ICT optimization is a continuous improvement exercise for CIOs seeking an optimal balance between potentially conflicting business priorities: radically improved digital business services should be enabled, continuous digital innovation cycle must be possible, ICT costs are to be radically reduced and stakeholder satisfaction must be kept at high level.
ICT strategy
The top level starting point in ICT optimization is to align business strategy and longer term ICT direction. In modern era, customer expectations, businesses strategy, digital capabilities and ICT must all point towards same objectives. Speed of change is only increasing and even strategic choices may change rapidly. Lower level domain specific key results, for example in areas like customer experience platforms, ICT infrastructure and digital competences, must be derived from the objectives and progress of the related actions is to be continuously followed.
Collaborative, cross-organizational planning is the baseline that enables top management support and success in jungle of conflicting priorities. Cross-organizational alignment is crucial also because most of the optimization activities cannot be implemented by ICT function alone. Midagon can help organization in the planning by offering senior and independent leaders to facilitate the interactive planning process.
Portfolio analysis
Today many organizations face the challenges that come with a diversified and vast application portfolio due to accumulated technical infra debt, “shadow IT”, M&A activities and rapid business growth. This complexity of the ICT landscape often creates unnecessary costs and insufficient support of business processes. We will analyze your application portfolio and make an execution plan that covers all needed activities to optimize – whether it means updating or adjusting a service, moving to cloud or terminating a service.
Architecture design
We help you create a modern digital and ICT solution architecture which fulfills the business needs and includes stakeholder experience. The design is typically based on target operating model, the latest cloud and enterprise platform technologies and service development models such as agile and DevOps.
Next-generation operating model
Today, most organizations are on a digital transformation journey employing disruptive technologies to innovate across products, services, and business models. This will also require new operating model(s) that must be able to co-exist in balance with old “traditional” models.
We help CIOs to align their ICT organization with new requirements and meet the demand for new digital capabilities as well as traditional. We know how to adopt multi-mode operating models to increase agile development, to transform ICT platforms and infrastructure, and to run existing ICT.
Cloudification
Cloud is not just a cost-efficiency enabler – move servers from on-premise to cloud – but it is also an enabler of speed and time to market. Cloud ecosystems involve a constantly growing ecosystem of developers and similarly increasing number of applications and components that can be used to create application on a very rapid speed.
Obviously, cloud will also provide great opportunities for cost savings in technical infra side.
We have great skills and experiences from planning these transformations and are currently serving as right hands to CIOs who must implement these changes in their companies.
Vendor and ecosystem
One of the best ways to optimize ICT is to review your vendor contracts and purchasing habits. There may be times when you will have the option to redesign, renew or cancel service agreements. It is also important to identify opportunities for new co-operation modes, licensing bundles, software transition to SaaS or software licensing agreement updates regularly.
Our guidelines
- Ensure business and ICT strategy includes action plan to address digitalization, cloudification and new development operations
- Have a clear and overall cloudification plan
- Ensure your digital ICT operations will be able to co-exist and co-operate with your legacy ICT operations
- Invest in digital, data and cognitive.
Readings:
ICT Optimoinnin haaste – lisää voimavaroja ylläpidosta kehitykseen
