Safety as a secondary consideration

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This is a story that should make you perk up.

I know of a department that was eager to launch their new product. The strain was severe. The board was breathing down their necks. Rivals were catching up (or so they thought).

What did they do?

"Let's get this thing live, prove the market wants it, then we'll circle back and handle all the security and stability backlog items." For the product owner, at the time, that seemed the right thing to do.

They were hacked 48 hours after going live.

Customer information was stolen. The brand's reputation suffered. The decision led to a months-long legal nightmare. And they still had to completely rebuild the system. Making stability and security bolt-on items is never a good idea.

The true price of "fix it later"

See, I understand. When the product owner is pressing for user experience enhancements and you're running out of time for launch, it's easy to overlook those "non-functional requirements." Yet, we should avoid blaming the product owner. The PO is under pressure from many stakeholders, and a delayed launch may also come with significant costs.

Load balancing isn't visible to customers, after all. Penetration testing doesn't excite them. Failure mechanisms don't matter to them. This statement is true until a malfunction impacts a client. Then it suddenly becomes the most important thing in the world.

However, I know that ignoring non-functional requirements (NFRs) can lead to failed businesses (or business lines). This elevates these issues beyond mere technical inconveniences. NFRs are designed with the client in mind.

Look at it this way. When your system crashes during periods of high traffic, how does the user experience change? How satisfied are customers when their personal information is stolen? When it takes 30 seconds for your website to load, how does that conversion rate look?

Let me expose you to some consultant figures. The average cost of IT outages is $5,600 per minute, according to a 2014 Gartner study. That figure can rise to $300,000 per hour for larger businesses. The reality is that in your department, you will rarely reach these numbers. When we look at current (2020-2025) and expected (2026) trends, the typical operational loss numbers in international commercial banking or insurance are closer to 100K for high-impact incidents that are handled within 2–3 hours.

Obviously, your numbers will vary. And if you don't know what your costs are, now would be a good time to discover that. This does not imply that you should simply accept the risks associated with such situations. You must fix or mitigate such opportunities for hackers to get in. Do so at the appropriate cost for your business.

Data breaches are a unique phenomenon. According to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, a data breach typically costs $4.44 million, and detecting and containing it takes an average of 241 days. Some preview data from the 2025 report include that 97% of organizations that reported on the study indicated that they lacked access controls for their AI systems. That means that many companies don't even have the basics in order. And AI-related breaches are just going to accelerate. AI security defenses will help lower the cost of such breaches.

Despite the decreasing cost of these breaches, I anticipate an increase in their frequency in the upcoming years.

This means that non-functional requirements in terms of security and resilience should take a more prominent place in the prioritizations. Your client depends on your systems being safe, resilient, and performant.

The blind spot in leadership

And yet, this is where some leaders make mistakes. I have the impression they believe that client-focused design means more functionality and elegant interfaces. They prioritize user experience enhancements over system reliability.

I want to share a key fact that distinguishes successful businesses: customers desire more than just a good product. It must always function for them. And that means following certain procedures. They are not there to hamper you; they are there to retain customers.

88% of online shoppers are less likely to visit a website again after a negative experience, according to research from Forrester. Amazon found that they lose 1% of sales for every 100 ms of latency. That 100 milliseconds adds up to millions of lost profits when billions of dollars are at stake.

You run the risk of more than just technical difficulties when you deprioritize safety. Customer trust, revenue stability, competitive advantage, adherence to the law, costs, and team morale are all at stake.

The "happy flow" trap is costing you revenue.

Allow me to illustrate what I see happening during development cycles.

The team tests the happy flow. The user successfully logs in. The user navigates with ease. The user makes the purchase without any problems. The user logs off without incident.

"Excellent! Publish it!"

However, what occurs if 1000 users attempt to log in at once? What occurs if an attempt is made to insert malicious code into your contact form? During a transaction, what happens if your database connection fails?

These are not extreme situations. These are real-life occurrences.

Fifty percent of data center managers and operators reported having an impactful outage in the previous three years, according to the Uptime Institute's 2025 Global Data Center Survey. Note that this is at the infra level. The biggest contributor is power outages. What role does power play in ensuring a smooth flow? Power will not always flow as you want it, so plan for lack of power and for spikes.

With regard to software failures, the spread of possible causes widens. AI is a big contributor. AI is typically brought in to accelerate development and assist in coding. But it tends to introduce subtle bugs and vulnerabilities that a seasoned developer has to review and solve.

Another upcoming article will discuss how faster release cycles often lead to a rush in testing. This should not be the case; by spending some time automating your (non-)regression test bank, you will gain speed. But you have to invest time in building the test suite.

Can your system handle success? This question should keep every executive awake at night.

I've witnessed businesses invest millions in advertising campaigns to drive traffic to systems that fail due to their success. Consider describing to your board how your greatest marketing victory became your worst operational mishap.

Managing traffic spikes is only one aspect of load balancing. It is about ensuring that your business can handle opportunities without being overwhelmed.

The mindset that transforms everything

Let's now address the most pressing issue: security.

The majority of leaders consider security to be like insurance, something you hope you never need. The fact that security is more than just protection, however, will alter the way you approach every project. It's approval to develop.

According to the Ponemon Institute's 2025 Cost of Insider Threats Global Report, the average annualized cost of insider threats, defined as employee negligence, criminal insiders, and credential thieves, has risen to $17.4 million per incident, up from $15.4 million in 2022. The number of discovered and analyzed incidents increased from 3,269 in 2018 to 7,868 in 2025 research studies. 

Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that cybercrime will cost the global economy $10.5 trillion annually by 2025.

The most fascinating thing, though, is that companies that invest in proactive security see measurable outcomes. Organizations that allocate over 10% of their IT budget to cybersecurity have a 2.5-fold higher chance of experiencing no security incidents than those that allocate less than 1%, per Deloitte's Future of Cyber Survey.

By hardening your systems against common attack vectors, you can scale quickly without worrying about the future. You can handle sensitive data with confidence, enter new markets without fear, establish partnerships that require trust, and focus on innovation instead of crisis management.

The non-functional needs that genuinely generate income

Allow me to explain this in a way that will satisfy your CFO.

Retention is equal to reliability. Customers return when a system functions reliably (given you sell items they want). The Harvard Business Review claims that a 5% increase in customer retention rates boosts profits by 25% to 95%. It is five to twenty-five times less expensive to retain customers than to acquire new ones.

Scalability is equal to security. Secure systems can handle larger client volumes, more sensitive data, and higher-value transactions. 69% of board members and C-suite executives think that privacy and cyber risks could affect their company's ability to grow, according to PwC.

Profit is equal to performance. You lose conversions for every second of load time. Google discovered that the likelihood of a bounce rises by 32% as page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds. It increases by 90% from 1 second to 5 seconds. Walmart discovered that every second improvement in page load time led to a 2% increase in conversions.

Reputation is equal to resilience. Guess which company benefits when your system works while your competitors' systems fail? Failures reduce trust. 71% of consumers will actively advocate against companies they don't trust, and 67% of consumers will stop purchasing from them, according to Edelman's 2023 Trust Barometer. While the 2025 report does not present comparative numbers, distrust impacting consumer behavior is likely to be even more prevalent. 

The structure that reverses the script

Reframe this discussion with your executives and team

  • The question we should not ask is, "Can we afford to build this right?" but rather, "Can we afford not to?" This consideration is crucial because we risk losing customers at every obstacle they encounter. 
  • Non-functional requirements should be viewed as competitive advantages rather than obstructions. If it suddenly does not work, the customer walks away.
  • Consider viewing system reliability as a profit center instead of a cost center. When a customer knows it will work, they will order again and refer a friend.

The numbers support this point. Businesses that invest in operational resilience see three times higher profit margins and 2.5 times higher revenue growth than their counterparts, according to McKinsey's 2023 State of Organizations report. In 2025 we see a focus on AI, but the point remains.

These metrics will grab the attention when you're presenting them.

Although the average cost of downtime varies by industry, it is always high. 

The impact of a security breach on customer lifetime value is equally uncomfortable. Following a data breach, 78% of consumers will cease interacting with a brand online, and 36% will never do so again, according to Ping Identity's 2023 Consumer Identity Breach Report.

Every second that the system is unavailable results in a rapidly mounting loss of money. That's about $3,170 per minute of full downtime for a business that makes $100 million a year. We're talking about $31,700 per minute for billion-dollar businesses. Again, your experience may differ, but it's important to note that this cost is often unseen yet undeniable. If you want to calculate this more granularly, then I have a calculation method for you that is easy to implement.

There is a discernible trend in the cost of rebuilding versus building correctly the first time. Resolving a problem in production can cost four to five times as much as fixing it during design, and it can cost up to 100 times as much as fixing it during the requirements and design phase, according to IBM's Systems Sciences Institute.

The plan of action that truly works

This is what you should do right away.

Please begin by reviewing your current primary systems. When they're under stress, what happens? What occurs if they are attacked? What occurs if they don't work? 40% of businesses that suffer a significant system failure never reopen, although only 23% of organizations have tested their disaster recovery plans in the previous year, according to Gartner. Companies we work with test their systems at least once per year. If the results are unsatisfactory, we conduct a retest to ensure they meet our standards.

Next, please determine the actual cost of addressing issues at a later stage. Add in the costs of customer attrition, security breaches, downtime, and reconstruction. To lend credibility to your calculations, try to work out exact numbers for your company. Industry standards (like in this article) will give you indicators, but you need to know your figures.

Third, recast your non-functional needs as business needs. Consider focusing on strategies for managing success rather than solely discussing load balancing. Instead of discussing security testing, focus on revenue protection.

Fourth, consider safety when defining "done." Until a feature is dependable, secure, and scalable, it isn't considered complete. Projects that incorporate non-functional requirements from the outset have a threefold higher chance of success, per the Standish Group's 2023 Chaos Report.

Fifth, use system dependability as a differentiator in the marketplace. You're up when your rivals are down. You're safe when they're compromised.

The bottom line

I understand that resilience isn't sexy. I am aware that UI enhancements are more exciting than infrastructure resilience.

And yet, I know that businesses that prioritize safety will survive and lead after seeing others thrive and fail based on this one choice. Customers trust them. They are capable of scaling without breaking. Because they are confident that their systems can manage whatever comes next, they are the ones who get a good night's sleep.

Resilient organizations are twice as likely to surpass customer satisfaction goals and are 2.5 times more likely to achieve revenue growth of 10% or more.

Resilience represents the most significant competitive advantage. You have a choice. Just keep in mind that your clients are depending on you to do the job correctly.

Always happy to engage in a conversation.

Identify Opportunities to Mature the Security Architecture

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  • Organizations do not have a solid grasp on the complexity of their infrastructure and are unaware of the overall risk to their infrastructure posed by inadequate security.
  • Organizations do not understand how to properly create and deliver value propositions of technical security solutions.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • The security architecture is a living, breathing thing based on the risk profile of your organization.
  • Compliance and risk mitigation create an intertwined relationship between the business and your security architecture. The security architecture roadmap must be regularly assessed and continuously maintained to ensure security controls align with organizational objectives.

Impact and Result

  • A right-sized security architecture can be created by assessing the complexity of the IT department, the operations currently underway for security, and the perceived value of a security architecture within the organization. This will bring about a deeper understanding of the organizational infrastructure.
  • Developing a security architecture should also result in a list of opportunities (i.e. initiatives) that an organization can integrate into a roadmap. These initiatives will seek to improve security operations and strengthen the IT department’s understanding of security’s role within the organization.
  • A better understanding of the infrastructure will help to save time on determining the correct technologies required from vendors and therefore cut down on the amount of vendor noise.
  • Creating a defensible roadmap will assist with justifying future security spend.

Identify Opportunities to Mature the Security Architecture Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should develop a right-sized security architecture, 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. Identify the organization’s ideal security architecture

Complete three unique assessments to define the ideal security architecture maturity for your organization.

  • Identify Opportunities to Mature the Security Architecture – Phase 1: Identify the Organization's Ideal Security Architecture
  • Security Architecture Recommendation Tool
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2. Create a security program roadmap

Use the results of the assessments from Phase 1 of this research to create a roadmap for improving the security program.

  • Identify Opportunities to Mature the Security Architecture – Phase 2: Create a Security Program Roadmap
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The Rush Trap: Why "Move Fast and Break Things" Breaks Your Business

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Most business leaders think that the best way to beat the competition is to push their development teams harder and demand faster delivery. I've seen the opposite happen many times.

When you prioritize "shipping fast" and "getting to market first," you often end up taking the longest time to succeed, because your team must spend months, sometimes years, addressing the problems caused by your haste. On the surface, things appear to be improving, but internally, they can feel overwhelming. You will notice this impact on your staff.

This is the harsh truth about rushing IT development:

Every Shortcut Creates Two New Problems

Here's what really happens in the codebase when you tell your team to "just get it done fast": you don't do proper input validation and sanitization because you say, "We'll add that later." And then you have to deal with SQL injection attacks and data breaches for months. This wasted time could have been avoided by using simple parameterized queries and validation frameworks.

In 2024, the average cost of a data breach was $4.88 million. 73% of these breaches require more than 200 days to resolve. You only code for the happy flow, but real users submit incorrect data, experience network timeouts, and encounter failures with third-party APIs. 

Your app crashes more than it should because you didn't set up proper error handling, or circuit breakers, or graceful degradation patterns. I know these take time to implement, but what would you rather have? Customers abandoning it?

Businesses lose an average of $5,600 per minute when their systems go down, and e-commerce sites can lose up to $300,000 per hour during busy times. Instead of fixing the root causes of problems, you just patch them up with quick fixes. Instead of proper garbage collection, that memory leak gets a band-aid restart script. Instead of being optimized, the slow database query is cached.

Soon, you will find yourself struggling to keep your building intact.

To keep up with technical debt, companies usually have to spend 23–42% of their total IT budget each year.

You don't do full testing because "writing unit tests takes longer than manual testing." This approach does not include load testing, test-driven development, or integration testing. Your first real test is when you have paying customers in production. Companies that don't test their software properly have 60% more bugs in their products and spend 40% more time fixing them than companies that do.

You start without being able to properly monitor and see what's going on. There are no logging frameworks, no application performance monitoring, and no health checks in place. When things go wrong—and they will—it's difficult to figure out what's amiss. Without proper monitoring, it takes an average of 4.5 hours to find and fix IT problems. With full observability tools, it only takes 45 minutes.

It's easy to see that every shortcut you take today will cause two new problems tomorrow. Each of those problems makes two more. You're going to be in a lot of trouble with technical debt, security holes, and unstable systems soon. All because you were in a hurry to meet some random deadline.

The true cost of rushing in those "move fast and break things" success stories is often overlooked. You don't guarantee a quick time to market when you rush code to market. You're just making sure that failure to market happens quickly. Remember that most Silicon Valley break-movers lose millions, but you never read about those; you only read about the 1 in 350 VC-backed companies that make it. That is a staggering 0.29%. I would not bet on that strategy just yet.

Because code that is rushed doesn't just break once. It breaks all the time. In production. This issue arises when dealing with real customers. At the worst times. Your developers are putting out fires instead of adding new features. Instead of adding the features that the customer asked for, they're fixing race conditions at 2 AM. They're patching vulnerabilities in dependencies rather than creating the next version.

According to research, developers in environments with a lot of technical debt spend 42% of their time on maintenance and bug fixes, while those in well-architected systems spend only 23% of their time on these tasks. Bad code drives up your infrastructure costs by requiring more servers to handle the same load. Your database runs slower because no one took the time to make the right indexes or make the queries run faster. Unoptimized applications typically require 3 to 5 times more infrastructure resources, directly impacting your cloud computing and operational costs.

The costs of getting new customers go up because products that are rushed have higher churn rates. People stop using apps that crash a lot or don't work well. For example, 53% of mobile users will stop using an app if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. It costs 5 to 25 times more to get a new customer than to keep an old one.

In the meantime, what about your competitor who took an extra month to set up proper error handling, security controls, and performance optimization? They're growing smoothly while you're still working on the base.

The Slow Way Is the Quick Way

Let me tell you a myth that is costing you millions: The race isn't about speed unless you're in a real winner-take-all market with huge network effects. It's about lasting.

There is usually room for more than one winner in most markets. Your real job isn't to be the first to market; it's to still be there when the "fast movers" fail because they owe too much money. The businesses that are the biggest in their markets aren't usually the first ones there. They are the ones who took the time to use excellent software engineering practices from the start. They used well-known security frameworks like the OWASP guidelines to make their systems safe, set up the right authentication and authorization patterns, and made sure their APIs were designed with security and resilience in mind from the start.

Companies that have good security practices have 76% fewer security incidents and save an average of $1.76 million for every breach they avoid. They wrote code for failure scenarios using patterns like retry logic with exponential backoff, circuit breakers to stop failures from spreading, and bulkhead isolation to keep problems from spreading.

They set up full logging and monitoring so they could find problems before customers did. Systems that are built well and have the right resilience patterns are up 99.9% of the time, while systems that are built quickly are up 95% to 98% of the time. While you may believe that 95% to 98% uptime is an acceptable figure to agree to, take a moment to consider what that actually translates to in terms of downtime for your availability metrics. Remember that you should only calculate the times you really want to be available. This is due to the fact that any unavailability during your downtime is not taken into account. But failures do not take your opening hours into consideration. 

Successful companies used domain-driven design to get the business requirements right, made complete API documentation, and built automated testing suites that found regressions before deployment. Companies that do a lot of testing deliver features 2.5 times faster and with 50% fewer bugs after deployment.

They made sure that their environments were always the same by using infrastructure as code, setting up the right CI/CD pipelines with automated security scanning and regression testing, and planning for horizontal scaling from the start.

Companies that have mature DevOps practices deploy 208 times more often and have lead times that are 106 times faster, all while being more reliable.

What This Means for Your Process of Development

The truth is that your development schedule isn't about meeting deadlines. The purpose is to create systems that function effectively when real people use them in real-life situations with actual data and at a large scale. If your code crashes under load because you didn't use the right caching strategies or database connection pooling, it doesn't matter how fast it is to market.

If you neglect to conduct security code reviews and utilize static analysis tools, the likelihood of hacking increases significantly.

Think about the return on investment: putting in an extra 20–30% up front for the right architecture, security, and testing usually cuts the total cost of ownership by 60–80% over the life of the application.

The first "delay" of 2 to 4 weeks for proper engineering practices saves 6 to 12 months of fixing technical debt later on.

You have a simple choice: either take the time to follow excellent software engineering practices now, or spend the next two years telling customers why your system is down again while your competitors take your market share. The companies that last and eventually take over choose quality engineering over random speed. I leave it up to your imagination as to what multi-trillion-dollar company immediately comes to mind.

I am always up for a conversation.

Availability and Capacity Management

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Develop your availability and capacity management plant and align it with exactly what the business expects.

ChatGPT Beyond the hype. What can it do for you?

ChatGPT Beyond The Hype Tymans Group

Summary of the deck.

ChatGPT is a generative AI tool developed by OpenAI, a non-profit founded by Silicon Valley titans, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman. It is designed to interact with users in a way that mimics human dialogue. The tool became available via a research release on November 30, 2022, and was an immediate hit – within a week; it attracted more than a million users. Functionally, ChatGPT is designed to answer questions, but it is not the first one. The concept has existed for decades. While it is very powerful, it has also attracted criticism. 

IT Operations, strategy

Register to read more …

First 30 Days Pandemic Response Plan

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  • Given the speed and scope of the spread of the pandemic, governments are responding with changes almost daily as to what organizations and people can and can’t do. This volatility and uncertainty challenges organizations to respond, particularly in the absence of a business continuity or crisis management plan.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Assess the risk to and viability of your organization in order to create appropriate action and communication plans quickly.

Impact and Result

  • HR departments must be directly involved in developing the organization’s pandemic response plan. Use Info-Tech's Risk and Viability Matrix and uncover the crucial next steps to take during the first 30 days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

First 30 Days Pandemic Response Plan Research & Tools

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

1. Create a response plan for the first 30 days of a pandemic

Manage organizational risk and viability during the first 30 days of a crisis.

  • First 30 Days Pandemic Response Plan Storyboard
  • Crisis Matrix Communications Template: Business As Usual
  • Crisis Matrix Communications Template: Organization Closing
  • Crisis Matrix Communications Template: Manage Risk and Leverage Resilience
  • Crisis Matrix Communications Template: Reduce Labor and Mitigate Risk
[infographic]

Drive Ongoing Adoption With an M365 Center of Excellence

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  • Parent Category Name: End-User Computing Applications
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There are roadblocks common to all CoEs: lack of in-house expertise, lack of resources (time, budget, etc.), and employee perception that this is just another burdensome administrative layer. These are exacerbated when building an M365 CoE.

  • Constant vendor-initiated change in M365 means expertise always needs updating.
  • The self-service architecture of M365 is at odds with centralized limits and controls.
  • M365 has a multitude of services that can be adopted across a huge swath of the organization compared to the specific capabilities and limited audience of traditional CoEs.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

The M365 CoE should be somewhat decentralized to avoid an “us versus them” mentality. Having clear KPIs at the center of the program makes it easier to demonstrate improvements and competencies. COMMUNICATE these early successes! They are vital in gaining widespread credibility and momentum.

Impact and Result

Having a clear vision of what you want business outcomes you want your Microsoft 365 CoE to accomplish is key. This vision helps select the core competencies and deliverables of the CoE.

  • Ongoing measurement and reporting of business value generated from M365 adoption.
  • Servant leadership allows the CoE to work closely and deeply with end users, which builds them up to share knowledge with others
  • Focus and clear lines of accountability ensure that everyone involved feels part of the compromise when decisions are to be made.

Drive Ongoing Adoption With an M365 Center of Excellence Research & Tools

Build out your M365 CoE competencies, membership, and roles; create success metrics and build your M365 adoption, then communicate

In this deck we explain why your M365 CoE needs to be distributed and how it should be organized. Using a roadmap will assist you in building competency and maturity through training, certifications, and building governance.

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

  • Drive Ongoing Adoption With an M365 Center of Excellence Storyboard
[infographic]

Further reading

Drive Ongoing Adoption With an M365 Center of Excellence

Accelerate business processes change and get more value from your subscription by building and sharing thanks to an effective Centre of Excellence.

CLIENT ADVISORY DECK

Drive Ongoing Adoption With an M365 Centre of Excellence

Accelerate business processes change and get more value from your subscription by building and sharing thanks to an effective Centre of Excellence

Research Team:
John Donovan
John Annand
Principal Research Directors I&O Practice

41 builds released in 2021!
IT can no longer be expected to provide training to all users on all features

  • Traditional classroom training (online and self-paced) is time consuming and overly generic
  • Users tend to hold onto old familiar tools even as new ones roll out
  • Citizen Programming comes with a lot of promise but also the spectre of reliving the era of Access ‘97 databases
  • Seemingly small decisions around configuration have outsized impacts
  • Every enterprises’ journey through adoption is unique

▲20% $ spent in 2021

148% more meetings
66% more users collaborating on documents
40.6B more emails

2021 vs. 2022 Source: Microsoft The Work Trend Index

  • Who needs to be in a CoE? What daily tasks do they undertake?
  • How do you turn artifacts like best practice documents into actual behavioral change?
  • How does CoE differ from governance? And why is it going to be any more successful?
  • How does the CoE evolve over time as enterprises become more mature?

CoE Competencies, Membership and Roles
Communication, Standards Templates
Adoption, and Business Success Metrics

this image depicts the key CoE Competencies: Goals; Controls; Tools; Training; and Support

Using these deliverables, Info-Tech will help you drive consistency in your enterprise collaboration, increase end-user satisfaction in the tools they are provided, optimize your license spending, fill the gaps between implementation of a technology and realization of business value, and empower end-users to innovate in ways that senior leadership had not imagined.

Executive Summary

Insight

User adoption is the primary focus of the efforts in the CoE

User adoption and setting up guardrails in governance are the focuses of the CoE in its early stages. Purging obsolete data from legacy share servers, and exchange, and rationalize legacy applications that are comparable to Microsoft offerings. The primary goal is M365 excellence, but that needs to be primed with a Roadmap, and laying down clear milestones to show progress, along with setting up quick wins to get buy in from the organization.

Breakdown your CoE into distinct areas for improvement

Due to the size and complexity of Microsoft 365, breaking it into clearly defined divisions makes sense. The parts that need to be fragmented into are, Collaboration, Power Apps, Office tools, Learning, Professional Training and Certifications, Governance and Support. Subject Matter experts needs to keep pace with the ever-changing M365 environment with enhancements continuously being rolled out. (There were 41 build releases in 2021 alone! )

Set up your M365 CoE in a decentralized design

Define how your CoE will be set up. It will either be centralized, distributed, or a combination of both. They all have their strengths and weaknesses; however a distributed CoE can ensure there is buy-in from the various departments across the CoE, as they participate in the decision making and therefore the direction the CoE goes. Additionally, it ensures that each segment of the CoE is accountable for the success of the M365 adoption, its usage, and delivering value to the organization.

Summary

Your Challenge

You have purchased Microsoft 365 for your business, and you have determined that you are not realizing the full value and potential of the product, neither adoption nor usage – for example, you have legacy applications that the user base is reluctant to move away from, whether it be Skype, Jabber, or other collaboration tools available to them. You have released Teams to the organization but may have not shown how useful it is and you have not communicated to the business that it is your new collaboration tool, along with SharePoint Online and OneDrive. How do you fix this problem?

Common Obstacles

There are roadblocks common to all CoEs: lack of in-house expertise, lack of resources (time, budget, etc.) and employee perception of just another burdensome administrative layer. These are exacerbated when building an M365 CoE.

  • Constant vendor-initiated change in M365 means expertise always needs updating
  • The self-service architecture of M365 is at odds with centralized limits and controls
  • M365 is a multitude of services, adopted across a huge swath of the organization compared to the specific capabilities and limited audience of traditional CoEs

Info-Tech’s Approach

Having a clear vision of what business outcomes you want your Microsoft 365 CoE to accomplish is key. This vision helps select the core competencies and deliverables of the CoE.

  1. Ongoing measurement and reporting of business value generated from M365 adoption
  2. Servant leadership allows the CoE to work closely and deeply with end-users, which builds them up to share knowledge with others
  3. Focus and clear lines of accountability ensure that everyone involved feels part of the compromise when decisions are to be made

Info-Tech Insight

The M365 CoE should be somewhat decentralized to avoid an “us versus them” mentality. Having clear KPIs at the center of the program makes it easier to demonstrate improvements and competencies. COMMUNICATE these early successes! They are vital in gaining widespread credibility and momentum.

Charter Mandate Authority to Operate

Mission : To accelerate the value that M365 brings to the organization by using the M365 CoE to increase adoption, build competency through training and best practices, and deliver on end user innovation throughout the business.

Vision Statement: To transform the organization’s efficiencies and performance through an optimized world-class M365 CoE by meeting all KPIs set out in the Charter.

Info-Tech Insights

A mission and vision for your M365 CoE are a necessary step to kick the program off. Not aving clear goals and a roadmap to get there will hinder your progress. It may even stall the whole objective if you cannot agree or measure what you are trying to accomplish

  • The scope of the M365 CoE is to build the adoption rate that can meet milestone goals to advance user competency, as well as the maturation of the SMEs in each segment of the CoE leadership and contributors.
  • Maturity will be measured through 100% adoption, specifically around collaboration tools and Office apps across the organization that use M365. Strategic value will be measured by core competencies within the CoE.
  • SMEs are developed and educated with certifications and other training throughout the course of the CoE development to bring “bench strength” to the vision of optimizing a world-class M365 CoE.
  • SMEs will all be certified Microsoft professionals. They will set the standard to be met within the CoE. The SMEs can either be internal candidates or external hires, depending on the current IT department competency.
  • Additional resources required will be tech savvy department leads that understand and can help in the training of staff, who also are willing to spend a certain amount of their work time in coaching colleagues.
  • They will be assisted by the training through the SMEs providing relevant material and various M365 courses both in class and self-paced online learning using M365 VIVA tools.

Charter Metrics

Areas in Scope:

  • Ensure Mission is aligned to the business objectives.
  • Form core team for M365 CoE, including steering committee.
  • Create document for signoff from business sponsors.
  • Build training plans for users, engineers, and admins.
  • Document best practices and build standard templates for organizational uniformity.
  • Build governance charter and priorities, setting up guardrails early to ensure compliance and security.
  • Transition away and retire all legacy on-Prem apps to M365 Cloud apps.
  • Build a RACI model for roles and responsibility.

Info-Tech Insights

If meaningful metrics are set up correctly, the CoE can produce results early in the one- or two-year process, demonstrating business value and increasing production amongst staff and demonstrating SME development.

this image contains example metrics, spread across three phases.

CoE

What are the reason to build an M365 CoE, and what is it expected to deliver?

What It IS NOT

It does not design or build applications, migrate applications, or create migration plans. It does not deploy applications nor does it operate and monitor applications. While a steering committee is a key part of the M365 CoE, its real function is to set the standards to be achieved though metrics that can measure a successful, efficient, and best-in-class M365 operation. It does not set business goals but does align M365 goals to the business drivers. SMEs in the CoE give guidance on M365 best practices and assist in its adoption and users’ competency.

What It IS

M365 CoE means investing in and developing usage growth and adoption while maintaining governance and control. A CoE is designed to drive innovation and improvement, and as a business-wide functional unit, it can break down geographical and organizational silos that utilize their own tools and collaboration platforms. It builds a training and artifacts database of relevant and up-to-date materials.

Why Build It

Benefits that can be realized are:

  • Building efficiencies, delivering quality training and knowledge transfer, and reducing risk from an organized and effective governance.
  • Consistency in document and information management.
  • Reusable templates and blueprints that standardize the business processes.
  • Standardized and communicated business policies around security and best practices.
  • Overcoming the challenges that comes with the titan of a platform that is M365.

Expected Goals and Benefits With Risk

Demonstrated impact for sustainability
Ensuring value is delivered
Ability to escalate to executive branch

The What?

What does the M365 CoE solve?

  • M365 Adoption
  • M365 tools templates
  • SME in tools deployment and delivery
  • Training and education – create artifacts and organize training sessions and certifications
  • Empower users into super users
  • Build analytics around usage, adoption, and ROI from license optimization

And the How?

How does the M365 CoE do it?

  • By defining clear adoption goals and best practices
  • By building a dedicated team with the confidence to improve the user experience
  • By creating a collection of reusable artifacts.
  • By establishing a stable, tested environment ensures users are not hindered in execution of the tools
  • By continuously improving M365 processes

What are the Risks?

  • All goals must be achievable
  • Timeline phases are based on core SME competency of the IT department and the training quality of end users
  • Current state of SMEs in house or hired to execute the mandate of the M365 CoE
  • Business success – if business is struggling to make profits and grow, its usually the CoE that will get chopped – mainly due to layoffs
  • Inability to find SMEs or train SMEs
  • Turnover in CoE due to job function changes or attrition
  • Overload of day-to-day responsibilities preventing SMEs from executing work for the CoE – Need to align SMEs and CoE steering chair to establish and enable shared responsibilities.

Who needs to be in a CoE for M365

Design the CoE – What model to be used?

What are their daily tasks? Is the CoE centralized, decentralized, or a combination?

a flow chart is depicted, starting with the executive steering committee, describing governance 365, and VP applications.

Info-Tech Insights

Due to the size and complexity of Microsoft 365, a decentralized model works best. Each segment of the group could in themselves be a CoE, as in governance, training, or collaboration CoE. Maintaining SME in each group will drive the success of the M365 CoE.

Key Competencies for CoE

  • Build a team of experts in M365 with sub teams in Products.
  • Manage the business processes around M365.
  • Train and optimize technical teams.
  • Share best practices and create a knowledge base.
  • Build processes that are repeatable and self-provisioned.
This image depicts the core Coe Competencies, Strategy; Technology; Governance; and Skills/Capabilities.

CoE for M365

What is the Structure? Is it centralized, decentralized, or combination? What are the pros and cons?

Thought Model

This image depicts a thought model describing CoE for M365.

How does the CoE differ from governance?

Why is it going to be any more successful?

“These problems already exist and haven't been successfully addressed by governance – how is the CoE going to be any different?”

  • Leadership
  • Empower end users
  • Automation of processes
  • Retention policies
  • Governance priorities
  • Risk management
  • Standard procedures
  • Set metrics
  • Self service
  • Training
  • SMEs
  • Automation
  • Innovation

CoE

While M365 governance is an integral part of the M365 CoE, the CoE is a more strategic program aimed at providing guidance, experienced leadership, and training.

The CoE is designed to drive innovation and improvements throughout the organization’s M365 deployment. It will build best practices, create artifacts, and mentor members to become SMEs.

Governance

CoE is a form of collaborative governance. Those responsible for making the rules are the same ones who are working through how the rules are implemented in practice.

The word most associated with CoE is "nurture." The word most associated with governance is "prevent."

The CoE is experimental and innovative and constantly revising its guidance compared to governance, which is opaque and static.

RACI chart for CoE define activities and ownership

The Work

Build artifacts

Templates

Scripts

Reference architecture

Policies definition

Blueprints

Version control

Measure usage and ROI

Quality assurance

Baseline creation and integrity

ActivitiesSupport Steering CTraining TeamM365 Tools Admin M365 Security AdminDoc Mgt
Monitor M365 ChangeAIRR
CommunicationsIR
TrainingAR
Support – Microsoft + HelpdeskRI
Monitor UsageR
Security and ComplianceAR
Decom On-PremAR
Eliminate Shadow ITR
Identity and AccessAR
Automate Policies in TennantAR
Audit MonitorAR
Data and Information ProtectionARR
Build TemplatesAAR
Manage ArtifactsARA

Steering Committee

This image contains a screenshot of the organization of the CoE Steering Committee

Roles and Responsibilities

  • Set the goals and metrics for the CoE charter
  • Ensure the CoE is aligned to the business objectives
  • Clear any roadblocks that may hinder progress for the team leads
  • Provide guidance on best practices
  • Set expectations for training and certifications
  • Build SME strength through mentoring
  • Promote and facilitate research into M365 developments and releases
  • Ensure knowledge transfer is documented
  • Create roadmap to ensure phase KPIs are met and drive toward excellence

Info-Tech Insight

Executive sponsorship is an element of the CoE that cannot be overlooked. If this occurs, the funding and longevity of the CoE will be limited. Additionally, ensure you determine if the CoE will have an end of life and what that looks like.

M365 Governance CoE Team

Governance and Management

After you’ve developed and implemented your data classification framework, ongoing governance and maintenance will be critical to your success. In addition to tracking how sensitivity labels are used in practice, you’ll need to update your control requirements based on changes in regulations, cybersecurity leading practices, and the nature of the content you manage. Governance and maintenance efforts can include:

  • Establishing a governance body dedicated to data classification or adding a data classification responsibility to the charter of an existing information security body.
  • Defining roles and responsibilities for those overseeing Data Classification
  • Establishing KPIs to monitor and measure progress
  • Tracking cybersecurity leading practices and regulatory changes
  • Developing Standard Operating Procedures that support and enforce a data classification framework

Governance CoE

Tools Used in the Governance CoE Identity – MFA, SSO, Identity Manager, Conditional Access, AD , Microsoft Defender, Compliance Assessments Templates

Security and Compliance - Azure Purview, Microsoft Defender Threat Analytics, Rules-Based Classification (AIP Client & Scanner), Endpoint DLP, Insider Risk Management

Information Management – Audit Log Retention, Information Protection and Governance, Trainable Classifiers

Licenses – Entitlement Management, Risk-Based Conditional Access.

This image depicts the M365 Governance CoE Team organization.

M365 Tools CoE Team

  • Collaboration tools are at the center of the product portfolio for M365.
  • Need to get users empowered to manage and operate Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint Online and promote uniform communications and collaborate with document building, sharing, and storing.

This image depicts a screenshot of the Tools CoE Team organization

Collaboration SME – Teams admin, Exchange admin, SharePoint, One Drive admin, Viva Learning (Premium), and Viva Insights (Premium)

Application SME – Covers all updates and new features related to Office programs

Power BI SME – Covers Power Automate for Office 365, Power Apps for Office 365, and Power BI Pro

Voice and Video – Tools-Calling Plan, Audio Conference (Full), Teams Phone, Mobility

PMO – Manages all M365 products online and in production. Also coordinates enhancements, writes up documentation for updates, and releases them to the training CoE for publication.

Microsoft 365 tools used to support business

M365 Training CoE Team

Training and certifications for both end users and technical staff managing the M365 platform. Ensure that you set goals and objectives with your training schedule.

this image depicts the framework for the training CoE team.

Training for SMEs can be broken into two categories:

First line training is internal training for users, in the collaboration space. Teams, One Drive, SharePoint Online, Exchange, and specialty training on Office tools – Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Microsoft Forms.

Second line training is professional development for the SMEs including certifications in M365 admin, Global admin, Teams admin, and SharePoint administrator.

Additional training and certification can be obtained in governance, information management, and in the admin center for licencing optimization and compliance.

Tools used

  • Viva topics – Integrated knowledge and expert discovery
  • Viva Insight
  • Viva Learning
  • Viva Connections
  • Dynamics 365
  • Voice of the customer surveys

Support M365 CoE Team

This image depicts the framework for m365 CoE team support.

Support CoE:

In charge of creating a knowledge base for M365. Manages incidents with access, usage, and administering apps to desktop. Manages change issues related to updates in patching.

Help Desk Admin:

Resets passwords when self service fails, force sign out, manages service requests.

Works with learning CoE to populate knowledge base with articles and templates.

Manages end user issues with changes and enhancements for M365.

Supporting Metrics

  • Number of calls for M365 support
  • Recurring M365 incidents
  • Number of unresolved Platform issues
  • First call resolution
  • Knowledge sharing of M365
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Turnaround time of tickets created

Roadmap

How does the CoE evolve over time as enterprises become more mature?

  • Depending on the complexity and regulatory requirements of the business, baseline governance and rules around external partners sharing internal documents will need to be set up.
  • Identifying your SMEs in the organization is a perquisite at the beginning stages of setting up the M365 working group.
  • Build a roadmap to get to maturity and competency that brings strategic business value.
  • Meet milestone goals through a two-year, three-phase process. Begin with setting up governance guardrails.
  • Set up foundational baselines against which metrics will be measured.
  • Set up the M365 CoE, at first with target easy wins through group training and policy communications throughout the organization.
this image depicts the CoE Roadmap, from Foundational Baseline, to Standardize Process, to Optimization

How do you turn artifacts like best practice documents into actual behavior change?

this image depicts the process of turning M365 ARtifacts into actual behavioural change within a company

Info-Tech Insights

Building Blocks
The building blocks for a change in end user behavior are based on four criteria which must be clearly communicated. Knowledge transfer from SMEs to the training team is key. That in turn leads to effective knowledge transfer, allowing end users to develop skills quickly that can be shared with their teams. Sharing practices leads to best practices and maintaining these in a repository that can be quickly accessed will build on the efficiencies and effectiveness of the employees.

How Do You Empower End Users to Innovate?

Info-Tech Insights

Understand the Vision

Empowering End users starts with understanding the business vision that is embedded into the M365 CoE charter.

Ensure that the business innovation goals are aligned to the organizational strategies.

The innovative strategies need to be clearly communicated to the employees and the tools to achieve this needs to be mapped out and trained. Clearly lay out the goals, outcomes, and expectations.

End users need to understand how the M365 CoE will assist them in their day-to-day operations, whether in the collaboration space with their colleagues, or with power BI that assists them in their decision making though analytics.

The Right Resources

Arm your team with the resources they need to be successful. Building use cases as part of the training program will give the employees insight into how the M365 tools can be used in their daily work environment. It will also address the pervasive use of nonstandard tools as is seen throughout organizations that are operated in a vacuum.

Empowering your user base though the knowledge transfer borne through the building of artifacts that deal with real life examples that join the dots for employees.

By painting a picture of how the innovative use of the M365 platform can be achieved, users will feel empowered and use those use cases to build out their own innovative ideas.

Hybrid Work

Digital fabric

Collaboration – Communication – Creation

Cloud Services – Innovative Apps – Security

Productivity anywhere any place

Shared working documents in secure cloud

Mesh for Microsoft Teams/Viva

Power apps and dataverse for Teams

Self Service M365

My Apps

My Sign-Ins

My Groups

My Staff

My Access

My Account

Password reset

Sample Best Practices
Tools and Standards Templates

Then communicate them

Collaboration Best Practices

Sharing documents

Real time co-authoring

Comment

Meet

Mobile

Version History

Security Best Practices

This is a screenshot of the Security Best Practices

Default Security Settings

Microsoft Security Score

Enable Alert Policies

Assign RBAC for Admins

Enable Continuous Access Evaluation

Admin Roles Best Practices in M365

This is a screenshot of the admin roles best ractices in M365.

Business Success Metrics for M365 CoE

What does success look like?

  • Are you aligning the M365 metrics to business goals?
  • Are your decisions data driven?
  • Are you able to determine opportunities to improve with your metrics – continuous process improvement?
  • Are you seeing productivity gains, and are they being measured?
This image contains a screenshot of the Business Success Metrics for M365-CoE: SMC Training; Content published and tagged; Usage Metrics; Cost Metrics; Adoption Metrics; New Product Introduction

Activity Output

Start building your M365 CoE and considering the steps for the Phase 1 checklist

BUILD A FOUNDATIONAL BASELINE

Step 1

  1. Select Resources to create a CoE working group
  2. Define your goals and objectives
  3. Identify SMEs within the business and do a gap analysis
  4. Build the M365 charter, mission, and vision
  5. Build consensus and sponsorship from C suite
  6. Create an organizational M365 framework that provides best coverage for all touch points to the platform, from support to training to controls.
  7. Determine the type of CoE you want to create that fits your business (centralized, distributed, or a combination).

Step 2

  1. Build training plans for SMEs and M365 teams
  2. Populate company intranet with artifacts, knowledge articles, and user training portal with all things M365
  3. Build out best practice workbooks, tools, and templates that encompass all departments
  4. Create roles and responsibilities matrix
  5. Identify “super users” in departments to assist with promoting learning and knowledge sharing.
  6. Develop Metrics scorecards on success criteria ensuring they align to business goals

Step 3

  1. Rational M365 licensing
  2. Create communication plan promoting CoE and M365 advantages
  3. Align your governance posture and building guardrails
  4. Identify legacy apps that can be retired and replaced
  5. Train support team and analysts with metrics supporting M365 CoE goals
  6. Create baseline metrics with clear alignment to business KPIs

Related Blueprints

Modernize Your Microsoft Licensing for the Cloud Era

  • Take control of your Microsoft licensing and optimize spend

Govern Office 365

  • Office 365 is as difficult to wrangle as it is valuable. Leverage best practices to produce governance outcomes aligned with your goals

Migrate to Office 365 Now

  • One small step to cloud, one big leap to Office 365. The key is to look before you leap

Build a Data Classification MVP for M365

  • Kickstart your governance with data classification users will actually use!

Bibliography

“Five Guiding Principles of a successful Center of Excellence” Perficient, n.d. Web.

“Self Service in Microsoft 365.” Janbakker.tech, n.d. Web.

“My Apps portal overview.” Microsoft, June 2, 2022. Web.

“Collaboration Best Practices Microsoft365.” Microsoft, n.d. Web.

“Security Best Practices Microsoft 365” Microsoft, July 1, 2022. Web.

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]

Assess Your IT Financial Management Maturity Effectively

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  • Parent Category Name: Cost & Budget Management
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Organizations wishing to mature their IT financial management (ITFM) maturity often face the following obstacles:

  • Unfamiliarity: Lack of knowledge and understanding related to ITFM maturity.
  • Shortsightedness: Randomly reacting to changing circumstances.
  • Exchange: Inability to consistently drive dialogues.
  • Perception: IT is perceived as a cost center instead of a trustworthy strategic partner.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

No matter where you currently stand in your ITFM practice, there is always room for improvement. Hence, a maturity assessment should be viewed as a self-improvement tool that is only valuable if you are willing to act on it.

Impact and Result

A mature ITFM practice leads to many benefits.

  • Foundation: Improved governance, skill sets, processes, and tools.
  • Data: An appropriate taxonomy/data model alongside accurate data for high-quality reporting and insights.
  • Language: A common vocabulary across the organization.
  • Organization Culture: Improved communication and collaboration between IT and business partners.

Assess Your IT Financial Management Maturity Effectively Research & Tools

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

1. Assess Your IT Financial Management Maturity Effectively Storyboard – A framework and step-by-step methodology to assess your ITFM maturity.

This research seeks to support IT leaders and ITFM practitioners in evaluating and improving their current maturity. It will help document both current and target states as well as prioritize focus areas for improvement.

  • Assess Your IT Financial Management Maturity Effectively Storyboard

2. IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool – A structured tool to help you assess your ITFM maturity.

This Excel workbook guides IT finance practitioners to effectively assess their IT financial management practice. Incorporate the visual outputs into your final executive presentation document. Key activities include context setting, completing the assessment, and prioritizing focus areas based on results.

  • IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

3. IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Report Template – A report summarizing your ITFM maturity assessment results to help you communicate with stakeholders.

Use this template to document your final ITFM maturity outputs, including the current and target states and your identified priorities.

  • IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Report Template
[infographic]

Further reading

Assess Your IT Financial Management Maturity Effectively

Influence your organization’s strategic direction.

Analyst Perspective

Make better informed data-driven business decisions.

Technology has been evolving throughout the years, increasing complexity and investments, while putting more stress on operations and people involved. As an IT leader, you are now entrusted to run your outfit as a business, sit at the executive table as a true partner, and be involved in making decisions that best suit your organization. Therefore, you have an obligation to fulfill the needs of your end customers and live up to their expectations, which is not an easy task.

IT financial management (ITFM) helps you generate value to your organization’s clientele by bringing necessary trade-offs to light, while driving effective dialogues with your business partners and leadership team.

This research will focus on Info-Tech’s approach to ITFM maturity, aiming for a state of continuous improvement, where an organization can learn and grow as it adapts to change. As the ITFM practice matures, IT and business leaders will be able to better understand one another and together make better business decisions, driven by data.

This client advisory presentation and accompanying tool seek to support IT leaders and ITFM practitioners in evaluating and improving their current maturity. It will help document both current and target states as well as prioritize focus areas for improvement.

Photo of Bilal Alberto Saab, Research Director, IT Financial Management, Info-Tech Research Group. Bilal Alberto Saab
Research Director, IT Financial Management
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

The value of ITFM is undermined

ITFM is often discarded and not given enough importance and relevance due to the operational nature of IT, and the specialized skillset of its people, leading to several problems and challenges, such as:

  • Unfamiliarity: Lack of knowledge and understanding related to ITFM maturity.
  • Shortsightedness: Randomly reacting to changing circumstances.
  • Exchange: Inability to consistently drive dialogues.
  • Perception: IT is perceived as a cost center instead of a trustworthy strategic partner.

Constructive dialogues with business partners are not the norm

Business-driven conversations around financials (spending, cost, revenue) are a rarity in IT due to several factors, including:

  • Foundation: Weak governance, inadequate skillset, and less than perfect processes and tools.
  • Data: Lack of adequate taxonomy/data model, alongside inaccurate data leading to poor reporting and insights.
  • Language: Lack of a common vocabulary across the organization.
  • Organization culture: No alignment, alongside minimal communication and collaboration between IT and business partners.

Follow Info-Tech’s approach to move up the ITFM maturity ladder

Mature your ITFM practice by activating the means to make informed business decisions.

Info-Tech’s methodology helps you move the dial by focusing on three maturity focus areas:

  • Build an ITFM Foundation
  • Manage and Monitor IT Spending
  • Bridge the Language Barrier

Info-Tech Insight

Influence your organization’s strategic direction by maturing your ITFM practice.

What is ITFM?

ITFM is not just about finance.

  • ITFM has evolved from traditional budgeting, accounting, and cost optimization; however, it is much more than those activities alone.
  • It starts with understanding the financial implications of technology by adopting different perspectives to become adept in communicating with various stakeholders, including finance, business partners, IT managers, and your CEO.
  • Armed with this knowledge, ITFM helps you address a variety of questions, such as:
    • How are technology funds being spent?
    • Which projects is IT prioritizing and why?
    • What are the resources needed to speed IT delivery?
    • What’s the value of IT within the organization?
  • ITFM’s main objective is thus to improve decision-making capabilities by facilitating communication between IT leaders and stakeholders, while enabling a customer focus attitude throughout the organization.

“ITFM embeds technology in financial management practices. Through cost, demand, and value, ITFM brings technology and business together, forging the necessary relationships and starting the right conversations to enable the best decisions for the organization.”
– Monica Braun, Research Director, Info-Tech Research Group

Your challenge

IT leaders struggle to articulate and communicate business value.

  • IT spending is often questioned by different stakeholders, such as business partners and various IT business units. These questions, usually resulting from shifts in business needs, may revolve around investments, expenditures, services, and speed to market, among others. While IT may have an idea about its spending habits, aligning it to the business strategy may prove difficult.
  • IT staff often does not have access to, or knowledge of, the business model and its intricacies. In an operational environment, the focus tends to be on technical issues rather than overall value.
  • People tend to fear what they do not know. Some business managers may not be comfortable with technology. They do not recognize the implications and ramifications of certain implementations or understand the related terminology, which puts a strain on any conversation.

“Value is not the numbers you visualize on a chart, it’s the dialogue this data generates with your business partners and leadership team.”
– Dave Kish, Practice Lead, Info-Tech Research Group

Technology is constantly evolving

Increasing IT spending and decision-making complexity.

Timeline of IT technology evolution, starting with 'Timesharing' in the 1980s to 'All Things Digital' in the 2020s. 'IT Spend Growth' grows from start to finish.

Common obstacles

IT leaders are not able to have constructive dialogues with their stakeholders.

  • The way IT funds are spent has changed significantly, moving from the purchase of discrete hardware and software tools to implementing data lakes, cloud solutions, the metaverse and blockchain. This implies larger investments and more critical decisions. Conversations around interoperability, integration, and service-based solutions that focus more on big-picture architecture than day-to-day operations have become the norm.
  • Speed to market is now a survival criterion for most organizations, requiring IT to shift rapidly based on changing priorities and customer expectations. This leads to the need for greater financial oversight, with the CFO as the gatekeeper. Today’s IT leaders need to possess both business and financial management savvy to justify their spending with various stakeholders.
  • Any IT budget increase is tied to expectations of greater value. Hence, the compelling demands for IT to prove its worth to the business. Promoting value comes in two ways: 1) objectively, based on data, KPIs, and return on investment; and 2) subjectively, based on stakeholder satisfaction, alongside relationships. Building trust, credibility, and confidence can go a long way.

In a technology-driven world, advances come at a price. With greater spending required, more complex and difficult conversations arise.

Constructive dialogues are key

You don’t know what you don’t know.

  • IT, being historically focused on operations, has become a hub for technically savvy personnel. On the downside, technology departments are often alien to business, causing problems such as:
    • IT staff have no knowledge of the business model and lack customer focus.
    • Business is not comfortable with technology and related jargon.
  • The lack of two-way communication and business alignment is hence an important ramification. If the business does not understand technology, and IT does not speak in business terms, where does that lead us?
  • Poor data quality and governance practices, alongside overly manual processes can only exasperate the situation.

IT Spending Survey

79% of respondents believe that decisions taking too long to make is either a significant or somewhat of a challenge (Flexera 2022 Tech Spend Pulse; N=501).

81% of respondents believe that ensuring spend efficiency (avoiding waste) is either a challenge or somewhat of a challenge (Flexera 2022 Tech Spend Pulse; N=501).

ITFM is trailing behind

IT leaders must learn to speak business.

In today’s world, where organizations are driving customer experience through technology investments, having a seat at the table means IT leaders must be well versed in business language and practice, including solid financial management skills.

However, IT staff across all industries aren’t very confident in how well IT is doing in managing its finances. This becomes evident after looking at three core processes:

  • Demonstrating IT’s value to the business.
  • Accounting of costs and budgets.
  • Optimizing costs to gain the best return on investment.

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 on 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 demonstrating IT’s contribution to business value.

Bar charts comparing percentages of people who 'Agree process is important' and 'Agree process is effective' for three processes: Business Value, Cost & Budget Management, and Cost Optimization. In all instances, the importance outweighed the perceived effectiveness.
Source: Info-Tech Research Group, IT Management & Governance Diagnostic, 2023.

Info-Tech’s approach

We take a holistic approach to ITFM and support you throughout your maturity journey.

Visualization of the IT maturity levels with three goals at the bottom, 'Build am ITFM Foundation', 'Manage & Monitor IT Spending', and 'Bridge the Language Barrier'. The 5 levels, from bottom to top, are 'Nascent - Level 1, Inability to consistently deliver financial planning services', 'Cost Operator - Level 2, Rudimentary financial planning capabilities', 'Trusted Coordinator - Level 3, Enablement of business through cost-effective supply of technology', 'Value Optimizer - Level 4, Effective impact on business performance', and 'Strategic Partner - Level 5, Influence on the organization's strategic direction'.

The Info-Tech difference:

  • Info-Tech has a methodology and set of tools that will help assess your ITFM maturity and take the first step in developing an improvement plan. We have identified three maturity focus areas:
    • Build an ITFM Foundation
    • Manage and Monitor IT Spending
    • Bridge the Language Barrier
      •
  • No matter where you currently stand in your ITFM practice, there is always room for improvement. Hence, a maturity assessment should be viewed as a self-improvement tool, which is only valuable if you are willing to act on it.

Note: See Appendix A for maturity level definitions and descriptions.

Climb the maturity ladder

By growing along three maturity focus areas.

A diagram with '3 Maturity Focus Areas' and '9 Maturity Levers' within them. The first area is 'Build an ITFM Foundation' with levers 'Establish your Team', 'Set up your Governance Structure', and 'Adopt ITFM Processes & Tools'. The second area is 'Manage & Monitor IT Spending', with levers 'Standardize your Taxonomy & Data Model', 'Identify, Gather & Prepare your Data', and 'Analyze your Findings and Develop your Reports'. The third area is 'Bridge the Language Barrier' with levers 'Communicate your IT Spending', 'Educate the Masses', and 'Influence your Organization's Culture'.

Info-Tech identified three maturity focus areas, each containing three levers.

Identify where you stand across the nine maturity levers, detect the gaps, and determine your priorities as a first step to develop an improvement plan.

Note: See Appendix B for maturity level definitions and descriptions per lever.

Key project deliverables

Each step of this activity is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals.

IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Report Template

A template of an ITFM maturity assessment report that can be customized based on your own results.

IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

A workbook including an ITFM maturity survey, generating a summary of your current state, target state, and priorities.

Measure the value of this activity

Reach your 12-month maturity target.

  • Determine your 12-month maturity target, identify your gaps, and set your priorities.
  • Use the ITFM maturity assessment to kickstart your improvement plan by developing actionable initiatives.
  • Implement your initiatives and monitor your progress to reach your 12-month target.

Sample of a result page from the ITFM maturity assessment.

Build your improvement plan and implement your initiatives to move the dial and climb the maturity ladder.

Sample of a result page from the ITFM maturity assessment with a graph.

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

Step 1

Prepare for the ITFM maturity assessment

Content Overview

  1. Identify your stakeholders
  2. Set the context
  3. Determine the methodology
  4. Identify assessment takers

This step involves the following participants:

  • CIO/IT director
  • CFO/finance director
  • IT finance lead
  • IT audit lead
  • Other IT management

1. Prepare to take the ITFM maturity assessment

3 hours

Input: Understanding your context, objectives, and methodology

Output: ITFM maturity assessment stakeholders and their objectives, ITFM maturity assessment methodology, ITFM maturity assessment takers

Materials: 1a. Prepare for Assessment tab in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool

Participants: CIO/IT director, CFO/finance director, IT finance lead, IT audit lead, Other IT management

  1. Identify your stakeholders and document it in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool (see next slides). We recommend having representatives from different business units across the organization, most notably IT, IT finance, finance, and IT audit.
  2. Set the context with your stakeholders and document it in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool. Discuss the reason behind taking the ITFM maturity assessment among the various stakeholders. Why do each of your stakeholders want to take the assessment? What are their main objectives? What would they like to achieve?
  3. Determine the methodology and document it in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool. Discuss how you want to go about taking the assessment with your stakeholders. Do you want to have representatives from each business unit take the assessment individually, then share and discuss their findings? Do you prefer forming a working group with representatives from each business unit and go through the assessment together? Or does any of your stakeholders have a different suggestion? You will have to consider the effort, skillset, and knowledge required.
  4. Identify the assessment takers and document it in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool. Determine who will be taking the assessment (specific names of stakeholders). Consider their availability, knowledge, and skills.

Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

TEMPLATE & EXAMPLE

Document your stakeholders, objectives, and methodology

Excel Workbook: ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool – Prepare for Assessment worksheet

Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to document stakeholders, objectives, and methodology (table range: columns B to G and rows 8 to 15).

Example table from the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool re: 'Maturity Assessment Stakeholders'.

Column ID Input Type Guidelines
B Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required.
C Text Enter the full name of each stakeholder on a separate row.
D Text Enter the job title related to each stakeholder.
E Text Enter the objective(s) related to each stakeholder.
F Text Enter the agreed upon methodology.
G Text Enter any notes or comments per stakeholder (optional).

Review the following in the Excel workbook as per guidelines:

  1. Navigate to the 1a. Prepare for Assessment tab.
  2. Enter the full names and job titles of the ITFM maturity assessment stakeholders.
  3. Document the maturity assessment objective of each of your stakeholders.
  4. Document the agreed-upon methodology.
    5.

Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

TEMPLATE & EXAMPLE

Document your assessment takers

Excel Workbook: ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool – Prepare for Assessment worksheet

Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to document assessment takers (table range: columns B to E and rows 18 to 25).

Example table from the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool re: 'Maturity Assessment Takers'.

Column ID Input Type Guidelines
B Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required.
C Text Enter the full name of each assessment taker on a separate row.
D Text Enter the job title related to each stakeholder to identify which party is being represented per assessment taker.
E Text Enter any notes or comments per stakeholder (optional).

Review the following in the Excel workbook as per guidelines:

  1. Navigate to the 1a. Prepare for Assessment tab.
  2. Enter the full name of each assessment taker, along with the job title of the stakeholder they are representing.
    3.

Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

Step 2

Take the ITFM maturity assessment

Content Overview

  1. Complete the survey
  2. Review your assessment results
  3. Determine your priorities

This step involves the following participants:

  • CIO/IT director
  • CFO/finance director
  • IT finance lead
  • IT audit lead
  • Other IT management

2. Take the ITFM maturity assessment

3 hours

Input: Understanding of your ITFM current state and 12-month target state, ITFM maturity assessment results

Output: ITFM current- and target-state maturity levels, average scores, and variance, ITFM current- and target-state average scores, variance, and priority by maturity focus area and maturity lever

Materials: 1b. Glossary, 2a. Assess ITFM Foundation, 2b. Assess Mngt. & Monitoring, 2c. Assess Language, and 3. Assessment Summary tabs in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool

Participants: CIO/IT director, CFO/finance director, IT finance lead, IT audit lead, Other IT management

  1. Complete the survey: select the current and target state of each statement – refer to the glossary as needed for definitions of key terms – in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool (see next slides). There are three tabs (one per maturity focus area) with three tables each (nine maturity levers). Review and discuss statements with all assessment takers: consider variations, differing opinions, and reach an agreement on each statement inputs.
  2. Review assessment results: navigate to the Assessment Summary tab in the ITFM maturity assessment tool (see next slides) to view your results. Review and discuss with all assessment takers: consider any shocking output and adjust survey input if necessary.
  3. Determine your priorities: decide on the priority (Low/Medium/High) by maturity focus area and/or maturity lever. Rank your maturity focus area priorities from 1 to 3 and your maturity lever priorities from 1 to 9. Consider the feasibility in terms of timeframe, effort, and skillset required, positive and negative impacts on business and technology, likelihood of failure, and necessary approvals. Document your priorities in the ITFM maturity assessment tool (see next slides).
    Review and discuss priorities with all assessment takers: consider variations, differing opinions, and reach an agreement on each priority.

Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

TEMPLATE & EXAMPLE

Complete the survey

Excel workbook: ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool – Survey worksheets

Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to complete the survey.

Example table from the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool re: Survey worksheets.

Column ID Input Type Guidelines
B Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required.
C Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: ITFM maturity statement to assess.
D, E Dropdown Select the maturity levels of your current and target states. One of five maturity levels for each statement, from “1. Nonexistent” (lowest maturity) to “5. Advanced” (highest maturity).
F, G, H Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: scores associated with your current and target state selection, along with related variance (column G – column F).
I Text Enter any notes or comments per ITFM maturity statement (optional).

Review the following in the Excel workbook as per guidelines:

  1. Navigate to the survey tabs: 2a. Assess ITFM Foundation, 2b. Assess Management and Monitoring, and 2c. Assess Language.
  2. Select the appropriate current and target maturity levels.
  3. Add any notes or comments per ITFM maturity statement where necessary or helpful.
    4.

Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

TEMPLATE & EXAMPLE

Review your overall result

Excel Workbook: ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool – Assessment Summary worksheet

Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to review your results.

Example table from the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool re: Assessment Summary worksheet.

Column ID Input Type Guidelines
K Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required.
L Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: Current State, Target State, and Variance entries. Please ignore the current state benchmark, it’s a placeholder for future reference.
M Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: average overall maturity score for your Current State and Target State entries, along with related Variance.
N, O Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: maturity level and related name based on the overall average score (column M), where level 1 corresponds to an average score less than or equal to 1.49, level 2 corresponds to an average score between 1.5 and 2.49 (inclusive), level 3 corresponds to an average score between 2.5 and 3.49 (inclusive), level 4 corresponds to an average score between 3.5 and 4.49 (inclusive), and level 5 corresponds to an average score between 4.5 and 5 (inclusive).
P, Q Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: maturity definition and related description based on the maturity level (column N).

Review the following in the Excel workbook as per guidelines:

  1. Navigate to tab 3. Assessment Summary.
  2. Review your overall current state and target state result along with the corresponding variance.
    3.

Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

TEMPLATE & EXAMPLE

Set your priorities

Excel Workbook: ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool – Assessment Summary worksheet

Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to review your results per maturity focus area and maturity lever, then prioritize accordingly.

Example table from the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool re: Assessment Summary worksheet.

Column ID Input Type Guidelines
B Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required.
C Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: ITFM maturity focus area or lever, depending on the table.
D Placeholder Ignore this column because it’s a placeholder for future reference.
E, F, G Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: average score related to the current state and target state, along with the corresponding variance per maturity focus area or lever (depending on the table).
H Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: preliminary priority based on the average variance (column G), where Low corresponds to an average variance between 0 and 0.5 (inclusive), Medium corresponds to an average variance between 0.51 and 0.99 (inclusive), and High corresponds to an average variance greater than or equal to 1.
J Dropdown Select your final priority (Low, Medium, or High) per ITFM maturity focus area or lever, depending on the table.
K Whole Number Enter the appropriate rank based on your priorities; do not use the same number more than once. A whole number between 1 and 3 to rank ITFM maturity focus areas, and between 1 and 9 to rank ITFM maturity levers, depending on the table.

Review the following in the Excel workbook as per guidelines:

  1. Navigate to tab 3. Assessment Summary.
  2. Review your current-state and target-state result along with the corresponding variance per maturity focus area and maturity lever.
  3. Select the appropriate priority for each maturity focus area and maturity lever.
  4. Enter a unique rank for each maturity focus area (1 to 3).
  5. Enter a unique rank for each maturity lever (1 to 9).
    6.

Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

Step 3

Communicate your ITFM maturity results

Content Overview

  1. Review your assessment charts
  2. Customize the assessment report
  3. Communicate your results

This step involves the following participants:

  • CIO/IT director
  • CFO/finance director
  • IT finance lead
  • IT audit lead
  • Other IT management

3. Communicate your ITFM maturity results

3 hours

Input: ITFM maturity assessment results

Output: Customized ITFM maturity assessment report

Materials: 3. Assessment Summary tab in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool, ITFM Maturity Assessment Report Template

Participants: CIO/IT director, CFO/finance director, IT finance lead, IT audit lead, Other IT management

  1. Review assessment charts: navigate to the Assessment Summary tab in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool (see next slides) to view your results and related charts.
  2. Edit the report template: complete the template based on your results and priorities to develop your customized ITFM maturity assessment report (see next slide).
  3. Communicate results: communicate and deliberate the assessment results with assessment takers at a first stage, and with your stakeholders at a second stage. The objective is to agree on next steps, including developing an improvement plan.

Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

TEMPLATE & EXAMPLE

Review assessment charts

Excel Workbook: ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool – Assessment Summary worksheet

Refer to the example below on charts depicting different views of the maturity assessment results across the three focus areas and nine levers.

Samples of different tabs from the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool: 'Assessment Summary tab: From cell B49 to cell M100' and 'Assessment Summary tab: From cell K13 to cell Q34'.

From the Excel workbook, after completing your potential initiatives and filling all related entries in the Outline Initiatives tab:

  1. Navigate to tab 3. Assessment Summary.
  2. Review each of the charts.
  3. Navigate back to the survey tabs to examine, drill down, and amend individual entries as you deem necessary.
    4.

Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

TEMPLATE & EXAMPLE

Customize your report

PowerPoint presentation: ITFM Maturity Assessment Report Template

Refer to the example below on slides depicting different views of the maturity assessment results across the three maturity focus areas and nine maturity levers.

Samples of different slides from the ITFM Maturity Assessment Report Template, detailed below.

Slide 6: Edit levels based on your assessment results. Copy and paste the appropriate maturity level definition and description from slide 4.

Slide 7: Copy related charts from the assessment summary tab in the Excel workbook and remove the chart title. You can use the “Outer Offset: Bottom” shadow under shape effects on the chart.

Slide 8: Copy related charts from the assessment summary tab in the Excel workbook and remove the chart title and legend. You can use the “Outer Offset: Center” shadow under shape effects on the chart.

From the ITFM Maturity Assessment Report Template:

  1. Edit the report based on your results found in the assessment summary tab of the Excel workbook (see previous slide).
  2. Review slides 6 to 8 and bring necessary adjustments.
    3.

Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Report Template

Make informed business decisions

Take a holistic approach to ITFM.

  • A thorough understanding of your technology spending in relation to business needs and drivers is essential to make informed decisions. As a trusted partner, you cannot have effective conversations around budgets and cost optimization without a solid foundation.
  • It is important to realize that ITFM is not a one-time exercise, but a continuous, sustainable process to educate (teach, mentor, and train), increase transparency, and assign responsibility.
  • Move up the ITFM maturity ladder by improving across three maturity focus areas:
    • Build an ITFM Foundation
    • Manage and Monitor IT Spending
    • Bridge the Language Barrier

What’s Next?

Communicate your maturity results with stakeholders and develop an actionable ITFM improvement plan.

And remember, having informed discussions with your business partners and stakeholders, where technology helps propel your organization forward, is priceless!

IT Financial Management Team

Photo of Dave Kish, Practice Lead, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group. Dave Kish
Practice Lead, ITFM Practice
Info-Tech Research Group
Photo of Jennifer Perrier, Principal Research Director, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group. Jennifer Perrier
Principal Research Director, ITFM Practice
Info-Tech Research Group
Photo of Angie Reynolds, Principal Research Director, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group. Angie Reynolds
Principal Research Director, ITFM Practice
Info-Tech Research Group
Photo of Monica Braun, Research Director, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group. Monica Braun
Research Director, ITFM Practice
Info-Tech Research Group
Photo of Rex Ding, Research Specialist, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group. Rex Ding
Research Specialist, ITFM Practice
Info-Tech Research Group
Photo of Aman Kumari, Research Specialist, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group. Aman Kumari
Research Specialist, ITFM Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

Research Contributors and Experts

Photo of Amy Byalick, Vice President, IT Finance, Info-Tech Research Group. Amy Byalick
Vice President, IT Finance
Info-Tech Research Group 		Amy Byalick is an IT Finance practitioner with 15 years of experience supporting CIOs and IT leaders elevating the IT financial storytelling and unlocking insights. Amy is currently working at Johnson Controls as the VP, IT Finance, previously working at PepsiCo, AmerisourceBergen, and Jacobs.
Photo of Carol Carr, Technical Counselor, Executive Services, Info-Tech Research Group. Carol Carr
Technical Counselor, Executive Services
Info-Tech Research Group
Photo of Scott Fairholm, Executive Counselor, Executive Services, Info-Tech Research Group. Scott Fairholm
Executive Counselor, Executive Services
Info-Tech Research Group
Photo of Gokul Rajan, Executive Counselor, Executive Services, Info-Tech Research Group. Gokul Rajan
Executive Counselor, Executive Services
Info-Tech Research Group
Photo of Allison Kinnaird, Practice Lead, Infrastructure & Operations, Info-Tech Research Group. Allison Kinnaird
Practice Lead, Infrastructure & Operations
Info-Tech Research Group
Photo of Isabelle Hertanto, Practice Lead, Security & Privacy, Info-Tech Research Group. Isabelle Hertanto
Practice Lead, Security & Privacy
Info-Tech Research Group

Related Info-Tech Research

Sample of the IT spending transparency research. Achieve IT Spending Transparency

Mature your ITFM practice by activating the means to make informed business decisions.

Sample of the IT cost optimization roadmap research. Build Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap

Develop an IT cost optimization strategy based on your specific circumstances and timeline.

Bibliography

Eby, Kate. “The Complete Guide to Organizational Maturity: Models, Levels, and Assessments.” Smartsheet, 8 June 2022. Web.

“Financial Management Maturity Model.” National Audit Office, n.d. Accessed 28 Apr. 2023.

“ITFM/TBM Program Maturity Guide.” Nicus Software, n.d. Accessed 28 Apr. 2023.

Jouravlev, Roman. "Service Financial Management: ITIL 4 Practice Guide." Axelos, 2020.

McCarthy, Seamus. “Financial Management Maturity Model: A Good Practice Guide.” Office of the Comptroller & Auditor General, 26 June 2018. Web.

“Principles for Effective Risk Data Aggregation and Risk Reporting.“ Bank for International Settlements, Jan. 2013. Web.

“Role & Influence of the Technology Decision-Maker 2022.” Foundry, 2022. Web.

Stackpole, Beth. “State of the CIO, 2022: Focus turns to IT fundamentals.” CIO, 21 March 2022. Web.

“Tech Spend Pulse.” Flexera, 2022. Web.

Appendix A

Definition and Description
Per Maturity Level

ITFM maturity levels and definitions

Maturity Level

Definition

Description
Nascent
Level 1 		Inability to consistently deliver financial planning services ITFM practices are almost inexistent. Only the most basic financial tasks and activities are being performed on an ad hoc basis to fulfill the Finance department’s requests.
Cost Operator
Level 2 		Rudimentary financial planning capabilities. ITFM activities revolve around minimizing the IT budget as much as possible. ITFM practices are not well defined, and IT’s financial view is limited to day-to-day technical operations.
IT is only involved in low complexity decision making, where financial conversations center on general ledger items and IT spending.
Trusted Coordinator
Level 3 		Enablement of business through cost-effective supply of technology. ITFM activities revolve around becoming a proficient and cost-effective technology supplier to business partners.
ITFM practices are in place, with moderate coordination and adherence to execution. Various IT business units coordinate to produce a consolidated financial view focused on business services.
IT is involved in moderate complexity decision making, as a technology subject matter expert, where financial conversations center on IT spending in relation to technology services or solutions provided to business partners.
Value Optimizer
Level 4 		Effective impact on business performance. ITFM activities revolve around optimizing existing technology investments to improve both IT and business performance.
ITFM practices are well managed, established, documented, repeatable, and integrated as necessary across the organization. IT’s financial view tie technology investments to lines of business, business products, and business capabilities.
Business partners are well informed on the technology mix and drive related discussion. IT is trusted to contribute to complex decision making around existing investments to cost-effectively plan initiatives, as well as enhance business performance.
Strategic Partner
Level 5 		Influence on the organization’s strategic direction. ITFM activities revolve around predicting the outcome of new or potential technology investments to continuously optimize business performance.
ITFM practices are fully optimized, reviewed, and improved in a continuous and sustainable manner, and related execution is tracked by gathering qualitative and quantitative feedback. IT’s financial view is holistic and fully integrated with the business, with an outlook on innovation, growth, and strategic transformation.
Business and IT leaders know the financial ramifications of every business and technology investment decision. IT is trusted to contribute to strategic decision making around potential and future investments to grow and transform the business.

Appendix B

Maturity Level Definitions and Descriptions
Per Lever

Establish your ITFM team

Maturity focus area: Build an ITFM foundation.

Maturity Level

Definition

Description

Nascent
Level 1		Inability to provide any type of financial insight.ITFM tasks, activities, and functions are not being met in any way, shape, or form.
Cost Operator
Level 2		Ability to provide basic financial insights.There is no dedicated ITFM team.


Basic ITFM tasks, activities, and functions are being performed on an ad hoc basis, such as high-level budget reporting.

Trusted Coordinator
Level 3		Ability to provide basic business insights.A dedicated team is fulfilling essential ITFM tasks, activities, and functions.


ITFM team can combine and analyze financial and technology data to produce necessary reports.

Value Optimizer
Level 4		Ability to provide valuable business driven insights.A dedicated ITFM team with well-defined roles and responsibilities can provide effective advice to IT leaders, in a timely fashion, and positively influence IT decisions.
Strategic Partner
Level 5		Ability to influence both technology and business decisions.A dedicated and highly specialized ITFM team is trusted and valued by both IT and Business leaders.


Insights provided by the ITFM team can influence and shape the organization’s strategy.

Set up your governance structure

Maturity focus area: Build an ITFM foundation

Maturity Level

Definition

Description

Nascent
Level 1		Inability to ensure any adherence to rules and regulations.ITFM frameworks, guidelines, policies, and procedures are not developed nor documented.
Cost Operator
Level 2		Ability to ensure basic adherence to rules and regulations.Basic ITFM frameworks, guidelines, policies, and procedures are in place, developed on an ad hoc basis, with no apparent coherence or complete documentation.
Trusted Coordinator
Level 3		Ability to ensure compliance to rules and regulations, as well as accountability across ITFM processes.Essential ITFM frameworks, guidelines, policies, and procedures are in place, coherent, and documented, aiming to (a) comply with rules and regulations, and (b) provide clear accountability.
Value Optimizer
Level 4		Ability to ensure compliance to rules and regulations, as well as structure, transparency, and business alignment across ITFM processes.ITFM frameworks, guidelines, policies, and procedures are well defined, coherent, documented, and regularly reviewed, aiming to (a) comply with rules and regulations, (b) provide clear accountability, and (c) maintain business alignment.
Strategic Partner
Level 5		Ability to:
  • Ensure compliance to rules and regulations, as well as ITFM processes are transparent, structured, focused on business objectives, and support decision making.
  • Reinforce and shape the organization culture.
ITFM frameworks, guidelines, policies, and procedures are complete, well defined, coherent, documented, continuously reviewed, and improved, aiming to (a) comply with rules and regulations, (b) provide clear accountability, (c) maintain business alignment, and (d) facilitate the decision-making process.


Enforcement of the ITFM governance structure can influence the organization culture.

Adopt ITFM processes and tools

Maturity focus area: Build an ITFM foundation.

Maturity Level

Definition

Description

Nascent
Level 1		Inability to deliver IT financial planning and performance output.ITFM processes and tools are not developed nor documented.
Cost Operator
Level 2		Ability to deliver basic IT financial planning output.Basic ITFM processes and tools are in place, developed on an ad hoc basis, with no apparent coherence or complete documentation.
Trusted Coordinator
Level 3		Ability to deliver accurate IT financial output and basic IT performance output in a consistent cadence.Essential ITFM processes and tools are in place, coherent, and documented, aiming to (a) maintain integrity across activities, tasks, methodologies, data, and reports; (b) deliver IT financial planning and performance output needed by stakeholders; and (c) provide clear accountability. ITFM tools and processes are adopted by the ITFM team and some IT business units but are not fully integrated.
Value Optimizer
Level 4		Ability to deliver accurate IT financial planning and performance output at the needed level of detail to stakeholders in a consistent cadence.ITFM processes and tools are complete, well defined, coherent, documented, continuously reviewed, and improved, aiming to (a) maintain integrity across activities, tasks, methodologies, data, and reports; (b) deliver IT financial planning and performance output needed by stakeholders; (c) provide clear accountability; and (d) facilitate decision-making. ITFM tools and processes are adopted by IT and business partners but are not fully integrated.
Strategic Partner
Level 5		Ability to:
  • Deliver accurate IT financial planning and performance output at the needed level of detail to stakeholders.
  • Leverage IT financial planning and performance output in real time and when needed by stakeholders.
ITFM processes and tools are complete, well defined, coherent, documented, continuously reviewed, and improved, aiming to (a) maintain integrity across activities, tasks, methodologies, data, and reports; (b) deliver IT financial planning and performance output needed by stakeholders; (c) provide clear accountability; and (d) facilitate decision making.


ITFM processes and tools are automated to the full extent needed by the organization, utilized to their full potential, and integrated into a single enterprise platform, providing a holistic view of IT spending and IT performance.

Standardize your taxonomy and data model

Maturity focus area: Manage and monitor IT spending.

Maturity Level

Definition

Description

Nascent
Level 1		Inability to provide transparency across technology spending.ITFM taxonomy and data model are not developed nor documented.
Cost Operator
Level 2		Ability to provide transparency and support IT financial planning data, analysis, and reporting needs of finance stakeholders.ITFM taxonomy and data model are in place, developed on an ad hoc basis, with no apparent coherence or complete documentation, to comply with, and meet the needs of finance stakeholders.
Trusted Coordinator
Level 3		Ability to provide transparency and support IT financial planning and performance data, analysis, and reporting needs of IT and finance stakeholders.ITFM taxonomy and data model are in place, coherent, and documented to meet the needs of IT and finance stakeholders.
Value Optimizer
Level 4		Ability to provide transparency and support IT financial planning and performance data, analysis, and reporting needs of IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders.ITFM taxonomy and data model are complete, well defined, coherent, documented, continuously reviewed, and improved, aiming to provide (a) a holistic view of IT spending and IT performance, (b) visibility and transparency, (c) flexibility, and (d) valuable insights to facilitate data driven decision making.


ITFM taxonomy and data model are standardized to meet the needs of IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders, but not flexible enough to be adjusted in a timely fashion as needed.

Strategic Partner
Level 5		Ability to:
  • Provide transparency and support IT financial planning and performance data, analysis, and reporting needs of IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders.
  • Change to meet evolving needs.
ITFM taxonomy and data model are complete, well defined, coherent, documented, continuously reviewed, and improved, aiming to provide (a) a holistic view of IT spending and IT performance, (b) visibility and transparency, (c) flexibility, and (d) valuable insights to facilitate data driven decision making.


ITFM taxonomy and data model are standardized and meet the changing needs of IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders.

Identify, gather, and prepare your data

Maturity focus area: Manage and monitor IT spending.

Maturity Level

Definition

Description

Nascent
Level 1		Inability to provide accurate and complete across technology spending.ITFM data needs and requirements are not understood.
Cost Operator
Level 2		Ability to provide accurate, but incomplete IT financial planning data to meet the needs of finance stakeholders.Technology spending data is extracted, transformed, and loaded on an ad hoc basis to meet the needs of finance stakeholders.
Trusted Coordinator
Level 3		Ability to provide accurate and complete IT financial planning data to meet the needs of IT and finance stakeholders, but IT performance data remain incomplete.IT financial planning data is extracted, transformed, and loaded in a regular cadence to meet the needs of IT and finance stakeholders.


IT financial planning data is (a) complete and accurate, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.), (b) regularly validated for inconsistencies, and (c) sourced from the organization’s system of record.

Value Optimizer
Level 4		Ability to provide accurate and complete IT financial planning and performance data to meet the needs of IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders.ITFM data needs and requirements are understood.


ITFM data is extracted, transformed, and loaded in a regular cadence to meet the needs of IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders.


IT financial planning and performance data are (a) complete and accurate, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.), (b) regularly validated for inconsistencies, and (c) sourced from the organization’s system of record.

Strategic Partner
Level 5		Ability to provide accurate and complete IT financial planning and performance data real time and when needed by IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders.ITFM data needs and requirements are understood.


IT financial planning and performance data are (a) complete and accurate, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.), (b) regularly validated for inconsistencies, (c) available and refreshed as needed, and (d) sourced from the organization’s system of record.

Analyze your findings and develop your reports

Maturity focus area: Manage and monitor IT spending.

Maturity Level

Definition

Description

Nascent
Level 1		Inability to provide any type of financial insight.ITFM analysis and reports are not developed nor documented.
Cost Operator
Level 2		Ability to provide basic financial insights.IT financial planning analysis is conducted on an ad hoc basis to meet the needs of finance stakeholders.
Trusted Coordinator
Level 3		Ability to provide basic financial planning and performance insights to meet the needs of IT and finance stakeholders.IT financial planning and performance analysis are methodical and rigorous, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.).


IT financial planning and performance reports are accurate, precise, and methodical, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.).

Value Optimizer
Level 4		Ability to provide practical insights and useful recommendations as needed by IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders to facilitate business decision making around technology investments.ITFM analysis and reports support business decision making around technology investments.


IT financial planning and performance analysis are methodical and rigorous, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.).


IT financial planning and performance reports are (a) accurate, precise, and methodical, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.), (b) fit for purpose, and (c) regularly validated for inconsistencies.

Strategic Partner
Level 5		Ability to provide practical insights and useful recommendations as needed by IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders to facilitate strategic decision making.ITFM analysis and reports support strategic decision making.


IT financial planning and performance analysis are methodical and rigorous, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.), and consider multiple point of views (hypotheses, interpretations, opinions, etc.).


IT financial planning and performance reports are (a) accurate, precise, and methodical, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.), (b) fit for purpose, (c) comprehensive, and (d) regularly validated for inconsistencies.

Communicate your IT spending

Maturity focus area: Bridge the language barrier.

Maturity Level

Definition

Description

Nascent
Level 1		Inability of organization stakeholders to communicate and understand each other.The organization stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives do not understand one another, and cannot speak the same language.
Cost Operator
Level 2		Ability to understand business and finance requirements.IT understands and meets business and financial planning requirements but does not communicate in a similar language.


IT cannot influence finance or business decision making.

Trusted Coordinator
Level 3		Ability to understand the needs of different stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives and take part in decision making around technology spending.The organization stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives understand each other’s needs, but do not communicate in a common language.


IT leaders provide insights as technology subject matter experts, where conversations center on IT spending in relation to technology services or solutions provided to business partners.


IT can influence technology decisions around its own budget.

Value Optimizer
Level 4		Ability to communicate in a common vocabulary across the organization and take part in business decision making around technology investments.The organization stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives communicate in a common vocabulary and understand one another.


IT and business leaders, along with their respective teams, collaborate frequently across various initiatives.


IT leaders provide valuable insight to support and influence business decision making around existing technology investments.

Strategic Partner
Level 5		Ability to communicate in a common vocabulary across the organization and take part in strategic decision making.The organization stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives communicate in a common vocabulary and understand one another.


IT and business leaders, along with their respective teams, collaborate frequently across various initiatives.


IT leaders provide valuable insight to facilitate decision making around potential and future investments to grow and transform the business, thus influencing the organization’s overall strategic direction.

Educate the masses

Maturity focus area: Bridge the language barrier.

Maturity Level

Definition

Description

Nascent
Level 1		Inability of organization stakeholders to acquire knowledge.Educational resources are inexistent.
Cost Operator
Level 2		Ability to acquire financial knowledge and understand financial concepts.IT leaders have access to educational resources to gain the financial knowledge necessary to perform their duties.
Trusted Coordinator
Level 3		Ability to acquire financial and business knowledge and understand related concepts.IT leaders and their respective teams have access to educational resources to gain the financial and business knowledge necessary to perform their duties.


ITFM team has access to the necessary educational resources to keep up with changing financial regulations and technology developments.

Value Optimizer
Level 4		Ability to acquire knowledge, across technology, business, and finance as needed by different organization stakeholders, and the leadership understand concepts across these various domains.Stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives have access to various educational resources to gain knowledge in different domains as needed.


IT leaders have a good understanding of business and financial concepts.


Business leaders have a good understanding of technology concepts.

Strategic Partner
Level 5		Ability to acquire knowledge, and understand concepts across technology, business, and finance as needed by different organization stakeholders.The organization promotes continuous learning through well designed programs including training, mentorship, and academic courses. Thus, stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives have access to various educational resources to gain knowledge in different domains as needed.


IT leaders and their respective teams have a good understanding of business and financial concepts.


Business leaders and their respective teams have a good understanding of technology concepts.

Influence your organization’s culture

Maturity focus area: Bridge the language barrier.

Maturity Level

Definition

Description

Nascent
Level 1		Inability to provide and foster an environment of collaboration and continuous improvement.Stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives operate in silos, and collaboration between different teams is inexistent.
Cost Operator
Level 2		Ability to provide an environment of cooperation to meet the needs of IT, finance, and business leaders.IT, finance, and business leaders cooperate to meet financial planning requirements as necessary to perform their duties.
Trusted Coordinator
Level 3		Ability to provide and foster an environment of collaboration across the organization.IT, finance, and business collaborate on various initiatives.

ITFM employees are trusted and supported by their stakeholders (IT, finance, and business).

Value Optimizer
Level 4		Ability to provide and foster an environment of collaboration and continuous improvement, where employees across the organization feel trusted, supported, empowered, and valued.Stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives support and promote continuous improvement, transparency practices, and collaboration across the organization.


Employees are trusted, supported, empowered, and valued.

Strategic Partner
Level 5		Ability to provide and foster an environment of collaboration and continuous improvement, where leaders are willing to change, and employees across the organization feel trusted, supported, empowered, and valued.Stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives support and promote continuous improvement, transparency practices, and collaboration across the organization.


The organization’s leadership is adaptable and open to change.


Employees are trusted, supported, empowered, and valued.

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
[infographic]

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.

Modernize Data Architecture for Measurable Business Results

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  • Parent Category Name: Data Management
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  • Data architecture projects have often failed in the past, causing businesses today to view the launch of a new project as a costly initiative with unclear business value.
  • New technologies in big data and analytics are requiring organizations to modernize their data architecture, but most organizations have failed to spend the time and effort refining the appropriate data models and blueprints that enable them to do so.
  • As the benefits for data architecture are often diffused across an organization’s information management practice, it can be difficult for the business to understand the value and necessity of data architecture.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • At the heart of tomorrow’s insights-driven enterprises is a modern data environment anchored in fit-for-purpose data architectures.
  • The role of traditional data architecture is transcending beyond organizational boundaries and its focus is shifting from “keeping the lights on” (i.e. operational data and BI) to providing game-changing insights gleaned from untapped big data.

Impact and Result

  • Perform a diagnostic assessment of your present day architecture and identify the capabilities of your future “to be” environment to position your organization to capitalize on new opportunities in the data space.
  • Use Info-Tech’s program diagnostic assessment and guidance for developing a strategic roadmap to support your team in building a fit-for purpose data architecture practice.
  • Create a data delivery architecture that harmonizes traditional and modern architectural opportunities.

Modernize Data Architecture for Measurable Business Results Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should modernize your data architecture, 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. Develop a data architecture vision

Plan your data architecture project and align it with the business and its strategic vision.

  • Modernize Data Architecture for Measurable Business Results – Phase 1: Develop a Data Architecture Vision
  • Modernize Data Architecture Project Charter
  • Data Architecture Strategic Planning Workbook

2. Assess data architecture capabilities

Evaluate the current and target capabilities of your data architecture, using the accompanying diagnostic assessment to identify performance gaps and build a fit-for-purpose practice.

  • Modernize Data Architecture for Measurable Business Results – Phase 2: Assess Data Architecture Capabilities
  • Data Architecture Assessment and Roadmap Tool
  • Initiative Definition Tool

3. Develop a data architecture roadmap

Translate your planned initiatives into a sequenced roadmap.

  • Modernize Data Architecture for Measurable Business Results – Phase 3: Develop a Data Architecture Roadmap
  • Modernize Data Architecture Roadmap Presentation Template
[infographic]

Workshop: Modernize Data Architecture for Measurable Business Results

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 Develop a Data Architecture (DA) Vision

The Purpose

Discuss key business drivers and strategies.

Identify data strategies.

Develop a data architecture vision.

Assess data architecture practice capabilities. 

Key Benefits Achieved

A data architecture vision aligned with the business.

A completed assessment of the organization’s current data architecture practice capabilities.

Identification of "to be" data architecture practice capabilities.

Identification of key gaps. 

Activities

1.1 Explain approach and value proposition

1.2 Discuss business vision and key drivers

1.3 Discover business pain points and needs

1.4 Determine data strategies

1.5 Assess DA practice capabilities

Outputs

Data strategies

Data architecture vision

Current and target capabilities for the modernized DA practice

2 Assess DA Core Capabilities (Part 1)

The Purpose

Assess the enterprise data model (EDM).

Assess current and target data warehouse, BI/analytics, and big data architectures.

Key Benefits Achieved

A completed assessment of the organization’s current EDM, data warehouse, BI and analytics, and big data architectures.

Identification of "to be" capabilities for the organization’s EDM, data warehouse, BI and analytics, and big data architectures.

Identification of key gaps.

Activities

2.1 Present an overarching DA capability model

2.2 Assess current and target EDM capabilities

2.3 Assess current/target data warehouse, BI/analytics, and big data architectures

2.4 Identify gaps and high level strategies

Outputs

Target capabilities for EDM

Target capabilities for data warehouse architecture, BI architecture, and big data architecture

3 Assess DA Core Capabilities (Part 2)

The Purpose

Assess EDM.

Assess current/target MDM, metadata, data integration, and content architectures.

Assess dynamic data models.

Key Benefits Achieved

A completed assessment of the organization’s current MDM, metadata, data integration, and content architectures.

Identification of “to be” capabilities for the organization’s MDM, metadata, data integration, and content architectures.

Identification of key gaps.

Activities

3.1 Present an overarching DA capability model

3.2 Assess current and target MDM, metadata, data integration, and content architectures

3.3 Assess data lineage and data delivery model

3.4 Identify gaps and high level strategies

Outputs

Target capabilities for MDM architecture, metadata architecture, data integration architecture, and document & content architecture

Target capabilities for data lineage/delivery

4 Analyze Gaps and Formulate Strategies

The Purpose

Map performance gaps and document key initiatives from the diagnostic assessment.

Identify additional gaps and action items.

Formulate strategies and initiatives to address priority gaps. 

Key Benefits Achieved

Prioritized gap analysis.

Improvement initiatives and related strategies.

Activities

4.1 Map performance gaps to business vision, pain points, and needs

4.2 Identify additional gaps

4.3 Consolidate/rationalize/prioritize gaps

4.4 Formulate strategies and actions to address gaps

Outputs

Prioritized gaps

Data architecture modernization strategies

5 Develop a Data Architecture Roadmap

The Purpose

Plot initiatives and strategies on a strategic roadmap.

Key Benefits Achieved

A roadmap with prioritized and sequenced initiatives.

Milestone plan.

Executive report. 

Activities

5.1 Transform strategies into a plan of action

5.2 Plot actions on a prioritized roadmap

5.3 Identify and discuss next milestone plan

5.4 Compile an executive report

Outputs

Data architecture modernization roadmap

Data architecture assessment and roadmap report (from analyst team)

Get Started With Customer Advocacy

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Getting started with customer advocacy (CA) is no easy task. Many customer success professionals carry out ad hoc customer advocacy activities to address immediate needs but lack a more strategic approach.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Customer success leaders must reposition their CA program around growth; the recognition that customer advocacy is a strategic growth initiative is necessary to succeed in today’s competitive market.
  • Get key stakeholders on board early – especially Sales!
  • Always link your CA efforts back to retention and growth.
  • Make building genuine relationships with your advocates the cornerstone of your CA program.

Impact and Result

  • Enable the organization to identify and develop meaningful relationships with top customers and advocates.
  • Understand the concepts and benefits of CA and how CA can be used to improve marketing and sales and fuel growth and competitiveness.
  • Follow SoftwareReviews’ methodology to identify where to start to apply CA within the organization.
  • Develop a customer advocacy proof of concept/pilot program to gain stakeholder approval and funding to get started with or expand efforts around customer advocacy.

Get Started With Customer Advocacy Research & Tools

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

1. Get Started With Customer Advocacy Executive Brief – An overview of why customer advocacy is critical to your organization and the recommended approach for getting started with a pilot program.

Understand the strategic benefits and process for building a formal customer advocacy program. To be successful, you must reposition CA as a strategic growth initiative and continually link any CA efforts back to growth.

  • Get Started With Customer Advocacy Storyboard

2. Define Your Advocacy Requirements – Assess your current customer advocacy efforts, identify gaps, and define your program requirements.

With the assessment tool and steps outlined in the storyboard, you will be able to understand the gaps and pain points, where and how to improve your efforts, and how to establish program requirements.

  • Customer Advocacy Maturity Assessment Tool

3. Win Executive Approval and Launch Pilot – Develop goals, success metrics, and timelines, and gain approval for your customer advocacy pilot.

Align on pilot goals, key milestones, and program elements using the template and storyboard to effectively communicate with stakeholders and gain executive buy-in for your customer advocacy pilot.

  • Get Started With Customer Advocacy Executive Presentation Template

Infographic

Further reading

Get Started With Customer Advocacy

Develop a customer advocacy program to transform customer satisfaction into revenue growth.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst perspective

Customer advocacy is critical to driving revenue growth

The image contains a picture of Emily Wright.

Customer advocacy puts the customer at the center of everything your organization does. By cultivating a deep understanding of customer needs and how they define value and by delivering positive experiences throughout the customer journey, organizations inspire and empower customers to become evangelists for their brands or products. Both the client and solution provider enjoy satisfying and ongoing business outcomes as a result.

Focusing on customer advocacy is critical for software solutions providers. Business-to-business (B2B) buyers are increasingly looking to their peers and third-party resources to arm themselves with information on solutions they feel they can trust before they choose to engage with solution providers. Your satisfied customers are now your most trusted and powerful resource.

Customer advocacy helps build strong relationships with your customers, nurtures brand advocacy, gives your marketing messaging credibility, and differentiates your company from the competition; it’s critical to driving revenue growth. Companies that develop mature advocacy programs can increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) by 16% (Wharton Business School, 2009), increase customer retention by 35% (Deloitte, 2011), and give themselves a strong competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Emily Wright
Senior Research Analyst, Advisory
SoftwareReviews

Executive summary

Your Challenge

Ad hoc customer advocacy (CA) efforts and reference programs, while still useful, are not enough to drive growth. Providers increase their chance for success by assessing if they face the following challenges:

  • Lack of referenceable customers that can turn into passionate advocates, or a limited pool that is at risk of burnout.
  • Lack of references for all key customer types, verticals, etc., especially in new growth segments or those that are hard to recruit.
  • Lack of a consistent program for gathering customer feedback and input to make improvements and increase customer satisfaction.
  • Lack of executive and stakeholder (e.g. Sales, Customer Success, channel partners, etc.) buy-in for the importance and value of customer advocacy.

Building a strong customer advocacy program must be a high priority for customer service/success leaders in today’s highly competitive software markets.

Common Obstacles

Getting started with customer advocacy is no easy task. Many customer success professionals carry out ad hoc customer advocacy activities to address immediate needs but lack a more strategic approach. What separates them from success are several nagging obstacles:

  • Efforts lack funding and buy-in from stakeholders.
  • Senior management doesn’t fully understand the business value of a customer advocacy program.
  • Duplicate efforts are taking place between Sales, Marketing, product teams, etc., because ownership, roles, and responsibilities have not been determined.
  • Relationships are guarded/hoarded by those who feel they own the relationship (e.g. Sales, Customer Success, channel partners, etc.).
  • Customer-facing staff often lack the necessary skills to foster customer advocacy.

SoftwareReviews’ Approach

This blueprint will help leaders of customer advocacy programs get started with developing a formalized pilot program that will demonstrate the value of customer advocacy and lay a strong foundation to justify rollout. Through SoftwareReviews’ approach, customer advocacy leaders will:

  • Enable the organization to identify and develop meaningful relationships with top customers and advocates.
  • Understand the concepts and benefits of CA and how CA can be used to improve marketing and sales and fuel growth and competitiveness.
  • Follow SoftwareReviews’ methodology to identify where to start to apply CA within the organization.
  • Develop a customer advocacy proof of concept/pilot program to gain stakeholder approval and funding to get started with or expand efforts around customer advocacy.

What is customer advocacy?

“Customer advocacy is the act of putting customer needs first and working to deliver solution-based assistance through your products and services." – Testimonial Hero, 2021

Customer advocacy is designed to keep customers loyal through customer engagement and advocacy marketing campaigns. Successful customer advocacy leaders experience decreased churn while increasing return on investment (ROI) through retention, acquisition, and cost savings.

Businesses that implement customer advocacy throughout their organizations find new ways of supporting customers, provide additional customer value, and ensure their brands stand unique among the competition.

Customer Advocacy Is…

  • An integral part of any marketing and/or business strategy.
  • Essential to improving and maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction.
  • Focused on delivering value to customers.
  • Not only a set of actions, but a mindset that should be fostered and reinforced through a customer-centric culture.
  • Mutually beneficial relationships for both company and customer.

Customer Advocacy Is Not…

  • Only referrals and testimonials.
  • Solely about what you can get from your advocates.
  • Brand advocacy. Brand advocacy is the desired outcome of customer advocacy.
  • Transactional. Brand advocates must be engaged.
  • A nice-to-have.
  • Solved entirely by software. Think about what you want to achieve and how a software solution can you help you reach those goals.

SoftwareReviews Insight

Customer advocacy has evolved into being a valued company asset versus a simple referral program – success requires an organization-wide customer-first mindset and the recognition that customer advocacy is a strategic growth initiative necessary to succeed in today’s competitive market.

Customer advocacy: Essential to high retention

When customers advocate for your company and products, they are eager to retain the value they receive

  • Customer acts of advocacy correlate to high retention.
  • Acts of advocacy won’t happen unless customers feel their interests are placed ahead of your company’s, thereby increasing satisfaction and customer success. That’s the definition of a customer-centric culture.
  • And yet your company does receive significant benefits from customer advocacy:
    • When customers advocate and renew, your costs go down and margins rise because it costs less to keep a happy customer than it does to bring a new customer onboard.
    • When renewal rates are high, customer lifetime value increases, also increasing profitability.

Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer (Huify, 2018).

Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95% (Bain & Company, cited in Harvard Business Review, 2014).

SoftwareReviews Insight

Don’t overlook the value of customer advocacy to retention! Despite the common knowledge that it’s far easier and cheaper to sell to an existing customer than to sell to a new prospect, most companies fail to leverage their customer advocacy programs and continue to put pressure on Marketing to focus their budgets on customer acquisition.

Customer advocacy can also be your ultimate growth strategy

In your marketing and sales messaging, acts of advocacy serve as excellent proof points for value delivered.

Forty-five percent of businesses rank online reviews as a top source of information for selecting software during this (top of funnel) stage, followed closely by recommendations and referrals at 42%. These sources are topped only by company websites at 54% (Clutch, 2020).

With referrals coming from customer advocates to prospects via your lead gen engine and through seller talk tracks, customer advocacy is central to sales, marketing, and customer experience success.

✓ Advocates can help your new customers learn your solution and ensure higher adoption and satisfaction.
✓ Advocates can provide valuable, honest feedback on new updates and features.

The image contains a picture to demonstrate the cycle of customer advocacy. The image has four circles, with one big circle in the middle and three circles surrounding with arrows pointing in both directions in between them. The middle circle is labelled customer advocacy. The three circles are labelled: sales, customer success, marketing.

“A customer advocacy program is not just a fancy buzz word or a marketing tool that’s nice to have. It’s a core discipline that every major brand needs to integrate into their overall marketing, sales and customer success strategies if they expect to survive in this trust economy. Customer advocacy arguably is the common asset that runs throughout all marketing, sales and customer success activities regardless of the stage of the buyer’s journey and ties it all together.” – RO Innovation, 2017

Positive experience drives acts of advocacy

More than price or product, experience now leads the way in customer advocacy and retention

Advocacy happens when customers recommend your product. Our research shows that the biggest drivers of likeliness to recommend and acts of customer advocacy are the positive experiences customers have with vendors and their products, not product features or cost savings. Customers want to feel that:

  1. Their productivity and performance is enhanced and the vendor is helping them to innovate and grow as a company.
  2. Their vendor inspires them and helps them to continually improve.
  3. They can rely on the vendor and the product they purchased.
  4. They are respected by the vendor.
  5. They can trust that the vendor will be on their side and save them time.

The image contains a graph to demonstrate the correlation of likeliness to recommend a satisfaction driver. Where anything above a 0.5 indicates a strong driver of satisfaction.

Note that anything above 0.5 indicates a strong driver of satisfaction.
Source: SoftwareReviews buyer reviews (based on 82,560 unique reviews).

SoftwareReviews Insight

True customer satisfaction comes from helping customers innovate, enhancing their performance, inspiring them to continually improve, and being reliable, respectful, trustworthy, and conscious of their time. These true drivers of satisfaction should be considered in your customer advocacy and retention efforts. The experience customers have with your product and brand is what will differentiate your brand from competitors, drive advocacy, and ultimately, power business growth. Talk to a SoftwareReviews advisor to learn how users rate your product on these satisfaction drivers in the SoftwareReviews Emotional Footprint Report.

Yet challenges exist for customer advocacy program leaders

Customer success leaders without a strong customer advocacy program feel numerous avoidable pains:

  • Lack of compelling stories and proof points for the sales team, causing long sales cycles.
  • Heavy reliance on a small pool of worn-out references.
  • Lack of references for all needed customer types, verticals, etc.
  • Lack of a reliable customer feedback process for solution improvements.
  • Overspending on acquiring new customers due to a lack of customer proof points.
  • Missed opportunities that could grow the business (customer lifetime value, upsell/cross-sell, etc.).

Marketing, customer success, and sales teams experiencing any one of the above challenges must consider getting started with a more formalized customer advocacy program.

Obstacles to customer advocacy programs

Leaders must overcome several barriers in developing a customer advocacy program:

  • Stakeholders are often unclear on the value customer advocacy programs can bring and require proof of benefits to invest.
  • Efforts are duplicated among sales, marketing, product, and customer success teams, given ownership and collaboration practices are ill-defined or nonexistent.
  • There is a culture of guarding or hoarding customer relationships by those who feel they own the relationship, or there’s high turnover among employees who own the customer relationships.
  • The governance, technology, people, skills, and/or processes to take customer advocacy to the next level are lacking.
  • Leaders don’t know where to start with customer advocacy, what needs to be improved, or what to focus on first.

A lack of customer centricity hurts organizations

12% of people believe when a company says they put customers first. (Source: HubSpot, 2019)

Brands struggle to follow through on brand promises, and a mismatch between expectations and lived experience emerges. Customer advocacy can help close this gap and help companies live up to their customer-first messaging.

42% of companies don’t conduct any customer surveys or collect feedback. (Source: HubSpot, 2019)

Too many companies are not truly listening to their customers. Companies that don’t collect feedback aren’t going to know what to change to improve customer satisfaction. Customer advocacy will orient companies around their customer and create a reliable feedback loop that informs product and service enhancements.

Customer advocacy is no longer a nice-to-have but a necessity for solution providers

B2B buyers increasingly turn to peers to learn about solutions:

“84% of B2B decision makers start the buying process with a referral.” (Source: Influitive, Gainsight & Pendo, 2020)

“46% of B2B buyers rely on customer references for information before purchasing.” (Source: RO Innovation, 2017)

“91% of B2B purchasers’ buying decisions are influenced by word-of-mouth recommendations.” (Source: ReferralRock, 2022)

“76% of individuals admit that they’re more likely to trust content shared by ‘normal’ people than content shared by brands.” (Source: TrustPilot, 2020)

By ignoring the importance of customer advocacy, companies and brands are risking stagnation and missing out on opportunities to gain competitive advantage and achieve growth.

Getting Started With Customer Advocacy: SoftwareReviews' Approach

1 BUILD
Build the business case
Identify your key stakeholders, steering committee, and working team, understand key customer advocacy principles, and note success barriers and ways to overcome them as your first steps.

2 DEVELOP
Develop your advocacy requirements
Assess your current customer advocacy maturity, identify gaps in your current efforts, and develop your ideal advocate profile.

3 WIN
Win executive approval and implement pilot
Determine goals and success metrics for the pilot, establish a timeline and key project milestones, create advocate communication materials, and finally gain executive buy-in and implement the pilot.

SoftwareReviews Insight
Building and implementing a customer advocacy pilot will help lay the foundation for a full program and demonstrate to executives and key stakeholders the impact on revenue, retention, and CLV that can be achieved through coordinated and well-planned customer advocacy efforts.

Customer advocacy benefits

Our research benefits customer advocacy program managers by enabling them to:

  • Explain why having a centralized, proactive customer advocacy program is important.
  • Clearly communicate the benefits and business case for having a formalized customer advocacy program.
  • Develop a customer advocacy pilot to provide a proof of concept (POC) and demonstrate the value of customer advocacy.
  • Assess the maturity of your current customer advocacy efforts and identify what to improve and how to improve to grow your customer advocacy function.

"Advocacy is the currency for business and the fuel for explosive growth. Successful marketing executives who understand this make advocacy programs an essential part of their go-to-market strategy. They also know that advocacy isn't something you simply 'turn on': ... ultimately, it's about making human connections and building relationships that have enduring value for everyone involved."
- Dan Cote, Influitive, Dec. 2021

Case Study: Advocate impact on sales at Genesys

Genesys' Goal

Provide sales team with compelling customer reviews, quotes, stories, videos, and references.

Approach to Advocacy

  • Customers were able to share their stories through Genesys' customer hub GCAP as quotes, reviews, etc., and could sign up to host reference forum sessions for prospective customers.
  • Content was developed that demonstrated ROI with using Genesys' solutions, including "top-tier logos, inspiring quotes, and reference forums featuring some of their top advocates" (Influitive, 2021).
  • Leveraged customer advocacy-specific software solution integration with the CRM to easily identify reference recommendations for Sales.

Advocate Impact on Sales

According to Influitive (2021), the impacts were:

  • 386% increase in revenue influences from references calls
  • 82% of revenue has been influence by reference calls
  • 78 reference calls resulted in closed-won opportunities
  • 250 customers and prospects attended 7 reference forums
  • 112 reference slides created for sales enablement
  • 100+ quotes were collect and transformed into 78 quote slides

Who benefits from getting started with customer advocacy?

This Research Is Designed for:

  • Customer advocacy leaders and marketers who are looking to:
    • Take a more strategic, proactive, and structured approach to customer advocacy.
    • Find a more effective and reliable way to gather customer feedback and input on products and services.
    • Develop and nurture a customer-oriented mindset throughout the organization.
    • Improve marketing credibility both within the company and outside to prospective customers.

This Research Will Help You:

  • Explain why having a centralized, proactive customer advocacy program is important.
  • Clearly communicate the benefits and business case for having a formalized customer advocacy program.
  • Develop a customer advocacy pilot to provide a proof of concept (POC) and demonstrate the value of customer advocacy.
  • Assess the maturity of your current customer advocacy efforts and identify what to improve and how to improve to grow your customer advocacy function.

This Research Will Also Assist:

  • Customer success leaders and sales directors who are responsible for:
    • Gathering customer references and testimonials.
    • Referral or voice of the customer (VoC) programs.

This Research Will Help Them:

  • Align stakeholders on an overall program of identifying ideal advocates.
  • Coordinate customer advocacy efforts and actions.
  • Gather and make use of customer feedback to improve products, solutions, and service provided.
  • Provide an amazing customer experience throughout the entirety of the customer journey.

SoftwareReviews’ methodology for getting started with customer advocacy

Phase Steps

1. Build the business case

  1. Identify your key stakeholders, steering committee, and working team
  2. Understand the concepts and benefits of customer advocacy as they apply to your organization
  3. Outline barriers to success, risks, and risk mitigation tactics

2. Develop your advocacy requirements

  1. Assess your customer advocacy maturity using the SoftwareReviews CA Maturity Assessment Tool
  2. Identify gaps/pains in current CA efforts and add tasks to your action plan
  3. Develop ideal advocate profile/identify target advocate segment(s)

3. Create implementation plan and pitch CA pilot

  1. Determine pilot goals and success metrics
  2. Establish timeline and create advocate communication materials
  3. Gain executive buy-in and implement pilot

Phase Outcomes

  1. Common understanding of CA concepts and benefits
  2. Buy-in from CEO and head of Sales
  3. List of opportunities, risks, and risk mitigation tactics
  1. Identification of gaps in current customer advocacy efforts and/or activities
  2. Understanding customer advocacy readiness
  3. Identification of ideal advocate profile/target segment
  4. Basic actions to bridge gaps in CA efforts
  1. Clear objective for CA pilot
  2. Key metrics for program success
  3. Pilot timelines and milestones
  4. Executive presentation with business case for CA

Insight summary

Customer advocacy is a critical strategic growth initiative
Customer advocacy (CA) has evolved into being a highly valued company asset as opposed to a simple referral program, but not everyone in the organization sees it that way. Customer success leaders must reposition their CA program around growth instead of focusing solely on retention and communicate this to key stakeholders. The recognition that customer advocacy is a strategic growth initiative is necessary to succeed in today’s competitive market.

Get key stakeholders on board early – especially Sales!
Work to bring the CEO and the head of Sales on your side early. Sales is the gatekeeper – they need to open the door to customers to turn them into advocates. Clearly reposition CA for growth and communicate that to the CEO and head of Sales; wider buy-in will follow.

Identify the highest priority segment for generating acts of advocacy
By focusing on the highest priority segment, you accomplish a number of things: generating growth in a critical customer segment, proving the value of customer advocacy to key stakeholders (especially Sales), and setting a strong foundation for customer advocacy to build upon and expand the program out to other segments.

Always link your CA efforts back to retention and growth
By clearly demonstrating the impact that customer advocacy has on not only retention but also overall growth, marketers will gain buy-in from key stakeholders, secure funding for a full CA program, and gain the resources needed to expand customer advocacy efforts.

Focus on providing value to advocates
Many organizations take a transactional approach to customer advocacy, focusing on what their advocates can do for them. To truly succeed with CA, focus on providing your advocates with value first and put them in the spotlight.

Make building genuine relationships with your advocates the cornerstone of your CA program
"57% of small businesses say that having a relationship with their consumers is the primary driver of repeat business" (Factory360).

Guided Implementation

What does our GI on getting started with building customer advocacy look like?

Build the Business Case

Call #1: Identify key stakeholders. Map out motivations and anticipate any concerns or objections. Determine steering committee and working team. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #2: Discuss concepts and benefits of customer advocacy as they apply to organizational goals. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #3: Discuss barriers to success, risks, and risk mitigation tactics. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #4: Finalize CA goals, opportunities, and risks and develop business case. Plan next call – 2 weeks.

Develop Your Advocacy Requirements

Call #5: Review the SoftwareReviews CA Maturity Assessment Tool. Assess your current level of customer advocacy maturity. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #6: Review gaps and pains in current CA efforts. Discuss tactics and possible CA pilot program goals. Begin adding tasks to action plan. Plan next call – 2 weeks.

Call #7: Discuss ideal advocate profile and target segments. Plan next call – 2 weeks.

Call #8: Validate and finalize ideal advocate profile. Plan next call – 1 week.

Win Executive Approval and Implement Pilot

Call #9: Discuss CA pilot scope. Discuss performance metrics and KPIs. Plan next call – 3 days.

Call #10: Determine timeline and key milestones. Plan next call –2 weeks.

Call #11: Develop advocate communication materials. Plan next call – 3 days.

Call #12: Review final business case and coach on executive presentation. Plan next call – 1 week.

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.


Customer Advocacy Workshop

Pre-Workshop Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Post-Workshop
Activities Identify Stakeholders & CA Pilot Team Build the Business Case Assess Current CA Efforts Develop Advocacy Goals & Ideal Advocate Profile Develop Project Timelines, Materials, and Exec Presentation Next Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite) Pitch CA Pilot
0.1 Identify key stakeholders to involve in customer advocacy pilot and workshop; understand their motivations and anticipate possible concerns. 1.1 Review key CA concepts and identify benefits of CA for the organization.
1.2 Outline barriers to success, risks, and risk mitigation tactics. 		2.1 Assess your customer advocacy maturity using the SoftwareReviews CA Maturity Assessment Tool.
2.2 Identify gaps/pains in current CA efforts.
2.3 Prioritize gaps from diagnostic and any other critical pain points. 		3.1 Identify and document the ideal advocate profile and target customer segment for pilot.
3.2 Determine goal(s) and success metrics for program pilot. 		4.1 Develop pilot timelines and key milestones.
4.2 Outline materials needed and possible messaging.
4.3 Build the executive buy-in presentation. 		5.1 Complete in-progress deliverables from the previous four days. 6.1 Present to executive team and stakeholders.
6.2 Gain executive buy-in and key stakeholder approval.
6.3 Execute CA pilot.
Deliverables
  1. Rationale for CA pilot; clear benefits, and how they apply to the organization.
  2. Documented barriers to success, risks, and risk mitigation tactics.
  1. CA Maturity Assessment results.
  2. Identification of gaps in current customer advocacy efforts and/or activities.
  1. Documented ideal advocate profile/target customer segment.
  2. Clear goal(s) and success metrics for CA pilot.
  1. Documented pilot timelines and key milestones.
  2. Draft/outlines of advocate materials.
  3. Draft executive presentation with business case for CA.
  1. Finalized implementation plan for CA pilot.
  2. Finalized executive presentation with business case for CA.
  1. Buy-in from decision makers and key stakeholders.

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

Get started!

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Phase 1
Build the Business Case

Phase 2
Develop Your Advocacy Requirements

Phase 3
Win Executive Approval and Implement Pilot

Phase 1: Build the Business Case

Steps
1.1 Identify your key stakeholders, steering committee, and working team
1.2 Understand the concepts and benefits of customer advocacy as they apply to your organization
1.3 Outline barriers to success, risks, and risk mitigation tactics

Phase Outcome

  • Common understanding of CA concepts and benefits
  • Buy-in from CEO and head of Sales
  • List of barriers to success, risks, and risk mitigation tactics

Build the business case

Step 1.1 Identify your key stakeholders, steering committee, and working team

Total duration: 2.5-8.0 hours

Objective
Identify, document, and finalize your key stakeholders to know who to involve and how to get them onboard by truly understanding the forces of influence.

Output

  • Robust stakeholder list with key stakeholders identified.
  • Steering committee and working team decided.

Participants

  • Customer advocacy lead
  • Identified stakeholders
  • Workstream leads

MarTech
None

Tools

1.1.1 Identify Stakeholders
(60-120 min.)

Identify
Using the guidance on slide 28, identify all stakeholders who would be involved or impacted by your customer advocacy pilot by entering names and titles into columns A and B on slide 27 "Stakeholder List Worksheet."

Document
Document as much information about each stakeholder as possible in columns C, D, E, and F into the table on slide 27.

1.1.2 Select Steering Committee & Working Team
(60-90 min.)

Select
Using the guidance on slides 28 and 29 and the information collected in the table on slide 27, identify the stakeholders that are steering committee members, functional workstream leads, or operations; document in column G on slide 27.

Document
Open the Executive Presentation Template to slides 5 and 6 and document your final steering committee and working team selections. Be sure to note the Executive Sponsor and Program Manager on slide 5.

Tips & Reminders

  1. It is critical to identify "key stakeholders"; a single missed key stakeholder can disrupt an initiative. A good way to ensure that nobody is missed is to first uncover as many stakeholders as possible and later decide how important they are.
  2. Ensure steering committee representation from each department this initiative would impact or that may need to be involved in decision-making or problem-solving endeavors.

Consult Info-Tech's Manage Stakeholder Relations blueprint for additional guidance on identifying and managing stakeholders, or contact one of our analysts for more personalized assistance and guidance.

Stakeholder List Worksheet

*Possible Roles
Executive Sponsor
Program Manager
Workstream Lead
Functional Lead
Steering Committee
Operations
A B C D E F G
Name Position Decision Involvement
(Driver / Approver / Contributor / Informe 		Direct Benefit?
(Yes / No) 		Motivation Concerns *Role in Customer Advocacy Pilot
E.g. Jane Doe VP, Customer Success A N
  • Increase customer retention
  • Customer advocate burnout
 Workstream Lead

Customer advocacy stakeholders

What to consider when identifying stakeholders required for CA:
Customer advocacy should be done as a part of a cross-functional company initiative. When identifying stakeholders, consider:

  • Who can make the ultimate decision on approving the CA program?
  • Who are the senior leadership members you need buy-in from?
  • Who do you need to support the CA program?
  • Who is affected by the CA program?
  • Who will help you build the CA program?
  • Where and among who is there enthusiasm for customer advocacy?
  • Consider stakeholders from Customer Success, Marketing, Sales, Product, PR & Social, etc.
Key Roles Supporting an Effective Customer Advocacy Pilot
Executive Sponsor
  • Owns the function at the management/C-suite level
  • Responsible for breaking down barriers and ensuring alignment with organizational strategy
  • CMO, VP of Marketing, and in SMB providers, the CEO
Program Manager
  • Typically, a senior member of the marketing team
  • Responsible for organizing the customer advocacy pilot, preparing summary executive-level communications, and approval requests
  • Program manages the customer advocacy pilot, and in many cases, the continued formal program
  • Product Marketing Director, or other Marketing Director, who has strong program management skills, has run large-scale marketing or product programs, and is familiar with the stakeholder roles and enabling technologies
Functional / Workstream Leads
  • Works alongside the Program Manager on planning and implementing the customer advocacy pilot and ensures functional workstreams are aligned with pilot objectives
  • Typical customer advocacy pilots will have a team comprised of representatives from Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success
Steering Committee
  • Comprised of C-suite/management-level individuals that guide key decisions, approve requests, and mitigate any functional conflicts
  • Responsible for validating goals and priorities, enabling adequate resourcing, and critical decision making
  • CMO, CRO/Head of Sales, Head of Customer Success
Operations
  • Comprised of individuals whose application and tech tools knowledge and skills support integration of customer advocacy functions into existing tech stack/CRM (e.g. adding custom fields into CRM)
  • Responsible for helping select technology that enables customer advocacy program activities
  • CRM, Marketing Applications, and Analytics Managers, IT Managers

Customer advocacy working team

Consider the skills and knowledge required for planning and executing a customer advocacy pilot.

Workstream leads should have strong project management and collaboration skills and deep understanding of both product and customers (persona, journeys, satisfaction, etc.).

Required Skills Suggested Functions
  • Project management
  • CRM knowledge
  • Marketing automation experience
  • MarTech knowledge
  • Understanding of buyer persona and journey
  • Product knowledge
  • Understanding of executive-level goals for the pilot
  • Content creation
  • Customer advocacy experience, if possible
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Email and event marketing experience
  • Customer Success
  • Marketing
  • Sales
  • Product
  • PR/Corporate Comms.

Build the business case

Step 1.2 Understand key concepts and benefits of customer advocacy

Total duration: 2.0-4.0 hours

Objective
Understand customer advocacy and what benefits you seek from your customer advocacy program, and get set up to best communicate them to executives and decision makers.

Output

  • Documented customer advocacy benefits

Participants

  • Customer advocacy lead

MarTech
None

Tools

1.2.1 Discuss Key Concepts
(60-120 min.)

Envision
Schedule a visioning session with key stakeholders and share the Get Started With Customer Advocacy Executive Brief (slides 3-23 in this deck).

Discuss how key customer advocacy concepts can apply to your organization and how CA can contribute to organizational growth.

Document
Determine the top benefits sought from the customer advocacy program pilot and record them on slides 4 and 12 in the Executive Presentation Template.

Finalize
Work with the Executive Sponsor to finalize the "Message from the CMO" on slide 4 in the Executive Presentation Template.

Tips & Reminders

Keep in mind that while we're starting off broadly, the pilot for your customer advocacy program should be narrow and focused in scope.

Build the business case

Step 1.3 Understand barriers to success, risks, and risk mitigation tactics

Total duration: 2.0-8.0 hours

Objective
Anticipate threats to pilot success; identify barriers to success, any possible risks, and what can be done to reduce the chances of a negative pilot outcome.

Output

  • Awareness of barriers
  • Tactics to mitigate risk

Participants

  • Customer advocacy lead
  • Key stakeholders

MarTech
None

Tools

1.3.1 Brainstorm Barriers to Success & Possible Risks
(60-120 min.)

Identify
Using slide 7 of the Executive Presentation Template, brainstorm any barriers to success that may exist and risks to the customer advocacy program pilot success. Consider the people, processes, and technology that may be required.

Document
Document all information on slide 7 of the Executive Presentation Template.

1.3.2 Develop Risk Mitigation Tactics
(60-300 min.)

Develop
Brainstorm different ways to address any of the identified barriers to success and reduce any risks. Consider the people, processes, and technology that may be required.

Document
Document all risk mitigation tactics on slide 7 of the Executive Presentation Template.

Tips & Reminders
There are several types of risk to explore. Consider the following when brainstorming possible risks:

  • Damage to brand (if advocate guidance not provided)
  • Legal (compliance with regulations and laws around contact, incentives, etc.)
  • Advocate burnout
  • Negative advocate feedback

Phase 2: Develop Your Advocacy Requirements

Steps
2.1 Assess your customer advocacy maturity
2.2 Identify and document gaps and pain points
2.3 Develop your ideal advocate profile

Phase Outcome

  • Identification of gaps in current customer advocacy efforts or activities
  • Understanding of customer advocacy readiness and maturity
  • Identification of ideal advocate profile/target segment
  • Basic actions to bridge gaps in CA efforts

Develop your advocacy requirements

Step 2.1 Assess your customer advocacy maturity

Total duration: 2.0-8.0 hours

Objective
Use the Customer Advocacy Maturity Assessment Tool to understand your organization's current level of customer advocacy maturity and what to prioritize in the program pilot.

Output

  • Current level of customer advocacy maturity
  • Know areas to focus on in program pilot

Participants

  • Customer advocacy lead
  • Key stakeholders

MarTech
None

Tools

2.1.1 Diagnose Current Customer Advocacy Maturity
(60-120 min.)

Diagnose
Begin on tab 1 of the Customer Advocacy Maturity Assessment Tool and read all instructions.

Navigate to tab 2. Considering the current state of customer advocacy efforts, answer the diagnostic questions in the Diagnostic tab of the Customer Advocacy Maturity Assessment Tool.

After completing the questions, you will receive a diagnostic result on tab 3 that will identify areas of strength and weakness and make high-level recommendations for your customer advocacy program pilot.

2.1.2 Discuss Results
(60-300 min.)

Discuss
Schedule a call to discuss your customer advocacy maturity diagnostic results with a SoftwareReviews Advisor.

Prioritize the recommendations from the diagnostic, noting which will be included in the program pilot and which require funding and resources to advance.

Transfer
Transfer results into slides 8 and 11 of the Executive Presentation Template.

Tips & Reminders
Complete the diagnostic with a handful of key stakeholders identified in the previous phase. This will help provide a more balanced and accurate assessment of your organization’s current level of customer advocacy maturity.

Develop your advocacy requirements

Step 2.2 Identify and document gaps and pain points

Total duration: 2.5-8.0 hours

Objective
Understand the current pain points within key customer-related processes and within any current customer advocacy efforts taking place.

Output

  • Prioritized list of pain points that could be addressed by a customer advocacy program.

Participants

  • Customer advocacy lead
  • Key stakeholders

MarTech
None

Tools

2.2.1 Identify Pain Points
(60-120 min.)

Identify
Identify and list current pain points being experienced around customer advocacy efforts and processes around sales, marketing, customer success, and product feedback.

Add any gaps identified in the diagnostic to the list.

Transfer
Transfer key information into slide 9 of Executive Presentation Template.

2.2.2 Prioritize Pain Points
(60-300 min.)

Prioritize
Indicate which pains are the most important and that a customer advocacy program could help improve.

Schedule a call to discuss the outputs of this step with a SoftwareReviews Advisor.

Document
Document priorities on slide 9 of Executive Presentation Template.

Tips & Reminders

Customer advocacy won't solve for everything; it's important to be clear about what pain points can and can't be addressed through a customer advocacy program.

Develop your advocacy requirements

Step 2.3 Develop your ideal advocate profile

Total duration: 3.0-9.0 hours

Objective
Develop an ideal advocate persona profile that can be used to identify potential advocates, guide campaign messaging, and facilitate advocate engagement.

Output

  • Ideal advocate persona profile

Participants

  • Customer advocacy lead
  • Key stakeholders
  • Sales lead
  • Marketing lead
  • Customer Success lead
  • Product lead

MarTech
May require the use of:

  • CRM or marketing automation platform
  • Available and up-to-date customer database

Tools

2.3.1 Brainstorm Session Around Ideal Advocate Persona
(60-150 min.)

Brainstorm
Lead the team to prioritize an initial, single, most important persona and to collaborate to complete the template.

Choose your ideal advocate for the pilot based on your most important audience. Start with firmographics like company size, industry, and geography.

Next, consider satisfaction levels and behavioral attributes, such as renewals, engagement, usage, and satisfaction scores.

Identify motivations and possible incentives for advocate activities.

Document
Use slide 10 of the Executive Presentation Template to complete this exercise.

2.3.2 Review and Refine Advocate Persona
(60-300 min.)

Review & Refine
Place the Executive Presentation Template in a shared drive for team collaboration. Encourage the team to share persona knowledge within the shared drive version.

Hold any necessary follow-up sessions to further refine persona.

Validate
Interview advocates that best represent your ideal advocate profile on their type of preferred involvement with your company, their role and needs when it comes to your solution, ways they'd be willing to advocate, and rewards sought.

Confirm
Incorporate feedback and inputs into slide 10 of the Executive Presentation Template. Ensure everyone agrees on persona developed.

Tips & Reminders

  1. When identifying potential advocates, choose based on your most important audience.
  2. Ensure you're selecting those with the highest satisfaction scores.
  3. Ideally, select candidates that have, on their own, advocated previously such as in social posts, who may have acted as a reference, or who have been highly visible as a positive influence at customer events.
  4. Knowing motivations will determine the type of acts of advocacy they would be most willing to perform and the incentives for participating in the program.

Consider the following criteria when identifying advocates and developing your ideal advocate persona:

Demographics Firmographics Satisfaction & Needs/Value Sought Behavior Motivation
Role - user, decision-maker, etc. Company size: # of employees Satisfaction score Purchase frequency & repeat purchases (renewals), upgrades Career building/promotion
Department Company size: revenue NPS score Usage Collaboration with peers
Geography CLV score Engagement (e.g. email opens, response, meetings) Educate others
Industry Value delivered (outcomes, occasions used, etc.) Social media interaction, posts Influence (on product, service)
Tenure as client Benefits sought
Account size ($) Minimal and resolved service tickets, escalations
1. When identifying potential advocates, choose based on your most important audience/segments. 2. Ensure you're selecting those with the highest satisfaction, NPS, and CLV scores. 3. When identifying potential advocates, choose based on high engagement and interaction, regular renewals, and high usage. 4. Knowing motivations will determine the type of acts of advocacy they would be most willing to perform and incentives for participating in the program.

Phase 3: Win Executive Approval and Implement Pilot

Steps
3.1 Determine pilot goals and success metrics
3.2 Establish timeline and create advocate communication materials
3.3 Gain executive buy-in and implement pilot

Phase Outcome

  • Clear objective for CA pilot
  • Key metrics for program success
  • Pilot timelines and milestones
  • Executive presentation with business case for CA

Win executive approval and implement pilot

Step 3.1 Determine pilot goals and success metrics

Total duration: 2.0-4.0 hours

Objective
Set goals and determine the scope for the customer advocacy program pilot.

Output

  • Documented business objectives for the pilot
  • Documented success metrics

Participants

  • Customer advocacy lead
  • Key stakeholders
  • Sales lead
  • Marketing lead
  • Customer Success lead
  • Product lead

MarTech
May require to use, set up, or install platforms like:

  • Register to a survey platform
  • CRM or marketing automation platform

Tools

3.1.1 Establish Pilot Goals
(60-120 min.)

Set
Organize a meeting with department heads and review organizational and individual department goals.

Using the Venn diagram on slide 39 in this deck, identify customer advocacy goals that align with business goals. Select the highest priority goal for the pilot.

Check that the goal aligns with benefits sought or addresses pain points identified in the previous phase.

Document
Document the goals on slides 9 and 16 of the Executive Presentation Template.

3.1.2 Establish Pilot Success Metrics
(60-120 min.)

Decide
Decide how you will measure the success of your program pilot using slide 40 in this document.

Document
Document metrics on slide 16 of the Executive Presentation Template.

Tips & Reminders

  1. Don't boil the ocean. Pick the most important goal that can be achieved through the customer advocacy pilot to gain executive buy-in and support or resources for a formal customer advocacy program. Once successfully completed, you'll be able to tackle new goals and expand the program.
  2. Keep your metrics simple, few in number, and relatively easy to track

Connect customer advocacy goals with organizational goals

List possible customer advocacy goals, identifying areas of overlap with organizational goals by taking the following steps:

  1. List organizational/departmental goals in the green oval.
  2. List possible customer advocacy program goals in the purple oval.
  3. Enter goals that are covered in both the Organizational Goals and Customer Advocacy Goals sections into the Shared Goals section in the center.
  4. Highlight the highest priority goal for the customer advocacy program pilot to tackle.
Organizational Goals Shared Goals Customer Advocacy Goals
Example Example: Gain customer references to help advance sales and improve win rates Example: Develop pool of customer references
[insert goal] [insert goal] Example: Gather customer feedback
[insert goal] [insert goal] [insert goal]
[insert goal] [insert goal] [insert goal]

Customer advocacy success metrics for consideration

This table provides a starting point for measuring the success of your customer advocacy pilot depending on the goals you've set.

This list is by no means exhaustive; the metrics here can be used, or new metrics that would better capture success measurement can be created and tracked.

Metric
Revenue influenced by reference calls ($ / % increase)
# of reference calls resulting in closed-won opportunities
# of quotes collected
% of community growth YoY
# of pieces of product feedback collected
# of acts of advocacy
% membership growth
% product usage amongst community members
# of social shares, clicks
CSAT score for community members
% of registered qualified leads
# of leads registered
# of member sign-ups
# of net-new referenceable customers
% growth rate of products used by members
% engagement rate
# of published third-party reviews
% increase in fulfilled RFPs

When selecting metrics, remember:
When choosing metrics for your customer advocacy pilot, be sure to align them to your specific goals. If possible, try to connect your advocacy efforts back to retention, growth, or revenue.

Do not choose too many metrics; one per goal should suffice.

Ensure that you can track the metrics you select to measure - the data is available and measuring won't be overly manual or time-consuming.

Win executive approval and implement pilot

Step 3.2 Establish timeline and create advocate communication materials

Total duration: 2.5-8.0 hours

Objective
Outline who will be involved in what roles and capacities and what tasks and activities need to completed.

Output

  • Timeline and milestones
  • Advocate program materials

Participants

  • Customer advocacy lead
  • Key stakeholders
  • Sales lead
  • Marketing lead
  • Customer Success lead
  • Product lead

MarTech
None

Tools

3.2.1 Establish Timeline & Milestones
(30-60 min.)

List & Assign
List all key tasks, phases, and milestones on slides 13, 14, and 15 in the Executive Presentation Template.

Include any activities that help close gaps or address pain points from slide 9 in the Executive Presentation Template.

Assign workstream leads on slide 15 in the Executive Presentation Template.

Finalize all tasks and activities with working team.

3.2.2 Design & Build Advocate Program Materials
(180-300 min.)

Decide
Determine materials needed to recruit advocates and explain the program to advocate candidates.

Determine the types of acts of advocacy you are looking for.

Determine incentives/rewards that will be provided to advocates, such as access to new products or services.

Build
Build out all communication materials.

Obtain incentives.

Tips & Reminders

  1. When determining incentives, use the validated ideal advocate profile for guidance (i.e. what motivates your advocates?).
  2. Ensure to leave a buffer in the timeline if the need to adjust course arises.

Win executive approval and implement pilot

Step 3.3 Implement pilot and gain executive buy-in

Total duration: 2.5-8.0 hours

Objective
Successfully implement the customer advocacy pilot program and communicate results to gain approval for full-fledged program.

Output

  • Deliver Executive Presentation
  • Successful customer advocacy pilot
  • Provide regular updates to stakeholders, executives

Participants

  • Customer advocacy lead
  • Workstream leads

MarTech
May require the use of:

  • CRM or Marketing Automation Platform
  • Available and up-to-date customer database

Tools

3.3.1 Complete & Deliver Executive Presentation
(60-120 min.)

Present
Finalize the Executive Presentation.

Hold stakeholder meeting and introduce the program pilot.

3.3.2 Gain Executive Buy-in
(60-300 min.)

Pitch
Present the final results of the customer advocacy pilot using the Executive Presentation Template and gain approval.

3.3.3 Implement the Customer Advocacy Program Pilot
(30-60 min.)

Launch
Launch the customer advocacy program pilot. Follow the timelines and activities outlined in the Executive Presentation Template. Track/document all advocate outreach, activity, and progress against success metrics.

Communicate
Establish a regular cadence to communicate with steering committee, stakeholders. Use the Executive Presentation Template to present progress and resolve roadblocks if/as they arise.

Tips & Reminders

  1. Continually collect feedback and input from advocates and stakeholders throughout the process.
  2. Don't be afraid to make changes on the go if it helps to achieve the end goal of your pilot.
  3. If the pilot program was successful, consider scaling it up and rolling it out to more customers.

Summary of Accomplishment

Mission Accomplished

  • You successfully launched your customer advocacy program pilot and demonstrated clear benefits and ROI. By identifying the needs of the business and aligning those needs with key customer advocacy activities, marketers and customer advocacy leaders can prioritize the most important tasks for the pilot while also identifying potential opportunities for expansion pending executive approval.
  • SoftwareReviews' comprehensive and tactical approach takes you through the steps to build the foundation for a strategic customer advocacy program. Our methodology ensures that a customer advocacy pilot is developed to deliver the desired outcomes and ROI, increasing stakeholder buy-in and setting up your organization for customer advocacy success.

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

Related SoftwareReviews Research

Measure and Manage the Customer Satisfaction Metrics That Matter the Most
Understand what truly keeps your customer satisfied. Measure what matters to improve customer experience and increase satisfaction and advocacy.

  • Understand the true drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction among your customer segments.
  • Establish process and cadence for effective satisfaction measurement and monitoring.
  • Know where resources are needed most to improve satisfaction levels and increase retention.

Develop the Right Message to Engage Buyers
Sixty percent of marketers find it hard to produce high-quality content consistently. SaaS marketers have an even more difficult job due to the technical nature of content production.

  • Create more compelling and relevant content that aligns with a buyer's needs and journey.
  • Shrink marketing and sales cycles.
  • Increase the pace of content production.

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.

Bibliography

"15 Award-Winning Customer Advocacy Success Stories." Influitive, 2021. Accessed 8 June 2023.

"Advocacy Marketing." Influitive, June 2016. Accessed 26 Oct. 2021.

Andrews, Marcus. "42% of Companies Don’t Listen to their Customers. Yikes." HubSpot, June 2019. Accessed 2 Nov. 2021.

"Before you leap! Webcast." Point of Reference, Sept. 2019. Accessed 4 Nov. 2021.

"Brand Loyalty: 5 Interesting Statistics." Factory360, Jan. 2016. Accessed 2 Nov. 2021.

Brenner, Michael. "The Data Driven Guide to Customer Advocacy." Marketing Insider Group, Sept. 2021. Accessed 3 Feb. 2022.

Carroll, Brian. "Why Customer Advocacy Should Be at the Heart of Your Marketing." Marketing Insider Group, Sept. 2017. Accessed 3 Feb. 2022.

Cote, Dan. "Advocacy Blooms and Business Booms When Customers and Employees Engage." Influitive, Dec. 2021. Accessed 3 Feb. 2022.

"Customer Success Strategy Guide." ON24, Jan. 2021. Accessed 2 Nov. 2021.

Dalao, Kat. "Customer Advocacy: The Revenue-Driving Secret Weapon." ReferralRock, June 2017. Accessed 7 Dec. 2021.

Frichou, Flora. "Your guide to customer advocacy: What is it, and why is it important?" TrustPilot, Jan. 2020. Accessed 26 Oct. 2021.

Gallo, Amy. "The Value of Keeping the Right Customers." Harvard Business Review, Oct. 2014. Accessed 10 March 2022.

Huhn, Jessica. "61 B2B Referral Marketing Statistics and Quotes." ReferralRock, March 2022. Accessed 10 March 2022.

Kemper, Grayson. "B2B Buying Process: How Businesses Purchase B2B Services and Software." Clutch, Feb. 2020. Accessed 6 Jan. 2022.

Kettner, Kyle. "The Evolution of Ambassador Marketing." BrandChamp.io, Oct. 2018. Accessed 2 Nov. 2021.

Landis, Taylor. "Customer Retention Marketing vs. Customer Acquisition Marketing." OutboundEngine, April 2022. Accessed 23 April 2022.

Miels, Emily. "What is customer advocacy? Definition and strategies." Zendesk Blog, June 2021. Accessed 27 Oct. 2021.

Mohammad, Qasim. "The 5 Biggest Obstacles to Implementing a Successful B2B Customer Advocacy Program." HubSpot, June 2018. Accessed 6 Jan. 2022.

Murphy, Brandon. "Brand Advocacy and Social Media - 2009 GMA Conference." Deloitte, Dec. 2009. Accessed 8 June 2023.

Patel, Neil. "Why SaaS Brand Advocacy is More Important than Ever in 2021." Neil Patel, Feb. 2021. Accessed 4 Nov. 2021.

Pieri, Carl. "The Plain-English Guide to Customer Advocacy." HubSpot, Apr. 2020. Accessed 27 Oct. 2021.

Schmitt, Philipp; Skiera, Bernd; Van den Bulte, Christophe. "Referral Programs and Customer Value." Wharton Journal of Marketing, Jan. 2011. Accessed 8 June 2023.

"The Complete Guide to Customer Advocacy." Gray Group International, 2020. Accessed 15 Oct. 2021.

"The Customer-powered Enterprise: Playbook." Influitive, Gainsight & Pendo. 2020. Accessed 26 Oct. 2021.

"The Winning Case for a Customer Advocacy Solution." RO Innovation, 2017. Accessed 26 Oct. 2021.

Tidey, Will. "Acquisition vs. Retention: The Importance of Customer Lifetime Value." Huify, Feb. 2018. Accessed 10 Mar. 2022.

"What a Brand Advocate Is and Why Your Company Needs One." RockContent, Jan. 2021. Accessed 7 Feb. 2022.

"What is Customer Advocacy? A Definition and Strategies to Implement It." Testimonial Hero, Oct. 2021. Accessed 26 Jan. 2022.

Business Process Controls and Internal Audit

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  • byline: Make sure you really have control, and not just the illusion of control.
Establish an Effective System of Internal IT Controls to Mitigate Risks.

Manage End-User Devices

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  • Parent Category Name: End-User Computing Devices
  • Parent Category Link: /end-user-computing-devices
  • Desktop and mobile device management teams use separate tools and different processes.
  • People at all levels of IT are involved in device management.
  • Vendors are pushing unified endpoint management (UEM) products, and teams struggling with device management are hoping that UEM is their savior.
  • The number and variety of devices will only increase with the continued advance of mobility and emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Many problems can be solved by fixing roles, responsibilities, and process. Standardize so you can optimize.
  • UEM is not a silver bullet. Your current solution can image computers in less than 4 hours if you use lean images.
  • Done with, not done to. Getting input from the business will improve adoption, avoid frustration, and save everyone time.

Impact and Result

  • Define the benefits that you want to achieve and optimize based on those benefits.
  • Take an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, approach to merging end-user support teams. Process and tool unity comes first.
  • Define the roles and responsibilities involved in end-user device management, and create a training plan to ensure everyone can execute their responsibilities.
  • Stop using device management practices from the era of Windows XP. Create a plan for lean images and app packages.

Manage End-User Devices Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should optimize end-user device management, 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. Identify the business and IT benefits of optimizing endpoint management

Get your desktop and mobile device support teams out of firefighting mode by identifying the real problem.

  • Manage End-User Devices – Phase 1: Identify the Business and IT Benefits
  • End-User Device Management Standard Operating Procedure
  • End-User Device Management Executive Presentation

2. Improve supporting teams and processes

Improve the day-to-day operations of your desktop and mobile device support teams through role definition, training, and process standardization.

  • Manage End-User Devices – Phase 2: Improve Supporting Teams and Processes
  • End-User Device Management Workflow Library (Visio)
  • End-User Device Management Workflow Library (PDF)

3. Improve supporting technologies

Stop using management tools and techniques from the Windows XP era. Save yourself, and your technicians, from needless pain.

  • Manage End-User Devices – Phase 3: Improve Supporting Technologies
[infographic]

Workshop: Manage End-User Devices

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 the Business and IT Benefits of Optimizing End-User Device Management

The Purpose

Identify how unified endpoint management (UEM) can improve the lives of the end user and of IT.

Key Benefits Achieved

Cutting through the vendor hype and aligning with business needs.

Activities

1.1 Identify benefits you can provide to stakeholders.

1.2 Identify business and IT goals in order to prioritize benefits.

1.3 Identify how to achieve benefits.

1.4 Define goals based on desired benefits.

Outputs

Executive presentation

2 Improve the Teams and Processes That Support End-User Device Management

The Purpose

Ensure that your teams have a consistent approach to end-user device management.

Key Benefits Achieved

Developed a standard approach to roles and responsibilities, to training, and to device management processes.

Activities

2.1 Align roles to your environment.

2.2 Assign architect-, engineer-, and administrator-level responsibilities.

2.3 Rationalize your responsibility matrix.

2.4 Ensure you have the necessary skills.

2.5 Define Tier 2 processes, including patch deployment, emergency patch deployment, device deployment, app deployment, and app packaging.

Outputs

List of roles involved in end-user device management

Responsibility matrix for end-user device management

End-user device management training plan

End-user device management standard operating procedure

Workflows and checklists of end-user device management processes

3 Improve the Technologies That Support End-User Device Management

The Purpose

Modernize the toolset used by IT to manage end-user devices.

Key Benefits Achieved

Saving time and resources for many standard device management processes.

Activities

3.1 Define the core image for each device/OS.

3.2 Define app packages.

3.3 Gather action items for improving the support technologies.

3.4 Create a roadmap for improving end-user device management.

3.5 Create a communication plan for improving end-user device management.

Outputs

Core image outline

Application package outline

End-user device management roadmap

End-user device management communication plan

Become a Strategic CIO

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  • Parent Category Name: IT Strategy
  • Parent Category Link: /it-strategy
  • As a CIO, you are currently operating in a stable and trusted IT environment, but you would like to advance your role to strategic business partner.
  • CIOs are often overlooked as a strategic partner by their peers, and therefore face the challenge of proving they deserve a seat at the table.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • To become a strategic business partner, you must think and act as a business person that works in IT, rather than an IT person that works for the business.
  • Career advancement is not a solo effort. Building relationships with your executive business stakeholders will be critical to becoming a respected business partner.

Impact and Result

  • Create a personal development plan and stakeholder management strategy to accelerate your career and become a strategic business partner. For a CIO to be considered a strategic business partner, he or she must be able to:
    • Act as a business person that works in IT, rather than an IT person that works for the business. This involves meeting executive stakeholder expectations, facilitating innovation, and managing stakeholder relationships.
    • Align IT with the customer. This involves providing business stakeholders with information to support stronger decision making, keeping up with disruptive technologies, and constantly adapting to the ever-changing end-customer needs.
    • Manage talent and change. This involves performing strategic workforce planning, and being actively engaged in identifying opportunities to introduce change in your organization, suggesting ways to improve, and then acting on them.

Become a Strategic CIO Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should become a strategic CIO, 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

Analyze strategic CIO competencies and assess business stakeholder satisfaction with IT using Info-Tech's CIO Business Vision Diagnostic and CXO-CIO Alignment Program.

  • Become a Strategic CIO – Phase 1: Launch

2. Assess

Evaluate strategic CIO competencies and business stakeholder relationships.

  • Become a Strategic CIO – Phase 2: Assess
  • CIO Strategic Competency Evaluation Tool
  • CIO Stakeholder Power Map Template

3. Plan

Create a personal development plan and stakeholder management strategy.

  • Become a Strategic CIO – Phase 3: Plan
  • CIO Personal Development Plan
  • CIO Stakeholder Management Strategy Template

4. Execute

Develop a scorecard to track personal development initiatives.

  • Become a Strategic CIO – Phase 4: Execute
  • CIO Strategic Competency Scorecard
[infographic]

Workshop: Become a Strategic CIO

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 Assess Competencies & Stakeholder Relationships

The Purpose

Gather and review information from business stakeholders.

Assess strategic CIO competencies and business stakeholder relationships.

Key Benefits Achieved

Gathered information to create a personal development plan and stakeholder management strategy.

Analyzed the information from diagnostics and determined the appropriate next steps.

Identified and prioritized strategic CIO competency gaps.

Evaluated the power, impact, and support of key business stakeholders.

Activities

1.1 Conduct CIO Business Vision diagnostic

1.2 Conduct CXO-CIO Alignment program

1.3 Assess CIO competencies

1.4 Assess business stakeholder relationships

Outputs

CIO Business Vision results

CXO-CIO Alignment Program results

CIO competency gaps

Executive Stakeholder Power Map

2 Take Control of Your Personal Development

The Purpose

Create a personal development plan and stakeholder management strategy.

Track your personal development and establish checkpoints to revise initiatives.

Key Benefits Achieved

Identified personal development and stakeholder engagement initiatives to bridge high priority competency gaps.

Identified key performance indicators and benchmarks/targets to track competency development.

Activities

2.1 Create a personal development plan

2.2 Create a stakeholder management strategy

2.3 Establish key performance indicators and benchmarks/targets

Outputs

Personal Development Plan

Stakeholder Management Strategy

Strategic CIO Competency Scorecard

IT Organizational Design

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  • Parent Category Name: People and Resources
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  • byline: The structure follows strategy; design your IT organization to match the business strategy.

The challenge

  • IT can ensure full business alignment through an organizational redesign.
  • Finding the best approach for your company is difficult due to many frameworks and competing priorities.
  • External competitive influences and technological trends exacerbate this.

Our advice

Insight

  • Your structure is the critical enabler of your strategic direction. Structure dictates how people work together and how they can fill in their roles to create the desired business value. 
  • Constant change is killing for an organization. You need to adapt, but you need a stable baseline and make sure the change is in line with the overall strategy and company context.
  • A redesign is only successful if it really happens. Shifting people into new positions is not enough to implement a redesign. 

Impact and results 

  • Define your redesign principles. They will act as a manifesto to your change. It also provides for a checklist, ensuring that the structure does not deviate from the business strategy.
  • Visualize the new design with a customized operating model for your company. It must demonstrate how IT creates value and supports the business value creation chains.
  • Define the future-state roles, functions, and responsibilities to enable your IT department to support the business effectively.

The roadmap

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

Get started

Our concise executive brief explains to you the challenges associated with the organizational redesign. We'll show you our methodology and the ways we can help you in completing this.

Define your organizational design principles and select your operating model

The design principles will govern your organizational redesign; Align the principles with your business strategy.

  • Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure – Phase 1: Craft Organizational Design Principles and Select an IT Operating Model (ppt)
  • Organizational Design Communications Deck (ppt)

Customize the selected IT operating model to your company

Your operating model must account for the company's nuances and culture.

  • Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure – Phase 2: Customize the IT Operating Model (ppt)
  • Operating Models and Capability Definition List (ppt)

Design the target-state of your IT organizational structure

Go from an operating model to the structure fit for your company.

  • Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure – Phase 3: Architect the Target-State IT Organizational Structure (ppt)
  • Organizational Design Capability RACI Chart (xls)
  • Work Unit Reference Structures (Visio)
  • Work Unit Reference Structures (pdf)

Communicate the benefits of the new structure

Change does not come easy. People will be anxious. Craft your communications to address critical concerns and obtain buy-in from the organization. If the reorganization will be painful, be up-front on that, and limit the time in which people are uncertain.

  • Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure – Phase 4: Communicate the Benefits of the New Organizational Structure (ppt)

 

Build an Extensible Data Warehouse Foundation

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  • Parent Category Name: Big Data
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  • Data warehouse implementation is a costly and complex undertaking, and can end up not serving the business' needs appropriately.
  • Too heavy a focus on technology creates a data warehouse that isn’t sustainable and ends up with poor adoption.
  • Emerging data sources and technologies add complexity to how the appropriate data is made available to business users.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • A data warehouse is a project; but successful data warehousing is a program. An effective data warehouse requires planning beyond the technology implementation.
  • Governance, not technology needs to be the core support system for enabling a data warehouse program.
  • Understand business processes at the operational, tactical, and ad hoc levels to ensure a fit-for-purpose DW is built.

Impact and Result

  • Leverage an approach that focuses on constructing a data warehouse foundation that is able to address a combination of operational, tactical, and ad hoc business needs.
  • Invest time and effort to put together pre-project governance to inform and provide guidance to your data warehouse implementation.
  • Develop “Rosetta Stone” views of your data assets to facilitate data modeling.
  • Select the most suitable architecture pattern to ensure the data warehouse is “built right” at the very beginning.

Build an Extensible Data Warehouse Foundation Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why the data warehouse is becoming an important tool for driving business value, 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. Prepare for the data warehouse foundation project

Begin the data warehouse foundation by defining the project and governance teams, as well as reviewing supporting data management practices.

  • Build an Extensible Data Warehouse Foundation – Phase 1: Prepare for the Data Warehouse Foundation Project
  • Data Warehouse Foundation Project Plan Template
  • Data Warehouse Work Breakdown Structure Template
  • Data (Warehouse) Architect
  • Data Integration Specialist
  • Business Intelligence Specialist
  • Director of Data Warehousing/Business Intelligence
  • Data Warehouse Program Charter Template
  • Data Warehouse Steering Committee Charter Template

2. Establish the business drivers and data warehouse strategy

Using the business activities as a guide, develop a data model, data architecture, and technology plan for a data warehouse foundation.

  • Build an Extensible Data Warehouse Foundation – Phase 2: Establish the Business Drivers and Data Warehouse Strategy
  • Business Data Catalog
  • Data Classification Inventory Tool
  • Data Warehouse Architecture Planning Tool
  • Master Data Mapping Tool

3. Plan for data warehouse governance

Start developing a data warehouse program by defining how users will interact with the new data warehouse environment.

  • Build an Extensible Data Warehouse Foundation – Phase 3: Plan for Data Warehouse Governance
  • Data Warehouse Standard Operating Procedures Template
  • Data Warehouse Service Level Agreement
[infographic]

Workshop: Build an Extensible Data Warehouse Foundation

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 for the Data Warehouse Foundation Project

The Purpose

Identify the members of the foundation project team.

Define overarching statements and define success factors/risks.

Outline basic project governance.

Key Benefits Achieved

Defined membership, roles, and responsibilities involved in the foundation project.

Establishment of a steering committee as a starting point for the data warehouse program.

Activities

1.1 Identify foundation project team and create a RACI chart.

1.2 Understand what a data warehouse can and cannot enable.

1.3 Define critical success factors, key performance metrics, and project risks.

1.4 Develop rough timelines for foundation project completion.

1.5 Define the current and future states for key data management practices.

Outputs

Job Descriptions and RACI

Data Warehouse Steering Committee Charter

Data Warehouse Foundation Project Plan

Work Breakdown Structure

2 Establish the Business Drivers and Data Warehouse Strategy

The Purpose

Define the information needs of the business and its key processes.

Create the components that will inform an appropriate data model.

Design a data warehouse architecture model.

Key Benefits Achieved

Clear definition of business needs that will directly inform the data and architecture models.

Activities

2.1 Understand the most fundamental needs of the business.

2.2 Define the data warehouse vision, mission, purpose, and goals.

2.3 Detail the most important operational, tactical, and ad hoc activities the data warehouse should support.

2.4 Link the processes that will be central to the data warehouse foundation.

2.5 Walk through the four-column model and business entity modeling as a starting point for data modeling.

2.6 Create data models using the business data glossary and data classification.

2.7 Identify master data elements to define dimensions.

2.8 Design lookup tables based on reference data.

2.9 Create a fit-for-purpose data warehousing model.

Outputs

Data Warehouse Program Charter

Data Warehouse Vision and Mission

Documentation of Business Processes

Business Entity Map

Business Data Glossary

Data Classification Scheme

Data Warehouse Architecture Model

3 Plan for Data Warehouse Governance

The Purpose

Create a plan for governing your data warehouse efficiently and effectively.

Key Benefits Achieved

Documentation of current standard operating procedures.

Identified members of a data warehouse center of excellence.

Activities

3.1 Develop a technology capability map to visualize your desired state.

3.2 Establish a data warehouse center of excellence.

3.3 Create a data warehouse foundation roadmap.

3.4 Define data warehouse service level agreements.

3.5 Create standard operating procedures.

Outputs

Technology Capability Map

Project Roadmap

Service Level Agreement

Data Warehouse Standard Operating Procedure Workbook

Capture and Market the ROI of Your VMO

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  • Parent Category Name: Vendor Management
  • Parent Category Link: /vendor-management
  • All IT organizations are dependent on their vendors for technology products, services, and solutions to support critical business functions.
  • Measuring the impact of and establishing goals for the vendor management office (VMO) to maximize its effectiveness requires an objective and quantitative approach whenever possible.
  • Sharing the VMO’s impact internally is a balancing act between demonstrating value and self-promotion.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • The return on investment (ROI) calculation for your VMO must be customized. The ROI components selected must match your VMO ROI maturity, resources, and roadmap. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to calculating VMO ROI.
  • ROI contributions come from many areas and sources. To maximize the VMO’s ROI, look outside the traditional framework of savings and cost avoidance to vendor-facing interactions and the impact the VMO has on internal departments.

Impact and Result

  • Quantifying the contributions of the VMO takes the guess work out of whether the VMO is performing adequately.
  • Taking a comprehensive approach to measuring the value created by the VMO and the ROI associated with it will help the organization appreciate the importance of the VMO.
  • Establishing goals for the VMO with the help of the executives and key stakeholders ensures that the VMO is supporting the needs of the entire organization.

Capture and Market the ROI of Your VMO Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should calculate and market internally your VMO’s ROI, 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. Get organized

Begin the process by identifying your VMO’s ROI maturity level and which calculation components are most appropriate for your situation.

  • Capture and Market the ROI of the VMO – Phase 1: Get Organized
  • VMO ROI Maturity Assessment Tool
  • VMO ROI Calculator and Tracker
  • VMO ROI Data Source Inventory and Evaluation Tool
  • VMO ROI Summary Template

2. Establish baseline

Set measurement baselines and goals for the next measurement cycle.

  • Capture and Market the ROI of the VMO – Phase 2: Establish Baseline
  • VMO ROI Baseline and Goals Tool

3. Measure and monitor results

Measure the VMO's ROI and value created by the VMO’s efforts and the overall internal satisfaction with the VMO.

  • Capture and Market the ROI of the VMO – Phase 3: Measure and Monitor Results
  • RFP Cost Estimator
  • Improvements in Working Capital Estimator
  • Risk Estimator
  • General Process Cost Estimator and Delta Estimator
  • VMO Internal Client Satisfaction Survey
  • Vendor Security Questionnaire
  • Value Creation Worksheet
  • Deal Summary Report Template

4. Report results

Report the results to key stakeholders and executives in a way that demonstrates the value added by the VMO to the entire organization.

  • Capture and Market the ROI of the VMO – Phase 4: Report Results
  • Internal Business Review Agenda Template
  • IT Spend Analytics
  • VMO ROI Reporting Worksheet
  • VMO ROI Stakeholder Report Template
[infographic]

Workshop: Capture and Market the ROI of Your VMO

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 Organized

The Purpose

Determine how you will measure the VMO’s ROI.

Key Benefits Achieved

Focus your measurement on the appropriate activities.

Activities

1.1 Determine your VMO’s maturity level and identify applicable ROI measurement categories.

1.2 Review and select the appropriate ROI formula components for each applicable measurement category.

1.3 Compile a list of potential data sources, evaluate the viability of each data source selected, and assign data collection and analysis responsibilities.

1.4 Communicate progress and proposed ROI formula components to executives and key stakeholders for feedback and/or approval/alignment.

Outputs

VMO ROI maturity level and first step of customizing the ROI formula components.

Second and final step of customizing the ROI formula components…what will actually be measured.

Viable data sources and assignments for team members.

A progress report for key stakeholders and executives.

2 Establish Baseline

The Purpose

Set baselines to measure created value against.

Key Benefits Achieved

ROI contributions cannot be objectively measured without baselines.

Activities

2.1 Gather baseline data.

2.2 Calculate/set baselines.

2.3 Set SMART goals.

2.4 Communicate progress and proposed ROI formula components to executives and key stakeholders for feedback and/or approval/alignment.

Outputs

Data to use for calculating baselines.

Baselines for measuring ROI contributions.

Value creation goals for the next measurement cycle.

An updated progress report for key stakeholders and executives.

3 Measure and Monitor Results

The Purpose

Calculate the VMO’s ROI.

Key Benefits Achieved

An understanding of whether the VMO is paying for itself.

Activities

3.1 Assemble the data and calculate the VMO’s ROI.

3.2 Organize the data for the reporting step.

Outputs

The VMO’s ROI expressed in terms of how many times it pays for itself (e.g. 1X, 3X, 5X).

Determine which supporting data will be reported.

4 Report Results

The Purpose

Report results to stakeholders.

Key Benefits Achieved

Stakeholders understand the value of the VMO.

Activities

4.1 Create a reporting template.

4.2 Determine reporting frequency.

4.3 Decide how the reports will be distributed or presented.

4.4 Send out a draft report and update based on feedback.

Outputs

A template for reporting ROI and supporting data.

A decision about quarterly or annual reports.

A decision regarding email, video, and in-person presentation of the ROI reports.

Final ROI reports.

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 Horizontally Optimized SDLC to Better Meet Business Demands

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  • Parent Category Name: Development
  • Parent Category Link: /development
  • While teams are used to optimizing their own respective areas of responsibility, there is lack of clarity on the overall core SDLC process resulting in applications being released that are of poor quality.
  • Software development teams are struggling to release on time and within budget.
  • Teams do not understand the overall process, are not communicating well, and traceability is hard to achieve.
  • Each team claims to be optimized yet the final deliverable doesn’t reflect the expected quality.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Optimizing can make you worse. One cannot just optimize locally – the SDLC must be optimized in its entirety to ensure traceability across the process.
  • Separate process from framework.
    You don’t need to “Go Agile” or follow other industry jargon to effectively optimize your SDLC.
  • SDLC process improvement is ongoing.
    Start with your team’s current capabilities and optimize. You should set expectations that new improvements will always come in the future.

Impact and Result

  • Use a systematic framework to bring out local optimizations as potential candidates for SDLC optimization.
  • Prioritize those candidates that will aid in optimizing the overall core SDLC process.
  • Create the necessary governance and control structures to sustain the changes.
  • Use Info-Tech tools and templates to accelerate your process optimization.

Create a Horizontally Optimized SDLC to Better Meet Business Demands Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read this Executive Brief to understand Info-Tech's approach to SDLC optimization and why the SDLC must be optimized in its entirety to ensure traceability across the process.

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

1. Document the current state of the SDLC

This phase of the blueprint will help in understanding the organization's business priorities, documenting the current SDLC process, and identifing current SDLC challenges.

  • Create a Horizontally Optimized SDLC to Better Meet Business Demands – Phase 1: Document the Current State of the SDLC
  • SDLC Optimization Playbook

2. Define root causes, determine optimization initiatives, and define target state

This phase of the blueprint, will help with defining root causes, determining potential optimization initiatives, and defining the target state of the SDLC.

  • Create a Horizontally Optimized SDLC to Better Meet Business Demands – Phase 2: Define Root Causes, Determine Optimization Initiatives, and Define Target State

3. Develop a rollout strategy for SDLC optimization

This phase of the blueprint will help with prioritizing initiatives in order to develop a rollout strategy, roadmap, and communication plan for the SDLC optimization.

  • Create a Horizontally Optimized SDLC to Better Meet Business Demands – Phase 3: Develop a Rollout Strategy for SDLC Optimization
  • SDLC Communication Template
[infographic]

Workshop: Create a Horizontally Optimized SDLC to Better Meet Business Demands

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 Current SDLC

The Purpose

Understand SDLC current state.

Key Benefits Achieved

Understanding of your current SDLC state and metrics to measure the success of your SDLC optimization initiative.

Activities

1.1 Document the key business objectives that your SDLC delivers upon.

1.2 Document your current SDLC process using a SIPOC process map.

1.3 Identify appropriate metrics in order to track the effectiveness of your SDLC optimization.

1.4 Document the current state process flow of each SDLC phase.

1.5 Document the control points and tools used within each phase.

Outputs

Documented business objectives

Documented SIPOC process map

Identified metrics to measure the effectiveness of your SDLC optimization

Documented current state process flows of each SDLC phase

Documented control points and tools used within each SDLC phase

2 Assess Challenges and Define Root Causes

The Purpose

Understand current SDLC challenges and root causes.

Key Benefits Achieved

Understand the core areas of your SDLC that require optimization.

Activities

2.1 Identify the current challenges that exist within each SDLC phase.

2.2 Determine the root cause of the challenges that exist within each SDLC phase.

Outputs

Identified current challenges

Identified root causes of your SDLC challenges

3 Determine Your SDLC Optimization Initiatives

The Purpose

Understand common best practices and the best possible optimization initiatives to help optimize your current SDLC.

Key Benefits Achieved

Understand the best ways to address your SDLC challenges.

Activities

3.1 Define optimization initiatives to address the challenges in each SDLC phase.

Outputs

Defined list of potential optimization initiatives to address SDLC challenges

4 Define SDLC Target State

The Purpose

Define your SDLC target state while maintaining traceability across your overall SDLC process.

Key Benefits Achieved

Understand what will be required to reach your optimized SDLC.

Activities

4.1 Determine the target state of your SDLC.

4.2 Determine the people, tools, and control points necessary to achieve your target state.

4.3 Assess the traceability between phases to ensure a seamlessly optimized SDLC.

Outputs

Determined SDLC target state

Identified people, processes, and tools necessary to achieve target state

Completed traceability alignment map and prioritized list of initiatives

5 Prioritize Initiatives and Develop Rollout Strategy

The Purpose

Define how you will reach your target state.

Key Benefits Achieved

Create a plan of action to achieve your desired target state.

Activities

5.1 Gain the full scope of effort required to implement your SDLC optimization initiatives.Gain the full scope of effort required to implement your SDLC optimization initiatives.

5.2 Identify the enablers and blockers of your SDLC optimization.

5.3 Define your SDLC optimization roadmap.

5.4 Create a communication plan to share initiatives with the business.

Outputs

Level of effort required to implement your SDLC optimization initiatives

Identified enablers and blockers of your SDLC optimization

Defined optimization roadmap

Completed communication plan to present your optimization strategy to stakeholders

Implement Your Negotiation Strategy More Effectively

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  • Parent Category Name: Vendor Management
  • Parent Category Link: /vendor-management
  • Forty-eight percent of CIOs believe their budgets are inadequate.
  • CIOs and IT departments are getting more involved with negotiations to reduce costs and risk.
  • Not all negotiators are created equal, and the gap between a skilled negotiator and an average negotiator is not always easy to identify objectively.
  • Skilled negotiators are in short supply.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Preparation is critical for the success of your negotiation, but you cannot prepare for every eventuality.
  • Communication is the heart and soul of negotiations, but what is being “said” is only part of the picture.
  • Skilled negotiators separate themselves based on skillsets, and outcomes alone may not provide an accurate assessment of a negotiator.

Impact and Result

Addressing and managing critical negotiation elements helps:

  • Improve negotiation skills.
  • Implement your negotiation strategy more effectively.
  • Improve negotiation results.

Implement Your Negotiation Strategy More Effectively Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should create and follow a scalable process for preparing to negotiate with vendors, 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. During

Throughout this phase, ten essential negotiation elements are identified and reviewed.

  • Implement Your Negotiation Strategy More Effectively – Phase 1: During
  • During Negotiations Tool
[infographic]

Workshop: Implement Your Negotiation Strategy More Effectively

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 12 Steps to Better Negotiation Preparation

The Purpose

Improve negotiation skills and outcomes.

Understand how to use the Info-Tech During Negotiations Tool.

Key Benefits Achieved

A better understanding of the subtleties of the negotiation process and an identification of where the negotiation strategy can go awry.

The During Negotiation Tool will be reviewed and configured for the customer’s environment (as applicable).

Activities

1.1 Manage six key items during the negotiation process.

1.2 Set the right tone and environment for the negotiation.

1.3 Focus on improving three categories of intangibles.

1.4 Improve communication skills to improve negotiation skills.

1.5 Customize your negotiation approach to interact with different personality traits and styles.

1.6 Maximize the value of your discussions by focusing on seven components.

1.7 Understand the value of impasses and deadlocks and how to work through them.

1.8 Use concessions as part of your negotiation strategy.

1.9 Identify and defeat common vendor negotiation ploys.

1.10 Review progress and determine next steps.

Outputs

Sample negotiation ground rules

Sample vendor negotiation ploys

Sample discussion questions and evaluation matrix

Optimize the Current Testing Process for Enterprise Mobile Applications

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  • Parent Category Name: Testing, Deployment & QA
  • Parent Category Link: /testing-deployment-and-qa
  • Your team has little or no experience in mobile testing.
  • You need to optimize current testing processes to include mobile.
  • You need to conduct an RFP for mobile testing tools.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • One-size-fits-all testing won’t work for mobile. The testing tools are fragmented.
  • Mobile offers many new test cases, so organizations can expect to spend more time testing.

Impact and Result

  • Identify and address gaps between your current testing process and a target state that includes mobile testing.
  • Establish project value metrics to ensure business and technical requirements are met.

Optimize the Current Testing Process for Enterprise Mobile Applications Research & Tools

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

1. Assess the current testing state

Determine a starting point for architecture and discuss pain points that will drive reusability.

  • Storyboard: Optimize the Current Testing Process for Enterprise Mobile Applications
  • Mobile Testing Project Charter Template
  • Visual SOP Template for Application Testing

2. Determine the target state testing framework

Document a preliminary list of test requirements and create vendor RFP and scoring.

  • Test Requirements Tool
  • Request for Proposal (RFP) Template

3. Implement testing tools to support the testing SOP

Create an implementation rollout plan.

  • Project Planning and Monitoring Tool

Infographic

Workshop: Optimize the Current Testing Process for Enterprise Mobile Applications

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 Assess the Fit for Test Process Optimization

The Purpose

Understand mobile testing pain points.

Evaluate current statistics and challenges around mobile testing and compare with your organization.

Realize the benefits of mobile testing.

Understand the differences of mobile testing.

Assess your readiness for optimizing testing to include mobile.

Key Benefits Achieved

Preliminary understanding of how mobile testing is different from conventional approaches to testing apps.

Understanding of how mobile testing can optimize your current testing process.

Activities

1.1 Understand the pain points experienced with mobile testing

1.2 Evaluate current statistics and challenges of mobile testing and compare your organization

1.3 Realize the benefits that come from mobile testing

1.4 Understand the differences between mobile app testing and conventional app testing

1.5 Assess your readiness for optimizing the testing process to include mobile

Outputs

Organizational state assessment for mobile testing

2 Structure & Launch the Project

The Purpose

Identify stakeholders for testing requirements gathering.

Create a project charter to obtain project approval.

Present and obtain project charter sign-off.

Key Benefits Achieved

Well documented project charter.

Approval to launch the project.

Activities

2.1 Identify stakeholders for testing requirements gathering

2.2 Create a project charter to obtain project approval

2.3 Present & obtain project charter sign-off

Outputs

Project objectives and scope

Project roles and responsibilities

3 Assess Current Testing State

The Purpose

Document your current non-mobile testing processes.

Create a current testing visual SOP.

Determine current testing pain points.

Key Benefits Achieved

Thorough understanding of current testing processes and pain points.

Activities

3.1 Document your current non-mobile testing processes

3.2 Create a current state visual SOP

3.3 Determine current testing pain points

Outputs

Documented current testing processes in the form of a visual SOP

List of current testing pain points

4 Determine Target State Testing Framework

The Purpose

Determine your target state for mobile testing.

Choose vendors for the RFP process.

Evaluate selected vendor(s) against testing requirements.

Design mobile testing visual SOP(s).

Key Benefits Achieved

Prioritized list of testing requirements for mobile.

Vendor selection for mobile testing solutions through an RFP process.

New SOP designed to include both current testing and mobile testing processes.

Activities

4.1 Determine your target state for mobile testing by following Info-Tech’s framework as a starting point

4.2 Design new SOP to include testing for mobile apps

4.3 Translate all considered visual SOP mobile injections into requirements

4.4 Document the preliminary list of test requirements in the RFP

4.5 Determine which vendors to include for the RFP process

4.6 Reach out to vendors for a request for proposal

4.7 Objectively evaluate vendors against testing requirements

4.8 Identify and assess the expected costs and impacts from determining your target state

Outputs

List of testing requirements for mobile

Request for Proposal

5 Implement Testing Tools to Support Your Testing SOP

The Purpose

Develop an implementation roadmap to integrate new testing initiatives.

Anticipate potential roadblocks during implementation rollout.

Operationalize mobile testing and ensure a smooth hand-off to IT operations.

Key Benefits Achieved

Creation of implementation project plan.

List of approaches to mitigate potential implementation roadblocks.

Achieving clean hand-off to IT ops team.

Activities

5.1 Develop a project plan to codify your current understanding of the scope of work

5.2 Anticipate potential roadblocks during your tool’s implementation

5.3 Operationalize your testing tools and ensure a smooth hand-off from the project team

Outputs

Mobile testing metrics implementation plan

6 Conduct Your Retrospectives

The Purpose

Conduct regular retrospectives to consider areas for improvement.

Adjust your processes, systems, and testing tools to improve performance and usability.

Revisit implementation metrics to communicate project benefits.

Leverage the lessons learned and apply them to other projects.

Key Benefits Achieved

Project specific metrics.

Discovery of areas to improve.

Activities

6.1 Conduct regular retrospectives to consider areas for improvement

6.2 Revisit your implementation metrics to communicate project benefits to business stakeholders

6.3 Adjust your processes, systems, and testing tools to improve performance and usability

6.4 Leverage the lessons learned and apply them to other IT projects

Outputs

Steps to improve your mobile testing

Gain Control of Cloud Integration Strategies Before they Float Away

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  • Parent Category Name: Enterprise Integration
  • Parent Category Link: /enterprise-integration
  • IT is typically backlogged with tasks while the business waits to implement key solutions to remain competitive. In this competitive space, Cloud solutions offer attractive benefits to business stakeholders especially around agility and cost.
  • Moving to the Cloud involves more than outsourcing a component of the technology stack. Roles, processes, and authentication technologies need to be redefined to fit a distributed stack where parts of the IT solution space reside on-premise while the rest are in the Cloud.
  • Cloud integration means accepting loss of control in product development. A Cloud vendor will address the needs of most constituents and any high degree of customization which counteracts their business model. This makes integration a complex initiative involving two separate parties trying to align.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Cloud integration is a fundamental commitment to change within the organization as it deeply impacts roles, processes, and technologies.
  • Be prepared to lose some degree of control of SLA management. IT will have to manage multiple Cloud SLAs and deliver a lowest common approach to the business. This may mean lowering the SLA standards previously set with on-premise solutions.
  • Cloud integration isn’t just about the technology. It is a dedication to establish solid relationships with the Cloud vendor. Understanding where the cloud solution is moving and what issues are being addressed are critical to creating an organizational road map for the future.

Impact and Result

  • Develop a Cloud integration strategy by proactively understanding the impact of Cloud integration efforts to the organization.
  • Realize that Cloud integration will be an ongoing process of collaboration with the business, and that the initial implementation does not constitute an end.
  • Implement an integrated support structure that includes on-premise and cloud stacks.

Gain Control of Cloud Integration Strategies Before they Float Away Research & Tools

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

1. Understand the impacts of Cloud computing on Data, Application, Access, and Service Level Agreement integration

Assess your current level of Cloud adoption and integration, focusing on solutions that are emerging in the market and the applicability to your IT environment.

  • Storyboard: Gain Control of Cloud Integration Strategies Before they Float Away
  • Cloud Integration Checklist
  • None
[infographic]

Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence

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  • Parent Category Name: Development
  • Parent Category Link: /development
  • 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).

    Manage Your Chromebooks and MacBooks

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}167|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact: N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
    • member rating average days saved: N/A
    • 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.

    Integrate Physical Security and Information Security

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    • Parent Category Name: Security Processes & Operations
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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

    CIO Priorities 2022

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}328|cart{/j2store}
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    • Parent Category Name: Innovation
    • Parent Category Link: /innovation
    • Understand how to respond to trends affecting your organization.
    • Determine your priorities based on current state and relevant internal factors.
    • Assign the right amount of resources to accomplish your vision.
    • Consider what new challenges outside of your control will demand a response.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    A priority is created when external factors hold strong synergy with internal goals and an organization responds by committing resources to either avert risk or seize opportunity. These are the priorities identified in the report:

    1. Reduce Friction in the Hybrid Operating Model
    2. Improve Your Ransomware Readiness
    3. Support an Employee-Centric Retention Strategy
    4. Design an Automation Platform
    5. Prepare to Report on New Environmental, Social, and Governance Metrics

    Impact and Result

    Update your strategic roadmap to include priorities that are critical and relevant for your organization based on a balance of external and internal factors.

    CIO Priorities 2022 Research & Tools

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

    1. CIO Priorities 2022 – A report on the key priorities for competing in the digital economy.

    Discover Info-Tech’s five priorities for CIOs in 2022.

    • CIO Priorities Report for 2022

    2. Listen to the podcast series

    Hear directly from our contributing experts as they discuss their case studies with Brian Jackson.

    • Frictionless hybrid working: How the Harvard Business School did it
    • Close call with ransomware: A CIO recounts a near security nightmare
    • How a financial services company dodged "The Great Resignation"
    • How Allianz took a blockchain platform from pilot to 1 million transactions
    • CVS Health chairman David Dorman on healthcare's hybrid future

    Infographic

    Further reading

    CIO Priorities 2022

    A jumble of business-related words. Info-Tech’s 2022 Tech Trends survey asked CIOs for their top three priorities. Cluster analysis of their open-ended responses shows four key themes:
    1. Business process improvements
    2. Digital transformation or modernization
    3. Security
    4. Supporting revenue growth or recovery

    Info-Tech’s annual CIO priorities are formed from proprietary primary data and consultation with our internal experts with CIO stature

    2022 Tech Trends Survey CIO Demographic N=123

    Info-Tech’s Tech Trends 2022 survey was conducted between August and September 2021 and collected a total of 475 responses from IT decision makers, 123 of which were at the C-level. Fourteen countries and 16 industries are represented in the survey.

    2022 IT Talent Trends Survey CIO Demographic N=44

    Info-Tech’s IT Talent Trends 2022 survey was conducted between September and October 2021 and collected a total of 245 responses from IT decision makers, 44 of which were at the C-level. A broad range of countries from around the world are represented in the survey.

    Internal CIO Panels’ 125 Years Of Combined C-Level IT Experience

    Panels of former CIOs at Info-Tech focused on interpreting tech trends data and relating it to client experiences. Panels were conducted between November 2021 and January 2022.

    CEO-CIO Alignment Survey Benchmark Completed By 107 Different Organizations

    Info-Tech’s CEO-CIO Alignment program helps CIOs align with their supervisors by asking the right questions to ensure that IT stays on the right path. It determines how IT can best support the business’ top priorities and address the gaps in your strategy. In 2021, the benchmark was formed by 107 different organizations.

    Build IT alignment

    IT Management & Governance Diagnostic Benchmark Completed By 320 Different Organizations

    Info-Tech’s Management and Governance Diagnostic helps IT departments assess their strengths and weaknesses, prioritize their processes and build an improvement roadmap, and establish clear ownership of IT processes. In 2021, the benchmark was formed by data from 320 different organizations.

    Assess your IT processes

    The CIO priorities are informed by Info-Tech’s trends research reports and surveys

    Priority: “The fact or condition of being regarded or treated as more important than others.” (Lexico/Oxford)

    Trend: “A general direction in which something is developing or changing.” (Lexico/Oxford)

    A sequence of processes beginning with 'Sensing', 'Hypothesis', 'Validation', and ending with 'Trends, 'Priorities'. Under Sensing is Technology Research, Interviews & Insights, Gathering, and PESTLE. Under Hypothesis is Near-Future Probabilities, Identify Patterns, Identify Uncertainties, and Identify Human Benefits. Under Validation is Test Hypothesis, Case Studies, and Data-Driven Insights. Under Trends is Technology, Talent, and Industry. Under Priorities is CIO, Applications, Infrastructure, and Security.

    Visit Info-Tech’s Trends & Priorities Research Center

    Image called 'Defining the CIO Priorities for 2022'. Image shows 4 columns, Implications, Resource Investment, Amplifiers, and Actions and Outcomes, with 2 dotted lines, labeled External Context and Internal Context, running through all 4 columns and leading to bottom-right label called CIO Priorities Formed

    The Five Priorities

    Priorities to compete in the digital economy

    1. Reduce Friction in the Hybrid Operating Model
    2. Improve Your Ransomware Readiness
    3. Support an Employee-Centric Retention Strategy
    4. Design an Automation Platform
    5. Prepare to Report on New Environmental, Social, and Governance Metrics

    Reduce friction in the hybrid operating model

    Priority 01 | APO07 Human Resources Management

    Deliver solutions that create equity between remote workers and office workers and make collaboration a joy.

    Hybrid work is here to stay

    CIOs must deal with new pain points related to friction of collaboration

    In 2020, CIOs adapted to the pandemic’s disruption to offices by investing in capabilities to enable remote work. With restrictions on gathering in offices, even digital laggards had to shift to an all-remote work model for non-essential workers.

    Most popular technologies already invested in to facilitate better collaboration

    • 24% Web Conferencing
    • 23% Instant Messaging
    • 20% Document Collaboration

    In 2022, the focus shifts to solving problems created by the new hybrid operating model where some employees are in the office and some are working remotely. Without the ease of collaborating in a central hub, technology can play a role in reducing friction in several areas:

    • Foster more connections between employees. Remote workers are less likely to collaborate with people outside of their department and less likely to spontaneously collaborate with their peers. CIOs should provide a digital employee experience that fosters collaboration habits and keeps workers engaged.
    • Prevent employee attrition. With more workers reevaluating their careers and leaving their jobs, CIOs can help employees feel connected to the overall purpose of the organization. Finding a way to maintain culture in the new context will require new solutions. While conference room technology can be a bane to IT departments, making hybrid meetings effortless to facilitate will be more important.
    • Provide new standards for mediated collaboration. Meeting isn’t as easy as simply gathering around the same table anymore. CIOs need to provide structure around how hybrid meetings are conducted to create equity between all participants. Business continuity processes must also consider potential outages for collaboration services so employees can continue the work despite a major outage.

    Three in four organizations have a “hybrid” approach to work. (Tech Trends 2022 Survey)

    In most organizations, a hybrid model is being implemented. Only 14.9% of organizations are planning for almost everyone to return to the office, and only 9.9% for almost everyone to work remotely.

    Elizabeth Clark

    CIO, Harvard Business School

    "I want to create experiences that are sticky. That keep people coming back and engaging with their colleagues."

    		 Photo of Elizabeth Clark, CIO, Harvard Business School.

    Listen to the Tech Insights podcast:
    Frictionless hybrid working: How the Harvard Business School did it

    Internal interpretation: Harvard Business School

    • March 2020
      The pandemic disrupts in-class education at Harvard Business School. Their case study method of instruction that depends on in-person, high-quality student engagement is at risk. While students and faculty completed the winter semester remotely, the Dean and administration make the goal to restore the integrity of the classroom experience with equity for both remote and in-person students.
    • May 2020
      A cross-functional task force of about 100 people work intensively, conducting seven formal experiments, 80 smaller tests, and hundreds of polling data points, and a technology and facilities solution is designed: two 4K video cameras capturing both the faculty and the in-class students, new ceiling mics, three 85-inch TV screens, and students joining the videoconference from their laptops. A custom Zoom room, combining three separate rooms, integrated all the elements in one place and integrated with the lecture capture system and learning management system.
    • October 2020
      Sixteen classrooms are renovated to install the new solution. Students return to the classroom but in lower numbers due to limits on in-room capacity, but students rotate between the in-person and remote experience.
    • September 2021
      Renovations for the hybrid solution are complete in 26 classrooms and HBS has determined this will be its standard model for the classroom. The case method of teaching is kept alive and faculty and students are thrilled with the results.
    • November 2021
      HBS is adapting its solution for the classroom to its conference rooms and has built out eight different rooms for a hybrid experience. The 4K cameras and TV screens capture all participants in high fidelity as well as the blackboard.

    Photo of a renovated classroom with Zoom participants integrated with the in-person students.
    The renovated classrooms integrate all students, whether they are participating remotely or in person. (Image courtesy of Harvard Business School.)

    Implications: Organization, Process, Technology

    External

    • Organization – About half of IT practitioners in the Tech Trends 2022 survey feel that IT leaders, infrastructure and operations teams, and security teams were “very busy” in 2021. Capacity to adapt to hybrid work could be constrained by these factors.
    • Process – Organizations that want employees to benefit from being back in the office will have to rethink how workers can get more value out of in-person meetings that also require videoconference participation with remote workers.
    • Technology – Fifty-four percent of surveyed IT practitioners say the pandemic raised IT spending compared to the projections they made in 2020. Much of that investment went into adapting to a remote work environment.

    Internal

    • Organization – HBS added 30 people to its IT staff on term appointments to develop and implement its hybrid classroom solutions. Hires included instructional designers, support technicians, coordinators, and project managers.
    • Process – Only 25 students out of the full capacity of 95 could be in the classroom due to COVID-19 regulations. On-campus students rotated through the classroom seats. An app was created to post last-minute seat availability to keep the class full.
    • Technology – A Zoom room was created that combines three rooms to provide the full classroom experience: a view of the instructor, a clear view of each student that enlarges when they are speaking, and a view of the blackboard.

    Resources Applied

    Appetite for Technology

    CIOs and their direct supervisors both ranked internal collaboration tools as being a “critical need to adopt” in 2021, according to Info-Tech’s CEO-CIO Alignment Benchmark Report.

    Intent to Invest

    Ninety-seven percent of IT practitioners plan to invest in technology to facilitate better collaboration between employees in the office and outside the office by the end of 2022, according to Info-Tech’s 2022 Tech Trends survey.

    “We got so many nice compliments, which you don’t get in IT all the time. You get all the complaints, but it’s a rare case when people are enthusiastic about something that was delivered.” (Elizabeth Clark, CIO, Harvard Business School)

    Harvard Business School

    • IT staff were reassigned from other projects to prioritize building a hybrid classroom solution. A cloud migration and other portfolio projects were put on pause.
    • The annual capital A/V investment was doubled. The amount of spend on conference rooms was tripled.
    • Employees were hired to the media services team at a time when other areas of the organization were frozen.

    Outcomes at Harvard Business School

    The new normal at Harvard Business School

    New normal: HBS has found its new default operating model for the classroom and is extending its solution to its operating environment.

    Improved CX: The high-quality experience for students has helped avoid attrition despite the challenges of the pandemic.

    Engaged employees: The IT team is also engaged and feels connected to the mission of the school.

    Photo of a custom Zoom room bringing together multiple view of the classroom as well as all remote students.
    A custom Zoom room brings together multiple different views of the classroom into one single experience for remote students. (Image courtesy of Harvard Business School.)

    From Priorities to Action

    Make hybrid collaboration a joy

    Align with your organization’s goals for collaboration and customer interaction, with the target of high satisfaction for both customers and employees. Invest in capital projects to improve the fidelity of conference rooms, develop and test a new way of working, and increase IT capacity to alleviate pressure points.

    Foster both asynchronous and synchronous collaboration approaches to avoid calendars filling up with videoconference meetings to get things done and to accommodate workers contributing from across different time zones.

    “We’ll always have hybrid now. It’s opened people’s eyes and now we’re thinking about the future state. What new markets could we explore?” (Elizabeth Clark, CIO, Harvard Business School)

    Take the next step

    Run Better Meetings
    Hybrid, virtual, or in person – set meeting best practices that support your desired meeting norms.

    Prepare People Leaders for the Hybrid Work Environment
    Set hybrid work up for success by providing people leaders with the tools they need to lead within the new model.

    Hoteling and Hot-Desking: A Primer
    What you need to know regarding facilities, IT infrastructure, maintenance, security, and vendor solutions for desk hoteling and hot-desking.

    “Human Resources Management” gap between importance and effectiveness
    Info-Tech Research Group Management and Governance Diagnostic Benchmark 2021

    A bar chart illustrating the Human Resources Management gap between importance and effectiveness. The difference is marked as Delta 2.3.

    Improve your ransomware readiness

    Priority 02 | APO13 Security Strategy

    Mitigate the damage of successful ransomware intrusions and make recovery as painless as possible.

    The ransomware crisis threatens every organization

    Prevention alone won’t be enough against the forces behind ransomware.

    Cybersecurity is always top of mind for CIOs but tends to be deprioritized due to other demands related to digital transformation or due to cost pressures. That’s the case when we examine our data for this report.

    Cybersecurity ranked as the fourth-most important priority by CIOs in Info-Tech’s 2022 Tech Trends survey, behind business process improvement, digital transformation, and modernization. Popular ways to prepare for a successful attack include creating offline backups, purchasing insurance, and deploying new solutions to eradicate ransomware.

    CIOs and their direct supervisors ranked “Manage IT-Related Security” as the third-most important top IT priority on Info-Tech’s CEO-CIO Alignment Benchmark for 2021, in support of business goals to manage risk, comply with external regulation, and ensure service continuity.

    Most popular ways for organizations to prepare for the event of a successful ransomware attack:

    • 25% Created offline backups
    • 18% Purchased cyberinsurance
    • 19% New tech to eradicate ransomware

    Whatever priority an organization places on cybersecurity, when ransomware strikes, it quickly becomes a red alert scenario that disrupts normal operations and requires all hands on deck to respond. Sophisticated attacks executed at wide scale demonstrate that security can be bypassed without creating an alert. After that’s accomplished, the perpetrators build their leverage by exfiltrating data and encrypting critical systems.

    CIOs can plan to mitigate ransomware attacks in several constructive ways:

    • Business impact analysis. Determine the costs of an outage for specific periods and the system and data recovery points in time.
    • Engage a partner for 24/7 monitoring. Gain real-time awareness of your critical systems.
    • Review your identity access management (IAM) policies. Use of multi-factor authentication and limiting access to only the roles that need it reduces ransomware risk.

    50% of all organizations spent time and money specifically to prevent ransomware in the past year. (Info-Tech Tech Trends 2022 Survey)

    John Doe

    CIO, mid-sized manufacturing firm in the US

    "I want to create experiences that are sticky. That keep people coming back and engaging with their colleagues."

    		Blank photo.

    Listen to the Tech Insights podcast:
    Close call with ransomware: a CIO recounts a near security nightmare

    Internal interpretation: US-based, mid-sized manufacturing firm

    • May 1, 2021
      A mid-sized manufacturing firm (“The Firm”) CIO gets a call from his head of security about odd things happening on the network. A call is made to Microsoft for support. Later that night, the report is that an unwanted crypto-mining application is the culprit. But a couple of hours later, that assessment is proven wrong when it’s realized that hundreds of systems are staged for a ransomware attack. All the attacker has to do is push the button.
    • May 2, 2021
      The Firm disconnects all its global sites to cut off new pathways for the malware to infect. All normal operations cease for 24 hours. It launches its cybersecurity insurance process. The CIO engages a new security vendor, CrowdStrike, to help respond. Employees begin working from home if they can so they can make use of their own internet service. The Firm has cut off its public internet connectivity and is severed from cloud services such as Azure storage and collaboration software.
    • May 4, 2021
      The hackers behind the attack are revealed by security forensics experts. A state-sponsored agency in Russia set up the ransomware and left it ready to execute. It sold the staged attack to a cybercriminal group, Doppel Spider. According to CrowdStrike, the group uses malware to run “big game hunting operations” and targets 18 different countries including the US and multiple industries, including manufacturing.
    • May 10, 2021
      The Firm has totally recovered from the ransomware incident and avoided any serious breach or paying a ransom. The CIO worked more hours than at any other point in his career, logging an estimated 130 hours over the two weeks.
    • November 2021
      The Firm never previously considered itself a ransomware target but has now reevaluated that stance. It has hired a service provider to run a security operations center on a 24/7 basis. It's implemented a more sophisticated detection and response model and implemented multi-factor authentication. It’s doubled its security spend in 2021 and will invest more in 2022.

    “Now we take the approach that if someone does get in, we're going to find them out.” (John Doe, CIO, “The Firm”)

    Implications: Organization, Process, Technology

    External

    • Organization – Organizations must consider how their employees play a role in preventing ransomware and plan for training to recognize phishing and other common traps. They must make plans for employees to continue their work if systems are disrupted by ransomware.
    • Process – Backup processes across multiple systems should be harmonized to have both recent and common points to recover from. Work with the understanding IT will have to take systems offline if ransomware is discovered and there is no time to ask for permission.
    • Technology – Organizations can benefit from security services provided by a forensics-focused vendor. Putting cybersecurity insurance in place not only provides financial protection but also guidance in what to do and which vendors to work with to prevent and recover from ransomware.

    Internal

    • Organization – The Firm was prepared with a business continuity plan to allow many of its employees to work remotely, which was necessary because the office network was incapacitated for ten days during recovery.
    • Process – Executives didn’t seek to assign blame for the security incident but took it as a signal there were some new costs involved to stay in business. It initiated new outsource relationships and hired one more full-time employee to shore up security resources.
    • Technology – New ransomware eradication software was deployed to 2,000 computers. Scripted processes automated much of the work, but in some cases full system rebuilds were required. Backup systems were disconnected from the network as soon as the malware was discovered.

    Resources Applied

    Consider the Alternative

    Organizations should consider how much a ransomware attack on critical systems would cost them if they were down for a minimum of 24-48 hours. Plan to invest an amount at least equal to the costs of that downtime.

    Ask for ID

    Implementing across-the-board multi-factor authentication reduces chances of infection and is cheap, with enterprise solutions ranging from $2 to $5 per user on average. Be strict and deny access when connections don’t authenticate.

    “You'll never stop everything from getting into the network. You can still focus on stopping the bad actors, but then if they do make it in, make sure they don't get far.” (John Doe, CIO, “The Firm”)

    “The Firm” (Mid-Sized Manufacturer)

    • During the crisis, The Firm paused all activities and focused solely on isolating and eliminating the ransomware threat.
    • New outsourcing relationship with a vendor provides a 24/7 Security Operations Center.
    • One more full-time employee on the security team.
    • Doubled investment in security in 2021 and will spend more in 2022.

    Outcomes at “The Firm” (Mid-Sized Manufacturer)

    The new cost of doing business

    Real-time security: While The Firm is still investing in prevention-based security, it is also developing its real-time detection and response capabilities. When ransomware makes it through the cracks, it wants to know as soon as possible and stop it.

    Leadership commitment: The C-suite is taking the experience as a wake-up call that more investment is required in today’s threat landscape. The Firm rates security more highly as an overall organizational goal, not just something for IT to worry about.

    Stock photo of someone using their phone while sitting at a computer, implying multi-factor authentication.
    The Firm now uses multi-factor authentication as part of its employee sign-on process. For employees, authenticating is commonly achieved by using a mobile app that receives a secret code from the issuer.

    From Priorities to Action

    Cybersecurity is everyone’s responsibility

    In Info-Tech’s CEO-CIO Alignment Benchmark for 2021, the business goal of “Manage Risk” was the single biggest point of disagreement between CIOs and their direct supervisors. CIOs rank it as the second-most important business goal, while CEOs rank it as sixth-most important.

    Organizations should align on managing risk as a top priority given the severity of the ransomware threat. The threat actors and nature of the attacks are such that top leadership must prepare for when ransomware hits. This includes halting operations quickly to contain damage, engaging third-party security forensics experts, and coordinating with government regulators.

    Cybersecurity strategies may be challenged to be effective without creating some friction for users. Organizations should look beyond multi-layer prevention strategies and lean toward quick detection and response, spending evenly across prevention, detection, and response solutions.

    Take the next step

    Create a Ransomware Incident Response Plan
    Don’t be the next headline. Determine your current readiness, response plan, and projects to close gaps.

    Simplify Identity and Access Management
    Select and implement IAM and produce vendor RFPs that will contain the capabilities you need, including multi-factor authentication.

    Cybersecurity Series Featuring Sandy Silk
    More from Info-Tech’s Senior Workshop Director Sandy Silk in this video series created while she was still at Harvard University.

    Gap between CIOs and CEOs in points allocated to “Manage risk” as a top business goal

    A bar chart illustrating the gap between CIOs and CEOs in points allocated to 'Manage risk' as a top business goal. The difference is marked as Delta 1.5.

    Support an employee-centric retention strategy

    Priority 03 | ITRG02 Leadership, Culture & Values

    Avoid being a victim of “The Great Resignation” by putting employees at the center of an experience that will engage them with clear career path development, purposeful work, and transparent feedback.

    Defining an employee-first culture that improves retention

    The Great resignation isn’t good for firms

    In 2021, many workers decided to leave their jobs. Working contexts were disrupted by the pandemic and that saw non-essential workers sent home to work, while essential workers were asked to continue to come into work despite the risks of COVID-19. These disruptions may have contributed to many workers reevaluating their professional goals and weighing their values differently. At the same time, 2021 saw a surging economy and many new job opportunities to create a talent-hungry market. Many workers could have been motivated to take a new opportunity to increase their salary or receive other benefits such as more flexibility.

    Annual turnover rate for all us employees on the rise

    • 20% – Jan.-Aug. 2020, Dipped from 22% in 2019
    • 25% Jan.-Aug. 2021, New record high
      • Data from Visier Inc.

    When you can’t pay them, develop them

    IT may be less affected than other departments by this trend. Info-Tech’s 2022 IT Talent Trends Report shows that on average, estimated turnover rate in IT is lower than the rest of the organization. Almost half of respondents estimated their organization’s voluntary turnover rate was 10% or higher. Only 30% of respondents estimate that IT’s voluntary turnover rate is in the same range. However, CIOs working in industries with the highest turnover rates will have to work to keep their workers engaged and satisfied, as IT skills are easily transferred to other industries.

    49% ranked “enabling learning & development within IT” as high priority, more than any other single challenge. (IT Talent Trends 2022 Survey, N=227)

    A bar chart of 'Industries with highest turnover rates (%)' with 'Leisure and Hospitality' at 6.4%, 'Trade, Transportation & Utilities' at 3.6%, 'Professional and Business' at 3.3%, and 'Other Services' at 3.1%. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022.

    Jeff Previte

    Executive Vice-President of IT, CrossCountry Mortgage

    “We have to get to know the individual at a personal level … Not just talking about the business, but getting to know the person."

    		 Photo of Jeff Previte, Executive Vice-President of IT, CrossCountry Mortgage.

    Listen to the Tech Insights podcast:
    How a financial services company dodged ‘The Great Resignation’

    Internal interpretation: CrossCountry Mortgage

    • May 2019
      Jeff Previte joins Cleveland, Ohio-based CrossCountry Mortgage in the CIO role. The company faces a challenge with employee turnover, particularly in IT. The firm is a sales-focused organization and saw its turnover rate reach as high as 60%. Yet Previte recognized that IT had some meaningful goals to achieve and would need to attract – and retain – some higher caliber talent. His first objective in his new role was to meet with IT employees and business leadership to set priorities.
    • July 2019
      Previte takes a “people-first” approach to leadership and meets his staff face-to-face to understand their personal situations. He sets to work on defining roles and responsibilities in the organization, spending about a fifth of his time on defining the strategy.
    • June 2020
      Previte assigned his leadership team to McLean & Company’s Design an Impactful Employee Development Program. From there, the team developed a Salesforce tool called the Career Development Workbook. “We had some very passionate developers and admins that wanted to build a home-grown tool,” he says. It turns McLean & Company’s process into a digital tool employees can use to reflect on their careers and explore their next steps. It helps facilitate development conversations with managers.
    • January 2021
      CrossCountry Mortgage changes its approach to career development activities. Going to external conferences and training courses is reduced to just 30% of that effort. The rest is by doing hands-on work at the company. Previte aligned with his executives and road-mapped IT projects annually. Based on employee’s interests, opportunities are found to carve out time from usual day-to-day activities to spend time on a project in a new area. When there’s a business need, someone internally can be ready to transition roles.
    • June 2021
      In the two years since joining the company, Previte has reduced the turnover rate to just 12%. The IT department has grown to more adequately meet the needs of the business and employees are engaged with more opportunities to develop their careers. Instead of focusing on compensation, Previte focused more on engaging employees with a developmentally dedicated environment and continuous hands-on learning.

    “It’s come down to a culture shift. Folks have an idea of where we’re headed as an organization, where we’re headed as an IT team, and how their role contributes to that.” (Jeff Previte, EVP of IT, CrossCountry Mortgage)

    Implications: Organization, Process, Technology

    External

    • Organization – A high priority is being placed on improving IT’s maturity through its talent. Enabling learning and development in IT, enabling departmental innovation, and recruiting are the top three highest priorities according to IT Talent Trends 2022 survey responses.
    • Process – Recruiting is more challenging for industries that operate primarily onsite, according to McLean & Company's 2022 HR Trends Report. They face more challenges attracting applications, more rejected offers, and more candidate ghosting compared to remote-capable industries.
    • Technology – Providing a great employee experience through digital tools is more important as many organizations see a mix of workers in the office and at home. These tools can help connect colleagues, foster professional development, and improve the candidate experience.

    Internal

    • Organization – CrossCountry Mortgage faced a situation where IT employees did not have clarity on their roles and responsibilities. In terms of salary, it wasn’t offering at the high end compared to other employers in Cleveland.
    • Process – To foster a culture of growth and development, CrossCountry Mortgage put in place a performance assessment system that encouraged reflection and goal setting, aided by collaboration with a manager.
    • Technology – The high turnover rate was limiting CrossCountry Mortgage from achieving the level of maturity it needed to support the company’s goals. It ingrained its new PA process with a custom build of a Salesforce tool.

    Resources Applied

    Show me the money

    Almost six in ten Talent Trends survey respondents identified salary and compensation as the reason that employees resigned in the past year. Organizations looking to engage employees must first pay a fair salary according to market and industry conditions.

    Build me up

    Professional development and opportunity for innovative work are the next two most common reasons for resignations. Organizations must ensure they create enough capacity to allow workers time to spend on development.

    “Building our own solution created an element of engagement. There was a sense of ownership that the team had in thinking through this.” (Jeff Previte, CrossCountry Mortgage)

    CrossCountry Mortgage

    • Executive time: CIO spends 10-20% of his time on activities related to designing the approach.
    • Leveraged memberships with Info-Tech Research Group and McLean & Company to define professional development process.
    • Internal IT develops automated workflow in Salesforce.
    • Hired additional IT staff to build out overall capacity and create time for development activities.

    Outcomes at CrossCountry Mortgage

    Engaged IT workforce

    The Great Maturation: IT staff turnover rate dropped to 10-12% and IT talent is developing on the job to improve the department’s overall skill level. More IT staff on hand and more engaged workers mean IT can deliver higher maturity level results.

    Alignment achieved: Connecting IT’s initiatives to the vision of the C-suite creates a clear purpose for IT in its initiatives. Staff understand what they need to achieve to progress their careers and can grow while they work.

    Photo of employees from CrossCountry Mortgage assisting with a distribution event.
    Employees from CrossCountry Mortgage headquarters assist with a drive-thru distribution event for the Cleveland Food Bank on Dec. 17, 2021. (Image courtesy of CrossCountry Mortgage.)

    From Priorities to Action

    Staff retention is a leadership priority

    The Great Resignation trend is bringing attention to employee engagement and staff retention. IT departments are busier than ever during the pandemic as they work overtime to keep up with a remote workforce and new security threats. At the same time, IT talent is among the most coveted on the market.

    CIOs need to develop a people-first approach to improve the employee experience. Beyond compensation, IT workers need clarity in terms of their career paths, a direct connection between their work and the goals of the organization, and time set aside for professional development.

    Info-Tech’s 2021 benchmark for “Leadership, Culture & Values” shows that most organizations rate this capability very highly (9) but see room to improve on their effectiveness (6.9).

    Take the next step

    IT Talent Trends 2022
    See how IT talent trends are shifting through the pandemic and understand how themes like The Great Resignation has impacted IT.

    McLean & Company’s Modernize Performance Management
    Customize the building blocks of performance management to best fit organizational needs to impact individual and organizational performance, productivity, and engagement.

    Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure
    Define future-state work units, roles, and responsibilities that will enable the IT organization to complete the work that needs to be done.

    “Leadership, Culture & Values” gap between importance and effectiveness
    Info-Tech Research Group Management and Governance Diagnostic Benchmark 2021

    A bar chart illustrating the 'Leadership, Culture & Values' gap between importance and effectiveness. The difference is marked as Delta 2.1.

    Design an automation platform

    Priority 04 | APO04 Innovation

    Position yourself to buy or build a platform that will enable new automation opportunities through seamless integration.

    Build it or buy it, but platform integration can yield great benefits

    Necessity is the mother of innovation

    When it’s said that digital transformation accelerated during the pandemic, what’s really meant is that processes that were formerly done manually became automated through software. In responses to the Tech Trends survey, CIOs say digital transformation was more of a focus during the pandemic, and eight in ten CIOs also say they shifted more than 20% of their organization’s processes to digital during the pandemic. Automating tasks through software can be called digitalization.

    Most organizations became more digitalized during the pandemic. But how they pursued it depends on their IT maturity. For digital laggards, partnering with a technology services platform is the path of least resistance. For sophisticated innovators, they can consider building a platform to address the specific needs of their business process. Doing so requires the foundation of an existing “digital factory” or innovation arm where new technologies can be tested, proofs of concept developed, and external partnerships formed. Patience is key with these efforts, as not every investment will yield immediate returns and some will fail outright.

    Build it or buy it, platform participants integrate with their existing systems through application programming interfaces (APIs). Organizations should determine their platform strategies based on maturity, then look to integrate the business processes that will yield the most gains.

    What role should you play in the platform ecosystem?

    A table with levels on the maturity ladder laid out as a sprint. Column headers are maturity levels 'Struggle', 'Support', 'Optimize', 'Expand', and 'Transform', row headers are 'Maturity' and 'Role'. Roles are assigned to one or many levels. 'Improve' is solely under Struggle. 'Integrate' spans from Support to Transform. 'Buy' spans Support to Expand. 'Build' begins midway through Expand and all of Transform. 'Partner' spans from Optimize to halfway through Transform.

    68% of CIOs say digital transformation became much more of a focus for their organization during the pandemic (Info-Tech Tech Trends 2022 Survey)

    Bob Crozier

    Chief Architect, Allianz Technology & Global Head of Blockchain, Allianz Technology SE

    "Smart contracts are really just workflows between counterparties."

    		 Photo of Bob Crozier, Chief Architect, Allianz Technology & Global Head of Blockchain, Allianz Technology SE.

    Listen to the Tech Insights podcast:
    How Allianz took a blockchain platform from pilot to 1 million transactions

    Internal interpretation: Allianz Technology

    • 2015
      After smart contracts are demonstrated on the Ethereum blockchain, Allianz and other insurers recognize the business value. There is potential to use the capability to administer a complex, multi-party contract where the presence of the reinsurer in the risk transfer ecosystem is required. Manual contracts could be turned into code and automated. Allianz organized an early proof of concept around a theoretical pandemic excessive loss contract.
    • 2018
      Allianz Chief Architect Bob Crozier is leading the Global Blockchain Center of Competence for Allianz. They educate Allianz on the value of blockchain for business. They also partner with a joint venture between the Technology University of Munich and the state of Bavaria. A cohort of Masters students is looking for real business problems to solve with open-source distributed ledger technology. Allianz puts its problem statement in front of the group. A student team presents a proof of concept for an international motor insurance claims settlement and it comes in second place at a pitch day competition.
    • 2019
      Allianz brings the concept back in-house, and its business leaders return to the concept. Startup Luther Systems is engaged to build a minimum-viable product for the solution, with the goal being a pilot involving three or four subsidiaries in different countries. The Blockchain Center begins communicating with 25 Allianz subsidiaries that will eventually deploy the platform.
    • 2020
      Allianz is in build mode on its international motor insurance claims platform. It leverages its internal Dev/SecOps teams based in Munich and in India.
    • May 2021
      Allianz goes live with its new platform on May 17, decommissioning its old system and migrating all live claims data onto the new blockchain platform. It sees 400 concurrent users go live across Europe.
    • January 2022
      Allianz mines its one-millionth block to its ledger on Jan. 19, with each block representing a peer-to-peer transaction across its 25 subsidiaries in different countries. The platform has settled hundreds of millions of dollars.

    Stock photo of two people arguing over a car crash.

    Implications: Organization, Process, Technology

    External

    • Organization – To explore emerging technologies like blockchain, organizations need staff that are accountable for innovation and have leeway to develop proofs of concept. External partners are often required to bring in fresh ideas and move quickly towards an MVP.
    • Process – According to the Tech Trends 2022 survey, 84% of CIOs consider automation a high-value digital capability, and 77% say identity verification is a high-value capability. A blockchain platform using smart contracts can deliver those.
    • Technology – The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric is an open-source blockchain technology that’s become popular in the financial industry for its method of forming consensus and its modular architecture. It’s been adopted by USAA, MasterCard, and PayPal. It also underpins the IBM Blockchain Platform and is supported by Azure Blockchain.

    Internal

    • Organization – Allianz is a holding company that owns Allianz Technology and 25 operating entities across Europe. It uses the technology arm to innovate on the business process and creates shared platforms that its entities can integrate with to automate across the value chain.
    • Process – Initial interest in smart contracts on blockchain were funneled into a student competition, where a proof of concept was developed. Allianz partnered with a startup to develop an MVP, then developed the platform while aligning with its business units ahead of launch.
    • Technology – Allianz built its blockchain platform on Hyperledger Fabric because it was a permissioned system, unlike other public permissionless blockchains such as Ethereum, and because its mining mechanism was much more energy efficient compared to other blockchains using Proof of Work consensus models.

    Resources Applied

    Time to innovate

    Exploring emerging technology for potential use cases is difficult for staff tasked with running day-to-day operations. Organizations serious about innovation create a separate team that can focus on “moonshot” projects and connect with external partners.

    Long-term ROI

    Automation of new business processes often requires a high upfront initial investment for a long-term efficiency gain. A proof of concept should demonstrate clear business value that can be repeated often and for a long period.

    “My next project has to deliver in the tens of millions of value in return. The bar is high and that’s what it should be for a business of our size.” (Bob Crozier, Allianz)

    Allianz

    • Several operating entities from different countries supplied subject matter expertise and helped with the testing process.
    • Allianz Technology team has eight staff members. It is augmented by Luther Systems and the team at industry group B3i.
    • Funding of less than $5 million to develop. Dev team continues to add improvements.
    • Operating requires just one full-time employee plus infrastructure costs, mostly for public cloud hosting.

    Outcomes at Allianz

    From insurer to platform provider

    Deliver your own SaaS: Allianz Technology built its blockchain-based claims settlement platform and its subsidiaries consume it as software as a service. The platform runs on a distributed architecture across Europe, with each node running the same version of the software. Operating entities can also integrate their own systems to the platform via APIs and further automate business processes such as billing.

    Ready to scale: After processing one million transactions, the international claims settlement platform is proven and ready to add more participants. Crozier sees auto repair shops and auto manufacturers as the next logical users.

    Stock photo of Blockchain.
    Allianz is a shareholder of the Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative (B3i). It is providing a platform used by a group of insurance companies in the commercial and reinsurance space.

    When should we use blockchain? THREE key criteria:

    • Redundant processes
      Different entities follow the same process to achieve the desired outcome.
    • Audit trail
      Accountability in the decision making must be documented.
    • Reconciliation
      Parties need to be able to resolve disputes by tracing back to the truth.

    From Priorities to Action

    It’s a build vs. buy question for platforms

    Allianz was able to build a platform for its group of European subsidiaries because of its established digital factory and commitment to innovation. Allianz Technology is at the “innovate” level of IT maturity, allowing it to create a platform that subsidiaries can integrate with via APIs. For firms that are lower on the IT maturity scale, buying a platform solution is the better path to automation. These firms will be concerned with integrating their legacy systems to platforms that can reduce the friction of their operating environments and introduce modern new capabilities.

    From Info-Tech’s Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook

    An infographic comparing pros and cons of Build versus Buy. On the 'Build: High Delivery Capacity & Capability' side is 'Custom Development', 'Data Integration', 'AI/ML', 'Configuration', 'Native Workflow', and 'Low & No Code'. On the 'Buy: Low Delivery Capacity & Capability' side is 'Outsource Development', 'iPaaS', 'Chatbots', 'iBPMS & Rules Engines', 'RPA', and 'Point Solutions'.

    Take the next step

    Accelerate Your Automation Processes
    Integrate automation solutions and take the first steps to building an automation suite.

    Build Effective Enterprise Integration on the Back of Business Process
    From the backend to the frontlines – let enterprise integration help your business processes fly.

    Evolve Your Business Through Innovation
    Innovation teams are tasked with the responsibility of ensuring that their organizations are in the best position to succeed while the world is in a period of turmoil, chaos, and uncertainty.

    “Innovation” gap between importance and effectiveness Info-Tech Research Group Management and Governance Diagnostic Benchmark 2021

    A bar chart illustrating the 'Innovation' gap between importance and effectiveness. The difference is marked as Delta 2.1.

    Prepare to report on new environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics

    Priority 05 | ITRG06 Business Intelligence and Reporting

    Be ready to either lead or support initiatives to meet the criteria of new ESG reporting mandates and work toward disclosure reporting solutions.

    Time to get serious about ESG

    What does CSR or ESG mean to a CIO?

    Humans are putting increasing pressure on the planet’s natural environment and creating catastrophic risks as a result. Efforts to mitigate these risks have been underway for the past 30 years, but in the decade ahead regulators are likely to impose more strict requirements that will be linked to the financial value of an organization. Various voluntary frameworks exist for reporting on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) or corporate social responsibility (CSR) metrics. But now there are efforts underway to unify and clarify those standards.

    The most advanced effort toward a global set of standards is in the environmental area. At the United Nations’ COP26 summit in Scotland last November, the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) announced its headquarters (Frankfurt) and three other international office locations (Montreal, San Francisco, and London) and its roadmap for public consultations. It is working with an array of voluntary standards groups toward a consensus.

    In Info-Tech’s 2022 Tech Trends survey, two-thirds of CIOs say their organization is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, yet only 40% say their organizational leadership is very concerned with reducing those emissions. CIOs will need to consider how to align organizational concern with internal commitments and new regulatory pressures. They may investigate new real-time reporting solutions that could serve as a competitive differentiator on ESG.

    Standards informing the ISSB’s global set of climate standards

    A row of logos of organizations that inform ISSB's global set of climate standards.

    67% of CIOs say their organization is committed to reducing greenhouse gases, with one-third saying that commitment is public. (Info-Tech Tech Trends 2022 Survey)

    40% of CIOs say their organizational leadership is very concerned with reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

    David W. Dorman

    Chairman of the board, CVS Health

    “ESG is a question of what you do in the microcosm of your company to make sure there is a clear, level playing field – that there is a color-blind, gender-blind meritocracy available – that you are aware that not in every case can you achieve that without really focusing on it. It’s not going to happen on its own. That’s why our commitments have real dollars behind them and real focus behind them because we want to be the very best at doing them.”

    		Photo of David W. Dorman, Chairman of the Board, CVS Health.

    Listen to the Tech Insights podcast:
    CVS Health chairman David Dorman on healthcare's hybrid future

    Internal interpretation: CVS Health

    CVS Health established a new steering committee of senior leaders in 2020 to oversee ESG commitments. It designs its corporate social responsibility strategy, Transform Health 2030, by aligning company activities in four key areas: healthy people, healthy business, healthy planet, and healthy community. The strategy aligns with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. In alignment with these goals, CVS identifies material topics where the company has the most ability to make an impact. In 2020, its top three topics were:

    1. Access to quality health care
    2. Patient and customer safety
    3. Data protection and privacy
    Material Topic
    Access to quality health care
    Material Topic
    Patient and customer safety
    Material Topic
    Data protection and privacy
    Technology Initiative
    MinuteClinic’s Virtual Collaboration for Nurses

    CVS provided Apple iPads compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to clinics in a phased approach, providing training to more than 700 providers in 26 states by February 2021. Nurses could use the iPads to attend virtual morning huddles and access clinical education. Nurses could connect virtually with other healthcare experts to collaborate on delivering patient care in real-time. The project was able to scale across the country through a $50,000 American Nurses Credentialing Center Pathway Award. (Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.)

    Technology Initiative
    MinuteClinic’s E-Clinic

    MinuteClinics launched this telehealth solution in response to the pandemic, rolling it out in three weeks. The solution complemented video visits delivered in partnership with the Teladoc platform. Visits cost $59 and are covered by Aetna insurance plans, a subsidiary of CVS Health. It hosted more than 20,000 E-Clinic visits through the end of 2020. CVS connected its HealthHUBs to the solution to increase capacity in place of walk-in appointments and managed patients via phone for medication adherence and care plans. CVS also helped behavioral health providers transition patients to virtual visits. (CVS Health)

    Technology Initiative
    Next Generation Authentication Platform

    CVS patented this solution to authenticate customers accessing digital channels. It makes use of the available biometrics data and contextual information to validate identity without the need for a password. CVS planned to extend the platform to voice channels as well, using voiceprint technology. The solution prevents unauthorized access to sensitive health data while providing seamless access for customers. (LinkedIn)

    Implications: Organization, Process, Technology

    External

    • Organization – Since the mid-2010s, younger investors have demonstrated reliance on ESG data when making investment decisions, resulting in the creation of voluntary standards that offered varied approaches. Organizations in ESG exchange-traded funds are outperforming the overall S&P 500 (S&P Global Market Intelligence).
    • Process – Organizations are issuing ESG reports today despite the absence of clear rules to follow for reporting results. With regulators expected to step in to establish more rigid guidelines, many organizations will need to revisit their approach to ESG reports.
    • Technology – Real-time reporting of ESG metrics will become a competitive advantage before 2030. Engineering a solution that can alert organizations to poor performance on ESG measures and allow them to respond could avert losing market value.

    Internal

    • Organization – CVS Health established an ESG Steering Committee in 2020 composed of senior leaders including its chief governance officers, chief sustainability officer, chief risk officer, and controller and SVP of investor relations. It is supported by the ESG Operating Committee.
    • Process – CVS conducts a materiality assessment in accordance with Global Reporting Initiative standards to determine the most significant ESG impacts it can make and what topics most influence the decisions of stakeholders. It engages with various stakeholder groups on CSR topics.
    • Technology – CVS technology initiatives during the pandemic focused on supporting patients and employees in collaborating on health care delivery using virtual solutions, providing rich digital experiences that are easily accessible while upholding high security and privacy standards.

    Resources Applied

    Lack of commitment

    While 83% of businesses state support for the Sustainable Development Goals outlined by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), only 40% make measurable commitments to their goals.

    Show your work

    The GRI recommends organizations not only align their activities with sustainable development goals but also demonstrate contributions to specific targets in reporting on the positive actions they carry out. (GRI, “State of Progress: Business Contributions to the SDGS.”)

    “We end up with a longstanding commitment to diversity because that’s what our customer base looks like.” (David Dorman, CVS Health)

    CVS Health

    • The MinuteClinic Virtual Collaboration solution was piloted in Houston, demonstrated success, and won additional $50,000 funding from the Pathway to Excellence Award to scale the program across the country (Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.).
    • The Next-Gen Authentication solution is provided by the vendor HYPR. It is deployed to ten million users and looking to scale to 30 million more. Pricing for enterprises is quoted at $1 per user, but volume pricing would apply to CVS (HYPR).

    Outcomes at CVS Health

    Delivering on hybrid healthcare solutions

    iPads for collaboration: Healthcare practitioners in the MinuteClinic Virtual Collaboration initiative agreed that it improved the use of interprofessional teams, working well virtually with others, and improved access to professional resources (Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.)

    Remote healthcare: Saw a 400% increase in MinuteClinic virtual visits in 2020 (CVS Health).

    Verified ID: The Next Generation Authentication platform allowed customers to register for a COVID-19 vaccination appointment. CVS has delivered more than 50 million vaccines (LinkedIn).

    Stock photo of a doctor with an iPad.
    CVS Health is making use of digital channels to connect its customers and health practitioners to a services platform that can supplement visits to a retail or clinic location to receive diagnostics and first-hand care.

    From Priorities to Action

    Become your organization’s ESG Expert

    The risks posed to organizations and wider society are becoming more severe, driving a transition from voluntary frameworks for ESG goals to a mandatory one that’s enforced by investors and governments. Organizations will be expected to tie their core activities to a defined set of ESG goals and maintain a balance sheet of their positive and negative impacts. CIOs should become experts in ESG disclosure requirements and recommend the steps needed to meet or exceed competitors’ efforts. If a leadership vacuum for ESG accountability exists, CIOs can either seek to support their peers that are likely to become accountable or take a leadership role in overseeing the area. CIOs should start working toward solutions that deliver real-time reporting on ESG goals to make reporting frictionless.

    “If you don’t have ESG oversight at the highest levels of the company, it won’t wind up getting the focus. That’s why we review it at the Board multiple times per year. We have an annual report, we compare how we did, what we intended to do, where did we fall short, where did we exceed, and where we can run for daylight to do more.” (David Dorman, CVS Health)

    Take the next step

    ESG Disclosures: How Will We Record Status Updates on the World We Are Creating?
    Prepare for the era of mandated environmental, social, and governance disclosures.

    Private Equity and Venture Capital Growing Impact of ESG Report
    Learn about how the growing impact of ESG affects both your organization and IT specifically, including challenges and opportunities, with expert assistance.

    “Business Intelligence and Reporting” gap between importance and effectiveness
    Info-Tech Research Group Management and Governance Diagnostic Benchmark 2021

    A bar chart illustrating the 'BI and Reporting' gap between importance and effectiveness. The difference is marked as Delta 2.4.

    The Five Priorities

    Priorities to compete in the digital economy

    1. Reduce Friction in the Hybrid Operating Model
    2. Improve Your Ransomware Readiness
    3. Support an Employee-Centric Retention Strategy
    4. Design an Automation Platform
    5. Prepare to Report on New Environmental, Social, and Governance Metrics

    Contributing Experts

    Elizabeth Clark

    CIO, Harvard Business School
    		Photo of Elizabeth Clark, CIO, Harvard Business School.

    Jeff Previte

    Executive Vice-President of IT, CrossCountry Mortgage
    		Photo of Jeff Previte, Executive Vice-President of IT, CrossCountry Mortgage.

    Bob Crozier

    Chief Architect, Allianz Technology & Global Head of Blockchain, Allianz Technology SE
    		Photo of Bob Crozier, Chief Architect, Allianz Technology & Global Head of Blockchain, Allianz Technology SE.

    David W. Dorman

    Chairman of the Board, CVS Health
    		Photo of David W. Dorman, Chairman of the Board, CVS Health.

    Info-Tech’s internal CIO panel contributors

    • Bryan Tutor
    • John Kemp
    • Mike Schembri
    • Janice Clatterbuck
    • Sandy Silk
    • Sallie Wright
    • David Wallace
    • Ken McGee
    • Mike Tweedie
    • Cole Cioran
    • Kevin Tucker
    • Angelina Atkins
    • Yakov Kofner
    		 Photo of an internal CIO panel contributor. Photo of an internal CIO panel contributor.Photo of an internal CIO panel contributor.
    Photo of an internal CIO panel contributor.Photo of an internal CIO panel contributor.Photo of an internal CIO panel contributor.Photo of an internal CIO panel contributor.
    Photo of an internal CIO panel contributor.Photo of an internal CIO panel contributor.Photo of an internal CIO panel contributor.

    Thank you for your support

    Logo for the Blockchain Research Institute.
    Blockchain Research Institute

    Bibliography – CIO Priorities 2022

    “2020 Corporate Social Responsibility Report.” CVS Health, 2020, p. 127. Web.

    “Adversary: Doppel Spider - Threat Actor.” Crowdstrike Adversary Universe, 2021. Accessed 29 Dec. 2021.

    “Aetna CVS Health Success Story.” HYPR, n.d. Accessed 6 Feb. 2022.

    Baig, Aamer. “The CIO agenda for the next 12 months: Six make-or-break priorities.” McKinsey Digital, 1 Nov. 2021. Web.

    Ball, Sarah, Kristene Diggins, Nairobi Martindale, Angela Patterson, Anne M. Pohnert, Jacinta Thomas, Tammy Todd, and Melissa Bates. “2020 ANCC Pathway Award® winner.” Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc., 2021. Accessed 6 Feb. 2022.

    “Canadian Universities Propose Designs for a Central Bank Digital Currency.” Bank of Canada, 11 Feb. 2021. Accessed 14 Dec. 2021.

    “Carbon Sequestration in Wetlands.” MN Board of Water and Soil Resources, n.d. Accessed 15 Nov. 2021.

    “CCM Honored as a NorthCoast 99 Award Winner.” CrossCountry Mortgage, 1 Dec. 2021. Web.

    Cheek, Catherine. “Four Things We Learned About the Resignation Wave–and What to Do Next.” Visier Inc. (blog), 5 Oct. 2021. Web.

    “Companies Using Hyperledger Fabric, Market Share, Customers and Competitors.” HG Insights, 2022. Accessed 25 Jan. 2022.

    “IFRS Foundation Announces International Sustainability Standards Board, Consolidation with CDSB and VRF, and Publication of Prototype Disclosure Requirements.” IFRS, 3 Nov. 2021. Web.

    “IT Priorities for 2022: A CIO Report.” Mindsight, 28 Oct. 2021. Web.

    “Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.” Databases, Tables & Calculators by Subject, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022. Accessed 9 Feb. 2022.

    Kumar, Rashmi, and Michael Krigsman. “CIO Planning and Investment Strategy 2022.” CXOTalk, 13 Sept. 2021. Web.

    Leonhardt, Megan. “The Great Resignation Is Hitting These Industries Hardest.” Fortune, 16 Nov. 2021. Accessed 7 Jan. 2022.

    “Most companies align with SDGs – but more to do on assessing progress.” Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), 17 Jan. 2022. Web.

    Navagamuwa, Roshan. “Beyond Passwords: Enhancing Data Protection and Consumer Experience.” LinkedIn, 15 Dec. 2020.

    Ojo, Oluwaseyi. “Achieving Digital Business Transformation Using COBIT 2019.” ISACA, 19 Aug. 2019. Web.

    “Priority.” Lexico.com, Oxford University Press, 2021. Web.

    Riebold, Jan, and Yannick Bartens. “Reinventing the Digital IT Operating Model for the ‘New Normal.’” Capgemini Worldwide, 3 Nov. 2020. Web.

    Samuels, Mark. “The CIO’s next priority: Using the tech budget for growth.” ZDNet, 1 Sept. 2021. Accessed 1 Nov. 2021.

    Sayer, Peter. “Exclusive Survey: CIOs Outline Tech Priorities for 2021-22.” CIO, 5 Oct. 2021. Web.

    Shacklett, Mary E. “Where IT Leaders Are Likely to Spend Budget in 2022.” InformationWeek, 10 Aug. 2021. Web.

    “Table 4. Quits Levels and Rates by Industry and Region, Seasonally Adjusted - 2021 M11 Results.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Economic News Release, 1 Jan. 2022. Accessed 7 Jan. 2022.

    “Technology Priorities CIOs Must Address in 2022.” Gartner, 19 Oct. 2021. Accessed 1 Nov. 2021.

    Thomson, Joel. Technology, Talent, and the Future Workplace: Canadian CIO Outlook 2021. The Conference Board of Canada, 7 Dec. 2021. Web.

    “Trend.” Lexico.com, Oxford University Press, 2021. Web.

    Vellante, Dave. “CIOs signal hybrid work will power tech spending through 2022.” SiliconANGLE, 25 Sept. 2021. Web.

    Whieldon, Esther, and Robert Clark. “ESG funds beat out S&P 500 in 1st year of COVID-19; how 1 fund shot to the top.” S&P Global Market Intelligence, April 2021. Accessed Dec. 2021.

    Avoid Project Management Pitfalls

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    • Parent Category Name: Program & Project Management
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    • IT organizations seem to do everything in projects, yet fewer than 15% successfully complete all deliverables on time and on budget.
    • Project managers seem to succumb to the relentless pressure from stakeholders to deliver more, more quickly, with fewer resources, and with less support than is ideal.
    • To achieve greater likelihood that your project will stay on track, watch out for the four big pitfalls: scope creep, failure to obtain stakeholder commitment, inability to assemble a team, and failure to plan.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • While many project managers worry about proper planning as the key to project success, skilled management of the political factors around a project has a much greater impact on success.
    • Alone, combating scope creep can improve your likelihood of success by a factor of 2x.
    • A strong project sponsor will be key to fighting the inevitable battles to control scope and obtain resources.

    Impact and Result

    • Take steps to avoid falling into common project pitfalls.
    • Assess which pitfalls threaten your project in its current state and take appropriate steps to avoid falling into them.
    • Avoiding pitfalls will allow you to deliver value on time and on budget, creating the perception of success in users’ and managers’ eyes.

    Avoid Project Management Pitfalls Research & Tools

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

    1. Learn about common PM pitfalls and the strategies to avoid them

    Consistently meet project goals through enhanced PM knowledge and awareness.

    • Storyboard: Avoid Project Management Pitfalls
    • None

    2. Detect project pitfalls

    Take action and mitigate a pitfall before it becomes a problem.

    • Project Pitfall Detection & Mitigation Tool

    3. Document and report PM issues

    Learn from issues encountered to help map PM strategies for future projects.

    • Project Management Pitfalls Issue Log
    [infographic]

    Prepare for Cognitive Service Management

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    • Parent Category Name: Strategy and Organizational Design
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    • The evolution of natural language processing and machine learning applications has led to specialized AI-assisted toolsets that promise to improve the efficiency and timeliness of IT operations.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • These are early days. These AI-assisted toolsets are generating a considerable amount of media attention, but most of them are relatively untested. Early adopters willing to absorb experimentation costs are in the process of deploying the first use cases. Initial lessons are showing that IT operations in most organizations are not yet mature enough to take advantage of AI-assisted toolsets.
    • Focus on the problem, not the tool. Explicit AI questions should be at the end of the list. Start by asking what business problem you want to solve.
    • Get your house in order. The performance of AI-assisted tools depends on mature IT operations processes and reliable data sets. Standardize service management processes and build a knowledgebase of structured content to prepare for AI-assisted IT operations.

    Impact and Result

    • Don’t fall prey to the AI-bandwagon effect. AI-assisted innovations will support shift-left service support strategies through natural language processing and machine learning applications. However, the return on your AI investment will depend on whether it helps you meet an actual business goal.
    • AI-assisted tools presuppose the existence of mature IT operations functions, including standardized processes, high-quality structured content focused on the incidents and requests that matter, and a well-functioning ITSM web portal.
    • The success of AI ITSM projects hinges on adoption. If your vision is to power end-user interactions with chatbots and deploy intelligent agents on tickets coming through the web portal, be sure to develop a self-service culture that empowers end users to help themselves and experiment with new tools and technologies. Without end-user adoption, the promised benefits of AI projects will not materialize.

    Prepare for Cognitive Service Management Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should prepare for cognitive service management, 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. Review emerging AI technology

    Get an overview of emerging AI applications to understand how they will strengthen a shift-left service support strategy.

    2. Sort potential IT operations AI use cases

    Review potential use cases for AI applications to prioritize improvement initiatives and align them to organizational goals.

    • Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool
    • Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    3. Prepare for a cognitive service management project

    Develop an ITSM AI strategy to prepare your organization for the coming of cognitive service management, and build a roadmap for implementation.

    • Customer Journey Map (PDF)
    • Customer Journey Map (Visio)
    • Infrastructure Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool
    • Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool
    [infographic]

    IT Metrics and Dashboards During a Pandemic

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    The ways you measure success as a business are based on the typical business environment, but during a crisis like a pandemic, the business environment is rapidly changing or significantly different.

    • How do you assess the scope of the risk?
    • How do you quickly align your team to manage new risks?
    • How do you remain flexible enough to adapt to a rapidly changing situation?

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Measure what you have the data for and focus on managing the impacts to your employees, customers, and suppliers. Be willing to make decisions based on imperfect data. Don’t forget to keep an eye on the long-term objectives and remember that how you act now can reflect on your business for years to come.

    Impact and Result

    Use Info-Tech’s approach to:

    • Quickly assess the risk and identify critical items to manage.
    • Communicate what your decisions are based on so teams can either quickly align or challenge conclusions made from the data.
    • Quickly adjust your measures based on new information or changing circumstances.
    • Use the tools you already have and keep it simple.

    IT Metrics and Dashboards During a Pandemic Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out how to develop your temporary crisis dashboard.

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

    1. Consider your organizational goals

    Identify the short-term goals for your organization and reconsider your long-term objectives.

    • Crisis Temporary Measures Dashboard Tool

    2. Build a temporary data collection and dashboard method

    Determine your tool for data collection and your data requirements and collect initial data.

    3. Implement a cadence for review and action

    Determine the appropriate cadence for reviewing the dashboard and action planning.

    [infographic]

    Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively

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    • Parent Category Name: Development
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    • Your organization wants to implement (or revamp existing) software delivery metrics to monitor performance as well as achieve its goals.
    • You know that metrics can be a powerful tool for managing team behavior.
    • You also know that all metrics are prone to misuse and mismanagement, which can lead to unintended consequences that will harm your organization.
    • You need an approach for selecting and using effective software development lifecycle (SDLC) metrics that will help your organization to achieve its goals while minimizing the risk of unintended consequences.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Metrics are powerful, dangerous, and often mismanaged, particularly when they are tied to reward or punishment. To use SDLC metrics effectively, know the dangers, understand good practices, and then follow Info-Tech‘s TAG (team-oriented, adaptive, and goal-focused) approach to minimize risk and maximize impact.

    Impact and Result

    • Begin by understanding the risks of metrics.
    • Then understand good practices associated with metrics use.
    • Lastly, follow Info-Tech’s TAG approach to select and use SDLC metrics effectively.

    Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Understand both the dangers and good practices related to metrics, along with Info-Tech’s TAG approach to the selection and use of SDLC metrics.

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

    1. Understand the dangers of metrics

    Explore the significant risks associated with metrics selection so that you can avoid them.

    • Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively – Phase 1: Understand the Risks of Metrics

    2. Know good practices related to metrics

    Learn about good practices related to metrics and how to apply them in your organization, then identify your team’s business-aligned goals to be used in SDLC metric selection.

    • Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively – Phase 2: Know Good Practices Related to Metrics
    • SDLC Metrics Evaluation and Selection Tool

    3. Rank and select effective SDLC metrics for your team

    Follow Info-Tech’s TAG approach to selecting effective SDLC metrics for your team, create a communication deck to inform your organization about your selected SDLC metrics, and plan to review and revise these metrics over time.

    • Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively – Phase 3: Rank and Select Effective SDLC Metrics for Your Team
    • SDLC Metrics Rollout and Communication Deck
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively

    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 Dangers of Metrics

    The Purpose

    Learn that metrics are often misused and mismanaged.

    Understand the four risk areas associated with metrics: Productivity loss Gaming behavior Ambivalence Unintended consequences

    Productivity loss

    Gaming behavior

    Ambivalence

    Unintended consequences

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An appreciation of the dangers associated with metrics.

    An understanding of the need to select and manage SDLC metrics carefully to avoid the associated risks.

    Development of critical thinking skills related to metric selection and use.

    Activities

    1.1 Examine the dangers associated with metric use.

    1.2 Share real-life examples of poor metrics and their impact.

    1.3 Practice identifying and mitigating metrics-related risk.

    Outputs

    Establish understanding and appreciation of metrics-related risks.

    Solidify understanding of metrics-related risks and their impact on an organization.

    Develop the skills needed to critically analyze a potential metric and reduce associated risk.

    2 Understand Good Practices Related to Metrics

    The Purpose

    Develop an understanding of good practices related to metric selection and use.

    Introduce Info-Tech’s TAG approach to metric selection and use.

    Identify your team’s business-aligned goals for SDLC metrics.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding of good practices for metric selection and use.

    Document your team’s prioritized business-aligned goals.

    Activities

    2.1 Examine good practices and introduce Info-Tech’s TAG approach.

    2.2 Identify and prioritize your team’s business-aligned goals.

    Outputs

    Understanding of Info-Tech’s TAG approach.

    Prioritized team goals (aligned to the business) that will inform your SDLC metric selection.

    3 Rank and Select Your SDLC Metrics

    The Purpose

    Apply Info-Tech’s TAG approach to rank and select your team’s SDLC metrics.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identification of potential SDLC metrics for use by your team.

    Collaborative scoring/ranking of potential SDLC metrics based on their specific pros and cons.

    Finalize list of SDLC metrics that will support goals and minimize risk while maximizing impact.

    Activities

    3.1 Select your list of potential SDLC metrics.

    3.2 Score each potential metric’s pros and cons against objectives using a five-point scale.

    3.3 Collaboratively select your team’s first set of SDLC metrics.

    Outputs

    A list of potential SDLC metrics to be scored.

    A ranked list of potential SDLC metrics.

    Your team’s first set of goal-aligned SDLC metrics.

    4 Create a Communication and Rollout Plan

    The Purpose

    Develop a rollout plan for your SDLC metrics.

    Develop a communication plan.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    SDLC metrics.

    A plan to review and adjust your SDLC metrics periodically in the future.

    Communication material to be shared with the organization.

    Activities

    4.1 Identify rollout dates and responsible individuals for each SDLC metric.

    4.2 Identify your next SDLC metric review cycle.

    4.3 Create a communication deck.

    Outputs

    SDLC metrics rollout plan

    SDLC metrics review plan

    SDLC metrics communication deck

    Identify and Build the Data & Analytics Skills Your Organization Needs

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    The rapid technological evolution in platforms, processes, and applications is leading to gaps in the skills needed to manage and use data. Some common obstacles that could prevent you from identifying and building the data & analytics skills your organization needs include:

    • Lack of resources and knowledge to secure professionals with the right mix of D&A skills and right level of experience/skills
    • Lack of well-formulated and robust data strategy
    • Underestimation of the value of soft skills

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Skill deficiency is frequently stated as a roadblock to realizing corporate goals for data & analytics. Soft skills and technical skills are complementary, and data & analytics teams need a combination of both to perform effectively. Identify the essential skills and the gap with current skills that fit your organization’s data strategy to ensure the right skills are available at the right time and minimize pertinent risks.

    Impact and Result

    Follow Info-Tech's advice on the roles and skills needed to support your data & analytics strategic growth objectives and how to execute an actionable plan:

    • Define the skills required for each essential data & analytics role.
    • Identify the roles and skills gaps in alignment with your current data strategy.
    • Establish an action plan to close the gaps and reduce risks.

    Identify and Build the Data & Analytics Skills Your Organization Needs Research & Tools

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

    1. Identify and Build the Data & Analytics Skills Your Organization Needs Deck – Use this research to assist you in identifying and building roles and skills that are aligned with the organization’s data strategy.

    To generate business value from data, data leaders must first understand what skills are required to achieve these goals, identify the current skill gaps, and then develop skills development programs to enhance the relevant skills. Use Info-Tech's approach to identify and fill skill gaps to ensure you have the right skills at the right time.

    • Identify and Build the Data & Analytics Skills Your Organization Needs Storyboard

    2. Data & Analytics Skills Assessment and Planning Tool – Use this tool to help you identify the current and required level of competency for data & analytics skills, analyze gaps, and create an actionable plan.

    Start with skills and roles identified as the highest priority through a high-level maturity assessment. From there, use this tool to determine whether the organization’s data & analytics team has the key role, the right combination of skill sets, and the right level competency for each skill. Create an actionable plan to develop skills and fill gaps.

    • Data & Analytics Skills Assessment and Planning Tool
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Identify and Build the Data & Analytics Skills Your Organization Needs

    Blending soft skills with deep technical expertise is essential for building successful data & analytics teams.

    Analyst Perspective

    Blending soft skills with deep technical expertise is essential for building successful data & analytics teams.

    In today's changing environment, data & analytics (D&A) teams have become an essential component, and it is critical for organizations to understand the skill and talent makeup of their D&A workforce. Chief data & analytics officers (CDAOs) or other equivalent data leaders can train current data employees or hire proven talent and quickly address skills gaps.

    While developing technical skills is critical, soft skills are often left underdeveloped, yet lack of such skills is most likely why the data team would face difficulty moving beyond managing technology and into delivering business value.

    Follow Info-Tech's methodology to identify and address skills gaps in today's data workplace. Align D&A skills with your organization's data strategy to ensure that you always have the right skills at the right time.

    Ruyi Sun
    Research Specialist,
    Data & Analytics, and Enterprise Architecture
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    The rapid technological evolution in platforms, processes, and applications is leading to gaps in the skills needed to manage and use data. Some critical challenges organizations with skills deficiencies might face include:

    • Time loss due to delayed progress and reworking of initiatives
    • Poor implementation quality and low productivity
    • Reduced credibility of data leader and data initiatives

    Common Obstacles

    Some common obstacles that could prevent you from identifying and building the data and analytics (D&A) skills your organization needs are:

    • Lack of resources and knowledge to secure professionals with the right mixed D&A skills and the right experience/skill level
    • Lack of well-formulated and robust data strategy
    • Neglecting the value of soft skills and placing all your attention on technical skills

    Info-Tech's Approach

    Follow Info-Tech's guidance on the roles and skills required to support your D&A strategic growth objectives and how to execute an actionable plan:

    • Define skills required for each essential data and analytics role
    • Identify roles and skills gap in alignment with your current data strategy
    • Establish action plan to close the gaps and reduce risks

    Info-Tech Insight

    Skills gaps are a frequently named obstacle to realizing corporate goals for D&A. Soft skills and technical skills are complementary, and a D&A team needs both to perform effectively. Identify the essential skills and the gap with current skills required by your organization's data strategy to ensure the right skill is available at the right time and to minimize applicable risks.

    The rapidly changing environment is impacting the nature of work

    Scarcity of data & analytics (D&A) skills

    • Data is one of the most valuable organizational assets, and regardless of your industry, data remains the key to informed decision making. More than 75% of businesses are looking to adopt technologies like big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI) in the next five years (World Economic Forum, 2023). As organizations pivot in response to industry disruptions and technological advancements, the nature of work is changing, and the demand for data expertise has grown.
    • Despite an increasing need for data expertise, organizations still have trouble securing D&A roles due to inadequate upskilling programs, limited understanding of the skills required, and more (EY, 2022). Notably, scarce D&A skills have been critical. More workers will need at least a base level of D&A skills to adequately perform their jobs.

    Stock image of a data storage center.

    Organizations struggle to remain competitive when skills gaps aren't addressed

    Organizations identify skills gaps as the key barriers preventing industry transformation:

    60% of organizations identify skills gaps as the key barriers preventing business transformation (World Economic Forum, 2023)

    43% of respondents agree the business area with the greatest need to address potential skills gaps is data analytics (McKinsey & Company, 2020)

    Most organizations are not ready to address potential role disruptions and close skills gaps:

    87% of surveyed companies say they currently experience skills gaps or expect them within a few years (McKinsey & Company, 2020)

    28% say their organizations make effective decisions on how to close skills gaps (McKinsey & Company, 2020)

    Neglecting soft skills development impedes CDOs/CDAOs from delivering value

    According to BearingPoint's CDO survey, cultural challenges and limited data literacy are the main roadblocks to a CDO's success. To drill further into the problem and understand the root causes of the two main challenges, conduct a root cause analysis (RCA) using the Five Whys technique.

    Bar Chart of 'Major Roadblocks to the Success of a CDO' with 'Limited data literacy' at the top.
    (Source: BearingPoint, 2020)

    Five Whys RCA

    Problem: Poor data literacy is the top challenge CDOs face when increasing the value of D&A. Why?

    • People that lack data literacy find it difficult to embrace and trust the organization's data insights. Why?
    • Data workers and the business team don't speak the same language. Why?
    • No shared data definition or knowledge is established. Over-extensive data facts do not drive business outcomes. Why?
    • Leaders fail to understand that data literacy is more than technical training, it is about encompassing all aspects of business, IT, and data. Why?
    • A lack of leadership skills prevents leaders from recognizing these connections and the data team needing to develop soft skills.

    Problem: Cultural challenge is one of the biggest obstacles to a CDO's success. Why?

    • Decisions are made from gut instinct instead of data-driven insights, thus affecting business performance. Why?
    • People within the organization do not believe that data drives operational excellence, so they resist change. Why?
    • Companies overestimate the organization's level of data literacy and data maturity. Why?
    • A lack of strategies in change management, continuous improvement & data literacy for data initiatives. Why?
    • A lack of expertise/leaders possessing these relevant soft skills (e.g. change management, etc.).

    As organizations strive to become more data-driven, most conversations around D&A emphasize hard skills. Soft skills like leadership and change management are equally crucial, and deficits there could be the root cause of the data team's inability to demonstrate improved business performance.

    Data cannot be fully leveraged without a cohesive data strategy

    Business strategy and data strategy are no longer separate entities.

    • For any chief data & analytics officer (CDAO) or equivalent data leader, a robust and comprehensive data strategy is the number one tool for generating measurable business value from data. Data leaders should understand what skills are required to achieve these goals, consider the current skills gap, and build development programs to help employees improve those skills.
    • Begin your skills development programs by ensuring you have a data strategy plan prepared. A data strategy should never be formulated independently from the business. Organizations with high data maturity will align such efforts to the needs of the business, making data a major part of the business strategy to achieve data centricity.
    • Refer to Info-Tech's Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy blueprint to ensure data can be leveraged as a strategic asset of the organization.

    Diagram of 'Data Strategy Maturity' with two arrangements of 'Data Strategy' and 'Business Strategy'. One is 'Aligned', the other is 'Data Centric.'

    Info-Tech Insight

    The process of achieving data centricity requires alignment between the data and business teams, and that requires soft skills.

    Follow Info-Tech's methodology to identify the roles and skills needed to execute a data strategy

    1. Define Key Roles and Skills

      Digital Leadership Skills, Soft Skills, Technical Skills
      Key Output
      • Defined essential competencies, responsibilities for some common data roles

    2. Uncover the Skills Gap

      Data Strategy Alignment, High-Level Data Maturity Assessment, Skills Gap Analysis
      Key Output
      • Data roles and skills aligned with your current data strategy
      • Identified current and target state of data skill sets

    3. Build an Actionable Plan

      Initiative Priority, Skills Growth Feasibility, Hiring Feasibility
      Key Output
      • Identified action plan to address the risk of data skills deficiency

    Info-Tech Insight

    Skills gaps are a frequently named obstacle to realizing corporate goals for D&A. Soft skills and technical skills are complementary, and a D&A team needs both to perform effectively. Identify the essential skills and the gap with current skills that fit your organization's data strategy to ensure the right skill is available at the right time and to minimize applicable risks.

    Research benefits

    Member benefits

    • Reduce time spent defining the target state of skill sets.
    • Gain ability to reassess the feasibility of execution on your data strategy, including resources and timeline.
    • Increase confidence in the data leader's ability to implement a successful skills development program that is aligned with the organization's data strategy, which correlates directly to successful business outcomes.

    Business benefits

    • Reduce time and cost spent hiring key data roles.
    • Increase chance of retaining high-quality data professionals.
    • Reduce time loss for delayed progress and rework of initiatives.
    • Optimize quality of data initiative implementation.
    • Improve data team productivity.

    Insight summary

    Overarching insight

    Skills gaps are a frequently named obstacle to realizing corporate goals for D&A. Soft skills and technical skills are complementary, and a D&A team needs both to perform effectively. Identify the essential skills and the gap with current skills that fit your organization's data strategy to ensure the right skill is available at the right time and to minimize applicable risks.

    Phase 1 insight

    Technological advancements will inevitably require new technical skills, but the most in-demand skills go beyond mastering the newest technologies. Soft skills are essential to data roles as the global workforce navigates the changes of the last few years.

    Phase 2 insight

    Understanding and knowing your organization's data maturity level is a prerequisite to assessing your current skill and determining where you must align in the future.

    Phase 3 insight

    One of the misconceptions that organizations have includes viewing skills development as a one-time effort. This leads to underinvestment in data team skills, risk of falling behind on technological changes, and failure to connect with business partners. Employees must learn to continuously adapt to the changing circumstances of D&A.

    While the program must be agile and dynamic to reflect technological improvements in the development of technical skills, the program should always be anchored in soft skills because data management is fundamentally about interaction, collaboration, and people.

    Tactical insight

    Seeking input and support across your business units can align stakeholders to focus on the right data analytics skills and build a data learning culture.

    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 four to six calls over the course of two to three months.

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3
    Call #1: Understand common data & analytics roles and skills, and your specific objectives and challenges. Call #2: Assess the current data maturity level and competency of skills set. Identify the skills gap. Call #3: Identify the relationship between current initiatives and capabilities. Initialize the corresponding roadmap for the data skills development program.

    Call #4: (follow-up call) Touching base to follow through and ensure that benefits have received.

    Identify and Build the Data & Analytics Skills Your Organization Needs

    Phase 1

    Define Key Roles and Skills

    Define Key Roles and Skills Uncover the Skills Gap Build an Actionable Plan

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • 1.1 Review D&A Skill & Role List in Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Data leads

    Key resources for your data strategy: People

    Having the right role is a key component for executing effective data strategy.

    D&A Common Roles

    • Data Steward
    • Data Custodian
    • Data Owner
    • Data Architect
    • Data Modeler
    • Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) Specialist
    • Database Administrator
    • Data Quality Analyst
    • Security Architect
    • Information Architect
    • System Architect
    • MDM Administrator
    • Data Scientist
    • Data Engineer
    • Data Pipeline Developer
    • Data Integration Architect
    • Business Intelligence Architect
    • Business Intelligence Analyst
    • ML Validator

    AI and ML Specialist is projected to be the fastest-growing occupation in the next five years (World Economic Forum, 2023).

    While tech roles take an average of 62 days to fill, hiring a senior data scientist takes 70.5 days (Workable, 2019). Start your recruitment cycle early for this demand.

    D&A Leader Roles

    • Chief Data Officer (CDO)/Chief Data & Analytics Officer (CDAO)
    • Data Governance Lead
    • Data Management Lead
    • Information Security Lead
    • Data Quality Lead
    • Data Product Manager
    • Master Data Manager
    • Content and Record Manager
    • Data Literacy Manager

    CDOs act as impactful change agents ensuring that the organization's data management disciplines are running effectively and meeting the business' data needs. Only 12.0% of the surveyed organizations reported having a CDO as of 2012. By 2022, this percentage had increased to 73.7% (NewVantage Partners, 2022).

    Sixty-five percent of respondents said lack of data literacy is the top challenge CDOs face today (BearingPoint, 2020). It has become imperative for companies to consider building a data literacy program which will require a dedicated data literacy team.

    Key resources for your data strategy: Skill sets

    Distinguish between the three skills categories.

    • Soft Skills

      Soft skills are described as power skills regarding how you work, such as teamwork, communication, and critical thinking.

    • Digital Leadership Skills

      Not everyone working in the D&A field is expected to perform advanced analytical tasks. To thrive in increasingly data-rich environments, however, every data worker, including leaders, requires a basic technological understanding and skill sets such as AI, data literacy, and data ethics. These are digital leadership skills.

    • Technical Skills

      Technical skills are the practical skills required to complete a specific task. For example, data scientists and data engineers require programming skills to handle and manage vast amounts of data.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Technological advancements will inevitably require new technical skills, but the most in-demand skills go beyond mastering the newest technologies. Soft skills are essential to data roles as the global workforce navigates the changes of the last few years.

    Soft skills aren't just nice to have

    They're a top asset in today's data workplace.

    Leadership

    • Data leaders with strong leadership abilities can influence the organization's strategic execution and direction, support data initiatives, and foster data cultures. Organizations that build and develop leadership potential are 4.2 times more likely to financially outperform those that do not (Udemy, 2022).

    Business Acumen

    • The process of deriving conclusions and insights from data is ultimately utilized to improve business decisions and solve business problems. Possessing business acumen helps provide the business context and perspectives for work within data analytics fields.

    Critical Thinking

    • Critical thinking allows data leaders at every level to objectively assess a problem before making judgment, consider all perspectives and opinions, and be able to make decisions knowing the ultimate impact on results.

    Analytical Thinking

    • Analytical thinking remains the most important skill for workers in 2023 (World Economic Forum, 2023). Data analytics expertise relies heavily on analytical thinking, which is the process of breaking information into basic principles to analyze and understand the logic and concepts.

    Design Thinking & Empathy

    • Design thinking skills help D&A professionals understand and prioritize the end-user experience to better inform results and assist the decision-making process. Organizations with high proficiency in design thinking are twice as likely to be high performing (McLean & Company, 2022).

    Learning Focused

    • The business and data analytics fields continue to evolve rapidly, and the skills, especially technical skills, must keep pace. Learning-focused D&A professionals continuously learn, expanding their knowledge and enhancing their techniques.

    Change Management

    • Change management is essential, especially for data leaders who act as change agents developing and enabling processes and who assist others with adjusting to changes with cultural and procedural factors. Organizations with high change management proficiency are 2.2 times more likely to be high performing (McLean & Company, 2022).

    Resilience

    • Being motivated and adaptable is essential when facing challenges and high-pressure situations. Organizations highly proficient in resilience are 1.8 times more likely to be high performing (McLean & Company, 2022).

    Managing Risk & Governance Mindset

    • Risk management ability is not limited to highly regulated institutions. All data workers must understand risks from the larger organizational perspective and have a holistic governance mindset while achieving their individual goals and making decisions.

    Continuous Improvement

    • Continuously collecting feedback and reflecting on it is the foundation of continuous improvement. To uncover and track the lessons learned and treat them as opportunities, data workers must be able to discover patterns and connections.

    Teamwork & Collaboration

    • Value delivery in a data-centric environment is a team effort, requiring collaboration across the business, IT, and data teams. D&A experts with strong collaborative abilities can successfully work with other teams to achieve shared objectives.

    Communication & Active Listening

    • This includes communicating with relevant stakeholders about timelines and expectations of data projects and associated technology and challenges, paying attention to data consumers, understanding their requirements and needs, and other areas of interest to the organization.

    Technical skills for everyday excellence

    Digital Leadership Skills

    • Technological Literacy
    • Data and AI Literacy
    • Cloud Computing Literacy
    • Data Ethics
    • Data Translation

    Data & Analytics Technical Competencies

    • Data Mining
    • Programming Languages (Python, SQL, R, etc.)
    • Data Analysis and Statistics
    • Computational and Algorithmic Thinking
    • AI/ML Skills (Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, etc.)
    • Data Visualization and Storytelling
    • Data Profiling
    • Data Modeling & Design
    • Data Pipeline (ETL/ELT) Design & Management
    • Database Design & Management
    • Data Warehouse/Data Lake Design & Management

    1.1 Review D&A Skill & Role List in the Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool

    Sample of Tab 2 in the Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool.

    Tab 2. Skill & Role List

    Objective: Review the library of skills and roles and customize them as needed to align with your organization's language and specific needs.

    Download the Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool

    Identify and Build the Data & Analytics Skills Your Organization Needs

    Phase 2

    Uncover the Skills Gap

    Define Key Roles and Skills Uncover the Skills Gap Build an Actionable Plan

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • 2.1 High-level assessment of your present data management maturity
    • 2.2 Interview business and data leaders to clarify current skills availability
    • 2.3 Use the Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool to Identify your skills gaps

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Data leads
    • Business leads and subject matter experts (SMEs)
    • Key business stakeholders

    Identify skills gaps across the organization

    Gaps are not just about assigning people to a role, but whether people have the right skill sets to carry out tasks.

    • Now that you have identified the essential skills and roles in the data workplace, move to Phase 2. This phase will help you understand the required level of competency, assess where the organization stands today, and identify gaps to close.
    • Using the Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool, start with areas that are given the highest priority through a high-level maturity assessment. From there, three levels of gaps will be found: whether people are assigned to a particular position, the right combination of D&A skill sets, and the right competency level for each skill.

    • Lack of talent assigned to a position

    • Lack of the right combination of D&A skill sets

    • Lack of appropriate competency level

    Info-Tech Insight

    Understanding your organization's data maturity level is a prerequisite to assessing the skill sets you have today and determining where you need to align in the future.

    2.1 High-level assessment of your present data management maturity

    Identifying and fixing skills gaps takes time, money, and effort. Focus on bridging the gap in high-priority areas.

    Input: Current state capabilities, Use cases (if applicable), Data culture diagnostic survey results (if applicable)
    Output: High-level maturity assessment, Prioritized list of data management focused area
    Materials: Data Management Assessment and Planning Tool (optional), Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool
    Participants: Data leads, Business leads and subject matter experts (SMEs), Key business stakeholders

    Objectives:

    Prioritize these skills and roles based on your current maturity levels and what you intend to accomplish with your data strategy.

    Steps:

    1. (Optional Step) Refer to the Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy blueprint. You can assess your data maturity level using the following frameworks and methods:
      • Review current data strategy and craft use cases that represent high-value areas that must be addressed for their teams or functions.
      • Use the data culture assessment survey to determine your organization's data maturity level.
    2. (Optional Step) Refer to the Create a Data Management Roadmap blueprint and Data Management Assessment and Planning Tool to dive deep into understanding and assessing capabilities and maturity levels of your organization's data management enablers and understanding your priority areas and specific gaps.
    3. If you have completed Data Management Assessment and Planning Tool, fill out your maturity level scores for each of the data management practices within it - Tab 3 (Current-State Assessment). Skip Tab 4 (High-Level Maturity Assessment).
    4. If you have not yet completed Data Management Assessment and Planning Tool, skip Tab 3 and continue with Tab 4. Assign values 1 to 3 for each capability and enabler.
    5. You can examine your current-state data maturity from a high level in terms of low/mid/high maturity using either Tabs 3 or 4.
    6. Suggested focus areas along the data journey:
      • Low Maturity = Data Strategy, Data Governance, Data Architecture
      • Mid Maturity = Data Literacy, Information Management, BI and Reporting, Data Operations Management, Data Quality Management, Data Security/Risk Management
      • High Maturity = MDM, Data Integration, Data Product and Services, Advanced Analytics (ML & AI Management).

    Download the Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool

    2.2 Interview business and data leaders to clarify current skills availability

    1-2 hours per interview

    Input: Sample questions targeting the activities, challenges, and opportunities of each unit
    Output: Identified skills availability
    Materials: Whiteboard/Flip charts, Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool
    Participants: Data leads, Business leads and subject matter experts (SMEs), Key business stakeholders

    Instruction:

    1. Conduct a deep-dive interview with each key data initiative stakeholder (data owners, SMEs, and relevant IT/Business department leads) who can provide insights on the skill sets of their team members, soliciting feedback from business and data leaders about skills and observations of employees as they perform their daily tasks.
    2. Populate a current level of competency for each skill in the Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool in Tabs 5 and 6. Having determined your data maturity level, start with the prioritized data management components (e.g. if your organization sits at low data maturity level, start with identifying relevant positions and skills under data governance, data architecture, and data architecture elements).
    3. More detailed instructions on how to utilize the workbook are at the next activity.

    Key interview questions that will help you :

    1. Do you have personnel assigned to the role? What are their primary activities? Do the personnel possess the soft and technical skills noted in the workbook? Are you satisfied with their performance? How would you evaluate their degree of competency on a scale of "vital, important, nice to have, or none"? The following aspects should be considered when making the evaluation:
      • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Business unit data will show where the organization is challenged and will help identify potential areas for development.
      • Project Management Office: Look at successful and failed projects for trends in team traits and competencies.
      • Performance Reviews: Look for common themes where employees excel or need to improve.
      • Focus Groups: Speak with a cross section of employees to understand their challenges.
    2. What technology is currently used? Are there requirements for new technology to be bought and/or optimized in the future? Will the workforce need to increase their skill level to carry out these activities with the new technology in place?

