About Giarte

Giarte’s services are based on three key principles:

• service excellence;
• transparency;
• shared responsibility.

These principles are sometimes manifested explicitly, but particularly serve as the basis for making decisions on the specific structure of our services: in the design and implementation of research, for example, or when interpreting and presenting results or providing our clients with advice.

We don’t view these principles as a religion or dogma, but rather as a manifestation of our practical experience and our vision on IT. These principles also reflect our ideas on how to interact and do business with others, and the way in which we want to operate: aimed at improvement and progress for all parties involved. Certainly not mere hollow phrases, but simply based on experience, common sense and decency.

Service Excellence

An IT organisation is there to serve others. Its primary task is to support both end users and businesses in the effective and efficient execution of their duties. Service excellence needs to be high from the start if you want to achieve even higher levels of cooperation and realise inspiring partnerships within the business sector. Good service coupled with a service-oriented approach is essential for a relationship based on mutual trust with businesses and to build up credit.

The importance of a good basic IT service is often neglected. Projects require vast amounts of money and management attention and the parties involved are rewarded with prestige or problems. A good basic service is based on a streamlined process, reliable tools and motivated staff. It is the result of innumerable decisions, large and small, as well as a keen eye for both the bigger picture and the smallest of details. Achieving service excellence is not a question of money. Instead it is about a widely supported vision and a burning desire for improvement. To the benefit of the end user and the interest of the organisation as a whole.

This makes service excellence a culture rather than a business case. For projects, you build a business case; service excellence pays for itself, though not everyone would see it that way. That doesn’t mean that you should abandon measurements and a critical look at the results. Measuring is the cornerstone of every quality-based method. IT managers are responsible for creating a culture in which a customer-oriented service organisation can prosper.

Transparency

IT service benefits from transparency. Show which areas are excelling and which are not. Show where you are today and where you intend to be tomorrow. Targeted improvement is only possible through transparency. And nobody can keep things hidden forever, not even a business. In that sense, transparency contributes to a constructive and mature dialogue about objectives and available resources between business and IT. What do we want to achieve as an entity, what are our priorities and which resources are we willing to invest?

The IT organisation can contribute actively to transparency. By providing control information in functional terms. There are many types of data of interest to businesses – the number of incidents per week, the average resolution time, or the availability of core applications, to name a few. Another step further is where you show the average direct and indirect costs of an incident or the costs of one hour of downtime of a core application. This information enables you to build a business case aimed at investing in service excellence and highlighting the added value of the IT department.

Creating transparency is easier said than done. It requires the establishment of a future-oriented culture. In a blame culture, where pointing fingers is the name of the game, transparency is frustrated in every way. After all, it will only be used against you anyway.
What is important is not how you got here, but how you will continue from now on.

Shared responsibility

We won’t hesitate to remind a supplier of his responsibility. And we do the same towards our clients. If problems arise, it’s pointless to call only the supplier to account without taking a critical look at the role of the client. It is not only pointless, but also counterproductive. A client carries mutual responsibility for a poor relationship. If not directly, then certainly in an indirect way, for example by failing to create circumstances that make for a better functioning of the relationship. As client, it is easy to complain about your service provider; you’ll have to adopt a different approach if you truly want to contribute to change.

The focus on service excellence, transparency and shared responsibility is reflected in our activities in many ways. With our ITsat^® service and our studies, which include Outsourcing Performance^®, we support a culture of service excellence, foster transparency within the sector and take a critical look at everyone’s responsibility. We identify bottlenecks on both the demand and supply side of the market. But even more importantly: we take a close look at which mechanisms get in the way of optimum cooperation and come up with alternatives to remove these obstacles . That is the essence of Giarte’s service.