Business IT Consulting:

Overview

Top line growth, reducing operational cost, increasing customer satisfaction and effective use of information for competitive differentiation are the top business priorities for the CEOs today. It is thus no surprise that the CIO's focus is surely shifting from techno-centric IT to Business-centric IT. To facilitate this journey, Senate brings together key IT consulting services that address aspects of reducing cost, increasing agility and enabling transformation. Our consulting offerings are based on an analytical approach to understand the business problems, resulting in practical recommendation and actionable plans. Our value proposition is based on a confluence of business knowledge, deep hands-on technology skills and a focused approach through the use of in-house methodologies, frameworks and tools.

Our key IT Consulting service offerings include:

• Application Portfolio Rationalization
• Service Oriented Architecture
• Business Process Management
• Compliance
• Enterprise Architecture
• Offshore Advisory Services
• Technology Advisory and Adoption Services.

Application Portfolio Rationalization

Aligning IT with business objectives and ensuring that it generates maximum business value, is a primary goal of a CIO. In today's fast track IT environment, it is not unusual to observe that about 75-80% of an organization's IT budget is spent on Application management / maintenance. In addition, over the years legacy applications have become the operational and knowledge backbone of organizations; they are non-negotiable and crucial to business survival. Market research estimates that more than 70% of corporate data still resides on legacy systems. In such a scenario, managing key assets like the Application Portfolio of an organization at an optimal level of efficiency is an important aspect of aligning IT to business.

At Senate we believe that Application Portfolio Management is not just about running multiple enhancement projects or maintaining applications. In a strategic initiative, that IT and business groups should jointly plan and execute, each asset in the Portfolio needs to be assessed in terms of its business value and "total cost of ownership". Similar to a financial portfolio, the application portfolio must be monitored and re-valued continuously and altered to suit the enterprise's business goals.

Our Offerings

Using a workshop driven approach Senate subject matter experts will collaborate with you and help:

• Define a business case for Application Portfolio Rationalization
• Identify the best ROI for your Application Portfolio Rationalization Strategy
• Define an optimal Application Portfolio Rationalization Roadmap
• Define a Program Management Structure to manage rationalization and sustain it.

A key outcome of this service offering will be:

• Identifying opportunities for business process improvements
• Identifying optimal application architecture.

Senate will use its proprietary frameworks and tools which it has built leveraging its extensive experience of managing fortune 500 client applications. These include:

• Application Portfolio Rationalization Framework
• iReturns ROI Assessment Framework
• Claro Agnitio Assessment Framework.

Our Value Proposition

• Senate understands the dependency of business processes on the Application Portfolio and has an in-built mechanism in its Application Portfolio Rationalization Framework to offer the best rationalization roadmap which aligns and improves your business processes.
• Senate's ROI analysis will ensure that you get a fair idea on your ROI. We will also provide you a fore view of the related demands on infrastructure, people and monetary resources.

Business Process Management

As increased competition and continuous pressure to enhance shareholder value, drive organizations to continuously augment and ameliorate their products and services. There is also a heightened need for enterprises to comply with changing regulations and adopt good governance practices. Enterprises which hope to survive in this fiercely competitive environment need to be highly efficient, effective, agile and flexible. This is possible only if processes which underpin an enterprise function exhibit these traits.

These and other challenges are driving the adoption of 'process approach' in enterprises. The advantage of taking a process centric approach has been well-documented and most organizations having a process framework in place have reported an increase in operational efficiencies, customer satisfaction and corporate profits.

The 'process framework' or business process approach tends to look at the value chain business process and seeks to optimize this by driving out inefficiencies due to sub optimal processes to design an end to end optimized process.

Senate's Business Process Management (BPM) solution enable enterprises to incorporate KPI driven, process centric agile solutions that help organizations address need for end-to-end visibility, process discipline, process flexibility and process management.

Our BPM Offerings

Our Business Process Management solutions and service offerings include:

Process Consulting Services

• BPM strategy and roadmap
• Product evaluation and selection
• Business process modeling
• Process re-engineering & optimization

Process Implementation Services

• BPM suite implementation
• Production support

Specialized Services

• Composite application frameworks
• Reference template-based rapid ROI deployment.

Offshore Advisory Services

Organizations have, over the years, adopted a diverse mix of offshore options. These options have mainly been either a selective offshoring and/or an Offshore Development Center (ODC) with focus on a single- or a multi-vendor approach. To date, the predominant drivers for offshorization has been cost, quality, easier access to required technical talent, faster ramp-up and accelerated delivery.

However, any offshore strategy formulated around achieving these benefits, has been adding little or nothing when it comes to ensuring the alignment of IT with business. Various industry research estimates that 80% of IT budgets go into maintaining existing applications, leaving only 20% for new projects. In addition, economic and regulatory frameworks over the last few years have resulted in several emerging challenges for organizations. Such dynamic considerations have made it imperative for them to assess the financial viability of their IT portfolio. With most organizations' applications being supported from offshore, it is very important to have business-IT alignment as a part of their offshore strategy. In addition, the selection of an appropriate offshore engagement model also becomes a key issue as organizations go forward on the Transformational Offshore Outsourcing Path. Though traditionally organizations have been concentrating on ODC as the only possible solution, there has to be a focus on other engagement models (like BOT, JV, Captive, etc.) as a part of their evaluation process.

Senate has been instrumental in developing long-term offshore strategies for their large customers. Based on our experience of setting-up and managing large ODCs for clients, our involvement has been right from the conceptualization stage. Senate plays a major role in developing the transition roadmap to enable effective implementation of a long-term offshore outsourcing strategy.

Our Offshore Consultancy Offerings

Senate's Offshore Consultancy and Advisory Services can help you develop an effective offshore strategy with key focus on the following issues:

• Selection of an appropriate Offshore Engagement Model
• Identification of Offshore Candidates
• Identification of transformational application candidates in the early stage of the offshore planning process
• Identification of SLAs and metrics (including ROI and Application Value) that need to be monitored throughout the relationship
• Defining an appropriate transition and transformation roadmap
• Addressing the change management.