    Download the Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool

    2.3 Use the Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool to identify skills gaps

    1-3 hours — Not everyone needs the same skill levels.

    Input: Current skills competency, Stakeholder interview results and findings
    Output: Gap identification and analysis
    Materials: Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool
    Participants: Data leads

    Instruction:

    1. Select your organization's data maturity level in terms of Low/Mid/High in cell A6 for both Tab 5 (Soft Skills Assessment) and Tab 6 (Technical Skills Assessment) to reduce irrelevant rows.
    2. Bring together key business stakeholders (data owners, SMEs, and relevant IT custodians) to determine whether the data role exists in the organization. If yes, assign a current-state value from “vital, important, nice to have, or none” for each skill in the assessment tool. Info-Tech has specified the desired/required target state of each skill set.
    3. Once you've assigned the current-state values, the tool will automatically determine whether there is a gap in skill set.

    Download the Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool

    Identify and Build the Data & Analytics Skills Your Organization Needs

    Phase 3

    Build an Actionable Plan

    Define Key Roles and Skills Uncover the Skills Gap Build an Actionable Plan

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • 3.1 Use the Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool to build your actionable roadmap

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Data leads
    • Business leads and subject matter experts (SMEs)
    • Key business stakeholders

    Determine next steps and decision points

    There are three types of internal skills development strategies

    • There are three types of internal skills development strategies organizations can use to ensure the right people with the right abilities are placed in the right roles: reskill, upskill, and new hire.

    1. Reskill

      Reskilling involves learning new skills for a different or newly defined position.

    2. Upskill

      Upskilling involves building a higher level of competency in skills to improve the worker's performance in their current role.

    3. New hire

      New hire involves hiring workers who have the essential skills to fill the open position.

    Info-Tech Insight

    One of the misconceptions that organizations have includes viewing skills development as a one-time effort. This leads to underinvestment in data team skills, risk of falling behind on technological changes, and failure to connect with business partners. Employees must learn to continuously adapt to the changing circumstances of D&A. While the program must be agile and dynamic to reflect technological improvements in the development of technical skills, the program should always be anchored in soft skills because data management is fundamentally about interaction, collaboration, and people.

    How to determine when to upskill, reskill, or hire to meet your skills needs

    Reskill

    Reskilling often indicates a change in someone's career path, so this decision requires a goal aligned with both individuals and the organization to establish a mutually beneficial situation.

    When making reskilling decisions, organizations should also consider the relevance of the skill for different positions. For example, data administrators and data architects have similar skill sets, so reskilling is appropriate for these employees.

    Upskill

    Upskilling tends to focus more on the soft skills necessary for more advanced positions. A data strategy lead, for example, might require design thinking training, which enables leaders to think from different perspectives.

    Skill growth feasibility must also be considered. Some technical skills, particularly those involving cutting-edge technologies, require continual learning to maintain operational excellence. For example, a data scientist may require AI/ML skills training to incorporate use of modern automation technology.

    New Hire

    For open positions and skills that are too resource-intensive to reskill or upskill, it makes sense to recruit new employees. Consider, however, time and cost feasibility of hiring. Some positions (e.g. senior data scientist) take longer to fill. To minimize risks, coordinate with your HR department and begin recruiting early.

    Data & Analytics skills training

    There are various learning methods that help employees develop priority competencies to achieve reskilling or upskilling.

    Specific training

    The data team can collaborate with the human resources department to plan and develop internal training sessions aimed at specific skill sets.

    This can also be accomplished through external training providers such as DCAM, which provides training courses on data management and analytics topics.

    Formal education program

    Colleges and universities can equip students with data analytics skills through formal education programs such as MBAs and undergraduate or graduate degrees in Data Science, Machine Learning, and other fields.

    Certification

    Investing time and effort to obtain certifications in the data & analytics field allows data workers to develop skills and gain recognition for continuous learning and self-improvement.

    AWS Data Analytics and Tableau Data Scientist Certification are two popular data analytics certifications.

    Online learning from general providers

    Some companies offer online courses in various subjects. Coursera and DataCamp are two examples of popular providers.

    Partner with a vendor

    The organization can partner with a vendor who brings skills and talents that are not yet available within the organization. Employees can benefit from the collaboration process by familiarizing themselves with the project and enhancing their own skills.

    Support from within your business

    The data team can engage with other departments that have previously done skills development programs, such as Finance and Change & Communications, who may have relevant resources to help you improve your business acumen and change management skills.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Seeking input and support across your business units can align stakeholders to focus on the right data analytics skills and build a data learning culture.

    Data & Analytics skills reinforcement

    Don't assume learners will immediately comprehend new knowledge. Use different methods and approaches to reinforce their development.

    Innovation Space

    • Skills development is not a one-time event, but a continuous process during which innovation should be encouraged. A key aspect of being innovative is having a “fail fast” mentality, which means collecting feedback, recognizing when something isn't working, encouraging experimentation, and taking a different approach with the goal of achieving operational excellence.
    • Human-centered design (HCD) also yields innovative outcomes with a people-first focus. When creating skills development programs for various target groups, organizations should integrate a human-centered approach.

    Commercial Lens

    • Exposing people to a commercial way of thinking can add long-term value by educating people to act in the business' best interest and raising awareness of what other business functions contribute. This includes concepts such as project management, return on investment (ROI), budget alignment, etc.

    Checklists/Rubrics

    • Employees should record what they learn so they can take the time to reflect. A checklist is an effective technique for establishing objectives, allowing measurement of skills development and progress.

    Buddy Program

    • A buddy program helps employees gain and reinforce knowledge and skills they have learned through mutual support and information exchange.

    Align HR programs to support skills integration and talent recruitment

    With a clear idea of skills needs and an executable strategy for training and reinforcing of concepts, HR programs and processes can help the data team foster a learning environment and establish a recruitment plan. The links below will direct you to blueprints produced by McLean & Company, a division of Info-Tech Research Group.

    Workforce Planning

    When integrating the skills of the future into workforce planning, determine the best approach for addressing the identified talent gaps – whether to build, buy, or borrow.

    Integrate the future skills identified into the organization's workforce plan.

    Talent Acquisition

    In cases where employee development is not feasible, the organization's talent acquisition strategy must focus more on buying or borrowing talent. This will impact the TA process. For example, sourcing and screening must be updated to reflect new approaches and skills.

    If you have a talent acquisition strategy, assess how to integrate the new roles/skills into recruiting.

    Competencies/Succession Planning

    Review current organizational core competencies to determine if they need to be modified. New skills will help inform critical roles and competencies required in succession talent pools.

    If no competency framework exists, use McLean & Company's Develop a Comprehensive Competency Framework blueprint.

    Compensation

    Evaluate modified and new roles against the organization's compensation structure. Adjust them as necessary. Look at market data to understand compensation for new roles and skills.

    Reassess your base pay structure according to market data for new roles and skills.

    Learning and Development

    L&D plays a huge role in closing the skills gap. Build L&D opportunities to support development of new skills in employees.

    Design an Impactful Employee Development Program to build the skills employees need in the future.

    3.1 Use the Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool to build an actionable plan

    1-3 hours

    Input: Roles and skills required, Key decision points
    Output: Actionable plan
    Materials: Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool
    Participants: Data leads, Business leads and subject matter experts (SMEs), Key business stakeholders

    Instruction:

    1. On Tab 7 (Next Steps & Decision Points), you will find a list of tasks that correspond to roles that where there is a skills gap.
    2. Customize this list of tasks initiatives according to your needs.
    3. The Gantt chart, which will be generated automatically after assigning start and finish dates for each activity, can be used to structure your plan and guarantee that all the main components of skills development are addressed.

    Sample of Tab 7 in the Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool.

    Download the Data & Analytics Assessment and Planning Tool

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Sample of the Create a Data Management Roadmap blueprint.

    Create a Data Management Roadmap

    • This blueprint will help you design a data management practice that will allow your organization to use data as a strategic enabler.

    Stock image of a person looking at data dashboards on a tablet.

    Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy

    • Put a strategy in place to ensure data is available, accessible, well-integrated, secured, of acceptable quality, and suitably visualized to fuel organization-wide decision making. Start treating data as strategic and corporate asset.

    Sample of the Foster Data-Driven Culture With Data Literacy blueprint.

    Foster Data-Driven Culture With Data Literacy

    • By thoughtfully designing a data literacy training program appropriate to the audience's experience, maturity level, and learning style, organizations build a data-driven and engaged culture that helps them unlock their data's full potential and outperform other organizations.

    Research Authors and Contributors

    Authors:

    Name Position Company
    Ruyi Sun Research Specialist Info-Tech Research Group

    Contributors:

    Name Position Company
    Steve Wills Practice Lead Info-Tech Research Group
    Andrea Malick Advisory Director Info-Tech Research Group
    Annabel Lui Principal Advisory Director Info-Tech Research Group
    Sherwick Min Technical Counselor Info-Tech Research Group

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    Bika, Nikoletta. “Key hiring metrics: Useful benchmarks for tech roles.” Workable, 2019. Accessed 20 June 2023.

    Chroust, Tomas. “Chief Data Officer – Leaders of data-driven enterprises.” BearingPoint, 2020. Accessed 20 June 2023.

    “Data and AI Leadership Executive Survey 2022.” NewVantage Partners, Jan 2022. Accessed 20 June 2023.

    Dondi, Marco, et al. “Defining the skills citizens will need in the future world of work.” McKinsey & Company, June 2021. Accessed 20 June 2023.

    Futschek, Gerald. “Algorithmic Thinking: The Key for Understanding Computer Science.” Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4226, 2006.

    Howard, William, et al. “2022 HR Trends Report.” McLean & Company, 2022. Accessed 20 June 2023.

    “Future of Jobs Report 2023.” World Economic Forum, May 2023. Accessed 20 June 2023.

    Knight, Michelle. “What is Data Ethics?” Dataversity, 19 May 2021. Accessed 20 June 2023.

    Little, Jim, et al. “The CIO Imperative: Is your technology moving fast enough to realize your ambitions?” EY, 22 Apr. 2022. Accessed 20 June 2023.

    “MDM Roles and Responsibilities.” Profisee, April 2019. Accessed 20 June 2023.

    “Reskilling and Upskilling: A Strategic Response to Changing Skill Demands.” TalentGuard, Oct. 2019. Accessed 20 June 2023.

    Southekal, Prashanth. “The Five C's: Soft Skills That Every Data Analytics Professional Should Have.” Forbes, 17 Oct. 2022. Accessed 20 June 2023.

    Data Protection Notice

    Tymans Group BV processes personal information in compliance with this privacy statement. For further information, questions or comments on our privacy policy, please contact Gert Taeymans at https://tymansgroup.com/gdpr-contact.

    Purposes of the processing

    Tymans Group BV collects and processes customers’ personal data for customer and order management (customer administration, order / delivery follow-up, invoicing, solvency follow-up, profiling and the sending of marketing and personalised advertising).

    Legal foundation for the processing

    Personal data is processed based on several provisions of Article 6.1.

    (a)  consent, which you can revoke at any time,

    (b) required for the implementation of an agreement between you and Tymans Group BV, eg. when you enter into a contract with us,

    (c)  required to satisfy a legal obligation

    (f)  (required for the protection of our legitimate interest in entrepreneurship)] of the General Data Protection Regulation. An actual data item may be subject to multiple provisions.

    Insofar as the processing of personal data takes place based on Article 6.1. a) (consent), customers always have the right to withdraw the given consent.

    Transfer to third parties

    If required to achieve the set purposes, your personal data will be shared with other companies within the European Economic Area, which are linked directly or indirectly with Gert Taeymans BV or with any other partner of Tymans Group BV

    Tymans Group BV guarantees that these recipients will take the necessary technical and organisational measures for the protection of personal data.

    Third party categories that are subject to this provision are:

        Accounting
        Hosting
        Software Engineering (when you order websites or custom development with us)
        Social Media (only as part of Social Media Marketing contracted services by you)

    Due to the ECJ striking down the  EU-US Privacy Shield agreement, this leaves us with a open gap. The resulting implications and actions to take are not yet clear. You must be aware that one can argue that any data transfer from the EU towards the US is now in breach of the law. Other argue that necessary transfers are still allowed, whithout however defining, as far as we know, what "necessary" actually means. This website runs on servers within the EU. We also closely follow the opinions by the scholars and our regulator.

    Retention period

    Personal data processed for customer management will be stored for the time necessary to satisfy legal requirements (in terms of bookkeeping, among others).

    Right to inspection, improvement, deletion, limitation, objection and transferability of personal data

    You have at all times the right to inspect your personal data and can have it improved should it be incorrect or incomplete, have it removed, limit its processing an object to the processing of their personal data based on Article 6.1 (f), including profiling based on said provisions. Any personal data however that is needed for the legal processing of your order cannot be removed after you placed an order, as we need to keep it for legal purposes.

    Furthermore, you are entitled to obtain a copy of your personal data and to have said personal data forwarded to another company.

    In order to exercise the aforementioned rights, you are requested to send an e-mail the following address: dataprivacy@tymansgroup.com.

    Direct marketing

    You are entitled to object free of charge to the processing of any processing of their personal data aimed at direct marketing.

    Complaint

    You have the right to file a complaint with the Belgian Privacy Protection Commission (35 Rue de la Presse, 1000 Brussels - contact@adp-gba.be - 02/ 274 48 00 or 02/ 274 48 35).

    Get the Most Out of Workday

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}239|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact: 10.0/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: 20 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: Optimization
    • Parent Category Link: /optimization
    • Your Workday systems are critical to supporting the organization’s business processes.They are expensive. Direct benefits and ROI can be hard to measure.
    • Workday application portfolios are often behemoths to support. With complex integration points and unique business processes, stabilization is the norm.
    • Application optimization is essential to staying competitive and productive in today’s digital environment.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Continuous assessment and optimization of your Workday enterprise resource planning (ERP) is critical to the success of your organization.

    Impact and Result

    • Build an ongoing optimization team to conduct application improvements.
    • Assess your Workday application(s) and the environment in which they exist. Take a business first strategy to prioritize optimization efforts.
    • Validate Workday capabilities, user satisfaction, processes, issues around data, integrations, and vendor management to build out an optimization strategy
    • Pull this all together to develop a prioritized optimization roadmap.

    Get the Most Out of Workday Research & Tools

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

    1. Get the Most Out of Workday – A guide to help the business leverages to accomplish its goals.

    Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a core tool that the business leverages to accomplish its goals. Take a proactive approach to optimize your enterprise applications. Strategically re-align business goals, identify business application capabilities, complete a process assessment, evaluate user satisfaction, measure module satisfaction, and vendor relations to create an optimization plan that will drive a cohesive technology strategy that delivers results.

    • Get the Most Out of Workday – Phases 1-4

    2. Get the Most Out of Workday Workbook – A tool to document and assist with this project.

    The Get the Most out of Workday Workbook serves as the holding document for the different elements of the Get the Most out Workday blueprint. Use each assigned tab to input the relevant information for the process of optimizing Workday.

    • Get the Most Out of Workday Workbook

    3. Workday Application Inventory Tool – A tool to define applications and capabilities around ERP.

    Use this tool provide Info-Tech with information surrounding your ERP application(s). This inventory will be used to create a custom Application Portfolio Assessment (APA) for your ERP. The template includes demographics, application inventory, departments to be surveyed and data quality inclusion.

    • Workday Application Inventory Tool

    Infographic

    Workshop: Get the Most Out of Workday

    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 Workday Application Vision

    The Purpose

    Define your workday application vision.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Set the foundation for optimizing Workday by building a cross-functional team, aligning with organizational strategy, inventorying current system state, defining your timeframe, and exploring current costs.

    Activities

    1.1 Identify stakeholders and build your optimization team.

    1.2 Build an ERP strategy model.

    1.3 Inventory current system state.

    1.4 Define optimization timeframe.

    1.5 Understand Workday costs.

    Outputs

    Workday optimization team

    Workday business model

    Workday optimization goals

    System inventory and data flow

    Application and business capabilities list

    Workday optimization timeline

    2 Map Current-State Capabilities

    The Purpose

    Map current-state capabilities.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Measure the state of your current Workday system to understand where it is not performing well.

    Activities

    2.1 Assess Workday capabilities.

    2.2 Review your satisfaction with the vendor/product and willingness for change.

    Outputs

    Workday capability gap analysis

    Workday user satisfaction (application portfolio assessment)

    Workday SoftwareReviews survey results

    Workday current costs

    3 Assess Workday

    The Purpose

    Assess Workday.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Explore underperforming areas to:

    Uncover where user satisfaction is lacking and possible root causes.

    Identify process and workflows that are creating issues for end users and identify improvement options.

    Understand where data issues are occurring and explore how you can improve these.

    Identify integration points and explore if there are any areas of improvement.

    Investigate your relationship with the vendor and product, including that relative to others.

    Identify any areas for cost optimization (optional).

    Activities

    3.1 Prioritize optimization opportunities.

    3.2 Discover optimization initiatives.

    Outputs

    Product and vendor satisfaction opportunities

    Capability and feature optimization opportunities

    Process optimization opportunities

    Integration optimization opportunities

    Data optimization opportunities

    Workday cost-saving opportunities

    4 Build the Optimization Roadmap

    The Purpose

    Build the optimization roadmap.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding where you need to improve is the first step, now understand where to focus your optimization efforts, build out next steps and put a timeframe in place.

    Activities

    4.1 Build your optimization roadmap.

    Outputs

    Workday optimization roadmap

    Further reading

    Get the Most Out of Workday

    In today’s connected world, the continuous optimization of enterprise applications to realize your digital strategy is key.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Focus optimization on organizational value delivery.

    HR, finance, and planning systems are the core foundation of enterprise resource systems (ERP) systems. These are core tools that the business leverages to accomplish its goals. An ERP that is doing its job well is invisible to the business. The challenges come when the tool is no longer invisible. It has become a source of friction in the functioning of the business.

    Workday is expensive, benefits can be difficult to quantify, and optimization can be difficult to navigate. Over time, technology evolves, organizational goals change, and the health of these systems is often not monitored. This is complicated in today’s digital landscape with multiple integration points, siloed data, and competing priorities.

    Too often organizations jump into selecting replacement systems without understanding the health of their systems. We can do better than this.

    IT leaders need to take a proactive approach to continually monitor and optimize their enterprise applications. Strategically realign business goals, identify business application capabilities, complete a process assessment, evaluate user satisfaction, measure module satisfaction, and improve vendor relations to create an optimization plan that will drive a cohesive technology strategy that delivers results.

    Lisa Highfield

    Research Director, Enterprise Applications

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Your Workday systems are critical to supporting the organization’s business processes. They are expensive. Direct benefits and ROI can be hard to measure.

    Workday application portfolios are often behemoths to support. With complex integration points and unique business processes, stabilization is the norm.

    Application optimization is essential to staying competitive and productive in today’s digital environment.

    Common Obstacles

    Balancing optimization with stabilization is one of the most difficult decisions for Workday application leaders.

    Competing priorities and often unclear enterprise application strategies make it difficult to make decisions about what, how, and when to optimize.

    Enterprise applications involve large numbers of processes, users, and evolving vendor roadmaps.

    Teams do not have a framework to illustrate, communicate, and justify the optimization effort in the language your stakeholders understand.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    In today’s changing world, it is imperative to evaluate your applications for optimization and to look for opportunities to capitalize on rapidly expanding technologies, integrated data, and employee solutions that meet the needs of your organization.

    Assess your Workday applications and the environment in which they exist. Take a business-first strategy to prioritize optimization efforts.

    Validate capabilities, user satisfaction, and issues around data, vendor management, and costs to build out an overall roadmap and optimization strategy.

    Pull this all together to prioritize optimization efforts and develop a concrete roadmap.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Workday is investing heavily in expanding and deepening its finance and expanded product offerings, but we cannot stand still on our optimization efforts. Understand your product(s), processes, user satisfaction, integration points, and the availability of data to business decision makers. Examine these areas to develop a personalized Workday optimization roadmap that fits the needs of your organization. Incorporate these methodologies into an ongoing optimization strategy aimed at enabling the business, increasing productivity, and reducing costs.

    The image shows a graphic titled Get the Most Out of Your ERP. The centre of the graphic shows circular gears labelled with text such as Processes; User Satisfaction; Integrations; Data; and Vendor Relations. There is also text surrounding the central gears in concentric circles, and on either side, there are sets of arrows titled Service-centric capabilities and Product-centric capabilities.

    Insight summary

    Continuous assessment and optimization of your Workday ERP is critical to the success of your organization.

    • Applications and the environments in which they live are constantly evolving.
    • This blueprint provides business and application managers with a method to complete a health assessment of their Workday systems to identify areas for improvement and optimization.
    • Put optimization practices into effect by:
      • Aligning and prioritizing key business and technology drivers.
      • Identifying ERP process classification and performing a gap analysis.
      • Measuring user satisfaction across key departments.
      • Evaluating vendor relations.
      • Understanding how data plays into the mix.
      • Pulling it all together into an optimization roadmap.

    Workday enterprise resource planning (ERP) facilitates the flow of information across business units. It allows for the seamless integration of data across financial and people systems to create a holistic view of the enterprise to support decision making.

    In many organizations, Workday is considered the core people systems and is becoming more widely adopted for finance and a full ERP system.

    ERP systems are considered the lifeblood of organizations. Problems with this key operational system will have a dramatic impact on the ability of the enterprise to survive and grow.

    ERP implementation should not be a one-and-done exercise. There needs to be ongoing optimization to enable business processes and optimal organizational results.

    Workday enterprise resource planning (ERP)

    Workday

    • Finance
    • Human Resources Management
    • Talent and Performance
    • Payroll and Workforce Management
    • Employee Experience
    • Student Information Systems
    • Professional Services Automation
    • Analytics and Reporting
    • Spend Management
    • Enterprise Planning

    What is Workday?

    Workday has many modules that work together to facilitate the flow of information across the business. Workday’s unique data platform allows for seamless integration of systems and creates a holistic view of the enterprise to support decision making.

    In many organizations, the ERP system is considered the lifeblood of the enterprise. Problems with this key operational system will have a dramatic impact on the ability of the enterprise to survive and grow.

    Workday operates in many industry verticals and performs well in service organizations.

    An ERP system:

    • Automates processes, reducing the amount of manual, routine work.
    • Integrates with core modules, eliminating the fragmentation of systems.
    • Centralizes information for reporting from multiple parts of the value chain to a single point.

    Workday Fast Facts

    Product Description

    • Workday offers HR, Finance, planning systems, and extended offerings. Workday prides itself on rapidly expanding its product portfolio to meet the needs of organizations in a changing world.
    • The integrated cloud data model Workday has been built on allows for seamless end-to-end organizational data.
    • Offerings include Financial Management, Human Capital Management, Workday Adaptive Planning, Spend Management, Talent Management, Payroll & Workforce Management, Analytics & Reporting, Student, Professional Services Automation, Platform & Product Extensions, Workday Peakon Employee Voice, and most recently VNDLY (contract and vendor management).

    Evolution of Workday

    Workday HCM 2006

    Workday Financial Management 2007

    Workday 10 (Finance & HCM) 2010

    Workday Student (Higher Education) 2011

    Workday Cloud (PAAS) 2017

    Acquisition of Adaptive Insights 2018

    Acquisition of VNDLY 2021

    Vendor Description

    • Workday was founded in 2005 by Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield (former PeopleSoft founder.)
    • The platform-as-a-service (PaaS) bundles and modules are sold in a subscription model to customers.
    • Workday has untaken several acquisitions in recent years to grow the product and invests in early-stage companies through Workday Ventures.
    • Workday is publicly traded (2012); Nasdaq: WDAY.

    Employees: 12,500

    Headquarters: Pleasanton, CA

    Website: workday.com

    Founded: 2005

    Presence: Global, Publicly Traded

    Workday by the numbers

    77%

    77% of clients were satisfied with the product’s business value created. 78% of clients were satisfied that the cost is fair relative to value, and 95% plan to renew. (SoftwareReviews, 2022)

    50% of Fortune 500

    Workday has seen steady growth working with over 50% of Fortune 500 companies. 4,100 of those are HCM and finance customers. It has seen great success in service industries and has a 95% gross retention rate. (Diginomica)

    40%

    Workday reported a 40% year-over-year increase in Workday Financial Management deployments for both new and existing customers, as accelerated demand for Workday cloud-based continues. (Workday, June 2021)

    Workday Finance

    A great opportunity for Workday

    Workday continues to invest in Workday Finance

    • 35% of the Fortune 500 and 50% of the Fortune 50 use Workday HCM products (Seeking Alpha, 2019).
    • The customer base for Workday Financial Management has increased from 45 in 2014 to 530 in 2019 with 9 Fortune 500 companies in the mix. This infers that Financial Management is a product that will drive future growth for Workday.

    Recent Finance-Related Acquisitions

    • Zimit - Quotation Management
    • Stories.bi - Augmented Analytics
    • Adaptive Insights - Business Planning
    • SkipFlag - Machine Learning (AI)
    • Platfora - Analytics
    • VNDLY - Contractor and Vendor Management

    Workday challenges and dissatisfaction

    Workday challenges and dissatisfaction

    Organizational

    • Competing Priorities
    • Lack of Strategy
    • Budget Challenges

    People and teams

    • Knowledgeable Staff/Turnover
    • Lack of Internal Skills
    • Ability to Manage New Products
    • Lack of Training

    Technology

    • Integration Issues
    • Selecting Tools & Technology
    • Keeping Pace With Technology Changes
    • Update Challenges

    Data

    • Access to Data
    • Data Literacy
    • Data Hygiene
    • One View of the Customer

    Finance, IT, Sales, and other users of the ERP system can only optimize ERP with the full support of each other. The cooperation of the departments is crucial when trying to improve ERP technology capabilities and customer interaction.

    Info-Tech Insight

    While technology is the key enabler of building strong customer experiences, there are many other drivers of dissatisfaction. IT must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the business to develop a technology framework for ERP.

    Where are applications leaders focusing?

    Big growth numbers

    Year-over-year call topic requests

    Enterprise Application Optimization - 124%

    Product - 65%

    Enterprise Application Selection - 76%

    Agile - 79%

    (Info-Tech case data, 2022; N=3,293)

    We are seeing Applications leaders’ priorities change year over year, driven by a shift in their approach to problem solving. Leaders are moving from a process-centric approach to a collaborative approach that breaks down boundaries and brings teams together.

    Other changes

    Year-over-year call topic requests

    Application Portfolio Management - 13%

    Business Process Management - 4%

    Software Development Lifecycle -25%

    (Info-Tech case data, 2022; N=3,293)

    Software development lifecycle topics are tactical point solutions. Organizations have been “shifting left” to tackle the strategic issues such as product vision and Agile mindset to optimize the whole organization.

    Application optimization is risky without a plan

    Avoid these common pitfalls:

    • Not considering how this pays into the short-, medium-, and long-term ERP strategy.
    • Not considering application optimization as a business and IT partnership, which requires the continuous formal engagement of all participants.
    • Not having a good understanding of your current state, including integration points and data.
    • Not adequately accommodating feedback and changes after digital applications are deployed and employed.
    • Not treating digital applications as a motivator for potential future IT optimization efforts and incorporating digital assets in strategic business planning.
    • Not involving department leads, management, and other subject-matter experts to facilitate the organizational change digital applications bring.

    “A successful application optimization strategy starts with the business need in mind and not from a technological point of view. No matter from which angle you look at it, modernizing a legacy application is a considerable undertaking that can’t be taken lightly. Your best approach is to begin the journey with baby steps.” – Norelus, Pamidala, and Senti, 2020

    Info-Tech’s methodology for getting the most out of your ERP

    1. Map Current-State Capabilities 2. Assess Your Current State 3. Identify Key Optimization Areas 4. Build Your Optimization Roadmap
    Phase Steps
    1. Identify Stakeholders and Build Your Workday Optimization Team
    2. Build an ERP Strategy Model
    3. Inventory Current System State
    4. Define Business Capabilities
    • Conduct a Gap Analysis for ERP Processes
    • Assess User Satisfaction
    • Review Your Satisfaction With the Vendor and Product
    1. Identify Key Optimization Areas
    2. Evaluate Product Sustainability Over the Short, Medium, and Long Term
    3. Identify Any Product Changes Anticipated Over Short, Medium, and Long Term
    1. Prioritize Optimization Opportunities
    2. Identify Key Optimization Areas
    3. Compile Optimization Assessment Results
    Phase Outcomes
    1. Stakeholder map
    2. Workday optimization team
    3. Workday business model
    4. Strategy alignment
    5. Systems inventory and diagram
    6. Business capabilities map
    7. Key Workday processes list
    1. Gap analysis for Workday-related processes
    2. Understanding of user satisfaction across applications and processes
    3. Insight into Workday data quality
    4. Quantified satisfaction with the vendor and product
    5. Understanding Workday costs
    1. List of Workday optimization opportunities
    1. Workday optimization roadmap

    Blueprint deliverables

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

    Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Identify and prioritize your Workday optimization goals.

    Application Portfolio Assessment

    Assess IT-enabled user satisfaction across your Workday portfolio.

    Key deliverable:

    Workday Optimization Roadmap

    Complete an assessment of processes, user satisfaction, data quality, and vendor management.

    Case Study

    MANAGED AP AUTOMATION with OneSource Virtual

    TripAdvisor + OneSource

    INDUSTRY: Travel

    SOURCE: OneSource Virtual, 2017

    Challenge

    TripAdvisor needed a solution that would decrease administrative labor from its accounting department.

    “We needed something that was already compatible with our Workday tenant, that didn’t require a lot of customizations and would be an enhancement to our processes.” – Director of Accounting Operations, Scott Garner

    Requirements included:

    • Easy implementation
    • Existing system compatibility
    • Enhancement to the company’s process
    • Competitive pricing
    • Secure

    Solution

    TripAdvisor chose to outsource its accounts payable services to OneSource Virtual (OSV).

    OneSource Virtual offers the comprehensive finance and accounting outsourcing solutions needed to improve efficiency, eliminate paper processes, reduce errors, and improve cash flow.

    Managed AP services include scanning and auditing all extracted invoice data for accuracy, transmitting AP files with line-item details from invoices, and creating full invoice images in Workday.

    Results

    • Accurate and timely invoice processing for over 3,000 invoices per month.
    • Empowered employees to focus on higher-level tasks rather than day-to-day data entry.
    • 50+ hours saved per week on routine data entry.
    • Employees had 30% of their time freed up to focus on high-value tasks.
    • Allowed TripAdvisor to become more scalable across departments and as an organization.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to 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?

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is 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: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenge.

    Phase 2

    Call #2:

    • Build the Workday team.
    • Align organizational goals.

    Call #3:

    • Map current state.
    • Inventory Workday capabilities and processes.
    • Explore Workday-related costs.

    Phase 3

    Call #4: Understand product satisfaction and vendor management.

    Call #5: Review APA results.

    Call #6: Understand Workday optimization opportunities.

    Call #7: Determine the right Workday path for your organization.

    Phase 4

    Call #8: Build out optimization roadmap and next steps.

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Day 1Day 2Day 3Day 4Day 5
    Define Your Workday Application VisionMap Current StateAssess WorkdayBuild Your Optimization RoadmapNext Steps and

    Wrap-Up (offsite)

    Activities

    1.1 Identify Stakeholders and Build Your Optimization Team

    1.2 Build an ERP Strategy Model

    1.3 Inventory Current System State

    1.4 Define Optimization Timeframe

    1.5 Understand Workday Costs

    2.1 Assess Workday Capabilities

    2.2 Review Your Satisfaction With the Vendor/Product and Willingness for Change

    3.1 Prioritize Optimization Opportunities

    3.2 Discover Optimization Initiatives

    		4.1 Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    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. Workday optimization team
    2. Workday business model
    3. Workday optimization goals
    4. System inventory and data flow
    5. Application and business capabilities list
    6. Workday optimization timeline
    1. Workday capability gap analysis
    2. Workday user satisfaction (application portfolio assessment)
    3. Workday SoftwareReviews survey results
    4. Workday current costs
    1. Product and vendor satisfaction opportunities
    2. Capability and feature optimization opportunities
    3. Process optimization opportunities
    4. Integration optimization opportunities
    5. Data optimization opportunities
    6. Workday cost-saving opportunities
    1. Workday optimization roadmap

    Phase 1

    Map Current-State Capabilities

    Phase 1

    1.1 Identify Stakeholders and Build Your Optimization Team

    1.2 Build an ERP Strategy Model

    1.3 Inventory Current System State

    1.4 Define Optimization Timeframe

    1.5 Understand Workday Costs

    Phase 2

    2.1 Assess Workday Capabilities

    2.2 Review Your Satisfaction With the Vendor/Product and Willingness for Change

    Phase 3

    3.1 Prioritize Optimization Opportunities

    3.2 Discover Optimization Initiatives

    Phase 4

    4.1 Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    This phase will guide you through the following activities:

    • Align your organizational goals
    • Gain a firm understanding of your current state
    • Inventory Workday and related applications
    • Confirm the organization’s capabilities

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CFO
    • Department Leads – Finance, Procurement, Asset Management
    • Applications Director
    • Senior Business Analyst
    • Senior Developer
    • Procurement Analysts

    Step 1.1

    Identify Stakeholders and Build Your Optimization Team

    Activities

    1.1.1 Identify Stakeholders Critical to Success

    1.1.2 Map Your Workday Optimization Stakeholders

    1.1.3 Determine Your Workday Optimization Team

    Map Current State Capabilities

    Step 1.1

    Step 1.2

    Step 1.3

    Step 1.4

    Step 1.5

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Identify ERP drivers and objectives
    • Explore ERP challenges and pain points
    • Discover ERP benefits and opportunities
    • Align the ERP foundation with your corporate strategy

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Stakeholders
    • Project sponsors and leaders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Stakeholder map
    • Workday optimization team

    ERP optimization stakeholders

    • Understand the roles necessary to Get the Most Out of Your Workday.
    • Understand the role of each player within your project structure. Look for listed participants on the activities slides to determine when each player should be involved.
    Title Role Within the Project Structure
    Organizational Sponsor
    • Owns the project at the management/C-suite level
    • Responsible for breaking down barriers and ensuring alignment with your organizational strategy
    • CIO, CFO, COO, or similar
    Project Manager
    • The IT individual(s) that oversee day-to-day project operations
    • Responsible for preparing and managing the project plan and monitoring the project team’s progress
    • Applications Manager or other IT Manager, Business Analyst, Business Process Owner, or similar
    Business Unit Leaders
    • Works alongside the IT Project Manager to ensure the strategy is aligned with business needs
    • In this case, likely to be a marketing, sales, or customer service lead
    • Sales Director, Marketing Director, Customer Care Director, or similar
    Optimization Team
    • Comprised of individuals whose knowledge and skills are crucial to project success
    • Responsible for driving day-to-day activities, coordinating communication, and making process and design decisions; can assist with persona and scenario development for ERP
    • Project Manager, Business Lead, ERP Manager, Integration Manager, Application SMEs, Developers, Business Process Architects, and/or similar SMEs
    Steering Committee
    • Comprised of the C-suite/management-level individuals that act as the project’s decision makers
    • Responsible for validating goals and priorities, defining the project scope, enabling adequate resourcing, and managing change
    • Project Sponsor, Project Manager, Business Lead, CFO, Business Unit SMEs, or similar

    Info-Tech Insight

    Do not limit project input or participation. Include subject-matter experts and internal stakeholders at stages within the project. Such inputs can be solicited on a one-off basis as needed. This ensures you take a holistic approach to create your ERP optimization strategy.

    1.1.1 Identify Workday optimization stakeholders

    1 hour

    1. Hold a meeting to identify the Workday optimization stakeholders.
    2. Use the next slide as a guide.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Understand how to navigate the complex web of stakeholders in ERP

    Identify which stakeholders to include and what their level of involvement should be during requirements elicitation based on relevant topic expertise.

    Sponsor End User IT Business
    Description An internal stakeholder who has final sign-off on the ERP project. Front-line users of the ERP technology. Back-end support staff who are tasked with project planning, execution, and eventual system maintenance. Additional stakeholders that will be impacted by any ERP technology changes.
    Examples
    • CEO
    • CIO/CTO
    • COO
    • CFO
    • Warehouse personnel
    • Sales teams
    • HR admins
    • Applications manager
    • Vendor relationship manager(s)
    • Director, Procurement
    • VP, Marketing
    • Manager, HR
    Values Executive buy-in and support is essential to the success of the project. Often, the sponsor controls funding and resource allocation. End users determine the success of the system through user adoption. If the end user does not adopt the system, the system is deemed useless and benefits realization is poor. IT is likely to be responsible for more in-depth requirements gathering. IT possesses critical knowledge around system compatibility, integration, and data. Involving business stakeholders in the requirements gathering will ensure alignment between HR and organizational objectives.

    Large-scale ERP projects require the involvement of many stakeholders from all corners and levels of the organization, including project sponsors, IT, end users, and business stakeholders. Consider the influence and interest of stakeholders in contributing to the requirements elicitation process and involve them accordingly.

    The image shows a graph with dots on it, titled Example: Stakeholder Involvement during Selection.

    Activity 1.1.2 Map your Workday optimization stakeholders

    1 hour

    1. Use the list of Workday optimization stakeholders.
    2. Map each stakeholder on the quadrant based on their expected Influence and involvement in the project.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    The image shows a graph titled Map the Organization's Stakeholders, with stakeholders listed on the left, and arranged in quadrants. Along the bottom of the graph is the text: Involvement, with an arrow pointing to the right. Along the left side of the graph is the text: Influence, with an arrow pointing upwards.

    Map the organization’s stakeholders

    The image shows the same organization stakeholder map shown in the previous section.

    The Workday optimization team

    Consider the core team functions when putting together the project team. Form a cross-functional team (i.e. across IT, Marketing, Sales, Service, and Operations) to create a well-aligned ERP optimization strategy.

    Don’t let your project team become too large when trying to include all relevant stakeholders. Carefully limiting the size of the project team will enable effective decision making while still including functional business units such as Human Resources, Operations, Manufacturing, Marketing, Sales, Service, and Finance as well as IT.

    Required Skills/Knowledge Suggested Project Team Members
    Business
    • Department leads
    • Business process leads
    • Business analysts
    • Subject matter experts
    • SMEs/Business process leads across all functional areas, for example, Strategy, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Finance, HR
    IT
    • Application development
    • Enterprise integration
    • Business processes
    • Data management
    • Product owner
    • ERP application manager
    • Business process manager
    • Integration manager
    • Application developer
    • Data stewards
    Other
    • Operations
    • Administrative
    • Change management
    • COO
    • CFO
    • Change management officer

    1.1.3 Determine your Workday optimization team

    1 hour

    1. Have the project manager and other key stakeholders discuss and determine who will be involved in the Workday optimization project.
      • The size of the team will depend on the initiative and size of your organization.
      • Key business leaders in key areas and IT representatives should be involved.

    Note: Depending on your initiative and size of your organization, the size of this team will vary.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Step 1.2

    Build an ERP Strategy Model

    Activities

    1.2.1 Explore Organizational Goals and Business Needs

    1.2.2 Discover Environmental Factors and Technology Drivers

    1.2.3 Consider Potential Barriers to Achieving Workday Optimization

    1.2.4 Set the Foundation for Success

    1.2.5 Discuss Workday Strategy and Develop Your ERP Optimization Goals

    Map Current State Capabilities

    Step 1.1

    Step 1.2

    Step 1.3

    Step 1.4

    Step 1.5

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Identify ERP drivers and objectives
    • Explore ERP challenges and pain points
    • Discover ERP benefits and opportunities
    • Align the ERP foundation with the corporate strategy

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Workday Optimization Team

    Outcomes of this step

    • ERP business model
    • Strategy alignment

    Align your Workday strategy with the corporate strategy

    Corporate Strategy

    Your corporate strategy:

    • Conveys the current state of the organization and the path it wants to take.
    • Identifies future goals and business aspirations.
    • Communicates the initiatives that are critical for getting the organization from its current state to the desired future state.

    Unified ERP Strategy

    • The ideal ERP strategy is aligned with overarching organizational business goals and broader IT initiatives.
    • Include all affected business units and departments in these conversations.
    • The ERP optimization can be and should be linked, with metrics, to the corporate strategy and ultimate business objectives.

    IT Strategy

    Your IT strategy:

    • Communicates the organization’s budget and spending on ERP.
    • Identifies IT initiatives that will support the business and key ERP objectives.
    • Outlines staffing and resourcing for ERP initiatives.

    ERP projects are more successful when the management team understands the strategic importance and the criticality of alignment. Time needs to be spent upfront aligning business strategies with ERP capabilities. Effective alignment between IT and the business should happen daily. Alignment doesn’t just need to occur at the executive level but at each level of the organization.

    ERP Business Model Template

    The image shows a template of the ERP Business Model. At the top, there is a section for ERP Needs, then on the left and right, Environmental Factors and Organizational Goals. At the center, there is a box with text that reads Barriers, with empty space underneath it, then the text: ERP Strategy, and then the heading Enables with empty space beneath it. At the bottom are Technology Drivers. There are notes attached to sections. For ERP Needs, the note reads: What are your business drivers? What are your current ERP pains?. For the Environmental Factors section, the note reads: What factors impacting your strategy are out of your control?. For the Technology Drivers section, the note reads: Why do you need a new system? What is the purpose for becoming an integrated organization?.

    Conduct interviews to elicit the business context

    Stakeholder Interviews

    Begin by conducting interviews of your executive team. Interview the following leaders:

    1. Chief Information Officer
    2. Chief Executive Officer
    3. Chief Financial Officer
    4. Chief Revenue Officer/Sales Leader
    5. Chief Operating Officer/Supply Chain & Logistics Leader
    6. Chief Technology Officer/Chief Product Officer

    INTERVIEWS MUST UNCOVER:

    1. Your organization’s mission & vision
    2. Your organization’s top business goals
    3. Your organization’s top business initiatives
    4. The stakeholder’s top goals and initiatives
    5. Tools and systems needed to facilitate organizational and departmental goals

    Understand the mission, vision, and goals of the organization and supporting departments

    Business Needs Business Drivers
    Definition A business need is a requirement associated with a particular business process. A business need is a requirement associated with a particular business process.
    Examples
    • Audit tracking
    • Authorization levels
    • Business rules
    • Data quality
    • Customer satisfaction
    • Branding
    • Time-to-resolution

    Info-Tech Insight

    One of the biggest drivers for ERP adoption is the ability to make quicker decisions from timely information. This driver is a result of external considerations. Many industries today are highly competitive, uncertain, and rapidly changing. To succeed under these pressures, there needs to be timely information and visibility into all components of the organization.

    1.2.1 Explore organizational goals and business needs

    60 minutes

    1. Discuss organizational mission, vision, and goals. What are the top initiatives underway? Are you contracting, expanding, or innovating?
    2. Discuss business needs to support organizational goals. What are identified goals and initiatives at the departmental level? What tools and resources within the Workday system will help make this successful?
    3. Understand how the company is running today and what the organization’s future will look like. Envision the future system state.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    The image shows the same ERP Business Model Template from the previous section, zoomed in on the centre of the graphic.

    Organizational Goals

    • Organization’s mission and vision
    • Top business goals
    • Initiatives underway

    Business Needs

    • Departmental goals
    • Business drivers
    • Key initiatives
    • Key capabilities to support the organization
    • Requirements to support the business capability and process

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    ERP Business Model

    Organizational Goals

    • Organization’s mission and vision
    • Top business goals (~3)
    • Initiatives underway
    • KPIs and metrics that are important to the organization in achieving its goals and objectives

    Business Needs

    • Departmental goals
    • Key initiatives
    • Key capabilities to support the organization
    • Tools and systems required to support business capability or process
    • KPIs and metrics that are important to the department/stakeholder in achieving its goals and objectives

    Understand the technology drivers and environmental factors

    Technology Drivers Environmental Factors
    Definition Technology drivers are technological changes that have created the need for a new ERP enablement strategy. Many organizations turn to technology systems to help them obtain a competitive edge. These external considerations are factors that take place outside of the organization and impact the way business is conducted inside the organization. These are often outside the control of the business. Look three to five years ahead, what challenges will the business face? Where will you have to adapt and pivot? How can we prepare for this?
    Examples
    • Deployment model (i.e. SaaS)
    • Integration
    • Reporting capabilities
    • Fragmented technologies
    • Economic and political factors
    • Competitive influencers
    • Compliance regulations

    Info-Tech Insight

    A comprehensive plan that takes into consideration organizational goals, departmental needs, technology drivers, and environmental factors will allow for a collaborative approach to defining your Workday strategy.

    1.2.2 Discover environmental factors and technology drivers

    30 minutes

    1. Identify business drivers that are contributing to the organization’s need for ERP.
    2. Understand how the company is running today and what the organization’s future will look like. Try to identify the purpose for becoming an integrated organization. Use a whiteboard or flip charts and markers to capture key findings.
    3. Consider external considerations, organizational drivers, technology drivers, and key functional requirements.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    The image is the same ERP Business Model Template from previous sections. In this instance, it is zoomed into the centre of the graphic, with the environmental factors section circled.

    External Considerations

    • Funding constraints
    • Regulations

    Technology Considerations

    • Data accuracy
    • Data quality
    • Better reporting

    Functional Requirements

    • Information availability
    • Integration between systems
    • Secure data

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Create a realistic ERP foundation by identifying the challenges and barriers the project will bestow

    There are several different factors that may stifle the success of an ERP implementation. Organizations that are creating an ERP foundation must scan their current environment to identify internal barriers and challenges.

    Common Internal Barriers

    Management Support Organizational Culture Organizational Structure IT Readiness
    Definition The degree of understanding and acceptance toward ERP systems. The collective shared values and beliefs. The functional relationships between people and departments in an organization. The degree to which the organization’s people and processes are prepared for a new ERP system.
    Questions
    • Is an ERP project recognized as a top priority?
    • Will management commit time to the project?
    • Are employees resistant to change?
    • Is the organization highly individualized?
    • Is the organization centralized?
    • Is the organization highly formalized?
    • Is there strong technical expertise?
    • Is there strong infrastructure?
    Impact
    • Funding
    • Resources
    • Knowledge sharing
    • User acceptance
    • Flow of knowledge
    • Quality of implementation
    • Need for reliance on consultants

    1.2.3 Consider potential barriers to achieving Workday optimization

    1-3 hours

    1. Open tab 1.2, “Strategy & Goals,” in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.
    2. Identify barriers to ERP optimization success.
    3. Review the ERP critical success factors and how they relate to your optimization efforts.
    4. Discuss potential barriers to successful ERP optimization.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    The image is the same zoomed-in section of the ERP Strategy Business Model Template seen in previous sections. In this instance, the Barriers section is circled.

    Functional Gaps

    • No online purchase order requisitions

    Technical Gaps

    • Inconsistent reporting – data quality concerns

    Process Gaps

    • Duplication of data
    • Lack of system integration

    Barriers to Success

    • Cultural mindset
    • Resistance to change
    • Lack of training
    • Funding

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    ERP Business Model

    Organizational Goals

    • Efficiency
    • Effectiveness
    • Integrity
    • One source of truth for data
    • One team
    • Customer service, external and internal

    Barriers

    • Organizational silos
    • Lack of formal process documentation
    • Funding availability
    • What goes first? Organizational priorities

    What does success look like?

    Top 15 Critical Success Factors for ERP System Implementation

    The image shows a horizontal bar graph with the text: Frequency of Citation (n=127) at the top. Different implementation strategies are listed on the left, in descending order of frequency.

    (Epizitone and Olugbara, 2019; CC BY 4.0)

    Info-Tech Insight

    Complement your ability to deliver on your critical success factors with the capabilities of your implementation partner to drive a successful ERP implementation.

    “Implementation partners can play an important role in successful ERP implementations. They can work across the organizational departments and layers creating a synergy and a communications mechanism.” – Ayogeboh Epizitone, Durban University of Technology

    1.2.3 Set the foundation for success

    1-3 hours

    1. Open tab 1.2, “Strategy & Goals,” in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.
    2. Identify barriers to ERP optimization success.
    3. Review the ERP critical success factors and how they relate to your optimization efforts.
    4. Discuss potential barriers to successful ERP optimization.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    The image is the same zoomed-in section of the ERP Strategy Business Model Template seen in previous sections. In this instance, the Enablers section is circled.

    Business Benefits

    • Business-IT alignment

    IT Benefits

    • Compliance
    • Scalability
    • Operational efficiency

    Organizational Benefits

    • Data accuracy
    • Data quality
    • Better reporting

    Enablers of Success

    • Change management
    • Training
    • Alignment with strategic objectives

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    ERP Business Model

    Organizational Goals

    • Efficiency
    • Effectiveness
    • Integrity
    • One source of truth for data
    • One team
    • Customer service, external and internal

    Enablers

    • Cross-trained employees
    • Desire to focus on value-add activities
    • Collaborative
    • Top-level executive support
    • Effective change management process

    The Business Value Matrix

    Rationalizing and quantifying the value of Workday

    Benefits can be realized internally and externally to the organization or department and have different drivers of value.

    • 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 refers to value sources that have an internal impact and improve your organization’s effectiveness and efficiency in performing its operations.
    • Outward refers to value sources that come from your interaction with external factors, such as the market or your customers.

    Organizational Goals

    Increased Revenue

    Application functions that are specifically related to the impact on your organization’s ability to generate revenue and deliver value to your customers.

    Reduced Costs

    Reduction of overhead. The ways in which an application limits the operational costs of business functions.

    Enhanced Services

    Functions that enable business capabilities that improve the organization’s ability to perform its internal operations.

    Reach Customers

    Application functions that enable and improve the interaction with customers or produce market information and insights.

    Business Value Matrix

    The image shows a matrix, with Human benefits and Financial Benefits on the horizontal axis, and Outward and Inward on the Vertical axis.

    1.2.4 Define your Workday strategy and optimization goals

    30 minutes

    1. Discuss the Workday business model exercises and ERP critical success factors.
    2. Through the lens of corporate goals and objectives think about the supporting ERP technology. How can the ERP system bring value to the organization? What are the top things that will make this initiative a success? What major themes are emerging?
    3. Develop five to ten optimization goals that will form the basis for the success of this initiative.
      • What is a strong statement that will help guide decision making throughout the life of the ERP project?
      • What are your overarching requirements for business processes?
      • What do you ultimately want to achieve?
      • What is a statement that will ensure all stakeholders are on the same page for the project?

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Workday strategy and optimization goals

    Key Themes Emerging / Workday Strategy

    • Efficiency
    • Effectiveness
    • Integrity
    • One source of truth for data
    • One team
    • Customer service, external and internal

    Optimization Goals

    • Support Business Agility: A flexible and adaptable integrated business system providing a seamless user experience.
    • Use ERP best practices: Do not recreate or replicate what we have today; focus on modernization. Exercise customization governance by focusing on those customizations that are strategically differentiating.
    • Automate: Take manual work out where we can, empowering staff and improving productivity through automation and process efficiencies.
    • Stay focused: Focus on scope around core business capabilities. Maintain scope control. Prioritize demand in line with the strategy.
    • Strive for “One Source of Truth”: Unified data model and integrate processes where possible. Assess integration needs carefully.

    Step 1.3

    Inventory Current System State

    Activities

    1.3.1 Inventory Workday Applications and Interactions

    1.3.2 Draw Your Workday System Diagram

    1.3.3 Inventory Your Workday Modules and Business Capabilities (or Business Processes)

    1.3.4 Define Your Key Workday Optimization Modules and Business Capabilities

    Map Current-State Capabilities

    Step 1.1

    Step 1.2

    Step 1.3

    Step 1.4

    Step 1.5

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Inventory of applications
    • Mapping interactions between systems

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Workday Optimization Team
    • Enterprise Architect
    • Data Architect

    Outcomes of this step

    • Systems inventory
    • Systems diagram

    1.3.1 Inventory Workday applications and interfaces

    1-3+ hours

    1. Enter your Workday systems, Workday extended applications, and integrated applications within scope.
    2. Include any abbreviated names or nicknames.
    3. List the application type or main function. List the modules the organization has licensed.
    4. List any integrations.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    ERP Data Flow

    When assessing the current application portfolio that supports your ERP, the tendency will be to focus on the applications under the ERP umbrella. These relate mostly to marketing, sales, and customer service. Be sure to include systems that act as input to, or benefit due to outputs from, ERP or similar applications.

    The image shows a flowchart, with example ERP Data. There is a colour-coded legend for the data, and at the bottom of the graphic, there is text that reads: Be sure to include enterprise applications that are not included in the ERP application portfolio. There are also definitions of abbreviated terms at the bottom of the graphic.

    1.3.2 Draw your Workday system diagram (optional)

    1-3+ hours

    1. From the Workday application inventory, diagram your network. Include:
      • Any internal or external systems
      • Integration points
      • Data flow

    The image shows the flowchart section of th image that appears in the previous section.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Sample Workday and integrations map

    The image shows a sample map of Workday and integrations. There is a colour-coded legend at the bottom right.

    Business capability map (Level 0)

    In business architecture, the primary view of an organization is known as a business capability map.

    A business capability defines what a business does to enable value creation, rather than how.

    Business capabilities:

    • Represent stable business functions.
    • Are unique and independent of each other.
    • Will typically have a defined business outcome.

    A business capability map provides details that help the business architecture practitioner direct attention to a specific area of the business for further assessment.

    The image shows a Business Capability Map, which is divided into 4 sections: Products and Services Development; Revenue Generation; Demand Fulfillment; and Enterprise Management and Planning

    The value stream

    Value stream defined:

    Value Streams:

    Design Product

    • Manufacturers work proactively to design products and services that will meet consumer demand.
    • Products are driven by consumer demand and government regulations.

    Produce Product

    • Production processes and labor costs are constantly analyzed for efficiencies and accuracies.
    • Quality of product and services are highly regulated through all levels of the supply chain.

    Sell Product

    • Sales networks and sales staff deliver the product from the organization to the end consumer.
    • Marketing plays a key role throughout the value stream connecting consumers’ wants and needs to the products and services offered.

    Customer Service

    • Relationships with consumers continue after the sale of products and services.
    • Continued customer support and data mining is important to revenue streams.

    Value streams connect business goals to the organization’s value realization activities in the marketplace. Those activities are dependent on the specific industry segment in which an organization operates. There are two types of value streams: core value streams and support value streams.

    • Core value streams are mostly externally facing. They deliver value to either an external or internal customer and they tie to the customer perspective of the strategy map.
    • Support value streams are internally facing and provide the foundational support for an organization to operate.

    Taking a value stream approach to process mapping allows you to move across departmental and system boundaries to understand the underlying business capability.

    Some mistakes organizations make are over-customizing processes, or conversely, not customizing when required. Workday provides good baseline process that work for most organizations. However, if a process is broken or not working efficiently take the time to investigate it, including underlying policies, roles, workflows, and integrations.

    Process frameworks

    Help define your inventory of sales, marketing, and customer services processes.

    Operating Processes
    1. Develop vision and strategy 2. Develop and manage products and services 3. Market and sell products and services 4. Deliver physical products 5. Deliver services
    Management and Support Processes
    6. Manage customer service
    7. Develop and manage human capital
    8. Manage IT
    9. Manage financial resources
    10. Acquire, construct, and manage assets
    11. Manage enterprise risk, compliance, remediation, and resiliency
    12. Manage external relationships
    13. Develop and manage business capabilities

    (APQC)

    If you do not have a documented process model, you can use the APQC Framework to help define your inventory of sales business processes.

    APQC’s Process Classification Framework is a taxonomy of cross-functional business processes intended to allow the objective comparison of organizational performance within and among organizations.

    APQC’s Process Classification Framework

    Process mapping hierarchy

    A process classification framework is helpful for organizations to effectively define their processes and manage them appropriately.

    Use Info-Tech’s related industry resources or publicly available process frameworks (such as APQC) to develop and map your business processes.

    These processes can then be mapped to supporting applications and modules. Policies, roles, and workflows also play a role and should be considered in the overall functioning.

    APQC’s Process Classification Framework

    The image shows a chart, titled PCL Levels Explained, with each of the PCF Levels listed, and a brief description of each.

    (APQC)

    Focus on level-1 processes

    Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 4
    Market and sell products and services Understand markets, customers, and capabilities Perform customer and market intelligence analysis Conduct customer and market research
    Market and sell products and services Develop a sales strategy Develop a sales forecast Gather current and historic order information
    Deliver services Manage service delivery resources Manage service delivery resource demand Develop baseline forecasts
    ? ? ? ?

    Info-Tech Insight

    Focus your initial assessment on the level-1 processes that matter to your organization. This allows you to target your scant resources on the areas of optimization that matter most to the organization and minimize the effort required from your business partners.

    You may need to iterate the assessment as challenges are identified. This allows you to be adaptive and deal with emerging issues more readily and become a more responsive partner to the business.

    Process mapping and supporting ERP modules

    The operating model

    An operating model is a framework that drives operating decisions. It helps to set the parameters for the scope of ERP and the processes that will be supported. The operating model will serve to group core operational processes. These groupings represent a set of interrelated, consecutive processes aimed at generating a common output.

    From your developed processes and your Workday license agreements you will be able to pinpoint the scope for investigation, including the processes and modules.

    The image shows three images, overlapping one another. At the back is a chart with three sections, and boxes beneath. In front of that is a graphic with Objectives, Value Streams, Capabilities, and Processes written down the left side, and descriptions on the right. Below that image is an arrow pointing downward to the text Supporting Workday Modules. In front is a circular graphic with the word Workday in the centre, and circles with text in them around it.

    Workday modules and process enablement

    Workday Finance

    • Accounts Receivable and Collections
    • Accounts Payable and Payments
    • Asset Management
    • Audit and Controls
    • Billing and Invoicing
    • Cash Management
    • Contracts
    • Financial Reporting and Analysis
    • [Global] Close and Consolidation
    • Multi-GAAP/Multi-book/Multi-chart of Accounts
    • Revenue Management

    Spend Management

    • Strategic Sourcing
    • Procure to Pay
    • Inventory
    • Expenses

    Professional Services Automation

    • Project and Resource Management
    • Project Financials
    • Project Billing
    • Expense Management
    • Time Tracking

    Enterprise Planning

    • Financial planning
    • Reporting
    • Analytics
    • Budgets
    • Insights
    • Workforce planning
    • Sales planning
    • Operational planning

    Analytics and Reporting

    • Financial Management Core Reporting
    • Human Capital Management Core Reporting
    • Benchmarking
    • Data Hub
    • Augmented Analytics

    Student

    • Admissions
    • Financial Aid
    • Advising
    • Student Finance
    • Student Records

    Human Capital Management (HCM)

    • Human Resource Management
    • Organization Management
    • Business Process Management
    • Reporting and Analytics
    • Employee and Manager Self-Service
    • Contingent Labor Management
    • Skills Cloud
    • Absence Management
    • Benefits Administration
    • ACA Management
    • Compensation
    • Talent Optimization

    Payroll and Workforce Management

    • Scheduling and Labor Management
    • Time and Attendance
    • Absence
    • Payroll

    Employee Experience

    • Employee Engagement Insights
    • Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Measurement
    • Health and Well-Being Metrics
    • Back-to-Workplace Readiness
    • Confidential Employee-Manager Conversations
    • Attrition Prediction
    • Continuous Industry Benchmarks

    Talent and Performance

    • Talent Profile
    • Continuous Feedback
    • Survey Campaigns
    • Embedded Analytics
    • Goal Management
    • Performance Management
    • Talent Review
    • Calibration
    • Competencies
    • Career and Development Planning
    • Succession Planning
    • Talent Marketplace
    • Mobile
    • Expenses

    1.3.3 Inventory your Workday modules and business capabilities

    1-3+ hours

    1. Look at the major functions or processes within the scope of ERP.
    2. From the inventory of current systems, choose the submodules or processes that you want to investigate and are within scope for this optimization initiative.
    3. List the top modules, capabilities, or processes that will be within the scope of this optimization initiative.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    1.3.4 Define your key Workday optimization modules and business capabilities

    1-3+ hours

    1. Look at the major functions or processes within the scope of ERP.
    2. From the inventory of current systems, choose the submodules or processes for this optimization initiative. Base this on those that are most critical to the business, those with the lowest levels of satisfaction, or those that perhaps need more knowledge around them.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Step 1.4

    Define Optimization Timeframe

    Activities

    1.4.1 Define Workday Key Dates, and Workday Optimization Roadmap Timeframe and Structure

    Map Current-State Capabilities

    Step 1.1

    Step 1.2

    Step 1.3

    Step 1.4

    Step 1.5

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Defining key dates related to your optimization initiative
    • Identifying key building blocks for your optimization roadmap

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Workday Optimization Team
    • Vendor Management

    Outcomes of this step

    • Optimization Key Dates
    • Optimization Roadmap Timeframe and Structure

    1.4.1 Optimization roadmap timeframe and structure

    1-3+ hours

    1. Key items and dates relevant to your optimization initiatives, such as any products reaching end of life or end of contract, or budget proposal submission deadlines.
    2. Enter the expected Optimization Initiative Start Date.
    3. Enter the Roadmap Length. This is the total amount of time you expect to participate in the Workday Optimization Initiative. This includes short-, medium-, and long-term initiatives.
    4. Enter your Roadmap Date markers – how you want dates displayed on the roadmap.
    5. Enter column time values – what level of granularity will be helpful for this initiative?
    6. Enter the sprint or cycle timeframe – use this if following Agile.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Step 1.5

    Understand Workday Costs

    Activities

    1.5.1 Document Costs Associated With Workday

    Map Current-State Capabilities

    Step 1.1

    Step 1.2

    Step 1.3

    Step 1.4

    Step 1.5

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Define your Workday direct and indirect costs
    • List your Workday expense line items

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Finance representatives
    • Workday Optimization Team

    Outcomes of this step

    • Current Workday and related costs

    1.5.1 Document costs associated with Workday

    1-3 hours

    Before you can make changes and optimization decisions, you need to understand the high-level costs associated with your current application architecture. This activity will help you identify the types of technology and people costs associated with your current systems.

    1. Identify the types of technology costs associated with each current system:
      1. System Maintenance
      2. Annual Renewal
      3. Licensing
    2. Identify the cost of people associated with each current system:
      1. Full-Time Employees
      2. Application Support Staff
      3. Help Desk Tickets

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Phase 2

    Assess Your Current State

    Phase 1

    1.1 Identify Stakeholders and Build Your Optimization Team

    1.2 Build an ERP Strategy Model

    1.3 Inventory Current System State

    1.4 Define Optimization Timeframe

    1.5 Understand Workday Costs

    Phase 2

    2.1 Assess Workday Capabilities

    2.2 Review Your Satisfaction With the Vendor/Product and Willingness for Change

    Phase 3

    3.1 Prioritize Optimization Opportunities

    3.2 Discover Optimization Initiatives

    Phase 4

    4.1 Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    This phase will guide you through the following activities:

    • Determine process relevance
    • Perform a gap analysis
    • Perform a user satisfaction survey
    • Assess software and vendor satisfaction

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Workday Optimization Team
    • Users across functional areas of your ERP and related technologies

    Step 2.1

    Assess Workday Capabilities

    Activities

    2.1.1 Rate Capability Relevance to Organizational Goals

    2.1.2 Complete a Workday Application Portfolio Assessment

    2.1.3 (Optional) Assess Workday Process Maturity

    Assess Workday Capabilities

    Step 2.1

    Step 2.2

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Capability Relevance
    • Process Gap Analysis
    • Application Portfolio Assessment

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Workday Users

    Outcomes of this step

    • Workday Capability Assessment

    Benefits of the Application Portfolio Assessment

    Assess the health of the application portfolio

    • Get a full 360-degree view of the effectiveness, criticality, and prevalence of all relevant applications to get a comprehensive view of the health of the applications portfolio.
    • Identify opportunities to drive more value from effective applications, retire nonessential applications, and immediately address at-risk applications that are not meeting expectations.

    Provide targeted department feedback

    • Share end-user satisfaction and importance ratings for core IT services, IT communications, and business enablement to focus on the right end-user groups or lines of business, and ramp up satisfaction and productivity.

    Gain insight into the state of data quality

    • Data quality is one of the key issues causing poor ERP user satisfaction and business results. This can include the relevance, accuracy, timeliness, or usability of the organization’s data.
    • Targeted, open-ended feedback around data quality will provide insight into where optimization efforts should be focused.

    2.1.1 Complete a current state assessment (via the Application Portfolio Assessment)

    3 hours

    Option 1: Use Info-Tech’s Application Portfolio Assessment to generate your user satisfaction score. This tool not only measures application satisfaction but also elicits great feedback from users regarding the support they receive from the IT team around Workday.

    1. Download the Workday Application Inventory Tool.
    2. Complete the “Demographics” tab (tab 2).
    3. Complete the “Inventory” tab (tab 3).
      1. Complete the inventory by treating each module within your Workday system as an application.
      2. Treat every department as a separate column in the department section. Feel free to add, remove, or modify department names to match your organization.
      3. Include data quality for all applications applicable.

    Option 2: Create a survey manually.

    1. Use tab Reference 2.1 “APA Questions” as a guide for creating your survey.
    2. Send out surveys to end users.
    3. Modify tab 2.1 “Workday Assessment” if required.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Content for New section Tag Goes HereThe image shows a number of charts relating to applications, such as Overall Applications Portfolio Satisfaction and Most Critical Applications. Data is shown in each category relating to number of users, usability, data quality, status, and others.

    2.1.2 Complete the Application Portfolio Assessment

    3 hours

    Option 1: Use Info-Tech’s Application Portfolio Assessment to generate your user satisfaction score. This tool not only measures application satisfaction but also elicits great feedback from users regarding the support they receive from the IT team around Workday.

    1. Download the Workday Application Inventory Tool.
    2. Complete the “Demographics” tab (tab 2).
    3. Complete the “Inventory” tab (tab 3).
      1. Complete the inventory by treating each module within your Workday system as an application.
      2. Treat every department as a separate column in the department section. Feel free to add, remove, or modify department names to match your organization.
      3. Include data quality for all applications applicable.

    Option 2: Create a survey manually.

    1. Use tab Reference 2.1 “APA Questions” as a guide for creating your survey.
    2. Send out surveys to end users.
    3. Modify tab 2.1 “Workday Assessment” if required.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    2.1.3 (Optional) Assess Workday process maturity

    1. As with any ERP system, the issues encountered may not be related to the system itself but processes that have developed over time.
    2. Use this opportunity to interview key stakeholders to learn about deeper capability processes.
      1. Identify key stakeholders.
      2. Hold sessions to document deeper processes.
      3. Discuss processes and technical enablement in each area.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Process Maturity Assessment

    Process Assessment

    Strong

    Moderate

    Weak

    1.1 Financial Planning and Analysis

    1.2 Accounting and Financial Close

    1.3 Treasury Management

    1.4 Financial Operations

    1.5 Governance, Risk & Compliance

    2.1 Core HR

    Description All aspects related to financial operations
    Key Success Indicators Month-end reporting in 5 days AR at risk managing down (zero over 90 days) Weekly operating cash flow updates
    Timely liquidity for claims payments Payroll audit reporting and insights reporting 90% of workflow tasks captured in ERP
    EFT uptake Automated reconciliations Reduce audit hours required
    Current Pain Points A lot of voided and re-issued checks NIDPP Integration with banks; can’t get the information back into existing ERP
    There is no payroll integration No payroll automation and other processes Lack of integration with HUB
    Not one true source of data Incentive payment processing Rewards program management
    Audit process is onerous Reconcile AP and AR for dealers

    Stakeholders Interviewed:

    The process is formalized, documented, optimized, and audited.

    The process is poorly documented. More than one person knows how to do it. Inefficient and error-prone.

    The process is not documented. One person knows how to do it. The process is ad hoc, not formalized, inconsistent.

    Capability Processes:

    General Ledger

    Accounts Receivable

    Incentives Management

    Accounts Payable

    General Ledger Consolidation

    Treasury Management

    Cash Management

    Subscription / recurring payments

    Treasury Transactions

    Step 2.2

    Review Your Satisfaction With the Vendor/Product and Willingness for Change

    Activities

    2.2.1 Rate Your Vendor and Product Satisfaction

    2.2.2 Review Workday Product Scores (if applicable)

    2.2.3 Evaluate Your Product Satisfaction

    2.2.4 Check Your Business Process Change Tolerance

    Product Satisfaction

    Step 2.1

    Step 2.2

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Rate your vendor and product satisfaction
    • Compare with survey data from SoftwareReviews

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Workday Product Owner(s)
    • Procurement Representative
    • Vendor Contracts Manager

    Outcomes of this step

    • Quantified satisfaction with vendor and product

    2.2.1 Rate your vendor and product satisfaction

    30 minutes

    Use Info-Tech’s vendor satisfaction survey to identify optimization areas with your ERP product(s) and vendor(s).

    1. Option 1 (recommended): Conduct a satisfaction survey using SoftwareReviews. This option allows you to see your results in the context of the vendor landscape.
    2. Option 2: Use the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook to review your satisfaction with your Workday software.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    SoftwareReviews’ Enterprise Resource Planning Category

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    2.2.2 Review Workday product scores (if applicable)

    30 minutes

    1. Download the scorecard for your Workday product from the SoftwareReviews website. (Note: Not all products are represented or have sufficient data, so a scorecard may not be available.)
    2. Use the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook tab 2.3 to record the scorecard results.
    3. Use your Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook to flag areas where your score may be lower than the product scorecard. Brainstorm ideas for optimization.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    SoftwareReviews’ Enterprise Resource Planning Category

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    2.2.3 How does your satisfaction compare with your peers?

    Use SoftwareReviews to explore product features, vendor experience, and capability satisfaction.

    The image shows two data quadrants, one titled Enterprise Resource Planning - Enterprise, and Enterprise Resource Planning - Midmarket.

    (SoftwareReviews ERP Mid-Market, 2022; SoftwareReviews ERP Enterprise, 2022)

    2.2.4 Check your business process change tolerance

    1 hours

    Input

    • Business process capability map

    Output

    • Heat map of risk areas that require more attention to validate best practices or minimize customization

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Participants

    • Implementation team
    • SMEs
    • Departmental Leaders
    1. As a group, list your level-0 and level-1 business capabilities. Sample on the next slide.
    2. Assess the department’s willingness for change and the risk of maintaining the status quo.
    3. Color-code the level-0 business capabilities based on:
      1. Green – Willing to follow best practices
      2. Yellow – May be challenging or unique business model
      3. Red – Low tolerance for change

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Heat map representing desire for best practice or those having the least tolerance for change

    Legend:

    Willing to follow best practice

    May be challenging or unique business model

    Low tolerance for change

    Out of Scope

    Product-Centric Capabilities
    R&D Production Supply Chain Distribution Asset Mgmt
    Idea to Offering Plan to Produce Procure to Pay Forecast to Delivery Acquire to Dispose
    Add/Remove Shop Floor Scheduling Add/Remove Add/Remove Add/Remove
    Add/Remove Product Costing Add/Remove Add/Remove Add/Remove
    Service-Centric Capabilities
    Finance HR Marketing Sales Service
    Record to Report Hire to Retire Market to Order Quote to Cash Issue to Resolution
    Add/Remove Add/Remove Add/Remove Add/Remove Add/Remove
    Add/Remove Add/Remove Add/Remove Add/Remove Add/Remove

    Determine the areas of risk to conform to best practice and minimize customization. These will be areas needing focus from the vendor, supporting change and guiding best practice.

    For example: Must be able to support our unique process manufacturing capabilities and enhance planning and visibility to detailed costing.

    Phase 3

    Identify Key Optimization Opportunities

    Phase 1

    1.1 Identify Stakeholders and Build Your Optimization Team

    1.2 Build an ERP Strategy Model

    1.3 Inventory Current System State

    1.4 Define Optimization Timeframe

    1.5 Understand Workday Costs

    Phase 2

    2.1 Assess Workday Capabilities

    2.2 Review Your Satisfaction With the Vendor/Product and Willingness for Change

    Phase 3

    3.1 Prioritize Optimization Opportunities

    3.2 Discover Optimization Initiatives

    Phase 4

    4.1 Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify key optimization areas
    • Create an optimization roadmap

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Workday Optimization Team

    Step 3.1

    Prioritize optimization opportunities

    Activities

    3.1.1 Prioritize Optimization Capability Areas

    Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    Step 3.1

    Step 3.2

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Explore existing process gaps
    • Identify the impact of processes on user satisfaction
    • Identify the impact of data quality on user satisfaction
    • Review your overall product satisfaction and vendor management

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Workday Optimization Team

    Outcomes of this step

    • Application optimization plan

    Info-Tech Insight

    Enabling a high-performing organization requires excellent management practices and continuous optimization efforts. Your technology portfolio and architecture are important, but we must go deeper. Taking a holistic view of ERP technologies in the environments in which they operate allows for the inclusion of people and process improvements – this is key to maximizing business results. Using a formal ERP optimization initiative will drive business-IT alignment, identify IT automation priorities, and dig deep into continuous process improvement.

    Address process gaps:

    • ERP and related technologies are invaluable to the goal of organizational enablement, but they must have supported processes driven by business goals.
    • Identify areas where capabilities need to be improved and work toward optimization.

    Support user satisfaction:

    • The best technology in the world won’t deliver business results if it’s not working for the users who need it.
    • Understand concerns, communicate improvements, and support users in all roles.

    Improve data quality:

    • Data quality is unique to each business unit and requires tolerance, not perfection.
    • Implement data quality initiatives that are aligned with overall business objectives and aimed at addressing data practices and the data itself.

    Proactively manage vendors:

    • Vendor management is a critical component of technology enablement and IT satisfaction.
    • Assess your current satisfaction against that of your peers and work toward building a process that is best fit for your organization.

    Assessing application business value

    The Business

    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.

    Business Value of Applications

    IT

    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 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. Additionally, it is how effective the application is at producing that outcome.

    Business value IS NOT

    the user’s experience or satisfaction with the application.

    Brainstorm IT initiatives to enable high areas of opportunity to support the business

    Create or Improve:

    • ERP Capabilities
    • Optimization Initiatives

    Capabilities are what the system and business do that creates value for the organization.

    Optimization initiatives are projects with a definitive start and end date, and they enhance, create, maintain, or remove capabilities with the goal of increasing value.

    Brainstorm ERP optimization initiatives in each area. Ensure you are looking for all-encompassing opportunities within the context of IT, the business, and Workday systems.

    • Process
    • Technology
    • Organization

    Discover the value drivers of your applications

    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 refers to value sources that have an internal impact and improve your organization’s effectiveness and efficiency in performing its operations.

    Outward refers to value sources that come from your interaction with external factors, such as the market or your customers.

    The image shows a business value matrix, with Human benefit and Financial benefit in the horizontal and Outward and Inward on the vertical. In the top left quadrant is Reach Customers; top right is Increase Revenue or Deliver Value; bottom left is Enhance Services, and bottom right is Reduce Costs.

    The image shows a graph titled Perceived business benefits from using digital tools. It is a bar graph, showing percentages assigned to each perceived benefit. The source is Collins et al, 2017.

    Increased Revenue

    Application functions that are specifically related to the impact on your organization’s ability to generate revenue and deliver value to your customers.

    Reduced Costs

    Reduction of overhead. The ways in which an application limits the operational costs of business functions.

    Enhanced Services

    Functions that enable business capabilities that improve the organization’s ability to perform its internal operations.

    Reach Customers

    Application functions that enable and improve the interaction with customers or produce market information and insights.

    Prioritize Workday optimization areas that will bring the most value to the organization

    Review your ERP capability areas and rate them according to relevance to organizational goals. This will allow you to eliminate optimization ideas that may not bring value to the organization.

    The image shows a graph, separated into quadrants. On the x-axis is Satisfaction, from low to high, and on the Y-axis is Relevant to Organizational Goals from Low to High. The top left quadrant is High Priority, top right is Maintain, and the two lower quadrants are both low priority.

    Value vs. Effort

    How important is it? vs. How difficult is it?

    How important is it? How Difficult is it?

    What is the value?

    • Increase revenue
    • Decrease costs
    • Enhanced services
    • Reach customers

    What is the benefit?

    • How can it help us reach our goals?

    What is the impact?

    • To organizational goals
    • To ERP goals
    • To departmental goals

    What is the cost?

    • Hours x Rates ++ =

    What is the level of effort?

    • Development effort
    • Operational effort
    • Implementation effort
    • Outside resource coordination

    What is the risk of implementing/not implementing?

    What is the complexity?

    (Roadmunk)

    RICE method

    Measure the “total impact per time worked”

    The image shows a graphic with the word Confidence at the top, then an arrow pointing upwards that reads Impact. Below that, there is an arrow pointing horizontally in both directions that reads Reach, and then a horizontal line, with the word Effort below it.

    Reach Impact Confidence Effort

    How many people will this improvement impact? Internal: # of users OR # of transactions per period

    External: # of customers OR # of transactions per period

    What is the scale of impact? How much will the improvement affect satisfaction?

    Example Weighting:

    1 = Massive Impact

    2 = High Impact

    1 = Medium Impact

    0.5 = Low Impact

    0.25 = Very Low Impact

    How confident are we that the improvements are achievable and that they will meet the impact estimates?

    Example Weighting:

    1 = High Confidence

    0.80 = Medium Confidence

    0.50 = Low Confidence

    How much investment will be required to implement the improvement initiative?

    FTE hours x cost per hour

    (Intercom)

    3.1.1 Prioritize and rate optimization capability areas

    1-3 hours

    1. Use tab 3.1 Optimization Priorities.
    2. From the Workday Key Capabilities (pulled from tab 1.3 Key Capabilities), discuss areas of scope for the Workday optimization initiative.
    3. Discuss the four areas of the business value matrix and identify how each module, along with organizational goals, can bring value to the organization.
    4. Rate each of your Workday capabilities for the level of importance to your organization. The levels of importance are:
      • Crucial
      • Important
      • Secondary
      • Unimportant
      • Not applicable

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Step 3.2

    Discover Optimization Initiatives

    Activities

    3.2.1 Discover Product and Vendor Satisfaction Opportunities

    3.2.2 Discover Capability and Feature Optimization Opportunities

    3.2.3 Discover Process Optimization Opportunities

    3.2.4 Discover Integration Optimization Opportunities

    3.2.5 Discover Data Optimization Opportunities

    3.2.6 Discover Workday Cost-Saving Opportunities

    Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    Step 3.1

    Step 3.2

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Explore existing process gaps
    • Identify the impact of processes on user satisfaction
    • Identify the impact of data quality on user satisfaction
    • Review your overall product satisfaction and vendor management

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Workday Optimization Team

    Outcomes of this step

    • Application optimization plan
    Content for New section Tag Goes HereThe image shows a graphic title Product Feature Satisfaction, showing features in rank order and data on each.
    Content for New section Tag Goes HereThe image shows a graphic titled Vendor Capability Satisfaction, showing features in rank order with related data.

    Workday’s partner landscape

    Workday uses an extensive partner network to help deliver results.

    ADVISORY PARTNERS

    Workday Advisory Partners have in-depth knowledge to help customers determine what’s best for their needs and how to maximize business value. They guide you through digital acceleration strategy and planning, product selection, change management, and more.

    SERVICES PARTNERS

    Workday Services Partners represent a curated community of global systems integrators and regional firms that help companies deploy Workday and continually adopt new capabilities.

    SOFTWARE PARTNERS

    Workday Software Partners are a global ecosystem of application, content, and technology software companies that design, build, and deploy solution extensions to help customers enhance the capabilities of Workday.

    Global payroll PARTNERS

    Workday’s Global Payroll Cloud (GPC) program makes it easy to expand payroll (outside of the US, Canada, the UK, and France) to third-party payroll providers around the world using certified, prebuilt integrations from Workday Partners. Payroll partners provide solutions in more than 100 countries.

    Adaptive planning PARTNERS

    Adaptive planning partners guide you through all aspects of everything from integration to deployment.

    With large-scale ERP and HCM systems, the success of the system can be as much about the SI (Systems Integrator) or vendor partners as it is about the core product.

    In evaluating your Workday system, think about Workday’s extensive partner network to understand how you can capitalize on your installation.

    You do not need to reinvent the system; you may just need an additional service partner or bolt-on solution to round out your product functionality.

    Improving vendor management

    Create a right-size, right-fit strategy for managing the vendors relevant to your organization.

    The image shows a matrix, with strategic value on the x-axis from low to high, and Vendor Spend/Switching Costs on the y-axis, from low to high. In the top left is Operational, top right is Strategic; lower left is commodity; and lower right Tactical.

    Info-Tech Insight

    A vendor management initiative is an organization’s formalized process for evaluating, selecting, managing, and optimizing third-party providers of goods and services.

    The amount of resources you assign to managing vendors depends on the number and value of your organization’s relationships. Before optimizing your vendor management program around the best practices presented in Info-Tech’s Jump Start Your Vendor Management Initiative blueprint, assess your current maturity and build the process around a model that reflects the needs of your organization.

    Note: Info-Tech uses VMI interchangeably with the terms “vendor management office (VMO),” “vendor management function,” “vendor management process,” and “vendor management program.”

    Jump Start Your Vendor Management Initiative

    3.2.1 Discover product and vendor satisfaction

    1-2 hours

    1. Review tab 2.2 Vend. & Prod. Sat. to review the overall Product (and Vendor) satisfaction of your Workday system.
    2. Use tab 3.2 Optimization Initiatives to answer the following questions in the Overall Product (and Vendor) Evaluation area.
      • Document overall product satisfaction.
      • How does your satisfaction compare with your peers?
      • Is the overall system fit for use?
      • Do you have a proactive vendor management strategy in place?
      • Is the product dissatisfaction at the point that you need to evaluate if it is time to replace the product?
      • Could your vendor or SI help you achieve better results?

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    The image shows a box with text in it, titled 3.2.1 Overall Product (and Vendor) Evaluation.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Content for New section Tag Goes HereThe image is a graphic, with the Five Most Critical Applications section at the top, with related data, and other sets of data included in smaller text at the bottom of the image.

    3.2.2 Discover capability and feature optimization opportunities

    1-2 hours

    1. Review tab 2.2 Vend. & Prod. Sat. and tab 3.1 Optimization Priorities to review the satisfaction with the capabilities and features of your Workday system.
    2. Use tab 3.2 Optimization Initiatives to answer the following questions in the Capabilities and Features Evaluation area to answer the following questions:
      • What capabilities and features are performing the worst?
      • Do other organizations and users struggle with these areas?
      • Why is it not performing well?
      • Is there an opportunity for improvement?
      • What are some optimization initiatives that could be undertaken?

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    The image is a box with text in it, titled 3.2.2 Capabilities and Features Evaluation.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Process optimization: the hidden goldmine

    Know your strategic goals and KPIs that will deliver results.

    Goals of Process Improvement Process Improvement Sample Areas Improvement Possibilities
    • Optimize business and improve value drivers
    • Reduce TCO
    • Reduce process complexity
    • Eliminate manual processes
    • Increase efficiencies
    • Support digital transformation and enablement
    • Order to cash
    • Procure to pay
    • Order to replenish
    • Plan to produce
    • Request to settle
    • Make to order
    • Make to stock
    • Purchase to order
    • Increase number of process instances processed successfully end to end
    • Increase number of instances processed in time
    • Increase degree of process automation
    • Speed up cycle times of supply chain processes
    • Reduce number of process exceptions
    • Apply internal best practices across organizational units

    3.2.3 Discover process optimization opportunities

    1-2 hours

    1. Use tab 3.1 Optimization Priorities and tab 2.2 Bus Proc Change Tolerance to review process optimization opportunities.
    2. Use tab 3.2 Optimization Initiatives to answer the following questions in the Capabilities and Features Evaluation area to answer the following questions:
      • List underperforming capabilities around process.
      • Answer the following:
        • What is the state of the current processes?
        • Is there an opportunity for process improvement?
        • What are some optimization initiatives that could be undertaken in this area?

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    The image shows a box with text in it, titled Processes Optimization.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Integration provides long-term usability

    Balance the need for secure, compliant data availability with organizational agility.

    The benefits of integration

    • The largest benefit is the extended use of data. The ERP data can be used in the enterprise-level business intelligence suite rather than the application-specific analytics.
    • Enhanced data security. Integrated approaches lend themselves to auditable processes such as sign-on and limit the email movement of data.
    • Regulatory compliance. Large multi-site organizations have many layers of regulation. A clear understanding of where orders, deliveries, and payments were made streamlines the audit process.

    The challenges of integration

    • Extending a single instance ERP to multiple sites. The challenge for data management is the same as any SaaS application. The connection and data replication present challenges.
    • Combining data from equally high-volume systems. For Workday it is recommended that one instance is set to primary and all other sites are read-only to maintain data integrity.
    • Incorporating data from the separate system(s). The proprietary and locked-in nature of the data collection and definitions for ERP systems often limit the movement of data between separate systems.

    Common integration and consolidation scenarios

    Financial Consolidation Data Backup Synchronization Across Sites Legacy Consolidation
    • Financial consolidation requires a holistic view of data format and accounting schedules
    • Problem: Controlling financial documentation across geographic regions. Most companies are required to report in each region where they maintain a presence. Stakeholders and senior management also need a holistic view. This leads to significant strain on the financial department to consolidate both revenue and budget allocations for cross-site projects across the various geographic locations on a regular basis.
    • Solution: For enterprises with a single vendor or Workday-only portfolios, Workday can offer integration tools. For those needing to integrate with other ERPs the use of a connector may be required to send financial data to the main system. The format and accounting calendar for transactions should match the primary ERP system to allow consolidation. The local specific format should be a role-based customization at the level of the site’s specific instance.
    • Use a data center as the main repository to ensure all geographic locations have equal access to the necessary data.
    • Problem: ERP systems generate high volumes of data. Most systems have a defined schedule of back-up during off-hours. Multi-instance brings additional issues through lack of defined off-hours, higher volume of data, and the potential for cross-site or instance data relationships. This leads to headaches for both the Database Administrator and Business Analysts.
    • Solution: The best solution is an offsite data center with high availability. This may include cloud storage or hosted data centers. Regardless of where the data is stored, centralize the data and replicate to each site. Ensure that the data center can mirror the database and Binary Large Object (BLOB) storage that exists for each site.
    • Set up synchronization schedules based on data usage, not site location.
    • Problem: Providing access to up-to-date transactions requires copying of both contextual information (permissions, timestamp, location, history) and the transaction itself across multiple sites to allow local copies to be used for analysis and audits. The sheer volume of information makes timely synchronization difficult.
    • Solution: Not all data needs to be synchronized in a timely fashion. In Workday, administrators can use NetWeaver to maintain and alter global data synchronization through the Master Data Management module. Permissions can be given to users to perform on-demand synchronization of data attached to that user.
    • Carefully define older transactions. Only active transactions should be brought in the ERP. Send older data to storage.
    • Problem: Subsidiaries and acquired companies often have a Tier 2 ERP product. Prior to fully consolidating the processes, many enterprises will want to migrate data to their ERP system to build compliance and audit trails. Migration of data often breaks historical linkages between transactions.
    • Solution: Workday offers tools to integrate data across applications that can be used as part of a data migration strategy. The process of data migration should be combined with data warehousing to ensure a cost-effective process. For most enterprises, the lack of experience in data migration will necessitate the use of consultants and Independent Software Vendors (ISV).

    For more information: Implement a Multi-site ERP

    3.2.4 Discover integration optimization opportunities

    1-2 hours

    1. Use tab 3.2 Optimization Initiatives to answer the following questions in the Integration Evaluation area:
      1. Are there some areas where integration could be improved?
      2. Is there an opportunity for process improvement?
      3. What are some optimization initiatives that could be undertaken in this area?

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    The image shows a box with text in it, titled Integration Evaluation.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Use a data strategy that fixes the enterprise-wide data management issues

    Your data management must allow for flexibility and scalability for future needs.

    IT has several concerns around ERP data and wide dissemination of that data across sites. Large organizations can benefit from building a data warehouse or at least adopting some of the principles of data warehousing. The optimal way to deal with the issue of integration is to design a metadata-driven data warehouse that acts as a central repository for all ERP data. This serves as the storage facility for millions of transactions, formatted to allow analysis and comparison.

    Key considerations:

    • Technical: At what stage does data move to the warehouse? Can processes be automated to dump data or to do a scheduled data movement?
    • Process: Data integration requires some level of historical context for all data. Ensure that all data has multiple metadata tags to future-proof the data.
    • People: Who will be accessing the data and what are the key items that users will need to adapt to the data warehouse process?

    Info-Tech Insight

    Data warehouse solutions can be expensive. See Info-Tech’s Build a Data Warehouse on a Solid Foundation for guidance on what options are available to meet your budget and data needs.

    Optimizing Workday data, additional considerations

    Data Quality Management Effective Data Governance Data-Centric Integration Strategy Extensible Data Warehousing
    • Prevention is 10x cheaper than remediation. Stop fixing data quality with band-aid solutions and start fixing at the source of the problem.
    • Data quality is unique to each business unit and requires tolerance, not perfection. If the data allows the business to operate at the desired level, don’t waste time fixing data that may not need to be fixed.
    • Implement a set of data quality initiatives that are aligned with overall business objectives and aimed at addressing data practices and the data itself.
    • Develop a prioritized data quality improvement project roadmap and long-term improvement strategy.
    • Build related practices with more confidence and less risk after achieving an appropriate level of data quality.
    • Data governance enables data-driven insight. Think of governance as a structure for making better use of data.
    • Collaboration is critical. The business may own the data, but IT understands the data. Data governance will not work unless the business and IT work together.
    • Data governance powers the organization up the data value chain through policies and procedures, master data management, data quality, and data architecture.
    • Create a roadmap to prioritize initiatives and delineate responsibilities among data stewards, data owners, and the data governance steering committee.
    • Ensure buy-in from business and IT stakeholders. Communicate initiatives to end users and executives to reduce resistance.
    • Every enterprise application involves data integration. Any change in the application and database ecosystem requires you to solve a data integration problem.
    • Data integration is becoming more and more critical for downstream functions of data management and for business operations to be successful. Poor integration holds back these critical functions.
    • Build your data integration practice with a firm foundation in governance and a reference architecture. Ensure that your process is scalable and sustainable.
    • Support the flow of data through the organization and meet the organization’s requirements for data latency, availability, and relevancy.
    • Data availability must be frequently reviewed and repositioned to continue to grow with the business.
    • A data warehouse is a project, but successful data warehousing is a program. An effective data warehouse requires planning beyond the technology implementation.
    • Governance, not technology, needs to be the core support system for enabling a data warehouse program.
    • Leverage an approach that focuses on constructing a data warehouse foundation that can address a combination of operational, tactical, and ad hoc business needs.
    • Invest time and effort to put together pre-project governance to inform and guide your data warehouse implementation.
    • Select the most suitable architecture pattern to ensure the data warehouse is “built right” at the very beginning.

    Build Your Data Quality Program

    Establish Data Governance

    Build a Data Integration Strategy

    Build an Extensible Data Warehouse Foundation

    3.2.5 Discover data optimization opportunities

    1-2 hours

    1. Use your 2.1 APA survey and/or tab 2.2 Vendor & Prod Sat to better understand issues related to data.
    • Note: Data issues happen for a number of reasons:
      • Poor underlying data in the system
      • More than one source of truth
      • Inability to consolidate data
      • Inability to measure KPIs (key performance indicators) effectively
      • Reporting that is cumbersome or non-existent
  • Use tab 3.2 Optimization Initiatives to answer the following questions in the Data Evaluation area:
    • What are some underlying issues?
    • Is there an opportunity for data improvement?
    • What are some optimization initiatives that could be undertaken in this area?

    • Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    The image shows a box with text in it, titled 3.2.5 Data Evaluation.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Content for New section Tag Goes HereThe image shows a graphic, with a bar graph at the bottom, showing Primary Reason for Leaving Workday Human Capital Management.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The number one reason organizations leave Workday is because of cost. Do not be strong-armed into a contract you do not feel comfortable with. Do your homework, know your leverage points, be fully prepared for cost negotiations, use their competition to your advantage, and get support – such as Info-Tech’s vendor management resources and team.

    Approach contracts and pricing strategically

    Don’t go into contract negotiation blind.

    • Understand the vendor – year-end, market strategy, and competitive position.
    • Take the time to understand the contract. including contract details such as length of the contract, full-service equivalent (FSE, employee count,) innovation fees, modules included, and renewal clauses.
    • Be fully prepared to take a proactive approach to cost negotiations.
      • Use Info-Tech’s vendor management services to support you.
      • Go in prepared.
      • Use your leverage points – FSE count, Module Bundles, CPI & Innovation Fees.
      • Use competition to your advantage.

    Since 2007, Workday has been steadily growing its market share and footprint in human capital management, finance, and student information systems.

    Organizations considering additional modules or undergoing contract renewal need to gain insight into areas of leverage and other relevant vendor information.

    Key issues that occur include pricing transparency and contractual flexibility on terms and conditions. Adequate planning and communication need to be taken into consideration before entering into any agreement.

    3.2.6 Discover Workday cost-saving opportunities

    1-2 hours

    1. Use tab 1.5 Current Costs, as an input for this exercise. Another great resource is Info-Tech’s Workday vendor management resources which you can use to help understand cost-saving strategies.
    2. Use tab 3.2 Optimization Initiatives Costs Evaluation area to list cost savings initiatives and opportunities.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    The image shows a box with text in it, titled 3.2.6 Costs Evaluation.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Other optimization opportunities

    There are many opportunities to improve your Workday portfolio. Choose the ones that are right for your business.

    • Artificial intelligence (AI) (and management of the AI lifecycle)
    • Machine learning (ML)
    • Augment business interactions
    • Automatically execute sales pipelines
    • Process mining
    • Workday application monitoring
    • Be aware of the Workday product roadmap
    • Implement and take advantage of Workday tools and product offerings

    Phase 4

    Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    Phase 1

    1.1 Identify Stakeholders and Build Your Optimization Team

    1.2 Build an ERP Strategy Model

    1.3 Inventory Current System State

    1.4 Define Optimization Timeframe

    1.5 Understand Workday Costs

    Phase 2

    2.1 Assess Workday Capabilities

    2.2 Review Your Satisfaction With the Vendor/Product and Willingness for Change

    Phase 3

    3.1 Prioritize Optimization Opportunities

    3.2 Discover Optimization Initiatives

    Phase 4

    4.1 Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Review the different options to solve the identified pain points
    • Build out a roadmap showing how you will get to those solutions
    • Build a communication plan that includes the stakeholder presentation

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Primary stakeholders in each value stream supported by the ERP
    • ERP Applications support team

    Get the Most Out of Your Workday

    Step 4.1

    4.1 Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    Activities

    4.1.1 Evaluate Optimization Initiatives

    4.1.2 Prioritize Your Workday Initiatives

    4.1.3 Build a Roadmap

    4.1.4 Build a Visual Roadmap

    Next steps

    Step 4.1

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Review the different options to solve the identified pain points then build out a roadmap of how to get to that solution.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Primary stakeholders in each value stream supported by the ERP
    • ERP Applications support team

    Outcomes of this step

    • A strategic direction is set
    • An initial roadmap is laid out

    Evaluate your optimization initiatives and determine next steps to build out your optimization roadmap

    The image shows a chart titled Value Drivers, with specific categories and criteria listed along the top as headings. The rows below the headings are blank.

    Activity 4.1.1 Evaluate optimization Initiatives

    1 hour

    1. Evaluate your optimization initiatives from tab 3.2, Optimization Initiatives.
    2. Complete Value Drivers:
    • Relevance to Organizational Goals and Objectives
    • Applications Portfolio Assessment Survey:
      • Impact: Number of Users, Importance to Role
      • Current State: Satisfaction With Features, Usability, and Data Quality.
    • Value Drivers: Increase Revenue, Decrease Costs, Enhanced Services, or Reach Customers.
    • Additional Factors:
      • Current to Future Risk Profile
      • Number of Departments to Benefit
      • Importance to Stakeholder Relations
  • Complete Effort and Cost Estimations:
    • Resources: Do we have resources available and the skillset?
    • Cost
    • Overall Effort Rating
  • Gut Check: “Is it achievable? Have we done it or something similar before? Are we willing to invest in it?“
  • Decision to Proceed
  • Next Steps

    • Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Activity 4.1.2 Determine your optimization roadmap building blocks

    1 hour

    Optimization initiatives: Determine which if any to proceed with.

    1. Identify initiatives.
    2. For each item on your roadmap assign an owner who will be accountable to the completion of the roadmap item.
    3. Wherever possible, assign a start date, month, or quarter. The more specific you can be the better.
    4. Identify completion dates to create a sense of urgency. If you are struggling with start dates, it can help to start with a finish date and “back in” to a start date based on estimated efforts.
    5. Include periphery tasks such as communication strategy.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    Note: Your roadmap should be treated as a living document that is updated and shared with the stakeholders on a regular schedule.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Activity 4.1.3 – Build a visual Workday optimization roadmap (optional)

    1 hour

    For some, a visual representation of a roadmap is easier to comprehend.

    Consider taking the roadmap built in 4.1.2 and creating a visual roadmap.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook.

    The image shows a chart that tracks Initiative and Owner across multiple years.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your Workday Workbook

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Get the Most Out of Your Workday

    ERP technology is critical to facilitating an organization’s flow of information across business units. It allows for seamless integration of systems and creates a holistic view of the enterprise to support decision making. ERP implementation should not be a one-and-done exercise. There needs to be ongoing optimization to enable business processes and optimal organizational results.

    Get the Most Out of Your Workday allows organizations to proactively implement continuous assessment and optimization of their enterprise resource planning system, including:

    • Alignment and prioritization of key business and technology drivers.
    • Identification of processes, including classification and gap analysis.
    • Measurement of user satisfaction across key departments.
    • Improved vendor relations.
    • Data quality initiatives.

    This formal Workday optimization initiative will drive business-IT alignment, identify IT automation priorities, and dig deep into continuous process improvement.

    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

    Research Contributors

    Ben Dickie

    Research Practice Lead

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Ben Dickie is a Research Practice Lead at Info-Tech Research Group. His areas of expertise include customer experience management, CRM platforms, and digital marketing. He has also led projects pertaining to enterprise collaboration and unified communications.

    Scott Bickley

    Practice Lead and Principal Research

    Director Info-Tech Research Group

    Scott Bickley is a Practice Lead and Principal Research Director at Info-Tech Research Group focused on vendor management and contract review. He also has experience in the areas of IT asset management (ITAM), software asset management (SAM), and technology procurement along with a deep background in operations, engineering, and quality systems management.

    Andy Neil

    Practice Lead, Applications

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Andy is a Senior Research Director, Data Management and BI, at Info-Tech Research Group. He has over 15 years of experience in managing technical teams, information architecture, data modeling, and enterprise data strategy. He is an expert in enterprise data architecture, data integration, data standards, data strategy, big data, and the development of industry standard data models.

    Bibliography

    “9 product prioritization frameworks for product managers.” Roadmunk, n.d. Accessed 15 May 2022.

    Armel, Kate. "New Article: Data-Driven Estimation, Management Lead to High Quality." QSM: Quantitative Software Management, 14 May 2013. Accessed 4 Feb. 2021.

    Collins, George, et al., “Connecting Small Businesses in the US.” Deloitte Commissioned by Google, 2017. Web.

    Epizitone, Ayogeboh, and Oludayo O. Olugbara. "Critical Success Factors for ERP System Implementation to Support Financial Functions." Academy of Accounting and Financial Studies Journal, vol. 23, no. 6, 2019. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021

    Gheorghiu, Gabriel. "The ERP Buyer’s Profile for Growing Companies." Selecthub, 2018. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

    Karlsson, Johan. "Product Backlog Grooming Examples and Best Practices." Perforce, 18 May 2018. Accessed 4 Feb. 2021.

    Lauchlan, Stuart. “Workday accelerates into fiscal 2023 with a strong year end as cloud adoption gets a COVID-bounce.” diginomica, 1 March 2022. Web.

    "Maximizing the Emotional Economy: Behavioral Economics." Gallup, n.d. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

    Noble, Simon-Peter. “Workday: A High-Quality Business That's Fairly Valued.” Seeking Alpha, 8 Apr. 2019. Web.

    Norelus, Ernese, Sreeni Pamidala, and Oliver Senti. "An Approach to Application Modernization: Discovery and Assessment Phase," Medium, 24 Feb. 2020. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

    "Process Frameworks." APQC, n.d. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

    Saxena, Deepak, and Joe Mcdonagh. "Evaluating ERP Implementations: The Case for a Lifecycle-based Interpretive Approach." The Electronic Journal of Information Systems Evaluation, vol. 22, no. 1, 2019, pp. 29-37. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

    “Workday Enterprise Management Cloud Product Scorecard.” SoftwareReviews, May 2022. Web.

    “Workday Meets Growing Customer Demand with Record Number of Deployments and Industry-Leading Customer Satisfaction Score.” Workday, Inc., 7 June 2021. Web.

    Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}331|cart{/j2store}
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    • Parent Category Name: Project Management Office
    • Parent Category Link: /project-management-office
    • As an IT leader, you oversee a project environment in which the organizational demand for new products, services, and enhancements far outweighs IT’s resource capacity to adequately deliver on everything.
    • As a result, project throughput suffers. IT starts a lot of projects, but has constant difficulties delivering the bulk of them on time, on budget, in scope, and of high quality. What’s more, many of the projects that consume IT’s time are of questionable value to the business.
    • You need a project portfolio management (PPM) strategy to help bring order to IT’s project activity. With the right PPM strategy, you can ensure that you’re driving the throughput of the best projects and maximizing stakeholder satisfaction with IT.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • IT leaders commonly conflate PPM and project management, falsely believing that they already have a PPM strategy via their project management playbook. While the tactical focus of project management can help ensure that individual projects are effectively planned, executed, and closed, it is no supplement for the insight into “the big picture” that a PPM strategy can provide.
    • Many organizations falter at PPM by mistaking a set of processes for a strategy. While processes are no doubt important, without an end in mind – such as that provided by a deliberate strategy – they inevitably devolve into inertia or confusion.
    • Executive layer buy-in is a critical prerequisite for the success of a PPM strategy. Without it, any efforts to reconcile supply and demand, and improve the strategic value of IT’s project activity, could be quashed by irresponsible, non-compliant stakeholders.

    Impact and Result

    • Manage the portfolio as more than just the sum of its parts. Create a coherent strategy to maximize the sum of values that projects deliver as a whole – as a project portfolio, rather than a collection of individual projects.
    • Get to value early. Info-Tech’s methodology tackles one of PPM’s most pressing challenges upfront by helping you to articulate a strategy and get executive buy-in for it before you define your process goals. When senior management understands why a PPM strategy is necessary and of value to them, the path to implementation is much more stable.
    • Create PPM processes you can sustain. Translate your PPM strategy into specific, tangible near-term and long-term goals, which are realized through a suite of project portfolio management processes tailored to your organization and its culture.

    Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should develop a project portfolio management 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:

    • Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy – Executive Brief
    • Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy – Phases 1-3

    1. Get executive buy-in for your PPM strategy

    Choose the right PPM strategy for your organization and get executive buy-in before you start to set PPM process goals.

    • Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy – Phase 1: Get Executive Buy-In for Your PPM Strategy
    • PPM High-Level Supply-Demand Calculator
    • PPM Strategic Plan Template
    • PPM Strategy-Process Goals Translation Matrix Template

    2. Align PPM processes to your strategic goals

    Use the advice and tools in this phase to align the PPM processes that make up the infrastructure around projects with your new PPM strategy.

    • Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy – Phase 2: Align PPM Processes to Your Strategic Goals
    • PPM Strategy Development Tool

    3. Complete your PPM strategic plan

    Refine your PPM strategic plan with inputs from the previous phases by adding a cost-benefit analysis and PPM tool recommendation.

    • Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy – Phase 3: Complete Your PPM Strategic Plan
    • Project Portfolio Analyst / PMO Analyst
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Develop a Project Portfolio 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 Get Executive Buy-In for Your PPM Strategy

    The Purpose

    Choose the right PPM strategy for your organization and ensure executive buy-in.

    Set process goals to address PPM strategic expectations and steer the PPM strategic plan.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A right-sized PPM strategy complete with executive buy-in for it.

    A prioritized list of PPM process goals.

    Activities

    1.1 Assess leadership mandate.

    1.2 Determine potential resource capacity.

    1.3 Create a project inventory.

    1.4 Prepare to communicate your PPM strategy to key stakeholders.

    1.5 Translate each strategic goal into process goals.

    1.6 Set metrics and preliminary targets for PPM process goals.

    Outputs

    Choice of PPM strategy and the leadership mandate

    Analysis of current project capacity

    Analysis of current project demand

    PPM Strategic Plan – Executive Brief

    PPM strategy-aligned process goals

    Metrics and long-term targets for PPM process goals

    2 Align PPM Processes to Your Strategic Goals

    The Purpose

    Examine your current-state PPM processes and create a high-level description of the target-state process for each of the five PPM processes within Info-Tech’s PPM framework.

    Build a sound business case for implementing the new PPM strategy by documenting roles and responsibilities for key PPM activities as well as the time costs associated with them.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Near-term and long-term goals as well as an organizationally specific wireframe for your PPM processes.

    Time cost assumptions for your proposed processes to ensure sustainability.

    Activities

    2.1 Develop and refine the project intake, prioritization, and approval process.

    2.2 Develop and refine the resource management process.

    2.3 Develop and refine the portfolio reporting process.

    2.4 Develop and refine the project closure process

    2.5 Develop and refine the benefits realization process.

    Outputs

    Process capability level

    Current-state PPM process description

    Retrospective examination of the current-state PPM process

    Action items to achieve the target states

    Time cost of the process at current and target states

    3 Complete Your PPM Strategic Plan

    The Purpose

    Perform a PPM tool analysis in order to determine the right tool to support your processes.

    Estimate the total cost-in-use of managing the project portfolio, as well as the estimated benefits of an optimized PPM strategy.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A right-sized tool selection to help support your PPM strategy.

    A PPM strategy cost-benefit analysis.

    Activities

    3.1 Right-size the PPM tools for your processes.

    3.2 Conduct a cost-benefit analysis of implementing the new PPM strategy.

    3.3 Define roles and responsibilities for the new processes.

    3.4 Refine and consolidate the near-term action items into a cohesive plan.

    Outputs

    Recommendation for a PPM tool

    Cost-benefit analysis

    Roles and responsibilities matrix for each PPM process

    An implementation timeline for your PPM strategy

    Further reading

    Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy

    Drive IT project throughput by throttling resource capacity.

    Analyst Perspective

    “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” – Sun Tzŭ

    "Organizations typically come to project portfolio management (PPM) with at least one of two misconceptions: (1) that PPM is synonymous with project management and (2) that a collection of PPM processes constitutes a PPM strategy.

    Both foundations are faulty: project management and PPM are separate disciplines with distinct goals and processes, and a set of processes do not comprise a strategy – they should flow from a strategy, not precede one. When built upon these foundations, the benefits of PPM go unrealized, as the means (i.e. project and portfolio processes) commonly eclipse the ends of a PPM strategy – e.g. a portfolio better aligned with business goals, improved project throughput, increased stakeholder satisfaction, and so on.

    Start with the end in mind: articulate a PPM strategy that is truly project portfolio in nature, i.e. focused on the whole portfolio and not just the individual parts. Then, let your PPM strategy guide your process goals and help to drive successful outcomes, project after project." (Barry Cousins, Senior Director of Research, PMO Practice, Info-Tech Research Group)

    Our understanding of the problem

    This Research Is Designed For:

    • CIOs who want to maximize IT’s fulfillment of both business strategic goals and operational needs.
    • CIOs who want to better manage the business and project sponsors’ expectations and satisfaction.
    • CIOs, PMO directors, and portfolio managers who want a strategy to set the best projects for the highest chance of success.

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Get C-level buy-in on a strategy for managing the project portfolio and clarify their expectations on how it should be managed.
    • Draft strategy-aligned, high-level project portfolio management process description.
    • Put together a strategic plan for improving PPM processes to reclaim wasted project capacity and increase business satisfaction of IT.

    This Research Will Also Assist:

    • Steering committee and C-suite management who want to maximize IT’s value to business.
    • Project sponsors who seek clarity and fairness on pushing their projects through a myriad of priorities and objectives.
    • CIOs, PMO directors, and portfolio managers who want to enable data-driven decisions from the portfolio owners.

    This Research Will Help Them:

    • Optimize IT’s added value to the business through project delivery.
    • Provide clarity on how IT’s project portfolio should be managed and the expectations for its management.
    • Improve project portfolio visibility by making trustworthy project portfolio data available, with which to steer the portfolio.

    Executive Summary

    Situation

    • As CIO, there are too many projects and not enough resource capacity to deliver projects on time, on budget, and in scope with high quality.
    • Prioritizing projects against one another is difficult in the face of conflicting priorities and agenda; therefore, projects with dubious value/benefits consume resource capacity.

    Complication

    • Not all IT projects carry a direct value to business; IT is accountable for keeping the lights on and it consumes a significant amount of resources.
    • Business and project sponsors approve projects without considering the scarcity of resource capacity and are frustrated when the projects fail to deliver or linger in the backlog.

    Resolution

    • Create a coherent strategy to maximize the total value that projects deliver as a whole portfolio, rather than a collection of individual projects.
    • Ensure that the steering committee or senior executive layer buys into the strategy by helping them understand why the said strategy is necessary, and more importantly, why the strategy is valuable to them.
    • Translate the strategic expectations to specific, tangible goals, which are realized through a suite of project portfolio management processes tailored to your organization and its culture.
    • Putting into place people, processes, and tools that are sustainable and manageable, plus a communication strategy to maintain the stakeholder buy-in.

    Info-Tech Insight

    1. Time is money; therefore, the portfolio manager is an accountant of time. It is the portfolio manager’s responsibility to provide the project portfolio owners with reliable data and close the loop on portfolio decisions.
    2. Business satisfaction is driven by delivering projects that align to and maximize business value. Use Info-Tech’s method for developing a PPM strategy and synchronize its definition of “best projects” with yours.

    Projects that deliver on strategic goals of the business is the #1 driver of business satisfaction for IT

    Info-Tech’s CIO Business Vision Survey (N=21,367) has identified a direct correlation between IT project success and overall business satisfaction with IT.

    Comparative rankings of IT services in two columns 'Reported Importance' and 'Actual Importance' with arrows showing where each service moved to in the 'Actual Importance' ranking. The highlighted move is 'Projects' from number 10 in 'Reported' to number 1 in 'Actual'. 'Reported' rankings from 1 to 12 are 'Network Infrastructure', 'Service Desk', 'Business Applications', 'Data Quality', Devices', 'Analytical Capability', 'Client-Facing Technology', 'Work Orders', 'Innovation Leadership', 'Projects', 'IT Policies', and 'Requirements Gathering'. 'Actual' rankings from 1 to 12 are 'Projects', 'Work Orders', 'Innovation Leadership', 'Business Applications', 'Requirements Gathering', 'Service Desk', 'Client-Facing Technology', 'Network Infrastructure', 'Analytical Capability', 'Data Quality', 'IT Policies', and 'Devices'.

    Reported Importance: Initially, when CIOs were asked to rank the importance of IT services, respondents ranked “projects” low on the list – 10 out of a possible 12.

    Actual Importance: Despite this low “reported importance,” of those organizations that were “satisfied” to “fully satisfied” with IT, the service that had the strongest correlation to high business satisfaction was “projects,” i.e. IT’s ability to help plan, support, and execute projects and initiatives that help the business achieve its strategic goals.

    On average, executives perceive IT as being poorly aligned with business strategy

    Info-Tech’s CIO Business Vision Survey data highlights the importance of IT projects in supporting the business achieve its strategic goals. However, Info-Tech’s CEO-CIO Alignment Survey (N=124) data indicates that CEOs perceive IT to be poorly aligned to business’ strategic goals:

    • 43% of CEOs believe that business goals are going unsupported by IT.
    • 60% of CEOs believe that improvement is required around IT’s understanding of business goals.
    • 80% of CIOs/CEOs are misaligned on the target role for IT.
    • 30% of business stakeholders* are supporters of their IT departments.
      • (Source: Info-Tech CIO/CEO Alignment Diagnostics, * N=32,536)

    Efforts to deliver on projects are largely hampered by causes of project failure outside a project manager’s control

    The most recent data from the Project Management Institute (PMI) shows that more projects are meeting their original goals and business intent and less projects are being deemed failures. However, at the same time, more projects are experiencing scope creep. Scope creeps result in schedule and cost overrun, which result in dissatisfied project sponsors, stakeholders, and project workers.

    Graph of data from Project Management Institute comparing projects from 2015 to 2017 that 'Met original goals/business intent', 'Experienced scope creep', and were 'Deemed failures'. Projects from the first two categories went up in 2017, while projects that were deemed failures went down.

    Meanwhile, the primary causes of project failures remain largely unchanged. Interestingly, most of these primary causes can be traced to sources outside of a project manager’s control, either entirely or in part. As a result, project management tactics and processes are limited in adequately addressing them.

    Relative rank

    Primary cause of project failure

    2015

    2016

    2017

    Trend
    Change in organization's priorities 1st 1st 1st Stable
    Inaccurate requirements gathering 2nd 3rd 2nd Stable
    Change in project objectives 3rd 2nd 3rd Stable
    Inadequate vision/goal for project 6th 5th 4th Rising
    Inadequate/poor communication 5th 7th 5th Stable
    Poor change management 11th 9th 6th Rising
    (Source: Project Management Institute, Pulse of the Profession, 2015-2017)

    Project portfolio management (PPM) can improve business alignment of projects and reduce chance of project failure

    PPM is about “doing the right things.”

    The PMI describes PPM as:

    Interrelated organizational processes by which an organization evaluates, selects, prioritizes, and allocates its limited internal resources to best accomplish organizational strategies consistent with its vision, mission, and values. (PMI, Standard for Portfolio Management, 3rd ed.)

    Selecting and prioritizing projects with the strongest alignment to business strategy goals and ensuring that resources are properly allocated to deliver them, enable IT to:

    1. Improve business satisfaction and their perception of IT’s alignment with the business.
    2. Better engage the business and the project customers.
    3. Minimize the risk of project failure due to changing organizational/ project vision, goals, and objectives.

    "In today’s competitive business environment, a portfolio management process improves the linkage between corporate strategy and the selection of the ‘right’ projects for investment. It also provides focus, helping to ensure the most efficient and effective use of available resources." (Lou Pack, PMP, Senior VP, ICF International (PMI, 2015))

    PPM is a common area of shortcomings for IT, with much room for improvement

    Info-Tech’s IT Management & Governance Survey (N=879) shows that PPM tends to be regarded as neither an effective nor an important process amongst IT organizations.

    Two deviation from median charts highlighting Portfolio Management's ranking compared to other IT processes in 'Effectiveness scores' and 'Importance scores'. PPM ranks 37th out of 45 in Effectiveness and 33rd out of 45 in Importance.

    55% ... of IT organizations believe that their PPM processes are neither effective nor important.

    21% ... of IT organizations reported having no one responsible or accountable for PPM.

    62% ... of projects in organizations effective in PPM met/exceeded the expected ROI (PMI, 2015).

    In addition to PPM’s benefits, improving PPM processes presents an opportunity for getting ahead of the curve in the industry.

    Info-Tech’s methodology for developing a PPM strategy delivers extraordinary value, fast

    Our methodology is designed to tackle your hardest challenge first to deliver the highest-value part of the deliverable. For developing a PPM strategy, the biggest challenge is to get the buy-in of the executive layer.

    "Without senior management participation, PPM doesn’t work, and the organization is likely to end up with, or return to, a squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease mindset for all those involved." (Mark Price Perry, Business Driven Project Portfolio Management)

    In the first step of the blueprint, you will be guided through the following steps:

    1. Choose the right PPM strategy: driven by the executives, supported by management.
    2. Objectively assess your current project portfolio with minimal effort to build a case for the PPM strategy.
    3. Engage the executive layer to get the critical prerequisite of a PPM strategy: their buy-in.

    A PPM strategic plan is the end deliverable of this blueprint. In the first step, download the pre-filled template with content that represents the most common case. Then, throughout the blueprint, customize with your data.

    Use this blueprint to develop, or refine, a PPM strategy that works for your organization

    Get buy-in for PPM strategy from decision makers.

    Buy-in from the owners of project portfolio (Steering Committee, C-suite management, etc.) is a critical prerequisite for any PPM strategy. This blueprint will give you the tools and templates to help you make your case and win the buy-in of portfolio owners.

    Connect strategic expectations to PPM process goals.

    This blueprint offers a methodology to translate the broad aim of PPM to practical, tactical goals of the five core PPM processes, as well as how to measure the results. Our methodology is supported with industry-leading frameworks, best practices, and our insider research.

    Develop your PPM processes.

    This blueprint takes you through a series of steps to translate the process goals into a high-level process description, as well as a business case and a roadmap for implementing the new PPM processes.

    Refine your PPM processes.

    Our methodology is also equally as applicable for making your existing PPM processes better, and help you draft a roadmap for improvement with well-defined goals, roles, and responsibilities.

    Info-Tech’s PPM model consists of five core processes

    There are five core processes in Info-Tech’s thought model for PPM.

    Info-Tech's Process Model detailing the steps and their importance in project portfolio management. Step 3: 'Status and Progress Reporting' sits above the others as a process of importance throughout the model. In the 'Intake' phase of the model are Step 1: 'Intake, Approval, and Prioritization' and Step 2: 'Resource Management'. In the 'Execution' phase is 'Project Management', the main highlighted section, and a part of Step 3, the overarching 'Status and Progress Reporting'. In the 'Closure' phase of the model are Step 4: 'Project Closure' and Step 5: 'Benefits Tracking'.

    These processes create an infrastructure around projects, which aims to enable:

    1. Initiation of the “best” projects with the right resources and project information.
    2. Timely and trustworthy reporting to facilitate the flow of information for better decision making.
    3. Proper closure of projects, releasing resources, and managing benefits realization.

    PPM has many moving pieces. To ensure that all of these processes work in harmony, you need a PPM strategy.

    De-couple project management from PPM to break down complexity and create flexibility

    Tailor project management (PM) processes to fit your projects.

    Info-Tech’s PPM thought model enables you to manage your project portfolio independent of your PM methodology or capability. Projects interact with PPM via:

    • A project charter that authorizes the use of resources and defines project benefits.
    • Status reports that feed up-to-date, trustworthy data to your project portfolio.
    • Acceptance of deliverables that enable proper project closure and benefits reporting.

    Info-Tech’s PPM strategy is applicable whether you use Agile, waterfall, or anything in between for PM.

    The process model from the previous page but with project management processes overlaid. The 'Intake' phase is covered by 'Project Charter'. The 'Execution' phase, or 'Project Management' is covered by 'Status report'. The 'Closure' phase is covered by 'Deliverable Acceptance'.

    Learn about project management approach for small projects in Info-Tech’s Tailor PM Processes to Fit Your Projects blueprint.

    Sample of the Info-Tech blueprint 'Tailor PM Processes to Fit Your Projects'.

    Info-Tech’s approach to PPM is informed by industry best practices and rooted in practical insider research

    Info-Tech uses PMI and ISACA frameworks for areas of this research.

    Logo for 'Project Management Institute (PMI)'.' Logo for 'COBIT 5 an ISACA Framework'.
    PMI’s Standard for Portfolio Management, 3rd ed. is the leading industry framework, proving project portfolio management best practices and process guidelines. COBIT 5 is the leading framework for the governance and management of enterprise IT.

    In addition to industry-leading frameworks, our best-practice approach is enhanced by the insights and guidance from our analysts, industry experts, and our clients.

    Logo for 'Info-Tech Research Group'.

    33,000+ Our peer network of over 33,000 happy clients proves the effectiveness of our research.

    1000+ Our team conducts 1,000+ hours of primary and secondary research to ensure that our approach is enhanced by best practices.

    Re-position IT as the “facilitator of business projects” for PPM success

    CASE STUDY

    Industry: Construction
    Source: Info-Tech Client

    Chaos in the project portfolio

    At first, there were no less than 14 teams of developers, each with their own methodologies and processes. Changes to projects were not managed. Only 35% of the projects were completed on time.

    Business drives, IT facilitates

    Anyone had the right to ask for something; however, converting ideas to a formal project demand required senior leadership within a business division getting on board with the idea.

    The CIO and senior leadership decided that projects, previously assigned to IT, were to be owned and driven by the business, as the projects are undertaken to serve its needs and rarely IT’s own. The rest of the organization understood that the business, not IT, was accountable for prioritizing project work: IT was re-positioned as a facilitator of business projects. While it was a long process, the result speaks for itself: 75% of projects were now being completed on time.

    Balancing the target mix of the project portfolio

    What about maintaining and feeding the IT infrastructure? The CIO reserved 40% of IT project capacity for “keeping the lights on,” and 20% for reactive, unplanned activities, with an aim to lower this percentage. With the rest of the time, IT facilitated business projects

    Three key drivers of project priority

    1. Does the project meet the overall company goals and objectives?
      “If they don't, we must ask why we are bothering with it.”
    2. Does the project address a regulatory or compliance need?
      “Half of our business is heavily regulated. We must focus on it.”
    3. Are there significant savings to be had?
      “Not soft; hard savings. Can we demonstrate that, after implementing this, can we see good hard results? And, can we measure it?”

    "Projects are dumped on IT, and the business abdicates responsibility. Flip that over, and say ‘that's your project’ and ‘how can we help you?’"

    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.

    A small monochrome icon of a wrench and screwdriver creating an X.

    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.

    A small monochrome icon depicting a person in front of a blank slide.

    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

    Develop a PPM strategy – project overview

    1. Get executive buy-in for your PPM strategy

    2. Align PPM processes to your strategic goals

    3. Complete your PPM strategic plan
    Supporting Tool icon

    Best-Practice Toolkit

    1.1 Choose the right PPM strategy for your organization

    1.2 Translate PPM strategy expectations to specific process goals

    2.1 Develop and refine project intake, prioritization, and resource management processes

    2.2 Develop and refine portfolio reporting, project closure, and benefits realization processes

    3.1 Select a right-sized PPM solution for supporting your new processes

    3.2 Finalize customizing your PPM Strategic Plan Template

    Guided Implementations
    • Scoping call: discuss current state of PPM and review strategy options.
    • How to wireframe realistic process goals, rooted in your PPM strategic expectations, that will be sustained by the organization.
    • Examine your current-state PPM process and create a high-level description of the target-state process for each of the five PPM processes (1-2 calls per each process).
    • Assess your PPM tool requirements to help support your processes.
    • Determine the costs and potential benefits of your PPM practice.
    Associated Activity icon

    Onsite Workshop

    		 Module 1:
    Set strategic expectations and realistic goals for the PPM strategy    		 Module 2:
    Develop and refine strategy-aligned PPM processes    		 Module 3:
    Compose your PPM strategic plan
    Phase 1 Outcome:
    • Analysis of the current state of PPM
    • Strategy-aligned goals and metrics for PPM processes
    		 Phase 2 Outcome:
    • PPM capability levels
    • High-level descriptions of near- and long-term target state
    		 Phase 3 Outcome:
    • PPM tool recommendations
    • Cost-benefit analysis
    • Customized PPM strategic plan

    Workshop overview

    Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Workshop Day 1

    Workshop Day 2

    Workshop Day 3

    Workshop Day 4

    Workshop Day 5
    Get leadership buy-in for PPM strategy Set PPM process goals and metrics with strategic expectations Develop and Refine PPM processes Develop and Refine PPM processes Complete the PPM strategic plan

    Activities
    • 1.1 Assess leadership mandate.
    • 1.2 Determine potential resource capacity.
    • 1.3 Create a project inventory.
    • 1.4 Communicate your PPM strategy to key stakeholders.
    • 2.1 Translate each strategic goal into process goals.
    • 2.2 Set metrics and preliminary targets for PPM process goals.
    • 3.1 Develop and refine the project intake, prioritization, and approval process.
    • 3.2 Develop and refine the resource management process.
    • 4.1 Develop and refine the portfolio reporting process.
    • 4.2 Develop and refine the project closure process.
    • 4.3 Develop and refine the benefits realization process.
    • 5.1 Right-size the PPM tools for your processes.
    • 5.2 Conduct a cost-benefit analysis of implementing the new PPM strategy.
    • 5.3 Define roles and responsibilities for the new processes.

    Deliverables
    1. Choice of PPM strategy and the leadership mandate
    2. Analysis of current project capacity
    3. Analysis of current project demand
    4. PPM Strategic Plan – Executive Brief
    1. PPM strategy-aligned process goals
    2. Metrics and long-term targets for PPM process goals
      For each of the five PPM processes:
    1. Process capability level
    2. Current-state PPM process description
    3. Retrospective examination of the current-state PPM process
    4. Action items to achieve the target states
    5. Time cost of the process at current and target states
    1. Recommendation for a PPM tool
    2. Cost-benefit analysis
    3. Roles and responsibilities matrix for each PPM process

    Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy

    PHASE 1

    Get Executive Buy-In for Your PPM Strategy

    Phase 1 outline

    Associated Activity icon 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: Get executive buy-in for your PPM strategy

    Proposed Time to Completion: 2 weeks
    Step 1.1: Choose the right PPM strategy Step 1.2: Translate strategic expectations to process goals
    Start with an analyst kick-off call:
    • Scoping call to discuss the current state of PPM and review strategy options.
    		 Work with an analyst to:
    • Discuss how to wireframe realistic process goals, rooted in your PPM strategic expectations, that will be sustained by the organization.
    Then complete these activities…
    • Execute a leadership mandate survey.
    • Perform a high-level supply/demand analysis.
    • Prepare an executive presentation to get strategy buy-in.
    		 Then complete these activities…
    • Develop realistic process goals based in your PPM strategic expectations.
    • Set metrics and preliminary targets for your high-priority PPM process goals.
    With these tools & templates:
    • PPM High-Level Supply/Demand Calculator
    • PPM Strategic Plan Template
    		 With these tools & templates:
    • PPM Strategy-Process Translation Matrix

    Phase 1 Results & Insights

    • Executive layer buy-in is a critical prerequisite for the success of a top-down PPM strategy. Ensure your executives are onboard before proceeding to implement your PPM strategy.

    Prepare to get to value early with step 1.1 of this blueprint

    The first step of this blueprint will help you define your PPM strategy and get executive buy-in for it using section one of Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    Where traditional models of consulting can take considerable amounts of time before delivering value to clients, Info-Tech’s methodology for developing a PPM strategy gets you to value fast.

    In the first step of this blueprint, you will define your PPM strategy and prepare an executive presentation to get buy-in for the strategy. The presentation can be prepared in just a few hours.

    • The activities in step 1.1 of this blueprint will help you customize the slides in section 1 of Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.
    • Section one of the Template will then serve as your presentation document.

    Once you have received buy-in for your PPM strategy, the remainder of this blueprint will help you customize section 2 of the Template.

    • Section 2 of the Template will communicate:
      • Your processes and process goals.
      • Your near-term and long-term action items for implementing the strategy.
      • Your PPM tool requirements.
      • The costs and benefits of your PPM strategy.

    Download Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    Sample of Info-Tech's 'PPM Strategic Plan Template.'

    Step 1.1: Choose the right PPM strategy for your organization

    PHASE 1

    PHASE 2

    PHASE 3
    1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2
    Choose the right PPM strategy Translate strategy into process goals Define intake & resource mgmt. processes Define reporting, closure, & benefits mgmt. processes Select a right-sized PPM solution Finalize your PPM strategic plan

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Perform a leadership mandate survey.
    • Choose your PPM strategy.
    • Calculate your resource capacity for projects.
    • Determine overall organizational demand for projects.
    • Prepare an executive presentation of the PPM strategy.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • PMO Director/Portfolio Manager
    • Project Managers
    • IT Managers

    Outcomes of this step

    • A PPM strategy
    • A resource supply/project demand analysis
    • An executive brief presentation
    • Executive buy-in for the PPM strategy

    “Too many projects, not enough resources” is the reality of most IT environments

    In today’s organizations, the desires of business units for new products and enhancements, and the appetites of senior leadership to approve more and more projects for those products and services, far outstrips IT’s ability to realistically deliver on everything.

    The vast majority of IT departments lack the resourcing to meet project demand – especially given the fact that day-to-day operational demands frequently trump project work.

    As a result, project throughput suffers – and with it, IT's reputation within the organization.

    A visualization of 'Project Demand' versus 'Resource supply' utilizing courtroom scales with numerous project titles weighing down the 'Project Demand' side and silhouettes of three little people raised aloft on the 'Resource supply' side.

    In these environments, a PPM strategy is required.

    A PPM strategy should enable executive decision makers to make sense of the excess of demand and give IT the ability to prioritize those projects that are of the most strategic value to the business.

    With the right PPM strategy, IT can improve project outcomes across its portfolio and drive business value – all while improving the workloads of IT project staff.

    Info-Tech has two PPM strategy options that you can start to deploy today

    This step will help you choose the most suitable option, depending on your project pain points and current level of executive engagement in actively steering the portfolio.

    Option A:
    Top-Down, Executive Driven Strategy

    Option B:
    Bottom-Up, Project Manager Driven Strategy
    Goals of this approach:
    • This approach is intended to assist decision makers in their job: choosing the right projects, committing to timelines for those projects, and monitoring/directing their progress.
    		 Goals of this approach:
    • This approach is primarily intended to ensure that projects are well managed in a standardized manner in order to provide project managers with clear direction.
    Who this approach is for:
    • IT departments looking to improve alignment of project demand and resource capacity.
    • IT departments wanting to prioritize strategically valuable work.
    • IT departments with sufficient executive backing and engagement with the portfolio.
    		 Who this approach is for:
    • IT departments that would not the get support for a top-down approach due to a disengaged executive layer.
    • IT departments that already have a top-down PPM strategy and feel they are sufficiently resourced to confront project demand.

    Each of these strategy options is driven by a set of specific strategic expectations to help communicate your PPM goals. See the following slides for an articulation of each strategy option.

    A top-down, executive driven strategy is the optimal route, putting leadership in a position to best conduct the portfolio

    Option A: Top-Down, Executive Driven Strategy

    Strategic Expectations:

    • Project Throughput: Maximize throughput of the best projects.
    • Portfolio Visibility: Ensure visibility of current and pending projects.
    • Portfolio Responsiveness: Make the portfolio responsive to executive steering when new projects and changing priorities need rapid action.
    • Resource Utilization: Minimize resource waste and optimize the alignment of skills to assignments.
    • Benefits Realization: Clarify accountability for post-project benefits attainment for each project, and facilitate the process of tracking/reporting those benefits.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Serve the executive with insight before you impede the projects with governance. This strategy option is where Info-Tech sees the most PPM success. A strategy focused at improving decision making at the executive layer will both improve project outcomes and help alleviate project workloads.

    A bottom-up strategy can help project managers and teams succeed where insight into the big picture is lacking

    Option B: Bottom-Up, Project Manager Driven Strategy

    Strategic Expectations:

    • Project Management Governance: All projects consuming IT resources will be continually validated in terms of best-practice process compliance.
    • Project Risk Management: Identify risks and related mitigation approaches for all high-risk areas.
    • Stakeholder Management: Ensure that project stakeholders are identified and involved.
    • Project Manager Resourcing: Provide project managers as needed.
    • Project-Level Visibility: Provide access to the details of project management processes (planning and progress) as needed.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Right-size governance to maximize success. Project management and governance success don’t necessarily equal project success. Project management processes should be a means to an end (i.e. successful project outcomes), and not an end in themselves. Ensure the ends justify the means.

    Most recurring project challenges require a top-down portfolio management approach

    While project management is a key ingredient to project success, tying to solve endemic project problems with project management alone won’t improve results over the long term.

    Why Top-Down is a better starting point than Bottom-Up.

    The most common IT project problems – schedule and budget overruns, scope creep, and poor quality – can ultimately, in the vast majority of cases, be traced back to bad decisions made at the portfolio level:

    • The wrong projects get greenlighted.
    • Shifting leadership priorities and operational demands make project plans and estimated delivery dates obsolete from the start.
    • Too many projects get approved when there are not enough resources to effectively work on them all.

    No amount of project management rigor can help alleviate these common root causes of project failure.

    With a top-down PPM strategy, however, you can make sure that leadership is informed and engaged in making the right project decisions and that project managers and teams are situated for success.

    "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." (Peter Drucker (quoted in Lessing))

    Info-Tech Insight

    Get Strategic About Project Success.

    The difference between project management and project portfolio management comes down to doing things right vs. doing the right things. Both are important, no doubt; but doing the wrong things well doesn’t provide much value to the business in the long run.

    Get insight into the big picture with a top-down strategy before imposing more administrative overhead on project managers and leads.

    Perform a leadership mandate assessment to gauge executive needs and expectations

    Associated Activity icon 1.1.1 – 15 to 30 minutes (prep time) 10 to 20 minutes (execution time)

    INPUT: Leadership expectations for portfolio and project management.

    OUTPUT: Leadership mandate bar chart

    Materials: Tab 6 of Info-Tech’s PPM High-Level Supply-Demand Calculator

    Participants: Portfolio manager (or equivalent), PPM strategy sponsor(s), CIO and other members of senior management

    Before choosing your strategy option, survey the organization’s leadership to assess what they’re expecting from the PPM strategy.

    Use the “Leadership Mandate Survey” (located on tab 6 of Info-Tech’s PPM High-Level Supply-Demand Calculator) to assess the degree to which your leadership expects the PPM strategy to provide outcomes across the following capabilities: portfolio reporting, project governance, and project management.

    • Deploy the 12-question survey via individual one-on-one meetings or group working sessions with your boss (the PPM strategy sponsor) as well as with the CIO and other senior managers from within IT and the business.
      • If you cannot connect with the executive layer for this survey, do your best to estimate their responses to complete the survey.
    • The survey should help distinguish if executives are looking for portfolio management or project management. It should be one input that informs your choice of strategy option A or B.
      • If leadership is looking primarily for project management, you should proceed to Info-Tech’s Tailor Project Management Processes that Fit Your Projects blueprint.

    Refer to the next slide for assistance analyzing the outputs in tab 6 and using them to inform your choice of strategy.

    How to make use of the results of the leadership survey

    Two possible result scenarios of the leadership survey. There are two bar graphs titled 'Leadership Mandate', each with an explanation of the scenario they belong to. In Scenario 1, the 'Leadership Mandate' graph has a descending trend with 'Portfolio Reporting' at the highest level, 'Project Governance' in the middle, and 'Project Management' at the lowest level. 'A result like this, with a higher portfolio reporting score, shows a higher need for a top-down approach and demonstrates well-balanced expectations for a PPM strategy from the leadership. There is greater emphasis put on the portfolio than there is project governance or project management.' In Scenario 2, the 'Leadership Mandate' graph has an ascending trend with 'Portfolio Reporting' at the lowest level, 'Project Governance' in the middle, and 'Project Management' at the highest level. 'If your graph looks like this, your executive leadership has placed greater importance on project governance and management. Completing a top-down PPM strategy may not meet their expectations at this time. In this situation, a bottom-up approach may be more applicable.'

    Customize Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template. Insert screenshots of the survey and the bar graph from tab 6 of the PPM High-Level Supply-Demand Calculator onto slides 7 and 8, “PPM Strategy Leadership Mandate,” of the PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    Proceed with the right PPM strategy for your organization

    Based upon the results of the “Leadership Mandate Survey,” and your assessment of each strategy option as described in the previous slides, choose the strategy option that is right for your IT department/PMO at this time.

    "Without a strategic methodology, project portfolio planning is frustrating and has little chance of achieving exceptional business success." (G Wahl (quoted in Merkhofer))

    Option A:

    Those proceeding with Option A should continue with remainder of this blueprint. Update your strategy statement on slide 3 of your PPM Strategic Plan Template to reflect your choice

    Option B:

    Those proceeding with Option B should exit this blueprint and refer to Info-Tech’s Tailor Project Management Processes to Fit Your Projects blueprint to help define a project management standard operating procedure.

    Customize Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template. If you’re proceeding with Option A, update slide 4, “Project Portfolio Management Strategy,” of your PPM Strategic Plan Template to reflect your choice of PPM strategy. If you’re proceeding with Option B, you may want to include your strategy statement in your Project Management SOP Template.

    The success of your top-down strategy will hinge on the quality of your capacity awareness and resource utilization

    A PPM strategy should facilitate alignment between project demand with resource supply. Use Info-Tech’s PPM High-Level Supply/Demand Calculator as a step towards this alignment.

    Info-Tech’s research shows that the ability to provide a centralized view of IT’s capacity for projects is one of the top PPM capabilities that contributes to overall project success.

    Accurate and reliable forecasts into IT’s capacity, coupled with an engaged executive layer making project approval and prioritization decisions based upon that capacity data, is the hallmark of an effective top-down PPM strategy.

    • Use Info-Tech’s PPM High-Level Supply/Demand Calculator to help improve visibility (and with it, organizational understanding) into project demand and IT resource supply.
    • The Calculator will help you determine IT’s actual capacity for projects and analyze organizational demand by taking an inventory of active and backlog projects.

    Download Info-Tech’s PPM High-Level Supply/Demand Calculator.

    Sample of Into-Tech's PPM High-Level Supply/Demand Calculator.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Where does the time go? The portfolio manager (or equivalent) should function as the accounting department for time, showing what’s available in IT’s human resources budget for projects and providing ongoing visibility into how that budget of time is being spent.

    Establish the total resource capacity of your portfolio

    Associated Activity icon 1.1.2 – 30 to 60 minutes

    INPUT: Staff resource types, Average work week, Estimated allocations

    OUTPUT: Breakdown of annual portfolio HR spend, Capacity pie chart

    Materials: PPM High-Level Supply/Demand Calculator, tab 3

    Participants: Portfolio manager (or equivalent), Resource and/or project managers

    Use tab 3 of the calculator to determine your actual HR portfolio budget for projects, relative to the organization’s non-project demands.

    • Tab 3 analyzes your resource supply asks you to consider how your staff spend their time weekly across four categories: out of office time, administrative time (e.g. meetings, training, checking email), keep-the-lights-on time (i.e. support and maintenance), and project time.
    • The screenshot below walks you through columns B to E of tab 3, which help calculate your potential capacity. This activity will continue on the next slide, where we will determine your realized capacity for project work from this potential capacity.
    Screenshot of tab 3 in the PPM High-Level Supply/Demand Calculator. It has 4 columns, 'Resource Type', '# People', 'Hours / Week', and 'Hours / Year', which are referred to in notes as columns B through E respectively. The note on 'Resource Type' reads '1. Compile a list of each of the roles within your department in column B'. The note on '# People' reads '2. In column C, provide the number of staff currently performing each role'. The note on 'Hours / Week' reads '3. In column D, provide a baseline for the number of hours in a typical work week for each role'. The note on 'Hours / Year' reads '4. Column E will auto-populate based on E and D. The total at the bottom of column E (row 26) constitutes your department’s total capacity'.

    Determine the project/non-project ratio for each role

    Associated Activity icon 1.1.2 (continued)

    The previous slide walked you through columns B to E of tab 3. This slide walks you through columns F to J, which ask you to consider how your potential capacity is spent.

    Screenshot of tab 3 in the PPM High-Level Supply/Demand Calculator. It has 6 columns, 'Hours / Year', 'Absence', 'Working Time / Year', 'Admin', 'KTLO', and 'Project Work', which, starting at 'Absence', are referred to in notes as columns F through J respectively. The note on 'Absence' reads '5. Enter the percentage of your total time across each role that is unavailable due to foreseeable out-of-office time (vacation, sick time, etc.) in column F. Industry standard runs anywhere from 12% to 16%, depending on your industry and geographical region'. The note on 'Working Time / Year' reads '6. Column G will auto-calculate to show your overall net capacity after out-of-office percentages have been taken off the top. These totals constitute your working time for the year'. The note on 'Admin' and 'KTLO' reads '6. Column G will auto-calculate to show your overall net capacity after out-of-office percentages have been taken off the top. These totals constitute your working time for the year'. The note on 'Project Work' reads '8. The project percentage in column J will auto-calculate based upon what’s leftover after your non-project working time allocations in columns H and I have been subtracted'.

    Review your annual portfolio capacity for projects

    Associated Activity icon 1.1.2 (continued)

    The previous slides walked you through the inputs for tab “3. Project Capacity.” This slide walks you through the outputs of the tab.

    Based upon the inputs from columns B to J, the rest of tab 3 analyzes how IT available time is spent across the time categories, highlighting how much of IT’s capacity is actually available for projects after admin work, support and maintenance work, and absences have been taken into account.

    A table and pie chart of output data from Tab 3 of the PPM High-Level Supply/Demand Calculator. Pie segments are labelled 'Admin', 'Absence', 'Project Capacity', and 'Keep The Lights On'.

    Customize Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template. Update slide 10, “Current Project Capacity,” of your PPM Strategic Plan Template to include the outputs from tab 3 of the Calculator.

    Create an inventory of active and backlog projects to help gauge overall project demand

    Associated Activity icon 1.1.3 – 15 to 30 minutes

    INPUT: Number of active and backlog projects across different sizes

    OUTPUT: Total project demand in estimated hours of work effort

    Materials: PPM High-Level Supply/Demand Calculator, tab 4

    Participants: Portfolio manager (or equivalent), Project managers

    Where tab 3 of the Calculator gave you visibility into your overall resource supply for projects, tab 4 will help you establish insight into the demand side.

    • Before starting on tab 4, be sure to enter the required project size data on the set-up tab.
    • Using a list of current active projects, categorize the items on the list by size: small, medium, large, and extra large. Enter the number of projects in each category of project in column C of tab 4.
    • Using a list of on-hold projects, or projects that have been approved but not started, categorize the list by size and enter the number of projects in each category in column D.
    • In column E, estimate the number of new requests and projects across each size that you anticipate being added to the portfolio/backlog in the next 12 months. Use historical data from the past 12 to 24 months to inform your estimates.
    • In column F, estimate the number of projects that you anticipate being completed in each size category in the next 12 months. Take the current state of active projects into account as you make your estimates, as well as throughput data from the previous 12 to 24 months.
    Screenshot of tab 4 in the PPM High-Level Supply/Demand Calculator. It has 5 columns labelled 'Project Types' with values Small to Extra-Large, 'Number of active projects currently in the portfolio', 'Number of projects currently in the portfolio backlog', 'Number of new requests anticipated to be added to the portfolio/backlog in the next 12 months', and 'Number of projects expected to be delivered within the next 12 months'.

    Make supply and demand part of the conversation as you get buy-in for your top-down strategy

    Tab 5 of the Calculator is an output tab, visualizing the alignment (or lack thereof) of project demand and resource supply.

    Once tabs 3 and 4 are complete, use tab 5 to analyze the supply/demand data to help build your case for a top-down PPM strategy and get buy-in for it.

    Screenshots of Tab 5 in the PPM High-Level Supply/Demand Calculator. A bar chart obscures a table with the note 'The bar chart shows your estimated total project demand in person hours (in black) relative to your estimated total resource capacity for projects (in green)'. Notes on the table are 'The table below the bar chart shows your estimated annual project throughput rate (based upon the number of projects you estimated you would complete this year) as well as the rate at which portfolio demand will grow (based upon the number of new requests and projects you estimated for the next 12 months)' and 'If the “Total Estimated Project Demand (in hours) in 12 Months Time” number is more than your current demand levels, then you have a supply-demand problem that your PPM strategy will need to address'.

    Customize Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template. Update slides 11 and 12, “Current Project Demand,” of your PPM Strategic Plan Template to include the outputs from tabs 4 and 5 of the Calculator.

    Recommended: Complete Info-Tech’s PPM Current State Scorecard to measure your resource utilization

    Associated Activity icon Contact your rep or call 1-888-670-8889

    This step is highly recommended but not required. Call 1-888-670-8889 to inquire about or request the PPM Diagnostics.

    Info-Tech’s PPM Current State Scorecard diagnostic provides a comprehensive view of your portfolio management strengths and weaknesses, including project portfolio management, project management, customer management, and resource utilization.

    Screenshots of Info-Tech's PPM Current State Scorecard diagnostic with a pie chart obscuring a table/key. The attached note reads 'In particular, the analysis of resource utilization in the PPM Current State Scorecard report, will help to complement the supply/demand analysis in the previous slides. The diagnostic will help you to analyze how, within that percentage of your overall capacity that is available for project work, your staff productively utilizes this time to successfully complete project tasks and how much of this time is lost within Info-Tech’s categories of resource waste.'

    Customize Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template. Update slides 14 and 15, “Current State Resource Utilization” of your PPM Strategic Plan Template to include the resource utilization outputs from your PPM Current State Scorecard.

    Finalize section one of the PPM Strategic Plan Template and prepare to communicate your strategy

    Associated Activity icon 1.1.4 – 10 to 30 minutes

    INPUT: The previous activities from this step

    OUTPUT: An presentation communication your PPM strategy

    Materials: PPM Strategic Plan Template, section 1

    Participants: Portfolio manager (or equivalent)

    By now, you should be ready to complete section one of the PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    The purpose of this section of the Template is to capture the outputs of this step and use them to communicate the value of a top-down PPM strategy and to get buy-in for this strategy from senior management before you move forward to develop your PPM processes in the subsequent phases of this blueprint.

    • Within section one, update any of the text that is (in grey) to reflect the specifics of your organization – i.e. the name of your organization and department – and the specific outcomes of step 1.2 activities. In addition, replace the placeholders for a company logo with the logo of your company.
    • Replace the tool screenshots with the outputs from your version of the PPM High-Level Supply/Demand Calculator.
    • Proofread all of the text to ensure the content accurately reflects your outcomes. Edit the content as needed to more accurately reflect your outcomes.
    • Determine the audience for the presentation of your PPM strategy and make a logistical arrangement. Include PPM strategy sponsors, senior management from within IT and the business, and other important stakeholders.

    Get executive buy-in for your top-down PPM strategy

    Executive layer buy-in is a critical prerequisite for the success of a top-down PPM strategy. Ensure your executives are on board before preceding.

    You’re now ready to communicate your PPM strategy to your leadership team and other stakeholders.

    It is essential that you get preliminary buy-in for this strategy from the executive layer before you move forward to develop your PPM processes in the subsequent phases of this blueprint. Lack of executive engagement is one of the top barriers to PPM strategy success.

    • If you have gone through the preceding activities in this step, section one of your PPM Strategic Plan Template should now be ready to present.
    • As explained in 1.1.4, you should present this section to an audience of PPM strategy sponsors, C-suite executives, and other members of the senior management team.
    • Allow at least 60 minutes for the presentation – around 20 minutes to deliver the slide presentation and 40 minutes for discussion.
    • If you get sufficient buy-in by the end of the presentation, proceed to the next step of this blueprint. If buy-in is lacking, now might not be the right time for a top-down PPM strategy. Think about adopting a bottom-up approach until leadership is more engaged in the portfolio.

    "Gaining executive sponsorship early is key…It is important for the executives in your organization to understand that the PPM initiatives and the PMO organization are there to support (but never hinder) executive decision making." (KeyedIn Projects)

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Engage(d) sponsorship. According to Prosci, the top factor in contributing to the success of a change initiative is active and visible executive sponsorship. Use this meeting to communicate to your sponsor(s) the importance of their involvement in championing the PPM strategy.

    A PPM strategic plan elevates PMO’s status to a business strategic partner

    CASE STUDY

    Industry: Public Administration
    Source: IAG / Info-Tech Interview

    Challenge

    The PMO operated in a way that is, in their self-assessment, reactive; project requests and capacity were not effectively managed. Perhaps due to this, the leadership team was not always visible, or regularly available, to PM leaders. This, in turn, complicated efforts to effectively manage their projects.

    Solution

    Establishing a simple prioritization methodology enabled the senior leadership to engage and effectively steer the project portfolio by strategic importance. The criteria and tool also gave the business units a clear understanding to promote the strategic value of each of their project requests.

    Results

    PM leaders now have the support and confidence of the senior leadership team to both proactively manage and deliver on strategic projects. This new prioritization model brought the PM Leader and senior leadership team in direct access with each other.

    "By implementing this new project intake and prioritization framework, we drastically improved our ability to predict, meet, and manage project requests and unit workload. We adopted a client-focused and client-centric approach that enabled all project participants to see their role and value in successful project delivery. We created methodologies that were easy to follow from the client participation perspective, but also as PM leaders, provided us with the metrics, planning, and proactive tools to meet and anticipate client project demand. The response from our clients was extremely positive, encouraging, and appreciative."

    Step 1.2: Translate PPM strategic expectations to process goals

    PHASE 1

    PHASE 2

    PHASE 3

    1.11.22.12.23.13.2
    Choose the right PPM strategyTranslate strategy into process goalsDefine intake & resource mgmt. processesDefine reporting, closure, & benefits mgmt. processesSelect a right-sized PPM solutionFinalize your PPM strategic plan

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Determine process goals based upon your PPM strategy.
    • Set metrics and preliminary targets for your PPM processes.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • Steering Committee
    • Business Unit Leaders
    • PMO Director/Portfolio Manager

    Outcomes of this step

    • Stakeholder-prioritized PPM process goals
    • Metrics and targets for high-priority process goals

    Use the PPM strategy to set the direction for PPM processes that make up the infrastructure around projects

    PPM strategy enables you to answer any and all of these questions in a way that is consistent, cohesive, and aligned with one another.

    Info-Tech's PPM Process Model from earlier with notes overlaid asking a series of questions. The questions for '1. Intake, Approval, and Prioritization' are 'Who can request a project? How do you request a project? Who decides what to fund? What is the target investment mix? How will they decide?' The questions for '2. Resource Management' are 'Who assigns the resources? Who feeds the data on resources? How do we make sure it’s valid? How do we handle contingencies when projects are late, or if availability changes?' The questions for '3. Status and Progress Reporting' are 'What project information that should be reported? Who reports on project status? When? How?' The questions between 'Project Management' and '4. Project Closure' are 'Who declares that a project is done? Who validates it? Who is this reported to? Who terminates low-value projects? How will they decide?' The questions for '5. Benefits Tracking' are 'How do we validate the project benefits from the original business case? How do we track the benefits? Who reports it? When?'

    Set process goals to address PPM strategic expectations and steer the PPM strategic plan

    Associated Activity icon 1.2.1 – 2 hours

    INPUT: PPM strategy & expectations, Organizational strategy and culture

    OUTPUT: Prioritized list of strategy-aligned PPM process goals

    Materials: PPM Strategy-Process Translation Matrix

    Participants: CIO, Steering Committee, Business Unit Leaders, PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager

    This activity is designed for key departmental stakeholders to articulate how PPM processes should be developed or refined to meet the PPM strategic expectations.

    Participation of the key departmental stakeholders in this exercise is critical, e.g. CIO, Steering Committee, business unit leaders.

    Strategic Expectations x Processes = Process goals aligned to strategy
    Throughput Project Intake, Approval, & Prioritization
    Visibility Resource Management
    Responsiveness Status & Progress Reporting
    Resource Utilization Project Closure
    Benefits Benefits Realization

    Download Info-Tech’s PPM Strategy-Process Goals Translation Matrix Template.

    Use Info-Tech’s Translation Matrix to systematically articulate strategy-aligned PPM process goals

    Supporting Tool icon 1.2.1 – PPM Strategy-Process Translation Matrix, tab 2

    Formula: To answer “[question]” in a way that we can [strategic expectation], it will be important to [process goal].

    Example 1:
    To answer the question “who can request a project, and how?” in a way that we can maximize the throughput of the best projects, it will be important to standardize the project request process.

    Example 2:
    To answer the question “how will they decide what to fund?” in a way that we can maximize the throughput of the best projects, it will be important to reach a consensus on project prioritization criteria.

    Example 3:
    To answer the question “how will we track the projected benefits?” in a way that we can maximize the throughput of the best projects, it will be important to double-check the validity of benefits before projects are approved.

    Screenshot of Tab 2 in Info-Tech's PPM Strategy-Process Translation Matrix tool. There is a table with notes overlaid 'Enter the process goals in the appropriate question–strategic expectation slot' and 'Assign a priority, from the most important (1) to the least important (5)'.

    Set metrics and preliminary targets for your high-priority PPM process goals

    Associated Activity icon 1.2.2 – 1-2 hours

    INPUT: Prioritized list of strategy-aligned PPM process goals, Organizational strategy and culture

    OUTPUT: Metrics and targets for high-priority PPM process goals

    Materials: PPM Strategy-Process Translation Matrix

    Participants: CIO, Steering Committee, Business Unit Leaders, PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager

    Your highest-priority process goals and their corresponding strategy expectations are displayed in tab 3 of the PPM Strategy-Process Translation Matrix template (example below).

    Through a group discussion, document what will be measured to decide the achievement of each process goal, as well as your current estimate and the long-term target. If necessary, adjust the approximate target duration.

    Screenshot of Tab 3 in Info-Tech's PPM Strategy-Process Translation Matrix tool. There is a table with 6 columns 'PPM Process', 'High-priority Process Goals', 'Strategy Expectation', 'How will you measure success?', 'Current Estimate', and 'Long-Term Target'; they are referred to in notes as columns B through G respectively. Overlaid notes are 'Columns C and D will auto-populate based upon your inputs from tab 2. The five PPM process areas are arranged vertically in column B and your top-five process goals from each area appear in column C.' 'Use column E to brainstorm how you might measure the success of each process goal at your organization. These can be tentative for now and refined over time.' 'Determine current metrics for each process goals and long-term target metrics in columns F and G.'

    Project-client-centered approach to PPM process design improves client satisfaction and team confidence

    CASE STUDY

    Industry: Public Administration
    Source: IAG / Info-Tech Interview

    Challenge

    Reactive instead of proactive

    "We had no effective means of tracking project intake requests vs. capacity. We struggled using ad hoc processes and methods which worked to meet immediate needs, but we quickly realized that they were ineffective in tracking critical project metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), or performance measures...In short, we were being reactive, instead of proactive."

    The result was a disorganized portfolio that led to low client satisfaction and team morale.

    Solution

    Examine processes “through the eyes of the client”

    With the guiding principle of “through the eyes of the client,” PPM processes and tools were developed to formalize project intake, prioritization, and capacity planning. All touchpoints between client and PPM processes were identified, and practices for managing client expectations were put in place. A client satisfaction survey was formulated as part of the post-project assessment and review.

    Results

    Client-centered processes improved client satisfaction and team confidence

    People, processes, and tools are now aligned to support client demand, manage client expectations, measure project KPIs, and perform post-project analysis. A standard for client satisfaction metrics was put in place. The overwhelmingly positive feedback has increased team confidence in their ability to deliver quality efforts.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech Workshop Associated Activity icon

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    Photo of Barry Cousins.
    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analyst 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:

    Sample of activity 1.1.2 'Determine your actual resource capacity for projects'. Determine your actual resource capacity for projects

    Work with Info-Tech analysts to define your project vs. non-project ratio to help define how much of your overall resource capacity is actual available for projects.
    Sample of activity 1.2.1 'Set realistic PPM process goals'. Set realistic PPM process goals

    Leverage Info-Tech facilitators to help walk you through our PPM framework and define achievable process goals that are rooted in your current PPM maturity levels and organizational culture.

    Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy

    PHASE 2

    Align PPM Processes to Your Strategic Goals

    Phase 2 outline

    Associated Activity icon 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: Align PPM processes to your strategic goals

    Proposed Time to Completion: 2-4 weeks
    Step 2.1: Develop intake & resource mgmt. processes Step 2.2: Define reporting, closure, & benefits processes
    Work with an analyst to:
    • Assess your current intake, prioritization, and resource management processes and wireframe a sustainable target state for each capability.
    		 Work with an analyst to:
    • Analyze your current portfolio reporting, project closure, and benefits realization processes and wireframe a sustainable target state for each capability.
    Then complete these activities…
    • Set near-term and long-term goals.
    • Draft high-level steps within your target-state processes.
    • Document your process steps and roles and responsibilities.
    		 Then complete these activities…
    • Set near-term and long-term goals.
    • Draft high-level steps within your target-state processes.
    • Document your process steps and roles and responsibilities.
    With these tools & templates:
    • PPM Strategy Development Tool
    • PPM Strategic Plan Template
    		 With these tools & templates:
    • PPM Strategy Development Tool
    • PPM Strategic Plan Template

    Phase 2 Results & Insights

    • The means of project and portfolio management (i.e. processes) shouldn’t eclipse the ends – strategic goals. Root your process in your PPM strategic goals to realize PPM benefits (e.g. optimized portfolio value, improved project throughput, increased stakeholder satisfaction).

    Read first: Overview of the methodology for articulating new strategy-aligned PPM processes

    In the previous step of the blueprint, key department stakeholders established the PPM process goals, metrics, and targets in a way that aligns with the overall PPM strategy. In this phase, we draft a high-level description of the five PPM processes that reflect those goals using the following methodology:

    Methodology at a glance

    1. Articulate the current state of the process.
    2. Examine the process against the strategy-aligned goals.
    3. Create short- and long-term action items to refine the current process and meet the strategy-aligned targets.
    4. Develop a high-level target-state description of the PPM process.
    5. Estimate costs-in-use of the target-state process.

    Out-of-scope topics

    • Draft a detailed target-state description of the PPM process. Avoid falling into the “analysis paralysis” trap and keep the discussion focused on the overall PPM strategy.
    • PPM tools to support the process. This discussion will take place in the next phase of the blueprint.

    INPUT

    		 –›

    PROCESS

    		 –›

    OUTPUT
    • Strategy-aligned process goals, metrics, and targets (Activity 1.2.1)
    • Knowledge of current process
    • Knowledge of organizational culture and structure
    • Capability level assessment
    • Table-top design planning activity
    • Start-stop-continue retrospective
    • High-level description of the target state
    • PPM Strategy Development Tool
    • High-level descriptions of current and target states
    • Short- and long-term action items for improving the process
    • Cost-in-use of the current- and target-state processes

    Download Info-Tech’s PPM Strategy Development Tool

    Build a sound business case for implementing the new PPM strategy with realistic costs and benefits of managing your project portfolio.

    Time spent on managing the project portfolio is an investment. Like any other business endeavors, the benefits must outweigh the costs to be worth doing.

    As you draft a high-level description of the PPM processes in this phase of the blueprint, use Info-Tech’s PPM Strategy Development Tool to track the estimate the cost-in-use of the process. In the next phase, this information will be inform a cost-benefit analysis, which will be used to support your plan to implement the PPM strategy.

    Download Info-Tech’s PPM Strategy Development Tool.

    Screenshots of Info-Tech's PPM Strategy Development Tool including a Cost-Benefit Analysis with tables and graphs.

    Step 2.1: Develop and refine project intake, prioritization, and resource management processes

    PHASE 1

    PHASE 2

    PHASE 3

    1.11.22.12.23.13.2
    Choose the right PPM strategyTranslate strategy into process goalsDefine intake & resource mgmt. processesDefine reporting, closure, & benefits mgmt. processesSelect a right-sized PPM solutionFinalize your PPM strategic plan

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Determine your process maturity.
    • Benchmark current processes against strategy-aligned goals.
    • Set near- and long-term action items.
    • Draft a high-level description of your target state.
    • Document your new processes.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • PMO Director/Portfolio Manager
    • Project Managers
    • Resource Managers
    • Business Analysts

    Outcomes of this step

    • A definition of current and target state maturity levels for intake, prioritization, and resource management
    • Near-term and long-term process goals for intake, prioritization, and resource management
    • A high-level wireframe for your intake, prioritization, and resource management process steps

    Project intake, prioritization, and approval: Get projects with the highest value done first

    Give your organization the voice to say “no” (or “not yet”) to new projects.

    Questions

    • Who can request a project?
    • How do you request a project?
    • Who decides what to fund?
    • What is the target investment mix?
    • How will they decide?

    Benefits

    • Maximize value of time spent on project work by aligning projects with priorities and stakeholder needs.
    • Finish the projects you start by improving alignment of intake and prioritization with resource capacity.
    • Improve stakeholder satisfaction by managing expectations with consistent, streamlined processes.

    Challenges

    • Stakeholders who benefit from political or ad hoc prioritization processes will resist or circumvent formal intake processes.
    • Many organizations lack sufficient awareness of resource capacity necessary to align intake with availability.

    A graph highlighting the sweet spot of project intake decision making. The vertical axis is 'Rigor and Effort' increasing upward, and the horizontal axis is 'Quality and Effectiveness of Decisions' increasing to the right. The trend line starts at 'Gut Feel' with low 'Rigor and Effort', and gradually curves upward to 'Analysis Paralysis' at the top. A note with an arrow pointing to a midway point in the line reads 'The sweet spot changes between situations and types of decisions'.

    Info-Tech Insight

    This process aims to control the project demand. A balance between rigor and flexibility is critical in order to avoid the “analysis paralysis” as much as the “gut feel” approach.

    Funnel project requests into a triage system for project intake

    Info-Tech recommends following a four-step process for managing project intake.

    1. Requestor fills out form and submits the request into the funnel.
    2. Requests are triaged into the proper queue.
      1. Divert non-project request.
      2. Quickly assess value and urgency.
      3. Assign specialist to follow up on request.
      4. Inform the requestor.
    3. Business analyst starts to gather preliminary requirements.
      1. Follow up with sponsors to validate and define scope.
      2. Estimate size and determine project management rigor required.
      3. Start to develop an initial business case.
    4. Requestor is given realistic expectations for approval process.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    An excess number of intake channels is the tell-tale sign of a project portfolio in distress. The PMO needs to exercise and enforce discipline on stakeholders. PMO should demand proper documentation and diligence from stakeholders before proceeding with requests.

    Maintain reliable resourcing data with a recurrent project intake, prioritization, and approval practice

    Info-Tech recommends following a five-step process for managing project intake, prioritization, and approval.

    A diagram of Info-Tech's five-step process for managing project intake. There are four groups that may be involved in any one step, they are laid out on the side as row headers that each step's columns may fall into, 'Resources', 'Business Analysts', 'PMO', and 'Governance Layer'. The first step is 'Collect project requests' which involves 'Resources'. Step 2 is 'Screen project requests' which involves 'Business Analysts' and 'PMO'. A part of the step that may be applicable to some organizations is 'Concept approval' involving 'Governance Layer'. Step 3 is 'Develop business case' which involves 'Business Analysts' and 'PMO'. A part of the step that may be applicable to some organizations is 'Get a project sponsor' involving 'Governance Layer'. Step 4 is 'Prioritize project' which involves 'Business Analysts' and 'PMO'. Step 5 is 'Approve (greenlight) project' which involves 'Business Analysts', 'PMO', and 'Governance Layer', with an attached note that reads 'Ensure that up-to-date project portfolio information is available (project status, resource forecast, etc.)'. All of these steps lead to 'Initiate project, commit resources, etc.'

    Info-Tech Insight

    “Approval” can be a dangerous word in project and portfolio management. Use it carefully. Clarify precisely what is being “approved” at each step in the process, what is required to pass each gate, and how long the process will take.

    Determine your project intake, prioritization, and approval process maturity

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.1a – 10 minutes

    INPUT: Organizational strategy and culture

    OUTPUT: Project intake, prioritization, and approval capability level

    Materials: PPM Strategy Development Tool

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Resource Managers, Business Analysts

    Kick-off the discussion about the project intake, prioritization, and approval process by reading the capability level descriptions below and discussing which level currently applies to you the most.

    Capability Level Descriptions
    Capability Level 5: Optimized We have effective intake processes with right-sized administrative overhead. Work is continuously prioritized to keep up with emerging challenges and opportunities.
    Capability Level 4: Aligned We have very strong intake processes. Project approvals are based on business cases and aligned with future resource capacity.
    Capability Level 3: Engaged Processes are in place to track project requests and follow up on them. Priorities are periodically re-evaluated, based largely on the best judgment of one or several executives.
    Capability Level 2: Defined Some processes are in place, but there is no capacity to say no to new projects. There is a backlog, but little or no method for grooming it.
    Capability Level 1: Unmanaged Our organization has no formal intake processes in place. Most work is done reactively, with little ability to prioritize project work proactively.

    Benchmark the current project intake, prioritization, and approval process against strategy-aligned goals

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.1b – 1-2 hours

    INPUT: Documentation describing the current process (e.g. standard operating procedures), Process goals from activity 1.2.1

    OUTPUT: Retrospective review of current process

    Materials: 4x6” recipe cards, Whiteboard

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Resource Managers, Business Analysts

    Conduct a table-top planning exercise to map out the process currently in place.

    1. Use white 4”x6” recipe cards to write unique steps of a process. Use the intake, prioritization, and approval process from the previous slides as a guide.
    2. Use green cards to write artifacts or deliverables that result from a step.
    3. Use pink cards to write issues, problems, or risks.
    4. Discuss how the process could better achieve the strategy-aligned goals from activity 1.2.1. Keep a list of possible changes in the form of a start-stop-continue retrospective (example below) on a whiteboard.
    Start Stop Continue
    • Simplify business cases
    • Send emails to requestor to manage expectations
    • Accept verbal project requests
    • Approve “pet projects”
    • Monthly prioritization meetings
    • Evaluate prioritization criteria

    Set near- and long-term action items for the project intake, prioritization, and approval process

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.1c – 30 minutes - 1 hour

    INPUT: Outcome of the retrospective review, Process goals and metrics from activity 1.2.1

    OUTPUT: Action items for evolving the process to a target state

    Materials: Whiteboard

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Resource Managers, Business Analysts

    Analyze each item in the start-stop-continue retrospective to compile a set of near-term and long-term action items.

    The near-term plan should include steps that are within the authority of the PMO and do not require approval or investment outside of that authority. The long-term plan should include steps that may require a longer approval process, buy-in of external stakeholders, and the investment of time and money.
    Near-Term Action Items Long-Term Action Items
    For example:
    • Limit the number of channels available to request new projects.
    • Revise the intake form.
    • Establish a regular triage process.
    		 For example:
    • Establish a comprehensive scorecard and business case scoring process at the steering committee level.
    • Limit the rate of approval to be aligned with resource capacity.

    Review and customize slide 23, “Project intake, prioritization, and approval: action items,” in Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    Draft a high-level description of the intake, prioritization, and approval process at a target state

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.1d – 1-2 hours

    INPUT: Action items for evolving the process to a target state

    OUTPUT: High-level description of the process at the target state

    Materials: Whiteboard, PPM Strategy Development Tool

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Resource Managers, Business Analysts

    1. Break down the process into several tasks at a high level. Avoid getting into too much detail by limiting the number of steps.
      2. An example of high-level breakdown: project intake, prioritization, and approval
      Collect project requests –› Screen requests –› Develop business case –› Prioritize project –› Approve project

    2. Describe each task by answering the following questions. Document your response in the PPM Strategic Plan Template.

      3. Question

      Description
      Input What information do you need to perform the work?
      Output What artifacts/deliverables are produced as a result?
      Frequency/Timing How often, and when, will the work be performed?
      Responsibility Who will perform the work?
      Accountability Who will approve the work and assume the ownership of any decisions?

    3. Record the time cost of each process using the PPM Strategy Development Tool; see next slide for instructions.

    Use the PPM Strategy Development Tool to track the time cost of the process

    Supporting Tool icon 2.1.1 – PPM Strategy Development Tool, Tab 3: Costing Assumptions

    Record the time cost of each high-level process task from Activity 2.1.1d.

    Screenshot of tab 3 from Info-Tech's PPM Strategy Development Tool with notes overlaid. Columns are 'ID', 'Task Description', 'Who does the task?', a super-column titled 'Current State' which includes 'How many times per year?', 'How many people?', and 'For how long?', a super-column titled 'Near-Term Target State' with the same three sub columns, and a super-column titled 'Long-Term Target State' with the same three sub columns. Notes for 'Who does the task?' read 'Choose executive, management or resource' and 'If task is done by more than one party, duplicate the task'. Notes for the 3 recurring sub columns are 'Estimate how many times in a year the task is performed (e.g. 120 project requests per year)', 'Indicate the number of people needed to perform the task each time', 'Estimate the average work-hours for the task… either in minutes or in hours', 'If a task is not applicable to a state (e.g. currently PMO does not screen project requests), leave the row blank', and 'For meetings, remember to indicate the number of people'.

    Document the high-level description for the new intake, prioritization, and approval process

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.1e – 30 minutes - 1 hour

    INPUT: High-level description of the process at the target state

    OUTPUT: Updated PPM strategic plan

    Materials: Whiteboard, PPM Strategic Plan Template

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager

    Update your PPM strategic plan with the new high-level description for the new project intake, prioritization, and approval process. Depending on your current process capability level, you may wish to include additional information on your strategic document, for example:

    • Updated prioritization scorecard.
    • Roles and responsibility matrix, identifying consulted and informed parties.

    Info-Tech has a dedicated blueprint to help you develop the high-level process description into a fully operationalized process. Upon completion of this PPM strategy blueprint, speak to an Info-Tech account manager or analyst to get started.

    Read Info-Tech’s Optimize Project Intake, Prioritization, and Approval blueprint.

    Review and customize slide 24, “Project intake, prioritization, and approval: target state,” in Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    Clarity in project prioritization process leads to enterprise-wide buy-in

    CASE STUDY

    Industry: Public Administration
    Source: IAG / Info-Tech Interview

    Challenge

    "Our challenge from the start was to better understand the strategic perspective and priorities of our client departments.

    In addition, much of the work requested was not aligned to corporate goals and efforts, and seemed to be contradictory, redundant, and lacking strategic focus."

    Complicating this challenge was the fact that work requests were being received via all means of communication, which made the monitoring and controlling of requests more difficult.

    Solution

    Client departments were consulted to improve the understanding of their strategic goals and priorities. Based on the consultation:

    • A new, enterprise-wide project prioritization criteria was developed.
    • Priority of project requests from all business areas are evaluated on a quarterly basis.
    • A prioritized list of projects are made available to the senior leadership team.

    Results

    "By creating and implementing a tool for departments to prioritize strategic efforts, we helped them consider the important overall project criteria and measure them uniformly, across all anticipated projects. This set a standard of assessment, prioritization, and ranking, which helped departments clearly see which efforts were supportive and matched their strategic goals."

    Resource management process ensures that projects get the resources they need

    Reclaim project capacity: properly allocate project work and establish more stable project timelines.

    Questions

    • Who assigns the resources?
    • Who feeds the data on resources?
    • How do we make sure it’s valid?
    • How do we handle contingencies when projects are late, or if availability changes?

    Benefits

    • Ensure that approved projects can be completed by aligning intake with real project capacity.
    • Reduce over-allocation of resources by allocating based on their proportion of project vs. non-project work.
    • Forecast future resource requirements by maintaining accurate resource capacity data.

    Challenges

    • Time tracking can be difficult when project workers balance project work with “keep the lights on” activities and other administrative work.
    • Continuous partial attention, interruptions, and distractions are a part of today’s reality that makes it very difficult to maximize productivity.
    A see-saw balancing 'Resource availability' on one side and 'Ongoing projects, Operational work, Administrative work, and Resource absence' on the other side.

    Maintain reliable resourcing data with a recurrent resource management practice

    Info-Tech recommends following a five-step process for resource management.

    A diagram of Info-Tech's five-step process for resource management. There are five groups that may be involved in any one step, they are laid out on the side as row headers that each step's columns may fall into, 'Resources', 'Resource Managers', 'Project Managers', 'PMO', and 'Governance Layer'. The first step is 'Collect resource availability' which involves 'Resources' and 'Resource Managers'. Step 2 is 'Collect resource demand' which involves 'Resource Managers', 'Project Managers' and 'PMO'. Step 3 is 'Identify need for reconciliation' which involves 'PMO'. Step 4 is 'Resolve conflicts and smoothen resource allocations' which involves 'Resource Managers', 'Project Managers' and 'PMO'. Step 5 is 'Report resource allocations and forecast' which involves all groups, with an attached note that reads 'Ensure that up-to-date information is available for project approval, portfolio reporting, closure, etc.'

    Info-Tech Insight

    This process aims to control the resource supply to meet the demand – project and non-project alike. Coordinate this process with the intake, approval, and prioritization process.

    Determine your resource management process capability level

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.2a – 10 minutes

    INPUT: Organizational strategy and culture

    OUTPUT: Resource management capability level

    Materials: PPM Strategy Development Tool

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Resource Managers, Business Analysts

    Kick-off the discussion about the resource management process by reading the capability level descriptions below and discussing which level currently applies to you the most.

    Capability Level Descriptions

    Capability Level 5: OptimizedOur organization has an accurate picture of project versus non-project work loads and allocates resources accordingly. We periodically reclaim lost capacity through organizational and behavioral change.
    Capability Level 4: AlignedWe have an accurate picture of how much time is spent on project versus non-project work. We allocate resources to these projects accordingly. We are checking in on project progress bi-weekly.
    Capability Level 3: PixelatedWe are allocating resources to projects and tracking progress monthly. We have a rough estimate of how much time is spent on project versus non-project work.
    Capability Level 2: OpaqueWe match resources teams to projects and check in annually, but we do not forecast future resource needs or track project versus non-project work.
    Capability Level 1: UnmanagedOur organization expects projects to be finished, but there is no process in place for allocating resources or tracking project progress.

    Benchmark the current resource management process against strategy-aligned goals

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.2b – 1-2 hours

    INPUT: Documentation describing the current process (e.g. standard operating procedures), Process goals from activity 1.2.1

    OUTPUT: Retrospective review of current process

    Materials: 4x6” recipe cards, Whiteboard

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Resource Managers, Business Analysts

    Conduct a table-top planning exercise to map out the process currently in place.

    1. Use white 4”x6” recipe cards to write unique steps of a process. Use the resource management process from the previous slides as a guide.
    2. Use green cards to write artifacts or deliverables that result from a step.
    3. Use pink cards to write issues, problems, or risks.
    4. Discuss how the process could better achieve the strategy-aligned goals from activity 1.2.1. Keep a list of possible changes in the form of a start-stop-continue retrospective (example below) on a whiteboard.
    Start Stop Continue
    • Collect project actuals
    • Make enhancements to the PPM tool in use
    • Over allocating resources
    • “Around the room” reporting at monthly meeting
    • Send project updates before resource management meetings

    Set near- and long-term action items for the resource management process

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.2c – 30 minutes - 1 hour

    INPUT: Outcome of the retrospective review, Process goals and metrics from activity 1.2.1

    OUTPUT: Action items for evolving the process to a target state

    Materials: Whiteboard

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Resource Managers, Business Analysts

    Analyze each item in the start-stop-continue retrospective to compile a set of near-term and long-term action items.

    The near-term plan should include steps that are within the authority of the PMO and do not require approval or investment outside of that authority. The long-term plan should include steps that may require a longer approval process, buy-in of external stakeholders, and the investment of time and money.
    Near-Term Action Items Long-Term Action Items
    For example:
    • Determine the percentage of project vs. non-project work through implementation of a weekly survey.
    		 For example:
    • Reduce resource waste to 6%.
    • Forecast resource requirements monthly.
    • Implement a mid-market PPM tool.

    Review and customize slide 26, “Resource management: action items,” in Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    Draft a high-level description of the resource management process at a target state

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.2d – 1-2 hours

    INPUT: Action items for evolving the process to a target state

    OUTPUT: High-level description of the process at the target state

    Materials: Whiteboard, PPM Strategy Development Tool

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Resource Managers, Business Analysts

    1. Break down the process into several tasks at a high level. Avoid getting into too much detail by limiting the number of steps.
      2. An example of high-level breakdown: resource management
      Collect resource availability –› Collect resource demand –› Identify need for reconciliation –› Resolve conflicts and over-allocation –› Update resource forecast


    2. Describe each task by answering the following questions. Document your response in the PPM Strategic Plan Template.

      3. Question

      Description
      Input What information do you need to perform the work?
      Output What artifacts/deliverables are produced as a result?
      Frequency/Timing How often, and when, will the work be performed?
      Responsibility Who will perform the work?
      Accountability Who will approve the work and assume the ownership of any decisions?


    3. Record the time cost of each process using the PPM Strategy Development Tool.

    Document the high-level description for the new resource management process

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.2e – 30 minutes - 1 hour

    INPUT: High-level description of the process at the target state

    OUTPUT: Updated PPM strategic plan

    Materials: PPM Strategic Plan Template

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager

    Update your PPM strategic plan with the new high-level description for the new resource management process. Depending on your current process capability level, you may wish to include additional information on your strategic plan, for example:

    • Resource management meeting agenda template
    • Roles and responsibility matrix, identifying consulted and informed parties

    Info-Tech has a dedicated blueprint to help you develop the high-level process description into a fully operationalized process. Upon completion of this PPM strategy blueprint, speak to an Info-Tech account manager or analyst to get started.

    Read Info-Tech’s Develop a Resource Management for the New Reality blueprint.

    Review and customize slide 27, “Resource management: target state,” in Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    Step 2.2: Develop and refine portfolio reporting, project closure, and benefits realization processes

    PHASE 1

    PHASE 2

    PHASE 3

    1.11.22.12.23.13.2
    Choose the right PPM strategyTranslate strategy into process goalsDefine intake & resource mgmt. processesDefine reporting, closure, & benefits mgmt. processesSelect a right-sized PPM solutionFinalize your PPM strategic plan

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Determine your process maturity.
    • Benchmark current processes against strategy-aligned goals.
    • Set near- and long-term action items.
    • Draft a high-level description of your target state.
    • Document your new processes.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • PMO Director/Portfolio Manager
    • Project Managers
    • Business Analysts

    Outcomes of this step

    • A definition of current and target state maturity levels for portfolio reporting, project closure, and benefits realization
    • Near-term and long-term process goals for portfolio reporting, project closure, and benefits realization
    • A high-level wireframe for your portfolio reporting, project closure, and benefits realization process steps

    Portfolio reporting process makes trustworthy data accessible for informing decisions

    Giving stakeholders the ability to make informed decisions is the most important function of managing the project portfolio.

    Questions

    • What project information should be reported?
    • Who reports on project status?
    • When and how do we report on the status of the project portfolio?

    Benefits

    • Reporting is the linchpin of any successful PPM strategy.
    • Timely and accurate status reports enable decision makers to address issues risks and issues before they create bigger problems.
    • Executive visibility can be achieved with or without a commercial tool using spreadsheets, a content management system such as SharePoint, or a combination of tools you already have.

    Challenges

    • Trying to increase detailed visibility too fast leads to difficulty gathering and maintaining data. As a result, reporting is rarely accurate and people quickly lose trust in the portfolio.
    • If you are planning to adopt a commercial tool, Info-Tech strongly recommends validating your organization’s ability to maintain a consistent reporting process using simple tools before investing in a more sophisticated system.

    Info-Tech Insight

    If you can only do one thing, establish frequently current reporting on project status. Reporting doesn’t have to be detailed or precise, as long as it’s accurate.

    Maintain reliable portfolio status data with a recurrent status and progress reporting practice

    Info-Tech recommends following a four-step process for portfolio status and progress reporting.

    A diagram of Info-Tech's four-step process for portfolio status and progress reporting. There are four groups that may be involved in any one step, they are laid out on the side as row headers that each step's columns may fall into, 'Resources', 'Project Managers', 'PMO', and 'Governance Layer'. The first step is 'Create project status reports' which involves 'Resources' and 'Project Managers'. Step 2 is 'Create a project portfolio status report' which involves 'Project Managers' and 'PMO', with a note that reads 'Ensure that up-to-date information is available for project approval, resource management, closure, etc.' Step 3 is 'Report on project portfolio status' which involves 'PMO' and 'Governance layer'. Step 4 is 'Act on portfolio steering decisions' which involves 'Resources', 'Project Managers' and 'PMO'.

    Start by establishing a regular reporting cadence with lightweight project status KPIs:

    Red Issue or risk that requires intervention For projects that are red or yellow, high-level status reports should be elaborated on with additional comments on budget, estimated hours/days until completion, etc.
    Yellow Issue or risk that stakeholders should be aware of
    Green No significant risks or issues

    Determine your resource management process capability level

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.1a – 10 minutes

    INPUT: Organizational strategy and culture

    OUTPUT: Portfolio reporting capability level

    Materials: PPM Strategy Development Tool

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers

    Kick-off the discussion about the portfolio reporting process by reading the capability level descriptions below and discussing which level currently applies to you the most.

    Capability Level Descriptions

    Capability Level 5: OptimizedWith the right tools, we can ensure that all projects are planned and maintained at a detailed task level with high-quality estimates, and that actual task progress is updated at least weekly.
    Capability Level 4: AlignedWe have the skills, knowledge, and resources needed to prepare a detailed cost-benefit analysis for all proposed projects. We track the progress throughout project execution.
    Capability Level 3: InterventionWith the right tools, we can ensure that project issues and risks are identified and addressed on a regular basis (e.g. at least monthly) for all projects.
    Capability Level 2: OversightWith the right tools, we can ensure that project status updates are revised on a regular basis (e.g. at least monthly) for all ongoing projects.
    Capability Level 1: ReactiveProject managers escalate issues directly with their direct supervisor or project sponsor because there is no formal PPM practice.

    Benchmark the current portfolio reporting process against strategy-aligned goals

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.1b – 1-2 hours

    INPUT: Documentation describing the current process (e.g. standard operating procedures), Process goals from activity 1.2.1

    OUTPUT: Retrospective review of current process

    Materials: 4x6” recipe cards, Whiteboard

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers

    Conduct a table-top planning exercise to map out the process currently in place.

    1. Use white 4”x6” recipe cards to write unique steps of a process. Use the portfolio reporting process from the previous slides as a guide.
    2. Use green cards to write artifacts or deliverables that result from a step.
    3. Use pink cards to write issues, problems, or risks.
    4. Discuss how the process could better achieve the strategy-aligned goals from activity 1.2.1. Keep a list of possible changes in the form of a start-stop-continue retrospective (example below) on a whiteboard.
    Start Stop Continue
    • Report on lightweight KPIs
    • Standardize the status reports
    • Project managers waiting too long before declaring a red status
    • Produce weekly project portfolio-wide report for senior leadership

    Set near- and long-term action items for the portfolio reporting process

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.1c – 30 minutes - 1 hour

    INPUT: Outcome of the retrospective review, Process goals and metrics from activity 1.2.1

    OUTPUT: Action items for evolving the process to a target state

    Materials: Whiteboard

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers

    Analyze each item in the start-stop-continue retrospective to compile a set of near-term and long-term action items.

    The near-term plan should include steps that are within the authority of the PMO and do not require approval or investment outside of that authority. The long-term plan should include steps that may require a longer approval process, buy-in of external stakeholders, and the investment of time and money.
    Near-Term Action Items Long-Term Action Items
    For example:
    • Establish a reporting process that can be consistently maintained using lightweight KPIs.
    • Provide a simple dashboard that stakeholders can use to see their project status reports at a high level.
    		 For example:
    • Adopt a commercial tool for maintaining consistent status reports.
    • Support the tool with training and a mandate of adoption among all users.

    Review and customize slide 29, “Portfolio reporting: action items,” in Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    Draft a high-level description of the portfolio reporting process at a target state

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.1d – 1-2 hours

    INPUT: Action items for evolving the process to a target state

    OUTPUT: High-level description of the process at the target state

    Materials: Whiteboard, PPM Strategy Development Tool

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers

    1. Break down the process into several tasks at a high level. Avoid getting into too much detail by limiting the number of steps.
      2. An example of high-level breakdown: portfolio reporting
      Create project status reports –› Create a project portfolio status report –› Report on project portfolio status –› Act on portfolio steering decisions


    2. Describe each task by answering the following questions. Document your response in the PPM Strategic Plan Template.

      3. Question

      Description

      InputWhat information do you need to perform the work?
      OutputWhat artifacts/deliverables are produced as a result?
      Frequency/TimingHow often, and when, will the work be performed?
      ResponsibilityWho will perform the work?
      AccountabilityWho will approve the work and assume the ownership of any decisions?

    3. Record the time cost of each process using the PPM Strategy Development Tool.

    Document the high-level description for the new portfolio reporting process

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.1e – 30 minutes - 1 hour

    INPUT: High-level description of the process at the target state

    OUTPUT: Updated PPM strategic plan

    Materials: PPM Strategic Plan Template

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager

    Update your PPM strategic plan with the new high-level description for the new portfolio reporting process. Depending on your current process capability level, you may wish to include additional information on your strategic plan, for example:

    • Updated project status report template with new KPIs.
    • Documentation of requirements for improved PPM dashboards and reports.

    Info-Tech has a dedicated blueprint to help you develop the high-level process description into a fully operationalized process. Upon completion of this PPM strategy blueprint, speak to an Info-Tech account manager or analyst to get started.

    Read Info-Tech’s Enhance PPM Dashboards and Reports blueprint.

    Review and customize slide 30, “Portfolio reporting: target state,” in Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    Streamlined status reporting improves portfolio visibility for executives, enabling data-driven steering of the portfolio

    CASE STUDY

    Industry: Public Administration
    Source: IAG / Info-Tech Interview

    Challenge

    The client had no effective real-time reporting in place to summarize their work efforts. In addition, the client struggled with managing existing resources against the ability to deliver on the requested project workload.

    Existing project reporting processes were manually intensive and lacked mature reporting capabilities.

    Solution

    Through a short and effective engagement, IAG conducted surveys and facilitated interviews to identify the information needed by each stakeholder. From this analysis and industry best practices, IAG developed scorecards, dashboards, and project summary reports tailored to the needs of each stakeholder group. This integrated reporting tool was then made available on a central portal for PPM stakeholders.

    Results

    Stakeholders can access project scorecard and dashboard reports that are available at any given time.

    Resource reporting enabled the PMO to better balance client demand with available project capacity and forecast any upcoming deficiencies in resourcing that affect project delivery.

    Project closure at the portfolio level controls throughput and responsiveness of the portfolio

    Take control over projects that linger on, projects that don’t provide value, and projects that do not align with changing organizational priority.

    Questions

    • Who declares that a project is done?
    • Who validates it?
    • Who is this reported to?
    • Who terminates low-value projects?
    • How will they decide that a project is too low value to continue?

    Benefits

    • Minimize post-implementation problems by ensuring clean handoffs, with clear responsibilities for ongoing support and maintenance.
    • Drive continuous improvement by capturing and applying lessons learned.
    • Increase the project portfolio’s responsiveness to change by responding to emerging opportunities and challenges.

    Challenges

    • Completion criteria and “definition of done” need to be well defined and done so at project initiation.
    • Scope changes need to be managed and documented throughout the project.
    • Portfolio responsiveness requires deep cultural changes that will be met with confusion and resistance from some stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Although “change in organizational priority” is the most frequently cited cause of project failure (PMI Pulse of Profession, 2017), closing projects that don’t align with organizational priority ought to be a key PPM goal. Therefore, don’t think of it as project failure; instead, think of it as PPM success.

    Maintain the health of the project portfolio with a repeatable project closure process

    Info-Tech recommends following a four-step process for project closure.

    A diagram of Info-Tech's four-step process for project closure. There are five groups that may be involved in any one step, they are laid out on the side as row headers that each step's columns may fall into, 'Resources', 'Resource Managers', 'Project Managers', 'PMO', and 'Governance Layer'. The first steps are 'Complete project' which involves 'Project Managers', and 'Terminate low value projects' which involves 'PMO' and 'Governance layer'. Step 2 is 'Validate project closure' which involves 'Project Managers' and 'PMO', with a note that reads 'This includes facilitating the project sponsor sign-off, accepting and archiving lessons learned documents, etc.' The third steps are 'Conduct post-project work' which involves 'Project Managers' and 'PMO', and 'Update resource availability' which includes 'Resource Managers'. Step 4 is 'Conduct post-implementation review' which involves all groups.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Post-implementation review checks which benefits (including those set out in the business case) have been achieved and identifies opportunities for further improvement. Without it, it can be difficult to demonstrate that investment in a project was worthwhile.

    Determine your project closure process capability level

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.2a – 10 minutes

    INPUT: Organizational strategy and culture

    OUTPUT: Project closure capability level

    Materials: PPM Strategy Development Tool

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Business Analysts

    Kick-off the discussion about the project closure process by reading the capability level descriptions below and discussing which level currently applies to you the most.

    Capability Level Descriptions

    Capability Level 5: OptimizedProject closure is centrally managed and supports post-project benefits tracking.
    Capability Level 4: AlignedProject closure is centrally managed at the portfolio level to ensure completion/acceptance criteria are satisfied.
    Capability Level 3: EngagedProject closure is confirmed at the portfolio level, but with minimal enforcement of satisfaction of completion/acceptance criteria.
    Capability Level 2: EncouragedProject managers often follow handoff and closure procedures, but project closure is not confirmed or governed at the portfolio level.
    Capability Level 1: UnmanagedProject closure is not governed at either the project or portfolio level.

    Benchmark the current project closure process against strategy-aligned goals

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.2b – 1-2 hours

    INPUT: Documentation describing the current process (e.g. standard operating procedures), Process goals from activity 1.2.1

    OUTPUT: Retrospective review of current process

    Materials: 4x6” recipe cards, Whiteboard

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Business Analysts

    Conduct a table-top planning exercise to map out the process currently in place.

    1. Use white 4”x6” recipe cards to write unique steps of a process. Use the project closure process from the previous slides as a guide.
    2. Use green cards to write artifacts or deliverables that result from a step.
    3. Use pink cards to write issues, problems, or risks.
    4. Discuss how the process could better achieve the strategy-aligned goals from activity 1.2.1. Keep a list of possible changes in the form of a start-stop-continue retrospective (example below) on a whiteboard.
    Start Stop Continue
    • Conduct reprioritization of projects at a regular cadence
    • Prune projects every year
    • Waive post-implementation review for time-constrained projects
    • Collect project post-mortem reports and curate in PMO SharePoint

    Set near- and long-term action items for the project closure process

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.2c – 30 minutes - 1 hour

    INPUT: Outcome of the retrospective review, Process goals and metrics from activity 1.2.1

    OUTPUT: Action items for evolving the process to a target state

    Materials: Whiteboard

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Resource Managers, Business Analysts

    Analyze each item in the start-stop-continue retrospective to compile a set of near-term and long-term action items.

    The near-term plan should include steps that are within the authority of the PMO and do not require approval or investment outside of that authority. The long-term plan should include steps that may require a longer approval process, buy-in of external stakeholders, and the investment of time and money.
    Near-Term Action Items Long-Term Action Items
    For example:
    • Begin establishing project closure criteria in the project initiation process.
    • Manage and document scope changes throughout the project.
    		 For example:
    • Institute a formal process to ensure that all projects are closed at the portfolio level and properly handed off to support and maintenance teams.

    Review and customize slide 32, “Project closure: action items,” in Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    Draft a high-level description of the project closure process at a target state

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.2d – 1-2 hours

    INPUT: Action items for evolving the process to a target state

    OUTPUT: High-level description of the process at the target state

    Materials: Whiteboard, PPM Strategy Development Tool

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Resource Managers, Business Analysts

    1. Break down the process into several tasks at a high level. Avoid getting into too much detail by limiting the number of steps.
      2. An example of high-level breakdown: project closure
      Complete or terminate projects –› Validate project closure –› Conduct post-project work –› Conduct post-implementation review


    2. Describe each task by answering the following questions. Document your response in the PPM Strategic Plan Template.

      3. Question

      Description
      Input What information do you need to perform the work?
      Output What artifacts/deliverables are produced as a result?
      Frequency/Timing How often, and when, will the work be performed?
      Responsibility Who will perform the work?
      Accountability Who will approve the work and assume the ownership of any decisions?


    3. Record the time cost of each process using the PPM Strategy Development Tool.

    Document the high-level description for the new project closure process

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.2e – 30 minutes - 1 hour

    INPUT: High-level description of the process at the target state

    OUTPUT: Updated PPM strategic plan

    Materials: PPM Strategic Plan Template

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager

    Update your PPM strategic plan with the new high-level description for the new project closure process. Depending on your current process capability level, you may wish to include additional information on your strategic plan, for example:

    • Updated project closure checklist.
    • Project value review meeting process document.
    • Post-implementation review process document.

    Info-Tech has several research notes that elaborate on aspects of project closure. Upon completion of this PPM strategy blueprint, speak to an Info-Tech account manager or analyst to get started.

    Read Info-Tech’s research notes on project closure:

    • The Importance of Conducting a Post Implementation Review
    • Five Key Steps to Mastering Project Closure
    • ‘Governance’ Will Kill Your Projects

    Review and customize slide 33, “Project closure: target state,” in Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    Validate the time and effort spent on projects with a benefits realization process

    Maximizing benefits from projects is the primary goal of PPM. Tracking and reporting on benefits post-project closes the loop on benefits.

    Questions

    • How do validate the project benefits from the original business case?
    • How do we track the benefits?
    • Who reports it? When?

    Benefits

    • Maximize benefits realization by identifying and addressing unforeseen issues or limitations to success.
    • Improve project approval and prioritization by improving validity of the business case definition process.

    Challenges

    • Project sponsors need to be willing to invest time – months and years post-project completion – to validate benefits realization.
    • Portfolio management needs to proactively work with sponsors to facilitate benefits tracking.
    • Business cases need to be well developed and documented to reflect real anticipated benefits.

    Too many projects fail to achieve the originally proposed benefits, and too few organizations are able to identify and address the root causes of those shortfalls.

    Info-Tech Insight

    In reality, benefits realization process extends across the entire project life cycle: during intake, during the execution of the project, and after project completion. Be mindful of this extended scope when you discuss benefits realization in the following activity.

    Keep project benefits front and center with a repeatable benefits realization process

    Info-Tech recommends following a four-step process for benefits realization.

    A diagram of Info-Tech's four-step process for benefits realization. There are four groups that may be involved in any one step, they are laid out on the side as row headers that each step's columns may fall into, 'Business Analysts', 'Project Managers', 'PMO', and 'Governance Layer'. The first step is 'Quantify and validate benefits in business case' which happens 'Before Project' and involves 'Business Analysts' and 'Project Managers'. Step 2 is 'Update projected project benefits' which happens 'During Project' and involves 'Project Managers' and 'PMO'. Step 3 is 'Hand-off benefits realization ownership' which happens at the end of project and involves 'Project Managers', 'PMO' and 'Governance layer'. Step 4 is 'Monitor and report on benefits' which happens 'After Project' and involves 'PMO' and 'Governance layer'.

    Info-Tech Insight

    At the heart of benefits realization is accountability: who is held accountable for projects that don’t realize the benefits and how? Without the buy-in from the entire executive layer team, addressing this issue is very difficult.

    Determine your benefits realization process capability level

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.3a – 10 minutes

    INPUT: Organizational strategy and culture

    OUTPUT: benefits realization capability level

    Materials: PPM Strategy Development Tool

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Resource Managers, Business Analysts

    Kick-off the discussion about the benefits realization process by reading the capability level descriptions below and discussing which level currently applies to you the most.

    Capability Level Descriptions

    Capability Level 5: OptimizedProject sponsors and key stakeholders are accountable for stated project benefits before, during and after the project. There is a process to maximize the realization of project benefits.
    Capability Level 4: AlignedProject benefits are forecasted and taken into account for approval, updated when changes are made to the project, and monitored/reported after projects are completed.
    Capability Level 3: EngagedProject benefits are forecasted and taken into account for approval, and there is a loosely defined process to report on benefits realization.
    Capability Level 2: DefinedProject benefits are forecasted and taken into account for approval, but there is no process to monitor whether the said benefits are realized.
    Capability Level 1: UnmanagedProjects are approved and initiated without discussing benefits.

    Benchmark the current benefits realization process against strategy-aligned goals

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.3b – 1-2 hours

    INPUT: Documentation describing the current process (e.g. standard operating procedures), Process goals from activity 1.2.1

    OUTPUT: Retrospective review of current process

    Materials: 4x6” recipe cards, Whiteboard

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Resource Managers, Business Analysts

    Conduct a table-top planning exercise to map out the process currently in place.

    1. Use white 4”x6” recipe cards to write unique steps of a process. Use the benefits realization process from the previous slides as a guide.
    2. Use green cards to write artifacts or deliverables that result from a step.
    3. Use pink cards to write issues, problems, or risks.
    4. Discuss how the process could better achieve the strategy-aligned goals from activity 1.2.1. Keep a list of possible changes in the form of a start-stop-continue retrospective (example below) on a whiteboard.
    StartStopContinue
    • Require “hard monetary value” in business benefits
    • Send project updates before resource management meetings

    Set near- and long-term action items for the benefits realization process

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.3c – 30 minutes - 1 hour

    INPUT: Outcome of the retrospective review, Process goals and metrics from activity 1.2.1

    OUTPUT: Action items for evolving the process to a target state

    Materials: Whiteboard

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Resource Managers, Business Analysts

    Analyze each item in the start-stop-continue retrospective to compile a set of near-term and long-term action items.

    The near-term plan should include steps that are within the authority of the PMO and do not require approval or investment outside of that authority. The long-term plan should include steps that may require a longer approval process, buy-in of external stakeholders, and the investment of time and money.
    Near-Term Action Items Long-Term Action Items
    For example:
    • Create an “orientation for project sponsors” document.
    • Encourage project managers to re-validate project benefits on an ongoing basis and report any deviation.
    		 For example:
    • Recruit the finance department’s help in benefits tracking.
    • Require Finance’s sign-off on project benefits in business cases during intake.

    Review and customize slide 35, “Benefits realization: action items,” in Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    Draft a high-level description of the benefits realization process at a target state

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.3d – 1-2 hours

    INPUT: Action items for evolving the process to a target state

    OUTPUT: High-level description of the process at the target state

    Materials: Whiteboard, PPM Strategy Development Tool

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Resource Managers, Business Analysts

    1. Break down the process into several tasks at a high level. Avoid getting into too much detail by limiting the number of steps.
      2. An example of high-level breakdown: benefits realization
      Validate benefits in business case –› Update project benefits during execution –› Hand-off benefits ownership –› Monitor and report on benefits


    2. Describe each task by answering the following questions. Document your response in the PPM Strategic Plan Template.

      3. Question

      Description

      InputWhat information do you need to perform the work?
      OutputWhat artifacts/deliverables are produced as a result?
      Frequency/TimingHow often, and when, will the work be performed?
      ResponsibilityWho will perform the work?
      AccountabilityWho will approve the work and assume the ownership of any decisions?

    3. Record the time cost of each process using the PPM Strategy Development Tool.

    Document the high-level description for the new benefits realization process

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.3e – 30 minutes - 1 hour

    INPUT: High-level description of the process at the target state

    OUTPUT: Updated PPM strategic plan

    Materials: PPM Strategic Plan Template

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager

    Update your PPM strategic plan with the new high-level description for the new benefits realization process. Depending on your current process capability level, you may wish to include additional information on your strategic plan, for example:

    • Updated business plan templates.
    • Communication plan for project sponsors.

    Info-Tech has a dedicated blueprint to help you develop the high-level process description into a fully operationalized process. Upon completion of this PPM strategy blueprint, speak to an Info-Tech account manager or analyst to get started.

    Read Info-Tech’s Establish the Benefits Realization Process blueprint.

    Review and customize slide 36, “Benefits realization: target state,” in Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech Workshop Associated Activity icon

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    Photo of Barry Cousins.
    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analyst 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:

    Sample of activity 2.1.1 'Align your project intake, prioritization, and approval process to the PPM strategy'. Align your project intake, prioritization, and approval process to the PPM strategy

    Examine the process at the current state and develop an action plan to improve it, with a high-level description of the process at a target state and its overhead costs. The outcome of this activity feeds into the overall PPM strategic plan.
    Sample of activity 2.1.2 'Align your resource management process to the PPM strategy'. Align your resource management process to the PPM strategy

    Examine the process at the current state and develop an action plan to improve it, with a high-level description of the process at a target state and its overhead costs. The outcome of this activity feeds into the overall PPM strategic plan.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech Workshop Associated Activity icon

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    Sample of activity 2.2.1 'Align your portfolio reporting process to the PPM strategy'.Align your portfolio reporting process to the PPM strategy

    Examine the process at the current state and develop an action plan to improve it, with a high-level description of the process at a target state and its overhead costs. The outcome of this activity feeds into the overall PPM strategic plan.

    Sample of activity 2.2.2 'Align your project closure process to the PPM strategy'.Align your project closure process to the PPM strategy

    Examine the process at the current state and develop an action plan to improve it, with a high-level description of the process at a target state and its overhead costs. The outcome of this activity feeds into the overall PPM strategic plan.

    Sample of activity 2.2.3 'Align your benefits realization process to the PPM strategy'.Align your benefits realization process to the PPM strategy

    Examine the process at the current state and develop an action plan to improve it, with a high-level description of the process at a target state and its overhead costs. The outcome of this activity feeds into the overall PPM strategic plan.

    Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy

    PHASE 3

    Complete Your PPM Strategic Plan

    Phase 2 outline

    Associated Activity icon 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: Complete your PPM strategic plan

    Proposed Time to Completion: 2 weeks
    Step 3.1: Select a right-sized PPM solutionStep 3.2: Finalize your PPM Strategic Plan Template
    Work with an analyst to:
    • Assess your PPM tool requirements to help support your processes.
    		Review findings with analyst:
    • Determine the costs and potential benefits of your PPM strategy.
    Then complete these activities…
    • Determine the functionality requirements of the PPM solution.
    • Estimate your PPM tool budget.
    • Review the tool assessment.
    		Then complete these activities…
    • Estimate the total cost-in-use of managing the project portfolio.
    • Estimate the benefits of the PPM strategy.
    • Refine and consolidate the near-term action items into a cohesive implementation plan.
    With these tools & templates:
    • PPM Strategy Development Tool
    		With these tools & templates:
    • PPM Strategy Development Tool
    • PPM Strategic Plan Template

    Phase 3 Insight:

    • Approach PPM as an evolving discipline that requires adaptability and long-term organizational change. Near-term process improvements should create stakeholder desire for better portfolio visibility and agility over the long term.

    Step 3.1: Select a right-sized PPM solution for supporting your new processes

    PHASE 1

    PHASE 2

    PHASE 3

    1.11.22.12.23.13.2
    Choose the right PPM strategyTranslate strategy into process goalsDefine intake & resource mgmt. processesDefine reporting, closure, & benefits mgmt. processesSelect a right-sized PPM solutionFinalize your PPM strategic plan

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Determine the functionality requirements of a PPM solution in the near and long terms.
    • Estimate your PPM tool budget.
    • Review tool assessment.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager
    • Project Managers
    • IT Managers

    Outcomes of this step

    • List of functional requirements for a PPM solution
    • An estimate budget and cost for supporting a PPM tool in the near and long terms
    • PPM tool requirements for the near and long terms

    Right-size your PPM solution/tool to fit your PPM processes

    Avoid a common pitfall: the disconnect between PPM processes and PPM tools.

    PPM tools act as both a receptacle for portfolio data generated by your processes and a source of portfolio data to drive your processes forward. Therefore, choosing a suitable PPM tool is critical to the success of your PPM strategy:

    • PPM tool inputs must match the type, level of detail, and amount of portfolio data generated by your PPM processes.
    • PPM tool outputs must be useful, insightful, easy to access, and easy to understand for people who engage in your PPM processes.

    User adoption is an often cited cause of failed PPM tool implementation:

    "The biggest problem is getting the team to work with the tool. We need to make sure that we’re not wasting time delving too far down into the tool, yet putting enough information to get useful information back." (IT Director, Financial Services)

    This final step of the blueprint will discuss the choice of PPM tools to ensure the success of PPM strategy by avoiding the process-tool disconnect.

    Common pitfalls for PPM tools

    • Purchasing and implementing a PPM tool before the process is defined and accepted.
    • Poor expectation setting: inability of tools to perform the necessary analysis.
    • Underleveraged: low user/process adoption.
    • Poor integration with the corporate finance function.
      • (WGroup, 2017)

    Leverage PPM tools to get the information you need

    An optimized PPM solution is the vehicle that provides decision makers with four key pieces of information they require when making decisions for your project portfolio:

    • Historical Insight – inform decision makers about how much time and resources have been spent to date, and benchmark the accuracy of prior project estimates and resource allocations.
    • Forecasting – provide a trustworthy estimate of demand on resources and current projects.
    • Portfolio Analytics – analyze portfolio data and generate easy-to-consume reports that provide answers to questions such as:
      • How big is our overall portfolio?
      • How much money/resource time is available?
      • How efficiently are we using our resources?
    • Project Visibility – provide a trustworthy report on the status of current projects and the resources working on them.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Without the proper information, decision makers are driving blind and are forced to make gut feel decisions as opposed to data-informed decisions. Implement a PPM solution to allocate projects properly and ensure time and money don’t vanish without being accounted for.

    Commercial PPM tools have more functionality but are more costly, complex, and difficult to adopt

    • Granular timesheet management
    • Workflow and team collaboration
    • Robust data and application integration
    • Advanced what-if planning
    • Mobile usability
    		 A map comparing commercial PPM tools by 'Functionality', 'Cost', and 'Difficulty to implement/adopt'. 'Functionality' and 'Difficulty to implement/adopt' share an axis and can be assumed to have a linear relationship. 'Spreadsheets' are low functionality and low cost. 'Google Sites' are low to middling functionality and low cost. 'SharePoint' is middling functionality with a slightly higher cost. The next three start at middling cost and above-average functionality and trend higher in both categories: 'Commercial Entry-Level PPM', 'Commercial Mid-Market PPM', and 'Commercial Enterprise PPM'.
    • Business case scoring and prioritization
    • Multi-user reporting and request portal
    • High-level resource management
    • Project status, cost, and risk tracking

    "Price tags [for PPM tools] vary considerably. Expensive products don't always provide more capability. Inexpensive products are generally low cost for good reason." (Merkhofer)

    Your PPM tool options are not limited to commercial offerings

    Despite the rapid growth in the commercial PPM tool market today, homegrown approaches like spreadsheets and intranet sites continue to be used as PPM tools.

    Kinds of PPM solutions used by Info-Tech clients

    A pie chart visualizing the kinds of PPM solutions that are used by Info-Tech clients. There are three sections, the largest of which is 'Spreadsheet-based, 46%', then 'Commercial, 33%', then 'No solution, 21%'. (Source: Info-Tech Research Group (2016), N=433)

    Category

    Characteristics

    PPM maturity
    Enterprise tool
    • Higher professional services requirements for enterprise deployment
    • Larger reference customers
    		 High
    Mid-market tool
    • Lower expectation of professional services engaged in initial deployment contract
    • Fewer globally recognizable reference clients
    • Faster deployments
    		 High
    Entry-level tool
    • Lower cost than mid-market & enterprise PPM tools
    • Limited configurability, reporting, and resource management functionalities
    • Compelling solutions to the organizations that wants to get a fast start to a trial deployment
    		 Intermediate
    Spreadsheet based
    • Little/no up-front cost, highly customizable to suit your organization’s needs
    • Varying degrees of sophistication
    • Few people in the organization may understand the logic behind the tool; knowledge may not be easily transferrable
    		 Intermediate Low

    Determine the functional requirements of the PPM solution

    Associated Activity icon 3.1.1 – 20 minutes

    INPUT: PPM strategic plan

    OUTPUT: Modified PPM strategic plan with a proposed choice of PPM tool

    Materials: PPM Strategy Development Tool

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, IT Managers

    Use the Tool Assessment tab (tab 4) of Info-Tech’s PPM Strategy Development Tool to rate and analyze functional requirements of your PPM solution.

    • Review the list of PPM features provided on column B of tab 4. You can add any desired features not listed.
    • Rate your near-term and long-term feature requirements using the drop-down menus in columns C and D. Your selections here will inform the tool selection bubble chart to the right of the features list.

    Screenshot showing the features list on tab 4 of the PPM Strategy Development Tool.

    Estimate your PPM tool budget

    Associated Activity icon 3.1.2 – 20 minutes

    INPUT: PPM strategic plan

    OUTPUT: Modified PPM strategic plan with a proposed choice of PPM tool

    Materials: PPM Strategy Development Tool

    Participants: CIO, PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, IT Managers

    Enter the PPM tool budget information on the Tool Assessment tab of Info-Tech’s PPM Strategy Development Tool.

    • As a starting point, it can help to know that low-priced PPM tools cost around $1,000 per user per year. High-priced PPM tools cost around $3,000 per user per year.
    • Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based pricing for PPM solutions is increasingly popular. If you plan to purchase perpetual licensing, divide the total implementation and licensing cost by three years to be comparable with a three-year SaaS total cost of ownership analysis.

    Screenshot showing the tool assessment from the PPM Strategy Development Tool with 'Near-Term' and 'Long-Term' budget columns. Notes include 'Enter the number of fully licensed PPM users you expect to provision for and your estimated annual budget for a PPM tool', 'The tool assessment automatically calculates your annual budget per user, which is reflected in the bubble chart analysis (see next slide)'.

    Review the tool assessment graphic

    Associated Activity icon 3.1.3 – 20 minutes

    The map comparing commercial PPM tools from before, this time overlaid with 'Near-Term' and 'Long-Term' budgets as coloured circles. The vertical axis is 'Functionality Rating' and the horizontal axis is now 'Annual Cost/Budget per User'. 'Spreadsheets' are low functionality and low cost. 'Google Sites' are low to middling functionality and low cost. 'SharePoint' is middling functionality with a slightly higher cost. The 'Near-Term' budget circle covers those three tools. The next three start at middling cost and above-average functionality and trend higher in both categories: 'Commercial Entry-Level PPM', 'Commercial Mid-Market PPM', and 'Commercial Enterprise PPM'. The 'Long-Term' budget circle covers 'Commercial Mid-Market PPM'.

    If you are in one of the non-covered areas, consider revisiting your functional requirements and PPM strategy. You may need to lessen your expectations to be able to stay within your budget, or find a way to get more money.

    Keep in mind that the long-term goal can be to work towards a commercial tool, while the short-term goal would be to be able to maintain your portfolio in a simple spreadsheet first.

    Info-Tech Insight

    If you choose a commercial solution, you will need to gain executive buy-in in order to implement the tool; proceed to near-term and long-term plans to get the ball rolling on this decision.

    Review and customize slide 37, “Tools for PPM: proposed near- and long-term solutions,” in Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    Grow your own, or select and implement, a PPM solution with Info-Tech

    Whether you choose spreadsheet-based or commercially available PPM solutions, use Info-Tech’s research for scoping, designing, and implementing them.

    Info-Tech’s Grow Your Own PPM Solution blueprint will help you implement a highly evolved spreadsheet-based PPM solution. It features the Portfolio Manager 2017, a Microsoft Excel-based workbook that leverages its business intelligence features to provide a basis for implementing a scalable, highly customizable PPM tool with useful and easy-to-manipulate analytics.

    Read Info-Tech’s Grow Your Own PPM Solution blueprint.

    Info-Tech’s Select and Implement a PPM Solution blueprint is part of our Vendor Landscape research. Make sense of the diversity of PPM solutions available in today’s market, and choose the most appropriate solutions for your organization’s size and level of PPM maturity.

    Read Info-Tech’s Select and Implement a PPM Solution blueprint.

    A right-sized PPM strategy leads to a right-sized portfolio management tool based on Info-Tech’s template

    CASE STUDY

    Industry: Energy
    Source: Info-Tech Client

    “The approach makes it easy to run the portfolio without taking time away from the project themselves.” (IT Manager, Energy Resources Firm)

    Situation

    • A small IT department struggled with balancing project work with ongoing operational management and support work.
    • The department includes experienced and successful project managers and a mature, skilled team.
    • However, the nature of the department’s role has evolved to the point where the project and operational work demands have exceeded the available time.
    • Prioritization needed to become more centralized and formalized while management control of the work assignments became increasingly decentralized.

    Complication

    • Agile projects offer clear advantages by lightening the requirement for proactive planning. However, getting the staff to adapt would be challenging because of the overall workload and competing priorities.
    • Some of the team’s time needed to be carefully tracked and reported for time & materials-based billing, but the time sheet system was unsuited to their portfolio management needs.
    • Commercial PPM systems were ruled out because strict task management seemed unlikely to gain adoption.

    Resolution

    • The team deployed Info-Tech’s Project Portfolio Workbook, based on a Microsoft Excel template, and the Grow Your Own PPM Solution blueprint.
    • For the first time, executive leadership was given a 12-month forecast of resource capacity based on existing and pending project commitments. The data behind the capacity forecast was based on allocating people to projects with a percentage of their time for each calendar month.
    • The data behind the forecast is high level but easily maintainable.

    Step 3.2: Finalize customizing your PPM Strategic Plan Template

    PHASE 1

    PHASE 2

    PHASE 3

    1.11.22.12.23.13.2
    Choose the right PPM strategyTranslate strategy into process goalsDefine intake & resource mgmt. processesDefine reporting, closure, & benefits mgmt. processesSelect a right-sized PPM solutionFinalize your PPM strategic plan

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Determine the costs of support your PPM strategic plan.
    • Estimate some of the benefits of your PPM strategic plan.
    • Perform a cost-benefit analysis.
    • Refine and consolidate the near-term action items into a cohesive plan.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager
    • Project Managers
    • IT Managers

    Outcomes of this step

    • A cost/benefit analyst
    • An implementation action plan
    • A finalized PPM Strategic Plan Template

    Estimate the total cost-in-use of managing the project portfolio

    Supporting Tool icon 3.2.1 – PPM Strategy Development Tool, Tab 5: Costing Summary

    The time cost of PPM processes (tab 3) and PPM tool costs (tab 4) are summarized in this tab. Enter additional data to estimate the total PPM cost-in-use: the setup information and the current cost of PPM software tools.

    Screenshot of the PPM Strategy Development Tool, Tab 5: Costing Summary. Notes include 'If unknown, the overall HR budget of your project portfolio can be estimated as: (# FTEs) * (fully-loaded FTE cost per hour) * 1800', 'This is your total PPM cost-in-use'.

    Estimate the benefits of managing the project portfolio

    Supporting Tool icon 3.2.2 – PPM Strategy Development Tool, Tab 6: Benefits Assumptions

    The benefits of PPM processes are estimated by projecting the sources of waste on your resource capacity.

    1. Estimate the current extent of waste on your resource capacity. If you have completed Info-Tech’s PPM Current Score Scorecard, enter the data from the report.
      2. Screenshot of a Waste Assessment pie chart from the PPM Strategy Development Tool, Tab 6: Benefits Assumptions.
    2. Given your near- and long-term action items for improving PPM processes, estimate how each source of waste on your resource capacity will change.
      3. Screenshot of a Waste Assessment table titled 'These inputs represent the percentage of your overall portfolio budget that is wasted in each scenario' from the PPM Strategy Development Tool, Tab 6: Benefits Assumptions.

    Review the cost-benefit analysis results and update the PPM Strategic Plan Template

    Supporting Tool icon 3.2.3 – PPM Strategy Development Tool, Tab 7: Conclusion Screenshot of a 'PPM Strategy Cost-Benefit Analysis' from the PPM Strategy Development Tool, Tab 7: Conclusion. It has tables on top and bar charts underneath.

    This tab summarizes the costs and benefits of your PPM strategic plan.

    • Costs are estimated from wasted project capacity and time spent on PPM process work.
    • Benefits are estimated from the project capacity to be reclaimed as a result of improvements in PPM.
    • Return on investment is calculated by dividing the value of project capacity to be reclaimed by investment in PPM in addition to the current-state cost.

    Capture this summary in your PPM strategic plan.

    Customize slides 40 and 41, “Return on PPM investment,” in Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    Determine who will be responsible for coordinating the flow, collection, and reporting of portfolio data

    Supporting Tool icon 3.2.3 – Project Portfolio/PMO Analyst Job Description

    You will need to determine responsibilities and accountabilities for portfolio management functions within your team.

    If you do not have a clearly identifiable portfolio manager at this time, you will need to clarify who will wear which hats in terms of facilitating intake and prioritization, high-level capacity awareness, and portfolio reporting.

    • Use Info-Tech’s Project Portfolio Analyst Job Description Template to help clarify some of the required responsibilities to support your PPM strategy.
      • If you need to bring in an additional staff member to help support the strategy, you can customize the job description template to help advertise the position. Simply edit the text in grey within the template.
    • If you have other PPM tasks that you need to define responsibilities for, you can use the RASCI chart on the final tab of the PPM Strategy Develop Tool.

    Download Info-Tech’s Project Portfolio Analyst Job Description Template.

    Sample of Info-Tech's Project Portfolio Analyst Job Description Template.

    Refine and consolidate the near-term action items into a cohesive plan

    Associated Activity icon 3.2.4 – 30 minutes

    INPUT: Near-term action items

    OUTPUT: Near-term action plan

    Materials: PPM Strategy Development Tool

    Participants: PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager, Project Managers, Resource Managers, Business Analysts

    Collect the near-term action items for each of the five PPM processes and arrange them into a table that outlines the near-term action plan. Once it is compiled, adjust the timeline and responsibility so that the plan is coherent and realistic as a whole.

    Example:

    Outcome

    Action required

    Timeline

    Responsibility
    Determine the percentage distribution of project vs. non-project work Run a time audit survey with all project resources 2 weeks Resource managers
    Test a simple dashboard for project status Pilot Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager 2017 workbook 2 weeks PMO Director

    "There is a huge risk of taking on too much too soon, especially with the introduction of specific tools and tool sets. There is also an element of risk involved that can lead to failure and disappointment with PPM if these tools are not properly introduced and supported." (Jim Carse, Director of the Portfolio Office, Queen’s University)

    Review and customize slide 43, “Summary of near-term action plan,” in Info-Tech’s PPM Strategic Plan Template.

    Finalize and publish your PPM strategic plan

    Table of Contents

    Read over the document to ensure its completeness and consistency.

    At this point, you have a PPM strategic plan that is actionable and realistic, which addresses the goals set by the senior leadership.

    The executive brief establishes the need for PPM strategy, the goals and metrics are set by members of the senior leadership that gave the initial buy-in, and the target states of PPM processes that meet those goals are described. Finally, the costs and benefits of the improved PPM practice are laid out in a way that can be validated.

    The next step for your PPM strategy is to use this document as a foundation for implementing and operationalizing the target-state PPM processes.

    Review and publish the document for your executive layer and key project stakeholders. Solicit their feedback.

    Info-Tech has a library of blueprints that will guide you through each of the five processes. Contact your Info-Tech account manager or Info-Tech analyst to get started.
    • Project Portfolio Management Strategy
      • Strategic Expectations
      • Overview
    • Leadership Mandate
    • Project Demand and Resource Supply
    • The Current State of Resource Utilization
    • PPM Processes
      • Project intake, prioritization, and approval
      • Resource management
      • Portfolio reporting
      • Project closure
      • Benefits realization
      • Tools for PPM
    • The Economic Impact of PPM
    • PPM Strategy Next Steps

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech Workshop Associated Activity icon

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    Photo of Barry Cousins.
    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analyst 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:

    Sample of activity 3.1 'Scope the right-sized PPM solution for your PPM strategy'. Scope the right-sized PPM solution for your PPM strategy

    Use the PPM Strategy Development Tool to quickly determine our near- and long-term recommendation for your PPM solution.
    Sample of activity 3.2 'Conduct a cost-benefit analysis of your PPM strategic plan'. Conduct a cost-benefit analysis of your PPM strategic plan

    Using the time cost estimates of each process and the requirement for a PPM tool, Info-Tech helps you quantify the overhead costs of PPM and estimate the monetary benefits of reclaimed project capacity for your project portfolio.

    Insight breakdown

    Insight 1

    • Executive layer buy-in is a critical prerequisite for the success of a top-down PPM strategy. Ensure your executives are on board before preceding to implement your PPM strategy.

    Insight 2

    • The means of project and portfolio management (i.e. processes) shouldn’t eclipse the ends – strategic goals. Root your process in your PPM strategic goals to realize PPM benefits (e.g. optimized portfolio value, improved project throughput, increased stakeholder satisfaction).

    Insight 3

    • Without the proper information, decision makers are driving blind and are forced to make gut-feel decisions as opposed to data-informed decisions. Implement a PPM solution to allocate projects properly and ensure time and money don’t vanish without being accounted for.

    Summary of accomplishment

    Knowledge Gained

    • Info-Tech’s thought model on PPM processes that create an infrastructure around projects
    • Your current state of project portfolio: project capacity vs. project demand
    • Importance of gaining executive buy-in for installing the PPM practice

    Processes Optimized

    • Project intake, prioritization, and approval process
    • Resource management process
    • Portfolio reporting process
    • Project closure process
    • Benefits realization process

    Deliverables Completed

    • Choice of PPM strategy and the leadership mandate
    • Analysis of current project capacity and demand
    • PPM process goals and metrics, aligned to meet PPM strategic expectations
    • PPM process capability levels
    • Retrospective examination of current state, near/long-term action items for improvement, and high-level descriptions of the five PPM processes
    • Recommendation of PPM tools to support the processes
    • Estimate of PPM overhead costs
    • Cost-benefit analysis of PPM practice
    • PPM strategic plan

    Related Info-Tech Research

    • Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy
    • Grow Your Own PPM Solution
    • Optimize Project Intake, Approval, and Prioritization
    • Develop a Resource Management Strategy for the New Reality
    • Manage a Minimum-Viable PMO
    • Establish the Benefits Realization Process
    • Manage an Agile Portfolio
    • Establish the Benefits Realization Process
    • Project Portfolio Management Diagnostic Program
      The Project Portfolio Management Diagnostic Program is a low-effort, high-impact program designed to help project owners assess and improve their PPM practices. Gather and report on all aspects of your PPM environment in order to understand where you stand and how you can improve.

    Research contributors and experts

    Photo of Kiron D. Bondale PMP, PMI-RMP, CDAP, CDAI, Senior Project Portfolio Management Professional Kiron D. Bondale PMP, PMI-RMP, CDAP, CDAI
    Senior Project Portfolio Management Professional

    Kiron has worked in the project management domain for more than fifteen years managing multiple projects, leading Project Management Offices (PMO) and providing project portfolio management consulting services to over a hundred clients across multiple industries. He has been an active member of the Project Management Institute (PMI) since 1999 and served as a volunteer director on the Board of the PMI Lakeshore Chapter for six years. Kiron has published articles on project and project portfolio management in multiple journals and has delivered over a hundred webinar presentations on a variety of PPM and PM topics and has presented at multiple industry conferences. Since 2009, Kiron has been blogging on a weekly basis on project management topics and responds to questions daily in the LinkedIn PMI Project, Program and Portfolio Management discussion group.
    Photo of Shaun Cahill, Project Manager, Queen’s University Shaun Cahill, Project Manager &
    Jim Carse, Director of the Project Portfolio Office
    Queen’s University

    Research contributors and experts

    Photo of Amy Fowler Stadler, Managing Partner, Lewis Fowler Amy Fowler Stadler, Managing Partner
    Lewis Fowler

    Amy has more than 20 years of experience in business and technology, most recently owning her own management consulting firm since 2002, focused on business transformation, technology enablement, and operational improvement. Prior to that, she was at CenturyLink (formerly Qwest) as an IT Director, Perot Systems in various roles, and Information Handling Services, Inc. as a Software Development Product Manager.

    Amy holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science with a minor in Business Communications and is also a 2015 Hall of Fame inductee to Illinois State University College of Applied Science and Technology.
    Photo of Rick Morris, President, R2 Consulting LLC Rick Morris, President
    R2 Consulting LLC

    Rick A. Morris, PMP, is a certified Scrum Agile Master, Human Behavior Consultant, best-selling author, mentor, and evangelist for project management. Rick is an accomplished project manager and public speaker. His appetite for knowledge and passion for the profession makes him an internationally sought after speaker delivering keynote presentations for large conferences and PMI events around the world. He holds the PMP (Project Management Professional), MPM (Masters of Project Management), Scrum Agile Master, OPM3, Six Sigma Green Belt, MCITP, MCTS, MCSE, TQM, ATM-S, ITIL, and ISO certifications, and is a John Maxwell Certified Speaker, Mentor, and Coach. Rick is the Owner of R2 Consulting, LLC and has worked for organizations such as GE, Xerox, and CA, and has consulted with numerous clients in a wide variety of industries including financial services, entertainment, construction, non-profit, hospitality, pharmaceutical, retail, and manufacturing.

    Research contributors and experts

    Photo of Terry Lee Ricci PgMP, PfMP, PMP, PPM Practice Lead, IAG Consulting Terry Lee Ricci PgMP, PfMP, PMP, PPM Practice Lead
    IAG Consulting

    Terry is passionate and highly skilled at PMO transformation, developing high-performing teams that sustain long-term business results. Terry has a reputation built upon integrity, resourcefulness, and respect. She has the vision to implement long and short-term strategies, meeting both current and evolving business needs.

    Change Management/Business transformation: Terry has extensive background in PMO strategy development aligned to corporate goals. Many years in the PMO organization integration/transformation building or overhauling programs and processes.

    Governance: Terry loves to monitor and measure performance and outcomes and uses her collaborative style to successfully bring simplicity to complexity (technology – people – process). Performance optimization results are easy to use and clearly define who is doing what across functions. End results consistently align to business strategy while mitigating risks effectively.

    Comprehensive: A “through the ranks” executive with a comprehensive understanding of PMO operations, high-performance teams, and the respective business units they support.
    Photo of Alana Ruckstuhl MSc, IT Project Officer, Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario Alana Ruckstuhl MSc, IT Project Officer
    Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario

    Research contributors and experts

    Photo of Jay Wardle, Director of the PMO, Red Wing Shoes Co. Jay Wardle, Director of the PMO
    Red Wing Shoes Co.
    Photo of Bob White, Vice President/Chief Information Officer, ALM Holding Company Bob White, Vice President/Chief Information Officer
    ALM Holding Company

    As vice president and chief information officer for ALM Holding Company, Bob White directs all technology activity and support for three main verticals: road construction, energy management, and delivery and transportation. He has been with ALM Holding Company for one and a half years, focusing on PPM process improvement, cybersecurity initiatives, and IT service management.

    Prior to joining ALM, Bob was executive vice president/chief information officer at Ashley Furniture Industries, Inc. where he led the strategic direction, implementation, and management of information technology throughout the company’s global operations. Bob has also held VP/CIO positions at the Stride Rite Corporation and Timex Corporation.

    Bob holds a Master’s degree in Operations Management from the University of Arkansas and a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Southern Illinois University.

    Bibliography

    Bersin, Josh. “Time to Scrap Performance Appraisals?” Forbes Magazine, 5 June 2013. Web. 30 Oct 2013.

    Cheese, Peter et al. “Creating an Agile Organization.” Accenture, Oct. 2009. Web. Nov. 2013.

    Croxon, Bruce et al. “Dinner Series: Performance Management with Bruce Croxon from CBC's 'Dragon's Den'” HRPA Toronto Chapter. Sheraton Hotel, Toronto, ON. 12 Nov. 2013. Panel discussion.

    Culbert, Samuel. “10 Reasons to Get Rid of Performance Reviews.” Huffington Post Business, 18 Dec. 2012. Web. 28 Oct. 2013.

    Denning, Steve. “The Case Against Agile: Ten Perennial Management Objections.” Forbes Magazine, 17 Apr. 2012. Web. Nov. 2013.

    Estis, Ryan. “Blowing up the Performance Review: Interview with Adobe’s Donna Morris.” Ryan Estis & Associates, 17 June 2013. Web. Oct. 2013.

    Gallup, Inc. “Gallup Study: Engaged Employees Inspire Company Innovation.” Gallup Management Journal, 12 Oct. 2006. Web. 12 Jan 2012.

    Gartside, David et al. “Trends Reshaping the Future of HR.” Accenture, 2013. Web. 5 Nov. 2013.

    KeyedIn Solutions. “Why PPM and PMOs Fail.” KeyedIn Projects, 2013. Ebook.

    Lessing, Lawrence. Free Culture. Lulu Press Inc.: 30 July 2016.

    Merkhofer, Lee. “Keys to Implementing Project Portfolio Management.” Lee Merkhofer Consulting, 2017.

    Perry, Mark Price. Business Driven Project Portfolio Management. J Ross Pub: 17 May 2011.

    Project Management Institute. “Pulse of the Profession 2015: Capturing the Value of Project Management.” PMI, Feb. 2015. Web.

    Project Management Institute. “Pulse of the Profession 2016: The High Cost of Low Performance.” PMI, 2016. Web.

    Project Management Institute. “Pulse of the Profession 2017: Success Rates Rise.” PMI, 2017. Web.

    Project Management Institute. The Standard for Portfolio Management – Third Edition. PMI: 1 Dec. 2012.

    WGroup. “Common Pitfalls in Project Portfolio Management – Part 2.” WGroup, 24 Jan. 2017. Web.

    Tell Your Story With Data Visualization

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    • Parent Category Name: Business Intelligence Strategy
    • Parent Category Link: /business-intelligence-strategy

    Analysts do not feel empowered to challenge requirements to deliver a better outcome. This alongside underlying data quality issues prevents the creation of accurate and helpful information. Graphic representations do not provide meaningful and actionable insights.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    As organizations strive to become more data-driven, good storytelling with data visualization supports growing corporate data literacy and helps analysts in providing insights that improves organization's decision-making and value-driving processes, which ultimately boosts business performance.

    Impact and Result

    Follow a step-by-step guide to address the business bias of tacet experience over data facts and increase audience's understanding and acceptance toward data solutions.

    Save the lost hours and remove the challenges of reports and dashboards being disregarded due to ineffective usage.

    Gain insights from data-driven recommendations and have decision support to make informed decisions.

    Tell Your Story With Data Visualization Research & Tools

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

    1. Tell Your Story With Data Visualization Deck – Solve challenging business problems more effectively and improve communication with audiences by demonstrating significant insights through data storytelling with impactful visuals.

    Here is our step-by-step process of getting value out of effective storytelling with data visualization:

  • Step 1: Frame the business problem and the outcomes required.
  • Step 2: Explore the potential drivers and formulate hypotheses to test.
  • Step 3: Construct a meaningful narrative which the data supports.

    • Tell Your Story With Data Visualization Storyboard

    2. Storytelling Whiteboard Canvas Template – Plan out storytelling using Info-Tech’s whiteboard canvas template.

    This storytelling whiteboard canvas is a template that will help you create your visualization story narrative by:

  • Identifying the problem space.
  • Finding logical relationships and data identification.
  • Reviewing analysis and initial insights.
  • Building the story and logical conclusion.

    • Storytelling Whiteboard Canvas Template
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Tell Your Story With Data Visualization

    Build trust with your stakeholders.

    Analyst Perspective

    Build trust with your stakeholders.

    Data visualization refers to graphical representations of data which help an audience understand. Without good storytelling, however, these representations can distract an audience with enormous amounts of data or even lead them to incorrect conclusions.

    Good storytelling with data visualization involves identifying the business problem, exploring potential drivers, formulating a hypothesis, and creating meaningful narratives and powerful visuals that resonate with all audiences and ultimately lead to clear actionable insights.

    Follow Info-Tech's step-by-step approach to address the business bias of tacit experience over data facts, improve analysts' effectiveness and support better decision making.

    Ibrahim Abdel-Kader, Research Analyst

    Ibrahim Abdel-Kader
    Research Analyst,
    Data, Analytics, and Enterprise Architecture

    Nikitha Patel, Research Specialist

    Nikitha Patel
    Research Specialist,
    Data, Analytics, and Enterprise Architecture

    Ruyi Sun, Research Specialist

    Ruyi Sun
    Research Specialist,
    Data, Analytics, and Enterprise Architecture

    Our understanding of the problem

    This research is designed for

    • Business analysts, data analysts, or their equivalent who (in either a centralized or federated operating model) look to solve challenging business problems more effectively and improve communication with audiences by demonstrating significant insights through visual data storytelling.

    This research will also assist

    • A CIO or business unit (BU) leader looking to improve reporting and analytics, reduce time to information, and embrace decision making.

    This research will help you

    • Identify the business problem and root causes that you are looking to address for key stakeholders.
    • Improve business decision making through effective data storytelling.
    • Focus on insight generation rather than report production.
    • Apply design thinking principles to support the collection of different perspectives.

    This research will help them

    • Understand the report quickly and efficiently, regardless of their data literacy level.
    • Grasp the current situation of data within the organization.

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge Common Obstacles Info-Tech's Approach
    As analysts, you may experience some critical challenges when presenting a data story.
    • The graphical representation does not provide meaningful or actionable insights.
    • Difficulty selecting the right visual tools or technologies to create visual impact.
    • Lack of empowerment, where analysts don't feel like they can challenge requirements.
    • Data quality issues that prevent the creation of accurate and helpful information.
    		 Some common roadblocks may prevent you from addressing these challenges.
    • Lack of skills and context to identify the root cause or the insight that adds the most value.
    • Lack of proper design or over-visualization of data will mislead/confuse the audience.
    • Business audience bias, leading them to ignore reliable insights presented.
    • Lack of the right access to obtain data could hinder the process.
    • Understand and dissect the business problem through Info-Tech's guidance on root cause analysis and design thinking process.
    • Explore each potential hypothesis and construct your story's narratives.
    • Manage data visualization using evolving tools and create visual impact.
    • Inform business owners how to proceed and collect feedback to achieve continuous improvement.

    Info-Tech Insight
    As organizations strive to become more data-driven, good storytelling with data visualization supports growing corporate data literacy and helps analysts provide insights that improve organizational decision-making and value-driving processes, which ultimately boosts business performance.

    Glossary

    • Data: Facts or figures, especially those stored in a computer, that can be used for calculating, reasoning, or planning. When data is processed, organized, structured, or presented in a given context to make it useful, it is called information. Data leaders are accountable for certain data domains and sets.
    • Data storytelling: The ability to create a narrative powered by data and analytics that supports the hypothesis and intent of the story. Narrators of the story should deliver a significant view of the message in a way easily understood by the target audience. Data visualization can be used as a tactic to enhance storytelling.
    • Data visualization: The ability to visually represent a complete story to the target audience powered by data & analytics, using data storytelling as an enabling mechanism to convey narratives. Typically, there are two types of visuals used as part of data visualization: explanatory/informative visuals (the entire story or specific aspects delivered to the audience) and exploratory visuals (the collected data used to clarify what questions must be answered).
    • Data literacy: The ability to read, work with, analyze, and argue with data. Easy access to data is essential to exercising these skills. All organizational employees involved with data-driven decisions should learn to think critically about the data they use for analytics and how they assess and interpret the results of their work.
    • Data quality: A measure of the condition of data based on factors such as accuracy, completeness, consistency, reliability, and being up-to-date. This is about how well-suited a data set is to serve its intended purpose, therefore business users and stakeholders set the standards for what is good enough. The governance function along with IT ensures that data quality measures are applied, and corrective actions taken.
    • Analytics/Business intelligence (BI): A technology-driven process for analyzing data and delivering actionable information that helps executives, managers, and workers make informed business decisions. As part of the BI process, organizations collect data from internal IT systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, run queries against the data, and create data visualizations.
      Note: In some frameworks, analytics and BI refer to different types of analyses (i.e. analytics predict future outcomes, BI describes what is or has been).

    Getting value out of effective storytelling with data visualization

    Data storytelling is gaining wide recognition as a tool for supporting businesses in driving data insights and making better strategic decisions.

    92% of respondents agreed that data storytelling is an effective way of communicating or delivering data and analytics results.

    87% of respondents agreed that if insights were presented in a simpler/clearer manner, their organization's leadership team would make more data-driven decisions.

    93% of respondents agreed that decisions made based on successful data storytelling could potentially help increase revenue.

    Source: Exasol, 2021

    Despite organizations recognizing the value of data storytelling, issues remain which cannot be remedied solely with better technology.

    61% Top challenges of conveying important insights through dashboards are lack of context (61%), over-communication (54%), and inability to customize contents for intended audiences (46%).

    49% of respondents feel their organizations lack storytelling skills, regardless of whether employees are data literate.

    Source: Exasol, 2021

    Info-Tech Insight
    Storytelling is a key component of data literacy. Although enterprises are increasingly investing in data analytics software, only 21% of employees are confident with their data literacy skills. (Accenture, 2020)

    Prerequisite Checklist

    Before applying Info-Tech's storytelling methodology, you should have addressed the following criteria:

    • Select the right data visualization tools.
    • Have the necessary training in statistical analysis and data visualization technology.
    • Have competent levels of data literacy.
    • Good quality data founded on data governance and data architecture best practices.

    To get a complete view of the field you want to explore, please refer to the following Info-Tech resources:

    Select and Implement a Reporting and Analytics Solution

    Build a Data Architecture Roadmap

    Establish Data Governance

    Build Your Data Quality Program

    Foster Data-Driven Culture With Data Literacy

    Info-Tech's Storytelling With Data Visualization Framework

    Data Visualization Framework

    Info-Tech Insight
    As organizations strive to become more data-driven, good storytelling with data visualization supports growing corporate data literacy and helps analysts provide insights that improve organizational decision-making and value-driving processes, which ultimately boosts business performance.

    Research Benefits

    Member Benefits Business Benefits
    • Reduce time spent on getting your audience in the room and promote business involvement with the project.
    • Eliminate ineffectively used reports and dashboards being disregarded for lack of storytelling skills, resulting in real-time savings and monetary impact.
    • Example: A $50k reporting project has a 49% risk of the company being unable to communicate effective data stories (Exasol, 2021). Therefore, a $50k project has an approx. 50% chance of being wasted. Using Info-Tech's methodology, members can remove the risk, saving $25k and the time required to produce each report.
    • Address the common business bias of tacit experience over data-supported facts and increase audience understanding and acceptance of data-driven solutions.
    • Clear articulation of business context and problem.
    • High-level improvement objectives and return on investment (ROI).
    • Gain insights from data-driven recommendations to assist with making informed decisions.

    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.

    Activate Your Augmented Reality Initiative

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    • 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.

    Develop an IT Infrastructure Services Playbook

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    • Parent Category Name: Operations Management
    • Parent Category Link: /i-and-o-process-management
    • Infrastructure and operations teams are managing deployments on- and off-premises, and across multiple infrastructure services providers.
    • Though automation tools speed up the delivery process, documentation is always pushed off so the team can meet urgent deadlines.
    • Without documented delivery processes, wait times are longer, controls are adequate but ad hoc, builds are non-standard, and errors are more likely to be introduced in production.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Prioritize in-demand services to add to the playbook. Pilot a few services to get value from the project quickly.
    • Do not get lost in automation or tooling. You do not need a complex tool or back-end automation to get value from this project.
    • Learn, then iterate. With a few completed service processes, it is much easier to identify opportunities for service automation.

    Impact and Result

    • Prioritize in-demand services for documentation and standardization.
    • Build service workflows and document service requirements in the services playbook.
    • Create a costing model and track costs to deliver defined services.
    • Leverage data on costs and service requirements to improve service delivery.

    Develop an IT Infrastructure Services Playbook Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read this Executive Brief to find out why you should create an infrastructure services playbook, 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 and prioritize infrastructure services

    Produce a prioritized list of high-demand infrastructure services.

    • Develop an IT Infrastructure Services Playbook – Phase 1: Define and Prioritize Infrastructure Services
    • Infrastructure Services Playbook

    2. Build workflows and an infrastructure services playbook

    Design workflows and create the first draft of the infrastructure services playbook.

    • Develop an IT Infrastructure Services Playbook – Phase 2: Build Workflows and an Infrastructure Services Playbook
    • Infrastructure Service Workflows (Visio)
    • Infrastructure Service Workflows (PDF)

    3. Identify costs and mature service delivery capabilities

    Build a service rate sheet to track costs and develop better service capabilities.

    • Develop an IT Infrastructure Services Playbook – Phase 3: Identify Costs and Mature Service Delivery Capabilities
    • Service Rate Sheet
    • Infrastructure Service Catalog Mind Map Example
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Develop an IT Infrastructure Services Playbook

    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 and Prioritize Infrastructure Services

    The Purpose

    Define and prioritize infrastructure services.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identify candidate services for the Playbook.

    Activities

    1.1 Define the services you own.

    1.2 Prioritize infrastructure services.

    Outputs

    Affinity map of infrastructure services

    Service pain points and root causes

    A list of high-demand infrastructure services

    2 Build the Infrastructure Services Playbook

    The Purpose

    Build workflows and an infrastructure services playbook.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Produce a draft infrastructure services playbook.

    Activities

    2.1 Design workflow for service delivery.

    2.2 Add steps and requirements to the Services Playbook.

    Outputs

    Documented service workflows

    Infrastructure Services Playbook

    3 Identify Costs and Mature Service Delivery Capabilities

    The Purpose

    Identify costs and mature service delivery capabilities.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Build an infrastructure service rate sheet.

    Define next steps for infrastructure service capabilities.

    Activities

    3.1 Optimize infrastructure cost estimates.

    3.2 Mature your I&O organization into a service broker.

    Outputs

    Service Rate Sheet

    Master list of infrastructure services

    Action plan for Playbook implementation

    Further reading

    Develop an IT Infrastructure Services Playbook

    Automation, SDI, and DevOps – build a cheat sheet to manage a changing Infrastructure & Operations environment.

    Table of contents

    Analyst Perspective

    Executive Summary

    Project Overview

    Summary and Conclusion

    ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

    Technology is changing how infrastructure services are delivered.

    "Managing a hybrid infrastructure environment is challenge enough. Add to this the pressure on IT Operations to deliver services faster and more continuously – it’s a recipe for boondoggle deployments, overcommitted staff, end-user frustration, and operational gridlock.

    It’s not every service you provide that causes problems, so prioritize a few in-demand, painful services. Build and maintain durable, flexible processes that enable your team to provide consistent, repeatable services at a standard cost. Identify opportunities to improve service delivery.

    You’ll save the business time and money and your own team significant grief." (Andrew Sharp, Research Manager, Infrastructure & Operations, Info-Tech Research Group)

    Your infrastructure and operations team is a service provider; standardize, document, and communicate service capabilities

    This Research is Designed For:

    • CTOs and Infrastructure Managers
    • Service Level Managers
    • ITSM Managers and Process Owners

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Inventory services that IT Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) provides to the business (servers, storage, and network).
    • Standardize services and track costs.
    • Articulate the value of these services to business owners.
    • Develop a catalog of infrastructure services.

    This Research Will Also Assist:

    • CIOs
    • Application Development Managers
    • Security Managers
    • Auditors

    This Research Will Help Them:

    • Understand the complexities of technical service delivery.
    • Make better strategic IT infrastructure decisions.

    Executive summary

    Situation

    • Infrastructure and operations teams are managing deployments on- and off-premises and across multiple infrastructure service providers.
    • Though automation tools speed up the delivery process, documentation is always pushed off so the team can meet urgent deadlines.

    Complication

    • Cloud providers have set the bar high for ease of access to stable infrastructure services.
    • Without documented delivery processes, wait times are longer, controls are adequate but ad hoc, builds are non-standard, and errors are more likely to be introduced in production.

    Resolution

    • Prioritize in-demand services for documentation and standardization.
    • Build service workflows and document service requirements in the services playbook.
    • Create a costing model and track costs to deliver defined services.
    • Leverage data on costs and service requirements to improve service delivery.

    Info-Tech Insight

    1. Keep it simple. Work through a few in-demand services to get early value from the project.
    2. Don’t get lost in automation or tooling. You don’t need a complex tool or back-end automation to get value from standardized services.
    3. Do then iterate. With a few completed service processes, it’s much easier to identify opportunities for service automation.

    Create an infrastructure services playbook to improve efficiency, support DevOps, and streamline service delivery

    Begin building an infrastructure services playbook by defining the services you provide. This will also help your team support changes to service delivery (e.g. more use of cloud services and the shift to DevOps).

    In this blueprint, the first step will be to document infrastructure services to:

    1. Clarify infrastructure capabilities and achievable service levels.

      Document infrastructure services to clarify achievable service levels with given resources and what you will need to meet service-level requirement gaps. Establishing your ability to meet customer demands is the first step toward becoming a broker of internal or external services.

    2. Standardize infrastructure service delivery.

      Sometimes, it’s extremely important to do the exact same thing every time (e.g. server hardening). Sometimes, your team needs room to deviate from the script. Create a playbook that allows you to standardize service delivery as needed.

    3. Make good strategic infrastructure decisions.

      Knowledge is power. Defined services and capabilities will help you make important strategic infrastructure decisions around capacity planning and when outsourcing is appropriate.

    Review and optimize infrastructure service delivery as you shift to more cloud-based services

    If you can’t standardize and streamline how you support cloud services, you risk AppDev and business leaders circumventing the I&O team.

    Logo for 'vmware'.

    Example:

    Create a new server resource in a virtual environment vs. public cloud

    In a virtualized environment, provisioning processes can still be relatively siloed.

    In a software-defined environment, many steps require knowledge across the infrastructure stack. Better documentation will help your team deliver services outside their area of specialty.

    		 Logo for 'Microsoft Azure'.
    • Identify CPU requirements for a virtual machine (VM)
    • Calculate VM memory requirements
    • Configure the floppy drive for a VM
    • Configure IDE devices for a VM
    • Configure SCSI adapters for a VM
    • Configure network adapters for a VM
    • Configure VM priority for host CPU resources

      • Server is live
    • Complete SDI code development & review, version control, build status, etc.
    • Identify software and specifications for the instance you want to use
    • Review configuration, storage, and security settings
    • Secure the instance with an existing key pair or create a new key pair
    • Update documentation – public IP address, physical & logical connections, data flows, etc.
    • Launch and connect to instance

      • Server is live

    Strengthen DevOps with an infrastructure playbook

    The purpose behind DevOps is to reduce friction and deliver faster, more continuous, more automated services through the use of cross-functional teams.

    DevOps: bridging Applications Development and Infrastructure & Operations by embracing a culture, practices, and tools born out of Lean and Agile methodologies.

    • Create a common language across functions.
    • Ensure that all service steps are documented.
    • Move towards more standard deployments.
    • Increase transparency within the IT department.
    • Cultivate trust across teams.
    • Build the foundation for automated services.
    A colorful visualization of the DevOps cycle. On the Development side is 'Feedback', Plan', 'Build', 'Integrate', then over to the Operations side is 'Deploy', and 'Operate', then back to Dev with 'Feedback', starting the cycle over again.

    "The bar has been raised for delivering technology products and services – what was good enough in previous decades is not good enough now." (Kim, Humble, Debois, Willis (2016))

    Leverage an infrastructure services playbook to improve service delivery, one step at a time

    Crawl

    • Prioritize infrastructure services that are good candidates for standardization.
    • Document the steps and requirements to deliver the service.
    • Use the playbook and workflows internally as you gather requirements and deliver on requests.
    • Track costs internally.

    Walk

    • Provide infrastructure clients with the playbook and allow them to make requests against it.
    • Update and maintain existing documentation.
    • Automate, where possible.
    • Showback costs to the business.

    Run

    • Provide infrastructure customers with scripts to provision infrastructure resources.
    • Audit requests before fulfilling them.
    • Chargeback costs, as needed.
    A turtle smiles happily on four legs, simply content to be alive. Another turtle moves quickly on two legs, seemingly in a runner's trance, eyes closed, oblivious to the fact that another turtle has beaten him to finish line.

    Focus on in-demand infrastructure services — PHASE 1

    Standardize in-demand, repeatable services first.

    Demand for infrastructure services is usually driven by external requests or operational requirements. Prioritize services based on criticality, durability, frequency, availability, and urgency requirements.

    Scheduling Delays
    • Dealing with a slew of capital projects driven by a major funding initiative, the IT team of a major US transit system is struggling to execute on basic operational tasks.

      • Action:
    • A brainstorming and prioritization exercise identifies web server deployment as their most in-demand service.
    • Identifying breakdowns in web server deployment helps free up resources for other tasks and addresses a serious pain point.
    Think outside the box
    • On a new project for a sporting goods client, the IT department for a marketing firm deploys and supports a “locker” kiosk that users engage with for a chance to win a gift.

      • Action:
    • As the campaign proves successful, the I&O Manager creates a playbook to guide kiosk support and deployment in the future, including required skills, timelines, success metrics, and costs.
    Keep it standard, keep it safe
    • An IT audit at a higher education institution finds that no standard process for server hardening has been defined or documented by the infrastructure team.

      • Action:
    • Improving IT security is a strategic priority for the department.
    • The infrastructure team decides to standardize and document processes, guidelines, and configurations for hardening OS, SCCM, SaltStack, scripting, and patching.

    Leverage service workflows to populate the playbook — PHASE 2

    Infrastructure as Code is breaking down traditional infrastructure silos and support models.

    1. Document the workflow to deliver the service. Identify pain points and target broken processes first.
      Provision –› Configure –› Run –› Quiesce –› Destroy
    2. Define logical expected results and metrics for problematic steps in the process. Identify challenges and possible improvements to each problematic step.
      Building and deploying toolsets is taking a long time
      Start
      • Create a baseline offering for common requests.
      • Make clear that non-standard requests will take time to fulfil.
      		 Stop
      • Move to just one web server.
      		 Continue
      • Use weekly drop-ins to communicate the change.
    3. Document skills and roles, approvers, and pre-requirements to fill out the documentation, as needed. Use the documented process to guide internal process and align with external expectations.

    Cross-silo knowledge is needed: In a software-defined environment, building and launching a new server requires knowledge across the stack.

    • Complete SDI code development & review, version control, build status, etc.
    • Identify software and specifications for the instance you want to use
    • Review configuration, storage, and security settings
    • Secure the instance with an existing key pair, or create a new key pair
    • Update documentation – public IP address, physical & logical connections, data flows, etc.
    • Launch and connect to the instance

      • Server is live

    Take a progressive approach to cost tracking — PHASE 3

    Infrastructure & Operations are bound by two metrics:

    1. Are systems up?
    2. Is technology delivered as efficiently as possible?

    Because tracking cost is integral to efficiency, cost and budget management, by proxy, is one of the most important Infrastructure & Operations metrics.

    Cost management is not a numbers game. It is an indicator of how well infrastructure is managed.

    Track costs in a practical way that delivers value to your organization:

    1. Build and leverage an internal rate sheet to help estimate cost to serve.
    2. Showback rate sheet to help managers and architects make better infrastructure decisions.
    3. Chargeback costs to defined cost centers.

    Project overview

    Use Info-Tech’s methodology to get value faster from your infrastructure services playbook.

    Phases

    		 Phase 1: Define and prioritize infrastructure services Phase 2: Build the infrastructure services playbook Phase 3: Identify costs and mature service delivery capabilities

    Steps

    		 1.1 Define the services you own 2.1 Design workflows for service delivery 3.1 Estimate infrastructure service costs
    1.2 Prioritize infrastructure services 2.2 Add steps and requirements to the services playbook 3.2 Mature your I&O organization into a service broker

    Tools & Templates

    		 Infrastructure Services Playbook Infrastructure Service Workflows Service Rate Sheet

    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.

    A small monochrome icon of a wrench and screwdriver creating an X.

    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.

    A small monochrome icon depicting a person in front of a blank slide.

    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

    Guided Implementation Overview

    Your Trusted Advisor is just a call away.

    Scoping
    (Call 1)

    Scope requirements, objectives, and stakeholders. Review the playbook toolset and methodology, and establish fit-for-need.

    		 Identify Services
    (Call 2)

    Brainstorm common infrastructure services your group provides. Consolidate the list and identify priority services.

    		 Create Service Workflows
    (Calls 3-4)

    Build Visio workflows for 2-3 priority services.

    		 Populate the Playbook
    (Calls 4-5)

    Add data to the playbook based on infrastructure service workflows

    		 Create a Rate Sheet for Costs
    (Call 6)

    Build a rate sheet that allows you to calculate costs for additional

    Your Guided Implementation will pair you with an advisor from our analyst team for the duration of your infrastructure services project.

    Workshop Overview

    Module 1
    (Day 1)    		 Module 1
    (Day 1)    		 Module 1
    (Day 1)    		 Offsite deliverables wrap-up (Day 5)
    Activities
    Define and Prioritize Infrastructure Services

    1.1 Assess current maturity of services and standardization processes.

    1.2 Identify, group, and break out important infrastructure services.

    1.3 Define service delivery pain points and perform root-cause analysis.

    1.4 Prioritize services based on demand criteria.
    Build the Infrastructure Services Playbook

    2.1 Determine criteria for standard versus custom services.

    2.2 Document standard workflows for better alignment and consistent delivery.

    2.3 Build a flowchart for the identified high-demand service(s).

    2.4 Outline information as it relates to the service lifecycle in the Playbook template.
    Identify Costs and Mature Service Delivery Capabilities

    4.1 Gather information for the rate sheet.

    4.2 Choose an allocation method for overhead costs.

    4.3 Select the right approach in the crawl, walk, run model for your organization.

    4.4 Discuss the promotion plan and target revision dates for playbook and rate sheet.
    Deliverables
    1. High-demand infrastructure services list
    1. Right-sized criteria for standardization
    2. Service workflows
    3. Infrastructure Services Playbook
    1. Service Rate Sheet
    2. Deployment plan

    Develop an IT Infrastructure Services Playbook

    PHASE 1

    Define and Prioritize Infrastructure Services

    Step 1.1: Define the services you own

    PHASE 1

    Define and prioritize infrastructure services

    		 1.1

    Define the services you own

    		 1.2

    Prioritize infrastructure services

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Define “infrastructure service”
    • Brainstorm service offerings
    • Consolidate services with affinity map

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Infrastructure Manager
    • I&O SMEs

    Results & Insights

    • Results: Consolidated list of end-to-end services
    • Insights: Avoid analysis paralysis by brainstorming without restrictions. It is more effective to cut down in Step 1.2 rather than risk neglecting important services for the playbook.

    Consider a range of infrastructure services

    Your infrastructure team is a service provider to the applications team – and sometimes other users as well.

    Service Requests
    • A developer requests a new web server.
    • The marketing department asks for a database to support a six-month digital marketing campaign.
    Projects
    • A new service is promoted to production.
    Operations
    • Firewall rules are updated to support server, network, or security posture changes.
    • Standard practices are followed and maintained to harden a range of different operating systems.
    • Engineers follow a standard process to integrate new tools and entitlements into Active Directory.
    • Patches and firmware updates are applied to core infrastructure components as needed.
    Problems
    • A database batch job often breaks on overnight batch jobs and requires manual intervention to check and restart.
    A visualization of the word 'Infrastructure Services' being orbited by 'Service Requests', 'Projects', 'Operations', and 'Problems'.

    IT infrastructure & operations teams deliver services that fulfil requests, support projects, resolve problems, and operate systems.

    Take Control of Cloud Costs on AWS

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    • Parent Category Name: Cloud Strategy
    • Parent Category Link: /cloud-strategy
    • Traditional IT budgeting and procurement processes don't work for public cloud services.
    • The self-service nature of the cloud means that often the people provisioning cloud resources aren't accountable for the cost of those resources.
    • Without centralized control or oversight, organizations can quickly end up with massive AWS bills that exceed their IT salary cost.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Most engineers care more about speed of feature delivery and reliability of the system than they do about cost.
    • Often there are no consequences for over architecting or overspending on AWS.
    • Many organizations lack sufficient visibility into their AWS spend, making it impossible to establish accountability and controls.

    Impact and Result

    • Define roles and responsibilities.
    • Establish visibility.
    • Develop processes, procedures, and policies.

    Take Control of Cloud Costs on AWS Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should take control of cloud costs, 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 cost accountability framework

    Assess your current state, define your cost allocation model, and define roles and responsibilities.

    • Cloud Cost Management Worksheet
    • Cloud Cost Management Capability Assessment
    • Cloud Cost Management Policy
    • Cloud Cost Glossary of Terms

    2. Establish visibility

    Define dashboards and reports, and document account structure and tagging requirements.

    • Service Cost Cheat Sheet

    3. Define processes and procedures

    Establish governance for tagging and cost control, define processes for right-sizing, and define processes for purchasing commitment discounts.

    • Right-Sizing Workflow (Visio)
    • Right-Sizing Workflow (PDF)
    • Commitment Purchasing Workflow (Visio)
    • Commitment Purchasing Workflow (PDF)

    4. Build implementation plan

    Document process interactions, establish program KPIs, and build implementation roadmap and communication plan.

    • Cloud Cost Management Task List

    Infographic

    Workshop: Take Control of Cloud Costs on AWS

    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 Build Cost Accountability Framework

    The Purpose

    Establish clear lines of accountability and document roles and responsibilities to effectively manage cloud costs.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Chargeback/showback model to provide clear accountability for costs.

    Understanding of key areas to focus on to improve cloud cost management capabilities.

    Activities

    1.1 Assess current state

    1.2 Determine cloud cost model

    1.3 Define roles and responsibilities

    Outputs

    Cloud cost management capability assessment

    Cloud cost model

    Roles and responsibilities

    2 Establish Visibility

    The Purpose

    Establish visibility into cloud costs and drivers of those costs.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Better understanding of what is driving costs and how to keep them in check.

    Activities

    2.1 Develop architectural patterns

    2.2 Define dashboards and reports

    2.3 Define account structure

    2.4 Document tagging requirements

    Outputs

    Architectural patterns; service cost cheat sheet

    Dashboards and reports

    Account structure

    Tagging scheme

    3 Define Processes and Procedures

    The Purpose

    Develop processes, procedures, and policies to control cloud costs.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Improved capability of reducing costs.

