IBM Global Technology Services IBM Podcast Business of IT Executive Workshop and Business of IT Dashboard Welcome to Showcase on Services, an IBM podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Gluck, and my guests today are Jeanine Cotter, Vice President of IT Strategy and Architecture Services, and Marie Wieck, Vice President of Middleware Services, both from IBM Global Technology Services. In this series we're talking about new ways to buy and use services from IBM, and today's subject is the business of IT: that is, how companies can measure their IT activities and align them with overall business objectives. So we have two related service products to talk about. The first one, Jeanine, I'll ask you to discuss. And it's called the Business of IT Workshop. This service product, the Business of IT Executive Workshop, is based on the Component Business Model for the Business of IT which we refer to as the CBM for BOIT. This is a rapid half - to two-day workshop which helps the CIO question whether they have the right IT processes and skills in place to both implement and run an IT environment capable of satisfying an organization's business priorities.
The CBM for the Business of IT articulates a view of IT as a contributor and a driver of business value rather than simply a support function which is a very important distinction. So the client leads the workshop with a diagnostic of the prioritized parts of the organization and operation to work on first. And Marie Wieck, the dashboard is something different, even though it sounds a little bit the same. Yes, we have a Business of IT dashboard that really is a follow on solution that tries to identify the actual visibility of the services that you've prioritized. So if you've now picked certain elements of your IT infrastructure to focus on, how can you provide a visible view, a dashboard-based approach, of the key performance indicators around those service areas that deliver value back to the business. So how do you get more operational control and visibility to those services and relate them to the actual business tasks that you're trying to measure. What are some of the trends in the industry that have prompted IBM to come up with these two new offerings? Well, after a great deal of change starting in the 1990s what we see now is a time when companies are taking a much more controlled approach to spending and cost cutting with a new emphasis on business processes and a vision 2
that blends business and IT. So when it comes to optimizing IT, minimizing risk and enabling growth, these are all issues that CIOs all over the world in every industry are dealing with. This workshop and the follow on dashboard allows a CIO and his or her team to quickly get at the greatest pain points in their organization and operation and begin to address them. Once they are in agreement about where to focus, IBM can then offer a range of service products downstream to help transform their processes and operations. Makes me think of that old quote, if you don't know where you're going any road will get you there. This is about choosing the right path and then setting yourself up for success when it comes to implementation. Yes, and an important element of this workshop is gaining consensus up-front across the leadership team, which typically is the IT organization, the leadership of IT, but could include business stakeholders, so that once we do identify the, quote, hotspots of an organization or an operation, everyone in the company is then aligned around fixing those things. And this really is consistent as well with what we're hearing in terms of the CEO study that IBM did earlier this year and even the more recent study on the Institute of Business Value, that CEOs and CFOs are all really looking for ways to not only reduce costs but to increase the innovation and increase the 3
collaboration with their partners and their clients. And this provides a really good mechanism for the CIOs to try to connect with those mandates within a company. Let me see if I have this right. CIOs are like just about anybody else in business these days; they are being asked to do more, to innovative with less resource. This is a way to get there. Absolutely. Specific ways that clients benefit, let me take a guess: faster implementation times, getting these changes made with less headache, less expense. Absolutely. And one of the nice things about this workshop is it's a very rapid way to assess the places to go after. So within a half day, one day, a team can really have a nice plan for attack to go forward. So it's not a lengthy engagement. And the reason we're good at this is we take methodology that we've developed over the years and apply it to you and your business because it turns out no matter what the industry there's probably a lot more in common with a lot of these processes than you might at first think. Right, exactly. We have CBMs for each industry. The CBM for the Business of IT tends to be industry agnostic, because the processes and 4
components within an IT operation tend to be fairly standard across industries. Let's hear about a specific example of where we've gone in and done a workshop and see what happened. Well, we do have an example of a retail company in Europe who used this workshop to gain a comprehensive overview of its IT infrastructure and to begin to align its IT initiatives with the corporate goals that had been established. So the IT management team discussed in detail what challenges they face as a result of the need to grow their business. And they then had a comprehensive understanding of the issues and were able to implement effective strategies to create a more flexible environment to support those business objectives. The CIO will now use the information gained from the workshop to prioritize the IT projects and plan a budget for the next year. And the good news is the client is very confident that all the fiscal and labor investments in 2007 will directly support the business and create business value, which is a resonant theme amongst all CIOs that we talk to. Marie, do you have an example of where we've implemented the dashboard and it's provided value and we have very happy clients? Well, the dashboard is actually a brand new service product, so this is one of our new showcase products that we just announced and which we are shipping later this year. So the real focus right now has been with some of our pilot 5
customers, and we've done some work in both the banking and the pharmaceutical arena to work with our initial customers on the technology involved and on the methodology and approach. And what we've seen, we're leveraging technology from the Tivoli portfolio as part of the [Net cool and RAD] technology provides really strong performance in terms of the real-time capability and really has provided a clarity of view of the performance of indicators so that you really get a benefit before problems occur......so you can really try to take proactive action before problems materialize by looking at service levels and getting both historical trends as well as trying to plan in advance for things that may be production schedule related or fiscal close related, and you can actually balance and plan accordingly in your IT organization. So those are some of the benefits we're seeing with those early customers. Do we come to you for the workshops, or do you come to us anywhere in the world? How does that work? Yes, we will deliver the workshop anywhere in the world, and this is one that is based on a set of very established methods and the CBM framework so we can deliver it very consistently around the world. How are these services and IBM's approach different from what others in the marketplace are doing? 6
CBM is patented, so we use a patented IBM method to perform this analysis and the diagnostic of the client's IT environment to ensure that first they have a very comprehensive view of their current state. And then we have trained CBM consultants who are experts at working with client CIOs to ensure that every major IT area within their organization is analyzed in the framework and actions are defined. And both of these new service products are on a Web site, and you can get a lot more information about either one or more than a dozen others. They are. Talk to your IBM client rep or visit ibm.com/services/spotlight. I want to thank you both. Thank you. Thank you. This has been Showcase on Services, an IBM podcast. Thank you to my guests, Jeanine Cotter, Vice President of IT Strategy and Architecture Services, and Marie Wieck, Vice President of Middleware Services for IBM Global Technology Services. I'm Jeff Gluck, thank you for listening. [END OF SEGMENT] 7