IBA Group: Your Trusted ITO Partner
In its 2012 volume 1 issue, CEO Magazine published an interview with Sergei Levteev, IBA Group President. The article is entitled Your Trusted ITO Partner.
“CEO Magazine: There has been a lot of talk about vendor management recently. How does IBA Group help clients to align their information technology outsourcing (ITO) to their business objectives?
Sergei Levteev: As IBA is working on the provider side, outsourcing vendors are customers for us. We also seek to turn our customers into partners. We know from our 20 years of experience that outsourcing yields the best results when a vendor and a provider work in partnership. If you perceive the vendor as your partner, you would never allow yourself to limit project implementation to ‘coding in line with the specs’. Our teams start working on a project with a thorough analysis of the customer’s business. In many cases, they come up with an optimised solution that may differ from the initial project specifications.
For certain projects – primarily transformation ventures, including those involving business intelligence (BI) – we form joint IBA-customer teams. BI provides excellent opportunities for aligning IT to business objectives. It is the software that helps managers understand what is happening with their business and why, and what should be done to make it better.
Some companies treat BI as a ‘must have’ without a clear understanding of why it is needed and what problems it can solve. They seek to embrace a maximum number of operations, gathering as much data and building as many reports as possible. We advise them to think of the bottlenecks in their business and of how BI can overcome them. In this way, a BI project is able to resolve a specific business problem. If a customer needs to solve a wide range of methodological, organisational and technical issues, IBA applies an iterative approach to software development and deployment.