“I just want the damn stuff to work!”

...and other messages from the real world.

DAVID COURTLEY, CEO Fujitsu Services, on a new realism in IT.

A couple of years ago, we asked a sample of European CEOs and CIOs to tell us what they thought of the IT Services Industry. They didn’t mince their words:

“No more hype and blue sky please. Just make it happen.”
“IT should be invisible.”
“Some problems aren’t glamorous, they just need solving.”
“I just want the damn stuff to work!”

They were tired of wild theories and radical thinking. They weren’t prepared to swap hope for strategy any more. They just wanted IT to do its job.

Anyone who has dealings with the IT services industry knows that too many big IT projects have failed to work, arrived months or years late, or been millions over budget.

And many smaller projects, while not necessarily hitting the headlines, have failed to work first time or caused disappointment in some other way, so it’s no surprise that IT buyers are feeling cynical.

It’s high time this was addressed by the industry and Fujitsu is beginning to lead the way in this respect. Our record is well above average when it comes to delivery and I believe we are better placed than most others to actually do something about it.

For example, we are the only global IT services business that’s Japanese-owned and Europe-centred. Our financial structure and reporting cycles don’t force us into the short-termism that others may suffer from, and we think and work differently to the other big IT services businesses. That’s why I believe we can lead the way to what I’m calling a new reality in IT.

The new reality: learn from old industries
I’m a big fan of Toyota and Taiichi Ohno. They have led the way for decades in manufacturing quality and continuous improvement and they’re relentless, even now, in searching for tiny improvements in process, speed, reliability, and understanding. We need this in IT, and Fujitsu Services, as a Japanese owned business, is well placed to head the movement.

Gone are the days when a new car needed tweaking or reengineering a dozen times before it would get you where you wanted to go. But most big IT systems are still built by hand. Each one slightly different, a little temperamental to get started, and difficult to fix or change. This is unnecessary.

The new reality: hear your customers
We need to come down from our ivory towers and start contracting with customers in ways that fit their business, not just ours. Everyone knows that markets and business structures change all the time, so an outsourcing contract that costs millions in penalty clauses when you want to change something is, frankly, an anachronism.

Every business says it listens to its customers. Far fewer actually hear them.

The new reality: do what it says on the tin
We must design, build and operate IT systems and services so that they work first time, arrive on time and stay on budget. In short, we need to make things that do what it says on the tin. Common sense, yes of course. Common practice? Not at all.

How is a real IT services company different?
Although many of our attitudes and processes have been unlike the other big IT services players for a long time, the answers we got in the research finally prompted me to formalise realism, common sense and relentless customer focus, and build our European structure and culture around these things.

So what’s a real IT services business like?

First, it’s a different shape. Its structures and systems are driven by the realities of its customers’ strategies and problems.

Second: it’s like a traditional manufacturer in that it expects its products and services to work first time, arrive on time and on budget and keep on working well into the future.

Third, it thinks and works long term, by which I mean it’s able to plan investments and build customer and supplier relationships over many years.

Let me give you three examples of our different way of doing things:

Industrial IT
The industrialisation of IT has to happen sooner or later. At the moment projects are expensive, slow to get approval, slow to deploy and seldom achieve their ROI.

More so 80% of what one company wants its IT to do is also what everyone else wants theirs to do – so why not industrialise (standardise if you like) 80% of the infrastructure solutions we make and sell?

So we’ve created a set of templates that we call TRIOLE. When we make a system to a template, everything from environment through configuration and performance to service operation is pre-known, already defined and proven to work.

40% of Fujitsu’s Japanese customers have bought into the TRIOLE approach; they deploy 30% faster, cost 20% less to operate and are at least 30% more reliable.

Realistic contracts
Another example is a commercial one. Our contract with a leading UK airline is written in their terms, not ours, so they pay us based on measurements that align with their business strategies and operational needs. They sell a lot of tickets online, we get paid more. They don’t, we don’t. And there are many other examples of this kind of commitment in our commercial relationships.

Sense and Respond®
Sense and Respond is our approach to delivering IT services that can eliminate unproductive work. It’s our way of thinking and working that aligns the everyday running of IT with the actual objectives of the business.

Fujitsu Services is able to improve both the service and the infrastructure to prevent failure rather than just fix it.

Does realism work?
More and more, Fujitsu Services finds itself doing things differently. Some people say such contrarian behaviour is risky, but I’m convinced it’s the only way to work. Happily, the figures bear me out.

Our order book is £6.2 billion – a record - and profit before tax is up by 36% over last year.

Realism is a win/win for us and our clients and, in my opinion, the sooner the rest of IT services realises and starts doing things differently, the sooner the industry will regain its reputation and begin to achieve its true potential.

Will the others follow? I believe so, which is why I intend to repeat that piece of research I mentioned in about two years time. I’ll let you know then if anything has changed!