Situation

• Our client had recently gone through electric deregulation; during this time, significant IT resources had been focused on simply becoming compliant with the rules of deregulation
• Recently, to reduce costs and drive more value out of IT investment, the entire IT organization had been outsourced
• An outsourced IT function was a new dimension of delivery that our client had never had to deal with
• The relationship with the new vendor was already strained
• Recent leadership changes with a strategic focus on becoming more competitive had changed the complexion of IT needs

Solution

• We created a vision for IT investment to upgrade their IT infrastructure so that they could successfully compete while still reducing long term IT costs
• We delivered this vision with a supporting business systems plan (BSP) for their retail and trading business units
• Our vision included:
• Migrating to one view of their customer
• Consolidating key systems by business unit
• Automating new processes through workflow
• We worked directly with the outsourcing company to build business cases for each of the recommendations

Benefits

• The business executives have a long term technology vision that can be used to assess future IT investments
• The business and the outsourced IT organization have an IT plan for the coming year
• They have initiated the high priority initiatives that will move them towards a new IT infrastructure