Prioritizing a $600m Investment in New Technologies

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The Challenge

Our client, which has over 50,000 employees, was unable to prioritize and spread a $2bn technology budget across revenue units, shared services and hundreds of scrum teams. The complexity was made worse with no clear view on current IT capacity and budget utilization across multiple business units. By turning to BCG Platinion, the CIO was able to prioritize and manage the technology portfolio and develop transparency on the decision making process.

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The Approach

It only took one week for BCG Platinion to run a diagnostic phase to assess the current process for prioritizing IT spend, which included interviews with IT leadership and analysis for reporting lines, performance metrics, budget allocation, reporting processes, data flow processes and an examination of the lifecycle for live technology initiatives. The approach also placed the end-users at the center of the design process. By gathering insights and aligning with the many stakeholders tied to the project, the team was able to elicit ideas from a plethora of influencers, while not deviating from the purpose to design a technology platform that would preserve a personal experience without being obtrusive.

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In the second phase, BCG Platinion redesigned an end-to-end technology portfolio by conducting five deep dive sessions with critical stakeholders to define a future state for governance, and embrace uniform ways of working. The team also created a protocol for arbitrating disputes across business units and an automated data-flow across systems of record to inform reporting. To wrap up the project BCG Platinion demonstrated how the new solutions could be applied to three complex real-life prioritization scenarios.

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The Impact

1. Clear reporting lines on budget utilization
2. A clear taxonomy focusing prioritization on enterprise value
3. Reprioritization of live initiatives

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Looking Into the Future

At the outset there was a lack of defining values, aligned to the business strategy, around which decisions could be made on budget allocation. Today the banks IT spend is focused on value-add initiatives that support the bank’s vision for financial services in a digital economy. And in delegating the budget across multiple business units, there is an Agile process supported by automated data-flows that record project spending and inform reporting.

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