IT Assessment Budget Planning

Project Background

As the organization transitioned from a traditional “bricks-and-mortar,” catalog-based provider of services to web, mobile device, and social media on-line community and merchant, management desired to understand and benchmark, using cross-industry best practices, how its IT organization (people and processes) operated relative to business needs and organizations of its size and complexity.

The Strategy

After interviews with 25% of executives, business leaders, staff, and IT staff we discovered areas for improvement in delivery, user alignment, and IT efficiencies. We educated the executive team on different IT service and organizational models and listened as they concluded IT was integral to the success of their mission and not just an “expense-line” service provider. Our time was equally spent across IT development and infrastructure teams with assessments spanning corporate and remote offices. We discovered IT had been depriving itself of important technical and process improvements in order to deliver more to users.

Working with executive sponsors we presented our findings and recommendations to the company’s Strategy Team, President, and IT staff.

Proven Results

• Aligned development teams by line-of-business to simplify planning and expectation setting. An Enterprise Architecture and IT Project team was created, and clear ownership and accountability of users, projects, offices, and technologies were defined.
• A full-time project manager and leader (CIO) for IT who reported to the President was added.
• Harvard Partners was asked to continue on in an Executive CIO role, help better align IT with business teams, recruit a permanent CIO and new project manager, and participate as part of the organization’s Strategy Team.