Managed Cloud Services, The Buzz Around

'He brought opera to the masses and reinvented the waltz..' as an example for the definition of "Reinvent" by Google for the actual meaning that reads as "change (something) so much that it appears to be entirely new". The new era of cloud computing is behind some of the biggest shifts in business since the industrial revolution. Today, the gegine is out of the bottle, and change is imminent and inevitable with the new way to stay fast and lean.

Many companies that were established more than a decade ago approached IT hosting companies that were providing access to single-tenant servers over the Internet no matter where your businesses were doing rounds. Now, what those hosting companies didn’t provide was was end-to-end customer service. Customer service over the last decade has taken different shapes to tailor suit every industry in form of Managed Services, now with Cloud Managed Services!

Frontier having won its first ever cloud services award from AWS for being the debutant consulting partner for the year just last week after acquiring 30+ customers in just 4 months speaks about how cloud managed services is emerging the leader after war on pricing from AWS, Google etc. From startups to enterprise, both want to focus more on their core businesses than looking after the SLA of their IT systems. Many offer cloud managed services with certain SLA's into play, some are even doing a great job in providing the value to the customer, but many are still struggling to even breakeven in understanding customers business and mapping them into what is required vs what the deliver. No doubt its still the same server, the same application or database. But MSP need to understand that the same is not at customer or MSP's premises. Its out there in the Cloud, which means the customer, the IT and the provider need not all be in the same time zone?

Frontier has invested immensely on time, resources and skills to build the capability than an enterprise would seek for bundled in a IT as a Service model to SMB's in India and across the globe. One of the most important part of this model are the architects that help give each customer the best fit for its unique needs to achieve the highest performance, enhanced security, and cost efficiency environment each time every-time.

The key point is that, today, no businesses want to invest big time to lock their investments for a long period of time, yet want to scale high very fast. In this time where new ideas become old in a matter of time, startups need to make their VC's returns in lesser time and where almost every other idea thought today is dependent on technology, it becomes important what the role the MSP wants to play in making Managed Cloud Services a world class customer service while knowing, change is imminent and its changing very fast every day!

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The Grey Zone - Leadership and Competencies

While large aspects of Leadership are about Values, Ideals and Humanism – I believe Leaders must establish and develop a core set of competencies. As we have discussed earlier, a Leader is all about Change – Positive Change. The process of making change and leading through that process requires a Leader to have a certain set of competencies and expertise that enables and enhances the change process.

From what I have seen and experienced, Great Leaders usually have either one of two characteristics:

Firstly they either have all of the competencies necessary and have the expertise necessary to establish the change process from start to finish.

Alternately, they surround themselves with People who have these competencies which demand a great degree of self-awareness, humility and openness. Not too many Leaders have these attributes or the willingness to acknowledge that there may be others who have greater competencies than themselves.

I once asked my boss in one of my earliest Leadership roles a question. This person was known to surround himself with extremely talented people. And not just that, but also had the ability to grow and groom these people and then share them across the Organization. I asked him why he surrounded himself with such people – and what enabled him to pick such people.

He answered very simply – “I surround myself with people who make up for my deficiencies”. He very clearly recognized that he had gaps in his own abilities and traits and therefore ensured that he picked people who had those competencies and skills. Further, what enabled him to do this was a clear recognition of what he did not have that also enabled him to look for and find it in others.

For anyone, the challenge is not just to find and surround oneself with such people, but to also allow them to do what you picked them for in the first place. Many Leaders I know fulfill the first part extremely well – that of picking the right people – but there are very few who are able to follow-through on allowing the people they pick to do what they are best at.

The primary competencies any Leader needs to be aware of are:

These sets of competencies when put together create a spiral that is infinite. I call this the “Value Spiral”. These competencies when taken as individual elements come through as very basic skills that any aspiring professional needs to develop. While this is true – a Leader is able to pull these together and have them feed off each other in a continuous spiral that creates magic. The analogy that comes to mind is a music conductor of a symphony orchestra. Each instrument and piece of music taken in and of itself is good – but put together and conducted well makes magic and a Symphony. A Leaders role in working with a diverse set of competencies is in making it work as a continuum.

