MANAGEMENT CONSULTING

Digital Trends

Digital technology is disrupting existing business models and shaping the future like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

Many organizations struggle to understand how digital innovations and technologies can disrupt their current business models. Others have trouble identifying how digital innovations and technologies can create opportunities to increase value creation for existing customers or enable the organization to serve new customers.

FUTURE-PROOF YOUR ORGANIZATION

With new technologies bringing new threats and opportunities to organizations, it’s important to understand the digital trends that businesses are facing.

At Straten Consulting, we can help you get a better understanding of the digital trends that will enable you to make better decisions about how to prepare your business for the future. This includes workshops in “Scenario Analysis & Planning” and “Trend Spotting”, which will build your organization’s capability to identify and work with digital trends on a continuous basis – enabling your organization to react to new digital innovations and technologies in the future.

Digitalization & IT Strategies

Unify stakeholders, build engagement and align focus for IT investments by making strategic choices in collaboration with the business.

IT advancements are moving at an unprecedented pace. So how can an organization stay informed about emerging technology, ensure desired business impact from its existing systems and get engagement and agreement across the business on new investments?

ACCELERATE AND MAXIMIZE BUSINESS VALUE

At Straten Consulting, we believe that digitalization strategies and IT strategy should outline how IT will accelerate and maximize business value. We use three key principles to deliver a successful strategy design process that will deliver real business impact in your organization.

• The digitalization strategy and the IT strategy must be aligned with the corporate strategy. This helps us to see how relevant technologies and industry trends can support the current business model and enable new business offerings.
• Strategic prioritization must be defined in collaboration with the business and validated throughout the process to ensure strong commitment and unification.
• Strategy must be holistic but focused and functional to ensure impact. The scope could be enterprise resource planning (ERP), omni-channel, new operating model, analytics, cloud, internet of things (IoT), social media, etc.

IT Cost & Benchmark Analysis

Get an in-depth understanding of IT spending to gain the full potential of IT investments and a better foundation for strategic IT decisions.

IT spending can be complex and become inconsistent with the business strategy if left unchecked. This may result in spiraling IT costs or inadequate IT performance. Or both.

Getting an overview of organizational IT spending serves as a great platform for optimization and development of IT initiatives that can support the business.

At Straten Consulting, we can help you optimize your IT spending with an IT cost and benchmark analysis. This is a proven method that maps all the direct and indirect IT costs alongside the business objectives they are supposed to address: running the business, building the business and innovating the business.

This enables us to identify areas that require a deep-dive assessment and where corrections should be made. We benchmark your results against similar companies to compare your performance against industry standards, giving further indications of areas to optimize in order to achieve full business value from IT.

IT Maturity Assessment

Identify the critical capabilities needed to improve the performance of the IT organization – and reap the short- and long-term benefits.

At Straten Consulting, we work with a lot of IT organizations. We know that they’re under constant pressure to deliver greater value to the business and identify cost savings at the same time.

From our experience, we recognize that this “more-for-less” paradigm requires IT organizations to optimize their operations by increasing their maturity. This is a challenging task that requires a proven method and a balanced approach.

We have developed a unique method based on IT capability modelling that allows us to:

• Assess the strategic priorities and business requirements for IT utilization
• Analyze current maturity levels for the relevant capabilities to support strategic choices
• Define the desired future maturity level per capability area to realize strategic choices
• Identify and prioritize the required initiatives to drive change, so that the organization can arrive at its target state

IT Project & Program Management

Does your organization have an IT master plan? One that gives a clear overview of all ongoing IT projects and makes sure they support your business strategy?

With the majority of business development tasks carried out as projects and programs, it is important that these activities are organized properly. That is exactly what IT program and project management delivers.

IT activities that are not properly managed are a liability for any organization. Poor management typically results in loss of overview, bad decision-making or even totally failed projects – all of which are bad for business.

When your business accelerates or your strategy changes, your IT must follow suit. Our consultants have the experience and specialist competences to help you design an efficient IT management framework customized to your organization – to ensure that your setup delivers business results.

Periods of leave, recruitment issues, illness or resignations among key employees. All private and public organizations run into periods when they are temporarily low on capacity or miss key competences on the IT front. Our IT management consultants can help you through such periods, making sure that your IT operations run as smoothly as possible.

IT Vendor Management

Change the way you collaborate with your vendor to boost their value contribution and the benefit realization for your organization.

Relationships with IT vendors can be painful and time-consuming. Handling contracts, following up on invoices, managing compliance, ensuring performance. Overseeing the basics leaves little room to align mutual objectives between you and your vendor – let alone optimize benefit realization.

A recent study has shown a clear correlation between adopting a collaborative approach towards vendor management and the value generated from the relationship. It points to a need for directing the vendor’s effort to meet your business objectives – through effective relationship building.

At Straten Consulting, we believe that working strategically with vendors is just as crucial as focusing on compliance and cost reduction. A longer-term focus on reaching common goals through improved relationships increases a vendor’s value contribution and creates impact.

We apply the following principles to help clients increase value from their vendor relationships:

• Use vendor management best practice tools and processes to boost your maturity so you do not have to struggle with the basics.
• Communicate frequently at all levels – and be honest in your communication and consequent in your actions.
• Inform the vendor about your pains, strategy and plans to enhance mutual knowledge and commitment – and raise the value of your co-operation.
• Understand your vendor and their business model in order to understand their strengths and limitations.
• Set your sights on the long term – as the cost of frequently switching vendors exceeds the cost of long-term relationships.
• Accept only competitive offers, but do not squeeze the vendor’s profit to zero as low price often equals low quality.

