IT review & strategic roadmap development

The organisation offers professional indemnity and a variety of support services to a vast international membership of professionals across multiple global regions, while also managing a substantial investment portfolio.

The IT department comprises a team of approx. 120 people, primarily UK-based, with the majority working from the organisation’s headquarters. Internal support is provided across the organisation, with additional assistance from sub-contractors and partners to manage international operations.

Challenge

The client had recently engaged a new CIO who wanted help with gaining a rapid assessment of the organisation’s IT function and production of an associated strategic roadmap.

Several large projects were underway and in distress with no clear IT strategy to address the fundamental issues causing the problems with the projects, or to provide a north star to build towards.

Solution

Mason Advisory conducted a four-week rapid assessment of the IT function. followed by another four-week period to provide a strategic vision and a high-level three-year roadmap to deliver the change.

Our analysis involved individual interviews with key consumers of IT services as well as members of the IT team with workshops to review and iterate on the findings. This produced a summary which indicated that the IT team was not adequately delivering the services required by the organisation, pinpointing specific issues with the operating model and technology roadmap.

To form the vision, we again worked with key consumers and the IT senior leadership team. This highlighted a strong need to move from solely taking direction from the wider business to providing more leadership and ownership of the technology estate.

Upon acceptance of the vision, we deployed our expertise to structure key initiatives required to drive the strategy along a three-year roadmap.

The key focus of the recommendations was to focus on short to medium term improvements to the operating model and supplier landscape to provide the leadership and ownership required alongside an improved ability to deliver. This was then coupled with longer term recommendations around driving a more flexible technology stack to move away from the legacy applications and infrastructure.

Outcome

The clear business case provided for an improved operating model and supplier strategy lead to an immediate project to deliver these initiatives and place the organisation in a significantly improved position for the future.

The wider IT vision and three-year strategy is being communicated throughout the organisation to provide a clear direction for all parties, and to highlight to the wider organisation the range of changes that the IT department were planning in the next few years and the positive steps being taken to drive improvements across people, process and technology.

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