SERVICE LINE
Digital Transformation Consulting
Strategy, architecture, policy and process work for organisations that need a defensible plan before they spend. Advice from a firm that also has to deliver, which changes the kind of advice you get.
Advice from people who will have to build it
Our consulting practice is small by design — eighteen consultants, most of whom have spent years in delivery roles before moving into advisory work. It is overseen by Dr. Amina Bello Tarauni, Chief Technology Officer, with public-sector assignments led by Kabiru Ismail Gaya, Director of Public Sector Business, and financial-services work by Chinedu Okafor Nwosu, Regional Director for Lagos & Financial Services. The composition is deliberate. A strategy written by people who have never had to migrate a payroll at month-end tends to be optimistic in expensive ways, and Nigerian institutions have paid for enough of those.
The assignments we take fall into eight areas: IT strategy and target operating model, enterprise architecture, ICT policy drafting for ministries, departments and agencies, business process re-engineering, procurement and vendor advisory, programme assurance and health checks, organisational change management, and benefits realisation. Several of these are commissioned precisely because the client wants a view independent of the vendor who is bidding — and where that is the case we will say up front whether we intend to bid for the resulting implementation, or exclude ourselves from it. Roughly a quarter of our consulting work is delivered on an implementation-excluded basis.
What we will not do is produce a document that sits on a shelf. Every assignment ends with a costed, sequenced roadmap in which each initiative has an owner, a budget line, a dependency map and a defined benefit with a measurement method. Where the honest conclusion is that the client should not proceed — that the process should be fixed before it is automated, or that the existing system is adequate and the real problem is training — we write that, and we have walked away from implementation revenue several times as a result. It is the only way advisory work retains any value.
Advisory services
Six areas we are most often engaged for. Assignments typically combine two or three.
IT strategy and operating model
Direction
Where the technology estate should be in three to five years, what it will cost, how the function should be organised and resourced, and which capabilities to build rather than buy.
Enterprise architecture
Structure
Current and target-state architecture across business, application, data and technology layers, with a transition plan, standards and a governance forum that can actually enforce them.
ICT policy for MDAs
Governance
Drafting of ICT, data protection, information security, acceptable use and digital service policies for ministries and agencies, aligned to NITDA guidance and the Nigeria Data Protection Act.
Process re-engineering
Efficiency
End-to-end process mapping, cycle-time and cost measurement, redesign against a service standard, and implementation support so the redesign survives contact with the office.
Procurement and vendor advisory
Independence
Requirement specification, market analysis, tender documentation, evaluation criteria and scoring support, contract and SLA review, and vendor performance frameworks.
Programme assurance
Confidence
Independent health checks and gateway reviews on programmes in flight, with a candid red-amber-green assessment, root causes, and recovery actions a sponsor can act on.
Our six-stage transformation method
Adapted from established public and private sector practice and tested across more than sixty assignments. The stages are sequential, but the loop from stage six back to stage two is the one that separates a transformation from a project.
Frame
Establish why the organisation is doing this at all. We interview the sponsor and the sceptics, read the mandate or strategic plan, and write a problem statement and set of success measures that the executive signs. Assignments that skip this stage argue about scope for their entire duration.
Diagnose
Evidence gathering: process observation and timing, system inventory, cost baseline, data quality sampling, capability assessment of the workforce, and structured interviews across grades. We measure the current state rather than accepting the organisation’s description of it, and the two rarely match.
Design
Target operating model, process redesign, architecture and the shape of the technology estate that supports them. Options are developed in threes — do minimum, do sensible, do ambitious — each costed over five years with benefits, risks and the workforce implications stated plainly.
Sequence
Turn the design into a roadmap: initiatives ordered by dependency, value and organisational capacity to absorb change, each with an owner, budget line, benefit and measurement method. Capacity is the constraint most roadmaps ignore, and the reason so many are abandoned in year two.
