Outsourcing
Gartner, 6/26/03: How to Develop an RFP
Many enterprises fail to recognize the importance of the vendor selection process, which should include developing an accurate statement of requirements — statement of work or request for proposal (RFP) — and the appropriate steps in selecting, negotiating and contracting with a service provider. Streamlined selection processes like Gartner’s Fast Track are often an attractive alternative to the traditional RFP process. They have in common several critical elements that help ensure attracting the right vendors and enabling a careful provider selection process.
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Gartner, 6/26/03: Outsourcing as a Business Growth Strategy: Who Does What Next?
In the new millennium, bigger is not better. The demands of real-time business require flexibility, agility and responsiveness. A few large, dominant companies will pursue a strategy of being big to take advantage of economies of scale. The rest will compete on economies of scope—delivering big value through relationship, not ownership. The new manta is “you don’t have to be big to deliver big.”
The sourcing relationship decision is deceptively simple: There are some activities and processes your company should be doing itself, and some that should be pushed out to others in a variety of value relationships ranging from tactical to transformational. Getting this decision right means business growth: market leadership, faster delivery of solutions to market and improved agility. Getting it wrong means relegating yourself to the pack of followers.
Strategic outsourcing is the underlying discipline to form these relationships correctly.
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Gartner, 6/26/03: Trust and Control: The Art of Making Outsourcing Relationships Work
Organizational agility and the ability to create value requires flexible thinking and creativity that goes beyond process excellence. These factors are often “negotiated out” of outsourcing deals due to traditional approaches based on control rather than trust. A trust-based relationship is a powerful foundation in influencing the long-term success of strategically important business deals. In January 2002, Gartner launched a research project to establish how the framework for a trust-based relationship is built. The research found recognizable and predictable patterns of behavior determining how these complex business to business relationships work. The research is ongoing; this presentation highlights the key findings to date.
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Gartner, 6/26/03: The Future of Network Management
By 2005, more than 50 percent of enterprises will source the operation and management of premise network infrastructure to ESPs (0.7 probability). By 2006, the leading providers of managed network infrastructure and telecommunications solutions will be systems integrators and outsourcers, not carriers (0.8 probability).
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Giga, 6/26/03: Benefits of Integrating Help Desk and Desktop Management in Outsourcing Deals
Robert McNeill
What are the benefits of integrating the help desk in a desktop outsourcing deal?
Bundling help desk services into desktop outsourcing deals can have many benefits, including leverage, economies of scale, cost savings and service improvements. However, the most important reason is pushing increasingly accountability for cost and service improvement to the outsourcer. If structured correctly, an outsourcing agreement that gives the vendor responsibility for desktop management and help desk can provide built-in accountability. For instance, if the outsourcer does a poor job, or cuts corners in desktop maintenance, there will be a rise in costs in the help desk operations as the numbers of problems and incidents rise. If, however, the vendor is motivated to invest in preventative maintenance, automation and the deployment of user technologies such as verification software to handle password resets, not only will the outsourcer’s costs be lower (and profits higher), but the customer will benefit with higher availability, improved service levels and ultimately lower costs.
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Server Migration
eWeek, 6/30/03: Migration Tool Targets Windows File Servers
By Paula Musich
A startup on Monday will bring its unique perspective on how to streamline the server deployment process when it introduces its first tool.
Consera Software Inc. took aim specifically at Microsoft Windows file servers with its new AgileOne server lifecycle management tool, which automates the workflow processes associated with moving or migrating server configurations from one machine to another.
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Active Directory Migration
Giga, 6/26/03: Building Business Value With Desktop Services
Robert McNeill
How can we communicate the business benefit of desktop management/outsourcing to the business?
Many organizations fail to communicate the value of IT investments especially when performing infrastructure/desktop services. Infrastructure investments typically have not received the same level of investment due to the image that it does not provide direct benefit to the business. Traditionally, the application has seen more investment since it has been viewed as the link between the business and IT operations. However, with the need to invest in standardizing, consolidating and automating legacy infrastructure investments, it is becoming critical to map the business value of infrastructure services to business metrics.
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eWeek, 6/30/03: New Twist to Microsoft Active Directory Server Migrations
By Paula Musich
Miramar Systems Inc. next week will bring a new twist to Microsoft Active Directory server migrations with the ability to migrate end user desktop settings.
The Santa Barbara, Calif., company's Desktop DNA Enterprise Edition version 4.6 automates the process of transferring user profiles from Windows NT Server 4.0 domains to Windows Server 2003 Active Directory.
