From fragmented applications to a product-driven technology organisation

Growth had come through repeated acquisitions, each absorbed without consolidating the technology estate behind it. The result was an application landscape assembled from local choices and supplier-led implementations, with substantial overlap between systems and no shared view of what the group actually ran.

Without that view, every transformation argument was contestable. Rationalisation proposals could not be costed, and technology remained a support function rather than an enterprise capability.

What we did

I designed and launched a multi-year transformation programme that deliberately started with the fundamentals rather than with a target architecture. The first step was to build the enterprise application portfolio: a complete inventory and assessment of the landscape.

• Built a complete enterprise application inventory and assessment
• Identified redundancies and quantified rationalisation opportunities
• Established cost and value analysis for each part of the estate
• Segmented enterprise systems from genuinely local ones
• Set the operating model direction toward product-driven technology ownership

Where it landed

The portfolio became the factual baseline for every subsequent transformation decision. Arguments about rationalisation moved from opinion to evidence, and the technology organisation gained the footing to be run as an enterprise capability rather than a collection of inherited local estates.