Liberating your IT department

Technology is the great enabler. Or rather it should be. All too often managing technology can become an all-consuming task, leaving the IT department with little time to engage with key stakeholders and departments across the business. Even companies with the largest number of people, or the most experienced of IT teams, can find themselves in this situation.

Business and IT need to work more closely

We’ve talked a lot about the need for the CIO to get closer to the business, and raised the question of what the IT department should keep in-house, and what they should outsource.  I don’t mean the outsourcing of old where streamlined processes are contracted out to offshore providers to achieve cost benefits through scale. Instead we’re talking about outsourcing the IT and network to enable the CIO and his team to focus on becoming the trusted internal service provider. An outsourced service which covers provision, configuration and operation. This approach isn’t IT as we know it.  The right balance is critical as companies increasingly look to keep pace with the demands of the business while doing more with less. When the balance is right, the in-house team can focus on differentiating the business in the marketplace while looking to outsource the rest of their requirements.

Time to liberate the IT department

There are many reasons for the increased popularity of outsourcing– and one of the most compelling is the ‘liberation’ of the IT department, removing the IT department from what Jaguar Land Rover’s CIO calls “the treadmill of maintenance”.

Liberation comes from the idea that a re-evaluation of internal resources – both human and technological –is taking part in our customer organisations today. IT professionals are moving towards the position of being valued for their ability to solve business problems and develop new products to meet changing customer demands. But in order to do this, they must be freed from the burden of “the plumbing” - managing networks or IT infrastructure – whether partially or even completely.

Making it work at Leroy Merlin

At Colt we have encountered many customers seeking to realise the potential of their IT staff so that they play a different role in delivering the business objectives. A great example is Leroy Merlin. This  leading European home improvement retailer specialises in supporting self-sufficiency – but it also knows when not to ‘do-it-yourself’. When it came to IT infrastructure and networking services, Leroy Merlin looked within its organisation and decided that it was time to stop managing these requirements using an in-house resource.

Colt was seen as that trusted partner where our infrastructure and networking services were carefully specified to enable Leroy Merlin’s CIO and his colleagues to focus on customer service and business evolution across their 47 Italian stores.

Put simply, the solution consists of an  enterprise class cloud and networking service, delivered from one of Colt’s Italian datacentres, which provides a scalable environment to support Leroy Merlin’s growing line of business requirements. The solution also includes storage and backup for business continuity and an additional colocation environment.

The real value

On the frontline, this translates into increased customer retention and protection of brand reputation. Leroy Merlin’s 66,000 global employees – including its 5,750 strong Italian division – depend upon the availability of Leroy Merlin’s systems to check stock information and to answer customer queries seven days a week, delivering fast, responsive customer service.

Crucially, the IT department is now able to act, as previously mentioned,  as the internal service provider to the business, understanding the business and increasing turnover, as Technology and Innovation Manager Sergio Casado Castejón confirms: “The future is to outsource data centres to a specialist and focus on the data itself. That’s what generates growth, not infrastructure.”

Here we have IT professionals as innovators – with infrastructure as the foundation for business evolution. This is the kind of innovation that really changes an organisation, delivering the ideal combination of high quality human resources and technology working together to meet customer demand and create compelling new products and services.

Now I am looking forward to seeing what we can continue to achieve together.