Client Detail:
The client is a state agency that generates revenue to support higher education, health and human services, environmental conservation, and economic and business development.
The mission of the state agency is to generate revenue to support higher education, health and human services, environmental conservation, and economic and business development. Being efficient and effective is critical for the agency to deliver more value to Arizona.
The Challenge:
The client had developed a pattern of ‘firefighting’ or jumping from one business emergency to another. They were battling tactical obstacles to keep the organization running instead of stepping back and thinking strategically about organizational improvements.
Caught in this reactionary cycle, the client was unable to address critical issues: How can we enhance operations to run smoothly? How can we improve as an organization? How can we appropriately retire (end of life) certain outdated hardware to make the move to a more cloud-based infrastructure?
They also understood their data and security policies needed to be revised and built out more significantly.
The client's major concerns fell into three areas of examination:
Information Protection – policies relating to securing sensitive data
Infrastructure – hardware, server space, and keeping systems up and running
IT Operations Assessment – roles and responsibilities, gaps or overlap, what the IT organization should look like
Understanding what needed to be assessed, the client requested a roadmap to outline what changes needed to be implemented, the estimated cost of the initiative(s), and the resource bandwidth it would require from the organization.
Our Solution:
MSS Business Transformation Advisory (MSSBTA) facilitated the establishment of a baseline of the client’s current state, heavily leveraging Info-Tech Research Group diagnostic tools and techniques.
The consulting team began by emailing survey assessments to both the leaders in the organization and the impacted employees to assess their current state, as well as their analysis of the client’s performance in different areas.
From the survey results, MSSBTA facilitated a conversation with those key leadership stakeholders to get more detail and validate the results. The outputs provided the client with a good understanding of the current state, areas where improvement opportunities existed, and strengths and weaknesses of the organization.
Leveraging the Info-Tech tools, the consulting team was able to identify a best practice IT organization framework and assess the client’s alignment to the different areas provided within the framework.
MSSBTA recommended the client embrace an incremental move to the next desired state of maturity. The strategy centered around transitioning vulnerable areas in the organization from a 2s to 3s on the maturity scale.
Using the RACI model, MSSBTA posed more direct questions around task ownership, IT strategy, and vendor management. It became clear some areas had two or three people attempting to own the same task and several areas where no one owned a task, causing lack of accountability in these areas.
Due to the lack of accountability presented when the Info-Tech analysis and RACI model were applied, the consulting team applied LGA (Leadership, Governance, and Accountability service offering) This gave the client an accurate snapshot of what the organization looked like as well as the parts not being addressed.
The Results:
MSSBTA built a roadmap of what the client should do and shared timelines to be administered over the course of the next two to three years. The first stage of the roadmap included building a stable foundation of the policies and procedures in place for the organization to mature. The client is currently working on this in-house and is moving forward over the next few years.
Deliverables:
Establishment of current state baseline
Future state roadmap