EAdirections Education, Seminar and Speaking Offerings

Home | Site Map | Blog | Contact

Offerings

» Advisory Subscriptions

» Rapid EA Assessment

» Education & Seminars

» Expert Consulting

User login

Vectors Newsletter

Education & Seminars

We deliver structured training and education to our clients at their site. Each course is customized to the specific challenges and environment of each client. We can impact a wide range of audiences including the core EA team, IS staff, line executives, and the extended enterprise. Our topics can range from fundamental EA concepts to aligning business and IT strategy – from enhancing EA effectiveness to trends in business and technology innovation. Over the last 15 years we have delivered hundreds of EA workshops and seminars. We can deliver customized educational seminars in 1-, 2- and 3-day formats, for groups up to 40 participants.

Example Seminar Topics:

Increasing the Effectiveness of Your EA Program
Fundamental EA Concepts
Business and Information Architecture
Getting an EA Program Started
EA in your specific industry
EA and Service Oriented Architecture
Enterprise Portfolio Management
Enterprise Governance
Cost Containment Strategies

NEW! - IT Cost Containment Workshop

We have been developing an IT Cost Containment Workshop in response to challenges faced by our clients. Although a lot has been written about cost containment and reduction, most of the published material focuses on either a very high-level model, an emphasis on a particular strategy (e.g. renegotiate with vendors, outsource), or a particular vendor/solution. In our experience most comprehensive and effective approaches look across all areas of IT, require a thorough understanding of the various ‘flavors’ of cloud computing and SaaS, analyze outsourcing, and constantly iterate while shifting back and forth between holistic and point-specific analysis.

This Workshop is designed for an IT leadership team focused on cost strategies, typically including the Chief Architect, and is focused primarily on budget under IT’s control. This workshop is intended to initially educate our clients about strategies, alternatives and implications in significant detail. The workshop then evolves into a facilitated analysis and decision-making. The length of the overall session will largely be determined by the number of categories that your team wishes to explore - because not all categories may be a good fit for your organization, and the amount of discussion in each category your team will choose to focus on.

Depending on the client’s requirements this Workshop can be delivered either in a single day or in 2 or 3 sessions over a couple of weeks. Major topics include:

An overview of cost containment

IT versus Business cost containment, and options in between
A basic taxonomy

Creating a cost containment strategy worksheet
High-level overview of common strategies

Vendor renegotiations (e.g. telecommunications)
New technologies (e.g. virtualization, cloud computing, SaaS)
‘Green’
Range of outsourcing alternatives/options
Examining product alternatives (you might be surprised!)
Other

Examining and categorizing the client’s cost structure
Reviewing the range of alternatives for each category and potential implications of each including:

Cost
OpEx vs CapEx
Architecture
Implementation
Management & Support
Other

Examining representative vendors and solutions in each of those categories
‘Quick Wins’ to show cost containment momentum to leadership (get the politics right)
Understanding potential accounting implications (before you talk to your CFO)
Managing IT staff and user expectations (including delivering ‘bad news’ such as reduced service levels)

What to do after the Workshop – Next Steps & Priorities

The workshop will include a number of specific examples such as: outsourcing Blackberry support; Wal-mart's use of SaaS for all employee scheduling in its stores, Microsoft’s add-in to create PDFs; etc.

Security / Legal / Privacy

design by dxpgroup