Our client is a rapidly growing global financial services company that provides support to fund managers, global companies, family offices, and private clients around the world. The company has expanded significantly in recent years through organic growth and several M&A activities, which will continue to be a key part of their strategy going forward. The client currently maintains its infrastructure on premises and is seeking to explore the potential benefits of cloud technology as part of their global expansion plans.
The client was looking to develop a cohesive cloud strategy that would enable the company to align its various teams and create buy-in for the adoption of cloud services across the entire organization. The challenge was to gain a clear understanding of the company’s current and future business IT requirements and identify any existing pain points that could be addressed through cloud adoption.
The goal was to create a strategy that aligned with the company’s business drivers and enabled a smooth transition to cloud services.
Our team worked closely with the client to understand their needs, goals, and IT strategy. We conducted interviews with stakeholders across the business and analyzed the results collaboratively to identify the most appropriate cloud strategy. The aim of the strategy was to enhance the company’s ability to meet current and future IT demands by defining desired business outcomes, identifying the skills and capabilities needed to execute the cloud strategy, and defining activities that would enable the transition of services to the cloud.
The team identified several actionable workstreams, including current landscape assessments, application assessments, enablement projects, and key target workstreams aimed at addressing the highest-priority challenges. The cloud strategy also included a framework for governance and adoption, ensuring that the adoption of cloud services was controlled and aligned with the company’s overall business goals.
In strategy and architecture, an often-neglected aspect is the Return on Investment (ROI). As financial professionals demand concrete figures when considering investments, more than a mere mention of process improvement or technology optimisation may be required. In their eyes, such endeavours represent costs, making it challenging to secure the necessary funding. Considering this, it is crucial to demonstrate ROI, regardless of how impressive a project’s visual outputs may be. How did Konvergent do this on this project?
“Value is a number, everything else is noise”
One of the significant challenges was gaining consensus on the way forward due to the organisation’s diverse makeup, with small companies of less than 50 people used to doing things their own way, and larger organisations with different perspectives on “what good looks like.” Our team’s clear and concise visual outputs, coupled with numerous workshops, finally led to a way forward and, most importantly, got key decision-makers on the same page after the goals and objectives of the department were mapped to overall business ones.
A clear and tangible ROI was seen in the UK and Luxembourg procurement functions. Both parties wanted to maintain their existing processes and solutions, resulting in approximately £250,000 spent on circular discussions. Our team’s strategy and workshops provided a clear and concise visual output that enabled decision-makers to align and reach a consensus. This alone returned a 3x or £170,000 ROI for the company.
Over time, the overall cloud strategy should provide between an 8x-15x ROI for the company.
Konvergent,
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T: +44 (0)20 3744 1256
E: info@konvergent.co.uk
