MEA November 2017

22 MEA MARKETS / November 2017 , Proving a detailed piece on the “ARCH” strategy - a strategy that enables the delivery of IT- enabled services more consistently and efficiently, and allows the IT department to provide the organizationwith new, innovative, high-value business applications that can set the organizations on a strong growth trajectory, is the Sales Director, Middle East, ServiceNow, Mark Ackerman. Consolidation - The Foundation for IT and Business Transformation In every type of business, growth is good. However, there is what might be considered “good growth” and “bad growth.” Good growth makes an enterprise more agile, responsive, and competitively successful, and tends to spur further growth. Bad growth, in contrast, can hobble agility, responsiveness, and competitive success, and lead to stagnation or worse for that enterprise. A hallmark characteristic of bad growth is the proliferation of multiple redundant and/ or incompatible versions of the same or similar resources. What’s needed to address the “bad growth” challenges are an effective strategy for consolidation and modernization, and a technology platform that enables execution of that strategy. At the highest level, your strategy will consist of four primary elements, which can be summarized by the acronym “ARCH.” • Assess your current IT Service Management (ITSM) and business resources to determine their real business value and costs • Retire those resources not meeting your business needs • Consolidate and modernize those resources worth keeping • Host your most valuable and critical resources on a common platform that enables easy and effective migration, modernization and management Assess What You’ve Got Once you have identified one or more compelling use cases, you need to assess and quantify the true business value and costs of current resources carefully. This information is necessary to determine which resources should be consolidated, which should be migrated to a more robust platform, and which should be retired. Wherever possible, this information should be expressed in dollars or some other metric that enables consistent, “apples-to-apples” comparisons of all resources under consideration. Retire What’s Not Delivering Value Your assessment efforts will enable you to rank your incumbent application based on the value they are delivering to the business and the costs required to realize that value. This ranking is a critical element of your next major step: retiring the applications that cost too much, deliver too little, or both. This step is essential, as it will help your IT and business teams to focus on the applications that matter the most to the business. These are the applications your company should consolidate. Consolidate – On the Right Platform How best to consolidate will depend on specific business needs and goals, and on the consolidation features available to you. Those features, in turn, depend upon the specific characteristics of your candidate consolidation platforms. At a very minimum, the platform should: • Support both ITSM and business resource consolidation, for maximum business value • Already be known, validated and approved by IT decision makers and their teams for rapid adoption and effective support by IT • Be cloud-based, and should include integrated support for multiple consolidation- enabling features • Integrate with your applications and information sources, and support modern, open Web standards to ease and speed resource consolidation efforts • Include extensive, easy- to-use, pre-built templates