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IT Health Check

Operational Performance

There are often occasions when the management of a company, or new owners, want an independent review of the efficiency and effectiveness of IT within a company. Moreover, to ensure that value can be delivered from this process, they also want to know how much improvement can be delivered, the likely timescales and how best to achieve it.

 

In order to meet this need, CIO Plus has developed a Fixed Price IT Health Check that can answer the above questions rapidly.

 

The approach that CIO Plus follow is a combination of ‘top down’ Benchmarking coupled with a ‘bottom up’ (big data), IT Operations Analytics element. 

 

Utilising this methodology we will address the following 5 areas:

Overall IT Strategy
 
To what extent is it aligned to the short and medium term business strategy? As part of this element we will also seek to answer these supplemental questions:
 
  • Is the IT function and the senior management team working effectively?
  • How effective are communications within IT and between IT and the business?
IT Sourcing Strategy:
 
  • We will map out the overall picture for all the key areas
  • We will conduct a high level Relationship Review involving the major 3rd party suppliers
  • We will provide a view on Value for Money in respect of the current sourcing arrangements
  • We will recommend areas for improvement where relationships should be maintained and areas for change where alternate sourcing, or insourcing, is more appropriate.
IT Infrastructure Review and Risk Assessment:
 
As well as assessing Data Centre and Network provision, this aspect will utilise an IT Operations Analytics tool, the state of the art Nexthink monitoring solution. Nexthink will give CIO Plus a Big Data view of around 300 metrics within the customer endpoint (end user devices) estate which we aggregate and on which we perform sophisticated analytics. The information provided will enable CIO Plus to develop a detailed view on a range of areas and provide recommendations for improvements; these areas include:
 
  • Security & Compliance, including antivirus status, firewall settings, malware and use of non-corporate software
  • Software across the estate, exposure due to unlicensed software occurs, and savings opportunities where over-licensing is apparent
  • Quality of IT Services being consumed from an end user perspective (i.e. an assessment of consumption as opposed to provision – this is a USP of the CIO Plus offering)
  • Providing the means to improve the customer’s Service Desk, rendering it proactive rather than reactive and improving the perception of IT from the business perspective. We also expect to be able to reduce the number of incidents reported and increase the speed with which problems are identified and resolved
IT Change Programmes
 
  • We will review major IT Change Programmes that are underway or planned
Benchmarking
 
  • We will assess the overall IT cost baseline against industry standards
 
The output of this process will be a detailed report of findings and recommendations along with a revised IT Strategy supported by a fully costed high level transformation plan taking the IT function from where it is to where it needs to be. 
 
What Our Clients Have Said:
"We knew we had significant IT issues and we expected to have to pay a substantial sum to sort them out. We didn’t expect IT to go through so much improvement and be the biggest contributor to profitability in the same year."

Huw Davies, Chief Financial Officer Wates
 

QinetiQ revenues reduced from £1,703m in 2011 to £1,470m in 2012 but profitability rose by £90m to £145m in the same period. The reduction in the cost of IT made a significant contribution to this performance and QinetiQ was nominated for the PLC Turnaround of the Year Award.
"If IT were an operating division, it would have been the most profitable one"

Leo Quinn, Chief Executive of QinetiQ commenting on IT’s performance

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