Abstracts of Magazine FUJITSU 2005-9 (VOL.56, NO.5)

Special Issue : Outsourcing

• Outsourcing Market Trends and Related Fujitsu Activities

Because of the severe and intense changes that are occurring in the business environment, companies must now tackle many complicated and diverse problems. To solve these problems, businesses are increasingly turning to outsourcing services.
The Fujitsu Group offers a total outsourcing service that can meet all of a customer's needs and recommends further expansions of this service to individual customers based on, for example, system life cycle, target site, and service class. The Group is also improving the value of this service using the latest technologies and improving the service quality using a wide range of methods.
This paper describes the significance of the outsourcing service in corporate management, the feature of Fujitsu's outsourcing service, and the future of this service.

• How to Get Value of Business Management out of Outsourcing

The exploitation of IT in the enterprise has been shifting from "Automation" to "Information", and then to "Transformation". This means IT has become to contribute to the business management much more when compared with before. In other words, it is becoming more important to secure alignment between business management and IT on the strategy level as well as coal-face level.
Outsourcing is valid to secure the above-mentioned alignment between business management and IT. It is important to walk away from "TCO reduction thinking way". Rather, we should regard IT as an element to realize business strategy together with other elements such as business process, people, and organization.
In addition, we should think IT resources such as "people", "money" and "assets" to pursue the optimized utilization of resources on business management from the perspective of IT governance.

• Datacenter Service Technology System

Fujitsu recognizes that IT is now a basic essential of its customers' business. As a result, we are convinced that IT management must become a central part of our customers' business management. Moreover, in today's business environment, customers need to adjust to conflicting developments, for example, slower growth but intensified competition and the need to improve efficiency but also protect the environment. To help customers with their business management problems, IT management should include new technologies for risk management and added flexibility. Focusing on Fujitsu's datacenters and IT management service, this paper discusses the relationship between our customers' business management and IT management and presents a development roadmap for new IT management technologies.

• Fujitsu's Approach to Network Services

With the recent spread of broadband networks and progress in wireless technology, corporate users can now access high-speed networks and use a wide range of audio/video applications. As a result, network services have become closely integrated with the application services, ubiquitous networks, and security measures used by our customers. Moreover, these environmental changes are stimulating a rapid diversification of IT-based business styles and models. To cope with the changes in customers' business and network environments, Fujitsu offers network services that provide highly added value. This paper outlines the current status and new approaches of Fujitsu's network services that cooperate with applications and products.

• IT Life Cycle Management for On-Site Outsourcing

Because of the large variety and rapid changes of IT equipment and the need for more extensive system risk management, our customers are facing big challenges regarding their on-site operations: for example, how to improve operation quality and reduce costs. To help our customers overcome these challenges, we provide various on-site outsourcing LCM (Life Cycle Management) services that cover the entire life cycle of PCs and other IT equipment. These services include IT infrastructure planning/design and the procurement, installation, operation/maintenance, and removal/disposal of equipment. Our on-site outsourcing services feature Fujitsu service technologies such as service management, on-demand resource supply, an LCM center function, an IT-resource management function based on SystemDefenderBox, and an environment recycle function. This paper describes how these functions reduce the burden of system operation, reduce costs, and improve IT operation quality.

• Utility Computing and Operation Reforming

Recently, the concept of "utility computing" has been proposed. In this concept, IT processing capacity is made available and used as required in the same way as water and electric power. Utility computing can be regarded as one of the most advanced forms of outsourcing because in some cases no additional computer hardware needs to be installed at the user's side in order to use it. However, establishing utility-like systems requires enormous efforts, for example, the consolidation of many multi-vendor devices and middleware and the realization of autonomous control of system operation. In this paper, we describe Fujitsu's approach toward solving the system operation problems of utility computing.

• IT System Behavior Analysis and Visualization Technology

To keep up with the changes in today's severe business environment, companies must overcome various problems and also expand their business. Businesses therefore must clearly understand the operation status of their IT systems. If a system's status is well analyzed and made easy to visualize at the data center, when problems occur at environment changes, they can be clearly identified and the optimal business conditions can be quickly reestablished and then maintained. System analysis and visualization therefore improves the effectiveness of IT systems because it makes it easier to detect problems that deteriorate system performance and also maintain a system for optimal performance. This paper introduces technology for understanding system operation. This technology is used to analyze and visualize systems in three different function layers from the standpoints of managing the business process flow, transaction processing, and packet flow in an IP network.

