October 2014

Foreword 1Foreword

2From the Gartner Files: Outsourcing Trends 2013: How to Integrate and Manage Multiple IT Service Providers

6 Empowering SIAM to Fulfil its Promise- Multi-sourcing and Expectations

from SIAM- Useful Features to Enable

Successful SIAM- Enhanced Decision-making

augmented with the use of Analytics

- How is MasterCraft Tool Suite Different?

- Summary

17 About Tata Consultancy Services

Featuring research from

Empowering SIAM to Fulfil its Promise

Enterprises today are extending their business operation across industries and geographies, not least due to the digital economy that has widened their market horizon. Likewise, an emerging paradigm of “everything as a service” is commoditizing many industry segments and offering excellent opportunities for enterprises to leverage outsourcing, partnership and collaboration, and bring in new business models. This allows enterprises to be more nimble, flexible and extensible. For this, enterprises need to manage complex business relationship with their partners and vendors using clear performance measures and service level expectations, to improve business IT alignment.

It is this challenge of managing the complexity of a multi-service, multi-vendor eco-system that fuels the need for a Service Integration and Management (SIAM) as a discipline. The intent is to ensure that the enterprise IT and the entire partner & vendor eco-system exist only to ensure end service delivery meets the dynamic business needs in an agile and flexible manner.

Borrowing a leaf from Kano’s work, SIAM may initially focus on delivering the basic end service, the absence of which would lead to customer dissatisfaction. Once this is in place, SIAM needs to move up the value chain to enhance service delivery performance, which has a proportional impact on end customer satisfaction. Finally as services mature, SIAM needs to have primary focus on the excitement perspective e.g. to help drive transformational initiatives across the enterprise.

The SIAM function, can effectively respond to such business demands, only when it is empowered with the right set of tools.

In this article, after a pre-cursor from Gartner, we present how organizations adopting SIAM can achieve the intended benefits from their outsourcing and partnering initiatives, through an integrated tools approach, and also demonstrate how TCS MasterCraft Suite of Products address the exacting tooling demands for an effective SIAM. The emphasis is on multiple aspects of service delivery in a typical business-IT ecosystem such as insight into quality of service, vendor performance measurement, contractual governance, faster root-cause analysis, and decision-making facilitated by use of analytics.

Wish you happy reading!

Vijayalakshmi Gopal Head, MasterCraft & TCS Tools Group Tata Consultancy Service

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Empowering SIAM to Fulfil its Promise is published by TATA Consultancy Services. Editorial content supplied by TATA Consultancy Services is independent of Gartner analysis. All Gartner research is used with Gartner’s permission, and was originally published as part of Gartner’s syndicated research service available to all entitled Gartner clients. © 2014 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. The use of Gartner research in this publication does not indicate Gartner’s endorsement of TATA Consultancy Services products and/or strategies. Reproduction or distribution of this publication in any form without Gartner’s prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Although Gartner research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner is a public company, and its shareholders may include firms and funds that have financial interests in entities covered in Gartner research. Gartner’s Board of Directors may include senior managers of these firms or funds. Gartner research is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from these firms, funds or their managers. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see “Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity” on its website, http://www.gartner.com/technology/about/ombudsman/omb_guide2.jsp.

Outsourcing Trends 2013: How to Integrate and Manage Multiple IT Service Providers

This research is part of “Gartner on Outsourcing, 2013 series.” Sourcing managers are using greater numbers of external providers, but fail to integrate and manage them effectively. Managers must define collaboration expectations, apply structured governance and align performance metrics.

Impacts

• Cooperation between IT vendors does not happen automatically without the right framework, processes and governance put in place by the client.

• Enterprises lack end-to-end visibility when vendor relationships are constructed, managed and reported in silos.

• Without strong vendor management to keep control over the enterprise vendor ecosystem, enterprises are more likely to experience business disruption when vendors fail to work together cooperatively to resolve issues that may cross individual contract lines.

Recommendations

• Plan how multiple vendors will work together in your enterprise and define the governance framework and collaboration expectations in your RFPs and contracts.