    Documented processes and procedures for continuous improvement.

    Activities

    3.1 Establish governance for tagging

    3.2 Establish governance for costs

    3.3 Define right-sizing process

    3.4 Define purchasing process

    3.5 Define notification and alerts

    Outputs

    Tagging policy

    Cost control policy

    Right-sizing process

    Commitment purchasing process

    Notifications and Alerts

    4 Build Implementation Plan

    The Purpose

    Document next steps to implement and improve cloud cost management program.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Concrete roadmap to stand up and/or improve the cloud cost management program.

    Activities

    4.1 Document process interaction changes

    4.2 Define cloud cost program KPIs

    4.3 Build implementation roadmap

    4.4 Build communication plan

    Outputs

    Changes to process interactions

    Cloud cost program KPIs

    Implementation roadmap

    Communication plan

    Map Your Business Architecture to Define Your Strategy

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    • Parent Category Name: Strategy & Operating Model
    • Parent Category Link: /strategy-and-operating-model
    • Organizations need to innovate rapidly to respond to the changing forces in their industry, but their IT initiatives often fail to deliver meaningful outcomes.
    • Planners face challenges in understanding the relationships between the important customer-focused innovations they’re trying to introduce and the resources (capabilities) that make them possible, including applications, human resources, information, and processes. For example, are we risking the success of a new service offering by underpinning it with a legacy or manual solution?

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Successful execution of business strategy requires planning that:

    1. Accurately reflects organizational capabilities.
    2. Is traceable so all levels can understand how decisions are made.
    3. Makes efficient use of organizational resources.

    To accomplish this, the business architect must engage stakeholders, model the business, and drive planning with business architecture.

    • Business architecture is often regarded as an IT function when its role and tools should be fixtures within the business planning and innovation practice.
    • Any size of organization – from start-ups to global enterprises -- can benefit from using a common language and modeling rigor to identify the opportunities that will produce the greatest impact and value.
    • You don’t need sophisticated modeling software to build an effective business architecture knowledgebase. In fact, the best format for engaging business stakeholders is intuitive visuals using business language.

    Impact and Result

    • Execute more quickly on innovation and transformation initiatives.
    • More effectively target investments in resources and IT according to what goals and requirements are most important.
    • Identify problematic areas (e.g. legacy applications, manual processes) that hinder the business strategy and create inefficiencies in our information technology operation.

    Map Your Business Architecture to Define Your Strategy Research & Tools

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

    1. Map Your Business Architecture Deck – A step-by-step document that walks you through how to properly engage business and IT in applying a common language and process rigor to build key capabilities required to achieve innovation and growth goals.

    Build a structured, repeatable framework for both IT and business stakeholders to appraise the activities that deliver value to consumers; and assess the readiness of their capabilities to enable them.

    • Map Your Business Architecture to Define Your Strategy – Phases 1-3

    2. Stakeholder Engagement Strategy Template – A best-of-breed template to help you build a clear, concise, and compelling strategy document for identifying and engaging stakeholders.

    This template helps you ensure that your business architecture practice receives the resources, visibility, and support it needs to be successful, by helping you develop a strategy to engage the key stakeholders involved.

    • Stakeholder Engagement Strategy Template

    3. Value Stream Map Template – A template to walk through the value streams that are tied to your strategic goals.

    Record the complete value stream and decompose it into stages. Add a description of the expected outcome of the value stream and metrics for each stage.

    • Value Stream Map Template

    4. Value Stream Capability Mapping Template – A template to define capabilities and align them to selected value streams.

    Build a business capability model for the organization and map capabilities to the selected value stream.

    • Value Stream – Capability Mapping Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Map Your Business Architecture to Define Your 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 Discover the Business Context

    The Purpose

    Identify and consult stakeholders to discover the business goals and value proposition for the customer.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Engage stakeholders and SMEs in describing the business and its priorities and culture.

    Identify focus for the areas we will analyze and work on.

    Activities

    1.1 Select key stakeholders

    1.2 Plan for engaging stakeholders

    1.3 Gather business goals and priorities

    Outputs

    Stakeholder roles

    Engagement plan

    Business strategy, value proposition

    2 Define Value Streams

    The Purpose

    Describe the main value-adding activities of the business from the consumer’s point of view, e.g. provide product or service.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Shared understanding of why we build resources and do what we do.

    Starting point for analyzing resources and investing in innovation.

    Activities

    2.1 Define or update value streams

    2.2 Decompose selected value stream(s) into value stages and identify problematic areas and opportunities

    Outputs

    Value streams for the enterprise

    Value stages breakdown for selected value stream(s)

    3 Build Business Capability Map

    The Purpose

    Describe all the capabilities that make up an organization and enable the important customer-facing activities in the value streams.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Basis for understanding what resources the organization has and their ability to support its growth and success.

    Activities

    3.1 Define and describe all business capabilities (Level 1)

    3.2 Decompose and analyze capabilities for a selected priority value stream.

    Outputs

    Business Capability Map (Level 1)

    Business Capabilities Level 2 for selected value stream

    4 Develop a Roadmap

    The Purpose

    Use the Business Capability Map to identify key capabilities (e.g. cost advantage creator), and look more closely at what applications or information or business processes are doing to support or hinder that critical capability.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Basis for developing a roadmap of IT initiatives, focused on key business capabilities and business priorities.

    Activities

    4.1 Identify key capabilities (cost advantage creators, competitive advantage creators)

    4.2 Assess capabilities with the perspective of how well applications, business processes, or information support the capability and identify gaps

    4.3 Apply analysis tool to rank initiatives

    Outputs

    Business Capability Map with key capabilities: cost advantage creators and competitive advantage creators

    Assessment of applications or business processes or information for key capabilities

    Roadmap of IT initiatives

    Further reading

    Map Your Business Architecture to Define Your Strategy

    Plan your organization’s capabilities for best impact and value.

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Info-Tech is a provider of best-practice IT research advisory services that make every IT leader’s job easier.

    35,000 members sharing best practices you can leverage Millions spent developing tools and templates annually Leverage direct access to over 100 analysts as an extension of your team Use our massive database of benchmarks and vendor assessments Get up to speed in a fraction of the time

    Analyst perspective

    Know your organization’s capabilities to build a digital and customer-driven culture.

    Business architecture provides a holistic and unified view of:

    • All the organization’s activities that provide value to their clients (value streams).
    • The resources that make them possible and effective (capabilities, i.e. its employees, software, processes, information).
    • How they inter-relate, i.e. depend on and impact each other to help deliver value.

    Without a business architecture it is difficult to see the connections between the business’s activities for the customer and the IT resources supporting them – to demonstrate that what we do in IT is customer-driven.

    As a map of your business, the business architecture is an essential input to the digital strategy:

    • Develop a plan to transform the business by investing in the most important capabilities.
    • Ensure project initiatives are aligned with business goals as they evolve.
    • Respond more quickly to customer requirements and to disruptions in the industry by streamlining operations and information sharing across the enterprise.

    Crystal Singh, Research Director, Data and Analytics

    Crystal Singh
    Research Director, Data and Analytics
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Andrea Malick, Research Director, Data and Analytics

    Andrea Malick
    Research Director, Data and Analytics
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive summary

    Your Challenge Common Obstacles Info-Tech’s Approach

    Organizations need to innovate rapidly to respond to ever-changing forces and demands in their industry. But they often fail to deliver meaningful outcomes from their IT initiatives within a reasonable time.

    Successful companies are transforming, i.e. adopting fluid strategies that direct their resources to customer-driven initiatives and execute more quickly on those initiatives. In a responsive and digital organization, strategies, capabilities, information, people, and technology are all aligned, so work and investment are consistently allocated to deliver maximum value.

    You don’t have a complete reference map of your organization’s capabilities on which to base strategic decisions.

    You don’t know how to prioritize and identify the capabilities that are essential for achieving the organization’s customer-driven objectives.

    You don’t have a shared enterprise vision, where everyone understands how the organization delivers value and to whom.

    Begin important business decisions with a map of your organization – a business reference architecture. Model the business in the form of architectural blueprints.

    Engage your stakeholders. Recognize the opportunity for mapping work, and identify and engage the right stakeholders.

    Drive business architecture forward to promote real value to the organization. Assess your current projects to determine if you are investing in the right capabilities. Conduct business capability assessments to identify opportunities and prioritize projects.

    Info-Tech Insight
    Business architecture is the set of strategic planning techniques that connects organization strategy to execution in a manner that is accurate and traceable and promotes the efficient use of organizational resources.

    Blueprint activities summary

    Phase Purpose Activity Outcome
    1. Business context:
    Identify organization goals, industry drivers, and regulatory requirements in consultation with business stakeholders.     		Identify forces within and outside the organization to consider when planning the focus and timing of digital growth, through conducting interviews and surveys and reviewing existing strategies. Business value canvas, business strategy on a page, customer journey
    2. Customer activities (value stream):
    What is the customer doing? What is our reason for being as a company? What products and services are we trying to deliver?     		Define or update value streams, e.g. purchase product from supplier, customer order, and deliver product to customer. Value streams enterprise-wide (there may be more than one set of value streams, e.g. a medical school and community clinic)
    Prioritize value streams:
    Select key value streams for deeper analysis and focus.     		Assess value streams. Priority value streams
    Value stages:
    Break down the selected value stream into its stages.     		Define stages for selected value streams. Selected value stream stages
    3. Business capability map, level 1 enterprise:
    What resources and capabilities at a high level do we have to support the value streams?     		Define or update the business capabilities that align with and support the value streams. Business capability map, enterprise-wide capabilities level 1
    Business capability map, level 2 for selected area:
    List resources and capabilities that we have at a more detailed level.     		Define or update business capabilities for selected value stream to level 2. Business capability map, selected value stream, capability level 2
    Heatmap Business Capability Map: Flag focus areas in supporting technology, applications, data and information.

    Info-Tech’s workshop methodology

    Day 1: Discover Business Context Day 2: Define Value Streams Day 3: Build Business Capability Map Day 4: Roadmap Business Architecture
    Phase Steps

    1.1 Collect corporate goals and strategies

    1.2 Identify stakeholders

    2.1 Build or update value streams

    2.2 Decompose selected value stream into value stages and analyze for opportunities

    3.1 Update business capabilities to level 1 for enterprise

    3.2 For selected value streams, break down level 1 to level 2

    3.3 Use business architecture to heatmap focus areas: technology, information, and processes

    3.4 Build roadmap of future business architecture initiatives

    Phase Outcomes
    • Organizational context and goals
    • Business strategy on a page, customer journey map, business model canvas
    • Roles and responsibilities
    • Value stream map and definitions
    • Selected value stream(s) decomposed into value stages
    • Enterprise business capabilities map to level 1
    • Business architecture to level 2 for prioritized value stream
    • Heatmap business architecture
    • Business architecture roadmap, select additional initiatives

    Key concepts for this blueprint

    INDUSTRY VALUE CHAIN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION BUSINESS ARCHITECTURE
    A high-level analysis of how the industry creates value for the consumer as an overall end-to-end process. The adoption of digital technologies to innovate and re-invent existing business, talent ,and operating models to drive growth, business value, and improved customer experience. A holistic, multidimensional business view of capabilities, end-to-end value, and operating model in relation to the business strategy.
    INDUSTRY VALUE STREAM STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES CAPABILITY ASSESSMENTS
    A set of activities, tasks, and processes undertaken by a business or a business unit across the entire end-to-end business function to realize value. A set of standard objectives that most industry players will feature in their corporate plans. A heat-mapping effort to analyze the maturity and priority of each capability relative to the strategic priorities that they serve.

    Info-Tech’s approach

    1 Understand the business context and drivers
    Deepen your understanding of the organization’s priorities by gathering business strategies and goals. Talking to key stakeholders will allow you to get a holistic view of the business strategy and forces shaping the strategy, e.g. economy, workforce, and compliance.
    2 Define value streams; understand the value you provide
    Work with senior leadership to understand your customers’ experience with you and the ways your industry provides value to them.
    Assess the value streams for areas to explore and focus on.
    3 Customize the industry business architecture; develop business capability map
    Work with business architects and enterprise architects to customize Info-Tech’s business architecture for your industry as an enterprise-wide map of the organization and its capabilities.
    Extend the business capability map to more detail (Level 2) for the value stream stages you select to focus on.

    Business architecture is a planning function that connects strategy to execution

    Business architecture provides a framework that connects business strategy and IT strategy to project execution through a set of models that provide clarity and actionable insights. How well do you know your business?

    Business architecture is:

    • Inter-disciplinary: Business architecture is a core planning activity that supports all important decisions in the organization, for example, organizational resources planning. It’s not just about IT.
    • Foundational: The best way to answer the question, “Where do we start?” or “Where is our investment best directed?”, comes from knowing your organization, what its core functions and capabilities are (i.e. what’s important to us as an organization), and where there is work to do.
    • Connecting: Digital transformation and modernization cannot work with siloes. Connecting siloes means first knowing the organization and its functions and recognizing where the siloes are not communicating.

    Business architecture must be branded as a front-end planning function to be appropriately embedded in the organization’s planning process.

    Brand business architecture as an early planning pre-requisite on the basis of maintaining clarity of communication and spreading an accurate awareness of how strategic decisions are being made.

    As an organization moves from strategy toward execution, it is often unclear as to exactly how decisions pertaining to execution are being made, why priority is given to certain areas, and how the planning function operates.

    The business architect’s primary role is to model this process and document it.

    In doing so, the business architect creates a unified view as to how strategy connects to execution so it is clearly understood by all levels of the organization.

    Business architecture is part of the enterprise architecture framework

    Business Architecture
    Business strategy map Business model canvas Value streams
    Business capability map Business process flows Service portfolio
    Data Architecture Application Architecture Infrastructure Architecture
    Conceptual data model Application portfolio catalog Technology standards catalog
    Logical data model Application capability map Technology landscape
    Physical data model Application communication model Environments location model
    Data flow diagram Interface catalog Platform decomposition diagram
    Data lifecycle diagram Application use-case diagram Network computing / hardware diagram
    Security Architecture
    Enterprise security model Data security model Application security model

    Business architecture is a set of shared and practical views of the enterprise

    The key characteristic of the business architecture is that it represents real-world aspects of a business, along with how they interact.

    Many different views of an organization are typically developed. Each view is a diagram that illustrates a way of understanding the enterprise by highlighting specific information about it:

    • Business strategy view captures the tactical and strategic goals that drive an organization forward.
    • Business capabilities view describes the primary business functions of an enterprise and the pieces of the organization that perform those functions.
    • Value stream view defines the end-to-end set of activities that deliver value to external and internal stakeholders.
    • Business knowledge view establishes the shared semantics (e.g. customer, order, and supplier) within an organization and relationships between those semantics (e.g. customer name, order date, supplier name) – an information map.
    • Organizational view captures the relationships among roles, capabilities, and business units, the decomposition of those business units into subunits, and the internal or external management of those units.

    Business architect connects all the pieces

    The business owns the strategy and operating model; the business architect connects all the pieces together.

    R Business Architect (Responsible)
    A Business Unit Leads (Accountable)
    C Subject Matter Experts (Consulted)
    – Business Lines, Operations, Data, Technology Systems & Infrastructure Leads
    I Business Operators (Informed)
    – Process, Data, Technology Systems & Infrastructure

    Choose a key business challenge to address with business architecture

    Choose a key business challenge to address with business architecture

    Picking the right project is critical to setting the tone for business architecture work in the organization.

    Best practices for business architecture success

    Consider these best practices to maintain a high level of engagement from key stakeholders throughout the process of establishing or applying business architecture.

    Balance short-term cost savings with long-term benefits

    Participate in project governance to facilitate compliance

    Create a center of excellence to foster dialogue

    Identify strategic business objectives

    Value streams: Understand how you deliver value today

    It is important to understand the different value-generating activities that deliver an outcome for and from your customers.

    We do this by looking at value streams, which refer to the specific set of activities an industry player undertakes to create and capture value for and from the end consumer (and so the question to ask is, how do you make money as an organization?).

    Our approach helps you to strengthen and transform those value streams that generate the most value for your organization.

    Understand how you deliver value today

    An organization can have more than one set of streams.
    For example, an enterprise can provide both retail shopping and financial services, such as credit cards.

    Define the organization’s value streams

    • Value streams connect business goals to the organization’s value realization activities. They enable an organization to create and capture value in the market place by engaging in a set of interconnected activities. Those activities are dependent on the specific industry segment an organization operates within. Value streams can extend beyond the organization into the supporting ecosystem, whereas business processes are contained within and the organization has complete control over them.
    • There are two types of value streams: core value streams and support value streams. Core value streams are mostly externally facing: they deliver value to either an external or internal customer and they tie to the customer perspective of the strategy map. Support value streams are internally facing and provide the foundational support for an organization to operate.
    • An effective method for ensuring all value streams have been considered is to understand that there can be different end-value receivers. Info-Tech recommends identifying and organizing the value streams with customers and partners as end-value receivers.

    Example: Value stream descriptions for the retail industry

    Value Streams Create or Purchase the Product Manage Inventory Distribute Product Sell Product, Make Product Available to Customers
    • Product is developed before company sells it.
    • Make these products by obtaining raw materials from external suppliers or using their own resources.
    • Retailers purchase the products they are going to sell to customers from manufacturers or wholesale distributors.
    • Retailer success depends on its ability to source products that customers want and are willing to buy.
    • Inventory products are tracked as they arrive in the warehouse, counted, stored, and prepared for delivery.
    • Estimate the value of your inventory using retail inventory management software.
    • Optimizing distribution activities is an important capability for retailers. The right inventory needs to be at a particular store in the right quantities exactly when it is needed. This helps to maximize sales and minimize how much cash is held up in inventory.
    • Proper supply chain management can not only reduce costs for retailers but drive revenues by enhancing shopping experiences.
    • Once produced, retailers need to sell the products. This is done through many channels including physical stores, online, the mail, or catalogs.
    • After the sale, retailers typically have to deliver the product, provide customer care, and manage complaints.
    • Retailers can use loyalty programs, pricing, and promotions to foster repeat business.

    Value streams describe your core business

    Value streams describe your core business

    Value streams – the activities we do to provide value to customers – require business capabilities.

    Value streams are broken down further into value stages, for example, the Sell Product value stream has value stages Evaluate Options, Place Order, and Make Payment.

    Think of value streams as the core operations: the reason for your organization’s being. A professional consulting organization may have a legal team but it does not brand itself as a law firm. A core value stream is providing research products and services; a business capability that supports it is legal counsel.

    Decompose the value stream into stages

    The stages of a value stream are usually action-oriented statements or verbs that make up the individual steps involved throughout the scope of the value stream, e.g. Place Order or Make Payment.

    Each value stream should have a trigger or starting point and an end result for a client or receiver.

    Decompose the value stream into stages

    There should be measurable value or benefits at each stage. These are key performance indicators (KPIs). Spot problem areas in the stream.

    Value streams usually fall into one of these categories:

    1. Fulfillment of products and services
    2. Manufacturing
    3. Software products
    4. Supporting value streams (procurement of supplies, product planning)

    Value streams need capabilities

    • Value streams connect business goals to the organization’s value realization activities. They enable an organization to create and capture value in the market place by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.
    • There are two types of value streams: core value streams and support value streams. Core value streams are mostly externally facing: they deliver value to either an external or internal customer and they tie to the customer perspective of the strategy map. Support value streams are internally facing and provide the foundational support for an organization to operate.
    • There can be different end-value receivers. Info-Tech recommends identifying and organizing the value streams with customers and partners as end-value receivers.

    Value streams need business capabilities

    Business capabilities are built up to allow the business to perform the activities that bring value to customers. Map capabilities to the value-add activities in the value stream. Business capabilities lie at the top layer of the business architecture:

    • They are the most stable reference for planning organizations.
    • They make strategy more tangible.
    • If properly defined, they can help overcome organizational silos.

    Value streams need business capabilities

    Example business capability map – Higher Education

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organization’s business capabilities and represents a view of what your data program must support.

    Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

    Example business capability map for: Higher Education

    Example business capability map for Higher Education

    Example business capability map – Local Government

    Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organization’s business capabilities and represents a view of what your data program must support.

    Example business capability map for: Local Government

    Example business capability map for Local Government

    Value streams need business capabilities

    Value streams – the activities we do to provide value to customers – require business capabilities. Value streams are broken down further into value stages.

    Business capabilities are built up to allow the business to perform the activities that bring value to customers. Map capabilities to the activities in the value stage to spot opportunities and problems in delivering services and value.

    Business processes fulfill capabilities. They are a step-by-step description of who is performing what to achieve a goal. Capabilities consist of networks of processes and the resources – people, technology, materials – to execute them.

    Capability = Processes + Software, Infrastructure + People

    Prioritize a value stream and identify its supporting capabilities

    Prioritize your improvement objectives and business goals and identify a value stream to transform.

    Align the business objectives of your organization to your value streams (the critical actions that take place within your organization to add value to a customer).

    Prioritize a value stream to transform based on the number of priorities aligned to a value stream, and/or the business value (e.g. revenue, EBITDA earnings, competitive differentiation, or cost efficiency).

    Decompose the selected value stream into value stages.

    Align capabilities level 1 and 2 to value stages. One capability may support several value stages in the stream.

    Build a business architecture for the prioritized value stream with a map of business capabilities up to level 2.

    NOTE: We can’t map all capabilities all at once: business architecture is an ongoing practice; select key mapping initiatives each year based on business goals.

    Prioritize a value stream and identify its supporting capabilities

    Map business capabilities to Level 2

    Map business capabilities to Level 2

    Map capabilities to value stage

    Map capabilities to value stage

    Business value realization

    Business value defines the success criteria of an organization as manifested through organizational goals and outcomes, and it is interpreted from four perspectives:

    • Profit generation: The revenue generated from a business capability with a product that is enabled with modern technologies.
    • Cost reduction: The cost reduction when performing business capabilities with a product that is enabled with modern technologies.
    • Service enablement: The productivity and efficiency gains of internal business operations from products and capabilities enhanced with modern technologies.
    • Customer and market reach: The improved reach and insights of the business in existing or new markets.

    Business Value Matrix

    Value, goals, and outcomes cannot be achieved without business capabilities

    Break down your business goals into strategic and achievable initiatives focused on specific value streams and business capabilities.

    Business goals and outcomes

    Accelerate the process with an industry business architecture

    It’s never a good idea to start with a blank page.

    The business capability map available from Info-Tech and with industry standard models can be used as an accelerator. Assemble the relevant stakeholders – business unit leads and product/service owners – and modify the business capability map to suit your organization’s context.

    Acceleration path: Customize generic capability maps with the assistance of our industry analysts.

    Accelerate the process with an industry business architecture

    Identify goals and drivers

    Consider organizational goals and industry forces when planning.

    Business context Define value streams Build business capability map
    1.1 Select key stakeholders
    1.2 Collect and understand corporate goals     		2.1 Update or define value streams
    2.2 Decompose and analyze selected value stream     		3.1 Build level 1 capability map
    3.2 Build level 2 capability map
    3.3 Heatmap capability map
    3.4 Roadmap

    Use inputs from business goals and strategies to understand priorities.

    It is not necessary to have a comprehensive business strategy document to start – with key stakeholders, the business architect should be able to gather a one-page business value canvas or customer journey.

    Determine how the organization creates value

    Begin the process by identifying and locating the business mission and vision statements.

    What is business context?

    “The business context encompasses an understanding of the factors impacting the business from various perspectives, including how decisions are made and what the business is ultimately trying to achieve. The business context is used by IT to identify key implications for the execution of its strategic initiatives.”

    Source: Businesswire, 2018

    Identify the key stakeholders who can help you promote the value of business architecture

    First, as the CIO, you must engage executive stakeholders and secure their support.
    Focus on key players who have high power and high interest in business architecture.

    Engage the stakeholders who are impacted the most and have the power to impede the success of business architecture.

    For example, if the CFO – who has the power to block funding – is disengaged, business architecture will be put at risk.

    Use Info-Tech’s Stakeholder Power Map Template to help prioritize time spent with stakeholders.

    Sample power map

    Identify the key stakeholders concerned with the business architecture project

    A business architecture project may involve the following stakeholders:

    Business architecture project stakeholders

    You must identify who the stakeholders are for your business architecture work.

    Think about:

    • Who are the decision makers and key influencers?
    • Who will impact the business architecture work? Who will the work impact?
    • Who has vested interest in the success or failure of the practice?
    • Who has the skills and competencies necessary to help us be successful?

    Avoid these common mistakes:

    • Don’t focus on the organizational structure and hierarchy. Often stakeholder groups don’t fit the traditional structure.
    • Don’t ignore subject-matter experts on either the business or IT side. You will need to consider both.

    1.1 Identify and assemble key stakeholders

    1-3 hours

    Build an accurate depiction of the business.

    1. It is important to make sure the right stakeholders participate in this exercise. The exercise of identifying capabilities for an organization is very introspective and requires deep analysis.
    2. Consider:
      1. Who are the decision makers and key influencers?
      2. Who will impact the business capability work? Who has a vested interest in the success or failure of the outcome?
      3. Who has the skills and competencies necessary to help you be successful?
    3. Avoid:
      1. Don’t focus on the organizational structure and hierarchy. Often stakeholder groups don’t fit the traditional structure.
      2. Don’t ignore subject matter experts on either the business or IT side. You will need to consider both.
    Input Output
    • List of who is accountable for key business areas and decisions
    • Organizational chart
    • List of who has decision-making authority
    • A list of the key stakeholders
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • Modeling software (e.g. Visio, ArchiMate)
    • Business capability map industry models
    • CIO
    • Enterprise/Business Architect
    • Business Analysts
    • Business Unit Leads
    • Departmental Executives & Senior Managers

    Conduct interviews with the business to gather intelligence for strategy

    Talking to key stakeholders will allow you to get a holistic view of the business strategy.

    Stakeholder interviews provide holistic view of business strategy

    Build a strategy on a page through executive interviews and document reviews

    Understanding the business mandate and priorities ensures alignment across the enterprise.

    A business strategy must articulate the long-term destination the business is moving into. This illustration shapes all the strategies and activities in every other part of the business, including what IT capabilities and resources are required to support business goals. Ultimately, the benefits of a well-defined business strategy increase as the organization scales and as business units or functions are better equipped to align the strategic planning process in a manner that reflects the complexity of the organization.

    Using the Business Strategy on a Page canvas, consider the questions in each bucket to elicit the overall strategic context of the organization and uncover the right information to build your digital strategy. Interview key executives including your CEO, CIO, CMO, COO, CFO, and CRO, and review documents from your board or overall organizational strategy to uncover insights.

    Info-Tech Insight
    A well-articulated and clear business strategy helps different functional and business units work together and ensures that individual decisions support the overall direction of the business.

    Focus on business value and establish a common goal

    Business architecture is a strategic planning function and the focus must be on delivering business value.

    Examples business objectives:

    • Digitally transform the business, redefining its customer interactions.
    • Identify the root cause for escalating customer complaints and eroding satisfaction.
    • Identify reuse opportunities to increase operational efficiency.
    • Identify capabilities to efficiently leverage suppliers to handle demand fluctuations.

    Info-Tech Insight
    CIOs are ideally positioned to be the sponsors of business architecture given that their current top priorities are digital transformation, innovation catalyzation, and business alignment.

    1.2 Collect and understand business objectives

    1-3 hours

    Having a clear understanding of the business is crucial to executing on the strategic IT initiatives.

    1. Discover the strategic CIO initiatives your organization will pursue:
    • Schedule interviews.
    • Use the CIO Business Vision diagnostic or Business Context Discovery Tool.
  • Document the business goals.
  • Update and finalize business goals.
    • InputOutput
    • Existing business goals and strategies
    • Existing IT strategies
    • Interview findings
    • Diagnostic results
    • List of business goals
    • Strategy on a page
    • Business model canvas
    • Customer journey
    MaterialsParticipants
    • CIO Business Vision diagnostic
    • Interview questionnaire
    • CIO
    • Enterprise/Business Architect
    • Business Analysts
    • Business Unit Leads
    • Departmental Executives & Senior Managers

    CIO Business Vision Diagnostic

    CEO

    Vision

    Where do you want to go?
    What is the problem your organization is addressing?

    Mission/Mandate

    What do you do?
    How do you do?
    Whom do you do it for?

    Value Streams

    Why are you in business? What do you do?
    What products and services do you provide?
    Where has your business seen persistent demand?

    Key Products & Services

    What are your top three to five products and services?

    Key Customer Segments

    Who are you trying to serve or target?
    What are the customer segments that decide your value proposition?

    Value Proposition

    What is the value you deliver to your customers?

    Future Value Proposition

    What is your value proposition in three to five years’ time?

    Digital Experience Aspirations

    How can you create a more effective value stream?
    For example, greater value to customers or better supplier relationships.

    Business Resilience Aspirations

    How can you reduce business risks?
    For example, compliance, operational, security, or reputational.

    Sustainability (or ESG) Aspirations

    How can you deliver ESG and sustainability goals?

    Interview the following executives for each business goal area.

    CEO
    CRO
    COO

    Core Business Goals

    What are the core business goals to meet business objectives?

    Top Priorities & Initiatives

    What are the top initiatives and priorities over the planning horizon?

    Performance Insights/Metrics

    What do we need to achieve?
    How can the success be measured?

    CMO
    COO
    CFO

    Shared Business Goals

    What are the shared (operational) business goals to meet business objectives?

    Top Priorities & Initiatives

    What are the top initiatives and priorities over the planning horizon?

    Performance Insights/Metrics

    What do we need to achieve?
    How can the success be measured?

    CFO
    CIO
    COO
    CHRO

    Enabling Business Goals

    What are the enabling (supporting/enterprise) business goals to meet business objectives?

    Top Priorities & Initiatives

    What are the top initiatives and priorities over the planning horizon?

    Performance Insights/Metrics

    What do we need to achieve?
    How can the success be measured?

    Craft a strategy to increase stakeholder support and participation

    The BA practice’s supporters are potential champions who will help you market the value of BA; engage with them first to create positive momentum. Map out the concerns of each group of stakeholders so you can develop marketing tactics and communications vehicles to address them.

    Example Communication Strategy

    Stakeholder Concerns Tactics to Address Concerns Communication Vehicles Frequency
    Supporters
    (High Priority)
    • Build ability to execute BA techniques
    • Build executive support
    • Build understanding of how they can contribute to the success of the BA practice
    • Communicate the secured executive support
    • Help them apply BA techniques in their projects
    • Show examples of BA work (case studies)
    • Personalized meetings and interviews
    • Department/functional meetings
    • Communities of practice or centers of excellent (education and case studies)
    		 Bi-Monthly
    Indifferent
    (Medium Priority)
    • Build awareness and/or confidence
    • Feel like BA has nothing to do with them
    • Show quick wins and case studies
    • Centers of excellence (education and case studies
    • Use the support of the champions
    		 Quarterly
    Resistors
    (Medium Priority)
    • BA will cause delays
    • BA will step in their territory
    • BA’s scope is too broad
    • Lack of understanding
    • Prove the value of BA – case studies and metrics
    • Educate how BA complements their work
    • Educate them on the changes resulting from the BA practice’s work, and involve them in crafting the process
    • Individual meetings and interviews
    • Political jockeying
    • Use the support of the champions
    		 Tailored to individual groups

    1.3 Craft a strategy to increase stakeholder support and participation

    1-2 hours

    Now that you have organized and categorized your stakeholders based on their power, influence, interest, and knowledge of business architecture, it is time to brainstorm how you are going to gain their support and participation.

    Think about the following:

    • What are your stakeholders’ concerns?
    • How can you address them?
    • How will you deliver the message?
    • How often will you deliver the message?

    Avoid these common mistakes:

    • Your communication strategy development should be an iterative process. Do not assume to know the absolute best way to get through to every resistor right away. Instead, engage with your supporters for their input on how to communicate to resistors and repeat the process for indifferent stakeholders as well.
    Input Output
  • Stakeholder Engagement Map
    		•
    • Stakeholder Communications Strategy
    Materials Participants
    • Stakeholder Engagement Strategy Template
    • A computer
    • A whiteboard and markers CIO
    • Business Architect
    • IT Department Leads

    Download the Stakeholder Engagement Strategy Template for this project.

    Engaging the right stakeholders

    CASE STUDY

    Industry
    Financial - Banking

    Source
    Anonymous

    Situation Complication Result

    To achieve success with the business architecture initiative, the bank’s CIO needed to put together a plan to engage the right stakeholders in the process.

    Without the right stakeholders, the initiative would suffer from inadequate information and thus would run the risk of delivering an ineffective solution.

    The bank’s culture was resistant to change and each business unit had its own understanding of the business strategy. This was a big part of the problem that led to decreasing customer satisfaction.

    The CIO needed a unified vision for the business architecture practice involving people, process, and technology that all stakeholders could support.

    Starting with enlisting executive support in the form of a business sponsor, the CIO identified the rest of the key stakeholders, in this case, the business unit heads, who were necessary to engage for the initiative.

    Once identified, the CIO promoted the benefits of business architecture to each of the business unit heads while taking stock of their individual needs.

    1.4 Develop a plan to engage key stakeholders

    1 hour

    Using your stakeholder power map as a starting point, focus on the three most important quadrants: those that contain stakeholders you must keep informed, those to keep satisfied, and the key players.

    Plot the stakeholders from those quadrants on a stakeholder engagement map.

    Think about the following:

    • Who are your resistors? These individuals will actively detract from project’s success if you don’t address their concerns.
    • Who is indifferent? These individuals need to be educated more on the benefits of business architecture to have an opinion either way.
    • Who are your supporters? These individuals will support you and spread your message if you equip them to do so.

    Avoid these common mistakes:

    • Do not jump to addressing resistor concerns first. Instead, equip your supporters with the info they need to help your cause and gain positive momentum before approaching resistors.
    InputOutput
    • Stakeholder Engagement Map
    • Stakeholder Communications Strategy
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Stakeholder Engagement Strategy Template
    • A computer
    • A whiteboard and markers
    • CIO
    • Business Architect
    • IT Department Leads

    Download the Stakeholder Engagement Strategy Template for this project.

    1.5 Craft a strategy to increase stakeholder support and participation

    1-2 hours

    Now that you have organized and categorized your stakeholders based on their power, influence, interest, and knowledge of business architecture, it is time to brainstorm how you are going to gain their support and participation.

    Think about the following:

    • What are your stakeholders’ concerns?
    • How can you address them?
    • How will you deliver the message?
    • How often will you deliver the message?

    Avoid these common mistakes:

    • Your communication strategy development should be an iterative process. Do not assume to know the absolute best way to get through to every resistor right away. Instead, engage with your supporters for their input on how to communicate to resistors and repeat the process for indifferent stakeholders as well.
    InputOutput
    • Stakeholder Engagement Map
    • Stakeholder Communications Strategy
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Stakeholder Engagement Strategy Template
    • A computer
    • A whiteboard and markers
    • CIO
    • Business Architect
    • IT Department Leads

    Download the Stakeholder Engagement Strategy Template for this project.

    Define value streams

    Identify the core activities your organization does to provide value to your customers.

    Business context Define value streams Build business capability map

    1.1 Select key stakeholders
    1.2 Collect and understand corporate goals

    2.1 Update or define value streams
    2.2 Decompose and analyze selected value stream

    3.1 Build Level 1 capability map
    3.2 Build Level 2 capability map
    3.3 Heatmap capability map
    3.4 Roadmap

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Note: It is recommended that you gather and leverage relevant industry standard business architecture models you may have available to you. Example: Info-Tech Industry Business Architecture, BIZBOK, APQC.
    • Defining or updating the organization’s value streams.
    • Selecting priority value streams for deeper analysis.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Business Architect, Enterprise Architect
    • Relevant Business Stakeholder(s): Business Unit Leads, Departmental Executives, Senior Mangers, Business Analysts

    Define the organization’s value streams

    • Value streams connect business goals to the organization’s value realization activities. They enable an organization to create and capture value in the marketplace by engaging in a set of interconnected activities. Those activities are dependent on the specific industry segment an organization operates within. Value streams can extend beyond the organization into the supporting ecosystem, whereas business processes are contained within and the organization has complete control over them.
    • There are two types of value streams: core value streams and support value streams. Core value streams are mostly externally facing: they deliver value to either an external or internal customer and they tie to the customer perspective of the strategy map. Support value streams are internally facing and provide the foundational support for an organization to operate.
    • An effective method for ensuring all value streams have been considered is to understand that there can be different end-value receivers. Info-Tech recommends identifying and organizing the value streams with customers and partners as end-value receivers.

    Connect business goals to value streams

    Example strategy map and value stream

    Identifying value streams

    Value streams connect business goals to organization’s value realization activities. They enable an organization to create and capture value in the market place by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

    There are several key questions to ask when endeavoring to identify value streams.

    Key Questions
    • Who are your customers?
    • What are the benefits we deliver to them?
    • How do we deliver those benefits?
    • How does the customer receive the benefits?

    Example: Value stream descriptions for the retail industry

    Value StreamsCreate or Purchase ProductManage InventoryDistribute ProductSell Product
    • Retailers need to purchase the products they are going to sell to customers from manufacturers or wholesale distributors.
    • A retailer’s success depends on its ability to source products that customers want and are willing to buy.
    • In addition, they need to purchase the right amount and assortment of products based on anticipated demand.
    • The right inventory needs to be at a particular store in the right quantities exactly when it is needed. This helps to maximize sales and minimize how much cash is held up in inventory.
    • Inventory management includes tracking, ordering, and stocking products, e.g. raw materials, finished products, buffer inventory.
    • Optimizing distribution activities is important for retailers.
    • Proper supply chain management can not only reduce costs for retailers but also drive revenues by enhancing shopping experiences.
    • Distribution includes transportation, packaging and delivery.
    • As business becomes global, it is important to ensure the whole distribution channel is effective.
    • Once produced, retailers need to sell the products. This is done through many channels including physical stores, online, the mail, or catalogs.
    • After the sale, retailers typically have to deliver the product, provide customer care, and manage complaints.
    • Retailers can use loyalty programs, pricing, and promotions to foster repeat business.

    Value streams describe your core business

    Value streams – the activities we do to provide value to customers – require business capabilities.

    Value streams are broken down further into value stages, for example, Sell Product value stream has value stages Evaluate Options, Place Order, and Make Payment.

    Think of value streams as the core operations, the reason for our organization’s being. A professional consulting organization may have a legal team but it does not brand itself as a law firm. A core value stream is providing research products and services – a business capability that supports it is legal counsel.

    2.1 Define value streams

    1-3 hours

    Unify the organization’s perspective on how it creates value.

    1. Write a short description of the value stream that includes a statement about the value provided and a clear start and end for the value stream. Validate the accuracy of the descriptions with your key stakeholders.
    2. Consider:
      1. How does the organization deliver those benefits?
      2. How does the customer receive the benefits?
      3. What is the scope of your value stream? What will trigger the stream to start and what will the final value be?
    3. Avoid: Don’t start with a blank page. Use Info-Tech’s business architecture models for sample value streams.
    Input Output
    • Business strategy or goals
    • Financial statements
    • Info-Tech’s industry-specific business architecture
    • List of organizational specific value streams
    • Detailed value stream definition(s)
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard / Kanban Board
    • Reference Architecture Template – See your Account Representative for details
    • Other industry standard reference architecture models: BIZBOK, APQC, etc.
    • Info-Tech Archi Models
    • Enterprise/Business Architect
    • Business Analysts
    • Business Unit Leads
    • CIO
    • Departmental Executives & Senior Managers

    See your Info-Tech Account Representative for access to the Reference Architecture Template

    Decompose the value stream into stages

    The stages of a value stream are usually action-oriented statements or verbs that make up the individual steps involved throughout the scope of the value stream, e.g. Place Order or Make Payment.

    Each value stream should have a trigger or starting point and an end result for a client or receiver.

    Decompose the value stream into stages

    There should be measurable value or benefits at each stage.
    These are key performance indicators (KPIs).
    Spot problem areas in the stream.

    Value streams usually fall into one of these categories:

    1. Fulfillment of products and services
    2. Manufacturing
    3. Software products
    4. Supporting value streams (procurement of supplies, product planning)

    Value stream and value stages examples

    Customer Acquisitions
    Identify Prospects > Contact Prospects > Verify Interests

    Sell Product
    Identify Options > Evaluate Options > Negotiate Price and Delivery Date > Place Order > Get Invoice > Make Payment

    Product Delivery
    Confirm Order > Plan Load > Receive Warehouse > Fill Order > Ship Order > Deliver Order > Invoice Customer

    Product Financing
    Initiate Loan Application > Decide on Application > Submit Documents > Review & Satisfy T&C > Finalize Documents > Conduct Funding > Conduct Funding Audits

    Product Release
    Ideate > Design > Build > Release

    Sell Product is a value stream, made up of value stages Identify options, Evaluate options, and so on.

    2.2 Decompose selected value streams

    1-3 hours

    Once we have a good understanding of our value streams, we need to decide which ones to focus on for deeper analysis and modeling, e.g. extend the business architecture to more detailed level 2 capabilities.

    Organization has goals and delivers products or services.

    1. Identify which value propositions are most important, e.g. be more productive or manage money more simply.
    2. Identify the value stream(s) that create the value proposition.
    3. Break the selected value stream into value stages.
    4. Analyze value stages for opportunities.

    Practical Guide to Agile Strategy Execution

    InputOutput
    • Value stream maps and definitions
    • Business goals, business model canvas, customer journey (value proposition) Selected value streams decomposed into value stages
    • Analysis of selected value streams for opportunities
    • Value stream map
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard / Kanban Board
    • Reference Architecture Template – See your Account Representative for details
    • Other industry standard reference architecture models: BIZBOK, APQC, etc.
    • Enterprise/Business Architect
    • Business Analysts
    • Business Unit Leads
    • CIO
    • Departmental Executives & Senior Managers

    Build your value stream one layer at a time to ensure clarity and comprehensiveness

    The first step of creating a value stream is defining it.

    • In this step, you create the parameters around the value stream and document them in a list format.
    • This allows you to know where each value stream starts and ends and the unique value it provides.

    The second step is the value stream mapping.

    • The majority of the mapping is done here where you break down your value stream into each of its component stages.
    • Analysis of these stages allows for a deeper understanding of the value stream.
    • The mapping layer connects the value stream to organizational capabilities.

    Define the value streams that are tied to your strategic goals and document them in a list

    Title

    • Create a title for your value stream that indicates the value it achieves.
    • Ensure your title is clear and will be understood the same way across the organization.
    • The common naming convention for value streams is to use nouns, e.g. product purchase.

    Scope

    • Determine the scope of your value stream by defining the trigger to start the value stream and final value delivered to end the value stream.
    • Be precise with your trigger to ensure you do not mistakenly include actions that would not trigger your value stream.
    • A useful tip is creating a decision tree and outlining the path that results in your trigger.

    Objectives

    • Determine the objectives of the value stream by highlighting the outcome it delivers.
    • Identify the desired outcomes of the value stream from the perspective of your organization.

    Example Value Streams List

    Title Scope Objectives
    Sell Product From option identification to payment Revenue Growth
    … … …
    … … …

    Create a value stream map

    A Decompose the Value Stream Into Stages B Add the Customer Perspective
    • Determine the different stages that comprise the value stream.
    • Place the stages in the correct order.
    • Outline the likely sentiment and meaningful needs of the customer at each value stage.
    C Add the Expected Outcome D Define the Entry and Exit Criteria
    • Define the desired outcome of each stage from the perspective of the organization.
    • Define both the entry and exit criteria for each stage.
    • Note that the entry criteria of the first stage is what triggers the value stream.
    E Outline the Metrics F Assess the Stages
    • For each stage of the value stream, outline the metrics the organization can use to identify its ability to attain the desired outcome.
    • Assess how well each stage of the value stream is performing against its target metrics and use this as the basis to drill down into how/where improvements can be made.

    Decompose the value stream into its value stages

    The first step in creating a value stream map is breaking it up into its component stages.

    The stages of a value stream are usually action-oriented statements or verbs that make up the individual steps involved throughout the scope of the value stream.

    Illustration of decomposing value stream into its value stages

    The Benefit
    Segmenting your value stream into individual stages will give you a better understanding of the steps involved in creating value.

    Connect the stages of the value stream to a specific customer perspective

    Example of a sell product value stream

    The Benefit
    Adding the customer’s perspective will inform you of their priorities at each stage of the value stream.

    Connect the stages of the value stream to a desired outcome

    Example of a sell product value stream

    The Benefit
    Understanding the organization’s desired outcome at each stage of the value stream will help set objectives and establish metrics.

    Define the entry and exit criteria of each stage

    Example of entry and exit criteria for each stage

    The Benefit
    Establishing the entry and exit criteria for each stage will help you understand how the customer experience flows from one end of the stream to the other.

    Outline the key metric(s) for each stage

    Outline the key metrics for each stage

    The Benefit
    Setting metrics for each stage will facilitate the tracking of success and inform the business architecture practitioner of where investments should be made.

    Example value stream map: Sell Product

    Assess the stages of your value stream map to determine which capabilities to examine further

    To determine which specific business capabilities you should seek to assess and potentially refine, you must review performance toward target metrics at each stage of the value stream.

    Stages that are not performing to their targets should be examined further by assessing the capabilities that enable them.

    Value Stage Metric Description Metric Target Current Measure Meets Objective?
    Evaluate Options Number of Product Demonstrations 12,000/month 9,000/month No
    Identify Options Google Searches 100K/month 100K/month Yes
    Identify Options Product Mentions 1M/month 1M/month Yes
    … Website Traffic (Hits) … … …
    Average Deal Size
    Number of Deals
    Time to Complete an Order
    Percentage of Invoices Without Error
    Average Time to Acquire Payment in Full

    Determine the business capabilities that support the value stage corresponding with the failing metric

    Sell Product

    Identify Options > Evaluate Options > Negotiate Price and Delivery Date > Place Order > Get Invoice > Make Payment

    The value stage(s) that doesn’t meet its objective metrics should be examined further.

    • This is done through business capability mapping and assessment.
    • Starting at the highest level (level 0) view of a business, the business architecture practitioner must drill down into the lower level capabilities that support the specific value stage to diagnose/improve an issue.

    Info-Tech Insight
    In the absence of tangible metrics, you will have to make a qualitative judgement about which stage(s) of the value stream warrant further examination for problems and opportunities.

    Build business capability map

    Align supporting capabilities to priority activities.

    Business context Define value streams Build business capability map
    1.1 Select key stakeholders
    1.2 Collect and understand corporate goals     		2.1 Update or define value streams
    2.2 Decompose and analyze selected value stream     		3.1 Build Level 1 capability map
    3.2 Build Level 2 capability map
    3.3 Heatmap capability map
    3.4 Roadmap

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Determine which business capabilities support value streams
    • Accelerate the process with an industry reference architecture
    • Validate the business capability map
    • Establish level 2 capability

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Enterprise/Business Architect
    • Business Analysts
    • Business Unit Leads
    • CIO
    • Departmental Executives & Senior Managers

    Outcomes of this step

  • A validated level 1 business capability map
  • Level 2 capabilities for selected value stream(s)
  • Heatmapped business capability map
  • Business architecture initiatives roadmap

    • Develop a business capability map – level 1

    • Business architecture consists of a set of techniques to create multiple views of an organization; the primary view is known as a business capability map.
    • A business capability defines what a business does to enable value creation and achieve outcomes, rather than how. Business capabilities are business terms defined using descriptive nouns such as “Marketing” or “Research and Development.” They represent stable business functions, are unique and independent of each other, and typically will have a defined business outcome. Business capabilities should not be defined as organizational units and are typically longer lasting than organizational structures.
    • A business capability mapping process should begin at the highest-level view of an organization, the level 1, which presents the entire business on a page.
    • An effective method of organizing business capabilities is to split them into logical groupings or categories. At the highest level, capabilities are either “core” (customer-facing functions) or “enabling” (supporting functions).
    • As a best practice, Info-Tech recommends dividing business capabilities into the categories illustrated to the right.

    The Business Capability Map is the primary visual representation of the organization’s key abilities or services that are delivered to stakeholders. This model forms the basis of strategic planning discussions.

    Example of a business capability map

    Example business capability map – Higher Education

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organization’s business capabilities and represents a view of what your data program must support.

    Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

    Example business capability map for: Higher Education

    Example business capability map for higher education

    Example business capability map – Local Government

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organization’s business capabilities and represents a view of what your data program must support.

    Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

    Example business capability map for: Local Government

    Example business capability map for local government

    Map capabilities to value stage

    Example of a value stage

    Source: Lambert, “Practical Guide to Agile Strategy Execution”

    3.1 Build level 1 business capability map

    1-3 hours

    1. Analyze the value streams to identify and describe the organization’s capabilities that support them. This stage requires a good understanding of the business and will be a critical foundation for the business capability map. Use the reference business architecture’s business capability map for your industry for examples of level 1 and 2 business capabilities and the capability map template to work in.
    2. Avoid:
      1. Don’t repeat capabilities. Capabilities are typically mutually exclusive activities.
      2. Don’t include temporary initiatives. Capabilities should be stable over time. The people, processes, and technologies that support capabilities will change continuously.

    Ensure you engage with the right stakeholders:

    Don’t waste your efforts building an inaccurate depiction of the business: The exercise of identifying capabilities for an organization is very introspective and requires deep analysis.

    It is challenging to develop a common language that everyone will understand and be able to apply. Invest in the time to ensure the right stakeholders are brought into the fold and bring their business area expertise and understanding to the table.

    InputOutput
    • Existing business capability maps
    • Value stream map
    • Info-Tech’s industry-specific business architecture
    • Level 1 business capability map for enterprise
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard
    • Reference Architecture Template – See your Account Representative for details
    • Other industry standard reference architecture models: BIZBOK, APQC, etc.
    • Archi Models
    • Enterprise/Business Architect
    • Business Analysts
    • Business Unit Leads
    • CIO
    • Departmental Executives & Senior Managers

    Prioritize one value stream and build a business architecture to level 2 capabilities

    Prioritize your innovation objectives and business goals, and identify a value stream to transform.

    Align the innovation goals and business objectives of your organization to your value streams (the critical actions that take place within your organization to add value to a customer).
    Prioritize a value stream to transform based on the number of priorities aligned to a value stream and/or the business value (e.g. revenue, EBITDA earnings, competitive differentiation, or cost efficiency).
    Working alongside a business or enterprise architect, build a reference architecture for the prioritized value stream up to level 2.

    Example of a value stream to business architecture level 2 capabilities

    Info-Tech Insight
    To produce maximum impact, focus on value streams that provide two-thirds of your enterprise value (EBITDA earnings).

    From level 1 to level 2 business capabilities

    Example moving from level 1 to level 2 business capabilities

    3.2 Build level 2 business capability map

    1-3 hours

    It is only at level 2 and further that we can pinpoint the business capabilities – the exact resources, whether applications or data or processes – that we need to focus on to realize improvements in the organization’s performance and customer experience.

    1. Gather industry reference models and any existing business capability maps.
    2. For the selected value stream, further break down its level 1 business capabilities into level 2 capabilities.
    3. You can often represent the business capabilities on a single page, providing a holistic visual for decision makers.
    4. Use meaningful names for business capabilities so that planners, stakeholders, and subject matter experts can easily search the map.
    InputOutput
    • Existing business capability maps
    • Value stream map
    • Info-Tech’s industry-specific business architecture
    • Level 1 business capability map
    • Level 2 Business Capability Map for selected Value Stream
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard
    • Reference Architecture Template – See your Account Representative for details.
    • Other industry standard reference architecture models: BIZBOK, APQC, etc.
    • Archi Models
    • Enterprise/Business Architect
    • Business Analysts
    • Business Unit Leads
    • CIO
    • Departmental Executives & Senior Managers

    Download: See your Account Representative for access to Info-Tech’s Reference Architecture Template

    3.3 Heatmap business capability map

    1-3 hours

    Determine the organization’s key capabilities.

    1. Determine cost advantage creators. If your organization has a cost advantage over competitors, the capabilities that enable it should be identified and prioritized. Highlight these capabilities and prioritize the programs that support them.
    2. Determine competitive advantage creators. If your organization does not have a cost advantage over competitors, determine if it can deliver differentiated end-customer experiences. Once you have identified the competitive advantages, understand which capabilities enable them. These capabilities are critical to the success of the organization and should be highly supported.
    3. Define key future state capabilities. In addition to the current and competitive advantage creators, the organization may have the intention to enhance new capabilities. Discuss and select the capabilities that will help drive the attainment of future goals.
    4. Assess how well information, applications, and processes support capabilities.
    InputOutput
    • Business capability map
    • Cost advantage creators
    • Competitive advantage creators
    • IT and business assessments
    • Key business capabilities
    • Business process review
    • Information assessment
    • Application assessment
    • List of IT implications
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard
    • Reference Architecture Template – See your Account Representative for details.
    • Other industry standard reference architecture models: BIZBOK, APQC, etc.
    • Archi Models
    • Enterprise/Business Architect
    • Business Analysts
    • Business Unit Leads
    • CIO
    • Departmental Executives & Senior Managers

    Download: See your Account Representative for access to Info-Tech’s Reference Architecture Template

    Business capability map: Education

    Illustrative example of a business capability map for education

    Define key capabilities

    Illustrative example of Define key capabilities

    Note: Illustrative Example

    Business process review

    Illustrative example of a business process review

    Note: Illustrative Example

    Information assessment

    Illustrative example of an Information assessment

    Note: Illustrative Example

    Application assessment

    Illustrative example of an Application assessment

    Note: Illustrative Example

    MoSCoW analysis for business capabilities

    Illustrative example of a MoSCoW analysis for business capabilities

    Note: Illustrative Example

    Ranked list of IT implications

    MoSCoW Rank IT Implication Value Stream Impacted Comments/Actions
    M [Implication] [Value Stream]
    M [Implication] [Value Stream]
    M [Implication] [Value Stream]
    S [Implication] [Value Stream]
    S [Implication] [Value Stream]
    S [Implication] [Value Stream]
    C [Implication] [Value Stream]
    C [Implication] [Value Stream]
    C [Implication] [Value Stream]
    W [Implication] [Value Stream]
    W [Implication] [Value Stream]
    W [Implication] [Value Stream]

    3.4 Roadmap business architecture initiatives

    1-3 hours

    Unify the organization’s perspective on how it creates value.

    1. Write a short description of the value stream that includes a statement about the value provided and a clear start and end for the value stream. Validate the accuracy of the descriptions with your key stakeholders.
    2. Consider:
      1. How does the organization deliver those benefits?
      2. How does the customer receive the benefits?
      3. What is the scope of your value stream? What will trigger the stream to start and what will the final value be?
    3. Don’t start with a blank page. Use Info-Tech’s business architecture models for sample value streams.
    InputOutput
    • Existing business capability maps
    • Value stream map
    • Info-Tech’s industry-specific business architecture
    • Level 1 business capability map
    • Heatmapped business capability map
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard
    • Reference Architecture Template – See your Account Representative for details.
    • Other industry standard reference architecture models: BIZBOK, APQC, etc.
    • Archi Models
    • Enterprise/Business Architect
    • Business Analysts
    • Business Unit Leads
    • CIO
    • Departmental Executives & Senior Managers

    Download: See your Account Representative for access to Info-Tech’s Reference Architecture Template

    Example: Business architecture deliverables

    Enterprise Architecture Domain Architectural View Selection
    Business Architecture Business strategy map Required
    Business Architecture Business model canvas Optional
    Business Architecture Value streams Required
    Business Architecture Business capability map Not Used
    Business Architecture Business process flows
    Business Architecture Service portfolio
    Data Architecture Conceptual data model
    Data Architecture Logical data model
    Data Architecture Physical data model
    Data Architecture Data flow diagram
    Data Architecture Data lineage diagram

    Tools and templates to compile and communicate your business architecture work

    The Industry Business Reference Architecture Template for your industry is a place for you to collect all of the activity outputs and outcomes you’ve completed for use in next-steps.

    Download the Industry Business Reference Architecture Template for your industry

    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

    Research Contributors and Experts

    Name Role Organization
    Ibrahim Abdel-Kader Research Analyst, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group
    Ben Abrishami-Shirazi Technical Counselor, Enterprise Architecture Info-Tech Research Group
    Andrew Bailey Consulting, Manager Info-Tech Research Group
    Dana Dahar Research & Advisory Director, CIO / Digital Business Strategy Info-Tech Research Group
    Larry Fretz VP Info-Tech Research Group
    Shibly Hamidur Enterprise Architect Toronto Transit Commission (TTC)
    Rahul Jaiswal Principal Research Director, Industry Info-Tech Research Group
    John Kemp Executive Counselor, Executive Services Info-Tech Research Group
    Gerald Khoury Senior Executive Advisor Info-Tech Research Group
    Igor Ikonnikov Principal Advisory Director, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group
    Daniel Lambert VP Benchmark Consulting
    Milena Litoiu Principal Research Director, Enterprise Architecture Info-Tech Research Group
    Andy Neill AVP Data & Analytics, Chief Enterprise Architect Info-Tech Research Group
    Rajesh Parab Research Director, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group
    Rick Pittman VP, Research Info-Tech Research Group
    Irina Sedenko Research Director, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group

    Bibliography

    Andriole, Steve. “Why No One Understands Enterprise Architecture & Why Technology Abstractions Always Fail.” Forbes, 18 September 2020. Web.

    “APQC Process Classification Framework (PCF) – Retail.” American Productivity & Quality Center, 9 January 2019. Web.

    Brose, Cari. “Who’s on First? Architecture Roles and Responsibilities in SAFe.” Business Architecture Guild, 9 March 2017. Web.

    Burlton, Roger, Jim Ryne, and Daniel St. George. “Value Streams and Business Processes: The Business Architecture Perspective.” Business Architecture Guild, December 2019. Web.

    “Business Architecture: An overview of the business architecture professional.” Capstera, 5 January 2022. Web.

    Business Architecture Guild. “What is Business Architecture?” Business Analyst Mentor, 18 November 2022. Web.

    “Business Architecture Overview.” The Business Architecture Working Group of the Object Management Group (OMG), n.d. Web.

    “Delivering on your strategic vision.” The Business Architecture Guild, n.d. Web.

    Ecker, Grant. “Deploying business architecture.” LinkedIn, 11 November 2021. (Presentation)

    IRIS. “Retail Business Architecture Framework and Examples.” IRIS Business Architect, n.d. Web.

    IRIS. “What Is Business Architecture?” IRIS Business Architect, 8 May 2014. Web.

    IRIS. “Your Enterprise Architecture Practice Maturity 2021 Assessment.” IRIS Business Architect, 17 May 2021. Web.

    Khuen, Whynde. “How Business Architecture Breaks Down and Bridges Silos.” Biz Arch Mastery, January 2020. Web.

    Lambert, Daniel. “Practical Guide to Agile Strategy Execution.” 18 February 2020.

    Lankhorst, Marc, and Bernd Ihnen. “Mapping the BIZBOK Metamodel to the ArchiMate Language.” Bizzdesign, 2 September 2021. Web.

    Ramias, Alan, and Andrew Spanyi, “Demystifying the Relationship Between Processes and Capabilities: A Modest Proposal.” BPTrends, 2 February 2015. Web.

    Newman, Daniel. “NRF 2022: 4 Key Trends From This Year’s Big Show.” Forbes, 20 January 2022. Web.

    Research and Markets. “Define the Business Context Needed to Complete Strategic IT Initiatives: 2018 Blueprint.” Business Wire, 1 February 2018. Web.

    Sabanoglu, Tugba. “Retail market worldwide - Statistics & Facts.” Statista, 21 April 2022. Web.

    Spacey, John. “Capability vs Process.” Simplicable, 18 November 2016. Web.

    “The Definitive Guide to Business Capabilities.” LeanIX, n.d. Web.

    TOGAF 9. Version 9.1. The Open Group, 2011. Web.

    “What is Business Architecture?” STA Group, 2017. PDF.

    Whittie, Ralph. “The Business Architecture, Value Streams and Value Chains.” BA Institute, n.d. Web.

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    IBM i Migration Considerations

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    IBM i remains a vital platform and now many CIOs, CTOs, and IT leaders are faced with the same IBM i challenges regardless of industry focus: how do you evaluate the future viability of this platform, assess the future fit and purpose, develop strategies, and determine the future of this platform for your organization?

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    For organizations that are struggling with the iSeries/IBM i platform, resourcing challenges are typically the culprit. An aging population of RPG programmers and system administrators means organizations need to be more pro-active in maintaining in-house expertise. Migrating off the iSeries/IBM i platform is a difficult option for most organizations due to complexity, switching costs in the short term, and a higher long-term TCO.

    Impact and Result

    The most common tactic is for the organization to better understand their IBM i options and adopt some level of outsourcing for the non-commodity platform retaining the application support/development in-house. To make the evident, obvious; the options here for the non-commodity are not as broad as with commodity server platforms. Options include co-location, onsite outsourcing, managed and public cloud services.

    IBM i Migration Considerations Research & Tools

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

    1. IBM i Migration Considerations – A brief deck that outlines key migration options for the IBM i platforms.

    This project will help you evaluate the future viability of this platform; assess the fit, purpose, and price; develop strategies for overcoming potential challenges; and determine the future of this platform for your organization.

    • IBM i Migration Considerations Storyboard

    2. Infrastructure Outsourcing IBM i Scoring Tool – A tool to collect vendor responses and score each vendor.

    Use this scoring sheet to help you define and evaluate IBM i vendor responses.

    • Infrastructure Outsourcing IBM i Scoring Tool
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    IBM i Migration Considerations

    Don’t be overwhelmed by IBM i migration options.

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    IBM i remains a vital platform and now many CIO, CTO, and IT leaders are faced with the same IBM i challenges regardless of industry focus; how do you evaluate the future viability of this platform, assess the future fit and purpose, develop strategies, and determine the future of this platform for your organization?

    Common Obstacles

    For organizations that are struggling with the iSeries/IBM i platform, resourcing challenges are typically the culprit. An aging population of RPG programmers and system administrators means organizations need to be more proactive in maintaining in-house expertise. Migrating off the iSeries/IBM i platform is a difficult option for most organizations due to complexity, switching costs in the short term, and a higher long-term TCO.

    Info-Tech Approach

    The most common tactic is for the organization to better understand its IBM i options and adopt some level of outsourcing for the non-commodity platform, retaining the application support/development in-house. To make the evident, obvious: the options here for the non-commodity are not as broad as with commodity server platforms. Options include co-location, onsite outsourcing, managed hosting, and public cloud services.

    Info-Tech Insight

    “For over twenty years, IBM was ‘king,’ dominating the large computer market. By the 1980s, the world had woken up to the fact that the IBM mainframe was expensive and difficult, taking a long time and a lot of work to get anything done. Eager for a new solution, tech professionals turned to the brave new concept of distributed systems for a more efficient alternative. On June 21, 1988, IBM announced the launch of the AS/400, their answer to distributed computing.” (Dale Perkins)

    Review

    We help IT leaders make the most of their IBM i environment.

    Problem Statement:

    The IBM i remains a vital platform for many businesses and continues to deliver exceptional reliability and performance and play a key role in the enterprise. With the limited resources at hand, CIOs and the like must continually review and understand their migration path with the same regard as any other distributed system roadmap.

    This research is designed for:

    • IT strategic direction decision makers
    • IT managers responsible for an existing iSeries or IBM i platform
    • Organizations evaluating platforms for mission-critical applications

    This research will help you:

    1. Evaluate the future viability of this platform.
    2. Assess the fit, purpose, and price.
    3. Develop strategies for overcoming potential challenges.
    4. Determine the future of this platform for your organization.

    The “fit for purpose” plot

    Thought Model

    We will investigate the aspect of different IBM i scenarios as they impact business, what that means, and how that can guide the questions that you are asking as you move to an aligned IBM i IT strategy. Our model considers:

    • Importance to Business Outcomes
      • Important to strategic objectives
      • Provides competitive advantage
      • Non-commodity IT service or process
      • Specialized in-house knowledge required
    • Vendor’s Performance Advantage
      • Talent or access to skills
      • Economies of scale or lower cost at scale
      • Access to technology

    Info-Tech Insights

    With multiple control points to be addressed, care must be taken in simplifying your options while addressing all concerns to ease operational load.

    		Map different 'IBM i' scenarios with axes 'Importance to Business Outcomes - Low to High' and 'Vendor’s Performance Advantage - Low to High'. Quadrant labels are '[LI/LA] Potentially Outsource: Service management, Help desk, desk-side support, Asset management', '[LI/HA] Outsource: Application & Infra Support, Web Hosting, SAP Support, Email Services, Infrastructure', '[HI/LA] Insource (For Now): Application development tech support', and '[HI/HA] Potentially Outsource: Onshore or offshore application maintenance'.

    IBM i environments are challenging

    “The IBM i Reality” – Darin Stahl

    Most members relying on business applications/workloads running on non-commodity platforms (zSeries, IBM i, Solaris, AIX, etc.) are first motivated to get out from under the perceived higher costs for the hardware platform.

    An additional challenge for non-commodity platforms is that from an IT Operations Management perspective they become an island with a diminishing number of integrated operations skills and solutions such as backup/restore and monitoring tools.

    The most common tactic is for the organization to adopt some level of outsourcing for the non-commodity platform, retaining the application support and development in-house.

    		Key challenges with current IBM i environments:
    1. DR Requirements
      Understand what the business needs are and where users and resources are located.
    2. Market Lack of Expertise
      Skilled team members are hard to find.
    3. Cost Management
      There is a perceived cost disadvantage to managing on-prem solutions.
    4. Aging Support Teams
      Current support teams are aging with little backfill in skill and experience.

    Understand your options

    Co-Location

    A customer transitions their hardware environment to a provider’s data center. The provider can then manage the hardware and “system.”

    		Onsite Outsourcing

    A provider will support the hardware/system environment at the client’s site.

    		Managed Hosting

    A customer transitions their legacy application environment to an off-prem hosted, multi-tenanted environment.

    		Public Cloud

    A customer can “re-platform” the non-commodity workload into public cloud offerings or in a few offerings “re-host.”

    Co-Location

    Provider manages the data center hardware environment.

    Abstract

    Here a provider manages the system data center environment and hardware; however, the client’s in-house IBM i team manages the IBM i hardware environment and the system applications. The client manages all of the licenses associated with the platform as well as the hardware asset management considerations. This is typically part of a larger services or application transformation. This effectively outsources the data center management while maintaining all IBM i technical operations in-house.

    Advantages

    • On-demand bandwidth
    • Cost effective
    • Secure and compliant environment
    • On-demand remote “hands and feet” services
    • Improved IT DR services
    • Data center compliance

    Considerations

    • Application transformation
    • CapEx cost
    • Fluctuating network bandwidth costs
    • Secure connectivity
    • Disaster recovery and availability of vendor
    • Company IT DR and BC planning
    • Remote system maintenance (HW)

    Info-Tech Insights

    This model is extremely attractive for organizations looking to reduce their data center management footprint. Idea for the SMB.

    Onsite Sourcing

    A provider will support the hardware/system environment at the client’s site.

    Abstract

    Here a provider will support and manage the hardware/system environment at the client’s site. The provider may acquire the customer’s hardware and provide software licenses. This could also include hiring or “rebadging” staff supporting the platform. This type of arrangement is typically part of a larger services or application transformation. While low risk, it is not as cost-effective as other deployment models.

    Advantages

    • Managed environment within company premises
    • Cost effective (OpEx expense)
    • Economies of scale
    • On-demand “as-a-service” model
    • Improved IT DR staffing services
    • 24x7 monitoring and support

    Considerations

    • Outsourced IT talent
    • Terms and contract conditions
    • IT staff attrition
    • Increased liability
    • Modified technical support and engagement
    • Secure connectivity and communication
    • Internal problem and change management

    Info-Tech Insights

    Depending on the application lifecycle and viability, in-house skill and technical depth is a key consideration when developing your IBM i strategy.

    Managed Hosting

    Transition legacy application environment to an off-prem hosted multi-tenanted environment.

    Abstract

    This type of arrangement is typically part of an application migration or transformation. In this model, a client can “re-platform” the application into an off-premises-hosted provider platform. This would yield many of the cloud benefits however in a different scaling capacity as experienced with commodity workloads (e.g. Windows, Linux) and the associated application.

    Advantages

    • Turns CapEx into OpEx
    • Reduces in-house need for diminishing or scarce human resources
    • Allows the enterprise to focus on the value of the IBM i platform through the reduction of system administrative toil
    • Improved IT DR services
    • Data center compliance

    Considerations

    • Application transformation
    • Network bandwidth
    • Contract terms and conditions
    • Modified technical support and engagement
    • Secure connectivity and communication
    • Technical security and compliance
    • Limited providers; reduced options

    Info-Tech Insights

    There is a difference between a “re-host” and “re-platform” migration strategy. Determine which solution aligns to the application requirements.

    Public Cloud

    Leverage “public cloud” alternatives with AWS, Google, or Microsoft AZURE.

    Abstract

    This type of arrangement is typically part of a larger migration or application transformation. While low risk, it is not as cost-effective as other deployment models. In this model, client can “re-platform” the non-commodity workload into public cloud offerings or in a few offerings “re-host.” This would yield many of the cloud benefits however in a different scaling capacity as experienced with commodity workloads (e.g. Windows, Linux).

    Advantages

    • Remote workforce accessibility
    • OpEx expense model
    • Improved IT DR services
    • Reduced infrastructure and system administration
    • Vendor management
    • 24x7 monitoring and support

    Considerations

    • Contract terms and conditions
    • Modified technical support and engagement
    • Secure connectivity and communication
    • Technical security and compliance
    • Limited providers; reduced options
    • Vendor/cloud lock-in
    • Application migration/”re-platform”
    • Application and system performance

    Info-Tech Insights

    This model is extremely attractive for organizations that consume primarily cloud services and have a large remote workforce.

    Understand your vendors

    • To best understand your options, you need to understand what IBM i services are provided by the industry vendors.
    • Within the following slides, you will find a defined activity with a working template that will create “vendor profiles” for each vendor.
    • As a working example, you can review the following partners:
    • Connectria (United States)
    • Rowton IT Solutions Ltd (United Kingdom)
    • Mid-Range (Canada)

    Info-Tech Insights

    Creating vendor profiles will help quickly filter the solution providers that directly meet your IBM i needs.

    Vendor Profile #1

    Rowton IT

    Summary of Vendor

    “Rowton IT thrive on creating robust and simple solutions to today's complex IT problems. We have a highly skilled and motivated workforce that will guarantee the right solution.

    Working with select business partners, we can offer competitive and cost effective packages tailored to suit your budget and/or business requirements.

    Our knowledge and experience cover vast areas of IT including technical design, provision and installation of hardware (Wintel and IBM Midrange), technical engineering services, support services, IT project management, application testing, documentation and training.”

    IBM i Services

    • ✔ IBM Power Hardware Sales
    • ✔ Co-Managed Services
    • ✔ DR/High Available Config
    • ✔ Full Managed Services
    • ✖ Co-Location Services
    • ✔ Public Cloud Services (AWS)

    URL
    rowtonit.com

    Regional Coverage:
    United Kingdom

    		Logo for RowtonIT.com.

    Vendor Profile #2

    Connectria

    Summary of Vendor

    “Every journey starts with a single step and for Connectria, that step happened to be with the world’s largest bank, Deutsche Bank. Followed quickly by our second client, IBM. Since then, we have added over 1,000 clients worldwide. For 25 years, each customer, large or small, has relied on Connectria to deliver on promises made to make it easy to do business with us through flexible terms, scalable solutions, and straightforward pricing. Join us on our journey.”

    IBM i Services

    • ✔ IBM Power Hardware Sales
    • ✔ Co-Managed Services
    • ✔ DR/High Available Config
    • ✔ Full Managed Services
    • ✔ Co-Location Services
    • ✔ Public Cloud Services (AWS)

    URL
    connectria.com

    Regional Coverage:
    United States

    		Logo for Connectria.

    Vendor Profile #3

    Mid-Range

    Summary of Vendor

    “Founded in 1988 and profitable throughout all of those 31 years, we have a solid track record of success. At Mid-Range, we use our expertise to assess your unique needs, in order to proactively develop the most effective IT solution for your requirements. Our full-service approach to technology and our diverse and in-depth industry expertise keep our clients coming back year after year.

    Serving clients across North America in a variety of industries, from small and emerging organizations to large, established enterprises – we’ve seen it all. Whether you need hardware or software solutions, disaster recovery and high availability, managed services or hosting or full ERP services with our JD Edwards offerings – we have the methods and expertise to help.”

    IBM i Services

    • ✔ IBM Power Hardware Sales
    • ✔ Co-Managed Services
    • ✔ DR/High Available Config
    • ✔ Full Managed Services
    • ✔ Co-Location Services
    • ✔ Public Cloud Services (AWS)

    URL
    midrange.ca

    Regional Coverage:
    Canada

    		Logo for Mid-Range.

    Activity

    Understand your vendor options

    Activities:
    1. Create your vendor profiles
    2. Score vendor responses
    3. Develop and manage your vendor agenda

    This activity involves the following participants:

    • IT strategic direction decision makers
    • IT managers responsible for an existing iSeries or IBM i platform

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Vendor Profile Template
    • Completed IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Scoring Tool

    Info-Tech Insights

    This check-point process creates transparency around agreement costs with the business and gives the business an opportunity to re-evaluate its requirements for a potentially leaner agreement.

    1. Create your vendor profiles

    Define what you are looking for:

    • Create a vendor profile for every vendor of interest.
    • Leverage our starting list and template to track and record the advantages of each vendor.

    Mindshift

    First National Technology Solutions

    Key Information Systems

    MainLine

    Direct Systems Support

    T-Systems

    Horizon Computer Solutions Inc.

    Vendor Profile Template

    [Vendor Name]

    Summary of Vendor

    [Vendor Summary]
    *Detail the Vendor Services as a Summary*

    IBM i Services

    • ✔ IBM Power Hardware Sales
    • ✔ Co-Managed Services
    • ✔ DR/High Available Config
    • ✔ Full Managed Services
    • ✔ Co-Location Services
    • ✔ Public Cloud Services (AWS)
    *Itemize the Vendor Services specific to your requirements*

    URL
    https://www.url.com/
    *Insert the Vendor URL*

    Regional Coverage:
    [Country\Region]
    *Insert the Vendor Coverage & Locations*

    		*Insert the Vendor Logo*

    2. Score your vendor responses

    Use the IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Scoring Tool to manage vendor responses.
    Use Info-Tech’s IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Scoring Tool to systematically score your vendor responses.

    The overall quality of the IBM i questions can help you understand what it might be like to work with the vendor.

    Consider the following questions:

    • Is the vendor clear about what it’s able to offer? Is its response transparent?
    • How much effort did the vendor put into answering the questions?
    • Does the vendor seem like someone you would want to work with?

    Once you have the vendor responses, you will select two or three vendors to continue assessing in more depth leading to an eventual final selection.

    		Screenshot of the IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Scoring Tool's Scoring Sheet. There are three tables: 'Scoring Scale', 'Results', and one with 'RFP Questions'. Note on Results table says 'Top Scoring Vendors', and note on questions table says 'List your IBM i questions (requirements)'.

    Info-Tech Insights

    Watch out for misleading scores that result from poorly designed criteria weightings.

    3. Develop your vendor agenda

    Vendor Conference Call

    Develop an agenda for the conference call. Here is a sample agenda:
    • Review the vendor questions.
    • Go over answers to written vendor questions previously submitted.
    • Address new vendor questions.

    Commonly Debated Question:
    Should vendors be asked to remain anonymous on the call or should each vendor mention their organization when they join the call?

    Many organizations worry that if vendors can identify each other, they will price fix. However, price fixing is extremely rare due to its consequences and most vendors likely have a good idea which other vendors are participating in the bid. Another thought is that revealing vendors could either result in a higher level of competition or cause some vendors to give up:

    • A vendor that hears its rival is also bidding may increase the competitiveness of its bid and response.
    • A vendor that feels it doesn’t have a chance may put less effort into the process.
    • A vendor that feels it doesn’t have real competition may submit a less competitive or detailed response than it otherwise would have.

    Vendor Workshop

    A vendor workshop day is an interactive way to provide context to your vendors and to better understand the vendors’ offerings. The virtual or in-person interaction also offers a great way to understand what it’s like to work with each vendor and decide whether you could build a partnership with them in the long run.

    The main focus of the workshop is the vendors’ service solution presentation. Here is a sample agenda for a two-day workshop:

    Day 1
    • Meet and greet
    • Welcome presentation with objectives, acquisition strategy, and company overview
    • Overview of the current IT environment, technologies, and company expectations
    • Question and answer session
    • Site walk
    Day 2
    • Review Day 1 activities
    • Vendor presentations and solution framing
    Use the IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Scoring Tool to manage vendor responses.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Effectively Acquire Infrastructure Services
    Acquiring a service is like buying an experience. Don’t confuse the simplicity of buying hardware with buying an experience.

    Outsource IT Infrastructure to Improve System Availability, Reliability, and Recovery
    There are very few IT infrastructure components you should be housing internally – outsource everything else.

    Build Your Infrastructure Roadmap
    Move beyond alignment: Put yourself in the driver’s seat for true business value.

    Define Your Cloud Vision
    Make the most of cloud for your organization.

    Document Your Cloud Strategy
    Drive consensus by outlining how your organization will use the cloud.

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan
    Close the gap between your DR capabilities and service continuity requirements.

    Create a Better RFP Process
    Improve your RFPs to gain leverage and get better results.

    Research Authors

    Photo of Darin Stahl, Principal Research Advisor, Info-Tech Research Group.Darin Stahl, Principal Research Advisor, Info-Tech Research Group

    Principal Research Advisor within the Infrastructure Practice and 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 (APM), Managed FTP, and non-commodity servers (zSeries, mainframe, IBM i, AIX, Power PC).

    Photo of 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) start-ups.

    Research Contributors

    Photo of Dan Duffy, President & Owner, Mid-Range.Dan Duffy, President & Owner, Mid-Range

    Dan Duffy is the President and Founder of Mid-Range Computer Group Inc., an IBM Platinum Business Partner. Dan and his team have been providing the Canadian and American IBM Power market with IBM infrastructure solutions including private cloud, hosting and disaster recovery, high availability and data center services since 1988. He has served on numerous boards and associations including the Toronto Users Group for Mid-Range Systems (TUG), the IBM Business Partners of the Americas Advisory Council, the Cornell Club of Toronto, and the Notre Dame Club of Toronto. Dan holds a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University.

    Photo of George Goodall, Executive Advisor, Info-Tech Research Group.George Goodall, Executive Advisor, Info-Tech Research Group

    George Goodall is an Executive Advisor in the Research Executive Services practice at Info-Tech Research Group. George has over 20 years of experience in IT consulting, enterprise software sales, project management, and workshop delivery. His primary focus is the unique challenges and opportunities in organizations with small and constrained IT operations. In his long tenure at Info-Tech, George has covered diverse topics including voice communications, storage, and strategy and governance.

    Bibliography

    “Companies using IBM i (formerly known as i5/OS).” Enlyft, 21 July 2021. Web.

    Connor, Clare. “IBM i and Meeting the Challenges of Modernization.” Ensono, 22 Mar. 2022. Web.

    Huntington, Tom. “60+ IBM i User Groups and Communities to Join?” HelpSystems, 16 Dec. 2021. Web.

    Perkins, Dale. “The Road to Power Cloud: June 21st 1988 to now. The Journey Continues.” Mid-Range, 1 Nov. 2021. Web.

    Prickett Morgan, Timothy. “How IBM STACKS UP POWER8 AGAINST XEON SERVERS.” The Next Platform, 13 Oct. 2015. Web.

    “Why is AS/400 still used? Four reasons to stick with a classic.” NTT, 21 July 2016. Web.

    Appendix

    Public Cloud Provider Notes

    Appendix –
    Cloud
    Providers


    “IBM Power (IBM i and AIX) workloads are also available in the so-called ‘cloud.’” (Darin Stahl)

    AWS

    Appendix –
    Cloud
    Providers



    “IBM Power (IBM i and AIX) workloads are also available in the so-called ‘cloud.’” (Darin Stahl)

    Google

    • Google Cloud console supports IBM Power Systems.
    • This offering provides cloud instances running on IBM Power Systems servers with PowerVM.
    • The service uses a per-day prorated monthly subscription model for cloud instance plans with different capacities of compute, memory, storage, and network. Standard plans are listed below and custom plans are possible.
    • There is no IBM i offering yet that we are aware of.
    • For AIX on Power, this would appear to be a better option than AWS (Converge Enterprise Cloud with IBM Power for Google Cloud).

    Appendix –
    Cloud
    Providers



    “IBM Power (IBM i and AIX) workloads are also available in the so-called ‘cloud.’” (Darin Stahl)

    Azure

    • Azure has partners using the Azure Dedicated Host offerings to deliver “native support for IBM POWER Systems to Azure data centres” (PowerWire).
    • Microsoft has installed Power servers in an couple Azure data centers and Skytap manages the IBM i, AIX, and Linux environments for clients.
    • As far as I am aware there is no ability to install IBM i or AIX within an Azure Dedicated Host via the retail interfaces – these must be worked through a partner like Skytap.
    • The cloud route for IBM i or AIX might be the easiest working with Skytap and Azure. This would appear to be a better option than AWS in my opinion.

    Appendix –
    Cloud
    Providers



    “IBM Power (IBM i and AIX) workloads are also available in the so-called ‘cloud.’” (Darin Stahl)

    IBM

    Extend Agile Practices Beyond IT

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    • Your organization has started to realize benefits from adopting Agile principles and practices. However, these advances are contained within your IT organization.
    • You are seeking to extend Agile development beyond IT into other areas of the organization. You are looking for a coordinated approach aligned to business priorities.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Not all lessons from scaling Agile to IT are transferable. IT Agile scaling processes are tailored to IT’s scope, team, and tools, which may not account for diverse attributes within your organization.
    • Control may be necessary for coordination. With increased time-to-value, enforcing consistent cadences, reporting, and communication is a must if teams are not disciplined or lack good governance.
    • Extend Agile in departments tolerant to change. Incrementally roll out Agile in departments where its principles are accepted (e.g. a culture that embraces failures as lessons).

    Impact and Result

    • Complete an assessment of your prior efforts to scale Agile across IT to gauge successful, consistent adoption. Identify the business objectives and the group drivers that are motivating the extension of Agile to the business.
    • Understand the challenges that you may face when extending Agile to business partners. Investigate the root causes of existing issues that can derail your efforts.
    • Ideate solutions to your scaling challenges and envision a target state for your growing Agile environment. Your target state should realize new opportunities to drive more business value and eliminate current activities driving down productivity.
    • Coordinate the implementation and execution of your scaling Agile initiatives with an implementation action plan. This collaborative document will lay out the process, roles, goals, and objectives needed to successfully manage your Agile environment.

    Extend Agile Practices Beyond IT Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should extend Agile practices to improve product delivery, 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. Assess your readiness to scale agile vertically

    Assess your readiness to scale Agile vertically by identifying and mitigating potential Agile maturity gaps remaining after scaling Agile across your IT organization.

    • Extend Agile Practices Beyond IT – Phase 1: Assess Your Readiness to Scale Agile Vertically
    • Agile Maturity Assessment Tool

    2. Establish an enterprise scaled agile framework

    Complete an overview of various scaled Agile models to help you develop your own customized delivery framework.

    • Extend Agile Practices Beyond IT – Phase 2: Establish an Enterprise Scaled Agile Framework
    • Framework Selection Tool

    3. Create your implementation action plan

    Determine the effort and steps required to implement your extended delivery framework.

    • Extend Agile Practices Beyond IT – Phase 3: Create Your Implementation Action Plan
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Extend Agile Practices Beyond 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 Assess Current State of Agile Maturity

    The Purpose

    Assess your readiness to scale Agile vertically.

    Identify and mitigate potential Agile maturity gaps remaining after scaling Agile across your IT organization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    IT Agile maturity gaps identified and mitigated to ensure successful extension of Agile to the business

    Activities

    1.1 Characterize your Agile implementation using the CLAIM model.

    1.2 Assess the maturity of your Agile teams and organization.

    Outputs

    Maturity gaps identified with mitigation requirements

    2 Establish an Enterprise Scaled Agile Framework

    The Purpose

    Complete a review of scaled Agile models to help you develop your own customized delivery framework.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A customized Agile delivery framework

    Activities

    2.1 Explore various scaled frameworks.

    2.2 Select an appropriate scaled framework for your enterprise.

    2.3 Define the future state of your team and the communication structure of your functional business group.

    Outputs

    Blended framework delivery model

    Identification of team and communication structure impacts resulting from the new framework

    3 Create Your Implementation Action Plan

    The Purpose

    Create your implementation action plan for the new Agile delivery framework.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A clearly defined action plan

    Activities

    3.1 Define your value drivers.

    3.2 Brainstorm the initiatives that must be completed to achieve your target state.

    3.3 Estimate the effort of your Agile initiatives.

    3.4 Define your Agile implementation action plan.

    Outputs

    List of target state initiatives

    Estimation of effort to achieve target state

    An implementation action plan

    Data security consultancy

    Data security consultancy

    Based on experience
    Implementable advice
    human-based and people-oriented

    Data security consultancy makes up one of Tymans Group’s areas of expertise as a corporate consultancy firm. We are happy to offer our insights and solutions regarding data security and risk to businesses, both through online and offline channels. Read on and discover how our consultancy company can help you set up practical data security management solutions within your firm.

    How our data security consultancy services can help your company

    Data security management should be an important aspect of your business. As a data security consultancy firm, Tymans Group is happy to assist your small or medium-sized enterprise with setting up clear protocols to keep your data safe. As such, we can advise on various aspects comprising data security management. This ranges from choosing a fit-for-purpose data architecture to introducing IT incident management guidelines. Moreover, we can perform an external IT audit to discover which aspects of your company’s data security are vulnerable and which could be improved upon.

    Security and risk management

    Our security and risk services

    Security strategy

    Security Strategy

    Embed security thinking through aligning your security strategy to business goals and values

    Read more

    Disaster Recovery Planning

    Disaster Recovery Planning

    Create a disaster recovey plan that is right for your company

    Read more

    Risk Management

    Risk Management

    Build your right-sized IT Risk Management Program

    Read more

    Check out all our services

    Discover our practical data security management solutions

    Data security is just one aspect with which our consultancy firm can assist your company. Tymans Group offers its extensive expertise in various corporate management domains, such as quality management and risk management. Our solutions all stem from our vast expertise and have proven their effectiveness. Moreover, when you choose to employ our consultancy firm for your data security management, you benefit from a holistic, people-oriented approach.

    Set up an appointment with our experts

    Do you wish to learn more about our data security management solutions and services for your company? We are happy to analyze any issues you may be facing and offer you a practical solution if you contact us for an appointment. You can book a one-hour online talk or elect for an on-site appointment with our experts. Contact us to set up your appointment now.

    Register to read more …

    Understand Common IT Contract Provisions to Negotiate More Effectively

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    • Parent Category Name: Vendor Management
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    • Contract reviews are tedious, and reviewers may lack the skills and experience to effectively complete the process.
    • Vendors have a repository of contract terms and conditions that are road-tested and often biased in their favor.
    • Vendors change their contracts frequently through hyperlinked documents without notifying customers, and the onus is on you to stay compliant.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • 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.

    Impact and Result

    • Align contract language to meet IT and business needs.
    • Communicate more effectively with Legal and the vendors.
    • Identify and reduce contractual and performance risk.
    • Understand the relationship between contract provisions.
    • Negotiate more effectively.

    Understand Common IT Contract Provisions to Negotiate More Effectively Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should employ a systematic process for reviewing contracts, 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 contract terms and conditions

    Review and assess your IT contracts for vendor-biased terms and conditions, and gain tips for getting vendors to take on their fair share of risk and become more accountable.

    • Contract Review Tool
    • Contract Playbook
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Understand Common IT Contract Provisions to Negotiate More Effectively

    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 Assess Contract Terms and Conditions

    The Purpose

    Understand IT contract clauses, improve risk identification, and be more effective at negotiating contract terms.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Increased awareness of how contract provisions relate to each other.

    Demystification of legalese and legal concepts.

    Increased ability to seek assistance from internal parties (e.g. Legal, Risk, and Procurement).

    Activities

    1.1 Review the Contract Review Tool.

    1.2 Review the Contract Playbook template.

    1.3 Review 35 contract provisions and reinforce key learnings with exercises (spread across three days)

    Outputs

    Partial completion of the template

    Exercise results and debrief

    Integrate Threat Intelligence Into Your Security Operations

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    • Organizations have limited visibility into their threat landscape, and as such are vulnerable to the latest attacks, hindering business practices, workflow, revenue generation, and damaging their public image.
    • Organizations are developing ad hoc intelligence capabilities that result in operational inefficiencies, the misalignment of resources, and the misuse of their security technology investments.
    • It is difficult to communicate the value of a threat intelligence solution when trying to secure organizational buy-in and the appropriate resourcing.
    • There is a vast array of “intelligence” in varying formats, often resulting in information overload.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    1. Information alone is not actionable. A successful threat intelligence program contextualizes threat data, aligns intelligence with business objectives, and then builds processes to satisfy those objectives.
    2. Your security controls are diminishing in value (if they haven’t already). As technology in the industry evolves, threat actors will inevitably adopt new tools, tactics, and procedures; a threat intelligence program can provide relevant situational awareness to stay on top of the rapidly-evolving threat landscape.
    3. Your organization might not be the final target, but it could be a primary path for attackers. If you exist as a third-party partner to another organization, your responsibility in your technology ecosystem extends beyond your own product/service offerings. Threat intelligence provides visibility into the latest threats, which can help you avoid becoming a backdoor in the next big data breach.

    Impact and Result

    • Assess the needs and intelligence requirements of key stakeholders.
    • Garner organizational buy-in from senior management.
    • Identify organizational intelligence gaps and structure your efforts accordingly.
    • Understand the different collection solutions to identify which best supports your needs.
    • Optimize the analysis process by leveraging automation and industry best practices.
    • Establish a comprehensive threat knowledge portal.
    • Define critical threat escalation protocol.
    • Produce and share actionable intelligence with your constituency.
    • Create a deployment strategy to roll out the threat intelligence program.
    • Integrate threat intelligence within your security operations.

    Integrate Threat Intelligence Into Your Security Operations Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should implement a threat intelligence 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. Plan for a threat intelligence program

    Assess current capabilities and define an ideal target state.

    • Integrate Threat Intelligence Into Your Security Operations – Phase 1: Plan for a Threat Intelligence Program
    • Security Pressure Posture Analysis Tool
    • Threat Intelligence Maturity Assessment Tool
    • Threat Intelligence Project Charter Template
    • Threat Intelligence RACI Tool
    • Threat Intelligence Management Plan Template
    • Threat Intelligence Policy Template

    2. Design an intelligence collection strategy

    Understand the different collection solutions to identify which best supports needs.

    • Integrate Threat Intelligence Into Your Security Operations – Phase 2: Design an Intelligence Collection Strategy
    • Threat Intelligence Prioritization Tool
    • Threat Intelligence RFP MSSP Template

    3. Optimize the intelligence analysis process

    Begin analyzing and acting on gathered intelligence.

    • Integrate Threat Intelligence Into Your Security Operations – Phase 3: Optimize the Intelligence Analysis Process
    • Threat Intelligence Malware Runbook Template

    4. Design a collaboration and feedback program

    Stand up an intelligence dissemination program.

    • Integrate Threat Intelligence Into Your Security Operations – Phase 4: Design a Collaboration and Feedback Program
    • Threat Intelligence Alert Template
    • Threat Intelligence Alert and Briefing Cadence Schedule Template
    [infographic]

    Manage Third-Party Service Security Outsourcing

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    • Parent Category Name: Security Processes & Operations
    • Parent Category Link: /security-processes-and-operations
    • A lack of high-skill labor increases the cost of internal security, making outsourcing more appealing.
    • It is unclear what processes could or should be outsourced versus what functions should remain in-house.
    • It is not feasible to have 24/7/365 monitoring in-house for most firms.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • You are outsourcing support, not accountability, unless you preface that with your customer.
    • For most of you, you won’t have a choice – you’ll have to outsource high-end security skills to meet future needs.
    • Third-party service providers may be able to more effectively remediate threats because of their large, disparate customer base and wider scope.

    Impact and Result

    • Documented obligations and processes. This will allow you to determine which solution (outsourcing vs. insourcing) allows for the best use of resources, and maintains your brand reputation.
    • A list of variables and features to rank potential third-party providers vs. internal delivery to find which solution provides the best fit for your organization.
    • Current limitations of your environment and the limitations of third parties identified for the environments you are looking to mature.
    • Security responsibilities determined that can be outsourced, and which should be outsourced in order to gain resource allocation and effectiveness, and to improve your overall security posture.
    • The limitations or restrictions for third-party usage understood.

    Manage Third-Party Service Security Outsourcing Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to understand how to avoid common mistakes when it comes to outsourcing security, 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 to outsource

    Identify different responsibilities/functions in your organization and determine which ones can be outsourced. Complete a cost analysis.

    • Manage Third-Party Service Security Outsourcing – Phase 1: What to Outsource
    • Insourcing vs. Outsourcing Costing Tool

    2. How to outsource

    Identify a list of features for your third-party provider and analyze.

    • Manage Third-Party Service Security Outsourcing – Phase 2: How to Outsource
    • MSSP Selection Tool
    • Checklist for Third-Party Providers

    3. Manage your third-party provider

    Understand how to align third-party providers to your organization.

    • Manage Third-Party Service Security Outsourcing – Phase 3: Manage Your Third-Party Provider
    • Security Operations Policy for Third-Party Outsourcing
    • Third-Party Security Policy Charter Template
    [infographic]

    Resilience, It's about your business

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    January 17th, 2025 is when your ability to serve clients without interruption is legislated. At least when you are in the financial services sector, or when you supply such firms.  If you are not active in the financial arena, don’t click away. Many of these requirements can just give you an edge over your competition.

    Many firms underestimated the impact of the legislation, but let’s be honest, so did the European Union. The last pieces of the puzzle are still not delivered only two days before the law comes into effect.

    What is DORA all about again? It is the Digital Operational Resilience Act. In essence, it is about your ability to withstand adverse events that may impact your clients or the financial system.

    Aside from some nasty details, this really is just common sense. You need to be organized so that the right people know what is expected of them, from the accountable top to the staff executing the day to day operations. You need to know what to do when things go wrong. You need to know your suppliers, especially those who supply services to your critical business services. You need to test your defenses and your IT. You may want to share intelligence around cyber-attacks.

    There, all of the 45 business-relevant DORA articles and technical standards in a single paragraph. The remaining articles deal with the competent authorities and make for good reading as they provide some insights into the workings of the regulatory body. The same goes for the preamble of the law. No less than 104 “musings” that elaborate on the operating environment and intent of the law.

    If you’re firm is still in the thick of things trying to become compliant, you are not alone. I have seen at least one regulator indicating that they will be understanding of that situation, but you must have a clear roadmap to compliance in the near future. Your regulator may or may not be in line with that position. In the eastern-most countries of the EU, signals are that the regulator will take a much tougher stance.

    (This kind of negates one of the musings of the law; the need for a single view on what financial services firms must adhere to to be considered compliant and resilient. But I think this is an unavoidable byproduct of having culturally diverse member states.)

    I dare to say that firms typically have the governance in place as well as the IM processes and testing requirements. The biggest open items seem to be in the actual IT hard operational resilience, monitoring and BCM.

    Take a look at your own firm and make an honest assessment in those areas. They key resilience (DORA-related or not) is knowing how your service works and is performing from a client perspective.

    You need to know how a client achieves all their interaction goals with your company. Typically this is mapped in the client journey. Unfortunately, this usually only maps the business flow, not the technical flow. And usually you look at it from the client UX perspective. This is obviously very important, but it does not help you to understand the elements that ensure you that your clients can always complete that journey.

    The other day, I had a customer journey with an online ski-shop. I had bought two ski helmets in size M, the same size my adult son and I had. When the helmets arrived it turned out they were too small. So, ok, no worries, I start the return process online. Once we complete the initial steps, after a few days I notice that the price for only one helmet is shown on the site. This, despite the indicators that both helmets are approved to be returned. Later both helmets are shown as effectively returned. Refund still shows one helmet’s price. What gives? I give it some more time, but after ten days, I decide to enquire. The site still shows refund for one helmet.

    Then I receive an email that both helmets will be refunded as they accepted the state of the helmets (unused) and amount of the refund is now correct. Site still shows the wrong amount.

    This is obviously a small inconvenience, but it does show that the IT team does not have a full view of the entire customer journey and systems interactions. You need to fix this.

    Suppose this is not about two ski helmets, but about ski or home insurance. Or about the sale of a car or a B2B transaction involving tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or euro, or any other currency? Does your system show the real-time correct status of the transaction? If not, I would, as a consumer, decide to change provider. Why? Because the trust is gone.

    Resilience is about withstanding events that threaten your service to your clients. Events are nit just earthquakes or floods. Events are also wrong or missing information. To protect against that, you need to know what the (value) chain is that leads to you providing that service. Additionally, you need to know if that service chain has any impediments at any moment in time. Aka, you need to know that any service request can be fulfilled at any given time. And to have the right processes and resources in place to fix whatever is not working at that time.

    And that is in my opinion the biggest task still outstanding with many companies to ensure true resilience and customer service.

    Align Projects With the IT Change Lifecycle

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    • Parent Category Name: Operations Management
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    • Coordinate IT change and project management to successfully push changes to production.
    • Manage representation of project management within the scope of the change lifecycle to gather requirements, properly approve and implement changes, and resolve incidents that arise from failed implementations.
    • Communicate effectively between change management, project management, and the business.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Improvement can be incremental. You do not have to adopt every recommended improvement right away. Ensure every process change you make will create value and slowly add improvements to ease buy-in.

    Impact and Result

    • Establish pre-set touchpoints between IT change management and project management at strategic points in the change and project lifecycles.
    • Include appropriate project representation at the change advisory board (CAB).
    • Leverage standard change resources such as the change calendar and request for change form (RFC).

    Align Projects With the IT Change Lifecycle Research & Tools

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

    1. Align Projects With the IT Change Lifecycle Deck – A guide to walk through integrating project touchpoints in the IT change management lifecycle.

    Use this storyboard as a guide to align projects with your IT change management lifecycle.

    • Align Projects With the IT Change Lifecycle Storyboard

    2. The Change Management SOP – This template will ensure that organizations have a comprehensive document in place that can act as a point of reference for the program.

    Use this SOP as a template to document and maintain your change management practice.

    • Change Management Standard Operating Procedure
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Align Projects With the IT Change Lifecycle

    Increase the success of your changes by integrating project touchpoints in the change lifecycle.

    Analyst Perspective

    Focus on frequent and transparent communications between the project team and change management.

    Benedict Chang

    Misalignment between IT change management and project management leads to headaches for both practices. Project managers should aim to be represented in the change advisory board (CAB) to ensure their projects are prioritized and scheduled appropriately. Advanced notice on project progress allows for fewer last-minute accommodations at implementation. Widespread access of the change calendar can also lead project management to effectively schedule projects to give change management advanced notice.

    Moreover, alignment between the two practices at intake allows for requests to be properly sorted, whether they enter change management directly or are governed as a project.

    Lastly, standardizing implementation and post-implementation across everyone involved ensures more successful changes and socialized/documented lessons learned for when implementations do not go well.

    Benedict Chang
    Senior Research Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Common Obstacles

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    To align projects with the change lifecycle, IT leaders must:

    • Coordinate IT change and project management to successfully push changes to production.
    • Manage representation of project management within the scope of the change lifecycle to gather requirements, properly approve and implement changes, and resolve incidents that arise from failed implementations.
    • Communicate effectively between change management, project management, and the business.

    Loose definitions may work for clear-cut examples of changes and projects at intake, but grey-area requests end up falling through the cracks.

    Changes to project scope, when not communicated, often leads to scheduling conflicts at go-live.

    Too few checkpoints between change and project management can lead to conflicts. Too many checkpoints can lead to delays.

    Set up touchpoints between IT change management and project management at strategic points in the change and project lifecycles.

    Include appropriate project representation at the change advisory board (CAB).

    Leverage standard change resources such as the change calendar and request for change form (RFC).

    Info-Tech Insight

    Improvement can be incremental. You do not have to adopt every recommended improvement right away. Ensure every process change you make will create value, and slowly add improvements to ease buy-in.

    Info-Tech’s approach

    Use the change lifecycle to identify touchpoints.

    The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's approach.

    The Info-Tech difference:

    1. Start with your change lifecycle to define how change control can align with project management.
    2. Make improvements to project-change alignment to benefit the relationship between the two practices and the practices individually.
    3. Scope the alignment to your organization. Take on the improvements to the left one by one instead of overhauling your current process.

    Use this research to improve your current process

    This deck is intended to align established processes. If you are just starting to build IT change processes, see the related research below.

    Align Projects With the IT Change Lifecycle

    02 Optimize IT Project Intake, Approval, and Prioritization

    		 01 Optimize IT Change Management

    Increase the success of your changes by integrating project touchpoints in your change lifecycle.

    (You are here)

    Decide which IT projects to approve and when to start them.

    Right-size IT change management to protect the live environment.

    Successful change management will provide benefits to both the business and IT

    Respond to business requests faster while reducing the number of change-related disruptions.

    IT Benefits

    Business Benefits
    • Fewer incidents and outages at project go-live
    • Upfront identification of project and change requirements
    • Higher rate of change and project success
    • Less rework
    • Fewer service desk calls related to failed go-lives
    • Fewer service disruptions
    • Faster response to requests for new and enhanced functionalities
    • Higher rate of benefits realization when changes are implemented
    • Lower cost per change
    • Fewer “surprise” changes disrupting productivity

    IT satisfaction with change management will drive business satisfaction with IT. Once the process is working efficiently, staff will be more motivated to adhere to the process, reducing the number of unauthorized changes. As fewer changes bypass proper evaluation and testing, service disruptions will decrease and business satisfaction will increase.

    Change management improves core benefits to the business: the four Cs

    Most organizations have at least some form of change control in place, but formalizing change management leads to the four Cs of business benefits:

    Control

    Collaboration

    Consistency

    Confidence

    Change management brings daily control over the IT environment, allowing you to review every relatively new change, eliminate changes that would have likely failed, and review all changes to improve the IT environment.

    Change management planning brings increased communication and collaboration across groups by coordinating changes with business activities. The CAB brings a more formalized and centralized communication method for IT.

    Request-for-change templates and a structured process result in implementation, test, and backout plans being more consistent. Implementing processes for pre-approved changes also ensures these frequent changes are executed consistently and efficiently.

    Change management processes will give your organization more confidence through more accurate planning, improved execution of changes, less failure, and more control over the IT environment. This also leads to greater protection against audits.

    1. Alignment at intake

    Define what is a change and what is a project.

    Both changes and projects will end up in change control in the end. Here, we define the intake.

    Changes and projects will both go to change control when ready to go live. However, defining the governance needed at intake is critical.

    A change should be governed by change control from beginning to end. It would typically be less than a week’s worth of work for a SME to build and come in at a nominal cost (e.g. <$20k over operating costs).

    Projects on the other hand, will be governed by project management in terms of scope, scheduling, resourcing, etc. Projects typically take over a week and/or cost more. However, the project, when ready to go live, should still be scheduled through change control to avoid any conflicts at implementation. At triage and intake, a project can be further scoped based on projected scale.

    This initial touchpoint between change control and project management is crucial to ensure tasks and request are executed with the proper governance. To distinguish between changes and projects at intake, list examples of each and determine what resourcing separates changes from projects.

    Need help scoping projects? Download the Project Intake Classification Matrix

    Change

    Project
    • Smaller scale task that typically takes a short time to build and test
    • Generates a single change request
    • Governed by IT Change Management for the entire lifecycle
    • Larger in scope
    • May generate multiple change requests
    • Governed by PMO
    • Longer to build and test

    Info-Tech Insight

    While effort and cost are good indicators of changes and projects, consider evaluating risk and complexity too.

    1 Define what constitutes a change

    1. As a group, brainstorm examples of changes and projects. If you wish, you may choose to also separate out additional request types such as service requests (user), operational tasks (backend), and releases.
    2. Have each participant write the examples on sticky notes and populate the following chart on the whiteboard/flip chart.
    3. Use the examples to draw lines and determine what defines each category.
    • What makes a change distinct from a project?
    • What makes a change distinct from a service request?
    • What makes a change distinct from an operational task?
    • When do the category workflows cross over with other categories? (For example, when does a project interact with change management?
  • Record the definitions of requests and results in section 2.3 of the Change Management Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).

    • Change

    Project

    Service Request (Optional)

    Operational Task (Optional)

    Release (Optional)

    Changing Configuration

    New ERP

    Add new user

    Delete temp files

    Software release

    Download the Change Management Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).

    Input Output
    • List of examples of each category of the chart
    • Definitions for each category to be used at change intake
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts (or shared screen if working remotely)
    • Service catalog (if applicable)
    • Sticky notes
    • Markers/pens
    • Change Management SOP
    • Change Manager
    • Project Managers
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board

    2. Alignment at build and test

    Keep communications open by pre-defining and communicating project milestones.

    CAB touchpoints

    Consistently communicate the plan and timeline for hitting these milestones so CAB can prioritize and plan changes around it. This will give change control advanced notice of altered timelines.

    RFCs

    Projects may have multiple associated RFCs. Keeping CAB appraised of the project RFC or RFCs gives them the ability to further plan changes.

    Change Calendar

    Query and fill the change calendar with project timelines and milestones to compliment the CAB touchpoints.

    Leverage the RFC to record and communicate project details

    The request for change (RFC) form does not have to be a burden to fill out. If designed with value in mind, it can be leveraged to set standards on all changes (from projects and otherwise).

    When looking at the RFC during the Build and Test phase of a project, prioritize the following fields to ensure the implementation will be successful from a technical and user-adoption point of view.

    Filling these fields of the RFC and communicating them to the CAB at go-live approval gives the approvers confidence that the project will be implemented successfully and measures are known for when that implementation is not successful.

    Download the Request for Change Form Template

    Communication Plan

    The project may be successful from a technical point of view, but if users do not know about go-live or how to interact with the project, it will ultimately fail.

    Training Plan

    If necessary, think of how to train different stakeholders on the project go-live. This includes training for end users interacting with the project and technicians supporting the project.

    Implementation Plan

    Write the implementation plan at a high enough level that gives the CAB confidence that the implementation team knows the steps well.

    Rollback Plan

    Having a well-formulated rollback plan gives the CAB the confidence that the impact of the project is well known and the impact to the business is limited even if the implementation does not go well.

    Provide clear definitions of what goes on the change calendar and who’s responsible

    Inputs

    • Freeze periods for individual business departments/applications (e.g. finance month-end periods, HR payroll cycle, etc. – all to be investigated)
    • Maintenance windows and planned outage periods
    • Project schedules, and upcoming major/medium changes
    • Holidays
    • Business hours (some departments work 9-5, others work different hours or in different time zones, and user acceptance testing may require business users to be available)

    Guidelines

    • Business-defined freeze periods are the top priority.
    • No major or medium normal changes should occur during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
    • Vendor SLA support hours are the preferred time for implementing changes.
    • The vacation calendar for IT will be considered for major changes.
    • Change priority: High > Medium > Low.
    • Minor changes and preapproved changes have the same priority and will be decided on a case-by-case basis.

    Roles

    • The Change Manager will be responsible for creating and maintaining a change calendar.
    • Only the Change Manager can physically alter the calendar by adding a new change after the CAB has agreed upon a deployment date.
    • All other CAB members, IT support staff, and other impacted stakeholders should have access to the calendar on a read-only basis to prevent people from making unauthorized changes to deployment dates.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Make the calendar visible to as many parties as necessary. However, limit the number of personnel who can make active changes to the calendar to limit calendar conflicts.

    3. Alignment at approval

    How can project management effectively contribute to CAB?

    As optional CAB members

    Project SMEs may attend when projects are ready to go live and when invited by the change manager. Optional members provide details on change cross-dependencies, high-level testing, rollback, communication plans, etc. to inform prioritization and scheduling decisions.

    As project management representatives

    Project management should also attend CAB meetings to report in on changes to ongoing projects, implementation timelines, and project milestones. Projects are typically high-priority changes when going live due to their impact. Advanced notice of timeline and milestone changes allow the rest of the CAB to properly manage other changes going into production.

    As core CAB members

    The core responsibilities of CAB must still be fulfilled:

    1. Protect the live environment from poorly assessed, tested, and implemented changes.

    2. Prioritize changes in a way that fairly reflects change impact, urgency, and likelihood.

    3. Schedule deployments in a way the minimizes conflict and disruption.

    If you need to define the authority and responsibilities of the CAB, see Activity 2.1.3 of the Optimize IT Change Management blueprint.

    4. Alignment at implementation

    At this stage, the project or project phase is treated as any other change.

    Verification

    Once the change has been implemented, verify that all requirements are fulfilled.

    Review

    Ensure all affected systems and applications are operating as predicted.

    Update change ticket and change log

    Update RFC status and CMDB as well (if necessary).

    Transition

    Once the change implementation is complete, it’s imperative that the team involved inform and train the operational and support groups.

    If you need to define transitioning changes to production, download Transition Projects to the Service Desk

    5. Alignment at post-implementation

    Tackle the most neglected portion of change management to avoid making the same mistake twice.

    1. Define RFC statuses that need a PIR

      2. Conduct PIRs for failed changes. Successful changes can simply be noted and transitioned to operations.

    2. Conduct a PIR for every failed change

      3. It’s best to perform a PIR once a change-related incident is resolved.

    3. Avoid making the same mistake twice

      4. Include a root-cause analysis, mitigation actions/timeline, and lessons learned in the documentation.

    4. Report to CAB

      5. Socialize the findings of the PIR at the subsequent CAB meeting.

    5. Circle back on previous PIRs

      6. If a similar change is conducted, append the related PIR to avoid the same mistakes.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Include your PIR documentation right in the RFC for easy reference.

    Download the RFC template for more details on post-implementation reviews

    2 Implement your alignments stepwise

    1. As a group, decide on which implementations you need to make to align change management and project management.
    2. For each improvement, list a timeline for implementation.
    3. Update section 3.5 in the Change Management Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). to outline the responsibilities of project management within IT Change Management.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Change Management SOP

    Download the Change Management Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).

    Input Output
    • This deck
    • SOP update
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts (or shared screen if working remotely)
    • Service catalog (if applicable)
    • Sticky notes
    • Markers/pens
    • Change Management SOP
    • Change Manager
    • Project Managers
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Optimize IT Change Management

    Right-size IT change management to protect the live environment.

    Optimize IT Project Intake, Approval, and Prioritization

    Decide which IT projects to approve and when to start them.

    Maintain an Organized Portfolio

    Align portfolio management practices with COBIT (APO05: Manage Portfolio).

    Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization

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    • Parent Category Name: Selection & Implementation
    • Parent Category Link: /selection-and-implementation
    • Organizations are under continual pressure to deliver faster, with shorter time-to-market, while introducing new products and services at the same time.
    • You and your team have concerns that your existing portfolio of applications is not up to the task.
    • While you understand the need for more investments to modernize your portfolio, your leadership does not appreciate what is required.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Legacy modernization is a process, not a single event.
    • Your modernization approach requires you to understand your landscape and decide on a path that minimizes business continuity risks, keeps the investments under control, and is prepared for surprises but always has your final state in mind.

    Impact and Result

    • Evaluate the current state, develop a legacy application strategy, and execute in an agile manner.
    • When coupled with a business case and communications strategy, this approach gives the organization a clear decision-making framework that will maximize business outcomes and deliver value where needed.

    Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization Research & Tools

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

    1. Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization Storyboard – Understand legacy application modernization in the context of your organization, assess your landscape of applications, and define prioritization and disposition.

    This blueprint provides the steps necessary to build your own enterprise application implementation playbook that can be deployed and leveraged by your implementation teams.

    • Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization Storyboard

    2. Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization Presentation Template – The key output from leveraging this research is a presentation to pitch the modernization process.

    Build a proposal deck to make the case for legacy application modernization for your stakeholders. This will contain a definition of what a legacy application is in the context of your organization, a list of candidate applications to modernize, and a disposition strategy for each selected application.

    • Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization Presentation Template
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization

    Revamp your business potential to improve agility, security, and user experience while reducing costs.

    Analyst Perspective

    An old application may have served us reliably, but it can prevent us from pursuing future business needs.

    Legacy systems remain well-embedded in the fabric of many organizations' application portfolios. They were often custom-built to meet the needs of the business. Typically, these are core tools that the business leverages to accomplish its goals.

    A legacy application becomes something we need to address when it no longer supports our business goals, is no longer supportable, bears an unsustainable ownership cost, or poses a threat to the organization's cybersecurity or compliance.

    When approaching your legacy application strategy, you must navigate a complex web of business, stakeholder, software, hardware, resourcing, and financial decisions. To complicate matters, the full scope of required effort is not immediately clear. Years of development are embedded in these legacy applications, which must be uncovered and dealt with appropriately.

    IT leaders require a proactive approach for evaluating the current state, developing a legacy application strategy, and executing in an agile manner. When coupled with a business case and communications strategy, the organization will have a clear decision-making framework that will maximize business outcomes and deliver value where needed.

    Ricardo de Oliveira, Research Director, Enterprise Applications

    Ricardo de Oliveira
    Research Director, Enterprise Applications
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge Common Obstacles Info-Tech's Approach
    • Organizations face continual pressure to decrease time-to-market while also introducing new products and services.
    • You and your team have concerns that the existing application portfolio is not up to the task.
    • While you may understand the need for greater investment to modernize your portfolio, leadership does not appreciate what is required.
    • For well-established organizations, applications can have a long lifespan. Employees who are used to existing tools and processes often resist change.
    • Modernization plans can be substantial, but budget and resources are limited.
    • Poor documentation of legacy applications can make it challenging to know what to modernize and how to do it effectively.
    • There are concerns that any changes will have material impacts on business continuity.
    • Info-Tech will enable you to build a proposal deck to make the case for legacy application modernization for your stakeholders. This will assist with:
      • Defining what a legacy application is in the context of your organization.
      • Creating a list of candidate applications for modernization.
      • Articulating the right disposition strategy for each selected applications.
      • Laying out what is next on your modernization journey.

    Info-Tech Insight
    Legacy modernization is a process, not a single event. Your modernization approach requires you to understand your landscape and decide on a path that minimizes business continuity risks, keeps investments under control, and is prepared for surprises but always has your final state in mind.

    An approach to making the case for legacy application modernization

    Understand
    Assess the challenges, lay out the reasons, define your legacy, and prepare to remove the barriers to modernization.
    Assess
    Determine the benefits by business capability. Leverage APM foundations to select the candidate applications and prioritize.     		Legacy Application Modernization
    Define
    Use the prioritized application list to drive the next steps to modernization.

    Legacy application modernization is perceived as necessary to remain competitive

    The 2022 State CIO Survey by NASCIO shows that legacy application modernization jumped from fifth to second in state CIO priorities.

    "Be patient and also impatient. Patient because all states have a lot of legacy tech they are inheriting and government is NOT easy. But also, impatient because there is a lot to do - make your priorities clear but also find out what the CIO needs to accomplish those priorities."

    Source: NASCIO, 2022

    State CIO Priorities

    US government agencies feel pressured to deal with legacy applications

    In fiscal year 2021, the US government planned to spend over $100 billion on information technology. Most of that was to be used to operate and maintain existing systems, including legacy applications, which can be both more expensive to maintain and more vulnerable to hackers. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified:

    • 10 critical federal IT legacy systems
    • In operation between 8 and 51 years
    • Collectively cost $337 million per year to operate and maintain

    Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2021

    Example: In banking, modern platforms are essential

    Increasing competition from fintech 73% of financial services executives perceive retail banking as being the most susceptible to fintech disruption (PwC, 2016)
    Growing number of neo-banks The International Monetary Fund (IMF) notes the fast growth of fintech in financial services is creating systemic risk to global financial stability (IMF, 2022)
    Access to data and advanced analytics Estimated global bank revenue lost due to poor data is 15% to 25% (MIT, 2017)
    Shifting client expectations/demographics 50% of Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z use a digital bank to provide their primary checking account (Finextra, 2022)
    Generational transfer of wealth It is estimated that up to US$68 trillion in wealth will be transferred from baby boomers (Forbes, 2021)

    Case Study

    Delta takes off with a modernized blend of mainframes and cloud

    INDUSTRY: Transportation
    SOURCE: CIO Magazine, 2023

    Challenge
    The airline has hundreds of applications in the process of moving to the cloud, but most main capabilities are underpinned by workloads on the mainframe and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
    Some of those workloads include travel reservation systems and crew scheduling systems - mission-critical, 24/7 applications that are never turned off.     		Solution
    Delta has shifted to a hybrid architecture, with a customer experience transformation that makes the most of the cloud's agility and the mainframe's dependability.
    Delta's foray into the cloud began about two years ago as the pandemic brought travel to a virtual halt. The airline started migrating many front-end and distributed applications to the cloud while retaining traditional back-end workloads on the mainframe.     		Results
    Hybrid infrastructures are expected to remain in complex industries such as airlines and banking, where high availability and maximum reliability are non-negotiable.
    While some CIOs are sharpening their mainframe exit strategies by opting for a steep journey to the cloud, mainframes remain ideal for certain workloads.

    Phase 1: Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization

    Phase 1
    1.1 Understand your challenges
    1.2 Define legacy applications
    1.3 Assess your barriers
    1.4 Find the impacted capabilities
    1.5 Define candidate applications
    1.6 Now, Next, Later

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Understand your challenges with modernization
    • Define legacy applications in your context
    • Assess your barriers to modernization
    • Find the impacted capabilities and their benefits
    • Define candidate applications and dispositions

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Application group leaders
    • Individual application owners

    Embrace the Inevitability of Multicloud

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    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.

    Cybersecurity Priorities in Times of Pandemic

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    • Novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has thrown organizations around the globe into chaos as they attempt to continue operations while keeping employees safe.
    • IT needs to support business continuity – juggling available capacity and ensuring that services are available to end users – without clarity of duration, amid conditions that change daily, on a scale never seen before.
    • Security has never been more important than now. But…where to start? What are the top priorities? How do we support remote work while remaining secure?

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • There is intense pressure to enable employees to work remotely, as soon as possible. IT is scrambling to enable access, source equipment to stage, and deploy products to employees, many of whom are unfamiliar with working from home.
    • There is either too much security to allow people to be productive or too little security to ensure that the organization remains protected and secure.
    • These events are unprecedented, and no plan currently exists to sufficiently maintain a viable security posture during this interim new normal.

    Impact and Result

    • Don’t start from scratch. Leverage your current security framework, processes, and mechanisms but tailor them to accommodate the new way of remote working.
    • Address priority security items related to remote work capability and its implications in a logical sequence. Some security components may not be as time sensitive as others.
    • Remain diligent! Circumstances may have changed, but the importance of security has not. In fact, IT security is likely more important now than ever before.

    Cybersecurity Priorities in Times of Pandemic Research & Tools

    Start here – read our Cybersecurity Priorities research.

    Our recommendations and the accompanying checklist tool will help you quickly get a handle on supporting a remote workforce while maintaining security in your organization.

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

    • Cybersecurity Priorities in Times of Pandemic Storyboard
    • Cybersecurity Priorities Checklist Tool
    [infographic]

    Reduce Manual Repetitive Work With IT Automation

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    • IT staff are overwhelmed with manual repetitive work.
    • You have little time for projects.
    • You cannot move as fast as the business wants.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Optimize before you automate.
    • Foster an engineering mindset.
    • Build a process to iterate.

    Impact and Result

    • Begin by automating a few tasks with the highest value to score quick wins.
    • Define a process for rolling out automation, leveraging SDLC best practices.
    • Determine metrics and continually track the success of the automation program.

    Reduce Manual Repetitive Work With IT Automation Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read this Executive Brief to understand why you should reduce manual repetitive work with IT automation.

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

    1. Identify automation candidates

    Select the top automation candidates to score some quick wins.

    • Reduce Manual Repetitive Work With IT Automation – Phase 1: Identify Automation Candidates
    • IT Automation Presentation
    • IT Automation Worksheet

    2. Map and optimize process flows

    Map and optimize process flows for each task you wish to automate.

    • Reduce Manual Repetitive Work With IT Automation – Phase 2: Map & Optimize Process Flows

    3. Build a process for managing automation

    Build a process around managing IT automation to drive value over the long term.

    • Reduce Manual Repetitive Work With IT Automation – Phase 3: Build a Process for Managing Automation

    4. Build automation roadmap

    Build a long-term roadmap to enhance your organization's automation capabilities.

    • Reduce Manual Repetitive Work With IT Automation – Phase 4: Build Automation Roadmap
    • IT Automation Roadmap
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Reduce Manual Repetitive Work With IT Automation

    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 Automation Candidates

    The Purpose

    Identify top candidates for automation.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Plan to achieve quick wins with automation for early value.

    Activities

    1.1 Identify MRW pain points.

    1.2 Drill down pain points into tasks.

    1.3 Estimate the MRW involved in each task.

    1.4 Rank the tasks based on value and ease.

    1.5 Select top candidates and define metrics.

    1.6 Draft project charters.

    Outputs

    MRW pain points

    MRW tasks

    Estimate of MRW involved in each task

    Ranking of tasks for suitability for automation

    Top candidates for automation & success metrics

    Project charter(s)

    2 Map & Optimize Processes

    The Purpose

    Map and optimize the process flow of the top candidate(s).

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Requirements for automation of the top task(s).

    Activities

    2.1 Map process flows.

    2.2 Review and optimize process flows.

    2.3 Clarify logic and finalize future-state process flows.

    Outputs

    Current-state process flows

    Optimized process flows

    Future-state process flows with complete logic

    3 Build a Process for Managing Automation

    The Purpose

    Develop a lightweight process for rolling out automation and for managing the automation program.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Ability to measure and to demonstrate success of each task automation, and of the program as a whole.

    Activities

    3.1 Kick off your test plan for each automation.

    3.2 Define process for automation rollout.

    3.3 Define process to manage your automation program.

    3.4 Define metrics to measure success of your automation program.

    Outputs

    Test plan considerations

    Automation rollout process

    Automation program management process

    Automation program metrics

    4 Build Automation Roadmap

    The Purpose

    Build a roadmap to enhance automation capabilities.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A clear timeline of initiatives that will drive improvement in the automation program to reduce MRW.

    Activities

    4.1 Build a roadmap for next steps.

    Outputs

    IT automation roadmap

    Further reading

    Reduce Manual Repetitive Work With IT Automation

    Free up time for value-adding jobs.

    ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

    Automation cuts both ways.

    Automation can be very, very good, or very, very bad.
    Do it right, and you can make your life a whole lot easier.
    Do it wrong, and you can suffer some serious pain.
    All too often, automation is deployed willy-nilly, without regard to the overall systems or business processes in which it lives.
    IT professionals should follow a disciplined and consistent approach to automation to ensure that they maximize its value for their organization.

    Derek Shank,
    Research Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive summary

    Situation

    • IT staff are overwhelmed with manual repetitive work.
    • You have little time for projects.
    • You cannot move as fast as the business wants.

    Complication

    • Automation is simple to say, but hard to implement.
    • Vendors claim automation will solve all your problems.
    • You have no process for managing automation.

    Resolution

    • Begin by automating a few tasks with the highest value to score quick wins.
    • Define a process for rolling out automation, leveraging SDLC best practices.
    • Determine metrics and continually track the success of the automation program.

    Info-Tech Insight

    1. Optimize before you automate.The current way isn’t necessarily the best way.
    2. Foster an engineering mindset.Your team members may not be process engineers, but they should learn to think like one.
    3. Build a process to iterate.Effective automation can't be a one-and-done. Define a lightweight process to manage your program.

    Infrastructure & operations teams are overloaded with work

    • DevOps and digital transformation initiatives demand increased speed.
    • I&O is still tasked with security and compliance and audit.
    • I&O is often overloaded and unable to keep up with demand.

    Manual repetitive work (MRW) sucks up time

    • Manual repetitive work is a fact of life in I&O.
    • DevOps circles refer to this type of work simply as “toil.”
    • Toil is like treading water: it must be done, but it consumes precious energy and effort just to stay in the same place.
    • Some amount of toil is inevitable, but it's important to measure and cap toil, so it does not end up overwhelming your team's whole capacity for engineering work.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Follow our methodology to focus IT automation on reducing toil.

    Manual hand-offs create costly delays

    • Every time there is a hand-off, we lose efficiency and productivity.
    • In addition to the cost of performing manual work itself, we must also consider the impact of lost productivity caused by the delay of waiting for that work to be performed.

    Every queue is a tire fire

    Queues create waste and are extremely damaging. Like a tire fire, once you get started, they’re almost impossible to stamp out!

    Increase queues if you want

    • “More overhead”
    • “Lower quality”
    • “More variability”
    • “Less motivation”
    • “Longer cycle time”
    • “Increased risk”

    (Source: Edwards, citing Donald G. Reinersten: The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development )

    Increasing complexity makes I&O’s job harder

    Every additional layer of complexity multiplies points of failure. Beyond a certain level of complexity, troubleshooting can become a nightmare.

    Today, Operations is responsible for the outcomes of a full stack of a very complex, software-defined, API-enabled system running on infrastructure they may or may not own.
    – Edwards

    Growing technical debt means an ever-rising workload

    • Enterprises naturally accumulate technical debt.
    • All technology requires care and feeding.
    • I&O cannot control how much technology it’s expected to support.
    • I&O faces a larger and larger workload as technical debt accumulates.

    The systems built under each new technology paradigm never fully replace the systems built under the old paradigms. It’s not uncommon for an enterprise to have an accumulation of systems built over 10-15 years and have no budget, risk appetite, or even a viable path to replace them all. With each shift, who bares [SIC] the brunt of the responsibility for making sure the old and the new hang together? Operations, of course. With each new advance, Operations juggles more complexity and more layers of legacy technologies than ever before.
    – Edwards

    Most IT shops can’t have a dedicated engineering team

    • In most organizations, the team that builds things is best equipped to support them.
    • Often the knowledge to design systems and the knowledge to run those systems naturally co-exists in the same personnel resources.
    • When your I&O team is trying to do engineering work, they can end up frequently interrupted to perform operational tasks.
    A Venn Diagram is depicted which compares People who build things with People who run things. the two circles are almost completely overlapping, indicating the strong connection between the two groups.

    Personnel resources in most IT organizations overlap heavily between “build” and “run.”

    IT operations must become an engineering practice

    • Usually you can’t double your staff or double their hours.
    • IT professionals must become engineers.
    • We do this by automating manual repetitive work and reducing toil.
    Two scenarios are depicted. The first scenario is found at a hypothetical work camp, in which one employee performs the task of manually splitting firewood with an axe. In order to split twice as much firewood, the employee would need to spend twice the time. The second scenario is Engineering Operations. in this scenario, a wood processor is used to automate the task, allowing far more wood to be split in same amount of time.

    Build your Sys Admin an Iron Man suit

    Some CIOs see a Sys Admin and want to replace them with a Roomba. I see a Sys Admin and want to build them an Iron Man suit.
    – Deepak Giridharagopal, CTO, Puppet

    Two Scenarios are depicted. In one, an employee is replaced by automation, represented by a Roomba, reducing costs by laying off a single employee. In the second scenario, the single employee is given automated tools to do their job, represented by an iron-man suit, leading to a 10X boost in employee productivity.

    Use automation to reduce risk

    Consistency

    When we automate, we can make sure we do something the same way every time and produce a consistent result.

    Auditing and Compliance

    We can design an automated execution that will ship logs that provide the context of the action for a detailed audit trail.

    Change

    • Enterprise environments are continually changing.
    • When context changes, so does the procedure.
    • You can update your docs all you want, but you can't make people read them before executing a procedure.
    • When you update the procedure itself, you can make sure it’s executed properly.

    Follow Info-Tech’s approach: Start small and snowball

    • It’s difficult for I&O to get the staffing resources it needs for engineering work.
    • Rather than trying to get buy-in for resources using a “top down” approach, Info-Tech recommends that I&O score some quick wins to build momentum.
    • Show success while giving your team the opportunity to build their engineering chops.

    Because the C-suite relies on upwards communication — often filtered and sanitized by the time it reaches them — executives don’t see the bottlenecks and broken processes that are stalling progress.
    – Andi Mann

    Info-Tech’s methodology employs a targeted approach

    • You aren’t going to automate IT operations end-to-end overnight.
    • In fact, such a large undertaking might be more effort than it’s worth.
    • Info-Tech’s methodology employs a targeted approach to identify which candidates will score some quick wins.
    • We’ll demonstrate success, gain momentum, and then iterate for continual improvement.

    Invest in automation to reap long-term rewards

    • All too often people think of automation like a vacuum cleaner you can buy once and then forget.
    • The reality is you need to perform care and feeding for automation like for any other process or program.
    • To reap the greatest rewards you must continually invest in automation – and invest wisely.

    To get the full ROI on your automation, you need to treat it like an employee. When you hire an employee, you invest in that person. You spend time and resources training and nurturing new employees so they can reach their full potential. The investment in a new employee is no different than your investment in automation.– Edwards

    Measure the success of your automation program

    Example of How to Estimate Dollar Value Impact of Automation
    Metric Timeline Target Value
    Hours of manual repetitive work 12 months 20% reduction $48,000/yr.(1)
    Hours of project capacity 18 months 30% increase $108,000/yr.(2)
    Downtime caused by errors 6 months 50% reduction $62,500/yr.(3)

    1 15 FTEs x 80k/yr.; 20% of time on MRW, reduced by 20%
    2 15 FTEs x 80k/yr.; 30% project capacity, increased by 30%
    3 25k/hr. of downtime.; 5 hours per year of downtime caused by errors

    Automating failover for disaster recovery

    CASE STUDY

    Industry Financial Services
    Source Interview

    Challenge

    An IT infrastructure manager had established DR failover procedures, but these required a lot of manual work to execute. His team lacked the expertise to build automation for the failover.

    Solution

    The manager hired consultants to build scripts that would execute portions of the failover and pause at certain points to report on outcomes and ask the human operator whether to proceed with the next step.

    Results

    The infrastructure team reduced their achievable RTOs as follows:
    Tier 1: 2.5h → 0.5h
    Tier 2: 4h → 1.5h
    Tier 3: 8h → 2.5h
    And now, anyone on the team could execute the entire failover!

    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

    Reduce Manual Repetitive Work With IT Automation – project overview

    1. Select Candidates 2. Map Process Flows 3. Build Process 4. Build Roadmap
    Best-Practice Toolkit

    1.1 Identify MRW pain points

    1.2 Drill down pain points into tasks

    1.3 Estimate the MRW involved in each task

    1.4 Rank the tasks based on value and ease

    1.5 Select top candidates and define metrics

    1.6 Draft project charters

    2.1 Map process flows

    2.2 Review and optimize process flows

    2.3 Clarify logic and finalize future-state process flows

    3.1 Kick off your test plan for each automation

    3.2 Define process for automation rollout

    3.3 Define process to manage your automation program

    3.4 Define metrics to measure success of your automation program

    4.1 Build automation roadmap

    Guided Implementations

    Introduce methodology.

    Review automation candidates.

    Review success metrics.

    Review process flows.

    Review end-to-end process flows.

    Review testing considerations.

    Review automation SDLC.

    Review automation program metrics.

    Review automation roadmap.

    Onsite Workshop Module 1:
    Identify Automation Candidates     		Module 2:
    Map and Optimize Processes     		Module 3:
    Build a Process for Managing Automation     		Module 4:
    Build Automation Roadmap
    Phase 1 Results:
    Automation candidates and success metrics     		Phase 2 Results:
    End-to-end process flows for automation     		Phase 3 Results:
    Automation SDLC process, and automation program management process     		Phase 4 Results:
    Automation roadmap

    Build a Data Warehouse

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    • Parent Category Name: Big Data
    • Parent Category Link: /big-data
    • Relational data warehouses, although reliable, centralized repositories for corporate data, were not built to handle the speed and volume of data and analytics today.
    • IT is under immense pressure from business units to provide technology that will yield greater agility and insight.
    • While some organizations are benefitting from modernization technologies, the majority of IT departments are unfamiliar with the technologies and have not yet defined clear use cases.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The vast majority of your corporate data is not being properly leveraged. Modernize the data warehouse to get value from the 80% of unstructured data that goes unused.
    • Avoid rip and replace. Develop a future state that complements your existing data warehouse with emerging technologies.
    • Be flexible in your roadmap. Create an implementation roadmap that’s incremental and adapts to changing business priorities.

    Impact and Result

    • Establish both the business and IT perspectives of today’s data warehouse environment.
    • Explore the art-of-the-possible. Don’t get stuck trying to gather technical requirements from business users who don’t know what they don’t know. Use Info-Tech’s interview guide to discuss the pains of the current environment, and more importantly, where stakeholders want to be in the future.
    • Build an internal knowledgebase with respect to emerging technologies. The technology landscape is constantly shifting and often difficult for IT staff to keep track of. Use Info-Tech’s Data Warehouse Modernization Technology Education Deck to ensure that IT is able to appropriately match the right tools to the business’ use cases.
    • Create a compelling business case to secure investment and support.

    Build a Data Warehouse Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should be looking to modernize the relational data warehouse, review Info-Tech’s framework for identifying modernization opportunities, 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 the current data warehouse environment

    Review the business’ perception and architecture of the current data warehouse environment.

    • Drive Business Innovation With a Modernized Data Warehouse Environment – Phase 1: Assess the Current Data Warehouse Environment
    • Data Warehouse Maturity Assessment Tool

    2. Define modernization drivers

    Collaborate with business users to identify the strongest motivations for data warehouse modernization.

    • Drive Business Innovation With a Modernized Data Warehouse Environment – Phase 2: Define Modernization Drivers
    • Data Warehouse Modernization Stakeholder Interview Guide
    • Data Warehouse Modernization Technology Education Deck
    • Data Warehouse Modernization Initiative Building Tool

    3. Create the modernization future state

    Combine business ideas with modernization initiatives and create a roadmap.

    • Drive Business Innovation With a Modernized Data Warehouse Environment – Phase 3: Create the Modernization Future State
    • Data Warehouse Modernization Technology Architectural Template
    • Data Warehouse Modernization Deployment Plan
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Build a Data Warehouse

    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 Assess the Current Data Warehouse Environment

    The Purpose

    Discuss the general project overview for data warehouse modernization.

    Establish the business and IT perspectives of the current state.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Holistic understanding of the current data warehouse.

    Business user engagement from the start of the project.

    Activities

    1.1 Review data warehouse project history.

    1.2 Evaluate data warehouse maturity.

    1.3 Draw architecture diagrams.

    1.4 Review supporting data management practices.

    Outputs

    Data warehouse maturity assessment

    Data architecture diagrams

    2 Explore Business Opportunities

    The Purpose

    Conduct a user workshop session to elicit the most pressing needs of business stakeholders.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Modernization technology selection is directly informed by business drivers.

    In-depth IT understanding of the business pains and opportunities.

    Activities

    2.1 Review general trends and drivers in your industry.

    2.2 Identify primary business frustrations, opportunities, and risks.

    2.3 Identify business processes to target for modernization.

    2.4 Capture business ideas for the future state.

    Outputs

    Business ideas for modernization

    Defined strategic direction for data warehouse modernization

    3 Review the Technology Landscape

    The Purpose

    Educate IT staff on the most common technologies for data warehouse modernization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Improved ability for IT to match technology with business ideas.

    Activities

    3.1 Appoint Modernization Advisors.

    3.2 Hold an open education and discussion forum for modernization technologies.

    Outputs

    Modernization Advisors identified

    Modernization technology education deck

    4 Define Modernization Solutions

    The Purpose

    Consolidate business ideas into modernization initiatives.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Refinement of the strategic direction for data warehouse modernization.

    Activities

    4.1 Match business ideas to technology solutions.

    4.2 Group similar ideas to create modernization initiatives.

    4.3 Create future-state architecture diagrams.

    Outputs

    Identified strategic direction for data warehouse modernization

    Defined modernization initiatives

    Future-state architecture for data warehouse

    5 Establish a Modernization Roadmap

    The Purpose

    Validate and build out initiatives with business users.

    Define benefits and costs to establish ROI.

    Identify enablers and barriers to modernization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Completion of materials for a compelling business case and roadmap.

    Activities

    5.1 Validate use cases with business users.

    5.2 Define initiative benefits.

    5.3 Identify enablers and barriers to modernization.

    5.4 Define preliminary activities for initiatives.

    5.5 Evaluate initiative costs.

    5.6 Determine overall ROI.

    Outputs

    Validated modernization initiatives

    Data warehouse modernization roadmap

    Recruit and Retain More Women in IT

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    • Parent Category Name: Attract & Select
    • Parent Category Link: /attract-and-select
    • While the number of jobs in IT has increased dramatically, the percentage of women in IT has progressed disproportionately, with only 25% of IT jobs being held by women (CIO from IDG, 2021).
    • The challenge is not a lack of talented women with the competencies to excel within IT, but rather organizations lack an effective strategy to recruit and retain women in IT.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Retaining and attracting top women is good business, not personal. As per McKinsey Global Institute, “$4.3 trillion of additional annual GDP in 2025 could be added to the U.S. by fully bridging the gender gap.”
    • In the war on talent, having a strategy around how you will recruit & retain of women in IT is Marketing 101. What influences whether women apply for roles and stay at organizations is different than men; traditional models won’t cut it.

    Impact and Result

    To stay competitive, IT leaders need to radically change the way they recruit and retain talent, and women in IT represent one of the largest untapped markets for IT talent. CIOs need a targeted strategy to attract and retain the best, and this requires a shift in how leaders currently manage the talent lifecycle. Info-Tech offers a targeted solution that will help IT leaders:

    1. Build a Recruitment Playbook: Leverage Info-Tech tools to effectively sell to, search for, and secure top talent.
    2. Build a Retention Strategy: Follow Info-Tech’s step-by-step process to identify initiatives and opportunities to retain your top talent.

    Recruit and Retain More Women in IT Research & Tools

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

    1. Recruit and Retain More Women in IT Deck – A step-by-step document that walks you through how to build a recruitment and retention plan for women in IT.

    Create a targeted recruitment and retention strategy for women. Increase the number of viable candidates by leveraging best practices to sell to, search for, and secure top women in IT. Take a data-driven approach to improving retention of women by using best practices to measure and improve employee engagement.

    • Recruit and Retain More Women in IT – Phases 1-2

    2. Employee Value Proposition Tools – Build and road-test your employee value proposition to ensure that it is aligned, clear, compelling, and differentiated.

    These tools tap into best practices to help you collect the information you need to build, assess, test, and adopt an employee value proposition.

    • Employee Value Proposition (EVP) Interview Guide
    • Employee Value Proposition (EVP) Scorecard
    • Employee Value Proposition (EVP) Internal Scorecard Handout

    3. IT Behavioral Interview Question Library – A complete list of sample questions aligned with core, leadership, and IT competencies.

    Don’t hire by intuition, consider leveraging behavioral interview questions to reduce bias and uncover candidates that will be able to execute on the job.

    • IT Behavioral Interview Question Library

    4. Stay Interview Guide – Use this tool to guide one-on-one conversations with your team members to monitor employee engagement between surveys.

    Stay interviews are an effective method for monitoring employee engagement. Have these informal conversations to gain insight into what your employees really think about their jobs, what causes them to stay, and what may lead them to leave.

    • Stay Interview Guide

    Infographic

    Workshop: Recruit and Retain More Women 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 Make the Case for Strategically Recruiting and Retaining Women in IT

    The Purpose

    Identify the need for a targeted strategy to recruit and retain women in IT and pinpoint your largest opportunities to drive diversity in your IT team.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Establish goals and targets for the changes to be made to your IT recruitment and retention strategies.

    Activities

    1.1 Understand trends in IT staffing.

    1.2 Assess your talent lifecycle challenges and opportunities.

    1.3 Make the case for changes to recruitment and retention strategies.

    Outputs

    Recruitment & Retention Metrics Report

    Business Case for Recruitment and Retention Changes

    2 Develop Strategies to Sell Your Organization to Wider Candidate Pool

    The Purpose

    The way you position the organization impacts who is likely to apply to posted positions. Ensure you are putting a competitive foot forward by developing a unique, meaningful, and aspirational employee value proposition and clear job descriptions.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Implement effective strategies to drive more applications to your job postings.

    Activities

    2.1 Develop an IT employee value proposition.

    2.2 Adopt your employee value proposition.

    2.3 Write meaningful job postings.

    Outputs

    Employee Value Proposition

    EVP Marketing Plan

    Revised Job Ads

    3 Expand Your Talent Sourcing Strategy

    The Purpose

    Sourcing shouldn’t start with an open position, it should start with identifying an anticipated need and then building and nurturing a talent pipeline.

    IT participation in this is critical to effectively promote the employee experience and foster relationships before candidates even apply.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Develop a modern job requisition form though role analysis.

    Increase your candidate pool by expanding sourcing programs.

    Activities

    3.1 Build realistic job requisition forms.

    3.2 Identify new alternative sourcing approaches for talent.

    3.3 Build a sourcing strategy.

    Outputs

    Job requisition form for key roles

    Sourcing strategy for key roles

    4 Secure Top Talent

    The Purpose

    Work with your HR department to influence the recruitment process by taking a data-driven approach to understanding the root cause of applicant drop-off and success and take corrective actions.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Optimize your selection process.

    Implement non-bias interview techniques in your selection process.

    Activities

    4.1 Assess key selection challenges.

    4.2 Implement behavioral interview techniques.

    Outputs

    Root-Cause Analysis of Section Challenges

    Behavioral Interview Guide

    5 Retain Top Women in IT

    The Purpose

    Employee engagement is one of the greatest predictors of intention to stay.

    To retain employees you need to understand not only engagement, but also your employee experience and the moments that matter, and actively work to create positive experience.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identify opportunities to drive engagement across your IT organization.

    Implement tactical programs to reduce turnover in IT.

    Activities

    5.1 Measure employee engagement and review results.

    5.2 Identify new alternative sourcing approaches for talent.

    5.3 Train managers to conduct stay interviews and drive employee engagement.

    Outputs

    Identified Employee Engagement Action Plan

    Action Plan to Execute Stay Interviews

    Further reading

    Recruit and Retain More Women in IT

    Gender diversity is directly correlated to IT performance.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Technology has never been more important to organizations, and as a result, recruiting and retaining quality IT employees is increasingly difficult.

    • IT unemployment rates continue to hover below 2% in the US.
    • The IT talent market has evolved into one where the employer is the seller and the employee is the buyer.

    Common Obstacles

    • While the number of jobs in IT has increased dramatically, the percentage of women in IT has progressed disproportionately, with only 25% of IT jobs being held by women.*
    • The challenge is not a lack of talented women with the competencies to excel within IT, but rather organizations lack an effective strategy to recruit and retain women in IT.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    To stay competitive, IT leaders need to radically change the way they recruit and retain talent, and women in IT represent one of the largest untapped markets. CIOs need a targeted strategy to attract and retain the best, and this requires a shift in how leaders currently manage the talent lifecycle. Info-Tech offers a targeted solution to help:

    • Build a Recruitment Playbook: Leverage Info-Tech tools to effectively sell to, search for, and secure top talent.
    • Build a Retention Strategy: Follow Info-Tech’s step-by-step process to identify initiatives and opportunities to retain your top talent.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Retaining and attracting top women is good business, not personal. Companies with greater gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to have above-average profitability.1 In the war on talent, having a strategy around how you will recruit and retain women in IT is Marketing 101. What influences whether women apply for roles and stay at organizations is different than men; traditional models won’t cut it.

    *– McKinsey & Company, 2020; 2 – CIO From IDG, 2021
    The image contains a screenshot of a thought model titled: Recruit and Retain More Women in IT. Its subheading is: Gender Diversity is Directly Correlated to IT Performance. The thought model lists critical methods to recruit and retain, and also a traditional method to compare.

    Diversity & inclusion – it’s good business, not personal

    Why should organizations care about diversity?

    1. The war for talent is real. Every CIO needs a plan of attack. Unemployment rates are dropping and 54% of CIOs report that the skills shortage is holding them up from meeting their strategic objectives.
      2. Source: Harvey Nash and KPMG, 2020
    2. Diversity has clear ROI – both in terms of recruitment and retention. Eighty percent of technology managers experienced increased turnover in 2021. Not only are employee tenures decreasing, the competition for talent is fierce and the average cost of turnover is 150% of an IT worker’s salary.
      3. Source: Robert Half, 2021
    3. Inability to recruit and retain talent will reduce business satisfaction. Organizations who are continuously losing talent will be unable to meet corporate objectives due to lost productivity, keeping them in firefighting mode. An engaged workforce is a requirement for driving innovation and project success.

    ISACA’s 2020 study shows a disconnect between what men and women think is being done to recruit and retain female employees

    Key findings from ISACA’s 2020 Tech Workforce survey

    65% of men think their employers have a program to encourage hiring women. But only 51% of women agree.

    71% of men believe their employers have a program to encourage the promotion or advancement of women. But only 59% of women agree.

    49% of women compared to 44% of men in the survey feel they must work harder than their peers.

    22% of women compared to 14% of men feel they are underpaid.

    66% of women compared to 72% of men feel they are receiving sufficient resources to sustain their career.

    30% of women compared to 23% of men feel they have unequal growth opportunities.

    74% of women compared to 64% of men feel they lack confidence to negotiate their salaries.

    To see ISACA’s full report click here.
    The image contains a screenshot of a multi bar graph to demonstrate the percentage of female employees in the workforce of major tech companies. The major tech companies include: Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
    Image: Statista, 2021, CC BY-ND 4.0

    The chart to the left, compiled by Statista, (based on self-reported company figures) shows that women held between 23% to 25% of the tech jobs at major tech companies.

    Women are also underrepresented in leadership positions: 34% at Facebook, 31% at Apple, 29% at Amazon, 28% at Google, and 26% at Microsoft.

    (Statista, 2021)

    To help support women in tech, 78% of women say companies should promote more women into leadership positions. Other solutions include:

    • Providing mentorship opportunities (72%)
    • Offering flexible scheduling (64%)
    • Conducting unconscious bias training (57%)
    • Offering equal maternity and paternity leave (55%)
      • (HRD America, 2021)

    Traditional retention initiatives target the majority – the drivers that impact the retention of women in IT are different

    Ranked correlation of impact of engagement drivers on retention

    The image contains a screenshot that demonstrates the differences in retaining men and women in IT.

    * Recent data stays consistent, but, the importance of compensation and recognition in retaining women in IT is increasing.

    Info-Tech Research Group Employee Engagement Diagnostic; N=1,856 IT employees

    The majority of organizations take a one-size-fits-all approach to retaining and engaging employees.

    However, studies show that women are leaving IT in significantly higher proportions than men and that the drivers impacting men’s and women’s retention are different. Knowing how men and women react differently to engagement drivers will help you create a targeted retention strategy.

    In particular, to increase the retention and engagement of women, organizations should develop targeted initiatives that focus on:

    • Organizational culture
    • Employee empowerment
    • Manager relationships

    Why organizations need to focus on the recruitment and retention of women in IT

    1. Women expand the talent pool. Women represent a vast, untapped talent pool that can bolster the technical workforce. Unfortunately, traditional IT recruitment processes are targeted toward a limited IT profile – the key to closing the IT skills gap is to look for agile learners and expand your search criteria to cast a larger net.
    2. Diversity increases innovation opportunities. Groups with greater diversity solve complex problems better and faster than homogenous groups, and the presence of women is more likely to increase the problem-solving and creative abilities of the group.
    3. Women increase your ROI. Research shows that companies with the highest representation of women in their management teams have a 34% higher return on investment than those with few or no women. Further, organizations who are unable to retain top women in their organization are at risk for not being able to deliver to SLAs or project expectations and lose the institutional knowledge needed for continuous improvement.
      4. Source: Bureau of Labour Statistics; Info-Tech Research Group/McLean & Company Analysis

    Improving the representation of women in your organization requires rethinking recruitment and retention strategies

    SIGNS YOU MAY NEED A TARGETED RECRUITMENT STRATEGY…

    SIGNS YOU MAY NEED A TARGETED RETENTION STRATEGY…
    • “It takes longer than 8 weeks to fill a posted IT position.”
    • “Less than 35% of applicants to posted positions are women.”
    • “In the last year the number of applicants to posted positions has decreased.”
    • “The number of female employees who have referred employees in the last year is significantly lower than men in the department.”
    • “Less than 35% of your IT workforce is made up of women.”
    • “Proportionally women decline IT roles in higher rates than men in IT.”
    • “Voluntary turnover of high performers and high potentials is above 5%.”
    • “Turnover of women in IT is disproportionate to the percentage of IT staff.”
    • “Employee rankings of the IT department on social networking sites (e.g. Glassdoor) are low.”
    • “Employees are frequently absent from their jobs.”
    • “Less than 25% of management roles in IT are filled by women.”
    • “Employee engagement scores are lower among women than men.”

    Info-Tech’s approach to improving gender diversity at your organization

    Info-Tech takes a practical, tactical approach to improving gender diversity at organizations, which starts with straightforward tactics that will help you improve the recruitment and retention of women in your organization.

    How we can help

    1. Leverage Info-Tech’s tools to define your current challenges and opportunities for gender diversity to improve your recruitment and retention issues.
    2. Employ straightforward and tested tactics to increase talent acquisition of women in IT by optimizing how you sell to, search for, and secure top female talent.
    3. Take a data-driven approach to measure and increase the retention and engagement of women within your IT organization, and know how and when to involve your staff for optimal results.

    Leverage Info-Tech’s customizable deliverables to improve the recruitment and retention of women in your organization

    RECRUIT Top Women in IT

    If you don’t have a targeted recruitment strategy for women, you are missing out on 50% of the candidate pool. Increase the number of viable candidates by leveraging best practices to sell to, search for, and secure top women in IT.

    Key metrics to track:

    • Average number of female candidates per posting
    • Average time to fill position
    • Percentage of new hires still at the organization one year later

    RETAIN Top Women in IT

    The drivers that impact the retention of men and women are different. Take a data-driven approach to improving retention of women in your organization by using best practices to measure and improve employee engagement.

    Key metrics to track:

    • Voluntary turnover rates of men and women
    • Average tenure of men and women
    • Percentage of internal promotions going to men and women
    • Employee engagement scores

    Info-Tech’s methodology for Recruit and Retain More Women in IT

    1. Enhance Your Recruitment Strategies

    2. Enhance Your Retention Strategies

    Phase Steps
    1. Sell:
    • Develop an attractive employee value proposition.
    • Understand the impact of language on applicants.
  • Search:
    • Define meaningful job requirements
    • Evaluate various sourcing pools.
  • Secure:
    • Improve the interview experience.
    • Leverage behavioral interview questions to limit bias.
    1. Drive engagement in key areas correlated with driving higher retention of women in IT.
    2. Train managers to understand key moments that matter in the employee experience.
    3. Understand what motivates key performers to stay at your organization.

    Phase Outcomes

    Recruitment Optimization Plan

    Retention Optimization Plan

    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 teams 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?

    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 6 calls over the course of 1 to 2 months.

    1. Tactics to Recruit More Women in IT

    Call #1: Develop a strategy to better sell your organization to diverse candidates.

    Call #2: Evaluate your candidate search practices to reach a wider audience.

    Call #3: Introduce best practices in your interviews to improve the candidate experience and limit bias.

    2. Tactics to Retain More Women in IT

    Call #4: Launch focus groups to improve performance of key retention drivers.

    Call #5: Measure the employee experience and identify key moments that matter to staff.

    Call #6: Conduct stay interviews and establish actions to improve retention.

    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

    Make the Case

    Develop Strategies to Sell to a Wider Candidate Pool

    Expand Your Talent Sourcing Strategy

    Secure & Retain Top Talent

    Next Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite)

    Activities

    1.1 Understand trends in IT staffing.

    1.2 Assess your talent lifecycle.

    1.3 Make the case for changes to recruitment and retention strategies.

    2.1 Develop an IT employee value proposition (EVP).

    2.2 Adopt your employee value proposition.

    2.3 Write meaningful job postings.

    3.1 Build realistic job requisition forms.

    3.2 Identify new alternative sourcing approaches for talent.

    3.3 Build a sourcing strategy.

    4.1 Assess key selection challenges.

    4.2 Implement behavioral interview techniques.

    4.3 Measure employee engagement and review results.

    4.4 Develop programs to improve employee engagement.

    4.5 Train managers to conduct stay interviews and drive employee engagement.

    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. Recruitment & retention metrics report
    2. Business case for recruitment and retention changes
    1. Employee Value Proposition
    2. EVP marketing plan
    3. Revised job ads
    1. Job requisition form for key roles
    2. Sourcing strategy for key roles
    1. Root-cause analysis of section challenges
    2. Behavioral interview guide
    3. Identified employee engagement action plan
    4. Action plan to execute stay interviews
    1. Completed recruitment optimization plan
    2. Completed retention optimization plan

    Phase 1

    Enhance Your Recruitment Strategies

    Phase 1

    • 1.1 Sell
    • 1.2 Search
    • 1.3 Secure

    Phase 2

    • 2.1 Engagement
    • 2.2 Employee Experience
    • 2.3 Stay Interviews

    Consider key factors within the recruitment process

    Key Talent Pipeline Opportunities:

    • In today’s talent landscape IT leaders need to be highly strategic about how they recruit new talent to the organization.
    • IT professionals have a huge number of options to choose from when considering their next career.
    • IT leaders need to actively market and expand their search to attract top talent. The “where” and “how” to recruit men and women in IT are different and your strategy should reflect this.
    • Partnering with your HR department to help you improve the number of applicants, expand your search criteria, and optimize the interview experience will all directly impact your talent pipeline.
    1. Sell

      2. How do you position the value of working for your organization and roles in a meaningful way?

    2. Search

      3. How can you expand your key search criteria and sourcing strategies to reach more candidates?

    3. Secure

      4. How can you reduce bias in your interview process and create positive candidate experiences?

    Info-Tech’s Sell-Search-Secure recruitment model

    Follow these steps to increase your pool of female candidates.

    1. Sell Tactics:

      2. 1. Develop an employee value proposition that will attract female candidates.

      2. Understand how your job postings may be deterring female candidates.

    2. Search Tactics:

      3. 3. Identify opportunities to expand your role analysis for job requisitions.

      4. Increase your candidate pool by expanding sourcing programs.

    3. Secure Tactics:

      4. 5. Identify tactics to improve women’s interview experience.

      6. Leverage behavioral interview questions to limit bias in interviews.

    Please note, this section is not a replacement or a full talent strategy. Rather, this blueprint will highlight key tactics within talent acquisition practices that the IT leadership team can help to influence to drive greater diversity in recruitment.

    Understand where leaks exist in your talent pipeline

    Start your recruitment enhancement here.

    Work with your HR department to track critical metrics around where you need to make improvements and where you can partner with your recruitment team to improve your recruitment process and build a more diverse pipeline. Identify where you have significant drops or variation in diversity or overall need and select where you’d like to focus your recruitment improvement efforts.

    Selection Process Step

    Sample Metrics to Track
    Sell

    Average time to fill a vacant position

    Average number of applicants for posted positions

    Total # of Candidates; # of Male Candidates (% of total);

    # of Female Candidates (% of total); % Difference Male & Female

    Number of page visits vs. applications for posted positions

    Total # of Candidates

    # of Male Candidates

    % of total

    # of Female Candidates

    % of total

    % Difference Male & Female
    Search

    Number of applicants coming from your different sourcing channels (one line per sourcing channel: LinkedIn Group A, website, job boards, specific events, etc.)

    Number of applicants coming from referrals

    Secure

    Number of applicants meeting qualifications

    Number of applicants selected for second interview

    Number of applicants rejecting an offer

    Number of applicants accepting an offer

    Number of employees retained for one year

    Enhance your recruitment strategies

    The way you position the organization impacts who is likely to apply to posted positions. Ensure you are putting a competitive foot forward by developing a unique, meaningful, and aspirational employee value proposition and clear job descriptions.

    Sell the organization

    What is an employee value proposition?

    An employee value proposition (EVP) is a unique and clearly defined set of attributes and benefits that capture an employee’s overall work experience within an organization. An EVP is your opportunity to showcase the unique benefits and opportunities of working at your organization, allowing you to attract a wider pool of candidates.

    How is an employee value proposition used?

    Your EVP should be used internally and externally to promote the unique benefits of working within the department. As a recruiting tool, you can use it to attract candidates, highlighting the benefits of working for your organization. The EVP is often highlighted where you are most likely to reach your target audience, whether that is through social media, in-person events, or in other advertising activities.

    Why tailor this to multiple audiences?

    While your employee value proposition should remain constant in terms of the unique benefits of working for your organization, you want to ensure that the EVP appeals to multiple audiences and that it is backed up by relevant stories that support how your organization lives your EVP every day. Candidates need to be able to relate to the EVP and see it as desirable, so ensuring that it is relatable to a diverse audience is key.

    Develop a strong employee value proposition

    Three key steps

    The image contains a cycle to demonstrate the three key steps. The steps are: Build and Assess the EVP, Test the EVP, and Adopt the EVP.

    1. Build and Assess the EVP

    Assess your existing employee value proposition and/or build a forward-looking, meaningful, authentic, aspirational EVP.

    2. Test the EVP

    Gather feedback from staff to ensure the EVP is meaningful internally and externally.

    3. Adopt the EVP

    Identify how and where you will leverage the EVP internally and externally, and integrate the EVP into your candidate experience, job ads, and employee engagement initiatives.

    As you build your EVP, keep in mind that while it’s important to brand your IT organization as an inclusive workplace to help you attract diverse candidates, be honest about your current level of diversity and your intentions to improve. Otherwise, new recruits will be disappointed and leave.

    What is an employee value proposition?

    And what are the key components?

    The employee value proposition is your opportunity to showcase the unique benefits and opportunities of working at your organization, allowing you to attract a wider pool of candidates.

    AN EMPLOYEE VALUE PROPOSITION IS:

    AN EMPLOYEE VALUE PROPOSITION IS NOT:
    • An authentic representation of the employee experience
    • Aligned with organizational culture
    • Fundamental to all stages of the employee lifecycle
    • A guide to help investment in programs and policies
    • Short and succinct
    • What the employee can do for you
    • A list of programs and policies
    • An annual project

    THE FOUR KEY COMPONENTS OF AN EMPLOYEE VALUE PROPOSITION

    Rewards

    Organizational Elements

    Working Conditions

    Day-to-Day Job Elements
    • Compensation
    • Health Benefits
    • Retirement Benefits
    • Vacation
    • Culture
    • Customer Focus
    • Organization Potential
    • Department Relationships
    • Senior Management Relationships
    • Work/Life Balance
    • Working Environment
    • Employee Empowerment
    • Development
    • Rewards & Recognition
    • Co-Worker Relationships
    • Manager Relationships

    Creating a compelling EVP that presents a picture of your employee experience, with a focus on diversity, will attract females to your team. This can lead to many internal and external benefits for your organization.

    Collect relevant information

    Existing Employee Value Proposition: If your organization or IT department has an existing employee value proposition, rather than starting from scratch, we recommend leveraging that and moving to the testing phase to see if the EVP still resonates with staff and external parties.

    Employee Engagement Results: If your organization does an employee engagement survey, review the results to identify the areas in which the IT organization is performing well. Identify and document any key comment themes in the report around why employees enjoy working for the organization or what makes your IT department a great place to work.

    Social Media Sites. Prepare for the good, the bad, and the ugly. Social media websites like Glassdoor and Indeed make it easier for employees to share their experiences at an organization honestly and candidly. While postings on these sites won’t relate exclusively to the IT department, they do invite participants to identify their department in the organization. You can search these to identify any positive things people are saying about working for the organization and potentially opportunities for improvement (which you can use as a starting point in the retention section of this report).

    Step 1.1

    Sell – Assess the current state and develop your employee value proposition

    Activities

    1.1.1 Gather feedback on unique benefits

    1.1.2 Build key messages

    1.1.3 Test your EVP

    1.1.4 Adopt your EVP

    1.1.5 Review job postings for gender bias

    1.1.1 Gather feedback

    1. Hold a series of focus groups with employees to understand what about the organization attracted them to join and to stay at the organization.
    2. Start by identifying if you will interview all employees or a subset. If you are going to use a subset, ensure you have at least one male and one female participating from each team and representation of all levels within the department.
    3. Print the EVP Interview Guide to focus your conversation, and ask each individual to take 15 minutes and respond to questions 1-3 in the Guide:
    4. Draw a quadrant on the board and mark each quadrant with four categories: Day-to-Day Elements, Organizational Elements, Compensation & Benefits, and Working Conditions. Provide each participant with sticky notes and ask them to brainstorm the top five things they value most about working at the organization. Ask them to place each sticky in the appropriate category and identify any key themes.
    5. Ask participants to hand in their EVP Interview Guides and document all of the key findings.

    Input

    Output
    • Employee opinions
    • Employee responses to four EVP components
    • Content for EVP

    Materials

    Participants
    • EVP Interview Guide handout
    • Pen and paper for documenting responses
    • Male and female employees
    • Different departments
    • Different role levels

    Download the EVP Interview Guide

    1.1.2 Build key messages

    1. Collect all of the information from the various focus groups and begin to build out the employee value proposition statements.
    2. Identify the key elements that staff felt were unique and highly valued by employees and group these into common themes.
    3. Identify categories that related to one of the five key drivers* of women’s retention in IT and highlight any key elements related to these:
    • Culture: The degree to which an employee identifies with the beliefs, values, and attitudes of the organization.
    • Company Potential: An employee’s understanding, commitment, and excitement about the organization’s mission and future.
    • Employee Empowerment: The degree to which employees have accountability and control over their work within a supported environment.
    • Learning and Development: A cooperative and continuous effort to enhance an employee’s skill set and expertise and meet an employee’s career objectives.
    • Manager Relationships: The professional and personal relationship an employee has with their manager, including trust, support, and development.
  • Identify up to four key statements to focus on for the EVP, ensuring that your EVP speaks to at least one of the five categories above.
  • Integrate these into one overall statement.

    • *See Engagement Driver Handout slides for more details on these five drivers.

    Input

    Output

    • Feedback from focus groups
    • EVP and supporting statements

    Materials

    Participants

    • EVP Interview Guide handout
    • Pen and paper for documenting responses
    • IT leadership team

    Quality test your revised EVP

    Use Info-Tech’s EVP Scorecard.

    Internally and Externally

    Use the EVP Scorecard and EVP Scorecard Handout throughout this step to assess your EVP against:

    Internal Criteria:

    • Accuracy
    • Alignment
    • Aspirational
    • Differentiation

    External Criteria:

    • Clear
    • Compelling
    • Concise
    • Differentiation
    The image contains screenshots of Info-Tech's EVP Scorecard.

    Ensure your EVP resonates with employees and prospects

    Test your EVP with internal and external audiences.

    INTERNAL TEST REVOLVES AROUND THE 3A’s

    EXTERNAL TEST REVOLVES AROUND THE 3C’s

    ALIGNED: The EVP is in line with the organization’s purpose, vision, values, and processes. Ensure policies and programs are aligned with the organization’s EVP.

    CLEAR: The EVP is straightforward, simple, and easy to understand. Without a clear message in the market, even the best intentioned EVPs can be lost in confusion.

    ACCURATE: The EVP is clear and compelling, supported by proof points. It captures the true employee experience, which matches the organization’s communication and message in the market.

    COMPELLING: The EVP emphasizes the value created for employees and is a strong motivator to join this organization. A strong EVP will be effective in drawing in external candidates. The message will resonate with them and attract them to your organization.

    ASPIRATIONAL: The EVP inspires both individuals and the IT organization as a whole. Identify and invest in the areas that are sure to generate the highest returns for employees.

    COMPREHENSIVE: The EVP provides enough information for the potential employee to understand the true employee experience and to self-assess whether they are a good fit for your organization. If the EVP lacks depth, the potential employee may have a hard time understanding the benefits and rewards of working for your organization.

    1.1.3 Test your EVP

    1. Identify the internal and external individuals who you want to gather feedback from about the EVP.
    2. For internal candidates, send a copy of the EVP and ask them to complete the Internal Assessment (ensure that you have at least 50% representation of women).
    3. For external candidates, identify first how you will reach out to them; popular options are to have team members in key roles reach out to members of their LinkedIn network who are in similar roles to themselves. Request that they look for a diverse group to gather feedback from.
    4. Have the external candidates complete the External Assessment.
    5. Collect the feedback around the EVP and enter the findings into the EVP Scorecard Tool.
    6. If you are dissatisfied with the scorecard results, go back to the employees you interviewed to ask for additional feedback, focusing on the areas that scored low.
    7. Incorporate the feedback and present the revised EVP to see if the changes resonate with stakeholders.
    8. If you are satisfied with the results, present to the leadership and HR teams for agreement and proceed to adopting the EVP in your organization.

    Input

    Output

    • Internal assessment
    • External assessment
    • Finalized EVP

    Materials

    Participants

    • EVP Internal Assessmentt
    • EVP External Assessment
    • Internal staff members
    • External IT professionals

    1.1.4 Adopt your EVP

    Identify your target audience and marketing channels.

    1. Identify the internal and external individuals who you want to gather feedback from about the EVP.
    • The target audience for your employee value proposition
    • Internal and/or external
    • Local, national, international
    • Experience
    • Applicant pool (e.g. new graduates, professionals, internship)
  • For each target audience, identify where you want to reach them with your employee value proposition.
    • Internal: Town hall meetings, fireside chats
    • External: Social media, advertising, job postings
    • Global: Professional affiliations, head hunters
  • For each target audience, build the communication strategy and identify messaging, mediums, timeline, and task ownership.

    • Input

    Output

    • Employee value proposition
    • EVP plan

    Materials

    Participants

    • Pen and paper
    • EVP participants

    Case Study

    INDUSTRY: Restaurant

    SOURCE: McDonald’s Careers, Canadian Business via McLean & Company

    McDonald’s saw a divide between employee experience and its vision. McDonald’s set out to reinvent its employer image and create the reputation it wanted.

    Challenge

    • Historically, McDonald’s has had a challenging employer brand. Founded on the goal of cost effectiveness, a “McJob” was often associated with lower pay and a poor reputation.
    • McDonald’s reached out to employees using a global survey and asked, “What is it you love most about working at McDonald’s?”

    Solution

    • McDonald’s revaluated its employer brand by creating an EVP focused on the three F’s.
    1. Future – career growth and development opportunities
    2. Flexibility – flexible working hours and job variety
    3. Family & Friends – a people-centric work culture

    Results

    • As a result of developing and promoting its EVP internally, McDonald’s has experienced higher engagement and a steady decrease in turnover.
    • Externally, McDonald’s has been recognized numerous times by the Great Place to Work Institute and has been classified by Maclean’s magazine as one of Canada’s top 50 employers for 13 years running.

    Make your job descriptions more attractive to female applicants

    10 WAYS TO REMOVE GENDER BIAS FROM JOB DESCRIPTIONS – GLASSDOOR – AN EXCERPT

    1. USE GENDER-NEUTRAL TITLES: Male-oriented titles can inadvertently prevent women from clicking on your job in a list of search results. Avoid including words in your titles like “hacker,” “rockstar,” “superhero,” “guru,” and “ninja,” and use neutral, descriptive titles like “engineer,” “project manager,” or “developer.
    2. CHECK PRONOUNS: When describing the tasks of the ideal candidate, use “they” or “you.” Example: “As Product Manager for XYZ, you will be responsible for setting the product vision and strategy.
    3. AVOID (OR BALANCE) YOUR USE OF GENDER-CHARGED WORDS: Analysis from language tool Textio found that the gender language bias in your job posting predicts the gender of the person you’re going to hire. Use a tool like Textio tool or the free Gender Decoder to identify problem spots in your word choices. Examples: “Analyze” and “determine” are typically associated with male traits, while “collaborate” and “support” are considered female. Avoid aggressive language like “crush it.
    4. AVOID SUPERLATIVES: Excessive use of superlatives such as “expert,” “superior,” and “world class” can turn off female candidates who are more collaborative than competitive in nature. Research also shows that women are less likely than men to brag about their accomplishments. In addition, superlatives related to a candidate’s background can limit the pool of female applicants because there may be very few females currently in leading positions at “world-class” firms
    5. LIMIT THE NUMBER OF REQUIREMENTS: Identify which requirements are “nice to have” versus “must have,” and eliminate the “nice to haves.” Research shows that women are unlikely to apply for a position unless they meet 100 percent of the requirements, while men will apply if they meet 60 percent of the requirements.

    For the full article please click here.

    1.1.5 Review job postings

    To understand potential gender bias

    1. Select a job posting that you are looking to fill, review the descriptions, and identify if any of the following apply:
    • Are the titles gender neutral? This doesn’t mean you can’t be creative in your naming, but consider if the name really represents the role you are looking to fill.
    • Do you use pronouns? If there are instances where the posting says “he” OR “she” change this to “they” or “you.”
    • Are you overusing superlatives? Review the posting and ensure that when words like “expert” or “world class” are used that you genuinely need someone who is at that level.
    • Are all of the tasks/responsibilities listed the ones that are absolutely essential to the job? Women are less likely to apply if they don’t have direct experience with 100% of the criteria – if it’s a non-essential, consider whether it’s needed in the posting.
    • Is there any organization-specific jargon used? Where possible, avoid using organization-specific jargon in order to create an inclusive posting. Avoid using terms/acronyms that are only known to your organization.
  • Select four to six members of your staff, both male and female, and have them highlight within the job posting what elements appeal to them and what elements do not appeal to them or would concern them about the job.
  • Review the feedback from staff, and identify potential opportunities to reduce bias within the posting.

    • Input

    Output

    • Job posting
    • Updated job posting

    Materials

    Participants

    • Pen and paper
    • IT staff members

    Case Study

    INDUSTRY: Social Media

    SOURCE: Buffer Open blog

    When the social media platform Buffer replaced one word in a job posting, it noticed an increase in female candidates.

    Challenge

    For the social media platform Buffer, all employees were called “hackers.” It had front-end hackers, back-end hackers, Android hackers, iOS hackers, and traction hackers.

    As the company began to grow and ramp up hiring, the Chief Technology Officer, Sunil Sadasivan, noticed that Buffer was seeing a very low percentage of female candidates for these “hacker” jobs.

    In researching the challenge in lack of female candidates, the Buffer team discovered that the word “hacker” may be just the reason why.

    Solution

    Understanding that wording has a strong impact on the type of candidates applying to work for Buffer started a great and important conversation on the Buffer team.

    Buffer wanted to be as inviting as possible in job listings, especially because it hires for culture fit over technical skill.

    Buffer went through a number of wording choices that could replace “hacker,” and ended on the term “developer.” All external roles were updated to reflect this wording change.

    Results

    By making this slight change to the wording used in their jobs, Buffer went from seeing a less than 2% female representation of applicants for developer jobs to around 12% female representation for the same job.

    Step 1.2

    Search – Reach more candidates by expanding key search criteria and sourcing strategies

    Activities

    1.2.1 Complete role analysis

    1.2.2 Expand your sourcing pools

    Enhance your recruitment strategies

    Sourcing shouldn’t start with an open position; it should start with identifying an anticipated need and building and nurturing a talent pipeline. IT participation in this is critical to effectively promote the employee experience and foster relationships before candidates even apply.

    Expand your search

    What is a candidate sourcing program?

    A candidate sourcing program is one element of the overall HR sourcing approach, which consists of the overall process (steps to source talent), the people responsible for sourcing, and the programs (internal talent mobility, social media, employee referral, alumni network, campus recruitment, etc.).

    What is a sourcing role analysis?

    Part of the sourcing plan will outline how to identify talent for a role, which includes both the role analysis and the market assessment. The market assessment is normally completed by the HR department and consists of analyzing the market conditions as they relate to specific talent needs. The role analysis looks at what is necessary to be successful in a role, including competencies, education, background experience, etc.

    How will this enable you to attract female candidates?

    Expanding your sourcing programs and supporting deeper role analysis will allow your HR department to reach a larger candidate pool and better understand the type of talent that will be successful in roles within your organization. By expanding from traditional pools and criteria you will open the organization up to a wider variety of talent options.

    Minimize bias in sourcing to hire the right talent and protect against risk

    Failure to take an inclusive approach to sourcing will limit your talent pool by sidelining entire groups or discouraging applicants from diverse backgrounds. Address bias in sourcing so that diverse candidates are not excluded from the start. Solutions such as removing biographical data from CVs prior to interviews may reduce bias, but they may come too late to impact diversity.

    Potential areas of bias in sourcing:

    Modifications to reduce bias:

    Intake Session

    • Describing a specific employee when identifying what it takes to be successful in the role. This may include attributes that do not actually promote success (e.g. school or program) but will decrease diversity of thought.
    • Hiring managers display a “like me” bias where they describe a successful candidate as similar to themselves.
    • Focus on competencies for the role rather than attributes of current employees or skills. Technology is changing rapidly – look for people who have demonstrated a capability over a specific skill.

    Sourcing Pools

    • Blindly hunting or sourcing individuals from a few sources, assuming that these sources are always better than others (e.g. Ivy League schools always produce the best candidates).
    • Expand sources. Don’t exclude diverse sources because they’re not popular.
    • Objectively measure source effectiveness to address underlying assumptions.

    1.2.1 Role analysis

    Customize a sourcing plan for key roles to guide talent pipeline creation.

    1. Complete a role analysis to understand key role requirements. If you are hiring for an existing role, start by taking an inventory of who your top and low performers are within the role today.
    2. Consider your top performers and identify what a successful employee can do better than a less successful one. Start by considering their alignment with job requirements, and identify the education, designations/certifications, and experiences that are necessary for this job. Do not limit yourself; carefully consider if the requirements you are including are actually necessary or just nice to have.

      3. Required Entry Criteria

      Preferred Entry Criteria

      Education
      • University Degree – Bachelors
      • University Degree – Masters

      Experience
      • 5+) years design, or related, experience
      • Experience leading a team
      • External consulting experience
      • Healthcare industry experience

      Designations/Certifications
      • ITIL Foundations
    3. Review Info-Tech’s Job Competency Library in the Workforce Planning Workbook, identify the key competencies that are ideal for this anticipated role, and write a description of how this would manifest in your organization.

      4. Competency

      Level of Proficiency

      Behavioral Descriptions

      Business Analysis

      Level 2: Capable
      • Demonstrates a basic understanding of business roles, processes, planning, and requirements in the organization.
      • Demonstrates a basic understanding of how technologies assist in business processes.
      • Develop basic business cases using internal environment analysis for the business unit level.
    4. Hold a meeting with your HR team or recruiter to highlight the types of experience and competencies you are looking for in a hire to expand the search criteria.

    Target diverse talent pools through different sources

    When looking to diversify your workforce, it’s critical that you look to attract and recruit talent from a variety of different talent pools.

    SOURCING APPROACH

    INTERNAL MOBILITY PROGRAM

    Positioning the right talent in the right place, at the right time, for the right reasons, and supporting them appropriately. Often tied to succession or workforce planning, mentorship, and learning and development.

    SOCIAL MEDIA PROGRAM

    The widely accessible electronic tools that enable anyone to publish and access information, collaborate on common efforts, and build relationships. Think beyond the traditional and consider niche social media platforms.

    EMPLOYEE REFERRAL PROGRAM

    Employees recommend qualified candidates. If the referral is hired, the referring employee typically receives some sort of reward.

    ALUMNI PROGRAM

    An alumni referral program is a formalized way to maintain ongoing relationships with former employees of the organization.

    CAMPUS RECRUITING PROGRAM

    A formalized means of attracting and hiring individuals who are about to graduate from schools, colleges, or universities.

    EVENTS & ASSOCIATION PROGRAM

    A targeted approach for participation in non-profit associations and industry events to build brand awareness of your organization and create a forward-looking talent pipeline.

    1.2.2 Expand your sourcing pools

    Increase the number of female applicants.

    1. Identify where your employees are currently being sourced from and identify how many female candidates you have gotten from each channel as a percentage of applicants.

      2. # of Candidates From Approach

      % of Female Candidates From Approach

      Target # of Female Candidates

      Internal Talent Mobility

      Social Media Program

      Employee Referral Program

      Alumni Program

      Campus Recruiting Program

      Events & Non-Profit Affiliations

      Other (job databases, corporate website, etc.)
    2. Work with your HR partner or organization’s recruiter to identify three recruitment channels from the list that you will work on expanding.
    3. Review the following two slides and identify key success factors for the implementation. Identify what role IT will play and what role HR will play in implementing the approach.
    4. Following implementation, monitor the impact of the tactics on the number of women candidates and determine whether to add additional tactics.

    Different talent sources

    Benefits and success factors of using different talent sources

    Benefits

    Keys to Success

    Internal Mobility Program

    • Drives retention by providing opportunities to develop professionally
    • Provides a ready pipeline for rapid changes
    • Reduces time and cost of recruitment
    • Identify career pathing opportunities
    • Identify potential successors for succession planning
    • Build learning and development and mentorship

    Social Media Program

    • Access to candidates
    • Taps extended networks
    • Facilitates consistent communication with candidates and talent in pipelines
    • Personalizes the candidate experience
    • Identify platforms – common and niche
    • Talk to your top performers and IT network and identify which sites they use
    • Identify how people use that platform – nature of posts and engagement
    • Define what content to share and who from IT should be engaging
    • Be timely with participation and responses

    Employee Referral Program

    • Higher applicant-to-hire rate
    • Decreased time to fill positions
    • Decreased turner
    • Increased quality of hire
    • Expands your network – women in IT often know other qualified women in IT and in project delivery
    • Educate employees (particularly female employees) to participate
    • Send reminders, incorporate into onboarding, and ask leaders to share job openings
    • Make it easy to share jobs by providing templates and shortened URLs
    • Where possible, simplify the process by avoiding paper forms, reaching out quickly
    • Select metrics that will identify areas of strength and gaps in the referral program

    Alumni Program

    • A formalized way to maintain ongoing relationship with former employees
    • Positive branding as alumni are regarded as a credible source of information
    • Source of talent – boomerang employees are doubly as valuable as they understand the organization
    • Increased referral potential provides access to a larger network and alumni know what is required to be successful in the organization
    • Identify the purpose of the network and set clear goals
    • Identify what the network will do: Will the network be virtual or in person? Who will chair? Who should participate? etc.
    • Create a simple process for alumni to share information about vacancies and refer people
    • Measure progress

    Campus Recruiting Program

    • Increases employer brand awareness among talent entering the workforce
    • Provides the opportunity to interact with large groups of potential candidates at one time
    • Offers access to a highly diverse audience
    • Identify key competencies and select programs based on relevant curriculum for building those competencies
    • Select targeted schools keeping in mind programs and existing relationships
    • Work with HR to get involved

    Events & Non-Profit Affiliations

    • Create a strong talent pipeline for future positions
    • Build relationships based on shared values in a comfortable environment for participants
    • Ability to expand diversity by targeting different types of events or by leveraging women-focused, specifically women in technology, groups
    • Look for events that attract similar participants to the skills or roles you are looking to attract, e.g. Women Who Code if you’re looking for developers
    • Actively engage and participate in the event
    • Couple this with learning and development activities, and invite female top performers to participate

    Enhance your recruitment strategies

    Work with your HR department to influence the recruitment process by taking a data-driven approach to understand the root cause of applicant drop-off and success and take corrective actions.

    Secure top candidates

    Why does the candidate experience matter?

    Until recently it was an employer’s market, so recruiters and hiring managers were able to get good talent without courting top candidates. Today, that’s not the case. You need to treat your IT candidates like customers and be mindful that this is often one of the first experiences future staff will have with the organization. It will give them their first real sense of the culture of the organization and whether they want to work for the organization.

    What can IT leaders do if they have limited influence over the interview process?

    Work with your HR department to evaluate the existing recruitment process, share challenges you’ve experienced, and offer additional support in the process. Identify where you can influence the process and if there are opportunities to build service-level agreements around the candidate experience.

    Take a data-driven approach

    Understand opportunities to enhance the talent selection process.

    While your HR department likely owns the candidate experience and processes, if you have identified challenges in diversity we recommend partnering with your HR department or recruitment team to identify opportunities for improvement within the process. If you are attracting a good amount of candidates through your sell and search tactics but aren’t finding that this is translating into more women selected, it’s time to take a look at your selection processes.

    SIMPLIFIED CANDIDATE SELECTION PROCESS STEPS

    1. Application Received
    2. Candidate Selected for Interview
    3. Offer Extended
    4. Offer Accepted
    5. Onboarding of Staff

    To understand the challenges within your selection process, start by baselining your drop-off rates throughout selection and comparing the differences in male and female candidates. Use this to pin point the issues within the process and complete a root-cause analysis to identify where to improve.

    Step 1.3

    Secure – reduce bias in your interview process and create positive candidate experiences

    Activities

    1.3.1 Identify selection challenges

    1.3.1 Identify your selection challenges

    Review your candidate data.

    1. Hold a meeting with your HR partner to identify trends in your selection data. If you have an applicant tracking system, pull all relevant information for analysis.
    2. Start by identifying the total number of candidates that move forward in each stage of the process. Record the overall number of applicants for positions (should have this number from your sourcing analysis), overall number of candidates selected for interviews, overall number of offers extended, overall number of offers rejected, and overall number of employees still employed after one year.
    3. Identify the number of female and male candidates in each of those categories and as a percentage of the total number of applicants.

      4. Selection Process Step

      Total # of Candidates

      Male Candidates

      Female Candidates

      % Difference Male & Female

      #

      #

      % of total

      #

      % of total

      Applicants for Posted Position

      150

      115

      76.7%

      35

      23.3%

      70% fewer females

      Selected for Interview

      (Selected for Second Interview)

      (Selected for Final Interview)

      Offer Extended

      Offer Rejected

      Employees Retained for One Year
    4. Identify where there are differences in the percentages of male and female candidates and where there are significant drop-off rates between steps in the process.

    Note: For larger organizations, we highly recommend analyzing differences in specific teams/roles and/or at different seniority levels. If you have that data available, repeat the analysis, controlling for those factors.

    Root-cause analysis can be conducted in a variety of ways

    Align your root-cause analysis technique with the problem that needs to be solved and leverage the skills of the root-cause analysis team.

    Brainstorming/Process of Elimination

    After brainstorming, identify which possible causes are not the issue’s root cause by removing unlikely causes.

    The Five Whys

    Use reverse engineering to delve deeper into a recruitment issue to identify the root cause.

    Ishikawa/Fishbone Diagram

    Use an Ishikawa/fishbone diagram to identify and narrow down possible causes by categories.

    Process of elimination

    Leveraging root-cause analysis techniques.

    Using the process of elimination can be a powerful tool to determine root causes.

    • To use the process of elimination to determine root cause, gather the participants from within your hiring team together once you have identified where your issues are within the recruitment process and brainstorm a list of potential causes.
    • Like all brainstorming exercises, remember that the purpose is to gather the widest possible variety of perspectives, so be sure not to eliminate any suggested causes out of hand.
    • Once you have an exhaustive list of potential causes, you can begin the process of eliminating unlikely causes to arrive at a list of likely potential causes.

    Example

    Problem: Women candidates are rejecting job offers more consistently

    Potential Causes

    • The process took too long to complete
    • Lack of information about the team and culture
    • Candidates aren’t finding benefits/salary compelling
    • Lack of clarity on role expectations
    • Lack of fit between candidate and interviewers
    • Candidates offered other positions
    • Interview tactics were negatively perceived

    As you brainstorm, ensure that you are identifying differentiators between male and female candidate experiences and rationale. If you ask candidates their rationale for turning down roles, ensure that these are included in the discussion.

    The five whys

    Leveraging root-cause analysis techniques

    Repeatedly asking “why” might seem overly simplistic, but it has the potential to be useful.

    • It can be useful, when confronting a problem, to start with the end result and work backwards.
    • According to Olivier Serrat, a knowledge management specialist at the Asian Development Bank, there are three key components that define successful use of the five whys: “(i) accurate and complete statements of problems, (ii) complete honesty in answering the questions, and (iii) the determination to get to the bottom of problems and resolve them.”
    • As a group, develop a consensus around the problem statement. Go around the room and have each person suggest a potential reason for its occurrence. Repeat the process for each potential reason (ask “why?”) until there are no more potential causes to explore.
    • Note: The total number of “whys” may be more or less than five.

    Example

    The image contains an example of the five whys activity as described in the text above.

    Ishikawa/fishbone diagram

    Leveraging root-cause analysis techniques.

    Use this technique to sort potential causes by category and match them to the problem.

    • The first step in creating a fishbone diagram is agreeing on a problem statement and populating a box on the right side of a whiteboard or a piece of chart paper.
    • Draw a horizontal line left from the box and draw several ribs on either side that will represent the categories of causes you will explore.
    • Label each rib with relevant categories. In the recruitment context, consider cause categories like technology, interview, process, etc. Go around the room and ask, “What causes this problem to happen?” Every result produced should fit into one of the identified categories. Place it there, and continue to brainstorm sub-causes.

    The image contains a screenshot example of the Ishikawa/fishbone diagram.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Avoid naming individuals in the fishbone diagram. The goal of the root-cause exercise is not to lay blame or zero in on a guilty party but rather to identify how you can rectify any challenges.

    Leverage behavioral interviews

    Use Info-Tech’s Behavioral Interview Questions Library.

    Reduce bias in your interviews.

    In the past, companies were pushing the boundaries of the conventional interview, using unconventional questions to find top talent, e.g. “what color is your personality?” The logic was that the best people are the ones who don’t necessarily show perfectly on a resume, and they were intent on finding the best.

    However, many companies have stopped using these questions after extensive statistical analysis revealed there was no correlation between candidates’ ability to answer them and their future performance on the job. Hiring by intuition – or “gut” – is usually dependent on an interpersonal connection being developed over a very short period of time. This means that people who were naturally likeable would be given preferential treatment in hiring decisions whether they were capable of doing the job.

    Asking behavioral interview questions based on the competency needs of the role is the best way to uncover if the candidates will be able to execute on the job.

    For more information see Info-Tech’s Behavioral Interview Question Library.

    The image contains screenshots of Info-Tech's Behavioral Interview Questions Library.

    Improve the level of diversity in your organization by considering inclusive candidate selection practices

    Key action items to create inclusivity in your candidate selection practices:

    1. Managers must be aware of how bias can influence hiring. Encourage your HR department to provide diversity training for recruiters and hiring managers. Ensure those responsible for recruitment are using best practices, are aware of the impact of unconscious bias, and are making decisions in alignment with your DEI strategy.
    2. Use a variety of interviewers to leverage multiple/diverse perspectives. Hiring decisions made by a group can offer a more balanced perspective. Include interviewers from multiple levels in the organization and both men and women.
    3. Hire for distinguished excellence. Be careful not to simply choose the same kind of people over and over, in the name of cultural fit (Source: Recruiter.com, 2015).

      4. Broaden the notion of fit:

    • Hire for skill fit: you might still hire certain types for a specific job (e.g. analytical types for analysis positions), but these candidates can still be diverse.
    • Hire for fit with your organization’s DEI values, regardless of whether the candidate is from a diverse background or not.
    • It can be tempting for hiring managers to hire individuals who are similar to themselves. However, doing so limits the amount of diversity entering your organization, and as a result, limits your organization’s ability to innovate.
  • Deliberately hire for cognitive diversity. Diverse thought processes, perspectives, and problem-solving abilities are positively correlated with firm performance (Source: Journal of Diversity Management, 2014).

    • Leverage a third-party tool

    Ensure recruiting and onboarding programs are effective by surveying your new hires.

    For a deeper analysis of your new hire processes Info-Tech’s sister company, McLean & Company, is an HR research and advisory firm that offers powerful diagnostics to measure HR processes effectiveness. If you are finding diversity issues to be systemic within the organization, leveraging a diagnostic can greatly improve your processes.

    Use this diagnostic to get vital feedback on:

    • Recruiting efforts. Find out if your job marketing efforts are successful, which paths your candidates took to find you, and whether your company is maintaining an attractive profile.
    • Interviewing process. Ensure candidates experience an organized, professional, and ethical process that accurately sets their expectations for the job.
    • Onboarding process. Make sure your new hires are being trained and integrated into their team effectively.
    • Organizational culture. Is your culture welcoming and inclusive? You need to know if top talent enjoy the environment you have to offer.
    The image contains a screenshot of the New Hire Survey.

    For more information on the New Hire Survey click here. If you are interested in referring your HR partner please contact your account manager.

    Phase 2

    Enhance Your Retention Strategies

    Phase 1

    • 1.1 Sell
    • 1.2 Search
    • 1.3 Secure

    Phase 2

    • 2.1 Engagement
    • 2.2 Employee Experience
    • 2.3 Stay Interviews

    Actively engage female staff to retain them

    Employee engagement: the measurement of effective management practices that create a positive emotional connection between the employee and the organization.

    Engaged employees do what’s best for the organization: they come up with product/service improvements, provide exceptional service to customers, consistently exceed performance expectations, and make efficient use of their time and resources. The result is happy customers, better products/services, and saved costs.

    Today, what we find is that 54% of women in IT are not engaged,* but…

    …engaged employees are: 39% more likely to stay at an organization than employees who are not engaged.*

    Additionally, engaging your female staff also has the additional benefit of increasing willingness to innovate by 30% and performance by 28%. The good news is that increasing employee engagement is not difficult, it just requires dedication and an effective toolkit to monitor, analyze, and implement tactics.*

    * Info-Tech and McLean & Company Diagnostics; N=1,308 IT employees

    Don’t seek to satisfy; drive IT success through engagement

    The image contains a screenshot of a diagram that highlights the differences between satisfied and engaged employees.

    Engagement drivers that impact retention for men and women are different – tailor your strategy to your audience

    Ranked correlation of impact of engagement drivers on retention

    The image contains a screenshot that demonstrates the differences in retaining men and women in IT.

    * Recent data stays consistent, but the importance of compensation and recognition in retaining women in IT is increasing.

    Info-Tech Research Group Employee Engagement Diagnostic; N=1,856 IT employees.

    An analysis of the differences between men and women in IT’s drivers indicates that women in IT are significantly less likely than men in IT to agree with the following statements:

    Culture:

    • They identify well with the organization’s values.
    • The organization has a very friendly atmosphere.

    Employee Empowerment:

    • They are given the chance to fully leverage their talents through their job.

    Manager Relationships:

    • They can trust their manager.
    • Their manager cares about them as a person

    Working Environment:

    • They have not seen incidents of discrimination at their organization based on age, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or ethnicity.

    Enhance your retention strategies

    Employee engagement is one of the greatest predictors of intention to stay. To retain you need to understand not only engagement but also your employee experience – the moments that matter – and actively work to create a positive experience.

    Improve employee engagement

    What differentiates an engaged employee?

    Engaged employees do what’s best for the organization: they come up with product/service improvements, provide exceptional service to customers, consistently exceed performance expectations, and make efficient use of their time and resources. The result is happy customers, better products/services, and saved costs.

    Why measure engagement when looking at retention?

    Engaged employees report 39%1 higher intention to stay at the organization than disengaged employees. The cost of losing an employee is estimated to be 150% to 200% of their annual salary.2 Can you afford to not engage your staff?

    Why should IT leadership be responsible for their staff engagement?

    Engagement happens every day, through every interaction, and needs to be tailored to individual team members to be successful. When engagement is owned by IT leadership, engagement initiatives are incorporated into daily experiences and personalized to their employees based on what is happening in real time. It is this active, dynamic leadership that inspires ongoing employee engagement and differentiates those who talk about engagement from those who succeed in engaging their teams.

    Sources: 1 - McLean & Company Employee Engagement Survey, 2 - Gallup, 2019

    Step 2.1

    Improve employee engagement

    Activities

    2.1.1 Review employee engagement results and trends

    2.1.2 Focus on areas that impact retention of women

    Take a data-driven approach

    Info-Tech’s employee engagement diagnostics are low-effort, high-impact programs that will give you detailed report cards on the organization’s engagement levels. Use these insights to understand your employees’ engagement levels by a variety of core demographics.

    FULL ENGAGEMENT DIAGNOSTIC

    EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE MONITOR

    The full engagement diagnostic provides a comprehensive view of your organization’s engagement levels, informing you of what motivates employees and providing a detailed view of what engagement drivers to focus on for optimal results.

    Info-Tech & McLean & Company’s Full Engagement Diagnostic Survey has 81 questions in total.

    The survey should be completed annually and typically takes 15-20 minutes to complete.

    The EXM Dashboard is designed to give organizations a real-time view of employee engagement while being minimally intrusive.

    This monthly one-question survey allows organizations to track the impact of events and initiatives on employee engagement as they happen, creating a culture of engagement.

    The survey takes less than 30 seconds to complete and is fully automated.

    For the purpose of improving retention of women in IT, we encourage you to leverage the EXM tool, which will allow you to track how this demographic group’s engagement changes as you implement new initiatives.

    Engagement survey

    For a detailed breakdown of staff overall engagement priorities.

    Overall Engagement Results

    • A clear breakdown of employee engagement results by demographic, gender, and team.
    • Detailed engagement breakdown and benchmarking.
    The image contains a screenshot of the overall engagement results.

    Priority Matrix and Driver Scores

    • A priority matrix specific to your organization.
    • A breakdown of question scores by priority matrix quadrant.
    • Know what not to focus your effort on – not all engagement drivers will have a high impact on engagement.
    The image contains a screenshot of the priority matrix and driver scores.

    EXM dashboard

    Reporting to track engagement in real time.

    EXM Dashboard

    • Leverage Info-Tech’s real-time Employee Experience Monitor dashboard to track your team’s engagement levels over time.
    • Track changes in the number of supporters and detractors and slice the data by roles, teams, and gender.
    The image contains a screenshot of the EXM dashboard.

    Time Series Trends

    • As you implement new initiatives to improve the engagement and retention of staff, track their impact and continuously course correct.
    • Empower your leaders to actively manage their team culture to drive innovation, retention, and productivity.
    The image contains a screenshot of the time series trends.

    Start your diagnostic now

    Leverage your Info-Tech membership to seamlessly launch your employee engagement survey.

    Info-Tech’s dedicated team of program managers will facilitate this diagnostic program remotely, providing you with a convenient, low-effort, high-impact experience.

    We will guide you through the process with your goals in mind to deliver deep insight into your successes and areas to improve.

    What You Need to Do:

    Info-Tech’s Program Manager Will:
    1. Contact Info-Tech to launch the program.
    2. Review the two survey options to select the right survey for your organization.
    3. Work with an Info-Tech analyst to set up your personal diagnostic.
    4. Identify who you would like to take the survey.
    5. Customize Info-Tech’s email templates.
    6. Participate in a one-hour results call with an Info-Tech executive advisor.
    1. Work with you to define your engagement strategy and goals.
    2. Launch, maintain, and support the diagnostic in the field.
    3. Provide you with response rates throughout the process.
    4. Explore your results in a one-hour call with an executive advisor to fully understand key insights from the data.
    5. Provide quarterly updates and training materials for your leadership team.

    Start Now

    2.1.1 Review employee engagement results

    Identify trends

    1. In a call with one of Info-Tech’s executive advisors, review the results of your employee engagement survey.
    2. Identify which departments are most and least engaged and brainstorm some high-level reasons.
    3. Review the demographic information and highlight any inconsistencies or areas with high levels of variance. Document which demographics have the most and least engaged, disengaged, and indifferent employees.
    4. With help from the Info-Tech executive advisor, identify and document any dramatic differences in the demographic data, particularly around gender.
    5. Identify if the majority of issues effecting engagement are at an organization or department level and which stakeholders you need to engage to support the process moving forward.
    6. Identify next steps.
    Input
    • Employee engagement results
    Participants
    • CIO
    • Info-Tech Advisor

    2.1.2 Focus on areas that impact retention of women

    Hold focus groups with IT staff and focus on the five areas with the greatest impact on women’s retention.

    1. Review the handout slides on the following pages to get a better understanding of the definition of each of the top five drivers impacting women’s retention. Depending on your team’s size, pick one to three drivers to focus on for your first focus group.
    2. Divide the participants into teams and on flip chart paper or using sticky notes have the teams brainstorm what you can stop/start/continue doing to help you improve on your assigned driver.
    • Continue: actions that work for the team related to this driver and should proceed.
    • Start: actions/initiatives that the team would like to begin.
    • Stop: actions/initiatives that the team would like to stop.
  • Prioritize the initiatives by considering: Is this initiative something you feel will make an impact on the engagement driver? Eliminate any initiatives that would not make an impact.
  • Have the groups present back and vote on two to three initiatives to implement to drive improvements within that area.

    • Culture

    Engagement driver handout

    Culture: The degree to which an employee identifies with the beliefs, values, and attitudes of the organization.

    Questions:

    • I identify well with the organization’s values.
    • This organization has a collaborative work environment.
    • This organization has a very friendly atmosphere.
    • I am a fit for the organizational culture.

    Ranked Correlation of Impact of Engagement Driver on Retention:

    • Women in IT: #1
    • Men in IT: #2

    Company Potential

    Engagement driver handout

    Company Potential: An employee’s understanding of and commitment to the organization’s mission, and the employee’s excitement about the organization’s mission and future.

    Questions:

    • This organization has a bright future.
    • I am impressed with the quality of people at this organization.
    • People in this organization are committed to doing high-quality work.
    • I believe in the organization’s overall business strategy.
    • This organization encourages innovation.

    Ranked Correlation of Impact of Engagement Driver on Retention:

    • Women in IT: #2
    • Men in IT: #1

    Employee Empowerment

    Engagement driver handout

    Employee Empowerment: The degree to which employees have accountability and control over their work within a supported environment.

    Questions:

    • I am not afraid of trying out new ideas in my job.
    • If I make a suggestion to improve something in my department I believe it will be taken seriously.
    • I am empowered to make decisions about how I do my work.
    • I clearly understand what is expected of me on the job.
    • I have all the tools I need to do a great job.
    • I am given the chance to fully leverage my talents through my job.

    Ranked Correlation of Impact of Engagement Driver on Retention:

    • Women in IT: #3
    • Men in IT: #6

    Learning and Development

    Engagement driver handout

    Learning and Development: A cooperative and continuous effort between an employee and the organization to enhance an employee’s skill set and expertise and meet an employee’s career objectives and the organization’s needs.

    Questions:

    • I can advance my career in this organization.
    • I am encouraged to pursue career development activities.
    • In the last year, I have received an adequate amount of training.
    • In the last year, the training I have received has helped me do my job better.

    Ranked Correlation of Impact of Engagement Driver on Retention:

    • Women in IT: #4
    • Men in IT: #5

    Manager Relationships

    Engagement driver handout

    Manager Relationships: The professional and personal relationship an employee has with their manager. Manager relationships depend on the trust that exists between these two individuals and the extent that a manager supports and develops the employee.

    Questions:

    • My manager inspires me to improve.
    • My manager provides me with high-quality feedback.
    • My manager helps me achieve better results.
    • I trust my manager.
    • My manager cares about me as a person.
    • My manager keeps me well informed about decisions that affect me.

    Ranked Correlation of Impact of Engagement Driver on Retention:

    • Women in IT: #5
    • Men in IT: #11

    Step 2.2

    Examine employee experience

    Activities

    2.2.1 Identify moments that matter

    Understand why and when employees plan to depart

    Leverage “psychology of quitting” expertise.

    Train your managers to provide them with the skills and expertise to recognize the warning signs of an employee’s departure and know how to re-engage and retain them.

    • The majority of resignations are not spur of the moment. They are the result of a compilation of events over a period of time. Normally, these instances are magnified by a stimulant. The final straw or the breaking point drives the employee to make a change. In fact, it has been estimated that a shock jumpstarts 65% of departures.*
      • These shocks could be a lack of promotion, loss of privilege or development opportunity, or a quarrel with a manager.
    • Employees rarely leave right away. Most wait until they have confirmed a new job opportunity before leaving. This creates a window in which you can reengage and retain them.
    • The majority of employees show signs that they are beginning to think of leaving. Whether that is leaving immediately, putting in the bare minimum of effort, or job searching online at work. Train your managers to know the signs and to keep an eye out for potentially dissatisfied and searching employees.*
    • It is easier and less costly to reengage an employee than to start the hiring process from the beginning.
    *Source: The Career Café, 2017

    Examine employee experience (EX)

    Look beyond engagement drivers to drive retention.

    Employee experience (EX) is the employee’s perception of their cumulative lived experiences with the organization. It is gauged by how well the employee’s expectations are met within the parameters of the workplace, especially by the “moments that matter” to them. Individual employee engagement is the outcome of a strong overall EX.

    The image contains a diagram as an example of examining employee experience.

    Drive a positive employee experience

    Identify moments that matter.

    Moments that matter are defining pieces or periods in an employee’s experience that create a critical turning point or memory that is of significant importance to them.

    These are moments that dramatically change the path of the emotional journey, influence the quality of the final outcome, or end the journey prematurely.

    To identify the moment that matters look for significant drops in the emotional journey that your organization needs to improve or significant bumps that your organization can capitalize on. Look for these drops or bumps in the journey and take stock of everything you have recorded at that point in the process. To improve the experience, analyze the hidden needs and how they are or aren’t being met.

    The image contains a screenshot of an example graph to demonstrate opportunities and issues to help drive a positive employee experience.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The moment that matters is key and it could be completely separate from organizational life, like the death of a family member. Leaders can more proactively address these moments that matter by identifying them and determining how to make the touchpoint at that moment more impactful.

    2.2.1 Identify moments that matter

    1. Review your Employee Experience Monitor weekly trends by logging into your dashboard and clicking on “Time Series Trends.”
    2. With your management team, identify any weekly trends where your Employee Experience Score has seen changes in the number of detractor, passive, or promoter responses.
    3. For each significant change identify:
    • Increase in promoters or decrease in detractors:
      • What can we do to duplicate positive moments that occurred this week?
      • What did I do as a leader to create positive employee experiences?
      • What happened in the organization that created a positive employee experience?
    • Increase in detractors or decrease in promoters:
      • What difficult change was delivered this week?
      • What about this change was negatively perceived?
      • During the difficult situation how did we as a leadership team support our staff?
      • Who did we engage and recognize during the difficult situation?
      • Was this situation a one-off issue or is this likely to occur again?
  • Consider your interactions with employees and identify how you made moments matter during those times related to four key engagement drivers impacting women in IT:
    • How did you promote a positive culture and friendly atmosphere?
    • How did you empower female staff to leverage their talents?
    • How did you interact with staff?
    • How did you promote a positive work environment? Where did you see bias in decisions?
  • Independently as manager, document three to five lessons learned from the changes in your detractors and promoters, and determine what action you will take.

    • Measured benefits of positive employee experience

    Positive employee experiences lead to engaged employees, and engaged employees are eight times more likely to recommend the organization (McLean & Company Employee Engagement Database, 2017; N=74,671).

    Retention

    Employees who indicate they are having a positive experience at work have a 52% higher level of intent to stay (Great Place To Work Institute, 2021)

    The bottom line

    Organizations that make employee experience a focus have: 23% higher profitability 10% higher customer loyalty (Achievers, 2021)

    Case Study

    INDUSTRY: Post-Secondary Education

    SOURCE: Adam Grant, “Impact and the Art of Motivation Maintenance: The Effects of Contact with Beneficiaries on Persistence Behavior”

    The future is here! Is your data architecture practice ready?

    Challenge

    A university call center, tasked with raising scholarship money from potential donors, had high employee turnover and low morale.

    Solution

    A study led by Grant arranged for a test group of employees to meet and interact with a scholarship recipient. In the five-minute meeting, employees learned what the student was studying.

    Results

    Demonstrating the purpose behind their work had significant returns. Employees who had met with the student demonstrated:

    More than two times longer “talk time” with potential donors.

    A productivity increase of 400%: the weekly average in donations went from $185.94 to $503.22 for test-group employees.

    Enhance your retention strategies

    Do not wait until employees leave to find out what they were unhappy with or why they liked the organization. Instead, perform stay interviews with top and core talent to create a holistic understanding of what they are perceiving and feeling.

    Conduct stay interviews

    What is a stay interview?

    A stay interview is a conversation with current employees. It should be performed on a yearly basis and is an informal discussion to generate deeper insight into the employee’s opinions, perspectives, concerns, and complaints. Stay interviews can have a multitude of uses. In this project they will be used to understand why top and core talent chose to stay with the organization to ensure that organizations understand and build upon their current strengths.

    When should you do stay interviews?

    We recommend completing stay interviews at least on an annual, if not quarterly, basis to truly understand how staff are feeling about the organization and their job, why they stay at the organization, and what would cause them to leave. Couple the outcomes of these interviews with employee engagement action planning to ensure that you are able to address talent needs.

    Step 2.3

    Conduct stay interviews and learn why employees stay

    Activities

    2.3.1 Conduct stay interviews

    Conduct regular “stay” or “retention” interviews

    Build stay interviews into the regular routine. By incorporating stay interviews into your schedule, they are more likely to stick. This regularity provides several advantages:

    1. Ensures that retention issues do not take you by surprise. With a finger on the pulse of the organization you will be aware of potential issues.
    2. Acts as a supplement to the engagement survey by providing additional information and context for the current level of emotion within the organization.
    3. Begins to build a wealth of information that can be analyzed to identify themes and trends. This can be used to track whether the reasons why individuals stay are consistent or if are they changing. This will ensure that the retention strategy remains up to date.

    Stay interview best practices:

    • Ideally is performed by managers, but can be performed by HR.
      • Ideally completed by managers as they are more familiar with their employees, have a greater reach, can hold meetings in a more informal setting, and will receive information first hand.
      • If conducted by managers, it’s a best practice to ensure that there is a central repository of themes so that you can identify if there are any trends in the responses, that consistent questions are asked, and that all of the information is in one place
    • Should be an informal conversation.
    • Should be conducted in a non-critical time in the business year.
    • Ask three types of questions:
      • What do you enjoy about working here?
      • What would you change about your working environment?
      • What would encourage or force you to leave the organization?
    • Interview a diverse employee base:
      • Demographics
      • Role
      • Performance level
      • Location
    Source: Talent Management & HT, 2013

    Leverage stay interviews

    Use Info-Tech’s Stay Interview Guide.

    Proactively identify opportunities to drive retention.

    The Stay Interview Guide helps managers conduct interviews with current employees, enabling the manager to understand:

    • The employee's current engagement level.
    • The employee's satisfaction with current role and responsibilities.
    • Suggestions for potential improvements.
    • An employee's intent to stay with the organization.

    Use this template to help you understand how you can best engage your employees and identify any challenges, in terms of moments that mattered, that negatively impacted their intention to stay at the organization.

    The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's Stay Interview Guide.

    2.3.1 Conduct stay interviews

    1. If you are using the Employee Experience Monitor, prepare for your stay interviews by reviewing your results and identifying if there have been any changes in the results over the previous six weeks. Identify which demographics have the highest and lowest engagement levels – and identify any changes in experience between different demographics.
    2. Identify a meeting schedule and cadence that seems appropriate for your stay interviews. For example, you likely will not do all staff at the same time and it may be beneficial to space out your meetings throughout the year. Select a candidate for your first stay interview and invite them for a one-on-one meeting. If it’s unusual for you to meet with this employee, we recommend providing some light context around the rationale, such as that you are looking for opportunities to strengthen the organizational culture and better understand how you can improve retention and engagement at the organization.
    3. Download the Stay Interview Template, review all of the questions beforehand, and identify the key questions that you want to ask in the meeting.
    • TIP: Even though this is called a “stay interview,” really it should be more of a conversation, and certainly not an interrogation. Know the questions you want to ask, and ask your staff member if it’s ok if you jot down some notes. It may even be beneficial to have the meeting outside of the office, over lunch, or out for coffee.
  • Hold your meeting with the employee and thank them for their time.
  • Following the meeting, send them a thank-you email to thank them for providing feedback, summarize your top three to five key takeaways from the meeting, verify with them that this aligns with their perspective, and see if they have anything else to add to the conversation. Identify any initiatives or changes that you will make as a result of the information – set a date for execution and follow-up.
  • If you are in the process of recruiting new employees to the organization, don’t forget to remind them of your referral program and ask if they might know of any candidates that would be a good fit for the organization.

    • Download the Stay Interview Guide

    Ten tips for best managing stay interviews

    Although stay interviews are meant to be informal, you should schedule them as you would any other meeting. Simply invite the employee for a chat.

    1. Step out of the office if possible. Opt for your local coffee shop, a casual lunch destination, or another public but informal location.
    2. Keep the conversation short, no more than 15 to 20 minutes. If there are any areas of concern that you think warrant action, ask the employee if they would like to discuss them another time. Suggest another meeting to delve deeper into specific issues.
    3. Be clear about the purpose of the conversation. Stay interviews are not performance reviews.
    4. Focus on what you can do for them. Ask about the employee’s preferences when it comes to feedback and communication (frequency, method, etc.) as well as development (preferences around methods, e.g. coaching or rotations, and personal goals).
    5. Be positive. Ask your employee what they like about their job and use positively framed questions.
    6. Ask about what they like doing. People enjoy talking about what they like to do. Ask employees about the talents and skills they would like to incorporate into their work duties.
    7. Show that you’re listening – paraphrase, ask for clarification, and use appropriate gestures.
    8. Refrain from taking notes during the meeting to preserve a conversational atmosphere.
    9. Pay attention to the employee’s body language and tone. If it appears that they are uncomfortable talking to you, stop the interview or pause to let them collect themselves.
    10. Be open to suggestions, but remember that you can’t control everything. If the employee brings up issues that are beyond your control, tell them that you will do all you can to improve the situation but can’t guarantee anything.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT

    • 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 Top IT Talent

    • Changing workforce dynamics and increased transparency have shifted the power from employers to job seekers, stiffening the competition for talent.
    • Candidate expectations match high consumer expectations and affect the employer brand, the consumer brand, and overall organizational reputation. Delivering a positive candidate experience (CX2) is no longer optional.

    Acquire the Right Hires with Effective Interviewing

    • Talk is cheap. Hiring isn’t.
    • Gain insight into and understand the need for a strong interview process.
    • Strategize and plan your interview process.
    • Understand various hiring scenarios and how an interview process may be modified to reflect your organization’s scenario.

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    Garner, Mandy. “How to attract and recruit a more gender diverse team.” Working Mums, 4 March 2016. Web.

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    Johnson, Stephanie K., David R. Hekman, and Elsa T. Chan. “If There’s Only One Woman in Your Candidate Pool, There’s Statistically No Chance She’ll Be Hired.” Harvard Business Review, 26 April 2016. Web.

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    Kosinski, M. “Why You Might Want to Focus a Little Less on Hiring for Cultural Fit.” Recruiter.com, 11 Aug. 2015. Web.

    Krome, M. A. “Knowledge Transformation: A Case for Workforce Diversity.” Journal of Diversity Management (JDM), vol. 9, no. 2, Nov. 2014, pp. 103-110.

    Ladimeij, Kazim. “Why Staff Resign; the Psychology of Quitting.” The Career Café, 31 March 2017. Updated 9 Jan. 2018. Web.

    Loehr, Anne. “Why You Need a New Strategy For Retaining Female Talent.” ReWork, 10 Aug. 2015. Web.

    Lucas, Suzanne. “How Much Employee Turnover Really Costs You.” Inc., 30 Aug. 2013. Web.

    Marttila, Paula. “5 Step Action Plan To Attract Women Join Tech Startups.” LinkedIn, 10 March 2016. Web.

    Mayor, Tracy. “Women in IT: How deep is the bench?” Computerworld, 19 Nov. 2012. Web.

    McCracken, Douglas M. “Winning the Talent War for Women: Sometimes It Takes a Revolution.” Harvard Business Review, Nov.-Dec. 2000. Web.

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    McFeely, Shane, and Ben Wigert. “This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion.” Gallup, Inc., 31 March 2019. Accessed 4 March 2022.

    Morgan, Jacob. The Employee Experience Advantage: How to Win the War for Talent by Giving Employees the Workspaces they Want, the Tools they Need, and a Culture They Can Celebrate. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2017. Print.

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    Peck, Emily. “The Stats On Women In Tech Are Actually Getting Worse.” Huffington Post. 27 March 2015. Updated 6 Dec. 2017. Web. 20

    Porter, Jane. “Why Are Women Leaving Science, Engineering, And Tech Jobs?” Fast Company, 15 Oct. 2014. Web.

    Pratt, Siofra. “Emma Watson: Your New Recruitment Guru - How to: Attract, Source and Recruit Women.” SocialTalent, 25 Sept. 2014. Web.

    “RBC Diversity Blueprint 2012-2015.” 2012-2015 Report Card, RBC, 2015. Web.

    Richter, Felix. “Infographic: Women’s Representation in Big Tech.” Statista Infographics, 1 July 2021. Web.

    Rogers, Rikki. “5 Ways Companies Can Attract More Women (Aside From Offering to Freeze Their Eggs).” The Muse, n.d. Web.

    Sazzoid. “HOWTO recruit and retain women in tech workplaces.” Geek Feminism Wiki, 10 Jan. 2012. Updated 18 Aug. 2016. Web.

    Seiter, Courtney. “Why We Removed the Word ‘Hacker’ From Buffer Job Descriptions.” Buffer Open blog, 13 March 2015. Updated 31 Aug. 2018. Web.

    Serebrin, Jacob. “With tech giants like Google going after female talent, how can startups compete?” The Globe and Mail, 18 Jan. 2016. Updated 16 May 2018. Web.

    Snyder, Kieran. “Why women leave tech: It's the culture, not because 'math is hard'.” Fortune, 2 Oct. 2014. Web.

    Stackpole, Beth. “5 ways to attract and retain female technologists.” Computerworld, 7 March 2016. Web.

    Sullivan, John. “4 Stay Interview Formats You Really Should Consider.” Talent Management & HT, 5 Dec. 2013. Web.

    Syed, Nurhuda. “IWD 2021: Why Are Women Underrepresented in the C-Suite?” HRD America, 5 March 2021. Web.

    Sylvester, Cheryl. “How to empower women in IT (and beyond) on #InternationalWomenDay.” ITBUSINESS.CA, 31 March 2016. Web.

    “The Power of Parity: Advancing Women’s Equality in the United States.” McKinsey Global Institute, April 2016. Web.

    White, Cindy. “How to Promote Gender Equality in the Workplace.” Chron, 8 Aug. 2018. Web.

    White, Sarah. “Women in Tech Statistics: The Hard Truths of an Uphill Battle.” CIO From IDG Communication, Inc., 8 March 2021. Accessed 24 Feb. 2022.

    Time Study

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    • Parent Category Name: Governance, Risk & Compliance
    • Parent Category Link: /governance-risk-compliance
    • In ESG’s 2018 report “The Life of Cybersecurity Professionals,” 36% of participants expressed the overwhelming workload was a stressful aspect of their job.
    • Organizations expect a lot from their security specialists. From monitoring the threat environment, protecting business assets, and learning new tools, to keeping up with IT initiatives, cybersecurity teams struggle to balance their responsibilities with the constant emergencies and disruptions that take them away from their primary tasks.
    • Businesses fail to recognize the challenges associated with task prioritization and the time management practices of a security professional.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The majority of scheduled calendar meetings include employees and peers.
      • Our research indicates cybersecurity professionals spent the majority of their meetings with employees (28%) and peers (24%). Other stakeholders involved in meetings included by myself (15%), boss (13%), customers (10%), vendors (8%), and board of directors (2%).
    • Calendar meetings are focused on project work, management, and operations.
      • When asked to categorize calendar meetings, the focus was on project work (26%), management (23%), and operations (22%). Other scheduled meetings included ones focused on strategy (15%), innovation (9%), and personal time (5%).
    • Time management scores were influenced by the percentage of time spent with employees and peers.
      • When participants were divided into good and poor time managers, we found good time managers spent less time with their peers and more time with their employees. This may be due to the nature of employee meetings being more directly tied to the project outputs of the manager than their peer meetings. Managers who spend more time in meetings with their employees feel a sense of accomplishment, and hence rate themselves higher in time management.

    Impact and Result

    • Understand how cybersecurity professionals allocate their time.
    • Gain insight on whether perceived time management skills are associated with calendar maintenance factors.
    • Identify common time management pain points among cybersecurity professionals.
    • Identify current strategies cybersecurity professionals use to manage their time.

    Time Study Research & Tools

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

    1. Read our Time Study

    Read our Time Study to understand how cybersecurity professionals allocate their time, what pain points they endure, and tactics that can be leveraged to better manage time.

    • Time Study Storyboard
    [infographic]

    Annual CIO Survey Report 2024

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    CIOs today face increasing pressures, disruptive emerging technologies, talent shortages, and a slew of other challenges. What are their top concerns, priorities, and technology bets that will define the future direction of IT?

    CIO responses to our Future of IT 2024 survey reveal key insights on spending projects, the potential disruptions causing the most concern, plans for adopting emerging technology, and how firms are responding to generative AI.

    See how CIOs are sizing up the opportunities and threats of the year ahead

    Map your organization’s response to the external environment compared to CIOs across geographies and industries. Learn:

    • The CIO view on continuing concerns such as cybersecurity.
    • Where they rate their IT department’s maturity.
    • What their biggest concerns and budget increases are.
    • How they’re approaching third-party generative AI tools.

    Annual CIO Survey Report 2024 Research & Tools

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

    1. Future of IT Survey 2024 – A summary of key insights from the CIO responses to our Future of IT 2024 survey.

    Take the pulse of the IT industry and see how CIOs are planning to approach 2024.

    • Annual CIO Survey Report for 2024
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Annual CIO Survey Report 2024

    An inaugural look at what's on the minds of CIOs.

    1. Firmographics

    • Region
    • Title
    • Organization Size
    • IT Budget Size
    • Industry

    Firmographics

    The majority of CIO responses came from North America. Contributors represent regions from around the world.

    Countries / Regions Response %
    United States 47.18%
    Canada 11.86%
    Australia 9.60%
    Africa 6.50%
    China 0.28%
    Germany 1.13%
    United Kingdom 5.37%
    India 1.41%
    Brazil 1.98%
    Mexico 0.56%
    Middle East 4.80%
    Asia 0.28%
    Other country in Europe 4.52%

    n=354

    Firmographics

    A typical CIO respondent held a C-level position at a small to mid-sized organization.

    Half of CIOs hold a C-level position, 10% are VP-level, and 20% are director level

    Pie Chart of CIO positions

    38% of respondents are from an organization with above 1,000 employees

    Pie chart of size of organizations

    Firmographics

    A typical CIO respondent held a C-level position at a small to mid-sized organization.

    40% of CIOs report an annual budget of more than $10 million

    Pie chart of CIO annual budget

    A range of industries are represented, with 29% of respondents in the public sector or financial services

    Range of industries

    2. Key Factors

    • IT Maturity
    • Disruptive Factors
    • IT Spending Plans
    • Talent Shortage

    Two in three respondents say IT can deliver outcomes that Support or Optimize the business

    IT drives outcomes

    Most CIOs are concerned with cybersecurity disruptions, and one in four expect a budget increase of above 10%

    How likely is it that the following factors will disrupt your business in the next 12 months?

    Chart for factors that will disrupt your business

    Looking ahead to 2024, how will your organization's IT spending change compared to spending in 2023?

    Chart of IT spending change

    3. Adoption of Emerging Technology

    • Fastest growing tech for 2024 and beyond

    CIOs plan the most new spend on AI in 2024 and on mixed reality after 2024

    Top five technologies for new spending planned in 2024:

    1. Artificial intelligence - 35%
    2. Robotic process automation or intelligent process automation - 24%
    3. No-code/low-code platforms - 21%
    4. Data management solutions - 14%
    5. Internet of Things (IoT) - 13%

    Top five technologies for new spending planned after 2024:

    1. Mixed reality - 20%
    2. Blockchain - 19%
    3. Internet of Things (IoT) - 17%
    4. Robotics/drones - 16%
    5. Robotic process automation or intelligent process automation - 14%

    n=301

    Info-Tech Insight
    Three in four CIOs say they have no plans to invest in quantum computing, more than any other technology with no spending plans.

    4. Adoption of AI

    • Interest in generative AI applications
    • Tasks to be completed with AI
    • Progress in deploying AI

    CIOs are most interested in industry-specific generative AI applications or text-based

    Rate your business interest in adopting the following generative AI applications:

    Chart for interest in AI

    There is interest across all types of generative AI applications. CIOs are least interested in visual media generators, rating it just 2.4 out of 5 on average.

    n=251

    Info-Tech Insight
    Examples of generative AI solutions specific to the legal industry include Litigate, CoCounsel, and Harvey.

    By the end of 2024, CIOs most often plan to use AI for analytics and repetitive tasks

    Most popular use cases for AI by end of 2024:

    1. Business analytics or intelligence - 69%
    2. Automate repetitive, low-level tasks - 68%
    3. Identify risks and improve security - 66%
    4. IT operations - 62%
    5. Conversational AI or virtual assistants - 57%

    Fastest growing uses cases for AI in 2024:

    1. Automate repetitive, low-level tasks - 39%
    2. IT operations - 38%
    3. Conversational AI or virtual assistants - 36%
    4. Business analytics or intelligence - 35%
    5. Identify risks and improve security - 32%

    n=218

    Info-Tech Insight
    The least popular use case for AI is to help define business strategy, with 45% saying they have no plans for it.

    One in three CIOs are running AI pilots or are more advanced with deployment

    How far have you progressed in the use of AI?

    Chart of progress in use of AI

    Info-Tech Insight
    Almost half of CIOs say ChatGPT has been a catalyst for their business to adopt new AI initiatives.

    5. AI Risk

    • Perceived impact of AI
    • Approach to third-party AI tools
    • AI features in business applications
    • AI governance and accountability

    Six in ten CIOs say AI will have a positive impact on their organization

    What overall impact do you expect AI to have on your organization?

    Overall impact of AI on organization

    The majority of CIOs are waiting for professional-grade generative AI tools

    Which of the following best describes your organization's approach to third-party generative AI tools (such as ChatGPT or Midjourney)?

    Third-party generative AI

    Info-Tech Insight
    Business concerns over intellectual property and sensitive data exposure led OpenAI to announce ChatGPT won't use data submitted via its API for model training unless customers opt in to do so. ChatGPT users can also disable chat history to avoid having their data used for model training (OpenAI).

    One in three CIOs say they are accountable for AI, and the majority are exploring it cautiously

    Who in your organization is accountable for governance of AI?

    Governance of AI

    More than one-third of CIOs say no AI governance steps are in place today

    What AI governance steps does your organization have in place today?

    Chart of AI governance steps

    Among organizations that plan to invest in AI in 2024, 30% still say there are no steps in place for AI governance. The most popular steps to take are to publish clear explanations about how AI is used, and to conduct impact assessments (n=170).

    Chart of AI governance steps

    Among all CIOs, including those that do not plan to invest in AI next year, 37% say no steps are being taken toward AI governance today (n=243).

    6. Contribute to Info-Tech's Research Community

    • Volunteer to be interviewed
    • Attend LIVE in Las Vegas

    It's not too late; take the Future of IT online survey

    Contribute to our tech trends insights

    If you haven't already contributed to our Future of IT online survey, we are keeping the survey open to continue to collect insights and inform our research reports and agenda planning process. You can take the survey today. Those that complete the survey will be sent a complimentary Tech Trends 2024 report.

    Complete an interview for the Future of IT research project

    Help us chart the future course of IT

    If you are receiving this for completing the Future of IT online survey, thank you for your contribution. If you are interested in further participation and would like to provide a complementary interview, please get in touch at brian.Jackson@infotech.com. All interview subjects must also complete the online survey.

    If you've already completed an interview, thank you very much, and you can look forward to seeing more impacts of your contribution in the near future.

    LIVE 2023

    Methodology

    All data in this report is from Info-Tech's Future of IT online survey 2023 edition.

    A CIO focus for the Future of IT

    Data in this report represents respondents to the Future of IT online survey conducted by Info-Tech Research Group between May 11 and July 7, 2023.

    Only CIO respondents were selected for this report, defined as those who indicated they are the most senior member of their organization's IT department.

    This data segment reflects 355 total responses with 239 completing every question on the survey.

    Further data from the Future of IT online survey and the accompanying interview process will be featured in Info-Tech's Tech Trends 2024 report this fall and in forthcoming Priorities reports including Applications, Data & EA, CIO, Infrastructure, and Security.

    Secure Operations in High-Risk Jurisdictions

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    Business operations in high-risk areas of the world contend with complex threat environments and risk scenarios that often require a unique response. But traditional approaches to security strategy often miss these jurisdictional risks, leaving organizations vulnerable to threats that range from cybercrime and data breaches to fines and penalties.

    Security leaders need to identify high-risk jurisdictions, inventory critical assets, identify vulnerabilities, assess risks, and identify security controls necessary to mitigate those risks.

    Secure operations and protect critical assets in high-risk regions

    Across risks that include insider threats and commercial surveillance, the two greatest vulnerabilities that organizations face in high-risk parts of the world are travel and compliance. Organizations can make small adjustments to their security program to address these risks:

    1. Support high-risk travel: Put measures and guidelines in place to protect personnel, data, and devices before, during, and after employee travel.
    2. Mitigate compliance risk: Consider data residency requirements, data breach notification, cross-border data transfer, and third-party risks to support business growth.

    Using these two prevalent risk scenarios in high-risk jurisdictions as examples, this research walks you through the steps to analyze the threat landscape, assess security risks, and execute a response to mitigate them.

    Secure Operations in High-Risk Jurisdictions Research & Tools

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

    1. Secure Operations in High-Risk Jurisdictions – A step-by-step approach to mitigating jurisdictional security and privacy risks.

    Traditional approaches to security strategy often miss jurisdictional risks. Use this storyboard to make small adjustments to your security program to mitigate security risks in high-risk jurisdictions.

    • Secure Operations in High-Risk Jurisdictions – Phases 1-3

    2. Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heat Map Tool – A tool to inventory, assess, and treat jurisdictional risks.

    Use this tool to track jurisdictional risks, assess the exposure of critical assets, and identify mitigation controls. Use the geographic heatmap to communicate inherent jurisdictional risk with key stakeholders.

    • Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heat Map Tool

    3. Guidelines for Key Jurisdictional Risk Scenarios – Two structured templates to help you develop guidelines for two key jurisdictional risk scenarios: high-risk travel and compliance risk

    Use these two templates to develop help you develop your own guidelines for key jurisdictional risk scenarios. The guidelines address high-risk travel and compliance risk.

    • Digital Safety Guidelines for International Travel
    • Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template

    Infographic

    Workshop: Secure Operations in High-Risk Jurisdictions

    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 Context for Risk Assessment

    The Purpose

    Assess business requirements and evaluate security pressures to set the context for the security risk assessment.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understand the goals of the organization in high-risk jurisdictions.

    Assess the threats to critical assets in these jurisdictions and capture stakeholder expectations for information security.

    Activities

    1.1 Determine assessment scope.

    1.2 Determine business goals.

    1.3 Determine compliance obligations.

    1.4 Determine risk appetite.

    1.5 Conduct pressure analysis.

    Outputs

    Business requirements

    Security pressure analysis

    2 Analyze Key Risk Scenarios for High-Risk Jurisdictions

    The Purpose

    Build key risk scenarios for high-risk jurisdictions.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identify critical assets in high-risk jurisdictions, their vulnerabilities to relevant threats, and the adverse impact should malicious agents exploit them.

    Assess risk exposure of critical assets in high-risk jurisdictions.

    Activities

    2.1 Identify critical assets.

    2.2 Identify threats.

    2.3 Assess risk likelihood.

    2.4 Assess risk impact.

    Outputs

    Key risk scenarios

    Jurisdictional risk exposure

    Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heat Map

    3 Build Risk Treatment Roadmap

    The Purpose

    Prioritize and treat jurisdictional risks to critical assets.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Build an initiative roadmap to reduce residual risks in high-risk jurisdictions.

    Activities

    3.1 Identify and assess risk response.

    3.2 Assess residual risks.

    3.3 Identify security controls.

    3.4 Build initiative roadmap.

    Outputs

    Action plan to mitigate key risk scenarios

    Further reading

    Secure Operations in High-Risk Jurisdictions

    Assessments often omit jurisdictional risks. Are your assets exposed?

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Operations in high-risk jurisdictions face unique security scenarios.

    The image contains a picture of Michel Hebert.

    Michel Hébert

    Research Director

    Security and Privacy

    Info-Tech Research Group


    The image contains a picture of Alan Tang.

    Alan Tang

    Principal Research Director

    Security and Privacy

    Info-Tech Research Group


    Traditional approaches to security strategies may miss key risk scenarios that critical assets face in high-risk jurisdictions. These include high-risk travel, heightened insider threats, advanced persistent threats, and complex compliance environments. Most organizations have security strategies and risk management practices in place, but securing global operations requires its own effort. Assess the security risk that global operations pose to critical assets. Consider the unique assets, threats, and vulnerabilities that come with operations in high-risk jurisdictions. Focus on the business activities you support and integrate your insights with existing risk management practices to ensure the controls you propose get the visibility they need. Your goal is to build a plan that mitigates the unique security risks that global operations pose and secures critical assets in high-risk areas. Don’t leave security to chance.

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    • Security leaders who support operations in many countries struggle to mitigate security risks to critical assets. Operations in high-risk jurisdictions contend with complex threat environments and security risk scenarios that often require a unique response.
    • Security leaders need to identify critical assets, assess vulnerabilities, catalog threats, and identify the security controls necessary to mitigate related operational risks.

    Common Obstacles

    • Securing operations in high-risk jurisdictions requires additional due diligence. Each jurisdiction involves a different risk context, which complicates efforts to identify, assess, and mitigate security risks to critical assets.
    • Security leaders need to engage the organization with the right questions and identify high-risk vulnerabilities and security risk scenarios to help stakeholders make an informed decision about how to assess and treat the security risks they face in high-risk jurisdictions.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    Info-Tech has developed an effective approach to protecting critical assets in high-risk jurisdictions.

    This approach includes tools for:

    • Evaluating the security context of your organization’s high-risk jurisdictions.
    • Identifying security risk scenarios unique to high-risk jurisdictions and assessing the exposure of critical assets.
    • Planning and executing a response.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Organizations with global operations must contend with a more diverse set of assets, threats, and vulnerabilities when they operate in high-risk jurisdictions. Security leaders need to take additional steps to secure operations and protect critical assets.

    Business operations in high-risk jurisdictions face a more complex security landscape

    Information security risks to business operations vary widely by region.

    The 2022 Allianz Risk Barometer surveyed 2,650 business risk specialists in 89 countries to identify the most important risks to operations. The report identified cybercrime, IT failures, outages, data breaches, fines, and penalties as the most important global business risks in 2022, but their results varied widely by region. The standout finding of the 2022 Allianz Risk Barometer is the return of security risks as the most important threat to business operations. Security risks will continue to be acute beyond 2022, especially in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, where they will dwarf risks of supply chain interruptions, natural catastrophe, and climate change.

    Global operations in high-risk jurisdictions contend with more diverse threats. These security risk scenarios are not captured in traditional security strategies.

    The image contains a picture of the world map that has certain areas of the map highlighted in various shades of blue based on higher security-related business risks.

    Figures represent the number of cybersecurity risks business risk specialists selected as a percentage of all business risks (Allianz, 2022). Higher scores indicate jurisdictions with higher security-related business risks. Jurisdictions without data are in grey.

    Different jurisdictions’ commitment to cybersecurity also varies widely, which increases security risks further

    The Global Cybersecurity Index (GCI) provides insight into the commitment of different countries to cybersecurity.

    The index assesses a country’s legal framework to identify basic requirements that public and private stakeholders must uphold and the legal instruments prohibiting harmful actions.

    The 2020 GCI results show overall improvement and strengthening of the cybersecurity agenda globally, but significant regional gaps persist. Of the 194 countries surveyed:

    • 33% had no data protection legislation.
    • 47% had no breach notification measures in place.
    • 50% had no legislation on the theft of personal information.
    • 19% still had no legislation on illegal access.

    Not every jurisdiction has the same commitment to cybersecurity. Protecting critical assets in high-risk jurisdictions requires additional due diligence.

    The image contains a picture of the world map that has certain areas of the map highlighted in various shades of blue based on scores in relation to the Global Security Index.

    The diagram sets out the score and rank for each country that took part in the Global Cybersecurity Index (ITU, 2021)

    Higher scores show jurisdictions with a lower rank on the CGI, which implies greater risk. Jurisdictions without data are in grey.

    Securing critical assets in high-risk jurisdictions requires additional effort

    Traditional approaches to security strategy may miss these key risk scenarios.

    As a result, security leaders who support operations in many countries need to take additional steps to mitigate security risks to critical assets.

    Guide stakeholders to make informed decisions about how to assess and treat the security risks and secure operations.

    • Engage the organization with the right questions.
    • Identify critical assets and assess vulnerabilities.
    • Catalogue threats and build risk scenarios.
    • Identify the security controls necessary to mitigate risks.

    Work with your organization to analyze the threat landscape, assess security risks unique to high-risk jurisdictions, and execute a response to mitigate them.

    This project blueprint works through this process using the two most prevalent risk scenarios in high-risk jurisdictions: high-risk travel and compliance risk.

    Key Risk Scenarios

    • High-Risk Travel
    • Compliance Risk
    • Insider Threat
    • Advanced Persistent Threat
    • Commercial Surveillance
    The image contains a screenshot of an Info-Tech thought model regarding secure global operations in high-risk jurisdictions.

    Travel risk is the first scenario we use as an example throughout the blueprint

    • This project blueprint outlines a process to identify, assess, and mitigate key risk scenarios in high-risk jurisdictions. We use two common key risk scenarios as examples throughout the deck to illustrate how you create and assess your own scenarios.
    • Supporting high-risk travel is the first scenario we will study in-depth as an example. Business growth, service delivery, and mergers and acquisitions can lead end users to travel to high-risk jurisdictions where staff, devices, and data are at risk.
    • Compromised or stolen devices can provide threat actors with access to data that could compromise the organization’s strategic, economic, or competitive advantage or expose the organization to regulatory risk.

    The project blueprint includes template guidance in Phase 3 to help you build and deploy your own travel guidelines to protect critical assets and support end users before they leave, during their trip, and when they return.

    Before you leave

    • Identify high-risk countries.
    • Enable controls.
    • Limit what you pack.

    During your trip

    • Assume you are monitored.
    • Limit access to systems.
    • Prevent theft.

    When you return

    • Change your password.
    • Restore your devices.

    Compliance risk is the second scenario we use as an example

    • Mitigating compliance risk is the second scenario we will study as an example in this blueprint. The legal and regulatory landscape is evolving rapidly to keep step with the pace of technological change. Security and privacy leaders are expected to mitigate the risk of noncompliance as the organization expands to new jurisdictions.
    • Later sections will show how to think through at least four compliance risks, including:
      • Cross-border data transfer
      • Third-party risk management
      • Data breach notification
      • Data residency

    The project blueprint includes template guidance in Phase 3 to help you deploy your own compliance governance controls as a risk mitigation measure.

    Secure Operations in High-Risk Jurisdictions: Info-Tech’s methodology

    1. Identify Context

    2. Assess Risks

    3. Execute Response

    Phase Steps

    1. Assess business requirements
    2. Evaluate security pressures
    1. Identify risks
    2. Assess risk exposure
    1. Treat security risks
    2. Build initiative roadmap

    Phase Outcomes

    • Internal security pressures that capture the governance, policies, practices, and risk tolerance of the organization
    • External security pressures that capture the expectations of customers, regulators, legislators, and business partners
    • A heatmap that captures not only the global exposure of your critical assets but also the business processes they support
    • A security risk register to allow for the easy transfer of critical assets’ global security risk data to your organization’s enterprise risk management practice
    • A roadmap of prioritized initiatives to apply relevant controls and secure global assets
    • A set of key risk indicators to monitor and report your progress

    Blueprint deliverables

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

    Business Security Requirements

    Identify the context for the global security risk assessment, including risk appetite and risk tolerance.

    Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap

    Identify critical global assets and the threats they face in high-risk jurisdictions and assess exposure.

    Mitigation Plan

    Roadmap of initiatives and security controls to mitigate global risks to critical assets. Tools and templates to address key security risk scenarios.

    Key deliverable:

    Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap

    Use the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool to capture information security risks to critical assets in high-risk jurisdictions. The tool generates a world chart that illustrates the risks global operations face to help you engage the business and execute a response.

    Blueprint benefits

    Protect critical assets in high-risk jurisdictions

    IT Benefits

    Assess and remediate information security risk to critical assets in high-risk jurisdictions.

    Easily integrate your risk assessment with enterprise risk assessments to improve communication with the business.

    Illustrate key information security risk scenarios to make the case for action in terms the business understands.

    Business Benefits

    Develop mitigation plans to protect staff, devices, and data in high-risk jurisdictions.

    Support business growth in high-risk jurisdictions without compromising critical assets.

    Mitigate compliance risk to protect your organization’s reputation, avoid fines, and ensure business continuity.

    Quantify the impact of securing global operations

    The tool included with this blueprint can help you measure the impact of implementing the research

    • Use the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool to describe the key risk scenarios you face, assess their likelihood and impact, and estimate the cost of mitigating measures. Working through the project in this way will help you quantify the impact of securing global operations.
    The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool. The image contains a screenshot of the High-Risk Travel Jurisdiction.

    Establish Baseline Metrics

    • Review existing information security and risk management metrics and the output of the tools included with the blueprint.
    • Identify metrics to measure the impact of your risk management efforts. Focus specifically on high-risk jurisdictions.
    • Compare your results with those in your overall security and risk management program.

    ID

    Metric

    Why is this metric valuable?

    How do I calculate it?

    1.

    Overall Exposure – High-Risk Jurisdictions

    Illustrates the overall exposure of critical assets in high-risk jurisdictions.

    Use the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool. Calculate the impact times the probability rating for each risk. Take the average.

    2.

    # Risks Identified – High-Risk Jurisdictions

    Informs risk tolerance assessments.

    Use the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool.

    3.

    # Risks Treated – High-Risk Jurisdictions

    Informs residual risk assessments.

    Use the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool.

    4.

    Mitigation Cost – High-Risk Jurisdictions

    Informs cost-benefit analysis to determine program effectiveness.

    Use the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool.

    5.

    # Security Incidents – High-Risk Jurisdictions

    Informs incident trend calculations to determine program effectiveness.

    Draw the information from your service desk or IT service management tool.

    6.

    Incident Remediation Cost – High-Risk Jurisdictions

    Informs cost-benefit analysis to determine program effectiveness.

    Estimate based on cost and effort, including direct and indirect cost such as business disruptions, administrative finds, reputational damage, etc.

    7.

    TRENDS: Program Effectiveness – High-Risk Jurisdictions

    # of security incidents over time. Remediation : Mitigation costs over time

    Calculate based on metrics 5 to 7.

    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?

    Phase 1

    Call #1: Scope project requirements, determine assessment scope, and discuss challenges.

    Phase 2

    Call #2: Conduct initial risk assessment and determine risk tolerance.

    Call #3: Evaluate security pressures in high-risk jurisdictions.

    Call #4: Identify risks in high-risk jurisdictions.

    Call #5: Assess risk exposure.

    Phase 3

    Call #6: Treat security risks in high-risk jurisdictions.

    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.

    Workshop Overview

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

    Days 1

    Days 2-3

    Day 4

    Day 5

    Identify Context

    Key Risk Scenarios

    Build Roadmap

    Next Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite)

    Activities

    1.1.1 Determine assessment scope.

    1.1.2 Determine business goals.

    1.1.3 Identify compliance obligations.

    1.2.1 Determine risk appetite.

    1.2.2 Conduct pressure analysis.

    2.1.1 Identify assets.

    2.1.2 Identify threats.

    2.2.1 Assess risk likelihood.

    2.2.2 Assess risk impact.

    3.1.1 Identify and assess risk response.

    3.1.2 Assess residual risks.

    3.2.1 Identify security controls.

    3.2.2 Build initiative roadmap.

    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. Business requirements for security risk assessment
    2. Identification of high-risk jurisdictions
    3. Security threat landscape for high-risk jurisdictions
    1. Inventory of relevant threats, critical assets, and their vulnerabilities
    2. Assessment of adverse effects should threat agents exploit vulnerabilities
    3. Risk register with key risk scenarios and heatmap of high-risk jurisdictions
    1. Action plan to mitigate key risk scenarios
    2. Investment and implementation roadmap
    1. Completed information security risk assessment for two key risk scenarios
    2. Risk mitigation roadmap

    No safe jurisdictions

    Stakeholders sometimes ask information security and privacy leaders to produce a list of safe jurisdictions from which to operate. We need to help them see that there are no safe jurisdictions, only relatively risky ones. As you build your security program, deepen the scope of your risk assessments to include risk scenarios critical assets face in different jurisdictions. These risks do not need to rule out operations, but they may require additional mitigation measures to keep staff, data, and devices safe and reduce potential reputational harms.

    Traditional approaches to security strategy often omit jurisdictional risks.

    Global operations must contend with a more complex security landscape. Secure critical assets in high-risk jurisdictions with a targeted risk assessment.

    The two greatest risks are high-risk travel and compliance risk.

    You can mitigate them with small adjustments to your security program.

    Support High-Risk Travel

    When securing travel to high-risk jurisdictions, you must consider personnel safety as well as data and device security. Put measures and guidelines in place to protect them before, during, and after travel.

    Mitigate Compliance Risk

    Think through data residency requirements, data breach notification, cross-border data transfer, and third-party risks to support business growth and mitigate compliance risks in high-risk jurisdictions to protect your organization’s reputation and avoid hefty fines or business disruptions.

    Phase 1

    Identify Context

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Assess business requirements to understand the goals of the organization’s global operations, as well as its risk governance, policies, and practices.
    • Evaluate jurisdictional security pressures to understand threats to critical assets and capture the expectations of external stakeholders, including customers, regulators, legislators, and business partners, and assess risk tolerance.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Business stakeholders
    • IT leadership
    • Security team
    • Risk and Compliance

    Step 1.1

    Assess Business Requirements

    Activities

    1.1.1 Determine assessment scope

    1.1.2 Identify enterprise goals in high-risk jurisdictions

    1.1.3 Identify compliance obligations

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business stakeholders
    • IT leadership
    • Security team
    • Risk and Compliance

    Outcomes of this step

    • Assess business requirements to understand the goals of the organization’s global operations, as well as its risk governance, policies, and practices.

    Focus the risk assessment on high-risk jurisdictions

    Traditional approaches to information security strategy often miss threats to global operations

    • Successful security strategies are typically sensitive to risks to different IT systems and lines of business.
    • However, securing global operations requires additional focus on high-risk jurisdictions, considering what makes them unique.
    • This first phase of the project will help you evaluate the business context of operations in high-risk jurisdictions, including:
      • Enterprise and security goals.
      • Lines of business, physical locations, and IT systems that need additional oversight.
      • Unique compliance obligations.
      • Unique risks and security pressures.
      • Organizational risk tolerance in high-risk jurisdictions.

    Focus your risk assessment on the business activities security supports in high-risk jurisdictions and the unique threats they face to bridge gaps in your security strategy.

    Identify jurisdictions with higher inherent risks

    Your security strategy may not describe jurisdictional risk adequately.

    • Security strategies list lines of business, physical locations, and IT systems the organization needs to secure and those whose security will depend on a third-party. You can find additional guidance on fixing the scope and boundaries of a security strategy in Phase 1 of Build an Information Security Strategy.
    • However, security risks vary widely from one jurisdiction to another according to:
      • Active cyber threats.
      • Legal and regulatory frameworks.
      • Regional security and preparedness capabilities.
    • Your first task is to identify high-risk jurisdictions to target for additional oversight.

    Work closely with your enterprise risk management function.

    Enterprise risk management functions are often tasked with developing risk assessments from composite sources. Work closely with them to complete your own assessment.

    Countries at heightened risk of money laundering and terrorism financing are examples of high-risk jurisdictions. The Financial Action Task Force and the U.S. Treasury publish reports three times a year that identify Non-Cooperative Countries or Territories.

    Develop a robust jurisdictional assessment

    Design an intelligence collection strategy to inform your assessment

    Strategic Intelligence

    White papers, briefings, reports. Audience: C-Suite, board members

    Tactical Intelligence

    Internal reports, vendor reports. Audience: Security leaders

    Operational intelligence

    Indicators of compromise. Audience: IT Operations

    Operational intelligence focuses on machine-readable data used to block attacks, triage and validate alerts, and eliminate threats from the network. It becomes outdated in a matter of hours and is less useful for this exercise.

    Determine travel risks to bolster your assessments

    Not all locations and journeys will require the same security measures.

    • Travel risks vary significantly according to destination, the nature of the trip, and traveler profile.
    • Access to an up-to-date country risk rating system enables your organization and individual staff to quickly determine the overall level of risk in a specific country or location.
    • Based on this risk rating, you can specify what security measures are required prior to travel and what level of travel authorization is appropriate, in line with the organization's security policy or travel security procedures.
    • While some larger organizations can maintain their own country risk ratings, this requires significant capacity, particularly to obtain the necessary information to keep these regularly updated.
    • It may be more effective for your organization to make use of the travel risk ratings provided by an external security information provider, such as a company linked to your travel insurance or travel booking service, if available.
    • Alternatively, various open-source travel risk ratings are available via embassy travel sites or other website providers.

    Without a flexible system to account for the risk exposures of different jurisdictions, staff may perceive measures as a hindrance to operations.

    Develop a tiered risk rating

    The example below outlines potential risk indicators for high-risk travel.

    Rating

    Description

    Low

    Generally secure with adequate physical security. Low violent crime rates. Some civil unrest during significant events. Acts of terrorism rare. Risks associated with natural disasters limited and health threats mainly preventable.

    Moderate

    Periodic civil unrest. Antigovernment, insurgent, or extremist groups active with sporadic acts of terrorism. Staff at risk from common and violent crime. Transport and communications services are unreliable and safety records are poor. Jurisdiction prone to natural disasters or disease epidemics.

    High

    Regular periods of civil unrest, which may target foreigners. Antigovernment, insurgent, or extremist groups very active and threaten political or economic stability. Violent crime rates high, often targeting foreigners. Infrastructure and emergency services poor. May be regular disruption to transportation or communications services. Certain areas off-limits to foreigners. Jurisdictions experiencing natural disasters or epidemics are considered high risk.

    Extreme

    Undergoing active conflict or persistent civil unrest. Risk of being caught up in a violent incident or attack is very high. Authorities may have lost control of significant portions of the country. Lines between criminality and political and insurgent violence are blurred. Foreigners are likely to be denied access to parts of the country. Transportation and communication services are severely degraded or nonexistent. Violence presents a direct threat to staff security.

    Ratings are formulated by assessing several types of risk, including conflict, political/civil unrest, terrorism, crime, and health and infrastructure risks.

    1.1.1 Determine assessment scope

    1 – 2 hours

    1. As a group, brainstorm a list of high-risk jurisdictions to target for additional assessment. Write down as many items as possible to include in:
    • Lines of business
    • Physical locations
    • IT systems

    Pay close attention to elements of the assessment that are not in scope.

  • Discuss the response and the rationale for targeting each of them for additional risk assessments. Identify security-related concerns for different lines of business, locations, user groups, IT systems, and data.
  • Record your responses and your comments in the Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.

    • Input

    Output

    • Corporate strategy
    • IT strategy
    • Security strategy
    • Relevant threat intelligence
    • A list of high-risk jurisdictions to focus your risk assessment

    Materials

    Participants

    • Laptop
    • Projector
    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • Business stakeholders
    • Enterprise Risk Management
    • Compliance
    • Legal

    Download the Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool

    Position your efforts in a business context

    Securing critical assets in high-risk jurisdictions is a business imperative

    • Many companies relegate their information security strategies to their IT department. Aside from the strain the choice places on a department that already performs many different functions, it wrongly implies that mitigating information security risk is simply an IT problem.
    • Managing information security risks is a business problem. It requires that organizations identify their risk appetite, prioritize relevant threats, and define risk mitigation initiatives. Business leaders can only do these activities effectively in a context that recognizes the business and financial benefits of implementing protections.
    • This is notably true of businesses with operations in many different countries. Each jurisdiction has its own set of security risks the organization must account for, as well as unique local laws and regulations that affect business operations.
    • In high-risk jurisdictions, your efforts must consider the unique operational challenges your organization may not face in its home country. Your efforts to secure critical assets will be most successful if you describe key risk scenarios in terms of their impact on business goals.
    • You can find additional guidance on assessing the business context of a security strategy in Phase 1 of Build an Information Security Strategy.

    Do you understand the unique business context of operations in high-risk jurisdictions?

    1.1.2 Identify business goals

    Estimated Time: 1-2 hours

    1. As a group, brainstorm the primary and secondary business goals of the organization. Focus your assessment on operations in high-risk jurisdictions you identified in Exercise 1.1.1. Review:
    • Relevant corporate and IT strategies.
    • The business goal definitions and indicator metrics in tab 2, “Goals Definition,” of the Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.
  • Limit business goals to no more than two primary goals and three secondary goals. This limitation will help you prioritize security initiatives at the end of the project.
  • For each business goal, identify up to two security alignment goals that will support business goals in high-risk jurisdictions.

    • Input

    Output

    • Corporate strategy
    • IT strategy
    • Security strategy
    • Your goals for the security risk assessment for high-risk jurisdictions

    Materials

    Participants

    • Laptop
    • Projector
    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • Business stakeholders
    • Risk Management
    • Compliance
    • Legal

    Download the Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool

    Record business goals

    Capture the results in the Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool

    1. Record the primary and secondary business goals you identified in tab 3, “Goals Cascade,” of the Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.
    2. Next, record the two security alignment goals you selected for each business goal based on the tool’s recommendations.
    3. Finally, review the graphic diagram that illustrates your goals on tab 6, “Results,” of the Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.
    4. Revisit this exercise whenever operations expands to a new jurisdiction to capture how they contribute to the organization’s mission and vision and how the security program can support them.
    The image contains a screenshot of Tab 3, Goals Cascade.

    Tab 3, Goals Cascade

    The image contains a screenshot of Tab 6, Results.

    Tab 6, Results

    Analyze business goals

    Assess how operating in multiple jurisdictions adds nuance to your business goals

    • Security leaders need to understand the direction of the business to propose relevant security initiatives that support business goals in high-risk jurisdictions.
    • Operating in different jurisdictions carries its own degree of risk. The organization is subject not only to the information security risks and legal frameworks of its country of origin but also to those associated with international jurisdictions.
    • You need to understand where your organization operates and how these different jurisdictions contribute to your business goals to support their performance and protect the firm’s reputation.
    • This exercise will make an explicit link between security and privacy concerns in high-risk jurisdictions, what the business cares about, and what security is trying to accomplish.

    If the organization is considering a merger and acquisition project that will expand operations in jurisdictions with different travel risk profiles, the security organization needs to revise the security strategy to ensure the organization can support high-risk travel and mitigate risks to critical assets.

    Identify compliance obligations

    Data compliance obligations loom large in high-risk jurisdictions

    The image contains four hexagons, each with their own words. SOX, PCI DSS, HIPAA, HITECH.

    Security leaders are familiar with most conventional regulatory obligations that govern financial, personal, and healthcare data in North America and Europe.

    The image contains four hexagons, each with their own words. Residency, Cross-Border Transfer, Breach Notification, Third-Party Risk Mgmt.

    Data privacy concerns, nationalism, and the economic value of data are all driving jurisdictions to adopt data residency and data localization and to shut down the cross-border transfer of data.

    The next step requires you to consider the compliance obligations the organization needs to meet to support the business as it expands to other jurisdictions through natural growth, mergers, and acquisitions.

    1.1.3 Identify compliance obligations

    Estimated Time: 1-2 hours

    1. As a group, brainstorm compliance obligations in target jurisdictions. Focus your assessment on operations in high-risk jurisdictions.

      2. Include:

    • Laws
    • Governing regulations
    • Industry standards
    • Contractual agreements
  • Record your compliance obligations and comments on tab 4, “Compliance Obligations,” of the Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.
  • If you need to take full stock of the laws and regulations in place in the jurisdictions where you operate that you are not familiar with, consider seeking local legal counsel to help you navigate this exercise.

    • Input

    Output

    • Legal and compliance frameworks in target jurisdictions
    • Mandatory and voluntary compliance obligations for target jurisdictions

    Materials

    Participants

    • Laptop
    • Projector
    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • Business stakeholders
    • Risk Management
    • Compliance
    • Legal

    Download the Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool

    Step 1.2

    Evaluate Security Pressures

    Activities

    1.2.1 Conduct initial risk assessment

    1.2.2 Conduct pressure analysis

    1.2.3 Determine risk tolerance

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Security team
    • Risk and Compliance
    • IT leadership (optional)

    Outcomes of this step

    Identify threats to global assets and capture the security expectations of external stakeholders, including customers, regulators, legislators, and business partners, and determine risk tolerance.

    Evaluate security pressures to set the risk context

    Perform an initial assessment of high-risk jurisdictions to set the context.

    Assess:

    • The threat landscape.
    • The security pressures from key stakeholders.
    • The risk tolerance of your organization.

    You should be able to find the information in your existing security strategy. If you don’t have the information, work through the next three steps of the project blueprint.

    The image contains a diagram to demonstrate evaluating security pressures, as described in the text above.

    Some jurisdictions carry inherent risks

    • Jurisdictional risks stem from legal, regulatory, or political factors that exist in different countries or regions. They can also stem from unexpected legal changes in regions where critical assets have exposure. Understanding jurisdictional risks is critical because they can require additional security controls.
    • Jurisdictional risk tends to be higher in jurisdictions:
      • Where the organization:
        • Conducts high-value or high-volume financial transactions.
        • Supports and manages critical infrastructure.
        • Has high-cost data or data whose compromise could undermine competitive advantage.
        • Has a high percentage of part-time employees and contractors.
        • Experiences a high rate of employee turnover.
      • Where state actors:
        • Have a low commitment to cybersecurity, financial, and privacy legislation and regulation.
        • Support cybercrime organizations within their borders.

    Jurisdictional risk is often reduced to countries where money laundering and terrorist activities are high. In this blueprint, the term refers to the broader set of information security risks that arise when operating in a foreign country or jurisdiction.

    Five key risk scenarios are most prevalent

    Key Risk Scenarios

    • High-Risk Travel
    • Compliance Risk
    • Insider Threat
    • Advanced Persistent Threat
    • Commercial Surveillance

    Security leaders who support operations in many countries need to take additional steps to mitigate security risks to critical assets. The goal of the next two exercises is to analyze the threat landscape and security pressures unique to high-risk jurisdictions, which will inform the construction of key scenarios in Phase 2. These five scenarios are most prevalent in high-risk jurisdictions. Keep them in mind as you go through the exercises in this section.

    1.2.1 Assess jurisdictional risk

    1-3 hours

    1. As a group, review the questions on tab 2, “Risk Assessment,” of the Information Security Pressure Analysis Tool.
    2. Gather the required information from subject matter experts on the following risk elements with a focus on high-risk jurisdictions:
    3. Review each question in tab 2 of the Information Security Pressure Analysis Tool and select the most appropriate response.

    Input

    Output

    • Existing security strategy
    • List of organizational assets
    • Historical data on information security incidents
    • Completed risk assessment

    Materials

    Participants

    • Information Security Pressure Analysis Tool
    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • Risk Management

    For more information on how to complete the risk assessment questionnaire, see Step 1.2.1 of Build an Information Security Strategy.

    1.2.2 Conduct pressure analysis

    1-3 hours

    1. As a group, review the questions on tab 3, “Pressure Analysis,” of the Information Security Pressure Analysis Tool.
    2. Gather the required information from subject matter experts on the following pressure elements with a focus on high-risk jurisdictions:
    • Compliance and oversight
    • Customer expectations
    • Business expectations
    • IT expectations
  • Review each question in the questionnaire and provide the most appropriate response using the drop-down list. It may be helpful to consult with the appropriate departments to obtain their perspectives.

    • For more information on how to complete the pressure analysis questionnaire, see Step 1.3 of Build an Information Security Strategy.

    Input

    Output

    • Information on various pressure elements within the organization
    • Existing security strategy
    • Completed pressure analysis

    Materials

    Participants

    • Information Security Pressure Analysis Tool
    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • Business leaders
    • Compliance

    A low security pressure means that your stakeholders do not assign high importance to information security. You may need to engage stakeholders with the right key risk scenarios to illustrate jurisdictional risk and generate support for new security controls.

