Bath Building Society formed in 1904 in Bath, Somerset. The Society’s purpose is to do everything they can to help Members achieve their financial goals. Whether it’s buying a home, saving for a special purchase, or putting a bit aside for a rainy day. They are a smaller building society, specialising in bespoke mortgage & savings products for their Members.
Bath Building Society recently carried out a comprehensive review of its 5-year corporate strategy. With the business direction set, the Society turned focus to a suitability review of the existing technology estate. They were keen to understand areas of improvement which would deliver maximum benefit to the organisation. Altus Consulting identified the key areas of the IT estate which needed investment, and made recommendations to the Executive Committee. We supported the preparation of the business case to secure funding for the transformation required.
Working in partnership throughout the engagement, we used our proprietary industry reference models to drive a series of workshops to explore capability, process, and technology. We then created a bespoke capability model for the Society and we were able to use this to project issues, hotspots, and scalability restrictions. Once the business capability gaps were known, attention turned to mapping these gaps to our technical reference models. This enabled us to produce Future State Logical Architecture diagrams. Our recommendations were presented to, and accepted by the Society, helping to ensure their programme is set up for success.
Working with business experts from each area of the Society, Altus Consulting ran workshops to understand the processes and systems used for the variety of tasks Bath Building Society perform. Through this business-wide engagement we were able to identify systems that were used, along with business users’ perceptions of issues, bottlenecks or progress. We used our sector-specific capability model to streamline and structure our conversations with the business, as well as to project our findings across business areas and capabilities.
Altus Consulting built up a view of the systems in use at Bath Building Society, overlaying these on our logical reference architecture for Banking and Building Societies. This overlay enabled clear visualisation of areas which were lacking in capability, as well as those areas where multiple systems overlapped in functionality. Along with this gap analysis, we were able to draw out key themes affecting the overall technology landscape, and present a view for a rationalised future landscape and a roadmap to achieve this.
Altus Consulting presented Bath Building Society with recommendations for prioritised architectural improvements in support of their 5-year business strategy. Bath Building Society has taken the Altus Consulting recommendations and embedded our priorities and recommendations into their five-year programme of change. This will deliver a robust, rationalised technology landscape which supports the Society’s desire for scalability, and provides a technical framework to strengthen and support the excellence in customer service which the Society provides.
