Develop an IT Strategy to Support Customer Service
Your Challenge
Customer expectations regarding service are rapidly evolving. As your current IT systems may be viewed as ineffective at delivering upon these expectations, a transformation is called for.
It is unclear whether IT has the system architecture/infrastructure to support modern Customer Service channels and technologies.
The relationship between Customer Service and IT is strained. Strategic system-related decisions are being made without the inclusions of IT, and IT is only engaged post-purchase to address integration or issues as they arise.
Scope: An ABPM-centric approach is taken to model the desired future state, and retrospectively look into the current state to derive gaps and sequential requirements. The requirements are bundled into logical IT initiatives to be plotted on a roadmap and strategy document.
Challenge: The extent to which business processes can be mapped down to task-based Level 5 can be challenging depending on the maturity of the organization.
Pain/Risk: The health of the relationship between IT and Customer Service may determine project viability. Poor collaboration and execution may strain the relationship further.
Our advice
Critical Insight
Keep your systems dormant until disaster strikes. Prepare as much of your environment as possible without tapping into compute resources. Enjoy the low at-rest costs, and leverage the reliability of the cloud in your failover.
Avoid failure on the failback! Bringing up your systems in the cloud is a great temporary solution, but an expensive long-term strategy. Make sure you have a plan to get back on premises.
Leverage cloud DR as a start for cloud migration. Cloud DR provides a gateway for broader infrastructure lift and shift to cloud IaaS, but this should only be the first phase of a longer-term roadmap that ends in multi-service hybrid cloud.
Impact and Result
Calculate the cost of your DR solution with a cloud vendor. Test your systems often to build out more accurate budgets and to define failover and failback action plans to increase confidence in your capabilities.
Define “good enough” performance by consulting with the business and setting correct expectations for the recovery state.
Dig deeper into the various flavors of cloud-based DR beyond backup and restore, including pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site recovery. Each of these has unique benefits and challenges when done in the cloud.