Simple Computer Answers

Whether or not IT Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders believe they are well-positioned to support customer growth, the business does. Their expectations are high, and they firmly believe that technology’s ability to serve and support customers is most valuable, even more so than cost savings. To deliver on these ambitions, I&O leaders must follow suit and build a customer-obsessed organisation that takes an outside-in view from the customer’s perspective – not inside-out from the data centre.

While this transformation will be anything but easy, there are invaluable lessons to be learned from those who have already taken on the challenge of rebooting their people, process, and technology to become more customer-centric. Lessons from companies like Fidelity, where Wilson DSouza, Senior VP of End User Computing, and George Brady, Executive VP of Distributing Hosting For Fidelity Technology Group, have applied these rebooting principles to improve associate experience. In preparation for their upcoming keynote at next weeks Infrastructure & Operations Forum, I recently spoke with Wilson and George about the importance of building customer-centric infrastructure:

Serving our customers has been at the core of Fidelitys business since our founding 65 years ago.  Our goal is to provide the best customer experience and outcomes in our industry. We believe that customer experience results achieved are a function of the technology environment we provide our associates.

I’ll boil it down to three steps that we will unpack in more detail in our keynote address:

1. We have a core set of customer strategies and design principles that guide our work across Infrastructure & Operations.
2. Weve established listening posts for customer feedback. These listening posts inform our priorities and activities.
3. We apply incremental improvements (an Agile approach) to our infrastructure services based on this continual feedback loop.

In the keynote, we will highlight the work we are doing to improve our IT services for associates and to re-engineering our Data Centre services with the emergence of Cloud capabilities.

I hope you can join George, Wilson, and Forresters Infrastructure & Operations team in Miami.