Technology
Make IT work for you
Using IT for a competitive advantage
By Steve Trusty
Smart Business Cincinnati | December 2008
Keith Blachowiak
Senior vice president, operations
CIO
Pomeroy IT Solutions
In today’s business climate, chief information officers struggle with tight
budgets and limited resources while being asked to have a broader impact
across their organizations. Doing more
with less is a common theme.
“It is imperative to build a successful
partner strategy,” says Keith Blachowiak,
senior vice president, operations, and
CIO at Pomeroy IT Solutions. “No one
can do everything. You need to keep your
precious internal resources focused on
those items that drive your competitive
differentiation and use partners to provide support for back office IT functions
— all while lowering your costs and providing enhanced service levels.”
Smart Business gained further insight
from Blachowiak into maximizing competitiveness with IT.
What are the focus areas for IT management?
I see three priorities of IT. First, protect
the company’s assets. In addition to IT
security, this includes the recovery of
assets, backups, and business continuity.
Second, ensure all deployed technology
is running as efficiently today as it did
yesterday. This includes keeping the business systems running, networks available, desktops supported, etc. The impact of an unproductive work force due
to technology issues is often underestimated. Third, deliver new products and
services. This can range from developing
new reports to entirely new products.
In today’s highly competitive environment, there is tremendous pressure within an organization for the IT team to
place the emphasis on the third priority,
which is typically where the competitive
differentiation is created. Thus IT management needs to find a solution that
provides acceptable levels of protection
and operations so they can focus their
attention on driving incremental business value. The answer lies in partnerships. By employing partners to handle
the back-office, commodity facets of IT,
they are able to focus their precious internal resources on the initiatives most
important to the company.
Can you give an example?
The IT help desk is a perfect example.
Everyone within an organization, from the
CEO to the person shipping your product,
calls the IT help desk at one time or another. Industry statistics show that most people call the IT help desk one or two times
each month. When people place calls to
the help desk they are usually in a situation where they cannot do their job and
thus are unproductive until the situation
is resolved. To make matters worse, very
often this also means a customer is not
being serviced. The combined loss of productivity and impact to customers can be
staggering yet in most companies the IT
help desk is not a focus area of the IT
management team or the IT budget. The
help desk team is usually a lower paid set
of individuals, with minimal training, typically working in the back corner of the IT
department, answering phone calls but
usually providing nothing more than log and escalation assistance. At best, they
usually have a system that allows them to
record the calls but generally lack the
tools to solve the problems in a timely
manner. Minimal focus is placed on the
average seconds to answer or the first call
resolution rate. The company’s IT staff is
generally focusing on other more pressing
issues and isn’t researching the latest
tools for remote problem resolution and
knowledge tools — things that would help
maximize the productivity of their entire
company. By partnering with a company
that has already invested in the talent and
tools to provide this service, the IT management team can dramatically improve
the level of service within the company
while maintaining or lowering costs and
keeping their focus on other company priorities.
Why are partners necessary to accomplish
your goals?
No company, regardless of its size and
resources, has enough bandwidth to
focus in all areas. Partners have focus.
This focus allows them to hire the talent
with the necessary expertise, procure the
tools and technologies that help deliver
world-class service and stay abreast of
the latest advancements in their particular specialty. They are then able to spread
these costs across multiple companies
thereby allowing each individual company to receive world class benefits at typically the same or lower costs than when
it was run internally.
Are there other areas in which partners can
assist?
As mentioned above, the IT help desk is
certainly a prime area. Other areas
include desk side support, asset procurement, network and telecom support and
management, security, database management, data center management and new
technology deployments.
KEITH BLACHOWIAK is senior vice president, operations, and CIO at Pomeroy IT Solutions. Reach him at (859) 586-0600 or by
e-mail at Keith.Blachowiak@pomeroy.com.
