Cost-Reducing Modernisation (CRM) 

On the one hand, you wish to use the ICT budget for process optimisation, with cost reduction as a spearhead. On the other hand, the ICT infrastructure should be able to facilitate new developments such as SOA and HPW. Getting out of this split requires an integral vision on security, service management, management automation and virtualisation of infrastructures. Inter Access can assist you in developing and implementing this vision. To this end, we have developed the Cost-Reducing Modernisation (CRM) concept.

ICT policy as a spearhead for governments and businesses

ICT policy is high on the political agenda of local governments. This has everything to do with the need to get more of a grip on the complex coherence between legislation and rules, local government policy, corporate processes, information supply and infrastructures. The necessity of this is threefold:

  • The government wants to be better able to deal with social problems;
  • The government wants the Netherlands to be among the top countries in Europe in the field of ICT;
  • Electronic services offer the possibility to use new channels (e-mail and internet).

ICT policy is more and more important for private businesses as well. The challenge for ICT managers is to find a balance between traditional ICT objectives – for example cost reduction or quality improvement – and innovation objectives such as setting up an ICT environment in which corporate processes can be changed dynamically. This balance is time-based and is different for each ICT department.

The necessity of Cost-Reducing Modernisation

Business and governments wish to distinguish themselves based on cost management, quality, flexibility and innovation. CRM takes up on this by indicating specifically how these core competences can be supported using ICT. In public bodies as well as in large organisations in the trade and industry business, INK (the Dutch Quality Model) is a much used management model to determine the organisation's maturity. CRM is in keeping with this by applying INK to ICT. In the public domain CRM is also suitable for organisations which:

  • Are looking for a possibility to translate the spearheads as addressed in the 'Electronic Government' into ICT policy as well as into actual ICT solutions;
  • Wish to implement reference architectures such as those introduced by EGEM.

CRM is meant for public and private organisations which struggle with the implementation of answers to questions such as How can we:

  • increase our INK maturity level?
  • attune our company, information, ICT and information security policies?
  • streamline and standardise our ICT infrastructure and/or organisation?
  • guide the internal and external ICT suppliers in the best way possible?
  • judge ICT investments on their merits?
  • make a choice between doing something ourselves or outsourcing?
Step-by-step plan for CRM projects

Inter Access has developed Cost-Reducing Modernisation to help customers develop, manage, safeguard as well as implement an ICT policy. CRM consists of the following steps:

  • Scan to determine the current and the desired level of your ICT organisation. This includes: policy & strategy, tactical and operational plans, architecture, implementation, tools, IT Governance, IT processes, IT activities, (core) competences and skills.
  • Road map which provides a compact and specific description of the path to the desired situation.
  • Master plan in which the road map has been developed into a programme plan in which projects have been defined for each phase: from policy development to the actual implementation.
  • Product selection in which we indicate which technology and which solutions can be applied successively during implementation. You can involve Inter Access in the whole project, or in specific steps.
Focus areas
  • Surveys by organisations such as EGEM and BMC show that many public and private ICT organisations have not yet been set up in a way that allows for maximum support of company objectives. Municipal ICT organisations, for example, should collaborate more with branch partners to fulfil the concept of the Electronic Government. In addition, companies in the trade and industry business should, for example, automate management tasks to use ICT more efficiently. And financial service providers benefit from SOA architectures to make their services more flexible;
  • In RFPs, customers often make high demands of ICT suppliers when it comes to operational management. But this means they have to be able to adequately guide ICT suppliers themselves. The CRM vision on information and demand management provides the basis for this.

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