Ensuring your business makes good decisions that drive long-term success

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It starts with strong business and IT sponsorship. The IT is there to support a business need. We tend to straddle the two and keep this link closer than it would otherwise be.

We focus on helping our clients to understand and set clear priorities, then to break down the complexity and deliver the project in bite-sized chunks. We can help you find a balance between ambition and deliverability by helping you understand what it will take in realistic terms.

These projects typically involve contracting with one or more third parties, such as a systems integrator or software vendor. This is not a typical procurement challenge. Such arrangements can be a commercial minefield and apparent short term commercial wins can create significant unintended consequences further down the line. We are very experienced at establishing and managing these relationships for our clients in a manner that drives the right behaviours and reinforces the achievement of shared goals.

Your team needs to be at the heart of the project. We typically augment your own team with a small number of experienced, expert practitioners, bringing capability and helping everyone to play to their strengths. We aim to create a one-team feel, where everyone is focused on the same goal.

he change can be thought of as moving from a building, maintaining and running your own electricity generator or plugging into the grid and buying from a utility company.

The benefits of moving your data to the cloud infrastructure are compelling.

Cost: We see clients regularly make savings in their running costs of 30–50% compared with more traditional data-centre operations;
Speed: Cloud IT services are available instantly - there is no lead-time to order and provision hardware;
Flexibility: If sizing estimates prove incorrect or an experiment proves wildly successful, capacity can be added or withdrawn in minutes. Solutions can be built to scale up and down in response to demand, meaning that seasonal businesses don’t need to have expensive assets sitting idle waiting for peak periods;
Resilience: Solutions can be engineered to automatically “throw-away” failed components, and re-provision replacements, with no impact to the user;
Security: Cloud providers invest in security services at every layer of their offer, and are able to share the costs of such protection across multiple clients;
An “Evergreen” service: A move to the cloud infrastructure avoids the need to spend capital refreshing hardware every 3–5 years to ensure that it remains serviceable. This work is done by the provider as part of the service.

The move to the cloud brings its own unique challenges that we have extensive experience in helping to solve. We can help with

Making sure that the legislative and regulatory implications of holding data in the cloud and potentially in different geographies and legislative regimes are understood and appropriately mitigated.

Cloud IT skills are “hot” in the market so developing them in your teams without losing them to the highest bidder, whilst continuing to attract and retain the talent that your business is increasingly dependent on, can be increasingly difficult.

The move to cloud isn’t just a technical change - it turns many of the principles and philosophies that have underpinned technology organisations for years on their heads. For example, leading-edge cloud practices include throwing away and re-building platforms every night to keep costs down, implementing the latest builds and security patches automatically on a daily schedule to take away the risk of malware attacks; and deliberately “killing” server instances to continually prove operational resilience.

Selecting and contracting with the right cloud partner(s) is a big decision and will need to factor in the consequences on your entire supplier landscape. There can be material implications for the financial balance between Capex and Opex, for software licenses, and for existing infrastructure and application support and maintenance agreements

Making the move from on-premise to the cloud is a large and complex exercise in its own right. Determining which applications to “lift and shift” with minimum change, and which to re-engineer to take maximum advantage of the move, is key to the overall success. And like any big change programme, strong leadership, good governance and rigorous execution are critical.

Change activity is increasingly interconnected across the client organisation and often part of a broad business transformation. In these sorts of scenarios we’ve found that strong management of the overall portfolio is vital. Often though we find that these functions fall short of delivering the control and transparency that senior management need.

We do this by focusing in on what the function should be delivering and just as importantly how it should operate in the client’s environment. Our recent article on portfolio management sets this out in more detail.