Git public repos
    5. Frameworks and tools for AI/ML/DL
    6. CI/CD tooling
    7. Cloud-related tools
    8. Security tools
    9. Container technology
    10. Networking

    Source: OpenLogic, 2022

    Common Attributes of All Open-Source Software

    • Publicly shared repository that anyone can access to use the solution and contribute changes to the design and functionality of the project.
    • A community that is an open forum to share ideas and solution enhancements, discuss project direction and vision, and seek support from peers.
    • Project governance that sets out guidelines, rules, and requirements to participate and contribute to the project.
    • Distribution license that defines the terms of how a solution can be used, assessed, modified, and distributed.

    Take the first steps to embrace open-source software

    Begin to understand what is required to embrace open-source software in your organization.

    A diagram of open-source community.

    State the Value of Open Source: Discuss current business and IT priorities, use cases, and value opportunities to determine what to expect from open-source versus commercial software.

    Select Your Open-Source Software: Clarify the driving factors in your evaluation of open-source and commercial software using your existing IT procurement practices as a starting point.

    Prepare for Open Source: Clarify the roles, processes, and tools needed for the implementation, use, and maintenance of open-source software.

    Step 1.1: State the Value of Open Source

    Diagram of step 1.1

    Activities

    1.1.1 Outline the value you expect to gain from open-source software

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Applications team
    • Product owner

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Value proposition for open source
    • Potential open-source use cases

    Use a canvas to frame your open-source evaluation

    A photo of open-source canvas

    This canvas is intended to provide a single pane of glass to start collecting your thoughts and framing your future conversations on open-source software selection and adoption.

    Record the results in the “Open-Source Canvas” tab in the Open-Source Readiness Assessment.

    Open source presents unique software and tooling opportunities

    Innovation

    Many leading-edge and bleeding-edge technologies are collaborated and innovated in open-source projects, especially in areas that are beyond the vision and scope of vendor products and priorities.

    Niche Solutions

    Open-source projects are focused. They are designed and built to solve specific business and technology problems.

    Flexible & Customizable

    All aspects of the open-source software are customizable, including source code and integrations. They can be used to extend, complement, or replace internally developed code. Licenses define how open-source code should be and must be used, productized, and modified.

    Brand & Recognition

    Open-source communities encourage contribution and collaboration among their members to add functionality and improve quality and adoption.

    Cost

    Open-source software is accessible to everyone, free of charge. Communities do not need be consulted prior to acquisition, but the software’s use, configurations, and modifications may be restricted by its license.

    However, myths continue to challenge adoption

    • Open source is less secure or poorer quality than proprietary solutions.
    • Open source is free from risk of intellectual property (IP) infringement.
    • Open source is cheaper than proprietary solutions.

    What are the top perceived barriers to using enterprise open source?

    • Concerns about the level of support
    • Compatibility concerns
    • Concerns about inherent security of the code
    • Lack of internal skills to manage and support it

    Source: Red Hat, 2022

    Design a Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Program

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    • Parent Category Name: Threat Intelligence & Incident Response
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    • Businesses prioritize speed to market over secure coding and testing practices in the development lifecycle. As a result, vulnerabilities exist naturally in software.
    • To improve overall system security, organizations are leveraging external security researchers to identify and remedy vulnerabilities, so as to mitigate the overall security risk.
    • A primary challenge to developing a coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) program is designing repeatable procedures and scoping the program to the organization’s technical capacity.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Having a coordinated vulnerability disclosure program is likely to be tomorrow’s law. With pressures from federal government agencies and recommendations from best-practice frameworks, it is likely that a CVD will be mandated in the future to encourage organizations to be equipped and prepared to respond to externally disclosed vulnerabilities.
    • CVD programs such as bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure programs (VDPs) may reward differently, but they have the same underlying goals. As a result, you don't need dramatically different process documentation.

    Impact and Result

    • Design a coordinated vulnerability disclosure program that reflects business, customer, and regulatory obligations.
    • Develop a program that aligns your resources with the scale of the coordinated vulnerability disclosure program.
    • Follow Info-Tech’s vulnerability disclosure methodology by leveraging our policy, procedure, and workflow templates to get you started.

    Design a Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Program Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should design a coordinated vulnerability disclosure program, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Assess goals

    Define the business, customer, and compliance alignment for the coordinated vulnerability disclosure program.

    • Design a Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Program – Phase 1: Assess Goals
    • Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool

    2. Formalize the program

    Equip your organization for coordinated vulnerability disclosure with formal documentation of policies and processes.

    • Design a Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Program – Phase 2: Formalize the Program
    • Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Policy
    • Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Plan
    • Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Workflow (Visio)
    • Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Workflow (PDF)
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    IT Service Management Selection Guide

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    • Parent Category Name: Service Desk
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    • Your ITSM solution that was once good enough is no longer adequate for a rapidly evolving services culture.
    • Processes and data are disconnected with multiple workarounds and don’t allow the operations team to mature processes.
    • The workarounds, disparate systems, and integrations you’ve implemented to solve IT operations issues are no longer adequate.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Accessing funding for IT solutions can be challenging when the solution isn’t obviously aligned to the business need.
    • To maximize value and stakeholder satisfaction, determine use cases early, engage the right stakeholders, and define success.
    • Choosing a solution for a single purpose and then expanding it to cover other use cases can be a very effective use of technology dollars. However, spending the time up front to determine which use cases should be included and which will need a separate best-of-breed solution will make the best use of your investment.

    Impact and Result

    • Create a business case that defines use cases and requirements.
    • Shorten the list of viable vendors by matching vendors to use cases.
    • Determine which features are most important to reach your goals and select the best-matched vendor.

    IT Service Management Selection Guide Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out how Info-Tech’s methodology will provide a quick solution to selecting ITSM vendors and understand the ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Build a business case

    Create a light business case to gain buy-in and define goals, milestones, and use cases.

    • IT Service Management Business Case Template

    2. Define requirements

    Create your list of requirements and shortlist vendors.

    • The ITSM Vendor Evaluation Workbook
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    Application Portfolio Management Foundations

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    Organizations consider application oversight a low priority and app portfolio knowledge is poor:

    • No dedicated or centralized effort to manage the app portfolio means no single source of truth is available to support informed decision making.
    • Organizations acquire more applications over time, creating redundancy, waste, and the need for additional support.
    • Organizations are more vulnerable to changing markets. Flexibility and growth are compromised when applications are unadaptable or cannot scale.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • You cannot outsource application strategy.
    • Modern software options have lessened the need for organizations to have robust in-house application management capabilities. But your applications’ future and governance of the portfolio still require centralized oversight to ensure the best overall return on investment.
    • Application portfolio management is the mechanism to ensure that the applications in your enterprise are delivering value and support for your value streams and business capabilities. Understanding value, satisfaction, technical health, and total cost of ownership are critical to digital transformation, modernization, and roadmaps.

    Impact and Result

    Build an APM program that is actionable and fit for size:

    • Understand your current state, needs, and goals for your application portfolio management.
    • Create an application and platform inventory that is built for better decision making.
    • Rationalize your apps with business priorities and communicate risk in operational terms.
    • Create a roadmap that improves communication between those who own, manage, and support your applications.

    Application Portfolio Management Foundations Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Application Portfolio Management Foundations Deck – A guide that helps you establish your core application inventory, simplified rationalization, redundancy comparison, and modernization roadmap.

    Enterprises have more applications than they need and rarely apply oversight to monitor the health, cost, and relative value of applications to ensure efficiency and minimal risk. This blueprint will help you build a streamlined application portfolio management process.

    • Application Portfolio Management Foundations – Phases 1-4

    2. Application Portfolio Management Diagnostic Tool – A tool that assesses your current application portfolio.

    Visibility into your application portfolio and APM practices will help inform and guide your next steps.

    • Application Portfolio Management Diagnostic Tool

    3. Application Portfolio Management Foundations Playbook – A template that builds your application portfolio management playbook.

    Capture your APM roles and responsibilities and build a repeatable process.

    • Application Portfolio Management Foundations Playbook

    4. Application Portfolio Management Snapshot and Foundations Tool – A tool that stores application information and allows you to execute rationalization and build a portfolio roadmap.

    This tool is the central hub for the activities within Application Portfolio Management Foundations.

    • Application Portfolio Management Snapshot and Foundations Tool
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    Workshop: Application Portfolio Management Foundations

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Lay Your Foundations

    The Purpose

    Work with key corporate stakeholders to come to a shared understanding of the benefits and aspects of application portfolio management.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Establish the goals of APM.

    Set the scope of APM responsibilities.

    Establish business priorities for the application portfolio.

    Activities

    1.1 Define goals and metrics.

    1.2 Define application categories.

    1.3 Determine steps and roles.

    1.4 Weight value drivers.

    Outputs

    Set short- and long-term goals and metrics.

    Set the scope for applications.

    Set the scope for the APM process.

    Defined business value drivers.

    2 Improve Your Inventory

    The Purpose

    Gather information on your applications to build a detailed inventory and identify areas of redundancy.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Populated inventory based on your and your team’s current knowledge.

    Understanding of outstanding data and a plan to collect it.

    Activities

    2.1 Populate inventory.

    2.2 Assign business capabilities.

    2.3 Review outstanding data.

    Outputs

    Initial application inventory

    List of areas of redundancy

    Plan to collect outstanding data

    3 Gather Application Information

    The Purpose

    Work with the application subject matter experts to collect and compile data points and determine the appropriate disposition for your apps.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Dispositions for individual applications

    Application rationalization framework

    Activities

    3.1 Assess business value.

    3.2 Assess end-user perspective.

    3.3 Assess TCO.

    3.4 Assess technical health.

    3.5 Assess redundancies.

    3.6 Determine dispositions.

    Outputs

    Business value score for individual applications

    End-user satisfaction scores for individual applications

    TCO score for individual applications

    Technical health scores for individual applications

    Feature-level assessment of redundant applications

    Assigned dispositions for individual applications

    4 Gather, Assess, and Select Dispositions

    The Purpose

    Work with application delivery specialists to determine the strategic plans for your apps and place these in your portfolio roadmap.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Prioritized initiatives

    Initial application portfolio roadmap

    Ongoing structure of APM

    Activities

    4.1 Prioritize initiatives

    4.2 Populate roadmap.

    4.3 Determine ongoing APM cadence.

    4.4 Build APM action plan.

    Outputs

    Prioritized new potential initiatives.

    Built an initial portfolio roadmap.

    Established an ongoing cadence of APM activities.

    Built an action plan to complete APM activities.

    Further reading

    Application Portfolio Management Foundations

    Ensure your application portfolio delivers the best possible return on investment.

    Analyst Perspective

    You can’t outsource accountability.

    Many lack visibility into their overall application portfolio, focusing instead on individual projects or application development. Inevitably, application sprawl creates process and data disparities, redundant applications, and duplication of resources and stands as a significant barrier to business agility and responsiveness. The shift from strategic investment to application maintenance creates an unnecessary constraint on innovation and value delivery.

    With the rise and convenience of SAAS solutions, IT has an increasing need to discover and support all applications in the organization. Unmanaged and unsanctioned applications can lead to increased reputational risk. What you don’t know WILL hurt you.

    You can outsource development, you can even outsource maintenance, but you cannot outsource accountability for the portfolio. Organizations need a holistic dashboard of application performance and dispositions to help guide and inform planning and investment discussions. Application portfolio management (APM) can’t tell you why something is broken or how to fix it, but it is an important tool to determine if an application’s value and performance are up to your standards and can help meet your future goals.

    The image contains a picture of Hans Eckman.

    Hans Eckman
    Principal Research Director
    Info-Tech Research Group


    Is this research right for you?

    Research Navigation

    Managing your application portfolio is essential regardless of its size or whether your software is purchased or developed in house. Each organization must have some degree of application portfolio management to ensure that applications deliver value efficiently and that their risk or gradual decline in technical health is appropriately limited.

    Your APM goals

    If this describes your primary goal(s)

    • We are building a business case to determine where and if APM is needed now.
    • We want to understand how well supported are our business capabilities, departments, or core functions by our current applications.
    • We want to start our APM program with our core or critical applications.
    • We want to build our APM inventory for less than 150 applications (division, department, operating unit, government, small enterprise, etc.).
    • We want to start simple with a quick win for our 150 most important applications.
    • We want to start with an APM pilot before committing to an enterprise APM program.
    • We need to rationalize potentially redundant and underperforming applications to determine which to keep, replace, or retire.
    • We want to start enterprise APM, with up to 150 critical applications.
    • We want to collect and analyze detailed information about our applications.
    • We need tools to help us calculate total cost of ownership (TCO) and value.
    • We want to customize our APM journey and rationalization.
    • We want to build a formal communication strategy for our APM program.

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Common Obstacles

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    • Organizations consider application oversight a low priority and app portfolio knowledge is poor.
    • No dedicated or centralized effort to manage the app portfolio means no single source of truth is available to support informed decision making.
    • Organizations acquire more applications over time, creating redundancy, waste, and the need for additional support.
    • Organizations are more vulnerable to changing markets. Flexibility and growth are compromised when applications are unadaptable or cannot scale.
    • APM implies taking a holistic approach and compiling multiple priorities and perspectives.
    • Organizations have limited time to act strategically or proactively and need to be succinct.
    • Uncertainties on business value prevent IT from successfully advising software decision making.
    • IT knows its technical debt but struggles to get the business to act on technical risks.
    • Attempts at exposing these problems rarely gain buy-in and discourage the push for improvement.
    • Think low priority over no priority.
    • Integrate these tasks into your mixed workload.
    • Create an inventory built for better decision making.
    • Rationalize your apps in accordance with business priorities and communicate risks on their terms.
    • Create a roadmap that improves communication between those who own, manage, and support an application.
    • Build your APM process fit for size.

    Info-Tech Insight: You can’t outsource strategy.

    Modern software options have decreased the need for organizations to have robust in-house application management capabilities. Your applications’ future and governance of the portfolio still require a centralized IT oversight to ensure the best return on investment.

    The top IT challenges for SE come from app management

    #1 challenge small enterprise owners face in their use of technology:

    Taking appropriate security precautions

    24%

    The costs of needed upgrades to technology

    17%

    The time it takes to fix problems

    17%

    The cost of maintaining technology

    14%

    Lack of expertise

    9%

    Breaks in service

    7%
    Source: National Small Business Association, 2019

    Having more applications than an organization needs means unnecessarily high costs and additional burden on the teams who support the applications. Especially in the case of small enterprises, this is added pressure the IT team cannot afford.

    A poorly maintained portfolio will eventually hurt the business more than it hurts IT.

    Legacy systems, complex environments, or anything that leads to a portfolio that can’t adapt to changing business needs will eventually become a barrier to business growth and accomplishing objectives. Often the blame is put on the IT department.

    56%

    of small businesses cited inflexible technology as a barrier to growth

    Source: Salesforce as quoted by Tech Republic, 2019

    A hidden and inefficient application portfolio is the root cause of so many pains experienced by both IT and the business.

    • Demand/Capacity Imbalance
    • Overspending
    • Security and Business Continuity Risk
    • Delays in Delivery
    • Barriers to Growth

    APM comes at a justified cost

    The image contains a screenshot of a graph to demonstrate APM and the costs.

    The benefits of APM

    APM identifies areas where you can reduce core spending and reinvest in innovation initiatives.

    Other benefits can include:

    • Fewer redundancies
    • Less risk
    • Less complexity
    • Improved processes
    • Flexibility
    • Scalability

    APM allows you to better understand and set the direction of your portfolio

    Application Inventory

    The artifact that documents and informs the business of your application portfolio.

    Application Rationalization

    The process of collecting information and assessing your applications to determine recommended dispositions.

    Application Alignment

    The process of revealing application information through interviewing stakeholders and aligning to business capabilities.

    Application Roadmap

    The artifact that showcases the strategic directions for your applications over a given timeline.

    Application Portfolio Management (APM):

    The ongoing practice of:

    • Providing visibility into applications across the organization.
    • Recommending corrections or enhancements to decision makers.
    • Aligning delivery teams on priority.
    • Showcasing the direction of applications to stakeholders.

    Create a balanced approach to value delivery

    Enterprise Agility and Value Realization

    Product Lifecycle Management

    Align your product and service improvement and execution to enterprise strategy and value realization in three key areas: defining your products and services, aligning product/service owners, and developing your product vision.

    Product Delivery Lifecycle (Agile DevOps)

    Enhance business agility by leveraging an Agile mindset and continuously improving your delivery throughput, quality, value realization, and adaptive governance.

    Application Portfolio Management

    Transform your application portfolio into a cohesive service catalog aligned to your business capabilities by discovering, rationalizing, and modernizing your applications while improving application maintenance, management, and reuse.

    The image contains a screenshot of a Thought Model on the Application Department Strategy.


    The image contains a screenshot of a Thought Model on Accelerate Your Transition to Product Delivery.

    Every organization experiences some degree of application sprawl

    The image contains a screenshot of images to demonstrate application sprawl.

    Causes of Sprawl

    • Poor Lifecycle Management
    • Turnover & Lack of Knowledge Transfer
    • Siloed Business Units & Decentralized IT
    • Business-Managed IT
    • (Shadow IT)
    • Mergers & Acquisitions

    Problems With Sprawl

    • Redundancy and Inefficient Spending
    • Disparate Apps & Data
    • Obsolescence
    • Difficulties in Prioritizing Support
    • Barriers to Change & Growth

    Application Sprawl:

    Inefficiencies within your application portfolio are created by the gradual and non-strategic accumulation of applications.

    You have more apps than you need.

    Only 34% of software is rated as both IMPORTANT and EFFECTIVE by users.

    Source: Info-Tech’s CIO Business Vision

    Build your APM journey map

    The image contains screenshots of diagrams that reviews building your APM journey map.

    Application rationalization provides insight

    Directionless portfolio of applications

    Info-Tech’s Five Lens Model

    Assigned dispositions for individual apps

    The image contains a screenshot of an example of directionless portfolio of applications.

    Application Alignment

    Business Value

    Technical Health

    End-User Perspective

    Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

    Maintain: Keep the application but adjust its support structure.

    Modernize: Create a new initiative to address an inadequacy.

    Consolidate: Create a new initiative to reduce duplicate functionality.

    Retire: Phase out the application.

    Disposition: The intended strategic direction or implied course of action for an application.

    How well do your apps support your core functions and teams?

    How well are your apps aligned to value delivery?

    Do your apps meet all IT quality standards and policies?

    How well do your apps meet your end users’ needs?

    What is the relative cost of ownership and operation of your apps?

    Application rationalization requires the collection of several data points that represent these perspectives and act as the criteria for determining a disposition for each of your applications.

    APM is an iterative and evergreen process

    APM provides oversight and awareness of your application portfolio’s performance and support for your business operations and value delivery to all users and customers.

    Determine Scope and categories Build your list of applications and capabilities Score each application based on your values Determine outcomes based on app scoring and support for capabilities

    1. Lay Your Foundations

    1.1 Assess the state of your current application portfolio.

    1.2 Determine narrative.

    1.3 Define goals and metrics.

    1.4 Define application categories.

    1.5 Determine APM steps and roles (SIPOC).

    2. Improve Your Inventory

    2.1 Populate your inventory.

    2.2 Align to business capabilities.

    *Repeat

    3. Rationalize Your Apps

    3.1 Assess business value.

    3.2 Assess technical health.

    3.3 Assess end-user perspective.

    3.4 Assess total cost of ownership.

    *Repeat

    4. Populate Your Roadmap

    4.1 Review APM Snapshot results.

    4.2 Review APM Foundations results.

    4.3 Determine dispositions.

    4.4 Assess redundancies (optional).

    4.5 Determine dispositions for redundant applications (optional).

    4.6 Prioritize initiatives.

    4.7 Determine ongoing cadence.

    *Repeat

    Repeat according to APM cadence and application changes

    Executive Brief Case Study

    INDUSTRY: Retail

    SOURCE: Deloitte, 2017

    Supermarket Company

    The grocer was a smaller organization for the supermarket industry with a relatively low IT budget. While its portfolio consisted of a dozen applications, the organization still found it difficult to react to an evolving industry due to inflexible and overly complex legacy systems.

    The IT manager found himself in a scenario where he knew the applications well but had little awareness of the business processes they supported. Application maintenance was purely in keeping things operational, with little consideration for a future business strategy.

    As the business demanded more responsiveness to changes, the IT team needed to be able to react more efficiently and effectively while still securing the continuity of the business.

    The IT manager found success by introducing APM and gaining a better understanding of the business use and future needs for the applications. The organization started small but then increased the scope over time to produce and develop techniques to aid the business in meeting strategic goals with applications.

    Results

    The IT manager gained credibility and trust within the organization. The organization was able to build a plan to move away from the legacy systems and create a portfolio more responsive to the dynamic needs of an evolving marketplace.

    The application portfolio management initiative included the following components:

    Train teams and stakeholders on APM

    Model the core business processes

    Collect application inventory

    Assign APM responsibilities

    Start small, then grow

    Info-Tech’s application portfolio management methodology

    1. Lay Your Foundations

    2. Improve Your Inventory

    3. Rationalize Your Apps

    4. Populate Your Roadmap

    Phase Activities

    1.1 Assess your current application portfolio

    1.2 Determine narrative

    1.3 Define goals and metrics

    1.4 Define application categories

    1.5 Determine APM steps and roles

    2.1 Populate your inventory

    2.2 Align to business capabilities

    3.1 Assess business value

    3.2 Assess technical health

    3.3 Assess end-user perspective

    3.4 Assess total cost of ownership

    4.1 Review APM Snapshot results

    4.2 Review APM Foundations results

    4.3 Determine dispositions

    4.4 Assess redundancies (optional)

    4.5 Determine dispositions for redundant applications (optional)

    4.6 Prioritize initiatives

    4.7 Determine ongoing APM cadence

    Phase Outcomes

    Work with the appropriate management stakeholders to:

    • Extract key business priorities.
    • Set your goals.
    • Define scope of APM effort.

    Gather information on your own understanding of your applications to build a detailed inventory and identify areas of redundancy.

    Work with application subject matter experts to collect and compile data points and determine the appropriate disposition for your apps.

    Work with application delivery specialists to determine the strategic plans for your apps and place these in your portfolio roadmap.

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals.

    Application Portfolio Management Foundations Playbook

    Application Portfolio Management Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    This template allows you to capture your APM roles and responsibilities and build a repeatable process.

    This tool stores all relevant application information and allows you to assess your capability support, execute rationalization, and build a portfolio roadmap.

    The image contains screenshots of the Application Portfolio Management Foundations Playbook. The image contains screenshots of the Application Portfolio Management Snapshot and Foundations Tool.

    Key deliverable:

    Blueprint Storyboard

    This is the PowerPoint document you are viewing now. Follow this guide to understand APM, learn how to use the tools, and build a repeatable APM process that will be captured in your playbook.

    The image contains a screenshot of the blueprint storyboard.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    Guided Implementation

    Workshop

    Consulting

    “Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.” “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.” “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.” “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI for on this topic look like?

    Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4

    Call #1: Establish goals and foundations for your APM practice.

    Call #2:

    Initiate inventory and determine data requirements.

    Call #3:

    Initiate rationalization with group of applications.

    Call #4:

    Review result of first iteration and perform retrospective.

    Call #5:

    Initiate your roadmap and determine your ongoing APM practice.

    Note: The Guided Implementation will focus on a subset or group of applications depending on the state of your current APM inventory and available time. The goal is to use this first group to build your APM process and models to support your ongoing discovery, rationalization, and modernization efforts.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our right-sized best practices in your organization. A typical GI, using our materials, is 3 to 6 calls over the course of 1 to 3 months.

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    1. Lay Your Foundations

    2. Improve Your Inventory

    3. Rationalize Your Apps

    4. Populate Your Roadmap

    Post Workshop Steps

    Activities

    1.1 Assess your current
    application portfolio

    1.2 Determine narrative

    1.3 Define goals and metrics

    1.4 Define application categories

    1.5 Determine APM steps and roles

    2.1 Populate your inventory

    2.2 Align to business capabilities

    3.1 Assess business value

    3.2 Assess technical health

    3.3 Assess end-user perspective

    3.4 Assess total cost of ownership

    4.1 Review APM Snapshot results

    4.2 Review APM Foundations results

    4.3 Determine dispositions

    4.4 Assess redundancies (optional)

    4.5 Determine dispositions for redundant applications (optional)

    4.6 Prioritize initiatives

    4.7 Determine ongoing APM cadence

    • Complete in-progress deliverables from the previous four days.
    • Set up review time for workshop deliverables and to discuss the next steps.

    Outcomes

    Work with the appropriate management stakeholders to:

    1. Extract key business priorities
    2. Set your goals
    3. Agree on key terms and set the scope for your APM effort

    Work with your applications team to:

    1. Build a detailed inventory
    2. Identify areas of redundancy

    Work with the SMEs for a subset of applications to:

    1. Define your rationalization criteria, descriptions, and scoring
    2. Evaluate each application using rationalization criteria

    Work with application delivery specialists to:

    1. Determine the appropriate disposition for your apps
    2. Build an initial application portfolio roadmap
    3. Establish an ongoing cadence of APM activities

    Info-Tech analysts complete:

    1. Workshop report
    2. APM Snapshot and Foundations Toolset
    3. Action plan

    Note: The workshop will focus on a subset or group of applications depending on the state of your current APM inventory and available time. The goal is to use this first group to build your APM process and models to support your ongoing discovery, rationalization, and modernization efforts.

    Workshop Options

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Outcomes

    1-Day Snapshot

    3-Day Snapshot and Foundations (Key Apps)

    4-Day Snapshot and Foundations (Pilot Area)

    APM Snapshot

    • Align applications to business capabilities
    • Evaluate application support for business capabilities

    APM Foundations

    • Define your APM program and cadence
    • Rationalize applications using weighted criteria
    • Define application dispositions
    • Build an application roadmap aligned to initiatives

    Establish APM practice with a small sample set of apps and capabilities.

    Establish APM practice with a pilot group of apps and capabilities.

    Blueprint Pre-Step: Get the right stakeholders to the right exercises

    The image contains four steps and demonstrates who should be handling each exercise. 1. Lay Your Foundations, is to be handled by the APM Lead/Owner and the Key Corporate Stakeholders. 2. Improve Your Inventory, is to be handled by the APM Lead/Owner and the Applications Subject Matter Experts. 3. Rationalize Your Apps, is to be handled by the APM Lead/Owner, the Applications Subject Matter Experts, and the Delivery Leads. 4. Populate Your Roadmap, is to be handled by the APM Lead/Owner, the Key Corporate Stakeholders, and the Delivery Leads.

    APM Lead/Owner (Recommended)

    ☐ Applications Lead or the individual responsible for application portfolio management, along with any applications team members, if available

    Key Corporate Stakeholders

    Depending on size and structure, participants could include:

    ☐ Head of IT (CIO, CTO, IT Director, or IT Manager)

    ☐ Head of shared services (CFO, COO, VP HR, etc.)

    ☐ Compliance Officer, Steering Committee

    ☐ Company owner or CEO

    Application Subject Matter Experts

    Individuals who have familiarity with a specific subset of applications

    ☐ Business owners (product owners, Head of Business Function, power users)

    ☐ Support owners (Operations Manager, IT Technician)

    Delivery Leads

    ☐ Development Managers

    ☐ Solution Architects

    ☐ Project Managers

    Understand your APM tools and outcomes

    1.Diagnostic The image contains a screenshot of the diagnostic APM tool.

    5. Foundations: Chart

    The image contains a screenshot of the Foundations: Chart APM tool.

    2. Data Journey

    The image contains a screenshot of the data journey APM tool.

    6. App Comparison

    The image contains a screenshot of the App Comparison APM tool.

    3. Snapshot

    The image contains a screenshot of the snapshot APM tool.

    7. Roadmap

    The image contains a screenshot of the Roadmap APM tool.

    4. Foundations: Results

    The image contains a screenshot of the Foundations: Results APM Tool.

    Examples and explanations of these tools are located on the following slides and within the phases where they occur.

    Assess your current application portfolio with Info-Tech’s APM Diagnostic Tool

    The image contains a screenshot of the APM Diagnostic Tool.

    One of the primary purposes of application portfolio management is to get what we know and need to know on paper so we can share a common vision and understanding of our portfolio. This enables better discussions and decisions with your application owners and stakeholders.

    APM worksheet data journey map

    The image contains a screenshot of the APM worksheet data journey map.

    Interpreting your APM Snapshot results

    The image contains a screenshot of the APM snapshots results.

    Interpreting your APM Foundations results

    The image contains a screenshot of the APM Foundations results.

    Interpreting your APM Foundations chart

    The image contains a screenshot of the APM Foundations chart.

    Compare application groups

    Group comparison can be used for more than just redundant/overlapping applications.

    The image contains a screenshot of images that demonstrate comparing application groups.

    Apply Info-Tech’s 6 R’s Rationalization Disposition Model

    The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's 6 R's Rationalization Disposition Model.

    Disposition

    Description

    Reward

    Prioritize new features or enhancement requests and openly welcome the expansion of these applications as new requests are presented.

    Refresh

    Address the poor end-user satisfaction with a prioritized project. Consult with users to determine if UX issues require improvement to address satisfaction.

    Refocus

    Determine the root cause of the low value. Refocus, retrain, or refresh the UX to improve value. If there is no value found, aim to "keep the lights on" until the app can be decommissioned.

    Replace

    Replace or rebuild the application as technical and user issues are putting important business capabilities at risk. Decommission application alongside replacement.

    Remediate

    Address the poor technical health or risk with a prioritized project. Further consult with development and technical teams to determine if migration or refactoring is suited to address the technical issue.

    Retire

    Cancel any requested features and enhancements. Schedule the proper decommission and transfer end users to a new or alternative system if necessary.

    TCO, compared relatively to business value, helps determine the practicality of a disposition and the urgency of any call to action. Application alignment is factored in when assessing redundancies and has a separate set of dispositions.

    Populate roadmap example

    The image contains an example of the populate roadmap.

    ARE YOU READY TO GET STARTED?

    Phase 1

    Lay Your Foundations

    Phase 1

    1.1 Assess Your Current Application Portfolio

    1.2 Determine Narrative

    1.3 Define Goals and Metrics

    1.4 Define Application Categories

    1.5 Determine APM Steps and Roles

    Phase 2

    2.1 Populate Your Inventory

    2.2 Align to Business Capabilities

    Phase 3

    3.1 Assess Business Value

    3.2 Assess Technical Health

    3.3 Assess End-User Perspective

    3.4 Assess Total Cost of Ownership

    Phase 4

    4.1 Review APM Snapshot Results

    4.2 Review APM Foundations Results

    4.3 Determine Dispositions

    4.4 Assess Redundancies (Optional)

    4.5 Determine Dispositions for Redundant Applications (Optional)

    4.6 Prioritize Initiatives

    4.7 Determine Ongoing APM Cadence

    This phase involves the following participants:

    Applications Lead

    Key Corporate Stakeholders

    Additional Resources

    APM supports many goals

    Building an APM process requires a proper understanding of the underlying business goals and objectives of your organization’s strategy. Effectively identifying these drivers is paramount to gaining buy-in and the approval for any changes you plan to make to your application portfolio.

    After identifying these goals, you will need to ensure they are built into the foundations of your APM process.

    “What is most critical?” but also “What must come first?”

    Discover

    Improve

    Transform

    Collect Inventory

    Uncover Shadow IT

    Uncover Redundancies

    Anticipate Upgrades

    Predict Retirement

    Reduce Cost

    Increase Efficiency

    Reduce Applications

    Eliminate Redundancy

    Limit Risk

    Improve Architecture

    Modernize

    Enable Scalability

    Drive Business Growth

    Improve UX

    Assess your current application portfolio with Info-Tech’s APM Diagnostic Tool

    The image contains a screenshot of the APM Diagnostic Tool.

    One of the primary purposes of application portfolio management is to get what we know and need to know on paper so we can share a common vision and understanding of our portfolio. This enables better discussions and decisions with your application owners and stakeholders.

    1.1 Assess your current application portfolio with Info-Tech’s diagnostic tool

    Estimated time: 1 hour

    1. This tool provides visibility into your application portfolio and APM practices.
    2. Based on your assessment, you should gain a better understanding of whether the appropriate next steps are in application discovery, rationalization, or roadmapping.
    3. Complete the “Data Entry” worksheet in the Application Portfolio Management Diagnostic Tool (Excel).
    4. Review the “Results” worksheet to help inform and guide your next steps.

    Download the Application Portfolio Management Diagnostic Tool

    Input Output
    • Current APM program
    • Application landscape
    • APM current-state assessment
    Materials Participants
    • Application Portfolio Management Diagnostic Tool
    • Applications Lead

    1.1 Understanding the diagnostic results

    • Managed Apps are your known knowns and most of your portfolio.
    • Unmanaged and Unsanctioned Apps are known but have unknown risks and compliance. Bring these under IT support.
    • Unknown Apps are high risk and noncompliant. Prioritize these based on risk, cost, and use.
    The image contains a screenshot of the diagnostic APM tool.
    • APM is more than an inventory and assessment. A strong APM program provides ongoing visibility and insights to drive application improvement and value delivery.
    • Use your Sprawl Factors to identify process and organizational gaps that may need to be addressed.
    • Your APM inventory is only as good as the information in it. Use this chart to identify gaps and develop a path to define missing information.
    • APM is an iterative process. Use this state assessment to determine where to focus most of your current effort.

    Understand potential motivations for APM

    The value of APM is defined by how the information will be used to drive better decisions.

    Portfolio Governance

    Transformative Initiatives

    Event-Driven Rationalization

    Improves:

    • Spending efficiency
    • Risk
    • Retirement of aged and low-value applications
    • Business enablement

    Impact on your rationalization framework:

    • Less urgent
    • As rigorous as appropriate
    • Apply in-depth analysis as needed

    Enables:

    • Data migration or harmonization
    • Legacy modernization
    • Infrastructure/cloud migration
    • Standardizing platforms
    • Shift to cloud and SAAS

    Impact on your rationalization framework:

    • Time sensitive
    • Scope on impacted areas
    • Need to determine specific dispositions
    • Outcomes need to include detailed and actionable steps

    Responds to:

    • Mergers and acquisitions
    • Regulatory and compliance change
    • New applications
    • Application retirement by vendors
    • Changes in business operations
    • Security risks and BC/DR

    Impact on your rationalization framework:

    • Time constrained
    • Lots of discovery work
    • Primary focus on duplication
    • Increased process and system understanding

    Different motivations will influence the appropriate approach to and urgency of APM or, specifically, rationalizing the portfolio. When rationalizing is directly related to enabling or in response to a broader initiative, you will need to create a more structured approach with a formal budget and resources.

    1.2 Determine narrative

    Estimated time: 30 minutes-2 hours

    1. Open the “Narrative” tab in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool.
    2. Start by listing your prevailing IT pain points with the application portfolio. These will be the issues experienced predominantly by the IT team and not necessarily by the stakeholders. Be sure to distinguish pain points from their root causes.
    3. Determine an equivalent business pain point for each IT pain point. This should be how the problem manifests itself to business stakeholders and should include potential risks to the organization is exposed to.
    4. Determine the business goal for each business pain point. Ideally, these are established organizational goals that key decision-makers will recognize. These goals should address the business pain points you have documented.
    5. Determine the technical objective for each business goal. These speak to the general corrections or enhancements to the portfolio required to accomplish the business goals.
    6. Use the “Narrative - Matrix” worksheet to group items into themes if needed.

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    Input Output
    • Familiarity with application landscape
    • Organizational context and strategic artifacts
    • Narrative for application portfolio transformation
    Materials Participants
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Application Portfolio Manager

    Connect your pains to what the business cares about to find the most effective narrative

    Root Cause

    IT Pain Points

    Business Pain Points

    Business Goals

    Narrative

    Technical Objectives

    Sprawl

    Shadow IT/decentralized oversight

    Neglect over time

    Poor delivery processes

    Back-End Complexity

    Disparate Data/Apps

    Poor Architectural Fit

    Redundancy

    Maintenance Demand/
    Resource Drain

    Low Maintainability

    Technical Debt

    Legacy, Aging, or Expiring Apps

    Security Vulnerabilities

    Unsatisfied Customers

    Hurdles to Growth/Change

    Poor Business Analytics

    Process Inefficiency

    Software Costs

    Business Continuity Risk

    Data Privacy Risk

    Data/IP Theft Risk

    Poor User Experience

    Low-Value Apps

    Scalability

    Flexibility/Agility

    Data-Driven Insights

    M&A Transition

    Business Unit Consolidation/ Centralization

    Process Improvement

    Process Modernization

    Cost Reduction

    Stability

    Customer Protection

    Security

    Employee Enablement

    Business Enablement

    Innovation

    Create Strategic Alignment

    Identify specific business capabilities that are incompatible with strategic initiatives.

    Reduce Application Intensity

    Highlight the capabilities that are encumbered due to functional overlaps and complexity.

    Reduce Software Costs

    Specific business capabilities come at an unnecessarily or disproportionately high cost.

    Mitigate Business Continuity Risk

    Specific business capabilities are at risk of interruption or stoppages due to unresolved back-end issues.

    Mitigate Security Risk

    Specific business capabilities are at risk due to unmitigated security vulnerabilities or breaches.

    Increase Satisfaction Applications

    Specific business capabilities are not achieving their optimal business value.

    Platform Standardization

    Platform Standardization Consolidation

    Data Harmonization

    Removal/Consolidation of Redundant Applications

    Legacy Modernization

    Application Upgrades

    Removal of Low-Value Applications

    1.3 Define goals and metrics

    Estimated time: 1 hour

    1. Determine the motivations behind APM. You may want to collect and review any of the organization’s strategic documents that provide additional context on previously established goals.
    2. With the appropriate stakeholders, discuss the goals of APM. Try to label your goals as either:
      1. Short term: Refers to immediate goals used to represent the progress of APM activities. Likely these goals are more IT-oriented
      2. Long term: Refers to broader and more distant goals more related to the impact of APM. These goals tend to be more business-oriented.
    3. To help clearly define your goals, discuss appropriate metrics for each goal. Often these metrics can be expressed as:
      1. Leading indicators: Metrics used to gauge the success of your short-term goals and the progress of APM activities.
      2. Lagging indicators: Metrics used to gauge the success of your long-term goals.

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    Input Output
    • Overarching organizational strategy
    • IT strategy
    • Defined goals and metrics for APM
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Applications Lead
    • Key Corporate Stakeholders

    1.3 Define goals and metrics: Example

    Goals

    Metric

    Target

    Short Term

    Improve ability to inform the business

    Leading Indicators

    • Application inventory with all data fields completed
    • Applications with recommended dispositions
    • 80% of portfolio

    Improve ownership of applications

    • Applications with an assigned business and technical owner
    • 80% of portfolio

    Reduce costs of portfolio

    • TCO of full application portfolio
    • The number of recovered/avoided software licenses from retired apps
    • Reduce by 5%
    • $50,000

    Long Term

    Migrate platform

    Lagging Indicators

    • Migrate all applications
    • Total value change in on-premises apps switched to SaaS
    • 100% of applications
    • Increase 50%

    Improve overall satisfaction with portfolio

    • End-user satisfaction rating
    • Increase 25%

    Become more customer-centric

    • Increased sales
    • Increased customer experience
    • Increase 35%

    “Application” doesn’t have the same meaning to everyone

    The image contains a picture of Martin Fowler.

    Code: A body of code that's seen by developers as a single unit.

    Functionality: A group of functionality that business customers see as a single unit.

    Funding: An initiative that those with the money see as a single budget.

    ?: What else?

    “Essentially applications are social constructions.

    Source: Martin Fowler

    APM focuses on business applications.

    “Software used by business users to perform a business function.”

    – ServiceNow, 2020

    Unfortunately, that definition is still quite vague.

    You must set boundaries and scope for “application”

    1. Many individual items can be considered applications on their own or components within or associated with an application.

    2. Different categories of applications may be out of scope or handled differently within the activities and artifacts of APM.

    Different categories of applications may be out of scope or handled differently within the activities and artifacts of APM.

    • Interface
    • Software Component
    • Supporting Software
    • Platform
    • Presentation Layer
    • Middleware
    • Micro Service
    • Database
    • UI
    • API
    • Data Access/ Transfer/Load
    • Operating System

    Apps can be categorized by generic categories

    • Enterprise Applications
    • Unique Function-Specific Applications
    • Productivity Tools
    • Customer-Facing Applications
    • Mobile Applications

    Apps can be categorized by bought vs. built or install types

    • Custom
    • On-Prem
    • Off the Shelf
    • SaaS
    • Hybrid
    • End-User-Built Tools

    Apps can be categorized by the application family

    • Parent Application
    • Child Application
    • Package
    • Module
    • Suite
    • Component (Functional)

    Apps can be categorized by the group managing them

    • IT-Managed Applications
    • Business-Managed Applications (Shadow IT)
    • Partner/External Applications

    Apps can be categorized by tiers

    • Mission Critical
    • Tier 2
    • Tier 3

    Set boundaries on what is an application or the individual unit that you’re making business decisions on. Also, determine which categories of applications are in scope and how they will be included in the activities and artifacts of APM. Use your product families defined in Deliver Digital Products at Scale to help define your application categories, groups, and boundaries.

    1.4 Define application categories

    Estimated time: 1 hour

    1. Review the items listed on the previous slide and consider what categories provide the best initial grouping to help organize your rationalization and dispositions. Update the category list to match your application groupings.
    2. Identify the additional categories you need to manage in your application portfolio.
    3. For each category, establish or modify a description or definition and provide examples that exist in your current portfolio.
    4. For each category, answer:
      1. Will these be documented in the application inventory?
      2. Will these be included in application rationalization? Think about if this item will be assigned a TCO, value score, and, ultimately, a disposition.
      3. Will these be listed in the application portfolio roadmap?
    5. If you completed Deliver Digital Products at Scale, use your product families to help define your application categories.

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    InputOutput
    • Working list of applications
    • Definitions and guidelines for which application categories are in scope for APM
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard and markers
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Applications Lead
    • Key Corporate Stakeholders

    1.4 APM worksheet data journey map

    The image contains a screenshot of the APM worksheet data journey map.

    1.4 Define application categories: Example

    Category

    Definition/Description

    Examples

    Documented in your application inventory?

    Included in application rationalization?

    Listed in your application portfolio roadmap?

    Business Application

    End-user facing applications that directly enable specific business functions. This includes enterprise-wide and business-function-specific applications. Separate modules will be considered a business application when appropriate.

    ERP system, CRM software, accounting software

    Yes

    Yes. Unless currently in dev. TCO of the parent application will be divided among child apps.

    Yes

    Software Components

    Back-end solutions are self-contained units that support business functions.

    ETL, middleware, operating systems

    No. Documentation in CMDB. These will be listed as a dependency in the application inventory.

    No. These will be linked to a business app and included in TCO estimates and tech health assessments.

    No

    Productivity Tools

    End-user-facing applications that enable standard communication of general document creation.

    MS Word, MS Excel, corporate email

    Yes

    No

    Yes

    End-User- Built Microsoft Tools

    Single instances of a Microsoft tool that the business has grown dependent on.

    Payroll Excel tool, Access databases

    No. Documentation in Business Tool Glossary.

    No No

    Partner Applications

    Partners or third-party applications that the business has grown dependent on but are internally owned or managed.

    Supplier’s ERP portal, government portal

    No No

    Yes

    Shadow IT

    Business-managed applications.

    Downloaded tools

    Yes

    Yes. However, just from a redundancy perspective.

    Yes

    The roles in APM rarely exist; you need to adapt

    Application Portfolio Manager

    • Responsible for the health and evolution of the application portfolio.
    • Facilitates the rationalization process.
    • Compiles and assesses application information and recommends and supports key decisions regarding the direction of the applications.
    • This is rarely a dedicated role even in large enterprises. For small enterprises, this should be an IT employee at a manager level – an IT manager or operations manager.

    Business Owner

    • Responsible for managing individual applications on a functional level and approves and prioritizes projects.
    • Provides business process or functional subject matter expertise for the assessment of applications.
    • For small enterprises, this role is rarely defined, but the responsibility should exist. Consider the head of a business unit or a process owner as the owner of the application.

    Support Owner

    • Responsible for the maintenance and management of individual applications.
    • Provides technical information and subject matter expertise for the assessment of an application.
    • For small enterprises, this would be those responsible for maintaining the application and those responsible for its initial implementation. Often support responsibilities are external, and this role will be more of a vendor manager.

    Project Portfolio Manager

    • Responsible for intake, planning, and coordinating the resources that deliver any changes.
    • The body that consumes the results of rationalization and begins planning any required action or project.
    • For small enterprises, the approval process can come from a steering committee but it is often less formal. Often a smaller group of project managers facilitates planning and coordination and works closely with the delivery leads.

    Corner-of-the-Desk Approach

    • No one is explicitly dedicated to building a strategy or APM practices.
    • Information is collected whenever the applications team has time available.
    • Benefits are pushed out and the value is lost.

    Dedicated Approach

    • The initiative is given a budget and formal agenda.
    • Roles and responsibilities are assigned to team members.

    The high-level steps of APM present some questions you need to answer

    Build Inventory

    Create the full list of applications and capture all necessary attributes.

    • Who will build the inventory?
    • Do you know all your applications (Shadow IT)?
    • Do you know your applications’ functionality?
    • Do you know where your applications overlap?
    • Who do you need to consult with to fill in the gaps?
    • Who will provide specific application information?

    Collect & Compile

    Engage with appropriate SMEs and collect necessary data points for rationalization.

    • Who will collect and compile the data points for rationalization?
    • What are the specific data points?
    • Are some of the data points currently documented?
    • Who will provide specific data points on technical health, cost, performance, and business value?
    • Who will determine what business value is?

    Assess & Recommend

    Apply rationalization framework and toolset to determine dispositions.

    • Who will apply a rationalization tool or decision-making framework to generate dispositions for the applications?
    • Who will modify the tool or framework to ensure results align to the goals of the organization?
    • Who will define any actions or projects that result from the rationalization? And who needs to be consulted to assess the feasibility of any potential project?

    Validate & Roadmap

    Present dispositions for validation and communicate any decisions or direction for applications.

    • Who will present the recommended disposition, corrective action, or new project to the appropriate decision maker?
    • Who is the appropriate decision maker for application changes or project approval?
    • What format is recommended (idea, proposal, business case) and what extra analysis is required?
    • Who needs to be consulted regarding the potential changes?

    1.5 Determine APM steps and roles (SIPOC)

    Estimated time: 1-2 hours

    1. Begin by comparing Info-Tech’s list of common APM roles to the roles that exist in your organization with respect to application management and ownership.
    2. There are four high-level steps for APM: build inventory, collect & compile, assess & recommend, and validate & roadmap. Apply the SIPOC (Supplier, Input, Process, Output, Customer) model by completing the following for each step:
      1. In the Process column, modify the description, if necessary. Identify who is responsible for performing the step.
      2. In the Inputs column, modify the list of inputs.
      3. In the Suppliers column, identify who must be included to provide the inputs.
      4. In the Outputs column, modify the list of outputs.
      5. In the Customers column, identify who consumes the outputs.
    3. (Optional) Outline how the results of APM will be consumed. For example, project intake or execution, data or platform migration, application or product management, or whichever is appropriate.

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    Input Output
    • Existing function and roles regarding application delivery, management, and ownership
    • Scope of APM
    • Responsibilities assigned to your roles
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard and markers
    • “Supporting Activities – SIPOC” worksheet in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Applications Lead
    • Key Corporate Stakeholders

    1.5 Determine steps and roles

    Suppliers

    Inputs

    Process

    Outputs

    Customers

    • Applications Manager
    • Operations Manager
    • Business Owners
    • IT Team
    • List of applications
    • Application attributes
    • Business capabilities

    Build Inventory

    Create the full list of applications and capture all necessary attributes.

    Resp: Applications Manager & IT team member

    • Application inventory
    • Identified redundancies
    • Whole organization
    • Applications SMEs
    • Business Owners
    • Support Owners & Team
    • End Users
    • Application inventory
    • Existing documentation
    • Additional collection methods
    • Knowledge of business value, cost, and performance for each application

    Collect & Compile

    Engage with appropriate SMEs and collect necessary data points for rationalization.

    Resp: IT team member

    • Data points of business value, cost, and performance for each application
    • Applications Manager
    • Applications Manager
    • Defined application rationalization framework and toolset
    • Data points of business value, cost, and performance for each application

    Assess & Recommend

    Apply rationalization framework and toolset to determine dispositions.

    Resp: Applications Manager

    • Assigned disposition for each application
    • New project ideas for applications
    • Business Owners
    • Steering Committee
    • Business Owners
    • Steering Committee
    • Assigned disposition for each application
    • New project ideas for applications
    • Awareness of goals and priorities
    • Awareness of existing projects and resources capacity

    Validate & Roadmap

    Present dispositions for validation and communicate any decisions or direction for applications.

    Resp: Applications Manager

    • Application portfolio roadmap
    • Confirmed disposition for each application
    • Project request submission
    • Whole organization
    • Applications Manager
    • Solutions Engineer
    • Business Owner
    • Project request submission
    • Estimated cost
    • Estimated value or ROI

    Project Intake

    Build business case for project request.

    Resp: Project Manager

    • Approved project
    • Steering Committee

    Planning your APM modernization journey steps

    Discovery Rationalization Disposition Roadmap

    Enter your pilot inventory.

    • Optional Snapshot: Populate your desired snapshot grouping lists (departments, functions, groups, capabilities, etc.).

    Score your pilot apps to refine your rationalization criteria and scoring.

    • Score 3 to 9 apps to adjust and get comfortable with the scoring.
    • Validate scoring with the remaining apps in your pilot group. Refine and finalize the criteria and scoring descriptions.
    • Optional Snapshot: Use the Group Alignment Matrix to match your grouping list to select which apps support each grouping item.

    Determine recommended disposition for each application.

    • Review and adjust the disposition recommendations on the “Disposition Options” worksheet and set your pass/fail threshold.
    • Review your apps on the “App Rationalization Results” worksheet. Update (override) the recommended disposition and priority if needed.

    Populate your application roadmap.

    • Indicate programs, projects, initiatives, or releases that are planned for each app.
    • Update the priority based on the initiative.
    • Use the visual roadmap to show high-level delivery phases.

    Phase 2

    Improve Your Inventory

    Phase 1

    1.1 Assess Your Current Application Portfolio

    1.2 Determine Narrative

    1.3 Define Goals and Metrics

    1.4 Define Application Categories

    1.5 Determine APM Steps and Roles

    Phase 2

    2.1 Populate Your Inventory

    2.2 Align to Business Capabilities

    Phase 3

    3.1 Assess Business Value

    3.2 Assess Technical Health

    3.3 Assess End-User Perspective

    3.4 Assess Total Cost of Ownership

    Phase 4

    4.1 Review APM Snapshot Results

    4.2 Review APM Foundations Results

    4.3 Determine Dispositions

    4.4 Assess Redundancies (Optional)

    4.5 Determine Dispositions for Redundant Applications (Optional)

    4.6 Prioritize Initiatives

    4.7 Determine Ongoing APM Cadence

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Applications Lead
    • Applications Team

    Additional Resources

    Document Your Business Architecture

    Industry Reference Architectures

    Application Capability Template

    Pre-step: Collect your applications

    1. Consult with your IT team and leverage any existing documentation to gather an initial list of your applications.
    2. Build an initial working list of applications. This is just meant to be a starting point. Aim to include any new applications in procurement, implementation, or development.
    3. The rationalization and roadmapping phases are best completed when iteratively focusing on manageable groups of applications. Group your applications into subsets based on shared subject matter experts. Likely this will mean grouping applications by business units.
    4. Select a subset to be the first group of applications that will undergo the activities of rationalization and roadmapping to refine your APM processes, scoring, and disposition selection.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    The more information you plan to capture, the larger the time and effort, especially as you move along toward advanced and strategic items. Capture the information most aligned to your objectives to make the most of your investment.

    If you completed Deliver Digital Products at Scale, use your product families and products to help define your applications.

    Learn more about automated application discovery:
    High Application Satisfaction Starts With Discovering Your Application Inventory

    Discover your applications

    The image contains a screenshot of examples of applications that support APM.

    2.1 Populate your inventory

    Estimated time: 1-4 hours per group

    1. Review Info-Tech’s list of application inventory attributes.
    2. Open the “Application Inventory Details” tab of the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool. Modify, add, or omit attributes.
    3. For each application, populate your prioritized data fields or any fields you know at the time of discovery. You will complete all the fields in future iterations.
    4. Complete this the best you can based on your team’s familiarity and any readily available documentation related to these applications.
    5. Use the drop-down list to select Enabling, Redundant/Overlapping, and Dependent apps. This will be used to help determine dispositions and comparisons.
    6. Highlight missing information or placeholder values that need to be verified.

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    Input Output
    • Working list of applications
    • Determined attributes for inventory
    • Populated inventory
    Materials Participants
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Applications Lead
    • Any Applications Team Members

    2.1 APM worksheet data journey map

    The image contains a screenshot of the APM worksheet data journey map.

    Why is the business capability so important?

    For the purposes of an inventory, business capabilities help all stakeholders gain a sense of the functionality the application provides.

    However, the true value of business capability comes with rationalization.

    Upon linking all the organization’s applications to a standardized and consistent set of business capabilities, you can then group your applications based on similar, complementary, or overlapping functionality. In other words, find your redundancies and consolidation opportunities.

    Important Consideration

    Defining business capabilities and determining the full extent of redundancy is a challenging undertaking and often is a larger effort than APM all together.

    Business capabilities should be defined according to the unique functions and language of your organization, at varying levels of granularity, and ideally including target-state capabilities that identify gaps in the future strategy.

    This blueprint provides a simplified and generic list for the purpose of categorizing similar functionality. We strongly encourage exploring Document Your Business Architecture to help in the business capability defining process, especially when visibility into your portfolio and knowledge of redundancies is poor.

    The image contains a screenshot of the business capability scenarios.

    For a more detailed capability mapping, use the Application Portfolio Snapshot and the worksheets in your current workbook.

    What is a business capability map?

    The image contains a screenshot of a business capability map.

    A business capability map (BCM) is an abstraction of business operations that helps describe what the enterprise does to achieve its vision, mission, and goals. Business capabilities are the building blocks of the enterprise. They are typically defined at varying levels of granularity and include target-state capabilities that identify gaps in the future strategy. These are the people, process, and tool units that deliver value to your teams and customers.

    Info-Tech’s Industry Coverage and Reference Architectures give you a head start on producing a BCM fit for your organization. The visual to the left is an example of a reference architecture for the retail industry.

    These are the foundational piece for our Application Portfolio Snapshot. By linking capabilities to your supporting applications, you can better visualize how the portfolio supports the organization at a single glance. More specifically, you can highlight how issues with the portfolio are impacting capability delivery.

    Reminder: Best practices imply that business capabilities are methodologically defined by business stakeholders and business architects to capture the unique functions and language of your organization.

    The approach laid out in this service is about applying minimal time and effort to make the case for proper investment into the best practices, which can include creating a tailored BCM. Start with a good enough example to produce a useful visual and generate a positive conversation toward resourcing and analyses.

    We strongly encourage exploring Document Your Business Architecture and the Application Portfolio Snapshot to understand the thorough methods and tactics for BCM.

    Why perform a high-level application alignment before rationalization?

    Having to address redundancy complicates the application rationalization process. There is no doubt that assessing applications in isolation is much easier and allows you to arrive at dispositions for your applications in a timelier manner.

    Rationalization has two basic steps: first, collect and compile information, and second, analyze that information and determine a disposition for each application. When you don’t have redundancy, you can analyze an application and determine a disposition in isolation. When you do have redundancies, you need to collect information for multiple applications, likely across departments or lines of business, then perform a comparative analysis.

    Most likely your approach will fall somewhere between the examples below and require a hybrid approach.

    Benefits of a high-level application alignment:

    • Review the degree of redundancy across your portfolio.
    • Understand the priority areas for rationalization and the sequence of information collection.

    The image contains a screenshot of a timeline of rationalization effort.

    2.2 Align apps to capabilities and functions

    Estimated time: 1-4 hours per grouping

    The APM tool provides up to three different grouping comparisons to assess how well your applications are supporting your enterprise. Although business capabilities are important, identify your organizational perspectives to determine how well your portfolio supports these functions, departments, or value streams. Each grouping should be a consistent category, type, or arrangement of applications.

    1. Enter the business capabilities, from either your own BCM or the Info-Tech reference architectures, into the Business Capability column under Grouping 1.
    2. Open the “Group 1 Alignment Matrix” worksheet in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool.
    3. For each application’s row, enter an “X” in the column of a capability that the application supports.
    4. Optionally, repeat these steps under Grouping 2 and 3 for each value stream, department, function, or business unit where you’d like to assess application support. Note: To use Grouping 3, unhide the columns on the “Application and Group Lists” worksheet and unhide the worksheet “Grouping 3 Alignment Matrix.”

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    InputOutput
    • Application inventory
    • List of business capabilities, Info-Tech Reference Architecture capabilities, departments, functions, divisions, or value streams for grouping comparison
    • Assigned business capabilities to applications
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard and markers
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Applications Lead
    • Any Applications Team Members

    2.2 APM worksheet data journey map

    The image contains a screenshot of the APM worksheet data journey map.

    2.2 Aligning applications to groups example

    Alignment Matrix: Identify applications supporting each capability or function.

    Capability, Department, or Function 1

    Capability, Department, or Function 2

    Capability, Department, or Function 3

    Capability, Department, or Function 4

    Capability, Department, or Function 5

    Capability, Department, or Function 6

    Application A

    x

    Application B

    x

    Application C

    x

    Application D

    x

    Application E

    x x

    Application F

    x

    Application G

    x

    Application H

    x

    Application I

    x

    Application J

    x

    In this example:

    BC 1 is supported by App A

    BC 2 is supported by App B

    BC 3 is supported by Apps C & D

    BCs 4 & 5 are supported by App E

    BC 6 is supported by Apps F-G. BC 6 shows an example of potential redundancy and portfolio complexity.

    The APM tool supports three different Snapshot groupings. Repeat this exercise for each grouping.

    Align application to capabilities – tool view

    The image contains screenshots of the align application to capabilities - tool view

    Phase 3

    Rationalize Your Applications

    Phase 1

    1.1 Assess Your Current Application Portfolio

    1.2 Determine Narrative

    1.3 Define Goals and Metrics

    1.4 Define Application Categories

    1.5 Determine APM Steps and Roles

    Phase 2

    2.1 Populate Your Inventory

    2.2 Align to Business Capabilities

    Phase 3

    3.1 Assess Business Value

    3.2 Assess Technical Health

    3.3 Assess End-User Perspective

    3.4 Assess Total Cost of Ownership

    Phase 4

    4.1 Review APM Snapshot Results

    4.2 Review APM Foundations Results

    4.3 Determine Dispositions

    4.4 Assess Redundancies (Optional)

    4.5 Determine Dispositions for Redundant Applications (Optional)

    4.6 Prioritize Initiatives

    4.7 Determine Ongoing APM Cadence

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Applications Lead
    • Application SMEs

    Additional Resources

    Phase pre-step: Sequence rationalization assessments appropriately

    Use the APM Snapshot results to determine APM iterations

    • Application rationalization requires an iterative approach.
    • Review your application types and alignment from Phase 2 to begin to identify areas of overlapping or redundant applications.
    • Sequence the activities of Phase 3 based on whether you have a:
      • Redundant Portfolio
        • Use the APM Snapshot to prioritize analysis by grouping.
        • Complete the application functional analysis.
        • Use the “Application Comparison” worksheet to aid your comparison of application subsets.
        • Update application dispositions and roadmap initiatives.
      • Non-Redundant Portfolio
        • Use the APM Snapshot to prioritize analysis by grouping.
        • Update application dispositions and roadmap initiatives.

    The image contains a screenshot of a timeline of rationalization effort.

    Phase pre-step: Are the right stakeholders present?

    Make sure you have the right people at the table from the beginning.

    • Application rationalization requires specific stakeholders to provide specific data points.
    • Ensure your application subsets are grouped by shared subject matter experts. Ideally, these are grouped by business units.
    • For each subset, identify the appropriate SMEs for the five areas of rationalization criteria.
    • Communicate and schedule interviews with groups of stakeholders. Inform them of additional information sources to have readily available.
    • (Optional) This phase’s activities follow the clockwise sequence of the diagram to the right. Reorder the sequence of activities based on overlaps of availability in subject matter expertise.

    Application

    Rationalization

    Additional Information Sources

    Ideal Stakeholders

    • KPIs

    Business Value

    • Business Application/Product Owners
    • Business Unit/ Process Owners
    • Survey Results

    End User

    • Business Application/ Product Owners
    • Key/Power Users
    • End Users
    • General Ledger
    • Service Desk
    • Vendor Contracts

    TCO

    • Operations/Maintenance Manager
    • Vendor Managers
    • Finance & Acct.
    • Service Desk
    • ALM Tools

    Technical Health

    • Operations/ Maintenance Manager
    • Solution Architect
    • Security Manager
    • Dev. Manager
    • Capability Maps
    • Process Maps

    Application Alignment

    • Business Unit/ Process Owners

    Rationalize your applications

    The image contains screenshots of diagrams that reviews building your APM journey map.

    One of the principal goals of application rationalization is determining dispositions

    Disposition: The intended strategic direction or course of action for an application.

    Directionless portfolio of applications

    Assigned dispositions for individual apps

    High-level examples:

    The image contains a screenshot of an image that demonstrates a directionless portfolio of applications.

    Maintain: Keep the application but adjust its support structure.

    The image contains screenshots of a few images taken from the directionless application to demonstrate the text above.

    Modernize: Create a new project to address an inadequacy.

    The image contains screenshots of a few images taken from the directionless application to demonstrate the text above.

    Consolidate: Create a new project to reduce duplicate functionality.

    The image contains screenshots of a few images taken from the directionless application to demonstrate the text above.

    Retire: Phase out the application.

    The image contains screenshots of a few images taken from the directionless application to demonstrate the text above.

    Application rationalization provides insight

    Directionless portfolio of applications

    Info-Tech’s Five Lens Model

    Assigned dispositions for individual apps

    The image contains a screenshot of an example of directionless portfolio of applications.

    Application Alignment

    Business Value

    Technical Health

    End-User Perspective

    Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

    Maintain: Keep the application but adjust its support structure.

    Modernize: Create a new initiative to address an inadequacy.

    Consolidate: Create a new initiative to reduce duplicate functionality.

    Retire: Phase out the application.

    Disposition: The intended strategic direction or implied course of action for an application.

    How well do your apps support your core functions and teams?

    How well are your apps aligned to value delivery?

    Do your apps meet all IT quality standards and policies?

