Enhancing IT Portfolio Value for a Multi-billion-dollar Federal Agency’s Financial Investments

Overview

A large federal financial agency with a $2B+ annual budget needed a better way to tie its funding requests for IT projects to qualitative and quantitative business outcomes.

Our Approach

RiverNorth developed and executed a strategy to capture the “business vision” story for each of the agency’s 10+ Divisions, articulating operational challenges, desired future states, and enabling initiative(s) required to evolve business functions.

Next, through structured, facilitated working sessions with business leaders from each client Division, we uncovered business challenges and derived desired business outcomes from technical discussions. We then created a framework to capture, consolidate, and cross-reference Division-specific Roadmaps. These Roadmaps documented IT investments and Business Initiatives for the next 3 to 5 years, complete with capability mapping and dependencies between Division roadmaps, which was never accomplished at the client before. We also reviewed previously conducted Applications Inventory Assessments for all Divisions and created mapping to the Enterprise Architecture Capability Model.

Results

We delivered an integrated roadmap — a framework that captures, consolidates, and cross-references Division-specific Roadmaps, documenting IT investments and initiatives for the next 3–5 years, complete with capability mapping to the Enterprise Architecture and dependencies between Division roadmaps. This deliverable was the first of its kind, as the Agency had never accomplished this before our support.