CIONET Magazine 3

Magazine. Vol. 03, June, 2008.

Edwin D’Hondt “IT strategy based on knowledge management” 4

Paul Piebinga “Not many companies succeed in standardizing IT” 8

Hans Van Der Zwaag “Offer experiences to your employees” 14

Ivo Cools “Offshoring offers IT people who produce more for a lower budget” 13 Editorial: Unknown, unloved Umicore, KBC, Electrabel: IT staffing revealed Achmea about its successful outsourcing Strategic motives behind outsourcing Unified Communications: change in culture Outsourcing: 7 key areas Column: getting change underway

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Piet Van Petegem “Get a change underway” 18

The Technology Paradox The shortage of IT talent is one of the most crucial issues a CIO faces today and will continue to face in the coming years. Research shows that a lack of skilled people is one of the primary factors driving outsourcing.

ABOUT CIONET MAGAZINE

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Academia Belgica – the special interest group (SIG) that works on improving the cooperation between the academics and the CIO’s – focuses at the moment on promoting IT to young people.

How do we make IT more attractive as a sector, as a career and as a curriculum? And can this help us to solve the ‘Quest for IT talent’?

Promote or dump?

The SIG’s last meeting where more than 30 representatives of IT departments, vendors, academics and media joined, revealed an interesting paradox. “We need to promote technology – we need more nerds!” was the opinion of the academics from the faculties of engineering. “No, we need more right-brainers and should dump the term technology”, replied the professors from the economic faculties.

Of course both were correct. Thé IT person doesn’t exist. Like in the world of construction – where we have builders, engineers, architects, project managers and controllers, etc – we also have a range of different IT profiles, part of them technical by nature, the other part not at all.

Strangely enough we still have the tendency not to differentiate between these profiles and we still talk about thé IT person.

In this third issue of CIOnet Magazine we focus on the human side of IT. How do we find, attract and retain the right people in our IT departments?

How do we manage the competencies and knowledge inside the company? When do we decide to outsource parts of our organization and processes? What’s the best strategy for outsourcing and offshoring?

Joining CIOnet Are you a CIO with at least 20 people in your IT department or an IT Manager reporting to a CIO in an IT department with at least 200 people? Are you interested in joining CIOnet? Then send an email to an@cionet.com with your request and contact information.

HENDRIK DECKERS Managing Director - CIOnet hendrik@cionet.com

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Editorial

Unknown, unloved R

esearch into the motives behind outsourcing IT pinpoints the problem. It is not just the quest for cost reduction or more flexibility that leads to outsourcing, but above all the conclusion that Belgian businesses are simply not managing to get hold of the IT people they need. Furthermore, it does not look as though this is going to change anytime soon. The profession of IT specialist is weighed down, quite wrongly, by a negative image that is making younger people feel less inclined to opt for training in information technology.

Even though IT is a growth sector, in the long run the basic human capital necessary to support such growth is just not available. That is a cause for concern for the entire Belgian economy. Right now CIOs are already struggling with the phenomenon when they find themselves unable to fill certain vacancies. So outsourcing tasks to India or China is only resolving a specific practical problem, and does not get to the heart of the matter.

In order to turn the tide, we first have to polish up the image of IT people.

Unknown, unloved, or so it seems here. Most young people associate information technology with programming alone. They are unaware that the convergence between IT and business makes for some interesting hybrids. The use of graphics applications in the medical sector is one good example of this. IT can immerse you in the business, and vice versa.

Although there is now a PC in pretty much every living room, young people still know virtually nothing about the way in which IT has grown into becoming the nervous system of our information society. Straight away, that’s a considerable reproach for the education system. Clearly, IT merits a place in the overall education of our young people, alongside languages, mathematics and science. The media too does not escape criticism. The often negative coverage about viruses and hackers helps to define IT’s image among the general public. There never seems to be space for good news.

From a social perspective, IT is a young discipline. It has been mainstream for barely thirty years. Yet in view of the importance of IT in our society today, we are gradually approaching a certain state of alarm. Asia and North Africa are rushing through two industrial cycles. Yesterday they were still agricultural areas. Today they have a place in the digital world. And what of tomorrow? We no longer have much of our head start left. It is therefore high time to upgrade IT training and the profession of information specialist.

