Flexible Apprenticeship Delivery: Developing Delivery Plans to Meet Employers Needs
Future of Work Enabler: Flexible Service Delivery
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Future of Work Enabler:Flexible Service DeliveryA exible service delivery model is essential or enabling
the agility, responsiveness and innovation needed orsurviving in business today. This report is an installmentin our multi-part series that explores the shits necessaryor uture-proofng your company.
Making the Shit to the Next-Generation Enterprise(a multi-part series)
| FUTURE OF WORK
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Executive SummaryBusiness success today hinges on ast response, whether to
market orces, global catastrophes or new customer desires.
Speed and agility are the new core competencies or any 21st
century business.
However, technology inrastructure is oten the long pole in
the innovation tent. In the time it takes to stand up the serv-
ers, storage, networking and security capabilities to develop
a new product or service, an unanticipated competitor rom
anywhere in the world and with little technology investment or
overhead can easily steal the show. And at the slightest hint
o yet another shit on the global stage or in consumer taste,
these same light-ooted competitors can efciently morph, addonto or even withdraw their current oerings and move on to
the next best thing.
The time has come or companies to rewire their operations to
minimize the technology overhead and investment required or
eective delivery o IT services. This is possible with a exible
service delivery model, whether through utility and on-demand
computing; as-a-service applications, inrastructures and plat-
orms; and private, public and hybrid clouds. All o these ap-proaches also allow or businesses to extend their capabilities
into an emerging new master IT architecture, which combines
social, mobile, analytic and cloud technologies (the SMAC
stack) to create a exible, scalable platorm that supports more
collaborative and boundaryless ways o working.
A exible services delivery model is one o the eight enablers
companies need to consider when mapping their journey o
reinvention or the new world o work, as described in our
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FUTURE OF WORK ENABLER: FLEXIBLE SERVICE DELIVERY (A MULTI-PART SERIES) 3
overview paper, Making the Shit to the Next-Generation
Enterprise. In this installment, we will look at some o the
drivers propelling companies toward a exible service deliv-
ery model, as well as the many choices and considerations
they must make when adopting a more agile and adaptable IT
inrastructure.
Figure 1
Mapping the Enablers to the 3 Rs
1Community
Interaction
2Innovation
3Worker
Empowerment
4Virtual
Collaboration
5Customer
Empowerment
6Commercial
Model Flexibility
7Value Chain
Flexibility
8Flexible Service
Delivery
RETHINK
theBusinessModel
3 3 3 3 3
REINVENT
BusinessProcesses
3 3 3 3 3 3
REWIRE
Operations
3 3 3 3 3 3
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Quick Take
Here is a summary o considerations or
deciding which business unctions to transition
to a exible service delivery model:
Determine your primary pain points: What
keeps you up at night: long time to market,
lack o exibility and agility, low perormance,
security gaps, high costs, poor processes,
immature service management?
Do a core vs. context analysis: Which busi-
ness activities does your company excel at vs.
which could be ooaded to external providers?
Start with lower risk processes: Common
targets are non-production or back-ofce
unctions.
Consider resource requirements: What are
the applications needed levels o availability
and resource consumption?
Dont overlook change management: It will
take education and communication to shit the
corporate mindset and conduct business in a
new and aster way.
Analyze your service requirements: Most
public cloud providers oer standard, non-cus-
tomizable service level agreements.
Check for security qualications: Security
is a top-o-mind consideration, particularly
or applications and systems that deal with
personally identifable inormation.
Require a high level of transparency:
Companies should be able to view and monitor
the entire environment through a dashboard
to make day-to-day capacity decisions.
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Business DriversTo survive in business today, companies need an IT inrastructure that minimizes
costs, reliably scales resources according to need and enables quick introduction
o new oerings. And they need to do this without incurring the static overhead
and long lead times associated with traditional build-deploy-manage technology
models. Not all o these new product and service initiatives will be successul, so
companies also need the ability to quickly remove the underlying costs associated
with ailed endeavors and reallocate those unds to other innovative ideas. This isthe new standard by which businesses will remain competitive.
In addition to extremely uncertain and highly variable processing needs, business
will also need various options or rightsizing their fnancial models. All will need
to balance Cap-Ex vs. Op-Ex expenditures; or instance, some may need to drive
toward more o an Op-Ex approach, while others remain tethered to Cap-Ex models.
Dierent computing models oer dierent levels o capital spending; or instance,
companies still purchase their own hardware or private clouds, while they maintain
no equipment with public cloud-based inrastructure-as-a-service. All the while,
they also need heightened levels o transparency, control and visibility into their
expenditures, independent o how the services and compute resources are being
provided, and how their technology inrastructures are serving them.
More companies are realizing they need a exible services delivery platorm that
meets the needs o the uture o work (see Figure 1). No matter which platorm
the business chooses private or public cloud, as-a-service or a hybrid approach
a move away rom rigid IT inrastructures will enable improved agility in a cost-
eective way.