    How well do your apps meet your end users’ needs?

    What is the relative cost of ownership and operation of your apps?

    Application rationalization requires the collection of several data points that represent these perspectives and act as the criteria for determining a disposition for each of your applications.

    Disposition: The intended strategic direction or implied course of action for an application.

    3.1-3.4 APM worksheet data journey map

    The image contains a screenshot of the APM worksheet data journey map.

    Assessing application business value

    The Business Business Value of Applications IT
    Keepers of the organization’s mission, vision, and value statements that define IT success. The business maintains the overall ownership and evaluation of the applications. Technical subject matter experts of the applications they deliver and maintain. Each IT function works together to ensure quality applications are delivered to stakeholder expectations.

    First, the authorities on business value need to define and weigh their value drivers that describe the priorities of the organization.

    This will then allow the applications team to apply a consistent, objective, and strategically aligned evaluation of applications across the organization.

    In this context…business value is the value of the business outcome that the application produces and how effective the application is at producing that outcome.

    Business value IS NOT the user’s experience or satisfaction with the application.

    Review the value drivers of your applications

    The image contains a screenshot of a the business value matrix.

    Financial vs. Human Benefits

    Financial benefits refer to the degree to which the value source can be measured through monetary metrics and are often quite tangible.

    Human benefits refer to how an application can deliver value through a user’s experience.

    Inward vs. Outward Orientation

    Inward orientation refers to value sources that have an internal impact and improve your organization’s effectiveness and efficiency in performing its operations.

    Outward orientation refers to value sources that come from your interaction with external factors, such as the market or your customers.

    Increased Revenue

    Reduced Costs

    Enhanced Services

    Reach Customers

    Application functions that are specifically related to the impact on your organization’s ability to generate revenue and deliver value to your customers.

    Reduction of overhead. The ways in which an application limits the operational costs of business functions.

    Functions that enable business capabilities that improve the organization’s ability to perform its internal operations.

    Application functions that enable and improve the interaction with customers or produce market information and insights.

    3.1 Assess business value

    Estimated time: 1 -4 hours

    1. Review Info-Tech’s four quadrants of business value: increase revenue/value, reduce costs, enhance services, and reach customers. Edit your value drivers, description, and scoring on the “Rationalization Inputs” worksheet. For each value driver, update the key indicators specific to your organization’s priorities. When editing the scoring descriptions, keep only the one you are using.
    2. (Optional) Add an additional value driver if your organization has distinct value drivers (e.g. compliance, sustainability, innovation, and growth).
    3. For each application, score on a scale of 0 to 5 how impactful the application is for each value driver. Use the indicators set in Phase 1 to guide your scoring.
    4. For each value driver, adjust the criteria weighting to match its relative importance to the organization. Start with a balanced or low weighting. Adjust the weights to ensure that the category score matches your relative values and priorities.

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    InputOutput
    • Knowledge of organizational priorities
    • (Optional) Existing mission, vision, and value statements
    • Scoring scheme for assessing business value
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard and markers
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Applications Lead
    • Key Corporate Stakeholders

    3.1 Weigh value drivers: Example

    The image contains a screenshot example of the weigh value drivers.

    For additional support in implementing a balanced value framework, refer to Build a Value Measurement Framework.

    Understand the back end and technical health of your applications

    Technical health identifies the extent of technology risk to the organization.

    MAINTAINABILITY (RAS)

    RAS refers to an app’s reliability, availability, and serviceability. How often, how long, and how difficult is it for your resources to keep an app functioning, and what are the resulting continuity risks? This can include root causes of maintenance challenges.

    SECURITY

    Applications should be aligned and compliant with ALL security policies. Are there vulnerabilities or is there a history of security incidents? Remember that threats are often internal and non-malicious.

    ADAPTABILITY

    How easily can the app be enhanced or scaled to meet changes in business needs? Does the app fit within the business strategy?

    INTEROPERABILITY

    The degree to which an app is integrated with current systems. Apps require comprehensive technical planning and oversight to ensure they connect within the greater application architecture. Does the app fit within your enterprise architecture strategy?

    BUSINESS CONTINUITY/DISASTER RECOVERY

    The degree to which the application is compatible with business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) policies and plans that are routinely tested and verified.

    Unfortunately, the business only cares about what they can see or experience. Rationalization is your opportunity to get risk on the business’ radar and gain buy-in for the necessary action.

    3.2 Assess technical health

    Estimated time: 1-4 hours

    1. Review Info-Tech’s suggested technical health criteria. Edit your criteria, descriptions, and scoring on the “Rationalization Inputs” worksheet. For each criterion, update the key indicators specific to your organization’s priorities.
    2. For each application, score on a scale of 1 to 5 on how impactful the application is for each criterion.
    3. For each criterion, adjust the weighting to match its relative importance to the organization. Start with a balanced or low weighting. Adjust the weights to ensure that the category score matches your relative values and priorities.
    InputOutput
    • Familiarity of technical health perspective for applications within this subset
    • Maintenance history, architectural models
    • Technical health scores for each application
    MaterialsParticipants
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Technical SMEs
    • Applications Lead
    • Any Applications Team Members

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    End users provide valuable perspective

    Your end users are your best means of determining front-end issues.

    Data Quality

    To what degree do the end users find the data quality sufficient to perform their role and achieve their desired outcome?

    Effectiveness

    To what degree do the end users find the application effective for performing their role and desired outcome?

    Usability

    To what degree do the end users find the application reliable and easy to use to achieve their desired outcome?

    Satisfaction

    To what degree are end users satisfied with the features of this application?

    What else matters to you?

    Tune your criteria to match your values and priorities.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    When facing large user groups, do not make assumptions or use lengthy methods of collecting information. Use Info-Tech’s Application Portfolio Assessment to collect data by surveying your end users’ perspectives.

    3.3 Assess end-user perspective

    Estimated time: 1-4 hours

    1. Review Info-Tech’s suggested end-user perspective criteria. Edit your criteria, descriptions and scoring on the “Rationalization Inputs” worksheet. For each criterion, update the key indicators specific to your organization’s priorities.
    2. For each application, score on a scale of 1 to 5 on how impactful the application is for each criterion.
    3. For each criterion, adjust the weighting to match its relative importance to the organization. Start with a balanced or low weighting. Adjust the weights to ensure that the category score matches your relative values and priorities.
    InputOutput
    • Familiarity of end user’s perspective for applications within this subset
    • User satisfaction scores for each application
    MaterialsParticipants
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Business Owners, Key Users
    • Applications Lead
    • Any Applications Team Members

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    Consider the spectrum of application cost

    An application’s cost extends past a vendor’s fee and even the application itself.

    LICENSING AND SUBSCRIPTIONS: Your recurring payments to a vendor.

    Many commercial off-the-shelf applications require a license on a per-user basis. Review contracts and determine costs by looking at per-user or fixed rates charged by the vendor.

    MAINTENANCE COSTS: Your internal spending to maintain an app.

    These are the additional costs to maintain an application such as support agreements, annual maintenance fees, or additional software or hosting expenses.

    INDIRECT COSTS: Miscellaneous expenses necessary for an app’s continued use.

    Expenses like end-user training, developer education, and admin are often neglected, but they are very real costs organizations pay regularly.

    RETURN ON INVESTMENT: Perceived value of the application related to its TCO.

    Some of our most valuable applications are the most expensive. ROI is an optional criterion to account for the value and importance of the application.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    The TCO assessment is one area where what you are considering the ”application” matters quite a bit. An application’s peripherals or software components need to be considered in your estimates. For additional help calculating TCO, use the Application TCO Calculator from Build a Rationalization Framework.

    3.4 Assess total cost of ownership

    Estimated time: 1-4 hours

    1. Review Info-Tech’s suggested TCO criteria. Edit your criteria, descriptions, and scoring on the “Rationalization Inputs” worksheet. For each criterion, update the key indicators specific to your organization’s priorities.
    2. For each application, score on a scale of 1 to 5 on how impactful the application is for each criterion.
    3. For each criterion, adjust the weighting to match its relative importance to the organization. Start with a balanced or low weighting. Adjust the weights to ensure that the category score matches your relative values and priorities.
    InputOutput
    • Familiarity with the TCO for applications within this subset
    • Vendor contracts, maintenance history
    • TCO scores for each application
    MaterialsParticipants
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Business Owners, Vendor Managers, Operations Managers
    • Applications Lead
    • Any Applications Team Members

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    Phase 4

    Populate Your Roadmap

    Phase 1

    1.1 Assess Your Current Application Portfolio

    1.2 Determine Narrative

    1.3 Define Goals and Metrics

    1.4 Define Application Categories

    1.5 Determine APM Steps and Roles

    Phase 2

    2.1 Populate Your Inventory

    2.2 Align to Business Capabilities

    Phase 3

    3.1 Assess Business Value

    3.2 Assess Technical Health

    3.3 Assess End-User Perspective

    3.4 Assess Total Cost of Ownership

    Phase 4

    4.1 Review APM Snapshot Results

    4.2 Review APM Foundations Results

    4.3 Determine Dispositions

    4.4 Assess Redundancies (Optional)

    4.5 Determine Dispositions for Redundant Applications (Optional)

    4.6 Prioritize Initiatives

    4.7 Determine Ongoing APM Cadence

    his phase involves the following participants:

    • Applications Lead
    • Delivery Leads

    Additional Resources

    Review your APM Snapshot

    The image contains a screenshot of examples of applications that support APM.

    4.1 Review your APM Snapshot results

    Estimated time: 1-2 hours

    1. The APM Snapshot provides a dashboard to support your APM program’s focus and as an input to demand planning. Unhide the “Group 3” worksheet if you completed the alignment matrix.
    2. For each grouping area, review the results to determine underperforming areas. Use this information to prioritize your application root cause analysis and demand planning. Use the key on the following slide to guide your analysis.
    3. Analysis guidance:
      1. Start with the quartile grouping to find areas scoring in Remediate or Critical Need and focus follow-up actions on these areas.
      2. Use the lens/category heat map to determine which lenses are underperforming. Use this to then look up the individual app scores supporting that group to identify application issues.
      3. Use the “Application Comparison” worksheet to select and compare applications for the group to make your review and comparison easier.
      4. Work with teams in the group to provide root cause analysis for low scores.
      5. Build a plan to address any apps not supported by IT.
    InputOutput
    • Application list
    • Application to Group mapping
    • Rationalization scores
    • Awareness of application support for each grouping

    Materials

    Participants
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Business Owners
    • Applications Lead
    • Any Applications Team Members

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    Interpreting your APM Snapshot

    The image contains a screenshot of the APM Snapshot with guides on how to interpret it.

    4.1 APM worksheet data journey map

    The image contains a screenshot of the AMP worksheet data journey map.

    Review your APM rationalization results

    The image contains a screenshot of examples of applications that support APM.

    4.2 Review your APM Foundations results

    Estimated time: 1-2 hours

    The APM Foundations Results dashboard (“App Rationalization Results” worksheet) provides a detailed summary of your relative app scoring to serve as input to demand planning.

    1. For each grouping, review the results to determine underperforming app support. Use this information to prioritize your application root cause analysis using the individual criteria scores on the “Rationalization Inputs” worksheet.
    2. Use guidance on the following example slides to understand each area of the results.
    3. Any applications marked as N/A for evaluation will display N/A on the results worksheet and will not be displayed in the chart. You can still enter dispositions.
    4. Use the column filters to compare a subset of applications or use the “App Comparison” worksheet to maintain an ongoing view by grouping, redundancy, or category.
    5. Any applications marked as N/A for evaluation will display N/A on the results worksheet and will not be displayed in the chart. You can still enter dispositions.
    InputOutput
    • Application list
    • Rationalization scores
    • Application awareness
    MaterialsParticipants
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Business Owners
    • Applications Lead
    • Any Applications Team Members

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    4.2 APM worksheet data journey map

    The image contains a screenshot of the AMP worksheet data journey map.

    Interpreting your APM Foundations results

    The image contains a screenshot of the APM Foundations results.

    Interpreting your APM Foundations chart

    The image contains a screenshot of the APM Foundations chart.

    Modernize your applications

    The image contains a screenshot of examples of applications that support APM.

    Apply Info-Tech’s 6 R’s Rationalization Disposition Model

    The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's 6 R's Rationalization Disposition Model.

    Disposition

    Description

    Reward

    Prioritize new features or enhancement requests and openly welcome the expansion of these applications as new requests are presented.

    Refresh

    Address the poor end-user satisfaction with a prioritized project. Consult with users to determine if UX issues require improvement to address satisfaction.

    Refocus

    Determine the root cause of the low value. Refocus, retrain, or refresh the UX to improve value. If there is no value found, aim to "keep the lights on" until the app can be decommissioned.

    Replace

    Replace or rebuild the application as technical and user issues are putting important business capabilities at risk. Decommission application alongside replacement.

    Remediate

    Address the poor technical health or risk with a prioritized project. Further consult with development and technical teams to determine if migration or refactoring is suited to address the technical issue.

    Retire

    Cancel any requested features and enhancements. Schedule the proper decommission and transfer end users to a new or alternative system if necessary.

    TCO, compared relatively to business value, helps determine the practicality of a disposition and the urgency of any call to action. Application alignment is factored in when assessing redundancies and has a separate set of dispositions.

    4.3 Determine dispositions

    Estimated time: 1-4 hours

    1. The Recommended Disposition and Priority fields are prepopulated from your scoring thresholds and options on the “Disposition Options” worksheet. You can update any individual application disposition or priority using the drop-down menu and it will populate your selection on the “Roadmap” worksheet.
    2. Question if that disposition is appropriate. Be sure to consider:
      1. TCO – cost should come into play for any decisions.
      2. Alignment to strategic goals set for the overarching organizational, IT, technology (infrastructure), or application portfolio.
      3. Existing organizational priorities or funded initiatives impacting the app.
    3. Some dispositions may imply a call to action, new project, or initiative. Ideate and/or discuss with the team any potential initiatives. You can use different dispositions and priorities on the “App Rationalization Results” and “Roadmap” worksheets.
    4. Note: Modify the list of dispositions on the “Disposition Options” worksheet as appropriate for your rationalization initiative. Any modifications to the Disposition column will be automatically updated in the “App Rationalization Results” and “Roadmap” worksheets.
    InputOutput
    • Rationalization results
    • Assigned dispositions for applications
    MaterialsParticipants
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Business Owners
    • Applications Lead
    • Any Applications Team Members

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    4.3 APM worksheet data journey map

    The image contains a screenshot of the worksheet data journey map.

    Redundancies require a different analysis and set of dispositions

    Solving application redundancy is a lot more complicated than simply keeping one application and eliminating the others.

    First, you need to understand the extent of the redundancy. The applications may support the same capability, but do they offer the same functions? Determine which apps offer which functions within a capability. This means you cannot accurately arrive at a disposition until you have evaluated all applications.

    Next, you need to isolate the preferred system. This is completed by comparing the same data points collected for rationalization and the application alignment analysis. Cost and coverage of all necessary functions become the more important factors in this decision-making process.

    Lastly, for the non-preferred redundant applications you need to determine: What will you do with the users? What will you do with the data? And what can you do with the functionality (can the actual coding be merged onto a common platform)?

    Disposition

    Description & Additional Analysis

    Call to Action (Priority)

    Keep & Absorb

    Higher value, health satisfaction, and cost than alternatives

    These are the preferred apps to be kept. However, additional efforts are still required to migrate new users and data and potentially configure the app to new processes.

    Application or Process Initiative

    (Moderate)

    Shift & Retire

    Lower value, health satisfaction, and cost than alternatives

    These apps will be decommissioned alongside efforts to migrate users and data to the preferred system.

    *Confirm there are no unique and necessary features.

    Process Initiative & Decommission

    (Moderate)

    Merge

    Lower value, health satisfaction, and cost than alternatives but still has some necessary unique features

    These apps will be merged with the preferred system onto a common platform.

    *Determine the unique and necessary features.

    *Determine if the multiple applications are compatible for consolidation.

    Application Initiative

    (Moderate)

    Compare groups of applications

    The image contains a screenshot of examples of applications that support APM.

    4.4 Assess redundancies (optional)

    Estimated rime: 1 hour per group

    This exercise is best performed after aligning business capabilities to applications across the portfolio and identifying your areas of redundancy. At this stage, this is still an information collection exercise, and it will not yield a consolidation-based disposition until applied to all relevant applications. Lastly, this exercise may still be at too high a level to outline the full details of redundancy, but it is still vital information to collect and a starting point to determine which areas require more concentrated analysis.

    1. Determine which areas of redundancy or comparisons are desired. Duplicate the “App Comparison” worksheet for each grouping or comparison.
    2. Extend the comparison to better identify redundancy.
      1. For each area of redundancy, identify the high-level features. Aim to limit the features to ten, grouping smaller features if necessary. SoftwareReviews can be a resource for identifying common features.
      2. Label features using the MoSCoW model: must have, should have, could have, will not have.
      3. For each application, identify which features they support. You can use the grouping alignment matrix as a template for feature alignment comparison. Duplicate the worksheet, unlock it, and replace the grouping cell references with your list of features.
    Input Output
    • Areas of redundancy
    • Familiarity with features for applications within this subset
    • Feature-level review of application redundancy
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard and markers
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Business Owners
    • Applications Lead
    • Any Applications Team Members

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    4.4 Assess redundancies (optional)

    Account Management

    Call Management

    Order/Transaction Processing

    Contract Management

    Lead/Opportunity Management

    Forecasting/Planning

    Customer Surveying

    Email Synchronization

    M M M M S S C W

    CRM 1

    CRM 2

    CRM 3

    4.5 Determine dispositions for redundant applications (optional)

    Estimated time: 1 hour per group

    1. Based on the feature-level assessment, determine if you can omit applications if they don’t truly overlap with other applications.
    2. Make a copy of the “App Comparison” worksheet and select the applications you want to compare based on your functional analysis.
    3. Determine the preferred application(s). Use the diagram to inform your decision. This may be the application closest to the top right (strong health and value). However, less expensive options or any options that provide a more complete set of features may be preferable.
    4. Open the “App Rationalization Results” worksheet. Update your disposition for each application.
    5. Use these updated dispositions to determine a call to action, new project, or initiative. Ideate and/or discuss with the team any potential initiatives. Update your roadmap with these initiatives in the next step.
    InputOutput
    • Feature-level review of application redundancy
    • Redundancy comparison
    • Assigned dispositions for redundant applications
    MaterialsParticipants
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Business Owners
    • Applications Lead
    • Any Applications Team Members

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    Compare application groups

    Group comparison can be used for more than just redundant/overlapping applications.

    The image contains a screenshot of images that demonstrate comparing application groups.

    Roadmaps are used for different purposes

    Roadmaps are used for different communication purposes and at varying points in your application delivery practice. Some use a roadmap to showcase strategy and act as a feedback mechanism that allows stakeholders to validate any changes (process 1). Others may use it to illustrate and communicate approved and granular elements of a change to an application to inform appropriate stakeholders of what to anticipate (process 2).

    Select Dispositions & Identify New Initiatives

    Add to Roadmap

    Validate Direction

    Plan Project

    Execute Project

    Select Dispositions & Identify New Initiatives

    • Project Proposal
    • Feasibility/ Estimation
    • Impact Assessment
    • Business Case
    • Initial Design

    Approve Project

    Add to Roadmap

    Execute Project

    The steps between selecting a disposition and executing on any resulting project will vary based on the organization’s project intake standards (or lack thereof).

    This blueprint focuses on building a strategic portfolio roadmap prior to any in-depth assessments related to initiative/project intake, approval, and prioritization. For in-depth support related to intake, approval, prioritization, or planning, review the following resources.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Deliver on your Digital Product Vision blueprint. The image contains a screenshot of the Deliver Digital Products at Scale blueprint.

    Determine what makes it onto the roadmap

    A roadmap should not be limited to what is approved or committed to. A roadmap should be used to present the items that need to happen and begin the discussion of how or if this can be put into place. However, not every idea should make the cut and end up in front of key stakeholders.

    The image contains a screenshot of steps to be taken to determine what makes it onto the roadmap.

    4.6 Prioritize initiatives

    Estimated time: 1-4 hours

    1. This is a high-level assessment to provide a sense of feasibility, practicality, and priority as well as an estimated timeline of a given initiative. Do not get lost in granular estimations. Use this as an input to your demand planning process.
    2. Enter the specific name or type of initiative.
      1. Process Initiative: Any project or effort focused on process improvements without technical modification to an app (e.g. user migration, change in SLA, new training program). Write the application and initiative name on a blue sticky note.
      2. App Initiative: Any project or effort involving technical modification to an app (e.g. refactoring, platform migration, feature addition or upgrade). Write the application and initiative name on a yellow sticky note.
      3. Decommission Initiative: Any project and related efforts to remove an app (e.g. migrating data, removal from server). Write the application and initiative name on a red sticky note.
    3. Prioritize the initiative to aid in demand planning. This is prepopulated from your selected application disposition, but you can set a different priority for the initiative here.
    4. Select the Initiative Phase in the timeline to show the intended schedule and sequencing of the initiative.
    Input Output
    • Assigned dispositions
    • Rationalization results
    • Prioritized initiatives
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard and markers
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Delivery Leads
    • Applications Lead
    • Any Applications Team Members

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    4.6 APM worksheet data journey map

    The image contains a screenshot of the worksheet data journey map.

    Populate roadmap example

    The image contains an example of the populate roadmap.

    Create a recurring update plan

    • Application inventories become stale before you know it. Build steps in your procurement process to capture the appropriate information on new applications. Also, build in checkpoints to revisit your inventory regularly to assess the accuracy of inventory data.
    • Rationalization is not one and done; it must occur with an appropriate cadence.
      • Business priorities change, which will impact the current and future value of your apps.
      • Now more than ever, user expectations evolve rapidly.
      • Application sprawl likely won’t stop, so neither will shadow IT and redundancies.
      • Obsolescence, growing technical debt, changing security threats, or shifting technology strategies are all inevitable, as is the gradual decline of an app’s health or technical fit.
    • An application’s disposition changes quicker than you think, and rationalization requires a structured cadence. You need to plan to minimize the need for repeated efforts. Conversely, many use preceding iterations to increase the analysis (e.g. more thorough TCO projections or more granular capability-application alignment).
    • Portfolio roadmaps require a cadence for both updates and presentations to stakeholders. Updates are often completed semiannually or quarterly to gauge the business adjustments that affect the timeline of the domain-specific applications. The presentation of a roadmap should be completed alongside meetings or gatherings of key decision makers.
    • M&A or other restructuring events will prompt the need to address all the above.

    The image contains a screenshot of chart to help determine frequency of updating your roadmap.

    Build your APM maturity by taking the right steps at the right time

    The image contains a diagram to demonstrate the steps taken to build APM maturity.

    Info-Tech’s Build an Application Rationalization Framework provides additional TCO and value tools to help build out your portfolio strategy.

    APM is an iterative and evergreen process

    APM provides oversight and awareness of your application portfolio’s performance and support for your business operations and value delivery to all users and customers.

    Determine scope and categories Build your list of applications and capabilities Score each application based on your values Determine outcomes based on app scoring and support for capabilities

    1. Lay Your Foundations

    • 1.1 Assess the state of your current application portfolio
    • 1.2 Determine narrative
    • 1.3 Define goals and metrics
    • 1.4 Define application categories
    • 1.5 Determine APM steps and roles (SIPOC)

    2. Improve Your Inventory

    • 2.1 Populate your inventory
    • 2.2 Align to business capabilities

    3. Rationalize Your Apps

    • 3.1 Assess business value
    • 3.2 Assess technical health
    • 3.3 Assess end-user perspective
    • 3.4 Assess total cost of ownership

    4. Populate Your Roadmap

    • 4.1 Review APM Snapshot results
    • 4.2 Review APM Foundations results
    • 4.3 Determine dispositions
    • 4.4 Assess redundancies (Optional)
    • 4.5 Determine dispositions for redundant applications (Optional)
    • 4.6 Prioritize initiatives
    • 4.7 Ongoing APM cadence

    Repeat according to APM cadence and application changes

    4.7 Ongoing APM cadence

    Estimated time: 1-2 hours

    1. Determine how frequently you will update or present the artifacts of your APM practice: Application Inventory, Rationalization, Disposition, and Roadmap.
    2. For each artifact, determine the:
      1. Owner: Who is accountable for the artifact and the data or information within the artifact and will be responsible for or delegate the responsibility of updating or presenting the artifact to the appropriate audience?
      2. Update Cadence: How frequently will you update the artifact? Include what regularly scheduled meetings this activity will be within.
      3. Update Scope: Describe what activities will be performed to keep the artifact up to date. The goal here is to minimize the need for a full set of activities laid out within the blueprint. Optional: How will you expand the thoroughness of your analysis?
      4. Audience: Who is the audience for the artifact or assessment results?
      5. Presentation Cadence: How frequently and when will you review the artifact with the audience?
    InputOutput
    • Initial experience with APM
    • Strategic meetings schedule
    • Ongoing cadence for APM activities
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard and markers
    • APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool
    • Applications Lead
    • Any Applications Team Members

    Record the results in the APM Snapshot and Foundations Tool

    4.7 Ongoing APM cadence

    Artifact

    Owner

    Update Cadence

    Update Scope

    Audience

    Presentation Cadence

    Inventory

    Greg Dawson

    • As new applications are acquired
    • Annual review
    • Add new application data points (this is added to implementation standards)
    • Review inventory and perform a data health check
    • Validate with app’s SME
    • Whole organization
    • Always available on team site

    Rationalization Tool

    Judy Ng

    • Annual update
    • Revisit value driver weights
    • Survey end users
    • Interview support owners
    • Interview business owners
    • Update TCO based on change in operational costs; expand thoroughness of cost estimates
    • Rescore applications
    • Business owners of applications
    • IT leaders
    • Annually alongside yearly strategy meeting

    Portfolio Roadmap

    Judy Ng

    • Monthly update alongside project updates
    • Shift the timeline of the roadmap to current day 1
    • Carry over project updates and timeline changes
    • Validate with PMs and business owners
    • Steering Committee
    • Business owners of applications
    • IT leaders
    • Quarterly alongside Steering Committee meetings
    • Upon request

    Appendices

    • Additional support slides
    • Bibliography

    The APM tool provides a single source of truth and global data sharing

    The table shows where source data is used to support different aspects of APM discovery, rationalization, and modernization.

    Worksheet Data Mapping

    Application and Capability List

    Group Alignment Matrix (1-3)

    Rationalization Inputs

    Group 1-3 Results

    Application Inventory Details

    App Rationalization Results

    Roadmap

    App Redundancy Comparison

    Application and Capability List

    App list, Groupings

    App list

    App list, Groupings

    App list, Categories

    App list, Categories

    App list

    App list

    Groups 1-3 Alignment Matrix

    App to Group Tracing

    Application Categories

    Category
    drop-down

    Category

    Category

    Rationalization Inputs

    Lens Scores (weighted input to Group score)

    Lens Scores (weighted input)

    Disposition Options

    Disposition list, Priorities list, Recommended Disposition and Priority

    Lens Scores (weighted input)

    App Rationalization Results

    Disposition

    Common application inventory attributes

    Attribute Description Common Collection Method
    Name Organization’s terminology used for the application. Auto-discovery tools will provide names for the applications they reveal. However, this may not be the organizational nomenclature. You may adapt the names by leveraging pre-existing documentation and internal knowledge or by consulting business users.
    ID Unique identifiers assigned to the application (e.g. app number). Typically an identification system developed by the application portfolio manager.
    Description A brief description of the application, often referencing core capabilities. Typically completed by leveraging pre-existing documentation and internal knowledge or by consulting business users.
    Business Units A list of all business units, departments, or user groups. Consultation, surveys, or interviews with business unit representatives. However, this doesn’t always expose hidden applications. Application-capability mapping is the most effective way to determine all the business units/user groups of an app.
    Business Capabilities A list of business capabilities the application is intended to enable. Application capability mapping completed via interviews with business unit representatives.
    Criticality A high-level grading of the importance of the application to the business, typically used for support prioritization purposes (i.e. critical, high, medium, low). Typically the criticality rating is determined by a committee representing IT and business leaders.
    Ownership The individual accountable for various aspect of the application (e.g. product owner, product manager, application support, data owner); typically includes contact information and alternatives. If application ownership is an established accountability in your organization, typically consulting appropriate business stakeholders will reveal this information. Otherwise, application capability mapping can be an effective means of identifying who that owner should be.
    Application SMEs Any relevant subject matter experts who can speak to various aspects of the application (e.g. business process owners, development managers, data architects, data stewards, application architects, enterprise architects). Technical SMEs should be known within an IT department, but shadow IT apps may require interviews with the business unit. Application capability mapping will determine the identity of those key users/business process SMEs.
    Type An indication of whether the application was developed in-house, commercial off-the-shelf, or a hybrid option. Consultation, surveys, or interviews with product owners or development managers.
    Active Status An indication of whether the application is currently active, out of commission, in repair, etc. Consultation, surveys, or interviews with product owners or operation managers.

    Common application inventory attributes

    Attribute Description Common Collection Method
    Vendor Information Identification of the vendor from whom the software was procured. May include additional items such as the vendor’s contact information. Consultation with business SMEs, end users, or procurement teams, or review of vendor contracts or license agreements.
    Links to Other Documentation Pertinent information regarding the other relevant documentation of the application (e.g. SLA, vendor contracts, data use policies, disaster recovery plan). Typically includes links to documents. Consultation with product owners, service providers, or SMEs, or review of vendor contracts or license agreements.
    Number of Users The current number of users for the application. This can be based on license information but will often require some estimation. Can include additional items of quantities at different levels of access (e.g. admin, key users, power users). Consultation, surveys, or interviews with product owners or appropriate business SMEs or review of vendor contracts or license agreements. Auto-discovery tools can reveal this information.
    Software Dependencies List of other applications or operating components required to run the application. Consultation with application architects and any architectural tools or documentation. This information can begin to reveal itself through application capability mapping.
    Hardware Dependencies Identification of any hardware or infrastructure components required to run the application (i.e. databases, platform). Consultation with infrastructure or enterprise architects and any architectural tools or documentation. This information can begin to reveal itself through application capability mapping.
    Development Language Coding language used for the application. Consultation, surveys, or interviews with development managers or appropriate technical SMEs.
    Platform A framework of services that application programs rely on for standard operations. Consultation, surveys, or interviews with infrastructure or development managers.
    Lifecycle Stage Where an application is within the birth, growth, mature, end-of-life lifecycle. Consultation with business owners and technical SMEs.
    Scheduled Updates Any major or minor updates related to the application, including the release date. Consultation with business owners and vendor managers.
    Planned or In-Flight Projects Any projects related to the application, including estimated project timeline. Consultation with business owners and project managers.

    Bibliography

    ”2019 Technology & Small Business Survey.” National Small Business Association (NSBA), n.d. Accessed 1 April 2020.
    “Application Rationalization – Essential Part of the Process for Modernization and Operational Efficiency.” Flexera, 2015. Web.
    “Applications Rationalization during M&A: Standardize, Streamline, Simplify.” Deloitte Consulting, 2016. Web.
    Bowling, Alan. “Clearer Visibility of Product Roadmaps Improves IT Planning.” ComputerWeekly.com, 1 Nov. 2010. Web.
    Brown, Alex. “Calculating Business Value.” Agile 2014 Orlando, 13 July 2014. Scrum Inc. 2014. Web.
    Brown, Roger. “Defining Business Value.” Scrum Gathering San Diego 2017. Agile Coach Journal. Web.
    “Business Application Definition.” Microsoft Docs, 18 July 2012. Web.
    “Connecting Small Businesses in the US.” Deloitte Consulting, 2017. Accessed 1 April. 2020.
    Craveiro, João. “Marty meets Martin: connecting the two triads of Product Management.” Product Coalition, 18 Nov. 2017. Web.
    Curtis, Bill. “The Business Value of Application Internal Quality.” CAST, 6 April 2009. Web.
    Fleet, Neville, Joan Lasselle, and Paul Zimmerman. “Using a Balance Scorecard to Measure the Productivity and Value of Technical Documentation Organizations.” CIDM, April 2008. Web.
    Fowler, Martin. “Application Boundary.” MartinFowler.com, 11 Sept. 2003. Web.
    Harris, Michael. “Measuring the Business Value of IT.” David Consulting Group, 2007. Web.
    “How Application Rationalization Contributes to the Bottom Line.” LeanIX, 2017. Web.
    Jayanthi, Aruna. “Application Landscape Report 2014.” Capgemini, 4 March 2014. Web.
    Lankhorst, Marc., et al. “Architecture-Based IT Valuation.” Via Nova Architectura, 31 March 2010. Web.
    “Management of business application.” ServiceNow, Jan.2020. Accessed 1 April 2020.
    Mauboussin, Michael J. “The True Measures of Success.” HBR, Oct. 2012. Web.
    Neogi, Sombit., et al. “Next Generation Application Portfolio Rationalization.” TATA, 2011. Web.
    Riverbed. “Measuring the Business Impact of IT Through Application Performance.” CIO Summits, 2015. Web.
    Rouse, Margaret. “Application Rationalization.” TechTarget, March 2016. Web.
    Van Ramshorst, E.A. “Application Portfolio Management from an Enterprise Architecture Perspective.” Universiteit Utrecht, July 2013.
    “What is a Balanced Scorecard?” Intrafocus, n.d. Web.
    Whitney, Lance. “SMBs share their biggest constraints and great challenges.” Tech Republic, 6 May 2019. Web.

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    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Understanding trends and the focus of current and future AI research helps to define how AI will drive an organization’s new strategic opportunities.
    • Understanding the potential application of AI and its promise can help plan the future investments in AI-powered technologies and systems.

    Impact and Result

    Understanding AI trends and developments enables an organization’s competitive advantage.

    AI Trends 2023 Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. AI Trends 2023 – An overview of trends that will continue to drive AI innovation.

    • AI Trends Report 2023
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    AI Trends Report 2023

    The eight trends:

    1. Design for AI
    2. Event-Based Insights
    3. Synthetic Data
    4. Edge AI
    5. AI in Science and Engineering
    6. AI Reasoning
    7. Digital Twin
    8. Combinatorial Optimization
    Challenges that slowed the adoption of AI

    To overcome the challenges, enterprises adopted different strategies

    Data Readiness

    • Lack of unified systems and unified data
    • Data quality issues
    • Lack of the right data required for machine learning
    • Improve data management capabilities, including data governance and data initiatives
    • Create data catalogs
    • Document data and information architecture
    • Solve data-related problems including data quality, privacy, and ethics

    ML Operations Capabilities

    • Lack of tools, technologies, and methodologies to operationalize models created by data scientists
    • Increase availability of cloud platforms, tools, and capabilities
    • Develop and grow machine learning operations (MLOps) tools, platforms, and methodologies to enable model operationalizing and monitoring in production

    Understanding of AI Role and Its Business Value

    • Lack of understanding of AI use cases – how AI/ML can be applied to solve specific business problems
    • Lack of understanding how to define the business value of AI investments
    • Identify AI C-suite toolkits (for example, Empowering AI Leadership from the World Economic Forum, 2022)
    • Document industry use cases
    • Use frameworks and tools to define business value for AI investments

    Design for AI

    Sustainable AI system design needs to consider several aspects: the business application of the system, data, software and hardware, governance, privacy, and security.

    It is important to define from the beginning how AI will be used by and for the application to clearly articulate business value, manage expectations, and set goals for the implementation.

    Design for AI will change how we store and manage data and how we approach the use of data for development and operation of AI systems.

    An AI system design approach should cover all stages of AI lifecycle, from design to maintenance. It should also support and enable iterative development of an AI system.

    To take advantage of different tools and technologies for AI system development, deployment, and monitoring, the design of an AI system should consider software and hardware needs and design for seamless and efficient integrations of all components of the system and with other existing systems within the enterprise.

    AI in Science and Engineering

    AI helps sequence genomes to identify variants in a person’s DNA that indicate genetic disorders. It allows researchers to model and calculate complicated physics processes, to forecast the genesis of the universe’s structure, and to understand planet ecosystem to help advance the climate research. AI drives advances in drug discovery and can assist with molecule synthesis and molecular property identification.

    AI finds application in all areas of science and engineering. The role of AI in science will grow and allow scientists to innovate faster.

    AI will further contribute to scientific understanding by assisting scientists in deriving new insights, generating new ideas and connections, generalizing scientific concepts, and transferring them between areas of scientific research.

    Using synthetic data and combining physical and machine learning models and other advances of AI/ML – such as graphs, use of unstructured data (language models), and computer vision – will accelerate the use of AI in science and engineering.

    Event- and Scenario-Driven AI

    AI-driven signal-gathering systems analyze a continuous stream of data to generate insights and predictions that enable strategic decision modeling and scenario planning by providing understanding of how and what areas of business might be impacted by certain events.

    AI enables the scenario-based approach to drive insights through pattern identification in addition to familiar pattern recognition, helping to understand how events are related.

    A system with anticipatory capabilities requires an event-driven architecture that enables gathering and analyzing different types of data (text, video, images) across multiple channels (social media, transactional systems, news feeds, etc.) for event-driven and event-sequencing modeling.

    ML simulation-based training of the model using advanced techniques under the umbrella of Reinforcement Learning in conjunction with statistically robust Bayesian probabilistic framework will aid in setting up future trends in AI.

    AI Reasoning

    Most of the applications of machine learning and AI today is about predicting future behaviors based on historical data and past behaviors. We can predict what product the customer would most likely buy or the price of a house when it goes on sale.

    Most of the current algorithms use the correlation between different parameters to make a prediction, for example, the correlation between the event and the outcome can look like “When X occurs, we can predict that Y will occur.” This, however, does not translate into “Y occurred because of X.”

    The development of a causal AI that uses causal inference to reason and identify the root cause and the causal relationships between variables without mistaking correlation and causation is still in its early stages but rapidly evolving.

    Some of the algorithms that the researchers are working with are casual graph models and algorithms that are at the intersection of causal inference with decision making and reinforcement learning (Causal Artificial Intelligence Lab, 2022).

    Synthetic Data

    Synthetic data is artificially generated data that mimics the structure of real-life data. It should also have the same mathematical and statistical properties as the real-world data that it is created to replicate.

    Synthetic data is used to train machine learning models when there is not enough real data or the existing data does not meet specific needs. It allows users to remove contextual bias from data sets containing personal data, prevent privacy concerns, and ensure compliance with privacy laws and regulations.

    Another application of synthetic data is solving data-sharing challenges.

    Researchers learned that quite often synthetic data sets outperform real-world data. Recently, a team of researchers at MIT built a synthetic data set of 150,000 video clips capturing human actions and used that data set to train the model. The researchers found that “the synthetically trained models performed even better than models trained on real data for videos that have fewer background objects” (MIT News Office, 2022).

    Today, synthetic data is used in language systems, in training self-driving cars, in improving fraud detection, and in clinical research, just to name a few examples.

    Synthetic data opens the doors for innovation across all industries and applications of AI by enabling access to data for any scenario and technology and business needs.

    Digital Twins

    Digital twins (DT) are virtual replicas of physical objects, devices, people, places, processes, and systems. In Manufacturing, almost every product and manufacturing process can have a complete digital replica of itself thanks to IoT, streaming data, and cheap cloud storage.

    All this data has allowed for complex simulations of, for example, how a piece of equipment will perform over time to predict future failures before they happen, reducing costly maintenance and extending equipment lifetime.

    In addition to predictive maintenance, DT and AI technologies have enabled organizations to design and digitally test complex equipment such as aircraft engines, trains, offshore oil platforms, and wind turbines before physically manufacturing them. This helps to improve product and process quality, manufacturing efficiency, and costs. DT technology also finds applications in architecture, construction, energy, infrastructure industries, and even retail.

    Digital twins combined with the metaverse provide a collaborative and interactive environment with immersive experience and real-time physics capabilities (as an example, Siemens presented an Immersive Digital Twin of a Plant at the Collision 2022 conference).

    Future trends include enabling autonomous behavior of a DT. An advanced DT can replicate itself as it moves into several devices, hence requiring the autonomous property. Such autonomous behavior of the DT will in turn influence the growth and further advancement of AI.

    Edge AI

    A simple definition for edge AI: A combination of edge computing and artificial intelligence, it enables the deployment of AI applications in devices of the physical world, in the field, where the data is located, such as IoT devices, devices on the manufacturing floor, healthcare devices, or a self-driving car.

    Edge AI integrates AI into edge computing devices for quicker and improved data processing and smart automation.

    The main benefits of edge AI include:

    • Real-time data processing capabilities to reduce latency and enable near real-time analytics and insights.
    • Reduced cost and bandwidth requirements as there is no need to transfer data to the cloud for computing.
    • Increased data security as the data is processed locally, on the device, reducing the risk of loss of sensitive data.
    • Improved automation by training machines to perform automated tasks.

    Edge AI is already used in a variety of applications and use cases including computer vision, geospatial intelligence, object detection, drones, and health monitoring devices.

    Combinatorial Optimization

    “Combinatorial optimization is a subfield of mathematical optimization that consists of finding an optimal object from a finite set of objects” (Wikipedia, retrieved December 2022).

    Applications of combinatorial optimization include:

    • Supply chain optimization
    • Scheduling and logistics, for example, vehicle routing where the trucks are making stops for pickup and deliveries
    • Operations optimization

    Classical combinatorial optimization (CO) techniques were widely used in operations research and played a major role in earlier developments of AI.

    The introduction of deep learning algorithms in recent years allowed researchers to combine neural network and conventional optimization algorithms; for example, incorporating neural combinatorial optimization algorithms in the conventional optimization framework. Researchers confirmed that certain combinations of these frameworks and algorithms can provide significant performance improvements.

    The research in this space continues and we look forward to learning how machine learning and AI (backtracking algorithms, reinforcement learning, deep learning, graph attention networks, and others) will be used for solving challenging combinatorial and decision-making problems.

    References

    “AI Can Power Scenario Planning for Real-Time Strategic Insights.” The Wall Street Journal, CFO Journal, content by Deloitte, 7 June 2021. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Ali Fdal, Omar. “Synthetic Data: 4 Use Cases in Modern Enterprises.” DATAVERSITY, 5 May 2022. Accessed
    11 Dec. 2022.
    Andrews, Gerard. “What Is Synthetic Data?” NVIDIA, 8 June 2021. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Bareinboim, Elias. “Causal Reinforcement Learning.” Causal AI, 2020. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Bengio, Yoshua, Andrea Lodi, and Antoine Prouvost. “Machine learning for combinatorial optimization: A methodological tour d’horizon.” European Journal of Operational Research, vol. 290, no. 2, 2021, pp. 405-421, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2020.07.063. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Benjamins, Richard. “Four design principles for developing sustainable AI applications.” Telefónica S.A., 10 Sept. 2018. Accessed on 11 Dec. 2022.
    Blades, Robin. “AI Generates Hypotheses Human Scientists Have Not Thought Of.” Scientific American, 28 October 2021. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    “Combinatorial Optimization.” Wikipedia article, Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Cronholm, Stefan, and Hannes Göbel. “Design Principles for Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence.” University of Borås, Sweden, 11 Aug. 2022. Accessed on 11 Dec. 2022
    Devaux, Elise. “Types of synthetic data and 4 real-life examples.” Statice, 29 May 2022. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Emmental, Russell. “A Guide to Causal AI.” ITBriefcase, 30 March 2022. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    “Empowering AI Leadership: AI C-Suite Toolkit.” World Economic Forum, 12 Jan. 2022. Accessed 11 Dec 2022.
    Falk, Dan. “How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science.” Quanta Magazine, 11 March 2019. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Fritschle, Matthew J. “The Principles of Designing AI for Humans.” Aumcore, 17 Aug. 2018. Accessed 8 Dec. 2022.
    Garmendia, Andoni I., et al. Neural Combinatorial Optimization: a New Player in the Field.” IEEE, arXiv:2205.01356v1, 3 May 2022. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Gülen, Kerem. “AI Is Revolutionizing Every Field and Science is no Exception.” Dataconomy Media GmbH, 9 Nov. 9, 2022. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022
    Krenn, Mario, et al. “On scientific understanding with artificial intelligence.” Nature Reviews Physics, vol. 4, 11 Oct. 2022, pp. 761–769. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-022-00518-3. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. “The real promise of synthetic data.” MIT News, 16 Oct. 2020. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Lecca, Paola. “Machine Learning for Causal Inference in Biological Networks: Perspectives of This Challenge.” Frontiers, 22 Sept. 2021. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022. Mirabella, Lucia. “Digital Twin x Metaverse: real and virtual made easy.” Siemens presentation at Collision 2022 conference, Toronto, Ontario. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022. Mitchum, Rob, and Louise Lerner. “How AI could change science.” University of Chicago News, 1 Oct. 2019. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Okeke, Franklin. “The benefits of edge AI.” TechRepublic, 22 Sept. 2022, Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Perlmutter, Nathan. “Machine Learning and Combinatorial Optimization Problems.” Crater Labs, 31 July 31, 2019. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Sampson, Ovetta. “Design Principles for a New AI World.” UX Magazine, 6 Jan. 2022. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Sgaier, Sema K., Vincent Huang, and Grace Charles. “The Case for Causal AI.” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2020. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    “Synthetic Data.” Wikipedia article, Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Take, Marius, et al. “Software Design Patterns for AI-Systems.” EMISA Workshop 2021, CEUR-WS.org, Proceedings 30. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Toews, Rob. “Synthetic Data Is About To Transform Artificial Intelligence.” Forbes, 12 June 2022. Accessed
    11 Dec. 2022.
    Zewe, Adam. “In machine learning, synthetic data can offer real performance improvements.” MIT News Office, 3 Nov. 2022. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.
    Zhang, Junzhe, and Elias Bareinboim. “Can Humans Be out of the Loop?” Technical Report, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, NY, June 2022. Accessed 11 Dec. 2022.

    Contributors

    Irina Sedenko Anu Ganesh Amir Feizpour David Glazer Delina Ivanova

    Irina Sedenko

    Advisory Director

    Info-Tech

    Anu Ganesh

    Technical Counselor

    Info-Tech

    Amir Feizpour

    Co-Founder & CEO

    Aggregate Intellect Inc.

    David Glazer

    VP of Analytics

    Kroll

    Delina Ivanova

    Associate Director, Data & Analytics

    HelloFresh

    Usman Lakhani

    DevOps

    WeCloudData

    Achieve IT Spend & Staffing Transparency

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    • Parent Category Name: Cost & Budget Management
    • Parent Category Link: /cost-and-budget-management
    • IT spend has increased in volume and complexity, but how IT spend decisions are made has not kept pace.
    • In most organizations, technology has evolved faster than the business’ understanding of what it is, how it works, and what it can do for them.
    • How traditional financial accounting methods are applied to IT expenditure don’t align well to modern IT realities.
    • IT is often directed to make cuts when cost optimization and targeted investment are what’s really needed to sustain and grow the organization in the long term.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Meaningful conversations about IT spend don’t happen nearly as frequently as they should. When they do happen, they are often inhibited by a lack of IT financial management (ITFM) maturity combined with the absence of a shared vocabulary between IT, the CFO, and other business function leaders.
    • Supporting data about actual technology spend taking place that would inform decision making is often scattered and incomplete.
    • Creating transparency in your IT financial data is essential to powering collaborative and informed technology spend decisions.

    Impact and Result

    • Understand the uses and benefits of making your IT spend more transparent.
    • Discover and organize your IT financial data.
    • Map your organization’s total technology spend against four IT stakeholder views: CFO, CIO, CXO, and CEO.
    • Gain vocabulary and facts that will help you tell the true story of IT spend.

    Members may also be interested in Info-Tech's IT Spend & Staffing Benchmarking Service.

    Achieve IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Achieve IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Deck – A detailed, do-it-yourself framework and process for clearly mapping your organization’s total technology spend.

    This deck mirrors Info-Tech’s own internal methods for delivering its IT Spend & Staffing Benchmarking Service in a do-it-yourself format. Based on Info-Tech’s proven ITFM Cost Model, it includes an IT spend mapping readiness assessment, expert advice for sourcing and organizing your financial data, a methodology for mapping IT staff and vendor spend according to four key stakeholder views (CFO, CIO, CXO, and CEO), and guidance on how to analyze and share your results.

    • Achieve IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Storyboard

    2. IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook – A structured Excel tool that allows you to allocate your IT spend across four key stakeholder views and generate high-impact visualizations.

    This workbook offers a step-by-step approach for mapping and visualizing your organization’s true IT spend.

    • IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook

    3. IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Executive Presentation Template – A PowerPoint template that helps you summarize and showcase key results from your IT spend transparency exercise.

    This presentation template offers a recommended structure for introducing key executive stakeholders to your organization’s true IT spending behavior and IT financial management as a whole.

    • IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Executive Presentation Template

    Infographic

    Further reading

    Achieve IT Spend & Staffing Transparency

    Lay a foundation for meaningful conversations with the business.

    Analyst Perspective

    Take the first step in your IT spend journey.

    Talking about money is hard. Talking to the CEO, CFO, and other business leaders about money is even harder, especially if IT is seen as just a cost center, is not understood by stakeholders, or is simply taken for granted. In times of economic hardship, already lean IT operations are tasked with becoming even leaner.

    When there's little fat to trim, making IT spend decisions without understanding the spend's origin, location, extent, and purpose can lead to mistakes that weaken, not strengthen, the organization.

    The first step in optimizing IT spend decisions is setting a baseline. This means having a comprehensive and transparent view of all technology spend, organization-wide. This baseline is the only way to have meaningful, data-driven conversations with stakeholders and approvers around what IT delivers to the business and the implications of making changes to IT funding.

    Before stepping forward in your IT financial management journey, know exactly where you're standing today.

    Jennifer Perrier, Principal Research Director, ITFM Practice

    Jennifer Perrier
    Principal Research Director, ITFM Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge Common Obstacles Info-Tech's Approach
    IT spend has increased in volume and complexity, but how IT spend decisions are made has not kept pace:
    • Technology has evolved faster than the business' understanding of what it is, how it works, and what it can do for them.
    • How traditional financial accounting methods are applied doesn't align well to modern IT realities.
    • IT is directed to make cuts when cost optimization and targeted investment are what's really needed to sustain and grow the organization in the long-term.
    Meaningful conversations about IT spend don't happen nearly as much as they should. This is often due to:
    • A lack of maturity in how ITFM (IT financial management) is executed within IT and across the organization as a whole.
    • The absence of a shared vocabulary between IT, the CFO, and other business function leaders.
    • Scattered and incomplete data about the actual technology spend taking place in the organization.
    Lay a foundation for meaningful conversations and informed decision-making around IT spend.
    • Understand the uses and benefits of making your IT spend more transparent.
    • Discover and organize your IT financial data.
    • Map your organization's total technology spend against four IT stakeholder views: CFO, CIO, CXO, and CEO.
    • Gain both vocabulary and facts that will help you tell the true story of IT spend.

    Info-Tech Insight
    Create transparency in your IT financial data to power both collaborative and informed technology spend decisions.

    IT spend has grown alongside IT complexity

    IT spend has grown alongside IT complexity

    Growth creates change ... and challenges

    IT has become more integral to business operations and achievement of strategic goals, driving complexity in how IT funds are allocated and managed.

    How IT funds are spent has changed
    Value demonstration is two-pronged. The first is return on performance investment, focused on formal and objective goals, metrics, and KPIs. The second is stakeholder satisfaction, a more subjective measure driven by IT-business alignment and relationship. IT leaders must do both well to prove and promote IT's value.
    Funding decision cadence has sped up
    Many organizations have moved from three- to five-year strategic planning cycles to one-year planning horizons or less, most noticeably since the 2008/2009 recession. Not only has the pace of technological change accelerated, but so too has volatility in the broader business and economic environments, forcing rapid response.
    Justification rigor around IT spend has increased
    The need for formal business cases, proposals, and participation in formal governance processes has increased, as has demand for financial transparency. With many IT departments still reporting into the CFO, there's no getting around it - today's IT leaders need to possess financial management savvy.
    Clearly showing business value has become priority
    IT spend has moved from the purchase of discrete hardware and software tools traditionally associated with IT to the need to address larger-scale issues around interoperability, integration, and virtualized cloud solutions. Today's focus is more on big-picture architecture than on day-to-day operations.

    ITFM capabilities haven't grown with IT spend

    IT still needs to prove itself.

    Increased integration with the core business has made it a priority for the head of IT to be well-versed in business language and practice, specifically in the areas of measurement and financial management.

    However, IT staff across all industries aren't very confident in how well IT is doing in managing its finances via three core processes:

    • Accounting of costs and budgets.
    • Optimizing costs to gain the best return on investment.
    • Demonstrating IT's value to the business.

    Recent data from 4,137 respondents to Info-Tech's IT Management & Governance Diagnostic shows that while most IT staff feel that these three financial management processes are important, notably fewer feel that IT management is effective at executing them.

    IT leadership's capabilities around fundamental cost data capture appear to be lagging, not to mention the essential value-added capabilities around optimizing costs and showing how IT contributes to business value.

    Graph of Cost and Budget Management

    Graph of Cost Optimization

    Questions for support transition

    Source: IT Management & Governance Diagnostic, Info-Tech Research Group, 2022.

    Take the perspective of key IT stakeholders as a first step in ITFM capability improvement

    Other business unit leaders need to deliver on their own specific and unique accountabilities. Create true IT spend transparency by accounting for these multiple perspectives.

    Exactly how is IT spending all that money we give them?
    Many IT costs, like back-end infrastructure and apps maintenance, can be invisible to the business.

    Why doesn't my department get more support from IT?
    Some business needs won't align with spend priorities, while others seem to take more than their fair share.

    Does the amount we spend on each IT service make sense?
    IT will get little done or fall short of meeting service level requirements without appropriate funding.

    I know what IT costs us, but what is it really worth?
    Questions about value arise as IT investment and spend increase. How to answer these questions is critical.

    At the end of the day, telling IT's spend story to the business is a significant challenge if you don't understand your audience, have a shared vocabulary, or use a repeatable framework.

    Mapping your IT spend against a reusable framework helps generate transparency

    A framework makes transparency possible by simplifying methods, creating common language, and reducing noise.

    However, the best methodological framework won't work if the materials and information plugged into it are weak. With IT spend, the materials and information are your staff and your vendor financial data. To achieve true transparency, inputs must have the following three characteristics:

    Availability Reliability Usability
    The data and information are up-to-date and accessible when needed. The data and information are accurate, complete, and verifiable. The data and information are clearly defined, consistently and predictably organized, consumable, and meaningful for decision-making.

    A framework is an organizing principle. When it comes to better understanding your IT spend, the things being organized by a framework are your method and your data.

    If your IT spend information is transparent, you have an excellent foundation for having the right conversations with the right people in order to make strategically impactful decisions.

    Info-Tech's approach enables meaningful dialogue with stakeholders about IT spend

    View of meaningful dialogue with stakeholders about IT spend

    Investing time in preparing and mapping your IT spend data enables better IT governance

    While other IT spend transparency methods exist, Info-Tech's is designed to be straightforward and tactical.

    Info-Tech method for IT spend transparency

    Put your data to work instead of being put to work by your data.

    Introducing Info-Tech's methodology for creating transparency on technology spend

    1. Know your objectives 2. Gather required data 3. Map your IT staff spend 4. Map your IT vendor spend 5. Identify implications for IT
    Phase Steps
    1. Review your business context
    2. Set IT staff and vendor spend transparency objectives
    3. Assess effort and readiness
    1. Collect IT staff spend data
    2. Collect IT vendor spend data
    3. Define industry-specific CXO Business View categories
    1. Categorize IT staff spend in each of the four views
    2. Validate
    1. Categorize IT vendor spend in each of the four views
    2. Validate
    1. Analyze your findings
    2. Craft your key messages
    3. Create an executive presentation
    Phase Outcomes Goals and scope for your IT spend and staffing transparency effort. Information and data required to perform the IT staff and vendor spend transparency initiative. A mapping of the allocation of IT staff spend across the four views of the Info-Tech ITFM Cost Model. A mapping of the allocation of IT vendor spend across the four views of the Info-Tech ITFM Cost Model. An analysis of your results and a presentation to aid your communication of findings with stakeholders.

    Insight Summary

    Overarching insight
    Take the perspective of key stakeholders and lay out your organization's complete IT spend footprint in terms they understand to enable meaningful conversations and start evolving your IT financial management capability.

    Phase 1 insight
    Your IT spend transparency efforts are only useful if you actually do something with the outcomes of those efforts. Be clear about where you want your IT transparency journey to take you.

    Phase 2 insight
    Your IT spend transparency efforts are only as good as the quality of your inputs. Take the time to properly source, clean, and organize your data.

    Phase 3 insight
    Map your IT staff spend data first. It involves work but is relatively straightforward. Practice your mapping approach here and carry forward your lessons learned.

    Phase 4 insight
    The importance of good, usable data will become apparent when mapping your IT vendor spend. Apply consistent and meaningful vendor labels to enable true aggregation and insight.

    Phase 5 insight
    Communicating your final IT spend transparency mapping with executive stakeholders is your opportunity to debut IT financial management as not just an IT issue but an organization-wide concern.

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals.

    Use this tool in Phases 1-4

    IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook

    Input your IT staff and vendor spend data to generate visual outputs for analysis and presentation in your communications.

    Key deliverable:

    IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Executive Presentation

    Create a showcase for your newly-transparent IT staff and vendor spend data and present it to key business stakeholders.

    Use this tool in Phase 5

    IT and business blueprint benefits

    IT Benefits Business Benefits
    • Gain insight into exactly where you're spending IT funds on hardware, software, service providers, and the workforce.
    • Understand how much it's costing IT to deliver specific IT services.
    • Illustrate differences in business consumption of IT spend.
    • Learn the ratio of spend allocated to innovation vs. growth vs. keeping the lights on (KTLO).
    • Develop a series of core IT spend metrics including IT spend as a percent of revenue, IT spend per organization employee, and IT spend per IT staff member.
    • Create a complete IT spend baseline to serve as a foundation for future benchmarking, cost optimization, and other forms of IT financial analysis.
    • Understand the relative allocation of IT spend across capital vs. operational expenditure.
    • See the degree to which IT differentially supports and enables organizational goals, strategies, and functions.
    • Have better data for informing the organization's IT spend allocation and prioritization decisions.
    • Gain better visibility into real-life IT spending behaviors, cadences, and patterns.
    • Identify potential areas of spend waste as well as underinvestment.
    • Understand the true value that IT brings to the business.

    Measure the value of this blueprint

    You will know that your IT spend and staffing transparency effort is succeeding when:

    • Your understanding of where technology funds are really being allocated is comprehensive.
    • You're having active and meaningful dialogue with key stakeholders about IT spend issues.
    • IT spend transparency is a permanent part of your IT financial management toolkit.

    In phase 1 of this blueprint, we will help you identify initiatives where you can leverage the outcomes of your IT spend and staffing transparency effort.

    In phases 2, 3, and 4, we will guide you through the process of mapping your IT staff and vendor spend data so you can generate your own IT spend metrics based on reliable sources and verifiable facts.

    Win #1: Knowing how to reliably source the financial data you need to make decisions.

    Win #2: Getting your IT spend data in an organized format that you can actually analyze.

    Win #3: Having a framework that puts IT spend in a language stakeholders understand.

    Win #4: Gaining a practical starting point to mature ITFM practices like cost optimization.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit Guided Implementation Workshop Consulting
    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful." "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track." "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place." "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

    Guided Implementation

    Info-Tech recommends the following calls in your Guided Implementation.

    Phase 1: Know your objectives Phase 2: Gather required data Phase 3: Map your IT staff spend Phase 4: Map your IT vendor spend Phase 5: Identify implications for IT
    Call #1: Discuss your IT spend and staffing transparency objectives and readiness. Call #2: Review spend and staffing data sources and identify data organization and cleanup needs. Call #3: Review your mapped IT staff spend and resolve lingering challenges. Call #4: Review your mapped IT vendor spend and resolve lingering challenges. Call #5: Analyze your mapping outputs for opportunities and devise next steps.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is between four to six calls over the course of two to three months.

    Want even more help with your IT spend transparency effort?

    Let us fast-track your IT spend journey.

    The path to IT financial management maturity starts with knowing exactly where your money is going. To streamline this effort, Info-Tech offers an IT Spend & Staffing Benchmarking service that provides full transparency into where your money is going without any heavy lifting on your part.

    This unique service features:

    • A client-proven approach to meet your IT spend transparency goals.
    • Vendor and staff spend mapping that reveals business consumption of IT.
    • Industry benchmarking to compare your spending and staffing to that of your peers.
    • Results in a fraction of the time with much less effort than going it alone.
    • Expert review of results and ongoing discussions with Info-Tech analysts.

    If you'd like Info-Tech to pave the way to IT spend transparency, contact your account manager for more information - we're happy to talk anytime.

    Phase 1

    Know Your Objectives

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Establish IT spend and staffing transparency uses and objectives
    • Assess your readiness to tackle IT spend and staffing transparency

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Head of IT
    • IT financial lead
    • Other members of IT management

    Phase 1: Know your objectives

    Envision what transparency can do.

    You're at the very beginning of your IT spend transparency journey. In this phase you will:

    • Set your objectives for making your IT spend and staffing transparent.
    • Assess your readiness to tackle the exercise and gauge how much work you'll need to do in order to do it well.

    "I've heard this a lot lately from clients: 'I've got my hands on this data, but it's not structured in a way that will allow me to make any decisions about it. I have these journal entries and they have some accounting codes, GL descriptors, cost objects, and some vendors, but it's not enough detail to make any decisions about my services, my applications, my asset spend.'"
    - Angie Reynolds, Principal Research Director, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group

    Transparency positively enables both business outcomes and the practice of business ethics

    However, transparency's real superpower is in how it provides fact-based context.

    • More accurate and relevant data for decision-making.
    • Better managed and more impactful financial outcomes.
    • Increased inclusion of people in the decisions that affect them.
    • Clearer accountabilities for organizational efficiency and effectiveness goals.
    • Concrete proof that business priorities and decisions are being acted on and implemented.
    • Greater trust and respect between IT and the business.
    • Demonstration of integrity in how funds are being used.

    IT spend transparency efforts are only useful if you actually do something with the outputs

    Identify in advance how you plan to leverage IT spend transparency outcomes.

    CFO expense view

    • Demonstrate actual IT costs at the right level of granularity.
    • Update/change the categories finance uses to track IT spend.
    • Adjust the expected CapEx/OpEx ratio.

    CXO business view

    • Calculate consumption of IT resources by department.
    • Implement a showback/chargeback mechanism.
    • Change the funding conversation about proposed IT projects.

    CIO service view

    • Calculate the total cost to deliver a specific IT service.
    • Adjust the IT service spend-to-value ratio as per business priorities.
    • Rightsize IT service levels to reflect true value to the business.