CARL TILKIN-FRANSSENS

CIO – KBC President Advisory Board CIOnet Belgium

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IT staffing revealed

Strategic HR POLICY The IT sector has obviously learned some lessons from the job auctioning that got so out of hand in the 90s. Those lessons translate into a clear HR policy in terms of IT staffing and recruitment. Companies are making a point of only attracting the right profiles. They are aiming for the ideal balance between internal and external staff. And when they are recruiting, they set the standard high.

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Edwin D’Hondt, CIO at Umicore: “I prefer an IT strategy based on knowledge management.

You can indeed save costs by hiving off certain activities, but it also means losing much of the internally accumulated knowledge.”

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” t is important for IT to evolve along with the business, and for that evolution to be well rooted in the overall IT policy.” So says Edwin D’Hondt, CIO with Umicore. The company specializes in materials technology and precious metal products. There are two hundred IT people working in Umicore’s Information Systems department, eighty of which are external staff. They are responsible for the company’s administration.

At Umicore, there are seven thousand PC users and three thousand SAP users. “The evolution of the environment in which the company operates

represents a big challenge in the area of IT. The complexity of the business models is growing constantly, there is globalization, and so on. At the same time, IT is also evolving very fast. So it is a good idea to follow the lesson well and also to anticipate the opportunities that arise from IT.” IT people also need to network Just as previous editions of CIOnet Magazine have illustrated, the hard thing in this is to gear business and IT to one another as best as possible. “The business side relies on IT being sufficiently flexible for supporting market opportunities rapidly”, says Edwin D’Hondt. However, from the IT side this does not always seem easy to organize. “The business side tends to have the idea that IT should guarantee a supportive competence of the total lifecycle of the IT solutions, and that at the same time IT people can follow a normal career path. That is often not so obvious.”

When an organization decides to switch off its mainframe, what should happen to all of those employees who have spent their whole career immersed in Cobol? Quite plainly, it is a challenge to have those IT people swap over to a new job.

“There is enough to do within IT to bring employees regularly into contact with different jobs. It is important that they do not stay glued to the same chair for years. IT people have to network more.

Talking with other members of the company’s staff, or with IT people from other organizations and sectors, allows them to broaden their field of vision. It is important for IT to climb down from its ivory tower.”

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Frank Noten, head of HRM for the ICT division at KBC Group: “Many aspects help to define the HR policy of the IT department: outsourcing and offshoring, IT governance, the tension in the IT job market, and so on.”

At the same time, the company’s business side expects IT costs to fall or at least to remain at the same level. “That vision means a certain risk”, believes Edwin D’Hondt. “Moving forward purely on cost reduction can mean jeopardizing your internal IT knowledge. For that reason I prefer an approach based on knowledge management. You can indeed save costs if you hive off certain activities and hire external staff instead, but that means losing much of the previously accumulated knowledge.”

Edwin D’Hondt therefore argues for a transformation of the traditional IT team, with a strong focus on the individual. “You have to emphasize the IT department’s strong points, and involve individual employees in the company’s vision at first hand.

Only by carefully explaining what the core activities are for IT do the employees gain an insight into the direction that the company is planning to go in. It also helps them understand better why the company is opting to outsource certain aspects of IT, and lets them express sooner in what way they would like to contribute towards the core business of IT.” Shifts influence IT KBC is also finding it challenging to attract and indeed keep the right IT staff. The bank has a big IT organization: all together it has almost 4,300 IT people, just two thousand of whom are internal

employees in Belgium. This year KBC’s IT budget amounts to eight hundred million euro. “Over the years there have been a couple of shifts in our HR strategy”, says Frank Noten, head of HRM of the ICT division at KBC Group. “Outsourcing and offshoring, IT governance and globalization, the evolution of the IT architecture and in the IT job market: these are all factors that have helped form the HR policy of the IT department.” One constant remains that KBC prefers to fill key roles and management functions from among its own staff members, allowing them the opportunity to advance. In addition, the company recruits a mix of school leavers and more experienced profiles, with or without qualifications in IT. “We attract ICT bachelors and masters. But, after some training in our ICT Academy, new employees with different degrees, such as economics, mathematics or science, are also able to land a job in IT.” KBC is seeing an evolution in the competences required of its IT staff. “We are tending to be looking more for people who would like to work on international projects. Aside from the technical knowledge and skills, the importance of personal abilities has also risen greatly. A good IT person not only knows the technology, but is also communicative, able to work well in a team, deal with customers easily, and so forth.” The company is doing all it can to >

