Managed Services for the Intelligent Enterprise
(6 min read)
“The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.” This sentence was shaped by Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada, at the World Economic Forum in Davos 2018.
And it has been become glaringly obvious again in the current COVID-19 crisis and the impact on the economic environment. Shining a harsh light on processes and technology that needed to be rapidly adapted or modified. Although most businesses had some type of digital strategy in place before the pandemic, for many companies this was a wakeup call.
The concept of the Intelligent Enterprise – as a combination of the right mindset, new technologies and a digital core at the center of its operation – that is able to quickly adjust in changing environments or even to pivot into a new business model becomes the holy grail worth striving for. Learn what an intelligent enterprise is and how intelligent technologies can help you.
Today, I would like to focus on how Managed Services can empower your IT for this intelligent transformation.
Balancing Operations and Transformation of the Entire IT Landscape?
As recent studies show, IT Teams and decision makers are being held down by repetitive tasks – ones that keep the boat afloat but don’t move it further up the river. The resources are fully occupied with daily routine, bogging down the ability to move beyond the status quo.
Managing and maintaining the existing IT infrastructure and internal applications, working off help desk requests from colleagues, or similar everyday operations and mundane tasks dominate major workloads and chew up the most time.
This said, it’s required to keep up with all of this and still focus on what’s next for the company and the market. Managed Services can play a vital role to support and accelerate this journey and truly become an Intelligent Enterprise. In the next section I would like to show some examples of this:
- Ensure Operations and Gain Back Freedom
- Turn Insights into Action
- Cloud Adoption
- Ideation, Innovation and Transformation
- Service Integration and Multiprovider Management
1. Ensure Operations and Gain Back Freedom
Innovation and transformation need freedom. Freedom to think, explore, create, and to welcome change. But how can you keep up with changing business requirements when new solutions and technology are arising faster than ever, when you’re in over your head in managing the current landscape and facing employee shortage and the war for talents instead?
By running your daily IT-operations as a Managed Service with a scalable, flexible, and agile support model utilizing best of breed processes with predictable SLA’s and proactive services to stabilize and optimize your business operations, you can gain back that much needed freedom. With a combination of local and global experts, your queries concerning SAP applications are addressed immediately due to our 24/7 availability. Upgrades and release changes, ongoing development, enhancement and testing of SAP applications as well as the complete technical management of the entire system landscape are no longer something to be afraid of.
Companies like Mercer, Duracell, Leifheit AG, Canyon Bicycles GmbH and many more rely on our Managed Services to gain back freedom and rather appoint scarce company resources to drive the digital transformation initiatives further will resting assured that day-to-day operations is secured.
2. Turn Insights into Actions
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Peter Drucker, the often-attributed author of this quote, is aiming on the fact that a judgment on whether you are successful or not depends on how success is defined and tracked. With a clearly established metric, you can quantify progress and adjust your process accordingly in order to produce the desired outcome. Without clear objectives, you’re stuck in a constant state of guessing.
Therefore, having a defined end-to-end system and application monitoring with the right metrics and KPI’s in place is a must. This not only creates a full visibility of the overall health of the system landscape, but also acts as single source of truth to collect and correlate alerts from various systems and applications in your landscapes in one central place. Thus, building a solid basis to identify bottle necks, gaps, and errors early on in process and derive the right measures before they become critical for the business.
Using analytical based insights combined with a proactive problem management process NTT DATA Business Solutions Managed Services is not only ensuring the smooth operation of business processes but also reduce the TCO. Continuous reduction of incidents through ticket analysis, automation of reoccurring tasks with the help of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to improvements productivity, the proper implementation of archiving and housekeeping measures to limit data volume growth or the use of performance optimization to right size the system landscape to name but a few of the activities we take care of.
This again, creates freedom to work on higher value activities.
3. Cloud Adoption
In times of globalization and digitization, business needs to be able to react flexibly and quickly to changing demands. For this, we are witnessing an industry-wide shift to the cloud, with companies adopting more and more cloud solutions into their IT strategies. And overall there is little debate that there are huge cost savings opportunities when moving to the cloud. Changing financial models from capital expenses (CapEx) with upfront investments to operational expenses (OpEx) with a pay-as-you-go or subscription model allows organizations to unlock money that was formerly frozen in CapEx purchases on other business needs.
Besides the impact on the balance sheet, cloud-based solutions make it also possible to easily evaluate new technologies and also thereby accelerate everyday processes. Agile and DevOps methodologies are reinventing the way development and operations teams design and deliver applications. New practices like design thinking are elevating speed and time-to-value over lengthy, complex project cycles.
But still a lot of questions need to be answered, before making the shift:
- What solutions benefit from the move to the cloud?
- What workloads should be shifted to the cloud?
- Can old solutions be subsidized by cloud native features?
- What’s the impact of a hybrid or multicloud approach on the day-to-day operations? How can I measure the cloud utilization to ensure maximum usage and avoid overspending?
Just to name a few.
Based on your needs, we review the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) options, guide you in your cloud strategy, migrate your data, and manage your hybrid cloud with our full spectrum of enterprise Managed Cloud Services.
With this full–service approach, our customers get the needed flexibility and reduced TCO to focus on and invest in their business.
4. Ideation, Innovation and Transformation
The journey to become an Intelligent Enterprise is not a predefined path and looks different for every company and industry. And this is in no way a discussion driven by technology: The intention is to help you to improve your business, not to implement a technology at random, just for its own sake.
Based on your current challenges, pain points, or plans for the future, we start the conversation as part of our Managed Services DNA. Based on our experience, there are usually some very good, yet uncovered ideas already “in the air” of your company. Next to that, our modular Innovation Consulting helps you to identify the right tools and methods and acts as an accelerator.
To further foster innovation within your company, we integrate “Idea and Innovation Management” in our day-to-day operations and also facilitate collaboration on basis of focused “Innovation Days”. Together we continuously evaluate new ideas considering stakeholder demands, industry trends, market analysis, and technology innovations.
5. Service Integration and Multiprovider Management
With the dynamic market development, business requirements constantly changing and new cloud technologies arising at every corner, IT Landscapes are becoming more complex as we speak.
Transferring specified IT tasks to service providers therefore can turn into a piecemeal process – you need experts for each of the different areas – from developing the cloud strategy, management and the continuous development of solutions to hosting and application management.
What you end up with is often a wide array of IT contracts and contact partners who each know only a fraction of your IT system. We, however, support you in two ways as your trusted advisor:
- With the first option, you receive all services from a single source which are coordinated with one another. This is the case when, for instance, you want to introduce a new solution. You can rest assured that your existing infrastructure will continue to run smoothly.
- With the second option, we take on the efficient control of all third-party providers for you. With 30 years of experience in the SAP market and proximity to SAP as a SAP Platinum Partner, we know applications, stakeholders as well as service providers across the industry.
You decide which option is right for you.
Managed Services as a Strategic Advisor towards the Intelligent Enterprise
As you see, Managed Services can be much more than just “keeping the lights on”. We support your transformation path and help you not only increase operational efficiency, contain costs, and free up internal resources. Managed Services serve as your strategic advisor in today’s fast-paced, fiercely competitive business environment to continuously innovate, evolve and integrate a diverse system landscape to achieve better business outcomes.
With us as a strong full-service partner at your side you’ll be able to leverage digital technologies and capabilities to help you to achieve your goal of becoming an Intelligent Enterprise and to stay ahead of the competition.
Attend our webinar ‹Cloud-Based Technologies for the Intelligent Enterprise›
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