Horizontal Expertise

Why Horizontal?

One of an organization's strongest attributes is the ability to work horizontally. This occurs both across the business process and across the functional organizations. LTI has demonstrated this capability for more than two decades. It generally consists of being able to take expertise in one area and expand it an adjacent functional area in the same business. We refer to this as intra-component. It takes additional skill to replicate the expertise across businesses requiring the same service. We refer to this as inter-component. LTI has demonstrated capability in both areas.

Intra-component

Our infrastructure roots are in Unix System Administration. After several years perfecting this expertise, we were asked to take on NT/WinTel System Administration. This resulted in a common set of processes and procedures and eliminated the hand-offs that generally occur between support teams. We expanded our expertise to the storage and data protection arenas and moved through multiple technologies. Along the way, we developed tools and processes to monitor operations and automate wherever possible.

Inter-component

LTI has a long history of providing High Performance Computing for an equipment manufacturing component of a Fortune 50 organization. This success led to a request to provide a similar service to the organization’s Research component. These efforts were similar yet ran different processes and procedures. The success of this expansion led to two other manufacturing components requesting similar High Performance Computing support. Over the a period of approximately 12 months LTI combined these four teams in four locations into a single team and have worked to develop a common set of processes and procedures. This has resulted in increased capacity and lower cost as well as faster turn-around and through put. LTI now provides High Performance Computing expertise horizontally across the entire corporation.

Business Value

Horizontal expertise results in lower total cost, increased standardization, improved productivity and consistency across businesses.