B TO IT Alignment

Do you fully understand what your business colleagues expect from your IT services?

One of the biggest trends in the IT industry is to be agile and the Business users expect now the IT to address more than their needs.
Business to IT Alignment becomes a key concept for the survival of the IT departments.
This supposes that you would place the way you communicate with your Business colleagues on top of your list.
Without detailing too far what Business to IT Alignment is about, a major aspect to consider is your Service front end.

Service Catalogue and Portfolio

Most ITSM suite vendors have been developing products to address the Service Catalogue, Service Portfolio and Request Fulfilment for a few years now.

Our analysis has found that these products are in their early stage of development and are yet missing some features that may transform into limitations as your requirements increase and as you get more knowledge and expectations. If you are new to this field, the solution proposed by the ITSM suite vendors may be sufficient to cover your original needs.

The experience of other IT Organisations has shown that when they apply sufficient focus on these processes, their scope tend to increase rapidly and expand beyond the boundaries of IT Services.

Other niche players have developed strong Service Catalogue and Service Portfolio Management products that address today your end users’ expectations as they get more and more accustomed to effective service frontends such as Amazon.com.

Resource planning, Demand and Supplier Management

You will see processes such as Demand Management, Supplier Management, Resource Planning and Finance Management getting suddenly huge momentum and you would need to be ready to address them as the Business would expect more and more accountability.

What about Cloud Computing?

Everybody is talking about the Cloud with diverse definitions. New words are now used to describe things that you have been doing for years, sometimes without knowing it. Even if you think you are not using the Cloud, think twice and verify if yourself or someone in your organisation have been using it over and over. Was it AaaS (Application as a Service) - like WebEx for example -, SaaS (Software as a Service) - not that different from AaaS, PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).

Now these Services must be taken in account within your IT Service Management strategy. Although the traditional Service Desk (Incident, Problem, Change)may not be very different, there are aspects which become more important, especially for in the Service Delivery Management area like:

Is your contract efficient?

Does it makes clear what is expected from the supplier and what is expected FROM YOU?

Do you have an Exit Strategy?

How are you and your supplier handle the termination of a contract (if they go bust for example)

Who owns the data?

Do you know how to handle it at every moment?

What about security?

Physically, Legally, etc

How can we help?

Our difference is that we are working independently and are constantly monitoring the market along our Market Analyst colleagues whilst having hands on experience of the products and Product Marketing experience.
We have helped customers like you to define the right strategy based on maturity assessment, requirement gathering both on the Business Service perspective and the Operational and Technical daily implications.
We accompany your teams in driving the change that is unavoidable. Our approach is consistent and aligned with ITIL best practices. We consider the recommendations of the renowned Gartner Quadrant and Forrester Wave as well as our own market research . We concentrate on your specific context, industry and environment as we don’t think that a “one size fits all” strategy is viable for every industry and organisation.

B2ITA: Business to IT Alignment

The services we propose are not limited to the selection of a product. We have developed what we call the “Business to IT Alignment model”. Business to IT alignment is a model that we develop and use in our approach to product replacement. Although ITIL has introduced a great way to communicate within the IT Organisation by defining a common vision and language, it is somewhat meaningless and remote to the Business users. We believe that such a major event as the end of life of a product is one time opportunity to get the Business and IT together and establish constructive collaboration.

Leadership and Communication

Our expertise in leadership, consulting, coaching and listening and communication techniques sets us aside from the traditional consulting arena as we are putting People on top of the pyramid (People, Processes, Products and Partners). In this respect, we recognise the importance of building an effective front end to the IT Organisation as they become accessible and transparent both to the Business End Users community than to the Business Executives and Decision makers.
IT Service Management takes more and more precedence in these areas with the introduction of Self Service, Service Catalogue, Service Portfolio, Service Desk, Business Relationship Management supported by effective Reporting. Supplier Management and Resource Planning becomes also key activities as the concept is extended to include effective results measurement of 3rd parties as well as internal resources.
This sounds challenging to some organisations as they tend to have different approach in both cases. Now think about it from a Business perspective. For a Business user, it makes no difference to use a service provided by internal teams than an outsourced service. Cynically they sometimes prefer to deal with an external service provider as their services are clearer.

From an IT organisation perspective, you may wonder what to outsource or keep in house and some of these choices may be imposed to you as the Business evolves with the market.
Where do you stand with regards to Cloud Computing?
Are you ready to face an acquisition or a merge?
Are you ready to react if an entire Business Unit was to be sold or decide to select another service provider for their IT Services?