Because from the consultant’s point of view, selling the customer products that he may or may not need, is most likely just another way of how to help them putting out more fires, but never really getting to the heart of the issue.
…and from the customer’s lead strategist perspective, if their business strategy is not aligned with the corresponding IT strategy without the big picture, without looking at the requirements and needs of the business, consultants have a hard time coming to a solution that eventually leads to reduction in CAPEX and OPEX, creates more revenue and is more secure.
Other institutions, such as government agencies, may have other objectives such as a transition to a Digital Government, or strengthening cybersecurity, but the result is the same without a roadmap that is matched to the business outcomes.
In short: We have the ability to help our customers to create a well-defined and actionable IT roadmap, that aligns IT priorities with key business initiatives, identifies the culture, competencies and capabilities our customer needs to be successful and enables their IT to deliver strategic business value faster.
At this point, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to point out what appears to be a contradiction: the methodology of the Outcome Focused Approach I will lay out in this blog was developed by VMware. “So how can they be objective?” you may ask, “all they want to do is sell VMware products, yet they claim to be purely focused on the outcome, not (software) products to sell!”.
Well, just because a methodology has been developed by a for-profit business, doesn’t mean it’s bad, as a matter of fact, quite the opposite is true. The resources and work VMware has put into this are quite astonishing. Even at the tail end of the workshop, where eventually an SOW with solutions to be integrated will be developed, you can still swap out a solution that enable you to gain a competency for one that is not from VMware. Let’s say you have a good integration of Nutanix in your infrastructure and don’t want to use vSAN – if it works for you, fine, we will put that into the solution.
So much for a disclaimer, let’s continue…
How do we do this?
First, we listen. We want to know what the current business situation is like, and what are key challenges, and implications in your IT department.
During the workshop we will capture and align IT and business outcomes by identifying capability gaps and problems your IT department is facing. This will give us and the customer a good handle to determine where the IT department stands in relationship with the business and where it wants to be.
IT as the Infrastructure Provider
Are we still at the Infrastructure Provider stage, where the IT department is expected to drive efficiencies to consolidate, standardize and optimize cost?
IT as the Business Partner
Is your IT department able to provide on-demand business aligned applications and services with quality to increase agility?
When the IT department is a business partner instead of just an infrastructure provider, it caters directly to the line of business with focus on high quality service delivery to accelerate innovation.
Digital Enterprise
This is where the IT department becomes a medium to do business, by focusing on developing new digital business models. This is when the IT department's customer is no longer just the own organization, but rather the customer of the organization.
The result
This categorization, this research of your company's maturity when it comes to IT services, will then lead to the competencies in the three pillars that need to be fulfilled, or where the operating model maturity needs to be increased to achieve the desired outcome.
What’s next?
Using a whiteboard we will align the business outcomes with the required IT outcomes and the problems the customer's IT faces today.
Then we will ensure that the proper competencies are matched with the solutions that are either already utilized on premises or in the Cloud and we will provide a comprehensive statement of work, that outlines which new competencies need to be implemented to achieve the desired outcome.
All of this will come with a timeline that enables you to plan ahead and budget accordingly.
If this sounds interesting to you and you would like us to help your organization building a roadmap in a 90 minute workshop like this, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me!