• Develop vendor performance metrics and incentives that are suitable for driving more collaborative behavior and performance in your vendor contract terms and conditions.

• Ensure that disciplined and skilled vendor management exists in your enterprise, or gain these skills before sourcing externally. You need vendor management oversight, especially when using a multiple-vendor delivery approach.

Analysis

IT organizations have discovered that different vendors have different strengths and this has led to extensive adoption of the multiple vendor delivery model. Vendors are also marketing and branding their specific strengths more heavily. While this model harnesses the power of each vendor’s core strengths, creates competition and mitigates risk, it also serves to increase complexity for enterprise delivery.

In many client environments where multiple vendors are used, each vendor delivers its discrete contracted area with little or no expectation of interaction with other providers delivering in the same client ecosystem. The lack of defined processes, inconsistent oversight and understanding of interoperability between vendors, can leave organizations subject to increased business disruption.

Significant reliance on IT vendors also exacerbates this issue. Gartner’s IT and Business Process Sourcing Survey conducted in June 2012, concluded that 41% of companies outsource to fewer than five vendors, but the average stands at 31. Western Europe and North America drive this high proportion and Latin America reports using 51 vendors on average.1

Key Challenges in 2012Organizations eager to meet IT delivery obligations are quick to sign service delivery contracts with discrete vendors, especially when trying to solve the crisis of the day. These tactically motivated one-off deals may solve the immediate challenge, but result in a very complex ecosystem with vendors operating in silos, especially when there is integration or handoffs required between vendors delivering across the IT ecosystem.

Additionally, many organizations do not fully understand the value of disciplined vendor management (VM) and often do not think about VM until after they sign a contract.2 Excellent VM is required, especially when an organization relies heavily on IT vendors and creates complex multivendor models.

Outlook for 2013The numbers of vendors used to support IT and business needs is growing at a rapid pace. The average number of vendors per client has increased dramatically through the three generations of traditional IT outsourcing. Most clients now have three to five major service providers, along with another five to ten suppliers they work with on a regular basis. This doesn’t take into account the suppliers used to supplement delivery, such as contracted or staff augmentation labor.

Gartner expects this number to increase dramatically, especially as clients start to contract with more cloud service providers.3 Additional cloud research by Gartner shows that clients are also more willing to change providers for relatively small differences in public cloud space, especially infrastructure as a service.4 This will add further complications to multiple vendor management.

The following impacts and recommendations address how organizations can manage multiple vendors more effectively.

From the Gartner Files:

3

3

Gen-1single/ prime

Gen-2selective best-of-breed

Gen-3 disciplined multi-sourcing

Next-generationcloud sourcing

1 to

23.

710

+15

to 2

0+

2000 2005 2010 2015

Source: Gartner (February 2013)

FIGURE 1 Use of Multiple Service Vendors Is the “Norm” and Increasing

Impacts and Recommendations

Cooperation between IT vendors does not happen automatically without the right framework, processes and governance put in place by the clientCooperation between IT vendors will not happen automatically and a lack of cooperation comes at a cost. In a multi-vendor environment, ensuring end-to-end service delivery is often the customer’s responsibility and failure to address this can lower the value of the services delivered and create operational and business challenges and disruptions.

As a part of a multi-vendor strategy, organizations must solve the key question of cooperation between their vendors, both internal and external. The solution lies in service management governance mechanisms, standards, practices between service providers and those between service providers and the enterprise.

Sourcing agreements in a multi-vendor environment should contain the requirement to adopt a common service delivery language, for example, that of the ITIL. Agreements should also contain standards and measurable obligations for providers to cooperate in the interests of the enterprise. These agreements comprise what Gartner calls Operational Level Agreements (OLAs), which typically provide a set of operating procedures and collaboration principles, a statement of common principles agreed to by all parties, an outline for addressing cross-boundary issues and related problem and change management processes, and an outline of issue and dispute resolution procedures and escalation processes.5

It is also critical that RFPs state the intent for cooperation across vendors, governance and processes to ensure interoperability and how cross-vendor performance will be measured. Vendors must understand the “rules of the road” when they are bidding on work where cooperation between suppliers is expected.

