Enable Consulting

Self Funding Application Modernisation Programme

How to design a self funding application modernisation programme

Overview

One of the main challenges with getting any modernisation programme off the drawing board, is securing the funding for the programme.  With competing priorities leaving the programme competing for funding with other programmes. These competing programmes often delivering much needed new functionality the business urgently required.  The result was that modernisation was often pushed lower down the priority list.

However one of the side effects of this behaviour is that the business improvement programmes are more complex. As a result they become more costly to implement because of the issues integrating with a legacy application and ageing infrastructure.

 

The Challenge

Competing priorities and a finite in year budget meant the stakeholders were faced with a challenge to get the proposed modernisation programme off the ground.

 

The Solution

Enable Consulting were able to help design a programme that became self-funding.  By triaging the entire application estate we were able to develop business cases for some of the easier modernisation targets that delivered in year return on investment.  This return was then reinvested into the programme to deliver some of the more complex modernisation activities.

The triage effort looked at a number of parameters to help classify the applications. This helped to initially focus on applications that potentially could release the in year return.

The 3 categories were:

Simple —Software as a Service and UNIX to LINUX migration

Medium—Application Replacement or Business Process Changes

Hard— Complex systems (Mainframe/Multiple Interfaces/Missing Source Code)

 

The Result

As a result we were able to instigate a self-funding programme that resulted in reducing the IT run rate for the client.  It also reduced the complexity of the environment reducing the cost of implementing future business improvement activities.

The key learning from this successful programme was that it is critical to understand the measurable value you will deliver.  By understanding this value and tracking your programme against delivering this value it was possible to feed this ROI back into future activities.