Managed Services Breakfast Briefing - transform your IT department into a strategic asset
Thursday 25th September 2008, BSG House, London, EC1.
The majority of IT departments today spend at least 70% of their time maintaining the systems they already have. This creates an IT environment that struggles to respond to increasing business demands, resulting in the business viewing IT as a cost centre rather than a business asset. The process of changing an IT department from a cost centre to a strategic asset is not something that can be done overnight, so how do you start?
Chaired by Gary Barnett, Research Director at independent analyst The Bathwick Group, the Managed Services Breakfast Briefing is the first in a series of events aimed at evaluating your current IT environment and enabling the transformation of IT into a strategic asset. This briefing aims to provide an overview of the different aspects of managed services, when a managed service should be considered, and the process of engaging an appropriate managed services supplier. At the Managed Services Breakfast Briefing you will hear about the following:
- Market Overview
A broad look at trends in the IT market currently and over the next few years, including an assessment of the impact of Software as a Service and the increasing outsourcing of non-strategic IT systems
- IT - Strategic Asset or Commodity
A debate on how IT is viewed by the business and how IT can alter this perception by identifying and understanding how the various elements of the IT function add value to the business
- Outsourcing - v - Out-tasking
On average IT Departments spend over 70% of their time and effort in basic operational tasks with less than 30% available for research, development and improvement. Traditional outsourcing was held for a long time to be the panacea to this problem but more recently strategic out-tasking is becoming the operational model of choice for the most successful IT departments. This section will be a debate on the core differences and describe success and failure stories of both models
- Six Reasons for Outsourcing
A discussion around the six main reasons that cause organisations to outsource all or part of their IT, examining the main drivers for the attendees and assessing the success and failure of outsourcing in meeting the needs behind those drivers. The identified reasons are Organisational Driven, Improvement Driven, Financially Driven, Revenue Driven, Cost Driven and Employee Driven
- What does a good Managed Services Partner look like?
Finding a true partner is often a difficult task so this section will concentrate on the features to look for when selecting a partner in this space as distinct from selecting a hardware vendor or a project based partner
- Defining a Roadmap - the Managed Services Maturity Model
The Managed Services Roadmap is the first step to creating a proactive environment, which brings together the distributed systems existing in organisations today, to create a dynamic infrastructure.
The Managed Services Breakfast Briefing is designed to be relevant and informative. You will get the most from it if you come along with specific questions which you would like answered.
Who Should Attend?
The event is aimed at IT decision makers who are charged with creating an IT environment which is able to contribute to maintaining and building your organisation's competitive advantage. The Managed Services Breakfast Briefing is a round table event hosted by an experienced Managed Services Consultant.
Next steps
Places are limited so register now to confirm your place.
Please note
Please note that BSG events are free of charge, however, due to over-subscription to events, BSG reserve the right to charge a £100 fee if cancellation notice is not received 48 hours prior to the event. This is to ensure that cancelled seats can be reallocated to those on the waiting list and to cover event overheads incurred in the event of non-attendance.