This document describes the objectives an results of a 6-month project aiming at designing
an IT transformation plan for a leading industrial gas company.
In a hard context of post 2008-crisi, the objectives of the transformation were quite ambitious:
Generate 20% savings on the considered scope, reinforce the security of the systems while
keeping the current flexibility and reactivity.
After a first detailed assessment of the scope baseline, the project team identified a series of
levers to be implemented in order to generate the target savings. On the end-user services
costs, which corresponds to the dedicated scope covered by this report, levers as diverse as
rationalizing the number of devices allocated to the employees, improving the efficiency of
the call-centers, outsourcing the digital workplace to contract it “as a Service” or
standardizing the catalog of available devices to adapt them to the needs of each specific job
have generated 7.5 millions € (M€) savings out of the 37M€ baseline collected for 2014.
Those levers have been prioritized and timed out to ensure the best ROI possible, starting by
the “quick wins” and finishing by the heavy investments, which were financed by the savings
of the first deployed levers. The final payback was estimated to be of 1.5 years.
At the project level, organization and staffing for the project were also defined, with a peak of
61 FTE needed at the peak of the transformation. Different committees were created, from
the board level to ensure the respect of general directives to the weekly review meetings to
follow the pace of the implementation and to solve operational issues.
IT transformation projects are getting more and more frequently at the agenda of the biggest
companies’ CEOs as it enables to generate important savings with a quick payback. Long
put aside and considered as the playfield of the CIO only, it should now become critical for
top management to launch this kind of initiatives on a regular basis to ensure the leanest
cost structure possible.