Most aspiring Leaders I have worked with usually have possessed one or two of these competencies. On many occasions, I have noticed either of two tendencies with such people:

In order to compensate for the lack of other competencies, people have a tendency to focus on developing them and their own strengths become rusty with disuse and neglect.

With others, I have observed overindulgence in what they are good at. This then leads to a comfort level that then holds them back from their own growth.

I was in the habit of meeting the Global CIO of a major corporation at least once a year to hear directly from the horse’s mouth as to how he felt I was doing and also to get some career advice. This was a person I respected a great deal and this year I was eager to learn where I needed to get better and grow to the next level.

We got started talking about skills development and what we all needed to work on. At that point, I asked him as to what he felt I needed to get better at. He said that he had not seen me be very creative and constantly full of ideas. He also gave me an example of one of my peers who he felt was an “Ideas person”. Now, of course I bristled – but held my own counsel. One thing I have noticed is that developmental feedback makes us bristle or feel hurt – only because we already know that to be the truth – but the feeling comes because we are hearing it from somebody else.

What I realized was happening was that I was getting to be pigeon-holed as a terrific Execution and Follow-through person. What rankled was that I had always felt that I had Ideation and Creativity and that I was unfairly being compared to another person.

On cooler thought, I realized that I had been unconsciously doing some things. As I had been rewarded for my Execution in the past, it merely reinforced my behavior – instead of encouraging me to explore other aspects of the Value Spiral.

I would like to believe that it was at this point that I started to become aware of the Value Spiral. The key to a Value Spiral is the acknowledgement that it is all these aspects working in concert that actually create the Value, not one or the other.

The second aspect of the Value Spiral is the acknowledgement that all the aspects/dimensions may not reside in any one individual but actually could reside in various individuals.

The second aspect of the Value Spiral is the acknowledgement that all the aspects/dimensions may not reside in any one individual but actually could reside in various individuals.

Further, much like a conductor in a symphony orchestra – not only does the Leader ensure that all the musical sections (Winds, Brass, Strings etc.) are in concert – but also brings in their own knowledge, experience and most important of all their own “Feel” to the music.

It is this “Feel” that distinguishes being good and being great – being motivational and being inspirational. The ability to infuse into a group the concept of a collective Value Spiral and the difference that it can bring in peoples lives is a significant part of being a Leader.

The individual components and competencies of a Value Spiral make organizations good – but what makes them different and great is the recognition and belief that all of them in concert make them meaningful - meaningfulness, makes the difference that make Organizations and Leaders Great. Exploring each of these competencies is critical in understanding how they work together and the positive differences they can make to the whole rather than a part.

Ideation – The ability to imagine and create a Vision or a Concept that is unifying and Positive Change oriented for the greater good.

Strategizing – Moving from the abstract image to a more concrete “How” to realize the image or Vision through detailed analysis of the forces that could impact the realization of the Image positively or negatively.

Planning – Breaking down the strategy that is broad and far-seeing into discrete and tactical What’s and How’s and Who’s, Where’s, Why’s and When’s yielding a defined outcome.

Analysis – Understanding of the risks, resources, pros and cons of each discrete step to realizing the Plan.

Execution – Actioning of the Plan and leveraging the circumstance to drive the Plan to accomplishment of discrete goals.

Follow-through – Ensuring the Execution actually happens – and more critically – actually “sticks” and finally ensures that the Positive Change happens and that is has an impact that is favorable to and in-line with the Idea/Image/Vision.

Most Leaders I have worked with have always exhibited a tendency to be focused more on the Strategizing and Planning aspects. That being said – an underlying competency that all of them have exhibited is Execution.