Mobilise
Stand up the programme: governance structure, delivery roles, reporting cadence, risk and issue management, procurement route and a change and communications plan aimed at the people whose jobs will change. Quick wins are deliberately scheduled early to build credibility.
Realise and adapt
Track benefits against the baseline with an agreed measurement method, review at defined gates, and adjust the roadmap on evidence. Where a benefit is not materialising we say so early. A transformation that never revises its plan is not being managed, it is being narrated.
Typical assignments
Indicative durations and fee bands for assignments we are commonly asked to quote. Fees exclude VAT and travel, and assume the client provides reasonable access to people and records.
| Assignment | Typical duration | Team shape | Indicative fee band |
|---|---|---|---|
| IT strategy and target operating model | 10 – 14 weeks | Engagement partner, lead consultant, two analysts | ₦28m – ₦65m |
| Enterprise architecture current and target state | 12 – 20 weeks | Lead architect, two domain architects, one analyst | ₦34m – ₦82m |
| ICT and data protection policy suite for an MDA | 6 – 10 weeks | Policy lead, legal adviser, security consultant | ₦14m – ₦32m |
| Business process re-engineering, single directorate | 8 – 12 weeks | Process lead, two analysts, change specialist | ₦18m – ₦44m |
| Procurement advisory and tender support | 6 – 12 weeks | Procurement lead, technical specialist, evaluator support | ₦12m – ₦38m |
| Independent programme assurance review | 4 – 6 weeks | Review lead, technical reviewer, commercial reviewer | ₦9m – ₦24m |
| Change management and adoption programme | 16 – 40 weeks | Change lead, communications specialist, trainers | ₦22m – ₦70m |
| Benefits realisation framework and tracking | 6 – 8 weeks, then quarterly | Benefits lead, data analyst | ₦8m – ₦19m plus quarterly retainer |
What an honest assurance review looks like
A federal agency asked us to review a digitisation programme in its third year, eighteen months late and roughly seventy per cent over its original budget. The steering committee wanted an assessment of the vendor. Four weeks of evidence gathering pointed somewhere less comfortable.
The vendor was delivering broadly to specification. The specification had been written against a paper process that three separate directorates carried out differently, and nobody had reconciled them; the programme had no single accountable business owner, and change requests were being authorised by whoever attended the meeting. We reported that the primary causes were on the client side, recommended pausing new development for eight weeks to fix ownership and harmonise the process, and set out how the remaining scope could be re-baselined.
It was not the report the committee expected. They acted on it, the programme was re-baselined, and it went live eleven months later. We were explicitly excluded from bidding for the remaining implementation work, which was the right governance decision and one we had proposed ourselves. Figures are illustrative of typical engagements.
- Four-week independent review with full access to programme records
- Findings tested with the vendor before publication, not sprung on them
- Red-amber-green assessment against eight assurance domains
- Recovery plan with named owners and dated actions
- Implementation-excluded basis agreed in the engagement letter
Frequently asked questions
How do you manage the conflict of interest when you also implement?
Do you use frameworks like TOGAF, ITIL or PRINCE2?
Who actually does the work — partners or juniors?
Can you help us write a tender we might award to someone else?
What if your recommendation is that we do nothing?
How do you measure benefits after the assignment ends?
Where consulting leads next
Consulting assignments most often lead into Software Engineering at /services/software-engineering or Cloud & Data Centre at /services/cloud-data-centre — subject to the independence position agreed at the outset.
For sector context see Government and Public Sector at /industries/government and Oil & Gas at /industries/oil-gas. Where an assignment concludes that a productised platform is the right answer, we point clients to /solutions/e-procurement-portal or /solutions/government-revenue-platform, and our published thinking is at /insights/whitepapers.
Get a defensible plan before you spend
A ten-week strategy assignment or a four-week assurance review costs a fraction of the programme it will shape — and occasionally saves the whole of it. Tell us the decision you are trying to make.