IT Transformation Consulting Services
Catriona Anderson
No business can stand the test of time without adapting to change, and business-led IT transformation is the act of supporting strategic growth or changing how an organisation operates. These changes are significant, not simple tweaks to processes or upgrades to systems. Business IT transformation consulting firms are expert consultants who work on projects that help clients integrate strategy, process, and information technology, and provide support to increase effectiveness, reduce costs and improve profit and shareholder value.
IT Transformation Services
IT transformation is “the process of exploiting digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create a robust new digital business model” (Gartner) and involves changing the systems, processes, people and technology across a whole business or business unit, to achieve measurable improvements in efficiency, effectiveness, and stakeholder satisfaction. Transformation should always be a step-change in the right direction for an organisation. As such, this organisational change could be sought with the aim of capturing a new segment of the market, adding commercial value to the business, improving information technology efficiencies through leveraging big data, automation and cloud computing projects, building more appropriate operating models to support transformation efforts and designing and implementing programmes that transform a business’ operational resilience (such as DR planning or cyber awareness training).
Leveraging Modern Technology approaches to accelerate transformation
Data forms a key part of the engine that underpins successful digital business transformation. The opportunity data brings, from reducing waste and costs through to identifying new revenue from your IP can be leveraged relatively quickly through data transformation efforts (data architecture, integration and management).
Automation outcomes such as process speed execution or enhanced organizational integration can be achieved through automation landscape readiness and process opportunity pipeline approaches (process mining).
Cloud Computing is the process of moving your existing IT workloads to the cloud, including migration of apps, software programs, desktops, data, or an entire infrastructure in alignment with the business objectives of the organisation. Moving to cloud computing sometimes reduces the cost of managing IT systems, but its true value comes in the ability to scale, build robust business continuity capabilities, and give access to agile, enterprise-class technology, for everyone.
Using architecture in the right way to accelerate decision making and roadmaps
Architecture should add value by providing business and technology synchronicity, enabling business outcomes and creating value through future-proofing the organisation and focusing on enterprise agility. From an architecture perspective, this can be achieved by delivering business insight, ensuring consistency, accelerating decision making and fulfilling the trusted advisor role. At its core architecture is about planning for the future, advising how to operate efficiently, and guiding decision-making while building strong business and stakeholder relationships.
Having the right people, culture and operating models necessary to enact the desired change
A coherent IT transformation strategy needs a focus in culture, skills and operating models. By its definition, IT transformation will need to support the need to respond to a changing IT buying landscape, a change in expected business outcomes or the desire to accelerate the speed of delivery. You can’t do that with existing traditional approaches and legacy skills. When we talk to clients, they typically look to address these challenges in one of three ways:
- Target Operating Model Design & Delivery: involves business outcome definition, internal and market capability assessments, OP model design options and transition & transformation.
- Functional Maturity Assessments & Remediation: involving a best practice assessment against our proprietary or industry frameworks and an actionable remediation plan.
- Ways of Working Review & Change Delivery: involving a review of people, processes and tools to enable faster, flexible and scalable working practices.
Building and embedding robust operational resilience practices
Resilience is often forgotten about when embarking on IT Transformation activity. Resilience is not just clearly marking exit points, practising fire/safety drills, or making sure you have a data backup ready to go in case something happens. It is about having a clear plan in place to assist your employees and sustain your business. It also means using a secure, secondary infrastructure that hosts all the critical data and systems that run your business and can be accessed when disaster strikes. The benefits and importance of a DR plan are clear. Once a thorough plan is designed and implemented, if an unforeseen and damaging event occurs, you can mitigate risk, minimise downtime, remain compliant and ensure client records are safe and protected.
Approaching IT Transformation
There are five key tenets of business transformation: strategy and direction, goals and measurement, design and implementation, cultural change and continual improvement
Strategy and Direction
A business strategy, defining an organisation’s purpose, business goals and how they’ll be achieved, is commonplace. An IT transformation strategy, describing the business’s future state in terms of technology, organisation and process along with a compelling business case explaining how these support the company’s business objectives and a delivery plan, is equally important.
