Empower & Align Business Objectives – Harmonise teams with the high pace of change
Increase your overall performance across the entire organisation.
The problem is rarely a lack of reporting systems data on either side of the fence. Rather it’s a case that the data hasn’t automatically been filtered through a service/product standards lens that understands service and compliance obligation. The cause of this communication friction is most often a lack of clarity of who is responsible to do what and what were the baselines that need to be maintained. You might call this a lack of clear day to day operational vision between what the customer thought they purchased and what the supplier thought they sold.
This problem is becoming more pronounced as customers source digital services from increasingly diverse suppliers. There is now a web of technical service dependencies on a scale never seen before in history.
Ikara allows the development of trust between team members (internally and externally) because we can categorise what the current terms of service expectations are. Ikara integrates automatically with your current operational monitoring toolsets to provide insights into the service obligations between provide both customer and partner. Instant transparency and oversight of performance and governance standards being delivered right now, across your entire digital ecology worldwide.
Aligning events to service goals and obligations allows your organisation to eliminate organisational silos and unify service teams that may be in other companies, counties or operating under differing legislative obligations.
Use Case: Business Objectives
A global logistics organisation, outsources the management of a series of critical remote access and security appliances, to a global systems integrator with billions of dollars of services revenue per annum.
The head of procurement in the global logistics organisation, realizes that there are escalating penalties being imposed for security and privacy breaches. The risk assessment of the outsourcing of the remote access/security technologies leaves the customer exposed to vicarious risks, if the global systems integrator were to have a failure of security process. Business risk assessments also found that it was imprudent for the service provider to be the exclusive source of reporting on compliance without an independent method of assessing service delivery from the provider, who had historically reported on themselves.
Accordingly, the head of procurement required that as part of the conditions of supply, the service provider must provide a regular feed of attestation data showing compliance with the security policies of the customer they are servicing.
In this use case the Ikara platform consumes compliant event data from the hosted platforms under the control of the service provider and correlates events against the security policies of the global logistics organisation and the contractual obligations of the supplier. The result allows both customer and service provider to align reporting data to business objective, whilst automating compliance attestation/reporting as a process. Executive oversight in the customer was improved with the instant detection of threats to policy which may have occurred for service elements operated outside of the direct control of the customer organisation. (Ecology alignment and insight)
Benefits of defining service standards and business objectives.
- When performance and compliance issues arise, how you communicate to your partners, defines how quickly you can achieve a unified response to the situation. Imagine of you could invite your suppliers to view the problem and associated event data, in context to their service delivery contract with your organisation? With Ikara, events shared in context, are the definition of performance and compliance in an operational state, that you have already agreed with the partner. Your compliance data is securely shared when there is an event that demands that an extended supplier team response, is delivered to a Service Assurance standard. Immediately reduce confusion and explanation time when bringing your supplier partners into compliance with your performance and governance business agenda.
- Business leaders want a simplified yet substantiative view of information on what’s being done to avoid governance issues systemically. Ikara offers a simple explanation in the face of growing technical dependencies and complexity. Ikara’s simplification, replaces detailed technical explanations of performance and compliance problems up and down the chain of command. Ikara provides busy executives with performance and compliance control over their technical estates that that are mission critical yet fall under the control of multiple stakeholders and outsourced service partners.
- Standards for Service Delivery are based on published industry standards and where no recognised international standard exists, the events metrics are the best practice/best in class performance standard that Ikara customers can achieve when quality standards are being met for application service delivery.
- The Ikara Service Assurance platform, offers complex organisations a vehicle to affect a sustained cultural shift in operations. Today standards in ICT are on the rise (ISO 27001, Essential 8, NIST) as security threats and outsourcing converge to create operational assurance gaps, Ikara creates a process bridge between your organisation and your suppliers. Ikara Business Objectives will allow you to protect the physical and/or operational characteristics of a service. Ikara’s Compliance Standards detail the processes used to deploy and operate the product.