The digital backbone

It is now common place for companies to establish and embed digital technologies which drive their growth strategy. For many, this involves implementing digital technologies into specific business areas; however, few have a holistic strategy, business case or transformation roadmap covering all aspects of their company.

Partnering for success

Contents

Digital technologies to drive

growth strategy 2

Changing how businesses work 4

How IT can lead the way 5

Adopting digital technologies

to drive cost efficiencies 6

Enabling business change

through cloud and Agile DevOps 7

CGI Advisory Services 8

Digital backbone solutions – a focus on

transformation 9

Digital service centre 11

Service management and integration 12

About us 14

Digital technologies to drive growth strategy

Business re-engineeringWith the emergence and ever-evolving maturity of digital technologies such as software robots (BoTs), artificial intelligence (AI), automation and the Internet of Things (IoT), alongside an ever-increasing reliance on analytics, companies are re-thinking their priorities.

By 2022

50%of organisations will integrate complementary technologies to enable decision making and modern work management for digital business evolution

By 2024

40% of large enterprises will leverage AI capabilities in their sourcing process

By 2024 collaboration with other partners will enable organisations to deliver their business outcomes

25%faster than their competitors do

Source: Gartner ‘Top priorities for IT 2021’

2

Digital technologies are shaping, enabling and delivering a change in the way companies work

The way we used to conduct business may not be relevant in today’s consumer-driven world. The manner in which consumers expect services to be presented to them, or consumed, and the experience of using a company’s services have changed. It has extended beyond a relationship with a sales agent or account manager, becoming an omni-channel experience fronted by BoTs contacting and transacting with companies in the way that consumers wish to interact.

Intelligent Automation

Disruptive Behaviours

Connectivity

Always on and always connected is the norm. Real time communication, be it business-to-customer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B) or inter-business, is critical to a company’s success. The ability to exchange information and react instantly is critical to securing new business and retaining established relationships.

What was a manually driven process is now becoming far more zero-touch with the use of sensors detecting changes in behaviour, and the ability to interpret this to trigger automated resolution or corrective actions. Link that with analytics, proactively providing insights to determine appropriate courses of action.

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The maturity of digital technologies plays a major role in how businesses operate, as well as the ways in which workforces fulfil their roles.

BusinessThe recent COVID-19 pandemic has taught businesses that they need to be adaptable and flexible in conducting their business internally, i.e., re-engineering goods and services, and interacting with suppliers and customers.

Additionally, businesses have to be able to adapt their products and services to meet customers’ expectations and needs. They also need to meet geopolitical and regulatory changes in the way the business is delivered.

Business disrupters are also playing a major role in how businesses have to adapt. There is a constant risk of new start-ups (not hindered by a legacy business) taking the market share with innovative ideas. For many, this requires a major shift in strategy, re-engineering, repositioning and engaging with suppliers and customers to enable the business to survive and grow.

This is the influence of digital technologies. The entire customer experience has evolved with new engagement channels, omni-channel experiences, etc., enabling you to do business in the manner that the customer or supplier wants, as opposed to how it is dictated.

This has also brought about more attention to the way a company’s workforce is enabled. Recent surveys evidence that employees who feel they do not have the right tools to properly do their work as they see fit, are more likely to seek new roles in other companies. Providing employees with the right support and environment to succeed is therefore as important as the underlying business itself.

ITFor many years, IT has been considered the support to a business; however, the emergence of digital technologies has shifted this emphasis. The key to a successful IT organisation is now the ability to enable a business with technologies. This is done by leading by example, and showing how the deployment of a common, digitally-enabled platform enables IT to deliver services at a reduced cost whilst using the latest innovations.

This digitally-enabled platform, “the digital backbone”, can then be leveraged by the business to enable more holistic business decisions to be made.

The digital backbone brings benefits to both IT and the business it supports:

• Moving from a Capex to Opex financial model – the cloud economics

• Being predictive rather than reactive

• Automation rather than manual intervention

• Improving client experience – giving end users and businesses the tools they need.