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> get that notion across to the academic world and

to the students themselves. “We try to assist as closely as possible in training, among other things by presenting cases, sponsoring professorships and offering trainee placements.” However, in spite of all the efforts, there is still a shortage of IT people in the Belgian market. KBC is solving the acute need for specific profiles by engaging external staff for the shorter term. For the longer term, the company prefers to train new employees internally. “We offer our employees a great deal of career opportunities and provide them with guidance and coaching”, adds Frank Noten.

“At the same time we are quite open about the required competence and the associated salary level.” Of course, the advantage of a large organization like KBC is that it offers a wide range of options for advancing to technology specialist or to manager, both nationally and internationally.

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Luc Olbrechts, HR manager at Electrabel ITS: “We started out from a competence strategy.

We mapped the jobs and profiles, in order to obtain a view of the available and necessary IT resources.”

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Competence strategy forms starting point Naturally, before you attract and train people, as a company you have to be sure of what profiles you need. For four years, Luc Olbrechts was closely involved in the HR part of the IT transformation within Electrabel. The deregulation of the energy market and the acquisition by Suez meant

that Electrabel’s decentralized IT approach was ready for a revamped strategy. “The assignment was to centralize IT, achieve proper integration between business and IT and adapt our IT model to suit the new, European context. For this reason we first developed a competence strategy.

We wanted to know how many and what kind of IT people we would need for that. The insight into the required competence formed the basis for the further strategy.” Electrabel’s approach had a significant influence on the recruiting policy. Indeed the competence strategy indicated which profiles the company had to recruit in the short term, which ones it could develop internally and which ones it would have to phase out or reorientate. In three years, the transformation of the IT competence that resulted from this produced a saving for Electrabel of about seven million euro.

The company cut back more than one hundred jobs, mainly infrastructure related functions, via an advancement plan, outsourcing and a retirement plan for older employees. At the same time, over a two-year period there were seventy-five recruitments, mostly project leaders, service delivery managers and specialists in process integration.

Job atlas “It is important to complete a couple of successful projects early”, explains Luc Olbrechts. “This helps you create a sound basis for the projects that follow.” The experience from the first project phase served as guideline for the further development and implementation of the renewed HR policy. “One of the key points was composing a job atlas. We analyzed the business processes, linked the associated IT processes to them, and allocated them to various IT jobs. In that way we were able to map fourteen different job descriptions and competence profiles.” The job atlas gave Electrabel a clearer view of the available and required IT resources. “We linked that approach to performance management”, adds Luc Olbrechts. “Through a portal we have access to a tool for evaluating and validating the competence of employees. For instance we are able to draw up the most suitable training plan for each individual IT person, in order to give him or her the best possible support both in their current role and in the future.”

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Special feature

Achmea about its successful outsourcing

Proven partnership In 2006, Achmea Group IT Services (GITS), Achmea’s internal IT service provider, started a big outsourcing project under which three parts (data centers, workstations and network and communication) were outsourced in full. A massive process that was completed within eighteen months. Paul Piebinga (GITS chief executive) and his right-hand man Wout Kok were responsible for this process, which was supervised by management consultants Quint Wellington Redwood.

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Paul Piebinga held ultimate responsibility for Group IT Services at Achmea until 1 April 2008. Over the past six years Piebinga has been responsible for Achmea’s IT.

very complicated project has been wrapped up and Paul Piebinga is a happy man. He explains: “Seven years ago we began centralizing our IT, which was spread out across the entire company. In 2001, that structure was causing a number of difficulties. It was clear that it was becoming increasingly hard to do portfolio-wide business with our customers, because we were unable to see beyond the boundaries of a division. For that reason we decided first to centralize IT, so that afterwards we would be able to tackle the business problem properly. In that same period, ten mergers also took place, which made it even more important to move everything

into one line. The plan of action was focused on centralizing, standardizing and finally optimizing.”