Successful IT transformation strategies have many of the following approaches in common:
- Strategic planning is a joint activity, with business and IT leaders establishing a shared understanding of business goals, tactics and constraints and fully exploring the potential of IT to enable business success
- Business and IT focus on IT capabilities rather than features, products and protocols
- The IT strategy is accessible and communicated clearly and regularly to staff, customers and suppliers/partners
- Dependencies across the portfolio are actively managed when making decisions about individual projects
- The IT strategy describes the organisational capability necessary to implement it, including costs and activities
- The future state of IT is described as a journey via several transitional states, aligned with planned milestones where decisions can be made to “do more”, “do differently” or “stop”.
Business Goals & Measurement
Transformation without clear measurement will never be achieved. Setting business goals and benefits from your transformation efforts will set the right behaviours and create a shared vision for your programme teams. The actual realisation of transformation benefits should be managed as a key part of programme delivery. Throughout the programme, individual benefits must be tracked, measured, managed, and realised by the business. Effective transformation involves pursuing the organisation's fundamental purpose, within the context of its core values, in ways that effectively and optimally meet and reconcile the current needs of the target market and key stakeholders. Some realised benefits could include service improvement, customer retention, an uplift in customer or user experience, process reengineering & optimisation and/or, reduction in costs.
Design and Implementation
Designing and testing the implementation of your transformation programme should be approached by focusing on small incremental steps towards an overarching goal. Running pilots and proof of concepts before implementing new tools and moving forward with your plan. If the technology you are planning to implement is new to your business, it might be difficult to anticipate how things are going to work or how it will affect your processes. But you need to stay realistic upfront and build stakeholder checkpoints into the plan. That is how you can ensure that everyone is aware of how your transformation journey is progressing and can reduce the impact of misunderstood requirements or technologies. Start small, learn and scale should be the mantra for any transformation efforts.
Cultural Change
Cultural change is fundamental to any transformational efforts – after all, it’s your people that will make or break that change. Transformation can only happen through the careful orchestration of different organisational capabilities that serve the mission, vision, and business goals.
Transformation is a process that gradually takes organisations through different phases of innovation and allows them to become nimbler and more competitive in the current market. Moreover, it is a holistic and comprehensive process that covers several processes, interactions, technological changes, as well as internal and external factors. This ongoing journey needs to be supported by the right leadership and people long term, not just the right technology infrastructure.
Continual Improvement
Lastly is a focus on continual measurement and improvement – transformation does not have an end state it’s a journey with a continual focus on better customer or user experience. You can never really say the transformation has stopped - your organisation’s ability to enact change through an agile and flexible culture will determine future success.
One way to look at this is through the lens of the Build-Measure-Learn cycle. The idea here is to test your hypotheses regularly, gain actionable insights, and then adapt or discard experiments along the way. That way, you will avoid investing in IT assets that do not bring you that much value and might be expensive to develop. Moreover, this approach helps to connect innovation to the big-picture vision of your business. Make experimenting easy for employees and encourage that type of experimentation – foster a design and learning mindset.
How Peru Consulting can help?
Peru practitioners are transformation experts, assisting and supporting private, non-for-profit and public sector organisations to modernise and transform their teams and technology. We specialise in helping our customers digitise their business, source the right capabilities, and deliver lasting change. Our people reflect our values, and we guarantee a collaborative, quality, agile and trusted managed service. We only hire experts in their fields; sector-focused, customer-led and technology-agnostic. As Peruvians we differentiate ourselves through our “Triple A” consulting principles: Accelerate – Identify and deliver value early, Assure – the right things and provide certainty and Augment – be a part of the team and hit the ground running. The value we bring is through our market insight, our accelerator tools, our commercial focus, and our flexibility.