IWC was asked by a local regulating body to undertake a review of their technology infrastructure, applications and managed services. This review came at the end of a challenging year for the organisation as it had made extensive changes to its remit and target operating model. After these changes it was felt this was a good time to take stock of the IT provision and set out a roadmap for the next 3-5 years.
Starting with an initial scoping exercise to understand where IT was used in the organisation, IWC set out to understand the organisation and its technology requirements – operations, processes, and business plan initially. I then moved into the detail of each area of IT to understand usage, supply, contracts and support.
Using an IWC-developed methodology, reviewed and configured to make it specific to the team at the regulating body, we set out to measure the IT areas against a set of criteria in the areas of –
- Day to day operations
- Solid reliable IT platforms
- Collaboration
- Value for money
- Cyber security and Data Protection
The organisation, being a regulating authority, is a highly professional and dedicated team managing the authority and this review ensured the requirements were suited to a small agile and flexible team, along with the criteria necessary for future growth. However, the team were quite clear from the outset – they had no technical skills – so were not confident with producing an action plan on their own.
The review has also been cognisant of the fact that the organisation has gone through major change this year and now moving to the next phase in its development.
The findings have overall been positive. The team uses technology in their day-to-day operations in a secure and robust way, and individuals are given autonomy and freedom to work. Good decisions have been made to adopt good industry-standard applications. As you would expect from this type of organisation, documents and data are handled with extreme care through their lifecycle.
The recommendations focused on elements that hindered the organisation in achieving its goals. The high level conclusion was there were a number of costly platforms in use that overlapped in functionality and in some cases held back the team in terms of useability. The recommendation was for them to focus on one platform. Moving to cloud-based, vendor-managed platforms with their own ecosystem is vastly more beneficial than using proprietary platforms utilising older infrastructure.
At the end of the review the CEO of the regulating body said, “This review has given us the confidence to develop our own way forward and we have been able to put into action a number of improvements, enabling us to become more flexible and productive as a result.”
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