Cambridge’s services may involve assistance in policy formulation, re-investment decisions, external/internal resource decisions, integration of sources of IT within the enterprise and developing architectures), economics (value analysis, contribution and productivity analysis, financial tools and alternative funding and charging mechanisms, plus research into budgets and spending patterns), organization (the development of business models and management processes), planning (structuring the IT organization of an enterprise to increase alignment and to better identify business opportunities, also management implications of emerging IT technological issues, addressing of disaster recovery strategies), learning (processes for adoption of appropriate best practices, contracting and relationship management and the various means to add skills to an IT organization), and effective use of the IT function (business unit managers' responsibilities for IT, the management of external service providers and the marketing of IT services within the enterprise).

Business Objective Translation
Injecting the right caliber of IT professional into the business strategic planning process can help to ensure that the IT strategic plan is a direct derivative of business needs. Cambridge seeks not only to ensure accurate translation but also strives to add value to the process itself by enriching discussions with domain expertise. It also helps to be ‘realistic’ about technology capabilities during business strategic planning; especially where cost, time to implement, and expected benefits are concerned.

Capability Portfolio Alignment
Businesses need to be dynamic and move quickly on market opportunities. It is therefore vital that IT’s capability portfolio contains an existing set of solutions or platforms which have already been aligned with business needs and objectives. Cambridge understands that business change can sometimes mean re-inventing existing capabilities and acquiring new platforms, the key point being that a capability portfolio should be iterative and evolving with an open review channel to ensure continual alignment.

IT Strategic Planning
The IT Strategic Planning process is largely about gearing technology resources and investments most effectively toward building and supporting a business-aligned technology capability portfolio. But it also means doing it in a highly coordinated fashion and leveraging common resources and assets to bring exponential value to the business. Cambridge has assisted in a plethora of Enterprise IT Strategy formulation exercises and consistently brought value by identifying and garnering economies of scale.

Emerging Technology Evaluation
‘Staying ahead of the curve’ is usually an essential component of business strategy and can be realized when the very latest technologies are applied to a practical business application. But companies don’t want to be at the ‘bleeding edge’ where discovery investment can outweigh financial benefits. This fine balance has been found by many companies who have engaged with Cambridge to develop standard assessment frameworks and pilot programs to properly test and stabilize new technologies before putting them out to market.

Technology Platform Evaluation & Selection
Developing enterprise-wide capabilities and platforms is always a challenge because usually such strategic initiatives can be found where distributed pockets of technology investment have already occurred. Bringing cross-functional constituents to a common decision on platforms can therefore be a lengthy and somewhat arduous process. The only remedy for this is a standard evaluation process and framework which is entirely metrics based and removes ‘gut feel’ and personal opinions from the evaluation and selection process. Cambridge’s product and platform agnostic philosophy along with our finely tuned evaluation framework has resulted in smooth, rapid and accurate platform decision making for many large companies.

IT Asset Management & Technology Standardization
Compliance to a well defined set of enterprise technology standards facilitates operational efficiencies because rationalizing your technology stack means rationalizing your support resources. In other words, support more with less. It also permits the acquisition of technology assets in larger planned quantities giving the purchasing department a much easier time to negotiate important discounts and therefore savings. But standardizing the technology portfolio must be done carefully so as not to handicap initiatives and to permit a best of breed approach to be taken. Cambridge’s long line of engagements has spread our expertise across many technologies so we understand what standards should be sought for which technology categories and when to support a heterogeneous environment.

IT Organization Structure Optimization
IT functions are now commonly recognized as ‘shared service’ functions in most organizations today, similar to other shared services such as HR or Travel. This means that IT departments usually service a global client base regardless of the organizations centralized or de-centralized structure. Despite this, it is still common to see this global servicing being done in a highly fragmented and geography specific manner, even in some of the largest, well established companies. Cambridge is the right catalyst to transform these distributed IT activities into a global internal service function because we live and breathe this business model as an IT service company every day. Indeed, our engagements to assist companies in globalizing their IT structures have quite often also resulted in significant cost savings and productivity improvement.

Vendor Performance Management & Rationalization
Vendor Management is critical to ensure that the maximum value is derived from vendor engagements and relationships. Metrics should be used to measure financial performance as well as performance in other areas such as contribution, benefits realization, cost saving, and individual resource or platform performance. This set of metrics or key performance indicators should be presented as an executive dashboard to allow IT personnel to make critical and timely decisions about the nature of their relationships with vendors. Cambridge provides organizations with the expertise and ability to profile and measure its vendor portfolio to conduct this level of performance management as well as make decisions to rationalize engagements with vendors where it makes sense. Of course rationalizing vendors also means reducing the effort and cost involved in managing these relationships!

Offshore Outsourcing Strategy
For many years now, organizations have been leveraging a globally distributed talent pool to deliver significant cost savings in both IT and other shared services functions. This also usually means that organizations are investing in either their own captive centers in less costly locations such as India and China or in IT vendor partnerships or engagements being serviced from similar locations. Either way, an offshore strategy needs to be carefully thought through, commercially viable by allowing organizations to build equity in their investments, and applied to the right opportunities in the right order. Cambridge has been assisting its clients for many years their offshore outsourcing strategies with a proven track record for allowing the cost arbitrage business case to become a reality.

IT Delivery Process
When an organization recognizes an opportunity to leverage technology capabilities, the request is usually to deliver that capability as soon as possible and as cost effectively as possible. The process of delivering these capabilities is usually quite similar regardless of the type of project or technology involved and people commonly refer to this as ‘project management’. However, how do you prioritize one project against another to determine where you are going to apply your resources? How do you ensure that you are not taking on too much and overloading your resources? How do you ensure that your projects are executed on time and on budget? These questions and many others can be answered through Cambridge’s IT Delivery Process which is a customizable methodology that organizations can adopt to ensure the most efficient deployment of projects right from the concept stage right through to measuring and realizing the benefits. A well defined IT Delivery Process also helps tie your Professional Services Automation (PSA) Tools such as Microsoft Project Central, Niku, Planview and others to address real IT planning and management challenges.

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