Establishing the building blocks for IT evolution

A connected approach to IT strategy

The higher education sector is changing and institutions need to ensure that their IT estates keep pace with this change. To meet the evolving IT needs of students, academics, and staff, you need a clear strategy for IT success, one that is tightly aligned to objectives and target outcomes.

Sam Sanders

Partner, Consulting Lead for Education, Skills & Productivity (ESP)

KPMG in the UK

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When it comes to establishing the foundations for IT strategy success, the word connectedness is key. During the time of collaboration with KPMG to get the IT strategy into a place ready for implementation, I had an IT function with seven different areas, which included: tech engineers, service desk, data centre team, IS, corporate information systems. Now all these areas are connected, part of the same flow and aligned to the wider organisational objectives, which is a radical departure from where we were. It's been tremendously refreshing for us to see and experience an approach that is about evolution not revolution, we've made significant progress towards having clear strategic direction of the IT estate by making targeted continual improvements.

David Myers

CIO of Lancaster University

Moving away from monolithic transformation programmes to targeted continual improvements in the IT estate

Lancaster University launched an ambitious five year strategic plan and required an IT strategy and approach that supported targeted continual improvement to the IT estate.

Utilising our Connected Enterprise methodology we have supported the university in developing its IT strategy to enable enterprise architecture and enhance its capability to deliver its target outcomes that improve the experience of students and staff.

The outcomes

A detailed view of the current IT estate, challenges and opportunities for improvement
A clear strategic direction for the IT estate, a robust programme business case and an architectural blueprint to deliver against
A programme, governance and IT operating model
A coherent change management methodology and communications approach for delivery

How did we get to this point?

We worked in collaboration with the University to develop a 5 year forward thinking, ambitious IT strategy which focused on enterprise IT development.

1. Strategy plan	Aligning the direction of travel for IT to wider strategic vision by documenting the effectiveness of IT in supporting outcomes across 130 capability areas; identifying opportunities for evolution.
2. Reconfiguring the target IT architecture	Analysed the findings from the IT maturity assessment and prioritised the areas for IT evolution required in the next 5 years.
3. Roadmap	Established an implementation plan for a target enterprise architecture that covered areas such as business capability, platforms and applications, data and integration, cloud infrastructure and network, identity and security and the IT operating model.
4. Business case	Developed the supporting business case which embodied a five-case model approach: strategy, economic/social, financial, commercial and management. This informed the critical success factors needed for the enterprise architecture blueprint and the target IT estate blueprint.

Our difference

Our focus and future state ambitions for the IT strategy can be summarised across 8 strategic themes:

Expand the use of robotic process automation to streamline workflow, reduce costs and increase operational efficiency by eliminating mundane and repetitive tasks while improving user experience overall.