Why Traditional IT Models No Longer Work

Demand management for technology portfolios has fundamentally changed. What was once a portfolio of time-bound projects is now a set of continuously evolving products powered by shared digital, data, and analytics platforms. Yet many organisations still operate with project-centric funding, functional ownership, and delivery models designed for stability rather than speed and scale. This mismatch creates recurring issues.

Fragmented Accountability: At best, business leaders own outcomes while technology teams own delivery; at worst, ownership is unclear. As a result, prioritisation is disconnected from impact, and trade-offs among speed, cost, and quality remain unresolved, often evident in lagging time-to-market and low reuse that depresses ROI.

Technology Infrastructure Is Often Sub-Scale: Growth now comes from a long tail of brands, products, and use cases. Without shared platforms, organisations duplicate solutions, multiply vendors, and accumulate technical debt.

Project-Based Delivery Is Slow: Short-lived teams, repeated onboarding, and contractual handovers lengthen lead times and increase delivery risk, especially in cloud, data, and AI environments, where learning and reuse are critical. In contrast, organisations with systematic innovation and product models report materially faster cycles and higher revenue growth, signalling a downside to project-centric fragmentation.

The Shift to Product and Platform Models

Leading organisations are responding to these shifts by reorganising technology provision around products and platforms, aligning ownership, funding, and delivery with how value is created and scaled.

Products represent business-facing capabilities with clear target audiences, defined roadmaps and lifecycles, and signed-off value cases. Platforms provide shared, reusable services: technology, data, infrastructure, and security that enable multiple products to operate efficiently and consistently. The distinction matters. Products drive differentiation and business value. Platforms drive scale, reliability, and cost efficiency.

Product and platform models replace temporary delivery constructs with persistent teams, clear accountability, and explicit economic trade-offs between local optimisation and enterprise scale. When executed well, these models correlate with 40% faster time-to-market and materially higher revenue growth in organisations that mature their product and innovation capabilities, reflecting the compounding effect of reuse, stable teams, and platform economics.

How Winning Organisations Design Their Models

Across industries, successful adopters converge on a small set of design principles.

They assign clear end-to-end ownership. Product owners are accountable for outcomes, adoption, and total cost of ownership. Platform teams own reliability, scalability, security, and unit economics.

In both product and platform constructs, customer is key, with both product and platform teams always building with the end-customer front and centre. For platform teams, the rest of the organisation (and in particular, the product team) are the customer that defines their existence.

They invest in stable, cross-functional teams that combine business, IT, data, and operations capabilities. Team continuity improves speed, quality, and cost efficiency over time.

They enforce a clean separation between product and platform layers. Platforms are governed centrally with clear standards and interfaces, while products own P&L, adoption, and retain autonomy to innovate within defined guardrails. This separation enables measurable reuse rates and simplifies portfolio changes: deployments and decommissions occur faster, with a contained blast radius and clear interfaces.

They modernise funding and governance. Funding shifts from projects to product roadmaps. Products are funded against signed-off value cases and tracked for adoption, outcomes, and total cost of ownership; platforms are assessed on reliability, consumption, reuse, and unit economics. Governance focuses on architectural standards, security, and financial transparency rather than approval-heavy control processes, supporting the 25–40% cycle-time reductions seen when organisations move from stage-gate project constructs to productised, iterative flows.

Redefining the Role of Systems Integrators

Product and platform models do not reduce the importance of external partners, but they fundamentally change how they are used.

Leading organisations embed systems integrators directly into product and platform teams rather than operating them as parallel delivery factories. Partners provide specialised capacity, accelerate capability build-up, and contribute to platform evolution under enterprise standards.

Commercial models shift away from fixed scope and input-based metrics toward capacity, outcomes, and roadmap alignment. Accountability for value remains internal.

This approach reduces knowledge loss, improves continuity, and aligns partner incentives with long-term value creation.

The Value Delivered in Practice

When executed well, product and platform models deliver measurable benefits.

Time-to-market improves through persistent teams, reduced handovers, and greater reuse of shared services. Organisations with mature, systematic approaches report faster cycles on average, changing pilot deployment timelines from two- to three-months to a two- to three-week sprint. Structural costs decline over time as duplication is eliminated, platforms scale, and technical debt is actively managed. Business impact increases as technology prioritisation aligns more closely with outcomes and adoption.

Critically, a strong operating model enables quantifiable value beyond the technology function. For example, better collaboration patterns and reduced handoffs can unlock an 8–15% productivity improvement in knowledge work settings when coupled with data-driven portfolio and team optimisation, yielding tangible financial impact at scale.

Results are amplified when P&L ownership and roadmap accountability are explicit: segments commit to product outcomes and TCO, while central teams commit to platform reliability, security, and unit economics.

These results are well established among digital natives and increasingly evident in large enterprises, particularly where traditional project models have failed to scale beyond pilots.

The most effective organisations treat technology as a value engine, not a service function. They invest deliberately in platform economics, integrate partners without outsourcing accountability, and measure success in outcomes, reliability, and total cost, not activity or utilisation.

What This Means for Executives and How We Support Value Realisation

For enterprises facing fragmented portfolios, rising run costs, and slow execution, product and platform models are no longer optional. They are becoming the default operating model for scalable technology value, however, the operating model is only an enabler. The real objective is to unlock measurable value: speed, cost efficiency, and business impact without disrupting critical operations.

Our work with leadership teams focuses on where value sits and how it is released, rather than on organisational redesign for its own sake.

First, we distinguish value levers from operating model mechanics. Not every role, activity, or cost issue is solved through product or platform redesign. We separate structural value drivers such as platform reuse, demand reduction, vendor consolidation, and delivery acceleration from hygiene improvements that stabilise operations but do not materially change economics. In practice, we set targets like >5x ROI on incremental IT investments over a two–three year horizon by combining:

• Outcome delivery velocity increase of 40–50% through persistent product teams, reduction of handoffs, and higher platform reuse, consistent with performance uplifts observed in mature innovation/product operating models.
• 8–15% productivity improvement in knowledge work by optimising collaboration patterns, portfolio load, and team topology using data from work systems and analytics, translating directly to measurable financial value.

Second, we identify capacity that can be released or redeployed. By mapping products, platforms, and services to outcomes and demand patterns, we identify FTEs tied to duplication, low-value customisation, or inefficient sourcing models. This enables organisations to reduce run costs or reinvest capacity in higher-growth areas without blunt, across-the-board cuts.

Third, we design clear and executable ways of working with third parties. Rather than layering systems integrators onto existing structures, we define how partners are embedded within product and platform teams, how accountability is retained internally, and how commercial models reinforce – rather than dilute - value creation. This includes defining decision rights, handoffs, performance metrics, and exit points.

Finally, we anchor the model in practical execution. This means sequencing change, protecting business continuity, and ensuring leaders can make informed trade-offs among speed, cost, and risk. The result is an operating model that leaders can run - not one that exists only on paper.

Alvarez & Marsal’s focus is not on implementing a product and platform model, but on using it as a mechanism to unlock value - financial, operational, and strategic - while creating a sustainable foundation for growth.