Best Practice Consulting

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BENCHMARK



Benchmark of IT infrastructur Many corporations today are in a critical competitive environment in regards to their expense situation versus their earning capacity. Agility and cost savings in combination with the necessary internal alignment of the IT with the business processes - business alignment - are precedents for successfully fulfilling qualifying requirements. In order to gain fair insight and a realistic basis for critical financial decision-making, an understanding of the corporate marketability and position of internal service offerings as compared to those of other companies and external IT services providers, terms and scope of service, a formal benchmark measurement of the entire IT infrastructure is necessary.

Goal

Goal of the benchmark is of current sources of IT infrastructure. Costs should be categorized into at least the following groups:

  • Internal and external employees
  • Hardware
  • Software
  • Infrastructure
  • Outsourcing

From the information gained from categorizing the expenses and costs, a comparative analysis of similarly sized IT service providers can be performed to establish a comparative map of market and competitive capacity.

The IT infrastructure should be evaluated with priority given to the following collected und evaluated data:

  • Operations and infrastructure (SAP Data Center , ...)
  • End-user processing (incl. file/print/mail server)
  • Networking (LAN and WAN)
  • User help desk

From the results and conclusions it will be apparent, which areas or departments will require further in depth analysis.

The evaluation of data collected is based on standardized operations and performance data. Depending on the area under study, a set of operating figures, so called key performance indicators (KPI) will be introduced at the kick-off workshop. Vation Technology will recommend the appropriate approach.

The comparison of collected date and standardized operations and performance data is mapped against reference data of similar corporations according to

  • lower threshold
  • upper threshold and
  • average

in accordance with Best-Practice standards.

Expectations

Expected results and goals of the infrastructure benchmark:

  • Evaluation of cost-benefit relation
  • Overview of strengths of the current service portfolio and offering
  • Catalog of weaknesses and recommended areas of improvement
  • Identification of cost drivers
  • Creation of transparency in the IT- services spectrum
  • Development of concrete points of action for the optimization of the IT infrastructure and alignment of strategic purpose.
  • Selection of a dedicated Benchmark-Theme for close scrutiny - i.e. SAP-operations or client-server/LAN-environments

Vation Technology GmbH - Max-Planck-Str. 6  -  D-86420 Diedorf - HRB 20056 Augsburg - Tel.: +49-(0) 821-484194 - Fax: +49-(0) 821-484193