Advertisment
Features

Thinking Globally

author-image
DQI Bureau
New Update

Scenario

1: The executive team of our company is visiting the Asia Pacific. The

advanced scouting team for the visit talks to the regional IT team. We ask them

what kind of support they would need and they indicate basic support to ensure

they can access company data when traveling. We say no problem. Why? Because

they use the same model laptops which we use due to our global standards in

laptops. This may seem like a simple case but illustrates the point that for

global companies it really pays to have standardized environments.

Advertisment

Scenario 2:

There is a global portfolio of products developed internally for use by our

researchers, we do a quick and easy rollout. How? Because all Monsanto machines

anywhere in the world will have the same version and even the same patches

installed.

Anand

Kumar



head-IT, Monsanto
Key

Benefits





  • Lower maintenance and operating

    costs for IT

  • IT can now leverage skills and

    talent based on regional availability

  • Better able to manage risk and

    information security since you have global processes and a team

    looking at the big picture

There was a time when

local deployment was enabled, the challenges we faced were:

Advertisment

  • Software

    developed in a region would not work in another

  • Individuals

    would go about procuring whatever they wanted, this included handhelds,

    printers etc, then individuals would demand support for the same, which IT

    could not handle

  • IT

    could not ensure that security patches and concerns could be remedied easily

    as every machine required a different solution most of the time

  • Leveraging

    globalization and virtualization could not really happen, IT was relegated

    largely to the task of managing general infrastructure

  • We had

    several ERPs and ensuring that consistent data was reported was a huge

    challenge

  • TCO of

    IT was high and the challenge of managing SG&A was critical. 

Pain Points

  • This strategy would make sense for large companies which are

    faced with challenges in terms of ensuring standardization of

    processes vis-à-vis managing SG&A

  • The initial costs of global deployment would be high as

    systems and processes would have to be developed which would run/work

    in all areas where the systems/processes would need to be deployed

  • There is a very good chance that because of global deployment

    strategies the IT talent pool could not be leveraged due to

    'categorization' of talent , examples would be “ Indians are

    good programmers so let us only give programming work”, “Singapore

    IT is more methodical and attrition is low so let us give process

    centric repetitive work there”

Then we decided to look

at globalization and virtualization, and thus came the formation of the global

center of expertise (COE). These COEs were formed for back office, front office,

directory services, handhelds, telecom, data management, archiving,

applications, tools, and frameworks, and were charted with defining standards

which would capitalize on the concepts of reuse and reducing TCO. We have been

very successful as a corporation in defining standards. We have also defined

standards for data management as well in terms of design and architecture for

DBMS and DW, we have also defined standards for coding practices in the use of

languages, tools and frameworks to ensure that true reusability can be

leveraged.

I would recommend that

a careful study be made before deciding on global vis-à-vis local deployment

strategies since both have benefits as well as challenges.

As told to Goutam Das 



goutamd@cybermedia.co.in

Advertisment