What Does It Mean to Successfully Operate in “The Cloud Era”?

We have entered “The Cloud Era”. But what precisely does this mean and how can enterprises adapt and maximise the benefits of this?

In a nutshell, the Cloud Era enterprises now face is revolutionising service delivery and it’s not an optional shift. It won’t just go away, it’s an irreversible series of trends. Competition demands that enterprises keep up with what consumers want, or they will fall behind their competitors.

The Cloud Era encompasses elements such as mobile over fixed computing, personal devices being used for work, rather than provided by the enterprises, wireless rather than wired, cloud hosting rather than on-premises models and applications, or ‘apps’ rather than program suites. The pace of change today is rapid; tablets did not exist until 2010, but now they are being used by growing number of employees for work across various of industries.

All of these contrast starkly with the traditional computing approach of even the mid to late 1990s.

Desktop shipments declining

Recent research by Gartner found that Worldwide PC shipments (particularly enterprise desktop PCs) totaled 71.7 million units in the first quarter of 2015, a 5.2% fall from the first quarter of 2014. At the same time, shipments of mobile PCs, including notebooks, hybrid and Windows tablets, grew compared with a year ago. Gartner forecasts that PC replacements will be driven by thin and light notebooks with tablet functionality. Their early study suggests strong growth of hybrid notebooks, especially in mature markets, in 1Q15.

Research house IDC found that in the US PC market shrank by about one percent from the previous year, with shipments totaling 14.2 million PCs in 1Q 2015. Again any growth centred on mobility devices, portables, particularly around emerging product categories such as Chromebooks, Bing, Ultraslims and Convertibles. IDC said desktop shipments were also relatively sluggish this quarter.

The push for organisations to encompass “The Cloud Era” is coming from consumers not businesses.

A recent article on the Citrix website puts it quite well: “The consumerisation of IT is letting today’s users connect to IT services using an array of devices — from desktops, to tablets, to mobile phones. Pervasive network connectivity, both wired and wireless, is driving anywhere access for mobile and remote workers. Multi-tenant data centres are more efficient and are powering entirely new business models. Elastic compute architectures are enabling web-like applications that automatically scale in response to fluctuations in demand.”

Consumers demanding more

So, highly tech-savvy consumers are now demanding that organisations cater for their mobile, connected lifestyles. They expect the same service responses from your business that they would get from Cloud giants like Amazon, Facebook, Google and eBay. If they are in any way disappointed, it is too easy to switch their business somewhere else. Forget consumer loyalty, ‘it’s the technology, stupid’. Organisations are now primarily measured on how successfully and easily they deliver their products and services to whatever personal device a consumer may choose to use.

The Cloud today offers many faces – public, private or hybrid – and it has become a very specialised and somewhat complicated IT aspect, explaining why organisations are turning to external service provides, expert in cloud management for enterprises, to ensure they keep up with the pack. It could be argued that the days are fading fast where enterprises, particularly large ones, could rely on internal IT departments and experts to configure and manage their complex IT diaspora.

Outsource providers popular

Just like organisations would not consider drilling for their own oil to power their equipment, or installing their own power stations [Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) aside, because this is another story] or necessarily building, operating and maintaining their own data centres, they now routinely outsource key IT services and facilities to external service providers, whose business it is to keep systems up to date and effectively operating.

Such outsourcing is popular because there are so many opportunities to benefit from ‘The Cloud Era’, particularly in partnership with expert outsourcers and managed service providers who know the market and thoroughly track the changes and trends.

It could be argued that only qualified and experienced external IT service providers have the skills, knowledge and expertise to properly enable enterprises to thrive in ‘The Cloud Era’. So, solid advice is to do your homework and find an outsourcing partner who can help you make the journey.

Logicalis is such a partner, to find out how Logicalis can support you and your business head to the Solutions and Services page.

2015 – A Tipping Point for Work Model Changes

Changes to the world of work, which have been gaining momentum in recent years, are forecast to reach a tipping point in 2015. Enterprises need to prepare for, and take account of, these shifts away from the 9-5, Monday to Friday work model and away from the central city based office.

Telecommuting, working from home or even from cafes, job hopping based on how technology friendly organisations are and generation clashes in the work place, are all set to be increasing features of the work world. But how prepared is your enterprise to capitalise on these growing trends?

These tectonic shifts point to the need for organisations to at least have policies in place to account for workplace changes, even if they don’t enthusiastically adopt them. The popularity of new workplace approaches come on top of recent Australian political discussion about changes to penalty rates, the dominance of part-time and casual work, plus the increasing enterprise hunger for workplace flexibility.

