Strategic Technology Assessments

Today’s IT management is faced with a growing number challenges that drive the manner in which the technology itself is architected, deployed and managed.  Aligning IT and business strategy remains the No. 1 or No. 2 business IT issue year after year.  This is followed closely behind by an ever increasing focus on IT Compliance, both to internal policies and processes, as well as to regulatory requirements.  Finally how IT manages Risk, both within the systems environment itself, as well as how IT provides the tools to manage Business Risk has become a top level priority.  Managing the IT organization to address these concerns, while at the same time managing cost and prioritizing investments, has driven IT Governance initiatives in many forward thinking organizations.

NewVista Advisors assists its clients in understanding the current state of their IT organization and technical environment, determining the actual IT needs, based on the current and future goals of the business, and determining the gaps between the current IT environment and where IT needs to be to meet the business goals.  We accomplish this through our Strategic Technology Assessment.  This service includes the following activities:

• Comprehensive interviews with business leaders are preformed to understand the goals and aspirations of the business, as well as providing an understanding of how the business views IT, where they feel there are gaps, and the priority of those gaps.

• Interviews are preformed with both senior and mid-level IT management to understand the current IT environment, the future IT plans, the challenges IT has in delivering the services needed by the business

• A comprehensive review of the IT infrastructure is performed to understand the effectiveness of this important foundation through which all services will be delivered.  The evaluation includes a review of the overall architecture to determine its alignment with the business needs, the scalability and capacity of the systems to meet projected business growth, redundancies in function which can be capitalized on to reduce costs, as well as the systems, policies and processes designed to manage the infrastructure and drive its availability.

• A comprehensive review of the application portfolio is performed to understand its alignment with the business goals and aspirations.  This includes a review of application data management, classification, permissions and replication for Business Continuity.

• An analysis of the Business Continuity plans, processes and underlying infrastructure is performed.  The current assessment of application criticality is validated with the Application Business Owners, and the infrastructure deployed to provide the required recovery is assessed in relation to the recovery needs.  Application Recovery Plans are reviewed and validated

• In those situations where the IT environment is impacted by regulatory requirements, a review of the compliance of those requirements is performed.

The result of NewVista Advisors’s Strategic Technology Assessment is a comprehensive report detailing the results of the interviews, prioritized business and technical goals, gaps between the technical needs of the organization and the ability of the systems and applications to support them and gaps in the governance of the technical environment.  Wherever possible, gaps are further defined in terms of financial impact to the organization, giving the company the basis for prioritization of future investments in IT.

The report includes comprehensive set of actionable recommendations, prioritized according to business impact.  In addition, an IT Roadmap is included to chart the execution of the strategy into a series of tactical IT initiatives.

NewVista Advisors has performed this Strategic Technology Assessment many times for some of the most forward thinking organizations, in such industries as Financial Services and Manufacturing.  Additionally, we have performed subsets of the overall analysis in such areas as Business Continuity or Infrastructure.