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Solution Experience

  • CyberAdmin Strategy Definition (Public Sector)
  • Enterprise Architecture Team Implementation (Chemical Industry)
  • Change Management Process (Private Bank)
  • Risk-Mgmt / Program Impact Analysis (Chemical Industry)
  • Data & Master Data Governance Definition (Consumer Goods & Chemical Industries)
  • Enterprise Architecture Implementation Support (Public Sector)
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    IT Strategic Alignment

    Aligning your IT with overall business strategy to maximize value
    In a global economy, CIOs are facing new challenges nearly every month: M&A, competition, regulation, etc. are but a few examples of globalization challenges highly impacting an organization. In this context, it is all the more critical to make sure that every facet of an organization is aligned with the overall strategy.

    Moreover, IT today should not only put its costs under stringent control (and decrease them whenever possible) but also fuel business growth by enabling innovative and new business capabilities.

    The problem is that, when dealing with IT, complexity quickly becomes a powerful obstacle to successfully address these challenges; stakeholders starting to challenge IT efficiency and foreboding a web of overlapping features intertwined with gapping lacks in yet useful functionalities.

    To reduce complexity and propel IT as a real and reliable business value creator, one should lay strong foundations with flexible layers that are all aligned with the business objectives.

    This is typically what dynamic enterprise architecture is all about: rigorously describe all the performance vectors within an organization, highlight the potential gaps between the business strategy and these vectors, and design the best way to fill these gaps.

    This discipline requires examining the strategic layers first, before drilling down to policies, business processes, organizations, until more IT-related items like applications and technology. This way, you will avoid the common pitfall of focusing too much on the "T" of "IT" without having a clear view of what the business really needs first.

    Cambridge IT Strategy Alignment services is the right solution if...

    • You need to standardize and/or industrialize your IT
    • You need to rationalize and/or mutualize your IT
    • You would like to know how to best fuel business growth
    • You have difficulties in assessing the current situation of your IT
    • You want to intrinsically incorporate agility into your IT and better understand the potential impacts of leading business and IT trends over your IT
    • You need to define and explain a long term vision for IT to enable and support business
    • You are facing major strategic operations or an evolution of the business or company scope
    • You are suffering from a lack of clear view of potential impacts of your organization's strategy, and how to best address them
    • You would like to uncover which technology will provide the best and the most cost-efficient solution for your business
    • You would like to seamlessly modernize your IT at reasonable costs by integrating new technology into current legacy architecture to meet the challenges caused by the increasing cost of application maintenance, with a stringent control of impacts and potential risks
    • As a business manager, you need to have a single view of your customers or providers no matter where the data is stored and how it is maintained up to date

    Cambridge's solutions and service offering

    Cambridge's management consultants have the capabilities to get involved in all or some of the typical areas of IT strategic alignment, which are:

  • Business strategy, goals and corporate policies
  • Business processes
  • Organizations, roles and responsibilities
  • Master data
  • Applications portfolios
  • Technology

    • Our participative workshop approach, paired with formal gates and standard frameworks like Zachman or TOGAF whenever relevant, allows us to take into account the full context of your industry incorporated into a web of regulatory, business and operational constraints.

    By doing so, we highlight potential gaps or even inconsistencies between your IT and your business strategy and we deliver you a set of operational recommendations along with a clear roadmap to better and durably realign your IT and your business strategy, with a view to better managing future business growth opportunities.

     

    And because a good, one-shot alignment is doomed on the long range without a suitable governance framework, we are strongly committed to help you implementing the central golden rules required to maintain a dynamically up-to-date IT base for your business growth.

    Moreover, to put the best chance of success on your side, all our engagements are performed under direct supervision of a principal, with the following key principles in mind:

  • Long-term support with a full knowledge transfer
  • Impactful and yet low-profiled and financially disciplined
  • Relevant, simple whenever possible, and priority-driven

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