Technology Strategy and Advisory

 

Strategy matters. The success of any enterprise depends on understanding the current and future sources of advantage in that business arena, capturing then maintaining a distinct advantage.

 

An IT strategy is key to defining direction and creating business alignment for leading organizations. Our approach is facilitative, spanning assessment, visioning, scoping, justification, and implementation. The result is an IT strategy that is aligned with the needs and priorities of the business.

 

When a consultant walks through your door, he or she will be thinking about new and innovative ways for you to compete. Working in partnership with your company, we closely assess all relevant aspects of your business, design strategies to unlock new sources of advantage, and support you in bringing them to life.

 

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Strategy Capabilities

 

IT strategy

The IT strategy aligns with and enables the overall business strategy, while leveraging the latest technology innovations. Our capabilities in IT strategy span developing the future application landscape, defining IT infrastructure architecture, and determining IT core competencies in preparation for make-or-buy decisions. We help clients make foundational IT improvements, such as strengthening relationships between business leaders and the IT organization, and aligning and managing their IT talent.

 

IT operational improvement

Improvements to IT operations often include key decisions and implementations for new organization design, governance models and responsibilities, and outsourcing / off-shoring. Providing support for clients, ranging from defining and right-sizing the future IT organization to developing sustainable governance processes.

 

IT cost reduction

When our clients need to reduce IT-related costs, they turn to us for help with optimizing their infrastructure and application portfolio, analyzing and optimizing their IT supplier portfolio, and more effective using key technologies (e.g., mainframes, server farms, networks, cloud). We apply industry-specific benchmarks for setting cost-reduction targets while maintaining or improving services, identify and apply economies of scale to gain cost advantage, and gain the information transparency necessary to drive reductions across geographies and functions.

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• Corporate Strategy and Portfolio Management. Assessing the corporate portfolio of business units and developing strategies to maximize advantage, growth, and value creation.

 

• Strategy Development. We help our clients formulate strategies that enable them to meet their mission and goals by taking advantage of the opportunities presented in highly uncertain and rapidly changing environments—while also managing the risks. We provide clients with a suite of tools, frameworks, and planning and decision-making processes—proven in the public and private sectors—that help them make solid strategic choices, especially in a resource-constrained environment. We help clients incorporate a long-term perspective into their strategies, while focusing on the best way to get results.

 

• Strategic Planning and Implementation. Fine-tuning, supplementing, or entirely redesigning planning approaches for greater effectiveness and agility and tighter linkages with business and financial plans. We leverage commercial best practices to help our clients reinvent their strategic planning processes.  We help provoke questions and facilitate conversations rather than create documents, rely on facts to make key decisions, and involve those expected to implement the strategy in the planning process.  We help clients decide where to focus and how to allocate resources.
   

• Organization Model/Design. Organizations must function in relationship to their environment; therefore, the organizational design should suit the organization’s purpose and environment. Our approach to organization model and design begins with a full assessment to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the current organization model and progresses to designing the organization to fit the mission.  We create organizations whose people and processes are appropriately aligned with the organizational purpose and environment.

 

• Organizational Efficiency and Process Management. A complementary disciplines, tools, and techniques to study an organization’s mission, value proposition, strategic focus, and stakeholder requirements and then to envision, define, design, develop, and deploy measures for improvement.

 

• Transformation and Change Management. A proven approach for executing large-scale organization transformation focused on achieving improved results. Focused on addressing the four dimensions of change (i.e., People, Process, Technology, and Physical Infrastructure) that enable capabilities.  Clearly describing the activities, methodologies, and techniques needed for transforming the organization through the entire life cycle, from vision and definition through roll out and deployment.

 

• Performance Management. In today's competitive world, would you bet your company's success on a strategy in which you have no comprehensive understanding of the direction, the processes that most materially influence its execution, or the measures that directly reflect your organization's performance against it? Given the fact that less than 10% of created strategies are ever effectively executed, most companies are doing just that. They lose their focus when the most critical element of strategy execution comes due, just "getting it done in the day to day," despite the significant investment involved in developing their strategy.