Lean IT Management

Use standardization to increase output and quality of your internal IT processes.

Professionalization of IT departments has been on the agenda in many public and private organizations during the last couple of years. IT has had to up their game and focus more on standardization, more efficient processes, optimization and structuring – to deliver greater value for the organization.

When it comes to professionalization, we believe it is more important to get started and reap small benefits early on – rather than try to invent a state-of-the-art concept that takes far longer to develop.

At Straten Consulting, we work with an extensive toolbox within Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) and Lean IT and have long experience in employing these tools with immediate effect. In fact, the combination of Lean IT and ITIL® has proven highly effective in taking an IT organization to the next level.

Our services within Lean IT include tools for working with improvements within the following five process areas:

• Support and help desk
• Operations
• Software development
• Project management
• Control and governance

Based on IT’s processes and inspiration from e.g. ITIL®, Straten Consulting has developed a unique approach which creates fast and effective process improvement and subsequent implementation.

SAP Implementation

SAP supports critical business processes. To implement SAP successfully, you have to know what you want SAP to deliver – and create the platform to make this happen.

To ensure business impact, SAP must be based on clear business goals and the right resources. First of all, you need to translate your business goals into specific project deliverables. Without clear deliverables, you cannot scope your projects correctly. Secondly, you need to align your resources – employee skills, methods and technologies – to make sure that the project can deliver the results you need.

At Straten Consulting, we can set up an effective SAP implementation process. Our consultants have detailed knowledge of SAP technologies, implementation experience and, not least, the business experience necessary to help you define the results you wish your SAP system to deliver.

Startup Advisory

Our management team members are available to help startup companies finding their way to success. For best results, we appoint one Straten Consulting management team member as your primary contact, but our entire management team will be available for additional support and expertise as needed. Our combined expertise enables startup companies to fully focus on their core expertise without getting distracted by other areas they don’t have expertise for.

The service includes, but is not limited to, the following areas of expertise:

• Creating a Business Model and Plan to make you successful
• Designing a scaleable IT Infrastructure using a mix of Open Source and Commercial solutions to meet your requirements
• A Pricing and Payment Processing model that puts you ahead of competitors while lowering cost
• Comprehensive Reviews that include constructive feedback to improve your product
• An industry specific Sales and Marketing Plan
• Setting up an Advisory Board that delivers valuable input to your business

We understand that startup companies have limited resources and capital. As such, we will work with you on a fair and simple compensation plan tailored to your needs.

Strategic IT Governance

Benefit from working strategically and innovatively with IT development by involving organizational functions and levels in decision-making and design.

IT is increasingly becoming a business asset that is regarded as an enabler for strategic business development. It’s moving away from its purely “functional” role and reaching all levels and functions in the organization. But in companies where there is still a lack of clarity between IT projects and business goals, how can IT be governed and managed as a strategic business asset?

At Straten Consulting, we believe that strategic IT governance is a discipline that enables companies to work strategically and innovatively with IT development.

We can help your IT organization become a true business partner in the company by involving various organizational functions and levels in decision-making and design. We design business engagement models that are fully integrated with corporate planning and strategy development. We do this by designing and implementing a structure where your company can govern and manage IT as a strategic business asset, and at the same time build an operating model where you manage IT as a business portfolio.

The result? Your IT organization will play an active role – often as a leader – in business transformation and innovation.

System Procurement

To make sure your IT investment makes good business sense, involve your staff in drafting your requirements specifications.

When it comes to new IT investments, it makes good sense to involve employees in decision-making. Their know-how and practical experience are hugely important – particularly when it comes to drafting requirements specifications and finding the right IT solution and supplier.

However, it is important to involve the right people at the right time. Drawing on functionality descriptions, process flows and cases, we can help you make the best use of staff resources.

Requirements specifications are never standard documents; they reflect the needs of the organization that produces them. A requirements specification may represent a list or an illustration that identifies the needs that the new IT solution must fulfill – and what you expect from the supplier. It may also be a tool for communicating needs across disciplines and functions. Some organizations even use requirements specifications as a framework for system development, as an addendum to a contract or verification of delivery.

Whatever purpose your requirements specification serves, we can help you:

• Manage your list of possible suppliers
• Design a requirement template (description with categorization)
• Prepare an information model/entity relation diagram, architecture model or context diagram
• Collect needs specification from various business units
• Design prototypes/mock-ups and scenario-based processes

System Sourcing

Which IT processes should be outsourced – and which are best and cheapest handled in-house? Getting this balance right is key to increasing your turnover.

Focusing on core competences and processes that create value and competitive edge. That is the clue to a profitable business. Consequently, tasks that are not covered by your core competences should be entrusted to others. This makes sense, but it might be difficult to put into practice.

Straten Consulting has extensive experience in helping private and public organizations strike the right balance between insourcing and/or outsourcing of IT processes.

Our services include:

• Analysis that identifies the consequences of insourcing or outsourcing specific activities
• Identification of relevant areas for insourcing and/or outsourcing (e.g. development and system maintenance, operation, procurement and infrastructure)
• Identification of service elements and levels in SLA/OLAs and definition of subsequent concept for supplier management
• Assistance in connection with tender, identification of supplier and contract negotiations
• Assistance with the implementation of the insourced/outsourced activities
• System procurement and identification of supplier

When investing in IT equipment, systems or services, a lot of money can be saved by going through a well-structured procurement process. We recommend that you start by ensuring organizational anchoring prior to the procurement process. This way, you create the best foundation for an optimal process – and common understanding and acceptance of the expected results are established from the very start. When anchoring is in place, you’re ready to find the solution and supplier that match your needs.