Changing how businesses work

4

User devices - For many, device utilisation needs to be flexible. Productive and secure devices used for work-based activities adapt in leisure time to enable social activities, whether it’s listening to the radio or streaming content. This adaptability is key to enabling a better overall user experience.

Productivity - It is vital that the right application (productivity or business) can be accessed simply and securely. The productivity suite should enable users the ability to work from anywhere and at any time suited to their needs, without the restriction of location or access points. Productivity suites must also include unified communication and collaboration to aid a “one company and integrated team” approach.

Support employees - An omni-channel support centre is a prerequisite, enabling users the ability to seek support medias (click to fix, guided resolution, etc.) through whatever means and preference they like, i.e., voice, text, video, portal or social media. Employees want a single front end for both service incidents and requests.

Talent retention and motivation are key to a successful business. Technology plays a key role, enabling the employee to feel motivated to fulfil their role in the most productive manner.

How IT can lead the way

5

Through the adoption of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), automation and analytics, the next wave of service improvements, cost optimisation and better continuous improvement can occur. This is equally applicable to business and IT processes.

Process automation enables consistently high quality, repeatable services. It is key that the process is mature, as automating a poor and immature process will only result in poor service delivery and quality. Process automation also leads to zero touch processing, thus improving predictability and speed of processing.

Information that is continually produced from systems and applications can be harvested to provide valuable insights. By analysing unstructured data, a view can be gained on performance, and in the event of an incident or problem this data aids root cause analysis. In addition, analytics is key to providing insights on how services can be improved, through identifying common and repeatable issues which either generate a fix or enable knowledge articles through automated scripting to reduce manual intervention.

For many organisations, outsourcing was a means to reduce cost by changing the delivery model, i.e., near or off-shore delivery models. Zero touch service operations provide platforms with the opportunity to further optimise cost delivery, AI and automation, enabling the next evolution of service delivery. Additionally, threshold-based service operations move from a reactive to proactive mode; by setting defined service thresholds, breaches can trigger corrective actions which minimise unplanned outages and incidents.

Process automation

Analytics based improvement

AI driven operations

Adopting digital technologies to drive cost efficiencies

6

IT agility is key to enabling businesses to respond to the existing markets and improving business growth. Agile DevOps provides an overlay to cloud, accelerating the development and delivery of new business capabilities.Cloud adoption or “cloud first” - the focus should be placed on developing applications in native cloud environments, such a PaaS development platforms and SaaS cloud-based applications. Legacy application migration through the adoption of IaaS (infrastructure) should be accelerated, assuming that application interdependences are not compromised.

Due to the freedom to procure cloud, there are often challenges to overcome total cost of ownership (TCO) and utilisation. Governance without barriers is key to ensure that IT stays in control of cloud utilisation. Having a portal-based request front engine that controls the procurement enables IT to stay in control of business cloud usage.

This is particularly important as the cloud is an additional layer of technological complexity integrated into the overall technical operations.

Agile DevOps – taking the flexibility and adaptability of the cloud to develop business applications quickly to address business requirements. The key to success is the ability to record, prioritise and develop a backlog of application requirements that developers can take, code and release in an iterative basis.

This requires integration of a target-operating model and processes that accelerate and optimise the collection of user requirements; building and managing backlogs to enable multiple streams of development work to be handled professionally and without delivery risk.

Bi-Model IT and Pace Layers Multi-cloud Provider

Cloud CoE

Product IT

Platform Operations

Cloud Strategy Cloud Brokerage

Operating Model Hybrid Cloud

Key constructs used for Cloud

adoption

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0703

08040905

Enabling business change through cloud and Agile DevOps

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Digital technologies can help organisations to unlock their full potential – but only when done right. We understand that digital transformation isn’t simple, and CGI Advisory Services is here to help you develop the right solutions which are aligned to your business capabilities, transforming the way your organisation works.