    CEO innovation view

    • Formalize the organization's position on use of cloud/outsourcing.
    • Reduce the portion of spend dedicated to "keeping the lights on."
    • Develop a plan for boosting commitment to innovation investment.

    When determining your end objectives, think about the real questions IT is being asked by the business and how IT spend transparency will help you answer them.

    CFO: Financial accounting perspective

    IT spend used to be looked at from a strictly financial accounting perspective - this is the view of the CFO and the finance department. Their question, "exactly how is IT spending all that money we give them," is really about how money is distributed across different asset classes. This question breaks down into other questions that IT leaders needs to ask themselves in order to provide answers:

    • How should I classify my IT costs? What are the standard categories you need to have that are meaningful to folks crunching the corporate numbers? If you're too detailed, it won't make sense to them. If you pick outmoded categories, you'll have to adjust in the future as IT evolves, which makes tracking year-over-year spend patterns harder.
    • What information should I include in my plans and reports? This is about two things. One is about communicating with the finance department in language that reduces back-and-forth and eliminates misinterpretation. The other is about aligning with the categories the finance department uses to track financial data in the general ledger.
    • How do I justify current spend? This is about clarity and transparency. Specifically itemizing spend into categories that are meaningful for your audience does a lot of justification work for you since you don't have to re-explain what everything means.
    • How do I justify a budget increase? In a declining economy, this question may not be appropriate. However, establishing a baseline puts you in a better position to discuss spend requirements based on past performance and to focus the conversation.

    Exactly how is IT spending all that money we give them?

    Example
    Asset Class % IT Spend
    Workforce 42.72%
    Software - Cloud 9.26%
    Software - On Prem 13.61%
    Hardware - Cloud 0.59%
    Hardware - On Prem 15.68%
    Contract Services 18.14%
    Info-Tech IT Spend & Staffing Studies, 2022.

    CIO: IT operations management perspective

    As the CIO role was adopted, IT spend was viewed from the IT operations management perspective. Optimizing the IT delivery model is a critical step to reducing time to provision services. For the IT leader, the questions they need to ask themselves are:

    • What's the impact of cloud adoption on speed of delivery? Leveraging a SaaS solution can reduce time to deployment as well as increase your ability to scale; however, integration with other functionality will still be a challenge that will incur costs.
    • Where can I improve spend efficiency? This is about optimizing spend in your IT delivery model. What service levels does the business require and what's the most cost-effective way to meet those levels without incurring significant technical debt?
    • Is my support model optimized? By reviewing where support staff are focused and which services are using most of your resources, you can investigate underlying drivers of your staffing requirements. If staff costs in support of a business function are high, perhaps the portfolio of applications needs to be reviewed.
    • How does our spend compare to others? Benchmarking against peers is a useful input, but reflects common practice, not best practice. For example, if you need to invest in IT security, your entire industry is lagging on this front, and you happen to be doing slightly better than most, then bringing forth this benchmark won't help you make the case. Starting with year-over-year internal benchmarking is essential - establish your categories, establish your baseline, and track it consistently.

    Does the amount we spend on each IT service make sense?

    Example
    Service Area % IT Spend
    App Development 9.06%
    App Maintenance 30.36%
    Hosting/Network 25.39%
    End User 18.59%
    Data & BI 3.58%
    Security & Risk 5.21%
    IT Management 7.82%
    Info-Tech IT Spend & Staffing Studies, 2022.

    CXO: Business unit perspective

    As business requests have increased, so too has the importance of the business unit perspective. Each business function has a unique mandate to fulfill in the organization and also competes with other business functions for IT resources. By understanding business consumption of IT, organizations can bring transparency and drive a different dialog with their business partners. Every IT leader should find out the answers to these questions:

    • Which business units consume the most IT resources? By understanding consumption of IT by business function, IT organizations can clearly articulate which business units are getting the highest share of IT resources. This will bring much needed clarity when it comes to IT spend prioritization and investment.
    • Which business units are underserved by IT? By providing full transparency into where all IT spend is consumed, organizations can determine if certain business functions may need increased attention in an upcoming budget cycle. Knowing which levers to pull is critical in aligning IT activities with delivering business value.
    • How do I best communicate spend data internally? Different audiences need information presented to them differently. This is not just about the language - it's also about the frequency, format, and channel you use. Ask your audiences directly what methods of communication stand the best chance of you being seen and heard.
    • Where do I need better business sponsorship for IT projects? If a lot of IT spend is going toward one or two business units, the leaders of those units need to be active sponsors of IT projects and associated spend that will benefit all users.

    Why doesn't my business unit get more support from IT?

    Example
    Business Function % IT Spend
    HR Department 6.16%
    Finance Department 15.15%
    IT Department 10.69%
    Business Function 1 23.80%
    Business Function 2 10.20%
    Business Function 3 6.80%
    Business Function 4 27.20%
    Source: Info-Tech IT Spend & Staffing Studies, 2022.

    CEO: Strategic vs. operations perspective

    With a business view now available, evaluating IT spend from a strategic standpoint is critical. Simply put, how much is being spent keeping the lights on (KTLO) in the organization versus supporting business or organizational growth versus net-new business innovations? This view is not about what IT costs but rather how it is being prioritized to drive revenue, operating margin, or market share. Here are the questions IT leaders should be asking themselves along with the organization's executive leadership and the CEO:

    • Why is KTLO spend so high? This question is a good gauge of where the line is drawn between operations and strategy. Many IT departments want to reduce time spent on maintenance and redeploy resource investment toward strategic projects. This reallocation must include retiring or eliminating technologies to free up funds.
    • What should our operational spend priorities be? Maintenance and basic operations aren't going anywhere. The issue is what is necessary and what could be done more wisely. Are you throwing good money after bad on a high-maintenance legacy system?
    • Which projects and investments should we prioritize? The answer to this question should tightly align with business strategic goals and account for the lion's share of growth and innovation spend.
    • Are we spending enough on innovative initiatives? This is the ultimate dialogue between business partners, the CEO, and IT that needs to take place, yet often doesn't.

    I know what IT costs us, but what is it really worth?

    Example
    Focus Area % IT Spend
    KTLO 89.16%
    Grow 7.18%
    Innovate 3.66%
    Info-Tech IT Spend Studies, 2022.

    Be clear about where you want your IT spend transparency journey to take you in real life

    Transparent IT spend data will allow you to have conversations you couldn't have before. Consider this example of how telling an IT spend story could evolve.

    I want to ...
    Analyze the impact of the cloud on IT operating expenditure to update finance's expectations of a realistic IT CapEx/OpEx ratio now and into the future.

    To address the problem of ...

    • Many of our key software vendors have eliminated on-premises products and only offer software as an OpEx service.
    • Assumptions that modern IT solutions are largely on-premises and can be treated as capitalizable assets are out-of-date and don't reflect IT financial realities.

    And will use transparency to ...

    • Provide the CFO with specific, accurate, and annotated OpEx by product/service and vendor for all cloud-based and on-premises solutions.
    • Facilitate a realistic calculation of CapEx/OpEx distribution based on actuals, as well as let us develop defendable projections of OpEx into the future based on typical annual service fee increases and anticipated growth in the number of users/licenses.

    1.1 Establish ITFM objectives that leverage IT spend transparency

    Duration: One hour

    1. Consider the problems or issues commonly voiced by the business about IT, as well as your own ongoing challenges in communicating with stakeholders. Document these problems/issues as questions or statements as spoken by a person. To help structure your brainstorming, consider these general process domains and examples:
      1. Spend tracking and reporting. E.g. Why is IT's OpEx so high? We need you to increase IT's percentage of CapEx.
      2. Service levels and business continuity. E.g. Why do we need to hire more service desk staff? There are more of them in IT than any other role.
      3. Project and operations resourcing. E.g. Why can't IT just buy this new app we want? It's not very expensive.
      4. Strategy and innovation. E.g. Did output increase or decrease last quarter per input unit? IT should be able to run those reports for us.
    2. For each problem/issue noted, identify:
      1. The source(s) of the question/concern (e.g. CEO, CFO, CXO, CIO).
      2. The financial process involved (e.g. accurate costing, verification of costs, building a business case to invest).
    3. For each problem/issue, identify a broader project-style initiative where having transparent IT spend data is a valuable input. One initiative may apply to multiple problems/issues. For each initiative:
      1. Give it a working title.
      2. State the goal for the initiative with reference to ITFM aspirations.
      3. Identify key stakeholders (these will likely overlap with the problem/issue source).
      4. Set general time frames for resolution.

    Document your outputs on the slide immediately following the instruction slides for this exercise. Examples are included.

    1.1 Establish ITFM objectives that leverage IT spend transparency

    Input Output
    • Organizational knowledge
    • List of the potential uses and objectives of transparent IT spend and staffing data
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Head of IT
    • IT financial lead

    ITFM initiatives that leverage transparency

    Problem/Issue Statement Source/ Stakeholder Associated ITFM Process Potential Initiative Initiative Goal Time Frame
    "Why is IT's OpEx so high? We need you to increase IT's percentage of CapEx." CFO IT spend categorization and reporting. Analyze the impact of the cloud on IT operating expenditure. To update finance's expectations of a realistic IT CapEx/OpEx ratio. <12 months
    "Why do we need to hire more service desk staff? There are more of them in IT than any other role." CFO, VP of HR Business case for hiring IT staff. Document ongoing IT support requirements for proposed ERP platform migration project. To ensure sufficient resources for an anticipated increase in service desk tickets due to implementation of a new ERP system. 1-3 months
    "Why can't IT just buy this new app we want? It's not very expensive." CEO, all CXOs/VPs Total cost of technology ownership. Develop a mechanism to review the lifecycle impact on IT of proposed technology purchases. To determine if functionality of new tool already exists in the org. and the total cost of ownership of a new app. <6 months
    "Did output increase or decrease last quarter per input unit? IT should be able to run those reports for us." CEO, CFO, VP of Production IT service costing. Develop an organizational business intelligence strategy. To create a comprehensive plan for evolving BI capability in the organization and transferring report development to users. Select a department for pilot. <12 months

    Your organization's governance culture will affect how you approach transparency

    Know your governance culture Lower Governance
    • Few regulations.
    • Financial reporting is largely internal.
    • Change is frequent and rapid.
    • Informal or nonexistent mechanisms and structures.
    • Data sharing behavior driven by competitive concerns.
    Higher Governance
    • Many regulations.
    • Stringent and regular external reporting requirements.
    • Change is limited and/or slow.
    • Defined and established mechanisms and structures.
    • Data sharing behavior driven by regulatory concerns.
    Determine impact on opportunities How does your governance culture impact IT spend transparency opportunities?
    Resistance to formality and bureaucracy Resistance to change and uncertainty
    Set expectations and approach You have plenty of room to implement transparency rigor within the confines of IT, but getting others to give you the time and attention you want will be a challenge. One-on-one, informal relationship building to create goodwill and dialogue is needed before putting forth recommendations or numbers. Many existing procedures must be accommodated and respected. While you can benefit by working with preexisting mechanisms and touchpoints, expect any changes you want to make to things like IT cost categories or CapEx/OpEx ratios to require a lot of time, meetings, and case-making.

    IT's current maturity around ITFM practice will also affect your approach to transparency

    Know your ITFM maturity level Lower ITFM Maturity
    • No/few formal policies, standards, or procedures exist.
    • There is little/no formal education or experience within IT around budget, costing, charging, or accounting practices.
    • Financial reporting is sporadic and inconsistent in its contents.
    • Business cases are rarely used in decision-making.
    • Financial data is neither reliable nor readily available.
    Higher ITFM Maturity
    • Formal policies, standards, and procedures are enforced organization-wide for all financial management activities.
    • Formally-trained accountants are embedded within IT.
    • Financial reporting is regular, scheduled, and defined.
    • Business cases are leveraged in most decision-making activities.
    • Financial data is governed, centralized, and current.
    Determine stakeholders' financial literacy How does your degree of ITFM maturity impact IT spend transparency opportunities?
    Improve your own financial literacy first Determine stakeholders' financial literacy
    Set expectations and approach Brush up on core financial management and accounting concepts before taking the discussion beyond IT's walls. Do start mapping your costs, but just know how to communicate what the data is saying before sharing it. Not everyone will be at your level, familiar with ITFM language and concepts, or focused on the same things you are. Gauge where your audience is at so you can prepare for meaningful dialogue.

    1.2 Assess your readiness to tackle IT spend transparency

    Duration: One hour

    Note: This assessment is general in nature. It's intended to help you identify and prepare for potential challenges in your IT spend and staffing transparency effort.

    1. Rate your agreement with the "Data & Information" and "Experience, Expertise, & Support" statements listed on the slide immediately following the two instruction slides for this exercise. For each statement, indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree, where:
      1. 1 = Strongly disagree
      2. 2 = Disagree
      3. 3 = Neither agree nor disagree
      4. 4 = Agree
      5. 5 = Strongly agree
    2. Add up your numerical scores for all statements, where the highest possible score is 65.
    3. Assess your general readiness against the following guidelines:
      1. 50-65: Ready. The transparency exercise will involve work, but should be straightforward since you have the data, skills, tools, processes, and support to do it.
      2. 40-49: Ready, with caveats. The transparency exercise is doable but will require some preparatory legwork and investigation on your part around data sourcing, organization, and interpretation.
      3. 30-39: Challenged. The transparency exercise will present some obstacles. Expect to encounter data gaps, inconsistencies, errors, roadblocks, and frustrations that will need to be resolved.
      4. Less than 30: Not ready. You don't have the data, skills, tools, processes, and/or support to do the data transparency exercise. Take time to develop a stronger foundation of financial literacy and governance before tackling it.

    Document your outputs on the slide immediately following the two instruction slides for this exercise.

    1.2 Assess your readiness to tackle IT spend transparency

    InputOutput
    • Organizational knowledge
    • Estimation of IT spend and staffing transparency effort
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Head of IT
    • IT financial lead

    IT spend transparency readiness assessment

    Data & Information
    Statement Rating
    We know how to access all IT department spend records.
    We know how to access all non-IT-department technology spend records.
    We know how to access all IT vendor/contractor agreements.
    We know how to access data about our IT staff costs and allocation, such as organizational charts and salaries/benefits.
    Our financial and staffing data is up-to-date.
    Our financial and staffing data are labeled, described, and organized so that we know what they're referring to.
    Our financial and staffing data are in a format that we can easily manipulate (e.g. export, copy and paste, perform calculations).
    Experience, Expertise, & Support
    Statement Rating
    We have sufficient expertise within the IT department to navigate and accurately interpret financial records.
    We have reasonable access to expertise/resources in our finance department to support us in an IT spend transparency exercise.
    We can allocate sufficient time (about 40 hours) and resources in the near term to do an IT spend transparency exercise.
    We have current accountabilities to track and internally report financial information to others on at least a monthly basis.
    There are existing financial policies, procedures, and standards in the organization with which we must closely adhere and comply.
    We have had the experience of participating in, or responding to the results of, an internal or external audit.

    Rating scale:
    1 = Strongly Disagree; 2 = Disagree; 3 = Neither agree nor disagree; 4 = Agree; 5 = Strongly agree
    Assessment scale:
    Less than 30 = Not ready; 30-39 = Challenged; 40-49 = Ready with caveats; 50-65 = Ready

    Take a closer look at the statements you rated 1, 2, or 3. These will be areas of challenge no matter what your total score on the assessment scale.

    Phase 1: Know your objectives

    Achievement summary

    You've now completed the first two steps on your IT spend transparency journey. You have:

    • Set your objectives for making your IT spend and staffing transparent.
    • Assessed your readiness to tackle the exercise and know how much work you'll need to do in order to do it well.

    "Mapping to a transparency model is labor intensive. You can do it once and never revisit it again, but we would never advise that. What it does is play well into an IT financial management maturity roadmap."
    - Monica Braun, Research Director, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group

    Phase 2

    Gather Required Data

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Gather, clean, and organize your data
    • Build your industry-specific business views

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Head of IT
    • IT financial lead
    • Other members of IT management

    Phase 2: Gather required data

    Finish your preparation.

    You're now ready to do the final preparation for your IT spend and staffing transparency journey. In this phase you will:

    • Gather your IT spend and staffing data and information.
    • Clean and organize your data to streamline mapping.
    • Identify your baseline data points.

    "Some feel like they don't have all the data, so they give up. Don't. Every data point counts."
    - Rex Ding, Research Specialist, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group

    Your IT spend transparency efforts are only as good as the quality of your inputs

    Aim for a comprehensive, complete, and accurate set of data and information.

    Diagram of comprehensive, complete, and accurate set of data and information

    Start by understanding what's included in technology spend

    Info-Tech's ITFM Technology Inventory

    In scope:

    • All network, telecom, and data center equipment.
    • All end-user productivity software and devices (e.g. laptops, peripheral devices, cell phones).
    • Information security.
    • All acquisition, development, maintenance, and management of business and operations software.
    • All systems used for the storage and management of business assets, data, records, and information.
    • All managed IT services.
    • Third-party consulting services.
    • All identifiable spend from the business for the above.

    Expand your thinking: Total tech spend goes beyond what's under IT's operational umbrella

    "Technology" means all technology in the organization regardless of where it lives, who bought it, who owns it, who runs it, or who uses it.

    IT may have low or no visibility into technologies that exist in the broader business environment beyond IT. Accept that you won't gain 100% visibility right now. However, do get started and be persistent.

    Where to look for non-IT technology ...

    • Highly specialized business functions - niche tools that are probably used by only a few people.
    • Power users and the "underserved" - cloud-based workflow, communication, and productivity tools they got on their own.
    • Operational technology - network-connected industrial, building, or physical security sensors and control systems.
    • Recently acquired/merged entities - inherited software.

    Who might get you what you need ...

    • Business unit and team leaders - identification of what they use and copies of their spend records and/or contracts.
    • Finance - a report of the "software" expenditure category to spot unrecognized technologies and their owners.
    • Vendors - copies of contracts if not forthcoming internally.
    • Your service desk - informal knowledge gained about unknown technologies at play in the course of doing their job.

    The IT spend and staffing transparency exercise is an opportunity to kick-start a technology discovery process that will give you and the business a true picture of your technology profile, use, and spend.

    Seek out data at the right level of granularity with the right supporting information

    Key data and information to seek out:

    • Credits applied to appropriate debits that show net expense, or detailed descriptions of credits with no matching debit.
    • Cash-based accounting (not accrual accounting). If accrual, will need to determine how to simplify the data for your uses.
    • Vendor names, asset classes, descriptors, and departments.
    • A total spend amount (CapEx + OpEx) that:
      • Aligns with the spend period.
      • Passes your gut check for total IT spend.
      • Includes annual amounts for multi-year contracts (e.g. one year of a three-year Microsoft enterprise agreement).
      • Includes technology spend from the business (e.g. OT that IT supports).
    • Insights on large projects.
    • Consolidated recurring payments, salaries and benefits, and other small expenses.

    Look for these data descriptors in your files:

    • Cost center/accounting unit
    • Cost center/department description
    • GL ACCT
    • CL account description
    • Activity description
    • Status
    • Program/business function/project description
    • Accounting period
    • Transaction amount
    • Vendor/vendor name
    • Product/product name

    Avoid data that's hard to use or problematic as it will slow you down and bring limited benefits

    Spend data that's out of scope:

    • Depreciation/amortization.
    • Gain or loss of asset write-off.
    • Physical security (e.g. key cards, cameras, motion sensors, floodlights).
    • Printer consumables costs.
    • Heating and cooling costs (for data centers).

    Challenging data formats:

    • Large raw data files with limited or no descriptors.
    • Major accounts (hardware and software) combined in the same line item.
    • Line items (especially software) with no vendor reference information.
    • PDF files or screenshots that you can't extract data from readily. Use Excel or CSV files whenever possible.

    Getting at the data you need can be easy or hard – it all depends

    This is where your governance culture and ITFM maturity start to come into play.

    Data source Potential data and information What to expect
    IT Current/past budget, vendor agreements, IT project records, discretionary spend, number of IT employees. The rigor of your ITFM practice and centralization of data and documents will affect how straightforward this is.
    Finance General ledger, cash and income statements, contractor payments and other accounts payable, general revenue. Secure their expertise early. Let them know what you're trying to do and what you need. They may be willing to prepare data for you in the format you need and help you decipher records.
    Purchasing List of vendors/suppliers, vendor agreements, purchase invoices. Purchasing often has more descriptive information about vendors than finance. They can also point you to tech spend in other departments that you didn't know about.
    Human Resources Organizational chart, staff salaries and benefits, number of employees overall and by department. Data about benefits costs is something you're not likely to have, and there's only one place you can reliably get it.
    Other Business Units Non-IT technology spend vendor agreements and purchase invoices, number of department employees. Other departments may be tracking spend in an entirely different way than you. Be prepared to dig and reconcile.

    There may be some data or information you can't get without a Herculean effort. Don't worry about it too much - these items are usually relatively minor and won't significantly affect the overall picture.

    Commit to finding out what you don't know

    Many IT leaders don't have visibility into other departments' technology spend. In some cases, the fact that spend is even happening may be a complete surprise.

    Near-term visibility fix ...

    • Ask your finance department for a report on all technology-related spend categories. "Software" is a broad category that finance departments tend to track. Scan the report for items that don't look familiar and confirm the originating department or approver.
    • Check in with the procurement office. See what technology-related contracts they have on record and which departments "own" them. Get copies of those contracts if possible.
    • Contact individual department heads or technology spend approvers. Devise your contact shortlist based on what you already know or learned from finance and procurement. Position your outreach as a discovery process that supports your transparency effort. Avoid coming across as though you're judging their spend or planning to take over their technologies.

    Long-term visibility fix ...

    • Develop your relationships with other business unit leaders. This will help open the lines of communication permanently.
    • Establish a cross-functional central technology office or group. The main task of this unit is to set and manage technology standards organization-wide, including standards for tracking and documenting technology costs and asset lifecycle factors.
    • Ensure IT is formally involved in all technology spend proposals and plans. This gives IT the opportunity to assess them for security compliance, IT network/system interoperability, manageability, and IT support requirements prior to purchase.
    • Ensure IT is notified of all technology financial transactions. This includes contracts, invoices, and payments for all one-time purchases, subscription fees, and maintenance costs.

    Finally, note any potential anomalies in the IT spend period you're looking at

    No two years have the exact same spend patterns. One-time spend for a big capital project, for example, can dramatically alter your overall spend landscape.

    Look for the following anomalies:

    • New or ongoing capital implementations or projects that span more than one fiscal year.
    • Completed projects that have recently transitioned, or are transitioning, from CapEx (decreasing) to OpEx (increasing).
    • A major internal reorganization or merger, acquisition, or divestiture event.
    • Crises, disasters, or other rare emergencies.
    • Changes in IT funding sources (e.g. new or expiring grants).

    These anomalies often explain why IT spend is unusually high in certain areas. There's often a good business reason.

    In many cases, doing a separate spend transparency exercise for these anomalous projects or events can isolate their costs from other spend so their true nature and impact can be better understood.

    2.1 Gather your input data and information

    Duration: Variable

    1. Develop a complete list of the spending and staffing data and information you need to complete the transparency mapping exercise. For each required item, note the following:
      1. Description of data needed (i.e. type, timeframe, and format).
      2. Ideal timeframe or deadline for receipt.
      3. Probable source(s) and contact(s).
      4. Additional facilitation/support required.
      5. Person on your transparency team responsible for obtaining it.
    2. Set up a data and information repository to store all files as soon as they're received. Ideally, you'll want all data/information files to be in an electronic format so that everything can be stored in one place. Avoid paper documents if possible.
    3. Conduct your outreach to obtain the input data and information on your list. This could include delegating it to a subordinate, sending emails, making phone calls, booking meetings, and so on.
    4. Review the data and information received to confirm that it's the right type of data, at the correct level of granularity, for the right timeframe, in a usable format, and is generally accurate.
    5. Enter documentation about your data and information sources in tab "1. Data & Information Sources" in the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook to reflect what you needed and where you got it in order to make the discovery process easier in the future.
    6. In the same tab in the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook, document any significant events that occurred that directly or indirectly impacted the selected year's spend values. These could include mergers/acquisitions/divestitures, major reorganizations or changes in leadership, significant shifts in product offerings or strategic direction, large capital projects, legal/regulatory changes, natural disasters, or changes in the economy.

    Download the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook

    2.1 Gather your input data and information

    InputOutput
    • Knowledge of potential data and information sources
    • List of data and information required to complete the IT spend and staffing transparency exercise
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Head of IT
    • IT financial lead

    Tidy up your data before beginning any spend mapping

    Most organizations aren't immaculate in their tech spend documentation and tracking practices. This creates data rife with gaps that lives in hard-to-use formats.

    The more preparation you do to approach the "good data" intersection point in the diagram below, the easier your mapping effort will be and the more useful and insightful your final findings.

    Venn diagram of good data

    Make your data "un-unique" to reduce the number of line items and make it manageable

    There's a good chance that the IT spend data you've received is in the form of tens of thousands of unique line items. Use the checklist below to help you roll it up.

    Warning: Never overwrite your original data. Insert new columns/rows and put your alternate information in these instead.

    Step 1: Standardize vendor names

    • Start with known large vendors.
    • Select a standard name for the vendor.
    • Brainstorm possible variations on the vendor name, including abbreviations and shortforms.
    • Search for the vendor in your data and document the new standardized vendor name in the appropriate row.
    • Repeat the above for all vendors.
    • Sort the new vendor name column from A-Z. Look for instances where names remain unique or are missing entirely. Reconcile if needed and fill in missing data.

    Step 2: Consolidate vendor spend

    • Sort the new vendor name column from A-Z. Start with vendors that have the most line items.
    • Add together related spend items from a given vendor. Create a new row for the consolidated spend item and flag it as consolidated. Keep the following item types in separate rows:
      • Hardware vs. software spend for the same vendor.
      • Cloud vs. on-premises spend for the same vendor.
    • Repeat the above for all vendors.
    • Consider breaking out separate rows for overly consolidated line items that contain too many different types of IT spend.

    2.2 Clean and organize your data

    Duration: Variable

    1. Check to ensure that you have all data and information required to conduct the IT spend transparency exercise.
    2. Conduct an initial scan to assess the data's current state of hygiene and overall usability. Flag anything of concern and follow up with the data/information provider to fix or reconcile any issues.
    3. Normalize your data to make it easier to work with. This includes selecting data format standards and changing anything that doesn't conform to those standards. This includes items such as date conventions, currencies, and so on.
    4. Standardize product and vendor naming/references throughout to enable searching, sorting, and grouping. For example, Microsoft Office may be variably referred to as "Microsoft", "Office", "Office 365", and "Office365" throughout your data. Pick one descriptor for the product/vendor and replace all related references with that descriptor.
    5. Consolidate and aggregate your data. Ideally, the data you received from your sources has already been simplified; however, you may need to further organize it to reduce the number of individual line items to a more manageable number. The transparency exercise uses relatively high-level categories, so combine data sets and aggregate where feasible without losing appropriate granularity.
    6. Archive any original copies of files that have been modified or replaced with consolidated/aggregated versions for future reference if needed.

    2.2 Clean and organize your data

    InputOutput
    • Data and information files
    • A normalized set of data and information for completing the IT spend and staffing transparency exercise
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Head of IT
    • IT financial lead

    Select IT spend "buckets" for the CXO Business View as your final preparatory step

    Every organization has both industry-agnostic and industry-specific lines of business that are the direct beneficiaries of IT spend.

    Common shared business functions:

    • Human resources.
    • Finance and accounting.
    • Sales/customer service.
    • Marketing and advertising.
    • Legal services and regulatory compliance.
    • Information technology.

    It may seem odd to see IT on the business functions list since the purpose of this exercise is to map IT spend. For business view purposes, IT spend refers to what IT spends on itself to support its own internal operations.

    Examples of industry-specific functions:

    • Manufacturing: Product research and development; production operations; supply chain management.
    • Retail banking: Core banking services; loan, mortgage and credit services; investment and wealth management services.
    • Hospitals: Patient intake and admissions; patient diagnosis; patient treatment; patient recovery and ongoing care.
    • Insurance: Actuarial analysis; policy creation; underwriting; claims processing.

    See the Appendix of this blueprint for definitions of shared business functions plus sample industry-specific business view categories.

    Define your CXO Business View categories to set yourself up well for future ITFM analyses

    The CXO Business View buckets you set up today are tools you can and should reuse in your overall approach to ITFM governance. Spend some time to get them right.

    Stay high-level

    Getting too granular invites administrative headaches and overhead. Keep things high-level and general:

    • Limit the number of direct stakeholders represented: This will reduce communication overhead and ensure you're dealing only with people who have real decision-making authority.
    • Look to your org. chart: Note the departments or business units listed across the top of the chart that have one executive or top-ranking senior manager accountable for them. These business units often translate as-is into a tidy CXO Business View category.

    Limit your number of buckets

    Tracking IT spend across more than 8-10 shared and industry-specific business categories is impractical.

    • Simplify your options: Too many buckets gets confusing and invites time-wasting doubt.
    • Reduce future rework: Business structures will change, which means recategorizing spend data. Using a forklift is a lot easier than using tweezers.
    • Stick to major business units: Create separate "Business Other" and "Industry Other" catch-all categories to track IT spend for smaller functions that fall outside of major business unit structures.

    Stay high-level with the CXO Business View

    Be clear on what's in and what's out of your categories to keep everyone on the same page

    Clear lines of demarcation between CXO Business View categories reduce confusion, doubt, and wheel-reinvention when deciding where to allocate IT spend.

    Ensure clear boundaries

    Mutual exclusivity is key when defining categories in any taxonomical structure.

    • Avoid overlaps: Each high-level business function category should have few or no core function or process overlaps with another business function category. Aim for clear vertical separation.
    • Be encompassing: When defining a category, list all the business capabilities and sub-functions included in that category. For example, if defining the finance and accounting function, remember to specify its less obvious accountabilities, like enterprise asset management if appropriate.

    Identify exclusions

    Listing what's out can be just as informative and clarifying as listing what's in.

    • Beware odd bedfellows: Minor business groups are often tucked under a bigger organizational entity even though the two use different processes and technologies. Separate them if appropriate and state this exclusion in the bigger entity's definition.
    • Draw a line: If a process crosses business function categories, state which sub-steps are out of scope.
    • Document your decisions: This helps ensure you allocate IT spend the same way every time.

    Clear lines of demarcation between CXO Business View categories

    2.3 Build your industry-specific business views

    Duration: Two hours

    1. Confirm your list of high-level shared business services (human resources, finance and accounting, etc.) as provided in Info-Tech's IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook. Rename them if needed to match the nomenclature used in your organization.
    2. Set and define your additional list of high-level, industry-specific business categories that are unique to or define your industry. See the slides immediately following this exercise for tips on developing these categories, as well as the appendix of this blueprint for some examples of industry-specific categories and definitions.
    3. Create "Business Other" and "Industry Other" categories to capture minor groups and activities supported by IT that fall beyond the major shared and industry-specific business functions you've shortlisted. Briefly note the business groups/activities that fall under these categories.
    4. Edit/enter your shared and industry-specific business function categories and their definitions on tab "2. Business View Definitions" in the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook.

    Download the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook

    2.3 Build your industry-specific business views

    InputOutput
    • Knowledge about your organization's structure and business functions/units
    • A list of major shared business functions and industry-specific business functions/capabilities that are defining of your industry
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Head of IT
    • IT financial lead

    Lock in key pieces of baseline data

    Calculating core IT spend metrics relies on a few key numbers. Settle these first based on known data before diving into detailed mapping.

    These baseline data will allow you to calculate high-level metrics like IT spend as a percent of revenue and year-over-year percent change in IT spend, as well as more granular metrics like IT staff spend per employee for a specific IT service.

    Baseline data checklist

    • IT spend analysis period (date range).
    • Currency used.
    • Organizational revenue.
    • Organizational OpEx.
    • Total current year IT spend.
    • Total current year IT CapEx and IT OpEx.
    • Total previous-year IT spend.
    • Total projected next-year IT spend.
    • Number of organizational employees.
    • Number of IT employees.

    You may have discovered some things you didn't know about during the mapping process. Revisit your baseline data when your mapping is complete and make adjustments where needed.

    2.4 Enter your baseline data

    Duration: One hour

    1. Navigate to tab "3. Baseline Data" in the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook. Using the data you've gathered, enter the following information to set your baseline data for future calculations:
      1. Your IT spend analysis date range. This can be concrete dates, a fiscal year abbreviation, etc.
      2. The currency you will be using throughout the workbook. It's important that all monetary values entered are in the same currency.
      3. Your organization's total revenue and total operating expenditure (OpEx) for the spend analysis data range you've specified. Revenue includes all sources of funding/income.
      4. Your total IT OpEx and total IT capital expenditure (CapEx). The workbook will add your OpEx and CapEx values for you to arrive at a total IT spend value.
      5. Total IT spend for the year prior to the current IT spend analysis date range, as well as anticipated total IT spend for the year following.
      6. Total IT staff spend (salaries, benefits, training, travel, and fees for employees and contractors in a staff augmentation role) for the spend analysis date range.
      7. The total number of organizational employees and total number of IT employees. These are typically full-time equivalent (FTE) values and include contractors in a staff augmentation role.
    2. Make note of any issues that have influenced the values you entered.

    Download the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook

    2.4 Enter your baseline data

    InputOutput
    • Cleaned and organized spend and staffing data and information
    • Finalized baseline data for deriving spend metrics
    MaterialsParticipants
    • IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook
    • Head of IT
    • IT financial lead

    Phase 2: Gather required data

    Achievement summary

    You've now completed all preparation steps for your IT spend transparency journey. You have:

    • Gathered your IT spend and staffing data and information.
    • Cleaned and organized your data to streamline mapping.
    • Identified your baseline data points.

    "As an IT person, you're not speaking the same language at all as the accounting department. There's almost always a session of education that's required first."
    - Angie Reynolds, Principal Research Director, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group

    Phase 3

    Map Your IT Staff Spend

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Mapping your IT staff spend across the four views of the ITFM Cost Model
    • Validating your mapping

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Head of IT
    • IT financial lead
    • Other members of IT management

    Phase 3: Map your IT staff spend

    Allocate your workforce costs across the four views.

    Now it's time to tackle the first part of your hands-on spend mapping effort, namely IT staff spend. In this phase you will:

    • Allocate your IT staff spend across the four views of the ITFM Cost Model.
    • Validate your mapping to ensure that it's accurate and complete.

    "We're working towards the truth. We know the answer, but it's how to get it. Take Data & BI. For some organizations, four FTEs is too many. Are these people really doing Data & BI? Look at the big picture and see if something's missing."
    - Rex Ding, Research Specialist, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group

    Staffing costs comprise a significant percent of OpEx

    Staffing is the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to spend. Intentionally bring it out of the shadows to promote constructive conversations.

    • Total staffing costs stand out from other IT spend line items. This is because they're comparatively large, often comprising 30-50% of total IT costs.
    • Standing out comes at a price. Staff costs are where business leadership looks first if they want cuts. If IT leadership doesn't bring forward ways to cut staffing costs as part of a broader cost-cutting mandate, it will be seen as ignorant of business priorities at best and outright insubordinate at worst.
    • Staffing costs as a percentage of total costs vary between IT functions. On the business side, there's a lack of understanding about what functions IT staff serve and support and the real-world costs of obtaining (and keeping) needed IT skills. For example, IT security staffing costs as a percentage of that service's total OpEx will likely be higher than service desk staff given the scarcity and higher market value of the former. Trimming 20% of IT staffing costs from the IT security function has much different implications than cutting 20% of service desk staffing costs.

    Staffing spend transparency can do a lot to change the conversation from one where the business thinks that IT management is just being self-protecting to one where they know that IT management is actually protecting the business.

    Demonstrating the legitimate reasons behind IT staff spend is critical in both rationalizing past and current spend decisions as well as informing future decisions.

    Info-Tech recommends that you map your IT staffing costs before all other IT costs

    Mapping your IT staffing spend first is a good idea because:

    • Staffing costs are usually documented more clearly, simply, and accurately than other IT costs.
    • Gathering all your IT staffing data is usually a one-stop shop (i.e. the HR department).
    • The comparative straightforwardness of mapping staff costs compared to other IT costs gives you the opportunity to:
      • Get familiar with the ITFM Cost Model views and categories.
      • Get the hang of the hands-on mapping process.
      • Determine the kinds of speed bumps and questions you'll encounter down the road when you tackle the more complicated mappings.

    "Some companies will say software developer. Others say application development specialist or engineer. What are these things? You have to have conversations ..."
    - Rex Ding, Research Specialist, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group

    Understand the CFO Expense View: "Workforce" categories defined

    For the staffing spend mapping exercise, we're defining the Workforce category here and will offer Vendor category definitions in the vendor spend mapping exercise later.

    Workforce: The total costs of employing labor in the IT organization. This includes all salary/wages, benefits, travel/training, dues and memberships, and contractor pay. Managed services expenses associated with an external service provider should be excluded from Workforce and included in Contract Services.

    Employee: A person employed by the IT organization on a permanent full-time or part-time basis. Costs include salary, benefits, training, travel and expenses, and professional dues and memberships. These relationships are managed under human resources and the bulk of spend transactions via payroll processes.

    Contractor: A person serving in a non-permanent staff augmentation role. These relationships are typically managed under procurement or finance and spend transactions handled via invoicing and accounts payable processes. Labor costs associated with an external service provider are excluded.

    CFO Expense View

    Mapping your IT staff across the CFO Expense View is relatively cut-and-dried

    The CFO Expense View is the most straightforward in terms of mapping IT staffing costs as it's made up of only two main categories: Workforce and Vendor.

    In the CFO Expense View, all IT spend on staffing is allocated to the Workforce bucket under either Employee or Contractor.

    What constitutes a Contractor can be confusing given increased use of long-term labor augmentation strategies, so being absolutely clear about this is imperative. For spend mapping purposes:

    • Any staff members under independent contract where individuals are paid directly by your organization as opposed to indirectly via a service provider (e.g. staffing firm) are considered Workforce > Contractor.
    • Any circumstances where you pay a third-party organization for labor is slotted under Vendor > Contract Services.

    CFO Expense View

    Understand the CIO Service View: Categories defined

    We've provided definitions for the major categories that require clarification.

    Applications Development: Purchase/development, testing, and deployment of application projects. Includes internally developed or packaged solutions.

    Applications Maintenance: Software maintenance fees or maintaining current application functionality along with minor enhancements.

    Hosting & Networks: Compute, storage, and network functionality for running/hosting applications and providing communications/connectivity for the organization.

    End User: Procurement, provision, management, and maintenance (break/fix) of end-user devices (desktop, laptops, tablets, peripherals, and phones) as well as purchase/support and use of productivity software on these devices. The IT service desk is included here as well.

    PPM & Projects: People, processes, and technologies dedicated to the management of IT projects and the IT project portfolio as a whole.

    Data & BI: Strategy and oversight of the technology used to support data warehousing, business intelligence, and analytics.

    IT Management: Senior IT leadership, IT finance, IT strategy and governance, enterprise architecture, process management, vendor management, talent management, and program and portfolio management oversight.

    Security: Information security strategy and oversight, practices, procedures, compliance, and risk mitigation to protect and prevent unauthorized access to organizational data and technology assets.

    CIO Service View

    Mapping your IT staff across the CIO Service View is a slightly harder exercise

    The complexity of mapping staff across this view depends on how your IT department is organized and the degree of role specialization vs. generalization.

    The CIO Service View mirrors how many IT departments are organized into teams or work groups. However, some partial percentage-based allocations are probably required, especially for smaller IT units with more generalized, cross-functional roles. For example:

    • A systems administrator's costs may need to be allocated 80% to Hosting & Networks and 20% to Security.
    • An app development team lead may spend about 40% of their time doing hands-on Development work and the other 60% on project management (i.e. PPM & Projects).

    Info-Tech has found that allocating staffing costs for Data & BI raises the most doubts as it can be very entangled with Applications and other spend. Do the best you can.

    Understand the CXO Expense View: Categories defined

    Expand shared services and industry function categories as suits your organization.

    Industry Functions: As listed and defined by you for your specific industry.

    Human Resources: IT staff and specific application functionality in support of organizational human resource management.

    Finance & Accounting: IT staff and specific application functionality in support of corporate finance and accounting.

    Shared Services Other: IT staff and specific application functionality in support of all other shared enterprise functions.

    Information Technology: IT staff and specific application functionality in support of IT performing its own internal IT operations functions.

    Industry Other: IT staff and specific application functionality in support of all other industry-specific functions.

    CXO Expense View

    Mapping your IT staff across the CXO Business View warrants the most time

    This view is probably the most difficult as many IT department roles are set up according to lines of IT service, not lines of business. Prepare to do a little math.

    The CXO Expense View also requires percentage-based splitting of role spend, but to a greater extent.

    • Start by mapping staff cost allocations for those roles that are at, or close to, 100% dedicated to a specific business function (if any).
    • For IT roles that support organization-wide or multi-department functions, knowing the percent of employees that work in each relevant business unit and parceling IT staff spend by those same percentages may be easiest. For example, a general systems administrator's costs could be allocated as 4% to HR, 2% to finance, 25% to sales, 20% to production operations, and so on based on the percentage of employees in each of the supported business units.

    Take a minute to figure out how you plan to map IT's indirect CXO Business View costs

    Direct IT costs are those that are dedicated to a specific business unit or user group, such a marketing campaign management app, specialized devices used by a specific subset of workers in the field, or a business analyst embedded full-time in a sales organization.

    VS

    Indirect IT costs are pretty much everything else that's shared broadly across the organization and can't be tied to just one stakeholder or user group, such as network infrastructure, the service desk, and office productivity apps. These costs must be fairly and evenly distributed.

    No indirect mapping method is perfect, but here's a suggestion:

    • Take the respective headcount of all business functions sharing the IT resource/service in question.
    • Calculate each business function's staff as a percentage of all organizational staff.
    • Use this same percent of staff to calculate and allocate a business function's indirect staff and indirect vendor costs.

    "There is always a conversation about indirect allocations. There's never been an organization I've heard of or worked for which has been able to allocate every technology cost directly to a business consumption or business unit."
    Monica Braun, ITFM Research Director, Info-Tech Research Group

    Example:

    • A company of 560 employees has six HR staff (about 1.1% of total staff).
    • Network admin staffing costs $143,000, so $1,573 (1.1%) would be allocated to HR.
    • Internet services cost $40,000, so $440 (1.1%) would be allocated to HR.

    Some indirect costs are shared by multiple business functions, but not all. In these cases, exclude non-participating business functions from the total number of organizational employees and re-calculate a new percent of staff for each participating business function.

    Know where you're most likely to encounter direct vs. indirect IT staffing costs

    Info-Tech has found that direct vs. indirect staffing spend is more commonly found in some areas than others. Use this insight to focus your work.

    Direct IT staffing spend

    Definition: Individuals or teams whose total time is formally dedicated to the support of one business unit/function.

    • Data & BI (direct to one non-IT unit)
    • IT Management (direct to IT)
      • Service planning & Architecture
      • Strategy & Governance
      • Financial Management
      • People & Resources

    Hybrid IT staffing spend

    Definition: Teams with a percent of time or entire FTEs formally dedicated to one business unit/function while the remainder of the time or team is generalized.

    • Applications
      • Applications Development
      • Applications Maintenance
    • IT Management
      • PPM & Projects

    Indirect IT staffing spend

    Definition: Individuals or teams whose total time is generalized to the support of multiple or all business units or functions.

    • Infrastructure
      • Hosting & Networks
      • End Users
    • Security

    Indirect staff spend only comes into play in the CXO Business View. Thoroughly map the CIO Service View first and leverage its outcomes to inform your allocations to individual business and industry functions.

    Understand the CEO Innovation View: Categories defined

    Be particularly clear on your understanding of the difference between business growth and business innovation.

    Business Innovation: IT spend/ activities focused on the development of new business capability, new products and services, and/or introduction of existing products/ services into new markets. It does not include expansion or update of existing capabilities.

    Business Growth: IT spend/activities focused on the expansion, scaling, or modernization of an existing business capability, product/service, or market. This is specifically related to growth within a current market.

    Keep the Lights On: IT spend/activities focused on keeping the organization running on a day-to-day basis. This includes all activities used to ensure the smooth operation of business functions and overall business continuity.

    CEO Innovation View

    Important Note

    Info-Tech analysts often skip mapping staff for the CEO Innovation View when delivering the IT Spend & Staffing Benchmarking Service.

    This is because, for many organizations, either most IT staff spend is allocated to Keep the Lights On or any IT staff allocation to Business Growth and Business Innovation activities is untracked, undocumented, and difficult to parse out.

    Mapping your IT staff across the CEO Innovation View is largely straightforward

    Clear divisions between CapEx and OpEx can be your friend when it comes to mapping this view. Focus your efforts on parsing growth vs. innovation.

    • The majority of IT staff costs are OpEx: And the majority of OpEx will land in the Keep the Lights On category. This is a comparatively simple mapping exercise. Know in advance that this will be the largest of the three buckets in the CEO Innovation View by a very wide margin, so don't be surprised if over 90% of IT staffing costs end up here.
    • Most of the remaining IT staff costs will be tied to capital projects and investments: This means that they will land in either Business Growth or Business Innovation, with the majority typically sitting under Business Growth. Again, don't be surprised if the Business Innovation category holds less than 3% of total IT staffing spend.

    Take your IT staff spend mapping to the next level with detailed time and headcount data

    Overlay a broader assessment of your IT staff

    Info-Tech's IT Staffing Assessment diagnostic can expand your view of what's really happening on the staffing front.

    • Learn your true distribution of IT staff across the same IT services listed in the ITFM Cost Model's CIO Service View.
    • Get other metrics such as degrees of seniority, manager span of control, and IT staff perception of their effectiveness.

    Take action

    1. Set it up: Contact your Info-Tech Account Manager and sign your team up to take the diagnostic.
    2. Assess the findings: Review the output report, specifically how your staff says they spend their time versus what your organization chart's been telling you.
    3. Apply the percentages: Use the FTE allocation percentages in the output report to guide how you distribute your staff spend across the CIO Service View.
    4. Expand your analysis: Use your staff's feedback around perceived aids and obstacles to effectiveness in order to inform and defend your recommendations and decisions on how IT funds should be spent.

    Consider these final tips for mapping your IT staffing costs before diving in

    Mapping your IT staffing costs definitely requires some work. However, knowing the common stumbling blocks and being systematic will yield the best results.

    Approach: Be efficient to be effective

    Start with what you know best: Map the CFO Expense View first to plug in information you already have. Next, map the CIO Service View since it's most aligned to your organization chart.

    Keep a list of questions: You'll need to seek clarifications. Note your questions, but don't reach out until you've done a first pass at the mapping - don't annoy people with a barrage of questions.

    Delegate: Your managers and leads have a more accurate view of exactly what their staff do. Consider delegating the CIO Service View and CXO Business View to them or turn the mapping exercise into a series of collaborative leadership team activities.

    Biggest challenge: Role/title ambiguity

    • The Business Analyst role is often vague. These staffers are often jacks-of-all-trades in IT. You probably can't rely on a generic job description to figure out exactly which services and business functions BAs are spending their time on. Plan to ask a lot of questions.
    • Other role titles may be completely inaccurate. Is the word "system" referring to apps, infrastructure, or both? Is the user experience specialist actually a programmer? Is a manager really managing anything? Know your organization's tendencies around meaningful job titling and set your workload expectations accordingly.

    Key step - validate! If you see services or functions with low or no allocation, or something just doesn't look right, investigate. Someone's doing that work - take the time to figure out who.

    3.1 Map your IT staffing costs

    Duration: Variable

    1. Navigate to tab "4. Staff Spend Mapping" in the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook. On one row, enter the name of an individual or group to be mapped, their role/title (if an individual), and their total known cost as per your collected data.
    2. Under the CFO Expense View (columns F-G), enter the number of FTEs represented by the individual or group named and their status (i.e. Employee or Contractor).
    3. Under the CIO Service View (columns L-AF), allocate the individual or group's spend as a percentage across all service categories. If the allocation for a service is 0%, leave the cell blank.
    4. Under the CXO Business View (columns AI-BA), allocate the individual or group's spend as a percentage across all business function and industry-specific function categories. If the allocation for a function is 0%, leave the cell blank.
    5. Under the CEO Innovation View (columns BD-BH), allocate the individual or group's spend as a percentage across Business Innovation, Business Growth, and Keep the Lights On. If the allocation for an investment type is 0%, leave the cell blank.
    6. Repeat steps 2 to 5 for all other IT staff (as individuals or groups).
    7. Follow up on and resolve any additional inquiries you need to make based on questions that arose during the mapping process.
    8. Validate your mapping by:
      1. Identifying spend categories that have zero staff spend allocation. Additional percentage allocation splits for certain roles are probably required.
      2. Investigating spend categories that seem to have very high or very low spend allocations based on a gut check. Again, double-check your percentage allocation splits.
      3. Ensuring your amounts add up to your previously calculated total IT staff spend. A balance tracker is provided on tab "6. Tracker & General Outputs" of the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook.

    Download the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook

    3.1 Map your staffing costs

    Input Output
    • Cleaned and organized IT staffing data and information
    • Finalized mapping of IT staff spend across the four views of the ITFM Cost Model
    Materials Participants
    • IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook
    • Head of IT
    • IT financial lead
    • Other IT management as required

    Phase 3: Map your IT staff spend

    Achievement summary

    You've now completed your IT staff spend mapping. You have:

    • Allocated your IT staff spend across the four views of the ITFM Cost Model.
    • Validated your mapping to ensure it's accurate and complete.

    "Some want to allocate everybody to IT, but that's not how we do it. [In one CXO Business View mapping], a client allocated all their sand network people to the IT department. At the end of the process, the IT department itself accounted for 20% of total IT spend. We went back and reallocated those indirect staff costs across the business."
    - Kennedy Confurius, Research Analyst, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group

    Phase 4

    Map Your IT Vendor Spend

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Mapping your IT vendor spend across the four views of the ITFM Cost Model
    • Validating your mapping

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Head of IT
    • IT financial lead
    • Other members of IT management

    Phase 4: Map your IT vendor spend

    Allocate your vendor costs across the four views.

    Now you're ready to take on the second part of your spend mapping, namely IT vendor spend. In this phase you will:

    • Allocate your IT vendor spend across the four views of the ITFM Cost Model.
    • Validate your mapping to ensure it's accurate and complete.

    "[One CIO] said that all technology spend runs through their IT group. But they didn't have hardware in their financial data file - no cellphones or laptops, no network or server expenses. They thought they had everything, but they didn't know what they didn't have. Assume it's out there somewhere."
    - Kennedy Confurius, Research Analyst, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group

    Tackle the non-staff side of IT spend

    Info-Tech analysts find that mapping the IT vendor spend data is harder because the source data is often scattered and not meaningfully labeled.

    • Be patient and systematic. As with mapping your IT staff spend data, the more organized you are from the outset and the more thoroughly you've prepared your data, the more straightforward the exercise will be.
      • Did you "un-unique" your data? If not, do that now before attempting mapping.
    • Get comfortable with making some assumptions. You need to get through the exercise, so sometimes making a best guess and entering a value is better than diving down a rabbit hole. Your gut is probably right anyway. But only make assumptions around smaller line items that don't have a massive impact on your final numbers. Never assume anything when it comes to big-ticket items.
    • Curb your urge to fix. Some of your buckets will start to get big, while others will barely budge. This is normal ... and interesting! Resist the urge to "balance" staffing spend in a bucket by loading it with apps and hardware for fear that the staffing spend looks too high and will be questioned. This exercise is about how things are, not how they look.

    "A common financial data problem is no vendor names. I've noticed that, even if the vendor name is there, there are no descriptors. You cannot actually tell what type of service it is. Data security? Infrastructure? Networking? Ask yourself 'What did we purchase and what does it do?'"
    - Aman Kumari, Research Specialist, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group

    Understand the CFO Expense View: Vendor categories defined

    These are the final definitions for this view. See the previous section for CFO Expense View > Workforce definitions used in the IT staffing cost mapping exercise.

    Vendor: Provider of a good or service in exchange for payment.

    Hardware: Costs of procuring, maintaining, and managing all IT hardware, including end-user devices, data center and networking equipment, cabling, and hybrid appliances for both on-premises and cloud-based providers.

    Software: Costs for all software (applications, database, middleware, utilities, tools) used across the organization. This includes purchase, maintenance, and licensing costs.

    Contract Services: Costs for all third-party services including managed service providers, consultants, and advisory services.

    Cloud: Offsite hosting and delivery of an on-demand software or hardware computing function by a third-party provider, often on a subscription-type basis.

    On-Prem: On-site hosting and delivery of a software or hardware computing function, often requiring upfront purchase cost and subsequent maintenance costs.

    Managed Services: Costs for outsourcing the provision and maintenance of a technical process or function.

    Consulting & Advisory: Costs for the third-party provision of professional or technical advice and expertise.

    CFO Expense View

    Know if a technology is cloud-based or on-premises before mapping

    A technology may be one, the other, or both if multiple versions are in play. Financial records rarely indicate which, but on-premises vs. cloud matters in your planning.

    On-Premises

    • Check your CapEx. Any net-new purchases of software or hardware for the IT spend analysis year in question should appear on the CapEx side of the equation. After the first year of implementation/rollout, all ongoing maintenance and management costs should be found under OpEx.
    • Focus on real in-year costs.
      • Don't try to map depreciation or amortization associated with CapEX. Instead, map any upfront purchase costs that occurred in the relevant IT spend analysis year.
      • Map any OpEX costs incurred from maintenance and management. For multi-year maintenance contracts, apply the percentage of fees paid for the relevant year.

    Cloud

    • Check your OpEx. Cloud services are typically fee-based, which means the costs often come in the form of regularly timed bills akin to a subscription.
    • Differentiate new services from older ones. If the cloud service was initiated during the IT spend analysis year in question, there may be some one-time service setup and initiation fees that were legitimately slotted under CapEx. If the cloud service isn't new, then all costs should be OpEx.

    Vendors are increasingly "retiring" on-premises software products. This means an older version may be on-prem, a newer one cloud, and you may have both in play.

    Mapping built-in data, analytics, and security functions can raise doubts

    With so many apps focused on capturing, manipulating, and protecting data, built-in analytics, reporting, and security functions blur CIO Service View bucket boundaries.

    Applications vs. Data & BI

    • In recent years, much more powerful analysis and report-generation features have been added to core enterprise applications. If analytics and reporting functionality is an extended feature of a database-driven application, such as ERP or CRM, then map it to one of the Applications buckets.
    • If the sole purpose of the application is to store, manipulate, query, analyze, and/or visualize data, then log its costs under Data & BI. These would include technologies such as data warehouses, marts, cubes, and lakes; desktop data visualization tools; enterprise business intelligence platforms; and specialized reporting tools.

    Applications vs. Security

    • A similar conundrum exists for Security. So many tools today have built-in security functionality that cannot be unintegrated from the app they support. Don't even try to isolate native security functionality for spend mapping purposes - map it to Applications.
    • If the tool is a special-purpose, standalone security tool or security platform, then map it to Security. These tools usually sit within, and are used/managed by, IT. They include firewalls; antivirus/anti-malware; intrusion prevention, detection and response; access control and authentication; encryption; and penetration testing and vulnerability assessment.

    Putting spend in the right bucket does matter. However, if uncertainty persists, err on the side of consistency. For most organizations Applications Maintenance does end up being the biggest bucket.

    When mapping the CXO Business View, do the biggest vendors first

    Below is a suggested order of operations to clear through the majority of vendor spend as early as possible in the process.

    1 Sort high to low Sort your list of vendor spend from highest to lowest. Your top 20 vendors should constitute most of the spend.
    2 Map multi-department enterprise apps Flag your top apps vendors that have presence in most or all of your business units. Map these first. These tend to be enterprise-level business apps "owned" by core business functions but used broadly across the organization such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and people management systems.
    3 Map end-user spend Identify top vendors of general end-user technologies like office productivity apps, desktop hardware, and IT service desk tools. Allocate percentages according to your selected indirect spend mapping method.
    4 Map core infrastructure spend Map the behind-the-scenes network, telecom, and data center technologies that underpin IT, plus any infrastructure managed services. Again, apply your selected indirect spend mapping method.
    5 Map business-unit specific technologies This is the spend that's often incurred by just one department. This may also be technology spend that's out in the business, not in IT proper. Map it to the right business function or put it in Business Other or Industry Other if the business function doesn't have its own bucket.
    6 Map the miscellaneous Only smaller spend items likely remain at this point. When in doubt, map them to either Business Other or Industry Other.

    After mapping the CXO Business View, your Other buckets might be getting a bit big

    It's common for the Business Other and Industry Other categories to be quite large, and even the largest. This is okay, but plan to dig deeper and understand why.

    Remember "when in doubt, map to either the Business Other or Industry Other category"? Know what large Other buckets might really be telling you. After your first pass at mapping the CXO Business View, review Business Other and Industry Other if either is more than about 10% of your total spend.
    Diversification: Your organization has a wide array of business functions and/or associated staff that exist outside the core business and industry-specific categories selected. Are there minor business functions that can reasonably be included with the core categories identified? If not, don't force it. Better to keep your core buckets clean and uncomplicated.
    Non-core monolith: There's a significant technology installation outside the core that's associated with a comparatively minor business function. Is there a business function incurring substantial technology spend that should probably be broken out on its own and added to the core? If so, do it. Spend is unlikely to get smaller as the organization grows, so best to shine a light on it now.
    Shadow IT: There's significant technology spend in several areas of the organization that is unowned, unmanaged, or serving an unknown purpose as far as IT is concerned. Is a lot of the spend non-IT technology in the business? If yes, flag it and plan to learn more. It's likely that technologies living elsewhere in the organization will become IT concerns eventually. Better to be ready than to be surprised.

    As with staffing, CapEx vs. OpEx helps map the CEO Innovation View

    Mapping to this view was optional for IT staffing. For hard technology vendor spend, mapping this view is key. Use the guidance below to determine what goes where.

    Keep the Lights On
    Spend usually triggered by a service deck ticket or work order, not a formal project. Includes:

    • Daily maintenance and management.
    • Repair or upgrade of existing technology to preserve business function/continuity.
    • Purchase of "commodity" technology, such as standard-issue laptops and licenses for office productivity software.

    Business Growth
    Spend usually in the context of a formal project under a CapEx umbrella. Includes:

    • Technology spend that directly supports business expansion of an existing product or service and/or market.
    • Modernizing existing technology.
    • Extension of, or investment in, existing infrastructure to ensure reliability and availability in response to growth-driven scaling of headcount and utilization.

    Business Innovation
    Spend is always in the context of a formal project and should be 100% CapEx in the first year after purchase. Includes:

    • Technology spend that directly supports development and rollout of new products or service and/or entry into new markets.
    • Use of existing technology or investment in net-new technology in direct support of a new business initiative, direction, or requirement.

    In many organizations, most technology spend will be allocated to Keep the Lights On. This is normal but should generate conversations with the business about redirecting funds to growth and innovation.

    Remember these top tips when mapping your technology vendor spend

    The benefits of having tidy and organized data can't be overstated, as your source data will be in a more varied state for this phase of the mapping than with IT staffing data.

    Approach: Move from macro to micro

    • Start with the big enterprise apps: These will probably be in the top five of your vendor spend list and will likely have good info about how and by whom they're used. Get them out of the way.
    • Clear out shared technologies. This will feature infrastructure and operations plus office productivity and communications spend. Portioning spend by department headcount for the CXO Business View is the hardest part. Get this forklift task out of the way too.
    • Don't sweat the small stuff. Wasting hours chasing the details of a $500 line item isn't worth it when you have five-, six-, or even seven-figure line items to map.

    Biggest challenge: Poor vendor labeling

    • Vendor labels are often an inconsistent mess or missing entirely. Standardize and apply consistent vendor labels throughout your data so that you can aggregate your data into a workable form.
    • Spend transactions with the same vendor can be scattered all over the place in your general ledger. Take the time to "un-unique" your data to save yourself tremendous grief later on.
    • Start new go-forward labeling habits. Talk to finance about your new list of vendor naming standards and tagging spend as on-prem or cloud. Getting their cooperation with these are major wins.

    Key step - validate! If you see services or functions with low or no allocation, or something just doesn't look right, investigate. There's probably a technology out there in the business doing that work.

    4.1 Map your IT vendor spend

    Duration: Variable

    1. Navigate to tab "5. Vendor Spend Mapping" in the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook. On one row, enter a spend line item (vendor, product, etc.), a brief description, and the known amount of spend.
    2. Under the CFO Expense View (columns F-P), allocate the line item's spend as a percentage across all asset-class categories. If the allocation for a line item is 0%, leave the cell blank.
    3. Under the CIO Service View (columns S-AM), allocate the line item's spend as a percentage across all service categories. If the allocation for a service is 0%, leave the cell blank.
    4. Under the CXO Business View (columns AP-BH), allocate the line item's spend as a percentage across all business function and industry-specific function categories. If the allocation for a function is 0%, leave the cell blank.
    5. Under the CEO Innovation View (columns BK-BO), allocate the line item's spend as a percentage across Business Innovation, Business Growth, and Keep the Lights On. If the allocation for an investment type is 0%, leave the cell blank.
    6. Repeat steps 2-5 for all spend line items.
    7. Follow up on and resolve any additional inquiries you need to make based on questions that arose during the mapping process.
    8. Validate your mapping by:
      1. Ensuring your amounts add up to your previously calculated total IT vendor spend. A balance tracker is provided on tab "6. Tracker & General Outputs" of the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook.
      2. Identifying spend categories that have zero spend allocation. Additional percentage allocation splits for certain line items are probably required.
      3. Investigating spend categories that seem to have very high or very low spend allocations based on a gut check. Again, double-check your percentage allocation splits.

    Download the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook

    4.1 Map your IT vendor spend

    InputOutput
    • Cleaned and organized IT vendor spend data and information
    • Finalized mapping of IT vendor spend across the four views of the IT Cost Model
    MaterialsParticipants
    • IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook
    • Head of IT
    • IT financial lead
    • Other IT management as required

    Phase 4: Map your IT vendor spend

    Achievement summary

    You've now completed your IT vendor spend mapping. You have:

    • Allocated your IT vendor spend across the four views of the ITFM Cost Model.
    • Validated your mapping to ensure it's accurate and complete.