Recommendations:

• Plan how multiple vendors will work together in your enterprise and define the framework and processes in your RFPs.

• Consider using a service integrator to manage the end-to-end delivery.

• Develop vendor performance metrics and incentives suitable for driving more collaborative behavior and performance in vendor contract terms and conditions, such as OLAs.

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Source: Gartner (February 2013)

FIGURE 1 Impacts and Recommendations for Sourcing Managers

Impacts Top Recommendations

Enterprises lack end-to-end visibility when vendors' contracts are constructed, managed and reported in silos.

• Utilize the same structure for SLAs in all vendor contracts.

• Ensure SLAs are reported in the same time frame across all vendor contracts.

• Contractually obligate vendors to upload SLA metrics.

• Ensure your internal team also has service level measures.

Cooperation between IT vendors does not happen automatically.

• Develop vendor performance metrics and incentives suitable for collaborative terms and conditions in contracts.

• Consider a service integrator to manage end-to-end delivery.

• Plan how multiple vendors will work together in your enterprise.

Strong vendor management is needed to manage the enterprise vendor ecosystem.

• Ensure that disciplined and skilled vendor management exists in your enterprise.

• Ensure vendor managers have process and governance linkages for separate deals.

Enterprises lack end-to-end visibility when vendor relationships are constructed, managed and reported in silosSLAs are the way for clients to contractually measure and apply delivery standards to agreements. For every outsourcing contract, clients should use the same process when constructing SLAs, which consists of defining, measuring, examining, correcting and guiding the process.6 Without consistent use of the same development process setting a standard format across all vendor contracts, clients will be unable to construct end-to-end service levels without significant effort and frustration. This does not mean that the SLAs are the same across all contracts, but that the same process is used when creating the performance metrics.

SLA reporting should also occur in the same time frame for every vendor agreement, so clients can ensure that the same time period is being reported on for feeding into end-to-end metrics. For example, this could consist of stating in the outsourcing contract that SLA reports must be delivered no later than the end of the first week of the month for the proceeding month’s metrics. This method ensures that all providers submit the same SLA reporting period.

Additionally, providers must be contractually obligated to upload their metrics into an enterprise key performance indicator (KPI) dashboard. Requirements for how submissions can and should be made and the format for uploads need to be clear in RFPs. Establish this delivery early on in the RFP and ensure that it is in your final negotiated contract.

Recommendations:

• Use the same structure for SLAs in all vendor contracts.

• Ensure SLAs are reported in the same time frame across all vendor contracts.

• Contractually obligate vendors to upload SLA metrics to an enterprise KPI dashboard.

• For a seamless ecosystem and end-to-end visibility, ensure your internal team also has service level measures for mandatory reporting.

Without strong vendor management to keep control over the enterprise vendor ecosystem, enterprises are more likely to experience business disruption when vendors fail to work together cooperatively to resolve issues that may cross individual contract linesClient vendor management is important for every vendor, let alone a complex ecosystem of vendors with critical interdependencies and handoffs for issues that arise during delivery. However, many organizations underestimate and under invest in the management of their vendors.

In many cases, vendor management responsibilities are spread throughout the organization, if they are performed at all. As organizations rely more heavily on IT vendors and create more complex multivendor models, they must realize the importance of disciplined vendor management. This approach goes beyond just managing the contract terms and conditions and extends into the areas of collaboration, innovation and vendor performance.7

Disciplined vendor management is also required because organizations must contemplate how vendors will work together before they issue RFPs and sign one-off outsourcing contracts. This activity is ideally suited to vendor or sourcing management within an organization, especially if a formalized group, such as a vendor management office has been created.

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Vendor management must be considered before decisions to outsource are made so that organizations have the right discipline and skills in place to manage deals effectively and to ensure that maximum value is derived from outsourcing relationships. Clients also need to be certain that vendor management objectives and strategies are consistent with those of the business.

Separate vendor managers are often assigned for each outsourcing deal, especially if they are of significant size and criticality. If this is the case, then there must be procedural and governance linkages between these vendor managers for the issues arising out of multiple vendor delivery between the contracts to be addressed.