Solution ledWe have developed solutions around key areas of IT (which can also be expanded out to other business functions) to address many of the digital transformation challenges faced by clients.

Capability drivenWe are proven practitioners that understand how to deliver digital transformation programmes. Our advisory practitioners have both the latest knowledge of technology and industry, linked with ‘real life’ experience of working within transformation programmes, from concept, to operational handover, to continuous improvement.

Providing a unique industry insightWe listen carefully to your needs and work together to deliver services that are highly relevant and responsive. Over the past five years, we have met with more than 6,000 executives like you to gather perspectives on the trends affecting your business. We analyse these findings to provide a valuable global antenna for your industry—based on facts, not hype—to benchmark best practices.

CGI Advisory Services

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Our advisory practice has developed the following to support a client’s digital transformation journey – focusing on IT and extending into the business.

• Business enabled by digital IT

• IT digital platform backbone

• Digital technology adoption through transformation

• Target operating model

• Work from anywhere

• Cloud-based productivity

• Unified communication and collaboration

• Device independence

• Omni-channel experience

• Voice, video, text and email

• Expert system - “click to fix” guided resolutions

• Seamless routing and resolution

• End-to-end life cycle of service

• ITIL-based process disciplines

• Zero touch

• Predictive monitoring and resolution

• Artificial intelligence and automation led

• Analytics for continuous improvements

• Cloud readiness

• Application and environment preparation

• Application platform/upgrade

• Migration factory

• Management platform

• SIAM integration

• End-to-end enterprise service operations and management

• Major incident management

• Service introduction, release and change coordination

• Supplier (external and internal) performance management

• Business intelligence for IT

• Smart environment management

• Structured testing and software release control

• Collaborative approach – release, enhance, update

• Integrated tool management

• Securing through assessment of risk

• Securing the IP and not just the perimeter

• Proactive security alerts and threat management

• Collaboration across borders

THE DIGITAL

‘BACKBONE’

Digital WorkplaceDigital Services Support Centre

Digital Service Operations and Management Centre

Cloud Adoption

eSIAM Digital DevOps

SECURITY THE DIGITAL ENTERPRISE

Digital backbone solutions – a focus on transformation

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Beyond ITMany of our solutions (including digital service centre, digital technical operations and digital service management) can be leveraged and configured to support your business:• Digital service centre can be configured for any

business customer service centre.

• Digital technical operations and service management can be configured to support business process re-engineering and automation.

“CGI Advisory Services have developed the digital backbone, a comprehensive PoV on how to drive digital transformation and use IT technologies in business - the digital backbone spine.”

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The digital service centre is the next generation of service desks, using an omni-channel experience of voice, text, video, portal and social media (enabled by virtual agent BoTs) to support users in the manner they wish to be served.

Artificial intelligence and automation enables many repeatable user

requests to be resolved with a high degree of quality, without a service agent. These resolution paths such as click to fix, knowledge-based process resolution and knowledge articles are constructed through analysis of calls to determine common pattern resolutions.

Digital technical operationsMany companies are reviewing their sourcing strategies by either bringing this back in-house, or challenging their sourcing partners to do more.

The evolution of technical operations is now one of zero touch resolution, without the need for intervention. The ability to capture information from clients’ tooling and act upon these messages through automation-based script execution removes the repetitive nature of first-line support. Artificial intelligence and analytics are leveraged to examine second-line support events

to understand and correlate from multiple sources the potential nature of the issue or problem, therefore triggering the most appropriate set of actions for resolution. Only when this does not lead to resolution will this trigger manual intervention.

Placing thresholds on device instances ensures that actions are taken before any device hardware and/or software issues might become business affecting, thereby enabling a proactive approach to technical operations.

