From local governance to global application governance

The client was a large professional services firm with Europe as home market. Due to end-of-life ERP solutions in several countries they decided to replace all with a shared ERP solution. The company was split into country based BA with historically very large autonomy in terms of IT investments.

As part of the global ERP roll-out it became clear that the existing country autonomy would no longer work in order for the client to maintain a global solution appropriate for everyone. Since we were already engaged to run the global implementation we were trusted to also develop a global governance organisation together with the CFO and CIO.

The outcome was a global governance organisation that engaged top management in all countries, prioritized changes and roadmaps on a global level and created predictability for the IT organization.

The main challenges was to find a streamlined setup that did not add unwanted OH costs and at the same time captured business requirements in a timely fashion. This took some time but at the end of the day an acceptable solution was agreed which is now in place at the client.