Establishing IT’s Business Case
The Requirement:
UK Power Networks was preparing to submit its business case to Ofgem, the electricity industry’s regulator, as part of Ofgem’s price review process.
Given that IT services are a significant component of the Ofgem review, UK Power Networks wanted to see how their technology infrastructure and applications support compared with its peers, while at the same time identifying any additional cost efficiencies and improvement opportunities.
Our Approach:
The biggest challenge was that we had to coordinate data from three suppliers as well as UK Power Networks staff.
Also, in order to assess the final report and include any recommendations in the Ofgem submission, UK Power Networks was working to a tight timescale.
We completed a complex and extensive review of over 30 different service lines (including hosting, maintenance, the service desk, as well as applications support). This incorporated an analysis of scope, costs, prices and quality of the service provider’s service delivery; staffing levels; infrastructure complexity; processing and incident volumes; methodologies and IT governance processes of each service.
The Outcome:
Whilst the overall cost performance was good, some discrete areas were identified as being able to offer cost savings, such as Service Desk and applications licences. Overall we found a possible immediate saving of around 2% of the total IT operational spend.
While this confirmation was certainly encouraging, what was of particular interest in the study were the recommendations for optimisation and improvement which had, in the main, a focus on improving the contractual management and thus the subsequent delivery from UK Power Networks.
“ImprovIT turned a lot around in such a short time, even when we made last minute changes which was really phenomenal. They showed a lot of flexibility and commitment.”
