Overview
The Bank of Ireland, has a long-established history, a strong domestic market share and is considered a pillar of the Irish national banking system.
The Bank of Ireland continues to modernise in response to customer demand, the onset of challenger banks and the need to manage down operating costs. The Bak needed to develop and implement a new IT Operating model to support effective change management and reduce complexity in the change delivery process.
Client Challenges
- Ensuring an appropriate level of internal control and governance during heightened levels of technology change in a predominantly outsourced IT Change environment
- Maintaining close alignment to the business, ensuring all Technology spend remains strategic, appropriately prioritized and delivers measurable outcomes and business cases
- The need for a flexible approach to Technology Change, which is suited to both agile incremental deployments (i.e. customer apps, frontend systems and B2B services) and the larger waterfall systems transformation and migration Programmes
- The need to challenge and reduce the cost of change and underlying operating costs with a focus on insourcing, Partner costs, efficiency and location strategy
- Strengthen internal resource capabilities to ensure the required skills, tools and processes are in place to deliver the internal transformation journey
What did Aveas do?
The Programme was structured around 4 phases of activity, each of which was led by Aveas at the top and workstream level, and reporting into the COO on a weekly basis.
- Understand and Initiate: In this phase, Aveas performed an independent assessment of existing IT Capabilities, while in parallel, developing the Technology, IT and Sourcing Strategies. This enabled us to understand the capability gaps necessary to support the roadmap and thereby develop the design principles for a Level 1 COO structure, an outline business case and the change impact assessment
- Detailed Design: The formation of 3 core workstreams, headed by the CIO, Director of Change and the Director of Group Strategy & Planning, each supported by an Aveas lead and a number of Bank and Aveas SME’s with defining the Organisation structures, Roles, RACI, Governance Models, Location Strategies, outsourcing/insourcing priorities for their respective divisions
- Plan the Implementation: In this phase we developed a two-stage implementation approach, which minimised employee uncertainty and enabled a controlled change within a large and complex operating environment
- The communication and appointment of the new leadership team and the strategic intent of the COO function
- The communication and appointment of the level 2 Management Teams within the divisions and the rollout of further operational change
- Implementation and Realisation of Benefits: during this phase the focus was on managing a sizeable recruitment programme, tracking the benefits through to budgetary realisation, delivering a number of large town halls communication events and working with internal communication teams to ensure employee feedback was understood and acted upon as the communication events where rolled out. We developed a full IT operating model handbook to enable communication of the Change
What were the outcomes?
- A significant positive business case with immediate benefits
- The recruitment & set-up of a team of senior Bank Change Directors, accountable for End to End Change within the Bank
- An re-energised workforce with a new sense of purpose
- The establishment of a new Business Architecture function, to foster a more strategic partnership with the business and ensure that major Change Programmes will have a strong articulation of purpose and outcome
- The recruitment & set-up of a Bank led Engineering Function, to focus solely on Technology Change and the delivery of Technology Solutions faster, better and cheaper
- A procurement function delivering effective supplier management and focused on core capabilities