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It's teamwork – within your company and with experienced IT service partners – that will help make your centralisation program successful

Organisations can gain considerable strategic and cost benefits through centralising IT, but the challenges of doing so successfully – particularly on a multi-national basis – can seem dauntingly difficult. So how do you ensure the process is successful and how can partnering with a specialist services organisation such as Computacenter help? The answers will vary according to your sector, organisational structure, culture and business goals, but the first step must be to formulate an appropriate and workable strategy for your specific business.

When they begin to look at the possibility of centralising their IT, many organisations are often initially attracted by the potential cost savings, but may have only a sketchy idea of the available options and most effective course of action. In these cases, it can be worthwhile to consult a trusted IT services supplier such as Computacenter at an early stage. Their broad experience of implementing various centralised IT models and contracts for a range of customers means they have unique insight into what works where, and what doesn’t. As a result, they are often able to provide invaluable help on developing the right strategy.

Mark Peter, Computacenter’s international senior service manager, says: “Often, an organisation will use us as the lever to centralise. Occasionally it may have done little more than think about it prior to contacting us.”

Mo Siddiqi, Computacenter’s director of international operations, agrees: “Typically, the first step we’d take is to qualify whether the client has thought through the issues, so we go through an initial qualification process. Our job is to offer some honest feedback at the early stages as to whether we think they’re being realistic, what changes are required and whether we can help them meet their objectives.” He adds: “Existing customers often come to us at the very early stages and ask us to advise them on how to proceed. We will then start to look at benefits and help them develop a roadmap for achieving their goals. Other organisations may come to us with a semi-formulated strategy or approach, which we can help them to refine.”

Making the effort

Most business cases centre on cost savings, but organisations also need to be aware that there may be considerable upfront expenditure if they are to achieve those ongoing savings. Siddiqi explains: “Sometimes, moving to a common environment can involve additional project and capital cost to create consistency – but you need that consistency in order to succeed in implementing a more consolidated, centralised environment.” The level and scope of IT centralisation can vary from hardware procurement and desktop maintenance at the low end, through centralised support and service desks, right up to high-level services like remote server and network management. “We can offer the full range of managed services globally. We provide centralised international service desks for a number of customers. We have other customers for whom we just provide onsite support globally. We even have sophisticated storage on demand contracts with some customers, where they pay per terabyte of storage used on a three-year cycle. But the key point is that the customer’s ability to take advantage of these services depends on the maturity of their centralisation model,” says Siddiqi.

One Computacenter customer employs around 130,000 people worldwide but is structured as 100 or so small to medium sized businesses. “We support around 5,500 of their users – including about 2,500 in the UK, 1,000 of which are in the London HQ,” says Peter. “We also support a number of other European operations. So From Barcelona, we provide first- and second-level remote support, server and network monitoring, problem management, a change management, asset management, and all the reporting for the service.”

The customer's driver was to centralise its support through its internal IT organisation. “There’s been a lot of pain and hard work involved,” says Peter, “but through centralising the service desk they now understand a lot better the challenges they face in taking the process further. For example, we’re delivering support in Europe to six different ‘end markets’, which are effectively local businesses. Within those, they have six different joiner, leaver and mover processes, six different types of authorisation process, and six standards for desktop PCs (although they have a global image). So they are only at an early stage and we’re helping them to drive their central standards.”

International standards

As we saw in the Strategy feature (pg.10), there are challenges in developing and maintaining the necessary standards in any multi-national organisation and the reasons are largely cultural. There is no way an organisation can address those cultural issues successfully without solid leadership and commitment from senior management in order to ensure that local organisations buy into the changes. Again, though, partnering with an experienced supplier can help you considerably when it comes to securing that buy-in.

Peter says: “Many organisations face resistance from local organisations to any plan to centralise IT. People are often worried about losing control or access to the services they need. In other words, there is an internal sale that companies need to make to their local organisations and in the initial phase we can help them make that sale.” He continues: “We can act as the local representative and show local organisations the real-world benefits of centralisation by referring to our experiences with other customers. And with our extensive track record of delivering centralised services, we can probably address some of the concerns of the local regions better than the company can on its own.”

