Restructuring IT ways of working for agility and innovation

A prominent player in the UK financial services sector, supporting a vast network of professional advisers. They provide comprehensive regulatory, business, and technical support to wealth, mortgage, and insurance advisers, ensuring their clients are equipped for long-term success. With a strong focus on customer-centric solutions, they aim to empower advisers to deliver exceptional service while fostering sustainable growth and innovation within the industry.

Challenge

Our client faced persistent challenges within their IT function, which was struggling to keep pace with the rapidly evolving needs of the business. Inefficiencies and legacy processes resulted in slow decision-making, fragmented governance, and limited scalability. There was an urgent need to optimise IT operations, align with business goals, and create a foundation for future innovation. The client also needed to build the capabilities to support growth through data-driven techniques and foster a culture of innovation to stay competitive in a fast-changing marketplace.

Solution

We initiated an extensive maturity assessment, focusing on the client’s IT capabilities, processes, and governance structures. Our approach was centered on a three-phase transformation roadmap designed to modernise operations and enable long-term growth:

• Lean: Eliminating bottlenecks, streamlining workflows, and implementing governance reforms to reduce inefficiencies and create faster delivery cycles.
• Agile: Deploying Agile methodologies to empower teams, enabling them to prioritise work more effectively, accelerate decision-making, and deliver customer value with greater speed.
• Innovate: Establishing a foundation for innovation by creating a culture of continuous improvement and experimentation. The final phase of the roadmap focuses on fostering an innovation-driven environment, leveraging data and advanced analytics to fuel new ideas, enhance customer experiences, and drive business value. This phase is supported by the strengthened Enterprise Architecture (EA) function, which ensures strategic alignment and provides the necessary frameworks for innovation to thrive across the organisation.

Outcome

The client has successfully restructured their IT organisation and is actively progressing through the Lean and Agile phases. The Enterprise Architecture function is being built as strategic hub, to help to align IT initiatives with overall business goals and setting the roadmap for future developments. As they continue to advance, their focus shifts toward leveraging innovation and data-driven techniques to propel future growth. This structured approach positions the client to lead in their sector by embracing continuous improvement and a forward-thinking innovation strategy that will fuel long-term success.

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