Business Consulting

Align Your IT Initiatives with Business Objectives

ePlus’ unique approach to Business Consulting takes you beyond “keeping the lights green”—by leveraging the insight we have into your IT infrastructure to ensure your team is performing a strategic role to drive innovation. We can help your IT team more effectively interact with the rest of the business to enable growth and agility. Our progressive approach to IT maturity and our focus on measurable outcomes provides your organization with the perspective, methodology, and tools to build a strong foundation that serves and is valued by all your stakeholders.

Executive Services Portfolio

Our Executive Services Portfolio (ESP) evaluates the maturity of your current priorities and technologies to identify stakeholder-driven areas of strategic focus. You’ll be armed with the knowledge to drive business process re-engineering and enablement as well as maximize efficiencies by utilizing third-party knowledge that spans multiple technologies and verticals.

• Organization Fingerprinting to cross-reference your business processes and core technologies to your strategic goals while also analyzing your infrastructure to collect performance and inventory lifecycle data—to create the first data source for a Strategic Roadmap
• Strategic Roadmapping to develop a three-five year visual roadmap that aligns your IT investments with your organization's initiatives, processes and standards, and overall business strategy (including a mid-term health check and alignment sessions)
• ESP Supplement to Quarterly Business Reviews to discuss aggregated technology trends, syndicated content, and IT research that may impact your business to ensure the Strategic Roadmap is a living, breathing document that is aligned with your objectives

Virtual CIO

Operational flexibility requirements are continuously increasing. Strategies and forecasts are changing weekly, if not daily. From managed services to staff augmentation, today’s resource-challenged businesses seek new and creative ways to meet their complex, ever-changing needs. Through Virtual CIO (vCIO), ePlus works with you to create a multi-year technology reference architecture, helping to get your internal systems and processes in line with your business goals—and keep them there so you can embrace technologies that shape your business.

In addition to our ESP offerings, you can leverage ePlus as the catalyst for change—providing guidance to grow your business and bolster your ITIL framework

Executive Leadership

Clarity is proven to increase productivity. Effective leaders take a no-nonsense approach to determining what can be accomplished with the resources at hand. Success is more dependent on your ability to operate as an effective team than on your specific budget or resources. To unlock your potential, you must promote the voice of IT and form a cohesive, credible leadership team that can drive the necessary change.

• Focus on what’s important
• Address the underlying obstacles
• Baseline and continually improve
• Maximize the potential of a cohesive team
• Use your data for a macro view of your team and business to stay focused

Operations Management

Too often, IT Operations is reacting and just trying to “keep the lights on.” So why then, all the buzz about “lights out” data centers? Because remote monitoring and the data insights it produces can shed new light on old problems—the kind of problems that persist and compound risk when you keep looking at the same things. If all your performance indicators are showing green but your customers are unhappy, start monitoring something else. It’s likely time for a new approach.

• If you have limited resources, check our customer’s lights first.
• When the lights go out, look for past events to find a pattern.
• Check to see if it is just your lights, or did your neighbors’ lights go out too.
• Look at how Service Level Management and Event Management lights interact.
• Combine data records in new ways to illuminate opportunities for improvement.

Business Management

We all have limited resources. IT is no different. Responsible management of IT resources supports business success—the kind of success supported by frictionless engagements. Engagements between customers and your business. Engagements between vendors and your business. And even those engagements between organizations and people within your business. That means policies need to be clearly defined and expectations clearly set with all stakeholders. Doing so makes you a relevant and trusted partner to manage risk, compliance, and operational efficiency:

• Setting expectations around business outcomes
• Effectively communicating and building IT linkages with business units
• Optimizing intersections with operations and services management
• Valuing your IT assets and simplifying their management
• Promoting the business benefits of IT, including data insights and frictionless engagements

Service Management

Predictability is a good thing. Part of creating frictionless engagements is ensuring high-quality and consistent interactions with your stakeholders. What that looks like can vary widely based on the stage of your company and the maturity of your IT operations. Using light and structured methodologies to assess where you are and then adopting Service Management frameworks to get you to where you want to be is the key to greater efficiencies–and consistently good outcomes.

• Baseline and measure your improvements
• Integrate practices via data utilization to reduce risk and improve efficiency
• Distribute process management ownership for fresh perspectives and greater buy-in
• Stakeholders will align with the processes if they are easy and address defined needs
• Too much process too soon, will bog you down

Technology Enablement

Technology Enablement accelerates the delivery of IT services by automating key IT processes. Whether it’s incident ticket resolution, alert notification, or system provisioning, we establish the means to provide automation, configuration, and orchestration of the resources in your environment.