From Findings to Roadmap: Fixing IT for a Business Community
At a glance
CLIENT
National business community association (20K+ member organizations)
SERVICE
- IT Audit, Operating Model Redesign, Cloud & Support Modernization
INDUSTRY
- Non-profit / Associations
The association’s digital estate had grown organically for a decade: 47 servers (on-prem and cloud), 120+ third-party tools, and five separate member portals. Incidents were handled ad hoc, change approvals lived in spreadsheets, and average request fulfillment took 6–9 business days. An external review flagged gaps in identity controls, backup coverage, and vendor management. The board requested an independent audit plus a 12-month modernization roadmap that would cut incident volume by 30%+, improve SLAs, and free budget for member-facing products.
LeanCoded conducted a comprehensive IT audit across infrastructure, apps, data, security, and support operations. We quantified toil, mapped value streams, and prioritized a staged transformation: platform hardening, support centralization, and selective re-platforming of the most visible services. Delivery combined strategy with execution by a software development company team and adjacent practices—digital transformation services, software development services, application development consulting, and targeted security/sourcing initiatives—to convert findings into measurable improvements within one quarter.
Clarity First: Evidence, Baselines, and a Sequenced Plan
We analyzed 24 months of tickets, change records, and cloud bills. The estate supported 1.8M annual portal sessions and ~3,400 monthly support contacts with a 14.7% re-open rate. Core issues: fragmented ownership, duplicated tooling, weak identity hygiene, and expensive like-for-like renewals. Using an audit model aligned to risk and member impact, we proposed a three-wave roadmap. Wave 1 centralized support, identity, and observability; Wave 2 consolidated portals and automated releases; Wave 3 addressed data governance and analytics enablement via data analytics consulting services.
Contracts and vendors were rationalized under an IT outsourcing services company framework to reduce sprawl without losing expertise. Commodity operations went to service desk outsourcing with strict SLAs (first response ≤15 min, resolution ≤8 business hours for P3), while escalations flowed to engineering. User support was unified with IT help desk outsourcing to a single queue and catalog. Parallel to this, our engineering lane began targeted fixes and small product increments so members saw progress before long programs completed.
Security, Stability, and Speed—Engineered Together
We closed critical gaps by introducing baseline controls (MFA everywhere, privileged access workflows, encrypted backups with tested restores) and by onboarding a partner from managed IT security services providers for 24×7 monitoring. Release risk dropped as we stood up modern pipelines and smoke/regression suites with a software testing services company, then offloaded repetitive validation to qa outsourcing. Within 90 days, incident volume fell by 37%, mean time to resolution improved from 2.4 days to 0.9 days, and change failure rate decreased from 11.8% to 4.9%.
Single front door for support
Identity and backup you can audit
Fewer vendors, better outcomes
Quality in the pipeline, not after
Data you can use tomorrow
What the Business Gained in the First Quarter
Modernization paid back quickly because it targeted member-visible pain and operational waste first. Members saw faster portal fixes and clearer communications; staff saw one catalog and predictable SLAs. Financially, vendor consolidation funded the first year of the roadmap. Strategically, an execution engine—combining a software development company delivery lane with application development consulting and digital transformation services—gave leadership confidence that improvements would continue on a fixed cadence.
- Stability — Incidents –37%; CFR 4.9%
- Speed — MTTR 0.9 days; releases 3 days
- Cost — Tooling run-rate –19%
- Experience — FCR 42%; misroutes –61%
- Insight — Board prep –70% time
Next: Member Experience, Portals, and Data at Scale
Wave 2 consolidates five portals into two, with shared identity and content services, while Wave 3 builds a governed analytics layer for programs and advocacy. Execution continues through software development services and application development consulting, with commodity support kept at IT help desk outsourcing and service desk outsourcing under firm SLAs. Advanced use cases (predictive churn, campaign performance) will be delivered with data analytics consulting services, ensuring each quarter ships both risk reduction and visible member value.