    Download the Information Security Pressure Analysis Tool

    Assess risk tolerance

    • Risk tolerance expresses the types and amount of risk the organization is willing to accept in pursuit of its goals.
    • These expectations can help you identify, manage, and report on key risk scenarios in high-risk jurisdictions.
    • For instance, an organization with a low risk tolerance will require a stronger information security program to minimize operational security risks.
    • It’s up to business leaders to determine the risks they are willing to accept. They may need guidance to understand how system-level risks affect the organization’s ability to pursue its goals.

    A formalized risk tolerance statement can help:

    • Support risk-based security decisions that align with business goals.
    • Provide a meaningful rationale for security initiatives.
    • Improve the transparency of investments in the organization’s security program.
    • Provide guidance for monitoring inherent risk and residual risk exposure.

    The role of security professionals is to identify and analyze key risk scenarios that may prevent the organization from reaching its goals.

    1.2.3 Determine risk tolerance

    1-3 hours

    1. As a group, review the questions on tab 4, “Risk Tolerance,” of the Information Security Pressure Analysis Tool.
    2. Gather the required information from subject matter experts on the following risk tolerance elements:
    • Recent IT problems, especially downtime and data recovery issues
    • Historical security incidents
  • Review any relevant documentation, including:
    • Existing security strategy
    • Business impact assessments
    • Service-level agreements

    For more information on how to complete the risk tolerance questionnaire, see Step 1.4 of Build an Information Security Strategy.

    Input

    Output

    • Existing security strategy
    • Data on recent IT problems and incidents
    • Business impact assessments
    • Completed risk tolerance statement

    Materials

    Participants

    • Information Security Pressure Analysis Tool
    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • Risk Management

    Download the Information Security Pressure Analysis Tool

    Review the output of the results tab

    • The organizational risk assessment provides a high-level assessment of inherent risks in high-risk jurisdictions. Use the results to build and assess key risk scenarios in Phase 2.
    • Use the security pressure analysis to inform stakeholder management efforts. A low security pressure indicates that stakeholders do not yet grasp the impact of information security on organizational goals. You may need to communicate its importance before you discuss additional security controls.
    • Jurisdictions in which organizations have a low risk tolerance will require stronger information security controls to minimize operational risks.
    The image contains a screenshot of the organizational risk assessment. The image contains a screenshot of the security pressure analysis. The image contains a screenshot of the risk tolerance curve.

    Phase 2

    Assess Security Risks to Critical Assets

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify critical assets, their vulnerabilities to relevant threats, and the adverse impact a successful threat event would have on the organization.
    • Assess risk exposure of critical assets in high-risk jurisdictions for each risk scenario through an analysis of its likelihood and impact.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Security team
    • Risk and Compliance
    • IT leadership (optional)

    Step 2.1

    Identify Risks

    Activities

    2.1.1 Identify assets

    2.1.2 Identify threats

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Security team
    • Risk and Compliance
    • IT leadership (optional)

    Outcomes of this step

    • Define risk scenarios that identify critical assets, their vulnerabilities to relevant threats, and the adverse impact a successful threat event would have on the organization.

    This blueprint focuses on mitigating jurisdictional risks

    The image contains a screenshot of the IT Risk Management Framework. The framework includes: Risk Identification, Risk Assessment, Risk Response, and Risk Governance.

    For a deeper dive into building a risk management program, see Info-Tech’s core project blueprints on risk management:

    Build an IT Risk Management Program

    Combine Security Risk Management Components Into One Program

    Draft key risk scenarios to illustrate adverse events

    Risk scenarios help decision-makers understand how adverse events affect business goals.

    • Risk-scenario building is the process of identifying the critical factors that contribute to an adverse event and crafting a narrative that describes the circumstances and consequences if it were to happen.
    • Risk scenarios set up the risk analysis stage of the risk assessment process. They are narratives that describe in detail:
      • The asset at risk.
      • The threat that can act against the asset.
      • Their intent or motivation.
      • The circumstances and threat actor model associated with the threat event.
      • The potential effect on the organization.
      • When or how often the event might occur.

    Risk scenarios are further distilled into a single sentence or risk statement that communicates the essential elements from the scenario.

    Well-crafted risk scenarios have four components

    The second phase of the project will help you craft meaningful risk scenarios

    Threat

    Exploits an

    Asset

    Using a

    Method

    Creating an

    Effect

    An actor capable of harming an asset

    Anything of value that can be affected and results in loss

    Technique an actor uses to affect an asset

    How loss materializes

    Examples: Malicious or untrained employees, cybercriminal groups, malicious state actors

    Examples: Systems, regulated data, intellectual property, people

    Examples: Credential compromise, privilege escalation, data exfiltration

    Examples: Loss of data confidentiality, integrity, or availability; impact on staff health & safety

    Risk scenarios are concise, four to six sentence narratives that describe the core elements of forecasted adverse events. Use them to engage stakeholders with the right questions and guide them to make informed decisions about how to address and treat security risks in high-risk jurisdictions.

    The next slides review five key risk scenarios prevalent in high-risk jurisdictions. Use them as examples to develop your own.

    Travel to high-risk jurisdictions requires special measures to protect staff, devices, and data

    Governmental, academic, and commercial advisors compile lists of jurisdictions that pose greater travel risks annually.

    For instance, in the US, these lists might include countries that are:

    • Subjects of travel warnings by the US Department of State.
    • Identified as high risk by other US government sources such as:
      • The Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
      • The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
      • The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
    • Compiled from academic and commercial sources, such as Control Risks.

    When securing travel to high-risk jurisdictions, you must consider personnel safety as well as data and device security.

    The image contains a diagram to present high-risk jurisdictions.

    The diagram presents high-risk jurisdictions based on US governmental sources (2021) listed on this slide.

    High-risk travel

    Likelihood: Medium

    Impact: Medium

    Key Risk Scenario #1

    Malicious state actors, cybercriminals, and competitors can threaten staff, devices, and data during travel to high-risk jurisdictions. Device theft or compromise may occur while traveling through airports, accessing hotel computer and phone networks, or in internet cafés or other public areas. Threat actors can exploit data from compromised or stolen devices to undermine the organization’s strategic, economic, or competitive advantage. They can also infect compromised devices with malware that delivers malicious payloads once they reconnect with home networks.

    Threat Actor:

    • Malicious state actors
    • Cybercriminals
    • Competitors

    Assets:

    • Staff
    • IT systems
    • Sensitive data

    Effect:

    • Compromised staff health and safety
    • Loss of data
    • Lost of system integrity

    Methods:

    • Identify, steal, or target mobile devices.
    • Compromise network, wireless, or Bluetooth connections.
    • Leverage stolen devices as a means of infecting other networks.
    • Access devices to track user location.
    • Activate microphones on devices to collect information.
    • Intercept electronic communications users send from high-risk jurisdictions.

    The data compliance landscape is a jigsaw puzzle of data protection and data residency requirements

    Since the EU passed the GDPR in 2016, jurisdictions have turned to data regulations to protect citizen data

    Data privacy concerns, nationalism, and the economic value of data are all driving jurisdictions to adopt data residency, breach notification, and cross-border data transfer regulations. As 2021 wound down to a close, nearly all the world’s 30 largest economies had some form of data regulation in place. The regulatory landscape is shifting rapidly, which complicates operations as organizations grow into new markets or engage in merger and acquisition activities.

    Global operations require special attention to data-residency requirements, data breach notification requirements, and cross-border data transfer regulations to mitigate compliance risk.

    The image contains a diagram to demonstrate the data regulations placed in various places around the world.

    Compliance risk

    Likelihood: Medium

    Impact: High

    Key Risk Scenario #2

    Rapid changes in the privacy and security regulatory landscape threaten organizations’ ability to meet their compliance obligations from local legal and regulatory frameworks. Organizations risk reputational damage, administrative fines, criminal charges, and loss of market share. In extreme cases, organizations may lose their license to operate in high-risk jurisdictions. Shifts in the regulatory landscape can involve additional requirements for data residency, cross-border data transfer, data breach notification, and third-party risk management.

    Threat Actor:

    • Local, regional, and national state actors

    Asset:

    • Reputation, market share
    • License to operate

    Effect:

    • Administrative fines
    • Loss of reputation, brand trust, and consumer loyalty
    • Loss of market share
    • Suspension of business operations
    • Lawsuits due to collective actions and claims
    • Criminal charges

    Methods:

    • Shifts in the privacy and security regulatory landscape, including requirements for:
      • Data residency.
      • Cross-border data transfer.
      • Data breach notification.
      • Third-party security and privacy risk management.

    The incidence of insider threats varies widely by jurisdiction in unexpected ways

    On average, companies in North America, the Middle East, and Africa had the most insider incidents in 2021, while those in the Asia-Pacific region had the least.

    The Ponemon Institute set out to understand the financial consequences that result from insider threats and gain insight into how well organizations are mitigating these risks.

    In the context of this research, insider threat is defined as:

    • Employee or contractor negligence.
    • Criminal or malicious insider activities.
    • Credential theft (imposter risk).

    On average, the total cost to remediate insider threats in 2021 was US$15.4 million per incident.

    In all regions, employee or contractor negligence occurred most frequently. Organizations in North America and in the Middle East and Africa were most likely to experience insider threat incidents in 2021.

    the image contains a diagram of the world, with various places coloured in different shades of blue.

    The diagram represents the average number of insider incidents reported per organization in 2021. The results are analyzed in four regions (Ponemon Institute, 2022)

    Insider threat

    Likelihood: Low to Medium

    Impact: High

    Key Risk Scenario #3

    Malicious insiders, negligent employees, and credential thieves can exploit inside access to information systems to commit fraud, steal confidential or commercially valuable information, or sabotage computer systems. Insider threats are difficult to identify, especially when security is geared toward external threats. They are often familiar with the organization’s data and intellectual property as well as the methods in place to protect them. An insider may steal information for personal gain or install malicious software on information systems. They may also be legitimate users who make errors and disregard policies, which places the organization at risk.

    Threat Actor:

    • Malicious insiders
    • Negligent employees
    • Infiltrators

    Asset:

    • Sensitive data
    • Employee credentials
    • IT systems

    Effects:

    • Loss of system integrity
    • Loss of data confidentiality
    • Financial loss

    Methods:

    • Infiltrators may compromise credentials.
    • Malicious or negligent insiders may use corporate email to steal or share sensitive data, including:
      • Regulated data.
      • Intellectual property.
      • Critical business information.
    • Malicious agents may facilitate data exfiltration, as well as open-port and vulnerability scans.

    The risk of advanced persistent threats is more prevalent in Central and South America and the Asia-Pacific region

    Attacks from advanced persistent threat (APT) actors are more sophisticated than traditional ones.

    • More countries will use legal indictments as part of their cyber strategy. Exposing toolsets of APT groups carried out at the governmental level will drive more states to do the same.
    • Expect APTs to increasingly target network appliances like VPN gateways as organizations continue to sustain hybrid workforces.
    • The line between APTs and state-sanctioned ransomware groups is blurring. Expect cybercriminals to wield better tools, mount more targeted attacks, and use double-extortion tactics.
    • Expect more disruption and collateral damage from direct attacks on critical infrastructure.

    Top 10 Significant Threat Actors:

    • Lazarus
    • DeathStalker
    • CactusPete
    • IAmTheKing
    • TransparentTribe
    • StrongPity
    • Sofacy
    • CoughingDown
    • MuddyWater
    • SixLittleMonkeys

    Top 10 Targets:

    • Government
    • Banks
    • Financial Institutions
    • Diplomatic
    • Telecommunications
    • Educational
    • Defense
    • Energy
    • Military
    • IT Companies
    The image contains a world map coloured in various shades of blue.
    Top 12 countries targeted by APTs (Kaspersky, 2020)

    Track notable APTs to revise your list of high-risk jurisdictions and review the latest tactics and techniques

    Governmental advisors track notable APT actors that pose greater risks.

    The CISA Shields Up site, SANS Storm Center site, and MITRE ATT&CK group site provide helpful and timely information to understand APT risks in different jurisdictions.

    The following threat actors are currently associated with cyberattacks affiliated with the Russian government.

    Activity Group

    Risks

    APT28 (GRU)

    Known as Fancy Bear, this threat group has been tied to espionage since 2004. They compromised the Hillary Clinton campaign, amid other major events.

    APT29 (SVT)

    Tied to espionage since 2008. Reportedly compromised the Democratic National Committee in 2015. Cited in the 2021 SolarWinds compromise.

    Buhtrap/RTM Group

    Group focused on financial targets since 2014. Currently known to target Russian and Ukrainian banks.

    Gamaredon

    Operating in Crimea. Aligned with Russian interests. Has previously targeted Ukrainian government officials and organizations.

    DEV-0586

    Carried out wiper malware attacks on Ukrainian targets in January 2022.

    UNC1151

    Active since 2016. Linked to information operation campaigns and the distribution of anti-NATO material.

    Conti

    Most successful ransomware gang of 2021, with US$188M revenue. Supported Russian invasion of Ukraine, threatening attacks on allied critical infrastructure.

    Sources: MITRE ATT&CK; Security Boulevard, 2022; Reuters, 2022; The Verge, 2022

    Advanced persistent threat

    Likelihood: Low to Medium

    Impact: High

    Key Risk Scenario #4

    Advanced persistent threats are state actors or state-sponsored affiliates with the means to avoid detection by anti-malware software and intrusion detection systems. These highly-skilled and persistent malicious agents have significant resources with which to bypass traditional security controls, establish a foothold in the information technology infrastructure, and exfiltrate data undetected. APTs have the resources to adapt to a defender’s efforts to resist them over time. The loss of system integrity and data confidentiality over time can lead to financial losses, business continuity disruptions, and the destruction of critical infrastructure.

    Threat Actor:

    • State actors
    • State-sponsored affiliates

    Asset:

    • Sensitive data
    • IT systems
    • Critical infrastructure

    Effects:

    • Loss of system integrity
    • Loss of data confidentiality
    • Financial loss
    • Business continuity disruptions
    • Infrastructure destruction

    Methods:

    • Persistent, consistent attacks using the most advanced threats and tactics to bypass security defenses.
    • The goal of APTs is to maintain access to networks for prolonged periods without being detected.
    • The median dwell time differs widely between regions. FireEye reported the mean dwell time for 2018:
      • Americas: 71 days
      • Europe, Middle East, and Africa: 177 days
      • Asia-Pacific: 204 days
    Sources: Symantec, 2011; FireEye, 2019

    Threat agents have deployed invasive technology for commercial surveillance in at least 76 countries since 2015

    State actors and their affiliates purchased and used invasive spyware from companies in Europe, Israel, and the US.

    • “Customers are predominantly repressive regimes looking for new ways to control the flow of information and stifle dissent. Less than 10% of suspected customers are considered full democracies by the Economist Intelligence Unit.” (Top10VPN, 2021)
    • Companies based in economically developed and largely democratic states are profiting off the technology.
    • The findings demonstrate the need to consider geopolitical realities when assessing high-risk jurisdictions and to take meaningful action to increase layered defenses against invasive malware.
    • Spyware is having an increasingly well-known impact on civil society. For instance, since 2016, over 50,000 individual phone numbers have been identified as potential targets by NSO Group, the Israeli manufacturers of the notorious Pegasus Spyware. The target list contained the phone numbers of politicians, journalists, activists, doctors, and academics across the world.
    • The true number of those affected by spyware is almost impossible to determine given that many fall victim to the technology and do not notice.
    The image contains a map of the world with various countries highlighted in shades of blue.

    Countries where commercial surveillance tools have been deployed (“Global Spyware Market Index,” Top10VPN, 2021)

    The risks and effects of spyware vary greatly

    Spyware can steal mundane information, track a user’s every move, and everything in between.

    Adware

    Software applications that display advertisements while the program is running.

    Keyboard Loggers

    Applications that monitor and record keystrokes. Malicious agents use them to steal credentials and sensitive enterprise data.

    Trojans

    Applications that appear harmless but inflict damage or data loss to a system.

    Mobile Spyware

    Surveillance applications that infect mobile devices via SMS or MMS channels, though the most advanced can infect devices without user input.

    State actors and their affiliates use system monitors to track browsing habits, application usage, and keystrokes and capture information from devices’ GPS location data, microphone, and camera. The most advanced system monitor spyware, such as NSO Group’s Pegasus, can infect devices without user input and record conversations from end-to-end encrypted messaging systems.

    Commercial surveillance

    Likelihood: Low to Medium

    Impact: Medium

    Key Risk Scenario #5

    Malicious agents can deploy malware on end-user devices with commercial tools available off the shelf to secretly monitor the digital activity of users. Attacks exploit widespread vulnerabilities in telecommunications protocols. They occur through email and text phishing campaigns, malware embedded in untested applications, and sophisticated zero-click attacks that deliver payloads without requiring user interactions. Attacks target sensitive as well as mundane information. They can be used to track employee activities, investigate criminal activity, or steal credentials, credit card numbers, or other personally identifiable information.

    Threat Actor:

    • State actors
    • State-sponsored affiliates

    Asset:

    • Sensitive data
    • Staff health and safety
    • IT systems

    Effects:

    • Data breaches
    • Loss of data confidentiality
    • Increased risk to staff health and safety
    • Misuse of private data
    • Financial loss

    Methods:

    • Email and text phishing attacks that delivery malware payloads
    • Sideloading untested applications from a third-party source rather than an official retailer
    • Sophisticated zero-click attacks that deliver payloads without requiring user interaction

    Use the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool

    The tool included with this blueprint can help you draft risk scenarios and risk statements in this section.

    The risk register will capture a list of critical assets and their vulnerabilities, the threats that endanger them, and the adverse effect your organization may face.

    The image includes two screenshots of the jurisdictional risk register and heatmap tool. The image contains a screenshot of the High-Risk Travel Jurisdiction.

    Download the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool

    2.1.1 Identify assets

    1 – 2 hours

    1. As a group, consider critical or mission-essential functions in high-risk jurisdictions and the systems on which they depend. Brainstorm a list of the organization’s mission-supporting assets in high-risk jurisdictions. Consider:
    • Staff
    • Critical IT systems
    • Sensitive data
    • Critical operational processes
  • On a whiteboard, brainstorm the potential adverse effect of malicious agents in high-risk jurisdictions compromising critical assets. Consider the impact on:
    • Information systems.
    • Sensitive or regulated data.
    • Staff health and safety.
    • Critical operations and objectives.
    • Organizational finances.
    • Reputation and brand loyalty

    Threat

    Exploits an

    Asset

    Using a

    Method

    Creating an

    Effect

    Inputs for risk scenario identification

    Input

    Output

    • Corporate strategy
    • IT strategy
    • Security strategy
    • Business impact analyses
    • A list of the organization’s mission-supporting assets

    Materials

    Participants

    • Laptop
    • Projector
    • Whiteboard
    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • System owner
    • Enterprise Risk Management

    Threat

    Exploits an

    Asset

    Using a

    Method

    Creating an

    Effect

    Inputs for risk scenario identification

    The image contains an example of the activity mentioned in the text above.

    Model threats to narrow the range of scenarios

    Motives and capabilities to perform attacks on critical assets vary across different threat actors.

    Category

    Actions

    Motivation

    Sophistication

    Nation-states

    Cyberespionage, cyberattacks

    Geopolitical

    High. Dedicated resources and personnel, extensive planning and coordination.

    Proxy organizations

    Espionage, destructive attacks

    Geopolitical, Ideological, Profit

    Moderate. Some planning and support functions and technical expertise.

    Cybercrime

    Theft, fraud, extortion

    Profit

    Moderate. Some planning and support functions and technical expertise.

    Hacktivists

    Disrupt operations, attack brands, release sensitive data

    Ideological

    Low. Rely on widely available tools that require little skill to deploy.

    Insiders

    Destruction or release of sensitive data, theft, exposure through negligence

    Incompetence, Discontent

    Internal access. Acting on their own or in concert with any of the above.

    • Criminals, hacktivists, and insiders vary in sophistication. Some criminal groups demonstrate a high degree of sophistication; however, a large cyber event that damages critical infrastructure does not align with their incentives to make money at minimal risk.
    • Proxy actors conduct offensive cyber operations on behalf of a beneficiary. They may be acting on behalf of a competitor, national government, or group of individuals.
    • Nation-states engage in long-term espionage and offensive cyber operations that support geopolitical and strategic policy objectives.

    2.1.2 Identify threats

    1 – 2 hours

    1. Review the outputs from activity 1.1.1 and activity 2.1.1.
    2. Identify threat agents that could undermine the security of critical assets in high-risk jurisdictions. Include internal and external actors.
    3. Assess their motives, means, and opportunities.
    • Which critical assets are most attractive? Why?
    • What paths and vulnerabilities can threat agents exploit to reach critical assets without going through a control?
    • How could they defeat existing controls? Draw on the MITRE framework to inform your analysis.
    • Once agents defeat a control, what further attack can they launch?

    Threat

    Exploits an

    Asset

    Using a

    Method

    Creating an

    Effect

    Inputs for risk scenario identification

    Input

    Output

    • Jurisdictional assessment from activity 1.1.1
    • Critical assets from activity 2.1.1
    • Potential vulnerabilities from:
      • Security control gap analysis
      • Security risk register
    • Threat intelligence
    • MITRE framework
    • A list of critical assets, threat agents, vulnerabilities, and potential attack vectors.

    Materials

    Participants

    • Laptop
    • Projector
    • Whiteboard
    • Security team
    • Infrastructure & Operations team
    • Enterprise Risk Management

    2.1.2 Identify threats (continued)

    1 – 2 hours

    1. On a whiteboard, brainstorm how threat agents will exploit vulnerabilities in critical assets to reach their goal. Redefine attack vectors to capture what could result from a successful initial attack.

    For example:

    • State actors and cybercriminals may steal or compromise end-user devices during travel to high-risk jurisdictions using malware they embed in airport charging stations, internet café networks, or hotel business centers.
    • Compromised devices may infect corporate networks and threaten sensitive data once they reconnect to them.

    Threat

    Exploits an

    Asset

    Using a

    Method

    Creating an

    Effect

    The image contains a screenshot of activity 2.1.2 as described in the text above.

    Bring together the critical risk elements into a single risk scenario

    Summarize the scenario further into a single risk statement

    Risk Scenario: High-Risk Travel

    State actors and cybercriminals can threaten staff, devices, and data during travel to high-risk jurisdictions. Device theft or compromise may occur while traveling through airports, accessing hotel computer and phone networks, or in internet cafés or other public areas. Threat actors can exploit data from compromised or stolen devices to undermine the organization’s strategic, economic, or competitive advantage. They can also infect compromised devices with malware that delivers malicious payloads once they reconnect with home networks.

    Risk Statement

    Cybercriminals compromise end-user devices during travel to high-risk jurisdictions, jeopardizing staff safety and leading to loss of sensitive data.

    Risk Scenario: Compliance Risk

    Rapid changes in the privacy and security regulatory landscape threaten an organization’s ability to meet its compliance obligations from local legal and regulatory frameworks. Organizations that fail to do so risk reputational damage, administrative fines, criminal charges, and loss of market share. In extreme cases, organizations may lose their license to operate in high-risk jurisdictions. Shifts in the regulatory landscape can involve additional requirements for data residency, cross-border data transfer, data breach notification, and third-party risk management.

    Risk Statement

    Rapid changes in the privacy and security regulations landscape threaten our ability to remain compliant, leading to reputational and financial loss.

    Fill out the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool

    The tool is populated with data from two key risk scenarios: high-risk travel and compliance risk.

    The image includes two screenshots of the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool.

    1. Label the risk in Tab 3, Column B.
    2. Record your risk scenario in Tab 3, Column C.
    3. Record your risk statement in Tab 3, Column D.
    4. Identify the applicable jurisdictions in Tab 3, Column E.
    5. You can further categorize the scenario as:
      • an enterprise risk (Column G).
      • an IT risk (Column H).

    Download the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool

    Step 2.2

    Assess Risk Exposure

    Activities

    2.2.1 Identify existing controls

    2.2.2 Assess likelihood and impact

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Security team
    • Risk and Compliance
    • IT leadership (optional)

    Outcomes of this step

    • Assess risk exposure for each risk scenario through an analysis of its likelihood and impact.

    Brush up on risk assessment essentials

    The next step will help you prioritize IT risks based on severity.

    Likelihood of Occurrence X Likelihood of Impact = Risk Severity

    Likelihood of occurrence: How likely the risk is to occur.

    Likelihood of impact: The likely impact of a risk event.

    Risk severity: The significance of the risk.

    Evaluate risk severity against the risk tolerance thresholds and the cost of risk response.

    Identify existing controls before you proceed

    Existing controls will reduce the inherent likelihood and impact of the risk scenario you face.

    Existing controls were put in place to avoid, mitigate, or transfer key risks your organization faced in the past. Without considering existing controls, you run the risk of overestimating the likelihood and impact of the risk scenarios your organization faces in high-risk jurisdictions.

    For instance, the ability to remote-wipe corporate-owned devices will reduce the potential impact of a device lost or compromised during travel to high-risk jurisdictions.

    As you complete the risk assessment for each scenario, document existing controls that reduce their inherent likelihood and impact.

    2.2.1 Document existing controls

    6-10 hours

    1. Document the Risk Category and Existing Controls in the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool.
      • Tactical controls apply to individual risks only. For instance, the ability to remote-wipe devices mitigates the impact of a device lost in a high-risk jurisdiction.
      • Strategic controls apply to multiple risks. For instance, deploying MFA for critical applications mitigates the likelihood that malicious actors can compromise a lost device and impedes their access in devices they do compromise.

    Input

    Output

    • Risk scenarios
    • Existing controls for risk scenarios

    Materials

    Participants

    • Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool
    • Laptop
    • Projector
    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • Business stakeholders
    • Enterprise Risk Management

    Download the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool.

    Assess the risk scenarios you identified in Phase 1

    The risk register is the central repository for risks in high-risk jurisdictions.

    • Use the second tab of the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool to create likelihood, impact, and risk tolerance assessment scales to evaluate every risk event effectively.
    • Severity-level assessment is a “first pass” of your risk scenarios that will reveal your organization’s most severe risks in high-risk jurisdictions.
    • You can incorporate expected cost calculations into your evaluation to assess scenarios in greater detail.
    • Expected cost represents how much you would expect to pay in an average year for each risk event. Expected cost calculations can help compare IT risks to non-IT risks that may not use the same scales and communicate system-level risk to the business in a language they will understand.

    Expected cost calculations may not be practical. Determining robust likelihood and impact values to produce cost estimates can be challenging and time consuming. Use severity-level assessments as a first pass to make the case for risk mitigation measures and take your lead from stakeholders.

    The image contains two screenshots of the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool.

    Use the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool to capture and analyze your data.

    2.2.2 Assess likelihood and impact

    6-10 hours

    1. Assign each risk scenario a likelihood of occurrence and a likely impact level that represents the impact of the scenario on the whole organization considering existing controls. Record your results in Tab 3, column R and S, respectively.
    2. You can further dissect likelihood and impact into component parameters but focus first on total likelihood and impact to keep the task manageable.
    3. As you input the first few likelihood and impact values, compare them to one another to ensure consistency and accuracy. For instance, is a device lost in a high-risk jurisdiction truly more impactful than a device compromised with commercial surveillance software?
    4. The tool will calculate the probability of risk exposure based on the likelihood and consequence associated with the scenario. The results are published in Tab 3, Column T.

    Input

    Output

    • Risk scenarios
    • Assessed the likelihood of occurrence and impact for all identified risk events

    Materials

    Participants

    • Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool
    • Laptop
    • Projector
    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • Business stakeholders
    • Enterprise Risk Management

    Download the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool.

    Refine your risk assessment to justify your estimates

    Document the rationale behind each value and the level of consensus in group discussions.

    Stakeholders will likely ask you to explain some of the numbers you assigned to likelihood and impact assessments. Pointing to an assessment methodology will give your estimates greater credibility.

    • Assign one individual to take notes during the assessment exercise.
    • Have them document the main rationale behind each value and the level of consensus.

    The goal is to develop robust intersubjective estimates of the likelihood and impact of a risk scenario.

    We assigned a 50% likelihood rating to a risk scenario. Were we correct?

    Assess the truth of the following statements to test likelihood assessments. In this case, do these two statements seem true?

    • The risk event will likely occur once in the next two years, all things being equal.
    • In two nearly identical organizations, one out of two will experience the risk event this year.
    The image includes a screenshot of the High-Risk Travel Jurisdictions.

    Phase 3

    Execute Response

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Prioritize and treat global risks to critical assets based on their value and exposure.
    • Build an initiative roadmap that identifies and applies relevant controls to protect critical assets. Identify key risk indicators to monitor progress.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Security team
    • Risk and Compliance
    • IT leadership (optional)

    Step 3.1

    Treat Security Risks

    Activities

    3.1.1 Identify and assess risk response

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Security team
    • Risk and Compliance
    • IT leadership (optional)

    Outcomes of this step

    • Prioritize and treat global risks to critical assets based on their value and exposure.

    Analyze and select risk responses

    The next step will help you treat the risk scenarios you built in Phase 2.

    Identify

    Identify risk responses.

    Predict

    Predict the effectiveness of the risk response, if implemented, by estimating the residual likelihood and impact of the risk.

    Calculate

    The tool will calculate the residual severity of the risk after applying the risk response.

    The first part of the phase outlines project activities. The second part elaborates on high-risk travel and compliance risk, the two key risk scenarios we are following throughout the project. Use the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool to capture your work.

    Analyze likelihood and impact to identify response

    The image contains a diagram of he risk response analysis. Risk Transfer and Risk Avoidance has the most likelihood, and Risk Acceptance and Risk Mitigation have the most impact. Risk Avoidance has the most likelihood and most impact in regards to risk response.

    3.1.1 Identify and assess risk response

    Complete the following steps for each risk scenario.

    1. Identify a risk response action that will help reduce the likelihood of occurrence or the impact if the scenario were to occur. Indicate the type of risk response (avoidance, mitigation, transfer, acceptance, or no risk exists).
    2. Assign each risk response action a residual likelihood level and a residual impact level. This is the same step you performed in Activity 2.2.2, but you are now are estimating the likelihood and impact of the risk event after you implemented the risk response action successfully. The Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool will generate a residual risk severity level for each risk event.
    3. Identify the potential Risk Action Owner (Project Manager) if the response is selected and turned into an IT project, and document this in the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool .
    4. For each risk event, document risk response actions, residual likelihood and impact levels, and residual risk severity level.

    Input

    Output

    • Risk scenarios from Phase 2
    • Risk scenario mitigation plan

    Materials

    Participants

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool
    • Security team
    • Risk and Compliance
    • IT leadership (optional)

    Download the Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool

    Step 3.2

    Mitigate Travel Risk

    Activities

    3.2.1 Develop a travel policy

    3.2.2 Develop travel procedures

    3.2.3 Design high-risk travel guidelines

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Security team
    • Risk and Compliance
    • IT leadership (optional)

    Outcomes of this step

    • Prioritize and treat global risks to critical assets based on their value and exposure.

    Identify controls to mitigate jurisdictional risk

    This section provides guidance on the most prevalent risk scenarios identified in Phase 2 and provides a more in-depth examination of the two most prevalent ones, high-risk travel and compliance risk. Determine the appropriate response to each risk scenario to keep global risks to critical assets aligned with the organization’s risk tolerance.

    Key Risk Scenarios

    • High-Risk Travel
    • Compliance Risk
    • Insider Threat
    • Advanced Persistent Threat
    • Commercial Surveillance

    Travel risk is a common concern in organizations with global operations

    • The security of staff, devices, and data is one of the biggest challenges facing organizations with a global footprint. Working and traveling in unpredictable environments will aways carry a degree of risk, but organizations can do much to develop a safer and more secure working environment.
    • Compromised or stolen devices can provide threat actors with access to data that could compromise the organization’s strategic, economic, or competitive advantage or expose the organization to regulatory risk.
    • For many organizations, security risk assessments, security plans, travel security procedures, security training, and incident reporting systems are a key part of their operating language.
    • The following section provides a simple structure to help organizations demystify travel in high-risk jurisdictions.

    The image contains a diagram to present high-risk jurisdictions.

    Before you leave

    • Identify high-risk countries.
    • Enable controls.
    • Limit what you pack.

    During your trip

    • Assume you are monitored.
    • Limit access to systems.
    • Prevent theft.

    When you return

    • Change your password.
    • Restore your devices.

    Case study

    Higher Education: Camosun College

    Interview: Evan Garland

    Frame additional security controls as a value-added service.

    Situation

    The director of the international department at Camosun College reached out to IT security for additional support. Department staff often traveled to hostile environments. They were concerned malicious agents would either steal end-user devices or compromise them and access sensitive data. The director asked IT security for options that would better protect traveling staff, their devices, and the information they contain.

    Challenges

    First, controls would need to admit both work and personal use of corporate devices. Staff relied exclusively on work devices for travel to mitigate the risk of personal device theft. Personal use of corporate devices during travel was common. Second, controls needed to strike the right balance between friction and effortless access. Traveling staff had only intermittent access to IT support. Restrictive controls could prevent them from accessing their devices and data altogether.

    Solution

    IT consulted staff to discuss light-touch solutions that would secure devices without introducing too much complexity or compromising functionality. They then planned security controls that involved user interaction and others that did not and identified training requirements.

    Results

    Controls with user interaction

    Controls without user interaction

    • Multifactor authentication for college systems and collaboration platforms
    • Password manager for both work and personal use for staff for stronger passwords and practices
    • Security awareness training to help traveling staff identify potential threats while traveling through airports or accessing public Wi-Fi.
    • Drive encryption and always-on VPN to protect data at rest and in transit
    • Increased setting for phishing and spam filtering for traveling staff email
    • Enhanced anti-malware/endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution for traveling laptops

    Build a program to mitigate travel risks

    There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

    The most effective solution will take advantage of existing risk management policies, processes, and procedures at your organization.

    • Develop a framework. Outline the organization’s approach to high-risk travel, including the policies, procedures, and mechanisms put in place to ensure safe travel to high-risk jurisdictions.
    • Draft a policy. Outline the organization’s risk attitude and key security principles and define roles and responsibilities. Include security responsibilities and obligations in job descriptions of staff members and senior managers.
    • Provide flexible options. Inherent travel risk will vary from one jurisdiction to another. You will likely not find an approach that works for every case. Establish locally relevant measures and plans in different security contexts and risk environments.
    • Look for quick wins. Identify measures or requirements that you can establish quickly but that can have a positive effect on the security of staff, data, and devices.
    • Monitor and review. Undertake periodic reviews of the organization’s security approach and management framework, as well as their implementation, to ensure the framework remains effective.

    3.2.1 Develop a travel policy

    1. Work with your business leaders to build a travel policy for high-risk jurisdictions. The policy should be a short and accessible document structured around four key sections:
      • A statement on the importance of staff security and safety, the scope of the policy, and who it applies to (staff, consultants, contractors, volunteers, visitors, accompanying dependants, etc.).
      • A principles section explaining the organization’s security culture, risk attitude, and the key principles that shape the organization’s approach to staff security and safety.
      • A responsibilities section setting out the organization’s security risk management structure and the roles and actions allocated to specific positions.
      • A minimal security requirements section establishing the specific security requirements that must be in place in all locations and specific locations.
    2. Common security principles include:
    • Shared responsibility – Managing risks to staff is a shared organizational responsibility.
    • Acknowledgment of risk – Managing security will not remove all risks. Staff need to appreciate, as part of their informed consent, that they are still exposed to risk.
    • Primacy of life – Staff safety is of the highest importance. Staff should never place themselves at excessive risk to meet program objectives or protect property.
    • Proportionate risk – Risks must be assessed to ensure they are proportionate to the benefits organizational activities provide and the ability to manage those risks.
    • Right to withdraw – Staff have the right to withdraw from or refuse to take up work in a particular area due to security concerns.
    • No right to remain – The organization has the right to suspend activities that it considers too dangerous.
  • Cross-reference the organization’s other governing policies that outline requirements related to security risk management, such as the health and safety policy, access control policy, and acceptable use of security assets.

    • Input

    Output

    • List of high-risk jurisdictions
    • Risk scenarios from Phase 2
    • Data inventory and data flows
    • Travel policy for high-risk jurisdictions

    Materials

    Participants

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool
    • Security team
    • Legal team
    • IT leadership
    • Risk Management

    Develop security plans for high-risk travel

    Security plans advise staff on how to manage the risk identified in assessments.

    Security plans are key country documents that outline the security measures and procedures in place and the responsibilities and resources required to implement them. Security plans should be established in high-risk jurisdictions where your organization has a regular, significant presence. Security plans must remain relevant and accessible documents that address the specific risks that exist in that location, and, if appropriate, are specific about where the measures apply and who they apply to. Plans should be updated regularly, especially following significant incidents or changes in the operating environment or activities.

    Key Components

    Critical information – One-page summary of pertinent information for easy access and quick reference (e.g. curfew times, no-go areas, important contacts).

    Overview – Purpose and scope of the document, responsibilities for security plan, organization’s risk attitude, date of completion and review date, and a summary of the security strategy and policy.

    Current Context – Summary of current operating context and overall security situation; main risks to staff, assets, and operations; and existing threats and risk rating.

    Procedures – Simple security procedures that staff should adhere to in order to prevent incidents and how to respond should problems arise. Standard operating procedures (SOPs) should address key risks identified in the assessment.

    Security levels – The organization's security levels/phases, with situational indicators that reflect increasing risks to staff in that context and location and specific actions/measures required in response to increasing insecurity.

    Incident reporting – The procedures and responsibilities for reporting security-related incidents; for example, the type of incidents to be reported, the reporting structure, and the format for incident reporting.

    Determine travel risk

    Tailor your risk response to the security risk assessment you conducted in earlier stages of this project.

    Ratings are formulated by assessing several types of risk, including conflict, political/civil unrest, terrorism, crime, and health and infrastructure risks.

    Rating

    Description (Examples)

    Recommended Action

    Low

    Generally secure with adequate physical security. Low violent crime rates. Some civil unrest during significant events. Acts of terrorism rare. Risks associated with natural disasters limited and health threats mainly preventable.

    Basic personal security, travel, and health precautions required.

    Moderate

    Periodic civil unrest. Antigovernment, insurgent, or extremist groups active with sporadic acts of terrorism. Staff at risk from common and violent crime. Transport and communications services are unreliable and safety records are poor. Jurisdiction prone to natural disasters or disease epidemics.

    Increased vigilance and routine security procedures required.

    High

    Regular periods of civil unrest, which may target foreigners. Antigovernment, insurgent, or extremist groups very active and threaten political or economic stability. Violent crime rates high and targeting of foreigners is common. Infrastructure and emergency services poor. May be regular disruption to transportation or communications services. Certain areas off-limits to foreigners. Jurisdictions experiencing a natural disaster or a disease epidemic are considered high risk.

    High level of vigilance and effective, context-specific security precautions required.

    Extreme

    Undergoing active conflict or persistent civil unrest. Risk of being caught up in a violent incident or attack is very high. Civil authorities may have lost control of significant portions of the country. Lines between criminality and political and insurgent violence are blurred. Foreigners are likely to be denied access to significant parts of the country. Transportation and communication services are severely degraded or non-existent. Violence presents a direct threat to staff security.

    Stringent security precautions essential and may not be sufficient to prevent serious incidents.

    Program activities may be suspended and staff withdrawn at very short notice.

    3.2.2 Develop travel procedures

    1. Work with your business leaders to build travel procedures for high-risk jurisdictions. The procedures should be tailored to the risk assessment and address the risk scenarios identified in Phase 2.
    2. Use the categories outlined in the next two slides to structure the procedure. Address all types of travel, detail security measures, and outline what the organization expects of travelers before, during, and after their trip.
    3. Consider the implementation of special measures to limit the impact of a potential security event, including:
      • Information end-user device loaner programs.
      • Temporary travel service email accounts.
    4. Specify what happens when staff add personal travel to their work trip to cover issues such as insurance, check-in, actual travel times, etc.
    5. Discuss the rationale for each procedure. Ensure the components align with the policy statements outlined in the high-risk travel policy developed in the previous step.

    Input

    Output

    • List of high-risk jurisdictions
    • Risk scenarios from Phase 2
    • High-risk travel policy
    • Travel procedures for high-risk jurisdictions

    Materials

    Participants

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool
    • Security team
    • Legal team
    • IT leadership
    • Risk Management

    Draft procedures to mitigate travel risks

    Address all types of travel, detail security measures, and outline what the organization expects of travelers before, during, and after their trip

    Introduction

    Clarifies who the procedures apply to. Highlights any differences in travel security requirements or support provided to staff, consultants, partners, and official visitors.

    Travel risk ratings

    Explains the travel or country risk rating system, how staff access the information, the different categories and indicators, and their implications.

    Roles and responsibilities

    Clarifies the responsibilities of travelers, their line managers or contact points, and senior management regarding travel security and how this changes for destinations with higher risk ratings.

    Travel authorization

    Stipulates who in the organization authorizes travel, the various compliance measures required, and how this changes for destinations with higher risk ratings.

    Travel risk assessment

    Explains when travel risk assessments are required, the template that should be used, and who approves the completed assessments.

    Travel security procedures should specify what happens when staff add personal travel to their work trip to cover issues such as insurance, check-in, actual travel times, etc.

    Pre-travel briefings

    Outlines the information that must be provided to travelers prior to departure, the type of briefing required and who provides it, and how these requirements change as risk ratings increase.

    Security training

    Explain security training required prior to travel. This may vary depending on the country’s risk rating. Includes information on training waiver system, including justifications and authorization.

    Traveler profile forms

    Travelers should complete a profile form, which includes personal details, emergency contacts, medical details, social media footprint, and proof-of-life questions (in contexts where there are abduction risks).

    Check-in protocol

    Specifies who travelers must maintain contact with while traveling and how often, as well as the escalation process in case of loss of contact. The frequency of check-ins should reflect the increase in the risk rating for the destination.

    Emergency procedures

    Outlines the organization's emergency procedures for security and medical emergencies.

    3.2.3 Design high-risk travel guidelines

    • Supplement the high-risk travel policies and procedures with guidelines to help international travelers stay safe.
    • The document is intended for an end-user audience and should reflect your organization’s policies and procedures for the use of information and information systems during international travel.
    • Use the Digital Safety Guidelines for International Travel template in concert with this blueprint to provide guidance on what end users can do to stay safe before they leave, during their trip, and when they return.
    • Consider integrating the guidelines into specialized security awareness training sessions that target end users who travel to high-risk jurisdictions.
    • The guidelines should supplement and align with existing technical controls.

    Input

    Output

    • List of high-risk jurisdictions
    • Risk scenarios from Phase 2
    • High-risk travel policy
    • High-risk travel procedure
    • Travel guidelines for high-risk jurisdictions

    Materials

    Participants

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Jurisdictional Risk Register and Heatmap Tool
    • Security team
    • Legal team
    • IT leadership
    • Risk Management

    Download the Digital Safety Guidelines for International Travel template

    Step 3.3

    Mitigate Compliance Risk

    Activities

    3.3.1 Identify data localization obligations

    3.3.2 Integrate obligations into IT system design

    3.3.3 Document data processing activities

    3.3.4 Choose the right mechanism

    3.3.5 Implement the appropriate controls

    3.3.6 Identify data breach notification obligations

    3.3.7 Integrate data breach notification into incident response

    3.3.8 Identify vendor security and data protection requirements

    3.3.9 Build due diligence questionnaire

    3.3.10 Build appropriate data processing agreement

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Security team
    • Risk and Compliance
    • IT leadership (optional)

    Outcomes of this step

    • Prioritize and treat global risks to critical assets based on their value and exposure.

    Compliance risk is a prevalent risk in organizations with a global footprint

    • The legal and regulatory landscape is evolving rapidly to keep step with the pace of technological change. Security and privacy leaders are expected to mitigate the risk of noncompliance as the organization expands to new jurisdictions.
    • Organizations with a global footprint must stay abreast of local regulations and provide risk management guidance to business leaders to support global operations.
    • This sections describes four compliance risks in this context:
      • Cross-border data transfer
      • Third-party risk management
      • Data breach notification
      • Data residency

    Compliance with local obligations

    Likelihood: Medium to High

    Impact: High

    Data Residency

    Gap Controls

    • Identify and document the data localization obligations for the jurisdictions that the organization is operating in.
    • Design and implement IT systems that satisfy the data localization requirements.
    • Comply with data localization obligations within each jurisdiction.

    Heatmap of Global Data Residency Regulations

    The image contains a screenshot of a picture of a world map with various shades of blue to demonstrate the heatmap of global data residency regulations.
    Source: InCountry, 2021

    Examples of Data Residency Requirements

    Country

    Data Type

    Local Storage Requirements

    Australia

    Personal data – heath record

    My Health Records Act 2012

    China

    Personal information — critical information infrastructure operators

    Cybersecurity law

    Government cloud data

    Opinions of the Office of the Central Leading Group for Cyberspace Affairs on Strengthening Cybersecurity Administration of Cloud Computing Services for Communist Party and Government Agencies

    India

    Government email data

    The Public Records Act of 1993

    Indonesia

    Data held by electronic system operator for the public service

    Regulation 82 concerning “Electronic System and Transaction Operation”

    Germany

    Government cloud service data

    Criteria for the procurement and use of cloud services by the federal German administration

    Russia

    Personal data

    The amendments of Data Protection Act No. 152 FZ

    Vietnam

    Data held by internet service providers

    The Decree on Management, Provision, and Use of Internet Services and Information Content Online (Decree 72)

    US

    Government cloud service data

    Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement: Network Penetration Reporting and Contracting for Cloud Services (DFARS Case 2013-D018)

    3.3.1 Identify data localization obligations

    1-2 hours

    1. Work with your business leaders to identify and document the jurisdictions where your organization is operating in or providing services and products to consumers within.
    2. Work with your legal team to identify and document all relevant data localization obligations for the data your organization generates, collects, and processes in order to operate your business.
    3. Record your data localization obligations in the table below.

    Jurisdiction

    Relevant Regulations

    Local Storage Requirements

    Date Type

    Input

    Output

    • List of jurisdictions your organization is operating in
    • Relevant security and data protection regulations
    • Data inventory and data flows
    • Completed list of data localization obligations

    Materials

    Participants

    • Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template
    • Privacy team
    • Security team
    • Legal team
    • IT leadership
    • Risk Management

    Download the Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template

    3.3.2 Integrate obligations into your IT system design

    1-2 hours

    1. Work with your IT department to design the IT architecture and systems to satisfy the data localization requirements.
    2. The table below provides a checklist for integrating privacy considerations into your IT systems.

    Item

    Consideration

    Answer

    Supporting Document

    1

    Have you identified business services that process data that will be subject to localization requirements?

    2

    Have you identified IT systems associated with the business services mentioned above?

    3

    Have you established a data inventory (i.e. data types, business purposes) for the IT systems mentioned above?

    4

    Have you established a data flow diagram for the data identified above?

    5

    Have you identified the types of data that should be stored locally?

    6

    Have you confirmed whether a copy of the data locally stored will satisfy the obligations?

    7

    Have you confirmed whether an IT redesign is needed or whether modifications (e.g. adding a server) to the IT systems would satisfy the obligations?

    8

    Have you confirmed whether access from another jurisdiction is allowed?

    9

    Have you identified how long the data should be stored?

    Input

    Output

    • Data localization obligations
    • Business services that process data that will be subject to localization requirements
    • IT systems associated with business services
    • Data inventory and data flows
    • Completed checklist of localization obligations for IT system design

    Materials

    Participants

    • Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template
    • Privacy team
    • Security team
    • Legal team
    • IT leadership
    • Risk Management

    Download the Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template

    Compliance with local obligations

    Likelihood: Medium to High

    Impact: High

    Cross-Border Transfer

    Gap Controls

    • Know where you transfer your data.
    • Identify jurisdictions that your organization is operating in and that impose different requirements for the cross-border transfer of personal data.
    • Adopt and implement a proper cross-border data transfer mechanism in accordance with applicable privacy laws and regulations.
    • Re-evaluate at appropriate intervals.

    Which cross-border transfer mechanism should I choose?

    Transfer Mechanism

    Advantages

    Disadvantages

    Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC)

    • Easy to implement
    • No DPA (data processing agreement) approval
    • Not suitable for complex data transfers
    • Do not meet business agility
    • Needs legal solution

    Binding Corporate Rules (BCRs)

    • Meets business agility needs
    • Raises trust in the organization
    • Doubles as solution for art. 24/25 of the GDPR
    • Sets high compliance maturity level
    • Takes time to draft/implement
    • Requires DPA approval (scrutiny)
    • Requires culture of compliance
    • Approved by one "lead" authority and two other "co-lead“ authorities
    • Takes usually between six and nine months for the approval process only

    Code of Conduct

    • Raises trust in the sector
    • Self-regulation instead of law
    • No code of conduct approved yet
    • Takes time to draft/implement
    • Requires DPA approval and culture of compliance
    • Needs of organization may not be met

    Certification

    • Raises trust in the organization
    • No certification schemes available yet
    • Risk of compliance at minimum necessary
    • Requires audits

    Consent

    • Legal certainty
    • Transparent
    • Administrative burden
    • Some data subjects are incapable of consenting all or nothing

    3.3.3 Document data processing activities

    1-2 hours

    1. Identify and document the following information:
      • Name of business process
      • Purposes of processing
      • Lawful basis
      • Categories of data subjects and personal data
      • Data subject categories
      • Which system the data resides in
      • Recipient categories
      • Third country/international organization
      • Documents for appropriate safeguards for international transfer (adequacy, SCCs, BCRs, etc.)
      • Description of mitigating measures

    Input

    Output

    • Name of business process
    • Categories of personal data
    • Which system the data resides
    • Third country/international organization
    • Documents for appropriate safeguards for international transfer
    • Completed list of data processing activities

    Materials

    Participants

    • Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template
    • Privacy team
    • Security team
    • Legal team
    • IT leadership
    • Risk Management

    Download the Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template

    3.3.4 Choose the right mechanism

    1-2 hours

    1. Identify jurisdictions that your organization is operating in and that impose different requirements for the cross-border transfer of personal data. For example, the EU’s GDPR and China’s Personal Information Protection Law require proper cross-border transfer mechanisms before the data transfers. Your organization should decide which cross-border transfer mechanism is the best fit for your cross-border data transfer scenarios.
    2. Use the following table to identify and document the pros and cons of each data transfer mechanism and the final decision.

    Data Transfer Mechanism

    Pros

    Cons

    Final Decision

    SCC

    BCR

    Code of Conduct

    Certification

    Consent

    Input

    Output

    • List of relevant data transfer mechanisms
    • Assessment of the pros and cons of each mechanism
    • Final decision regarding which data transfer mechanism is the best fit for your organization

    Materials

    Participants

    • Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template
    • Privacy team
    • Security team
    • Legal team
    • IT leadership
    • Risk Management

    Download the Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template

    3.3.5 Implement the appropriate controls

    1-3 hours

    • One of the most common mechanisms is standard contractual clauses (SCCs).
    • Use Info-Tech’s Standard Contractual Clauses Template to facilitate your cross-border transfer activities.
    • Identify and check whether the following core components are covered in your SCC and record the results in the table below.
    # Core Components Status Note
    1 Purpose and scope
    2 Effect and invariability of the Clauses
    3 Description of the transfer(s)
    4 Data protection safeguards
    5 Purpose limitation
    6 Transparency
    7 Accuracy and data minimization
    8 Duration of processing and erasure or return of data
    9 Storage limitation
    10 Security of processing
    11 Sensitive data
    12 Onward transfers
    13 Processing under the authority of the data importer
    14 Documentation and compliance
    15 Use of subprocessors
    16 Data subject rights
    17 Redress
    18 Liability
    19 Local laws and practices affecting compliance with the Clauses
    20 Noncompliance with the Clauses and termination
    21 Description of data processing activities, such as list of parties, description of transfer, etc.
    22 Technical and organizational measures
    InputOutput
    • Description of the transfer(s)
    • Duration of processing and erasure or return of data
    • Onward transfers
    • Use of subprocessors
    • Etc.
    • Draft of the standard contractual clauses (SCC)
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template
    • Legal team
    • Privacy team
    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • Risk Management

    Download the Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template

    Compliance with local obligations

    Likelihood: High

    Impact: Medium to High

    Data Breach

    Gap Controls

    • Identify jurisdictions that your organization is operating in and that impose different obligations for data breach reporting.
    • Document the notification obligations for various business scenarios, such as controller to DPA, controller to data subject, and processor to controller.
    • Integrate breach notification obligations into security incident response process.

    Examples of Data Breach Notification Obligations

    Location

    Regulation/ Standard

    Reporting Obligation

    EU

    GDPR

    72 hours

    China

    PIPL

    Immediately

    US

    HIPAA

    No later than 60 days

    Canada

    PIPEDA

    As soon as feasible

    Global

    PCI DSS

    • Visa – immediately after breach discovered
    • Mastercard – within 24 hours of discovering breach
    • American Express – immediately after breach discovered

    Summary of US State Data Breach Notification Statutes

    The image contains a graph to show the summary of the US State Data Breach Notification Statutes.

    Source: Davis Wright Tremaine

    3.3.6 Identify data breach notification obligations

    1-2 hours

    1. Identify jurisdictions that your organization is operating in and that impose different obligations for data breach reporting.
    2. Document the notification obligations for various business scenarios, such as controller to DPA, controller to data subject, and processor to controller.
    3. Record your data breach obligations in the table below.
    Region Regulation/Standard Reporting Obligation

    Input

    Output

    • List of regions and jurisdictions your business is operating in
    • List of relevant regulations and standards
    • Documentation of data breach reporting obligations in applicable jurisdictions

    Materials

    Participants

    • Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template
    • Legal team
    • Privacy team
    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • Risk Management

    Download the Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template

    3.3.7 Integrate data breach notification into incident response

    1-2 hours

    • Integrate breach notification obligations into the security incident response process. Understand the security incident management framework.
    • All incident runbooks follow the same process: detection, analysis, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident activity.
    • The table below provides a basic checklist for you to consider when implementing your data breach and incident handling process.
    # Phase Considerations Status Notes
    1 Prepare Ensure the appropriate resources are available to best handle an incident.
    2 Detect Leverage monitoring controls to actively detect threats.
    3 Analyze Distill real events from false positives.
    4 Contain Isolate the threat before it can cause additional damage.
    5 Eradicate Eliminate the threat from your operating environment.
    6 Recover Restore impacted systems to a normal state of operations.
    7 Report Report data breaches to relevant regulators and data subjects if required.
    8 Post-Incident Activities Conduct a lessons-learned post-mortem analysis.
    InputOutput
    • Security and data protection incident response steps
    • Key considerations for integrating data breach notifications into incident response
    • Data breach notifications integrated into the incident response process
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template
    • Security team
    • Privacy team
    • Legal team
    • IT leadership
    • Risk Management

    Download the Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template

    Compliance with local obligations

    Likelihood: High

    Impact: Medium to High

    Third-Party Risk

    Gap Controls

    • Build an end-to-end third-party security and privacy risk management process.
    • Perform internal due diligence prior to selecting a service provider.
    • Stipulate the security and privacy protection obligations of the third party in a legally binding document such as contract or data processing agreement, etc.

    End-to-End Third-Party Security and Privacy Risk Management

    1. Pre-Contract
    • Due diligence check
  • Signing of Contract
    • Data processing agreement
  • Post-Contract
    • Continuous monitoring
    • Regular check or audit
  • Termination of Contract
    • Data deletion
    • Access deprovisioning

    Examples of Vendor Security Management Requirements

    Region

    Law/Standard

    Section

    EU

    General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

    Article 28 (1)

    Article 46 (1)

    US

    Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

    §164.308(b)(1)

    US

    New York Department of Financial Services Cybersecurity Requirements

    500.11(a)

    Global

    ISO 27002:2013

    15.1.1

    15.1.2

    15.1.3

    15.2.1

    15.2.2

    US

    NIST 800-53

    SA-12

    SA-12 (2)

    US

    NIST Cybersecurity Framework

    ID-SC-1

    ID-SC-2

    ID-SC-3

    ID-SC-4

    Canada

    OSFI Cybersecurity Guidelines

    4.25

    4.26

    3.3.8 Identify vendor security and data protection requirements

    1-2 hours

    • Effective vendor security risk management is an end-to-end process that includes assessment, risk mitigation, and periodic reassessments.
    • An efficient and effective assessment process can only be achieved when all stakeholders are participating.
    • Identify and document your vendor security and data protection requirements in the table below.
    Region Law/Standard Section Requirements

    Input

    Output

    • List of regions and jurisdictions your business is operating in
    • List of relevant regulations and standards
    • Documentation of vendor security and data protection obligations in applicable jurisdictions

    Materials

    Participants

    • Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template
    • Legal team
    • Privacy team
    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • Risk Management

    Download the Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template

    3.3.9 Build due diligence questionnaire

    1-2 hours

    Perform internal due diligence prior to selecting a service provider.

    1. Build and right-size your vendor security questionnaire by leveraging Info-Tech’s Vendor Security Questionnaire template.
    2. Document your vendor security questionnaire in the table below.
    # Question Vendor Request Vendor Comments
    1 Document Requests
    2 Asset Management
    3 Governance
    4 Supply Chain Risk Management
    5 Identify Management, Authentication, and Access Control
    InputOutput
    • List of regions and jurisdictions your business is operating in
    • List of relevant regulations and standards
    • Business security and data protection requirements and expectations
    • Draft of due diligence questionnaire
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template
    • Legal team
    • Privacy team
    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • Risk Management

    Download the Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template

    3.3.10 Build appropriate data processing agreement

    1-2 hours

    1. Stipulate the security and privacy protection obligations of the third party in a legally binding document such as contract or data processing agreement, etc.
    2. Leverage Info-Tech’s Data Processing Agreement Template to put the language into your legally binding document.
    3. Use the table below to check whether core components of a typical DPA are covered in your document.
    # Core Components Status Note
    1 Processing of personal data
    2 Scope of application and responsibilities
    3 Processor's obligations
    4

    Controller's obligations

    5 Data subject requests
    6 Right to audit and inspection
    7 Subprocessing
    8 Data breach management
    9 Security controls
    10 Transfer of personal data
    11 Duty of confidentiality
    12 Compliance with applicable laws
    13 Service termination
    14 Liability and damages
    InputOutput
    • Processing of personal data
    • Processor’s obligations
    • Controller’s obligations
    • Subprocessing
    • Etc.
    • Draft of data processing agreement (DPA)
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template
    • Legal team
    • Privacy team
    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • Risk Management

    Download the Guidelines for Compliance With Local Security and Privacy Laws Template

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Problem Solved

    By following Info-Tech’s methodology for securing global operations, you have:

    • Evaluated the security context of your organization’s global operations.
    • Identified security risks scenarios unique to high-risk jurisdictions and assessed the exposure of critical assets.
    • Planned and executed a response.

    You have gone through a deeper analysis of two key risk scenarios that affect global operations:

    • Travel to high-risk jurisdictions.
    • Compliance risk.

    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.

    workshop@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.

    The image contains a picture of Michel Hebert.

    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:

    The image contains a screenshot of High-Risk Travel Jurisdictions.

    Identify High-Risk Jurisdictions

    Develop requirements to identify high-risk jurisdictions.

    The image contains a screenshot of Build Risk Scenarios.

    Build Risk Scenarios

    Build risk scenarios to capture assets, vulnerabilities, threats, and the potential effect of a compromise.

    External Research Contributors

    Ken Muir

    CISO

    LMC Security

    Premchand Kurup

    CEO

    Paramount Computer Systems

    Preeti Dhawan

    Manager, Security Governance

    Payments Canada

    Scott Wiggins

    Information Risk and Governance

    CDPHP

    Fritz Y. Jean Louis

    CISO

    Globe and Mail

    Eric Gervais

    CIO

    Ovivo Water

    David Morrish

    CEO

    MBS Techservices

    Evan Garland

    Manager, IT Security

    Camosun College

    Jacopo Fumagalli

    CISO

    Axpo

    Dennis Leon

    Governance and Security Manager

    CPA Canada

    Tero Lehtinen

    CIO

    Planmeca Oy

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Build an IT Risk Management Program

    • Build a program to identify, evaluate, assess, and treat IT risks.
    • Monitor and communicate risks effectively to support business decision making.

    Combine Security Risk Management Components Into One Program

    • Develop a program focused on assessing and managing information system risks.
    • Build a governance structure that integrates security risks within the organization’s broader approach to risk management.

    Build an Information Security Strategy

    • Build a holistic, risk-aware strategy that aligns to business goals.
    • Develop a roadmap of prioritized initiatives to implement the strategy over 18 to 36 months.

    Bibliography

    2022 Cost of Insider Threats Global Report.” Ponemon Institute, NOVIPRO, 9 Feb. 2022. Accessed 25 May 22.

    “Allianz Risk Barometer 2022.” Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty, Jan. 2022. Accessed 25 May 22.

    Bickley, Shaun. “Security Risk Management: a basic guide for smaller NGOs”. European Interagency Security Forum (EISF), 2017. Web.

    “Biden Administration Warns against spyware targeting dissidents.” New York Times, 7 Jan 22. Accessed 20 Jan 2022.

    Boehm, Jim, et al. “The risk-based approach to cybersecurity.” McKinsey & Company, October 2019. Web.

    “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021.” IBM Security, July 2021. Web.

    “Cyber Risk in Asia-Pacific: The Case for Greater Transparency.” Marsh & McLennan Companies, 2017. Web.

    “Cyber Risk Index.” NordVPN, 2020. Accessed 25 May 22

    Dawson, Maurice. “Applying a holistic cybersecurity framework for global IT organizations.” Business Information Review, vol. 35, no. 2, 2018, pp. 60-67.

    “Framework for improving critical infrastructure cybersecurity.” National Institute of Standards and Technology, 16 Apr 2018. Web.

    “Global Cybersecurity Index 2020.” International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 2021. Accessed 25 May 22.

    “Global Risk Survey 2022.” Control Risks, 2022. Accessed 25 May 22.

    “International Travel Guidance for Government Mobile Devices.” Federal Mobility Group (FMG), Aug. 2021. Accessed 18 Nov 2021.

    Kaffenberger, Lincoln, and Emanuel Kopp. “Cyber Risk Scenarios, the Financial System, and Systemic Risk Assessment.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 2019. Accessed 11 Jan 2022.

    Koehler, Thomas R. Understanding Cyber Risk. Routledge, 2018.

    Owens, Brian. “Cybersecurity for the travelling scientist.” Nature, vol. 548, 3 Aug 2017. Accessed 19 Jan. 2022.

    Parsons, Fintan J., et al. “Cybersecurity risks and recommendations for international travellers.” Journal of Travel Medicine, vol. 1, no. 4, 2021. Accessed 19 Jan 2022.

    Quinn, Stephen, et al. “Identifying and estimating cybersecurity risk for enterprise risk management.” National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Interagency or Internal Report (IR) 8286A, Nov. 2021.

    Quinn, Stephen, et al. “Prioritizing cybersecurity risk for enterprise risk management.” NIST, IR 8286B, Sept. 2021.

    “Remaining cyber safe while travelling security recommendations.” Government of Canada, 27 April 2022. Accessed 31 Jan 2022.

    Stine, Kevin, et al. “Integrating cybersecurity and enterprise risk management.” NIST, IR 8286, Oct. 2020.

    Tammineedi, Rama. “Integrating KRIs and KPIs for effective technology risk management.” ISACA Journal, vol. 4, 1 July 2018.

    Tikk, Eneken, and Mika Kerttunen, editors. Routledge Handbook of International Cybersecurity. Routledge, 2020.

    Voo, Julia, et al. “National Cyber Power Index 2020.” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, Sept. 2020. Web.

    Zhang, Fang. “Navigating cybersecurity risks in international trade.” Harvard Business Review, Dec 2021. Accessed 31 Jan 22.

    Appendix

    Insider Threat

    Key Risk Scenario

    Likelihood: Medium to High

    Impact: High

    Gap Controls

    The image contains a picture of the Gap Controls. The controls include: Policy and Awareness, Identification, Monitoring and Visibility, which leads to Cooperation.

    • Identification: Effective and efficient management of insider threats begins with a threat and risk assessment to establish which assets and which employees to consider, especially in jurisdictions associated with sensitive or critical data. You need to pay extra attention to employees who are working in satellite offices in jurisdictions with loose security and privacy laws.
    • Monitoring and Visibility: Organizations should monitor critical assets and groups with privileged access to defend against malicious behavior. Implement an insider threat management platform that provides your organization with the visibility and context into data movement, especially cross-border transfers that might cause security and privacy breaches.
    • Policy and Awareness Training: Insider threats will persist without appropriate action and culture change. Training and consistent communication of best practices will mitigate vulnerabilities to accidental or negligent attacks. Customized training materials using local languages and role-based case studies might be needed for employees in high-risk jurisdictions.
    • Cooperation: An effective insider threat management program should be built with cross-team functions such as Security, IT, Compliance and Legal, etc.

    For more holistic approach, you can leverage our Reduce and Manage Your Organization’s Insider Threat Risk blueprint.

    Info-Tech Insight

    You can’t just throw tools at a human problem. While organizations should monitor critical assets and groups with privileged access to defend against malicious behavior, good management and supervision can help detect attacks and prevent them from happening in the first place.

    Insider threats are not industry specific, but malicious insiders are

    Industry

    Actors

    Risks

    Tactics

    Motives

    State and Local Government

    • Full-time employees
    • Current employees
    • Privileged access to personally identifiable information, financial assets, and physical property
    • Abuse of privileged access
    • Received or transferred fraudulent funds
    • Financial gain
    • Recognition
    • Benefiting foreign entity

    Information Technology

    • Equal mix of former and current employees
    • Privileged access to networks or systems as well as data
    • Highly technical attacks
    • Received or transferred fraudulent funds
    • Revenge
    • Financial gain

    Healthcare

    • Majority were full-time and current employees
    • Privileged access to customer data with personally identifiable information, financial assets
    • Abuse of privileged access
    • Received or transferred fraudulent funds
    • Financial gain
    • Entitlement

    Finance and Insurance

    • Majority were full-time and current employees
    • Authorized users
    • Electronic financial assets
    • Privileged access to customer data
    • Created or used fraudulent accounts
    • Fraudulent purchases
    • Identity theft
    • Financial gain
    • Gambling addiction
    • Family pressures
    • Multiple motivations

    Source: Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, 2019

    Advanced Persistent Threat

    Key Risk Scenario #4

    Likelihood: Medium to High

    Impact: High

    Gap Controls

    The image contains a screenshot of the Gap Controls listed: Prevent, Detect, Analyze, Respond.

    Prevent: Defense in depth is the best approach to protect against unknown and unpredictable attacks. Effective anti-malware, diligent patching and vulnerability management, and strong human-centric security are essential.

    Detect: There are two types of companies – those who have been breached and know it, and those who have been breached and don’t know it. Ensure that monitoring, logging, and event detection tools are in place and appropriate to your organizational needs.

    Analyze: Raw data without interpretation cannot improve security and is a waste of time, money, and effort. Establish a tiered operational process that not only enriches data but also provides visibility into your threat landscape.

    Respond: Organizations can’t rely on ad hoc response anymore – don’t wait until a state of panic. Formalize your response processes in a detailed incident runbook to reduce incident remediation time and effort.

    Best practices moving forward

    Defense in Depth

    Lock down your organization. Among other tactics, control administrative privileges, leverage threat intelligence, use IP whitelisting, adopt endpoint protection and two-factor authentication, and formalize incident response measures.

    Block Indicators

    Information alone is not actionable. A successful threat intelligence program contextualizes threat data, aligns intelligence with business objectives, and then builds processes to satisfy those objectives. Actively block indicators and act upon gathered intelligence.

    Drive Adoption

    Create organizational situational awareness around security initiatives to drive adoption of foundational security measures: network hardening, threat intelligence, red-teaming exercises, and zero-day mitigation, policies, and procedures.

    Supply Chain Security

    Security extends beyond your organization. Ensure your organization has a comprehensive view of your organizational threat landscape and a clear understanding of the security posture of any managed service providers in your supply chain.

    Awareness and Training

    Conduct security awareness and training. Teach end users how to recognize current cyberattacks before they fall victim – this is a mandatory first line of defense.

    Additional Resources

    Follow only official sources of information to help you assess risk

    The image contains an image highlighting a few additional resources.

    As misinformation is a major attack vector for malicious actors, follow only reliable sources for cyberalerts and actionable intelligence. Aggregate information from these reliable sources.

    Federal Cyber Agency Alerts

    Informational Resources

    Info-Tech Insight

    The CISA Shields Up site provides the latest cyber risk updates on the Russia-Ukraine conflict and should provide the most value in staying informed.

    Skills Development on the Mainframe Platform

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    • Parent Category Name: Strategy and Organizational Design
    • Parent Category Link: /strategy-and-organizational-design

    Mainframes remain a critical part of an organization’s infrastructure and will need to support these platforms for the foreseeable future. Despite the importance, it can be a challenge for organizations to find qualified resources to support them. Meanwhile, companies are unsure of where to find help to train and develop their teams on mainframe technologies and are at risk of a skills gap within their teams.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Mainframes continue to have wide usage, particularly in enterprise organizations. The complexity of moving or replatforming many of these applications means these platforms will be around for a long time still.
    • Companies need to be proactive about developing their teams to support their mainframe systems.

    Impact and Result

    • Companies can protect their assets by cultivating a pipeline of qualified resources to support their mainframe infrastructure.
    • There is a robust training ecosystem headed by large, reputable organizations to help develop and support companies' resources. You don’t have to do it alone.

    Skills Development on the Mainframe Platform Research & Tools

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

    1. Skills Development on the Mainframe Platform Storyboard – An overview of the solutions available to support your mainframe training and skills development needs.

    Your mainframes are not going to disappear overnight. These systems often support the most critical operations in your organization. You need to ensure you have the right qualified resources to support your platforms.

    • Skills Development on the Mainframe Platform Storyboard
    [infographic]

    Create an Architecture for AI

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    • Parent Category Name: Data Management
    • Parent Category Link: /data-management

    This research is designed to help organizations who are facing these challenges:

    • Deliver on the AI promise within the organization.
    • Prioritize the demand for AI projects and govern the projects to prevent overloading resources.
    • Have sufficient data management capability.
    • Have clear metrics in place to measure progress and for decision making.

    AI requires a high level of maturity in all data management capabilities, and the greatest challenge the CIO or CDO faces is to mature these capabilities sufficiently to ensure AI success.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Build your target state architecture from predefined best-practice building blocks.
    • Not all business use cases require AI to increase business capabilities.
    • Not all organizations are ready to embark on the AI journey.
    • Knowing the AI pattern that you will use will simplify architecture considerations.

    Impact and Result

    • This blueprint will assist organizations with the assessment, planning, building, and rollout of their AI initiatives.
      • Do not embark on an AI project with an immature data management practice. Embark on initiatives to fix problems before they cripple your AI projects.
      • Using architecture building blocks will speed up the architecture decision phase.
    • The success rate of AI initiatives is tightly coupled with data management capabilities and a sound architecture.

    Create an Architecture for AI Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to understand why you need an underlying architecture for AI, 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 business use cases for AI readiness

    Define business use cases where AI may bring value. Evaluate each use case to determine the company’s AI maturity in people, tools, and operations for delivering the correct data, model development, model deployment, and the management of models in the operational areas.

    • Create an Architecture for AI – Phase 1: Assess Business Use Cases for AI Readiness
    • AI Architecture Assessment and Project Planning Tool
    • AI Architecture Assessment and Project Planning Tool – Sample

    2. Design your target state

    Develop a target state architecture to allow the organization to effectively deliver in the promise of AI using architecture building blocks.

    • Create an Architecture for AI – Phase 2: Design Your Target State
    • AI Architecture Templates

    3. Define the AI architecture roadmap

    Compare current state with the target state to define architecture plateaus and build a delivery roadmap.

    • Create an Architecture for AI – Phase 3: Define the AI Architecture Roadmap
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Create an Architecture for AI

    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 Answer “Where To?”

    The Purpose

    Define business use cases where AI may add value and assess use case readiness.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Know upfront if all required data resources are available in the required velocity, veracity, and variety to service the use case.

    Activities

    1.1 Review the business vision.

    1.2 Identify and classify business use cases.

    1.3 Assess company readiness for each use case.

    1.4 Review architectural principles and download and install Archi.

    Outputs

    List of identified AI use cases

    Assessment of each use case

    Data sources needed for each use case

    Archi installed

    2 Define the Required Architecture Building Blocks

    The Purpose

    Define architecture building blocks that can be used across use cases and data pipeline.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    The architectural building blocks ensure reuse of resources and form the foundation of a stepwise rollout.

    Activities

    2.1 ArchiMate modelling language overview.

    2.2 Architecture building block overview

    2.3 Identify architecture building blocks by use case.

    2.4 Define the target state architecture.

    Outputs

    A set of building blocks created in Archi

    Defined target state architecture using architecture building blocks

    3 Assess the Current State Architecture

    The Purpose

    Assess your current state architecture in the areas identified by the target state.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Only evaluating the current state architecture that will influence your AI implementation.

    Activities

    3.1 Identify the current state capabilities as required by the target state.

    3.2 Assess your current state architecture.

    3.3 Define a roadmap and design implementation plateaus.

    Outputs

    Current state architecture documented in Archi

    Assessed current state using assessment tool

    A roadmap defined using plateaus as milestones

    4 Bridge the Gap and Create the Roadmap

    The Purpose

    Assess your current state against the target state and create a plan to bridge the gaps.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Develop a roadmap that will deliver immediate results and ensure long-term durability.

    Activities

    4.1 Assess the gaps between current- and target-state capabilities.

    4.2 Brainstorm initiatives to address the gaps in capabilities

    4.3 Define architecture delivery plateaus.

    4.4 Define a roadmap with milestones.

    4.5 Sponsor check-in.

    Outputs

    Current to target state gap assessment

    Architecture roadmap divided into plateaus

    Determine the Future of Microsoft Project in Your Organization

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    • Parent Category Name: Project Management Office
    • Parent Category Link: /project-management-office
    • You use Microsoft tools to manage your work, projects, and/or project portfolio.
    • Its latest offering, Project for the web, is new and you’re not sure what to make of it. Microsoft says it will soon replace Microsoft Project and Project Online, but the new software doesn’t seem to do what the old software did.
    • The organization has adopted M365 for collaboration and work management. Meetings happen on Teams, projects are scoped a bit with Planner, and the operations group uses Azure Boards to keep track of what they need to get done.
    • Despite your reservations about the new project management software, Microsoft software has become even more ubiquitous.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The various MS Project offerings (but most notably the latest, Project for the web) hold the promise of integrating with the rest of M365 into a unified work management solution. However, out of the box, Project for the web and the various platforms within M365 are all disparate utilities that need to be pieced together in a purpose-built manner to make use of them for holistic work management purposes. If you’re looking for a cohesive product out of the box, look elsewhere. If you’re looking to assemble a wide array of work, project, and portfolio management functions across different functions and departments, you may have found what you seek.
    • Rather than choosing tools based on your gaps, assess your current maturity level so that you optimize your investment in the Microsoft landscape.

    Impact and Result

    Follow Info-Tech’s path in this blueprint to:

    • Perform a tool audit to trim your work management tool landscape.
    • Navigate the MS Project and M365 licensing landscape.
    • Make sense of what to do with Project for the web and take the right approach to rolling it out (i.e. DIY or MS Gold Partner driven) based upon your needs.
    • Create an action plan to inform next steps.

    After following the program in this blueprint, you will be prepared to advise the organization on how to best leverage the rapidly shifting work management options within M365 and the place of MS Project within it.

    Determine the Future of Microsoft Project in Your Organization Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should make sense of the MS Project and M365 landscapes, 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. Determine your tool needs

    Assess your work management tool landscape, current state maturity, and licensing needs to inform a purpose-built work management action plan.

    • M365 Task Management Tool Guide
    • M365 Project Management Tool Guide
    • M365 Project Portfolio Management Tool Guide
    • Tool Audit Workbook
    • Force Field Analysis Tool
    • Microsoft Project & M365 Licensing Tool
    • Project Portfolio Management Maturity Assessment Workbook (With Tool Analysis)
    • Project Management Maturity Assessment Workbook (With Tool Analysis)

    2. Weigh your MS Project implementation options

    Get familiar with Project for the web’s extensibility as well as the MS Gold Partner ecosystem as you contemplate the best implementation approach(s) for your organization.

    • None
    • None

    3. Finalize your implementation approach

    Prepare a boardroom-ready presentation that will help you communicate your MS Project and M365 action plan to PMO and organizational stakeholders.

    • Microsoft Project & M365 Action Plan Template

    Infographic

    Workshop: Determine the Future of Microsoft Project 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 Assess Driving Forces and Risks

    The Purpose

    Assess the goals and needs as well as the risks and constraints of a work management optimization.

    Take stock of your organization’s current work management tool landscape.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Clear goals and alignment across workshop participants as well as an understanding of the risks and constraints that will need to be mitigated to succeed.

    Current-state insight into the organization’s work management tool landscape.

    Activities

    1.1 Review the business context.

    1.2 Explore the M365 work management landscape.

    1.3 Identify driving forces for change.

    1.4 Analyze potential risks.

    1.5 Perform current-state analysis on work management tools.

    Outputs

    Business context

    Current-state understanding of the task, project, and portfolio management options in M365 and how they align with the organization’s ways of working

    Goals and needs analysis

    Risks and constraints analysis

    Work management tool overview

    2 Determine Tool Needs and Process Maturity

    The Purpose

    Determine your organization’s work management tool needs as well as its current level of project management and project portfolio management process maturity.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An understanding of your tooling needs and your current levels of process maturity.

    Activities

    2.1 Review tool audit dashboard and conduct the final audit.

    2.2 Identify current Microsoft licensing.

    2.3 Assess current-state maturity for project management.

    2.4 Define target state for project management.

    2.5 Assess current-state maturity for project portfolio management.

    2.6 Define target state for project portfolio management.

    Outputs

    Tool audit

    An understanding of licensing options and what’s needed to optimize MS Project options

    Project management current-state analysis

    Project management gap analysis

    Project portfolio management current-state analysis

    Project portfolio management gap analysis

    3 Weigh Your Implementation Options

    The Purpose

    Take stock of your implementation options for Microsoft old project tech and new project tech.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An optimized implementation approach based upon your organization’s current state and needs.

    Activities

    3.1 Prepare a needs assessment for Microsoft 365 and Project Plan licenses.

    3.2 Review the business case for Microsoft licensing.

    3.3 Get familiar with Project for the web.

    3.4 Assess the MS Gold Partner Community.

    3.5 Conduct a feasibility test for PFTW.

    Outputs

    M365 and Project Plan needs assessment

    Business case for additional M365 and MS Project licensing

    An understand of Project for the web and how to extend it

    MS Gold Partner outreach plan

    A go/no-go decision for extending Project for the web on your own

    4 Finalize Implementation Approach

    The Purpose

    Determine the best implementation approach for your organization and prepare an action plan.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A purpose-built implementation approach to help communicate recommendations and needs to key stakeholders.

    Activities

    4.1 Decide on the implementation approach.

    4.2 Identify the audience for your proposal.

    4.3 Determine timeline and assign accountabilities.

    4.4 Develop executive summary presentation.

    Outputs

    An implementation plan

    Stakeholder analysis

    A communication plan

    Initial executive presentation

    5 Next Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite)

    The Purpose

    Finalize your M365 and MS Project work management recommendations and get ready to communicate them to key stakeholders.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Time saved in developing and communicating an action plan.

    Stakeholder buy-in.

    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

    Finalized executive presentation

    A gameplan to communicate your recommendations to key stakeholders as well as a roadmap for future optimization

    Further reading

    Determine the Future of Microsoft Project in Your Organization

    View your task management, project management, and project portfolio management options through the lens of M365.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Microsoft Project is an enigma

    Microsoft Project has dominated its market since being introduced in the 1980s, yet the level of adoption and usage per license is incredibly low.

    The software is ubiquitous, mostly considered to represent its category for “Project Management.” Yet, the software is conflated with its “Portfolio Management” offerings as organizations make platform decisions with Microsoft Project as the incorrectly identified incumbent.

    And incredibly, Microsoft has dominated the next era of productivity software with the “365” offerings. Yet, it froze the “Project” family of offerings and introduced the not-yet-functional “Project for the web.”

    Having a difficult time understanding what to do with, and about, Microsoft Project? You’re hardly alone. It’s not simply a question of tolerating, embracing, or rejecting the product: many who choose a competitor find they’re still paying for Microsoft Project-related licensing for years to come.

    If you’re in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, use this research to understand your rapidly shifting landscape of options.

    (Barry Cousins, Project Portfolio Management Practice Lead, Info-Tech Research Group)

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    You use Microsoft (MS) tools to manage your work, projects, and/or project portfolio.

    Their latest offering, Project for the web, is new and you’re not sure what to make of it. Microsoft says it will soon replace Microsoft Project and Project Online, but the new software doesn’t seem to do what the old software did.

    The organization has adopted M365 for collaboration and work management. Meetings happen on Teams, projects are scoped a bit with Planner, and the operations group uses Azure Boards to keep track of what they need to get done.

    Despite your reservations about the new project management software, Microsoft software has become even more ubiquitous.

    Common Obstacles

    M365 provides the basic components for managing tasks, projects, and project portfolios, but there is no instruction manual for making those parts work together.

    M365 isn’t the only set of tools at play. Business units and teams across the organization have procured other non-Microsoft tools for work management without involving IT.

    Microsoft’s latest project offering, Project for the web, is still evolving and you’re never sure if it is stable or ready for prime time. The missing function seems to involve the more sophisticated project planning disciplines, which are still important to larger, longer, and costlier projects.

    Common Obstacles

    Follow Info-Tech’s path in this blueprint to:

    • Perform a tool audit to trim your work management tool landscape.
    • Navigate the MS Project and M365 licensing landscape.
    • Make sense of what to do with Project for the web and take the right approach to rolling it out (i.e. DIY or MS Gold Partner driven) for your needs.
    • Create an action plan to inform next steps.

    After following the program in this blueprint, you will be prepared to advise the organization on how to best leverage the rapidly shifting work management options within M365 and the place of MS Project within it.

    M365 and, within it, O365 are taking over

    Accelerated partly by the pandemic and the move to remote work, Microsoft’s market share in the work productivity space has grown exponentially in the last two years.

    70% of Fortune 500 companies purchased 365 from Sept. 2019 to Sept. 2020. (Thexyz blog, 2020)

    In its FY21 Q2 report, Microsoft reported 47.5 million M365 consumer subscribers – an 11.2% increase from its FY20 Q4 reporting. (Office 365 for IT Pros, 2021)

    As of September 2020, there were 258,000,000 licensed O365 users. (Thexyz blog, 2020)

    In this blueprint, we’ll look at what the what the phenomenal growth of M365 means for PMOs and project portfolio practitioners who identify as Microsoft shops

    The market share of M365 warrants a fresh look at Microsoft’s suite of project offerings

    For many PMO and project portfolio practitioners, the footprint of M365 in their organizations’ work management cultures is forcing a renewed look at Microsoft’s suite of project offerings.

    The complicating factor is this renewed look comes at a transitional time in Microsoft’s suite of project and portfolio offerings.

    • The market dominance of MS Project Server and Project Online are wanning, with Microsoft promising the end-of-life for Online sometime in the coming years.
    • Project Online’s replacement, Project for the web, is a viable task management and lightweight project management tool, but its viability as a replacement for the rigor of Project Online is at present largely a question mark.
    • Related to the uncertainty and promise around Project for the web, the Dataverse and the Power Platform offer a glimpse into a democratized future of work management tools but anything specific about that future has yet to solidify.

    Microsoft Project has 66% market share in the project management tool space. (Celoxis, 2018)

    A copy of MS project is sold or licensed every 20 seconds. (Integent, 2013)

    MS Project is evolving to meet new work management realities

    It also evolved to not meet the old project management realities.

    • The lines between traditional project management and operational task management solutions are blurring as organizations struggle to keep up with demands.
    • To make the software easier to use, modern work management doesn’t involve the complexities from days past. You won’t find anywhere to introduce complex predecessor-successor relationships, unbalanced assignments with front-loading or back-loading, early-start/late-finish, critical path, etc.
    • “Work management” is among the latest buzzwords in IT consulting. With Project for the web (PFTW), Azure Boards, and Planner, Microsoft is attempting to compete with lighter and better-adopted tools like Trello, Basecamp, Asana, Wrike, and Monday.com.
    • Buyers of project and work management software have struggled to understand how PFTW will still be usable if it gets the missing project management function from MS Project.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Beware of the Software Granularity Paradox.

    Common opinion 1: “Plans and estimates that are granular enough to be believable are too detailed to manage and maintain.”

    Common opinion 2: “Plans simple enough to publish aren’t detailed enough to produce believable estimates.”

    In other words, software simple enough to get widely adopted doesn’t produce believable plans. Software that can produce believable plans is too complex to use at scale.

    A viable task and project management option must walk the line between these dichotomies.

    M365 gives you the pieces, but it’s on PMO users to piece them together in a viable way

    With the new MS Project and M365, it’s on PMOs to avoid the granularity paradox and produce a functioning solution that fits with the organization’s ways of working.

    Common perception still sees Microsoft Project as a rich software tool. Thus, when we consider the next generation of Microsoft Project, it’s easy to expect a newer and friendlier version of what we knew before.

    In truth, the new solution is a collection of partially integrated but largely disparate tools that each satisfy a portion of the market’s needs. While it looks like a rich collection of function when viewed through high-level requirements, users will find:

    • Overlaps, where multiple tools satisfy the same functional requirement (e.g. “assign a task”)
    • Gaps, where a tool doesn’t quite do enough and you’re forced to incorporate another tool (e.g. reverting back to Microsoft Project for advanced resource planning)
    • Islands, where tools don’t fluently talk to each other (e.g. Planner data integrated in real-time with portfolio data, which requires clunky, unstable, decentralized end-user integrations with Microsoft Power Automate)
    A colourful arrangement of Microsoft programs arranged around a pile of puzzle pieces.

    Info-Tech's approach

    Use our framework to best leverage the right MS Project offerings and M365 components for your organization’s work management needs.

    The Info-Tech difference:

    1. A simple to follow framework to help you make sense of a chaotic landscape.
    2. Practical and tactical tools that will help you save time.
    3. Leverage industry best practices and practitioner-based insights.
    An Info-Tech framework titled 'Determine the Future of Microsoft Project in Your Organization, subtitle 'View your task, project, and portfolio management options through the lens of Microsoft 365'. There are four main sections titled 'Background', 'Approaches', 'Deployments', and 'Portfolio Outcomes'. In '1) Background' are 'Analyze Content', 'Assess Constraints', and 'Determine Goals and Needs'. In '2) Approaches' are 'DIY: Are you ready to do it yourself?' 'Info-Tech: Can our analysts help?', and 'MS Gold Partner: Are you better off with a third party?'. In '3) Deployments' are five sections: 'Personal Task Management', Barriers to Portfolio Outcomes: Isolated to One Person. 'Team Task Management', Barriers to Portfolio Outcomes: Isolated to One Team. 'Project Portfolio Management', Barriers to Portfolio Outcomes: Isolated to One Project. 'Project Management', Barriers to Portfolio Outcomes: Functionally Incomplete. 'Enterprise Project and Portfolio Management', Barriers to Portfolio Outcomes: Underadopted. In '4) Portfolio Outcomes' are 'Informed Steering Committee', 'Increased Project Throughput', 'Improved Portfolio Responsiveness', 'Optimized Resource Utilization', and 'Reduced Monetary Waste'.

    Determine the Future of Microsoft Project in Your Organization

    View your task, project, and portfolio management options through the lens of Microsoft 365.

    1. Background

    • Analyze Content
    • Assess Constraints
    • Determine Goals and Needs

    2. Approaches

    • DIY – Are you ready to do it yourself?
    • Info-Tech – Can our analysts help?
    • MS Gold Partner – Are you better off with a third party?

    3. Deployments

      Task Management

    • Personal Task Management
      • Who does it? Knowledge workers
      • What is it? To-do lists
      • Common Approaches
        • Paper list and sticky notes
        • Light task tools
      • Applications
        • Planner
        • To Do
      • Level of Rigor 1/5
      • Barriers to Portfolio Outcomes: Isolated to One Person
    • Team Task Management
      • Who does it? Groups of knowledge workers
      • What is it? Collaborative to-do lists
      • Common Approaches
        • Kanban boards
        • Spreadsheets
        • Light task tools
      • Applications
        • Planner
        • Azure Boards
        • Teams
      • Level of Rigor 2/5
      • Barriers to Portfolio Outcomes: Isolated to One Team

      • Project Management

    • Project Portfolio Management
      • Who does it? PMO Directors, Portfolio Managers
      • What is it?
        • Centralized list of projects
        • Request and intake handling
        • Aggregating reporting
      • Common Approaches
        • Spreadsheets
        • PPM software
        • Roadmaps
      • Applications
        • Project for the Web
        • Power Platform
      • Level of Rigor 3/5
      • Barriers to Portfolio Outcomes: Isolated to One Project
    • Project Management
      • Who does it? Project Managers
      • What is it? Deterministic scheduling of related tasks
      • Common Approaches
        • Spreadsheets
        • Lists
        • PM software
        • PPM software
      • Applications
        • Project Desktop Client
      • Level of Rigor 4/5
      • Barriers to Portfolio Outcomes: Functionally Incomplete

      • Enterprise Project and Portfolio Management

    • Enterprise Project and Portfolio Management
      • Who does it? PMO and ePMO Directors, Portfolio Managers, Project Managers
      • What is it?
        • Centralized request and intake handling
        • Resource capacity management
        • Deterministic scheduling of related tasks
      • Common Approaches
        • PPM software
      • Applications
        • Project Online
        • Project Desktop Client
        • Project Server
      • Level of Rigor 5/5
      • Barriers to Portfolio Outcomes: Underadopted

    4. Portfolio Outcomes

    • Informed Steering Committee
    • Increased Project Throughput
    • Improved Portfolio Responsiveness
    • Optimized Resource Utilization
    • Reduced Monetary Waste

    Info-Tech's methodology for Determine the Future of MS Project for Your Organization

    1. Determine Your Tool Needs

    2. Weigh Your MS Project Implementation Options

    3. Finalize Your Implementation Approach

    Phase Steps
    1. Survey the M365 Work Management Tools
    2. Perform a Process Maturity Assessment to Help Inform Your M365 Starting Point
    3. Consider the Right MS Project Licenses for Your Stakeholders
    1. Get Familiar With Extending Project for the Web Using Power Apps
    2. Assess the MS Gold Partner Community
    1. Prepare an Action Plan

    Phase Outcomes
    1. Work Management Tool Audit
    2. MS Project and Power Platform Licensing Needs
    3. Project Management and Project Portfolio Management Maturity Assessment
    1. Project for the Web Readiness Assessment
    2. MS Gold Partner Outreach Plan
    1. MS Project and M365 Action Plan Presentation

    Insight Summary

    Overarching blueprint insight: Microsoft Parts Sold Separately. Assembly required.

    The various MS Project offerings (but most notably the latest, Project for the web) hold the promise of integrating with the rest of M365 into a unified work management solution. However, out of the box, Project for the web and the various platforms within M365 are all disparate utilities that need to be pieced together in a purpose-built manner to make use of them for holistic work management purposes.

    If you’re looking for a cohesive product out of the box, look elsewhere. If you’re looking to assemble a wide array of work, project, and portfolio management functions across different functions and departments, you may have found what you seek

    Phase 1 insight: Align your tool choice to your process maturity level.

    Rather than choosing tools based on your gaps, make sure to assess your current maturity level so that you optimize your investment in the Microsoft landscape.

    Phase 2 insight: Weigh your options before jumping into Microsoft’s new tech.

    Microsoft’s new Project plans (P1, P3, and P5) suggest there is a meaningful connection out of the box between its old tech (Project desktop, Project Server, and Project Online) and its new tech (Project for the web).

    However, the offerings are not always interoperable.

    Phase 3 insight: Keep the iterations small as you move ahead with trials and implementations.

    Organizations are changing as fast as the software we use to run them.

    If you’re implementing parts of this platform, keep the changes small as you monitor the vendors for new software versions and integrations.

    Blueprint deliverables

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

    Key deliverable: Microsoft Project & M365 Action Plan Template

    The Action Plan will help culminate and present:

    • Context and Constraints
    • DIY Implementation Approach
    Or
    • MS Partner Implementation Approach
    • Future-State Vision and Goals
    Samples of Info-Tech's key deliverable 'Microsoft Project and M365 Action Plan Template'.

    Tool Audit Workbook

    Sample of Info-Tech deliverable 'Tool Audit Workbook'.

    Assess your organization's current work management tool landscape and determine what tools drive value for individual users and teams and which ones can be rationalized.

    Force Field Analysis

    Sample of Info-Tech deliverable 'Force Field Analysis'.

    Document the driving and resisting forces for making a change to your work management tools.

    Maturity Assessments

    Sample of Info-Tech deliverable 'Maturity Assessments'.

    Use these assessments to identify gaps in project management and project portfolio management processes. The results will help guide process improvement efforts and measure success and progress.

    Microsoft Project & M365 Licensing Tool

    Sample of Info-Tech deliverable 'Microsoft Project and M365 Licensing Tool'.

    Determine the best licensing options and approaches for your implementation of Microsoft Project.

    Curate your work management tools to harness valuable portfolio outcomes

    • Increase Project Throughput

      Do more projects by ensuring the right projects and the right amount of projects are approved and executed.

    • Support an Informed Steering Committee

      Easily compare progress of projects across the portfolio and enable the leadership team to make decisions.

    • Improve portfolio responsiveness

      Make the portfolio responsive to executive steering when new projects and changing priorities need rapid action.

    • Optimize Resource Utilization

      Assign the right resources to approved projects and minimize the chronic over-allocation of resources that leads to burnout.

    • Reduce Monetary Waste

      Terminate low-value projects early and avoid sinking additional funds into unsuccessful ventures.

    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?

    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 4 months.

      Introduction

    • Call #1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.

      • Phase 1

    • Call #2: Explore the M365 work management landscape.
    • Call #3: Discuss Microsoft Project Plans and their capabilities.
    • Call #4: Assess current-state maturity.

      • Phase 2

    • Call #5: Get familiar with extending Project for the web using Power Apps.
    • Call #6: Assess the MS Gold Partner Community.

      • Phase 3

    • Call #7: Determine approach and deployment.
    • Call #8: Discuss action plan.

    Workshop Overview

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

    Day 1
    Assess Driving Forces and Risks

    Day 2
    Determine Tool Needs and Process Maturity

    Day 3
    Weigh Your Implementation Options

    Day 4
    Finalize Implementation Approach

    Day 5
    Next Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite)

    Activities
    • 1.1 Review the business context.
    • 1.2 Explore the M365 work management landscape.
    • 1.3 Identify driving forces for change.
    • 1.4 Analyze potential risks.
    • 1.5 Perform current-state analysis on work management tools.
    • 2.1 Review tool audit dashboard and conduct the final audit.
    • 2.2 Identify current Microsoft licensing.
    • 2.3 Assess current-state maturity for project management.
    • 2.4 Define target state for project management.
    • 2.5 Assess current-state maturity for project portfolio management.
    • 2.6 Define target state for project portfolio management.
    • 3.1 Prepare a needs assessment for Microsoft 365 and Project Plan licenses.
    • 3.2 Review the business case for Microsoft licensing.
    • 3.3 Get familiar with Project for the web.
    • 3.4 Assess the MS Gold Partner Community.
    • 3.5 Conduct a feasibility test for PFTW.
    • 4.1 Decide on the implementation approach.
    • 4.2 Identify the audience for your proposal.
    • 4.3 Determine timeline and assign accountabilities.
    • 4.4 Develop executive summary presentation.
    • 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. Force Field Analysis
    2. Tool Audit Workbook
    1. Tool Audit Workbook
    2. Project Management Maturity Assessment
    3. Portfolio Management Maturity Assessment
    1. Microsoft Project and M365 Licensing Tool
    1. Microsoft Project & M365 Action Plan
    1. Microsoft Project & M365 Action Plan

    Determine the Future of Microsoft Project for Your Organization

    Phase 1: Determine Your Tool Needs

    Phase 1: Determine Your Tool Needs

    		 Phase 2: Weigh Your Implementation Options Phase 3: Finalize Your Implementation Approach
    • Step 1.1: Survey the M365 work management landscape
    • Step 1.2: Explore the Microsoft Project Plans and their capabilities
    • Step 1.3: Assess the maturity of your current PM & PPM capabilities
    • Step 2.1: Get familiar with extending Project for the web using Power Apps
    • Step 2.2: Assess the MS Gold Partner Community
    • Step 3.1: Prepare an action plan

    Phase Outcomes

    • Tool Audit
    • Microsoft Project Licensing Analysis
    • Project Management Maturity Assessment
    • Project Portfolio Management Maturity Assessments

    Step 1.1

    Survey the M365 Work Management Landscape

    Activities

    • 1.1.1 Distinguish between task, project, and portfolio capabilities
    • 1.1.2 Review Microsoft’s offering for task, project, and portfolio management needs
    • 1.1.4 Assess your organizational context and constraints
    • 1.1.3 Explore typical deployment options

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Assessing your organization’s context for project and project portfolio management
    • Documenting the organization’s constraints
    • Establishing the organization’s goals and needs

    This step involves the following participants:

    • PMO Director
    • Resource Managers
    • Project Managers
    • Knowledge Workers

    Outcomes of Step

    • Knowledge of the Microsoft ecosystem as it relates to task, project, and portfolio management
    • Current organizational context and constraints

    Don’t underestimate the value of interoperability

    The whole Microsoft suite is worth more than the sum of its parts … if you know how to put it together.

    38% of the worldwide office suite market belongs to Microsoft. (Source: Statistica, 2021)

    1 in 3 small to mid-sized organizations moving to Microsoft Project say they are doing so because it integrates well with Office 365. (Source: CBT Nuggets, 2018)

    There’s a gravity to the Microsoft ecosystem.

    And while there is no argument that there are standalone task management tools, project management tools, or portfolio management tools that are likely more robust, feature-rich, and easier to adopt, it’s rare that you find an ecosystem that can do it all, to an acceptable level.

    That is the value proposition of Microsoft: the ubiquity, familiarity, and versatility. It’s the Swiss army knife of software products.

    The work management landscape is evolving

    With M365, Microsoft is angling to become the industry leader, and your organization’s hub, for work management.

    Workers lose up to 40% of their time multi-tasking and switching between applications. (Bluescape, 2018)

    25 Context switches – On average, workers switch between 10 apps, 25 times a day. (Asana, 2021)

    “Work management” is among the latest buzzwords in IT consulting.

    What is work management? It was born of a blurring of the traditional lines between operational or day-to-day tasks and project management tasks, as organizations struggle to keep up with both operational and project demands.

    To make the software easier to use, modern work management doesn’t involve the complexities from days past. You won’t find anywhere to introduce complex predecessor-successor relationships, unbalanced assignments with front-loading or back-loading, early-start/late-finish, critical path, etc.

    Indeed, with Project for the web, Azure Boards, Planner, and other M365 utilities, Microsoft is attempting to compete with lighter and better-adopted tools (e.g. Trello, Wike, Monday.com).

    The Microsoft world of work management can be understood across three broad categories

    1. Task Management

      Task management is essentially the same as keeping track of a to-do list. While you can have a project-related task, you can also have a non-project-related task. The sum of project and non-project tasks make up the work that you need to complete.

    2. Project Management

      Project management (PM) is a methodical approach to planning and guiding project processes from start to finish. Implementing PM processes helps establish repeatable steps and controls that enable project success. Documentation of PM processes leads to consistent results and dependable delivery on expectations.

    3. Portfolio Management

      Project portfolio management (PPM) is a strategic approach to approving, prioritizing, resourcing, and reporting on project. In addition, effective PPM should nurture the completion of projects in the portfolio in the most efficient way and track the extent to which the organization is realizing the intended benefits from completed projects.

    The slides ahead explain each of these modes of working in the Microsoft ecosystem in turn. Further, Info-Tech’s Task, Project, and Project Portfolio Management Tool Guides explain these areas in more detail.

    Use Info-Tech’s Tool Guides assess your MS Project and M365 work management options

    Lean on Info-Tech’s Tool Guides as you navigate Microsoft’s tasks management, project management, and project portfolio management options.

    • The slides ahead take you through a bird’s-eye view of what your MS Project and M365 work management options look like across Info-Tech’s three broad categories
    • In addition to these slides, Info-Tech has three in-depth tool guides that take you through your operational task management, project management, and project portfolio management options in MS Project and M365.
    • These tool guides can be leveraged as you determine whether Microsoft has the required toolset for your organization’s task, project, and project portfolio management needs.

    Download Info-Tech’s Task Management, Project Management, and Project Portfolio Management Tool Guides

    Task Management Overview

    What is task management?

    • It is essentially the same as keeping track of a to-do list. While you can have a project-related task, you can also have a non-project-related task. The sum of project and non-project tasks make up the work that you need to complete.

    What are the benefits of task management using applications within the MS suite?

    • Many organizations already own the tools and don't have to go out and buy something separately.
    • There is easy integration with other MS applications.

    What is personal task management?

    • Tools that allow you to structure work that is visible only to you. This can include work from tasks you are going to be completing for yourself and tasks you are completing as part of a larger work effort.

    What is team task management?

    • Tools that allow users to structure work that is visible to a group. When something is moved or changed, it affects what the group is seeing because it is a shared platform.

    Get familiar with the Microsoft product offerings for task management

    A diagram of Microsoft products and what they can help accomplish. It starts on the right with 'Teams' and 'Outlook'. Both can flow through to 'Personal Task Management' with products 'Teams Tasks' and 'To-Do', but Teams also flows into 'Team Task Management' with products 'Planner' and 'Project for the web'. See the next two slides for more details on these modes of working.

    Download the M365 Task Management Tool Guide

    Personal Task Management

    The To-Do list

    • Who does it?
      • Knowledge workers
    • What is it?
      • How each knowledge worker organizes their individual work tasks in M365
    • When is it done?
      • As needed throughout the day
    • Where is it done?
      • Paper
      • Digital location
    • How is it done?
      • DIY and self-developed
      • Usually not repeatable and evolves depending on work location and tools available
      • Not governed

    Microsoft differentiator:

    Utilities like Planner and To-Do make it easier to turn what are often ad hoc approaches into a more repeatable process.

    Team Task Management

    The SharedTo-Do list

    • Who does it?
      • Groups of knowledge workers
    • What is it?
      • Temporary and permanent collections of knowledge workers
    • When is it done?
      • As needed or on a pre-determined cadence
    • Where is it done?
      • Paper
      • Digital location
    • How is it done?
      • User norms are established organically and adapted based upon the needs of the team.
      • To whatever extent processes are repeatable in the first place, they remain repeatable only if the team is a collective.
      • Usually governed within the team and not subject to wider visibility.

    Microsoft differentiator:

    Teams has opened personal task management tactics up to more collaborative approaches.

    Project Management Overview

    2003

    Project Server: This product serves many large enterprise clients, but Microsoft has stated that it is at end of life. It is appealing to industries and organizations where privacy is paramount. This is an on-premises system that combines servers like SharePoint, SQL, and BI to report on information from Project Desktop Client. To realize the value of this product, there must be adoption across the organization and engagement at the project-task level for all projects within the portfolio.

    2013

    Project Online: This product serves many medium enterprise clients. It is appealing for IT departments who want to get a rich set of features that can be used to intake projects, assign resources, and report on project portfolio health. It is a cloud solution built on the SharePoint platform, which provides many users a sense of familiarity. However, due to the bottom-up reporting nature of this product, again, adoption across the organization and engagement at the project task level for all projects within the portfolio is critical.

    2020

    Project for the web: This product is the newest on the market and is quickly being evolved. Many O365 enthusiasts have been early adopters of Project for the web despite its limited features when compared to Project Online. It is also a cloud solution that encourages citizen developers by being built on the MS Power Platform. This positions the product well to integrate with Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Apps. It is, so far, the only MS product that lends itself to abstracted portfolio management, which means it doesn’t rely on project task level engagement to produce portfolio reports. The portfolio can also run with a mixed methodology by funneling Project, Azure Boards, and Planner boards into its roadmap function.

    Get familiar with the Microsoft product offerings for project management

    A diagram of Microsoft products and what they can help accomplish in Personal and Team Project Management. Products listed include 'Project Desktop Client', 'Project Online', 'SharePoint', 'Power Platform', 'Azure DevOps', 'Project for the web', Project Roadmap', 'Project Home', and 'Project Server'. See the next slide for more details on personal and team project management as modes of working.

    Download the M365 Project Management Tool Guide

    Project Management

    Orchestrating the delivery of project work

    • Who does it?
      • Project managers
    • What is it?
      • Individual project managers developing project plans and schedules in the MS Project Desktop Client
    • When is it done?
      • Throughout the lifecycle of the project
    • Where is it done?
      • Digital location
    • How is it done?
      • Used by individual project managers to develop and manage project plans.
      • Common approaches may or may not involve reconciliation of resource capacity through integration with Active Directory.
      • Sometimes usage norms are established by organizational project management governance standards, though individual use of the desktop client is largely ungoverned.

    Microsoft differentiator:

    For better or worse, Microsoft’s core solution is veritably synonymous with project management itself and has formally contributed to the definition of the project management space.

    Project Portfolio Management Overview

    Optimize what you’re already using and get familiar with the Power Platform.

    What does PPM look like within M365?

    • The Office suite in the Microsoft 365 suite boasts the world’s most widely used application for the purposes of abstracted and strategic PPM: Excel. For the purposes of PPM, Excel is largely implemented in a suboptimal fashion, and as a result, organizations fail to gain PPM adoption and maturation through its use.
    • Until very recently, Microsoft toolset did not explicitly address abstracted PPM needs.
    • However, with the latest version of M365 and Project for the web, Microsoft is boasting of renewed PPM capabilities from its toolset. These capabilities are largely facilitated through what Microsoft is calling its Power Platform (i.e. a suite of products that includes Power, Power Apps, and Power Automate).

    Explore the Microsoft product offering for abstracted project portfolio management

    A diagram of Microsoft products for 'Adaptive or Abstracted Portfolio Management'. Products listed include 'Excel', 'MS Lists', 'Forms', 'Teams', and the 'Power Platform' products 'Power BI', 'Power Apps', and 'Power Automate'. See the next slide for more details on adaptive or abstracted portfolio management as a mode of working.

    Download the M365 Project Portfolio Management Tool Guide

    Project Portfolio Management

    Doing the right projects, at the right time, with the right resources

    • Who does it?
      • PMO directors; portfolio managers
    • What is it?
      A strategic approach to approving, prioritizing, resourcing, and reporting on projects using applications in M365 and Project for the web. In distinction to enterprise PPM, a top-down or abstracted approach is applied, meaning PPM data is not tied to project task details.
    • Where is it done?
      • Digital tool, either homegrown or commercial
    • How is it done?
      • Currently in M365, PPM approaches are largely self-developed, though Microsoft Gold Partners are commonly involved.
      • User norms are still evolving, along with the software’s (Project for the web) function.

    Microsoft differentiator:

    Integration between Project for the web and Power Apps allows for custom approaches.

    Project Portfolio Management Overview

    Microsoft’s legacy project management toolset has contributed to the definition of traditional or enterprise PPM space.

    A robust and intensive bottom-up approach that requires task level roll-ups from projects to inform portfolio level data. For this model to work, reconciliation of individual resource capacity must be universal and perpetually current.

    If your organization has low or no maturity with PPM, this approach will be tough to make successful.

    In fact, most organizations under adopt the tools required to effectively operate with the traditional project portfolio management. Once adopted and operationalized, this combination of tools gives the executives the most precise view of the current state of projects within the portfolio.

    Explore the Microsoft product offering for enterprise project portfolio management

    A diagram of Microsoft products for 'Enterprise or Traditional Portfolio Management'. Products listed include 'Project Desktop Client', 'SharePoint', 'Project Online', 'Azure DevOps', 'Project Roadmaps', and 'Project Home'. See the next slide for more details on this as a mode of working.

    Download the M365 Project Portfolio Management Tool Guide

    Enterprise Project and Portfolio Management

    Bottom-up approach to managing the project portfolio

    • Who does it?
      • PMO and ePMO directors; portfolio managers
      • Project managers
    • What is it?
      • A strategic approach to approving, prioritizing, resourcing, and reporting on projects using applications in M365 and Project for the web. In distinction to enterprise PPM, a top-down or abstracted approach is applied, meaning PPM data is not tied to project task details.
    • Where is it done?
      • Digital tool that is usually commercial.
    • How is it done?
      • Microsoft Gold Partner involvement is highly likely in successful implementations.
      • Usage norms are long established and customized solutions are prevalent.
      • To be successful, use must be highly governed.
      • Reconciliation of individual resource capacity must be universal and perpetually current.

    Microsoft differentiator:

    Microsoft’s established network of Gold Partners helps to make this deployment a viable option.

    Assess your current tool ecosystem across work management categories

    Use Info-Tech’s Tool Audit Workbook to assess the value and satisfaction for the work management tools currently in use.

    • With the modes of working in mind that have been addressed in the previous slides and in Info-Tech’s Tool Guides, the activity slides ahead encourage you to engage your wider organization to determine all of the ways of working across individuals and teams.
    • Depending on the scope of your work management optimization, these engagements may be limited to IT or may extend to the business.
    • Use Info-Tech’s Tool Audit Workbook to help you gather and make sense of the tool data you collect. The result of this activity is to gain insight into the tools that drive value and fail to drive value across your work management categories with a view to streamline the organization’s tool ecosystem.

    Download Info-Tech’s Tool Audit Workbook

    Sample of Info-Tech's Tool Audit Workbook.

    1.2.1 Compile list of tools

    1-3 hours

    Input: Information on tools used to complete task, project, and portfolio tasks

    Output: Analyzed list of tools

    Materials: Whiteboard/Flip Charts, Tool Audit Workbook

    Participants: Portfolio Manager (PMO Director), PMO Admin Team, Project Managers, Business Stakeholders

    1. Identify the stakeholder groups that are in scope. For each group that you’ve identified, brainstorm the different tools and artifacts that are necessary to get the task, project, and project portfolio management functions done.
    2. Make sure to record the tool name and specify its category (standard document, artifact, homegrown solution, or commercial solution).
    3. Think about and discuss how often the tool is being used for each use case across the organization. Document whether its use is required. Then assess reporting functionality, data accuracy, and cost.
    4. Lastly, give a satisfaction rating for each use case.

    Excerpt from the Tool Audit Workbook

    Excerpt from Info-Tech's Tool Audit Workbook on compiling tools.

    1.2.1 Review dashboard

    1-3 hours

    Input: List of key PPM decision points, List of who is accountable for PPM decisions, List of who has PPM decision-making authority

    Output: Prioritized list of PPM decision-making support needs

    Materials: Whiteboard/Flip Charts, Tool Audit Workbook

    Participants: Portfolio Manager (PMO Director), PMO Admin Team, CIO

    Discuss the outputs of the Dashboards tab to inform your decision maker on whether to pass or fail the tool for each use case.

    Sample of a BI dashboard used to evaluate the usefulness of tools. Written notes include: 'Slice the data based on stakeholder group, tool, use case, and category', and 'Review the results of the questionnaire by comparing cost and satisfaction'.

    1.2.1 Execute final audit

    1 hour

    Input: List of key PPM decision points, List of who is accountable for PPM decisions, List of who has PPM decision-making authority

    Output: Prioritized list of PPM decision-making support needs

    Materials: Whiteboard/Flip Charts, Tool Audit Workbook

    Participants: Portfolio Manager (PMO Director), PMO Admin Team, CIO

    1. Using the information available, schedule time with the leadership team to present the results.
    2. Identify the accountable party to make the final decision on what current tools pass or fail the final audit.
    3. Mind the gap presented by the failed tools and look to possibilities within the M365 and Microsoft Project suite. For each tool that is deemed unsatisfactory for the future state, mark it as “Fail” in column O on tab 2 of the Tool Audit Workbook. This will ensure the item shows in the “Fail” column on tab 4 of the tool when you refresh the data.
    4. For each of the tools that “fail” your audit and that you’re going to make recommendations to rationalize in a future state, try to capture the annual total current-state spending on licenses, and the work modes the tool currently supports (i.e. task, project, and/or portfolio management).
    5. Additionally, start to think about future-state replacements for each tool within or outside of the M365/MS Project platforms. As we move forward to finalize your action plan in the last phase of this blueprint, we will capture and present this information to key stakeholders.

    Document your goals, needs, and constraints before proceeding

    Use Info-Tech’s Force Field Analysis Tool to help weigh goals and needs against risks and constraints associated with a work management change.

    • Now that you have discussed the organization’s ways of working and assessed its tool landscape – and made some initial decisions on some tool options that might need to change across that landscape – gather key stakeholders to define (a) why a change is needed at this time and (b) to document some of the risks and constraints associated with changing.
    • Info-Tech’s Force Field Analysis Tool can be used to capture these data points. It takes an organizational change management approach and asks you to consider the positive and negative forces associated with a work management tool change at this time.
    • The slides ahead walk you through a force field analysis activity and help you to navigate the relevant tabs in the Tool.

    Download Info-Tech's Force Field Analysis Tool

    Sample of Info-Tech's Force Field Analysis Tool.

    1.2.1 Identify goals and needs (1 of 2)

    Use tab 1 of the Force Field Analysis Workbook to assess goals and needs.

    30 minutes

    Input: Opportunities associated with determining the use case for Microsoft Project and M365 in your organization

    Output: Plotted opportunities based on probability and impact

    Materials: Whiteboard/Flip Charts, Force Field Analysis Tool

    Participants: Portfolio Manager (PMO Director), PMO Admin Team, Project Managers

    1. Brainstorm opportunities associated with exploring and/or implementing Microsoft Project and the Microsoft 365 suite of products for task, project, and project portfolio management.
    2. Document relevant opportunities in tab 1 of the Force Field Analysis Tool. For each driving force for the change (note: a driving force can include goals and needs) that is identified, provide a category that explains why the driving force is a concern (i.e. with this force is the organization looking to mature, integrate, scape, or accelerate?).
    3. In addition, assess the ease of achieving or realizing each goal or need and the impact of realizing them on the PMO and/or the organization.
    4. See the next slide for a screenshot that helps you navigate tab 1 of the Tool.

    Download the Force Field Analysis Tool

    1.2.1 Identify goals and needs (2 of 2)

    Screenshot of tab 1 of the Force Field Analysis Workbook.

    Screenshot of tab 1 of the Force Field Analysis Workbook. There are five columns referred to as columns B through F with the headings 'Opportunities', 'Category', 'Source', 'Ease of Achieving', and 'Impact on PMO/Organization'.

    In column B on tab 1, note the specific opportunities the group would like to call out.

    In column C, categorize the goal or need being articulated by the list of drop-down options: will it accelerate the time to benefit? Will it help to integrate systems and data sources? Will it mature processes and the organization overall? Will it help to scale across the organization? Choose the option that best aligns with the opportunity.

    In column D, categorize the source of the goal or need as internal or external.

    In column E, use the drop-down menus to indicate the ease of realizing each goal or need for the organization. Will it be relatively easy to manifest or will there be complexities to implementing it?

    In column F, use the drop-down menus to indicate the positive impact of realizing or achieving each need on the PMO and/or the organization.

    On tab 3 of the Force Field Analysis Workbook, your inputs on tab 1 are summarized in graphical form from columns B to G. On tab 3, these goals and needs results are contrasted with your inputs on tab 2 (see next slide).

    1.2.2 Identify risk and constraints (1 of 2)

    Use tab 2 of the Force Field Analysis Workbook to assess opposing forces to change.

    30 minutes

    Input: Risks associated with determining the use case for Microsoft Project and M365 in your organization

    Output: Plotted risks based on probability and impact

    Materials: Whiteboard/Flip Charts, Force Field Analysis Tool

    Participants: Portfolio Manager (PMO Director), PMO Admin Team, Project Managers

    1. With the same working group from 1.2.1, brainstorm risks, constraints, and other opposing forces pertaining to your potential future state.
    2. Document relevant opposing forces in tab 2 of the Force Field Analysis Tool. For each opposing force for the change (note: a driving force can include goals and needs) that is identified, provide a category that explains why the opposing force is a concern (i.e. will it impact or is it impacted by time, resources, maturity, budget, or culture?).
    3. In addition, assess the likelihood of the risk or constraint coming to light and the negative impact of it coming to light for your proposed change.
    4. See the next slide for a screenshot that helps you navigate tab 2 of the Force Field Analysis Tool.

    Download the Force Field Analysis Tool

    1.2.2 Identify risk and constraints (2 of 2)

    Screenshot of tab 2 of the Force Field Analysis Workbook.

    Screenshot of tab 2 of the Force Field Analysis Workbook. There are five columns referred to as columns B through F with the headings 'Risks and Constraints', 'Category', 'Source', 'Likelihood of Constraint/Risk/Resisting Force Being Felt', and 'Impact to Derailing Goals and Needs'.

    In column B on tab 2, note the specific risks and constraints the group would like to call out.

    In column C, categorize the risk or constraint being articulated by the list of drop-down options: will it impact or is it impacted by time, resources, budget, culture or maturity?

    In column D, categorize the source of the goal or need as internal or external.

    In column E, use the drop-down menus to indicate the likelihood of each risk or constraint materializing during your implementation. Will it definitely occur or is there just a small chance it could come to light?

    In column F, use the drop-down menus to indicate the negative impact of the risk or constraint to achieving your goals and needs.

    On tab 3 of the Force Field Analysis Workbook, your inputs on tab 2 are summarized in graphical form from columns I to N. On tab 3, your risk and constraint results are contrasted with your inputs on tab 1 to help you gauge the relative weight of driving vs. opposing forces.

    Step 1.2

    Explore the Microsoft Project Plans and their capabilities

    Activities

    • 1.1.1 Review the Microsoft 365 licensing features
    • 1.1.2 Explore the Microsoft Project Plan licenses
    • 1.1.3 Prepare a needs assessment for Microsoft 365 and Project Plan licenses

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Review the suite of task management, project management, and project portfolio management options available in Microsoft 365.
    • Prepare a preliminary checklist of required M365 apps for your stakeholders.

    This step usually involves the following participants:

    • PMO/Portfolio Manager
    • Project Managers
    • CIO and other executive stakeholders
    • Other project portfolio stakeholders (project and IT workers)

    Outcomes of Step

    • Preliminary requirements for an M365 project management and project portfolio management tool implementation

    Microsoft recently revamped its project plans to balance its old and new tech

    Access to the new tech, Project for the web, comes with all license types, while Project Online Professional and Premium licenses have been revamped as P3 and P5.

    Navigating Microsoft licensing is never easy, and Project for the web has further complicated licensing needs for project professionals.

    As we’ll cover in step 2.1 of this blueprint, Project for the web can be extended beyond its base lightweight work management functionality using the Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI). Depending on the scope of your implementation, this can require additional Power Platform licensing.

    • In this step, we will help you understand the basics of what’s already included in your enterprise M365 licensing as well as what’s new in Microsoft’s recent Project licensing plans (P1, P3, and P5).
    • As we cover toward the end of this step, you can use Info-Tech’s MS Project and M365 Licensing Tool to help you understand your plan and licensing needs. Further assistance on licensing can be found in the Task, Project, and Portfolio Management Tool Guides that accompany this blueprint and Info-Tech’s Modernize Your Microsoft Licensing for the Cloud Era.

    Download Info-Tech’s Modernize Your Microsoft Licensing for the Cloud Era

    Licensing features for knowledge workers

    Please note that licensing packages are frequently subject to change. This is up to date as of August 2021. For the most up-to-date information on licensing, visit the Microsoft website.

    Bundles are extremely common and can be more cost effective than à la carte options for the Microsoft products.

    The biggest differentiator between M365 and O365 is that the M365 product also includes Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility and Security.

    The color coding in the diagram indicates that the same platform/application suite is available.

    Platform or Application M365 E3 M365 E5 O365 E1 O365 E3 O365 E5
    Microsoft Forms X X X X X
    Microsoft Lists X X X X X
    OneDrive X X X X X
    Planner X X X X X
    Power Apps for Office 365 X X X X X
    Power Automate for Office X X X X X
    Power BI Pro X X
    Power Virtual Agents for Teams X X X X X
    SharePoint X X X X X
    Stream X X X X X
    Sway X X X X X
    Teams X X X X X
    To Do X X X X X

    Get familiar with Microsoft Project Plan 1

    Please note that licensing packages are frequently subject to change. This is up to date as of August 2021. For the most up to date information on licensing, visit the Microsoft website.

    Who is a good fit?

    • New project managers
    • Zero-allocation project managers
    • Individuals and organizations who want to move out of Excel into something less fragile (easily breaking formulas)

    What does it include?

    • Access to Project Home, a landing page to access all project plans you’ve created or have been assigned to.
    • Access to Grid View, Board View, and Timeline (Gantt) View to plan and manage your projects with Project for the web
    • Sharing Project for the web plans across Microsoft Teams channels
    • Co-authoring on project plans

    When does it make sense?

    • Lightweight project management
    • No process to use bottom-up approach for resourcing data
    • Critical-path analysis is not required
    • Organization does not have an appetite for project management rigor

    Get familiar with Microsoft Project Plan 3

    Please note that licensing packages are frequently subject to change. This is up to date as of August 2021. For the most up to date information on licensing, visit the Microsoft website.

    Who is a good fit?

    • Experienced and dedicated project managers
    • Organizations with complex projects
    • Large project teams are required to complete project work
    • Organizations have experience using project management software

    What does it include?

    Everything in Project Plan 1 plus the following:

    • Reporting through Power BI Report template apps (note that there are no pre-built reports for Project for the web)
    • Access to build a Roadmap of projects from Project for the web and Azure DevOps with key milestones, statuses, and deadlines
    • Project Online to submit and track timesheets for project teams
    • MS Project Desktop Client to support resource management

    When does it make sense?

    • Project management is an established discipline at the organization
    • Critical-path analysis is commonly used
    • Organization has some appetite for project management rigor
    • Resources are expected to submit timesheets to allow for more precise resource management data

    Get familiar with Microsoft Project Plan 5

    Please note that licensing packages are frequently subject to change. This is up to date as of August 2021. For the most up to date information on licensing, visit the Microsoft website.

    Who is a good fit?

    • Experienced and dedicated project managers
    • Experienced and dedicated PMO directors
    • Dedicated portfolio managers
    • Organizations proficient at sustaining data in a standard tool

    What does it include?

    Everything in Project Plan 3 plus the following:

    • Portfolio selection and optimization
    • Demand management
    • Enterprise resource planning and management through deterministic task and resource scheduling
    • MS Project Desktop Client to support resource management

    When does it make sense?

    • Project management is a key success factor at the organization
    • Organization employs a bottom-up approach for resourcing data
    • Critical-path analysis is required
    • Formal project portfolio management processes are well established
    • The organization is willing to either put in the time, energy, and resources to learn to configure the system through DIY or is willing to leverage a Microsoft Partner to help them do so

    What’s included in each plan (1 of 2)

    Plan details are up to date as of September 2021. Plans and pricing can change often. Visit the Microsoft website to validate plan options and get pricing details.
    MS Project Capabilities Info-Tech's Editorial Description P1 P3 P5
    Project Home Essentially a landing page that allows you to access all the project plans you've created or that you're assigned to. It amalgamates plans created in Project for the web, the Project for the web app in Power Apps, and Project Online. X X X
    Grid view One of three options in which to create your project plans in Project for the web (board view and timeline view are the other options). You can switch back and forth between the options. X X X
    Board view One of three options in which to create your project plans in Project for the web (grid view and timeline view are the other options). You can switch back and forth between the options. X X X
    Timeline (Gantt) view One of three options in which to create your project plans in Project for the web (board view and grid view are the other options). You can switch back and forth between the options. X X X
    Collaboration and communication This references the ability to add Project for the web project plans to Teams channels. X X X
    Coauthoring Many people can have access to the same project plan and can update tasks. X X X
    Project planning and scheduling For this the marketing lingo says "includes familiar scheduling tools to assign project tasks to team members and use different views like Grid, Board, and Timeline (Gantt chart) to oversee the schedule." Unclear how this is different than the project plans in the three view options above. X X X

    X - Functionality Included in Plan

    O - Functionality Not Included in Plan

    What’s included in each plan (2 of 2)

    Plan details are up to date as of September 2021. Plans and pricing can change often. Visit the Microsoft website to validate plan options and get pricing details.
    MS Project Capabilities Info-Tech's Editorial Description P1 P3 P5
    Reporting This seems to reference Excel reports and the Power BI Report Template App, which can be used if you're using Project Online. There are no pre-built reports for Project for the web, but third-party Power Apps are available. O X X
    Roadmap Roadmap is a platform that allows you to take one or more projects from Project for the web and Azure DevOps and create an organizational roadmap. Once your projects are loaded into Roadmap you can perform additional customizations like color status reporting and adding key days and milestones. O X X
    Timesheet submission Project Online and Server 2013 and 2016 allow team members to submit timesheets if the functionality is required. O X X
    Resource management The rich MS Project client supports old school, deterministic project scheduling at the project level. O X X
    Desktop client The full desktop client comes with P3 and P5, where it acts as the rich editor for project plans. The software enjoys a multi-decade market dominance as a project management tool but was never paired with an enterprise collaboration server engine that enjoyed the same level of success. O X X
    Portfolio selection and optimization Portfolio selection and optimization has been offered as part of the enterprise project and portfolio suite for many years. Most people taking advantage of this capability have used a Microsoft Partner to formalize and operationalize the feature. O O X
    Demand Management Enterprise demand management is targeted at the most rigorous of project portfolio management practices. Most people taking advantage of this capability have used a Microsoft Partner to formalize and operationalize the feature. O O X
    Enterprise resource planning and management The legacy MS Project Online/Server platform supports enterprise-wide resource capacity management through an old-school, deterministic task and resource scheduling engine, assuming scaled-out deployment of Active Directory. Most people succeeding with this capability have used a Microsoft Partner to formalize and operationalize the feature. O O X

    X - Functionality Included in Plan

    O - Functionality Not Included in Plan

    Use Info-Tech’s MS Project and M365 Licensing Tool

    Leverage the analysis in Info-Tech’s MS Project & M365 Licensing Tool to help inform your initial assumptions about what you need and how much to budget for it.

    • The Licensing Tool can help you determine what Project Plan licensing different user groups might need as well as additional Power Platform licensing that may be required.
    • It consists of four main tabs: two set-up tabs where you can validate the plan and pricing information for M365 and MS Project; an analysis tab where you set up your user groups and follow a survey to assess their Project Plan needs; and another analysis tab where you can document your Power Platform licensing needs across your user groups.
    • There is also a business case tab that breaks down your total licensing needs. The outputs of this tab can be used in your MS Project & M365 Action Plan Template, which we will help you develop in phase three of this blueprint.

    Download Info-Tech's Microsoft Project & M365 Licensing Tool

    Sample of Info-Tech's Microsoft Project and M365 Licensing Tool.

    1.2.1 Conduct a needs assessment

    1-2 hours

    Input: List of key user groups/profiles, Number of users and current licenses

    Output: List of Microsoft applications/capabilities included with each license, Analysis of user group needs for Microsoft Project Plan licenses

    Materials: Microsoft Project & 365 Licensing Tool

    Participants: Portfolio Manager (PMO Director), PMO Admin Team, Project Managers

    1. As a group, analyze the applications included in your current or desired 365 license and calculate any additional Power Platform licensing needs.
      2. Screenshot of the 'Application/Capabilities' screen from the 'Microsoft Project and M365 Licensing Tool'.
    2. Within the same group, use the drop-down menus to analyze your high-level MS Project requirements by selecting whether each capability is necessary or not.
    3. Your inputs to the needs assessment will determine the figures in the Business Case tab. Consider exporting this information to PDF or other format to distribute to stakeholders.
      4. Screenshot of the 'Business Case' tab from the 'Microsoft Project and M365 Licensing Tool'.

    Download Info-Tech's Microsoft Project & M365 Licensing Tool

    Step 1.3

    Assess the maturity of your current PM & PPM capabilities

    Activities

    • Assess current state project and project portfolio management processes and tools
    • Determine target state project and project portfolio management processes and tools

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Assess current state project and project portfolio management processes and tools
    • Determine target state project and project portfolio management processes and tools

    This step usually involves the following participants:

    • PMO/Portfolio Manager
    • Project Managers
    • CIO and other executive stakeholders
    • Other project portfolio stakeholders (project and IT workers)

    Outcomes of Step

    • Current and target state maturity for project management and project portfolio management processes

    Project portfolio management and project management are more than tools

    Implementing commercial tools without a matching level of process discipline is a futile exercise, leaving organizations frustrated at the wasted time and money.

    • The tool is only as good as the data that is input. There is often a misunderstanding that a tool will be “automatic.” While it is true that a tool can help make certain processes easier and more convenient by aggregating information, enhancing reporting, and coauthoring, it will not make up the data. If data becomes stale, the tool is no longer valid for accurate decision making.
    • Getting people onboard and establishing a clear process is often the hardest part. As IT folk, it can be easy to get wrapped up in the technology. All too often excitement around tools can drown out the important requisites around people and process. The reality is people and process are a necessary condition for a tool to be successful. Having a tool will not be sufficient to overcome obstacles like poor stakeholder buy-in, inadequate governance, and the absence of a standard operating procedure.

    • Slow is the way to go. When deciding what tools to purchase, start small and scale up rather than going all in and all too often ending up with many unused features and fees.

    "There's been a chicken-egg debate raging in the PPM world for decades: What comes first, the tool or the process? It seems reasonable to say, ‘We don't have a process now, so we'll just adopt the one in the tool.’ But you'll soon find out that the tool doesn't have a process, and you needed to do more planning and analysis before buying the tool." (Barry Cousins, Practice Lead, Project Portfolio Management)

    Assess your process maturity to determine the right tool approach

    Take the time to consider and reflect on the current and target state of the processes for project portfolio management and project management.

    Project Portfolio Management

    • Status and Progress Reporting

      1. Intake, Approval, and Prioritization

        PPM is the practice of selecting the right projects and ensuring the organization has the necessary resources to complete them. PPM should enable executive decision makers to make sense of the excess of demand and give IT the ability to prioritize those projects that are most valuable to the business.

      2. Resource Management

      3. Project Management

        1. Initiation
        2. Planning
        3. Execution
        4. Monitoring and Controlling
        5. Closing
        Tailor a project management framework to fit your organization. Formal methodologies aren’t always the best fit. Take what you can use from formal frameworks and define a right-sized approach to your project management processes.

      4. Project Closure

      5. Benefits Tracking

    Info-Tech’s maturity assessment tools can help you match your tools to your maturity level

    Use Info-Tech’s Project Portfolio Management Maturity Assessment Tool and Project Management Maturity Assessment Tool.

    • The next few slides in this step take you through using our maturity assessment tools to help gauge your current-state and target-state maturity levels for project management (PM) and project portfolio management (PPM).
    • In addition to the process maturity assessments, these workbooks also help you document current-state support tools and desired target-state tools.
    • The outputs of these workbooks can be used in your MS Project & M365 Action Plan Template, which we will help you develop in phase three of this blueprint.

    Download Info-Tech’s Project Portfolio Management Maturity Assessment Tool and Project Management Maturity Assessment Tool

    Samples of Info-Tech's Project Portfolio Management Maturity Assessment Tool and Project Management Maturity Assessment Tool.

    Conduct a gap analysis survey for both project and project portfolio management.

    • Review the category and activity statements: For each gap analysis tab in the maturity assessments, use the comprehensive activity statements to identify gaps for the organization.
    • Assess the current state: To assess the current state, evaluate whether the statement should be labeled as:
      • Absent: There is no evidence of any activities supporting this process.
      • Initial: Activity is ad hoc and not well defined.
      • Defined: Activity is established and there is moderate adherence to its execution.
      • Repeatable: Activity is established, documented, repeatable, and integrated with other phases of the process.
      • Managed: Activity execution is tracked by gathering qualitative and quantitative feedback

    Once this is documented, take some time to describe the type of tool being used to do this (commercial, home-grown, standardized document) and provide additional details, where applicable.

    Define the target state: Repeat the assessment of activity statements for the target state. Then gauge the organizational impact and complexity of improving each capability on a scale of very low to very high.

    Excerpt from Info-Tech's Project Portfolio Management Maturity Assessment Tool, the 'PPM Current State Target State Maturity Assessment Survey'. It has five columns whose purpose is denoted in notes. Column 1 'Category within the respective discipline'; Column 2 'Statement to consider'; Column 3 'Select the appropriate answer for current and target state'; Column 4 'Define the tool type'; Column 5 'Provide addition detail about the tool'.

    Analyze survey results for project and project portfolio management maturity

    Take stock of the gap between current state and target state.

    • What process areas have the biggest gap between current and target state?
    • What areas are aligned across current and target state?

    Identify what areas are currently the least and most mature.

    • What process area causes the most pain in the organization?
    • What process area is the organization’s lowest priority?

    Note the overall current process maturity.

    • After having done this exercise, does the overall maturity come as a surprise?
    • If so, what are some of the areas that were previously overlooked?
    A table and bar graph documenting and analysis of maturity survey results. The table has four columns labelled 'Process Area', 'Current Process Completeness', 'Current Maturity Level', and 'Target State Maturity'. Rows headers in the 'Process Area' column are 'Intake, Approval, and Prioritization', 'Resource Management', 'Portfolio Reporting', 'Project Closure and Benefits Realization', 'Portfolio Administration', and finally 'Overall Maturity'. The 'Current Process Completeness' column's values are in percentages. The 'Current Maturity Level' and 'Target State Maturity' columns' values can be one of the following: 'Absent', 'Initial', 'Defined', 'Repeatable', or 'Managed'. The bar chart visualizes the levels of the 'Target State' and 'Current State' with 'Absent' from 0-20%, 'Initial' from 20-40%, 'Defined' from 40-60%, 'Repeatable' from 60-80%, and 'Managed' from 80-100%.
    • Identify process areas with low levels of maturity
    • Spot areas of inconsistency between current and target state.
    • Assess the overall gap to get a sense of the magnitude of the effort required to get to the target state.
    • 100% doesn’t need to be the goal. Set a goal that is sustainable and always consider the value to effort ratio.

    Screenshot your results and put them into the MS Project and M365 Action Plan Template.

    Review the tool overview and plan to address gaps (tabs 3 & 4)

    Tool Overview:

    Analyze the applications used to support your project management and project portfolio management processes.

    Look for:

    • Tools that help with processes across the entire PM or PPM lifecycle.
    • Tools that are only used for one specific process.

    Reflect on the overlap between process areas with pain points and the current tools being used to complete this process.

    Consider the sustainability of the target-state tool choice

    Screenshot of a 'Tool Overview' table. Chart titled 'Current-to-Target State Supporting Tools by PPM Activity' documenting the current and target states of different supporting tools by PPM Activity. Tools listed are 'N/A', 'Standardized Document', 'Homegrown Tool', and 'Commercial Tool'.

    You have the option to create an action plan for each of the areas of improvement coming out of your maturity assessment.

    This can include:

    • Tactical Optimization Action: What is the main action needed to improve capability?
    • Related Actions: Is there a cross-over with any actions for other capabilities?
    • Timeframe: Is this near-term, mid-term, or long-term?
    • Proposed Start Date
    • Proposed Go-Live Date
    • RACI: Who will be responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed?
    • Status: What is the status of this action item over time?

    Determine the Future of Microsoft Project for Your Organization

    Phase 2: Weigh Your Implementation Options

    Phase 1: Determine Your Tool Needs

    Phase 2: Weigh Your Implementation Options

    		Phase 3: Finalize Your Implementation Approach
    • Step 1.1: Survey the M365 work management landscape
    • Step 1.2: Perform a process maturity assessment to help inform your M365 starting point
    • Step 1.3: Consider the right MS Project licenses for your stakeholders
    • Step 2.1: Get familiar with extending Project for the web using Power Apps
    • Step 2.2: Assess the MS Gold Partner Community
    • Step 3.1: Prepare an action plan

    Phase Outcomes

    • A decision on how best to proceed (or not proceed) with Project for the web
    • A Partner outreach plan

    Step 2.1

    Get familiar with extending Project for the web using Power Apps

    Activities

    • Get familiar with Project for the web: how it differs from Microsoft’s traditional project offerings and where it is going
    • Understand the basics of how to extend Project for the web in Power Apps
    • Perform a feasibility test

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Get familiar with Project for the web
    • Understand the basics of how to extend Project for the web in Power Apps
    • Perform a feasibility test to determine if taking a DIY approach to extending Project for the web is right for your organization currently

    This step usually involves the following participants:

    • Portfolio Manager (PMO Director)
    • Project Managers
    • Other relevant PMO stakeholders

    Outcomes of Step

    • A decision on how best to proceed (or not proceed) with Project for the web

    Project for the web is the latest of Microsoft’s project management offerings

    What is Project for the web?

    • First introduced in 2019 as Project Service, Project for the web (PFTW) is Microsoft’s entry into the world of cloud-based work management and lightweight project management options.
    • Built on the Power Platform and leveraging the Dataverse for data storage, PFTW integrates with the many applications that M365 users are already employing in their day-to-day work management and collaboration activities.
    • It is available as a part of your M365 subscription with the minimum activation of P1 license – it comes with P3 and P5 licenses as well.
    • From a functionality and user experience perspective, PFTW is closer to applications like Planner or Azure Boards than it is to traditional MS Project options.

    What does it do?

    • PFTW allows for task and dependency tracking and basic timeline creation and scheduling and offers board and grid view options. It also allows real-time coauthoring of tasks among team members scheduled to the same project.
    • PFTW also comes with a product/functionality Microsoft calls Roadmap, which allows users to aggregate multiple project timelines into a single view for reporting purposes.

    What doesn't it do?

    • With PFTW, Microsoft is offering noticeably less traditional project management functionality than its existing solutions. Absent are table stakes project management capabilities like critical path, baselining, resource load balancing, etc.

    Who is it for?

    • Currently, in its base lightweight project management option, PFTW is targeted toward occasional or part-time project managers (not the PMP-certified set) tasked with overseeing and/or collaborating on small to mid-sized initiatives and projects.

    Put Project for the web in perspective

    Out of the box, PFTW occupies a liminal space when it comes to work management options

    • More than a task management tool, but not quite a full project management tool
    • Not exactly a portfolio management tool, yet some PPM reporting functionality is inherent in the PFTW through Roadmap

    The table to the right shows some of the functionality in PFTW in relation to the task management functionality of Planner and the enterprise project and portfolio management functionality of Project Online.

    Table 2.1a Planner Project for the web Project Online
    Coauthoring on Tasks X X
    Task Planning X X X
    Resource Assignments X X X
    Board Views X X X
    MS Teams Integration X X X
    Roadmap X X
    Table and Gantt Views X X
    Task Dependency Tracking X X
    Timesheets X
    Financial Planning X
    Risks and Issues Tracking X
    Program Management X
    Advanced Portfolio Management X

    Project for the web will eventually replace Project Online

    • As early as 2018 Microsoft has been foreshadowing a transition away from the SharePoint-backed Project environments of Server and Online toward something based in Common Data Service (CDS) – now rebranded as the Dataverse.
    • Indeed, as recently as the spring of 2021, at its Reimagine Project Management online event, Microsoft reiterated its plans to sunset Project Online and transition existing Online users to the new environment of Project for the web – though it provided no firm dates when this might occur.
      • The reason for this move away from Online appears to be an acknowledgment that the rigidity of the tool is awkward in our current dynamic, collaborative, and overhead-adverse work management paradigm.
      • To paraphrase a point made by George Bullock, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, for Microsoft at the Reimagine Project Management event, teams want to manage work as they see fit, but the rigidity of legacy solutions doesn’t allow for this, leading to a proliferation of tools and data sprawl. (This comment was made during the “Overview of Microsoft Project” session during the Reimagine event.)

    PFTW is Microsoft’s proposed future-state antidote to this challenge. Its success will depend on how well users are able to integrate the solution into a wider M365 work management setting.

    "We are committed to supporting our customers on Project Online and helping them transition to Project for the Web. No end-of-support has been set for Project Online, but when the time comes, we will communicate our plans on the transition path and give you plenty of advance notice." (Heather Heide, Program Manager, Microsoft Planner and Project. This comment was made during the “Overview of Microsoft Project” session during the Reimagine event.)

    Project for the web can be extended beyond its base lightweight functionality

    Project for the web can be extended to add more traditional and robust project and project portfolio management functionality using the Power Platform.

    Microsoft plans to sunset Project Online in favor of PFTW will at first be a head-scratcher for those familiar with the extensive PPM functionality in Project Online and underwhelmed by the project and portfolio management in PFTW.

    However, having built the solution upon the Power Platform, Microsoft has made it possible to take the base functionality in PFTW and extend it to create a more custom, organizationally specific user experience.

    • With a little taste of what can be done with PFTW by leveraging the Power Platform – and, in particular, Power Apps – it becomes more obvious how we, as users, can begin to evolve the base tool toward a more traditional PPM solution and how, in time, Microsoft’s developers may develop the next iteration of PFTW into something more closely resembling Project Online.

    Before users get too excited about using these tools to build a custom PPM approach, we should consider the time, effort, and skills required. The slides ahead will take you through a series of considerations to help you gauge whether your PMO is ready to go it alone in extending the solution.

    Extending the tool enhances functionality

    Table 2.1a in this step displayed the functionality in PFTW in relation to the task management tool Planner and the robust PPM functionality in Online.

    The table to the right shows how the functionality in PFTW can differ from the base solution and Project Online when it is extended using the model-driven app option in Power Apps.

    Caveat: The list of functionality and processes in this table is sample data.

    This functionality is not inherent in the solution as soon as you integrate with Power Apps. Rather it must be built – and your success in developing these functions will depend upon the time and skills you have available.

    Table 2.1b Project for the web PFTW extended with PowerApps Project Online
    Critical Path X
    Timesheets X
    Financial Planning X X
    Risks and Issues Tracking X X
    Program Management X
    Status Updates X
    Project Requests X
    Business Cases X
    Project Charters X
    Resource Planning and Capacity Management X X
    Project Change Requests X

    Get familiar with the basics of Power Apps before you decide to go it alone

    While the concept of being able to customize and grow a commercial PPM tool is enticing, the reality of low-code development and application maintenance may be too much for resource-constrained PMOs.

    Long story short: Extending PFTW in Power Apps is time consuming and can be frustrating for the novice to intermediate user.

    It can take days, even weeks, just to find your feet in Power Apps, let alone to determine requirements to start building out a custom model-driven app. The latter activity can entail creating custom columns and tables, determining relationships between tables to get required outputs, in addition to basic design activities.

    Time-strapped and resource-constrained practitioners should pause before committing to this deployment approach. To help better understand the commitment, the slides ahead cover the basics of extending PFTW in Power Apps:

    1. Dataverse environments.
    2. Navigating Power App Designer and Sitemap Designer
    3. Customizing tables and forms in the Dataverse

    See Info-Tech’s M365 Project Portfolio Management Tool Guide for more information on Power Apps in general.

    Get familiar with Power Apps licensing

    Power Apps for 365 comes with E1 through E5 M365 licenses (and F3 and F5 licenses), though additional functionality can be purchased if required.

    While extending Project for the web with Power Apps does not at this time, in normal deployments, require additional licensing from what is included in a E3 or E5 license, it is not out of the realm of possibility that a more complex deployment could incur costs not included in the Power Apps for 365 that comes with your enterprise agreement.

    The table to the right shows current additional licensing options.

    Power Apps, Per User, Per App Plan

    Per User Plan
    Cost: US$10 per user per app per month, with a daily Dataverse database capacity of 40 MB and a daily Power Platform request capacity of 1,000. Cost: US$40 per user per month, with a daily Dataverse database capacity of 250 MB and a daily Power Platform request capacity of 5,000.
    What's included? This option is marketed as the option that allows organizations to “get started with the platform at a lower entry point … [or those] that run only a few apps.” Users can run an application for a specific business case scenario with “the full capabilities of Power Apps” (meaning, we believe, that unlicensed users can still submit data via an app created by a licensed user). What's included? A per-user plan allows licensed users to run unlimited canvas apps and model-driven apps – portal apps, the licensing guide says, can be “provisioned by customers on demand.” Dataverse database limits (the 250 MB and 5,000 request capacity mentioned above) are pooled at the per tenant, not the per user plan license, capacity.

    For more on Power Apps licensing, refer to Info-Tech’s Modernize Your Microsoft Licensing for the Cloud Era for more information.

    What needs to be configured?

    Extending Project for the web requires working with your IT peers to get the right environments configured based upon your needs.

    • PFTW data is stored in the Microsoft Dataverse (formerly Common Data Service or CDS).
    • The organization’s Dataverse can be made up of one to many environments based upon its needs. Environments are individual databases with unique proprieties in terms of who can access them and what applications can store data in them.
    • Project for the web supports three different types of environments: default, production, and sandbox.
    • You can have multiple instances of a custom PFTW app deployed across these environments and across different users – and the environment you choose depends upon the use case of each instance.

    Types of Environments

    • Default Environment

      • It is the easiest to deploy and get started with the PFTW Power App in the default environment. However, it is also the most restricted environment with the least room for configuration.
      • Microsoft recommends this environment for simple deployments or for projects that span the organization. This is because everyone in the organization is by default a member of this environment – and, with the least room for configuration, the app is relatively straightforward.
      • At minimum, you need one project license to deploy PFTW in the default environment.

    • Production Environment

      • This environment affords more flexibility for how a custom app can be configured and deployed. Unlike the default environment, deploying a production environment is a manual process (through the Power Platform Admin Center) and security roles need to be set to limit users who can access the environment.
      • Because users can be limited, production environments can be used to support more advanced deployments and can support diverse processes for different teams.
      • At present, you need at least five Project licenses to deploy to production environments.

    • Sandbox Environment

      • This environment is for users who are responsible for the creation of custom apps. It offers the same functionality as a production environment but allows users to make changes without jeopardizing a production environment.

    Resources to provide your IT colleagues with to help in your PFTW deployment:

    1. Project for the web admin help (Product Documentation, Microsoft)
    2. Advanced deployment for Project for the web (Video, Microsoft)
    3. Get Started with Project Power App (Product Support Documentation, Microsoft)
    4. Project for the Web Security Roles (Product Support Documentation, Microsoft)

    Get started creating or customizing a model-driven app

    With the proper environments procured, you can now start extending Project for the web.

    • Navigate to the environment you would like to extend PFTW within. For the purposes of the slides ahead, we’ll be using a sandbox environment for an example. Ensure you have the right access set up for production and sandbox environments of your own (see links on previous slide for more assistance).
    • To begin extending PFTW, the two core features you need to be familiar with before you start in Power Apps are (1) Tables/Entities and (2) the Power Apps Designer – and in particular the Site Map.

    From the Power Apps main page in 365, you can change your environment by selecting from the options in the top right-hand corner of the screen.

    Screenshot of the Power Apps “Apps” page in a sandbox environment. The Project App will appear as “Project” when the application is installed, though it is also easy to create an app from scratch.

    Model-driven apps are built around tables

    In Power Apps, tables (formerly called entities and still referred to as entities in the Power Apps Designer) function much like tables in Excel: they are containers of columns of data for tracking purposes. Tables define the data for your app, and you build your app around them.

    In general, there are three types of tables:

    • Standard: These are out-of-the box tables included with a Dataverse environment. Most standard tables can be customized.
    • Managed: These are tables that get imported into an environment as part of a managed solution. Managed tables cannot be customized.
    • Custom: These types of tables can either be imported from another solution or created directly in the Dataverse environment. To create custom tables, users need to have System Administrator or System Customizer security roles within the Dataverse.

    Tables can be accessed under Data banner on the left-hand panel of your Power Apps screen.

    The below is a list of standard tables that can be used to customize your Project App.

    A screenshot of the 'Data' banner in 'Power Apps' and a list of table names.

    Table Name

    Display Name
    msdyn_project Project
    msdyn_projectchange Change
    msdyn_projectprogram Program
    msdyn_projectrequest Request
    msdyn_projectrisk Risk
    msdyn_projectissue Issue
    msdyn_projectstatusreport Status

    App layouts are designed in the Power App Designer

    You configure tables with a view to using them in the design of your app in the Power Apps Designer.

    • If you’re customizing a Project for the web app manually installed into your production or sandbox environment, you can access Designer by highlighting the app from your list of apps on the Apps page and clicking “Edit” in the ribbon above.
      • If you’re creating a model-driven app from scratch, Designer will open past the “Create a New App” intro screen.
      • If you need to create separate apps in your environment for different PMOs or business units, it is as easy to create an app from scratch as it is to customize the manual install.
    • The App Designer is where you can design the layout of your model-driven app and employ the right data tables.
    Screenshot of the 'App Designer' screen in 'Power Apps'.

    The Site Map determines the navigation for your app, i.e. it is where you establish the links and pages users will navigate. We will review the basics of the sitemap on the next few slides.

    The tables that come loaded into your Project Power App environment (at this time, 37) via the manual install will appear in the Power Apps Designer in the Entity View pane at the bottom of the page. You do not have to use all of them in your design.

    Navigate the Sitemap Designer

    With the components of the previous two slides in mind, let’s walk through how to use them together in the development of a Project app.

    As addressed in the previous slide, the sitemap determines the navigation for your app, i.e. it is where you establish the links and the pages that users will navigate.

    To get to the Sitemap Designer, highlight the Project App from your list of apps on the Apps page and click “Edit” in the ribbon above. If you’re creating a model-driven app from scratch, Designer will open past the “Create a New App” intro screen.

    • To start designing your app layout, click the pencil icon beside the Site Map logo on the App Designer screen.
    • This will take you into the Sitemap Designer (see screenshot to the right). This is where you determine the layout of your app and the relevant data points (and related tables from within the Dataverse) that will factor into your Project App.
    • In the Sitemap Designer, you simply drag and drop the areas, groups, and subareas you want to see in your app’s user interface (see next slide for more details).
    Screenshot of the 'Sitemap Designer' in 'Power Apps'.

    Use Areas, Groups, and Subareas as building blocks for your App

    Screenshots of the main window and the right-hand panel in the 'Sitemap Designer', and of the subarea pop-up panel where you connect components to data tables. The first two separate elements into 'Area', 'Group', and 'Subarea'.

    Drag and drop the relevant components from the panel on the right-hand side of the screen into the main window to design the core pieces that will be present within your user interface.

    For each subarea in your design, use the pop-up panel on the right-hand side of the screen to connect your component the relevant table from within your Dataverse environment.

    How do Areas, Groups, and Subareas translate into an app?

    Screenshots of the main window in the 'Sitemap Designer' and of a left-hand panel from a published 'Project App'. There are notes defining the terms 'Area', 'Group', and 'Subarea' in the context of the screenshot.

    The names or titles for your Areas and Groups can be customized within the Sitemap Designer.

    The names or titles for your Subareas is dependent upon your table name within the Dataverse.

    Area: App users can toggle the arrows to switch between Areas.

    Group: These will change to reflect the chosen Area.

    Subarea: The tables and forms associated with each subarea.

    How to properly save and publish your changes made in the Sitemap Designer and Power Apps Designer:

    1. When you are done making changes to your components within the Sitemap Designer, and want your changes to go live, hit the “Publish” button in the top right corner; when it has successfully published, select “Save and Close.”
    2. You will be taken back to the Power App Designer homepage. Hit “Save,” then “Publish,” and then finally “Play,” to go to your app or “Save and Close.”

    How to find the right tables in the Dataverse

    While you determine which tables will play into your app in the Sitemap Designer, you use the Tables link to customize tables and forms.

    Screenshots of the tables search screen and the 'Tables' page under the 'Data' banner in 'Power Apps'.

    The Tables page under the Data banner in Power Apps houses all of the tables available in your Dataverse environment. Do not be overwhelmed or get too excited. Only a small portion of the tables in the Tables folder in Power Apps will be relevant when it comes to extending PFTW.

    Find the table you would like to customize and/or employ in your app and select it. The next slides will look at customizing the table (if you need to) and designing an app based upon the table.

    To access all the tables in your environment, you’ll need to ensure your filter is set correctly on the top right-hand corner of the screen, otherwise you will only see a small portion of the tables in your Dataverse environment.

    If you’re a novice, it will take you some time to get familiar with the table structure in the Dataverse.

    We recommend you start with the list of tables listed on slide. You can likely find something there that you can use or build from for most PPM purposes.

    How to customize a table (1 of 3)

    You won’t necessarily need to customize a table, but if you do here are some steps to help you get familiar with the basics.

    Screenshot of the 'Columns' tab, open in the 'msdyn_project table' in 'Power Apps'.

    In this screenshot, we are clicked into the msdyn_project (display name: Project) table. As you can see, there are a series of tabs below the name of the table, and we are clicked into the Columns tab. This is where you can see all of the data points included in the table.

    You are not able to customize all columns. If a column that you are not able to customize does not meet your needs, you will need to create a custom column from the “+Add column” option.

    “Required” or “Optional” status pertains to when the column or field is used within your app. For customizable or custom columns this status can be set when you click into each column.

    How to customize a table (2 of 3)

    Create a custom “Status” column.

    By way of illustrating how you might need to customize a table, we’ll highlight the “msdyn_project_statecode” (display name: Project Status) column that comes preloaded in the Project (msdyn_project) table.

    • The Project Status column only gives you a binary choice. While you are able to customize what that binary choice is (it comes preloaded with “Active” and “Inactive” as the options) you cannot add additional choices – so you cannot set it to red/yellow/green, the most universally adopted options for status in the project portfolio management world.
    • Because of this, let’s look at the effort involved in creating a choice and adding a custom column to your table based upon that choice.
    Screenshots of the '+New choice' button in the 'Choices' tab and the 'New choice' pane that opens when you click it.

    From within the Choices tab, click “+New choice” option to create a custom choice.

    A pane will appear to the right of your screen. From there you can give your choice a name, and under the “Items” header, add your list of options.

    Click save. Your custom choice is now saved to the Choices tab in the Dataverse environment and can be used in your table. Further customizations can be made to your choice if need be.

    How to customize a table (3 of 3)

    Back in the Tables tab, you can put your new choice to work by adding a column to a table and selecting your custom choice.

    Screenshots of the pop-up window that appear when you click '+Add Column', and details of what happens when you select the data type 'Choice'.

    Start by selecting “+ Add Column” at the top left-hand side of your table. A window will appear on the right-hand side of the page, and you will have options to name your column and choose the data type.

    As you can see in this screenshot to the left, data type options include text, number and date types, and many more. Because we are looking to use our custom choice for this example, we are going to choose “Choice.”

    When you select “Choice” as your data type, all of the choice options available or created in your Dataverse environment will appear. Find your custom choice – in this example the one name “RYG Status” – and click done. When the window closes, be sure to select “Save Table.”

    How to develop a Form based upon your table (1 of 3 – open the form editor)

    A form is the interface users will engage with when using your Project app.

    When the Project app is first installed in your environment, the main user form will be lacking, with only a few basic data options.

    This form can be customized and additional tabs can be added to your user interface.

    1. To do this, go to the table you want to customize.
    2. In the horizontal series of tabs at the top of the screen, below the table title select the “Forms” option.
    3. Click on the main information option or select Edit Form for the form with “Main” under its form type. A new window will open where you can customize your form.
    Screenshot of the 'Forms' tab, open in the 'msdyn_project' table in 'Power Apps'.

    Select the Forms tab.

    Start with the form that has “Main” as its Format Type.

    How to develop a Form based upon your table (2 of 3 – add a component)

    Screenshot of the 'Components' window in 'Power Apps' with a list of layouts as a window to the right of the main screen where you can name and format the chosen layout.

    You can add element like columns or sections to your form by selecting the Components window.

    In this example, we are adding a 1-Column section. When you select that option from the menu options on the left of the screen, a window will open to the right of the screen where you can name and format the section.

    Choose the component you would like to add from the layout options. Depending on the table element you are looking to use, you can also add input options like number inputs and star ratings and pull in related data elements like a project timeline.

    How to develop a Form based upon your table (3 of 3 – add table columns)

    Screenshot of the 'Table Columns' window in 'Power Apps' and instructions for adding table columns.

    If you click on the “Table Columns” option on the left-hand pane, all of the column options from within your table will appear in alphabetical order.

    When clicked within the form section you would like to add the new column to, select the column from the list of option in the left-hand pane. The new data point will appear within the section. You can order and format section elements as you would like.

    When you are done editing the form, click the “Save” icon in the top right-hand corner. If you are ready for your changes to go live within your Project App, select the “Publish” icon in the top right-hand corner. Your updated form will go live within all of the apps that use it.

    The good and the bad of extending Project for the web

    The content in this step has not instructed users how to extend PFTW; rather, it has covered three basic core pieces of Power Apps that those interesting in PFTW need to be aware of: Dataverse environments, the Power Apps and Sitemaps Designers, and Tables and associated Forms.

    Because we have only covered the very tip of the iceberg, those interested in going further and taking a DIY approach to extending PFTW will need to build upon these basics to unlock further functionality. Indeed, it takes work to develop the product into something that begins to resemble a viable enterprise project and portfolio management solution. Here are some of the good and the bad elements associated with that work:

    The Good:

    • You can right-size and purpose build: add as much or as little project management rigor as your process requires. Related, you can customize the solution in multiple ways to suit the needs of specific business units or portfolios.
    • Speed to market: it is possible to get up and running quickly with a minimum-viable product.

    The Bad:

    • Work required: to build anything beyond MVP requires independent research and trial and error.
    • Time required: to build anything beyond MVP requires time and skills that many PMOs don’t have.
    • Shadow support costs: ungoverned app creation could have negative support and maintenance impacts across IT.

    "The move to Power Platform and low code development will […increase] maintenance overhead. Will low code solution hit problems at scale? [H]ow easy will it be to support hundreds or thousands of small applications?

    I can hear the IT support desks already complaining at the thought of this. This part of the puzzle is yet to hit real world realities of support because non developers are busy creating lots of low code applications." (Ben Hosking, Software Developer and Blogger, "Why low code software development is eating the world")

    Quick start your extension with the Accelerator

    For those starting out, there is a pre-built app you can import into your environment to extend the Project for the web app without any custom development.

    • If the DIY approach in the previous slides was overwhelming, and you don’t have the budget for a MS Partner route in the near-term, this doesn’t mean that evolving your Project for the web app is unattainable.
    • Thanks to a partnership between OnePlan (one of the MS Gold Partners we detail in the next step) and Microsoft, Project for the web users have access to a free resource to help them evolve the base Project app. It’s called the “Project for the web Accelerator” (commonly referred to as “the Accelerator” for short).
    • Users interested in learning more about, and accessing, this free resource should refer to the links below:
      1. The Future of Microsoft Project Online (source: OnePlan).
      2. Introducing the Project Accelerator (source: Microsoft).
      3. Project for the web Accelerator (source: GitHub)
    Screen shot from one of the dashboards that comes with the Accelerator (image source: GitHub).

    2.1.1 Perform a feasibility test (1 of 2)

    15 mins

    As we’ve suggested, and as the material in this step indicates, extending PFTW in a DIY fashion is not small task. You need a knowledge of the Dataverse and Power Apps, and access to the requisite skills, time, and resources to develop the solution.

    To determine whether your PMO and organization are ready to go it alone in extending PFTW, perform the following activity:

    1. Convene a collection of portfolio, project, and PMO staff.
    2. Using the six-question survey on tab 5 of the Microsoft Project & M365 Licensing Tool (see screenshot to the right) as a jumping off point for a discussion, consider the readiness of your PMO or project organization to undertake a DIY approach to extending and implementing PFTW at this time.
    3. You can use the recommendations on tab 5 of the Microsoft Project & 365 Licensing Tool to inform your next steps, and input the gauge graphic in section 4 of the Microsoft Project & M365 Action Plan Template.
    Screenshots from the 'Project for the Web Extensibility Feasibility Test'.

    Go to tab 5 of the Microsoft Project & M365 Licensing Tool

    See next slide for additional activity details

    2.1.1 Perform a feasibility test (2 of 2)

    Input: The contents of this step, The Project for the Web Extensibility Feasibility Test (tab 5 in the Microsoft Project & 365 Licensing Tool)

    Output: Initial recommendations on whether to proceed and how to proceed with a DIY approach to extending Project for the web

    Materials: The Project for the Web Extensibility Feasibility Test (tab 5 in the Microsoft Project & 365 Licensing Tool)

    Participants: Portfolio Manager (PMO Director), Project Managers, Other relevant PMO stakeholders

    Step 2.2

    Assess the Microsoft Gold Partner Community

    Activities

    • Review what to look for in a Microsoft Partner
    • Determine whether your needs would benefit from reaching out to a Microsoft Partner
    • Review three key Partners from the North American market
    • Create a Partner outreach plan

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Review what to look for in a Microsoft Partner.
    • Determine whether your needs would benefit from reaching out to a Microsoft Partner.
    • Review three key Partners from the North American market.

    This step usually involves the following participants:

    • Portfolio Manager (PMO Director)
    • Project Managers
    • Other relevant PMO stakeholders

    Outcomes of Step

    • A better understanding of MS Partners
    • A Partner outreach plan

    You don’t have to go it alone

    Microsoft has an established community of Partners who can help in your customizations and implementations of Project for the web and other MS Project offerings.

    If the content in the previous step seemed too technical or overly complex in a way that scared you away from a DIY approach to extending Microsoft’s latest project offering (and at some point in the near future, soon to be its only project offering), Project for the web, fear not.

    You do not have to wade into the waters of extending Project for the web alone, or for that matter, in implementing any other MS Project solution.

    Instead, Microsoft nurtures a community of Silver and Gold partners who offer hands-on technical assistance and tool implementation services. While the specific services provided vary from partner to partner, all can assist in the customization and implementation of any of Microsoft’s Project offerings.

    In this step we will cover what to look for in a Partner and how to assess whether you are a good candidate for the services of a Partner. We will also highlight three Partners from within the North American market.

    The basics of the Partner community

    What is a Microsoft Partner?

    Simply put, an MS Gold Partner is a software or professional services organization that provides sales and services related to Microsoft products.

    They’re resellers, implementors, integrators, software manufacturers, trainers, and virtually any other technology-related business service.

    • Microsoft has for decades opted out of being a professional services organization, outside of its very “leading edge” offerings from MCS (Microsoft Consulting Services) for only those technologies that are so new that they aren’t yet supported by MS Partners.
    • As you can see in the chart on the next slide, to become a silver or gold certified partner, firms must demonstrate expertise in specific areas of business and technology in 18 competency areas that are divided into four categories: applications and infrastructure, business applications, data and AI, and modern workplace and security.

    More information on what it takes to become a Microsoft Partner:

    1. Partner Center (Document Center, Microsoft)
    2. Differentiate your business by attaining Microsoft competencies (Document Center, Microsoft)
    3. Partner Network Homepage (Webpage, Microsoft)
    4. See which partner offer is right for you (Webpage, Microsoft)

    Types of partnerships and qualifications

    Microsoft Partner Network

    Microsoft Action Pack

    Silver Competency

    Gold Competency

    What is it?

    		 The Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) is a community that offers members tools, information, and training. Joining the MPN is an entry-level step for all partners. The Action Pack is an annual subscription offered to entry-level partners. It provides training and marketing materials and access to expensive products and licenses at a vastly reduced price. Approximately 5% of firms in the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) are silver partners. These partners are subject to audits and annual competency exams to maintain silver status. Approximately 1% of firms in the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) are gold partners. These partners are subject to audits and annual competency exams to maintain Gold status.

    Requirements

    		 Sign up for a membership Annual subscription fee While requirements can vary across competency area, broadly speaking, to become a silver partner firms must:
    • Pass regular exams and skills assessments, with at least two individuals on staff with Microsoft Certified Professional Status.
    • Hit annual customer, revenue, and licensing metrics.
    • Pay the annual subscription fee.
    		 While requirements can vary across competency area, broadly speaking, to become a gold partner firms must:
    • Pass regular exams and skills assessments, with at least two individuals on staff with Microsoft Certified Professional Status.
    • Hit annual customer, revenue, and licensing metrics.
    • Pay the annual subscription fee.

    Annual Fee

    		 No Cost $530 $1800 $5300

    When would a MS Partner be helpful?

    • Project management and portfolio management practitioners might look into procuring the services of a Microsoft Partner for a variety of reasons.
    • Because services vary from partner to partner (help to extend Project for the web, implement Project Server or Project Online, augment PMO staffing, etc.) we won’t comment on specific needs here.
    • Instead, the three most common conditions that trigger the need are listed to the right.

    Speed

    When you need to get results faster than your staff can grow the needed capabilities.

    Cost

    When the complexity of the purchase decision, implementation, communication, training, configuration, and/or customization cannot be cost-justified for internal staff, often because you’ll only do it once.

    Expertise & Skills

    When your needs cannot be met by the core Microsoft technology without significant extension or customization.

    Canadian Microsoft Partners Spotlight

    As part of our research process for this blueprint, Info-Tech asked Microsoft Canada for referrals and introductions to leading Microsoft Partners. We spent six months collaborating with them on fresh research into the underlying platform.

    These vendors are listed below and are highlighted in subsequent slides.

    Spotlighted Partners:

    Logo for One Plan. Logo for PMO Outsource Ltd. Logo for Western Principles.

    Please Note: While these vendors were referred to us by Microsoft Canada and have a footprint in the Canadian market, their footprints extend beyond this to the North American and global markets.

    A word about our approach

    Photo of Barry Cousins, Project Portfolio Management Practice Lead, Info-Tech Research Group.
    Barry Cousins
    Project Portfolio Management Practice Lead
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Our researchers have been working with Microsoft Project Online and Microsoft Project Server clients for years, and it’s fair to say that most of these clients (at some point) used a Microsoft Partner in their deployment. They’re not really software products, per se; they’re platforms. As a Microsoft Partner in 2003 when Project Server got its first big push, I heard it loud and clear: “Some assembly required. You might only make 7% on the licensing, but the world’s your oyster for services.”

    In the past few years, Microsoft froze the market for major Microsoft Project decisions by making it clear that the existing offering is not getting updates while the new offering (Project for the web) doesn’t do what the old one did. And in a fascinating timing coincidence, the market substantially adopted Microsoft 365 during that period, which enables access to Project for the web.

    Many of Info-Tech’s clients are justifiably curious, confused, and concerned, while the Microsoft Partners have persisted in their knowledge and capability. So, we asked Microsoft Canada for referrals and introductions to leading Microsoft Partners and spent six months collaborating with them on fresh research into the underlying platform.

    Disclosure: Info-Tech conducted collaborative research with the partners listed on the previous slide to produce this publication. Market trends and reactions were studied, but the only clients identified were in case studies provided by the Microsoft Partners. Info-Tech’s customers have been, and remain, anonymous. (Barry Cousins, Project Portfolio Management Practice Lead, Info-Tech Research Group)

    MS Gold Partner Spotlight:

    OnePlan

    Logo for One Plan.
    Headquarters: San Marcos, California, and Toronto, Ontario
    Number of Employees: ~80
    Active Since: 2007 (as EPMLive)
    Website: www.oneplan.ai

    Who are they?

    • While the OnePlan brand has only been the marketplace for a few years, the company has been a major player in MS Gold Partner space for well over a decade.
    • Born out of EPMLive in the mid-aughts, OnePlan Solutions has evolved through a series of acquisitions, including Upland, Tivitie, and most recently Wicresoft.

    What do they do?

    • Software: Its recent rebranding is largely because OnePlan Solutions is as much a software company as it is a professional services firm. The OnePlan software product is an impressive solution that can be used on its own to facilitate the portfolio approaches outlined on the next slide and that can also integrate with the tools your organization is already using to manage tasks (see here for a full rundown of the solutions within the Microsoft stack and beyond OnePlan can integrate with).

      • Beyond its ability to integrate with existing solutions, as a software product, OnePlan has modules for resource planning, strategic portfolio planning, financial planning, time tracking, and more.

    • PPM Consulting Services: The OnePlan team also offers portfolio management consulting services. See the next slide for a list of its approaches to project portfolio management.

    Markets served

    • US, Canada, Europe, and Australia

    Channel Differentiation

    • OnePlan scales to all the PPM needs of all industry types.
    • Additionally, OnePlan offers insights and functionality specific to the needs of BioTech-Pharma.

    What differentiates OnePlan?

    • OnePlan co-developed the Project Accelerator for Project for the web with Microsoft. The OnePlan team’s involvement in developing the Accelerator and making it free for users to access suggests it is aligned to and has expertise in the purpose-built and collaborative vision behind Microsoft’s move away from Project Online and toward the Power Platform and Teams collaboration.
    • 2021 MS Gold Partner of the Year. At Microsoft’s recent Microsoft Inspire event, OnePlan was recognized as the Gold Partner of the Year for Project and Portfolio Management as well as a finalist for Power Apps and Power Automate.
    • OnePlan Approaches: Below is a list of the services or approaches to project portfolio management that OnePlan provides. See its website for more details.
      • Strategic Portfolio Management: Align work to objectives and business outcomes. Track performance against the proposed objectives outcomes.
      • Agile Portfolio Management: Implement Agile practices across the organization, both at the team and executive level.
      • Adaptive Portfolio Management: Allow teams to use the project methodology and tools that best suit the work/team. Maintain visibility and decision making across the entire portfolio.
      • Professional Services Automation: Use automation to operate with greater efficiency.

    "OnePlan offers a strategic portfolio, financial and resource management solution that fits the needs of every PMO. Optimize your portfolio, financials and resources enterprise wide." (Paul Estabrooks, Vice President at OnePlan)

    OnePlan Case Study

    This case study was provided to Info-Tech by OnePlan.

    Brambles

    INDUSTRY: Supply Chain & Logistics
    SOURCE: OnePlan

    Overview: Brambles plays a key role in the delivery or return of products amongst global trading partners such as manufacturers, distributors and retailers.

    Challenge

    Brambles had a variety of Project Management tools with no easy way of consolidating project management data. The proliferation of project management solutions was hindering the execution of a long-term business transformation strategy. Brambles needed certain common and strategic project management processes and enterprise project reporting while still allowing individual project management solutions to be used as part of the PPM platform.

    Solution

    As part of the PMO-driven business transformation strategy, Brambles implemented a project management “operating system” acting as a foundation for core processes such as project intake, portfolio management, resource, and financial planning and reporting while providing integration capability for a variety of tools used for project execution.

    OnePlan’s new Adaptive PPM platform, combining the use of PowerApps and OnePlan, gives Brambles the desired PPM operating system while allowing for tool flexibility at the execution level.

    Results

    • Comprehensive picture of progress across the portfolio.
    • Greater adoption by allowing flexibility of work management tools.
    • Modern portfolio management solution that enables leadership to make confident decision.

    Solution Details

    • OnePlan
    • Project
    • Power Apps
    • Power Automate
    • Power BI
    • Teams

    Contacting OnePlan Solutions

    www.oneplan.ai

    Joe Larscheid: jlarscheid@oneplan.ai
    Paul Estabrooks: pestabrooks@oneplan.ai
    Contact Us: contact@oneplan.ai
    Partners: partner@oneplan.ai

    Partner Resources. OnePlan facilitates regular ongoing live webinars on PPM topics that anyone can sign up for on the OnePlan website.

    For more information on upcoming webinars, or to access recordings of past webinars, see here.

    Additional OnePlan Resources

    1. How to Extend Microsoft Teams into a Collaborative Project, Portfolio and Work Management Solution (on-demand webinar, OnePlan’s YouTube channel)
    2. What Does Agile PPM Mean To The Modern PMO (on-demand webinar, OnePlan’s YouTube channel)
    3. OnePlan is fused with the Microsoft User Experience (blog article, OnePlan)
    4. Adaptive Portfolio Management Demo – Bringing Order to the Tool Chaos with OnePlan (product demo, OnePlan’s YouTube channel)
    5. How OnePlan is aligning with Microsoft’s Project and Portfolio Management Vision (blog article, OnePlan)
    6. Accelerating Office 365 Value with a Hybrid Project Portfolio Management Solution (product demo, OnePlan’s YouTube channel)

    MS Gold Partner Spotlight:

    PMO Outsource Ltd.

    Logo for PMO Outsource Ltd.

    Headquarters: Calgary, Alberta, and Mississauga, Ontario
    Website: www.pmooutsource.com

    Who are they?

    • PMO Outsource Ltd. is a Microsoft Gold Partner and PMI certified professional services firm based in Alberta and Ontario, Canada.
    • It offers comprehensive project and portfolio management offerings with a specific focus on project lifecycle management, including demand management, resource management, and governance and communication practices.

    What do they do?

    • Project Online and Power Platform Expertise. The PMO Outsource Ltd. team has extensive knowledge in both Microsoft’s old tech (Project Server and Desktop) and in its newer, cloud-based technologies (Project Online, Project for the web, the Power Platform, and Dynamics 365). As the case study in two slides demonstrates, PMO Outsource Ltd. Uses its in-depth knowledge of the Microsoft suite to help organizations automate project and portfolio data collection process, create efficiencies, and encourage cloud adoption.
    • PPM Consulting Services: In addition to its Microsoft platform expertise, the PMO Outsource Ltd. team also offers project and portfolio management consulting services, helping organizations evolve their process and governance structures as well as their approaches to PPM tooling.

    Markets served

    • Global

    Channel Differentiation

    • PMO Outsource Ltd. scales to all the PPM needs of all industry types.

    What differentiates PMO Outsource Ltd.?

    • PMO Staff Augmentation. In addition to its technology and consulting services, PMO Outsource Ltd. offers PMO staff augmentation services. As advertised on its website, it offers “scalable PMO staffing solutions. Whether you require Project Managers, Business Analysts, Admins or Coordinators, [PMO Outsource Ltd.] can fulfill your talent search requirements from a skilled pool of resources.”
    • Multiple and easy-to-understand service contract packages. PMO Outsource Ltd. offers many prepackaged service offerings to suit PMOs’ needs. Those packages include “PMO Management, Admin, and Support,” “PPM Solution, Site and Workflow Configuration,” and “Add-Ons.” For full details of what’s included in these services packages, see the PMO Outsource Ltd. website.
    • PMO Outsource Ltd. Services: Below is a list of the services or approaches to project portfolio management that PMO Outsource Ltd. Provides. See its website for more details.
      • Process Automation, Workflows, and Tools. Facilitate line of sight by tailoring Microsoft’s technology to your organization’s needs and creating custom workflows.
      • PMO Management Framework. Receive a professionally managed PPM methodology as well as governance standardization of processes, tools, and templates.
      • Custom BI Reports. Leverage its expertise in reporting and dashboarding to create the visibility your organization needs.

    "While selecting an appropriate PPM tool, the PMO should not only evaluate the standard industry tools but also analyze which tool will best fit the organization’s strategy, budget, and culture in the long run." (Neeta Manghnani, PMO Strategist, PMO Outsource Ltd.)

    PMO Outsource Ltd. Case Study

    This case study was provided to Info-Tech by PMO Outsource Ltd.

    SAMUEL

    INDUSTRY: Manufacturing
    SOURCE: PMO Outsource Ltd.

    Challenge

    • MS Project 2013 Server (Legacy/OnPrem)
    • Out-of-support application and compliance with Office 365
    • Out-of-support third-party application for workflows
    • No capability for resource management
    • Too many manual processes for data maintenance and server administration

    Solution

    • Migrate project data to MS Project Online
    • Recreate workflows using Power Automate solution
    • Configure Power BI content packs for Portfolio reporting and resource management dashboards
    • Recreate OLAP reports from legacy environment using Power BI
    • Cut down nearly 50% of administrative time by automating PMO/PPM processes
    • Save costs on Server hardware/application maintenance by nearly 75%

    Full Case Study Link

    • For full details about how PMO Outsource Ltd. assisted Samuel in modernizing its solution and creating efficiencies, visit the Microsoft website where this case study is highlighted.

    Contacting PMO Outsource Ltd.

    www.pmooutsource.com

    700 8th Ave SW, #108
    Calgary, AB T2P 1H2
    Telephone : +1 (587) 355-3745
    6045 Creditview Road, #169
    Mississauga, ON L5V 0B1
    Telephone : +1 (289) 334-1228
    Information: info@pmooutsource.com
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pmo-outsource/

    Partner Resources. PMO Outsource Ltd.’s approach is rooted within a robust and comprehensive PPM framework that is focused on driving strategic outcomes and business success.

    For a full overview of its PPM framework, see here.

    Additional PMO Outsource Ltd. Resources

    1. 5 Benefits of PPM tools and PMO process automation (blog article, PMO Outsource Ltd.)
    2. Importance of PMO (blog article, PMO Outsource Ltd.)
    3. Meet the Powerful and Reimagined PPM tool for Everyone! (video, PMO Outsource Ltd. LinkedIn page)
    4. MS Project Tips: How to add #Sprints to an existing Project? (video, PMO Outsource Ltd. LinkedIn page)
    5. MS Project Tips: How to add a milestone to your project? (video, PMO Outsource Ltd. LinkedIn page)
    6. 5 Benefits of implementing Project Online Tools (video, PMO Outsource Ltd. LinkedIn page)

    MS Gold Partner Spotlight:

    Western Principles

    Logo for Western Principles.

    Headquarters: Vancouver, British Columbia
    Years Active: 16 Years
    Website: www.westernprinciples.com

    Who are they?

    • Western Principles is a Microsoft Gold Partner and UMT 360 PPM software provider based in British Columbia with a network of consultants across Canada.
    • In the last sixteen years, it has successfully conducted over 150 PPM implementations, helping in the implementation, training, and support of Microsoft Project offerings as well as UMT360 – a software solution provider that, much like OnePlan, enhances the PPM capabilities of the Microsoft platform.

    What do they do?

    • Technology expertise. The Western Principles team helps organizations maximize the value they are getting form the Microsoft Platform. Not only does it offer expertise in all the solutions in the MS Project ecosystem, it also helps organizations optimize their use and understanding of Teams, SharePoint, the Power Platform, and more. In addition to the Microsoft platform, Western Principles is partnered with many other technology providers, including UMT360 for strategic portfolio management, the Simplex Group for project document controls, HMS for time sheets, and FluentPro for integration, back-ups, and migrations.
    • PPM Consulting Services: In addition to its technical services and solutions, Western Principles offers PPM consulting and staff augmentation services.

    Markets served

    • Canada

    Channel Differentiation

    • Western Principles scales to all the PPM needs of all industry types, public and private sector.
    • In addition, its website offers persona-specific information based on the PPM needs of engineering and construction, new product development, marketing, and more.

    What differentiates Western Principles?

    • Gold-certified UMT 360 partner. In addition to being a Microsoft Gold Partner, Western Principles is a gold-certified UMT 360 partner. UMT 360 is a strategic portfolio management tool that integrates with many other work management solutions to offer holistic line of sight into the organization’s supply-demand pain points and strategic portfolio management needs. Some of the solutions UMT 360 integrates with include Project Online and Project for the web, Azure DevOps, Jira, and many more. See here for more information on the impressive functionality in UMT360.
    • Sustainment Services. Adoption can be the bane of most PPM tool implementations. Among the many services Western Principles offers, its “sustainment services” stand out. According to Western Principles’ website, these services are addressed to those who require “continual maintenance, change, and repair activities” to keep PPM systems in “good working order” to help maximize ROI.
    • Western Principles Services: In addition to the above, below is a list of some of the services that Western Principles offers. See its website for a full list of services.
      • Process Optimization: Determine your requirements and process needs.
      • Integration: Create a single source of truth.
      • Training: Ensure your team knows how to use the systems you implement.
      • Staff Augmentation: Provide experienced project team members based upon your needs.

    "One of our principles is to begin with the end in mind. This means that we will work with you to define a roadmap to help you advance your strategic portfolio … and project management capabilities. The roadmap for each customer is different and based on where you are today, and where you need to get to." (Western Principles, “Your Strategic Portfolio Management roadmap,” Whitepaper)

    Contacting Western Principles

    www.westernprinciples.com

    610 – 700 West Pender St.
    Vancouver, BC V6C 1G8
    +1 (800) 578-4155
    Information: info@westernprinciples.com
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/western-principle...

    Partner Resources. Western Principles provides a multitude of current case studies on its home page. These case studies let you know what the firm is working on this year and the type of support it provides to its clientele.

    To access these case studies, see here.

    Additional Western Principles Resources

    1. Program and Portfolio Roll ups with Microsoft Project and Power BI (video, Western Principles YouTube Channel)
    2. Dump the Spreadsheets for Microsoft Project Online (video, Western Principles YouTube Channel)
    3. Power BI for Project for the web (video, Western Principles YouTube Channel)
    4. How to do Capacity Planning and Resource Management in Microsoft Project Online [Part 1 & Part 2] (video, Western Principles YouTube Channel)
    5. Extend & Integrate Microsoft Project (whitepaper, Western Principles)
    6. Your COVID-19 Return-to-Work Plan (whitepaper, Western Principles)

    Watch Info-Tech’s Analyst-Partner Briefing Videos to lean more

    Info-Tech was able to sit down with the partners spotlighted in this step to discuss the current state of the PPM market and Microsoft’s place within it.

    • All three partners spotlighted in this step contributed to Info-Tech’s research process for this publication.
    • For two of the partners, OnePlan and PMO Outsource Ltd., Info-Tech was able to record a conversation where our analysts and the partners discuss Microsoft’s current MS Project offerings, the current state of the PPM tool market, and the services and the approaches of each respective partner.
    • A third video briefing with Western Principles has not happened yet due to logistical reasons. We are hoping we can include a video chat with our peers at Western Principles in the near future.
    Screenshot form the Analyst-Partner Briefing Videos. In addition to the content covered in this step, you can use these videos for further information about the partners to inform your next steps.

    Download Info-Tech’s Analyst-Partner Briefing Videos (OnePlan & PMO Outsource Ltd.)

    2.2.1 Create a partner outreach plan

    1-3 hours

    Input: Contents of this step, List of additional MS Gold Partners

    Output: A completed partner outreach program

    Materials: MS Project & M365 Action Plan Template

    Participants: Portfolio Manager (PMO Director), PMO Admin Team, Project Managers, CIO

    1. With an understanding of the partner ecosystem, compile a working group of PMO peers and stakeholders to produce a gameplan for engaging the MS Gold Partner ecosystem.
      • For additional partner options see Microsoft’s Partner Page.
    2. Using slide 20 in Info-Tech’s MS Project and M365 Action Plan Template, document the Partners you would want or have scheduled briefings with.
      • As you go through the briefings and research process, document the pros and cons and areas of specialized associated with each vendor for your particular work management implementation.

    Download the Microsoft Project & M365 Action Plan Template

    2.2.2 Document your PM and PPM requirements

    1-3 hours

    Input: Project Portfolio Management Maturity Assessment, Project Management Maturity Assessment

    Output: MS Project & M365 Action Plan Template

    Materials: Project Portfolio Management Maturity Assessment, Project Management Maturity Assessment, MS Project & M365 Action Plan Template

    Participants: Portfolio Manager (PMO Director), PMO Admin Team, Project Managers, CIO

    1. As you prepare to engage the Partner Community, you should have a sense of where your project management and project portfolio management gaps are to better communicate your tooling needs.
    2. Leverage tab 4 from both your Project Portfolio Management Assessment and Project Management Assessment from step 1.3 of this blueprint to help document and communicate your requirements. Those tabs prioritize your project and portfolio management needs by highest impact for the organization.
    3. You can use the outputs of the tab to inform your inputs on slide 23 of the MS Project & M365 Action Plan Template to present to organizational stakeholders and share with the Partners you are briefing with.

    Download the Microsoft Project & M365 Action Plan Template

    Determine the Future of Microsoft Project for Your Organization

    Phase 3: Finalize Your Implementation Approach

    Phase 1: Determine Your Tool NeedsPhase 2: Weigh Your Implementation Options

    Phase 3: Finalize Your Implementation Approach

    • Step 1.1: Survey the M365 work management landscape
    • Step 1.2: Perform a process maturity assessment to help inform your M365 starting point
    • Step 1.3: Consider the right MS Project licenses for your stakeholders
    • Step 2.1: Get familiar with extending Project for the web using Power Apps
    • Step 2.2: Assess the MS Gold Partner Community
    • Step 3.1: Prepare an action plan

    Phase Outcomes

    An action plan concerning what to do with MS Project and M365 for your PMO or project organization.

    Step 3.1

    Prepare an action plan

    Activities

    • Compile the current state results
    • Prepare an Implementation Roadmap
    • Complete your presentation deck

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Assess the impact of organizational change for the project
    • Develop your vision for stakeholders
    • Compile the current state results and document the implementation approach
    • Create clarity through a RACI and proposed implementation timeline

    This step usually involves the following participants:

    • Portfolio Manager (PMO Director)
    • PMO Admin Team
    • Business Analysts
    • Project Managers

    Outcomes of Step

    • Microsoft Project and M365 Action Plan

    Assess the impact of organizational change

    Be prepared to answer: “What’s in it for me?”

    Before jumping into licensing and third-party negotiations, ensure you’ve clearly assessed the impact of change.

    Tailor the work effort involved in each step, as necessary:

    1. Assess the impact
      • Use the impact assessment questions to identify change impacts.
    2. Plan for change
      • Document the impact on each stakeholder group.
      • Anticipate their response.
      • Curate a compelling message for each stakeholder group.
      • Develop a communication plan.
    3. Act according to plan
      • Identify your executive sponsor.
      • Enable the sponsor to drive change communication.
      • Coach managers on how they can drive change at the individual level.

    Impact Assessment Questions

    • Will the change impact how our clients/customers receive, consume, or engage with our products/services?
    • Will there be a price increase?
    • Will there be a change to compensation and/or rewards?
    • Will the vision or mission of the job change?
    • Will the change span multiple locations/time zones?
    • Are multiple products/services impacted by this change?
    • Will staffing levels change?
    • Will this change increase the workload?
    • Will the tools of the job be substantially different?
    • Will a new or different set of skills be needed?
    • Will there be a change in reporting relationships?
    • Will the workflow and approvals be changed?
    • Will there be a substantial change to scheduling and logistics?

    Master Organizational Change Management Practices blueprint

    Develop your vision for stakeholders

    After careful analysis and planning, it’s time to synthesize your findings to those most impacted by the change.

    Executive Brief

    • Prepare a compelling message about the current situation.
    • Outline the considerations the working group took into account when developing the action plan.
    • Succinctly describe the recommendations proposed by the working group.

    Goals

    • Identify the goals for the project.
    • Explain the details for each goal to develop the organizational rationale for the project.
    • These goals are the building blocks for the change communication that the executive sponsor will use to build a coalition of sponsors.

    Future State Vision

    • Quantify the high-level costs and benefits of moving forward with this project.
    • Articulate the future- state maturity level for both the project and project portfolio management process.
    • Reiterate the organizational rationale and drivers for change.

    "In failed transformations, you often find plenty of plans, directives, and programs, but no vision…A useful rule of thumb: If you can’t communicate the vision to someone in five minutes or less and get a reaction that signifies both understanding and interest, you are not yet done…" (John P. Kotter, Leading Change)

    Get ready to compile the analysis completed throughout this blueprint in the subsequent activities. The outputs will come together in your Microsoft Project and M365 Action Plan.

    Use the Microsoft Project & M365 Action Plan Template to help communicate your vision

    Our boardroom-ready presentation and communication template can be customized using the outputs of this blueprint.

    • Getting stakeholders to understand why you are recommending specific work management changes and then communicating exactly what those changes are and what they will cost is key to the success of your work management implementation.
    • To that end, the slides ahead walk you through how to customize the Microsoft Project & M365 Action Plan Template.
    • Many of the current-state analysis activities you completed during phase 1 of this blueprint can be directly made use of within the template as can the decisions you made and requirements you documented during phase 2.
    • By the end of this step, you will have a boardroom-ready presentation that will help you communicate your future-state vision.
    Screenshot of Info-Tech's Microsoft Project and M365 Action Plan Template with a note to 'Update the presentation or distribution date and insert your name, role, and organization'.

    Download Info-Tech’s Microsoft Project & M365 Action Plan Template

    3.1.1 Compile current state results

    1-3 hours

    Input: Force Field Analysis Tool, Tool Audit Workbook, Project Management Maturity Assessment Tool, Project Portfolio Management Maturity Assessment Tool

    Output: Section 1: Executive Brief, Section 2: Context and Constraints

    Materials: Microsoft Project and M365 Action Plan Template

    Participants: PMO Director, PMO Admin Team, Business Analysts, Project Managers

    1. As a group, review the results of the tools introduced throughout this blueprint. Use this information along with organizational knowledge to document the business context and current state.
    2. Update the driving forces for change and risks and constraints slides using your outputs from the Force Field Analysis Tool.
    3. Update the current tool landscape, tool satisfaction, and tool audit results slides using your outputs from the Tool Audit Workbook.
    4. Update the gap analysis results slides using your outputs from the Project Management and Project Portfolio Management Maturity Assessment Tools.

    Screenshots of 'Business Context and Current State' screen from the 'Force Field Analysis Tool', the 'Tool Audit Results' screen from the 'Tool Audit Workbook', and the 'Project Portfolio Management Gap Analysis Results' screen from the 'PM and PPM Maturity Assessments Tool'.

    Download the Microsoft Project & M365 Action Plan Template

    3.2.1 Option A: Prepare a DIY roadmap

    1-3 hours; Note: This is only applicable if you have chosen the DIY route

    Input: List of key PPM decision points, List of who is accountable for PPM decisions, List of who has PPM decision-making authority

    Output: Section 3: DIY Implementation Approach

    Materials: Microsoft Project and M365 Action Plan Template

    Participants: PMO Director, PMO Admin Team, Business Analysts, Project Managers

    1. As a group, review the results of the Microsoft Project and M365 Licensing Tool. Use this information along with organizational knowledge and discussion with the working group to complete Section 3: DIY Implementation Approach.
    2. Copy and paste your results from tab 5 of the Microsoft Project and M365 Licensing Tool. Update the Implementation Approach slide to detail the rationale for selecting this option.
    3. Update the Action Plan to articulate the details for total and annual costs of the proposed licensing solution.
    4. Facilitate a discussion to determine roles and responsibilities for the implementation. Based on the size, risk, and complexity of the implementation, create a reasonable timeline.
    Screenshots from the 'Microsoft Project and M365 Action Plan Template' outlining the 'DIY Implementation Approach'.

    Download the Microsoft Project and M365 Action Plan Template

    3.2.1 Option b: Prepare a Partner roadmap

    1-3 hours; Note: This is only applicable if you have chosen the Partner route

    Input: Microsoft Project and M365 Licensing Tool, Information on Microsoft Partners

    Output: Section 4: Microsoft Partner Implementation Route

    Materials: Microsoft Project and M365 Action Plan Template

    Participants: PMO Director, PMO Admin Team, Business Analysts, Project Managers

    1. As a group, review the results of the Microsoft Project and M365 Licensing Tool. Use this information along with organizational knowledge and discussion with the working group to complete Section 4: Microsoft Partner Implementation Route.
    2. Copy and paste your results from tab 5 of the Microsoft Project and M365 Licensing Tool. Update the Implementation Approach slide to detail the rationale for selecting this option.
    3. Develop an outreach plan for the Microsoft Partners you are planning to survey. Set targets for briefing dates and assign an individual to own any back-and-forth communication. Document the pros and cons of each Partner and gauge interest in continuing to analyze the vendor as a possible solution.
    4. Facilitate a discussion to determine roles and responsibilities for the implementation. Based on the size, risk, and complexity of the implementation, create a reasonable timeline.

    Screenshots from the 'Microsoft Project and M365 Action Plan Template' outlining the 'Microsoft Partner Implementation Route'.

    Microsoft Project and M365 Action Plan Template

    3.1.2 Complete your presentation deck

    1-2 hours

    Input: Outputs from the exercises in this blueprint

    Output: Section 5: Future-State Vision and Goals

    Materials: Microsoft Project and M365 Action Plan Template

    Participants: PMO Director, PMO Admin Team, Business Analysts, Project Managers

    1. Put the finishing touches on your presentation deck by documenting your future- state vision and goals.
    2. Prepare to present to your stakeholders.
      • Understand your audience, their needs and priorities, and their degree of knowledge and experiences with technology. This informs what to include in your presentation and how to position the message and goal.
    3. Review the deck beginning to end and check for spelling, grammar, and vertical logic.
    4. Practice delivering the vision for the project through several practice sessions.

    Screenshots from the 'Microsoft Project and M365 Action Plan Template' regarding finishing touches.

    Microsoft Project and M365 Action Plan Template

    Pitch your vision to key stakeholders

    There are multiple audiences for your pitch, and each audience requires a different level of detail when addressed. Depending on the outcomes expected from each audience, a suitable approach must be chosen. The format and information presented will vary significantly from group to group.

    Audience

    Key Contents

    Outcome

    Business Executives
    • Section 1: Executive Brief
    • Section 2: Context and Constraints
    • Section 5: Future-State Vision and Goals
    • Identify executive sponsor

    IT Leadership
    • Sections 1-5 with a focus on Section 3 or 4 depending on implementation approach
    • Get buy-in on proposed project
    • Identify skills or resourcing constraints

    Business Managers
    • Section 1: Executive Brief
    • Section 2: Context and Constraints
    • Section 5: Future-State Vision and Goals
    • Get feedback on proposed plan
    • Identify any unassessed risks and organizational impacts

    Business Users
    • Section 1: Executive Brief
    • Support the organizational change management process

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Problem Solved

    Knowledge Gained
    • How you work: Work management and the various ways of working (personal and team task management, strategic project portfolio management, formal project management, and enterprise project and portfolio management).
    • Where you need to go: Project portfolio management and project management current- and target-state maturity levels.
    • What you need: Microsoft Project Plans and requisite M365 licensing.
    • The skills you need: Extending Project for the web.
    • Who you need to work with: Get to know the Microsoft Gold Partner community.
    Deliverables Completed
    • M365 Tool Guides
    • Tool Audit Workbook
    • Force Field Analysis Tool
    • Project Portfolio Management Maturity Assessment Tool
    • Project Management Maturity Assessment Tool
    • Microsoft Project & M365 Action Plan Template

    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.

    Photo of Barry Cousins.
    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:

    Perform a work management tool audit

    Gain insight into the tools that drive value or fail to drive value across your work management landscape with a view to streamline the organization’s tool ecosystem.

    Prepare an action plan for your tool needs

    Prepare the right work management tool recommendations for your IT teams and/or business units and develop a boardroom-ready presentation to communicate needs and next steps.

    Research Contributors and Experts

    Neeta Manghnani
    PMO Strategist
    PMO Outsource Ltd.

    Photo of Neeta Manghnani, PMO Strategist, PMO Outsource Ltd.
    • Innovative, performance-driven executive with significant experience managing Portfolios, Programs & Projects, and technical systems for international corporations with complex requirements. A hands-on, dynamic leader with over 20 years of experience guiding and motivating cross-functional teams. Highly creative and brings a blend of business acumen and expertise in multiple IT disciplines, to maximize the corporate benefit from capital investments.
    • Successfully deploys inventive solutions to automate processes and improve the functionality, scalability and security of critical business systems and applications. Leverages PMO/PPM management and leadership skills to meet the strategic goals and business initiatives.

    Robert Strickland
    Principal Consultant & Owner
    PMO Outsource Ltd.

    Photo of Robert Strickland, Principal Consultant and Owner, PMO Outsource Ltd.
    • Successful entrepreneur, leader, and technologist for over 15 years, is passionate about helping organizations leverage the value of SharePoint, O365, Project Online, Teams and the Power Platform. Expertise in implementing portals, workflows and collaboration experiences that create business value. Strategic manager with years of successful experience building businesses, developing custom solutions, delivering projects, and managing budgets. Strong transformational leader on large implementations with a technical pedigree.
    • A digital transformation leader helping clients move to the cloud, collaborate, automate their business processes and eliminate paper forms, spreadsheets and other manual practices.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    • Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy
      Time is money; spend it wisely.
    • Establish Realistic IT Resource Management Practices
      Holistically balance IT supply and demand to avoid overallocation.
    • Tailor Project Management Processes to Fit Your Projects
      Spend less time managing processes and more time delivering results

    Bibliography

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    Advisicon. “Project Online vs Project for the Web.” YouTube, 13 Nov. 2013. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Branscombe, Mary. “Is Project Online ready to replace Microsoft Project?” TechRepublic, 23 Jan. 2020. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Chemistruck, Dan. “The Complete Office 365 and Microsoft 365 Licensing Comparison.” Infused Innovations, 4 April 2019. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Compare Project management solutions and costs.” Microsoft. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Day to Day Dynamics 365. “Microsoft Project for the web - Model-driven app.” YouTube, 29 Oct. 2019. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Deploying Project for the web.” Microsoft, 24 Aug. 2021. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Differentiate your business by attaining Microsoft competencies.” Microsoft, 26 Jan. 2021. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Extend & Integrate Microsoft Project.” Western Principles. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Get Started with Project Power App.” Microsoft. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Hosking, Ben. “Why low code software development is eating the world.” DevGenius, May 2021. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “How in the World is MS Project Still a Leading PM Software?” CBT Nuggets, 12 Nov. 2018. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Integent. “Project for the Web - Create a Program Entity and a model-driven app then expose in Microsoft Teams.” YouTube, 25 Mar. 2020. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Introducing the Project Accelerator.” Microsoft, 10 Mar. 2021. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Join the Microsoft Partner Network.” Microsoft. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Kaneko, Judy. “How Productivity Tools Can Lead to a Loss of Productivity.” Bluescape, 2 Mar. 2018 Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Kotter, John. Leading Change. Harvard Business School Press, 1996.

    Leis, Merily. “What is Work Management.” Scoro. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Liu, Shanhong. “Number of Office 365 company users worldwide as of June 2021, by leading country.” Statistica, 2021. Web.

    Manghnani, Neeta. “5 Benefits of PPM tools and PMO process automation.” PMO Outsource Ltd., 11 Apr. 2021. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Microsoft 365 and Office 365 plan options.” Microsoft, 31 Aug. 2021. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Microsoft 365 for enterprise.” Microsoft. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021

    “Microsoft Office 365 Usage Statistics.” Thexyz blog, 18 Sept. 2020. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Virtual Agents Licensing Guide.” Microsoft, June 2021. Web.

    “Microsoft Project service description.” Microsoft, 31 Aug. 2021. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Microsoft Project Statistics.” Integent Blog, 12 Dec. 2013. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Nanji, Aadil . Modernize Your Microsoft Licensing for the Cloud Era. Info-Tech Research Group, 12 Mar. 2020. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Number of Office 365 company users worldwide as of June 2021, by leading country.” Statista, 8 June 2021. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Overcoming disruption in a digital world.” Asana. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Pajunen, Antti. “Customizing and extending Project for the web.” Day to Day Dynamics 365, 20 Jan. 2020. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Partner Center Documentation.” Microsoft. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Pragmatic Works. “Building First Power Apps Model Driven Application.” YouTube, 21 June 2019. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Project architecture overview.” Microsoft, 27 Mar. 2020. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Project for the web Accelerator.” GitHub. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Project for the web admin help.” Microsoft, 28 Oct. 2019. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Project for the Web – The New Microsoft Project.” TPG. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Project for the Web Security Roles.” Microsoft, 1 July 2021. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “Project Online: Project For The Web vs Microsoft Project vs Planner vs Project Online.” PM Connection, 30 Nov. 2020. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Redmond, Tony. “Office 365 Insights from Microsoft’s FY21 Q2 Results.” Office 365 for IT Pros, 28 Jan. 2021. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Reimagine Project Management with Microsoft. “Advanced deployment for Project for the web.” YouTube, 4 Aug. 2021. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Reimagine Project Management with Microsoft. “Overview of Microsoft Project.” YouTube, 29 July 2021. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “See which partner offer is right for you.” Microsoft. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Shalomova, Anna. “Microsoft Project for Web 2019 vs. Project Online: What’s Best for Enterprise Project Management?” FluentPro, 23 July 2020. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Speed, Richard. “One Project to rule them all: Microsoft plots end to Project Online while nervous Server looks on.” The Register, 28 Sept. 2018. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Spataro, Jared. “A new vision for modern work management with Microsoft Project.” Microsoft, 25 Sept. 2018. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Stickel, Robert. “OnePlan Recognized as Winner of 2021 Microsoft Project & Portfolio Management Partner of the Year.” OnePlan, 8 July 2021. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Stickel, Robert. “The Future of Project Online.” OnePlan, 2 Mar. 2021. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Stickel, Robert. “What It Means to be Adaptive.” OnePlan, 24 May 2021. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “The Future of Microsoft Project Online.” OnePlan. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Weller, Joe. “Demystifying Microsoft Project Licensing.” Smartsheet, 10 Mar. 2016. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Western Principles Inc. “Dump the Spreadsheets for Microsoft Project Online.” YouTube, 2 July 2020. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Western Principles Inc. “Project Online or Project for the web? Which project management system should you use?” YouTube, 11 Aug. 2020. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    “What is Power Query?” Microsoft, 22 July 2021. Web.

    Wicresoft. “The Power of the New Microsoft Project and Microsoft 365.” YouTube, 29 May 2020. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Wicresoft. “Why the Microsoft Power Platform is the Future of PPM.” YouTube, 11 June 2020. Accessed 17 Sept. 2021.

    Establish High-Value IT Performance Dashboards and Metrics

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}58|cart{/j2store}
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    • Parent Category Name: Performance Measurement
    • Parent Category Link: /performance-measurement

    While most CIOs understand the importance of using metrics to measure IT’s accomplishments, needs, and progress, when it comes to creating dashboards to communicate these metrics, they:

    • Concentrate on the data instead of the audience.
    • Display information specific to IT activities instead of showing how IT addresses business goals and problems.
    • Use overly complicated, out of context graphs that crowd the dashboard and confuse the viewer.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    While most CIOs understand the importance of using metrics to measure IT’s accomplishments, needs, and progress, when it comes to creating dashboards to communicate these metrics, they:

    • Concentrate on the data instead of the audience.
    • Display information specific to IT activities instead of showing how IT addresses business goals and problems.
    • Use overly complicated, out of context graphs that crowd the dashboard and confuse the viewer.

    Impact and Result

    Use Info-Tech’s ready-made dashboards for executives to ensure you:

    • Speak to the right audience
    • About the right things
    • In the right quantity
    • Using the right measures
    • At the right time.

    Establish High-Value IT Performance Dashboards and Metrics Research & Tools

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

    1. Establish High-Value IT Performance Metrics and Dashboards – a document that walks you through Info-Tech’s ready-made IT dashboards.

    This blueprint guides you through reviewing Info-Tech’s IT dashboards for your audience and organization, then walks you through practical exercises to customize the dashboards to your audience and organization. The blueprint also gives practical guidance for delivering your dashboards and actioning your metrics.

    • Establish High-Value IT Performance Metrics and Dashboards Storyboard

    2. Info-Tech IT Dashboards and Guide – Ready-made IT dashboards for the CIO to communicate to the CXO.

    IT dashboards with visuals and metrics that are aligned and organized by CIO priority and that allow you to customize with your own data, eliminating 80% of the dashboard design work.

    • Info-Tech IT Dashboards and Guide

    3. IT Dashboard Workbook – A step-by-step tool to identify audience needs, translate needs into metrics, design your dashboard, and track/action your metrics.

    The IT Dashboard Workbook accompanies the Establish High Value IT Metrics and Dashboards blueprint and guides you through customizing the Info-Tech IT Dashboards to your audience, crafting your messages, delivering your dashboards to your audience, actioning metrics results, and addressing audience feedback.

    • Info-Tech IT Dashboards Workbook

    4. IT Metrics Library

    Reference the IT Metrics Library for ideas on metrics to use and how to measure them.

    • IT Metrics Library

    5. HR Metrics Library

    Reference the HR Metrics Library for ideas on metrics to use and how to measure them.

    • HR Metrics Library

    Infographic

    Workshop: Establish High-Value IT Performance Dashboards and Metrics

    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 Test Info-tech’s IT Dashboards Against Your Audience’s Needs and Translate Audience Needs Into Metrics

    The Purpose

    Introduce the Info-Tech IT Dashboards to give the participants an idea of how they can be used in their organization.

    Understand the importance of starting with the audience and understanding audience needs before thinking about data and metrics.

    Explain how audience needs translate into metrics.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding of where to begin when it comes to considering dashboards and metrics (the audience).

    Identified audience and needs and derived metrics from those identified needs.

    Activities

    1.1 Review the info-Tech IT Dashboards and document impressions for your organization.

    1.2 Identify your audience and their attributes.

    1.3 Identify timeline and deadlines for dashboards.

    1.4 Identify and prioritize audience needs and desired outcomes.

    1.5 Associate metrics to each need.

    1.6 Identify a dashboard for each metric.

    Outputs

    Initial impressions of Info-Tech IT Dashboards.

    Completed Tabs 2 and 3 of the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    2 Inventory Your Data and Assess Data Quality and Readiness

    The Purpose

    Provide guidance on how to derive metrics and assess data.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understand the importance of considering how you will measure each metric and get the data.

    Understand that measuring data can be costly and that sometimes you just can’t afford to get the measure or you can’t get the data period because the data isn’t there.

    Understand how to assess data quality and readiness.

    Activities

    2.1 Complete a data inventory for each metric on each dashboard: determine how you will measure the metric, the KPI, any observation biases, the location of the data, the type of source, the owner, and the security/compliance requirements.

    2.2 Assess data quality for availability, accuracy, and standardization.

    2.3 Assess data readiness and the frequency of measurement and reporting.

    Outputs

    Completed Tab 4 of the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    3 Design and Build Your Dashboards

    The Purpose

    Guide participants in customizing the Info-Tech IT Dashboards with the data identified in previous steps.

    This step may vary as some participants may not need to alter the Info-Tech IT Dashboards other than to add their own data.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding of how to customize the dashboards to the participants’ organization.

    Activities

    3.1 Revisit the Info-Tech IT Dashboards and use the identified metrics to determine what should change in them.

    3.2 Build your dashboards by editing the Info-Tech IT Dashboards with your changes as planned in Step 3.1.

    Outputs

    Assessed Info-Tech IT Dashboards for your audience’s needs.

    Completed Tab 5 of the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    Finalized dashboards.

    4 Deliver Your Dashboard and Plan to Action Metrics

    The Purpose

    Guide participants in learning how to create a story around the dashboards.

    Guide participants in planning to action metrics and where to record results.

    Guide participants in how to address results of metrics and feedback from audience about dashboards.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Participants understand how to speak to their dashboards.

    Participants understand how to action metrics results and feedback about dashboards.

    Activities

    4.1 Craft your story.

    4.2 Practice delivering your story.

    4.3 Plan to action your metrics.

    4.4 Understand how to record and address your results.

    Outputs

    Completed Tabs 6 and 7 of the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    5 Next Steps and Wrap-Up

    The Purpose

    Finalize work outstanding from previous steps and answer any questions.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Participants have thought about and documented how to customize the Info-Tech IT Dashboards to use in their organization, and they have everything they need to customize the dashboards with their own metrics and visuals (if necessary).

    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 Dashboards tailored to your organization.

    Completed IT Dashboard Workbook

    Further reading

    Establish High-Value IT Performance Dashboards and Metrics

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

    Analyst Perspective

    A dashboard is a communication tool that helps executives make data-driven decisions

    CIOs naturally gravitate toward data and data analysis. This is their strength. They lean into this strength, using data to drive decisions, track performance, and set targets because they know good data drives good decisions.

    However, when it comes to interpreting and communicating this complex information to executives who may be less familiar with data, CIOs struggle, often falling back on showing IT activity level data instead of what the executives care about. This results in missed opportunities to tell IT’s unique story, secure funding, reveal important trends, or highlight key opportunities for the organization.

    Break through these traditional barriers by using Info-Tech’s ready-made IT dashboards. Spend less time agonizing over visuals and layout and more time concentrating on delivering IT information that moves the organization forward.

    Photo of Diana MacPherson
    Diana MacPherson
    Senior Research Analyst, CIO
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    While most CIOs understand the importance of using metrics to measure IT’s accomplishments, needs, and progress, when it comes to creating dashboards to communicate these metrics, they:

    • Concentrate on the data instead of the audience.
    • Display information specific to IT activities instead of showing how IT addresses business goals and problems.
    • Use overly complicated, out of context graphs that crowd the dashboard and confuse the viewer.

    Common Obstacles

    CIOs often experience these challenges because they:

    • Have a natural bias toward data and see it as the whole story instead of a supporting character in a larger narrative.
    • Assume that the IT activity metrics that are easy to get and useful to them are equally interesting to all their stakeholders.
    • Do not have experience communicating visually to an audience unfamiliar with IT operations or lingo.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    Use Info-Tech’s ready-made dashboards for executives to ensure you:

    • Speak to the right audience
    • About the right things
    • In the right quantity
    • Using the right measures
    • At the right time

    Info-Tech Insight

    The purpose of a dashboard is to drive decision making. A well designed dashboard presents relevant, clear, concise insights that help executives make data-driven decisions.

    Your challenge

    CIOs struggle to select the right metrics and dashboards to communicate IT’s accomplishments, needs, and progress to their executives. CIOs:

    • Fail to tailor metrics to their audience, often presenting graphs that are familiar and useful to them, but not their executives. This results in dashboards full of IT activities that executives neither understand nor find valuable.
    • Do not consider the timeliness of their metrics, which has the same effect as not tailoring their metrics: the executives do not care about the metrics they are shown.
    • Present too many metrics, which not only clutters the board but also dilutes the message the CIO needs to communicate.
    • Do not act on the results of their metrics and show progress, which makes metrics meaningless. Why measure something if you won’t act on the results?

    The bottom line: CIOs often communicate to the wrong audience, about the wrong things, in the wrong amount, using the wrong metrics, at the wrong time.

    In a survey of 500 executives, organizations that struggled with dashboards identified the reasons as:
    61% Inadequate context
    54% Information overload

    — Source: Exasol

    CXOs and CIOs agree that IT performance metrics need improvement

    When asked which performance indicators should be implemented in your business, CXOs and CIOs both agree that IT needs to improve its metrics across several activity areas: technology performance, cost and salary, and risk.

    A diagram that shows performance indicators and metrics from cxo and cio.

    The Info-Tech IT Dashboards center key metrics around these activities ensuring you align your metrics to the needs of your CXO audience.

    Info-Tech CEO/CIO Alignment Survey Benchmark Report n=666

    The Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by the top CIO priorities

    The top six areas that a CIO needs to prioritize and measure outcomes, no matter your organization or industry, are:

    • Managing to a budget: Reducing operational costs and increasing strategic IT spend
    • Customer/constituent satisfaction: Directly and indirectly impacting customer experience.
    • Risk management: Actively knowing and mitigating threats to the organization.
    • Delivering on business objectives: Aligning IT initiatives to the vision of the organization.
    • Employee engagement: Creating an IT workforce of engaged and purpose-driven people.
    • Business leadership relations: Establishing a network of influential business leaders.

    Deliver High-Value IT Dashboards to Your Executives

    A diagram that shows Delivering High-Value IT Dashboards to Your Executives

    Info-Tech’s approach

    Deliver High-Value Dashboards to Your Executives

    A diagram that shows High-Value Dashboard Process.

    Executives recognize the benefits of dashboards:
    87% of respondents to an Exasol study agreed that their organization’s leadership team would make more data-driven decisions if insights were presented in a simpler and more understandable way
    (Source: Exasol)

    The Info-Tech difference:

    We created dashboards for you so you don’t have to!

    1. Eliminate 80% of the dashboard design work by selecting from our ready-made Info-Tech IT Dashboards.
    2. Use our IT Dashboard Workbook to adjust the dashboards to your audience and organization.
    3. Follow our blueprint and IT Dashboard Workbook tool to craft, and deliver your dashboard to your CXO team, then action feedback from your audience to continuously improve.

    Info-Tech’s methodology for establishing high-value dashboards

    1. Test Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards Against Your Audience’s Needs

    Phase Steps

    1. Validate Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards for Your Audience
    2. Identify and Document Your Audience’s Needs

    Phase Outcomes

    1. Initial impressions of Info-Tech IT Dashboards
    2. Completed Tabs 2 of the IT Dashboard Workbook

    2. Translate Audience Needs into Metrics

    Phase Steps

    1. Review Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards for Your Audience
    2. Derive Metrics from Audience Needs
    3. Associate metrics to Dashboards

    Phase Outcomes

    1. Completed IT Tab 3 of IT Dashboard Workbook

    3. Ready Your Data for Dashboards

    Phase Steps

    1. Assess Data Inventory
    2. Assess Data Quality
    3. Assess Data Readiness
    4. Assess Data Frequency

    Phase Outcomes

    1. Assessed Info-Tech IT Dashboards for your audience’s needs
    2. Completed Tab 5 of the IT Dashboard Workbook
    3. Finalized dashboards

    4. Build and Deliver Your Dashboards

    Phase Steps

    1. Design Your Dashboard
    2. Update Your Dashboards
    3. Craft Your Story and Deliver Your Dashboards

    Phase Outcomes

    1. Completed IT Tab 5 and 6 of IT Dashboard Workbook and finalized dashboards

    5. Plan, Record, and Action Your Metrics

    Phase Steps

    1. Plan How to Record Metrics
    2. Record and Action Metrics

    Phase Outcomes

    1. Completed IT Dashboards tailored to your organization
    2. Completed IT Dashboard Workbook

    How to Use This Blueprint

    Choose the path that works for you

    A diagram that shows path of using this blueprint.

    The Info-Tech IT Dashboards address several needs:

    1. New to dashboards and metrics and not sure where to begin? Let the phases in the blueprint guide you in using Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards to create your own dashboards.
    2. Already know who your audience is and what you want to show? Augment the Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards framework with your own data and visuals.
    3. Already have a tool you would like to use? Use the Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards as a design document to customize your tool.

    Insight Summary

    The need for easy-to-consume data is on the rise making dashboards a vital data communication tool.

    70%: Of employees will be expected to use data heavily by 2025, an increase from 40% in 2018.
    — Source: Tableau

    Overarching insight

    A dashboard’s primary purpose is to drive action. It may also serve secondary purposes to update, educate, and communicate, but if a dashboard does not drive action, it is not serving its purpose.

    Insight 1

    Start with the audience. Resist the urge to start with the data. Think about who your audience is, what internal and external environmental factors influence them, what problems they need to solve, what goals they need to achieve, then tailor the metrics and dashboards to suit.

    Insight 2

    Avoid showing IT activity-level metrics. Instead use CIO priority-based metrics to report on what matters to the organization. The Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by the CIO priorities: risks, financials, talent, and strategic initiatives.

    Insight 3

    Dashboards show the what not the why. Do not assume your audience will draw the same conclusions from your graphs and charts as you do. Provide the why by interpreting the results, adding insights and calls to action, and marking key areas for discussion.

    Insight 4

    A dashboard is a communication tool and should reflect the characteristics of good communication. Be clear, concise, consistent, and relevant.

    Insight 5

    Action your data. Act and report progress on your metrics. Gathering metrics has a cost, so if you do not plan to action a metric, do not measure it.

    Blueprint deliverables

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

    Photo of Dashboards

    Key deliverable: Dashboards

    Ready-made risk, financials, talent, and strategic initiatives dashboards that organize your data in a visually appealing way so you can concentrate on the metrics and communication.

    Photo of IT Dashboard Workbook

    IT Dashboard Workbook

    The IT Dashboard Workbook keeps all your metrics, data, and dashboard work in one handy file!

    Photo of IT Dashboard Guide

    IT Dashboard Guide

    The IT Dashboard Guide provides the Info-Tech IT Dashboards and information about how to use them.

    Blueprint benefits

    CIO Benefits

    • Reduces the burden of figuring out what metrics to show executives and how to categorize and arrange the visuals.
    • Increases audience engagement through tools and methods that guide CIOs through tailoring metrics and dashboards to audience needs.
    • Simplifies CIO messages so executives better understand IT needs and value.
    • Provides CIOs with the tools to demonstrate transparency and competency to executive leaders.
    • Provides tools and techniques for regular review and action planning of metrics results, which leads to improved performance, efficiency, and effectiveness.

    Business Benefits

    • Provides a richer understanding of the IT landscape and a clearer connection of how IT needs and issues impact the organization.
    • Increases understanding of the IT team’s contribution to achieving business outcomes.
    • Provides visibility into IT and business trends.
    • Speeds up decision making by providing insights and interpretations to complex situations.

    Measure the value of this blueprint

    Realize measurable benefits after using Info-Tech’s approach:

    Determining what you should measure, what visuals you should use, and how you should organize your visuals, is time consuming. Calculate the time it has taken you to research what metrics you should show, create the visuals, figure out how to categorize the visuals, and layout your visuals. Typically, this takes about 480 hours of time. Use the ready-made Info-Tech IT Dashboards and the IT Dashboard Workbook to quickly put together a set of dashboards to present your CXO. Using these tools will save approximately 480 hours.

    A study at the University of Minnesota shows that visual presentations are 43% more effective at persuading their audiences (Bonsignore). Estimate how persuasive you are now by averaging how often you have convinced your audience to take a specific course of action. After using the Info-Tech IT Dashboards and visual story telling techniques described in this blueprint, average again. You should be 43% more persuasive.

    Further value comes from making decisions faster. Baseline how long it takes, on average, for your executive team to make a decision before using Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards then time how long decisions take when you use your Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards. Your audience should reach decisions 21% faster according to studies at Stanford University and the Wharton School if business (Bonsignore).

    Case Study

    Visuals don’t have to be fancy to communicate clear messages.

    • Industry: Construction
    • Source: Anonymous interview participant

    Challenge

    Year after year, the CIO of a construction company attended business planning with the Board to secure funding for the year. One year, the CEO interrupted and said, “You're asking me for £17 million. You asked me for £14 million last year and you asked me for £12 million the year before that. I don't quite understand what we get for our money.”

    The CEO could not understand how fixing laptops would cost £17 million and for years no one had been able to justify the IT spend.

    Solutions

    The CIO worked with his team to produce a simple one-page bubble diagram representing each IT department. Each bubble included the total costs to deliver the service, along with the number of employees. The larger the bubble, the higher the cost. The CIO brought each bubble to life as he explained to the Board what each department did.

    The Board saw, for example, that IT had architects who thought about the design of a service, where it was going, the life cycle of that service, and the new products that were coming out. They understood what those services cost and knew how many architects IT had to provide for those services.

    Recommendations

    The CEO remarked that he finally understood why the CIO needed £17 million. He even saw that the costs for some IT departments were low for the amount of people and offered to pay IT staff more (something the CIO had requested for years).

    Each year the CIO used the same slide to justify IT costs and when the CIO needed further investment for things like security or new products, an upgrade, or end of life support, the sign-offs came very quickly because the Board understood what IT was doing and that IT wasn't a bottomless pit.

    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

    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.

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    A diagram that shows Guided Implementation in 5 phases.

    Workshop overview

    Day 1: Test Info-tech’s IT Dashboards Against Your Audience’s Needs and Translate Audience Needs Into Metrics

    Activities
    1.1 Review the info-Tech IT Dashboards and document impressions for your organization.
    1.2 Identify your audience’s attributes.
    1.3 Identify timeline and deadlines for dashboards.
    1.4 Identify and prioritize audience needs and desired outcomes.
    1.5 Associate metrics to each need.
    1.6 Identify a dashboard for each metric.

    Deliverables
    1. Initial impressions of Info-Tech IT Dashboards.
    2. Completed Tabs 2 and 3 of the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    Day 2: Inventory Your Data; Assess Data Quality and Readiness

    Activities
    2.1 Complete a data inventory for each metric on each dashboard: determine how you will measure the metric, the KPI, any observation biases, the location of the data, the type of source, and the owner and security/compliance requirements.
    2.2 Assess data quality for availability, accuracy, and standardization.
    2.3 Assess data readiness and frequency of measurement and reporting.

    Deliverables
    1. Completed Tab 4 of the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    Day 3: Design and Build Your Dashboards

    Activities
    3.1 Revisit the Info-Tech IT Dashboards and use the identified metrics to determine what should change on the dashboards.
    3.2 Build your dashboards by editing the Info-Tech IT Dashboards with your changes as planned in Step 3.1.

    Deliverables
    1. Assessed Info-Tech IT Dashboards for your audience’s needs.
    2. Completed Tab 5 of the IT Dashboard Workbook.
    3. Finalized dashboards.

    Day 4: Deliver Your Dashboard and Plan to Action Metrics

    Activities
    4.1 Craft your story.
    4.2 Practice delivering your story.
    4.3 Plan to action your metrics.
    4.4 Understand how to record and address your results.

    Deliverables
    1. Completed Tabs 6 and 7 of the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    Day 5: Next Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite)

    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.

    Deliverables
    1. Completed IT Dashboards tailored to your organization.
    2. Completed IT Dashboard Workbook.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com
    1-888-670-8889

    What is an IT dashboard?

    A photo of Risks - Protect the Organization. A photo of Financials: Transparent, fiscal responsibility
    A photo of talent attrat and retain top talent A photo of Strategic Initiatives: Deliver Value to Customers.

    An IT dashboard is…
    a visual representation of data, and its main purpose is to drive actions. Well-designed dashboards use an easy to consume presentation style free of clutter. They present their audience with a curated set of visuals that present meaningful metrics to their audience.

    Dashboards can be both automatically or manually updated and can show information that is dynamic or a snapshot in time.

    Info-Tech IT Dashboards

    Review the Info-Tech IT Dashboards

    We created dashboards so you don’t have to.

    A photo of Risks - Protect the Organization. A photo of Financials: Transparent, fiscal responsibility A photo of talent attrat and retain top talent A photo of Strategic Initiatives: Deliver Value to Customers.

    Use the link below to download the Info-Tech IT Dashboards and consider the following:

    1. What are your initial reactions to the dashboards?
    2. Are the visuals appealing? If so, what makes them appealing?
    3. Can you use these dashboards in your organization? What makes them usable?
    4. How would you use these dashboards to speak your own IT information to your audience?

    Download the Info-Tech IT Dashboards

    Why Use Dashboards When We Have Data?

    How graphics affect us

    Cognitively

    • Engage our imagination
    • Stimulate the brain
    • Heighten creative thinking
    • Enhance or affect emotions

    Emotionally

    • Enhance comprehension
    • Increase recollection
    • Elevate communication
    • Improve retention

    Visual clues

    • Help decode text
    • Attract attention
    • Increase memory

    Persuasion

    • 43% more effective than text alone

    — Source: (Vogel et al.)

    Phase 1

    Test Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards Against Your Audience’s Needs

    A diagram that shows phase 1 to 5.

    This phase will walk you through the following:

    • Documenting impressions for using Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards for your audience.
    • Documenting your audience and their needs and metrics for your IT dashboards

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Info-Tech IT Dashboard organization and audience

    We created a compelling way to organize IT dashboards so you don’t have to. The Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by CIO Priorities, and these are consistent irrespective of industry or organization. This is a constant that you can organize your metrics around.

    A photo of Info-Tech IT Dashboards

    Dashboard Customization

    The categories represent a constant around which you can change the order; for example, if your CXO is more focused on Financials, you can switch the Financials dashboard to appear first.

    The Info-Tech IT Dashboards are aimed at a CXO audience so if your audience is the CXO, then you may decide to change very little, but you can customize any visual to appeal to your audience.

    Phase 1 will get you started with your audience.

    Always start with the audience

    …and not the data!

    Reliable, accurate data plays a critical role in dashboards, but data is only worthwhile if it is relevant to the audience who consumes it, and dashboards are only as meaningful as the data and metrics they represent.

    Instead of starting with the data, start with the audience. The more IT understands about the audience, the more relevant the metrics will be to their audience and the more aligned leadership will be with IT.

    Don’t forget yourself and who you are. Your audience will have certain preconceived notions about who you are and what you do. Consider these when you think about what you want your audience to know.

    46% executives identify lack of customization to individual user needs as a reason they struggle with dashboards.
    — Source: (Exasol)

    Resist the Data-First Temptation

    If you find yourself thinking about data and you haven’t thought about your audience, pull yourself back to the audience.

    Ask first Ask later
    Who is this dashboard for? What data should I show?
    How will the audience use the dashboard to make decisions? Where do I get the data?
    How can I show what matters to the audience? How much effort is required to get the data?

    Meaningful measures rely on understanding your audience and their needs

    It is crucial to think about who your audience is so that you can translate their needs into metrics and create meaningful visuals for your dashboards.

    A diagram that highlights step 1-3 of understanding your audience in the high-value dashboard process.

    Step 1.1

    Review and Validate Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards for Your Audience

    Activities:
    1.1.1 Examine Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards.

    • Note, the Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by CIO priorities – Risk, Financials, Talent, and Strategic Initiatives – and address the needs of the CXO audience. The IT Dashboard Workbook is pre-populated with this information.
    • If this meets your audience’s needs, you do not have to edit this content and can instead use the pre-populated information. You may wish to review the information to ensure it is still valid for your audience.

    A diagram that shows step 1.1 & 1.2 to Test Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards Against Your Audience’s Needs.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Info-Tech dashboards reviewed for your organization’s audience.

    1.1.1 Examine the Info-Tech IT Dashboards

    30 minutes

    1. If you haven’t already downloaded the Info-Tech IT Dashboards, click the link below to download.
    2. Complete a quick review of the dashboards and consider how your audience would receive them.
    3. Document your thoughts, with special emphasis on your audience in the Info-Tech Dashboard Impressions slide.

    A diagram that shows Info-Tech IT Dashboards

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboards

    Reviewing visuals can help you think about how your audience will respond to them

    Jot down your thoughts below. You can refer to this later as you consider your audience.

    Consider:

    • Who is your dashboard audience?
    • Are their needs different from the Info-Tech IT Dashboard audience’s? If so, how?
    • Will the visuals work for your audience on each dashboard?
    • Will the order of the dashboards work for your audience?
    • What is missing?

    Step 1.2

    Identify and Document Your Audience’s Needs

    Activities:
    1.2.1 Document your audience’s needs in the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    • Note, the Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by CIO priorities – Risk, Financials, Talent, and Strategic Initiatives – and address the needs of the CXO audience. The IT Dashboard Workbook is pre-populated with this information.
    • If this meets your audience’s needs, you do not have to edit this content and can instead use the pre-populated information. You may wish to review the information to ensure it is still valid for your audience.

    A diagram that shows step 1.1 & 1.2 to Test Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards Against Your Audience’s Needs.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Audience details documented in IT Dashboard Workbook

    Identify Your Audience and dig deeper to understand their needs

    Connect with your audience

    • Who is your audience?
    • What does your audience care about? What matters to them?
    • How is their individual success measured? What are their key performance indicators (KPIs)?
    • Connect the challenges and pain points of your audience to how IT can help alleviate those pain points:
      • For example, poor financial performance could be due to a lack of digitization. Identify areas where IT can help alleviate this issue.
      • Try to uncover the root cause behind the need. Root causes are often tied to broad organizational objectives, so think about how IT can impact those objectives.

    Validate the needs you’ve uncovered with the audience to ensure you have not misinterpreted them and clarify the desired timeline and deadline for the dashboard.

    Document audiences and needs on Tab 2 of the IT Dashboard Workbook

    Typical Audience Needs
    Senior Leadership
    • Inform strategic planning and track progress toward objectives.
    • Understand critical challenges.
    • Ensure risks are managed.
    • Ensure budgets are managed.
    Board of Directors
    • Understand organizational risks.
    • Ensure organization is fiscally healthy.
    Business Partners
    • Support strategic workforce planning.
    • Surface upcoming risks to workforce.
    CFO
    • IT Spend
    • Budget Health and Risks

    Prioritize and select audience needs that your dashboard will address

    Prioritize needs by asking:

    • Which needs represent the largest value to the entire organization (i.e. needs that impact more of the organization than just the audience)?
    • Which needs will have the largest impact on the audience’s success?
    • Which needs are likely to drive action (e.g. if supporting a decision, is the audience likely to be amenable to changing the way they make that decision based on the data)?

    Select three to five of the highest priority needs for each audience to include on a dashboard.

    Prioritize needs on Tab 2 of the IT Dashboard Workbook

    A diagram that shows 3 tiers of high priority, medium priority, and low priority.

    1.2.1 Document Your Audience Needs in the IT Dashboard Workbook

    1 hour

    Click the link below to download the IT Dashboard Workbook and open the file. Select Tab 2. The workbook contains pre-populated text that reflects information about Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards. You may want to keep the pre-populated text as reference as you identify your own audience then remove after you have completed your updates.

    A table of documenting audience, including key attributes, desired timeline, deadline, needs, and priority.

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook

    Phase 2

    Translate Audience Needs Into Metrics

    A diagram that shows phase 1 to 5.

    This phase will walk you through the following:

    • Revisiting the Info-Tech IT Dashboards for your audience.
    • Documenting your prioritized audience’s needs and the desired outcome of each in the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Linking audience needs to metrics has positive outcomes

    When you present metrics that your audience cares about, you:

    • Deliver real value and demonstrate IT’s value as a trusted partner.
    • Improve the relationship between the business and IT.
    • Enlighten the business about what IT does and how it is connected to the organization.

    29% of respondents to The Economist Intelligence Unit survey cited inadequate collaboration between IT and the business as one of the top barriers to the organization’s digital objectives.
    — Source: Watson, Morag W., et al.

    Dashboard Customization

    The Info-Tech IT Dashboards use measures for each dashboard that correspond with what the audience (CXO) cares about. You can find these measures in the IT Dashboard Workbook. If your audience is the CXO, you may have to change a little but you should still validate the needs and metrics in the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    Phase 2 covers the process of translating needs into metrics.

    Once you know what your audience needs, you know what to measure

    A diagram that highlights step 4-5 of knowing your audience needs in the high-value dashboard process.

    Step 2.1

    Document Desired Outcomes for Each Prioritized Audience Need

    Activities:
    2.1.1 Compare the Info-Tech IT Dashboards with your audience’s needs.
    2.1.2 Document prioritized audience needs and the desired outcome of each in the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    • Note, the Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by CIO priorities – Risk, Financials, Talent, and Strategic Initiatives – and address the needs of the CXO audience. The IT Dashboard Workbook is pre-populated with this information.
    • If this meets your audience’s needs, you do not have to edit this content and can instead use the pre-populated information. You may wish to review the information to ensure it is still valid for your audience.

    A diagram that shows step 2.1 to 2.3 to translate audience needs into metrics.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Understanding of how well Info-Tech IT Dashboards address audience needs.
    • Documented desired outcomes for each audience need.

    2.1.1 Revisit Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards and Review for Your Audience

    30 minutes

    1. If you haven’t already downloaded the Info-Tech IT Dashboards, click the link below to download.
    2. Click the link below to download the Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook.
    3. Recall your first impressions of the dashboards that you recorded on earlier in Phase 1 and open up the audience and needs information you documented in Tab 2 of the IT Dashboard Workbook.
    4. Compare the dashboards with your audience’s needs that you documented on Tab 2.
    5. Record any updates to your thoughts or impressions on the next slide. Think about any changes to the dashboards that you would make so that you can reference it when you build the dashboards.

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook

    A photo of Info-Tech IT Dashboards
    The Info-Tech IT Dashboards contain a set of monthly metrics tailored toward a CXO audience.

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboards

    Knowing what your audience needs, do the metrics the visuals reflect address them?

    Any changes to the Info-Tech IT Dashboards?

    Consider:

    • Are your audience’s needs already reflected in the visuals in each of the dashboards? If so, validate this in the next activity by reviewing the prioritized needs, desired outcomes, and associated metrics already documented in the IT Dashboard Workbook.
    • Are there any visuals your audience would need that you don’t see reflected in the dashboards? Write them here to use in the next exercise.

    Desired outcomes make identifying metrics easier

    When it’s not immediately apparent what the link between needs and metrics is, brainstorm desired outcomes.

    A diagram that shows an example of desired outcomes

    2.1.2 Document your audience’s desired outcome per prioritized need

    Now that you’ve examined the Info-Tech IT Dashboards and considered the needs of your audience, it is time to understand the outcomes and goals of each need so that you can translate your audience’s needs into metrics.

    1 hour

    Click the link below to download the IT Dashboard Workbook and open the file. Select Tab 3. The workbook contains pre-populated text that reflects information about Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards. You may want to keep the pre-populated text as reference as you identify your own audience then remove it after you have completed your updates.

    A diagram that shows desired outcome per prioritized need

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook

    Deriving Meaningful Metrics

    Once you know the desired outcomes, you can identify meaningful metrics

    A diagram of an example of meaningful metrics.

    Common Metrics Mistakes

    Avoid the following oversights when selecting your metrics.

    A diagram that shows 7 metrics mistakes

    Step 2.2

    Derive Metrics From Audience Needs

    Activities:
    2.2.1 Derive metrics using the Info-Tech IT Dashboards and the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    • Note, the Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by CIO priorities – Risk, Financials, Talent, and Strategic Initiatives – and address the needs of the CXO audience. The IT Dashboard Workbook is pre-populated with this information.
    • If this meets your audience’s needs, you do not have to edit this content and can instead use the pre-populated information. You may wish to review the information to ensure it is still valid for your audience.

    A diagram that shows step 2.1 to 2.3 to translate audience needs into metrics.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Documented metrics for audience needs.

    2.2.1 Derive metrics from desired outcomes

    Now that you have completed the desired outcomes, you can determine if you are meeting those desired outcomes. If you struggle with the metrics, revisit the desired outcomes. It could be that they are not measurable or are not specific enough.

    2 hours

    Click the link below to download the IT Dashboard Workbook and open the file. Select Tab 3. The workbook contains pre-populated text that reflects information about Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards. You may want to keep the pre-populated text as reference as you identify your own audience then remove it after you have completed your updates.

    A diagram that shows derive metrics from desired outcomes

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook

    Download IT Metrics Library

    Download HR Metrics Library

    Step 2.3

    Associate Metrics to Dashboards

    Activities:
    2.3.1 Review the metrics and identify which dashboard they should appear on.

    • Note, the Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by CIO priorities – Risk, Financials, Talent, and Strategic Initiatives – and address the needs of the CXO audience. The IT Dashboard Workbook is pre-populated with this information.
    • If this meets your audience’s needs, you do not have to edit this content and can instead use the pre-populated information. You may wish to review the information to ensure it is still valid for your audience.

    A diagram that shows step 2.1 to 2.3 to translate audience needs into metrics.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Metrics associated to each dashboard.

    2.3.1 Associate metrics to dashboards

    30 minutes

    Once you have identified all your metrics from Step 2.2, identify which dashboard they should appear on. As with all activities, if the Info-Tech IT Dashboard meets your audience’s needs, you do not have to edit this content and can instead use the pre-populated information.

    A diagram that shows associate metrics to dashboards

    Phase 3

    Ready Your Data for Dashboards

    A diagram that shows phase 1 to 5.

    This phase will walk you through the following:

    • Inventorying your data
    • Assessing your data quality
    • Determining data readiness
    • Determining data measurement frequency

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Can you measure your metrics?

    Once appropriate service metrics are derived from business objectives, the next step is to determine how easily you can get your metric.

    A diagram that highlights step 5 of measuring your metrics in the high-value dashboard process.

    Make sure you select data that your audience trusts

    40% of organizations say individuals within the business do not trust data insights.
    — Source: Experian, 2020

    Phase 3 covers the process of identifying data for each metric, creating a data inventory, assessing the readiness of your data, and documenting the frequency of measuring your data. Once complete, you will have a guide to help you add data to your dashboards.

    Step 3.1

    Assess Data Inventory

    Activities:
    3.1.1 Download the IT Dashboard Workbook and complete the data inventory section on Tab 4.

    • Note, the Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by CIO priorities – Risk, Financials, Talent, and Strategic Initiatives – and address the needs of the CXO audience. The IT Dashboard Workbook is pre-populated with this information.
    • If this meets your audience’s needs, you do not have to edit this content and can instead use the pre-populated information. You may wish to review the information to ensure it is still valid for your audience.

    A diagram that shows step 3.1 to 3.4 to ready your data for dashboards.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Documented data inventory for each metric.

    3.1.1 Data Inventory

    1 hour

    Click the link below to download the IT Dashboard Workbook and open the file. Select Tab 4. The pre-populated text is arranged into the tables according to the dashboard they appear on; you may need to scroll down to see all the dashboard tables.

    Create a data inventory by placing each metric identified on Tab 3 into the corresponding dashboard table. Complete each column as described below.

    A diagram that shows 9 columns of data inventory.

    Metrics Libraries: Use the IT Metrics Library and HR Metrics Library for ideas for metrics to use and how to measure them.

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook

    Step 3.2

    Assess Data Quality

    Activities:
    3.2.1 Use the IT Dashboard Workbook to complete an assessment of data quality on Tab 4.

    • Note, the Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by CIO priorities – Risk, Financials, Talent, and Strategic Initiatives – and address the needs of the CXO audience. The IT Dashboard Workbook is pre-populated with this information.
    • If this meets your audience’s needs, you do not have to edit this content and can instead use the pre-populated information. You may wish to review the information to ensure it is still valid for your audience.

    A diagram that shows step 3.1 to 3.4 to ready your data for dashboards.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Documented data quality assessment for each metric.

    3.2.1 Assess Data Quality

    1 hour

    Document the data quality on Tab 4 of the IT Dashboard Workbook by filling in the data availability, data accuracy, and data standardization columns as described below.

    A diagram that shows data availability, data accuracy, and data standardization columns.

    Data quality is a struggle for many organizations. Consider how much uncertainty you can tolerate and what would be required to improve your data quality to an acceptable level. Consider cost, technological resources, people resources, and time required.

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook

    Step 3.3

    Assess Data Readiness

    Activities:
    3.3.1 Use the IT Dashboard Workbook to determine the readiness of your data.

    • Note, the Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by CIO priorities – Risk, Financials, Talent, and Strategic Initiatives – and address the needs of the CXO audience. The IT Dashboard Workbook is pre-populated with this information.
    • If this meets your audience’s needs, you do not have to edit this content and can instead use the pre-populated information. You may wish to review the information to ensure it is still valid for your audience.

    A diagram that shows step 3.1 to 3.4 to ready your data for dashboards.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Documented data readiness for each metric

    3.3.1 Determine Data Readiness

    1 hour

    Once the data quality has been documented and examined, complete the Data Readiness section of Tab 4 in the Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook. Select a readiness classification using the definitions below. Use the readiness of your data to determine the level of effort required to obtain the data and consider the constraints and cost/ROI to implement new technology or revise processes and data gathering to produce the data.

    A diagram that shows data readiness section

    Remember: Although in most cases, simple formulas that can be easily understood are the best approach, both because effort is lower and data that is not manipulated is more trustworthy, do not abandon data because it is not perfect but instead plan to make it easier to obtain.

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook

    Step 3.4

    Assess Data Frequency

    Activities:
    3.4.1 Use the IT Dashboard Workbook to determine the readiness of your data and how frequently you will measure your data.

    • Note, the Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by CIO priorities – Risk, Financials, Talent, and Strategic Initiatives – and address the needs of the CXO audience. The IT Dashboard Workbook is pre-populated with this information.
    • If this meets your audience’s needs, you do not have to edit this content and can instead use the pre-populated information. You may wish to review the information to ensure it is still valid for your audience.

    A diagram that shows step 3.1 to 3.4 to assess data inventory, quality, and readiness.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Documented frequency of measurement for each metric.

    3.4.1 Document Planned Frequency of measurement

    10 minutes

    Document the planned frequency of measurement for all your metrics on Tab 4 of the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    For each metric, determine how often you will need to refresh it on the dashboard and select a frequency from the drop down. The Info-tech IT Dashboards assume a monthly refresh.

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook

    Phase 4

    Build and Deliver Your Dashboards

    A diagram that shows phase 1 to 5.

    This phase will walk you through the following:

    • Designing your dashboards
    • Updating your dashboards
    • Crafting your story
    • Delivering your dashboards

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Using your dashboard to tell your story with visuals

    Now that you have linked metrics to the needs of your audience and you understand how to get your data, it is time to start building your dashboards.

    A diagram that highlights step 6 of creating meaningful visuals in the high-value dashboard process.

    Using visual language

    • Shortens meetings by 24%
    • Increases the ability to reach consensus by 21%
    • Strengthens persuasiveness by 43%

    — Source: American Management Association

    Phase 4 guides you through using the Info-Tech IT Dashboard visuals for your audience’s needs and your story.

    Step 4.1

    Design Your Dashboard

    Activities:
    4.1.1 Plan and validate dashboard metrics, data, level of effort and visuals.

    • Note, the Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by CIO priorities – Risk, Financials, Talent, and Strategic Initiatives – and address the needs of the CXO audience. The IT Dashboard Workbook is pre-populated with this information.
    • If this meets your audience’s needs, you do not have to edit this content and can instead use the pre-populated information. You may wish to review the information to ensure it is still valid for your audience.

    A diagram that shows step 4.1 to 4.3 to build and deliver your dashboards.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Identified and validated metrics, data, and visuals for your IT dashboards.

    Use clear visuals that avoid distracting the audience

    Which visual is better to present?

    Sample A:
    A photo of Sample A visuals

    Sample B:
    A diagram Sample B visuals

    Select the appropriate visuals

    Identify the purpose of the visualization. Determine which of the four categories below aligns with the story and choose the appropriate visual to display the data.

    Relationship

    A photo of Scatterplots
    Scatterplots

    • Used to show relationships between two variables.
    • Can be difficult to interpret for audiences that are not familiar with them.

    Distribution

    A photo of Histogram
    Histogram

    • Use a histogram to show spread of a given numeric variable.
    • Can be used to organize groups of data points.
    • Requires continuous data.
    • Can make comparisons difficult.

    A photo of Scatterplot
    Scatterplot

    • Can show correlation between variables.
    • Show each data plot, making it easier to compare.

    Composition

    A photo of Pie chart
    Pie chart

    • Use pie charts to show different categories.
    • Avoid pie charts with numerous slices.
    • Provide numbers alongside slices, as it can be difficult to compare slices based on size alone.

    A photo of Table
    Table

    • Use tables when there are a large number of categories.
    • Presents information in a simple way.

    Comparison

    A photo of Bar graph
    Bar graph

    • Use to compare categories.
    • Easy to understand, familiar format.

    A photo of Line chart
    Line chart

    • Use to show trends or changes over time.
    • Clear and easy to analyze.

    (Calzon)

    Examples of data visualization

    To compare categories, use a bar chart:
    2 examples of bar chart
    Conclusion: Visualizing the spend in various areas helps prioritize.


    To show trends, use a line graph:
    An example of line graph.
    Conclusion: Overlaying a trend line on revenue per employee helps justify headcount costs.


    To show simple results, text is sometimes more clear:
    A diagram that shows examples of text and graphics.
    Conclusion: Text with meaningful graphics conveys messages quickly.


    To display relative percentages of values, use a pie chart:
    An example of pie chart.
    Conclusion: Displaying proportions in a pie chart gives an at-a-glance understanding of the amount any area uses.

    Choose effective colors and design

    Select colors that will enhance the story

    • Use color strategically to help draw the audience’s attention and highlight key information.
    • Choose two to three colors to use consistently throughout the dashboard, as too many colors will be distracting to the audience.
    • Use colors that connect with the audience (e.g., organization or department colors).
    • Don’t use colors that are too similar in shade or brightness level, as those with colorblindness might have difficulty discerning them.

    Keep the design simple and clear

    • Leave white space to separate sections and keep the dashboard simple.
    • Don’t measure everything; show just enough to address the audience’s needs.
    • Use blank space between data points to provide natural contrast (e.g., leaving space between each bar on a bar graph). Don’t rely on contrast between colors to separate data (Miller).
    • Label each data point directly instead of using a separate key, so anyone who has difficulty discerning color can still interpret the data (Miller).

    Example

    A example that shows colours and design of a chart.

    Checklist to build compelling visuals in your presentation

    Leverage this checklist to ensure you are creating the perfect visuals and graphs for your presentation.

    Checklist:

    • Do the visuals grab the audience’s attention?
    • Will the visuals mislead the audience/confuse them?
    • Do the visuals facilitate data comparison or highlight trends and differences in a more effective manner than words?
    • Do the visuals present information simply, cleanly, and accurately?
    • Do the visuals illustrate messages and themes from the accompanying text?

    4.1.1 Plan and validate your dashboard visuals

    1 hour

    Click the links below to download the Info-Tech IT Dashboards and the IT Dashboard Workbook. Open the IT Dashboard Workbook and select Tab 5. For each dashboard, represented by its own table, open the corresponding Info-Tech IT Dashboard as reference.

    A diagram of dashboard and its considerations when selecting visuals.

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboards

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook

    Step 4.2

    Update Your Dashboards

    Activities:
    4.2.1 Update the visuals on the Info-Tech IT Dashboards with data and visuals identified in the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    • Note, the Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by CIO priorities – Risk, Financials, Talent, and Strategic Initiatives – and address the needs of the CXO audience. The IT Dashboard Workbook is pre-populated with this information.
    • If this meets your audience’s needs, you do not have to edit this content and can instead use the pre-populated information. You may wish to review the information to ensure it is still valid for your audience.

    A diagram that shows step 4.1 to 4.3 to build and deliver your dashboards.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Dashboards updated with your visuals, metrics, and data identified in the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    4.2.1 Update visuals with your own data

    2 hours

    1. Get the data that you identified in Tab 4 and Tab 5 of the IT Dashboard Workbook.
    2. Click the link below to go to the Info-Tech IT Dashboards and follow the instructions to update the visuals.

    Do not worry about the Key Insights or Calls to Action; you will create this in the next step when you plan your story.

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboards

    Step 4.3

    Craft Your Story and Deliver Your Dashboards

    Activities:
    4.3.1 Craft Your Story
    4.3.2 Finalize Your Dashboards
    4.3.3 Practice Delivering Your Story With Your Dashboards

    • Note, the Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by CIO priorities – Risk, Financials, Talent, and Strategic Initiatives – and address the needs of the CXO audience. The IT Dashboard Workbook is pre-populated with this information.
    • If this meets your audience’s needs, you do not have to edit this content and can instead use the pre-populated information. You may wish to review the information to ensure it is still valid for your audience.

    A diagram that shows step 4.1 to 4.3 to build and deliver your dashboards.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Documented situations, key insights, and calls to action for each dashboard/visual.
    • A story to tell for each dashboard.
    • Understanding of how to practice delivering the dashboards using stories.

    Stories are more easily understood and more likely to drive decisions

    IT dashboards are valuable tools to provide insights that drive decision making.

    • Monitor: Track and report on strategic areas IT supports.
    • Provide insights: sPresent important data and information to audiences in a clear and efficient way.

    “Data storytelling is a universal language that everyone can understand – from people in STEM to arts and psychology.” — Peter Jackson, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Exasol

    Storytelling provides context, helping the audience understand and connect with data and metrics.

    • 93% of respondents (business leaders and data professionals) agreed that decisions made as a result of successful data storytelling have the potential to help increase revenue.
    • 92% of respondents agreed that data storytelling was critical to communicate insights effectively.
    • 87% percent of respondents agreed that leadership teams would make more data-driven decisions if insights gathered from data were presented more simply.

    — Exasol

    For more visual guidance, download the IT Dashboard Guide

    Include all the following pieces in your message for an effective communication

    A diagram of an effective message, including consistent, clearn, relevant, and concise.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Time is a non-renewable resource. The message crafted must be considered a value-adding communication to your audience.

    Enable good communication with these components

    Be Consistent

    • The core message must be consistent regardless of audience, channel, or medium.
    • Test your communication with your team or colleagues to obtain feedback before delivering to a broader audience.
    • A lack of consistency can be interpreted as an attempt at deception. This can hurt credibility and trust.

    Be Clear

    • Say what you mean and mean what you say.
    • Choice of language is important: “Do you think this is a good idea? I think we could really benefit from your insights and experience here.” Or do you mean: “I think we should do this. I need you to do this to make it happen.”
    • Avoid jargon.

    Be Relevant

    • Talk about what matters to the audience.
    • Tailor the details of the message to the audience’s specific concerns.
    • IT thinks in processes but wider audiences focus mostly on results; talk in terms of results.
    • IT wants to be understood, but this does not matter to stakeholders. Think: “What’s in it for them?”
    • Communicate truthfully; do not make false promises or hide bad news.

    Be Concise

    • Keep communication short and to the point so key messages are not lost in the noise.
    • There is a risk of diluting your key message if you include too many other details.
    • If you provide more information than necessary, the clarity and consistency of the message can be lost.

    Draft the core messages to communicate

    1. Hook your audience: Use a compelling introduction that ensures your target audience cares about the message. Start with a story or metaphor and then support with the data on your dashboard. Avoid rushing in with data first.
    2. Demonstrate you can help: Let the audience know that based on the unique problem, you can help. There is value in engaging and working with you further.
    3. Write for the ear: Use concise and clear sentences, avoid technological language, and when you read it aloud ensure it sounds like how you would normally speak.
    4. Interpret visuals for your audience: Do not assume they will reach the same conclusions as you. For example, walk them through what a chart shows even if the axes are labeled, tell them what a trend line indicates or what the comparison between two data points means.
    5. Identify a couple of key insights: Think about one or two key takeaways you want your audience to leave with.
    6. Finish with a call to action: Your concluding statement should not be a thank-you but a call to action that ignites how your audience will behave after the communication. Dashboards exist to drive decisions, so if you have no call to action, you should ask if you need to include the visual.

    4.3.1 Craft Your Story

    1 hour

    Click the link below to download the IT Dashboard Workbook and open the file. Select Tab 6. The workbook contains grey text that reflects a sample story about the Info-Tech IT Dashboards. You may want to keep the sample text as reference, then remove after you have entered your information.

    A diagram of dashboard to craft your story.

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook

    4.3.2 Finalize Your Dashboards

    30 minutes

    1. Take the Key Insights and Calls to Action that you documented in Tab 6 of the IT Dashboard Workbook and place them in their corresponding dashboard.
    2. Add any text to your dashboard as necessary but only if the visual requires more information. You can add explanations more effectively during the presentation.

    A diagram that shows strategic initiatives: deliver value to customers.

    Tip: Aim to be brief and concise with any text. Dashboards simplify information and too much text can clutter the visuals and obscure the message.

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook

    4.3.3 Practice Delivering Your Story With Your Dashboards

    1 hour

    Ideally you can present your dashboard to your audience so that you are available to clarify questions and add a layer of interpretation that would crowd out boards if added as text.

    1. To prepare to tell your story, consult the Situation, Key Insights, and Call to Action sections that you documented for each dashboard in Tab 6 of the Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook.
    2. Practice your messages as you walk through your dashboards. The next two slides provide delivery guidance.
    3. Once you deliver your dashboards, update Tab 6 with audience feedback. Often dashboards are iterative and when your audience sees them, they are usually inspired to think about what else they would like to see. This is good and shows your audience is engaged!

    Don’t overwhelm your audience with information and data. You spent time to craft your dashboards so that they are clear and concise, so spend time practicing delivering a message that matches your clear, concise dashboards

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook

    Hone presentation skills before meeting with key stakeholders

    Using voice and body

    Think about the message you are trying to convey and how your body can support that delivery. Hands, stance, and frame all have an impact on what might be conveyed.

    If you want your audience to lean in and be eager about your next point, consider using a pause or softer voice and volume.

    Be professional and confident

    State the main points of your dashboard confidently. While this should be obvious, it needs to be stated explicitly. Your audience should be able to clearly see that you believe the points you are stating.

    Present in a way that is genuine to you and your voice. Whether you have an energetic personality or a calm and composed personality, the presentation should be authentic to you.

    Connect with your audience

    Look each member of the audience in the eye at least once during your presentation or if you are presenting remotely, look into the camera. Avoid looking at the ceiling, the back wall, or the floor. Your audience should feel engaged – this is essential to keeping their attention.

    Avoid reading the text from your dashboard, and instead paraphrase it while maintaining eye/camera contact.

    Info-Tech Insight

    You are responsible for the response of your audience. If they aren’t engaged, it is on you as the communicator.

    Communication Delivery Checklist

    • Have you practiced delivering the communication to team members or coaches?
    • Have you practiced delivering the communication to someone with little to no technology background?
    • Are you making yourself open to feedback and improvement opportunities?
    • If the communication is derailed from your plan, are you prepared to handle that change?
    • Can you deliver the communication without reading your notes word for word?
    • Have you adapted your voice throughout the communication to highlight specific components you want the audience to focus on?
    • Are you presenting in a way that is genuine to you and your personality?
    • Can you communicate the message within the time allotted?
    • Are you moving in an appropriate manner based on your communication (e.g., toward the screen, across the stage, hand gestures)
    • Do you have room for feedback on the dashboards? Solicit feedback with your audience after the meeting and record it in Tab 6 of the IT Dashboard Workbook.

    Phase 5

    Plan, record, and action your metrics

    A diagram that shows phase 1 to 5.

    This phase will walk you through the following:

    • Planning to track your metrics
    • Recording your metrics
    • Actioning your metrics

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Actioning your metrics to drive results

    To deliver real value from your dashboards, you need to do something with the results.

    Don’t fail on execution! The whole reason you labor to create inviting visuals and meaningful metrics is to action those metrics. The metrics results inform your entire story! It’s important to plan and do, but everything is lost if you fail to check and act.

    70%: of survey respondents say that managers do not get insights from performance metrics to improve strategic decision making.
    60%: of survey respondents say that operational teams do not get insights to improve operation decision making.

    (Bernard Marr)

    “Metrics aren’t a passive measure of progress but an active part of an organization’s everyday management….Applying the “plan–do–check–act” feedback loop…helps teams learn from their mistakes and identify good ideas that can be applied elsewhere”

    (McKinsey)

    Step 5.1

    Plan How to Record Metrics

    Activities:
    5.1.1 For each dashboard, add a baseline and target to existing metrics and KPIs.

    • Note, the Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by CIO priorities – Risk, Financials, Talent, and Strategic Initiatives – and address the needs of the CXO audience. The IT Dashboard Workbook is pre-populated with this information.
    • If this meets your audience’s needs, you do not have to edit this content and can instead use the pre-populated information. You may wish to review the information to ensure it is still valid for your audience.

    A diagram that shows step 5.1 to 5.2 to plan, record, and action your metrics.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Baselines and targets identified and recorded for each metric.

    5.1.1 Identify Baselines and Targets

    1 hour

    To action your metrics, you must first establish what your baselines and targets are so that you can determine if you are on track.

    To establish baselines:
    If you do not have a baseline. Run your metric to establish one.

    To establish targets:

    • Use historical data and trends of performance.
    • If you do not have historical data, establish an initial target based on stakeholder-identified requirements and expectations.
    • You can also run the metrics report over a defined period of time and use the baseline level of achievement to establish an initial target.
    • The target may not always be a number – it could be a trend. The initial target may be changed after review with stakeholders.

    Actions for Success:
    How will you ensure you can get this metric? For example, if you would like to measure delivered value, to make sure the metric is measurable, you will need to ensure that measures of success are documented for an imitative and then measured once complete.

    • If you need help with Action plans, the IT Metrics Library includes action plans for all of its metrics that may help

    A diagram of identify metrics and to identify baselines and targets.

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook

    Step 5.2

    Record and Action Metrics

    Activities:
    5.2.1 Record and Action Results

    • Note, the Info-Tech IT Dashboards are organized by CIO priorities – Risk, Financials, Talent, and Strategic Initiatives – and address the needs of the CXO audience. The IT Dashboard Workbook is pre-populated with this information.
    • If this meets your audience’s needs, you do not have to edit this content and can instead use the pre-populated information. You may wish to review the information to ensure it is still valid for your audience.

    A diagram that shows step 5.1 to 5.2 to plan, record, and action your metrics.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Dashboard SMEs

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Understanding of what and where to record metrics once run.

    5.2.1 Record and Action Results

    1 hour

    After analyzing your results, use this information to update your dashboards. Revisit Tab 6 of the IT Dashboard Workbook to update your story. Remember to record any audience feedback about the dashboards in the Audience Feedback section.

    Action your measures as well as your metrics

    What should be measured can change over time as your organization matures and the business environment changes. Understanding what creates business value for your organization is critical. If metrics need to be changed, record metrics actions under Identified Actions on Tab 7. A metric will need to be addressed in one of the following ways:

    • Added: A new metric is required or an existing metric needs large-scale changes (example: calculation method or scope).
    • Changed: A minor change is required to the presentation format or data. Note: a major change in a metric would be performed through the Add option.
    • Removed: The metric is no longer required, and it needs to be removed from reporting and data gathering. A final report date for that metric should be determined.
    • Maintained: The metric is still useful and no changes are required to the metric, its measurement, or how it’s reported.

    A diagram of record results and identify how to address results.

