Bruce Ferguson, President/CEO of WorkSource talks about the value of his relationship with Scarlett and the value of an IT Audit for continuous IT oversight and improvement.
Scarlett Group, LLC has announced in an effort to demonstrate the company’s commitment to operating under the highest standards of business practices and validate the best-in-class solutions provided to the clients, the Scarlett Group has successfully completed Auditing Standards Board of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA)’s Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements (SSAE) 16 accreditation.
The SSAE 16 accreditation, which effectively replaces SAS 70 as the authoritative guidance for reporting on service organizations, was finalized by the AICPA, which measures service organizations’ controls and safeguards. Its SAS 70 classification is a widely-recognized auditing standard and is recognized as one of the most rigorous assessments of a servicing company’s internal processes, systems and controls.
Superseding the SAS 70 standard, the Type I SSAE 16 assessments provide independent third party verification of management’s assertion that a service organization’s policies and procedures were correctly designed at a point in time to achieve specified control objectives.
Brian Chancey, Managing Partner at Scarlett, said in a statement, “At Scarlett, we are committed to provide the highest level of service to our customers and business partners. Scarlett’s dedication to a compliant and secure operation has now been documented, reviewed, and audited by an independent third party.”
About the Scarlett Group. The Scarlett Group's mission is to reduce costs and business risks associated with technology obsolescence, maintenance, IT personnel succession, security, downtime, deployment, training and incident management. The company’s commitment is to provide enterprise level IT management and process the yield predictability and repeatability and most importantly, create business value through IT.
For more information about Scarlett Group and its services, visit www.scarlettculture.com
CFOs Lack Faith in CIOs and IT Teams
Increasingly, it's the chief financial officer (CFO) who has direct oversight of the IT department and IT-related spending, but it turns out the CFO has a low opinion of the CIO and the entire IT group.
That's according to a survey of 344 CFOs at North American companies involved in manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, energy, transportation and other fields. The survey, conducted by the professional organization Financial Executives International in tandem with Gartner, sought to find out what CFOs think about use of information technology in their companies and the people who provide it. They weren't that happy.
According to the 2011 Gartner/FEI study, only about a quarter of the CFOs had confidence that their own IT organization "has the organizational and technical flexibility to respond to changing business priorities," or "is able to deliver against the enterprise/business unit strategy."
"Only 25% see the CIO as a key player in determining the business strategy," said Gartner analyst John Van Decker.
In addition, less than a quarter of the CFOs felt the IT department "delivers the technology innovation needed by the business," or that it "has the right mix of skilled people to meet business needs." And in the final act of disdain, only 18% of the CFOs said they thought "our IT service levels meet or exceed business expectations."
Van Decker said the results of the survey show that "CIOs sometimes care too much about technologies" rather than the business environment itself that is top of mind to the CFO. The survey showed that CFOs, when they are considering IT decisions, are inclined to invest in technologies where competitive advantage can be demonstrated, analysis and decision-making is assisted, or efficiencies and cost reduction are achieved.
If the typical CFO, whose job often entails keeping a close watch on spending, approving investments and assuring compliance with regulations, is really so disenchanted with the IT department, that could spell bad news for corporate IT. That's because the Gartner/FEI survey shows the rising influence of the CFO over the IT department. The survey showed 42% of IT organizations now report directly to CFOs, "and that is expected to increase," Van Decker says.
In terms of who authorizes IT investments, 29% of the respondents said it's a steering committee of IT and business executives. But 26% said it's the CFO alone authorizing IT investment, up from 18% last year. A quarter says it's the CIO and CFO together. In 11% of organizations, it's still the CIO alone.
IT Service Management in the age of Cloud Computing
The concept of Service Management Integration is not new as a one, but it will likely become the primary focus of the IT Team of the future. Nicolas Carr, in his book “The Big Switch – Rewiring the World from Edison to Google” predicts “the death of IT” and parallels the inventions and development of technology that allowed for the centralized production and distribution of electricity, to the inventions and development of technology that are driving the current movement toward the centralized production of IT as a Service (Cloud Computing). He postulates that the economies associated with Cloud Computing will ultimately “kill” in-house IT organizations. His logic is very hard to argue with. IT organization as we know them will ultimately die off and be swallowed up by new and disruptive IT service and support delivery models.
