This is one of the hardest questions for any management team to answer.
Is there mileage left in our current platform, and so another round of spending on fixes or bolting on some new bits will keep us going? Maybe our IT department is a little too keen to push for a shiny new kit and might be overlooking the business value? We could ask our consultants, but they could be biased towards expensive action.
In an ever-changing business landscape, enterprises often require a realignment of strategy as well as recalibration of capabilities. Organisations need to evaluate their Disaster Recovery strategy and if their IT staff spent more time on maintaining their current IT infrastructure or delivering new business capability. It needs to be explored if some potentially good business developments had to be avoided because IT would be an obstacle, or a new venture suffered because the IT was too slow to deliver.
A platform refresh that enables IT modernisation and transformation helps businesses drive efficiency and achieve greater business resilience and agility. These initiatives not only allow businesses to overcome operational challenges but also deal with any changes in business processes or myriad corporate or regulatory developments.
The key themes for a platform refresh
At Simplex, when we help businesses transform from traditional models to new age services models, we also help them improve their operational excellence and organisational productivity.
Whether it is for infrastructure modernisation for compliance or end-of-support reasons or workforce transformation to improve digital workplace productivity, we use a three-pronged approach for the transformation projects we undertake.
- There’s a focus on Business empowering our customers with speed and agility to enhance their technology proficiency and market competitiveness while making them future ready.
- This is done in conjunction with the aim of unlocking Value for the businesses. By engaging in diverse industry partnerships and contracting apposite vendors and solutions, we bring in resource and effort optimisation to improve cost efficiencies.
- All this must be done keeping in mind the Users who desires a consistent and reliable user experience. The organisation needs to build a collaborative workplace to improve productivity and drive growth.
For a platform refresh, we help businesses define business requirements specifications, offer them strategic options, build a programme to deliver the chosen strategy, and then execute it through all the stages – from transition to support.
Technology challenges are often business problems
Simplex worked with one of the world’s largest asset managers with operations in more than 30 countries addressing diverse technology challenges along the way. That said, some of the concerns are often not envisioned as technology issues but business problems.
We carried out a 360-degree review of their entire IT ecosystem. The idea was to improve the end user experience and improve stability of the IT infrastructure. Following the audit, recommendations were made, and a platform refresh was implemented.
One of our expertise is enabling rationalisation of the IT infrastructure. A few years later, we were engaged to refresh the customer’s infrastructure once again as part of their IT modernization initiative. The customer has a primary datacentre in London and a secondary one in another country. Simplex not only provided support for this large refresh programme and the technical governance and programme management services necessary for the success of the programme, but also added another datacentre on Azure for a succinct disaster recovery solution. Simplex helped deliver a uniform end user experience across the board while fulfilling diverse regulatory requirements pertaining to individual markets.
We also help with rebranding and technical movement in case of mergers & acquisitions as well as separations. The customer was initially separated from its parent company, and then after a series of acquisitions, was itself acquired. At each step along the way, Simplex helped analyse the impact on the systems, planning the remediation, and designing the target architecture for the email flow and system changes. Per our efforts, each time, the new brand was launched as per target without any impact on the business. Operational resilience is, after all, a key business priority.
Summary
At Simplex, we are constantly looking at ways to propel increased adoption of technology and aligning it with business goals. Our associates with outstanding technical depths and industry certifications think and deliver with that three-pronged approach – namely Business, Users and Value – rather than purely a technology play.
Whether it’s by building business resilience, achieving automation, or modernising operations, the idea is to achieve a demonstrated value for any digital transformation initiative.
With inputs from Derek Poots, a programme director with a long record of success in delivering major IT and organisational change programmes in public and private sectors.
Photo by Martijn Baudoin
