This large African bank wanted to break down their high-level business vision into a set of aligned IT objectives that would allow them to achieve their strategic ambitions. They also wanted to develop a MI and reporting operating model to allow stakeholders a real-time understanding of current progress against these objectives. To do all this, they needed the best support available.

Why Elixirr?

We had successfully completed a similar piece of work for the Enterprise Architecture function within this bank. We developed a successful methodology based on industry standards and the bank recognised the potential benefits that could be unlocked by developing a MI and reporting operating model for the whole of the Group IT function. We were the natural choice of partner.

The challenge

We were engaged to solve three main challenges:

  1. Distilling the high-level business objectives into a set of tangible requirements that were universally accepted by senior business and technology stakeholders across different functions and products.
  2. Developing a set of IT objectives that were directly aligned to the business strategy, using industry-leading frameworks to come up with a hierarchy of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) / Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) that would allow the effective and meaningful tracking of progress against their delivery milestones.
  3. Designing and building an automated digital reporting dashboard and the supporting operating model that would keep it real-time and relevant.

The approach

The business vision had been deliberately developed at a very high-level, so our first priority was to understand exactly what the statements in the vision document meant to the business. We then needed to achieve universal agreement from all senior stakeholders that the statements should act as the basis for the IT strategy. To do this, we conducted one-to-one interviews with every single stakeholder.

We conducted extensive research into current trends in banking technology, and to understand which were the right industry-leading technology performance indicators for the bank to track the implementation of their strategic objectives.

Essential to this was the development of a framework to assess the viability and maturity of the bank’s data estate. This was so we could understand what KPIs and KRIs could be supported by the dashboard.

Finally, we worked with a third party agency (IDE) to develop an interactive dashboard prototype to demonstrate the digital MI capability.

The value

We created a Proof of Concept (POC) dashboard and a very comprehensive execution roadmap to help this large African bank build the production version, and to mature the data sources and defined KPIs.