• Service Metrics Technology for Evaluating IT Outsourcing Services

High-quality IT outsourcing services require advanced technologies and sufficient equipment. These requirements are understandable from the technical standpoint, but corporate management does not usually consider them important enough to justify the associated investment. Hence, IT outsourcing plans proposed by outsourcers should be evaluated from the customer's perspective, and the most appropriate one should be chosen to make their business successful. Service metrics try to establish quantitative relationships between the business activities of customers and the workload characteristics of IT services by analyzing the operational log data of IT services. The most appropriate IT outsourcing plans for IT services should then be chosen by referencing the relevant established quantitative relationships. This paper gives an outline of service metrics.

• Trial to Improve IT Operation Maturity Level Based on ITIL at Shionogi & Co., Ltd.

Over the last five years, to maximize returns of IT investments, Shionogi & Company, Ltd. has made two big changes in its IT environment under a company-wide informatization program. One of these changes is to stop using mainframe architectures, and the other is to establish an IT administration framework by outsourcing to Fujitsu. This paper introduces several measures that Shionogi and Fujitsu have taken to optimize Shionogi's system operation and administration framework for the new architecture. It also looks at a trial for adapting ITSM (IT Service Management) based on ITIL (IT infrastructure Library) to improve Shionogi's operation maturity level.

• Application Portfolio Management in Hokkaido Gas Co., Ltd. Enables Shared Visibility of IT Investments

Hokkaido Gas Co., Ltd. has been enhancing its existing services and providing new services so their customers can use gas more conveniently and safely and with fewer interruptions. To make these improvements, every year, the company had to handle hundreds of maintenance issues about information systems, and it required a lot of time and effort to evaluate and prioritize them. Then, the company implemented its Advanced Business Promotion project to quickly evaluate and prioritize these issues using Fujitsu's Application Portfolio Management (APM) service. As a result, consensus among planning sections, user sections, and management is built extremely smoothly. Moreover, it has become easier to start early maintenance because the project discloses the decision process for evaluating and prioritizing IT investments and also standardizes the evaluation process. In this paper, we describe how Fujitsu's APM outsourcing service enabled shared visibility of IT investments in Hokkaido Gas Co., Ltd.

• Outsourcing Service to Minamikanto Yon Keibajyo

Minamikanto Yon Keibajyo (a rase track organization in the Minamikanto area) use Fujitsu's Outsourcing Service to make their Internet and mobile phone betting system an enhanced function of the existing telephone and home betting system. Fujitsu is confident that the system's service continuity, stability, and security measures are superior to those of any general system. Customer satisfaction is assured by the high quality of system construction (which was done by expert SEs of the totalizator system for municipally operated races) and Fujitsu's outsourcing service (including the Fmobile service). We maintain and improve service quality by setting targets, evaluating system performance, and making the necessary changes based on a Service Level Agreement (SLA). This paper introduces some case studies of the Outsourcing Services provided to Minamikanto Yon Keibajyo.

• Case of FENICS-Mail Services at Fuji Electric Holdings Co., Ltd.

Because e-mail is now an essential communication tool for everyday business activity, a failure of the e-mail infrastructure can cause fatal damage to an enterprise. Also, to maintain e-mail services, e-mail administrators have to struggle against increasing volumes of spam, computer viruses, different e-mail compliances and other problems. This situation is encouraging more and more enterprises to outsource their e-mail tasks to experts. This paper describes the case of Fuji Electric Holdings Co., Ltd., which introduced Fujitsu Limited's FENICS-Mail Service to handle its e-mail.

• On-Site Outsourcing to Support Business Growth of bitWallet, Inc.

Since its start in November 2001, the prepaid electronic money service "Edy" managed and promoted by bitWallet Inc. has rapidly come into wide use. In addition, the social importance of the IT infrastructure support business and its management has recently increased. Fujitsu has been in charge of Edy's management since its start. To support the growth of this service, we are developing a robust and transparent zero-failure management system. Especially, to respond to bitWallet's business growth, we have implemented a function for making system changes without stopping user services. This paper introduces the on-site outsourcing services that Fujitsu provides to bitWallet and describes the efforts we have made since Edy's start to improve its operation quality and reduce its costs. It also explains how we realized release management and hot system changes for Edy.

• Sense and Respond on Global Scale

Sense and Respond is a new management approach with a unique implementation methodology that puts our outsourcing customer at the heart of the organization. It creates a customer-knowledge driven culture based on leadership and analysis.
Sense and Respond draws upon Systems Thinking, Lean-Service, and Transformational Leadership. These three disciplines are combined to produce a powerful new technique that engages front-line staff from start to finish.
Sense and Respond is deployed throughout the Fujitsu Group in 18 countries, and defines business in terms of the value it creates, not the products or services it produces. It is quite simply a new way to design, build and operate organisations so that they continuously evolve in response to the changing needs of the customer.