The “death of IT” however is certainly a few years off... IT organizations still have a very big job to do. In addition to managing their legacy assets, they must move their respective organizations to higher ground and leverage these new delivery platforms and technologies in order to reduce cost. They themselves are transforming before our eyes from IT Shops, into IT Service Management Organizations. They are converting from organizations that purchase and manage all components of their information systems, to organizations that manage multiple providers of utility based IT services.
The goal throughout this change and into the new world of commodity IT services must be not only to gain TCO efficiencies… IT organizations may also aspire to leverage the DR/BC advantages offered by these services, dramatically increase scalability, simplify deployment, enhance functionality, integrate user and customer portal functions… the list goes on.
This process is not without its challenges. Consider a company that has decided to use Rackspace to host its Great Plains accounting application, and has outsourced his desktop support to a help-desk support to a nationally recognized help desk organization, and kept its Network Infrastructure management in-house (a very common scenario). An end user who contacts his IT support team complaining that he gets an error code when he tries to print to a network printer must rely on up to five organizations to solve this problem; Rackspace, who manages the virtual servers; the Great Plains consultant who is responsible for application updates; the in-house network team who is responsible for connectivity; the desktop support provider who may have taken the original request; and the print fleet management provider who manages the print servers and printers.
The trouble shooting steps involved with identifying the problem and correcting it doesn’t change in this environment. The communication and work-flow assignments however become much more difficult to achieve. Since the vendors involved have separate and distinct ticket management platforms that don’t integrate with each other, each partner in this organization is forced to work on his respective component without the full benefit of the information provided by the previous vendor. The IT manager is also forced complete each step in the process through the respective vendor, assimilate the information, and then provide relevant details to the next vendor.
Perhaps an even greater problem is that the IT manager doesn’t have a “Single pane of Glass” that shows the status of all activities and service levels. Usually, he has a trail of emails that can be, well, unwieldy to say the least. The resolution of this simple problem will be delayed due to the inefficiencies of managing the process. Service Management Integration platforms may be the key to solving this problem.
Service Management in the age of Cloud Computing:
The strategy for managing this environment starts with a commitment by the IT organization to own and manage the IT service deliver process… this cannot be outsourced. While it is possible to outsource virtually any single component of the model, the overall Service Management Integration process should be kept in-house. The IT organization must develop an outsourcing strategy and invest in tools that allow it to accomplish this.
The key to solving this problem lies in the integration of the internal, and all outsourced work-flow and functions into a single platform. IT service organizations must commit to owning their own data and service management process
Here are a few keys to providing world class service in a multi-vendor model:
First, understand the support impact of your outsourcing strategy. With each new partner added to your IT service delivery and support model, full consideration to must be given to the added complexity of integration this new partner into the mix. Careful attention must be given to impact on the overall service delivery model.
Pick a Service Management Integration partner early in the migration process. There are many partners and platforms emerging that specialize in bringing building and implementing the tools necessary to manage this process. This is a very unique skill-set based on knowledge of software applications, work-flow models, industry best-practices, service management system API’s, and RMM platforms.
Insist on owning your own Ticketing data and Metrics. Your service management data is your IP… It is the key to continuous improvement and it is a fundamental building block toward IT Maturity. This can be very easily and inexpensively accomplished by partnering with organizations like Autotask or Connectwise to implement you own ticketing platform. The ability to create you own dashboards, manage you own SLA information, access user and asset histories will prove to be invaluable. It is also much easier to replace a vendor that is under performing and replace them with a new vendor because your team can provide the new vendor with all of the history.
Find partners who are already in your ecosystem. Once you have a platform selected and implemented, additional selection criteria should be added to your partner selection matrix. Specifically, consideration should be given to the vendors willingness and ability to accept outsourced ticket requests on, or through your platform. This is very easy to accomplish if you have chose the right partner for a ticketing platform. The “outsource” function in Autotask for example will allow you to outsource a ticket to an ecosystem partner while retaining real time ticket updating capabilities, SLA management metrics and so on… API’s and other integrations will also help you workflow to larger organizations ease while still maintaining this information for your team.
Create your own work-flows. Through owning this effort, the IT organization can develop and refine processes that support strategic alignment with the Corporate Mission and Governance policies. Notifications, escalations, and priority handling for mission critical applications can be easily managed.