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Choices and ConsiderationsWhen it comes to designing a exible service delivery model, many actors come
into play, including the companys maturity, appetite or risk, competitive stance
and strategic goals. Decision points include perormance levels, security, dynamic
requirements and impact on end users. Here are some o the top considerations and
recommendations or making the transormation to a exible service delivery model.
Determine your primary pain points: The frst step is to determine your busi-nesss major area o weakness. What keeps you up at night: Is it long time tomarket, lack o exibility and agility, low perormance, security gaps, high costs,
poor processes, immature service management?
Many companies would want to improve in several or even
all o these areas, so they need to establish priorities. I
the business is constantly pushing or the capability to
introduce new products and services, then time to market
is the most critical actor. You may want to become more
agile in your ability to make business decisions and react
to market changes, or instance, but i service perormance
is poor whether process-, operations- or compute-wise
that needs to be addressed frst. Other companies may
be under heavy pressure to reduce costs. Still others may
be highly agile and need help with compliance or reliable
service delivery.
All o these areas can be addressed through exible service
delivery, but the actual model you choose will depend on
your top pain point.
Take a staged approach: Next, you need to select which unctions and process-es to shit to the exible service delivery model. This entails a core vs. context
analysis, in which you identiy the business activities your company excels at,
which ones provide competitive dierentiation and which should be ooaded
to external providers.
Very oten today, what was previously considered core is now viewed as context.Examples rom an IT inrastructure management perspective include network
management or Tier 1 support or internal customers. In fnance and accounting,
context unctions might include perormance measurement or budget/fnancial
planning.
Start with lower risk processes: Many companies choose to begin the trans-ormation with non-production environments, such as testing and development,
that have lower perormance requirements and less impact on end-user clients
and customers. Another option is to leverage the model or back-ofce unc-
tions, such as e-mail and time entry.
A national hotel chain, or instance, began with back-ofce unctions and is now
experimenting with the new model or its room-booking applications. However,
there are also companies that start with customer-acing applications when theyhave a pressing need to quickly bring to market new products and services (see
business case, next page).
Consider application resource requirements: Another step is to look at theapplications themselves and determine the levels o availability and resource
consumption required, such as CPU, memory, network and disk requirements.
Applications can sometimes incur surprising network charges, particularly
chatty applications that traverse the network between the cloud provider and
the business. This can result in a much higher bill than expected because the
application is using network resources that the company was unaware o.
When it comes to designing
a exible service delivery
model, many actors come
into play, including the
companys maturity, appetiteor risk, competitive stance
and strategic goals.
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Dont overlook change management: Cultural challenges are a reality, as in-ternal IT and even business units are accustomed to stoic processes and tech-
nologies and need to understand how to optimize the dynamic capabilities o a
exible service delivery model. It takes education and communication to shit the
corporate mindset and conduct business in a new and aster way.
For instance, once the technology inrastructure can be provisioned quickly,
the application development and testing organizations need to change their
processes so they dont become the bottleneck. In other words, i IT has deliveredthe equivalent o a 12-lane highway, other parts o the organization cannot
remain in horse-and-buggy mode. The challenge is to eectively leverage the
change in cycle time and optimize it across the entire enterprise so that other
areas dont hold up the sotware liecycle.
Analyze your service requirements: Most public cloud providers oer stan-dard service level agreements that cannot be customized according to client
needs. The service levels oered may be sufcient or a development environ-
ment but all ar short o the demands o a production environment.
Check for security certications and qualications: Security is a top-o-mindconsideration, particularly or applications and systems that deal with person-
ally identifable inormation. Cloud providers today typically conduct security
audits at a more intensive level than companies hosting internal private clouds;thereore, some o the security concerns perceived today can be addressed by
vetting providers security qualifcations.
Require a high level of transparency: Lastly, companies should be able toview and monitor the entire environment and all o its operational parameters
through a dashboard, straight down into the lowest end server. With this trans-
parency, they can make day-to-day decisions about the level o CPU, memory
and storage required and use metrics and trending dashboards to make uture
decisions about capacity managing and fnancial modeling.
A Business CaseWe recently worked with a large U.S.-based telecommunications frm to help it
develop the best path or designing and building a exible inrastructure to supporta new set o digital products and services or its subscribers. Market pressures are
high in the telecom industry, as customer habits and the services themselves are
quickly evolving with the move to digital platorms. To secure a competitive edge,
providers need to continuously innovate to provide dierentiating products and
services.
The client needed a delivery inrastructure that could quickly scale up to tens o
millions o subscribers when required and release new services and updates quickly
and on the y, without high overhead costs and with little or no disruption to sub-
scribers. Subscribers needed the ability to change, modiy and remove services, and
these changes needed to be quickly and automatically handled by the technology
inrastructure.
Because the digital services being developed were experimental and extremely
leading edge, the client anticipated it would need to make several and requent
changes to the product line. This introduced a challenge, as the client knew it was
extremely likely that it would delete many product iterations beore the production
versions were released. Even then, the product line would need to be expanded
upon by continuously incorporating subscriber eedback and improving the service
levels being provided.
