The Challenge
After experiencing major shifts in the student loan landscape based on COVID-19, loan forbearance and forgiveness, and changes in the federal student loan landscape, the company’s CIO had multiple competing critical priorities. These included cloud platform migration, a high volume of requests from clients, and a critical need to bootstrap product development to drive future revenue – all while tasked with reducing IT spend by over 50% over the next 3 – 5 years and maintain ongoing operations.
Project Description
Further was engaged to advise and assist the CIO with identifying required initiatives, prioritizing effort allocation, and devising a roadmap for realizing the myriad critical outcomes that were demanded. After inventorying operational demands, a three-track approach was developed to address the major needed actions IT – and the entire company – would need to take.
Outcomes Delivered
- Prioritized Enterprise Initiatives. We worked with the client to in both a top-down, and bottom-up approach to define and prioritize IT demands – by inventorying all legacy and active requests and aligning these with required capabilities driven by long-term enterprise strategic direction.
- Demand Governance Framework. Further designed and implemented a team across all major requesting groups – with representatives from the 3 business lines, Finance, and Legal/Regulatory/Compliance – with a mission and processes to clarify and specify strategic goals, and ensure alignment with development activities.
- Customer Request Prioritization and Policies. Based on overwhelming demand from customers with change requests resulting from upheavals in the student loan market, Further worked across Operations, Finance and Legal to structure pricing, policies and priorities for customer requests, both short-term, and as customer contracts were up for renewal – to help manage demand.
- Revenue Growth Case and Approach. As part of the CIO Advisory work, Business Development was identified as an area with ambiguous demand and value to the enterprise. Working in conjunction with the entire executive leadership, Further created and made the case to pursue Business Development as a critical focus for both enterprise strategy and IT execution.
