Digital Operating Model Development for a major rental organisation

The prominent listed property company aimed to provide excellent client service for customers to achieve their business goals, by offering business spaces that create opportunities and value for all stakeholders. They wished to continuously build sustainable competitive advantage by focusing on their management approach, talent and technology. Their strategy was based on the use and further development of their specialist operating platform to manage a portfolio of high-quality properties in secure urban locations, while achieving sustainable growth of income and net-asset value. This while balancing the needs of, and creating value for, shareholders, customers, employees, local communities, the environment and other stakeholders. 

Challenge

Our client wanted assurance that they could continue to develop and operate their transformed technology platform – using Azure cloud product and service components including Dynamics 365, Data Lake, Power BI and Microsoft (Office) 365 – and integrate them to deliver technology services in an efficient and effective manner.  

The business had experienced a time of unprecedented growth so needed the technology platform to scale to support demand, and to inform strategic decisions via the provision of reliable data. Their priorities, therefore, were the provision of digital services with the ability to gain insight from available data and agility to respond to changing business needs. Mason Advisory were engaged to support the development of a detailed Digital Operating Model and a phased transformation roadmap to mature their Technology and Data Services.  

Solution

We had not previously worked for our client, so flexibility of approach was key to establishing a collaborative relationship. This facilitated a rapid review of the current state of the technology ecosystem and cemented an understanding the business strategy that would guide the Technology and Data Strategy and inform the Digital Operating Model.  

With this baseline, we developed the vision and objectives for the technology organisation which would form the foundations of the operating model and roadmap of activities. In addition, we reviewed their in-flight projects including the further adoption of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, identifying and tracking dependencies and pre-requisites. Our team then conducted a maturity assessment of the technology team capability using our ITSM Maturity Assessment Framework to evaluate the current service and identify areas of opportunity and growth.  

Our recommendations included development of an enterprise architecture capability, industrialising and automating support services and supplier interfaces, standardising tools and services, enhancing security and compliance practices, effective supplier management and realigning the technology organisation structure to the new operating model. We identified investment areas across people and talent, tools, and services, in addition to data and automation capabilities, and subsequently provided an overview of benefits and areas of cost avoidance. Our consultants developed a detailed roadmap and backlog of activities with high level classification including priority, effort required, costs and associated benefits, and a list of immediate next steps for the client to undertake.  

To inform the sourcing plan and develop a strong technology partner ecosystem, we worked in partnership with our client’s key suppliers to review existing service lines, contractual agreements, ways of working and associated processes, and drafted enhancements to enable its suppliers to align to the new operating model.  

Our detailed, but pragmatic approach to defining the transformation roadmap ensured that our client had a tangible and actionable set of activities to realise each phase of the operating model development. 

Outcome

Our contribution has helped our client to successfully embark on its Digital Operating Model transformation journey and begin to align its people, processes, and tools to its business and technology platform strategy, and deliver innovative digital services and solutions for its multi-let industrials clients and shareholders. 

“Mason Advisory supported our organisation with its technology service transition efforts – in preparation for a significant expansion and maturity of its technology and data portfolio.  Mason Advisory leveraged its expertise to collaboratively work with us to define a MVP operating model, realign its sourcing model and to define a roadmap for delivering increased maturity and scalability to it technology and data operations.  The Mason Advisory teams’ diligence, quality and breadth/depth of expertise over the course of this project was outstanding and has delivered significant value to the business.” 

Senior Technology, Data & Transformation Lead – A prominent listed property company

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