BCG Greater China

Information Technology project

With more than 200 million customer accounts, our client is one of China's and the world's largest financial institutions. As China's economy steams ahead, our client needs to transform from a state-owned enterprise into a competitive bank with modern IT systems able to support customer-oriented banking operations.

We were charged with developing an IT blueprint – including application architecture, infrastructure consolidation, governance, and security – as well as a five-year transformation roadmap. Because our approach was driven by the bank's future business requirements, senior management for the first time understood the IT issues and their links to the business. As a result, they embraced the project with unprecedented enthusiasm. The IT blueprint became the "bible" that directs decision-making in all aspects of IT. As you are reading this, BCG is continuing to help our client to implement the blueprint.

Click on the image to read some more personal perspectives on the project.

My role was to develop and recommend IT governance arrangements to support our client's business needs and enable implementation of the IT blueprint.

Having identified key weaknesses in the existing IT organization and processes, I recommended a new organization structure for the IT units, which I discussed with senior management. I also designed new governance processes, including annual IT planning and budgeting, project prioritization and project management. These were supported by hands-on tools and templates to help make the new IT governance arrangements operational.

The client accepted our recommend-ations, which were implemented very quickly. It was extremely satisfying to deliver quality recommendations that had an immediate impact.

My role was to look at the consolidation of IT infrastructure. Part of that involved evaluating the likelihood of natural disasters in different regions of China, because we needed to identify the best places to locate the client's data centers. We also looked at target infrastructure and data center structure, data protection and backup, and how to move infrastructure from one place to another.

The client moved very quickly to implement our recommendations. This was rewarding evidence of both the buy-in we achieved and the value we delivered.

The client wanted a BCG team that combined international banking and IT expertise with a profound knowledge of the Chinese market. As project leader, I needed to introduce those aspects into the case and discuss them with the client, as well as orchestrating both the BCG and the client team.

I enjoyed working with a client who was eager to learn, open to change, and driven to act. It was breathtaking to see how quickly our recommendations became reality in one of the world's largest banks.

Professionally and personally, I learned a lot from working in a different culture, from delegating – not speaking Mandarin, I had to trust my team unconditionally – to broadening my communication skills.