Recommendations:

• Ensure that disciplined and skilled vendor management exists in your enterprise, or gain these skills before sourcing externally.

• Ensure vendor managers for separate deals have process and governance linkages.

Evidence1Gartner’s IT and Business Process Sourcing Survey, June 2012.

2“Introducing Gartner’s Vendor Management Framework: Designed to Improve Control, Reduce Risk and Drive More Value From Your Vendors”

3Gartner Survey summary: Since 2005, the average number of external IT outsourcing service providers used by enterprises has grown fr om approximately 3.7 to more than 10 globally. In conjunction with the growth of emerging cloud service delivery models, we can expect clients to be faced with an increasing number of service providers to manage.

See the following research for further information:

• “User Survey Report: Strategies for IT Outsourcing, Worldwide, 2005”

• “User Survey Analysis: Economic Pressures Drive Cost-Oriented Outsourcing, Worldwide, 2008-2009”

• “Survey Analysis: Outsourcing and IT Services Priorities, Europe, 2010”

• “Survey Analysis: End-User Trends in Infrastructure Utility Services and Infrastructure as a Service”

• “Understand the Three Generations of Outsourcing to Improve Deal Outcomes”

4“User Survey Analysis: How Public Cloud Strategies Impact Established IT Services Spending”

5“Determining the Difference Between SLAs and OLAs”

6“How to Develop and Use Service Levels for Successful Outsourcing Deals”

7“Introducing Gartner’s Vendor Management Framework: Designed to Improve Control, Reduce Risk and Drive More Value From Your Vendors”

8The Gartner Client Inquiry Database shows that from January 2011 to December 2012, calls relating to multiple vendors were largely associated with IT services sourcing (62.5%) and business process services (25%). Most calls on this subject were from U.S. clients at 71.43%. Manufacturing vertical clients made the highest number of inquiries at 37.5%, followed by insurance, federal government and healthcare.

Source: Gartner Research, G00239100, Helen Huntley, 15 February 2013

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Empowering SIAM to Fulfil its Promise

Multi-sourcing and Expectations from SIAM

Organizations across the globe in their pursuit of agile and cost-effective end-service delivery are increasingly leveraging multi sourcing. However, in this endeavor, these organizations are realizing that managing such an environment has its own set of challenges. Key among these challenges is the difficulty in managing the increased level of complexity inherent in multi-sourcing. Typical organizations lack the skills, processes and tools required to leverage the benefits multi-sourcing and are handicapped by inadequate control of the vendor ecosystem. “Without strong vendor management to keep control over the enterprise vendor ecosystem, enterprises are

more likely to experience business disruption when vendors fail to work together cooperatively to resolve issues that may cross individual contract lines.”1. All these prevent organizations from harnessing the full benefits from their multi-sourcing initiative.

To address this challenge, organizations are increasingly adopting a new function, called Service Integration and Management (SIAM). The function forges a balance between conflicting demands from management and end users. This is complemented with focused collaboration between vendors, thus converting a team of star players into a star team.

FIGURE 1SIAM – A Fine Act of Balancing Conflicting Demands

Source: TCS

Management Complexity

Service Demand

Technology

Scalability

Agility

End User Experience

Compliance

Supplier Governance

Growth

Cost

People Process Technology

CIO Unified

Governance Customer Satisfaction

SIAM

Management Focus

Operation Focus

Consistent Reporting

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SIAM is the

co-ordination of people, processes, tools and technology, data and governance

across multiple suppliers, to ensure effective and efficient operations

of the end-to-end service delivery to the business end-user

It should be noted, that it is critical to select and establish the right toolset to implement SIAM in true spirit, to prevent creating yet another costly management layer. Ideally, SIAM should be a thin and agile layer in the BAU mode enabled by the right toolset to fulfil the needs of the end services.

Based on TCS’ experience with global customers, and analysis of SIAM delivery experience, TCS believes that there are some specific needs and expectations from the SIAM function. Organizations deploying multi-sourcing often look for answers to the following tricky questions:

• How to achieve insight into the quality of services rendered by vendors?

• How to compare vendor performance ‘on the fly’ on parameters important to business?