Digital service managementAutomating an immature process or poorly structured organisation will not enable you to execute repeatable, quality automated service operations and management results. We have therefore developed a target operating model (that can overlay ITIL 4 processes) which is defined and configured to meet specific client

requirements. Once defined and with the right level of approval, these can be automated through ITSM tooling to enable smooth progress results with high-quality repeatability, whilst requiring very little manual intervention.

Digital service centre

11

More companies are adopting a best of breed sourcing model, which often places the responsibility on an IT organisation (be that a company’s internal IT department, or a third party supplier) to provide the role of service integrator (SIAM). This is further complicated when managing an ecosystem of cloud providers.

SIAM has been required for some time, but cloud has extended its responsibility, hence our term eSIAM. We have developed solution blueprints that can be applied to clients’ tooling, or we can propose a best of breed approach and integrate vendors’ information to provide a true end-to-end view that enables:

Service Operability

Service Introduction

Sourcing Partner

Assurance

Analytics

End-to-end command bridge view of overall service performance that enables the management of sourcing partners and in-house service delivery

Manage change, new service introduction and release

Ensure those responsible for delivering the service are doing so within agreed specifications and service level agreements (SLAs)

Through the information being collected, provide the analytics engine to support IT and business decisions

Service management and integration

12

Cloud management platformAs an extension or standalone capability, enabling cloud adoption and governance without barriers. Many organisations have already procured and utilised the cloud without IT knowledge; this is often due to IT being seen as unresponsive or the process is believed to inhibit agility.

Therefore, using either client existing or best of breed tooling, we can provide governance around cloud adoption using a service catalogue linked to automated provisioning and the management of environments.

The resultant management platform can provide valuable data on cloud usage to determine and improve cloud utilisation and optimise costs.

DevOpsCloud has and will continue to accelerate how business applications are developed and deployed.

We have defined a target operating model and processes that accelerate and optimise the collection of user requirements, building and managing backlogs to enable multiple streams of development work to be handled professionally and without delivery risk.

Using client or best of breed tooling, we provide clients with that overarching management capability of requirement prioritisation, resource allocation, development planning and tracking through to release.

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About us

Experienced business leadersAt CGI, we are insights-driven and outcomes-based to help you accelerate returns on your IT and business investments.

Across 10 industries in 400+ locations worldwide, our 78,000 consultants and professionals provide comprehensive and scalable services to help you achieve meaningful and sustainable outcomes.

Wherever we operate around the world, we align through common policies, principles, processes and frameworks to provide global consistency at scale.

As a company with a unique ownership culture, we call our employees members because they participate as owners of their company, focused on continuous improvement. You have recognised our members’ commitment by providing an overall client satisfaction score of 9.2 out of 10.

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A unique ownership cultureEnabling agility and resilience through comprehensive services

Client proximityWe build lasting, trusted relationships by following our clients, embedding operations within your metro markets, while working together to serve as a caring neighbour deeply rooted in our local communities. Our local experts draw on a diverse global network to bring the right talent, innovation and scale to every engagement. Using our collaborative style and consultative approach, we sit on the same side of the table with you to envision and plan new possibilities.

Industry expertiseIn addition to mastering technology, our experts have a deep understanding of the industries we serve. They apply their knowledge of domains, mission-critical systems and processes to help you navigate complex challenges with practical advice and solutions. We have blueprints that map your industry operating architectures to our offering roadmap to ensure we customise and adapt proven solutions for your unique needs. Additionally, as lines between industries continue to blur, we bring lessons learned and emerging innovation from across industries.

We combine our local proximity model, supported by global resources, with industry expertise and a full range of services to help you become a more agile business.

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About CGIInsights you can act on

Founded in 1976, CGI is among the largest IT and business consulting services firms in the world.

We are insights-driven and outcomes-based to help accelerate returns on your investments. Across hundreds of locations worldwide, we provide comprehensive, scalable and sustainable IT and business consulting services that are informed globally and delivered locally.

Learn more at cgi.com/uk

For More information email us at enquiry.uk@cgi.com

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