Digital Technology Assessment

Digital Technology Assessment

Group50’s Company Physical includes a digital technology assessment series focused on digital technology and IT infrastructure. Middle market companies struggle with understanding how well they are leveraging their investments in software, infrastructure and IT operations. The following technology assessments are part of Group50’s Digital Information Practice. They are focused on providing senior leaders with the insight necessary to make sound strategic decisions in the IT space.

Business-IT alignment and effectiveness

This technology assessment helps companies see how well their technology and software investments address the company’s current and future business needs in terms of financial, customer, business process and employees.

What we Do: We start with surveys and interviews of key personnel and compile a baseline of a company’s current year’s goals and 3 year objectives in terms of:

  • Revenue, Growth & Cost Reduction
  • Customer Acquisition, Retention, Satisfaction, and Profitability
  • Key Business Functions, Processes and their SLA’s
  • Employee Satisfaction, Retention, and Productivity

We map the key business functions with the associated systems and technology. Our team of business analysts and enterprise architects perform a comprehensive analysis of how well the company’s current systems and technology meet its needs.

Deliverables include:

  • A scorecard for your key systems and technology in how well they meet your current and 3 year financial, customer, business process, and employee goals.
  • Identifying gaps and further improvement opportunities in terms of process engineering, digitization, analytics, non-core competency outsourcing (process/technology)
  • Recommendations on how to address those gaps

Effective Infrastructure Utilization and Operations

This technology assessment looks at your top hardware / software spend and helps you see how well you are operating and utilizing these products. To maximize the benefits from the assessment we focus on your company’s top 10 annual hardware/software costs (purchase/ build capital and maintenance/support expense) for the past 2 years.

What we Do:

  • We check your product inventory, purchase and maintenance contracts to form a baseline of what you own and the associated non-personnel support costs.
  • Review the support organizations to capture associated personnel costs and support models.
  • Appraise your hardware / software monitoring tools to capture and actual installs and their utilization.
  • Survey your IT and end-user staff to capture feature usage versus features purchased.

Deliverables include:

  • Utilization and operating effectiveness of these hardware/software products and opportunities for further cost and productivity improvements.
  • Assessment of current inventory and monitoring capabilities and support model and opportunities for further cost and productivity improvements.

This technology assessment looks at your organization’s ability (methodology, tools, and processes) to gauge the lifetime costs of owning an IT asset, an essential decision making tool for new purchases or in identifying consolidation and cost reduction opportunities.

What we Do:

  • Analyze existing software and infrastructure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
  • Create TCO models for each critical system
  • Begin the development of a lifecycle model for each critical system.

Deliverables include:

  • An executive report on what works well in your existing capabilities
  • TCO models for critical software systems and infrastructure
  • Improvement recommendations based on preliminary lifecycle models

Customer Interface and Interaction Opportunities

This technology assessment details the customer (internal or external) journey map inside a company, creating a step by step view of a customer’s experience and providing senior leadership with a set of recommendations on how to significantly improve the customer’s experience

What we Do:

  • Identify, analyze and assess every opportunity for a customer to interact with a company
  • Highlight critical ‘moments of truth’ points
  • Identify “walk away” or “client for life” points’

Deliverables include:

  • A step by step customer journey map for the company
  • Identify opportunities where digital technology and improved business processes can further improve the customer experience
  • Make recommendations for improvements in customer experience and productivity via process re-engineering, automation, analytics and non-core competency outsourcing
  • Prioritization for implementing recommended improvements

Cloud Services Requirements and Scorecard

This technology assessment looks at a company’s business needs and support services model and helps develop a methodology and scorecard that shows how well a cloud service provider fares with the operational metrics and SLAs. It also provides a logical “Total Cost of Ownership” comparison to various cloud pricing models.

What we Do:

  • Analyze existing infrastructure platforms and IT Service management processes and SLAs for Availability Management, Incident Management, and Release Management.
  • Capture business functionality requirements for the cloud services under consideration.
  • Analyze the pricing and support models for existing and/or prospective cloud providers.

Deliverables include:

  • A cloud services scorecard template that articulates functional, support, management and financial requirements.
  • An evaluation of the company’s existing and/or prospective cloud service providers
  • Recommendations for the most cost-effective cloud service roadmap

Utilization of a Technology Assessment gives senior leaders critical insight to how well a company is leveraging its’ investment in digital technology and understanding how it impacts its’ marketplace. Contact a Group50 Digital Technology expert at (703) 201-3936, requesting more information here, or by sending Group50 a note at info@group50.com.

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