IT and business Governance

Effective governance results from having the right mechanisms in place for decision making, evaluation and monitoring, and an optimal organisational structure to deliver the required services. At SSG Advisory we provide a range of services to help you institute strong governance, including:

• Business case development and benefits realisation
• Portfolio management of applications and technical infrastructures
• Organisational review and design
• Programme and project management support and assurance
• Compliance with key ITIL processes
• Staff mentoring and development
• Information governance and data loss prevention.

Example projects:

• We worked with a county council to develop the business case to determine its best way forward to achieving substantial financial savings through the deployment of optimised business processes in key back-office services including finance, HR, payroll and asset management. We examined the business-fit of ERP and best-of-breed systems and concluded that, in this instance, an ERP solution offered the best way forward. Our consultants assisted with the procurement of the system and the system integrator and provided project management support for its implementation.
• A large unitary council had an IT service which was deemed to be failing because of the lack of engagement with the end-user community and a lack of confidence in its leadership. Our consultants worked with the council to develop an IT organisational structure that met the needs of its user community. This led to a further project to recruit a new IT management team to deliver the required improvement and to enhance user satisfaction.
• A high street bank was experiencing severe performance problems its payments hub engine which was unable to process its incoming and outgoing transactions within the time-limited operational windows permitted by the banking industry. Our consultants conducted a forensic investigation into the underlying reasons for the performance problems and identified than that an un-authorised design change to the processing platform had taken place which, at first sight was made to improve the performance of the application, in-fact reduced its performance by a factor of four. We found that the architecture of the new processing platform - whilst providing a much higher throughput for multi-threading applications - ran single threading applications at a much slower speed than the generation of processors it replaced.

Governance, risk and compliance (GRC)

In a world where information security breaches can destroy a business's reputation we provide GRC services to help you avoid such incidents.

We have experts in GRC and can deliver security and risk analysis services to our clients. Depending on the outcome of such assessments we may then make specific recommendations in relation to such areas as security, business continuity planning and disaster recovery. We can also help our clients to develop architectural approaches which ensure that GRC is embedded into the systems and solutions architectures they adopt..

Central to our approach on preventing "Information leakage" is the planning and design of content-aware data loss prevention applications which can stop data leakages from taking place and ensure that those responsible for attempting such leakages can be identified and appropriate action taken. Data loss prevention is key is such industries as financial services and public service organisations where, for the latter, connection to the Public Services Network requires such defences to be in place.