Traditional and modern organizations have always had a tendency to focus on Execution as a core competence and therefore develop Leaders using roles that are Execution heavy. Most of the Leaders in Organizations today have cut their teeth on Execution. I am not aware of any Organization that focuses on the growth of Leaders through the continuum of the Value Spiral. If they do so, I posit that it is more by chance/circumstance than a result of effort or clear focus.

Great Leaders have usually stumbled upon their own native abilities rather than a result of their respective environments engendering these qualities. Leaders must practice each of these competencies, much like they work on perfecting their traditional skills. Where Leaders must pay attention to is on the establishment and focus on the recognition of the fact that it is all of these competencies that create the Value Spiral and not just one or the other.

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Strategic Outsourcing: Partnering globally to leverage sustainable-shared-value in IT and Managed Services

Gains from IT sourcing strategy should be expected to be naturally aligned with a degree of corporate risk and the management of these via a corporate retained governance layer specifically at times where multi-supplier or multi-sourcing for competitive advantage, performance-enhancement and reduction in operating costs, is increasingly attractive an option in post-recession-hungry-for-more-times. Such supplier-management governance layers have an inherent cost and value built-in which could ideally stop at the service management integration layer where platforms, process, infrastructure, communications and people capabilities from the supplier-stratosphere are best left to deliver the value they are contracted for. The retained-governance layer provides the key ingredients of service management which on the one hand, underwrite the service delivery for the internal or end-customers, and on the other, manage the supplier relationship to ensure the expected value from the outsourcing contract is assured. Customers who invest in this aspect clearly ascribe the required focus to the decision and will most likely therefore, follow a meticulous review and reporting mechanism which yet again ensures the strategy is always on the radar, visible.

While the customer organization manages the risks of integrating multiple vendors to benefit optimally from multi-sourcing it is almost a business-imperative and often an incredibly daunting challenge to step-back and leave accountability, contractual and human, with the supplier-engines, in the interests of deriving, in good measure, the value- unique to the individual suppliers and the essential-health of the customer-supplier relationship which progressively delivers quantifiable shared-value. A failing relationship can cause service delivery to become less effective and more costly even when all contractual obligations are being met. Ironically, the real challenge remains in a lack of understanding of the most appropriate way of engaging with the services supplier.

The transformational value of strategic-

outsourcing and partner alliances follows well-crafted fail-proof plans where the health of the relationship remains at the heart of the matter and most important metric is C-SAT and not resolution-rates and percentage closure on Priority-One incidents not taking away from the significance of keeps nuts, bolts and the odd-component in a top-form. A productive partnership will deliver value via innovation and the supplier will keep moving a notch-up the value chain. All this, while being predicted-upon contractual terms, always requires a leap-of-faith and also, a larger leap away from one’s non-core outsourced operations with a longer-term view to take a “hold” position even as the Bulls and the Bears in the stock-market swing the pendulum when organizations find they stand at a perceived inflection-point when hard-decisions need to be taken. Hard-decisions, most certainly do need to be taken; wrong decisions, most definitely not! It has been found that the primary cause of repetitive failure at successful partnering are most-often rooted in knee-jerk reactions towards cost-recovery, hasty corporate restructuring, and “taking-IT- back-in” all on account of discovering the obvious while mid-course, which is, outsourcing offers much that is tangible when managed well. In addition to reduced-costs and a scalable skilled workforce, this includes, project control, best practices, risk- offsets, among others. But realizing some or all of these benefits is directly linked to good-planning and a staying-course with a carefully laid out strategy, especially if outsourced resources are offshore.IT Offshoring and Outsourcing

Overwhelming emphasis on reducing IT sourcing contracts costs result in short term gains, cause multiple weaknesses in relationships, integration effectiveness and innovation, which by themselves can bring cost reductions. Instead, there customer organization is left with paying the price of facing unexpected costs in resolving failing outsourcing contracts.

Customers are constantly re-assessing their outsourcing contracts and are seeking to build in continuous improvement and innovation clauses as these contracts come up for renewal. Suppliers are increasingly required to deliver continuous improvement in their service delivery as this remains a significant opportunity to add further value to the business in hard times.

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