As promised earlier this month, I’m kicking off our IT Showcase with the topic of insourcing. I was recruited to Symantec in February 2014 specifically to bring the information technology function back in house after eight years. Outsourcing nearly all of the company’s IT functions to a third party vendor had negative consequences—including repeated network outages and equipment, services and applications were allowed to atrophy. In short, IT had gone dark, becoming complex, expensive, slow and inefficient.
When I look back on that effort in an InformationWeek interview, I am reminded that bringing IT in house can be as complicated as outsourcing—sometimes even costlier with contract termination fees, the expense of building a more robust data center, application and lab migration and decommission, software license transfers, and new hiring and development. But insourcing can also serve as the impetus for driving IT transformation—improving technology, pushing more services to the cloud, and operating more effectively at reduced cost. That certainly was our goal and experience.
Some key insourcing questions to consider:
1) What are my termination rights and responsibilities?
2) Can my in-house IT team support the future state?
3) How long will it take?
Tackling this challenge required several initial steps. The first was to define our IT vision and strategy, and my initial plan covered several key imperatives (see sidebar). The second was to complete an organizational redesign—since most IT employees were in administrative roles primarily overseeing the outsourcing vendor, technologists were needed in several key networking and infrastructure, communication and collaboration, and IT architecture roles. I’m a strong advocate of an IT services-led model which assigns 100% of service responsibility to individual owners—this practice was also established. It was a critical departure from how IT had been run historically, and resulted in improved partnerships between IT and the business units, and more effective management of the company’s strategic goals.
With a focus on simplification, operational excellence, technical leadership and outstanding user experience, we launched our first strategic initiative: Build and deliver a new, next generation secure data center and network services—absolutely critical and foundational. Very significantly, we built our Next Generation Secure Data Center (NGSDC) in our own virtual private cloud, using a software defined network. Phase one (pre-production) was deployed in December 2014—within less than a year. It included identification of the technology architecture stack and key strategic partners—Cisco, NetApp and VMware—which enabled IT to leapfrog existing technology capabilities, including network, compute and storage. Full IT production of NGSDC was delivered by August 2015.
Our new NGSDC meant a significant improvement in how IT services were delivered and a substantial decrease in the cost of IT over the past three years (more on this in a future blog). During our primary insourcing period—covering five quarters from 2014-2015—we achieved a 25% reduction in IT expenses. Further insourcing enabled us to deliver 35% of applications from the cloud (and subsequently enabled us to move more apps to the cloud), transforming employee productivity and collaboration services globally.
Assigning a leader to drive all of our insourcing activity was a key success factor. IT Strategy, Planning and Business Operations Vice President Mark Giles managed this work full-time, serving as a hub for all of the moving parts.
“Driving change is always hard, but it is accelerated and easier when everyone is aligned to common goals,” says Giles. “Foundational was establishing a transition framework that enabled all parties to understand their part in achieving our joint success. Service owners led joint teams to build end-to-end operations at Symantec, maintain existing operations during transition and doing no harm to Symantec or our outsourcing partner as we exited. Our teams executed flawlessly, we transitioned on time, and with no disruption to our operations. What could have been a war story, was a true ‘win-win’ and was a major accomplishment for everyone involved,” Giles adds.
Finally, we renegotiated a new contract with our vendor. It might have been an awkward, uncomfortable conversion but instead was a true partnership. Our vendor knew of our mandate to bring services in-house, and was committed to ensuring a smooth transition. As a result, we signed a new vendor agreement in December 2014—in less than a year—outlining reduced scope and an evolution away from our outsourcing partner.
Overall results? Employees noticed new speed and agility in how their IT services were delivered. Operations improved dramatically. Over a two-year period, we’ve seen a reduction in critical outages of 98%. Provisioning a server, which previously took four months, is now accomplished in 15 minutes.
It was both exciting and rewarding to see this significant increase in service delivery while at the same time reducing expense. Our mantra was “faster, cheaper, better.” Reestablishing a high performing IT team and organization internally set us up well to tackle new challenges. I’ll talk more about those in my next blog.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on our experience—comments are always welcome!
Sidebar
Insourcing Strategic Initiatives
Build and deliver a new, next generation secure data center and network services
Drive efficiencies and deliver new business models and capabilities
Uplift our security capability, using our own technology, dramatically improving the security posture at Symantec
Improve employee productivity and collaboration
Adopting a bold cloud model for all major applications
Deliver end-to-end data services
Demonstrate ‘Symantec Inside’ product/services successes
Empower and develop IT employees