He jokes: “If I had to organize a dinner party for all of the companies that succeeded in it, the evening would not really cost me much. If I had to organize that same dinner party for all of the companies that had tried it, I would probably have to hire the RAI exhibition centre.”

Internal or external?

The infrastructure was tackled and, under Wout Kok’s lead, the entire IT was integrated into one company, Group IT Services where some 2,600 people work. Ten computer centers were cut back to two, where later on two were added from InterPolis and one type of workstation was opted for. Paul Piebinga: “During that whole project we were constantly working on standardizing more and more infrastructure components and on bringing them in line with the market. All of that

“Benchmarks ensure that we outsource at going market prices.” took a great deal of time, energy and manpower.

Gradually it became clear that the added value and Achmea’s competitive strength were not so much determined by the way in which IT was deployed, in other words where the actual manual work was done, but far more by where and how IT was deployed. A few years ago, therefore, we drew up a sourcing strategy, which had the ulti-

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mate goal of focusing Achmea increasingly on controlling its IT, rather than on administering it.

We look to see where we can best invest our energy and what mix of activities we should do ourselves and what we should do with partners, so that the total package is as effective as possible.”

“We want it to work, but at a normal price.”

Wout Kok adds: “Focus on steering it, rather than wanting to do it yourself. In every area, you have to see whether you have the operational scale for doing things yourself, or whether it would be better to pass that over to companies that have that particular discipline as their core business. If you carry on doing everything yourself, you also have to spend money. More money in fact. We made a financial model for if we were to do it ourselves, and a model for if we were to outsource everything. From a financial perspective, outsourcing was found to comply better with the requirements of good business sense.”

Benchmarks But then, who would be the most suitable parties to outsource parts of the IT infrastructure to? According to Paul Piebinga that was not too tricky: “All IT companies can do roughly the same things, for about the same price. So tendering then becomes a matter of comparing promises, amplifying marginal differences. Consequently, in August 2006, we proposed to our Board of Directors not to go out to tender, but rather to look back over our experiences of the preceding three years. This brought out a top five of partners with which we had worked well.” Wout Kok takes up this point: “All that sounds fine. You make your choice, but now how do you ensure that the partner’s service offering is actually up to the mark? In order to acquire a good overview, we first described in full the entire service provision to our customers. Then, together with Gartner, we made benchmarks of all of the components of the process. This put us in a position to assess the various offerings for market conformity. Then, of course, the partners only had to make an offer for the part that applied to them. The partners ul-

timately remaining, Atos Origin, Getronics PinkRoccade and KPN, were able to conform to the findings of the Gartner benchmarks. Therefore, by definition we knew that the pricing was right.

Certainly, there was some keen negotiating, but nobody ended up being fleeced.”

Process “In this process Quint acted mainly as sparring partner”, believes Paul Piebinga. “It was together with Quint that we formed our images of what exactly we wanted and how we saw our role in IT. Quint has the means to crystallize such a vision

and to help with the implementation.” Menzo Meijer (Principal Consultant) of Quint adds: “The six months that we were working on the implementation of the outsourcing project was a kind of simultaneous chess game. Three projects, three contracts. A rigid control. That was only possible due to the good relationship with Achmea and because Quint had the relevant knowledge for being able to supervise the process. The great thing is that we did not get tired of one another.” Wout Kok laughs: “For there is that risk, when you work for so long together. Things can get stale and you begin to deliver poorer quality.”

Above all he was happy with the controlled way in which the whole process ran: “I had never >

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Within Achmea’s Group IT Services, Wout Kok is responsible for the infrastructure operation and procurement.

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Paul Piebinga (l.) and Wout Kok (r.), Achmea, together with Menzo Meijer, Quint Wellington Redwood: their collaboration was a kind of a chess game.

> expected that we would manage it. The prepara-

tory stage began in August 2006. That was when we defined the technology roadmap together with Quint. The deadline was 1 July 2007, in the end it became 12 July.”

Flaws Naturally, such a large-scale process is bound to have its flaws too. About this Paul Piebinga says: “I think that the greatest mistake that we made was the fact that we did not properly involve the Works Council in the process. We overfed them with information and so there came to be too much emphasis on the complexity of the whole.

