Case Study: Strategy Development & Implementation

Technology strategy development and deployment for a Fixed Income trading house…

Background

• The CEO of a London based autonomous Fixed Income subsidiary of a global Swiss bank was increasingly concerned about the costs to run its technology
• These concerns were finally highlighted by increased difficulties in meeting the business’ change agenda in terms of diversification and meeting regulatory challenges
• C7 Consulting was engaged to review the current state of technology within the organisation and to make recommendations for a target state

Approach

• An 8 week current state review showed
• Poor understanding of the latest technology and its deployment resulted in inefficient deployment of underlying infrastructure
• Process and procedure shortfalls were leading to unnecessary failures of key technology and increased risk
• Applications were well received by business users, however they were not designed to meet contemporary trading environment rigours
• Applications had also evolved to essentially become fully bespoke, with limited knowledge available of how they worked and how they could be modified, creating key man dependencies
• Lack of experienced technology management had led to poor staffing decisions and degrees of distrust between the technology team and business departments
• The current state highlighted why support and development costs were considered excessive and technology and business disconnects had opened up
• A 3-stage strategy was devised covering
• Stabilisation
• Evolution
• Maintenance
• A target state roadmap was then created over the following 4 weeks to deploy the strategy
• Ground up infrastructure replacement – no material gains could be made without replacement of the technology foundations
• Support team restructure – additional skills were needed to augment the current team and to bring an up to date service approach to the organisation
• Application RFP – once the basics were in place a formal, thorough assessment of business requirements (fully aligning to business strategy) would evaluate which applications were required
• Systems deployment – on selecting the most appropriate application suite, it was smoothly deployed into the business along with any additional infrastructure, people and process changes required
• Steady state management – the appropriate level of personnel was put in place to ensure all the technology could be adequately supported and kept aligned with business direction

Outcome

• The current state review and target state recommendations greatly surpassed the CEO and business senior management team’s expectations, and provided an achievable roadmap that they believed to be impossible previously.
• With no in house capability to deliver on the target state, C7 Consulting was asked to lead the deployment of the target state
• A 2 year programme of work followed, implementing the proposed target state with C7 Consulting working closely with the management team, presenting proposals and funding requests to the wider bank board and helping select partners where additional skills were deemed necessary
• During this period, C7 Consulting was also asked to act fully in the capacity of “Head of IT”, a role which had been vacant for some time and which was acknowledged as causing audit and regulatory concerns
• Works undertaken in achieving the target state included
• Modern cabling and network infrastructure was deployed with zero business time
• State of the art trading phone systems were implemented providing much needed capacity, flexibility and supportability
• Refreshed desktop infrastructure provided a much more satisfactory working environment with significantly improved use of desktop real estate giving greater flexibility to improve the working environment
• Experienced support staff were added to the team providing much needed skills and processes to the support of the technology in place. Outsourcing was also leveraged for some elements of support were it was most effective to do so
• Full application RFP completed, including the incumbent suppliers
• Application selection and deployment took place with close collaboration between the business, technology and the wider bank promoting relationships that were previously non-existent
• Throughout all stages workshops, demonstrations and seminars were provided for all members of the organisation to ensure requirements were correctly harvested and understood, and to improve business understanding of how the technology worked and vice versa

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