    Don’t be discouraged if you need to update your metrics a few times before you get it right. It can take some trial and error to find the measures that best indicate the health of what you are measuring.

    Download Info-Tech IT Dashboard Workbook

    Tips for actioning results

    Sometimes actioning your metrics results requires more analysis

    If a metric deviates from your target, you may need to analyze how to correct the issue then run the metric again to see if the results have improved.

    Identify Root Cause
    Root Cause Analysis can include problem exploration techniques like The 5 Whys, fishbone diagrams, or affinity mapping.

    Select a Solution
    Once you have identified a possible root cause, use the same technique to brainstorm and select a solution then re-run your metrics.

    Consider Tension Metrics
    Consider tension metrics when selecting a solution. Will improving one area affect another? A car can go faster but it will consume more fuel – a project can be delivered faster but it may affect the quality.

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Problem Solved

    1. Using this blueprint and the IT Dashboard Workbook, you validated and customized the dashboards for your audience and organization, which reduced or eliminated time spent searching for and organizing your own visuals.
    2. You documented your dashboards’ story so you are ready to present them to your audience.
    3. You assessed the data for your dashboards and you built a metrics action-tracking plan to maintain your dashboards’ metrics.

    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

    Additional Support

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech Workshop.

    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.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com
    1-888-670-8889

    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

    A photo of Info-Tech IT Dashboards
    Review the Info-Tech IT Dashboards
    Determine how you can use the Info-Tech IT Dashboards in your organization and the anticipated level of customization.

    A photo of the IT Dashboard Workbook
    Plan your dashboards
    Complete the IT Dashboard Workbook to help plan your dashboards using Info-Tech’s IT Dashboards.

    Research Contributors and Experts

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    John Corrado
    Head of IT
    X4 Pharmaceuticals

    As head of IT, John is charged with the creation of strategic IT initiatives that align with X4s vision, mission, culture, and long-term goals and is responsible for the organization’s systems, security, and infrastructure. He works closely developing partnerships with X4tizens across the organization to deliver value through innovative programs and services.

    Photo of Grant Frost
    Grant Frost
    Chief Information & Security Officer
    Niagara Catholic School Board

    Grant Frost is an experienced executive, information technologist and security strategist with extensive experience in both the public and private sector. Grant is known for, and has extensive experience in, IT transformation and the ability to increase capability while decreasing cost in IT services.

    Photo of Nick Scozzaro
    Nick Scozzaro
    CEO and Co-Founder of MobiStream and ShadowHQ
    ShadowHQ

    Nick got his start in software development and mobility working at BlackBerry where he developed a deep understanding of the technology landscape and of what is involved in both modernizing legacy systems and integrating new ones. Working with experts across multiple industries, he innovated, learned, strategized, and ultimately helped push the boundaries of what was possible.

    Photo of Joseph Sanders
    Joseph Sanders
    Managing Director of Technology/Cyber Security Services
    Kentucky Housing Corporation

    In his current role Joe oversees all IT Operations/Applications Services that are used to provide services and support to the citizens of Kentucky. Joe has 30+ years of leadership experience and has held several executive roles in the public and private sector. He has been a keynote speaker for various companies including HP, IBM, and Oracle.

    Photo of Jochen Sievert
    Jochen Sievert
    Director Performance Excellence & IT
    Zeon Chemicals

    Jochen moved to the USA from Duesseldorf, Germany in 2010 to join Zeon Chemicals as their IT Manager. Prior to Zeon, Jochen has held various technical positions at Novell, Microsoft, IBM, and Metro Management Systems.

    Info-Tech Contributors

    Ibrahim Abdel-Kader, Research Analyst
    Donna Bales, Principal Research Director
    Shashi Bellamkonda, Principal Research Director
    John Burwash, Executive Counselor
    Tony Denford, Research Lead
    Jody Gunderman, Senior Executive Advisor
    Tom Hawley, Managing Partner
    Mike Higginbotham, Executive Counselor
    Valence Howden, Principal Research Director
    Dave Kish, Practice Lead
    Carlene McCubbin, Practice Lead
    Jennifer Perrier, Principal Research Director
    Gary Rietz, Executive Counselor
    Steve Schmidt, Senior Managing Partner
    Aaron Shum, Vice President, Security & Privacy
    Ian Tyler-Clarke, Executive Counselor

    Plus, an additional four contributors who wish to remain anonymous.

    Related Info-Tech Research

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    Bibliography

    “10 Signs You Are Sitting on a Pile of Data Debt.” Experian, n.d. Web.

    “From the What to the Why: How Data Storytelling Is Key to Success.” Exasol, 2021. Web.

    Bonsignore, Marian. “Using Visual Language to Create the Case for Change.” Amarican Management Association. Accessed 19 Apr. 2023.

    Calzon, Bernardita. “Top 25 Dashboard Design Principles, Best Practices & How To’s.” Datapine, 5 Apr. 2023.

    “Data Literacy.” Tableau, n.d. Accessed 3 May 2023.

    “KPIs Don’t Improve Decision-Making In Most Organizations.” LinkedIn, n.d. Accessed 2 May 2023.

    Miller, Amanda. “A Comprehensive Guide to Accessible Data Visualization.” Betterment, 2020. Accessed May 2022.

    “Performance Management: Why Keeping Score Is so Important, and so Hard.” McKinsey. Accessed 2 May 2023.

    Vogel, Douglas, et al. Persuasion and the Role of Visual Presentation Support: The UM/3M Study. Management Information Systems Research Center School of Management University of Minnesota, 1986.

    Watson, Morag W., et al. ”IT’s Changing Mandate in an Age of Disruption.” The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited, 2021.

    Maintain an Organized Portfolio

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    • Parent Category Name: Portfolio Management
    • Parent Category Link: /portfolio-management
    • All too often, the portfolio of programs and projects looks more like a random heap than a strategically organized and balanced collection of investments that will drive the business forward.
    • Portfolio managers know that with the right kind of information and the right level of process maturity they can get better results through the portfolio; however, organizations often assume (falsely) that the required level of maturity is out of reach from their current state and perpetually delay improvements.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The information needed to define clear and usable criteria for organizing the portfolio of programs and projects already exists. Portfolio managers only need to identify the sources of that information and institute processes for regularly reviewing that information in order to define those criteria.
    • Once a portfolio manager has a clear idea of the goals and constraints that shape what ought to be included (or removed) from the portfolio and once these have been translated into clear and usable portfolio criteria, basic portfolio management processes can be instituted to ensure that these criteria are used consistently throughout the various stages of the project lifecycle.
    • Portfolio management frameworks and processes do not need to be built from scratch. Well-known frameworks – such as the one outlined in COBIT 5 APO05 – can be instituted in a way that will allow even low-maturity organizations to start organizing their portfolio.
    • Organizations do not need to grow into portfolio management frameworks to get the benefits of an organized portfolio; instead, they can grow within such frameworks.

    Impact and Result

    • An organized portfolio will ensure that the projects and programs included in it are strategically aligned and can actually be executed within the finite constraints of budgetary and human resource capacity.
    • Portfolio managers are better empowered to make decisions about which projects should be included in the portfolio (and when) and are better empowered to make the very tough decisions about which projects should be removed from the portfolio (i.e. cancelled).
    • Building and maturing a portfolio management framework will more fully integrate the PMO into the broader IT management and governance frameworks, making it a more integral part of strategic decisions and a better business partner in the long run.

    Maintain an Organized Portfolio Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should maintain an organized portfolio of programs and projects, 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 the current state of the portfolio and PPM processes

    Analyze the current mix of programs and projects in your portfolio and assess the maturity of your current PPM processes.

    • Maintain an Organized Portfolio – Phase 1: Assess the Current State of the Portfolio and PPM Processes
    • Project Portfolio Organizer
    • COBIT APO05 (Manage Portfolio) Alignment Workbook

    2. Enhance portfolio organization through improved PPM criteria and processes

    Enhance and optimize your portfolio management processes to ensure portfolio criteria are clearly defined and consistently applied across the project lifecycle when making decisions about which projects to include or remove from the portfolio.

    • Maintain an Organized Portfolio – Phase 2: Enhance Portfolio Organization Through Improved PPM Criteria and Processes
    • Portfolio Management Standard Operating Procedures

    3. Implement improved portfolio management practices

    Implement your portfolio management improvement initiatives to ensure long-term sustainable adoption of new PPM practices.

    • Maintain an Organized Portfolio – Phase 3: Implement Improved Portfolio Management Practices
    • Portfolio Management Improvement Roadmap Tool
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Maintain an Organized Portfolio

    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 Assess Portfolio Mix and Portfolio Process Current State

    The Purpose

    Analyze the current mix of the portfolio to determine how to better organize it according to organizational goals and constraints.

    Assess which PPM processes need to be enhanced to better organize the portfolio.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An analysis of the existing portfolio of projects (highlighting areas of concern).

    An analysis of the maturity of current PPM processes and their ability to support the maintenance of an organized portfolio.

    Activities

    1.1 Pre-work: Prepare a complete project list.

    1.2 Define existing portfolio categories, criteria, and targets.

    1.3 Analyze the current portfolio mix.

    1.4 Identify areas of concern with current portfolio mix.

    1.5 Review the six COBIT sub-processes for portfolio management (APO05.01-06).

    1.6 Assess the degree to which these sub-processes have been currently achieved at the organization.

    1.7 Assess the degree to which portfolio-supporting IT governance and management processes exist.

    1.8 Perform a gap analysis.

    Outputs

    Analysis of the current portfolio mix

    Assessment of COBIT alignment and gap analysis.

    2 Define Portfolio Target Mix, Criteria, and Roadmap

    The Purpose

    Define clear and usable portfolio criteria.

    Record/design portfolio management processes that will support the consistent use of portfolio criteria at all stages of the project lifecycle.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Clearly defined and usable portfolio criteria.

    A portfolio management framework that supports the consistent use of the portfolio criteria across all stages of the project lifecycle.

    Activities

    2.1 Identify determinants of the portfolio mix, criteria, and constraints.

    2.2 Define the target mix, portfolio criteria, and portfolio metrics.

    2.3 Identify sources of funding and resourcing.

    2.4 Review and record the portfolio criteria based upon the goals and constraints.

    2.5 Create a PPM improvement roadmap.

    Outputs

    Portfolio criteria

    Portfolio metrics for intake, monitoring, closure, termination, reprioritization, and benefits tracking

    Portfolio Management Improvement Roadmap

    3 Design Improved Portfolio Sub-Processes

    The Purpose

    Ensure that the portfolio criteria are used to guide decision making at each stage of the project lifecycle when making decisions about which projects to include or remove from the portfolio.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Processes that support decision making based upon the portfolio criteria.

    Processes that ensure the portfolio remains consistently organized according to the portfolio criteria.

    Activities

    3.1 Ensure that the metrics used for each sub-process are based upon the standard portfolio criteria.

    3.2 Establish the roles, accountabilities, and responsibilities for each sub-process needing improvement.

    3.3 Outline the workflow for each sub-process needing improvement.

    Outputs

    A RACI chart for each sub-process

    A workflow for each sub-process

    4 Change Impact Analysis and Stakeholder Engagement Plan

    The Purpose

    Ensure that the portfolio management improvement initiatives are sustainably adopted in the long term.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Stakeholder engagement.

    Sustainable long-term adoption of the improved portfolio management practices.

    Activities

    4.1 Conduct a change impact analysis.

    4.2 Create a stakeholder engagement plan.

    Outputs

    Change Impact Analysis

    Stakeholder Engagement Plan

    Completed Portfolio Management SOP

    pricing

    • TymansGroupVideosExcerpt: BasicFor freelancers$19/ month 10 presentations/monthSupport at $25/hour1 campaign/month Choose plan StandardFor medium sized teams$29/ month 50 presentations/month5 hours of free support10 campaigns/month Choose plan EnterpriseFor large companies$79/ month Unlimited presentationsUnlimited supportUnlimited campaigns Choose plan

    Pricing

    Our pricing options will be available soon for simple download,

    In the meantime, please book a free discovery call. No cost, no sales pitch.

    Continue reading

    Build Your Enterprise Innovation Program

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    • Parent Category Name: Innovation
    • Parent Category Link: /innovation
    • You don’t know where to start when it comes to building an innovation program for your organization.
    • You need to create a culture of innovation in your business, department, or team.
    • Past innovation efforts have been met with resistance and cynicism.
    • You don’t know what processes you need to support business-led innovation.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Innovation is about people, not ideas or processes. Innovation does not require a formal process, a dedicated innovation team, or a large budget; the most important success factor for innovation is culture. Companies that facilitate innovative behaviors like growth mindset, collaboration, and taking smart risks are most likely to see the benefits of innovation.

    Impact and Result

    • Outperform your peers by 30% by adopting an innovative approach to your business.
    • Move quickly to launch your innovation practice and beat the competition.
    • Develop the skills and capabilities you need to sustain innovation over the long term.

    Build Your Enterprise Innovation Program Research & Tools

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

    1. Build Your Enterprise Innovation Program Storyboard – A step-by-step process to create the innovation culture, processes, and tools you need for business-led innovation.

    This storyboard includes three phases and nine activities that will help you define your purpose, align your people, and build your practice.

    • Build Your Enterprise Innovation Program – Phases 1-3

    2. Innovation Program Template – An executive communication deck summarizing the outputs from this research.

    Use this template in conjunction with the activities in the main storyboard to create and communicate your innovation program. This template uses sample data from a fictional retailer, Acme Corp, to illustrate an ideal innovation program summary.

    • Innovation Program Template

    3. Job Description – Chief Innovation Officer

    This job description can be used to hire your Chief Innovation Officer. There are many other job descriptions available on the Info-Tech website and referenced within the storyboard.

    • Chief Innovation Officer

    4. Innovation Ideation Session Template – Use this template to facilitate innovation sessions with the business.

    Use this framework to facilitate an ideation session with members of the business. Instructions for how to customize the information and facilitate each section is included within the deck.

    • Innovation Ideation Session Template

    5. Initiative Prioritization Workbook – Use this spreadsheet template to easily and transparently prioritize initiatives for pilot.

    This spreadsheet provides an analytical and transparent method to prioritize initiatives based on weighted criteria relevant to your business.

    • Initiative Prioritization Workbook

    Infographic

    Workshop: Build Your Enterprise Innovation 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 Ambitions

    The Purpose

    Define your innovation ambitions.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Gain a better understanding of why you are innovating and what your organization will gain from an innovation program.

    Activities

    1.1 Understand your innovation mandate.

    1.2 Define your innovation ambitions.

    1.3 Determine value proposition & metrics.

    Outputs

    Complete the "Our purpose" section of the Innovation Program Template

    Complete "Vision and guiding principles" section

    Complete "Scope and value proposition" section

    Success metrics

    2 Align Your People

    The Purpose

    Build a culture, operating model, and team that support innovation.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Develop a plan to address culture gaps and identify and implement your operating model.

    Activities

    2.1 Foster a culture of innovation.

    2.2 Define your operating model.

    Outputs

    Complete "Building an innovative culture" section

    Complete "Operating model" section

    3 Develop Your Capabilities

    The Purpose

    Create the capability to facilitate innovation.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Create a resourcing plan and prioritization templates to make your innovation program successful.

    Activities

    3.1 Build core innovation capabilities.

    3.2 Develop prioritization criteria.

    Outputs

    Team structure and resourcing requirements

    Prioritization spreadsheet template

    4 Build Your Program

    The Purpose

    Finalize your program and complete the final deliverable.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Walk away with a complete plan for your innovation program.

    Activities

    4.1 Define your methodology to pilot projects.

    4.2 Conduct a program retrospective.

    Outputs

    Complete "Operating model" section in the template

    Notable wins and goals

    Further reading

    Build Your Enterprise Innovation Program

    Transform your business by adopting the culture and practices that drive innovation.

    Analyst Perspective

    Innovation is not about ideas, it's about people.

    Many organizations stumble when implementing innovation programs. Innovation is challenging to get right, and even more challenging to sustain over the long term.

    One of the common stumbling blocks we see comes from organizations focusing more on the ideas and the process than on the culture and the people needed to make innovation a way of life. However, the most successful innovators are the ones which have adopted a culture of innovation and reinforce innovative behaviors across their organization. Organizational cultures which promote growth mindset, trust, collaboration, learning, and a willingness to fail are much more likely to produce successful innovators.

    This research is not just about culture, but culture is the starting point for innovation. My hope is that organizations will go beyond the processes and methodologies laid out here and use this research to dramatically improve their organization's performance.

    Kim Rodriguez

    Kim Osborne Rodriguez
    Research Director, CIO Advisory
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    As a leader in your organization, you need to:

    • Understand your organization's innovation goals.
    • Create an innovation program or structure.
    • Develop a culture of innovation across your team or organization.
    • Demonstrate an ability to innovate and grow the business.

    Common Obstacles

    In the past, you might have experienced one or more of the following:

    • Innovation initiatives lose momentum.
    • Cynicism and distrust hamper innovation.
    • Innovation efforts are unfocused or don't provide the anticipated value.
    • Bureaucracy has created a bottleneck that stifles innovation.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    This blueprint will help you:

    • Understand the different types of innovation.
    • Develop a clear vision, scope, and focus.
    • Create organizational culture and behaviors aligned with your innovation ambitions.
    • Adopt an operational model and methodologies best suited for your culture, goals, and budget.
    • Successfully run a pilot program.

    Info-Tech Insight

    There is no single right way to approach innovation. Begin with an understanding of your innovation ambitions, your existing culture, and the resources available to you, then adopt the innovation operating model that is best suited to your situation.

    Note: This research is written for the individual who is leading the development of the innovation. This role is referred to as the Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) throughout this research but could be the CIO, CTO, IT director, or another business leader.

    Why is innovation so challenging?

    Most organizations want to be innovative, but very few succeed.

    • Bureaucracy slows innovation: Innovation requires speed – it is important to fail fast and early so you can iterate to improve the final solution. Small, agile organizations like startups tend to be more risk tolerant and can move more quickly to iterate on new ideas compared to larger organizations.
    • Change is uncomfortable: Most people are profoundly uncomfortable with failure, risk, and unknowns – three critical components of innovation. Humans are wired to think efficiently rather than innovatively, which leads to confirmation bias and lack of ingenuity.
    • You will likely fail: Innovation initiatives rarely succeed on the first try – Harvard Business Review estimates between 70% and 90% of innovation efforts fail. Organizations which are more tolerant of failure tend to be significantly more innovative than those which are not (Review of Financial Studies, 2014).

    Based on a survey of global innovation trends and practices:

    75%

    Three-quarters of companies say innovation is a top-three priority.
    Source: BCG, 2021

    30%

    But only 30% of executives say their organizations are doing it well.
    Source: BCG, 2019

    The biggest obstacles to innovation are cultural

    The biggest obstacles to innovation in large companies

    Based on a survey of 270 business leaders.
    Source: Harvard Business Review, 2018

    A bar graph from the Harvard Business Review

    The most common challenges business leaders experience relate to people and culture. Success is based on people, not ideas.

    Politics, turf wars, and a lack of alignment: territorial departments, competition for resources, and unclear roles are holding back the innovation efforts of 55% of respondents.

    FIX IT
    Senior leadership needs to be clear on the innovation goals and how business units are expected to contribute to them.

    Cultural issues: many large companies have a culture that rewards operational excellence and disincentivizes risk. A history of failed innovation attempts may result in significant resistance to new change efforts.

    FIX IT
    Cultural change takes time. Ensure you are rewarding collaboration and risk-taking, and hire people with fresh new perspectives.

    Inability to act on signals crucial to the future of the business: only 18% of respondents indicated their organization was unaware of disruptions, but 42% said they struggled with acting on leading indicators of change.

    FIX IT
    Build the ability to quickly run pilots or partner with startups and incubators to test out new ideas without lengthy review and approval processes.
    Source: Harvard Business Review, 2018

    Build Your Enterprise Innovation Program

    Define your purpose, assess your culture, and build a practice that delivers true innovation.

    An image summarizing how to define your purpose, align your people, and Build your Practice.
    1 Source: Boston Consulting Group, 2021
    2 Source: Boston Consulting Group, 2019
    3 Source: Harvard Business Review, 2018

    Use this research to outperform your peers

    A seven-year review showed that the most innovative companies outperformed the market by upwards of 30%.

    A line graph showing the Normalized Market Capitalization for 2020.

    Innovators are defined as companies that were listed on Fast Company World's 50 Most Innovative Companies for 2+ years.

    Innovation is critical to business success.

    A 25-year study by Business Development Canada and Statistics Canada showed that innovation was more important to business success than management, human resources, marketing, or finance.

    Executive brief case study

    INDUSTRY: Healthcare
    SOURCE: Interview

    Culture is critical

    This Info-Tech member is a nonprofit, community-based mental health organization located in the US. It serves about 25,000 patients per year in community, school, and clinic settings.

    This organization takes its innovation culture very seriously and has developed methodologies to assess individual and team innovation readiness as well as innovation types, which it uses to determine everyone's role in the innovation process. These assessments look at knowledge of and trust in the organization, its innovation profile, and its openness to change. Innovation enthusiasts are involved early in the process when it's important to dream big, while more pragmatic perspectives are incorporated later to improve the final solution.

    Results

    The organization has developed many innovative approaches to delivering healthcare. Notably, they have reimagined patient scheduling and reduced wait times to the extent that some patients can be seen the same day. They are also working to improve access to mental health care despite a shortage of professionals.

    Developing an Innovative Culture

    • Innovation Readiness Assessment
    • Coaching Specific to Innovation Profile
    • Innovation Enthusiasts Involved Early
    • Innovation Pragmatists Involved Later
    • High Success Rate of Innovation

    Define innovation roles and responsibilities

    A table showing key innovation roles and responsibilities.

    Info-Tech's methodology for building your enterprise innovation program

    1. Define Your Purpose

    2. Align Your People

    3. Build Your Practice

    Phase Steps

    1. Understand your mandate
    2. Define your innovation ambitions
    3. Determine value proposition and metrics
    1. Foster a culture of innovation
    2. Define your operating model
    3. Build core innovation capabilities
    1. Build your ideation and prioritization methodologies
    2. Define your pilot project methodology
    3. Conduct a program retrospective

    Phase Outcomes

    Understand where the mandate for innovation comes from, and what the drivers are for pursuing innovation. Define what innovation means to your organization, and set the vision, mission, and guiding principles. Articulate the value proposition and key metrics for measuring success.

    Understand what it takes to build an innovative culture, and what types of innovation structure are most suited to your innovation goals. Define an innovation methodology and build your core innovation capabilities and team.

    Gather ideas and understand how to assess and prioritize initiatives based on standardized metrics. Develop criteria for tracking and measuring the success of pilot projects and conduct a program retrospective.

    Innovation program taxonomy

    This research uses the following common terms:

    Innovation Operating Model
    The operating model describes how the innovation program delivers value to the organization, including how the program is structured, the steps from idea generation to enterprise launch, and the methodologies used.
    Examples: Innovation Hub, Grassroots Innovation.

    Innovation Methodology
    Methodologies describe the ways the operating model is carried out, and the approaches used in the innovation practice.
    Examples: Design Thinking, Weighted Criteria Scoring

    Chief Innovation Officer
    This research is written for the person or team leading the innovation program – this might be a CINO, CIO, or other leader in the organization.

    Innovation Team
    The innovation team may vary depending on the operating model, but generally consists of the individuals involved in facilitating innovation across the organization. This may be, but does not have to be, a dedicated innovation department.

    Innovation Program
    The program for generating ideas, running pilot projects, and building a business case to implement across the enterprise.

    Pilot Project
    A way of testing and validating a specific concept in the real world through a minimum viable product or small-scale implementation. The pilot projects are part of the overall pilot program.

    Insight summary

    Innovation is about people, not ideas or processes
    Innovation does not require a formal process, a dedicated innovation team, or a large budget; the most important success factor for innovation is culture. Companies that facilitate innovative behaviors like growth mindset, collaboration, and the ability to take smart risk are most likely to see the benefits of innovation.

    Very few are doing innovation well
    Only 30% of companies consider themselves innovative, and there's a good reason: innovation involves unknowns, risk, and failure – three situations that people and organizations typically do their best to avoid. Counter this by removing the barriers to innovation.

    Culture is the greatest barrier to innovation
    In a survey of 270 business leaders, the top three most common obstacles were politics, turf wars, and alignment; culture issues; and inability to act on signals crucial to the business (Harvard Business Review, 2018). If you don't have a supportive culture, your ability to innovate will be significantly reduced.

    Innovation is a means to an end
    It is not the end itself. Don't get caught up in innovation for the sake of innovation – make sure you are getting the benefits from your investments. Measurable success factors are critical for maintaining the long-term success of your innovation engine.

    Tackle wicked problems
    Innovative approaches are better at solving complex problems than traditional practices. Organizations that prioritize innovation during a crisis tend to outperform their peers by over 30% and improve their market position (McKinsey, 2020).

    Innovate or die
    Innovation is critical to business growth. A 25-year study showed that innovation was more important to business success than management, human resources, marketing, or finance (Statistics Canada, 2006).

    Blueprint deliverables

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

    Sample Job Descriptions and Organization Charts

    Determine the skills, knowledge, and structure you need to make innovation happen.

    Sample Job Descriptions and Organization Charts

    Ideation Session Template

    Facilitate an ideation session with your staff to identify areas for innovation.

    Ideation Session Template

    Initiative Prioritization Workbook

    Evaluate ideas to identify those which are most likely to provide value.

    Prioritization Workbook

    Key deliverable:

    Enterprise Innovation Program Summary

    Communicate how you plan to innovate with a report summarizing the outputs from this research.

    Enterprise Innovation Program Summary

    Measure the value of this research

    US businesses spend over half a trillion dollars on innovation annually. What are they getting for it?

    • The top innovators(1) typically spend 5-15% of their budgets on innovation (including R&D).
    • This research helps organizations develop a successful innovation program, which delivers value to the organization in the form of new products, services, and methods.
    • Leverage this research to:
      • Get your innovation program off the ground quickly.
      • Increase internal knowledge and expertise.
      • Generate buy-in and excitement about innovation.
      • Develop the skills and capabilities you need to drive innovation over the long term.
      • Validate your innovation concept.
      • Streamline and integrate innovation across the organization.

    (1) based on BCG's 50 Most Innovative Companies 2022

    30%

    The most innovative companies outperform the market by 30%.
    Source: McKinsey & Company, 2020

    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 guided implementation (GI) on this topic look like?

    Phase 0 Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Finish

    Call #1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.

    Call #2: Understand your mandate.
    (Activity 1.1)

    Call #3: Innovation vision, guiding principles, value proposition, and scope.
    (Activities 1.2 and 1.3)

    Call #4: Foster a culture of innovation. (Activity 2.1)

    Call #5: Define your methodology. (Activity 2.2)

    Call #6: Build core innovation capabilities. (Activity 2.3)

    Call #7: Build your ideation and pilot programs. (Activities 3.1 and 3.2)

    Call #8: Identify success metrics and notable wins. (Activity 3.3)

    Call #9: Summarize results and plan next steps.

    A 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 three to six months.

    Workshop overview

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

    Session 1 Session 2 Session 3 Session 4

    Wrap Up

    Activities

    Define Your Ambitions

    Align Your People

    Develop Your Capabilities

    Build Your Program

    Next Steps and
    Wrap Up (offsite)

    1. Understand your innovation mandate (complete activity prior to workshop)
    2. Define your innovation ambitions
    3. Determine value proposition and metrics
    1. Foster a culture of innovation
    2. Define your operating model
    1. Build core innovation capabilities
    2. Develop prioritization criteria
    1. Define your methodology to pilot projects
    2. Conduct a program retrospective
    1. Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days
    2. Set up review time for workshop deliverables and to discuss next steps

    Deliverables

    1. Our purpose
    2. Message from the CEO
    3. Vision and guiding principles
    4. Scope and value proposition
    5. Success metrics
    1. Building an innovative culture
    2. Operating model
    1. Core capabilities and structure
    2. Idea evaluation prioritization criteria
    1. Program retrospective
    2. Notable wins
    3. Executive summary
    4. Next steps
    1. Completed enterprise innovation program
    2. An engaged and inspired team

    Phase 1: Define Your Purpose

    Develop a better understanding of the drivers for innovation and what success looks like.

    Purpose

    People

    Practice
    1. Understand your mandate
    2. Define your innovation ambitions
    3. Determine value proposition and metrics
    1. Foster a culture of innovation
    2. Define your operating model
    3. Build core innovation capabilities
    1. Build your ideation and prioritization methodologies
    2. Define your pilot project methodology
    3. Conduct a program retrospective

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Understand your innovation mandate, including its drivers, scope, and focus.
    • Define what innovation means to your organization.
    • Develop an innovation vision and guiding principles.
    • Articulate the value proposition and proposed metrics for evaluating program success.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CINO
    • Business executives

    Case study

    INDUSTRY: Transportation
    SOURCE: Interview

    ArcBest
    ArcBest is a multibillion-dollar shipping and logistics company which leverages innovative technologies to provide reliable and integrated services to its customers.

    An Innovative Culture Starts at the Top
    ArcBest's innovative culture has buy-in and support from the highest level of the company. Michael Newcity, ArcBest's CEO, is dedicated to finding better ways of serving their customers and supports innovation across the company by dedicating funding and resources toward piloting and scaling new initiatives.
    Having a clear purpose and mandate for innovation at all levels of the organization has resulted in extensive grassroots innovation and the development of a formalized innovation program.

    Results
    ArcBest has a legacy of innovation, going back to its early days when it developed a business intelligence solution before anything else existed on the market. It continues to innovate today and is now partnering with start-ups to further expand its innovation capabilities.

    "We don't micromanage or process-manage incremental innovation. We hire really smart people who are inspired to create new things and we let them run – let them create – and we celebrate it.
    Our dedication to innovation comes from the top – I am both the President and the Chief Innovation Officer, and innovation is one of my top priorities."

    Michael Newcity

    Michael Newcity
    President and Chief Innovation Officer ArcBest

    1.1 Understand your innovation mandate

    Before you can act, you need to understand the following:

    • Where is the drive for innovation coming from?
      The source of your mandate dictates the scope of your innovation practice – in general, innovating outside the scope of your mandate (i.e. trying to innovate on products when you don't have buy-in from the product team) will not be successful.
    • What is meant by "innovation"?
      There are many different definitions for innovation. Before pursuing innovation at your organization, you need to understand how it is defined. Use the definition in this section as a starting point, and craft your own definition of innovation.
    • What kind of innovation are you targeting?
      Innovation can be internal or external, emergent or deliberate, and incremental or radically transformative. Understanding what kind of innovation you want is the starting point for your innovation practice.

    The source of your mandate dictates the scope of your influence

    You can only influence what you can control.

    Unless your mandate comes from the CEO or Board of Directors, driving enterprise-wide innovation is very difficult. If you do not have buy-in from senior business leaders, use lighthouse projects and a smaller innovation practice to prove the value of innovation before taking on enterprise innovation.

    In order to execute on a mandate to build innovation, you don't just need buy-in. You need support in the form of resources and funding, as well as strong leadership who can influence culture and the authority to change policies and practices that inhibit innovation.

    For more resources on building relationships in your organization, refer to Info-Tech's Become a Transformational CIO blueprint.

    What is "innovation"?

    Innovation is often easier to recognize than define.

    Align on a useful definition of innovation for your organization before you embark on a journey of becoming more innovative.

    Innovation is the practice of developing new methods, products or services which provide value to an organization.

    Practice
    This does not have to be a formal process – innovation is a means to an end, not the end itself.

    New
    What does "new" mean to you?

    • New application of an existing method
    • Developing a completely original product
    • Adopting a service from another industry

    Value
    What does value mean to you? Look to your business strategy to understand what goals the organization is trying to achieve, then determine how "value" will be measured.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Some innovations are incremental, while some are radically transformative. Decide what kind of innovation you want to cultivate before developing your strategy.

    We can categorize innovation in three ways

    Evaluate your goals with respect to innovation: focus, strategy, and potential to transform.

    Focus: Where will you innovate?

    Focus

    Strategy: To what extent will you guide innovation efforts?

    Strategy

    Potential: How radical will your innovations be?

    Potential

    What are your ambitions?

    1. Develop a better understanding of what type of innovation you are trying to achieve by plotting out your goals on the categories on the left.
    2. All categories are independent of one another, so your goals may fall anywhere on the scales for each category.
    3. Understanding your innovation ambitions helps establish the operating model best suited for your innovation practice.
    4. In general, innovation which is more external, deliberate, and radical tends to be more centralized.

    Activity 1.1 Understand your innovation mandate

    1 hour

    1. Schedule a 30-minute discussion with the person (i.e. CEO) or group (i.e. Board of Directors) ultimately requesting the shift toward innovation. If there is no external party, then conduct this assessment yourself.
    2. Facilitate a discussion that addresses the following questions:
    • What is meant by "innovation"?
    • What are they hoping to achieve through innovation?
    • What is the innovation scope? Are any areas off-limits (i.e. org structure, new products, certain markets)?
    • What is the budget (i.e. people, money) they are willing to commit to innovation?
    • What type of innovation are they pursuing?
    1. Record this information and complete the "Our Purpose" section of the Innovation Program Template.

    Download the Innovation Program Template.

    Input

    • Knowledge of the key decision maker/sponsor for innovation

    Output

    • Understanding of the mandate for innovation, including definition, value, scope, budget, and type of innovation

    Materials

    • Innovation Program Template

    Participants

    • CINO
    • CEO, CTO, or Board of Directors (whoever is requesting/sponsoring the pursuit of innovation)

    1.2 Define your innovation ambitions

    Articulate your future state through a vision and guiding principles.

    • Vision and purpose make up the foundation on which all other design aspects will be based. These aspects should not be taken lightly, but rather they should be the force that aligns everyone to work toward a common outcome. It is incumbent on leaders to make them part of the DNA of the organization – to drive organization, structure, culture, and talent strategy.
    • Your vision statement is a future-focused statement that summarizes what you hope to achieve. It should be inspirational, ambitious, and concise.
    • Your guiding principles outline the guardrails for your innovation practice. What will your focus be? How will you approach innovation? What is off-limits?
    • Define the scope and focus for your innovation efforts. This includes what you can innovate on and what is off limits.

    Your vision statement is your North Star

    Articulate an ambitious, inspirational, and concise vision statement for your innovation efforts.

    A strong vision statement:

    • Is future-focused and outlines what you want to become and what you want to achieve.
    • Provides focus and direction.
    • Is ambitious, focused, and concise.
    • Answers: What problems are we solving? Who and what are we changing?

    Examples:

    • "We create radical new technologies to solve some of the world's hardest problems." – Google X, the Moonshot Factory
    • "To be the most innovative enterprise in the world." – 3M
    • "To use our imagination to bring happiness to millions of people." – Disney

    "Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion." – Jack Welch, Former Chairman and CEO of GE

    Your guiding principles are the guardrails for creativity

    Strong guiding principles give your team the freedom and direction to innovate.

    Strong guiding principles:

    • Focus on the approach, i.e. how things are done, as opposed to what needs to be done.
    • Are specific to the organization.
    • Inform and direct decision making with actionable statements. Avoid truisms, general statements, and observations.
    • Are long-lasting and based on values, not solutions.
    • Are succinct and easily digestible.
    • Can be measured and verified.
    • Answers: How do we approach innovation? What are our core values

    Craft your guiding principles using these examples

    Encourage experimentation and risk-taking
    Innovation often requires trying new things, even if they might fail. We encourage experimentation and learn from failure, so that new ideas can be tested and refined.

    Foster collaboration and cross-functional teams
    Innovation often comes from the intersection of different perspectives and skill sets.

    Customer-centric
    Focus on creating value for the end user. This means understanding their needs and pain points, and using that knowledge to develop new methods, products, or services.

    Embrace diversity and inclusivity
    Innovation comes from a variety of perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences. We actively seek out and encourage diversity and inclusivity among our team members.

    Foster a culture of learning and continuous improvement
    Innovation requires continuous learning, development, and growth. We facilitate a culture that encourages learning and development, and that seeks feedback and uses it to improve.

    Flexible and adaptable
    We adapt to changes in the market, customer needs, and new technologies, so that it can continue to innovate and create value over time.

    Data-driven
    We use performance metrics and data to guide our innovation efforts.

    Transparency
    We are open and transparent in our processes and let the business needs guide our innovation efforts. We do not lead innovation, we facilitate it.

    Activity 1.2 Craft your vision statement and guiding principles

    1-2 hours

    1. Gather your innovation team and key program sponsors. Review the guidelines for creating vision statements and guiding principles, as well as your mandate and focus for innovation.
    2. As a group, discuss what you hope to achieve through your innovation efforts.
    3. Separately, have each person write down their ideas for a vision statement. Bring the group back together and share ideas. Group the concepts together and construct a single statement which outlines your aspirational vision.
    4. As a group, review the example guiding principles.
    5. Separately, have each person write down three to five guiding principles. Bring the group back together and share ideas. Group similar concepts together and consolidate duplicate ideas. From this list, construct six to eight guiding principles.
    6. Document your vision and guiding principles in the appropriate sections of the Innovation Program Template.

    Input

    • Understanding of your innovation mandate
    • Business vision, mission, and values
    • Sample vision statements and guiding principles

    Output

    • Vision statement
    • Guiding principles

    Materials

    • In person: Whiteboard/flip charts, sticky notes, pens, and notepads
    • Virtual: Consider using a shared document, virtual whiteboard, or online facilitation tool like MURAL
    • Innovation Program Template

    Participants

    • CINO
    • Innovation sponsors
    • Business leaders
    • Innovation team

    1.3 Determine your value proposition and metrics

    Justify the existence of the innovation program with a strong value proposition.

    • The value proposition for developing an innovation program will be different for each organization, depending on what the organization hopes to achieve. Consider your mandate for innovation as well as the type of innovation you are pursuing when crafting the value proposition.
    • Some of the reasons organizations may pursue innovation:
      • Business growth: Respond to market disruption; create new customers; take advantage of opportunities.
      • Branding: Create market differentiation; increase customer satisfaction and retention; adapt to customer needs.
      • Profitability: Improve products, services, or operations to increase competitiveness and profitability; develop more efficient processes.
      • Culture: Foster a culture of creativity and experimentation within the organization, encouraging employees to think outside the box.
      • Positive impact: Address social challenges such as poverty and climate change.

    Develop a strong value proposition for your innovation program

    Demonstrate the value to the business.

    A strong value proposition not only articulates the value that the business will derive from the innovation program but also provides a clear focus, helps to communicate the innovation goals, and ultimately drives the success of the program.

    Focus
    Prioritize and focus innovation efforts to create solutions that provide real value to the organization

    Communicate
    Communicate the mandate and benefits of innovation in a clear and compelling way and inspire people to think differently

    Measure Success
    Measure the success of your program by evaluating outcomes based on the value proposition

    Track appropriate success metrics for your innovation program

    Your success metrics should link back to your organizational goals and your innovation program's value proposition.

    Revenue Growth: Increase in revenue generated by new products or services.

    Market Share: Percentage of total market that the business captures as a result of innovation.

    Customer Satisfaction: Reviews, customer surveys, or willingness to recommend the company.

    Employee Engagement: Engagement surveys, performance, employee retention, or turnover.

    Innovation Output: The number of new products, services, or processes that have been developed.

    Return on Investment: Financial return on the resources invested in the innovation process.

    Social Impact: Number of people positively impacted, net reduction in emissions, etc.

    Time to Launch: The time it takes for a new product or service to go from idea to launch.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The total impact of innovation is often intangible and extremely difficult to capture in performance metrics. Focus on developing a few key metrics rather than trying to capture the full value of innovation.

    How much does innovation cost?

    Company Industry Revenue(2)
    (USD billions)     		R&D Spend
    (USD billions)     		R&D Spend
    (% of revenue)
    Apple Technology $394.30 $26.25 6.70%
    Microsoft Technology $203.10 $25.54 12.50%
    Amazon.com Retail $502.20 $67.71 13.40%
    Alphabet Technology $282.10 $37.94 13.40%
    Tesla Manufacturing $74.90 $3.01 4.00%
    Samsung Technology $244.39 (2021)(3) $19.0 (2021) 7.90%
    Moderna Pharmaceuticals $23.39 $2.73 11.70%
    Huawei Technology $99.9 (2021)4 Not reported -
    Sony Technology $83.80 Not reported -
    IBM Technology $60.50 $1.61 2.70%
    Meta Software $118.10 $32.61 27.60%
    Nike Commercial goods $49.10 Not reported -
    Walmart Retail $600.10 Not reported -
    Dell Technology $105.30 $2.60 2.50%
    Nvidia Technology $28.60 $6.85 23.90%


    The top innovators(1) in the world spend 5% to 15% of their revenue on innovation.

    Innovation requires a dedicated investment of time, money, and resources in order to be successful. The most innovative companies, based on Boston Consulting Group's ranking of the 50 most innovative companies in the world, spend significant portions of their revenue on research and development.

    Note: This data uses research and development as a proxy for innovation spending, which may overestimate the total spend on what this research considers true innovation.

    (1) Based on Boston Consulting Group's ranking of the 50 most innovative companies in the world, 2022
    (2) Macrotrends, based on the 12 months ending Sept 30, 2022
    (3) Statista
    (4) CNBC, 2022

    Activity 1.3 Develop your value proposition and performance metrics

    1 hour

    1. Review your mandate and vision statement. Write down your innovation goals and desired outcomes from pursuing innovation, prioritize the desired outcomes, and select the top five.
    2. For each desired outcome, develop one to two metrics which could be used to track its success. Some outcomes are difficult to track, so get creative when it comes to developing metrics. If you get stuck, think about what would differentiate a great outcome from an unsuccessful one.
    3. Once you have developed a list of three to five key metrics, read over the list and ensure that the metrics you have developed don't negatively influence your innovation. For example, a metric of the number of successful launches may drive people toward launching before a product is ready.
    4. For each metric, develop a goal. For example, you may target 1% revenue growth over the next fiscal year or 20% energy use reduction.
    5. Document your value proposition and key performance metrics in the appropriate sections of the Innovation Program Template.

    Input

    • Understanding of your innovation mandate
    • Vision statement

    Output

    • Value proposition
    • Performance metrics

    Materials

    • Innovation Program Template

    Participants

    • CINO

    Phase 2: Align Your People

    Create a culture that fosters innovative behaviors and puts processes in place to support them.

    Purpose

    People

    Practice

    1. Understand your mandate
    2. Define your innovation ambitions
    3. Determine value proposition and metrics
    1. Foster a culture of innovation
    2. Define your operating model
    3. Build core innovation capabilities
    1. Build your ideation and prioritization methodologies
    2. Define your pilot project methodology
    3. Conduct a program retrospective

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Understand the key aspects of innovative cultures, and the behaviors associated with innovation.
    • Assess your culture and identify gaps.
    • Define your innovation operating model based on your organizational culture and the focus for innovation.
    • Build your core innovation capabilities, including an innovation core team (if required based on your operating model).

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CINO
    • Innovation team

    2.1 Foster a culture of innovation

    Culture is the most important driver of innovation – and the most challenging to get right.

    • Fostering a culture of innovation requires a broad approach which considers the perspectives of individuals, teams, leadership, and the overall organization.
    • If you do not have support from leadership, it is very difficult to change organizational culture. It may be more effective to start with an innovation pilot or lighthouse project in order to gain support before addressing your culture.
    • Rather than looking to change outcomes, focus on the behaviors which lead to innovation – such as growth mindset and willingness to fail. If these aren't in place, your ability to innovate will be limited.
    • This section focuses on the specific behaviors associated with increased innovation. For additional resources on implementing these changes, refer to Info-Tech's other research:

    Info-Tech's Fix Your IT Culture can help you promote innovative behaviors

    Refer to Improve IT Team Effectiveness to address team challenges

    Build a culture of innovation

    Focus on behaviors, not outcomes.

    The following behaviors and key indicators either stifle or foster innovation.

    Stifles Innovation Key Indicators Fosters Innovation Key Indicators
    Fixed mindset "It is what it is" Growth mindset "I wonder if there's a better way"
    Performance focused "It's working fine" Learning focused "What can we learn from this?"
    Fear of reprisal "I'll get in trouble" Psychological safety "I can disagree"
    Apathy "We've always done it this way" Curiosity "I wonder what would happen if…"
    Cynicism "It will never work" Trust "You have good judgement"
    Punishing failure "Who did this?" Willingness to fail "It's okay to make mistakes"
    Individualism "How does this benefit me?" Collaboration "How does this benefit us?"
    Homogeneity "We never disagree" Diversity and inclusion "We appreciate different views"
    Excessive bureaucracy "We need approval" Autonomy "I can do this"
    Risk avoidance "We can't try that" Appropriate risk-taking "How can we do this safely?"

    Ensure you are not inadvertently stifling innovation.
    Review the following to ensure that the desired behaviors are promoted:

    • Hiring practices
    • Performance evaluation metrics
    • Rewards and incentives
    • Corporate policies
    • Governance structures
    • Leadership behavior

    Case study

    INDUSTRY: Commercial Real Estate and Retail
    SOURCE: Interview

    How not to approach innovation.

    This anonymous national organization owned commercial properties across the country and had the goal of becoming the most innovative real estate and retail company in the market.

    The organization pursued innovation in the digital solutions space across its commercial and retail properties. Within this space, there were significant differences in risk tolerance across teams, which resulted in the more risk-tolerant teams excluding the risk-averse members from discussions in order to circumvent corporate policies on risk tolerance. This resulted in an adversarial and siloed culture where each group believed they knew better than the other, and the more risk-averse teams felt like they were policing the actions of the risk-tolerant group.

    Results

    Morale plummeted, and many of the organization's top people left. Unfortunately, one of the solutions did not meet regulatory requirements, and the company faced negative media coverage and legal action. There was significant reputational damage as a result.

    Lessons Learned

    Considering differences in risk tolerance and risk appetite is critical when pursuing innovation. While everyone doesn't have to agree, leadership needs to understand the different perspectives and ensure that no one party is dominating the conversation over the others. An understanding of corporate risk tolerance and risk appetite is necessary to drive innovation.

    All perspectives have a place in innovation. More risk tolerant perspectives should be involved early in the ideas-generation phase, and risk-averse perspectives should be considered later when ideas are being refined.

    Speed should not override safety or circumvent corporate policies.

    Understand your risk tolerance and risk appetite

    Evaluate and align the appetite for risk.

    • It is important to understand the organization's risk tolerance as well as the desire for risk. Consider the following risk categories when investigating the organization's views on risk:
      • Financial risk: the potential for financial or property loss.
      • Operational risk: the potential for disruptions to operations.
      • Reputational risk: the potential for negative impact to brand or reputation.
      • Compliance risk: the potential for loss due to non-compliance with laws and regulations.
    • Greater risk tolerance typically enables greater innovation. Understand the varying levels of risk tolerance across your organization, and how these differences might impact innovation efforts.

    An arrow showing the directions of risk tolerance.

    It is more important to match the level of risk tolerance to the degree of innovation required. Not all innovation needs to be (or can feasibly be) disruptive.
    Many factors impact risk tolerance including:

    • Regulation
    • Organization size
    • Country
    • Industry
    • Personal experience
    • Type of risk

    Use Info-Tech's Security Risk Management research to better understand risk tolerance

    Activity 2.1 Assess your innovation culture

    1-3 hours

    1. Review the behaviors which support and stifle innovation and give each behavior a score from 1 (stifling innovation) to 5 (fostering innovation). Any behaviors which fall below a 4 on this scale should be prioritized in your efforts to create an innovative culture.
    2. Review the following policies and practices to determine how they may be contributing to the behaviors you see in your organization:
      1. Hiring practices
      2. Performance evaluation metrics
      3. Rewards, recognition, and incentives
      4. Corporate policies
      5. Governance structures
      6. Leadership behavior
    3. Identify three concrete actions you can take to correct any behaviors which are stifling innovation. Examples might be revising a policy which punishes failure or changing performance incentives to reward appropriate risk taking.
    4. Summarize your findings in the appropriate section of the Innovation Program Template.

    Input

    • Innovation behaviors

    Output

    • Understanding of your organization's culture
    • Concrete actions you can take to promote innovation

    Materials

    • List of innovative behaviors
    • Relevant policies and documents to review
    • Innovation Program Template

    Participants

    • CINO

    2.2 Define your innovation model

    Set up your innovation practice for success using proven models and methodologies.

    • There are many ways to approach innovation, from highly distributed forms where it's just part of everyone's job to very centralized and arm's-length innovation hubs or even outsourced innovation via startups. You can combine different approaches to create your own approach.
    • You may or may not have a formal innovation team, but if you do, their role is to facilitate innovation – not lead it. Innovation is most effective when it is led by the business.
    • There are many tools and methodologies you can use to facilitate innovation. Choose the one (or combination) that best suits your needs.

    Select the right model

    There is no one right way to pursue innovation, but some methods are better than others for specific situations and goals. Consider your existing culture, your innovation goals, and your budget when selecting the right methodology for your innovation.

    Model Description Advantages Disadvantages Good when…
    Grassroots Innovation Innovation is the responsibility of everyone, and there is no centralized innovation team. Ideas are piloted and scaled by the person/team which produces it.
    • Can be used in any organization or team
    • Can support low or high degree of structure
    • Low funding requirement
    • Requires a strong innovation culture
    • Often does not produce results since people don't have time to focus on innovation
    • Innovation culture is strong
    • Funding is limited
    • Goal is internal, incremental innovation
    Community of Practice Innovation is led by a cross-divisional Community of Practice (CoP) which includes representation from across the business. Champions consult with their practice areas and bring ideas forward.
    • Bringing people together can help stimulate and share ideas
    • Low funding requirement
    • Able to support many types of innovation
    • Some people may feel left out if they can't be involved
    • May not produce results if people are too busy to dedicate time to innovate
    • Innovation culture is present
    • Funding is limited
    • Goal is incremental or disruptive innovation
    Innovation Enablement
    *Most often recommended*     		A dedicated innovation team with funding set aside to support pilots with a high degree of autonomy, with the role of facilitating business-led innovation.
    • Most flexible of all options
    • Supports business-led innovation
    • Can deliver results quickly
    • Can enable a higher degree of innovation
    • Requires dedicated staff and funding
    • Innovation culture is present
    • Funding is available
    • Goal is internal or external, incremental or radical innovation
    Center of Excellence Dedicated team responsible for leading innovation on behalf of the organization. Generally, has business relationship managers who gather ideas and liaise with the business.
    • Can deliver results quickly
    • Can offer a fresh perspective
    • Can enable a higher degree of innovation
    • Requires dedicated staff and funding
    • Is typically separate from the business
    • Results may not align with the business needs or have adequate input
    • Innovation culture is weak
    • Funding is significant
    • Goal is external, disruptive innovation
    Innovation Hub An arm's length innovation team is responsible for all or much of the innovation and may not interact much with the core business.
    • Can deliver results quickly
    • Can be extremely innovative
    • Expensive
    • Results may not align with the business needs or have adequate/any input
    • Innovation culture is weak
    • Funding is very significant
    • Goal is external, radical innovation
    Outsourced Innovation Innovation is outsourced to an external organization which is not linked to the primary organization. This can take the form of working with or investing in startups.
    • Can lead to more innovative ideas than internal innovation
    • Investments can become a diverse revenue stream if startups are successful
    • Innovation does not rely on culture
    • Higher risk of failure
    • Less control over goals or focus
    • Results may not align with the business needs or have any input from users
    • Innovation does not rely on culture
    • Funding is significant
    • Goal is external or internal, radical innovation

    Use the right methodologies to support different stages of your innovation process

    A chart showing methodologies to support different stages of the integration process.

    Adapted from Niklaus Gerber via Medium, 2022

    Methodologies are most useful when they are aligned with the goals of the innovation organization.

    For example, design thinking tends to be excellent for earlier innovation planning, while Agile can allow for faster implementation and launch of initiatives later in the process.

    Consider combining two or more methodologies to create a custom approach that best suits your organization's capabilities and goals.

    Sample methodologies

    A robust innovation methodology ensures that the process for developing, prioritizing, selecting, implementing, and measuring initiatives is aligned with the results you are hoping to achieve.

    Different types of problems (drivers for innovation) may necessitate different methodologies, or a combination of methodologies.

    Hackathon: An event which brings people together to solve a well-defined problem.

    Design Thinking: Creative approach that focuses on understanding the needs of users.

    Lean Startup: Emphasizes rapid experimentation in order to validate business hypotheses.

    Design Sprint: Five-day process for answering business questions via design, prototyping, and testing.

    Agile: Iterative design process that emphasizes project management and retrospectives.

    Three Horizons: Framework that looks at opportunities on three different time horizons.

    Innovation Ambition Matrix: Helps organizations categorize projects as part of the core offering, an adjacent offering, or completely new.

    Global Innovation Management: A process of identifying, developing and implementing new ideas, products, services, or processes using alternative thinking.

    Blue Ocean Strategy: A methodology that helps organizations identify untapped market space and create new markets via unique value propositions.

    Activity 2.2 Design your innovation model

    1-2 hours

    1. Think about the following factors which influence the design of your innovation practice:
      1. Existing organizational culture
      2. Available funding to support innovation
      3. Type of innovation you are targeting
    2. Review the innovation approaches, and identify which approach is most suitable for your situation. Note why this approach was selected.
    3. Review the innovation methodologies and research those of interest. Select two to five methodologies to use for your innovation practice.
    4. Document your decisions in the Innovation Program Template.

    Input

    • Understanding of your mandate and existing culture

    Output

    • Innovation approach
    • Selected methodologies

    Materials

    • Innovation Program Template

    Participants

    • CINO
    • Innovation team

    2.3 Build your core innovation capabilities

    Develop the skills, knowledge, and experience to facilitate successful innovation.

    • Depending on the approach you selected in step 2.2, you may or may not require a dedicated innovation team. If you do, use the job descriptions and sample organization charts to build it. If not, focus on developing key capabilities which are needed to facilitate innovation.
    • Diversity is key for successful innovation – ensure your team (formal or otherwise) includes diverse perspectives and backgrounds.
    • Use your guiding principles when hiring and training your team.
    • Focus on three core roles: evangelists, enablers, and experts.

    Focus on three key roles when building your innovation team

    Types of roles will depend on the purpose and size of the innovation team.

    You don't need to grow them all internally. Consider partnering with vendors and other organizations to build capabilities.

    Evangelists

    Visionaries who inspire, support, and facilitate innovation across the business. Their responsibilities are to drive the culture of innovation.

    Key skills and knowledge:

    • Strong communication skills
    • Relationship-building
    • Consensus-building
    • Collaboration
    • Growth mindset

    Sample titles:

    • CINO
    • Chief Transformation Officer
    • Chief Digital Officer
    • Innovation Lead
    • Business Relationship Manager

    Enablers

    Translate ideas into tangible business initiatives, including assisting with business cases and developing performance metrics.

    Key skills and knowledge:

    • Critical thinking skills
    • Business knowledge
    • Facilitation skills
    • Consensus-building
    • Relationship-building

    Sample titles:

    • Product Owner
    • Design Thinking Lead
    • Data Scientist
    • Business Analyst
    • Human Factors Engineer
    • Digital Marketing Specialist

    Experts

    Provide expertise in product design, delivery and management, and responsible for supporting and executing on pilot projects.

    Key skills and knowledge:

    • Project management skills
    • Technical expertise
    • Familiarity with emerging technologies
    • Analytical skills
    • Problem-solving skills

    Sample titles:

    • Product Manager
    • Scrum Master/Agile Coach
    • Product Engineer/DevOps
    • Product Designer
    • Emerging tech experts

    Sample innovation team structure (large enterprise)

    Visualize the whole value delivery process end-to-end to help identify the types of roles, resources, and capabilities required. These capabilities can be sourced internally (i.e. grow and hire internally) or through collaboration with centers of excellence, commercial partners, etc.

    A flow chart of a sample innovation team structure.

    Streamline your process by downloading Info-Tech's job description templates:

    Activity 2.3 Build your innovation team

    2-3 hours

    1. Review your work from the previous activities as well as the organizational structure and the job description templates.
    2. Start a list with two columns: currently have and needed. Start listing some of the key roles and capabilities from earlier in this step, categorizing them appropriately.
    3. If you are using an organizational structure for your innovation process, start to frame out the structure and roles for your team.
    4. Develop a list of roles you need to hire, and the key capabilities you need from candidates. Using the job descriptions, write job postings for each role.
    5. Record your work in the appropriate section of the Innovation Program Template.

    Input

    • Previous work
    • Info-Tech job description templates

    Output

    • List of capabilities required
    • Org chart
    • Job postings for required roles

    Materials

    • Note-taking capability
    • Innovation Program Template

    Participants

    • CINO

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Fix Your IT Culture

    • Promote psychological safety and growth mindset within your organization.
    • Develop the organizational behaviors that lead to innovation.

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    • Address behaviors, processes, and cultural factors which impact team effectiveness.
    • Grow the team's ability to address challenges and navigate volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments.

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    • Transformation and change are increasingly becoming the new normal. While this normality may help make people more open to change in general, specific changes still need to be planned, communicated, and managed. Agility and continuous improvement are good but can degenerate into volatility if change isn't managed properly.

    Phase 3: Build Your Practice

    Define your innovation process, streamline pilot projects, and scale for success.

    Purpose

    People

    Practice

    1. Understand your mandate
    2. Define your innovation ambitions
    3. Determine value proposition and metrics
    1. Foster a culture of innovation
    2. Define your operating model
    3. Build core innovation capabilities
    1. Build your ideation and prioritization methodologies
    2. Define your pilot project methodology
    3. Conduct a program retrospective

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Build the methodologies needed to elicit ideas from the business.
    • Develop criteria to evaluate and prioritize ideas for piloting.
    • Define your pilot program methodologies and processes, including criteria to assess and compare the success of pilot projects.
    • Conduct an end-of-year program retrospective to evaluate the success of your innovation program.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CINO
    • Innovation team

    Case study

    INDUSTRY: Government
    SOURCE: Interview

    Confidential US government agency

    The business applications group at this government agency strongly believes that innovation is key to progress and has instituted a formal innovation program as part of their agile operations. The group uses a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) with 2-week sprints and a 12-week program cycle.

    To support innovation across the business unit, the last sprint of each cycle is dedicated toward innovation and teams do not commit to any other during these two weeks. At the end of each innovation sprint, ideas are presented to leadership and the valuable ones were either implemented initially or were given time in the next cycle of sprints for further development. This has resulted in a more innovative culture across the practice.

    Results

    There have been several successful innovations since this process began. Notably, the agency had previously purchased a robotic process automation platform which was only being used for a few specific applications. One team used their innovation sprint to expand the use cases for this solution and save nearly 10,000 hours of effort.

    Standard 12-week Program Cycle
    An image of a standard 12-week program

    Design your innovation operating model to maximize value and learning opportunities

    Pilots are an iterative process which brings together innovators and business teams to test and evaluate ideas.

    Your operating model should include several steps including ideation, validation, evaluation and prioritization, piloting, and a retrospective which follows the pilot. Use the example on this slide when designing your own innovation operating model.

    An image of the design process for innovation operation model.

    3.1 Build your ideation and prioritization methodologies

    Engage the business to generate ideas, then prioritize based on value to the business.

    • There are many ways of generating ideas, from informal discussion to formal ideation sessions or submission forms. Whatever you decide to use, make sure that you're getting the right information to evaluate ideas for prioritization.
    • Use quantitative and qualitative metrics to evaluate ideas generated during the ideation process.
      • Quantitative metrics might include potential return on investment (ROI) or effort and resources required to implement.
      • Qualitative metrics might include alignment with the organizational strategy or the level of risk associated with the idea.

    Engage the business to generate ideas

    There are many ways of generating innovative ideas. Pick the methods that best suit your organization and goals.

    Design Thinking
    A structured approach that encourages participants to think creatively about the needs of the end user.

    An image including the following words: Empathize, Define; Ideate; Test.

    Ideation Workshop
    A formal session that is used to understand a problem then generate potential solutions. Workshops can incorporate the other methodologies (such as brainstorming, design thinking, or mind mapping) to generate ideas.

    • Define the problem
    • Generate ideas
    • Capture ideas
    • Evaluate and prioritize
    • Assign next steps

    Crowdsourcing
    An informal method of gathering ideas from a large group of people. This can be a great way to generate many ideas but may lack focus.

    Value Proposition Canvas
    A visual tool which helps to identify customer (or user) needs and design products and services that meet those needs.

    an image of the Value Proposition Canvas

    Evaluate ideas and focus on those with the greatest value

    Evaluation should be transparent and use both quantitative and qualitative metrics. The exact metrics used will depend on your organization and goals.

    It is important to include qualitative metrics as these dimensions are better suited to evaluating highly innovative ideas and can capture important criteria like alignment with overall strategy and feasibility.

    Develop 5 to 10 criteria that you can use to evaluate and prioritize ideas. Some criteria may be a pass/fail (for example, minimum ROI) and some may be comparative.

    Evaluate
    The first step is to evaluate ideas to determine if they meet the minimum criteria. This might include quantitative criteria like ROI as well as qualitative criteria like strategic alignment and feasibility.

    Prioritize
    Ideas that pass the initial evaluation should be prioritized based on additional criteria which might include quantitative criteria such as potential market size and cost to implement, and qualitative criteria such as risk, impact, and creativity.

    Quantitative Metrics

    Quantitative metrics are objective and easily comparable between initiatives, providing a transparent and data-driven process for evaluation and prioritization.
    Examples:

    • Potential market size
    • ROI
    • Net present value
    • Payback period
    • Number of users impacted
    • Customer acquisition cost
    • Customer lifetime value
    • Breakeven analysis
    • Effort required to implement
    • Cost to implement

    Qualitative Metrics

    Qualitative metrics are less easily comparable but are equally important when it comes to evaluating ideas. These should be developed based on your organization strategy and innovation goals.
    Examples:

    • Strategy alignment
    • Impact on users
    • Uncertainty and risk
    • Innovation potential
    • Culture impact
    • Feasibility
    • Creativity and originality
    • Type of innovation

    Activity 3.1 Develop prioritization metrics

    1-3 hours

    1. Review your mandate, purpose, innovation goals and the sample prioritization and evaluation metrics.
    2. Write down a list of your goals and their associated metrics, then prioritize which are the most important.
    3. Determine which metrics will be used to evaluate ideas before they move on to the prioritization stage, and which metrics will be used to compare initiatives in order to determine which will receive further investment.
    4. For each evaluation metric, determine the minimum threshold required for an idea to move forward. For each prioritization metric identify the definition and how it will be evaluated. Qualitative metrics may require more precise definitions than quantitative metrics.
    5. Enter your metrics into the Initiative Prioritization Template.

    Input

    • Innovation mandate
    • Innovation goals
    • Sample metrics

    Output

    • Evaluation and prioritization metrics for ideas

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/Flip charts
    • Innovation Program Template

    Participants

    • Innovation leader

    Download the Initiative Prioritization Template

    3.2 Build your program to pilot initiatives

    Test and refine ideas through real-world pilot projects.

    • The purpose of your pilot is to test and refine ideas in the real world. In order to compare pilot projects, it's important to track key performance indicators throughout the pilot. Measurements should be useful and comparable.
    • Innovation facilitators are responsible for supporting pilot projects, including designing the pilot, setting up metrics, tracking outcomes, and facilitating retrospectives.
    • Pilots generally follow an Agile methodology where ideas may be refined as the pilot proceeds, and the process iterates until either the idea is discarded or it has been refined into an initiative which can be scaled.
    • Expect that most pilots will fail the first time, and many will fail completely. This is not a loss; lessons learned from the retrospective can be used to improve the process and later pilots.

    Use pilot projects to test and refine initiatives before scaling to the rest of the organization

    "Learning is as powerful as the outcome." – Brett Trelfa, CIO, Arkansas Blue Cross

    1. Clearly define the goals and objectives of the pilot project. Goals and objectives ensure that the pilot stays on track and can be measured.
    2. Your pilot group should include a variety of participants with diverse perspectives and skill sets, in order to gather unique insights.
    3. Continuously track the progress of the pilot project. Regularly identify areas of improvement and implement changes as necessary to refine ideas.
    4. Regularly elicit feedback from participants and iterate in order to improve the final innovation. Not all pilots will be successful, but every failure can help refine future solutions.
    5. Consider scalability. If the pilot project is successful, it should be scalable and the lessons learned should be implemented in the larger organization.

    Sample pilot metrics

    Metrics are used to validate and test pilot projects to ensure they deliver value. This is an important step before scaling to the rest of the organization.

    Adoption: How many end users have adopted the pilot solution?

    Utilization: Is the solution getting utilized?

    Support Requests: How many support requests have there been since the pilot was initiated?

    Value: Is the pilot delivering on the value that it proposed? For example, time savings.

    Feasibility: Has the feasibility of the solution changed since it was first proposed?

    Satisfaction: Focus groups or surveys can provide feedback on user/customer satisfaction.

    A/B Testing: Compare different methods, products or services.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Ensure standard core metrics are used across all pilot projects so that outcomes can be compared. Additional metrics may be used to refine and test hypotheses through the pilot process.

    Activity 3.2 Build your program to pilot initiatives

    1-2 hours

    1. Gather the innovation team and review your mandate, purpose, goals, and the sample innovation operating model and metrics.
    2. As a group, brainstorm the steps needed from idea generation to business case. Use sticky notes if in person, or a collaboration tool if remote.
    3. Determine the metrics that will be used to evaluate ideas at each decision step (for example, prior to piloting). Outline what the different decisions might be (for example, proceed, refine or discard) and what happens as a result of each decision.
    4. Document your final steps and metrics in the Innovation Program Template.

    Input

    • Innovation mandate
    • Innovation goals
    • Sample metrics

    Output

    • Pilot project methodology
    • Pilot project metrics

    Materials

    • Innovation Program Template
    • Sticky notes (in person) or digital collaboration tool (if remote)

    Participants

    • Innovation leader
    • Innovation team

    3.3 Conduct a program retrospective

    Generate value from your successful pilots by scaling ideas across the organization.

    • The final step in the innovation process is to scale ideas to the enterprise in order to realize the full potential.
    • Keeping track of notable wins is important for showing the value of the innovation program. Track performance of initiatives that come out of the innovation program, including their financial, cultural, market, and brand impacts.
    • Track the success of the innovation program itself by evaluating the number of ideas generated, the number of pilots run and the success of the pilots. Keep in mind that many failed pilots is not a failure of the program if the lessons learned were valuable.
    • Complete an innovation program retrospective every 6 to 12 months in order to adjust and make any changes if necessary to improve your process.

    Retrospectives should be objective, constructive, and action-oriented

    A retrospective is a review of your innovation program with the aim of identifying lessons learned, areas for improvement, and opportunities for growth.

    During a retrospective, the team will reflect on past experiences and use that information to inform future decision making and improve outcomes.

    The goal of a retrospective is to learn from the past and use that knowledge to improve in the future.

    Objective

    Ensure that the retrospective is based on facts and objective data, rather than personal opinions or biases.

    Constructive

    Ensure that the retrospective is a positive and constructive experience, with a focus on finding solutions rather than dwelling on problems.

    Action-Oriented

    The retrospective should result in a clear action plan with specific steps to improve future initiatives.

    Activity 3.3 Conduct a program retrospective

    1-2 hours

    1. Post a large piece of paper on the wall with a timeline from the last year. Include dates and a few key events, but not much more. Have participants place sticky notes in the spots to describe notable wins or milestones that they were proud of. This can be done as part of a formal meeting or asynchronously outside of meetings.
    2. Bring the innovation team together and review the poster with notable wins. Do any themes emerge? How does the team feel the program is doing? Are there any changes needed?
    3. Consider the metrics you use to track your innovation program success. Did the scaled projects meet their targets? Is there anything that could be refined about the innovation process?
    4. Evaluate the outcomes of your innovation program. Did it meet the targets set for it? Did the goals and innovation ambitions come to fruition?
    5. Complete this step every 6 to 12 months to assess the success of your program.
    6. Complete the "Notable Wins" section of the Innovation Program Template.

    Input

    • Innovation mandate
    • Innovation goals
    • Sample metrics

    Output

    • Notable wins
    • Action items for refining the innovation process

    Materials

    • Innovation Program Template
    • Sticky notes (in person) or digital collaboration tool (if remote)

    Participants

    • CIO
    • Innovation team
    • Others who have participated in the innovation process

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    Summary of Accomplishment

    Congratulations on launching your innovation program!

    You have now completed your innovation strategy, covering the following topics:

    • Executive Summary
    • Our Purpose
    • Scope and Value Proposition
    • Guiding Principles
    • Building an Innovative Culture
    • Program Structure
    • Success Metrics
    • Notable Wins

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

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    Jack Hakimian

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    Mike holds a Bachelor's degree in Architecture from Ryerson University.

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    Mike Schembri
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    Managing Partner
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    Isabelle Hertanto
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    Hans Eckman

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    Clayton Gillett

    Clayton Gillett
    Managing Partner
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    Kristen Wilson-Jones

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    Application Development Throughput

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}27|cart{/j2store}
    • Related Products: {j2store}27|crosssells{/j2store}
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    • Parent Category Name: Applications
    • Parent Category Link: /applications
    • byline: Create a holistically optimized software development lifecycle to deliver increased business value.

    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)

     

    Streamline Your Workforce During a Pandemic

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    • Parent Category Name: Lead
    • Parent Category Link: /lead

    Reduced infection rates in compromised areas are providing hope that these difficult times will pass. However, organizations are facing harsh realities in real time. With significant reductions in revenue, employers are facing pressure to quickly implement cost-cutting strategies, resulting in mass layoffs of valuable employees.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Employees are an organization’s greatest asset. When faced with cost-cutting pressures, look for redeployment opportunities that use talent as a resource to get through hard times before resorting to difficult layoff decisions.

    Impact and Result

    Make the most of your workforce in this unprecedented situation by following McLean & Company’s process to initiate redeployment efforts and reduce costs. If all else fails, follow our guidance on planning for layoffs and considerations when doing so.

    Streamline Your Workforce During a Pandemic Research & Tools

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

    1. Meet with leadership

    Set a strategy with senior leadership, brainstorm underused and understaffed employee segments and departments, then determine an approach to redeployments and layoffs.

    • Streamline Your Workforce During a Pandemic Storyboard
    • Redeployment and Layoff Strategy Workbook

    2. Plan individual and department redeployment

    Collect key information, prepare and redeploy, and roll up information across the organization.

    • Short-Term Survival Segment Evaluation Tool
    • Skills Inventory for Redeployment Tool
    • Redeployment Action and Communication Plan
    • Crisis Communication Guide for HR
    • Crisis Communication Guide for Leaders
    • Leadership Crisis Communication Guide Template
    • 3i's of Engaging Management – Manager Guide
    • Feedback and Coaching Guide for Managers
    • Redeployment Communication Roll-up Template

    3. Plan individual and department layoffs

    Plan for layoffs, execute on the layoff plan, and communicate to employees.

    • Employee Departure Checklist Tool
    • 10 Communication Best Practices in the Face of Crisis
    • Termination Logistics Tool
    • Termination Costing Tool
    • COVID-19: Employee-Facing Frequently Asked Questions Template
    • COVID-19: Employee-Facing Frequently Asked Questions
    • Standard Internal Communications Plan

    4. Monitor and manage departmental effectiveness

    Monitor departmental performance, review organizational performance, and determine next steps.

    • HR Metrics Library
    • Standard HR Scorecard
    [infographic]

    Develop Meaningful Service Metrics

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    • Parent Category Name: Service Management
    • Parent Category Link: /service-management
    • IT organizations measure services from a technology perspective but rarely from a business goal or outcome perspective.
    • Most organizations do a poor job of identifying and measuring service outcomes over the duration of a service’s lifecycle – never ensuring the services remain valuable and meet expected long-term ROI.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Service metrics are critical to ensuring alignment of IT service performance and business service value achievement.
    • Service metrics reinforce positive business and end-user relationships by providing user-centric information that drives responsiveness and consistent service improvement.
    • Poorly designed metrics drive unintended and unproductive behaviors that have negative impacts on IT and produce negative service outcomes.

    Impact and Result

    Effective service metrics will provide the following service gains:

    • Confirm service performance and identify gaps.
    • Drive service improvement to maximize service value.
    • Validate performance improvements while quantifying and demonstrating business value.
    • Ensure service reporting aligns with end-user experience.
    • Achieve and confirm process and regulatory compliance.

    Which will translate into the following relationship gains:

    • Embed IT into business value achievement.
    • Improve the relationship between the business and IT.
    • Achieve higher customer satisfaction (happier end users receiving expected service, the business is able to identify how things are really performing).
    • Reinforce desirable actions and behaviors from both IT and the business.

    Develop Meaningful Service Metrics Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should develop meaningful service metrics, 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:

    • Develop Meaningful Service Metrics – Executive Brief
    • Develop Meaningful Service Metrics – Phases 1-3

    1. Design the metrics

    Identify the appropriate service metrics based on stakeholder needs.

    • Develop Meaningful Service Metrics to Ensure Business and User Satisfaction – Phase 1: Design the Metrics
    • Metrics Development Workbook

    2. Design reports and dashboards

    Present the right metrics in the most interesting and stakeholder-centric way possible.

    • Develop Meaningful Service Metrics to Ensure Business and User Satisfaction – Phase 2: Design Reports and Dashboards
    • Metrics Presentation Format Selection Guide

    3. Implement, track, and maintain

    Run a pilot with a smaller sample of defined service metrics, then continuously validate your approach and make refinements to the processes.

    • Develop Meaningful Service Metrics to Ensure Business and User Satisfaction – Phase 3: Implement, Track, and Maintain
    • Metrics Tracking Tool
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Develop Meaningful Service Metrics

    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 Design the Metrics

    The Purpose

    Define stakeholder needs for IT based on their success criteria and identify IT services that are tied to the delivery of business outcomes.

    Derive meaningful service metrics based on identified IT services and validate that metrics can be collected and measured.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Design meaningful service metrics from stakeholder needs.

    Validate that metrics can be collected and measured.

    Activities

    1.1 Determine stakeholder needs, goals, and pain points.

    1.2 Determine the success criteria and related IT services.

    1.3 Derive the service metrics.

    1.4 Validate the data collection process.

    1.5 Validate metrics with stakeholders.

    Outputs

    Understand stakeholder priorities

    Adopt a business-centric perspective to align IT and business views

    Derive meaningful business metrics that are relevant to the stakeholders

    Determine if and how the identified metrics can be collected and measured

    Establish a feedback mechanism to have business stakeholders validate the meaningfulness of the metrics

    2 Design Reports and Dashboards

    The Purpose

    Determine the most appropriate presentation format based on stakeholder needs.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Ensure the metrics are presented in the most interesting and stakeholder-centric way possible to guarantee that they are read and used.

    Activities

    2.1 Understand the different presentation options.

    2.2 Assess stakeholder needs for information.

    2.3 Select and design the metric report.

    Outputs

    Learn about infographic, scorecard, formal report, and dashboard presentation options

    Determine how stakeholders would like to view information and how the metrics can be presented to aid decision making

    Select the most appropriate presentation format and create a rough draft of how the report should look

    3 Implement, Track, and Maintain Your Metrics

    The Purpose

    Run a pilot with a smaller sample of defined service metrics to validate your approach.

    Make refinements to the implementation and maintenance processes prior to activating all service metrics.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    High user acceptance and usability of the metrics.

    Processes of identifying and presenting metrics are continuously validated and improved.

    Activities

    3.1 Select the pilot metrics.

    3.2 Gather data and set initial targets.

    3.3 Generate the reports and validate with stakeholders.

    3.4 Implement the service metrics program.

    3.5 Track and maintain the metrics program.

    Outputs

    Select the metrics that should be first implemented based on urgency and impact

    Complete the service intake form for a specific initiative

    Create a process to gather data, measure baselines, and set initial targets

    Establish a process to receive feedback from the business stakeholders once the report is generated

    Identify the approach to implement the metrics program across the organization

    Set up mechanism to ensure the success of the metrics program by assessing process adherence and process validity

    Further reading

    Develop Meaningful Service Metrics

    Select IT service metrics that drive business value.

    ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

    Are you measuring and reporting what the business needs to know?

    “Service metrics are one of the key tools at IT’s disposal in articulating and ensuring its value to the business, yet metrics are rarely designed and used for that purpose.

    Creating IT service metrics directly from business and stakeholder outcomes and goals, written from the business perspective and using business language, is critical to ensuring that the services that IT provides are meeting business needs.

    The ability to measure, manage, and improve IT service performance in relation to critical business success factors, with properly designed metrics, embeds IT in the value chain of the business and ensures IT’s focus on where and how it enables business outcomes.”

    Valence Howden,
    Senior Manager, CIO Advisory
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Our understanding of the problem

    This Research Is Designed For:
    • CIO
    • IT VPs
    		 This Research Will Help You:
    • Align business/IT objectives (design top-down or outside-in)
    • Significantly improve the relationship between the business and IT aspects of the organization
    • Reinforce desirable actions and behaviors
    This Research Will Also Assist:
    • Service Level Managers
    • Service Owners
    • Program Owners
    		 This Research Will Help Them
    • Identify unusual deviations from the normal operating state
    • Drive service improvement to maximize service value
    • Validate the value of performance improvements while quantifying and demonstrating benefits realization

    Executive summary

    Situation

    • IT organizations measure services from a technology perspective yet rarely measure services from a business goal/outcome perspective.
    • Most organizations do a poor job of identifying and measuring service outcomes over the duration of a service’s lifecycle – never ensuring the services remain valuable and meet expected long-term ROI.

    Complication

    • IT organizations have difficulty identifying the right metrics to demonstrate the value of IT services to the business in tangible terms.
    • IT metrics, as currently designed, reinforce division between the IT and business perspectives of service performance. They drive siloed thinking and finger-pointing within the IT structure, and prevent IT resources from understanding how their work impacts business value.

    Resolution

    • Our program enables IT to develop the right service metrics to tie IT service performance to business value and user experience.
    • Ensure the metrics you implement have immediate stakeholder value, reinforcing alignment between IT and the business while influencing behavior in the desired direction.
    • Make sure that your metrics are defined in relation to the business goals and drivers, ensuring they will provide actionable outcomes.

    Info-Tech Insight

    1. Service metrics are critical to ensuring alignment of IT service performance and business service value achievement.
    2. Service metrics reinforce positive business and end-user relationships by providing user-centric information that drives responsiveness and consistent service improvement.
    3. Poorly designed metrics drive unintended and unproductive behaviors, which have negative impacts on IT and produce negative service outcomes.

    Service metrics 101

    What are service metrics?

    Service metrics measure IT services in a way that relates to a business outcome. IT needs to measure performance from the business perspective using business language.

    		Why do we need service metrics?

    To ensure the business cares about the metrics that IT produces, start with business needs to make sure you’re measuring the right things. This will give IT the opportunity talk to the right stakeholders and develop metrics that will meet their business needs.

    Service metrics are designed with the business perspective in mind, so they are fully aligned with business objectives.

    Perspectives Matter

    Different stakeholders will require different types of metrics. A CEO may require metrics that provide a snapshot of the critical success of the company while a business manager is more concerned about the performance metrics of their department.

    		What are the benefits of implementing service metrics?

    Service metrics help IT communicate with the business in business terms and enables IT to articulate how and where they provide business value. Business stakeholders can also easily understand how IT services contribute to their success.

    The majority of CIOs feel metrics relating to business value and stakeholder satisfaction require significant improvement

    A significantly higher proportion of CIOs than CEOs feel that there is significant improvement necessary for business value metrics and stakeholder satisfaction reporting. Stacked horizontal bar chart presenting survey results from CIOs and CXOs of 'Business Value Metrics'. Answer options are 'Effective', 'Some Improvement Necessary', 'Significant Improvement Necessary', and 'Not Required'.N=364

    Stacked horizontal bar chart presenting survey results from CIOs and CXOs of 'Stakeholder Satisfaction Reporting'. Answer options are 'Effective', 'Some Improvement Necessary', 'Significant Improvement Necessary', and 'Not Required'.N=364

    (Source: Info-Tech CIO-CXO Alignment Diagnostic Survey)

    Meaningless metrics are a headache for the business

    A major pitfall of many IT organizations is that they often provide pages of technical metrics that are meaningless to their business stakeholders.

    1. Too Many MetricsToo many metrics are provided and business leaders don’t know what to do with these metrics.
    2. Metrics Are Too TechnicalIT provides technical metrics that are hard to relate to business needs, and methods of calculating metrics are not clearly understood, articulated, and agreed on.
    3. Metrics Have No Business ValueService metrics are not mapped to business goals/objectives and they drive incorrect actions or spend.
    		 When considering only CEOs who said that stakeholder satisfaction reporting needed significant improvement, the average satisfaction score goes down to 61.6%, which is a drop in satisfaction of 12%.

    A bar that says 73% dropping to a bar that says 61%. Description above.

    (Source: Info-Tech Research Group CIO-CXO Alignment Diagnostic Survey)

    Poorly designed metrics hurt IT’s image within the organization

    By providing metrics that do not articulate the value of IT services, IT reinforces its role as a utility provider and an outsider to strategic decisions.

    When the CIOs believe business value metrics weren’t required, 50% of their CEOs said that significant improvements were necessary.

    Pie Chart presenting the survey results from CEOs regarding 'Business Value Metrics'. Description above.

    (Source: Info-Tech Research Group CIO-CXO Alignment Diagnostic Survey)
    1. Reinforce the wrong behaviorThe wrong metrics drive us-against-them, siloed thinking within IT, and meeting metric targets is prioritized over providing meaningful outcomes.
    2. Do not reflect user experienceMetrics don’t align with actual business/user experience, reinforcing a poor view of IT services.
    3. Effort ≠ ValueInvesting dedicated resources and effort to the achievement of the wrong metrics will only leave IT more constrained for other important initiatives.

    Articulate meaningful service performance that supports the achievement of business outcomes

    Service metrics measure the performance of IT services and how they enable or drive the activity outcomes.

    A business process consists of multiple business activities. In many cases, these business activities require one or more supporting IT services.

    A 'Business Process' broken down to its parts, multiple 'Business Activities' and their 'IT Services'. For each business process, business stakeholders and their goals and objectives should be identified.

    For each business activity that supports the completion of a business process, define the success criteria that must be met in order to produce the desirable outcome.

    Identify the IT services that are used by business stakeholders for each business activity. Measure the performance of these services from a business perspective to arrive at the appropriate service metrics.

    Differentiate between different types of metrics

    Stakeholders have different goals and objectives; therefore, it is critical to identify what type of metrics should be presented to each stakeholder.

    Business Metrics

    Determine Business Success

    Business metrics are derived from a pure business perspective. These are the metrics that the business stakeholders will measure themselves on, and business success is determined using these metrics.

    Arrow pointing right.

    		Service Metrics

    Manage Service Value to the Business

    Service metrics are used to measure IT service performance against business outcomes. These metrics, while relating to IT services, are presented in business terms and are tied to business goals.

    Arrow pointing right.

    		IT Metrics

    Enable Operational Excellence

    IT metrics are internal to the IT organization and used to manage IT service delivery. These metrics are technical, IT-specific, and drive action for IT. They are not presented to the business, and are not written in business language.

    Implementing service metrics is a key step in becoming a service provider and business partner

    As a prerequisite, IT organizations must have already established a solid relationship with the business and have a clear understanding of its critical business-facing services.

    At the very least, IT needs to have a service-oriented view and understand the specific needs and objectives associated with each stakeholder.

    Visualization of 'Business Relationship Management' with an early point on the line representing 'Service Provider: Establish service-oriented culture and business-centric service delivery', and the end of the line being 'Strategic Partner'.

    Once IT can present service metrics that the business cares about, it can continue on the service provider journey by managing the performance of services based on business needs, determine and influence service demand, and assess service value to maximize benefits to the business.

    Which processes drive service metrics?

    Both business relationship management (BRM) and service level management (SLM) provide inputs into and receive outputs from service metrics.

    Venn Diagram of 'Business Relationship Management', 'Service Metrics', and 'Service Level Management'.

    Business Relationship Management

    BRM works to understand the goals and objectives of the business and inputs them into the design of the service metrics.

    Service Metrics

    BRM leverages service metrics to help IT organizations manage the relationship with the business.

    BRM articulates and manages expectations and ensures IT services are meeting business requirements.

    Which processes drive service metrics?

    Both BRM and SLM provide inputs into and receive outputs from service metrics.

    Venn Diagram of 'Business Relationship Management', 'Service Metrics', and 'Service Level Management'.

    Service Level Management

    SLM works with the business to understand service requirements, which are key inputs in designing the service metrics.

    Service Metrics

    SLM leverages service metrics in overseeing the day-to-day delivery of IT services. It ensures they are provided to meet expected service level targets and objectives.

    Effective service metrics will deliver both service gains and relationship gains

    Effective service metrics will provide the following service gains:

    • Confirm service performance and identify gaps
    • Drive service improvement to maximize service value
    • Validate performance improvements while quantifying and demonstrating business value
    • Ensure service reporting aligns with end-user experience
    • Achieve and confirm process and regulatory compliance
        Which will translate into the following relationship gains:
        • Embed IT into business value achievement
        • Improve relationship between the business and IT
        • Achieve higher customer satisfaction (happier end users receiving expected service, the business is able to identify how things are really performing)
        • Reinforce desirable actions and behaviors from both IT and the business

    Don’t let conventional wisdom become your roadblock

    Conventional Wisdom

    Info-Tech Perspective
    Metrics are measured from an application or technology perspective Metrics need to be derived from a service and business outcome perspective.
    The business doesn’t care about metrics Metrics are not usually designed to speak in business terms about business outcomes. Linking metrics to business objectives creates metrics that the business cares about.
    It is difficult to have a metrics discussion with the business It is not a metrics/number discussion, it is a discussion on goals and outcomes.
    Metrics are only presented for the implementation of the service, not the ongoing outcome of the service IT needs to focus on service outcome and not project outcome.
    Quality can’t be measured Quality must be measured in order to properly manage services.

    Our three-phase approach to service metrics development

    Let Info-Tech guide you through your service metrics journey

    1

    2

    3
    Design Your Metrics Develop and Validate Reporting Implement, Track, and Maintain
    Sample of Phase 1 of Info-Tech's service metric development package, 'Design Your Metrics'. Sample of Phase 2 of Info-Tech's service metric development package, 'Develop and Validate Reporting'. Sample of Phase 3 of Info-Tech's service metric development package, 'Implement, Track, and Maintain'.
    Start the development and creation of your service metrics by keeping business perspectives in mind, so they are fully aligned with business objectives. Identify the most appropriate presentation format based on stakeholder preference and need for metrics. Track goals and success metrics for your service metrics programs. It allows you to set long-term goals and track your results over time.

    CIOs must actively lead the design of the service metrics program

    The CIO must actively demonstrate support for the service metrics program and lead the initial discussions to determine what matters to business leaders.

    1. Lead the initiative by defining the need
      Show visible support and demonstrate importance
    2. Articulate the value to both IT and the business
      Establish the urgency and benefits
    3. Select and assemble an implementation group
      Find the best people to get the job done
    4. Drive initial metrics discussions: goals, objectives, actions
      Lead brainstorming with senior business leaders
    5. Work with the team to determine presentation formats and communication methods
      Identify the best presentation approach for senior stakeholders
    6. Establish a feedback loop for senior management
      Solicit feedback on improvements
    7. Validate the success of the metrics
      Confirm service metrics support business outcomes

    Measure the success of your service metrics

    It is critical to determine if the designed service metrics are fulfilling their intended purpose. The process of maintaining the service metrics program and the outcomes of implementing service metrics need to be monitored and tracked.

    Validating Service Metrics Design

    Target Outcome

    Related Metrics
    The business is enabled to identify and improve service performance to their end customer # of improvement initiatives created based on service metrics
    $ cost savings/revenue generated due to actions derived from service metrics

    Procedure to validate the usefulness of IT metrics

    # / % of service metrics added/removed per year

    Alignment between IT and business objectives and processes Business’ satisfaction with IT

    Measure the success of your service metrics

    It is critical to determine if the designed service metrics are fulfilling their intended purpose. The process of maintaining the service metrics program and the outcomes of implementing service metrics need to be monitored and tracked.

    Validating Service Metrics Process

    Target Outcome

    Related Metrics

    Properly defined service metrics aligned with business goals/outcomes
    Easy understood measurement methodologies    		% of services with (or without) defined service metrics

    % of service metrics tied to business goals

    Consistent approach to review and adjust metrics# of service metrics adjusted based on service reviews

    % of service metrics reviewed on schedule

    Demonstrate monetary value and impact through the service metrics program

    In a study done by the Aberdeen Group, organizations engaged in the use of metrics benchmarking and measurement have:
    • 88% customer satisfaction rate
    • 60% service profitability
    • 15% increase in workforce productivity over the last 12 months

    Stock image of a silhouette of three people's head and shoulders.
    (Source: Aberdeen Group. “Service Benchmarking and Measurement.”)

    		A service metric is defined for: “Response time for Business Application A”

    The expected response time has not been achieved and this is visible in the service metrics. The reduced performance has been identified as having an impact of $250,000 per month in lost revenue potential.

    The service metric drove an action to perform a root-cause analysis, which identified a network switch issue and drove a resolution action to fix the technology and architect redundancy to ensure continuity.

    The fix eliminated the performance impact, allowing for recovery of the $250K per month in revenue, improved end-user confidence in the organization, and increased use of the application, creating additional revenue.

    Implementing and measuring a video conferencing service

    CASE STUDY
    Industry: Manufacturing | Source: CIO interview and case material
    Situation

    The manufacturing business operates within numerous countries and requires a lot of coordination of functions and governance oversight. The company has monthly meetings, both regional and national, and key management and executives travel to attend and participate in the meetings.

    Complication

    While the meetings provide a lot of organizational value, the business has grown significantly and the cost of business travel has started to become prohibitive.

    Action

    It was decided that only a few core meetings would require onsite face-to-face meetings, and for all other meetings, the company would look at alternative means. The face-to-face aspect of the meetings was still considered critical so they focused on options to retain that aspect.

    The IT organization identified that they could provide a video conferencing service to meet the business need. The initiative was approved and rolled out in the organization.

    Result:

    IT service metrics needed to be designed to confirm that the expected value outcome of the implementation of video conferencing was achieved.

    Under the direction of the CIO, the business goals and needs driving use of the service (i.e. reduction in travel costs, efficiency, no loss of positive outcome) were used to identify success criteria and key questions to confirm success.

    With this information, the service manager was able to implement relevant service metrics in business language and confirmed an 80% adoption rate and a 95% success rate in term meetings running as expected and achieving core outcomes.

    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.

    A small monochrome icon of a wrench and screwdriver creating an X.

    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.

    A small monochrome icon depicting a person in front of a blank slide.

    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

    Develop meaningful service metrics to ensure business and user satisfaction

    1. Design the Metrics 2. Design Reports and Dashboards 3. Implement, Track, and Maintain
    Supporting Tool icon

    Best-Practice Toolkit
    1. Defining stakeholder needs for IT based on their success criteria
    2. Derive meaningful service metrics based on identified IT services and validate with business stakeholders
    3. Validate metrics can be collected and measured
    4. Determine calculation methodology
    1. Presentation format selected based on stakeholder needs and preference for information
    2. Presentation format validated with stakeholders
    1. Identify metrics that will be presented first to the stakeholders based on urgency or impact of the IT service
    2. Determine the process to collect data, select initial targets, and integrate with SLM and BRM functions
    3. Roll out the metrics implementation for a broader audience
    4. Establish roles and timelines for metrics maintenance

    Guided Implementations
    • Design metrics based on business needs
    • Validate the metrics
    • Select presentation format
    • Review metrics presentation design
    • Select and implement pilot metrics
    • Determine rollout process and establish maintenance/tracking mechanism
    Associated Activity icon

    Onsite Workshop

    		 Module 1:
    Derive Service Metrics From Business Goals     		Module 2:
    Select and Design Reports and Dashboards     		Module 3:
    Implement, Track, and Maintain Your Metrics to Ensure Success
    Phase 1 Outcome:
    • Meaningful service metrics designed from stakeholder needs
    		 Phase 2 Outcome:
    • Appropriate presentation format selected for each stakeholder
    		 Phase 3 Outcome:
    • Metrics implemented and process established to maintain and track program success

    Workshop overview

    Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
    Workshop Day 1 Workshop Day 2 Workshop Day 3 Workshop Day 4
    Design the Metrics
    Determine Presentation Format and Implement Metrics
    Gather Service Level Requirements
    Monitor and Improve Service Levels

    Activities
    • 1.1 Determine stakeholder needs
    • 1.2 Determine success criteria and key performance indicators
    • 1.3 Derive metrics
    • 1.4 Validate the metric collection
    • 2.1 Discuss stakeholder needs/preference for data and select presentation format
    • 2.2 Select and design the metric report
    • Requirements
    • 3.1 Determine the business requirements
    • 3.2 Negotiate service levels
    • 3.3 Align operational level agreements (OLAs) and supplier contracts
    • 4.1 Conduct service report and perform service review
    • 4.2 Communicate service review
    • 4.3 Remediate issues using action plan
    • 4.4 Proactive prevention

    Deliverables
    1. Metrics Development Workbook
    1. Metrics Presentation Format Selection Guide
    2. Metrics Tracking Tool
    1. Service Level Management SOP
    2. Service Level Agreement
    1. Service Level Report
    2. Service Level Review
    3. Business Satisfaction Report

    Develop Meaningful Service Metrics to Ensure Business and User Satisfaction

    PHASE 1

    Design the Metrics

    Step (1): Design the Metrics

    PHASE 1 PHASE 2 PHASE 3

    1.1

    Derive the Service Metrics

    1.2

    Validate the Metrics

    2.1

    Determine Reporting Format

    3.1

    Select Pilot Metrics

    3.2

    Activate and Maintain Metrics

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • Business Relationship Manager (BRM)
    • Service Level Manager (SLM)

    Outcomes of this step

    • Defined stakeholder needs for IT based on their success criteria
    • Identified IT services that are tied to the delivery of business outcomes
    • Derived meaningful service metrics based on identified IT services and validated with business stakeholders
    • Validated that metrics can be collected and measured
    • Determined calculation methodology

    Phase 1 outline

    Associated Activity icon 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: Design the Metrics

    Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 4 weeks
    Step 1.1: Design Metrics Step 1.2: Validate the Metrics
    Start with an analyst kick-off call:
    • Determine the stakeholder and their needs
    • Identify IT services that are tied to the delivery of business outcomes
    • Derive the service metrics
    		 Review findings with analyst:
    • For the selected metrics, identify the data source for collection
    • Validate whether or not the data can be created
    • Create a calculation method for the metrics
    Then complete these activities…
    • Using the methodology provided, identify additional stakeholders and map out their success criteria, including KPIs to determine the appropriate service metrics
    		 Then complete these activities…
    • Determine whether the designed metrics are measurable, and if so, how
    With these tools & templates:
    • Metrics Development Workbook
    		 With these tools & templates:
    • Metrics Development Workbook

    Design your service metrics – overview

    Figure representing 'CIO'. Step 1
    Derive your service metrics

    Metrics Worksheet

    		Figure representing 'SLM' and/or 'BRM'. Step 2
    Validate your metrics

    Metrics Worksheet

    		Figures representing 'CIO', 'SLM', and/or 'BRM'. Step 3
    Confirm with stakeholders

    Metrics Tracking Sheet

    		A star.

    Defined IT Service Metrics

    Deriving the right metrics is critical to ensuring that you will generate valuable and actionable service metrics.

    Derive your service metrics from business objectives and needs

    Service metrics must be designed with the business perspective in mind so they are fully aligned with business objectives.

    Thus, IT must start by identifying specific stakeholder needs. The more IT understands about the business, the more relevant the metrics will be to the business stakeholders.

    1. Who are your stakeholders?
    2. What are their goals and pain points?
    3. What do the stakeholders need to know?
    4. What do I need to measure?
    5. Derive your service metrics

    Derive your service metrics

    Supporting Tool icon 1.1 Metrics Development Workbook

    This workbook guides the development and creation of service metrics that are directly tied to stakeholder needs.

    This process will ensure that your service metrics are designed with the business perspective in mind so they are fully aligned with business objectives.

    1. Who are the relevant stakeholders?
    2. What are the goals and pain points of your stakeholders?
    3. What do the stakeholders need to know?
    4. What does IT need to measure?
    5. What are the appropriate IT metrics?

    Download the Metrics Development Workbook.

    		Sample of Info-Tech's Metrics Development Workbook.

    Determine your stakeholders

    Supporting Tool icon 1.1 0.5 Hour

    Who are your stakeholders?

    1. Identify the primary stakeholders of your service metrics. Stakeholders are the people who have a very specific need to know about how IT services affect their business outcomes. Different stakeholders can have different perspective on the same IT service metric.Most often, the primary target of service metrics are the business stakeholders, e.g. VP of a business unit.
    2. Identify any additional stakeholders. The CIO is also a stakeholder since they are effectively the business relationship manager for the senior leaders.

    Video Conferencing Case Study
    Manufacturing company

    For this phase, we will demonstrate how to derive the service metrics by going through the steps in the methodology.

    At a manufacturing company, the CIO’s main stakeholder is the CEO, whose chief concern is to improve the financial position of the company.

    Identify goals and pain points of your stakeholders

    Supporting Tool icon 1.2 0.5 Hour

    What are their goals and pain points?

    1. Clearly identify each stakeholder’s business goals and outcomes. These would be particular business goals related to a specific business unit.
    2. Identify particular pain points for each business unit to understand what is preventing them from achieving the desirable business outcome.

    VC Case Study

    One of the top initiatives identified by the company to improve financial performance was to reduce expense.

    Because the company has several key locations in different states, company executives used to travel extensively to carry out meetings at each location.

    Therefore, travel expenses represent a significant proportion of operational expenses and reducing travel costs is a key goal for the company’s executives.

    What do the stakeholders need to know?

    Supporting Tool icon 1.3 0.5 Hour

    What do the stakeholders need to know?

    1. Identify the key things that the stakeholders would need to know based on the goals and pain points derived from the previous step.These are your success criteria and must be met to successfully achieve the desired goals.

    VC Case Study

    The CEO needs to have assurance that without executives traveling to each location, remote meetings can be as effective as in-person meetings.

    These meetings must provide the same outcome and allow executives to collaborate and make similar strategic decisions without the onsite, physical presence.

    Therefore, the success criteria are:

    • Reduced travel costs
    • Effective collaboration
    • High-quality meetings

    What do I need to measure?

    Supporting Tool icon 1.4 1 Hour

    What does IT need to measure?

    1. Identify the IT services that are leveraged to achieve the business goals and success criteria.
    2. Identify the users of those services and determine the nature of usage for each group of users.
    3. Identify the key indicators that must be measured for those services from an IT perspective.

    VC Case Study

    The IT department decides to implement the video conferencing service to reduce the number of onsite meetings. This technology would allow executives to meet remotely with both audio and video and is the best option to replicate a physical meeting.

    The service is initially available to senior executives and will be rolled out to all internal users once the initial implementation is deemed successful.

    To determine the success of the service, the following needs to be measured:

    1. Outcomes of VC meetings
    2. Quality of the VC meetings
    3. Reduction in travel expenses

    Derive service metrics

    Supporting Tool icon 1.5 0.5 Hour

    Derive your service metrics

    1. Derive the service metrics that are meaningful to business stakeholders based on the IT services and the key indicators identified in the previous steps.
    2. Distinguish between service metrics and business metrics. You may identify some business metrics in addition to the IT metrics, and although these are important, IT doesn’t own the process of tracking and reporting business metrics.

    VC Case Study

    In the previous step, IT identified that it must measure the outcomes of VC meetings, quality of the VC meetings, and the reduction in travel expenses. From these, the appropriate service metrics can be derived to answer the needs of the CEO.

    IT needs to measure:

    1. Percent of VC meetings successfully delivered
    2. Growth of number of executive meetings conducted via VC
    Outcomes

    IT also identified the following business metrics:

    1. Reduction in percent of travel expense/spend
    2. Reduction in lost time due to travel

    Validate your metrics

    Once appropriate service metrics are derived from business objectives, the next step is to determine whether or not it is viable to actually measure the metrics.

    Can you measure it? The first question IT must answer is whether the metric is measurable. IT must identify the data source, validate its ability to collect the data, and specify the data requirement. Not all metrics can be measured!
    How will you measure it? If the metric is measurable, the next step is to create a way to measure the actual data. In most cases, simple formulas that can be easily understood are the best approach.
    Define your actions Metrics must be used to drive or reinforce desirable outcomes and behaviors. Thus, IT must predetermine the necessary actions associated with the different metric levels, thresholds, or trends.

    Determine if you can measure the identified metric

    Supporting Tool icon 1.6 0.5 Hour

    INSTRUCTIONS

    1. Determine what data sources are available. Make sure that you know where the information you need is captured, or will need to be captured. This would include:
      • A ticket/request system
      • An auto discovery tool
      • A configuration management database ( CMDB)
    2. Confirm that IT has the ability to collect the information.
      • If the necessary data is already contained in an identified data source, then you can proceed.
      • If not, consider whether it’s possible to gather the information using current sources and systems.
      • Understand the constraints and cost/ROI to implement new technology or revise processes and data gathering to produce the data.

    VC Case Study

    Using the metric derived from the video conferencing service example, IT wants to measure the % of VC meetings successfully delivered.

    What are the data sources?

    • Number of VC meetings that took place
    • Number of service incidents
    • User survey

    Determine if you can measure the identified metric

    Supporting Tool icon 1.6 0.5 Hour

    INSTRUCTIONS

    1. Understand your data requirements
      • To produce relevant metrics from your data, you need to ensure the level of quality and currency that provides you with useful information. You need to define:
        • The level of detail that has to be captured to make the data useful.
        • The consistency of the data, and how it needs to be entered or gathered.
        • The accuracy of the data. This includes how current the data needs to be, how quickly changes have to be made, and how data quality will be verified.

    VC Case Study

    Data requirement for percent of successful VC meetings:

    • Level of detail – user category, location, date/time,
    • Consistency – how efficiently are VC-related incidents opened and closed? Is the data collected and stored consistently?
    • Accuracy – is the information entered accurately?

    Create the calculation to measure it

    Supporting Tool icon 1.7 0.5 Hour

    Determine how to calculate the metrics.

    INSTRUCTIONS
    1. Develop the calculations that will be used for each accepted metric. The measurement needs to be clear and straightforward.
    2. Define the scope and assumptions for each calculation, including:
      • The defined measurement period (e.g. monthly, weekly)
      • Exclusions (e.g. nonbusiness hours, during maintenance windows)

    VC Case Study

    Metric: Percent of VC meetings delivered successfully

    IT is able to determine the total number of VC meetings that took place and the number of VC service requests to the help desk.

    That makes it possible to use the following formula to determine the success percentage of the VC service:

    ((total # VC) – (# of VC with identified incidents)) / (total # VC) * 100

    Define the actions to be taken for each metric

    Supporting Tool icon 1.7 1.5 Hour

    INSTRUCTIONS

    Centered on the defined metrics and their calculations, IT can decide on the actions that should be driven out of each metric based on one of the following scenarios:
    • Scenario 1: Ad hoc remedial action and root-cause investigation. If the reason for the result is unknown, determining root cause or identifying trends is required to determine required actions.
    • Scenario 2: Predefined remedial action. A set of predetermined actions associated with different results. This is useful when the meaning of the results is clear and points to specific issues within the environment.
    • Scenario 3: Nonremedial action. The metrics may produce a result that reinforces or supports company direction and strategy, or identifies an opportunity that may drive a new initiative or idea.

    VC Case Study

    If the success rate of the VC meetings is below 90%, IT needs to focus on determining if there is a common cause and identify if this is a consistent downward trend.

    A root-cause analysis is performed that identifies that network issues are causing difficulties, impacting the connection quality and usability of the VC service.

    Validate the confirmed metrics with the business

    Supporting Tool icon 1.8 1 Hour

    INPUT: Selected service metrics, Discussion with the business

    OUTPUT: Validated metrics with the business

    Materials: Metrics with calculation methodology

    Participants: IT and business stakeholders, Service owners

    INSTRUCTIONS

    1. Once you have derived the appropriate metrics and established that the metrics are measurable, you must go back to the targeted stakeholders and validate that the selected metrics will provide the right information to meet their identified goals and success criteria.
    2. Add confirmed metrics to the Metrics Tracking Tool, in the Metrics Tracking Plan tab.
    Service Metric Corresponding
    Business Goal     		Measurement
    Method     		Defined Actions

    Example: Measuring the online banking service at a financial institution

    Who are IT’s stakeholders? The financial institution provides various banking solutions to its customers. Retail banking is a core service offered by the bank and the VP of retail banking is a major stakeholder of IT.
    What are their goals and pain points? The VP of retail banking’s highest priorities are to increase revenue, increase market share, and maintain the bank’s brand and reputation amongst its customers.
    What do they need to know? In order to measure success, the VP of retail banking needs to determine performance in attracting new clients, retaining clients, expanding into new territory, and whether they have increased the number of services provided to existing clients.
    What does IT need to measure? The recent implementation of an online banking service is a key initiative that will keep the bank competitive and help retail banking meet its goals. The key indicators of this service are: the total number of clients, the number of products per client, percent of clients using online banking, number of clients by segment, service, territory.
    Derive the service metrics Based on the key indicators, IT can derive the following service metrics:
    1. Number of product applications originated from online banking
    2. Customer satisfaction/complaints
    As part of the process, IT also identified some business metrics, such as the number of online banking users per month or the number of times a client accesses online banking per month.

    Design service metrics to track service performance and value

    CASE STUDY
    Industry: Manufacturing | Source: CIO
    Challenge Solution Results
    The IT organization needed to generate metrics to show the business whether the video conferencing service was being adopted and if it was providing the expected outcome and value.

    Standard IT metrics were technical and did not provide a business context that allowed for easy understanding of performance and decision making.

    		The IT organization, working through the CIO and service managers, sat down with the key business stakeholders of the video conferencing service.

    They discussed the goals for the meeting and defined the success criteria for those goals in the context of video conference meeting outcomes.

    The success criteria that were discussed were then translated into a set of questions (key performance indicators) that if answered, would show that the success criteria were achieved.

    		The service manager identified what could be measured to answer the defined questions and eliminated any metrics that were either business metrics or non-IT related.

    The remaining metrics were identified as the possible service metrics, and the ability to gather the information and produce the metric was confirmed.

    Service metrics were defined for:

    1. Percent of video conference meetings delivered successfully
    2. Growth in the number of executive meetings conducted via video conference

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech Workshop Associated Activity icon

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    Photo of Valence Howden, Senior Manager, CIO Advisory, Info-Tech Research Group.
    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analyst 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

    		 Sample of activity 1.1 'Determine your stakeholders'. Determine stakeholder needs, goals, and pain points

    The onsite analyst will help you select key stakeholders and analyze their business objectives and current pain points.

    1.2

    		 Sample of activity 1.2 'Identify goals and pain points of your stakeholders'. Determine the success criteria and related IT services

    The analyst will facilitate a discussion to uncover the information that these stakeholders care about. The group will also identify the IT services that are supporting these objectives.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech Workshop Associated Activity icon

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    1.5

    		 Sample of activity 1.5 'Derive service metrics'. Derive the service metrics

    Based on the key performance indicators obtained in the previous page, derive meaningful business metrics that are relevant to the stakeholders.

    1.6

    		 Sample of activity 1.6 'Determine if you can measure the identified metric'. Validate the data collection process

    The analyst will help the workshop group determine whether the identified metrics can be collected and measured. If so, a calculation methodology is created.

    1.7

    		 Sample of activity 1.7 'Create the caluclation to measure it'. Validate metrics with stakeholders

    Establish a feedback mechanism to have business stakeholders validate the meaningfulness of the metrics.

    Develop Meaningful Service Metrics to Ensure Business and User Satisfaction

    PHASE 2

    Design Reports and Dashboards

    Step (2): Design Reports and Dashboards

    PHASE 1PHASE 2PHASE 3

    1.1

    Derive the Service Metrics

    1.2

    Validate the Metrics

    2.1

    Determine Reporting Format

    3.1

    Select Pilot Metrics

    3.2

    Activate and Maintain Metrics

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business Relationship Manager
    • Service Level Manager
    • Business Stakeholders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Presentation format selected based on stakeholder needs and preference for information
    • Presentation format validated with stakeholders

    Phase 2 outline

    Associated Activity icon 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: Design Reports and Dashboards

    Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 3 weeks
    Step 2.1: Select Presentation Format Step 2.2: Review Design
    Start with an analyst kick-off call:
    • Review the different format of metrics presentation and discuss the pros/cons of each format
    • Discuss stakeholder needs/preference for data
    • Select the presentation format
    		 Review findings with analyst:
    • Discuss stakeholder feedback based on selected presentation format
    • Modify and adjust the presentation format as needed
    Then complete these activities…
    • Design the metrics using the selected format
    		 Then complete these activities…
    • Finalize the design for metrics presentation
    With these tools & templates:
    • Metrics Presentation Format Selection Guide
    		 With these tools & templates:
    • Metrics Presentation Format Selection Guide

    Design the reports – overview

    Figure representing 'SLM' and/or 'BRM'. Step 1
    Understand the pros and cons of different reporting styles     		Figure representing 'SLM' and/or 'BRM'. Step 2
    Determine your reporting and presentation style

    Presentation Format Selection

    		Figure representing 'SLM' and/or 'BRM'. Step 3
    Design your metrics reports     		A star.

    Validated Service Reports

    The design of service metrics reporting is critically important. The reporting style must present the right information in the most interesting and stakeholder-centric way possible to ensure that it is read and used.

    The reports must also display information in a way that generates actions. If your stakeholders cannot make decisions, kick off activities, or ask questions based on your reports, then they have no value.

    Determine the right presentation format for your metrics

    Most often, metrics are presented in the following ways:

    Dashboard
    (PwC. “Mega-Trends and Implications.”)
    Sample of the 'Dashboard' metric presentation format.     		Infographic
    (PwC. “Healthcare’s new entrants.”)
    Sample of the 'Infographic' metric presentation format.
    Report
    (PwC Blogs. “Northern Lights.”)
    Sample of the 'Report' metric presentation format.     		Scorecard
    (PwC. “Annual Report 2015.”)
    Sample of the 'Scorecard' metric presentation format.

    Understand the advantages and disadvantages of each reporting style – Dashboard

    A dashboard is a reporting method that provides a dynamic at-a-glance view of key metrics from the perspective of key stakeholders. It provides a quick graphical way to process important performance information in real time.

    Features

    Typically web-based

    Dynamic data that is updated in real time

    		Advantage

    Aggregates a lot of information into a single view

    Presents metrics in a simplistic style that is well understood

    Provides a quick point-in-time view of performance

    Easy to consume visual presentation style

    		Disadvantage

    Complicated to set up well.
    Requires additional technology support: programming, API, etc.

    Promotes a short-term outlook – focus on now, no historical performance and no future trends. Doesn’t provide the whole picture and story.

    Existing dashboard tools are often not customized enough to provide real value to each stakeholder.

    Dashboards present real-time metrics that can be accessed and viewed at any time

    Sample of the 'Dashboard' metric presentation format.
    (Source: PwC. “Mega-Trends and Implications.”)     		Metrics presented through online dashboards are calculated in real time, which allows for a dynamic, current view into the performance of IT services at any time.

    Understand the advantages and disadvantages of each reporting style – Infographic

    An infographic is a graphical representation of metrics or data, which is used to show information quickly and clearly. It’s based on the understanding that people retain and process visual information more readily than written details.

    Features

    Turns dry into attractive –transforms data into eye-catching visual memory that is easier to retain

    Can be used as the intro to a formal report

    There are endless types of infographics

    		Advantage

    Easily consumable

    Easy to retain

    Eye catching

    Easily shared

    Spurs conversation

    Customizable

    		Disadvantage

    Require design expertise and resources

    Can be time consuming to generate

    Could be easily misinterpreted

    Message can be lost with poor design

    Infographics allow for completely unique designs

    Sample of the 'Infographic' metric presentation format.
    (Source: PwC. “Healthcare’s new entrants…”)     		There is no limit when it comes to designing an infographic. The image used here visually articulates the effects of new entrants pulling away the market.

    Understand the advantages and disadvantages of each reporting style – Formal Report

    A formal report is a more structured and official reporting style that contains detailed research, data, and information required to enable specific business decisions, and to help evaluate performance over a defined period of time.

    Definition

    Metrics can be presented as a component of a periodic, formal report

    A physical document that presents detailed information to a particular audience

    		Advantage

    More detailed, more structured and broader reporting period

    Formal, shows IT has put in the effort

    Effectively presents a broader and more complete story

    Targets different stakeholders at the same time

    		Disadvantage

    Requires significant effort and resources

    Higher risk if the report does not meet the expectation of the business stakeholder

    Done at a specific time and only valuable for that specific time period

    Harder to change format

    Formal reports provide a detailed view and analysis of performance

    Sample of the 'Formal Report' metric presentation format.
    (Source: PwC Blogs. “Northern Lights: Where are we now?”)     		An effective report incorporates visuals to demonstrate key improvements.

    Formal reports can still contain visuals, but they are accompanied with detailed explanations.

    Understand the advantages and disadvantages of each reporting style – Scorecard

    A scorecard is a graphic view of the progress and performance over time of key performance metrics. These are in relation to specified goals based on identified critical stakeholder objectives.

    Features

    Incorporates multiple metrics effectively.

    Scores services against the most important organizational goals and objectives. Scorecards may tie back into strategy and different perspectives of success.

    		Advantage

    Quick view of performance against objectives

    Measure against a set of consistent objectives

    Easily consumable

    Easy to retain

    		Disadvantage

    Requires a lot of forethought

    Scorecards provide a time-bound summary of performance against defined goals

    Sample of the 'Scorecard' metric presentation format.
    (PwC. “Annual Report 2015.”)     		Scorecards provide a summary of performance that is directly linked to the organizational KPIs.

    Determine your report style

    Supporting Tool icon 2.1 Metrics Presentation Format Selection Guide

    In this section, you will determine the optimal reporting style for the service metrics.

    This guide contains four questions, which will help IT organizations identify the most appropriate presentation format based on stakeholder preference and needs for metrics.

    1. Who is the relevant stakeholder?
    2. What are the defined actions for the metric?
    3. How frequently does the stakeholder need to see the metric?
    4. How does the stakeholder like to receive information?
    		 Sample of Info-Tech's Metrics Presentation Format Selection Guide.
    Download the Metrics Presentation Format Selection Guide.

    Determine your best presentation option

    Supporting Tool icon 2.1 2 Hours

    INPUT: Identified stakeholder and his/her role

    OUTPUT: Proper presentation format based on need for information

    Materials: Metrics Presentation Format Selection Guide

    Participants: BRM, SLM, Program Manager

    After deciding on the report type to be used to present the metric, the organization needs to consider how stakeholders will consume the metric.

    There are three options based on stakeholder needs and available presentation options within IT.

    1. Paper-based presentation is the most traditional form of reporting and works well with stakeholders who prefer physical copies. The report is produced at a specific time and requires no additional IT capability.
    2. Online documents stored on webpages, SharePoint, or another knowledge management system could be used to present the metrics. This allows the report to be linked to other information and easily shared.
    3. Online dashboards and graphics can be used to have dynamic, real-time reporting and anytime access. These webpages can be incorporated into an intranet and allow the user to view the metrics at any time. This will require IT to continuously update the data in order to maintain the accuracy of the metrics.

    Design your metric reports with these guidelines in mind

    Supporting Tool icon 2.2 30 Minutes
    1. Stakeholder-specificThe report must be driven by the identified stakeholder needs and preferences and articulate the metrics that are important to them.
    2. ClarityTo enable decision making and drive desired actions, the metrics must be clear and straightforward. They must be presented in a way that clearly links the performance measurement to the defined outcome without leading to different interpretations of the results.
    3. SimplicityThe report must be simple to read, understand, and analyze. The language of the report must be business-centric and remove as much complexity as possible in wording, imaging, and context.

    Be sure to consider access rights for more senior reports. Site and user access permissions may need to be defined based on the level of reporting.

    Metrics reporting on the video conferencing service

    CASE STUDY
    Industry: Manufacturing | Source: CIO Interview
    The Situation

    The business had a clear need to understand if the implementation of video conferencing would allow previously onsite meetings to achieve the same level of effectiveness.

    Reporting Context

    Provided reports had always been generated from an IT perspective and the business rarely used the information to make decisions.

    The metrics needed to help the business understand if the meetings were remaining effective and be tied into the financial reporting against travel expenses, but there would be limited visibility during the executive meetings.

    Approach

    The service manager reviewed the information that he had gathered to confirm how often they needed information related to the service. He also met with the CIO to get some insight into the reports that were already being provided to the business, including the ones that were most effective.

    Considerations

    The conversations identified that there was no need for a dynamic real-time view of the performance of the service, since tracking of cost savings and utility would be viewed monthly and quarterly. They also identified that the item would be discussed within a very small window of time during the management meetings.

    The Solution

    It was determined that the best style of reporting for the metric was an existing scorecard that was produced monthly, using some infographics to ensure that the information is clear at a glance to enable quick decision making.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech Workshop Associated Activity icon

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    Photo of Valence Howden, Senior Manager, CIO Advisory, Info-Tech Research Group.
    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analyst 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

    		 Sample of presentation format option slide 'Determine the right presentation format for your metrics'. Understand the different presentation options

    The onsite analyst will introduce the group to the communication vehicles of infographic, scorecard, formal report, and dashboard.

    2.1

    		 Sample of activity 2.1 'Determine your best presentation option'. Assess stakeholder needs for information

    For selected stakeholders, the analyst will facilitate a discussion on how stakeholders would like to view information and how the metrics can be presented to aid decision making.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech Workshop Associated Activity icon

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    2.2

    		 Sample of activity 2.2 'Design your metric reports with these guidelines in mind'. Select and design the metric report

    Based on the discussion, the working group will select the most appropriate presentation format and create a rough draft of how the report should look.

    Develop Meaningful Service Metrics to Ensure Business and User Satisfaction

    PHASE 3

    Implement, Track, and Maintain Your Metrics

    Step (3): Implement, Track, and Maintain Your Metrics

    PHASE 1PHASE 2PHASE 3

    1.1

    Derive the Service Metrics

    1.2

    Validate the Metrics

    2.1

    Determine Reporting Format

    3.1

    Select Pilot Metrics

    3.2

    Activate and Maintain Metrics

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Service Level Manager
    • Business Relationship Manager
    • Service Metrics Program Manager

    Activities in this step

    • Determine the first batch of metrics to be implemented as part of the pilot program
    • Create a process to collect and validate data, determine initial targets, and integrate with SLM and BRM functions
    • Present the metric reports to the relevant stakeholders and incorporate the feedback into the metric design
    • Establish a standard process and roll out the implementation of metrics in batches
    • Establish a process to monitor and track the effectiveness of the service metrics program and make adjustments when necessary

    Phase 3 outline

    Associated Activity icon 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: Implement, Track, and Maintain Your Metrics

    Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 4 weeks
    Step 3.1: Select and Launch Pilot Metrics Step 3.2: Track and Maintain the Metrics
    Start with an analyst kick-off call:
    • Identify metrics that will be presented first to the stakeholders based on urgency or impact of the IT service
    • Determine the process to collect data, select initial targets, and integrate with SLM and BRM functions
    		 Review findings with analyst:
    • Review the success of metrics and discuss feedback from stakeholders
    • Roll out the metrics implementation to a broader audience
    • Establish roles and timelines for metrics maintenance
    Then complete these activities…
    • Document the first batch of metrics
    • Document the baseline, initial targets
    • Create a plan to integrate with SLM and BRM functions
    		 Then complete these activities…
    • Create a document that defines how the organization will track and maintain the success of the metrics program
    • Review the metrics program periodically
    With these tools & templates:
    • Metrics Tracking Tool
    		 With these tools & templates:
    • Metrics Tracking Tool

    Implement, Track, and Maintain the Metrics

    Figure representing 'SLM' and/or 'BRM'. Step 1
    Run your pilot

    Metrics Tracking Tool

    		Figure representing 'SLM' and/or 'BRM'. Step 2
    Validate success

    Metrics Tracking Tool

    		Figure representing 'SLM' and/or 'BRM'. Step 3
    Implement your metrics program in batches

    Metrics Tracking Tool

    		A star.

    Active Service Metrics Program

    Once you have defined the way that you will present the metrics, you are ready to run a pilot with a smaller sample of defined service metrics.

    This allows you to validate your approach and make refinements to the implementation and maintenance processes where necessary, prior to activating all service metrics.

    Track the performance of your service metrics

    Supporting Tool icon 3.1

    The Metrics Tracking Tool will enable you to track goals and success metrics for your service metrics programs. It allows you to set long-term goals and track your results over time.

    There are three sections in this tool:
    1. Metrics Tracking Plan. Identify the metrics to be tracked and their purpose.
    2. Metrics Tracking Actuals. Monitor and track the actual performance of the metrics.
    3. Remediation Tracking. Determine and document the steps that need to be taken to correct a sub-performing metric.
    		 Sample of Info-Tech's Metrics Tracking Tool.

    Select pilot metrics

    Supporting Tool icon 3.1 30 Minutes

    INPUT: Identified services, Business feedback

    OUTPUT: Services with most urgent need or impact

    Materials: Service catalog or list of identified services

    Participants: BRM, SLM, Business representatives

    To start the implementation of your service metrics program and drive wider adoption, you need to run a pilot using a smaller subset of metrics.

    INSTRUCTIONS

    To determine the sample for the pilot, consider metrics that:

    • Are related to critical business services and functions
      • or
    • Address known/visible pain points for the business
      • or
    • Were designed for supportive or influential stakeholders

    Metrics that meet two or more criteria are ideal for the pilot

    Collect and validate data

    Supporting Tool icon 3.2 1 Hour

    INPUT: Identified metrics

    OUTPUT: A data collection mythology, Metrics tracking

    Materials: Metrics

    Participants: SLM, BRM, Service owner

    You will need to start collection and validation of your identified data in order to calculate the results for your pilot metrics.

    INSTRUCTIONS

    1. Initiate data collection
      • Use the data sources identified during the design phase and initiate the data collection process.
    2. Determine start date
      • If historical data can be retrieved and gathered, determine how far back you want your measurements to start.
    3. Compile data and validate
      • Ensure that the information is accurate and up to date. This will require some level of data validation and audit.
    4. Run the metric
      • Use the defined calculation and source data to generate the metrics result.
    5. Record metrics results
      • Use the metrics tracking sheet to track the actual results.

    Determine initial targets

    Supporting Tool icon 3.3 1 Hour

    INPUT: Historical data/baseline data

    OUTPUT: Realistic initial target for improvement

    Materials: Metrics Tracking Tool

    Participants: BRM, SLM, Service owner

    INSTRUCTIONS

    Identify an initial service objective based on one or more of the following options:

    1. Establish an initial target using historical data and trends of performance.
    2. Establish an initial target based on stakeholder-identified requirements and expectations.
    3. Run the metrics report over a defined period of time and use the baseline level of achievement to establish an initial target.

    The target may not always be a number - it could be a trend. The initial target will be changed after review with stakeholders

    Integrate with SLM and BRM processes

    Supporting Tool icon 3.4 1 Hour

    INPUT: SLM and BRM SOPs or responsibility documentations

    OUTPUT: Integrate service metrics into the SLM/BRM role

    Materials: SLM / BRM reports

    Participants: SLM, BRM, CIO, Program manager, Service manager

    The service metrics program is usually initiated, used, and maintained by the SLM and BRM functions.

    INSTRUCTIONS

    Ensure that the metrics pilot is integrated with those functions by:

    1. Engaging with SLM and BRM functions/resources
      • Identify SLM and BRM resources associated with or working on the services where the metrics are being piloted
      • Obtain their feedback on the metrics/reporting
    2. Integrating with the existing reporting and meeting cycles
      • Ensure the metrics will be calculated and available for discussion at standing meetings and with existing reports
    3. Establishing the metrics review and validation cycle for these metrics
      • Confirm the review and validation period for the metrics in order to ensure they remain valuable and actionable

    Generate reports and present to stakeholders

    Supporting Tool icon 3.5 1 Hour

    INPUT: Identified metrics, Selected presentation format

    OUTPUT: Metrics reports that are ready for distribution

    Materials: Metrics Presentation Format Selection Guide

    Participants: BRM, SLM, CIO, Business representatives

    INSTRUCTIONS

    Once you have completed the calculation for the pilot metrics:

    1. Confirm the report style for the selected metrics (as defined in Phase 2)
    2. Generate the reporting for the pilot metrics
    3. Present the pilot metric reports to the identified BRM and SLM resources who will present the reporting to the stakeholders
    4. Gather feedback from Stakeholders on metrics - results and process
    5. Create and execute remediation plans for any actions identified from the metrics
    6. Initiate the review cycle for metrics (to ensure they retain value)

    Plan the rollout and implementation of the metrics reporting program

    Supporting Tool icon 3.6 1 Hour

    INPUT: Feedback from pilot, Services in batch

    OUTPUT: Systematic implementation of metrics

    Materials: Metrics Tracking Tool

    Participants: BRM, SLM, Program manager

    Upon completion of the pilot, move to start the broader implementation of metrics across the organization:

    INSTRUCTIONS

    1. Identify the service metrics that you will implement. They can be selected based on multiple criteria, including:
      • Organizational area/business unit
      • Service criticality
      • Pain points
      • Stakeholder engagement (detractors, supporters)
    2. Create a rollout plan for implementation in batches, identifying expected launch timelines, owners, targeted stakeholders, and communications plans
    3. Use the implementation plan from the pilot to roll out each batch of service metrics:
      • Collect and validate data
      • Determine target(s)
      • Integrate with BRM and SLM
      • Generate and communicate reports to stakeholders

    Maintain the service metrics

    Supporting Tool icon 3.7 1.5 Hour

    INPUT: Feedback from business stakeholders

    OUTPUT: Modification to individual metrics or to the process

    Materials: Metrics Tracking Tool, Metrics Development Workbook

    Participants: CIO, BRM, SLM, Program manager, Service owner

    Once service metrics and reporting become active, it is necessary to determine the review time frame for your metrics to ensure they remain useful.

    INSTRUCTIONS

    1. Confirm and establish a review time frame with stakeholders (e.g. annually, bi-annually, after organizational or strategic changes).
    2. Meet with stakeholders by the review date to discuss the value of existing metrics and validate:
      • Whether the goals associated with the metrics are still valid
      • If the metric is still necessary
      • If there is a more effective way to present the metrics
    3. Track actions based on review outcomes and update the remediation tracking sheet.
    4. Update tracking sheet with last complete review date.

    Maintain the metrics

    Supporting Tool icon 3.7

    Based on the outcome of the review meeting, decide what needs to be done for each metric, using the following options:

    Add

    A new metric is required or an existing metric needs large-scale changes (example: calculation method or scope).
    Triggers metrics design as shown in phases 1 and 2.

    		Change

    A minor change is required to the presentation format or data. Note: a major change in a metric would be performed through the Add option.

    Remove

    The metric is no longer required, and it needs to be removed from reporting and data gathering. A final report date for that metric should be determined.

    		Maintain

    The metric is still useful and no changes are required to the metric, its measurement, or how it’s reported.

    Ensuring metrics remain valuable

    VC CASE STUDY
    Industry: Manufacturing | Source: CIO Interview

    Reviewing the value of active metrics

    When the video conferencing service was initially implemented, it was performed as a pilot with a group of executives, and then expanded for use throughout the company. It was understood that prior to seeing the full benefit in cost reduction and increased efficiency and effectiveness, the rate of use and adoption had to be understood.

    The primary service metrics created for the service were based on tracking the number of requests for video conference meetings that were received by the IT organization. This identified the growth in use and could be used in conjunction with financial metrics related to travel to help identify the impact of the service through its growth phase.

    Once the service was adopted, this metric continued to be tracked but no longer showed growth or expanded adoption.

    The service manager was no longer sure this needed to be tracked.

    Key Activity

    The metrics around requests for video conference meetings were reviewed at the annual metrics review meeting with the business. The service manager asked if the need for the metric, the goal of tracking adoption, was still important for the business.

    The discussion identified that the adoption rate was over 80%, higher than anticipated, and that there was no value in continuing to track this metric.

    Based on the discussion, the adoption metrics were discontinued and removed from data gathering and reporting, while a success rate metric was added (how many meetings ran successfully and without issue) to ensure the ongoing value of the video conferencing service.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech Workshop Associated Activity icon

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    Photo of Valence Howden, Senior Manager, CIO Advisory, Info-Tech Research Group.
    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analyst 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

    		 Sample of activity 3.1 'Select pilot metrics'. Select the pilot metrics

    The onsite analyst will help the workshop group select the metrics that should be first implemented based on the urgency and impact of these metrics.

    3.2

    		 Sample of activity 3.2 'Collect and validate data'. Gather data and set initial targets

    The analyst will help the group create a process to gather data, measure baselines, and set initial targets.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech Workshop Associated Activity icon

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    3.5

    		 Sample of activity 3.5 'Generate reports and present to stakeholders'. Generate the reports and validate with stakeholders

    The Info-Tech analyst will help the group establish a process to receive feedback from the business stakeholders once the report is generated.

    3.6

    		 Sample of activity 3.6 'Plan the rollout and implementation of the metrics reporting program'. Implement the service metrics program

    The analyst will facilitate a discussion on how to implement the metrics program across the organization.

    3.7

    		 Sample of activity 3.7 'Maintain the service metrics'. Track and maintain the metrics program

    Set up a mechanism to ensure the success of the metrics program by assessing process adherence and process validity.

    Insight breakdown

    Insight 1

    Service metrics are critical to ensuring alignment of IT service performance and business service value achievement.

    Insight 2

    Service metrics reinforce positive business and end-user relationships by providing user-centric information that drives responsiveness and consistent service improvement.

    Insight 3

    Poorly designed metrics drive unintended and unproductive behaviors that have negative impacts on IT and produce negative service outcomes.

    Summary of accomplishment

    Knowledge Gained

    • Follow a methodology to identify metrics that are derived from business objectives.
    • Understand the proper presentation format based on stakeholder needs for information.
    • Establish a process to ensure the metrics provided will continue to provide value and aid decision making.

    Processes Optimized

    • Metrics presentation to business stakeholders
    • Metrics maintenance and tracking

    Deliverables Completed

    • Metrics Development Workbook
    • Metrics Presentation Format Selection Guide
    • Metrics Tracking Tool

    Research contributors and experts

    Name Organization
    Joe Evers Joe Evers Consulting
    Glen Notman Associate Partner, Citihub
    David Parker Client Program Manager, eHealth Ontario
    Marianne Doran Collins CIO, The CIO-Suite, LLC
    Chris Kalbfleisch Manager, Service Management, eHealth Ontario
    Joshua Klingenberg BHP Billiton Canada Inc.

    Related Info-Tech research

    Stock image of a menu. Design & Build a User-Facing Service Catalog
    The user-facing service catalog is the go-to place for IT service-related information.
    Stock image of a laptop keyboard. Unleash the True Value of IT by Transforming Into a Service Provider
    Earn your seat at the table and influence business strategy by becoming an IT service provider.

    Bibliography

    Pollock, Bill. “Service Benchmarking and Measurement: Using Metrics to Drive Customer Satisfaction and Profits.” Aberdeen Group. June 2009. http://722consulting.com/ServiceBenchmarkingandMeasurement.pdf

    PwC. “Mega-Trends and Implications.” RMI Discussion. LinkedIn SlideShare. September 2015. http://www.slideshare.net/AnandRaoPwC/mega-trends-and-implications-to-retirement

    PwC. “Healthcare’s new entrants: Who will be the industry’s Amazon.com?” Health Research Institute. April 2014. https://www.pwc.com/us/en/health-industries/healthcare-new-entrants/assets/pwc-hri-new-entrant-chart-pack-v3.pdf

    PwC. “Northern Lights: Where are we now?” PwC Blogs. 2012. http://pwc.blogs.com/files/12.09.06---northern-lights-2--summary.pdf

    PwC. “PwC’s key performance indicators

    Identify and Manage Operational Risk Impacts on Your Organization

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}230|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact: N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
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    • Parent Category Name: Vendor Management
    • Parent Category Link: /vendor-management

    More than 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.

    A new threat will impact your organization's operations at some point. Make sure your plans are flexible enough to manage the inevitable consequences and that you understand where those threats may originate.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Identifying and managing a vendor’s potential operational 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 during crises, and their plans lack the flexibility to adjust to significant market 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 to manage potential impacts with our Operational Risk Impact Tool.

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

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

    • Identify and Manage Operational Risk Impacts to Your Organization Storyboard

    2. Operational 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.

    • Operational Risk Impact Tool
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Identify and Manage Operational Risk Impacts on Your Organization

    Understand internal and external vendor risks to avoid potential disaster.

    Analyst perspective

    Organizations need to be aware of the operational damage vendors may cause to plan around those impacts effectively.

    Frank Sewell

    Organizations must be mindful that operational risks come from internal and external vendor sources. Missing either component in the overall risk assessment can significantly impact day-to-day business processes that cost revenue, delay projects, and lead to customer dissatisfaction.

    Frank Sewell,

    Research Director, Vendor Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    More than any other 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.

    A new threat will impact your organization's operations at some point. Make sure your plans are flexible enough to manage the inevitable consequences and that you understand where those threats may originate.

    Common Obstacles

    Identifying and managing a vendor’s potential operational 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 during crises, and their plans lack the flexibility to adjust to significant market upheavals.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    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 to manage potential impacts with our Operational Risk Impact Tool.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Organizations must evolve their risk assessments to be more adaptive to respond to threats in the market. Ongoing monitoring of the vendors tied to company operations, and understanding where those vendors impact your operations, is imperative to avoiding disasters.

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

    There are many individual components of vendor risk beyond cybersecurity.

    There are many components to vendor risk, including: Financial, Reputational, Operational, Strategic, Security, Regulatory & Compliance.

    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.

    Operational risk impacts

    Potential losses to the organization due to incidents that affect operations.

    • In this blueprint we’ll explore operational risks, particularly from third-party vendors, 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.
    Operational

    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.

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

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

    27%

    Businesses are changing their internal processes around TPRM in response to the Pandemic.

    70%

    Of organizations attribute a third-party breach to too much privileged access.

    85%

    Of breaches involved human factors (phishing, poor passwords, etc.).

    Assess internal and external operational risk impacts

    Due diligence and consistent monitoring are the keys to safeguarding your organization.

    Two sides of the Same Coin

    Internal

    • Poorly vetted supplemental staff
    • Bad system configurations
    • Lack of relevant skills
    • Poor vendor performance
    • Failure to follow established processes
    • Weak contractual accountability
    • Unsupportable or end-of-life system components

    External

    • Cyberattacks
    • Supply Chain Issues
    • Geopolitical Disruptions
    • Vendor Acquisitions
    • N-Party Non-Compliance
    • Vendor Fraud

    Operational risk is the risk of losses caused by flawed or failed processes, policies, systems, or events that disrupt business operations.

    - Wikipedia

    Internal operational risk

    Vendors operating within your secure perimeter can open your organization to substantial risk.

    Frequently monitor your internal process around vendor management to ensure safe operations.

    • Poorly vetted supplemental staff
    • Bad system configurations
    • Lack of relevant skills
    • Poor vendor performance
    • Failure to follow established processes
    • Weak contractual accountability
    • Unsupportable or end-of-life system components

    Info-Tech Insight

    You may have solid policies, but if your employees and vendors are not following them, they will not protect the organization.

    External operational risks

    • Cyberattacks
    • Supplier issues and geopolitical instability
    • Vendor acquisitions
    • N-party vendor non-compliance

    Identify and manage operational risks

    Poorly configured systems

    Failing to ensure that your vendor-supported systems are properly configured and that your vendors are meeting your IT change control and configuration standards is more commonplace than expected. Proper oversight and management of your support vendors are crucial to ensure they are meeting expectations in this regard.

    Failure to follow processes

    Most companies have policies and procedures around IT change and configuration control, security standards, risk management, vendor performance standards, etc. While having these processes is a good start, failure to perform continuous monitoring and management of these leads to increased risks of incidents.

    Supply chain disruptions

    Awareness of the supply chain's complications, and each organization's dependencies, are increasing for everyone. However, most organizations still do not understand the chain of n-party vendors that support their specific vendors or how interruptions in their supply chains could affect them. The 2022 Toyota shutdown due to Kojima is a perfect example of how one essential parts vendor could shut down your operations.

    What to look for

    Identify operational risk impacts

    • Does the vendor have a business continuity plan they will share for your review?
    • Is the vendor operating on old hardware that may be out of warranty or at end of life?
    • Is the vendor operating on older software or shareware that may lack the necessary patches?
    • Does the vendor self-audit, or do they use a vetted third-party audit firm to issue a SOC report annually?
    • Does the vendor have sufficient personnel in acceptable regions to support your operations?
    • Is the vendor willing to make concessions on contractual protections, or are they only offering “one-sided” agreements with “as-is” warranties?

    Operational risks

    Not knowing where your risks come from creates additional risks to operations.

    • Supply chain disruptions and global shortages.
      • Geopolitical disruptions and natural disasters have caused unprecedented interruptions to business. Do you know where your critical vendors are getting their supplies? Are you aware of their business continuity plans to accommodate for those interruptions?
    • Poor vendor performance.
      • Organizations need to understand where vendors are acting in their operations and manage the impact of replacing that vendor and cutting their losses rather than continuing to throw good money away after a bad performance.
    • Vendor acquisitions.
      • A lot of acquisition is going on in the market today. Large companies are buying competitors, imposing new terms on customers, or removing competing products from the market. Understand your options if a vendor is acquired by a company with which you do not wish to be in a relationship.

    It is important to identify where potential risks to your operations may come from to manage and potentially eliminate them from impacting your organization.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Most organizations realize that their vendors could operationally affect them if an incident occurs. Still, they fail to follow the chain of events that might arise from those incidents to understand the impact fully.

    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.

    How to assess third-party operational risk

    1. Review Organizational Operations

      Understand the organization’s operational risks to prepare for the “what if” game exercise.

    2. Identify and Understand Potential Operational Risks

      Play the “what if” game with the right people at the table.

    3. Create a Risk Profile Packet for Leadership

      Pull all the information together in a presentation document.

    4. Validate the Risks

      Work with leadership to ensure that the proposed risks are in line with their thoughts.

    5. Plan to Manage the Risks

      Lower the overall risk potential by putting mitigations in place.

    6. Communicate the Plan

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

    7. Enact the Plan

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

    Insight summary

    Operational risk impacts often come from unexpected places and have unforeseen impacts. Knowing where your vendors place in critical business processes and those vendors' business continuity plans concerning your organization should be a priority for those who manage the vendors.

    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 they factor into a vendor’s business continuity plan.

    If one of your critical vendors goes down, do you know how they intend to re-establish business? Do you know how you factor into their priorities?

    Insight 3

    Organizations need to have a comprehensive understanding of how their vendor-managed systems integrate with Operations.

    Do you understand where in the business processes vendor-supported systems lie? Do you have contingencies around disruptions that account for those pieces missing from the process?

    Identifying operational vendor risk

    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 operational experts at your organization will enhance your organization's long-term potential for success.
    • Involving those who not only directly manage vendors but also understand your business processes will aid in determining the forward path for relationships with your current vendors and identifying new emerging potential partners.

    See the blueprint Build an IT Risk Management Program

    Review your operational 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 operational risk impacts

    What can we realistically do about the risks?

    • Review vendors’ business continuity plans and disaster recovery testing.
      • Understand your priority in their plans.
    • Institute proper contract lifecycle management.
      • Make sure to follow corporate due diligence and risk assessment policies and procedures.
      • Failure to do so consistently can be a recipe for disaster.
    • Develop IT governance and change control.
    • Introduce continual risk assessment to monitor the relevant vendor markets.
      • Regularly review your operational plans for new risks and evolving likelihoods.
      • Risk = Likelihood x Impact (R=L*I).
        • Impact (I) tends to remain the same and be well understood, while Likelihood (L) may often be considered 100%.
    • 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 need to review their organizational risk plans, considering the placement of vendors in their operations.

    Pandemics, extreme weather, and wars 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 improve our plans going forward.

    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.

    • Break into smaller groups (or if too small, continue as a single group).
    • Use the Operational 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.
    • 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.

    Download the Operational Risk Impact Tool

    Input

    • List of identified potential risk scenarios scored by likelihood and operational impact
    • List of potential management of the scenarios to reduce the risk

    Output

    • Comprehensive operational risk profile on the specific vendor solution

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Operational Risk Impact Tool to help drive discussion

    Participants

    • Vendor Management – Coordinator
    • Organizational Leadership
    • Operations Experts (SMEs)
    • Legal/Compliance/Risk Manager

    High risk example from tool

    Sample Questions to Ask to Identify Impacts. Lists questions impact score, weight, question and comments or notes.

    Being overly reliant on a single talented individual can impose risk to your operations. Make sure you include resiliency in your skill sets for critical business practices.

    Impact score and level. Each score for impacts are unique to the organization.

    Low risk example from tool

    Sample Questions to Ask to Identify Impacts. Lists questions impact score, weight, question and comments or notes. Impact score and level. Each score for impacts are unique to the organization.

    Summary

    Seek to understand all aspects of your operations.

    • Organizations need to understand and map out where vendors are critical to their operations.
    • Those organizations that consistently follow their established risk assessment and due diligence processes will be better positioned to avoid disasters.
    • Bring the right people to the table to outline potential risks in the market and your organization.
    • Understand how your vendors prioritize your organization in their business continuity processes.
    • Incorporate “lessons learned” from prior incidents into your risk management process to build better plans for future issues.

    Organizations must evolve their operational risk assessments considering their vendor portfolio.

    Ongoing monitoring of the market and the vendors tied to company operations is imperative to avoiding disaster.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Identify and Manage Financial Risk Impacts on Your Organization

    • Vendor management practices educate organizations on the different 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 the different 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 the different 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.

    Bibliography

    “Weak Cybersecurity is taking a toll on Small Businesses.” Tripwire. August 7, 2022.

    SecureLink 2022 White Paper SL_Page_EA+PAM (rocketcdn.me)

    Member Poll March 2021 "Guide: Evolving Work Environments Impact of Covid-19 on Profile and Management of Third Parties.“ Shared Assessments. March 2021.

    “Operational Risk.” Wikipedia.

    Tonello, Matteo. “Strategic Risk Management: A Primer for Directors.” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, August 23, 2012.

    Frigo, Mark L., and Richard J. Anderson. “Embracing Enterprise Risk Management: Practical Approaches for Getting Started.” COSO, 2011.

    Prevent Data Loss Across Cloud and Hybrid Environments

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    • Parent Category Name: Governance, Risk & Compliance
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    • Organizations are often beholden to compliance obligations that require protection of sensitive data.
    • All stages of the data lifecycle exist in the cloud and all stages provide opportunity for data loss.
    • Organizations must find ways to mitigate insider threats without impacting legitimate business access.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Data loss prevention is the outcome of a well-designed strategy that incorporates multiple, sometimes disparate, tools within your existing security program.
    • The journey to data loss prevention is complex and should be taken in small and manageable steps.

    Impact and Result

    • Organizations will achieve data comprehension.
    • Organizations will align DLP with their current security program and architecture.
    • A DLP strategy will be implemented with a distinct goal in mind.

    Prevent Data Loss Across Cloud and Hybrid Environments Research & Tools

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

    1. Prevent Data Loss Across Cloud and Hybrid Environments Storyboard – A guide to handling data loss prevention in cloud services.

    This research describes an approach to strategize and implement DLP solutions for cloud services.

    • Prevent Data Loss Across Cloud and Hybrid Environments Storyboard

    2. Data Loss Prevention Strategy Planner – A workbook designed to guide you through identifying and prioritizing your data and planning what DLP actions should be applied to protect that data.

    Use this tool to identify and prioritize your data, then use that information to make decisions on DLP strategies based on classification and data environment.

    • Data Loss Prevention Strategy Planner
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Prevent Data Loss Across Cloud and Hybrid Environments

    Leverage existing tools and focus on the data that matters most to your organization.

    Analyst Perspective

    Data loss prevention is an additional layer of protection

    Driven by reduced operational costs and improved agility, the migration to cloud services continues to grow at a steady rate. A recent report by Palo Alto Networks indicates workload in the cloud increased by 13% last year, and companies are expecting to move an additional 11% of their workload to the cloud in the next 24 months1.

    However, moving to the cloud poses unique challenges for cyber security practitioners. Cloud services do not offer the same level of management and control over resources as traditional IT approaches. The result can be reduced visibility of data in cloud services and reduced ability to apply controls to that data, particularly data loss prevention (DLP) controls.

    It’s not unusual for organizations to approach DLP as a point solution. Many DLP solutions are marketed as such. The truth is, DLP is a complex program that uses many different parts of an organization’s security program and architecture. To successfully implement DLP for data in the cloud, an organization should leverage existing security controls and integrate DLP tools, whether newly acquired or available in cloud services, with its existing security program.

    Photo of Bob Wilson
    Bob Wilson
    CISSP
    Research Director, Security and Privacy
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Organizations must prevent the misuse and leakage of data, especially sensitive data, regardless of where it’s stored.

    Organizations often have compliance obligations requiring protection of sensitive data.

    All stages of the data lifecycle exist in the cloud and all stages provide opportunity for data loss.

    Organizations must find ways to mitigate insider threats without impacting legitimate business access.

    Common Obstacles

    Many organizations must handle a plethora of data in multiple varied environments.

    Organizations don’t know enough about the data they use or where it is located.

    Different systems offer differing visibility.

    Necessary privileges and access can be abused.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    The path to data loss prevention is complex and should be taken in small and manageable steps.

    First, organizations must achieve data comprehension.

    Organizations must align DLP with their current security program and architecture.

    Organizations need to implement DLP with a distinct goal in mind.

    Once the components are in place it’s important to measure and improve.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Data loss prevention is the outcome of a well-designed strategy that incorporates multiple, sometimes disparate, tools within your existing security program.

    Your challenge

    Protecting data is a critical responsibility for organizations, no matter where it is located.

    45% of breaches occurred in the cloud (“Cost of a Data Breach 2022,” IBM Security, 2022).

    A diagram that shows the mean time to detect and contain.

    It can take upwards of 12 weeks to identify and contain a breach (“Cost of a Data Breach 2022,” IBM Security, 2022).

    • Compliance obligations will require organizations to protect certain data.
    • All data states can exist in the cloud, and each state provides a unique opportunity for data loss.
    • Insider threats, whether intentional or not, are especially challenging for organizations. It’s necessary to prevent illicit data use while still allowing work to happen.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Data loss prevention doesn’t depend on a single tool. Many of the leading cloud service providers offer DLP controls with their services and these controls should be considered.

    Common obstacles

    As organizations increasingly move data into the cloud, their environments become more complex and vulnerable to insider threats

    • It’s not uncommon for an organization not to know what data they use, where that data exists, or how they are supposed to protect it.
    • Cloud systems, especially software as a service (SaaS) applications, may not provide much visibility into how that data is stored or protected.
    • Insider threats are a primary concern, but employees must be able to access data to perform their duties. It isn’t always easy to strike a balance between adequate access and being too restrictive with controls.

    Insider threats are a significant concern

    53%

    53% of a study’s respondents think it is more difficult to detect insider threats in the cloud.

    Source: "2023 Insider Threat Report," Cybersecurity Insiders, 2023

    45%

    Only about 45% of organizations think native cloud app functionality is useful in detecting insider threats.

    Source: "2023 Insider Threat Report," Cybersecurity Insiders, 2023

    Info-Tech Insight

    An insider threat management (ITM) program focuses on the user. DLP programs focus on the data.

    Insight summary

    DLP is not just a single tool. It’s an additional layer of security that depends on different components of your security program, and it requires time and effort to mature.

    Organizations should leverage existing security architecture with the DLP controls available in the cloud services they use.

    Data loss prevention is not a point solution

    Data loss prevention is the outcome of a well-designed strategy that incorporates multiple, sometimes disparate tools within your existing security program.

    Prioritize data

    Start with the data that matters most to your organization.

    Define an objective

    Having a clearly defined objective will make implementing a DLP program much easier.

    DLP is a layer

    Data loss prevention is not foundational, and it depends on many other parts of a mature information security program.

    The low hanging fruit is sweet

    Start your DLP implementation with a quick win in mind and build on small successes.

    DLP is a work multiplier

    Your organization must be prepared to investigate alerts and respond to incidents.

    Prevent data loss across cloud or hybrid environments

    A diagram that shows preventing data loss across cloud or hybrid environments

    Data loss prevention is not a point solution.
    It’s the outcome of a well-designed strategy that incorporates multiple, sometimes disparate tools within your existing security program.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Leverage existing security tools where possible.

    Data loss prevention (DLP) overview

    DLP is an additional layer of security.

    DLP is a set of technologies and processes that provides additional data protection by identifying, monitoring, and preventing data from being illicitly used or transmitted.

    DLP depends on many components of a mature security program, including but not limited to:

    • Acceptable use policy
    • Data classification policy and data handling guidelines
    • Identity and access management

    DLP is achieved through some or all of the following tactics:

    • Identify: Data is detected using policies, rules, and patterns.
    • Monitor: Data is flagged and data activity is logged.
    • Prevent: Action is taken on data once it has been detected.

    Info-Tech Insight

    DLP is not foundational. Your information security program needs to be moderately mature to support a DLP strategy.

    DLP approaches and methods

    DLP uses a handful of techniques to achieve its tactics:

    • Policy and access rights: Limits access to data based on user permissions or other contextual attributes.
    • Isolation or virtualization: Data is isolated in an environment with channels for data leakage made unavailable.
    • Cryptographic approach: Data is encrypted.
    • Quantifying and limiting: Use or transfer of data is restricted by quantity.
    • Social and behavioral analysis: The DLP system detects anomalous activity, such as users accessing data outside of business hours.
    • Pattern matching: Data content is analyzed for specific patterns.
    • Data mining and text clustering: Large sets are analyzed, typically with machine learning (ML), to identify patterns.
    • Data fingerprinting: Data files are matched against a pre-calculated hash or based on file contents.
    • Statistical Analysis: Data content is analyzed for sensitive data. Usually involves machine learning.


    DLP has two primary approaches for applying techniques:

    • Content-based: Data is identified through inspecting its content. Fingerprinting and pattern matching are examples of content-based methods.
    • Context-based: Data is identified based on its situational or contextual attributes. Some factors that may be used are source, destination, and format.

    Some DLP tools use both approaches.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Different DLP products will support different methods. It is important to keep these in mind when choosing a DLP solution.

    Start by defining your data

    Define data by answering the 5 “W”s

    Who? Who owns the data? Who needs access? Who would be impacted if it was lost?
    What? What data do you have? What type of data is it? In what format does it exist?
    When? When is the data generated? When is it used? When is it destroyed?
    Where? Where is the data stored? Where is it generated? Where is it used?
    Why? Why is the data needed?

    Use what you discover about your data to create a data inventory!

    Compliance requirements

    Compliance requirements often dictate what must be done to manage and protect data and vary from industry to industry.

    Some examples of compliance requirements to consider:

    • Healthcare - Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
    • Financial Services - Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA)
    • Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS)

    Info-Tech Insight

    Why is especially important. If you don’t need a specific piece of data, dispose of it to reduce risk and administrative overhead related to maintaining or protecting data.

    Classify your data

    Data classification facilitates making decisions about how data is treated.

    Data classification is a process by which data is categorized.

    • The classifications are often based on the sensitivity of the data or the impact a loss or breach of that data would have on the organization.
    • Data classification facilitates decisions about data handling and how information security controls are implemented. Instead of considering many different types of data individually, decisions are based on a handful of classification levels.
    • A mature data classification should include a formalized policy, handling standards, and a steering committee.

    Refer to our Discover and Classify Your Data blueprint for guidance on data classification.

    Sample data classification schema

    Label

    Category
    Top Secret Data that is mission critical and highly likely to negatively impact the organization if breached. The “crown jewels.”
    Examples: Trade secrets, military secrets
    Confidential Data that must not be disclosed, either because of a contractual or regulatory requirement or because of its value to the organization.
    Examples: Payment card data, private health information, personally identifiable information, passwords
    Internal Data that is intended for organizational use, which should be kept private.
    Examples: Internal memos, sales reports
    Limited Data that isn’t generally intended for public consumption but may be made public.
    Examples: Employee handbooks, internal policies
    Public Data that is meant for public consumption and anonymous access.
    Examples: Press releases, job listings, marketing material

    Info-Tech Insight

    Data classification should be implemented as a continuous program, not a one-time project.

    Understand data risk

    Knowing where and how your data is at risk will inform your DLP strategy.

    Data exists in three states, and each state presents different opportunities for risk. Different DLP methodologies will be appropriate for different states.

    Data states

    In use

    • End-user devices
    • Mobile devices
    • Servers

    In motion

    • Cloud services
    • Email
    • Web/web apps
    • Instant messaging
    • File transfers

    At rest

    • Cloud services
    • Databases
    • End-user devices
    • Email archives
    • Backups
    • Servers
    • Physical storage devices

    Causes of Risk

    The most common causes of data loss can be categorized by people, processes, and technology.

    A diagram that shows the categorization of causes of risk.

    Check out our Combine Security Risk Management Components Into One Program blueprint for guidance on risk management, including how to do a full risk assessment.

    Prioritize your data

    Know what data matters most to your organization.

    Prioritizing the data that most needs protection will help define your DLP goals.

    The prioritization of your data should be a business decision based on your comprehension of the data. Drivers for prioritizing data can include:

    • Compliance-driven: Noncompliance is a risk in itself and your organization may choose to prioritize data based on meeting compliance requirements.
    • Audit-driven: Data can be prioritized to prepare for a specific audit objective or in response to an audit finding.
    • Business-driven: Data could be prioritized based on how important it is to the organization’s business processes.

    Info-Tech Insight

    It’s not feasible for most organizations to apply DLP to all their data. Start with the most important data.

    Activity: Prioritize your data

    Input: Lists of data, data types, and data environments
    Output: A list of data types with an estimated priority
    Materials: Data Loss Prevention Strategy Planner worksheet
    Participants: Security leader, Data owners

    1-2 hours

    For this activity, you will use the Data Loss Prevention Strategy Planner workbook to prioritize your data.

    1. Start with tab “2. Setup” and fill in the columns. Each column features a short explanation of itself, and the following slides will provide more detail about the columns.
    2. On tab “3. Data Prioritization,” work through the rows by selecting a data type and moving left to right. This sheet features a set of instructions at the top explaining each column, and the following slides also provide some guidance. On this tab, you may use data types and data environments multiple times.

    Click to download the Data Loss Prevention Strategy Planner

    Activity: Prioritize your data

    In the Data Loss Prevention Strategy Planner tool, start with tab “2. Setup.”

    A diagram that shows tab 2 setup

    Next, move to tab “3. Data Prioritization.”

    A diagram that shows tab 3 Data Prioritization.

    Click to download the Data Loss Prevention Strategy Planner

    Determine DLP objectives

    Your DLP strategy should be able to function as a business case.

    DLP objectives should achieve one or more of the following:

    • Prevent disclosure or unauthorized use of data, regardless of its state.
    • Preserve usability while providing adequate security.
    • Improve security, privacy, and compliance capabilities.
    • Reduce overall risk for the enterprise.

    Example objectives:

    • Prevent users from emailing ePHI to addresses outside of the organization.
    • Detect when a user is uploading an unusually large amount of data to a cloud drive.

    Most common DLP use cases:

    • Protection of data, primarily from internal threats.
    • Meet compliance requirements to protect data.
    • Automate the discovery and classification of data.
    • Provide better data management and visibility across the enterprise.
    • Manage and protect data on mobile devices.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Having a clear idea of your objectives will make implementing a DLP program easier.

    Align DLP with your existing security program/architecture

    DLP depends on many different aspects of your security program.
    To the right are some components of your existing security program that will support DLP.


    1. Data handling standards or guidelines: These specify how your organization will handle data, usually based on its classification. Your data handling standards will inform the development of DLP rules, and your employees will have a clear idea of data handling expectations.

    2. Identity and access management (IAM): IAM will control the access users have to various resources and data and is integral to DLP processes.

    3. Incident response policy or plan: Be sure to consider your existing incident handling processes when implementing DLP. Modifying your incident response processes to accommodate alerts from DLP tools will help you efficiently process and respond to incidents.

    4. Existing security tools: Firewalls, email gateways, security information and event management (SIEM), and other controls should be considered or leveraged when implementing a DLP solution.

    5. Acceptable use policy: An organization must set expectations for acceptable/unacceptable use of data and IT resources.

    6. User education and awareness: Aside from baseline security awareness training, organizations should educate users about policies and communicate the risks of data leakage to reduce risk caused by user error.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Consider DLP as a secondary layer of protection; a safety net. Your existing security program should do most of the work to prevent data misuse.

    Cloud service models

    A fundamental challenge with implementing DLP with cloud services is the reduced flexibility that comes with managing less of the technology stack. Each cloud model offers varying levels of abstraction and control to the user.

    Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): This service model provides customers with virtualized technology resources, such as servers and networking infrastructure. IaaS allows users to have complete control over their virtualized infrastructure without needing to purchase and maintain hardware resources or server space. Popular examples include Amazon Web Servers, Google Cloud Engine, and Microsoft Azure.

    Platform as a service (PaaS): This service model provides users with an environment to develop and manage their own applications without needing to manage an underlying infrastructure. Popular examples include Google Cloud Engine, OpenShift, and SAP Cloud.

    Software as a service (SaaS): This service model provides customers with access to software that is hosted and maintained by the cloud provider. SaaS offers the least flexibility and control over the environment. Popular examples include Salesforce, Microsoft Office, and Google Workspace.

    A diagram that shows cloud models, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Cloud service providers may include DLP controls and functionality for their environments with the subscription. These tools are usually well suited for DLP functions on that platform.

    Different DLP tools

    DLP products often fall into general categories defined by where those tools provide protection. Some tools fit into more than one category.

    Cloud DLP refers to DLP products that are designed to protect data in cloud environments.

    • Cloud access security broker (CASB): This system, either in-cloud or on-premises, sits between cloud service users and cloud service providers and acts as a point of control to enforce policies on cloud-based resources. CASBs act on data in motion, for the most part, but can detect and act on data at rest through APIs.
    • Existing tools integrated within a service: Many cloud services provide DLP tools to manage data loss in their service.

    Endpoint DLP: This DLP solution runs on an endpoint computing device and is suited to detecting and controlling data at rest on a computer as well as data being uploaded or downloaded. Endpoint DLP would be feasible for IaaS.

    Network DLP: Network DLP, deployed on-premises or as a cloud service, enforces policies on network flows between local infrastructure and the internet.

    • “Email DLP”: Detects and enforces security policies specifically on data in motion as emails.

    A diagram of CASB

    Choosing a DLP solution

    You will also find that some DLP solutions are better suited for some cloud service models than others.


    DLP solution types that are better suited for SaaS: CASB and Integrated Tools

    DLP solution types that are better suited for PaaS: CASB, Integrated Tools, Network DLP

    DLP solution types that are better suited for IaaS: CASB, Integrated Tools, Network DLP, and Endpoint DLP

    Your approach for DLP will vary depending on the data state you’ll be acting on and whether you are trying to detect or prevent.

    A diagram that shows DLP tactics by approach and data state

    Click to download the Data Loss Prevention Strategy Planner
    Check the tab labeled “6. DLP Features Reference” for a list of common DLP features.

    Activity: Plan DLP methods

    Input: Knowledge of data states for data types
    Output: A set of technical DLP policy rules for each data type by environment
    Materials: The same Data Loss Prevention Strategy Planner worksheet from the earlier activity
    Participants: Security leader, Data owners

    1-2 hours

    Continue with the same workbook used in the previous activity.

    1. On tab “4. DLP Methods,” indicate the expected data state the DLP control will act on. Then, select the type of DLP control your organization intends to use for that data type in that data environment.
    2. DLP actions are suggested based on the classification of the data type, but these may be overridden by manually selecting your preferred action.
    3. You will find more detail on this activity on the following slide, and you will find some additional guidance in the instructional text at the top of the worksheet.
    4. Once you have populated the columns on this worksheet, a summary of suggested DLP rules can be found on tab “5. Results.”

    Click to download the Data Loss Prevention Strategy Planner

    Activity: Plan DLP methods

    Use tab “4. DLP Methods” to plan DLP rules and technical policies.

    A diagram that shows tab 4 DLP Methods

    See tab “5. Results” for a summary of your DLP policies.

    A diagram that shows tab 5 Results.

    Click to download the Data Loss Prevention Strategy Planner

    Implement your DLP program

    Take the steps to properly implement your DLP program

    1. It’s important to shift the culture. You will need leadership’s support to implement controls and you’ll need stakeholders’ participation to ensure DLP controls don’t negatively affect business processes.
    2. Integrate DLP tools with your security program. Most cloud service providers, like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google provide DLP controls in their native environment. Many of your other security controls, such as firewalls and mail gateways, can be used to achieve DLP objectives.
    3. DLP is best implemented with a crawl, walk, then run approach. Following change management processes can reduce friction.
    4. Communicating controls to users will also reduce friction.

    A diagram of implementing DLP program

    Info-Tech Insight

    After a DLP program is implemented, alerts will need to be investigated and incidents will need a response. Be prepared for DLP to be a work multiplier!

    Measure and improve

    Metrics of effectiveness

    DLP attempts to tackle the challenge of promptly detecting and responding to an incident.
    To measure the effectiveness of your DLP program, compare the number of events, number of incidents, and mean time to respond to incidents from before and after DLP implementation.

    Metrics that indicate friction

    A high number of false positives and rule exceptions may indicate that the rules are not working well and may be interfering with legitimate use.
    It’s important to address these issues as the frustration felt by employees can undermine the DLP program.

    Tune DLP rules

    Establish a process for routinely using metrics to tune rules.
    This will improve performance and reduce friction.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Aside from performance-based tuning, it’s important to evaluate your DLP program periodically and after major system or business changes to maintain an awareness of your data environment.

    Related Info-Tech Research

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    Understand where your data lives and who has access to it. This blueprint will help you develop an appropriate data classification system by conducting interviews with data owners and by incorporating vendor solutions to make the process more manageable and end-user friendly.

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    Identify the Components of Your Cloud Security Architecture

    This blueprint and associated tools are scalable for all types of organizations within various industry sectors. It allows them to know what types of risk they are facing and what security services are strongly recommended to mitigate those risks.

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    Research Contributors

    Andrew Amaro
    CSO and Founder
    Klavan Physical and Cyber Security Services

    Arshad Momin
    Cyber Security Architect
    Unicom Engineering, Inc.

    James Bishop
    Information Security Officer
    StructureFlow

    Michael Mitchell
    Information Security and Privacy Compliance Manager
    Unicom Engineering, Inc.

    One Anonymous Contributor

    Bibliography

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    Cash, Lauryn. "Why Modern DLP is More Important Than Ever." Armorblox, 10 June 2022. Accessed 10 February 2023. https://www.armorblox.com/blog/modern-dlp-use-cases/

    Chavali, Sai. "The Top 4 Use Cases for a Modern Approach to DLP." Proofpoint, 17 June 2021. Accessed 7 February 2023. https://www.proofpoint.com/us/blog/information-protection/top-4-use-cases-modern-approach-dlp

    Crowdstrike. "What is Data Loss Prevention?" Crowdstrike, 27 Sept. 2022. Accessed 6 Feb. 2023. https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/data-loss-prevention-dlp/

    De Groot, Juliana. "What is Data Loss Prevention (DLP)? Definition, Types, and Tips." Digital Guardian, 8 February 2023. Accessed 9 Feb. 2023. https://digitalguardian.com/blog/what-data-loss-prevention-dlp-definition-data-loss-prevention

    Denise. "Learn More About DLP Key Use Cases." CISO Platform, 28 Nov. 2019. Accessed 10 February 2023. https://www.cisoplatform.com/profiles/blogs/learn-more-about-dlp-key-use-cases

    Google. "Cloud Data Loss Prevention." Google Cloud Google, n.d. Accessed 7 Feb. 2023. https://cloud.google.com/dlp#section-6

    Gurucul. "2023 Insider Threat Report." Cybersecurity Insiders, 13 Jan. 2023. Accessed 23 Feb. 2023. https://gurucul.com/2023-insider-threat-report

    IBM Security. "Cost of a Data Breach 2022." IBM Security, 1 Aug. 2022. Accessed 13 Feb. 2023. https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/3R8N1DZJ

    Mell, Peter & Grance, Tim. "The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing." NIST CSRC NIST, Sept. 2011. Accessed 7 Feb. 2023. https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-145/final

    Microsoft. "Plan for Data Loss Prevention (DLP)." Microsoft 365 Solutions and Architecture Microsoft, 6 Feb. 2023. Accessed 14 Feb. 2023. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/dlp-overview-plan-for-dlp

    Nanchengwa, Christopher. "The Four Questions for Successful DLP Implementation." ISACA Journal ISACA, 1 Jan. 2019. Accessed 6 Feb. 2023. https://www.isaca.org/resources/isaca-journal/issues/2019/volume-1/the-four-questions-for-successful-dlp-implementation

    Palo Alto Networks. "The State of Cloud Native Security 2023." Palo Alto Networks, 2 March 2023. Accessed 23 March 2023. https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/content/dam/pan/en_US/assets/pdf/reports/state-of-cloud-native-security-2023.pdf

    Pritha. "Top Six Metrics for your Data Loss Prevention Program." CISO Platform, 27 Nov. 2019. Accessed 10 Feb. 2023. https://www.cisoplatform.com/profiles/blogs/top-6-metrics-for-your-data-loss-prevention-program

    Raghavarapu, Mounika. "Understand DLP Key Use Cases." Cymune, 12 June 2021. Accessed 7 Feb. 2023. https://www.cymune.com/blog-details/DLP-key-use-cases

    Sheela, G. P., & Kumar, N. "Data Leakage Prevention System: A Systematic Report." International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering BEIESP, 30 Nov. 2019. Accessed 2 March 2023. https://www.ijrte.org/wp-content/uploads/papers/v8i4/D6904118419.pdf

    Sujir, Shiv. "What is Data Loss Prevention? Complete Guide [2022]." Pathlock, 15 Sep. 2022. Accessed 7 February 2023. https://pathlock.com/learn/what-is-data-loss-prevention-complete-guide-2022/

    Wlosinski, Larry G. "Data Loss Prevention - Next Steps." ISACA Journal, 16 Feb. 2018. Accessed 21 Feb. 2023. https://www.isaca.org/resources/isaca-journal/issues/2018/volume-1/data-loss-preventionnext-steps

    z-Series Modernization and Migration

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    Under the best of circumstances, mainframe systems are complex, expensive, and difficult to scale. In today’s world, applications written for mainframe legacy systems also present significant operational challenges to customers compounded by the dwindling pool of engineers who specialize in these outdated technologies. Many organizations want to migrate their legacy applications to the cloud but to do so they need to go through a lengthy migration process that is made more challenging by the complexity of mainframe applications.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    The most common tactic is for the organization to better realize their z/Series options and adopt a strategy built on complexity and workload understanding. To make the evident, obvious, the options here for the non-commodity are not as broad as with commodity server platforms and the mainframe is arguably the most widely used and complex non-commodity platform on the market.

    Impact and Result

    This research will help you:

    • Evaluate the future viability of this platform.
    • Assess the fit and purpose, and determine TCO
    • Develop strategies for overcoming potential challenges.
    • Determine the future of this platform for your organization.

    z/Series Modernization and Migration Research & Tools

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

    1. z/Series Modernization and Migration Guide – A brief deck that outlines key migration options and considerations for the z/Series platform.

    This blueprint will help you assess the fit, purpose, and price; develop strategies for overcoming potential challenges; and determine the future of z/Series for your organization.

    • z/Series Modernization and Migration Storyboard

    2. Scale Up vs. Scale Out TCO Tool – A tool that provides organizations with a framework for TCO.

    Use this tool to play with the pre-populated values or insert your own amounts to compare possible database decisions, and determine the TCO of each. Note that common assumptions can often be false; for example, open-source Cassandra running on many inexpensive commodity servers can actually have a higher TCO over six years than a Cassandra environment running on a larger single expensive piece of hardware. Therefore, calculating TCO is an essential part of the database decision process.

    • Scale Up vs. Scale Out TCO Tool
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    z/Series Modernization and Migration

    The biggest migration is yet to come.

    Executive Summary

    Info-Tech Insight

    “A number of market conditions have coalesced in a way that is increasingly driving existing mainframe customers to consider running their application workloads on alternative platforms. In 2020, the World Economic Forum noted that 42% of core skills required to perform existing jobs are expected to change by 2022, and that more than 1 billion workers need to be reskilled by 2030.” – Dale Vecchio

    Your Challenge

    It seems like anytime there’s a new CIO who is not from the mainframe world there is immediate pressure to get off this platform. However, just as there is a high financial commitment required to stay on System Z, moving off is risky and potentially more costly. You need to truly understand the scale and complexity ahead of the organization.

    Common Obstacles

    Under the best of circumstances, mainframe systems are complex, expensive, and difficult to scale. In today’s world, applications written for mainframe legacy systems also present significant operational challenges to customers compounded by the dwindling pool of engineers who specialize in these outdated technologies. Many organizations want to migrate their legacy applications to the cloud, but to do so they need to go through a lengthy migration process that is made more challenging by the complexity of mainframe applications.

    Info-Tech Approach

    The most common tactic is for the organization to better realize its z/Series options and adopt a strategy built on complexity and workload understanding. To make the evident, obvious: the options here for the non-commodity are not as broad as with commodity server platforms and the mainframe is arguably the most widely used and complex non-commodity platform on the market.

    Review

    We help IT leaders make the most of their z/Series environment

    Problem statement:

    The z/Series remains a vital platform for many businesses and continues to deliver exceptional reliability and performance and play a key role in the enterprise. With the limited and aging resources at hand, CIOs and the like must continually review and understand their migration path with the same regard as any other distributed system roadmap.

    This research is designed for:

    IT strategic direction decision makers.

    IT managers responsible for an existing z/Series platform.

    Organizations evaluating platforms for mission critical applications.

    This research will help you:

    1. Evaluate the future viability of this platform.
    2. Assess the fit and purpose, and determine TCO.
    3. Develop strategies for overcoming potential challenges.
    4. Determine the future of this platform for your organization.

    Analyst Perspective

    Good Luck.

    Darin Stahl.

    Modernize the mainframe … here we go again.

    Prior to 2020, most organizations were muddling around in “year eleven of the four-year plan” to exit the mainframe platform where a medium-term commitment to the platform existed. Since 2020, it appears the appetite for the mainframe platform changed. Again. Discussions mostly seem to be about what the options are beyond hardware outsourcing or re-platforming to “cloud” migration of workloads – mostly planning and strategy topics. A word of caution: it would appear unwise to stand in front of the exit door for fear of being trampled.

    Hardware expirations between now and 2025 are motivating hosting deployments. Others are in migration activities, and some have already decommissioned and migrated but now are trying to rehab the operations team now lacking direction and/or structure.

    There is little doubt that modernization and “digital transformation” trends will drive more exit traffic, so IT leaders who are still under pressure to get off the platform need to assess their options and decide. Being in a state of perpetually planning to get off the mainframe handcuffs your ability to invest in the mainframe, address deficiencies, and improve cost-effectiveness.

    Darin Stahl
    Principal Research Advisor, Infrastructure & Operations Research
    Info-Tech Research Group

    The mainframe “fidget spinner”

    Thinking of modernizing your mainframe can cause you angst so grab a fidget spinner and relax because we have you covered!

    External Business Pressures:

    • Digital transformation
    • Modernization programs
    • Compliance and regulations
    • TCO

    Internal Considerations:

    • Reinvest
    • Migrate to a new platform
    • Evaluate public and vendor cloud alternatives
    • Hosting versus infrastructure outsourcing

    Info-Tech Insight

    With multiple control points to be addressed, care must be taken to simplify your options while addressing all concerns to ease operational load.

    The analyst call review

    “Who has Darin talked with?” – Troy Cheeseman

    Dating back to 2011, Darin Stahl has been the primary z/Series subject matter expert within the Infrastructure & Operations Research team. Below represents the percentage of calls, per industry, where z/Series advisory has been provided by Darin*:

    37% - State Government

    19% - Insurance

    11% - Municipality

    8% - Federal Government

    8% - Financial Services

    5% - Higher Education

    3% - Retail

    3% - Hospitality/Resort

    3% - Logistics and Transportation

    3% - Utility

    Based on the Info-Tech call history, there is a consistent cross section of industry members who not only rely upon the mainframe but are also considering migration options.

    Note:

    Of course, this only represents industries who are Info-Tech members and who called for advisory services about the mainframe.

    There may well be more Info-Tech members with mainframes who have no topic to discuss with us about the mainframe specifically. Why do we mention this?

    We caution against suggesting things like, ”somewhat less than 50% of mainframes live in state data centers” or any other extrapolated inference from this data.

    Our viewpoint and discussion is based on the cases and the calls that we have taken over the years.

    *37+ enterprise calls were reviewed and sampled.

    Scale out versus scale up

    For most workloads “scale out" (e.g. virtualized cloud or IaaS ) is going to provide obvious and quantifiable benefits.

    However, with some workloads (extremely large analytics or batch processing ) a "scale up" approach is more optimal. But the scale up is really limited to very specific workloads. Despite some assumptions, the gains made when moving from scale up to scale out are not linear.

    Obviously, when you scale out from a performance perspective you experience a drop in what a single unit of compute can do. Additionally, there will be latency introduced in the form of network overhead, transactions, and replication into operations that were previously done just bypassing object references within a single frame.

    Some applications or use cases will have to be architected or written differently (thinking about the high-demand analytic workloads at large scale). Remember the “grid computing” craze that hit us during the early part of this century? It was advantageous for many to distribute work across a grid of computing devices for applications but the advantage gained was contingent on the workload able to be parsed out as work units and then pulled back together through the application.

    There can be some interesting and negative consequences for analytics or batch operations in a large scale as mentioned above. Bottom line, as experienced previously with Microfocus mainframe ports to x86, the batch operations simply take much longer to complete.

    Big Data Considerations*:

    • Value: Data has no inherent value until it’s used to solve a business problem.
    • Variety: The type of data being produced is increasingly diverse and ranges from email and social media to geo-spatial and photographic data. This data may be difficult to process using a structured data model.
    • Volume: The sheer size of the datasets is growing exponentially, often ranging from terabytes to petabytes. This is complicating traditional data management strategies.
    • Velocity: The increasing speed at which data is being collected and processed is also causing complications. Big data is often time sensitive and needs to be captured in real time as it is streaming into the enterprise.

    *Build a Strategy for Big Data Platforms

    Consider your resourcing

    Below is a summary of concerns regarding core mainframe skills:

    1. System Management (System Programmers): This is the most critical and hard-to-replace skill since it requires in-depth low-level knowledge of the mainframe (e.g. at the MVS level). These are skills that are generally not taught anymore, so there is a limited pool of experienced system programmers.
    2. Information Management System (IMS) Specialists: Requires a combination of mainframe knowledge and data analysis skills, which makes this a rare skill set. This is becoming more critical as business intelligence takes on an ever-increasing focus in most organizations.
    3. Application Development: The primary concern here is a shortage of developers skilled in older languages such as COBOL. It should be noted that this is an application issue; for example, this is not solved by migrating off mainframes.
    4. Mainframe Operators: This is an easier skill set to learn, and there are several courses and training programs available. An IT person new to mainframes could learn this position in about six weeks of on-the-job training.
    5. DB2 Administration: Advances in database technology have simplified administration (not just for DB2 but also other database products). As a result, as with mainframe operators, this is a skill set that can be learned in a short period of time on the job.

    The Challenge

    An aging workforce, specialized skills, and high salary expectations

    • Mainframe specialists, such as system programmers and IMS specialists, are typically over 50, have a unique skill set, and are tasked with running mission-critical systems.

    The In-House Solution:

    Build your mentorship program to create a viable succession plan

    • Get your money’s worth out of your experienced staff by having them train others.
    • Operator skills take about six weeks to learn. However, it takes about two years before a system programmer trainee can become fully independent. This is similar to the learning curve for other platforms; however, this is a more critical issue for mainframes since organizations have far fewer mainframe specialists to fall back on when senior staff retire or move on.

    Understand your options

    Migrate to another platform

    Use a hosting provider

    Outsource

    Re-platform (cloud/vendors)

    Reinvest

    There are several challenges to overcome in a migration project, from finding an appropriate alternative platform to rewriting legacy code. Many organizations have incurred huge costs in the attempt, only to be unsuccessful in the end, so make this decision carefully.

    Organizations often have highly sensitive data on their mainframes (e.g. financial data), so many of these organizations are reluctant to have this data live outside of their four walls. However, the convenience of using a hosting provider makes this an attractive option to consider.

    The most common tactic is for the organization to adopt some level of outsourcing for the non-commodity platform, retaining the application support/development in-house.

    A customer can “re-platform” the non-commodity workload into public cloud offerings or in a few offerings
    “re-host.”

    If you’re staying with the mainframe and keeping it in-house, it’s important to continue to invest in this platform, keep it current, and look for opportunities to optimize its value.

    Migrate

    Having perpetual plans to migrate handcuffs your ability to invest in your mainframe, extend its value, and improve cost effectiveness.

    If this sounds like your organization, it’s time to do the analysis so you can decide and get clarity on the future of the mainframe in your organization.

    1. Identify current performance, availability, and security requirements. Assess alternatives based on this criteria.
    2. Review and use Info-Tech’s Mainframe TCO Comparison Tool to compare mainframe costs to the potential alternative platform.
    3. Assess the business risks and benefits. Can the alternative deliver the same performance, reliability, and security? If not, what are the risks? What do you gain by migrating?
    4. If migration is still a go, evaluate the following:
    • Do you have the expertise or a reliable third party to perform the migration, including code rewrites?
    • How long will the migration take? Can the business function effectively during this transition period?
    • How much will the migration cost? Is the value you expect to gain worth the expense?

    *3 of the top 4 challenges related to shortfalls of alternative platforms

    The image contains a bar graph that demonstrates challenges related to shortfalls of alternative platforms.

    *Source: Maximize the Value of IBM Mainframes in My Business

    Hosting

    Using a hosting provider is typically more cost-effective than running your mainframe in-house.

    Potential for reduced costs

    • Hosting enables you to reduce or eliminate your mainframe staff.
    • Economies of scale enable hosting providers to reduce software licensing costs. They also have more buying power to negotiate better terms.
    • Power and cooling costs are also transferred to the hosting provider.

    Reliable infrastructure and experienced staff

    • A quality hosting provider will have 24/7 monitoring, full redundancy, and proven disaster recovery capabilities.
    • The hosting provider will also have a larger mainframe staff, so they don’t have the same risk of suddenly being without those advanced critical skills.

    So, what are the risks?

    • A transition to a hosting provider usually means eliminating or significantly reducing your in-house mainframe staff. With that loss of in-house expertise, it will be next to impossible to bring the mainframe back in-house, and you become highly dependent on your hosting provider.

    Outsourcing

    The most common tactic is for the organization to adopt some level of outsourcing for the non-commodity platform, retaining the application support/development in-house.

    The options here for the non-commodity (z/Series, IBM Power platforms, for example) are not as broad as with commodity server platforms. More confusingly, the term “outsourcing” for these can include:

    Traditional/Colocation – A customer transitions their hardware environment to a provider’s data center. The provider can then manage the hardware and “system.”

    Onsite Outsourcing – Here a provider will support the hardware/system environment at the client’s site. The provider may acquire the customer’s hardware and provide software licenses. This could also include hiring or “rebadging” staff supporting the platform. This type of arrangement is typically part of a larger services or application transformation. While low risk, it is not as cost-effective as other deployment models.

    Managed Hosting – A customer transitions their legacy application environment to an off-prem hosted multi-tenanted environment. It will provide the most cost savings following the transition, stabilization, and disposal of existing environment. Some providers will provide software licensing, and some will also support “Bring Your Own,” as permitted by IBM terms for example.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Technical debt for non-commodity platforms isn’t only hardware based. Moving an application written for the mainframe onto a “cheaper” hardware platform (or outsourced deployment) leaves the more critical problems and frequently introduces a raft of new ones.

    Re-platform – z/Series COBOL Cloud

    Re-platforming is not trivial.

    While the majority of the coded functionality (JCLs, programs, etc.) migrate easily, there will be a need to re-code or re-write objects – especially if any object, code, or location references are not exactly the same in the new environment.

    Micro Focus has solid experience in this but if consider it within the context of an 80/20 rule (the actual metrics might be much better than that), meaning that some level of rework would have to be accomplished as an overhead to the exercise.

    Build that thought into your thinking and business case.

    AWS Cloud

    • Astadia (an AWS Partner) is re-platforming mainframe workloads to AWS. With its approach you reuse the original application source code and data to AWS services. Consider reviewing Amazon’s “Migrating a Mainframe to AWS in 5 Steps.”

    Azure Cloud

    Micro Focus COBOL (Visual COBOL)

    • Micro Focus' Visual COBOL also supports running COBOL in Docker containers and managing and orchestrating the containers with Kubernetes. I personally cannot imagine what sort of drunken bender decision would lead me to move COBOL into Docker and then use Kubernetes to run in GCP but there you are...if that's your Jam you can do it.

    Re-platform – z/Series (Non-COBOL)

    But what if it's not COBOL?

    Yeah, a complication for this situation is the legacy code.

    While re-platforming/re-hosting non-COBOL code is not new, we have not had many member observations compared to the re-platforming/re-hosting of COBOL functionality initiatives.

    That being said, there are a couple of interesting opportunities to explore.

    NTT Data Services (GLOBAL)

    • Most intriguing is the re-hosting of a mainframe environment into AWS. Not sure if the AWS target supports NATURAL codebase; it does reference Adabas however (Re-Hosting Mainframe Applications to AWS with NTT DATA Services). Nevertheless, NTT has supported re-platforming and NATURAL codebase environments previously.

    ModernSystems (or ModSys) has relevant experience.

    • ModSys is the resulting entity following a merger between BluePhoenix and ATERAS a number of years ago. ATERAS is the entity I find references to within my “wayback machine” for member discussions. There are also a number of published case studies still searchable about ATERAS’ successful re-platforming engagements, including the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) most famously after the Accenture project to rewrite it failed.

    ATOS, as a hosting vendor mostly referenced by customers with global locations in a short-term transition posture, could be an option.

    Lastly, the other Managed Services vendors with NATURAL and Adabas capabilities:

    Reinvest

    By contrast, reducing the use of your mainframe makes it less cost-effective and more challenging to retain in-house expertise.

    • For organizations that have migrated applications off the mainframe (at least partly to reduce dependency on the platform), inevitably there remains a core set of mission critical applications that cannot be moved off for reasons described on the “Migrate” slide. This is when the mainframe becomes a costly burden:
      • TCO is relatively high due to low utilization.
      • In-house expertise declines as workload declines and current staffing allocations become harder to justify.
    • Organizations that are instead adding capacity and finding new ways to use this platform have lower cost concerns and resourcing challenges. The charts below illustrate this correlation. While some capacity growth is due to normal business growth, some is also due to new workloads, and it reflects an ongoing commitment to the platform.

    *92% of organizations that added capacity said TCO is lower than for commodity servers (compared to 50% of those who did not add capacity)

    *63% of organizations that added capacity said finding resources is not very difficult (compared to 42% of those who did not add capacity)
    The image contains a bar graph as described in the above text. The image contains a bar graph as described in the above text.

    *Maximize the Value of IBM Mainframes in My Business

    An important thought about data migration

    Mainframe data migrations – “VSAM, IMS, etc.”

    • While the application will be replaced and re-platformed, there is the historical VIN data remaining in the VSAM files and access via the application. The challenge is that a bulk conversion can add upfront costs and delay the re-platforming of the application functionality. Some shops will break the historical data migration into a couple of phases.
    • While there are technical solutions to accessing VSAM data stores, what I have observed with other members facing a similar scenario is a need to “shrink” the data store over time. The technical accesses to historical VSAM records would also have a lifespan, and rather than kicking the can down the road indefinitely, many have turned to a process-based solution allowing them to shrink the historical data store over time. I have observed three approaches to the handling or digitization of historical records like this:

    Temporary workaround. This would align with a technical solution allowing the VASM files to be accessed using platforms other than on mainframe hardware (Micro Focus or other file store trickery). This can be accomplished relatively quickly but does run the risk of technology obsolesce for the workaround at some point in the future.

    Bulk conversion. This method would involve the extract/transform/load of the historical records into the new application platform. Often the order of the conversion is completed on work newest to oldest (the idea is that the newest historical records would have the highest likelihood of an access need), but all files would be converted to the new application and the old data store destroyed.

    Forward convert, which would have files undergo the extract/transform/load conversion into the new application as they are accessed or reopened. This method would keep historical records indefinitely or until they are converted – or the legal retention schedule allows for their destruction (hopefully no file must be kept forever). This could be a cost-efficient approach since the historical files remaining on the VSAM platform would be shrunk over time based on demand from the district attorney process. The conversion process could be automated and scripted, with a QR step allowing for the records to be deleted from the old platform.

    Info-Tech Insight

    It is not usual for organizations to leverage options #2 and #3 above to move the functionality forward while containing the scope creep and costs for the data conversions.

    Enterprise class job scheduling

    Job scheduling or data center automation?

    • Enterprise class job scheduling solutions enable complex unattended batched programmatically conditioned task/job scheduling.
    • Data center automation (DCIM) software automates and orchestrates the processes and workflow for infrastructure operations including provisioning, configuring, patching of physical, virtual, and cloud servers, and monitoring of tasks involved in maintaining the operations of a data center or Infrastructure environment.
    • While there maybe some overlap and or confusion between data center automation and enterprise class job scheduling solutions, data center automation (DCIM) software solutions are least likely to have support for non-commodity server platforms and lack robust scheduling functionality.

    Note: Enterprise job scheduling is a topic with low member interest or demand. Since our published research is driven by members’ interest and needs, the lack of activity or member demand would obviously be a significant influence into our ability to aggregate shared member insight, trends, or best practices in our published agenda.

    Data Center Automation (DCIM) Software

    Orchestration/Provisioning Software

    Enterprise class job scheduling features

    The feature set for these tools is long and comprehensive. The feature list below is not exhaustive as specific tools may have additional product capabilities. At a minimum, the solutions offered by the vendors in the list below will have the following capabilities:

    • Automatic restart and recovery
    • File management
    • Integration with security systems such as AD
    • Operator alerts
    • Ability to control spooling devices
    • Cross-platform support
    • Cyclical scheduling
    • Deadline scheduling
    • Event-based scheduling / triggers
    • Inter-dependent jobs
    • External task monitoring (e.g. under other sub-systems)
    • Multiple calendars and time-zones
    • Scheduling of packaged applications (such as SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards)
    • The ability to schedule web applications (e.g. .net, java-based)
    • Workload analysis
    • Conditional dependencies
    • Critical process monitoring
    • Event-based automation (“self-healing” processes in response to common defined error conditions)
    • Graphical job stream/workflow visualization
    • Alerts (job failure notifications, task thresholds (too long, too quickly, missed windows, too short, etc.) via multiple channels
    • API’s supporting programmable scheduler needs
    • Virtualization support
    • Workload forecasting and workload planning
    • Logging and message data supporting auditing capabilities likely to be informed by or compliant with regulatory needs such as Sarbanes, Gramme-Leach
    • Historical reporting
    • Auditing reports and summaries

    Understand your vendors and tools

    List and compare the job scheduling features of each vendor.

    • This is not presented as an exhaustive list.
    • The list relies on observations aggregated from analyst engagements with Info-Tech Research Group members. Those member discussions tend to be heavily tilted toward solutions supporting non-commodity platforms.
    • Nothing is implied about a solution suitability or capability by the order of presentation or inclusion or absence in this list.

    ✓ Advanced Systems Concepts

    ✓ BMC

    ✓ Broadcom

    ✓ HCL

    ✓ Fortra

    ✓ Redwood

    ✓ SMA Technologies

    ✓ StoneBranch

    ✓ Tidal Software

    ✓ Vinzant Software

    Info-Tech Insight

    Creating vendor profiles will help quickly filter the solution providers that directly meet your z/Series needs.

    Advanced Systems Concepts

    ActiveBatch

    Workload Management:

    Summary

    Founded in 1981, ASCs ActiveBatch “provides a central automation hub for scheduling and monitoring so that business-critical systems, like CRM, ERP, Big Data, BI, ETL tools, work order management, project management, and consulting systems, work together seamlessly with minimal human intervention.”*

    URL

    advsyscon.com

    Coverage:

    Global

    Amazon EC2

    Hadoop Ecosystem

    IBM Cognos

    DataStage

    IBM PureData (Netezza)

    Informatica Cloud

    Microsoft Azure

    Microsoft Dynamics AX

    Microsoft SharePoint

    Microsoft Team Foundation Server

    Oracle EBS

    Oracle PeopleSoft

    SAP

    BusinessObjects

    ServiceNow

    Teradata

    VMware

    Windows

    Linux

    Unix

    IBM i

    *Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc.


    BMC

    Control-M

    Workload Management:

    Summary

    Founded in 1980, BMCs Control-M product “simplifies application and data workflow orchestration on premises or as a service. It makes it easy to build, define, schedule, manage, and monitor production workflows, ensuring visibility, reliability, and improving SLAs.”*

    URL

    bmc.com/it-solutions/control-m.html

    Coverage:

    Global

    AWS

    Azure

    Google Cloud Platform

    Cognos

    IBM InfoSphere

    DataStage

    SAP HANA

    Oracle EBS

    Oracle PeopleSoft

    BusinessObjects

    ServiceNow

    Teradata

    VMware

    Windows

    Linux

    Unix

    IBM i

    IBM z/OS

    zLinux

    *BMC

    Broadcom

    Atomic Automation

    Autosys Workload Automation

    Workload Management:

    Summary

    Broadcom offers Atomic Automation and Autosys Workload Automation which ”gives you the agility, speed and reliability required for effective digital business automation. From a single unified platform, Atomic centrally provides the orchestration and automation capabilities needed accelerate your digital transformation and support the growth of your company.”*

    URL

    broadcom.com/products/software/automation/automic-automation

    broadcom.com/products/software/automation/autosys

    Coverage:

    Global


    Windows

    MacOS

    Linux

    UNIX

    AWS

    Azure

    Google Cloud Platform

    VMware

    z/OS

    zLinux

    System i

    OpenVMS

    Banner

    Ecometry

    Hadoop

    Oracle EBS

    Oracle PeopleSoft

    SAP

    BusinessObjects

    ServiceNow

    Teradata

    VMware

    Windows

    Linux

    Unix

    IBM i

    *Broadcom

    HCL

    Workload Automation

    Workload Management:

    Summary

    “HCL Workload Automation streamlined modelling, advanced AI and open integration for observability. Accelerate the digital transformation of modern enterprises, ensuring business agility and resilience with our latest version of one stop automation platform. Orchestrate unattended and event-driven tasks for IT and business processes from legacy to cloud and kubernetes systems.”*

    URL

    hcltechsw.com/workload-automation

    Coverage:

    Global


    Windows

    MacOS

    Linux

    UNIX

    AWS

    Azure

    Google Cloud Platform

    VMware

    z/OS

    zLinux

    System i

    OpenVMS

    IBM SoftLayer

    IBM BigInsights

    IBM Cognos

    Hadoop

    Microsoft Dynamics 365

    Microsoft Dynamics AX

    Microsoft SQL Server

    Oracle E-Business Suite

    PeopleSoft

    SAP

    ServiceNow

    Apache Oozie

    Informatica PowerCenter

    IBM InfoSphere DataStage

    Salesforce

    BusinessObjects BI

    IBM Sterling Connect:Direct

    IBM WebSphere MQ

    IBM Cloudant

    Apache Spark

    *HCL Software

    Fortra

    JAMS Scheduler

    Workload Management:

    Summary

    Fortra’s “JAMS is a centralized workload automation and job scheduling solution that runs, monitors, and manages jobs and workflows that support critical business processes.

    JAMS reliably orchestrates the critical IT processes that run your business. Our comprehensive workload automation and job scheduling solution provides a single pane of glass to manage, execute, and monitor jobs—regardless of platforms or applications.”*

    URL

    jamsscheduler.com

    Coverage:

    Global


    OpenVMS

    OS/400

    Unix

    Windows

    z/OS

    SAP

    Oracle

    Microsoft

    Infor

    Workday

    AWS

    Azure

    Google Cloud Compute

    ServiceNow

    Salesforce

    Micro Focus

    Microsoft Dynamics 365

    Microsoft Dynamics AX

    Microsoft SQL Server

    MySQL

    NeoBatch

    Netezza

    Oracle PL/SQL

    Oracle E-Business Suite

    PeopleSoft

    SAP

    SAS

    Symitar

    *JAMS

    Redwood

    Redwood SaaS

    Workload Management:

    Summary

    Founded in 1993 and delivered as a SaaS solution, ”Redwood lets you orchestrate securely and reliably across any application, service or server, in the cloud or on-premises, all inside a single platform. Automation solutions are at the core of critical business operations such as forecasting, replenishment, reconciliation, financial close, order to cash, billing, reporting, and more. Enterprises in every industry — from manufacturing, utility, retail, and biotech to healthcare, banking, and aerospace.”*

    URL

    redwood.com

    Coverage:

    Global


    OpenVMS

    OS/400

    Unix

    Windows

    z/OS

    SAP

    Oracle

    Microsoft

    Infor

    Workday

    AWS

    Azure

    Google Cloud Compute

    ServiceNow

    Salesforce

    Github

    Office 365

    Slack

    Dropbox

    Tableau

    Informatica

    SAP BusinessObjects

    Cognos

    Microsoft Power BI

    Amazon QuickSight

    VMware

    Xen

    Kubernetes

    *Redwood

    Fortra

    Robot Scheduler

    Workload Management:

    Summary

    “Robot Schedule’s workload automation capabilities allow users to automate everything from simple jobs to complex, event-driven processes on multiple platforms and centralize management from your most reliable system: IBM i. Just create a calendar of when and how jobs should run, and the software will do the rest.”*

    URL

    fortra.com/products/job-scheduling-software-ibm-i

    Coverage:

    Global


    IBM i (System i, iSeries, AS/400)

    AIX/UNIX

    Linux

    Windows

    SQL/Server

    Domino

    JD Edwards EnterpriseOne

    SAP

    Automate Schedule (formerly Skybot Scheduler)

    *Fortra

    SMA Technologies

    OpCon

    Workload Management:

    Summary

    Founded in1980, SMA offers to “save time, reduce error, and free your IT staff to work on more strategic contributions with OpCon from SMA Technologies. OpCon offers powerful, easy-to-use workload automation and orchestration to eliminate manual tasks and manage workloads across business-critical operations. It's the perfect fit for financial institutions, insurance companies, and other transactional businesses.”*

    URL

    smatechnologies.com

    Coverage:

    Global

    Windows

    Linux

    Unix

    z/Series

    IBM i

    Unisys

    Oracle

    SAP

    Microsoft Dynamics AX

    Infor M3

    Sage

    Cegid

    Temenos

    FICS

    Microsoft Azure Data Management

    Microsoft Azure VM

    Amazon EC2/AWS

    Web Services RESTful

    Docker

    Google Cloud

    VMware

    ServiceNow

    Commvault

    Microsoft WSUS

    Microsoft Orchestrator

    Java

    JBoss

    Asysco AMT

    Tuxedo ART

    Nutanix

    Corelation

    Symitar

    Fiserv DNA

    Fiserv XP2

    *SMA Technologies

    StoneBranch

    Universal Automation Center (UAC)

    Workload Management:

    Summary

    Founded in 1999, ”the Stonebranch Universal Automation Center (UAC) is an enterprise-grade business automation solution that goes beyond traditional job scheduling. UAC's event-based workload automation solution is designed to automate and orchestrate system jobs and tasks across all mainframe, on-prem, and hybrid IT environments. IT operations teams gain complete visibility and advanced control with a single web-based controller, while removing the need to run individual job schedulers across platforms.”*

    URL

    stonebranch.com/it-automation-solutions/enterprise-job-scheduling

    Coverage:

    Global

    Windows

    Linux

    Unix

    z/Series

    Apache Kafka

    AWS

    Databricks

    Docker

    GitHub

    Google Cloud

    Informatica

    Jenkins

    Jscape

    Kubernetes

    Microsoft Azure

    Microsoft SQL

    Microsoft Teams

    PagerDuty

    PeopleSoft

    Petnaho

    RedHat Ansible

    Salesforce

    SAP

    ServiceNow

    Slack

    SMTP and IMAP

    Snowflake

    Tableau

    VMware

    *Stonebranch

    Tidal Software

    Workload Automation

    Workload Management:

    Summary

    Founded in 1979, Tidal’s Workload Automation will “simplify management and execution of end-to-end business processes with our unified automation platform. Orchestrate workflows whether they're running on-prem, in the cloud or hybrid environments.”*

    URL

    tidalsoftware.com

    Coverage:

    Global

    CentOS

    Linux

    Microsoft Windows Server

    Open VMS

    Oracle Cloud

    Oracle Enterprise Linux

    Red Hat Enterprise Server

    Suse Enterprise

    Tandem NSK

    Ubuntu

    UNIX

    HPUX (PA-RISC, Itanium)

    Solaris (Sparc, X86)

    AIX, iSeries

    z/Linux

    z/OS

    Amazon AWS

    Microsoft Azure

    Oracle OCI

    Google Cloud

    ServiceNow

    Kubernetes

    VMware

    Cisco UCS

    SAP R/3 & SAP S/4HANA

    Oracle E-Business

    Oracle ERP Cloud

    PeopleSoft

    JD Edwards

    Hadoop

    Oracle DB

    Microsoft SQL

    SAP BusinessObjects

    IBM Cognos

    FTP/FTPS/SFTP

    Informatica

    *Tidal

    Vinzant Software

    Global ECS

    Workload Management:

    Summary

    Founded in 1987, Global ECS can “simplify operations in all areas of production with the GECS automation framework. Use a single solution to schedule, coordinate and monitor file transfers, database operations, scripts, web services, executables and SAP jobs. Maximize efficiency for all operations across multiple business units intelligently and automatically.”*

    URL

    vinzantsoftware.com

    Coverage:

    Global

    Windows

    Linux

    Unix

    iSeries

    SAP R/3 & SAP S/4HANA

    Oracle, SQL/Server

    *Vizant Software

    Activity

    Scale Out or Scale Up

    Activities:

    1. Complete the Scale Up vs. Scale Out TCO Tool.
    2. Compare total lifecycle costs to determine TCO.

    This activity involves the following participants:

    IT strategic direction decision makers

    IT managers responsible for an existing z/Series platform

    Organizations evaluating platforms for mission critical applications

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Completed Scale Up vs. Scale Out TCO Tool

    Info-Tech Insight

    This checkpoint process creates transparency around agreement costs with the business and gives the business an opportunity to re-evaluate its requirements for a potentially leaner agreement.

    Scale out versus scale up activity

    The Scale Up vs. Scale Out TCO Tool provides organizations with a framework for estimating the costs associated with purchasing and licensing for a scale-up and scale-out environment over a multi-year period.

    Use this tool to:

    • Compare the pre-populated values.
    • Insert your own amounts to contrast possible database decisions and determine the TCO of each.
    		The image contains screenshots of the Scale Up vs. Scale Out TCO Tool.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Watch out for inaccurate financial information. Ensure that the financials for cost match your maintenance and contract terms.

    Use the Scale Up vs. Scale Out TCO Tool to determine your TCO options.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Effectively Acquire Infrastructure Services

    Acquiring a service is like buying an experience. Don’t confuse the simplicity of buying hardware with buying an experience.

    Outsource IT Infrastructure to Improve System Availability, Reliability, and Recovery

    There are very few IT infrastructure components you should be housing internally – outsource everything else.

    Build Your Infrastructure Roadmap

    Move beyond alignment: Put yourself in the driver’s seat for true business value.

    Define Your Cloud Vision

    Make the most of cloud for your organization.

    Document Your Cloud Strategy

    Drive consensus by outlining how your organization will use the cloud.

    Build a Strategy for Big Data Platforms

    Know where to start and where to focus attention in the implementation of a big data strategy.

    Create a Better RFP Process

    Improve your RFPs to gain leverage and get better results.

    Research Authors

    Darin Stahl.

    Darin Stahl, Principal Research Advisor, Info-Tech Research Group

    Darin is a Principal Research Advisor within the Infrastructure Practice, and 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/ APM, Managed FTP, non-commodity servers (z/Series, mainframe, IBM i, AIX, Power PC).
    Troy Cheeseman.

    Troy Cheeseman, Practice Lead, Info-Tech Research Group

    Troy has over 25 years of IT management 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) start-ups.

    Bibliography

    “AWS Announces AWS Mainframe Modernization.” Business Wire, 30 Nov. 2021.
    de Valence, Phil. “Migrating a Mainframe to AWS in 5 Steps with Astadia?” AWS, 23 Mar. 2018.
    Graham, Nyela. “New study shows mainframes still popular despite the rise of cloud—though times are changing…fast?” WatersTechnology, 12 Sept. 2022.
    “Legacy applications can be revitalized with API.” MuleSoft, 2022.
    Vecchio, Dale. “The Benefits of Running Mainframe Applications on LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe® & Microsoft Azure.” LzLabs Sites, Mar. 2021.

    Reduce Shadow IT With a Service Request Catalog

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    • Parent Category Name: Asset Management
    • Parent Category Link: /asset-management
    • Shadow IT: The IT team is regularly surprised to discover new products within the organization, often when following up on help desk tickets or requests for renewals from business users or vendors.
    • Renewal Management: The contracts and asset teams need to be aware of upcoming renewals and have adequate time to review renewals.
    • Over-purchasing: Contracts may be renewed without a clear picture of usage, potentially renewing unused applications.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    There is a direct correlation between service delivery dissatisfaction and increases in shadow IT. Whether the goal is to reduce shadow IT or gain control, improved customer service and fast delivery are key to making lasting changes.

    Impact and Result

    Our blueprint will help you design a service that draws the business to use it. If it is easier for them to buy from IT than it is to find their own supplier, they will use IT.

    A heavy focus on customer service, design optimization, and automation will provide a means for the business to get what they need, when they need it, and provide visibility to IT and security to protect organizational interests.

    This blueprint will help you:

    • Design the request service
    • Design the request catalog
    • Build the request catalog
    • Market the service

    Reduce Shadow IT With a Service Request Catalog Research & Tools

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

    1. Reduce Shadow IT With a Service Request Catalog – A step-by-step document that walks you through creation of a request service management program.

    Use this blueprint to create a service request management program that provides immediate value.

    • Reduce Shadow IT With a Service Request Catalog Storyboard

    2. Nonstandard Request Assessment – A template for documenting requirements for vetting and onboarding new applications.

    Use this template to define what information is needed to vet and onboard applications into the IT environment.

    • Nonstandard Request Assessment

    3. Service Request Workflows – A library of workflows used as a starting point for creating and fulfilling requests for applications and equipment.

    Use this library of workflows as a starting point for creating and fulfilling requests for applications and equipment in a service catalog.

    • Service Request Workflows

    4. Application Portfolio – A template to organize applications requested by the business and identify which items are published in the catalog.

    Use this template as a starting point to create an application portfolio and request catalog.

    • Application Portfolio

    5. Reduce Shadow IT With a Service Request Catalog Communications Template – A presentation and communications plan to announce changes to the service and introduce a catalog.

    Use this template to create a presentation and communications plan for launching the new service and service request catalog.

    • Reduce Shadow IT with a Service Request Catalog Communications Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Reduce Shadow IT With a Service Request Catalog

    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 Design the Service

    The Purpose

    Collaborate with the business to determine service model.

    Collaborate with IT teams to build non-standard assessment process.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Designed a service for service requests, including new product intake.

    Activities

    1.1 Identify challenges and obstacles.

    1.2 Complete customer journey map.

    1.3 Design process for nonstandard assessments.

    Outputs

    Nonstandard process.

    2 Design the Catalog

    The Purpose

    Design the service request catalog management process.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Ensure the catalog is kept current and is integrated with IT service catalog if applicable.

    Activities

    2.1 Determine what will be listed in the catalog.

    2.2 Determine process to build and maintain the catalog, including roles, responsibilities, and workflows.

    2.3 Define success and determine metrics.

    Outputs

    Catalog scope.

    Catalog design and maintenance plan.

    Defined success metrics

    3 Build and Market the Catalog

    The Purpose

    Determine catalog contents and how requests will be fulfilled.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Catalog framework and service level agreements will be defined.

    Create communications documents.

    Activities

    3.1 Determine how catalog items will be displayed.

    3.2 Complete application categories for catalog.

    3.3 Create deployment categories and SLAs.

    3.4 Design catalog forms and deployment workflows.

    3.5 Create roadmap.

    3.6 Create communications plan.

    Outputs

    Catalog workflows and SLAs.

    Roadmap.

    Communications deck.

    4 Breakout Groups – Working Sessions

    The Purpose

    Create an applications portfolio.

    Prepare to populate the catalog.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Portfolio and catalog contents created.

    Activities

    4.1 Using existing application inventory, add applications to portfolio and categorize.

    4.2 Determine which applications should be in the catalog.

    4.3 Determine which applications are packaged and can be easily deployed.

    Outputs

    Application Portfolio.

    List of catalog items.

    Further reading

    Reduce Shadow IT With a Service Request Catalog

    Foster business partnerships with sourcing-as-a-service.

    Analyst Perspective

    Improve the request management process to reduce shadow IT.

    In July 2022, Ivanti conducted a study on the state of the digital employee experience, surveying 10,000 office workers, IT professionals, and C-suite executives. Results of this study indicated that 49% of employees are frustrated by their tools, and 26% of employees were considering quitting their jobs due to unsuitable tech. 42% spent their own money to gain technology to improve their productivity. Despite this, only 21% of IT leaders prioritized user experience when selecting new tools.

    Any organization’s workers are expected to be productive and contribute to operational improvements or customer experience. Yet those workers don’t always have the tools needed to do the job. One option is to give the business greater control, allowing them to choose and acquire the solutions that will make them more productive. Info-Tech's blueprint Embrace Business-Managed Applications takes you down this path.

    However, if the business doesn’t want to manage applications, but just wants have access to better ones, IT is positioned to provide services for application and equipment sourcing that will improve the employee experience while ensuring applications and equipment are fully managed by the asset, service, and security teams.

    Improving the request management and deployment practice can give the business what they need without forcing them to manage license agreements, renewals, and warranties.

    Photo of Sandi Conrad

    Sandi Conrad
    ITIL Managing Professional
    Principal Research Director, IT Infrastructure & Operations,
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Your challenge

    This research is designed to help organizations that are looking to improve request management processes and reduce shadow IT.

    Shadow IT: The IT team is regularly surprised to discover new products within the organization, often when following up on help desk tickets or requests for renewals from business users or vendors.

    Renewal management: The contracts and asset teams need to be aware of upcoming renewals and have adequate time to review renewals.

    Over-purchasing and over-spending: Contracts may be renewed without a clear picture of utilization, potentially renewing unused applications. Applications or equipment may be purchased at retail price where corporate, government, or educational discounts exist.

    Info-Tech Insight

    To increase the visibility of the IT environment, IT needs to transform the request management process to create a service that makes it easier for the business to access the tools they need rather than seeking them outside of the organization.

    609
    Average number of SaaS applications in large enterprises

    40%
    On average, only 60% of provisioned SaaS licenses are used, with the remaining 40% unused.

    — Source: Zylo, SaaS Trends for IT Leaders, 2022

    Common obstacles

    Too many layers of approvals and a lack of IT workers makes it difficult to rethink service request fulfillment.

    Delays: The business may not be getting the applications they need from IT to do their jobs or must wait too long to get the applications approved.

    Denials: Without IT’s support, the business is finding alternative options, including SaaS applications, as they can be bought and used without IT’s input or knowledge.

    Threats: Applications that have not been vetted by security or installed without their knowledge may present additional threats to the organization.

    Access: Self-serve isn’t mature enough to support an applications catalog.

    A diagram that shows the number of SaaS applications being acquired outside of IT is increasing year over year, and that business units are driving the majority of SaaS spend.

    8: average number of applications entering the organization every 30 days

    — Source: Zylo, SaaS Trends for Procurement, 2022

    Info-Tech’s approach

    Improve the request management process to create sourcing-as-a-service for the business.

    • Improve customer service
    • Reduce shadow IT
    • Gain control in a way that keeps the business happy

    1. Design the service

    Collaborate with the business

    Identify the challenges and obstacles

    Gain consensus on priorities

    Design the service

    2. Design the catalog

    Determine catalog scope

    Create a process to build and maintain the catalog

    Define metrics for the request management process

    3. Build the catalog

    Determine descriptions for catalog items

    Create definitions for license types, workflows, and SLAs

    Create application portfolio

    Design catalog forms and workflows

    4. Market the service

    Create a roadmap

    Determine messaging

    Build a communications plan

    Blueprint deliverables

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

    Communications Presentation

    Photo of Communications Presentation

    Application Portfolio

    Photo of Application Portfolio

    Visio Library

    Photo of Visio Library

    Nonstandard Request Assessment

    Photo of Nonstandard Request Assessment

    Create a request management process and service catalog to improve delivery of technology to the business

    Tymans Group Consulting

    IT resilience, carefree entrepreneurship.

    Discover and implement all the ingredients that make your IT perform fast and rock solid.

    Yes, I want stable and performant IT Operations

    We are multidisciplinary infrastructure and IT Operations experts.
    We bring passion, focus, and results to our work and your company.

    TY innovates resilience embedding in your organization

    Let's have a chat

    • TY as your advisor

      This gives you our expertise on tap. Do you have an issue? Call us. You want to have a sparring partner to solve a problem? Call us. Do you need a sounding board? Call us.

      TY provides advisory services as well as traditional consulting. We also execute study and revision services for your policies, standards, procedures, and guidelines to ensure compliance with DORA, NIS2 and corporate requirements of both your own company and that of your clients. And we also check against our internal best ways of working.

      Book a conversation

    • Focused Consulting and Implementing

      This is where you have our undivided attention, and we work with you one on one until resolution. Note that there is a waiting period for this service at this time.

      If you are interested, please first book a call so that we can determine if we are a good fit together.

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    What our relations tell us

    • Citigroup Manager

      As a technical consultant, Gert is an All-Star performer...  He has got many wins under his belt... His willingness to work hard, knowledge of regional systems (especially Tokyo) and Microsoft Office is well respected within the Group 

    • Sandra

      Tx for all the efforts done! Great Job! And good luck for the ones amongst you that still need to work tomorrow Grtz Sandra VB

    • Patrick A.

      Hi Gert, I'm busy documenting .... Thanks for your real friendly and careful, yet effective support :-) Patrick A.

    • Lucie VH

      During my vacation, Gert took over the management of a number of ongoing problems. Even before I actually left for my trip, he took action and proposed a number of improvements. Gert coordinated between the different stakeholders and PTA's and resolved a number of acute issues. And he did this in a very pleasant, yet effective way.

    • Dawn

      No worries. It only freaked me out for a few minutes, then I saw that the system had blocked them from doing any real damage. Thanks for the cleanup and extra measures, though! As always, you rock!

    • After a successful DRP

      Thanks for all the efforts done ans special Tx Gert for Coordinating this again!

    • A CIO

      Yet again Gert, Thanks for handling this in such a top way!

    • A Sales Manager

      Awesome Gert, I will let the team know we can close this issue!

    • Investment bank manager

      Flexibility, Adaptability, problem Solving are Gert's strong points, Exceptionally beneficial in "crisis." I can attest that Gert will always see a problem through. if he needs to hand it off, it will aways have good handoff notes. His business knowledge is good and will part of the next project.

    • Wall Street Performance Review

      As with the classes for SFC, Gert organised formal classes for all of the Research IT teams.... I would class this job as well done, given everything that was going on with Rsearch IT. 

    • Stuart B on Gert Taeymans

      Excellent technical resource. Quick help on issues and provide explanations to regional teams. Often covers for us in the evenings or when things get particularly busy.

    • Asia support to roll out global system

      Gert time in Japan was a great success. He really helped the IT group through a really difficult tume during the roll out of {the global research publishing system} and had to cover all the bases that had not been properly coverd by the previous person in Japan. Gert's visit also coincided with Stuart's joining into the Asia IT Research group. Gert was very flexible  in the hours that he worked and the lenght of time he was out in Tokyo (in the end more than 4 weeks.)

      The feedback from both the users and the IT group was VERY positive on Gertt's contribution. He was more than capabable to put across technical points to the IT team, in their language.

    • IT Director

      Gert is a knowledgeable individual who takes on additional responsibility... rapidly addressng end-user issues and developing custom solutions when needed.

    Benefits of working with Tymans Group

    • We focus on actual deliverables

      TY delivers on the IT resilience what and how. Get actionable IT, management, governance, and productivity research, insights, blueprints with templates, easy-to-use tools, and clear instructions to help you execute effectively and become IT resilient.

    • Get insights from top IT professionals

      Our TY network base constantly informs us about our IT resilience research and validates it through client experiences. TY adds to that by applying this research to real-world situations in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Europe and the US.

    • Data-driven insights

      It is tempting to use your gut instinct. Don't. Everything TY does, is data-driven. From our research to our interactions with you, we use an analytical approach to help you move forward with your key IT resilience projects.

    Frequently asked questions

    • How does Tymans Group IT Operations advisory work?

      TY believes strongly in leveraging technology and personal delivery. That is why TY uses one on one calling sessions using Teams and Zoom. When needed I do on site delivery.

      Every advisory option has a set number of interactive contact points in addition to email and chat options. Every contact request is answered by me personally. 

      Through the use of technology, I ensure that instead of you having to drive to your coach, the coach “comes” to you!

    • What are Tymans Group advisory service timings?

      TY is available on European time from 09:00 until 17:00 and US EST 09:00-17:00 (depending on already booked appointments). 

    • How much to Tymans Group programs cost?

      While this is a difficult question to answer, let's give it a shot.

      Ideally I work value-based. But this is more for well-defined projects where the ROI is quantifiable rather than qualifiable.

      Often advisory services are a discovery and we obtain results together. You may even only need an experienced sounding board. This type of pricing starts from €4,500.

    • Does Tymans Group have a "pick your brain" option?

      By popular demand, yes, I added this. It is not the cheapest way to use me, but it may be the most effective for you.

    • How are Tymans Group advisory services delivered?

      TY believes strongly in leveraging technology and personal delivery. That is why TY uses one on one calling sessions using Teams and Zoom. When needed I do on site delivery.

      This way I ensure that instead of you having to drive to your coach, the coach “comes” to you!

      You are allowed to record the sessions and use them internally in your organization, including as part of your internal training. You are not allowed to resell these without a resale agreement.

    • Tymans Group is delivered online via calls? Isn't on-site better?

      Interestingly, in the majority of advisory services the answer is no.

      Purely on-site automatically limits the time we can spend together. Thus, typically, the interactions are of a shorter duration. Even when this is done over a longer timeframe, like 5 to 10 days, this is really too short for effective advising, coaching and mentoring. 

      We stay away from accelerated programs, where I can send a lot of information, and most of it will not stick.

      Terry Sejnowski  a neuroscientist, actually states that cramming does not help you remember. It gets you, maybe, through the next exam, but the information is not retained. The way to integrate and remember information is to spread out the study and repeat. This is called the spacing effect.

      This is why I employ the online delivery method. When you record our sessions, you can come back and again repeat it, note down your questions and fire them off to me. I respond and you go back into the talk. Then you apply, possibly fail, and come back again until it succeeds, and then you make it your own.

      That is why time-pressured, on-site delivery does not work. Our method makes you effective because you internalized the material and feedback. This can then be rounded-off by on-site finalization.

      10-15 years ago, this was not possible, as the web-based tools were simply not fast enough. Today, unless you are taking classes like carpentry or other topics that require on-site delivery, online delivery is the way to go.

    • Can I pay by wire transfer?

      We actually prefer wire transfer. It cuts down on the financial fees and it is the norm in the European Union. Our US customer can also use this feature and pay into our US bank.

    • Where is Tymans Group located?

      Tymans Group has two locations:

      In Europe, Belgium and in Greenville, DE, United States, 

      The HQ is in Belgium.

    • Does this work for less than 25 employees?

      Resilience is not size-dependent. That said, if you are supplying critical services to financial services firms, you may not have a choice. In that case, be prepared to up your game. Call TY in this case. We can help you fulfill third-party requirements, such as the DORA regulation.

      In other cases, if you plan to grow your company beyond 25 employees, then yes. Start with the basics, though. Make sure you have a good understanding of your current challenges. Schedule a chat with me to determine the right baseline.

      If you are just starting out and want to ensure that your company's processes are correct right out of the gate, it's better to give me a call. We can start you off in the right direction without spending too much.

      Our guides are only available to existing advisory clients. Let's chat informally if we are a fit for you.

    • I'm a small business owner, can I do all this by myself?

      Our guides are only available to existing advisory clients.

      But also see the above question about company size and target clients. If you have fewer than 25 employees and you are not supplying critical services to financial institutions, then maybe some of our guides are not for you. We can still help you organize your resilience, but it may be more cost-effective to use only our TY Advisory services.

      Once you grow beyond 25 employees, you will benefit from our processes. Just implement what you need. How do you know what you require? You probably already have an inkling of what is lacking in your organization. If you are unsure, please get in touch with us.

      In short, the answer is yes, and TY can help you. Once you know what you are looking for, that guide allows you to handle it yourself. If you require help selecting the right guide, please get in touch with us.

    • Do you provide refunds?

      Before buying the DIY guides, available only to existing advisory clients,, please refer to the free Executive Summary when available. If there is no Executive summary available, please contact me with any questions you have. 

      As these are downloadable products, I cannot provide any refunds, but I will help you with any exchange where you have a good reason. 

    • I bought the wrong item

      If you bought the wrong item, please contact me and we'll be happy to provide an alternative item.

    • I want more assistance

      Yes, more assistance is available.  Tymans Group can provide you with any assistance you require within the parameters of your contract.

      Per-guide assistance ranges from a single phone or video consultation to guided implementation or a workshop. Alternatively we can go to do-it-for-you implementation or even full-time consulting.

      Note that our guides are only available to existing advisory clients.

      Please contact me for a talk.

    I want more information to become more resilient.

    Continue reading

    Build a Security Compliance Program

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    • Parent Category Name: Governance, Risk & Compliance
    • Parent Category Link: /governance-risk-compliance
    • Most organizations spend between 25 and 40 percent of their security budget on compliance-related activities.
    • Despite this growing investment in compliance, only 28% of organizations believe that government regulations help them improve cybersecurity.
    • The cost of complying with cybersecurity and data protection requirements has risen to the point where 58% of companies see compliance costs as barriers to entering new markets.
    • However, recent reports suggest that while the costs of complying are higher, the costs of non-compliance are almost three times greater.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Test once, attest many. Having a control framework allows you to satisfy multiple compliance requirements by testing a single control.
    • Choose your own conformance adventure. Conformance levels allow your organization to make informed business decisions on how compliance resources will be allocated.
    • Put the horse before the cart. Take charge of your audit costs by preparing test scripts and evidence repositories in advance.

    Impact and Result

    • Reduce complexity within the control environment by using a single framework to align multiple compliance regimes.
    • Provide senior management with a structured framework for making business decisions on allocating costs and efforts related to cybersecurity and data protection compliance obligations.
    • Reduces costs and efforts related to managing IT audits through planning and preparation.
    • This blueprint can help you comply with NIST, ISO, CMMC, SOC2, PCI, CIS, and other cybersecurity and data protection requirements.

    Build a Security Compliance Program Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should manage your security compliance obligations, 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:

    Infographic

    Workshop: Build a Security Compliance 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 Establish the Program

    The Purpose

    Establish the security compliance management program.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Reviewing and adopting an information security control framework.

    Understanding and establishing roles and responsibilities for security compliance management.

    Identifying and scoping operational environments for applicable compliance obligations.

    Activities

    1.1 Review the business context.

    1.2 Review the Info-Tech security control framework.

    1.3 Establish roles and responsibilities.

    1.4 Define operational environments.

    Outputs

    RACI matrix

    Environments list and definitions

    2 Identify Obligations

    The Purpose

    Identify security and data protection compliance obligations.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identifying the security compliance obligations that apply to your organization.

    Documenting obligations and obtaining direction from management on conformance levels.

    Mapping compliance obligation requirements into your control framework.

    Activities

    2.1 Identify relevant security and data protection compliance obligations.

    2.2 Develop conformance level recommendations.

    2.3 Map compliance obligations into control framework.

    2.4 Develop process for operationalizing identification activities.

    Outputs

    List of compliance obligations

    Completed Conformance Level Approval forms

    (Optional) Mapped compliance obligation

    (Optional) Identification process diagram

    3 Implement Compliance Strategy

    The Purpose

    Understand how to build a compliance strategy.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Updating security policies and other control design documents to reflect required controls.

    Aligning your compliance obligations with your information security strategy.

    Activities

    3.1 Review state of information security policies.

    3.2 Recommend updates to policies to address control requirements.

    3.3 Review information security strategy.

    3.4 Identify alignment points between compliance obligations and information security strategy.

    3.5 Develop compliance exception process and forms.

    Outputs

    Recommendations and plan for updates to information security policies

    Compliance exception forms

    4 Track and Report

    The Purpose

    Track the status of your compliance program.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Tracking the status of your compliance obligations.

    Managing exceptions to compliance requirements.

    Reporting on the compliance management program to senior stakeholders.

    Activities

    4.1 Define process and forms for self-attestation.

    4.2 Develop audit test scripts for selected controls.

    4.3 Review process and entity control types.

    4.4 Develop self-assessment process.

    4.5 Integrate compliance management with risk register.

    4.6 Develop metrics and reporting process.

    Outputs

    Self-attestation forms

    Completed test scripts for selected controls

    Self-assessment process

    Reporting process

    Recommended metrics

    Position and Agree on ROI to Maximize the Impact of Data and Analytics

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    • Because ROI is a financial concept, it can be difficult to apply ROI to anything that produces intangible value.
    • It is a lot harder to apply ROI to functions like data and analytics than it is to apply it to functions like sales without misrepresenting its true purpose.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The standard ROI formula cannot be easily applied to data and analytics and other critical functions across the organization.
    • Data and analytics ROI strategy is based on the business problem being solved.
    • The ROI score itself doesn’t have to be perfect. Key decision makers need to agree on the parameters and measures of success.

    Impact and Result

    • Agreed-upon ROI parameters
    • Defined measures of success
    • Optimized ROI program effectiveness by establishing an appropriate cadence between key stakeholders

    Position and Agree on ROI to Maximize the Impact of Data and Analytics Research & Tools

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

    1. Data and Analytics ROI Strategy Deck – A guide for positioning ROI to maximize the value of data and analytics.

    This research is meant to ensure that data and analytics executives are aligned with the key business decision makers. Focus on the value you are trying to achieve rather than perfecting the ROI score.

    • Position and Agree on ROI to Maximize the Impact of Data and Analytics Storyboard

    2. Data and Analytics Service to Business ROI Map – An aligned ROI approach between key decision makers and data and analytics.

    A tool to be used by business and data and analytics decision makers to facilitate discussions about how to approach ROI for data and analytics.

    • Data and Analytics Service to Business ROI Map
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Position and Agree on ROI to Maximize the Impact of Data and Analytics

    Data and analytics ROI strategy is based on the business problem being solved and agreed-upon value being generated.

    Analyst Perspective

    Missing out on a significant opportunity for returns could be the biggest cost to the project and its sponsor.

    This research is directed to the key decision makers tasked with addressing business problems. It also informs stakeholders that have any interest in ROI, especially when applying it to a data and analytics platform and practice.

    While organizations typically use ROI to measure the performance of their investments, the key to determining what investment makes sense is opportunity cost. Missing out on a significant opportunity for return could be the biggest cost to the project and its sponsor. By making sure you appropriately estimate costs and value returned for all data and analytics activities, you can prioritize the ones that bring in the greatest returns.
    Ibrahim Abdel-Kader
    Research Analyst,
    Data & Analytics Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group    		 Ben Abrishami-Shirazi
    Technical Counselor
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary – ROI on Data and Analytics

    Your Challenge

    Common Obstacles

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    Return on investment (ROI) is a financial term, making it difficult to articulate value when trying to incorporate anything that produces something intangible.

    The more financial aspects there are to a professional function (e.g. sales and commodity-related functions), the easier it is to properly assess the ROI.

    However, for functions that primarily enable or support business functions (such as IT and data and analytics), it is a lot harder to apply ROI without misrepresenting its true purpose.
    • Apples and oranges – There is no simple way to apply the standard ROI formula to data and analytics among other critical functions across the organization.
    • Boiling the ocean – Obsession with finding a way to calculate a perfect ROI on data and analytics.
    • Not getting the big picture – Data and analytics teams suffer a skill set deficit when it comes to commercial acumen.
    • Not seeing eye to eye – ROI does not account for time in its calculation, making it prone to misalignment between stakeholders.

    Approach ROI for data and analytics appropriately:

    • Answer the following questions:
      • What is the business problem?
      • Whose business problem is it?
      • What is the objective?
    • Define measures of success based on the answers to the questions above.
    • Determine an appropriate cadence to continuously optimize the ROI program for data and analytics in collaboration with business problem owners.

    Info-Tech Insight

    ROI doesn’t have to be perfect. Parameters and measures of success need to be agreed upon with the key decision makers.

    Glossary

    Return on Investment (ROI): A financial term used to determine how much value has been or will be gained or lost based on the total cost of investment. It is typically expressed as a percentage and is supported by the following formula:

    Payback: How quickly money is paid back (or returned) on the initial investment.
    Business Problem Owner (BPO): A leader in the organization who is accountable and is the key decision maker tasked with addressing a business problem through a series of investments. BPOs may use ROI as a reference for how their financial investments have performed and to influence future investment decisions.
    Problem Solver: A key stakeholder tasked with collaborating with the BPO in addressing the business problem at hand. One of the problem solver’s responsibilities is to ensure that there is an improved return on the BPO’s investments.
    Return Enhancers: A category for capabilities that directly or indirectly enhance the return of an investment.
    Cost Savers: A category for capabilities that directly or indirectly save costs in relation of an investment.
    Investment Opportunity Enablers: A category for capabilities that create or enable a new investment opportunity that may yield a potential return.
    Game Changing Components: The components of a capability that directly yield value in solving a business problem.

    ROI strategy on data and analytics

    The image contains a screenshot of a diagram that demonstrates the ROI strategy on data and analytics.

    ROI roles

    Typical roles involved in the ROI strategy across the organization

    CDOs and CAOs typically have their budget allocated from both IT and business units.

    This is evidenced by the “State of the CIO Survey 2023” reporting that up to 63% of CDOs and CAOs have some budget allocated from within IT; therefore, up to 37% of budgets are entirely funded by business executives.

    This signifies the need to be aligned with peer executives and to use mechanisms like ROI to maximize the performance of investments.

    Source: Foundry, “State of the CIO Survey 2023.”

    Build a Vendor Security Assessment Service

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    • Parent Category Name: Threat Intelligence & Incident Response
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    • Vendor security risk management is a growing concern for many organizations. Whether suppliers or business partners, we often trust them with our most sensitive data and processes.
    • More and more regulations require vendor security risk management, and regulator expectations in this area are growing.
    • However, traditional approaches to vendor security assessments are seen by business partners and vendors as too onerous and are unsustainable for information security departments.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • An efficient and effective assessment process can only be achieved when all stakeholders are participating.
    • Security assessments are time-consuming for both you and your vendors. Maximize the returns on your effort with a risk-based approach.
    • Effective vendor security risk management is an end-to-end process that includes assessment, risk mitigation, and periodic re-assessments.

    Impact and Result

    • Develop an end-to-end security risk management process that includes assessments, risk treatment through contracts and monitoring, and periodic re-assessments.
    • Base your vendor assessments on the actual risks to your organization to ensure that your vendors are committed to the process and you have the internal resources to fully evaluate assessment results.
    • Understand your stakeholder needs and goals to foster support for vendor security risk management efforts.

    Build a Vendor Security Assessment Service Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should build a vendor security assessment service, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the three 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 governance and process

    Determine your business requirements and build your process to meet them.

    • Build a Vendor Security Assessment Service – Phase 1: Define Governance and Process
    • Vendor Security Policy Template
    • Vendor Security Process Template
    • Vendor Security Process Diagram (Visio)
    • Vendor Security Process Diagram (PDF)

    2. Develop assessment methodology

    Develop the specific procedures and tools required to assess vendor risk.

    • Build a Vendor Security Assessment Service – Phase 2: Develop Assessment Methodology
    • Service Risk Assessment Questionnaire
    • Vendor Security Questionnaire
    • Vendor Security Assessment Inventory

    3. Deploy and monitor process

    Implement the process and develop metrics to measure effectiveness.

    • Build a Vendor Security Assessment Service – Phase 3: Deploy and Monitor Process
    • Vendor Security Requirements Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Build a Vendor Security Assessment Service

    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 Governance and Process

    The Purpose

    Understand business and compliance requirements.

    Identify roles and responsibilities.

    Define the process.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding of key goals for process outcomes.

    Documented service that leverages existing processes.

    Activities

    1.1 Review current processes and pain points.

    1.2 Identify key stakeholders.

    1.3 Define policy.

    1.4 Develop process.

    Outputs

    RACI Matrix

    Vendor Security Policy

    Defined process

    2 Define Methodology

    The Purpose

    Determine methodology for assessing procurement risk.

    Develop procedures for performing vendor security assessments.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Standardized, repeatable methodologies for supply chain security risk assessment.

    Activities

    2.1 Identify organizational security risk tolerance.

    2.2 Develop risk treatment action plans.

    2.3 Define schedule for re-assessments.

    2.4 Develop methodology for assessing service risk.

    Outputs

    Security risk tolerance statement

    Risk treatment matrix

    Service Risk Questionnaire

    3 Continue Methodology

    The Purpose

    Develop procedures for performing vendor security assessments.

    Establish vendor inventory.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Standardized, repeatable methodologies for supply chain security risk assessment.

    Activities

    3.1 Develop vendor security questionnaire.

    3.2 Define procedures for vendor security assessments.

    3.3 Customize the vendor security inventory.

    Outputs

    Vendor security questionnaire

    Vendor security inventory

    4 Deploy Process

    The Purpose

    Define risk treatment actions.

    Deploy the process.

    Monitor the process.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding of how to treat different risks according to the risk tolerance.

    Defined implementation strategy.

    Activities

    4.1 Define risk treatment action plans.

    4.2 Develop implementation strategy.

    4.3 Identify process metrics.

    Outputs

    Vendor security requirements

    Understanding of required implementation plans

    Metrics inventory

    Build an Application Rationalization Framework

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    • Almost two-thirds of organizations report that they have too many or far too many applications due to sprawl from poorly managed portfolios, and application managers are spending too much time supporting non-critical applications and not enough time on their most vital ones.
    • The necessary pieces of rationalization are rarely in one place. You need to assemble the resources to collect vital rationalization criteria.
    • There is a lack of standard practices to define the business value that the applications in a portfolio provide, and without value rationalization, decisions are misaligned to business needs.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    There is no “one size fits all.” Applying a rigid approach to rationalization with inflexible inputs can delay or prevent you from realizing value. Play to your strengths and build a framework that aligns to your goals and limitations.

    Impact and Result

    • Define the roles, responsibilities, and outputs for application rationalization within your application portfolio management practice.
    • Build a tailored application rationalization framework (ARF) aligned with your motivations, goals, and limitations.
    • Apply the various application assessments to produce the information that your dispositions will be based on.
    • Initiate an application portfolio roadmap that will showcase your rationalization decisions to key stakeholders.

    Build an Application Rationalization Framework Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should rationalize your applications and why you need a framework that is specific to your goals and limitations, 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. Lay your foundations

    Define the motivations, goals, and scope of your rationalization effort. Build the action plan and engagement tactics to roll out the rationalization activities.

    • Build an Application Rationalization Framework – Phase 1: Lay Your Foundations
    • Application Rationalization Tool

    2. Plan your application rationalization framework

    Understand the core assessments performed in application rationalizations. Define your application rationalization framework and degree of rigor in applying these assessments based on your goals and limitations.

    • Build an Application Rationalization Framework – Phase 2: Plan Your Application Rationalization Framework

    3. Test and adapt your application rationalization framework

    Test your application rationalization framework using Info-Tech’s tool set on your first iteration. Perform a retrospective and adapt your framework based on that experience and outcomes.

    • Build an Application Rationalization Framework – Phase 3: Test and Adapt Your Application Rationalization Framework
    • Application TCO Calculator
    • Value Calculator

    4. Initiate your roadmap

    Review, determine, and prioritize your dispositions to ensure they align to your goals. Initiate an application portfolio roadmap to showcase your rationalization decisions to key stakeholders.

    • Build an Application Rationalization Framework – Phase 4: Initiate Your Roadmap
    • Disposition Prioritization Tool
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Build an Application Rationalization Framework

    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

    Define the goals, scope, roles, and responsibilities of your rationalization effort.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Defined motivations, long and short-term goals, and metrics for your rationalization effort.

    Definition of application.

    Defined roles and responsibilities for your rationalization effort.

    Activities

    1.1 Define motivations and goals for rationalization.

    1.2 Define “application.”

    1.3 Identify team and responsivities.

    1.4 Adapt target dispositions.

    1.5 Initiate Application Rationalization Framework (ARF).

    Outputs

    Goals, motivations, and metrics for rationalizations

    Definition of “Application”

    Defined dispositions

    Defined core APM team and handoffs

    2 Assess Business Value

    The Purpose

    Review and adapt Info-Tech’s methodology and toolset.

    Assess business value of applications.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Tailored application rationalization framework

    Defined business value drivers

    Business value scores for applications

    Activities

    2.1 Review Application Rationalization Tool.

    2.2 Review focused apps, capabilities, and areas of functionality overlap.

    2.3 Define business value drivers.

    2.4 Determine the value score of focused apps.

    Outputs

    Application Rationalization Tool

    List of functional overlaps

    Weighed business value drivers

    Value scores for focused application

    Value Calculator

    3 Gather Application Information

    The Purpose

    Continue to review and adapt Info-Tech’s methodology and toolset.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Tailored application rationalization framework

    TCO values for applications

    Technical health review of applications

    Recommended dispositions for applications

    Activities

    3.1 Determine TCO for focused apps.

    3.2 Determine technical health of focused apps.

    3.3 Review APA.

    3.4 Review recommended dispositions.

    3.5 Perform retrospective of assessments and adapt ARF.

    Outputs

    TCO of focused applications

    TCO Calculator

    Technical health of focused apps

    Defined rationalization criteria

    Recommended disposition for focused apps

    4 Gather, Assess, and Select Dispositions

    The Purpose

    Review and perform high-level prioritization of dispositions.

    Build a roadmap for dispositions.

    Determine ongoing rationalization and application portfolio management activities.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Application Portfolio Roadmap

    Prioritized Dispositions

    Activities

    4.1 Determine dispositions.

    4.2 Prioritize dispositions.

    4.3 Initiate portfolio roadmap.

    4.4 Build an action plan for next iterations and ongoing activities.

    4.5 Finalize ARF.

    Outputs

    Disposition Prioritization Tool

    Application portfolio roadmap

    Action plan for next iterations and ongoing activities

    Further reading

    Build an Application Rationalization Framework

    Manage your application portfolio to minimize risk and maximize value.

    Analyst Perspective

    "You're not rationalizing for the sake of IT, you’re rationalizing your apps to create better outcomes for the business and your customers. Consider what’s in it for delivery, operations, the business, and the customer." – Cole Cioran, Senior Director – Research, Application Delivery and Management

    Our understanding of the problem

    This Research Is Designed For:

    • Application portfolio managers, application portfolio management (APM) teams, or any application leaders who are tasked with making application portfolio decisions.
    • Application leaders looking to align their portfolios to the organization’s strategy.
    • Application leaders who need a process for rationalizing their applications.

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Measure the business value of your applications.
    • Rationalize your portfolio to determine the best disposition for each application.
    • Initiate a roadmap that will showcase the future of your applications.

    This Research Will Also Assist:

    • CIOs and other business leaders who need to understand the applications in their portfolio, the value they contribute to the business, and their strategic direction over a given timeline.
    • Steering committees and/or the PMO that needs to understand the process by which application dispositions are generated.

    This Research Will Help Them:

    • Build their reputation as an IT leader who drives the business forward.
    • Define the organization’s value statement in the context of IT and their applications.
    • Visualize the roadmap to the organization’s target application landscape.

    Executive Summary

    Situation

    • Almost two-thirds of organizations report that they have too many or far too many applications due to sprawl from poorly managed portfolios (Flexera, 2015).
    • Application managers are spending too much time supporting non-critical applications and not enough time on their most vital ones.
    • Application managers need their portfolios to be current and effective and evolve continuously to support the business or risk being marginalized.

    Complication

    • The necessary pieces of rationalization are rarely in one place. You need to assemble the resources to collect vital rationalization criteria.
    • There is a lack of standard practices to define the business value that the applications in a portfolio provide and, without value rationalization, decisions are misaligned to business needs.

    Resolution

    • Define the roles, responsibilities, and outputs for application rationalization within your application portfolio management (APM) and other related practices.
    • Build a tailored application rationalization framework (ARF) aligned with your motivations, goals, and limitations.
    • Apply the various application assessments to produce the information, which your dispositions will be based on, and adapt your ARF based on the experiences of your first iteration.
    • Review, determine, and prioritize your application dispositions to create a portfolio strategy aligned to your goals.
    • Initiate an application portfolio roadmap, which will showcase your rationalization decisions to key stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Insight

    There is no one size fits all.

    Applying a rigid approach with inflexible inputs can delay or prevent you from realizing value. Play to your strengths and build a framework that aligns to your goals and limitations.

    Business value must drive your decisions.

    Of the 11 vendor capabilities asked about by Info-Tech’s SoftwareReviews, “business value created” has the second highest relationship with overall software satisfaction.

    Take an iterative approach.

    Larger approaches take longer and are more likely to fail. Identify the applications that best address your strategic objectives, then: rationalize, learn, repeat.

    Info-Tech recommends a disciplined, step-by-step approach as outlined in our Application Portfolio Strategy Program

    Step 1 "No Knowledge": Define application capabilities and visualize lifecycle stages

    Application Discovery

    1. Build in Application Portfolio Management Principles.
    2. Conduct Application Alignment.
    3. Build Detailed Application Inventory

    Step 2 "No Strategy": Rationalize application portfolio and visualize strategic directions

    Application Rationalization

    1. Set Your Rationalization Framework
    2. Conduct Assessment & Assign Dispositions
    3. Create an Application Portfolio Roadmap

    Step 3 "No Plan": Build a product roadmap and visualize the detailed plan

    Detailed Disposition Planning

    1. Conduct an Impact Assessment
    2. Determine the Details of the Disposition
    3. Create Detailed Product Roadmaps

    This blueprint focuses on step 2 of Info-Tech's Application Portfolio Strategy Program. Our methodology assumes you have completed the following activities, which are outlined in Discover Your Applications.

    • Collected your full application inventory (including Shadow IT)
    • Aligned applications to business capabilities
    • Determined redundant applications
    • Identified appropriate subject matter experts (business and technical) for your applications

    Info-Tech's four-phase methodology

    Phase 1

    Lay Your Foundations

    • Define Motivations, Goals, and Scope
    • Iteration and Engagement Planning

    This phase is intended to establish the fundamentals in launching either a rationalization initiative or ongoing practice.

    Here we define goals, scope, and the involvement of various roles from both IT and the business.

    Phase 2

    Plan Your ARF

    • Establish Rationalization Inputs and Current Gaps

    This phase is intended to review a high-level approach to rationalization and determine which analyses are necessary and their appropriate level of depth.

    Here we produce an initial ARF and discuss any gaps in terms of the availability of necessary data points and additional collection methods that will need to be applied.

    Phase 3

    Test and Adapt Your ARF

    • Perform First Iteration Analysis
    • First Iteration Retrospective and Adaptation

    This phase is intended to put the ARF into action and adapt as necessary to ensure success in your organization.

    If appropriate, here we apply Info-Tech’s ARF and toolset and test it against a set of applications to determine how best to adapt these materials for your needs.

    Phase 4

    Initiate Your Roadmap

    • Prioritize and Roadmap Applications
    • Ongoing Rationalization and Roadmapping

    This phase is intended to capture results of rationalization and solidify your rationalization initiative or ongoing practice.

    Here we aim to inject your dispositions into an application portfolio roadmap and ensure ongoing governance of APM activities.

    There is an inconsistent understanding and ownership of the application portfolio

    What can I discover about my portfolio?

    Application portfolios are misunderstood.

    Portfolios are viewed as only supportive in nature. There is no strategy or process to evaluate application portfolios effectively. As a result, organizations build a roadmap with a lack of understanding of their portfolio.

    72% of organizations do not have an excellent understanding of the application portfolio (Capgemini).

    How can I improve my portfolio?

    Misalignment between Applications and Business Operations

    Applications fail to meet their intended function, resulting in duplication, a waste of resources, and a decrease in ROI. This makes it harder for IT to justify to the business the reasons to complete a roadmap.

    48% of organizations believe that there are more applications than the business requires (Capgemini).

    How can my portfolio help transform the business?

    IT's budget is to keep the lights on.

    The application portfolio is complex and pervasive and requires constant support from IT. This makes it increasingly difficult for IT to adopt or develop new strategies since its immediate goal will always be to fix what already exists. This causes large delays and breaks in the timeline to complete a roadmap.

    68% of IT directors have wasted time and money because they did not have better visibility of application roadmaps (ComputerWeekly).

    Roadmaps can be the solution, but stall when they lack the information needed for good decision making

    An application portfolio roadmap provides a visual representation of your application portfolio, is used to plan out the portfolio’s strategy over a given time frame, and assists management in key decisions. But…

    • You can’t change an app without knowing its backend.
    • You can't rationalize what you don't know.
    • You can’t confirm redundancies without knowing every app.
    • You can’t rationalize without the business perspective.

    A roadmap is meaningless if you haven’t done any analysis to understand the multiple perspectives on your applications.

    Application rationalization ensures roadmaps reflect what the business actually wants and needs

    Application rationalization is the practice of strategically identifying business applications across an organization to determine which applications should be kept, replaced, retired, or consolidated (TechTarget).

    Discover, Improve, and Transform Through Application Rationalization

    Your application rationalization effort increases the maturity of your roadmap efforts by increasing value to the business. Go beyond the discover phase – leverage application rationalization insights to reach the improve and transform phases.

    Strong Apps Are Key to Business Satisfaction

    79% of organizations with high application suite satisfaction believe that IT offers the organization a competitive edge over others in the industry. (Info-Tech Research Group, N=230)

    Info-Tech Insight

    Companies with an effective portfolio are twice as likely to report high-quality applications, four times as likely to report high proficiency in legacy apps management, and six times as likely to report strong business alignment.

    Rationalization comes at a justified cost

    Rationalization can reduce costs and drive innovation

    Projecting the ROI of application rationalization is difficult and dangerous when used as the only marker for success.

    However, rationalization, when done effectively, will help drop operational or maintenance costs of your applications as well as provide many more opportunities to add value to the business.

    A graph with Time on the X-axis and Cost on the Y axis. The graph compares cost before rationalization, where the cost of the existing portfolio is high, with cost after rationalization, where the cost of the existing portfolio is reduced. The graph demonstrates a decrease in overall portfolio spend after rationalization

    Organizations lack a strategic approach to application rationalization, leading to failure

    IT leaders strive to push the business forward but are stuck in a cycle of reaction where they manage short-term needs rather than strategic approaches.

    Why Is This the Case?

    Lack of Relevant Information

    Rationalization fails without appropriately detailed, accurate, and up-to-date information. You need to identify what information is available and assemble the teams to collect and analyze it.

    Failure to Align With Business Objectives

    Rationalization fails when you lack a clear list of strategic and collaborative priorities; priorities need to be both IT and non-IT related to align with the business objectives and provide value.

    IT Leaders Fails to Justify Projects

    Adhering to a rigid rationalization process can be complex and costly. Play to your strengths and build an ARF based on your goals and limitations.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Misaligned portfolio roadmaps are known to lead teams and projects into failure!
    Building an up-to-date portfolio roadmap that aligns business objectives to IT objectives will increase approval and help the business see the long-term value of roadmapping.

    Don’t start in the middle; ensure you have the basics down

    Application portfolio strategy practice maturity stages

    1. Discover Your Applications
    2. Improve
    3. Transform
    A graph with Rigor of APM Practice on the X-axis and Value to the Business on the Y-axis. The content of the graph is split into the 3 maturity stages, Discover, Improve, and Transform. With each step, the Value to the Business and Rigor of APM Practice increase.

    Disambiguate your systems and clarify your scope

    Define the items that make up your portfolio.

    Broad or unclear definitions of “application” can complicate the scope of rationalization. Take the time to define an application and come to a common understanding of the systems which will be the focus of your rationalization effort.

    Bundling systems under common banner or taking a product view of your applications and components can be an effective way to ensure you include your full collection of systems, without having to perform too many individual assessments.

    Scope

    Single... Capability enabled by... Whole...
    Digital Product + Service Digital Platform Platform Portfolio Customer Facing
    Product (one or more apps) Product Family Product Portfolio

    ↕

    Application Application Architecture Application Portfolio Internal

    A graphic listing the following products: UI, Applications, Middleware, Data, and Infrastructure. A banner reading APIs runs through all products, and UI, Applications, and Middleware are bracketed off as Application

    Info-Tech’s framework can be applied to portfolios of apps, products, and their related capabilities or services.

    However you organize your tech stack, Info-Tech’s application rationalization framework can be applied.

    Understand the multiple lenses of application rationalization and include in your framework

    There are many lenses to view your applications. Rationalize your applications using all perspectives to assess your portfolio and determine the most beneficial course of action.

    Application Alignment - Architect Perspective

    How well does the entire portfolio align to your business capabilities?

    Are there overlaps or redundancies in your application features?

    Covered in Discover Your Applications.

    Business Value - CEO Perspective

    Is the application producing sufficient business value?

    Does it impact profitability, enable capabilities, or add any critical factor that fulfills the mission and vision?

    TCO - CIO Perspective

    What is the overall cost of the application?

    What is the projected cost as your organization grows? What is the cost to maintain the application?

    End User

    How does the end user perceive the application?

    What is the user experience?

    Do the features adequately support the intended functions?

    Is the application important or does it have high utilization?

    Technical Value - App Team Perspective

    What is the state of the backend of the application?

    Has the application maintained sufficient code quality? Is the application reliable? How does it fit into your application architecture?

    Each perspective requires its own analysis and is an area of criteria for rationalization.

    Apply the appropriate amount of rigor for your ARF based on your specific goals and limitations

    Ideally, the richer the data the better the results, but the reality is in-depth analysis is challenging and you’ll need to play to your strengths to be successful.

    Light-Weight Assessment

    App to capability alignment.

    Determine overlaps.

    Subjective 1-10 scale

    Subjective T-shirt size (high, med., low)

    End-user surveys

    Performance temperature check

    Thorough Analysis

    App to process alignment.

    Determine redundancies.

    Apply a value measurement framework.

    Projected TCO with traceability to ALM & financial records.

    Custom build interviews with multiple end users

    Tool and metric-based analysis

    There is no one-size-fits all rationalization. The primary goal of this blueprint is to help you determine the appropriate level of analysis given your motivations and goals for this effort as well as the limitations of resources, timeline, and accessible information.

    Rationalize and build your application portfolio strategy the right way to ensure success

    Big-Bang Approach

    • An attempt to assess the whole portfolio at once.
    • The result is information overload.
    • Information gathered is likely incomplete and/or inaccurate.
    • Tangible benefits are a long time away.

    Covert Approach

    • Information is collected behind the scenes and whenever information sources are available.
    • Assumptions about the business use of applications go unconfirmed.

    Corner-of-the-Desk Approach

    • No one is explicitly dedicated to building a strategy or APM practices.
    • Information is collected whenever the application team has time available.
    • Benefits are pushed out and value is lost.

    Iterative Approach

    • Carried out in phases, concentrating on individual business units or subsets of applications.
    • Priority areas are completed first.
    • The APM practice strengthens through experience.

    Sponsored Mandate Approach

    • The appropriate business stakeholders participate.
    • Rationalization is given project sponsors who champion the practice and communicate the benefits across the organization.

    Dedicated Approach

    • Rationalization and other APM activities are given a budget and formal agenda.
    • Roles and responsibilities are assigned to team members.

    Use Info-Tech’s Application Portfolio Assessment Diagnostic to add the end users’ perspective to your decision making

    Prior to Blueprint: Call 1-888-670-8889 to inquire about or request the Application Portfolio Assessment.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    The approach in this blueprint has been designed in coordination with Info-Tech’s Application Portfolio Assessment (APA) Diagnostic. While it is not a prerequisite, your project will experience the best results and be completed much quicker by taking advantage of our diagnostic offering prior to initiating the activities in this blueprint.

    Use the program diagnostic to:

    • Assess the importance and satisfaction of enterprise applications.
    • Solicit feedback from your end users on applications being used.
    • Understand the strengths and weaknesses of your current applications.
    • Perform a high-level application rationalization initiative.

    Integrate diagnostic results to:

    • Target which applications to analyze in greater detail.
    • Expand on the initial application rationalization results with a more comprehensive and business-value-focused criteria.

    Use Info-Tech’s Application Rationalization Tool to determine and then visualize your application portfolio strategy

    At the center of this project is an Application Rationalization Tool that is used as a living document of your:

      1. Customizable Application Rationalization Framework

      2. Recommendation Dispositions

      3. Application Portfolio Roadmap (seen below)

    Use the step-by-step advice within this blueprint to rationalize your application portfolio and build a realistic and accurate application roadmap that drives business value.

    Central to our approach to application rationalization are industry-leading frameworks

    Info-Tech uses the APQC and COBIT5 frameworks for certain areas of this research. Contextualizing application rationalization within these frameworks clarifies its importance and role and ensures that our assessment tool is focused on key priority areas. The APQC and COBIT5 frameworks are used as a starting point for assessing application effectiveness within specific business capabilities of the different components of application rationalization.

    APQC is one of the world's leading proponents of business benchmarking, best practices, and knowledge management research.

    COBIT 5 is the leading framework for the governance and management of enterprise IT.

    In addition to industry-leading frameworks, our best-practice approach is enhanced by the insights and guidance from our analysts, industry experts, and our clients.

    Our peer network of over 33,000 happy clients proves the effectiveness of our research.

    Our team conducts 1,000+ hours of primary and secondary research to ensure that our approach is enhanced by best practices.

    A public utility organization is using Info-Tech’s approach for rationalization of its applications for reduced complexity

    Case Study

    Industry: Public Sector

    Source: Info-Tech Research Group

    Challenge

    • The public utility has a complex application portfolio, with a large number of applications custom-built that provide limited functionality to certain business groups.
    • The organization needed to move away from custom point solutions and adopt more hosted solutions to cater to larger audiences across business domains.
    • The organization required a comprehensive solution for the following:
      • Understanding how applications are being used by business users.
      • Unraveling the complexity of its application landscape using a formal rationalization process.

    Solution

    • The organization went through a rationalization process with Info-Tech in a four-day onsite engagement to determine the following:
      • Satisfaction level and quality evaluation of end users’ perception of application functionality.
      • Confirmation on what needs to be done with each application under assessment.
      • The level of impact the necessary changes required for a particular application would have on the greater app ecosystem.
      • Prioritization methodology for application roadmap implementation.

    Results

    • Info-Tech’s Application Portfolio Assessment Diagnostic report helped the public utility understand what applications users valued and found difficult to use.
    • The rationalization process gave insight into situations where functionality was duplicated across multiple applications and could be consolidated within one application.
    • The organization determined that its application portfolio was highly complex, and Info-Tech provided a good framework for more in-depth analysis.
    • The organization now has a rationalization process that it can take to other business domains.

    Mergers & Acquisitions: The Sell Blueprint

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}324|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact: N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
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    • Parent Category Name: IT Strategy
    • Parent Category Link: /it-strategy

    There are four key scenarios or entry points for IT as the selling/divesting organization in M&As:

    • IT can suggest a divestiture to meet the business objectives of the organization.
    • IT is brought in to strategy plan the sale/divestiture from both the business’ and IT’s perspectives.
    • IT participates in due diligence activities and complies with the purchasing organization’s asks.
    • IT needs to reactively prepare its environment to enable the separation.

    Consider the ideal scenario for your IT organization.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Divestitures are inevitable in modern business, and IT’s involvement in the process should be too. This progression is inspired by:

    • The growing trend for organizations to increase, decrease, or evolve through these types of transactions.
    • A maturing business perspective of IT, preventing the difficulty that IT is faced with when invited into the transaction process late.
    • Transactions that are driven by digital motivations, requiring IT’s expertise.
    • There never being such a thing as a true merger, making the majority of M&A activity either acquisitions or divestitures.

    Impact and Result

    Prepare for a sale/divestiture transaction by:

    • Recognizing the trend for organizations to engage in M&A activity and the increased likelihood that, as an IT leader, you will be involved in a transaction in your career.
    • Creating a standard strategy that will enable strong program management.
    • Properly considering all the critical components of the transaction and integration by prioritizing tasks that will reduce risk, deliver value, and meet stakeholder expectations.

    Mergers & Acquisitions: The Sell Blueprint Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out how your organization can excel its reduction strategy by engaging in M&A transactions. 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. Proactive Phase

    Be an innovative IT leader by suggesting how and why the business should engage in an acquisition or divestiture.

    • One-Pager: M&A Proactive
    • Case Study: M&A Proactive
    • Information Asset Audit Tool
    • Data Valuation Tool
    • Enterprise Integration Process Mapping Tool
    • Risk Register Tool
    • Security M&A Due Diligence Tool
    • Service Catalog Internal Service Level Agreement Template

    2. Discovery & Strategy

    Create a standardized approach for how your IT organization should address divestitures or sales.

    • One-Pager: M&A Discovery & Strategy – Sell
    • Case Study: M&A Discovery & Strategy – Sell

    3. Due Diligence & Preparation

    Comply with due diligence, prepare the IT environment for carve-out possibilities, and establish the separation project plan.

    • One-Pager: M&A Due Diligence & Preparation – Sell
    • Case Study: M&A Due Diligence & Preparation – Sell
    • IT Due Diligence Charter
    • IT Culture Diagnostic
    • M&A Separation Project Management Tool (SharePoint)
    • SharePoint Template: Step-by-Step Deployment Guide
    • M&A Separation Project Management Tool (Excel)

    4. Execution & Value Realization

    Deliver on the separation project plan successfully and communicate IT’s transaction value to the business.

    • One-Pager: M&A Execution & Value Realization – Sell
    • Case Study: M&A Execution & Value Realization – Sell

    Infographic

    Workshop: Mergers & Acquisitions: The Sell Blueprint

    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-Transaction Discovery & Strategy

    The Purpose

    Establish the transaction foundation.

    Discover the motivation for divesting or selling.

    Formalize the program plan.

    Create the valuation framework.

    Strategize the transaction and finalize the M&A strategy and approach.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    All major stakeholders are on the same page.

    Set up crucial elements to facilitate the success of the transaction.

    Have a repeatable transaction strategy that can be reused for multiple organizations.

    Activities

    1.1 Conduct the CIO Business Vision and CEO-CIO Alignment diagnostics.

    1.2 Identify key stakeholders and outline their relationship to the M&A process.

    1.3 Understand the rationale for the company's decision to pursue a divestiture or sale.

    1.4 Assess the IT/digital strategy.

    1.5 Identify pain points and opportunities tied to the divestiture/sale.

    1.6 Create the IT vision statement and mission statement and identify IT guiding principles and the transition team.

    1.7 Document the M&A governance.

    1.8 Establish program metrics.

    1.9 Create the valuation framework.

    1.10 Establish the separation strategy.

    1.11 Conduct a RACI.

    1.12 Create the communication plan.

    1.13 Prepare to assess target organizations.

    Outputs

    Business perspectives of IT

    Stakeholder network map for M&A transactions

    Business context implications for IT

    IT’s divestiture/sale strategic direction

    Governance structure

    M&A program metrics

    IT valuation framework

    Separation strategy

    RACI

    Communication plan

    Prepared to assess target organization(s)

    2 Mid-Transaction Due Diligence & Preparation

    The Purpose

    Establish the foundation.

    Discover the motivation for separation.

