IT Policies, Standards and Procedures Development –Evaluation and/or creation of documentation used to establish a governing framework around IT or related controls. Kingston Smith Consulting can create the documents through facilitated sessions and interviews whilst incorporating best practice.
IT Risk Management – Create or assess the IT control framework. A risk assessment will identify redundancies, inefficiencies, weak controls. Risk mitigation plans would then be designed and implemented.
Monitor/Manage IT Controls – Monitoring helps ensure that internal controls continue to operate effectively. Kingston Smith Consulting can assess the effectiveness of current monitoring methods and suggest solutions and tools to enable more efficient monitoring.
Process Improvement – We bring a systematic approach to identify and analyse IT process improvement opportunities using a variety of methods such as benchmarking, continuous quality improvement, Six Sigma, CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) or Lean. We can facilitate full process re-engineering – a process improvement involving multiple processes across an organisation and requiring a great deal of change.
IT Value Management – Evaluation and selection of IT investments, benefit realisation, delivery of value (Val IT). Kingston Smith Consulting can assess the current procedures in the investment decisions and recommend widely accepted methods to implement metrics, measure the value obtained, and establish decision points.
IT Cost Management – Kingston Smith Consulting can assist you in measuring and optimising IT costs. Our approach follows five distinct but related work streams:
Financial Baseline – Linking costs to services, providing management with an organisational budget mapped to service lines.
Benchmarking – Comparing IT expenditure against industry benchmarks, identifying key areas of cost over or under-utilisation in order to determine whether the IT budget is considered low or high by industry standards.
Assets – This determines how efficiently items are being used in the organisation and identifies the degree of standardisation and duplication. This assists in identifying potential asset candidates for retirement or consolidation.
Project – Assesses all IT-related projects against their contribution to business objectives. This allows projects to be categorised as essential or discretionary, which in turn provides management with a prioritised list of all projects, detailing the deliverables and financial return on project investment.
IT Management – Deliverables are based on COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology), which enables the development of clear policy and best practice for technology control. It importantly assesses the alignment with the corporate strategic objectives using proven methodologies (eg Balanced Scorecard). It allows the development of the appropriate technology change management and governance programmes.
