IT Modernization Strategy

Our Work: Client Story

Empowering a health services non-profit organization with modern IT services and capabilities

Strategic Challenge

The three-pronged challenge for our client, was and is a common but complex one.

They had started to experience the increasing consequences of technical debt of IT systems, infrastructure and processes.
Their board of directors was unsure and unclear about the effectiveness of their IT capabilities and IT’s functional readiness to support the short and long term business strategy.
Lastly, they had limited internal IT and cyber expertise and the relationship with their Managed Services Provider (MSP) was becoming less productive and strained.

We were engaged to provide an objective and independent analysis of the situation and offer strategic recommendations.

Outcomes Achieved

Cloud-focused strategy and successful migration of critical legacy infrastructure to cloud-based infrastructure and systems
Effective migration path to gradually address technical debt, improve flexibility, scalability.
Strategic transition to new MSP with better alignment and more robust support services
Discovery of significant gaps in cyber incident detection and response capabilities.
Improved cyber protection capabilities and risk mitigation strategies to close the significant gaps discovered.

Background & Context

Our client is a non-profit organization that specializes in providing health support services to thousands of individuals and families every year. Their dedication to serving the community is highly regarded.

The board of directors encouraged the organization to be proactive about assessing and evaluating their current IT capabilities, systems and infrastructure to determine what would be needed to support future needs. The board also wanted to include cyber risk as part of this effort and we were initially engaged to focus on cyber risk. However, our client proactively requested our advisory expertise to help with modernizing their IT systems, capabilities and infrastructure.

We took a very collaborative approach, working with our collaboration partner, leaders in the organization as well as their managed services provider (MSP) to define what success should look like and how to get there

We’re very grateful to have had the opportunity to share in our client’s mission by helping them modernize their IT and cyber function and establishing the right performance standards for their MSP

IT Modernization Strategy

We began by reviewing the strategic plan of the organization and then conducted a comprehensive initial assessment of the current IT and cyber capabilities. These foundational activities, including relevant interviews and systems/environment analysis, informed the strategy options considered and ultimately our recommendations. After alignment on the discovered gaps with the leadership team, we recommended a strategy that prioritized the following four fundamental principles:

Employee experience: Preserve a positive experience for employees as measured by a Net Promoter Score (NPS) or equivalent objective metric. This also included enhanced productivity and ensuring acceptable incident resolution times.
Cloud focused: Transition to a cloud-focused strategy from a dominant on-premise approach to delivering IT functions and services. Redesign IT Architecture to support future capacity, requirements and potential workloads
Cyber Security: Defining and adopting best practices for risk mitigation with a short and long term plan to protect sensitive data, ensure operational resilience and effectively maintain regulatory compliance standards (e.g. HIPAA)
MSP Assessment: Review the functional services’ deliverables of the incumbent MSP in the context of quality and competency of MSPs. This included establishing the performance standards for and expectations of the MSP as well as effectiveness of solutions and capabilities. In other words, was our client getting what they thought they were paying for? And are the paid services actually as effective as advertised?
Organizational Change & Sustainability: Careful preparedness and thoughtfulness given to ensuring that the organization can absorb new changes (i.e. operational readiness) and the timing, training and communication with relevant escalation support for trouble resolution.

Side Bar - MSP Transition Strategy : Comparative Score Card

Sometimes the evaluation and selection of a new or replacement MSP can be very complex. It can feel like untangling a complex hair knot. For some organizations it can be so overwhelming that they decide to live with poor service levels and standards instead of opting to consider alternate options.

You don’t have to live with the hair knot. We hope you can use the guide below to simplify the complexity of your MSP evaluation and selection

Download Guide

The scope of the strategy covered Cloud infrastructure, systems and services (Microsoft 365 Outlook, SharePoint, Office, Teams and Microsoft Azure Active Directory services) as well as recommendations for:

Migration Strategy: Working with key individuals to define a migration path (prioritized systems & workloads) that would minimize down time for our client after initial pilot and phase 1 testing by the pilot test team. It was essential to include operational readiness testing as part of the phase 1 testing to reduce the impact on the employee experience and productivity.
Asset Management & Monitoring Services: Developing a structured plan for asset life cycle management that included configurations and software standardization across end-user devices (laptops, desktops, mobile devices), system and user administration for cloud-based services, as well as next generation local network infrastructure assets and cloud-based storage management.
Support Services: Establishing quality standards for help desk services and business continuity in alignment with the business needs of the organization and it’s clients. Ensuring an appropriate process to facilitate end-user training and employee feedback on the IT function was helpful in improving service quality.
Cyber Security & Risk Management: We created a risk mitigation plan comprising important cyber functions including cloud security, identity and access management, network defense and threat protection, 24x7 security monitoring, Managed Detection & Response (MDR), vulnerability management, email & web security, security awareness training and simulations, risk reporting
Operations & Execution: An important element was to ensure that the strategy could be operationalized effectively. We executed the strategy including transitioning our client to a new MSP that could handle the modernized cloud infrastructure and the other strategy recommendations.

Success Factor - Client’s Chief Operating Officer (COO)

The COO played a pivotal role in the success of the strategy execution and operations. These included:

Commitment to the strategy against the overwhelming volume of operational demands
Easy to work with and open communication
Flexibility and the willingness to learn new concepts and practices
Digital savvy