Harbour IT adapted their communications style to mine. I'm a CFO - not a techie - and to make decisions I need information in a form I understand. Moving away from tech-speak has helped clarify my business needs. Harbour IT has done it really well."
Kym Warner, CFO, The Coffee Club
Less IT, More Business
Franchise group relinquishes IT; gets back more control
Some say handing over IT operations to a third-party specialist is just too risky; others say business IT is so critical you'd be crazy to manage it yourself. Iconic hospitality retailer and franchise group The Coffee Club is in the latter group. CFO Kym Warner, a self-professed non-techie, is more interested in information than IT. However, without trustworthy IT infrastructure, timely information was no sure thing. By outsourcing IT management to Harbour IT and moving to the Infrastructure as a Service cloud, The Coffee Club ticks all the audit boxes, turning an operational handicap into a strategic advantage.
Confronting IT Guesswork
Kym Warner, CFO of franchise group The Coffee Club, doesn't like guesswork. In her mind, data is the centre of the business universe and the key to sound decision-making. So, anything jeopardising management information flashes brightly on her radar. A key executive in the $250 million franchise group, which includes 220-plus franchisee stores and fledging international expansion, Warner's focus on information swung her attention to underlying IT systems, information safeguards, and services provision to the group's many franchisees.
Appointed CFO - a role also embracing IT management - Warner didn't like the look of The Coffee Club's piecemeal computing infrastructure. Network performance was slow and unstable, and data backups were sketchy.
"It was good to have IT under my control, but systems were haphazard," says Warner. "Eighteen years of piecemeal development, little planning, and deficient DR freaked me out. If something fell over I wasn't confident we could get it back up and running quickly. And as we host point-of-sale systems, any deficiencies would directly impact our stores. As a franchise group, we are supporting 220 franchisees, who have invested in the business. So, we're safeguarding those livelihoods as well."
Building in stability
Moving quickly, Warner engaged Harbour IT to perform a systems audit. The findings confirmed her suspicions, and also spotlighted the precariousness of critical data. While fortnightly tape rotation sounded adequate, closer inspection revealed a three-month absence of backups.
The immediate job was resurrecting backups and smoothing network performance, and Warner turned to Harbour IT to get the job done. However, longer term, she wanted a planned approach that would eventually deliver necessary computing infrastructure robustness and scalability, without the burden of mandatory capital expenditure and systems upkeep.
The first step was outsourcing IT infrastructure, which, at that point, comprised 26 physical servers supporting Microsoft Office and Exchange, the group's point-of-sale application MICROS, associated testing and development environments, and financial systems.
Harbour IT stepped in with infrastructure monitoring, called Harbour Watch, and Infrastructure management, or Harbour Manage - key service planks delivering what is effectively outsourced IT management.
While The Coffee Club IT systems remain onsite at the Brisbane head office, Harbour IT do all the watching and caretaking, applying proactive systems detection to arrest performance issues before they impact business services, and process management streamlining, which spans networks, infrastructure, applications, and security.
Critically, the engagement had to minimise capital outlay. On the ground, this meant extending the life of out-of-warranty servers, and remedial work to stabilise performance and satisfy internal and external audits. Chief amongst this activity was the migration of Microsoft Exchange to a new server platform; long-term archiving to satisfy business continuity requirements and litigation protection; a terminal server upgrade, and a new communications link and firewall.
Next step: Moving to the Cloud
No one buys IT infrastructure for fun, and if you could get by without it you probably would. But these days IT is the central weave striping business fabric, and functioning without IT isn't possible. Nevertheless, the delivery model is changing to minimise IT footprints. For example, Infrastructure-as-a-Service provides businesses with exactly what they require. In much the same way, households enjoy electricity supply without tending their own generators.
The model appealed to Warner at a number of levels, but principally for dissolving commitments to hardware and availing imminently scalable capacity in a predictable and transparent manner. Accordingly, she is spearheading the adoption of Harbour IT's cloud-based infrastructure services platform, which combines virtual computing platforms to deliver scaleable infrastructure services, spanning applications, operating systems, and infrastructure layers.
She explains: "We wanted a simple way to scale up and down, as we need, without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars," she says. "Just like a lease agreement - we know what we're going to use and what it will cost. It's very easy to plan - I don't have to go back to the board to buy more assets, and there's no need to look at financing options. So, from a CFO viewpoint, it's a great model. And from a business operations point of view it's very helpful to go up and down as we need to - otherwise you buy hardware that sits there not being fully utilised. In any case, who knows what we'll be doing in two years time - so why commit to a platform that may become outdated."
Protection from all angles
With IT footprints fast disappearing from The Coffee Club head office, Warner is protecting the business from all angles - systems performance variability, demand spikes, accounting uncertainty and tunnel vision.
"If you're relying on an IT person you're relying on one person's knowledge of a market that's changing everyday," says Warner. "How can you possibly stay up-to-date? The beauty of Harbour IT is that we benefit from a depth of experience across a number of industries and clients."
Solutions, rather than technology, are close to the accountant's heart. "We're interested in business enablement - not IT, which is just a tool," says Warner. "Harbour IT run their business as a business and helps us to run our business as a business. They come to us with solutions, which, for a non-technical person like me, is great. They understand our business well enough to know what's going to work and what isn't. So, they're not wasting my time with stuff that isn't going to come to anything."
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