Restoring Strategic Control in a Mission-Critical Digital Environment
A national community services organisation regained digital control by unwinding technical debt, resetting vendor governance and establishing a clear, executable recovery roadmap.
Context
As one of Australia’s largest providers of welfare, housing and community services, the organisation depends on technology to support vulnerable people at scale. Over time, however, its digital environment had become a constraint rather than an enabler.
The ServiceNow platform was heavily customised, difficult to upgrade and poorly integrated with surrounding systems. Vendor relationships were unbalanced, licensing costs were escalating and leadership lacked a clear view of what a sustainable future state should look like. Resources were being drained away from frontline services to manage avoidable complexity.
Approach
This engagement focused on restoring clarity, confidence and control through honest assessment and a realistic path to recovery.
Define
The first step was establishing an unfiltered view of reality.
A deep diagnostic was conducted across the ServiceNow platform, the organisation’s end-to-end process layer and its broader technology architecture. This exposed where legacy customisation had frozen the platform, where integrations were creating silos and where architectural gaps were undermining coherence.
Critically, the engagement clarified what “good” actually looked like, something that had been missing from executive conversations.
Align
With the baseline established, attention shifted to alignment and recovery planning.
A governed, step-by-step roadmap was developed to systematically unwind technical debt and return the platform to a manageable, supportable state. This plan balanced urgency with realism, prioritising actions that would restore flexibility without introducing disruption.
Procurement governance was also addressed. A specialised licensing and vendor management report re-established executive-level engagement with the vendor, shifting the commercial dynamic back in the client’s favour.
In parallel, targeted training programs were designed to upskill internal teams, reducing long-term reliance on external providers.
Govern
Governance was reintroduced through clarity and ownership.
By providing leadership with objective data, architectural insight and a clear remediation path, the organisation was able to move from reactive vendor management to deliberate, informed control. Decision-making became grounded in outcomes rather than pressure.
Outcome
Digital helplessness was replaced with strategic confidence.
The CIO and CFO received a clear enterprise strategy and prioritised remediation roadmap, enabling informed investment planning and funding discussions. Leadership gained a shared understanding of where to focus effort and how to hold vendors accountable.
Most importantly, the organisation regained the ability to shape its digital environment in support of its mission, ensuring technology once again served community outcomes rather than competing with them.