Boosting Efficiency Across Global Operations
IN ASSOCIATION WITH:
DIGITAL REPORT 2021
BOOSTING EFFICIENCY ACROSS GLOBAL OPERATIONS
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WRITTEN BY: GEORGIA WILSON PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY
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Patrick Beyer discusses T-Systems’ global efficiency programme and how the company helps others to boost efficiency via cultural change
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tarting his career at T-Systems in 2009, Patrick Beyer has climbed through the business from IT Project Manager to Vice President Global Business Operations. T-Systems has several portfolio units; Beyer, in particular, runs the Global Business Operations in T-Systems’ Private Cloud Business. “To just give you a feel of what Global Business Operations are about, we are not finance, but we are doing all efficiency programmes. We are not human resources, but we are doing the entire resource management. We are not procurement, but we do all make supplier and licence management. That means, it's mainly about being a cross-functional unit in a large IT company,” explains Beyer. With 28,000 employees and a revenue of €4.2bn a year, “T-Systems is one of the leading IT service providers in Europe, and we are serving our customers with nearly all services, from digital solutions to cloud services and security services, and this makes us really unique in the market that we can serve the entire value chain for our customers.”
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Boosting Global End-to-End Efficiency Sharing some insight into the management of global efficiency programmes and how T-Systems boost them, Beyer explains that agile end-2-end efficiency is a framework for how T-Systems push significant efficiencies in IT operation. “We are also deeply convinced that this method, how we do IT, and efficiency is also valuable for a lot of other companies. Basically, we
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T-Systems: Boosting Efficiency Across Global Operations
break down the silos from the organisation by uniting the experts despite hierarchy levels and roles - forming a unit structure, an environment to let them share their ideas about further IT improvements and cost reductions.”
“Agile E2E“ efficiency doesn’t start with training, its starts with the ”right mindset”
down into three topics: agile methodology, agile E2E streams, and new T-Mindset. Starting with agile methodology, Beyer explains, “we looked at the benefits from SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) and from Scrum to PATRICK BEYER implement for efficiency. VICE PRESIDENT OF GLOBAL BUSINESS OPERATIONS, The Method Behind We wanted to bring our T-SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL GMBH Positive Results international colleagues for T-Systems together, collaborating Like many others in the last year, alongside across all units, by applying the agile the continuous year on year challenges, methodology. We wanted to break down the T-Systems has faced financial challenges silos by uniting the experts, despite hierarchy and pressures from the COVID-19 crisis. To level roles and form the organisational drive its own yearly efficiency, T-Systems unit. And we wanted to set up a real enddeveloped this ‘agile, end-to-end (E2E) to-end cloud collaboration from service efficiency’ approach, which can be broken management via delivery to offshore.” 6
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PATRICK BEYER INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY LOCATION: GERMANY
EXECUTIVE BIO
“So we took all those learnings from SAFe and from Scrum and brought it into one common programme where we invited several experts from all different departments like Finance, Operations, Procurement, Sales, Resource Management into several design thinking workshops, asking ‘How can we improve on an overarching level?’ From the meetings, we had so many great ideas and user stories that the next step was to determine how we can now structure those ideas into a common programme?” says Beyer. “It became clear very early on that we need to have dedicated people working on those programmes, if it’s only taking 10% of your working time, it will not succeed, which is why we said we wanted to have experts with at least 50% capacity to really drive these projects forward. This really brought us into a new framework on how we want to take our efficiency programmes further. One very important thing for me was always giving the responsibility to the respective scrum teams, and they set up their own individual efficient ambitions and targets. The mix between enabling high flexibility by using new agile methods like Scrum and self-organised teams was THE key success factor for us.” Based on this, T-Systems created five different agile E2E streams: 1. Transparency and monitoring 2. Third-party agreement optimisation 3. External workforce optimisation 4. Account optimisation 5. Cross function improvement “Working together as a team, we went through the best practices of our organisation, based on the cross-functional experts in the programme, we ask frequently are doing, what we can stop doing, what we can substitute and what we really need to
With more than 14 years of experience in the international IT business and transformation management (in several expert, head and executive positions), Patrick has a proven track record in leveraging 3-digit million euro in IT cost savings annually. In conjunction with the long-term strategy, he developed T-Systems' private cloud business became the company's most profitable unit. In his current role as Vice President Global Business Operations at T-Systems International GmbH, he has the planning and steering responsibility for a revenue volume of €1.7bn and 7,000 employees. With his international team, Patrick manages the P&L and important business transformation programs at T-Systems Private Cloud business and drives cost savings through IT process automation, nearshore migrations, supplier management and complex end-2-end IT service chain optimisations. In 2020, Patrick and his team were able to generate more than 10% cost reduction in T-Systems’ Private Cloud business. In parallel, he transformed the portfolio unit into a real flexible organisation based on agile working and a global skill management.