Furthermore, it was a very long process that was also at one point interrupted by the merger with InterPolis, so that there were different start and stop times. For the people it is devastating. As long as three years ago, the staff knew that we were going to outsource, but all the same it did take a long time.”

Future Nonetheless, the end is not in sight. Paul Piebinga sighs: “As far as we are able, we have put

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things in order on the infrastructure level. However, you cannot standardize your infrastructure without tackling the application level too; that will be happening over the next few years. We are now able to focus on restructuring our applications and converging the different application functions that we have.”

480 million euros Achmea’s entire IT infrastructure is outsourced to three parties: Atos Origin (data centres), KPN (network and communication) and Getronics PinkRoccade (workstations). The total value of the deal with the three partners is 480 million euros over five years. Management consultants Quint Wellington Redwood led the project supervision. The total infrastructure was transferred to the partners with effect from the beginning of 2008. Thus, contractually that did represent a ‘big bang’, but the ultimate transition will be finished off in the coming eighteen months. Earning back the investment starts in a year and nine months.

Building Relationships Sharing Knowledge Growing your Network CIOnet is the first online network that empowers CIO’s & ICT Managers to network more efficiently for business.

CIOnet is an invitation-only business network with strict admission criteria.

Please find all details on www.cionet.com Not a member yet, but think you qualify? Contact an@cionet.com for more info.

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Motives behind outsourcing

A strategic choice Outsourcing provides a solution to the shortage of IT people and the persistent pressure on IT budgets. Record Bank and Belgacom explain their strategic choice.

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ecord Bank is a full subsidiary of the ING Group, originating from the merger and acquisition of all eight organizations. The bank provides loan, savings and insurance products amongst others. Record Bank has 700 employees in-house and a network of 750 independent agents. In view of the background to Record Bank’s origin, there was a great need for a new IT environment. For this reason the bank developed

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Louis Mahy, CIO with Record Bank: “IT acquired an entirely new role with us. IT has evolved from a pure necessity into a strategic trump card.”

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a model of selective sourcing based on three pillars: a new infrastructure with full migration to the banking package Thaler v2, the definition of new processes based on ITIL with associated SLA’s, and finally attention to the governance aspect of IT. “Outsourcing was the only way to tackle this”,

claims Louis Mahy, CIO with Record Bank. “We did not have enough IT people of our own to cope with such a major revamp. Furthermore, the project was urgent in nature. Stability had to be brought about quickly.”

Record Bank decided to outsource the new infrastructure with different partners. The new Unix and Windows environments were accommodated with HP Belgium, which rented data center space from Belgacom for the purpose. Telindus became responsible for the new network of the independent agents. Getronics elaborated a standard PC configuration for the workstations in the agencies. Finally Record Bank transferred the print shop from ING to Joos-Ardatis. For supporting the IT processes, the bank is applying ITIL procedures. The company opted for the solution of HP OpenView Service Desk, among others for incident management, request for change management and user administration. Record Bank entrusted that solution to Getronics. “Since the infrastructure and applications have been outsourced, IT is fulfilling an entirely new role with us”, adds Louis Mahy. “IT has evolved from a pure necessity into a strategic trump card. Not only is outsourcing having a direct cost saving effect, it also allows costs to be kept better under control.” Moreover, Record Bank’s IT infrastructure is now ready to support further growth of the organization, for example if an acquisition should take place once again. “In the past IT actually used to put the brake on that kind of situation.

The present IT model is also reusable within other group companies.”

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Offshoring as strategic choice Belgacom has had experience with outsourcing for a long time. The company has been working for over ten years with partners in India for its software development. “We are in a fast growing business”, says Ivo Cools, vice president Service Center & Remote Infrastructure Operations with Belgacom. “At the end of the nineties we were not finding enough new employees to continue to meet the growing demand for applications. However, the necessary competence does exist in India. Among our Indian partners we have, in principle, about 300,000 developers ready to help

Cools. “These days it is a strategic choice. Offshoring offers us a scaleable, flexible and efficient group of IT people, who produce more for a lower budget.” Scalability in particular is important. Depending on need, via its Indian partners, Belgacom can set more or fewer developers to work. A Belgian IT team of the company’s own does not provide that flexibility. “In that way, offshoring has ensured that we are able to organize IT from a business approach: now we are genuinely business needs driven, instead of resource driven.”