IT leads the way

And, of course, IT enterprises, service providers and technology focused organisations have been at the forefront of work place changes, long pushing for outsourcing, managed services and resource sharing, which all pursue greater agility, flexibility and efficiency.

A recent article in Business Insider Magazine, by IT commentator Michael McQueen, highlights six key areas of work place change that are worth revisiting here.

1. Third space working environments – McQueen postulates that 2015 is the year in which flexible working arrangements and telecommuting will become mainstream. Research by IT giant Cisco has found that 89% of their employees across the globe telecommute at least once a week. At the financial benefits are considerable – a saving of some three million commuting hours per year, equating to some US$370 million in extra productive worktime. Cisco calculated that this telecommuting also save about one billion dollars in real estate costs over two-and-a-half years. In Australia, the Federal Government has set a target of 12% of the public service to be working from home on high speed broadband by 2020.And it’s not just working from home. In Germany, a company called Regus is already offering specialised workplaces, co-located with Shell service stations, where mobile workers can access the web, print and scan documents, while occupying workspaces paid for by time used.

2. Increasing job hopping – Today’s employees certainly have itchy feet and will switch jobs for better pay, and even for better technology and company access to social media as part of their work. A survey by Fortune Magazine has found that 86% of employees are looking for work outside their current occupations. A US survey by CareerBuilder found that nearly one third of employers even expect their staff to job hop. It’s important for organisations to pander to their employee’s hunger for technology, like social media, and to be engaged in their work and to consider colleagues as friends.

3. Generation Ys are running the show – Another study by CareerBuilder discovered that 38% of the workforce is now being run by Generation-Y) individuals (born in in the 1980s or early 2000s), who often have been thrust into managerial positions by necessity, without adequate training. These managers tend to favor fellow workers in their own age group and believe their demographic knows much more about technology than older workers.

4. The Generation Z challenge – Born from 1999 – 2012, Generation Zs are moving into the workplace and are far more technology immersed, better educated and confident than even the Generation Ys. The downside is they are also lack resilience, interpersonal skills and can have low attention spans.

5. Employer branding is increasingly important – Social media policies have been shown to be a valued factor when employees consider a job. Research has shown that 58% of people are more likely to want to work at a company if they are using social media and more than 20% are more likely to stay at their company if they are using social media. The Gen-Xs measure the technology friendliness of organisations and if they are dissatisfied, are happy to immediately spread their discontent via the web. They want more from their enterprises that just corporate announcements and press releases; something more real like social media commentary.

6. The Freelance Economy – A recent study by Elance-oDesk found that 53 million Americans are now freelancers – 34% of the US workforce. In Australia 30% of Australians now undertake some form of flexible, freelance work with this forecast to increase to 50% by 2020. Companies are now looking to hire more temp works and consultants to save costs, such as holiday pay and sickness benefits.

This year 2015 could be remembered for the time when older, traditional companies, reluctant to adapt, are left behind by smaller, more forward thinking organisations which grasp the changed workplace trends and become more competitive.

Logicalis can help you survive in this ever-changing world of workplace trends, to find out more check out our Solutions and Services section or head straight to the Logicalis People page to see how flexible resourcing could possibly save your IT company.

Revealing Project Management Success Secrets

With Project Management (PM) such a key function for any external service provider, just what are the secrets to good PM delivery that could differentiate one from another?

To determine these secrets, we picked the brains of Daryl Yeo, from the National Project Management Office at IT Infrastructure and Managed Services provider, Logicalis Australia. What we found showed that Logicalis has a complex system that takes Project Management very seriously.

Yeo revealed the two key secrets to good PM delivery – accountability and governance – plus appropriate PM enablement for the organisation.

 

Weekly PM review

On the accountability and governance front, Yeo said that Logicalis has a Project Management Office that reviews all projects weekly (regardless of their value) against the key performance indicators of schedule, scope, budget and customer satisfaction.

“If any of these indicators are flagged as in risk, an action plan/mitigation strategy is formed immediately,” he said. “In addition to this, we have executive support and buy in by our CEO and CFO. Every month we hold an internal Project Board Review where the project managers report on the health of their projects to the CFO and CEO. All projects are reviewed to ensure they adhere to the Logicalis PMO Standard Practice.”

Yeo said that Logicalis also had an ‘Enablement Model’ for their Project Management.

“In addition to our governance practice, we understand that the success and health of a project is often in the hands of a project manager,” he said. “The purpose of the PMO in this regard is to ensure that the project managers have the correct support or environment to manage their projects in accordance to the Logicalis standard.”

