What's your Branch Office Strategy?

Monday, October 09, 2006

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One of the most challenging tasks for any IT decision maker today is managing IT in branch offices. It can't be given second priority because branch offices reach out directly to your company's customers. Unless they're well connected to HO and have a well-managed IT infrastructure, they won't be able to serve the customers well. So, your organization's image and future growth actually depend on how well are the branch offices performing, which in turn depends upon how well are you managing their IT. You can't, therefore, afford to ignore the IT in your branch offices, and need a proper strategy to manage them. This is easier said than done.

Anil Chopra, Associate Editor

There are several key issues involved that hinder proper management of the branch office IT infrastructure. One of course is availability, or rather the lack of skilled manpower to deploy there. As the IT infrastructure in the branch offices is far simpler than that at the HO, it's difficult to find and retain good people in branch offices. The situation becomes worse if the branches are in remote areas because nobody wants to go there. Without skilled manpower, everything else becomes troublesome, whether it's rolling out applications, or applying a critical patch. In fact, in a survey that we did in July, wherein we went to a cross section of CIOs across the country, we found that rolling out applications to remote offices was a very critical issue. As a result, branch offices are more vulnerable to security threats even though you might have created a fort out of your head office.

So, what's the solution? How do you manage your branch office? One possibility is to centralize all core applications and provide remote connectivity to your branches. However, even this approach has its own problems that need to be accounted for. First is bandwidth, which needs to be planned and optimized. This is a task in itself, especially if you're using legacy applications that are not optimized to work over WAN links. Next is seamless connectivity, for which you would need to provide redundant communication links that automatically failover and prevent any disruption in work. The third most important point is identifying what will be hosted centrally and what will be local. You can't have everything hosted locally because of management and security issues, nor can you host everything centrally. For instance, you wouldn't want work at the branch office to stop just because users are not able to login, or the PCs can't get an IP address from the DHCP server. What's needed therefore is a mix of both, which needs to be devised carefully based on the strength of each branch.

Branch office automation therefore, isn't an easy job, but if planned and executed properly, can bring in big business benefits for your organization.

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