IT assessment provides prioritized recommendations to support future needs

Client background

This company is the parent company of multiple divisions that manufacture, sell, service and repair heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) products for commercial, industrial and residential uses.

The business challenge

This company had recently hired a new CFO who was struggling to comprehend current IT processes and priorities. The company’s core enterprise resource planning (ERP) software platform was dated and no longer being marketed by the software vendor to new customers, pointing to a need for technology investments and changes in the near future. Compounding the challenges, the client had several key IT software professionals that were approaching retirement and clear succession strategies and plans were necessary.

As a result, the client engaged Baker Tilly to comprehensively assess their current IT function and practices. This included assessing their organizational structure and staffing and the skills and capacity of the IT function against their current and future needs to provide recommendations on strategic and tactical priorities.

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly assessed the company’s IT function, focusing on how the IT structure, including people, process and technology supports the company’s current and future needs. The focus was to provide initial direction on improvements in alignment with the overall business strategy and organizational needs including changes to best support the company’s planned growth in a cost-effective way. Our approach included reviewing existing plans, budgets and other operational artifacts, as well as interviewing key business stakeholders and IT leaders to better understand how IT operates, is managed, the capabilities provided to the business and current IT-related priorities. We identified a number of improvement opportunities and presented organizational and performance improvement recommendations specific to the company’s strategy and governance, application sustainability, technical infrastructure, organizational structure and IT operating model.

As a result of this analysis, the company requested additional assistance in providing a focused strategic road map for their IT function, specifically addressing succession plans for key personnel who were approaching retirement and transition plans to free up IT leadership capacity. Further, as executive management was still grappling with strategic direction regarding division autonomy, integration and consolidation, we provided insight and a series of questions for which the answers would provide the company with business guidance for IT strategy direction. This included IT organization structure and size, outsourcing versus continuing to perform IT functions in-house, system standardization and the strategy regarding ERP replacement or continued use of existing systems.