ISG assists a unique Australian media and entertainment company through the time-sensitive establishment of a new technology operating model, sourcing strategy and transaction.
Opportunity
An Australian media and entertainment organization initially engaged ISG to design its operating models for service integration and management (SIAM) and vendor management. After the ISG team had been there for an extended period, the media company’s management team realized its technology practices were far from industry norms, even at the process-discipline level. The management team then asked ISG to expand scope across additional towers for applications, infrastructure, networks and workplace services.
The environment included heavy regulation and a unique divestment scenario. Therefore, ISG had to rapidly support the management team through a retained-organization design that incorporated high-level functions and sizing, considering key factors in the future state, such as multi-vendor management, meeting post-divestment financial benefit targets, and shaping a multi-year sourcing strategy to support the company’s transformation goals.
Imagining IT Differently
ISG hosted a series of workshops to help the management team as they jointly established key design principles. They iterated through functional model designs to arrive at the right one.
ISG also leveraged the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) to determine the necessary responsibility levels and skills minimally required in the retained organization to sustainably remain accountable for technology-service outcomes and govern the planned multi-vendor environment.
They addressed several key questions from the executive leadership:
- What should the retained organization functionally look like?
- What is the realistic size of the minimum-viable retained organization?
- Are there any gaps to reach the future state?
Future Made Possible
- The future-state retained organization can now demonstrate alignment with industry best practices, including Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and SFIA.
- The SFIA framework can be leveraged to provide a consistent description of skills and role requirements across rate cards in the multi-vendor environment.
- The framework can also be applied short term to support the skills-gap analysis, training and development plans for the retained organization as it shifts from “doing” itself to “overseeing” vendors.
- The foundation is set to develop a future framework for capability uplift, skills development and career progression, standardizing job descriptions (roles and responsibilities) across the technology group in harmony with existing HR usage of the Hay System job-performance evaluation method.
