Improving IT Governance.

The Challenge
Organisations with good IT governance achieve greater returns on IT investment, experience fewer incidents and have a reduced risk of major incidents.  However the focus of governance is frequently seen as a ‘compliance’ related overhead and securing funding for governance initiatives is difficult in the current cost down environment.  Complexity is the single biggest issue cited as a challenge to good governance and IT governance can feel overwhelming to address.

The Solution
A ‘boil the ocean’ approach to governance has no place in the current economic environment.  Applio has worked with organisations to deliver short focused pieces of work that have a high impact and create headroom to deliver further level of value.  Typically around 20-days effort, these have included:

• Cost Reduction
  Applio completed a 20 day analysis that resulted in a route-map to reduce application service costs by £5m over 3 years without impacting service provision. Execution of the route-map commenced and  £ benefits were being realised within 3 months.  Reduction of costs has allowed re-investment into the business planning and KPI management approach to achieve greater customer insight.
• Service Alignment
  To increase service alignment, Applio undertook an assignment to define and implement a performance reporting approach that more closely reflected the business community user experience.   A closer representation of the actual business experience, service performance calendars were introduced, based on the business impact of incidents, scored against an agreed business impact matrix.  As a result the client is reporting against fewer, higher value metrics and has narrowed the gap between the service reported and the actual user experience.  The route-map delivered defined the strategy for increasing business focus to service reviews and IT service personnel orientation.
  
• Performance Measurement
  Applio was appointed to deliver the required management insight into the end-to-end status across all development programmes.  This required combining a high-level view of portfolio performance, supplemented by the detail to allow effective management within programmes.  Executive decision making was enhanced through a migration to a single source of truth, increased data veracity and timeliness of its presentation.
  
• Corporate Governance
  Applio was engaged to enhance the corporate KPIs and the associated reporting process.   Balanced scorecards were introduced and the focus moved from operational metrics to business performance metrics. KPI reporting was harmonised across business, operational and customer management.  In certain areas the KPI definition process surfaced opportunities to clarify role responsibilities and introduce metrics to direct performance.