Achieving IT Budget Efficiency

This not only enabled significant savings, but allowed us to reduce the time to market (TTM) accordingly. In partnership with our internal business customers, we launched a set of ‘TTM accelerators’ that we started applying to most new projects:

Improving BRS gathering and functional design. We aligned incentives of business and IT professionals by ensuring both groups are incentivized to make tradeoffs decisions between costs, complexity and time without having to escalate. We also formalized the role of IT experts as consultants to the business and not as simple contractors, and ensured they are involved as early as possible to advise on ways to change requirements to reduce implementation complexity. Often business users are not aware that small changes in their requirement can potentially increase IT complexity disproportionately. Another simple but effective lever is helping users to get familiar with out-of-the-box functionalities upfront, before asking for requirements, to offload unnecessary changes to readily available capabilities. We also found that AGILE proved a great way to increase team spirit and create better functioning cross-functional teams

Improving approach to testing. Compliance to risk management and regulatory frameworks usually makes testing a difficult issue to tackle. However, the push to digitalization and the need for rapid development cycles are forcing a review of testing approach and IT risk management: companies cannot ‘go digital’ fully without reviewing the way risk is defined and dealt with. In line with these trends we are reducing the burden of testing especially for functionalities that relate to customer interfaces, promoting a ‘fail-fast’ environment whereby resources are shifted from testing to development with a different risk calculus agreed with Finance and Audit

        We are not through adopting all these accelerators, but based on the results so far we envisaged that we can save up to 40% in the development time and/or costs of standard                  business enhancements projects once full adoption is achieved.

Prioritization of Projects with Immediate Impact

In times of budget constraints it pays to change the portfolio mix of IT projects towards projects with faster return on investments. It sounds obvious but the complexity of prioritizing investments across different business units, varying degree of end customer impact and interdependencies with other initiatives makes this lever somewhat difficult to use. At TM we decided to prioritize a cluster of projects for Big Data Analytics and Cloud, and the benefits we are gainingare significant:

Creating a common Infra for big data analytics. At TM, we are building an enterprise wide common analytics platform as this eliminates storage silos and simplifies data management tremendously.This accelerated big data adoption. The first benefits we are seeing are in broad band fault rate reduction: thanks to a deeper understanding of factors contributing to faults, we are now able to intervene before customers call and remove the underlying causes before faults occur. Pilots show that the adoption of analytics in driving field force activities can reduce fault rates up to 30%, with a proportional reduction in costs.

Adopting cloud. Since 2013 TM has a sizeable private cloud, by some measures one of the biggest in South East Asia. The benefits of cloud are well understood, but it is comforting to see them in action even a short time after project completion: Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) reduction of 30% through 60% improvement in IT infrastructure requirements and resource utilization. Not to mention real time provisioning and process simplifications. An important selection criterion for new software is now the ability to work in our private cloud environment.

The challenges posed by tightening budgets and economic uncertainties are surely going to put pressure on IT budgets, but there is perhaps no better opportunity to prove how a close partnership with the business can provide benefits across all company activities even in a short time. The days of the CIO as the enabler of business transformation may have finally arrived.

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