Stop paying for technology your strategy doesn't need

Sound familiar?

• Bills arrive that nobody planned, and you have to pay them.
• A third of new applications are written off within two years of launch.
• Two teams in two countries run two systems that do the same job.
• You're on plan, on budget and on forecast, and somehow the money still isn't buying what the strategy needs.
• Nobody can say what it costs to deliver one business capability, so budget debates stay budget debates.

What I do

I put a business capability model under your technology spend. For banks it's BIAN; for utilities and others, a model built from your own operations. Every application and every dollar of project and run spend gets mapped to the capability it serves, and every capability gets a named executive owner. Then the business case process changes: a request has to say which capability it serves, what that capability already costs, and what would change. Finance and Technology review every case on the same terms. Quarterly, the owners decide what to keep, globalise or retire.

What it has produced

At Scotiabank, 3,500 applications mapped to 525 capabilities, each with a VP owner. $102M redirected from unnecessary programmes. 533 applications retired, taking $12.1M a year of licence spend with them. Later, with the model in Finance's approval process, projects adopting an existing application rather than building rose from 20% to 46%, and $83M of regrettable project cost was avoided. → Scotiabank product operating model · Scotiabank, reuse before build

At Toronto Hydro, the finance team's IT spend mapped to application level by capability, with one budgeting dashboard and a budget process everyone could see their part in. → Toronto Hydro

How we'd start

A six-week review: your application inventory and spend, mapped to a first-cut capability model, with the duplication, the orphaned spend and the first retirements on one page. You keep the model and the dashboard. Through Seamus Birch Solutions, or through Strategy Go with Omar Shakil, who ran Product Finance at Scotiabank while I ran Product Management.