 

Project manager enablement

The Logicalis Enablement Model has several aspects. Firstly, project managers are coached in the company’s professional services vision so they develop the values to guide them to deliver amazing customer experiences and to aid with decision-making.

The next fundamental building block of the Enablement Model has been designed to ensure project managers have the appropriate tools and templates in place to deliver consistency and effectiveness for the benefit of customers.

Next, the project managers are armed with a set of goals and objectives that align with their department’s strategic and organisational objectives. These are broken down to engender meaningful and clear understanding.

With the Logicalis management philosophy that ‘the carrot is mightier than the stick’ there is a rewards and recognition scheme attached to the project manager’s goals and objectives to make success worth their while.

 

The Logicalis Academy

To ensure that project managers are qualified and appropriately experienced, the company has established a Logicalis Academy where they can build their capabilities and help their careers grow.

Yeo said that Logicalis has a set of processes and procedures, based on industry best practice. Each project manager is taken through Logicalis’ practices and standards to ensure consistency and increased likelihood of successful projects for their customers.

So with all this coaching, training, checking and double-checking, we asked Yeo: ‘What can Logicalis clients expect relating to Project Management through Logicalis? What can clients learn from good Project Management?’

 

Risk and issues assessment

“Logicalis clients can expect their projects to run on time, budget and scope through Project Management,” he said. “To have their projects fully owned by Logicalis includes a full risk and issues assessment of their project – this is a proactive way to mitigate potential problems that may impact the success of your project and to ensure that if a problem does eventuate, the most effective solution is collaborated and approved before implementation.”

Yeo said that clients can also expect to receive project schedules that consist of timelines and planning to aid future decisions.

“In addition to this, clients will also receive full project reporting and progress reports through the right communication and engagement model throughout the customer’s organisation,” he said.

And, perhaps the cherry on top of the Logicalis Project Management ice cream sundae: “Clients can expect organisational change management with their projects too,” said Yeo.

“Organisational change is about effective people management by taking them through, and on, the journey when introducing a change, regardless of how big or small the project impact is perceived to be on its people.”

To find out more about Logicalis’ Project Management offering, head to last week’s post or to read more on how Logicalis can support your business, visit our Solutions and Services page.

Project Management Critical for 3rd Platform Implementations

To the layperson, Project Management (PM) may appear to be dry, administrative and boring, but to the IT world, it is critical to success.

With enterprises now seeking to take advantage of the new 3rd Platform revolution which is underway, the adoption and implementation of Cloud, Big Data and Analytics and Mobility must be properly measured and tracked by a professional project management.

When you scratch the ‘surface paint’, you will find that PM is the fundamental skillset offered by managed service providers, consultants and external IT experts of all labels and persuasions.

Research House Gartner sees PM as “the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements”. They say the primary value of PM goes beyond just delivering on-time and on-budget projects, but is ensuring expected business outcomes and realised value.

 

PM a culture measure

Gartner rightly regards PM as so important because the biggest changes from project activities are actually people-oriented, influencing culture and mind-sets across the whole enterprise. The way an organisation approaches one particular project, will likely be the template they apply to all projects and to the way they generally do business.

Successful PM, say Gartner, “is characterised by the ongoing development and refinement of methods and practices and ensuring that any software tools deployed meet the needs without becoming a burden”.

A solid way of determining the ability and expertise of a service provider is to check their project management approach and to grill them on their overall philosophy.

Daryl Yeo, from the National Project Management Office at IT Infrastructure and Managed Services provider, Logicalis Australia, says his firm believes that the success of a project is determined by the ability to manage and control the project.

 

Strategic and tactical investments

“We understand that each project from our customer is more than just another IT integration or implementation – they are business investments that are tactical and strategic to help achieve a business outcome,” Yeo said. “So we take pride when our customers trust us to deliver and we make it our goal to ensure that they see the realisation of their investments in the time required by the business, that the investment delivers what they need and, most of all, fits within their budget.”

Yeo shared the most common project management issues that Logicalis encounters. Misaligned expectations between project delivery – and what is in the scope to be delivered – stands out as number one.

“This occurs frequently because often the time when a solution is presented, to when the project commences, can be months or a year. In this time requirements may have changed or the environment has shifted,” he said.

 

Customer Consultation

“To avoid this, we facilitate a project kick-off with the customer that runs through the scope and covers the project objectives. This normally allows us to clarify 80 to 90% of assumptions regarding scope. Typically for larger and complex projects, where the outcome is so far to conceive in detail, a miss-aligned assumption or expectation can often cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in unforeseeable costs to the project. In these scenarios, experience has taught us to break up larger more complex projects into smaller more manageable projects,” Yeo said.

