by DavidSpratt | Apr 18, 2016 | Case Studies
When you have a global supply chain delivering premium live seafood and chilled fresh fish to domestic and overseas markets, there is little room for communications, business process or system errors.
Aotearoa Fisheries Limited is the largest Maori-owned fisheries company and it’s been harvesting, processing and delivering live, chilled and frozen seafood since its establishment in 2004. It harvests, processes and delivers chilled, canned and frozen seafood and ready to eat products to over 20 countries.
For the past five years Aotearoa Fisheries has been working with utilities procurement specialists, Total Utilities, to ensure that their telecommunications/ICT, natural gas, electricity suppliers are providing high levels of service at the best price.
Independent ICT Strategic Review
When David Spratt, Director of ICT at Total Utilities, carried out a strategic review of Aotearoa Fisheries IT architecture, hardware and management in 2015, he brought 30 years of experience in senior ICT roles to the table.
Aotearoa Fisheries had recently moved to a new IT provider supplying Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), with one division retaining and maintaining its own servers. The business was interested in comparing the two approaches as well as benchmarking costs against other providers in the market.
Photo by Aotearoa Fisheries
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by DavidSpratt | Apr 11, 2016 | ICT
I had lunch with an old friend last week and he raised the issue of technical debt with me: the notion that complexity breeds complexity until a business’ IT systems are a burden rather than a benefit.
The realisation came, like a bolt from the blue, that this was the reason my beloved IT industry had moved from being a creative, savvy business industry to being seen as a dull cost centre, distrusted and feared by many businesses and their management.
Harsh perhaps, but why else then have we seen the CIO, a key executive team member in the 90s, relegated to the IT Manager, reporting instead to finance?
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by DavidSpratt | Jul 14, 2015 | ICT
This is the fourth and final part of this blog series on cloud service management.
We’ve written in the past about cloud service management but, in this final installment of our cloud management series, we’re talking about a strategy to ensure you are getting the most value from your providers’ service management activities, whilst simultaneously retaining a tight focus on your business’ own needs and the needs of your client – all while staying under budget, of course.
Sounds like magic, right? Well, so did the cloud a decade ago!
So how do we work this magic? How do we manage a cloud-based infrastructure environment (IaaS) in a way that allows us to benefit from the simplicity, scalability and quality of these services without cost and consumption blowouts?
First off, in order to achieve our multi-faceted goal, we need to go into battle. To win this battle, we need to understand who our enemies are. In this case, they are fourfold: Complexity, Transparency, Proliferation and Vested Interest. Let’s divide and conquer: (more…)
by DavidSpratt | Aug 25, 2014 | ICT
Having outlined some of the structural issues facing CIO’s and providers of cloud service management processes in my previous blog on managing cloud infrastructure I am left with a real challenge.
As a critic of the old, over scaled, expensive and wasteful ESM/ITIL based service management systems, how can I now offer some constructive suggestions on a new way of looking at service management in the cloud?
Cloud service management strategies
1. Find a common language
- ITIL provides a meaningful and commonly understood language for all parties. We can use this language to identify the differences between a global public cloud (Azure, Amazon, Google, Rack Space et al) and a locally hosted private or public cloud service management model (DIY, All of Government, Datacom, HP, Gen-i, IBM etc).
- We can run through the ITIL framework step by step and identify where the global public cloud provider owns the service management environment; where it is owned by a local outsourcer; and where this responsibility is shouldered by the internal IT Department.
- This allows the service consumer to see and pay for the value being delivered while ensuring all other parties have a clear, profitable and sustainable model for delivering on their promises.
2. Be clear on the desired outcomes
- Rather than requiring that major public cloud providers redesign their internal processes (unlikely when dealing with players bigger than Australasia’s biggest companies) we should instead focus on the key elements we require. Namely:
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by DavidSpratt | Jul 23, 2014 | ICT
I get a strong sense that CIO’s across New Zealand want to make changes but feel burdened by their existing provider and service constructs. Ironically the situation is the same whether they do the work in-house or outsource it to a trusted provider.
CIO’s and Service Managers are also expressing increasing levels of concern around the Service Management and Service Desk environment needed to support private, public and hybrid cloud instances. Many providers seem to be struggling to monitor and support an infrastructure and services environment that has been designed by someone else and is located outside their control in the Public Cloud.
This difficulty is not unique to New Zealand. I have also had a series of conversations with some very large organisations struggling with the same issue in the US and Australia. So what is the cause of all this angst?
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