It was interesting to watch “Monster Moves” in National Geographic Channel the other day. I still admire the way engineers unearthed a huge building from one location and moved it to another, without breaking or losing even a single brick, using trucks. This Herculean task makes me still wonder, ‘How did they do it?’ However, when the job was done, the building was habitable and ready to use, in quick time. What else can one ask for? A true engineering miracle.
Before we begin, let us assume the IT Infrastructure as all Systems and associated Processes, which aid in either Fulfilling the Service requested or Handling a Fault reported by your customer, all the way from Customer Contact through to Billing.
Over the last few years, there has been an increased demand for investment in re-usability of varied Systems and Processes within your Organisation. You will have also made a significant investment in varied Transformation Programmes to reduce Operational Costs through Rationalisation of your IT Infrastructure and hence reduced head count. With recession in place this demand for both above has only aggravated.
The question is does this investment provide your business with good ROI? Are you even considering your IT Infrastructure as a means to generate new revenues?
As a successful Organisation you will have your expansion strategy into other geographies as part of your growth plans. You will need to make a significant investment in your IT Infrastructure in the new geography, either by building it from scratch or, in the instance of acquiring an existing company, making changes to the existing IT Infrastructure to suit your needs. Again, due to recession, you are constrained in the monies you can invest, hampering your growth plans.
The investment you have already made in your IT Infrastructure both in Re-usable Components and in Rationalisation should ideally help you roll out quickly in the new geography. Just like buildings being moved from one place to another in Monster Moves, you should be able to mirror your Infrastructure in this new geography in quick time and minimal investment. Your Infrastructure should be robust and scalable (both upward and downward) to accommodate the changes in reflections the new geography has to offer.
Achieving such an Infrastructure is a mammoth task but the benefits surpass the investment both in monies and the accelerated time in achieving your business goals. Looking back a few years ICICI bank in India established a branch and became fully operational in 5 days! Imagine what this could mean to you, should you be able to become fully operational, from an IT perspective, in such a quick time. The benefits speak for themselves, well reaching infinity.
The journey doesn’t end here. An IT Infrastructure, this scalable, can potentially help you offer this as an ‘Off the Shelf’ service to other players across the globe within the same segment of business as yours. There will be a huge demand for such a service as this will solve the right problems, the right way, in quick time. We see traces of this already happening globally, for example Managed Network Services offering by companies like British Telecom. Amazon was smart enough to rent out its hard disk space earlier because only 15% of it was utilised at any given time.
Organisations should not rule out the possibility of an ‘Off the Shelf’ offering for the very reason that this Infrastructure is more or less a one-off investment. Imagine printing photographs of your favourite moments in a kiosk, the more prints you take, the lesser the average cost of each print. Organisations should capitalise on this rule of thumb. The initial investment in building such an IT Infrastructure may be higher, but an Off the Shelf offering not only helps generate increased revenues but at the same time lowers the overall Operational Cost as well. The cost gets shared with other similar players who are in demand of such an offering.
IT Infrastructure truly acts as the backbone in realising the goals of any business. Organisations should stop being inward centric and start visualising their IT Infrastructure to be able to provide them with benefits mentioned above. There is enough technology in the industry to make this happen, if not, is evolving.
What Next?
Organisations should start investigating the possibility of building such an IT Infrastructure for their business. They should value their IT Infrastructure, not just as an enabler to run their business, but as business by itself. There are enough questions today to even consider adopting this strategy within any Organisation. However, as a starter for ten, Organisations should perform a simple analysis as below:
• What is the As-Is state of my IT Infrastructure?
• What has stopped my Organisation till now in building such an IT Infrastructure?
• What does it cost me, both in time and money, to build such an IT Infrastructure?
• What potential benefits does this offer, should this be implemented, bearing my growth plans in mind?
All these above are indeed a food for thought and nevertheless, the answers come with their own challenges. I am sure there will be ways around these challenges as both Organisations and Technology mature to make this happen.
This is a vision today and in my opinion, this will be the future - a journey we will all embark in days to come.
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