Bringing Strategy to Life: Aligning IT with Business Goals

Client Overview and Business Challenges

 

Our client reached out to us to help lay out the risks that existed across their core line of business applications infrastructure.  Initially we did an overall infrastructure assessment and evaluated their IT operations.  Our findings returned a pretty low score due to numerous challenges our client was facing such as aging equipment, reactive maintenance of technology systems, and a limited IT budget.  In addition, one of the challenges our client was facing was its culture where a sense of technology ownership was impeding change.  Overall, our client had to put a lot of effort in order to keep everything running.  Our goal was to implement systems that would allow operations and employees as a whole to work more efficiently through simplifying IT operations.

Agosto’s Solution

Our team created and facilitated an IT Steering Committee where we discussed our client’s risks.  We formed executive leadership team that had to understand the process and that had success criteria and results mapped out in advance so that we could understand what expectations are.  This allowed us to create a IT Strategy Roadmap which mapped out all of areas of risk and determined over a period of time what would have to be done in order to mature the environment.  This commitee also addressed our client’s needs as the evolved and how we would systematically prioritize and execute on projects, with the goal of  maturing the environment in a cost effective way.  Software cost-cutting suggestions that our Strategic Services team recommended reduced the total IT budget from 0.7 percent of revenue in 2007 to 0.3 percent in 2009.  Not only we cut the costs of our client, but we helped develop and implement a plan to leverage SaaS on many fronts and in this way overcame multiple challenges they were facing.  Some of the end results are updating ten year old IT infrastructure to current technologies, implementing Google Apps that replaced outdated e-mail and servers, replacing old Peachtree accounting software and $180,000-a-year CRM software with Netsuite, and setting up Web-based payroll system from ADP.  We did last evaluation of our client’s business about eight months ago and it showed that everything that has been an issue is now updated, changed, and rebuilt so their risks level is substantially reduced.

At the moment, IT Steering Committee meets quarterly focusing more on maintenance during the economic slowdown.  Our team is constantly looking at platforms to support growth for our client, and how to provide much more strategic and forward looking foundations.  In this rough economy our client reached the point where their IT is stable, and they can spend their time and money focusing on operations that generate their business.  

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