In peril? You need a pIT stop

The pIT stop panel: William Crowe, Stuart Dommett, James Governor and David Mitchell

The pIT stop is a unique reader service hosted by Computing.

In the first part of the programme, we offered four IT managers the chance to present their technology problems to a panel of experts, and receive free personalised advice on how to tackle their business challenges.

Each participant was subsequently set a real-life task to complete, and asked to record their progress in a video blog.

The best of these would win an all-expenses paid trip to this year’s Formula One race in Valencia, courtesy of Intel, sponsor of the BMW Sauber F1 team. The advice offers insights for IT managers facing similar challenges.

The panellists were:

• James Governor, principal analyst, RedMonk.
• David Mitchell, senior vice president of IT research, Ovum.
• William Crowe, enterprise solution architect, Intel.
• Stuart Dommett, enterprise client product manager, Intel.

To watch videos of each participant discussing their issues with the pITstop panel and to see their video blogs, visit: www.computing.co.uk/pitstop

Managing mergers

Richard Castillo, Head of IT, EFM

EFM is a property management firm that has grown rapidly by acquisition. “We pretty much doubled in size in 2007,” says Castillo.

“There is a lot of taking stock of the current situation, and with the forecast growth coming up, I have to try to take stock before that growth happens.”

The key challenges:

• Manage IT in a company growing through acquisition.
• Improve collaboration and document management in a fast-expanding firm.
• Plan for the effect of technology during mergers and acquisitions (M& A).

The pITstop panel’s advice:

Look into consolidating hardware and applications. Start evaluating virt ualisation ­ – get the skill sets in place, understand the application use across your disparate sites, and start thinking about how these would map to a virtualised infrastructure, because that process will probably take you 12 months in the planning phase alone.
William Crowe

Try to build not just a technology foundation for M&A, but also a culture of taking on new people and new firms. There are many platforms that will enable you to support that. You could establish an interesting culture around the use of Wikis, blogs and so on for collaboration. It would be something that tied people together culturally.
James Governor

With a big M&A project there are two things you need. One is an IT due diligence shopping list that you demand of the integration team before the deal is made, because it can materially affect the value of the acquisition. The second is to know what you are going to do from day one to day 100 of that contract, once it is signed.

When do you consolidate the acquired firm’s applications from its servers onto yours? When do you change domain names? It is about the real grubby-level detail of what you are going to do for that first 100 days.
David Mitchell

The task:

This is an opportunity to show that IT could make a major contribution to the profit of future acquisitions.

Produce an inventory of tasks and information as part of the due diligence for the next deal. What is the ideal shopping list of commercial, financial and technical information you want from the due diligence team?

And what is your 30-, 60- and 90-day IT integration plan? What are the major tasks, how do they fit together and how are you going to show you can control and drive value out of that acquisition in its first 90 days?

View Richard Castillo’s video blog of how he tackled the task set by the panel at: www.computing.co.uk/pitstop/castillodiary

Controlling information

Marek Suchocki, Head of IT, Mouchel

Engineering group Mouchel is a geographically distributed organisation with more than 100 offices.

“We have more than 40TB of data that we are having to back up as well as manage those servers,” says Suchocki.

“We would like to move some of that data to our datacentres, consolidate it and manage archiving better.”

The key challenges:

• Gain better control of information in a highly distributed organisation.
• Make users more aware of the importance of good information management.
• How classifying data can help introduce a shared services and shared cost model.

The pITstop panel’s advice:

Look at what data is being used for. You talked about different data types, such as movies and CAD drawings; is there an infrastructure you can adopt for each one of these?

Start to segregate your data and your applications. You do not want to upset users because they will need to be able to work on data locally, but you have to acknowledge that you cannot keep all that data pushed out for ever. Getting it back into the centre is going to be key.
Stuart Dommett

You need to stop people thinking there is a service or a server under their desk, and make them realise there is a cost under their desk. You need to make that obvious – ­ think about gold, silver and bronze categories of data.

You need to think about different costs for different content types, and make it clear those decisions have a cost. Then you can have a better conversation with the business divisions about whether or not they really need the data to be physically located next to them.
James Governor

There is an organisational architecture discussion to be had as well. At the moment you are having to cope with all sorts of IT problems because the business is spread across the country. If you have a specialised shared services organisation, then some of the IT architectural issues go away. I think it is an organisational issue, not an IT issue.
David Mitchell

The task:

With a shared service model you need shared costs, so build a shared cost model for storage in the organisation. You have a lot of different data types and you need to get a handle on that, as well as a clearer sense of how much that costs. Use the gold, silver and bronze categorisation to keep it simple, so you can talk to the business about how much they are costing the organisation.

View Marek Suchocki’s video blog of how he tackled the task set by the panel at: www.computing.co.uk/pitstop/suchockidiary

Continue to the next page to read about Alex Reeves and Mikko Green's advice from the pIT stop panel.