Hello and welcome to the latest issue of the Avanade Advisor, our forum for sharing insight, best practices, and other advice from our IT consultants with our colleagues and customers worldwide.

In today’s ultra-competitive environment, organizations are continually looking for ways to further reduce costs and grow the top line. In this issue, we take a look two different ways businesses can achieve profitable growth by improving their IT agility— by streamlining their operations and also maximizing collaboration across organizations.

We first take a look at a real-life example from International SOS, a global provider of medical and security services. The organization’s recent implementation of its NewCase system gave them a better view of its worldwide operations and aided in more accurate decision making, enabling it to improve services to customers.

We also hear from Avanade consultants who share their experience on how organizations can streamline their existing or planned investments and maximize the return on investment for businesses. CRM expert Matt Parks explains how a federated architecture can increase the value and flexibility of a global CRM implementation by enabling individual groups to maintain their independence and optimize operations where necessary. Americas CTO Tyson Hartman examines how SOA can make businesses more agile and illustrates both the opportunities and limits of SOA implementations.

Last, we hear from Avanade CTO Ashish Kumar, whose vision on the direction of digital collaboration in the workplace shows new ways organizations will be able to improve their business performance by connecting people and information across global enterprises.

Thank you for your time and interest. As always, we look forward to receiving your comments – simply send as an e-mail to editor@avanade.com.

Adam Warby
Executive VP - Market Development