Siddiqi adds: “While we are supporting the customer’s overall mission of centralisation, part of our role is to point out where there will be genuine limitations and where flexibility is required to meet a specific country’s business requirements. That’s something you can’t do without real-world experience of having delivered it. Through our partners we have local presence in 110 countries worldwide and we rely on those local people to give us a lot of information about the local behaviours and some of the local technical and logistical issues that affect the centralisation process – such as regulations governing export of equipment into certain countries and how fast you can get an IS line installed. That local knowledge through our global network is critical to our ability to explain to our customers the approaches they need to adopt to achieve success in standardisation.”

In some cases, he says, the company almost acts as a ‘cultural liaison’ between local organisations and the centre, reassuring local organisations about the changes on one hand and highlighting local issues missed by the centre on the other. “For example, some of the assurance we can provide to help secure local buy-in is around our global service management infrastructure and how we ensure issues can be effectively escalated and managed centrally. For example, we would never just subcontract the total SLA to a partner organisation (except in very simple areas). We always retain control and therefore we can reassure local organisations that when they speak to our people, we have the authority and accountability to make something happen.” On the other hand, in the initial stages the centre often presents a set of requirements which, nine times out of ten, turn out to be based on false assumptions about a particular country’s requirements or which have failed to capture some of the real sensitivities about that country’s issues. This is generally revealed during Computacenter’s detailed investigations as part of the due diligence process and so one valuable service it provides is in communicating those issues back to the customer.

Best practice

Access to best practice principles and processes is one of the key reasons why it makes sense for many organisations to partner with an accredited third-party service supplier. Another is the ability to tap in to the supplier’s already proven infrastructure, thus reducing the level of risk associated with such a major change. “We have a global service management team which acts as the customer management interface and the escalation point for international support, based in Europe, Asia Pacific and the Americas. The hub of the client support operation is the Barcelona ISC and we also have a satellite office in Kuala Lumpur that acts as central point for call handling and passing calls down to local engineers,” Siddiqi notes.

For centralised product supply, Computacenter can offer different models depending on customers’ requirements. Siddiqi says: “For those with a multi-country requirement, we export from our central hubs in Hatfield, Kerpen and Paris. And that is particularly relevant when customers have very high SLAs for product, or an enterprise product where availability is limited. We have some of the best stockholding in Europe in our central hubs so we can offer fast SLAs for product fulfilment. With other contracts, particularly ones involving desktop or component supply, we use a local supply model. There, we ensure the local countries are buying according to set standards and reporting back to the customer’s central purchasing department the amounts procured so they can better manage their suppliers on a global basis.”

Unique position

Computacenter also believes it is in a unique position in offering customers truly standardised global SLAs. Richard Weston, international services director, says: “To offer effective centralised services, suppliers have to demonstrate not just the cultural piece but the organisational piece. We can offer effective service internationally, not only because we are the single interface to the client team within Computacenter, but because we also have control of the levers for service delivery among our international partners.”

While some very large organisations may prefer to source their own offshore suppliers and manage the range of services through an in-house team, the risks and challenges involved in such an approach are far more prevalent than opting to work with an experienced supplier. For many medium to large enterprises it makes far more business sense to outsource centralised operations or their management, even if they retain ownership of the physical assets. “Our primary customers for these services are organisations ranging from 1,000-20,000 users.

Right now the majority are going through that consolidation phase, and therefore the issues of cultural compatibility, change management – a lot of the softer issues, in fact – are at the fore,” says Siddiqi. However, as business models mature and companies move further down the road of centralisation, Computacenter is committed to providing ever more services and ever better service levels to help customers achieve continual improvements to their efficiency, flexibility and agility.

Siddiqi says: “I think as they mature internationally, a lot of our customers will take more advantage of our service offerings, which are evolving all the time. For example, they’ll be able to reduce call volumes and cut the total cost of support aggressively over a period through implementing best practice and best-of-breed technology, as well as in many cases taking advantage of support from lower-cost locations such as Eastern Europe.” He adds: “Increasingly, a lot of the priorities for consolidation that they currently have at a national level will become more important internationally, and we want to help them achieve those goals.”