Case Study RICS - Strategic IT Review and Buiness Change Management

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IndigoBlue’s insight and expertise provided the vision and strategy we required, and helps us to understand the art of the possible.”

Company Profile

With around 100,000 qualified members and over 50,000 students and trainees in some 140 countries, RICS provides the world's leading professional qualification in land, property, construction and the associated environmental issues.

An independent, not-for-profit organisation, RICS acts in the public interest: setting and regulating the highest standards of competence and integrity among our members; and providing impartial, authoritative advice on key issues for business, society and governments worldwide.

The Challenge

Previously within RICS there has been a fragmentation of technology services provision; different areas of the organisation have procured their own stand-alone application services leading to difficulties is consolidating data and complexity and cost when adding new the new online services demanded by the business and customers.

The application landscape within RICS had a number of issues and restrictions. One of the consequences was that it was difficult to obtain a single view of a RICS customer. The tightly-coupled nature of the systems architecture imposed a significant constraint on the ability to adapt to changing business needs.

Our Approach

IndigoBlue was originally contracted to complete a review of RICS IT capability, systems, and infrastructure.

The RICS IT capability, systems and infrastructure were assessed against their ability to support the organisation’s business plans by two IndigoBlue consultants. Their remit was to identify areas of opportunity for improvement in each of these. This assessment included meetings with stakeholders, workstream managers and delivery managers.

A number of areas of opportunity were identified, as were the key risks. To allow RICS to attain benefits as early as possible, IndigoBlue recommended a phased approach to the delivery of the recommendations.

As a result of the review, a programme was set up to migrate to an externally-hosted simplified architecture using a phased approach. The first phases were to move to an external hosting provider and to set up a new database and core infrastructure; the creation of a new Foundation Platform.

In March 2010, the start-up and running of this programme was tasked to an IndigoBlue programme manager and IndigoBlue also provided the lead systems architecture role. The deliveries from these first phases were completed in October 2010.

RICS also engaged an IndigoBlue strategic consultant to assist in developing an organisational structure that is better suited to meeting the business challenges and in the engagement of an external agency to provide a organisation-wide digital strategy.

Benefits

The Foundation Programme provides a technology platform that will delivery RICS business of the future facilitating a broader, more engaging web presence and supporting internationalisation. Additionally, the platform requires significantly less resource to support and maintain.

IndigoBlue has also supported RICS in the identification and recruitment of a new full-time IT director, who will continue the business-focused developments on the platform.