Piero Verdiani
IT-Business Integration in crisis times: a utopia?
By Piero Verdiani, Delivery Director, Intrasoft International
Short Bio of the speaker
Piero Verdiani is Intrasoft International Delivery Director for Outsourcing and Managed Services. Born in Milano (Italy) he relocated to Denmark in 1973 in order to be able to follow his dream of becoming a computer specialist. He started as an operator on mainframes moving up to programmer, system programmer, network specialist, project manager, and later R&D manager for software development projects.
In 1984 he become Managing Director for Ambrasoft International a Copenhagen based software development company which was one of the first one in Europe to use new technologies for software development and that embraced Windows and UNIX as production environments. Object oriented programming was also extensively used. The company was also a precursor for the usage of artificial intelligence in many areas such as security, health care and aircraft maintenance.
In 1985 he introduced a global Software Development Quality Approach in order to be able to deliver quality projects within agreed time and price. This approach will lead the company to become one of the first software development companies, in 1990, to be certified ISO9001 by the British Standardization Institute (BSI).
At the same time he presented at the Scandinavian NordData Conference a new organizational model for software development teams based on the concept of independent teams working in close relationship to each other through a well-defined interface. This organizational model, called the “rolling bearing” model, discards the classic top down organizational approach with the management on the top, but put the management in the centre of any project/operation and moves operational teams around the management. This opened an interesting discussion within the Danish IT world: today it can be concluded that this model has been embraced by many companies.
In 1994 he was asked to improve Olivetti’s worldwide network of professional services operations counting more than 10.000 people. During a three years period he succeed to create a profitable and networked organization where cooperation between the units was the keyword.
In 1997 he was called to manage Eli Lilly’s (pharmaceutical industry) Programme Office for the year 2000 for the EMEA Area and, afterwards, the migration to Euro. He approached those programmes by introducing the concept of “programme bible”, the IT screenplay.
In 2001 he started working with Intrasoft International with the responsibility of growing the IT Outsourcing and Managed Services business area, which by now is Intrasoft‘s third largest business area.
Within this context he introduced in operations the first ITIL concepts in 2001 developing an operational methodology for new projects/operations which is ITIL based, but that also takes into account the customer reality and it is, therefore, quite flexible and adaptable.
He also uses his skills to support his customers to evolve, improve and optimize their service management services
He holds an ITIL Service Manager certification and he has been guest speaker to several ITSMF conferences in Europe.
Summary of the session
In those crisis times when the buzzwords are “margins”, “costs cutting”, lean organizations, the following questions arise:
- Is IT part of the business?
- Is the business really interested in to be involved in IT related decisions that maybe they do not understand?
- Is the business interested in integration or to have more IT services for less costs without troubling how they get it?
- Is IT interested in being integrated in the business?
- Shouldn’t we take direct responsibility to make this happen?
- Shouldn’t we use the fat that exists in every organization and convert it into energy?
- Is ITIL becoming a religion with too many gurus (guruization) and parting from its original pragmatic approach?
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