Tightening IT budgets have highlighted a specific PM danger of which enterprises should be aware of.

Yeo said that, unfortunately due to many IT budget constraints customers are adopting the lean approach to services by solely selecting proposals that are the most cost effective.

 

Dangerous PM trend

“As a result, we are starting to see a trend where some customers don’t see the value of effective project management and are requesting that it be removed from the services quote,” he said. “As a result of this, we have several customer-managed projects that have exceeded deadlines and budget. We’ve had cases where an implementation should take 3 months but is still open after 12 months.”

“A common misconception is the lack of visibility and understanding in unforseen cost to their business as a result of delays and budget overruns. For example, an organisation may save an extra $5,000 on project services, but as a result of delays the actual cost of impact to their business (in not being able to manage change effectively) is measured in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Project Management (PM) is a complex and involved subject (Frost & Sullivan offers more than 40 distinct PM courses) so the next blog in our series will also take on this examination of PM.

In the meantime, have a look at how Logicalis can help you and your business stay afloat.

 

The Emerging IoT Threat to Information Security

CIOs are facing a huge impact from the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) on their digital and information security.

With enterprises beginning to realise the importance of handling Big Data and incorporating Smart Analytics in their ITC systems, IoT is now forecast to add vast mountains of extra data to the already incredible avalanche with which business now has to cope.

So, the key question is: how well is an organisation (yours) prepared for this IoT impact? What is your strategy for developing ‘Next Generation Security’?

In December 2014, IDC came out with some frightening IoT predictions from their ‘FutureScape: Worldwide Internet of Things 2015 Predictions’ web conference. Among these they concluded that “within two years, 90% of IT networks will have an IoT-based security breach and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) will be forced to adopt new IoT policies”.

Complex IoT challenges

Gartner said that “the requirements for securing the IoT will be complex, forcing CISOs to use a blend of approaches from mobile and cloud architectures, combined with industrial control, automation and physical security.”

Perhaps even more startling, IDC predicts that “within three years, 50% of IT networks will transition from having excess capacity to handle the additional IoT devices to being network-constrained with nearly 10% of sites being overwhelmed”.

Gartner predicts that “by 2020, the installed base of ‘things’ – excluding PCs, tablets and smartphones – will grow to 26 billion units”.

Historic Anthem hack attack

In February this year, cyber-criminals, thought to be based in China, obtained the unencrypted information – including names, addresses, social security numbers – of some 80 million customers of US health insurer Anthem.

Ed Simcox, Logicalis’s Healthcare Practice Leader, gave this advice relating to the Anthem attack, thought to be one of the biggest in history to date:

“Given heightened attacks such as this one, it’s an important reminder that CIOs must maintain the necessary security posture,” Simcox said. “They need to do so even in the face of declining IT budgets and important, competing priorities by evaluating security against these other priorities.

“CIOs need to be comfortable communicating the business value of security initiatives to boards of directors and senior leadership. Only then can they acquire the proper funding levels and organisational support necessary to properly care for security.”

A range of Australian attitudes

Logicalis Australia Solutions Architect, Dr Greg Daley said that, in parts of Australia there is still a focus on controlling the ‘pipes’ data is accessed through.

“But I think that is becoming table stakes now: threats arrive through diverse sources, including paths independent of the corporate Internet service,” he said. “I think the focus in IT security will start shifting to control and management of breaches as organisations aim to trace and mitigate business impacts from attack.”

Dr Daley said that digital security threats are almost always worse from internal sources. Productivity relies on staff members having ready and flexible access to data. Internal security controls need to be robust to prevent such incidents, also because user level privileges are a significant vector for exterior attackers.

Changing security effectiveness

He highlighted recent trends towards encryption and said they have altered the effectiveness of perimeter security measures, such as web proxies.

“This means that threat mitigation needs to move to the end-systems, which embeds security in the end applications,” he said.

Dr Daley said that as a business-focused technology infrastructure vendor, Logicalis has always placed security as a key enabler for its customers.  Their philosophy is that security is a function that has to be “baked into infrastructure and services”, and has to be considered from the business requirements and design stages through to implementation and operation.

There has been a movement in recent years towards operational technology which means organisations are leveraging computing and network technologies for productivity.

Security ‘baked into the system’

“The risks that come along with this are that security breaches no longer impact the back-of-house operations: they can literally stop a road, a machine or a transaction,” he said. ” This means that the digital security of the environment has to be considered in the operational risk assessment, and once again this needs to be baked into the system from its inception.”

