TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--By helping IT departments worldwide complete pressing initiatives in just five business days, Info-Tech Research Group’s Workshops service has grown rapidly since its launch in 2012.
Info-Tech Research Group, an information technology research and advisory company, has delivered more than 1,400 workshops to members which include organizations such as NASA, Toyota, University of Exeter and the United Nations.
According to Info-Tech founder and CEO Joel McLean, “One of our most successful innovations has been our reimagining of the IT workshop, in its execution and delivery to our members. Working collaboratively with the team onsite, our expert facilitators work through critical IT problems and project deliverables while training the team, using a learning-based approach. Our analysts spend five very productive and collaborative days helping the member organization finish at least 90 percent of the key project it selects. Our solutions and services are rooted in years of research and insights from best-practice data and deliver real measured value, both in terms of time and dollars saved.”
Fernco, a U.S.-based manufacturing company, has been an Info-Tech member since 2015 and recently concluded its eighth workshop. The workshops have covered critical IT areas such as change management, risk management, IT strategy, information security strategy and disaster recovery planning. With help from the team at Info-Tech, Fernco has been able to systematically implement an ERP solution, launch a three-year IT strategy and take a strategic approach to disaster recovery and business continuity. Fernco was able to quantify the measured value from one of the workshops at $50,000 and time savings of 20 business days.
Member Amy Meger, information and cyber governance manager at Platte River Power Authority, speaks to the quality of workshops conducted by Info-Tech and the results they achieved for her organization. “The Incident Response Workshop allowed us to walk out of the week-long workshop with buy-in from the primary stakeholders and a draft for our plan and runbooks,” Meger said.
During a workshop, the facilitators work together with the participants to help them take on the identified challenge and put in place a working solution that can streamline processes and operations, while helping improve collaboration among different departments. Info-Tech workshops have been proven to save companies an average of $56,411 and 29 business days.
“At Info-Tech Research Group, we work hard to offer better workshops than anyone else,” said Alan Neal, vice president, IT Workshop Delivery. “We use an intensive learning-oriented approach combining insights that are backed with pragmatic research and industry best practices, along with onsite expertise provided by our SME analysts and workshop specialists. Our approach allows us to get started immediately, and not only helps our members collaboratively reach resolutions in one week, but also equips them with industry best practices, for the future. The return on investment and other benefits speak for themselves. We are excited about our growth on a global scale, and we remain committed to further innovation across our processes to continually improve and deliver value.”
Members use Info-Tech’s workshops for various objectives, which include the following: to accelerate project timelines, implement or improve a core IT process, increase the skillset of teams, and get third-party validation on a key project. Info-Tech offers four different types of workshop experiences, each geared to help achieve a specific goal: strategic workshops help the IT leader build consensus on how IT will support business capabilities in the future; process workshops enable the organization to design and map out a draft version of a broken, incomplete, or nonexistent process; training workshops help build specific skillsets in members’ teams; and finally technology workshops help members build strategies for specific technologies that their organizations are looking to leverage.
Ian Tilsed, assistant director, IT (Strategy & Architecture), at the University of Exeter has been a member of Info-Tech Research Group for many years. Speaking of the successful partnership, he says, “For us, the workshops have helped bring alive the guided implementations that we’ve been using. It encourages us to make the investment of time, and to bring together all the relevant people in one room to work collaboratively with the experts from Info-Tech Research Group over a period of five very productive days. Info-Tech has helped us deliver results much quicker than if we had tried to do it ourselves.”
University of Exeter has engaged Info-Tech for several workshops covering a variety of topics, including data lifecycle management, IT service management, and most recently configuration management. This workshop delivered a measured value of $122,217 with a time saving of 10 business days.
Summing up the benefits of partnering with Info-Tech Research Group, Tilsed says, “We have been going through a period of significant change, as a department, as well as an organization, as we strive to successfully deliver a digital transformation. With services such as the Workshops and [Info-Tech] Academy, Info-Tech Research Group offers us a unique combination of foresight and knowledge, of knowing what is going to happen in the future, along with a set of practical tools and processes that help us move forward, achieve great results and focus on delivering value-add, rather than reinventing something that has been done before.”
About Info-Tech Research Group
Info-Tech Research Group is one of the fastest growing full-service research and analyst firms in North America, serving more than 30,000 IT and HR professionals. With offices in Canada, U.S. and Australia, Info-Tech Research Group offers pragmatic analyst insights and actionable tools to IT departments from world-class organizations such as NASA, New Balance, Spotify and the United Nations. Info-Tech Research Group’s divisions include McLean & Company and SoftwareReviews.
