Our Approach

ISDE assists Boards and senior management to gain improved understanding, clarity and renewed focus of the management of IT often through a rapid but comprehensive review of IT in the organisation that provides insights and answers two key questions:

"Where does IT fit into the organisation? How should we manage it?"

We help generate a clear and common understanding of the role of IT within the organisation, and a better basis for management to deal with the justification of the substantial IT-related expenses and investment. We also outline the way forward in terms of innovative strategies to streamline and modernise the IT environment for improved business effectiveness, for example by using emerging web-based technologies to enhance legacy IT environments.

Our approach is based on the recognition that in banking, insurance and other service industries technology is now the basis of business operations. Information technology is thus a means and not an end in itself and it is important to ensure that investment in technology will result in the anticipated business outcomes.

Our first step is to understand our clients' business operations and to define the task at hand in terms of meaningful objectives, issues or problem statements. Working closely with our clients we then help to formulate and implement effective solutions to the issues faced by the business, or devise initiatives to achieve competitive advantage in terms of the above factors.

In successfully transforming the management of IT in organisations, we engage business and IT management at all levels, creating a common understanding of IT-related issues and enabling business and IT to work together more effectively. In some cases we have carried out such reviews in interim management roles leading to the transformation of IT governance arrangements within the organisation.

In dealing with the strategic evolution and management of enterprise IT environments we have found that the traditional IT management models are often limiting and dysfunctional and the cause of less than satisfactory outcomes for IT investment.

Our approach relies on the following distinctions gleaned from this model to produce powerful and workable IT solution strategies and organisational outcomes:

IT should not be viewed and managed as a support function but as integral to various aspects of business operations. The key success factors for IT should be expressed in terms of organisational effectiveness related to: Business process enablement (including data management and transaction processing) Information services and business intelligence for business and management decision making Organisational communication (email and office systems) The traditional bipartisan methodology of IT (ie business users and IT professionals operating in a client/builder relationship) is not adequate for developing and implementing complex IT solutions and major IT projects. A more appropriate model is the tri-partite client/architect/builder model used in other fields involving technology where Business-IT Architects (as distinct from major IT service providers) help to design and explain to the business (clients) proposed solutions and courses of action and then help supervise the evolution of the IT environment and manage the major IT service providers (builders) involved. A long-term enterprise IT strategy as a 'technology town-plan' is a useful paradigm for providing a flexible framework for the evolution of the IT environment and a context for major projects in large and complex organisations.

The resulting approach and methodology, used by ISDE for the development and management of enterprise IT strategies and architectures, are powerful, innovative and practical and are well suited to emerging web-based application environments.

The key to the success of our approach is that it can be readily communicated to various constituencies in the organisation and it does not get bogged down in a mass of detail, unlike many traditional IT planning methodologies.