International Company Rail Traffic Management & Train Services - Independent As-Is Evaluation

The company successfully provides specific rail traffic management and train services internationally. Innovations, operational excellence, and digital transformation are strategic drivers for the firm.

Corporate IT plays an essential part. Reducing overall IT costs had been the primary strategic target in the past. Now, this has switched to significantly increasing the IT capability of enabling the business and allowing for business agility while maintaining cost-effectiveness.

It is crucial to get an independent view of the current state of the corporate IT function, to derive proper actions for the future.

The goal of the project was to provide an independent analysis & discussion of the corporate IT function considering the following key points in particular:

• Understand the strengths and weaknesses of the current IT setup (organization, governance, processes, architecture, sourcing, project portfolio)
• Compare the corporation against common IT benchmarks and IT key metrics
• Discuss potential future changes and initiatives considering corporate strategy and IT strategy

The following approach has been taken to provide an independent analysis & discussion of the newly developed IT strategy:

• Settings session with the CIO and related IT executives
• Analysis of the existing IT strategy and key documents
• Walkthrough sessions with the CIO and respectively his IT executives
• Interviews with selected stakeholders in IT and business
• Comparison of the company against selected IT benchmarks and IT key metrics
• Final discussion on the external review and particular topics of interest

The project length for the independent as-is analysis of the IT function, including benchmarks and IT key metrics, was approximately 3 months.