Dr Daley had this valuable advice: “Organisations which seek to integrate best security practice into their organisation’s processes from inception onward will limit the scope and damage of attacks,” he said. “Where they have systematic plans to defend, identify, remediate and recover from attack, they will be able to focus on core business with some certainty.”

To find out more about how Logicalis can help you and your business, head to the Solutions & Services page.

CIOs Must Ride The Wave of Change

There’s an old ancient aphorism that ‘change is the only constant in life’.

Although this was originally coined by a Greek Philospher (Heraclitus) somewhere around 500 BC, he may well have been talking about CIOs.

For at least the past two decades or more, the role of the CIO has been disrupted and redefined by an on-going wave of technology innovation which shows no signs of slowing. And, depending on how you look at this, it’s a continuing threat or an opportunity – a glass half-full or half-empty decision.

Research house Gartner sees more competition and challenges for CIOs in the near future because they are “increasingly overloaded with additional responsibilities relating to issues such as digital innovation, change management programs and transformation”.

The new CDO

Gartner predicts (February 2015) that, because of the importance of Big Data, data analysis and digital innovation, 25% of organisations will have a Chief Data Officer (CDO) by 2017. They say this will rise to 50% in heavily regulated industries such as banking and insurance. And the push has already started. Gartner research found that 20% of large organisations’ CEOs have already involved a data officer in leading their organisation’s digital innovation.

Does your organisation have a Chief Data Officer yet?

It’s worth thinking about, because the financial impact of badly handling data is apparently costly. Gartner warns that having poor quality data currently costs an average organisation about US$13.5 million per year.

“Few organisations use a consistent, common language for understanding business information and the semantics around it; instead, they generally maintain divergent and often conflicting definitions of the same data,” said Debra Logan, vice president and Gartner Fellow.

The value of information

Gartner believes that CIOs and CDOs must work shoulder to shoulder. “The CDO is a peer of the CIO, but practises a different discipline,” said Ms Logan. “The CDO also becomes an advocate of information, not just a governor of it. Increasingly, successful information governance is about advocating the use of information as a source of value, not just controlling and monitoring it.”

Logicalis’ Vice President of Strategy, Asia, Joe Poon, also sees positive opportunities for CIOs, in today’s hyper-change environment, to create a new kind of IT department, run by a ‘hybrid CIO’ and acting as a critical connector between the business, its technology and IT service needs.

“The IT function will become a kind of pseudo service provider, freed from the burden of supporting legacy technology and instead focused on selecting and delivering technology solutions that support business agility and which are aligned with a wider business strategy,” Mr Poon said.

In the bigger picture, Mr Poon echoes Gartner’s forecasts. He says “effective collaboration between CIOs, CEOs and CFOs is becoming even more critical. It could come to define not only an organisation’s IT spend, but its ability to compete in a new business reality.”

Evolving corporate responsibilities

Research last year, by recruiting company Hays, was already pointing to this ‘merging’ of corporate responsibilities.

Nick Deligiannis, Managing Director of recruiting company Hays in Australia & New Zealand stuck his neck out by saying that technology “will no longer sit in the domain of the CTO or CIO, but will instead integrate with both marketing and finance.”

“This integration of both technology with marketing, and technology with finance, will see staff in these departments become jointly responsible for outcomes. It will create a need for people with multilevel hybrid knowledge,” he said.

“For example, in the digital marketing space professionals need to engage technology to inform their decisions. Meanwhile marketing analytics professionals use modelling and analytics practices to improve their marketing outcomes.”

Better business analysis

Business analysis is another example where professionals have a functional background and in-depth knowledge of their industry and company, but also need to translate requirements in technical areas. As a result, marketing and finance professionals will need to enhance their technology skills to remain competitive in the jobs market.”

So, rolling change is afoot in the C-suite for many organisations and the measure of their success in adapting, will be their willingness to put aside entrenched beliefs and be innovative and much more collaborative.

Is your organisation properly prepared to evolve?

From integration to maintenance and cloud solutions, Logicalis has many offerings that can support your business in this changing world of IT. To find out more head to the solutions and services section on the Logicalis website.

Third Platform ITaaS – a Competitive Strategy

As we pass through the business-technology predictions and forecast season, there are strong indications that managed IT services providers will definitely be in great demand over the next few years.

The range of choices, complexity and demands stemming from the accelerating popularity of new business technology directions requires focused expertise and experience that generally can only come with the acquired knowledge and experience of professional managed service providers.

In recent research (January 2015) IDC has concluded that these 3rd Platform technologies – cloud computing, big data, social media, and mobile devices – are now fundamentally altering “how IT organisations function, how business is conducted, and how enterprises compete”.