According to Ivo Cools, the fact that a large part of the knowledge concerning the development of

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Ivo Cools, vice president Service Center & Remote Infrastructure Operations with Belgacom: “Offshoring is a strategic choice. It offers us a scaleable, flexible and efficient group of IT people, who produce more for a lower budget.”

us.” For a while, Belgacom also had an offshoring project running in Vietnam. The standard of infrastructure, training and language knowledge was found to be quite a bit lower than in India. “As far as we are concerned, India continues to be the best environment for application development. In 2006 we thoroughly evaluated and confirmed our sourcing strategy.”

That strategy is aimed, amongst other things, at finding the right balance between the company’s own employees and offshoring. Belgacom opted for the solution that guarantees the lowest costs over the long term. “When we first turned to India, it was to get around the capacity problem in the Belgian IT recruitment market”, explains Ivo

applications, and concerning the applications themselves, is situated outside the company is not only a problem with outsourcing. “You also have turnover amongst your own employees.

With a sound program for knowledge containment management your can keep knowledge management well under control with offshoring.”

About 95 percent of the coding of the applications is done in India, in addition to 70 percent of the application tests and 40 percent of the functional analysis and the design. Architecture is only 5 percent subcontracted. “We prefer to control that part ourselves. We are really strict about anything to do with ITIL: change management, ticket handling, that kind of thing. We do not believe that you can outsource everything.”

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Case study

Unified Communications

Change in culture Pension fund manager PGGM and Rabobank have introduced Unified Communications in their organizations. It has led to a change in culture and calls for due guidance.

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he subject was unraveled during a meeting that CIOnet organized in the Netherlands at the end of April. Guus Pijpers, known for his book ‘On an Information Diet’, (see also CIOnet Mag 2) stressed the necessity for Unified Communications. More than half of the attendees receive over 80 email messages a day, yet only a few of them go in for Unified Communications. “We are facing information overload”, concludes Guus Pijpers. According to him, technical aids are all very well, but the problem is with people. As people, we have to be smarter in our work, and the

The experience economy “One of our HR staff members was no good with technology. She had the system explained to her, and then she said: ‘Fantastic, I can do that at home too with my children in New Zealand’. People are aware of the possibilities from their home life and would like that at work as well.” So explains Hans Van Der Zwaag, Director of ICT & Facilities with PGGM on the subject of their Unified Communications system, with which they have been working for some time now.

PGGM, these days a public limited company that does the administration for pension funds, has 1,200 workstations, and 250 people there have a PDA. Unified Communications works on the basis of Microsoft products: Exchange, Outlook (with Outlook Web Access), ActiveSync, Voice Access, Exchange Unified Messaging and in addition there is software from NEC Philips in place for integrating with the telephone exchange (PABX). These products bring Unified Communications in the form of instant messaging (‘chat’), videoconferencing, linking with telephony, and livemeeting – remote collaboration. Linking with the telephone exchange makes it possible to switch from one form of communication to another.

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Hans Van Der Zwaag, Director of ICT & Facilities with PGGM: “If you want to be an attractive employer in the jobs market, you have to offer experiences to your employees.”

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information has to fit in better with individual needs. For this reason, Guus Pijpers is arguing for a change in the communication culture into a culture based more on the needs of the recipient rather than the interests of the sender. “Naturally you can use Unified Communications for reducing your costs, but the real reason for introducing it has to be for dovetailing better with human capabilities.”

“One of the greatest advantages is that you can see at a glance who is active on it,” explains Hans Van Der Zwaag, “and if someone phones you, your status on the screen changes to ‘busy’.

‘Presence’ is useful here; it is one of the powerful options of Unified Communications.” Mobile phones are involved in it too. For instance, you can listen to your emails on your mobile phone.

One of the main reasons for introducing this kind

Case study

of system lies in ‘generation Y’, the younger employees. “This generation is accustomed to doing ten things at once: chat, email, documents, telephone, and so that imposes demands on an organization”, says Hans Van Der Zwaag. He believes that we are moving towards an ‘experience economy’, and nowadays employers are required to offer experiences. That should not be a low priority, if you want to be an attractive employer in the jobs market. And you should not be wary of the costs either, for Hans Van Der Zwaag claims that those costs are “just a tenner or so per year per employee”.

device-independently, so that both business and private tasks can be dealt with combined on the one device.”

