What's driving the need for a new IT operating model in your organization?
Sort by:
The main goal is to justify our existence relative to technology within our portfolio of companies and platforms. In industries like real estate and senior healthcare, it's often challenging to justify additional IT spending. For example, in the senior health sector, much is controlled by Medicare, limiting what can be billed. We don’t have control over rate increases as costs rise. In real estate, technology is sometimes viewed as unnecessary. We aim to help our business partners understand and manage technology costs, building a model that gives them more control over spending. This involves balancing cost concerns with the need to meet both minimum and advanced requirements, building trust, and demonstrating the value of technology investments.
Is your approach more of a shared services model or a federated IT operating model?<br><br>
It's more of a shared services model, and it's evolving. When I started with the Miller organization, I was part of the Sports and Entertainment Group, which included multiple companies and IT groups. We consolidated these IT groups for efficiency. At the parent company level, we had a small IT staff, and we've been working towards creating consistency across all businesses. Now, a help desk team of 12 supports 10 different companies, based on their service level needs and operational hours. The model is shared, but it sometimes faces challenges, such as managing timelines with general contractors. We're working on structuring and pricing to incentivize desired behaviors and help businesses understand their role in meeting service level agreements.<br><br>
Our current operating model has been somewhat of a patchwork over the years, pieced together based on workflow and project outcomes. There hasn't been a lot of structure. When I joined, I assessed how efficiently we were delivering projects and whether we were meeting our business goals. I noticed several pain points within the organization. Although we're not a huge company, with about $45 million in annual revenue, we are big enough that without structure, we won't be able to scale and operate as efficiently as we could. The need to meet our business goals and resolve these longstanding pain points is what's driving the change.
Specifically in IT, I've already revamped our operations since joining four years ago, finding a good hybrid model of insourcing and outsourcing. We're a centralized IT organization, though our digital business unit handles more independent website technology management. Moving to the cloud has helped solidify a partially managed service model, reducing the need for internal staff to manage infrastructure. Instead, we focus on finding the right number of developers to handle minor enhancements and day-to-day operations. For larger projects, we rely on CapEx funding and partner with big vendors to augment our team. The challenge is finding the right team size to meet our enterprise needs without the expense of full-time staff, especially as we can't compete with larger companies on salary. In security, we use MDR vendors to handle automation and event management, allowing our staff to focus on critical actions. We're shifting towards having more senior staff who can work effectively with vendors.