IDC’s bold forecast is that by 2016, nearly two-thirds of global competitive strategies will require 3rd Platform IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS).

Nearly Half Favour External Service

Separate research by managed services provider Logicalis backs up this IDC finding. The Logicalis 2014 Optimal Services survey discovered that nearly (47%) want the majority (50% or more) of their IT services to be provided or managed by external service providers, including cloud (IaaS/PaaS & SaaS). Just 3% wanted all those services to be retained in-house.

IDC even goes as far as declaring that: “The ability of IT to immediately achieve a maturing business focus within its strategic planning and execution process is now an imperative”. There has even been one IDC forecast that 3rd platform technologies will drive 90% of global IT growth through to 2020.

And there’s this gem from the IDC report, which should jump out at CIOs, because it recommends a cost-effective, ‘step-by-step’ cautious approach to 3rd platform transformation:

IDC says: “Rather than tackle IT business-facing objectives through massive project implementations, IDC recommends companies take a ‘theory of constraints’ approach, frequently used within ITaaS to quickly identify, analyse, and resolve a prioritised impediment (constraint) to IT-business alignment, thereby empowering subsequent energy and action for a second and third IT-business alignment constraint.”

Advanced analytics a priority

Competing research house Gartner adds ‘advanced analytics’ to the priority list that CIOs should be considering for 2015 and beyond.

Alexander Linden, research director at Gartner said: “Many of our clients assume that once they have mastered analytics, they can then progress to the next level with simply some learning and additional software tools. The reality is that advanced analytics isn’t just a more complex form of ‘normal’ analytics.

‘Normal’ analytics mainly reports what has happened (descriptive analytics), whereas advanced analytics solves problems using predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics, he said. Predictive analytics predicts future outcomes and behaviour, such as a customer’s shopping behaviour or a machine’s failure. Prescriptive analytics goes further, suggesting actions to take based on the predictions.

So important is data analytics to business success that Gartner points to new specialised executives being appointed in the near future to specifically manage this.

Citizen data scientists

One of Gartner’s latest predictions is that through to 2017, the number of ‘citizen data scientists’ will grow five times faster than the number of highly-skilled data scientists.

“Extracting value out of data is not a trivial task, and one of the key elements of any such “making sense out of data” program is the people, who must have the right skills,” said Gartner’s Linden. “Data scientists are not traditional business analysts, they are professionals with the rare capability to derive mathematical models from data to reap clear and hard-hitting business benefits. They need to network well across different business units and work at the intersection of business goals, constraints, processes, available data and analytical possibilities. ”

Linden said that many of Gartner’s most advanced clients are experimenting with the notions of chief data officers (CDOs) or chief analytics officers (CAOs).

“Sometimes the CDO/CAO will directly command a (virtual) data science lab”, he said. “We think that those labs must be orchestrated virtually, with the (citizen) data scientists distributed throughout the organization.”

Big data optimism

Other research (January 2015) by The Economist Intelligence Unit has also found much executive optimism for using advanced analytics and Big Data, but some concerns about its application.

Key findings of the EIU research included:

• Executives at the helm of organisations today are experimenting with ways that big data can be used to strategically add business value. Leadership is needed to bring about a cultural shift toward big data but disagreement exists about who should lead big-data adoption;
• Most top executives believe big data is a useful tool, with 23% claiming it will revolutionise the way business is managed;
• Business needs to take an integrated approach to big-data implementation;
• Customer insights and targeting are currently the highest priority for the application of big data — cited by 42% of C-level executives, but new uses of big data are spreading.

To find out more about how Logicalis can support you and your business in the future head to our Solutions & Services page.

Latest IT Trends force CIOs To Become Service Integration Experts

Outsourcing and managed services are cementing their place in the global business environment. Recent surveys clearly indicate that CIOs now acknowledge that they need to become experts in service integration.

One survey, of 177 CIOs spanning 24 countries, the second annual Optimal Services Study from Logicalis, found strong support for outsourcing. The survey involved CIOs and IT Directors from mid-market organisations across 24 countries spanning Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

The survey found that almost half (47%) want the majority (50% or more) of their IT services to be provided or managed by external service providers, including cloud (IaaS/PaaS & SaaS).

Over half the respondents agreed that by 2016, 80% of IT budgets will be based on providing service integration for a broad portfolio of internal and external sources of IT and business services.

A change in IT recruiting

The survey results pointed to a strong need to transform organisations’ IT skills base. This means they will have to recruit specialists with broader, business IT orientated skills.

They must actively reduce the level of technology their teams maintain in-house, and they must succeed where they have so far failed – in refocusing the CIO role on strategic activities.