• How to overcome finger pointing among vendors, over fault resolution, and rather determine the fault root cause quickly?

• How to assure that vendors meet regulatory and security requirements, for e.g. assuring confidentiality of customer data?

• How to leverage vendor performance data to further tighten vendor SLAs, and drive service quality improvement? How to be sure when to pull up a vendor, and more importantly, when to initiate off-boarding a consistently underperforming one?

• How to establish a reliable system for measuring key IT parameters like application landscape health, incident management effectiveness, risk compliance, etc.?

• How to measure delivered end-service quality against past performance, expected targets, and to-be stretch targets – and establish the value from each outsourced service?

• How to respond to user demands and markets trends, while ensuring sustained delivery of committed end services?

The SIAM function is expected to collate reports from each vendor and provide a consolidated view of end to end service delivery to the IT governance forums. Much effort is spent into ensuring timeliness of such reports and collating the data to create an the end to end picture manually, while less focus goes into analysis of the data and gathering insightful information to facilitate decision making around service delivery. Based on our extensive experience of key asks from customers around SIAM, TCS has identified a series of key features that a SIAM tool should have. TCS MasterCraft tool suite is a highly capable set of tools which can help organizations establish successful SIAM by fulfilling the requirements outlined in the following sections.

Useful Features to Enable Successful SIAMa. Insight into Quality of Service

While Quality of Service can be defined in several ways, the simplest is ‘the degree to which a provided activity promotes end customer satisfaction’. In a multi-vendor environment, the quality of service rendered to end users is related to the tower services in a complex manner. This is even more so, when tower vendors deliver services from offshore and/or the cloud. Nevertheless, each key tower service needs to be monitored by the SIAM to ensure the cumulative effect is the delivery of the desired end service quality.

A typical multi-vendor environment may have dozens of individual services, characterized by scores of indicators. It is therefore imperative that organizations select the optimal indicators to be monitored by each relevant function, Retained IT, SIAM and the tower vendors, so that overall, the end service governance is achieved with rigour and ease.

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FIGURE 2SIAM – Vendor Service Quality Dashboard

Source: TCS

TCS’ MasterCraft Service Governance Manager tool (SGM), allows the SIAM function driven by business objectives and required end services, to configure an integrated view of services delivered across multiple service providers, using standard out-of the box and custom views. Figure 2 shows a sample dashboard with monthly SLA performance across vendors serving multiple business units.

The dashboard, depicted in Figure 2, can be leveraged effectively by SIAM to track vendor performance, and serve as a single source-of-truth, and help drive the discussion in the cross-vendor forums.

b. Assessing Vendors Performance

In a typical multi-vendor environment, vendors may use disparate data capture and reporting approaches, in terms of formats, frequencies, semantics of data, as well as reporting windows. Without effective alignment and integration of this information, the SIAM function will likely need to spend considerable effort to arrive at an integrated view, leaving little or no time for critical analysis and inference, before such reports are made available to the intended business users.

The MasterCraft tool suite provides a single source-of-truth to help assess vendor performance on important business indicators. Shown in Figure 3 depicts a sample Incident Management dashboard providing a comparative view across vendors.

Risk and reward mechanism is often used as a technique to manage vendor performance. To implement this model successfully, an end-to-end picture comparing vendor performance on the basis of such rewards and penalties over a period of time is important. The retained IT and SIAM function would benefit from such a consolidated view to analyze how vendors have performed based on defined commercial / contractual parameters.

MasterCraft tool suite captures and reports vendor performance on the basis of credits and bonuses assigned to them. A sample view from MasterCraft suite is shown in Figure 4, indicating consistent achievement of performance credits by Vendor 1.

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FIGURE 3Vendor Performance Dashboard

Source: TCS

FIGURE 4Comparing Vendor Credits

Source: TCS

c. Contractual Governance and Measuring Value from Managed Services:

Managing multiple contracts in a multi-vendor environment is a strategic need, but could be a daunting task. This is often performed in siloed manner or is a neglected area in many organizations.

