Information Management

Our Information Management competency supports our clients to drive change in their respective organization.

Creating and establishing an IT strategy close to and aligned with the corporate level presents an often not completed challenge. Very close to this scenario we find governance, a mandatory framework for successfully running IT processes and operations, often not being “lived” and adhered to in day to day operations.

Relying and building on both, IT strategy and governance, IT executives have to come to decisions on the vertical integration within their organization.

The resulting discussion on sourcing requires to choose between “Make” or “Buy”, go to the cloud, stay and operate on premise, or integrate remote service providers for on-premise services, to name just a few examples.

To support managing the IT workload, be it project driven or due to lack of sufficient internal staffing, onboarding interim management is an excellent option to keep change processes agile.


Strategy

In order to build a profitable business (or, in other words, create value), the first rule is to define, implement and live a well-thought-out strategy. Key to achieve this is the creation of your corporate or business strategy.

In general, a strategy defines the realization of resource allocation choices (financial, human, technological, etc.) that engage the company in the long term and give it a sustainable, decisive and defensible competitive advantage.
The strategy provides the specification of the best route to follow, medium or long term, taking into account the external environment (risks and opportunities) and the capacities and possibilities available internally.

Taking into account the business strategy, your information technology (IT) strategy is laid down, basically following the same principles stated above. This process explicitly focusses on transforming high-level business strategy objectives into IT goals, thereby closely aligning both areas.
The outcome of this break-down then needs to be fed into a chain of steps to develop the IT strategy.

At its core, the IT strategy’s primary outcome is to create and deliver business-aligned IT capabilities to the enterprise units. This truly puts information technology at the heart of the organization as a key business enabler, providing real value to the business.

RIMOC shall assist and work together with you on this journey, among others, for example to

  • Identify the approach that best suits your overall strategic plan, reviewing
    • Business drivers and IT mission statement,
    • Enterprise architecture and project portfolio,
    • IT organization and processes,
    • Staffing and budgets,
      to create an IT strategy.
  • Define the scope as well as the required stakeholders within that scope and timelines for implementing the IT strategy.
  • Define metrics within your organization to collect key performance indicator (KPI) data for monitoring and analyzing the capability alignment.
  • Reorganize your IT organization to match IT strategy requirements, if deemed necessary

Governance

In general, governance focusses on two mutually supplemental groups of activities related to 

  • Acting together, and
  • Decision making within an organizational structure.

In any kind of such organizational structure, if members act together, decisions are to be made (and vice versa).

To allow for both, acting together and decision making, various approaches how to create, implement, maintain, and regulate actions, including their often-attached rules and norms, need to be defined and established.

Living by this rules and norms framework, the governance framework, resulting IT processes are very well aligned to support business processes, often forming the boundary values for the focused actions.

Within the area of information technology, implementation of a governance framework zooms in on topics such as:

  • External and internal compliance,
  • Performance, and
  • Risk management

In addition, supervision of IT goals and proper alignment with interest of business stakeholders need to be taken into account.

To practice and benefit from governance, RIMOC aids you to develop the right approach for your organization and successfully launch the processes together with you. This includes but is not limited to answer the following questions:

  • Define the scope what to cover and include, e.g.
    • regional,
    • organizational,
    • functional,
    • process-related.
  • Find the suitable implementation methodology, including
    • Participation,
    • Stakeholder,
    • Communication,
    • Sign-off or consensus,
    • Project team(s). 
  • Assure awareness for and interact with other areas, including cross sections and dependencies with
    • Enterprise Governance,
    • Corporate Governance,
    • Global IT Governance.
  • Drive acceptance within the organization, preparing answers to questions like
      • Where is the value add for Governance adherence?
      • Which are the benefits to respect accountability?
      • What do we ideally need to assign decision rights?
      • How should we measure Governance?
      • What are there best practice KPIs or frameworks for measurement?

    Sourcing

    Delivering not only cost effective but efficient IT services to your organization, potentially including regional or global affiliates, requires “best of breed” selection of the resources involved to bring the respective services into production. The required contributions are to be provided either from the existing IT department(s) of your organization and its affiliates or from suppliers external to the corporation.

    In case of external suppliers, sourcing is the methodology of choice to initially establish new services or transfer existing, internal services to be provided by external partners.

    It represents a strategic methodology that matches the company’s needs within the dynamics of the market and should be approached in a holistic manner:

    • Facilitating the decision-making process as well as the procurement process, and
    • Supporting the implementation process after a selection between “make” or “buy” has been made,

    by laying out a straightforward sourcing process which incorporates and starts with a mandatory requirements management section.

    As one of our core competencies, RIMOC will support you during your (out-) sourcing journey, the major steps of which include the following tasks:

    • Establish a decision-making process. 
      • Buy in stake holders for sourcing objective,
      • Define sourcing strategy and sourcing team,
      • Consolidate requirements and create a feature demand compilation,
      • Prepare a business case,
      • Execute decision “Make” or “Buy”
    • Execute the procurement process to aid the selection of a supplier. Procurement and IT departments closely working together to
      • Initiate and Perform bidding contest,
      • Evaluate potential suppliers,
      • Recommend and select partner for sourcing,
      • Drive commercial and legal negotiations.
    • Perform the implementation stage which includes among other tasks to
      • Plan quality gates and quality assurance measures,
      • Perform transition management,
      • Hand-off 
        • Services execution to provider operations team (“Go Live”), and
        • Provider control to the service manager of your organization.
    • Attend to two more classical out-sourcing life cycle steps after take-over of the sourced services by the external partner, the
      • Management of the Supplier, and 
      • Timely preparation for termination, renewal of contract, or execution of new bidding contest.

    Interim Management

    “Coming in to leave again”

    We understand the term “interim management” as the temporary provision of management resources and skills either to fill temporary assignments or to fill an open position when a proven qualified permanent employee cannot be found quickly enough.
    Interim managers are distinguished by active and operational participation in the management of the company. They represent the “the quick operational solution to business problems by senior executives recruited on a temporary basis”.

    Advantages of interim manager assignments include:

    • Quick on- and offboarding, within a matter of days;
    • Highly, often over-qualified, bringing considerable experience to find a solution to the problems your organization might face;
    • Concentrating on entrusted and important tasks results are usually achieved in an extremely profitable and timely manner;
    • Exceptionally intercultural and social competency allow to be sensitive to your corporate culture and at the same time benefit from not being involved in its often historically grown internal politics and protocols, thereby leveraging multiple degrees of freedom.

    By providing highly qualified senior IT interim managers RIMOC has been able to help our customers to

    • Temporarily bridge an organizational gap at various hierarchy levels, from team lead to IT division manager;
    • Manage in an accountable manner crisis, transition, or change phases with high expertise, commitment, and effectiveness; and to
    • Experience an objective and professional approach of external management which guarantees excellent RoI.