The market leading tool, which migrates individual users' settings, data and preferences during a Windows operating system update or hardware refresh, complements server migration tools that don't address end user desktop settings, according to Mike Walker, director of marketing at Miramar in Santa Barbara, Calif.
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IT Management
Gartner, 6/26/03: Guidelines on How to Staff an E-Mail System
The infrastructure and business conditions that influence the management of an e-mail system differ greatly between enterprises. Critical tasks can be overlooked, and trivial tasks overadministered, without a staffing plan.
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Darwin, 6/03: How to Get the Business Value You Need
Simple: Don't take consultants' words as gospel and follow these seven golden rules.
BY MICHAEL HUGOS
BEING RESOURCEFUL calls for a set of skills and a mindset that goes beyond just doing more with less. Certainly, doing more with less is a good thing — that's called thriftiness. But thriftiness is only one part of resourcefulness. Resourcefulness requires that in addition to doing things in a thrifty way, you must also do new things.
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The Golden Seven Rules
I believe that there is a short list of seven rules or guidelines for the resourceful use of IT. The first guideline cannot be ignored under any circumstances and it is best to follow all the other six guidelines as well. If more than two of them are ignored, failure is the inevitable result. These guidelines are:
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Microsoft
Fortune, 6/24/03: Alas, Poor Microsoft ... You Used to Be So Interesting
These guys are no longer the zeitgeist-setting titans we loved to hate. It makes a polemicist like me sad.
By Stewart Alsop
A tech-savvy friend of mine casually said something the other day that's been bothering me ever since. "Microsoft is in trouble," he said. It's not unusual to hear people in Silicon Valley flip Microsoft the bird, saying stuff like "Microsoft is evil incarnate" or "Microsoft must be neutered." But "Microsoft is in trouble"? That's a new one. How could my buddy possibly believe that Microsoft—Microsoft!—is in trouble?
Right after that, I noticed in some magazine that Microsoft's total shareholder return has actually been negative over the past 12 months. You have to put thoughts like those in perspective, of course. Shareholder return depends heavily on timing. And despite Microsoft's size, its revenues continue to grow at a healthy pace—not to mention the fact that nearly 30 cents of each dollar of revenue is profit. If this company has a financial problem, it's figuring out what to do with all the cash it generates.
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Information Week, 6/26/03: Exchange 2003: More Features, Same Price
Microsoft says it has added features to Exchange Server 2003, due later this summer, while not raising the price.
By Tony Kontzer
The good news for Microsoft Exchange customers is that the new release of the market-leading E-mail server, due later this summer, won't cost them any more than previous versions.
Microsoft shared pricing and licensing options for Exchange Server 2003 for the first time Thursday, and it opted to keep pricing consistent from Exchange 2000. The standard edition of the server, recommended for small and midsize businesses with no more than 5,000 users, will be priced at $699, while a more-scalable enterprise edition is priced at $3,999. But a Microsoft official says new capabilities in Exchange will make it feel like more of a bargain. "Even though the price is flat, customers are getting a lot more value," says Missy Stern, Exchange product manager.
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Grid Computing
Computerworld, 6/27/03: HP to give software to grid developers
By Robert McMillan
Hewlett-Packard Co. plans to release new open source software for configuring grid applications, the company's chief technology officer told attendees in a keynote presentation at the Global Grid Forum (GGF) in Seattle Thursday.
"We are contributing an HP-developed technology called SmartFrog (Framework for object groups) to the open source community and specifically to the GGF," said HP CTO Shane Robison.
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Ideas
The Wall Street Journal, 6/30/03: Is Priceline Founder Walker's Plan To Police Sites Genius or Just Goofy?
Jay Walker, who made a fortune with Priceline, the name-your-price airline ticket company, describes himself less as a businessman than an inventor, using the Internet to rethink how things work. Having helped remake the way the country buys plane tickets, Mr. Walker is now working on changing the way it fights terrorists.
His USHomeGuard, a for-profit company that Mr. Walker and associates are now talking up in Washington and elsewhere, is one of those ideas that will either leave you applauding its cleverness and ambition, or cringing at its kookiness and opportunism.
I think Mr. Walker is on to something, though not in quite the same way he probably imagines.
As do most other terrorism entrepreneurs, Mr. Walker begins by noting that there are tens of thousands of pieces of "unprotected infrastructure" in the country: power plants, gas tanks, petroleum refineries and the like.
USHomeGuard would point Webcams at all of them. Those photographs would then be distributed over the Internet to the home PCs of Americans who have signed up to earn money -- an estimated $10 an hour -- working as what Mr. Walker calls "citizen spotters." Most of us would just call them security guards.
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