Originally, the company considered a traditional inrastructure, but it quickly
determined that choice would not provide adequate levels o exibility or continuity.
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When we began working with the client, it was airly well down the path o choosing
a public cloud provider to host the inrastructure. However, when we completed an
analysis o using a public vs. an internally hosted private cloud within its own data
center, we determined the public cloud would be the ar more expensive option
not initially but over time because o the incremental costs. Our business case
analysis urther determined that an internal private cloud was the model that
would meet the clients primary requirements: time-to-market, minimal downtime
and the ability to scale up and down very quickly. The model also let open the
option or incorporating the public cloud in the uture.
Our team helped the telecom provider design and implement an on-demand
technology inrastructure that was virtualized across servers, storage and the
network, with a high level o availability that ensured low impact o outages. The
model included:
Cloud-based sotware as a service or the applications.
Open source tools or the application development environment.
Platorm as a service or other devices, including enterprise service bus.
A private cloud hosted internally.
The open-source development tools provided the client with process change inte-grations to help expedite service delivery, with tighter control and more pronounced
visibility into inrastructure perormance. This led to enhanced exibility and agility
in the cloud environment with reduced costs and ensured that it could provide
applications more quickly and robustly than with its traditional tools.
The holistic goal o the environment was achieved, and the client was able to
build upon established design principles, such as improved security, by ensuring
that only projects appropriately selected within the enterprise could initially take
advantage o the new inrastructure. Additionally, aspects traditionally considered
an aterthought, like business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities, were
(McKinsey deines lexible delivery as cloud- and mobile-based platorms. Respondents who answereddont know are not shown; igures do not sum to 100%.)Base: 1,469 C-level executivesSource: McKinsey & Co.
Figure 1
Increased Focus on Flexible Delivery PlatormsAlthough a third o respondents are not yet ocusing on exibleplatorms, more than hal say its a top priority.
0%
6%
12%
23% 23%
15%17%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
Top corporatepriority
Top 3corporate
priority
Top 10corporate
priority
Top priorityfor 1-2
business units
Not a toppriority or BU
priority
Not on theagenda
Percentofrespondents
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8 FUTURE OF WORK September 2012
seamlessly integrated into the design and supported within the inrastructure rom
the outset. The beta test phase confrmed that the model enabled rapid elasticity,
with the ability to quickly add and subtract compute resources as needed, increase
uptime and reduce time to market or new products and services. The client now
deploys new and updated applications on the open and highly available environ-
ment that can be seamlessly deployed with little or no downtime.
Call to ActionThe traditional business-as-usual approach will stie most companies in todays
competitive global economy. The lead times and upront knowledge required with
traditional technology inrastructures are ar too great to keep up with market
reaction in distant corners o the world.
The changes required to move to a exible service delivery mode can seem over-
whelming. But when you map out what needs to happen, you can more clearly ocus
on the key choices and considerations you need to make.
The frst step is to assess where you stand in several key areas, including business
goals, core vs. context analysis, appetite or risk, service level requirements and the
ability o your organization to absorb change. At that point, you can identiy your
strengths and weaknesses as they relate to your strategic business priorities, andtarget specifc areas where improvement is necessary. From there, you can build
a strategic roadmap to drive necessary change in a purposeul, eective manner.
In the uture o work, companies need an IT inrastructure based on a exible
service delivery model that can adapt quickly to todays swit-changing and unor-
giving business world. It is only then that companies can respond to known changes,
as well as the unknowns o tomorrow.
About the Authors
Marcello Burgio is Assistant Vice President and Global Practice Leader responsibleor Cognizants Inrastructure Consulting and Proessional Services business. He has
25 years o IT industry experience as both an IT manager and consultant to Fortune
100 companies. Beore becoming a consultant, Marcello was an executive at The
Hartord Financial Group, responsible or IT inrastructure, and an IT manager with
United Technologies Corp. He has extensive IT experience, including architecture
development, systems design and integration, data center management, security
and compliance management. Marcello has a degree in mathematics/computer
science and an MBA with a concentration in operations management rom the
University o Hartord. Marcello can be reached [email protected].
Ryan Marquiss is a Principal Consultant and Enterprise Inrastructure Architect or
the Consulting and Proessional Services group within Cognizants IT IS Business
Unit. He has more than 10 years o experience in the IT industry, rom enterprisesotware development to large-scale virtualization deployments that support
end-to-end business-enabling applications, including servers and desktops. Ryans
primary ocus is enterprise inrastructure, specifcally virtual environments and
cloud computing architecture ulfllment. He is a VMware Certifed Proessional
(VCP); holds a masters o science degree in sotware engineering, with specializa-
tions in e-commerce and relational database management systems, rom Pennsyl-
vania State University; and a bachelors o science degree in computer engineering,
specializing in operating systems and networking rom Drexel University. Ryan can
be reached [email protected].
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