    "A lot of organizations log their spending by vendor name with no description of the goods or services they actually purchased from the vendor. It could be hardware, software, consulting services ... anything. Having a clear understanding of what's really in there is an essential aspect of the spend conversation."
    - Rex Ding, Research Specialist, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group

    Phase 5

    Identify Implications for IT

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Analyzing the results of your IT staff and vendor spend mapping across the four views of the ITFM Cost Model
    • Preparing an executive presentation of your transparent IT spend

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Head of IT
    • IT financial lead
    • Other members of IT management

    Phase 5: Identify implications for IT

    Analyze and communicate.

    You're now nearing the end of the first leg in your IT spend transparency journey. In this phase you will:

    • Analyze the results of your IT spend mapping process.
    • Revisit your transparency objectives.
    • Prepare an executive presentation so you can share findings with other leaders in your organization.

    "Don't plug in numbers just to make yourself look good or please someone else. The only way to improve is to look at real life."
    - Monica Braun, Research Director, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group

    You've mapped your IT spend data. Now what?

    With mapped data in hand, now you can start to tell IT's spend story with stakeholders in the business.

    Mapping your IT spend is a lot of work, but what you've achieved is impressive (applause!) as well as essential for growing your ITFM maturity. Now put your hard work to work.

    • Consider benchmarking. While not covered in-depth here, benchmarking against yourself in a year-over-year approach as well as against external industry peers are very useful exercises in your technology spend analysis.
    • Review your numbers and graphs. Your IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook contains a series of data visualizations that will help you see the big picture as well as relationships between spend categories.
    • Note the very big numbers, the very small numbers, and the things that just look odd. You'll want to investigate and understand these further.
    • Prepare to communicate. Facilitating conversations with stakeholders in the business is the immediate objective of the IT spend and staffing transparency exercise. Decide where and with whom you want to start dialogue.

    The slides that follow show sample data summaries and visualizations generated in the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook. We'll take a look at the metrics, tables, and graphs you now have available to you post-mapping and how you can potentially use them in conversations with different IT stakeholders.

    Evaluate how you might use benchmarks before diving into your analysis

    Benchmarking can be a useful input for contextualizing and interpreting your IT spend data. It's not essential at this point but should be part of your ITFM toolkit.

    There are two basic types of benchmarking ...

    Internal: Capturing a current-state set of data about an in-house operation to serve as a baseline. Over time, snapshots of the same data are taken and compared to the baseline to track and assess changes. Common uses for internal benchmarking include:

    • Assessing the impact of a project or initiative.
    • Measuring year-over-year performance.

    External: Seeking out aggregated, current-state data about a peer-group operation to assess your own relative status or performance on the same operation. Common uses for external benchmarking include:

    • Understanding common practices in the industry.
    • Strategic and operational visioning, planning, and goal-setting.
    • Putting together a business case for change or investment.

    Both types of benchmarking benefit from some formality and rigor. Info-Tech can help you stand up an ITFM benchmarking approach as well as connect you with actual IT spend peer benchmarks via our IT Spend & Staffing Benchmarking service.

    5.1 Analyze the results of your IT spend mapping

    Duration: Variable

    1. Review the guidance slides that follow the two instruction slides for this exercise to provide yourself with a grounding on how to interpret and analyze your mapped IT staff and vendor spend data.
    2. Systematically review the data tables and graphs on the "Outputs" tabs 6 through 10 in the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook. There are several approaches you can take - use the one that works best for you. For example:
      1. Review each view in its entirety, one at a time.
      2. Review all workforce spend collectively across all four views, followed by all vendor spend across all four views (or vice versa).
    3. Make note of any spend values that are comparatively high or low or strike you as odd or worth further investigation.
    4. Craft a series of spend-related questions you want to answer for yourself and your stakeholders using the data.
      1. For example, you need to cut costs and apps maintenance is high. Your question could be, "Can we cut costs on applications maintenance staffing?"
      2. Alternatively, you can develop a series of statements (research hypotheses) that you seek to prove true or false with the data. This approach is useful for testing assumptions you've been making. For example, "We can cut spending on applications maintenance staff. True or false?"
    5. Use the template provided on tab "11. Data Analysis" in the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook to document your findings and conclusions, along with the data that supports them.

    Download the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook

    5.1 Analyze the results of your IT spend mapping

    InputOutput
    • Tabular and graphical data outputs
    • Conclusions and potential actions about IT staff and vendor spend
    MaterialsParticipants
    • IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook
    • Head of IT
    • IT financial lead
    • Other IT management as required

    High-level findings: Use these IT spend metrics to review and set big picture goals

    Think of these metrics as key anchors in your long-term strategic planning efforts.

    Use IT spend metrics to review and set big goals

    It's common for the business to want a sacrifice in IT OpEx in favor of CapEx

    CapEx and OpEx approval mechanisms are often entirely separate. Different tax treatment for CapEx means that it's usually preferred by the business over OpEx.

    OpEx is often seen as a sunk cost (i.e. an IT problem).

    • Barring a major decision or event, OpEx on an individual item will generally trend upward over time, often by a few percent every year, in lockstep with inflation and growth in organizational headcount.
    • A good portion of OpEx, however, is necessary for basic business continuity.

    CapEx is usually seen as investment (i.e. a business growth opportunity).

    • CapEx behaves quite differently than OpEx. On-the-books capitalized spend on an individual asset tends to trend downward over time due to depreciation or amortization.
    • CapEx only tends to go up when a net-new capital project is initiated, and organizations often have more control over if, when, and how this spend happens.

    Break down the OpEx/CapEx wall. Reference OpEx whenever you talk about CapEx. The best way to do this is via Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

    • Present data on long-term OpEx projections whenever a new capital project is proposed and ensure ongoing maintenance funds are secured.
    • Educate your CFO about the impact of the cloud on OpEx. See if internal OpEx/CapEx ratio expectations can be adjusted to reflect this reality.

    Spend by asset class offers the CFO a visual illustration of where the money's really gone

    The major spend categories should look very familiar to your CFO. It's the minor sub-categories that sit underneath where you ultimately want to drive the conversation.

    Traditional categories don't reflect IT reality anymore.

    • Most finance departments have "software" accounts that contain apples and oranges, plus other dissimilar fruit.
    • Software isn't just software anymore. Now it's on-premises (CapEx) or cloud (OpEx). The same distinction applies to traditional hardware due to the advent of managed services.
    • The basic categories traditionally used to tag IT spend are out of date. This makes it hard for IT to have meaningful conversations with the CFO since they're not working from the same glossary.

    "Software (on-premises)" and "hardware (cloud)" are more meaningful descriptors than "software" and "hardware." Shift the dialogue.

    Start the migration from major categories to minor categories.

    • Still give the CFO the traditional major categories they're looking for but start including minor category breakdowns into your communications. Most importantly, have a meeting to explain what these minor categories are and why they're important to managing IT effectively.
    • Next, see if the CFO can formally split on-premises vs. cloud software on the books as a first step in making IT spend tracking more meaningful.

    Employees vs. contractors warrants a specific conversation, plus a change in mindset

    IT leaders often find it easier to get approval for contracted labor than to hire a permanent employee. However, the true value proposition for contractors does vary.

    The decision to go with permanent employees or contractors depends on your ultimate goals.

    • Contractors tend to be less expensive and provide more flexibility when adjusting to changing business needs. However, contractors may be less dedicated and take their skills and knowledge with them when they leave.
    • Permanent employees bring additional costs like benefits and training. Plus, letting them go is a lot more complicated. However, they can also bring real value in a way a contractor can't when it comes to sustaining long-term strategic growth. They're assets in themselves.

    Far too often, labor-sourcing decisions are driven by controlling near-term costs instead of generating and sustaining long-term value.

    Introduce the cost-to-value ratio to your workforce spend conversations.

    • Your mapped data will allow you to talk about comparative headcount and spend. This is a financial conversation devoid of context.
    • Go beyond. Show how workforce spend has allowed stated goals to be achieved while controlling for costs. This is the true definition of value.

    CFO Expense View: Shift the ITFM conversation

    Now that you've mapped your IT spend data to the CFO Expense View, there are some questions you're better equipped to answer, namely:

    • How should I classify my IT costs?
    • What information should I include in my plans and reports?
    • How do I justify current spend?
    • How do I justify a budget increase?

    You now have:

    • A starting point for educating the CFO about IT spend realities.
    • A foundation for creating a shared glossary of terms that works for both IT and the finance department and facilitates more meaningful conversations.
    • Proof that there are major areas of IT spend, such as cloud software, that are distinctive and probably warrant their own financial category in the general ledger.
    • A transparent record of IT spend that shows that you understand and care about financial issues, fostering the goodwill and trust that facilitates investment in IT.
    • A starting point to change the ITFM conversation with the CFO from one focused on cost to one focused on value.

    Exactly how is IT spending all that money we give them?

    Exactly like this ...

    Chart of the CFO Expense View

    The CIO Service View aligns with how IT organizes and manages itself – this is your view

    The data mapped here is a critical input for IT's service planning and management program and should be integrated into your IT performance measurement activities.

    Major service categories: These values give a high-level snapshot of your general IT service spend priorities. In most organizations, Applications dominates, making it a focus for cost optimization.

    Minor service categories: The level of granularity for these values prove more practical when measuring performance and making service management decisions - not too big, not too small. While not reflected in this example, application maintenance is usually the largest relative consumer of IT spend in most organizations.

    Data & BI and security: Isolating the exact spend for these services is challenging given that they're often entangled in applications and infrastructure spend respectively, and separate spend tracking for both is a comparatively recent practice.

    Table of CIO Service View

    Check the alignment of individual service spend against known business objectives

    Some IT services are taken for granted by the business, while others are virtually invisible. This lack of visibility often translates into funding misalignments.

    Is the amount of spend on a given service in parallel with the service's overall importance?

    • Though often unstated, ensuring continuity of basic business operations is always the top priority. This means business apps, core infrastructure, end users, and security need to be appropriately funded - these should collectively comprise the majority of IT service spend.
    • Strategy-supporting IT services, like data & BI, see high investment variability between organizations. If its strategic role/importance doesn't align with spend, flag it as an issue you'll need to reconcile with the business by increasing funding (important) or reducing service levels (unimportant).
    • The strategic importance of IT as a whole is often reflected in the spend on IT management services. If spend is low, IT's probably seen as a support function, not a strategic one.

    Identify the hot spots and pick your battles.

    • Spend levels are just approximate gauges of where and how the business is willing to spend its money. Start with this simple gut check.
    • Noting the areas of importance vs. spend misalignment will help you identify where negotiations with the business should probably happen.

    A mature IT cost optimization practice is often approached from the service perspective

    When optimizing IT costs, you have two OpEx levers to pull - vendor spend and staff spend. Isolating these two sources of IT service spend will help shortlist your options.

    It's all about how much room you have to move.

    • Any decision made about how a service is provisioned will push vendor and staff spend in clear, predictable, and often opposite directions (e.g. in-house and people-intensive services tend to see higher staff spend, while outsourced and tech-intensive services higher vendor spend).
    • Service levels required by the business should be the driving factor behind service design and spend decisions. High service spend may reflect priority but may also indicate it's over-built and is ripe for a cost-optimization treatment.
    • Service spend is a useful barometer for tracking the financial impact of any changes made to IT. Add simple unit-cost metrics like "service spend per organizational employee" and "service spend per FTE assigned to the service" to see if and how the dial has moved over time.

    Grow your IT service management practice.

    • The real power of the CIO Service View is laying the groundwork for next-level IT service management initiatives like developing a service catalog, negotiating service-level agreements, rolling out chargeback and showback mechanisms, and calculating IT's value to the business.
    • Use service spend as a common denominator for both your IT service management and IT performance management programs. Better yet, integrate the two programs to ensure a single version of the truth.

    CIO Service View: Optimize your cost-to-value ratio

    Now that you've mapped your IT spend data to the CIO Service View, there are some questions you're better equipped to answer, namely:

    • What's the impact of cloud adoption on speed of delivery?
    • Where can I improve spend efficiency?
    • Is my support model optimized?
    • How does our spend compare to others?

    You now have:

    • Data that shows the financial impact of change decisions on service costs.
    • Insight into the relationship between vendor spend and staff spend within a given IT service.
    • The information you need to start developing service unit costing mechanisms.
    • A tool for setting and right-sizing service-level agreements with the business.
    • A more focused starting point for investigating IT cost-optimization opportunities.
    • A baseline for benchmarking common IT services against your peers.

    Does the amount we spend on each IT service make sense?

    We have some good opportunities for optimization ...

    Chart of CIO Service View

    The CXO Business View will spur conversations that may have never happened before

    This view is a potential game changer as previously unknown technology spend is often revealed, triggering change in IT's relationship with business unit leaders.

    Table of CXO Business View

    The big beneficiaries of IT spend will leap out

    The CXO Business View mapping does have a "shock and awe" quality to it given large spend disparities. They may be totally legitimate, but they're still eye-catching.

    Share information, don't push recommendations.

    • Have a series of one-on-one meetings with business unit leaders to present these numbers.
      • Approach initial meetings as information-sharing sessions only. The data is probably new to them, and they'll need time to reflect and ask questions.
      • Bring a list of the big-ticket spend items for that business unit to focus the conversation.
    • Present these numbers at a broader leadership meeting.
      • It's critical for everyone to hear the same truth and learn about each other's technology needs and uses.
      • This is where recommendations for better aligning IT spend with business goals and cost-optimization strategies should surface. A group approach will bring technology haves and have-nots into the open, as well as provide a forum for collaborative solutioning.

    If possible, slice the numbers by business unit headcount.

    • IT spend per business unit employee is an attention-getting metric that can help gain entry to important conversations.
    • Comparing per-employee spend across different business functions is not necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison, as units like HR may have few employees but serve the entire organization. Bring up these kinds of differences to provide context and avoid misinterpretations.

    Questions will arise in how you calculated and allocated indirect IT spend

    IT spend for things like core infrastructure and end-user services must be distributed fairly across multiple or all business units. Be prepared to explain your methods.

    Be transparent in your transparency.

    • Distributing indirect spend is imprecise by nature. You can't account for every unique circumstance. However, you can devise a logic-driven, general approach that's defensible, fair, and works for most people most of the time.
    • Lay out your assumptions from the start. This is an important part of communicating transparently and can prevent unwanted descent into weedy rabbit holes.
      • List what you classified as indirect spend. Use the CFO Expense View and/or CIO Service View categories to aid your presentation of this information.
      • Point out known circumstances that didn't fit your general allocation method and how you handled them. Opting to ignore minor anomalies is reasonable but be sure to tell business unit leaders you did this and why.

    Use questions about indirect IT staff spend distribution to engage stakeholders.

    • As a percentage, the indirect IT staff spend allocation to a specific business unit may be higher than that for IT vendor spend since IT staff tend to operate more generally than the technologies they support.
    • Leverage any pushback about indirect spend as an opportunity to engage the broader business leadership group. Let them arrive at a consensus of how they want it done and confirm buy-in.

    CXO Business View: Bring the truth to light

    Now that you've mapped your IT spend data to the CXO Business View, there are some questions you're better equipped to answer, namely:

    • Which business units consume the most IT resources?
    • Which business units are underserved by IT?
    • How do I best communicate spend data internally?
    • Where do I need better business sponsorship for IT projects?

    You now have:

    • A reason-based accounting of direct and indirect amounts spent on IT vendors and staff in support of each major business unit.
    • Insight into the technology haves and have-nots in your organization and where opportunities to optimize costs may exist.
    • Attention-getting numbers that will help you engage business-unit leaders in meaningful conversations about their use of IT resources and the value they receive.
    • A mechanism to assess if a business unit's consumption of IT is appropriate and aligned with its purpose and mandate in the organization.
    • A list of previously unknown business-side technologies that IT will investigate further.

    Why doesn't my business unit get more support from IT?

    Let's look at how you compare to the other departments ...

    Chart of the CXO Business View

    From the CEO's high-level perspective, IT spend is a collection of distinct financial islands

    From IT's perspective, these islands are intimately connected, with events on one affecting what happens (or doesn't) on another. Focus on the bridges.

    Table of CEO High-level Perspective

    Focus more on unifying the view of technology spend than on the numbers

    When talking to the CEO, seek to build mutual understanding and encourage a holistic approach to the organization's technology spend.

    Use the numbers to get to the real issues.

    • Clarify with the CEO what business innovation, business growth, and KTLO means to them and the role each plays in the organization's strategic and operational plans.
    • Find out the role they think IT, and technology as a whole, has in realizing business plans. Only then can you look at the relative allocation of IT spend with them to see if the aspiration aligns with reality.
    • Eventually, you'll need to discuss expectations around who pays the bills for operationally supporting capital technology investments over the long-term (i.e. IT or the business units that actually want and use it). You'll have concrete examples of business projects that consumed IT operations resources without a corresponding increase in IT's OpEx budget.

    Focus your KTLO spend conversation on risk and trade-off.

    • Every strategic conversation needs to look at the impact on ongoing operations. Every discussion about CapEx needs to investigate the long-term repercussions for OpEx. Look at the whole tech spend picture.
    • Use risk to get KTLO/OpEx into the conversation. Be straightforward (i.e. "If we do/don't do this, then we can/can't do that"). Simply put, mitigating the risks that get in the way of having it all usually requires spending.

    CEO Innovation View: Learn what's really expected of IT

    Now that you've mapped your IT spend data to the CEO Innovation View, there are some questions you're better equipped to answer, namely:

    • Why is KTLO spend so high?
    • What should our operational spend priorities be?
    • Which projects and investments should we prioritize?
    • Are we spending enough on innovative initiatives?

    You now have:

    • A holistic, organization-wide view of total technology spend in support of different investment types, namely business innovation, business growth, and keeping things up and running.
    • Data-driven examples that prove the impact of near-term capital spend on long-term operational expenses and the intimate relationship between the two types of spend.
    • A way to measure the degree of alignment between the innovation and growth goals the organization has and how money is actually being spent to realize those goals.
    • A platform to discuss how technology investment decision-making and governance can work better to realize organizational mandates and goals.

    I know what IT costs us, but what is it really worth?

    Here's how tech spend directly supports business objectives ...

    Chart of CEO Innovation View

    Revisit your IT spend transparency objectives before crafting your executive presentation

    Go back to exercise 1.1 to remind yourself why you undertook this effort in the first place, clear your head of all that data, and refocus on the big picture.

    Review the real problems and issues you need to address and the key stakeholders.
    This will guide what data you focus on or showcase with other business leaders. For example, if IT OpEx is perceived as high, be prepared to examine the CapEx/OpEx ratio as well as cloud-related spend's impact on OpEx.

    Flag ITFM processes you'll develop as part of your ITFM maturity improvement plan.
    You won't become a TCO math expert overnight, but being able to communicate your awareness of and commitment to developing and applying ITFM capabilities helps build confidence in you and the information you're presenting.

    Use your first big presentation to debut ITFM.
    ITFM as a formal practice and the changes you hope to make may be a novel concept for your business peers. Use your newfound IT spend and staffing transparency to gently wade into the topic instead of going for the deep dive.

    Now it's time to present your transparent IT spend and staffing data to your executive

    Pull out of analysis mode. You're starting to tell the IT spend story, and this is just the first chapter. Introduce your cast of characters and pique your audience's interest.

    The goal of this first presentation is to showcase IT spend in general and make sure that everyone's getting the same information as everyone else.

    Go broad, not deep
    Defer any in-depth examinations until after you're sure you have everyone's attention. Only dive deep when you're ready to talk about specific plans via follow-up sessions.

    Focus on the CXO
    Given your audience, the CXO Business View may be the most interesting for them and will trigger the most questions and discussion. Plan to spend the largest chunk of your time here.

    Avoid judgment
    Let the numbers speak for themselves. Do point out what's high and what's low, but don't offer your opinion about whether it's good or bad. Let your audience draw their own conclusions.

    Ask for impressions
    Education and awareness are primary objectives. What comes up will give a good indication of what's known, what's news, who's interested, and where there's work to do.

    Pick a starting point
    Ask what they see as high-priority areas for both optimizing IT costs as well as improving the organization's approach to making IT spend decisions in general.

    What to include in your presentation ...

    • Purpose: Why you did the IT spend and staffing transparency exercise.
    • Method: The models and processes you used to map the data.
    • Data: Charts from the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook.
    • Feedback: Space for your audience to voice their thoughts.
    • Next steps: Discussion and summary of actions to come.

    5.2 Develop an executive presentation

    Duration: Two hours

    1. Download the IT Staff & Spend Executive Presentation Template.
    2. Copy and paste the IT spend output tables and graphs into the template. (Note: Pasting as an image will preserve formatting.)
    3. Incorporate observations and insights about your analysis of your IT spend metrics.
    4. Conduct an internal review of the final presentation to ensure it includes all the elements you need and is error free.
    5. Book time to make your presentation to the executive team. Plan time after the presentation to field questions, engage in follow-up information sessions, and act on feedback.

    Note: Refer to your organization's standards and norms for executive-level presentations and either adapt the Info-Tech template accordingly or use your own.

    Input Output
    • Tabular and graphical data outputs in the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook
    • Executive presentation summarizing your organization's actual IT spend
    Materials Participants
    • IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Workbook
    • IT Staff & Spend Executive Presentation Template
    • CIO/IT directors
    • IT financial lead
    • Other IT management

    Download the IT Spend & Staffing Transparency Executive Presentation TemplateTemplate

    Phase 5: Identify implications for IT

    Achievement summary

    You've done the hard part in starting your IT spend transparency journey. You have:

    • Analyzed the results of your IT spend mapping process.
    • Revisited your transparency objectives.
    • Prepared an executive presentation so you can share findings with other leaders in your organization.

    "Having internal conversations, especially if there is doubt, allows for accuracy and confidence in your model. I was showing someone the cost of a service he managed. He didn't believe the service was so expensive. We went through it: here are the people we allocated, the assets we allocated, and the software we allocated. It was right - that was the total cost. He was like, 'No way. Wow.' The costs were high, and the transparency is what allowed for a conversation on cost optimization."
    - Monica Braun, Research Director, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group

    Next Steps

    Achieve IT Spend & Staffing Transparency

    This final section will provide you with:

    • An overall summary of accomplishment
    • Recommended next steps
    • A list of contributors to this research
    • Some related Info-Tech resources to help you grow your ITFM practice

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Congratulations! You now have a fully transparent view of your IT spend.

    You've now mapped the entirety of technology spend in your organization. You've:

    1. Learned the key sources of spend data and information in your organization.
    2. Set some standards for data organization and labeling.
    3. Have a methodology for continuing to track and document spend in a transparent way.
    4. Crafted an executive presentation that's a first step in having more meaningful and constructive conversations about IT spend with your key stakeholders.

    What's next?

    With a reliable baseline, you can look forward to more informed and defensible IT budgeting and cost optimization. Use your newly-transparent IT spend as a foundation for improving your financial data hygiene in the near term and evolving your overall ITFM governance maturity in the long-term.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through an Info-Tech full-service engagement or Guided Implementation.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    1-888-670-8889

    Research Contributors and Experts

    Monica Braun, Research Director, ITFM Practice

    Monica Braun
    Research Director, ITFM Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Dave Kish, Practice Lead, ITFM Practice

    Dave Kish
    Practice Lead, ITFM Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Kennedy Confurius, Research Analyst, ITFM Practice

    Kennedy Confurius
    Research Analyst, ITFM Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Aman Kumari, Research Specialist, ITFM Practice

    Aman Kumari
    Research Specialist, ITFM Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Rex Ding, Research Specialist, ITFM Practice

    Rex Ding
    Research Specialist, ITFM Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Angie Reynolds, Principal Research Director, ITFM Practice

    Angie Reynolds
    Principal Research Director, ITFM Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Build Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap

    • Cost optimization often doesn't go beyond the cutting part, but cutting costs isn't strategic - it's reactive and can easily result in mistakes.
    • True cost optimization is much more than this. Re-focus your efforts on optimizing your cost-to-value ratio and implementing a sustainable cost-optimization practice.

    Build an IT Budget

    • Budgetary approval is difficult because finance executives have a limited understanding of IT and use a different vocabulary.
    • Detailed budgets must be constructed in a way that is transparent but at a level of appropriate detail in order to limit complexity and confusion.

    Manage an IT Budget

    • No one likes to be over budget, but being under budget isn't necessarily good either.
    • Implement a budget management process that documents your planned budget and actual expenditures, tracks variances, and responds to those variances to stay on track.
    • Control for under- or overspending using Info Tech's budget management tool and tactics.

    APPENDIX

    Sample shared business services

    Sample industry-specific business services

    Sample shared business functions

    Business function Definition
    Human Resources The management of the recruitment, training, development, appraisal, compensation/reward, retention, and departure of employees in an organization. Does not include management of subcontractor or outsourced relationships.
    Finance and Accounting The management and analysis of an organization's revenue, funds, spend, investments, financial transactions, accounts, and financial statements. Often includes enterprise asset management.
    Procurement and Supplier Management Acquiring materials, goods, and services from an external party, including identifying potential suppliers/providers, managing tendering or bidding processes, negotiating terms and agreements, and managing the relationship with the vendor/provider.
    Information Technology The development, management, and optimization of information technology resources and systems over their lifecycle in support of an organization's work priorities and goals. Includes computer-based information and communication systems, but typically excludes industrial operational technologies.
    Legal Expertise in interpretation, implication, and application of legislation and regulation that affects the enterprise, including guidance and support in the areas of risk, contracting, compliance, ownership, and litigation.
    Regulatory Affairs and Compliance Management Identification, operationalization, monitoring, reporting, and enforcement of the standards, rules, codes, and laws that apply to an organization's operating environment and the products and services it offers.
    Sales Transactional provision of a product or service to a buyer at an agreed-upon price. Includes identifying and developing prospective buyers, presenting and explaining the product/service, overcoming prospect objections and concerns to purchase, negotiating terms, developing contracts, and billing or invoicing.
    Customer Service and Support A range of activities designed to optimize the customer experience with an organization and its products and services throughout the customer lifecycle with the goals of retaining the customer; encouraging additional spend or consumption; the customer positively influencing other potential customers; and minimizing financial and reputational business risks.
    Marketing and Advertising Understanding customer/prospect needs, developing strategies to meet those needs, and promotion of the organization's products/services to a target market via a range of channels to maximize revenue, membership, donations, and/or develop the organization's brand or reputation. Includes market research and analysis and promotion, campaign, and brand management.

    Sample industry-specific functions

    Supply chain and capital-intensive industries.

    Industry function Definition
    Product Innovation Research, design, development, and launch of new products, including the engineering of their underlying production processes.
    Product and Service Portfolio Management The management of an organization's collection of products and services, including management of the product/service roadmap; product/service portfolio and catalog; product/service quality and performance; and product/service pricing, bundling and markdown.
    Logistics and Supply Chain Management Sourcing raw materials or component parts needed and shipping of a finished product. Includes demand planning; procurement/supplier management; inventory management; yard management; allocation management; fulfillment and replenishment; and product distribution and delivery.
    Production Operations Manufacture, storage, and tracking of a product and ensuring product and production process quality. Includes operations management, materials management, quality/safety control, packaging management, and management of the tools, equipment, and technologies that support it.
    Architecture & Engineering The design and planning of structures or critical infrastructure systems according to scientific, functional, and aesthetic principles.
    Construction New construction, assembly, or alteration of buildings and critical infrastructure (e.g. transportation systems; telecommunications systems; utilities generation/transmission/distribution facilities and systems). Includes management of all construction project plans and the people, materials, and equipment required to execute.
    Real Estate Management Management of any residential, commercial, or industrial real estate holdings (land and buildings), including any financial dealings such as its purchase, sale, transfer, and rental as well as ongoing maintenance and repair of associated infrastructure and capital assets.

    Sample industry-specific functions

    Financial services and insurance industries.

    Industry function Definition
    Core Banking Services Includes ATM management; account management (opening, deposit/withdrawal, interest calculation, overdraft management, closing); payments processing; funds transfers; foreign currency exchange; cash management.
    Loan, Mortgage, and Credit Services Includes application, adjudication, and approval; facility; disbursement/card issuance; authorization management; merchant services; interest calculation; billing/payment; debt/collections management.
    Investment and Wealth Management Processes for the investment of premiums/monies received from policy holders/customers to generate wealth. Often two-pronged: internal investment to fund claim payout in the case of insurance, and customer-facing investment as a financial service (e.g. retirement planning/annuities). Includes product development and management, investment management, safety deposit box services, trust management services.
    Actuarial Analysis & Policy Creation Development of new policy products based on analysis of past losses and patterns, forecasts of financial risks, and assessment of potential profitability (i.e. actuarial science). These processes also include development of rate schedules (pricing) and the reserves that the insurer needs to have available for potential claim payouts.
    Underwriting & Policy Administration Processes for assessing risk of a potential policy holder; determining whether to insure them or not; setting the premiums the policy holder must pay; and administering the policy over the course of its lifecycle (including updates and billing).
    Claims Processing & Claims Management Processes for receiving, investigating, evaluating, approving/denying, and disbursing a claim payout. This process is unique to the insurance industry. In health insurance, ongoing case management processes need to be considered here whereby the insurer monitors and approves patient treatments over a long-term basis to ensure that the treatments are both necessary and beneficial.

    Sample industry-specific functions

    Healthcare industry

    Industry function Definition
    Patient Intake & Admissions Processes whereby key pieces of information about a patient are registered, updated, or confirmed with the healthcare provider in order to access healthcare services. Includes patient triage, intake management, and admissions management. These processes are generally administrative in nature.
    Patient Diagnosis A range of methods for determining the medical condition a patient has in order to provide appropriate care or treatment. Includes examination, consultation, testing, and diagnostic imaging.
    Patient Treatment The range of medical procedures, methods, and interventions to mitigate, relieve, or cure a patient's symptom, injury, disease, or other medical condition. Includes consultation and referral; treatment and care planning; medical procedure management; nursing and personal support; medicine management; trauma management; diet and nutrition management; and patient transportation.
    Patient Recovery & Ongoing Care Processes and methods for tracking the progress of a patient post-treatment; improving their health outcomes; restoring, maintaining, or improving their quality of life; and discharging or transferring them to other providers. Includes remote monitoring of vital parameters, physical therapy, post-trauma care, and a range of restorative and lifestyle modification programs.

    Sample industry-specific functions

    Gaming and hospitality industries

    Industry function Definition
    Accommodation Short-term lodging in hotel facilities. Includes management and maintenance of guest rooms and common spaces, amenities (e.g. swimming pool), and other related services (e.g. valet parking).
    Gaming Includes table wagering games and gambling activities such as slot machines or any other activity that includes on premises mobile casino gaming.
    Food & Beverage Services Food and beverages prepared, served, or available for sale by the hotel on the hotel premises via restaurants and bars and room service. Excludes catering (see Events Management) and management or operation of independent leased food and beverage establishments located on the hotel premises.
    Entertainment & Events Planning, coordination, and on-premises hosting of events including conferences, conventions, trade shows, parties, ceremonies and live entertainment, and other forms of recreation on the hotel premises. Includes all aspects of entertainment operations, facility management and catering for the event.

    Data Architecture

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    • Parent Category Name: Data and Business Intelligence
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    Enable the business to achieve operational excellence, client intimacy, and product leadership with an innovative, agile, and fit-for-purpose data architecture practice

    Modernize Enterprise Storage

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    • Parent Category Name: Storage & Backup Optimization
    • Parent Category Link: /storage-and-backup-optimization
    • Current storage solutions are nearing end of life, performance or capacity limits.
    • Data continues to grow at an exponential rate, and management complexity is growing even faster. Some kinds of data, like unstructured data, are leading factors in the exponential growth of data.
    • Emerging storage technologies and storage software/automation are disrupting the market and redefining the role of disk arrays, including how storage aligns with people and process.
    • Storage infrastructure budgets are not satisfying the exponential growth of data.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Start with the data, not storage. Answer what is being stored and why before investigating the where and how of storage solutions.
    • Governance and archiving are not IT projects. These can have tremendous benefits for managing data growth but must involve the larger business.
    • More capacity is not a long-term solution. Data is growing faster than decreasing storage costs. Data and capacity mitigation strategies will help in more effective and efficient infrastructure utilization and cost reduction.

    Impact and Result

    • It’s about the data. Start with what is being supported and why. Decide on what and how data is stored before you decide on where. Let the needs of your workloads and governance requirements of your business drive your storage infrastructure decisions and the technologies you adopt.
    • Identify current and future capacity needs for current and future data drivers. Evaluating the ability of current infrastructure to meet these needs will help you discover necessary additions to meet these requirements.
    • Identify governance requirements and constraints that exist across the organization and are specific to workloads. Technology has to conform to these requirements and constraints, not the other way around.
    • Align people and process with technology changes. To effectively utilize the changes in storage, appropriate changes must be made to existing people and process.

    Modernize Enterprise Storage Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should modernize enterprise storage, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Build the case for storage modernization

    Develop the business case for modernizing storage and assess your existing infrastructure for meeting data needs.

    • Modernize Enterprise Storage – Phase 1: Build the Case for Storage Modernization
    • Modernize Enterprise Storage Workbook

    2. Develop your storage technology needs and goals

    Review data governance, explore emerging storage technologies, and identify current and future storage needs.

    • Modernize Enterprise Storage – Phase 2: Develop Your Storage Technology Needs and Goals
    • Evaluate Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Your Infrastructure Roadmap
    • Evaluate Software-Defined Storage Solutions for Your Infrastructure Roadmap
    • Evaluate All Flash in Primary Storage for Your Infrastructure Roadmap
    • Infrastructure Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool

    3. Develop and communicate the roadmap, TCO, and RFP

    Communicate the roadmap with people, process, and technology initiatives, develop an RFP, and conduct a TCO.

    • Modernize Enterprise Storage – Phase 3: Develop and Communicate the Roadmap and RFP
    • Modernize Enterprise Storage Communications Report
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Modernize Enterprise Storage

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Identify Business Case and Assess Current State

    The Purpose

    Identify a business case and need for storage modernization by assessing current and future storage needs.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A clear understanding of the business expectations and needs of storage infrastructure.

    Activities

    1.1 Identify current storage pain points.

    1.2 Discuss storage modernization drivers.

    1.3 Identify data growth drivers.

    1.4 Determine relative growth burden.

    Outputs

    Alignment of storage modernization with organizational pain points

    Desired outcomes of storage modernization

    An understanding of growth impact across drivers

    An understanding of capacity and expansion needs

    2 Review Governance and Emerging Technologies

    The Purpose

    Review existing data governance.

    Explore emerging technologies and trends in the storage space.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Review data governance objectives that must be met.

    Identify a shortlist of storage technologies and trends that may be of interest.

    Activities

    2.1 Shortlist interest in storage technologies.

    2.2 Prioritize shortlist of storage technologies.

    2.3 Identify solutions that meet data and governance needs.

    Outputs

    A starting point for research into new and emerging storage technologies

    Expressed interest in adopting storage technologies

    A list of storage solutions needed to deliver on future data and governance needs

    3 Identify Storage Needs and Develop Initiatives

    The Purpose

    Identify the people, process, and technology initiatives required to adopt new storage technologies.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Align your organizational people and process with new and disruptive technologies to best take advantage of what these new technologies have to offer.

    Activities

    3.1 Complete future storage structure planning tool.

    3.2 Identify storage modernization technology initiatives.

    3.3 Identify storage modernization people initiatives.

    3.4 Identify storage modernization process initiatives.

    Outputs

    A understanding of the future state of your storage infrastructure

    Technology initiatives needed to adopt storage structure

    People initiatives needed to adopt storage structure

    Process initiatives needed to adopt storage structure

    4 Build a Roadmap and RFP, Calculate TCO

    The Purpose

    Develop an executive communications report.

    Conduct a TCO analysis comparing on-premises and cloud storage solutions.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Communicate storage modernization goals and plans to stakeholders.

    Activities

    4.1 Prioritize storage modernization initiatives.

    4.2 Complete project timeline and build roadmap.

    4.3 Compare TCO of on-premises and cloud storage solutions.

    Outputs

    Alignment of people, process, and technology with storage adoption

    Communicate storage modernization goals and plans to stakeholders and executives

    Compare cost of on-premises and cloud storage alternatives

    Cost-Reduction Planning for IT Vendors

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    • Parent Category Name: Cost & Budget Management
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    • Unprecedented health and economic conditions are putting extreme pressure and controls on expense management.
    • IT needs to implement proactive measures to reduce costs with immediate results.
    • IT must sustain these reductions beyond the near term since no one knows how long the current conditions will last.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Proactively initiating a “War on Waste” (WoW) to reduce the expenses and costs in areas that do not impact operational capabilities of IT is an easy way to reduce IT expenditures.
    • This is accomplished by following the principle “Stop Doing Stupid Stuff” (SDSS), which many organizations deemphasize or overlook during times of growth and prosperity.
    • Initiating a WoW and SDSS program with passion, creativity, and urgency will deliver short-term cost reductions.

    Impact and Result

    • Pinpoint and implement tactical countermeasures and savings opportunities to reduce costs immediately (Reactive: <3 months).
    • Identify and deploy proven practices to capture and sustain expense reduction throughout the mid-term (Proactive: 3-12months).
    • Create a long-term strategy to improve flexibility, make changes more swiftly, and quickly generate cost-cutting opportunities (Strategic: >12 months).
    • Use Info-Tech’s 4 R’s Framework (Required, Removed, Rescheduled, and Reduced) and guiding principles to develop your cost-reduction roadmap.

    Cost-Reduction Planning for IT Vendors Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Start here – read the Storyboard

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out how you can reduce your IT cost in the short term while establishing a foundation for long-term sustainment of IT cost containment.

    • Cost-Reduction Planning for IT Vendors Storyboard
    • Cost-Cutting Classification and Prioritization Tool
    [infographic]

    Build an ITSM Tool Implementation Plan

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    • Parent Category Name: Service Desk
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    • Selecting the Wrong Resources: You need ITSM technology and process experts, because this is not just a technology project, but also a process improvement opportunity.
    • Over-Reliance on the Vendor to Optimize Your Tool: Yes, the vendor will typically install and set up the tool, but they will not fix your processes for you.
    • Not Preparing for Data Migration: Data migration is complex. You need to determine what data to migrate, if any, and how that data will be mapped to the new environment.
    • Insufficient IT and End-User Training: A link to the ITSM tool manual is not enough. Staff and users need training on how your processes will be executed in the new tool.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Start with the assumption you don’t need to migrate old data.
    • ITSM tools are designed to support ITIL best practices.
    • Implement your new tool in stages to manage scope.

    Impact and Result

    • Ability to plan and scope the project to avoid or reduce last-minute chaos.
    • Opportunity to review and optimize processes as part of the ITSM tool implementation project.
    • Improved project management, and therefore, better cost and effort estimates, by identifying required tasks upfront.

    Build an ITSM Tool Implementation Plan Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Build an ITSM Tool Implementation Plan Deck – An implementation guide that walks you through the steps to ensure the tool delivers business value.

    There may be hundreds of parameters to define and decisions to make, so identifying the full list of tasks early is critical for the success of the implementation project.

    • Build an ITSM Tool Implementation Plan – Phases 1-3

    2. ITSM Tool Project Charter Template – A charter to document your project scope, milestones, stakeholders, risks etc. to kick-off and manage your project.

    This project charter document summarizes the Project Overview (Description, background, drivers, and objectives), Governance and Management (Project stakeholders/roles, budget, and dependencies), and Risk, Assumptions, and Constraints (Known and potential risks and mitigation strategy).

    • ITSM Tool Implementation Project Charter Template

    3. ITSM Tool Implementation Checklist – A tool to help identify the most common decisions you will need to make and prepare for your implementation project.

    The checklists in this tool identify the most common decisions and preparation you will need to make to support the implementation for the ITSM modules that we recommend are set up first: incident management and service requests; change management; and asset management. Use these checklists as a model to follow for any additional ITSM modules you plan to implement, and refer to Info-Tech's blueprints for each service management topic for additional guidance.

    • ITSM Tool Implementation Checklist

    4. ITSM Tool Deployment Plan Template – A tool to help prioritize and prepare for tool rollout plan.

    This deployment plan documents the strategy and decisions made for making the transition to the new ITSM tool, and the details to execute the cutover to a live environment, including how, when, where.

    • ITSM Tool Deployment Plan Template

    5. ITSM Tool Training Schedule – Use the tool to create your new tool training roadmap.

    This template is a guide for creating a training and communication plan as part of the implementation project for your ITSM tool. Use the template to document and plan the communications and training needs prior to deployment of the new tool.

    • ITSM Tool Training Schedule

    Infographic

    Further reading

    Build an ITSM Tool Implementation Plan

    Plan ahead with a step-by-step approach to ensure the tool delivers business value.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst perspective

    Take control of the wheel or you might end up in a ditch.

    The image contains a picture of Frank Trovato.

    An ITSM tool implementation is a complex project with direct impact on IT’s ability to support the business. With that level of risk, you need to take control early on.

    Yes, your vendor will support or execute the technical implementation, but they depend on you to tell them how to configure ITSM parameters and workflows that affect user interface, the ability to manage incidents, and governance over assets and IT changes.

    If you leave the configuration completely to the vendor, at best you might get the same setup as in your old tool (and not realize the benefits that leadership is expecting). At worst you end up with default values that don’t fit your process needs, i.e., confusion and not realizing expected benefits.

    A successful implementation requires early planning from a wide range of resources including ITSM tool experts (supported by the vendor), process experts, and a project manager to methodically step through the hundreds of parameters you will need to define before implementation.

    Frank Trovato
    Research Director, Infrastructure and Operations
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Common Obstacles

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    Leadership has invested significantly in a new ITSM tool and expects to see the benefits they were promised by the vendor and the procurement team.

    The ITSM project team needs to balance leadership expectations with the direct impact this project will have on IT staff and end users.

    Implementing an ITSM tool is a large project that is often highly complex in part because it requires input from a wide range of stakeholders: IT staff, end users, senior management, and vendors.

    A new ITSM tool will change how IT staff work and how users are serviced, and change is always difficult.

    Finally, implementing the new tool requires a migration from an existing tool without a pause in IT service availability. Incidents don’t take a week off while you execute the final product rollout.

    There may be hundreds of parameters to define and decisions to make, so identifying the full list of tasks early is critical to:

    • Identify the necessary stakeholders to provide input into implementation decisions.
    • Properly define scope and timelines.
    • Take advantage of the opportunity to review and improve processes as part of defining what will need to be configured in the new ITSM tool.

    Info-Tech Insight

    As with any large project, a key step is tackling it one bite at a time – but also understanding the size of the whole meal. This is where organizations often fail with ITSM implementations: not understanding upfront the volume of work required for a successful implementation.

    Your Challenge

    Organizations implementing a new ITSM tool often face these pitfalls:

    • Selecting the Wrong Resources: You need ITSM technology and process experts, because this is not just a technology project but also a process improvement opportunity. You will need to configure ITSM parameters and workflows in the new tool – which directly affects processes. Take advantage of that opportunity to fix pain points. For example, if your existing ticket categories are not effective, implement a better categorization scheme rather than just configure the same old, ineffective scheme.
    • Over-Reliance on the Vendor to Optimize Your Tool: Yes, the vendor will typically install and set up the tool but they will not fix your processes for you. On installation day, if you are not prepared with the categories, ticket templates, and so on that you wish to configure, your vendor will just go with the default or migrate your old parameters from your old ITSM tool.
    • Not Preparing for Data Migration: Data migration is complex. You need to determine what data to migrate, if any, and how that data will be mapped to the new environment. That takes planning and must be defined well before the vendor is ready to implement your tool.
    • Insufficient IT and End-User Training: A link to the ITSM tool manual is not enough. Staff and users need training on how your processes will be executed in the new tool.

    A survey of implementation challenges for ServiceNow’s customers

    26% Resistance to change

    43% Lacked a clear roadmap

    38% Planning for resources

    Source: Acorio, 2019

    Info-Tech’s approach

    Divide the implementation project into controllable phases for an effective implementation.

    Plan

    Define the scope of your project, identify and get buy-in from your stakeholders, and establish a timeframe for the implementation.

    Design & Build

    Identify existing process challenges and design workflows and ticket management to improve processes. Make decisions on data migrations and integrations for your new tool.

    Deploy & Train

    Create a rollout plan and communicate changes and improvements to users. Plan for the new tool deployment and monitor your solution.

    STOP: Use this blueprint after you have selected an ITSM solution

    Leverage our SoftwareReviews service and related blueprints to assist with ITSM tool selection, and then use this blueprint to plan the implementation.

    1. Evaluate solutions

    2. Select and purchase

    3. Implement (use this blueprint)

    Use our SoftwareReviews resources to evaluate solutions and vendors based on criteria such as features and customer service. Below are links to our ITSM software reviews:

    Use the following resources to help you make the case for funding and execute the purchase process:

    Your ITSM vendor or systems integrator will lead the technical implementation (e.g. software install and integration).

    As a result, your implementation plan needs to focus on preparing the information needed for implementation (e.g. ticket categories, workflow requirements) and organizational change management.

    This blueprint provides a methodology, checklist, and supporting templates to prepare for the implementation.

    Info-Tech’s methodology to build an ITSM Tool Implementation Plan

    1. Identify Scope, Stakeholders, and Preliminary Timeline

    2. Prepare to Implement Incident Management and Service Request Modules

    3. Create a Deployment Plan (Communication, Training, Rollout)

    Phase Steps

    1.1 Document define scope

    1.2 Define roles and responsibilities

    1.3 Identify preliminary timeline

    2.1 Review your existing solution and challenges

    2.2 Plan ticket management and workflow implementation

    2.3 Plan data migration, knowledgebase setup, and integrations

    2.4 Plan the module rollout

    3.1 Create a communication plan (for IT, users, and business leaders)

    3.2 Create a training plan

    3.3 Plan how you will deploy, monitor, and maintain the solution

    Phase Outcomes

    • RACI chart outlining high-level accountability and responsibilities for the project
    • Documenting timeline and team for the implementation project
    • ITSM tool implementation checklist
    • Strategy and identified opportunities to implement incident and service request modules
    • Documented communications and targeted training plan
    • Completed rollout plan and prepared to monitor your success metrics

    Insight summary

    Start with the assumption you don’t need to migrate old data

    ITSM tools are designed to support ITIL best practices

    Implement your new tool in stages to manage scope

    We all love data. We love being able to run reports showing trends, measuring changes over time, and highlighting pain points – but is your data from five years ago relevant to those assessments? Can you get by with just migrating open tickets and perhaps just the last year of critical tickets?

    Be ruthless in deciding what really needs to be in your active system to support incident matching, troubleshooting, or ongoing reporting.

    If you can’t make a strong case, don’t waste your time on old data. Remember, you can still save an exported copy or report of your old data if the need arises to search historical records.

    For organizations lacking process maturity, the tool’s default settings will often provide a good starting point. For example, a good ITSM tool will typically already be configured to follow best practices such as:

    • Separating incidents from service requests
    • Assigning resolution codes to solved tickets
    • Enabling routing based on categories

    Within those defaults, you will still need to decide your specific parameters – e.g. what your categories and resolution codes should be – so don’t blindly follow default settings but use them as a starting point.

    Start with the incident management and service requests modules. Those are typically the core of IT service management operations, so that should help realize benefits from the new tool sooner. In addition, incident management and service requests processes will support other ITSM processes such as asset management and problem management.

    Once those modules are implemented successfully (from a technology and process perspective), then start to implement your next core module (e.g. asset or change management), and continue to build from there.

    Blueprint deliverables

    This blueprint includes tools and templates to help you accomplish your goals:

    ITSM Tool Implementation Checklist

    Identify the most common decisions you will need to make and prepare for your implementation project.

    ITSM Tool Project Charter Template

    Review and edit the template to suit your project requirements

    The image contains a screenshot of the ITSM Tool Project Charter Template.
    The image contains screenshots of the ITSM Tool Implementation Checklist.

    ITSM Tool Deployment Plan Template

    Prioritize and prepare tool rollout plan

    The image contains a screenshot of the ITSM Tool Deployment Plan Template.

    ITSM Tool Training Schedule

    Use the checklist to create your new tool training roadmap

    The image contains a screenshot of the ITSM Tool Training Schedule.

    Blueprint benefits

    Benefits for IT

    Benefits for the business

    • Checklists and templates to support a smoother transition to the new ITSM tool.
    • Opportunity to review and optimize processes as part of the ITSM tool implementation project. A new tool with the same old processes will not achieve expected benefits.
    • Ability to plan and scope the project to avoid or reduce last-minute chaos.
    • Better planning means better results – specifically, ensuring that the implementation takes into account targeted business benefits.
    • Improved project management, and therefore better cost and effort estimates, by identifying required tasks upfront. This also provides the opportunity to re-scope or adjust timelines based on estimated effort.
    • Higher end-user satisfaction by executing a well-organized ITSM tool implementation.

    Measured value from using this blueprint

    Use this guide as an example to calculate your total cost savings from the ITSM tool implementation project.

    Phase 1

    Identify Scope, Stakeholders, and Preliminary Timeline

    Time, value, and resources saved by using Info-Tech’s methodology to define scope and plan your project

    E.g. 2 FTEs * 6 days * $80,000/year = $4,000/-

    Phase 2

    Prepare to Implement Incident Management and Service Request Modules

    Time, value, and resources saved by using Info-Tech’s methodology to build your solution strategy and determine configurations

    E.g. 2 FTEs * 8 days * $80,000/year = $5,400/-

    Phase 3

    Create a Deployment Plan (Communication, Training, Rollout)

    Time, value, and resources saved by using Info-Tech’s methodology to establish an effective communications roadmap and deploy tool

    E.g. 2 FTEs * 6 days * $80,000/year = $4,000/-

    Total Savings

    Total Savings

    Phase 1 + Phase 2 + Phase 3 = $13,400

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit Guided Implementation Workshop Consulting
    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful." “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.” “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.” “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Guided Implementation

    Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3

    Call #1: Define scope, roles, responsibilities and timeline.

    Call #2: Review your existing solution and challenges.

    Call #3: Plan ticket management and workflow implementation.

    Call #4: Plan data migration, knowledgebase setup, and integrations.

    Call #5: Plan the module rollout.

    Call #6: Create a communication plan.

    Call #7: Create a training plan.

    Call #8: Plan how you will deploy, monitor, and maintain the solution.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization. A typical GI is between 6 to 8 calls over the course of 3 to 6 months.

    Phase 1

    Identify Stakeholders, Scope, and Preliminary Timeline

    Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3

    Identify Stakeholders, Scope, and Preliminary Timeline

    Prepare to Implement Incident Management and Service Request Modules

    Create a Deployment Plan (Communication, Training, Rollout)

    This phase will walk you through the following steps:

    1. Define scope
    2. Define roles and responsibilities
    3. Identify preliminary timeline

    Step 1.1

    Define scope

    Activities

    1.1.1

    Use the Project Charter Template to capture project parameters

    1.1.2

    Leverage the Implementation Checklist to guide your preparation

    1.1.3

    Review goals that drove the ITSM tool purchase

    1.1.4

    Interview ITSM staff to identify current tool challenges and support organizational change management

    1.1.5

    Identify the modules and features you will plan to implement

    1.1.6

    Determine if data migration is required

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Define the scope of the implementation project
    • Establish the future processes and functionalities the tool will support

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Director/Manager
    • Service Manager
    • Project Manager and the project team

    Outcomes of this step

    • Specifying the implementation project
    • Identifying the business units that are needed to support the project
    • Defining the ongoing and future service management processes the tool will support

    1.1.1 Use the Project Charter Template to capture scope, stakeholders, and timeline as outlined in Phase 1

    Follow the instructions in Phase 1 (step 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3) to gather information needed to create a project charter to define project parameters.

    Specific subsections are listed below and described in more detail in the remainder of this phase.

    1. Project Overview: Includes deliverables, scope, milestones, and success metrics.
    2. Governance and Management: Includes roles, responsibilities, and resource requirements.
    3. Project Risks, Assumptions, and Constraints: Includes risks and mitigation strategies as well as any assumptions and constraints.
    4. Project Sign-Off: Includes IT and executive sign-off (if required).

    The image contains a screenshot of the Project Charter Template.

    Download the ITSM Tool Implementation Project Charter Template

    1.1.2 Leverage the Implementation Checklist to guide your preparation

    The checklist tabs align to each phase of this blueprint.

    • Phase 1 (Tab 1) – Identify Stakeholders, Scope, and Preliminary Timeline
    • Phase 2 (Tab 2) – Prepare to Implement Incident Management and Service Request Modules
    • Phase 3 (Tabs 3+4) – Prepare to Implement Additional ITSM Modules (e.g. Change Management)
    • Phase 4 (deployment section in each tab) – Create a Deployment Plan (Communication, Training, Rollout)

    The image contains screenshots from the Implementation Checklist.

    Download the ITSM Tool Implementation Checklist

    1.1.3 Review goals that drove the ITSM tool purchase

    Identify the triggers for the selection and implementation of your new ITSM tool.

    Whether this is your first ITSM tool or a replacement for your old tool, the project was likely triggered by pain points that must be addressed by the new tool to improve your service desk. Having a clear understanding of these pain points throughout the implementation of your new tool will help to prevent them from reoccurring.

    Common ITSM pain points include:

    1. Poor communication with end users on ticket status.
    2. Lack of SLA automation to escalate issues to the appropriate channels.
    3. Poor self-service options for end users to perform simple requests on their own.
    4. Undeveloped knowledgebase for users to find answers to common issues.
    5. Lack of reporting or mistrust in reporting data.
    6. Lack of automation, including ticket templates.
    7. Overcomplicated ticket categories resulting in categories being misused.
    8. Overconfiguration prevents future upgrades.
    9. Lack of integration with other tools.

    If you haven't already selected an ITSM tool, leverage the IT Service Management Selection Guide to select the right tool.

    Download the IT Service Management Selection Guide

    1.1.4 Plan to interview staff to support organizational change management

    Identify challenges with the existing tool and processes as well as potential objections to the new tool.

    Incorporate this feedback in the implementation to drive buy-in and a successful rollout.

    Implementing a new ITSM tool will force changes in how IT staff do their work:

    • At a minimum, it means learning a new interface.
    • It could also mean leveraging features that improve IT operations but could change the process or tasks for the staff.
    • Their input on the current tool and process challenges can be critical for the project.
    • Solving at least some of their challenges can help bring them onboard to use this tool properly and follow associated process changes.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Keep management in the loop through every stage of the implementation process. They are the ones who are paying for the software, so they need to be informed throughout implementation and feel that their needs and feedback are being heard to prevent pushback further into the implementation.

    1.1.5 Identify the modules and features you will plan to implement

    Consider these factors when deciding what modules and features you want to implement:

    • Specific ITSM modules based on the recommended order and any unique business requirements
    • Key features that drove the tool purchase and address key issues
    • High-level process changes needed to address challenges and realize expected benefits from the new ITSM tool (e.g. if a key goal was automated ticket routing based on categories, then the project needs to include developing a good categorization scheme)

    Recommended order for implementation:

    1. Incident Management and Service Request
    2. This is the core of service management and typically has the highest impact on the organization. Include knowledgebase development as part of this implementation.

    3. Change Management
    4. A foundational component of service management, it allows organizations to minimize disruptions to IT services when making changes to services and critical systems.

    5. Asset Management
    6. A foundational component of service management, it allows organizations to track their assets’ locations, how they are used, and when changes are made to them.

    1.1.6 Determine if data migration is required

    If you are switching from a previous ITSM tool, carefully weigh the pros and cons as well as the necessity of migrating historical transactional data before deciding to import it into the new tool.

    Importing your old transactional data will allow you to track metrics over time, which can be valuable for data analysis and reporting purposes.

    However, ask yourself what the true value of your data is before you import it.

    You will not get value out of migrating the old data if:

    • You have incomplete or inaccurate data (a high percentage of incidents did not have tickets created in the old system).
    • The categorization of your old tickets was not useful or was used inconsistently.
    • You plan on changing the ticket categorization in the new system.

    “Don’t debate whether you can import your old data until you’ve made sure that you should.”

    – Barry Cousins, Practice Lead at Info-Tech Research Group

    Info-Tech Insight

    If you decide to migrate your data, keep in mind that it can be a complex process and proper time should be budgeted for planning, structuring the data, and importing and testing it.

    Step 1.2

    Define roles and responsibilities

    Activities

    1.2.1

    Key internal roles and responsibilities

    1.2.2

    Key external roles and responsibilities

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Director/Manager
    • Service Manager
    • Project Manager and the project team

    Outcomes of this step

    • Decision on whether to hire professional services for the implementation
    • Clearly defined roles and responsibilities for the project

    1.2.1 Identify key internal roles and responsibilities

    Review the tasks outlined in the Implementation Checklist to help you identify appropriate roles and specific staff that will be needed to execute this project.

    Project Role

    Description

    RACI

    Assigned To

    Executive Sponsor

    Liaison with the executive team (the CIO would be a good candidate for this role).

    Accountable for project completion.

    Approves resource allocation and funding.

    A, C

    Name(s)

    Project Manager

    Manages the project schedule, tasks, and budget.

    May act as a liaison between executives and the project-level team.

    R

    Name(s)

    Product Owner

    Liaison with the vendor.

    SME for the new tool.

    Provides input to tool configuration decisions.

    Manages the tool post-implementation.

    R

    Name(s)

    Process Owners

    Define current processes.

    Provide input to identifying current-state process challenges to address and potential changes as part of the new tool implementation.

    R

    Name(s)

    Service Desk Manager

    Provides input to tool configuration decisions.

    Manages and trains service desk agents to use new tool and processes.

    R

    Name(s)

    ITSM Tool Core Users (e.g. Service Desk Technicians)

    Provide input to identifying current-state process challenges to address.

    Provide input to tool configuration decisions.

    C

    Name(s)

    RACI = Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed

    Assign individuals to roles through each step of the implementation project in the governance and management chart in the Project Charter Template.

    Download the Project Charter Template

    1.2.2 Key external roles and responsibilities

    Determine whether you will engage professional services for the implementation.

    There are three main ways to implement your ITSM tool

    Implemented in-house by own staff

    Implemented using a combination of your own staff and your ITSM tool vendor

    Implemented by professional services and your ITSM tool vendor

    DIY Implementation

    Adopting a DIY implementation approach can save money but could draw out your implementation timeline and increase the likelihood of errors. Carefully consider your integration environment to determine your resourcing capabilities and maturity.

    Vendor Implementation

    In most cases, your vendor will support or execute the technical implementation based on your requirements. Use this blueprint to help you define those requirements.

    Professional Services

    Opting for professional services may result in a shorter implementation period and fewer errors but may also deny your IT staff the opportunity to develop the skills necessary to maintain and configure the solution in the future.

    Clarify the role of the professional services vendor before acquiring their services to make sure your expectations are aligned. For example, are you hiring the vendor for tool installation, tool configuration, or tool customization or for training your end users?

    Step 1.3

    Identify preliminary timeline

    Activities

    1.3.1

    Identify preliminary internal target dates

    1.3.2

    Identify target dates for vendor involvement

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Director/Manager
    • Service Manager
    • Project Manager and the project team

    Outcomes of this step

    • Specifying the target dates for the implementation project

    1.3.1 Identify preliminary internal target dates

    Identify high-level start and end dates based on the following:

    • Existing process maturity
    • Process changes required (to address process issues or to realize targeted benefits from the new tool)
    • Data migration requirements (if any)
    • Information to prepare for the implementation (review the Checklist Tool)
    • Vendor availability to support implementation
    • Executive mandates that have established specific milestone dates

    Create an initial project schedule:

    • Review the remaining phases of this blueprint for more details on the implementation planning steps.
    • Review and update the Checklist Tool to suit your implementation goals and requirements.
    • Assign task owners and target dates in the Checklist Tool.

    Note: This is a preliminary schedule. Monitor progress as well as requirement changes, and adjust the scope or schedule as needed.

    Update the columns in the Checklist Tool to plan and keep track of your implementation project.

    1.3.2 Identify target dates for vendor involvement

    Plan when you'll be ready for the vendor and identify the key points for when the vendor will come in.

    Are dates already scheduled for tool installation/configuration/customization?

    If yes:

    • Clarify vendor expectations for those target dates (i.e. what do you have to have prepared in advance?).
    • Determine options to adjust dates if needed.

    If no:

    • Defer scheduling until you have reviewed and updated the Implementation Checklist. The checklist will help you determine your readiness for vendor involvement.

    Consider if the vendor will implement the ITSM tool in one go or if they will help setup the tool in stages. Keep in mind that ITSM implementation projects typically take anywhere from 9 weeks to 16 months and plan accordingly depending on the maturity of your processes and the modules and features you plan to implement.

    Use your internal target dates to estimate when you'll be ready for the vendor to set up the tool and implement the setting that you've defined.

    Phase 2

    Prepare to Implement Incident Management and Service Request Modules

    Phase 1Phase 2Phase 3

    Identify Stakeholders, Scope, and Preliminary Timeline

    Prepare to Implement Incident Management and Service Request Modules

    Create a Deployment Plan (Communication, Training, Rollout)

    This phase will walk you through the following steps:

    • Review your existing solution and challenges
    • Plan ticket management and workflow implementation
    • Plan data migration, knowledgebase setup, and integrations
    • Plan the module rollout

    Additional Info-Tech Research

    The Implementation Checklist Tool summarizes what you need to prepare for the implementation. If you need more assistance with developing the underlying ITSM processes, use the tools, templates, and guidance in these blueprints.

    Standardize the Service Desk

    Build core elements of service desk operations, including incident management and service request workflows, ticket categorization schemes, and ticket prioritization rules.

    Optimize the Service Desk With a Shift-Left Strategy

    Implement tools such as an improved knowledgebase and self-service portal to enable lower tier support staff and end users to resolve incidents or fulfill service requests.

    Incident and Problem Management

    Develop a critical incident management workflow and create standard operating procedures for problem management.

    Step 2.1

    Review your existing solution and challenges

    Activities

    2.1.1

    Configure, don’t customize, your solution to minimize risk

    2.1.2

    Review your existing process and solution challenges for opportunities for improvement

    This step involves the following participants:

    1. Service Manager and Service Desk Team
    2. Project Manager and Core Project Team
    3. Subject Matter Experts and Tool Administrator, if applicable

    2.1.1 Configure your tool, don’t customize it

    Your tool may require at least some basic configurations to align with your processes, but in most cases customization of the tool is not recommended.

    Configuration

    Customization

    • Creating settings and recording reference data in the tool within the normal functionality of the tool.
    • Does not require changes to source code.

    Documentation of configurations is key.

    Failure to document configurations and the reasons for specific configurations will lead to:

    • Difficulty diagnosing incidents and problems.
    • Difficulty reconstructing the tool in the case of disaster recovery.
    • One administrator having all of the knowledge of configurations and taking it with them if they leave the organization.
    • Configurations that become useless in the future are maintained and lead to unnecessary work if documentation is not regularly reviewed.
    • Extending the functionality of the tool beyond what it was originally intended to do.
    • Requires manual changes to source code.

