Overview

IT Procurement departments can no longer exist in isolation from the rest of the business. End-users are no longer prepared to order a new “desktop” only to contend with acquiring the necessary installation service separately or worse yet, with no transparency to the status or progress of either. The “customer” makes no distinction between these processes; despite being fulfiled by many independent functions behind the scenes, the end-user simply views this as a single request. Simply stated, IT product procurement triggers a significant portion of IT services, particularly in provisioning, and Request Management helps to create a cohesive relationship between these functions.

Conventional eProcurement technology suffers from two fundamental limitations when applied to IT:

1. eProcurement processes are only focused on the acquisition of goods. They typically neither account for the inclusion of other services nor for fulfilment processes. Consider a new starter request, where in addition to purchasing new goods, the request may need to initiate a number of provisioning services (i.e. create new email account, add to workgroup etc) which need to be fulfilled by different resolver groups.

2. eProcurement technology is inwardly focused towards procurement specialists, and does not easily adapt itself for end-user requisitioning. Many existing eProcurement tools (particularly in-house developed) have been extended beyond their limits and have become unmanageable and difficult to maintain.

 

Emerging Requirements

Convergence with IT Service Management

The IT service desk (or helpdesk) often inherits the burden because it is frequently regarded as a single point of contact for business users; but it is clearly challenged with performing request management behind the scenes. In this capacity, the IT service desk functions as a “front-end” for requests that are usually re-routed to the IT procurement desk. At this point, the original request is usually fractured or the IT service desk attempts to provide the orchestration behind the scenes – usually in technologies aimed principally at managing and delivering service!

When a request results in fulfillment processes that span multiple business functions, something more is required. Attemping to perform Request Management “behind the scenes” usually increases latency and cost, but moreover reduces the visibility of status, approval, and fulfilment granted back to the originating user. Hence, front-line IT Service Management personnel can be easily overwhelmed with “status request” calls from users or “verification” calls back to users when request content is ambiguous or incomplete. The IT Service Management function, in the mean time, furthers its perception as a bottleneck, despite best intentions to proxy for IT procurement.

Having control over asset information as it enters the operational environment allows for tighter control of inventory and assets as well as the ability to automate processes (i.e direct software push) easily onto target machines. End to end processes like this can now be “single touch” and fully automated.

Multi-Sourcing

Over the last 10 years outsourcing and insourcing has become commonplace within the IT environment, with the initial trend towards outsourcing to one supplier now evolving to individual business processes being outsourced to many suppliers.

What is clear is that many IT services (procurement is an IT service) are no longer seen as being key to being carried out in house and are now being seen as commoditised services (just like buying electricity), with measurement of costs and SLA’s required for in-house services to enable comparison with outsourcers offering.

What is also clear is that the company outsourcing does not want to be tied to “tool prescription” by the outsourcer. The flexibility to turn suppliers on and off at will is a key requirement today and likely to be in the future.

Request Management provides the equivalent of a “utility grid” to enable similar sourcing flexibility. Adoption of RM allows the holistic measurement of product and service suppliers, and the ability to switch them in and out without affecting the end-user experience. This eliminates the need for costly retraining or extensive coordination when change in provider occurs. These same principals have long since benefited modern manufacturing and distribution practices.

Green Initiatives

As corporations continue to adopt “green initiatives”, IT procurement departments must frequently expand their breadth and incorporate additional processes:

• Recycling – real-time “asset checking” can be incorporated into authorisation workflow to determine whether the requested good(s) need to be procured or whether they can re-deployed from surplus.

• Disposal – Correct disposal of both packaging of the new assets procured and disposal of the old assets can be trigged by the RM system, and audit information automatically generated for later reference.

• Green supply routes can be set-up and monitored with preference given to local suppliers for both products and services. By linking the whole IT asset lifecycle in a RM system allows the ongoing analysis of the best ‘green’ solution for each scenario.

The expanded workflow and fulfilment capabiltities of RM enables such processes to be embedded within the context of traditional eProcurement workflow.