CEO/CFO Helper

Modern information systems can substantially reduce operating costs of companies in a highly competitive and rapidly changing environment. For instance, a collaboration systems, including portal solutions, simplifies interaction among colleagues and raises their productivity. Such solutions prove most effective for companies with remote business units and enterprises with large numbers of business users. Such companies include insurers, banks, and retailers. Networking systems give employees of such companies simultaneous access to the needed information, the possibility to collectively create, modify, and approve documents, and the ability to respond to customer queries with maximum efficiency.

 

The transparency of IT departments can be achieved exclusively through systemic work along these lines. Relying on their rich experience of completing major projects, De Novo experts recommend developing the company’s information systems according to a single IT strategy.  The main obstacle for an objective assessment of the progress in IT systems development is the absence of criteria that could be used to compare the condition of IT services after some time. De Novo experts are highly qualified in developing a corporate infrastructure strategy as part of an IT strategy that would meet the company’s business requirements taking into account its growth strategy.

 

Quite often, the dynamics of companies operating in highly-competitive segments of the economy depends on the capabilities of business solutions serving the core business processes and enabling the company to adapt quickly to changing market conditions. Rich project experience enables De Novo experts to optimize the IT infrastructure of a dynamic company to minimize risks when rolling out new business applications. To this end we use:

To determine what particular solutions would best influence the dynamism of the key business processes, De Novo experts will audit the company and come up with recommendations based on the audit results.

 

Companies planning to secure external investments sometimes have to appraise their assets based on assumptions for lack of accurate data. Investments in IT infrastructure optimization and introduction of tools for quality assessment of IT services at a company accomplish two objectives at once. First, these measures enable a more accurate assessment of business value (appraisal of information systems according to the generally accepted model based on their maturity level). Second, the transparency of the processes of gathering, processing, and analyzing data is a key point in the process of raising the investor appeal of a potential investment target.

 

This task can be accomplished using virtualization technologies. Besides raising the overall reliability of corporate information systems, these technologies also ensure more effective utilization of corporate computing resources and make it possible to postpone the costly expansion of costly rack space at data centers. Virtualization allows combining the computing capacity of several nodes into a single environment, which can then be divided into the required number of isolated information environments, each one of them serving a separate business application. The flexibility of this technology allows distributing resource utilization according to clearly defined criteria—application priority and significance in terms of ensuring business continuity. Should one node in this system fail, computing resources will be evenly distributed among the remaining nodes until the device is brought back online. De Novo experts recommend implementing best practices from the ITIL library, which allows linking individual IT services with specific corporate business processes. This link enables maximally effective management of IT risks, assessing the cost of failure of individual services in money terms, and, accordingly, identifying with maximum accuracy the priorities, risks, and requirements for fail safety of the key nodes in the IT infrastructure.

 

Corporate IT systems can develop in two ways. The first was widely practiced by many Ukrainian enterprises. It involved quick resolution of any current issues and forecasting potential IT needs for the short term (several months). The downside of this approach is that information services were mainly structured according to the principle of patching holes based on the personal preferences of frequently changing IT specialists. After several years the IT infrastructure would become a zoo of hardware and solutions, becoming unmanageable over time.

A more effective method is planning the IT infrastructure development in conjunction with the company’s business plans. The IT infrastructure is built according to a single strategy and taking into account future business needs. As a rule, such infrastructures are well scalable, manageable, and meet the needs of key business users. A solution to this problem for a company that had not previously conducted broad planning of the IT infrastructure development lies in the set of measures that have been time and again proven effective by De Novo in its previous projects. This set comprises an audit and evaluation of the IT infrastructure and key information systems of the company, preparation and planning of measures to transform and optimize the IT infrastructure over a horizon of 2-3 years (infrastructure strategy).