Brexit: a survival strategy for CIOs

Navigating Brexit is likely to be a white-water ride for many organisations; however, this three-stage plan for CIOs will help businesses to navigate the rapids.

Nobody yet knows exactly how Brexit will affect IT products and services, but it clearly has the potential to involve wrestling a bear of a change programme that is fraught with risk.

Don't let that bear sneak up on you: start planning now to help steer your organisation successfully through the myriad changes likely to be required as the UK extricates itself from the EU. There will be new trading, legal, employment, regulatory, audit, and reporting requirements, and Brexit could hit your ability to attract and retain the talent you need, where you need it.

Specific details are unlikely to be known until late 2018 or beyond, but the broad areas of impact are clear. If you identify and assess the impacts of a range of possible Brexit scenarios, you can go a long way towards taming the beast; giving your organisation the very best chance of a successful Brexit transition. The ability to maintain operational stability through what may be several volatile years is crucial.

1. Prepare

Understanding your organisation's exposure to Brexit is critical for making informed decisions and containing costs. We recommend all organisations mobilise a small, multi-disciplinary taskforce to prepare, in a bid to minimise its challenges and maximise the opportunities it presents.

Look at the possible impacts of Brexit across your current IT operating model. How might it affect your commercial arrangement for supplying and procuring IT products and services? How will it affect your employees and where they are located? Will you need to change where you host your data and services? What are the implications for your business and IT strategies? And the list goes on.

The first step is to identify the many potential issues, and then to assess the time, cost, and strategic implications of different Brexit scenarios on each of them. Once you have a complete picture of the IT implications, you can start building an executive-agreed roadmap to guide the business safely through, no matter how the Brexit story unfolds.

If there are any changes you can safely make in advance, before the full implications of Brexit are known, then get them out of the way. The clearer the decks are when Brexit hits, the smoother the ride will be.

2. Implement

Implementation of Brexit changes will require a formalised project approach, managed by an experienced programme director with full C-Suite support. IT changes should, of course, be an integral component of an organisation-wide programme.

If you developed outline plans for likely eventualities in the preparation stage, you should be ahead of the game and won't be swamped by the live Brexit agenda. Stay focused, make sure IT and business requirements remain tightly harnessed and follow a typical programme approach of initiating, delivering, and closing projects that will implement the individual changes required.

Stay responsive and flexible, though: the Brexit negotiations may well take a number of twists and turns which throw the odd unexpected obstacle into your path.

3. Embed

Check you haven't overlooked any pieces of the jigsaw that will secure enterprise success post-Brexit. Properly embedding the people, process, and technology changes involved is essential.

• Stabilise: make sure the changed processes, functions, and systems are performing consistently.
• Optimise: drive incremental improvements through performance analysis and applying disciplines such as Lean and Six Sigma.
• Improve: drive step changes via new projects, reworking the new processes, functions, and systems.

Follow the three-phase strategy - prepare, implement, embed - and you will survive the Brexit rapids unscathed - and with no grizzly bears onboard.

Mark Smallwood has a strong consulting and operational management pedigree, having worked for both FTSE100 companies and several of the leading consultancy organisations. He has over 25 years' direct, hands-on experience of successfully leading major business and IT transformation programmes; these have covered the financial services, retail and energy sectors, with budgets in excess of £200 million, involving large teams that spanned global client delivery centres and multiple third-party providers. Mark is experienced at working at board level, while at the same time being able to provide business and technical teams with the context, direction and challenge needed to drive delivery.

Mason Advisory is an IT consultancy based in the heart of MediaCityUK. Clients from around the world come to the firm because they need experts in IT who match technology know-how with commercial and business sense.