    Identify expectations and create the carve-out roadmap.

    Prepare and manage employees.

    Plan the separation roadmap.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    All major stakeholders are on the same page.

    Methodology identified to enable compliance during due diligence.

    Employees are set up for a smooth and successful transition.

    Separation activities are planned and assigned.

    Activities

    2.1 Gather and evaluate the stakeholders involved, M&A strategy, future-state operating model, and governance.

    2.2 Review the business rationale for the divestiture/sale.

    2.3 Establish the separation strategy.

    2.4 Create the due diligence charter.

    2.5 Create a list of IT artifacts to be reviewed in the data room.

    2.6 Create a carve-out roadmap.

    2.7 Create a service/technical transaction agreement.

    2.8 Measure staff engagement.

    2.9 Assess the current culture and identify the goal culture.

    2.10 Create employee transition and functional workplans.

    2.11 Establish the separation roadmap.

    2.12 Establish and align project metrics with identified tasks.

    2.13 Estimate integration costs.

    Outputs

    Stakeholder map

    IT strategy assessed

    IT operating model and IT governance structure defined

    Business context implications for IT

    Separation strategy

    Due diligence charter

    Data room artifacts

    Carve-out roadmap

    Service/technical transaction agreement

    Engagement assessment

    Culture assessment

    Employee transition and functional workplans

    Integration roadmap and associated resourcing

    3 Post-Transaction Execution & Value Realization

    The Purpose

    Establish the transaction foundation.

    Discover the motivation for separation.

    Plan the separation roadmap.

    Prepare employees for the transition.

    Engage in separation.

    Assess the transaction outcomes.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    All major stakeholders are on the same page.

    Separation activities are planned and assigned.

    Employees are set up for a smooth and successful transition.

    Separation strategy and roadmap are executed to benefit the organization.

    Review what went well and identify improvements to be made in future transactions.

    Activities

    3.1 Identify key stakeholders and outline their relationship to the M&A process.

    3.2 Gather and evaluate the M&A strategy, future-state operating model, and governance.

    3.3 Review the business rationale for the divestiture/sale.

    3.4 Establish the separation strategy.

    3.5 Prioritize separation tasks.

    3.6 Establish the separation roadmap.

    3.7 Establish and align project metrics with identified tasks.

    3.8 Estimate separation costs.

    3.9 Measure staff engagement.

    3.10 Assess the current culture and identify the goal culture.

    3.11 Create employee transition and functional workplans.

    3.12 Complete the separation by regularly updating the project plan.

    3.13 Assess the service/technical transaction agreement.

    3.14 Confirm separation costs.

    3.15 Review IT’s transaction value.

    3.16 Conduct a transaction and separation SWOT.

    3.17 Review the playbook and prepare for future transactions.

    Outputs

    M&A transaction team

    Stakeholder map

    IT strategy assessed

    IT operating model and IT governance structure defined

    Business context implications for IT

    Separation strategy

    Separation roadmap and associated resourcing

    Engagement assessment

    Culture assessment

    Employee transition and functional workplans

    Updated separation project plan

    Evaluated service/technical transaction agreement

    SWOT of transaction

    M&A Sell Playbook refined for future transactions

    Further reading

    Mergers & Acquisitions: The Sell Blueprint

    For IT leaders who want to have a role in the transaction process when their business is engaging in an M&A sale or divestiture.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Don’t wait to be invited to the M&A table, make it.

    Photo of Brittany Lutes, Research Analyst, CIO Practice, Info-Tech Research Group.
    Brittany Lutes
    Research Analyst,
    CIO Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Photo of Ibrahim Abdel-Kader, Research Analyst, CIO Practice, Info-Tech Research Group.
    Ibrahim Abdel-Kader
    Research Analyst,
    CIO Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    IT has always been an afterthought in the M&A process, often brought in last minute once the deal is nearly, if not completely, solidified. This is a mistake. When IT is brought into the process late, the business misses opportunities to generate value related to the transaction and has less awareness of critical risks or inaccuracies.

    To prevent this mistake, IT leadership needs to develop strong business relationships and gain respect for their innovative suggestions. In fact, when it comes to modern M&A activity, IT should be the ones suggesting potential transactions to meet business needs, specifically when it comes to modernizing the business or adopting digital capabilities.

    IT needs to stop waiting to be invited to the acquisition or divestiture table. IT needs to suggest that the table be constructed and actively work toward achieving the strategic objectives of the business.

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    There are four key scenarios or entry points for IT as the selling/divesting organization in M&As:

    • IT can suggest a divestiture to meet the business objectives of the organization.
    • IT is brought in to strategy plan the sale/divestiture from both the business’ and IT’s perspectives.
    • IT participates in due diligence activities and complies with the purchasing organization’s asks.
    • IT needs to reactively prepare its environment to enable the separation.

    Consider the ideal scenario for your IT organization.

    Common Obstacles

    Some of the obstacles IT faces include:

    • IT is often told about the transaction once the deal has already been solidified and is now forced to meet unrealistic business demands.
    • The business does not trust IT and therefore does not approach IT to define value or reduce risks to the transaction process.
    • The people and culture element is forgotten or not given adequate priority.

    These obstacles often arise when IT waits to be invited into the transaction process and misses critical opportunities.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    Prepare for a sale/divestiture transaction by:

    • Recognizing the trend for organizations to engage in M&A activity and the increased likelihood that, as an IT leader, you will be involved in a transaction in your career.
    • Creating a standard strategy that will enable strong program management.
    • Properly considering all the critical components of the transaction and integration by prioritizing tasks that will reduce risk, deliver value, and meet stakeholder expectations.

    Info-Tech Insight

    As the number of merger, acquisition, and divestiture transactions continues to increase, so too does IT’s opportunity to leverage the growing digital nature of these transactions and get involved at the onset.

    The changing M&A landscape

    Businesses will embrace more digital M&A transactions in the post-pandemic world

    • When the pandemic occurred, businesses reacted by either pausing (61%) or completely cancelling (46%) deals that were in the mid-transaction state (Deloitte, 2020). The uncertainty made many organizations consider whether the risks would be worth the potential benefits.
    • However, many organizations quickly realized the pandemic is not a hindrance to M&A transactions but an opportunity. Over 16,000 American companies were involved in M&A transactions in the first six months of 2021 (The Economist). For reference, this had been averaging around 10,000 per six months from 2016 to 2020.
    • In addition to this transaction growth, organizations have increasingly been embracing digital. These trends increase the likelihood that, as an IT leader, you will engage in an M&A transaction. However, it is up to you when you get involved in the transactions.

    The total value of transactions in the year after the pandemic started was $1.3 billion – a 93% increase in value compared to before the pandemic. (Nasdaq)

    71% of technology companies anticipate that divestitures will take place as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. (EY, 2020)

    Your challenge

    IT is often not involved in the M&A transaction process. When it is, it’s often too late.

    • The most important driver of an acquisition is the ability to access new technology (DLA Piper), and yet 50% of the time, IT isn’t involved in the M&A transaction at all (IMAA Institute, 2017).
    • Additionally, IT’s lack of involvement in the process negatively impacts the business:
      • Most organizations (60%) do not have a standardized approach to integration (Steeves and Associates), let alone separation.
      • Two-thirds of the time, the divesting organization and acquiring organization will either fail together or succeed together (McKinsey, 2015).
      • Less than half (47%) of organizations actually experience the positive results sought by the M&A transaction (Steeves and Associates).
    • Organizations pursuing M&A and not involving IT are setting themselves up for failure.

    Only half of M&A deals involve IT (Source: IMAA Institute, 2017)

    Common Obstacles

    These barriers make this challenge difficult to address for many organizations:

    • IT is rarely afforded the opportunity to participate in the transaction deal. When IT is invited, this often happens later in the process where separation will be critical to business continuity.
    • IT has not had the opportunity to demonstrate that it is a valuable business partner in other business initiatives.
    • One of the most critical elements that IT often doesn’t take the time or doesn’t have the time to focus on is the people and leadership component.
    • IT waits to be invited to the process rather then actively involving themselves and suggesting how value can be added to the process.

    In hindsight, it’s clear to see: Involving IT is just good business.

    47% of senior leaders wish they would have spent more time on IT due diligence to prevent value erosion. (Source: IMAA Institute, 2017)

    “Solutions exist that can save well above 50 percent on divestiture costs, while ensuring on-time delivery.” (Source: SNP)

    Info-Tech's approach

    Acquisitions & Divestitures Framework

    Acquisitions and divestitures are inevitable in modern business, and IT’s involvement in the process should be too. This progression is inspired by:

    1. The growing trend for organizations to increase, decrease, or evolve through these types of transactions.
    2. Transactions that are driven by digital motivations, requiring IT’s expertise.
    3. A maturing business perspective of IT, preventing the difficulty that IT is faced with when invited into the transaction process late.
    4. There never being such a thing as a true merger, making the majority of M&A activity either acquisitions or divestitures.
    A diagram highlighting the 'IT Executives' Role in Acquisitions and Divestitures' when they are integrated at different points in the 'Core Business Timeline'. There are four main entry points 'Proactive', 'Discovery and Strategy', 'Due Diligence and Preparation', and 'Execution and Value Realized'. It is highlighted that IT can and should start at 'Proactive', but most organizations start at 'Execution and Value Realized'. 'Proactive': suggest opportunities to evolve the organization; prove IT's value and engage in growth opportunities early. Innovators start here. Steps of the business timeline in 'Proactive' are 'Organization strategies are defined' and 'M and A is considered to enable strategy'. After a buy or sell transaction is initiated is 'Discovery and Strategy': pre-transaction state. If it is a Buy transaction, 'Establish IT's involvement and approach'. If it is a Sell transaction, 'Prepare to engage in negotiations'. Business Partners start here. Steps of the business timeline in 'Discovery and Strategy' are 'Searching criteria is set', 'Potential candidates are considered', and 'LOI is sent/received'. 'Due Diligence and Preparation': mid-transaction state. If it is a Buy transaction, 'Identify potential transaction benefits and risks'. If it is a Sell transaction, 'Comply, communicate, and collaborate in transaction'. Trusted Operators start here. Steps of the business timeline in 'Due Diligence and Preparation' are 'Due diligence engagement occurs', 'Final agreement is reached', and 'Preparation for transaction execution occurs'. 'Execution and Value Realization': post-transaction state. If it is a Buy transaction, 'Integrate the IT environments and achieve business value'. If it is a Sell transaction, 'Separate the IT environment and deliver on transaction terms'. Firefighters start here. Steps of the business timeline in 'Execution and Value Realization' are 'Staff and operations are addressed appropriately', 'Day 1 of implementation and integration activities occurs', '1st 100 days of new entity state occur' and 'Ongoing risk mitigating and value creating activities occur'.

    The business’ view of IT will impact how soon IT can get involved

    There are four key entry points for IT

    A colorful visualization of the four key entry points for IT and a fifth not-so-key entry point. Starting from the top: 'Innovator', Information and Technology as a Competitive Advantage, 90% Satisfaction; 'Business Partner', Effective Delivery of Strategic Business Projects, 80% Satisfaction; 'Trusted Operator', Enablement of Business Through Application and Work Orders, 70% Satisfaction; 'Firefighter', Reliable Infrastructure and IT Service Desk, 60% Satisfaction; and then 'Unstable', Inability to Consistently Deliver Basic Services, <60% Satisfaction.
    1. Innovator: IT suggests a sale or divestiture to meet the business objectives of the organization.
    2. Business Partner: IT is brought in to strategy plan the sale/divestiture from both the business’ and IT’s perspective.
    3. Trusted Operator: IT participates in due diligence activities and complies with the purchasing organization’s asks.
    4. Firefighter: IT needs to reactively prepare its environment in order to enable the separation.

    Merger, acquisition, and divestiture defined

    Merger

    A merger looks at the equal combination of two entities or organizations. Mergers are rare in the M&A space, as the organizations will combine assets and services in a completely equal 50/50 split. Two organizations may also choose to divest business entities and merge as a new company.

    Acquisition

    The most common transaction in the M&A space, where an organization will acquire or purchase another organization or entities of another organization. This type of transaction has a clear owner who will be able to make legal decisions regarding the acquired organization.

    Divestiture

    An organization may decide to sell partial elements of a business to an acquiring organization. They will separate this business entity from the rest of the organization and continue to operate the other components of the business.

    Info-Tech Insight

    A true merger does not exist, as there is always someone initiating the discussion. As a result, most M&A activity falls into acquisition or divestiture categories.

    Selling vs. buying

    The M&A process approach differs depending on whether you are the selling or buying organization

    This blueprint is only focused on the sell side:

    • Examples of sell-related scenarios include:
      • Your organization is selling to another organization with the intent of keeping its regular staff, operations, and location. This could mean minimal separation is required.
      • Your organization is selling to another organization with the intent of separating to be a part of the purchasing organization.
      • Your organization is engaging in a divestiture with the intent of:
        • Separating components to be part of the purchasing organization permanently.
        • Separating components to be part of a spinoff and establish a unit as a standalone new company.
    • As the selling organization, you could proactively seek out suitors to purchase all or components of your organization, or you could be approached by an organization.

    The buy side is focused on:

    • More than two organizations could be involved in a transaction.
    • Examples of buy-related scenarios include:
      • Your organization is buying another organization with the intent of having the purchased organization keep its regular staff, operations, and location. This could mean minimal integration is required.
      • Your organization is buying another organization in its entirety with the intent of integrating it into your original company.
      • Your organization is buying components of another organization with the intent of integrating them into your original company.
    • As the purchasing organization, you will probably be initiating the purchase and thus will be valuating the selling organization during due diligence and leading the execution plan.

    For more information on acquisitions or purchases, check out Info-Tech’s Mergers & Acquisitions: The Buy Blueprint.

    Core business timeline

    For IT to be valuable in M&As, you need to align your deliverables and your support to the key activities the business and investors are working on.

    Info-Tech’s methodology for Selling Organizations in Mergers, Acquisitions, or Divestitures

    1. Proactive

    2. Discovery & Strategy

    3. Due Diligence & Preparation

    4. Execution & Value Realization

    Phase Steps
    1. Identify Stakeholders and Their Perspective of IT
    2. Assess IT’s Current Value and Future State
    3. Drive Innovation and Suggest Growth Opportunities
    1. Establish the M&A Program Plan
    2. Prepare IT to Engage in the Separation or Sale
    1. Engage in Due Diligence and Prepare Staff
    2. Prepare to Separate
    1. Execute the Transaction
    2. Reflection and Value Realization

    Phase Outcomes

    Be an innovative IT leader by suggesting how and why the business should engage in an acquisition or divestiture.

    Create a standardized approach for how your IT organization should address divestitures or sales.

    Comply with due diligence, prepare the IT environment for carve-out possibilities, and establish the separation project plan.

    Deliver on the separation project plan successfully and communicate IT’s transaction value to the business.

    Metrics for each phase

    1. Proactive

    2. Discovery & Strategy

    3. Valuation & Due Diligence

    4. Execution & Value Realization

    • % Share of business innovation spend from overall IT budget
    • % Critical processes with approved performance goals and metrics
    • % IT initiatives that meet or exceed value expectation defined in business case
    • % IT initiatives aligned with organizational strategic direction
    • % Satisfaction with IT's strategic decision-making abilities
    • $ Estimated business value added through IT-enabled innovation
    • % Overall stakeholder satisfaction with IT
    • % Percent of business leaders that view IT as an Innovator
    • % IT budget as a percent of revenue
    • % Assets that are not allocated
    • % Unallocated software licenses
    • # Obsolete assets
    • % IT spend that can be attributed to the business (chargeback or showback)
    • % Share of CapEx of overall IT budget
    • % Prospective organizations that meet the search criteria
    • $ Total IT cost of ownership (before and after M&A, before and after rationalization)
    • % Business leaders that view IT as a Business Partner
    • % Defects discovered in production
    • $ Cost per user for enterprise applications
    • % In-house-built applications vs. enterprise applications
    • % Owners identified for all data domains
    • # IT staff asked to participate in due diligence
    • Change to due diligence
    • IT budget variance
    • Synergy target
    • % Satisfaction with the effectiveness of IT capabilities
    • % Overall end-customer satisfaction
    • $ Impact of vendor SLA breaches
    • $ Savings through cost-optimization efforts
    • $ Savings through application rationalization and technology standardization
    • # Key positions empty
    • % Frequency of staff turnover
    • % Emergency changes
    • # Hours of unplanned downtime
    • % Releases that cause downtime
    • % Incidents with identified problem record
    • % Problems with identified root cause
    • # Days from problem identification to root cause fix
    • % Projects that consider IT risk
    • % Incidents due to issues not addressed in the security plan
    • # Average vulnerability remediation time
    • % Application budget spent on new build/buy vs. maintenance (deferred feature implementation, enhancements, bug fixes)
    • # Time (days) to value realization
    • % Projects that realized planned benefits
    • $ IT operational savings and cost reductions that are related to synergies/divestitures
    • % IT staff–related expenses/redundancies
    • # Days spent on IT separation
    • $ Accurate IT budget estimates
    • % Revenue growth directly tied to IT delivery
    • % Profit margin growth

    IT's role in the selling transaction

    And IT leaders have a greater likelihood than ever of needing to support a merger, acquisition, or divestiture.

    1. Reduced Risk

      IT can identify risks that may go unnoticed when IT is not involved.

    2. Increased Accuracy

      The business can make accurate predictions around the costs, timelines, and needs of IT.

    3. Faster Integration

      Faster integration means faster value realization for the business.

    4. Informed Decision Making

      IT leaders hold critical information that can support the business in moving the transaction forward.

    5. Innovation

      IT can suggest new opportunities to generate revenue, optimize processes, or reduce inefficiencies.

    The IT executive’s critical role is demonstrated by:

    • Reduced Risk

      47% of senior leaders wish they would have spent more time on IT due diligence to prevent value erosion (IMAA Institute, 2017).

    • Increased Accuracy

      Sellers often only provide 15 to 30 days for the acquiring organization to decide (Forbes, 2018), increasing the necessity of accurate pricing.

    • Faster Integration

      36% of CIOs have visibility into only business unit data, making the divestment a challenge (EY, 2021).

    • Informed Decision Making

      Only 38% of corporate and 22% of private equity firms include IT as a significant aspect in their transaction approach (IMAA Institute, 2017).

    • Innovation

      Successful CIOs involved in M&As can spend 70% of their time on aspects outside of IT and 30% of their time on technology and delivery (CIO).

    Playbook benefits

    IT Benefits

    • IT will be seen as an innovative partner to the business, and its suggestions and involvement in the organization will lead to benefits, not hindrances.
    • Develop a streamlined method to prepare the IT environment for potential carve-out and separations, ensuring risk management concerns are brought to the business’ attention immediately.
    • Create a comprehensive list of items that IT needs to do during the separation that can be prioritized and actioned.

    Business Benefits

    • The business will get accurate and relevant information about its IT environment in order to sell or divest the company to the highest bidder for a true price.
    • Fewer business interruptions will happen, because IT can accurately plan for and execute the high-priority separation tasks.
    • The business can obtain a high-value offer for the components of IT being sold and can measure the ongoing value the sale will bring.

    Insight summary

    Overarching Insight

    IT controls if and when it gets invited to support the business through a purchasing growth transaction. Take control of the process, demonstrate the value of IT, and ensure that separation of IT environments does not lead to unnecessary and costly decisions.

    Proactive Insight

    CIOs on the forefront of digital transformation need to actively look for and suggest opportunities to acquire or partner on new digital capabilities to respond to rapidly changing business needs.

    Discovery & Strategy Insight

    IT organizations that have an effective M&A program plan are more prepared for the transaction, enabling a successful outcome. A structured strategy is particularly necessary for organizations expected to deliver M&As rapidly and frequently.

    Due Diligence & Preparation Insight

    IT often faces unnecessary separation challenges because of a lack of preparation. Secure the IT environment and establish how IT will retain employees early in the transaction process.

    Execution & Value Realization Insight

    IT needs to demonstrate value and cost savings within 100 days of the transaction. The most successful transactions are when IT continuously realizes synergies a year after the transaction and beyond.

    Blueprint deliverables

    Key Deliverable: M&A Sell Playbook

    The M&A Sell Playbook should be a reusable document that enables your IT organization to successfully deliver on any divestiture transaction.

    Screenshots of the 'M and A Sell Playbook' deliverable.

    M&A Sell One-Pager

    See a one-page overview of each phase of the transaction.

    Screenshots of the 'M and A Sell One-Pagers' deliverable.

    M&A Sell Case Studies

    Read a one-page case study for each phase of the transaction.

    Screenshots of the 'M and A Sell Case Studies' deliverable.

    M&A Separation Project Management Tool (SharePoint)

    Manage the separation process of the divestiture/sale using this SharePoint template.

    Screenshots of the 'M and A Separation Project Management Tool (SharePoint)' deliverable.

    M&A Separation Project Management Tool (Excel)

    Manage the separation process of the divestiture/sale using this Excel tool if you can’t or don’t want to use SharePoint.

    Screenshots of the 'M and A Separation Project Management Tool (Excel)' deliverable.

    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?

    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 10 calls over the course of 2 to 4 months.

      Proactive Phase

    • Call #1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.

      • Discovery & Strategy Phase

    • Call #2: Determine stakeholders and business perspectives on IT.
    • Call #3: Identify how M&A could support business strategy and how to communicate.

      • Due Diligence & Preparation Phase

    • Call #4: Establish a transaction team and divestiture/sale strategic direction.
    • Call #5: Create program metrics and identify a standard separation strategy.
    • Call #6: Prepare to carve out the IT environment.
    • Call #7: Identify the separation program plan.

      • Execution & Value Realization Phase

    • Call #8: Establish employee transitions to retain key staff.
    • Call #9: Assess IT’s ability to deliver on the divestiture/sale transaction.

    The Sell Blueprint

    Phase 1

    Proactive

    Phase 1

    		 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4
    • 1.1 Identify Stakeholders and Their Perspective of IT
    • 1.2 Assess IT’s Current Value and Future State
    • 1.3 Drive Innovation and Suggest Reduction Opportunities
    • 2.1 Establish the M&A Program Plan
    • 2.2 Prepare IT to Engage in the Separation or Sale
    • 3.1 Engage in Due Diligence and Prepare Staff
    • 3.2 Prepare to Separate
    • 4.1 Execute the Transaction
    • 4.2 Reflection and Value Realization

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Conduct the CEO-CIO Alignment diagnostic
    • Conduct the CIO Business Vision diagnostic
    • Visualize relationships among stakeholders to identify key influencers
    • Group stakeholders into categories
    • Prioritize your stakeholders
    • Plan to communicate
    • Valuate IT
    • Assess the IT/digital strategy
    • Determine pain points and opportunities
    • Align goals to opportunities
    • Recommend reduction opportunities

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT and business leadership

    What is the Proactive phase?

    Embracing the digital drivers

    As the number of merger, acquisition, or divestiture transactions driven by digital means continues to increase, IT has an opportunity to not just be involved in a transaction but actively seek out potential deals.

    In the Proactive phase, the business is not currently considering a transaction. However, the business could consider one to reach its strategic goals. IT organizations that have developed respected relationships with the business leaders can suggest these potential transactions.

    Understand the business’ perspective of IT, determine who the critical M&A stakeholders are, valuate the IT environment, and examine how it supports the business goals in order to suggest an M&A transaction.

    In doing so, IT isn’t waiting to be invited to the transaction table – it’s creating it.

    Goal: To support the organization in reaching its strategic goals by suggesting M&A activities that will enable the organization to reach its objectives faster and with greater-value outcomes.

    Proactive Prerequisite Checklist

    Before coming into the Proactive phase, you should have addressed the following:

    • Understand what mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures are.
    • Understand what mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures mean for the business.
    • Understand what mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures mean for IT.

    Review the Executive Brief for more information on mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures for selling organizations.

    Proactive

    Step 1.1

    Identify M&A Stakeholders and Their Perspective of IT

    Activities

    • 1.1.1 Conduct the CEO-CIO Alignment diagnostic
    • 1.1.2 Conduct the CIO Business Vision diagnostic
    • 1.1.3 Visualize relationships among stakeholders to identify key influencers
    • 1.1.4 Group stakeholders into categories
    • 1.1.5 Prioritize your stakeholders
    • 1.16 Plan to communicate

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT executive leader
    • IT leadership
    • Critical M&A stakeholders

    Outcomes of Step

    Understand how the business perceives IT and establish strong relationships with critical M&A stakeholders.

    Business executives' perspectives of IT

    Leverage diagnostics and gain alignment on IT’s role in the organization

    • To suggest or get involved with a merger, acquisition, or divestiture, the IT executive leader needs to be well respected by other members of the executive leadership team and the business.
    • Specifically, the Proactive phase relies on the IT organization being viewed as an Innovator within the business.
    • Identify how the CEO/business executive currently views IT and where they would like IT to move within the Maturity Ladder.
    • Additionally, understand how other critical department leaders view IT and how they view the partnership with IT.
    A colorful visualization titled 'Maturity Ladder' detailing levels of IT function that a business may choose from based on the business executives' perspectives of IT. Starting from the bottom: 'Struggle', Does not embarrass, Does not crash; 'Support', Keeps business happy, Keeps costs low; 'Optimize', Increases efficiency, Decreases costs; 'Expand', Extends into new business, Generates revenue; 'Transform', Creates new industry.

    Misalignment in target state requires further communication between the CIO and CEO to ensure IT is striving toward an agreed-upon direction.

    Info-Tech’s CIO Business Vision (CIO BV) diagnostic measures a variety of high-value metrics to provide a well-rounded understanding of stakeholder satisfaction with IT.

    Sample of Info-Tech's CIO Business Vision diagnostic measuring percentages of high-value metrics like 'IT Satisfaction' and 'IT Value' regarding business leader satisfaction. A note for these two reads 'Evaluate business leader satisfaction with IT this year and last year'. A section titled 'Relationship' has metrics such as 'Understands Needs' and 'Trains Effectively'. A note for this section reads 'Examine relationship indicators between IT and the business'. A section titled 'Security Friction' has metrics such as 'Regulatory Compliance-Driven' and 'Office/Desktop Security'.

    Business Satisfaction and Importance for Core Services

    The core services of IT are important when determining what IT should focus on. The most important services with the lowest satisfaction offer the largest area of improvement for IT to drive business value.

    Sample of Info-Tech's CIO Business Vision diagnostic specifically comparing the business satisfaction of 12 core services with their importance. Services listed include 'Service Desk', 'IT Security', 'Requirements Gathering', 'Business Apps', 'Data Quality', and more. There is a short description of the services, a percentage for the business satisfaction with the service, a percentage comparing it to last year, and a numbered ranking of importance for each service. A note reads 'Assess satisfaction and importance across 12 core IT capabilities'.

    1.1.1 Conduct the CEO-CIO Alignment diagnostic

    2 weeks

    Input: IT organization expertise and the CEO-CIO Alignment diagnostic

    Output: An understanding of an executive business stakeholder’s perception of IT

    Materials: M&A Sell Playbook, CEO-CIO Alignment diagnostic

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, Business executive/CEO

    1. The CEO-CIO Alignment diagnostic can be a powerful input. Speak with your Info-Tech account representative to conduct the diagnostic. Use the results to inform current IT capabilities.
    2. You may choose to debrief the results of your diagnostic with an Info-Tech analyst. We recommend this to help your team understand how to interpret and draw conclusions from the results.
    3. Examine the results of the survey and note where there might be specific capabilities that could be improved.
    4. Determine whether there are any areas of significant disagreement between the you and the CEO. Mark down those areas for further conversations. Additionally, take note of areas that could be leveraged to support transactions or support your rationale in recommending transactions.

    Download the sample report.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    1.1.2 Conduct the CIO Business Vision diagnostic

    2 weeks

    Input: IT organization expertise, CIO BV diagnostic

    Output: An understanding of business stakeholder perception of certain IT capabilities and services

    Materials: M&A Buy Playbook, CIO Business Vision diagnostic

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, Senior business leaders

    1. The CIO Business Vision (CIO BV) diagnostic can be a powerful tool for identifying IT capability focus areas. Speak with your account representative to conduct the CIO BV diagnostic. Use the results to inform current IT capabilities.
    2. You may choose to debrief the results of your diagnostic with an Info-Tech analyst. We recommend this to help your team understand how to interpret the results and draw conclusions from the diagnostic.
    3. Examine the results of the survey and take note of any IT services that have low scores.
    4. Read through the diagnostic comments and note any common themes. Especially note which stakeholders identified they have a favorable relationship with IT and which stakeholders identified they have an unfavorable relationship. For those who have an unfavorable relationship, identify if they will have a critical role in a growth transaction.

    Download the sample report.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Create a stakeholder network map for M&A transactions

    Follow the trail of breadcrumbs from your direct stakeholders to their influencers to uncover hidden stakeholders.

    Example:

    Diagram of stakeholders and their relationships with other stakeholders, such as 'Board Members', 'CFO/Finance', 'Compliance', etc. with 'CIO/IT Leader' highlighted in the middle. There are unidirectional black arrows and bi-directional green arrows indicating each connection.

      Legend
    • Black arrows indicate the direction of professional influence
    • Dashed green arrows indicate bidirectional, informal influence relationships

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your stakeholder map defines the influence landscape that the M&A transaction will occur within. This will identify who holds various levels of accountability and decision-making authority when a transaction does take place.

    Use connectors to determine who may be influencing your direct stakeholders. They may not have any formal authority within the organization, but they may have informal yet substantial relationships with your stakeholders.

    1.1.3 Visualize relationships among stakeholders to identify key influencers

    1-3 hours

    Input: List of M&A stakeholders

    Output: Relationships among M&A stakeholders and influencers

    Materials: Flip charts, Markers, Sticky notes, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive leadership

    1. The purpose of this activity is to list all the stakeholders within your organization that will have a direct or indirect impact on the M&A transaction.
    2. Determine the critical stakeholders, and then determine the stakeholders of your stakeholders and consider adding each of them to the stakeholder list.
    3. Assess who has either formal or informal influence over your stakeholders; add these influencers to your stakeholder list.
    4. Construct a diagram linking stakeholders and their influencers together.
      • Use black arrows to indicate the direction of professional influence.
      • Use dashed green arrows to indicate bidirectional, informal influence relationships.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Categorize your stakeholders with a prioritization map

    A stakeholder prioritization map helps IT leaders categorize their stakeholders by their level of influence and ownership in the merger, acquisition, or divestiture process.

    A prioritization map of stakeholder categories split into four quadrants. The vertical axis is 'Influence', from low on the bottom to high on top. The horizontal axis is 'Ownership/Interest', from low on the left to high on the right. 'Spectators' are low influence, low ownership/interest. 'Mediators' are high influence, low ownership/interest. 'Noisemakers' are low influence, high ownership/interest. 'Players' are high influence, high ownership/interest.

    There are four areas in the map, and the stakeholders within each area should be treated differently.

    Players – players have a high interest in the initiative and the influence to effect change over the initiative. Their support is critical, and a lack of support can cause significant impediment to the objectives.

    Mediators – mediators have a low interest but significant influence over the initiative. They can help to provide balance and objective opinions to issues that arise.

    Noisemakers – noisemakers have low influence but high interest. They tend to be very vocal and engaged, either positively or negatively, but have little ability to enact their wishes.

    Spectators – generally, spectators are apathetic and have little influence over or interest in the initiative.

    1.1.4 Group stakeholders into categories

    30 minutes

    Input: Stakeholder map, Stakeholder list

    Output: Categorization of stakeholders and influencers

    Materials: Flip charts, Markers, Sticky notes, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive leadership, Stakeholders

    1. Identify your stakeholders’ interest in and influence on the M&A process as high, medium, or low by rating the attributes below.
    2. Map your results to the model to the right to determine each stakeholder’s category.

    Same prioritization map of stakeholder categories as before. This one has specific stakeholders mapped onto it. 'CFO' is mapped as low interest and middling influence, between 'Mediator' and 'Spectator'. 'CIO' is mapped as higher than average interest and high influence, a 'Player'. 'Board Member' is mapped as high interest and high influence, a 'Player'.

    Level of Influence
    • Power: Ability of a stakeholder to effect change.
    • Urgency: Degree of immediacy demanded.
    • Legitimacy: Perceived validity of stakeholder’s claim.
    • Volume: How loud their “voice” is or could become.
    • Contribution: What they have that is of value to you.
    Level of Interest

    How much are the stakeholder’s individual performance and goals directly tied to the success or failure of the product?

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Prioritize your stakeholders

    There may be too many stakeholders to be able to manage them all. Focus your attention on the stakeholders that matter most.

    Level of Support

    Supporter

    Evangelist

    Neutral

    Blocker
    Stakeholder Category Player Critical High High Critical
    Mediator Medium Low Low Medium
    Noisemaker High Medium Medium High
    Spectator Low Irrelevant Irrelevant Low

    Consider the three dimensions for stakeholder prioritization: influence, interest, and support. Support can be determined by answering the following question: How significant is that stakeholder to the M&A or divestiture process?

    These parameters are used to prioritize which stakeholders are most important and should receive your focused attention.

    1.1.5 Prioritize your stakeholders

    30 minutes

    Input: Stakeholder matrix

    Output: Stakeholder and influencer prioritization

    Materials: Flip charts, Markers, Sticky notes, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive leadership, M&A/divestiture stakeholders

    1. Identify the level of support of each stakeholder by answering the following question: How significant is that stakeholder to the M&A transaction process?
    2. Prioritize your stakeholders using the prioritization scheme on the previous slide.

    Stakeholder

    Category

    Level of Support

    Prioritization
    CMO Spectator Neutral Irrelevant
    CIO Player Supporter Critical

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Define strategies for engaging stakeholders by type

    A revisit to the map of stakeholder categories, but with strategies listed for each one, and arrows on the side instead of an axis. The vertical arrow is 'Authority', which increases upward, and the horizontal axis is Ownership/Interest which increases as it moves to the right. The strategy for 'Players' is 'Engage', for 'Mediators' is 'Satisfy', for 'Noisemakers' is 'Inform', and for 'Spectators' is 'Monitor'.

    Type

    Quadrant

    Actions
    Players High influence, high interest – actively engage Keep them updated on the progress of the project. Continuously involve Players in the process and maintain their engagement and interest by demonstrating their value to its success.
    Mediators High influence, low interest – keep satisfied They can be the game changers in groups of stakeholders. Turn them into supporters by gaining their confidence and trust and including them in important decision-making steps. In turn, they can help you influence other stakeholders.
    Noisemakers Low influence, high interest – keep informed Try to increase their influence (or decrease it if they are detractors) by providing them with key information, supporting them in meetings, and using Mediators to help them.
    Spectators Low influence, low interest – monitor They are followers. Keep them in the loop by providing clarity on objectives and status updates.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Each group of stakeholders draws attention and resources away from critical tasks. By properly identifying stakeholder groups, the IT executive leader can develop corresponding actions to manage stakeholders in each group. This can dramatically reduce wasted effort trying to satisfy Spectators and Noisemakers while ensuring the needs of Mediators and Players are met.

    1.1.6 Plan to communicate

    30 minutes

    Input: Stakeholder priority, Stakeholder categorization, Stakeholder influence

    Output: Stakeholder communication plan

    Materials: Flip charts, Markers, Sticky notes, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive leadership, M&A/divestiture stakeholders

    The purpose of this activity is to make a communication plan for each of the stakeholders identified in the previous activities, especially those who will have a critical role in the M&A transaction process.

    1. In the M&A Sell Playbook, input the type of influence each stakeholder has on IT, how they would be categorized in the M&A process, and their level of priority. Use this information to create a communication plan.
    2. Determine the methods and frequency of communication to keep the necessary stakeholder satisfied and maintain or enhance IT’s profile within the organization.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Proactive

    Step 1.2

    Assess IT’s Current Value and Method to Achieve a Future State

    Activities

    • 1.2.1 Valuate IT
    • 1.2.2 Assess the IT/digital strategy

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT executive leader
    • IT leadership
    • Critical stakeholders to M&A

    Outcomes of Step

    Identify critical opportunities to optimize IT and meet strategic business goals through a merger, acquisition, or divestiture.

    How to valuate your IT environment

    And why it matters so much

    • Valuating your current organization’s IT environment is a critical step that all IT organizations should take, whether involved in an M&A or not, to fully understand what it might be worth.
    • The business investments in IT can be directly translated into a value amount. For every $1 invested in IT, the business might be gaining $100 in value back or possibly even loosing $100.
    • Determining, documenting, and communicating this information ensures that the business takes IT’s suggestions seriously and recognizes why investing in IT is so critical.
    • There are three ways a business or asset can be valuated:
      • Cost Approach: Look at the costs associated with building, purchasing, replacing, and maintaining a given aspect of the business.
      • Market Approach: Look at the relative value of a particular aspect of the business. Relative value can fluctuate and depends on what the markets and consequently society believe that particular element is worth.
      • Discounted Cash Flow Approach: Focus on what the potential value of the business could be or the intrinsic value anticipated due to future profitability.
      • (Source: “Valuation Methods,” Corporate Finance Institute)

    Four ways to create value through digital

    1. Reduced costs
    2. Improved customer experience
    3. New revenue sources
    4. Better decision making
      5. (Source: McKinsey & Company)

    1.2.1 Valuate IT

    1 day

    Input: Valuation of data, Valuation of applications, Valuation of infrastructure and operations, Valuation of security and risk

    Output: Valuation of IT

    Materials: Relevant templates/tools listed on the following slides, Capital budget, Operating budget, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership

    The purpose of this activity is to demonstrate that IT is not simply an operational functional area that diminishes business resources. Rather, IT contributes significant value to the business.

    1. Review each of the following slides to valuate IT’s data, applications, infrastructure and operations, and security and risk. These valuations consider several tangible and intangible factors and result in a final dollar amount.
    2. Input the financial amounts identified for each critical area into a summary slide. Use this information to determine where IT is delivering value to the organization.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Consistency is key when valuating your IT organization as well as other IT organizations throughout the transaction process.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Data valuation

    Data valuation identifies how you monetize the information that your organization owns.

    Create a data value chain for your organization

    When valuating the information and data that exists in an organization, there are many things to consider.

    Info-Tech has two tools that can support this process:

    1. Information Asset Audit Tool: Use this tool first to take inventory of the different information assets that exist in your organization.
    2. Data Valuation Tool: Once information assets have been accounted for, valuate the data that exists within those information assets.

    Data Collection

    Insight Creation

    Value Creation

    Data Valuation
    01 Data Source
    02 Data Collection Method
    03 Data     		04 Data Analysis
    05 Insight
    06 Insight Delivery     		07 Consumer
    08 Value in Data     		09 Value Dimension
    10 Value Metrics Group
    11 Value Metrics
    Screenshots of Tab 2 of Info-Tech's Data Valuation Tool.

    Instructions

    1. Using the Data Valuation Tool, start gathering information based on the eight steps above to understand your organization’s journey from data to value.
    2. Identify the data value spectrum. (For example: customer sales service, citizen licensing service, etc.)
    3. Fill out the columns for data sources, data collection, and data first.
    4. Capture data analysis and related information.
    5. Then capture the value in data.
    6. Add value dimensions such as usage, quality, and economic dimensions.
      • Remember that economic value is not the only dimension, and usage/quality has a significant impact on economic value.
    7. Collect evidence to justify your data valuation calculator (market research, internal metrics, etc.).
    8. Finally, calculate the value that has a direct correlation with underlying value metrics.

    Application valuation

    Calculate the value of your IT applications

    When valuating the applications and their users in an organization, consider using a business process map. This shows how business is transacted in the company by identifying which IT applications support these processes and which business groups have access to them. Info-Tech has a business process mapping tool that can support this process:

    • Enterprise Integration Process Mapping Tool: Complete this tool first to map the different business processes to the supporting applications in your organization.

    Instructions

    1. Start by calculating user costs. This is the multiplication of: (# of users) × (% of time spent using IT) × (fully burdened salary).
    2. Identify the revenue per employee and divide that by the average cost per employee to calculate the derived productivity ratio (DPR).
    3. Once you have calculated the user costs and DPR, multiply those total values together to get the application value.

      4. User Costs

      Total User Costs

      Derived Productivity Ratio (DPR)

      Total DPR

      Application Value
      # of users % time spent using IT Fully burdened salary Multiply values from the 3 user costs columns Revenue per employee Average cost per employee (Revenue P.E) ÷ (Average cost P.E) (User costs) X (DPR)

    4. Once the total application value is established, calculate the combined IT and business costs of delivering that value. IT and business costs include inflexibility (application maintenance), unavailability (downtime costs, including disaster exposure), IT costs (common costs statistically allocated to applications), and fully loaded cost of active (full-time equivalent [FTE]) users.
    5. Calculate the net value of applications by subtracting the total IT and business costs from the total application value calculated in step 3.

      6. IT and Business Costs

      Total IT and Business Costs

      Net Value of Applications
      Application maintenance Downtime costs (include disaster exposure) Common costs allocated to applications Fully loaded costs of active (FTE) users Sum of values from the four IT and business costs columns (Application value) – (IT and business costs)

    (Source: CSO)

    Infrastructure valuation

    Assess the foundational elements of the business’ information technology

    The purpose of this exercise is to provide a high-level infrastructure valuation that will contribute to valuating your IT environment.

    Calculating the value of the infrastructure will require different methods depending on the environment. For example, a fully cloud-hosted organization will have different costs than a fully on-premises IT environment.

    Instructions:

    1. Start by listing all of the infrastructure-related items that are relevant to your organization.
    2. Once you have finalized your items column, identify the total costs/value of each item.
      • For example, total software costs would include servers and storage.
    3. Calculate the total cost/value of your IT infrastructure by adding all of values in the right column.

    Item

    Costs/Value
    Hardware Assets Total Value +$3.2 million
    Hardware Leased/Service Agreement -$
    Software Purchased +$
    Software Leased/Service Agreement -$
    Operational Tools
    Network
    Disaster Recovery
    Antivirus
    Data Centers
    Service Desk
    Other Licenses
    Total:

    For additional support, download the M&A Runbook for Infrastructure and Operations.

    Risk and security

    Assess risk responses and calculate residual risk

    The purpose of this exercise is to provide a high-level risk assessment that will contribute to valuating your IT environment. For a more in-depth risk assessment, please refer to the Info-Tech tools below:

    1. Risk Register Tool
    2. Security M&A Due Diligence Tool
      3.

    Instructions

    1. Review the probability and impact scales below and ensure you have the appropriate criteria that align to your organization before you conduct a risk assessment.
    2. Identify the probability of occurrence and estimated financial impact for each risk category detail and fill out the table on the right. Customize the table as needed so it aligns to your organization.

      3. Probability of Risk Occurrence

      Occurrence Criteria
      (Classification; Probability of Risk Event Within One Year)

      Negligible Very Unlikely; ‹20%
      Very Low Unlikely; 20 to 40%
      Low Possible; 40 to 60%
      Moderately Low Likely; 60 to 80%
      Moderate Almost Certain; ›80%

    Note: If needed, you can customize this scale with the severity designations that you prefer. However, make sure you are always consistent with it when conducting a risk assessment.

    Financial & Reputational Impact

    Budgetary and Reputational Implications
    (Financial Impact; Reputational Impact)
    Negligible (‹$10,000; Internal IT stakeholders aware of risk event occurrence)
    Very Low ($10,000 to $25,000; Business customers aware of risk event occurrence)
    Low ($25,000 to $50,000; Board of directors aware of risk event occurrence)
    Moderately Low ($50,000 to $100,000; External customers aware of risk event occurrence)
    Moderate (›$100,000; Media coverage or regulatory body aware of risk event occurrence)

    Risk Category Details

    Probability of Occurrence

    Estimated Financial Impact

    Estimated Severity (Probability X Impact)
    Capacity Planning
    Enterprise Architecture
    Externally Originated Attack
    Hardware Configuration Errors
    Hardware Performance
    Internally Originated Attack
    IT Staffing
    Project Scoping
    Software Implementation Errors
    Technology Evaluation and Selection
    Physical Threats
    Resource Threats
    Personnel Threats
    Technical Threats
    Total:

    1.2.2 Assess the IT/digital strategy

    4 hours

    Input: IT strategy, Digital strategy, Business strategy

    Output: An understanding of an executive business stakeholder’s perception of IT, Alignment of IT/digital strategy and overall organization strategy

    Materials: Computer, Whiteboard and markers, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, Business executive/CEO

    The purpose of this activity is to review the business and IT strategies that exist to determine if there are critical capabilities that are not being supported.

    Ideally, the IT and digital strategies would have been created following development of the business strategy. However, sometimes the business strategy does not directly call out the capabilities it requires IT to support.

    1. On the left half of the corresponding slide in the M&A Sell Playbook, document the business goals, initiatives, and capabilities. Input this information from the business or digital strategies. (If more space for goals, initiatives, or capabilities is needed, duplicate the slide).
    2. On the other half of the slide, document the IT goals, initiatives, and capabilities. Input this information from the IT strategy and digital strategy.

    For additional support, see Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Proactive

    Step 1.3

    Drive Innovation and Suggest Growth Opportunities

    Activities

    • 1.3.1 Determine pain points and opportunities
    • 1.3.2 Align goals with opportunities
    • 1.3.3 Recommend reduction opportunities

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT executive leader
    • IT leadership
    • Critical M&A stakeholders

    Outcomes of Step

    Establish strong relationships with critical M&A stakeholders and position IT as an innovative business partner that can suggest reduction opportunities.

    1.3.1 Determine pain points and opportunities

    1-2 hours

    Input: CEO-CIO Alignment diagnostic, CIO Business Vision diagnostic, Valuation of IT environment, IT-business goals cascade

    Output: List of pain points or opportunities that IT can address

    Materials: Computer, Whiteboard and markers, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Business stakeholders

    The purpose of this activity is to determine the pain points and opportunities that exist for the organization. These can be external or internal to the organization.

    1. Identify what opportunities exist for your organization. Opportunities are the potential positives that the organization would want to leverage.
    2. Next, identify pain points, which are the potential negatives that the organization would want to alleviate.
    3. Spend time considering all the options that might exist, and keep in mind what has been identified previously.

    Opportunities and pain points can be trends, other departments’ initiatives, business perspectives of IT, etc.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    1.3.2 Align goals with opportunities

    1-2 hours

    Input: CEO-CIO Alignment diagnostic, CIO Business Vision diagnostic, Valuation of IT environment, IT-business goals cascade, List of pain points and opportunities

    Output: An understanding of an executive business stakeholder’s perception of IT, Foundations for reduction strategy

    Materials: Computer, Whiteboard and markers, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Business stakeholders

    The purpose of this activity is to determine whether a growth or separation strategy might be a good suggestion to the business in order to meet its business objectives.

    1. For the top three to five business goals, consider:
      1. Underlying drivers
      2. Digital opportunities
      3. Whether a growth or reduction strategy is the solution
    2. Just because a growth or reduction strategy is a solution for a business goal does not necessarily indicate M&A is the way to go. However, it is important to consider before you pursue suggesting M&A.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    1.3.3 Recommend reduction opportunities

    1-2 hours

    Input: Growth or separation strategy opportunities to support business goals, Stakeholder communication plan, Rationale for the suggestion

    Output: M&A transaction opportunities suggested

    Materials: M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, Business executive/CEO

    The purpose of this activity is to recommend a merger, acquisition, or divestiture to the business.

    1. Identify which of the business goals the transaction would help solve and why IT is the one to suggest such a goal.
    2. Leverage the stakeholder communication plan identified previously to give insight into stakeholders who would have a significant level of interest, influence, or support in the process.

    Info-Tech Insight

    With technology and digital driving many transactions, leverage your organizations’ IT environment as an asset and reason why the divestiture or sale should happen, suggesting the opportunity yourself.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    By the end of this Proactive phase, you should:

    Be prepared to suggest M&A opportunities to support your company’s goals through sale or divestiture transactions

    Key outcome from the Proactive phase

    Develop progressive relationships and strong communication with key stakeholders to suggest or be aware of transformational opportunities that can be achieved through sale or divestiture strategies.

    Key deliverables from the Proactive phase
    • Business perspective of IT examined
    • Key stakeholders identified and relationship to the M&A process outlined
    • Ability to valuate the IT environment and communicate IT’s value to the business
    • Assessment of the business, digital, and IT strategies and how M&As could support those strategies
    • Pain points and opportunities that could be alleviated or supported through an M&A transaction
    • Sale or divestiture recommendations

    The Sell Blueprint

    Phase 2

    Discovery & Strategy

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    		Phase 3Phase 4
    • 1.1 Identify Stakeholders and Their Perspective of IT
    • 1.2 Assess IT’s Current Value and Future State
    • 1.3 Drive Innovation and Suggest Reduction Opportunities
    • 2.1 Establish the M&A Program Plan
    • 2.2 Prepare IT to Engage in the Separation or Sale
    • 3.1 Engage in Due Diligence and Prepare Staff
    • 3.2 Prepare to Separate
    • 4.1 Execute the Transaction
    • 4.2 Reflection and Value Realization

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Create the mission and vision
    • Identify the guiding principles
    • Create the future-state operating model
    • Determine the transition team
    • Document the M&A governance
    • Create program metrics
    • Establish the separation strategy
    • Conduct a RACI
    • Create the communication plan
    • Assess the potential organization(s)

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT executive/CIO
    • IT senior leadership
    • Company M&A team

    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

    Day 5

    Establish the Transaction FoundationDiscover the Motivation for Divesting or SellingFormalize the Program PlanCreate the Valuation FrameworkStrategize the TransactionNext Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite)

    Activities

    • 0.1 Conduct the CIO Business Vision and CEO-CIO Alignment diagnostics
    • 0.2 Identify key stakeholders and outline their relationship to the M&A process
    • 0.3 Identify the rationale for the company's decision to pursue a divestiture or sale
    • 1.1 Review the business rationale for the divestiture/sale
    • 1.2 Assess the IT/digital strategy
    • 1.3 Identify pain points and opportunities tied to the divestiture/sale
    • 1.4 Create the IT vision statement, create the IT mission statement, and identify IT guiding principles
    • 2.1 Create the future-state operating model
    • 2.2 Determine the transition team
    • 2.3 Document the M&A governance
    • 2.4 Establish program metrics
    • 3.1 Valuate your data
    • 3.2 Valuate your applications
    • 3.3 Valuate your infrastructure
    • 3.4 Valuate your risk and security
    • 3.5 Combine individual valuations to make a single framework
    • 4.1 Establish the separation strategy
    • 4.2 Conduct a RACI
    • 4.3 Review best practices for assessing target organizations
    • 4.4 Create the communication plan
    • 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. Business perspectives of IT
    2. Stakeholder network map for M&A transactions
    1. Business context implications for IT
    2. IT’s divestiture/sale strategic direction
    1. Operating model for future state
    2. Transition team
    3. Governance structure
    4. M&A program metrics
    1. IT valuation framework
    1. Separation strategy
    2. RACI
    3. Communication plan
    1. Completed M&A program plan and strategy
    2. Prepared to assess target organization(s)

    What is the Discovery & Strategy phase?

    Pre-transaction state

    The Discovery & Strategy phase during a sale or divestiture is a unique opportunity for many IT organizations. IT organizations that can participate in the transaction at this stage are likely considered a strategic partner of the business.

    For one-off sales/divestitures, IT being invited during this stage of the process is rare. However, for organizations that are preparing to engage in many divestitures over the coming years, this type of strategy will greatly benefit from IT involvement. Again, the likelihood of participating in an M&A transaction is increasing, making it a smart IT leadership decision to, at the very least, loosely prepare a program plan that can act as a strategic pillar throughout the transaction.

    During this phase of the pre-transaction state, IT may be asked to participate in ensuring that the IT environment is able to quickly and easily carve out components/business lines and deliver on service-level agreements (SLAs).

    Goal: To identify a repeatable program plan that IT can leverage when selling or divesting all or parts of the current IT environment, ensuring customer satisfaction and business continuity

    Discovery & Strategy Prerequisite Checklist

    Before coming into the Discovery & Strategy phase, you should have addressed the following:

    • Understand the business perspective of IT.
    • Know the key stakeholders and have outlined their relationship to the M&A process.
    • Be able to valuate the IT environment and communicate IT's value to the business.
    • Understand the rationale for the company's decision to pursue a sale or divestiture and the opportunities or pain points the sale should address.

    Discovery & Strategy

    Step 2.1

    Establish the M&A Program Plan

    Activities

    • 2.1.1 Create the mission and vision
    • 2.1.2 Identify the guiding principles
    • 2.1.3 Create the future-state operating model
    • 2.1.4 Determine the transition team
    • 2.1.5 Document the M&A governance
    • 2.1.6 Create program metrics

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT executive/CIO
    • IT senior leadership
    • Company M&A team

    Outcomes of Step

    Establish an M&A program plan that can be repeated across sales/divestitures.

    The vision and mission statements clearly articulate IT’s aspirations and purpose

    The IT vision statement communicates a desired future state of the IT organization, whereas the IT mission statement portrays the organization’s reason for being. While each serves its own purpose, they should both be derived from the business context implications for IT.

    Vision Statements

    Mission Statements

    Characteristics
    • Describe a desired future
    • Focus on ends, not means
    • Concise
    • Aspirational
    • Memorable
    • Articulate a reason for existence
    • Focus on how to achieve the vision
    • Concise
    • Easy to grasp
    • Sharply focused
    • Inspirational

    Samples

    		 To be a trusted advisor and partner in enabling business innovation and growth through an engaged IT workforce. (Source: Business News Daily) IT is a cohesive, proactive, and disciplined team that delivers innovative technology solutions while demonstrating a strong customer-oriented mindset. (Source: Forbes, 2013)

    2.1.1 Create the mission and vision statements

    2 hours

    Input: Business objectives, IT capabilities, Rationale for the transaction

    Output: IT’s mission and vision statements for reduction strategies tied to mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures

    Materials: Flip charts/whiteboard, Markers, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to create mission and vision statements that reflect IT’s intent and method to support the organization as it pursues a reduction strategy.

    1. Review the definitions and characteristics of mission and vision statements.
    2. Brainstorm different versions of the mission and vision statements.
    3. Edit the statements until you get to a single version of each that accurately reflects IT’s role in the reduction process.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Guiding principles provide a sense of direction

    IT guiding principles are shared, long-lasting beliefs that guide the use of IT in constructing, transforming, and operating the enterprise by informing and restricting IT investment portfolio management, solution development, and procurement decisions.

    A diagram illustrating the place of 'IT guiding principles' in the process of making 'Decisions on the use of IT'. There are four main items, connecting lines naming the type of process in getting from one step to the next, and a line underneath clarifying the questions asked at each step. On the far left, over the question 'What decisions should be made?', is 'Business context and IT implications'. This flows forward to 'IT guiding principles', and they are connected by 'Influence'. Next, over the question 'How should decisions be made?', is the main highlighted section. 'IT guiding principles' flows forward to 'Decisions on the use of IT', and they are connected by 'Guide and inform'. On the far right, over the question 'Who has the accountability and authority to make decisions?', is 'IT policies'. This flows back to 'Decisions on the use of IT', and they are connected by 'Direct and control'.

    IT principles must be carefully constructed to make sure they are adhered to and relevant

    Info-Tech has identified a set of characteristics that IT principles should possess. These characteristics ensure the IT principles are relevant and followed in the organization.

    Approach focused. IT principles should be focused on the approach – how the organization is built, transformed, and operated – as opposed to what needs to be built, which is defined by both functional and non-functional requirements.

    Business relevant. Create IT principles that are specific to the organization. Tie IT principles to the organization’s priorities and strategic aspirations.

    Long lasting. Build IT principles that will withstand the test of time.

    Prescriptive. Inform and direct decision making with actionable IT principles. Avoid truisms, general statements, and observations.

    Verifiable. If compliance can’t be verified, people are less likely to follow the principle.

    Easily Digestible. IT principles must be clearly understood by everyone in IT and by business stakeholders. IT principles aren’t a secret manuscript of the IT team. IT principles should be succinct; wordy principles are hard to understand and remember.

    Followed. Successful IT principles represent a collection of beliefs shared among enterprise stakeholders. IT principles must be continuously communicated to all stakeholders to achieve and maintain buy-in.

    In organizations where formal policy enforcement works well, IT principles should be enforced through appropriate governance processes.

    Consider the example principles below

    IT Principle Name

    IT Principle Statement
    1. Risk Management We will ensure that the organization’s IT Risk Management Register is properly updated to reflect all potential risks and that a plan of action against those risks has been identified.
    2. Transparent Communication We will ensure employees are spoken to with respect and transparency throughout the transaction process.
    3. Separation for Success We will create a carve-out strategy that enables the organization and clearly communicates the resources required to succeed.
    4. Managed Data We will handle data creation, modification, separation, and use across the enterprise in compliance with our data governance policy.
    5.Deliver Better Customer Service We will reduce the number of products offered by IT, enabling a stronger focus on specific products or elements to increase customer service delivery.
    6. Compliance With Laws and Regulations We will operate in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations for both our organization and the potentially purchasing organization.
    7. Defined Value We will create a plan of action that aligns with the organization’s defined value expectations.
    8. Network Readiness We will ensure that employees and customers have immediate access to the network with minimal or no outages.
    9. Value Generator We will leverage the current IT people, processes, and technology to turn the IT organization into a value generator by developing and selling our services to purchasing organizations.

    2.1.2 Identify the guiding principles

    2 hours

    Input: Business objectives, IT capabilities, Rationale for the transaction, Mission and vision statements

    Output: IT’s guiding principles for reduction strategies tied to mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures

    Materials: Flip charts/whiteboard, Markers, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to create the guiding principles that will direct the IT organization throughout the reduction strategy process.

    1. Review the role of guiding principles and the examples of guiding principles that organizations have used.
    2. Brainstorm different versions of the guiding principles. Each guiding principle should start with the phrase “We will…”
    3. Edit and consolidate the statements until you have a list of approximately eight to ten statements that accurately reflect IT’s role in the reduction process.
    4. Review the guiding principles every six months to ensure they continue to support the delivery of the business’ reduction strategy goals.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Create two IT teams to support the transaction

    IT M&A Transaction Team

    • The IT M&A Transaction Team should consist of the strongest members of the IT team who can be expected to deliver on unusual or additional tasks not asked of them in normal day-to-day operations.
    • The roles selected for this team will have very specific skills sets or deliver on critical separation capabilities, making their involvement in the combination of two or more IT environments paramount.
    • These individuals need to have a history of proving themselves very trustworthy, as they will likely be required to sign an NDA as well.
    • Expect to have to certain duplicate capabilities or roles across the M&A Team and Operational Team.

    IT Operational Team

    • This group is responsible for ensuring the business operations continue.
    • These employees might be those who are newer to the organization but can be counted on to deliver consistent IT services and products.
    • The roles of this team should ensure that end users or external customers remain satisfied.

    Key capabilities to support M&A

    Consider the following capabilities when looking at who should be a part of the IT Transaction Team.

    Employees who have a significant role in ensuring that these capabilities are being delivered will be a top priority.

    Infrastructure & Operations

    • System Separation
    • Data Management
    • Helpdesk/Desktop Support
    • Cloud/Server Management

    Business Focus

    • Service-Level Management
    • Enterprise Architecture
    • Stakeholder Management
    • Project Management

    Risk & Security

    • Privacy Management
    • Security Management
    • Risk & Compliance Management

    Build a lasting and scalable operating model

    An operating model is an abstract visualization, used like an architect’s blueprint, that depicts how structures and resources are aligned and integrated to deliver on the organization’s strategy.

    It ensures consistency of all elements in the organizational structure through a clear and coherent blueprint before embarking on detailed organizational design.

    The visual should highlight which capabilities are critical to attaining strategic goals and clearly show the flow of work so that key stakeholders can understand where inputs flow in and outputs flow out of the IT organization.

    As you assess the current operating model, consider the following:

    • Does the operating model contain all the necessary capabilities your IT organization requires to be successful?
    • What capabilities should be duplicated?
    • Are there individuals with the skill set to support those roles? If not, is there a plan to acquire or develop those skills?
    • A dedicated project team strictly focused on M&A is great. However, is it feasible for your organization? If not, what blockers exist?
    A diagram with 'Initiatives' and 'Solutions' on the left and right of an area chart, 'Customer' at the top, the area between them labelled 'Functional Area n', and six horizontal bars labelled 'IT Capability' stacked on top of each other. The 'IT Capability' bars are slightly skewed to the 'Solutions' side of the chart.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Investing time up-front getting the operating model right is critical. This will give you a framework to rationalize future organizational changes, allowing you to be more iterative and allowing your model to change as the business changes.

    2.1.3 Create the future-state operating model

    4 hours

    Input: Current operating model, IT strategy, IT capabilities, M&A-specific IT capabilities, Business objectives, Rationale for the transaction, Mission and vision statements

    Output: Future-state operating model for divesting organizations

    Materials: Operating model, Capability overlay, Flip charts/whiteboard, Markers, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to establish what the future-state operating model will be if your organization needs to adjust to support a divestiture transaction. If your organization plans to sell in its entirety, you may choose to skip this activity.

    1. Ensuring that all the IT capabilities are identified by the business and IT strategy, document your organization’s current operating model.
    2. Identify what core capabilities would be critical to the divesting transaction process and separation. Highlight and make copies of those capabilities in the M&A Sell Playbook. As a result of divesting, there may also be capabilities that will become irrelevant in your future state.
    3. Ensure the capabilities that will be decentralized are clearly identified. Decentralized capabilities do not exist within the central IT organization but rather in specific lines of businesses, products, or locations to better understand needs and deliver on the capability.

    An example operating model is included in the M&A Sell Playbook. This process benefits from strong reference architecture and capability mapping ahead of time.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    2.1.4 Determine the transition team

    3 hours

    Input: IT capabilities, Future-state operating model, M&A-specific IT capabilities, Business objectives, Rationale for the transaction, Mission and vision statements

    Output: Transition team

    Materials: Reference architecture, Organizational structure, Flip charts/whiteboard, Markers

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to create a team that will support your IT organization throughout the transaction. Determining which capabilities and therefore which roles will be required ensures that the business will continue to get the operational support it needs.

    1. Based on the outcome of activity 2.1.3, review the capabilities that your organization will require on the transition team. Group capabilities into functional groups containing capabilities that are aligned well with one another because they have similar responsibilities and functionalities.
    2. Replace the capabilities with roles. For example, stakeholder management, requirements gathering, and project management might be one functional group. Project management and stakeholder management might combine to create a project manager role.
    3. Review the examples in the M&A Sell Playbook and identify which roles will be a part of the transition team.

    For more information, see Redesign Your Organizational Structure

    What is governance?

    And why does it matter so much to IT and the M&A process?

    • Governance is the method in which decisions get made, specifically as they impact various resources (time, money, and people).
    • Because M&A is such a highly governed transaction, it is important to document the governance bodies that exist in your organization.
    • This will give insight into what types of governing bodies there are, what decisions they make, and how that will impact IT.
    • For example, funds to support separation need to be discussed, approved, and supplied to IT from a governing body overseeing the acquisition.
    • A highly mature IT organization will have automated governance, while a seemingly non-existent governance process will be considered ad hoc.
    A pyramid with four levels representing the types of governing bodies that are available with differing levels of IT maturity. An arrow beside the pyramid points upward. The bottom of the arrow is labelled 'Traditional (People and document centric)' and the top is labelled 'Adaptive (Data centric)'. Starting at the bottom of the pyramid is level 1 'Ad Hoc Governance', 'Governance that is not well defined or understood within the organization. It occurs out of necessity but often not by the right people'. Level 2 is 'Controlled Governance', 'Governance focused on compliance and decisions driven by hierarchical authority. Levels of authority are defined and often driven by regulatory'. Level 3 is 'Agile Governance', 'Governance that is flexible to support different needs and quick response in the organization. Driven by principles and delegated throughout the company'. At the top of the pyramid is level 4 'Automated Governance', 'Governance that is entrenched and automated into organizational processes and product/service design. Empowered and fully delegated governance to maintain fit and drive organizational success and survival'.

    2.1.5 Document M&A governance

    1-2 hours

    Input: List of governing bodies, Governing body committee profiles, Governance structure

    Output: Documented method on how decisions are made as it relates to the M&A transaction

    Materials: Flip charts/whiteboard, Markers, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to determine the method in which decisions are made throughout the M&A transaction as it relates to IT. This will require understanding both governing bodies internal to IT and those external to IT.

    1. First, determine the other governance structures within the organization that will impact the decisions made about M&A. List out these bodies or committees.
    2. Create a profile for each committee that looks at the membership, purpose of the committee, decision areas (authority), and the process of inputs and outputs. Ensure IT committees that will have a role in this process are also documented. Consider the benefits realized, risks, and resources required for each.
    3. Organize the committees into a structure, identifying the committees that have a role in defining the strategy, designing and building, and running.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Current-state structure map – definitions of tiers

    Strategy: These groups will focus on decisions that directly connect to the strategic direction of the organization.

    Design & Build: The second tier of groups will oversee prioritization of a certain area of governance as well as design and build decisions that feed into strategic decisions.

    Run: The lowest level of governance will be oversight of more-specific initiatives and capabilities within IT.

    Expect tier overlap. Some committees will operate in areas that cover two or three of these governance tiers.

    Measure the IT program’s success in terms of its ability to support the business’ M&A goals

    Upper management will measure IT’s success based on your ability to support the underlying reasons for the M&A. Using business metrics will help assure business stakeholders that IT understands their needs and is working with the business to achieve them.

    Business-Specific Metrics

    • Revenue Growth: Increase in the top line as seen by market expansion, product expansion, etc. by percentage/time.
    • Synergy Extraction: Reduction in costs as determined by the ability to identify and eliminate redundancies over time.
    • Profit Margin Growth: Increase in the bottom line as a result of increased revenue growth and/or decreased costs over time.

    IT-Specific Metrics

    • IT operational savings and cost reductions due to synergies: Operating expenses, capital expenditures, licenses, contracts, applications, infrastructure over time.
    • Reduction in IT staff expense and headcount: Decreased budget allocated to IT staff, and ability to identify and remove redundancies in staff.
    • Meeting or improving on IT budget estimates: Delivering successful IT separation on a budget that is the same or lower than the budget estimated during due diligence.
    • Meeting or improving on IT time-to-separation estimates: Delivering successful IT carve-out on a timeline that is the same or shorter than the timeline estimated during due diligence.
    • Business capability support: Delivering the end state of IT that supports the expected business capabilities and growth.

    Establish your own metrics to gauge the success of IT

    Establish SMART M&A Success Metrics

    S pecific Make sure the objective is clear and detailed.
    M easurable Objectives are measurable if there are specific metrics assigned to measure success. Metrics should be objective.
    A ctionable Objectives become actionable when specific initiatives designed to achieve the objective are identified.
    R ealistic Objectives must be achievable given your current resources or known available resources.
    T ime-Bound An objective without a timeline can be put off indefinitely. Furthermore, measuring success is challenging without a timeline.
    • What should IT consider when looking to identify potential additions, deletions, or modifications that will either add value to the organization or reduce costs/risks?
    • Provide a definition of synergies.
    • IT operational savings and cost reductions due to synergies: Operating expenses, capital expenditures, licenses, contracts, applications, infrastructure.
    • Reduction in IT staff expense and headcount: Decreased budget allocated to IT staff, and ability to identify and remove redundancies in staff.
    • Meeting or improving on IT budget estimates: Delivering successful IT separation on a budget that is the same or lower than the budget estimated during due diligence.
    • Meeting or improving on IT time-to-separation estimates: Delivering successful IT carve-out on a timeline that is the same or shorter than the timeline estimated during due diligence.
    • Revenue growth: Increase in the top line as a result, as seen by market expansion, product expansion, etc., as a result of divesting lines of the business and selling service-level agreements to the purchasing organization.
    • Synergy extraction: Reduction in costs, as determined by the ability to identify and eliminate redundancies.
    • Profit margin growth: Increase in the bottom line as a result of increased revenue growth and/or decreased costs.

    Metrics for each phase

    1. Proactive

    2. Discovery & Strategy

    3. Valuation & Due Diligence

    4. Execution & Value Realization

    • % Share of business innovation spend from overall IT budget
    • % Critical processes with approved performance goals and metrics
    • % IT initiatives that meet or exceed value expectation defined in business case
    • % IT initiatives aligned with organizational strategic direction
    • % Satisfaction with IT's strategic decision-making abilities
    • $ Estimated business value added through IT-enabled innovation
    • % Overall stakeholder satisfaction with IT
    • % Percent of business leaders that view IT as an Innovator
    • % IT budget as a percent of revenue
    • % Assets that are not allocated
    • % Unallocated software licenses
    • # Obsolete assets
    • % IT spend that can be attributed to the business (chargeback or showback)
    • % Share of CapEx of overall IT budget
    • % Prospective organizations that meet the search criteria
    • $ Total IT cost of ownership (before and after M&A, before and after rationalization)
    • % Business leaders that view IT as a Business Partner
    • % Defects discovered in production
    • $ Cost per user for enterprise applications
    • % In-house-built applications vs. enterprise applications
    • % Owners identified for all data domains
    • # IT staff asked to participate in due diligence
    • Change to due diligence
    • IT budget variance
    • Synergy target
    • % Satisfaction with the effectiveness of IT capabilities
    • % Overall end-customer satisfaction
    • $ Impact of vendor SLA breaches
    • $ Savings through cost-optimization efforts
    • $ Savings through application rationalization and technology standardization
    • # Key positions empty
    • % Frequency of staff turnover
    • % Emergency changes
    • # Hours of unplanned downtime
    • % Releases that cause downtime
    • % Incidents with identified problem record
    • % Problems with identified root cause
    • # Days from problem identification to root cause fix
    • % Projects that consider IT risk
    • % Incidents due to issues not addressed in the security plan
    • # Average vulnerability remediation time
    • % Application budget spent on new build/buy vs. maintenance (deferred feature implementation, enhancements, bug fixes)
    • # Time (days) to value realization
    • % Projects that realized planned benefits
    • $ IT operational savings and cost reductions that are related to synergies/divestitures
    • % IT staff–related expenses/redundancies
    • # Days spent on IT separation
    • $ Accurate IT budget estimates
    • % Revenue growth directly tied to IT delivery
    • % Profit margin growth

    2.1.6 Create program metrics

    1-2 hours

    Input: IT capabilities, Mission, vision, and guiding principles, Rationale for the acquisition

    Output: Program metrics to support IT throughout the M&A process

    Materials: Flip charts/whiteboard, Markers, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to determine how IT’s success throughout a growth transaction will be measured and determined.

    1. Document a list of appropriate metrics on the whiteboard. Remember to include metrics that demonstrate the business impact. You can use the sample metrics listed on the previous slide as a starting point.
    2. Set a target and deadline for each metric. This will help the group determine when it is time to evaluate progression.
    3. Establish a baseline for each metric based on information collected within your organization.
    4. Assign an owner for tracking each metric as well as someone to be accountable for performance.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Discovery & Strategy

    Step 2.2

    Prepare IT to Engage in the Separation or Sale

    Activities

    • 2.2.1 Establish the separation strategy
    • 2.2.2 Conduct a RACI
    • 2.2.3 Create the communication plan
    • 2.2.4 Assess the potential organization(s)

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT executive/CIO
    • IT senior leadership
    • Company M&A team

    Outcomes of Step

    Identify IT’s plan of action when it comes to the separation/sale and align IT’s separation/sale strategy with the business’ M&A strategy.

    Separation strategies

    There are several IT separation strategies that will let you achieve your target technology environment.

    IT Separation Strategies
    • Divest. Carve out elements of the IT organization and sell them to a purchasing organization with or without a service-level agreement.
    • Sell. Sell the entire IT environment to a purchasing organization. The purchasing organization takes full responsibility in delivering and running the IT environment.
    • Spin-Off Joint Venture. Carve out elements of the IT organization and combine them with elements of a new or purchasing organization to create a new entity.

    The approach IT takes will depend on the business objectives for the M&A.

    • Generally speaking, the separation strategy is well understood and influenced by the frequency of and rationale for selling.
    • Based on the initiatives generated by each business process owner, you need to determine the IT separation strategy that will best support the desired target technology environment, especially if you are still operating or servicing elements of that IT environment.

    Key considerations when choosing an IT separation strategy include:

    • What are the main business objectives of the M&A?
    • What are the key synergies expected from the transaction?
    • What IT separation strategy best helps obtain these benefits?
    • What opportunities exist to position the business for sustainable and long-term growth?

    Separation strategies in detail

    Review highlights and drawbacks of different separation strategies

    Divest
      Highlights
    • Recommended for businesses striving to reduce costs and potentially even generate revenue for the business through the delivery of SLAs.
    • Opportunity to reduce or scale back on lines of business or products that are not driving profits.
      Drawbacks
    • May be forced to give up critical staff that have been known to deliver high value.
    • The IT department is left to deliver services to the purchasing organization with little support or consideration from the business.
    • There can be increased risk and security concerns that need to be addressed.
    Sell
      Highlights
    • Recommended for businesses looking to gain capital to exit the market profitably or to enter a new market with a large sum of capital.
    • The business will no longer exist, and as a result all operational costs, including IT, will become redundant.
      Drawbacks
    • IT is no longer needed as an operating or capital service for the organization.
    • Lost resources, including highly trained and critical staff.
    • May require packaging employees off and using the profit or capital generated to cover any closing costs.
    Spin-Off or Joint Venture
      Highlights
    • Recommended for businesses looking to expand their market presence or acquire new products. Essentially aligning the two organizations in the same market.
    • Each side has a unique offering but complementing capabilities.
      Drawbacks
    • As much as the organization is going through a separation from the original company, it will be going through an integration with the new company.
    • There could be differences in culture.
    • This could require a large amount of investment without a guarantee of profit or success.

    2.2.1 Establish the separation strategy

    1-2 hours

    Input: Business separation strategy, Guiding principles, M&A governance

    Output: IT’s separation strategy

    Materials: Flip charts/whiteboard, Markers, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to determine IT’s approach to separating or selling. This approach might differ slightly from transaction to transaction. However, the businesses approach to transactions should give insight into the general separation strategy IT should adopt.

    1. Make sure you have clearly articulated the business objectives for the M&A, the technology end state for IT, and the magnitude of the overall separation.
    2. Review and discuss the highlights and drawbacks of each type of separation.
    3. Use Info-Tech’s Separation Posture Selection Framework on the next slide to select the separation posture that will appropriately enable the business. Consider these questions during your discussion:
      1. What are the main business objectives of the M&A? What key IT capabilities will need to support business objectives?
      2. What key synergies are expected from the transaction? What opportunities exist to position the business for sustainable growth?
      3. What IT separation best helps obtain these benefits?

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Separation Posture Selection Framework

    Business M&A Strategy

    Resultant Technology Strategy

    M&A Magnitude (% of Seller Assets, Income, or Market Value)

    IT Separation Posture
    A. Horizontal Adopt One Model ‹100% Divest
    ›99% Sell
    B. Vertical Create Links Between Critical Systems Any Divest
    C. Conglomerate Independent Model Any Joint Venture
    Divest
    D. Hybrid: Horizontal & Conglomerate Create Links Between Critical Systems Any Divest
    Joint Venture

    M&A separation strategy

    Business M&A Strategy Resultant Technology Strategy M&A Magnitude (% of Seller Assets, Income, or Market Value) IT Separation Posture

    You may need a hybrid separation posture to achieve the technology end state.

    M&A objectives may not affect all IT domains and business functions in the same way. Therefore, the separation requirements for each business function may differ. Organizations will often choose to select and implement a hybrid separation posture to realize the technology end state.

    Each business division may have specific IT domain and capability needs that require an alternative separation strategy.

    • Example: Even when conducting a joint venture by forming a new organization, some partners might view themselves as the dominant partner and want to influence the IT environment to a greater degree.
    • Example: Some purchasing organizations will expect service-level agreements to be available for a significant period of time following the divestiture, while others will be immediately independent.

    2.2.2 Conduct a RACI

    1-2 hours

    Input: IT capabilities, Transition team, Separation strategy

    Output: Completed RACI for Transition team

    Materials: Reference architecture, Organizational structure, Flip charts/whiteboard, Markers, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to identify the core accountabilities and responsibilities for the roles identified as critical to your transition team. While there might be slight variation from transaction to transaction, ideally each role should be performing certain tasks.

    1. First, identify a list of critical tasks that need to be completed to support the sale or separation. For example:
      • Communicate with the company M&A team.
      • Identify the key IT solutions that can and cannot be carved out.
      • Gather data room artifacts and provide them to acquiring organization.
    2. Next, identify at the activity level which role is accountable or responsible for each activity. Enter an A for accountable, R for responsible, or A/R for both.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Communication and change

    Prepare key stakeholders for the potential changes

    • Anytime you are starting a project or program that will depend on users and stakeholders to give up their old way of doing things, change will force people to become novices again, leading to lost productivity and added stress.
    • Change management can improve outcomes for any project where you need people to adopt new tools and procedures, comply with new policies, learn new skills and behaviors, or understand and support new processes.
    • M&As move very quickly, and it can be very difficult to keep track of which stakeholders you need to be communicating with and what you should be communicating.
    • Not all organizations embrace or resist change in the same ways. Base your change communications on your organization’s cultural appetite for change in general.
      • Organizations with a low appetite for change will require more direct, assertive communications.
      • Organizations with a high appetite for change are more suited to more open, participatory approaches.

    Three key dimensions determine the appetite for cultural change:

    • Power Distance. Refers to the acceptance that power is distributed unequally throughout the organization.
      In organizations with a high power distance, the unequal power distribution is accepted by the less powerful employees.
    • Individualism. Organizations that score high in individualism have employees who are more independent. Those who score low in individualism fall into the collectivism side, where employees are strongly tied to one another or their groups.
    • Uncertainty Avoidance. Describes the level of acceptance that an organization has toward uncertainty. Those who score high in this area find that their employees do not favor uncertain situations, while those that score low in this area find that their employees are comfortable with change and uncertainty.

    2.2.3 Create the communication plan

    1-2 hours

    Input: IT’s M&A mission, vision, and guiding principles, M&A transition team, IT separation strategy, RACI

    Output: IT’s M&A communication plan

    Materials: Flip charts/whiteboard, Markers, RACI, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to create a communication plan that IT can leverage throughout the initiative.

    1. Create a structured communication plan that allows for continuous communication with the integration management office, senior management, and the business functional heads.
    2. Outline key topics of communication, with stakeholders, inputs, and outputs for each topic.
    3. Review Info-Tech’s example communication plan in the M&A Sell Playbook and update it with relevant information.
    4. Does this communication plan make sense for your organization? What doesn’t make sense? Adjust the communication guide to suit your organization.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Assessing potential organizations

    As soon as you have identified organizations to consider, it’s imperative to assess critical risks. Most IT leaders can attest that they will receive little to no notice when the business is pursuing a sale and IT has to assess the IT organization. As a result, having a standardized template to quickly assess the potential acquiring organization is important.

    Ways to Assess

    1. News: Assess what sort of news has been announced in relation to the organization. Have they had any risk incidents? Has a critical vendor announced working with them?
    2. LinkedIn: Scan through the LinkedIn profiles of employees. This will give you a sense of what platforms they have based on employees. It will also give insight into positive or negative employee experiences that could impact retention.
    3. Trends: Some industries will have specific solutions that are relevant and popular. Assess what the key players are (if you don’t already know) to determine the solution.
    4. Business Architecture: While this assessment won’t perfect, try to understand the business’ value streams and the critical business and IT capabilities that would be needed to support them. Will your organization or employee skills be required to support these long term?

    Info-Tech Insight

    Assessing potential organizations is not just for the purchaser. The seller should also know what the purchasing organization’s history with M&As is and what potential risks could occur if remaining connected through ongoing SLAs.

    2.2.4 Assess the potential organization(s)

    1-2 hours

    Input: Publicized historical risk events, Solutions and vendor contracts likely in the works, Trends

    Output: IT’s valuation of the potential organization(s) for selling or divesting

    Materials: M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO

    The purpose of this activity is to assess the organization(s) that your organization is considering selling or divesting to.

    1. Complete the Historical Valuation Worksheet in the M&A Sell Playbook to understand the type of IT organization that your company may support.
      • The business likely isn’t looking for in-depth details at this time. However, as the IT leader, it is your responsibility to ensure critical risks are identified and communicated to the business.
    2. Use the information identified to help the business narrow down which organizations could be the right organizations to sell or divest to.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    By the end of this pre-transaction phase you should:

    Have a program plan for M&As and a repeatable M&A strategy for IT when engaging in reduction transactions

    Key outcomes from the Discovery & Strategy phase
    • Prepare the IT environment to support the potential sale or divestiture by identifying critical program plan elements and establishing a separation or carve-out strategy that will enable the business to reach its goals.
    • Create a M&A strategy that accounts for all the necessary elements of a transaction and ensures sufficient governance, capabilities, and metrics exist.
    Key deliverables from the Discovery & Strategy phase
    • Create vision and mission statements
    • Establish guiding principles
    • Create a future-state operating model
    • Identify the key roles for the transaction team
    • Identify and communicate the M&A governance
    • Determine target metrics
    • Identify the M&A operating model
    • Select the separation strategy framework
    • Conduct a RACI for key transaction tasks for the transaction team
    • Document the communication plan

    M&A Sell Blueprint

    Phase 3

    Due Diligence & Preparation

    Phase 1Phase 2

    Phase 3

    		Phase 4
    • 1.1 Identify Stakeholders and Their Perspective of IT
    • 1.2 Assess IT’s Current Value and Future State
    • 1.3 Drive Innovation and Suggest Reduction Opportunities
    • 2.1 Establish the M&A Program Plan
    • 2.2 Prepare IT to Engage in the Separation or Sale
    • 3.1 Engage in Due Diligence and Prepare Staff
    • 3.2 Prepare to Separate
    • 4.1 Execute the Transaction
    • 4.2 Reflection and Value Realization

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Drive value with a due diligence charter
    • Gather data room artifacts
    • Measure staff engagement
    • Assess culture
    • Create a carve-out roadmap
    • Prioritize separation tasks
    • Establish the separation roadmap
    • Identify the buyer’s IT expectations
    • Create a service/transaction agreement
    • Estimate separation costs
    • Create an employee transition plan
    • Create functional workplans for employees
    • Align project metrics with identified tasks

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT executive/CIO
    • IT senior leadership
    • Company M&A team
    • Business leaders
    • Purchasing organization
    • Transition team

    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

    Day 5

    Establish the Transaction FoundationDiscover the Motivation for SeparationIdentify Expectations and Create the Carve-Out RoadmapPrepare and Manage EmployeesPlan the Separation RoadmapNext Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite)

    Activities

    • 0.1 Identify the rationale for the company's decision to pursue a divestiture/sale.
    • 0.2 Identify key stakeholders and determine the IT transaction team.
    • 0.3 Gather and evaluate the M&A strategy, future-state operating model, and governance.
    • 1.1 Review the business rationale for the divestiture/sale.
    • 1.2 Identify pain points and opportunities tied to the divestiture/sale.
    • 1.3 Establish the separation strategy.
    • 1.4 Create the due diligence charter.
    • 2.1 Identify the buyer’s IT expectations.
    • 2.2 Create a list of IT artifacts to be reviewed in the data room.
    • 2.3 Create a carve-out roadmap.
    • 2.4 Create a service/technical transaction agreement.
    • 3.1 Measure staff engagement.
    • 3.2 Assess the current culture and identify the goal culture.
    • 3.3 Create an employee transition plan.
    • 3.4 Create functional workplans for employees.
    • 4.1 Prioritize separation tasks.
    • 4.2 Establish the separation roadmap.
    • 4.3 Establish and align project metrics with identified tasks.
    • 4.4 Estimate separation costs.
    • 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. IT strategy
    2. IT operating model
    3. IT governance structure
    4. M&A transaction team
    1. Business context implications for IT
    2. Separation strategy
    3. Due diligence charter
    1. Data room artifacts identified
    2. Carve-out roadmap
    3. Service/technical transaction agreement
    1. Engagement assessment
    2. Culture assessment
    3. Employee transition plans and workplans
    1. Separation roadmap and associated resourcing
    1. Divestiture separation strategy for IT

    What is the Due Diligence & Preparation phase?

    Mid-transaction state

    The Due Diligence & Preparation phase during a sale or divestiture is a critical time for IT. If IT fails to proactively participate in this phase, IT will have to merely react to separation expectations set by the business.

    If your organization is being sold in its entirety, staff will have major concerns about their future in the new organization. Making this transition as smooth as possible and being transparent could go a long way in ensuring their success in the new organization.

    In a divestiture, this is the time to determine where it’s possible for the organization to divide or separate from itself. A lack of IT involvement in these conversations could lead to an overcommitment by the business and under-delivery by IT.

    Goal: To ensure that, as the selling or divesting organization, you comply with regulations, prepare staff for potential changes, and identify a separation strategy if necessary

    Due Diligence Prerequisite Checklist

    Before coming into the Due Diligence & Preparation phase, you must have addressed the following:

    • Understand the rationale for the company's decision to pursue a sale or divestiture and what opportunities or pain points the sale should alleviate.
    • Identify the key roles for the transaction team.
    • Identify the M&A governance.
    • Determine target metrics.
    • Select a separation strategy framework.
    • Conduct a RACI for key transaction tasks for the transaction team.

    Before coming into the Due Diligence & Preparation phase, we recommend addressing the following:

    • Create vision and mission statements.
    • Establish guiding principles.
    • Create a future-state operating model.
    • Identify the M&A operating model.
    • Document the communication plan.
    • Examine the business perspective of IT.
    • Identify key stakeholders and outline their relationship to the M&A process.
    • Be able to valuate the IT environment and communicate IT’s value to the business.

    The Technology Value Trinity

    Delivery of Business Value & Strategic Needs

    • Digital & Technology Strategy
      The identification of objectives and initiatives necessary to achieve business goals.
    • IT Operating Model
      The model for how IT is organized to deliver on business needs and strategies.
    • Information & Technology Governance
      The governance to ensure the organization and its customers get maximum value from the use of information and technology.

    All three elements of the Technology Value Trinity work in harmony to deliver business value and achieve strategic needs. As one changes, the others need to change as well.

    • Digital and IT Strategy tells you what you need to achieve to be successful.
    • IT Operating Model and Organizational Design is the alignment of resources to deliver on your strategy and priorities.
    • Information & Technology Governance is the confirmation of IT’s goals and strategy, which ensures the alignment of IT and business strategy. It’s the mechanism by which you continuously prioritize work to ensure that what is delivered is in line with the strategy. This oversight evaluates, directs, and monitors the delivery of outcomes to ensure that the use of resources results in the achieving the organization’s goals.

    Too often strategy, operating model and organizational design, and governance are considered separate practices. As a result, “strategic documents” end up being wish lists, and projects continue to be prioritized based on who shouts the loudest – not based on what is in the best interest of the organization.

    Due Diligence & Preparation

    Step 3.1

    Engage in Due Diligence and Prepare Staff

    Activities

    • 3.1.1 Drive value with a due diligence charter
    • 3.1.2 Gather data room artifacts
    • 3.1.3 Measure staff engagement
    • 3.1.4 Assess culture

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT executive/CIO
    • IT senior leadership
    • Company M&A team
    • Business leaders
    • Prospective IT organization
    • Transition team

    Outcomes of Step

    This step of the process is when IT should prepare and support the business in due diligence and gather the necessary information about staff changes.

    3.1.1 Drive value with a due diligence charter

    1-2 hours

    Input: Key roles for the transaction team, M&A governance, Target metrics, Selected separation strategy framework, RACI of key transaction tasks for the transaction team

    Output: IT Due Diligence Charter

    Materials: M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to create a charter leveraging the items completed in the previous phase, as listed on the Due Diligence Prerequisite Checklist slide, to gain executive sign-off.

    1. In the IT Due Diligence Charter in the M&A Sell Playbook, complete the aspects of the charter that are relevant for you and your organization.
    2. We recommend including these items in the charter:
      • Communication plan
      • Transition team roles
      • Goals and metrics for the transaction
      • Separation strategy
      • Sale/divestiture RACI
    3. Once the charter has been completed, ensure that business executives agree to the charter and sign off on the plan of action.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    3.1.2 Gather data room artifacts

    4 hours

    Input: Future-state operating model, M&A governance, Target metrics, Selected separation strategy framework, RACI of key transaction tasks for the transaction team

    Output: List of items to acquire and verify can be provided to the purchasing organization while in the data room

    Materials: Critical domain lists on following slides, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team, Transition team, Legal team, Compliance/privacy officers

    The purpose of this activity is to create a list of the key artifacts that you could be asked for during the due diligence process.

    1. Review the lists on the following pages as a starting point. Identify which domains, stakeholders, artifacts, and information should be requested for the data room.
    2. IT leadership may or may not be asked to enter the data room directly. The short notice for having to find these artifacts for the purchasing organization can leave your IT organization scrambling. Identify the critical items worth obtaining ahead of time.
    3. Once you have identified the artifacts, provide the list to the legal team or compliance/privacy officers and ensure they also agree those items can be provided. If changes to the documents need to be made, take the time to do so.
    4. Store all items in a safe and secure file or provide to the M&A team ahead of due diligence.

    **Note that if your organization is not leading/initiating the data room, then you can ignore this activity.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Critical domains

    Understand the key stakeholders and outputs for each domain

    Domain

    Stakeholders

    Key Artifacts

    Key Information to request
    Business
    • Enterprise Architecture
    • Business Relationship Manager
    • Business Process Owners
    • Business capability map
    • Capability map (the M&A team should be taking care of this, but make sure it exists)
    • Business satisfaction with various IT systems and services
    Leadership/IT Executive
    • CIO
    • CTO
    • CISO
    • IT budgets
    • IT capital and operating budgets (from current year and previous year)
    Data & Analytics
    • Chief Data Officer
    • Data Architect
    • Enterprise Architect
    • Master data domains, system of record for each
    • Unstructured data retention requirements
    • Data architecture
    • Master data domains, sources, and storage
    • Data retention requirements
    Applications
    • Applications Manager
    • Application Portfolio Manager
    • Application Architect
    • Applications map
    • Applications inventory
    • Applications architecture
    • Copy of all software license agreements
    • Copy of all software maintenance agreements
    Infrastructure
    • Head of Infrastructure
    • Enterprise Architect
    • Infrastructure Architect
    • Infrastructure Manager
    • Infrastructure map
    • Infrastructure inventory
    • Network architecture (including which data centers host which infrastructure and applications)
    • Inventory (including separation capabilities of vendors, versions, switches, and routers)
    • Copy of all hardware lease or purchase agreements
    • Copy of all hardware maintenance agreements
    • Copy of all outsourcing/external service provider agreements
    • Copy of all service-level agreements for centrally provided, shared services and systems
    Products and Services
    • Product Manager
    • Head of Customer Interactions
    • Product lifecycle
    • Product inventory
    • Customer market strategy

    Critical domains (continued)

    Understand the key stakeholders and outputs for each domain

    Domain

    Stakeholders

    Key Artifacts

    Key Information to request

    Operations
    • Head of Operations
    • Service catalog
    • Service overview
    • Service owners
    • Access policies and procedures
    • Availability and service levels
    • Support policies and procedures
    • Costs and approvals (internal and customer costs)
    IT Processes
    • CIO
    • IT Management
    • VP of IT Governance
    • VP of IT Strategy
    • IT process flow diagram
    • Processes in place and productivity levels (capacity)
    • Critical processes/processes the organization feels they do particularly well
    IT People
    • CIO
    • VP of Human Resources
    • IT organizational chart
    • Competency & capacity assessment
    • IT organizational structure (including resources from external service providers such as contractors) with appropriate job descriptions or roles and responsibilities
    • IT headcount and location
    Security
    • CISO
    • Security Architect
    • Security posture
    • Information security staff
    • Information security service providers
    • Information security tools
    • In-flight information security projects
    Projects
    • Head of Projects
    • Project portfolio
    • List of all future, ongoing, and recently completed projects
    Vendors
    • Head of Vendor Management
    • License inventory
    • Inventory (including what will and will not be transitioning, vendors, versions, number of licenses)

    Retain top talent throughout the transition

    Focus on retention and engagement

    • People are such a critical component of this process, especially in the selling organization.
    • Retaining employees, especially the critical employees who hold specific skills or knowledge, will ensure the success and longevity of the divesting organization, purchasing organization, or the new company.
    • Giving employees a role in the organization and ensuring they do not see their capabilities as redundant will be critical to the process.
    • It is okay if employees need to change what they were doing temporarily or even long-term. However, being transparent about these changes and highlighting their value to the process and organization(s) will help.
    • The first step to moving forward with retention is to look at the baseline engagement and culture of employees and the organization. This will help determine where to focus and allow you to identify changes in engagement that resulted from the transaction.
    • Job engagement drivers are levers that influence the engagement of employees in their day-to-day roles.
    • Organizational engagement drivers are levers that influence an employee’s engagement with the broader organization.
    • Retention drivers are employment needs. They don’t necessarily drive engagement, but they must be met for engagement to be possible.

    3.1.3 Measure staff engagement

    3-4 hours

    Input: Engagement survey

    Output: Baseline engagement scores

    Materials: Build an IT Employee Engagement Program

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, IT employees of current organization

    The purpose of this activity is to measure current staff engagement to have a baseline to measure against in the future state. This is a good activity to complete if you will be divesting or selling in entirety.

    The results from the survey should act as a baseline to determine what the organization is doing well in terms of employee engagement and what drivers could be improved upon.

    1. Review Info-Tech’s Build an IT Employee Engagement Program research and select a survey that will best meet your needs.
    2. Conduct the survey and note which drivers employees are currently satisfied with. Likewise, note where there are opportunities.
    3. Document actions that should be taken to mitigate the negative engagement drivers throughout the transaction and enhance or maintain the positive engagement drivers.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Assess culture as a part of engagement

    Culture should not be overlooked, especially as it relates to the separation of IT environments

    • There are three types of culture that need to be considered.
    • Most importantly, this transition is an opportunity to change the culture that might exist in your organization’s IT environment.
    • Make a decision on which type of culture you’d like IT to have post transition.

    Target Organization's Culture. The culture that the target organization is currently embracing. Their established and undefined governance practices will lend insight into this.

    Your Organization’s Culture. The culture that your organization is currently embracing. Examine people’s attitudes and behaviors within IT toward their jobs and the organization.

    Ideal Culture. What will the future culture of the IT organization be once separation is complete? Are there aspects that your current organization and the target organization embrace that are worth considering?

    Culture categories

    Map the results of the IT Culture Diagnostic to an existing framework

    Competitive
    • Autonomy
    • Confront conflict directly
    • Decisive
    • Competitive
    • Achievement oriented
    • Results oriented
    • High performance expectations
    • Aggressive
    • High pay for good performance
    • Working long hours
    • Having a good reputation
    • Being distinctive/different
    Innovative
    • Adaptable
    • Innovative
    • Quick to take advantage of opportunities
    • Risk taking
    • Opportunities for professional growth
    • Not constrained by rules
    • Tolerant
    • Informal
    • Enthusiastic
    Traditional
    • Stability
    • Reflective
    • Rule oriented
    • Analytical
    • High attention to detail
    • Organized
    • Clear guiding philosophy
    • Security of employment
    • Emphasis on quality
    • Focus on safety
    Cooperative
    • Team oriented
    • Fair
    • Praise for good performance
    • Supportive
    • Calm
    • Developing friends at work
    • Socially responsible

    Culture Considerations

    • What culture category was dominant for each IT organization?
    • Do you share the same dominant category?
    • Is your current dominant culture category the most ideal to have post-separation?

    3.1.4 Assess Culture

    3-4 hours

    Input: Cultural assessments for current IT organization, Cultural assessment for target IT organization

    Output: Goal for IT culture

    Materials: IT Culture Diagnostic

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, IT employees of current organization, IT employees of target organization, Company M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to assess the different cultures that might exist within the IT environments of the organizations involved. By understanding the culture that exists in the purchasing organization, you can identify the fit and prepare impacted staff for potential changes.

    1. Complete this activity by leveraging the blueprint Fix Your IT Culture, specifically the IT Culture Diagnostic.
    2. Fill out the diagnostic for the IT department in your organization:
      1. Answer the 16 questions in tab 2, Diagnostic.
      2. Find out your dominant culture and review recommendations in tab 3, Results.
    3. Document the results from tab 3, Results, in the M&A Sell Playbook if you are trying to record all artifacts related to the transaction in one place.
    4. Repeat the activity for the purchasing organization.
    5. Leverage the information to determine what the goal for the culture of IT will be post-separation if it will differ from the current culture.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Due Diligence & Preparation

    Step 3.2

    Prepare to Separate

    Activities

    • 3.2.1 Create a carve-out roadmap
    • 3.2.2 Prioritize separation tasks
    • 3.2.3 Establish the separation roadmap
    • 3.2.4 Identify the buyer’s IT expectations
    • 3.2.5 Create a service/transaction agreement
    • 3.2.6 Estimate separation costs
    • 3.2.7 Create an employee transition plan
    • 3.2.8 Create functional workplans for employees
    • 3.2.9 Align project metrics with identified tasks

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT executive/CIO
    • IT senior leadership
    • Transition team
    • Company M&A team
    • Purchasing organization

    Outcomes of Step

    Have an established plan of action toward separation across all domains and a strategy toward resources.

    Don’t underestimate the importance of separation preparation

    Separation involves taking the IT organization and dividing it into two or more separate entities.

    Testing the carve capabilities of the IT organization often takes 3 months. (Source: Cognizant, 2014)

    Daimler-Benz lost nearly $19 billion following its purchase of Chrysler by failing to recognize the cultural differences that existed between the two car companies. (Source: Deal Room)

    Info-Tech Insight

    Separating the IT organization requires more time and effort than business leaders will know. Frequently communicate challenges and lost opportunities when carving the IT environment out.

    Separation needs

    Identify the business objectives of the sale to determine the IT strategy

    Set up a meeting with your IT due diligence team to:

    • Ensure there will be no gaps in the delivery of products and services in the future state.
    • Discuss the people and processes necessary to achieve the target technology environment and support M&A business objectives.

    Use this opportunity to:

    • Identify data and application complexities between the involved organizations.
    • Identify the IT people and process gaps, initiatives, and levels of support expected.
    • Determine your infrastructure needs to ensure effectiveness and delivery of services:
      • Does IT have the infrastructure to support the applications and business capabilities?
      • Identify any gaps between the current infrastructure in both organizations and the infrastructure required.
      • Identify any redundancies/gaps.
      • Determine the appropriate IT separation strategies.
    • Document your gaps, redundancies, initiatives, and assumptions to help you track and justify the initiatives that must be undertaken and help estimate the cost of separation.

    Separation strategies

    There are several IT separation strategies that will let you achieve your target technology environment.

    IT Separation Strategies
    • Divest. Carve out elements of the IT organization and sell them to a purchasing organization with or without a service-level agreement.
    • Sell. Sell the entire IT environment to a purchasing organization. The purchasing organization takes full responsibility in delivering and running the IT environment.
    • Spin-Off Joint Venture. Carve out elements of the IT organization and combine them with elements of a new or purchasing organization to create a new entity.

    The approach IT takes will depend on the business objectives for the M&A.

    • Generally speaking, the separation strategy is well understood and influenced by the frequency of and rationale for selling.
    • Based on the initiatives generated by each business process owner, you need to determine the IT separation strategy that will best support the desired target technology environment, especially if you are still operating or servicing elements of that IT environment.

    Key considerations when choosing an IT separation strategy include:

    • What are the main business objectives of the M&A?
    • What are the key synergies expected from the transaction?
    • What IT separation strategy best helps obtain these benefits?
    • What opportunities exist to position the business for sustainable and long-term growth?

    Separation strategies in detail

    Review highlights and drawbacks of different separation strategies

    Divest
      Highlights
    • Recommended for businesses striving to reduce costs and potentially even generate revenue for the business through the delivery of SLAs.
    • Opportunity to reduce or scale back on lines of business or products that are not driving profits.
      Drawbacks
    • May be forced to give up critical staff that have been known to deliver high value.
    • The IT department is left to deliver services to the purchasing organization with little support or consideration from the business.
    • There can be increased risk and security concerns that need to be addressed.
    Sell
      Highlights
    • Recommended for businesses looking to gain capital to exit the market profitably or to enter a new market with a large sum of capital.
    • The business will no longer exist, and as a result all operational costs, including IT, will become redundant.
      Drawbacks
    • IT is no longer needed as an operating or capital service for the organization.
    • Lost resources, including highly trained and critical staff.
    • May require packaging employees off and using the profit or capital generated to cover any closing costs.
    Spin-Off or Joint Venture
      Highlights
    • Recommended for businesses looking to expand their market presence or acquire new products. Essentially aligning the two organizations in the same market.
    • Each side has a unique offering but complementing capabilities.
      Drawbacks
    • As much as the organization is going through a separation from the original company, it will be going through an integration with the new company.
    • There could be differences in culture.
    • This could require a large amount of investment without a guarantee of profit or success.

    Preparing the carve-out roadmap

    And why it matters so much

    • When carving out the IT environment in preparation for a divestiture, it’s important to understand the infrastructure, application, and data connections that might exist.
    • Much to the business’ surprise, carving out the IT environment is not easy, especially when considering the services and products that might depend on access to certain applications or data sets.
    • Once the business has indicated which elements they anticipate divesting, be prepared for testing the functionality and ability of this carve-out, either through automation or manually. There are benefits and drawbacks to both methods:
      • Automated requires a solution and a developer to code the tests.
      • Manual requires time to find the errors, possibly more time than automated testing.
    • Identify if there are dependencies that will make the carve-out difficult.
      • For example, the business is trying to divest Product X, but that product is integrated with Product Y, which is not being sold.
      • Consider all the processes and products that specific data might support as well.
      • Moreover, the data migration tool will need to enter the ERP system and identify not just the data but all supporting and historical elements that underlie the data.

    Critical components to consider:

    • Selecting manual or automated testing
    • Determining data dependencies
    • Data migration capabilities
    • Auditing approval
    • People and skills that support specific elements being carved out

    3.2.1 Create a carve-out roadmap

    6 hours

    Input: Items included in the carve-out, Dependencies, Whether testing is completed, If the carve-out will pass audit, If the carve-out item is prepared to be separated

    Output: Carve-out roadmap

    Materials: Business’ divestiture plan, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Business leaders, Transition team

    The purpose of this activity is to prepare the IT environment by identifying a carve-out roadmap, specifically looking at data, infrastructure, and applications. Feel free to expand the roadmap to include other categories as your organization sees fit.

    1. In the Carve-Out Roadmap in the M&A Sell Playbook, identify the key elements of the carve-out in the first column.
    2. Note any dependencies the items might have. For example:
      • The business is selling Product X, which is linked to Data X and Data Y. The organization does not want to sell Data Y. Data X would be considered dependent on Data Y.
    3. Once the dependencies have been confirmed, begin automated or manual testing to examine the possibility of separating the data sets (or other dependencies) from one another.
    4. After identifying an acceptable method of separation, inform the auditing individual or body and confirm that there would be no repercussions for the planned process.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    3.2.2 Prioritize separation tasks

    2 hours

    Input: Separation tasks, Transition team, M&A RACI

    Output: Prioritized separation list

    Materials: Separation task checklist, Separation roadmap

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to prioritize the different separation tasks that your organization has identified as necessary to this transaction. Some tasks might not be relevant for this particular transaction, and others might be critical.

    1. Begin by downloading the SharePoint or Excel version of the M&A Separation Project Management Tool.
    2. Identify which separation tasks you want to have as part of your project plan. Alter or remove any tasks that are irrelevant to your organization. Add in tasks you think are missing.
    3. When deciding criticality of the task, consider the effect on stakeholders, those who are impacted or influenced in the process of the task, and dependencies (e.g. data strategy needs to be addressed first before you can tackle its dependencies, like data quality).
    4. Feel free to edit the way you measure criticality. The standard tool leverages a three-point scale. At the end, you should have a list of tasks in priority order based on criticality.

    Record the updates in the M&A Separation Project Management Tool (SharePoint).

    Record the updates in the M&A Separation Project Management Tool (Excel).

    Separation checklists

    Prerequisite Checklist
    • Build the project plan for separation and prioritize activities
      • Plan first day
      • Plan first 30/100 days
      • Plan first year
    • Create an organization-aligned IT strategy
    • Identify critical stakeholders
    • Create a communication strategy
    • Understand the rationale for the sale or divestiture
    • Develop IT's sale/divestiture strategy
      • Determine goal opportunities
      • Create the mission and vision statements
      • Create the guiding principles
      • Create program metrics
    • Consolidate reports from due diligence/data room
    • Conduct culture assessment
    • Create a transaction team
    • Establish a service/technical transaction agreement
    • Plan and communicate culture changes
    • Create an employee transition plan
    • Assess baseline engagement
    Business
    • Design an enterprise architecture
    • Document your business architecture
    • Meet compliance and regulatory standards
    • Identify and assess all of IT's risks
    Applications
    • Prioritize and address critical applications
      • CRM
      • HRIS
      • Financial
      • Sales
      • Risk
      • Security
      • ERP
      • Email
    • Develop method of separating applications
    • Model critical applications that have dependencies on one another
    • Identify the infrastructure capacity required to support critical applications
    • Prioritize and address critical applications
    Leadership/IT Executive
    • Build an IT budget
    • Structure operating budget
    • Structure capital budget
    • Identify the workforce demand vs. capacity
    • Establish and monitor key metrics
    • Communicate value realized/cost savings
    Data
    • Confirm data strategy
    • Confirm data governance
    • Build a data architecture roadmap
    • Analyze data sources and domains
    • Evaluate data storage (on-premises vs. cloud)
    • Develop an enterprise content management strategy and roadmap
    • Ensure cleanliness/usability of data sets
    • Identify data sets that can remain operational if reduced/separated
    • Develop reporting and analytics capabilities
    • Confirm data strategy
    Operations
    • Manage sales access to customer data
    • Determine locations and hours of operation
    • Separate/terminate phone lists and extensions
    • Split email address books
    • Communicate helpdesk/service desk information

    Separation checklists (continued)

    Infrastructure
    • Manage organization domains
    • Consolidate data centers
    • Compile inventory of vendors, versions, switches, and routers
    • Review hardware lease or purchase agreements
    • Review outsourcing/service provider agreements
    • Review service-level agreements
    • Assess connectivity linkages between locations
    • Plan to migrate to a single email system if necessary
    • Determine network access concerns
    Vendors
    • Establish a sustainable vendor management office
    • Review vendor landscape
    • Identify warranty options
    • Identify the licensing grant
    • Rationalize vendor services and solutions
    People
    • Design an IT operating model
    • Design your future IT organizational structure
    • Conduct a RACI for prioritized activities
    • Conduct a culture assessment and identify goal IT culture
    • Build an IT employee engagement program
    • Determine critical roles and systems/process/products they support
    • Define new job descriptions with meaningful roles and responsibilities
    • Create employee transition plans
    • Create functional workplans
    Projects
    • Identify projects to be on hold
    • Communicate project intake process
    • Reprioritize projects
    Products & Services
    • Redefine service catalog
    • Ensure customer interaction requirements are met
    • Select a solution for product lifecycle management
    • Plan service-level agreements
    Security
    • Conduct a security assessment
    • Develop accessibility prioritization and schedule
    • Establish an information security strategy
    • Develop a security awareness and training program
    • Develop and manage security governance, risk, and compliance
    • Identify security budget
    • Build a data privacy and classification program
    IT Processes
    • Evaluate current process models
    • Determine productivity/capacity levels of processes
    • Identify processes to be changed/terminated
    • Establish a communication plan
    • Develop a change management process
    • Establish/review IT policies
    • Evaluate current process models

    3.2.2 Establish the separation roadmap

    2 hours

    Input: Prioritized separation tasks, Carve-out roadmap, Employee transition plan, Separation RACI, Costs for activities, Activity owners

    Output: Separation roadmap

    Materials: M&A Separation Project Plan Tool (SharePoint), M&A Separation Project Plan Tool (Excel), SharePoint Template: Step-by-Step Deployment Guide

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Transition team, Company M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to create a roadmap to support IT throughout the separation process. Using the information gathered in previous activities, you can create a roadmap that will ensure a smooth separation.

    1. Use our Separation Project Management Tool to help track critical elements in relation to the separation project. There are a few options available:
      1. Follow the instructions on the next slide if you are looking to upload our SharePoint project template. Additional instructions are available in the SharePoint Template Step-by-Step Deployment Guide.
      2. If you cannot or do not want to use SharePoint as your project management solution, download our Excel version of the tool.
        **Remember that this your tool, so customize to your liking.
    2. Identify who will own or be accountable for each of the separation tasks and establish the time frame for when each project should begin and end. This will confirm which tasks should be prioritized.

    Record the updates in the M&A Separation Project Management Tool (SharePoint).

    Record the updates in the M&A Separation Project Management Tool (Excel).

    Separation Project Management Tool (SharePoint Template)

    Follow these instructions to upload our template to your SharePoint environment

    1. Create or use an existing SP site.
    2. Download the M&A Separation Project Management Tool (SharePoint) .wsp file from the Mergers & Acquisitions: The Sell Blueprint landing page.
    3. To import a template into your SharePoint environment, do the following:
      1. Open PowerShell.
      2. Connect-SPO Service (need to install PowerShell module).
      3. Enter in your tenant admin URL.
      4. Enter in your admin credentials.
      5. Set-SPO Site https://YourDomain.sharepoint.com/sites/YourSiteHe... -DenyAddAndCustomizePages 0
      OR
      1. Turn on both custom script features to allow users to run custom
      4. Screenshot of the 'Custom Script' option for importing a template into your SharePoint environment. Feature description reads 'Control whether users can run custom script on personal sites and self-service created sites. Note: changes to this setting might take up to 24 hours to take effect. For more information, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkIn=397546'. There are options to prevent or allow users from running custom script on personal/self-service created sites.
    4. Enable the SharePoint Server feature.
    5. Upload the .wsp file in Solutions Gallery.
    6. Deploy by creating a subsite and select from custom options.
      • Allow or prevent custom script
      • Security considerations of allowing custom script
      • Save, download, and upload a SharePoint site as a template
      7. Refer to Microsoft documentation to understand security considerations and what is and isn’t supported:

    For more information, check out the SharePoint Template: Step-by-Step Deployment Guide.

    Supporting the transition and establishing service-level agreements

    The purpose of this part of the transition is to ensure both buyer and seller have a full understanding of expectations for after the transaction.

    • Once the organizations have decided to move forward with a deal, all parties need a clear level of agreement.
    • IT, since it is often seen as an operational division of an organization, is often expected to deliver certain services or products once the transaction has officially closed.
    • The purchasing organization or the new company might depend on IT to deliver these services until they are able to provide those services on their own.
    • Having a clear understanding of what the buyer’s expectations are and what your company, as the selling organization, can provide is important.
    • Have a conversation with the buyer and document those expectations in a signed service agreement.

    3.2.4 Identify the buyer's IT expectations

    3-4 hours

    Input: Carve-out roadmap, Separation roadmap, Up-to-date version of the agreement

    Output: Buyer’s IT expectations

    Materials: Questions for meeting

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team, Purchasing company M&A team, Purchasing company IT leadership

    The purpose of this activity is to determine if the buyer has specific service expectations for your IT organization. By identifying, documenting, and agreeing on what services your IT organization will be responsible for, you can obtain a final agreement to protect you as the selling organization.

    1. Buyers should not assume certain services will be provided. Organize a meeting with IT leaders and the company M&A teams to determine what services will be provided.
    2. The next slide has a series of questions that you can start from. Ensure you get detailed information about each of the services.
    3. Once you fully understand the buyer’s IT expectations, create an SLA in the next activity and obtain sign-off from both organizations.

    Questions to ask the buyer

    1. What services would you like my IT organization to provide?
    2. How long do you anticipate those services will be provided to you?
    3. How do you expect your staff/employees to communicate requests or questions to my staff/employees?
    4. Are there certain days or times that you expect these services to be delivered?
    5. How many staff do you expect should be available to support you?
    6. What should be the acceptable response time on given service requests?
    7. When it comes to the services you require, what level of support should we provide?
    8. If a service requires escalation to Level 2 or Level 3 support, are we still expected to support this service? Or are we only Level 1 support?
    9. What preventative security methods does your organization have to protect our environment during this agreement period?

    3.2.5 Create a service/ transaction agreement

    6 hours

    Input: Buyer's expectations, Separation roadmap

    Output: SLA for the purchasing organization

    Materials: Service Catalog Internal Service Level Agreement Template, M&A Separation Project Plan Tool (SharePoint), M&A Separation Project Plan Tool (Excel)

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team, Purchasing company M&A team, Purchasing company IT leadership

    The purpose of this activity is to determine if the buyer has specific service expectations for your IT organization post-transaction that your IT organization is agreeing to provide.

    1. Document the expected services and the related details in a service-level agreement.
    2. Provide the SLA to the purchasing organization.
    3. Obtain sign-off from both organizations on the level of service that is expected of IT.
    4. Update the M&A Separation Project Management Tool Excel or SharePoint document to reflect any additional items that the purchasing organization identified.

    *For organizations being purchased in their entirety, this activity may not be relevant.

    Modify the Service Catalog Internal Service Level Agreement with the agreed-upon terms of the SLA.

    Importance of estimating separation costs

    Change is the key driver of separation costs

    Separation costs are dependent on the following:
    • Meeting synergy targets – whether that be cost saving or growth related.
      • Employee-related costs, licensing, and reconfiguration fees play a huge part in meeting synergy targets.
    • Adjustments related to compliance or regulations – especially if there are changes to legal entities, reporting requirements, or risk mitigation standards.
    • Governance or third party–related support required to ensure timelines are met and the separation is a success.
    Separation costs vary by industry type.
    • Certain industries may have separation costs made up of mostly one type, differing from other industries, due to the complexity and demands of the transaction. For example:
      • Healthcare separation costs are mostly driven by regulatory, safety, and quality standards, as well as consolidation of the research and development function.
      • Energy and Utilities tend to have the lowest separation costs due to most transactions occurring within the same sector rather than as cross-sector investments. For example, oil and gas transactions tend to be for oil fields and rigs (strategic fixed assets), which can easily be added to the buyer’s portfolio.

    Separation costs are more related to the degree of change required than the size of the transaction.

    3.2.6 Estimate separation costs

    3-4 hours

    Input: Separation tasks, Transition team, Valuation of current IT environment, Valuation of target IT environment, Outputs from data room, Technical debt, Employees

    Output: List of anticipated costs required to support IT separation

    Materials: Separation task checklist, Separation roadmap, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team, Transition team

    The purpose of this activity is to estimate the costs that will be associated with the separation. Identify and communicate a realistic figure to the larger M&A team within your company as early in the process as possible. This ensures that the funding required for the transaction is secured and budgeted for in the overarching transaction.

    1. On the associated slide in the M&A Sell Playbook, input:
      • Task
      • Domain
      • Cost type
      • Total cost amount
      • Level of certainty around the cost
    2. Provide a copy of the estimated costs to the company’s M&A team. Also provide any additional information identified earlier to help them understand the importance of those costs.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Employee transition planning

    Considering employee impact will be a huge component to ensure successful separation

    • Meet With Leadership
    • Plan Individual and Department Redeployment
    • Plan Individual and Department Layoffs
    • Monitor and Manage Departmental Effectiveness
    • For employees, the transition could mean:
      • Changing from their current role to a new role to meet requirements and expectations throughout the transition.
      • Being laid off because the role they are currently occupying has been made redundant.
    • It is important to plan for what the M&A separation needs will be and what the IT operational needs will be.
    • A lack of foresight into this long-term plan could lead to undue costs and headaches trying to retain critical staff, rehiring positions that were already let go, and keeping redundant employees longer then necessary.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Being transparent throughout the process is critical. Do not hesitate to tell employees the likelihood that their job may be made redundant. This will ensure a high level of trust and credibility for those who remain with the organization after the transaction.

    3.2.7 Create an employee transition plan

    3-4 hours

    Input: IT strategy, IT organizational design

    Output: Employee transition plans

    Materials: M&A Sell Playbook, Whiteboard, Sticky notes, Markers

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company M&A team, Transition team

    The purpose of this activity is to create a transition plan for employees.

    1. Transition planning can be done at specific individual levels or more broadly to reflect a single role. Consider these four items in the transition plan:
      • Understand the direction of the employee transitions.
      • Identify employees that will be involved in the transition (moved or laid off).
      • Prepare to meet with employees.
      • Meet with employees.
    2. For each employee that will be facing some sort of change in their regular role, permanent or temporary, create a transition plan.
    3. For additional information on transitioning employees, review the blueprint Streamline Your Workforce During a Pandemic.

    **Note that if someone’s future role is a layoff, then there is no need to record anything for skills needed or method for skill development.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    3.2.8 Create functional workplans for employees

    3-4 hours

    Input: Prioritized separation tasks, Employee transition plan, Separation RACI, Costs for activities, Activity owners

    Output: Employee functional workplans

    Materials: M&A Sell Playbook, Learning and development tools

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, IT management team, Company M&A team, Transition team

    The purpose of this activity is to create a functional workplan for the different employees so that they know what their key role and responsibilities are once the transaction occurs.

    1. First complete the transition plan from the previous activity (3.2.7) and the separation roadmap. Have these documents ready to review throughout this process.
    2. Identify the employees who will be transitioning to a new role permanently or temporarily. Creating a functional workplan is especially important for these employees.
    3. Identify the skills these employees need to have to support the separation. Record this in the corresponding slide in the M&A Sell Playbook.
    4. For each employee, identify someone who will be a point of contact for them throughout the transition.

    It is recommended that each employee have a functional workplan. Leverage the IT managers to support this task.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Metrics for separation

    Valuation & Due Diligence

    • % Defects discovered in production
    • $ Cost per user for enterprise applications
    • % In-house-built applications vs. enterprise applications
    • % Owners identified for all data domains
    • # IT staff asked to participate in due diligence
    • Change to due diligence
    • IT budget variance
    • Synergy target

    Execution & Value Realization

    • % Satisfaction with the effectiveness of IT capabilities
    • % Overall end-customer satisfaction
    • $ Impact of vendor SLA breaches
    • $ Savings through cost-optimization efforts
    • $ Savings through application rationalization and technology standardization
    • # Key positions empty
    • % Frequency of staff turnover
    • % Emergency changes
    • # Hours of unplanned downtime
    • % Releases that cause downtime
    • % Incidents with identified problem record
    • % Problems with identified root cause
    • # Days from problem identification to root cause fix
    • % Projects that consider IT risk
    • % Incidents due to issues not addressed in the security plan
    • # Average vulnerability remediation time
    • % Application budget spent on new build/buy vs. maintenance (deferred feature implementation, enhancements, bug fixes)
    • # Time (days) to value realization
    • % Projects that realized planned benefits
    • $ IT operational savings and cost reductions that are related to synergies/divestitures
    • % IT staff–related expenses/redundancies
    • # Days spent on IT separation
    • $ Accurate IT budget estimates
    • % Revenue growth directly tied to IT delivery
    • % Profit margin growth

    3.2.9 Align project metrics with identified tasks

    3-4 hours

    Input: Prioritized separation tasks, Employee transition plan, Separation RACI, Costs for activities, Activity owners, M&A goals

    Output: Separation-specific metrics to measure success

    Materials: Separation roadmap, M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Transition team

    The purpose of this activity is to understand how to measure the success of the separation project by aligning metrics to each identified task.

    1. Review the M&A goals identified by the business. Your metrics will need to tie back to those business goals.
    2. Identify metrics that align to identified tasks and measure achievement of those goals. For each metric you consider, ask the following questions:
      • What is the main goal or objective that this metric is trying to solve?
      • What does success look like?
      • Does the metric promote the right behavior?
      • Is the metric actionable? What is the story you are trying to tell with this metric?
      • How often will this get measured?
      • Are there any metrics it supports or is supported by?

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    By the end of this mid-transaction phase you should:

    Have successfully evaluated your IT people, processes, and technology to determine a roadmap forward for separating or selling.

    Key outcomes from the Due Diligence & Preparation phase
    • Participate in due diligence activities to comply with regulatory and auditing standards and prepare employees for the transition.
    • Create a separation roadmap that considers the tasks that will need to be completed and the resources required to support separation.
    Key deliverables from the Due Diligence & Preparation phase
    • Drive value with a due diligence charter
    • Gather data room artifacts
    • Measure staff engagement
    • Assess culture
    • Create a carve-out roadmap
    • Prioritize separation tasks
    • Establish the separation roadmap
    • Identify the buyer’s IT expectations
    • Create a service/transaction agreement
    • Estimate separation costs
    • Create an employee transition plan
    • Create functional workplans for employees
    • Align project metrics with identified tasks

    M&A Sell Blueprint

    Phase 4

    Execution & Value Realization

    Phase 1Phase 2Phase 3

    Phase 4

    • 1.1 Identify Stakeholders and Their Perspective of IT
    • 1.2 Assess IT’s Current Value and Future State
    • 1.3 Drive Innovation and Suggest Reduction Opportunities
    • 2.1 Establish the M&A Program Plan
    • 2.2 Prepare IT to Engage in the Separation or Sale
    • 3.1 Engage in Due Diligence and Prepare Staff
    • 3.2 Prepare to Separate
    • 4.1 Execute the Transaction
    • 4.2 Reflection and Value Realization

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Monitor service agreements
    • Continually update the project plan
    • Confirm separation costs
    • Review IT’s transaction value
    • Conduct a transaction and separation SWOT
    • Review the playbook and prepare for future transactions

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT executive/CIO
    • IT senior leadership
    • Vendor management team
    • IT transaction team
    • Company M&A team

    Workshop Overview

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

    Pre-Work

    Day 1

    Day 2

    Day 3

    Engage in Separation

    Day 4

    Establish the Transaction FoundationDiscover the Motivation for IntegrationPlan the Separation RoadmapPrepare Employees for the TransitionEngage in SeparationAssess the Transaction Outcomes (Must be within 30 days of transaction date)

    Activities

    • 0.1 Identify the rationale for the company's decision to pursue a divestiture/sale.
    • 0.2 Identify key stakeholders and determine the IT transaction team.
    • 0.3 Gather and evaluate the M&A strategy, future-state operating model, and governance.
    • 1.1 Review the business rationale for the divestiture/sale.
    • 1.2 Identify pain points and opportunities tied to the divestiture/sale.
    • 1.3 Establish the separation strategy.
    • 1.4 Create the due diligence charter.
    • 2.1 Prioritize separation tasks.
    • 2.2 Establish the separation roadmap.
    • 2.3 Establish and align project metrics with identified tasks.
    • 2.4 Estimate separation costs.
    • 3.1 Measure staff engagement
    • 3.2 Assess the current culture and identify the goal culture.
    • 3.3 Create an employee transition plan.
    • 3.4 Create functional workplans for employees.
    • S.1 Complete the separation by regularly updating the project plan.
    • S.2 Assess the service/technical transaction agreement.
    • 4.1 Confirm separation costs.
    • 4.2 Review IT’s transaction value.
    • 4.3 Conduct a transaction and separation SWOT.
    • 4.4 Review the playbook and prepare for future transactions.

    Deliverables

    1. IT strategy
    2. IT operating model
    3. IT governance structure
    4. M&A transaction team
    1. Business context implications for IT
    2. Separation strategy
    3. Due diligence charter
    1. Separation roadmap and associated resourcing
    1. Engagement assessment
    2. Culture assessment
    3. Employee transition plans and workplans
    1. Evaluate service/technical transaction agreement
    2. Updated separation project plan
    1. SWOT of transaction
    2. M&A Sell Playbook refined for future transactions

    What is the Execution & Value Realization phase?

    Post-transaction state

    Once the transaction comes to a close, it’s time for IT to deliver on the critical separation tasks. As the selling organization in this transaction, you need to ensure you have a roadmap that properly enables the ongoing delivery of your IT environment while simultaneously delivering the necessary services to the purchasing organization.

    Throughout the separation transaction, some of the most common obstacles IT should prepare for include difficulty separating the IT environment, loss of key personnel, disengaged employees, and security/compliance issues.

    Post-transaction, the business needs to understands the value they received by engaging in the transaction and the ongoing revenue they might obtain as a result of the sale. You also need to ensure that the IT environment is functioning and mitigating any high-risk outcomes.

    Goal: To carry out the planned separation activities and deliver the intended value to the business.

    Execution Prerequisite Checklist

    Before coming into the Execution & Value Realization phase, you must have addressed the following:

    • Understand the rationale for the company's decisions to pursue a sale or divestiture and what opportunities or pain points the sale should alleviate.
    • Identify the key roles for the transaction team.
    • Identify the M&A governance.
    • Determine target metrics.
    • Select a separation strategy framework.
    • Conduct a RACI for key transaction tasks for the transaction team.
    • Create a carve-out roadmap.
    • Prioritize separation tasks.
    • Establish the separation roadmap.
    • Create employee transition plans.

    Before coming into the Execution & Value Realization phase, we recommend addressing the following:

    • Create vision and mission statements.
    • Establish guiding principles.
    • Create a future-state operating model.
    • Identify the M&A operating model.
    • Document the communication plan.
    • Examine the business perspective of IT.
    • Identify key stakeholders and outline their relationship to the M&A process.
    • Establish a due diligence charter.
    • Be able to valuate the IT environment and communicate IT’s value to the business.
    • Gather and present due diligence data room artifacts.
    • Measure staff engagement.
    • Assess and plan for culture.
    • Estimate separation costs.
    • Create functional workplans for employees.
    • Identify the buyer’s IT expectations.
    • Create a service/ transaction agreement.

    Separation checklists

    Prerequisite Checklist
    • Build the project plan for separation and prioritize activities
      • Plan first day
      • Plan first 30/100 days
      • Plan first year
    • Create an organization-aligned IT strategy
    • Identify critical stakeholders
    • Create a communication strategy
    • Understand the rationale for the sale or divestiture
    • Develop IT's sale/divestiture strategy
      • Determine goal opportunities
      • Create the mission and vision statements
      • Create the guiding principles
      • Create program metrics
    • Consolidate reports from due diligence/data room
    • Conduct culture assessment
    • Create a transaction team
    • Establish a service/technical transaction agreement
    • Plan and communicate culture changes
    • Create an employee transition plan
    • Assess baseline engagement
    Business
    • Design an enterprise architecture
    • Document your business architecture
    • Meet compliance and regulatory standards
    • Identify and assess all of IT's risks
    Applications
    • Prioritize and address critical applications
      • CRM
      • HRIS
      • Financial
      • Sales
      • Risk
      • Security
      • ERP
      • Email
    • Develop method of separating applications
    • Model critical applications that have dependencies on one another
    • Identify the infrastructure capacity required to support critical applications
    • Prioritize and address critical applications
    Leadership/IT Executive
    • Build an IT budget
    • Structure operating budget
    • Structure capital budget
    • Identify the workforce demand vs. capacity
    • Establish and monitor key metrics
    • Communicate value realized/cost savings
    Data
    • Confirm data strategy
    • Confirm data governance
    • Build a data architecture roadmap
    • Analyze data sources and domains
    • Evaluate data storage (on-premises vs. cloud)
    • Develop an enterprise content management strategy and roadmap
    • Ensure cleanliness/usability of data sets
    • Identify data sets that can remain operational if reduced/separated
    • Develop reporting and analytics capabilities
    • Confirm data strategy
    Operations
    • Manage sales access to customer data
    • Determine locations and hours of operation
    • Separate/terminate phone lists and extensions
    • Split email address books
    • Communicate helpdesk/service desk information

    Separation checklists (continued)

    Infrastructure
    • Manage organization domains
    • Consolidate data centers
    • Compile inventory of vendors, versions, switches, and routers
    • Review hardware lease or purchase agreements
    • Review outsourcing/service provider agreements
    • Review service-level agreements
    • Assess connectivity linkages between locations
    • Plan to migrate to a single email system if necessary
    • Determine network access concerns
    Vendors
    • Establish a sustainable vendor management office
    • Review vendor landscape
    • Identify warranty options
    • Identify the licensing grant
    • Rationalize vendor services and solutions
    People
    • Design an IT operating model
    • Design your future IT organizational structure
    • Conduct a RACI for prioritized activities
    • Conduct a culture assessment and identify goal IT culture
    • Build an IT employee engagement program
    • Determine critical roles and systems/process/products they support
    • Define new job descriptions with meaningful roles and responsibilities
    • Create employee transition plans
    • Create functional workplans
    Projects
    • Identify projects to be on hold
    • Communicate project intake process
    • Reprioritize projects
    Products & Services
    • Redefine service catalog
    • Ensure customer interaction requirements are met
    • Select a solution for product lifecycle management
    • Plan service-level agreements
    Security
    • Conduct a security assessment
    • Develop accessibility prioritization and schedule
    • Establish an information security strategy
    • Develop a security awareness and training program
    • Develop and manage security governance, risk, and compliance
    • Identify security budget
    • Build a data privacy and classification program
    IT Processes
    • Evaluate current process models
    • Determine productivity/capacity levels of processes
    • Identify processes to be changed/terminated
    • Establish a communication plan
    • Develop a change management process
    • Establish/review IT policies
    • Evaluate current process models

    Execution & Value Realization

    Step 4.1

    Execute the Transaction

    Activities

    • 4.1.1 Monitor service agreements
    • 4.1.2 Continually update the project plan

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Monitor service agreements
    • Continually update the project plan

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT executive/CIO
    • IT senior leadership
    • Vendor management team
    • IT transaction team
    • Company M&A team

    Outcomes of Step

    Successfully execute the separation of the IT environments and update the project plan, strategizing against any roadblocks as they come.

    Key concerns to monitor during separation

    If you are entering the transaction at this point, consider and monitor the following three items above all else.

    Your IT environment, reputation as an IT leader, and impact on key staff will depend on monitoring these aspects.

    • Risk & Security. Make sure that the channels of communication between the purchasing organization and your IT environment are properly determined and protected. This might include updating or removing employees’ access to certain programs.
    • Retaining Employees. Employees who do not see a path forward in the organization or who feel that their skills are being underused will be quick to move on. Make sure they are engaged before, during, and after the transaction to avoid losing employees.
    • IT Environment Dependencies. Testing the IT environment several times and obtaining sign-off from auditors that this has been completed correctly should be completed well before the transaction occurs. Have a strong architecture outlining technical dependencies.

    For more information, review:

    • Reduce and Manage Your Organization’s Insider Threat Risk
    • Map Technical Skills for a Changing Infrastructure Operations Organization
    • Build a Data Architecture Roadmap

    4.1.1 Monitor service agreements

    3-6 months

    Input: Original service agreement, Risk register

    Output: Service agreement confirmed

    Materials: Original service agreement

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, External organization IT senior leadership

    The purpose of this activity is to monitor the established service agreements on an ongoing basis. Your organization is most at risk during the initial months following the transaction.

    1. Ensure the right controls exist to prevent the organization from unnecessarily opening itself up to risks.
    2. Meet with the purchasing organization/subsidiary three months after the transaction to ensure that everyone is satisfied with the level of services provided.
    3. This is not a quick and completed activity, but one that requires ongoing monitoring. Repeatedly identify potential risks worth mitigating.

    For additional information and support for this activity, see the blueprint Build an IT Risk Management Program.

    4.1.2 Continually update the project plan

    Reoccurring basis following transition

    Input: Prioritized separation tasks, Separation RACI, Activity owners

    Output: Updated separation project plan

    Materials: M&A Separation Project Plan Tool (SharePoint), M&A Separation Project Plan Tool (Excel)

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, IT transaction team, Company M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to ensure that the project plan is continuously updated as your transaction team continues to execute on the various components outlined in the project plan.

    1. Set a regular cadence for the transaction team to meet, update the project plan, review the status of the various separation task items, and strategize how to overcome any roadblocks.
    2. Employ governance best practices in these meetings to ensure decisions can be made effectively and resources allocated strategically.

    Record the updates in the M&A Separation Project Management Tool (SharePoint).

    Record the updates in the M&A Separation Project Management Tool (Excel).

    Execution & Value Realization

    Step 4.2

    Reflection and Value Realization

    Activities

    • 4.2.1 Confirm separation costs
    • 4.2.2 Review IT’s transaction value
    • 4.2.3 Conduct a transaction and separation SWOT
    • 4.2.4 Review the playbook and prepare for future transactions

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT executive/CIO
    • IT senior leadership
    • Transition team
    • Company M&A team

    Outcomes of Step

    Review the value that IT was able to generate around the transaction and strategize about how to improve future selling or separating transactions.

    4.2.1 Confirm separation costs

    3-4 hours

    Input: Separation tasks, Carve-out roadmap, Transition team, Previous RACI, Estimated separation costs

    Output: Actual separation costs

    Materials: M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Transaction team, Company M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to confirm the associated costs around separation. While the separation costs would have been estimated previously, it’s important to confirm the costs that were associated with the separation in order to provide an accurate and up-to-date report to the company’s M&A team.

    1. Taking all the original items identified previously in activity 3.2.6, identify if there were changes in the estimated costs. This can be an increase or a decrease.
    2. Ensure that each cost has a justification for why the cost changed from the original estimation.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    Track cost savings and revenue generation

    Throughout the transaction, the business would have communicated its goals, rationales, and expectations for the transaction. Sometimes this is done explicitly, and other times the information is implicit. Either way, IT needs to ensure that metrics have been defined and are measuring the intended value that the business expects. Ensure that the benefits realized to the organization are being communicated regularly and frequently.

    1. Define Metrics: Select metrics to track synergies through the separation.
      1. You can track value by looking at percentages of improvement in process-level metrics depending on the savings or revenue being pursued.
      2. For example, if the value being pursued is decreasing costs, metrics could range from capacity to output, highlighting that the output remains high despite smaller IT environments.
    2. Prioritize Value-Driving Initiatives: Estimate the cost and benefit of each initiative's implementation to compare the amount of business value to the cost. The benefits and costs should be illustrated at a high level. Estimating the exact dollar value of fulfilling a synergy can be difficult and misleading.
        Steps
      • Determine the benefits that each initiative is expected to deliver.
      • Determine the high-level costs of implementation (capacity, time, resources, effort).
    3. Track Cost Savings and Revenue Generation: Develop a detailed workplan to resource the roadmap and track where costs are saved and revenue is generated as the initiatives are undertaken.

    4.2.2 Review IT’s transaction value

    3-4 hours

    Input: Prioritized separation tasks, Separation RACI, Activity owners, M&A company goals

    Output: Transaction value

    Materials: M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Company's M&A team

    The purpose of this activity is to track how your IT organization performed against the originally identified metrics.

    1. If your organization did not have the opportunity to identify metrics, determine from the company M&A what those metrics might be. Review activity 3.2.9 for more information on metrics.
    2. Identify whether the metric (which should support a goal) was at, below, or above the original target metric. This is a very critical task for IT to complete because it allows IT to confirm that they were successful in the transaction and that the business can count on them in future transactions.
    3. Be sure to record accurate and relevant information on why the outcomes (good or bad) are supporting the M&A goals set out by the business.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    4.2.3 Conduct a transaction and separation SWOT

    2 hours

    Input: Separation costs, Retention rates, Value that IT contributed to the transaction

    Output: Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats

    Materials: Flip charts, Markers, Sticky notes

    Participants: IT executive/CIO, IT senior leadership, Business transaction team

    The purpose of this activity is to assess the positive and negative elements of the transaction.

    1. Consider the internal and external elements that could have impacted the outcome of the transaction.
      • Strengths. Internal characteristics that are favorable as they relate to your development environment.
      • Weaknesses Internal characteristics that are unfavorable or need improvement.
      • Opportunities External characteristics that you may use to your advantage.
      • Threats External characteristics that may be potential sources of failure or risk.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    M&A Sell Playbook review

    With an acquisition complete, your IT organization is now more prepared then ever to support the business through future M&As

    • Now that the transaction is more than 80% complete, take the opportunity to review the key elements that worked well and the opportunities for improvement.
    • Critically examine the M&A Sell Playbook your IT organization created and identify what worked well to help the transaction and where your organization could adjust to do better in future transactions.
    • If your organization were to engage in another sale or divestiture under your IT leadership, how would you go about the transaction to make sure the company meets its goals?

    4.2.4 Review the playbook and prepare for future transactions

    4 hours

    Input: Transaction and separation SWOT

    Output: Refined M&A playbook

    Materials: M&A Sell Playbook

    Participants: IT executive/CIO

    The purpose of this activity is to revise the playbook and ensure it is ready to go for future transactions.

    1. Using the outputs from the previous activity, 4.2.3, determine what strengths and opportunities there were that should be leveraged in the next transaction.
    2. Likewise, determine which threats and weaknesses could be avoided in the future transactions.
      Remember, this is your M&A Sell Playbook, and it should reflect the most successful outcome for you in your organization.

    Record the results in the M&A Sell Playbook.

    By the end of this post-transaction phase you should:

    Have completed the separation post-transaction and be fluidly delivering the critical value that the business expected of IT.

    Key outcomes from the Execution & Value Realization phase
    • Ensure the separation tasks are being completed and that any blockers related to the transaction are being removed.
    • Determine where IT was able to realize value for the business and demonstrate IT’s involvement in meeting target goals.
    Key deliverables from the Execution & Value Realization phase
    • Monitor service agreements
    • Continually update the project plan
    • Confirm separation costs
    • Review IT’s transaction value
    • Conduct a transaction and separation SWOT
    • Review the playbook and prepare for future transactions

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Problem Solved

    Congratulations, you have completed the M&A Sell Blueprint!

    Rather than reacting to a transaction, you have been proactive in tackling this initiative. You now have a process to fall back on in which you can be an innovative IT leader by suggesting how and why the business should engage in a separation or sale transaction. You have:

    • Created a standardized approach for how your IT organization should address divestitures or sales.
    • Retained critical staff and complied with any regulations throughout the transaction.
    • Delivered on the separation project plan successfully and communicated IT’s transaction value to the business.

    Now that you have done all of this, reflect on what went well and what can be improved if you were to engage in a similar divestiture or sale again.

    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 1-888-670-8899

    Research Contributors and Experts

    Ibrahim Abdel-Kader
    Research Analyst | CIO
    Info-Tech Research Group     		Brittany Lutes
    Senior Research Analyst | CIO
    Info-Tech Research Group
    John Annand
    Principal Research Director | Infrastructure
    Info-Tech Research Group     		Scott Bickley
    Principal Research Director | Vendor Management
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Cole Cioran
    Practice Lead | Applications
    Info-Tech Research Group     		Dana Daher
    Research Analyst | Strategy & Innovation
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Eric Dolinar
    Manager | M&A Consulting
    Deloitte Canada     		Christoph Egel
    Director, Solution Design & Deliver
    Cooper Tire & Rubber Company
    Nora Fisher
    Vice President | Executive Services Advisory
    Info-Tech Research Group     		Larry Fretz
    Vice President | Industry
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Research Contributors and Experts

    David Glazer
    Vice President of Analytics
    Kroll     		Jack Hakimian
    Senior Vice President | Workshops and Delivery
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Gord Harrison
    Senior Vice President | Research & Advisory
    Info-Tech Research Group     		Valence Howden
    Principal Research Director | CIO
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Jennifer Jones
    Research Director | Industry
    Info-Tech Research Group     		Nancy McCuaig
    Senior Vice President | Chief Technology and Data Office
    IGM Financial Inc.
    Carlene McCubbin
    Practice Lead | CIO
    Info-Tech Research Group     		Kenneth McGee
    Research Fellow | Strategy & Innovation
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Nayma Naser
    Associate
    Deloitte     		Andy Neill
    Practice Lead | Data & Analytics, Enterprise Architecture
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Research Contributors and Experts

    Rick Pittman
    Vice President | Research
    Info-Tech Research Group     		Rocco Rao
    Research Director | Industry
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Mark Rosa
    Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer
    Mohegan Gaming and Entertainment     		Tracy-Lynn Reid
    Research Lead | People & Leadership
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Jim Robson
    Senior Vice President | Shared Enterprise Services (retired)
    Great-West Life     		Steven Schmidt
    Senior Managing Partner Advisory | Executive Services
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Nikki Seventikidis
    Senior Manager | Finance Initiative & Continuous Improvement
    CST Consultants Inc.     		Allison Straker
    Research Director | CIO
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Justin Waelz
    Senior Network & Systems Administrator
    Info-Tech Research Group     		Sallie Wright
    Executive Counselor
    Info-Tech Research Group

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    Document Your Cloud Strategy

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    • 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.

    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.

    Register to read more …

    Looking at Risk in a New Light: The Six Pillars of Vendor Risk Management

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}209|cart{/j2store}
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    • Parent Category Name: Vendor Management
    • Parent Category Link: /vendor-management

    • Moreso 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 an organization's vendors, or their n-party support vendors, will cause an incident. 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 risk 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 your organization.
    • 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 Comprehensive Risk Impact Tool to manage potential impacts.

    Looking at Risk in a New Light: The Six Pillars of Vendor Risk Management Research & Tools

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

    1. Looking at Risk in a New Light: The Six Pillars of Vendor Risk Management – Use the research to better understand the negative impacts of vendor actions to your organization

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

    • Looking at Risk in a New Light: The Six Pillars of Vendor Risk Management Storyboard

    2. Comprehensive Risk Impact Tool – Use this tool to help identify and quantify the 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.

    • Comprehensive Risk Impact Tool
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Looking at Risk in a New Light: The Six Pillars of Vendor Risk Management

    Approach vendor risk impact assessments from all perspectives.

    Analyst Perspective

    Organizations must comprehensively understand the impacts vendors may cause through different potential actions.

    Frank Sewell

    The risks from the vendor market have become more prevalent as the technologies and organizational strategies shift to a global direction. With this shift in risk comes a necessary perspective change to align with the greater likelihood of an incident occurring from vendors' (or one of their downstream support vendor's) negative actions.

    Organizational leadership must become more aware of the increasing risks that engaging vendors impose. To do so, they need to make informed decisions, which can only be provided by engaging expert resources in their organizations to compile a comprehensive look at potential risk impacts.

    Frank Sewell

    Research Director, Vendor Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    More so 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 cause an incident. Organizations must protect themselves by creating better mechanisms to hold their n-party vendors accountable and validate that they comply.

    Common Obstacles

    Identifying and managing a vendor’s potential risk 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 your organization.

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

    Info-Tech's Approach

    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 Comprehensive Risk Impact Tool to manage potential impacts.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Organizations must evolve their risk assessments to be more adaptive to respond to changes in the global market. Ongoing monitoring and continual assessment of vendors’ risks is crucial to avoiding negative impacts.

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

    There are many individual components of vendor risk beyond cybersecurity.`

    6 components of vendor risk beyond cybersecurity. Financial, Reputational, Operational, Strategic, Security, Regulatory & Compliance.

    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.

    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.

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

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

    62%

    of IT professionals are more concerned about being a victim of ransomware than they were a year ago.

    Info-Tech Tech Trends Survey 2022

    82%

    of Microsoft non-essential employees shifted to working from home in 2020, joining the 18% already remote.

    Info-Tech Tech Trends Survey 2022

    89%

    of organizations invested in web conferencing technology to facilitate collaboration.

    Info-Tech Tech Trends Survey 2022

    Looking at Risk in a New Light:

    the 6 Pillars of Vendor Risk Management

    Vendor Risk

    • Financial

    • Strategic

    • Operational

    • Security

    • Reputational

    • Regulatory

    • Organizations must review their 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.
    • Prepare your vendor risk management for success using due diligence and scenario- based “What If” discussions to bring all the relevant parties to the table and educate your whole organization on risk factors.
    Assessing Financial Risk Impacts

    Strategic risks on a global scale

    Odds are at least one of these is currently affecting your strategic plans

    • Vendor Acquisitions
    • Global Pandemic
    • Global Shortages
    • Gas Prices
    • Poor Vendor Performance
    • Travel Bans
    • War
    • Natural Disasters
    • Supply Chain Disruptions
    • Security Incidents

    Make sure you have the right people at the table to identify and plan to manage impacts.

    Assess internal and external operational risk impacts

    Two sides of the same coin

    Internal

    • Poorly vetted supplemental staff
    • Bad system configurations
    • Lack of relevant skills
    • Poor vendor performance
    • Failure to follow established processes
    • Weak contractual accountability
    • Unsupportable or end-of-life system components

    External

    • Cyberattacks
    • Supply Chain Issues
    • Geo-Political Disruptions
    • Vendor Acquisitions
    • N-Party Non-Compliance
    • Vendor Fraud

    Operational risk is the risk of losses caused by flawed or failed processes, policies, systems, or events that disrupt business operations.

    Identify and manage security risk impacts on your organization

    Due diligence will enable successful outcomes

    • Poor vendor performance
    • Vendor acquisition
    • Supply chain disruptions and shortages
    • N-party risk
    • Third-party risk

    What your vendor associations say about you

    Reputations that affect your brand: Bad customer reviews, breach of data, poor security posture, negative news articles, public lawsuits, poor performance.

    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?

    6 components of vendor risk beyond cybersecurity. Financial, Reputational, Operational, Strategic, Security, Regulatory & Compliance.

    Review your expectations with your vendors and hold them accountable

    Regulatory entities are looking beyond your organization’s internal compliance these days. Instead, they are more and more 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?

    Identify and manage risks

    Regulatory

    Regulatory agencies are putting more enforcement around 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.

    Security-Data protection

    Data protection remains an issue. 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. 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.

    Identify and manage risks

    Poor vendor performance

    Consider the impact of a vendor that fails to perform midway through the implementation. Organizations need to be able to manage the impact of replacing that vendor and cutting their losses rather than continuing to throw good money away after bad performance.

    Supply chain disruptions and global shortages

    Geopolitical disruptions and natural disasters have caused unprecedented interruptions to business. Incorporate forecasting of product and ongoing business continuity planning into your strategic plans to adapt as events unfold.

    Poorly configured systems

    Failing to ensure that your vendor-supported systems are properly configured and that your vendors are meeting your IT change control and configuration standards is more commonplace than expected. Proper oversight and management of your support vendors is crucial to ensure they are meeting expectations in this regard.

    What to look for

    Identify potential risk impacts

    • Is there a record of complaints against the vendor from their employees or customers?
    • Is the vendor financially sound, with the resources to support your needs?
    • 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 instability?
    • 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.

      8. (Adapted from COSO)

    How to assess third-party risk

    1. Review organizational risks

      Understand the organizations risks to prepare for the “What If” game exercise.

    2. Identify and understand potential risks

      Play the “What If” game with the right people at the table.

    3. Create a risk profile packet for leadership

      Pull all the information together in a presentation document.

    4. Validate the risks

      Work with leadership to ensure that the proposed risks are in line with their thoughts.

    5. Plan to manage the risks

      Lower the overall risk potential by putting mitigations in place.

    6. Communicate the plan

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

    7. Enact the plan

      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

    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’ strategic plans need to be adaptable to avoid vendors’ negative actions causing an expedited shift in priorities.

    For example, Philips’ recall of ventilators impacted its products and the availability of its competitors’ products as demand overwhelmed the market.

    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 protections throughout the lifecycle of the vendor, you could be monitoring for breaches in perpetuity.

    Insight summary

    Assessing financial impacts is an ongoing, educative, and collaborative multidisciplinary process that vendor management initiatives are uniquely designed to coordinate and manage for organizations.

    Operational risk impacts often come from unexpected places and have unforeseen impacts. Knowing where your vendors place in critical business processes and those vendors' business continuity plans concerning your organization should be a priority for those managing the vendors.

    Insight 4

    Organizations need to learn how to assess the likelihood of potential risks in the rapidly changing online environments and recognize how their partnerships and subcontractors’ actions can affect their brand.

    For example, do you understand how a simple news article raises your profile for short-term and long-term adverse events?

    Insight 5

    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 for replacing critical vendors purchased in such a manner?

    Insight 6

    Vendors are becoming more and more crucial to organizations’ overall operations, and most organizations have a poor understanding of the potential impacts they represent.

    Is your vendor solvent? Do they have enough staff to accommodate your needs? Has their long-term planning been affected by changes in the market? Are they unique in their space?

    Identifying vendor risk

    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 operational experts at your organization will enhance your business's long-term potential for success.
    • Involving those who directly manage vendors and understand the market will aid operational experts in determining the forward path for relationships with your current vendors and identifying emerging potential strategic partners.
    • Make sure security, risk, and compliance are all at the table. These departments all look at risk from different angles for the business and give valuable insight collectively.
    • Organizations have a wealth of experience in their marketing departments that can help identify real-world scenarios of negative actions.

    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 risk impacts

    How could your vendors impact your organization?

    • Review vendors’ downstream connections to understand thoroughly who you are in business with
    • Institute continuous vendor lifecycle management
    • Develop IT risk governance and change control
    • Introduce continual risk assessment to monitor the relevant vendor markets
    • Monitor and schedule contract renewals and new service/module negotiations
    • Perform business alignment meetings to reassess relationships
    • Ensure strategic alignment in contracts
    • Review vendors’ business continuity plans and disaster recovery testing
    • Re-evaluate corporate policies frequently
    • Monitor your company’s and associated vendors’ online presence
    • 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 risk appetite and tolerance levels, considering their complete landscape.

    Changing regulations, acquisitions, new security issues, 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 that 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 improve our plans going forward.

    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 (if too small, continue as a single group).
    2. Use the Comprehensive 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.

    Download the Comprehensive Risk Impact Tool

    Input

    • List of identified potential risk scenarios scored by impact
    • List of potential mitigations of the scenarios to reduce the risk

    Output

    • Comprehensive risk profile on the specific vendor solution

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Comprehensive Risk Impact Tool to help drive discussion

    Participants

    • Vendor Management – Coordinator
    • Organizational Leadership
    • Operations Experts (SMEs)
    • Business Process Experts
    • Legal/Compliance/Risk Manager

    High risk example from tool

    High risk example from Tool. Shows sample questions to ask to identify impacts, their associated score, weight, and comments or notes.

    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.

    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.
    • At renewal negotiate better contractual terms and protections for your organization.

    Low risk example from tool

    Low risk example from Tool. Shows sample questions to ask to identify impacts, their associated score, weight, and comments or notes.

    Summary

    Seek to understand all potential risk impacts to better prepare your organization for success.

    • 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.
    • Organizations need to be realistic about the likelihood of potential risks in the changing global world.
    • Those organizations that consistently follow their established risk-assessment and due-diligence processes are better positioned to avoid penalties.
    • Understand how your vendors prioritize your organization in their business continuity processes.
    • Bring the right people to the table to outline potential risks in the market and your organization.
    • Socialize the third-party vendor risk management process throughout the organization to heighten awareness and enable employees to help protect the organization.
    • Organizations need to learn how to assess the likelihood of potential risks in the changing global markets and recognize how their partnerships and subcontracts affect their brand.
    • Incorporate lessons learned from prior incidents into your risk management process to build better plans for future issues.

    Organizations must evolve their risk assessments to be more meaningful to respond to global changes in the market.

    Organizations should increase the resources dedicated to monitoring the market as regulatory agencies continue to hold them more and more accountable.

    Bibliography

    Olaganathan, Rajee. “Impact of COVID-19 on airline industry and strategic plan for its recovery with special reference to data analytics technology.” Global Journal of Engineering and Technology Advances, vol 7, no 1, 2021, pp. 033-046.

    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.

    Weak Cybersecurity is taking a toll on Small Businesses (tripwire.com)

    SecureLink 2022 White Paper SL_Page_EA+PAM (rocketcdn.me)

    Shared Assessments Member Poll March 2021 "Guide: Evolving Work Environments Impact of Covid-19 on Profile and Management of Third Parties“

    “Cybersecurity only the tip of the iceberg for third-party risk management”. Help Net Security, April 21, 2021. Accessed: 2022-07-29.

    “Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) Managed Services”. Deloitte, 2022. Accessed: 2022-07-29.

    “The Future of TPRM: Third Party Risk Management Predictions for 2022”. OneTrust, December 20th2021. Accessed 2022-07-29.

    “Third Party Vendor definition”. Law Insider, Accessed 2022-07-29.

    “Third Party Risk”. AWAKE Security, Accessed 2022-07-29.

    Glidden, Donna. "Don't Underestimate the Need to Protect Your Brand in Publicity Clauses", Info-Tech Research Group, June 2022.

    Greenaway, Jordan. "Managing Reputation Risk: A start-to-finish guide", Transmission Private, July 2022. Accessed June 2022.

    Jagiello, Robert D, and Thomas T Hills. “Bad News Has Wings: Dread Risk Mediates Social Amplification in Risk Communication. ”Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis vol. 38,10 (2018): 2193-2207.doi:10.1111/risa.13117

    Kenton, Will. "Brand Recognition", Investopedia, August 2021. Accessed June 2022. Lischer, Brian. "How Much Does it Cost to Rebrand Your Company?", Ignyte, October 2017. Accessed June 2022.

    "Powerful Examples of How to Respond to Negative Reviews", Review Trackers, February 2022. Accessed June 2022.

    "The CEO Reputation Premium: Gaining Advantage in the Engagement Era", Weber Shadwick, March 2015. Accessed on June 2022.

    "Valuation of Trademarks: Everything You Need to Know",UpCounsel, 2022. Accessed June 2022.

    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.

    Regulatory guidance and industry standards

    Define Service Desk Metrics That Matter

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    • member rating overall impact: N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
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    • Parent Category Name: Service Desk
    • Parent Category Link: /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.

    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

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    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

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    Enterprise Network Design Considerations

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    Security, risk, and trust models play into how networks are designed and deployed. If these models are not considered during network design, band-aids and workarounds will be deployed to achieve the needed goals, potentially bypassing network controls.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    The cloud “gold rush” has made it attractive for many enterprises to migrate services off the traditional network and into the cloud. These services are now outside of the traditional network and associated controls. This shifts the split of east-west vs. north-south traffic patterns, as well as extending the network to encompass services outside of enterprise IT’s locus of control.

    Impact and Result

    Where users access enterprise data or services and from which devices dictate the connectivity needed. With the increasing shift of work that the business is completing remotely, not all devices and data paths will be under the control of IT. This shift does not allow IT to abdicate from the responsibility to provide a secure network.

    Enterprise Network Design Considerations Research & Tools

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

    1. Enterprise Network Design Considerations Deck – A brief deck that outlines key trusts and archetypes when considering enterprise network designs.

    This blueprint will help you:

    • Enterprise Network Design Considerations Storyboard

    2. Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool – Build an infrastructure assessment in an hour.

    Dispense with detailed analysis and customizations to present a quick snapshot of the road ahead.

    • Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Enterprise Network Design Considerations

    It is not just about connectivity.

    Executive Summary

    Info-Tech Insight

    Connectivity and security are tightly coupled

    Security, risk, and trust models play into how networks are designed and deployed. If these models are not considered during network design, band-aids and workarounds will be deployed to achieve the needed goals, potentially bypassing network controls.

    Many services are no longer within the network

    The cloud “gold rush” has made it attractive for many enterprises to migrate services off the traditional network and into the cloud. These services are now outside of the traditional network and associated controls. This shifts the split of east-west vs. north-south traffic patterns, as well as extending the network to encompass services outside of enterprise IT’s locus of control.

    Users are demanding an anywhere, any device access model

    Where users access enterprise data or services and from which devices dictate the connectivity needed. With the increasing shift of work that the business is completing remotely, not all devices and data paths will be under the control of IT. This shift does not allow IT to abdicate from the responsibility to provide a secure network.

    Enterprise networks are changing

    The new network reality

    The enterprise network of 2020 and beyond is changing:

    • Services are becoming more distributed.
    • The number of services provided “off network” is growing.
    • Users are more often remote.
    • Security threats are rapidly escalating.

    The above statements are all accurate for enterprise networks, though each potentially to differing levels depending on the business being supported by the network. Depending on how affected the network in question currently is and will be in the near future, there are different common network archetypes that are best able to address these concerns while delivering business value at an appropriate price point.

    High-Level Design Considerations

    1. Understand Business Needs

      2. Understand what the business needs are and where users and resources are located.

    2. Define Your Trust Model

      3. Trust is a spectrum and tied tightly to security.

    3. Align With an Archetype

      4. How will the network be deployed?

    4. Understand Available Tooling

      5. What tools are in the market to help achieve design principles?

    Understand business needs

    Mission

    Never ignore the basics. Start with revisiting the mission and vision of the business to address relevant needs.

    Users

    Identify where users will be accessing services from. Remote vs. “on net” is a design consideration now more than ever.

    Resources

    Identify required resources and their locations, on net vs. cloud.

    Controls

    Identify required controls in order to define control points and solutions.

    Define a trust model

    Trust is a spectrum

    • There is a spectrum of trust, from fully trusted to not trusted at all. Each organization must decide for their network (or each area thereof) the appropriate level of trust to assign.
    • The ease of network design and deployment is directly proportional to the trust spectrum.
    • When resources and users are outside of direct IT control, the level of appropriate trust should be examined closely.

    Implicit

    Trust everything within the network. Security is perimeter based and designed to stop external actors from entering the large trusted zone.

    Controlled

    Multiple zones of trust within the network. Segmentation is a standard practice to separate areas of higher and lower trust.

    Zero

    Verify trust. The network is set up to recognize and support the principle of least privilege where only required access is supported.

    Align with an archetype

    Archetypes are a good guide

    • Using a defined archetype as a guiding principle in network design can help clarify appropriate tools or network structures.
    • Different aspects of a network can have different archetypes where appropriate (e.g. IT vs. OT [operational technology] networks).

    Traditional

    Services are provided from within the traditional network boundaries and security is provided at the network edge.

    Hybrid

    Services are provided both externally and from within the traditional network boundaries, and security is primarily at the network edge.

    Inverted

    Services are provided primarily externally, and security is cloud centric.

    Traditional networks

    Resources within network boundaries

    Moat and castle security perimeter

    Abstract

    A traditional network is one in which there are clear boundaries defined by a security perimeter. Trust can be applied within the network boundaries as appropriate, and traffic is generally routed through internally deployed control points that may be centralized. Traditional networks commonly include large firewalls and other “big iron” security and control devices.

    Network Design Tenets

    • The full network path from resource to user is designed, deployed, and controlled by IT.
    • Users external to the network must first connect to the network to gain access to resources.
    • Security, risk, and trust controls will be implemented by internal enterprise hardware/software devices.

    Control

    In the traditional network, it is assumed that all required control points can be adequately deployed across hardware/software that is “on prem” and under the control of central IT.

    Info-Tech Insight

    With increased cloud services provided to end users, this network is now more commonly used in data centers or OT networks.

    Traditional networks

    The image contains an example of what traditional networks look like, as described in the text below.

    Defining Characteristics

    • Traffic flows in a defined path under the control of IT to and from central IT resources.
    • Due to visibility into, and the control of, the traffic between the end user and resources, IT can relatively simply implement the required security controls on owned hardware.

    Common Components

    • Traditional offices
    • Remote users/road warriors
    • Private data center/colocation space

    Hybrid networks

    Resources internal and external to network

    Network security perimeter combined with cloud protection

    Abstract

    A hybrid network is one that combines elements of a traditional network with cloud resources. As some of these resources are not fully under the control of IT and may be completely “offnet” or loosely coupled to the on-premises network, the security boundaries and control points are less likely to be centralized. Hybrid networks allow the flexibility and speed of cloud deployment without leaving behind traditional network constructs. This generally makes them expensive to secure and maintain.

    Network Design Tenets

    • The network path from resource to user may not be in IT’s locus of control.
    • Users external to the network must first connect to the network to gain access to internal resources but may directly access publicly hosted ones.
    • Security, risk, and trust controls may potentially be implemented by a mixture of internal enterprise hardware/software devices and external control points.

    Control

    The hallmark of a hybrid network is the blending of public and private resources. This blending tends to necessitate both public and private points of control that may not be homogenous.

    Info-Tech Insight

    With multiple control points to address, take care in simplifying designs while addressing all concerns to ease operational load.

    Hybrid networks

    The image contains an example of what hybrid networks look like, as described in the text below.

    Defining Characteristics

    • Traffic flows to central resources across a defined path under the control of IT.
    • Traffic to cloud assets may be partially under the control of IT.
    • For central resources, the traffic to and from the end user can have the required security controls relatively simply implemented on owned hardware.
    • For public cloud assets, IT may or may not have some control over part of the path.

    Common Components

    • Traditional offices
    • Remote users/road warriors
    • Private data center/colocation space
    • Public cloud assets (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS)

    Inverted perimeter

    Resources primarily external to the network

    Security control points are cloud centric

    Abstract

    An inverted perimeter network is one in which security and control points cover the entire workflow, on or off net, from the consumer of services through to the services themselves with zero trust. Since the control plane is designed to encompass the workflow in a secure manner, much of the underlying connectivity can be abstracted. In an extreme version of this deployment, IT would abstract end-user access, and any cloud-based or on-premises resources would be securely published through the control plane with context-aware precision access.

    Network Design Tenets

    • The network path from resource to user is abstracted and controlled by IT through services like secure access service edge (SASE).
    • Users only need internet access and appropriate credentials to gain access to resources.
    • Security, risk, and trust controls will be implemented through external cloud based services.

    Control

    An inverted network abstracts the lower-layer connectivity away and focuses on implementing a cloud-based zero trust control plane.

    Info-Tech Insight

    This model is extremely attractive for organizations that consume primarily cloud services and have a large remote work force.

    Inverted networks

    The image contains an example of what inverted networks look like, as described in the text below.

    Defining Characteristics

    • The end user does not have to be in a defined location.
    • All central resources that are to be accessed are hosted on cloud resources.
    • IT has little to no control of the path between the end user and central resources.

    Common Components

    • Traditional offices
    • Regent offices/shared workspaces
    • Remote users/road warriors
    • Public cloud assets (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS)

    Understand available tooling

    Don’t buy a hammer and go looking for nails

    • A network archetype must be defined in order to understand what tools (hardware or software) are appropriate for consideration in a network build or refresh.
    • Tools are purpose built and generally designed to solve specific problems if implemented and operated correctly. Choose the tools to align with the challenges that you are solving as opposed to choosing tools and then trying to use those purchases to overcome challenges.
    • The purchase of a tool does not allow for abdication of proper design. Tools must be chosen appropriately and integrated properly to orchestrate the best solutions. Purchasing a tool and expecting the tool to solve all your issues rarely succeeds.

    “It is essential to have good tools, but it is also essential that the tools should be used in the right way.” — Wallace D. Wattles

    Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN)

    Simplified branch office connectivity

    Archetype Value: Traditional Networks

    What It Is Not

    SD-WAN is generally not a way to slash spending by lowering WAN circuit costs. Though it is traditionally deployed across lower cost access, to minimize risk and realize the most benefits from the platform many organizations install multiple circuits with greater bandwidths at each endpoint when replacing the more costly traditional circuits. Though this maximizes the value of the technology investment, it will result in the end cost being similar to the traditional cost plus or minus a small percentage.

    What It Is

    SD-WAN is a subset of software-defined networking (SDN) designed specifically to deploy a secure, centrally managed, connectivity agnostic, overlay network connecting multiple office locations. This technology can be used to replace, work in concert with, or augment more traditional costly connectivity such as MPLS or private point to point (PtP) circuits. In addition to the secure overlay, SD-WAN usually also enables policy-based, intelligent controls, based on traffic and circuit intelligence.

    Why Use It

    You have multiple endpoint locations connected by expensive lower bandwidth traditional circuits. Your target is to increase visibility and control while controlling costs if and where possible. Ease of centralized management and the ability to more rapidly turn up new locations are attractive.

    Cloud access security broker (CASB)

    Inline policy enforcement placed between users and cloud services

    Archetype Value: Hybrid Networks

    What It Is Not

    CASBs do not provide network protection; they are designed to provide compliance and enforcement of rules. Though CASBs are designed to give visibility and control into cloud traffic, they have limits to the data that they generally ingest and utilize. A CASB does not gather or report on cloud usage details, licencing information, financial costing, or whether the cloud resource usage is aligned with the deployment purpose.

    What It Is

    A CASB is designed to establish security controls beyond a company’s environment. It is commonly deployed to augment traditional solutions to extend visibility and control into the cloud. To protect assets in the cloud, CASBs are designed to provide central policy control and apply services primarily in the areas of visibility, data security, threat protection, and compliance.

    Why Use It

    You a mixture of on-premises and cloud assets. In moving assets out to the cloud, you have lost the traditional controls that were implemented in the data center. You now need to have visibility and apply controls to the usage of these cloud assets.

    Secure access service edge (SASE)

    Convergence of security and service access in the cloud

    Archetype Value: Inverted Networks

    What It Is Not

    Though the service will consist of many service offerings, SASE is not multiple services strung together. To present the value proposed by this platform, all functionality proposed must be provided by a single platform under a “single pane of glass.” SASE is not a mature and well-established service. The market is still solidifying, and the full-service definition remains somewhat fluid.

    What It Is

    SASE exists at the intersection of network-as-a-service and network-security-as-a-service. It is a superset of many network and security cloud offerings such as CASB, secure web gateway, SD-WAN, and WAN optimization. Any services offered by a SASE provider will be cloud hosted, presented in a single stack, and controlled through a single pane of glass.

    Why Use It

    Your network is inverting, and services are provided primarily as cloud assets. In a full realization of this deployment’s value, you would abstract how and where users gain initial network access yet remain in control of the communications and data flow.

    Activity

    Understand your enterprise network options

    Activity: Network assessment in an hour

    • Learn about the Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool
    • Complete the Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool

    This activity involves the following participants:

    • IT strategic direction decision makers.
    • IT managers responsible for network.
    • Organizations evaluating platforms for mission critical applications.

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Completed Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool

    Info-Tech Insight

    Review your design options with security and compliance in mind. Infrastructure is no longer a standalone entity and now tightly integrates with software-defined networks and security solutions.

    Build an assessment in an hour

    Learn about the Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool.

    This workbook provides a high-level analysis of a technology’s readiness for adoption based on your organization’s needs.

    • The workbook then places the technology on a graph that measures both the readiness and fit for your organization. In addition, it provides warnings for specific issues and lets you know if you have considerable uncertainty in your answers.
    • At a glance you can now communicate what you are doing to help the company:
      • Grow
      • Save money
      • Reduce risk
    • Regardless of your specific audience, these are important stories to be able to tell.
    The image contains three screenshots from the Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool.

    Build an assessment in an hour

    Complete the Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool.

    Dispense with detailed analysis and customizations to present a quick snapshot of the road ahead.

    1. Weightings: Adjust the Weighting tab to meet organizational needs. The provided weightings for the overall solution areas are based on a generic firm; individual firms will have different needs.
    2. Data Entry: For each category, answer the questions for the technology you are considering. When you have completed the questionnaire, go to the next tab for the results.
    3. Results: The Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool provides a value versus readiness assessment of your chosen technology customized to your organization.

    The image contains three screenshots from the Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool. It has a screenshot for each step as described in the text above.

    Related Info-Tech Research

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    Move beyond alignment: Put yourself in the driver’s seat for true business value.

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    Leverage your vendor sourcing process to get better results.

    Research Authors

    The image contains a photo of Scott Young.

    Scott Young, Principal Research Advisor, Info-Tech Research Group

    Scott Young is a Director of Infrastructure Research at Info-Tech Research Group. Scott has worked in the technology field for over 17 years, with a strong focus on telecommunications and enterprise infrastructure architecture. He brings extensive practical experience in these areas of specialization, including IP networks, server hardware and OS, storage, and virtualization.

    The image contains a photo of Troy Cheeseman.

    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.

    Bibliography

    Ahlgren, Bengt. “Design considerations for a network of information.” ACM Digital Library, 21 Dec. 2008.

    Cox Business. “Digital transformation is here. Is your business ready to upgrade your mobile work equation?” BizJournals, 1 April 2022. Accessed April 2022.

    Elmore, Ed. “Benefits of integrating security and networking with SASE.” Tech Radar, 1 April 2022. Web.

    Greenfield, Dave. “From SD-WAN to SASE: How the WAN Evolution is Progressing.” Cato Networks, 19 May 2020. Web

    Korolov, Maria. “What is SASE? A cloud service that marries SD-WAN with security.” Network World, 7 Sept. 2020. Web.

    Korzeniowski, Paul, “CASB tools evolve to meet broader set of cloud security needs.” TechTarget, 26 July 2019. Accessed March 2022.

    Integrate IT Risk Into Enterprise Risk

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    • Parent Category Name: IT Governance, Risk & Compliance
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    • IT risks, when considered, are identified and classified separately from the enterprise-wide perspective.
    • IT is expected to own risks over which they have no authority or oversight.
    • Poor behaviors, such as only considering IT risks when conducting compliance or project due diligence, have been normalized.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Stop avoiding risk – integrate it. This provides a holistic view of uncertainty for the organization to drive innovative new approaches to optimize the organization’s ability to respond to risk.

    Impact and Result

    • Understand gaps in the organization’s current approach to risk management practices.
    • Establish a standardized approach for how IT risks impact the enterprise as a whole.
    • Drive a risk-aware organization toward innovation and consider alternative options for how to move forward.
    • Integrate IT risks into the foundational risk practice.

    Integrate IT Risk Into Enterprise Risk Research & Tools

    Integrated Risk Management Capstone – A framework for how IT risks can be integrated into your organization’s enterprise risk management program to enable strategic risk-informed decisions.

    This is a capstone blueprint highlighting the benefits of an integrated risk management program that uses risk information and data to inform strategic decision making. Throughout this research you will gain insight into the five core elements of integrating risk through assessing, governing, defining the program, defining the process, and implementing.

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

    • Integrate IT Risk Into Enterprise Risk Capstone
    • Integrated Risk Maturity Assessment
    • Risk Register Tool

    Infographic

    Further reading

    Integrate IT Risk Into Enterprise Risk

    Don’t fear IT risks, integrate them.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Having siloed risks is risky business for any enterprise.

    Photo of Valence Howden, Principal Research Director, CIO Practice.
    Valence Howden
    Principal Research Director, CIO Practice     		Photo of Petar Hristov Research Director, Security, Privacy, Risk & Compliance.
    Petar Hristov
    Research Director, Security, Privacy, Risk & Compliance     		Photo of Ian Mulholland Research Director, Security, Risk & Compliance.
    Ian Mulholland
    Research Director, Security, Risk & Compliance     		Photo of Brittany Lutes, Senior Research Analyst, CIO Practice.
    Brittany Lutes
    Senior Research Analyst, CIO Practice     		Photo of Ibrahim Abdel-Kader, Research Analyst, CIO Practice
    Ibrahim Abdel-Kader
    Research Analyst, CIO Practice

    Every organization has a threshold for risk that should not be exceeded, whether that threshold is defined or not.

    In the age of digital, information and technology will undoubtedly continue to expand beyond the confines of the IT department. As such, different areas of the organization cannot address these risks in silos. A siloed approach will produce different ways of identifying, assessing, responding to, and reporting on risk events. Integrated risk management is about embedding IT uncertainty to inform good decision making across the organization.

    When risk is integrated into the organization's enterprise risk management program, it enables a single view of all risks and the potential impact of each risk event. More importantly, it provides a consistent view of the risk event in relation to uncertainty that might have once been seemingly unrelated to IT.

    And all this can be achieved while remaining within the enterprise’s clearly defined risk appetite.

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Most organizations fail to integrate IT risks into enterprise risks:

    • IT risks, when considered, are identified and classified separately from the enterprise-wide perspective.
    • IT is expected to own risks over which they have no authority or oversight.
    • Poor behaviors, such as only considering IT risks when conducting compliance or project due diligence, have been normalized.

    Common Obstacles

    IT leaders have to overcome these obstacles when it comes to integrating risk:

    • Making business leaders aware of, involved in, and able to respond to all enterprise risks.
    • A lack of data or information being used to support a holistic risk management process.
    • A low level of enterprise risk maturity.
    • A lack of risk management capabilities.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    By leveraging the Info-Tech Integrated Risk approach, your business can better address and embed risk by:

    • Understanding gaps in the organization’s current approach to risk management practices.
    • Establishing a standardized approach for how IT risks impact the enterprise as a whole.
    • Driving a risk-aware organization toward innovation and considering alternative options for how to move forward.
    • Helping integrate IT risks into the foundational risk practice.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Stop avoiding risk – integrate it. This provides a holistic view of uncertainty for the organization to drive innovative new approaches to optimize its ability to respond to risk.

    What is integrated risk management?

    • Integrated risk management is the process of ensuring all forms of risk information, including information and technology, are considered and included in the enterprise’s risk management strategy.
    • It removes the siloed approach to classifying risks related to specific departments or areas of the organization, recognizing that each of those risks is a threat to the overarching enterprise.
    • Aggregating the different threats or uncertainty that might exist within an organization allows for informed decisions to be made that align to strategic goals and continue to drive value back to the business.
    • By holistically considering the different risks, the organization can make informed decisions on the best course of action that will reduce any negative impacts associated with the uncertainty and increase the overall value.

    Enterprise Risk Management (ERM)

    • IT
    • Security
    • Digital
    • Vendor/Third Party
    • Other

    Enterprise risk management is the practice of identifying and addressing risks to your organization and using risk information to drive better decisions and better opportunities.

    IT risk is enterprise risk

    Multiple types of risk, 'Finance', 'IT', 'People', and 'Digital', funneling into 'ENTERPRISE RISKS'. IT risks have a direct and often aggregated impact on enterprise risks and opportunities in the same way other business risks can. This relationship must be understood and addressed through integrated risk management to ensure a consistent approach to risk.

    Your challenge

    Embedding IT risks into the enterprise risk management program is challenging because:

    • Most organizations classify risks based on the departments or areas of the business where the uncertainty is likely to happen.
    • Unnecessary expectations are placed on the IT department to own risks over which they have no authority or oversight.
    • Risks are often only identified when conducting due diligence for a project or ensuring compliance with regulations and standards.

    Risk-mature organizations have a unique benefit in that they often have established an overarching governance framework and embedded risk awareness into the culture.

    35% — Only 35% of organizations had embraced ERM in 2020. (Source: AICPA and NC State Poole College of Management)

    12% — Only 12% of organizations are leveraging risk as a tool to their strategic advantage. (Source: AICPA and NC State Poole College of Management)

    Common obstacles

    These barriers make integrating IT risks difficult to address for many organizations:

    • IT risks are not seen as enterprise risks.
    • The organization’s culture toward risk is not defined.
    • The organization’s appetite and threshold for risk are not defined.
    • Each area of the organization has a different method of identifying, assessing, and responding to risk events.
    • Access to reliable and informative data to support risk management is difficult to obtain.
    • Leadership does not see the business value of integrating risk into a single management program.
    • The organization’s attitudes and behaviors toward risk contradict the desired and defined risk culture.
    • Skills, training, and resources to support risk management are lacking, let alone those to support integrated risk management.

    Integrating risks has its challenges

    62% — Accessing and disseminating information is the main challenge for 62% of organizations maturing their organizational risk management. (Source: OECD)

    20-28% — Organizations with access to machine learning and analytics to address future risk events have 20 to 28% more satisfaction. (Source: Accenture)

    Integrate Risk and Use It to Your Advantage

    Accelerate and optimize your organization by leveraging meaningful risk data to make intelligent enterprise risk decisions.

    Risk management is more than checking an audit box or demonstrating project due diligence.

    Risk Drivers
    • Audit & compliance
    • Preserve value & avoid loss
    • Previous risk impact driver
    • Major transformation
    • Strategic opportunities
    		 Arrow pointing right. Only 7% of organizations are in a “leading” or “aspirational” level of risk maturity. (OECD, 2021) 63% of organizations struggle when it comes to defining their appetite toward strategy related risks. (“Global Risk Management Survey,” Deloitte, 2021) Late adopters of risk management were 70% more likely to use instinct over data or facts to inform an efficient process. (Clear Risk, 2020) 55% of organizations have little to no training on ERM to properly implement such practices. (AICPA, NC State Poole College of Management, 2021)
    1. Assess Enterprise Risk Maturity 3. Build a Risk Management Program Plan 4. Establish Risk Management Processes 5. Implement a Risk Management Program
    2. Determine Authority with Governance
    Unfortunately, less than 50% of those in risk focused roles are also in a governance role where they have the authority to provide risk oversight. (Governance Institute of Australia, 2020)
    IT can improve the maturity of the organization’s risk governance and help identify risk owners who have authority and accountability.

    Governance and related decision making is optimized with integrated and aligned risk data.

    		List of 'Integrated Risk Maturity Categories': '1. Context & Strategic Direction', '2. Risk Culture and Authority', '3. Risk Management Process', and '4. Risk Program Optimization'. The five types of a risk in Enterprise Risk Management.

    ERM incorporates the different types of risk, including IT, security, digital, vendor, and other risk types.

    The program plan is meant to consider all the major risk types in a unified approach.

    		The 'Risk Process' cycle starting with '1. Identify', '2. Assess', '3. Respond', '4. Monitor', '5. Report', and back to the beginning. Implementation of an integrated risk management program requires ongoing access to risk data by those with decision making authority who can take action.

    Integrated Risk Mapping — Downside Risk Focus

    A diagram titled 'Risk and Controls' beginning with 'Possible Sources' and a list of sources, 'Control Activities' to prevent, the 'RISK EVENT', 'Recovery Activities' to recover, and 'Possible Repercussions' with a list of ramifications.

    Integrated Risk Mapping — Downside and Upside Risk

    Third-Party Risk Example

    Example of a third-party risk mapped onto the diagram on the previous slide, but with potential upsides mapped out as well. The central risk event is 'Vendor exposes private customer data'. Possible Sources of the downside are 'External Attack' with likelihood prevention method 'Define security standard requirements for vendor assessment' and 'Exfiltration of data through fourth-party staff' with likelihood prevention method 'Ensure data is properly classified'. Possible Sources of the upside are 'Application rationalization' with likelihood optimization method 'Reduce number of applications in environment' and 'Review vendor assessment practices' with likelihood optimization method 'Improve vendor onboarding'. Possible Repercussions on the downside are 'Organization unable to operate in jurisdiction' with impact minimization method 'Engage in-house risk mitigation responses' and 'Fines levied against organization' with impact minimization method 'Report incident to any regulators'. Possible Repercussions on the upside are 'Easier vendor integration and management' with impact utilization method 'Improved vendor onboarding practices' and 'Able to bid on contracts with these requirements' with impact utilization method 'Vendors must provide attestations (e.g. SOC or CMMC)'.

    Insight Summary

    Overarching insight

    Stop fearing risk – integrate it. Integration leads to opportunities for organizations to embrace innovation and new digital technologies as well as reducing operational costs and simplifying reporting.

    Govern risk strategically

    Governance of risk management for information- and technology-related events is often misplaced. Just because it's classified as an IT risk does not mean it shouldn’t be owned by the board or business executive.

    Assess risk maturity

    Integrating risk requires a baseline of risk maturity at the enterprise level. IT can push integrating risks, but only if the enterprise is willing to adopt the attitudes and behaviors that will drive the integrated risk approach.

    Manage risk

    It is not a strategic decision to have different areas of the organization manage the risks perceived to be in their department. It’s the easy choice, but not the strategic one.

    Implement risk management

    Different areas of an enterprise apply risk management processes differently. Determining a single method for identification, assessment, response, and monitoring can ensure successful implementation of enterprise risk management.

    Tactical insight

    Good risk management will consider both the positives and negatives associated with a risk management program by recognizing both the upside and downside of risk event impact and likelihood.

    Integrated risk benefits

    IT Benefits

    • IT executives have a responsibility but not accountability when it comes to risk. Ensure the right business stakeholders have awareness and ability to make informed risk decisions.
    • Controls and responses to risks that are within the “IT” realm will be funded and provided with sufficient support from the business.
    • The business respects and values the role of IT in supporting the enterprise risk program, elevating its role into business partner.

    Business Benefits

    • Business executives and boards can make informed responses to the various forms of risk, including those often categorized as “IT risks.”
    • The compounding severity of risks can be formally assessed and ideally quantified to provide insight into how risks’ ramifications can change based on scenarios.
    • Risk-informed decisions can be used to optimize the business and drive it toward adopting innovation as a response to risk events.
    • Get your organization insured against cybersecurity threats at the lowest premiums possible.

    Measure the value of integrating risk

    • Reduce Operating Costs

      • Organizations can reduce their risk operating costs by 20 to 30% by adopting enterprise-wide digital risk initiatives (McKinsey & Company).

    • Increase Cybersecurity Threat Preparedness

      • Increase the organization’s preparedness for cybersecurity threats. 79% of organizations that were impacted by email threats in 2020 were not prepared for the hit (Diligent)

    • Increase Risk Management’s Impact to Drive Strategic Value

      • Currently, only 3% of organizations are extensively using risk management to drive their unique competitive advantage, compared to 35% of companies who do not use it at all (AICPA & NC State Poole College of Management).

    • Reduce Lost Productivity for the Enterprise

      • Among small businesses, 76% are still not considering purchasing cyberinsurance in 2021, despite the fact that ransomware attacks alone cost Canadian businesses $5.1 billion in productivity in 2020 (Insurance Bureau of Canada, 2021).

    “31% of CIO’s expected their role to expand and include risk management responsibilities.” (IDG “2021 State of the CIO,” 2021)

    Make integrated risk management sustainable

    58%

    Focus not just on the preventive risk management but also the value-creating opportunities. With 58% of organizations concerned about disruptive technology, it’s an opportunity to take the concern and transform it into innovation. (Accenture)

    70%

    Invest in tools that have data and analytics features. Currently, “gut feelings” or “experience” inform the risk management decisions for 70% of late adopters. (Clear Risk)

    54%

    Align to the strategic vision of the board and CEO, given that these two roles account for 54% of the accountability associated with extended enterprise risk management. (Extended Enterprise Risk Management Survey, 2020,” Deloitte)

    63%

    Include IT leaders in the risk committee to help informed decision making. Currently 63% of chief technology officers are included in the C‑suite risk committee. (AICPA & NC State Poole College of Management)

    Successful adoption of integrated risk management is often associated with these key elements.

    Assessment

    Assess your organization’s method of addressing risk management to determine if integrated risk is possible

    Assessing the organization’s risk maturity

    Mature or not, integrated risk management should be a consideration for all organizations

    The first step to integrating risk management within the enterprise is to understand the organization’s readiness to adopt practices that will enable it to successfully integrate information.

    In 2021, we saw enterprise risk management assessments become one of the most common trends, particularly as a method by which the organization can consolidate the potential impacts of uncertainties or threats (Lawton, 2021). A major driver for this initiative was the recognition that information and technology not only have enterprise-wide impacts on the organization’s risk management but that IT has a critical role in supporting processes that enable effective access to data/information.

    A maturity assessment has several benefits for an organization: It ensures there is alignment throughout the organization on why integrated risk is the right approach to take, it recognizes the organization’s current risk maturity, and it supports the organization in defining where it would like to go.

    		Pie chart titled 'Organizational Risk Management Maturity Assessment Results' showing just under half 'Progressing', a third 'Established', a seventh 'Emerging', and a very small portion 'Leading or Aspirational'.

    Integrated Risk Maturity Categories

    		 Semi-circle with colored points indicating four categories.

    1

    		Context & Strategic Direction Understand the organization’s main objectives and how risk can support or enhance those objectives.

    2

    		Risk Culture and Authority Examine if risk-based decisions are being made by those with the right level of authority and if the organization’s risk appetite is embedded in the culture.

    3

    		Risk Management Process Determine if the current process to identify, assess, respond to, monitor, and report on risks is benefitting the organization.

    4

    		Risk Program Optimization Consider opportunities where risk-related data is being gathered, reported, and used to make informed decisions across the enterprise.

    Maturity should inform your approach to risk management

    The outcome of the risk maturity assessment should inform how risk management is approached within the organization.

    A row of waves starting light and small and becoming taller and darker in steps. The levels are 'Non-existent', 'Basic', 'Partially Integrated', 'Mostly Integrated', 'Fully Integrated', and 'Optimized'.

    For organizations with a low maturity, remaining superficial with risk will offer more benefits and align to the enterprise’s risk tolerance and appetite. This might mean no integrated risk is taking place.

    However, organizations that have higher risk maturity should begin to integrate risk information. These organizations can identify the nuances that would affect the severity and impact of risk events.

    Integrated Risk Maturity Assessment

    The purpose of the Integrated Risk Maturity Assessment is to assess the organization's current maturity and readiness for integrated risk management (IRM).

    Frequently and continually assessing your organization’s maturity toward integrated risk ensures the right risk management program can be adopted by your organization.

    Integrated Risk Maturity Assessment

    A simple tool to understand if your organization is ready to embrace integrated risk management by measuring maturity across four key categories: Context & Strategic Direction, Risk Culture & Authority, Risk Management Process, and Risk Program Optimization

    		Sample of the Integrated Risk Maturity Assessment deliverable.

    Use the results from this integrated risk maturity assessment to determine the type of risk management program that can and should be adopted by your organization.

    Some organizations will need to remain siloed and focused on IT risk management only, while others will be able to integrate risk-related information to start enabling automatic controls that respond to this data.

    Position IT to Support and Be a Leader in Open Data Initiatives

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    • Parent Category Name: Innovation
    • Parent Category Link: /innovation
    • Open data programs are often seen as unimportant or not worth taking up space in the budget in local government.
    • Open data programs are typically owned by a single open data evangelist who works on it as a side-of-desk project.
    • Having a single resource spend a portion of their time on open data doesn’t allow the open data program to mature to the point that local governments are realizing benefits from it.
    • It is difficult to gain buy-in for open data as it is hard to track the benefits of an open data program.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Local government can help push the world towards being more open, unlocking economic benefits for the wider economy.
    • Cities don’t know the solutions to all of their problems often they don’t know all of the problems they have. Release data as a platform to crowdsource solutions and engage your community.
    • Build your open data policies in collaboration with the community. It’s their data, let them shape the way it’s used!

    Impact and Result

    • Level-set expectations for your open data program. Every local government is different in terms of the benefits they can achieve with open data; ensure the business understands what is realistic to achieve.
    • Create a team of open data champions from departments outside of IT. Identify potential champions for the team and use this group to help gain greater business buy-in and gather feedback on the program’s direction.
    • Follow the open data maturity model in order to assess your current state, identify a target state, and assess capability gaps that need to be improved upon.
    • Use industry best practices to develop an open data policy and processes to help improve maturity of the open data program and reach your desired target state.
    • Identify metrics that you can use to track, and communicate the success of, the open data program.

    Position IT to Support and Be a Leader in Open Data Initiatives Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should develop your open data 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. Set the foundation for the success of your open data program

    Identify your open data program's current state maturity, and gain buy-in from the business for the program.

    • Position IT to Support and Be a Leader in Open Data Initiatives – Phase 1: Set the Foundation for the Success of Your Open Data Program
    • Open Data Maturity Assessment
    • Open Data Program – IT Stakeholder Powermap Template
    • Open Data in Our City Stakeholder Presentation Template

    2. Grow the maturity of your open data program

    Identify a target state maturity and reach it through building a policy and processes and the use of metrics.

    • Position IT to Support and Be a Leader in Open Data Initiatives – Phase 2: Grow the Maturity of Your Open Data Program
    • Open Data Policy Template
    • Open Data Process Template
    • Open Data Process Descriptions Template
    • Open Data Process Visio Templates (Visio)
    • Open Data Process Visio Templates (PDF)
    • Open Data Metrics Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Position IT to Support and Be a Leader in Open Data Initiatives

    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 Business Drivers for Open Data Program

    The Purpose

    Ensure that the open data program is being driven out from the business in order to gain business support.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identify drivers for the open data program that are coming directly from the business.

    Activities

    1.1 Understand constraints for the open data program.

    1.2 Conduct interviews with the business to gain input on business drivers and level-set expectations.

    1.3 Develop list of business drivers for open data.

    Outputs

    Defined list of business drivers for the open data program

    2 Assess Current State and Define Target State of the Open Data Program

    The Purpose

    Understand the gaps between where your program currently is and where you want it to be.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identify top processes for improvement in order to bring the open data program to the desired target state maturity.

    Activities

    2.1 Perform current state maturity assessment.

    2.2 Define desired target state with business input.

    2.3 Highlight gaps between current and target state.

    Outputs

    Defined current state maturity

    Identified target state maturity

    List of top processes to improve in order to reach target state maturity

    3 Develop an Open Data Policy

    The Purpose

    Develop a draft open data policy that will give you a starting point when building your policy with the community.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A draft open data policy will be developed that is based on best-practice standards.

    Activities

    3.1 Define the purpose of the open data policy.

    3.2 Establish principles for the open data program.

    3.3 Develop a rough governance outline.

    3.4 Create a draft open data policy document based on industry best-practice examples.

    Outputs

    Initial draft of open data policy

    4 Develop Open Processes and Identify Metrics

    The Purpose

    Build open data processes and identify metrics for the program in order to track benefits realization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Formalize processes to set in place to improve the maturity of the open data program.

    Identify metrics that can track the success of the open data program.

    Activities

    4.1 Develop the roles that will make up the open data program.

    4.2 Create processes for new dataset requests, updates of existing datasets, and the retiring of datasets.

    4.3 Identify metrics that will be used for measuring the success of the open data program.

    Outputs

    Initial draft of open data processes

    Established metrics for the open data program

    Build a Strong Technology Foundation for Customer Experience Management

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    • Parent Category Name: Customer Relationship Management
    • Parent Category Link: /customer-relationship-management
    • Technology is a fundamental enabler of an organization’s customer experience management (CXM) strategy. However, many IT departments fail to take a systematic approach when building a portfolio of applications for supporting marketing, sales, and customer service functions.
    • The result is a costly, ineffective, and piecemeal approach to CXM application deployment (including high-profile applications like CRM).

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • IT must work in lockstep with their counterparts in marketing, sales, and customer service to define a unified vision and strategic requirements for enabling a strong CXM program.
    • To deploy applications that specifically align with the needs of the organization’s customers, IT leaders must work with the business to define and understand customer personas and common interaction scenarios. CXM applications are mission critical and failing to link them to customer needs can have a detrimental effect on customer satisfaction and ultimately, revenue.
    • IT must act as a valued partner to the business in creating a portfolio of CXM applications that are cost effective.
    • Organizations should create a repeatable framework for CXM application deployment that addresses critical issues, including the integration ecosystem, customer data quality, dashboards and analytics, and end-user adoption.

    Impact and Result

    • Establish strong application alignment to strategic requirements for CXM that is based on concrete customer personas.
    • Improve underlying business metrics across marketing, sales, and service, including customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction metrics.
    • Better align IT with customer experience needs.

    Build a Strong Technology Foundation for Customer Experience Management Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should build a strong technology foundation for CXM, 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. Drive value with CXM

    Understand the benefits of a robust CXM strategy.

    • Build a Strong Technology Foundation for Customer Experience Management – Phase 1: Drive Value with CXM
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template
    • CXM Strategy Project Charter Template

    2. Create the framework

    Identify drivers and objectives for CXM using a persona-driven approach and deploy the right applications to meet those objectives.

    • Build a Strong Technology Foundation for Customer Experience Management – Phase 2: Create the Framework
    • CXM Business Process Shortlisting Tool
    • CXM Portfolio Designer

    3. Finalize the framework

    Complete the initiatives roadmap for CXM.

    • Build a Strong Technology Foundation for Customer Experience Management – Phase 3: Finalize the Framework
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Build a Strong Technology Foundation for Customer Experience 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 Create the Vision for CXM Technology Enablement

    The Purpose

    Establish a consistent vision across IT, marketing, sales, and customer service for CXM technology enablement.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A clear understanding of key business and technology drivers for CXM.

    Activities

    1.1 CXM fireside chat

    1.2 CXM business drivers

    1.3 CXM vision statement

    1.4 Project structure

    Outputs

    CXM vision statement

    CXM project charter

    2 Conduct the Environmental Scan and Internal Review

    The Purpose

    Create a set of strategic requirements for CXM based on a thorough external market scan and internal capabilities assessment.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Well-defined technology requirements based on rigorous, multi-faceted analysis.

    Activities

    2.1 PEST analysis

    2.2 Competitive analysis

    2.3 Market and trend analysis

    2.4 SWOT analysis

    2.5 VRIO analysis

    2.6 Channel map

    Outputs

    Completed external analysis

    Strategic requirements (from external analysis)

    Completed internal review

    Channel interaction map

    3 Build Customer Personas and Scenarios

    The Purpose

    Augment strategic requirements through customer persona and scenario development.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Functional requirements aligned to supporting steps in customer interaction scenarios.

    Activities

    3.1 Persona development

    3.2 Scenario development

    3.3 Requirements definition for CXM

    Outputs

    Personas and scenarios

    Strategic requirements (based on personas)

    4 Create the CXM Application Portfolio

    The Purpose

    Using the requirements identified in the preceding modules, build a future-state application inventory for CXM.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A cohesive, rationalized portfolio of customer interaction applications that aligns with identified requirements and allows investment (or rationalization) decisions to be made.

    Activities

    4.1 Build business process maps

    4.2 Review application satisfaction

    4.3 Create the CXM application portfolio

    4.4 Prioritize applications

    Outputs

    Business process maps

    Application satisfaction diagnostic

    Prioritized CXM application portfolio

    5 Review Best Practices and Confirm Initiatives

    The Purpose

    Establish repeatable best practices for CXM applications in areas such as data management and end-user adoption.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Best practices for rollout of new CXM applications.

    A prioritized initiatives roadmap.

    Activities

    5.1 Create data integration map

    5.2 Define adoption best practices

    5.3 Build initiatives roadmap

    5.4 Confirm initiatives roadmap

    Outputs

    Integration map for CXM

    End-user adoption plan

    Initiatives roadmap

    Further reading

    Build a Strong Technology Foundation for Customer Experience Management

    Design an end-to-end technology strategy to enhance marketing effectiveness, drive sales, and create compelling customer service experiences.

    ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

    Technology is the catalyst to create – and keep! – your customers.

    "Customers want to interact with your organization on their own terms, and in the channels of their choice (including social media, mobile applications, and connected devices). Regardless of your industry, your customers expect a frictionless experience across the customer lifecycle. They desire personalized and well-targeted marketing messages, straightforward transactions, and effortless service. Research shows that customers value – and will pay more for! – well-designed experiences.

    Strong technology enablement is critical for creating customer experiences that drive revenue. However, most organizations struggle with creating a cohesive technology strategy for customer experience management (CXM). IT leaders need to take a proactive approach to developing a strong portfolio of customer interaction applications that are in lockstep with the needs of their marketing, sales, and customer service teams. It is critical to incorporate the voice of the customer into this strategy.

    When developing a technology strategy for CXM, don’t just “pave the cow path,” but instead move the needle forward by providing capabilities for customer intelligence, omnichannel interactions, and predictive analytics. This blueprint will help you build an integrated CXM technology roadmap that drives top-line revenue while rationalizing application spend."

    Ben Dickie

    Research Director, Customer Experience Strategy

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Framing the CXM project

    This Research Is Designed For:

    • IT leaders who are responsible for crafting a technology strategy for customer experience management (CXM).
    • Applications managers who are involved with the selection and implementation of critical customer-centric applications, such as CRM platforms, marketing automation tools, customer intelligence suites, and customer service solutions.

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Clearly link your technology-enablement strategy for CXM to strategic business requirements and customer personas.
    • Build a rationalized portfolio of enterprise applications that will support customer interaction objectives.
    • Adopt standard operating procedures for CXM application deployment that address issues such as end-user adoption and data quality.

    This Research Will Also Assist:

    • Business leaders in marketing, sales, and customer service who want to deepen their understanding of CXM technologies, and apply best practices for using these technologies to drive competitive advantage.
    • Marketing, sales, and customer service managers involved with defining requirements and rolling out CXM applications.

    This Research Will Help Them:

    • Work hand-in-hand with counterparts in IT to deploy high-value business applications that will improve core customer-facing metrics.
    • Understand the changing CXM landscape and use the art of the possible to transform the internal technology ecosystem and drive meaningful customer experiences.

    Executive summary

    Situation

    • Customer expectations for personalization, channel preferences, and speed-to-resolution are at an all-time high.
    • Your customers are willing to pay more for high-value experiences, and having a strong customer CXM strategy is a proven path to creating sustainable value for the organization.

    Complication

    • Technology is a fundamental enabler of an organization’s CXM strategy. However, many IT departments fail to take a systematic approach to building a portfolio of applications to support Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service.
    • The result is a costly, ineffective, and piecemeal approach to CXM application deployment (including high profile applications like CRM).

    Resolution

    • IT must work in lockstep with their counterparts in marketing, sales, and customer service to define a unified vision, strategic requirements and roadmap for enabling strong customer experience capabilities.
    • In order to deploy applications that don’t simply follow previously established patterns but are aligned with the specific needs of the organization’s customers, IT leaders must work with the business to define and understand customer personas and common interaction scenarios. CXM applications are mission critical and failing to link them to customer needs can have a detrimental effect on customer satisfaction – and ultimately revenue.
    • IT must act as a valued partner to the business in creating a portfolio of CXM applications that are cost effective.
    • Organizations should create a repeatable framework for CXM application deployment that addresses critical issues, including the integration ecosystem, customer data quality, dashboards and analytics, and end-user adoption.

    Info-Tech Insight

    1. IT can’t hide behind the firewall. IT must understand the organization’s customers to properly support marketing, sales, and service efforts.
    2. IT – or Marketing – must not build the CXM strategy in a vacuum if they want to achieve a holistic, consistent, and seamless customer experience.
    3. IT must get ahead of shadow IT. To be seen as an innovator within the business, IT must be a leading enabler in building a rationalized and integrated CXM application portfolio.

    Guide to frequently used acronyms

    CXM - Customer Experience Management

    CX - Customer Experience

    CRM - Customer Relationship Management

    CSM - Customer Service Management

    MMS - Marketing Management System

    SMMP - Social Media Management Platform

    RFP - Request for Proposal

    SaaS - Software as a Service

    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.

    67% of end consumers will pay more for a world-class customer experience. 74% of business buyers will pay more for strong B2B experiences. (Salesforce, 2018)

    5 CORE CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS

    1. More personalization
    2. More product options
    3. Constant contact
    4. Listen closely, respond quickly
    5. Give front-liners more control

    (Customer Experience Insight, 2016)

    Customers expect to interact with organizations through the channels of their choice. Now more than ever, you must enable your organization to provide tailored customer experiences.

    Realize measurable value by enabling CXM

    Providing a seamless customer experience increases the likelihood of cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and boosts customer loyalty and retention. IT can contribute to driving revenue and decreasing costs by providing the business with the right set of tools, applications, and technical support.

    Contribute to the bottom line

    Cross-sell, up-sell, and drive customer acquisition.

    67% of consumers are willing to pay more for an upgraded experience. (Salesforce, 2018)

    80%: The margin by which CX leaders outperformer laggards in the S&P 500.(Qualtrics, 2017)

    59% of customers say tailored engagement based on past interactions is very important to winning their business. (Salesforce, 2018)

    Enable cost savings

    Focus on customer retention as well as acquisition.

    It is 6-7x more costly to attract a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer. (Salesforce Blog, 2019)

    A 5% increase in customer retention has been found to increase profits by 25% to 95%. (Bain & Company, n.d.)

    Strategic CXM is gaining traction with your competition

    Organizations are prioritizing CXM capabilities (and associated technologies) as a strategic investment. Keep pace with the competition and gain a competitive advantage by creating a cohesive strategy that uses best practices to integrate marketing, sales, and customer support functions.

    87% of customers share great experiences they’ve had with a company. (Zendesk, n.d.)

    61% of organizations are investing in CXM. (CX Network, 2015)

    53% of organizations believe CXM provides a competitive advantage. (Harvard Business Review, 2014)

    Top Investment Priorities for Customer Experience

    1. Voice of the Customer
    2. Customer Insight Generation
    3. Customer Experience Governance
    4. Customer Journey Mapping
    5. Online Customer Experience
    6. Experience Personalization
    7. Emotional Engagement
    8. Multi-Channel Integration/Omnichannel
    9. Quality & Customer Satisfaction Management
    10. Customer/Channel Loyalty & Rewards Programs

    (CX Network 2015)

    Omnichannel is the way of the future: don’t be left behind

    Get ahead of the competition by doing omnichannel right. Devise a CXM strategy that allows you to create and maintain a consistent, seamless customer experience by optimizing operations within 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 a wide range of interaction channels.

    Omnichannel is a “multi-channel approach to sales that seeks to provide the customer with a seamless transactional experience whether the customer is shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone, or in a bricks and mortar store.” (TechTarget, 2014)

    97% of companies say that they are investing in omnichannel. (Huffington Post, 2015)

    23% of companies are doing omnichannel well.

    CXM applications drive effective multi-channel customer interactions across marketing, sales, and customer service

    The success of your CXM strategy depends on the effective interaction of various marketing, sales, and customer support functions. To deliver on customer experience, organizations need to take a customer-centric approach to operations.

    From an application perspective, a CRM platform generally serves as the unifying repository of customer information, supported by adjacent solutions as warranted by your CXM objectives.

    CXM ECOSYSTEM

    Customer Relationship Management Platform

    • Web Experience Management Platform
    • E-Commerce & Point of Sale Solutions
    • Social Media Management Platform
    • Customer Intelligence Platform
    • Customer Service Management Tools
    • Marketing Management Suite

    Application spotlight: Customer experience platforms

    Description

    CXM solutions are a broad range of tools that provide comprehensive feature sets for supporting customer interaction processes. These suites supplant more basic applications for customer interaction management. Popular solutions that fall under the umbrella of CXM include CRM suites, marketing automation tools, and customer service applications.

    Features and Capabilities

    • Manage sales pipelines, provide quotes, and track client deliverables.
    • View all opportunities organized by their current stage in the sales process.
    • View all interactions that have occurred between employees and the customer, including purchase order history.
    • Manage outbound marketing campaigns via multiple channels (email, phone, social, mobile).
    • Build visual workflows with automated trigger points and business rules engine.
    • Generate in-depth customer insights, audience segmentation, predictive analytics, and contextual analytics.
    • Provide case management, ticketing, and escalation capabilities for customer service.

    Highlighted Vendors

    Microsoft Dynamics

    Adobe

    Marketo

    sprinklr

    Salesforce

    SugarCRM

    Application spotlight: Customer experience platforms

    Key Trends

    • CXM applications have decreased their focus on departmental silos to make it easier to share information across the organization as departments demand more data.
    • Vendors are developing deeper support of newer channels for customer interaction. This includes providing support for social media channels, native mobile applications, and SMS or text-based services like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
    • Predictive campaigns and channel blending are becoming more feasible as vendors integrate machine learning and artificial intelligence into their applications.
    • Content blocks are being placed on top of scripting languages to allow for user-friendly interfaces. There is a focus on alleviating bottlenecks where content would have previously needed to go through a specialist.
    • Many vendors of CXM applications are placing increased emphasis on strong application integration both within and beyond their portfolios, with systems like ERP and order fulfillment.

    Link to Digital Strategy

    • For many organizations that are building out a digital strategy, improving customer experience is often a driving factor: CXM apps enable this goal.
    • As part of a digital strategy, create a comprehensive CXM application portfolio by leveraging both core CRM suites and point solutions.
    • Ensure that a point solution aligns with the digital strategy’s technology drivers and user personas.

    CXM KPIs

    Strong CXM applications can improve:

    • Lead Intake Volume
    • Lead Conversion Rate
    • Average Time to Resolution
    • First-Contact Resolution Rate
    • Customer Satisfaction Rate
    • Share-of-Mind
    • Share-of-Wallet
    • Customer Lifetime Value
    • Aggregate Reach/Impressions

    IT is critical to the success of your CXM strategy

    Technology is the key enabler of building strong customer experiences: IT must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the business to develop a technology framework for CXM.

    Top 5 Challenges with CXM for Marketing

    1. Maximizing customer experience ROI
    2. Achieving a single view of the customer
    3. Building new customer experiences
    4. Cultivating a customer-focused culture
    5. Measuring CX investments to business outcomes

    Top 5 Obstacles to Enabling CXM for IT

    1. Systems integration
    2. Multichannel complexity
    3. Organizational structure
    4. Data-related issues
    5. Lack of strategy

    (Harvard Business Review, 2014)

    Only 19% of organizations have a customer experience team tasked with bridging gaps between departments. (Genesys, 2018)

    IT and Marketing can only tackle CXM with the full support of each other. The cooperation of the departments is crucial when trying to improve CXM technology capabilities and customer interaction and drive a strong revenue mandate.

    CXM failure: Blockbuster

    CASE STUDY

    Industry Entertainment

    Source Forbes, 2014

    Blockbuster

    As the leader of the video retail industry, Blockbuster had thousands of retail locations internationally and millions of customers. Blockbuster’s massive marketing budget and efficient operations allowed it to dominate the competition for years.

    Situation

    Trends in Blockbuster’s consumer market changed in terms of distribution channels and customer experience. As the digital age emerged and developed, consumers were looking for immediacy and convenience. This threatened Blockbuster’s traditional, brick-and-mortar B2C operating model.

    The Competition

    Netflix entered the video retail market, making itself accessible through non-traditional channels (direct mail, and eventually, the internet).

    Results

    Despite long-term relationships with customers and competitive standing in the market, Blockbuster’s inability to understand and respond to changing technology trends and customer demands led to its demise. The organization did not effectively leverage internal or external networks or technology to adapt to customer demands. Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2010.

    Customer Relationship Management

    • Web Experience Management Platform
    • E-Commerce & Point of Sale Solutions
    • Social Media Management
    • Customer Intelligence
    • Customer Service
    • Marketing Management

    Blockbuster did not leverage emerging technologies to effectively respond to trends in its consumer network. It did not optimize organizational effectiveness around customer experience.

    CXM success: Netflix

    CASE STUDY

    Industry Entertainment

    Source Forbes, 2014

    Netflix

    Beginning as a mail-out service, Netflix offered subscribers a catalog of videos to select from and have mailed to them directly. Customers no longer had to go to a retail store to rent a video. However, the lack of immediacy of direct mail as the distribution channel resulted in slow adoption.

    The Situation

    In response to the increasing presence of tech-savvy consumers on the internet, Netflix invested in developing its online platform as its primary distribution channel. The benefit of doing so was two-fold: passive brand advertising (by being present on the internet) and meeting customer demands for immediacy and convenience. Netflix also recognized the rising demand for personalized service and created an unprecedented, tailored customer experience.

    The Competition

    Blockbuster was the industry leader in video retail but was lagging in its response to industry, consumer, and technology trends around customer experience.

    Results

    Netflix’s disruptive innovation is built on the foundation of great CXM. Netflix is now a $28 billion company, which is tenfold what Blockbuster was worth.

    Customer Relationship Management Platform

    • Web Experience Management Platform
    • E-Commerce & Point of Sale Solutions
    • Social Media Management Platform
    • Customer Intelligence Platform
    • Customer Service Management Tools
    • Marketing Management Suite

    Netflix used disruptive technologies to innovatively build a customer experience that put it ahead of the long-time, video rental industry leader, Blockbuster.

    Leverage Info-Tech’s approach to succeed with CXM

    Creating an end-to-end technology-enablement strategy for CXM requires a concerted, dedicated effort: Info-Tech can help with our proven approach.

    Build the CXM Project Charter

    Conduct a Thorough Environmental Scan

    Build Customer Personas and Scenarios

    Draft Strategic CXM Requirements

    Build the CXM Application Portfolio

    Implement Operational Best Practices

    Why Info-Tech’s Approach?

    Info-Tech draws on best-practice research and the experiences of our global member base to develop a methodology for CXM that is driven by rigorous customer-centric analysis.

    Our approach uses a unique combination of techniques to ensure that your team has done its due diligence in crafting a forward-thinking technology-enablement strategy for CXM that creates measurable value.

    A global professional services firm drives measurable value for CXM by using persona design and scenario development

    CASE STUDY

    Industry Professionals Services

    Source Info-Tech Workshop

    The Situation

    A global professional services firm in the B2B space was experiencing a fragmented approach to customer engagement, particularly in the pre-sales funnel. Legacy applications weren’t keeping pace with an increased demand for lead evaluation and routing technology. Web experience management was also an area of significant concern, with a lack of ongoing customer engagement through the existing web portal.

    The Approach

    Working with a team of Info-Tech facilitators, the company was able to develop several internal and external customer personas. These personas formed the basis of strategic requirements for a new CXM application stack, which involved dedicated platforms for core CRM, lead automation, web content management, and site analytics.

    Results

    Customer “stickiness” metrics increased, and Sales reported significantly higher turnaround times in lead evaluations, resulting in improved rep productivity and faster cycle times.

    Components of a persona
    Name Name personas to reflect a key attribute such as the persona’s primary role or motivation.
    Demographic Include basic descriptors of the persona (e.g. age, geographic location, preferred language, education, job, employer, household income, etc.)
    Wants, needs, pain points Identify surface-level motivations for buying habits.
    Psychographic/behavioral traits Observe persona traits that are representative of the customers’ behaviors (e.g. attitudes, buying patterns, etc.).

    Follow Info-Tech’s approach to build your CXM foundation

    Create the Project Vision

    • Identify business and IT drivers
    • Outputs:
      • CXM Strategy Guiding Principles

    Structure the Project

    • Identify goals and objectives for CXM project
    • Form Project Team
    • Establish timeline
    • Obtain project sponsorship
    • Outputs:
      • CXM Strategy Project Charter

    Scan the External Environment

    • Create CXM operating model
    • Conduct external analysis
    • Create customer personas
    • Outputs:
      • CXM Operating Model
    • Conduct PEST analysis
    • Create persona scenarios
    • Outputs:
      • CXM Strategic Requirements

    Assess the Current State of CXM

    • Conduct SWOT analysis
    • Assess application usage and satisfaction
    • Conduct VRIO analysis
    • Outputs:
      • CXM Strategic Requirements

    Create an Application Portfolio

    • Map current processes
    • Assign business process owners
    • Create channel map
    • Build CXM application portfolio
    • Outputs:
      • CXM Application Portfolio Map

    Develop Deployment Best Practices

    • Develop CXM integration map
    • Create mitigation plan for poor data quality
    • Outputs:
      • Data Quality Preservation Map

    Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

    • Create risk management plan
    • Identify work initiative dependencies
    • Create roadmap
    • Outputs:
      • CXM Initiative Roadmap

    Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

    • Identify success metrics
    • Create stakeholder communication plan
    • Present CXM strategy to stakeholders
    • Outputs:
      • Stakeholder Presentation

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to 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

    Build a Strong Technology Foundation for CXM – project overview

    1. Drive Value With CXM 2. Create the Framework 3. Finalize the Framework
    Best-Practice Toolkit

    1.1 Create the Project Vision

    1.2 Structure the CXM Project

    2.1 Scan the External Environment

    2.2 Assess the Current State of CXM

    2.3 Create an Application Portfolio

    2.4 Develop Deployment Best Practices

    3.1 Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

    3.2 Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

    Guided Implementations
    • Determine project vision for CXM.
    • Review CXM project charter.
    • Review environmental scan.
    • Review application portfolio for CXM.
    • Confirm deployment best practices.
    • Review initiatives rollout plan.
    • Confirm CXM roadmap.
    Onsite Workshop Module 1: Drive Measurable Value with a World-Class CXM Program Module 2: Create the Strategic Framework for CXM Module 3: Finalize the CXM Framework

    Phase 1 Outcome:

    • Completed drivers
    • Completed project charter

    Phase 2 Outcome:

    • Completed personas and scenarios
    • CXM application portfolio

    Phase 3 Outcome:

    • Strategic summary blueprint

    Workshop overview

    Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Workshop Day 1 Workshop Day 2 Workshop Day 3 Workshop Day 4 Workshop Day 5
    Activities

    Create the Vision for CXM Enablement

    1.1 CXM Fireside Chat

    1.2 CXM Business Drivers

    1.3 CXM Vision Statement

    1.4 Project Structure

    Conduct the Environmental Scan and Internal Review

    2.1 PEST Analysis

    2.2 Competitive Analysis

    2.3 Market and Trend Analysis

    2.4 SWOT Analysis

    2.5 VRIO Analysis

    2.6 Channel Mapping

    Build Personas and Scenarios

    3.1 Persona Development

    3.2 Scenario Development

    3.3 Requirements Definition for CXM

    Create the CXM Application Portfolio

    4.1 Build Business Process Maps

    4.2 Review Application Satisfaction

    4.3 Create the CXM Application Portfolio

    4.4 Prioritize Applications

    Review Best Practices and Confirm Initiatives

    5.1 Create Data Integration Map

    5.2 Define Adoption Best Practices

    5.3 Build Initiatives Roadmap

    5.4 Confirm Initiatives Roadmap

    Deliverables
    1. CXM Vision Statement
    2. CXM Project Charter
    1. Completed External Analysis
    2. Completed Internal Review
    3. Channel Interaction Map
    4. Strategic Requirements (from External Analysis)
    1. Personas and Scenarios
    2. Strategic Requirements (based on personas)
    1. Business Process Maps
    2. Application Satisfaction Diagnostic
    3. Prioritized CXM Application Portfolio
    1. Integration Map for CXM
    2. End-User Adoption Plan
    3. Initiatives Roadmap

    Phase 1

    Drive Measurable Value With a World-Class CXM Program

    Build a Strong Technology Foundation for Customer Experience Management

    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: Drive Measurable Value With a World-Class CXM Program

    Proposed Time to Completion: 2 weeks

    Step 1.1: Create the Project Vision

    Start with an analyst kick-off call:

    • Review key drivers from a technology and business perspective for CXM
    • Discuss benefits of strong technology enablement for CXM

    Then complete these activities…

    • CXM Fireside Chat
    • CXM Business and Technology Driver Assessment
    • CXM Vision Statement

    With these tools & templates:

    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template

    Step 1.2: Structure the Project

    Review findings with analyst:

    • Assess the CXM vision statement for competitive differentiators
    • Determine current alignment disposition of IT with different business units

    Then complete these activities…

    • Team Composition and Responsibilities
    • Metrics Definition

    With these tools & templates:

    • CXM Strategy Project Charter Template

    Phase 1 Results & Insights:

    • Defined value of strong technology enablement for CXM
    • Completed CXM project charter

    Step 1.1: Create the Project Vision

    Phase 1

    1.1 Create the Project Vision

    1.2 Structure the Project

    Phase 2

    2.1 Scan the External Environment

    2.2 Assess the Current State of CXM

    2.3 Create an Application Portfolio

    2.4 Develop Deployment Best Practices

    Phase 3

    3.1 Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

    3.2 Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

    Activities:

    • Fireside Chat: Discuss past challenges and successes with CXM
    • Identify business and IT drivers to establish guiding principles for CXM

    Outcomes:

    • Business benefits of a rationalized technology strategy to support CXM
    • Shared lessons learned
    • Guiding principles for providing technology enablement for CXM

    Building a technology strategy to support customer experience isn’t an option – it’s a mission-critical activity

    • Customer-facing departments supply the lifeblood of a company: revenue. In today’s fast-paced and interconnected world, it’s becoming increasingly imperative to enable customer experience processes with a wide range of technologies, from lead automation to social relationship management. CXM is the holistic management of customer interaction processes across marketing, sales, and customer service to create valuable, mutually beneficial customer experiences. Technology is a critical building block for enabling CXM.
    • The parallel progress of technology and process improvement is essential to an efficient and effective CXM program. While many executives prefer to remain at the status quo, new technologies have caused major shifts in the CXM environment. If you stay with the status quo, you will fall behind the competition.
    • However, many IT departments are struggling to keep up with the pace of change and find themselves more of a firefighter than a strategic partner to marketing, sales, and service teams. This not only hurts the business, but it also tarnishes IT’s reputation.

    An aligned, optimized CX strategy is:

    Rapid: to intentionally and strategically respond to quickly-changing opportunities and issues.

    Outcome-based: to make key decisions based on strong business cases, data, and analytics in addition to intuition and judgment.

    Rigorous: to bring discipline and science to bear; to improve operations and results.

    Collaborative: to conduct activities in a broader ecosystem of partners, suppliers, vendors, co-developers, and even competitors.

    (The Wall Street Journal, 2013)

    Info-Tech Insight

    If IT fails to adequately support marketing, sales, and customer service teams, the organization’s revenue will be in direct jeopardy. As a result, CIOs and Applications Directors must work with their counterparts in these departments to craft a cohesive and comprehensive strategy for using technology to create meaningful (and profitable) customer experiences.

    Fireside Chat, Part 1: When was technology an impediment to customer experience at your organization?

    1.1.1 30 minutes

    Input

    • Past experiences of the team

    Output

    • Lessons learned

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Core Team

    Instructions

    1. Think about a time when technology was an impediment to a positive customer experience at your organization. Reflect on the following:
      • What frustrations did the application or the technology cause to your customers? What was their reaction?
      • How did IT (and the business) identify the challenge in the first place?
      • What steps were taken to mitigate the impact of the problem? Were these steps successful?
      • What were the key lessons learned as part of the challenge?

    Fireside Chat, Part 2: What customer success stories has your organization created by using new technologies?

    1.1.2 30 minutes

    Input

    • Past experiences of the team

    Output

    • Lessons learned

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Core Team

    Instructions

    1. Think about a time when your organization successfully leveraged a new application or new technology to enhance the experience it provided to customers. Reflect on this experience and consider:
      • What were the organizational drivers for rolling out the new application or solution?
      • What obstacles had to be overcome in order to successfully deploy the solution?
      • How did the application positively impact the customer experience? What metrics improved?
      • What were the key lessons learned as part of the deployment? If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

    Develop a cohesive, consistent, and forward-looking roadmap that supports each stage of the customer lifecycle

    When creating your roadmap, consider the pitfalls you’ll likely encounter in building the IT strategy to provide technology enablement for customer experience.

    There’s no silver bullet for developing a strategy. You can encounter pitfalls at a myriad of different points including not involving the right stakeholders from the business, not staying abreast of recent trends in the external environment, and not aligning sales, marketing, and support initiatives with a focus on the delivery of value to prospects and customers.

    Common Pitfalls When Creating a Technology-Enablement Strategy for CXM

    Senior management is not involved in strategy development.

    Not paying attention to the “art of the possible.”

    “Paving the cow path” rather than focusing on revising core processes.

    Misalignment between objectives and financial/personnel resources.

    Inexperienced team on either the business or IT side.

    Not paying attention to the actions of competitors.

    Entrenched management preferences for legacy systems.

    Sales culture that downplays the potential value of technology or new applications.

    IT is only one or two degrees of separation from the end customer: so take a customer-centric approach

    IT →Marketing, Sales, and Service →External Customers

    Internal-Facing Applications

    • IT enables, supports, and maintains the applications used by the organization to market to, sell to, and service customers. IT provides the infrastructural and technical foundation to operate the function.

    Customer-Facing Applications

    • IT supports customer-facing interfaces and channels for customer interaction.
    • Channel examples include web pages, mobile device applications and optimization, and interactive voice response for callers.

    Info-Tech Insight

    IT often overlooks direct customer considerations when devising a technology strategy for CXM. Instead, IT leaders rely on other business stakeholders to simply pass on requirements. By sitting down with their counterparts in marketing and sales, and fully understanding business drivers and customer personas, IT will be much better positioned to roll out supporting applications that drive customer engagement.

    A well-aligned CXM strategy recognizes a clear delineation of responsibilities between IT, sales, marketing, and service

    • When thinking about CXM, IT must recognize that it is responsible for being a trusted partner for technology enablement. This means that IT has a duty to:
      • Develop an in-depth understanding of strategic business requirements for CXM. Base your understanding of these business requirements on a clear conception of the internal and external environment, customer personas, and business processes in marketing, sales, and customer service.
      • Assist with shortlisting and supporting different channels for customer interaction (including email, telephony, web presence, and social media).
      • Create a rationalized, cohesive application portfolio for CXM that blends different enabling technologies together to support strategic business requirements.
      • Provide support for vendor shortlisting, selection, and implementation of CXM applications.
      • Assist with end-user adoption of CXM applications (i.e. training and ongoing support).
      • Provide initiatives that assist with technical excellence for CXM (such as data quality, integration, analytics, and application maintenance).
    • The business (marketing, sales, customer service) owns the business requirements and must be responsible for setting top-level objectives for customer interaction (e.g. product and pricing decisions, marketing collateral, territory management, etc.). IT should not take over decisions on customer experience strategy. However, IT should be working in lockstep with its counterparts in the business to assist with understanding business requirements through a customer-facing lens. For example, persona development is best done in cross-functional teams between IT and Marketing.

    Activity: Identify the business drivers for CXM to establish the strategy’s guiding principles

    1.1.3 30 minutes

    Input

    • Business drivers for CXM

    Output

    • Guiding principles for CXM strategy

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Define the assumptions and business drivers that have an impact on technology enablement for CXM. What is driving the current marketing, sales, and service strategy on the business side?
    Business Driver Name Driver Assumptions, Capabilities, and Constraints Impact on CXM Strategy
    High degree of customer-centric solution selling A technically complex product means that solution selling approaches are employed – sales cycles are long. There is a strong need for applications and data quality processes that support longer-term customer relationships rather than transactional selling.
    High desire to increase scalability of sales processes Although sales cycles are long, the organization wishes to increase the effectiveness of rep time via marketing automation where possible. Sales is always looking for new ways to leverage their reps for face-to-face solution selling while leaving low-level tasks to automation. Marketing wants to support these tasks.
    Highly remote sales team and unusual hours are the norm Not based around core hours – significant overtime or remote working occurs frequently. Misalignment between IT working only core hours and after-hours teams leads to lag times that can delay work. Scheduling of preventative sales maintenance must typically be done on weekends rather than weekday evenings.

    Activity: Identify the IT drivers for CXM to establish the strategy’s guiding principles

    1.1.4 30 minutes

    Input

    • IT drivers for CXM

    Output

    • Guiding principles for CXM strategy

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Define the assumptions and IT drivers that have an impact on technology enablement for CXM. What is driving the current IT strategy for supporting marketing, sales, and service initiatives?
    IT Driver Name Driver Assumptions, Capabilities, and Constraints Impact on CXM Strategy
    Sales Application Procurement Methodology Strong preference for on-premise COTS deployments over homebrewed applications. IT may not be able to support cloud-based sales applications due to security requirements for on premise.
    Vendor Relations Minimal vendor relationships; SLAs not drafted internally but used as part of standard agreement. IT may want to investigate tightening up SLAs with vendors to ensure more timely support is available for their sales teams.
    Development Methodology Agile methodology employed, some pockets of Waterfall employed for large-scale deployments. Agile development means more perfective maintenance requests come in, but it leads to greater responsiveness for making urgent corrective changes to non-COTS products.
    Data Quality Approach IT sees as Sales’ responsibility IT is not standing as a strategic partner for helping to keep data clean, causing dissatisfaction from customer-facing departments.
    Staffing Availability Limited to 9–5 Execution of sales support takes place during core hours only, limiting response times and access for on-the-road sales personnel.

    Activity: Use IT and business drivers to create guiding principles for your CXM technology-enablement project

    1.1.5 30 minutes

    Input

    • Business drivers and IT drivers from 1.1.3 and 1.1.4

    Output

    • CXM mission statement

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Core Team

    Instructions

    1. Based on the IT and business drivers identified, craft guiding principles for CXM technology enablement. Keep guiding principles in mind throughout the project and ensure they support (or reconcile) the business and IT drivers.

    Guiding Principle Description
    Sales processes must be scalable. Our sales processes must be able to reach a high number of target customers in a short time without straining systems or personnel.
    Marketing processes must be high touch. Processes must be oriented to support technically sophisticated, solution-selling methodologies.

    2. Summarize the guiding principles above by creating a CXM mission statement. See below for an example.

    Example: CXM Mission Statement

    To ensure our marketing, sales and service team is equipped with tools that will allow them to reach out to a large volume of contacts while still providing a solution-selling approach. This will be done with secure, on-premise systems to safeguard customer data.

    Ensure that now is the right time to take a step back and develop the CXM strategy

    Determine if now is the right time to move forward with building (or overhauling) your technology-enablement strategy for CXM.

    Not all organizations will be able to proceed immediately to optimize their CXM technology enablement. Determine if the organizational willingness, backbone, and resources are present to commit to overhauling the existing strategy. If you’re not ready to proceed, consider waiting to begin this project until you can procure the right resources.

    Do not proceed if:

    • Your current strategy for supporting marketing, sales, and service is working well and IT is already viewed as a strategic partner by these groups. Your current strategy is well aligned with customer preferences.
    • The current strategy is not working well, but there is no consensus or support from senior management for improving it.
    • You cannot secure the resources or time to devote to thoroughly examining the current state and selecting improvement initiatives.
    • The strategy has been approved, but there is no budget in place to support it at this time.

    Proceed if:

    • Senior management has agreed that technology support for CXM should be improved.
    • Sub-divisions within IT, sales, marketing, and service are on the same page about the need to improve alignment.
    • You have an approximate budget to work with for the project and believe you can secure additional funding to execute at least some improvement initiatives.
    • You understand how improving CXM alignment will fit into the broader customer interaction ecosystem in your organization.

    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:

    1.1.3; 1.1.4; 1.1.5 - Identify business and IT drivers to create CXM guiding principles

    The facilitator will work with stakeholders from both the business and IT to identify implicit or explicit strategic drivers that will support (or pose constraints on) the technology-enablement framework for the CXM strategy. In doing so, guiding principles will be established for the project.

    Step 1.2: Structure the Project

    Phase 1

    1.1 Create the Project Vision

    1.2 Structure the Project

    Phase 2

    2.1 Scan the External Environment

    2.2 Assess the Current State of CXM

    2.3 Create an Application Portfolio

    2.4 Develop Deployment Best Practices

    Phase 3

    3.1 Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

    3.2 Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

    Activities:

    • Define the project purpose, objectives, and business metrics
    • Define the scope of the CXM strategy
    • Create the project team
    • Build a RACI chart
    • Develop a timeline with project milestones
    • Identify risks and create mitigation strategies
    • Complete the strategy project charter and obtain approval

    Outcomes:

    CXM Strategy Project Charter Template

    • Purpose, objectives, metrics
    • Scope
    • Project team & RACI
    • Timeline
    • Risks & mitigation strategies
    • Project sponsorship

    Use Info-Tech’s CXM Strategy Project Charter Template to outline critical components of the CXM project

    1.2.1 CXM Strategy Project Charter Template

    Having a project charter is the first step for any project: it specifies how the project will be resourced from a people, process, and technology perspective, and it clearly outlines major project milestones and timelines for strategy development. CXM technology enablement crosses many organizational boundaries, so a project charter is a very useful tool for ensuring everyone is on the same page.

    Sections of the document:

    1. Project Drivers, Rationale, and Context
    2. Project Objectives, Metrics, and Purpose
    3. Project Scope Definition
    4. Project Team Roles and Responsibilities (RACI)
    5. Project Timeline
    6. Risk Mitigation Strategy
    7. Project Metrics
    8. Project Review & Approvals

    INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

    CXM Strategy Project Charter Template

    Populate the relevant sections of your project charter as you complete activities 1.2.2-1.2.8.

    Understand the roles necessary to complete your CXM technology-enablement strategy

    Understand the role of each player within your project structure. Look for listed participants on the activities slides to determine when each player should be involved.

    Title Role Within Project Structure
    Project Sponsor
    • Owns the project at the management/C-suite level
    • Responsible for breaking down barriers and ensuring alignment with organizational strategy
    • CIO, CMO, VP of Sales, VP of Customer Care, or similar
    Project Manager
    • The IT individual(s) that will oversee day-to-day project operations
    • Responsible for preparing and managing the project plan and monitoring the project team’s progress
    • Applications or other IT Manager, Business Analyst, Business Process Owner, or similar
    Business Lead
    • Works alongside the IT PM to ensure that the strategy is aligned with business needs
    • In this case, likely to be a marketing, sales, or customer service lead
    • Sales Director, Marketing Director, Customer Care Director, or similar
    Project Team
    • Comprised of individuals whose knowledge and skills are crucial to project success
    • Responsible for driving day-to-day activities, coordinating communication, and making process and design decisions. Can assist with persona and scenario development for CXM.
    • Project Manager, Business Lead, CRM Manager, Integration Manager, Application SMEs, Developers, Business Process Architects, and/or similar SMEs
    Steering Committee
    • Comprised of C-suite/management level individuals that act as the project’s decision makers
    • Responsible for validating goals and priorities, defining the project scope, enabling adequate resourcing, and managing change
    • Project Sponsor, Project Manager, Business Lead, CFO, Business Unit SMEs and similar

    Info-Tech Insight

    Do not limit project input or participation to the aforementioned roles. Include subject matter experts and internal stakeholders at particular stages within the project. Such inputs can be solicited on a one-off basis as needed. This ensures you take a holistic approach to creating your CXM technology-enablement strategy.

    Activity: Kick-off the CXM project by defining the project purpose, project objectives, and business metrics

    1.2.2 30 minutes

    Input

    • Activities 1.1.1 to 1.1.5

    Output

    • Drivers & rationale
    • Purpose statement
    • Business goals
    • Business metrics
    • CXM Strategy Project Charter Template, sections 1.0, 2.0, and 2.1

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Sponsor
    • Project Manager
    • Business Lead
    • Steering Committee

    Instructions

    Hold a meeting with IT, Marketing, Sales, Service, Operations, and any other impacted business stakeholders that have input into CXM to accomplish the following:

    1. Discuss the drivers and rationale behind embarking on a CXM strategy.
    2. Develop and concede on objectives for the CXM project, metrics that will gauge its success, and goals for each metric.
    3. Create a project purpose statement that is informed by decided-upon objectives and metrics from the steps above. When establishing a project purpose, ask the question, “what are we trying to accomplish?”
    • Example: Project Purpose Statement
      • The organization is creating a CXM strategy to gather high-level requirements from the business, IT, and Marketing, Sales, and Service, to ensure that the selection and deployment of the CXM meets the needs of the broader organization and provides the greatest return on investment.
  • Document your project drivers and rationale, purpose statement, project objectives, and business metrics in Info-Tech’s CXM Strategy Project Charter Template in sections 1.0 and 2.0.

    • Info-Tech Insight

    Going forward, set up a quarterly review process to understand changing needs. It is rare that organizations never change their marketing and sales strategy. This will change the way the CXM will be utilized.

    Establish baseline metrics for customer engagement

    In order to gauge the effectiveness of CXM technology enablement, establish core metrics:

    1. Marketing Metrics: pertaining to share of voice, share of wallet, market share, lead generation, etc.
    2. Sales Metrics: pertaining to overall revenue, average deal size, number of accounts, MCV, lead warmth, etc.
    3. Customer Service Metrics: pertaining to call volumes, average time to resolution, first contact resolution, customer satisfaction, etc.
    4. IT Metrics: pertaining to end-user satisfaction with CXM applications, number of tickets, contract value, etc.
    Metric Description Current Metric Future Goal
    Market Share 25% 35%
    Share of Voice (All Channels) 40% 50%
    Average Deal Size $10,500 $12,000
    Account Volume 1,400 1,800
    Average Time to Resolution 32 min 25 min
    First Contact Resolution 15% 35%
    Web Traffic per Month (Unique Visitors) 10,000 15,000
    End-User Satisfaction 62% 85%+
    Other metric
    Other metric
    Other metric

    Understand the importance of setting project expectations with a scope statement

    Be sure to understand what is in scope for a CXM strategy project. Prevent too wide of a scope to avoid scope creep – for example, we aren’t tackling ERP or BI under CXM.

    In Scope

    Establishing the parameters of the project in a scope statement helps define expectations and provides a baseline for resource allocation and planning. Future decisions about the strategic direction of CXM will be based on the scope statement.

    Scope Creep

    Well-executed requirements gathering will help you avoid expanding project parameters, drawing on your resources, and contributing to cost overruns and project delays. Avoid scope creep by gathering high-level requirements that lead to the selection of category-level application solutions (e.g. CRM, MMS, SMMP, etc.), rather than granular requirements that would lead to vendor application selection (e.g. Salesforce, Marketo, Hootsuite, etc.).

    Out of Scope

    Out-of-scope items should also be defined to alleviate ambiguity, reduce assumptions, and further clarify expectations for stakeholders. Out-of-scope items can be placed in a backlog for later consideration. For example, fulfilment and logistics management is out of scope as it pertains to CXM.

    In Scope
    Strategy
    High-Level CXM Application Requirements CXM Strategic Direction Category Level Application Solutions (e.g. CRM, MMS, etc.)
    Out of Scope
    Software Selection
    Vendor Application Review Vendor Application Selection Granular Application System Requirements

    Activity: Define the scope of the CXM strategy

    1.2.3 30 minutes

    Input

    • N/A

    Output

    • Project scope and parameters
    • CXM Strategy Project Charter Template, section 3.0

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Sponsor
    • Project Manager
    • Business Lead

    Instructions

    1. Formulate a scope statement. Decide which people, processes, and functions the CXM strategy will address. Generally, the aim of this project is to develop strategic requirements for the CXM application portfolio – not to select individual vendors.
    2. Document your scope statement in Info-Tech’s CXM Strategy Project Charter Template in section 3.0.

    To form your scope statement, ask the following questions:

    • What are the major coverage points?
    • Who will be using the systems?
    • How will different users interact with the systems?
    • What are the objectives that need to be addressed?
    • Where do we start?
    • Where do we draw the line?

    Identify the right stakeholders to include on your project team

    Consider the core team functions when composing the project team. Form a cross-functional team (i.e. across IT, Marketing, Sales, Service, Operations) to create a well-aligned CXM strategy.

    Required Skills/Knowledge Suggested Project Team Members
    IT
    • Application development
    • Enterprise integration
    • Business processes
    • Data management
    • CRM Application Manager
    • Business Process Manager
    • Integration Manager
    • Application Developer
    • Data Stewards
    Business
    • Understanding of the customer
    • Departmental processes
    • Sales Manager
    • Marketing Manager
    • Customer Service Manager
    Other
    • Operations
    • Administrative
    • Change management
    • Operations Manager
    • CFO
    • Change Management Manager

    Info-Tech Insight

    Don’t let your project team become too large when trying to include all relevant stakeholders. Carefully limiting the size of the project team will enable effective decision making while still including functional business units such as marketing, sales, service, and finance, as well as IT.

    Activity: Create the project team

    1.2.4 45 minutes

    Input

    • Scope Statement (output of Activity 1.2.3).

    Output

    • Project Team
    • CXM Strategy Project Charter Template, section 4.0

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Manager
    • Business Lead

    Instructions

    1. Review your scope statement. Have a discussion to generate a complete list of key stakeholders that are needed to achieve the scope of work.
    2. Using the previously generated list, identify a candidate for each role and determine their responsibilities and expected time commitment for the CXM strategy project.
    3. Document the project team in Info-Tech’s CXM Strategy Project Charter Template in section 4.0.

    Define project roles and responsibilities to improve progress tracking

    Build a list of the core CXM strategy team members, and then structure a RACI chart with the relevant categories and roles for the overall project.

    Responsible - Conducts work to achieve the task

    Accountable - Answerable for completeness of task

    Consulted - Provides input for the task

    Informed - Receives updates on the task

    Info-Tech Insight

    Avoid missed tasks between inter-functional communications by defining roles and responsibilities for the project as early as possible.

    Benefits of Assigning RACI Early:

    • Improve project quality by assigning the right people to the right tasks.
    • Improve chances of project task completion by assigning clear accountabilities.
    • Improve project buy-in by ensuring that stakeholders are kept informed of project progress, risks, and successes.

    Activity: Build a RACI chart

    1.2.5 30 minutes

    Input

    • Project Team (output of Activity 1.2.4)

    Output

    • RACI chart
    • CXM Strategy Project Charter Template, section 4.2

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Manager
    • Business Lead

    Instructions

    1. Identify the key stakeholder teams that should be involved in the CXM strategy project. You should have a cross-functional team that encompasses both IT (various units) and the business.
    2. Determine whether each stakeholder should be responsible, accountable, consulted, and/or informed with respect to each overarching project step.
    3. Confirm and communicate the results to relevant stakeholders and obtain their approval.
    4. Document the RACI chart in Info-Tech’s CXM Strategy Project Charter Template in section 4.2.
    Example: RACI Chart Project Sponsor (e.g. CMO) Project Manager (e.g. Applications Manager) Business Lead (e.g. Marketing Director) Steering Committee (e.g. PM, CMO, CFO…) Project Team (e.g. PM, BL, SMEs…)
    Assess Project Value I C A R C
    Conduct a Current State Assessment I I A C R
    Design Application Portfolio I C A R I
    Create CXM Roadmap R R A I I
    ... ... ... ... ... ...

    Activity: Develop a timeline in order to specify concrete project milestones

    1.2.6 30 minutes

    Input

    • N/A

    Output

    • Project timeline
    • CXM Strategy Project Charter Template, section 5.0

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Manager
    • Business Lead

    Instructions

    1. Assign responsibilities, accountabilities, and other project involvement to each project team role using a RACI chart. Remember to consider dependencies when creating the schedule and identifying appropriate subtasks.
    2. Document the timeline in Info-Tech’s CXM Strategy Project Charter Template in section 5.0.
    Key Activities Start Date End Date Target Status Resource(s)
    Structure the Project and Build the Project Team
    Articulate Business Objectives and Define Vision for Future State
    Document Current State and Assess Gaps
    Identify CXM Technology Solutions
    Build the Strategy for CXM
    Implement the Strategy

    Assess project-associated risk by understanding common barriers and enablers

    Common Internal Risk Factors

    Management Support Change Management IT Readiness
    Definition The degree of understanding and acceptance of CXM as a concept and necessary portfolio of technologies. The degree to which employees are ready to accept change and the organization is ready to manage it. The degree to which the organization is equipped with IT resources to handle new systems and processes.
    Assessment Outcomes
    • Is CXM enablement recognized as a top priority?
    • Will management commit time to the project?
    • Are employees resistant to change?
    • Is there an organizational awareness of the importance of customer experience?
    • Who are the owners of process and content?
    • Is there strong technical expertise?
    • Is there strong infrastructure?
    • What are the important integration points throughout the business?
    Risk
    • Low management buy-in
    • Lack of funding
    • Lack of resources
    • Low employee motivation
    • Lack of ownership
    • Low user adoption
    • Poor implementation
    • Reliance on consultants

    Activity: Identify the risks and create mitigation strategies

    1.2.7 45 minutes

    Input

    • N/A

    Output

    • Risk mitigation strategy
    • CXM Strategy Project Charter Template, section 6.0

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Manager
    • Business Lead
    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Brainstorm a list of possible risks that may impede the progress of your CXM project.
    2. Classify risks as strategy based (related to planning) or systems based (related to technology).
    3. Brainstorm mitigation strategies to overcome each risk.
    4. On a scale of 1 to 3, determine the impact of each risk on project success and the likelihood of each risk occurring.
    5. Document your findings in Info-Tech’s CXM Strategy Project Charter Template in section 6.0.

    Likelihood:

    1 - High/Needs Focus

    2 - Can Be Mitigated

    3 - Unlikely

    Impact

    1 - High Impact

    2 - Moderate Impact

    3 - Minimal Impact

    Example: Risk Register and Mitigation Tactics

    Risk Impact Likelihood Mitigation Effort
    Cost of time and implementation: designing a robust portfolio of CXM applications can be a time consuming task, representing a heavy investment for the organization 1 1
    • Have a clear strategic plan and a defined time frame
    • Know your end-user requirements
    • Put together an effective and diverse strategy project team
    Availability of resources: lack of in-house resources (e.g. infrastructure, CXM application developers) may result in the need to insource or outsource resources 1 2
    • Prepare a plan to insource talent by hiring or transferring talent from other departments – e.g. marketing and customer service

    Activity: Complete the project charter and obtain approval

    1.2.8 45 minutes

    Input

    • N/A

    Output

    • Project approval
    • CXM Strategy Project Charter Template, section 8.0

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Manager
    • Business Lead
    • Project Team

    Instructions

    Before beginning to develop the CXM strategy, validate the project charter and metrics with senior sponsors or stakeholders and receive their approval to proceed.

    1. Schedule a 30-60 minute meeting with senior stakeholders and conduct a live review of your CXM strategy project charter.
    2. Obtain stakeholder approval to ensure there are no miscommunications or misunderstandings around the scope of the work that needs to be done to reach a successful project outcome. Final sign-off should only take place when mutual consensus has been reached.
      • Obtaining approval should be an iterative process; if senior management has concerns over certain aspects of the plan, revise and review again.

    Info-Tech Insight

    In most circumstances, you should have your CXM strategy project charter validated with the following stakeholders:

    • Chief Information Officer
    • IT Applications Director
    • CFO or Comptroller (for budget approval)
    • Chief Marketing Office or Head of Marketing
    • Chief Revenue Officer or VP of Sales
    • VP Customer Service

    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:

    1.2.2 Define project purpose, objectives, and business metrics

    Through an in-depth discussion, an analyst will help you prioritize corporate objectives and organizational drivers to establish a distinct project purpose.

    1.2.3 Define the scope of the CXM strategy

    An analyst will facilitate a discussion to address critical questions to understand your distinct business needs. These questions include: What are the major coverage points? Who will be using the system?

    1.2.4; 1.2.5; 1.2.6 Create the CXM project team, build a RACI chart, and establish a timeline

    Our analysts will guide you through how to create a designated project team to ensure the success of your CXM strategy and suite selection initiative, including project milestones and team composition, as well as designated duties and responsibilities.

    Phase 2

    Create a Strategic Framework for CXM Technology Enablement

    Build a Strong Technology Foundation for Customer Experience Management

    Phase 2 outline: Steps 2.1 and 2.2

    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: Create a Strategic Framework for CXM Technology Enablement

    Proposed Time to Completion: 4 weeks

    Step 2.1: Scan the External Environment

    Start with an analyst kick-off call:

    • Discuss external drivers
    • Assess competitive environment
    • Review persona development
    • Review scenarios

    Then complete these activities…

    • Build the CXM operating model
    • Conduct a competitive analysis
    • Conduct a PEST analysis
    • Build personas and scenarios

    With these tools & templates:

    CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template

    Step 2.2: Assess the Current State for CRM

    Review findings with analyst:

    • Review SWOT analysis
    • Review VRIO analysis
    • Discuss strategic requirements for CXM

    Then complete these activities…

    • Conduct a SWOT analysis
    • Conduct a VRIO analysis
    • Inventory existing applications

    With these tools & templates:

    CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template

    Phase 2 outline: Steps 2.3 and 2.4

    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: Create a Strategic Framework for CXM Technology Enablement

    Proposed Time to Completion: 4 weeks

    Step 2.3: Create an Application Portfolio

    Start with an analyst kick-off call:

    • Discuss possible business process maps
    • Discuss strategic requirements
    • Review application portfolio results

    Then complete these activities…

    • Build business maps
    • Execute application mapping

    With these tools & templates:

    CXM Portfolio Designer

    CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template

    CXM Business Process Shortlisting Tool

    Step 2.4: Develop Deployment Best Practices

    Review findings with analyst:

    • Review possible integration maps
    • Discuss best practices for end-user adoption
    • Discuss best practices for customer data quality

    Then complete these activities…

    • Create CXM integration ecosystem
    • Develop adoption game plan
    • Create data quality standards

    With these tools & templates:

    CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template

    Phase 2 Results & Insights:

    • Application portfolio for CXM
    • Deployment best practices for areas such as integration, data quality, and end-user adoption

    Step 2.1: Scan the External Environment

    Phase 1

    1.1 Create the Project Vision

    1.2 Structure the Project

    Phase 2

    2.1 Scan the External Environment

    2.2 Assess the Current State of CXM

    2.3 Create an Application Portfolio

    2.4 Develop Deployment Best Practices

    Phase 3

    3.1 Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

    3.2 Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

    Activities:

    • Inventory CXM drivers and organizational objectives
    • Identify CXM challenges and pain points
    • Discuss opportunities and benefits
    • Align corporate and CXM strategies
    • Conduct a competitive analysis
    • Conduct a PEST analysis and extract strategic requirements
    • Build customer personas and extract strategic requirements

    Outcomes:

    • CXM operating model
      • Organizational drivers
      • Environmental factors
      • Barriers
      • Enablers
    • PEST analysis
    • External customer personas
    • Customer journey scenarios
    • Strategic requirements for CXM

    Develop a CXM technology operating model that takes stock of needs, drivers, barriers, and enablers

    Establish the drivers, enablers, and barriers to developing a CXM technology enablement strategy. In doing so, consider needs, environmental factors, organizational drivers, and technology drivers as inputs.

    CXM Strategy

    • Barriers
      • Lack of Resources
      • Cultural Mindset
      • Resistance to Change
      • Poor End-User Adoption
    • Enablers
      • Senior Management Support
      • Customer Data Quality
      • Current Technology Portfolio
    • Business Needs (What are your business drivers? What are current marketing, sales, and customer service pains?)
      • Acquisition Pipeline Management
      • Live Chat for Support
      • Social Media Analytics
      • Etc.
    • Organizational Goals
      • Increase Profitability
      • Enhance Customer Experience Consistency
      • Reduce Time-to-Resolution
      • Increase First Contact Resolution
      • Boost Share of Voice
    • Environmental Factors (What factors that affect your strategy are out of your control?)
      • Customer Buying Habits
      • Changing Technology Trends
      • Competitive Landscape
      • Regulatory Requirements
    • Technology Drivers (Why do you need a new system? What is the purpose for becoming an integrated organization?)
      • System Integration
      • Reporting Capabilities
      • Deployment Model

    Understand your needs, drivers, and organizational objectives for creating a CXM strategy

    Business Needs Organizational Drivers Technology Drivers Environmental Factors
    Definition A business need is a requirement associated with a particular business process (for example, Marketing needs customer insights from the website – the business need would therefore be web analytics capabilities). Organizational drivers can be thought of as business-level goals. These are tangible benefits the business can measure such as customer retention, operation excellence, and financial performance. Technology drivers are technological changes that have created the need for a new CXM enablement strategy. Many organizations turn to technology systems to help them obtain a competitive edge. External considerations are factors taking place outside of the organization that are impacting the way business is conducted inside the organization. These are often outside the control of the business.
    Examples
    • Web analytics
    • Live chat capabilities
    • Mobile self-service
    • Social media listening
    • Data quality
    • Customer satisfaction
    • Branding
    • Time-to-resolution
    • Deployment model (i.e. SaaS)
    • Integration
    • Reporting capabilities
    • Fragmented technologies
    • Economic factors
    • Customer preferences
    • Competitive influencers
    • Compliance regulations

    Info-Tech Insight

    A common organizational driver is to provide adequate technology enablement across multiple channels, resulting in a consistent customer experience. This driver is a result of external considerations. Many industries today are highly competitive and rapidly changing. To succeed under these pressures, you must have a rationalized portfolio of enterprise applications for customer interaction.

    Activity: Inventory and discuss CXM drivers and organizational objectives

    2.1.1 30 minutes

    Input

    • Business needs
    • Exercise 1.1.3
    • Exercise 1.1.4
    • Environmental factors

    Output

    • CXM operating model inputs
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Info-Tech examples
    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Brainstorm the business needs, organizational drivers, technology drivers, and environmental factors that will inform the CXM strategy. Draw from exercises 1.1.3-1.1.5.
    2. Document your findings in the CXM operating model template. This can be found in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    The image is a graphic, with a rectangle split into three sections in the centre. The three sections are: Barriers; CXM Strategy; Enablers. Around the centre are 4 more rectangles, labelled: Business Needs; Organizational Drivers; Technology Drivers; Environmental Factors. The outer rectangles are a slightly darker shade of grey than the others, highlighting them.

    Understand challenges and barriers to creating and executing the CXM technology-enablement strategy

    Take stock of internal challenges and barriers to effective CXM strategy execution.

    Example: Internal Challenges & Potential Barriers

    Understanding the Customer Change Management IT Readiness
    Definition The degree to which a holistic understanding of the customer can be created, including customer demographic and psychographics. The degree to which employees are ready to accept operational and cultural changes and the degree to which the organization is ready to manage it. The degree to which IT is ready to support new technologies and processes associated with a portfolio of CXM applications.
    Questions to Ask
    • As an organization, do we have a true understanding of our customers?
    • How might we achieve a complete understanding of the customer throughout different phases of the customer lifecycle?
    • Are employees resistant to change?
    • Are there enough resources to drive an CXM strategy?
    • To what degree is the existing organizational culture customer-centric?
    • Is there strong technical expertise?
    • Is there strong infrastructure?
    Implications
    • Uninformed creation of CXM strategic requirements
    • Inadequate understanding of customer needs and wants
    • User acceptance
    • Lack of ownership
    • Lack of accountability
    • Lack of sustainability
    • Poor implementation
    • Reliance on expensive external consultants
    • Lack of sustainability

    Activity: Identify CXM challenges and pain points

    2.1.2 30 minutes

    Input

    • Challenges
    • Pain points

    Output

    • CXM operating model barriers
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Info-Tech examples
    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Brainstorm the challenges and pain points that may act as barriers to the successful planning and execution of a CXM strategy.
    2. Document your findings in the CXM operating model template. This can be found in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    The image is the same graphic from a previous section. In this instance, the Barriers sections is highlighted.

    Identify opportunities that can enable CXM strategy execution

    Existing internal conditions, capabilities, and resources can create opportunities to enable the CXM strategy. These opportunities are critical to overcoming challenges and barriers.

    Example: Opportunities to Leverage for Strategy Enablement

    Management Buy-In Customer Data Quality Current Technology Portfolio
    Definition The degree to which upper management understands and is willing to enable a CXM project, complete with sponsorship, funding, and resource allocation. The degree to which customer data is accurate, consistent, complete, and reliable. Strong customer data quality is an opportunity – poor data quality is a barrier. The degree to which the existing portfolio of CXM-supporting enterprise applications can be leveraged to enable the CXM strategy.
    Questions to Ask
    • Is management informed of changing technology trends and the subsequent need for CXM?
    • Are adequate funding and resourcing available to support a CXM project, from strategy creation to implementation?
    • Are there any data quality issues?
    • Is there one source of truth for customer data?
    • Are there duplicate or incomplete sets of data?
    • Does a strong CRM backbone exist?
    • What marketing, sales, and customer service applications exist?
    • Are CXM-enabling applications rated highly on usage and performance?
    Implications
    • Need for CXM clearly demonstrated
    • Financial and logistical feasibility
    • Consolidated data quality governance initiatives
    • Informed decision making
    • Foundation for CXM technology enablement largely in place
    • Reduced investment of time and money needed

    Activity: Discuss opportunities and benefits

    2.1.3 30 minutes

    Input

    • Opportunities
    • Benefits

    Output

    • Completed CXM operating model
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Info-Tech examples
    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Brainstorm opportunities that should be leveraged or benefits that should be realized to enable the successful planning and execution of a CXM strategy.
    2. Document your findings in the CXM operating model template. This can be found in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    The image is the same graphic from earlier sections, this time with the Enablers section highlighted.

    Ensure that you align your CXM technology strategy to the broader corporate strategy

    A successful CXM strategy requires a comprehensive understanding of an organization’s overall corporate strategy and its effects on the interrelated departments of marketing, sales, and service, including subsequent technology implications. For example, a CXM strategy that emphasizes tools for omnichannel management and is at odds with a corporate strategy that focuses on only one or two channels will fail.

    Corporate Strategy

    • Conveys the current state of the organization and the path it wants to take.
    • Identifies future goals and business aspirations.
    • Communicates the initiatives that are critical for getting the organization from its current state to the future state.

    CXM Strategy

    • Communicates the company’s budget and spending on CXM applications and initiatives.
    • Identifies IT initiatives that will support the business and key CXM objectives, specific to marketing, sales, and service.
    • Outlines staffing and resourcing for CXM initiatives.

    Unified Strategy

    • The CXM implementation can be linked, with metrics, to the corporate strategy and ultimate business objectives.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your organization’s corporate strategy is especially important in dictating the direction of the CXM strategy. Corporate strategies are often focused on customer-facing activity and will heavily influence the direction of marketing, sales, customer service, and consequentially, CXM. Corporate strategies will often dictate market targeting, sales tactics, service models, and more.

    Review sample organizational objectives to decipher how CXM technologies can support such objectives

    Identifying organizational objectives of high priority will assist in breaking down CXM objectives to better align with the overall corporate strategy and achieve buy-in from key stakeholders.

    Corporate Objectives Aligned CXM Technology Objectives
    Increase Revenue Enable lead scoring Deploy sales collateral management tools Improve average cost per lead via a marketing automation tool
    Enhance Market Share Enhance targeting effectiveness with a CRM Increase social media presence via an SMMP Architect customer intelligence analysis
    Improve Customer Satisfaction Reduce time-to-resolution via better routing Increase accessibility to customer service with live chat Improve first contact resolution with customer KB
    Increase Customer Retention Use a loyalty management application Improve channel options for existing customers Use customer analytics to drive targeted offers
    Create Customer-Centric Culture Ensure strong training and user adoption programs Use CRM to provide 360-degree view of all customer interaction Incorporate the voice of the customer into product development

    Activity: Review your corporate strategy and validate its alignment with the CXM operating model

    2.1.4 30 minutes

    Input

    • Corporate strategy
    • CXM operating model (completed in Activity 2.1.3)

    Output

    • Strategic alignment between the business and CXM strategies

    Materials

    • Info-Tech examples
    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Brainstorm and create a list of organizational objectives at the corporate strategy level.
    2. Break down each organizational objective to identify how CXM may support it.
    3. Validate CXM goals and organizational objectives with your CXM operating model. Be sure to address the validity of each with the business needs, organizational drivers, technology drivers, and environmental factors identified as inputs to the operating model.

    Amazon leverages customer data to drive decision making around targeted offers and customer experience

    CASE STUDY

    Industry E-Commerce

    Source Pardot, 2012

    Situation

    Amazon.com, Inc. is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company. It is the largest e-commerce retailer in the US.

    Amazon originated as an online book store, later diversifying to sell various forms of media, software, games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and more.

    By taking a data-driven approach to marketing and sales, Amazon was able to understand its customers’ needs and wants, penetrate different product markets, and create a consistently personalized online-shopping customer experience that keeps customers coming back.

    Technology Strategy

    Use Browsing Data Effectively

    Amazon leverages marketing automation suites to view recent activities of prospects on its website. In doing so, a more complete view of the customer is achieved, including insights into purchasing interests and site navigation behaviors.

    Optimize Based on Interactions

    Using customer intelligence, Amazon surveys and studies standard engagement metrics like open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribes to ensure the optimal degree of marketing is being targeted to existing and prospective customers, depending on level of engagement.

    Results

    Insights gained from having a complete understanding of the customer (from basic demographic characteristics provided in customer account profiles to observed psychographic behaviors captured by customer intelligence applications) are used to personalize Amazon’s sales and marketing approaches. This is represented through targeted suggestions in the “recommended for you” section of the browsing experience and tailored email marketing.

    It is this capability, partnered with the technological ability to observe and measure customer engagement, that allows Amazon to create individual customer experiences.

    Scan the external environment to understand your customers, competitors, and macroenvironmental trends

    Do not develop your CXM technology strategy in isolation. Work with Marketing to understand your STP strategy (segmentation, targeting, positioning): this will inform persona development and technology requirements downstream.

    Market Segmentation

    • Segment target market by demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics
    • What does the competitive market look like?
    • Who are the key customer segments?
    • What segments are you going to target?

    Market Targeting

    • Evaluate potential and commercial attractiveness of each segment, considering the dynamics of the competition
    • How do you target your customers?
    • How should you target them in the future?
    • How do your products/services differ from the competition?

    Product Positioning

    • Develop detailed product positioning and marketing mixes for selected segments
    • What is the value of the product/service to each segment of the market?
    • How are you positioning your product/service in the market?

    Info-Tech Insight

    It is at this point that you should consider the need for and viability of an omnichannel approach to CXM. Through which channels do you target your customers? Are your customers present and active on a wide variety of channels? Consider how you can position your products, services, and brand through the use of omnichannel methodologies.

    Activity: Conduct a competitive analysis to understand where your market is going

    2.1.5 1 hour

    Input

    • Scan of competitive market
    • Existing customer STP strategy

    Output

    • Strategic CXM requirements
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team
    • Marketing SME

    Instructions

    1. Scan the market for direct and indirect competitors.
    2. Evaluate current and/or future segmentation, targeting, and positioning strategies by answering the following questions:
    • What does the competitive market look like?
    • Who are the key customer segments?
    • What segments are you going to target?
    • How do you target your customers?
    • How should you target them in the future?
    • How do your products/services differ from the competition?
    • What is the value of the product/service to each segment of the market?
    • How are you positioning your product/service in the market?
    • Other helpful questions include:
      • How formally do you target customers? (e.g. through direct contact vs. through passive brand marketing)
      • Does your organization use the shotgun or rifle approach to marketing?
        • Shotgun marketing: targets a broad segment of people, indirectly
        • Rifle marketing: targets smaller and more niche market segments using customer intelligence
  • For each point, identify CXM requirements.
  • Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    • Activity: Conduct a competitive analysis (cont’d)

    2.1.5 30 minutes

    Input

    • Scan of competitive market

    Output

    • Competitive analysis
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team
    • Marketing SME (e.g. Market Research Stakeholders)

    Instructions

    1. List recent marketing technology and customer experience-related initiatives that your closest competitors have implemented.
    2. For each identified initiative, elaborate on what the competitive implications are for your organization.
    3. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    Example: Competitive Implications

    Competitor Organization Recent Initiative Associated Technology Direction of Impact Competitive Implication
    Organization X Multichannel E-Commerce Integration WEM – hybrid integration Positive
    • Up-to-date e-commerce capabilities
    • Automatic product updates via PCM
    Organization Y Web Social Analytics WEM Positive
    • Real-time analytics and customer insights
    • Allows for more targeted content toward the visitor or customer

    Conduct a PEST analysis to determine salient political, economic, social, and technological impacts for CXM

    A PEST analysis is a structured planning method that identifies external environmental factors that could influence the corporate and IT strategy.

