Thread regarding Follett layoffs

The five pillars of IT success - don't offshore. IT is a competitive advantage. #1# Focus on the customer. To Smoley, this first pillar is all about creating a customer service orientation inside IT. “Every IT employee needs to ask, ‘Who is my customer? How am I serving them? How well do I understand what they need to do? How am I linking what I do to what they do?’” he says. #2# Deliver operational excellence: “While we need to be innovative, we must also recognize that we operate IT and that we need a stable and secure global infrastructure,” says Smoley. To this end, AstraZeneca is building out a global footprint of technology talent in Chennai, India and in Silicon Valley, where Smoley’s CTO resides. #3# Lead through technology: For years, consultants have been preaching that much of IT is a commodity and belongs in the hands of outsourcers. Rather than run IT ops, the pundits say, CIOs should focus solely on the technology that differentiates their businesses. But what do you do when technology has moved into the forefront of business change? “We had become somewhat removed from technology leadership through the use of third party consultants and advisory services who would select and run our technology,” says Smoley. “As a result, we were not as close to the technology as we needed to be. We now recognize that with the potential for technology to transform our business, we have to master the technology ourselves. We are moving from ‘give us the requirements and we’ll go to the vendors,’ to ‘let’s think about where this technology is headed and how it impacts our business.’” #4# Simplify: Smoley describes AstraZeneca’s previous IT sourcing arrangement as “A complex ecosystem of multiple third-party suppliers who were involved in everything we did. We had multiple handoffs so you had to get 10 people in a room to make a change.” Having shifted from 70 percent of IT services outsourced to 30 percent, Smoley and his IT team have “minimized the handoffs and simplified our overall processes internal to IT.” #5# Collaborate: “How do we collaborate as a large global function? How do we work more effectively between different geographies and business areas? How do we help our scientists collaborate with academics, payers and providers? How we let them share information and do video-conferencing on any device anywhere? How do we build a culture of collaboration?” For Smoley and his team, taking a “mobile first” strategy is one way to answer these critical questions. “We look at every application we develop and every package we choose from a mobile perspective,’ says Smoley. “Can you use it from the phone? If the answer is yes, then we go back to see what it looks like on a desktop.”