Welcome to illamar.

illamar is an Inuit (better known to Europeans a Eskimos) word meaning Friend or Associated. This is the kind of service that we offer. Having advanced capability in the IT field, we can provide a reassuring interaction at all levels of an organization. We specialize in conducting business process re-engineering and we are focused on returning value for IT investments.

Our primary area of expertise is the offering of Governance of Enterprise IT frameworks or standards implementation. We also provide tools to complement our assignments and, most importantly, continuity after our departure.

Our Philisophy

Looking at an Enterprise from a fairly standard and generic point of view, we decompose it into six (6) functional areas: Human Resources, Strategic Planning, Finance, Information Technology, Operations and Marketing (which includes Sales). From these functional areas, that people are accustomed to at work, we can directly produce an organizational chart to represent its top two (2) levels (see Exhibit 2). The CEO is accountable to the board of directors regarding all aspects of the orgnizations operations. While the Chief of Human Resources (CHR) is accountable to the CEO for all aspects of the Human Resources operations, the Chief Strategic Officer, for stragic planning, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for the financials, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for a proper alignment between the Business Strategy and the IT strategy while providing an acceptable return on IT investment. The Chief Operations Officer (COO) handles Operations and the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) handles customer interactions, including Sales and Public relations.

Managing Functional Areas

Most organizations now run their operations in a matrix environment. This means that multiple organisational charts represent dimensions of the matrix. This anables us to tackle governance at a macro level. The draw back is that the connection points of these organisational charts or dimensions are people. Therefore, people must report to many supervisors and it becomes more complex to manage performmace.

Driving the Enterprise

In order for an organization to be responsive to internal and external environment and for them to reap benefits from opportunities as they arises, managment must be flexible and responsive to change. It is imperative that good communication mechanisms be implemented to translate and diffuse the business strategy into tactical direction. There are no automated ways to do so as each node on the organisation chart must digest the message coming from upper management and translate it into their own Mission, Vision, Objectives and Goal and then cascade it down the hierarchy (see Exhibit 3). This is like the captain of a ship giving commands to move the ship to a destination. However, even more importantly, only by finding the ship's position can the captain decide if the ship is on the right course. The same applies to any organization, and this is acheived by a reporting matrix, digesting and summarizing performance at all levels in the organisation and generating a Balanced ScoreCard. We develop internet/intranet tools to support such functionality.

Aligning IT Strategy with Business Strategy

To represent our expertise, we will create a two dimension matrix organisation chart. The first one is the already defined Functional structure and the second is being an IT structure (see Exhibit 4). We can say that Human Resources touches everybody in the organization, as well as Finance.

However, IT has become an integral part of day-to-day operations and an important tool in achieving market leadership and organisational governance. IT must provide high levels of services, being flexible in adapting to changes and be reliable while providing optimized values in IT investment.

As people must deal with HR to make sure that an acceptable and agreed upon remuneration scheme is in place to reward for services provided to the organization, the same applies to IT services. It is generally expected that the proper IT infrastructure will be in place to provide Effective and Efficient business functionality while maintaining Confidentiality. Integrity and Availability of Services. These must meet Service Levels Requirements whether written in a Service Level Agreement (SLA) or not all the while being compliant with laws and regulations.

In order to achieve these objectives, proper communication channels must be put in place at all levels of the organization (see Exhibit 3).
We only show the first two (2) level of the organisational chart but this inter-relationship must be present at all nodes of the organisation. This does not mean that a one to one connection must exist at each level but one to many or many to one relationship can exist and they can span many levels of the organisation.

Many generally accepted best practice frameworks and standards exist which greatly help in establishing the necessary infrastructure to meet these demands. These frameworks and standards apply to Security, Governance and Risk in operational and project management (to name a few).

We at illamar focus on implementing IT Security, Governance and Risk management. We thrive to excel at implementing what is the best fit for an organization and have acquired substantial knowledge in ISACA's COBIT, Val IT and Risk IT frameworks.