    Political - Examine political factors, such as relevant data protection laws and government regulations.

    Economic - Examine economic factors, such as funding, cost of web access, and labor shortages for maintaining the site(s).

    Technological - Examine technological factors, such as new channels, networks, software and software frameworks, database technologies, wireless capabilities, and availability of software as a service.

    Social - Examine social factors, such as gender, race, age, income, and religion.

    Info-Tech Insight

    When looking at opportunities and threats, PEST analysis can help to ensure that you do not overlook external factors, such as technological changes in your industry. When conducting your PEST analysis specifically for CXM, pay particular attention to the rapid rate of change in the technology bucket. New channels and applications are constantly emerging and evolving, and seeing differential adoption by potential customers.

    Activity: Conduct and review the PEST analysis

    2.1.6 30 minutes

    Input

    • Political, economic, social, and technological factors related to CXM

    Output

    • Completed PEST analysis

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Identify your current strengths and weaknesses in managing the customer experience.
    2. Identify any opportunities to take advantage of and threats to mitigate.

    Example: PEST Analysis

    Political

    • Data privacy for PII
    • ADA legislation for accessible design

    Economic

    • Spending via online increasing
    • Focus on share of wallet

    Technological

    • Rise in mobile
    • Geo-location based services
    • Internet of Things
    • Omnichannel

    Social

    • Increased spending power by millennials
    • Changing channel preferences
    • Self-service models

    Activity: Translate your PEST analysis into a list of strategic CXM technology requirements to be addressed

    2.1.7 30 minutes

    Input

    • PEST Analysis conducted in Activity 2.1.6.

    Output

    • Strategic CXM requirements
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    For each PEST quadrant:

    1. Document the point and relate it to a goal.
    2. For each point, identify CXM requirements.
    3. Sort goals and requirements to eliminate duplicates.
    4. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    Example: Parsing Requirements from PEST Analysis

    Technological Trend: There has been a sharp increase in popularity of mobile self-service models for buying habits and customer service access.

    Goal: Streamline mobile application to be compatible with all mobile devices. Create consistent branding across all service delivery applications (e.g. website, etc.).

    Strategic Requirement: Develop a native mobile application while also ensuring that resources through our web presence are built with responsive design interface.

    IT must fully understand the voice of the customer: work with Marketing to develop customer personas

    Creating a customer-centric CXM technology strategy requires archetypal customer personas. Creating customer personas will enable you to talk concretely about them as consumers of your customer experience and allow you to build buyer scenarios around them.

    A persona (or archetypal user) is an invented person that represents a type of user in a particular use-case scenario. In this case, personas can be based on real customers.

    Components of a persona Example – Organization: Grocery Store
    Name Name personas to reflect a key attribute such as the persona’s primary role or motivation Brand Loyal Linda: A stay-at-home mother dedicated to maintaining and caring for a household of 5 people
    Demographic Include basic descriptors of the persona (e.g. age, geographic location, preferred language, education, job, employer, household income, etc.) Age: 42 years old Geographic location: London Suburbia Language: English Education: Post-secondary Job: Stay-at-home mother Annual Household Income: $100,000+
    Wants, needs, pain points Identify surface-level motivations for buying habits

    Wants: Local products Needs: Health products; child-safe products

    Pain points: Fragmented shopping experience

    Psychographic/behavioral traits Observe persona traits that are representative of the customers’ behaviors (e.g. attitudes, buying patterns, etc.)

    Psychographic: Detail-oriented, creature of habit

    Behavioral: Shops at large grocery store twice a week, visits farmers market on Saturdays, buys organic products online

    Activity: Build personas for your customers

    2.1.8 2 hours

    Input

    • Customer demographics and psychographics

    Output

    • List of prioritized customer personas
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Info-Tech examples
    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    Project Team

    Instructions

    1. In 2-4 groups, list all the customer personas that need to be built. In doing so, consider the people who interact with your organization most often.
    2. Build a demographic profile for each customer persona. Include information such as age, geographic location, occupation, annual income, etc.
    3. Augment the persona with a psychographic profile of each customer. 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.

    Info-Tech Insight

    For CXM, 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 CXM applications), personas can also be built for this purpose. Examples of useful internal personas are sales managers, brand managers, customer service directors, etc.

    Sample Persona Templates

    Fred, 40

    The Family Man

    Post-secondary educated, white-collar professional, three children

    Goals & Objectives

    • Maintain a stable secure lifestyle
    • Progress his career
    • Obtain a good future for his children

    Behaviors

    • Manages household and finances
    • Stays actively involved in children’s activities and education
    • Seeks potential career development
    • Uses a cellphone and email frequently
    • Sometimes follows friends Facebook pages

    Services of Interest

    • SFA, career counselling, job boards, day care, SHHS
    • Access to information via in-person, phone, online

    Traits

    General Literacy - High

    Digital Literacy - Mid-High

    Detail-Oriented - High

    Willing to Try New Things - Mid-High

    Motivated and Persistent - Mid-High

    Time Flexible - Mid-High

    Familiar With [Red.] - Mid

    Access to [Red.] Offices - High

    Access to Internet - High

    Ashley, 35

    The Tourist

    Single, college educated, planning vacation in [redacted], interested in [redacted] job opportunities

    Goals & Objectives

    • Relax after finishing a stressful job
    • Have adventures and try new things
    • Find a new job somewhere in Canada

    Behaviors

    • Collects information about things to do in [redacted]
    • Collects information about life in [redacted]
    • Investigates and follows up on potential job opportunities
    • Uses multiple social media to keep in touch with friends
    • Shops online frequently

    Services of Interest

    • SFA, job search, road conditions, ferry schedules, hospital, police station, DL requirements, vehicle rental
    • Access to information via in-person, phone, website, SMS, email, social media

    Traits

    General Literacy - Mid

    Digital Literacy - High

    Detail-Oriented - Mid

    Willing to Try New Things - High

    Motivated and Persistent - Mid

    Time Flexible - Mid-High

    Familiar With [Red.] - Low

    Access to [Red.] Offices - Low

    Access to Internet - High

    Bill, 25

    The Single Parent

    15-year resident of [redacted], high school education, waiter, recently divorced, two children

    Goals & Objectives

    • Improve his career options so he can support his family
    • Find an affordable place to live
    • Be a good parent
    • Work through remaining divorce issues

    Behaviors

    • Tries to get training or experience to improve his career
    • Stays actively involved in his children’s activities
    • Looks for resources and supports to resolve divorce issues
    • Has a cellphone and uses the internet occasionally

    Services of Interest

    • Child care, housing authority, legal aid, parenting resources
    • Access to information via in person, word-of mouth, online, phone, email

    Traits

    General Literacy - Mid

    Digital Literacy - Mid-Low

    Detail-Oriented - Mid-Low

    Willing to Try New Things - Mid

    Motivated and Persistent - High

    Time Flexible - Mid

    Familiar With [Red.] - Mid-High

    Access to [Red.] Offices - High

    Access to Internet - High

    Marie, 19

    The Regional Youth

    Single, [redacted] resident, high school graduate

    Goals & Objectives

    • Get a good job
    • Maintain ties to family and community

    Behaviors

    • Looking for work
    • Gathering information about long-term career choices
    • Trying to get the training or experience that can help her develop a career
    • Staying with her parents until she can get established
    • Has a new cellphone and is learning how to use it
    • Plays videogames and uses the internet at least weekly

    Services of Interest

    • Job search, career counselling
    • Access to information via in-person, online, phone, email, web applications

    Traits

    General Literacy - Mid

    Digital Literacy - Mid

    Detail-Oriented - Mid-Low

    Willing to Try New Things - Mid-High

    Motivated and Persistent - Mid-Low

    Time Flexible - High

    Familiar With [Red.] - Mid-Low

    Access to [Red.] Offices - Mid-Low

    Access to Internet - Mid

    Build key scenarios for each persona to extract strategic requirements for your CXM application portfolio

    A scenario is a story or narrative that helps explore the set of interactions that a customer has with an organization. Scenario mapping will help parse requirements used to design the CXM application portfolio.

    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 2-3 key scenarios per persona
    • Sketch each scenario out so that stakeholders understand the goal of the scenario

    Activity: Build scenarios for each persona and extract strategic requirements for the CXM strategy

    2.1.9 1.5 hours

    Input

    • Customer personas (output of Activity 2.1.5)

    Output

    • CX scenario maps
    • Strategic CXM requirements
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. For each customer persona created in Activity 2.1.5, build a scenario. Choose and differentiate scenarios based on the customer goal of each scenario (e.g. make online purchase, seek customer support, etc.).
    2. Think through the narrative of how a customer interacts with your organization, at all points throughout the scenario. List each step in the interaction in a sequential order to form a scenario journey.
    3. Examine each step in the scenario and brainstorm strategic requirements that will be needed to support the customer’s use of technology throughout the scenario.
    4. Repeat steps 1-3 for each persona. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    Example: Scenario Map

    Persona Name: Brand Loyal Linda

    Scenario Goal: File a complaint about in-store customer service

    Look up “[Store Name] customer service” on public web. →Reach customer support landing page. →Receive proactive notification prompt for online chat with CSR. →Initiate conversation: provide order #. →CSR receives order context and information. →Customer articulates problem, CSR consults knowledgebase. →Discount on next purchase offered. →Send email with discount code to Brand Loyal Linda.

    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; 2.1.2; 2.1.3; 2.1.4 - Create a CXM operating model

    An analyst will facilitate a discussion to identify what impacts your CXM strategy and how to align it to your corporate strategy. The discussion will take different perspectives into consideration and look at organizational drivers, external environmental factors, as well as internal barriers and enablers.

    2.1.5 Conduct a competitive analysis

    Calling on their depth of expertise in working with a broad spectrum of organizations, our facilitator will help you work through a structured, systematic evaluation of competitors’ actions when it comes to CXM.

    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:

    2.1.6; 2.1.7 - Conduct a PEST analysis

    The facilitator will use guided conversation to target each quadrant of the PEST analysis and help your organization fully enumerate political, economic, social, and technological trends that will influence your CXM strategy. Our analysts are deeply familiar with macroenvironmental trends and can provide expert advice in identifying areas of concern in the PEST and drawing strategic requirements as implications.

    2.1.8; 2.1.9 - Build customer personas and subsequent persona scenarios

    Drawing on the preceding exercises as inputs, the facilitator will help the team create and refine personas, create respective customer interaction scenarios, and parse strategic requirements to support your technology portfolio for CXM.

    Step 2.2: Assess the Current State of CXM

    Phase 1

    1.1 Create the Project Vision

    1.2 Structure the Project

    Phase 2

    2.1 Scan the External Environment

    2.2 Assess the Current State of CXM

    2.3 Create an Application Portfolio

    2.4 Develop Deployment Best Practices

    Phase 3

    3.1 Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

    3.2 Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

    Activities:

    • Conduct a SWOT analysis and extract strategic requirements
    • Inventory existing CXM applications and assess end-user usage and satisfaction
    • Conduct a VRIO analysis and extract strategic requirements

    Outcomes:

    • SWOT analysis
    • VRIO analysis
    • Current state application portfolio
    • Strategic requirements

    Conduct a SWOT analysis to prepare for creating your CXM strategy

    A SWOT analysis is a structured planning method that evaluates the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats involved in a project.

    Strengths - Strengths describe the positive attributes that are within your control and internal to your organization (i.e. what do you do better than anyone else?)

    Weaknesses - Weaknesses are internal aspects of your business that place you at a competitive disadvantage; think of what you need to enhance to compete with your top competitor.

    Opportunities - Opportunities are external factors the project can capitalize on. Think of them as factors that represent reasons your business is likely to prosper.

    Threats - Threats are external factors that could jeopardize the project. While you may not have control over these, you will benefit from having contingency plans to address them if they occur.

    Info-Tech Insight

    When evaluating weaknesses of your current CXM strategy, ensure that you’re taking into account not just existing applications and business processes, but also potential deficits in your organization’s channel strategy and go-to-market messaging.

    Activity: Conduct a SWOT analysis

    2.2.1 30 minutes

    Input

    • CXM strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats

    Output

    • Completed SWOT analysis

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Identify your current strengths and weaknesses in managing the customer experience. Consider marketing, sales, and customer service aspects of the CX.
    2. Identify any opportunities to take advantage of and threats to mitigate.

    Example: SWOT Analysis

    Strengths

    • Strong customer service model via telephony

    Weaknesses

    • Customer service inaccessible in real-time through website or mobile application

    Opportunities

    • Leverage customer intelligence to measure ongoing customer satisfaction

    Threats

    • Lack of understanding of customer interaction platforms by staff could hinder adoption

    Activity: Translate your SWOT analysis into a list of requirements to be addressed

    2.2.2 30 minutes

    Input

    • SWOT Analysis conducted in Activity 2.2.1.

    Output

    • Strategic CXM requirements
    • CXM Stakeholder Presentation Template

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    For each SWOT quadrant:

    1. Document the point and relate it to a goal.
    2. For each point, identify CXM requirements.
    3. Sort goals and requirements to eliminate duplicates.
    4. Document your outputs in the CXM Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    Example: Parsing Requirements from SWOT Analysis

    Weakness: Customer service inaccessible in real-time through website or mobile application.

    Goal: Increase the ubiquity of access to customer service knowledgebase and agents through a web portal or mobile application.

    Strategic Requirement: Provide a live chat portal that matches the customer with the next available and qualified agent.

    Inventory your current CXM application portfolio

    Applications are the bedrock of technology enablement for CXM. Review your current application portfolio to identify what is working well and what isn’t.

    Understand Your CXM Application Portfolio With a Four-Step Approach

    Build the CXM Application Inventory →Assess Usage and Satisfaction →Map to Business Processes and Determine Dependencies →Determine Grow/Maintain/ Retire for Each Application

    When assessing the CXM applications portfolio, do not cast your net too narrowly; while CRM and MMS applications are often top of mind, applications for digital asset management and social media management are also instrumental for ensuring a well-integrated CX.

    Identify dependencies (either technical or licensing) between applications. This dependency tracing will come into play when deciding which applications should be grown (invested in), which applications should be maintained (held static), and which applications should be retired (divested).

    Info-Tech Insight

    Shadow IT is prominent here! When building your application inventory, ensure you involve Marketing, Sales, and Service to identify any “unofficial” SaaS applications that are being used for CXM. Many organizations fail to take a systematic view of their CXM application portfolio beyond maintaining a rough inventory. To assess the current state of alignment, you must build the application inventory and assess satisfaction metrics.

    Understand which of your organization’s existing enterprise applications enable CXM

    Review the major enterprise applications in your organization that enable CXM and align your requirements to these applications (net-new or existing). Identify points of integration to capture the big picture.

    The image shows a graphic titled Example: Integration of CRM, SMMP, and ERP. It is a flow chart, with icons defined by a legend on the right side of the image

    Info-Tech Insight

    When assessing the current application portfolio that supports CXM, the tendency will be to focus on the applications under the CXM umbrella, relating mostly to marketing, sales, and customer service. Be sure to include systems that act as input to, or benefit due to outputs from, CRM or similar applications. Examples of these systems are ERP systems, ECM (e.g. SharePoint) applications, and more.

    Assess CXM application usage and satisfaction

    Having a portfolio but no contextual data will not give you a full understanding of the current state. The next step is to thoroughly assess usage patterns as well as IT, management, and end-user satisfaction with each application.

    Example: Application Usage & Satisfaction Assessment

    Application Name Level of Usage IT Satisfaction Management Satisfaction End-User Satisfaction Potential Business Impact
    CRM (e.g. Salesforce) Medium High Medium Medium High
    CRM (e.g. Salesforce) Low Medium Medium High Medium
    ... ... ... ... ... ...

    Info-Tech Insight

    When evaluating satisfaction with any application, be sure to consult all stakeholders who come into contact with the application or depend on its output. Consider criteria such as ease of use, completeness of information, operational efficiency, data accuracy, etc.

    Use Info-Tech’s Application Portfolio Assessment to gather end-user feedback on existing CXM applications

    2.2.3 Application Portfolio Assessment: End-User Feedback

    Info-Tech’s Application Portfolio Assessment: End-User Feedback diagnostic is a low-effort, high-impact program that will give you detailed report cards on end-user satisfaction with an application. Use these insights to identify problems, develop action plans for improvement, and determine key participants.

    Application Portfolio Assessment: End-User Feedback is an 18-question survey that provides valuable insights on user satisfaction with an application by:

    • Performing a general assessment of the application portfolio that provides a full view of the effectiveness, criticality, and prevalence of all relevant applications.
    • Measuring individual application performance with open-ended user feedback surveys about the application, organized by department to simplify problem resolution.
    • Providing targeted department feedback to identify end-user satisfaction and focus improvements on the right group or line of business.

    INFO-TECH DIAGNOSTIC

    Activity: Inventory your CXM applications, and assess application usage and satisfaction

    2.2.4 1 hour

    Input

    • List of CXM applications

    Output

    • Complete inventory of CXM applications
    • CXM Stakeholder Presentation Template

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. List all existing applications that support the creation, management, and delivery of your customer experience.
    2. Identify which processes each application supports (e.g. content deployment, analytics, service delivery, etc.).
    3. Identify technical or licensing dependencies (e.g. data models).
    4. Assess the level of application usage by IT, management, and internal users (high/medium/low).
    5. Assess the satisfaction with and performance of each application according to IT, management, and internal users (high/medium/low). Use the Info-Tech Diagnostic to assist.

    Example: CXM Application Inventory

    Application Name Deployed Date Processes Supported Technical and Licensing Dependencies
    Salesforce June 2018 Customer relationship management XXX
    Hootsuite April 2019 Social media listening XXX
    ... ... ... ...

    Conduct a VRIO analysis to identify core competencies for CXM applications

    A VRIO analysis evaluates the ability of internal resources and capabilities to sustain a competitive advantage by evaluating dimensions of value, rarity, imitability, and organization. For critical applications like your CRM platform, use a VRIO analysis to determine their value.

    Is the resource or capability valuable in exploiting an opportunity or neutralizing a threat? Is the resource or capability rare in the sense that few of your competitors have a similar capability? Is the resource or capability costly to imitate or replicate? Is the organization organized enough to leverage and capture value from the resource or capability?
    NO → → → COMPETITIVE DISADVANTAGE
    YES NO→ → → COMPETITIVE EQUALITY/PARITY
    YES YES NO→ → TEMPORARY COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
    YES YES YES NO→ UNUSED COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
    YES YES YES YES LONG-TERM COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

    (Strategic Management Insight, 2013)

    Activity: Conduct a VRIO analysis on your existing application portfolio

    2.2.5 30 minutes

    Input

    • Inventory of existing CXM applications (output of Activity 2.2.4)

    Output

    • Completed VRIO analysis
    • Strategic CXM requirements
    • CXM Stakeholder Presentation Template

    Materials

    • VRIO Analysis model
    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Evaluate each CXM application inventoried in Activity 2.2.4 by answering the four VRIO questions in sequential order. Do not proceed to the following question if “no” is answered at any point.
    2. Record the results. The state of your organization’s competitive advantage, based on each resource/capability, will be determined based on the number of questions with a “yes” answer. For example, if all four questions are answered positively, then your organization is considered to have a long-term competitive advantage.
    3. Document your outputs in the CXM Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide your through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    2.2.1; 2.2.2 Conduct a SWOT Analysis

    Our facilitator will use a small-team approach to delve deeply into each area, identifying enablers (strengths and opportunities) and challenges (weaknesses and threats) relating to the CXM strategy.

    2.2.3; 2.2.4 Inventory your CXM applications, and assess usage and satisfaction

    Working with your core team, the facilitator will assist with building a comprehensive inventory of CXM applications that are currently in use and with identifying adjacent systems that need to be identified for integration purposes. The facilitator will work to identify high and low performing applications and analyze this data with the team during the workshop exercise.

    2.2.5 Conduct a VRIO analysis

    The facilitator will take you through a VRIO analysis to identify which of your internal technological competencies ensure, or can be leveraged to ensure, your competitiveness in the CXM market.

    Step 2.3: Create an Application Portfolio

    Phase 1

    1.1 Create the Project Vision

    1.2 Structure the Project

    Phase 2

    2.1 Scan the External Environment

    2.2 Assess the Current State of CXM

    2.3 Create an Application Portfolio

    2.4 Develop Deployment Best Practices

    Phase 3

    3.1 Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

    3.2 Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

    Activities

    • Shortlist and prioritize business processes for improvement and reengineering
    • Map current CXM processes
    • Identify business process owners and assign job responsibilities
    • Identify user interaction channels to extract strategic requirements
    • Aggregate and develop strategic requirements
    • Determine gaps in current and future state processes
    • Build the CXM application portfolio

    Outcomes

    CXM application portfolio map

    • Shortlist of relevant business processes
    • Current state map
    • Business process ownership assignment
    • Channel map
    • Complete list of strategic requirements

    Understand business process mapping to draft strategy requirements for marketing, sales, and customer service

    The interaction between sales, marketing, and customer service is very process-centric. Rethink sales and customer-centric workflows and map the desired workflow, imbedding the improved/reengineered process into the requirements.

    Using BPM to Capture Strategic Requirements

    Business process modeling facilitates the collaboration between the business and IT, recording the sequence of events, tasks performed, who performed them, and the levels of interaction with the various supporting applications.

    By identifying the events and decision points in the process and overlaying the people that perform the functions, the data being interacted with, and the technologies that support them, organizations are better positioned to identify gaps that need to be bridged.

    Encourage the analysis by compiling an inventory of business processes that support customer-facing operations that are relevant to achieving the overall organizational strategies.

    Outcomes

    • Operational effectiveness
    • Identification, implementation, and maintenance of reusable enterprise applications
    • Identification of gaps that can be addressed by acquisition of additional applications or process improvement/ reengineering

    INFO-TECH OPPORTUNITY

    Refer to Info-Tech’s Create a Comprehensive BPM Strategy for Successful Process Automation blueprint for further assistance in taking a BPM approach to your sales-IT alignment.

    Leverage the APQC framework to help define your inventory of sales, marketing, and service processes

    APQC’s Process Classification Framework is a taxonomy of cross-functional business processes intended to allow the objective comparison of organizational performance within and among organizations.

    OPERATING PROCESSES
    1.0 Develop Vision and Strategy 2.0 Develop and Manage Products and Services 3.0 Market and Sell Products and Services 4.0 Deliver Products and Services 5.0 Manage Customer Service
    MANAGEMENT AND SUPPORT SERVICES
    6.0 Develop and Manage Human Capital
    7.0 Manage Information Technology
    8.0 Manage Financial Resources
    9.0 Acquire, Construct, and Manage Assets
    10.0 Manage Enterprise Risk, Compliance, and Resiliency
    11.0 Manage External Relationships
    12.0 Develop and Manage Business Capabilities

    (APQC, 2011)

    MORE ABOUT APQC

    • APQC serves as a high-level, industry-neutral enterprise model that allows organizations to see activities from a cross-industry process perspective.
    • Sales processes have been provided up to Level 3 of the APQC framework.
    • The APQC Framework can be accessed through APQC’s Process Classification Framework.
    • Note: The framework does not list all processes within a specific organization, nor are the processes that are listed in the framework present in every organization.

    Understand APQC’s “Market and Sell Products and Services” framework

    3.0 Market and Sell Products

    3.1 Understand markets, customers, and capabilities

    • 3.1.1 Perform customer and market intelligence analysis
    • 3.1.2 Evaluate and prioritize market opportunities

    3.2 Develop marketing strategy

    • 3.2.1 Define offering and customer value proposition
    • 3.2.2 Define pricing strategy to align to value proposition
    • 3.2.3 Define and manage channel strategy

    3.3 Develop sales strategy

    • 3.3.1 Develop sales forecast
    • 3.3.2 Develop sales partner/alliance relationships
    • 3.3.3 Establish overall sales budgets
    • 3.3.4 Establish sales goals and measures
    • 3.3.5 Establish customer management measures

    3.4 Develop and manage marketing plans

    • 3.4.1 Establish goals, objectives, and metrics by products by channels/segments
    • 3.4.2 Establish marketing budgets
    • 3.4.3 Develop and manage media
    • 3.4.4 Develop and manage pricing
    • 3.4.5 Develop and manage promotional activities
    • 3.4.6 Track customer management measures
    • 3.4.7 Develop and manage packaging strategy

    3.5 Develop and manage sales plans

    • 3.5.1 Generate leads
    • 3.5.2 Manage customers and accounts
    • 3.5.3 Manage customer sales
    • 3.5.4 Manage sales orders
    • 3.5.5 Manage sales force
    • 3.5.6 Manage sales partners and alliances

    Understand APQC’s “Manage Customer Service” framework

    5.0 Manage Customer Service

    5.1 Develop customer care/customer service strategy

    • 5.1.1 Develop customer service segmentation
      • 5.1.1.1 Analyze existing customers
      • 5.1.1.2 Analyze feedback of customer needs
    • 5.1.2 Define customer service policies and procedures
    • 5.1.3 Establish service levels for customers

    5.2 Plan and manage customer service operations

    • 5.2.1 Plan and manage customer service work force
      • 5.2.1.1 Forecast volume of customer service contacts
      • 5.2.1.2 Schedule customer service work force
      • 5.2.1.3 Track work force utilization
      • 5.2.1.4 Monitor and evaluate quality of customer interactions with customer service representatives

    5.2 Plan and 5.2.3.1 Receive customer complaints 5.2.3.2 Route customer complaints 5.2.3.3 Resolve customer complaints 5.2.3.4 Respond to customer complaints manage customer service operations

    • 5.2.2 Manage customer service requests/inquiries
      • 5.2.2.1 Receive customer requests/inquiries
      • 5.2.2.2 Route customer requests/inquiries
      • 5.2.2.3 Respond to customer requests/inquiries
    • 5.2.3 Manage customer complaints
      • 5.2.3.1 Receive customer complaints
      • 5.2.3.2 Route customer complaints
      • 5.2.3.3 Resolve customer complaints
      • 5.2.3.4 Respond to customer complaints

    Leverage the APQC framework to inventory processes

    The APQC framework provides levels 1 through 3 for the “Market and Sell Products and Services” framework. Level 4 processes and beyond will need to be defined by your organization as they are more granular (represent the task level) and are often industry-specific.

    Level 1 – Category - 1.0 Develop vision and strategy (10002)

    Represents the highest level of process in the enterprise, such as manage customer service, supply chain, financial organization, and human resources.

    Level 2 – Process Group - 1.1 Define the business concept and long-term vision (10014)

    Indicates the next level of processes and represents a group of processes. Examples include perform after sales repairs, procurement, accounts payable, recruit/source, and develop sales strategy.

    Level 3 – Process - 1.1.1 Assess the external environment (10017)

    A series of interrelated activities that convert input into results (outputs); processes consume resources and require standards for repeatable performance; and processes respond to control systems that direct quality, rate, and cost of performance.

    Level 4 – Activity - 1.1.1.1 Analyze and evaluate competition (10021)

    Indicates key events performed when executing a process. Examples of activities include receive customer requests, resolve customer complaints, and negotiate purchasing contracts.

    Level 5 – Task - 12.2.3.1.1 Identify project requirements and objectives (11117)

    Tasks represent the next level of hierarchical decomposition after activities. Tasks are generally much more fine grained and may vary widely across industries. Examples include create business case and obtain funding, and design recognition and reward approaches.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Define the Level 3 processes in the context of your organization. When creating a CXM strategy, concern yourself with the interrelatedness of processes across existing departmental silos (e.g. marketing, sales, customer service). Reserve the analysis of activities (Level 4) and tasks (Level 3) for granular work initiatives involved in the implementation of applications.

    Use Info-Tech’s CXM Business Process Shortlisting Tool to prioritize processes for improvement

    2.3.1 CXM Business Process Shortlisting Tool

    The CXM Business Process Shortlisting Tool can help you define which marketing, sales, and service processes you should focus on.

    Working in concert with stakeholders from the appropriate departments, complete the short questionnaire.

    Based on validated responses, the tool will highlight processes of strategic importance to your organization.

    These processes can then be mapped, with requirements extracted and used to build the CXM application portfolio.

    INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

    The image shows a screenshot of the Prioritize Your Business Processes for Customer Experience Management document, with sample information filled in.

    Activity: Define your organization’s top-level processes for reengineering and improvement

    2.3.2 1 hour

    Input

    • Shortlist business processes relating to customer experience (output of Tool 2.3.1)

    Output

    • Prioritized list of top-level business processes by department

    Materials

    • APQC Framework
    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Inventory all business processes relating to customer experience.
    2. Customize the impacted business units and factor weightings on the scorecard below to reflect the structure and priorities of your organization.
    3. Using the scorecard, identify all processes essential to your customer experience. The scorecard is designed to determine which processes to focus on and to help you understand the impact of the scrutinized process on the different customer-centric groups across the organization.

    The image shows a chart with the headings Factor, Check If Yes, repeated. The chart lists various factors, and the Check if Yes columns are left blank.

    This image shows a chart with the headings Factor, Weights, and Scores. It lists factors, and the rest of the chart is blank.

    Current legend for Weights and Scores

    F – Finance

    H – Human Resources

    I – IT

    L – Legal

    M – Marketing

    BU1 – Business Unit 1

    BU2 – Business Unit 2

    Activity: Map top-level business processes to extract strategic requirements for the CXM application portfolio

    2.3.3 45 minutes

    Input

    • Prioritized list of top-level business processes (output of Activity 2.3.2)

    Output

    • Current state process maps
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • APQC Framework
    • Whiteboard
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. List all prioritized business processes, as identified in Activity 2.3.2. Map your processes in enough detail to capture all relevant activities and system touchpoints, using the legend included in the example. Focus on Level 3 processes, as explained in the APQC framework.
    2. Record all of the major process steps on sticky notes. Arrange the sticky notes in sequential order.
    3. On a set of different colored sticky notes, record all of the systems that enable the process. Map these system touchpoints to the process steps.
    4. Draw arrows in between the steps to represent manual entry or automation.
    5. Identify effectiveness and gaps in existing processes to determine process technology requirements.
    6. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    INFO-TECH OPPORTUNITY

    Refer to Info-Tech’s Create a Comprehensive BPM Strategy for Successful Process Automation blueprint for further assistance in taking a BPM approach to your sales-IT alignment.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Analysis of the current state is important in the context of gap analysis. It aids in understanding the discrepancies between your baseline and the future state vision, and ensures that these gaps are documented as part of the overall requirements.

    Example: map your current CXM processes to parse strategic requirements (customer acquisition)

    The image shows an example of a CXM process map, which is formatted as a flow chart, with a legend at the bottom.

    Activity: Extract requirements from your top-level business processes

    2.3.4 30 minutes

    Input

    • Current state process maps (output of Activity 2.3.3)

    Output

    • Requirements for future state mapping

    Materials

    • Info-Tech examples
    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Discuss the current state of priority business processes, as mapped in Activity 2.3.3.
    2. Extract process requirements for business process improvement by asking the following questions:
    • What is the input?
    • What is the output?
    • What are the underlying risks and how can they be mitigated?
    • What conditions should be met to mitigate or eliminate each risk?
    • What are the improvement opportunities?
    • What conditions should be met to enable these opportunities?
    1. Break business requirements into functional and non-functional requirements, as outlined on this slide.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The business and IT should work together to evaluate the current state of business processes and the business requirements necessary to support these processes. Develop a full view of organizational needs while still obtaining the level of detail required to make informed decisions about technology.

    Establish process owners for each top-level process

    Identify the owners of the business processes being evaluated to extract requirements. Process owners will be able to inform business process improvement and assume accountability for reengineered or net-new processes going forward.

    Process Owner Responsibilities

    Process ownership ensures support, accountability, and governance for CXM and its supporting processes. Process owners must be able to negotiate with business users and other key stakeholders to drive efficiencies within their own process. The process owner must execute tactical process changes and continually optimize the process.

    Responsibilities include the following:

    • Inform business process improvement
    • Introduce KPIs and metrics
    • Monitor the success of the process
    • Present process findings to key stakeholders within the organization
    • Develop policies and procedures for the process
    • Implement new methods to manage the process

    Info-Tech Insight

    Identify the owners of existing processes early so you understand who needs to be involved in process improvement and reengineering. Once implemented, CXM applications are likely to undergo a series of changes. Unstructured data will multiply, the number of users may increase, administrators may change, and functionality could become obsolete. Should business processes be merged or drastically changed, process ownership can be reallocated during CXM implementation. Make sure you have the right roles in place to avoid inefficient processes and poor data quality.

    Use Info-Tech’s Process Owner Assignment Guide to aid you in choosing the right candidates

    2.3.5 Process Owner Assignment Guide

    The Process Owner Assignment Guide will ensure you are taking the appropriate steps to identify process owners for existing and net-new processes created within the scope of the CXM strategy.

    The steps in the document will help with important considerations such as key requirements and responsibilities.

    Sections of the document:

    1. Define responsibilities and level of commitment
    2. Define job requirements
    3. Receive referrals
    4. Hold formal interviews
    5. Determine performance metrics

    INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

    Activity: Assign business process owners and identify job responsibilities

    2.3.6 30 minutes

    Input

    • Current state map (output of Activity 2.3.3)

    Output

    • Process owners assigned
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Using Info-Tech’s Process Owner Assignment Guide, assign process owners for each process mapped out in Activity 2.3.3. To assist in doing so, answer the following questions
    • What is the level of commitment expected from each process owner?
    • How will the process owner role be tied to a formal performance appraisal?
    • What metrics can be assigned?
    • How much work will be required to train process owners?
    • Is there support staff available to assist process owners?
  • Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    • Choose the channels that will make your target customers happy – and ensure they’re supported by CXM applications

    Traditional Channels

    Face-to-Face is efficient and has a positive personalized aspect that many customers desire, be it for sales or customer service.

    Telephony (or IVR) has been a mainstay of customer interaction for decades. While not fading, it must be used alongside newer channels.

    Postal used to be employed extensively for all domains, but is now used predominantly for e-commerce order fulfillment.

    Web 1.0 Channels

    Email is an asynchronous interaction channel still preferred by many customers. Email gives organizations flexibility with queuing.

    Live Chat is a way for clients to avoid long call center wait times and receive a solution from a quick chat with a service rep.

    Web Portals permit transactions for sales and customer service from a central interface. They are a must-have for any large company.

    Web 2.0 Channels

    Social Media consists of many individual services (like Facebook or Twitter). Social channels are exploding in consumer popularity.

    HTML5 Mobile Access allows customers to access resources from their personal device through its integrated web browser.

    Dedicated Mobile Apps allow customers to access resources through a dedicated mobile application (e.g. iOS, Android).

    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).

    Activity: Extract requirements from your channel map

    2.3.7 30 minutes

    Input

    • Current state process maps (output of Activity 2.3.3)

    Output

    • Channel map
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Info-Tech examples
    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Inventory which customer channels are currently used by each department.
    2. Speak with the department heads for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service and discuss future channel usage. Identify any channels that will be eliminated or added.
    3. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    Example: Business Unit Channel Use Survey

    Marketing Sales Customer Service
    Current Used? Future Use? Current Used? Future Use? Current Used? Future Use?
    Email Yes Yes No No No No
    Direct Mail Yes No No No No No
    Phone No No Yes Yes Yes Yes
    In-Person No No Yes Yes Yes No
    Website Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
    Social Channels No Yes Yes Yes No Yes

    Bring it together: amalgamate your strategic requirements for CXM technology enablement

    Discovering your organizational requirements is vital for choosing the right business-enabling initiative, technology, and success metrics. Sorting the requirements by marketing, sales, and service is a prudent mechanism for clarification.

    Strategic Requirements: Marketing

    Definition: High-level requirements that will support marketing functions within CXM.

    Examples

    • Develop a native mobile application while also ensuring that resources for your web presence are built with responsive design interface.
    • Consolidate workflows related to content creation to publish all brand marketing from one source of truth.
    • Augment traditional web content delivery by providing additional functionality such as omnichannel engagement, e-commerce, dynamic personalization, and social media functionality.

    Strategic Requirements: Sales

    Definition: High-level requirements that will support sales functions within CXM.

    Examples

    • Implement a system that reduces data errors and increases sales force efficiency by automating lead management workflows.
    • Achieve end-to-end visibility of the sales process by integrating the CRM, inventory, and order processing and shipping system.
    • Track sales force success by incorporating sales KPIs with real-time business intelligence feeds.

    Strategic Requirements: Customer Service

    Definition: High-level requirements that will support customer service functions within CXM.

    Examples

    • Provide a live chat portal that connects the customer, in real time, with the next available and qualified agent.
    • Bridge the gap between the source of truth for sales with customer service suites to ensure a consistent, end-to-end customer experience from acquisition to customer engagement and retention.
    • Use customer intelligence to track customer journeys in order to best understand and resolve customer complaints.

    Activity: Consolidate your strategic requirements for the CXM application portfolio

    2.3.8 30 minutes

    Input

    • Strategic CXM requirements (outputs of Activities 2.1.5, 2.1.6, and 2.2.2)

    Output

    • Aggregated strategic CXM requirements
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Aggregate strategic CXM requirements that have been gathered thus far in Activities 2.1.5, 2.1.6, and 2.2.2, 2.3.5, and 2.3.7.
    2. Identify and rectify any obvious gaps in the existing set of strategic CXM requirements. To do so, consider the overall corporate and CXM strategy: are there any objectives that have not been addressed in the requirements gathering process?
    3. De-duplicate the list. Prioritize the aggregated/augmented list of CXM requirements as “high/critical,” “medium/important,” or “low/desirable.” This will help manage the relative importance and urgency of different requirements to itemize respective initiatives, resources, and the time in which they need to be addressed. In completing the prioritization of requirements, consider the following:
    • Requirements prioritization must be completed in collaboration with all key stakeholders (across the business and IT). Stakeholders must ask themselves:
      • What are the consequences to the business objectives if this requirement is omitted?
      • Is there an existing system or manual process/workaround that could compensate for it?
      • What business risk is being introduced if a particular requirement cannot be implemented right away?
  • Document your outputs in the CXM Strategic Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    • Info-Tech Insight

    Strategic CXM requirements will be used to prioritize specific initiatives for CXM technology enablement and application rollout. Ensure that IT, the business, and executive management are all aligned on a consistent and agreed upon set of initiatives.

    Burberry digitizes the retail CX with real-time computing to bring consumers back to the physical storefront

    CASE STUDY

    Industry Consumer Goods, Clothing

    Source Retail Congress, 2017

    Burberry London

    Situation

    Internally, Burberry invested in organizational alignment and sales force brand engagement. The more the sales associate knew about the brand engagement and technology-enabled strategy, the better the store’s performance. Before the efforts went to building relationships with customers, Burberry built engagement with employees.

    Burberry embraced “omnichannel,” the hottest buzzword in retailing to provide consumers the most immersive and intuitive brand experience within the store.

    Technology Strategy

    RFID tags were attached to products to trigger interactive videos on the store’s screens in the common areas or in a fitting room. Consumers are to have instant access to relevant product combinations, ranging from craftsmanship information to catwalk looks. This is equivalent to the rich, immediate information consumers have grown to expect from the online shopping experience.

    Another layer of Burberry’s added capabilities includes in-memory-based analytics to gather and analyze data in real-time to better understand customers’ desires. Burberry builds customer profiles based on what items the shoppers try on from the RFID-tagged garments. Although this requires customer privacy consent, customers are willing to provide personal information to trusted brands.

    This program, called “Customer 360,” assisted sales associates in providing data-driven shopping experiences that invite customers to digitally share their buying history and preferences via their tablet devices. As the data is stored in Burberry’s customer data warehouse and accessed through an application such as CRM, it is able to arm sales associates with personal fashion advice on the spot.

    Lastly, the customer data warehouse/CRM application is linked to Burberry’s ERP system and other custom applications in a cloud environment to achieve real-time inventory visibility and fulfillment.

    Burberry digitizes the retail CX with real-time computing to bring consumers back to the physical storefront (cont'd)

    CASE STUDY

    Industry Consumer Goods, Clothing

    Source Retail Congress, 2017

    Burberry London

    Situation

    Internally, Burberry invested in organizational alignment and sales force brand engagement. The more the sales associate knew about the brand engagement and technology-enabled strategy, the better the store’s performance. Before the efforts went to building relationships with customers, Burberry built engagement with employees.

    Burberry embraced “omnichannel,” the hottest buzzword in retailing to provide consumers the most immersive and intuitive brand experience within the store.

    The Results

    Burberry achieved one of the most personalized retail shopping experiences. Immediate personal fashion advice using customer data is only one component of the experience. Not only are historic purchases and preference data analyzed, a customer’s social media posts and fashion industry trend data is proactively incorporated into the interactions between the sales associate and the customer.

    Burberry achieved CEO Angela Ahrendts’ vision of “Burberry World,” in which the brand experience is seamlessly integrated across channels, devices, retail locations, products, and services.

    The organizational alignment between Sales, Marketing, and IT empowered employees to bring the Burberry brand to life in unique ways that customers appreciated and were willing to advocate.

    Burberry is now one of the most beloved and valuable luxury brands in the world. The brand tripled sales in five years, became one of the leading voices on trends, fashion, music, and beauty while redefining what top-tier customer experience should be both digitally and physically.

    Leverage both core CRM suites and point solutions to create a comprehensive CXM application portfolio

    The debate between best-of-breed point solutions versus comprehensive CRM suites is ongoing. There is no single best answer. In most cases, an effective portfolio will include both types of solutions.

    • When the CRM market first evolved, vendors took a heavy “module-centric” approach – offering basic suites with the option to add a number of individual modules. Over time, vendors began to offer suites with a high degree of out-of-the-box functionality. The market has now witnessed the rise of powerful point solutions for the individual business domains.
    • Point solutions augment, rather than supplant, the functionality of a CRM suite in the mid-market to large enterprise context. Point solutions do not offer the necessary spectrum of functionality to take the place of a unified CRM suite.
    • Point solutions enhance aspects of CRM. For example, most CRM vendors have yet to provide truly impressive social media capabilities. An organization seeking to dominate the social space should consider purchasing a social media management platform to address this deficit in their CRM ecosystem.

    Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

    Social Media Management Platform (SMMP)

    Field Sales/Service Automation (FSA)

    Marketing Management Suites

    Sales Force Automation

    Email Marketing Tools

    Lead Management Automation (LMA)

    Customer Service Management Suites

    Customer Intelligence Systems

    Don’t adopt multiple point solutions without a genuine need: choose domains most in need of more functionality

    Some may find that the capabilities of a CRM suite are not enough to meet their specific requirements: supplementing a CRM suite with a targeted point solution can get the job done. A variety of CXM point solutions are designed to enhance your business processes and improve productivity.

    Sales

    Sales Force Automation: Automatically generates, qualifies, tracks, and contacts leads for sales representatives, minimizing time wasted on administrative duties.

    Field Sales: Allows field reps to go through the entire sales cycle (from quote to invoice) while offsite.

    Sales Compensation Management: Models, analyzes, and dispenses payouts to sales representatives.

    Marketing

    Social Media Management Platforms (SMMP): Manage and track multiple social media services, with extensive social data analysis and insight capabilities.

    Email Marketing Bureaus: Conduct email marketing campaigns and mine results to effectively target customers.

    Marketing Intelligence Systems: Perform in-depth searches on various data sources to create predictive models.

    Service

    Customer Service Management (CSM): Manages the customer support lifecycle with a comprehensive array of tools, usually above and beyond what’s in a CRM suite.

    Customer Service Knowledge Management (CSKM): Advanced knowledgebase and resolution tools.

    Field Service Automation (FSA): Manages customer support tickets, schedules work orders, tracks inventory and fleets, all on the go.

    Info-Tech Insight

    CRM and point solution integration is critical. A best-of-breed product that poorly integrates with your CRM suite compromises the value generated by the combined solution, such as a 360-degree customer view. Challenge point solution vendors to demonstrate integration capabilities with CRM packages.

    Refer to your use cases to decide whether to add a dedicated point solution alongside your CRM suite

    Know your end state and what kind of tool will get you there. Refer to your strategic requirements to evaluate CRM and point solution feature sets.

    Standalone CRM Suite

    Sales Conditions: Need selling and lead management capabilities for agents to perform the sales process, along with sales dashboards and statistics.

    Marketing or Communication Conditions: Need basic campaign management and ability to refresh contact records with information from social networks.

    Member Service Conditions: Need to keep basic customer records with multiple fields per record and basic channels such as email and telephony.

    Add a Best-of-Breed or Point Solution

    Environmental Conditions: An extensive customer base with many different interactions per customer along with industry specific or “niche” needs. Point solutions will benefit firms with deep needs in specific feature areas (e.g. social media or field service).

    Sales Conditions: Lengthy sales process and account management requirements for assessing and managing opportunities – in a technically complex sales process.

    Marketing Conditions: Need social media functionality for monitoring and social property management.

    Customer Service Conditions: Need complex multi-channel service processes and/or need for best-of-breed knowledgebase and service content management.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The volume and complexity of both customers and interactions have a direct effect on when to employ just a CRM suite and when to supplement with a point solution. Check to see if your CRM suite can perform a specific business requirement before deciding to evaluate potential point solutions.

    Use Info-Tech’s CXM Portfolio Designer to create an inventory of high-value customer interaction applications

    2.3.9 CXM Portfolio Designer

    The CXM Portfolio Designer features a set of questions geared toward understanding your needs for marketing, sales, and customer service enablement.

    These results are scored and used to suggest a comprehensive solution-level set of enterprise applications for CXM that can drive your application portfolio and help you make investment decisions in different areas such as CRM, marketing management, and customer intelligence.

    Sections of the tool:

    1. Introduction
    2. Customer Experience Management Questionnaire
    3. Business Unit Recommendations
    4. Enterprise-Level Recommendations

    INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

    Understand the art of the possible and how emerging trends will affect your application portfolio (1)

    Cloud

    • The emergence and maturation of cloud technologies has broken down the barriers of software adoption.
    • Cloud has enabled easy-to-implement distributed sales centers for enterprises with global or highly fragmented workforces.
    • Cloud offers the agility, scalability, and flexibility needed to accommodate dynamic, evolving customer requirements while minimizing resourcing strain on IT and sales organizations.
    • It is now easier for small to medium enterprises to acquire and implement advanced sales capabilities to compete against larger competitors in a business environment where the need for business agility is key.
    • Although cost and resource reduction is a prominent view of the impact of cloud computing, it is also seen as an agile way to innovate and deliver a product/service experience that customers are looking for – the key to competitive differentiation.

    Mobile

    • Smartphones and other mobile devices were adopted faster than the worldwide web in the late 1990s, and the business and sales implications of widespread adoption cannot be ignored – mobile is changing how businesses operate.
      • Accenture’s Mobility Research Report states that 87% of companies in the study have been guided by a formal mobility strategy – either one that spans the enterprise or for specific business functions.
    • Mobile is now the first point of interaction with businesses. With this trend, gaining visibility into customer insights with mobile analytics is a top priority for organizations.
    • Enterprises need to develop and optimize mobile experiences for internal salespeople and customers alike as part of their sales strategy – use mobile to enable a competitive, differentiated sales force.
    • The use of mobile platforms by sales managers is becoming a norm. Sales enablement suites should support real-time performance metrics on mobile dashboards.

    Understand the art of the possible and how emerging trends will affect your application portfolio (2)

    Social

    • The rise of social networking brought customers together. Customers are now conversing with each other over a wide range of community channels that businesses neither own nor control.
      • The Power Shift: The use of social channels empowered customers to engage in real-time, unstructured conversations for the purpose of product/service evaluations. Those who are active in social environments come to wield considerable influence over the buying decisions of other prospects and customers.
    • Organizations need to identify the influencers and strategically engage them as well as developing an active presence in social communities that lead to sales.
    • Social media does have an impact on sales, both B2C and B2B. A study conducted in 2012 by Social Centered Selling states that 72.6% of sales people using social media as part of their sales process outperformed their peers and exceeded their quota 23% more often (see charts at right).

    The image shows two bar graphs, the one on top titled Achieving Quota: 2010-2012 and the one below titled Exceeding Quota: 2010-2012.

    (Social Centered Learning, n.d.)

    Understand the art of the possible and how emerging trends will affect your application portfolio (3)

    Internet of Things

    • Definition: The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects accessed through the internet. These objects contain embedded technology to interact with internal states or the external environment.
    • Why is this interesting?
      • IoT will make it possible for everybody and everything to be connected at all times, processing information in real time. The result will be new ways of making business and sales decisions supported by the availability of information.
      • With ubiquitous connectivity, the current product design-centric view of consumers is changing to one of experience design that aims to characterize the customer relationship with a series of integrated interaction touchpoints.
      • The above change contributes to the shift in focus from experience and will mean further acceleration of the convergence of customer-centric business functions. IoT will blur the lines between marketing, sales, and customer service.
      • Products or systems linked to products are capable of self-operating, learning, updating, and correcting by analyzing real-time data.
      • Take for example, an inventory scale in a large warehouse connected to the company’s supply chain management (SCM) system. When a certain inventory weight threshold is reached due to outgoing shipments, the scale automatically sends out a purchase requisition to restock inventory levels to meet upcoming demand.
    • The IoT will eventually begin to transform existing business processes and force organizations to fundamentally rethink how they produce, operate, and service their customers.

    The image shows a graphic titled The Connected Life by 2020, and shows a number of statistics on use of connected devices over time.

    For categories covered by existing applications, determine the disposition for each app: grow it or cut it loose

    Use the two-by-two matrix below to structure your optimal CXM application portfolio. For more help, refer to Info-Tech’s blueprint, Use Agile Application Rationalization Instead of Going Big Bang.

    1

    0

    Richness of Functionality

    		 INTEGRATE RETAIN
    1
    REPLACE REPLACE OR ENHANCE

    0

    Degree of Integration

    Integrate: The application is functionally rich, so spend time and effort integrating it with other modules by building or enhancing interfaces.

    Retain: The application satisfies both functionality and integration requirements, so it should be considered for retention.

    Replace/Enhance: The module offers poor functionality but is well integrated with other modules. If enhancing for functionality is easy (e.g. through configuration or custom development), consider enhancement or replace it.

    Replace: The application neither offers the functionality sought nor is it integrated with other modules, and thus should be considered for replacement.

    Activity: Brainstorm the art of the possible, and build and finalize the CXM application portfolio

    2.3.10 1-2 hours

    Input

    • Process gaps identified (output of Activity 2.3.9)

    Output

    • CXM application portfolio
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Review the complete list of strategic requirements identified in the preceding exercises, as well as business process maps.
    2. Identify which application would link to which process (e.g. customer acquisition, customer service resolution, etc.).
    3. Use Info-Tech’s CXM Portfolio Designer to create an inventory of high-value customer interaction applications.
    4. Define rationalization and investment areas.
    5. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    Example: Brainstorming the Art of the Possible

    Application Gap Satisfied Related Process Number of Linked Requirements Do we have the system? Priority
    LMA
    • Lead Generation
    • Social Lead Management
    • CRM Integration
    		Sales 8 No Business Critical
    Customer Intelligence
    • Web Analytics
    • Customer Journey Tracking
    		Customer Service 6 Yes Business Enabling
    ... ... ... ... ... ...

    Use Info-Tech’s comprehensive reports to make granular vendor selection decisions

    Now that you have developed the CXM application portfolio and identified areas of new investment, you’re well positioned to execute specific vendor selection projects. After you have built out your initiatives roadmap in phase 3, the following reports provide in-depth vendor reviews, feature guides, and tools and templates to assist with selection and implementation.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Not all applications are created equally well for each use case. The vendor reports help you make informed procurement decisions by segmenting vendor capabilities among major use cases. The strategic requirements identified as part of this project should be used to select the use case that best fits your needs.

    If you want additional support, have our analyst guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    2.3.2; 2.3.3 Shortlist and map the key top-level business processes

    Based on experience working with organizations in similar verticals, the facilitator will help your team map out key sample workflows for marketing, sales, and customer service.

    2.3.6 Create your strategic requirements for CXM

    Drawing on the preceding exercises, the facilitator will work with the team to create a comprehensive list of strategic requirements that will be used to drive technology decisions and roadmap initiatives.

    2.3.10 Create and finalize the CXM application portfolio

    Using the strategic requirements gathered through internal, external, and technology analysis up to this point, a facilitator will assist you in assembling a categorical technology application portfolio to support CXM.

    Step 2.4: Develop Deployment Best Practices

    Phase 1

    1.1 Create the Project Vision

    1.2 Structure the Project

    Phase 2

    2.1 Scan the External Environment

    2.2 Assess the Current State of CXM

    2.3 Create an Application Portfolio

    2.4 Develop Deployment Best Practices

    Phase 3

    3.1 Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

    3.2 Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

    Activities:

    • Develop a CXM integration map
    • Develop a mitigation plan for poor quality customer data
    • Create a framework for end-user adoption of CXM applications

    Outcomes:

    • CXM application portfolio integration map
    • Data quality preservation plan
    • End-user adoption plan

    Develop an integration map to specify which applications will interface with each other

    Integration is paramount: your CXM application portfolio must work as a unified face to the customer. Create an integration map to reflect a system of record and the exchange of data.

    • CRM
      • ERP
      • Telephony Systems (IVR, CTI)
      • Directory Services
      • Email
      • Content Management
      • Point Solutions (SMMP, MMS)

    The points of integration that you’ll need to establish must be based on the objectives and requirements that have informed the creation of the CXM application portfolio. For instance, achieving improved customer insights would necessitate a well-integrated portfolio with customer interaction point solutions, business intelligence tools, and customer data warehouses in order to draw the information necessary to build insight. To increase customer engagement, channel integration is a must (i.e. with robust links to unified communications solutions, email, and VoIP telephony systems).

    Info-Tech Insight

    If the CXM application portfolio is fragmented, it will be nearly impossible to build a cohesive view of the customer and deliver a consistent customer experience. Points of integration (POIs) are the junctions between the applications that make up the CXM portfolio. They are essential to creating value, particularly in customer insight-focused and omnichannel-focused deployments. Be sure to include enterprise applications that are not included in the CXM application portfolio. Popular systems to consider for POIs include billing, directory services, content management, and collaboration tools.

    After identifying points of integration, profile them by business significance, complexity, and investment required

    • After enumerating points of integration between the CRM platform and other CXM applications and data sources, profile them by business significance and complexity required to determine a rank-ordering of priorities.
    • Points of integration that are of high business significance with low complexity are your must do’s – these are your quick wins that deliver maximum value without too much cost. This is typically the case when integrating a vendor-to-vendor solution with available native connectors.
    • On the opposite end of the spectrum are your POIs that will require extensive work to deliver but offer negligible value. These are your should not do’s – typically, these are niche requests for integration that will only benefit the workflows of a small (and low priority) group of end users. Only accommodate them if you have slack time and budget built into your implementation timeline.

    The image shows a square matrix with Point of Integration Value Matrix in the centre. On the X-axis is Business Significance, and on the Y-axis is POI complexity. In the upper left quadrant is Should Not Do, upper right is Should Do, lower left is Could Do, and lower right is Must do.

    "Find the absolute minimum number of ‘quick wins’ – the POIs you need from day one that are necessary to keep end users happy and deliver value." – Maria Cindric, Australian Catholic University Source: Interview

    Activity: Develop a CXM application integration map

    2.4.1 1 hour

    Input

    • CXM application portfolio (output of Activity 2.3.10)

    Output

    • CXM application portfolio integration map
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. On sticky notes, record the list of applications that comprise the CXM application portfolio (built in Activity 2.3.10) and all other relevant applications. Post the sticky notes on a whiteboard so you can visualize the portfolio.
    2. Discuss the key objectives and requirements that will drive the integration design of the CXM application portfolio.
    3. As deemed necessary by step 2, rearrange the sticky notes and draw connecting arrows between applications to reflect their integration. Allow the point of the arrow to indicate direction of data exchanges.
    4. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    Example: Mapping the Integration of CXM Applications

    The image shows several yellow rectangles with text in them, connected by arrows.

    Plug the hole and bail the boat – plan to be preventative and corrective with customer data quality initiatives

    Data quality is king: if your customer data is garbage in, it will be garbage out. Enable strategic CXM decision making with effective planning of data quality initiatives.

    Identify and Eliminate Dead Weight

    Poor data can originate in the firm’s system of record, which is typically the CRM system. Custom queries, stored procedures, or profiling tools can be used to assess the key problem areas.

    Loose rules in the CRM system lead to records of no significant value in the database. Those rules need to be fixed, but if changes are made before the data is fixed, users could encounter database or application errors, which will reduce user confidence in the system.

    • Conduct a data flow analysis: map the path that data takes through the organization.
    • Use a mass cleanup to identify and destroy dead weight data. Merge duplicates either manually or with the aid of software tools. Delete incomplete data, taking care to reassign related data.
    • COTS packages typically allow power users to merge records without creating orphaned records in related tables, but custom-built applications typically require IT expertise.

    Create and Enforce Standards & Policies

    Now that the data has been cleaned, protect the system from relapsing.

    Work with business users to find out what types of data require validation and which fields should have changes audited. Whenever possible, implement drop-down lists to standardize values and make programming changes to ensure that truncation ceases.

    • Truncated data is usually caused by mismatches in data structures during either one-time data loads or ongoing data integrations.
    • Don’t go overboard on assigning required fields – users will just put key data in note fields.
    • Discourage the use of unstructured note fields: the data is effectively lost unless it gets subpoenaed.
    • To specify policies, use Info-Tech’s Master Data Record Tool.

    Profile your customer and sales-related data

    Applications are a critical component of how IT supports Sales, but IT also needs to help Sales keep its data current and accurate. Conducting a sales data audit is critical to ensure Sales has the right information at the right time.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Data is king. More than ever, having accurate data is essential for your organization to win in hyper-competitive marketplaces. Prudent current state analysis looks at both the overall data model and data architecture, as well as assessing data quality within critical sales-related repositories. As the amount of customer data grows exponentially due to the rise of mobility and the Internet of Things, you must have a forward-looking data model and data marts/customer data warehouse to support sales-relevant decisions.

    • A current state analysis for sales data follows a multi-step process:
      • Determine the location of all sales-relevant and customer data – the sales data inventory. Data can reside in applications, warehouses, and documents (e.g. Excel and Access files) – be sure to take a holistic approach.
    • For each data source, assess data quality across the following categories:
      • Completeness
      • Currency (Relevancy)
      • Correctness
      • Duplication
    • After assessing data quality, determine which repositories need the most attention by IT and Sales. We will look at opportunities for data consolidation later in the blueprint.

    INFO-TECH OPPORTUNITY

    Refer to Info-Tech’s Develop a Master Data Management Strategy and Roadmap blueprint for further reference and assistance in data management for your sales-IT alignment.

    Activity: Develop a mitigation plan for poor quality customer data

    2.4.2 30 minutes

    Input

    • List of departments involved in maintenance of CXM data

    Output

    • Data quality preservation plan
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Inventory a list of departments that will be interacting directly with CXM data.
    2. Identify data quality cleansing and preservation initiatives, such as those in previous examples.
    3. Assign accountability to an individual in the department as a data steward. When deciding on a data steward, consider the following:
    • Data stewards are designated full-time employees who serve as the go-to resource for all issues pertaining to data quality, including keeping a particular data silo clean and free of errors.
    • Data stewards are typically mid-level managers in the business (not IT), preferably with an interest in improving data quality and a relatively high degree of tech-savviness.
    • Data stewards can sometimes be created as a new role with a dedicated FTE, but this is not usually cost effective for small and mid-sized firms.
    • Instead, diffuse the steward role across several existing positions, including one for CRM and other marketing, sales, and service applications.
  • Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    • Example: Data Steward Structure

    Department A

    • Data Steward (CRM)
    • Data Steward (ERP)

    Department B

    • Data Steward (All)

    Department C

    • Data Steward (All)

    Determine if a customer data warehouse will add value to your CXM technology-enablement strategy

    A customer data warehouse (CDW) “is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, non-volatile collection of data used to support the strategic decision-making process across marketing, sales, and service. It is the central point of data integration for customer intelligence and is the source of data for the data marts, delivering a common view of customer data” (Corporate Information Factory, n.d.).

    Analogy

    CDWs are like a buffet. All the food items are in the buffet. Likewise, your corporate data sources are centralized into one repository. There are so many food items in a buffet that you may need to organize them into separate food stations (data marts) for easier access.

    Examples/Use Cases

    • Time series analyses with historical data
    • Enterprise level, common view analyses
    • Integrated, comprehensive customer profiles
    • One-stop repository of all corporate information

    Pros

    • Top-down architectural planning
    • Subject areas are integrated
    • Time-variant, changes to the data are tracked
    • Non-volatile, data is never over-written or deleted

    Cons

    • A massive amount of corporate information
    • Slower delivery
    • Changes are harder to make
    • Data format is not very business friendly

    Activity: Assess the need for a customer data warehouse

    2.4.3. 30 minutes

    Input

    • List of data sources
    • Data inflows and outflows

    Output

    • Data quality preservation plan
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Create a shortlist of customer data sources.
    2. Profile the integration points that are necessary to support inflows and outflows of customer data.
    3. Ask the following questions around the need for a CDW based on these data sources and points of integration:
    • What is the volume of customer information that needs to be stored? The greater the capacity, the more likely that you should build a dedicated CDW.
    • How complex is the data? The more complex the data, the greater the need for a CDW.
    • How often will data interchange happen between various applications and data sources? The greater and more frequent the interchange, the greater the need for a CDW.
    • What are your organizational capabilities for building a CDW? Do you have the resources in-house to create a CDW at this time?
  • Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    • INFO-TECH OPPORTUNITY

    Refer to Info-Tech’s Build an Agile Data Warehouse blueprint for more information on building a centralized and integrated data warehouse.

    Create a plan for end-user training on new (or refocused) CXM applications and data quality processes

    All training modules will be different, but some will have overlapping areas of interest.

    – Assign Project Evangelists – Analytics Training – Mobile Training

    Application Training

    • Customer Service - Assign Project Evangelists – Analytics Training – Mobile Training
      • Focus training on:
        • What to do with inbound tickets.
        • Routing and escalation features.
        • How to use knowledge management features effectively.
        • Call center capabilities.
    • Sales – Assign Project Evangelists – Analytics Training – Mobile Training
      • Focus training on:
        • Recording of opportunities, leads, and deals.
        • How to maximize sales with sales support decision tree.
    • Marketing - Assign Project Evangelists – Analytics Training
      • Focus training on:
        • Campaign management features.
        • Social media monitoring and engagement capabilities.
    • IT
      • Focus training on:
        • Familiarization with the software.
        • Software integration with other enterprise applications.
        • The technical support needed to maintain the system in the future.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Train customers too. Keep the customer-facing sales portals simple and intuitive, have clear explanations/instructions under important functions (e.g. brief directions on how to initiate service inquiries), and provide examples of proper uses (e.g. effective searches). Make sure customers are aware of escalation options available to them if self-service falls short.

    Ensure adoption with a formal communication process to keep departments apprised of new application rollouts

    The team leading the rollout of new initiatives (be they applications, new governance structures, or data quality procedures) should establish a communication process to ensure management and users are well informed.

    CXM-related department groups or designated trainers should take the lead and implement a process for:

    • Scheduling application platform/process rollout/kick-off meetings.
    • Soliciting preliminary input from the attending groups to develop further training plans.
    • Establishing communication paths and the key communication agents from each department who are responsible for keeping lines open moving forward.

    The overall objective for inter-departmental kick-off meetings is to confirm that all parties agree on certain key points and understand alignment rationale and new sales app or process functionality.

    The kick-off process will significantly improve internal communications by inviting all affected internal IT groups, including business units, to work together to address significant issues before the application process is formally activated.

    The kick-off meeting(s) should encompass:

    • Target business-user requirements
    • The high-level application overview
    • Tangible business benefits of alignment
    • Special consideration needs
    • Other IT department needs
    • Target quality of service (QoS) metrics

    Info-Tech Insight

    Determine who in each department will send out a message about initiative implementation, the tone of the message, the medium, and the delivery date.

    Construct a formal communication plan to engage stakeholders through structured channels

    Tangible Elements of a Communications Plan

    • Stakeholder Group Name
    • Stakeholder Description
    • Message
    • Concerns Relative to Application Maintenance
    • Communication Medium
    • Role Responsible for Communication
    • Frequency
    • Start and End Date

    Intangible Elements of a Communications Plan

    • Establish biweekly meetings with representatives from sales functional groups, who are tasked with reporting on:
      • Benefits of revised processes
      • Metrics of success
      • Resource restructuring
    • Establish a monthly interdepartmental meeting, where all representatives from sales and IT leadership discuss pressing bug fixes and minor process improvements.
    • Create a webinar series, complete with Q&A, so that stakeholders can reference these changes at their leisure.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Every piece of information that you give to a stakeholder that is not directly relevant to their interests is a distraction from your core message. Always remember to tailor the message, medium, and timing accordingly.

    Carry the CXM value forward with linkage and relationships between sales, marketing, service, and IT

    Once the sales-IT alignment committees have been formed, create organizational cadence through a variety of formal and informal gatherings between the two business functions.

    • Organizations typically fall in one of three maturity stages: isolation, collaboration, or synergy. Strive to achieve business-technology synergy at the operational level.
    • Although collaboration cannot be mandated, it can be facilitated. Start with a simple gauge of the two functions’ satisfaction with each other, and determine where and how inter-functional communication and synergy can be constructed.

    Isolation

    The image shows four shapes, with the words IT, Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing in them.

    • Point solutions are implemented on an ad-hoc basis by individual departments for specific projects.
    • Internal IT is rarely involved in these projects from beginning to end.

    Collaboration

    The image features that same four shapes and text from the previous image, but this time they are connected by dotted lines.

    • There is a formal cross-departmental effort to integrate some point solutions.
    • Internal IT gets involved to integrate systems and then support system interactions.

    Synergy

    The image features the same shapes and text from previous instances, except the shapes are now connect by solid lines and the entire image is surrounded by dotted lines.

    • Cross-functional, business technology teams are established to work on IT-enabled revenue generation initiatives.
    • Team members are collocated if possible.

    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:

    2.4.1 Develop a CXM application integration map

    Using the inventory of existing CXM-supporting applications and the newly formed CXM application portfolio as inputs, your facilitator will assist you in creating an integration map of applications to establish a system of record and flow of data.

    2.4.2 Develop a mitigation plan for poor quality customer data

    Our facilitator will educate your stakeholders on the importance of quality data and guide you through the creation of a mitigation plan for data preservation.

    2.4.3 Assess the need for a customer data warehouse

    Addressing important factors such as data volume, complexity, and flow, a facilitator will help you assess whether or not a customer data warehouse for CXM is the right fit for your organization.

    Phase 3

    Finalize the CXM Framework

    Build a Strong Technology Foundation for Customer Experience Management

    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: Finalize the CXM Framework

    Proposed Time to Completion: 1 week

    Step 3.1: Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

    Start with an analyst kick-off call:

    • Discuss strategic requirements and the associated application portfolio that has been proposed.

    Then complete these activities…

    • Initiatives prioritization

    With these tools & templates:

    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template

    Step 3.2: Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

    Review findings with analyst:

    • Discuss roadmap and next steps in terms of rationalizing and implementing specific technology-centric initiatives or rollouts.

    Then complete these activities…

    • Confirm stakeholder strategy presentation

    With these tools & templates:

    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template

    Phase 3 Results & Insights:

    • Initiatives roadmap

    Step 3.1: Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

    Phase 1

    1.1 Create the Project Vision

    1.2 Structure the Project

    Phase 2

    2.1 Scan the External Environment

    2.2 Assess the Current State of CXM

    2.3 Create an Application Portfolio

    2.4 Develop Deployment Best Practices

    Phase 3

    3.1 Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

    3.2 Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

    Activities:

    • Create a risk management plan
    • Brainstorm initiatives for CXM roadmap
    • Identify dependencies and enabling projects for your CXM roadmap
    • Complete the CXM roadmap

    Outcomes:

    • Risk management plan
    • CXM roadmap
      • Quick-win initiatives

    A CXM technology-enablement roadmap will provide smooth and timely implementation of your apps/initiatives

    Creating a comprehensive CXM strategy roadmap reduces the risk of rework, misallocation of resources, and project delays or abandonment.

    • People
    • Processes
    • Technology
    • Timeline
    • Tasks
    • Budget

    Benefits of a Roadmap

    1. Prioritize execution of initiatives in alignment with business, IT, and needs.
    2. Create clearly defined roles and responsibilities for IT and business stakeholders.
    3. Establish clear timelines for rollout of initiatives.
    4. Identify key functional areas and processes.
    5. Highlight dependencies and prerequisites for successful deployment.
    6. Reduce the risk of rework due to poor execution.

    Implement planning and controls for project execution

    Risk Management

    • Track risks associated with your CXM project.
    • Assign owners and create plans for resolving open risks.
    • Identify risks associated with related projects.
    • Create a plan for effectively communicating project risks.

    Change Management

    • Brainstorm a high-level training plan for various users of the CXM.
    • Create a communication plan to notify stakeholders and impacted users about the tool and how it will alter their workday and performance of role activities.
    • Establish a formal change management process that is flexible enough to meet the demands for change.

    Project Management

    • Conduct a post-mortem to evaluate the completion of the CXM strategy.
    • Design the project management process to be adaptive in nature.
    • Communication is key to project success, whether it is to external stakeholders or internal project team members..
    • Review the project’s performance against metrics and expectations.

    INFO-TECH OPPORTUNITIES

    Optimize the Change Management Process

    You need to design a process that is flexible enough to meet demand for change and strict enough to protect the live environment from change-related incidents.

    Create Project Management Success

    Investing time up front to plan the project and implementing best practices during project execution to ensure the project is delivered with the planned outcome and quality is critical to project success.

    Activity: Create a risk management plan

    3.1.1 45 minutes

    Input

    • Inventory of risks

    Output

    • Risk management plan
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Create a list of possible risks that may hamper the progress of your CXM project.
    2. Classify risks as strategy-based, related to planning, or systems-based, related to technology.
    3. Brainstorm mitigation strategies to overcome each listed risk.
    4. On a score of 1 to 3, determine the impact of each risk on the success of the project.
    5. On a score of 1 to 3, determine the likelihood of the occurrence for each risk.
    6. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    Example: Constructing a Risk Management Plan

    Risk Impact Likelihood Mitigation Effort
    Strategy Risks Project over budget
    • Detailed project plan
    • Pricing guarantees
    Inadequate content governance
    System Risks Integration with additional systems
    • Develop integration plan and begin testing integration methods early in the project
    .... ... ... ...

    Likelihood

    1 – High/ Needs Focus

    2 – Can Be Mitigated

    3 - Unlikely

    Impact

    1 - High Risk

    2 - Moderate Risk

    3 - Minimal Risk

    Prepare contingency plans to minimize time spent handling unexpected risks

    Understanding technical and strategic risks can help you establish contingency measures to reduce the likelihood that risks will occur. Devise mitigation strategies to help offset the impact of risks if contingency measures are not enough.

    Remember

    The biggest sources of risk in a CXM strategy are lack of planning, poorly defined requirements, and lack of governance.

    Apply the following mitigation tips to avoid pitfalls and delays.

    Risk Mitigation Tips

    • Upfront planning
    • Realistic timelines
    • Resource support
    • Change management
    • Executive sponsorship
    • Sufficient funding
    • Expectation setting
    1. Project Starts
    • Expectations are high
  • Project Workload Increases
    • Expectations are high
  • Pit of Despair
    • Why are we doing this?
  • Project Nears Close
    • Benefits are being realized
  • Implementation is Completed
    • Learning curve dip
  • Standardization & Optimization
    • Benefits are high

    • Identify factors to complete your CXM initiatives roadmap

    Completion of initiatives for your CXM project will be contingent upon multiple variables.

    Defining Dependencies

    Initiative complexity will define the need for enabling projects. Create a process to define dependencies:

    1. Enabling projects: complex prerequisites.
    2. Preceding tasks: direct and simplified assignments.

    Establishing a Timeline

    • Assign realistic timelines for each initiative to ensure smooth progress.
    • Use milestones and stage gates to track the progress of your initiatives and tasks.

    Defining Importance

    • Based on requirements gathering, identify the importance of each initiative to your marketing department.
    • Each initiative can be ranked high, medium, or low.

    Assigning Ownership

    • Owners are responsible for on-time completion of their assigned initiatives.
    • Populate a RACI chart to ensure coverage of all initiatives.

    Complex....Initiative

    • Enabling Project
      • Preceding Task
      • Preceding Task
    • Enabling Project
      • Preceding Task
      • Preceding Task

    Simple....Initiative

    • Preceding Task
    • Preceding Task
    • Preceding Task

    Activity: Brainstorm CXM application initiatives for implementation in alignment with business needs

    3.1.2 45 minutes

    Input

    • Inventory of CXM initiatives

    Output

    • Prioritized and quick-win initiatives
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. As a team, identify and list CXM initiatives that need to be addressed.
    2. Plot the initiatives on the complexity-value matrix to determine priority.
    3. Identify quick wins: initiatives that can realize quick benefits with little effort.
    4. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    Example: Importance-Capability Matrix

    The image shows a matrix, with Initiative Complexity on the X-axis, and Business Value on the Y-axis. There are circle of different sizes in the matrix.

    Pinpoint quick wins: high importance, low effort initiatives.

    The size of each plotted initiative must indicate the effort or the complexity and time required to complete.
    Top Right Quadrant Strategic Projects
    Top Left Quadrant Quick Wins
    Bottom Right Quadrant Risky Bets
    Bottom Left Quadrant Discretionary Projects

    Activity: Identify any dependencies or enabling projects for your CXM roadmap

    3.1.3 1 hour

    Input

    • Implementation initiatives
    • Dependencies

    Output

    • CXM project dependencies

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Using sticky notes and a whiteboard, have each team member rank the compiled initiatives in terms of priority.
    2. Determine preceding tasks or enabling projects that each initiative is dependent upon.
    3. Determine realistic timelines to complete each quick win, enabling project, and long-term initiative.
    4. Assign an owner for each initiative.

    Example: Project Dependencies

    Initiative: Omnichannel E-Commerce

    Dependency: WEM Suite Deployment; CRM Suite Deployment; Order Fulfillment Capabilities

    Activity: Complete the implementation roadmap

    3.1.4 30 minutes

    Input

    • Implementation initiatives
    • Dependencies

    Output

    • CXM Roadmap
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Establish time frames to highlight enabling projects, quick wins, and long-term initiatives.
    2. Indicate the importance of each initiative as high, medium, or low based on the output in Activity 3.1.2.
    3. Assign each initiative to a member of the project team. Each owner will be responsible for the execution of a given initiative as planned.
    4. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    Example: Importance-Capability Matrix

    Importance Initiative Owner Completion Date
    Example Projects High Gather business requirements. Project Manager MM/DD/YYYY
    Quick Wins
    Long Term Medium Implement e-commerce across all sites. CFO & Web Manager MM/DD/YYYY

    Importance

    • High
    • Medium
    • Low

    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:

    3.1.1 Create a risk management plan

    Based on the workshop exercises, the facilitator will work with the core team to design a priority-based risk mitigation plan that enumerates the most salient risks to the CXM project and addresses them.

    3.1.2; 3.1.3; 3.1.4 Identify initiative dependencies and create the CXM roadmap

    After identifying dependencies, our facilitators will work with your IT SMEs and business stakeholders to create a comprehensive roadmap, outlining the initiatives needed to carry out your CXM strategy roadmap.

    Step 3.2: Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

    Phase 1

    1.1 Create the Project Vision

    1.2 Structure the Project

    Phase 2

    2.1 Scan the External Environment

    2.2 Assess the Current State of CXM

    2.3 Create an Application Portfolio

    2.4 Develop Deployment Best Practices

    Phase 3

    3.1 Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

    3.2 Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

    Activities:

    • Identify success metrics
    • Create a stakeholder power map
    • Create a stakeholder communication plan
    • Complete and present CXM strategy stakeholder presentation

    Outcomes:

    • Stakeholder communication plan
    • CXM strategy stakeholder presentation

    Ensure that your CXM applications are improving the performance of targeted processes by establishing metrics

    Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

    Key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable measures that demonstrate the effectiveness of a process and its ability to meet business objectives.

    Questions to Ask

    1. What outputs of the process can be used to measure success?
    2. How do you measure process efficiency and effectiveness?

    Creating KPIs

    Specific

    Measurable

    Achievable

    Realistic

    Time-bound

    Follow the SMART methodology when developing KPIs for each process.

    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.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Metrics are essential to your ability to measure and communicate the success of the CXM strategy to the business. Speak the same language as the business and choose metrics that relate to marketing, sales, and customer service objectives.

    Activity: Identify metrics to communicate process success

    3.2.1 1 hour

    Input

    • Key organizational objectives

    Output

    • Strategic business metrics
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Recap the major functions that CXM will focus on (e.g. marketing, sales, customer service, web experience management, social media management, etc.)
    2. Identify business metrics that reflect organizational objectives for each function.
    3. Establish goals for each metric (as exemplified below).
    4. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.
    5. Communicate the chosen metrics and the respective goals to stakeholders.

    Example: Metrics for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service Functions

    Metric Example
    Marketing Customer acquisition cost X% decrease in costs relating to advertising spend
    Ratio of lifetime customer value X% decrease in customer churn
    Marketing originated customer % X% increase in % of customer acquisition driven by marketing
    Sales Conversion rate X% increase conversion of lead to sale
    Lead response time X% decrease in response time per lead
    Opportunity-to-win ratio X% increase in monthly/annual opportunity-to-win ratio
    Customer Service First response time X% decreased time it takes for customer to receive first response
    Time-to-resolution X% decrease of average time-to-resolution
    Customer satisfaction X% improvement of customer satisfaction ratings on immediate feedback survey

    Use Info-Tech’s Stakeholder Power Map Template to identify stakeholders crucial to CXM application rollouts

    3.2.2 Stakeholder Power Map Template

    Use this template and its power map to help visualize the importance of various stakeholders and their concerns. Prioritize your time according to the most powerful and most impacted stakeholders.

    Answer questions about each stakeholder:

    • Power: How much influence does the stakeholder have? Enough to drive the project 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 resistor?

    Focus on key players: relevant stakeholders who have high power, should have high involvement, and are highly impacted.

    INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

    Stakeholder Power Map Template

    Use Info-Tech’s Stakeholder Communication Planning Template to document initiatives and track communication

    3.2.3 Stakeholder Communication Planning Template

    Use the Stakeholder Communication Planning Template to document your list of initiative stakeholders so you can track them and plan communication throughout the initiative.

    Track the communication methods needed to convey information regarding CXM initiatives. Communicate how a specific initiative will impact the way employees work and the work they do.

    Sections of the document:

    1. Document the Stakeholder Power Map (output of Tool 3.2.2).
    2. Complete the Communicate Management Plan to aid in the planning and tracking of communication and training.

    INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

    Activity: Create a stakeholder power map and communication plan

    3.2.4 1 hour

    Input

    • Stakeholder power map

    Output

    • Stakeholder communication plan
    • CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

    Materials

    • Info-Tech’s Stakeholder Communication Planning Template
    • Info-Tech’s Stakeholder Power Map Template

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Using Info-Tech’s Stakeholder Power Map Template, identify key stakeholders for ensuring the success of the CXM strategy (Tool 3.2.2).
    2. Using Info-Tech’s Stakeholder Communication Plan Template, construct a communication plan to communicate and track CXM initiatives with all CXM stakeholders (Tool 3.2.3).
    3. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

    Use Info-Tech’s CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template to sell your CXM strategy to the business

    3.2.5 CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template

    Complete the presentation template as indicated when you see the green icon throughout this deck. Include the outputs of all activities that are marked with this icon.

    Info-Tech has designed the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template to capture the most critical aspects of the CXM strategy. Customize it to best convey your message to project stakeholders and to suit your organization.

    The presentation should be no longer than one hour. However, additional slides can be added at the discretion of the presenter. Make sure there is adequate time for a question and answer period.

    INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

    After the presentation, email the deck to stakeholders to ensure they have it available for their own reference.

    Activity: Determine the measured value received from the project

    3.2.6 30 minutes

    Input

    • Project Metrics

    Output

    • Measured Value Calculation

    Materials

    • Workbook

    Participants

    • Project Team

    Instructions

    1. Review project metrics identified in phase 1 and associated benchmarks.
    2. After executing the CXM project, compare metrics that were identified in the benchmarks with the revised and assess the delta.
    3. Calculate the percentage change and quantify dollar impact (i.e. as a result of increased customer acquisition or retention).

    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:

    3.2.4 Create a stakeholder power map and communication plan

    An analyst will walk the project team through the creation of a communication plan, inclusive of project metrics and their respective goals. If you are planning a variety of CXM initiatives, track how the change will be communicated and to whom. Determine the employees who will be impacted by the change.

    Insight breakdown

    Insight 1

    • IT must work in lockstep with Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service to develop a comprehensive technology-enablement strategy for CXM.
    • As IT works with its stakeholders in the business, it must endeavor to capture and use the voice of the customer in driving strategic requirements for CXM portfolio design.
    • IT must consider the external environment, customer personas, and internal processes as it designs strategic requirements to build the CXM application portfolio.

    Insight 2

    • The cloud is bringing significant disruption to the CXM space: to maintain relevancy, IT must become deeply involved in ensuring alignment between vendor capabilities and strategic requirements.
    • IT must serve as a trusted advisor on technical implementation challenges related to CXM, such as data quality, integration, and end-user training and adoption.
    • IT is responsible for technology enablement and is an indispensable partner in this regard; however, the business must ultimately own the objectives and communication strategy for customer engagement.

    Insight 3

    • When crafting a portfolio for CXM, be aware of the art of the possible: capabilities are rapidly merging and evolving to support new interaction channels. Social, mobile, and IoT are disrupting the customer experience landscape.
    • Big data and analytics-driven decision making is another significant area of value. IT must allow for true customer intelligence by providing an integration framework across customer-facing applications.

    Summary of accomplishment

    Knowledge Gained

    • Voice of the Customer for CXM Portfolio Design
    • Understanding of Strategic Requirements for CXM
    • Customer Personas and Scenarios
    • Environmental Scan
    • Deployment Considerations
    • Initiatives Roadmap Considerations

    Processes Optimized

    • CXM Technology Portfolio Design
    • Customer Data Quality Processes
    • CXM Integrations

    Deliverables Completed

    • Strategic Summary for CXM
    • CXM Project Charter
    • Customer Personas
    • External and Competitive Analysis
    • CXM Application Portfolio

    Bibliography

    Accenture Digital. “Growing the Digital Business: Accenture Mobility Research 2015.” Accenture. 2015. Web.

    Afshar, Vala. “50 Important Customer Experience Stats for Business Leaders.” Huffington Post. 15 Oct. 2015. Web.

    APQC. “Marketing and Sales Definitions and Key Measures.” APQC’s Process Classification Framework, Version 1.0.0. APQC. Mar. 2011. Web.

    CX Network. “The Evolution of Customer Experience in 2015.” Customer Experience Network. 2015. Web.

    Genesys. “State of Customer Experience Research”. Genesys. 2018. Web.

    Harvard Business Review and SAS. “Lessons From the Leading Edge of Customer Experience Management.” Harvard Business School Publishing. 2014. Web.

    Help Scout. “75 Customer Service Facts, Quotes & Statistics.” Help Scout. n.d. Web.

    Inmon Consulting Services. “Corporate Information Factory (CIF) Overview.” Corporate Information Factory. n.d. Web

    Jurevicius, Ovidijus. “VRIO Framework.” Strategic Management Insight. 21 Oct. 2013. Web.

    Keenan, Jim, and Barbara Giamanco. “Social Media and Sales Quota.” A Sales Guy Consulting and Social Centered Selling. n.d. Web.

    Malik, Om. “Internet of Things Will Have 24 Billion Devices by 2020.” Gigaom. 13 Oct. 2011. Web.

    McGovern, Michele. “Customers Want More: 5 New Expectations You Must Meet Now.” Customer Experience Insight. 30 July 2015. Web.

    McGinnis, Devon. “40 Customer Service Statistics to Move Your Business Forward.” Salesforce Blog. 1 May 2019. Web.

    Bibliography

    Reichheld, Fred. “Prescription for Cutting Costs”. Bain & Company. n.d. Web.

    Retail Congress Asia Pacific. “SAP – Burberry Makes Shopping Personal.” Retail Congress Asia Pacific. 2017. Web.

    Rouse, Margaret. “Omnichannel Definition.” TechTarget. Feb. 2014. Web.

    Salesforce Research. “Customer Expectations Hit All-Time High.” Salesforce Research. 2018. Web.

    Satell, Greg. “A Look Back at Why Blockbuster Really Failed and Why It Didn’t Have To.” Forbes. 5 Sept. 2014. Web.

    Social Centered Learning. “Social Media and Sales Quota: The Impact of Social Media on Sales Quota and Corporate Review.” Social Centered Learning. n.d. Web.

    Varner, Scott. “Economic Impact of Experience Management”. Qualtrics/Forrester. 16 Aug. 2017. Web.

    Wesson, Matt. “How to Use Your Customer Data Like Amazon.” Salesforce Pardot Blog. 27 Aug. 2012. Web.

    Winterberry Group. “Taking Cues From the Customer: ‘Omnichannel’ and the Drive For Audience Engagement.” Winterberry Group LLC. June 2013. Web.

    Wollan, Robert, and Saideep Raj. “How CIOs Can Support a More Agile Sales Organization.” The Wall Street Journal: The CIO Report. 25 July 2013. Web.

    Zendesk. “The Impact of Customer Service on Customer Lifetime Value 2013.” Z Library. n.d. Web.

    Achieve IT Spend & Staffing Transparency

    • 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.

    Considerations to Optimize Container Management

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    Do you experience challenges with the following:

    • Equipping IT operations processes to manage containers.
    • Choosing the right container technology.
    • Optimizing your infrastructure strategy for containers.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Plan ahead to ensure your container strategy aligns with your infrastructure roadmap. Before deciding between bare metal and cloud, understand the different components of a container management solution and plan for current and future infrastructure services.
    • When selecting tools from multiple sources, it is important to understand what each tool should and should not meet. This holistic approach is necessary to avoid gaps and duplication of effort.

    Impact and Result

    Use the reference architecture to plan for the solution you need and want to deploy. Infrastructure planning and strategy optimizes the container image supply chain, uses your current infrastructure, and reduces costs for compute and image scan time.

    Considerations to Optimize Container Management Research & Tools

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

    1. Considerations to Optimize Container Management Deck – A document to guide you design your container strategy.

    A document that walks you through the components of a container management solution and helps align your business objectives with your current infrastructure services and plan for your future assets.

    • Considerations to Optimize Container Management Storyboard

    2. Container Reference Architecture – A best-of-breed template to help you build a clear, concise, and compelling strategy document for container management.

    Complete the reference architecture tool to strategize your container management.

    • Container Reference Architecture
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Considerations to Optimize Container Management

    Design a custom reference architecture that meets your requirements.

    Analyst Perspective

    Containers have become popular as enterprises use DevOps to develop and deploy applications faster. Containers require managed services because the sheer number of containers can become too complex for IT teams to handle. Orchestration platforms like Kubernetes can be complex, requiring management to automatically deploy container-based applications to operating systems and public clouds. IT operations staff need container management skills and training.

    Installing and setting up container orchestration tools can be laborious and error-prone. IT organizations must first implement the right infrastructure setup for containers by having a solid understanding of the scope and scale of containerization projects and developer requirements. IT administrators also need to know how parts of the existing infrastructure connect and communicate to maintain these relationships in a containerized environment. Containers can run on bare metal servers, virtual machines in the cloud, or hybrid configurations, depending on your IT needs

    Nitin Mukesh, Senior Research Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations

    Nitin Mukesh
    Senior Research Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge Common Obstacles Info-Tech’s Approach

    The container software market is constantly evolving. Organizations must consider many factors to choose the right container management software for their specific needs and fit their future plans.

    It's important to consider your organization's current and future infrastructure strategy and how it fits with your container management strategy. The container management platform you choose should be compatible with the existing network infrastructure and storage capabilities available to your organization.

    		 IT operations staff have not been thinking the same way as developers who have now been using an agile approach for some time. Container image builds are highly automated and have several dependencies including scheduling, testing, and deployment that the IT staff is not trained for or lack the ability to create anything more than a simple image.

    Use the reference architecture to plan for the solution you need and want to deploy. Infrastructure planning and strategy optimizes the container image supply chain and reduces costs for compute and image scan time.

    Plan ahead to ensure your container strategy aligns with your infrastructure roadmap. Before deciding between bare metal and cloud, understand the different components of a container management solution and plan for current and future infrastructure services.

    Your challenge

    Choosing the right container technology: IT is a rapidly changing and evolving market, with startups and seasoned technology vendors maintaining momentum in everything from container platforms to repositories to orchestration tools. The rapid evolution of container platform components such as orchestration, storage, networking, and system services such as load balancing has made the entire stack a moving target.

    However, waiting for the industry to be standardized can be a recipe for paralysis, and waiting too long to decide on solutions and approaches can put a company's IT operations in catch-up mode.

    Keeping containers secure: Security breaches in containers are almost identical to operating system level breaches in virtual machines in terms of potential application and system vulnerabilities. It is important for any DevOps team working on container and orchestration architecture and management to fully understand the potential vulnerabilities of the platforms they are using.

    Optimize your infrastructure strategy for containers: One of the challenges enterprise IT operations management teams face when it comes to containers is the need to rethink the underlying infrastructure to accommodate the technology. While you may not want to embrace the public cloud for your critical applications just yet, IT operations managers will need an on-premises infrastructure so that applications can scale up and down the same way as they are containerized.

    Common ways organizations use containers

    A Separation of responsibilities
    Containerization provides a clear separation of responsibilities as developers can focus on application logic and dependencies, while IT operations teams can focus on deployment and management instead of application details such as specific software versions and configurations.

    B Workload portability
    Containers can run almost anywhere: physical servers or on-premise data centers on virtual machines or developer machines, as well as public clouds on Linux, Windows, or Mac operating systems, greatly easing development and deployment.

    “Lift and shift” existing applications into a modern cloud architecture. Some organizations even use containers to migrate existing applications to more modern environments. While this approach provides some of the basic benefits of operating system virtualization, it does not provide all the benefits of a modular, container-based application architecture.

    C Application isolation
    Containers virtualize CPU, memory, storage, and network resources at the operating system level, providing developers with a logically isolated view of the operating system from other applications.

    Source: TechTarget, 2021

    What are containers and why should I containerize?

    A container is a partially isolated environment in which an application or parts of an application can run. You can use a single container to run anything from small microservices or software processes to larger applications. Inside the container are all the necessary executable, library, and configuration files. Containers do not contain operating system images. This makes them lighter and more portable with much less overhead. Large application deployments can deploy multiple containers into one or more container clusters (CapitalOne, 2020).

    Containers have the following advantages:

    • Reduce overhead costs: Because containers do not contain operating system images, they require fewer system resources than traditional or hardware virtual machine environments.
    • Enhanced portability: Applications running in containers can be easily deployed on a variety of operating systems and hardware platforms.
    • More consistent operations: DevOps teams know that applications in containers run the same no matter where they are deployed.
    • Efficiency improvement: Containers allow you to deploy, patch, or scale applications faster.
    • Develop better applications: Containers support Agile and DevOps efforts to accelerate development and production cycles.

    Source: CapitalOne, 2020

    Container on the cloud or on-premise?

    On-premises containers Public cloud-based containers

    Advantages:

    • Full control over your container environment.
    • Increased flexibility in networking and storage configurations.
    • Use any version of your chosen tool or container platform.
    • No need to worry about potential compliance issues with data stored in containers.
    • Full control over the host operating system and environment.

    Disadvantages:

    • Lack of easy scalability. This can be especially problematic if you're using containers because you want to be more agile from a DevOps perspective.
    • No turnkey container deployment solution. You must set up and maintain every component of the container stack yourself.

    Advantages:

    • Easy setup and management through platforms such as Amazon Elastic Container Service or Azure Container Service. These products require significant Docker expertise to use but require less installation and configuration than on-premise installations.
    • Integrates with other cloud-based tools for tasks such as monitoring.
    • Running containers in the cloud improves scalability by allowing you to add compute and storage resources as needed.

    Disadvantages:

    • You should almost certainly run containers on virtual machines. That can be a good thing for many people; however, you miss out on some of the potential benefits of running containers on bare metal servers, which can be easily done.
    • You lose control. To build a container stack, you must use the orchestrator provided by your cloud host or underlying operating system.

    Info-Tech Insight
    Start-ups and small businesses that don't typically need to be closely connected to hardware can easily move (or start) to the cloud. Large (e.g. enterprise-class) companies and companies that need to manage and control local hardware resources are more likely to prefer an on-premises infrastructure. For enterprises, on-premises container deployments can serve as a bridge to full public cloud deployments or hybrid private/public deployments. The answer to the question of public cloud versus on premises depends on the specific needs of your business.

    Container management

    From container labeling that identifies workloads and ownership to effective reporting that meets the needs of different stakeholders across the organization, it is important that organizations establish an effective framework for container management.

    Four key considerations for your container management strategy:

    01 Container Image Supply Chain
    How containers are built

    02 Container Infrastructure and Orchestration
    Where and how containers run together

    03 Container Runtime Security and Policy Enforcement
    How to make sure your containers only do what you want them to do

    04 Container Observability
    Runtime metrics and debugging

    To effectively understand container management solutions, it is useful to define the various components that make up a container management strategy.

    1: Container image supply chain

    To run a workload as a container, it must first be packaged into a container image. The image supply chain includes all libraries or components that make up a containerized application. This includes CI/CD tools to test and package code into container images, application security testing tools to check for vulnerabilities and logic errors, registries and mirroring tools for hosting container images, and attribution mechanisms such as image signatures for validating images in registries.

    Important functions of the supply chain include the ability to:

    • Scan container images in registries for security issues and policy compliance.
    • Verify in-use image hashes have been scanned and authorized.
    • Mirror images from public registries to isolate yourself from outages in these services.
    • Attributing images to the team that created them.

    Source: Rancher, 2022

    Info-Tech Insight
    It is important to consider disaster recovery for your image registry. As mentioned above, it is wise to isolate yourself from registry disruptions. However, external registry mirroring is only one part of the equation. You also want to make sure you have a high availability plan for your internal registry as well as proper backup and recovery processes. A highly available, fault-tolerant container management platform is not just a runtime environment.

    2: Container infrastructure and orchestration

    Orchestration tools

    Once you have a container image to run, you need a location to run it. That means both the computer the container runs on and the software that schedules it to run. If you're working with a few containers, you can make manual decisions about where to run container images, what to run with container images, and how best to manage storage and network connectivity. However, at scale, these kinds of decisions should be left to orchestration tools like Kubernetes, Swarm, or Mesos. These platforms can receive workload execution requests, determine where to run based on resource requirements and constraints, and then actually launch that workload on its target. And if a workload fails or resources are low, it can be restarted or moved as needed.

    Source: DevOpsCube, 2022

    Storage

    Storage is another important consideration. This includes both the storage used by the operating system and the storage used by the container itself. First, you need to consider the type of storage you actually need. Can I outsource my storage concerns to a cloud provider using something like Amazon Relational Database Service instead? If not, do you really need block storage (e.g. disk) or can an external object store like AWS S3 meet your needs? If your external object storage service can meet your performance and durability requirements as well as your governance and compliance needs, you're in luck. You may not have to worry about managing the container's persistent storage. Many external storage services can be provisioned on demand, support discrete snapshots, and some even allow dynamic scaling on demand.

    Networking

    Network connectivity inside and outside the containerized environment is also very important. For example, Kubernetes supports a variety of container networking interfaces (CNIs), each providing different functionality. Questions to consider here are whether you can set traffic control policies (and the OSI layer), how to handle encryption between workloads and between workloads and external entities, and how to manage traffic import for containerized workloads. The impact of these decisions also plays a role on performance.

    Backups

    Backups are still an important task in containerized environments, but the backup target is changing slightly. An immutable, read-only container file system can be recreated very easily from the original container image and does not need to be backed up. Backups or snapshots on permanent storage should still be considered. If you are using a cloud provider, you should also consider fault domain and geo-recovery scenarios depending on the provider's capabilities. For example, if you're using AWS, you can use S3 replication to ensure that EBS snapshots can be restored in another region in case of a full region outage.

    3: Container runtime security and policy enforcement

    Ensuring that containers run in a place that meets the resource requirements and constraints set for them is necessary, but not sufficient. It is equally important that your container management solution performs continuous validation and ensures that your workloads comply with all security and other policy requirements of your organization. Runtime security and policy enforcement tools include a function for detecting vulnerabilities in running containers, handling detected vulnerabilities, ensuring that workloads are not running with unnecessary or unintended privileges, and ensuring that only other workloads that need to be allowed can connect.

    One of the great benefits of (well implemented) containerized software is reducing the attackable surface of the application. But it doesn't completely remove it. This means you need to think about how to observe running applications to minimize security risks. Scanning as part of the build pipeline is not enough. This is because an image without vulnerabilities at build time can become a vulnerable container because new flaws are discovered in its code or support libraries. Instead, some modern tools focus on detecting unusual behavior at the system call level. As these types of tools mature, they can make a real difference to your workload’s security because they rely on actual observed behavior rather than up-to-date signature files.

    4: Container observability

    What’s going on in there?

    Finally, if your container images are being run somewhere by orchestration tools and well managed by security and policy enforcement tools, you need to know what your containers are doing and how well they are doing it. Orchestration tools will likely have their own logs and metrics, as will networking layers, and security and compliance checking tools; there is a lot to understand in a containerized environment. Container observability covers logging and metrics collection for both your workloads and the tools that run them.

    One very important element of observability is the importance of externalizing logs and metrics in a containerized environment. Containers come and go, and in many cases the nodes running on them also come and go, so relying on local storage is not recommended.

    The importance of a container management strategy

    A container management platform typically consists of a variety of tools from multiple sources. Some container management software vendors or container management services attempt to address all four key components of effective container management. However, many organizations already have tools that provide at least some of the features they need and don't want to waste existing licenses or make significant changes to their entire infrastructure just to run containers.

    When choosing tools from multiple sources, it's important to understand what needs each tool meets and what it doesn't. This holistic approach is necessary to avoid gaps and duplication of effort.

    For example, scanning an image as part of the build pipeline and then rescanning the image while the container is running is a waste of CPU cycles in the runtime environment. Similarly, using orchestration tools and separate host-based agents to aggregate logs or metrics can waste CPU cycles as well as storage and network resources.

    Planning a container management strategy

    1 DIY, Managed Services, or Packaged Products
    Developer satisfaction is important, but it's also wise to consider the team running the container management software. Migrating from bare metal or virtual machine-based deployment methodologies to containers can involve a significant learning curve, so it's a good idea to choose a tool that will help smooth this curve.
    2 Kubernetes
    In the world of container management, Kubernetes is fast becoming the de facto standard for container orchestration and scheduling. Most of the products that address the other aspects of container management discussed in this post (image supply chain, runtime security and policy enforcement, observability) integrate easily with Kubernetes. Kubernetes is open-source software and using it is possible if your team has the technical skills and the desire to implement it themselves. However, that doesn't mean you should automatically opt to build yourself.
    3 Managed Kubernetes
    Kubernetes is difficult to implement well. As a result, many solution providers offer packaged products or managed services to facilitate Kubernetes adoption. All major cloud providers now offer Kubernetes services that reduce the operational burden on your teams. Organizations that have invested heavily in the ecosystem of a particular cloud provider may find this route suitable. Other organizations may be able to find a fully managed service that provides container images and lets the service provider worry about running the images which, depending on the cost and capacity of the organization, may be the best option.
    4 Third-Party Orchestration Products
    A third approach is packaged products from providers that can be installed on the infrastructure (cloud or otherwise). These products can offer several potential advantages over DIY or cloud provider offerings, such as access to additional configuration options or cluster components, enhanced functionality, implementation assistance and training, post-installation product support, and reduced risk of cloud provider lock-in.

    Source: Kubernetes, 2022; Rancher, 2022

    Infrastructure considerations

    It's important to describe your organization’s current and future infrastructure strategy and how it fits into your container management strategy. It’s all basic for now, but if you plan to move to a virtual machine or cloud provider next year, your container management solution should be able to adapt to your environment now and in the future. Similarly, if you’ve already chosen a public cloud, you may want to make sure that the tool you choose supports some of the cloud options, but full compatibility may not be an important feature.

    Infrastructure considerations extend beyond computing. Choosing a container management platform should be compatible with the existing network infrastructure and storage capacity available to your organization. If you have existing policy enforcement, monitoring, and alerting tools, the ideal solution should be able to take advantage of them. Moving to containers can be a game changer for developers and operations teams, so continuing to use existing tools to reduce complexity where possible can save time and money.

    Leverage the reference architecture to guide your container management strategy

    Questions for support transition

    Using the examples as a guide, complete the tool to strategize your container management

    Download the Reference Architecture

    Bibliography

    Mell, Emily. “What is container management and why is it important?” TechTarget, April 2021.
    https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/definition/container-management-software#:~:text=A%20container%20management%20ecosystem%20automates,operator%20to%20keep%20up%20with

    Conrad, John. “What is Container Orchestration?” CapitalOne, 24 August 2020.
    https://www.capitalone.com/tech/cloud/what-is-container-orchestration/?v=1673357442624

    Kubernetes. “Cluster Networking.” Kubernetes, 2022.
    https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster-administration/networking/

    Rancher. “Comparing Kubernetes CNI Providers: Flannel, Calico, Canal, and Weave.” Rancher, 2022.
    https://www.suse.com/c/rancher_blog/comparing-kubernetes-cni-providers-flannel-calico-canal-and-weave/

    Wilson, Bob. “16 Best Container Orchestration Tools and Services.” DevopsCube, 5 January 2022.
    https://devopscube.com/docker-container-clustering-tools/

    Human Resources Management

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    Talent is the differentiator; availability is not.

    Design an Enterprise Architecture Strategy

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    • The enterprise architecture (EA) team is constantly challenged to articulate the value of its function.
    • The CIO has asked the EA team to help articulate the business value the team brings.
    • Traceability from the business goals and vision to the EA contributions often does not exist.
    • Also, clients often struggle with complexity, priorities, and agile execution.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • EA can deliver many benefits to an organization. However, to increase the likelihood of success, the EA group needs to deliver value to the business and cannot be seen solely as IT.
    • Support from the organization is needed.
    • An EA strategy anchored in a value proposition will ensure that EA focuses on driving the most critical outcomes in support of the organization’s enterprise strategy.
    • As agility is not just for project execution, architects need to understand ways to deliver their guidance to influence project execution in real time, to enable the enterprise agility, and to enhance their responsiveness to changing conditions.

    Impact and Result

    • Create an EA value proposition based on enterprise needs that clearly articulates the expected contributions of the EA function.
    • Establish the EA fundamentals (vision and mission statement, goals and objectives, and principles) needed to position the EA function to deliver the promised value proposition.
    • Identify the services that EA has to provide to the organization to deliver on the promised value proposition.

    Design an Enterprise Architecture Strategy Research & Tools

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

    1. Design an Enterprise Architecture Strategy Deck – A guide to help you define services that your EA function will provide to the organization.

    Establish an effective EA function that will realize value for the organization with an EA strategy.

    • Design an Enterprise Architecture Strategy – Phases 1-4

    2. EA Function Strategy Template – A communication tool to secure the approval of the EA strategy from organizational stakeholders.

    Use this template to document the outputs of the EA strategy and to communicate the EA strategy for approval by stakeholders.

    • EA Function Strategy Template

    3. Stakeholder Power Map Template – A template to help visualize the importance of various stakeholders and their concerns.

    Identify and prioritize the stakeholders that are important to your IT strategy development effort.

    • Stakeholder Power Map Template

    4. PESTLE Analysis Template – A template to help you complete and document a PESTLE analysis.

    Use this template to analyze the effect of external factors on IT.

    • PESTLE Analysis Template

    5. EA Value Proposition Template – A template to communicate the value EA can provide to the organization.

    Use this template to create an EA value proposition that explicitly communicates to stakeholders how an EA function can contribute to addressing their needs.

    • EA Value Proposition Template

    6. EA Goals and Objectives Template – A template to identify the EA goals that support the identified promises of value from the EA value proposition.

    Use this template to help set goals for your EA function based on the EA value proposition and identify objectives to measure the progression towards those EA goals.

    • EA Goals and Objectives Template

    7. EA Principles Template – A template to identify the universal EA principles relevant to your organization.

    Use this template to define relevant universal EA principles and create new EA principles to guide and inform IT investment decisions.

    • EA Principles Template – EA Strategy

    8. EA Service Planning Tool – A template to identify the EA services your organization will provide to deliver on the EA value proposition.

    Use this template to identify the EA services relevant to your organization and then define how those services will be accessed.

    • EA Service Planning Tool
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Design an Enterprise Architecture 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 Map the EA Contributions to Business Goals

    The Purpose

    Show an example of traceability.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Members have a real-world example of traceability between business goals and EA contributions.

    Activities

    1.1 Start from the business goals of the organization.

    1.2 Document business and IT drivers.

    1.3 Identify EA contributions that help achieve the business goals.

    Outputs

    Business goals documented.

    Business and IT drivers documented.

    Identified EA contributions and traced them to business goals.

    2 Determine the Role of the Architect in the Agile Ceremonies of the Organization

    The Purpose

    Create an understanding about role of architect in Agile ceremonies.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding of the role of the EA architect in Agile ceremonies.

    Activities

    2.1 Document the Agile ceremony used in the organization (based on SAFe or other Agile approaches).

    2.2 Determine which ceremonies the system architect will participate in.

    2.3 Determine which ceremonies the solution architect will participate in.

    2.4 Determine which ceremonies the enterprise architect will participate in.

    2.5 Determine architect syncs, etc.

    Outputs

    Documented the Agile ceremonial used in the organization (based on SAFe or other Agile approaches).

    Determined which ceremonies the system architect will participate in.

    Determined which ceremonies the solution architect will participate in.

    Determined which ceremonies the enterprise architect will participate in.

    Determined architect syncs, etc.

    Further reading

    Design an Enterprise Architecture Strategy

    Develop a strategy that fits the organization’s maturity and remains adaptable to unforeseen future changes.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Build a right-size enterprise architecture strategy

    Enterprise Architecture Strategy
    Business & IT Strategy
    • Organizational Goals and Objectives
    • Business Drivers
    • Environment and Industry Trends
    • EA Capabilities and Services
    • Business Architecture
    • Data Architecture
    • Application Architecture
    • Integration Architecture
    • Innovation
    • Roles and Organizational Structure
    • Security Architecture
    • Technology Architecture
    • Integration Architecture
    • Insight and Knowledge
    • EA Operating Model
    		 Unlock the Value of Architecture
    • Increased Business and IT Alignment
    • Robust, Flexible, Scalable, Interoperable, Extensible and Reliable Solutions
    • Timely/Agile Service Delivery and Operations
    • Cost-Effective Solutions
    • Appropriate Risk Management to Address the Risk Appetite
    • Increased Competitive Advantage
    Current Environment
    • Business and IT Challenges
    • Opportunities
    • Enterprise Architecture Maturity

    Enterprise Architecture – Thought Model

    A thought model built around 'Enterprise Architecture', represented by a diagram on a cross-section of a ship which will be explained in the next slide. It begins with an arrow that says 'Organizational goals are the driving force and the ultimate goal' pointing to a bubble titled 'Organization' containing 'Analysis', 'Decisions', 'Actions'. An blue arrow on the right side with one '$' is labelled 'Iterations' and connects 'Organization' to 'Enterprise Architecture', 'Enterprise architecture creates new business value'. A green arrow on the left side with five '$' is labelled 'Goals' and connects back to 'Organization'. A the bottom, a bubble titled 'External forces, pressures, trends, data, etc.' has a blue arrow on the right side with one '$' connecting back to 'Enterprise Architecture'. Another blue arrow representing an output is labelled 'Outcomes' and originates from 'Enterprise Architecture'.

    Enterprise Architecture Capabilities

    A diagram on a cross-section of a ship representing 'Enterprise Architecture', including a row of process arrows beneath the ship pointing forward all labelled 'Agile iteration' and one airborne arrow above the stern pointing forward labelled 'Business Strategy'. Overlaid on the ship, starting at the back, are 'EA Strategy', 'EA Operating Model', 'Enterprise Principles, Methods, etc.', 'Foundational enterprise decisions: Business, Data/Apps, Technology, Integration, Security', 'Enterprise Reference Architecture', 'Goals, Value Chain, Capability, Business Processes', 'Enterprise Governance (e.g., Standard Mgmt.)', 'Domain Arch', 'Data & App Architecture', 'Security Architecture', 'Infrastructure: Cloud, Hybrid, etc.', at the very front is 'Implementation', and running along the bottom from back to front is 'Operations, Monitoring, and Continuous Improvement'.

    Analyst Perspective

    Enterprise architecture (EA) needs to be right-sized for the needs of the organization.

    Photo of Milena Litoiu, Principal/Senior Director, Enterprise Architecture, Info-Tech Research Group

    Enterprise architecture is NOT a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It needs to be right-sized to the needs of the organization.

    Enterprise architects are boots on the ground and part of the solution; in addition, they need to have a good understanding of the corporate strategy, vision, and goals and have a vested interest on the optimization of the outcomes for the enterprise. They also need to anticipate the moves ahead, to be able to determine future trends and how they will impact the enterprise.

    Milena Litoiu
    Principal/Senior Director, Enterprise Architecture
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Analyst Perspective

    EA provides business options based on a deep understanding of the organization.

    “Enterprise architects need to think about and consider different areas of expertise when formulating potential business options. By understanding the context, the puzzle pieces can combine to create a positive business outcome that aligns with the organization’s strategies. Sometimes there will be missing pieces; leveraging what you know to create an outline of the pieces and collaborating with others can provide a general direction.”

    Jean Bujold
    Senior Workshop Delivery Director
    Info-Tech Research Group

    “The role of enterprise architecture is to eliminate misalignment between the business and IT and create value for the organization.”

    Reddy Doddipalli
    Senior Workshop Director, Research
    Info-Tech Research Group

    “Every transformation journey is an opportunity to learn: ‘Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.’ Benjamin Franklin.”

    Graham Smith
    Senior Lead Enterprise Architect and Independent Consultant

    Develop an enterprise architecture strategy that:

    • Helps the organization make decisions that are hard to change in a complex environment.
    • Fits the current organization’s maturity and remains flexible and adaptable to unforeseen future changes.

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    We need to make decisions today for an unknown future. Decisions are influenced by:

    • Changes in the environment you operate in.
    • Complexity of both the business and IT landscapes.
    • IT’s difficulty in keeping up with business demands and remaining agile.
    • Program/project delivery pressure and long-term planning needs.
    • Other internal and external factors affecting your enterprise.

    Common Obstacles

    Decisions are often made:

    • Without a clear understanding of the business goals.
    • Without a holistic understanding; sometimes in conflict with one another.
    • That hinder the continuity of the organization.
    • That prevent value optimization at the enterprise level.

    The more complex an organization, the more players involved, the more difficult it is to overcome these obstacles.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    • Is a holistic, top-down approach, from the business goals all the way to implementation.
    • Has EA act as the canary in the coal mine. EA will identify and mitigate risks in the organization.
    • Enables EA to provide an essential service rather than be an isolated kingdom or an ivory tower.
    • Acknowledges that EA is a balancing act among competing demands.
    • Makes decisions using guiding principles and guardrails, to create a flexible architecture that can evolve and expand, enabling enterprise agility.

    Info-Tech Insight

    There is no “right architecture” for organizations of all sizes, maturities, and cultural contexts. The value of enterprise architecture can only be measured against the business goals of a single organization. Enterprise architecture needs to be right-sized for your organization.

    Info-Tech insight summary on arch. agility

    Continuous innovation is of paramount importance in achieving and maintaining competitive advantage in the marketplace.

    Business engagement

    It is important to trace architectural decisions to business goals. As business goals evolve, architecture should evolve as well.

    As new business input is provided during Agile cycles, architecture is continuously evolving.

    		EA fundamentals

    EA fundamentals will shape how enterprise architects think and act, how they engage with the organization, what decisions they make, etc.

    Start small and lean and evolve as needed.

    Continuously align strategy with delivery and operations.

    Architects should establish themselves as business partners as well as implementation/delivery leaders.

    		Enterprise services

    Definitions of enterprise services should start from the business goals of the organization and the capabilities IT needs to perform for the organization to survive in the marketplace.

    Continuous delivery and continuous innovation are the two facets of architecture.

    Tactical insight

    Your current maturity should be reflected as a baseline in the strategy.

    		Tactical insight

    Take Agile/opportunistic steps toward your strategic North star.

    		Tactical insight

    EA services differ based on goals, maturity, and the Agile appetite of the enterprise.

    From the best industry experts

    “The trick to getting value from enterprise architecture is to commit to the long haul.”

    Jeanne W. Ross, MIT CISR
    Co-author of Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution,
    Harvard Business Press, 2006.

    Typical EA maturity stages

    A line chart that moves through multiple stages titled 'Enterprise Architecture Maturity Stages (MIT CISR)' The five stages of the chart, starting on the left, are 'Business Silos', 'Standardized Technology', 'Optimized Core', 'Business Componentization', and 'Digital Ecosystem'. 'The trick to getting value from enterprise architecture is to commit to the long haul.' The line begins at the bottom left of the chart and gradually creates a stretched S shape to the top right. Points along the line, respective to the aforementioned stages, are 'Locally Optimal Business Solutions', 'Technology Infrastructure Platform', 'Digitized Process Platform', 'Repository of Reusable Business Components', 'Components Connecting with Partners' Components', and at the end of the line, outside of the chart is 'Strategic Business Value from Technology'. Percentages along the bottom, respective to the aforementioned stages, read 20%, 36%, 45%, 7%, 2%. Percentages are rough approximations based on findings reported in Mocker, M., Ross, J.W., Beath, C.M., 'How Companies Use Digital Technologies to Enhance Customer Offerings--Summary of Survey Findings,' MIT CISR Working Paper No. 434, Feb. 2019. Copyright MIT, 2019.

    Enterprise Architecture maturity

    A maturity ladder visualization for 'Enterprise Architecture' with five color-coded levels. From the bottom up, the colors and designations are Red: 'Unstable', Orange: 'Firefighter', Yellow: 'Trusted Operator', Blue: 'Business Partner', and Green: 'Innovator'. Beside the visualization at the bottom it says 'EA is here', then an arrow in the direction of the top where it says 'EA needs to be here'.
    • Innovator – Transforms the Business
      Reliable Technology Innovation
    • Business Partner – Expands the Business
      Effective Use of Enterprise Architecture in all Business Projects, Enterprise Architecture Is Strategically Engaged
    • Trusted Operator – Optimizes the Business
      Enterprise Architecture Provides Business, Data, Application & Technology Architectures for All IT Projects
    • Firefighter – Supports the Business
      Reliable Architecture for Some Practices/Projects
    • Unstable – Struggles to Support
      Inability to Provide Reliable Architectures

    Info-Tech Insight

    There is no “absolute maturity” for organizations of all sizes, maturities, and cultural contexts. The maturity of enterprise architecture can only be measured against the business goals of the 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

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com1-888-670-8889

    Session 1 Session 2 Session 3 Session 4 Session 5
    Activities
    Identify organizational needs and landscape

    1.0 Interview stakeholders to identify business and technology needs

    1.1 Review organization perspective, including business needs, challenges, and strategic directions

    1.2 Conduct PESTLE analysis to identify business and technology trends

    1.3 Conduct SWOT analysis to identify business and technology internal perspective

    Create the EA value proposition

    2.1 Identify and prioritize EA stakeholders

    2.2 Create business and technology drivers from needs

    2.3 Define the EA value proposition

    2.4 Identify EA maturity and target

    Define the EA fundamentals

    3.1 Define the EA goals and objectives

    3.2 Determine EA scope

    3.3 Create a set of EA principles

    3.4. Define the need of a methodology/agility

    3.5 Create the EA vision and mission statement

    Identify the EA framework and communicate the EA strategy

    4.1 Define initial EA operating model and governance mechanism

    4.2 Define the activities and services the EA function will provide, derived from business goals

    4.3 Determine effectiveness measures

    4.4 Create EA roadmap and next steps

    4.5 Build communication plan for stakeholders

    Next Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite)

    5.1 Generate workshop report

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

    Outcomes
    1. Stakeholder insights
    2. Organizational needs, challenges, and direction summary
    3. PESTLE & SWOT analysis
    1. Stakeholder power map
    2. List of business and technology drivers with associated pains
    3. Set of EA contributions articulating the promises of value in the EA value proposition
    4. EA maturity assessment
    1. EA scope
    2. List of EA principles
    3. EA vision statement
    4. EA mission statement
    5. Statement about role of enterprise architect relative to agility
    1. EA capabilities mapped to business goals of the organization
    2. List of EA activities and services the EA function is committed to providing
    3. KPI definitions
    4. EA roadmap
    5. EA communication plan
    1. Completed workshop report on EA strategy with roadmap, recommendations, and outcomes from workshop

    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 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

    While variations depend on the maturity of the organization as well as its aspirations, these are some typical steps:

      Phase 1

    • Call #1: Explore the role of EA in your organization.

      • Phase 2

    • Call #2: Identify and prioritize stakeholders.
    • Call #3: Use a PESTLE analysis to identify business and technology needs.
    • Call #4: Prepare for stakeholder interviews.
    • Call #5: Discuss your EA value proposition.

      • Phase 3

    • Call #5: Understand the importance of EA fundamentals.
    • Call #6: Define the relevant EA services and their contributions to the organization.
    • Call #7: Measure EA effectiveness.

      • Phase 4

    • Call #8: Build your EA roadmap and communication plan.
    • Call #9: Discuss the EA role relative to agility.
    • Call #10: Summarize results and plan next steps.

    Design an Enterprise Architecture Strategy

    Phase 1

    Explore the Role of Enterprise Architecture

    Phase 1

    • 1.1 Explore a general EA strategy approach
    • 1.2 Introduce Agile EA architecture
      •

    Phase 2

    • 2.1 Define the business and technology drivers
    • 2.2 Define your value proposition

    Phase 3

    • 3.1 Realize the importance of EA fundamentals
    • 3.2 Finalize the EA fundamentals

    Phase 4

    • 4.1 Select relevant EA services
    • 4.2 Finalize the set of services and secure approval

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    Define the role of the group and different roles inside the enterprise architecture competency.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Leaders
    • Business Leaders

    Enterprise architecture optimizes the outcomes of the entire organization

    Corporate Strategy –› Enterprise Architecture Strategy

    Info-Tech Insight

    Enterprise architecture needs to have input from the corporate strategy of the organization. Similarly, EA governance needs to be informed by corporate governance. If this is not the case, it is like planning and governing with your eyes closed.

    Existing EA functions vary in the value they achieve due to their level of maturity

    EA Functions
    Operationalized
    • EA function is operationalized and operates as an effective core function.
    • Effectively aligns the business and IT through governance, communication, and engagement.
    		 –––› Common EA value
    Decreased cost Reduced risk
    Emerging
    • Emerging but limited ad hoc EA function.
    • Limited by lack of alignment to the business and IT.
    		 –x–› Cut through complexity Increased agility
    (Source: Booz & Co., 2009)

    Benefits of enterprise architecture

    1. Focuses on business outcomes (business centricity)
    2. Provides traceability of architectural decisions to/from business goals
    3. Provides ways to measure results
    4. Provides consistency across different lines of business: establishes a common vocabulary, reducing inconsistencies
    5. Reduces duplications, creating additional efficiencies at the enterprise level
    6. Presents an actionable migration to the strategy/vision, through short-term milestones/steps

    Benefits of enterprise architecture continued

    1. Done right, increases agility
    2. Done right, reduces costs
    3. Done right, mitigates risks
    4. Done right, stimulates innovation
    5. Done right, helps achieve the stated business goals (e.g. customer satisfaction) and improves the enterprise agility.
    6. Done right, enhances competitive advantage of the enterprise

    Qualities of a well-established and practical enterprise architecture

    1. Objective
    2. Impartial
    3. Credible
    4. Practical
    5. Measurable
      6. (Source: University of Toronto, 2021)

    Role of the enterprise architecture

    • Primarily to set up guardrails for the enterprise, so Agile teams work independently in a safe, ready-to-integrate environment
    • Establish strategy
    • Establish priorities
    • Continuously innovate
    • Establish enterprise standards and enterprise guardrails to guide Solution/Domain/Portfolio Architectures
    • Align with and be informed by the organization’s direction

    Members of the Architecture Board:

    • Chief (Business) Strategist
    • Lead Enterprise Architect
    • Business SME from each major domain
    • IT SME from each major domain
    • Operational & Infrastructure SME
    • Security & Risk Officer
    • Process Management
    • Other relevant stakeholders

    For enterprise architecture to contribute, EA must address the organizational vision and goals

    External Factors –› Layers of a Business Model
    (Organization)         		–› Architecture Supported Transformation
    Industry Changes Business Strategy
    Competition Value Streams
    (Business Outcomes)
    Regulatory Impacts Business Capability Maps
    • Security
    Workforce Impacts Execution
    • Policies
    • Processes
    • People
    • Information
    • Applications
    • Technology

    Info-Tech Insight

    External forces can affect the organization as a whole; they need to be included as part of the holistic approach for enterprise architecture.

    How does EA provide value?

    Business and Technology Drivers – A set of statements created from business and technology needs. Gathered from information sources, it communicates improvements needed.

    • Vision, Aspirations, Long-Term Goals – Vision, aspirations, long term goals

      • EA Contributions – EA contributions that will alleviate obstructions. Removing the obstructions will allow EA to help satisfy business and technology needs.

        • Promise of Value – A statement that depicts a concrete benefit that the EA practice can provide for the organization in response to business and technology drivers.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Enterprise architecture needs to create and be part of a culture where decisions are made through collaboration while focusing on enterprise-wide efficiencies (e.g. reduced duplication, reusability, enterprise-wide cost minimization, overall security, comprehensive risk mitigation, and any other cross-cutting concerns) to optimize corporate business goals.

    The EA function scope is influenced by the EA value proposition and previously developed EA fundamentals

    Establish the EA function scope by using the EA value proposition and EA fundamentals that have already been developed. After defining the EA function scope, refer back to these statements to ensure it accurately reflects the EA value proposition and EA fundamentals.

    EA value proposition

    +

    EA vision statement
    EA mission statement
    EA goals and objectives

    		—›
    Influences

    Organizational coverage

    Architectural domains

    Depth

    Time horizon

    		—›
    Defines     		EA function scope

    EA team characteristics

    Create the optimal EA strategy by including personnel who understand a broad set of topics in the organization

    The team assembled to create the EA strategy will be defined as the “EA strategy creation team” in this blueprint.

    • Someone who has been in the organization for a long time and has built strong relationships with key stakeholders. This individual can exert influence and become the EA strategy sponsor.
    • An individual who understands how the different technology components in the organization support its business operations.
    • Someone in the organization who can communicate IT concepts to business managers in a language the business understands.
    • An individual with a strategy background or perspective on the organization. This individual will understand where the organization is headed.
    • Any individuals who feel an acute pain as a result of poorly made investment decisions. They can be champions of EA strategy in their respective functions.

    EA skills and competencies

    Apart from business know-how, the EA team should have the following skills

    • Architectural thinking
    • Analytical
    • Trusted, credible
    • Can handle complexity
    • Can change perspectives
    • Can learn fast (business and technology)
    • Independent and steadfast
    • Not afraid to go against the stream
    • Able to understand problems of others with empathy
    • Able to estimate scaling on design decisions such as model patterns
    • Intrinsic capability to identify where relevant details are
    • Able to identify root causes quickly
    • Able to communicate complex issues clearly
    • Able to negotiate and come up with acceptable solutions
    • Can model well
    • Able to change perspectives (from business to implementation and operational perspectives).

    Use of enterprise architecture methodologies

    Balance EA methodologies with Agile approaches

    Using an enterprise architecture methodology is a good starting point to achieving a common understanding of what that is. Often, organizations agree to "tailor" methodologies to their needs.

    The use of lean/Agile approaches will increase efficiency beyond traditional methodologies.

    Use of EA methodologies vs. Agile methods

    When to use what?

    • Use an existing methodology to structure your thinking and establish a common vocabulary to communicate basic concepts, processes, and approaches.
    • Customize the methodology to your needs; make it as lean as possible.
    • Execute in an Agile way, but keep in mind the thoughtful checks recommended by your end-to-end methodology.
    • Clarify goals.
    • Have good measures and metrics in place.
    • Continuously monitor progress, fit for purpose, etc.
    • Highlight risks, roadblocks, etc.
    • Get support.
    • Communicate vision, goals, key decisions, etc.
    • Iterate.

    Business strategy first, EA strategy second, and EA operating model third

    Corporate Strategy
    “Why does our enterprise exist in the market?”
    EA Strategy
    “What does EA need to be and do to support the enterprise’s ability to meet its goals? What is EA’s value proposition?”     		Business & IT Operating Culture
    “How does the organization’s culture and structure influence the EA operating model?”
    EA Operating Model
    How does EA need to operate on a daily basis to deliver the value proposition?”

    High-level perspective

    Creating an effective practice involves many moving parts.

    A visual of the many moving parts in an effective practice; there are 6 smaller circles in a large circle, an input arrow labelled 'Environment', an output arrow labelled 'Results', and a thin arrow connecting 'Results' back to 'Environment'. Of the circles, 'Leadership' is in the center, connected to each of the others, while 'Culture', 'Strategy', 'Core Processes', 'Structure', and 'Systems' create a cycle. (Source: The Center for Organizational Design)

    • Environment. Influences that are external to the organization, such as customer perceptions, changing needs, and changes in technology, and the organization’s ability to adjust to them.
    • Strategy. The business strategy defines how the organization adds value and acts as the rudder to direct the organization. Organizational strategy defines the character of the organization, what it wants to be, its values, its vision, its mission, etc.
    • Core Process. The flow of work through the organization.
    • Structure. How people are organized around business processes. Includes reporting structures, boundaries, roles, and responsibilities. The structure should assist the organization with achieving its goals rather than hinder its performance.
    • Systems. Interrelated sets of tasks or activities that help organize and coordinate work.
    • Culture. The personality of the organization: its leadership style, attitudes, habits, and management practices. Culture measures how well philosophy is translated into practice.
    • Results. Measurement of how well the organization achieved its goals.
    • Leadership. Brings the organization together by providing vision and strategy; designing, monitoring, and nurturing the culture; and fostering agility.

    The answer to the strategic planning entity dilemma is enterprise architecture

    Enterprise architecture is a discipline that defines the structure and operation of an organization. The intent of enterprise architecture is to determine how an organization can most effectively achieve its current and future objectives.

    Vision, goals, and aspirations as well internal and external pressures

    Business current state

    • Existing capability
    • Existing capability
    • Existing capability
    • Existing capability
    • Existing capability
    		 Enterprise Architecture

    IT current state

    • IT asset management
    • Database services
    • Application development

    Business target state

    • Existing capability
    • Existing capability
    • Existing capability
    • Existing capability
    • Existing capability
    • New capability

    IT target state

    • IT asset management
    • Database services
    • Application development
    • Business analytics
    Complex, overlapping, contradictory world of humans vs. logical binary world of IT
    EA is a planning tool to help achieve the corporate business goals

    EA spans across all the domains of architecture

    Business architecture is the cornerstone that sets the foundation for all other architectural domains: security, data, application, and technology.

    A flow-like diagram titled 'Enterprise Architecture' beginning with 'Digital Architecture' and 'Business Architecture', which feeds into 'Security Architecture', which feeds into both 'Data Architecture' and 'Application Architecture', which both feed into 'Technology Architecture: Infrastructure'.

    “An enterprise architecture practice is both difficult and costly to set up. It is normally built around a process of peer review and involves the time and talent of the strategic technical leadership of an enterprise.” (The Open Group Architecture Framework, 2018)

    Enterprise architecture deployment continuum

    A diagram visualizing the Enterprise architecture deployment continuum with two continuums, 'Level of Embedding' and 'EA Value', assigning terms to EA deployments based on where they fall. On the left is an 'Ivory Tower' configuration: EA' is separated from the 'BU's but is still controlling them. Level of Embedding: 'Centralized', EA Value: 'Dictatorship'. In the center is a 'Balanced' configuration: 'EA' is spread across and connected to each 'BU'. Level of Embedding: 'Federated', EA Value: 'Democracy'. On the right is a 'Siloed' configuration: Each 'BU' has its own separate 'EA'. Level of Embedding: 'Decentralized', EA Value: 'Abdication of enterprise role'.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The primary question during the design of the EA operating model is how to integrate the EA function with the rest of the business.

    If the EA practice functions on its own, you end up with ivory tower syndrome and a dictatorship.

    If you totally embed the EA function within business units it will become siloed with no enterprise value.

    Organizations need to balance consistency at the enterprise level with creativity from the grass roots.

    Enterprise vs. Program/Portfolio/Domain

    Enterprise vs. Program/Portfolio/Domain. Image depicts where Enterprise Scope overlaps Program/Portfolio Scope. Enterprise Scope includes Business Architecture. Program/Portfolio Scope includes Business Requirements, Business Process, and Solutions Architecture. Overlap between scope includes Technology Architecture, Data Architecture, and Applications Architecture.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Decisions at the enterprise level apply across multiple programs/portfolios/solutions and represent the guardrails set for all to play within.

    Decide on the degree of centralization

    Larger organizations with multiple domains/divisions or business units will need to decide which architecture functions will be centralized and which, if any, will be decentralized as they plan to scope their EA program. What are the core functions to be centralized for the EA to deliver the greatest benefits?

    Typically, we see a need to have a centralized repository of reusable assets and standards across the organization, while other approaches/standards can operate locally.

    Centralization

    • Allows for more strategic planning
    • Visibility into standards and assets across the organization promotes rationalization and cost savings
    • Ensures enterprise-wide assets are used
    • More strategic sourcing of vendors and resellers
    • Can centrally negotiate pricing for better deals
    • Easier to manage risk and prepare for audits
    • Greater coordination of resources
    • Derives benefits from enterprise decisions, e.g. integration…

    Decentralization

    • May allow for more innovation
    • May be easier to demonstrate local compliance if the organization is geographically decentralized
    • May be easier to procure software if offices are in different countries
    • Deployment and installation of software on user devices may be easier

    EA strategy

    What is the role of enterprise architecture vis-à-vis business goals?

    • What needs to be done?
    • Who needs to be involved?
    • When?
    • Where?
    • Why?
    • How?

    Top-down approach starting from the goals of the organization

      What the Business Sees...
    • Business Goals
      • Value Streams
          What the CxO Sees...
        • Capabilities
            What the App Managers See...
          • Processes
            • Applications
                What the Program Managers See...
              • Programs/Projects

    Info-Tech Insight

    Being able to answer the deceptively simple question “How am I doing?” requires traceability to and from the business goals to be achieved all the way to applications, to infrastructure, and ultimately, to the funded initiatives (portfolios, programs, projects, etc.).

    Measure EA strategy effectiveness by tracking the benefits it provides to the corporate business goals

    The success of the EA function spans across three main dimensions:

    1. The delivery of EA-enabled business outcomes that are most important to the enterprise.
    2. The alignment between the business and the technology from a planning perspective.
    3. Improvements in the corporate business goals due to EA contributions (standardization, rationalization, reuse, etc.).

    Corporate Business Goals

    • Reduction in operating costs
    • Decreased regulatory compliance infractions
    • Increased revenue from existing channels
    • Increased revenue from new channels
    • Faster time to business value
    • Improved business agility
    • Reduction in enterprise risk exposure

    EA Contributions

    • Alignment of IT investments to business strategy
    • Achievement of business results directly linked to IT involvement
    • Application and platform rationalization
    • Standards in place
    • Flexible architecture
    • Better integration
    • Higher organizational satisfaction with technology-enabled services and solutions

    Measurements

    • Cost reductions based on application and platform rationalization
    • Time and cost reductions due to standardization
    • Time reduction for integration
    • Service reused
    • Stakeholder satisfaction with EA services
    • Increase in customer satisfaction
    • Rework minimized
    • Lower cost of integration
    • Risk reduction
    • Faster time to market
    • Better scalability, etc.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Organizations must create clear and smart KPIs (key performance indicators) across the board.

    From corporate strategy to enterprise architecture

    A model connecting 'Enterprise Architecture' with 'Corporate Strategy' through 'EA Services' and 'EA Strategy'.

    Info-Tech Insight

    In the absence of a corporate strategy, enterprise architecture is missing its North Star.

    However, enterprise architects can partner with the business strategists to build the needed vision.

    Traceability to and from business corporate business goals to EA contributions (sample)

    A model connecting 'Enterprise Architecture' with 'Corporate Goals' through 'EA Contributions'.

    Enterprise architecture journey

    The enterprise architecture journey, from left to right: 'Business Goals' and 'EA Maturity Assessment', 'EA Strategy', 'Industry-Specific Capability Model' and 'Customized to the Organization's Needs', 'EA Operating Model' and 'EA Governance', 'Business Architecture' and 'EA Tooling', 'Data Architecture' and 'Application Architecture', 'Infrastructure Architecture'.

    Agile architecture principles

    Agile architecture principles:
    • Fast learning cycle
    • Explore alternatives
    • Create environment for decentralized ideation and innovation

    According to the Scaled Agile Framework, three of the most applicable principles for the architectural professions refer to the following:

    1. "Fast learning cycle" refers to learning cycles that allow for quick reiterations as well as the opportunity to fail fast to learn fast.
    2. "Explore alternatives" refers to the exploration phase and also to the need to make tough decisions and balance competing demands.
    3. "Create environment for decentralized ideation and innovation" ensures that no one has a monopoly on innovation. Moreover, EA needs to invite ideas from various stakeholders (from the business to operations as well as implementers, etc.).

    Architecture roles in lean enterprises

    Typical architecture roles in modern/Agile lean enterprises

    • System Architect
    • Solution Architect
    • Enterprise Architect

    Depth vs. strategy focus

    Typical architect roles

    A graph with different architect roles mapped onto it. Axes are 'Low Strategic Impact' to 'High Strategic Impact' and 'Breadth' to 'Depth'. 'Enterprise Architect' has the highest strategic impact and most breadth. 'Technical/System Architect' has the lowest strategic impact and most depth. 'Solution Architect' sits in the middle of both axes.

    Architecture roles continued

    The three architect roles from above and their impacts on the list of 'Common Domains' to the right. 'Enterprise Architect's impact is 'Across Value Streams', 'Solution Architect's impact is 'Across Systems', 'Technical/System Architect's impact is 'Single System'. Adapted from Scaled Agile.

    Common Domains

    Business Architecture

    Information Architecture

    Application Architecture

    Technical Architecture

    Integration Architecture

    Security Architecture

    Others

    Info-Tech Insight

    All architects are boots on the ground and play in the solutioning space. What differs is their decisions’ impact (the enterprise architect’s decisions affects all domains and solutions).

    SAFe definitions of the Enterprise/Solution and System Architect roles can be found here.

    The role of the Enterprise Architect is detailed here.

    Collaboration models across the enterprise

    A collaboration model with 'Enterprise Architecture' at the top consisting of a 'Chief Enterprise Architect', 'Enterprise Architects', and 'EA Concerns across solutions': 'Architect A', 'Architect B', and 'Architect C'. Each lettered Architect is connected to their respective 'Solution Architect (A-C)' which runs their respective 'Delivery Team (A-C)' with 'Other Team Members'.(Adapted from Disciplined Agile)

    There are both formal and informal collaborations between enterprise architects and solution architects across the enterprise.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Enterprise architects should collaborate with solutions architects to create the best solutions at the enterprise level and to provide guidance across the board.

    Architect roles in SAFe

    According to Scale Agile Framework 5 for Lean Enterprises:

    • The system architect participates in the Essential SAFe
    • Solution architects and system architects participate in Large Solution
    • The enterprise architect participates in the Portfolio SAFe
    • Enterprise, solution, and system architects are all involved in Full SAFe

    Please check the SAFe Scaled Agile site for detailed information on the approach.

    Architect roles and their participation in Agile events (see likely events and a typical calendar)

    Info-Tech Insight

    A clear commitment for architects to achieve and support agility is needed. Architects should not be in an ivory tower; they should be hands on and engaged in all relevant Agile ceremonies, like the pre- and post-program increment (PI) planning, etc.

    Architect syncs are also required to ensure the needed collaboration.

    Architect participation in Agile ceremonies, according to SAFe:

    Architecture runway (at scale)

    Info-Tech Insight

    Architecting for scale, modularity, and extensibility is key for the architecture to adapt to changing conditions and evolve.

    Proactively address NFRs; architect for performance and security.

    Continuously refine the solution intent.

    For large solutions, longer foundational architectural runways are needed.

    Having an intentional continuous improvement/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline to continuously release, test, and monitor is key to evolving large and complex systems.

    Parallel continuous exploration/integration/deployment

    A cycle titled DevOps containing three smaller cycles labelled 'Continuous Explorations', 'Continuous Integration', and 'Continuous Deployment'.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Architects need to help make some fundamental decisions, e.g. help define the environment that best supports continuous innovation or exploration and continuous integration, deployment, and delivery.

    Typical strategic enterprise architecture involvement

    Enterprise Architect —DRIVES–› Enterprise Architecture Strategy

    Enterprise Architecture Strategy
    • Application Strategy
    • Business Strategy
    • Data Strategy
    • Implementation Strategy
    • Infrastructure Strategy
    • Inter-domain Collaboration
    • Integration Strategy
    • Operations Strategy
    • Security Strategy
      • (Adapted from Scaled Agile)

    The EA statement relative to agility

    The enterprise architecture statement relative to agility specifies the architects’ responsibilities as well as the Agile protocols they will participate in. This statement will guide every architect’s participation in planning meetings, pre- and post-PI, various syncs, etc. Use simple and concise terminology; speak loudly and clearly.

    Strong EA statement relative to agility has the following characteristics:

    • Describes what different architect roles do to achieve the vision of the organization
    • In an agile way
    • Compelling
    • Easy to grasp
    • Sharply focused
    • Specific
    • Concise

    Sample EA statement relative to agility

    • Create strategies that provide guardrails for the organization, provide standards, reusable assets, accelerators, and other decisions at the enterprise level that support agility.
    • Participate in pre-PI and post-PI planning activities, architect syncs, etc.

    A clear statement can include additional details surrounding the enterprise architect’s role relative to agility

    Below is a sample of connecting keywords to form an enterprise architect role statement, relative to agility.

    Optimize, transform, and innovate by defining and implementing the [Company]’s target enterprise architecture in an agile way.

    Optimize – We collaborate with the business to analyze and optimize business capabilities and business processes to enable the agile and efficient attainment of [Company name] business objectives.

    Transform – We support IT-enabled business transformation programs by building and maintaining a shared vision of the future-state enterprise and consistently communicating it to stakeholders.

    Innovate – We identify and develop new and creative opportunities for IT to enable the business. We communicate the art of the possible to the business.

    Defining and implementing – We engage with project teams early and guide solution design and selection to ensure alignment to the target-state enterprise architecture and provide guidance and accelerators.

    Target enterprise structure in an agile way – We analyze business needs and priorities and assess the current state of the enterprise. We build and maintain the target enterprise architecture blueprints that define:

    • Business capabilities and processes (business architecture)
    • Data, application, and technology assets that enable business capabilities and processes (technology architecture)
    • Architecture principles
    • Standards and reusable assets
    • Continuous exploration, integration, and deployment

    Traditional vs. Agile approaches

    Traditional Enterprise Architecture Next-Generation Enterprise Architecture
    Scope: Technology focused Business transformation (scope includes both business and technology)
    Bottom up Top down
    Inside out Outside In
    Point to point; difficult to change Expandable, extensible, evolvable
    Control-based: Governance intensive; often over-centralized Guidance-based: Collaboration and partnership-driven based on accepted guardrails
    Big up-front planning Incremental/dynamic planning; frequent changes
    Functional siloes and isolated projects, programs, and portfolios Enterprise-driven outcome optimization (across value streams)

    Info-Tech Insight

    The role of the architecture in Lean (Agile) approaches is to set up the needed guardrails and ensure a safe environment where everyone can be effective and creative.

    Design an Enterprise Architecture Strategy

    Phase 2

    Create the EA Value Proposition

    Phase 1

    • 1.1 Explore a general EA strategy approach
    • 1.2 Introduce Agile EA architecture

    Phase 2

    • 2.1 Define the business and technology drivers
    • 2.2 Define your value proposition
      •

    Phase 3

    • 3.1 Realize the importance of EA fundamentals
    • 3.2 Finalize the EA fundamentals

    Phase 4

    • 4.1 Select relevant EA services
    • 4.2 Finalize the set of services and secure approval

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify and prioritize EA stakeholders.
    • Create business and technology drivers from stakeholder information.
    • Identify business pains and technology drivers.
    • Define EA contributions to alleviate the pains.
    • Create promises of value to fully articulate the value proposition.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Leaders
    • Business Leaders

    Step 2.1

    Define the Business and Technology Drivers

    Activities
    • 2.1.1 Use a stakeholder power map to identify and prioritize EA stakeholders
    • 2.1.2 Conduct a PESTLE analysis
    • 2.1.3 Review strategic planning documents
    • 2.1.4 Conduct EA stakeholder interviews

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Learn the five-step process to create an EA value proposition.
    • Uncover business and technology needs from stakeholders.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Leaders
    • Business Leaders

    Outcomes of this step

    An understanding of your organization’s EA needs.

    Create the Value Proposition

    Step 2.1 Step 2.2

    Value proposition is an important step in the creation of the EA strategy

    Creating an EA value proposition should be the first step to realizing a healthy EA function. The EA value proposition demonstrates to organizational stakeholders the importance of EA in helping to realize their needs.

    Five steps towards the successful articulation of EA value proposition:

    1. Identify and prioritize stakeholders. The EA function must know to whom to communicate the value proposition.
    2. Construct business and technology drivers. Drivers are derived from the needs of the business and IT. Needs come from the analysis of external factors, strategic documents, and interviewing stakeholders. Helping stakeholders and the organization realize their needs demonstrates the value of EA.
    3. Discover pains that prevent driver realization. There are always challenges that obstruct drivers of the organization. Find out what they are to get closer to showing the value of EA.
    4. Brainstorm EA contributions. Pains that obstruct drivers have now been identified. To demonstrate EA’s value, think about how EA can help to alleviate those pains. Create statements that show how EA’s contribution will be able to overcome the pain to show the value of EA.
    5. Derive promises of value. Complete the articulation of value for the EA value proposition by stating how realizing the business or technology will provide in terms of value for the organization. Speak with the stakeholders to discover the value that can be achieved.

    Info-Tech Insight

    EA can deliver many benefits to an organization. To increase the likelihood of success, each EA group needs to commit to delivering value to their organization based on the current operating environment and the desired direction of the enterprise. An EA value proposition will articulate the group’s promises of value to the enterprise.

    The foundation of an optimal EA value proposition is laid by defining the right stakeholders

    All stakeholders need to know how the EA function can help them. Provide the stakeholders with an understanding of the EA strategy’s impact on the business by involving them.

    A stakeholder map can be a powerful tool to help identify and prioritize stakeholders. A stakeholder map is a visual sketch of how various stakeholders interact with your organization, with each other, and with external audience segments.

    An example stakeholder map with the 'Key players' quadrant highlighted, it includes 'CEO', 'CIO', and the modified position of 'CFO' after being engaged.

    “Stakeholder management is critical to the success of every project in every organization I have ever worked with. By engaging the right people in the right way in your project, you can make a big difference to its success…and to your career.” (Rachel Thompson, MindTools)

    2.1.1 Use a stakeholder power map to identify and prioritize EA stakeholders

    2 hours

    Input: Expertise from the EA strategy creation team

    Output: An identified and prioritized set of stakeholders for the EA function to target

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    1. A stakeholder power map helps to visualize the importance of various stakeholders and their concerns so you can prioritize your time according to the most powerful and most impacted stakeholders.
    2. Evaluate each stakeholder in terms of power, Involvement, impact, and support.
      • Power: How much influence does the stakeholder have? Enough to drive the project 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 resistor?
    3. Map each stakeholder to an area on the Power Map Template.
    4. Ask yourself if the power map looks accurate. Is there someone who has no involvement in EA strategy development but should?
    5. Some stakeholders may have influence over others. For example, a COO who highly values the opinion of the Director of Operations would be influenced by that director. Draw an arrow from one stakeholder to another to signify this relationship.

    Download the Stakeholder Power Map Template for more detailed instructions on completing this activity.

    Each stakeholder will have a set of needs that will influence the final EA value proposition

    All stakeholders will have a set of needs they would like to address. Take those needs and translate them into business and technology drivers. Drivers help clearly articulate to stakeholders, and the EA function, the stakeholder needs to be addressed.

    Business Driver

    Business drivers are internal or external business conditions, changing business capabilities, and changing market trends that impact the way EA operates and provides value to the enterprise.

    Examples:

    Ensure corporate compliance with legislation pertaining to data and security (e.g. regulated oil fields).

    Enable the automation and digitization of internal processes and services to business stakeholders.

    Technology Driver

    Technology drivers are internal or external technology conditions or factors that are not within the control of the EA group that impact the way that the EA group operates and provides value to the enterprise.

    Examples:

    Establish standards and policies for enabling the organization to take advantage of cloud and mobile technologies.

    Reduce the frequency of shadow IT by lowering the propensity to make business–technology decisions in isolation.

    (Source: The Strategic CFO, 2013)

    Gather information from stakeholders to begin the process of distilling business and technology drivers

    Review information sources, then analyze them to derive business and technology drivers. Information sources are not targeted towards EA stakeholders. Analyze the information sources to create drivers that are relevant to EA stakeholders.

    Information Sources Drivers (Examples)

    PESTLE Analysis

    Strategy Documents

    Stakeholder Interviews

    SWOT Analysis

    		—›

    Analysis

    		 —›

    Help the organization align technology investments with corporate strategy

    Ensure corporate compliance with legislation.

    Increase the organization’s speed to market.

    Business and Technology Needs

    By examining information sources, the EA team will come across a set of business and technology needs. Through analysis, these needs can be synthesized into drivers.

    The PESTLE analysis will help you uncover external factors impacting the organization

    PESTLE examines six perspectives for external factors that may impact business and technology needs. Below are prompting questions to facilitate a PESTLE analysis working session.

    Political
    • Will a change in government (at any level) affect your organization?
    • Do inter-government or trade relations affect you?
    • Are there shareholder needs or demands that must be considered?
    • How are your costs changing (moving off-shore, fluctuations in markets, etc.)?
    • Do currency fluctuations have an effect on your business?
    • Can you attract and pay for top-quality talent (e.g. desirable location, reasonable cost of living, changes to insurance requirements)?
    		 Economic
    Social
    • What are the demographics of your customers and/or employees?
    • What are the attitudes of your customers and/or staff (e.g. do they require social media, collaboration, transparency of costs)?
    • What is the general lifecycle of an employee (i.e. is there high turnover)?
    • Is there a market of qualified staff?
    • Is your business seasonal?
    • Do you require constant technology upgrades (e.g. faster network, new hardware)?
    • What is the appetite for innovation within your industry/business?
    • Are there demands for increasing data storage, quality, BI, etc.?
    • Are you looking to cloud technologies?
    • What is the stance on bring your own device?
    • Are you required to do a significant amount of development work in-house?
    		 Technological
    Legal
    • Are there changes to trade laws?
    • Are there changes to regulatory requirements (i.e. data storage policies, privacy policies)?
    • Are there union factors that must be considered?
    • Is there a push towards being environmentally friendly?
    • Does the weather have any effect on your business (hurricanes, flooding, etc.)?
    		 Environmental

    2.1.2 Conduct a PESTLE analysis

    2 hours

    Input: Expertise from EA strategy creation team

    Output: Identified set of business and technology needs from PESTLE

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    1. Begin conducting the PESTLE analysis by breaking the participants into groups. Divide the six different perspectives amongst the groups.
    2. Ask each group to begin to derive business and technology needs from their assigned perspectives. Use some of the areas noted below along with the questions on the previous slide to derive business and technology needs.
      • Political: Examine taxes, environmental regulations, and zoning restrictions.
      • Economic: Examine interest rates, inflation rate, exchange rates, the financial and stock markets, and the job market.
      • Social: Examine gender, race, age, income, disabilities, educational attainment, employment status, and religion.
      • Technological: Examine servers, computers, networks, software, database technologies, wireless capabilities, and availability of Software as a Service.
      • Legal: Examine trade laws, labor laws, environmental laws, and privacy laws.
      • Environmental: Examine green initiatives, ethical issues, weather patterns, and pollution.
    3. Ask each group to take into account the following questions when deriving business and technology needs:
      • Will business components require any changes to address the factor?
      • Will information technology components changes be needed to address any factor?
    4. Have each team record its findings. Have each team present its list and have remaining teams give feedback and additional suggestions. Record any changes in this step.

    Download the PESTLE Analysis Template to assist with completing this activity.

    Strategic planning documents can provide information regarding the direction of the organization

    Some organizations (and business units) create an authoritative strategy document. These documents contain corporate aspirations and outline initiatives, reorganizations, and shifts in strategy. From these documents, a set of business and technology needs can be generated.

    Overt Statements

    • Corporate objectives and initiatives are often explicitly stated in these documents. Look for statements that begin with phrases such as “Our corporate objectives are…”
    • Remember that different organizations use different terminology; if you cannot find the word goal or objective then look for “pillar,” “imperative,” “theme,” etc.

    Turn these statements to business and technology needs by:

    Asking the following:
    • Is there a need from a business perspective to address these objectives, initiatives, and shifts in strategy?
    • Is there a need from a technology perspective to address these objectives, initiatives, and shifts in strategy?

    Covert Statements

    • Some corporate objectives and initiatives will be mentioned in passing and will require clarification. For example: “As we continue to penetrate new markets, we will be diversifying our manufacturing geography to simplify distribution.”

    2.1.3 Review strategic planning documents

    2 hours

    Input: Strategic documents in the organization

    Output: Identified set of business and technology needs from documents

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Begin the identification process of business and technology needs from strategic documents with the following steps:

    1. Work with the EA strategy creation team to identify the strategic documents within the organization. Look for documents with any of the following content:
      • Corporate strategy document
      • Business unit strategy documents
      • Annual general reports
    2. Gather the strategic documents into one place and call a meeting with the EA strategy creation team to identify the business and technology needs in those documents.
    3. Pick one document and look through its contents. Look for future-looking words such as:
      • We will be…
      • We are planning to…
      • We will need…
    4. Consider those portions of the document with future-looking words and ask the following:
      • Will business components require any changes to address these objectives?
      • Will information technology components changes be needed to address these objectives?
    5. Record the business and technology needs identified in step 4. As well, record any questions you may have regarding the document contents for stakeholders to validate later.
    6. Move to the next document once complete. Complete steps 3-5 for the remaining strategy documents.

    Stakeholder interviews will help you collect primary data and will shed light on stakeholder priorities and challenges

    In this interview process, you will be asking EA stakeholders questions that uncover their business and technology needs. You will also be able to ask follow-up questions to get a better understanding of abstract or complex concepts from the strategy document review and PESTLE analysis.

    EA Stakeholders:

    • Stakeholders may not think of their business and technology needs. But stakeholders will often explicitly state their objectives and initiatives.
    • Objectives often result in risks, opportunities, and annoyances:
      • Risks: Potential damage associated with pursuing an objective or initiative.
      • Opportunities: Potential gains that could be leveraged when capturing objectives and initiatives.
      • Annoyances: Roadblocks that could hinder the pursuit of objectives and initiatives.
    • Ask stakeholders questions on these areas to discern their business and technology needs.

    Risks + Opportunities + Annoyances –› Business and Technology Needs

    2.1.4 Conduct EA stakeholder interviews

    4-8 hours

    Input: Expertise from the EA stakeholders

    Output: Business and technology needs for EA stakeholders

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team, Identified EA stakeholders

    1. Schedule an interview with each of the stakeholders that were identified as key stakeholders in the Stakeholder Power Map.
    2. Meet with the key EA stakeholders and start business and technology needs gathering. Schedule each identified key stakeholder for an interview.
    3. When a stakeholder arrives for their interview, ask the following questions and record the answers to help uncover needs. Be sure to record which stakeholder answered the question. Further, record any future stakeholders that agree.
      • What are the current strengths of your organization?
      • What are the current weaknesses of your organization?
      • What is the number 1 risk you need to prevent?
      • What is the number 1 opportunity you want to capitalize on?
      • What is the number 1 annoying pet peeve you want to remove?
      • How would you prioritize these risks, opportunities, and annoyances?
    4. Recorded answer example: “We can’t see what the other departments are doing; when we spend a lot of money to invest in something, we later find out the capability is already within the company.”
    5. After completing each interview, verify with each stakeholder that you have captured their business and technology needs. Continue the interview process until all identified key stakeholders have been interviewed.
    6. Capture all inputs into a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) format.

    Step 2.2

    Define Your Value Proposition

    Activities
    • 2.2.1 Create a set of business and technology drivers from business and technology needs
    • 2.2.2 Identify the pains associated with the business and technology drivers
    • 2.2.3 Identify the EA contributions that can address the pains
    • 2.2.4 Create promises of value to shape the EA value proposition

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Use business and technology drivers to determine EA’s role in your organization.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Leaders
    • Business Leaders

    Outcomes of this step

    A value proposition document that ties the value of the EA function to stakeholder needs.

    Create the EA Value Proposition

    Step 2.1 Step 2.2

    Synthesize the collected data into business and technology drivers

    Two triangles labelled 'Business needs' and 'Technology needs' point to a cloud labelled 'Analysis', which connects to the driver attributes on the right via a dotted line.

    There are several key attributes that a driver should have.

    Driver Key Attributes
    • A succinct statement.
    • Begins with “action words” to communicate a call to action (e.g. Support, Help, Enable).
    • Written in a language understood by all parties involved.
    • Communicates a need for improvement or prevention.

    “The greatest impact of enterprise architecture is the strategic impact. Put the mission and the needs of the organization first.” (Matthew Kern, Clear Government Solutions)

    2.2.1 Create a set of business and technology drivers from business and technology needs

    3 hours

    Input: Expertise from EA strategy creation team

    Output: A set of business and technology drivers

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team, EA stakeholders

    Meet with the EA strategy creation team and follow the steps below to begin the process of synthesizing the business and technology needs into drivers.

    1. Lay out the documented business and technology needs your team gathered from PESTLE analysis, strategy document reviews, and stakeholder interviews.
    2. Assess the documented business and technology needs to see if there are common themes. Consolidate those similar business and technology needs by crafting one driver for them. For example:
      • PESTLE: Influx of competitors in the marketplace causing tighter margins.
      • Document review: Improve investment quality and their value to the organization.
      • Stakeholder interview: “We can’t see what the other departments are doing; when we spend a lot of money to invest in something, we later find out the capability is already within the company.”
      • Consolidated business driver example: Help the organization align investments with the corporate strategy and departmental priorities.
    3. As well, synthesize the business and technology needs that cannot be consolidated.
    4. Verify the completed list of drivers with stakeholders. This is to ensure you have fully captured their needs.

    Download the EA Value Proposition Template to record your findings in this activity.

    When addressing business and technology drivers, an organization can expect obstacles

    A pain is an obstacle that business stakeholders will face when attempting to address business and technology drivers. Identify the pains associated with each driver so that EA’s contributions can be linked to resolving obstacles to address business needs.

    Business and Technology Drivers

    ›

    Pains
    Created by assessing information sources. A sentence that states the nature of the pain and how the pain stops the organization from addressing the drivers.
    Examples:
    • Business driver: Help the organization align investments with the corporate strategy and departmental priorities.
    • Technology driver: Improve the organization’s technology responsiveness and increase speed to market.
    		 Examples:
    • Business driver pains: Lack of holistic view of business capabilities obstructs the organization from aligning investments with corporate strategy and departmental priorities.
    • Technology driver pains: Ineffective application development requiring delays decreases the speed to market.

    2.2.2 Identify the pains associated with the business and technology drivers

    2 hours

    Input: Expertise from EA strategy creation team and EA stakeholders

    Output: An associated pain that obstructs each identified driver

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team, EA stakeholders

    Call a meeting with the EA strategy creation team and any available stakeholders to identify the pains that obstruct addressing the business and technology drivers.

    Take each driver and ask the questions below to the EA strategy creation team and to any EA stakeholders who are available. Record the answers to identify the pains when realizing the drivers.

    1. What are your challenges in performing the activity or process today?
    2. What other business activities/processes will be impacted/improved if we solve this?
    3. What compliance/regulatory/policy concerns do we need to consider in any solution?
    4. What are the steps in the process/activity?

    Take the recorded answers and follow the steps below to create the pain statements:

    1. Answers to the questions above can be long, unfocused, or spoken in a casual manner. To turn the answer into pains, refine the recorded answers into a succinct sentence that captures its meaning.
      • Recorded answer example: “I feel like there needs to be a holistic view of the organization. If we had a tool to see all the capabilities across the business, then we can figure out what investments should be prioritized.”
      • Example of pain statement: Lack of holistic view of business capabilities obstructs the organization from aligning investments with corporate strategy and departmental priorities.
    2. When the list of pains has been written out, verify with the stakeholders that you have fully captured their pains.

    Download the EA Value Proposition Template to record your findings in this activity.

    The identified pains can be alleviated by a set of EA contributions

    Set the foundations for the value proposition by brainstorming the EA contributions that can alleviate the pains.

    Business and technology drivers produce:

    Pains

    		 —›
    EA contributions produce:

    Value by alleviating pains
    Pains

    Obstructions to addressing business and technology drivers. Stakeholders will face these pains.

    Examples
    • Business driver pains: Lack of holistic view of business capabilities obstructs the organization from aligning investments with corporate strategy and departmental priorities.
    EA contributions

    Activities the EA function can perform to help alleviate the pains. Demonstrates the contributions the EA function can make to business value.

    Examples:
    • Business driver EA contributions: Business capability mapping shows the business capabilities of the organization and the technology that supports those capabilities in the current and target state. This provides a view for the set of investments that are needed by the organization, which can then be prioritized.

    Enterprise architecture functions can provide a diverse set of contributions to any organization – Sample

    EA contribution category EA contribution details
    Define business capabilities and processes As-is and target business capabilities and processes are documented and understood by both IT and the business.
    Design information flows and services Information flows and services effectively support business capabilities and processes.
    Analyze gaps and identify project opportunities Create informed project identification, scope definition, and project portfolio management.
    Optimize technology assets Greater homogeneity and interoperability between tangible and intangible technology assets.
    Create and maintain technology standards Decrease development, integration, and support efforts. Reduce complexity and improve interoperability.
    Rationalize technology assets Tangible and intangible technology assets are rationalized to adequately and efficiently support information flows and services.

    2.2.3 Identify the EA contributions that can address the pains

    2 hours

    Input: Expertise from EA strategy creation team

    Output: EA contributions that addresses the pains that were identified

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Gather with the EA strategy creation team, take each pain, then ask and record the answers to the questions below to identify the EA contributions that would solve the pains:

    1. What activities can the EA practice conduct to overcome the pain?
    2. What are the core EA models that can help accurately define the problem and assist in finding appropriate resolutions?
    3. What are the general EA benefits that can be associated with solving this pain?

    Answers to the questions above will generate a list of activities EA can do to help alleviate the pains. Use the following steps to complete this activity:

    1. Create a stronger tie between the EA contributions and pains by linking the EA contribution statement to the pain.
      • Example of pain statement: Lack of holistic view of business capabilities obstructs the organization from aligning investments with corporate strategy and departmental priorities.
      • Example of EA contributions statement: Business capability mapping shows the business capabilities of the organization and the technology that supports those capabilities in the current and target state. This provides a view for the set of investments that are needed by the organization, which can then be prioritized.
    2. Verify with the stakeholders that they understand the EA contributions have been written out and how those contributions address the pains.

    Download the EA Value Proposition Template to record your findings in this activity.

    EA promises of value articulate EA’s commitment to the organization

    • Business Goals and Technology Drivers
      A set of statements created from business and technology needs. Gathered from information sources, it communicates improvements needed.

      • Value Streams, Aspirations, Long-Term Goals
        Value streams, aspirations, long-term goals

        • EA Contributions
          EA contributions that will alleviate the obstructions. Removing the obstructions will allow EA to help satisfy business and technology needs.

          • Promise of Value
            A statement that depicts a concrete benefit the EA practice can provide for the organization in response to business and technology drivers.
            Communicate the statements in a language that stakeholders understand to complete the articulation of EA’s value proposition.

    2.2.4 Create promises of value to shape the EA value proposition

    2 hours

    Input: Expertise from EA strategy creation team and EA stakeholders

    Output: Promises of value for each business and technology driver

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team, EA stakeholders

    Now that the EA contributions have been identified, identify the promises of value to articulate the value proposition.

    Take each driver, then ask and record the answers to the questions below to identify the promises of value when realizing the drivers:

    1. What does amazing look like if we solve this perfectly?
    2. What other business activities/processes will be impacted/improved if we solve this?
    3. What measures of success/change should we use to prove value of the effort (KPIs/ROI)?

    Take the recorded answers and follow the steps below to create the promises of value.

    1. Answers to the questions above can be long, unfocused, or spoken in a casual manner. To turn the answer into a promise of value, refine the recorded answer into a succinct sentence that captures its meaning.
      • Business driver example: Help the organization align investments with the corporate strategy and departmental priorities.
      • Recorded answer example: “If this would be solved perfectly, we would have a very easy time planning investments and investment planning hours can be spent doing other activities.”
      • Promises of value example: Increase the number of investments that have a direct tie to corporate strategy.
    2. When the promises of value have been written out, verify with the stakeholders that you have fully captured their ideas.

    Download the EA Value Proposition Template to record your findings in this activity.

    Design an Enterprise Architecture Strategy

    Phase 3

    Build the EA Fundamentals

    Phase 1

    • 1.1 Explore a general EA strategy approach
    • 1.2 Introduce Agile EA architecture

    Phase 2

    • 2.1 Define the business and technology drivers
    • 2.2 Define your value proposition

    Phase 3

    • 3.1 Realize the importance of EA fundamentals
    • 3.2 Finalize the EA fundamentals
      •

    Phase 4

    • 4.1 Select relevant EA services
    • 4.2 Finalize the set of services and secure approval

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Create an EA vision statement and an EA mission statement.
    • Create EA goals, define EA objectives, and link them to EA goals.
    • Define the EA function scope dimensions.
    • Create a set of EA principles for your organization.
    • Discuss current methodology.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • EA Team
    • IT Leaders
    • Business Leaders

    Step 3.1

    Realize the Importance of EA Fundamentals

    Activities
    • 3.1.1 Create the EA vision statement
    • 3.1.2 Create the EA mission statement
    • 3.1.3 Create EA goals
    • 3.1.4 Define EA objectives and link them to EA goals
    • 3.1.5 Record the details of each EA objective

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Define and document the fundamentals that guide the EA function.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • EA Team
    • IT Leaders
    • Business Leaders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Vision and mission statements for the EA function.
    • A set of EA goals and a set of objectives to track progression toward those goals.
    Build the EA Fundamentals
    Step 3.1 Step 3.2

    EA fundamentals guide the EA function

    EA fundamentals include a vision statement, a mission statement, goals and objectives, and principles. They are a set of documented statements that guide the EA function. The fundamentals guide the EA function in terms of its strategy and decision making.

    EA vision statement EA mission statement

    EA fundamentals
    EA goals and objectives EA principles

    Info-Tech Insight

    Treat the critical elements of the EA group the same way as you would a business. Create a directional foundation for EA and define the vision, mission, goals, principles, and scope necessary to deliver on the established value proposition.

    The EA vision statement articulates the aspirations of the EA function

    The enterprise architecture vision statement communicates a desired future state of the EA function. The statement is expressed in the present tense. It seeks to articulate the desired role of the EA function and how the EA function will be perceived.

    Strong EA vision statements have the following characteristics:

    • Describe a desired future
    • Focus on ends, not means
    • Communicate promise
    • Concise, no unnecessary words
    • Compelling
    • Achievable
    • Inspirational
    • Memorable

    Sample EA vision statements:

    • To be a trusted partner for both the business and IT, driving enterprise effectiveness, efficiency, and agility at [Company Name].
    • To be a trusted partner and advisor to both the business and IT, contributing to business-IT alignment and cost reduction at [Company Name].
    • To create distinctive value and accelerate [Company Name]’s transformation.

    The EA mission statement articulates the purpose of the EA function

    The enterprise architecture mission statement specifies the team’s purpose or “reason of being.” The mission should guide each day’s activities and decisions. The mission statements use simple and concise terminology, speak loudly and clearly, and generate enthusiasm for the organization.

    Strong EA mission statements have the following characteristics:

    • Articulates EA function purpose and reason for existence
    • Describes what the EA function does to achieve its vision
    • Defines who the customers of the EA function are
    • Compelling
    • Easy to grasp
    • Sharply focused
    • Inspirational
    • Memorable
    • Concise

    Sample EA mission statements:

    • Define target enterprise architecture for [Company Name], identify solution opportunities, inform IT investment management, and direct solution development, acquisition, and operation compliance.
    • Synergize with both the business and IT to define and help realize [Company Name]’s target enterprise architecture that enables the business strategy and optimizes IT assets, resources, and capabilities.

    The EA vision and mission statements become relevant to EA stakeholders when linked to the promises of value

    The process for constructing the enterprise architecture vision statement and enterprise architecture mission statement is articulated below.

    Promises of value Derive keywords Construct draft statements Reference test criteria Finalize statements
    Derive the a set of keywords from the promises of value to accurately capture their essence. Create the initial statement using the keywords. Check the initial statement against a set of test criteria to ensure their quality. Finalize the statement after referencing the initial statement against the test criteria.

    Derive keywords from promises of value to begin the vision and mission statement creation process

    Develop keywords by summarizing the promises of value that were derived from drivers into one word that will take on the essence of the promise. See examples below:

    Business and technology drivers Promises of value Keywords
    Help the organization align investments with the corporate strategy and departmental priorities. Increase the number of investments that have a direct tie to corporate strategy. Business
    Support the rapid growth and development of the company through fiscal planning, project planning, and technology sustainability. Ensure budgets and projects are delivered on time with the assistance of technology. IT-Enabled
    Reduce the duplication and work effort to build and deploy technology solutions across the entire organization. Aim to reduce the number of redundant applications in the organization to streamline processes and save costs. Catalyst
    Improve the organization’s technology responsiveness and increase speed to market. Reduce the number of days required in the SDLC for all core business support projects. Value delivery

    An inspirational vision statement is greater than the sum of the individual words

    Ensure the sentence is cohesive and captures additional value outside of the keywords. The statement as a whole should be greater than the sum of the parts. Expand upon the meaning of the words, if necessary, to communicate the value. Below is an example of a finished vision statement.

    Sample

    Be a catalyst for IT-enabled business value delivery.

    Catalyst – We will continuously interact with the business and IT to accelerate and improve results.

    IT-enabled – We will ensure the optimal use of technology in enabling business capabilities to achieve business objectives.

    Business – We will be perceived as a business-focused unit that understands [Company name]’s business priorities and required business capabilities.

    Value delivery – EA’s value will be recognized by both business and IT stakeholders. We will track and market EA’s contribution to business value organization-wide.

    A clear mission statement can include additional details surrounding the EA team’s desired and expected value

    Likewise, below is a sample of connecting keywords together to form an EA mission statement:

    Optimize, transform, and innovate by defining and implementing the [Company]’s target enterprise architecture.

    Optimize – We collaborate with the business to analyze and optimize business capabilities and business processes to enable the agile and efficient attainment of [Company name] business objectives.

    Transform – We support IT-enabled business transformation programs by building and maintaining a shared vision of the future-state enterprise and consistently communicating it to stakeholders.

    Innovate – We identify and develop new and creative opportunities for IT to enable the business. We communicate the art of the possible to the business.

    Defining and implementing – We engage with project teams early and guide solution design and selection to ensure alignment to the target-state enterprise architecture.

    Target enterprise structure – We analyze business needs and priorities and assess the current state of the enterprise. We build and maintain the target enterprise architecture blueprints that define:

    • Business capabilities and processes (business architecture)
    • Data, application, and technology assets that enable business capabilities and processes (technology architecture)
    • Architecture principles and standards

    3.1.1 Create the EA vision statement

    1 hour

    Input: Identified promises of value, Vision statement test criteria

    Output: EA function vision statement

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Begin the creation of the EA vision statement by following the steps below:

    1. Gather the EA strategy creation team and have the promises of value from the EA value proposition laid out.
    2. Select one promise of value and work with the team to identify one word that captures the essence of that promise of value.
    3. Continue to the next promise of value until all of the promises of value have a keyword identified.
    4. Have the identified set of keywords laid out and see if any of their meanings are similar and can be consolidated together. Consolidate similar meaning keywords.
    5. Create the initial draft of the EA vision statement by linking the keywords together.
    6. Check the initial draft of the vision statement against the test criteria below. Ask the team if the vision statement satisfies each of the test criteria.
      • Do you find this vision exciting?
      • Is the vision clear, compelling, and easy to grasp?
      • Does this vision somehow connect to the core purpose?
      • Will this vision be exciting to a broad base of people in the organization, not just those within the EA team?
    7. Make changes to the initial draft to satisfy the test criteria. Socialize the EA vision statement with EA stakeholders to make sure it captures their needs.

    3.1.2 Create the EA mission statement

    1 hour

    Input: Identified promises of value, Mission statement test criteria

    Output: EA function mission statement

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Begin the creation of the EA mission statement by following the steps below:

    1. Gather the EA strategy creation team and have the promises of value from the EA value proposition laid out.
    2. Select one promise of value and work with the team to identify one word that captures the essence of that promise of value.
    3. Continue to the next promise of value until all of the promises of value have a keyword identified.
    4. Have the identified set of keywords laid out, and see if any of their meanings are similar and can be consolidated together. Consolidate similar meaning keywords.
    5. Create the initial draft of the EA mission statement by linking the keywords together.
    6. Check the initial draft of the mission statement against the following test criteria below. Ask the team if the mission statement satisfies each of the test criteria.
      • Do you find this purpose personally inspiring?
      • Does the purpose help you to decide what activities to not pursue, to eliminate from consideration? Is this purpose authentic – something true to what the organization is all about – not merely words on paper that sound nice?
      • Would this purpose be greeted with enthusiasm rather than cynicism by a broad base of people in the organization?
    7. Make changes to the initial draft to satisfy the test criteria. Socialize the EA mission statement with EA stakeholders to make sure it captures their needs.

    EA goals demonstrate the achievement of success of the EA function

    Enterprise architecture goals define specific desired outcomes of an EA function. EA goals are important because they establish the milestones the EA function can strive toward to deliver their promises of value.

    Inform EA goals by examining:

    Promises of value

    		 —›
    EA goals produce:

    Targets and milestones
    Promises of value

    Produce EA strategic outcomes that can be classified into four categories. The four categories are:

    • Business performance
    • IT performance
    • Customer value
    • Risk management
    EA goals

    Support the strategic outcomes. EA goals can be strategic or operational:

    • EA strategic goals support the strategic outcomes.
    • EA operational goals help measure the architecture capability quality and supporting processes.

    3.1.3 Create EA goals

    2 hours

    Input: Identified promises of value

    Output: EA goals

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Begin the creation of EA goals by following the steps below:

    1. Gather the EA strategy creation team and the identified promises of value from Phase 2, Create the EA Value Proposition.
    2. Open the EA Goals and Objectives Template and examine the list of default EA goals already within the template.
    3. Take the identified promises of value and discuss with the team if any of the EA goals in the template relate to the promises of value. Record the related EA goal and promise of value. See example below:
      • Promises of value example: Increase the number of investments that have a direct tie to corporate strategy.
      • Related EA goal example: Alignment of IT and business strategy.
    4. Repeat step 3 until all identified promises of value have been examined in relation to the EA goals in the template.
    5. If there are promises of value that are not related to an EA goal in the template, create EA goals to relate to those promises of value. Keep in mind that EA goals need to support the strategic outcomes produced by the promises of value. Record the EA goals in the template and document the related promises of value.

    Download the EA Goals and Objectives Template to assist with completing this activity.

    Starting with COBIT, select the appropriate objectives to track EA goals – Sample

    Below are examples of EA goals and the objectives that track their performance:

    IT performance-oriented goals Objectives
    Alignment of IT and business strategy
    • Increase the percentage of enterprise strategic goals and requirements supported by IT strategic goals by X percent in the fiscal year.
    • Improve stakeholder satisfaction with planned function and services portfolio scope by X percent in the fiscal year.
    • Increase the percentage of IT value drivers mapped to business value drivers by X percent in the next fiscal year.
    Increase in IT agility
    • Improve business executive satisfaction with IT’s responsiveness to new requirements by X percent in the fiscal year.
    • Increase the number of critical business processes supported by up-to-date infrastructure and applications in the next three years.
    • Lower the average time to turn strategic IT objectives into agreed-upon and approved initiatives.
    Optimization of IT assets, resources, and capabilities
    • Increase the frequency of capability maturity and cost optimization assessments.
    • Improve the frequency of reporting for assessment result trends.
    • Raise the satisfaction levels of business and IT executives with IT-related costs and capabilities by X percent.

    3.1.4 Define EA objectives and link them to EA goals

    2 hours

    Input: Defined EA goals

    Output: EA objectives linked to EA goals

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Begin the process of defining EA objectives and linking them to EA goals using the following steps:

    1. Gather the EA strategy creation team and open the EA Goals and Objectives Template.
    2. Have the goals laid out, and refer to the objectives already in the EA Goals and Objectives Template. Examine if any of them will fit the goals your team has created.
    3. If some of the goals your team has created do not fit with the objectives in the template, begin the process of creating new objectives. Remember, EA objectives are SMART metrics that help track the progress toward the EA goals.
    4. Create an EA objective and check if it is SMART by asking some of the questions below:
      • Specific: Is the objective specific to the goal? Is the objective clear to anyone who has basic knowledge of the goal?
      • Measurable: Is it possible to figure out how far the team would be away from completing the objective?
      • Agreed Upon: Does everyone involved agree the objective is the correct way to measure progress?
      • Realistic: Can the objective be met within the availability of resources, knowledge, and time?
      • Time Based: Is there a time-bound component to the goal?
    5. Continue to create new objectives until each goal has an objective linked to it.

    Download the EA Goals and Objectives Template to assist with completing this activity.

    For each of the objectives, determine how they will be collected, reported, and implemented

    Add details to the enterprise architecture objectives previously defined to increase their clarity to stakeholders.

    EA objective detail category Description
    Unit of measure
    • The unit in which the objective will be presented.
    Calculation formula
    • The formula by which the objective will be calculated.
    Objective baseline, status, and target
    • Baseline: The state of the objective at the start of measurement.
    • Status: The current state of the measurement.
    • Target: The target state the measurement should reach.
    Data collection
    • Responsible: The individual responsible for collecting the data.
    • Source: Where the data originates.
    • Frequency: How often the data will be collected to calculate the objective.
    Reporting
    • Target Audience: The people the objective will be presented to.
    • Method: The method used to present the data collected on the objective (e.g. report, presentation).
    • Frequency: How often the data will be presented to the target audience.

    3.1.5 Record the details of each EA objective

    2 hours

    Input: Defined list of EA objectives

    Output: Increased detail into each defined EA objective

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Record the details of each EA objective. Use the following steps below to assist with recording the details:

    1. Gather the EA strategy creation team, and open the EA Goals and Objectives Template.
    2. Select one objective that has been identified and discuss the formula for calculating the objective and in what units the objective will be recorded. Record the information in the “Calculation formula” and “Unit of measure” columns in the template once they have been agreed upon.
    3. Using the same objective, move to the “Data Collection” portion of the template. Discuss and record the following: the source of the data that generates the objective, the frequency of reporting on the objective, and the person responsible for reporting the objective.
    4. Move to the “Reporting” portion of the template. Discuss and record the target audience for the objective and the reporting frequency and method to those audiences.
    5. Examine the “Objective baseline,” “Objective status,” and “Objective target” columns. Record any measurement you may currently have in the “Objective baseline” column. Record what you would like the objective measurement to be in the “Objective target” column. Note: Keep track of the progression towards the target in the “Objective status” column in the future.
    6. Select the next objective and complete steps 2–5 for that measure. Continue this process until you have recorded details for all objectives.

    Download the EA Goals and Objectives Template to assist with completing this activity.

    Step 3.2

    Finalize the EA Fundamentals

    Activities
    • 3.2.1 Define the organizational coverage dimension of the EA function scope
    • 3.2.2 Define the architectural domains and depth dimension
    • 3.2.3 Define the time horizon dimension
    • 3.2.4 Create a set of EA principles for your organization
    • 3.2.5 Add the rationale and implications to the principles
    • 3.2.6 Operationalize the EA principles
    • 3.2.7 Discuss the need for classical methodology and/or a combination including Agile practices

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Define the EA function scope dimensions.
    • Create a set of EA principles.
    • Discuss the organization’s current methodology, if any, and whether it works for the business.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • EA Team
    • IT Leaders
    • Business Leaders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Defined scope of the EA function.
    • A set of EA principles for your organization.
    • A decision on traditional vs. Agile methodology or a blend of both.

    Build the EA Fundamentals

    Step 3.1 Step 3.2

    A clear EA function scope defines the EA sandbox

    The EA function scope constrains the promises of value the EA function will deliver on by taking into account factors across four dimensions. The EA function scope ensures that the EA function is not stretched beyond its current/planned means and capabilities when delivering the promised value. The four dimensions are illustrated below:

    Organizational coverage
    Determine the focus of the enterprise architecture effort in terms of specific business units, functions, departments, capabilities, or geographical areas.     		Depth
    Determine the appropriate level of detail to be captured, based on the intended use of the enterprise architecture and the contingent decisions to be made.

    EA Scope
    Architectural Domains
    Determine the EA domains (business, data, application, infrastructure, security) that are appropriate to address stakeholder concerns and architecture requirements.     		Time horizon
    Determine the target-state architecture’s objective time period.

    The EA function scope is influenced by the EA value proposition and previously developed EA fundamentals

    Establish the EA function scope by using the EA value proposition and EA fundamentals that have been developed. After defining the EA function scope, refer back to these statements to ensure the EA function scope accurately reflects the EA value proposition and EA fundamentals.

    EA value proposition

    +

    EA vision statement
    EA mission statement
    EA goals and objectives

    		—›
    Influences

    Organizational coverage

    Architectural domains

    Depth

    Time horizon

    		—›
    Defines     		EA function scope

    EA scope – Organizational Coverage

    The organizational coverage dimension of EA scope determines the focus of enterprise architecture effort in the organization. Coverage can be determined by specific business units, functions, departments, capabilities, or geographic areas. Info-Tech has typically seen two types of coverage based on the size of the organization.

    Small and medium-size enterprise

    Indicators: Full-time employees dedicated to manage its data and IT infrastructure. Individuals are IT generalists and may have multiple roles.

    Recommended coverage: Typically, for small and medium-size businesses, the organizational coverage of architecture work is the entire enterprise. (Source: The Open Group, 2018)

    Large enterprise

    Indicators: Dedicated full-time IT staff with expertise to manage specific applications or parts of the IT infrastructure.

    Recommended coverage: For large enterprises, it is often necessary to develop a number of architectures focused on specific business segments and/or geographies. In this federated model, an overarching enterprise architecture should be established to ensure interoperability and conformance to overarching EA principles. (Source: DCIG, 2011)

    EA objectives track the progression towards the target set by EA goals

    Enterprise architecture objectives are specific metrics that help measure and monitor progress towards achieving an EA goal. Objectives are SMART.

    EA goals —› EA objectives
    • EA strategic goals:
      • Business performance
      • IT performance
      • Customer value
      • Risk management
    • EA operational goals
    • Specific
    • Measurable
    • Agreed upon
    • Realistic
    • Time bound
    (Source: Project Smart, 2014)

    Download the EA Goals and Objectives Template to see examples between the relationship of EA goals to objectives.

    Measure the EA strategy effectiveness by tracking the benefits it provides to the corporate business goals

    The success of the EA function is influenced by the following:

    • The delivery of EA-enabled business outcomes that are most important to the enterprise.
    • The alignment between the business and IT from a planning perspective.
    • Improvements in the corporate business goals due to EA contributions (standardization, rationalization, reuse, etc.).
    Corporate Business Goals Measurements
    • Reduction in operating costs
    • Decrease in regulatory compliance infractions
    • Increased revenue from existing channels
    • Increased revenue from new channels
    • Faster time to business value
    • Improved business agility
    • Reduction in enterprise risk exposure
    • Cost reductions based on application and platform rationalization
    • Standard-based solutions
    • Time reduction for integration
    • Service reused
    • Stakeholder satisfaction with EA services
    • Increase customer satisfaction
    • Rework minimized
    • Lower cost of integration
    • Risk reduction
    • Faster time to market
    • Better scalability, etc.

    3.2.1 Define the organizational coverage dimension of the EA function scope

    2 hours

    Input: EA value proposition, Previously defined EA fundamentals

    Output: Organizational coverage dimension of EA scope defined

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Define the organizational coverage of the EA function scope using the following steps below:

    1. Gather the EA strategy creation team. As well, gather the EA value proposition, the EA vision and mission statements, and the EA goals and objectives your team has already created.
    2. Ask the team to read each of the documents gathered in the previous step. This ensures the concepts are fresh in the team members’ minds when defining the EA function scope organizational coverage.
    3. Consider how much of the organization the EA function would need to cover. Refer to the gathered materials to assist with your decision. For example:
      • EA mission statement: Optimize, transform, and innovate by defining and implementing the [Company]’s target enterprise architecture.
      • Implications on organizational coverage: If the purpose of the EA function is to help optimize, transform, and innovate with target-state architecture mapping, then the scope should cover the entire organization. Only by mapping the entire organization’s architecture can the EA function assist with optimizing, transforming, and innovating.
    4. Work with the EA strategy creation team to examine all the gathered materials and document the implications on organization coverage as shown in step 3.
    5. Discuss with the team and select the organizational coverage level that best fits the documented implications for all the gathered materials. Refer back to the gathered materials and make any changes necessary to ensure they support the selected organizational coverage.

    EA scope – Architectural Domains

    A complete enterprise architecture should address all five architectural domains. The five architectural domains are business, data, application, infrastructure, and security.

    Enterprise Architecture
    —› Data Architecture
    Business Architecture —› Infrastructure Architecture
    Security Architecture
    —› Application Architecture

    “The realities of resource and time constraints often mean there is not enough time, funding, or resources to build a top-down, all-inclusive architecture encompassing all four architecture domains. Build architecture domains with a specific purpose in mind.” (The Open Group, 2018)

    Each architectural domain creates a different view of the organization

    Below are the definitions of different domains of enterprise architecture (Info-Tech perspective; others can be identified as well, e.g. Integration Architecture).

    Business Architecture

    Business architecture is a means of demonstrating the business value of subsequent architecture work to key stakeholders and the return on investment to those stakeholders from supporting and participating in the subsequent work. Business architecture defines the business strategy, governance, organization, and key business processes.

    Data Architecture

    Describes the structure of an organization’s logical and physical data assets and data management resources.

    Application Architecture

    Provides a blueprint for the individual applications to be deployed, their interactions, and their relationships to the core business processes of the organization.

    Infrastructure Architecture

    Represents the sum of hardware, software, and telecommunications-related IT capability associated with a particular enterprise. It is concerned with the synergistic operations and management of the devices in the organization.

    Security Architecture

    Provides an unified security design that addresses the necessities and potential risks involved in a certain scenario or environment. It also specifies when and where to apply security controls.
    (Sources: The Open Group, 2018; IT Architecture Journal, 2014; Technopedia, 2016)

    EA scope – Depth

    EA scope depth defines the architectural detail for each EA domain that the organization has selected to pursue. The level of depth is broken down into four levels. The level of depth the organization decides to pursue should be consistent across the domains.

    Contextual
    • Helps define the organization scope, and examines external and internal requirements and their effect on the organization. For example, enterprise governance.
    Conceptual
    • High-level representations of the organization or what the organization wants to be. For example, business strategy, IT strategy.
    Logical
    • Models that define how to implement the representation in the conceptual stage. For example, identifying the business gaps from the current state to the target state defined by the business strategy.
    Physical
    • The technology and physical tools used to implement the representation created in the logical stage. For example, business processes that need to be created to bridge the gaps identified and reach the target stage.
    (Source: Zachman International, 2011) Business Architecture Data Architecture Application Architecture Infrastructure Architecture Security Architecture

    Each architectural depth level contains a set of key artifacts

    The graphic below depicts examples of the key artifacts that each domain of architecture would produce at each depth level.

    Contextual Enterprise Governance
    Conceptual Business strategy Business objects Use-case models Technology landscaping Security policy
    Logical Business capabilities Data attribution Application integration Network/ hardware topology Security standards
    Physical Business process Database design Application design Configuration management Security configuration
    Business Architecture Data Architecture Application Architecture Infrastructure Architecture Security Architecture

    3.2.2 Define the architectural domains and depth dimension of the EA function scope

    2 hours

    Input: EA value proposition, Previously defined EA fundamentals

    Output: Architectural domain and depth dimensions of EA scope defined

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Define the EA function scope for your organization using the following steps below:

    1. Gather the EA strategy creation team. As well, gather the EA value proposition, the EA vision and mission statements, and the EA goals and objectives that your team has already created.
    2. Ask the team to read each of the documents gathered in the previous step. This ensures the concepts are fresh in the team members’ minds when defining the architectural domains and depth of the EA function scope.
    3. Consider the architectural domains and the depth those domains need to reach. Refer to the gathered materials to assist with your decision. For example:
      • Promise of value: Increase the number of IT investments with a direct tie to business strategy.
      • Implications on architectural domains: The EA function will need business architecture. Business architecture generates business capability mapping, which will anticipate what IT investments are needed for the future.
      • Implications on depth: Depth for business architecture needs to reach a logical level to encompass business capabilities.
    4. Work with the EA strategy creation team to examine all the gathered materials and document the implications on architectural domains and depth as shown in step 3.
    5. Discuss with the team and select the architectural domains and the depth for each domain that best fits the documented implication. Refer back to the gathered materials and make any changes necessary to ensure they support the selected architectural domains and depth.

    EA scope – Time Horizon

    The EA scope time horizon dictates how long to plan for the architecture.

    It is important that the EA team’s work has an appropriate planning horizon while avoiding two extremes:

    1. A planning horizon that is too short focuses on immediate operational goals and strategic quick wins, missing the “big picture,” and fails to support the achievement of strategic long-term enterprise goals.
    2. A planning horizon that is too long is at a higher risk of becoming irrelevant.

    Target the same strategic planning horizon as your business. Additionally, consider the following recommendations:

    Planning Horizon: 1 year 2-3 years 5 years
    Recommended under the following conditions:
    • Corporate strategy is not stable and frequently changes direction (typical for small and some mid-sized companies).
    • There will be a major update of the corporate strategy in one year.
    • The company will be acquired by or merged with another company in one year.
    • The business' strategic plan spans the next two to three years, and corporate strategy is moderately stable within this time frame (typical for mid-sized and some large companies).
    • The business' strategic plan spans the next five years and corporate strategy is very stable (typical for large companies).

    3.2.3 Define the time horizon dimension of the EA function scope

    2 hours

    Input: EA value proposition, Previously defined EA fundamentals

    Output: Time horizon dimension of EA scope defined

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Define the EA function scope for your organization using the following steps below:

    1. Gather the EA strategy creation team. As well, gather the EA value proposition, the EA vision and mission statements, and the EA goals and objectives your team has already created.
    2. Ask the team to read each of the documents gathered in the previous step. This ensures the concepts are fresh in the team members’ minds when crafting the EA function scope.
    3. Consider the time horizons of the EA function scope. Refer to the gathered materials to assist with your decision. For example:
      • EA Objective: Increase the percentage of enterprise strategic goals and requirements supported by IT strategic goals by 30% in the next 3 years.
      • Implications on time horizon: Because it will take 3 years to measure the success of these EA objectives, the time horizon may need to be 3 years.
    4. Work with the EA strategy creation team to examine all the gathered materials and document the implications on time horizon as shown in step 3.
    5. Discuss with the team and select the time horizon that best fits the documented implication. Refer back to the gathered materials and make any changes necessary to ensure they support the selected architectural time horizon.

    EA principles capture the EA value proposition essence and provide guidance for the decisions that impact architecture

    EA principles are shared, long-lasting beliefs that guide the use of IT in constructing, transforming, and operating the enterprise by informing and restricting target-state enterprise architecture design, IT investment portfolio management, solution development, and procurement decisions.

    EA value proposition Influences
    —›     		EA Principles Guide and inform
    —›     		Decisions on the Use of IT Direct and control
    ‹—     		Specific Domain Policies
    ‹———————

    What decisions should be made?     		————— ————— —————
    How should decisions be made?     		————— ————— —————————›
    Who has the accountability and authority to make decisions?

    EA principles must be carefully constructed to make sure they are adhered to and relevant

    Info-Tech has identified a set of characteristics that EA principles should possess. Having these characteristics ensures the EA principles are relevant and followed in the organization.

    Approach focused EA principles are focused on the approach, i.e. how the enterprise is built, transformed, and operated, as apposed to what needs to be built, which is defined by both functional and non-functional requirements.
    Business relevant Create EA principles specific to the organization. Tie EA principles to the organization’s priorities and strategic aspirations.
    Long lasting Build EA principles that will withstand the test of time.
    Prescriptive Inform and direct decision making with EA principles that are actionable. Avoid truisms, general statements, and observations.
    Verifiable If compliance can’t be verified, the principle is less likely to be followed.
    Easily digestible EA principles must be clearly understood by everyone in IT and by business stakeholders. EA principles aren’t a secret manuscript of the EA team. EA principles should be succinct; wordy principles are hard to understand and remember.
    Followed Successful EA principles represent a collection of beliefs shared among enterprise stakeholders. EA principles must be continuously “preached” to all stakeholders to achieve and maintain buy-in.

    In organizations where formal policy enforcement works well, EA principles should be enforced through appropriate governance processes.

    Review ten universal EA principles to determine if your organization wishes to adopt them

    1. Enterprise value focus We aim to provide maximum long-term benefits to the enterprise as a whole while optimizing total costs of ownership and risks.
    2. Fit for purpose We maintain capability levels and create solutions that are fit for purpose without over-engineering them.
    3. Simplicity We choose the simplest solutions and aim to reduce operational complexity of the enterprise.
    4. Reuse › buy › build We maximize reuse of existing assets. If we can’t reuse, we procure externally. As a last resort, we build custom solutions.
    5. Managed data We handle data creation, modification, and use enterprise-wide in compliance with our data governance policy.
    6. Controlled technical diversity We control the variety of technology platforms we use.
    7. Managed security We manage security enterprise-wide in compliance with our security governance policy.
    8. Compliance to laws and regulations We operate in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.
    9. Innovation We seek innovative ways to use technology for business advantage.
    10. Customer centricity We deliver best experiences to our customers with our services and products.

    3.2.4 Create a set of EA principles for your organization

    2 hours

    Input: Info-Tech’s ten universal EA principles, Identified promises of value

    Output: A defined set of EA principles for your organization

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Create a set of EA principles for your organization using the steps below:

    1. Gather the EA strategy creation team, download the EA Principles Template – EA Strategy, and have the identified promises of value opened.
    2. Select one universal principle and relate it to the promises of value by discussing with the EA strategy creation team. If there is a relation, record “Yes” in the template on the slide “Select the applicability of 10 universally accepted EA principles.” See example below:
      • Universal principle: Enterprise value focus – We aim to provide maximum long-term benefits to the enterprise as a whole while optimizing total costs of ownership and risks.
      • Related promise of value example: Increase the number of investments that have a direct tie with corporate strategy.
    3. Continue the process in step 2 until all ten universal EA principles have been examined. If there is a universal principle that is unrelated to a promise of value, discuss with the team whether the principle still needs to be included. If the principle is not included, record “No” in the template on the slide “Select the applicability of 10 universally accepted EA principles.”
    4. If there are any promises of value that are not captured by the universally accepted EA principles, the team may choose to create new principles. Create the new principles in the format below and record them in the template.
      • Name: The name of the principle, in a few words.
      • Statement: A sentence that expands on the “Name” section and explains what the principle achieves.

    Download the EA Principles Template – EA Strategy to document this step.

    Organizational stakeholders are more likely to follow EA principles when a rationale and an implication are provided

    After defining the set of EA principles, ensure they are all expanded upon with a rationale and implications. The rationale and implications ensure principles are more likely to be followed because they communicate why the principles are important and how they are to be used.

    Name
    • The name of the EA principle, in a few words.
    Statement
    • A sentence that expands on the “Name” section and explains what the principle achieves.
    Rationale
    • Describes the business benefits and reasoning for establishing the principle.
    • Explicitly links the principle to business/IT vision, mission, priorities, goals, or strategic aspirations (strategic themes).
    Implications
    • Describe when and how the principle is to be applied.
    • Communicate this section with “must” sentences.
    • Refer to domain-specific policies that provide detailed, domain-specific direction on how to apply the principle.

    3.2.5 Add the rationale and implications to the principles that have been created

    2 hours

    Input: Identified set of EA principles

    Output: EA principles that have rationale and implications

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Add the rationale and implication of each EA principle that your organization has selected using the following steps:

    1. Gather the EA strategy creation team and open the EA Principles Template – EA Strategy.
    2. Examine the EA Principles Template – EA Strategy. Look for the detailed descriptions of all the applicable EA universal principles, and discuss with the team whether the pre-populated rationale and implications need to be changed.
    3. Make sure all the rationale and implication sections of the applicable universal EA principles have been examined. Record the changes on the slide devoted to each principle in the template.
    4. Examine any new principles created outside of the universal EA principles. Create the rationale and implication sections for each of those principles. Use the slide “Review the rationale and implications for the applicable universal principles” in the EA Principles Template – EA Strategy to assist with this step.

    Download the EA Principles Template – EA Strategy to document this step.

    3.2.6 Operationalize the EA principles to ensure they are used when decisions are being made

    1-2 hours

    Input: Defined set of EA principles

    Output: EA principles are successfully operationalized

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Begin to operationalize the EA principles by reviewing the proposed principles with business and technology leadership to secure their approval.

    1. Publish the list of principles, their rationale, and their implications.
    2. Include the principles in any existing policies that guide decision making for the use of technology within the business.
    3. Provide existing governance bodies with the authority to enforce adherence to principles, and communicate the waiver process.
    4. Ensure that project-level teams are aware of the principles and have at least one champion guiding the decisions of the team.

    Review a use case for the utilization of EA principles – Sample

    After operationalizing the EA principles for your organization, the organization can now use those principles to guide and inform its IT investment decisions. Below is an example of a scenario where EA principles were used to guide and inform an IT investment decision.

    Organization wants to provision an application but it needs to decide how to do so, and it considers the relevant EA principles:

    • Reuse › buy › build
    • Managed security
    • Innovation

    The organization has decided to go with a specialized vendor, even though it normally prefers to reuse existing components. The vendor has experience in this domain, understands the data security implications, and can help the organization mitigate risk. Lastly, the vendor is known for providing new solutions on a regular basis and is a market leader, making it more likely to provide the organization with innovative solutions.

    An oil and gas company created EA fundamentals to guide the EA function

    CASE STUDY

    Industry: Oil & Gas
    Source: Info-Tech

    Challenge

    As an enterprise architecture function starting from ground zero, the organization did not have the EA fundamentals in place to guide the EA function. Further, the organization also did not possess an EA function scope to define the boundaries of the EA function.

    Due to the lack of EA scope, the EA function did not know which part of the organization to provide contributions toward. A lack of EA fundamentals caused confusion regarding the future direction of the EA function.

    Solution

    Info-Tech worked with the EA team to define the different components of the EA fundamentals. This included EA vision and mission statements, EA goals and objectives, and EA principles.

    Additionally, Info-Tech worked with the EA team to define the EA function scope.

    These EA strategy components were created by examining the needs of the business. The components were aligned with the identified needs of the EA stakeholders.

    Results

    The defined EA function scope helped set out the responsibilities of the enterprise architecture function to the organization.

    The EA vision and mission statements and EA goals and objectives were used to guide the direction of the EA function. These fundamentals helped the EA function improve its maturity and deliver on its promises.

    The EA principles were used in IT review boards to guide the decisions on IT investments in the organization.

    3.2.7 Discuss the need for a classical methodology and/or a combination including Agility practices

    1 hour

    Input: Existing methodologies

    Output: Decisions about need of agility, ceremonies, and protocols to be used

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Add the rationale and implication of adopting an Agile methodology and/or a combination with a traditional methodology.

    1. Is there an EA methodology adopted by the organization? Is there a classical one, or is it purely Agile?
    2. What would need to happen to address the business goals of the organization (e.g. is there a need to be more agile?)? Do you need to have more decisions centralized (e.g. to adopt certain standards, security controls)?
    3. Where on the decentralization continuum does your organization need to be?
    4. What role would Enterprise Architects have (would they need to be part of existing ceremonies? Would they need to blend traditional and agile processes?)?
    5. If a customized methodology is required, identify this as an item to be included as part of the EA roadmap (can be run as a Agile Enterprise Operating Model workshop).

    Design an Enterprise Architecture Strategy

    Phase 4

    Design the EA Services

    Phase 1

    • 1.1 Explore a general EA strategy approach
    • 1.2 Introduce Agile EA architecture

    Phase 2

    • 2.1 Define the business and technology drivers
    • 2.2 Define your value proposition

    Phase 3

    • 3.1 Realize the importance of EA fundamentals
    • 3.2 Finalize the EA fundamentals

    Phase 4

    • 4.1 Select relevant EA services
    • 4.2 Finalize the set of services and secure approval
      •

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Select relevant EA services
    • Finalize the set of services and secure approval

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • EA Team
    • IT Leaders
    • Business Leaders

    Step 4.1

    Select Relevant EA Services

    Activities
    • 4.1.1 Select the EA services relevant to your organization
    • 4.1.2 Identify if your organization needs additional services outside of the recommended list
    • 4.1.3 Complete all of the service catalog fields for each service to show the organization how each can be consumed

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Communicate a definition of EA services.
    • Link services to the previously identified EA contributions.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • EA Team
    • IT Leaders
    • Business Leaders

    Outcomes of this step

    • A defined set of services the EA function will provide.
    • An EA service catalog that demonstrates to the organization how each provided service can be accessed and consumed.

    Design the EA Services

    Step 3.1 Step 3.2

    The definition of EA services will allow the group to communicate how they can add value to EA stakeholders

    Enterprise architecture services are a set of activities the enterprise architecture function provides for the organization. EA services are important because the services themselves provide a set of benefits for the organization.

    Enterprise Architecture Services

    • A means of delivering value to the business by facilitating outcomes service consumers want to achieve.
    • EA services are defined from the business perspective using business language.
    • EA services are designed to enable required business activities.

    Viewing the EA function from a service perspective resolves the following pains:

    • Business users don’t know how EA can assist them.
    • Business users don’t know how to request access to a service with multiple sources of information available.
    • EA has no way of managing expectations for their users, which tend to inflate.
    • EA does not have a holistic view of all the services they need to provide.

    Link EA services to the previously identified EA contributions

    Previously identified EA contributions can be linked to EA services, which helps the EA function identify a set of EA services that are important to business stakeholders. Further, linking the EA contributions to EA services can define for the EA function the services they need to provide.

    Demonstrate EA service value by linking them to EA contributions

    1. EA stakeholders generate drivers
    2. Drivers have pains that obstruct them
    3. Pains are alleviated by EA contributions
    4. EA contributions help define the EA services needed

      • EA Contributions
        Example EA contribution: Business capability mapping shows the business capabilities of the organization and the technology that supports those capabilities in the current and target state. This provides a view for the set of investments that are needed by the organization, which can then be prioritized.

        • EA Services
          Example EA service: Target-state business capability mapping

    4.1.1 Select the EA services relevant to your organization

    2 hours

    Input: Previously identified EA contributions from the EA value proposition

    Output: A set of EA services selected for the organization from Info-Tech’s defined set of EA services

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Begin the selection of EA services relevant to your organization by following the steps below:

    1. Gather the EA strategy creation team, and the list of identified EA contributions that the team formulated during Phase 2.
    2. Open the EA Service Planning Tool, select one sub-service, and read its definition.
    3. Based on the definition of the sub-service, refer back to the identified list of EA contributions and check if there is an identified EA contribution that matches the service.
      • If the EA service definitions matches one of the identified EA contributions, then that EA service is relevant to the organization. If there is no match, then the EA service may not be relevant to the organization.
    4. Highlight the sub-service if it is relevant. Add a checkmark beside the EA contribution if it is addressed by a sub-service.
    5. Select the next sub-service and repeat steps 2-4. Continue down the list of sub-services in the EA Service Planning Tool until all sub-services have been examined.

    Download the EA Service Planning Tool to assist with this activity.

    4.1.2 Identify if your organization needs additional services outside of the recommended list

    2 hours

    Input: Expertise from the EA strategy creation team, Previously defined EA contributions

    Output: A defined set of EA services outside the list Info-Tech has recommended

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Identify if services outside of the recommended list in the EA Service Planning Tool are relevant to your organization by using the steps below:

    1. Gather the EA strategy creation team and the list of EA contributions with checkmarks for contributions addressed by EA services.
    2. Take the list of unaddressed EA contributions and select one EA contribution in the list. Assess whether an EA service is required to address the EA contribution. Ask the group the following:
      • Can the EA practice provide the service now?
      • Does providing this EA service line up with the previously defined EA function scope and EA fundamentals?
    3. Decide if a service needs to be provided for that contribution. If yes, give the service a name and a definition.
    4. Then, decide if the service fits into one of the service categories in the EA Service Planning Tool. If there is no fit, create another service category. Define the new service category as well.
    5. Continue to the next unaddressed EA contribution and repeat steps 2-4. Repeat this process until all unaddressed EA contributions have been assessed.

    Download the EA Service Planning Tool to assist with this activity.

    Create the EA service catalog to demonstrate to the organization how each service can be accessed and used

    The EA service catalog is an important communicator to the business. It shifts the technology-oriented view of EA to services that show direct benefit to the business. It is a tool that communicates and provides clarity to the business about the EA services that are available and how those services can assist them.

    Define the services to show value Define the service catalog to show how to use those services
    Already defined
    • EA service categories
    • The services needed by the EA stakeholders in each EA service category
    Need to define
    • Should EA deliver this service?
    • Service triggers
    • Service provider
    • Service requestor

    Info-Tech Insight

    The EA group must provide the organization with a list of services it will provide to demonstrate value. This will help the team manage expectations and the workload while giving organizational stakeholders a clear understanding of how to engage EA and what lies outside of EA’s involvement.

    4.1.3 Complete all the service catalog fields for each service to show the organization how each can be consumed

    4 hours

    Input: Expertise from the EA strategy creation team

    Output: Service details for each EA service in your organization

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Complete the details for each relevant EA service in the EA Service Planning Tool by using the following steps:

    1. Gather the EA strategy creation team, and open the EA Service Planning Tool.
    2. Select one of the services you have defined as relevant and begin the process of defining the service. Define the following fields:
      • Should EA deliver this service? Should the EA team provide this service? (Yes/No)
      • Service trigger: What trigger will signal the need for the service?
      • Service provider: Who in the EA team will provide the service?
      • Service requestor: Who outside of the EA team has requested this service?
    3. Have the EA strategy creation team discuss and define each of the fields for the service above. Record the decisions in the corresponding columns of the EA Service Planning Tool.
    4. Select the next required EA service, and repeat steps 2 and 3. Repeat the process until all required EA services have their details defined.

    Download the EA Service Planning Tool to assist with this activity.

    Step 4.2

    Finalize the Set of Services and Secure Approval

    Activities
    • 4.2.1 Secure approval for your organization’s EA strategy
    • 4.2.2 Map the EA contributions to business goals
    • 4.2.3 Quantify the EA effectiveness
    • 4.2.4 Determine the role of the architect in the Agile ceremonies of the organization

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Present the EA strategy to stakeholders.
    • Determine service details for each EA service in your organization.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • EA Team
    • IT Leaders
    • Business Leaders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Secured approval for your organization’s EA strategy.
    • Measure effectiveness of EA contributions.

    Design the EA Services

    Step 4.1 Step 4.2

    Present the EA strategy to stakeholders to secure approval of the finalized EA strategy

    For the EA strategy to be successfully executed, it must be approved by the EA stakeholders. Securing their approval will increase the likelihood of success in the execution of the EA operating model.

    Outputs that make up the EA strategy —› Present outputs to EA strategy stakeholders
    • Business and technology drivers
    • EA function value proposition

    • EA vision statement
    • EA mission statement
    • EA goals and objectives
    • EA scope
    • EA principles

    • EA function services
    • Identified and prioritized EA stakeholders.








    • The checkmark symbol represents the outputs this blueprint assists with creating.

    4.2.1 Secure approval of your organization’s EA strategy

    1 hour

    Input: Completed EA Function Strategy Template, Expertise from EA strategy creation team

    Output: Approval of the EA strategy

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team, Key EA stakeholders

    Use the following steps to assist with securing approval for your organization’s EA strategy:

    1. Call a meeting between the EA strategy creation team and the identified key EA stakeholders. Key stakeholders were defined in activity 2.1.1.
    2. Open the completed EA Function Strategy Template. Use it to help you discuss the merits of the EA strategy with the key stakeholders.
    3. Discuss with the stakeholders any concerns and modifications they wish to make to the strategy. If detailed questions are asked, refer to the other templates created as a part of this blueprint. Record those concerns and address them at a later time.
    4. After presenting the EA strategy, ask the stakeholders for approval. If stakeholders do not approve, refer back to the concerns documented in step 3 and inquire if addressing the concerns will result in approval.
    5. If applicable, address stakeholder concerns with the EA strategy.
    6. Once EA strategy has been approved, publish the EA strategy to ensure there is a mutual understanding of what the EA function will provide to the organization. Move on to Info-Tech’s Define an EA Operating Model blueprint to begin executing upon the EA strategy.

    Use the EA Function Strategy Template to assist with this activity.

    4.2.2 Map the EA contributions to the business goals

    3 hours

    Input: Expertise from EA strategy creation team

    Output: Service details for each EA service in your organization

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Map EA contributions/services to the goals of the organization.

    1. Start from the business goals of the organization.
    2. Determine Business and IT drivers.
    3. Identify EA contributions that help achieve the business goals.

    Download the EA Service Planning Tool to assist with this activity.

    Trace EA drivers to business goals (sample)

    A model connecting 'Enterprise Architecture' with 'Corporate Goals' through 'EA Contributions'.

    4.2.3 Quantify the EA effectiveness

    1 hour

    Input: Expertise from EA strategy creation team

    Output: Defined KPIs (SMART)

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Use SMART key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure EA contributions vis-à-vis business goals.

    Measure the EA strategy effectiveness by tracking the benefits it provides to the corporate business goals

    The success of the EA function spans across three main dimensions:

    • The delivery of EA-enabled business outcomes that are most important to the enterprise.
    • The alignment between the business and IT from a planning perspective.
    • Improvements in the corporate business goals due to EA contributions (standardization, rationalization, reuse, etc.).
    Corporate Business GoalsEA ContributionsMeasurements
    • Reduction in operating costs
    • Decrease in regulatory compliance infractions
    • Increased revenue from existing channels
    • Increased revenue from new channels
    • Faster time to business value
    • Improved business agility
    • Reduction in enterprise risk exposure
    • Alignment of IT investments to business strategy
    • Achievement of business results directly linked to IT involvement
    • Application and platform rationalization
    • Standards in place
    • Flexible architecture
    • Better integration
    • Higher organizational satisfaction with technology-enabled services and solutions
    • Cost reductions based on application and platform rationalization
    • Standard based solutions
    • Time reduction for integration
    • Service reused
    • Stakeholder satisfaction with EA services
    • Increase customer satisfaction
    • Rework minimized
    • Lower cost of integration
    • Risk reduction
    • Faster time to market
    • Better scalability, etc.

    The oil and gas company began the EA strategy creation by crafting an EA value proposition

    CASE STUDY

    Industry: Oil & Gas
    Source: Info-Tech

    Challenge

    The oil and gas corporation faced a great challenge in communicating the role of enterprise architecture to the organization. Although it has the mandate from the CIO to create the EA function, there was no function in existence. Thus, few people in the organization understood EA.

    Because of this lack of understanding, the EA function was often undermined. The EA function was seen as an order taker that provided some services to the organization.

    Solution

    First, Info-Tech worked with the enterprise architecture team to define the EA stakeholders in the organization.

    Second, Info-Tech interviewed those stakeholders to identify their needs. The needs were analyzed and pains that would obstruct addressing those needs were identified.

    Lastly, Info-Tech worked with the team to identify common EA contributions that would solve those pains.

    Results

    Through this process, Info-Tech helped the team at the oil and gas company create a document that could communicate the value of EA. Specifically, the document could articulate the issues obstructing each stakeholder from achieving their needs and how enterprise architecture could solve them.

    With this value proposition, EA was able to demonstrate value to important stakeholders and set itself up for success in its future endeavors.

    The oil and gas company defined EA services to provide and communicate value to the organization

    CASE STUDY

    Industry: Oil & Gas
    Source: Info-Tech

    Challenge

    As a brand new enterprise architecture function, the EA function at the oil and gas corporation did not have a set of defined EA services. Because of this lack of EA services, the organization did not know what contributions EA could provide.

    Further, without the definition of EA services, the EA function did not set out explicit expectations to the business. This caused expectations from the business to be different from those of the EA function, resulting in friction.

    Solution

    Info-Tech worked with the EA function at the oil and gas corporation to define a set of EA services the function could provide.

    The Info-Tech team, along with the organization, assessed the business and technology needs of the stakeholder. Those needs acted as the basis for the EA function to create their initial services.

    Additionally, Info-Tech worked with the team to define the service details (e.g. service benefits, service requestor, service provider) to communicate how to provide services to the business.

    Results

    The defined EA services led the EA function to communicate what it could provide for the business. As well, the defined services clarified the level of expectation for the business.

    The EA team was able to successfully service the business on future projects, adding value through their expertise and knowledge of the organization’s systems. Because of the demonstrated value, EA has been given greater responsibility throughout the organization.

    4.2.4 Determine the role of the architect in the Agile ceremonies of the organization

    1 hour

    Input: Expertise from EA strategy creation team

    Output: Participation in Agile Pre- and Post-PI, Architect Syncs, etc.

    Materials: Note-taking materials, Whiteboard or flip chart, markers

    Participants: EA strategy creation team

    Document the involvement of the enterprise architect in your organization’s Agile ceremonies.

    1. Document the Agile ceremonial used in the organization (based on SAFe or other Agile approaches).
    2. Determine ceremonies the System Architect will participate in.
    3. Determine ceremonies the Solution Architect will participate in
    4. Determine ceremonies the Enterprise Architect will participate in.
    5. Determine Architect Syncs, etc.

    Note: Roles and responsibilities can be further defined as part of the Agile Enterprise Operating Model.

    The EA role relative to agility

    The enterprise architecture role relative to agility specifies the architecture roles as well as the agile protocols they will participate in.
    This statement will guide every architect’s participation in planning meetings, pre- and post-PI, syncs, etc. Use simple and concise terminology; speak loudly and clearly.

    A strong EA role statement relative to agility has the following characteristics:

    • Describes what different architect roles do to achieve the vision of the organization
    • In an agile way
    • Compelling
    • Easy to grasp
    • Sharply focused
    • Specific
    • Concise

    Sample EA mission relative to agility

    • Create strategies that provide guardrails for the organization, provide standards, reusable assets, accelerators, and other decisions at the enterprise level that support agility.
    • Participate in pre-PI and post-PI planning activities, architect syncs, etc.

    A clear statement can include additional details surrounding the Enterprise Architect role relative to agility

    Likewise, below is a sample of connecting keywords together to form an enterprise architect role statement, relative to agility.

    Optimize, transform, and innovate by defining and implementing the [Company]’s target enterprise architecture in an agile way.

    Optimize – We collaborate with the business to analyze and optimize business capabilities and business processes to enable the agile and efficient attainment of [Company name] business objectives.

    Transform – We support IT-enabled business transformation programs by building and maintaining a shared vision of the future-state enterprise and consistently communicating it to stakeholders.

    Innovate – We identify and develop new and creative opportunities for IT to enable the business. We communicate the art of the possible to the business.

    Defining and implementing – We engage with project teams early and guide solution design and selection to ensure alignment to the target-state enterprise architecture and provide guidance as well as accelerators.

    Target enterprise structure in an agile way – We analyze business needs and priorities and assess the current state of the enterprise. We build and maintain the target enterprise architecture blueprints that define:

    • Business capabilities and processes (business architecture)
    • Data, application, and technology assets that enable business capabilities and processes (technology architecture)
    • Architecture principles
    • Standards and reusable assets
    • Continuous exploration, integration, and deployment

    Move to the enterprise architecture operating model blueprint to execute your EA strategy

    Once approved, move on to Info-Tech’s Define an EA Operating Model blueprint to begin executing on the EA strategy.

    Enterprise architecture strategy

    This blueprint focuses on setting up an enterprise architecture function, with the goal of maximizing the likelihood of EA success. The blueprint puts into place the components that will align the EA function with the needs of the stakeholders, guide the decision making of the EA function, and define the services EA can provide to the organization.

    Agile enterprise architecture operating model

    An EA operating model helps you design and organize the EA function, ensuring adherence to architectural standards and delivery of EA services. This blueprint acts on the EA strategy by creating methods to engage, govern, and develop architecture as a part of the larger organization.

    Research contributors and experts

    Photo of Milena Litoiu, Senior Director Research and Advisory, Enterprise Architecture Milena Litoiu
    Senior Director Research and Advisory, Enterprise Architecture
    • Milena Litoiu is a Principal/Senior Manager of Enterprise Architecture. She is Master Certified with The Open Group and she sits on global architecture certification boards.
    • Other certifications include SABSA, CRISC, and Scaled Agile Framework. She started as a certified IT Architect at IBM and has over 25 years experience in this field.
    • Milena teaches enterprise architecture at the University of Toronto and led the development of the Enterprise Architecture Certificate (a course on EA fundamentals, one on EA development and Governance, and one on Trends going forward).
    • She has a Masters in Engineering, an executive MBA, and extensive experience in enterprise architecture as well as methodologies and tools.
    		 Photo of Lan Nguyen, IT Executive, Mentor, Managing Partner at CIOs Beyond Borders Group Lan Nguyen
    IT Executive, Mentor, Managing Partner at CIOs Beyond Borders Group
    • Lan Nguyen has a wealth of experience driving the EA strategy and the digital transformation success at the City of Toronto.
    • Lan is a university lecturer on topics like strategic leadership in the digital enterprise.
    • Lan is a Managing Partner at CIOs Beyond Borders Group.
    • Lan specializes in Partnership Development; Governance; Strategic Planning, Business Development; Government Relations; Business Relationship Management; Leadership Development; Organizational Agility and Change Management; Talent Management; Managed Services; Digital Transformation; Strategic Management of Enterprise IT; Shared Services; Service Quality Improvement, Portfolio Management; Community Development; and Social Enterprise.


    Photo of Dirk Coetsee, Director Research and Advisory, Enterprise Architecture, Data & Analytics Dirk Coetsee
    Director Research and Advisory, Enterprise Architecture, Data & Analytics
    • Dirk Coetsee is a Research & Advisory Director in the Data & Analytics practice. Dirk has over 25 years of experience in data management and architecture within a wide range of industries, especially Financial Services, Manufacturing, and Retail.
    • Dirk spearheaded data architecture at several organizations and was involved in enterprise data architecture, data governance, and data quality and analytics. He architected many operational data stores of ranging complexity and transaction volumes and was part of major enterprise data warehouse initiatives. Lately, he was part of projects that implemented big data, enterprise service bus, and micro services architectures. Dirk has an in-depth knowledge of industry models within the financial and retail spaces.
    • Dirk holds a BSc (Hons) in Operational Research and an MBA with specialization in Financial Services from the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
    		 Photo of Andy Neill, AVP, Enterprise Architecture, Data and Analytics Andy Neill
    AVP, Enterprise Architecture, Data and Analytics
    • Andy is AVP Data and Analytics and Chief Enterprise Architect at Info-Tech Research Group. Previous roles include leading the data architecture practice for Loblaw Companies Ltd, Shoppers Drug Mart and 360 Insights in Canada as well as leading architecture practices at Siemens consultancy, BBC, NHS, Ordnance Survey, and Houses of Parliament and Commons in the UK.
    • His responsibilities at Info-Tech include leading the data and analytics and enterprise architecture research practices and guiding the future of research and client engagement in that space.
    • Andy is the Product Owner for the Technical Counselor seat offering at Info-Tech, which gives world-class holistic support to our senior technical members.
    • He is also a instructor and content creator for the University of Toronto in the field of Enterprise Architecture.


    Photo of Wayne Filin-Matthews, Chief Enterprise Architect, ICMG Winner of Global Chief Enterprise Architect of the Year 2019 Wayne Filin-Matthews
    Chief Enterprise Architect, ICMG Winner of Global Chief Enterprise Architect of the Year 2019
    • Wayne is currently the EA Discipline Lead/Chief Enterprise Architect – Global Digital Transformation Office, COE at Dell Technologies.
    • He is a distinguished Motivator & Tech Lead as well as an influencer.
    • Wayne has led multiple Enterprise Architecture practices at the global level and has valuable contributions in this space managing and growing Enterprise Architecture and CTO practices across strategy, execution, and adoption parts of the IT lifecycle.
    		 Photo of Graham Smith, Experienced lead Enterprise Architect and Independent Consultant Graham Smith
    Experienced lead Enterprise Architect and Independent Consultant
    • Graham is an experienced lead enterprise architect specializing in digital and data transformation, with over 33 years of experience, spanning financial markets, media, information, insurance, and telecommunications sectors. Graham has successfully established and led large teams across India, China, Australia, Americas, Japan, and the UK.
    • He is currently working as an independent consultant in digital and data-led transformation and his work spans established businesses and start-ups alike.

    Thanks also go to all experts who contributed to previous versions of this document:

    • Zachary Curry, Director, Enterprise Architecture and Innovation, FMC Technologies
    • Pam Doucette, Director of Enterprise Architecture, Tufts Health Plan
    • Joe Evers, Consulting Principal, JcEvers Consulting Corp
    • Cameron Fairbairn, Enterprise Architect, Agriculture Financial Services Corporation (AFSC)
    • Michael Fulton, Chief Digital Officer & Senior IT Strategy & Architecture Consultant at CC and C Solutions
    • Tom Graves, Principal Consultant, Tetradian Consulting
    • (JB) Brahmaiah Jarugumilli, Consultant, Federal Aviation Administration – Enterprise Services Center
    • Huw Morgan, IT Research Executive, Enterprise Architect
    • Serge Parisien, Manager, Enterprise Architecture, Canada Mortgage & Housing Corporation

    Additional interviews were conducted but are not listed due to privacy and confidentiality requirements.

    Bibliography

    “Agile Manifesto for Software Development,” Ward Cunningham, 2001. Accessed July 2021.

    “ArchiMate 3.1 Specification.” The Open Group, n.d. Accessed July 2021.

    “Are Your IT Strategy and Business Strategy Aligned?” 5Q Partners, 8 Jan. 2015. Accessed Oct. 2016.

    Bowen, Fillmore. “How agile companies create and sustain high ROI.” IBM. Accessed Oct. 2016.

    Burns, Peter, et al. Building Value through Enterprise Architecture: A Global Study. Booz & Co. 2009. Web. Nov. 2016.

    “Demonstrating the Value of Enterprise Architecture in Delivering Business Capabilities.” Cisco, 2008. Web. Oct. 2016.

    “Disciplined Agile.” Disciplined Agile Consortium, n.d. Web.

    Fowler, Martin. “Building Effective software.” MartinFowler.com. Accessed July 2021.

    Fowler, Martin. “Agile Software Guide.” MartinFowler.com, 1 Aug. 2019.

    Accessed July 2021.

    Haughey, Duncan. “SMART Goals.” Project Smart, 2014. Accessed July 2021.

    Kern, Matthew. “20 Enterprise Architecture Practices.” LinkedIn, 3 March 2016. Accessed Nov. 2016.

    Lahanas, Stephen. “Infrastructure Architecture, Defined.” IT Architecture Journal, Sept. 2014. Accessed July 2021.

    Lean IX website, Accessed July 2021.

    Litoiu, Milena. Course material from Information Technology 2690: Foundations of Enterprise Architecture, 2021, University of Toronto.

    Mocker, M., J.W. Ross, and C.M. Beath. “How Companies Use Digital Technologies to Enhance Customer Findings.” MIT CISR Working Paper No. 434, Feb. 2019. Qtd in Mayor, Tracy. “MIT expert recaps 30-plus years of enterprise architecture.” MIT Sloan, 10 Aug. 2020. Web.

    “Open Agile ArchitectureTM.” The Open Group, 2020. Accessed July 2021.

    “Organizational Design Framework – The Transformation Model.” The Center for Organizational Design, n.d. Accessed 1 Aug. 2020.

    Ross, Jeanne W. et al. Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution. Harvard Business School Press, 2006.

    Rouse, Margaret. “Enterprise Architecture (EA).” SearchCIO, June 2007. Accessed Nov. 2016.

    “SAFe 5 for Lean Enterprises.” Scaled Agile Framework, Scaled Agile, Inc. Accessed 2021.

    “Security Architecture.” Technopedia, updated 20 Dec. 2016. Accessed July 2021.

    “Software Engineering Institute.” Carnegie Mellon University, n.d. Web.

    “TOGAF 9.1.” The Open Group, 2011. Accessed Oct. 2016.

    “TOGAF 9.2.” The Open Group, 2018. Accessed July 2021.

    Thompson, Rachel. “Stakeholder Analysis: Winning Support for Your Projects.” MindTools, n.d. Accessed July 2021.

    Wendt, Jerome M. “Redefining ‘SMB’, ‘SME’ and ‘Large Enterprise.’” DCIG, 25 Mar. 2011. Accessed July 2021.

    Wilkinson, Jim. “Business Drivers.” The Strategic CFO, 23 July 2013. Accessed July 2021.

    Zachman, John. “Conceptual, Logical, Physical: It is Simple.” Zachman International, 2011. Accessed July 2021.

    Secure Your Hybrid Workforce

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    • Parent Category Name: Secure Cloud & Network Architecture
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    • Many IT and security leaders struggle to cope with the challenges associated with an hybrid workforce and how best to secure it.
    • Understanding the main principles of zero trust: never trust, always verify, assume breach, and verify explicitly.
    • How to go about achieving a zero trust framework.
    • Understanding the premise of SASE as it pertains to a hybrid workforce.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Securing your hybrid workforce should be an opportunity to get started on the zero trust journey. Realizing the core features needed to achieve this will assist you determine which of the options is a good fit for your organization.

    Impact and Result

    Every organization's strategy to secure their hybrid workforce should include introducing zero trust principles in certain areas. Our unique approach:

    • Assess the suitability of SASE/SSE and zero trust.
    • Present capabilities and feature benefits.
    • Procure SASE product and/or build a zero trust roadmap.

    Secure Your Hybrid Workforce Research & Tools

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

    1. Secure Your Hybrid Workforce Deck – The purpose of the storyboard is to provide a detailed description of the steps involved in securing your hybrid workforce with zero trust.

    The storyboard contains two easy-to-follow steps on securing your hybrid workforce with zero trust, from assessing the suitability of SASE/SSE to taking a step in building a zero trust roadmap.

    • Secure Your Hybrid Workforce – Phases 1-2

    2. Suitability Assessment Tool – A tool to identify whether SASE/SSE or a zero trust roadmap is a better fit for your organization.

    Use this tool to identify your next line of action in securing your hybrid workforce by assessing key components that conforms to the ideals and principles of Zero Trust.

    • Zero Trust - SASE Suitability Assessment Tool

    3. RFP Template – A document to guide you through requesting proposals from vendors.

    Use this document to request proposals from select vendors.

    • Request for Proposal (RFP) Template
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Secure Your Hybrid Workforce

    SASE as a driver to zero trust.

    Analyst Perspective

    Consolidate your security and network.

    Remote connections like VPNs were not designed to be security tools or to have the capacity to handle a large hybrid workforce; hence, organizations are burdened with implementing controls that are perceived to be "security solutions." The COVID-19 pandemic forced a wave of remote work for employees that were not taken into consideration for most VPN implementations, and as a result, the understanding of the traditional network perimeter as we always knew it has shifted to include devices, applications, edges, and the internet. Additionally, remote work is here to stay as recruiting talent in the current market means you must make yourself attractive to potential hires.

    The shift in the network perimeter increases the risks associated with traditional VPN solutions as well as exposing the limitations of the solution. This is where zero trust as a principle introduces a more security-focused strategy that not only mitigates most (if not all) of the risks, but also eliminates limitations, which would enhance the business and improve customer/employee experience.

    There are several ways of achieving zero trust maturity, and one of those is SASE, which consolidates security and networking to better secure your hybrid workforce as implied trust is thrown out of the window and verification of everything becomes the new normal to defend the business.

    This is a picture of Victor Okorie

    Victor Okorie
    Senior Research Analyst, Security and Privacy
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    CISOs are looking to zero trust to fill the gaps associated with their traditional remote setup as well as to build an adaptable security strategy. Some challenges faced include:

    • Understanding the main principles of zero trust: never trust, always verify, assume breach, and verify explicitly.
    • Understanding how to achieve a zero trust framework.
    • Understanding the premise of SASE as it pertains to a hybrid workforce.

    Common Obstacles

    The zero trust journey may seem tedious because of a few obstacles like:

    • Knowing what the principle is all about and the components that align with it.
    • Knowing where to start. Due to the lack of a standardized path for the zero trust journey, going about the journey can be confusing.
    • Not having a uniform definition of what makes up a SASE solution as it is heavily dependent on vendors.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    Info-Tech provides a three-service approach to helping organizations better secure their hybrid workforce.

    • Understand your current, existing technological capabilities and challenges with your hybrid infrastructure, and prioritize those challenges.
    • Gain insight into zero trust and SASE as a mitigation/control/tool to those challenges.
    • Identify the SASE features that are relevant to your needs and a source guide for a SASE vendor.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Securing your hybrid workforce should be an opportunity to get started on the zero trust journey. Realizing the core features needed to achieve this will assist you in determining which of the options is a good fit for your organization.

    Turn your challenges into opportunities

    Hybrid workforce is the new normal

    The pandemic has shown there is no going back to full on-prem work, and as such, security should be looked at differently with various considerations in mind.

    Understand that current hybrid solutions are susceptible to various forms of attack as the threat attack surface area has now expanded with users, devices, applications, locations, and data. The traditional perimeter as we know it has expanded beyond just the corporate network, and as such, it needs a more mature security strategy.

    Onboarding and offboarding have been done remotely, and with some growth recorded, the size of companies has also increased, leading to a scaling issue.

    Employees are now demanding remote work capabilities as part of contract negotiation before accepting a job.

    Attacks have increased far more quickly during the pandemic, and all indications point to them increasing even more.

    Scarce available security personnel in the job market for hire.

    Reality Today

    This image is a circle graph and 67% of it is coloured with the number 67% in the middle of the graph

    The number of breach incidents by identity theft.
    Source: Security Magazine, 2022.

    This image is a circle graph and 78% of it is coloured with the number 78% in the middle of the graph

    IT security teams want to adopt zero trust.
    Source: Cybersecurity Insiders, 2019.

    Reduce the risks of remote work by using zero trust

    $1.07m

    $1.76m

    235

    Increase in breaches related to remote work

    Cost difference in a breach where zero trust is deployed

    Days to identify a breach

    The average cost of a data breach where remote work was a factor rose by $1.07 million in 2021. COVID-19 brought about rapid changes in organizations, and digital transformation changes curbed some of its excesses. Organizations that did not make any digital transformation changes reported a $750,000 higher costs compared to global average.

    The average cost of a breach in an organization with no zero trust deployed was $5.04 million in 2021 compared to the average cost of a breach in an organization with zero trust deployed of $3.28 million. With a difference of $1.76 million, zero trust makes a significant difference.

    Organizations with a remote work adoption rate of 50% took 235 days to identify a breach and 81 days to contain that breach – this is in comparison to the average of 212 days to identify a breach and 75 days to contain that breach.

    Source: IBM, 2021.

    Network + Security = SASE

    What exactly is a SASE product?

    The convergence and consolidation of security and network brought about the formation of secure access service edge (SASE – pronounced like "sassy"). Digital transformation, hybrid workforce, high demand of availability, uninterrupted access for employees, and a host of other factors influenced the need for this convergence that is delivered as a cloud service.

    The capabilities of a SASE solution being delivered are based on certain criteria, such as the identity of the entity (users, devices, applications, data, services, location), real-time context, continuous assessment and verification of risk and "trust" throughout the lifetime of a session, and the security and compliance policies of the organization.

    SASE continuously identifies users and devices, applies security based on policy, and provides secure access to the appropriate and requested application or data regardless of location.

    image contains a list of the SASE Network Features and Security Features. the network Features are: WAN optimization; SD WAN; CDN; Network-as-a-service. The Security Features are: CASB; IDPS; ZTNA/VPN; FWaaS; Browser isolation; DLP; UEBA; Secure web gateway; Sandboxing

    Current Approach

    The traditional perimeter security using the castle and moat approach is depicted in the image here. The security shields valuable resources from external attack; however, it isn't foolproof for all kinds of external attacks. Furthermore, it does not protect those valuable resources from insider threat.

    This security perimeter also allows for lateral movement when it has been breached. Access to these resources is now considered "trusted" solely because it is now behind the wall/perimeter.

    This approach is no longer feasible in our world today where both external and internal threats pose continuous risk and need to be contained.

    Determine the suitability of SASE and zero trust

    The Challenge:

    Complications facing traditional infrastructure

    • Increased hybrid workforce
    • Regulatory compliance
    • Limited Infosec personnel
    • Poor threat detection
    • Increased attack surface

    Common vulnerabilities in traditional infrastructure

    • MITM attack
    • XSS attack
    • Session hijacking
    • Trust-based model
    • IP spoofing
    • Brute force attack
    • Distributed denial of service
    • DNS hijacking
    • Latency issues
    • Lateral movement once connection is established

    TRADITIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE

    NETWORK

    SECURITY

    AUTHENTICATION

    IDENTITY

    ACCESS

    • MPLS
    • Corporate Network
    • Antivirus installed
    • Traditional Firewall
    • Intrusion Detection and Prevention System
    • Allow and Deny rules
    • Businesses must respond to consumer requests to:
    • LDAP
    • AAA
    • Immature password complexity
    • Trusted device with improperly managed endpoint protection.
    • Little or no DNS security
    • Web portal (captive)
    • VPN client

    Candidate Solutions

    Proposed benefits of SASE

    • Access is only granted to the requested resource
    • Consolidated network and security as a service
    • Micro-segmentation on application and gateway
    • Adopts a zero trust security posture for all access
    • Managed detection and response
    • Uniform enforcement of policy
    • Distributed denial of service shield

    SASE

    NETWORK

    SECURITY

    AUTHENTICATION

    IDENTITY

    ACCESS

    • Software defined – WAN
    • Content delivery network
    • WAN optimization
    • Network-as-a-service
    • Firewall-as-a-service/NGFW
    • Zero trust network access
    • Endpoint detection & response
    • Secure web gateway
    • Cloud access security broker
    • Data loss prevention
    • Remote browser isolation
    • Multifactor authentication
    • Context-based security policy for authentication
    • Authorization managed with situational awareness and real-time risk analytics
    • Continuous verification throughout an access request lifecycle
    • Zero trust identity on users, devices, applications, and data.
    • Strong password complexity enforced
    • Privilege access management
    • Secure internet access
    • SASE client

    ZERO TRUST

    TENETS OF ZERO TRUST

    ZERO TRUST PILLARS

    • Continuous, dynamic authentication and verification
    • Principle of least privilege
    • Always assume a breach
    • Implement the tenets of zero trust across the following domains of your environment:
      • IDENTITY
      • APPLICATION
      • NETWORK
      • DEVICES
      • DATA

    Proposed benefits of zero trust

    • Identify and protect critical and non-critical resources in accordance with business objectives.
    • Produce initiatives that conform to the ideals of zero trust and are aligned with the corresponding pillars above.
    • Formulate policies to protect resources and aid segmentation.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Securing your hybrid workforce should be an opportunity to get started on the zero trust journey. Realizing the core features needed to achieve this will help you determine which of the options is a good fit for your organization.

    Measure the value of using Info-Tech's approach

    IT and business value

    PHASE 1

    PHASE 2

    Assess the benefits of adopting SASE or zero trust

    		Vendors will try to control the narrative in terms of what they can do for you, but it's time for you to control the narrative and identify pain points to IT and the business, and with that, to understand and define what the vendor solution can do for you.

    PHASE 2

    Assess the benefits of adopting SASE or zero trust

    		Vendors will try to control the narrative in terms of what they can do for you, but it's time for you to control the narrative and identify pain points to IT and the business, and with that, to understand and define what the vendor solution can do for you.

    Short-term benefits

    • Gain awareness of your zero trust readiness.
    • Embed a zero trust mindset across your architecture.
    • Control the narrative of what SASE brings to your organization.

    Long-term benefits

    • Identified controls to mitigate risks with current architecture while on a zero trust journey.
    • Improved security posture that reduces risk by increasing visibility into threats and user connections.
    • Reduced CapEx and OpEx due to the scalability, low staffing requirements, and improved time to respond to threats using a SASE or SSE solution.

    Determine SASE cost factors

    IT and business value

    Info-Tech Insight

    IT leaders need to examine different areas of their budget and determine how the adoption of a SASE solution could influence several areas of their budget breakdown.

    Determining the SASE cost factors early could accelerate the justification the business needs to move forward in making an informed decision.

    01- Infrastructure

    • Physical security
    • Cabling
    • Power supply and HVAC
    • Hosting

    02- Administration

    • Human hours to analyze logs and threats
    • Human hours to secure infrastructure
    • Fees associated with maintenance

    03- Inbound

    • DPI
    • DDoS
    • Web application firewall
    • VPN concentrators

    04- Outbound

    • IDPS
    • DLP on-prem
    • QoS
    • Sandbox & URL filtering

    04- Data Protection

    • Real-time URL
      insights
    • Threat hunting
    • Data loss prevention

    06- Monitoring

    • Log storage
    • Logging engine
    • Dashboards
    • Managed detection
      and response

    Info-Tech's methodology for securing your hybrid workforce

    1. Current state and future mitigation

    2. Assess the benefits of moving to SASE/zero trust

    Phase Steps

    1.1 Limitations of legacy infrastructure

    1.2 Zero trust principle as a control

    1.3 SASE as a driver of zero trust

    2.1 Sourcing out a SASE/SSE vendor

    2.2 Build a zero trust roadmap

    Phase Outcomes

    Identify and prioritize risks of current infrastructure and several ways to mitigate them.

    RFP template and build a zero trust roadmap.

    Consider several factors needed to protect your growing hybrid workforce and assess your current resource capabilities, solutions, and desire for a more mature security program. The outcome should either address a quick pain point or a long-term roadmap.

    The internet is the new corporate network

    The internet is the new corporate network, which opens the organization up to more risks not protected by the current security stack. Using Info-Tech's methodology of zero trust adoption is a sure way to reduce the attack surface, and SASE is one useful tool to take you on the zero trust journey.

    Current-state risks and future mitigation

    Securing your hybrid workforce via zero trust will inevitably include (but is not limited to) technological products/solutions.

    SASE and SSE features sit as an overlay here as technological solutions that will help on the zero trust journey by aggregating all the disparate solutions required for you to meet zero trust requirements into a single interface. The knowledge and implementation of this helps put things into perspective of where and what our target state is.

    The right solution for the right problem

    It is critical to choose a solution that addresses the security problems you are actually trying to solve.

    Don't allow the solution provider to tell you what you need – rather, start by understanding your capability gaps and then go to market to find the right partner.

    Take advantage of the RFP template to source a SASE or SSE vendor. Additionally, build a zero trust roadmap to develop and strategize initiatives and tasks.

    Blueprint deliverables

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

    Zero Trust and SASE Suitability Tool
    Identify critical and vulnerable DAAS elements to protect and align them to business goals.

    Zero Trust Program Gap Analysis Tool
    Perform a gap analysis between current and target states to build a zero trust roadmap.

    Key deliverable:

    Secure Your Hybrid Workforce With Zero Trust Communication deck
    Present your zero trust strategy in a prepopulated document that summarizes the work you have completed as a part of this blueprint.

    Phase 1

    Current state and future mitigation

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    1.1 Limitations of legacy infrastructure

    1.2 Zero trust principle as a control

    1.3 SASE as a driver of zero trust

    2.1 Sourcing out a SASE/SSE vendor

    2.2 Build a zero trust roadmap

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Introduction to the tool, how to use the input tabs to identify current challenges, technologies being used, and to prioritize the challenges. The prioritized list will highlight existing gaps and eventually be mapped to recommended mitigations in the following phase.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • CISO
    • CSO
    • IT security team
    • IT network team

    Secure Your Hybrid Workforce

    1.1 Limitations of legacy infrastructure

    Traditional security & remote access solutions must be modernized

    Info-Tech Insight
    Traditional security is architected with a perimeter in mind and is poorly suited to the threats in hybrid or distributed environments.

    Ensure you minimize or eliminate weak points on all layers.

    • SECURITY
      • DDoS
      • DNS hijacking
      • Weak VPN protocols
    • IDENTITY
      • One-time verification allowing lateral movement
    • NETWORK
      • Risk perimeter stops at corporate network edge
      • Split tunneling
    • AUTHENTICATION
      • Weak authentication
      • Weak passwords
    • ACCESS
      • Man-in-the-middle attack
      • Cross-site scripting
      • Session hijacking

    1.1.1 For example: traditional VPNs are poorly suited to a hybrid workforce

    There are many limitations that make it difficult for traditional VPNs to adapt to an ever-growing hybrid workforce.

    The listed limitations are tied to associated risks of legacy infrastructure as well as security components that are almost non-existent in a VPN implementation today.

    Scaling

    VPNs were designed for small-scale remote access to corporate network. An increase in the remote workforce will require expensive hardware investment.

    Visibility

    Users and attackers are not restricted to specific network resources, and with an absence of activity logs, they can go undetected.

    Managed detection & response

    Due to the reduction in or lack of visibility, threat detections are poorly managed, and responses are already too late.

    Hardware

    Limited number of locations for VPN hardware to be situated as it can be expensive.

    Hybrid workforce

    The increase in the hybrid workforce requires the risk perimeter to be expanded from the corporate network to devices and applications. VPNs are built for privacy, not security.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Hybrid workforces are here to stay, and adopting a strategy that is adaptable, flexible, simple, and cost-effective is a recommended road to take on the journey to bettering your security and network.

    1.1 Identify risk from legacy infrastructure

    Estimated Time: 1-2 hours

    1. Ensure all vulnerabilities described on slide 17 are removed.
    2. Note any forecasted challenge you think you might have down the line with your current hybrid setup.
    3. Identify any trend that may be of interest to you with regards to your hybrid setup.

    This is a screenshot of the organizational profile table found in the Zero Trust - SASE Suitability Assessment Tool

    Download the Zero Trust - SASE Suitability Assessment Tool

    Input

    • List of key pain points and challenges
    • List of forecasted challenges and trends of interest

    Output

    • Prioritized list of pain points and/or challenges

    Materials

    • Excel tool
    • Whiteboard

    Participants

    • CISO
    • InfoSec team
    • IT manager
    • CIO
    • Infrastructure team

    1.2 Zero trust principle as a control

    A zero trust implementation comes with benefits/initiatives that mitigate the challenges identified in earlier activities.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Zero trust/"always verify" is applied to identity, workloads, devices, networks, and data to provide a greater control for risks associated with traditional network architecture.

    Improve IAM maturity

    Zero trust identity and access will lead to a mature IAM process in an organization with the removal of implicit trust.

    Secure your remote access

    With a zero trust network architecture (ZTNA), both the remote and on-prem network access are more secure than the traditional network deployment. The software-defined parameter ensures security on each network access.

    Reduce threat surface area

    With zero trust principle applied on identity, workload, devices, network, and data, the threat surface area which births some of the risks identified earlier will be significantly reduced.

    Improve hybrid workforce

    Scaling, visibility, network throughput, secure connection from anywhere, micro-segmentation, and a host of other benefits to improve your hybrid workforce.

    1.2 SASE as an overlay to zero trust

    Security and network initiatives of a zero trust roadmap converged into a single pane of glass.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Security and network converged into a single pane of glass giving you some of the benefits and initiatives of a zero trust implemented architecture in one package.

    Improve IAM maturity

    The identity-centric nature of SASE solutions helps to improve your IAM maturity as it applies the principle of least privilege. The removal of implicit trust and continuous verification helps foster this more.

    Secure your remote access

    With ZTNA, both the remote and on-prem network access are more secure than the traditional network deployment. The software defined parameter ensures security on each network access.

    Reduce threat surface area

    Secure web gateway, cloud access security broker, domain name system, next-generation firewall, data loss prevention, and ZTNA protect against data leaks, prevent lateral movement, and prevent malicious actors from coming in.

    Improve hybrid workforce

    Reduced costs and complexity of IT, faster user experience, and reduced risk as a result of the scalability, visibility, ease of IT administration, network throughput, secure connection from anywhere, micro-segmentation, and a host of other benefits will surely improve your hybrid workforce.

    Align SASE features to zero trust core capabilities

    Verify Identity

    • Authentication & verification are enforced for each app request or session.
    • Use of multifactor authentication.
    • RBAC/ABAC and principle of least privilege are applied on the identity regardless of user, device, or location.

    Verify Device

    • Device health is checked to ensure device is not compromised or vulnerable.
    • No admin permissions on user devices.
    • Device-based risk assessment is enforced as part of UEBA.

    Verify Access

    • Micro-segmentation built around network, user, device, location and roles.
    • Use of context and content-based policy enforced to the user, application, and device identity.
    • Network access only granted to specified application request and not to the entire network.

    Verify Services

    • Applications and services are checked before access is granted.
    • Connections to the application and services are inspected with the security controls built into the SASE solution.

    Info-Tech Insight

    These features of SASE and zero trust mitigate the risks associated with a traditional VPN and reduce the threat surface area. With security at the core, network optimization is not compromised.

    Security components of SASE

    Otherwise known as security service edge (SSE)

    Security service edge is the convergence of all security services typically found in SASE. At its core, SSE consists of three services which include:

    • Secure web gateway – secure access to the internet and web.
    • Cloud access security broker – secure access to SaaS and cloud applications.
    • Zero trust network access – secure remote access to private applications.

    SSE components are also mitigations or initiatives that make up a zero trust roadmap as they comply with the zero trust principle, and as a result, they sit up there with SASE as an overlay/driver of a zero trust implementation. SSE's benefits are identical to SASE's in that it provides zero trust access, risk reduction, low costs and complexity, and a better user experience. The difference is SSE's sole focus on security services and not the network component.

    SASE

    NETWORK FEATURES

    SECURITY FEATURES

    • WAN optimization
    • SD WAN
    • CDN
    • Network-as-a-service
    • CASB
    • IDPS
    • ZTNA/VPN
    • FWaaS
    • Browser isolation
    • DLP
    • UEBA
    • Secure web gateway
    • Sandboxing

    1.3 Pros & cons of zero trust and SASE

    Zero Trust

    		SASE

    Pros

    Cons

    Pros

    Cons

    • Robust IAM process and technologies with role-based access control.
    • Strong and continuous verification of identity of user accounts, devices, data, location, and principle of least privilege applied.
    • Micro-segmentation applied around users, network, devices, roles, and applications to prevent lateral movement.
    • Threat attack surface eliminated, which reduces organizational risks.
    • Protection of data strengthened based on sensitivity and micro-segmentation.
    • Difficult to identify the scope of the zero trust initiative.
    • Requires continuous and ongoing update of access controls.
    • Zero trust journey/process could take years and is prone to being abandoned without commitment from executives.
    • Legacy systems can be hard to replace, which would require all stakeholders to prioritize resource allocation.
    • Can be expensive to implement.
    • Adopts a zero trust security posture for all access requests.
    • Converged and consolidated network and security delivered as a cloud service to the user rather than a single point of enforcement.
    • Centralized visibility of devices, data in transit and at rest, user activities, and threats.
    • Cheaper than a zero trust roadmap implementation.
    • Managed detection and response.
    • The limited knowledge of SASE.
    • No universally agreed upon SASE definition.
    • SASE products are still being developed and are open to vendors' interpretation.
    • Existing vendor relationships could be a hinderance to deployment.
    • Hard to manage MSSPs.

    Understand SASE and zero trust suitability for your needs

    Estimated Time: 1 hour

    Use the dashboard to understand the value assessment of adopting a SASE product or building a zero trust roadmap.

    This is an image of the SASE Suitability Assessment

    This is the image of the Zero Trust Suitability Assessment

    Info-Tech Insight

    This tool will help steer you on a path to take as a form of mitigation/control to some or all the identified challenges.

    Phase 2

    Make a decision and next steps

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    1.1 Limitations of legacy infrastructure

    1.2 Zero trust principle as a control

    1.3 SASE as a driver of zero trust

    2.1 Sourcing out a SASE/SSE vendor

    2.2 Build a zero trust roadmap

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Introduction to the tool activity, how to use the input tabs and considerations to generate an output that could help understand the current state of your hybrid infrastructure and what direction is to be followed next to improve.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • CISO
    • CSO
    • IT security
    • IT network team

    Secure Your Hybrid Workforce

    Step 2.1

    Sourcing out a SASE/SSE vendor

    Activities

    2.1.1 Use the RFP template to request proposal from vendors

    2.1.2 Use SoftwareReviews to compare vendors

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO, CISO, IT manager, Infosec team, executives.

    Outcomes of this step

    • Zero Trust Roadmap

    2.1.1 Use the RFP template to request proposal from vendors

    Estimated Time: 1-3 hours

    1. As a group, use the RFP Template to include technical capabilities of your desired SASE product and to request proposals from vendors.
    2. The features that are most important to your organization generated from phase one should be highlighted in the RFP.

    Input

    • List of SASE features
    • Technical capabilities

    Output

    • RFP

    Materials

    • RFP Template

    Participants

    • Security team
    • IT leadership

    Download the RFP Template

    2.1.2 Use SoftwareReviews to compare vendors

    SoftwareReviews

    • The Data Quadrant is a thorough evaluation and ranking of all software in an individual category to compare platforms across multiple dimensions.
    • Vendors are ranked by their Composite Score, based on individual feature evaluations, user satisfaction rankings, vendor capability comparisons, and likeliness to recommend the platform.
    • The Emotional Footprint is a powerful indicator of overall user sentiment toward the relationship with the vendor, capturing data across five dimensions.
    • 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.

    Step 2.2

    Zero trust readiness and roadmap

    Activities

    2.2.1 Assess the maturity of your current zero trust implementation

    2.2.2 Understand business needs and current security projects

    2.2.3 Set target maturity state with timeframe

    This step involves the following participants:

    CIO, CISO, IT manager, Infosec team, executives.

    Outcomes of this step

    Zero Trust Roadmap

    2.2.1 Assess the maturity of your current zero trust implementation

    Estimated Time: 1-3 hours

    • Realizing that zero trust is a journey helps create a better roadmap and implementation. Identify the current controls or solutions in your organization that align with the principle of zero trust.
    • Break down these controls or solutions into different silos (e.g. identity, security, network, data, device, applications, etc.).
    • Determine your zero trust readiness.

    Input

    • List of zero trust controls/solutions
    • Siloed list of zero trust controls/solutions
    • Current state of zero trust maturity

    Output

    • Zero trust readiness and current maturity state

    Materials

    • Zero Trust Security Benefit Assessment tool

    Participants

    • Security team
    • IT leadership

    Download the Zero Trust Security Benefit Assessment tool

    2.2.2 Understand business needs and current security projects

    Estimated Time: 1-3 hours

    1. Identify the business and IT executives, application owners, and board members whose vision aligns with the zero trust journey.
    2. Identify existing projects within security, IT, and the business and highlight interdependencies or how they fit with the zero trust journey.
    3. Build a rough sketch of the roadmap that fits the business needs, current projects and the zero trust journey.

    Input

    • Meetings with stakeholders
    • List of current and future projects

    Output

    • Sketch of zero trust roadmap

    Materials

    • Whiteboard activity

    Participants

    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • IT ops team
    • Business executives
    • Board members

    Download Zero Trust Protect Surface Mapping Tool

    2.2.3 Set target maturity state with a given timeframe

    Estimated Time: 1-3 hours

    1. With the zero trust readiness, current business, IT and security projects, current maturity state, and sketch of the roadmap, setting a target maturity state within some timeframe is at the top of the list. The target maturity state will include a list of initiatives that could be siloed and confined to a timeframe.
    2. A Gantt chart or graph could be used to complete this task.

    Input

    • Results from previous activity slides

    Output

    • Current state and target state assessment for gap analysis
    • List of initiatives and timeframe

    Materials

    • Zero Trust Program Gap Analysis Tool

    Participants

    • Security team
    • IT leadership
    • IT ops team
    • Business executives
    • Board members

    Download the Zero Trust Program Gap Analysis Tool

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Insights Gained

    • Difference between zero trust as a principle and SASE as a framework
    • Difference between SASE and SSE platforms.
    • Assessment of which path to take in securing your hybrid workforce

    Deliverables Completed

    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

    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.

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

    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

    This is a screenshot from the Zero Trust - SASE Suitability Assessment Tool

    Zero Trust - SASE Suitability Assessment Tool

    Assess current security capabilities and build a roadmap of tasks and initiatives that close maturity gaps.

    Research Contributors

    • Aaron Shum, Vice President, Security & Privacy
    • Cameron Smith, Research Lead, Security & Privacy
    • Brad Mateski, Zones, Solutions Architect for CyberSecurity
    • Bob Smock, Info-Tech Research Group, Vice President of Consulting
    • Dr. Chase Cunningham, Ericom Software, Chief Strategy Officer
    • John Kindervag, ON2IT Cybersecurity, Senior Vice President, Cybersecurity Strategy and ON2IT Group Fellow
    • John Zhao, Fonterra, Enterprise Security Architect
    • Rongxing Lu, University of New Brunswick, Associate Professor
    • Sumanta Sarkar, University of Warwick, Assistant Professor
    • Tim Malone, J.B. Hunt Transport, Senior Director Information Security
    • Vana Matte, J.B. Hunt Transport, Senior Vice President of Technology Services

    Related Info-Tech Research

    This is a screenshot from Info-Tech's Security Strategy Model

    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 out a security roadmap.

    This is a screenshot from Info-Tech's research: Determine Your Zero Trust Readiness

    Determine Your Zero Trust Readiness

    IT security was typified by perimeter security. However, the way the world does business has mandated a change to IT security. In response, zero trust is a set of principles that can add flexibility to planning your IT security strategy.

    Use this blueprint to determine your zero trust readiness and understand how zero trust can benefit both security and the business.

    This is a screenshot from Info-Tech's research: Mature Your Identity and Access Management Program

    Mature Your Identity and Access Management Program

    Many organizations are looking to improve their identity and access management (IAM) practices but struggle with where to start and whether all areas of IAM have been considered. This blueprint will help you improve the organization's IAM practices by following our three-phase methodology:

    • Assess identity and access requirements.
    • Identify initiatives using the identity lifecycle.
    • Prioritize initiatives and build a roadmap.

    Bibliography

    "2021 Data Breach Investigations Report." Verizon, 2021. Web.
    "Fortinet Brings Networking and Security to the Cloud" Fortinet, 2 Mar. 2021. Web.
    "A Zero Trust Strategy Has 3 Needs – Identify, Authenticate, and Monitor Users and Devices on and off the Network." Fortinet, 15 July 2021. Web.
    "Applying Zero Trust Principles to Enterprise Mobility." CISA, Mar. 2022. Web.
    "CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model." CISA, Cybersecurity Division, June 2021. Web.
    "Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation Program Overview." CISA, Jan. 2022. Web.
    "Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021 | IBM." IBM, July 2021. Web.
    English, Melanie. "5 Stats That Show The Cost Saving Effect of Zero Trust." Teramind, 29 Sept. 2021. Web.
    Hunter, Steve. "The Five Business Benefits of a Zero Trust Approach to Security." Security Brief - Australia, 19 Aug. 2020. Web.
    "Improve Application Access and Security With Fortinet Zero Trust Network Access." Fortinet, 2 Mar. 2021. Web.
    "Incorporating zero trust Strategies for Secure Network and Application Access." Fortinet, 21 Jul. 2021. Web.
    Jakkal, Vasu. "Zero Trust Adoption Report: How Does Your Organization Compare?" Microsoft, 28 July 2021. Web.
    "Jericho Forum™ Commandments." The Open Group, Jericho Forum, May 2007. Web.
    Schulze, Holger. "2019 Zero Trust Adoption Report." Cybersecurity Insiders, 2019. Web.
    "67% of Organizations Had Identity-Related Data Breaches Last Year." Security Magazine, 22 Aug. 2022. Web.
    United States, Executive Office of the President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. "Executive Order on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity." The White House, 12 May 2021. Web.

    Implement Software Asset Management

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}313|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact: 9.3/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: $107,154 Average $ Saved
    • member rating average days saved: 39 Average Days Saved
    • Parent Category Name: Asset Management
    • Parent Category Link: /asset-management
    • Organizations are aware of the savings that result from implementing software asset management (SAM), but are unsure of where to start the process.
    • Poor data capture procedures and lack of a centralized repository produce an incomplete picture of software assets and licenses, preventing accurate forecasting and license optimization.
    • Audit protocols are ad hoc, resulting in sloppy reporting and time-consuming work and lack of preparedness for external software audits.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • A strong SAM program will benefit all aspects of the business. Data and reports gained through SAM will enable data-driven decision making for all areas of the business.
    • Don’t just track licenses; manage them to create value from data. Gathering and monitoring license data is just the beginning. What you do with that data is the real test.
    • Win the audit battle without fighting. Conduct internal audits to minimize surprises when external audits are requested.

    Impact and Result

    • Conduct a current state assessment of existing SAM processes to form an appropriate plan for implementing or improving your SAM program.
    • Define standard policies, processes, and procedures for each stage of the software asset lifecycle, from procurement through to retirement.
    • Develop an internal audit policy to mitigate the risk of costly external audits.

    Implement Software Asset Management Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should implement software asset management, 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 & plan

    Assess current state and plan the scope of the SAM program, team, and budget.

    • Implement Software Asset Management – Phase 1: Assess & Plan
    • SAM Maturity Assessment
    • SAM Standard Operating Procedures
    • SAM Budget Workbook

    2. Procure, receive & deploy

    Define processes for software requests, procurement, receiving, and deployment.

    • Implement Software Asset Management – Phase 2: Procure, Receive & Deploy
    • SAM Process Workflows (Visio)
    • SAM Process Workflows (PDF)

    3. Manage, redeploy & retire

    Define processes for software inventory, maintenance, harvest and redeployment, and retirement.

    • Implement Software Asset Management – Phase 3: Manage, Redeploy & Retire
    • Patch Management Policy

    4. Build supporting processes

    Build processes for audits and plan the implementation.

