Introduction and challenges
Technological innovations continue to revolutionise use cases at a fast pace. In the past, companies could simply follow the trend, taking advantage of feedback from early adopters. Recently, this is becoming less and less true. The quick adoption of innovations by users (competitors/customers) and the competitive advantages they can enable are forcing companies to take a proactive approach. In this context, information systems (IS) are a key business performance improvement lever. Defining an appropriate IS vision and strategy is a priority. The strategy must meet five major challenges:
Agility: modularity, containerisation, data modelling structure, cloud use, software or platform as a service offers mean that the systems and strategy can be flexible and evolve over time.
Performance: in a context where data volumes are growing exponentially, IT systems are increasingly interconnected, functionally richer, available 24/7 and have the shortest possible response time.
Innovation: fast-paced technological disruptions (impacting habits and benchmarks) may require advocating for cultural changes as well as an open mind to structural changes.
Scalability: “Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast” is a precondition to staying in the race while controlling your investments.
Security: in more open environments, transaction and data protection are a survival issue for organisations.
How we can help
To succeed, careful management of the association between the business and the supporting technological applications is necessary. Argon & Co’s experts can help you in:
- The construction of your IT strategy, aligned with your business challenges and the definition of the associated transformation plan
- The audit of your current information systems (governance, skills, architecture, solutions, project methods)
- The adequacy between your IT architecture and your functional architecture and the drafting of a gap analysis covering best practice of current processes but also covering future business ambitions
- Alignment of IT initiatives with business strategy
- The control of master data management in the company (organisation, processes, tools)
- Adaptation of project methodologies to group IT strategy to integrate the dimensions necessary for successful implementation (integration, modularity, scalability, etc.)
- The implementation of ecosystems around new technologies (automation, data science, blockchain) through collaborations and partnerships
- The definition of the make or buy strategy (outsourcing, offshoring etc.) and its implementation
- The creation of synergies in IT teams and projects following mergers