Contractual Governance must ensure timely renewals of contracts as well as monitor and assess vendor performance regularly based on contractual terms and agreed SLAs. Contract Management should also include review and revision of existing contracts based on the committed end user SLAs and the underpinning set of SLAs/OLAs across multiple vendors. This may also include customers, depending on the need, deciding to novate/transfer certain vendor contracts to the SIAM provider.

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Internal housekeeping around contract related artifacts is the first step towards achieving contractual governance. The right people must have access to the contractual artifacts and regularly review the same to achieve the above requirements.

MasterCraft tool suite enables SIAM to govern contracts in a practical manner. It provides version controlled and role-based access to contracts documents and associated artifacts. This enables renewal of vendor contracts, better management of change orders, service agreements and management of assets under the contract, in a convenient manner. This tool provides the ability to track vendors on their commitments, as well as the level of deviations (positive or negative). This equips the SIAM/ retained IT function with valuable information for review by the relevant governance forums. With this single source of truth, clients may assess if the vendor performance is at par with contractual commitment, as well as help identify fine or major changes that may be considered for the forthcoming contract renewals.

Figure 5, shows a single view of all vendor contracts and the associated details which helps to achieve the first step of basic housekeeping of contract related artifacts. It also highlights by colour code, contracts due to expire and those already expired that need attention.

Figure 6 shows how contractual compliance tracking is done and deviations are reported, in this case translating into a service credit amount.

d. Faster Root Cause Analysis

In a multi-vendor environment, it is all the more complex to investigate the root cause of a problem or the immediate cause of an incident due to less transparency and lack of accountability. Hence investigating incidents within the SLA timeframe or conducting problem management and drilling down to the root cause of the problem post providing a temporary work around, is often a cumbersome and time consuming exercise. In such a scenario, we recommend SIAM to drive a diagnostic behavior, driving the focus away from “who-is-at-fault”

FIGURE 5Contract Management Repository

Source: TCS

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FIGURE 6Tracking Contractual Compliance and Deviations

Source: TCS

to “discover-and-fix-the-gap-in-service-delivery”, so that the disruptive gap may be identified and corrective / recovery actions are initiated in a timebound manner.

Due to large amount of data involved, it is evident that without an appropriate tool, the above is very difficult to achieve. Today organizations rely on multiple event management tools, information available from the CMDB and subjective manual co-relation to identify the real root cause.

This is far more effectively achieved by TCS MasterCraft tool suite. This brings in an end-to-end monitoring framework that seamlessly monitors multi-tier complex application systems. It measures key performance metrics in real time, provides error and application logs and displays error conditions in real time as alert dashboards, thus helping in proactive problem diagnosis and resolution. Hence, whether an application downtime occurred due to a server error, or a network issue or due to the application itself, the cause can be detected early, so that the relevant vendors can expedite the required fix in their respective area.

Figure 7 illustrates the availability status of different layers within a complex application system. Figure 8 provides a further drill down on application availability status.

e. Periodic Health-check Across Application Landscape

Several organizations in their 2nd or 3rd generation outsourcing programs, rely on multiple vendors to manage their application landscape based on vendor capabilities - their niche competencies, ability to manage large application portfolios and the cost advantage associated with their global delivery models. Unfortunately, in such a scenario, an enterprise wide view of application health is not available with any single party. Hence key decisions such as application retirement, rationalization andtechnology upgrades are not easy to take, and tend to be left to the discretion of individual vendors.

Access to an independent and comprehensive application health check report across the enterprrise provides valuable and neccessary insight to SIAM and the retained IT function.

The MasterCraft tool suite helps conduct a health check for applications and services in terms of business, technology, compliance and risk. Such analysis provides valuable insight on issues and risks that could potentially hurt the organization

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FIGURE 7Identifying Availability at Different Layers of a Complex Application System

Source: TCS

FIGURE 8Identifying Availability at Different Layers of a Complex Application System

Source: TCS

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in the short, medium or long term. For example, the Technology Obsolescence Manager module of this tool sends email notifications to the respective application owners, and business owners about the impending obsolescence. Such automated actions prevent security issues in the application portfolio. A variety of reports and executive dashboards can help the SIAM provider to advise and assist the CIO, architects and other stakeholders to quickly digest the key statistics, as well as drill down into more information if desired and drive the necessary action.

