Logicalis US Asks CIOs: Do You Need a Professional Consultant?

Solution Provider Lists Five Key Criteria to Help ID the Best Partners

NEW YORK, August 23, 2016 – There’s a significant change taking place in IT today as organizations shift from the fixed, premise-based, capex IT investments of yesteryear to a mindset wholly focused on leveraging the tenets of the third platform – cloud, social, mobile and analytics – to satisfy digital acceleration in the enterprise and deliver the kind of user experience (UX) an increasingly tech-savvy workforce demands.  According to Logicalis US, an international IT solutions and managed services provider (www.us.logicalis.com), for CIOs to succeed in this new paradigm, they first need a well-defined strategy centered around the business requirements driving application adoption.  Then, they need to determine the best “safe harbor” for those applications based on security protocols, industry regulations and commercial economics, and they need to run those workloads in a way that promotes business agility and the IT department’s strategic value to the organization while satisfying the digital demands of the business’ end users.

“We often encounter CIOs struggling to make their organizations more digitally enabled who have jumped straight into the tactics they think will deliver the results they want, completely bypassing the strategy needed to create a performance-oriented digital experience,” says Ed Konopasek, Vice President, Managed Solutions, Logicalis US. “In this new digitally focused paradigm, it’s no longer about building out systems from scratch and supporting everything on-prem with an in-house team; there are many new ways to operationalize the consumption of digital services today that might provide better options. This is where a professional consultant can help.”

Five Things to Look for When Choosing a Professional Consultant

Choosing a professional consultant wisely will allow CIOs to minimize the number of partners they engage, an important task since managing too many consultants is both costly and time consuming. To help, Logicalis US suggests CIOs look first for professional consultants that meet these five criteria:

  • Have a Point of View: Having a point of view is very different from having technological expertise.  It’s about applying that expertise to develop an opinion about the best way to implement a particular technology or solution – and it’s about being so confident in that opinion that they’re willing to share their point of view with you. It does not, however, mean rigidly adhering to a single point of view when another option may work better. The key is to find a partner that has the expertise to advise you about what has worked well for other clients in similar scenarios, yet one who is open to what will work best in yours.
  • Eat their Own Cheerios: As clients move into the third platform and need help extending their capabilities, there are many consultants that can talk with them from a position of strength and experience.  But, if you want to limit the number of partners you have, look for solution providers that are deploying their own strategies and leveraging their own services where possible.  If they aren’t eating their own Cheerios, metaphorically speaking, then you shouldn’t either.
  • Promote Choice and Flexibility: If the partner you select offers its own cloud services, for example, that can be a plus.  But when your business needs dictate using another solution, the right professional consultant will lead the charge.  It’s critical, therefore, that the partner you select is objective enough to be truly vendor neutral, promoting choice and flexibility even when that means helping you select a solution or service that competes with its own.  Many partners are now adopting strategies to manage solutions beyond their own portfolio promoting a framework offering flexibility and choice all delivered with a high-quality, consistent end-user experience.  In the end, partnering with organizations like these will allow you to leverage volume and scale and achieve the best commercial economics while spending less time managing partner relationships.
  • Have a Wide Array of Experiences: A partner that has served clients across a number of industries will often have a wide array of experiences and best practices that can lead to creative solutions that a more linearly focused partner might not have in its toolbox.
  • Be Able to Solve Business Problems Outside of IT: If one of the CIO’s top priorities is to be seen as a more strategic partner to the business, it’s important to have a consultant behind you that can think outside the box – and sometimes that means outside of IT.  Savvy consultants can often leverage common IT processes and service management protocols and apply them to business problems beyond the traditional realm of IT.  Can well-oiled service management-oriented processes around incident, problem and change leveraged through an ITSM platform, for example, be applied to a manufacturer’s warranty returns process? IT consultants that get to know your business can offer creative ideas that will help you solve vexing business problems in new and creative ways leading to innovation and strategic value.

Want to Learn More?

About Logicalis

Logicalis is an international multi-skilled solution provider providing digital enablement services to help customers harness digital technology and innovative services to deliver powerful business outcomes.

Our customers cross industries and geographical regions; our focus is to engage in the dynamics of our customers’ vertical markets including financial services, TMT (telecommunications, media and technology), education, healthcare, retail, government, manufacturing and professional services, and to apply the skills of our 4,000 employees in modernizing key digital pillars, data center and cloud services, security and network infrastructure, workspace communications and collaboration, data and information strategies, and IT operation modernization.

We are the advocates for our customers for some of the world’s leading technology companies including Cisco, HPE, IBM, NetApp, Microsoft, VMware and ServiceNow.

The Logicalis Group has annualized revenues of over $1.5 billion from operations in Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia Pacific. It is a division of Datatec Limited, listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the AIM market of the LSE, with revenues of over $6.5 billion.

For more information, visit www.us.logicalis.com.

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