What's your role at Sumerian?
My role as Client Delivery Manager involves managing our team of analysts and working on a wide range of analytics spanning the entire IT lifecycle. I work on a variety of projects for our clients - from helping to define requirements and rightsize their IT infrastructure, to providing recommendations for ensuring performance and capacity remains optimised, right up to supplying quantified insight for strategic innovation.
What type of analytics have you been working on recently?
One of the growing areas of work for us right now is in the area of independent verification and transparency of outsourced shared services and cloud environments. Although these models can offer significant benefits through economies of scale, improved agility and scalability, they can also be riddled with pitfalls, especially when it comes to costs. Organisations considering them need to understand what they are signing up for - and key to this is understanding how your organisation is currently using its IT. By modelling and analysing systems data generated from our client's existing IT environments and correlating this with the supplier's offering and billing sheet, we're acting as an independent advisor to ensure our clients get the best arrangement to meet their needs.
What does the independent viewpoint bring?
The reason why we're being asked to get involved is that it's not really the concern of the supplier to be transparent - mainly because it can reveal things that are not optimised as well as they could be or are over-provisioned in terms of capacity. But for businesses entering multi-million dollar contracts, it's in their best interests to make sure they are getting value for money and that the environment they're entrusting their business critical services to is fit for purpose. What we often see is that outsourcing suppliers will organise their IT services into silos - Wintel, network, SAP, storage and so on. Each will provide you with data and SLAs, but this is very hard to bring together and make sense of. It can be even worse if you have a number of outsourcers involved. In some instances we've also seen contracts where suppliers are not providing dedicated infrastructure - in the worst case scenario your competitors could be on the same infrastructure as you.
Why is it so important to have transparency?
Outsourced shared services and cloud are highly attractive options for businesses today - nevertheless, it's critical to maintain control of your IT in-house - and getting transparency into your IT performance, capacity and costs is fundamental to achieving this. Too often organisations are entrusting everything to their suppliers and losing this visibility. By keeping control in-house you can always see where there are issues and keep a firm grip if anything goes wrong.
But it doesn't stop there. Once you have the visibility in place you can start to gain some highly valuable insight that can be used across even more IT management areas. For example, you can verify supplier charges against what you're actually using - and, if required, start to use this usage insight to feed an accurate IT chargeback model for the business. On top of that, you can also see what your capacity position is against business consumption and formulate performance KPIs that the business can rely on. In shared services environments you can also answer a number of more strategic planning questions - for example, if you start consolidating servers and storage you can determine the impact on those quality measures, such as if more users are added does performance degrade? Is capacity starting to become limited? Or is it over-provisioned in certain areas? All of that insight is ultimately important to maintaining high levels of IT performance for the business, but at the same time it also acts as robust evidence to manage your supplier relationships.
What services does Sumerian offer around this space?
Our analytics span the entire shared services negotiation and contract lifecycle. In the case of agreeing pricing models with suppliers, we model and analyse utilisation data from the client's existing environment, to provide a baseline which can be accurately compared against the supplier's rate card. This provides precise quantification to not only know what your IT cost outlook is likely to be in the short-term, but how business growth will impact it for the long-term.
The key benefit is that our analysis is driven by the business need, not the supplier's agenda. We can model any number of scenarios and forecast what the likely outcome is going to be. As mentioned previously, our analysis can also inform areas such as IT chargeback, giving clarity to the business on how IT is being used and providing full transparency for cost management. Over time, this can also feed sophisticated management insight to identify other levers to flex costs - for example, business units can examine how areas such as messaging are being used and begin to apply strategies to improve employee working practices and fine tune business processes. Or if you have a document management system and users are storing large GBs of documents, there might be a case to question whether the right documents are being stored and whether they are being compressing effectively. These questions can be easily overlooked without good insight into how IT being used. One small change to a process can act as a butterfly effect, saving the business significant operational costs over the long haul.
How are Sumerian clients using this insight?
Our analysis is being consumed by different parts of our clients' organisations, giving different roles the insight they need to maximise IT's effectiveness for the business and optimise operational costs. For example, the CIO can gain reporting on the entire end-to-end picture for high-level strategic decision making and supplier management, CFOs gain transparency into the full IT cost picture, and business managers gain that all important understanding into how their staff are using IT and what it's costing them. It gives everyone the visibility to the levers that influence costs and efficiency.
Tell us about your background and interests?
I studied Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen, and have held various roles within the IT and telecommunications industry over the past 12 years. I've worked on a number of analysis projects in that time from analysing the quality of service in mobile roaming to large-scale grid computing, astronomy, and bio informatics.
Having recently joined Twitter, the Guardian's @datastore provides a great mix of data sets and visualisations; @radian6 provides an interesting platform for social media analytics and of course, @SumerianIT is also interesting.