Chas Shaffer is proud of all Guidehouse’s accomplishments, but says a key highlight was how its “cloud only” IT strategy allowed the business to integrate its acquisition of Navigant.
With this plan, Guidehouse’s first 90 days of the acquisition were seamless and provided a cohesive presence to its employees and clients, he said. Guidehouse was able to quickly integrate core corporate back office systems and enable cross-company collaboration, allowing quickly realization of critical synergies between the two legacy businesses.
The company was formed from the carveout of the PwC Public Sector practice. To execute the separation without any transaction service agreements, Guidehouse IT adopted the cloud only approach, which included the adoption of a software-defined network, or SDN, that allowed employees to work remotely anywhere they have internet access without the need to tether back to a private network and on-premises data center infrastructure.
So, when offices closed for the COVID-19 pandemic, 100% of Guidehouse’s employees were already able to work remotely without any modifications to its IT strategy. Because of this approach, virtual meeting software was already deployed businesswide and used extensively.
“This made the transition to working remotely seamless,” Shaffer said.
Why Watch
Guidehouse’s near-term focus will be the completion of the Navigant integration into its cloud only strategy, and then on the use of artificial intelligence and robotic processing automation to better inform and optimize the organization’s business operations.
Navigant primarily followed a tradition on-premise approach to data centers, and having an extensive private MPLS network. By the end of 2020, Guidehouse will have migrated Navigant to the SDN solution, consolidated it into a single collaboration environment and integrated it into the core cloud back-office suite.
“From there, data center consolidation from the on-prem data centers to cloud solutions for corporate functions and well as test, dev, sandbox and production client systems will be a main focus,” Shaffer said.
Read the entire Top CIOs to Watch in 2020 here.