    Carefully consider whether a customization is necessary.

    • Over-customization of your ITSM tool code may lock you into your current version of the software by preventing future patches and upgrades, leaving you with outdated software.
    • Over-customization becomes particularly risky when your ITSM solution is integrated with other tools, as a loss in functionality of your ITSM tool resulting from over-customization may cause disruptions across the business.
    • If your selected ITSM solution doesn’t do something you think you need it to do, carefully evaluate whether you really need that customization and if the trade-off of potentially limiting future innovation is worth it.

    Case Study

    Consider the consequences of over-customizing your solution.

    INDUSTRY: Education

    SOURCE: IT Director

    Situation

    Challenge

    Resolution

    A few years ago, the service management office at the university decided to switch ITSM tools, from Computer Associates to ServiceNow.

    They wanted the new tool to behave similarly to what they had previously, so they made a lot of customized code changes to ServiceNow during implementation.

    As a result of the customizations, much of the functionality of the tool was restricted, and the upgrades were not compatible with the solution.

    The external consultants who performed the customizations and backend work did not document their changes, leaving the service management team without an understanding of why they did what they did.

    The service management team is working with ServiceNow to slowly unravel the custom code to try to get the solution back to having out-of-the-box functionality, with the ability to be upgraded.

    It has been challenging to do this work without disrupting the functionality of the tool.

    Over-customization led to the organization paying for features they couldn’t use and spending more time and resources down the road to try to reverse the changes.

    2.1.2 Review your existing process to identify opportunities for improvement

    Documenting your existing processes is an effective method for also reviewing those processes and identifying inefficiencies. Take advantage of this project to fix your process issues.

    1. Document your existing workflows for incident management and service requests.
    2. Review your workflows to identify opportunities to optimize through process refinement (e.g. clarifying escalation guidelines) or by leveraging features in your new ITSM tool (e.g. improved workflow automation).
    3. Similarly, review the challenges identified through stakeholder interviews: is there an opportunity address those challenges through process changes or leveraging your new ITSM tool?
    4. Address those challenge and issues as you execute the tasks outlined in the Implementation Checklist Tool. For example, if inconsistent ticket routing was identified as a challenge due to a vague categorization scheme, that’s a driver to review and update your scheme rather than just carry forward your existing scheme.

    Regardless of your existing ITSM maturity, this is an opportunity to review and optimize existing processes. Even the most-mature organizations can typically find an area to improve.

    Case Study

    Reviewing and defining processes before the implementation can be a project in itself.

    INDUSTRY: Defense

    SOURCE: Anonymous

    Situation

    Challenge

    Resolution

    The organization was switching to a new ITSM tool. To prepare for the implementation, they gathered stakeholders, held steering committee meetings, and broke down key processes, teams, and owners before even meeting with the larger group.

    They used a software tool called InDesign to visibly map service requests and incidents and determine who owned each process and where the handoffs were.

    The service catalog also needed to be built out as they were performing certain services that didn’t relate to anything in the catalog.

    The goal for the implementation was to have it completed within a year, but it ended up going over, taking 15 to 16 months to complete.

    Most of the time was spent identifying processes upfront before configuring the tool. There were difficulties defining processes as well as agreeing on who owned a process or service.

    There were also difficulties agreeing upon who the valid stakeholders were for processes, as groups were siloed.

    The major obstacles to implementation were therefore people and process, not the product.

    New processes were introduced, and boundaries were placed around processes that were being done in the past that weren’t necessary.

    Once the groups were able to agree upon process owners, the tool configuration and implementation itself did not pose any major difficulties.

    After the implementation, the tool was continually improved and sharpened to adapt to processes.

    Step 2.2

    Plan ticket management and workflow implementation

    Activities

    2.2.1

    Define ticket classification values

    2.2.2

    Define ticket templates for common incident types and service requests

    2.2.3

    Plan your ticket intake channels

    2.2.4

    Design a self-service portal

    2.2.5

    Plan your knowledgebase implementation in the new tool

    2.2.6

    Design your ticket status notification processes and templates

    2.2.7

    Identify required user accounts, access levels, and skills/ service groups

    2.2.8

    Review and update your workflows and escalation rules

    2.2.9

    Identify desired reporting and relevant metrics to track

    This step involves the following participants:

    1. Service Manager and Service Desk Team
    2. Project Manager and Core Project Team
    3. Subject Matter Experts and Tool Administrator, if applicable

    Outcomes of this step

    Tool is designed and configured to support service desk processes and organization needs.

    Checklist overview

    The ITSM Tool Implementation Checklist will help you estimate resources required to support demand, based on your ticket volume.

    TAB 2

    TAB 3

    TAB 4

    Incident and Service Modules Checklist

    Change Management Modules

    Asset Management Modules

    The image contains a screenshot of the ITSM Tool Implementation Checklist, tab 2. The image contains a screenshot of the ITSM Tool Implementation Checklist, tab 3. The image contains a screenshot of the ITSM Tool Implementation Checklist, tab 4.

    How to follow this section:

    The following slides contain a table that explains why each task in the module matters and what needs to be considered. Complete the checklist modules referring to this section.

    2.2.1 Define ticket classification values

    Ticket classification improves reporting, workflow automation, and problem identification.

    Review your existing ticket classification values to identify what to carry forward, drop, or change. For example, if your categorization scheme has become too complex, this is your opportunity to fix it; don’t perpetuate ineffective classification in the new tool.

    Task

    Why this matters

    Ticket Types (e.g. incident, service request, change)

    In particular, separating incidents from service requests supports appropriate ticket prioritization and resourcing; for example, an incident typically should be prioritized, and service requests can be scheduled.

    Categories (e.g. network, servers)

    An effective categorization scheme can help identify ticket assignment and escalation (e.g. network tickets would be escalated to the network team), and potentially automate ticket routing.

    Resolution Codes

    Indicates how the ticket was resolved (e.g. configuration change). Supports another layer of trends reporting and data to support problem identification.

    Status Values

    Shows what status the ticket is currently in (e.g. if the ticket has been opened or assigned to an agent, if it is in progress or has been resolved).

    2.2.2 Define ticket templates for common incident types and service requests

    Ticket templates are the backbone of automation. A common complaint is that tickets take too much time. However, a little planning can reduce the time it takes to create a ticket to less than a minute.

    Task

    Why this matters

    Identify common recurring tickets that would be good candidates for using ticket templates (e.g. common service requests and incidents).

    Some common recurring tickets such as password reset, new laptop, and login requests would be great candidates to create ticket templates for. Building a deck of standard rules to follow for common tickets saves time and reduces the number of tickets generated.

    Design ticket templates and workflows for common tickets (e.g. fields to auto-populate as well as routing and secondary tickets for onboarding requests).

    Differentiating between recurring ticket types and building pre-defined templates not just saves time but can also have major impact on how service is delivered as this will also help separate tickets. Creating these templates beforehand will also let you communicate effectively with the users at a time when all hands need to be on deck.

    2.2.3 Plan your ticket intake channels

    Consider possible ticket intake channels and evaluate their relevance to your organization.

    Task

    Why this matters

    Decide on ticket intake channels (e.g. phone, email, portal, walk-ups).

    Each standard intake channel serves its own purposes and can be extremely valuable under different circumstances. For example, walk-ins may be inefficient but necessary for critical incidents.

    If using email, identify/create the email account and appropriate permissions.

    Email works well if it automatically creates a ticket in your ticketing system, but users often don’t provide enough information in unstructured emails. Use required fields and ticket templates to ensure the ticket is properly categorized.

    If using phone, identify/create the phone number and appropriate integrations.

    Maintain the phone for users from other locations and for critical incidents but encourage users who call in to submit a ticket through the portal.

    If using a portal, determine if you will leverage the tool's portal or an existing portal.

    The web portal is the most efficient intake method, but ensure it is user friendly before promoting it.

    If using chat, determine whether you will use the tool's chat or an existing chat mechanism and whether integrations are needed.

    Another way to improve support experience for your customers is through live chat. This gives your customers an easy way to reach you at the exact moment they have questions or issues they can't fix.

    2.2.4 Design a self-service portal

    Map your processes to the tool by defining your ticket input, categories, escalations, and workflows.

    Don’t forget about the client-facing side of the solution. It is important to build a self-serve portal that has an easy-to-use interface where the user can easily find the category for the help they’re looking for. It is also necessary to educate the users on where to find the portal or how to access it.

    Task

    Why this matters

    Identify components to include (e.g. service request, incident, knowledgebase).

    Identify the categories you want the users to be able to access in the portal. Finding the right balance of components to include is very important to make it easy for your users to find all the relevant information they are looking for. This could mean fewer tickets.

    Plan the input form for service requests and incidents (e.g. mandatory fields, optional fields, drop-down lists).

    Having relevant and specific fields helps to narrow down your user’s issues and provides more information on how to allocate these tasks among the service desk resources and reduce time to further investigate the issues.

    If service catalog will be attached to the ITSM tool, define routing and workflows; if there is no existing service catalog, start a separate project to define it (e.g. services, SLAs).

    A centrally defined guide enables a uniform quality in service and clarifies the responsible tier for the ticket. Identify services that will be included in the catalog, and if the information is attached to the ITSM tool, plan for how will the routing and workflows be structured.

    Plan design requirements (e.g. company branding).

    Ensure that the portal is aligned with the company’s theme and access format. Work with the vendor to customize the branding on the tool, design requirements, images.

    2.2.5 Plan your knowledgebase (KB) implementation in the new tool

    Evaluate how onerous KB migration will be for you. Is this an opportunity to improve how the KB is organized?

    Task

    Why this matters

    Define knowledgebase categories and structure.

    Establishing knowledgebase structures or having them separated into categories makes it easy for your clients to find them (e.g. do they align with ticket categories?).

    Identify existing knowledgebase articles to add to the new tool.

    Review existing knowledgebase articles at a high level (e.g. Do you carry forward all existing articles? Take an opportunity to retire old articles?).

    Define knowledgebase article templates.

    Having standardized templates makes it an easy read and will increase its usage (e.g. all knowledgebase articles for recurring incidents will follow the same template).

    Build knowledgebase article creation, usage, and revision workflows.

    Decide how new knowledgebase articles will be built and added to the tool, how it will be accessed and used, and also any steps necessary to update the articles.

    Plan a knowledgebase feedback system.

    For example, include a comments section, like buttons, and who will get notified about feedback.

    2.2.6 Design your ticket status notification processes and templates

    Task

    Why this matters

    Identify triggers for status notifications. Balance the need for keeping users informed versus notifications being treated as spam.

    Identify when and where the users are informed to make sure you are not under or over communicating with them. Status notifications and alerts are a great way to set or reset expectations to your users on the delivery or resolution on their tickets. For example, auto-response for a new ticket, or status updates to users when the ticket is assigned, solved, and closed.

    If using email notifications, design email templates for each type of notification.

    Creating notification templates is a great way to provide standardized service to your clients and it saves time when a ticket is raised. For example, email templates for new ticket, ticket updated, or ticket closed.

    Plan how you will enable users to validate the ticket or resolve request without causing the ticket to reopen.

    For example, in the ticket solved template, provide a link to close the ticket, and ask the user to reply only if they wish to re-open the ticket (i.e. if it's not resolved). May require consulting with the ITSM tool vendor.

    Decide if customer satisfaction surveys will be sent to end users after their ticket has been closed.

    Discuss if this data would be useful to you if captured to improve/modify your service.

    If customer satisfaction surveys will be used, design the survey.

    Discuss what data would be useful to you if captured and create survey questionnaires to capture that data from your clients. For example, how many questions, types of questions, whether sent for every ticket or randomly.

    2.2.7 Identify required user accounts, access levels, and skills/service groups

    Task

    Why this matters

    Define Tier 1, 2, and 3 roles and their associated access levels.

    Having pre-established roles for different tiers and teams is a great way to boost accountability and also helps identify training requirements for each tier. For example, knowledgebase training for tier 1 & 2, reporting/analytics for IT manager.

    Identify skill groups or support teams.

    Establishing accountability for all the support practices in the service desk is important for the tickets to be effectively distributed among the functional individuals and teams. Identifying the responsibilities of groups help execute shift-left strategy.

    Identify required email permissions for each role.

    For example, define which roles get permissions to include status updates or other ticket information in their emails or to support automated notifications and other integrations with email.

    Determine how you will import users into the new tool.

    Identify the best way to migrate your users to the new tool whether it be by importing from Active Directory or the old ITSM tool, etc.

    2.2.8 Review and update your workflows and escalation rules

    Task

    Why this matters

    Document your future-state incident and service request workflows that will incorporate the above planning as well as improvements supported by the new tool.

    Document your workflows and review it to make sure it’s accurate and also to help you with communicating process expectations to all the stakeholders.

    Review the future-state workflows.

    This helps you validate that the planned changes meet your goals and identify any additional required changes.

    Update ticket classification values, templates, and ticket intake as needed based on the future-state workflows.

    Documenting your process might uncover additional requirements for classification, templates, etc. Ensure that the classification templates and related parameters align with the workflows.

    Identify opportunities to further automate workflows by leveraging the new tool.

    The process of reviewing the workflows often helps identify manual processes, labor intensive processes, very repetitive processes, etc. These can be opportunities to further automate your processes.

    2.2.9 Identify desired reporting and relevant metrics to track

    Documentation of key metrics of service desk performance and end-user satisfaction that you wish to improve through the new solution is key to evaluate the success of your implementation.

    Task

    Why this matters

    Define the metrics you will track in the new ITSM tool.

    It is critical to ensure that your tool will be able to track necessary metrics on KPIs from the start and that this data is accurate and reliable so that reporting will be relevant and meaningful to the business. Whether you use your own tool for tracking metrics or an external tool, ensure that you can get the internal data you need from the ITSM tool. This may include measures of Productivity (e.g. time to respond, time to resolve), Service (e.g. incident backlog, customer satisfaction), and Proactiveness (e.g. number of knowledgebase articles per week).

    Determine what reports you want to generate from data collected through the tool.

    It’s not enough to simply set up metrics, you have to actually use the information. Reports should be analyzed regularly and used to manage costs and productivity, improve services, and identify issues. Ensure that your service desk team contributes to the usefulness of reporting by following processes such as creating tickets for every incident and request, categorizing it properly, and closing it after it’s resolved with the proper resolution code.

    Identify the information and metrics to include in the ITSM tool's dashboards.

    A dashboard helps drive accountability across the team through greater visibility. Decide what will be reported on the dashboard. For example, average time to resolution, number of open tickets with subtotals for each priority, problem ticket aging.

    Step 2.3

    Plan data migration and integrations

    Activities

    2.3.1

    Create a data migration and archiving plan

    2.3.2

    Identify and plan required integrations

    This step involves the following participants:

    1. Service Manager and Service Desk Team
    2. Project Manager and Core Project Team
    3. Subject Matter Experts and Tool Administrator, if applicable

    Outcomes of this step

    • Decisions made around data migration, integrations, automation, and reporting.
    • ITSM Tool Implementation Checklist

    2.3.1 Create a data migration and archiving plan

    Task

    Why this matters

    Document your future-state incident and service request workflows that will incorporate the above planning as well as improvements supported by the new tool.

    Document your workflows and review them to make sure they’re accurate and also to help you with communicating process expectations to all the stakeholders.

    Review the future-state workflows.

    This helps you validate that the planned changes meet your goals and identify any additional required changes.

    Update ticket classification values, templates, and ticket intake as needed based on the future-state workflows.

    Documenting your process might uncover additional requirements for classification, templates, etc. Ensure that the classification templates and related parameters align with the workflows.

    Identify opportunities to further automate workflows leveraging the new tool.

    The process of reviewing the workflows often helps identify manual processes, labor-intensive processes, very repetitive processes, etc. These can be opportunities to further automate your processes.

    2.3.2 Identify and plan required integrations

    Consider and plan for any necessary integrations with other systems.

    A major component of the implementation that should be carefully considered throughout is if and how to integrate your ITSM tool with other applications in the environment.

    Task

    Why this matters

    Identify the systems you need to integrate with your ITSM tool (e.g. asset discovery tools, reporting systems).

    Regardless of whether your solution will be configured and installed on-premises or as a SaaS, you need to consider the underlying technology to determine how you will integrate it with other tools where necessary.

    Businesses may need to integrate their ITSM tool with other systems including asset management, network monitoring, and reporting systems to make the organization more efficient.

    Determine how data will flow between systems.

    Carefully evaluate the purpose of each integration. Clients often want their ITSM tool to be integrated with all of the available data in another application when they only need a subset of that data to be integrated.

    Consider not only which systems you need to integrate with your ITSM tool but also who the owners of those systems are and which way the data needs to flow.

    Plan the development, configuration, and testing of integrations.

    As with other aspects of the implementation, configure and test the integrations before going live with the tool.

    Step 2.4

    Plan the module rollout

    Activities

    2.4.1

    Repeat the methodology for additional ITSM modules, using the Checklists as a guide

    2.4.2

    Leverage these blueprints to help you implement change and asset management modules

    This step involves the following participants:

    1. Service Manager and Service Desk Team
    2. Project Manager and Core Project Team
    3. Subject Matter Experts and Tool Administrator, if applicable

    Outcomes of this step

    Identify and plan for additional modules and features to be implemented

    2.4.1 Repeat the methodology for additional ITSM modules, using the Checklists as a guide

    The preparation completed in Phase 1 and 2 to this point provide a foundation for additional ITSM modules.

    This blueprint starts with the incident management and service request modules as those are typically implemented first since they are the most impactful to day-to-day IT service management.

    In addition, the methodology outlined in Phase 1 and 2 to this point provides a model to follow for additional ITSM modules:

    • If you did not already account for additional modules in Phase 1, then repeat the steps in Phase 1 to define scope, stakeholders, and timeline.
    • The Implementation Checklist Tool provides tabs for Change Management and Asset Management to outline the specific details for those topic areas, but they follow the same high-level steps as Phase 2 (e.g. review existing processes, design relevant workflows).
    • If you are planning to implement other modules (e.g. Problem Management), create additional tabs in the Implementation Checklist Tool as needed, using the existing tabs as a base.
    The image contains screenshots of the ITSM checklists.

    2.4.2 Leverage these blueprints to help you implement change and asset management modules

    The Implementation Checklist Tool summarizes what you need to prepare for the implementation. If you need more assistance with developing the underlying ITSM processes, use the tools, templates, and guidance in the blueprints below.

    Optimize IT Change Management

    Define change management workflows, key roles, and supporting elements such as request-for-change forms based on best practices.

    Implement Hardware Asset Management

    Create an SOP and associated process workflows to streamline and standardize hardware asset management.

    Implement Software Asset Management

    Build on a strong hardware asset management program to also properly track and manage software assets. This includes managing software licensing, finding opportunities to reduce costs, and improving your software audit readiness.

    Phase 3

    Create a Deployment Plan (Communication, Training, Rollout)

    Phase 1Phase 2Phase 3

    Identify Stakeholders, Scope, and Preliminary Timeline

    Prepare to Implement Incident Management and Service Request Modules

    Create a Deployment Plan (Communication, Training, Rollout)

    This phase will walk you through the following steps:

    1. Create a communication plan (for IT, users, and business leaders)
    2. Create a training plan
    3. Plan how you will deploy, monitor, and maintain the solution

    ITSM Tool Training Schedule

    ITSM Tool Deployment Plan Template

    Use the template to document and plan the communications and training needs prior to deployment of the new tool.

    The image contains a screenshot of the ITSM Tool Training Schedule.

    Use the deployment plan template to document the strategy and decisions made for making the transition to the new ITSM tool.

    The image contains a screenshot of the ITSM Tool Deployment Plan Template.

    Download the ITSM Tool Training Schedule

    Download the ITSM Tool Deployment Plan Template

    Step 3.1

    Create a communication plan (for IT, users, and business leaders)

    Activities

    3.1.1

    Ensure there is strong communication from management throughout the implementation and deployment

    3.1.2

    Base your communications timeline on a classic change curve to accommodate natural resistance

    3.1.3

    Communicate new processes with business leaders and end users to improve positive customer feedback

    This step involves the following participants:

    1. CIO/IT Director
    2. IT Manager
    3. Service Manager

    Outcomes of this step

    Plan for communicating the change with business executives, service desk agents, and end users.

    3.1.1 Ensure there is strong communication from management throughout the implementation and deployment

    A common contributing factor for unsuccessful implementation is a lack of communication around training, transitioning, and deploying the new tool.

    Common Pitfall:

    Organizational communication and change management should have been ongoing and tightly monitored throughout the project. However, cut-over is a time in which critical communication regarding deployment and proper user training can be derailed when last-minute preparations take priority. Not only will general user frustration increase, but unintended process workarounds will emerge, eroding system effectiveness.

    Mitigating Actions:

    Deliver training for end users that will be engaged in testing. For all other users, deliver training prior to go-live to avoid the risk of training too early (where materials may not be ready or users are likely to forget what was learned). If possible, host quick refresher training a week or two prior to go-live.

    Aim to communicate the upcoming go-live. The purpose of communication here is to reiterate expectations, complexities, and ramifications on business going forward. Alleviate performance anxiety by clearly stating that temporary drops in productivity are to be expected and that there will be appropriate assistance throughout the transition period.

    Transition: Have the project/program manager remain on the project team for some time after deployment to oversee and assure smooth transition for the organization.

    Complete training: Have a clear plan for training those users that were missed in the first round of training as well as a plan for ongoing training for those that require refresher training, for new joiners to your organization, and for any training requirements that result from subsequent upgrades.

    3.1.2 Base your communications timeline on a classic change curve

    It’s important to communicate the change ahead of the implementation, but also to reinforce that communication after implementation to recover from any resistance that occurs through the implementation itself.

    Stages in a typical change curve:

    1. Change is announced. Some people are skeptical and resistant, but others are enthusiastic. Most people are fence sitters; if they trust senior leadership, they will give the benefit of the doubt and expect change to be good.
    2. Positive sentiment declines as implementation approaches. Training and other disruptions take people’s time and energy away from their work. Project setbacks and delays take credibility away from project leaders and seem to validate the efforts of saboteurs and skeptics.
    3. Overall sentiment begins to improve as people adjust and see real progress made. Ideally, early successes or quick wins neutralize saboteurs and convert skeptics. At the very least, people will begin to accept and adapt to new realities.
    4. If the project is successful and communication is reinforced after implementation, sentiment will peak and level out over time as people move on to other projects.

    The image contains a diagram of a change curve.

    1. Honeymoon of “Uninformed Optimism”: Tentative support and enthusiasm for change before people have really felt or understood what it involves.
    2. Backlash of “Informed Pessimism” (leading to “Valley of Despair”): People realize they’ve overestimated the benefits (or how soon they’ll be achieved) and underestimated the difficulty of change.
    3. Valley of Despair and beginning of “Hopeful Realism”: Sentiment bottoms out and people begin to accept the difficulty (or inevitability) of change.
    4. Bounce of “Informed Optimism”: More optimism and support when people begin to see bright spots and early successes.
    5. Contentment of “Completion”: Change has been successfully adopted and benefits are being realized.

    3.1.3 Communicate new processes

    1. Communicate with business unit leaders and users:
    • Focus on the benefits for end users to encourage buy-in for the change.
    • Include preliminary instructions with a date for training sessions.
  • Train users:
    • Teach users how to contact the service desk and submit a ticket.
    • Set expectations for IT’s response.
    • Record all your training sessions so it can used for recursive training.
  • Enforce:
    • IT must point users toward the new process, but ad hoc requests should still be expected at first. Deal with these politely but encourage all employees to use the new service desk ticketing process, if applicable.
  • Measure success:
    • Continue to adjust communications if processes aren’t being followed to ensure SLAs can be met and improved.

    “Communicate with your end users in phase 1 to let them know what will be changing, get feedback and buy-in, and inform them that training will be happening, then ensure you train them once the tool is installed. A lot of times we’ll get our tool set up but people don’t know how to use it."

    – Director of ITSM Tools

    Info-Tech Insight

    If there is a new process for ticket input, consider using a reward system for users who submit a ticket through the proper channel ;(e.g. email or self-serve portal) instead of their old method (e.g. phone). However, if a significant cultural change is required, don’t expect it to happen right away.

    Step 3.2

    Create a training plan

    Activities

    3.2.1

    Target training session(s) to the specific needs of your service desk, service groups, IT managers

    3.3.1

    Provide training (tool/portal and process changes)

    3.4.1

    Choose an appropriate training delivery method that will focus on both process and tool

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Director
    • Project Manager
    • Service Desk Manager

    Outcomes of this step

    • Training modules for different users of the tool.
    • Assignment of training modules to users and schedule for completion.

    3.2.1 Target training session(s) to the specific needs of your service desk and IT staff

    Create targeted role-based training programs for your service desk analysts; they care about the portion of the solution they are responsible for, not the functionality that is irrelevant to their job.

    Create and execute a role-based training program by conducting training sessions for targeted groups of users, training them on the functions they require to perform their jobs.

    Use a table like this one to help identify which roles should be trained on which tasks within the ITSM tool.

    The image contains a table as an example of identifying which roles should be trained within the ITSM tool.

    The need for targeted training:

    • IT personnel may challenge the need for training. They may feel they don’t require training on the use of tools or that they don’t have time to dedicate to training when there is so much work to be done.
    • Providing targeted training focused on only the functions of the solution that each tier is responsible for can help to overcome that resistance.
    • Targeted training may include basic training for level 1 technicians and more advanced in-depth training for administrators, power users, or level 2/3 technicians.

    Info-Tech Insight:

    Properly trained users promote adoption and improve results. Always keep training materials updated and available. New employees, new software integration, and internal promotions create opportunities for training employees to align the ITSM tool with their roles and responsibilities.

    3.2.2 Provide training

    Training must take place before deployment to ensure that both your service desk agents and end users will use the tool in the way it was intended and improve end-user satisfaction.

    • Implementing a new ITSM tool will likely bring with it at least some degree of organizational and cultural change. It’s important to manage that change through proper training. Your training needs will vary depending on the maturity of the organization and the amount of cultural and process change being implemented.
    • If this is your first ITSM solution with many new changes for staff to take on board, it will be important to dedicate training time not only before deployment but also several months after the initial installation, to allow staff to gain more experience with the new tool and processes and formulate questions they may not think to ask during implementation.
    • A training plan should take into account not only training needs for the implementation project but also any ongoing training requirements that may be required. This may include:
      • Training for new personnel.
      • Training on any changes to the tool.
      • Training on any new processes the tool will support.
    • Better agent training will lead to better performance and improved end-user satisfaction.

    The image contains a screenshot of a graph to demonstrate training hours and first contact resolution.

    The blue graph line charts new-agent training hours against first contact resolution and the orange graph line charts the trendline for the dataset.

    Source: MetricNet, 2012

    3.2.3 Choose an appropriate training delivery method

    Training should include use cases that focus on not only how the tool’s interface works but also how the tool should be used to support process activities.

    1. Training through use cases highlights how the tool will support the user in role-based tasks.
    2. If new processes are being introduced along with the tool, training should cover both in an integrated way.
    3. Team leadership and management commitment ensures that all agents take their training seriously and are prepared for all use cases by the deployment date.

    Trainer-led sessions:

    Self-taught sessions:

    • May take the form of onsite or video training.
    • Vendor may train administrators or managers, who will later train remaining staff.
    • Allows for interaction with the trainer and greater opportunity to ask questions.
    • Difficult for large organizations with many users to be trained.
    • Delivered via computer-based training applications, typically through a web browser.
    • May include voice training sessions combined with exercises and quizzes.
    • More feasible for large, distributed organizations with less flexible schedules.

    Info-Tech Insight:

    Ensure that the training demonstrates not only how the tool should be used, but also the benefits it will provide your staff in terms of improved efficiency and productivity. Users who can clearly see the benefits the tool will provide for their daily work will accept the tool more readily and promote it across the organization.

    Step 3.3

    Plan how you will deploy, monitor, and maintain the solution

    Activities

    3.3.1

    Plan the transition from your old tool to ensure continual functionality

    3.3.2

    Choose a cut-over approach that works for you

    3.3.3

    Deploy the solution and any new processes simultaneously to ease the transition

    3.3.4

    Have a post-deployment support plan in place

    3.3.5

    Monitor success metrics defined in Phase 1

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Director
    • Project Manager
    • Service Desk Manager

    Outcomes of this step

    Deployment plan, including a plan for cut-over from the old tool (if applicable), release of the new tool, and post-deployment support and maintenance of the tool.

    3.3.1 Plan the transition from your old tool to ensure continual functionality

    If you will have a transitional period during which the current tool will be used alongside the new tool, develop a clear plan for the transition to ensure continued service for your end users.

    • If there will be an interim period during which only some aspects of the new ITSM tool are functional, you will need to determine how the new system and old systems will work together for that period of time. This may require creating interfaces as well as providing user documentation and/or SOPs on how the business processes will operate during the interim period.
    • Cut-over is the period during which the changeover to the new system occurs. Cut-over activities need to be tightly choreographed for a successful deployment. If improperly planned, chaos may erupt when unforeseen issues are encountered during deployment, the deployment may be jeopardized, and the organization may encounter costly interruptions to its daily operations.
    • Many organizations may leave any open tickets in the old tool until they are closed, which requires that tool run alongside the new tool for a transitional period. In this case, it is necessary to create guidelines around how long the open tickets will remain in the old system and ensure there is clear communication around these processes.

    Be prepared for the transition:

    1. Create a robust cut-over plan that includes when the old tool will be decommissioned, what activities are necessary during the cut-over, and what the contingency plan is in case of unforeseen issues.
    2. Plan for and perform mock cut-overs to establish the timeline and dependencies for all steps that need to be performed to successfully complete the changeover. Do this to avoid any surprises or delays during the true cut-over period.
    3. Establish cut-over logistics: Create a schedule for resources to work in shifts to avoid burn-out during cut-over, which can lead to lapses in judgment and easily avoidable mistakes. Allocate dedicated workspaces for cut-over activities, e.g. “war rooms” for the triage of issues.

    3.3.2 Choose a cut-over approach that works for you

    Approaches and insights from three case studies

    Case Study #1

    Case Study #2

    Case Study #3

    On day one we started recording all new incidents in the new tool, and everything that was open in the old tool remained open for about one month. At that point we transferred over some open incidents but closed old incidents with the view that if anyone really wanted something done that hadn’t been yet, they could re-submit a ticket.

    – Brett Andrews,

    Managing Director at BAPTISM Consultancy

    It made sense for us to start fresh with the new system. We left all of the old tickets in the old system and started the new system with ticket #1. We only had about a dozen open tickets in the old system so we left them there and ran the two tools side by side until those were closed.

    – CIO, Publishing

    It depends on the client and the size of their service desk as well as the complexity of their data and whether they need their old data for reporting. If there are only a dozen open tickets, they can manually move those over easily, and decide whether they want to migrate their historical data for reporting purposes.

    – Scott Walling,

    Co-Founder at Monitor 24-7 Inc.

    3.3.3 Deploy the solution and any new processes simultaneously to ease the transition

    Follow a deployment plan for introducing new processes alongside the new tool to ensure changes to both process and technology are adopted simultaneously.

    If you’re introducing new processes alongside the new tool, it’s important to maintain the link between process and tool. Typically, the processes and tool should be deployed simultaneously unless there is a strong reason not to do so.

    Deployment can be done as a big-bang or phased approach. The decision to employ a phased deployment depends on the number and size of business units the tool will support, as well as the organization’s geography and infrastructure (deployment locations).

    Before deployment, conduct readiness assessments to understand whether:

    The people are ready to accept the new system (have received the proper training and communications and understand how their jobs will change when the switch is flipped).

    The technology is ready (test results are favorable, workarounds and a plan for closure have been identified for any open defects, and the system is performing as expected).

    The data is ready (data for final conversion has been cleansed, and all conversions have been rehearsed).

    The post-deployment support model is ready (infrastructure and technical support is in place, sites are ready, knowledge transfer has been conducted with the support organization, and end users understand procedures for escalation of issues).

    3.3.4 Have a post-deployment support plan in place

    Ensure that strong internal support for the project and tool will continue after deployment.

    The stabilization period after a new software deployment can last between three and nine months, during which there may be continued training needs and fine-tuning of processes. Internal support from project leaders within your organization will be critical to recover from any dip in operational efficiency and deliver the benefits of the tool.

    Consider the following to prepare better for your support plan:

    What are the roles and responsibilities for ongoing tool administration support?

    What level of support will exist to assist service desk staff after deployment?

    How much time will project team resources devote to tackling upcoming issues and assisting with ongoing support?

    Who will be responsible for ongoing training needs and documentation?

    If your organization is spread across multiple locations, what level of support/assistance will be available at each site?

    How will new code releases or system upgrades be managed and communicated?

    Info-Tech Insight:

    Deployment is only the first step in the system lifecycle. Full benefit realization from the tool requires ongoing investment and learning to be sustained. Unless processes and training are updated on an ongoing basis, benefits gained will start to decrease over time. If your service desk efficiency stagnates at the level it was at prior to implementation, the tool has failed to serve its objective.

    Establish ongoing tool maintenance, improvement structures, and processes

    People, processes, and organizations change over time, and your ITSM tool will need to change to meet expectations.

    Develop and execute a plan for the maintenance of the solution and its infrastructure components.

    Include periodic reviews against business needs and operational requirements (e.g. patches, upgrades, and risk and security requirements).

    For maintenance updates, use the change management process and assess how an activity will impact solution design, functionality, and business processes.

    For major changes that result in significant change in current designs, functionality, and/or business processes, follow the development process used for new systems.

    Ensure that maintenance activities are periodically analyzed for abnormal trends indicating underlying quality or performance problems, cost/benefit of major upgrade, or replacement in lieu of maintenance.

    Assign responsibility for ongoing maintenance. Hold regular meetings for the following activities:

    1. Inspect data and reports.
    2. Assess whether you’re meeting SLAs.
    3. Predict any upcoming changes that may impact ticket volume (e.g. a new operating system or security patch).
    4. Create new ticket templates for recurring or upcoming issues.
    5. Create new knowledgebase articles.
    6. Determine whether ticket categories are being used correctly.
    7. Ask team if there are any problems with the tool.

    3.3.5 Monitor success metrics defined in Project Charter

    Revisit your goals for the solution and assess if they are being met by evaluating current metrics. If your goals have not yet been met, re-evaluate how to ensure the tool will deliver value.

    Sample High-Level Goals:

    1. Improved service desk efficiency
    2. Improved end-user satisfaction
    3. Improved self-service options for end users
    4. Improved data and reporting capabilities

    Sample Metric Descriptions

    Baseline Metric

    Goal

    Current Metric

    Increased ticket input through email versus phone

    50% of tickets submitted through phone

    10% of tickets submit through phone

    Reduced ticket volume (through improved self-serve capabilities)

    1,500 tickets per month

    1,200 tickets per month

    Improved first call resolution (through increased efficiency and automation)

    50% FCR

    60% FCR

    Improved ability to meet SLAs (through automated escalations and prioritization)

    5 minutes to log a ticket

    1 minute to log a ticket

    Improved time to produce reports

    3 business days

    1 business day

    Improved end-user satisfaction

    60% satisfied with services

    75% satisfied

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Optimize IT Change Management

    Define change management workflows, key roles, and supporting elements such as request-for-change forms based on best practices.

    Standardize the Service Desk

    Build core elements of service desk operations, including incident management and service request workflows, ticket categorization schemes, and ticket prioritization rules.

    Optimize the Service Desk With a Shift-Left Strategy

    Implement tools such as an improved knowledgebase and self-service portal to enable lower tier support staff and end users to resolve incidents or fulfill service requests.

    Incident and Problem Management

    Develop a critical incident management workflow and create standard operating procedures for problem management.

    IT Service Management Selection Guide

    Identify the best-of-breed solution to make the most of your investment and engage the right stakeholders to define success.

    Analyze Your Service Desk Ticket Data

    Develop a framework to track metrics, clean data, and put your data to use for pre-defined timelines.

    Bibliography

    Adiga, Siddanth. “10 Reasons Why ITSM Implementations Fail.” Could Strategy, 6 May 2015. Web.

    Hastie, Shane, and Stéphane Wojewoda. “Standish Group 2015 Chaos Report.” InfoQ, 4 October 2015. Web.

    “How to Manage Change in the Implementation of an ITSM Software.” C2, 20 April 2015. Web.

    Lockwood, Meghan. “First Look: Annual ServiceNow Insight and Vision Executive Summary [eBook].” Acorio, 31 October 2019. Web.

    Mainville, David. “7 Steps to a Successful ITSM Tool Implementation.” Navvia, 2012. Web.

    Rae, Barclay. “Preparing for ITSM Tool Implementation.” Joe the IT Guy, 24 June 2015. Web.

    Rae, Barclay. “Successful ITSM Tool Implementation.” BrightTALK, 9 May 2013. Webcast.

    Rumburg, Jeffrey. “Metric of the Month: Agent Training Hours.” MetricNet, 2012. Web.

    Activate Your Augmented Reality Initiative

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    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 10.0/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve.
    • member rating average days saved: Read what our members are saying
    • Parent Category Name: Customer Relationship Management
    • Parent Category Link: /customer-relationship-management
    • Augmented reality is a new technology and use cases are still emerging. Organizations have to work hard to stay ahead of the curve and predict how they will be impacted.
    • There are limited off-the-shelf augmented reality solutions in terms of business applications. IT not only needs to understand the emerging augmented reality hardware, but also the plethora of development platforms.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Augmented reality presents a new avenue to solve problems that cannot be addressed efficiently with existing technology. It is a new tool that will impact the way you work.
    • Beyond addressing existing problems, augmented reality will provide the ability to differently execute business processes. Current processes have been designed with existing systems and capabilities in mind. Augmented reality impacts organizational design processes that are more complex.
    • As a technology with an evolving set of use cases, IT and the business must anticipate some of the challenges that may arise with the use of augmented reality (e.g. health and safety, application development, regulatory).

    Impact and Result

    • Our methodology addresses the possible issues by using a case-study approach to demonstrate the “art of the possible” for augmented reality.
    • With an understanding of augmented reality, it is possible to find applicable use cases for this emerging technology and get a leg up on competitors.
    • By utilizing Info-Tech’s Augmented Reality Use Case Picklist and the Augmented Reality Stakeholder Presentation Template, the IT team and their business stakeholders can confidently approach augmented reality adoption.

    Activate Your Augmented Reality Initiative Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why your organization should care about augmented reality’s potential to transform the workplace and how Info-Tech will support you as you identify and build your augmented reality use case.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Understand augmented reality

    Analyze the four key benefits of augmented reality to understand how the technology can resolve industry issues.

    • Activate Your Augmented Reality Initiative – Phase 1: Understand Augmented Reality
    • Augmented Reality Glossary

    2. Finding space for augmented reality

    Develop and prioritize use cases for augmented reality using Info-Tech’s AR Initiative Framework.

    • Activate Your Augmented Reality Initiative – Phase 2: Finding Space for Augmented Reality
    • Augmented Reality Use Case Picklist

    3. Communicate project decisions to stakeholders

    Present the augmented reality initiative to stakeholders and understand the way forward for the AR initiative.

    • Activate Your Augmented Reality Initiative – Phase 3: Communicate Project Decisions to Stakeholders
    • Augmented Reality Stakeholder Presentation Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Activate Your Augmented Reality Initiative

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Understand Augmented Reality and Its Use Cases

    The Purpose

    Understand the fundamentals of augmented reality technology and its real-world business applications.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A prioritized list of augmented reality use cases.

    Activities

    1.1 Introduce augmented reality technology.

    1.2 Understand augmented reality use cases.

    1.3 Review augmented reality case studies.

    Outputs

    An understanding of the history and current state of augmented reality technology.

    An understanding of “the art of the possible” for augmented reality.

    An enhanced understanding of augmented reality.

    2 Conduct an Environmental Scan and Internal Review

    The Purpose

    Examine where the organization stands in the current competitive environment.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding of what is needed from an augmented reality initiative to differentiate your organization from its competitors.

    Activities

    2.1 Environmental analysis (PEST+SWOT).

    2.2 Competitive analysis.

    2.3 Listing of interaction channels and disposition.

    Outputs

    An understanding of the internal and external propensity for augmented reality.

    An understanding of comparable organizations’ approach to augmented reality.

    A chart with the disposition of each interaction channel and its applicability to augmented reality.

    3 Parse Critical Technology Drivers

    The Purpose

    Determine which business processes will be affected by augmented reality.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding of critical technology drivers and their KPIs.

    Activities

    3.1 Identify affected process domains.

    3.2 Brainstorm impacts of augmented reality on workflow enablement.

    3.3 Distill critical technology drivers.

    3.4 Identify KPIs for each driver.

    Outputs

    A list of affected process domains.

    An awareness of critical technology drivers for the augmented reality initiative.

    Lead Strategic Decision Making With Service Portfolio Management

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    • member rating average days saved: Read what our members are saying
    • Parent Category Name: Service Management
    • Parent Category Link: /service-management
    • There are no standardized processes for the intake of new ideas and no consistent view of the drivers needed to assess the value of these ideas.
    • IT is spending money on low-value services and doesn’t have the ability to understand and track value in order to prioritize IT investment.
    • CIOs are not trusted to drive innovation.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The service portfolio empowers IT to be a catalyst in business strategy, change, and growth.
    • IT must drive value-based investment by understanding value of all services in the portfolio.
    • Organizations must assess the value of their services throughout their lifecycle to optimize business outcomes and IT spend.

    Impact and Result

    • Optimize IT investments by prioritizing services that provide more value to the business, ensuring that you do not waste money on low-value or out-of-date IT services.
    • Ensure that services are directly linked to business objectives, goals, and needs, keeping IT embedded in the strategic vision of the organization.
    • Enable the business to understand the impact of IT capabilities on business strategy.
    • Ensure that IT maintains a strategic and tactical view of the services and their value.
    • Drive agility and innovation by having a streamlined view of your business value context and a consistent intake of ideas.
    • Provide strategic leadership and create new revenue by understanding the relative value of new ideas vs. existing services.

    Lead Strategic Decision Making With Service Portfolio Management Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Service portfolio management enables organizations to become strategic value creators by establishing a dynamic view of service value. Understand the driving forces behind the need to manage services through their lifecycles.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Establish the service portfolio

    Establish and understand the service portfolio process by setting up the Service Portfolio Worksheet.

    • Lead Strategic Decision Making With Service Portfolio Management – Phase 1: Establish the Service Portfolio
    • Service Portfolio Worksheet

    2. Develop a value assessment framework

    Use the value assessment tool to assess services based on the organization’s context of value.

    • Lead Strategic Decision Making With Service Portfolio Management – Phase 2: Develop a Value Assessment Framework
    • Value Assessment Tool
    • Value Assessment Example Tool

    3. Manage intake and assessment of initiatives

    Create a centralized intake process to manage all new service ideas.

    • Lead Strategic Decision Making With Service Portfolio Management – Phase 3: Manage Intake and Assessment of Initiatives
    • Service Intake Form

    4. Assess active services

    Continuously validate the value of the existing service and determine the future of service based on the value and usage of the service.

    • Lead Strategic Decision Making With Service Portfolio Management – Phase 4: Assess Active Services

    5. Manage and communicate the service portfolio

    Communicate and implement the service portfolio within the organization, and create a mechanism to seek out continuous improvement opportunities.

    • Lead Strategic Decision Making With Service Portfolio Management – Phase 5: Manage and Communicate the Service Portfolio
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Lead Strategic Decision Making With Service Portfolio Management

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Establish the Service Portfolio

    The Purpose

    Establish and understand the service portfolio process by setting up the Service Portfolio Worksheet.

    Understand at a high level the steps involved in managing the service portfolio.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Adapt the Service Portfolio Worksheet to organizational needs and create a plan to begin documenting services in the worksheet.

    Activities

    1.1 Review the Service Portfolio Worksheet.

    1.2 Adapt the Service Portfolio Worksheet.

    Outputs

    Knowledge about the use of the Service Portfolio Worksheet.

    Adapt the worksheet to reflect organizational needs and structure.

    2 Develop a Value Assessment Framework

    The Purpose

    Understand the need for a value assessment framework.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identify the organizational context of value through a holistic look at business objectives.

    Leverage Info-Tech’s Value Assessment Tool to validate and determine service value.

    Activities

    2.1 Understand value from business context.

    2.2 Determine the governing body.

    2.3 Assess culture and organizational structure.

    2.4 Complete the value assessment.

    2.5 Discuss value assessment score.

    Outputs

    Alignment on value context.

    Clear roles and responsibilities established.

    Ensure there is a supportive organizational structure and culture in place.

    Understand how to complete the value assessment and obtain a value score for selected services.

    Understand how to interpret the service value score.

    3 Manage Intake and Assessment of Initiatives

    The Purpose

    Create a centralized intake process to manage all new service ideas.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Encourage collaboration and innovation through a transparent, formal, and centralized service intake process.

    Activities

    3.1 Review or design the service intake process.

    3.2 Review the Service Intake Form.

    3.3 Design a process to assess and transfer service ideas.

    3.4 Design a process to transfer completed services to the service catalog.

    Outputs

    Create a centralized process for service intake.

    Complete the Service Intake Form for a specific initiative.

    Have a process designed to transfer approved projects to the PMO.

    Have a process designed for transferring of completed services to the service catalog.

    4 Assess Active Services

    The Purpose

    Continuously validate the value of existing services.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Ensure services are still providing the expected outcome.

    Clear next steps for services based on value.

    Activities

    4.1 Discuss/review management of active services.

    4.2 Complete value assessment for an active service.

    4.3 Determine service value and usage.

    4.4 Determine the next step for the service.

    4.5 Document the decision regarding the service outcome.

    Outputs

    Understand how active services must be assessed throughout their lifecycles.

    Understand how to assess an existing service.

    Place the service on the 2x2 matrix based on value and usage.

    Understand the appropriate next steps for services based on value.

    Formally document the steps for each of the IRMR options.

    5 Manage and Communicate Your Service Portfolio

    The Purpose

    Communicate and implement the service portfolio within the organization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Obtain buy-ins for the process.

    Create a mechanism to identify changes within the organization and to seek out continuous improvement opportunities for the service portfolio management process and procedures.

    Activities

    5.1 Create a communication plan for service portfolio and value assessment.

    5.2 Create a communication plan for service intake.

    5.3 Create a procedure to continuously validate the process.

    Outputs

    Document the target audience, the message, and how the message should be communicated.

    Document techniques to encourage participation and promote participation from the organization.

    Document the formal review process, including cycle, roles, and responsibilities.

    Manage an IT Budget

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    • member rating average days saved: Read what our members are saying
    • Parent Category Name: Cost & Budget Management
    • Parent Category Link: /cost-and-budget-management
    • IT is viewed as a cost center without a clear understanding of the value it provides.
    • After completing the budget, the CIO is faced with changing expectations, disruptions, new risks, and new threats.
    • IT departments often lack a reliable budget management process to keep itself on track towards its budget goals.
    • Over budgeting risks credibility if projects are not all delivered, while under budgeting risks not being able to execute important projects.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Managing your budget is not just about numbers; it’s also about people and processes. Better relationships and a proper process leads to better management of your budget. Understand how your relationships and current processes might be leveraged to manage your budget.
    • No one likes to be over budget, but being under budget isn’t necessarily good either. Coming in under budget may mean that you are not accomplishing the initiatives that you promised you would, reflecting poor job performance.

    Impact and Result

    • Implement a formal budget management process that documents your planned budget and actual expenditures, tracks variances, and responds to those variances to stay on track towards budget goals.
    • Manage the expectations of business stakeholders by communicating the links between IT spend and business value in a way that is easily understood by the business.
    • Control for under- or overspending by using Info Tech’s budget management tool and tactics.

    Manage an IT Budget Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to understand the increasing expectations for IT departments to better manage their budgets, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Document

    Create a streamlined documentation process that also considers the elements of people and technology.

    • Manage an IT Budget – Phase 1: Document
    • Manage Your IT Budget Tool

    2. Track

    Track your planned budget against actual expenditures to catch areas of over- and underspending in a timely manner.

    • Manage an IT Budget – Phase 2: Track

    3. Control

    Leverage control mechanisms to manage variances in your budget.

    • Manage an IT Budget – Phase 3: Control
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Manage an IT Budget

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Document Budget

    The Purpose

    The first step of managing your IT budget is to make sure there is a properly documented budget that everyone agrees upon.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A properly documented budget facilitates management and communication of the budget.

    Activities

    1.1 Review budget for the year.

    1.2 Document each budget in the tool.

    1.3 Review CAPEX vs. OPEX.

    1.4 Customize accounts to match your organization.

    Outputs

    Budget broken out into monthly increments and by each account.

    Budget documented in tool.

    Tool customized to reflect organization's specific accounts and terminology.

    2 Optimize Documentation Process

    The Purpose

    A proper documentation process forms the backbone for effective budget management.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A streamlined documentation process with accurate inputs that also considers the elements of people and technology.

    Activities

    2.1 Draw out process flow of current documentation.

    2.2 Identify bottlenecks.

    2.3 Discuss and develop roadmap to solving bottlenecks.

    Outputs

    Process flow of current documentation process with identified bottlenecks.

    Plan to mitigate bottlenecks.

    3 Track and Control for Over- and Underspending

    The Purpose

    Track your planned budget against actual expenditures to catch areas of over- and underspending in a timely manner. Then, leverage control mechanisms to manage variances in your budget.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Tracking and controlling for variances will help the IT department stay on track towards its budget goals. It will also help with communicating IT’s value to the business.

    Activities

    3.1 Walk through the “Overview Bar.”

    3.2 Document actual expenses incurred in fiscal to date.

    3.3 Review the risk of over- and underspending.

    3.4 Use the reforecast column to control for over- and underspend.

    Outputs

    Assess the “Overview Bar.”

    Document actual expenditures and committed expenses up to the current date.

    Develop a strategy and roadmap for how you will mitigate any current under- or overspends.

    Reforecast expenditures for each account for each month for the remainder of the fiscal year.

    Reduce Risk With Rock-Solid Service-Level Agreements

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    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
    • member rating average days saved: N/A
    • Parent Category Name: Vendor Management
    • Parent Category Link: /vendor-management

    Organizations can struggle to understand what service-level agreements (SLAs) are required and how they can differ depending on the service type. In addition, these other challenges can also cloud an organization’s knowledge of SLAs:

    • No standardized SLAs documents, service levels, or metrics
    • Dealing with lost productivity and revenue due to persistent downtime
    • Not understanding SLAs components and what service levels are required for a particular service
    • How to manage the SLA and hold the vendor accountable

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    SLAs need to have clear, easy-to-measure objectives, to meet expectations and service level requirements, including meaningful reporting and remedies to hold the provider accountable to its obligations.

    Impact and Result

    This project will provide several benefits and learnings for almost all IT workers:

    • Better understanding of an SLA framework and required SLA elements
    • Standardized service levels and metrics aligned to the organization’s requirements
    • Reduced time in reviewing, evaluating, and managing service provider SLAs

    Reduce Risk With Rock-Solid Service-Level Agreements Research & Tools

    Start here – Read our Executive Brief

    Understand how to resolve your challenges with SLAs and their components and ensuring adequate metrics. Learn how to create meaningful SLAs that meet your requirements and manage them effectively.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Understand SLA elements – Understand the elements of SLAs, service types, service levels, metrics/KPIs, monitoring, and reporting

    • SLA Checklist
    • SLA Evaluation Tool

    2. Create requirements – Create your own SLA criteria and templates that meet your organization’s requirements

    • SLA Template & Metrics Reference Guide

    3. Manage obligations – Learn the SLA Management Framework to track providers’ performance and adherence to their commitments.

    • SLO Tracker & Trending Tool

    Infographic

    Workshop: Reduce Risk With Rock-Solid Service-Level Agreements

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Understand the Elements of SLAs

    The Purpose

    Understand key components and elements of an SLA.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Properly evaluate an SLA for required elements.

    Activities

    1.1 SLA overview, objectives, SLA types, service levels

    1.2 SLA elements and objectives

    1.3 SLA components: monitoring, reporting, and remedies

    1.4 SLA checklist review

    Outputs

    SLA Checklist 

    Evaluation Process

    SLA Checklist

    Evaluation Process

    SLA Checklist

    Evaluation Process

    SLA Checklist

    Evaluation Process

    2 Create SLA Criteria and Management Framework

    The Purpose

    Apply knowledge of SLA elements to create internal SLA requirements.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Templated SLAs that meet requirements.

    Framework to manage SLOs.

    Activities

    2.1 Creating SLA criteria and requirements

    2.2 SLA templates and policy

    2.3 SLA evaluation activity

    2.4 SLA Management Framework

    2.5 SLA monitoring, tracking, and remedy reconciliation

    Outputs

    Internal SLA Management Framework

    Evaluation of current SLAs

    SLA tracking and trending

    Internal SLA Management Framework

    Evaluation of current SLAs

    SLA tracking and trending

    Internal SLA Management Framework

    Evaluation of current SLAs

    SLA tracking and trending

    Internal SLA Management Framework

    Evaluation of current SLAs

    SLA tracking and trending

    Internal SLA Management Framework

    Evaluation of current SLAs

    SLA tracking and trending

    Further reading

    Reduce Risk With Rock-Solid Service-Level Agreements

    Hold Service Providers more accountable to their contractual obligations with meaningful SLA components & remedies

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Reduce Risk With Rock-Solid Service-Level Agreements

    Every year organizations outsource more and more IT infrastructure to the cloud, and IT operations to managed service providers. This increase in outsourcing presents an increase in risk to the CIO to save on IT spend through outsourcing while maintaining required and expected service levels to internal customers and the organization. Ensuring that the service provider constantly meets their obligations so that the CIO can meet their obligation to the organization can be a constant challenge. This brings forth the importance of the Service Level Agreement.

    Research clearly indicates that there is a general lack of knowledge when comes to understanding the key elements of a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Even less understanding of the importance of the components of Service Levels and the Service Level Objectives (SLO) that service provider needs to meet so that the outsourced service consistently meets requirements of the organization. Most service providers are very good at providing the contracted service and they all are very good at presenting SLOs that are easy to meet with very few or no ramifications if they don’t meet their objectives. IT leaders need to be more resolute in only accepting SLOs that are meaningful to their requirements and have meaningful, proactive reporting and associated remedies to hold service providers accountable to their obligations.

    Ted Walker

    Principal Research Director, Vendor Practice

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Brief

    Vendors provide service level commitments to customers in contracts to show a level of trust, performance, availability, security, and responsiveness in an effort create a sense of confidence that their service or platform will meet your organization’s requirements and expectations. Sifting through these promises can be challenging for many IT Leaders. Customers struggle to understand and evaluate what’s in the SLA – are they meaningful and protect your investment? Not understanding the details of SLAs applicable to various types of Service (SaaS, MSP, Service Desk, DR, ISP) can lead to financial and compliance risk for the organization as well as poor customer satisfaction.

    This project will provide IT leadership the knowledge & tools that will allow them to:

    • Understand what SLAs are and why they need them.
    • Develop standard SLAs that meet the organization’s requirements.
    • Negotiate meaningful remedies aligned to Service Levels metrics or KPIs.
    • Create SLA monitoring & reporting and remedies requirements to hold the provider accountable.

    This research:

    1. Is designed for:
    • The CIO or CFO who needs to better understand their provider’s SLAs.
    • The CIO or BU that could benefit from improved service levels.
    • Vendor management who needs to standardize SLAs for the organization IT leadership that needs consistent service levels to the business
    • The contract manager who needs a better understanding of contact SLAs
  • Will help you:
    • Understand what a Service Level Agreement is and what it’s for
    • Learn what the components are of an SLA and why you need them
    • Create a checklist of required SLA elements for your organization
    • Develop standard SLA template requirements for various service types
    • Learn the importance of SLA management to hold providers accountable
  • Will also assist:
    • Vendor management
    • Procurement and sourcing
    • Organizations that need to understand SLAs within contract language
    • With creating standardized monitoring & reporting requirements
    • Organizations get better position remedies & credits to hold vendors accountable to their commitments
  • Reduce Risk With Rock-Solid Service-Level Agreements (SLAs)

    Hold service providers more accountable to their contractual obligations with meaningful SLA components and remedies

    The Problem

    IT Leadership doesn't know how to evaluate an SLA.

    Misunderstanding of obligations given the type of service provided (SAAS, IAAS, DR/BCP, Service Desk)

    Expectations not being met, leading to poor service from the provider.

    No way to hold provider accountable.

    Why it matters

    SLAS are designed to ensure that outsourced IT services meet the requirements and expectations of the organization. Well-written SLAs with all the required elements, metrics, and remedies will allow IT departments to provide the service levels to their customer and avoid financial and contractual risk to the organization.

    The Solution

    1. Understand the key service elements within an SLA
    • Develop a solid understanding of the key elements within an SLA and why they're important.
  • Establish requirements to create SLA criteria
    • Prioritize contractual services and establish concise SLA checklists and performance metrics.
  • Manage SLA obligations to ensure commitments are met
    • Review the five steps for effective SLA management to track provider performance and deal with chronic issues.
  • Service types

    • Availability/Uptime
    • Response Times
    • Resolution Time
    • Accuracy
    • First-Call Resolution

    Agreement Types

    • SaaS/IaaS
    • Service Desk
    • MSP
    • Co-Location
    • DR/BCP
    • Security Ops

    Performance Metrics

    • Reporting
    • Remedies & Credits
    • Monitoring
    • Exclusion

    Example SaaS Provider

    • Response Times ✓
    • Availability/Uptime ✓
    • Resolution Time ✓
    • Update Times ✓
    • Coverage Time ✓
    • Monitoring ✓
    • Reporting ✓
    • Remedies/Credits ✓

    SLA Management Framework

    1. SLO Monitoring
    • SLOs must be monitored by the provider, otherwise they can't be measured.
  • Concise Reporting
    • This is the key element for the provider to validate their performance.
  • Attainment Tracking
    • Capturing SLO metric attainment provides performance trending for each provider.
  • Score carding
    • Tracking details provide input into overall vendor performance ratings.
  • Remedy Reconciliation
    • From SLO tracking, missed SLOs and associated credits needs to be actioned and consumed.
  • Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    To understand which SLAs are required for your organization and how they can differ depending on the service type. In addition, these other challenges can also cloud your knowledge of SLAs

    • No standardized SLA documents, Service levels, or metrics
    • Dealing with lost productivity & revenue due to persistent downtime
    • Understanding SLA components and what service levels are requires for a particular service
    • How to manage the SLA and hold the vendor accountable

    Common Obstacles

    There are several unknowns that SLA can present to different departments within the organization:

    • Little knowledge of what service levels are required
    • Not knowing SLO standards for a service type
    • Lack of resources to manage vendor obligations
    • Negotiating required metrics/KPIs with the provider
    • Low understanding of the risk that poor SLAs can present to the organization

    Info-Tech's Approach

    Info-Tech has a three-step approach to effective SLAs

    • Understand the elements of an SLA
    • Create Requirements for your organization
    • Manage the SLA obligations

    There are some basic components that every SLA should have – most don’t have half of what is required

    Info-Tech Insight

    SLAs need to have clear, easy to measure objectives to meet your expectations and service level requirements, including meaningful reporting and remedies to hold the provider accountable to their obligations.

    Your challenge

    This research is designed to help organizations gain a better understanding of what an SLA is, understand the importance of SLAs in IT contracts, and ensure organizations are provided with rock-solid SLAs that meet their requirements and not just what the vendor wants to provide.

    • Vendors can make SLAs weak and difficult to understand; sometimes the metrics are meaningless. Not fully understanding what makes up a good SLA can bring unknown risks to the organization.
    • Managing vendor SLA obligations effectively is important. Are adequate resources available? Does the vendor provide manual vs. automated processes and which do you need? Is the process proactive from the vendor or reactive from the customer?

    SLAs come in many variations and for many service types. Understanding what needs to be in them is one of the keys to reducing risk to your organization.

    “One of the biggest mistakes an IT leader can make is ignoring the ‘A’ in SLA,” adds Wendy M. Pfeiffer, CIO at Nutanix. “

    An agreement isn’t a one-sided declaration of IT capabilities, nor is it a one-sided demand of business requirements,” she says. “An agreement involves creating a shared understanding of desired service delivery and quality, calculating costs related to expectations, and then agreeing to outcomes in exchange for investment.” (15 SLA mistakes IT leaders still make | CIO)

    Common obstacles

    There are typically a lot of unknowns when it comes to SLAs and how to manage them.

    Most organizations don’t have a full understanding of what SLAs they require and how to ensure they are met by the vendor. Other obstacles that SLAs can present are:

    • Inadequate resources to create and manage SLAs
    • Poor awareness of standard or required SLA metrics/KPIs
    • Lack of knowledge about each provider’s commitment as well as your obligations
    • Low vendor willingness to provide or negotiate meaningful SLAs and credits
    • The know-how or resources to effectively monitor and manage the SLA’s performance

    SLAs need to address your requirements

    55% of businesses do not find all of their service desk metrics useful or valuable (Freshservice.com)

    27% of businesses spend four to seven hours a month collating metric reports (Freshservice.com)

    Executive Summary

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    • Understand the elements of an SLA
      • Availability
      • Monitoring
      • Response Times
      • SLO Calculation
      • Resolution Time
      • Reporting
      • Milestones
      • Exclusions
      • Accuracy
      • Remedies & Credits
    • Create standard SLA requirements and criteria
      • SLA Element Checklist
      • Corporate Requirements and Standards
      • SLA Templates and Policy
    • Effectively Manage the SLA Obligations
      • SLA Management Framework
        • SLO Monitoring
        • Concise Reporting
        • Attainment Tracking
        • Score Carding
        • Remedy Reconciliation

    Info-Tech’s three phase approach

    Reduce Risk With Rock-Solid Service-Level Agreements

    Phase 1

    Understand SLA Elements

    Phase Content:

    • 1.1 What are SLAs, types of SLAs, and why are they needed?
    • 1.2 Elements of an SLA
    • 1.3 Obligation management monitoring, Reporting requirements
    • 1.4 Exclusions
    • 1.5 SLAs vs. SLOs vs. SLIs

    Outcome:

    This phase will present you with an understanding of the elements of an SLA: What they are, why you need them, and how to validate them.

    Phase 2

    Create Requirements

    Phase Content:

    • 2.1 Create a list of your SLA criteria
    • 2.2 Develop SLA policy & templates
    • 2.3 Create a negotiation strategy
    • 2.4 SLA Overachieving discussion

    Outcome:

    This phase will leverage knowledge gained in Phase 1 and guide you through the creation of SLA requirements, criteria, and templates to ensure that providers meet the service level obligations needed for various service types to meet your organization’s service expectations.

