Business IT Consulting:

Overview

In today’s date, top line growth, reducing operational cost, and increasing customer satisfaction through innovation and effective use of information for competitive differentiation are the top business priorities of a CEO. 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 the aspect of reducing cost, increasing agility and enabling transformation through business consulting and offshore outsourcing. Our business consulting service offerings are based on an analytical approach to understand the business problems, resulting in practical recommendation and actionable plans. Our business solutions 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 services offer:

• Application Portfolio Rationalization (APR)
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Business Process Management (BPM)
• Compliance
• Enterprise Architecture (EA)
• Offshore Advisory Services (OAS)
• Technology Advisory and Adoption Services (TAAS)

Application Portfolio Rationalization (APR)

Aligning IT with business objectives and ensuring to generate maximum business value, is one of the primary goals of a CIO. In today's IT business solutions & outsourcing companies, it is quite obvious to observe that about 75-80% of a companies IT budget is spent on Application management / maintenance. In addition to that, legacy applications have become the operational and knowledge backbone of organizations over the years; they are non-negotiable and crucial to the survival of IT business solutions & outsourcing companies. 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 consulting.

At Senate®, we believe that Application Portfolio Management (APM) is not just about running multiple enhancement projects or maintaining applications . In a strategic initiative, IT and business software development groups should jointly plan and execute, every asset of the Portfolio needs 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 solutions goals and needs.

Our Offerings

Using a workshop driven approach, Senate® Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) will collaborate with you and help to:

• Define a business solution for APR
• Identify the best ROI for your APR strategy
• Describe an optimal APR Roadmap
• Define a Program Management Structure to manage rationalization and sustain it

A key outcome of our global IT services offering will be to identify:

• Opportunities for business process management/outsourcing improvements
• Optimal application services architecture

Senate® will use its proprietary frameworks and tools which are built by leveraging extensive experience of managing applications of fortune 500IT business solutions & outsourcing companies. These include:

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

Our Value Proposition

• • Senate® understands the dependency of business process management on the Application Portfolio and has an in-built mechanism in its APR framework to offer the best rationalization roadmap which aligns and improves your business process management.
• • 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 IT infrastructure management services, people and monetary resources.

Business Process Management

Increase in competition and continuous pressure to enhance shareholder value, drives IT services company to continuously augment and ameliorate their business solutions and consulting services. There is also an absolute need for IT business solutions & outsourcing companies to comply with changing regulations and adopt good governance practices. IT services companies, which hope to survive in this fiercely competitive environment need to be highly efficient, effective, agile, innovative and flexible. This is possible, only if processes which underpin an enterprise function exhibit these traits.

These and other challenges are the driving force in the adoption of 'process approach' of IT services companies. The advantage of taking a process centric approach has been well-documented and most organizations have a process framework in place. IT services companies 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. The approach 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) solutions enable enterprises to incorporate KPI driven, process centric agile solutions. These solutions help organizations to address the need for an end-to-end visibility, process discipline, process flexibility and business 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

IT business solutions & outsourcing companies 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. Till date, the predominant drivers for offshorization have been cost, quality, easier access to required technical talent, faster ramp-up and accelerated delivery through innovation.

However, any offshore strategy formulated around achieving these benefits, has been adding little or nothing when it comes to ensure the alignment of IT with business solutions and consulting services. 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 IT services organizations. Such dynamic considerations have made it imperative for IT services organizations 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 IT services company have been concentrating on ODC as the only possible solution, focus to shift 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 business process change management