Cameo Technology Management, Inc.
Randolph, NJ
646.552.1300
"The missing peace in your business's technology"




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Be a Part of Our Research and Development Into The Very Best Place To Spend The Next IT Dollar

What is this all about?


Please note, this work is independent of Cameo Technology's retainer based service.

When it comes to technology, small to medium sized businesses frequently have two major questions:

"What are all of the things that need to be done in our Technology area"
and
"What would be the best thing to do first."

This research is intended to produce a consistent and easy-to-use criterion to develop the answer to those questions.

For the past few decades I have worked in large corporate environments on these same questions in one form or another. Of necessity, the work done in this area was never all inclusive nor was the outcome of our efforts very satisfying. First, because of the immense scale, comprehensive fact gathering would have been a staggering effort. Second, because of the hot topic du jour phenomenon little thought is given to the composite technology picture to determine the very best location for the next IT investment dollar spent. And third, the scale of investment funds at the macro level was sometimes so large that it obscured the need for global planning often resulting in foolish, flashy projects at the expense of the mundane with higher ROI's.

So it seems there is an opportunity to provide a service to small to medium sized companies. To wit, develop a way to produce a high level view of a firm's current technology posture that is easily analyized and yet granular enough to give a picture of open needs. More important, to end up with the vital knowledge of the very best place to spend the next IT dollar.

We want to further develop this research with the intention of producing industry papers and eventually offering it as a service on the open market.

The advantage you will realize if you are willing to participate out weighs any time spent in participating in the evaluations that are the basis of the research. At the end, an evaluation of your current IT position, the evaluation of the details matching your environment and where to begin work will be shared with you. Cameo Technology Management will gain the knowledge useful to the writing of the paper and in their productization effort.

Now, on to a more detailed description of how we have this research planned.

Our Research Will Focus On This

We need only build a base to apply a Bayesian analysis resulting in recommendations of where to apply your next IT dollar.

The evaluation description below is "building the base" and the second description explains the structure of the analysis.
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An Evaluation of Your Firm's Current IT Position

Evaluation Data Points - Building The Base

You have to know where you are to be able to take your next step.

By examining the six areas below, we can develop a picture of your current IT posture, take stock of your current, relative priorities and quantify the attitudes and personalities that will affect success or failure of action recommendations.

Corporate Characteristics Affecting the Use of Technology
Relative Maturity Level of IT Environment
IT to Business Plan Match
IT Resiliency
ITIL Adoption
Adoption of Enterprise Architecture

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Where Should You Spend Your Next IT Dollar?


We all know that money is tight. It is vital that you know where to spend your next IT dollar. Simply, you need to get the most bang for the buck.

The previous section (Your Firm's Current IT Position) contains the areas that you are most likely to invest IT dollars in. There are, however, literally hundreds of details that make up those areas. The goal of this section is to evaluate those details, relative to each other, and determine where the next dollar you invest will do you the most good.

For instance, from a pragmatic viewpoint, it makes little sense to plan to upgrade all of your workstations or PC's unless you know that the current state of your assets is having some affect on your ability to do business. However, that phrase "your ability to do business" can mean many things. From your staff being unable to get the work out due to the state of your PCs to the need to present a modern, up-to-date image to your clients, all of the relevant weighting factors have to be applied to each detail to come up with the true investment plan.

More details about the six areas to be examined.

Corporate Characteristics Affecting the Use of Technology

The affects of corporate characteristics provide an indicator of how likely any IT initiative will actually be implemented. If, for instance, the industry growth rate is negative, IT investment in expansion technologies, if put forward, will meet with heavy resistance from fiscally responsible executive committees and/or business owners.

Performance of Company
CTO/CIO Effectiveness
Technology Intensity of Firm
Importance of Technology to Company
Chairman’s Perception
Business Head’s Perception
Size of the company
Industry Growth Rate
IT Innovation
Regulatory Compliance
Return To Evaluation Data Points


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Relative Maturity Level of IT Environment

This is all about how IT contributes to the corporate business. To succeed long-term, a company must leverage information. IT is the caretaker of that information while the business is the owner. Success is tied to the efficiency with which a company operates and the quality and pace of their business decisions. They need consistent, reliable and accurate data to enter new markets, maximize customer value, make results-oriented decisions, and keep costs down. Getting to that level of data management requires a focus by both the business and the corporate IT environment. Determining what to do next requires an evaluation of where your company currently is. Your company will fall within one of the following four levels of maturity.
Unaware
Reactive
Proactive
Predictive
Return To Evaluation Data Points


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IT to Business Plan Match

The easiest way to describe how to ensure that the IT Plan matches the Business Plan is by example. Below, we list the components of a simple/generic business plan and comment on how the IT is supposed to further that plan. Some components are very briefly commented on, not because the subject is unimportant but because they would represent sections that are summarizing or informational in nature.

We will evaluate the alignment of the existing IT plan to the existing Business Plan. This part of evaluating will determine the relative importance of current activities and will expose any mismatches.