    Phase 3

    Manage Obligations

    Phase Content:

    • 3.1 SLA Monitoring, Tracking
    • 3.2 Reporting
    • 3.3 Vendor SLA Reviews & Optimizing
    • 3.4 Performance management

    Outcome:

    This phase will provide you with an SLA management framework and the best practices that will allow you to effectively manage service providers and their SLA obligations.

    Insight summary

    Overarching insight

    SLAs need to have clear, easy-to-measure objectives to meet your expectations and service level requirements, including meaningful reporting and remedies to hold the provider accountable to their obligations.

    Phase 1 insight

    Not understanding the required elements of an SLA and not having meaningful remedies to hold service providers accountable to their obligations can present several risk factors to your organization.

    Phase 2 insight

    Creating standard SLA criteria for your organization’s service providers will ensure consistent service levels for your business units and customers.

    Phase 3 insight

    SLAs can have appropriate SLOs and remedies but without effective management processes they could become meaningless.

    Tactical insight

    Be sure to set SLAs that are easily measurable from regularly accessible data and that are straight forward to interpret.

    Tactical insight

    Beware of low, easy to attain service levels and metrics/KPIs. Service levels need to meet your expectations and needs not the vendor’s.

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    SLA Tracker & Trending Tool

    Track the provider’s SLO attainment and see how their performance is trending over time

    SLA Evaluation Tool

    Evaluate SLA service levels, metrics, credit values, reporting, and other elements

    SLA Template & Metrics Reference Guide

    Reference guide for typical SLA metrics with a generic SLA Template

    Service-Level Agreement Checklist

    Complete SLA component checklist for core SLA and contractual elements.

    Key deliverable:

    Service-Level Agreement Evaluation Tool

    Evaluate each component of the SLA , including service levels, metrics, credit values, reporting, and processes to meet your requirements

    Blueprint objectives

    Understand the components of an SLA and effectively manage their obligations

    • To provide an understanding of different types of SLAs, their required elements, and what they mean to your organization. How to identify meaningful service levels based on service types. We will break down the elements of the SLA such as service types and define service levels such as response times, availability, accuracy, and associated metrics or KPIs to ensure they are concise and easy to measure.
    • To show how important it is that all metrics have remedies to hold the service provider accountable to their SLA obligations.

    Once you have this knowledge you will be able to create and negotiate SLA requirements to meet your organization’s needs and then manage them effectively throughout the term of the agreement.

    InfoTech Insight:

    Right-size your requirements and create your SLO criteria based on risk mitigation and create measurements that motivate the desired behavior from the SLA.

    Blueprint benefits

    IT Benefits

    • An understanding of standard SLA service levels and metrics
    • Reduced financial risk through clear and concise easy-to-measure metrics and KPIs
    • Improved SLA commitments from the service provider
    • Meaningful reporting and remedies to hold the provider accountable
    • Service levels and metrics that meet your requirements to support your customers

    Business Benefits

    • Better understanding of an SLA framework and required SLA elements
    • Improved vendor performance
    • Standardized service levels and metrics aligned to your organization’s requirements
    • Reduced time in reviewing and comprehending vendor SLAs
    • Consistent performance from your service providers

    Measure the value of this blueprint

    1. Dollars Saved
    • Improved performance from your service provider
    • Reduced financial risk through meaningful service levels & remedies
    • Dollars gained through:
      • Reconciled credits from obligation tracking and management
      • Savings due to automated processes
  • Time Saved
    • Reduced time in creating effective SLAs through requirement templates
    • Time spent tracking and managing SLA obligations
    • Reduced negotiation time
    • Time spent tracking and reconciling credits
  • Knowledge Gained
    • Understanding of SLA elements, service levels, service types, reporting, and remedies
    • Standard metrics and KPIs required for various service types and levels
    • How to effectively manage the service provider obligations
    • Tactics to negotiate appropriate service levels to meet your requirements
  • Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

    Guided Implementation

    "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way wound help keep us on track."

    Workshop

    "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

    Consulting

    "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is between three to six calls over the course of two to three months.

    Phase 1 - Understand

    • Call #1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific SLA challenges

    Phase 2 - Create Requirements

    • Call #2: Review key SLA and how to identify them
    • Call #3: Deep dive into SLA elements and why you need them
    • Call #4: Review your service types and SLA criteria
    • Call #5: Create internal SLA requirements and templates

    Phase 3 - Management

    • Call #6: Review SLA Management Framework
    • Call #7: Review and create SLA Reporting and Tracking

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Day 1 Day 2
    Understanding SLAs SLA Templating & Management
    Activities

    1.1 SLA overview, objectives, SLA types, service levels

    1.2 SLA elements and objectives

    1.3 SLA components – monitoring, reporting, remedies

    1.4 SLA Checklist review

    2.1 Creating SLA criteria and requirements

    2.2 SLA policy & template

    2.3 SLA evaluation activity

    2.4 SLA management framework

    2.5 SLA monitoring, tracking, remedy reconciliation

    Deliverables
    1. SLA Checklist
    2. SLA policy & template creation
    3. SLA management gap analysis
    1. Evaluation of current SLAs
    2. SLA tracking and trending
    3. Create internal SLA management framework

    Reduce Risk With Rock-Solid Service-Level Agreements

    Phase 1

    Phase 1

    Understand SLA Elements

    Phase Steps

    • 1.1 What are SLAs, the types of SLAs, and why are they needed?
    • 1.2 Elements of an SLA
    • 1.3 Obligation management monitoring, Reporting requirements
    • 1.4 Exclusions and exceptions
    • 1.5 SLAs vs. SLOs vs. SLIs

    Create Requirements

    Manage Obligations

    1.1 What are SLAs, the types of SLAs, and why are they needed?

    SLA Overview

    What is a Service Level Agreement?

    An SLA is an overarching contractual agreement between a service provider and a customer (can be external or internal) that describes the services that will be delivered by the provider. It describes the service levels and associated performance metrics and expectations, how the provider will show it has attained the SLAs, and defines any remedies or credits that would apply if the provider fails to meet its commitments. Some SLAs also include a change or revision process.

    SLAs come in a few forms. Some are unique, separate, standalone documents that define the service types and levels in more detail and is customized to your needs. Some are separate documents that apply to a service and are web posted or linked to an MSA or SSA. The most common is to have them embedded in, or as an appendix to an MSA or SSA. When negotiating an MSA it’s generally more effective to negotiate better service levels and metrics at the same time.

    Objectives of an SLA

    To be effective, SLAs need to have clearly described objectives that define the service type(s) that the service provider will perform, along with commitment to associated measurable metrics or KPIs that are sufficient to meet your expectations. The goal of these service levels and metrics is to ensure that the service provider is committed to providing the service that you require, and to allow you to maintain service levels to your customers whether internal or external.

    1.1 What are SLAs, the types of SLAs, and why are they needed?

    Key Elements of an SLA

    Principle service elements of an SLA

    There are several more common service-related elements of an SLA. These generally include:

    • The Agreement – the document that defines service levels and commitments.
    • The service types – the type of service being provided by the vendor. These can include SaaS, MSP, Service Desk, Telecom/network, PaaS, Co-Lo, BCP, etc.
    • The service levels – these are the measurable performance objectives of the SLA. They include availability (uptime), response times, restore times, priority level, accuracy level, resolution times, event prevention, completion time, etc.
    • Metrics/KPIs – These are the targets or commitments associated to the service level that the service provider is obligated to meet.
    • Other elements – Reporting requirements, monitoring, remedies/credit values and process.

    Contractual Construct Elements

    These are construct components of an SLA that outline their roles and responsibilities, T&Cs, escalation process, etc.

    In addition, there are several contractual-type elements including, but not limited to:

    • A statement regarding the purpose of the SLA.
    • A list of services being supplied (service types).
    • An in-depth description of how services will be provided and when.
    • Vendor and customer requirements.
    • Vendor and customer obligations.
    • Acknowledgment/acceptance of the SLA.
    • They also list each party’s responsibilities and how issues will be escalated and resolved.

    Common types of SLAs explained

    Service-level SLA

    • This service-level agreement construct is the Service-based SLA. This SLA covers an identified service for all customers in general (for example, if an IT service provider offers customer response times for a service to several customers). In a service-based agreement, the response times would be the same and apply to all customers using the service. Any customer using the service would be provided the same SLA – in this case the same defined response time.

    Customer-based SLA

    • A customer-based SLA is a unique agreement with one customer. The entire agreement is defined for one or all service levels provided to a particular customer (for example, you may use several services from one telecom vendor). The SLAs for these services would be covered in one contract between you and the vendor, creating a unique customer-based vendor agreement. Another scenario could be where a vendor offers general SLAs for its services but you negotiate a specific SLA for a particular service that is unique or exclusive to you. This would be a customer-based SLA as well.

    Multi-level SLA

    • This service-level agreement construct is the multi-level SLA. In a multi-level SLA, components are defined to the organizational levels of the customer with cascading coverage to sublevels of the organization. The SLA typically entails all services and is designed to the cover each sub-level or department within the organization. Sometimes the multi-level SLA is known as a master organization SLA as it cascades to several levels of the organization.

    InfoTech Insight: Beware of low, easy to attain Service levels and metrics/KPIs. Service levels need to meet your requirements, expectations, and needs not the vendor’s.

    1.2 Elements of SLA-objectives, service types, and service levels

    Objectives of Service Levels

    The objective of the service levels and service credits are to:

    • Ensure that the services are of a consistently high quality and meet the requirements of the customer
    • Provide a mechanism whereby the customer can attain meaningful recognition of the vendors failure to deliver the level of service for which it was contracted to deliver
    • Incentivize the vendor or service provider to comply with and to expeditiously provide a remedy for any failure to attain the service levels committed to in the SLA
    • To ensure that the service provider fulfills the defined objectives of the outsourced service

    Service types

    There are several service types that can be part of an SLA. Service types are the different nature of services associated with the SLA that the provider is performing and being measured against. These can include:

    Service Desk, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, ISP/Telecom/Network MSP, DR & BCP, Co-location security ops, SOW.

    Each service type should have standard service level targets or obligations that can vary depending on your requirements and reliance on the service being provided.

    Service levels

    Service levels are measurable targets, metrics, or KPIs that the service provider has committed to for the particular service type. Service levels are the key element of SLAs – they are the performance expectations set between you and the provider. The service performance of the provider is measured against the service level commitments. The ability of the provider to consistently meet these metrics will allow your organization to fully benefit from the objectives of the service and associated SLAs. Most service levels are time related but not all are.

    Common service levels are:

    Response times, resolution times per percent, restore/recovery times, accuracy, availability/uptime, completion/milestones, updating/communication, latency.

    Each service level has standard or minimum metrics for the provider. The metrics, or KPIs, should be relatively easy to measure and report against on a regular basis. Service levels are generally negotiable to meet your requirements.

    1.2.1 Activity SLA Checklist Tool

    1-2 hours

    Input

    • SLA content, Service elements
    • Contract terms & exclusions
    • Service metrices/KPIs

    Output

    • A concise list of SLA components
    • A list of missing SLA elements
    • Evaluation of the SLA

    Materials

    • Comprehensive checklist
    • Service provider SLA
    • Internal templates or policies

    Participants

    • Vendor or contract manager
    • IT or business unit manager
    • Legal
    • Finance

    Using this checklist will help you review a provider’s SLA to ensure it contains adequate service levels and remedies as well as contract-type elements.

    Instructions:

    Use the checklist to identify the principal service level elements as well as the contractual-type elements within the SLA.

    Review the SLA and use the dropdowns in the checklist to verify if the element is in the SLA and whether it is within acceptable parameters as well the page or section for reference.

    The checklist contains a list of service types that can be used for reference of what SLA elements you should expect to see in that service type SLA.

    Download the SLA Checklist Tool

    1.3 Monitoring, reporting requirements, remedies/credit process

    Monitoring & Reporting

    As mentioned, well-defined service levels are key to the success of the SLA. Validating that the metrics/KPIs are being met on a consistent basis requires regular monitoring and reporting. These elements of the SLA are how you hold the provider accountable to the SLA commitments and obligations. To achieve the service level, the service must be monitored to validate that timelines are met and accuracy is achieved.

    • Data or details from monitoring must then be presented in a report and delivered to the customer in an agreed-upon format. These formats can be in a dashboard, portal, spreadsheet, or csv file, and they must have sufficient criteria to validate the service-level metric. Reports should be kept for future review and to create historical trending.
    • Monitoring and reporting should be the responsibility of the service provider. This is the only way that they can validate to the customer that a service level has been achieved.
    • Reporting criteria and delivery timelines should be defined in the SLA and can even have a service level associated with it, such as a scheduled report delivery on the fifth day of the following month.
    • Reports need to be checked and balanced. When defining report criteria, be sure to define data source(s) that can be easily validated by both parties.
    • Report criteria should include compliance requirements, target metric/KPIs, and whether they were attained.
    • The report should identify any attainment shortfall or missed KPIs.

    Too many SLAs do not have these elements as often the provider tries to put the onus on the customer to monitor their performance of the service levels. .

    1.3.1 Monitoring, reporting requirements, remedies/credit process

    Remedies and Credits

    Service-level reports validate the performance of the service provider to the SLA metrics or KPIs. If the metrics are met, then by rights, the service provider is doing its job and performing up to expectations of the SLA and your organization.

    • What if the metrics are not being met either periodically or consistently? Solving this is the goal of remedies. Remedies are typically monetary costs (in some form) to the provider that they must pay for not meeting a service-level commitment. Credits can vary significantly and should be aligned to the severity of the missed service level. Sometimes there no credits offered by the vendor. This is a red flag in an SLA.
    • Typically expressed as a monetary credit, the SLA will have service levels and associated credits if the service-level metric/KPI is not met during the reporting period. Credits can be expressed in a dollar format, often defined as a percentage of a monthly fee or prorated annual fee. Although less common, some SLAs offer non-financial credits. These could include: an extension to service term, additional modules, training credits, access to a higher support level, etc.
    • Regardless of how the credit is presented, this is typically the only way to hold your provider accountable to their commitments and to ensure they perform consistently to expectations. You must do a rough calculation to validate the potential monetary value and if the credit is meaningful enough to the provider.

    Research shows that credit values that equate to just a few dollars, when you are paying the provider tens of thousands of dollars a month for a service or product, the credit is insignificant and therefore doesn’t incent the provider to achieve or maintain a service level.

    1.3.2 Monitoring, reporting requirements, remedies/credit process

    Credit Process

    Along with meaningful credit values, there must be a defined credit calculation method and credit redemption process in the SLA.

    Credit calculation. The credit calculation should be simple and straight forward. Many times, we see providers define complicated methods of calculating the credit value. In some cases complicated service levels require higher effort to monitor and report on, but this shouldn’t mean that the credit for missing the service level needs to require the same effort to calculate. Do a sample credit calculation to validate if the potential credit value is meaningful enough or meets your requirements.

    Credit redemption process. The SLA should define the process of how a credit is provided to the customer. Ideally the process should be fairly automated by the service provider. If the report shows a missed service level, that should trigger a credit calculation and credit value posted to account followed by notification. In many SLAs that we review, the credit process is either poorly defined or not defined at all. When it is defined, the process typically requires the customer to follow an onerous process and submit a credit request that must then be validated by the provider and then, if approved, posted to your account to be applied at year end as long as you are in complete compliance with the agreement and up-to-date on your account etc. This is what we need to avoid in provider-written SLAs. You need a proactive process where the service provider takes responsibility for missing an SLA and automatically assigns an accurate credit to your account with an email notice.

    Secondary level remedies. These are remedies for partial performance. For example, the platform is accessible but some major modules are not working (i.e.: the payroll platform is up and running and accessible but the tax table is not working properly so you can’t complete your payroll run on-time). Consider the requirement of a service level, metric, and remedy for critical components of a service and not just the platform availability.

    Info-Tech Insight SLA’s without adequate remedies to hold the vendor accountable to their commitments make the SLAs essentially meaningless.

    1.4 Exclusions indemnification, force majeure, scheduled maintenance

    Contract-Related Exclusions

    Attaining service-level commitments by the provider within an SLA can depend on other factors that could greatly influence their performance to service levels. Most of these other factors are common and should be defined in the SLA as exclusions or exceptions. Exceptions/exclusions can typically apply to credit calculations as well. Typical exceptions to attaining service levels are:

    • Denial of Service (DoS) attacks
    • Communication/ISP outage
    • Outages of third-party hosting
    • Actions or inactions of the client or third parties
    • Scheduled maintenance but not emergency maintenance
    • Force majeure events which can cover several different scenarios

    Attention should be taken to review the exceptions to ensure they are in fact not within the reasonable control of the provider. Many times the provider will list several exclusions. Often these are not reasonable or can be avoided, and in most cases, they allow the service provider the opportunity to show unjustified service-level achievements. These should be negotiated out of the SLA.

    1.5 Activity SLA Evaluation Tool

    1-2 hours

    Input

    • SLA content
    • SLA elements
    • SLA objectives
    • SLO calculation methods

    Output

    • Rating of the SLA service levels and objectives
    • Overall rating of the SLA content
    • Targeted list of required improvements

    Materials

    • SLA comprehensive checklist
    • Service provider SLA

    Participants

    • Vendor or contract manager
    • IT manager or leadership
    • Application or business unit manager

    The SLA Evaluation Tool will allow you evaluate an SLA for content. Enter details into the tool and evaluate the service levels and SLA elements and components to ensure the agreement contains adequate SLOs to meet your organization’s service requirements.

    Instructions:

    Review and identify SLA elements within the service provider’s SLA.

    Enter service-level details into the tool and rate the SLOs.

    Enter service elements details, validate that all required elements are in the SLA, and rate them accordingly.

    Capture and evaluate service-level SLO calculations.

    Review the overall rating for the SLA and create a targeted list for improvements with the service provider.

    Download the SLA Evaluation Tool

    1.5 Clarification: SLAs vs. SLOs vs. SLIs

    SLA – Service-Level Agreement The promise or commitment

    • This is the formal agreement between you and your service provider that contains their service levels and obligations with measurable metrics/KPIs and associated remedies. SLAs can be a separate or unique document, but are most commonly embedded within an MSA, SOW, SaaS, etc. as an addendum or exhibit.

    SLO – Service-Level Objective The goals or targets

    • This service-level agreement construct is the customer-based SLA. A Customer-based SLA is a unique agreement with one customer. The entire agreement is defined for one or all service levels provided to a particular customer. For example, you may use several services from one telecom vendor. The SLAs for these services would be covered in one contract between you and the Telco vendor, creating a unique customer-based to vendor agreement. Another scenario: a vendor offers general SLAs for its services and you negotiate a specific SLA for a particular service that is unique or exclusive to you. This would be a customer-based SLA as well.

    Other common names are Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs )

    SLI – Service-Level Indicator How did we do? Did we achieve the objectives?

    • An SLI is the actual metric attained after the measurement period. SLI measures compliance with an SLO (service level objective). So, for example, if your SLA specifies that your systems will be available 99.95% of the time, your SLO is 99.95% uptime and your SLI is the actual measurement of your uptime. Maybe it’s 99.96%. maybe 99.99% or even 99.75% For the vendor to be compliant to the SLA, the SLI(s) must meet or exceed the SLOs within the SLA document.

    Other common names: attainment, results, actual

    Info-Tech Insight:

    Web-posted SLAs that are not embedded within a signed MSA, can present uncertainty and risk as they can change at any time and typically without direct notice to the customer

    Reduce Risk With Rock-Solid Service-Level Agreements

    Phase 2

    Understand SLA Elements

    Phase 2

    Create Requirements

    Phase Steps

    • 2.1 Create a list of your SLA criteria
    • 2.2 Develop SLA policy & templates
    • 2.3 Create a negotiation strategy
    • 2.4 SLA overachieving discussion

    Manage Obligations

    2.1 Create a list of your SLA criteria

    Principle Service Elements

    With your understanding of the types of SLAs and the elements that comprise a well-written agreement

    • The next step is to start to create a set of SLA criteria for service types that your organization outsources or may require in the future.
    • This criteria should define the elements of the SLA with tolerance levels that will require the provider to meet your service expectations.
    • Service levels, metrics/KPIs, associated remedies and reporting criteria. This criteria could be captured into table-like templates that can be referenced or inserted into service provider SLAs.
    • Once you have defined minimum service-level criteria, we recommend that you do a deeper review of the various service provider types that your organization has in place. The goal of the review is to understand the objective of the service type and associated service levels and then compare them to your requirements for the service to meet your expectations. Service levels and KPIs should be no less than if your IT department was providing the service with its own resources and infrastructure.
    • Most IT departments have service levels that they are required to meet with their infrastructure to the business units or organization, whether it’s App delivery, issue or problem resolution, availability etc. When any of these services are outsourced to an external service provider, you need to make all efforts to ensure that the service levels are equal to or better than the previous or existing internal expectations.
    • Additionally, the goal is to identify service levels and metrics that don’t meet your requirements or expectations and/or service levels that are missing.

    2.2 Develop SLA policies and templates

    Contract-type Elements

    After creating templates for minimum-service metrics & KPIs, reporting criteria templates, process, and timing, the next step should be to work on contract-type elements and additional service-level components. These elements should include:

    • Reporting format, criteria, and timelines
    • Monitoring requirements
    • Minimum acceptable remedy or credits process; proactive by provider vs. reactive by customer
    • Roles & responsibilities
    • Acceptable exclusion details
    • Termination language for persistent failure to meet SLOs

    These templates or criteria minimums can be used as guidelines or policy when creating or negotiating SLAs with a service provider.

    Start your initial element templates for your strategic vendors and most common service types: SaaS, IaaS, Service Desk, SecOps, etc. The goal of SLA templates is to create simple minimum guidelines for service levels that will allow you to meet your internal SLAs and expectations. Having SLA templates will show the service provider that you understand your requirements and may put you in a better negotiating position when reviewing with the provider.

    When considering SLO metrics or KPIs consider the SMART guidance:

    Simple: A KPI should be easy to measure. It should not be complicated, and the purpose behind recording it must be documented and communicated.

    Measurable: A KPI that cannot be measured will not help in the decision-making process. The selected KPIs must be measurable, whether qualitatively or quantitatively. The procedure for measuring the KPIs must be consistent and well-defined.

    Actionable: KPIs should contribute to the decision-making process of your organization. A KPI that does not make any such contributions serves no purpose.

    Relevant: KPIs must be related to operations or functions that a security team seeks to assess.

    Time-based: KPIs should be flexible enough to demonstrate changes over time. In a practical sense, an ideal KPI can be grouped together by different time intervals.

    (Guide for Security Operations Metrics)

    2.2.1 Activity: Review SLA Template & Metrics Reference Guide

    1-2 hours

    Input

    • Service level metrics
    • List of who is accountable for PPM decisions

    Output

    • SLO templates for service types
    • SLA criteria that meets your organization’s requirements

    Materials

    • SLA Checklist
    • SLA criteria list with SLO & credit values
    • PPM Decision Review Workbook

    Participants

    • Vendor manager
    • IT leadership
    • Procurement or contract manager
    1. Review the SLA Template and Metrics Reference Guide for common metrics & KPIs for the various service types. Each Service Type tab has SLA elements and SLO metrics typically associated with the type of service.
    2. Some service levels have common or standard credits* that are typically associated with the service level or metric.
    3. Use the SLA Template to enter service levels, metrics, and credits that meet your organization’s criteria or requirements for a given service type.

    Download the SLA Template & Metrics Reference Guide

    *Credit values are not standard values, rather general ranges that our research shows to be the typical ranges that credit values should be for a given missed service level

    2.3 Create a negotiation strategy

    Once you have created service-level element criteria templates for your organization’s requirements, it’s time to document a negotiation position or strategy to use when negotiating with service providers. Not all providers are flexible with their SLA commitments, in fact most are reluctant to change or create “unique” SLOs for individual customers. Particularly cloud vendors providing IaaS, SaaS, or PaaS, SLAs. ISP/Telcom, Co-Lo and DR/BU providers also have standard SLOs that they don’t like to stray far from. On the other hand, security ops (SIEM), service desk, hardware, and SOW/PS providers who are generally contracted to provide variable services are somewhat more flexible with their SLAs and more willing to meet your requirements.

    • Service providers want to avoid being held accountable to SLOs, and their SLAs are typically written to reflect that.

    The goal of creating internal SLA templates and policies is to set a minimum baseline of service levels that your organization is willing to accept, and that will meet their requirements and expectations for the outsourced service. Using these templated SLOs will set the basis for negotiating the entire SLA with the provider. You can set the SLA purpose, objectives, roles, and responsibilities and then achieve these from the service provider with solid SLOs and associated reporting and remedies.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Web-posted SLAs that are not embedded within a signed MSA can present uncertainty and risk as they can change at any time and typically without direct notice to the customer

    2.3.1 Negotiating strategy guidance

    • Be prepared. Create a negotiating plan and put together a team that understands your organization’s requirements for SLA.
    • Stay informed. Request provider’s recent performance data and negotiate SLOs to the provider’s average performance.
    • Know what you need. Corporate SLA templates or policies should be positioned to service providers as baseline minimums.
    • Show some flexibility. Be willing to give up some ground on one SLO in exchange for acceptance of SLOs that may be more important to your organization.
    • Re-group. Have a fallback position or Plan B. What if the provider can’t or won’t meet your key SLOs? Do you walk?
    • Do your homework. Understand what the typical standard SLOs are for the type of service level.

    2.4 SLO overachieving incentive discussion

    Monitoring & Reporting

    • SLO overachieving metrics are seen in some SLAs where there is a high priority for a service provider to meet and or exceed the SLOs within the SLA. These are not common terms but can be used to improve the overall service levels of a provider. In these scenarios the provider is sometimes rewarded for overachieving on the SLOs, either consistently or on a monthly or quarterly basis. In some cases, it can make financial sense to incent the service provider to overachieve on their commitments. Incentives can drive behaviors and improved performance by the provider that can intern improve the benefits to your organization and therefore justify an incent of some type.
    • Example: You could have an SLO for invoice accuracy. If not achieved, it could cost the vendor if they don’t meet the accuracy metric, however if they were to consistently overachieve the metric it could save accounts payable hours of time in validation and therefore you could pass on some of these measurable savings to the provider.
    • Overachieving incentives can add complexity to the SLA so they need to be easily measurable and simple to manage.
    • Overachieving incentives can also be used in provider performance improvement plans, where a provider might have poor trending attainment and you need to have them improve their performance in a short period of time. Incentives typically will motivate provider improvement and generally will cost much less than replacing the provider.
    • There is another school of thought that you shouldn’t have to pay a provider for doing their job; however, others are of the opinion that incentives or bonuses improve the overall performance of individuals or teams and are therefore worth consideration if both parties benefit from the over performance.

    Reduce Risk With Rock-Solid Service-Level Agreements

    Phase 3

    Understand SLA Elements

    Create Requirements

    Phase 3

    Manage Obligations

    Phase Steps

    • 3.1 SLA monitoring and tracking
    • 3.2 Reporting
    • 3.3 Vendor SLA reviews & optimizing
    • 3.4 Performance management

    3.1 SLA monitoring, tracking, and remedy reconciliation

    The next step to effective SLAs is the management component. It could be fruitless if you were to spend your time and efforts negotiating your required service levels and metrics and don’t have some level of managing the SLA. In that situation you would have no way of knowing if the service provider is attaining their SLOs.

    There are several key elements to effective SLA management:

    • SLO monitoring
    • Simple, concise reporting
    • SLO attainment tracking
    • Score carding & trending
    • Remedy reconciliation

    SLA Management framework

    SLA Monitoring → Concise Reporting → Attainment Tracking → Score Carding →Remedy Reconciliation

    “A shift we’re beginning to see is an increased use of data and process discovery tools to measure SLAs,” says Borowski of West Monroe. “While not pervasive yet, these tools represent an opportunity to identify the most meaningful metrics and objectively measure performance (e.g., cycle time, quality, compliance). When provided by the client, it also eliminates the dependency on provider tools as the source-of-truth for performance data.” – Stephanie Overby

    3.1 SLA management framework

    SLA Performance Management

    • SLA monitoring provides data for SLO reports or dashboards. Reports provide attainment data for tacking over time. Attainment data feeds scorecards and allows for trending analysis. Missed attainment data triggers remedies.
    • All service providers monitor their systems, platforms, tickets, agents, sensors etc. to be able to do their jobs. Therefore, monitoring is readily available from your service provider in some form.
    • One of the key purposes of monitoring is to generate data into internal reports or dashboards that capture the performance metrics of the various services. Therefore, service-level and metric reports are readily available for all of the service levels that a service provider is contracted or engaged to provide.
    • Monitoring and reporting are the key elements that validate how your service provider is meeting its SLA obligations and thus are very important elements of an SLA. SLO report data becomes attainment data once the metric or KPI has been captured.
    • As a component of effective SLA management, this attainment data needs to be tracked/recorded in an easy-to-read format or table over a period of time. Attainment data can then be used to generate scorecards and trending reports for your review both internally and with the provider as required.
    • If attainment data shows that the service provider is meeting their SLA obligations, then the SLA is meeting your requirements and expectations. If on the other hand, attainment data shows that obligations are not being met, then actions must be taken to hold the service provider accountable. The most common method is through remedies that are typically in the form of a credit through a defined process (see Sec. 1.3). Any credits due for missed SLOs should also be tracked and reported to stakeholders and accounting for validation, reconciliation, and collection.

    3.2 Reporting

    Monitoring & Reporting

    • Many SLAs are silent on monitoring and reporting elements and require that the customer, if aware or able, to monitor the providers service levels and attainment and create their own KPI and reports. Then if SLOs are not met there is an arduous process that the customer must go through to request their rightful credit. This manual and reactive method creates all kinds of risk and cost to the customer and they should make all attempts to ensure that the service provider proactively provides SLO/KPI attainment reports on a regular basis.
    • Automated monitoring and reporting is a common task for many IT departments. There is no reason that a service provider can’t send reports proactively in a format that can be easily interpreted by the customer. The ideal state would be to capture KPI report data into a customer’s internal service provider scorecard.
    • Automated or automatic credit posting is another key element that service providers tend to ignore, primarily in hopes that the customer won’t request or go through the trouble of the process. This needs to change. Some large cloud vendors already have automated processes that automatically post a credit to your account if they miss an SLO. This proactive credit process should be at the top of your negotiation checklist. Service providers are avoiding thousands of credit dollars every year based on the design of their credit process. As more customers push back and negotiate more efficient credit processes, vendors will soon start to change and may use it as a differentiator with their service.

    3.2.1 Performance tracking and trending

    What gets measured gets done

    SLO Attainment Tracking

    A primary goal of proactive and automated reporting and credit process is to capture the provider’s attainment data into a tracker or vendor scorecard. These tracking scorecards can easily create status reports and performance trending of service providers, to IT leadership as well as feed QBR agenda content.

    Remedy Reconciliation

    Regardless of how a credit is processed it should be tracked and reconciled with internal stakeholders and accounting to ensure credits are duly applied or received from the provider and in a timely manner. Tracking and reconciliation must also align with your payment terms, whether monthly or annually.

    “While the adage, ‘You can't manage what you don't measure,’ continues to be true, the downside for organizations using metrics is that the provider will change their behavior to maximize their scores on performance benchmarks.” – Rob Lemos

    3.2.1 Activity SLA Tracker and Trending Tool

    1-2 hours setup

    Input

    • SLO metrics/KPIs from the SLA
    • Credit values associated with SLO

    Output

    • Monthly SLO attainment data
    • Credit tracking
    • SLO trending graphs

    Materials

    • Service provider SLO reports
    • Service provider SLA
    • SLO Tracker & Trending Tool

    Participants

    • Contract or vendor managers
    • Application or service managers
    • Service provider

    An important activity in the SLA management framework is to track the provider’s SLO attainment on a monthly or quarterly basis. In addition, if an SLO is missed, an associated credit needs to be tracked and captured. This activity allows you to capture the SLOs from the SLA and track them continually and provide data for trending and review at vendor performance meetings and executive updates.

    Instructions: Enter SLOs from the SLA as applicable.

    Each month, from the provider’s reports or dashboards, enter the SLO metric attainment.

    When an SLO is met, the cell will turn green. If the SLO is missed, the cell will turn red and a corresponding cell in the Credit Tracker will turn green, meaning that a credit needs to be reconciled.

    Use the Trending tab to view trending graphs of key service levels and SLOs.

    Download the SLO Tracker and Trending Tool

    3.3 Vendor SLA reviews and optimizing

    Regular reviews should be done with providers

    Collecting attainment data with scorecards or tracking tools provides summary information on the performance of the service provider to their SLA obligations. This information should be used for regular reviews both internally and with the provider.

    Regular attainment reviews should be used for:

    • Performance trending upward or downward
    • Identifying opportunities to revise or improve SLOs
    • Optimizing SLO and processes
    • Creating a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) for the service provider

    Some organizations choose to review SLA performance with providers at regular QBRs or at specific SLA review meetings

    This should be determined based on the criticality, risk, and strategic importance of the provider’s service. Providers that provide essential services like ERP, payroll, CRM, HRIS, IaaS etc. should be reviewed much more regularly to ensure that any decline in service is identified early and addressed properly in accordance with the service provider. Negative trending performance should also be documented for consideration at renewal time.

    3.4 Performance management

    Dealing with persistent poor performance and termination

    Service providers that consistently miss key service level metrics or KPIs present financial and security risk to the organization. Poor performance of a service provider reflects directly on the IT leadership and will affect many other business aspects of the organization including:

    • Ability to conduct day-to-day business activities
    • Meet internal obligations and expectations
    • Employee productivity and satisfaction
    • Maintain corporate policies or industry compliance
    • Meet security requirements

    Communication is key. Poor performance of a service provider needs to be dealt with in a timely manner in order to avoid more critical impact of the poor performance. Actions taken with the provider can also vary depending again on the criticality, risk, and strategic importance of the provider’s service.

    Performance reviews should provide the actions required with the goal of:

    • Making the performance problems into opportunities
    • Working with the provider to create a PIP with aggressive timelines and ramifications if not attained
    • Non-renewal or termination consideration, if feasible including provider replacement options, risk, costs, etc.
    • SLA renegotiation or revisions
    • Warning notifications to the service provider with concise issues and ramifications

    To avoid the issues and challenges of dealing with chronic poor performance, consider a Persistent or Chronic Failure clause into the SLA contract language. These clauses can define chronic failure, scenarios, ramifications there of, and defined options for the client including increased credit values, non-monetary remedies, and termination options without liability.

    Info-Tech Insight

    It’s difficult to prevent chronic poor performance but you can certainly track it and deal with it in a way that reduces risk and cost to your organization.

    SLA Hall of Shame

    Crazy service provider SLA content collection

    • Excessive list of unreasonable exclusions
    • Subcontractors’ behavior could be excluded
    • Downtime credit, equal to downtime percent x the MRC
    • Controllable FM events (internal labor issues, health events)
    • Difficult downtime or credit calculations that don’t make sense
    • Credits are not valid if agreement is terminated early or not renewed
    • Customer is not current on their account, SLA or credits do not count/apply
    • Total downtime = to prorated credit value (down 3 hrs = 3/720hrs = 0.4% credit)
    • SLOs don’t apply if customer fails to report the issue or request a trouble ticket
    • Downtime during off hours (overnight) do not count towards availability metrics
    • Different availability commitments based on different support-levels packages
    • Extending the agreement term by the length of downtime as a form of a remedy

    SLA Dos and Don’ts

    Dos

    • Do negotiate SLOs to vendor’s average performance
    • Do strive for automated reporting and credit processes
    • Do right-size and create your SLO criteria based on risk mitigation
    • Do review SLA attainment results with strategic service providers on a regular basis
    • Do ensure that all key elements and components of an SLA are present in the document or appendix

    Don'ts

    • Don’t accept the providers response that “we can’t change the SLOs for you because then we’d have to change them for everyone”
    • Don’t leave SLA preparation to the last minute. Give it priority as you negotiate with the provider
    • Don’t create complex SLAs with numerous service levels and SLOs that need to be reported and managed
    • Don’t aim for absolute perfection. Rather, prioritize which service levels are most important to you for the service

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Problem Solved

    Knowledge Gained

    • Understanding of the elements and components of an SLA
    • A list of SLO metrics aligned to service types that meet your organization’s criteria
    • SLA metric/KPI templates
    • SLA Management process for your provider’s service objectives
    • Reporting and tracking process for performance trending

    Deliverables Completed

    • SLA component and contract element checklist
    • Evaluation or service provider SLAs
    • SLA templates for strategic service types
    • SLA tracker for strategic service providers

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com

    1-888-670-8889

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Improve IT-Business Alignment Through an Internal SLA

    • Understand business requirements, clarify current capabilities, and enable strategies to close service-level gaps.

    Data center Co-location SLA & Service Definition Template

    • In essence, the SLA defines the “product” that is being purchased, permitting the provider to rationalize resources to best meet the needs of varied clients, and permits the buyer to ensure that business requirements are being met.

    Ensure Cloud Security in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS Environments

    • Keep your information security risks manageable when leveraging the benefits of cloud computing.

    Bibliography

    Henderson, George. “3 Most Common Types of Service Level Agreement (SLA).” Master of Project Academy. N.d. Web.

    “Guide to Security Operations Metrics.” Logsign. Oct 5, 2020. Web.

    Lemos, Rob. “4 lessons from SOC metrics: What your SpecOps team needs to know.” TechBeacon. N.d. Web.

    “Measuring and Making the Most of Service Desk Metrics.” Freshworks. N.d. Web.

    Overby, Stephanie. “15 SLA Mistakes IT Leaders Still Make.” CIO. Jan 21, 2021.

    Application Development Throughput

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    • Parent Category Name: Applications
    • Parent Category Link: /applications

    The challenge

    • As we work more and more using agile techniques, teams tend to optimize their areas of responsibility.
    • IT will still release lower-quality applications when there is a lack of clarity around the core SDLC processes.
    • Software development teams continue to struggle with budget and time constraints within their releases.
    • Typically each group claims to be optimized, yet the final deliverable falls short of the expected quality.

    Our advice

    Insight

    • Database administrators know this all too well: Optimizing can you perform worse. The software development lifecycle (SDLC) must be optimized holistically, not per area or team.
    • Separate how you work from your framework. You do not need "agile" or "extreme" or "agifall" or "safe" to optimize your SDLC.
    • SDLC optimization is a continuous effort. Start from your team's current capabilities and improve over time.

    Impact and results 

    • You can assume proper accountability for the implementation and avoid over-reliance on the systems integrator.
    • Leverage the collective knowledge and advice of additional IT professionals
    • Review the pitfalls and lessons learned from failed integrations.
    • Manage risk at every stage.
    • Perform a self-assessment at various stages of the integration path.

    The roadmap

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    Get started.

    Read our executive brief to understand our approach to SDLC optimization and why we advocate a holistic approach for your company.

    Document your current state

    This phase helps you understand your business goals and priorities. You will document your current SDLC process and find where the challenges are.

    • Create a Horizontally Optimized SDLC to Better Meet Business Demands – Phase 1: Document the Current State of the SDLC (ppt)
    • SDLC Optimization Playbook (xls)

    Find out the root causes, define how to move forward, and set your target state

    • Create a Horizontally Optimized SDLC to Better Meet Business Demands – Phase 2: Define Root Causes, Determine Optimization Initiatives, and Define Target State (ppt)

    Develop the roll-out strategy for SDLC optimization

    Prioritize your initiatives and formalize them in a roll-out strategy and roadmap. Communicate your plan to all your stakeholders.

    • Create a Horizontally Optimized SDLC to Better Meet Business Demands – Phase 3: Develop a Rollout Strategy for SDLC Optimization (ppt)
    • SDLC Communication Template (ppt)

     

    Contact Tymans Group

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    Continue reading

    Maximize Value From Your Value-Added Reseller (VAR)

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    • Parent Category Name: Vendor Management
    • Parent Category Link: /vendor-management

    Organizations need to understand their value-added reseller (VAR) portfolio and the greater VAR landscape to better:

    • Manage the VAR portfolio.
    • Understand additional value each VAR can provide.
    • Maximize existing VAR commitments.
    • Evaluate the VARs’ performance.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    VARs typically charge more for products because they are in some way adding value. If you’re not leveraging any of the provided value, you’re likely wasting money and should use a basic commodity-type reseller for procurement.

    Impact and Result

    This project will provide several benefits to Vendor Management and Procurement:

    • Defined VAR value and performance tracking.
    • Manageable portfolio of VARs that fully benefit the organization.
    • Added training, licensing advice, faster quoting, and invoicing resolution.
    • Reduced deployment and logistics costs.

    Maximize Value From Your Value-Added Reseller (VAR) Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our informative Executive Brief to find out why you should maximize value from your value-added reseller, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the three ways to better manage your VARs improve performance and reduce costs.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Organize and prioritize

    Organize all your VARs and create a manageable portfolio detailing their value, specific, product, services, and certifications.

    • Maximize Value From Your Value-Added Reseller – Phase 1: Organize and Prioritize
    • VAR Listing and Prioritization Tool

    2. “EvaluRate” your VARs

    Create an in-depth evaluation of the VARs’ capabilities.

    • Maximize Value From Your Value-Added Reseller – Phase 2: EvaluRate Your VARs
    • VAR Features Checklist Tool
    • VAR Profile and EvaluRation Tool

    3. Consolidate and reduce

    Assess each VAR for low performance and opportunity to increase value or consolidate to another VAR and reduce redundancy.

    • Maximize Value From Your Value-Added Reseller – Phase 3: Consolidate and Reduce

    4. Maximize their value

    Micro-manage your primary VARs to ensure performance to commitments and maximize their value.

    • Maximize Value From Your Value-Added Reseller – Phase 4: Maximize Their Value
    • VAR Information and Scorecard Workbook
    [infographic]

    Develop Necessary Documentation for GDPR Compliance

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    • Parent Category Name: Governance, Risk & Compliance
    • Parent Category Link: /governance-risk-compliance
    • It can be an overwhelming challenge to understand what documentation is required under the GDPR.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Hiring the right data protection officer (DPO) isn’t always easy. The person you think might be best may result in a conflict of interest. Be aware of all requirements and be objective when hiring for this role.
    • Keep retention to the bare minimum. Limiting the amount of data you are responsible for limits your liability for protecting it.
    • Under the GDPR, cookies constitute personal data. They require a standalone policy, separate from the privacy policy. Ensure pop-up cookie notification banners require active consent and give users the clear opportunity to reject them.

    Impact and Result

    • Save time developing documents by leveraging ready-to-go templates for the DPO job description, retention documents, privacy notice, and cookie policy.
    • Establishing GDPR-compliance documentation will set the foundation for an overall compliant program.

    Develop Necessary Documentation for GDPR Compliance Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Hire a data protection officer

    Understand the need for a DPO and what qualities to look for in a strong candidate.

    • Develop Necessary Documentation for GDPR Compliance Storyboard
    • Data Protection Officer Job Description Template

    2. Define retention requirements

    Understand your data retention requirements under the GDPR. Develop the necessary documentation.

    • Data Retention Policy Template
    • Data Retention Schedule Tool – GDPR

    3. Develop privacy and cookie policies

    Understand your website or application’s GDPR requirements to inform users on how you process their personal data and how cookies are used. Develop the necessary documentation.

    • Privacy Notice Template – External Facing
    • Cookie Policy Template – External Facing
    [infographic]

    Accelerate Business Growth and Valuation by Building Brand Awareness

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    Brands that fail to invest in brand awareness are likely to face some, if not all these problems:

    • Lack of brand visibility and recognition
    • Inability to reach and engage with the buyers
    • Difficulties generating and converting leads
    • Low customer retention rate
    • Inability to justify higher pricing
    • Limited brand equity, business valuation, and sustainability

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Awareness brings visibility and traction to brands, which is essential in taking the market leadership position and becoming the trusted brand that buyers think of first.

    Brand awareness also significantly contributes to increasing brand equity, market valuation, and business sustainability.

    Impact and Result

    Building brand awareness allows for the increase of:

    • Brand visibility, perception, recognition, and reputation
    • Interactions and engagement with the target audience
    • Digital advertising performance and ROI
    • Conversion rates and sales wins
    • Revenue and profitability
    • Market share & share of voice (SOV)
    • Talents, partners, and investors attraction and retention
    • Brand equity, business growth, and market valuation

    Accelerate Business Growth and Valuation by Building Brand Awareness Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Accelerate Business Growth and Valuation by Building Brand Awareness Storyboard - Learn how to establish the brand foundation, create assets and workflows, and deploy effective brand awareness strategies and tactics.

    A two-step approach to building brand awareness, starting with defining the brand foundations and then implementing effective brand awareness strategies and tactics.

    • Accelerate Business Growth and Valuation by Building Brand Awareness Storyboard

    2. Define Brand's Personality and Message - Analyze your target market and develop key elements of your brand guidelines.

    With this set of tools, you will be able to capture and analyze your target market, your buyers and their journeys, define your brand's values, personality, and voice, and develop all the key elements of your brand guidelines to enable people within your organization and external resources to build a consistent and recognizable image across all assets and platforms.

    • Market Analysis Template
    • Brand Recognition Survey and Interview Questionnaire and List Template
    • External and Internal Factors Analysis Template
    • Buyer Personas and Journey Presentation Template
    • Brand Purpose, Mission, Vision, and Values Template
    • Brand Value Proposition and Positioning Statement
    • Brand Voice Guidelines Template
    • Writing Style Guide Template
    • Brand Messaging Template
    • Writer Checklist

    3. Start Building Brand Awareness - Achieve strategic alignment.

    These tools will allow you to achieve strategic alignment and readiness, create assets and workflows, deploy tactics, establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and monitor and optimize your strategy on an ongoing basis.

    • Brand Awareness Strategy and Tactics Template
    • Asset Creation and Management List
    • Campaign Workflows Template
    • Brand Awareness Strategy Rollout Plan Template
    • Survey Emails Best Practices Guidelines

    Infographic

    Further reading

    Accelerate Business Growth and Valuation By Building Brand Awareness

    Develop and deploy comprehensive, multi-touchpoint brand awareness strategies to become the trusted brand that buyers think of first.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst perspective

    Building brand awareness

    Achieving high brand awareness in a given market and becoming the benchmark for buyers

    is what every brand wants to achieve, as it is a guarantee of success. Building brand awareness,

    even though its immediate benefits are often difficult to see and measure, is essential for companies that want to stand out from their competitors and continue to grow in a sustainable way. The return on investment (ROI) may take longer, but the benefits are also greater than those achieved through short-term initiatives with the expectation of immediate, albeit often limited, results.

    Brands that are familiar to their target market have greater credibility, generate more sales,

    and have a more loyal customer base. CMOs that successfully execute brand awareness programs

    build brand equity and grow company valuation.

    This is a picture of Nathalie Vezina

    Nathalie Vezina
    Marketing Research Director
    SoftwareReviews Advisory

    Executive summary

    Brand leaders know that brand awareness is essential to the success of all marketing and sales activities. Brands that fail to invest in brand awareness are likely to face some, if not all these problems:

    • Lack of brand visibility and compelling storytelling.
    • Inability to reach the target audience.
    • Low engagement on digital platforms and with ads.
    • Difficulties generating and converting leads, or closing/winning sales/deals, and facing a high cost per acquisition.
    • Low/no interest or brand recognition, trust level, and customer retention rate.
    • Inability to justify higher pricing.

    Convincing stakeholders of the benefits of strong brand awareness can be difficult when the positive outcomes are hard to quantify, and the return on investment (ROI) is often long-term. Among the many obstacles brand leaders must overcome are:

    • Lack of longer-term corporate vision, focusing all efforts and resources on short-term growth strategies for a quick ROI.
    • Insufficient market and target buyers' information and understanding of the brand's key differentiator.
    • Misalignment of brand message, and difficulties creating compelling content that resonates with the target audience, generates interest, and keeps them engaged.
    • Limited or no resources dedicated to the development of the brand.

    Inspired by top-performing businesses and best practices, this blueprint provides the guidance and tools needed to successfully build awareness and help businesses grow. By following these guidelines, brand leaders can expect to:

    • Gain market intelligence and a clear understanding of the buyer's needs, your competitive advantage, and key differentiator.
    • Develop a clear and compelling value proposition and a human-centric brand messaging driven by the brand's values.
    • Increase online presence and brand awareness to attract and engage with buyers.
    • Develop a long-term brand strategy and execution plan.

    "A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer's decision to choose one product or service over another."

    – Seth Godin

    What is brand awareness?

    The act of making a brand visible and memorable.

    Brand awareness is the degree to which buyers are familiar with and recognize the attributes and image of a particular brand, product, or service. The higher the level of awareness, the more likely the brand is to come into play when a target audience enters the " buying consideration" phase of the buyer's journey.

    Brand awareness also plays an important role in building equity and increasing business valuation. Brands that are familiar to their target market have greater credibility, drive more sales and have a more loyal customer base.
    Building brand awareness allows increasing:

    • Brand visibility, perception, recognition, and reputation
    • Interactions and engagement with the target audience
    • Digital advertising performance and ROI
    • Conversion rates and sales wins
    • Revenue and profitability
    • Market share and share of voice (SOV)
    • Talents, partners, and investors attraction and retention
    • Brand equity, business growth, and market valuation

    "Products are made in a factory, but brands are created in the mind."
    Source: Walter Landor

    Capitalizing on a powerful brand

    A longer-term approach for an increased and more sustainable ROI.

    Market leader position

    Developing brand awareness is essential to increase the visibility and traction of a brand.

    Several factors may cause a brand to be not well-known. One reason might be that the brand recently launched, such as a startup. Another reason could be that the brand has rebranded or entered a new market.

    To become the trusted brand that buyers think of first in their target markets, it is critical for these brands to develop and deploy comprehensive, multi-touchpoint brand awareness strategies.

    A relationship leading to loyalty

    A longer-term brand awareness strategy helps build a strong relationship between the brand and the buyer, fostering a lasting and rewarding alliance.

    It also enables brands to reach and engage with their target audience effectively by using compelling storytelling and meaningful content.

    Adopting a more human-centric approach and emphasizing shared values makes the brand more attractive to buyers and can drive sales and gain loyalty.

    Sustainable business growth

    For brands that are not well established in their target market, short-term tactics that focus on immediate benefits can be ineffective. In contrast, long-term brand awareness strategies provide a more sustainable ROI (return on investment).

    Investing in building brand awareness can impact a business's ability to interact with its target audience, generate leads, and increase sales. Moreover, it can significantly contribute to boosting the business's brand equity and market valuation.

    "Quick wins may work in the short term, but they're not an ideal substitute for long-term tactics and continued success."
    Source: Forbes

    Impacts of low brand awareness on businesses

    Unfamiliar brands, despite their strong potential, won't thrive unless they invest in their notoriety.

    Brands that choose not to invest in longer-term awareness strategies and rely solely on short-term growth tactics in hopes of an immediate gain will see their ability to grow diminished and their longevity reduced due to a lack of market presence and recognition.

    Symptoms of a weakening brand include:

    • High marketing spending and limited result
    • Low market share or penetration
    • Low sales, revenue, and gross margin
    • Weak renewal rate, customer retention, and loyalty
    • Difficulties delivering on the brand promise, low/no trust in the brand
    • Limited brand equity, business valuation, and sustainability
    • Unattractive brand to partners and investors

    "Your brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business."
    Source: Steve Forbes

    Most common obstacles to increasing brand awareness

    Successfully building brand awareness requires careful preparation and planning.

    • Limited market intelligence
    • Unclear competitive advantage/key differentiator
    • Misaligned and inconsistent messaging and storytelling
    • Lack of long-term vision
    • and low prioritization
    • Limited resources to develop and execute brand awareness building tactics
    • Unattractive content that does not resonate, generates little or no interest and engagement

    Investing in the notoriety of the brand

    Become the top-of-mind brand in your target market.

    To stand out, be recognized by their target audience, and become major players in their industry, brands must adopt a winning strategy that includes the following elements:

    • In-depth knowledge and understanding of the market and audience
    • Strengthening digital presence and activities
    • Creating and publishing content relevant to the target audience
    • Reaching out through multiple touchpoints
    • Using a more human-centric approach
    • Ensure consistency in all aspects of the brand, across all media and channels

    How far are you from being the brand buyers think of first in your target market?

    This is an image of the Brand Awareness Pyramid.

    Brand awareness pyramid

    Based on David Aaker's brand loyalty pyramid

    Tactics for building brand awareness

    Focus on effective ways to gain brand recognition in the minds of buyers.

    This is an image of the Brand Awareness Journey Roadmap.

    Brand recognition requires in-depth knowledge of the target market, the creation of strong brand attributes, and increased presence and visibility.

    Understand the market and audience you're targeting

    Be prepared. Act smart.

    To implement a winning brand awareness-building strategy, you must:

    • Be aware of your competitor's strengths and weaknesses, as well as yours.
    • Find out who is behind the keyboard, and the user experience they expect to have.
    • Plan and continuously adapt your tactics accordingly.
    • Make your buyer the hero.

    Identify the brands' uniqueness

    Find your "winning zone" and how your brand uniquely addresses buyers' pain points.

    Focus on your key differentiator

    A brand has found its "winning zone" or key differentiator when its value proposition clearly shows that it uniquely solves its buyers' specific pain points.

    Align with your target audience's real expectations and successfully interact with them by understanding their persona and buyer's journey. Know:

    • How you uniquely address their pain points.
    • Their values and what motivates them.
    • Who they see as authorities in your field.
    • Their buying habits and trends.
    • How they like brands to engage with them.

    An image of a Venn diagram between the following three terms: Buyer pain point; Competitors' value proposition; your unique value proposition.  The overlapping zone is labeled the Winning zone.  This is your key differentiator.

    Give your brand a voice

    Define and present a consistent voice across all channels and assets.

    The voice reflects the personality of the brand and the emotion to be transmitted. That's why it's crucial to establish strict rules that define the language to use when communicating through the brand's voice, the type of words, and do's and don'ts.

    To be recognizable it is imperative to avoid inconsistencies. No matter how many people are behind the brand voice, the brand must show a unique, distinctive personality. As for the tone, it may vary according to circumstances, from lighter to more serious.

    Up to 80% Increased customer recognition when the brand uses a signature color scheme across multiple platforms
    Source: startup Bonsai
    23% of revenue increase is what consistent branding across channels leads to.
    Source: Harvard Business Review

    When we close our eyes and listen, we all recognize Ella Fitzgerald's rich and unique singing voice.

    We expect to recognize the writing of Stephen King when we read his books. For the brand's voice, it's the same. People want to be able to recognize it.

    Adopt a more human-centric approach

    If your brand was a person, who would it be?

    Human attributes

    Physically attractive

    • Brand identity
    • Logo and tagline
    • Product design

    Intellectually stimulating

    • Knowledge and ideas
    • Continuous innovation
    • Thought leadership

    Sociable

    • Friendly, likeable and fun
    • Confidently engage with audience through multiple touchpoints
    • Posts and shares meaningful content
    • Responsive

    Emotionally connected

    • Inspiring
    • Powerful influencer
    • Triggers emotional reactions

    Morally sound

    • Ethical and responsible
    • Value driven
    • Deliver on its promise

    Personable

    • Honest
    • Self-confident and motivated
    • Accountable

    0.05 Seconds is what it takes for someone to form an opinion about a website, and a brand.
    Source: 8ways

    90% of the time, our initial gut reaction to products is based on color alone.
    Source: startup Bonsai

    56% of the final b2b purchasing decision is based on emotional factors.
    Source: B@B International

    Put values at the heart of the brand-buyers relationship

    Highlight values that will resonate with your audience.

    Brands that focus on the values they share with their buyers, rather than simply on a product or service, succeed in making meaningful emotional connections with them and keep them actively engaged.

    Shared values such as transparency, sustainability, diversity, environmental protection, and social responsibility become the foundation of a solid relationship between a brand and its audience.

    The key is to know what motivates the target audience.

    86% of consumers claim that authenticity is one of the key factors they consider when deciding which brands they like and support.
    Source: Business Wire

    56% of the final decision is based on having a strong emotional connection with the supplier.
    Source: B2B International

    64% of today's customers are belief-driven buyers; they want to support brands that "can be a powerful force for change."
    Source: Edelman

    "If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand."
    – Howard Schultz
    Source: Lokus Design

    Double-down on digital

    Develop your digital presence and reach out to your target audiences through multiple touchpoints.

    Beyond engaging content, reaching the target audience requires brands to connect and interact with their audience in multiple ways so that potential buyers can form an opinion.

    With the right message consistently delivered across multiple channels, brands increase their reach, create a buzz around their brand and raise awareness.

    73% of today's consumers confirm they use more than one channel during a shopping journey
    Source: Harvard Business Review

    Platforms

    • Website and apps
    • Social media
    • Group discussions

    Multimedia

    • Webinars
    • Podcasts
    • Publication

    Campaign

    • Ads and advertising
    • Landing pages
    • Emails, surveys drip campaigns

    Network

    • Tradeshows, events, sponsorships
    • Conferences, speaking opportunities
    • Partners and influencers

    Use social media to connect

    Reach out to the masses with a social media presence.

    Social media platforms represent a cost-effective opportunity for businesses to connect and influence their audience and tell their story by posting relevant and search-engine-optimized content regularly on their account and groups. It's also a nice gateway to their website.

    Building a relationship with their target buyer through social media is also an easy way for businesses to:

    • Understand the buyers.
    • Receive feedback on how the buyers perceive the brand and how to improve it.
    • Show great user experience and responsiveness.
    • Build trust.
    • Create awareness.

    75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-Suite executives use social media when considering a purchase
    Source: LinkedIn Business

    92% of B2B buyers use social media to connect with leaders in the sales industry.
    Source: Techjury

    With over 4.5 billion social media users worldwide, and 13 new users signing up to their first social media account every second, social media is fast becoming a primary channel of communication and social interaction for many.
    Source: McKinsey

    Become the expert subject matter

    Raise awareness with thought leadership content.

    Thought leadership is about building credibility
    by creating and publishing meaningful, relevant content that resonates with a target audience.
    Thought leaders write and publish all kinds of relevant content such as white papers, ebooks, case studies, infographics, video and audio content, webinars, and research reports.
    They also participate in speaking opportunities, live presentations, and other high-visibility forums.
    Well-executed thought leadership strategies contribute to:

    • Raise awareness.
    • Build credibility.
    • Be recognized as a subject expert matter.
    • Become an industry leader.

    60% of buyers say thought leadership builds credibility when entering a new category where the brand is not already known.
    Source: Edelman | LinkedIn

    70% of people would rather learn about a company through articles rather than advertising.
    Source: Brew Interactive

    57% of buyers say that thought leadership builds awareness for a new or little-known brand.
    Source: Edelman | LinkedIn

    To achieve best results

    • Know the buyers' persona and journey.
    • Create original content that matches the persona of the target audience and that is close to their values.
    • Be Truthful and insightful.
    • Find the right tone and balance between being human-centric, authoritative, and bold.
    • Be mindful of people's attention span and value their time.
    • Create content for each phase of the buyer's journey.
    • Ensure content is SEO, keyword-loaded, and add calls-to-action (CTAs).
    • Add reason to believe, data to support, and proof points.
    • Address the buyers' pain points in a unique way.

    Avoid

    • Focusing on product features and on selling.
    • Publishing generic content.
    • Using an overly corporate tone.

    Promote personal branding

    Rely on your most powerful brand ambassadors and influencers: your employees.

    The strength of personal branding is amplified when individuals and companies collaborate to pursue personal branding initiatives that offer mutual benefits. By training and positioning key employees as brand ambassadors and industry influencers, brands can boost their brand awareness through influencer marketing strategies.

    Personal branding, when well aligned with business goals, helps brands leverage their key employee's brands to:

    • Increase the organization's brand awareness.
    • Broaden their reach and circle of influence.
    • Show value, gain credibility, and build trust.
    • Stand out from the competition.
    • Build employee loyalty and pride.
    • Become a reference to other businesses.
    • Increase speaking opportunities.
    • Boost qualified leads and sales.

    About 90% of organizations' employee network tends to be completely new to the brand.
    Source: Everyone Social

    8X more engagement comes from social media content shared by employees rather than brand accounts.
    Source: Entrepreneur

    561% more reach when brand messages are shared by employees on social media, than the same message shared by the Brand's social media.
    Source: Entrepreneur

    "Personal branding is the art of becoming knowable, likable and trustable."
    Source: Founder Jar, John Jantsch

    Invest in B2B influencer marketing

    Broaden your reach and audiences by leveraging the voice of influencers.

    Influencers are trusted industry experts and analysts who buyers can count on to provide reliable information when looking to make a purchase.

    Influencer marketing can be very effective to reach new audiences, increase awareness, and build trust. But finding the right influencers with the level of credibility and visibility brands are expecting can sometimes be challenging.

    Search for influencers that have:

    • Relevance of audience and size.
    • Industry expertise and credibility.
    • Ability to create meaningful content (written, video, audio).
    • Charismatic personality with values consistent with the brand.
    • Frequent publications on at least one leading media platform.

    76% of people say that they trust content shared by people over a brand.
    Source: Adweek


    44% increased media mention of the brand using B2B influencer marketers.
    Source: TopRank Marketing

    Turn your customers into brand advocates

    Establish customer advocacy programs and deliver a great customer experience.

    Retain your customers and turn them into brand advocates by building trust, providing an exceptional experience, and most importantly, continuously delivering on the brand promise.

    Implement a strong customer advocacy program, based on personalized experiences, the value provided, and mutual exchange, and reap the benefits of developing and growing long-term relationships.

    92% of individuals trust word-of-mouth recommendations, making it one of the most trust-rich forms of advertising.
    Source: SocialToaster

    Word-of-mouth (advocacy) marketing increases marketing effectiveness by 54%
    Source: SocialToaster

    Make your brand known and make it stick in people's minds

    Building and maintaining high brand awareness requires that each individual within the organization carry and deliver the brand message clearly and consistently across all media whether in person, in written communications, or otherwise.

    To achieve this, brand leaders must first develop a powerful, researched narrative that people will embrace and convey, which requires careful preparation.

    Target market and audience intel

    • Target market Intel
    • Buyer persona and journey/pain points
    • Uniqueness and positioning

    Brand attributes

    • Values at the heart of the relationship
    • Brand's human attributes

    Brand visibly and recall

    • Digital and social media presence
    • Thought leadership
    • Personal branding
    • Influencer marketing

    Brand awareness building plan

    • Long-term awareness and multi-touchpoint approach
    • Monitoring and optimization

    Short and long-term benefits of increasing brand awareness

    Brands are built over the long term but the rewards are high.

