Assessment Analyst™

Consultant-Assisted Assessment Tools

Know what IT infrastructure improvement opportunities exist, reveal the value of improving IT Infrastructure, and better position your solutions with Cx-level executives as a Trusted Advisor

• Do your customers know what gaps and improvement opportunities exist in their current IT Infrastructure?
• Do your customers know how they compare to IT Service Management Best Practice and why this matters?
• Do they understand how they compare to peers and leaders and what falling behind could mean?
• Do your customers understand how your solutions and services could help address their most important IT Infrastructure challenges and goals?
• Do customers understand the potential IT and business benefits of implementing these recommendations?
• How can using ITIL/ITSM assessments make your engagements more strategic, differentiate your offerings from the competition, and speed the buying cycle?

CIOs and IT executives are under constant pressure to demonstrate the business value of IT and provide a roadmap on how this value will continuously improve. Assessment Analyst tools provide means to assess an organization’s capability and maturity, or readiness, or level of quality against standardized frameworks and best practices supporting the IT Hierarchy of Needs including disciplines for IT Services Infrastructure, Application Lifecycle Infrastructure, Enterprise Productivity Infrastructure and Business Intelligence Infrastructure.

It is important for your sales professionals, consultants and channel partners to be empowered to help customers understand opportunities, and how your solutions and services can help them improve their IT Infrastructure and Service Management capabilities.

In fact, one of IDC's top 10 predictions for 2008 suggests "End users are seeking IT engagements that are more "business-outcome oriented" to ensure greater efficiency and agility for their projects. Thus vendors are expected to deliver according to the IT Service Management (ITSM) and the latest version of ITILv3 which specifies the strategy of IT within the organization and alignment with business processes and outcomes. IDC believes that the ability to provide a mix of IT and business consulting will be critical for vendors wishing to act as strategic advisors to their clients throughout 2008 and beyond.." - IDC Press  Release 12 December 2007.

For consultative sessions with IT managers and executives, it is important you help them understand:

• know where their capability and maturity stands today in terms of overall scores, and in particular what risks and opportunities they face in delivering optimal quality of service.

• identify opportunities for improvement and develop a roadmap / plan for addressing the highest priority issues with potential solutions and the return on investment in terms the business organization will understand

• position their IT capabilities against Industry Best Practice and their peer competitors to portray their competitive advantage from IT

Alinean's Assessment Analyst software will empower your sales professionals, consultants and channel partners to be trusted advisors in assisting IT Executives in performing assessments, and most importantly, aligning your solution and services to IT Infrastructure improvement opportunities, and quantifying the potential high-level value of driving a recommended service improvement plan.

Your team can help an organization understand where they are today, where they want to be in the future and help decide the best path to get there. By facilitating the assessment and discussion, your team will accelerate the buying process and be able to position your solutions within the context of realizing quality of service, lowering IT costs, reducing business risk and loss, increasing IT productivity and efficiencies and improving user and customer satisfaction.

The Assessment Analyst is an online web-based, consultant-assisted assessment tool. It examines an organization's IT infrastructure and service management capabilities then pinpoints areas for enhancement based on industry-standard best practices.  Comparisons are made against all respondents who complete the assessment.

The tool assesses on a relevant selection of over 1,500 people, process and technology capabilities across ITIL v3 defined practices of Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement as well as ITIL v2 defined practices including:

• Service Delivery: Service Level Management, Availability Management, Capacity Management, Financial Management and IT Service Continuity Management

• Service Support: Service Desk, Incident Management, Problem Management, Configuration Management, Change Management and Release Management

• Application Management, Security Management and ICT Infrastructure Management

The Assessment Analyst tools deliver powerful engagement reports elevating the relationship beyond feature, function, price presentations to valued advisor and planning partner. And your products and services, and your unique rules on recommendations and value propositions may be added to customize the analytics and report, providing you and your team with a unique offering and competitive advantage.

The Alinean Assessment Analyst can immediately help your sales and consulting engagement teams to:

• Measure prospects  IT Infrastructure and Service Management capability and opportunities for improvement

• Compare prospects to other respondents to quantify gaps and raise urgency (e.g. how the customer compares against an Industry standards based ITSM capability model and to same industry peers and leaders with similar location and size.) 

• Communicate opportunities for improvement, including a detailed and prioritized gap analysis and solution recommendation.

• Quantify the value of improving gaps and implementing recommended solutions / products (directional high level value

Alinean Assessment Analyst-driven campaigns can help to:

• Drive higher level strategic selling

• Engage executives in annual planning cycles and consultative engagements to discover issues and understand gaps

• Drive understanding of the most important projects and product that can lead to competitive advantage and quantifiable value

• Improve urgency and drive demand for products using gap analysis, strategic positioning, competitive assessment and value quantification

Features

• Survey questions to assess current capability and opportunities for improvement

• Online assessment results comparing company Industry standards based capability model and to other respondents and peer average/ leader benchmarks

• Improvement value quantification, providing an overview on the value of improving and closing gap with competition

• Compelling printed Word and PPT reports

• Save/Open functions, to allow users to work iteratively in completing and refining assessment results

• Collaboration features to support team based work sharing, team selling and completion of online assessments and collaboration

• Lead and usage capture and tracking

• Database of respondent results for analysis

• Multi-currency support and worldwide database for worldwide selling opportunities

• Uses the EnterpriseROI™ sales tool platform for enterprise scalability, integration, collaboration and standardization

Benefits

• Connect with executive level/strategic buyers regarding assessments and programs

• Uncover opportunities to sell, up-sell and cross-sell your solutions with a business case for buying

• Enable sales and consulting professionals to be viewed as a trusted advisor in helping customers to realize the benefits of improving

• Raise urgency for your solutions / services by aligning with results from assessments, competitive measures, peer comparisons and gap analysis reports

• Position solutions and engagement as part of an overall strategic Service Improvement plan

• Reduce sales cycles and improve competitive advantage