Consulting

IT Strategy

A technology plan your finance director can actually read

How this is usually engaged

Typically four to eight weeks of part-time work, priced as a fixed engagement. Longer where the estate spans multiple sites or the ownership of systems is genuinely unclear. We do not require you to buy implementation from us afterwards, and the roadmap is written to be executable by whoever you choose.

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Practice: Consulting
Sectors: 4 served
Process: 5 stages
Standard: Built and tested to WCAG 2.2 AA

An assessment of the systems you run, what they cost, where the risk sits, and a sequenced plan for the next two to three years that survives contact with a budget cycle.

01What this solves

The problem this addresses

Most technology estates were not designed; they accumulated. A system bought for one department, a platform inherited in an acquisition, a contract renewed because nobody had time to look at alternatives. The result is a set of running costs nobody can fully explain, overlapping tools that each do part of a job, and a renewal calendar that drives decisions rather than the other way round. The question is not usually what to buy next. It is what to stop paying for, what to consolidate, and in what order.

02Capabilities

What is included

Estate and cost inventory

Every system, licence, hosting arrangement and support contract listed with its owner, annual cost and renewal date. For many organisations this document does not currently exist anywhere, and producing it changes the conversation on its own.

Application portfolio assessment

Each application judged on business value, technical condition and cost, so you can tell apart what to invest in, what to leave alone and what to retire.

Build, buy or stay decisions

Structured comparison of building, buying or keeping what you have, with the costs that people usually forget: migration, training, integration and the cost of leaving again later.

Risk and dependency mapping

Where the estate depends on one supplier, one server or one person, and what the realistic consequence would be. Named plainly, with the cost of mitigating each one.

Roadmap and sequencing

A phased plan with dependencies, indicative costs and decision points, aligned to your budget cycle so the first phase can actually be approved.

Sourcing and supplier review

An assessment of current suppliers and contracts, and help writing requirements for new ones — including the exit terms most organisations discover they lack only when they need them.

03Use cases

Where this work usually starts

Post-merger estate consolidation

Two organisations, two of everything, and a mandate to reduce cost without stopping either business. The work is deciding what survives and in what order.

Professional Services

A renewal that needs a decision, not a rollover

A large contract comes up in six months and nobody can say whether the platform is still the right one. We produce the comparison in time to negotiate rather than renew by default.

Finance

Technology due diligence before an investment

An assessment of what a target actually runs, what condition it is in, and what it will cost to bring to a supportable state.

04Approach

How we approach it

We start with an inventory: what runs, who owns it, what it costs, what it is contractually tied to and what depends on it. Then we map that against what the organisation is trying to do over the next few years and identify the gaps, the duplication and the concentrations of risk. The output is a sequenced roadmap with rough costs and dependencies, deliberately shaped around your renewal dates and budget cycles rather than an idealised order that could never be funded.

05Process

How the work runs

The order matters more than the ceremony. Stages overlap in practice, but none of them is skipped.

01
Framing
What decision this work has to support, who has to be convinced, and what has already been ruled in or out politically. Answering this first stops the report being interesting but unusable.
02
Discovery
Interviews with system owners and finance, contract review, and inspection of the environments themselves. We check what is running, not only what people believe is running.
03
Analysis
Costs consolidated, overlaps identified, dependencies mapped and options costed at the level of accuracy the decision actually needs.
04
Options review
A working session where we present options and you push back. The recommendation is written after this conversation, not before it.
05
Roadmap and handover
The final plan, sequenced to your budget cycle, with a session for the people who will have to deliver it.

06Deliverables

What you receive

Everything below is handed over as part of the engagement. If you take the work elsewhere afterwards, the next team has what it needs.

System and cost inventoryA spreadsheet you keep and maintain, with owners, costs and renewal dates.
Application portfolio assessmentValue, condition and cost per application, with a retain, invest, replace or retire recommendation.
Risk registerConcentration and dependency risks with likelihood, impact and cost to mitigate.
Sequenced roadmap with indicative costs
Board-level summaryTen pages that a non-technical committee can approve a budget from.

07Technologies

What we use on this work

These entries are drawn from our managed technology directory, which records why each one is in our stack and what we reach for it for. Nothing outside this list is claimed for this service.

Data & Storage

PostgreSQL

Cloud Platforms

Amazon Web Services
Microsoft Azure
Google Cloud

DevOps & Operations

Docker
Kubernetes
Terraform
Grafana

The full technology directory

Highlighted entries are used routinely on delivery work

08Security

How this is kept secure

Reviewing an estate means being given access to sensitive detail: contracts, network diagrams, incident history. We work to the minimum access needed, prefer read-only credentials and exported documents over standing accounts, and hold material in an access-controlled workspace for the engagement. Findings that describe exploitable weakness are shared through an agreed channel and named as such, not buried in a general report that circulates widely.

Our full security and quality approach

09Questions

Asked before we start

Will this just be a recommendation to hire you for the build?

No, and the engagement is priced so that it does not need to be. Several of these reviews have concluded that the right answer is to keep the current platform, or to buy an off-the-shelf product we do not implement. We will tell you where we could do the work, so you can weigh our advice accordingly.

How accurate are the costs in the roadmap?

They are indicative ranges intended for budget planning, not quotations. Ranges narrow as scope firms up, and we say explicitly which numbers are well understood and which depend on things nobody can know yet — usually data migration and integration with systems we have not seen inside.

Do you need access to our systems?

We need enough to verify what people tell us, which is usually read-only access to inventories, monitoring, billing consoles and documentation. Where you would rather not grant access, we can work from exports you produce, though that lengthens the engagement and we will note anything we could not independently confirm.

When is this work not worth doing?

If you have fewer than a handful of systems, or you already know what the problem is and simply need it fixed, a strategy engagement is an expensive way to reach a conclusion you have already drawn. It pays off when the estate is large enough that nobody holds the whole picture, or when a decision is genuinely contested internally.

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Talk to us about IT Strategy

The project brief takes about five minutes and gives us enough to have a useful first conversation about IT Strategy rather than a generic one. If you would rather just ask a question, the short form is there for that.

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We read every enquiry ourselves. If we are not the right fit, we will say so and tell you what to look for instead.