Imagine you are the IT leader for, say, a large bank that has grown both organically and through acquisitions over the last ten years. Having started as a mid-size regional bank, your employer now provides wealth management, investment bank services, insurance and a host of other offerings. In your position, you deal with many disparate systems and demanding internal clients that need faster response times, more agility, more of everything, and all of it—of course—at a reduced cost. Meanwhile, you face an environment that is crippled with “technical debt” and massive inefficiencies that have piled up over the years, impeding operations and preventing the bank from investing in new areas.
Now imagine a clear roadmap to an environment that is standardized and automated, an environment in which resources are aligned to business needs, to creating new products and services for customers, a place where the “virtual engineer” is the hero. Imagine an environment in which 40 percent of IT operating costs are now saved and reallocated to new investments that drive significantly greater top-line growth for the business. This is the future for organizations that embrace automation and standardization.
One of the many things we do at ISG is to analyze back-office operations to drive significant operational improvements. In so doing, we find the complexity and redundancy created by overlapping technologies in many organizations is staggering. As with any consulting firm, we have many tools to choose from, including our operational assessment and benchmarking capabilities. Which are the two tools that consistently deliver the greatest results? Automation and standardization. Over and over we see that, when IT leaders adopt these two tools, they lead their organizations to greater operational efficiency and growth.
Robotic process automation, autonomics, cognitive technology—different terms for the automation proposition—significantly add to the value IT can provide to the business, bringing deeper insights through analytics, reducing error rates, increasing agility and throughput, and allowing IT leaders to invest more wisely in business-differentiating initiatives.
Automation technology that is embedded in a larger IT standardization program helps meet the goal of doing things right (efficiency) and gives the financial freedom—through cost savings—to do the right things (effectiveness) that deliver business value.
At ISG, we believe enterprises will discover the right things to do when they achieve transparency. IT executives need to understand the constraints placed upon their organizations, many of which are imposed internally or contracted over time. Transparency requires a deep understanding of the relationship between costs (input) and performance (output) and the ability to see metrics in new ways.
Cost analysis disciplines like Technology Business Management (TBM) and software vendors such as Apptio are creating the data management and visualization engines that make data easier to understand and more transparent. By feeding our benchmarking data into these TBM software engines and delivering insights and advice through our consulting services, we are able to help our clients institutionalize transparency, translate it into actions and achieve greater operational effectiveness. The end result is true and measurable business value.
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