Challenge

A 100-year-old filtration company had built a $2.5 billion business providing innovative solutions for a wide range of industries including transportation, manufacturing, healthcare, hi-tech and consumer packaged goods. 

The client sought to validate current plans and develop a more efficient approach to align business demand with IT investment. This effort required a full application inventory and management platform linked to business capabilities.

Wipro was chosen based on its innovative approach to integrating business and technology imperatives while efficiently leveraging proven methods and tools over a 19-week program.

The scope included multiple business areas: supply chain management (SCM), product life cycle management (PLM), plant operations and customer relationship management (CRM). The effort covered more than 750 applications.

Solutions

Developing the strategic application roadmap called for a comprehensive look at the company’s business goals and its IT landscape. Wipro used its application rationalization methodology to understand both and align them more strategically.

Using a combination of automated surveys, workshops and individual interviews, Wipro collected 3,000 business and technical application attributes. Leveraging the company’s corporate strategic business plan, the Wipro team conducted 15 “deep dive” workshops and interviewed more than 20 senior business leaders to understand current and future business needs. This information was subsequently correlated, analyzed and used to create a business capability heat map to provide executives with a holistic view of critical business needs and a guide for technology investment planning.

In addition, Wipro created an application heat map based on characteristics such as functional alignment/redundancy, stability, agility, business/technical risk, compliance and total cost of ownership.

The business capability and application heat maps were integrated to develop short- and long-term investment strategy roadmaps that simultaneously addressed business needs while reducing technical debt and IT service delivery costs.

Business Impact

The resulting strategic application roadmap integrated business strategy with IT initiatives for the next five years. These initiatives were directly linked to stated business needs, reflected business-defined priorities and were integrated with technology imperatives. The data collected and compiled also provided an application portfolio management platform for the ongoing management of business demand and IT service delivery strategy.

This effort enabled the client to immediately embark on initiatives from the roadmap including the implementation of a global CRM solution to increase sales effectiveness and manage marketing programs as part of corporate goal to increase market share.

The program also identified business process inefficiencies associated with the product life cycle management area including a proliferation of software tools.