Background
Wavestone’s blue-chip financial services client completed the merger of another large financial services business and a multi-million-pound integration programme of work was initiated. Shortly after, the organisation sold one of its other businesses adding further complexity to an already challenging integration programme. The transaction included the sale of two data centres and a Transitional Services Agreement (TSA) was put in place until the separation of the business concluded.
What did Wavestone deliver?
Wavestone practitioners, experienced in complex cloud and infrastructure transformation, led the delivery of the IT Infrastructure workstream. This included two data centre migrations and provision of core services to support an integrated organisation (e.g. common middleware, WAN, Wi-Fi, etc). It also involved the setup and running of an industrialised data centre server, storage, and network provisioning team to meet the demands from application transformation teams. Hundreds of servers and many terabytes of storage were provisioned.
Wavestone consultants managed a team of more than 40 client employees, contractors and suppliers. We had budget responsibility for more than £50m and led the Infrastructure Integration Steering Committee, which was represented by senior client stakeholders.
Challenges
The culture of the two merged organisations were very different. Wavestone provided independent insight and expertise to bridge the gaps and to ensure that emotion was removed from the conversation and fact-based decisions were made.
The infrastructure-led data centre migration served as an insurance policy in case of delays to the application transformation. Any delay would result in significant Transitional Service Agreement (TSA) cost increases. Wavestone helped the client’s key stakeholders to understand that its chosen technical solution would not meet the objective of the programme and recommended that the initiative was cancelled.
Results
The client accepted Wavestone’s recommendation to cancel the infrastructure-led data centre migration because it would not meet its intended objectives. The client would have incurred significant costs had they pursued the initiative.
Our recommendation was to reinvest the budget and focus on achieving multi-million-pound infrastructure cost saving synergies. The recommendation was accepted, and we mobilised a programme to demonstrate and then assure that the cost saving synergies were achievable. Wavestone’s advice and recommendations will enable the client to realise the benefits of an integrated business sooner.
Our advice to other organisations embarking on an IT infrastructure integration programme includes;
- Ensuring data centre or cloud migrations are ‘as-is’ with minimal transformation to reduce the risk of delay to realising synergies;
- Publishing an IT Strategy and roadmap aligned to business strategy at the beginning of the integration programme to reduce the decision-making time
- Developing a target operating model with interim operation models as required to ensure roles and responsibilities are clear but to also identify gaps that can be addressed proactively rather than reactively.
