Technology Business Operations

Specialists

Technology Business Operations

Technology Business Operations

Swingtide specializes in Technology Business Operations. We believe that to successfully deliver these functions you need a thorough understanding of IT, finance, and sourcing. That is what we offer. CIOs today have to answer to a lot of people.

They are heads of a business, and they serve a business. In order to fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities, they need to oversee many diverse skills that are often difficult to obtain.

Technology Business Operations

IT Assessment

Swingtide will complete a rapid assessment of the state of your technology business operations (TBO). We’ll provide a comprehensive and objective analysis of the TBO functions and deliver an actionable assessment of your current state with an identification of delivery gaps, compatibility issues, and areas for cost, operational, process, and relationship improvements. This rapidly provides a platform to address short-term issues, develop strategic operational roadmaps, and support future IT decisions.

Target Audience
  • Organizations needing to rapidly evaluate the people, processes and tools supporting technology business operations
  • Organizations experiencing a change in IT leadership (new CIOs)
  • Organizations trying to understand IT costs and realign them to current business requirements
  • Organizations desiring to move up the technology business management maturity curve
  • Organizations prioritizing improvement activities to maximize value
Key Benefits
  • Focused technology business improvements to maximize the value
  • Understanding of organization, process, tools, and people
  • Ability to focus resources on activities valued by businesses and eliminate wasted spend
  • Helps with the prioritization of IT investment decisions
  • Clean-up operations: take out unneeded licenses, circuits, assets; eliminate excess capacity to align with current business needs
Technology Business Advisory

CIO Advisory

Due to the evolving complexity of technology, many organizations find themselves in a period of transition. They may be hiring a new CIO or searching for a CIO who has the mindset and capability to lead their technology organization. Companies need someone who is experienced, innovative, cost-conscious, and sophisticated to run things at an enterprise level. Swingtide can provide an interim CIO and will provide business analysis and recommend projects that will benefit your organization and accelerate the time to effectiveness for your permanent CIO.

Target Audience
  • Organizations searching for a new CIO
  • Organizations who hired a new CIO
  • Organizations in need of an assessment of current state of IT
  • Organizations in need of assistance with development of future state IT model
  • Organizations in need of prioritization of needs and key IT initiatives
Key Benefits
  • Quick-hit opportunities
  • Identification of goals and objectives
  • Identification and integration of business needs
  • Definition and understanding of key IT system and service requirements
  • Development or refinement of technology roadmap and standards
  • Development of strategies to achieve goals and objectives
Technology Business Advisory

M&A Support for IT

Swingtide offers services that help companies with organizational transitions. We provide program governance, financial oversight, and contractual assistance in the high-pressure circumstances of mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, spin-offs and other strategic organization level changes.

This offering includes the provision of the detailed, time-sensitive, and complex work necessary to complete contractual due diligence and all the technology business related integration or separation activities required to support these strategic business changes.

Swingtide’s activities span analysis of technology contracts for usage and transfer rights, development of transition services agreements, integration and separation planning and the identification of the economic impact of a transaction (e.g., unabsorbed overhead, separation fees, service realignment).

Target Audience
  • Organizations divesting or acquiring businesses
  • Organizations with limited experience supporting acquisitions & divestitures
  • Organizations seeking full understanding of a transaction impact
Key Benefits
  • Efficient and timely organizational transitions
  • Mitigation of risk, minimization of cost, effective governance during the transition
  • Understanding the fully-loaded cost of a transaction to support better decisions and eliminate surprises
Technology Business Advisory

Chargeback Service Catalog

Swingtide’s chargeback service catalog is a guide in business terms that describes the services your IT department delivers to internal customers. In effect, the chargeback service catalog is the pricing menu and statement of work for the IT department’s contract with its customers. Having the right service catalog enables demand management, operational optimization, and tax transfer pricing by setting the rules of engagement between business units and IT.

It enables customer alignment and creates a language that puts your internal customers in control of the IT support that is delivered. The approach balances administrative costs of implementation with real business benefits received.

Target Audience
  • Organizations wishing to implement a shared services structure
  • Organizations improving IT alignment with business needs
  • Organizations reducing or redirecting IT spend
  • Organizations confronting global transfer pricing tax issues
  • Organizations divesting or acquiring businesses
Key Benefits
  • Align costs with consumption, enabling better user decisions and business analysis
  • Focus resources on activities valued by businesses and eliminate wasted spend
  • Enable more standardized solutions and economies of scale
  • Establish processes and measurements to assist in prioritizing activities, benchmarking, and managing and sustaining improvement activities
  • Improve IT’s contribution to overall business profitability
Technology Business Advisory

Business Case Development

Swingtide’s business case process helps you make the right decision based on the total cost of all practical options. We start with a comprehensive base case of the current state that includes all costs impacted by the decision in question and then model the various options over years.

By documenting the detailed assumptions involved with all the costs modeled, the process allows for involvement from many stakeholder groups. This documentation of assumptions helps decisions stick.

This business case offering supports sourcing activities and other key decisions facing CIOs. After the decision is made, the model provides the basis for budgets and benefits realization.

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Target Audience
  • Organizations needing modules to support strategic decisions
  • Organizations lacking available IT finance resources
  • Organizations wanting to understand the multi-year cost of strategic decisions
  • Organizations wanting a basis to monitor benefit realization
Key Benefits
  • Better decisions
  • Documented assumptions that help make decisions stick
  • Detailed input for budgeting
Technology Business Advisory

IT Cost Clean-Up

Swingtide’s IT cost clean-up offering looks at the current spend and helps you determine what can be eliminated. Organizations change, requirements change, and it is rarely someone’s job to go back and eliminate the products and services that are no longer needed but are still being paid for.

Costs analyzed include maintenance (which may be continuing for assets no longer in service or may be contracted at a level no longer needed), circuits (that may need to be shut down or right-sized), software (to determine where products and quantities may have been purchased that are not needed), and other third party spend. We also review your third-party contracts to determine what can be eliminated and can help you modify those contracts to eliminate the costs.

When costs are identified that can be eliminated, we will also go back to old invoices to maximize the credits you may be entitled to receive.

Target Audience
  • Organizations needing to generate cost savings
  • Organizations lacking available resources for clean-up or optimization activities
  • Organizations reducing or redirecting IT spend to higher business value
  • Organizations prioritizing improvement activities to maximize value
Key Benefits
  • Reduced Costs
  • Eliminate spend where no value is provided
  • Money back that shouldn’t have been paid