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keep. Based on the best practices from all units and the common knowledge of the organisation, we were able to really succeed. From this, we understood the importance of having the right mindset.” “As we know, it is our mindset that drives our behaviour and ultimately determines our results. So, our new T-Mindset idea was launched in 2019 to create a unique mindset within T-Systems. The T-Mindset is composed of three mindset shifts: changing the way we work together (Agile Working), changing the way we think about ourselves (Personal Growth) and changing the way we collaborate with each other (Outward Mindset). Especially the shift to an outward mindset, to see others as people like ourselves, whose objectives and challenges matter to us; dramatically improved our abilities of squads and teams to work productively together.” Helping Other Benefit From Efficient, Best Practices With this approach, T-Systems gain a lot of savings, “it levelled up our efficiency,” says Beyer, “and we’ve had, in the end, more motivated people than before.” In adopting this approach, T-Systems Private Cloud unit has seen great results, “we’ve had a significant reduction in our
“What we have really learned in this endto-end efficiency programme is that it's all about enabling our people, empowering our people and powering their potential” PATRICK BEYER
VICE PRESIDENT OF GLOBAL BUSINESS OPERATIONS, T-SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL GMBH
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KEY PARTNERSHIP
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“ Even more interesting, is what we are doing with Micro Focus on Monitoring” PATRICK BEYER
VICE PRESIDENT OF GLOBAL BUSINESS OPERATIONS, T-SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL GMBH
T-SYSTEMS PARTNERSHIP WITH MICRO FOCUS “We at T-Systems - a couple of years ago - implemented a programme called Zero Outage, which is mainly about avoiding incidents towards our customers. This programme is very deeply integrated into our DNA, so we have initiated a Zero Outage community with our suppliers and vendors, which allows our customers to cancel the contract if they are suffering from critical outages. To support this, we have set up common services with Micro Focus such as automation and monitoring, which contribute to the Zero Outage programme,” says Beyer. In more detail, Beyer adds that “it is extremely important to have really reliable monitoring in place to see if a situation or incident occurs, which can then be
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automatically resolved before it becomes critical. And from an automation point of view, together with Micro Focus, we are improving our service workflows while automating entire processes. Micro Focus has also been working with T-Systems to create a common market portfolio like Monitoring as a Service, as well as helping to push our efficiencies further by automating intensive processes.
MICRO FOCUS: AUTOMATION “Our journey at T-Systems is from pure infrastructure automation to hyperautomation, and this means automation is to be the core of our value chain, and Micro Focus delivers the state of the art product range for us to achieve this. So, for example, we are doing server automation and proactive incident remediation together with Micro Focus. This means
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when an incident comes up, in the best case, our automation software is already detecting this incident in the monitoring, realising that there's something wrong, already starting the procedures to resolve the incident, creating the necessary ticket, informing the respective admin, and if necessary also the customer. We are using a lot of other things like robotic process automation (RPA) as well. “So the range from small automation on your personal desktop to server automation, to the entire data centre, the automation gives us a very broad variety of options that we can use from Micro Focus. To give you a few numbers in 2020, more than 200,000 incidents have been automatically resolved just by using automation tools based on Micro Focus.”
MICRO FOCUS: MONITORING “Even more interesting, is what we are doing with Micro Focus on Monitoring,” says Beyer. “Monitoring is a great toolset that allows us to monitor our entire IT landscape. This means we can monitor everything from operating systems, middleware, database applications, servers, storage, everything. On top of this, we are also using Micro Focus discovery and data analytics, which means we can do an application landscape discovery to see how the landscape has been set up, which interfaces is between the devices, and which server links to which network component. Specifically for incidents and configuration, it's great to have this entire landscape in one cockpit. We've been so successful that we've worked with Micro Focus to turn our in-house solution into a market portfolio and offer it to our customers, which is a real value-add for them."
“ Self-organised teams unleash the full potential of our employees” PATRICK BEYER
VICE PRESIDENT OF GLOBAL BUSINESS OPERATIONS, T-SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL GMBH
external workforce cost by 20%, in our third party costs by 15%, and in our internal personnel costs by 8%. What we have really learned in this end-to-end efficiency programme is that it's all about enabling our people, empowering our people and powering their potential (despite hierarchy), and embracing change and continuous improvement.” Helping other companies to do the same, Beyer reflects that “it leaves us a lot of new potential instead of just drumbeating targets into organisations. It brings experts together, giving them trust and allowing them to generate epics, user stories and great ideas. Specifically, the regular demo
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“ Outward mindset for me means thinking out of the box and seeing people as individuals and not just as objects. Through this perspective, we gain knowledge about their goals and understand what really drives their behaviour” PATRICK BEYER
VICE PRESIDENT OF GLOBAL BUSINESS OPERATIONS, T-SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL GMBH
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THE T-SYSTEMS COMPANY MOTTO:
COMPANY MOTTO
#PEOPLEMAKEITHAPPEN “It’s one of T-Systems’ core beliefs,” explains Beyer. “It has been introduced by our CEO Adel Al-Saleh, he brought this into our focus - ‘people make it happen’ - and I'm deeply convinced by it because it's not just a phrase, it's really the foundation of everything we do and want to achieve. Our CEO of Deutsche Telekom, Tim Höttges, said, ‘a culture without strategy lacks orientation, but a strategy without culture is powerless’ and this exactly describes this sentence. We need to have a culture in our organisation that focuses on our people and collaboration. Having a strategy is helpful, but you need to have the right culture to forward the strategy.”
calls as best practice, from my perspective, was one success factor that I definitely recommend to many organisations, instead of wasting too much time with status reporting and result tracking.” For others looking to apply this method, Beyer believes that it all starts with the right mindset. “Agile E2E efficiency doesn’t start with training, it starts with the right mindset. If you have the right attitude in an organisation, then it is much easier to succeed. That's why agile working and an agile mindset for me are the foundations for the success of this programme. And this is something that companies need to start first.”
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