Information Systems Transformation Program – Independent Broker/Dealer
 

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Situation

  • Firm going through a multi-year period of high growth, both organic and through acquisitions
  • Information Technology as an integral part of the Firm’s service offering and value proposition to its Financial Advisors
  • Convergence of several high risk projects, including migrating to a new Data Center, converting a major institutional client to the firm’s IT platform and integrating two new acquisitions
  • Core system supporting financial advisors experienced an outage that lasted several days, impacting the ability of advisors to conduct their business and causing financial losses to the firm
  • Firm needed to restore market and financial advisor credibility in its Information Technology and ensure it could reliably support future business plans

Actions Taken

  • AlixPartners assumed responsibility for three key IT leadership positions: Interim CIO, Interim Applications Development Lead and Interim CTO
  • Immediately implemented a three month stabilization plan to quickly achieve consistent service levels and mitigate short term risks
  • Defined and implemented a 12 month IT improvement program, targeting structural changes in the delivery of IT services, with a focus on IT operations, applications development and quality assurance testing
  • AlixPartners team progressively transitioned their responsibilities to newly recruited IT executives as different components of the plan were successfully completed

Results

  • Dramatic improvement in system availability to financial advisors. Sustained 99.9% service levels during Aug-Dec 2008, supporting 2x transaction volumes during periods of high market volatility
  • Successful delivery of major applications development projects and completion of data center migration
  • Implementation or redesign of critical IT processes to enable the turnaround: change management, release management, problem management, system monitoring and software quality assurance
  • Systematically corrected single points of failure in the server, network and database platforms, technology refresh of key software and hardware components
  • Implementation of operational controls and successful completion of initial SOX audit and second SAS-70 audit