Write contracts that support your end goals. Remember, outsourced IT services must fit your organization. There is a tendency developing in the industry toward conforming the organization the IT service offering, rather that forcing the vendor to conform the service offering to the business. Write contracts that clearly define the Service Management Integration function. Set the expectation that the new vendor participate as a member of the overall service management team. You will be much more likely to meet you end user support goals.
In the end, the biggest challenge will be convincing our peers that we as IT organizations are NOT going into that quiet good night, but rather we are managing a process that will allow us to leverage all that is good in the emerging commoditized IT services marketplace.
Boundless optimism is a job requirement for any small-business owner. After all, no one starts a company hoping to eke out a living. Entrepreneurs think big. They expect success. And they expect growth.
But while most small-business owners plan for more employees, larger offices, and growing bank accounts, they don’t always plan for their growing information technology needs. They should, because not planning for growth, in any part of your business, can be expensive, even disastrous. The small-business landscape is dotted with the remains of dysfunctional websites, data losses and fantastically expensive upgrades that have nearly bankrupted up-and-coming companies.
That’s why I’ve put together a five-step guide to preparing your IT infrastructure for growth. The steps are listed in the order in which they should be completed, but you’ll have to determine if you need to follow all the steps. Completing even one or two of them might save you a lot of money and/or hassle down the road. Assuming that road is heading toward success.
1. Align. This is a concept that most large enterprises are already familiar with. It means building an IT infrastructure that is in line with your business strategy. In the case of a small business, this would mean investing to fit the business plan. If you’re an e-tailer, that could mean spending the majority of your IT budget on your website. If you’re a sales-oriented company, it could mean investing in mobile technology to support your sales staff.
2. Outsource. Once you’ve aligned your IT investments with your business plan, you should consider outsourcing everything else. From software to processing power to storage, virtually any part of your company’s IT infrastructure can be outsourced and acquired as a service on a pay-per-use basis, allowing you to inexpensively add (or reduce) capacity at any time. It also allows you to focus more closely on the core capabilities of your company.
3. Spend. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money (here’s where that boundless optimism comes in handy). To plan for growth, you have to invest in growth. As painful as it might be, spending a little extra now on the IT infrastructure you’ll need to support your core internal capabilities may save you a bundle later.
4. Hire. This might be where you want to spend that extra money. If you haven’t already, you may need to hire an IT expert — an employee, a contractor, or even a part-time or full-time onsite consultant — to help you manage growth. As a company grows, it usually gets more complex. More customers. More employees. More vendors. This complexity spills over into the IT systems as well. And without the right level of at-hand expertise, that complexity can inhibit growth.
5. Innovate. Since you’ve focused your IT spending (and hired experts), you’re now ready to use technology to gain a competitive advantage. When properly planned for, IT can differentiate your company in the market. A better website. Better customer data analytics. Faster distribution systems. Quicker customer service tools. If you’re constantly trying to catch up to growth — spending on IT systems that support your company but don’t help you innovate — you won’t be growing for long.
Businesses are made to grow. And these days, so is IT infrastructure. So go ahead, be optimistic. Just make sure you lay the proper foundation first.
Dan Briody is the author of two books and the former executive editor of CIO Insight magazine, a leading publication for information technology managers. He is also a frequent contributor on technology topics for Wired and BusinessWeek magazines.
A business continuity plan should be a commonsense document that addresses the specific circumstances and needs of your business. It provides practical strategies to follow in a crisis, eg fire, flood, storm, explosion, adverse market or financial circumstances, computer viruses or power outages.
A good business continuity plan will give you a better understanding of how your business works, the risks it faces and the things that need to be done to ensure you recover from an incident.
What are the essentials of a business continuity plan?
A business continuity plan should be tailored to fit an individual business, but a typical plan will include:
- A list of essential business requirements identifying risks and assessing the impact they would have on your business, and
- A strategy to respond to, manage, and recover from an incident.
The plan needs to be regularly tested, reviewed and updated to make sure it remains relevant and useful.
Why is business continuity planning so important?
The current security environment makes business continuity planning important. In addition to natural disasters, fire, flood or malicious criminal activity, terrorism is also a threat.
Your business need to be protected. It is critical that we are prepared and have good business continuity plans in place. Every business should know how they will manage an emergency situation. Planning is best done before an event, not in the middle of it. Time spent planning is never wasted. How quickly your company gets back to business after an emergency often depends on the planning you do now.