Gartner's Value Proposition to Clients - Coursework Example

?What is Gartner's value proposition to their Gartner is the global leader in information technology (IT) research and consultancy. The company has been involved in information technology research and consultancy for over three decades thus it can boast of having a broader view of the issues that impact IT industry professionals at every level. In fact, Gartner has over the years developed proprietary research techniques that are currently referred to as the benchmark of IT research. Examples of these proprietary methodologies are: Gartner Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes, Gartner Hype Cycles, Gartner IT Score, Gartner IT Market Clocks and Gartner IT Key Metrics Data (“Introducing Gartner” 4). Using its depth of expertise, years of experience and extensive client interaction, Gartner promises its clients technology-related insight necessary for real-time, effective decision making (“About Gartner” 1). This technology-related insight comes in the form of independent, actionable advice on how and where to reduce cost, deploy IT to add value, drive innovation and manage risk (“Introducing Gartner” 3) Specifically how can they add value to the Supply Management Organization? Gartner works with IT professionals under four key markets: IT end-user professionals, high-tech & telecoms professionals, supply chain professionals and investment professionals. Specifically with regards to supply management organizations (SMOs), Gartner is able to provide three services that are highly valuable. Gartner helps SMOs with: (1) the selection of the right products and negotiating for the best terms and pricing; (2) staying current with important innovations and cutting through the technology information overload and hype; (3) networking opportunities with peers in Gartner organized events such as the Outsourcing and Vendor Management Summit and the IT Financial, Procurement and Asset Management Summit. One example of Gartner’s supply chain management initiatives is the AMR Supply Chain Leaders – a product that offers a full portfolio of indispensable services to help organizations maximize their supply chain productivity through strategic advice, best practices and case studies, Gartner analyst inquiry, webinars, custom alerts, and industry-focused insight (Gartner pdf 2). Gartner acquired AMR Research – the gold standard for research focused on supply chain management – in 2009. What are 5 tips in today's economy that can be shared with Clients? Supply managers to prioritize and enhance forecasting and planning activities as an antidote to imminent global inflation and supply shortages (Minahan 1) In volatile markets, it may be better to run more frequent and smaller sourcing projects to take advantage of fluctuating capacity and costs, as well as technological advances (Minahan 7) What is a hot topic in IT Supply Management today that clients are looking for direction on? What Key Findings, Recommendations can be made? The current hot topic in IT Supply Management today is how to relocate IT applications from Client-Server model to the new paradigm of Cloud computing model. Gartner proposes five ways through which organisations can migrate to the Cloud: re-hosting on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), refactoring for Platform as a Service (PaaS), revising for IaaS or PaaS, rebuilding on PaaS or replacing with Software as a Service (SaaS) (staff reporter 1). Each of these methods has specific situations where their use is preferable to the other. Re-hosting involves moving applications from one hardware environment to another without changing its form. This is appropriate for organizations that want to quickly migrate their systems with minimal revision to their system architecture. Refactoring offers good backward compatibility. Revising allows organizations to optimize their applications to leverage the cloud characteristics of the Cloud provider’s infrastructure (staff reporter 7). Rebuilding enables one to deploy innovative features in the Cloud provider’s platform. Replacing involves discarding the existing applications for use of commercial software provisioned as a service. This option evades the huge cost required of investment in assembling a development team. The major advantage of adopting the Cloud computing provisioning model is that it reduces the costs associated with management of hardware and software resources by shifting the computing infrastructure from on-site to on-network (Hayes 9). Cloud computing, arguably, converts fixed IT costs into variable costs. This conversion would help organizations avoid the overhead costs associated with unused IT capacity. What are common threats in IT Supply Management that most companies can benefit from if addressed can minimize risk and exposure? IT cost optimization is the most common threat that most companies could benefit from if addressed to minimize risk exposure. Gartner has developed four levels of cost optimization framework that they argue could help companies optimize their business costs. These levels are categorised into two: lower level and upper level. The lower levels comprise of IT procurement and cost savings within IT. The upper levels comprise of joint business with IT cost savings and innovation and business restructuring. The two lower levels objective is to reduce costs within IT and begins at the stage of IT procurement. Organizations can reduce IT spend drastically if they focus on developing true partnerships with IT vendors. Having a strong relationship with one’s IT vendors implies that both parties would be willing to make joint sacrifices in times of economic uncertainty and that both parties will benefit in the good economic times. Strong relationships encourage both parties to pursue win-win strategies in their procurement negotiations. The second lower level of cost savings within IT implies that companies make it a priority to find opportunities to reduce their baseline IT costs as opposed to moving the costs from one budget centre to another. Organizations that instil this practice do not simply follow the trend of other organizations but they critically assess their IT function and seek ways to bring down their costs with the knowledge that where they focus is where they will succeed in making cost savings. The two upper levels of cost optimization are no longer about IT itself but seek to involve the business as well to work in conjunction with IT to reduce overall operating costs. The first upper level is joint business and IT cost savings. Here the organisation must seek to implement cost-saving technologies that encompass the whole business and how it relates to IT. Gartner suggest that organizations look at factors such as total cost of ownership, acquisition models, energy-saving strategies, alternative IT delivery and so on (“From The Gartner Files: The Four Levels of Cost Optimization” 13). Finally, organizations need to refocus their energies to come up with long-term process improvement, business structuring and/or innovation. This strategy will enable companies to utilise IT as a game changing tool to create sustainable competitive advantages. It is important to note that there is a difference between cost cutting and cost optimization. Organizations may be tempted to believe that quickly reducing their IT spend leads to cost savings. Whereas this may be true in the short-term, in the long-term Gartner informs us that this is detrimental to the future performance of the organization since it delays investments in IT that would normally yield better results in the long run. Cost optimization is where there are savings realized without sacrificing necessary business processes. In other words, cost optimization is cost savings when service-level expectations of the business and IT are met. Works Cited “About Gartner.” Gartner 15 Aug 2011. Web. 15 Aug 2011. “From The Gartner Files: The Four Levels of Cost Optimization.” Qwest Business. Web. 15 Aug 2011. Hayes, Brian. “Cloud Computing.” Communications of the ACM 7 (2008) : 9-11. Print. “Introducing Gartner.” 2 June 2011 : n. pag. Print. Minahan, Tim. “Gartner’s Supply Tips: A Second Opinion.” Supply Excellence 5 Mar 2007. Web. 15 Aug 2011. Staff reporter. “Gartner Reveals 5 Tips to Move Applications to Cloud.” International Business Times 18 May 2011. Web. 15 Aug 2011.  Read More