Client Situation
Our client is a leading asset management institution in the Middle East which provides a wide range of services across Equity, Real Estate, Treasury, Oil & Gas, Private Equity & International Investments. The client has a higher dependency on application suppliers. Given the challenges faced by the technology team, the client engaged Cedar to embark on a diagnostic review of its application landscape to align with its business strategy & further enhance IT capabilities. The objective was to develop an overview of the gaps and implications across the key applications, benchmark against standard industry capabilities & provide a way forward.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar used a 4-step approach to assess the client’s current state covering Applications, Technology, Organization, and Supplier Operating Model.
- Applications: Cedar reviewed the current applications and supplier landscape based on sufficiency, architecture & alignment to business strategy. Application processes were reviewed from a straight-through process and reduced turnaround time.
- Technology: Cedar reviewed applications from the hosting (Cloud v/s On-Prem), Production & DR, Databases & operating systems.
- Supplier Operating Model: Cedar assessed the supplier operating model based on the delivery timelines, service quality & dependency on key resources. Potential vendor profiles were evaluated for capabilities.
- Organization: Cedar reviewed the user readiness & awareness of existing applications.
Outcome
The program resulted in defining the way forward for the client across the following key areas
- Benchmarking of the incumbent suppliers against the capabilities offered by other best-in-class platforms available in the industry
- Developed the architecture design principles along with the rationale & implications of the target IT applications & technology.
- Defined the Retain/ Upgrade/ Replace/ Consolidation of different applications in the institution’s landscape.
- Developed the way forward strategy & imperatives along with the detailed next steps across application & technology.
- Developed technology guiding principles for the different technology components across Hardware, Database, Application, Network & Web Servers.