Claritas One
Consulting/Digital Transformation/IT Strategy & Advisory

IT Strategy & Advisory

Technology debt is a balance-sheet liability. We partner with CIOs and CTOs to rationalise sprawling estates, modernise the architecture that matters, and build a technology strategy the board will actually fund.

The thesis

Architecture is a business decision, not a technical one.

The average Fortune 500 estate carries 900+ applications. Forty percent deliver marginal value. Sixty percent of that spend never reaches the P&L conversation — until it blocks a strategic move.

We treat the technology estate as a capital portfolio. Every application, platform, and vendor relationship is scored against business value, technical health, and strategic alignment — and re-sequenced into an investment plan your CFO will sign.

Before & after

What a 9-month rationalisation looks like on the P&L.

A composite from three recent CIO engagements — banking, healthcare, industrial. Scope, numbers, and sequencing blurred, the shape of the change is real.

Application portfolio
900+ apps, unclear ownership
Rationalised to 320, tiered by value
−64%
Annual run spend
$212M, 71% legacy maintenance
$128M, 44% on modern platforms
−$84M
Lead time for change
18–22 weeks, 4 approval gates
3–5 weeks, product-team owned
4× faster
Vendor surface
340 active contracts, 60% duplicative
112 strategic partners, tiered SLAs
−67%
Architecture debt
No target-state, per-team choices
Reference models + guardrails
Single source

Six pillars

The advisory scope. Compressed to the work that moves the needle.

01 / 06

Every application scored on three axes.

Business value, technical health, and strategic alignment — benchmarked against sector medians. The output is a four-quadrant disposition map: invest, modernise, consolidate, retire.

  • Financial cost model incl. hidden cost-to-serve
  • Technical health scoring (incidents, debt, talent)
  • Strategic alignment mapped to capability heatmap

Engagement stages

Six stages. Twelve to eighteen weeks. One decision log.

STAGE 01

Mandate alignment

Two-week exec framing — scope, guardrails, success measures agreed with CIO, CFO, and programme sponsor.

STAGE 02

Landscape audit

Portfolio, financials, architecture, vendors, and operating model assessed with our proprietary benchmarking data.

STAGE 03

Target-state design

Reference architecture, operating model, and investment principles — defended in an exec design review.

STAGE 04

Investment plan

Three-horizon roadmap with capex / opex split, dependency mapping, and board-ready narrative.

STAGE 05

Governance wiring

Architecture review board, TDO, and FinOps cadence stood up so the strategy survives the first quarter.

STAGE 06

Value realisation

Post-board checkpoints at 90, 180, 360 days — we stay accountable to the outcomes, not the deck.

Outcomes we stand behind

The numbers we target, stated up front.

40%
Average run-cost reduction
3.2×
Change-lead-time improvement
−64%
Application footprint rationalised
900+
Enterprise apps mapped per audit
34
CIO-level engagements delivered
96%
Boards approve the investment plan

Spend less on technology. Get more from it.

Tell us the shape of your technology estate. We'll come back within a week with a three-horizon investment hypothesis — and the audit plan that proves it.