Minimizing the Bull Whip Effect in the IT Supply Chain
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Infosys’ blog on industry solutions, trends, business process transformation and global implementation in Oracle.
December 06, 2009
September 15, 2009
Needs & Opportunities - Staffing Industry
There have been astounding changes and developments during the evolution of the staffing agency in its 50-plus years of existence. The staffing industry has evolved from its early years where temporaries were provided in emergency situations to replace absent workers to become strategic partners for its clients by providing wide range of employment services and solutions.
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June 30, 2009
Shared Services..do they really help to meet business objectives!!!
In the environment where the budgets for CIO’s offices are continuously declining (after all who wants to own ‘yet another fancy and heavy on features application software’ that requires a significant investment and without no surety of ROI) the businesses are left with two options:
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June 29, 2009
Consolidate, Cleanse, Complete Customer Data -Four steps away!
Today enterprises have IT systems performing varied business functions like Finance, Sales,R&D etc. and they are spread across geographies. All these different IT systems need to share the relevant and critical key data - products, customers, suppliers.
Customer Data Integration (CDI) integrates the customer data across multiple channels, multiple lines of business where there are potential multiple sources of customer data residing in multiple applications.
Customer Data Integration (CDI) integrates the customer data across multiple channels, multiple lines of business where there are potential multiple sources of customer data residing in multiple applications.
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June 16, 2009
IT Outsourcing - Recession Survival Kit - Series I
Everybody is talking about it.. Decision makers are contemplating either to invest for growth now or to cut costs to maintain margins.. or do both. well.. am sure people know that these are easier said than done. there are too many theories, hypothesis, advices, opinions and the latest in the list.. 'management books'... trying to use all possible ways of the current situation to make themselves heard.. but what is heartening is that there is good amount of truth and reality in all of these.. as they are directly from their heart.. they have felt it, experienced it and living with it.
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May 20, 2009
IT Shared Services - Will Governance be overlooked?
Governance, described by Oxford as 'an act of governing', is one important and essential element of any engagement. An engagement will be between two (or more) parties contractually obligated for its success and governance is a means to ensure it happens. Typically there will be, and preferably so, a three level governance structure governing the operational, tactical and strategic aspects of the engagement. Based on the level in the structure, multiple levels of people will be involved from the parties contracted.
In the traditional engagement models, where the customer has a dedicated IT team from the service provider, servicing his needs on projects or for support & maintenance, there will be a well defined Governance structure and mechanism overseeing the operations with periodic reviews on the progress. Now the question is will this setup be available for the shared services delivery model too??
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March 19, 2009
Exclusivity - Is it still relevant?
Websters defines 'Exclusivity' as something in the state of being exclusive.. simply put 'Truly yours only'. During the initial days of the Outsourcing wave, customers insisted on consultants working only for them and paid on the number of people working for them exclusively. Down the line, customers have matured on the outsourcing concept and offshoring work to the so-called low cost countries became norm. Customers were focussing on the work getting done for them by the carefully chosen skilled resources thereby reducing the weightage given to the individual's performance.. Monitoring their work was becoming an overhead. Then came the new wave of 'Managed Services' - where the service provider owned the end-to-end delivery of services upon agreed service levels with the customer. Even in this model, the exclusivity continued to exist.. Customers, who could afford, went for an exclusive location or development center for the teams working only for them with high security requirements.
March 12, 2009
IT Shared Services - Does it bring gains after braving the pains?
In very simple terms, IT Shared services are consolidated IT functions that are delivered over a shared infrastructure. Some of the key benefits that are achieved through shared services are:
- Lower TCO for customer and provider
- Higher levels of productivity and increased efficiency
- Wider service coverage in terms of domain, technology and service availability hours
- Higher probability of meeting SLA targets
- Capability to structure the Ticket Based Pricing or Pay Per Use pricing options
- Lower setup time required to integrate a new customer
- Higher agility to ramp up and rampdown the team size based on customer needs
- Better alignment for catering to small size outsourcing opportunities
Needless to say that none of these benefits accrue without facing the challenges head on. I recall the ones that I had faced while consolidating the IT services of a large program in my previous organization. Broadly I would divide them in 5 categories
- Service Provider people
- Service Provider Infrastructure
- Customer People
- Customer Infrastructure
- Service Governance and Reporting
March 11, 2009
Wanna beat the recession and still keep IT running?
Recession.. difficult times.. reduced cash flow.. credit hard to come by.. on and on and on..
Let us face it. These are unfortunate events but are reality.. but should we just sit and keep worrying about it or do something to beat it. We anyway need to have the business running.. Key executives are looking for ways to weather the storm by cutting down costs. Invariably, eyes roll towards the Enterprise IT of the company.. trying to optimize, consolidate or even retire some of the IT assets. Most easist and the fastest thing to achieve quick wins is to cut down on 'labor' as an asset class.
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