Peak Performance Blog

By now, most organizations understand the benefits, and more importantly, the need to shift to an agile, DevOps model to survive in today's rapidly changing and hyper-competitive digital world. In our four-part series, we have discussed how DevOps can transform your organization, and how to prepare for the transformation through the critical first two steps of the DevOps journey:

Recent developments in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) look a lot like the development of self-driving cars―as seen in the rear-view mirror. RPA has historically involved business process automation with little or no human intervention (unattended) while fully autonomous vehicles are 

According to the latest forecast by Gartner, worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.7 trillion in 2018, an increase of 4.3 percent from 2017 estimated spending of $3.5 trillion. In a recent Tech Pro Research survey, respondents reported that their organizations will be prioritizing spending on security, cloud services and hardware in 2018. 

The typical back-office of most organizations spends 75-80% of their time “keeping the lights on.” This means transactional processing and non-value added activities. This dynamic leaves only 20-25% of your capacity for business growth activities such as strategic planning, customer insights, and analytics.

I suspect that a high percentage of people reading this article are already familiar with the basics of Robotics Process Automation (RPA), and the significant cost savings and efficiencies that RPA can bring to your organization by automating high volume, transactional processes in multiple functions including Finance, HR and IT. 

In a recent post, I shared 5 Lessons Learned on How to Get Started with Robotics Process Automation (RPA). These lessons ranged from “don’t drink the vendor Kool-Aid” to “embrace your workforce” to “start small.”

Today’s competitive business landscape calls for aggressive and sustainable ways to cut internal costs without compromising the service levels of the organization. One area that has been prone to drive cost-cutting initiatives, and will continue to do so going forward is the back office through the establishment of shared services and outsourcing models.

In our ongoing series, we started by highlighting the challenges businesses face in today's rapidly changing world of technology and services and the benefits that an agile, DevOps approach can bring to your organization. In short, you need to either be first to deliver new digital capabilities to your customers or be prepared to catch up with more innovative competitors faster than ever before. While the case for DevOps sounds great in theory, implementing it effectively is another story, and it's not a one-off activity, but rather an ongoing journey, beginning with governance which we discussed in the last blog. Moving along, the next step involves implementing workforce management.

So, you have determined that implementing an agile DevOps framework and related business processes is the best strategy for your organization. The benefits are clear after all  ̶  faster time-to-market for new applications and services, better cross-team collaboration, increased organizational efficiency and higher quality code. As we noted in a previous blog, however, making the move to agile is not as easy as it may seem, and the transformation requires more than just deploying technology and finding the right talent. Rather, you need to approach DevOps as an ongoing journey and build these new capabilities into your organization systematically to align IT initiatives with your overall business strategy. 

Today, companies in all industries rely on software to meet customer and user demands. Besides, peoples' expectations have changed dramatically in the last few years, as they demand instant, convenient and reliable access to services that are continuously improved - and those requirements are changing at a rapid pace. To meet these demands, you need to innovate faster than ever before. Rapid innovation, in turn, requires you to transform your business into an agiler software development organization if you want to remain competitive.

Enter DevOps.

In today's rapidly changing world of technology, businesses must be flexible and agile to adapt quickly when delivering critical IT services or risk getting left behind. This means setting up a wide range of processes, policies, controls, and activities to ensure that IT becomes an asset to the business and that your customers' ever increasing demands are satisfied in a cloudy, "as-a-service" world. When in discussions about this issue, two acronyms always come up: ITSM (IT service management) and ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) ̶ however, though complementary, they often get confused.

It's official, Robotics Process Automation (RPA) has survived the hype cycle and is now one of the leading disruptive technologies of 2017. In other words, RPA is not just a thing of the future, it's a proven technology and already up and running in many organizations. There is a good reason for this. Today, organizations are under pressure to digitize and innovate faster than ever, and automation is one of the key ways to achieve this. To put the market potential into perspective, earlier this year McKinsey released a report stating that 51% of total employment in the US can be automated, while Gartner predicted that the RPA software market would grow 40% year-over-year through 2020.

It’s well understood that securing your AWS cloud applications is important and that it needs to be front and center. This is especially true for companies that primarily generate business through their applications and websites, such as online retailers and SaaS providers.

So, you made the leap and picked the right cloud provider or providers to migrate your workloads to, and everything is all set. NOT REALLY.

 There’s been a lot of hype during the last two weeks around Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods. Just when you thought that the traditional retail industry couldn't be in a more serious state of upheaval, e-commerce and cloud pioneer Amazon announced its plan to purchase the high-end grocery store chain Whole Foods for $13.7 billion - it's largest acquisition ever. It would be an understatement to say that this deal will only have serious implications for the future of grocery stores, as it’s going to impact the future of the retail industry as a whole. Disruption and innovation are nothing new for Amazon, in fact, it's what the company is a master of. It's just another spur (and a sharp one) for retailers to get moving on new strategies to be able to survive in today's rapidly changing and hyper-competitive world of commerce.

While many organizations have already moved at least some of their business workloads to public cloud infrastructure, some of you are just beginning the journey. The benefits are clear: elimination of capital expenditure on infrastructure, instant access to applications and data from any device wherever a user is on the network, additional agility to create and remove infrastructure as needed, improved collaboration and productivity, better security, unlimited storage and simple backup and recovery, and of course the cost advantages of paying only for the highly scalable resources you actually consume. Sounds great, but the next big question is which cloud provider should you choose.

 Today, any CIO can tell you that one of their biggest concerns is the growing lack of IT talent in the market.  With the massive uptick in cloud and mobility in industries across the board, the demand for both highly specialized and more general IT skills is creating a huge headache for businesses that are trying to remain competitive.  Just look at any company's job listing page and you'll likely find that there are more openings for technology jobs than any other department.  In fact, in the IT security space alone, Cybersecurity Ventures issued a 2017 report claiming that the workforce shortage will reach 1.5 million by 2019, more than 209,000 jobs in the U.S. are currently unfilled and that postings are up 74 percent over the past five years.

The 21^st HR Shared Services & Outsourcing Summit, organized by IQPC, was held this week in Chicago from May 15^th to May 18^th, 2017.

Help desk outsourcing has become more popular. Why? Should you Outsource your Help Desk? While help desk services are essential for businesses of all sizes, operating one in-house is essentially a non-core function of your organization. In other words,

In today's cloudy and mobile world, people expect to be able to access what they want wherever they are on the network and from whatever device they choose. To satisfy this demand, businesses need to become agiler and have the ability to scale resources up or down on-the-fly. Procuring the infrastructure to enable these elastic environments in-house, however, can be extremely expensive and time-intensive, and you often end up with more resources than you need - in other words - IT becomes a drain on your budget. In fact, organizations are often paying around 40 percent of the IT budget for over-capacity, according to a recent article by CIO.