Figure 9 provides a screenshot that shows a few elements of application portfolio analysis to help make key decisions such as whether to retain applications, retire them or to re-engineer them.

Figure 10 depicts how performance of an application can be determined based on several parameters which are configurable based on the organization’s needs.

f. Ensuring Data Confidentiality across Vendor Eco-system

According to Gartner’s top predictions for 2012 and beyond, “by 2015, 35 percent of IT expenditure for most enterprises will be managed outside the IT department’s budget”2 This means an increasing number of IT solutions will be procured directly by the business units. In such a scenario, as the overall security framework provided by enterprise IT is bypassed, ensuring security and confidentiality of data is an even greater challenge.

Without a common data confidentiality framework, business units and vendors are likely to differ in their approaches, leaving vulnerable and costly gaps. Defining and implementing an enterprise-wide policy for masking confidential data is an effective way to manage this.

The MasterCraft suite provides dynamic data masking that ensures users have access to data on a ‘need-to-know’ basis, driven by their defined roles. This comprehensive solution includes detection,

FIGURE 9Application Portfolio Analysis

Source: TCS

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FIGURE 10Application performance based on defined parameters

Source: TCS

protection and monitoring of data confidentiality breaches. The solution is unique as it combines data masking, identity & access management and data leakage prevention technologies in dynamic business environments.

Apart from addressing the issues around shadow IT, MasterCraft’s dynamic data masking feature can be leveraged for several other data sharing scenarios such as business process outsourcing, as well as outsourced production support, software testing, and user training. Figure 11 depicts how customer confidential data can be masked using data masking policies.

g. Managing Vendor Transition with Minimum Disruption

Transition from one vendor to another is often a dreaded exercise for most organization. This can come in the way of either choosing the best of breed vendors or going for a vendor consolidation exercise since this involves transition from one vendor to another. Several critical success factors like effective knowledge transfer (tacit as well as documented knowledge), transfer of access control, appropriate training, may get missed out if transition is not managed like a project, resulting in disruption of services during and after the transition.

Digitizing and automating the entire transition enables effective utilization of resources and governance of projects. The TCS MasterCraft suite of tools provide a complete digitization of the transition process through due diligence, quick and easy search,

configurable templates, tracking and monitoring, and report generation features, enabling effective governance of a project during transition. Some of the specific benefits of this tool are:

• Provides reporting, analytics and metrics to capture the due diligence attributes

• Helps eliminate the risks identified during the transition solutioning phase

• Aids in sharing and explaining of the due diligence insights to retained IT team and SIAM overseeing the transition

• Provides real time updates on transition status

• Allows drill down of the transition plan to monitor & track progress at a granular level

• Manages risks, assumptions and issues online and real time

• Drives decision making through real-time analytics

• Optimizes SME utilization by maintaining SME availability and schedule.

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FIGURE 11Masking Customer Confidential Data

Source: TCS

Overall, the tool helps to improve productivity and prevents value leakage by providing a one stop shop for transition planning, tracking and reporting from one vendor to another.

Enhanced Decision-making augmented with the use of Analytics

Organizations often take inordinate time and effort to consolidate vendor reports to develop an end-to-end service view, leaving little time and energy for analysis, and inference to identify actions for service improvement and betterment of governance. Various MasterCraft tools can be used in tandem to make inferences from the enormous data gathered and reported by individual vendors. In fact, this tool suite helps SIAM to determine how vendors:

• Perform in their individual space in terms of contractual commitments

• Perform against other vendors providing similar services

• Comply against regulations and enterprise-wide policies

• Contribute to maintain the end-service, not only to their individual area of service

The above information enables SIAM to assist Retained IT reach well-informed decisions in a timely manner. These may include decisions for tightening SLAs, for changes to contractual terms, for onboarding of new vendors, as also for extreme ones like off-boarding consistently under-performing vendors.