    • Implement Software Asset Management – Phase 4: Build Supporting Processes & Tools
    • Software Audit Scoping Email Template
    • Software Audit Launch Email Template
    • SAM Communication Plan
    • SAM FAQ Template
    • Software Asset Management Policy
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Implement Software Asset 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 Assess & Plan

    The Purpose

    Assess current state and plan the scope of the SAM program, team, and budget.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Current state assessment

    Defined roles and responsibilities

    SAM budget plan

    Activities

    1.1 Outline SAM challenges and objectives.

    1.2 Assess current state.

    1.3 Identify roles and responsibilities for SAM team.

    1.4 Identify metrics and reports.

    1.5 Identify SAM functions to centralize vs. decentralize.

    1.6 Plan SAM budget process.

    Outputs

    Current State Assessment

    RACI Chart

    Defined metrics and reports

    SAM Budget Workbook

    2 Procure, Receive & Deploy

    The Purpose

    Define processes for software requests, procurement, receiving, and deployment.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Defined standards for software procurement

    Documented processes for software receiving and deployment

    Activities

    2.1 Determine software standards.

    2.2 Define procurement process for new contracts.

    2.3 Define process for contract renewals and additional procurement scenarios.

    2.4 Design process for receiving software.

    2.5 Design deployment workflow.

    2.6 Define process for non-standard software requests.

    Outputs

    Software standards

    Standard Operating Procedures

    SAM Process Workflows

    3 Manage, Redeploy & Retire

    The Purpose

    Define processes for software inventory, maintenance, harvest and redeployment, and retirement.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Defined process for conducting software inventory

    Maintenance and patch policy

    Documented workflows for software harvest and redeployment as well as retirement

    Activities

    3.1 Define process for conducting software inventory.

    3.2 Define policies for software maintenance and patches.

    3.3 Map software license harvest and reallocation process.

    3.4 Define policy for retiring software.

    Outputs

    Standard Operating Procedures

    Patch management policy

    SAM Process Workflows

    4 Build Supporting Processes & Tools

    The Purpose

    Build processes for audits, identify tool requirements, and plan the implementation.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Defined process for internal and external audits

    Tool requirements

    Communication and implementation plan

    Activities

    4.1 Define and document the internal audit process.

    4.2 Define and document the external audit process.

    4.3 Document tool requirements.

    4.4 Develop a communication plan.

    4.5 Prepare an FAQ list.

    4.6 Identify SAM policies.

    4.7 Develop a SAM roadmap to plan your implementation.

    Outputs

    Audit response templates

    Tool requirements

    Communication plan

    End-user FAQ list

    Software Asset Management Policy

    Implementation roadmap

    Further reading

    Implement Software Asset Management

    Go beyond tracking licenses to proactively managing software throughout its lifecycle.

    Table of contents

    1. Title
    2. Executive Brief
    3. Execute the Project/DIY Guide
    4. Next Steps
    5. Appendix

    Analyst Perspective

    “Organizations often conflate software asset management (SAM) with license tracking. SAM is not merely knowing how many licenses you require to be in compliance; it’s asking the deeper budgetary questions to right-size your software spend.

    Software audits are a growing concern for businesses, but proactive reporting and decision making supported by quality data will mitigate audit risks. Value is left on the table through underused or poor-quality data, so active data management must be in play. A dedicated ITAM tool can assist with extracting value from your license data.

    Achieving an optimized SAM program is a transformative effort, but the people, processes, and technology need to be in place before that can happen.” (Sandi Conrad, Senior Director, Infrastructure & Operations Practice, Info-Tech Research Group)

    Software license complexity and audit frequency are increasing: are you prepared to manage the risk?

    This Research Is Designed For:

    • CIOs that want to improve IT’s reputation with the business.
    • CIOs that want to eliminate the threat of a software audit.
    • Organizations that want proactive reporting that benefits the entire business.
    • IT managers who want visibility into their software usage.

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Establish a standardized software management process.
    • Track and manage software throughout its lifecycle, from procurement through to retirement or redeployment.
    • Rationalize your software license estate.
    • Improve your negotiations with software vendors.
    • Improve the quality of your SAM data gathering and reporting.

    Executive summary

    Situation

    • Organizations are aware of the savings that result from implementing software asset management (SAM), but are unsure of where to start the process. With no formal standards in place for managing licenses, organizations are constantly at risk for costly software audits and poorly executed software spends.

    Complication

    • Poor data-capture procedures produce an incomplete picture of software lifecycles.
    • No centralized repository exists, resulting in fragmented reporting.
    • Audit protocols are ad hoc, resulting in sloppy reporting and time-consuming work.

    Resolution

    • Conduct a current state assessment of existing SAM processes to form an appropriate plan for implementing or improving your SAM program.
    • Build and involve a SAM team in the process from the beginning to help embed the change.
    • Define standard policies, processes, and procedures for each stage of the software asset lifecycle, from procurement through to retirement. Pace yourself; a staged implementation will make your ITAM program a success.
    • Develop an internal audit program to mitigate the risk of costly audits.
    • Once a standardized SAM program and data are in place, you will be able to use the data to optimize and rationalize your software licenses.

    Info-Tech Insight

    A strong SAM program will benefit all aspects of the business.
    Data and reports gained through SAM will enable data-driven decision making for all areas of the business.

    Don’t just track licenses; manage them to create value from data.
    Gathering and monitoring license data is just the beginning. What you do with that data is the real test.

    Win the audit battle without fighting.
    Conduct internal audits to minimize surprises when external audits are requested.

    Build the business case for SAM on cost and risk avoidance

    You can estimate the return even without tools or data.

    Benefit Calculate the return
    Compliance

    How many audits did you have in the past three years?

    How much time did you spend in audit response?

    		Suppose you had two audits each year for the last three years, each with an average $250,000 in settlements.

    A team of four with an average salary of $75,000 each took six months to respond each year, allocating 20% of their work time to the audit.

    You could argue annual audits cost on average $530,000. Increasing ITAM maturity stands to reduce that cost significantly.

    Efficiency

    How much do you spend on software and maintenance by supplier?

    		Suppose you spent $1M on software last year. What if you could reduce the spend by just 10% through better practices?

    SAM can help reduce the annual spend by simplifying support, renegotiating contracts based on asset data, reducing redundancy, and reducing spend.

    The Business Benefits of SAM

    • Compliance: Managing audits and meeting legal, contractual, and regulatory obligations.
    • Efficiency: Reducing costs and making the best use of assets while maintaining service.
    • Agility: Anticipate requirements using asset data for business intelligence and analytics.

    Poor software asset management practices increase costs and risks

    Failure to implement SAM can lead to:

    High cost of undiscovered IT assets
    • Needless procurement of software for new hires can be costly.
    Licensing, liability, and legal violations
    • Legal actions and penalties that result from ineffective SAM processes and license incompliance can severely impact an organization’s financial performance and corporate brand image.
    Compromised security
    • Not knowing what assets you have, who is using them and how, can compromise the security of sensitive information.
    Increased management costs
    • Not having up-to-date software license information impacts decision making, with many management teams failing to respond quickly and efficiently to operational demands.
    Increased disruptions
    • Vendors seek out organizations who don’t manage their software assets effectively; it is likely that you could be subject to major operational disruptions as a result of an audit.
    Poor supplier/vendor relationship
    • Most organizations fear communicating with vendors and are anxious about negotiating new licenses.

    54% — A study by 1E found that only 54% of organizations believe they can identify all unused software in their organization.

    28% — On average, 28% of deployed software is unused, with a wasted cost of $224 per PC on unused software (1E, 2014).

    53% — Express Metrix found that 53% of organizations had been audited within the past two years. Of those, 72% had been audited within the last 12 months.

    SAM delivers cost savings beyond the procurement stage

    SAM delivers cost savings in several ways:

    • Improved negotiating position
      • Certainty around software needs and licensing terms can put the organization in a better negotiating position for new contracts or contract renewals.
    • Improved purchasing position
      • Centralized procurement can allow for improved purchasing agreements with better pricing.
    • More accurate forecasting and spend
      • With accurate data on what software is installed vs. used, more accurate decisions can be made around software purchasing needs and budgeting.
    • Prevention of over deployment
      • Deploy software only where it is needed based on what end users actively use.
    • Software rationalization
      • SAM data may reveal multiple applications performing similar functions that can be rationalized into a single standard software that is used across the enterprise.
    • License harvesting
      • Identify unused licenses that can be harvested and redeployed to other users rather than purchasing new licenses.

    SAM delivers many benefits beyond cost savings

    Manage risk. If licensing terms are not properly observed, the organization is at risk of legal and financial exposure, including illegal software installation, loss of proof of licenses purchased, or breached terms and conditions.

    Control and predict spend. Unexpected problems related to software assets and licenses can significantly impact cash flow.

    Less operational interruptions. Poor software asset management processes could lead to failed deployments, software update interruptions, viruses, or a shutdown of unlicensed applications.

    Avoid security breaches. If data is not secure through software patches and security, confidential information may be disclosed.

    More informed decisions. More accurate data on software assets improves transparency and informs decision making.

    Improved contract management. Automated tools can alert you to when contracts are up for renewal to allow time to plan and negotiate, then purchase the right amount of licenses.

    Avoid penalties. Conduct internal audits and track compliance to avoid fees or penalties if an external audit occurs.

    Reduced IT support. Employees should require less support from the service desk with proper, up to date, licensed software, freeing up time for IT Operations to focus on other work.

    Enhanced productivity. By rationalizing and standardizing software offerings, more staff should be using the same software with the same versioning, allowing for better communication and collaboration.

    Asset management is especially correlated with the following processes

    Being highly effective at asset management means that you are more likely to be highly effective at almost all IT processes, especially:

    Icon for process 'BAI10 Configuration Management'. Configuration Management
    76% more effective         		Icon for process 'ITRG03 Manage Service Catalogs'. Service Catalog
    74% more effective
    Icon for process 'APO11 Quality Management'. Quality Management
    63% more effective         		Icon for process 'ITRG08 Data Quality'. Data Quality
    62% more effective
    Icon for process 'MEA01 Performance Measurement'. Performance Measurement
    61% more effective         		Icon for process 'BAI05 Organizational Change Management'. Organizational Change Management
    60% more effective
    Icon for process 'APO05 Portfolio Management'. Portfolio Management
    59% more effective         		Icon for process 'APO03 Enterprise Architecture'. Enterprise Architecture
    58% more effective

    Why? Good SAM processes are integral to both service management and configuration management

    (Source: Info-Tech Research Group, IT Management and Governance Diagnostic; N=972 organizations) (High asset management effectiveness was defined as those organizations with an effectiveness score of 8 or above.)

    To accelerate progress, Info-Tech Research Group parses software asset management into its essential processes

    Focus on software asset management essentials

    Software Procurement:

    • Define procurement standards for software and related warranties and support options.
    • Develop processes and workflows for purchasing and work out financial implications to inform budgeting later.

    Software Deployment and Maintenance:

    • Define policies, processes, and workflows for software receiving, deployment, and maintenance practices.
    • Develop processes and workflows for managing imaging, harvests and redeployments, service requests, and large-scale rollouts.

    Software Harvest and Retirement:

    • Manage the employee termination and software harvest cycle.
    • Develop processes, policies, and workflows for software security and retirement.

    Software Contract and Audit Management:

    • Develop processes for data collection and validation to prepare for an audit.
    • Define metrics and reporting processes to keep asset management processes on track.
    A diagram that looks like a tier circle with 'Implement SAM' at the center. The second ring has 'Request & Procure', 'Receive & Deploy', 'Manage & Maintain', and 'Harvest & Retire'. The third ring seems to be a cycle beginning with 'Plan', 'Request', 'Procure', 'Deploy', 'Manage', 'Retire', and back to 'Plan'.

    Asset management is a key piece of Info-Tech’s COBIT-based IT Management and Governance Framework

    The Info-Tech / COBIT5 IT Management & Governance Framework, a number of IT process icons arranged like a periodic table. A magnifying glass highlights process 'BAI09 Asset Management' in the 'Infrastructure & Operations' category.

    Follow Info-Tech's methodology to build a plan to implement software asset management

    Phase 1
    Assess & Plan     		Phase 2
    Procure, Receive & Deploy     		Phase 3
    Manage, Redeploy & Retire     		Phase 4
    Build supporting processes

    1.1

    		 Assess current state

    2.1

    		 Request & procure

    3.1

    		 Manage & maintain contracts

    4.1

    		 Compliance & audits

    1.2

    		 Build team and define metrics

    2.2

    		 Receive & deploy

    3.2

    		 Harvest or retire

    4.2

    		 Communicate & build roadmap

    1.3

    		 Plan & budget
    Deliverables
    Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)
    SAM maturity assessment Process workflows Process workflows Audit response templates
    RACI chart Software standards Patch management policy Communication plan & FAQ template
    SAM metrics SAM policies
    SAM budget workbook

    Thanks to SAM, Visa saved $200 million in three years

    Logo for VISA.

    Case Study

    Industry: Financial Services
    Source: International Business Software Managers Association

    Visa, Inc.

    Visa, Inc. is the largest payment processing company in the world, with a network that can handle over 40,000 transactions every minute.

    Software Asset Management Program

    In 2006, Visa launched a formal IT asset management program, but it was not until 2011 that it initiated a focus on SAM. Joe Birdsong, the SAM director, first addressed four major enterprise license agreements (ELAs) and compliance issues. The SAM team implemented a few dedicated SAM tools in conjunction with an aggressive approach to training.

    Results

    The proactive approach taken by Visa used a three-pronged strategy: people, process, and tools. The process included ELA negotiations, audit responses, and software license rationalization exercises.

    According to Birdsong, “In the past three years, SAM has been credited with saving Visa over $200 million.”

    An timeline arrow with benchmarks, in order: 'Tool purchases', 'ELA negotiations', 'License rationalization', 'Audit responses', '$200 million in savings in just three years thanks to optimized SAM processes'.

    Info-Tech delivers: Use our tools and templates to accelerate your project to completion

    Thumbnail of Info-Tech's 'SAM Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)'.
    SAM Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)     		Thumbnail of Info-Tech's 'SAM Maturity Assessment'.
    SAM Maturity Assessment     		Thumbnail of Info-Tech's 'SAM Visio Process Workflows'.
    SAM Visio Process Workflows     		Thumbnail of Info-Tech's 'SAM Budget Workbook'.
    SAM Budget Workbook
    Thumbnail of Info-Tech's 'Additional SAM Policy Templates'.
    Additional SAM Policy Templates     		Thumbnail of Info-Tech's 'Software Asset Management Policy'.
    Software Asset Management Policy     		Thumbnail of Info-Tech's 'SAM Communication Plan'.
    SAM Communication Plan     		Thumbnail of Info-Tech's 'SAM FAQ Template'.
    SAM FAQ Template

    Use these insights to help guide your understanding of the project

    • SAM provides value to other processes in IT.
      Data, reports, and savings gained through SAM will enable data-driven decision making for all areas of the business.
    • Don’t just track licenses; manage them to create value from data.
      Gathering and monitoring license data is just the beginning. What you do with that data is the real test.
    • SAM isn’t about managing costs; it’s about understanding your environment to make better decisions.
      Capital tied up in software can impact the progress of other projects.
    • Managing licenses can impact the entire organization.
      Gain project buy-in from stakeholders by articulating the impact that managing licenses can have on other projects and the prevalence of shadow IT.

    Measure the value of a guided implementation (GI)

    Engaging in GIs doesn’t just offer valuable project advice, it also results in significant cost savings.

    GI Measured Value (Assuming 260 workdays in a year)
    Phase 1: Assess & Plan
    • Time, value, and resources saved by using Info-Tech’s methodology to assess current state and create a defined SAM team with actionable metrics
    • For example, 2 FTEs * 5 days * $80,000/year = $6,400
    Phase 2: Procure, Receive & Deploy
    • Time, value, and resources saved by using Info-Tech’s methodology to streamline request, procurement, receiving, and deployment processes for software assets.
    • For example, 2 FTEs * 5 days * $80,000/year = $6,400
    Phase 3: Manage, Redeploy & Retire
    • Time, value, and resources saved by using Info-Tech’s methodology to streamline the maintenance, inventory, license redeployment, and software retiring processes.
    • For example, 2 FTEs * 5 days * $80,000/year = $6,400
    Phase 4: Build Supporting Processes and Tools
    • Time, resources, and potential audit fines saved by using Info-Tech’s methodology to improve audit defense processes ($298,325 average audit penalty (Based on the results of Cherwell Software’s 2013 Software Audit Industry Report)) and design a communication and implementation plan.
    • For example, 2 FTEs * 5days * $80,000/year = $6,400 + $298,325 = $304,725
    Total savings $330,325

    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

    Implement Software Asset Management – project overview

    Phase 1: Assess & plan Phase 2: Procure, receive & deploy Phase 3: Manage, redeploy & retire Phase 4: Build supporting processes
    Supporting Tool icon Best-Practice Toolkit

    Step 1.1: Assess current state

    Step 1.2: Build team and define metrics

    Step 1.3: Plan and budget

    Step 2.1: Request and procure

    Step 2.2: Receive and deploy

    Step 3.1: Manage and maintain contracts

    Step 3.2: Harvest, redeploy, or retire

    Step 4.1: Compliance and audits

    Step 4.2: Communicate and build roadmap

    Guided Implementations
    • Assess current state and challenges.
    • Define roles and responsibilities as well as metrics.
    • Discuss SAM budgeting.
    • Define software standards and procurement process.
    • Build processes for receiving software and deploying software.
    • Define process for conducting software inventory and maintenance and patches.
    • Build software harvest and redeployment processes and retirement.
    • Define process for internal and external audits.
    • Develop communication and implementation plan.
    Associated Activity icon Onsite Workshop Module 1:
    Assess & Plan     		Module 2:
    Map Core Processes: Procure, Receive & Deploy     		Module 3:
    Map Core Processes: Manage, Redeploy & Retire     		Module 4:
    Prepare for audit, build roadmap and communications

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Workshop Day 1 Workshop Day 2 Workshop Day 3 Workshop Day 4
    Activities
    Assess & Plan

    1.1 Outline SAM challenges and objectives

    1.2 Assess current state

    1.3 Identify roles and responsibilities for SAM team

    1.4 Identify metrics and reports

    1.5 Identify SAM functions to centralize vs. decentralize

    1.6 Plan SAM budget process

    Map Core Processes: Procure, Receive & Deploy

    2.1 Determine software standards

    2.2 Define procurement process for new contracts

    2.3 Define process for contract renewals and additional procurement scenarios

    2.4 Design process for receiving software

    2.5 Design deployment workflow

    2.6 Define process for non-standard software requests

    Map Core Processes: Manage, Redeploy & Retire

    3.1 Define process for conducting software inventory

    3.2 Define policies for software maintenance and patches

    3.3 Map software license harvest and reallocation process

    3.4 Define policy for retiring software

    Build Supporting Processes

    4.1 Define and document the internal audit process

    4.2 Define and document the external audit process

    4.3 Develop a communication plan

    4.4 Prepare an FAQ list

    4.5 Identify SAM policies

    4.6 Develop a SAM roadmap to plan your implementation

    Deliverables
    • SAM maturity assessment
    • RACI chart
    • Defined metrics and reports
    • Budget workbook
    • Process workflows
    • Software standards
    • Process workflows
    • Patch management policy
    • Standard operating procedures
    • Audit response templates
    • Communication plan
    • FAQ template
    • Additional policy templates
    • Roadmap of initiatives

    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.

    A small monochrome icon of a wrench and screwdriver creating an X.

    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.

    A small monochrome icon depicting a person in front of a blank slide.

    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.

    Phase 1: Assess Current State

    VISA fought fire with fire to combat costly software audits

    Logo for VISA.

    Case Study

    Industry: Financial Services
    Source: SAM Summit 2014

    Challenge

    Visa implemented an IT asset management program in 2006. After years of software audit teams from large firms visiting and leaving expensive software compliance bills, the world’s leading payment processing company decided it was time for a change.

    Upper management recognized that it needed to combat audits. It had the infrastructure in place and the budget to purchase SAM tools that could run discovery and tracking functions, but it was lacking the people and processes necessary for a mature SAM program.

    Solution

    Visa decided to fight fire with fire. It initially contracted the same third-party audit teams to help build out its SAM processes. Eventually, Visa formed a new SAM team that was led by a group of former auditors.

    The former auditors recognized that their role was not technology based, so a group of technical individuals were hired to help roll out various SAM tools.

    The team rolled out tools like BDNA Discover and Normalize, Flexera FlexNet Manager, and Microsoft SCCM.

    Results

    To establish an effective SAM team, diverse talent is key. Visa focused on employees that were consultative but also technical. Their team needed to build relationships with teams within the organization and externally with vendors.

    Most importantly, the leaders of the team needed to think like auditors to better prepare for audits. According to Joe Birdsong, SAM Director at Visa, “we want to be viewed as a team that can go in and help right-size their environment and better understand licensing to help teams make better decisions.”

    The SAM team was only the beginning.

    Step 1.1 Assess current state and plan scope

    Phase 1:
    Assess & Plan    		This step will walk you through the following activities:This step involves the following participants:

    1.1

    		Assess current state
    • 1.1.1 Outline the organization’s SAM challenges
    • 1.1.2 Identify objectives of SAM program
    • 1.1.3 Determine the maturity of your SAM program
    • Project Sponsor
    • IT Director, CIO
    • IT Managers and SAM Manager

    1.2

    		Build team and define metrics

    1.3

    		Plan & budget

    Step Outcomes

    • An outline of the challenges related to SAM
    • A clear direction for the program based on drivers, anticipated benefits, and goals
    • A completed maturity assessment of current SAM processes

    Sketch out challenges related to software asset management to shape the direction of the project

    Common SAM challenges

    • Audits are disruptive, time-consuming, and costly
    • No audit strategy and response in place
    • Software non-compliance risk is too high
    • Lacking data to forecast software needs
    • No central repository of software licenses
    • Untracked or unused software licenses results in wasted spend
    • Software license and maintenance costs account for a large percentage of the budget
    • Lacking data to know what software is purchased and deployed across the organization
    • Lack of software standards make it difficult to collect consistent information about software products
    • New software licenses are purchased when existing licenses remain on the shelf or multiple similar software products are purchased
    • Employees or departments make ad hoc purchases, resulting in overspending and reduced purchasing power
    • License renewal dates come up unexpectedly without time for adequate decision making
    • No communication between departments to coordinate software purchasing
    • Difficult to stay up to date with software licensing rule changes to remain in compliance
    • Processes and policies are unstandardized and undocumented

    Outline the organization’s SAM challenges

    Associated Activity icon 1.1.1 Brainstorm SAM challenges

    Participants: CIO/CFO, IT Director, Asset Manager, Purchasing, Service Desk Manager, Security (optional), Operations (optional)

    1. Distribute sticky notes to participants. Have everyone start by identifying challenges they face as a result of poor software asset management.
    2. As group, discuss and outline the software asset management challenges facing the organization. These may be challenges caused by poor SAM processes or simply by a lack of process. Group the challenges into key pain points to inform the current state discussion and assessment to follow.

    To be effective with software asset management, understand the drivers and potential impact to the organization

    Drivers of effective SAM Results of effective SAM
    Contracts and vendor licensing programs are complex and challenging to administer without data related to assets and their environment. → Improved access to accurate data on contracts, licensing, warranties, installed software for new contracts, renewals, and audit requests.
    Increased need to meet compliance requires a formal approach to tracking and managing assets. → Encryption, software application controls, and change notifications all contribute to better asset controls and data security.
    Cost cutting is on the agenda, and management is looking to reduce overall IT spend in the organization in any possible way. → Reduction of software spend through data for better forecasting, planning, and licensing rationalization and harvesting.
    Audits are time consuming, disruptive to project timelines and productivity, and costly. → Respond to audits with a formalized process, accurate data, and minimal disruption using always-available reporting.

    Determine goals to focus the direction of your SAM program

    Associated Activity icon 1.1.2 Identify objectives of the SAM program

    Participants: CIO/CFO, IT Director, Asset Manager, Service Manager (optional)

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    1. Identify the drivers behind the software asset management implementation or improvement project. List on a whiteboard or flip chart.
    2. Using the project drivers as input, brainstorm the goals of the SAM project. Discuss the goals as a group and finalize into a list of objectives for the SAM program.
    3. Record the objectives in the SOP and keep them in mind as you work through the rest of the project.

    Sample Objectives:

    1. A single data repository to efficiently manage assets for their entire lifecycle.
    2. Formalizing a methodology for documenting assets to make data retrieval easy and accurate.
    3. Defining and documenting processes to determine where improvements can be made.
    4. Improving customer experience in accessing, using, and maintaining assets.
    5. Centralizing contract information.
    6. Providing access to information for all technical teams as needed.

    Implementing SAM processes will support other IT functions

    By improving how you manage your licenses and audit requests, you will not only provide benefits through a mature SAM program, you will also improve your service desk and disaster recovery functions.

    Service Desk Disaster Recovery
    • Effective service desk tickets require a certain degree of technical detail for completion that a SAM program often provides.
    • Many tools are available that can handle both ITSM and ITAM functions. Your SAM data can be integrated into many of your service desk functions.
    • For example, if a particular application is causing a high number of tickets, SAM data could show the application’s license is almost expired and its usage has decreased due to end-user frustrations. The SAM team could review the application and decide to purchase software that better meets end-user needs.
    • If you don’t know what you have, you don’t know what needs to be back online first.
    • The ability to restore system functionality is heavily dependent on the ability to locate or reproduce master media documentation and system configuration information.
    • If systems/software are permanently lost, the ability to recover software licensing information is crucial to preserving compliance.
    • License agreement and software are needed to demonstrate software ownership. Unless the proof of ownership is present, there is no proof of compliance.
    Short description of Info-Tech blueprint 'Standardize the Service Desk'. Short description of Info-Tech blueprint 'Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan'.

    Each level of SAM maturity comes with its own unique challenges

    Maturity People & Policies Processes Technology
    Chaos
    • No dedicated staff
    • No policies published
    • Procedures not documented or standardized
    • Licenses purchased randomly
    • Help desk images machines, but users can buy and install software
    • Minimal tracking tools in place
    Reactive
    • Semi-focused SAM manager
    • No policies published
    • Reliance on suppliers to provide reports for software purchases
    • Buy licenses as needed
    • Software installations limited to help desk
    • Discovery tools and spreadsheets used to manage software
    Controlled
    • Full-time SAM manager
    • End-user policies published and requiring sign-off
    • License reviews with maintenance and support renewals
    • SAM manager involved in budgeting and planning sessions
    • Discovery and inventory tools used to manage software
    • Compliance reports run as needed
    Proactive
    • Extended SAM team, including help desk and purchasing
    • Corporate anti-piracy statement in place and enforced
    • Quarterly license reviews
    • Centralized view into software licenses
    • Software requests through service catalog with defined standard and non-standard software
    • Product usage reports and alerts in place to harvest and reuse licenses
    • Compliance and usage reports used to negotiate software contracts
    Optimized
    • SAM manager trained and certified
    • Working with HR, Legal, Finance, and IT to enforce policies
    • Full support and maintenance analysis for all license reviews
    • Quarterly meetings with SAM team to review policies, procedures, upcoming contracts, and rollouts
    • Software deployed automatically through service catalog/apps store
    • Detailed savings reports provided to executive team annually
    • Automated policy enforcement and process workflows

    Determine the maturity of your SAM program

    Supporting Tool icon 1.1.3 Use the SAM Maturity Assessment Tool
    1. Download the SAM Maturity Assessment Tool and go to tab 2.
    2. Complete the self-assessment in all seven categories:
      1. Control Environment
      2. Roles & Responsibilities
      3. Policies & Procedures
      4. Competence
      5. Planning & Implementation Process
      6. Monitoring & Review
      7. Inventory Processes
    3. Go to tab 3 and examine the graphs produced. Identify the areas in your SAM program that require the most attention and which are already relatively mature.
    4. Use the results of this maturity assessment to focus the efforts of the project moving forward. Return to the assessment after a pre-determined time (e.g. one year later) to track improvement in maturity over time.
    Screenshot of the results page from the SAM Maturity Assessment Tool. Screenshot of the processes page from the SAM Maturity Assessment Tool.

    Step 1.2 Build team and define metrics

    Phase 1:
    Assess & Plan    		This step will walk you through the following activities:This step involves the following participants:

    1.1

    		Assess current state
    • 1.2.1 Identify roles and responsibilities for SAM team
    • 1.2.2 Identify metrics and KPIs to track the success of your SAM program
    • 1.2.3 Define SAM reports to track metrics
    • CIO/CFO
    • IT Director
    • SAM Manager
    • SAM Team
    • Service Desk Manager

    1.2

    		Build team and define metrics

    1.3

    		Plan & budget

    Step Outcomes

    • A description of the roles and responsibilities of IT staff involved in SAM
    • A list of metrics and reports to track to measure the success of the software asset management program

    Define roles and responsibilities for the SAM program

    Roles and responsibilities should be adapted to fit specific organizational requirements based on its size, structure, and distribution and the scope of the program. Not all roles are necessary and in small organizations, one or two people may fulfill multiple roles.

    Senior Management Sponsor – Ensures visibility and support for the program.

    IT Asset Manager – Responsible for management of all assets and maintaining asset database.

    Software Asset Manager – Responsible for management of all software assets (a subset of the overall responsibility of the IT Asset Manager).

    SAM Process Owner – Responsible for overall effectiveness and efficiency of SAM processes.

    Asset Analyst – Maintains up-to-date records of all IT assets, including software version control.

    Additional roles that interact with SAM:

    • Security Manager
    • Auditors
    • Procurement Manager
    • Legal Council
    • Change Manager
    • Configuration Manager
    • Release and Deployment Manager
    • Service Desk Manager

    Form a software asset management team to drive project success

    Many organizations simply do not have a large enough staff to hire a full-time software asset manager. The role will need to be championed by an internal employee.

    Avoid filling this position with a temporary contract; one of the most difficult operational factors in SAM implementation and continuity is constant turnover and organizational shifts. Hiring a software asset manager on contract might get the project going faster, but without the knowledge gained by doing the processes, the program won’t have enough momentum to sustain itself.

    Software Asset Manager Duties

    • Gather proof of license.
    • Record and track all assets within the SAM repository.
    • Produce compliance reports.
    • Preparation of budget requests.
    • Administration of software renewal process.
    • Contract and support analysis.
    • Document procedures.
    • Ensure project is on track.

    SAM Team Member Duties

    • Record license and contract data in SAM tool.
    • Assist in production of SAM reports.
    • Data analysis.
    • Match tickets to SAM data.
    • Assist in documentation.
    • Assist in compliance reports.
    • Gather feedback from end users.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Make sure your SAM team is diverse. The SAM team will need to be skilled at achieving compliance, but there is also a need for technically skilled individuals to maximize the function of the SAM tool(s) at your organization.

    Identify roles and responsibilities for SAM

    Associated Activity icon 1.2.1 Complete a RACI chart for your organization

    Participants: CIO/CFO, IT Director, SAM Manager, SAM Team, Service Desk Manager

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    Determine the roles and responsibilities for your SAM program. Record the results in a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) chart such as the example below.

    SAM Processes and Tasks CIO CFO SAM Manager IT Director Service Management Team IT Ops Security Finance Legal Project Manager
    Policies/Governance A C R R I I C I R I
    Strategy A C R R I I I I C
    Risk Management/Asset Security A C R R C R C C C
    Data Entry/Quality I I A R R
    Compliance Auditing R C A R I I I I
    Education & Training R I A C I I
    Contract Lifecycle Management R R A R C C C C R C
    Workflows R C A R I I I R I C/I
    Budgeting R R R A C R
    Software Acquisition R I A R I C R C C
    Controls/Reporting R I A R I I C I
    Optimize License Harvesting I I A R I C C

    Identify metrics to form the framework of the project

    Trying to achieve goals without metrics is like trying to cook without measuring your ingredients. You might succeed, but you’ll have no idea how to replicate it.

    SAM metrics should measure one of five categories:

    • Quantity → How many do we have? How many do we want?
    • Compliance → What is the level of compliance in a specific area?
    • Duration → How long does it take to achieve the desired result?
    • Financial → What is the cost/value? What is our comparative spend?
    • Quality → How good was the end result? E.g. Completeness, accuracy, timeliness

    The metrics you track depend on your maturity level. As your organization shifts in maturity, the metrics you prioritize for tracking will shift to reflect that change. Example:

    Metric category Low maturity metric High maturity metric
    Compliance % of software installed that is unauthorized % of vendors in effective licensing position (ELP) report
    Quantity % of licenses documented in ITAM tool % of requests made through unauthorized channels

    Associate KPIs and metrics with SAM goals

    • Identify the critical success factors (CSFs) for your software asset management program based on strategic goals.
    • For each success factor, identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success, as well as specific metrics that will be tracked and reported on.
    • Sample metrics are below:

    CSF = Goal, or what success looks like

    KPI = How achievement of goal will be defined

    Metric = Numerical measure to determine if KPI has been achieved

    CSF/Goal KPI Metrics
    Improve accuracy of software budget and forecasting
    • Reduce software spend by 5%
    • Total software asset spending
    • Budgeted software spend vs. actual software spend
    Avoid over purchasing software licenses and optimize use of existing licenses
    • Reduce number of unused and underused licenses by 10%
    • Number of unused licenses
    • Money saved from harvesting licenses instead of purchasing new ones
    Improve accuracy of data
    • Data in SAM tool matches what is deployed with 95% accuracy
    • Percentage of entitlements recorded in SAM tool
    • Percentage of software titles recognized by SAM tool
    Improved service delivery
    • Reduce time to deploy new software by 10%
    • Mean time to purchase new software
    • Mean time to fulfill new software requests

    Identify metrics and KPIs to track the success of your SAM program

    Associated Activity icon 1.2.2 Brainstorm metrics and KPIs

    Participants: CIO, IT Director, SAM Manager, SAM Team

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    1. Discuss the goals and objectives of implementing or improving software asset management, based on challenges identified earlier.
    2. From the goals, identify the critical success factors for the SAM program.
    3. For each CSF, identify one to three key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate achievement of the success factor.
    4. For each KPI, identify one to three metrics that can be tracked and reported on to measure success. Ensure that the metrics are tangible and measurable.

    Use the table below as an example.

    Goal/CSF KPI Metric
    Improve license visibility Increase accuracy and completeness of SAM data
    • % of total titles included in ITAM tool
    • % of licenses documented in ITAM tool
    Reduce software costs Reduce number of unused software licenses by 20%
    • % of licenses assigned to ex-employees
    • % of deployed licenses that have not been used in the past six months
    Reduce shadow IT Reduce number of unauthorized software purchases and installations by 10%
    • % of software requests made through unauthorized channels
    • % of software installed that is unauthorized

    Tailor metrics and reports to specific stakeholders

    Asset Managers

    Asset managers require data to manage how licenses are distributed throughout the organization. Are there multiple versions of the same application deployed? What proportion of licenses deployed are assigned to employees who are no longer at the organization? What are the usage patterns for applications?

    Service Desk Technicians

    Service desk technicians need real-time data on licenses currently available to deploy to machines that need to be imaged/updated, otherwise there is a risk of breaching a vendor agreement.

    Business Managers and Executives

    Business managers and executives need reports to make strategic decisions. The reports created for business stakeholders need to help them align business projects or business processes with SAM metrics. To determine which reports will provide the most value, start by looking at business goals and determining the tactical data that will help inform and support these goals and their progress.

    Additional reporting guidelines:

    • Dashboards should provide quick-glance information for daily maintenance.
    • Alerts should be set for all contract renewals to provide enough advanced notice (e.g. 90 days).
    • Reports should be automated to provide actionable information to appropriate stakeholders as needed.

    Define SAM reports to track metrics

    Associated Activity icon 1.2.3 Identify reports and metrics to track regularly

    Participants: CIO, IT Director, SAM Manager, SAM Team

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    1. Identify key stakeholders requiring SAM reports. For each audience, identify their goals and requirements from reporting.
    2. Using the list of metrics identified previously, sort metrics into reports for each audience based on their requirements and goals. Add any additional metrics required.
    3. Identify a reporting frequency for each report.

    Example:

    Stakeholder Purpose Report Frequency
    Asset Manager
    • Manage budget
    • Manage contracts and cash flow
    • Ensure processes are being followed
    		 Operational budget spent to date Monthly
    Capital budget spent to date Monthly
    Contracts coming due for renewal Quarterly
    Software harvested for redeployment Quarterly
    Number of single applications being managed Annually
    CFO
    • Manage budget
    • Manage cash flow
    		 Software purchased, operational & capital Monthly
    Software accrued for future purchases Monthly
    Contracts coming due for renewal
    • Include dollar value, savings/spend
    		 Quarterly
    CIO
    • Resource planning
    • Progress reporting
    		 Software deployments and redeployments Monthly
    Software rollouts planned Quarterly
    % of applications patched Quarterly
    Money saved Annually
    Number of contracts & apps managed Quarterly

    Step 1.3 Plan the SAM program and budget

    Phase 1:
    Assess & Plan    		This step will walk you through the following activities:This step involves the following participants:

    1.1

    		Assess current state
    • 1.3.1 Identify SAM functions to centralize vs. decentralize
    • 1.3.2 Complete the SAM budget tool
    • Project Sponsor
    • IT Director, CIO
    • IT Managers and SAM Manager
    • CFO

    1.2

    		Build team and define metrics

    1.3

    		Plan & budget

    Step Outcomes

    • Defined scope for the SAM program in terms of the degree of centralization of core functions and contracts
    • A clearer picture of software spend through the use of a SAM budgeting tool.

    Asset managers need to be involved in infrastructure projects at the decision-making stage

    Ensure that your software asset manager is at the table when making key IT decisions.

    Many infrastructure managers and business managers are unaware of how software licensing can impact projects. For example, changes in core infrastructure configuration can have big impacts from a software licensing perspective.

    Mini Case Study

    • When a large healthcare organization’s core infrastructure team decided to make changes to their environment, they failed to involve their asset manager in the decision-making process.
    • When the healthcare organization decided to make changes to their servers, they were running Oracle software on their servers, but the licenses were not being tracked.
    • When the change was being made to the servers, the business contacted Oracle to notify them of the change. What began as a tech services call quickly devolved into a licensing error; the vendor determined that the licenses deployed in the server environment were unauthorized.
    • For breaching the licensing agreement, Oracle fined the healthcare organization $250,000.
    • Had the asset manager been involved in the process, they would have understood the implications that altering the hardware configuration would have on the licensing agreement and a very expensive mistake could have been avoided.

    Decide on the degree of centralization for core SAM functions

    • Larger organizations with multiple divisions or business units will need to decide which SAM functions will be centralized and which, if any, will be decentralized as they plan the scope of their SAM program. Generally, certain core functions should be centralized for the SAM program to deliver the greatest benefits.
    • The degree of centralization may also be broken down by contract, with some contracts centralized and some decentralized.
    • A centralized SAM database gives needed visibility into software assets and licenses across the organization, but operation of the database may also be done locally.

    Centralization

    • Allows for more strategic planning
    • Visibility into software licenses across the organization promotes rationalization and cost savings
    • Ensure common products are used
    • More strategic sourcing of vendors and resellers
    • Centrally negotiate pricing for better deals
    • Easier to manage risk and prepare for audits
    • Greater coordination of resources

    Decentralization

    • May allow for more innovation
    • May be easier to demonstrate local compliance if the organization is geographically decentralized
    • May be easier to procure software if offices are in different countries
    • Deployment and installation of software on user devices may be easier

    Identify SAM functions to centralize vs. decentralize

    Associated Activity icon 1.3.1 Identify functions for centralization

    Participants: CIO, IT Director, SAM Manager, SAM Team

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    1. If applicable, identify SAM functions that will need to be centralized and evaluate the implications of centralization to ensure it is feasible.
    2. If applicable, identify SAM functions that will be decentralized, if resources are available to manage those functions locally.

    Example:

    Centralized Functions
    • Operation of SAM database
    • SAM budget
    • Vendor selection
    • Contract negotiation and purchasing
    • Data analysis
    • Software receiving and inventory
    • Audits and risk management
    Decentralized functions
    • Procurement
    • Deployment and installation

    Software comprises the largest part of the infrastructure and operations budget

    After employee salaries (38%), the four next largest spend buckets have historically been infrastructure related. Adding salaries and external services, the average annual infrastructure and operations spend is over 50% of all IT spend.

    The largest portion of that spend is on software license and maintenance. As of 2016, software accounted for the roughly the same budget total as voice communications, data communications, and hardware combined. Managing software contracts is a crucial part of any mature budgeting process.

    Graph showing the percentage of all IT spend used for 'Ongoing software license and maintenance' annually. In 2010 it was 17%; in 2018 it was 21%. Graph showing the percentage of all IT spend used for 'Hardware maintenance / upgrades' annually. In 2010 it was 7%; in 2018 it was 8%. Graph showing the percentage of all IT spend used for 'Data communications' annually. In 2010 it was 7%; in 2018 it was 7%. Graph showing the percentage of all IT spend used for 'Voice communications' annually. In 2010 it was 5%; in 2018 it was 7%.

    Gain control of the budget to increase the success of SAM

    A sophisticated software asset management program will be able to uncover hidden costs, identify opportunities for rationalization, save money through reharvesting unused licenses, and improve forecasting of software usage to help control IT spending.

    While some asset managers may not have experience managing budgets, there are several advantages to the ITAM function owning the budget:

    • Be more involved in negotiating pricing with vendors.
    • Build better relationships with stakeholders across the business.
    • Gain greater purchasing power and have a greater influence on purchasing decisions.
    • Forecast software requirements more accurately.
    • Inform benchmarks and metrics with more data.
    • Directly impact the reduction in IT spend.
    • Manage the asset database more easily and have a greater understanding of software needs.
    • Identify opportunities for cost savings through rationalization.

    Examine your budget from a SAM perspective to optimize software spend

    How does examining your budget from a SAM perspective benefit the business?

    • It provides a chance to examine vendor contracts as they break down contracts by projects and services, which gives a clearer picture of where software fits into the budget.
    • It also gives organizations a chance to review vendor agreements and identify any redundancies present in software supporting services.

    Review the budget:

    • When reviewing your budget, implement a contingency fund to mitigate risk from a possible breach of compliance.
    • If your organization incurs compliance issues that relate to specific services, these fines may be relayed back to the departments that own those services, affecting how much money each department has.
    • The more sure you are of your compliance position, the less likely you are to need a contingency fund, and vice versa.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Finance needs to be involved. Their questions may cover:

    • Where are the monthly expenditures? Where are our financial obligations? Do we have different spending amounts based on what time of year it is?

    Use the SAM Budget Workbook to uncover insights about your software spend

    Supporting Tool icon 1.3.2 Complete the SAM budget tool

    The SAM Budget Workbook is designed to assist in developing and justifying the budget for software assets for the upcoming year.

    Instructions

    1. Work through tabs 2-6, following the instructions as you go.
    2. Tab 2 involves selecting software vendors and services provided by software.
    3. Tab 3 involves classifying services by vendor and assigning a cost to them. Tab 3 also allows you to classify the contract status.
    4. Tab 4 is a cost variance tracking sheet for software contracts.
    5. Tabs 5 and 6 are monthly budget sheets that break down software costs by vendor and service, respectively.
    6. Tab 7 provides graphs to analyze the data generated by the tool.
    7. Use the results found on tab 7 to analyze your budget: are you spending too much with one service? Is there vendor overlap based on what project or service that software is reporting?
    Screenshots of the 'Budget of Services Supported by Software Vendors' and 'Software Expense cashflow reports by Vendor' pages from the SAM Budget Workbook. Screenshot of the 'Analysis of Data' page from the SAM Budget Workbook.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech Workshop Associated Activity icon

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    Photo 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 analyst 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:

    1.1.3

    		 Sample of activity 1.1.3 'Determine the maturity of your SAM program'. Determine the maturity of your SAM program

    Using the SAM Maturity Assessment Tool, fill out a series of questions in a survey to assess the maturity of your current SAM program. The survey assesses seven categories that will allow you to align your strategy to your results.

    1.2.3

    		 Sample of activity 1.2.3 'Define SAM reports to track metrics'. Define SAM reports to track metrics

    Identify key stakeholders with reporting needs, metrics to track to fulfill reporting requirements, and a frequency for producing reports.

    Phase 1 outline

    Associated Activity icon 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: Assess and Plan

    Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 4
    Step 1.1: Assess current state Step 1.2: Build team and define metrics Step 1.3: Plan and budget
    Start with an analyst kick-off call:
    • Outline SAM challenges
    • Overview of the project
    • Assess current maturity level
    		 Review findings with analyst:
    • Define roles and responsibilities of SAM staff
    • Identify metrics and reports to track
    		 Review findings with analyst:
    • Plan centralization of SAM program
    • Discuss SAM budgeting
    Then complete these activities…
    • Identify challenges
    • Identify objectives of SAM program
    • Assess maturity of current state
    		 Then complete these activities…
    • Define roles and responsibilities
    • Identify metrics and KPIs
    • Plan reporting
    		 Then complete these activities…
    • Identify SAM functions to centralize
    • Complete the SAM budgeting tool
    With these tools & templates:
    • SAM Maturity Assessment
    • Standard Operating Procedures
    		 With these tools & templates:
    • Standard Operating Procedures
    		 With these tools & templates:
    • SAM Budget Workbook

    Phase 2: Procure, Receive, and Deploy

    VISA used high-quality SAM data to optimize its software licensing

    Logo for VISA.

    Case Study

    Industry: Financial Services
    Source: SAM Summit 2014

    Challenge

    Visa formed a SAM team in 2011 to combat costly software audits.

    The team’s first task was to use the available SAM data and reconcile licenses deployed throughout the organization.

    Organizations as large as Visa constantly run into issues where they are grossly over or under licensed, causing huge financial risk.

    Solution

    Data collection and analysis were used as part of the license rationalization process. Using a variety of tools combined with a strong team allowed Visa to perform the necessary steps to gather license data and analyze usage.

    One of the key exercises was uniting procurement and deployment data and the teams responsible for each.

    End-to-end visibility allowed the data to be uniform. As a result, better decisions about license rationalization can be made.

    Results

    By improving its measurement of SAM data, Visa was able to dedicate more time to analyze and reconcile its licenses. This led to improved license management and negotiations that reflected actual usage.

    By improving license usage through rationalization, Visa reduced the cost of supporting additional titles.

    The SAM team also performed license reclamation to harvest and redistribute licenses to further improve usage. The team’s final task was to optimize audit responses.

    Step 2.1 Request and procure software

    Phase 2:
    Procure, Receive & Deploy    		This step will walk you through the following activities:This step involves the following participants:

    2.1

    		Request & Procure
    • 2.1.1 Determine which software contracts should be centralized vs. localized
    • 2.1.2 Determine your software standards
    • 2.1.3 Define procurement policy
    • 2.1.4 Identify approvals and requests for authorization thresholds
    • 2.1.5 Build software procurement workflow for new contracts
    • 2.1.6 Define process for contract renewals and additional procurement scenarios
    • IT Director, CIO
    • IT Managers and SAM Manager
    • SAM Team

    2.2

    		Receive & Deploy

    Step Outcomes

    • Defined standards for software requests
    • A documented policy for software procurement including authorization thresholds
    • Documented process workflows for new contracts and contract renewals

    Procurement and SAM teams must work together to optimize purchasing

    Procurement and SAM must collaborate on software purchases to ensure software purchases meet business requirements and take into account all data on existing software and licenses to optimize the purchase and contract. Failure to work together can lead to unnecessary software purchases, overspending on purchases, and undesirable contract terms.

    SAM managers must collaborate with Procurement when purchasing software.

    SAM managers should:

    • Receive requests for software licenses
    • Ensure a duplicate license isn’t already purchased before going through with purchase
    • Ensure the correct license is purchased for the correct individuals
    • Ensure the purchasing information is tracked in the ITAM/SAM tool
    • Report on software usage to inform purchases
    		 Two cartoon people in work attire each holding a piece of a puzzle that fits with the other. Procurement must commit to be involved in the asset management process.

    Procurement should:

    • Review requests and ensure all necessary approvals have been received before purchasing
    • Negotiate optimal contract terms
    • Track and manage purchasing information and invoices and handle financial aspects
    • Use data from SAM team on software usage to decide on contract terms and optimize value

    Centralize procurement to decrease the likelihood of overspending

    Centralized negotiation and purchasing of software can ensure that the SAM team has visibility and control over the procurement process to help prevent overspending and uncontrolled agreements.

    Benefits of centralized procurement

    • Ability to easily manage software demand.
    • Provides capability to effectively manage your relationships with suppliers.
    • Allows for decreased contract processing times.
    • Provides easy access to data with a single consolidated system for tracking assets at an early stage.
    • Reduces number of rogue purchases by individual departments.
    • Efficiency through automation and coordinated effort to examine organization’s compliance and license position.
    • Higher degree of visibility and transparency into asset usage in the organization.

    Info-Tech Insights

    It may be necessary to procure some software locally if organizations have multiple locations, but try to centrally procure and manage the biggest contracts from vendors that are likely to audit the organization. Even with a decentralized model, ensure all teams communicate and that contracts remain visible centrally even if managed locally.

    Standards for software procurement help prevent overspending

    Software procurement is often more difficult for organizations than hardware procurement because:

    • Key departments that need to be involved in the purchasing process do not communicate or interact enough.
    • A fear of software auditing causes organizations to overspend to mitigate risk.
    • Standards are often not in place, with most purchases being made outside of the gold imaging standard.
    • A lack of discovery results in gross overspending on software licenses that are already present and underused.

    Info-Tech Insight

    One of the major challenges involved in implementing SAM is uniting multiple datasets and data sources across the enterprise. A conversation with each major business unit will help with the creation of software procurement standards that are acceptable to all.

    Determine which software contracts should be centralized vs. localized (optional)

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.1 Identify central standard enterprise offerings

    Participants: CIO, IT Director, SAM Manager, SAM Team

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    1. As a group, list as many software contracts that are in place across the organization as can easily be identified, focusing on top vendors.
    2. Identify which existing software contracts are standard enterprise offerings that are procured and managed centrally and which are non-standard or localized applications.
    3. Looking at the list of non-standard software, identify if any can or should be rationalized or replaced with a standard offering.
    Standard enterprise offerings
    • Microsoft
    • IBM
    • Adobe
    • Dell
    • Cisco
    • VMware
    • Barracuda
    Localized or non-standard software

    Classify your approved software into tiers to improve workflow efficiency

    Not all titles are created equal; classifying your pre-approved and approved software titles into a tiered system will provide numerous benefits for your SAM program.

    The more prestigious the asset tier, the higher the degree of data capture, support, and maintenance required.

    • Mission-critical, high-priority applications are classified as gold standard.
    • Secondary applications or high priority are silver standard.
    • Low-usage applications or normal priority are bronze standard.

    E.g. An enterprise application that needs to be available 24/7, such as a learning management system, should be classified as a gold tier to ensure it has 24/7 support.

    Creating tiers assists stakeholders in justifying the following set of decision points:

    • Which assets will require added maintenance (e.g. software assurance for Microsoft)
    • Technical support requirements to meet business requirements
    • Lifecycle and upgrade cycle of the software assets.
    • Monitoring usage to determine whether licenses can be harvested
    • Authorizations required for purchase requests

    Determine your software standards

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.2 Identify standard software images for your organization

    Participants: Asset Manager, Purchasing, Service Desk Manager, Operations (optional)

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    1. As a group, discuss and identify the relevant software asset tiers and number of tiers.
    2. For each tier, define:
      • Support requirements (hours and payments)
      • Maintenance requirements (mandatory or optional)
      • Lifecycle (when to upgrade, when to patch)
      • Financial requirements (CapEx/OpEx expenses)
      • Request authorizations (requestors and approvers)
    3. Sort the software contracts identified in the previous category into tiers, for example:
      • Mission-critical software (gold tier)
      • High-priority software (silver tier)
      • Normal-priority software (bronze tier)
    4. Use the SOP as an example.

    Determine which licensing options and methodologies fit into future IT strategy

    Not everyone is ready to embrace the cloud for all solutions; make sure to align cloud strategy to business requirements. Work closely with IT executives to determine appropriate contract terms, licensing options, and tracking processes.

    Vendors make changes to bundles and online services terms on a regular basis. Ensure you document your agreed upon terms to save your required functionality as vendor standard offerings change.

    • Any contracts getting moved to the cloud will need to undergo a contract comparison first.
    • The contract you signed last month could be completely different this month. Many cloud contracts are dynamic in nature.
    • Keep a copy of the electronic contract that you signed in a secure, accessible location.
    • Consider reaching a separate agreement with the vendor that they will ensure you maintain the results of the original agreement to prevent scope creep.

    Not all on-premises to cloud options transition linearly:

    • Features of perpetual licenses may not map to subscriptions
    • Product terms may differ from online services terms
    • Licensing may change from per device to per user
    • Vendor migrations may be more complex than anticipated

    Download the Own the Cloud: Strategy and Action Plan blueprint for more guidance

    Understand the three primary models of software usage agreements

    Licensed Open Source Shareware
    License Structure A software supplier is paid for the permission to use their software. The software is provided free of charge, but is still licensed. The software is provided free of charge, but is still licensed. Usage may be on a trial basis, with full usage granted after purchase.
    Source Code The source code is still owned by the supplier. Source code is provided, allowing users to change and share the software to suit their needs. Source code is property of the original developer/supplier.
    Technical Support Technical support is included in the price of the contract. Technical support may be provided, often in a community-based format from other developers of the open-source software in question. Support may be limited during trial of software, but upgraded once a purchase is made.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Open-source software should be managed in the same manner as commercial software to understand licensing requirements and be aware of any changes to these agreements, such as commercialization of such products, as well as any rules surrounding source code.

    Coordinate with purchasing department to define software procurement policy

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.3 Define procurement policy

    Participants: Asset Manager, Purchasing, Service Desk Manager, Operations (optional)

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    Define and document policies that will apply to IT software purchases, including policies around:

    • Software purchase approvals
    • Licenses for short-term contractors
    • On-premises vs. SaaS purchases
    • Shareware and freeware fees
    • Open-source software

    Use the example below as guidance and document in the SOP.

    • Software will not be acquired through user corporate credit cards, office supply, petty cash, or personal expense budgets. Purchases made outside of the acceptable processes will not be reimbursed and will be removed from company computers.
    • Contractors who are short term and paid through vendor contracts and invoices will supply their own licenses.
    • Software may be purchased as on-premises or as-a-service solutions as IT deems appropriate for the solution.
    • Shareware and freeware authors will be paid the fee they specify for use of their products.
    • Open-source software will be managed in the same manner as commercial software to understand licensing requirements and be aware of any changes to these agreements, such as commercialization of such products.

    Identify approvals and requests for authorization thresholds

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.4 Identify financial thresholds for approvals and requests

    Participants: Asset Manager, Purchasing, CIO, CFO, IT Director

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    Identify and classify financial thresholds for contracts requiring approval. For each category of contract value, identify who needs to authorize the request. Discuss and document any other approvals necessary. An example is provided below.

    Example:
    Requests for authorization will need to be directed based on the following financial thresholds:

    Contract value Authorization
    <$50,000 IT Director
    $50,000 to $250,000 CIO
    $250,000 to $500,000 CIO and CFO
    >$500,000 Legal review

    Develop a defined process for software procurement

    A poorly defined software procurement workflow can result in overspending on unnecessary software licensing throughout the year. This can impact budgeting and any potential software refreshes, as businesses will often rely on purchasing what they can afford, not what they need.

    Benefits of a defined workflow

    • Standardized understanding of the authorization processes results in reduced susceptibility to errors and quicker processing times.
    • Compliance with legal regulations.
    • Protection from compliance violations.
    • Transparency with the end user by communicating the process of software procurement to the business.

    Elements to include in procurement workflows:

    • RFP
    • Authorizations and approvals
    • Contract review
    • Internal references to numbers, cost centers, locations, POs, etc.

    Four types of procurement workflows:

    1. New contract – Purchasing brand new software
    2. Add to contract – Adding new POs or line items to an existing contract
    3. Contract renewal – Renewing an existing contract
    4. No contract required – Smaller purchases that don’t require a signed contract

    Outline the procurement process for new contracts

    The procurement workflow may involve the Service Desk, procurement team, and asset manager.

    The following elements should be accounted for:

    • Assignee
    • Requestor
    • Category
    • Type
    • Model or version
    • Requisition number
    • Purchase order number
    • Unit price
    A flowchart outlining the procurement process for new contracts. There are three levels, at the top is 'Tier 2 or Tier 3', the middle is 'IT Procurement', the bottom is 'Asset Manager'. It begins in 'Tier 2 or Tier 3' with 'Approved request received', and if it is not declined it moves on to 'Purchasing request forwarded to Procurement' on the 'IT Procurement' level. If an RFP is required, it eventually moves to 'Receives contract' on the 'Asset Manager' level and ends with 'Document license requirements, notify IT Product Owner'.

    Build software procurement workflow for new contracts

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.5 Build new contract procurement workflow

    Participants: Asset Manager, Purchasing, Service Desk Manager, Operations (optional)

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    1. As a team, outline each of the tasks in the process of procuring a new software asset using cue cards, sticky notes, or a whiteboard.
    2. Use the sample procurement workflow on the previous slide as an example if needed.
    3. Ensure the following elements required for the asset procurement process have been accounted for:
      • Assignee
      • Requestor
      • Category
      • Type
      • Model or version
      • Requisition number
      • Purchase order number
      • Unit price
    4. Review the workflow and make any adjustments necessary to improve the process. Document using Visio and add to the SOP.

    Review vendor contracts to right-size licensing procurement

    Many of your applications come from the same vendor, and a view into the business services provided by each software vendor contract will prove beneficial to the business.

    • You may uncover overlaps in services provided by software across departments.
    • The same service may be purchased from different vendors simply because two departments never compared notes!
    • This leaves a lot of money on the table from a lack of volume discounts.
    A graphic depicting a Venn diagram in which the 'Software' and 'Services' circles overlap, both of which stem from a 'Vendor Contract'.
    • Be cautious about approaching license budgeting strictly from a cost perspective. SAM is designed to right-size your licenses to properly support your organization.
    • One trap organizations often fall into is bundling discounts. Vendors will offer steep discounts if clients purchase multiple titles. On the surface, this might seem like a great offer.
    • However, what often happens is that organizations will bundle titles to get a steep discount on their prize title of the group.
    • The other titles become shelfware, and when the time comes to renew the contract, the maintenance fees on the shelfware titles will often make the contract more expensive than if only the prize title was purchased.

    Additionally, information regarding what licenses are being used for certain services may yield insight into potential redundancies. For example, two separate departments may have each have a different application deployed that supports the same service. This presents an opportunity for savings based on bulk licensing agreements, not to mention a simplified support environment by reducing the number of titles deployed in your environment.

    Define a procedure for tracking and negotiating contract renewals

    Participants: IT Director/CIO, Asset Manager, Purchasing, Service Desk Manager, Operations (optional)

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    Discuss and document a policy for tracking and negotiating contract renewals. Answer the following questions as guides:

    • How will renewal dates be tracked and monitored?
    • How soon should contracts be reviewed prior to renewal to determine appropriateness for use and compliance?
    • What criteria will be used to determine if the product should be renewed?
    • Who will be consulted for contract renewal decisions for major contracts?
    • How will licensing and support decisions be made?

    Optional contract review:

    1. Take a sample contract to renew. Create a list of services that are supported by the software. Look for overlaps, redundancies, shelfware, and potential bundling opportunities. Recall the issues outlined when purchasing bundled software.
    2. Create a list of action items to bring into the next round of contract negotiations with that vendor and identify a start date to begin reviewing these items.

    Define process for contract renewals and additional procurement scenarios

    Associated Activity icon 2.1.6 Build additional procurement workflows

    Participants: Asset Manager, Purchasing, Service Desk Manager, Operations (optional)

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    Build procurement workflows and define policies and procedures for additional purchasing scenarios beyond new contracts.

    This may include:

    1. Contract renewals
    2. Single purchase, non-contract procurement
    3. Adding to contracts

    Use the sample workflows in the Standard Operating Procedures as a guide.

    A flowchart outlining the procurement process for 'Software Contract Renewal'.

    A flowchart outlining the procurement process for 'Software single purchase, non-contract'.

    Negotiate for value to ensure quality license agreements

    Approach negotiating from a value-first, price-second perspective.

    Contract negotiations too often come down to a question of price. While you want to avoid overpaying for licenses, a worse offense is getting a steep discount for a bundle of applications where the majority will go unused.

    Vendors will try to sell a full stack of software at a steep discount to give the illusion of value. Often organizations bite off more than they can chew. → When auditors come knocking, the business may be in compliance, but being over-licensed is a dangerous state to be in. → Organizations end up over-licensed and in possession of numerous “shelfware” apps that sit on the proverbial shelf collecting dust while drawing expensive maintenance and licensing fees from the business.
    • Pressure from the business is also an issue. Negotiations can be rushed in an effort to fulfill an immediate need.
    • Make sure you clearly outline the level of compliance expected from the vendor.
    • Negotiate reduced-fee software support services. Your Service Desk can already handle the bulk of requests, and investing in a mature Service Desk will provide more lasting value than paying for expensive maintenance and support services that largely go unused.

    Learn to negotiate effectively to optimize contract renewals

    Leverage Info-Tech’s research, Master Contract Review and Negotiation for Software Agreements, to review your software contracts to leverage your unique position during negotiations and find substantial cost savings.

    This blueprint includes the following tools and templates:

    • RASCI Chart
    • Vendor Communication Management Plan
    • Software Business Use Case Template
    • SaaS TCO Calculator
    • Software Terms & Conditions Evaluation Tool
    • Software Buyer’s Checklist
    • Controlled Vendor Communications Letter
    • Key Vendor Fiscal Year End Calendar
    • Contract Negotiation Tactics Playbook

    Step 2.2 Receive and deploy software

    Phase 2:
    Procure, Receive & Deploy    		This step will walk you through the following activities:This step involves the following participants:

    2.1

    		Request & Procure
    • 2.2.1 Identify storage locations for software information and media
    • 2.2.2 Design the workflow for receiving software
    • 2.2.3 Design and document the deployment workflow(s)
    • 2.2.4 Create a list of pre-approved, approved, and unapproved software titles
    • 2.2.5 Document the request and deployment process for non-standard software requests
    • IT Director, CIO
    • IT Managers and SAM Manager
    • SAM Team
    • Purchasing (optional)
    • Service Desk Manager (optional)
    • Operations (optional)
    • Release & Deployment manager (optional)

    2.2

    		Receive & Deploy

    Step Outcomes

    • A strategy for storing software information and media in the ITAM database and DML
    • A documented workflow for the software receiving process
    • Documented process workflows for software requests and deployment, including for large quantities of software
    • A list of pre-approved, approved, and unapproved software titles for deployment
    • A process for responding to non-standard software requests

    Verify product and information upon receipt

    Upon receipt of procured software:

    • Verify that the product is correct
    • Reconcile with purchase record to ensure the order has been completed
    • Verify that the invoice is correct
    • Update financial information such as budget and accounting records
    • Update ITAM database to show status as received
    • Record/attach license keys and software codes in ITAM database
    • Attach relevant documents to record in the ITAM database (license reports, invoices, end-user agreement, etc.)
    • Download and store any installation files, DVDs, and CDs
    • Once software has been installed, verify license is matched to discovered installed software within the ITAM database

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    While most software will be received through email and download, in some cases physical software may be received through courier or mail. Ensure processes and procedures are defined for both cases.

    Establish a secure repository for licenses and documentation

    All licenses, documentation, and digital media for authorized and supported software should be collected and stored in a central, secure location to minimize risk of theft, loss, or unauthorized installation or duplication of software.

    Where to store software data?

    The ITAM database should contain an up-to-date record of all software assets, including their associated:

    • Serial numbers
    • License keys and codes
    • Contracts and agreements

    The database allows you to view software that is installed and associated licenses.

    A definitive media library (DML) is a single logical storage area, which may consist of one or more locations in which definitive authorized versions of all software configuration items are securely stored and protected.

    The DML consists of file storage as well as physical storage of CDs and DVDs and must be continually updated to contain the latest information about each configuration item.

    The DML is used to organize content and link to automated deployment to easily install software.

    Use a definitive media library (DML) to assist in storage of software packages for deployment

    The DML will usually contain the most up-to-date versions to minimize errors created by having unauthorized, old, or problematic software releases being deployed into the live IT environment. The DML can be used for both full-packed product (FPP) software and in-house developed software, providing formalized data around releases of in-house software.

    The DML should consist of two main storage areas:

    1. Secure file storage
    2. Secure physical storage for any master CD/DVDs

    Additional Recommendations:

    • The process of building, testing, adapting, and final pre-production testing should provide your IT department with a solid final deployment package, but the archive will enable you to quickly pull in a previous version if necessary.
    • When upgrading software packages to include new patches or configurations, use the DML to ensure you're referencing a problem-free version.
    • Include the DML in your disaster recovery plan (DRP) and include testing of the DML as part of your DRP testing. If you need to rebuild servers from these files, offsite, you'll want to know your backup DML is sound.

    Ensure you have a strategy to create and update your DML

    Your DML should have a way to separate archived, new, and current software to allow for optimal organization of files and code, to ensure the correct software is installed, and to prepare for automated deployment through the service catalog.

    New software hasn’t been tested yet. Make it available for testing, but not widely available.

    Keep a record for archived software, but do not make it available for install.

    Current software is regularly used and should be available for install.

    Deployment

    • Are you using tools to integrate with the DML for deployment?
    • Store files that are ready for automated deployment in a separate location.

    Identify storage locations for software information and media

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.1 Identify software storage locations

    Participants: Asset Manager, IT Director

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    1. Identify storage locations for asset data that is received (i.e. ITAM database, DML).
    2. Identify information that should be stored with each asset (i.e. license, serial number, invoice, end-user license agreement) and where this information should be stored.
    3. Identify fields that should be populated in the DML for each record:
      • Product name
      • Version
      • Description
      • Authorized by
      • Received by/date
      • Configuration item on which asset is installed
      • Media
      • Physical and backup locations
      • Verified by/date

    Define the standard process for receiving software

    Define the following in your receiving process:

    • Process for software received by email/download
    • Process for physical material received at Service Desk
    • Information to be recorded and where
    • Process following discrepancy of received software
    A flowchart outlining the standard process for receiving software. There are two levels, at the top is 'Desktop Support Team' and the bottom is 'Procurement'. It begins in 'Desktop Support Team' with 'Received at Service Desk' or 'Receive by email/download'. If the reconciliation is correct it eventually moves on to 'Fulfill service request, deliver and close ticket'. If the reconciliation is not correct it moves to 'Contact vendor with discrepancy details' in 'Procurement'. If a return is required 'Repackage and ship', or if not 'Notify Desktop Support Team of resolution'.

    Design the workflow for receiving software

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.2 Design the workflow for receiving software

    Participants: Asset Manager, Purchasing, Service Desk Manager, Operations (optional)

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    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. Use the sample workflow from this step as a guide if starting from scratch.
    4. Engage the team in refining the process workflow.
    5. 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 SOP.

    Build release management into your software deployment process

    A sound software deployment process is tied to sound release management practices.

    Releases: A collection of authorized changes to an IT service. Releases are divided into:

    • Major software releases/upgrades: Normally containing large areas of new functionality, some of which may make intervening fixes to redundant problems.
    • Minor software releases/upgrades: Normally containing small enhancements and fixes, some of which may have already been issued as emergency fixes.
    • Emergency software fixes: Contain the corrections to a small number of known problems.

    Ensure that release management processes work with SAM processes:

    • If a release will impact licensing, the SAM manager must be made aware to make any necessary adjustments.
    • Deployment models should be in line with SAM strategy (i.e. is software rolled out to everyone or individually when upgrades are needed?).
    • How will user requests for upgrades be managed?
    • Users should be on the same software version to ensure file compatibility and smooth patch management.
    • Ideally, software should be no more than two versions back.

    Document the process workflow for software deployment

    Define the process for deploying software to users.

    Include the following in your workflow:

    • All necessary approvals
    • Source of software
    • Process for standard vs. non-standard software requests
    • Update ITAM database once software has been installed with license data and install information
    A flowchart outlining the process workflow for software deployment. There are four levels, at the top is 'Business', then 'Desktop Support Team', 'Procurement', and the bottom is 'Asset Manager'. It begins in 'Business' with 'Request for software', and if it is approved by the manager it moves to 'Check DB: Can a volume serial # be used?' in 'Desktop Support Team'. If yes, it eventually moves on to 'Close ticket' on the same level, if not it eventually moves to 'Initiate procurement process' in 'Procurement', 'Initiate receiving process' in 'Asset Manager', and finally to 'Run quarterly license review to purchase volume licenses'.

    Large-scale software rollouts should be run as projects

    Rollouts or upgrades of large quantities of software will likely be managed as projects.

    These projects should include project plans, including resources, timelines, and detailed procedures.

    Define the process for large-scale deployment if it will differ from the regular deployment process.

    A flowchart outlining large-scale software rollouts. There are three levels, at the top is 'IT Procurement', then 'Asset Manager', and the bottom is 'Software Packager'. It begins in 'IT Procurement' with 'Project plan approved', and if a bid is not required it skips to 'Sign contract/Create purchase order'. This eventually moves to 'Receive access to eLicense site/receive access to new product' in 'Asset Manager', and either to 'Approve invoice for payment, forward to accounting' on the same level or to 'Download software, license keys' in 'Software Packager' then eventually to 'Deploy'.

    Design and document the deployment workflow(s)

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.3 Document deployment workflows for desktop and large-scale deployment

    Participants: Asset Manager, Service Desk Manager, Release & Deployment Manager

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    1. Outline each step in the process of software deployment using notecards or on a whiteboard. Be as granular as possible. On each card, describe the step and the individual responsible for each step.
      • Be sure to identify the type of release for standard software releases and patches.
      • Additionally, identify how additional software outside the scope of the base image will be addressed.
    2. When you are satisfied that each step is accurately captured, use a second color of notecard to document any challenges, inefficiencies, or pains associated with each step. Consider further documenting the time on each task.
    3. Examine each challenge or pain point. Discuss whether there is a clear solution to the problem. If so, document the solution and amend the workflow. If not, engage in a broader discussion of possible solutions, considering people, processes, and available technology.
    4. Document separately the process for large-scale software deployment if required.

    Develop standards to streamline your software estate

    Software should be approved and deployed based on approved standards to minimize over-deployed software and manage costs appropriately. A list of standard software improves the efficiency of the software approval process.

    • Pre-approved titles include basic platforms like Office or Adobe Reader that are often available in enterprise-wide license packages.
    • Approved titles include popular titles with license numbers that need to be managed on a role-by-role basis. For example, if most of your marketing team uses the Adobe Creative Suite, a user still needs to get approval before they can get a license.
    • Unapproved titles are managed on a case-by-case basis and are up to the discretion of the asset manager and other involved parties.

    Additionally, create a list of unauthorized software including titles not to be installed under any circumstances. This list should be designed with feedback from your end users and technical support staff. Front-line knowledge is crucial to identifying which titles are causing major problems.

    Create a list of pre-approved, approved, and unapproved software titles

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.4 Determine software categories for deployment

    Participants: IT Director, Asset Manager, Purchasing (optional), Service Desk Manager (optional), Release & Deployment Manager (optional)

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    1. Define software categories that will be used to build software standards.
    2. Include definitions of each category.
    3. Add examples of software to each category to begin building list of approved software titles for deployment.

    Use the following example as a guide.

    Category Definition Software titles
    Pre-approved/standard
    • Supported and approved for install for all end users
    • Included on most, if not all devices
    • Typically installed as a base image
    • Microsoft Office (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
    • Adobe Reader
    • Windows
    Approved by role
    • Supported and approved for install, but only for certain groups of end users
    • Popular titles with license numbers that need to be managed on a role-by-role basis
    • Pre-approved for purchase with business manager’s approval
    • Adobe Creative Cloud Suite
    • Adobe Acrobat Pro
    • Microsoft Visio
    Unapproved/requires review
    • Not previously approved or installed by IT
    • Special permission required for installation based on demonstrable business need
    • Managed on a case-by-case basis
    • Up to the discretion of the asset manager and other involved parties
    • Dynamics
    • Zoom Text
    • Adaptive Insights
    Unauthorized
    • Not to be installed under any circumstances
    • Privately owned software
    • Pirated copies of any software titles
    • Internet downloads

    Define the review and approval process for non-standard software

    Software requiring review will need to be managed on a case-by-case basis, with approval dependent on software evaluation and business need.

    The evaluation and approval process may require input from several parties, including business analysts, Security, technical team, Finance, Procurement, and the manager of the requestor’s department.

    A flowchart outlining the review and approval process for non-standard software. There are five levels, at the top is 'Business Analyst/Project Manager', then 'Security Team', 'Technical Team', 'Financial & Contract Review' and the bottom is 'Procurement'. It begins in 'Business Analyst/Project Manager' with 'Request for non-standard software', and if the approved product is available it moves to 'Evaluate tool for security, data, and privacy compliance' in 'Security Team'. If more evaluation is necessary it moves to 'Evaluate tool for infrastructure and integration requirements' in 'Technical Team', and then 'Evaluate terms and conditions' in 'Financial & Contract Review'. At any point in the evaluation process it can move back to the 'Business Analyst/Project Manager' level for 'Assemble requirements details', and finally down to the 'Procurement' level for 'Execute purchase'.

    Document the request and deployment process for non-standard software

    Associated Activity icon 2.2.5 Document process for non-standard software requests

    Participants: Asset Manager, Service Desk Manager, Release & Deployment Manager

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    Define the review and approval process for non-standard software requests.

    Use the workflow on the previous slide as a guide to map your own workflow process and document the steps in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    The following assessments may need to be included in the process:

    • Functionality and use requirements: May include suggestion back to the business before proceeding any further to see if similar, already approved software could be used in its place.
    • Technical specifications: Cloud, data center, hardware, backups, integrations (Active Directory, others), file, and program compatibility.
    • Security: Security team may need to assess to ensure nothing will install that will compromise data or systems security.
    • Privacy policy: Security and compliance team may need to evaluate the solution to ensure data will be secured and accessed only by authorized users.
    • Terms and conditions: The contracts team may evaluate terms and conditions to ensure contracts and end-user agreements do not violate existing standards.
    • Accessibility and compliance: Software may be required to meet accessibility requirements in accordance with company policies.

    BMW deployed a global data centralization program to achieve 100% license visibility

    Logo for BMW.

    Case Study

    Industry: Financial Services
    Source: SAM Summit 2014

    Challenge

    BMW is a large German automotive manufacturer that employs over 100,000 people. It has over 7,000 software products deployed across 106,000 clients and servers in over 150 countries.

    When the global recession hit in 2008, the threat of costly audits increased, so BMW decided to boost its SAM program to cut licensing costs. It sought to centralize inventory data from operations across the globe.

    Solution

    A new SAM office was established in 2009 in Germany. The SAM team at BMW began by processing all the accumulated license and installation data from operations in Germany, Austria, and the UK. Within six months, the team had full visibility of all licenses and software assets.

    Compliance was also a priority. The team successfully identified where they could make substantial reductions in support and maintenance costs as well as remove surplus costs associated with duplicate licensing.

    Results

    BMW overcame a massive data centralization project to achieve 100% visibility of its global licensing estate, an incredible achievement given the scope of the operation.

    BMW experienced efficiency gains due to transparency and centralized management of licenses through the new SAM office.

    Additionally, internal investment in training and technical knowledge has helped BMW continuously improve the program. This has resulted in ongoing cost reductions for the manufacturer.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech Workshop Associated Activity icon

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    Photo 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 analyst 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:

    2.1.5

    		 Sample of activity 2.1.5 'Build software procurement workflow for new contracts'. Build software procurement workflow for new contracts

    Use the sample workflow to document your own process for procurement of new software contracts.

    2.2.4

    		 Sample of activity 2.2.4 'Create a list of pre-approved, approved, and unapproved software titles'. Create a list of pre-approved, approved, and unapproved software titles

    Build definitions of software categories to inform software standards and brainstorm examples of each category.

    Phase 2 outline

    Associated Activity icon 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: Procure, receive, and deploy

    Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 6
    Step 2.1: Request and procureStep 2.2: Receive and deploy
    Start with an analyst kick-off call:
    • Define standards for software requests
    • Build procurement policy
    • Define procurement processes
    		Review findings with analyst:
    • Build processes for software receiving
    • Build processes for software requests and deployment
    • Define process for non-standard requests
    Then complete these activities…
    • Determine software standards
    • Define procurement policy
    • Identify authorization thresholds
    • Build procurement workflows for new contracts and renewals
    		Then complete these activities…
    • Identify storage locations for software information
    • Design workflow for receiving software
    • Design workflow for software deployment
    • Create a list of approved and non-standard requests
    • Define process for non-standard requests
    With these tools & templates:
    • Standard Operating Procedures
    		With these tools & templates:
    • Standard Operating Procedures

    Phase 3: Manage, Redeploy, and Retire

    Step 3.1 Manage and maintain software contracts

    Phase 3:
    Manage, Redeploy & Retire    		This step will walk you through the following activities:This step involves the following participants:

    3.1

    		Manage & Maintain Software
    • 3.1.1 Define process for conducting software inventory
    • 3.1.2 Define policies for software maintenance and patches
    • 3.1.3 Document your patch management policy
    • IT Director, CIO
    • IT Managers and SAM Manager
    • SAM Team
    • Release Manager (optional)
    • Security (optional)

    3.2

    		Harvest, Redeploy, or Retire

    Step Outcomes

    • A process for conducting regular software inventory checks and analyzing the data to continually manage software assets and license compliance.
    • An understanding of software maintenance requirements
    • A policy for conducting regular software maintenance and patching
    • A documented patch management policy

    Manage your software licenses to decrease your risk of overspending

    Many organizations fail to track their software inventory effectively; the focus often remains on hardware due to its more tangible nature. However, annual software purchases often account for a higher IT spend than annual hardware purchases, so it’s important to track both.

    Benefits of managing software licenses

    • Better control of the IT footprint. Many companies already employ hardware asset management, but when they employ SAM, there is potential to save millions of dollars through optimal use of all technology assets.
    • Better purchasing decisions and negotiating leverage. Enhanced visibility into actual software needs means not only can companies procure and deploy the right increments of software in the right areas, but they can also do so more cost-effectively through tools such as volume purchase agreements or bundled services.
    • No refund policy combined with shelfware (software that sits unused “on the shelf”) is where software companies make their money.
    • Managing licenses will help prevent costly audit penalties. Special attention should be paid to software purchased from large vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, SAP, or IBM.

    Maintain a comprehensive, up-to-date software inventory to manage licenses effectively

    A clearly defined process for inventory management will reduce the risk of over buying licenses and falling out of compliance.

    • A detailed software inventory and tracking system should act as a single point of contact for all your license data.
    • Maintain a comprehensive inventory of installed software through complete and accurate records of all licenses, certifications, and software purchase transactions, storing these in a secure repository.
    • Periodically review installed software and accompanying licenses to ensure only legal and supported software is in use and to ensure ongoing compliance with the software management policy.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Have and maintain a list of supported software to guide what new software will be approved for purchase and what current software should be retained on the desktops, servers, and other processing devices.

    Conduct a baseline inventory of deployed software to know what you have

    You have to know what you have before you can manage it.

    A baseline inventory tells you exactly what software you have deployed and where it is being used. This can help to determine how to best optimize software and license usage.

    A software inventory will allow you to:

    • Identify all software residing on computers.
    • Compare existing software to the list of supported software.
    • Identify and delete illegal or unsupported software.
    • Identify and stop software use that violates license agreements, copyright law, or organizational policies.

    Two methods for conducting a software inventory:

    1. If you have several computers to analyze, use automated tools to conduct inventory for greater accuracy and efficiency. Software inventory or discovery tools scan installed software and generate inventory reports, while asset management tools will help you manage that data.
    2. Manual inventory may be possible if your organization has few computers.

    How to conduct a manual software inventory:

    1. Record serial number of device being analyzed.
    2. Record department and employee to whom the computer is assigned.
    3. Inspect contents of hard drive and/or server to identify software as well as hidden files and directories.
    4. Record licensing information for software found on workstation and server.
    5. Compare findings with list of supported software and licenses stored in repository.

    Keep the momentum going through regular inventory and licensing checks

    Take preventive action to avoid unauthorized software usage through regular software inventory and license management:

    • Regularly update the list of supported software and authorized use.
    • Monitor and optimize software license usage.
    • Continually communicate with and train employees around software needs and policies.
    • Maintain a regular inventory schedule to keep data up to date and remain compliant with licensing requirements – your specific schedule will depend on the size of the company and procurement schedule.
    • Conduct random spot inventories – even if you are using a tool, periodic spot checks should still be performed to ensure accuracy of inventory.
    • Periodically review software procurement records and ensure procurement process is being followed.
    • Continuously monitor software installations on networked computers through automated tools.
    • Ensure software licensing documentation and data is secure.

    Define process for conducting software inventory

    Associated Activity icon 3.1.1 Define process for regular software inventory

    Participants: IT Director, Asset Manager

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    1. If a baseline software inventory has not been conducted, discuss and document a plan for completing the inventory.
      • Will the inventory be conducted manually or through automated tools?
      • If manually, what information will be collected and recorded? Which devices will be analyzed? Where will data be stored?
      • If automatically, which tools will be used? Will any additional information need to be collected? Who will have access to the inventory?
      • When will the inventory be conducted and by whom?
        • Monthly inventory may be required if there is a lot of change and movement, otherwise quarterly is usually sufficient.
    2. Document how inventory data will be analyzed.
      • How will data be compared against supported software?
      • How will software violations be addressed?
    3. Develop a plan for continual inventory spot checks and maintenance.
      • How often will inventory be conducted and/or analyzed?
      • How often will spot checks be performed?

    Don’t forget that software requires maintenance

    While maintenance efforts are typically focused around hardware, software maintenance – including upgrades and patches – must be built into the software asset management process to ensure software remains compliant with security and regulatory requirements.

    Software maintenance guidelines:

    • Maintenance agreements should be stored in the ITAM database.
    • Software should be kept as current as possible. It is recommended that software remain no more than two versions off.
    • Unsupported software should be uninstalled or upgraded as required.
    • Upgrades should be tested, especially for high-priority or critical applications or if integrated with other applications.
    • Change and release management best practices should be applied for all software upgrades and patches.
    • A process should be defined for how often patches will be applied to end-user devices.

    Integrate patch management with your SAM practice to improve security and reduce downtime

    The integration between patch management and asset management is incredibly valuable from a technology point of view. IT asset management (ITAM) tools create reports on the characteristics of deployed software. By combining these reports with a generalized software updater, you can automate most simple patches to save your team’s efforts for more-critical incidents. Usage reports can also help determine which applications should be reviewed and removed from the environment.

    • In recent years, patch management has grown in popularity due to widespread security threats, the resultant downtime, and expenses associated with them.
    • The main objective of patch management is to create a consistently configured environment that is secure against known vulnerabilities in operating systems and application software.

    Assessing new patches should include questions such as:

    • What’s the risk of releasing the patch? What is the criticality of the system? What end users will be affected?
    • How will we manage business disruption during an incident caused by a failed patch deployment?
    • In the event of service outage as a result of a failed patch deployment, how will we recover services effectively in business priority order?
    • What’s the risk of expediting the patch? Of not releasing the patch at all?

    Define policies for software maintenance and patches

    Associated Activity icon 3.1.2 Define software maintenance and patching policies

    Participants: IT Director, Asset Manager, Release Manager (optional), Security (optional)

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    Software maintenance:

    Review the software maintenance guidelines in this section and in the SOP template. Discuss each policy and revise and document in accordance with your policies.

    Patch management:

    Discuss and document patch management policies:

    1. How often will end-user devices receive patches?
    2. How often will servers be patched?
    3. How will patches be prioritized? See example below.
      • Critical patches will be applied within two days of release, with testing prioritized to meet this schedule.
      • High-priority patches will be applied within 30 days of release, with testing scheduled to meet this requirement.
      • Normal-priority patches will be evaluated for appropriateness and will be installed as needed.

    Document your patch management policy

    Supporting Tool icon 3.1.3 Use the Patch Management Policy template to document your policy

    The patch management policy helps to ensure company computers are properly patched with the latest appropriate updates to reduce system vulnerability and to enhance repair application functionality. The policy aids in establishing procedures for the identification of vulnerabilities and potential areas of functionality enhancements, as well as the safe and timely installation of patches. The patch management policy is key to identifying and mitigating any system vulnerabilities and establishing standard patch management practices.

    Use Info-Tech’s Patch Management Policy template to get started.

    Sample of the 'Patch Management Policy' template.

    Step 3.2 Harvest, Redeploy, or Retire Software

    Phase 3:
    Manage, Redeploy & Retire    		This step will walk you through the following activities:This step involves the following participants:

    3.1

    		Manage & Maintain Software
    • 3.2.1 Map your software license harvest and reallocation process
    • 3.2.2 Define the policy for retiring software
    • IT Director, CIO
    • IT Managers and SAM Manager
    • SAM Team

    3.2

    		Harvest, Redeploy, or Retire

    Step Outcomes

    • A defined process for harvesting and reallocating unused software licenses
    • A defined policy for how and when to retire unused or outdated software

    Harvest and reallocate software to optimize license usage

    Using a defined process for harvesting licenses will yield a crop of savings throughout the organization.

    Unused software licenses are present in nearly every organization and result in wasted resources and software spend. Recycling and reharvesting licenses is a critical process within software asset management to save your organization money.

    Licensing Recycling

    When computers are no longer in use and retired, the software licenses installed on the machines may be able to be reused.

    License recycling involves reusing these licenses on machines that are still in use or for new employees.

    License Harvesting

    License harvesting involves more actively identifying machines with licenses that are either not in use or under utilized, and recovering them to be used elsewhere, thus reducing overall software spend on new licenses.

    Use software monitoring data to identify licenses for reallocation in alignment with policies and agreements

    1. Monitor software usage
      Monitor and track software license usage to gain a clear picture of where and how existing software licenses are being used and identify any unused or underused licenses.
    2. Identify licenses for reharvesting
      Identify software licenses that can be reharvested and reallocated according to your policy.
    3. Uninstall software
      Notify user, schedule a removal time if approved, uninstall software, and confirm it has been removed.
    4. Reallocate license when needed

    Sources of surplus licenses for harvest:

    • Projects that required a license during a particular time period, but now do not require a license (i.e. the free version of the software will suffice)
    • Licenses assigned to users no longer with the organization
    • Software installed on decommissioned hardware
    • Installed software that hasn’t been used by the user in the last 90 days (or other defined period)
    • Over-purchased software due to poorly controlled software request, approval, or provisioning processes

    Info-Tech Insight

    Know the stipulations of your end-user license agreement (EULA) before harvesting and reallocating licenses. There may be restrictions on how often a license can be recycled in your agreement.

    Create a defined process for software license harvesting

    Define a standard reharvest timeline. For example, every 90 days, your SAM team can perform an internal audit using your SAM tool to gather data on software usage. If a user has not used a title in that time period, your team can remove that title from that user’s machine. Depending on the terms and conditions of the contract, the license can either be retired or harvested and reallocated.

    Ensure you have exception rules built in for software that’s cyclical in its usage. For example, Finance may only use tax software during tax season, so there’s no reason to lump it under the same process as other titles.

    It’s important to note that in addition to this process, you will need a software usage policy that supports your license harvest process.

    The value of license harvesting

    • Let’s say you paid for 1,000 licenses of a software title at a price of $200 per license.
    • Of this total, 950 have been deployed, and of that total, 800 are currently being used.
    • This means that 16% of deployed licenses are not in use – at a cost of $30,000.
    • With a defined license harvest process, this situation would have been prevented.

    Build a workflow to document the software harvest process

    Include the following in your process:

    • How will unused software be identified?
    • How often will usage reports be reviewed?
    • How will the user be notified of software to be removed?
    • How will the software be removed?
    A flowchart documenting the software harvest process. There are two levels, at the top is 'IT Asset Manager', and the bottom is 'Desktop Support Team'. It begins in 'IT Asset Manager' with 'Create/Review Usage Report', and if the client agrees to removal it moves to 'License deactivation required?' in 'Desktop Support Team'. Eventually you 'Close ticket' and it moves back up to 'Discovery tool will register change automatically' in 'IT Asset Manager'.

    Map your software license harvest and reallocation process

    Associated Activity icon 3.2.1 Build license harvest and reallocation workflow

    Participants: IT Director, Asset Manager, Service Desk Manager

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    1. Outline each step in the process of software harvest and reallocation using notecards or a whiteboard. Be as granular as possible. On each card, describe the step and the individual responsible for each step.
    2. When you are satisfied that each step is accurately captured, use a second color of notecard to document any challenges, inefficiencies, or pains associated with each step. Consider further documenting the time on each task.
    3. Examine each challenge or pain point. Discuss whether there is a clear solution to the problem. If so, document the solution and amend the workflow. If not, engage in a broader discussion of possible solutions, considering people, processes, and available technology.
    4. Use the sample workflow on the previous slide as a guide if needed.

    The same flowchart documenting the software harvest process from the previous section.

    Improve your software retirement process to drive savings for the whole business

    Business Drivers for Software Disposal

    • Cost Reduction
      • Application retirement allows the application and the supporting hardware stack to be decommissioned.
      • This eliminates recurring costs such as licensing, maintenance, and application administration costs, representing potentially significant savings
    • Consolidation
      • Many legacy applications are redundant systems. For example, many companies have ten or more legacy financial systems from mergers/acquisitions.
      • Systems can be siloed, running incompatible software. Moving data to a common accessible repository streamlines research, audits, and reporting.
    • Compliance
      • An increased focus on regulations places renewed emphasis on e-discovery policies. Keeping legacy applications active just to retain data is an expensive proposition.
      • During application retirement, data is classified, assigned retention policies, and disposed of according to data/governance initiatives.
    • Risk Mitigation
      • Relying on IT to manage legacy systems is problematic. The lack of IT staff familiar with the application increases the potential risk of delayed responses to audits and e-discovery.
      • Retiring application data to a common platform lets you leverage skills you have current investments in. This enables you to be responsive to audit or litigation results.

    Retire your outdated software to decrease IT spend on redundant applications

    Benefits of software retirement:

    1. Assists the service desk in not having to support every release, version, or edition of software that your company might have used in the past.
    2. Stay current with product releases so your company is better placed to take advantage of improvements built-in to such products, rather than being limited by the lack of a newly introduced function.
    3. Removing software that is no longer of commercial benefit can offer a residual value through assets.

    Consequences of continuing to support outdated software:

    • Budgets are tied up to support existing applications and infrastructure, which leaves little room to invest in new technologies that would otherwise help grow business.
    • Much of this software includes legacy systems that were acquired or replaced when new applications were deployed. The value of these outdated systems decreases with every passing year, yet organizations often continue to support these applications.
      • Fear of compliance and data access are the most common reasons.
    • Unfortunately, the cost of doing so can consume over 50% of an overall IT budget.

    The solution to this situation is to retire outdated software.

    “Time and time again, I keep hearing stories from schools on how IT budgets are constantly being squeezed, but when I dig a little deeper, little or no effort is being made on accounting for software that might be on the kit we are taking away.” (Phil Goldsmith, Managing Director – ScrumpyMacs)

    Define the policy for retiring software

    Associated Activity icon 3.2.2 Document process for software retirement

    Participants: IT Director, Asset Manager, Operations

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    1. Discuss and document the process for retiring software that has been deemed redundant due to changing business needs or an improvement in competitive options.
    2. Consider the following:
      • What criteria will determine when software is suited for retirement?
      • The contract should always be reviewed before making a decision to ensure proper notice is given to the vendor.
      • Notice should be provided as soon as possible to ensure no additional billing arrives for renewals.
      • How will software be removed from all devices? How soon must the software be replaced, if applicable?
      • How long will records be archived in the ITAM database?
    3. Document decisions in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech Workshop Associated Activity icon

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    Photo 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 analyst 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:

    3.1.2

    		 Sample of activity 3.1.2 'Define policies for software maintenance and patches'. Define policies for software maintenance and patches

    Discuss best practices and define policies for conducting regular software maintenance and patching.

    3.2.1

    		 Sample of activity 3.3.1 'Assess the maturity of audit management processes and policies'. Map your software license harvest and reallocation process

    Build a process workflow for harvesting and reallocating unused software licenses.

    Phase 3 outline

    Associated Activity icon 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: Manage, redeploy, and retire

    Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 4
    Step 3.1: Manage and maintain softwareStep 3.2: Harvest, redeploy, or retire
    Start with an analyst kick-off call:
    • Define a process for conducting software inventory
    • Define a policy for software maintenance
    • Build a patch management policy
    		Review findings with analyst:
    • Build a process for harvesting and reallocating software licenses
    • Define a software retirement policy
    Then complete these activities…
    • Define process for conducting software inventory
    • Define policies for software maintenance
    • Document patch management policy
    		Then complete these activities…
    • Map software harvest and reallocation process
    • Define software retirement policy
    With these tools & templates:
    • Standard Operating Procedures
    • Patch Management Policy
    		With these tools & templates:
    • Standard Operating Procedures

    Phase 4: Build Supporting Processes & Tools

    Visa used an internal SAM strategy to win the audit battle

    Logo for VISA.

    Case Study

    Industry: Financial Services
    Source: SAM Summit 2014

    Challenge

    The overarching goal of any SAM program is compliance to prevent costly audit fines. The SAM team at Visa was made up of many individuals who were former auditors.

    To deal with audit requests from vendors, “understand how auditors do things and understand their approach,” states Joe Birdsong, SAM Director at Visa.

    Vendors are always on the lookout for telltale signs of a lucrative audit. For Visa, the key was to understand these processes and learn how to prepare for them.

    Solution

    Vendors typically look for the following when evaluating an organization for audit:

    1. A recent decrease in customer spend
    2. How easy the licensed software is to audit
    3. Organizational health

    Ultimately, an audit is an attack on the relationship between the vendor and organization. According to Birdsong: “Maybe they haven’t really touched base with your teams and had good contact and relationship with them, and they don’t really know what’s going on in your enterprise.”

    Results

    By understanding the motivations behind potential audits, Visa was able to form a strategy to increase transparency with the vendor.

    Regular data collection, almost real-time reporting, and open, quick communication with the vendor surrounding audits made Visa a low-risk client for vendors.

    Buy-in from management is also important, and the creation of an official SAM strategy helps maintain support. Thanks to its proactive SAM program, Visa saved $200 million in just three years.

    Step 4.1 Ensure compliance for audits

    Phase 4:
    Build supporting processes & tools    		This step will walk you through the following activities:This step involves the following participants:

    4.1

    		Compliance & audits
    • 4.1.1 Define and document the internal audit process
    • 4.1.2 Define and document the external audit process
    • 4.1.3 Prepare an audit scoping email template
    • 4.1.4 Prepare an audit launch email template
    • IT Director, CIO
    • IT Managers and SAM Manager
    • SAM Team

    4.2

    		Communicate & build roadmap

    Step Outcomes

    • An understanding of the audit process and importance of audit preparation
    • A defined process for conducting regular internal audits to prepare for and defend against external audits
    • A strategy and documented process for responding to external audit requests

    Take a lifecycle approach to your software compliance process

    Internal audits are an effective way for organizations to regularly assess their licensing position in preparation for an audit.

    1. Gather License Data
      Use your SAM tool to run a discovery check to determine the current state of your software estate.
    2. Improve Data Quality
      Scan the data for red flags. Improve its completeness, consistency, and quality.
    3. Identify Audit Risks
      Using corrected license data, examine your reports and identify areas of risk within the organization.
    4. Identify priority titles
      Determine which titles need attention first by using the output of the license rationalization step.
    5. Reconcile to eliminate gaps
      Ensure that the correct number of licenses are deployed for each title.
    6. Draft Vendor Response
      Prepare response to vendor for when an audit has been requested.

    Improve audit response maturity by leveraging technology and contract data

    By improving your software asset management program’s maturity, you will drive savings for the business that go beyond the negotiating table.

    Recognize the classic signs of each stage of audit response maturity to identify where your organization currently stands and where it can go.

    • Optimized: Automated tools generate compliance, usage, and savings reports. Product usage reports and alerts in place to harvest and reuse licenses. Detailed savings reports provided to executive team.
    • Proactive: Best practices enforced. Compliance positions are checked quarterly, and compliance reports are used to negotiate software contracts.
    • Reactive: Best practices identified but unused. Manual tools still primarily in use. Compliance reports are time-consuming and often inaccurate.
    • Chaotic: Purchases are ad hoc and transaction based. Minimal tracking in place, leading to time-consuming manual processes.

    Implement a proactive internal audit strategy to defend against external audits

    Audits – particularly those related to software – have been on the rise as vendors attempt to recapture revenue.

    Being prepared for an audit is critical. Internal preparation will not only help your organization reduce the risk associated with an audit but will also improve daily operations through focusing on diligent documentation and data collection.

    Conducting routine internal audits will help prepare your organization for the real deal and may even prevent the audit from happening altogether. Hundreds of thousands of dollars can be saved through a proactive audit strategy with routine documentation in place.

    In addition to the fines incurred from a failed audit, numerous other negative consequences can arise:

    • Multiple audits: Failing an audit makes the organization more likely to be audited again.
    • Poor perception of IT: Unless non-compliance was previously disclosed to the business, IT can be deemed responsible.
    • Punitive injunctions: If a settlement is not reached, vendors will apply for an injunction, inhibiting use of their software.
    • Inability to justify purchases: IT can have difficulty justifying the purchase of additional resources after a failed audit.
    • Disruption to business: Precious time and resources will be spent dealing with the results of the audit.

    Perform routine internal compliance reports to decrease audit risk

    The intent of an internal audit is to stop the battle from happening before it starts. Waiting for a knock at the door from a vendor can be stressful, and it can do harm beyond a costly fine.

    • Internal audits help to ensure you’re keeping track of any software changes to keep your data and licensing up to date and avoid costly surprises if an external audit is requested.
    • Identify areas where processes are breaking down and address them before there’s a potential negative impact.
    • Identify control points in processes ahead of time to more easily identify access points where information should be verified.

    “You want to get [the] environment to a level where you’re comfortable sharing information with [a] vendor. Inviting them in to have a chat and exposing numbers means there’s no relationship there where they’re coming to audit you. They only come to audit you when they know there’s a gain to be had, otherwise what’s the point of auditing?
    I want customers to get comfortable with licensing and what they’re spending, and then there’s no problem exposing that to vendors. Vendors actually appreciate that.”     (Ben Brand, SAM Practice Manager, Insight)

    Info-Tech Insight

    “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” – Sun Tzu

    Performing routine checks on your license compliance will drastically reduce the risk that your organization gets hit with a costly fine. Maintaining transparency and demonstrating compliance will fend off audit-hungry vendors.

    Define and document the internal audit process

    Associated Activity icon 4.1.1 Document process and procedures for internal audits

    Participants: CIO and/or IT Director, Asset Manager, IT Managers

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    Define and document a process for conducting internal software audits.
    Include the following:

    1. How often will audits be completed for each software published?
    2. When will audits be conducted?
    3. Who will conduct the audit? Who will be consulted?
    4. What will be included in the scope of the audit?

    Example:

    • Annual audits will be completed for each software publisher, scheduled as part of the license or maintenance agreement renewals.
    • Where annual purchases are not required, vendor audits for compliance will be conducted annually, with a date predetermined based on minimizing scheduling conflicts with larger audits.
    • Audit will be completed with input from product managers.
    • Audit will include:
      • Software compliance review: Licenses owned compared to product installed.
      • Version review: Determine if installed versions match company standards. If there is a need for upgrades, does the license permit upgrading?
      • Maintenance review: Does the maintenance match requirements for the next year’s plans and licenses in use?
      • Support review: Is the support contract appropriate for use?
      • Budget: Has budget been allocated; is there an adjustment required due to increases?

    Identify organizational warning signs to decrease audit risk

    Being prepared for an audit is critical. Internal preparation will not only help your organization reduce the risk associated with an audit but will also improve daily operations through focusing on diligent documentation and data collection.

    Certain triggers exist that indicate a higher risk of an audit occurring. It is important to recognize these warning signs so you can prepare accordingly.

    Health of organization
    If your organization is putting out fires and a vendor can sense it, they’ll see an audit as a highly lucrative exercise.

    Decrease in customer spend
    A decrease in spend means that an organization has a high chance of being under-licensed.

    License complexity
    The more complex the license, the harder it is to remain in compliance. Some vendors are infamous for their complex licensing agreements.

    Audit Strategy

    • Audits should neither be feared nor embraced.
    • An audit is an attack on your relationship with your vendor; your vendor needs to defend its best interests, but it would also rather maintain a satisfied relationship with its client.
    • A proactive approach to audits through routine reporting and transparency with vendors will alleviate all fear surrounding the audit process. It provides your vendor with compliance assurance and communicates that an audit won’t net the vendor enough revenue to justify the effort.

    Focus on three key tactics for success before responding to an audit

    Taking these due diligence steps will pay dividends downstream, reducing the risk of negative results such as release of confidential information.

    Form an Audit Team

    • Once an audit letter is received from a vendor or third party, a virtual team needs to be formed.
    • The team should be cross-functional, representing various core areas of the business.
    • Don’t forget legal counsel: they will assist in the review of audit provision(s) to determine your contractual rights and obligations with respect to the audit.

    Sign an NDA

    • An NDA should be signed by all parties, the organization, the vendor, and the auditor.
    • Don’t wait on a vendor to provide its NDA. The organization should have its own and provide it to both parties.
    • If the auditor is a third party, negotiate a three-way NDA. This will prevent data being shared with other third parties.

    Examine Contract History

    • Vendors will attempt to alter terms of contracts when new products are purchased.
    • Maintain your current agreement if they are more favorable by “grandfathering” your original agreement.
    • Oracle master level agreements are an example: master level agreements offer more favorable terms than more recent versions.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Even if you cannot get a third-party NDA signed, the negotiation process should delay the overall audit process by at least a month, buying your organization valuable time to gather license data.

    Be prepared for external audit requests with a defined process for responding

    1. Vendor-initiated audit request received and brought to attention of IT Asset Manager and CIO.
    2. Acknowledge receipt of audit notice.
    3. Negotiate timing and scope of the audit (including software titles, geographic locations, entities, and completion date).
    4. Notify staff not to remove or acquire licenses for software under audit.
    5. Gather documentation and create report of all licensed software within audit scope.
      • Include original contract, most recent contract, and any addendums, purchase receipts, or reseller invoices, and publisher documentation such as manuals or electronic media.
    6. Compare documentation to installed software according to ITAM database.
    7. Validate any unusual or non-compliant software.
    8. Complete documentation requested by auditor and review results.

    Define and document the external audit process

    Associated Activity icon 4.1.2 Define external audit process

    Participants: CIO and/or IT Director, Asset Manager, IT Managers

    Document: Document in the Standard Operating Procedures.

    Define and document a process for responding to external software audit requests.
    Include the following:

    1. Who must be notified of the audit request when it is received?
    2. When must acknowledgement of the notice be sent and by whom?
    3. What must be defined under the scope of the audit (e.g. software titles, geographic locations, entities, completion date)?
    4. What communications must be sent to IT staff and end users to ensure compliance?
    5. What documentation should be gathered to review?
    6. How will documentation be verified against data?
    7. How will unusual or non-compliant software be identified and validated?
    8. Who needs to be informed of the results?

    Control audit scope with an audit response template

    Supporting Tool icon 4.1.3 Prepare an audit scoping email template

    Use the Software Audit Scoping Email Template to create an email directed at your external (or internal) auditors. Send the audit scoping email several weeks before an audit to determine the audit’s scope and objectives. The email should include:

    • Detailed questions about audit scope and objectives.
    • Critical background information on your organization/program.

    The email will help focus your preparation efforts and initiate your relationship with the auditors.

    Control scope by addressing the following:

    • Products covered by a properly executed agreement
    • Geographic regions
    • User groups
    • Time periods
    • Specific locations
    • A subset of users’ computers
    Sample of the 'Software Audit Scoping Email Template'.

    Keep leadership informed with an audit launch email

    Supporting Tool icon 4.1.4 Prepare an audit launch email template

    Approximately a week before the audit, you should email the internal leadership to communicate information about the start of the audit. Use the Software Audit Launch Email Template to create this email, including:

    • Staffing
    • Functional requirements
    • Audit contact person information
    • Scheduling details
    • Audit report estimated delivery time

    For more guidance on preparing for a software audit, see Info-Tech’s blueprint: Prepare and Defend Against a Software Audit.

    Sample of the 'Software Audit Launch Email Template'.

    A large bank employed proactive, internal audits to experience big savings

    Case Study

    Industry: Banking
    Source: Pomeroy

    Challenge

    A large American financial institution with 1,300 banking centers in 12 states, 28,000 end users, and 108,000 assets needed to improve its asset management program.

    The bank had employed numerous ITAM tools, but IT staff identified that its asset data was still fragmented. There was still incomplete insight into what assets the banked owned, the precise value of those assets, their location, and what they’re being used for.

    The bank decided to establish an asset management program that involved internal audits to gather more-complete data sets.

    Solution

    With the help of a vendor, the bank implemented cradle-to-grave asset tracking and lifecycle management, which provided discovery of almost $80 million in assets.

    The bank also assembled an ITAM team and a dedicated ITAM manager to ensure that routine internal audits were performed.

    The team was instrumental in establishing standardization of IT policies, hardware configuration, and service requirements.

    Results

    • The bank identified and now tracks over 108,000 assets.
    • The previous level of 80% accuracy in inventory tracking was raised to 96%.
    • Nearly $500,000 was saved through asset recovery and repurposing of 600 idle assets.
    • There are hundreds of thousands of dollars in estimated savings as the result of avoiding costly penalties from failed audits thanks to proactive internal audits.

    Step 4.2 Build communication plan and roadmap

    Phase 4:
    Build supporting processes & tools    		This step will walk you through the following activities:This step involves the following participants:

    4.1

    		Compliance & audits
    • 4.2.1 Develop a communication plan to convey the right messages
    • 4.2.2 Anticipate end-user questions by preparing an FAQ list
    • 4.2.3 Build a software asset management policy
    • 4.2.4 Build additional SAM policies
    • 4.2.5 Develop a SAM roadmap to plan your implementation
    • IT Director, CIO
    • IT Managers and SAM Manager
    • SAM Team

    4.2

    		Communicate & build roadmap

    Step Outcomes

    • A documented communications plan for relevant stakeholders to understand the benefits and changes the SAM program will bring
    • A list of anticipated end-user questions with responses
    • Documented software asset management policies
    • An implementation roadmap

    Communicate SAM processes to gain acceptance and support

    Communication is crucial to the integration and overall implementation of your SAM program. If staff and users do not understand the purpose of processes and policies, they will fail to provide the desired value.

    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.
    • Maintain the presence of the program throughout the business.
    • Instill ownership throughout the business from top-level management to new hires.

    Communicate the following:

    1. Advertise successes

      • Regularly demonstrate the value of the SAM program with descriptive statistics focused on key financial benefits.
      • Share data with the appropriate personnel; promote success to obtain further support from senior management.

    2. Report and share asset data

      • Sharing detailed asset-related reports frequently gives decision makers useful data to aid in their strategy.
      • These reports can help your organization prepare for audits, adjust budgeting, and detect unauthorized software.

    3. Communicate the value of SAM

      • Educate management and end users about how they fit into the bigger picture.
      • Individuals need to know which behaviors may put the organization at risk or adversely affect data quality.

    Educate staff and end users through SAM training to increase program success

    As part of your communication plan and overall SAM implementation, training should be provided to both staff and end users within the organization.

    • ITAM solutions are complex by nature with both business process and technical knowledge required to use them correctly.
    • All facets of the business, from management to new hires, should be provided with training to help them understand their role in the program’s success.
    • Keep the message appropriate to the audience – end users don’t need to know the complete process, but will need to know policy and how to request.
    • Even after the SAM program has been fully implemented, keep employees up to date with policies and processes through ongoing training sessions for both new hires and existing employees:
      • New hires: Provide new hires with all relevant SAM policies and ensure they understand the importance of software asset management.
      • Existing employees: Continually remind them of how SAM is involved in their daily operations and inform them of any changes to policies.

    Create your communications plan to anticipate challenges, remove obstacles, and ensure buy-in

    Provide separate communications to key stakeholder groups

    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?
    		 Three circular arrows each linking t the next in a downward daisy chain. The type arrow has 'IT Staff' in the middle, the second 'Management', and the third 'End Users' 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?

    Develop a communication plan to convey the right messages

    Associated Activity icon 4.2.1 Develop a communication plan to convey the right messages

    Participants: CIO, IT Director, Asset Manager, Service Desk Manager

    Document: Document in the SAM Communication Plan.

    1. Identify the groups that will be affected by the SAM program.
    2. For each group requiring a communication plan, identify the following:
    3. Benefits of SAM for that group of individuals (e.g. more efficient software requests).
    4. The impact the change will have on them (e.g. change in the way a certain process will work).
    5. Communication method (i.e. how you will communicate).
    6. Timeframe (i.e. when and how often you will communicate the changes).
    7. Complete this information in a table like the one below and document in the Communication Plan.
    Group Benefits Impact Method Timeline
    Executives
    • Improved audit compliance
    • Improved budgeting and forecasting
    • Review and sign off on policies
    End Users
    • Streamlined software request process
    • Follow software installation and security policies
    IT
    • Faster access to data and one source of truth
    • Modified processes
    • Ensure audits are completed regularly

    Anticipate end-user questions by preparing an FAQ list

    Associated Activity icon 4.2.2 Prepare an FAQ list

    Document: Document FAQ questions and answers in the SAM FAQ Template.

    ITAM imposes changes to end users throughout the business and it’s normal to expect questions about the new program. Prepare your team ahead of time by creating a list of FAQs.

    Some common questions include:

    • Why are you changing from the old processes?
    • Why now?
    • What are you going to ask me to do differently?
    • Will I lose any of my software?

    The benefits of preparing a list of answers to FAQs include:

    • A reduction in time spent creating answers to questions. If you focus on the most common questions, you will make efficient use of your team’s time.
    • Consistency in your team’s responses. By socializing the answers to FAQs, you ensure that no one on your team is out of the loop and the message remains consistent across the board.

    Include policy design and enforcement in your communication plan

    • Software asset management policies should define the actions to be taken to support software asset management processes and ensure the effective and efficient management of IT software assets across the asset lifecycle.
    • Implementing asset management policies enforces the notion that the organization takes its IT assets and the management of them seriously and will help ensure the benefits of SAM are achieved.
    • Designing, approving, documenting, and adopting one set of standard SAM policies for each department to follow will ensure the processes are enforced equally across the organization.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Use policy templates to jumpstart your policy development and ensure policies are comprehensive, but be sure to modify and adapt policies to suit your corporate culture or they will not gain buy-in from employees. For a policy to be successful, it must be a living document and have participation and involvement from the committees and departments to whom it will pertain.

    Build a software asset management policy

    Supporting Tool icon 4.2.3 Document a SAM policy

    Use Info-Tech’s Software Asset Management Policy template to define and document the purpose, scope, objectives, and roles and responsibilities for your organization's software asset management program.

    The template allows you to customize policy requirements for:

    • Procurement
    • Installation and Removal
    • Maintenance
    • Mergers and Acquisitions
    • Company Divestitures
    • Audits

    …as well as consequences for non-compliance.

    Sample of the 'Software Asset Management Policy' template.

    Use Info-Tech’s policy templates to build additional policies

    Supporting Tool icon 4.2.4 Build additional SAM policies

    Asset Security Policy
    The IT asset security policy will describe your organization's approach to ensuring the physical and digital security of your IT assets throughout their entire lifecycle.

    End-User Devices Acceptable Use Policy
    This policy should describe how business tools provided to employees are to be used in a responsible, ethical, and compliant manner, as well as the consequences of non-compliance.

    Purchasing Policy
    The purchasing policy helps to establish company standards, guidelines, and procedures for the purchase of all information technology hardware, software, and computer-related components as well as the purchase of all technical services.

    Release Management Policy
    Use this policy template to define and document the purpose, scope, objectives, and roles and responsibilities for your organization's release management program.

    Internet Acceptable Use Policy
    Use this template to help keep the internet use policy up to date. This policy template includes descriptions of acceptable and unacceptable use, security provisions, and disclaimers on the right of the organization to monitor usage and liability.

    		Samples of additional SAM policies, listed to the left.

    Implement SAM in a phased, constructive approach

    One of the most difficult decisions to make when implementing a SAM program is: “where do we start?”

    It’s not necessary to deploy a comprehensive SAM program to start. Build on the essentials to become more mature as you grow.

    SAM Program Maturity (highest to lowest)

    • Audits and reporting
      Gather and analyze data about software assets to ensure compliance for audits and to continually improve the business.
    • Contracts and budget
      Analyze contracts and licenses for software across the enterprise and optimize planning to enable cost reduction.
    • Lifecycle standardization
      Define standards and processes for all asset lifecycle phases from request and procurement through to retirement and redistribution.
    • Inventory and tracking
      Define assets you will procure, distribute, and track. Know what you have, where it is deployed, and keep track of contracts and all relevant data.

    Integrate your SAM program with the organization to assist its implementation

    SAM cannot perform on its own – it must be integrated with other functional areas of the organization to maintain its stability and support.

    • Effective SAM is supported by a comprehensive set of processes as part of its implementation.
    • For example, integration with the procurement team’s processes and tools is required to track software purchases to mitigate software license compliance risk.
    • Integration with Finance is required to support internal cost allocations and chargebacks.
    • Integration with the service desk is required to track and deploy software requests.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    To integrate SAM effectively, a clear implementation roadmap needs to be designed. Prioritize “quick wins” to demonstrate success to the business early and to gain buy-in from your team. Short-term gains should be designed to support long-term goals of your SAM program.

    Sample short-term goals
    • Identify inventory classification and tool
    • Create basic SAM policies and processes
    • Implement SAM auto-discovery tools
    Sample long-term goals
    • Software contract data integration
    • Continual improvement through review and revision
    • Software compliance reports, internal audits

    Develop a SAM roadmap to plan your implementation

    Associated Activity icon 4.2.5 Build a project roadmap
    1. Identify and review all initiatives that will be taken to implement or improve the software asset management program. These may fall under people, process, or technology-related tasks.
    2. Assign a priority level to each task (Quick Win, Low, Medium, High).
    3. Use the priority to sort tasks into start dates, breaking down by:
      1. Short, medium, or long-term
      2. 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 12+ months
      3. Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4
    4. Review tasks and adjust start dates for some, if needed to set realistic and achievable timelines.
    5. Transfer tasks to a project plan or Gantt chart to formalize.
    Examples:
    Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
    • Hire software asset manager
    • Document SOP
    • Define policies
    • Select a SAM tool
    • Create list of approved services and software
    • Define metrics
    • Inventory existing software and contracts
    • Build a patch policy
    • Build a service catalog
    • Contract renewal alignment
    • Run internal audit
    • Security review

    Review and maintain the SAM program to reach optimal maturity

    • SAM is a dynamic process. It must adapt to keep pace with the direction of the organization. New applications, different licensing needs, and a constant stream of new end users all contribute to complicating the licensing process.
    • As part of your organization’s journey to an optimized SAM program, put in place continual improvement practices to maintain momentum.

    A suggested cycle of review and maintenance for your SAM: 'Plan', 'Do', 'Check', 'Act'.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Advertising the increased revenue that is gained from good SAM practices is a powerful way to gain project buy-in.

    Keep the momentum going:

    • Clearly define ongoing responsibilities for each role.
    • Develop a training and awareness program for new employees to be introduced to SAM processes and policies.
    • Continually review and revise existing processes as necessary.
    • Measure the success of the program to identify areas for improvement and demonstrate successes.
    • Measure adherence to process and policies and enforce as needed.

    Reflect on the outcomes of implementing SAM to target areas for improvement and share knowledge gained within and beyond the SAM team. Some questions to consider include:

    1. How did the data compare to our expectations? Was the project a success?
    2. What obstacles were present that impacted the project?
    3. How can we apply lessons learned through this project to others in the future?

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech Workshop Associated Activity icon

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    Photo 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 analyst 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:

    4.2.1

    		 Sample of activity 4.2.1 'Develop a communication plan to convey the right messages'. Develop a communication plan to convey the right messages

    Identify stakeholders requiring communication and formulate a message and delivery method for each.

    4.2.5

    		 Sample of activity 4.2.5 'Develop a SAM roadmap to plan your implementation'. Develop a SAM roadmap to plan your implementation

    Outline the tasks necessary for the implementation of this project and prioritize to build a project roadmap.

    Phase 4 outline

    Associated Activity icon 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 4: Build supporting processes & tools

    Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 4
    Step 4.1: Compliance & audits Step 4.2: Communicate & build roadmap
    Start with an analyst kick-off call:
    • Discuss audit process
    • Define a process for internal audits
    • Define a process for external audit response
    		 Review findings with analyst:
    • Build communication plan
    • Discuss policy needs
    • Build a roadmap
    Then complete these activities…
    • Document internal audit process
    • Document external audit process
    • Prepare audit templates
    		 Then complete these activities…
    • Develop communication plan
    • Prepare an FAQ list for end users
    • Build SAM policies
    • Develop a roadmap
    With these tools & templates:
    • Standard Operating Procedures
    • Software Audit Scoping Email Template
    • Software Audit Launch Email Template
    		 With these tools & templates:
    • SAM Communication Plan
    • Software Asset Management FAQ Template
    • Software Asset Management Policy
    • Additional Policy Templates

    Bibliography

    2013 Software Audit Industry Report.” Express Metrix, 2013. Web.

    7 Vital Trends Disrupting Today’s Workplace: Results and Data from 2013 TINYpulse Employee Engagement Survey.” TINYpulse, 2013. Web.

    Beaupoil, Christof. “How to measure data quality and protect against software audits.” Network World, 6 June 2011.

    Begg, Daniel. “Effective Licence Position (ELP) – What is it really worth?” LinkedIn, 19 January 2016.

    Boehler, Bernhard. “Advanced License Optimization: Go Beyond Compliance for Maximum Cost Savings.” The ITAM Review, 24 November 2014.

    Bruce, Warren. “SAM Baseline – process & best practice.” Microsoft. 2013 Australia Partner Conference.

    Case Study Top 20 U.S. Bank Tackles Asset Management.” Pomeroy, 2012. Web.

    Cherwell Software Software Audit Industry Report.” Cherwell Software, 2015. Web.

    Conrad, Sandi. “SAM starter kit: everything you need to get started with software asset management. Conrad & Associates, 2010.

    Corstens, Jan, and Diederik Van der Sijpe. “Contract risk & compliance software asset management (SAM).” Deloitte, 2012.

    Deas, A., T. Markowitzm and E. Black. “Software asset management: high risk, high reward.” Deloitte, 2014.

    Doig, Chris. “Why you should always estimate ROI before buying enterprise software” CIO, 13 August 2015.

    Fried, Chuck. “America Needs An Education On Software Asset Management (SAM).” LinkedIn. 16 June 2015.

    Lyons, Gwen. “Understanding the Drivers Behind Application Rationalization Critical to Success.” Flexera Software Blog, 31 October 2012.

    Bibliography

    Metrics to Measure SAM Success: eight ways to prove your SAM program is delivering business benefits.” Snow Software White Paper, 2015.

    Microsoft. “The SAM Optimization Model.” Microsoft Corporation White Paper, 2010.

    Miller, D. and M. Oliver. “Engaging Stakeholders for Project Success.” Project Management Institute White Paper, 2015.

    Morrison, Dan. “5 Common Misconceptions of Software Asset Management.” SoftwareOne. 12 May 2015.

    O’Neill, Leslie T. “Visa Case Study: SAM in the 21st Century.” International Business Software Managers Association (IBSMA), 30 July 2014.

    Reducing Hidden Operating Costs Through IT Asset Discovery.” NetSupport Inc., 2011.

    SAM Summit 2014, 23-25 June 2014, University of Chicago Gleacher Center Conference Facilities, Chicago, MI.

    Saxby, Heather. “20 Things Every CIO Needs to Know about Software Asset Management.” Crayon Software Experts, 13 May 2015.

    The 2016 State of IT: Managing the money monsters for the coming year.” Spiceworks, 2016.

    The Hidden Cost of Unused Software.” A 1E Report, 1E.com: 2014. Web.

    What does it take to achieve software license optimization?” Flexera White Paper, 2013.

    Research contributors and experts

    Photo of Michael Dean, Director, User Support Services, Des Moines University Michael Dean
    Director, User Support Services
    Des Moines University     		Simon Leuty
    Co-Founder
    Livingstone Tech     		Photo of Simon Leuty, Co-Founder, Livingstone Tech
    Photo of Clare Walsh, PR Consultant, Adesso Tech Ltd. Clare Walsh
    PR Consultant
    Adesso Tech Ltd.     		Alex Monaghan
    Director, Presales EMEA
    Product Support Solutions     		Photo of Alex Monaghan, Director, Presales EMEA, Product Support Solutions

    Research contributors and experts

    Photo of Ben Brand, SAM Practice Manager, Insight Ben Brand
    SAM Practice Manager
    Insight     		Michael Swanson
    President
    ISAM     		Photo of Michael Swanson, President, ISAM
    Photo of Bruce Aboudara, SVP, Marketing & Business Development, Scalable Software Bruce Aboudara
    SVP, Marketing & Business Development
    Scalable Software     		Will Degener
    Senior Solutions Consultant
    Scalable Software     		Photo of Will Degener, Senior Solutions Consultant, Scalable Software

    Research contributors and experts

    Photo of Peter Gregorowicz, Associate Director, Network & Client Services, Vancouver Community College Peter Gregorowicz
    Associate Director, Network & Client Services
    Vancouver Community College     		Peter Schnitzler
    Operations Team Lead
    Toyota Canada     		Photo of Peter Schnitzler, Operations Team Lead, Toyota Canada
    Photo of David Maughan, Head of Service Transition, Mott MacDonald Ltd. David Maughan
    Head of Service Transition
    Mott MacDonald Ltd.     		Brian Bernard
    Infrastructure & Operations Manager
    Lee County Clerk of Court     		Photo of Brian Bernard, Infrastructure & Operations Manager, Lee County Clerk of Court

    Research contributors and experts

    Photo of Leticia Sobrado, IT Data Governance & Compliance Manager, Intercept Pharmaceuticals Leticia Sobrado
    IT Data Governance & Compliance Manager
    Intercept Pharmaceuticals

    10 Secrets for Successful Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}419|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact: 10.0/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: $12,096 Average $ Saved
    • member rating average days saved: 20 Average Days Saved
    • Parent Category Name: DR and Business Continuity
    • Parent Category Link: /business-continuity
    • The pay-per-use pricing structure of cloud services make it a cheaper DR option, but there are gotchas you need to avoid, ranging from unexpected licensing costs to potential security vulnerabilities.
    • You likely started on the path to cloud DR with consideration of cloud storage for offsite retention of backups. Systems recovery in the cloud can be a real value-add to using cloud as a backup target.
    • Your cloud-based DR environment has to be secure and compliant, but performance also has to be “good enough” to operate the business.
    • Location still matters, and selecting the DR site that optimizes latency tolerance and geo-redundancy can be difficult.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Keep your systems dormant until disaster strikes. Prepare as much of your environment as possible without tapping into compute resources. Enjoy the low at-rest costs, and leverage the reliability of the cloud in your failover.
    • Avoid failure on the failback! Bringing up your systems in the cloud is a great temporary solution, but an expensive long-term strategy. Make sure you have a plan to get back on premises.
    • Leverage cloud DR as a start for cloud migration. Cloud DR provides a gateway for broader infrastructure lift and shift to cloud IaaS, but this should only be the first phase of a longer-term roadmap that ends in multi-service hybrid cloud.

    Impact and Result

    • Calculate the cost of your DR solution with a cloud vendor. Test your systems often to build out more accurate budgets and to define failover and failback action plans to increase confidence in your capabilities.
    • Define “good enough” performance by consulting with the business and setting correct expectations for the recovery state.
    • Dig deeper into the various flavors of cloud-based DR beyond backup and restore, including pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site recovery. Each of these has unique benefits and challenges when done in the cloud.

    10 Secrets for Successful Disaster Recovery in the Cloud Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out the 10 secrets for success in cloud-based DR deployment, 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:

    [infographic]

    Master the Secrets of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Contracts to Right-Size Your Adobe Spend

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}139|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact: 10.0/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: $63,667 Average $ Saved
    • member rating average days saved: 110 Average Days Saved
    • Parent Category Name: Licensing
    • Parent Category Link: /licensing
    • Adobe operates in its own niche in the creative space, and Adobe users have grown accustomed to their products, making switching very difficult.
    • With Adobe’s transition to a cloud-based subscription model, it’s important for organizations to actively manage licenses, software provisioning, and consumption.
    • Without a detailed understanding of Adobe’s various purchasing models, overspending often occurs.
    • Organizations have experienced issues in identifying commercial licensed packages with their install files, making it difficult to track and assign licenses.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Focus on user needs first. Examine which products are truly needed versus nice to have to prevent overspending on the Creative Cloud suite.
    • Examine what has been deployed. Knowing what has been deployed and what is being used will greatly aid in completing your true-up.
    • Compliance is not automatic with products that are in the cloud. Shared logins or computers that have desktop installs that can be access by multiple users can cause noncompliance.

    Impact and Result

    • Visibility into license deployments and needs
    • Compliance with internal audits

    Master the Secrets of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Contracts to Right-Size Your Adobe Spend Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Procuring Adobe software is not the same game as it was just a few years ago. Adopt a comprehensive approach to understanding Adobe licensing to avoid overspending and to maximize negotiation leverage.

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

    1. Manage your Adobe agreements

    Use Info-Tech’s licensing best practices to avoid overspending on Adobe licensing and to remain compliant in case of audit.

    • Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table
    • Adobe ETLA Forecasted Costs and Benefits
    • Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Master the Secrets of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Contracts to Right-Size Your Adobe Spend

    Learn the essential steps to avoid overspending and to maximize negotiation leverage with Adobe.

    ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

    Only 18% of Adobe licenses are genuine copies: are yours?

    "Adobe has designed and executed the most comprehensive evolution to the subscription model of pre-cloud software publishers with Creative Cloud. Adobe's release of Document Cloud (replacement for the Acrobat series of software) is the final nail in the coffin for legacy licensing for Adobe. Technology procurement functions have run out of time in which to act while they still retain leverage, with the exception of some late adopter organizations that were able to run on legacy versions (e.g. CS6) for the past five years. Procuring Adobe software is not the same game as it was just a few years ago. Adopt a comprehensive approach to understanding Adobe licensing, contract, and delivery models in order to accurately forecast your software needs, transact against the optimal purchase plan, and maximize negotiation leverage. "

    Scott Bickley

    Research Lead, Vendor Practice

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Our understanding of the problem

    This Research is Designed For:

    • IT managers scoping their Adobe licensing requirements and compliance position.
    • CIOs, CTOs, CPOs, and IT directors negotiating licensing agreements in search of cost savings.
    • ITAM/Software asset managers responsible for tracking and managing Adobe licensing.
    • IT and business leaders seeking to better understand Adobe licensing options (Creative Cloud).
    • Vendor management offices in the process of a contract renewal.

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Understand and simplify licensing per product to help optimize spend.
    • Ensure agreement type is aligned to needs.
    • Navigate the purchase process to negotiate from a position of strength.
    • Manage licenses more effectively to avoid compliance issues, audits, and unnecessary purchases.

    This Research Will Also Assist:

    • CFOs and the finance department
    • Enterprise architects
    • ITAM/SAM team
    • Network and IT architects
    • Legal
    • Procurement and sourcing

    This Research Will Help Them:

    • Understand licensing methods in order to make educated and informed decisions.
    • Understand the future of the cloud in your Adobe licensing roadmap.

    Executive summary

    Situation

    • Adobe’s dominant market position and ownership of the creative software market is forcing customers to refocus the software acquisition process to ensure a positive ROI on every license.
    • In early 2017, Adobe announced it would stop selling perpetual Creative Suite 6 products, forcing future purchases to be transitioned to the cloud.

    Complication

    • Adobe operates in its own niche in the creative space, and Adobe users have grown accustomed to their products, making switching very difficult.
    • With transition to a cloud-based subscription model, organizations need to actively manage licenses, software provisioning, and consumption.
    • Without a detailed understanding of Adobe’s various purchasing models, overspending often occurs.
    • Organizations have experienced issues in identifying commercial licensed packages with their install files, making it difficult to track and assign licenses.

    Resolution

    • Gain visibility into license deployments and needs with a strong SAM program/tool; this will go a long way toward optimizing spend.
      • Number of users versus number of installs are not the same, and confusing the two can result in overspending. Device-based licensing historically would have required two licenses, but now only one may be required.
    • Ensure compliance with internal audits. Adobe has a very high rate of piracy stemming from issues such as license overuse, misunderstanding of contract language, using cracks/keygens, virtualized environments, indirect access, and sharing of accounts.
    • A handful of products are still sold as perpetual – Acrobat Standard/Pro, Captivate, ColdFusion, Photoshop, and Premiere Elements – but be aware of what is being purchased and used in the organization.
      • Beware of products deployed on server, where the number of users accessing that product cannot easily be counted.

    Info-Tech Insight

    1. Your user-need analysis has shifted in the new subscription-based model. Determine which products are needed versus nice to have to prevent overspending on the Creative Cloud suite.
    2. Examine what you need, not what you have. You can no longer mix and match applications.
    3. Compliance is not automatic with products that are in the cloud. Shared logins or computers with desktop installs that can be accessed by multiple users can cause noncompliance.

    The aim of this blueprint is to provide a foundational understanding of Adobe

    Why Adobe

    In 2011 Adobe took the strategic but radical move toward converting its legacy on-premises licensing to a cloud-based subscription model, in spite of material pushback from its customer base. While revenues initially dipped, Adobe’s resolve paid off; the transition is mostly complete and revenues have doubled. This was the first enterprise software offering to effect the transition to the cloud in a holistic manner. It now serves as a case study for those following suit, such as Microsoft, Autodesk, and Oracle.

    What to know

    Adobe elected to make this market pivot in a dramatic fashion, foregoing a gradual transition process. Enterprise clients were temporarily allowed to survive on legacy on-premises editions of Adobe software; however, as the Adobe Creative Cloud functionality was quickly enhanced and new applications were launched, customer capitulation to the new subscription model was assured.

    The Future

    Adobe is now leveraging the power of connected customers, the availability of massive data streams, and the ongoing digitalization trend globally to supplement the core Creative Cloud products with online services and analytics in the areas of Creative Cloud for content, Marketing Cloud for marketers, and Document Cloud for document management and workflows. This blueprint focuses on Adobe's Creative Cloud and Document Cloud solutions and the enterprise term license agreement (ETLA).

    Info-Tech Insight

    Beware of your contract being auto-renewed and getting locked into the quantities and product subset that you have in your current agreement. Determining the number of licenses you need is critical. If you overestimate, you're locked in for three years. If you underestimate, you have to pay a big premium in the true-up process.

    Learn the “Adobe way,” whether you are reviewing existing spend or considering the purchase of new products

    1. Legacy on-premises Adobe Creative Suite products used to be available in multiple package configurations, enabling right-sized spend with functionality. Adobe’s support for legacy Creative Suites CS6 products ended in May 2017.
    2. While early ETLAs allowed customer application packaging at a lower price than the full Creative Cloud suite, this practice has been discontinued. Now, the only purchasing options are the full suite or single-application subscriptions.
    3. Buyers must now assess alternative Adobe products as an option for non-power users. For example, QuarkXPress, Corel PaintShop Pro, CorelDRAW, Bloom, and Affinity Designer are possible replacements for some Creative Cloud applications.
    4. Document Cloud, Adobe’s latest step in creating an Acrobat-focused subscription model, limits the ability to reduce costs with an extended upgrade cycle. These changes go beyond the licensing model.
    5. Organizations need to perform a cost-benefit analysis of single app purchases vs. the full suite to right-size spend with functionality.

    As Adobe’s dominance continues to grow, organizations must find new ways to maintain a value-added relationship

    Adobe estimates the total addressable market for creative and document cloud to be $21 billion. With no sign of growth slowing down, Adobe customers must learn how to work within the current design monopoly.

    The image contains two pie graphs. The first is labelled FY2014 Revenue Mix, and the second graph is titled FY2017E Revenue Mix.

    Source: Adobe, 2017

    "Adobe is not only witnessing a steady increase in Creative Cloud subscriptions, but it also gained more visibility into customers’ product usage, which enables it to consistently push out software updates relevant to user needs. The company also successfully transformed its sales organization to support the recurring revenue model."

    – Omid Razavi, Global Head of Success, ServiceNow

    Consider your route forward

    Consider your route forward, as ETLA contract commitments, scope, and mechanisms differ in structure to the perpetual models previously utilized. The new model shortchanges technology procurement leaders in their expectations of cost-usage alignment and opex flexibility (White, 2016).

    ☑ Implement a user profile to assign licenses by version and limit expenditures. Alternatives can include existing legacy perpetual and Acrobat classic versions that may already be owned by the organization.

    ☑ Examine the suitability and/or dependency on Document Cloud functions, such as existing business workflows and e-signature integration.

    ☑ Involve stakeholders in the evaluation of alternate products for use cases where dependency on Acrobat-specific functionality is limited.

    ☑ Identify not just the installs and active use of the applications but also the depth and breadth of use across the various features so that the appropriate products can be selected.

    The image contains a screenshot of a diagram listing the adobe toolkit. The toolkit includes: Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast Tool, Adobe ETLA Forecasted Cost and Benefits, Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table.

    Use Info-Tech’s Adobe toolkit to prepare for your new purchases or contract renewal

    Info-Tech Insight

    IT asset management (ITAM) and software asset management (SAM) are critical! An error made in a true-up can cost the organization for the remaining years of the ETLA. Info-Tech worked with one client that incurred a $600k error in the true-up that they were not able to recoup from Adobe.

    Apply licensing best practices and examine the potential for cost savings through an unbiased third-party perspective

    Establish Licensing Requirements

    • Understand Adobe’s product landscape and transition to cloud.
    • Analyze users and match to correct Adobe SKU.
    • Conduct an internal software assessment.
    • Build an effective licensing position.

    Evaluate Licensing Options

    • Value Incentive Plan (VIP)
    • Cumulative Licensing Program (CLP)
    • Transactional Licensing Program (TLP)
    • Enterprise Term License Agreement (ETLA)

    Evaluate Agreement Options

    • Price
    • Discounts
    • Price protection
    • Terms and conditions

    Purchase and Manage Licenses

    • Learn negotiation tactics to enhance your current strategy.
    • Control the flow of communication.
    • Assign the right people to manage the environment.

    Preventive practices can help find measured value ($)

    Time and resource disruption to business if audited

    Lost estimated synergies in M&A

    Cost of new licensing

    Cost of software audit, penalties, and back support

    Lost resource allocation and time

    Third party, legal/SAM partners

    Cost of poor negotiation tactics

    Lost discount percentage

    Terms and conditions improved

    Explore Adobe licensing and optimize spend – project overview

    Establish Licensing Requirements

    Evaluate Licensing Options

    Evaluate Agreement Options

    Purchase and Manage Licenses

    Best-Practice Toolkit
    • Assess current state and align goals; review business feedback.
    • Interview key stakeholders to define business objectives and drivers.
    • Review licensing options.
    • Review licensing rules.
    • Determine the ideal contract type.
    • Review final contract.
    • Discuss negotiation points.
    • License management.
    • Future licensing strategy.

    Guided Implementations
    • Engage in a scoping call.
    • Assess the current state.
    • Determine licensing position.
    • Review product options.
    • Review licensing rules.
    • Review contract option types.
    • Determine negotiation points.
    • Finalize the contract.
    • Discuss license management.
    • Evaluate and develop a roadmap for future licensing.

    PHASE 1

    Manage Your Adobe Agreements

    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: Managing Adobe Contracts

    Proposed Time to Completion: 3-6 weeks

    Step 1.1: Establish Licensing Requirements

    Start with a kick-off call:

    • Assess the current state.
    • Determine licensing position.

    Then complete these activities…

    • Complete a deployment count, needs analysis, and internal audit.

    With these tools & templates:

    Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast

    Step 1.2: Determine Licensing Options

    Review findings with analyst:

    • Review licensing options.
    • Review licensing rules.
    • Review contract option types.

    Then complete these activities…

    • Select licensing option.
    • Document forecasted costs and benefits.

    With these tools & templates:

    Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table

    Adobe ETLA Forecasted Costs and Benefits

    Step 1.3: Purchase and Manage Licenses

    Review findings with analyst:

    • Review final contract.
    • Discuss negotiation points.
    • Plan a roadmap for SAM.

    Then complete these activities…

    • Negotiate final contract.
    • Evaluate and develop a roadmap for SAM.

    With these tools & templates:

    Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast

    Adobe’s Cloud – Snapshot of what has changed

    1. Since Adobe has limited the procurement and licensing options with the introduction of Creative Cloud, there are three main choices:
      1. Direct online purchase at Adobe.com
      2. Value Incentive Plan (VIP): Creative Cloud for teams–based purchase with a volume discount (minimal, usually ~10%); may have some incentives or promotional pricing
      3. Enterprise Term License Agreement (ETLA): Creative Cloud for Enterprise (CCE)
    2. Adobe has discontinued support for legacy perpetual licenses, with the latest version being CS6, which is steering organizations to prioritize their options for products in the creative and document management space.
    3. Document Cloud (DC) is the cloud product replacing the Acrobat perpetual licensing model. DC extends the subscription-based model further and limits options to extend the lifespan of legacy on-premises licenses through a protracted upgrade process.
    4. The subscription model, coupled with limited discount options on transactional purchases, forces enterprises to consider the ETLA option. The ETLA brings with it unique term commitments, new pricing structures, and true-up mechanisms and inserts the "land and expand" model vs. license reassignment.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Adobe’s move from a perpetual license to a per-user subscription model can be positive in some scenarios for organizations that experienced challenges with deployment, management of named users vs. devices, and license tracking.

    Core concepts of Adobe agreements: Discounting, pricing, and bundling

    ETLA

    Adobe has been systematically reducing discounts on ETLAs as they enter the second renewal cycle of the original three-year terms.

    Adobe Cloud Bundling

    Adobe cloud services are being bundled with ETLAs with a mandate that companies that do not accept the services at the proposed cost have Adobe management’s approval to unbundle the deal, generally with no price relief.

    Custom Bundling

    The option for custom bundling of legacy Creative Suite component applications has been removed, effectively raising the price across the board for licensees that require more than two Adobe applications who must now purchase the full Creative Cloud suite.

    Higher and Public Education

    Higher education/public education agreements have been revamped over the past couple of years, increasing prices for campus-wide agreements by double-digit percentages (~10-30%+). While they still receive an 80% discount over list price, IT departments in this industry are not prepared to absorb the budget increase.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Adobe has moved to an all-or-one bundle model. If you need more than two application products, you will likely need to purchase the full Creative Cloud suite. Therefore, it is important to focus on creating accurate user profiles to identify usage needs.

    Use Info-Tech’s Adobe deployment tool for SAM: Track deployment and needs

    The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's Adobe deployment tool for SAM: Track deployment and needs.

    Use Info-Tech’s Adobe deployment tool for SAM: Audit

    The image contains a screenshot of the Adobe Deployment Tool for SAM, specifically the Audit tab.

    Use Info-Tech’s Adobe deployment tool for SAM: Cost

    The image contains a screenshot of the Adobe Deployment Tool for SAM, specifically the Cost tab.

    Use Info-Tech’s tools to compare ETLA vs. VIP and to document forecasted costs and benefits

    Is the ETLA or VIP option better for your organization?

    Use Info-Tech’s Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table tool to compare ETLA costs against VIP costs.

    The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table.

    Your ETLA contains multiple products and is a multi-year agreement.

    Use Info-Tech’s ETLA Forecasted Costs and Benefits tool to forecast your ETLA costs and document benefits.

    The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's ETLA Forecasted Costs and Benefits.

    Adobe’s Creative Cloud Complete offering provides access to all Adobe creative products and ongoing upgrades

    Why subscription model?

    The subscription model forces customers to an annuity-based pricing model, so Adobe has recurring revenue from a subscription-based product. This increases customer lifetime value (CLTV) for Adobe while providing ongoing functionality updates that are not version/edition dependent.

    Key Characteristics:

    • Available as a month-to-month or annual subscription license
    • Can be purchased for one user, for a team, or for an enterprise
    • Subject to annual payment and true-up of license fees
    • Can only true-up during lifespan of contract; quantities cannot be reduced until renewal
    • May contain auto-renewal clauses – beware!

    Key things to know:

    1. Applications can be purchased individually if users require only one specific product. A few products continue to have on-premises licensing options, but most are offered by per-user subscriptions.
    2. At the end of the subscription period, the organization no longer has any rights to the software and would have to return to a previously owned version.
    3. True-downs are not possible (in contrast to Microsoft’s Office 365).
    4. Downgrade rights are not included or are limited by default.

    Which products are in the Creative Cloud bundle?

    Adobe Acrobat® XI Pro

    Adobe After Effects® CC

    Adobe Audition® CC

    Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition

    Adobe InDesign® CC

    Adobe Dreamweaver® CC

    Adobe Edge Animate

    Adobe Edge Code preview

    Adobe Edge Inspect

    Adobe Photoshop CC

    Adobe Edge Reflow preview

    Adobe Edge Web Fonts

    Adobe Extension Manager

    ExtendScript Toolkit

    Adobe Fireworks® CS6

    Adobe Flash® Builder® 4.7 Premium Edition

    Adobe Flash Professional CC

    Adobe Illustrator® CC

    Adobe Prelude® CC

    Adobe Premiere® Pro CC

    Adobe Scout

    Adobe SpeedGrade® CC

    Adobe Muse CC

    Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6

    Adobe offers different solutions for teams vs. enterprise licensing

    Evaluate the various options for Creative Cloud, as they can be purchased individually, for teams, or for enterprise.

    Bundle Name

    Target Customer

    Included Applications

    Features

    CC (for Individuals)

    Individual users

    The individual chooses
    • Sync, store, and share assets
    • Adobe Portfolio website
    • Adobe Typekit font collection
    • Microsoft Teams integration
    • Can only be purchased through credit card

    CC for Teams (CCT)

    Small to midsize organizations with a small number of Adobe users who are all within the same team

    Depends on your team’s requirements. You can select all applications or specific applications.

    Everything that CC (for individuals) does, plus

    • One license per user; can reassign CC licenses
    • Web-based admin console
    • Centralized deployment
    • Usage tracking and reporting
    • 100GB of storage per user
    • Volume discounts for 10+ seats

    CC for Enterprise (CCE)

    Large organizations with users who regularly use multiple Adobe products on multiple machines

    All applications including Adobe Stock for images and Adobe Enterprise Dashboard for managing user accounts

    Everything that CCT does, plus

    • Employees can activate a second copy of software on another device (e.g. home computer) as long as they share the same Adobe ID and are not used simultaneously
    • Ability to reassign licenses from old users to new users
    • Custom storage options
    • Greater integration with other Adobe products
    • Larger volume discounts with more seats

    For further information on specific functionality differences, reference Adobe’s comparison table.

    A Cloud-ish solution: Considerations and implications for IT organizations

    ☑ True cloud products are typically service-based, scalable and elastic, shared resources, have usage metering, and rely upon internet technologies. Currently, Adobe’s Creative Cloud and Document Cloud products lack these characteristics. In fact, the core products are still downloaded and physically installed on endpoint devices, then anchored to the cloud provisioning system, where the software can be automatically updated and continuously verified for compliance by ensuring the subscription is active.

    ☑ Adobe Cloud allows Adobe to increase end-user productivity by releasing new features and products to market faster, but the customer will increase lock-in to the Adobe product suite. The fast-release approach poses a different challenge for IT departments, as they must prepare to test and support new functionality and ensure compatibility with endpoint devices.

    ☑ There are options at the enterprise level that enable IT to exert more granular control over new feature releases, but these are tied to the ETLA and the provided enterprise portal and are not available on other subscription plans. This is another mechanism by which Adobe has been able to spur ETLA adoption.

    ☑ Not all CIOs consider SaaS/subscription applications their first choice, but the Adobe’s dominant position in the content and document management marketplace is forcing the shift regardless. It is significant that Adobe bypassed the typical hybrid transition model by effectively disrupting the ability to continue with perpetual licensing without falling behind the functionality curve.

    ☑ VIP plans do allow for annual terms and payment, but you lose the price elasticity that comes with multi-year terms.

    Download Info-Tech’s Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table tool to compare ETLA costs against VIP costs.

    When moving to Adobe cloud, validate that license requirements meet organizational needs, not a sales quota

    Follow these steps in your transition to Creative Cloud.

    Step 1: Make sure you have a software asset management (SAM) tool to determine Adobe installs and usage within your environment.

    Step 2: Look at the current Adobe install base and usage. We recommend reviewing three months’ worth of reliable usage data to decide which users should have which licenses going forward.

    Step 3: Understand the changes in Adobe packages for Creative Cloud (CC). Also, take into account that the license types are based on users, not devices.

    Step 4: Identify those users who only need a single license for a single application (e.g. Photoshop, InDesign, Muse).

    Step 5: Identify the users who require CC suites. Look at their usage of previous Adobe suites to get an idea of which CC suite they require. Did they have Design Suite Standard installed but only use one or two elements? This is a good way to ensure you do not overspend on Adobe licenses.

    Source: The ITAM Review

    Download Info-Tech’s Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast tool to track Adobe installs within your environment and to determine usage needs.

    Acquiring Adobe Software

    Adobe offers four common licensing methods, which are reviewed in detail in the following slides.

    Most common purchasing models

    Points for consideration
    • Value Incentive Plan (VIP)
    • Cumulative Licensing Program (CLP)
    • Transactional Licensing Program (TLP)
    • Enterprise Term License Agreement (ETLA)
    • Adobe, as with many other large software providers, includes special benefits and rights when its products are purchased through volume licensing channels.
    • Businesses should typically refrain from purchasing individual OEM (shrink wrap) licenses or those meant for personal use.
    • Purchase record history is available online, making it easier for your organization to manage entitlements in the case of an audit.

    "Customers are not even obliged to manage all the licenses themselves. The reseller partners have access to the cloud console and can manage licenses on behalf of their customers. Even better, they can seize cross and upsell opportunities and provide good insight into the environment. Additionally, Adobe itself provides optimization services."

    – B-lay

    CLP and TLP

    The CLP and TLP are transactional agreements generally used for the purchase of perpetual licenses. For example, they could be used for making Acrobat purchases if Creative Suite products are purchased on the ETLA.

    The image contains a screenshot of a table comparing CLP and TLP.

    Source: “Adobe Buying Programs Comparison Guide for Commercial and Government Organizations”

    VIP and ETLA

    The Value Incentive Plan is aimed at small- to medium-sized organizations with no minimum quantity required. However, there is limited flexibility to reduce licenses and limited price protection for future purchases. The ETLA is aimed at large organizations who wish to have new functionality as it comes out, license management portal, services, and security/IT control aspects.

    The image contains a screenshot of a table comparing VIP and ETLA.

    Source: “Adobe Buying Programs Comparison Guide for Commercial and Government Organizations”

    ETLA commitments risk creating “shelfware-as-a-service”

    The Adobe ETLA’s rigid contract parameters, true-up process, and unique deployment/provisioning mechanisms give technology/IT procurement leaders fewer options to maximize cost-usage alignment and to streamline opex costs.

    ☑ No ETLA price book is publicly published; pricing is controlled by the Adobe enterprise sales team.

    ☑ Adobe's retail pricing is a good starting point for negotiating discounted pricing.

    ☑ ETLA commitments are usually for three years, and the lack of a true-down option increases the risk involved in overbuying licenses should the organization encounter a business downturn or adverse event.

    ☑ Pricing discounts are the highest at the initial ETLA signing for the upfront volume commitment. The true-up pricing is discounted from retail but still higher than the signing cost per license.

    ☑ Technical support is included in the ETLA.

    ☑ While purchases typically go through value-added resellers (VARs), procurement can negotiate directly with Adobe.

    "For cloud products, it is less complex when it comes to purchasing and pricing. If larger quantities are purchased on a longer term, the discount may reach up to 15%. As soon as you enroll in the VIP program, you can control all your licenses from an ‘admin console’. Any updates or new functionalities are included in the original price. When the licenses expire, you may choose to renew your subscriptions or remove them. Partial renewal is also accepted. Of course, you can also re-negotiate your price if more subscriptions are added to your console."

    – B-lay

    ETLA recommendations

    1. Assess the end-user requirements with a high degree of scrutiny. Perform an analysis that matches the licensee with the correct Adobe product SKU to reduce the risk of overspending.
    • Leverage metering data that identifies actual usage and lack thereof, match to user profile functional requirements, and then determine end users’ actual license requirements.
  • Build in time to evaluate alternative products where possible and position the organization to leverage a Plan B vendor to replace or mitigate growth on the Adobe platform. Re-evaluate options well in advance of the ETLA renewal.
  • Secure price protection through negotiating a price cap or an extended ETLA term beyond the standard three-year term. Short of obtaining an escalation cap, which Adobe is strongly resisting, build in price increases for the ETLA renewal years.
    • Demand price transparency and granularity in the proposal process.
    • Validate that volume discounts are appropriate and show through to the true-up line item pricing.
  • Negotiate a true-down mechanism upfront with Adobe if usage decline is inevitable or expected due to a merger or acquisition, divestiture, or material restructuring event.

    • INFO-TECH TIP: For further guidance on ETLAs and pricing, contact your Info-Tech representative to set up a call with an analyst.

    Use Info-Tech’s Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast tool to match licensees with Adobe product SKUs.

    Prepare for Adobe’s true-up process

    How the true-up process works

    When adding a license, the true-up price will be prorated to 50% of the license cost for previous year’s usage plus 100% of the license cost for the next year. This back-charging adds up to 150% of the overall true-up license cost. In some rare cases, Adobe has provided an “unlimited” quantity for certain SKUs; these Unlimited ETLAs generally align with FTE counts and limit FTE increases to about 5%. Procurement must monitor and work with SAM/ITAM and stakeholder groups to restrain unnecessary growth during the term of an Unlimited ETLA to avoid the risk of cost escalation at renewal time.

    Higher-education specific

    Higher-education clients can license under the ETLA based on a prescribed number of user and classroom/lab devices and/or on a FTE basis. In these cases, the combination of Creative Cloud and Acrobat Pro volume must equal the FTE total, creating an enterprise footprint. FTE calculations establish the full-time faculty plus one-third of part-time faculty plus one-half of part-time staff.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Compliance takes a different form in terms of the ETLA true-up process. The completion of Adobe's transition to cloud-based licensing and verification has improved compliance rates via phone home telemetry such that pirated software is less available and more easily detected. Adobe has actually decommissioned its audit arm in the Americas and EMEA.

    Audits and software asset management with Adobe

    Watch out for:

    • Virtual desktops, freeware, and test and trial licenses
    • Adobe products that may be bundled into a suite; a manual check will be needed to ensure the suite isn’t recognized as a standalone license
    • Pirated licenses with a “crack” built into the software

    Simplify your process – from start to finish – with these steps:

    Determine License Entitlements

    Obtain documentation from internal records and Adobe to track licenses and upgrades to determine what licenses you own and have the right to use.

    Gather Deployment Information

    Leverage a software asset management tool or process to determine what software is deployed and what is/is not being used.

    Determine Effective License Position

    Compare license entitlements with deployment data to uncover surpluses and deficits in licensing. Look for opportunities.

    Plan Changes to License Position

    Meet with IT stakeholders to discuss the enterprise license program (ELP), short- and long-term project plans, and budget allocation. Plan and document licensing requirements.

    Adobe Genuine Software Integrity Service

    • This service was started in 2014 to combat non-genuine software sold by non-authorized resellers.
    • The service works hand in hand with the cloud movement to reduce piracy.
    • Every Adobe product now contains an executable file that will scan your machine for non-genuine software.
    • If non-genuine software is detected, the user will be notified and directed to the official Adobe website for next steps.

    Detailed list of Adobe licensing contract types

    The table below describes Adobe contract types beyond the four typical purchasing models explained in the previous slides:

    Option

    What is it?

    What’s included?

    For

    Term

    CLP (Cumulative Licensing Program)

    10,000 plus points, support and maintenance optional

    Select Adobe perpetual desktop products

    Business

    2 years

    EA (Adobe Enterprise Agreement)

    100 licenses plus maintenance and support for eligible Adobe products

    All applications

    100+ users requirement

    3 years

    EEA (Adobe Enterprise Education Agreement)

    Creative Cloud enterprise agreement for education establishments

    Creative Cloud applications without services

    Education

    1 or 2 years

    ETLA (Enterprise Term License Agreement)

    Licensing program designed for Adobe’s top commercial, government, and education customers

    All Creative Cloud applications

    Large enterprise companies

    3 years

    K-12 – Enterprise Agreement

    Enterprise agreement for primary and secondary schools

    Creative Cloud applications without services

    Education

    1 year

    K-12 – School Site License

    Allows a school to install a Creative Cloud on up to 500 school-owned computers regardless of school size

    Creative Cloud applications without services

    Education

    1 year

    TLP (Transactional Licensing Program)

    Agreement for SMBs that want volume licensing bonuses

    Perpetual desktop products only

    Aimed at SMBs, but Enterprise customers can use the TLP for smaller requirements

    N/A

    Upgrade Plan

    Insurance program for software purchased under a perpetual license program such as CLP or TLP for Creative Cloud upgrade

    Dependent on the existing perpetual estate

    Anyone

    N/A

    VIP (Value Incentive Plan)

    VIP allows customers to purchase, deploy, and manage software through a term-based subscription license model

    Creative Cloud of teams

    Business, government, and education

    Insight breakdown

    Insight 1

    Adobe operates in its own niche in the creative space, and Adobe users have grown accustomed to their products, making switching very difficult.

    Insight 2

    Adobe has transitioned the vast majority of its software offerings to the cloud-based subscription model. Active management of licenses, software provisioning, and consumption of cloud services is now an ongoing job.

    Insight 3

    With the vendor lock-in process nearly complete via the transition to a SaaS subscription model, Adobe is raising prices on an annual basis. Advance planning and strategic use of the ETLA is key to avoid budget-breaking surprises.

    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

    • Understanding of the importance of licensing in relation to business objectives.
    • Understanding of the various licensing considerations that need to be made.
    • Contract negotiation.

    Deliverables Completed

    • Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast
    • Adobe ETLA Forecasted Cost and Benefits
    • Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Take Control of Microsoft Licensing and Optimize Spend

    Create an Effective Plan to Implement IT Asset Management

    Establish an Effective System of Internal IT Controls to Mitigate Risks

    Optimize Software Asset Management

    Take Control of Compliance Improvement to Conquer Every Audit

    Cut PCI Compliance and Audit Costs in Half

    Bibliography

    “Adobe Buying Programs: At-a-glance comparison guide for Commercial and government organizations.” Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2014. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    “Adobe Buying Programs Comparison Guide for Commercial and Government Organizations.” Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2018. Web.

    “Adobe Buying Programs Comparison Guide for Education.” Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2018. Web. 1 Feb 2018.

    “Adobe Education Enterprise Agreement: Give your school access to the latest industry-leading creative tools.” Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2014. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    “Adobe Enterprise Term License Agreement for commercial and government organizations.” Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2016. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    Adobe Investor Presentation – October 2017. Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2017. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    Cabral, Amanda. “Students react to end of UConn-Adobe contract.” The Daily Campus (Uconn), 5 April 2017. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    de Veer, Patrick and Alecsandra Vintilescu. “Quick Guide to Adobe Licensing.” B-lay, Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    “Find the best program for your organization.” Adobe, Web. 1 Feb 2018.

    Foxen, David. “Adobe Upgrade Simplified.” Snow Software, 7 Oct. 2016. Web.

    Frazer, Bryant. “Adobe Stops Reporting Subscription Figures for Creative Cloud.” Studio Daily. Access Intelligence, LLC. 17 March 2016. Web.

    “Give your students the power to create bright futures.” Adobe, Web. 1 Feb 2018.

    Jones, Noah. “Adobe changes subscription prices, colleges forced to pay more.” BG Falcon Media. Bowling Green State University, 18 Feb. 2015. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    Mansfield, Adam. “Is Your Organization Prepared for Adobe’s Enterprise Term License Agreements (ETLA)?” UpperEdge,30 April 2013. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    Murray, Corey. “6 Things Every School Should Know About Adobe’s Move to Creative Cloud.” EdTech: Focus on K-12. CDW LLC, 10 June 2013. Web.

    “Navigating an Adobe Software Audit: Tips for Emerging Unscathed.” Nitro, Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    Razavi, Omid. “Challenges of Traditional Software Companies Transitioning to SaaS.” Sand Hill, 12 May 2015. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    Rivard, Ry. “Confusion in the Cloud.” Inside Higher Ed. 22 May 2013. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    Sharwood, Simon. “Adobe stops software licence audits in Americas, Europe.” The Register. Situation Publishing. 12 Aug. 2016. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    “Software Licensing Challenges Faced In The Cloud: How Can The Cloud Benefit You?” The ITAM Review. Enterprise Opinions Limited. 20 Nov. 2015. Web.

    White, Stephen. “Understanding the Impacts of Adobe’s Cloud Strategy and Subscriptions Before Negotiating an ETLA.” Gartner, 22 Feb. 2016. Web.

    Improve Your IT Recruitment Process

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}578|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact: N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
    • member rating average days saved: N/A
    • Parent Category Name: Attract & Select
    • Parent Category Link: /attract-and-select

    Business and IT leaders aiming to recruit and select the best talent need to:

    • Get involved in the talent acquisition process at key moments.
    • Market their organization to top talent through an authentic employer brand.
    • Create engaging and accurate job ads.
    • Leverage purposeful sourcing for anticipated talent needs.
    • Effectively assess candidates with a strong interview process.
    • Set up new employees for success.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    To create a great candidate experience, IT departments must be involved in the process at key points, recruitment and selection is not a job for HR alone!

    Impact and Result

    • Use this how-to guide to articulate an authentic (employee value proposition) EVP and employer brand.
    • Perform an analysis of current sourcing methods and build an action plan to get IT involved.
    • Create an effective and engaging job ad to insure the right people are applying.
    • Train hiring managers to effectively deliver interviews that correctly assess candidate suitability.
    • Get links to in-depth Info-Tech resources and tools.

    Improve Your IT Recruitment Process Research & Tools

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

    1. Improve Your IT Recruitment Process – A guide to help you attract and select the best talent.

    Train your IT department to get involved in the recruitment process to attract and select the best talent.

    • Improve Your IT Recruitment Process Capstone Deck

    2. Improve Your IT Recruitment Process Workbook – A tool to document your action plans.

    Use this tool in conjunction with the Improve you IT Recruitment Process to document your action plans

    • Improve Your IT Recruitment Process Workbook

    3. Interview Guide Template – A template to organize interview questions and their rating scales, take notes during the interview, and ensure all interviews follow a similar structure.

    To get useful information from an interview, the interviewer should be focused on what candidates are saying and how they are saying it, not on what the next question will be, what probes to ask, or how they will score the responses. This Interview Guide Template will help interviewers stay focused and collect good information about candidates.

    • Interview Guide Template

    4. IT Behavioral Interview Question Library – A tool that contains a complete list of sample questions aligned with core, leadership, and IT competencies.

    Hiring managers can choose from a comprehensive collection of core, functional, and leadership competency-based behavioral interview questions.

    • IT Behavioral Interview Question Library

    5. Job Ad Template – A template to allow complete documentation of the characteristics, responsibilities, and requirements for a given job posting in IT.

    Use this template to develop a well-written job posting that will attract the star candidates and, in turn, deflect submission of irrelevant applications by those unqualified.

    • Job Ad Template

    6. Idea Catalog – A tool to evaluate virtual TA solutions.

    The most innovative technology isn’t necessarily the right solution. Review talent acquisition (TA) solutions and evaluate the purpose each option serves in addressing critical challenges and replacing critical in-person activities.

    • Idea Catalog: Adapt the Talent Acquisition Process to a Virtual Environment
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Improve Your IT Recruitment 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 Employee Value Proposition and Employer Branding

    The Purpose

    Establish the employee value proposition (EVP) and employer brand.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Have a well-defined EVP that you communicate through your employer brand.

    Activities

    1.1 Gather feedback.

    1.2 Build key messages.

    1.3 Assess employer brand.

    Outputs

    Content and themes surrounding the EVP

    Draft EVP and supporting statements

    A clearer understanding of the current employer brand and how it could be improved

    2 Job Ads and Sourcing

    The Purpose

    Develop job postings and build a strong sourcing program.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Create the framework for an effective job posting and analyze existing sourcing methods.

    Activities

    2.1 Review and update your job ads.

    2.2 Review the effectiveness of existing sourcing programs.

    2.3 Review job ads and sourcing methods for bias.

    Outputs

    Updated job ad

    Low usage sourcing methods identified for development

    Minimize bias present in ads and sourcing methods

    3 Effective Interviewing

    The Purpose

    Create a high-quality interview process to improve candidate assessment.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Training on being an effective interviewer.

    Activities

    3.1 Create an ideal candidate scorecard.

    3.2 Map out your interview process.

    3.3 Practice behavioral interviews.

    Outputs

    Ideal candidate persona

    Finalized interview and assessment process

    Practice interviews

    4 Onboarding and Action Plan

    The Purpose

    Drive employee engagement and retention with a robust program that acclimates, guides, and develops new hires.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Evaluation of current onboarding practice.

    Activities

    4.1 Evaluate and redesign the onboarding program.

    Outputs

    Determine new onboarding activities to fill identified gaps.

    Further reading

    Improve Your IT Recruitment Process

    Train your IT department to get involved in the recruitment process to attract and select the best talent.

    Own the IT recruitment process

    Train your IT department to get involved in the recruitment process to attract and select the best talent.

    Follow this blueprint to:

    • Define and communicate the unique benefits of working for your organization to potential candidates through a strong employer brand.
    • Learn best practices around creating effective job postings.
    • Target your job posting efforts on the areas with the greatest ROI.
    • Create and deliver an effective, seamless, and positive interview and offer process for candidates.
    • Acclimate new hires and set them up for success.

    Get involved at key moments of the candidate experience to have the biggest impact


    Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and Employer Brand



    Job Postings and a Strong Sourcing Program

    Effective Interviewing

    Onboarding: Setting up New Hires For Success
    Awareness → Research → Application → Screening → Interview and Assessment → Follow Up → Onboarding

    RECRUIT QUALITY STAFF

    Hiring talent is critical to organizational success

    Talent is a priority for the entire organization:

    Respondents rated “recruitment” as the top issue facing organizations today (McLean & Company 2022 HR Trends Report).

    37% of IT departments are outsourcing roles to fill internal skill shortages (Info-Tech Talent Trends 2022 Survey).

    Yet bad hires are alarmingly common:

    Hiring is one of the least successful business processes, with three-quarters of managers reporting that they have made a bad hire (Robert Half, 2021).

    48% of survey respondents stated improving the quality of hires was the top recruiting priority for 2021 (Jobvite, 2021).

    Workshop overview

    Prework

    Day 1

    Day 2

    Day 3

    Day 4

    Post work

    Current Process and Job Descriptions Documented

    Establish the Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and Employer Brand

    Develop Job Postings and Build a Strong Sourcing Program

    Effective Interviewing

    Onboarding and Action Planning

    Putting the Action Plan Into Action!

    Activities
    • Recruitment Process Mapped Out and Stakeholders Identified
    • Prepare a JD and JP for Four Priority Jobs
    • Collect Information on Where Your Best Candidates Are Coming From

    1.1 Introduce the Concept of an EVP

    1.2 Brainstorm Unique Benefits of Working at Your Organization

    1.2 Employer Brand Introduction

    2.1 What Makes an Attractive Job Posting

    2.2 Create the Framework for Job Posting

    2.3 Improve the Sourcing Process

    2.4 Review Process for Bias

    3.1 Creating an Interview Process

    3.2 Selecting Interview Questions

    3.3 Avoiding Bias During Interviews

    3.4 Practice Interviews

    4.1 Why Onboarding Matters

    4.2 Acclimatize New Hires and Set Them Up for Success

    4.3 Action Plan

    5.1 Review Outputs and Select Priorities

    5.2 Consult With HR and Senior Management to Get Buy-In

    5.3 Plan to Avoid Relapse Behaviors

    Deliverables
    1. EVP draft completed
    2. Employer brand action plan
    1. Organization-specific job posting framework
    2. Sourcing Plan Template for four priority jobs
    3. Sourcing action plan
    1. Completed Interview Guide Template
    2. Managers practice a panel interview
    1. Onboarding best practices
    2. Action plan

    Enhance Your Recruitment Strategies

    The way you position the organization impacts who is likely to apply to posted positions.

    Develop a strong employee value proposition

    What is an employee value proposition?

    And what are the key components?

    The employee value proposition is your opportunity to showcase the unique benefits and opportunities of working at your organization, allowing you to attract a wider pool of candidates.

    AN EMPLOYEE VALUE PROPOSITION IS:

    AN EMPLOYEE VALUE PROPOSITION IS NOT:
    • An authentic representation of the employee experience
    • Aligned with organizational culture
    • Fundamental to all stages of the employee lifecycle
    • A guide to help investment in programs and policies
    • Short and succinct
    • What the employee can do for you
    • A list of programs and policies
    • An annual project

    THE FOUR KEY COMPONENTS OF AN EMPLOYEE VALUE PROPOSITION

    Rewards

    Organizational Elements

    Working Conditions

    Day-to-Day Job Elements
    • Compensation
    • Health Benefits
    • Retirement Benefits
    • Vacation
    • Culture
    • Customer Focus
    • Organization Potential
    • Department Relationships
    • Senior Management Relationships
    • Work/Life Balance
    • Working Environment
    • Employee Empowerment
    • Development
    • Rewards & Recognition
    • Co-Worker Relationships
    • Manager Relationships

    Creating a compelling EVP that presents a picture of your employee experience, with a focus on diversity, will attract a wide pool of diverse candidates to your team. This can lead to many internal and external benefits for your organization.

    How to collect information on your EVP

    Existing Employee Value Proposition: If your organization or IT department has an existing employee value proposition, rather than starting from scratch, we recommend leveraging that and moving to the testing phase to see if the EVP still resonates with staff and external parties.

    Employee Engagement Results: If your organization does an employee engagement survey, review the results to identify the areas in which the IT organization is performing well. Identify and document any key comment themes in the report around why employees enjoy working for the organization or what makes your IT department a great place to work.

    Social Media Sites. Prepare for the good, the bad, and the ugly. Social media websites like Glassdoor and Indeed make it easier for employees to share their experiences at an organization honestly and candidly. While postings on these sites won’t relate exclusively to the IT department, they do invite participants to identify their department in the organization. You can search these to identify any positive things people are saying about working for the organization and potentially opportunities for improvement (which you can use as a starting point in the retention section of this report).

    1.1 Gather feedback

    1. Download the Improve Your IT Recruitment Workbook.
    2. On tab 1.1, brainstorm the top five things you value most about working at the organization. Ask yourself what would fall in each category and identify any key themes. Be sure to take note of any specific quotes you have.
    3. Brainstorm limitations that the organization currently has in each of those areas.

    Download the Recruitment Workbook

    Input

    		 Output
    • Employee opinions
    • Employee responses to four EVP components
    • Content for EVP

    Materials

    Participants
    • Recruitment Workbook
    • Diverse employees
    • Different departments
    • Different role levels

    1.2 Build key messages

    1. Go to tab 1.2 in your workbook
    2. Identify themes from activity 1.1 that would be considered current strengths of you organization.
    3. Identify themes from activity 1.2 that are aspirational elements of your organization.
    4. Identify up to four key statements to focus on for the EVP, ensuring that your EVP speaks to at least one of the five categories above.
    5. Integrate these into one overall statement.

    Examples below.

    Input

    		Output
    • Feedback from focus groups
    • EVP and supporting statements

    Materials

    Participants

    • Workbook handout
    • Pen and paper for documenting responses
    • IT leadership team

    Sample EVPs

    Shopify

    “We’re Shopify. Our mission is to make commerce better for everyone – but we’re not the workplace for everyone. We thrive on change, operate on trust, and leverage the diverse perspectives of people on our team in everything we do. We solve problems at a rapid pace. In short, we get shit done.”

    Bettercloud

    “At Bettercloud, we have a smart, ambitious team dedicated to delighting our customers. Our culture of ownership and transparency empowers our team to achieve goals they didn’t think possible. For all those on board, it’s going to be a challenging and rewarding journey – and we’re just getting started.”

    Ellevest

    “As a team member at Ellevest, you can expect to make a difference through your work, to have a direct impact on the achievement of a very meaningful mission, to significantly advance your career trajectory, and to have room for fun and fulfillment in your daily life. We know that achieving a mission as critical as ours requires incredible talent and teamwork, and team is the most important thing to us.”
    Sources: Built In, 2021; Workology, 2022

    Ensure your EVP resonates with employees and prospects

    Test your EVP with internal and external audiences.

    INTERNAL TEST REVOLVES AROUND THE 3A’s

    EXTERNAL TEST REVOLVES AROUND THE 3C’s

    ALIGNED: The EVP is in line with the organization’s purpose, vision, values, and processes. Ensure policies and programs are aligned with the organization’s EVP.

    CLEAR: The EVP is straightforward, simple, and easy to understand. Without a clear message in the market, even the best intentioned EVPs can be lost in confusion.

    ACCURATE: The EVP is clear and compelling, supported by proof points. It captures the true employee experience, which matches the organization’s communication and message in the market.

    COMPELLING: The EVP emphasizes the value created for employees and is a strong motivator to join this organization. A strong EVP will be effective in drawing in external candidates. The message will resonate with them and attract them to your organization.

    ASPIRATIONAL: The EVP inspires both individuals and the IT organization as a whole. Identify and invest in the areas that are sure to generate the highest returns for employees.

    COMPREHENSIVE: The EVP provides enough information for the potential employee to understand the true employee experience and to self-assess whether they are a good fit for your organization. If the EVP lacks depth, the potential employee may have a hard time understanding the benefits and rewards of working for your organization.

    Want to learn more?

    Recruit IT Talent

    • Improve candidate experience to hire top IT talent.

    Recruit and Retain More Women in IT

    • Gender diversity is directly correlated to IT performance.

    Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT

    • Good business, not just good philanthropy.

    Enhance Your Recruitment Strategies

    The way you position the organization impacts who is likely to apply to posted positions.

    Market your EVP to potential candidates: Employer Brand

    Employer brand includes how you market the EVP internally and externally – consistency is key

    The employer brand is the perception internal and external stakeholders hold of the organization and exists whether it has been curated or not. Curating the employer brand involves marketing the organization and employee experience. Grounding your employer brand in your EVP enables you to communicate and market an accurate portrayal of your organization and employee experience and make you desirable to both current and potential employees.

    The image contains a picture of several shapes. There is a trapezoid that is labelled EVP, and has a an arrow pointing to the text beside it. There is also an arrowing pointing down from it to another trapezoid that is labelled Employer Brand.

    The unique offering an employer provides to employees in return for their effort, motivating them to join or remain at the organization.

    The perception internal and external stakeholders hold of the organization.

    Alignment between the EVP, employer brand, and corporate brand is the ideal branding package. An in-sync marketing strategy ensures stakeholders perceive and experience the brand the same way, creating brand ambassadors.

    The image contains three circles that are connected. The circles are labelled: EVP, Employer Brand, Corporate Brand.

    Ensure your branding material creates a connection

    How you present your employer brand is just as important as the content. Ideally, you want the viewer to connect with and personalize the material for the message to have staying power. Use Marketing’s expertise to help craft impactful promotional materials to engage and excite the viewer.

    Visuals

    Images are often the first thing viewers notice. Use visuals that connect to your employer brand to engage the viewer’s attention and increase the likelihood that your message will resonate. However, if there are too many visuals this may detract from your content – balance is key!

    Language

    Wordsmithing is often the most difficult aspect of marketing. Your message should be accurate, informative, and engaging. Work with Marketing to ensure your wording is clever and succinct – the more concise, the better.

    Composition

    Integrate visuals and language to complete your marketing package. Ensure that the text and images are balanced to draw in the viewer.

    Case Study: Using culture to drive your talent pool

    This case study is happening in real time. Please check back to learn more as Goddard continues to recruit for the position.

    Recruiting at NASA

    Goddard Space Center is the largest of NASA’s space centers with approximately 11,000 employees. It is currently recruiting for a senior technical role for commercial launches. The position requires consulting and working with external partners and vendors.

    NASA is a highly desirable employer due to its strong culture of inclusivity, belonging, teamwork, learning, and growth. Its culture is anchored by a compelling vision, “For the betterment of Humankind,” and amplified by a strong leadership team that actively lives their mission and vision daily.

    Firsthand lists NASA as #1 on the 50 most prestigious internships for 2022.

    Rural location and no flexible work options add to the complexity of recruiting

    The position is in a rural area of Eastern Shore Virginia with a population of approximately 60,000 people, which translates to a small pool of candidates. Any hire from outside the area will be expected to relocate as the senior technician must be onsite to support launches twice a month. Financial relocation support is not offered and the position is a two-year assignment with the option of extension that could eventually become permanent.

    The image contains a picture of Steve Thornton.

    “Looking for a Talent Unicorn: a qualified, experienced candidate with both leadership skills and deep technical expertise that can grow and learn with emerging technologies.”

    Steve Thornton

    Acting Division Chief, Solutions Division, Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA

    Case Study: Using culture to drive your talent pool

    A good brand overcomes challenges.

    Culture takes the lead in NASA's job postings, which attract a high number of candidates. Postings begin with a link to a short video on working at NASA, its history, and how it lives its vision. The video highlights NASA's diversity of perspectives, career development, and learning opportunities.

    NASA's company brand and employer brand are tightly intertwined, providing a consistent view of the organization.

    The employer vision is presented in the best place to reach NASA's ideal candidate: usajobs.gov, the official website of the United States Government and the “go-to” for government job listings. NASA also extends its postings to other generic job sites as well as LinkedIn and professional associations.

    The image contains a picture of Robert Leahy.

    Interview with Robert Leahy

    Chief Information Officer, Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA

    2.1 Assess your organization’s employer brand

    1. Go to tab 2.1 in the Improve Your IT Recruitment Workbook.
    2. Put yourself in the shoes of someone on the outside looking in. If they were to look up your organization, what impression would they be given about what is like to work there?
    3. Run a Google search on your organization with key words “jobs,” “culture,” and “working environment” to see what a potential candidate would see when they begin researching your organization.

      4. You can use sites like:

    • Glassdoor
    • Indeed company pages
    • LinkedIn company pages
    • Social media
    • Your own website
  • Identify what your organization is doing well and record that under the “Continue” box in your workbook.
  • Record anything your organization should stop doing under the “Stop” box.
  • Brainstorm some ideas that your organization should think about implementing to improve the employer brand under the “Start” Box.
    • Input Output
    • Existing branding material on the internet
    • A clearer understanding of the current employer brand and how it could be improved
    Materials Participants
    • Workbook handout
    • Senior IT Leaders

    Want to learn more?

    Recruit IT Talent

    • Improve candidate experience to hire top IT talent.

    Recruit and Retain More Women in IT

    • Gender diversity is directly correlated to IT performance.

    Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT

    • Good business, not just good philanthropy.

    Enhance Your Recruitment Strategies

    The way you position the organization impacts who is likely to apply to posted positions.

    Create engaging job ads to attract talent to the organization

    We have a job description; can I just post that on Indeed?

    A job description is an internal document that includes sections such as general job information, major responsibilities, key relationships, qualifications, and competencies. It communicates job expectations to incumbents and key job data to HR programs.

    A job ad is an externally facing document that advertises a position with the intent of attracting job applicants. It contains key elements from the job description as well as information on the organization and its EVP.

    Write an Effective Job Ad

    • Ensure that your job ad speaks to the audience you are targeting through the language you use.
      • E.g. If you are hiring for a creative role, use creative language and formatting. If you are writing for students, emphasize growth opportunities.
    • Highlight the organization’s EVP.
    • Paint an accurate picture of key aspects of the role but avoid the nitty gritty as it may overwhelm applicants.
    • Link to your organization’s website and social media platforms so applicants can easily find more information.

    A job description informs a job ad, it doesn’t replace it. Don’t be lulled into using a job description as a posting when there’s a time crunch to fill a position. Refer to job postings as job advertisements to reinforce that their purpose is to attract attention and talent.

    An effective job posting contains the following elements:

    Position Title
    • Clearly defined job titles are important for screening applicants as this is one of the first things the candidate will read.
    • Indicating the earnings range that the position pays cuts out time spent on reviewing candidates who may never accept the position and saves them from applying to a job that doesn’t match what they are looking for.
    Company
    • Provide a brief description of the organization including the products or services it offers, the corporate culture, and any training and career development programs.
    Summary Description
    • Describe briefly why the position exists. In other words, what is the position's primary purpose? The statement should include the overall results the job is intended to produce and some of the key means by which the position achieves these results.
    Responsibilities
    • Use bullet points to list the fundamental accountabilities of the position. Candidates want to know what they will be doing on a day-to-day basis.
    • Begin each responsibility or accountability statement with an action word and follow with a brief phrase to describe what is done to accomplish the function.
    Position Characteristics
    • Give examples of key problems and thinking challenges encountered by the position. Describe the type of analysis or creativity required to resolve these problems.
    • Provide examples of final decision-making authority. The examples should reflect the constraints placed on the position by people, policies, and/or procedures.
    Position Requirements
    • List all formal education and certifications required.
    • List all knowledge and experience required.
    • List all personal attributes required.
    Work Conditions
    • List all work conditions that the employee must accommodate. This could include any sensory, physical, or mental requirements of the position or any special conditions of employment, such as hours.
    Process to Apply
    • Include the methods in which the organization wants to receive applications and contact information of who will receive the applications.

    Bottom Line: A truly successful job posting ferrets out those hidden stars that may be over cautious and filters out hundreds of applications from the woefully under qualified.

    The do’s and don’ts of an inclusive job ad

    DON’T overlook the power of words. Avoid phrases like “strong English language skills” as this may deter non-native English speakers from applying and a “clean-shaven” requirement can exclude candidates whose faith requires them to maintain facial hair.

    DON’T post a long requirements list. A study showed that the average jobseeker spends only 49.7 seconds reviewing a listing before deciding it's not a fit.*

    DON’T present a toxic work culture; phrases such as “work hard, play hard” can put off many candidates and play into the “bro- culture” stereotype in tech.

    Position Title: Senior Lorem Ipsum

    Salary Band: $XXX to $XXX

    Diversity is a core value at ACME Inc. We believe that diversity and inclusion is our strength, and we’re passionate about building an environment where all employees are valued and can perform at their best.

    As a … you will …

    Our ideal candidate ….

    Required Education and Experience

    • Bachelor’s degree in …
    • Minimum five (5) years …

    Required Skills

    • …
    • …

    Preferred Skills

    • …
    • …

    At ACME Inc. you will find …

    DO promote pay equity by being up front and honest about salary expectations.

    DO emphasize your organization’s commitment to diversity and an inclusive workplace by adding an equity statement.

    DO limit your requirements to “must haves” or at least showcase them first before the “nice-to-haves.”

    DO involve current employees or members of your employee resource groups when creating job descriptions to ensure that they ask for what you really need.

    DO focus on company values and criteria that are important to the job, not just what’s always been done.
    *Source: Ladders, 2013

    Before posting the job ad complete the DEI job posting validation checklist

    ☑

    Does the job posting highlight your organization’s EVP
    ☐

    Does the job posting avoid words that might discourage women, people of color, and other members of underrepresented groups from applying?

    ☑

    Has the position description been carefully reviewed and revised to reflect current and future expectations for the position, rather than expectations informed by the persons who have previously held the job?
    ☐

    Has the hiring committee eliminated any unnecessary job skills or requirements (college degree, years or type of previous experience, etc.) that might negatively impact recruitment of underrepresented groups?
    ☑

    Has the hiring committee posted the job in places (job boards, websites, colleges, etc.) where applicants from underrepresented groups will be able to easily view or access it?

    ☐

    Have members of the hiring committee attended job fairs or other events hosted by underrepresented groups?

    ☐

    Has the hiring committee asked current employees from underrepresented groups to spread the word about the position?

    ☐

    Has the hiring committee worked with the marketing team to ensure that people from diverse groups are featured in the organization’s website, publications, and social media?
    ☐

    es the job description clearly demonstrate the organization’s and leadership’s commitment to DEI?
    *Source: Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT

    3.1 Review and update your job ads

    1. Download the Job Ad Template.
    2. Look online or ask HR for an example of a current job advertisement you are using.
    • If you don’t have one, you can use a job description as a starting point.
  • Review all the elements of the job ad and make sure they align with the list on the previous slide, adding or changing, as necessary. Your job ad should be no more than two pages long.
  • Using the tools on the previous two slides, review your first draft to ensure the job posting is free of language or elements that will discourage diverse candidates from applying.
  • Review your job advertisement with HR to get feedback or to use as a template going forward.
    • Input Output
    • Existing job ad or job description
    • Updated job ad
    Materials Participants
    • Job ad or job description
    • Job Ad Template
    • Hiring Managers

    Want to learn more?

    Recruit IT Talent

    • Improve candidate experience to hire top IT talent.

    Recruit and Retain More Women in IT

    • Gender diversity is directly correlated to IT performance.

    Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT

    • Good business, not just good philanthropy.

    Enhance Your Recruitment Strategies

    Focus on key programs and tactics to improve the effectiveness of your sourcing approach.

    Get involved with sourcing to get your job ad seen

    To meet growing expectations, organizations need to change the way they source

    Social Media

    Social media has trained candidates to expect:

    • Organizations to stay in touch and keep track of them.
    • A personalized candidate experience.
    • To understand organizational culture and a day in the life.

    While the focus on the candidate experience is important throughout the talent acquisition process, social media, technology, and values have made it a critical component of sourcing.

    Technology

    Candidates expect to be able to access job ads from all platforms.

    • Today, close to 90% of candidates use a mobile platform to job hunt (SmartRecruiters, 2022).
    • However, only 36% of organizations are optimizing their job postings for mobile. (The Undercover Recruiter, 2021)

    Job ads must be clear, concise, and easily viewed on a mobile device.

    Candidate Values

    Job candidate’s values are changing.

    • There is a growing focus on work/life balance, purpose, innovation, and career development. Organizations need to understand candidate values and highlight how the EVP aligns with these interests.

    Authenticity remains important.

    • Clearly and accurately represent your organization and its culture.

    Focus on key programs and tactics to improve the effectiveness of your sourcing approach

    Internal Talent Mobility (ITM) Program

    Social Media Program

    Employee Referral Program

    Alumni Program

    Campus Recruiting Program

    Other Sourcing Tactics

    Take advantage of your current talent with an internal talent mobility program

    What is it?

    Positioning the right talent in the right place, at the right time, for the right reasons, and supporting them appropriately.

    Internal Talent Mobility (ITM) Program

    Social Media Program

    Employee Referral Program

    Alumni Program

    Campus Recruiting Program

    Other Sourcing Tactics

    ITM program benefits:

    1. Retention

      2. Provide opportunities to develop professionally, whether in the current role or through promotions/lateral moves. Keep strong performers and high-potential employees committed to the organization.

    2. Close Skills Gap

      3. Address rapid change, knowledge drain due to retiring Baby Boomers, and frustration associated with time to hire or time to productivity.

    3. Cost/Time Savings

      4. Reduce spend on talent acquisition, severance, time to productivity, and onboarding.

    4. Employee Engagement

      5. Increase motivation and productivity by providing increased growth and development opportunities.

    5. EVP

      6. Align with the organization’s offering and what is important to the employees from a development perspective.

    6. Employee & Leadership Development

      7. Support and develop employees from all levels and job functions.

    Leverage social media to identify and connect with talent

    Internal Talent Mobility (ITM) Program

    Social Media Program

    Employee Referral Program

    Alumni Program

    Campus Recruiting Program

    Other Sourcing Tactics

    What is it? The widely accessible electronic tools that enable anyone to publish and access information, collaborate on common efforts, and build relationships.

    Learning to use social media effectively is key to sourcing the right talent.

    • Today, 92% of organizations leverage social media for talent acquisition.
    • 80% of employers find passive candidates through social media – second only to referrals.
    • 86% percent of job seekers used social media for their most recent job search.
    (Ku, 2021)

    Benefits of social media:

    • Provides access to candidates who may not know the organization.
    • Taps extended networks.
    • Facilitates consistent communication with candidates and talent in pipelines.
    • Personalizes the candidate experience.
    • Provides access to extensive data.

    Challenges of social media:

    With the proliferation of social media and use by most organizations, social media platforms have become overcrowded. As a result:

    • Organizations are directly and very apparently competing for talent with competitors.
    • Users are bombarded with information and are tuning out.

    “It is all about how we can get someone’s attention and get them to respond. People are becoming jaded.”

    – Katrina Collier, Social Recruiting Expert, The Searchologist

    Reap the rewards of an employee referral program

    Internal Talent Mobility (ITM) Program

    Social Media Program

    Employee Referral Program

    Alumni Program

    Campus Recruiting Program

    Other Sourcing Tactics

    What is it? Employees recommend qualified candidates. If the referral is hired, the referring employee typically receives some sort of reward.

    Benefits of an employee referral program:

    1. Lower Recruiting Costs

      2. 55% of organizations report that hiring a referral is less expensive that a non-referred candidate (Clutch, 2020).

    2. Decreased time to fill

      3. The average recruiting lifecycle for an employee referral is 29 days, compared with 55 days for a non referral (Betterup, 2022).

    3. Decreased turnover

      4. 46% percent of employees who were referred stay at their organization for a least one year, compared to 33% of career site hires (Betterup, 2022).

    4. Increased quality of hire

      5. High performers are more likely to refer other high performers to an organization (The University of Chicago Press, 2019).

    Avoid the Like Me Bias: Continually evaluate the diversity of candidates sourced from the employee referral program. Unless your workforce is already diverse, referrals can hinder diversity because employees tend to recommend people like themselves.

    Tap into your network of former employees

    Internal Talent Mobility (ITM) Program

    Social Media Program

    Employee Referral Program

    Alumni Program

    Campus Recruiting Program

    Other Sourcing Tactics

    What is it? An alumni referral program is a formalized way to maintain ongoing relationships with former employees of the organization.

    Successful organizations use an alumni program:

    • 98% of the F500 have some sort of Alumni program (LinkedIn, 2019).

    Benefits of an alumni program:

    1. Branding
    • Alumni are regarded as credible sources of information. They can be a valuable resource for disseminating and promoting the employer brand.
  • Source of talent
    • Boomerang employees are doubly valuable as they understand the organization and also have developed skills and industry experience.
      • Recover some of the cost of turnover and cost per hire with a pool of prequalified candidates who will more quickly reach full productivity.
  • Referral potential
    • Developing a robust alumni network provides access to a larger network through referrals.
    • Alumni already know what is required to be successful in the organization so they can refer more suitable candidates.

    Make use of a campus recruiting program

    Internal Talent Mobility (ITM) Program

    Social Media Program

    Employee Referral Program

    Alumni Program

    Campus Recruiting Program

    Other Sourcing Tactics

    What is it? A formalized means of attracting and hiring individuals who are about to graduate from schools, colleges, or universities.

    Almost 70% of companies are looking to employ new college graduates every year (HR Shelf, 2022).

    Campus recruitment benefits:

    • Increases employer brand awareness among talent entering the workforce.
    • Provides the opportunity to interact with large groups of potential candidates at one time.
    • Presents the opportunity to identify and connect with high-quality talent before they graduate and are actively looking for positions.
    • Offers access to a highly diverse audience.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Target schools that align with your culture and needs. Do not just focus on the most prestigious schools: they are likely more costly, have more intense competition, and may not actually provide the right talent.

    Identify opportunities to integrate non-traditional techniques

    Internal Talent Mobility (ITM) Program

    Social Media Program

    Employee Referral Program

    Alumni Program

    Campus Recruiting Program

    Other Sourcing Tactics

    		1. Professional industry associations
    • Tap into candidates who have the necessary competencies.

    5. Not-for-profit intermediaries

    • Partner with not-for-profits to tap into candidates in training or mentorship programs.
    • Example:
      • Year Up (General)
      • Bankwork$ (Banking)
      • Youth Build (Construction)
      • iFoster (Grocery)

    American Expresscreated a boot camp for software engineers in partnership with Year Up and Gateway Community College to increase entry-level IT hires.

    Results:

    • Annually hire 80-100 interns from Year Up.
    • Improved conversion rates: 72% of Year Up interns versus 60% of traditional interns.
    • Increased retention: 44 (Year Up) versus 18 months (traditional).
    (HBR, 2016)

    2. Special interest groups

    • Use for niche role sourcing.
    • Find highly specialized talent.
    • Drive diversity (Women in Project Management).

    6. Gamification

    • Attract curiosity and reaffirm innovation at your organization.
    • Communicate the EVP.
    3. Customers
    • Access those engaged with the organization.
    • Add the employer brand to existing messaging.

    PwC (Hungary) created Multiploy, a two-day game that allows students to virtually experience working in accounting or consulting at the organization.

    Results:

    • 78% of students said they wanted to work for PwC.
    • 92% indicated they had a more positive view of the firm.
    • Increase in the number of job applicants.
    (Zielinski, 2015)

    4. Exit interviews

    • Ask exiting employees “where should we recruit someone to replace you?”
    • Leverage their knowledge to glean insight into where to find talent.

    Partner with other organizational functions to build skills and leverage existing knowledge

    Use knowledge that already exists in the organization to improve talent sourcing capabilities.

    Marketing

    HR

    Marketing knows how to:

    • Build attention-grabbing content.
    • Use social media platforms effectively.
    • Effectively promote a brand.
    • Use creative methods to connect with people.

    HR knows how to:

    • Organize recruitment activities.
    • Identify the capabilities of various technologies available to support sourcing.
    • Solve issues that may arise along the way

    To successfully partner with other departments in your organization:

    • Acknowledge that they are busy. Like IT, they have multiple competing priorities.
    • Present your needs and prioritize them. Create a list of what you are looking for and then be willing to just pick your top need. Work with the other department to decide what needs can and cannot be met.
    • Present the business case. Emphasize how partnering is mutually beneficial. For example, illustrate to Marketing that promoting a strong brand with candidates will improve the organization’s overall reputation because often, candidates are customers.
    • Be reasonable and patient. You are asking for help, so be moderate in your expectations and flexible in working with your partner.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Encourage your team to seek out, and learn from, employees in different divisions. Training sessions with the teams may not always be possible but one-on-one chats can be just as effective and may be better received.

    5.1 Review the effectiveness of existing sourcing programs

    1. As a group review the description of each program as defined on previous slides. Ensure that everyone understands the definitions.
    2. In your workbook, look for the cell Internal Talent Mobility under the title; you will find five rows with the following
    • This program is formally structured and documented.
    • This program is consistently applied across the organization.
    • Talent is sourced this way on an ad hoc basis.
    • Our organization currently does not source talent this way.
    • There are metrics in place to assess the effectiveness of this program.
  • Ask everyone in the group if they agree with the statement for each column; once everyone has had a chance to answer each of the questions, discuss any discrepancies which exist.
  • After coming to a consensus, record the answers.
  • Repeat this process for the other four sourcing programs (social media, employee referral program, alumni network program, and campus recruiting program).
    • InputOutput
    • Existing knowledge on sourcing approach
    • Low usage sourcing methods identified for development
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Workbook
    • Hiring Managers

    Want to learn more?

    Recruit IT Talent

    • Improve candidate experience to hire top IT talent.

    Recruit and Retain More Women in IT

    • Gender diversity is directly correlated to IT performance.

    Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT

    • Good business, not just good philanthropy.

    Enhance Your Recruitment Strategies

    Interviews are the most often used yet poorly executed hiring tool.

    Create a high-quality interview process to improve candidate assessment

    Everyone believes they’re a great interviewer; self-assess your techniques, and “get real” to get better

    If you…

    • Believe everything the candidate says.
    • Ask mostly hypothetical questions: "What would you do in a situation where…"
    • Ask gimmicky questions: "If you were a vegetable, what vegetable would you be?"
    • Ask only traditional interview questions: "What are your top three strengths?”
    • Submit to a first impression bias.
    • Have not defined what you are looking for before the interview.
    • Ignore your gut feeling in an attempt to be objective.
    • Find yourself loving a candidate because they are just like you.
    • Use too few or too many interviewers in the process.
    • Do not ask questions to determine the motivational fit of the candidate.
    • Talk more than the interviewee.
    • Only plan and prepare for the interview immediately before it starts.

    …then stop. Use this research!

    Most interviewers are not effective, resulting in many poor hiring decisions, which is costly and counter-productive

    Most interviewers are not effective…

    • 82% of organizations don’t believe they hire highly talented people (Trost, 2022).
    • Approximately 76% of managers and HR representatives that McLean & Company interviewed agreed that the majority of interviewers are not very effective.
    • 66% of hiring managers come to regret their interview-based hiring decisions (DDI, 2021).

    …because, although everyone knows interviewing is a priority, most don’t make it one.

    • Interviewing is often considered an extra task in addition to an employee’s day-to-day responsibilities, and these other responsibilities take precedence.
    • It takes time to effectively design, prepare for, and conduct an interview.
    • Employees would rather spend this time on tasks they consider to be an immediate priority.

    Even those interviewers who are good at interviewing, may not be good enough.

    • Even a good interviewer can be fooled by a great interviewee.
    • Some interviewees talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk. They have great interviewing abilities but not the skills required to be successful in the specific position for which they are interviewing.
    • Even if the interviewer is well trained and prepared to conduct a strong interview, they can get caught up with an interviewee that seems very impressive on the surface, and end up making a bad hire.

    Preparing the Perfect Interview

    Step 5: Define decision rights

    Establish decision-making authority and veto power to mitigate post-interview conflicts over who has final say over a candidate’s status.

    Follow these steps to create a positive interview experience for all involved.

    Step 1: Define the ideal candidate profile; determine the attributes of the ideal candidate and their relative importance

    Define the attributes of the ideal candidate…

    Ideal candidate = Ability to do the job + Motivation to do the job + Fit

    Competencies

    • Education
    • Credentials
    • Technical skills
    • Career path
    • Salary expectations
    • Passion
    • Potential
    • Personality
    • Managerial style/preference

    Experiences

    • Years of service
    • Specific projects
    • Industry

    Data for these come from:

    • Interviews
    • Personality tests
    • Gut instinct or intuition

    Data for these come from:

    • Resumes
    • Interviews
    • Exercises and tests
    • References

    Caution: Evaluating for “organizational or cultural fit” can lead to interviewers falling into the trap of the “like me” bias, and excluding diverse candidates.

    …then determine the importance of the attributes.

    Non-negotiable = absolutely required for the job!

    Usually attributes that are hard to train, such as writing skills, or expensive to acquire after hire, such as higher education or specific technical skills.

    An Asset

    Usually attributes that can be trained, such as computer skills. It’s a bonus if the new hire has it.

    Nice-to-have

    Attributes that aren’t necessary for the job but beneficial. These could help in breaking final decision ties.

    Deal Breakers: Also discuss and decide on any deal breakers that would automatically exclude a candidate.

    The job description is not enough; meet with stakeholders to define and come to a consensus on the ideal candidate profile

    Definition of the Ideal Candidate

    • The Hiring Manager has a plan for the new hire and knows the criteria that will best fulfill that mandate.
    • The Executive team may have specific directives for what the ideal candidate should look like, depending on the level and critical nature of the position.
    • Industry standards, which are defined by regulatory bodies, are available for some positions. Use these to identify skills and abilities needed for the job.
    • Competitor information such as job descriptions and job reviews could provide useful data about a similar role in other organizations.
    • Exit interviews can offer insight into the most challenging aspects of the job and identify skills or abilities needed for success.
    • Current employees who hold the same or a similar position can explain the nuances of the day-to-day job and what attributes are most needed on the team.

    “The hardest work is accurately defining what kind of person is going to best perform this job. What are their virtues? If you’ve all that defined, the rest is not so tough.”

    – VP, Financial Services

    Use a scorecard to document the ideal candidate profile and help you select a superstar

    1. Download the Workbook and go to tab 6.1.
    2. Document the desired attributes for each category of assessment: Competencies, Experiences, Fit, and Motivation. You can find an Attribute Library on the next tab.
    3. Rank each attribute by level of priority: Required, Asset, or Nice-to-Have.
    4. Identify deal breakers that would automatically disqualify a candidate from moving forward.
    InputOutput
    • Job description
    • Stakeholder input
    • Ideal candidate persona
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Workbook
    • Hiring Managers

    To identify questions for screening interviews, use the Screening Interview Template

    A screening interview conducted by phone should have a set of common questions to identify qualified candidates for in-person interviews.

    The Screening Interview Template will help you develop a screening interview by providing:

    • Common screening questions that can be modified based on organizational needs and interview length.
    • Establishing an interview team.
    • A questionnaire format so that the same questions are asked of all candidates and responses can be recorded.

    Once completed, this template will help you or HR staff conduct candidate screening interviews with ease and consistency. Always do screening interviews over the phone or via video to save time and money.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Determine the goal of the screening interview – do you want to evaluate technical skills, communication skills, attitude, etc.? – and create questions based on this goal. If evaluating technical skill, have someone with technical competency conduct the interview.

    The image contains screenshots of the Screening Interview Template.

    Step 2: Choose interview types and techniques that best assess the ideal candidate attributes listed on the position scorecard

    There is no best interview type or technique for assessing candidates, but there could be a wrong one depending on the organization and job opening.

    • Understanding common interviewing techniques and types will help inform your own interviewing strategy and interview development.
    • Each interview technique and type has its own strengths and weakness and can be better suited for a particular organizational environment, type of job, or characteristic being assessed.
    The image contains a diagram to demonstrate the similarities and differences of Interview Technique and Interview Type. There is a Venn Diagram, the right circle is labelled: Interview Technique, and the right is: Interview Type. There is a double sided arrow below that has the following text: Unstructure, Semi-Structured, and Structured.

    Unstructured: A traditional method of interviewing that involves no constraints on the questions asked, no requirements for standardization, and a subjective assessment of the candidate. This format is the most prone to bias.

    Semi-Structured: A blend of structured and unstructured, where the interviewer will ask a small list of similar questions to all candidates along with some questions pertaining to the resume.

    Structured: An interview consisting of a standardized set of job-relevant questions and a scoring guide. The goal is to reduce interviewer bias and to help make an objective and valid decision about the best candidate.

    No matter which interview types or techniques you use, aim for it to be as structured as possible to increase its validity

    The validity of the interview increases as the degree of interview structure increases.

    Components of a highly structured interview include:

    1. Interview questions are derived from a job analysis (they are job related).
    2. Interview questions are standardized (all applicants are asked the same questions).
    3. Prompting, follow-up questioning, probing, and/or elaboration on questions are limited. Try to identify all prompts, follow-ups, and probes beforehand and include them in the interview guide so that all candidates get the same level of prompting and probing.
    4. Interview questions focus on behaviors or work samples rather than opinions or self-evaluations.
    5. Interviewer access to ancillary information (e.g. resumes, letters of reference, test scores, transcripts) is controlled. Sometimes limiting access to these documents can limit interviewer biases.
    6. Questions from the candidate are not allowed until after the interview. This allows the interviewer to stay on track and not go off the protocol.
    7. Each answer is rated during the interview using a rating scale tailored to the question (this is preferable to rating dimensions at the end of the interview and certainly preferable to just making an overall rating or ranking at the end).
    8. Rating scales are “anchored” with behavioral examples to illustrate scale points (e.g. examples of a “1,” “3,” or “5” answer).
    9. Total interview score is obtained by summing across scores for each of the questions.

    The more of these components your interview has, the more structured it is, and the more valid it will be.

    Step 3: Prepare interview questions to assess the attributes you are looking for in a candidate

    The purpose of interviewing is to assess, not just listen. Questions are what help you do this.

    Preparing questions in advance allows you to:

    • Match each question to a position requirement (included in your scorecard) to ensure that you assess all required attributes. Everything assessed should be job relevant!
    • Determine each question’s weighting, if applicable.
    • Give each candidate a chance to speak to all their job-relevant attributes.
    • Keep records should an unselected candidate decide to contest the decision.

    If you don’t prepare in advance:

    • You’ll be distracted thinking about what you are going to ask next and not be fully listening.
    • You likely won’t ask the same questions of all candidates, which impacts the ability to compare across candidates and doesn’t provide a fair process for everyone.
    • You likely won’t ask the questions you need to elicit the information needed to make the right decision.
    • You could ask illegal questions (see Acquire the Right Hires with Effective Interviewing for a list of questions not to ask in an interview).

    Use the Interview Question Planning Guide tab in the Candidate Interview Strategy and Planning Guide to prepare your interview questions.

    Use these tips to draft interview questions:

    • Use job analysis output, in particular the critical incident technique, to develop structured interview questions.
    • Search online or in books for example interview questions for the target position to inform interview question development. Just remember that candidates access these too, so be sure to ask for specific examples, include probing questions, and adapt or modify questions to change them.
    • Situational questions: The situation should be described in sufficient detail to allow an applicant to visualize it accurately and be followed by “what would you do?” Scoring anchors should reflect effective, typical, and ineffective behaviors.
    • Behavioral questions: Should assess a behavioral dimension (e.g. meeting deadlines) and apply to a variety of situations that share the underlying dimension (e.g. at work or school). Scoring anchors should be applicable to a variety of situations and reflect effective, typical, and ineffective behavior.

    Conduct an effective screening interview by listening to non-verbal cues and probing

    Follow these steps to conduct an effective screening interview:

    Introduce yourself and ask if now is a good time to talk. (Before calling, prepare your sales pitch on the organization and the position.)

    You want to catch candidates off guard so that they don’t have time to prepare scripted answers; however, you must be courteous to their schedule.

    Provide an overview of the position, then start asking pre-set questions. Take a lot of notes.

    It is important to provide candidates with as much information as possible about the position – they are deciding whether they are interested in the role as much as you are deciding whether they are suitable.

    Listen to how the questions are answered. Ask follow-up questions when appropriate and especially if the candidate seems to be holding something back.

    If there are long pauses or the candidate’s voice changes, there may be something they aren’t telling you that you should know.

    Be alert to inconsistencies between the resume and answers to the questions and address them.

    It’s important to get to the bottom of issues before the in-person interview. If dates, titles, responsibilities, etc. seem to be inconsistent, ask more questions.

    Ask candidates about their salary expectations.

    It’s important to ensure alignment of the salary expectations early on. If the expectations are much higher than the range, and the candidate doesn’t seem to be open to the lower range, there is no point interviewing them. This would be a waste of everyone’s time.

    Answer the applicant’s questions and conclude the interview.

    Wait until after the interview to rate the applicant.

    Don’t allow yourself to judge throughout the interview, or it could skew questions. Rate the applicant once the interview is complete.

    When you have a shortlist of candidates to invite to an in-person interview, use the Candidate Communication Template to guide you through proper phone and email communications.

    Don’t just prepare top-level interview questions; also prepare probing questions to probe to gain depth and clarity

    Use probing to drill down on what candidates say as much as possible and go beyond textbook answers.

    Question (traditional): “What would you identify as your greatest strength?”

    Answer: Ability to work on a team.

    Top-level interview questions set the stage for probing.

    Your interview script should contain the top two levels of questions in the pyramid and a few probes that you will likely need to ask. You can then drill down further depending on the candidate’s answers.

    Follow-Up Question:

    “Can you outline a particular example when you were able to exercise your teamwork skills to reach a team goal?”

    Probing questions start with asking what, when, who, why, and how, and gain insight into a candidate’s thought process, experiences, and successes.

    Probing Level 1:

    Probe around the what, how, who, when, and where. “How did you accomplish that?”

    How to develop probes? By anticipating the kinds of responses that candidates from different backgrounds or with different levels of experience are likely to give as a response to an interview question. Probes should provide a clear understanding of the situation, the behavior, and the outcome so that the response can be accurately scored. Common probes include:

    • What did you do? What was the outcome?
    • When did this take place (and how long did it take)?
    • Who was involved?
    • Were you leading or being led?
    • How did you accomplish what you did?
    • Why did you take those steps?

    Tailor probes to the candidate’s answers to evoke meaningful and insightful responses.

    Probing Level 2:

    Allow for some creativity.

    “What would you do differently if you were to do it again?”

    Conduct effective interviews and assessments

    Mitigate inherent biases of assessors by integrating formal assessments with objective anchors and clear criteria to create a more inclusive process.

    Consider leveraging behavioral interview questions in your interview to reduce bias.

    • In the past, companies were pushing the boundaries of the conventional interview, using unconventional questions to find top talent, e.g. “what color is your personality?” The logic was that the best people are the ones who don’t necessarily show perfectly on a resume, and they were intent on finding the best.
    • However, many companies have stopped using these questions after extensive statistical analysis revealed there was no correlation between candidates’ ability to answer them and their future performance on the job.
    • Asking behavioral interview questions based on the competency needs of the role is the best way to uncover if the candidates will be able to execute on the job.

    Assessments are created by people that have biases. This often means that assessments can be biased, especially with preferences towards a Western perspective. Even if the same assessments are administered, the questions will be interpreted differently by candidates with varying cultural backgrounds and lived experiences. If assessments do not account for this, it ultimately leads to favoring the answers of certain demographic groups, often ones similar to those who developed the assessment.

    Creating an interview question scorecard

    Attribute you are evaluating

    Probing questions prepared

    Area to take notes

    		 The image contains a screenshot of an Interview question scorecard.

    Exact question you will ask

    Place to record score

    Anchored scale with definitions of a poor, ok and great answer

    Step 4: Assemble an interview team

    HR and the direct reporting supervisor should always be part of the interview. Make a good impression with a good interview team.

    The must-haves:

    • The Future Manager should always be involved in the process. They should be comfortable with the new hire’s competencies and fit.
    • Human Resources should always be involved in the process – they maintain consistency, legality, and standardization. It’s their job to know the rules and follow them. HR may coordinate and maintain policy standards and/or join in assessing the candidate.
    • There should always be more than just one interviewer, even if it is not at the same time. This helps keep the process objective, allows for different opinions, and gives the interviewee exposure to multiple individuals in the company. But, try to limit the number of panel members to four or less.

    “At the end of the day, it’s the supervisor that has to live with the person, so any decision that does not involve the supervisor is a very flawed process.” – VP, Financial Services

    The nice-to-haves:

    • Future colleagues can offer benefits to both the interviewee and the colleague by:
      • Giving the candidate some insight into what their day-to-day job would be.
      • Relaxing the candidate; allowing for a less formal, less intimidating conversation.
      • Introducing potential teammates for a position that is highly collaborative.
      • Offering the interviewer an excellent professional development opportunity – a chance to present their understanding of what they do.
    • Executives should take part in interviewing for executive hiring, individuals that will report to an executive, or for positions that are extremely important. Executive time is scarce and expensive, so only use it when absolutely necessary.

    Record the interview team details in the Candidate Interview Strategy and Planning Guide template.

    Assign interviewers roles inside and outside the actual interview

    Define Interview Process Roles

    Who Should… Contact candidates to schedule interviews or communicate decisions?

    Who Should… Be responsible for candidate welcomes, walk-outs, and hand-offs between interviews?

    Who Should… Define and communicate each stakeholder’s role?

    Who Should… Chair the preparation and debrief meetings and play the role of the referee when trying to reach a consensus?

    Define Interview Roles

    • Set a role for each interviewer so they know what to focus on and where they fit into the process (e.g. Interviewer A will assess fit). Don’t ad hoc the process and allow everyone to interview based on their own ideas.
    • Consider interviewer qualifications and the impact of the new employee on each interviewer, when deciding the roles of each interviewer (i.e. who will interview for competency and who will interview for fit).
      • For example, managers may be most impacted by technical competencies and should be the interviewer to evaluate the candidate for technical competency.

    “Unless you’ve got roles within the panel really detailed and agreed upon, for example, who is going to take the lead on what area of questions, you end up with a situation where nobody is in charge or accountable for the final interview assessment." – VP, Financial Services

    Info-Tech Insight

    Try a Two Lens Assessment: One interviewer assesses the candidate as a project leader while another assesses them as a people leader for a question such as “Give me an example of when you exercised your leadership skills with a junior team member.”

    Step 5: Set decision rights in stone and communicate them in advance to manage stakeholder expectations and limit conflict

    All interviewers must understand their decision-making authority prior to the interview. Misunderstandings can lead to resentment and conflict.

    It is typical and acceptable that you, as the direct reporting manager, should have veto power, as do some executives.

    Veto Power

    Direct Supervisor or Manager

    Decision Makers: Must Have Consensus

    Other Stakeholders

    Direct Supervisor’s Boss

    Direct Supervisor

    Contributes Opinion

    HR Representative

    Peer

    After the preliminary interview, HR should not be involved in making the decision unless they have a solid understanding of the position.

    Peers can make an unfair assessment due to perceived competition with a candidate. Additionally, if a peer doesn’t want a candidate to be hired and the direct supervisor does hire the candidate, the peer may hold resentment against that candidate and set the team up for conflict.

    The decision should rest on those who will interact with the candidate on a daily basis and who manage the team or department that the candidate will be joining.

    The decisions being made can include whether or not to move a candidate onto the next phase of the hiring process or a final hiring decision. Deciding decision rights in advance defines accountability for an effective interview process.

    Create your interview team, assessments, and objective anchor scale

    1. Download the Behavioral Interview Question Library as a reference.
    2. On tab 9 of your workbook, document all the members of the team and their respective roles in the interview process. Fill in the decision-making authority section to ensure every team member is held accountable to their assigned tasks and understands how their input will be used.
    3. For each required attribute in the Ideal Candidate Scorecard, chose one to two questions from the library that can properly evaluate that attribute.
    4. Copy and paste the questions and probing questions into the Interview Guide Template.
    5. Create an objective anchor scale and clearly define what a poor, ok, and great answer to each question is.

    Download the Behavioral Interview Question Library

    Input Output
    • List of possible team members
    • Ideal Candidate Scorecard
    • Finalized hiring panel
    • Finalized interview and assessment process
    Materials Participants
    • IT Behavioral Interview Question Library
    • Workbook
    • Interview Guide Template
    • IT leadership team
    • IT staff members

    Conduct an effective, professional, and organized in-person interview

    Give candidates a warm, genuine greeting. Introduce them to other interviewers present. Offer a drink. Make small talk.

    “There are some real advantages to creating a comfortable climate for the candidate; the obvious respect for the individual, but people really let their guard down.”

    – HR Director, Financial Services

    Give the candidate an overview of the process, length, and what to expect of the interview. Indicate to the candidate that notes will be taken during the interview.

    If shorter than an hour, you probably aren’t probing enough or even asking the right questions. It also looks bad to candidates if the interview is over quickly.

    Start with the first question in the interview guide and make notes directly on the interview guide (written or typed) for each question.

    Take lots of notes! You think you’ll remember what was said, but you won’t. It also adds transparency and helps with documentation.

    Ask the questions in the order presented for interview consistency. Probe and clarify as needed (see next slide).

    Keep control of the interview by curtailing any irrelevant or long-winded responses.

    After all interview questions are complete, ask candidates if there was anything about their qualifications that was missed that they want to highlight.

    Lets you know they understand the job and gives them the feeling they’ve put everything on the table.

    Ask if the candidate has any questions. Respond to the questions asked.

    Answer candidate questions honestly because fit works both ways. Ensure candidates leave with a better sense of the job, expectations, and organizational culture.

    Review the compensation structure for the position and provide a realistic preview of the job and organization.

    Provide each candidate with a fair chance by maintaining a consistent interview process.

    Tell interviewees what happens next in the process, the expected time frame, and how they will be informed of the outcome. Escort them out and thank them for the interview.

    The subsequent slides provide additional detail on these eight steps to conducting an effective interview.

    Avoid these common biases and mistakes

    Common Biases

    Like-me effect: An often-unconscious preference for, and unfairly positive evaluation of, a candidate based on shared interests, personalities, and experiences, etc.

    Status effect: Overrating candidates based on the prestige of previously held positions, titles, or schools attended.

    Recency bias: Placing greater emphasis on interviews held closer to the decision-making date.

    Contrast effect: Rating candidates relative to those who precede or follow them during the interview process, rather than against previously determined data.

    Solution

    Assess candidates by using existing competency-based criteria.

    Common Mistakes

    Negative tone: Starting the interview on a negative or stressful note may derail an otherwise promising candidate.

    Poor interview management: Letting the candidate digress may leave some questions unanswered and reduce the interview value.

    Reliance of first impressions: Basing decisions on first impressions undermines the objectivity of competency-based selection.

    Failure to ask probing questions: Accepting general answers without asking follow-up questions reduces the evidentiary value of the interview.

    Solution

    Follow the structured interview process you designed and practiced.

    Ask the questions in the order presented in the interview guide, and probe and clarify as needed

    Do...

    Don’t…

    Take control of the interview by politely interrupting to clarify points or keep the interviewee on topic.

    Use probing to drill down on responses and ask for clarification. Ask who, what, when, why, and how.

    Be cognizant of confidentiality issues. Ask for a sample of work from a past position.

    Focus on knowledge or information gaps from previous interviews that need to be addressed in the interview.

    Ensure each member of a panel interview speaks in turn and the lead is given due respect to moderate.

    Be mean when probing. Intimidation actually works against you and is stressful for candidates. When you’re friendly, candidates will actually open up more.

    Interrupt or undermine other panel members. Their comments and questions are just as valid as yours are, and treating others unprofessionally gives a bad impression to the candidate.

    Ask illegal questions. Questions about things like religion, disability, and marital and family status are off limits.

    When listening to candidate responses, watch for tone, body language, and red flags

    Do...

    While listening to responses, also watch out for red and yellow flags.

    Listen to how candidates talk about their previous bosses – you want it to be mainly positive. If their discussion of past bosses reflects a strong sense of self-entitlement or a consistent theme of victimization, this could be a theme in their behavior and make them hard to work with.

    Red Flag

    A concern about something that would keep you from hiring the person.

    Yellow Flag

    A concern that needs to be addressed, but wouldn’t keep you from hiring the person.

    Pay attention to body language and tone. They can tell you a lot about candidate motivation and interest.

    ↓

    Listen to what candidates want to improve. It’s an opportunity to talk about development and advancement opportunities in the organization.

    		Not all candidates have red flags, but it is important to keep them in mind to identify potential issues with the candidate before they are hired.

    Don’t…

    Talk too much! You are there to listen. Candidates should do about 80% of the talking so you can adequately evaluate them. Be friendly, but ensure to spend the time allotted assessing, not chatting.

    If you talk too much, you may end up hiring a weak candidate because you didn’t perceive weaknesses or not hire a strong candidate because you didn’t identify strengths.

    What if you think you sense a red or yellow flag?

    Following the interview, immediately discuss the situation with others involved in the recruitment process or those familiar with the position, such as HR, another hiring manager, or a current employee in the role. They can help evaluate if it’s truly a matter of concern.

    Increase hiring success: Give candidates a positive perception of the organization in the interview

    Great candidates want to work at great organizations.

    When the interviewer makes a positive impression on a candidate and provides a positive impression of the organization it carries forward after they are hired.

    In addition, better candidates can be referred over the course of time due to higher quality networking.

    As much as choosing the right candidate is important to you, make sure the right candidate wants to choose you and work for your organization.

    The image contains a screenshot of a graph to demonstrate the percent of successful hires relates strongly to interviewers giving candidates a positive perception of the organization.

    Interview advice seems like common sense, but it’s often not heeded, resulting in poor interviews

    Don’t…

    Believe everything candidates say. Most candidates embellish and exaggerate to find the answers they think you want. Use probing to drill down to specifics and take them off their game.

    Ask gimmicky questions like “what color is your soul?” Responses to these questions won’t give you any information about the job. Candidates don’t like them either!

    Focus too much on the resume. If the candidate is smart, they’ve tailored it to match the job posting, so of course the person sounds perfect for the job. Read it in advance, highlight specific things you want to ask, then ignore it.

    Oversell the job or organization. Obviously you want to give candidates a positive impression, but don’t go overboard because this could lead to unhappy hires who don’t receive what you sold them. Candidates need to evaluate fit just as much as you.

    Get distracted by a candidate’s qualifications and focus only on their ability to do the job. Just because they are qualified does not mean they have the attitude or personality to fit the job or culture.

    Show emotion at any physical handicap. You can’t discriminate based on physical disability, so protect the organization by not drawing attention to it. Even if you don’t say anything, your facial expression may.

    Bring a bad day or excess baggage into the interview, or be abrupt, rushed, or uninterested in the interview. This is rude behavior and will leave a negative impression with candidates, which could impact your chances of hiring them.

    Submit to first impression bias because you’ll spend the rest of the interview trying to validate your first impression, wasting your time and the candidate’s. Remain as objective as possible and stick to the interview guide to stay focused on the task at hand.

    “To the candidate, if you are meeting person #3 and you’re hearing questions that person #1 and #2 asked, the company doesn’t look too hot or organized.” – President, Recruiting Firm

    Practice behavioral interviews

    1. In groups of at least three:
    • Assign one person to act as the manager conducting the interview, a second person to act as the candidate, and a third to observe.
    • The observer will provide feedback to the manager at the end of the role play based on the information you just learned.
    • Observers – please give feedback on the probing questions and body language.
  • Managers, select an interview question from the list your group put together during the previous exercise. Take a few minutes to think about potential probing questions you could follow up with to dig for more information.
  • Candidates, try to act like a real candidate. Please don’t make it super easy on the managers – but don’t make it impossible either!
  • Once the question has been asked and answered:
    • How did it go?
    • Were you able to get the candidate to speak in specifics rather than generalities? What tips do you have for others?
    • What didn’t go so well? Any surprises?
    • What would you do differently next time?
    • If this was a real hiring situation, would the information you got from just that one question help you make a hiring decision for the role?
  • Now switch roles and select a new interview question to use for this round. Repeat until everyone has had a chance to practice.
    • Input Output
    • Interview questions and scorecard
    • Practice interviews
    Materials Participants
    • IT Behavioral Interview Question Library
    • Workbook
    • Hiring Manager
    • Interview Panel Members

    Download the Behavioral Interview Question Library

    Record best practices, effective questions, and candidate insights for future use and current strategy

    Results and insights gained from evaluations need to be recorded and assessed to gain value from them going forward.

    • To optimize evaluation, all feedback should be forwarded to a central point so that the information can be shared with all stakeholders. HR can serve in this role.
    • Peer evaluations should be shared shortly after the interview. Immediate feedback that represents all the positive and negative responses is instructional for interviewers to consider right away.
    • HR can take a proactive approach to sharing information and analyzing and improving the interview process in order to collaborate with hiring departments for better talent management.
    • Collecting information about effective and ineffective interview questions will guide future interview revision and development efforts.

    Evaluations Can Inform Strategic Planning and Professional Development

    Strategic Planning

    • Survey data can be used to inform strategic planning initiatives in recruiting.
    • Use the information to build a case to the executive team for training, public relations initiatives, or better candidate management systems.

    Professional Development

    • Survey data from all evaluations should be used to inform future professional development initiatives.
    • Interview areas where all team members show weaknesses should be training priorities.
    • Individual weaknesses should be integrated into each professional development plan.

    Want to learn more?

    Recruit IT Talent

    • Improve candidate experience to hire top IT talent.

    Recruit and Retain More Women in IT

    • Gender diversity is directly correlated to IT performance.

    Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT

    • Good business, not just good philanthropy.

    Develop a Comprehensive Onboarding Plan

    Drive employee engagement and retention with a robust program that acclimates, guides, and develops new hires.

    Onboarding should pick up where candidate experience leaves off

    Do not confuse onboarding with orientation

    Onboarding ≠ Orientation

    Onboarding is more than just orientation. Orientation is typically a few days of completing paperwork, reading manuals, and learning about the company’s history, strategic goals, and culture. By contrast, onboarding is three to twelve months dedicated to welcoming, acclimating, guiding, and developing new employees – with the ideal duration reflecting the time to productivity for the role.

    A traditional orientation approach provides insufficient focus on the organizational identification, socialization, and job clarity that a new hire requires. This is a missed opportunity to build engagement, drive productivity, and increase organizational commitment. This can result in early disengagement and premature departure.

    Effective onboarding positively impacts the organization and bottom line

    Over the long term, effective onboarding has a positive impact on revenue and decreases costs.

    The benefits of onboarding:

    • Save money and frustration
      • Shorten processing time, reduce administrative costs, and improve compliance.
    • Boost revenue
      • Help new employees become productive faster – also reduce the strain on existing employees who would normally be overseeing them or covering a performance shortfall.
    • Drive engagement and reduce turnover
      • Quickly acclimate new hires to your organization’s environment, culture, and values.
    • Reinforce culture and employer brand
      • Ensure that new hires feel a connection to the organization’s culture.

    Onboarding drives new hire engagement from day one

    The image contains a graph to demonstrate the increase in overall engagement in relation to onboarding.

    When building an onboarding program, retain the core aims: acclimate, guide, and develop

    The image contains a picture of a circle with a smaller circle inside it, and a smaller circle inside that one. The smallest circle is labelled Acclimate, the medium sized circle is labelled Guide, and the biggest circle is labelled Develop.

    Help new hires feel connected to the organization by clearly articulating the mission, vision, values, and what the company does. Help them understand the business model, the industry, and who their competitors are. Help them feel connected to their new team members by providing opportunities for socialization and a support network.

    Help put new hires on the path to high performance by clearly outlining their role in the organization and how their performance will be evaluated.

    Help new hires receive the experience and training they require to become high performers by helping them build needed competencies.

    We recommend a three-to-twelve-month onboarding program, with the performance management aspect of onboarding extending out to meet the standard organizational performance management cycle.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The length of the onboarding program should align with the average time to productivity for the role(s). Consider the complexity of the role, the industry, and the level of the new hire when determining program length.

    For example, call center workers who are selling a straight-forward product may only require a three-month onboarding, while senior leaders may require a year-long program.

    Watch for signs that you aren’t effectively acclimating, guiding, and developing new hires

    Our primary and secondary research identified the following as the most commonly stated reasons why employees leave organizations prematurely. These issues will be addressed throughout the next section.

    Acclimate

    Guide

    Develop
    • Onboarding experience is misaligned from the employer’s brand.
    • Socialization and/or integration into the existing culture is left to the employee.
    • Key role expectations or role usefulness is not clearly communicated.
    • Company strategy is unclear.
    • Opportunities for advancement are unclear.
    • Coaching, counseling, and/or support from co-workers and/or management is lacking.
    • The organization fails to demonstrate that it cares about the new employee’s needs.

    “Onboarding is often seen as an entry-level HR function. It needs to rise in importance because it’s the first impression of the organization and can be much more powerful than we sometimes give it credit for. It should be a culture building and branding program.” – Doris Sims, SPHR, The Succession Consultant, and Author, Creative Onboarding Programs

    Use the onboarding tabs in the workbook to evaluate and redesign the onboarding program

    1. On tab 10, brainstorm challenges that face the organization's current onboarding program. Identify if they fall into the "acclimate," "guide," or "develop" category. Next, record the potential impact of this challenge on the overall effectiveness of the onboarding program.
    2. On tab 11, record each existing onboarding activity. Then, identify if that activity will be kept or if it should be retired. Next, document if the activity fell into the "acclimate," "guide," or "develop" category.
    3. On tab 12, document gaps that currently exist in the onboarding program. Modify the timeline along the side of the tab to ensure it reflects the timeline you have identified.
    4. On tab 13, document the activities that will occur in the new onboarding program. This should be a combination of current activities that you want to retain and new activities that will be added to address the gaps noted on tab 12. For each activity, identify if it will fall in the acclimate, guide, or develop section. Add any additional notes. Before moving on, make sure that there are no categories that have no activities (e.g. no guide activities).
    Input Output
    • Existing onboarding activities
    • Determine new onboarding activities
    • Map out onboarding responsibilities
    Materials Participants
    • Workbook
    • Hiring Managers
    • HR

    Review the administrative aspects of onboarding and determine how to address the challenges

    The image contains tabs, three main large tabs are labelled: Acclimate, Guide, and Develop. There are smaller tabs in between that are in relation to the three main ones.

    Sample challenges

    Potential solutions

    Some paperwork cannot be completed digitally (e.g. I-9 form in the US).

    Where possible, complete forms with digital signatures (e.g. DocuSign). Where not possible, begin the process earlier and mail required forms to employees to sign and return, or scan and email for the employee to print and return.

    Required compliance training material is not available virtually.

    Seek online training options where possible. Determine the most-critical training needs and prioritize the replication of materials in audio/video format (e.g. recorded lecture) and distribute virtually.

    Employees may not have access to their equipment immediately due to shipping or supply issues.

    Delay employee start dates until you can set them up with the proper equipment and access needed to do their job.

    New hires can’t get answers to their questions about benefits information and setup.

    Schedule a meeting with an HR representative or benefits vendor to explain how benefits will work and how to navigate employee self-service or other tools and resources related to their benefits.

    Info-Tech Insight

    One of the biggest challenges for remote new hires is the inability to casually ask questions or have conversations without feeling like they’re interrupting. Until they have a chance to get settled, providing formal opportunities for questions can help address this.

    Review how company information is shared during onboarding and how to address the challenges

    The image contains tabs, three main large tabs are labelled: Acclimate, Guide, and Develop. There are smaller tabs in between that are in relation to the three main ones.

    Sample challenges

    Potential solutions

    Key company information such as organizational history, charts, or the vision, mission, and values cannot be clearly learned by employees on their own.

    Have the new hire’s manager call to walk through the important company information to provide a personal touch and allow the new hire to ask questions and get to know their new manager.

    Keeping new hires up to date on crisis communications is important, but too much information may overwhelm them or cause unnecessary stress.

    Sharing the future of the organization is a critical part of the company information stage of onboarding and the ever-changing nature of the COVID-19 crisis is informing many organizations’ future right now. Be honest but avoid over-sharing plans that may change.

    New hires can’t get answers to their questions about benefits information and setup.

    Schedule a meeting with an HR representative or benefits vendor to explain how benefits will work and how to navigate employee self-service or other tools and resources related to their benefits.

    Review the socialization aspects of onboarding and determine how to address the challenges

    The image contains tabs, three main large tabs are labelled: Acclimate, Guide, and Develop. There are smaller tabs in between that are in relation to the three main ones.

    Sample challenges

    Potential solutions

    Team introductions via a team lunch or welcome event are typically done in person.

    Provide managers with a calendar of typical socialization events in the first few weeks of onboarding and provide instructions and ideas for how to schedule replacement events over videoconferencing.

    New hires may not have a point of contact for informal questions or needs if their peers aren’t around them to help.

    If it doesn’t already exist, create a virtual buddy program and provide instructions for managers to select a buddy from the new hire’s team. Explain that their role is to field informal questions about the company, team, and anything else and that they should book weekly meetings with the new hire to stay in touch.

    New hires will not have an opportunity to learn or become a part of the informal decision-making networks at the organization.

    Hiring managers should consider key network connections that new hires will need by going through their own internal network and asking other team members for recommendations.

    New hires will not be able to casually meet people around the office.

    Provide the employee with a list of key contacts for them to reach out to and book informal virtual coffee chats to introduce themselves.

    Adapt the Guide phase of onboarding to a virtual environment

    The image contains tabs, three main large tabs are labelled: Acclimate, Guide, and Develop. There are smaller tabs in between that are in relation to the three main ones.

    Sample challenges

    Potential solutions

    Performance management (PM) processes have been paused given the current crisis.

    Communicate to managers that new hires still need to be onboarded to the organization’s performance management process and that goals and feedback need to be introduced and the review process outlined even if it’s not currently happening.

    Goals and expectations differ or have been reprioritized during the crisis.

    Ask managers to explain the current situation at the organization and any temporary changes to goals and expectations as a result of new hires.

    Remote workers often require more-frequent feedback than is mandated in current PM processes.

    Revamp PM processes to include daily or bi-weekly touchpoints for managers to provide feedback and coaching for new hires for at least their first six months.

    Managers will not be able to monitor new hire work as effectively as usual.

    Ensure there is a formal approach for how employees will keep their managers updated on what they're working on and how it's going, for example, daily scrums or task-tracking software.

    For more information on adapting performance management to a virtual environment, see Info-Tech’s Performance Management for Emergency Work-From-Home research.

    Take an inventory of training and development in the onboarding process and select critical activities

    The image contains tabs, three main large tabs are labelled: Acclimate, Guide, and Develop. There are smaller tabs in between that are in relation to the three main ones.

    Categorize the different types of formal and informal training in the onboarding process into the following three categories. For departmental and individual training, speak to managers to understand what is required on a department and role basis:

    Organizational

    Departmental

    Individual

    For example:

    • Employee self-service overview
    • Health and safety/compliance training
    • Core competencies

    For example:

    • Software training (e.g. Salesforce)
    • Job shadowing to learn how to work equipment or to learn processes

    For example:

    • Mentoring
    • External courses
    • Support to work toward a certification

    In a crisis, not every training can be translated to a virtual environment in the short term. It’s also important to focus on critical learning activities versus the non-critical. Prioritize the training activities by examining the learning outcomes of each and asking:

    • What organizational training does every employee need to be a productive member of the organization?
    • What departmental or individual training do new hires need to be successful in their role?

    Lower priority or non-critical activities can be used to fill gaps in onboarding schedules or as extra activities to be completed if the new hire finds themselves with unexpected downtime to fill.

    Determine how onboarding training will be delivered virtually

    The image contains tabs, three main large tabs are labelled: Acclimate, Guide, and Develop. There are smaller tabs in between that are in relation to the three main ones.

    Who will facilitate virtual training sessions?

    • For large onboarding cohorts, consider live delivery via web conferencing where possible. This will create a more engaging training program and will allow new hires to interact with and ask questions of the presenter.
    • For individual new hires or small cohorts, have senior leaders or key personnel from across the organization record different trainings that are relevant for their role.
      • For example, training sessions about organizational culture can be delivered by the CEO or other senior leader, while sales training could be delivered by a sales executive.

      If there is a lack of resources, expertise, or time, outsource digital training to a content provider or through your LMS.

    What existing or free tools can be leveraged to immediately support digital training?

    • Laptops and PowerPoint to record training sessions that are typically delivered in-person
    • YouTube/Vimeo to host recorded lecture-format training
    • Company intranet to host links and files needed to complete training
    • Web conferencing software to host live training/orientation sessions (e.g. Webex)
    • LMS to host and track completion of learning content

    Want to learn more?

    Recruit IT Talent

    • Improve candidate experience to hire top IT talent.

    Recruit and Retain More Women in IT

    • Gender diversity is directly correlated to IT performance.

    Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT

    • Good business, not just good philanthropy.

    Adapt Your Onboarding Process to a Virtual Environment

    • Develop short-term solutions with a long-term outlook to quickly bring in new talent.

    Bibliography

    2021 Recruiter Nation Report. Survey Analysis, Jobvite, 2021. Web.

    “5 Global Stats Shaping Recruiting Trends.” The Undercover Recruiter, 2022. Web.

    Barr, Tavis, Raicho Bojilov, and Lalith Munasinghe. "Referrals and Search Efficiency: Who Learns What and When?" The University of Chicago Press, Journal of Labor Economics, vol. 37, no. 4, Oct. 2019. Web.

    “How to grow your team better, faster with an employee referral program.” Betterup, 10 Jan. 2022. Web.

    “Employee Value Proposition: How 25 Companies Define Their EVP.” Built In, 2021. Web.

    Global Leadership Forecast 2021. Survey Report, DDI World, 2021. Web.

    “Connecting Unemployed Youth with Organizations That Need Talent.” Harvard Business Review, 3 November 2016. Web.

    Ku, Daniel. “Social Recruiting: Everything You Need To Know for 2022.” PostBeyond, 26 November 2021. Web.

    Ladders Staff. “Shedding light on the job search.” Ladders, 20 May 2013. Web.

    Merin. “Campus Recruitment – Meaning, Benefits & Challenges.” HR Shelf, 1 February 2022. Web.

    Mobile Recruiting. Smart Recruiters, 2020. Accessed March 2022.

    Roddy, Seamus. “5 Employee Referral Program Strategies to Hire Top Talent.” Clutch, 22 April 2020. Web.

    Sinclair, James. “What The F*dge: That's Your Stranger Recruiting Budget?” LinkedIn, 11 November 2019. Web.

    “Ten Employer Examples of EVPs.” Workology, 2022. Web

    “The Higher Cost of a Bad Hire.” Robert Half, 15 March 2021. Accessed March 2022.

    Trost, Katy. “Hiring with a 90% Success Rate.” Katy Trost, Medium, 8 August 2022. Web.

    “Using Social Media for Talent Acquisition.” SHRM, 20 Sept. 2017. Web.

    Key Metrics for Every CIO

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}119|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact: N/A
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    • Parent Category Name: Performance Measurement
    • Parent Category Link: /performance-measurement
    • 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.

    Leverage Web Analytics to Reinforce Your Web Experience Management Strategy

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}563|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact: N/A
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    • Parent Category Name: Marketing Solutions
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    • Organizations are unaware of the capabilities of web analytics tools and unsure how to leverage these new technologies to enhance their web experience.
    • Traditional solutions offer only information and data about the activity on the website. It is difficult for organizations to understand the customer motivations and behavioral patterns using the data.
    • In addition, there is an overwhelming number of vendors offering various solutions. Understanding which solution best fits your business needs is crucial to avoid overspending.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Understanding organizational goals and business objectives is essential in effectively leveraging web analytics.
    • It is easy to get lost in a sea of expensive web analytical tools. Choosing tools that align with the business objectives will keep the costs of customer acquisition and retention to a minimum.
    • Beyond selection and implementation, leveraging web analytic tools requires commitment from the organization to continuously monitor key KPIs to ensure good customer web experience.

    Impact and Result

    • Understand what web analytic tools are and some key trends in the market space. Learn about top advanced analytic tools that help understand user behavior.
    • Discover top vendors in the market space and some of the top-level features they offer.
    • Understand how to use the metrics to gather critical insights about the website’s use and key initiatives for successful implementation.

    Leverage Web Analytics to Reinforce Your Web Experience Management Strategy Research & Tools

    Leverage Web Analytics to Reinforce Your Web Experience Management Strategy Storyboard – A deck outlining the importance of web analytic tools and how they can be leveraged to meet your business needs.

    This research offers insight into web analytic tools, key trends in the market space, and an introduction to advanced web analytics techniques. Follow our five-step initiative to successfully select and implement web analytics tools and identify which baseline metrics to measure and continuously monitor for best results.

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

    • Leverage Web Analytics to Reinforce Your Web Experience Management Strategy Storyboard
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Leverage Web Analytics to Reinforce Your Web Experience Management Strategy

    Web analytics tools are the gateway to understanding customer behavior.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    In today’s world, users want to consume concise content and information quickly. Websites have a limited time to prove their usefulness to a new user. Content needs to be as few clicks away from the user as possible. Analyzing user behavior using advanced analytics techniques can help website designers better understand their audience.

    Organizations need to implement sophisticated analytics tools to track user data from their website. However, simply extracting data is not enough to understand the user motivation. A successful implementation of a web analytics tool will comprise both understanding what a customer does on the website and why the customer does what they do.

    This research will introduce some fundamental and advanced analytics tools and provide insight into some of the vendors in the market space.

    Photo of Sai Krishna Rajaramagopalan, Research Specialist, Applications − Enterprise Applications, Info-Tech Research Group. Sai Krishna Rajaramagopalan
    Research Specialist, Applications − Enterprise Applications
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge
    • Web analytics solutions have emerged as applications that provide extensive information and data about users visiting your webpage. However, many organizations are unaware of the capabilities of these tools and unsure how to leverage these new technologies to enhance user experience.
    		 Common Obstacles
    • Traditional solutions offer information and data about customers’ activity on the website but no insight into their motivations and behavioral patterns.
    • In addition, an overwhelming number of vendors are offering various solutions. Understanding which solution best fits your business needs is crucial to avoid overspending.
    		 Info-Tech’s Approach
    • This research is aimed to help you understand what web analytic tools are and some key trends in the market space. Learn about top advanced analytic tools that help you understand user behavior. Discover top vendors in the market space and some of the high-level features offered.
    • This research also explains techniques and metrics to gather critical insights about your website’s use and will aid in understanding users’ motivations and patterns and better predict their behavior on the website.

    Info-Tech Insight

    It is easy to get lost in a sea of expensive web analytics tools. Choose tools that align with your business objectives to keep the costs of customer acquisition and retention to a minimum.

    Ensure the success of your web analytics programs by following five simple steps

    1. ORGANIZATIONAL GOALS

    The first key step in implementing and succeeding with web analytics tools is to set clearly defined organizational goals, e.g. improving product sales.

    3. KPI METRICS

    Define key performance indicators (KPIs) that help track the organization’s performance, e.g. number of page visits, conversion rates, bounce rates.

    5. REVIEW

    Continuous improvement is essential to succeed in understanding customers. The world is a dynamic place, and you must constantly revise your organizational goals, business objectives, and KPIs to remain competitive.

    		Centerpiece representing the five surrounding steps.

    2. BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

    The next step is to lay out business objectives that help to achieve the organization’s goals, e.g. to increase customer leads, increase customer transactions, increase web traffic.

    4. APPLICATION SELECTION

    Understand the web analytics tool space and which combination of tools and vendors best fits the organization’s goals.

    Web Analytics Introduction

    Understand traditional and advanced tools and their capabilities.

    Understanding web analytics

    • Web analytics is the branch of analytics that deals with the collection, reporting, and analysis of data generated by users visiting and interacting with a website.
    • The purpose of web analytics is to measure user behavior, optimize the website’s user experience and flow, and gain insights that help meet business objectives like increasing conversions and sales.
    • Web analytics allows you to see how your website is performing and how people are acting while on your website. What’s important is what you can do with this knowledge.
    • Data collected through web analytics may include traffic sources, referring sites, page views, paths taken, and conversion rates. The compiled data often forms a part of customer relationship management analytics to facilitate and streamline better business decisions.
    • Having strong web analytics is important in understanding customer behavior and fine-tuning marketing and product development approaches accordingly.
    		 Example of a web analytics dashboard.

    Why you should leverage web analytics

    Leveraging web analytics allows organizations to better understand their customers and achieve their business goals.

    The global web analytics market size is projected to reach US$5,156.3 million by 2026, from US$2,564 million in 2019, at a CAGR of 10.4% during 2021-2026. (Source: 360 Research Reports, 2021) Of the top 1 million websites with the highest traffic, there are over 3 million analytics technologies used. Google Analytics has the highest market share, with 50.3%. (Source: “Top 1 Million Sites,” BuiltWith, 2022)
    Of the 200 million active websites, 57.3% employ some form of web analytics tool. This trend is expected to grow as more sophisticated tools are readily available at a cheaper cost. (Source: “On the Entire Internet,” BuiltWith, 2022; Siteefy, 2022) A three-month study by Contentsquare showed a 6.9% increase in traffic, 11.8% increase in page views, 12.4% increase in transactions, and 3.6% increase in conversion rates through leveraging web analytics. (Source: Mordor Intelligence, 2022)

    Case Study

    		 Logo for Ryanair.
    INDUSTRY
    Aviation
    SOURCE
    AT Internet
    Web analytics

    Ryanair is a low-fare airline in Europe that receives nearly all of its bookings via its website. Unhappy with its current web analytics platform, which was difficult to understand and use, Ryanair was looking for a solution that could adapt to its requirements and provide continuous support and long-term collaboration.

    Ryanair chose AT Internet for its intuitive user interface that could effectively and easily manage all the online activity. AT was the ideal partner to work closely with the airline to strengthen strategic decision making over the long term, increase conversions in an increasingly competitive market, and increase transactions on the website.

    Results

    By using AT Internet Web Analytics to improve email campaigns and understand the behavior of website visitors, Ryanair was able to triple click-through rates, increase visitor traffic by 16%, and decrease bounce rate by 18%.

    		Arrows denoting increases or decreases in certain metrics: '3x increase in click-through rates', '16% increase in visitor traffic', '18% decrease in bounce rate'.

    Use traditional web analytics tools to understand your consumer

    What does the customer do?
    • Traditional web analytics allows organizations to understand what is happening on their website and what customers are doing. These tools deliver hard data to measure the performance of a website. Some of the data measured through traditional web analytics are:
    • Visit count: The number of visits received by a webpage.
    • Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors that leave the website after only viewing the first page compared to total visitors.
    • Referrer: The previous website that sent the user traffic to a specific website.
    • CTA clicks: The number of times a user clicks on a call to action (CTA) button.
    • Conversion rate: Proportion of users that reach the final outcome of the website.
    		 Example of a traditional web analytics dashboard.

    Use advanced web analytics techniques to understand your consumer

    Why does the customer do what they do?
    • Traditional web analytic tools fail to explain the motivation of users. Advanced analytic techniques help organizations understand user behavior and measure user satisfaction. The techniques help answer questions like: Why did a user come to a webpage? Why did they leave? Did they find what they were looking for? Some of the advanced tools include:
    • Heatmapping: A visual representation of where the users click, scroll, and move on a webpage.
    • Recordings: A recording of the mouse movement and clicks for the entire duration of a user’s visit.
    • Feedback forms and surveys: Voice of the customer tools allowing users to give direct feedback about websites.
    • Funnel exploration: The ability to visualize the steps users take to complete tasks on your site or app.
    		 Example of an advanced web analytics dashboard.

    Apply industry-leading techniques to leverage web analytics

    Heatmapping
    • Heatmaps are used to visualize where users move their mouse, click, and scroll in a webpage.
    • Website heatmaps use a warm-to-cold color scheme to indicate user activity, with the warmest color indicating the highest visitor engagement and the coolest indicating the lowest visitor engagement.
    • Organizations can use this tool to evaluate the elements of the website that attract users and identify which sections require improvement to increase user engagement.
    • Website designers can make changes and compare the difference in user interaction to measure the effectiveness of the changes.
    • Scrollmaps help designers understand what the most popular scroll-depth of your webpage is – and that’s usually a prime spot for an important call to action.
    		 Example of a website with heatmapping overlaid.
    (Source: An example of a heatmap layered with a scrollmap from Crazy Egg, 2020)

    Apply industry-leading techniques to leverage web analytics

    Funneling

    • Funnels are graphical representations of a customer’s journey while navigating through the website.
    • Funnels help organizations identify which webpage users land on and where users drop off.
    • Organizations can capture every user step to find the unique challenges between entry and completion. Identifying what friction stands between browsing product grids and completing a transaction allows web designers to then eliminate it.
    • Designers can use A/B testing to experiment with different design philosophies to compare conversion statistics.
    • Funneling can be expanded to cross-channel analytics by incorporating referral data, cookies, and social media analytics.
    		 Example of a bar chart created through funneling.

    Apply industry-leading techniques to leverage web analytics

    Session recordings

    • Session recordings are playbacks of users’ interaction with the website on a single session. User interaction can vary between mouse clicks, keyboard input, and mouse scroll.
    • Recordings help organizations understand user motivation and help identify why users undertake certain tasks or actions on the webpage.
    • Playbacks can also be used to see if users are confused anywhere between the landing page and final transaction phase. This way, playbacks further help ensure visitors complete the funneling seamlessly.
    		 Example of a session recording featuring a line created by the mouse's journey.

    Apply industry-leading techniques to leverage web analytics

    Feedback and microsurveys

    • Feedback can be received directly from end users to help organizations improve the website.
    • Receiving feedback from users can be difficult, since not every user is willing to spend time to submit constructive and detailed feedback. Microsurveys are an excellent alternative.
    • Users can submit short feedback forms consisting of a single line or emojis or thumbs up or down.
    • Users can directly highlight sections of the page about which to submit feedback. This allows designers to quickly pinpoint areas for improvement. Additionally, web designers can play back recordings when feedback is submitted to get a clear idea about the challenges users face.
    		 Example of a website with a microsurvey in the corner.

    Market Overview

    Choose vendors and tools that best match your business needs.

    Top-level traditional features

    Feature Name

    Description
    Visitor Count Tracking Counts the number of visits received by a website or webpage.
    Geographic Analytics Uses location information to enable the organization to provide location-based services for various demographics.
    Conversion Tracking Measures the proportion of users that complete a certain task compared to total number of users.
    Device and Browser Analytics Captures and summarizes device and browser information.
    Bounce and Exit Tracking Calculates exit rate and bounce rate on a webpage.
    CTA Tracking Measures the number of times users click on a call to action (CTA) button.
    Audience Demographics Captures, analyzes, and displays customer demographic/firmographic data from different channels.
    Aggregate Traffic Reporting Works backward from a conversion or other key event to analyze the differences, trends, or patterns in the paths users took to get there.
    Social Media Analytics Captures information on social signals from popular services (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.).

    Top-level advanced features

    Feature Name

    Description

    HeatmappingShows where users have clicked on a page and how far they have scrolled down a page or displays the results of eye-tracking tests through the graphical representation of heatmaps.
    Funnel ExplorationVisualizes the steps users take to complete tasks on your site or app.
    A/B TestingEnables you to test the success of various website features.
    Customer Journey ModellingEffectively models and displays customer behaviors or journeys through multiple channels and touchpoints.
    Audience SegmentationCreates and analyzes discrete customer audience segments based on user-defined criteria or variables.
    Feedback and SurveysEnables users to give feedback and share their satisfaction and experience with website designers.
    Paid Search IntegrationIntegrates with popular search advertising services (i.e. AdWords) and can make predictive recommendations around areas like keywords.
    Search Engine OptimizationProvides targeted recommendations for improving and optimizing a page for organic search rankings (i.e. via A/B testing or multivariate testing).
    Session RecordingRecords playbacks of users scrolling, moving, u-turning, and rage clicking on your site.

    Evaluate software category leaders using SoftwareReviews’ vendor rankings and awards

    		 Logo for SoftwareReviews.
    Sample of SoftwareReviews' The Data Quadrant. The Data Quadrant is a thorough evaluation and ranking of all software in an individual category to compare platforms across multiple dimensions.

    Vendors are ranked by their Composite Score, based on individual feature evaluations, user satisfaction rankings, vendor capability comparisons, and likeliness to recommend the platform.

    Sample of SoftwareReviews' The Emotional Footprint. The Emotional Footprint is a powerful indicator of overall user sentiment toward the relationship with the vendor, capturing data across five dimensions.

    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.

    Speak with category experts to dive deeper into the vendor landscape

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    Fact-based reviews of business software from IT professionals. Top-tier data quality backed by a rigorous quality assurance process. CLICK HERE to ACCESS

    Comprehensive software reviews
    to make better IT decisions

    We collect and analyze the most detailed reviews on enterprise software from real users to give you an unprecedented view into the product and vendor before you buy.

    Product and category reports with state-of-the-art data visualization. User-experience insight that reveals the intangibles of working with a vendor.

    SoftwareReviews is powered by Info-Tech

    Technology coverage is a priority for Info-Tech and SoftwareReviews provides the most comprehensive unbiased data on today’s technology. Combined with the insight of our expert analysts, our members receive unparalleled support in their buying journey.

    Top vendors in the web analytics space

    Logo for Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides comprehensive traditional analytics tools, free of charge, to understand the customer journey and improve marketing ROI. Twenty-four percent of all web analytical tools used on the internet are provided by Google analytics.
    Logo for Hotjar. Hotjar is a behavior analytics and product experience insights service that helps you empathize with and understand your users through their feedback via tools like heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys. Hotjar complements the data and insights you get from traditional web analytics tools like Google Analytics.
    Logo for Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg is a website analytics tool that helps you optimize your site to make it more user-friendly, more engaging, and more conversion-oriented. It does this through heatmaps and A/B testing, which allow you to see how people are interacting with your site.
    Logo for Amplitude Analytics. Amplitude Analytics provides intelligent insight into customer behavior. It offers basic functionalities like measuring conversion rate and engagement metrics and also provides more advanced tools like customer journey maps and predictive analytics capabilities through AI.

    Case Study

    		Logo for Miller & Smith.
    INDUSTRY
    Real Estate
    SOURCE
    Crazy Egg

    Heatmaps and playback recordings

    Challenge

    Miller & Smith had just redesigned their website, but the organization wanted to make sure it was user-friendly as well as visually appealing. They needed an analytics platform that could provide information about where visitors were coming from and measure the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns.

    Solution

    Miller & Smith turned to Crazy Egg to obtain visual insights and track user behavior. They used heatmaps and playback recordings to see user activity within webpages and pinpoint any issues with user interface. In just a few weeks, Miller & Smith gained valuable data to work with: the session recordings helped them understand how users were navigating the site, and the heatmaps allowed them to see where users were clicking – and what they were skipping.

    Results

    Detailed reports generated by the solution allowed Miller & Smith team to convince key stakeholders and implement the changes easily. They were able to pinpoint what changes needed to be made and why these changes would improve their experience.

    Within few weeks, the bounce rate improved by 7.5% and goal conversion increased by 8.5% over a similar period the previous year.

    Operationalizing Web Analytics Tools

    Execute initiatives for successful implementation.

    Ensure success of your web analytics programs by following five simple steps

    1. ORGANIZATIONAL GOALS

    The first key step in implementing and succeeding with web analytics tools is to set clearly defined organizational goals, e.g. improving product sales.

    3. KPI METRICS

    Define key performance indicators (KPIs) that help track the organization’s performance, e.g. number of page visits, conversion rates, bounce rates.

    5. REVIEW

    Continuous improvement is essential to succeed in understanding customers. The world is a dynamic place, and you must constantly revise your organizational goals, business objectives, and KPIs to remain competitive.

    		Centerpiece representing the five surrounding steps.

    2. BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

    The next step is to lay out business objectives that help to achieve the organization’s goals, e.g. to increase customer leads, increase customer transactions, increase web traffic.

    4. APPLICATION SELECTION

    Understand the web analytics tool space and which combination of tools and vendors best fits the organization’s goals.

    1.1 Understand your organization’s goals

    30 minutes

    Output: Organization’s goal list

    Materials: Whiteboard, Markers

    Participants: Core project team

    1. Identify the key organizational goals for both the short term and the long term.
    2. Arrange the goals in descending order of priority.

    Example table of goals ranked by priority and labeled short or long term.

    1.2 Align business objectives with organizational goals

    30 minutes

    Output: Business objectives

    Materials: Whiteboard, Markers

    Participants: Core project team

    1. Identify the key business objectives that help attain organization goals.
    2. Match each business objective with the corresponding organizational goals it helps achieve.
    3. Arrange the objectives in descending order of priority.

    Example table of business objectives ranked by priority and which organization goal they're linked to.

    Establish baseline metrics

    Baseline metrics will be improved through:

    1. Efficiently using website elements and CTA button placement
    2. Reducing friction between the landing page and end point
    3. Leveraging direct feedback from users to continuously improve customer experience

    1.3 Establish baseline metrics that you intend to improve via your web analytics tools

    30 minutes

    Example table with metrics, each with a current state and goal state.

    Accelerate your software selection project

    Vendor selection projects often demand extensive and unnecessary documentation.

    Software Selection Insight

    Balance the effort-to-information ratio required for a business impact assessment to keep stakeholders engaged. Use documentation that captures the key data points and critical requirements without taking days to complete. Stakeholders are more receptive to formal selection processes that are friction free.

    The Software Selection Workbook

    Work through the straightforward templates that tie to each phase of the Rapid Application Selection Framework, from assessing the business impact to requirements gathering.

    Sample of the Software Selection Workbook deliverable.

    The Vendor Evaluation Workbook

    Consolidate the vendor evaluation process into a single document. Easily compare vendors as you narrow the field to finalists.

    Sample of the Vendor Evaluation Workbook deliverable.

    The Guide to Software Selection: A Business Stakeholder Manual

    Quickly explain the Rapid Application Selection Framework to your team while also highlighting its benefits to stakeholders.

    Sample of the Guide to Software Selection: A Business Stakeholder Manual deliverable.

    Revisit the metrics you identified and revise your goals

    Track the post-deployment results, compare the metrics, and set new targets for the next fiscal year.

    Example table of 'Baseline Website Performance Metrics' with the column 'Revised Target' highlighted.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Stock image of two people going over a contract. Modernize Your Corporate Website to Drive Business Value

    Drive higher user satisfaction and value through UX-driven websites.

    Stock image of a person using the cloud on their smartphone. Select and Implement a Web Experience Management Solution

    Your website is your company’s face to the world: select a best-of-breed platform to ensure you make a rock-star impression with your prospects and customers!

    Stock image of people studying analytics. Create an Effective Web Redesign Strategy

    Ninety percent of web redesign projects, executed without an effective strategy, fail to accomplish their goals.

    Bibliography

    "11 Essential Website Data Factors and What They Mean." CivicPlus, n.d. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    “Analytics Usage Distribution in the Top 1 Million Sites.” BuiltWith, 1 Nov. 2022. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    "Analytics Usage Distribution on the Entire Internet." BuiltWith, 1 Nov. 2022. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    Bell, Erica. “How Miller and Smith Used Crazy Egg to Create an Actionable Plan to Improve Website Usability.” Crazy Egg, n.d. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    Brannon, Jordan. "User Behavior Analytics | Enhance The Customer Journey." Coalition Technologies, 8 Nov 2021. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    Cardona, Mercedes. "7 Consumer Trends That Will Define The Digital Economy In 2021." Adobe Blog, 7 Dec 2020. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    “The Finer Points.“ Analytics Features. Google Marketing Platform, 2022. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    Fitzgerald, Anna. "A Beginner’s Guide to Web Analytics." HubSpot, 21 Sept 2022. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    "Form Abandonment: How to Avoid It and Increase Your Conversion Rates." Fullstory Blog, 7 April 2022. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    Fries, Dan. "Plug Sales Funnel Gaps by Identifying and Tracking Micro-Conversions." Clicky Blog, 9 Dec 2019. Accessed 7 July 2022.

    "Funnel Metrics in Saas: What to Track and How to Improve Them?" Userpilot Blog, 23 May 2022. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    Garg, Neha. "Digital Experimentation: 3 Key Steps to Building a Culture of Testing." Contentsquare, 21 June 2021. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    “Global Web Analytics Market Size, Status and Forecast 2021-2027.” 360 Research Reports, 25 Jan. 2021. Web.

    Hamilton, Stephanie. "5 Components of Successful Web Analytics." The Daily Egg, 2011. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    "Hammond, Patrick. "Step-by-Step Guide to Cohort Analysis & Reducing Churn Rate." Amplitude, 15 July 2022. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    Hawes, Carry. "What Is Session Replay? Discover User Pain Points With Session Recordings." Dynatrace, 20 Dec 2021. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    Huss, Nick. “How Many Websites Are There in the World?” Siteefy, 8 Oct. 2022. Web.

    Nelson, Hunter. "Establish Web Analytics and Conversion Tracking Foundations Using the Google Marketing Platform.” Tortoise & Hare Software, 29 Oct 2022. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    "Product Analytics Vs Product Experience Insights: What’s the Difference?" Hotjar, 14 Sept 2021. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    “Record and watch everything your visitors do." Inspectlet, n.d. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    “Ryanair: Using Web Analytics to Manage the Site’s Performance More Effectively and Improve Profitability." AT Internet, 1 April 2020. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    Sibor, Vojtech. "Introducing Cross-Platform Analytics.” Smartlook Blog, 5 Nov 2022. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    "Visualize Visitor Journeys Through Funnels.” VWO, n.d. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    "Web Analytics Market Share – Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022-2027)." Mordor Intelligence, 2022. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    “What is the Best Heatmap Tool for Real Results?” Crazy Egg, 27 April 2020. Web.

    "What Is Visitor Behavior Analysis?" VWO, 2022. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    Zheng, Jack G., and Svetlana Peltsverger. “Web Analytics Overview.” IGI Global, 2015. Accessed 26 July 2022.

    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
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    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

    Leading Through Uncertainty Workshop Overview

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    • Parent Category Name: Leadership Development Programs
    • Parent Category Link: /leadership-development-programs

    As the world around us changes there is a higher risk that IT productivity and planned priorities will be derailed.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    To meet the challenges of uncertainty head on IT leaders must adapt so their employees are supported and IT departments continue to operate successfully.

    Impact and Result

    • Clearly define and articulate the current and future priorities to provide direction and cultivate hope for the future.
    • Recognize and manage your own reactions to be conscious of how you are showing up and the perceptions others may have.
    • Incorporate the 4Cs of Leading Through Uncertainty into your leadership practice to make sense of the situation and lead others through it.
    • Build tactics to connect with your employees that will ensure employee engagement and productivity.

    Leading Through Uncertainty Workshop Overview Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Workshop Overview

    Read our concise Workshop Overview to find out how this program can support IT leaders when managing teams through uncertain times.

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

    • Leading Through Uncertainty (LTU) Workshop Overview
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