* Research shows improvements in streamlining branch office IT decisions
It was only about 18 months ago when I was conducting another round of branch office research and asked some questions about who makes decisions at the branch. I was stunned at the number of people who embarrassingly admitted; “Well, it’s actually the secretary at most offices” or; “We have some sales guys at a few of the branch who are really tech-savvy” or; “I’m not sure.”
It was only about 18 months ago when I was conducting another round of branch office research and asked some questions about who makes decisions at the branch. I was stunned at the number of people who embarrassingly admitted; “Well, it’s actually the secretary at most offices” or; “We have some sales guys at a few of the branch who are really tech-savvy” or; “I’m not sure.”
Yikes.
In the past 12 to 18 months, we’ve seen a great deal of improvement in and attention to who actually makes these decisions. One of the biggest challenges for IT and networking staffs is to make sure there is some consistency in the branch office infrastructure. In this year’s research, we found that IT departments are focusing more heavily on driving consistency in the branch office infrastructure.
The haphazard decisions of the past resulted in a mixture of equipment and architectures in various offices that prevented any inter-office usage of telephony features, for example, and caused severe difficulty in managing the branches centrally. “A standardization process was brought before the committee run out of the CTO office,” says a senior advisor for an insurance company. “We look to ensure products will integrate, costs will be down, there will be an ROI, and we’ll make a correct decision.”
Nemertes still does not see a high-level “chief branch officer,” as we have suggested would be a wise move. But organizations at least identify an individual or group as the party responsible for architecting a branch office infrastructure.
This shift is good not only for enterprises, but also for vendors and carriers. Enterprises can leverage their buying power by developing a common architecture across all locations, and in doing so, they will bring the employees closer together through the use of collaborative technologies and consistent features. Further, they will make it easier for the IT/network staff to manage the remote locations by using common management tools across similarly architected branch offices.
For vendors and carriers, they aren’t shooting in the dark trying to find the right person or people with whom to discuss branch office products. (Certainly, some organizations liked the idea of the “mystery” surrounding who actually made that branch decision because it eliminated unwanted sales calls. But now, as they are trying to develop a clean branch office strategy, they are welcoming more visits from vendors and carriers who can provide advice on a solution.)
Only about a quarter (24%) of organizations has an individual make the branch office decision: 21% task an individual, including the CTO, VP of technology, IT director, or network architect, to make the decision on behalf of the entire organization; another 2.5% task an individual at each location to make the decision. So although there would be multiple people across the organization making decisions, each location has only one individual making decisions. These organizations have inconsistent branch office architectures.
The rest of the organizations rely on groups of people to make the branch office infrastructure decision. The largest percentage, 40%, assigns the task to the central IT department, while 20% pull in two or more groups—perhaps central IT, telecom, facilities management, and business units. Another 12.5% combine approaches, having a central group work with the workers on site. This approach generally includes either an IT person at the branch office, or the top business-unit leader at the branch site.
The combined central/branch approach makes the most sense, at least initially. The central group provides the architecture control, but it can rely upon input from the workers at each branch to determine whether it needs to modify the architecture for any reason. Once a handful of architecture options are available, companies can switch to either a central group or a by-location approach, providing they follow the standards set in place.
