Technology Investment Forum

Technology Investment Forum

How To Make The Right Technology Investments

Challenge

Our client, a medium sized Australian company (~$500 million revenue) was undertaking a company-wide digital transformation to establish a sustainable leadership position in their market. Digital transformation was viewed as technology-led business transformation and as such investments in technology were viewed as critical accelerators to execute this strategy. However, the organisation did not have a structured and effective governance forum to determine which portfolio of technology investments to fund in order to achieve the fastest time to value. The team at Technology Connect was engaged by the Executive Leadership Team to design and implement a technology investment governance forum.

Approach

Using our design methodology, we worked with a sponsor group of the Managing Director, Chief Information Officer and Chief Financial Officer to develop a charter for an Investment Review Board (IRB). We leveraged our technology investment tools and practices to establish tailored templates for developing a business case and investment proposal. To ensure a rapid take-up by stakeholders, we developed an end-to-end process summary which was communicated using our hub session methods (a hub session is a facilitated design workshop using a design and collaboration friendly workplace environment, technology, tools and techniques) to facilitate a shared understanding and commitment to this new way of working. We then worked with the broader executive leadership team to discuss and achieve commitment to this new way of working. To embed the new way of working we assisted key business unit stakeholders in using the new process and templates. To guide investment decisions at the IRB, we introduced a capability-driven strategy approach. Essentially, this approach ensured that funding was prioritised for uplifting differentiating capabilities, i.e. capabilities that would affect products and services in ways that was of high value to customers and further strengthening areas where our client was better than their competition.

Result

Our client has implemented an IRB for all technology related investments requiring more than 10 FTE days of IT resources (internal or external). Effectively, they have their own version of “the Shark Tank” / “the Dragons Den”. The inaugural IRB had 2 Investment Proposals requesting $2M in funding with $14M benefits (profit contribution) over 3 years.