Focused on managing change, managing programs, on measurable enterprise strategy, implementing that strategy, re-engineering the organization, and on managing technology in the interests of the enterprise.
With its predecessors, serving industry and governments since 1967, TechLabs is managed by world-recognized senior executives, experienced in both general management and in applicable branches of technology, principally information technology (IT), people experienced in:
(1) Building and meeting measurable goals.
(1) Re-engineering and managing to meet those goals, and
(2) Managing technology to support the enterprise, and not the reverse.
TechLabs helps its clients respond to the marketplace's competitive challenges, and to the enterprise challenges they entail: re-engineering, acquisition of technology, organizations and people, strategic positioning, and evolutionary improvement.
As part of our service, we help the enterprise's technological support systems, notably IT, provide the force multiplier necessary to obtain a competitive advantage and meet its goals, mission and strategy. 81% of FORTUNE-500 company senior executives recently polled reported unsatisfactory to marginal effectiveness of their companies' information technology operations .
We help enterprises:
Manage change.
To do this we deploy senior staff with records of personal attainment in both general management and technology, and support them with subject-matter experts, specialized tools, and the services of our affiliates.
TechLabs is firmly committed to this precept: Technology, particularly IT, is vital to building the enterprise and operationally meeting its goals. It usually represents the most complex function in an enterprise not directly assigned a profit goal. Nevertheless it must never be treated as an incomprehensible technological marvel, but as a tool which serves operations and management.
The Information Factory
Just as a factory provides, manages and operates resources to turn out a physical product, so does the IT operation, distributed or integrated, provide, manage and operate the resources to turn out information. The difference: information empowers management and operations, and contributes through them to enterprise goals. The information product is not a goal in itself.
Managers no longer build factories as showpieces, and measure their success by the costs (the higher the better). Why should the information factory be different? Its job is to turn out a product, which the enterprise sells and/or uses in operations.
The thick fog of jargon which surrounds technology in general, and particularly IT, and the difficulty of equating results with costs, have prevented these executives from taking the time to master the language; asking the "rude questions"; and doing for the IT operations what they do for every other part of the business:
Planning and executing a goal-directed, measurable strategy to make the information factory work, and work efficiently.
Managing IT as a responsive, goal-driven contributor to strategic enterprise goals, with measurable performance.
Re-engineering enterprise-wide IT to be a dynamic part of operations, management and strategy, as the enterprise itself grows, consolidates and re-engineers itself.
TechLabs serves senior executives senior managers and managers of major responsibility areas within an enterprise: Chairmen, CEOs, Managing Directors, Boards, COOs, CFOs, CIOs, general managers, divisional managers and their immediate staffs. Using our experience as general managers and IT executives, and formal planning and analytical tools, we:
Uncloak the jargon which pervades the field.
Relate divisional and support system goals to enterprise goals in a formal process.
Evaluate the processes from the point of view of the client, not the technologist.
Develop and test plans to grow with the enterprise.
Support the implementation of the plans.
Help organize for success and optimize the teams.
Plan and help execute divisional and support-system response to enterprise changes: M&A, downsizing, growth and changes in the marketplace.
When Company A acquires or merges with Company B, integrating analogous operations, such as the IT organizations, often devolves to a power struggle. Wrong. TechLabs supports the new managing organization to plan and execute a smooth integration of IT operations and resources, getting more for less, rather than less for more.
In addition to the organizational, financial, and cultural issues which must be faced in any re-engineering process, we employ the mathematics of multiserver network queuing analysis, via a proprietary software tool called CAINS, to develop before-and-after estimates of process operations, capacity and emergency responses.
Example: Downsizing a 40%-utilized IT system by a factor of two (either via redundancy or merger) does not merely yield an 80%-utilized system. Unless certain management, organizational and technical issues are met the downsizing can result in backlogs as high as 25 times those experienced previously. This is a result of the mathematics of queues, not foot-dragging.
When two organizations merge, an alternative tactic is to simply add the IT capabilities of the two predecessors together. This also results in less efficiency, because to the staffs of each sub-enterprise must be added the new coordination staff which reports to the new level of management.