Extensive Analytics Driven Insights for the Multi-Vendor Eco-System

The analytics engine of MasterCraft suite is highly useful to gain insights from the wealth of data generated on an operational basis in any multi-vendor client eco-system. Using the analytics feature, the SIAM function can perform regular customized assessments and achieve comprehensive impact analysis on various IT dimensions. These may include multi-stage and multi-dimensional analysis pyramid structure, using industry standard and TCS IP-based models. SIAM can analyze data on multiple dimensions of the eco-system for effective governance, by flexibly:

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• Sourcing and harvesting data from multiple repositories and systems for analysis,

• Translating the values, validating the range of inputs values,

• Leveraging techniques like weighted average score model, single /two criteria model, quadrant analysis, and 3 D analysis. Additionally, these techniques may be combined to build required complex models.

To facilitate the above, MasterCraft tool suite has pre-defined analysis capabilities for aspects such as IT Portfolio health analysis, risk analysis, capacity analysis, and operational efficiency analysis. The SIAM function may thus build portfolio KPIs, dashboards and other indicators (such as for risk, service quality, strategic actions, and compliance) to help monitor and drive effective Service delivery through service integration across multiple vendors.

How is MasterCraft Tool Suite Different?

TCS MasterCraft tool suite is built on more than four decades of TCS’ Application Development & Management and service delivery experience for demanding global clients. Following are the key differentiators of this tool:

• The tool set is highly configurable and can be customized to include client specific parameters to be measured

• MasterCraft tool suite can be used to complement an existing toolset, thus reducing overall costs. Also, the tool can be integrated with multiple other tools used by the client as well as tower vendors

• The suite includes useful features like automatic notifications, alerts and reports based on a required schedule

• The toolset is highly modular and loosely coupled, enabling clients choose the right mix of tools based on the specific SIAM operating model being deployed

• With a variety of modules, MasterCraft suite can address the evolving needs of SIAM, starting with entry level SIAM thru intermediate SIAM and in time, advanced SIAM.

Summary

MasterCraft suite of products offers a compelling set of functionality to achieve a successful SIAM, irrespective of it being implemented entirely in-house, outsourced to an external provider, or set up in a hybrid manner. With its modular structure, MasterCraft suite can address the evolving SIAM needs for a client, starting with ensuring basic end service, progressing to enhance service delivery performance, and maturing further to help clients drive transformational initiatives across the enterprise. With its SLA-based support, standard pricing, flexible and low total cost of ownership, TCS MasterCraft tool suite is well positioned to serve the demanding needs of SIAM.

Source: Tata Consultancy Services

1Gartner Inc., Outsourcing Trends 2013 : How to Integrate and Manage Multiple IT Service Providers , G00239100, 15 February 2013 2Gartner Press Release, Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2012 and Beyond , 1 December 2011 (http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/1862714)

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Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that delivers real results to global business, ensuring a level of certainty no other firm can match. TCS offers a consulting-led, integrated portfolio of IT, BPS, infrastructure, engineering and assurance services. This is delivered through its unique Global Network Delivery Model™, recognized as the benchmark of excellence in software development. A part of the Tata group, India’s largest industrial conglomerate, TCS has over 300,000 of the world’s best-trained consultants in 46 countries. The company generated consolidated revenues of US $13.4 billion for year ended March 31, 2014 and is listed on the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange in India. For more information, visit us at www.tcs.com.

TCS MasterCraft is a software automation toolset that enables IT organizations to optimize their services by – automating tasks and digitizing decision support, thereby reducing manual efforts, saving costs and enhancing productivity in overall IT solutions and services delivery.

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TCS’ Global Consulting Practice (GCP) is a key component in how TCS delivers additional value to clients. Using our collective industry insight, technology expertise, and consulting know-how, we partner with enterprises worldwide to deliver integrated end-to-end IT enabled business transformation services.

By tapping our worldwide pool of resources - onsite, offshore and near-shore, our high caliber consultants leverage solution accelerators and practice capabilities, balanced with our knowledge of local market demands, to enable enterprises to effectively meet their business goals.

GCP spearheads TCS’ consulting capacity with consultants located in North America, UK, Europe, Asia Pacific, India, Ibero-America and Australia.

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