Posts Tagged ‘IMF Reports’

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A Successful Approach to Recruiting and Retaining Top IT Talent

May 6th, 2013

IT employee retention strategies

A Successful Approach to Recruiting and Retaining Top IT Talent is based on a Forum presentation given by Rich Murr from Rackspace. Without the right talent, delivering the results your organization deserves is impossible. Competition for IT talent is fierce. In this report, Mr. Murr focuses on the best ways to approach an “employees’ market.”

Learn about the challenges leaders face and why their personal brand is often more important than the company’s brand. You reputation plays a critical role in attracting and retaining the people you need to achieve outstanding results. Historical data suggests that a good technical employee will stay with an IT services firm from three to five years, so how can you convince them to stay longer?

Find out how to connect with your employees on a deeper level to drive personal and professional growth. Mr. Murr discusses the degrees of “stickiness” keeping employees in place and their motivations may surprise you. Your employees and recruits are people and individuals. There are generational differences and varying incentives you must consider. Understanding these differences takes time, so get started today!

Members can download the full report by logging into TheIMF.com and visiting the Reports page. In this passage, Mr. Murr talks about the role an IT leader’s personal brand plays in recruiting and retention:

Always remember that “employees work for their leader, not the company.” Anybody who’s been in the workforce for any amount of time knows the difference between a good and bad boss. They know what it’s like dreading another eight hours under someone who doesn’t care. At the other end of the spectrum, they also know what it’s like to feel empowered by someone who believes in them and genuinely cares about their well-being.

 

If your company has a good brand, use it to your advantage. If it doesn’t, make no excuses, and focus on putting your best foot forward. A poor company brand doesn’t prevent you from setting a positive tone for your department and building loyalty. I’ve worked for companies where I didn’t necessarily appreciate the brand or mission, but was working for someone who really cared about what they were doing and their people, and it was motivating.

If you’re not an IMF member, you can still get in on the action. Download our free report on Tracking ROI for IT Projects!

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Moving Enterprise Email to the Cloud

May 1st, 2013

Enterprise Email Cloud

Moving Enterprise Email to the Cloud is based on a Web Forum presentation given by Doug Greene from the American Red Cross. The American Red Cross successfully transitioned over 40,000 staff members to the Microsoft Office 365 email solution. This included users at in their national headquarters, Blood Services Regions, and more than 500 chapter organizations. The effort consolidated over 400 different email domains. For the first time, the organization has a single, enterprise-wide email platform.

There were plenty of reasons for the Red Cross to make this move. For instance,   moving to a cloud-based email platform offers improved services and features like 24×7 support, centralized administration, and enterprise shared calendars. Find out how an enterprise platform solution also helped the Red Cross realize annual cost savings in excess of $1.5 million.

This report gives you a pre and post-migration outlook for the Red Cross. Discover the scope of products they’ve selected and the strategic decisions behind their migratory approach. Follow their timeline, from the beginning stages of planning and contracting up to the last chapter migration.

Finally, you’ll read about some of the obstacles encountered and lessons learned along the way. For example, learn how to make your biggest critics the earliest adopters. Find out why calendar migrations and different mobile devices can be rather problematic during migration. As with any large-scale initiative though, communication is the key and the Red Cross had a plan for user awareness.

Members can access the full report by logging into TheIMF.com and visiting our Reports page. In this brief excerpt, Mr. Greene talks about how to deal with user count in contract negotiations:

Some of our Chapters enjoy great online web access in the Office 365 environment. This is a good option, especially if cost is a consideration. I advise you to underestimate user count in contract negotiations because generally speaking once you’re locked in that’s what you pay. It’s not a variable scenario where you only pay for the mailboxes being used that particular month. Adding accounts is easy but there’s not real mechanism for removing or decreasing the number of monthly users. We signed a five-year deal and originally overestimated. However, because we’re a large customer with a large user-base, we’ve been able to re-baseline. If we were to do it all over again I would’ve underestimated by several thousand and simply added accounts when necessary. 

 

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Report: Moving Internal Applications to the Public Cloud

March 12th, 2013

Spratlen Cloud Cover Shadow

Moving Internal Applications to the Public Cloud is based on a Web Forum presentation given by Rackspace’s Daniel Spratlen. Rackspace is in the process of moving some their internal applications to the public cloud by way of open source software known as OpenStack. This is a work in progress and with any endeavor of this scope you’re going to run into challenges along the way. The report dives into their experiences, focusing mainly on the non-technical aspects like organization culture, compliance and security, as well as financial implications.

Find out what makes a good candidate for cloud migration and the factors you must consider if you hope to be successful. Learn about the kinds of organizational changes you can expect from such shifts. This impacts your QA teams, infrastructure teams, system administrators, and developers to name a few.

Security and compliance are always a primary concern when dealing with cloud technologies. Fortunately there are ways to move your applications in a secure manner and remain compliant. Some of these pre-cautions, like encrypting sensitive data, should’ve already been taken but the cloud will make them mandatory.

From a financial perspective, a cloud shift will obviously affect your budget so you need to know what to look out for in order to plan ahead. How are you going to handle capacity planning and chargeback? Rackspace was even able to shift what were historically considered CAPEX costs to OPEX. Thinking outside the box, discover why “speed to impact” can be a more important metric than cost savings.

Excerpt:  What makes an application a good cloud migration candidate?

In order to find the right application to move, you need to start simple. Don’t move your main billing platform or financial applications first. When considering what applications to move, you must take several things into account. For instance, are you moving to a public or private cloud? What is the organization comfortable with from a cultural perspective? Facebook uses largely private cloud inside its datacenters but it’s also a major adopter of cloud technologies. The company has a motto it follows which states: “move fast and break things.” This speaks to their application development and deployment approach as well as the cultural impact this line of thinking can have on people.

 

Look for an application that has fewer dependencies. It is not uncommon for enterprise applications to talk to many different systems. As a result, those are going to be some of the more challenging applications to move first. 

 

Consider underlying technologies of the applications used. In our experiences, we found applications that run a Linux stack or leverage open source technologies more readily lend themselves to cloud. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t move Microsoft applications to a cloud environment. I’m simply saying, from a first candidate perspective, toolsets for Linux and open source are generally more prevalent and have more features than you’ll find with some of the Microsoft technologies.

Members can download this and hundreds of other reports by logging into TheIMF.com and visiting the Reports page.

 

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