This latest Optimal Services survey also found that CIOs recognise the need for them to become experts in service integration.

In a key pointer to the growing presence of outsourcing, the survey found that: “Line of Business will now want access to a growing number of market offerings delivering transformational line of business applications making the selection, integration, governance and management of ‘as a service’ as important as maintaining in-house technologies.”

Cloud deployments grow

Separate recent research by IDC pointed to the growing prevalence of the use of the cloud, both outsourced and internally. IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, for the third quarter of 2014 found that cloud deployments made up almost one third of combined worldwide server, disk storage and ethernet switch infrastructure spending.

The total cloud revenue grew 16% on the previous year, to US$6.5 billion.

“Public and private clouds represent the ‘compute factories’ and ‘digital content depots’ of the 3rd Platform era,” noted Richard Villars, Vice President, Datacentre and Cloud research at IDC.

“Whether internally owned or ‘rented’ from a service provider, cloud environments are strategic assets that organisations of all types must rely upon to quickly introduce new services of unprecedented scale, speed, and scope. Their effective use will garner first –mover advantage to any organisation in a hyper-competitive market.”

Managed service providers

The survey results and the positive future for outsourcing bode well for organisations such as Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider with a breadth of knowledge and expertise in communications and collaboration; data centre and cloud services; and managed services.

Logicalis is now seeing managed services extend into the Cloud, where they manage a customer’s Cloud-based application environment.

Logicalis, with an average customer tenure of 5.3 years, deploys and manages secure, converged infrastructure that can increase agility, reduce risk for clients through a consistent and repeatable framework, with a record showing it can cut operating costs by 20-50%.

Range of managed services

Logicalis offers ‘traditional’ managed services around IT infrastructure, covering networks, data centre (compute, storage) and voice/collaboration. They can provide full management where the customer can’t make changes to their infrastructure; typically it’s co-management where the customer retains full visibility and control of their IT infrastruture, but rely on Logicalis to keep it all running.

In some cases, Logicalis has the flexibility to provide ‘out of hours’ management to augment a customer’s IT department, where they want to manage their environment during business hours.

Logicalis says that their advice to customers is not to focus on the technology, but to determine what service levels are required and what technical – technology skills are needed in-house (for example, for a business-critical application). Then to benchmark internal costs and investigate a managed service to take care of ‘keeping the lights on’. Watch our latest managed services video to learn what it takes to support business critical operations with mature managed services.

What to Ask Before Signing Up for a Service Desk

There are some important questions that should be asked of providers by organisations considering signing up for a full-equipped Service Desk solution. After all, this is an important decision with considerable ramifications.

Any organisation’s Service Desk provides a single point of contact and interface for both users and IT employees: it’s a window into the organisation’s entire IT environment, actively monitoring incidents and user questions and it should work to maximise service availability.

The Service Desk performance is a clear demonstration of competency, efficiency and professionalism. If it doesn’t leave customers satisfied, the organisation has a major problem.

Far from being a gloried help desk, the Service Desk should be measured, monitored and controlled within the discipline of IT Service Management, as defined by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

Disruptive trends

Research House IDC says:” The rapid proliferation of disruptive trends such as the consumerisation of IT, BYOD, mobility, and virtualisation is driving increasingly heterogeneous and hybrid IT environments that, in turn, are adding significant complexity to IT service delivery and support within the enterprise.

“As IT environments become ever more hybrid, Service Desk management solutions that offer advanced integration with both on-premises and cloud-based technologies will increasingly gain traction in the enterprise. Likewise, the need for better change control, discovery, software license management, and compliance tracking is also helping drive demand in this market,” says Robert Young, Research Manager, Client Device and IT Service Management Software.

“In addition, Service Desk software delivered through SaaS will also continue to be a growth driver as customers continue to seek solutions that reduce up-front capital expenditures as well as ongoing maintenance costs. What’s more, SaaS-based solutions can often offer faster procurement and delivery time frames than on-premises implementations.”

Questions to ask

• Relevant questions that should be asked of potential providers include:
• Is their Service Desk is dedicated to the task, or is it comprised on shared resources?
• Is an ITSM tool used, such as Remember or ServiceNow and are they properly configured?
• Is there a formal process in place for the Service Desk to use?
• Are any processes in place based on a methodology like ITIL?

Properly monitoring and reporting on the performance of the Service Desk is also important.

• Does the business have a clear understanding of what the Service Desk will deliver?
• Is there a Service Catalogue in place. Are there agreed service levels established and do they get regularly reported to the business?
• Do regular meetings happen with the business to discuss the Service Desk performance?

