ICT Strategy, Architecture and Business Case
Year: 2019
Scope and summary of activities
NCA engaged Strategic Reform (SR) to review the ICT strategy and enterprise architecture to inform and deliver a costed business case for significant investments in technology. Specific deliverables included an ICT Strategic Review and Modernisation Roadmap, Enterprise Architecture Design Principles, Current and Future Application Architecture, High Level Azure Design, Detailed Azure Design, Implementation of Azure Security Centre, Security Architecture and IRAP Assessment, Corporate ICT Restructure and Functional Service Design, and review of the Asset Management System Project.
SR assembled an exceptional, multi-disciplinary team, ensuring a diverse mix of broad management consulting combined with deep and practical experience in IT operating models, technology architecture, cloud migrations and ICT sourcing.
The review provided the NCA with an assessment of the current ICT environment against the business needs of the NCA and developed an initial enterprise architecture and made recommendations for future investments into ICT systems, technologies and capabilities. This captured and defined business drivers which are likely to include strategic (positioning NCA for the next wave of cloud transformation), financial (reducing operating costs), and quality (performance, service levels and satisfaction).
As part of the work SR analysed over 80 agency documents and conducted interviews and focus groups with 21 stakeholders, including the CEO and executive team, all agency directors, staff and external service providers.
Outcomes and Benefits
Strategic Reform developed the architecture framework developed through consultation with NCA staff, including the CEO, CFO and both key business and ICT stakeholders as instructed by the NCA. The specific focus areas of investigation included:
- Detailed strategic assessment of the NCA’s current ICT environment
- NCA’s high level business, information, application and technology architectures including a gap analysis
- A policy framework and principles to guide ICT investment decisions based on that architecture
- Developed a business case with cost estimates and implementation options for the cloud migration.
- Assessed current ICT environment against the business needs
- Developed an 18-month modernisation roadmap for delivery as a managed program of six, integrated work streams
- Developed ICT organisational redesign with a centralised ICT structure and an improved operating model and service management framework, including capability, sourcing and workforce and skills changes
- Developed High-Level Design for migration from an incumbent cloud provider to Microsoft Azure
- Developed current and future state ICT application architecture for key COTS and bespoke systems, including transition to SaaS where appropriate.
SR presented its report to the CEO and Executive Leadership Team and all 20 recommendations within the final report were endorsed.