Executive Summary
Company Description to include the Business Vision
Product or Service
Market Analysis
Strategy and Implementation
Web Plan Summary
Management Team
Financial Analysis
Return To Evaluation Data Points


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IT Resiliency

A definition:

Resilience is the positive ability of a system or company to adapt itself to the consequences of a catastrophic failure caused by power outage, a fire, a bomb or similar (particularly IT systems, archives)

Alternatively, Resilience is the ability of the system to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of various faults and challenges to normal operation.

Why is resiliency a part of the evaluation?

Your business systems must be able to deliver service that can justifiably be trusted. The only way to be sure of that dependability is to engage in resiliency analysis.

A system can, and usually does, fail. Failure however, does not necessarily mean it is undependable. Resiliency analysis relies on largely custom criterion for deciding whether or not, in spite of service failures, a system is still to be regarded as dependable.

Since Dependability (Resiliency) is a very broad subject and the analysis of the current state of a system is complex in its methodology, you will want to avoid useless spending of capital on systems whose dependability matters little to your over-all business and, unless you have been at this a long time and have invested in a complete, end-to-end resiliency analysis, you will have no basis for determining which of your assets warrants immediate dependability remediation.

What will we concentrate on?

We will help you determine where to focus future analytic activities to achieve the highest return on your investment.

The goal of our analysis will be to determine which if any of the technology components of the corporation will be likely to be found undependable or are such a critical component of the corporation's ability to survive that they must be resilient.

We'll want to look at your portfolio of technology assets and evaluate each. We will use about a dozen criteria for each to determine which assets:

Are most likely to need improvements in dependability
Are most critical to the business.
Are likely to be most costly to remediate.

This result becomes part of the quest to determine what needs to be done and which action will benefit you the most.
Return To Evaluation Data Points

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ITIL Adoption

A definition:

ITIL was developed in recognition of the fact that organizations are becoming increasingly dependent on IT to fulfill their corporate objectives. An IT application (sometimes referred to as an information system) only contributes to realizing corporate objectives if the system is available to users and, in the event of fault or necessary modifications, it is supported by maintenance and operations.

ITIL offers a common framework for all the activities of the IT department, as part of the provision of services, based on the IT infrastructure. These activities are divided into processes, which provide an effective framework to make IT Service Management more mature. This process approach makes it possible to describe the IT Service Management best practices independently from the actual organizational structure of the entity.

By using a process approach, ITIL primarily describes what must be included in IT Service Management to provide IT services of the required quality. The structure and allocation of tasks and responsibilities between functions and departments depends on the type of organization, and these structures vary widely among IT departments and often change.
The description of the process structure provides a common point of reference that changes less rapidly, which can help maintain the quality of IT services during and after reorganizations and among suppliers and partners as they change.

Advantages of ITIL:

To clarify, the following two advantages enumerated below, embody the reasons for employing some sort of structured framework as governance for your IT infrastructure. The ITIL methodology is the product of IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF) and is the most widely recognized solution to implementing best practice and applying control.

Advantages of ITIL to the customer/user:

  • The provision of IT services becomes more customer-focused and agreements about service quality improve the relationship.
  • The quality and cost of the services are managed better.
  • Communication with the IT organization is improved by agreeing on the points of contact.
  • The services are described better, in customer language, and in more appropriate detail. Advantages of ITIL to the customer/user:
  • The provision of IT services becomes more customer-focused and agreements about service quality improve the relationship.
  • The services are described better, in customer language, and in more appropriate detail.
  • The quality and cost of the services are managed better.
  • Communication with the IT organization is improved by agreeing on the points of contact.

Advantages of ITIL to the IT organization:

  • The IT organization develops a clearer structure, becomes more efficient, and more focused on the corporate objectives.
  • The management is more in control and changes become easier to manage.
  • An effective process structure provides a framework for the effective outsourcing of elements of the IT services.
  • Following the ITIL best practices encourages a cultural change towards providing service, and supports the introduction of a quality management system based on the ISO-9000 series.
  • ITIL provides a uniform frame of reference for internal communication and communication with suppliers, and standardization and identification of procedures.


Why is ITIL a part of the evaluation?

ITIL provides a very useful framework for evaluating the efficiency of the IT organization. ITIL has such a well formed structure that, no matter which version is used to evaluate, the answer to the primary question of how efficiently does the IT organization provide service can be measured by studying the current processes and methodologies and measuring them against relevant ITIL best practices.

What will we concentrate on?

Many of these best practices are clearly identifiable and are indeed used to some extent in most IT organizations. ITIL presents these best practices coherently.

A description of the ITIL Framework

The following table explains each of the parts of the framework and therefore outlines what we will evaluate against.
Incident Management
Problem Management
Configuration Management
Change Management
Release Management
Service desk
Service Level Management
Financial Management
Capacity Management
IT Service Continuity Management
Availability Management
Security Management
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Adoption of Enterprise Architecture (EA)

Why measure against the Adoption of Enterprise Architecture? Best practices dictate that we strive for an agile IT organization. To get there, we adopt a simplified, streamlined, less complex, standardized computing environment. Doing so will reduce inefficiencies and eliminate unnecessary replication. Enterprise Architecture delivers tremendous value in this area through standardization and consolidation.

We will look at the following four architectures and determine areas of needed activity.

Business Architecture
Data Architecture
Application Architecture
Technology Architecture
Return To Evaluation Data Points