By Bob Violino

There’s a common challenge in today’s frenetic business environment: How does one build a technology infrastructure agile enough to handle new business and customer requirements, but lean enough to remain efficient? It’s a tall order, but as was discussed at two recent Smart Enterprise Exchange events, it’s one that IT executives are finding new ways to achieve.

Clearly, the need for IT agility is critical. “Just about everything is conspiring against the old, static model of business these days,” says Ian Finley, Research Director at AMR Research. He cites deregulation, globalization and fast-changing markets.

Embarq Corp. has another reason to be agile. The Overland Park, Kan., communications provider faces growing competition. New players have been entering its markets, even as those markets constantly evolve, due to the rapid convergence of voice and data services. As a result, the company must design and deliver new products and services to customers faster than ever, says Embarq CIO Vercie Lark.

Embarq recently launched several IT initiatives designed to enhance the company’s agility. These include adding business intelligence (BI), customer relationship management (CRM) and e-commerce capabilities. All these additions are aimed at improving customers’ experiences when they request or purchase communications services from Embarq.

One such application, called Next Generation Dispatch (NGD), uses GPS technology to both enable real-time dispatch decisions and reduce the number of miles that network service technicians travel each day while fulfilling service requests. NGD should also significantly reduce Embarq’s fuel and other transportation costs while improving customer satisfaction, since Embarq will be able to dispatch its technicians more quickly, Lark says.

Setting Standards
Internally, Embarq is enabling HR and other departments to deploy new standardized applications and infrastructure services, including grid computing; server, storage, and desktop virtualization; service-oriented architecture (SOA); and software as a service (SaaS). These should enable fast changes in capacity as customer demand for products and services evolves. Also, the SaaS model, part of a larger strategy to move away from custom development, includes using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications and SaaS as Embarq’s first choices for delivering new products.

“Adopting the strategy to use COTS and SaaS laid the foundation for Embarq to have a more agile enterprise,” Lark says. “That is enabling IT to drastically reduce the complexity of our portfolio, while speeding up our ability to bring new products and services to market.”

Pacific Coast Companies, a Rancho Cordova, Calif., provider of building products, is also creating a more agile enterprise. The company uses BI, CRM and other applications to increase agility. “We’re using technology to ensure that we’re selling the right products at the right price — and that we have the right products in inventory,” says Mike O’Dell, the company’s CIO. “That reduces working capital and improves customer service.”

Also, Pacific Coast’s IT department has made process changes to help improve overall flexibility and enhance its services. While the IT department is a centralized, shared services entity, O’Dell says it has become more actively involved with business processes at company facilities. “There is nothing like living the business to enable you to know how to leverage technology to add value,” he says.

At Forbes, the New York-based media company, a key part of building an agile enterprise involves balancing operational support against new application deployment. While the Forbes IT department supports the basic infrastructure needs of the organization, it is continually evaluating a portfolio of new applications development work, says Mykolas Rambus, the company’s CIO.