Pipeline Publishing, Volume 3, Issue 12- David Page

Pipeline Publishing, Volume 3, Issue 12

	This Month's Issue:
	Standards Make A Stand

Solving the ICT Solutions Bottleneck

By David Page

Big Business but no IT

Providing ICT solutions to the world’s large enterprises is big business for a sizable number of outsourcers, both network and IT. For the business services division of a network outsourcer, for example, large-scale ICT solutions can account for 40% or more of total revenue despite representing only a tiny proportion of all business services customers. Such a revenue figure is a material contribution to creating shareholder value. For IT outsourcers, ICT solutions represent all, or nearly all revenue.

Globally, ICT solutions revenue is $150 billion now, and growing rapidly to more than $210 billion in 2010, according to Gartner. Interestingly, some analysts estimate that nearly half of present and future revenue is likely to move between different solution providers, adding urgency to the task of efficient delivery of ICT solutions. Despite the vast scale and growth of this complex ICT solutions market, solution providers remain worryingly underserved, though one could argue they are in fact not served at all. This is an intersection of commercial drivers, business processes, engineering discipline and software tooling built – a confluence of factors neither well addressed nor seen previously.

The answers are to be found in many areas, including standards-based engineering, best practice business processes, and software automation. One might argue this is not dissimilar from that of IT capabilities or support commonly found elsewhere. Why is it that this critical market is so underserved, so neglected?

Standards and IT are focused on point services not comprehensive solutions

The simple fact is that, today, standards bodies and OSS vendors are primarily focused on solving a different problem. Their focus is on highly repeatable, standardised, ‘factory’-like ICT products and services. Such products and services can be ordered by selecting from templates, fulfilled with flow-through automation and operated using routine operating procedures. Such services are rarely customised, lending themselves to such standardised tooling.

ICT solutions, by contrast, are one-off bespoke collections of services and products that are combined in various ways to meet a holistic enterprise need. Some of these service and product components might also need modification, and will, therefore, deviate from the recognised factory standards. To make things more complicated, many factories will invariably be used to provide the multiple product and service components that comprise a single ICT solution.

Why is it that this critical market is so underserved, so neglected?

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The result of this multi-factory, multi-service complexity means that the regular ‘factory’ order handling, fulfilment and operations environment is not able to directly enable an ICT solution.

Manual crafted solutions practice have not changed for 30 years

For an ICT solution provider today, the state-of-the-art is to provide a highly skilled manual process overlay to coordinate the processes and systems of their factory and extended multi-factory service supply-chain. In the ICT solution space for large enterprises, the fact is that solution providers use solution design techniques that haven’t evolved meaningfully over the last 30 years. Worse still, the critical pre-fulfilment decomposition and sequencing of the end-to-end, solution-level design into properly constructed factory-level service component orders is also handcrafted.

It is also accurate to say that the solution design and subsequent decomposition tasks are undertaken by large numbers of staff; this, and the inherent complexity of these tasks, often leads to serious errors, omissions and delays in solutioning and fulfilment. This, in turn, creates nightmare scenarios where service components are missing, improperly configured and solutions are poorly integrated. The resultant time delay in transformation to the new solution has a quite serious negative financial impact; there are numerous well-known examples of this.

Of course, large-scale ICT solutions such as these are never in a steady state; they are constantly changing as the customer evolves, and at any point in time, some part of a large solution will be undergoing re-design and fulfilment. Unhappily, this inadequacy in manual ICT solutioning, change control process coordination and fulfilment, all too often means that the solution model gradually diverges with what has actually been implemented, leading to steadily decreasing customer satisfaction over time. When the .....

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