    • Stronger brand perception
    • Improved engagement and brand associations
    • Enhanced credibility, reputation, and trust
    • Better connection with customers
    • Increased repeat business
    • High-quality leads
    • Higher and faster conversion rate
    • More sales closed/ deals won
    • Greater brand equity
    • Accelerated growth

    "Strong brands outperform their less recognizable competitors by as much as 73%."
    Source: McKinsey

    Brand awareness building

    Building brand awareness, even though immediate benefits are often difficult to see and measure, is essential for companies to stand out from their competitors and continue to grow in a sustainable way.

    To successfully raise awareness, brands need to have:

    • A longer-term vision and strategy.
    • Market Intelligence, a clear value proposition, and key differentiator.
    • Consistent, well-aligned messaging and storytelling.
    • Digital presence and content.
    • The ability to reach out through multiple touchpoints.
    • Necessary resources.

    Without brand awareness, brands become less attractive to buyers, talent, and investors, and their ability to grow, increase their market value, and be sustainable is reduced.

    Brand awareness building methodology

    Define brands' personality and message

    • Gather market intel and analyze the market.
    • Determine the value proposition and positioning.
    • Define the brand archetype and voice.
    • Craft a compelling brand message and story.
    • Get all the key elements of your brand guidelines.

    Start building brand awareness

    • Achieve strategy alignment and readiness.
    • Create and manage assets.
    • Deploy your tactics, assets, and workflows.
    • Establish key performance indicators (KPIs).
    • Monitor and optimize on an ongoing basis.

    Toolkit

    • Market and Influencing Factors Analysis
    • Recognition Survey and Best Practices
    • Buyer Personas and Journeys
    • Purpose, Mission, Vision, Values
    • Value Proposition and Positioning
    • Brand Message, Voice, and Writing Style
    • Brand Strategy and Tactics
    • Asset Creation and Management
    • Strategy Rollout Plan

    Short and long-term benefits of increasing brand awareness

    Increase:

    • Brand perception
    • Brand associations and engagement
    • Credibility, reputation, and trust
    • Connection with customers
    • Repeat business
    • Quality leads
    • Conversion rate
    • Sales closed / deals won
    • Brand equity and growth

    It typically takes 5-7 brand interactions before a buyer remembers the brand.
    Source: Startup Bonsai

    Who benefits from this brand awareness research?

    This research is being designed for:
    Brand and marketing leaders who:

    • Know that brand awareness is essential to the success of all marketing and sales activities.
    • Want to make their brand unique, recognizable, meaningful, and highly visible.
    • Seek to increase their digital presence, connect and engage with their target audience.
    • Are looking at reaching a new segment of the market.

    This research will also assist:

    • Sales with qualified lead generation and customer retention and loyalty.
    • Human Resources in their efforts to attract and retain talent.
    • The overall business with growth and increased market value.

    This research will help you:

    • Gain market intelligence and a clear understanding of the target audience's needs and trends, competitive advantage, and key differentiator.
    • The ability to develop clear and compelling, human-centric messaging and compelling story driven by brand values.
    • Increase online presence and brand awareness activities to attract and engage with buyers.
    • Develop a long-term brand awareness strategy and deployment plan.

    This research will help them:

    • Increase campaign ROI.
    • Develop a longer-term vision and benefits of investing in longer-term initiatives.
    • Build brand equity and increase business valuation.
    • Grow your business in a more sustainable way.

    SoftwareReviews' brand awareness building methodology

    Phase 1 Define brands' personality and message

    Phase 2 Start building brand awareness

    Phase steps

    1.1 Gather market intelligence and analyze the market.

    1.2 Develop and document the buyer's persona and journey.

    1.3 Uncover the brand mission, vision statement, core values, value proposition and positioning.

    1.4 Define the brand's archetype and tone of voice, then craft a compelling brand messaging.

    2.1 Achieve strategy alignment and readiness.

    2.2 Create assets and workflows and deploy tactics.

    2.3 Establish key performance indicators (KPIs), monitor, and optimize on an ongoing basis.

    Phase outcomes

    • Target market and audience are identified and documented.
    • A clear value proposition and positioning are determined.
    • The brand personality, voice, and messaging are developed.
    • All the key elements of the brand guidelines are in place and ready to use, along with the existing logo, typography, color palette, and imagery.
    • A comprehensive and actionable brand awareness strategy, with tactics, KPIs, and metrics, is set and ready to execute.
    • A progressive and effective deployment plan with deliverables, timelines, workflows, and checklists is in place.
    • Resources are assigned.

    Insight summary

    Brands to adapt their strategies to achieve longer-term growth
    Brands must adapt and adjust their strategies to attract informed buyers who have access to a wealth of products, services, and brands from all over. Building brand awareness, even though immediate benefits are often difficult to see and measure, has become essential for companies that want to stand out from their competitors and continue to grow in a sustainable way.

    A more human-centric approach
    Brand personalities matter. Brands placing human values at the heart of the customer-brand relationship will drive interest in their brand and build trust with their target audience.

    Stand out from the crowd
    Brands that develop and promote a clear and consistent message across all platforms and channels, along with a unique value proposition, stand out from their competitors and get noticed.

    A multi-touchpoints strategy
    Engage buyers with relevant content across multiple media to address their pain points. Analyze touchpoints to determine where to invest your efforts.

    Going social
    Buyers expect brands to be active and responsive in their interactions with their audience. To build awareness, brands are expected to develop a strong presence on social media by regularly posting relevant content, engaging with their followers and influencers, and using paid advertising. They also need to establish thought leadership through content such as white papers, case studies, and webinars.

    Thought leaders wanted
    To enhance their overall brand awareness strategy, organizations should consider developing the personal brand of key executives. Thought leadership can be a valuable method to gain credibility, build trust, and drive conversion. By establishing thought leadership, businesses can increase brand mentions, social engagement, website traffic, lead generation, return on investment (ROI), and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

    Save time and money with SoftwareReviews' branding advice

    Collaborating with SoftwareReviews analysts for inquiries not only provides valuable advice but also leads to substantial cost savings during branding activities, particularly when partnering with an agency.

    Guided Implementation Purpose Measured Value
    Build brands' personality and message Get the key elements of the brand guidelines in place and ready to use, along with your existing logo, typography, color palette, and imagery, to ensure consistency and clarity across all brand touchpoints from internal communication to customer-facing materials. Working with SoftwareReviews analysts to develop brand guidelines saves costs compared to hiring an agency.

    Example: Building the guidelines with an agency will take more or less the same amount of time and cost approximately $80K.

    Start building brand awareness Achieve strategy alignment and readiness, then deploy tactics, assets, and other deliverables. Start building brand awareness and reap the immediate and long-term benefits.

    Working with SoftwareReviews analysts and your team to develop a long-term brand strategy and deployment will cost you less than a fraction of the cost of using an agency.

    Example: Developing and executing long-term brand awareness strategies with an agency will cost between $50-$75K/month over a 24-month period minimum.

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Phase 1

    Build brands' personality and message

    Phase 2

    Start building brand awareness

    • Call #1: Discuss concept and benefits of building brand awareness. Identify key stakeholders. Anticipate concerns and objections.
    • Call #2: Discuss target market intelligence, information gathering, and analysis.
    • Call #3: Review market intelligence information. Address questions or concerns.
    • Call #4: Discuss value proposition and guide to find positioning and key differentiator.
    • Call #5: Review value proposition. Address questions or concerns.
    • Call #6: Discuss how to build a comprehensive brand awareness strategy using SR guidelines and template.
    • Call #7: Review strategy. Address questions or concerns.
    • Call #8: Second review of the strategy. Address questions or concerns.
    • Call #9 (optional): Third review of the strategy. Address questions or concerns.
    • Call #10: Discuss how to build the Execution Plan using SR template.
    • Call #11: Review Execution Plan. Address questions or concerns.
    • Call #12: Second review of the Execution Plan. Address questions or concerns.
    • Call #13 (optional): Third review of the Execution Plan. Address questions or concerns.
    • Call #14: Discuss how to build a compelling storytelling and content creation.
    • Call #15: Discuss website and social media platforms and other initiatives.
    • Call #16: Discuss marketing automation and continuous monitoring.
    • Call #17 (optional): Discuss optimization and reporting
    • Call #18: Debrief and determine how we can help with next steps.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with a SoftwareReviews Marketing Analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    Your engagement managers will work with you to schedule analyst calls.

    Brand awareness building tools

    Each step of this blueprint comes with tools to help you build brand awareness.

    Brand Awareness Tool Kit

    This kit includes a comprehensive set of tools to help you better understand your target market and buyers, define your brand's personality and message, and develop an actionable brand awareness strategy, workflows, and rollout plan.

    The set includes these templates:
    • Market and Influencing Factors Analysis
    • Recognition Survey and Best Practices
    • Buyer Personas and Journeys
    • Purpose, Mission, Vision, and Values
    • Value Proposition and Positioning
    • Brand Message, Voice, and Writing Style
    • Brand Strategy and Tactics
    • Asset Creation and Management
    • Strategy Rollout Plan
    An image of a series of screenshots from the templates listed in the column to the left of this image.

    Get started!

    Know your target market and audience, deploy well-designed strategies based on shared values, and make meaningful connections with people.

    Phase 1

    Define brands' personality and message

    Phase 2

    Start building brand awareness

    Phase 1

    Define brands' personality and message

    Steps

    1.1 Gather market intelligence and analyze the market.
    1.2 Develop and document the buyer's persona and journey.
    1.3 Uncover the brand mission, vision statement, core values, positioning, and value proposition.
    1.4 Define the brand's archetype and tone of voice, then craft a compelling brand messaging.

    Phase outcome

    • Target market and audience are identified and documented.
    • A clear value proposition and positioning are determined.
    • The brand personality, voice, and messaging are developed.
    • All the key elements of the brand guidelines are in place. and ready to use, along with the existing logo, typography, color palette, and imagery..

    Build brands' personality and message

    Step 1.1 Gather market intelligence and analyze the market.

    Total duration: 2.5-8 hours

    Objective

    Analyze and document your competitive landscape, assess your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities,
    and threats, gauge the buyers' familiarity with your brand, and identify the forces of influence.

    Output

    This exercise will allow you to understand your market and is essential to developing your value proposition.

    Participants

    • Head of branding and key stakeholders

    MarTech
    May require you to:

    • Register to a Survey Platform.
    • Use, setup, or install platforms like CRM and/or Marketing Automation Platform.

    Tools

    1.1.1 SWOT and competitive landscape

    (60-120 min.)

    Analyze & Document

    Follow the instructions in the Market Analysis Template to complete the SWOT and Competitive Analysis, slides 4 to 7.

    1.1.3 Internal and External Factors

    (30-60 min.)

    Analyze

    Follow the instructions in the External and Internal Factors Analysis Template to perform the PESTLE, Porter's 5 Forces, and Internal Factors and VRIO Analysis.

    Transfer

    Transfer key information into slides 10 and 11 of the Market Analysis Template.

    Consult SoftwareReviews website to find the best survey and MarTech platforms or contact one of our analysts for more personalized assistance and guidance

    1.1.2 Brand recognition

    (60-300 min.)

    Prep

    Adapt the survey and interview questions in the Brand Recognition Survey Questionnaire and List Template.

    Determine how you will proceed to conduct the survey and interviews (internal or external resources, and tools).

    Refer to the Survey Emails Best Practices Guidelines for more information on how to conduct email surveys.

    Collect & Analyze

    Use the Brand Recognition Survey Questionnaire and List Template to build your list, conduct the survey /interviews, and collect and analyze the feedback received.

    Transfer

    Transfer key information into slides 8 and 9 of the Market Analysis Template.

    Brand performance diagnostic

    Have you considered diagnosing your brand's current performance before you begin building brand awareness?

    Audit your brand using the Diagnose Brand Health to Improve Business Growth blueprint.Collect and interpret qualitative and quantitative brand performance measures.

    The toolkit includes the following templates:

    • Surveys and interviews questions and lists
    • External and internal factor analysis
    • Digital and financial metrics analysis

    Also included is an executive presentation template to communicate the results to key stakeholders and recommendations to fix the uncovered issues.

    Build brands' personality and message

    Step 1.2 Develop and document the buyer's persona and journey.

    Total duration: 4-8 hours

    Objective

    Gather existing and desired customer insights and conduct market research to define and personify your buyers' personas and their buying behaviors.

    Output

    Provide people in your organization with clear direction on who your target buyers are and guidance on how to effectively reach and engage with them throughout their journey.
    Participants

    • Head of branding
    • Key stakeholders from sales and product marketing

    MarTech
    May require you to:

    • Register to an Online Survey Platform (free version or subscription).
    • Use, setup, or installation of platforms like CRM and/or Marketing Automation Platform.

    Tools

    1.2.1 Buyer Personas and Journeys

    (240-280 min.)

    Research

    Identify your tier 1 to 3 customers using the Ideal Client Profile (ICP) Workbook. (Recommended)

    Survey and interview existing and desired customers based using the Buyer Persona and Journey Interview Guide and Data Capture Tool. (Recommended)

    Create

    Define and document your tier 1 to 3 Buyer Personas and Journeys using the Buyer Personas and Journeys Presentation Template.

    Consult SoftwareReviews website to find the best survey platform for your needs or contact one of our analysts for more personalized assistance and guidance

    Buyer Personas and Journeys

    A well-defined buyer persona and journey is a great way for brands to ensure they are effectively reaching and engaging their ideal buyers through a personalized buying experience.

    When properly documented, it provides valuable insights about the ideal customers, their needs, challenges, and buying decision processes allowing the development of initiatives that correspond to the target buyers.

    Build brands' personality and message

    Step 1.3 Uncover the brand mission, vision statement, core values, value proposition, and positioning.

    Total duration: 4-5.5 hours

    Objective
    Define the "raison d'être" and fundamental principles of your brand, your positioning in the marketplace, and your unique competitive advantage.

    Output
    Allows everyone in an organization to understand and align with the brand's raison d'être beyond the financial dimension, its current positioning and objectives, and how it intends to achieve them.
    It also serves to communicate a clear and appealing value proposition to buyers.

    Participants

    • Head of branding
    • Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
    • Key stakeholders

    Tools

    • Brand Purpose, Mission, Vision, and Values Template
    • Value Proposition and Positioning Statement Template

    1.3.1 Brand Purpose, Mission, Vision, and Values

    (90-120 min.)

    Capture or Develop

    Capture or develop, if not already existing, your brand's purpose, mission, vision statement, and core values using slides 4 to 7 of the Brand Purpose, Mission, Vision, and Values Template.

    1.3.2 Brand Value Proposition and Positioning

    (150-210 min.)

    Define

    Map the brand value proposition using the canvas on slide 5 of the Value Proposition and Positioning Statement Template, and clearly articulate your value proposition statement on slide 4.

    Optional: Use canvas on slide 7 to develop product-specific product value propositions.

    On slide 8 of the same template, develop your brand positioning statement.

    Build brands' personality and message

    Steps 1.4 Define the brand's archetype and tone of voice, and craft a compelling brand messaging.

    Total duration: 5-8 hours

    Objective

    Define your unique brand voice and develop a set of guidelines, brand story, and messaging to ensure consistency across your digital and non-digital marketing and communication assets.
    Output

    A documented brand personality and voice, as well as brand story and message, will allow anyone producing content or communicating on behalf of your brand to do it using a unique and recognizable voice, and convey the right message.

    Participants

    • Head of branding
    • Content specialist
    • Chief Executive Officer and other key stakeholders

    Tools

    • Brand Voice Guidelines Template
    • Writing Style Guide Template
    • Brand Messaging Template
    • Writer Checklist Template

    1.4.1 Brand Archetype and Tone of Voice

    (120-240 min.)

    Define and document

    Refer to slides 5 and 6 of the Brand Voice Guidelines Template to define your brand personality (archetype), slide 7.

    Use the Brand Voice Guidelines Template to define your brand tone of voice and characteristics on slides 8 and 9, based on the 4 primary tone of voice dimensions, and develop your brand voice chart, slide 9.

    Set Rules

    In the Writing Style Guide template, outline your brand's writing principles, style, grammar, punctuation, and number rules.

    1.4.2 Brand Messaging

    (180-240 min.)

    Craft

    Use the Brand Messaging template, slides 4 to 7, to craft your brand story and message.

    Audit

    Create a content audit to review and approve content to be created prior to publication, using the Writer's Checklist template.

    Important Tip!

    A consistent brand voice leads to remembering and trusting the brand. It should stand out from the competitors' voices and be meaningful to the target audience. Once the brand voice is set, avoid changing it.

    Phase 2

    Start building brand awareness

    Steps

    2.1 Achieve strategy alignment and readiness.
    2.2 Create assets and workflows, and deploy tactics.
    2.3 Establish key performance indicators (KPIs), monitor, and optimize on an ongoing basis.

    Phase outcome

    • A comprehensive and actionable brand awareness strategy, with tactics, KPIs, and metrics, is set and ready to execute.
    • A progressive and effective deployment plan with deliverables, timelines, workflows, and checklists is in place.
    • Resources are assigned.

    Start building brand awareness

    Step 2.1 Achieve strategy readiness and alignment.

    Total duration: 4-5 hours

    Objective

    Now that you have all the key elements of your brand guidelines in place, in addition to your existing logo, typography, color palette, and imagery, you can begin to build brand awareness.

    Start planning to build brand awareness by developing a comprehensive and actionable brand awareness strategy with tactics that align with the company's purpose and objectives. The strategy should include achievable goals and measurables, budget and staffing considerations, and a good workload assessment.

    Output

    A comprehensive long-term, actionable brand awareness strategy with KPIs and measurables.

    Participants

    • Head of branding
    • Key stakeholders

    Tools

    • Brand Awareness Strategy and Tactics Template

    2.1.1 Brand Awareness Analysis

    (60-120 min.)

    Identify

    In slide 5 of the Brand Awareness Strategy and Tactics Template, identify your top three brand awareness drivers, opportunities, inhibitors, and risks to help you establish your strategic objectives in building brand awareness.

    2.1.2 Brand Awareness Strategy

    (60-120 min.)

    Elaborate

    Use slides 6 to 10 of the Brand Awareness Strategy and Tactics Template to elaborate on your strategy goals, key issues, and tactics to begin or continue building brand awareness.

    2.1.3 Brand Awareness KPIs and Metrics

    (180-240 min.)

    Set

    Set the strategy performance metrics and KPIs on slide 11 of the Brand Awareness Strategy and Tactics Template.

    Monitor

    Once you start executing the strategy, monitor and report each quarter using slides 13 to 15 of the same document.

    Understanding the difference between strategies and tactics

    Strategies and tactics can easily be confused, but although they may seem similar at times, they are in fact quite different.

    Strategies and tactics are complementary.

    A strategy is a plan to achieve specific goals, while a tactic is a concrete action or set of actions used to implement that strategy.

    To be effective, brand awareness strategies should be well thought-out, carefully planned, and supported by a series of tactics to achieve the expected outcomes.

    Start building brand awareness

    Step 2.2 Create assets and workflows and deploy tactics.

    Total duration: 3.5-4.5 hours

    Objective

    Build a long-term rollout with deliverables, milestones, timelines, workflows, and checklists. Assign resources and proceed to the ongoing development of assets. Implement, manage, and continuously communicate the strategy and results to key stakeholders.

    Output

    Progressive and effective development and deployment of the brand awareness-building strategy and tactics.

    Participants

    • Head of branding

    Tools

    • Asset Creation and Management List
    • Campaign Workflows Template
    • Brand Awareness Strategy Rollout Plan Template

    2.2.1 Assets Creation List

    (60-120 min.)

    Inventory

    Inventory existing assets to create the Asset Creation and Management List.

    Assign

    Assign the persons responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed of the development of each asset, using the RACI model in the template. Ensure you identify and collaborate with the right stakeholders.

    Prioritize

    Prioritize and add release dates.

    Communicate

    Update status and communicate regularly. Make the list with links to the assets available to the extended team to consult as needed.

    2.2.2 Rollout Plan

    (60-120 min.)

    Inventory

    Map out your strategy deployment in the Brand Awareness Strategy Rollout Plan Template and workflow in the Campaign Workflow Template.

    Assign

    Assign the persons responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed for each tactic, using the RACI model in the template. Ensure you identify and collaborate with the right stakeholders.

    Prioritize

    Prioritize and adjust the timeline accordingly.

    Communicate

    Update status and communicate regularly. Make the list with links to the assets available to the extended team to consult as needed.

    Band Awareness Strategy Rollout Plan
    A strategy rollout plan typically includes the following:

    • Identifying a cross-functional team and resources to develop the assets and deploy the tactics.
    • Listing the various assets to create and manage.
    • A timeline with key milestones, deadlines, and release dates.
    • A communication plan to keep stakeholders informed and aligned with the strategy and tactics.
    • Ongoing performance monitoring.
    • Constant adjustments and improvements to the strategy based on data collected and feedback received.

    Start building brand awareness

    Step 2.3 Establish key performance indicators (KPIs), monitor, and optimize on an ongoing basis.

    Total duration: 3.5-4.5 hours

    Objective

    Brand awareness is built over a long period of time and must be continuously monitored in several ways. Measuring and monitoring the effectiveness of your brand awareness activities will allow you to constantly adjust your tactics and continue to build awareness.

    Output

    This step will provide you with a snapshot of your current level of brand awareness and interactions with the brand, and allow you to set up the tools for ongoing monitoring and optimization.

    Participants

    • Head of branding
    • Digital marketing manager

    MarTech
    May require you to:

    • Register to an Online Survey Platform(free version or subscription), or
    • Use, setup, or installation of platforms like CRM and/or Marketing Automation Platform.
    • Use Google Analytics or other tracking tools.
    • Use social media and campaign management tools.

    Tools

    • Brand Awareness Strategy and Tactics Template

    2.2.2 Rollout Plan

    (60-120 min.)

    Measure

    Monitor and record the strategy performance metrics in slides 12 to 15 of the Brand Awareness Strategy and Tactics template, and gauge its performance against preset KPIs in slide 11. Make ongoing improvements to the strategy and assets.

    Communicate

    The same slides in which you monitor strategy performance can be used to report on the results of the current strategy to key stakeholders on a monthly or quarterly basis, as appropriate.

    Take this opportunity to inform stakeholders of any adjustments you plan to make to the existing plan to improve its performance. Since brand awareness is built over time, be sure to evaluate the results based on how long the strategy has been in place before making major changes.

    Consult SoftwareReviews website to find the best survey, brand monitoring and feedback, and MarTech platforms, or contact one of our analysts for more personalized assistance and guidance

    Measuring brand strategy performance
    There are two ways to measure and monitor your brand's performance on an ongoing basis.

    • By registering to brand monitoring and feedback platforms and tools like Meltwater, Hootsuite, Insights, Brand24, Qualtrics, and Wooltric.
    • Manually, using native analytics built in the platforms you're already using, such as Google and Social Media Analytics, or by gathering customer feedback through surveys, or calculating CAC, ROI, and more in spreadsheets.

    SoftwareReviews can help you choose the right platform for your need. We also equip you with manual tools, available with the Diagnose Brand Health to Improve Business Growthblueprint to measure:

    • Surveys and interviews questions and lists.
    • External and internal factor analysis.
    • Digital and financial metrics analysis.
    • Executive presentation to report on performance.

    Related SoftwareReviews research

    An image of the title page for SoftwareReviews Create a Buyer Persona and Journey. An image of the title page for SoftwareReviews Diagnose Brand Health to Improve Business Growth.

    Create a Buyer Persona and Journey

    Get deeper buyer understanding and achieve product-market fit, with easier access to market and sales

    • Reduce time and resources wasted chasing the wrong prospects.
    • Increase open and click-through rates.
    • Perform more effective sales discovery.
    • Increase win rate.

    Diagnose Brand Health to Improve Business Growth

    Have a significant and well-targeted impact on business success and growth by knowing how your brand performs, identifying areas of improvement, and making data-driven decisions to fix them.

    • Increase brand awareness and equity.
    • Build trust and improve customer retention and loyalty.
    • Achieve higher and faster growth.

    Bibliography

    Aaker, David. "Managing Brand Equity." Simon & Schuster, 1991.
    "6 Factors for Brands to Consider While Designing Their Communication." Lokus Design, 23 Sept. 2022.
    "20 Advocacy Marketing Statistics You Need to Know." Social Toaster, n.d.
    Bazilian, Emma. "How Millennials and Baby Boomers Consume User-Generated Content And what brands can learn from their preferences." Adweek, January 2, 2017.
    B2B International, a Gyro: company, B2B Blog - Why Human-To-Human Marketing Is the Next Big Trend in a Tech-Obsessed World.
    B2B International, a Gyro: company, The State of B2B Survey 2019 - Winning with Emotions: How to Become Your Customer's First Choice.
    Belyh, Anastasia. "Brand Ambassador 101:Turn Your Personal Brand into Cash." Founder Jar, December 6, 2022.
    Brand Master Academy.com.
    Businesswire, a Berkshire Hathaway Company, "Stackla Survey Reveals Disconnect Between the Content Consumers Want & What Marketers Deliver." February 20, 2019.
    Chamat, Ramzi. "Visual Design: Why First Impressions Matter." 8 Ways, June 5, 2019.
    Cognism. "21 Tips for Building a LinkedIn Personal Brand (in B2B SaaS)."
    Curleigh, James. "How to Enhance and Expand a Global Brand." TED.
    "2019 Edelman Trust Barometer." Edelman.
    Erskine, Ryan. "22 Statistics That Prove the Value of Personal Branding." Entrepreneur, September 13, 2016.
    Forbes, Steve. "Branding for Franchise Success: How To Achieve And Maintain Brand Consistency Across A Franchise Network?" Forbes, 9 Feb. 2020.
    Godin, Seth. "Define: Brand." Seth's Blog, 30 Dec. 2009,
    Houragan, Stephen. "Learn Brand Strategy in 7 Minutes (2023 Crash Course)." YouTube.
    Jallad, Revecka. "To Convert More Customers, Focus on Brand Awareness." Forbes, October 22, 2019.
    Kingsbury, Joe, et al. "2021 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study." Edelman, 2021.
    Kunsman, Todd. "The Anatomy of an Employee Influencer." EveryoneSocial, September 8, 2022.
    Landor, Walter. A Brand New World: The Fortune Guide to the 21st Century. Time Warner Books, 1999.
    Liedke, Lindsay. "37+ Branding Statistics For 2023: Stats, Facts & Trends." Startup Bonsai, January 2, 2023.
    Millman, Debbie. "How Symbols and Brands Shape our Humanity." TED, 2019.
    Nenova, Velina. "21 Eye-Opening B2B Marketing Statistics to Know in 2023." Techjury, February 9, 2023.
    Perrey, Jesko et al., "The brand is back: Staying relevant in an accelerating age." McKinsey & Company, May 1, 2015.
    Schaub, Kathleen. "Social Buying Meets Social Selling: How Trusted Networks Improve the Purchase Experience." LinkedIn Business, April 2014.
    Sopadjieva, Emma et al. "A Study of 46,000 Shoppers Shows That Omnichannel Retailing Works." Harvard Business Review, January 3, 2017.
    Shaun. "B2B Brand Awareness: The Complete Guide 2023." B2B House. 2023.
    TopRank Marketing, "2020 State of B2B Influencer Marketing Research Report." Influencer Marketing Report.

    Mitigate Machine Bias

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    • Parent Category Name: Business Intelligence Strategy
    • Parent Category Link: /business-intelligence-strategy
    • AI is the new electricity. It is fundamentally and radically changing the fabric of our world, from the way we conduct business, to how we work and live, make decisions, and engage with each other, to how we organize our society, and ultimately, to who we are. Organizations are starting to adopt AI to increase efficiency, better engage customers, and make faster, more accurate decisions.
    • Like with any new technology, there is a flip side, a dark side, to AI – machine biases. If unchecked, machine biases replicate, amplify, and systematize societal biases. Biased AI systems may treat some of your customers (or employees) differently, based on their race, gender, identity, age, etc. This is discrimination, and it is against the law. It is also bad for business, including missed opportunities, lost consumer confidence, reputational risk, regulatory sanctions, and lawsuits.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Machine biases are not intentional. They reflect the cognitive biases, preconceptions, and judgement of the creators of AI systems and the societal structures encoded in the data sets used for machine learning.
    • Machine biases cannot be prevented or fully eliminated. Early identification and diversity in and by design are key. Like with privacy and security breaches, early identification and intervention – ideally at the ideation phase – is the best strategy. Forewarned is forearmed. Prevention starts with a culture of diversity, inclusivity, openness, and collaboration.
    • Machine bias is enterprise risk. Machine bias is not a technical issue. It is a social, political, and business problem. Integrate it into your enterprise risk management (ERM).

    Impact and Result

    • Just because machine biases are induced by human behavior, which is also captured in data silos, they are not inevitable. By asking the right questions upfront during application design, you can prevent many of them.
    • Biases can be introduced into an AI system at any stage of the development process, from the data you collect, to the way you collect it, to which algorithms are used, to which assumptions are made, etc. Ask your data science team a lot of questions; leave no stone unturned.
    • Don’t wait until “Datasheets for Datasets” and “Model Cards for Model Reporting” (or similar frameworks) become standards. Start creating these documents now to identify and analyze biases in your apps. If using open-source data sets or libraries, you may need to create them yourself for now. If working with partners or using AI/ ML services, demand that they provide such information as part of the engagement. You, not your partners, are ultimately responsible for the AI-powered product or service you deliver to your customers or employees.
    • Build a culture of diversity, transparency, inclusivity, and collaboration – the best mechanism to prevent and address machine biases.
    • Treat machine bias as enterprise risk. Use your ERM to guide all decisions around machine biases and their mitigation.

    Mitigate Machine Bias Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to understand the dark side of AI: algorithmic (machine) biases, how they emerge, why they are dangerous, and how to mitigate them. Review Info-Tech’s methodology and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Understand AI biases

    Learn about machine biases, how and where they arise in AI systems, and how they relate to human cognitive and societal biases.

    • Mitigate Machine Bias – Phase 1: Understand AI Biases

    2. Identify data biases

    Learn about data biases and how to mitigate them.

    • Mitigate Machine Bias – Phase 2: Identify Data Biases
    • Datasheets for Data Sets Template
    • Datasheets for Datasets

    3. Identify model biases

    Learn about model biases and how to mitigate them.

    • Mitigate Machine Bias – Phase 3: Identify Model Biases
    • Model Cards for Model Reporting Template
    • Model Cards For Model Reporting

    4. Mitigate machine biases and risk

    Learn about approaches for proactive and effective bias prevention and mitigation.

    • Mitigate Machine Bias – Phase 4: Mitigate Machine Biases and Risk
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Mitigate Machine Bias

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Prepare

    The Purpose

    Understand your organization’s maturity with respect to data and analytics in order to maximize workshop value.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Workshop content aligned to your organization’s level of maturity and business objectives.

    Activities

    1.1 Execute Data Culture Diagnostic.

    1.2 Review current analytics strategy.

    1.3 Review organization's business and IT strategy.

    1.4 Review other supporting documentation.

    1.5 Confirm participant list for workshop.

    Outputs

    Data Culture Diagnostic report.

    2 Understand Machine Biases

    The Purpose

    Develop a good understanding of machine biases and how they emerge from human cognitive and societal biases. Learn about the machine learning process and how it relates to machine bias.

    Select an ML/AI project and complete a bias risk assessment.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A solid understanding of algorithmic biases and the need to mitigate them.

    Increased insight into how new technologies such as ML and AI impact organizational risk.

    Customized bias risk assessment template.

    Completed bias risk assessment for selected project.

    Activities

    2.1 Review primer on AI and machine learning (ML).

    2.2 Review primer on human and machine biases.

    2.3 Understand business context and objective for AI in your organization.

    2.4 Discuss selected AI/ML/data science project or use case.

    2.5 Review and modify bias risk assessment.

    2.6 Complete bias risk assessment for selected project.

    Outputs

    Bias risk assessment template customized for your organization.

    Completed bias risk assessment for selected project.

    3 Identify Data Biases

    The Purpose

    Learn about data biases: what they are and where they originate.

    Learn how to address or mitigate data biases.

    Identify data biases in selected project.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A solid understanding of data biases and how to mitigate them.

    Customized Datasheets for Data Sets Template.

    Completed datasheet for data sets for selected project.

    Activities

    3.1 Review machine learning process.

    3.2 Review examples of data biases and why and how they happen.

    3.3 Identify possible data biases in selected project.

    3.4 Discuss “Datasheets for Datasets” framework.

    3.5 Modify Datasheets for Data Sets Template for your organization.

    3.6 Complete datasheet for data sets for selected project.

    Outputs

    Datasheets for Data Sets Template customized for your organization.

    Completed datasheet for data sets for selected project.

    4 Identify Model Biases

    The Purpose

    Learn about model biases: what they are and where they originate.

    Learn how to address or mitigate model biases.

    Identify model biases in selected project.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A solid understanding of model biases and how to mitigate them.

    Customized Model Cards for Model Reporting Template.

    Completed model card for selected project.

    Activities

    4.1 Review machine learning process.

    4.2 Review examples of model biases and why and how they happen.

    4.3 Identify potential model biases in selected project.

    4.4 Discuss Model Cards For Model Reporting framework.

    4.5 Modify Model Cards for Model Reporting Template for your organization.

    4.6 Complete model card for selected project.

    Outputs

    Model Cards for Model Reporting Template customized for your organization.

    Completed model card for selected project.

    5 Create Mitigation Plan

    The Purpose

    Review mitigation approach and best practices to control machine bias.

    Create mitigation plan to address machine biases in selected project. Align with enterprise risk management (ERM).

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A solid understanding of the cultural dimension of algorithmic bias prevention and mitigation and best practices.

    Drafted plan to mitigate machine biases in selected project.

    Activities

    5.1 Review and discuss lessons learned.

    5.2 Create mitigation plan to address machine biases in selected project.

    5.3 Review mitigation approach and best practices to control machine bias.

    5.4 Identify gaps and discuss remediation.

    Outputs

    Summary of challenges and recommendations to systematically identify and mitigate machine biases.

    Plan to mitigate machine biases in selected project.

    Domino – Maintain, Commit to, or Vacate?

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    • Parent Category Name: Strategy and Organizational Design
    • Parent Category Link: /strategy-and-organizational-design

    If you have a Domino/Notes footprint that is embedded within your business units and business processes and is taxing your support organization, you may have met resistance from the business and been asked to help the organization migrate away from the Lotus Notes platform. The Lotus Notes platform was long used by technology and businesses and a multipurpose solution that, over the years, became embedded within core business applications and processes.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    For organizations that are struggling to understand their options for the Domino platform, the depth of business process usage is typically the biggest operational obstacle. Migrating off the Domino platform is a difficult option for most organizations due to business process and application complexity. In addition, migrating clients have to resolve the challenges with more than one replaceable solution.

    Impact and Result

    The most common tactic is for the organization to better understand their Domino migration options and adopt an application rationalization strategy for the Domino applications entrenched within the business. Options include retiring, replatforming, migrating, or staying with your Domino platform.

    Domino – Maintain, Commit to, or Vacate? Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Domino – Maintain, Commit to, or Vacate? – A brief deck that outlines key migration options for HCL Domino platforms.

    This blueprint will help you assess the fit, purpose, and price of Domino options; develop strategies for overcoming potential challenges; and determine the future of Domino for your organization.

    • Domino – Maintain, Commit to, or Vacate? Storyboard

    2. Application Rationalization Tool – A tool to understand your business-developed applications, their importance to business process, and the potential underlying financial impact.

    Use this tool to input the outcomes of your various application assessments.

    • Application Rationalization Tool
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Domino – Maintain, Commit to, or Vacate?

    Lotus Domino still lives, and you have options for migrating away from or remaining with the platform.

    Executive Summary

    Info-Tech Insight

    “HCL announced that they have somewhere in the region of 15,000 Domino customers worldwide, and also claimed that that number is growing. They also said that 42% of their customers are already on v11 of Domino, and that in the year or so since that version was released, it’s been downloaded 78,000 times. All of which suggests that the Domino platform is, in fact, alive and well.”
    – Nigel Cheshire in Team Studio

    Your Challenge

    You have a Domino/Notes footprint embedded within your business units and business processes. This is taxing your support organization; you are meeting resistance from the business, and you are now asked to help the organization migrate away from the Lotus Notes platform. The Lotus Notes platform was long used by technology and businesses as a multipurpose solution that, over the years, became embedded within core business applications and processes.

    Common Obstacles

    For organizations that are struggling to understand their options for the Domino platform, the depth of business process usage is typically the biggest operational obstacle. Migrating off the Domino platform is a difficult option for most organizations due to business process and application complexity. In addition, migrating clients have to resolve the challenges with more than one replaceable solution.

    Info-Tech Approach

    The most common tactic is for the organization to better understand their Domino migration options and adopt an application rationalization strategy for the Domino applications entrenched within the business. Options include retiring, replatforming, migrating, or staying with your Domino platform.

    Review

    Is “Lotus” Domino still alive?

    Problem statement

    The number of member engagements with customers regarding the Domino platform has, as you might imagine, dwindled in the past couple of years. While many members have exited the platform, there are still many members and organizations that have entered a long exit program, but with how embedded Domino is in business processes, the migration has slowed and been met with resistance. Some organizations had replatformed the applications but found that the replacement target state was inadequate and introduced friction because the new solution was not a low-code/business-user-driven environment. This resulted in returning the Domino platform to production and working through a strategy to maintain the environment.

    This research is designed for:

    • IT strategic direction decision-makers
    • IT managers responsible for an existing Domino platform
    • Organizations evaluating migration options for mission-critical applications running on Domino

    This research will help you:

    1. Evaluate migration options.
    2. Assess the fit and purpose.
    3. Consider strategies for overcoming potential challenges.
    4. Determine the future of this platform for your organization.

    The “everything may work” scenario

    Adopt and expand

    Believe it or not, Domino and Notes are still options to consider when determining a migration strategy. With HCL still committed to the platform, there are options organizations should seek to better understand rather than assuming SharePoint will solve all. In our research, we consider:

    Importance to current business processes

    • Importance of use
    • Complexity in migrations
    • Choosing a new platform

    Available tools to facilitate

    • Talent/access to skills
    • Economies of scale/lower cost at scale
    • Access to technology

    Info-Tech Insight

    With multiple options to consider, take the time to clearly understand the application rationalization process within your decision making.

    • Archive/retire
    • Application migration
    • Application replatform
    • Stay right where you are

    Eliminate your bias – consider the advantages

    “There is a lot of bias toward Domino; decisions are being made by individuals who know very little about Domino and more importantly, they do not know how it impacts business environment.”

    – Rob Salerno, Founder & CTO, Rivet Technology Partners

    Domino advantages include:

    Modern Cloud & Application

    • No-code/low-code technology

    Business-Managed Application

    • Business written and supported
    • Embrace the business support model
    • Enterprise class application

    Leverage the Application Taxonomy & Build

    • A rapid application development platform
    • Develop skill with HCL training

    HCL Domino is a supported and developed platform

    Why consider HCL?

    • Consider scheduling a Roadmap Session with HCL. This is an opportunity to leverage any value in the mission and brand of your organization to gain insights or support from HCL.
    • Existing Domino customers are not the only entities seeking certainty with the platform. Software solution providers that support enterprise IT infrastructure ecosystems (backup, for example) will also be seeking clarity for the future of the platform. HCL will be managing these relationships through the channel/partner management programs, but our observations indicate that Domino integrations are scarce.
    • HCL Domino should be well positioned feature-wise to support low-code/NoSQL demands for enterprises and citizen developers.

    Visualize Your Application Roadmap

    1. Focus on the application portfolio and crafting a roadmap for rationalization.
      • The process is intended to help you determine each application’s functional and technical adequacy for the business process that it supports.
    2. Document your findings on respective application capability heatmaps.
      • This drives your organization to a determination of application dispositions and provides a tool to output various dispositions for you as a roadmap.
    3. Sort the application portfolio into a disposition status (keep, replatform, retire, consolidate, etc.)
      • This information will be an input into any cloud migration or modernization as well as consolidation of the infrastructure, licenses, and support for them.

    Our external support perspective

    by Darin Stahl

    Member Feedback

    • Some members who have remaining Domino applications in production – while the retire, replatform, consolidate, or stay strategy is playing out – have concerns about the challenges with ongoing support and resources required for the platform. In those cases, some have engaged external services providers to augment staff or take over as managed services.
    • While there could be existing support resources (in house or on retainer), the member might consider approaching an external provider who could help backstop the single resource or even provide some help with the exit strategies. At this point, the conversation would be helpful in any case. One of our members engaged an external provider in a Statement of Work for IBM Domino Administration focused on one-time events, Tier 1/Tier 2 support, and custom ad hoc requests.
    • The augmentation with the managed services enabled the member to shift key internal resources to a focus on executing the exit strategies (replatform, retire, consolidate), since the business knowledge was key to that success.
    • The member also very aggressively governed the Domino environment support needs to truly technical issues/maintenance of known and supported functionality rather than coding new features (and increasing risk and cost in a migration down the road) – in short, freezing new features and functionality unless required for legal compliance or health and safety.
    • There obviously are other providers, but at this point Info-Tech no longer maintains a market view or scan of those related to Domino due to low member demand.

    Domino database assessments

    Consider the database.

    • Domino database assessments should be informed through the lens of a multi-value database, like jBase, or an object system.
    • The assessment of the databases, often led by relational database subject matter experts grounded in normalized databases, can be a struggle since Notes databases must be denormalized.
    Key/Value Column

    Use case: Heavily accessed, rarely updated, large amounts of data
    Data Model: Values are stored in a hash table of keys.
    Fast access to small data values, but querying is slow
    Processor friendly
    Based on amazon's Dynamo paper
    Example: Project Voldemort used by LinkedIn

    this is a Key/Value example

    Use case: High availability, multiple data centers
    Data Model: Storage blocks of data are contained in columns
    Handles size well
    Based on Google's BigTable
    Example: Hadoop/Hbase used by Facebook and Yahoo

    This is a Column Example
    Document Graph

    Use case: Rapid development, Web and programmer friendly
    Data Model: Stores documents made up of tagged elements. Uses Key/Value collections
    Better query abilities than Key/Value databases.
    Inspired by Lotus Notes.
    Example: CouchDB used by BBC

    This is a Document Example

    Use case: Best at dealing with complexity and relationships/networks
    Data model: Nodes and relationships.
    Data is processed quickly
    Inspired by Euler and graph theory
    Can easily evolve schemas
    Example: Neo4j

    This is a Graph Example

    Understand your options

    Archive/Retire

    Store the application data in a long-term repository with the means to locate and read it for regulatory and compliance purposes.

    Migrate

    Migrate to a new version of the application, facilitating the process of moving software applications from one computing environment to another.

    Replatform

    Replatforming is an option for transitioning an existing Domino application to a new modern platform (i.e. cloud) to leverage the benefits of a modern deployment model.

    Stay

    Review the current Domino platform roadmap and understand HCL’s support model. Keep the application within the Domino platform.

    Archive/retire

    Retire the application, storing the application data in a long-term repository.

    Abstract

    The most common approach is to build the required functionality in whatever new application/solution is selected, then archive the old data in PDFs and documents.

    Typically this involves archiving the data and leveraging Microsoft SharePoint and the new collaborative solutions, likely in conjunction with other software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.

    Advantages

    • Reduce support cost.
    • Consolidate applications.
    • Reduce risk.
    • Reduce compliance and security concerns.
    • Improve business processes.

    Considerations

    • Application transformation
    • eDiscovery costs
    • Legal implications
    • Compliance implications
    • Business process dependencies

    Info-Tech Insights

    Be aware of the costs associated with archiving. The more you archive, the more it will cost you.

    Application migration

    Migrate to a new version of the application

    Abstract

    An application migration is the managed process of migrating or moving applications (software) from one infrastructure environment to another.

    This can include migrating applications from one data center to another data center, from a data center to a cloud provider, or from a company’s on-premises system to a cloud provider’s infrastructure.

    Advantages

    • Reduce hardware costs.
    • Leverage cloud technologies.
    • Improve scalability.
    • Improve disaster recovery.
    • Improve application security.

    Considerations

    • Data extraction, starting from the document databases in NSF format and including security settings about users and groups granted to read and write single documents, which is a powerful feature of Lotus Domino documents.
    • File extraction, starting from the document databases in NSF format, which can contain attachments and RTF documents and embedded files.
    • Design of the final relational database structure; this activity should be carried out without taking into account the original structure of the data in Domino files or the data conversion and loading, from the extracted format to the final model.
    • Design and development of the target-state custom applications based on the new data model and the new selected development platform.

    Application replatform

    Transition an existing Domino application to a new modern platform

    Abstract

    This type of arrangement is typically part of an application migration or transformation. In this model, client can “replatform” the application into an off-premises hosted provider platform. This would yield many benefits of cloud but in a different scaling capacity as experienced with commodity workloads (e.g. Windows, Linux) and the associated application.

    Two challenges are particularly significant when migrating or replatforming Domino applications:

    • The application functionality/value must be reproduced/replaced with not one but many applications, either through custom coding or a commercial-off-the-shelf/SaaS solution.
    • Notes “databases” are not relational databases and will not migrate simply to an SQL database while retaining the same business value. Notes databases are essentially NoSQL repositories and are difficult to normalize.

    Advantages

    • Leverage cloud technologies.
    • Improve scalability.
    • Align to a SharePoint platform.
    • Improve disaster recovery.
    • Improve application security.

    Considerations

    • Application replatform resource effort
    • Network bandwidth
    • New platform terms and conditions
    • Secure connectivity and communication
    • New platform security and compliance
    • Degree of complexity

    Info-Tech Insights

    There is a difference between a migration and a replatform application strategy. Determine which solution aligns to the application requirements.

    Stay with HCL

    Stay with HCL, understanding its future commitment to the platform.

    Abstract

    Following the announced acquisition of IBM Domino and up until around December 2019, HCL had published no future roadmap for the platform. The public-facing information/website at the time stated that HCL acquired “the product family and key lab services to deliver professional services.” Again, there was no mention or emphasis on upcoming new features for the platform. The product offering on their website at the time stated that HCL would leverage its services expertise to advise clients and push applications into four buckets:

    1. Replatform
    2. Retire
    3. Move to cloud
    4. Modernize

    That public-facing messaging changed with release 11.0, which had references to IBM rebranded to HCL for the Notes and Domino product – along with fixes already inflight. More information can be found on HCL’s FAQ page.

    Advantages

    • Known environment
    • Domino is a supported platform
    • Domino is a developed platform
    • No-code/low-code optimization
    • Business developed applications
    • Rapid application framework

    This is the HCL Domino Logo

    Understand your tools

    Many tools are available to help evaluate or migrate your Domino Platform. Here are a few common tools for you to consider.

    Notes Archiving & Notes to SharePoint

    Summary of Vendor

    “SWING Software delivers content transformation and archiving software to over 1,000 organizations worldwide. Our solutions uniquely combine key collaborative platforms and standard document formats, making document production, publishing, and archiving processes more efficient.”*

    Tools

    Lotus Notes Data Migration and Archiving: Preserve historical data outside of Notes and Domino

    Lotus Note Migration: Replacing Lotus Notes. Boost your migration by detaching historical data from Lotus Notes and Domino.

    Headquarters

    Croatia

    Best fit

    • Application archive and retire
    • Migration to SharePoint

    This is an image of the SwingSoftware Logo

    * swingsoftware.com

    Domino Migration to SharePoint

    Summary of Vendor

    “Providing leading solutions, resources, and expertise to help your organization transform its collaborative environment.”*

    Tools

    Notes Domino Migration Solutions: Rivit’s industry-leading solutions and hardened migration practice will help you eliminate Notes Domino once and for all.

    Rivive Me: Migrate Notes Domino applications to an enterprise web application

    Headquarters

    Canada

    Best fit

    • Application Archive & Retire
    • Migration to SharePoint

    This is an image of the RiVit Logo

    * rivit.ca

    Lotus Notes to M365

    Summary of Vendor

    “More than 300 organizations across 40+ countries trust skybow to build no-code/no-compromise business applications & processes, and skybow’s community of customers, partners, and experts grows every day.”*

    Tools

    SkyBow Studio: The low-code platform fully integrated into Microsoft 365

    Headquarters:

    Switzerland

    Best fit

    • Application Archive & Retire
    • Migration to SharePoint

    This is an image of the SkyBow Logo

    * skybow.com | About skybow

    Notes to SharePoint Migration

    Summary of Vendor

    “CIMtrek is a global software company headquartered in the UK. Our mission is to develop user-friendly, cost-effective technology solutions and services to help companies modernize their HCL Domino/Notes® application landscape and support their legacy COBOL applications.”*

    Tools

    CIMtrek SharePoint Migrator: Reduce the time and cost of migrating your IBM® Lotus Notes® applications to Office 365, SharePoint online, and SharePoint on premises.

    Headquarters

    United Kingdom

    Best fit

    • Application replatform
    • Migration to SharePoint

    This is an image of the CIMtrek Logo

    * cimtrek.com | About CIMtrek

    Domino replatform/Rapid application selection framework

    Summary of Vendor

    “4WS.Platform is a rapid application development tool used to quickly create multi-channel applications including web and mobile applications.”*

    Tools

    4WS.Platform is available in two editions: Community and Enterprise.
    The Platform Enterprise Edition, allows access with an optional support pack.

    4WS.Platform’s technical support provides support services to the users through support contracts and agreements.

    The platform is a subscription support services for companies using the product which will allow customers to benefit from the knowledge of 4WS.Platform’s technical experts.

    Headquarters

    Italy

    Best fit

    • Application replatform

    This is an image of the 4WS PLATFORM Logo

    * 4wsplatform.org

    Activity

    Understand your Domino options

    Application Rationalization Exercise

    Info-Tech Insight

    Application rationalization is the perfect exercise to fully understand your business-developed applications, their importance to business process, and the potential underlying financial impact.

    This activity involves the following participants:

    • IT strategic direction decision-makers.
    • IT managers responsible for an existing Domino platform
    • Organizations evaluating platforms for mission-critical applications.

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Completed Application Rationalization Tool

    Application rationalization exercise

    Use this Application Rationalization Tool to input the outcomes of your various application assessments

    In the Application Entry tab:

    • Input your application inventory or subset of apps you intend to rationalize, along with some basic information for your apps.

    In the Business Value & TCO Comparison tab, determine rationalization priorities.

    • Input your business value scores and total cost of ownership (TCO) of applications.
    • Review the results of this analysis to determine which apps should require additional analysis and which dispositions should be prioritized.

    In the Disposition Selection tab:

    • Add to or adapt our list of dispositions as appropriate.

    In the Rationalization Inputs tab:

    • Add or adapt the disposition criteria of your application rationalization framework as appropriate.
    • Input the results of your various assessments for each application.

    In the Disposition Settings tab:

    • Add or adapt settings that generate recommended dispositions based on your rationalization inputs.

    In the Disposition Recommendations tab:

    • Review and compare the rationalization results and confirm if dispositions are appropriate for your strategy.

    In the Timeline Considerations tab:

    • Enter the estimated timeline for when you execute your dispositions.

    In the Portfolio Roadmap tab:

    • Review and present your roadmap and rationalization results.

    Follow the instructions to generate recommended dispositions and populate an application portfolio roadmap.

    This image depicts a scatter plot graph where the X axis is labeled Business Value, and the Y Axis is labeled Cost. On the graph, the following datapoints are displayed: SF; HRIS; ERP; ALM; B; A; C; ODP; SAS

    Info-Tech Insight

    Watch out for misleading scores that result from poorly designed criteria weightings.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Build an Application Rationalization Framework

    Manage your application portfolio to minimize risk and maximize value.

    Embrace Business-Managed Applications

    Empower the business to implement their own applications with a trusted business-IT relationship.

    Satisfy Digital End Users With Low- and No-Code

    Extend IT, automation, and digital capabilities to the business with the right tools, good governance, and trusted organizational relationships.

    Maximize the Benefits from Enterprise Applications with a Center of Excellence

    Optimize your organization’s enterprise application capabilities with a refined and scalable methodology.

    Drive Successful Sourcing Outcomes With a Robust RFP Process

    Leverage your vendor sourcing process to get better results.

    Research Authors

    Darin Stahl, Principal Research Advisor, Info-Tech Research Group

    Darin Stahl, Principal Research Advisor,
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Darin is a Principal Research Advisor within the Infrastructure practice, leveraging 38+ years of experience. His areas of focus include IT operations management, service desk, infrastructure outsourcing, managed services, cloud infrastructure, DRP/BCP, printer management, managed print services, application performance monitoring, managed FTP, and non-commodity servers (zSeries, mainframe, IBM i, AIX, Power PC).

    Troy Cheeseman, Practice Lead, Info-Tech Research Group

    Troy Cheeseman, Practice Lead,
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Troy has over 24 years of experience and has championed large enterprise-wide technology transformation programs, remote/home office collaboration and remote work strategies, BCP, IT DRP, IT operations and expense management programs, international right placement initiatives, and large technology transformation initiatives (M&A). Additionally, he has deep experience working with IT solution providers and technology (cloud) startups.

    Research Contributors

    Rob Salerno, Founder & CTO, Rivit Technology Partners

    Rob Salerno, Founder & CTO, Rivit Technology Partners

    Rob is the Founder and Chief Technology Strategist for Rivit Technology Partners. Rivit is a system integrator that delivers unique IT solutions. Rivit is known for its REVIVE migration strategy which helps companies leave legacy platforms (such as Domino) or move between versions of software. Rivit is the developer of the DCOM Application Archiving solution.

    Bibliography

    Cheshire, Nigel. “Domino v12 Launch Keeps HCL Product Strategy On Track.” Team Studio, 19 July 2021. Web.

    “Is LowCode/NoCode the best platform for you?” Rivit Technology Partners, 15 July 2021. Web.

    McCracken, Harry. “Lotus: Farewell to a Once-Great Tech Brand.” TIME, 20 Nov. 2012. Web.

    Sharwood, Simon. “Lotus Notes refuses to die, again, as HCL debuts Domino 12.” The Register, 8 June 2021. Web.

    Woodie, Alex. “Domino 12 Comes to IBM i.” IT Jungle, 16 Aug. 2021. Web.

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    Integrate Physical Security and Information Security

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    Physical security is often managed by facilities, not by IT security, resulting in segmented security systems. Integrating physical and information security introduces challenges in:

    • Understanding the value proposition of investment in governing and managing integrated systems, including migration costs, compared to separated security systems.
    • Addressing complex risks and vulnerabilities of an integrated security system.
    • Operationalizing enhanced capabilities created by adoption of emerging and disruptive technologies.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Integrate security in people, process, and technology to improve your overall security posture. Having siloed systems running security is not beneficial. Many organizations are realizing the benefits of consolidating into a single platform across physical security, cybersecurity, HR, legal, and compliance.
    • Plan and engage stakeholders. Assemble the right team to ensure the success of your integrated security ecosystem, decide the governance model, and clearly define the roles and responsibilities.
    • Enhance strategy and risk management. Strategically, we want a physical security system that is interoperable with most technologies, flexible with minimal customization, functional, and integrated, despite the challenges of proprietary configurations, complex customization, and silos.

    Impact and Result

    Info-Tech's approach is a modular, incremental, and repeatable process to integrate physical and information security to:

    • Ensure the integration will meet the business' needs and determine effort and technical requirements.
    • Establish GRC processes that include integrated risk management and compliance.
    • Design and deploy an integrated security architecture.
    • Establish security metrics of effectiveness and efficiency for senior management and leadership.

    Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Storyboard – A step-by-step document that walks you through how to integrate physical security and information security.

    Info-Tech provides a three-phased framework for integrating physical security and information security: Plan, Enhance, and Monitor & Optimize.

    • Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Storyboard

    2. Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool – A tool to map organizational goals to IT goals, facilities goals, OT goals (if applicable), and integrated security goals.

    This tool serves as a repository for information about security integration elements, compliance, and other factors that will influence your integration of physical security and information security.

    • Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool

    3. Integrate Physical Security and Information Security RACI Chart Tool – A tool to identify and understand the owners of various security integration stakeholders across the organization.

    Populating a RACI chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) is a critical step that will assist you in organizing roles for carrying out integration steps. Complete this tool to assign tasks to suitable roles.

    • Integrate Physical Security and Information Security RACI Chart Tool

    4. Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Communication Deck – A tool to present your findings in a prepopulated document that summarizes the work you have completed.

    Complete this template to effectively communicate your integrated security plan to stakeholders.

    • Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Communication Deck
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Integrate Physical Security and Information Security

    Securing information security, physical security, or personnel security in silos may not secure much

    Analyst Perspective

    Ensure integrated security success with close and continual collaboration

    From physical access control systems (PACS) such as electronic locks and fingerprint biometrics to video surveillance systems (VSS) such as IP cameras to perimeter intrusion detection and prevention to fire and life safety and beyond: physical security systems pose unique challenges to overall security. Additionally, digital transformation of physical security to the cloud and the convergence of operational technology (OT), internet of things (IoT), and industrial IoT (IIoT) increase both the volume and frequency of security threats.

    These threats can be safety, such as the health impact when a gunfire attack downed wastewater pumps at Duke Energy Substation, North Carolina, US, in 2022. The threats can also be economic, such as theft of copper wire, or they can be reliability, such as when a sniper attack on Pacific Gas & Electric’s Metcalf Substation in California, US, damaged 17 out of 21 power transformers in 2013.

    Considering the security risks organizations face, many are unifying physical, cyber, and information security systems to gain the long-term overall benefits a consolidated security strategy provides.

    Ida Siahaan
    Ida Siahaan

    Research Director, Security and Privacy Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Physical security is often managed by facilities, not by IT security, resulting in segmented security systems. Meanwhile, integrating physical and information security introduces challenges in:

    • Value proposition of investment in governing and managing integrated systems including the migration costs compared to separated security systems.
    • Addressing complex risks and vulnerabilities of an integrated security system.
    • Operationalizing on enhanced capabilities created by adoption of emerging and disruptive technologies.

    Common Obstacles

    Physical security systems integration is complex due to various components such as proprietary devices and protocols and hybrid systems of analog and digital technology. Thus, open architecture with comprehensive planning and design is important.

    However, territorial protection by existing IT and physical security managers may limit security visibility and hinder security integration.

    Additionally, integration poses challenges in staffing, training and awareness programs, and dependency on third-party technologies and their migration plans.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    Info-Tech’s approach is a modular, incremental, and repeatable process to integrate physical and information security that enables organizations to:

    • Determine effort and technical requirements to ensure the integration will meet the business needs.
    • Establish GRC processes including integrated risk management and compliance.
    • Design and deploy integrated security architecture.
    • Establish metrics to monitor the effectiveness and efficiency of the security program.

    Info-Tech Insight

    An integrated security architecture, including people, process, and technology, will improve your overall security posture. These benefits are leading many organizations to consolidate their siloed systems into a single platform across physical security, cybersecurity, HR, legal, and compliance.

    Existing information security models are not comprehensive

    Current security models do not cover all areas of security, especially if physical systems and personnel are involved and safety is also an important property required.

    • The CIA triad (confidentiality, integrity, availability) is a well-known information security model that focuses on technical policies related to technology for protecting information assets.
    • The US Government’s Five Pillars of Information Assurance includes CIA, authentication, and non-repudiation, but it does not cover people and processes comprehensively.
    • The AAA model, created by the American Accounting Association, has properties of authentication, authorization, and accounting but focuses only on access control.
    • Donn Parker expanded the CIA model with three more properties: possession, authenticity, and utility. This model, which includes people and processes, is known as the Parkerian hexad. However, it does not cover physical and personnel security.

    CIA Triad

    The CIA Triad for Information Security: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability


    Parkerian Hexad

    The Parkerian Hexad for Security: Confidentiality, Possession, Utility, Availability, Authenticity and Integrity

    Sources: Parker, 1998; Pender-Bey, 2012; Cherdantseva and Hilton, 2015

    Adopt an integrated security model

    Adopt an integrated security model which consists of information security, physical security, personnel security, and organizational security.

    The security ecosystem is shifting from segregation to integration

    Security ecosystem is shifting from the past proprietary model to open interfaces and future open architecture

    Sources: Cisco, n.d.; Preparing for Technology Convergence in Manufacturing, Info-Tech Research Group, 2018

    Physical security includes:

    • Securing physical access,
      e.g. facility access control, alarms, surveillance cameras
    • Securing physical operations
      (operational technology – OT), e.g. programmable logic controllers (PLCs), SCADA

    Info-Tech Insight

    Why is integrating physical and information security gaining more and more traction? Because the supporting technologies are becoming more matured. This includes, for example, migration of physical security devices to IP-based network and open architecture.

    Reactive responses to physical security incidents

    April 1995

    Target: Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma, US. Method: Bombing. Impact: Destroyed structure of 17 federal agencies, 168 casualties, over 800 injuries. Result: Creation of Interagency Security Committee (ISC) in Executive Order 12977 and “Vulnerability Assessment of Federal Facilities” standard.
    (Source: Office of Research Services, 2017)

    April 2013

    Target: Pacific Gas & Electric’s Metcalf Substation, California, US. Method: Sniper attack. Impact: Out of 21 power transformers, 17 were damaged. Result: Creation of Senate Bill No. 699 and NERC- CIP-014 standard.
    (Source: T&D World, 2023)

    Sep. 2022

    Target: Nord Stream gas pipelines connecting Russia to Germany, Baltic sea. Method: Detonations. Impact: Methane leaks (~300,000 tons) at four exclusive economic zones (two in Denmark and two in Sweden). Result: Sweden’s Security Service investigation.
    (Source: CNBC News, 2022)

    Dec. 2022

    Target: Duke Energy Substation, North Carolina, US. Method: Gunfire. Impact: Power outages of ~40,000 customers and wastewater pumps in sewer lift stations down. Result: State of emergency was declared.
    (Source: CBS News, 2022)

    Info-Tech Insight

    When it comes to physical security, we have been mostly reactive. Typically the pattern starts with physical attacks. Next, the impacted organization mitigates the incidents. Finally, new government regulatory measures or private sector or professional association standards are put in place. We must strive to change our pattern to become more proactive.

    Physical security market forecast and top physical security challenges

    Physical security market forecast
    (in billions USD)

    A forecast by MarketsandMarkets projected growth in the physical security market, using historical data from 2015 until 2019, with a CAGR of 6.4% globally and 5.2% in North America.

    A forecast by MarketsandMarkets projected growth in the physical security market, using historical data from 2015 until 2019, with a CAGR of 6.4% globally and 5.2% in North America.

    Source: MarketsandMarkets, 2022

    Top physical security challenges

    An Ontic survey (N=359) found that threat data management (40%) was the top physical security challenge in 2022, up from 33% in 2021, followed by physical security threats to the C-suite and company leadership (35%), which was a slight increase from 2021. An interesting decrease is data protection and privacy (32%), which dropped from 36% in 2021.