Rabobank drew up different scenarios, for 2010, 2015 and even 2020, with the main conclusions being that: we are moving towards a 24-hour economy; we want to work independently of time and place; in the future there will no longer be space to have your own workstation.

The experiences have been positive up to now.

The target that half of the staff should have used the system within a year has been achieved. In spite of the increased communication possibilities, to date no decline in the number of emails has been seen yet. Now and again, stored email traffic does look like a “saved chat session”, says Hans Van Der Zwaag, yet he adds that he had not had any specific expectations about this beforehand. Video is experiencing only limited usage, one of the main factors being that the staff members do sit relatively close to one another.

Rabo Unplugged Rabo is taking action on the construction of a completely new office for an entirely new way of working. “Soon we will no longer be asking our employees ‘where were you’, but rather ‘what are you doing here’”, explains Pieter Ketting, deputy director of Rabobank’s Group ICT. This new way of working, dubbed ‘Rabo Unplugged’, is prompted by a clear vision of the future, and everything within that framework is being approached: from the way the new building is being laid out, right through to the IT systems. Departments involved in this program are IT, HR and facility management.

“First we want to move towards two devices per employee: a telephone and a laptop”, says Pieter Ketting, who emphasizes that it should produce a cost saving compared to the present situation, where employees have many more devices: a telephone, PDA, PC at home and PC at work, and often many others, such as a bigger screen for the laptop. “We want to be able to work entirely

That means that in 2010, when Rabobank occupies its new building on Croeselaan in Utrecht, it is allowing for 70 percent occupancy (at present it is 100 percent); there are no longer personal workstations. The entire building will be working digitally. That means that there will no longer be any cabinet space and that all post will be dealt with digitally.

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Pieter Ketting, deputy director of Rabobank’s Group ICT: “We want to place more responsibility with the employee. That is quite a challenge: we will have to give people trust.”

“It means that people will be obliged to collaborate more and that fewer rules will apply”, says Pieter Ketting. “We will be judging people by their output, imposing requirements on that output, and consequently placing more responsibility with the employee. That is quite a challenge: you will have to give people trust.”

The ‘Unplugged’ program will be phased in within Rabobank. The departments themselves will be responsible for implementing it.

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Column

Outsourcing: not a goal in itself

7 key areas

Successful outsourcing is successful insourcing. The new situation must offer opportunities for both the provider and the recipient, but also for the employees involved.

I

n spite of many disappointments, outsourcing is still frequently seen quite simply as a cure-all.

Lost control of your IT? Is there a shortage of know-how? Could it be done less expensively?

These are often reasons for thinking about outsourcing. Or maybe it’s just the hype going on around you and you are being comforted by suppliers who claim that it is time to concentrate on your core activities, or that there could be more possibilities for your IT personnel. Do not make outsourcing a goal in itself, but instead, together with your supplier look out for added value and pay heed to the 7 key areas that form the basis for successful outsourcing.

PICTURE

Ronald van Wuijtswinkel, author of this article, is CIO of internet provider Xs4all.

1. Stay in line with your corporate objectives and stay aware of why you are outsourcing work.

Be sure to draw up principles when you do or do not outsource something.

2. Ensure clarity about what you want provided in the way of IT services. What aspect of your IT, what is the nature of the service provision, what are the service levels? You need to be able to meet current agreements with customers and the contractual agreement has to be flexible enough for good collaboration.

3. Set out the different roles and the teamwork structure. Where is the break in the value chain of your processes? Set up the demand organization with a special role for purchasing ensuring a balance between giving and taking.

4. Create transparency in your decision-making and define the input of your IT partner in strategic innovations, investments and priorities.

5. Agree standards and a framework for creating insight into the active coherence of processes, systems and infrastructure.

6. Measure and control performance at the strategic and tactical levels.

7. Ensure support for those staff members who will be leaving in the outsourcing deal, but also for those who are staying. At the same time, there is a need for support amongst owners and users of IT. Make agreements explicitly and manage expectations.

