Client Situation
Our client is a group of companies operating in several industries, including automobile sales and service, luxury and lifestyle retail, perfumes and cosmetics distribution, engineering, real estate and interiors contracting across the Middle East. The client believed that it needed to restructure its IT infrastructure, which had become inefficient and improve alignment along all business lines to increase effectiveness and efficiency.
Cedar’s Approach
The client mandated Cedar to assess the attractiveness of undergoing an IT transformation and present an overview of the assessment to facilitate decision-making. The client also asked Cedar for assistance in creating a roadmap for the IT transformation. Cedar’s approach was as follows:
- Collection and validation of the client’s relevant internal data
- One-on-one interviews with relevant company management teams to articulate their perspectives on the existing IT infrastructure and the associated pros and cons
- Secondary research collection and validation of all relevant data, especially to develop an understanding of all suitable IT infrastructure alternatives along with their benefits and issues
- Integration of the internal assessment, secondary research and one-on-one interview inputs to establish a summarized analysis of the issues and objectives
Outcome
Some of the key outcomes of this program were as follows:
- Identification of IT challenges:
- IT was perceived as not being value-additive & was not meeting the demands of multiple divisions
- IT was viewed as operationally complex by the retail division
- Low clarity on IT alignment to strategy, primarily due to limited insights by IT
- After an intensive assessment, the client’s key expected IT capability requirements were identified:
- Increased speed, scalability, transparency, optimization and customer-centricity with higher security standards
- Improved monitoring & reporting processes
- 3rd party hosted platform and leased hardware required by the client
- Cedar facilitated comparison of the as-is IT system with the improved to-be model across business areas such as the service desk, field support, and the data centre and infrastructure to identify merits to full gaps, if any
- An operating model was developed along with identification of business service level agreement and key performance indicators for critical services related to IT infrastructure
- Cedar drew out a 3-phase transformation roadmap for implementation:
- Phase 1 spanning three months, consisting of operations take-over by vendor, knowledge acquisition & service stabilization
- Phase 2, lasting the next ten months, involving process optimization
- Phase 3 comprising innovation, alignment to industry standards, and achieving service excellence