    An Ontic survey (N=359) found that threat data management (40%) was the top physical security challenge in 2022, up from 33% in 2021, followed by physical security threats to the C-suite and company leadership (35%), which was a slight increase from 2021. An interesting decrease is data protection and privacy (32%), which dropped from 36% in 2021.

    Source: Ontic Center for Protective Intelligence, 2022

    Info-Tech Insight

    The physical security market is growing in systems and services, especially the integration of threat data management with cybersecurity.

    Top physical security initiatives and operations integration investments

    We know the physical security challenges and how the physical security market is growing, but what initiatives are driving this growth? These are the top physical security initiatives and top investments for physical security operations integration:

    Top physical security initiatives

    The number one physical security initiative is integrating physical security systems. Other initiatives with similar concerns included data and cross-functional integration

    A survey by Brivo asked 700 security professionals about their top physical security initiatives. The number one initiative is integrating physical security systems. Other initiatives with similar concerns included data and cross-functional integration.

    Source: Brivo, 2022

    Top investments for physical security operations integration

    The number one investment is on access control systems with software to identify physical threat actors. Another area with similar concern is integration of digital physical security with cybersecurity.

    An Ontic survey (N=359) on areas of investment for physical security operations integration shows the number one investment is on access control systems with software to identify physical threat actors. Another area with similar concern is integration of digital physical security with cybersecurity.

    Source: Ontic Center for Protective Intelligence, 2022

    Evaluate security integration opportunities with these guiding principles

    Opportunity focus

    • Identify the security integration problems to solve with visible improvement possibilities
    • Don’t choose technology for technology’s sake
    • Keep an eye to the future
    • Use strategic foresight

    Piece by piece

    • Avoid taking a big bang approach
    • Test technologies in multiple conditions
    • Run inexpensive pilots
    • Increase flexibility
    • Build a technology ecosystem

    Buy-in

    • Collaborate with stakeholders
    • Gain and sustain support
    • Maintain transparency
    • Increase uptake of open architecture

    Key Recommendations:

    Focus on your master plan

    Build a technology ecosystem

    Engage stakeholders

    Info-Tech Insight

    When looking for a quick win, consider learning the best internal or external practice. For example, in 1994 IBM reorganized its security operation by bringing security professionals and non-security professionals in one single structure, which reduced costs by approximately 30% in two years.

    Sources: Create and Implement an IoT Strategy, Info-Tech Research Group, 2022; Baker and Benny, 2013; Erich Krueger, Omaha Public Power District (contributor); Doery Abdou, March Networks Corporate (contributor)

    Case Study

    4Wall Entertainment – Asset Owner

    Industry: Architecture & Engineering
    Source: Interview

    4Wall Entertainment is quite mature in integrating its physical and information security; physical security has always been under IT as a core competency.

    4Wall Entertainment is a provider of entertainment lighting and equipment to event venues, production companies, lighting designers, and others, with a presence in 18 US and UK locations.

    After many acquisitions, 4Wall Entertainment needed to standardize its various acquired systems, including physical security systems such as access control. In its integrated security approach, IT owns the integrated security, but they interface with related entities such as HR, finance, and facilities management in every location. This allows them to obtain information such as holidays, office hours, and what doors need to be accessed as inputs to the security system and to get sponsorship in budgeting.

    In the past, 4Wall Entertainment tried delegating specific physical security to other divisions, such as facilities management and HR. This approach was unsuccessful, so IT took back the responsibility and accountability.

    Currently, 4Wall Entertainment works with local vendors, and its biggest challenge is finding third-party vendors that can provide nationwide support.

    In the future, 4Wall Entertainment envisions physical security modernization such as camera systems that allow more network accessibility, with one central system to manage and IoT device integration with SIEM and MDR.

    Results

    Lessons learned in integrating security from 4Wall Entertainment include:

    • Start with forming relationships with related divisions such as HR, finance, and facilities management to build trust and encourage sponsorship across management.
    • Create policies, procedures, and standards to deploy in various systems, especially when acquiring companies with low maturity in security.
    • Select third-party providers that offer the required functionalities, good customer support, and standard systems interoperability.
    • Close skill gaps by developing training and awareness programs for users, especially for newly acquired systems and legacy systems, or by acquiring expertise from consulting services.
    • Complete cost-benefit analysis for solutions on legacy systems to determine whether to keep them and create interfacing with other systems, upgrade them, or replace them entirely with newer systems.
    • Delegate maintenance of specific highly regulated systems, such as fire alarms and water sprinklers, to facilities management.
    Integration of Physical and Information Security Framework. Inputs: Integrated Items, Stakeholders, and Security Components. Phases, Outcomes and Benefits: Plan, Enhance and Monitor & Optimize.

    Tracking progress of physical and information security integration

    Physical security is often part of facilities management. As a result, there are interdependencies with both internal departments (such as IT, information security, and facilities) and external parties (such as third-party vendors). IT leaders, security leaders, and operational leaders should keep the big picture in mind when designing and implementing integration of physical and information security. Use this checklist as a tool to track your security integration journey.

    Plan

    • Engage stakeholders and justify value for the business.
    • Define roles and responsibilities.
    • Establish/update governance for integrated security.
    • Identify integrated elements and compliance obligations.

    Enhance

    • Determine the level of security maturity and update security strategy for integrated security.
    • Assess and treat risks of integrated security.
    • Establish/update integrated physical and information security policies and procedures.
    • Update incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity plan.

    Monitor & Optimize

    • Identify skill requirements and close skill gaps for integrating physical and information security.
    • Design and deploy integrated security architecture and controls.
    • Establish, monitor, and report integrated security metrics on effectiveness and efficiency.

    Benefits of the security integration framework

    Today’s matured technology makes security integration possible. However, the governance and management of single integrated security presents challenges. These can be overcome using a multi-phased framework that enables a modular, incremental, and repeatable integration process, starting with planning to justify the value of investment, then enhancing the integrated security based on risks and open architecture. This is followed by using metrics for monitoring and optimization.

    1. Modular

      • Implementing a consolidated security strategy is complex and involves the integration of process, software, data, hardware, and network and infrastructure.
      • A modular framework will help to drive value while putting in appropriate guardrails.
    2. Incremental

      • Integration of physical security and information security involves many components such as security strategy, risk management, and security policies.
      • An incremental framework will help track, manage, and maintain each step while providing appropriate structure.
    3. Repeatable

      • Integration of physical security and information security is a journey that can be approached with a pilot program to evaluate effectiveness.
      • A repeatable framework will help to ensure quick time to value and enable immediate implementation of controls to meet operational and security requirements.

    Potential risks of the security integration framework

    Just as medicine often comes with side effects, our Integration of Physical and Information Security Framework may introduce risks too. However, as John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth president of the United States, once said, "There are risks and costs to a program of action — but they are far less than the long-range cost of comfortable inaction."

    Plan Phase

    • Lack of transparency in the integration process can lead to lack of trust among stakeholders.
    • Lack of support from leadership results in unclear governance or lack of budget or human resources.
    • Key stakeholders leave the organization during the engagement and their replacements do not understand the organization’s operation yet.

    Enhance Phase

    • The risk assessment conducted focuses too much on IT risk, which may not always be applicable to physical security systems nor OT systems.
    • The integrated security does not comply with policies and regulations.

    Monitor and Optimize Phase

    • Lack of knowledge, training, and awareness.
    • Different testing versus production environments.
    • Lack of collected or shared security metrics.

    Data

    • Data quality issues and inadequate data from physical security, information security, and other systems, e.g. OT, IoT.
    • Too much data from too many tools are complex and time consuming to process.

    Develop an integration of information security, physical security, and personnel security that meets your organization’s needs

    Integrate security in people, process, and technology to improve your overall security posture

    Having siloed systems running security is not beneficial. Many organizations are realizing the benefits of consolidating into a single platform across physical security, cybersecurity, HR, legal, and compliance.

    Plan and engage stakeholders

    Assemble the right team to ensure the success of your integrated security ecosystem, decide the governance model, and clearly define the roles and responsibilities.

    Enhance strategy and risk management

    Strategically, we want a physical security system that is interoperable with most technologies, flexible with minimal customization, functional, and integrated, despite the challenges of proprietary configurations, complex customization, and silos.

    Monitor and optimize

    Find the most optimized architecture that is strategic, realistic, and based on risk. Next, perform an evaluation of the security systems and program by understanding what, where, when, and how to measure and to report the relevant metrics.

    Focus on master plan

    Identify the security integration problems to solve with visible improvement possibilities, and don’t choose technology for technology’s sake. Design first, then conduct market research by comparing products or services from vendors or manufacturers.

    Build a technology ecosystem

    Avoid a big bang approach and test technologies in multiple conditions. Run inexpensive pilots and increase flexibility to build a technology ecosystem.

    Deliverables

    Each step of this framework is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool

    Map organizational goals to IT goals, facilities goals, OT goals (if applicable), and integrated security goals. Identify your security integration elements and compliance.

    Integrate Physical Security and Information Security RACI Chart Tool

    Identify various security integration stakeholders across the organization and assign tasks to suitable roles.

    Key deliverable:

    Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Communication Deck

    Present your findings in a prepopulated document that summarizes the work you have completed.

    Plan

    Planning is foundational to engage stakeholders. Start with justifying the value of investment, then define roles and responsibilities, update governance, and finally identify integrated elements and compliance obligations.

    Plan

    Engage stakeholders

    • To initiate communication between the physical and information security teams and other related divisions, it is important to identify the entities that would be affected by the security integration and involve them in the process to gain support from planning to delivery and maintenance.
    • Possible stakeholders:
      • Executive leadership, Facilities Management leader and team, IT leader, Security & Privacy leader, compliance officer, Legal, Risk Management, HR, Finance, OT leader (if applicable)
    • A successful security integration depends on aligning your security integration initiatives and migration plan to the organization’s objectives by engaging the right people to communicate and collaborate.

    Info-Tech Insight

    It is important to speak the same language. Physical security concerns safety and availability, while information security concerns confidentiality and integrity. Thus, the two systems have different goals and require alignment.

    Similarly, taxonomy of terminologies needs to be managed,1 e.g. facility management with an emergency management background may have a different understanding from a CISO with an information security background when discussing the same term. For example:

    In emergency management prevention means “actions taken to eliminate the impact of disasters in order to protect lives, property and the environment, and to avoid economic disruption.”2

    In information security prevention is “preventing the threats by understanding the threat environment and the attack surfaces, the risks, the assets, and by maintaining a secure system.”3

    Sources: 1 Owen Yardley, Omaha Public Power District (contributor); 2 Translation Bureau, Government of Canada, n.d.; 3 Security Intelligence, 2020


    Map organizational goals to integrated security goals

    Input

    • Corporate, IT, and Facilities strategies

    Output

    • Your goals for the integrated security strategy

    Materials

    • Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool

    Participants

    • Executive leadership
    • Facilities Management leader and team
    • IT leader
    • Security & Privacy leader
    • Compliance officer
    • Legal
    • Risk Management
    • HR & Finance
    • OT leader (if applicable)
    1. As a group, brainstorm organization goals.
      • Review relevant corporate, IT, and facilities strategies.
    2. Record the most important business goals in the “Goals Cascade” tab of the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool. Try to limit the number of business goals to no more than ten goals. This limitation will be critical to helping focus on your integrated security goals.
    3. For each goal, identify one to two security alignment goals. These should be objectives for the security strategy that will support the identified organization goals.

    Download the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.

    Record organizational goals

    A table to identify Organization, IT, OT(if applicable), Facilities, and Security Goals Definitions.

    Refer to the Integration of Physical and Information Security Framework when filling in the table.

    1. Record your identified organizational goals in the “Goals Cascade” tab of the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.
    2. For each organizational goal, identify IT alignment goals.
    3. For each organizational goal, identify OT alignment goals (if applicable).
    4. For each organizational goal, identify Facilities alignment goals.
    5. For each organizational goal, select an integrated security goal from the drop-down menu.

    Justify value for the business

    Facilities in most cases have a team that is responsible for physical security installations such as access key controllers. Whenever there is an issue, they contact the provider to fix the error. However, with smart buildings and smart devices, the threat surface grows to include information security threats, and Facilities may not possess the knowledge and skills required to deal with them. At the same time, delegating physical security to IT may add more tasks to their already-too-long list of responsibilities. Consolidating security to a focused security team that covers both physical and information security can help.1 We need to develop the security integration business case beyond physical security "gates, guns, and guards" mentality.2

    An example of a cost-benefit analysis for security integration:

    Benefits

    Metrics

    Operational Efficiency and Cost Savings

    • Reduction in deployment, maintenance, and staff time in manual operations of physical security devices such as logs collection from analog cameras to be automated into digital.
    • Reduction in staffing costs by bringing physical security SOC and information security SOC in one single structure.

    Reliability Improvements

    • Reduction in field crew time by identifying hardware that can be virtualized to have a centralized remote control.
    • Improvement of operating reliability through continuous and real-time monitoring of equipment such as door access control systems and camera surveillance systems.

    Customers & Users Benefits

    • Improvement of customer safety for essential services such as access to critical locations only by authorized personnel.
    • Improvement of reliability of services and address human factor in adoption of change by introducing change as a friendly activity.

    Cost

    Metrics

    Equipment and Infrastructure

    • Upgrade of existing physical security equipment, e.g. replacement of separated access control, video management system (VMS), and physical access control system (PACS) with a unified security platform.
    • Implementation of communication network equipment and labor to install, configure, and maintain the new network component.

    Software and Commission

    • The software and maintenance fee as well as upgrade implementation project cost.
    • Labor cost of field commissioning and troubleshooting.
    • Integration with security systems, e.g. event and log management, continuous monitoring, and investigation.

    Support and Resources

    • Cost to hire/outsource security FTEs for ongoing management and operation of security devices, e.g. SOC, MSSP.
    • Cost to hire/outsource FTEs to analyze, design, and deploy the integrated security architecture, e.g. consulting fee.

    Sources: 1 Andrew Amaro, KLAVAN Security Services (contributor); 2 Baker and Benny, 2013;
    Industrial Control System Modernization, Info-Tech Research Group, 2023; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2021

    Plan

    Define roles and responsibilities

    Input

    • List of relevant stakeholders

    Output

    • Roles and responsibilities for the integration of physical and information security program

    Materials

    • Integrate Physical Security and Information Security RACI Chart Tool

    Participants

    • Executive leadership
    • Facilities Management leader and team
    • HR & Finance
    • IT leader and team
    • OT leader and team
    • Security & Privacy leader and team

    Many factors impact an organization’s level of effectiveness as it relates to integration of physical and information security. How the team interacts, what skill sets exist, the level of clarity around roles and responsibilities, and the degree of executive support and alignment are only a few. Thus, we need to identify stakeholders that are:

    • Responsible: The person(s) who does the work to accomplish the activity; they have been tasked with completing the activity and/or getting a decision made.
    • Accountable: The person(s) who is accountable for the completion of the activity. Ideally, this is a single person and is often an executive or program sponsor.
    • Consulted: The person(s) who provides information. This is usually several people, typically called subject matter experts (SMEs).
    • Informed: The person(s) who is updated on progress. These are resources that are affected by the outcome of the activities and need to be kept up to date.

    Download the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security RACI Chart Tool

    Define RACI chart

    Define Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed (RACI) stakeholders.

    1. Customize the Work Units to best reflect your operation with applicable stakeholders.
    2. Customize the Action rows as required.

    Integrate Physical Security and Information Security RACI Chart

    Sources: ISC, 2015; ISC, 2021

    Info-Tech Insight

    The roles and responsibilities should be clearly defined. For example, IT Security should be responsible for the installation and configuration of all physical access controllers and devices, and facility managers should be responsible for the physical maintenance including malfunctioning such as access device jammed or physically broken.

    Plan

    Establish/update governance for integrated security

    HR & Finance

    HR provides information such as new hires and office hours as input to the security system. Finance assists in budgeting.

    Security & Privacy

    The security and privacy team will need to evaluate solutions and enforce standards on various physical and information security systems and to protect data privacy.

    Business Leaders

    Business stakeholders will provide clarity for their strategy and provide input into how they envision security furthering those goals.

    IT Executives

    IT stakeholders will be a driving force, ensuring all necessary resources are available and funded.

    Facilities/ Operations

    Operational plans will include asset management, monitoring, and support to meet functional goals and manage throughout the asset lifecycle.

    Infrastructure & Enterprise Architects

    Each solution added to the environment will need to be chosen and architected to meet business goals and security functions.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Assemble the right team to ensure the success of your integrated security ecosystem and decide the governance model, e.g. security steering committee (SSC) or a centralized single structure.

    Adapted from Create and Implement an IoT Strategy, Info-Tech Research Group, 2022

    What does the SSC do?

    Ensuring proper governance over your security program is a complex task that requires ongoing care and feeding from executive management to succeed.

    Your SSC should aim to provide the following core governance functions for your security program:

    1. Define Clarity of Intent and Direction

      How does the organization’s security strategy support the attainment of the business, IT, facilities management, and physical and information security strategies? The SSC should clearly define and communicate strategic linkage and provide direction for aligning security initiatives with desired outcomes.
    2. Establish Clear Lines of Authority

      Security programs contain many important elements that need to be coordinated. There must be clear and unambiguous authority, accountability, and responsibility defined for each element so lines of reporting/escalation are clear and conflicting objectives can be mediated.
    3. Provide Unbiased Oversight

      The SSC should vet the organization’s systematic monitoring processes to ensure there is adherence to defined risk tolerance levels and that monitoring is appropriately independent from the personnel responsible for implementing and managing the security program.
    4. Optimize Security Value Delivery

      Optimized value delivery occurs when strategic objectives for security are achieved and the organization’s acceptable risk posture is attained at the lowest possible cost. This requires constant attention to ensure controls are commensurate with any changes in risk level or appetite.

    Adapted from Improve Security Governance With a Security Steering Committee , Info-Tech Research Group, 2018

    Plan

    Identify integrated elements and compliance obligations

    To determine what elements need to be integrated, it’s important to scope the security integration program and to identify the consequences of integration for compliance obligations.

    INTEGRATED ELEMENTS

    What are my concerns?

    Process integrations

    Determine which processes need to be integrated and how

    • Examples: Security prevention, detection, and response; risk assessment

    Software and data integration

    Determine which software and data need to be integrated and how

    • Examples: Threat management tools, SIEM, IDPS, security event logs

    Hardware integration

    Determine which hardware needs to be integrated and how

    • Examples: Sensors, alarms, cameras, keys, locks, combinations, and card readers

    Network and infrastructure

    Determine which network and infrastructure components need to be integrated and how

    • Example: Network segmentation for physical access controllers.

    COMPLIANCE

    How can I address my concerns?

    Regulations

    Adhere to mandatory laws, directives, industry standards, specific contractual obligations, etc.

    • Examples: NERC CIP (North American Utilities), Network and Information Security (NIS) Directive (EU), Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 (UK), Occupational Safety and Health Act, 1970 (US), Emergency Management Act, 2007 (Canada)

    Standards

    Adhere to voluntary standards and obligations

    • Examples: NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), The Risk Management Process for Federal Facilities: An Interagency Security Committee Standard (US), Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), Service Organization Control (SOC 1 and 2)

    Guidelines

    Adopt guidelines that can improve the integrated security program

    • Examples: Best Practices for Planning and Managing Physical Security Resources (US Interagency Security Committee), Information Security Manual - Guidelines for Physical Security (Australian Cyber Security Centre), 1402-2021-Guide for Physical Security of Electric Power Substations (IEEE)

    Record integrated elements

    Scope and Boundaries from the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.

    Refer to the “Scope” tab of the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool when filling in the following elements.

    1. Record your integrated elements, i.e. process integration, software and data integration, hardware integration, network and infrastructure, and physical scope of your security integration, in the “Scope” tab of the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.
    2. For each of your scoping give the rationale for including them in the Comments column. Careful attention should be paid to any elements that are not in scope.

    Record your compliance obligations

    Refer to the “Compliance Obligations” tab of the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.

    1. Identify your compliance obligations. These can include both mandatory and voluntary obligations. Mandatory obligations include:
      • Laws
      • Government regulations
      • Industry standards
      • Contractual agreements
      Voluntary obligations include standards that the organization has chosen to follow for best practices and any obligations that are required to maintain certifications. Organizations will have many different compliance obligations. For the purposes of your integrated security, include those that include physical security requirements.
    2. Record your compliance obligations, along with any notes, in your copy of the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.
    3. Refer to the “Compliance DB” tab for lists of standards/regulations/ guidelines.
    The “Compliance Obligations” tab of the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.

    Remediate third-party compliance gaps

    If you have third-party compliance gaps, there are four primary ways to eliminate them:

    1. Find a New, Compliant Partner

      Terminate existing contract and find another organization to partner with.
    2. Bring the Capability In-House

      Expense permitting, this may be the best way to protect yourself.
    3. Demand Compliance

      Tell the third party they must become compliant. Make sure you set a deadline.
    4. Accept Noncompliance and Assume the Risk

      Sometimes remediation just isn’t cost effective and you have no choice.

    Follow Contracting Best Practices to Mitigate the Risk of Future Third-Party Compliance Gaps

    1. Perform Initial Due Diligence: Request proof of third-party compliance prior to entering into a contract.
    2. Perform Ongoing Due Diligence: Request proof of third-party contractor compliance annually.
    3. Contract Negotiation: Insert clauses requesting periodic assertions of compliance.

    View a sample contract provided by the US Department of Health and Human Services.

    Source: Take Control of Compliance Improvement to Conquer Every Audit, Info-Tech Research Group, 2015

    Pitfalls to avoid when planning security integration

    • No Resources Lineups

      Integration of security needs support from leadership, proper planning, and clear and consistent communication across the organization.
    • Not Addressing Holistic Security

      Create policies and procedures and follow standards that are holistic and based on threats and risks, e.g. consolidated access control policies.
    • Lack of Governance

      While the IT department is a critical partner in cybersecurity, the ownership of such a role sits squarely in the organizational C-suite, with regular reporting to the board of directors (if applicable).
    • Overlooking Business Continuity Effort

      IT and physical security are integral to business continuity and disaster recovery strategies.
    • Not Having Relevant Training and Awareness

      Provide a training and awareness program based on relevant attack vectors. Trained employees are key assets to the development of a safe and secure environment. They must form the base of your security culture.
    • Overbuilding or Underbuilding

      Select third-party providers that offer systems interoperability with other security tools. The intent is to promote a unified approach to security to avoid a cumbersome tooling zoo.

    Sources: Real Time Networks, 2022; Andrew Amaro, KLAVAN Security Services (contributor)

    Enhance

    Enhancing is the development of an integrated security strategy, policies, procedures, BCP, DR, and IR based on the organization’s risks.

    Enhance

    Determine the level of security maturity and update the security strategy

    • Before updating your security strategies, you need to understand the organization’s business strategies, IT strategies, facilities strategies, and physical and information security strategies. The goal is to align your integrated security strategies to contribute to your organization’s success.
    • The integrated security leaders need to understand the direction of the organization. For example:
      • Growth expectation
      • Expansions or mergers anticipation
      • Product or service changes
      • Regulatory requirements
    • Wise security investments depend on aligning your security initiatives to the organization’s objectives by supporting operational performance and ensuring brand protection and shareholder values.
    Integrated security strategies. Consists of an organization’s business strategies, IT strategies, facilities strategies, and physical and information security strategies.

    Sources: Amy L. Meger, Platte River Power Authority (contributor); Baker and Benny, 2013; IFSEC Global, 2023; Security Priorities 2023, Info-Tech Research Group, 2023; Build an Information Security Strategy, Info-Tech Research Group, 2020; ISC, n.d.

    Understanding security maturity

    Maturity models are very effective for determining security states. This table provides examples of general descriptions for physical and information security maturity levels.

    Determine which framework is suitable and select the description that most accurately reflects the ideal state for security in your organization.

    Level 1

    Level 2

    Level 3

    Level 4

    Level 5

    Minimum security with simple physical barriers. Low-level security to prevent and detect some unauthorized external activity. Medium security to prevent, detect, and assess most unauthorized external activity and some unauthorized internal activity. High-level security to prevent, detect, and assess most unauthorized external and internal activity. Maximum security to prevent, detect, assess, and neutralize all unauthorized external and internal activity.

    Physical security maturity level1

    Initial/Ad hoc security programs are reactive. Developing security programs can be effective at what they do but are not holistic. A defined security program is holistic, documented, and proactive. Managed security programs have robust governance and metrics processes. An optimized security program is based on strong risk management practices, including the production of key risk indicators (KRIs).

    Information security maturity level2

    Sources: 1 Fennelly, 2013; 2 Build an Information Security Strategy, Info-Tech Research Group, 2020

    Enhance

    Assess and treat integrated security risks

    The risk assessment conducted consists of analyzing existing inherent risks, existing pressure to the risks such as health and safety laws and codes of practice, new risks from the integration process, risk tolerance, and countermeasures.

    • Some organizations already integrate security into corporate security that consists of risk management, compliance, governance, information security, personnel security, and physical security. However, some organizations are still separating security components, especially physical security and information security, which limits security visibility and the organization’s ability to complete a comprehensive risks assessment.
    • Many vendors are also segregating physical security and information security solutions because their tools do well only on certain aspects. This forces organizations to combine multiple tools, creating a complex environment.
    • Additionally, risks related to people such as mental health issues must be addressed properly. The prevalence of hybrid work post-pandemic makes this aspect especially important.
    • Assess and treat risks based on the organization’s requirements, including its environments. For example, the US federal facility security organization is required to conduct risk assessments at least every five years for Level I (lowest risk) and Level II facilities and at least every three years for Level III, IV, and V (highest risk) facilities.

    Sources: EPA, n.d.; America's Water Infrastructure Act (AWIA), 2018; ISC, 2021

    “In 2022, 95% of US companies are consolidating into a single platform across physical security, cybersecurity, HR, legal and compliance.”

    Source: Ontic Center for Protective Intelligence, 2022; N=359

    Example risk levels

    The risk assessment conducted is based on a combination of physical and information security factors such as certain facilities factors. The risk level can be used to determine the baseline level of protection (LOP). Next, the baseline LOP is customized to the achievable LOP. The following is an example for federal facilities determined by Interagency Security Committee (ISC).

    Risk factor, points and score. Facility security level (FSL), level of risk, and baseline level of protection.

    Source: ISC, 2021

    Example assets

    It is important to identify the organization’s requirements, including its environments (IT, IoT, OT, facilities, etc.), and to measure and evaluate its risks and threats using an appropriate risk framework and tools with the critical step of identifying assets prior to acquiring solutions.

    Organizational requirements including its environments(IT, loT, OT, facilities, etc.)

    Info-Tech Insight

    Certain exceptions must be identified in risk assessment. Usually physical barriers such as gates and intrusion detection sensors are considered as countermeasures,1 however, under certain assessment, e.g. America's Water Infrastructure Act (AWIA),2 physical barriers are also considered assets and as such must also be assessed.

    Compromising a fingerprint scanner

    An anecdotal example of why physical security alone is not sufficient.

    Biometrics: secure access and data security.

    Image by Rawpixel.com on Freepik

    Lessons learned from using fingerprints for authentication:

    • Fingerprint scanners can be physically circumvented by making a copy an authorized user’s fingerprint with 3D printing or even by forcefully amputating an authorized user’s finger.
    • Authorized users may not be given access when the fingerprint cannot be recognized, e.g. if the finger is covered by bandage due to injury.
    • Integration with information security may help detect unauthorized access, e.g. a fingerprint being scanned in a Canadian office when the same user was scanned at a close time interval from an IP in Europe will trigger an alert of a possible incident.

    Info-Tech Insight

    In an ideal world, we want a physical security system that is interoperable with all technologies, flexible with minimal customization, functional, and integrated. In the real world, we may have physical systems with proprietary configurations that are not easily customized and siloed.

    Source: Robert Dang, Info-Tech Research Group

    Use case: Microchip implant

    Microchip implants can be used instead of physical devices such as key cards for digital identity and access management. Risks can be assessed using quantitative or qualitative approaches. In this use case a qualitative approach is applied to impact and likelihood, and a quantitative approach is applied to revenue and cost.

    Asset: Microchip implant

    Benefits

    Impact

    • Improve user satisfaction by removing the need to carry key cards, IDs, etc.
    • Improve operating reliability by reducing the likelihood of losing physical devices such as key cards.
    • Improve reliability of services through continuous and real-time connection with other systems such as payment system.

    Likelihood

    • Improve user satisfaction: High
    • Improve operating reliability: High
    • Improve reliability of services: High

    Revenue

    • Acquire new customers or retain existing customers by making daily lives easier with no need to carry key cards, IDs, etc.
    • Cost reduction in staffing of security personnel, e.g. reducing the staffing of building guards or receptionist.

    Risks

    Impact

    • Security: issues such as biohacking of wearable technology and interconnected devices.
    • Safety: issues such as infections or reactions in the body's immune system.
    • Privacy: issues such as unauthorized surveillance and tracking of activities.

    Likelihood

    • Biohacking: Medium
    • Infections: Low
    • Surveillance: High

    Cost

    • Installation costs and hardware costs.
    • Overall lifecycle cost including estimated software and maintenance costs.
    • Estimated cost of training and estimated increase in productivity.

    Sources: Business Insider, 2018; BBC News, 2022; ISC, 2015

    Enhance

    Update integrated security policies and procedures

    Global policies with local implementation

    This model works for corporate groups with a parent company. In this model, global security policies are developed by a parent company and local policies are applied to the unique business that is not supported by the parent company.

    Update of existing security policies

    This model works for organizations with sufficient resources. In this model, integrated security policies are derived from various policies. For example, physical security in smart buildings/devices (sensors, automated meters, HVAC, etc.) and OT systems (SCADA, PLCs, RTUs, etc.) introduce unique risk exposures, necessitating updates to security policies.

    Customization of information security policies

    This model works for smaller organizations with limited resources. In this model, integrated security policies are derived from information security policies. The issue is when these policies are not applicable to physical security systems or other environments, e.g. OT systems.

    Sources: Kris Krishan, Waymo (contributor); Isabelle Hertanto, Info-Tech Research Group (contributor); Physical and Environmental Security Policy Template, Info-Tech Research Group, 2022.

    Enhance

    Update BCP, DR, IR

    • Physical threats such as theft of material, vandalism, loitering, and the like are also part of business continuity threats.
    • These threats can be carried out by various means such as vehicles breaching perimeter security, bolt cutters used for cutting wire and cable, and ballistic attack.
    • Issues may occur when security operations are owned separately by physical security or information security, thus lacking consistent application of best practices.
    • To overcome this issue, organizations need to update BCP, DR, and IR holistically based on a cost-benefit analysis and the level of security maturity, which can be defined based on the suitable framework.

    Sources: IEEE, 2021; ISC, 2021

    “The best way to get management excited about a disaster plan is to burn down the building across the street.”

    Source: Dan Erwin, Security Officer, Dow Chemical Co., in Computerworld, 2022

    Optimize

    Optimizing means working to make the most effective and efficient use of resources, starting with identifying skill requirements and closing skill gaps, followed by designing and deploying integrated security architecture and controls, and finally monitoring and reporting integrated security metrics.

    Optimize

    Identify skill requirements and close skill gaps

    • The pandemic changed how people work and where they choose to work, and most people still want a hybrid work model. Our survey in July 2022 (N=516) found that 55.8% of employees have the option to work offsite 2-3 days per week, 21.0% can work offsite 1 day per week, and 17.8% can work offsite 4 days per week.
    • The investment (e.g. on infrastructure and networks) to initiate remote work was huge, and the costs didn’t end there; organizations needed to maintain the secure remote work infrastructure to facilitate the hybrid work model.
    • Moreover, roles are evolving due to convergence and modernization. These new roles require an integrative skill set. For example, the grid security and ops team might consist of an IT security specialist, a SCADA technician/engineer, and an OT/IIOT security specialist, where OT/IIOT security specialist is a new role.
    Identify skill gaps that hinder the successful execution of the hybrid work security strategy. Use the identified skill gaps to define the technical skill requirements for current and future work roles. Conduct a skills assessment on your current workforce to identify employee skill gaps. Decide whether to train (including certification), hire, contract, or outsource to close each skill gap.

    Strategic investment in internal security team

    Internal security governance and management using in-house developed tools or off-the-shelf solutions, e.g. security information and event management (SIEM).

    Security management using third parties

    Internal security management using third-party security services, e.g. managed security service providers (MSSPs).

    Outsourcing security management

    Outsourcing the entire security functions, e.g. using managed detection and response (MDR).

    Sources: Info-Tech Research Group’s Security Priorities 2023, Close the InfoSec Skills Gap, Build an IT Employee Engagement Program, and Grid Modernization

    Select the right certifications

    What are the options?

    • One issue in security certification is the complexity of relevancy in topics with respect to roles and levels.
    • The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) takes the approach of analyzing existing certifications of ICS/SCADA professionals' cybersecurity skills by orientation, scope, and supporting bodies that are grouped into specific certifications, relevant certifications, and safety certifications (ENISA, 2015).
    • This approach can also be applied to integrated security certifications.

    Physical security certification

    • Examples: Industrial Security Professional Certification (NCMS-ISP); Physical Security Professional (ASIS-PSP); Physical Security Certification (CDSE-PSC); ISC I-100, I-200, I-300, and I-400

    Cyber physical system security certification

    • Examples: Certified SCADA Security Architect (CSSA), EC-Council ICS/SCADA Cybersecurity Training Course

    Information security certification

    • Examples: Network and Information Security (NIS) Driving License, ISA/IEC 62443 Cybersecurity Certificate Program, GIAC Global Industrial Cyber Security Professional (GICSP)

    Safety Certifications

    • Examples: Board of Certified Safety Professionals (BCSP), European Network of Safety and Health Professional Organizations (ENSHPO)
    Table showing options for Certification orientation, scope and supporting bodies.

    Optimize

    Design and deploy integrated security architecture and controls

    • A survey by Brivo found that 38% of respondents have partly centralized security platforms, 25% have decentralized platforms, and 36% have centralized platforms (Brivo, 2022; N=700).
    • If your organization’s security program is still decentralized or partly centralized and your organization is planning to establish an integrated security program, then the recommendation is to perform a holistic risk assessment based on probability and impact assessments on threats and vulnerabilities.
    • The impacted factors, for example, are customers served, criticality of services, equipment present inside the building, personnel response time for operational recovery and the mitigation of hazards, and costs.
    • Frameworks such as Sherwood Applied Business Security Architecture (SABSA), Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT), and The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) can be used to build security architecture that aligns security goals with business goals.
    • Finally, analyze the security design against the design criteria.

    Sources: ISA and Honeywell Integrated Security Technology Lab, n.d.; IEEE, 2021

    “As long as organizations treat their physical and cyber domains as separate, there is little hope of securing either one.”

    Source: FedTech magazine, 2009

    Analyze architecture design

    Cloud, on-premises, or hybrid? During the pandemic, many enterprises were under tight deadlines to migrate to the cloud. Many did not refactor data and applications correctly for cloud platforms during migration, with the consequence of high cloud bills. This happened because the migrated applications cannot take advantage of on-premises capabilities such as autoscaling. Thus, in 2023, it is plausible that enterprises will bring applications and data back on-premises.

    Below is an example of a security design analysis of platform architecture. Design can be assessed using quantitative or qualitative approaches. In this example, a qualitative approach is applied using high-level advantages and disadvantages.

    Design criteria

    Cloud

    Hybrid

    On-premises

    Effort

    Consumer effort is within a range, e.g. < 60%

    Consumer effort is within a range e.g. < 80%

    100% organization

    Reliability

    High reliability

    High reliability

    Medium reliability that depends on data centers

    Cost

    High cost when data and applications are not correctly designed for cloud

    Optimized cost when data and applications are correctly designed either for cloud or native

    Medium cost when data and applications take advantage of on-prem capabilities

    Info-Tech Insight

    It is important for organizations to find the most optimized architecture to support them, for example, a hybrid architecture of cloud and on-premises based on operations and cost-effectiveness. To help design a security architecture that is strategic, realistic, and based on risk, see Info-Tech’s Identify the Components of Your Cloud Security Architecture research.

    Sources: InfoWorld, 2023; Identify the Components of Your Cloud Security Architecture , Info-Tech Research Group, 2021

    Analyze equipment design

    Below is an example case of a security design analysis of electronic security systems. Design can be assessed using quantitative or qualitative approaches. In this example a qualitative approach is applied using advantages and disadvantages.

    Surveillance design criteria

    Video camera

    Motion detector

    Theft of security system equipment

    Higher economic loss Lower economic loss

    Reliability

    Positive detection of intrusion Spurious indication and lower reliability

    Energy savings and bandwidth

    Only record when motion is detected Detect and process all movement

    Info-Tech Insight

    Once the design has been analyzed, the next step is to conduct market research to analyze the solutions landscape, e.g. to compare products or services from vendors or manufacturers.

    Sources: IEEE, 202; IEC, n.d.; IEC, 2013

    Analyze off-the-shelf solutions

    Criteria to consider when comparing solutions:

    Criteria to consider when comparing solutions: 1 - Visibility and asset management. 2 - Threat detection, mitigation and response. 3 - Risk assessment and vulnerability management. 4 - Usability, architecture, Cost.

    Visibility and Asset Management

    Passively monitoring data using various protocol layers, actively sending queries to devices, or parsing configuration files of physical security devices, OT, IoT, and IT environments on assets, processes, and connectivity paths.

    Threat Detection, Mitigation, and Response (+ Hunting)

    Automation of threat analysis (signature-based, specification-based, anomaly-based, flow-based, content-based, sandboxing) not only in IT but also in relevant environments, e.g. physical, IoT, IIoT, and OT on assets, data, network, and orchestration with threat intelligence sharing and analytics.

    Risk Assessment and Vulnerability Management

    Risk scoring approach (qualitative, quantitative) based on variables such as behavioral patterns and geolocation. Patching and vulnerability management.

    Usability, Architecture, Cost

    The user and administrative experience, multiple deployment options, extensive integration capabilities, and affordability.

    Source: Secure IT/OT Convergence, Info-Tech Research Group, 2022

    Optimize

    Establish, monitor, and report integrated security metrics

    Security metrics serve various functions in a security program.1 For example:

    • As audit requirements. For integrated security, the requirements are derived from mandatory or voluntary compliance, e.g. NERC CIP.
    • As an indicator of maturity level. For integrated security, maturity level is used to measure the state of security, e.g. C2M2, CMMC.
    • As a measurement of effectiveness and efficiency. Security metrics consist of operational metrics, financial metrics, etc.

    Safety

    Physical security interfaces with the physical world. Thus, metrics based on risks related to safety are crucial. These metrics motivate personnel by making clear why they should care about security.
    Source: EPRI, 2017

    Business Performance

    The impact of security on the business can be measured with various metrics such as operational metrics, service level agreements (SLAs), and financial metrics.
    Source: BMC, 2022

    Technology Performance

    Early detection leads to faster remediation and less damage. Metrics such as maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) and mean time to recovery (MTR) indicate system reliability.
    Source: Dark Reading, 2022

    Security Culture

    Measure the overall quality of security culture with indicators such as compliance and audit, vulnerability management, and training and awareness.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Security failure can be avoided by evaluating the security systems and program. Security evaluation requires understanding what, where, when, and how to measure and to report the relevant metrics.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Secure IT/OT Convergence

    The previously entirely separate OT ecosystem is migrating into the IT ecosystem, primarily to improve access via connectivity and to leverage other standard IT capabilities for economic benefit.

    Hence, IT and OT need to collaborate, starting with communication to build trust and to overcome their differences and followed by negotiation on components such as governance and management, security controls on OT environments, compliance with regulations and standards, and establishing metrics for OT security.

    Preparing for Technology Convergence in Manufacturing

    Information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) teams have a long history of misalignment and poor communication.

    Stakeholder expectations and technology convergence create the need to leave the past behind and build a culture of collaboration.

    Build an Information Security Strategy

    Info-Tech has developed a highly effective approach to building an information security strategy – an approach that has been successfully tested and refined for over seven years with hundreds of organizations.

    This unique approach includes tools for ensuring alignment with business objectives, assessing organizational risk and stakeholder expectations, enabling a comprehensive current-state assessment, prioritizing initiatives, and building a security roadmap.

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    Research Contributors and Experts

    Amy L. Meger, IGP

    Information and Cyber Governance Manager
    Platte River Power Authority

    Andrew Amaro

    Chief Security Officer (CSO) & Founder
    KLAVAN Security

    Bilson Perez

    IT Security Manager
    4Wall Entertainment

    Dan Adams

    VP of Information Technology
    4Wall Entertainment

    Doery Abdou

    Senior Manager
    March Networks Corporate

    Erich Krueger

    Manager of Security Engineering
    Omaha Public Power District

    Kris Krishan

    Head of IT
    Waymo

    Owen Yardley

    Director, Facilities Security Preparedness
    Omaha Public Power District

    Document Your Cloud Strategy

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    • Parent Category Name: Cloud Strategy
    • Parent Category Link: /cloud-strategy

    Despite the universally agreed-upon benefit of formulating a coherent strategy, several obstacles make execution difficult:

    • Inconsistent understanding of what the cloud means
    • Inability to come to a consensus on key decisions
    • Ungoverned decision-making
    • Unclear understanding of cloud roles and responsibilities

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    A cloud strategy might seem like a big project, but it’s just a series of smaller conversations. The methodology presented here is designed to facilitate those conversations, using a curated list of topics, prompts, participant lists, and sample outcomes. We have divided the strategy into four key areas:

    • Vision and alignment
    • People
    • Governance
    • Technology

    Impact and Result

    • A shared understanding of what is necessary to succeed in the cloud
    • An end to ad hoc deployments that solve small problems and create larger ones
    • A unified approach and set of principles that apply to governance, architecture, integration, skills, and roles (and much, much more).

    Document Your Cloud Strategy Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Document Your Cloud Strategy – a phased guide to identifying, validating, and recording the steps you’ll take, the processes you’ll leverage, and the governance you’ll deploy to succeed in the cloud.

    This storyboard comprises four phases, covering mission and vision, people, governance, and technology, and how each of these areas requires forethought when migrating to the cloud.

    • Document Your Cloud Strategy – Phases 1-4

    2. Cloud Strategy Document Template – a template that allows you to record the results of the cloud strategy exercise in a clear, readable way.

    Each section of Document Your Cloud Strategy corresponds to a section in the document template. Once you’ve completed each exercise, you can record your results in the document template, leaving you with an artifact you can share with stakeholders.

    • Cloud Strategy Document Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Document Your Cloud Strategy

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Document Your Vision and Alignment

    The Purpose

    Understand and document your cloud vision and its alignment with your other strategic priorities.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A complete understanding of your strategy, vision, alignment, and a list of success metrics that will help you find your way.

    Activities

    1.1 Record your cloud mission and vision.

    1.2 Document your cloud strategy’s alignment with other strategic plans.

    1.3 Record your cloud guiding principles.

    Outputs

    Documented strategy, vision, and alignment.

    Defined success metrics.

    2 Record Your People Strategy

    The Purpose

    Define how people, skills, and roles will contribute to the broader cloud strategy.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Sections of the strategy that highlight skills, roles, culture, adoption, and the creation of a governance body.

    Activities

    2.1 Outline your skills and roles strategy.

    2.2 Document your approach to culture and adoption

    2.3 Create a cloud governing body.

    Outputs

    Documented people strategy.

    3 Document Governance Principles

    The Purpose

    This section facilitates governance in the cloud, developing principles that apply to architecture, integration, finance management, and more.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Sections of the strategy that define governance principles.

    Activities

    3.1 Conduct discussion on architecture.

    3.2 Conduct discussion on integration and interoperability.

    3.3 Conduct discussion on operations management.

    3.4 Conduct discussion on cloud portfolio management.

    3.5 Conduct discussion on cloud vendor management.

    3.6 Conduct discussion on finance management.

    3.7 Conduct discussion on security.

    3.8 Conduct discussion on data controls.

    Outputs

    Documented cloud governance strategy.

    4 Formalize Your Technology Strategy

    The Purpose

    Creation of a formal cloud strategy relating to technology around provisioning, monitoring, and migration.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Completed strategy sections of the document that cover technology areas.

    Activities

    4.1 Formalize organizational approach to monitoring.

    4.2 Document provisioning process.

    4.3 Outline migration processes and procedures.

    Outputs

    Documented cloud technology strategy.

    Further reading

    Document Your Cloud Strategy

    Get ready for the cloudy future with a consistent, proven strategy.

    Analyst perspective

    Any approach is better than no approach

    The image contains a picture of Jeremy Roberts

    Moving to the cloud is a big, scary transition, like moving from gas-powered to electric cars, or from cable to streaming, or even from the office to working from home. There are some undeniable benefits, but we must reorient our lives a bit to accommodate those changes, and the results aren’t always one-for-one. A strategy helps you make decisions about your future direction and how you should respond to changes and challenges. In Document Your Cloud Strategy we hope to help you accomplish just that: clarifying your overall mission and vision (as it relates to the cloud) and helping you develop an approach to changes in technology, people management, and, of course, governance. The cloud is not a panacea. Taken on its own, it will not solve your problems. But it can be an important tool in your IT toolkit, and you should aim to make the best use of it – whatever “best” happens to mean for you.

    Jeremy Roberts

    Research Director, Infrastructure and Operations

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    The cloud is multifaceted. It can be complicated. It can be expensive. Everyone has an opinion on the best way to proceed – and in many cases has already begun the process without bothering to get clearance from IT. The core challenge is creating a coherent strategy to facilitate your overall goals while making the best use of cloud technology, your financial resources, and your people.

    Common Obstacles

    Despite the universally agreed-upon benefit of formulating a coherent strategy, several obstacles make execution difficult:

    • Inconsistent understanding of what the cloud means
    • Inability to come to a consensus on key decisions
    • Ungoverned decision making
    • Unclear understanding of cloud roles and responsibilities

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    A cloud strategy might seem like a big project, but it’s just a series of smaller conversations. The methodology presented here is designed to facilitate those conversations, using a curated list of topics, prompts, participant lists, and sample outcomes. We have divided the strategy into four key areas:

    1. Vision and alignment
    2. People
    3. Governance
    4. Technology

    The answers might be different, but the questions are the same

    Every organization will approach the cloud differently, but they all need to ask the same questions: When will we use the cloud? What forms will our cloud usage take? How will we manage governance? What will we do about people? How will we incorporate new technology into our environment? The answers to these questions are as numerous as there are people to answer them, but the questions must be asked.

    Your challenge

    This research is designed to help organizations that are facing these challenges or looking to:

    • Ensure that the cloud strategy is complete and accurately reflects organizational goals and priorities.
    • Develop a consistent and coherent approach to adopting cloud services.
    • Design an approach to mitigate risks and challenges associated with adopting cloud services.
    • Create a shared understanding of the expected benefits of cloud services and the steps required to realize those benefits.

    Grappling with a cloud strategy is a top initiative: 43% of respondents report progressing on a cloud-first strategy as a top cloud initiative.

    Source: Flexera, 2021.

    Definition: Cloud strategy

    A document providing a systematic overview of cloud services, their appropriate use, and the steps that an organization will take to maximize value and minimize risk.

    Common obstacles

    These barriers make this challenge difficult to address for many organizations:

    • The cloud means different things to different people, and creating a strategy that is comprehensive enough to cover a multitude of use cases while also being written to be consumable by all stakeholders is difficult.
    • The incentives to adopt the cloud differ based on the expected benefit for the individual customer. User-led decision making and historically ungoverned deployments can make it difficult to reset expectation and align with a formal strategy.
    • Getting all the right people in a room together to agree on the key components of the strategy and the direction undertaken for each one is often difficult.

    Info-Tech’s approach

    Define Your Cloud Vision

    Vision and alignment

    • Mission and vision
    • Alignment to other strategic plans
    • Guiding principles
    • Measuring success

    Technology

    • Monitoring
    • Provisioning
    • Migration

    Governance

    • Architecture
    • Integration and interoperability
    • Operations management
    • Cloud portfolio management
    • Cloud vendor management
    • Finance management
    • Security
    • Data controls

    People

    • Skills and roles
    • Culture and adoption
    • Governing bodies

    Info-Tech’s approach

    Your cloud strategy will comprise the elements listed under “vision and alignment,” “technology,” “governance,” and “people.” The Info-Tech methodology involves breaking the strategy down into subcomponents and going through a three-step process for each one. Start by reviewing a standard set of questions and understanding the goal of the exercise: What do we need to know? What are some common considerations and best practices? Once you’ve had a chance to review, discuss your current state and any gaps: What has been done? What still needs to be done? Finally, outline how you plan to go forward: What are your next steps? Who needs to be involved?

    Review

    • What questions do we need to answer to complete the discussion of this strategy component? What does the decision look like?
    • What are some key terms and best practices we must understand before deciding?

    Discuss

    • What steps have we already taken to address this component?
    • Does anything still need to be done?
    • Is there anything we’re not sure about or need further guidance on?

    Go forward

    • What are the next steps?
    • Who needs to be involved?
    • What questions still need to be asked/answered?
    • What should the document’s wording look like?

    Info-Tech’s methodology for documenting your cloud strategy

    1. Document your vision and alignment

    2. Record your people strategy

    3. Document governance principles

    4. Formalize your technology strategy

    Phase Steps

    1. Record your cloud mission and vision
    2. Document your cloud strategy’s alignment with other strategic plans
    3. Record your cloud guiding principles
    4. Define success
    1. Outline your skills and roles strategy
    2. Document your approach to culture and adoption
    3. Create a cloud governing body

    Document official organizational positions in these governance areas:

    1. Architecture
    2. Integration and interoperability
    3. Operations management
    4. Cloud portfolio management
    5. Cloud vendor management
    6. Finance management
    7. Security
    8. Data controls
    1. Formalize organizational approach to monitoring
    2. Document provisioning process
    3. Outline migration processes and procedures

    Phase Outcomes

    Documented strategy: vision and alignment

    Documented people strategy

    Documented cloud governance strategy

    Documented cloud technology strategy

    Insight summary

    Separate strategy from tactics

    Separate strategy from tactics! A strategy requires building out the framework for ongoing decision making. It is meant to be high level and achieve a large goal. The outcome of a strategy is often a sense of commitment to the goal and better communication on the topic.

    The cloud does not exist in a vacuum

    Your cloud strategy flows from your cloud vision and should align with the broader IT strategy. It is also part of a pantheon of strategies and should exist harmoniously with other strategies – data, security, etc.

    People problems needn’t preponderate

    The cloud doesn’t have to be a great disruptor. If you handle the transition well, you can focus your people on doing more valuable work – and this is generally engaging.

    Governance is a means to an end

    Governing your deployment for its own sake will only frustrate your end users. Articulate the benefits users and the organization can expect to see and you’re more likely to receive the necessary buy-in.

    Technology isn’t a panacea

    Technology won’t solve all your problems. Technology is a force multiplier, but you will still have to design processes and train your people to fully leverage it.

    Key deliverable

    Cloud Strategy Document template

    Inconsistency and informality are the enemies of efficiency. Capture the results of the cloud strategy generation exercises in the Cloud Strategy Document template.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Cloud Strategy Document Template.
    • Record the results of the exercises undertaken as part of this blueprint in the Cloud Strategy Document template.
    • It is important to remember that not every cloud strategy will look exactly the same, but this template represents an amalgamation of best practices and cloud strategy creation honed over several years of advisory service in the space.
    • You know your audience better than anyone. If you would prefer a strategy delivered in a different way (e.g. presentation format) feel free to adapt the Cloud Vision Executive Presentation into a longer strategy presentation.
    • Emphasis is an area where you should exercise discretion as well. A cost-oriented cloud strategy, or one that prioritizes one type of cloud (e.g. SaaS) at the exclusion of others, may benefit from more focus on some areas than others, or the introduction of relevant subcategories. Include as many of these as you think will be relevant.
    • Parsimony is king – if you can distill a concept to its essence, start there. Include additional detail only as needed. You want your cloud strategy document to be read. If it’s too long or overly detailed, you’ll encounter readability issues.

    Blueprint benefits

    IT benefits

    Business benefits

    • A consistent, well-defined approach to the cloud
    • Consensus on key strategy components, including security, architecture, and integration
    • A clear path forward on skill development and talent acquisition/retention
    • A comprehensive resource for information about the organization’s approach to key strategy components
    • Predictable access to cloud services
    • A business-aligned approach to leveraging the resources available in the cloud
    • Efficient and secure consumption of cloud resources where appropriate to do so
    • Answers to questions about the cloud and how it will be leveraged in the environment

    Measure the value of this blueprint

    Don’t take our word for it:

    • Document Your Cloud Strategy has been available for several years in various forms as both a workshop and as an analyst-led guided implementation.
    • After each engagement, we send a survey that asks members how they benefited from the experience. Those who have worked through Info-Tech’s cloud strategy material have given overwhelmingly positive feedback.
    • Additionally, members reported saving between 10 and 20 days and an average of $46,499.
    • Measure the value by calculating the time saved as a result of using Info-Tech’s framework vs. a home-brewed cloud strategy alternative and by comparing the overall cost of a guided implementation or workshop with the equivalent offering from another firm. We’re confident you’ll come out ahead.

    8.8/10 Average reported satisfaction

    13 Days Average reported time savings

    $46,499 Average cost savings

    Executive Brief Case Study

    INDUSTRY: Pharmaceuticals

    SOURCE: Info-Tech workshop

    Pharmaceutical company

    The unnamed pharmaceutical company that is the subject of this case study was looking to make the transition to the cloud. In the absence of a coherent strategy, the organization had a few cloud deployments with no easily discernable overall approach. Representatives of several distinct functions (legal, infrastructure, data, etc.) all had opinions on the uses and abuses of cloud services, but it had been difficult to round everyone up and have the necessary conversations. As a result, the strategy exercise had not proceeded in a speedy or well-governed way. This lack of strategic readiness presented a roadblock to moving forward with the cloud strategy and to work with the cloud implementation partner, tasked with execution.

    Results

    The company engaged Info-Tech for a four-day workshop on cloud strategy documentation. Over the course of four days, participants drawn from across the organization discussed the strategic components and generated consensus statements and next steps. The team was able to formalize the cloud strategy and described the experience as saving 10 days.

    Example output: Document your cloud strategy workshop exercise

    The image contains an example of Document your cloud streatgy workshop exercise.

    Anything in green, the team was reasonably sure they had good alignment and next steps. Those yellow flags warranted more discussion and were not ready for documentation.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

    Guided Implementation

    "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

    Workshop

    "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

    Consulting

    "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Document your vision and alignment

    Record your people strategy

    Document governance principles

    Formalize your technology strategy

    Call #1: Review existing vision/strategy documentation.

    Call #2: Review progress on skills, roles, and governance bodies.

    Call #3: Work through integration, architecture, finance management, etc. based on reqs. (May be more than one call.)

    Call #4: Discuss challenges with monitoring, provisioning, and migration as-needed.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization. A typical GI is 4 to 6 calls over the course of 1 to 3 months

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Day 1

    Day 2

    Day 3

    Day 4

    Day 5

    Answer
    “so what?”

    Define the
    IT target state

    Assess the IT
    current state

    Bridge the gap and
    create the strategy

    Next steps and
    wrap-up (offsite)

    Activities

    1.1 Introduction

    1.2 Discuss cloud mission and vision

    1.3 Discuss alignment with other strategic plans

    1.4 Discuss guiding principles

    1.5 Define success metrics

    2.1 Discuss skills and roles

    2.2 Review culture and adoption

    2.3 Discuss a cloud governing body

    2.4 Review architecture position

    2.5 Discuss integration and interoperability

    3.1 Discuss cloud operations management

    3.2 Review cloud portfolio management

    3.3 Discuss cloud vendor management

    3.4 Discuss cloud finance management

    3.5 Discuss cloud security

    4.1 Review and formalize data controls

    4.2 Design a monitoring approach

    4.3 Document the workload provisioning process

    4.4 Outline migration processes and procedures

    5.1 Populate the Cloud Strategy Document

    Deliverables

    Formalized cloud mission and vision, along with alignment with strategic plans, guiding principles, and success metrics

    Position statement on skills and roles, culture and adoption, governing bodies, architecture, and integration/interoperability

    Position statements on cloud operations management, portfolio management, vendor management, finance management, and cloud security

    Position statements on data controls, monitoring, provisioning, and migration

    Completed Cloud Strategy Document

    Phase 1

    Document Your Vision and Alignment

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    Phase 4

    1.1 Document your mission and vision

    1.2 Document alignment to other strategic plans

    1.3 Document guiding principles

    1.4 Document success metrics

    2.1 Define approach to skills and roles

    2.2 Define approach to culture and adoption

    2.3 Define cloud governing bodies

    3.1 Define architecture direction

    3.2 Define integration approach

    3.3 Define operations management process

    3.4 Define portfolio management direction

    3.5 Define vendor management direction

    3.6 Document finance management tactics

    3.7 Define approach to cloud security

    3.8 Define data controls in the cloud

    4.1 Define cloud monitoring strategy

    4.2 Define cloud provisioning strategy

    4.3 Define cloud migration strategy

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    1. Record your cloud mission and vision
    2. Document your cloud strategy’s alignment with other strategic plans
    3. Record your cloud guiding principles
    4. Define success

    This phase has the following outcome:

    • Documented strategy: vision and alignment

    Record your mission and vision

    Build on the work you’ve already done

    Before formally documenting your cloud strategy, you should ensure that you have a good understanding of your overall cloud vision. How do you plan to leverage the cloud? What goals are you looking to accomplish? How will you distribute your workloads between different cloud service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS)? What will your preferred delivery model be (public, private, hybrid)? Will you support your cloud deployment internally or use the services of various consultants or managed service providers?

    The answers to these questions will inform the first section of your cloud strategy. If you haven’t put much thought into this or think you could use a deep dive on the fundamentals of your cloud vision and cloud archetypes, consider reviewing Define Your Cloud Vision, the companion blueprint to this one.

    Once you understand your cloud vision and what you’re trying to accomplish with your cloud strategy, this phase will walk you through aligning the strategy with other strategic initiatives. What decisions have others made that will impact the cloud strategy (or that the cloud strategy will impact)? Who must be involved/informed? What callouts must be involved at what point? Do users have access to the appropriate strategic documentation (and would they understand it if they did)?

    You must also capture some guiding principles. A strategy by its nature provides direction, helping readers understand the decisions they should make and why those decisions align with organizational interests. Creating some top-level principles is a useful exercise because those principles facilitate comprehension and ensure the strategy’s applicability.

    Finally, this phase will walk you through the process of measuring success. Once you know where you’d like to go, the principles that underpin your direction, and how your cloud strategy figures into the broader strategic pantheon, you should record what success actually means. If you’re looking to save money, overall cost should be a metric you track. If the cloud is all about productivity, generate appropriate productivity metrics. If you’re looking to expand into new technology or close a datacenter, you will need to track output specific to those overall goals.

    Review: mission and vision

    The overall organizational mission is a key foundational element of the cloud strategy. If you don’t understand where you’re going, how can you begin the journey to get there? This section of the strategy has four key parts that you should understand and incorporate into the beginning of the strategy document. If you haven’t already, review Define Your Cloud Vision for instructions on how to generate these elements.

    1. Cloud vision statement: This is a succinct encapsulation of your overall perspective on the suitability of cloud services for your environment – what you hope to accomplish. The ideal statement includes a scope (who/what does the strategy impact?), a goal (what will it accomplish?), and a key differentiator (what will make it happen?). This is an example: “[Organization] will leverage public cloud solutions and retire existing datacenter and colocation facilities. This transition will simplify infrastructure administration, support and security, while modernizing legacy infrastructure and reducing the need for additional capital expenditure.” You might also consider reviewing your overall cloud archetype (next slide) and including the output of that exercise in the document

    2. Service model decision framework: Services can be provided as software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), or they can be colocated or remain on premises. Not all cloud service models serve the same purpose or provide equal value in all circumstances. Understanding how you plan to take advantage of these distinct service models is an important component of the cloud strategy. In this section of the strategy, a rubric that captures the characteristics of the ideal workload for each of the named service models, along with some justification for the selection, is essential. This is a core component of Define Your Cloud Vision, and if you would like to analyze individual workloads, you can use the Cloud Vision Workbook for that purpose.

    3. Delivery model decision framework: Just as there are different cloud service models that have unique value propositions, there are several unique cloud delivery models as well, distinguished by ownership, operation, and customer base. Public clouds are the purview of third-party providers who make them available to paying customers. Private clouds are built for the exclusive use of a designated organization or group of organizations with internal clients to serve. Hybrid clouds involve the use of multiple, interoperable delivery models (interoperability is the key term here), while multi-cloud deployment models incorporate multiple delivery and service models into a single coherent strategy. What will your preferred delivery model be? Why?

    4. Support model decision framework: Once you have a service model nailed down and understand how you will execute on the delivery, the question then becomes about how you will support your cloud deployment going forward. Broadly speaking, you can choose to manage your deployment in house using internal resources (e.g. staff), to use managed service providers for ongoing support, or to hire consultants to handle specific projects/tasks. Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses, and many cloud customers will deploy multiple support models across time and different workloads. A foundational perspective on the support model is a key component of the cloud vision and should appear early in the strategy.

    Understand key cloud concepts: Archetype

    Once you understand the value of the cloud, your workloads’ general suitability for the cloud, and your proposed risks and mitigations, the next step is to define your cloud archetype. Your organization’s cloud archetype is the strategic posture that IT adopts to best support the organization’s goals. Info-Tech’s model recognizes seven archetypes, divided into three high-level archetypes. After consultation with your stakeholders, and based on the results of the suitability and risk assessment activities, define your archetype. The archetype feeds into the overall cloud vision and provides simple insight into the cloud future state for all stakeholders. The cloud vision itself is captured in a “vision statement,” a short summary of the overall approach that includes the overall cloud archetype.

    The image contains an arrow facing vertically up. The pointed end of the arrow is labelled more cloud, and the bottom of the arrow is labelled less cloud.

    We can best support the organization’s goals by:

    Cloud-Focused

    Cloud-Centric

    Providing all workloads through cloud delivery.

    Cloud-First

    Using the cloud as our default deployment model. For each workload, we should ask “why NOT cloud?”

    Cloud-Opportunistic

    Hybrid

    Enabling the ability to transition seamlessly between on-premises and cloud resources for many workloads.

    Integrated

    Combining cloud and traditional infrastructure resources, integrating data and applications through APIs or middleware.

    Split

    Using the cloud for some workloads and traditional infrastructure resources for others.

    Cloud-Averse

    Cloud-Light

    Using traditional infrastructure resources and limiting our use of the cloud to when it is absolutely necessary.

    Anti-Cloud

    Using traditional infrastructure resources and avoiding the use of cloud wherever possible.

    IT Strategy

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