IT as a Business Differentiator in the SMB Market
The SMB Breakfast Briefing - transform your IT department into a strategic asset
Thursday 12th June 2008, BSG House, London, EC1.
Leading industry research within the SMB market-place has concluded that 2008 will be the year that SMB's focus on improving IT and the surrounding business efficiency issues. The majority of SMB 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 analysts, The Bathwick Group and with guest speaker James Cushing, Finance Director at leading SMB property management group, Vail Williams, the Managed Services SMB Breakfast Briefing is an event aimed at helping you evaluate your current IT environment and to then assess the transformation of IT into a strategic, business 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
All markets are becoming increasingly competitive, everyone is striving for the same customer base. Organisations are working smarter, doing more with less, squeezing assets. Is this the right approach? Does working smarter have a different horizon, could spending a few extra pounds, initially, provide larger mid/long term rewards and differentiate you from your competitors?
- 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, and more importantly customers and prospective customers. What sort of things could IT deliver to your customers and prospects?
At the outset of this topic, James Cushing will spend some time sharing his personal experiences on how IT was viewed within Vail Williams, historically, and what IT now needs to deliver to retain competitive advantage.
Gary Barnett will be able to position James's statements within the wider SMB picture, are the experiences of Vail Williams typical, what can SMB businesses expect from outsourcing their IT? Are their genuine business gains to be made?
- 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. Across all of these topics we need to retain a focus on what difference this can make to your customer base, both existing and potential.
- 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. This would be something that a strong partner would help your business achieve. With the ultimate goal of IT helping you obtain increased revenue and profit, through attracting new customers. As an example, Forrester Research concluded that SMB's will achieve the greatest IT efficiencies through consolidating and virtualising their infrastructures. This would need to be implemented within a wider strategic IT Roadmap.
The SMB 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, FD's, CEO's, 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.