Another key indicator and predictor of Service Desk performance is staff satisfaction and contentment.

• What is the staff turnover of the Service Desk?
• Is there a career path available to the analysts?
• Do the staff receive proper on-going training in ITIL and CompTIA+?
• Does the provider have adequate strategies to cope with staff absences?

The best time to ask all these questions is before any agreement is signed, not after.

Staff turnover

Staff turnover has a direct relationship to Service Desk user satisfaction. Does the provider do regular customer satisfaction surveys and what are the results? A high level of customer satisfaction points to a well operating Service Desk.

Organisations seeking a Service Desk now have a variety of options and flexibility available, for example, Logicalis offers on-premise Service Desks for larger customers who want it outsourced, but in-house.

Customers can opt for a leveraged, on-shore Australian based Service Desk, located in a Logicalis office, or some form of hybrid using some or all of the options. Logicalis has a record of service excellence having deliver 1,000 project over the past decade, plus more than 100 managed services customers.

As to the overall future of the Service Desk and overall customer service, Research firm Gartner predicts that “By 2016, 35% of IT operations organisations will have 75% of IT service desk contacts from the business resolved by virtual assistants.”

To find out more about Logicalis’ Service Desk offering, go here.

Flexible Extra Resources for the Changing World of Work

The world of work is gaining greater flexibility and the shift – brought on by amazing advances in technology over the past few years – is forcing 21st century businesses to adapt to survive.

Employees, particularly in ICT-related industries, are changing their attitudes to the 9-to-5-work week and are developing different social expectations. How and when people expect to work is vastly different now to what it was less than two decades ago. In this emerging new world of employment – fueled by the technology ‘generation gap’ between ‘digital natives’ and older executives – managers are becoming viewed as peers, or even working to the instructions of fellow employees, so the idea of being ‘beholden to the boss’ is fading.

New professions and disciplines

In the IT world new professions and disciplines have emerged, such as project management, which is now taken for granted but was not much known outside the building industry in the 1990s. Other new professional models include change management, business analyst, Chief Security Officer and perhaps, in the not too distant future, Chief Digital Officer.

Bosses now need to climb off their pedestals and work hard to deliver to their team, becoming part of the team and leading by example, rather than ruling with an iron fist. It’s an exciting but challenging time. The generation gap is widening.

The speed of this breaking wave of social change means that success now hinges on the ability of companies to adapt to social and technological transformation; on their ability to be flexible to market demands. The emergence of this historic evolution of the work environment is having its impact on the managed services models provided by outsourcing and managed services companies like Logicalis Australia.

Breadth of knowledge and expertise

To better deal with revised business expectations and the changing work environment, Logicalis has developed a specialised services delivery model called Logicalis People (Flexible Resources). This is an extension of the service offerings already being provided by Logicalis; a different outsourcing approach which extends the technical, project management or other service offerings already being provided by Logicalis, as part of it’s core business.

Logicalis People goes beyond what is offered by traditional recruitment companies in that expert consultants are supplied, complete with supporting services. They can draw from facilities such as the Logicalis Lab plus the collective expertise of the Logicalis professional services team. They function as an additional expert unit and do not, in any way, compete with, or replace, an organisation’s existing workforce.

For short or long-term projects

Logicalis clients can adopt Logicalis People to deal with short-term, ad hoc projects, to augment large project teams, or to assist with short and long term consulting exercises. It’s like a ‘plug and play’ co-sourcing approach, designed to help enterprises to be innovative and to work smarter. And, it turns fixed staff costs into variable ones.

This new package is a total resource supply division of Logicalis that applies the concept of utility computing to the supply of skilled people. It is a strategic resourcing solution that removes the need for the expensive liabilities, training costs and other overheads that come with recruiting new permanent employees.

Logicalis People is designed to help companies keep expensive permanent headcount under control and to maximise productivity. Logicalis can leverage it’s existing relationships and partner eco-system to provide resourcing strategies that combine project, T&M (test and measurement) and Logicalis People resources to provide the best possible services fit for an IT Manager’s business and technical requirements.

A smooth partnership

Through its global experience, accumulated knowledge and trusted expertise, Logicalis has developed a network of resource solutions – now strengthened by Logicalis People – that enhance the discussion with clients around their specific resource pain points. This means a smoother partnership to develop the key business strategies to best suit the client’s needs.

Companies seeking to increase their flexibility, to increase productivity and to better cope with today’s increasingly dynamic business world, should investigate Logicalis People as a very practical strategy for greater success. To find out more, go to our Flexible Resourcing page.