Benchmarking IT Cost, Performance & Complexity
Benchmarking has the potential to be an extremely powerful improvement tool—providing objective data to identify opportunities to reduce IT cost and improve performance and an unbiased basis to evaluate and prioritize investments in IT. As you may have already experienced, IT benchmarking often fails to live up to expectations due to a combination of factors, including subjective peer selection, suspect data quality, lack of objectivity, results that are too high-level to be actionable; and too expensive and time consuming relative to the value provided. Fortunately, not all IT benchmarking is created equal. iTeres’ IT DNA based IT cost, performance and complexity benchmarking assessments overcome the shortcomings of traditional benchmarking approaches.
The iTeres Difference
Our benchmarking assessment evaluates the complexity of your IT environment and combines it with your workload to define the IT DNA of each IT functional area. Since complexity is a primary driver of cost and performance, understanding the complexities inherent to each IT functional area provides our clients the insights needed to make strategic and tactical changes to improve both IT cost and performance. Peer selection is based on IT DNA matching and comparative analysis is performed with both industry and cross-industry functional peers to provide deeper insights and the most complete and actionable data for near term and longer term decisions.
Scope of Benchmarking Assessment Services — IT Functional Areas
iTeres offers client’s the flexibility to benchmark a single IT functional area or any combination of functional areas as needed to assist with current objectives and priorities. IT DNA based cost and performance benchmarking assessments can be provided for the IT functional areas listed below.
End User Computing
IT Help Desk
Mobility
Telephony (PBX/VoIP)
Telecom (Wireline)
Networking
IT Security
Data Center – Mainframe
Data Center – Server (Windows/Unix/Linux)
Data Center – Storage
Application Development
Application Support
Affordable and Cost Effective Benchmarking
iTeres provides clients the ability to drill deeper into selected areas of opportunity when initial benchmark results indicate additional insights are needed. This flexibility reduces benchmarking cost and the client resources required by enabling organizations to obtain an accurate baseline cost and performance assessment identifying areas of opportunity and then selectively drill down to lower levels of detail where it is cost justified. iTeres’ approach delivers a practical and effective performance improvement tool by providing results quickly and making it affordable in terms of both cost and client resources required to complete the benchmark.
IT DNA Benchmark Based Services
Once the benchmark assessment is completed, iTeres provides additional consulting and analytic services to enable clients to leverage the knowledge of their environment captured during the benchmarking assessment to improve their IT environment.
- Consulting – Improving Cost, Performance & Complexity
- Consultation/workshops to gain additional understanding and deeper insights; Potentially includes generating additional metrics
- Develop performance monitoring — identify key metrics to measure progress going forward
- Roadmap development – collaborate to identify and prioritize improvement initiatives
- Ongoing Cost, Performance & Complexity Reporting
- Periodic (typically quarterly) reporting of cost, complexity and key metrics
- Comparisons with baseline measures and prior periods
- Complements ongoing benchmarking program
- Predictive Modeling
- Potential strategies & initiatives, e.g. consolidation of IT functional areas, transformation projects, outsourcing, migration to cloud, etc.
- M&A and divestitures
- Business Case Development / Business Case Realization Analysis
- Sourcing, Negotiation & Vendor Management Assistance
- Analysis to provide understanding of complexities and solution impact enabling more informed sourcing decisions, contract negotiations and vendor management