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Home > Typical Assignments > Technology Transformation
Technology Transformation
Introduction
Delivering a strategic programme of change to e-enable a business often gets scoped to look purely at the needs of the business users and public/customers. Websites with transparent links to the back end legacy systems are common place deliverables alongside new organisation structured for the business and in some instances re-engineered processes. But successful delivery often requires much more than these things particularly in an established organisation with existing practices and technologies. It cannot be simply assumed that the technology team is geared up to deliver and support these new services – in our experience they frequently fall behind the business in terms of managing their own changes.
Business Issues
Clients often find these sorts of programmes a little like “trying to change the wheel of the car while still moving down the motorway”. The need to support a large programme of radical business change, keep the business as usual performing and do it in a sustainable way such that the people are carried along the journey is a tall order. The complexity of migrating the technical architecture over to a new modern platform to support the “e” demands is not an easy task in itself. Add in the new skills and organisation structures required from an IT area, to enable them to design, develop, test and provide ongoing support to an e centric organisation and the complexity rises ten fold. Dealing with human and often political change invariably presents senior management with a really challenging if not almost impossible task
Approach
The entier team have hands on practical experience of helping organisations through the Technology Transformation required to support modern businesses and organisations. By linking the strategy and priorities at top level to a series of carefully scoped work streams it is possible to progress on a number of fronts in a focussed but integrated manner:
- Building a new strategic architecture with a clear migration path for often unstable/dated legacy platforms
- Pro-actively build the new platforms replacing the existing technology where necessary.
- Assessing the end to end Technology Capability sets and driving a programme of change to address the priority areas working with and through the existing management teams and staff
- Re-aligning the Technology team organisation and governance structure to work alongside the new capabilities being developed and most importantly interface powerfully with its customers
- Development and agreement of a sourcing strategy for Technology – linking where necessary with any outsourcing plans that are in place
One fundamental principle of the approach lies in the continual drive to transfer skills to permanent staff thus allowing them take on the new capabilities as they are developed in progressive and confident manner.
Outcomes
There is one continuing message that we deliver to clients about this sort of programme of change – "It takes time and much of what is developed and driven for in the first few months will be foundation building with little or no visibility to the business and the wider population". There are however many positive outcomes:
- Speedier delivery (up to 50% quicker) of much higher quality solutions
- Cost savings through re-use of technology components
- Consolidated and simplified sourcing
- Headcount reductions but with greater staff flexibility
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