A stitch in time
 Given today’s challenging market environment, ‘optimal use of resources’ is becoming an inherent motto of all aspects of business. Keeping in line with this, CIOs are increasingly turning towards proactive IT support to ensure consistent, productive and cost effective delivery of their technological resources. Vikas Arora, Group Director for Microsoft Enterprise Services (MES) division in India, shares his thoughts
The saying, ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,’ never meant as much to organizations as it does in today’s tough economic environment. With market pressures bottling up fast, enhancing productivity and driving efficiencies has become a priority for all businesses. In the current challenging market scenario, with factors like consumer familiarity and appropriate access driving both economic and social change, customer dynamics seems to be evolving too. In fact, businesses can lose customers literally at the click of a mouse!
Companies worldwide are turning to technology faster than ever, to understand how they can leverage their IT infrastructure to support business bottomlines. The role of cost-effective IT solutions as a crucial business enabler, has now taken the front seat specifically in the current economic downturn, where enterprises are thriving to ensure that their IT resources are delivering on the perspectives of cost, risk, security and operational agility.
Since technology has a direct impact on every business’ performance, CIOs have been faced with the dual challenge of managing the rapidly escalating complexity of IT infrastructure and ensuring near-constant availability. In the current economic crunch, companies are banking on CIOs, more than ever, to operate a 24x7, always-on, always-right computing environment…or risk significant damage to company brand, customer retention and profitability! As a result, the pressure to keep their IT systems available, reliable and constantly performing, is evidently more intense than ever before. Keeping in mind the increasing reliance of businesses on technology, the CIO’s thought process is changing too.
With ‘optimal use of resources’ becoming an inherent motto of all aspects of the business, as a new trend, we see CIOs increasingly opting for proactive IT support. Let’s understand this with a simple analogy. Just as human beings use preventive health checks and medication to avoid any severe health related issues, proper and timely IT support can save CIOs a lot of trouble. As against the conventional wisdom, wherein experts are called in reactively to combat IT infrastructure crisis situations, CIOs are now adopting proactive IT support to ensure consistent and productive delivery of their technological resources. So how does proactive IT support help?
PROACTIVE IT SUPPORT: WHAT, WHY AND HOW?
Proactive IT support helps customers optimize IT resources and minimize breakdowns, by working with the partner ecosystem to provide periodic and proactive IT health checks. In fact, studies done by research firms like Forrester have revealed that investments in proactive IT services is likely to (i) drastically reduce downtime, (ii) improve mean-time-to-repair, (iii) reduce cost and rework and (iv) improve business reputation, speed to market, customer service and overall profitability.
At Microsoft, we are engaging in conversations with customers every day on how they can use IT to save money, whether it is with the technology they already have, or by taking advantage of new cost effective trends. From our recent market engagements, we found three aspects fuelling the significance in proactive IT support across enterprises.
Firstly, reducing IT downtime has become a priority for all businesses. Think about it. Until sometime back, 80% of CIOs relied on reactive IT support to rescue their infrastructure from any breakdowns. Not only did this imply exorbitant last- minute recovery costs, but it was ineffective in ensuring that the company’s IT resources were running smoothly without throwing up any unprecedented surprises. CIOs are now starting to acknowledge that by being proactive in maintaining IT infrastructure, they can actually anticipate technology-related problems and resolve them before they hit business outcomes.
In these tough economic times, when CIOs are under more pressure than ever to ensure that IT systems are delivering consistently and cost effectively, proactive IT support is certainly emerging as the new hero. A few months ago, Sachin Jain, a CIO at KPO firm Evalueserve, observed a constant state of discomfort when it came to the stability of the company’s IT infrastructure. Jain realized that there was a need to have an expert team that could ensure quick response, stability and high availability of Evalueserve’s IT setup. The company opted for proactive IT support services across aspects like health check, risk assessment program and knowledge transfer. Today, Jain is a happier CIO who successfully runs a hassle-free IT environment in the organization.
Secondly, the concept of ‘IT optimization’ in organizations is gathering a great deal of momentum in the market today. According to estimates, a good 75% of IT budgets are usually spent in mere maintenance of existing infrastructure. As a result, organizations are left with only 25% to be dedicated to fresh technology requirements for the business. What if CIOs were to become proactive about periodically analyzing the current stage of the lifecycle of their IT infrastructure and taking a step back to ensure that IT resources were delivering in sync with the business requirements? With a strategically planned and regularly evaluated IT framework, CIOs are starting to realize how, by reducing maintenance and operational costs, their IT budgets can be prepared to pump in these savings into fresh IT initiates to meet today’s volatile and dynamic business requirements. Here’s an example.
By planning a proper ‘IT optimization’ cycle for Sapient’s worldwide Knowledge Management project, Technology Manager Deepak Aggarwal leveraged proactive IT services to flawlessly execute this mammoth task without facing any major glitches or loss of functionality, with help at every stage. According to Aggarwal, this “ensured knowledge transfer and created a coordinated effort” that helped Sapient smoothly land optimum delivery on this project.
Lastly, technology is increasingly being looked upon as a tool to drive immediate results on fresh business projects. CIOs are increasingly taking the smart route by proactively using IT support for end-to-end implementation of projects, bringing experts in to minimize the margin of error in new projects.
When working on a new technology project aimed at offering Business Intelligence capabilities to Marico’s sales and marketing team, IT head Girish Rao decided to leverage the benefits of proactive IT support. With this, Marico was able to ensure a strong back-end support spanning across strategic planning, designing and development, up to the final deployment. All product-related issues were addressed as they rose through the implementation stage; thus, Marico was able to minimize errors. Proactive IT support also helped Rao land timely implementation of this project, which in the longer run, will help Marico’s sales and marketing team increase productivity and reduce operational time from two days to two hours.
PROACTIVE IT SUPPORT: WHO?
Having discussed the business benefits of proactive IT support, it probably sounds like an obvious choice for CIOs. However, we often find that basic aspects of proactive IT support, like reduced downtime and optimization of infrastructure, are often neglected.
It is important that software vendors, in their role as advisors to customers, reach out to help CIOs realize the cost savings that can be achieved from ensuring maximum uptime of, and optimal delivery from IT resources, and by introducing fresh technology to generate immediate business results. Just as a stock market investor would appreciate his wealth manager reaching out to him just before stocks fall, as vendors, we believe that it is our responsibility to guide our customers through this economic period and help them understand ways in which they can optimize.
GOING FORWARD…
As a fast emerging and interesting trend, CIOs are now being seen stepping up in the new role of a strategic business advisor by actively recommending ways in which technology can support the business at the company board level. As Business Units clamor for new projects in the economic crunch, the CIO is seen juggling new projects, budgets, people, and computer resources to meet these expanding crucial demands.
At the same time, in such times where optimum utilization of costs has become a huge business imperative, top management is seen as demanding from CIOs, a complete transparency around the RoI deliverable from the company’s IT resources. Given this situation, CIOs have to ensure that the margin for error on new IT projects is zero. They have one shot at getting things right, albeit without increasing costs. This is where proactive IT support can play a crucial role.
Today, several CIOs are acknowledging the fact that proactive IT health checks, risk assessment and knowledge transfer can play a huge role in preventing infrastructure failures and cost optimization. Going forward, we see proactive IT support becoming an integral, logical and ongoing part of the CIOs IT framework.
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