Step towards offshoring There has now been a great deal of experience with outsourcing. Thirty percent of companies are spending more than half of their IT budgets on it, and it is still growing. Moreover, only half of companies manage to save costs by outsourcing.

Frequently therefore, outsourcing is not the goal but rather a step towards offshoring.

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Advertorial

Shift your focus to make a difference “By outsourcing service desk, desktop and licensing to HP, IT departments can shift the focus to strategic IT initiatives that drive business growth instead of just putting out fires in maintaining the end user workplace.”

The global business economy continues to drive increasingly complex requirements for knowledge sharing through virtual interactions and communications. To address these requirements, organizations are optimizing business workflow processes and an IT infrastructure that supports a workforce that is increasingly mobile and must collaborate in virtual teams or workplaces — across the globe and around the clock.

IT management faces the conflicting pressures to be agile and accommodating when responding to changing business needs and to achieve operational efficiencies and contain costs. One solution that many organizations are turning to is offloading part of this burden and outsourcing some IT operations.

IT organizations perform a number of complex tasks to support end-user environments.

These tasks include managing a wide variety of devices, securely managing the communications infrastructure, and providing 24 x 7 support to ensure that it all runs as smoothly as possible.

CIOs and IT managers are evaluating alternative methods for delivering these IT capabilities needed to support end users. The alternatives for enduser support range from in-house solutions, to a mix of in-house capabilities augmented by service providers, to full outsourcing. Each option has its corresponding costs, risks, and advantages.

PICTURE

HP offers End-User Workplace Solutions (EUWS) to help IT departments address the challenges of managing the end-user environment — to help employees connect, communicate, and collaborate and to help control costs and mitigate risk.

IDC has conducted an ongoing ROI analysis of the benefits of utilizing outsourced services. Specifically, using customer case studies, IDC has evaluated the benefits of adopting HP EUWS. The quantified benefits fall into three main areas — IT cost reductions, IT productivity increases, and user productivity increases. Based on these results, IDC made a TCO tool, which enables IT departments to compare total costs of their end-user environments with HP End-User Workplace Solutions.

HP offers the IDC TCO tool online to help you and your IT department get interesting insights into your end user workplace costs. Get your detailed ROI report at www.hp.be/euws

Column

Getting change underway

T

here is clearly a theme running throughout my career. For me the main thing is to be able to get a certain change underway in a relatively short time and to keep it going, both within IT and in a company’s business organization. By now, we are all aware that it is often those changes made to the business strategy that drive the changes in IT. As IT director, it is my responsibility to gear the IT strategy to the changing business strategy, and to translate that into a workable implementation plan. Subsequently, I make sure that the implementation plan actually takes shape, with strict programs and associated deadlines.

I had that kind of task with the former Delaware, just after its takeover

by Arthur Andersen, just as I did with Koramic Building Products. After that, I was CIO for almost four years with VRT. There my job was to professionalize the IT organization. The challenges that I faced at VRT included creating a harmony between the world of broadcast engineering and that of IT. I was also very closely involved in digitizing public broadcasting. The Joris Ide Group presented me with a similar assignment, albeit within entirely different surroundings. Here too it was mainly a case of building a professional IT organization, specifically because the business strategy had been adjusted following the company’s acquisition by private equity fund Ergon Capital Partners II. Harmonizing and standardizing the infrastructure and the applications featured high on the agenda for this. One of the first major projects in connection with this was implementing SAP in the Belgian branches of the Joris Ide Group within a period of barely seven months.

SAP is now sufficiently embedded within Joris Ide and the IT organization built up as planned. For the continual implementation of its strategy, Joris Ide needs an IT manager with a different profile. Consequently, I have recently moved on to another company, Bank van De Post. In that new job, I will once again be facing the challenge of shaping the IT strategy fully in line with the objectives of the business.

I am looking forward to it already.

PIET VAN PETEGEM

Program director Bank van De Post

The columnist for this issue passes the torch to Luc Verbist, IT director with De Persgroep. The media sector is experiencing a stage of rapid evolution: newspapers are facing competition from new media, the advertising market has changed and the readership is changing. Piet Van Petegem would like to know how Luc Verbist is dealing with these changes from the IT perspective.

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