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IT Advisory Services
CIOs Advising CIOs and Other IT Leaders
The challenges confronting CIOs, CTOs and other IT leaders are strategic and significant – improve operational performance, optimize and rationalize IT operations, reduce sustainment costs, capitalize on new technologies and comply with new regulatory requirements are just the most common examples. Where do you start? By benchmarking current performance, auditing costs, taking greater advantage of established and emerging best practices, and implementing a roadmap and a vision for the future.
Staffed by former CIOs and other IT leaders, Agilex Advisory Services works collaboratively with their peers to address these concerns. We quarterback major projects and consult with IT leaders. We bring additional thought leadership and expertise for improving IT and business performance.
Agilex Advisory Services is led by Bob Otto, the former CIO/CTO of the $75B United States Postal Service (USPS). During his tenure, Bob reduced IT costs by $150M annually, implemented a shared services model across IT, finance and HR, and consolidated, standardized and modernized USPS’s IT infrastructure. He also managed the deployment of one of the world’s largest SAP HR implementations, led significant e-business initiatives, including USPS.com and data warehousing, and was credited with automating significant aspects of the postal service’s operations.
Objective and Flexible Solutions for Strategic Requirements
Each engagement is supported by a hand-picked team of industry experts, selected for their relevant expertise, consultative experience and their ability to solve complex problems analytically and elegantly. Through this model, we are able to provide clients with advice and insight that is:
- Independent and unbiased — As a small, client-focused consultancy, we don’t have any other agenda than yours.
- Pragmatic and real-world — Unlike grad students that offer academic theory, all of our recommendations are designed to be implemented quickly and to deliver quantifiable results.
- Operationally-focused — No on-the-job training as each of our consultants averages over a decade of hands on experience in the field – often, much more.
In addition to one-on-one consulting, we also offer a number of dedicated solutions for CIOs, CTOs and other IT leaders:
- Enterprise IT Health Check — Agilex utilizes a tested methodology to ensure that clients are receiving maximum value from their IT investments. It includes a clear, independent analysis of the performance of your architecture, infrastructure and process management. We also provide an in-depth evaluation of key projects, organizational structure, management resources, staffing, skill set voids and operational integration in comparison with similar organizations. All of our findings include both short- and long-term recommendations for how to further optimize IT performance.
- Cost Structure Analysis and Modeling — We provide an assessment of your current cost structure and propose additional steps for reducing costs, workload, resource requirements and cycle time while improving service levels and streamlining operations. We can also develop comparative cost models and evaluate various ‘what if’ scenarios.
- Contract Management — The Agilex Advisory Services team helps clients achieve their financial objectives while avoiding common pitfalls when negotiating new or renewed contracts. Our expertise includes hardware, software, services and business process outsourcing agreements. We also provide performance monitoring services for existing contracts, ensuring that vendors continually meet their contracted service level agreement (SLA) commitments.
- CIO Leadership Services — We provide CIOs, CTOs and other IT leaders with a confidential performance appraisal and one-on-one coaching for continued professional development. We also review entire IT leadership teams, including an evaluation of the alignment between available skills and core responsibilities.
- Business Performance Improvement — We help organizations identify how technology can be used to meet specific business objectives. For example, by automating key operational processes, introducing better customer/stakeholder segmentation, or through the use of alternative communications, marketing and fulfillment channels. Taking an objective-based approach, we map these technology initiatives back to the original requirement to demonstrate how the projected results will be achieved.
- ERP Project Management — Our team has implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems from Oracle and SAP for hundreds of thousands of users. We are experts in configuring these complex systems to meet our client’s unique requirements and we provide end-to-end management of the implementation. Through our in-house resources, we can also meet the project’s system integration, data migration and end-user training requirements.
- Change Management — We help clients address the change management requirements associated with complying with new regulations and exploiting new technologies. For example, implementing new data security procedures or adopting a new customer relationship management (CRM) system. We identify the challenges and requirements that these updates create, develop a change management plan to support the implementation, and deploy it within the organization.