The Challenge
The client had experienced multiple disruptions to their business, including COVID-19, a divestiture from a parent company, coming under new ownership, and recent onboarding of nearly all executive leadership.
As one of the first actions for the new CEO and CFO, they needed to understand the role of technology to deliver their print, digital, eCommerce, and event experiences to customers, and how technology could enable their ambitious future strategy.
Project Description
Further assessed their current state business capabilities and tech, which helped the media organization understand the challenges they were facing – including:
- IT Decisions and Budgets at functional team level – leading to sub-optimal costs and standards
- Literally no IT infrastructure – with a single resource for IT support, a single project manager, and part-time developers distributed throughout the organization
- No established process or organization for planning, budgeting and delivering IT projects
We then built an IT Strategy, Architecture Diagrams, and a Roadmap to achieve enterprise goals and strategy, using the current state IT situation as a baseline.
Outcomes Delivered
- Current State Capabilities and Architecture across multiple media properties, multiple brands (including recently acquired brands), and across myriad tech solutions, often implemented ad hoc and by business unit.
- Tech Asset Inventory that catalogued all tech apps and spend across the entire organization – showing the media company all IT expenses in a single place for the first time.
- Target Architecture that portrayed a future strategic solution of a common source of media assets, and single points of access, for their audience, customers, and ad/sponsor partners.
- Timeline that integrated current needs (upcoming events, ongoing initiatives), short-term priorities (common apps/databases/user interfaces), and long-term strategic goals (eCommerce growth, global expansion, multiple brand acquisition and incorporation).
