ICT Roadmap for a Global Manufacturer

Overview

A global mining equipment manufacturer — with operations spanning four continents and a workforce distributed across multiple subsidiaries — engaged Knowble to develop a forward-looking ICT roadmap. Rapid business growth had driven significant technology investment, yet the organisation's ICT function was largely consumed by maintaining operational capacity and responding reactively to business requests.

The objective was to produce a structured, multi-year plan that would align ICT investment with business strategy, identify the capabilities required to support future growth, and establish the governance necessary to ensure disciplined execution.

The Challenge

The organisation had reached a point where its ICT landscape could no longer keep pace with the demands of a high-growth, globally distributed business. The IS team recognised that continuing to operate reactively was not economically sustainable and that a deliberate, planned approach to technology investment was urgently required.

Key concerns included:

• The existing ICT portfolio was poorly understood — the full extent of systems, platforms, and interdependencies had not been formally documented
• Technology investment decisions were being made in isolation, without a coherent view of how individual projects contributed to strategic objectives
• There was no formal governance structure to oversee ICT decision-making, leading to decisions that risked undermining the integrity of the broader technology landscape
• The skills and capacity of the IS team had not been assessed against the demands of the planned transformation programme
• Legacy systems required decommissioning, yet no structured approach existed to manage the transition

Our Approach

This engagement is a direct example of Knowble's Strategic Envisioning service — working with senior leadership to develop a clear, actionable technology strategy grounded in business outcomes.

Knowble undertook a structured assessment and planning methodology:

• Current state assessment — documented the existing application portfolio, infrastructure landscape, and ICT capabilities across the organisation to establish a factual baseline
• Strategy alignment — worked with business leadership to understand strategic priorities and map ICT capabilities to business outcomes, ensuring investment was directed where it would deliver the greatest value
• Capability identification — identified eleven discrete ICT capabilities required to support the organisation's current and future needs, spanning collaboration, business intelligence, information management, and infrastructure
• Vendor engagement — engaged with key technology vendors to clarify product roadmaps and upgrade paths, ensuring the plan accounted for platform lifecycle considerations
• Governance design — designed a dual-board governance model comprising a Programme Board and an Architecture Board to provide structured oversight of investment decisions

The IS team was consulted extensively throughout the engagement to ensure the roadmap addressed both strategic aspirations and the practical realities of day-to-day service delivery.

The Solution

The engagement produced a comprehensive ICT roadmap comprising the following deliverables:

• Technical Reference Model — a structured representation of the organisation's technology landscape, providing a common language for discussing ICT capabilities and their relationships
• Eleven capability areas — each with defined scope, current state assessment, target state, and a prioritised set of projects to close the gap — covering areas from enterprise resource planning and product lifecycle management through to business intelligence and disaster recovery
• Three programmes of work — projects grouped by business priority and technical dependency into coherent delivery streams, with prioritisation informed by business value relative to investment
• Investment analysis — budgetary estimates across the planning horizon, with distribution across operational and capital expenditure clearly articulated to support informed financial planning
• Governance framework — a dual-board model with defined composition, cadence, decision-making authority, and escalation paths, designed to balance time, cost, quality, and architectural integrity
• Skills framework — an assessment of the ICT team's capabilities against the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA), identifying gaps and development priorities to support roadmap execution

Outcomes

The ICT roadmap provided the organisation's leadership with a clear, evidence-based plan for technology investment:

• Strategic alignment — ICT investment was directly linked to business objectives, enabling leadership to prioritise spending based on business value rather than technical urgency alone
• Portfolio visibility — the full ICT landscape was formally documented for the first time, giving leadership and the IS team a shared understanding of the systems, platforms, and interdependencies they were managing
• Structured delivery — the grouping of projects into three programmes of work provided a realistic, dependency-aware delivery sequence that could be managed and adjusted as organisational priorities evolved
• Governance maturity — the introduction of a formal governance model established clear accountability for ICT decisions and reduced the risk of ad-hoc investments undermining the roadmap's integrity
• Workforce readiness — the skills assessment identified specific capability gaps in the IS team, enabling targeted development and recruitment planning ahead of the transformation programme