Elsis UAB, IT solutions group which has developed risk management information system for Italian aeronautical company Alenia Aeronautica, seeks to find more new niches and eventually to withdraw from outsourcing services provision.
Three years ago Elsis received Alenia Aeronautica request to develop a risk management system on the basis of provided functional descriptions and realised soon that the customer is not quite sure about what he wanted. Elsis, which had no experience in the field of risk management solutions at that time, could not help Alenia to identify its requirements precisely, so the project got stuck in the bureaucratic mechanism of the huge company and came to failure.
However, the EC funding gave Elsis an opportunity to develop a prototype of such system. The exact vision of the project and the acquired know-how was offered to the Italians which actually kept silence for almost a year, and the project was resumed. Therefore, Elsis, which finished the first stage of the Alenia Aeronautica system implementation last year, not only seeks to continue its cooperation with this aircraft producer, but also feels to have discovered a new specialisation profile.
Among the challenges of the abovementioned project was the size of Alenia Aeronautica, the number of its different and remote subsidiaries, the fact that the IT department of the company had poor understanding of the processes performed by different divisions, organisational and other peculiarities. Nevertheless Elsis have realised that instead of waiting for a ready order from such customers it would be better to offer them own vision and know-how.
Most often customers begin to realise what they want only after getting the first tangible product. Indeed few are granted a gift of abstract thinking enabling to comprehend the future or desirable result just at a glance to the papers – that is why in the IT world prototype development gains popularity: this way, customers can be promptly offered primary product versions.
The main lesson learned by Elsis in this case was that customers less and less need a mere order fulfiller. Technologies become a matter-of-cause – anyone can do a programming, so they can choose one company for one project and another for the other.
Attempts to sell simply programming skills (software development outsourcing service) guarantee only a minor share of the pie, whereas the greatest added value is created when a company offers its customer own know-how and vision.
Although Elsis implemented the Alenia project following the initial financial terms agreed and for this reason failed to gain an extra profit, managers of the company say that in the future system modelling, identification of processes and requirements and other consultancy services should generate much more profit than programming itself.
Elsis plans to make an active effort in popularising risk management systems in Lithuania, as well. Quite often company’s risks are assessed and reviewed using such primitive tools as Excel, although automatic collection and visualisation of risk determination data could prompt and simplify this function. Specific risk assessment criteria are usually set by the company itself. These can be hundreds of such variables as financial results, numbers of users’, purchasers’ and production mistakes or other parameters which are automatically collected and summarised by the system.
So far export generates only about 15–30 % of Elsis revenues, whereas in Lithuania the company works almost exclusively with the public sector. Although Elsis is not going to yield it, it plans to put all its efforts into increasing the share of export and in an ideal case the company would like to give away developing singular and occasional projects.
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The full text was published in business daily Verslo žinios on April 27, 2012.
Broader version at http://vz.lt/?PublicationId=0b4249a5-0d40-40b4-9228-a65adbe83c3d&ref=rss#ixzz1v22EXGsF