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SPONSORED REPORT ■
Regina Moran, CEO of Fujitsu Ireland, believes managed services
are a crucial weapon in the armoury of modern business leaders
WHERE do managed services fit into the modern What’s the first practical step you would recommend
business – is this now a critical boardroom issue? to a CEO/CFO looking at managed services?
With the downturn in the economy, I think people An excellent place to start is a ‘benefits realisation’
realise that their business needs to be lean to survive. exercise, where you clearly identify the business bene-
There are probably more senior executives looking at fits you are looking for, such as cost reductions or serv-
their internal business processes and asking themselves ice improvement. Once you do this, it’s easier to explain
whether there is a more efficient and cost-effective way to the rest of the organisation why the change is neces-
of supporting the business. For example, when IT is sary and also easier to go to the market and explain
optimised, it helps to ‘sharpen the saw’ of the entire what you want in business terms, as well as technology
business. Managed services are one way of delivering terms.
this optimisation.
What are main things that can go wrong with a
Are managed services right for everyone; how do you managed services engagement and how can they best
go about deciding whether your organisation might be avoided?
benefit? It stands to reason that you need to know what you
Managed services have a place in all businesses – small, have before you try to change it. So a very common
medium or large. Everybody should consider at some mistake is not properly defining your current or ‘as is’
stage whether to do everything themselves or to hand state. This leads to an absence of what Gartner terms
over some of it for management by a third party that “baseline information” about the organisation. Another
may have a better knowledge and a deeper pool of mistake is getting into an inflexible contract with a
resources. Your managed services requirement will also service provider and finding that as your business
differ depending on the size of your business and the changes – grows or contracts – you are locked into
complexity of its IT requirement – you can have a very some financial arrangement. A third pitfall is embark-
small company with complex requirements and con- ing on a big-bang type project, when an incremental,
versely a large company with a relatively straightfor- block-by-block initiative might have been a more
ward ‘commodity’ IT requirement. appropriate approach.
Should a managed services initiative be led by the How long does it take to put a managed service
CEO or CIO? in place?
The CEO – undoubtedly. You’re talking about a signif- Like any project, this depends on the complexity
icant change to your business model so the CEO has to involved. If you start with just desktop management,
be involved and lead that organisational change. I think that can be done in a relatively short space of time – a
that sometimes there is not enough senior-level few weeks perhaps. But if you’re talking about the
involvement in the decision to adopt managed services, desktop, server, storage and applications layer, this will
in the selection process and also thereafter for the take longer. It also depends on whether the project
initial transition/transformation period. involves just a ‘transition’ to a new organisation run-
ning the infrastructure at a lower cost, or whether it
Which is the better approach to managed services – involves a ‘transformation’ element as well. That is,
big bang or step-by-step? employing new practices and systems developed by the
Where managed services are concerned, one size does service provider in order to drive better service levels
not fit all. Big bang outsourcing – where you give every- and additional cost savings.
thing to a service provider – can be quite daunting and
risky too, especially if you have never done something How can I get the most out of my managed service
similar before. A step-by-step, layer-by-layer, process- agreement?
by-process approach might be more appropriate for You should agree with the service provider a number of
many Irish businesses. You could start off by outsourc- business-focused key performance indicators against
ing desktop management and, when you start to see the which the success of the managed services delivery can
benefits, move up the IT stack, as it were. The benefits be benchmarked. Also, ‘gain-sharing’ is becoming
of this approach are two-fold: the risk is reduced increasingly popular. This is where the client and the
because only part of your IT infrastructure is affected service provider share in any financial benefits that
and you build trust with the service provider. come from service innovations or improvements.
September 2008 Knowledge Ireland 55
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