Enterprise Readiness Scorecard

SynoFin Risikomanagement Service AG

The TDH Enterprise Readiness (ER) Assessment has been developed over a number of years after careful industry analysis and constant refinement, to ensure companies are only being asked the most relevant and informative questions. Our experts come from leading banks and investment houses with in-depth knowledge of the corporate landscape.

We regularly review our assessments to ensure that we have incorporated key developments in the industry. Participating in the assessment will provide management with a valuable learning experience to promote ideas for action.

The focus for TDH is to give companies the tools required to develop a long-term strategy that supports their ambitions to meet growth targets while ensuring the wellbeing of their workforce and positively impacting profitability and other key performance metrics.

Business Performance Overview

The Company Assessment evaluates the adaptability and scalability of financial service providers and checks for consistency between firm behaviour and company maturity. Companies are scored against the four following categories:

1. Business Model: A company’s business model is evaluated according to the product or service which it provides, the market in which it operates and the strategy with which it brings its product to market.

2. Customer Engagement: The approach with which a company engages its clients determines whether they understand customer needs, characteristics and behaviour. Effectively engaging, selling and marketing to a well-defined target audience is essential for a successful business.

3. Team Management: The individuals that make up a company determine how effectively and efficiently a company can scale. Leadership qualities and team effectiveness are indicative of how well the core values of the business are understood.

4. Financial Management: Qualitative evaluation of financial metrics provides an overview of financial capabilities. Firms are measured on their financial strength, management of resources and risk policy.

Business Model Score: 73

• Market Awareness: The company has a good sense of the total addressable market. It can identify growth opportunities as well as which types of products are successful. The management team has extensive experience working in the relevant business area.
• Market Engagement: The company has well-developed thought leadership. It collaborates with external parties and regularly engages with end-users.
• Market Positioning: The company is well positioned to succeed. The company has good market share relative to its competitors. It proactively monitors existing and emerging competitors, which also facilitates price point validation.
• Product Adaptability: The company has made pivots based on customer needs. It has a platform and is not heavily reliant on change management.
• Product Scalability: The company can demonstrate the competitive advantage of its product offering and has the potential to scale into additional sectors and capture international market share.
• Strategy: The company has a robust strategy for business growth. It offers an adequate number of products and is looking to expand its target market.

Customer Engagement Score: 69

• Change Management: Clients can easily integrate the company’s technology into their existing systems. The company offers a range of set-up and post-sale technical support and staff training to facilitate seamless integration and use.
• Client Management: The team understands customer needs and customers are satisfied with the product offering. The customer retention rate is high.
• Feedback Loop: The company frequently collects customer feedback, which is disseminated across the company. The team has made changes to the firm’s product offering and business model as a result of customer feedback.
• Sales Efficiency: The company supports the sales team with a full scope of sales and marketing resources to drive sales efficiency. Dedicated sales staff and account managers perform specialist sales functions.
• Sales Strategy: The company has a clear sales strategy in place to gain clients and employs a range of techniques to generate leads. There is an experienced marketing team with a clear marketing strategy.
• Scalable Client Base: The company caters to a varied and large client base. It intends to penetrate international markets and has the sales expertise and capacity to achieve this. The sales team can demonstrate high rates of customer retention.
  

Team Management Score: 72

• Communication: There is a balance of full and part-time team members. The company holds team meetings on a monthly basis and all staff are encouraged to share ideas. Management involves all stakeholders in key strategic decisions.
• Corporate Governance: The company is actively governed by an experienced Board. Governance structures are clearly-defined and formally-documented. Employees are offered access to incentives and programmes, including equity participation schemes.
• Diversity: There is a good balance of gender and ethnic diversity within the management team, which provides a broad skill base within the company.
• Leadership Qualities: Senior management team members have founded other companies prior to this firm. Executives are working to define strategy and ensure their team understand the company’s goals and vision.
• Strategic Advice: The company receives strategic direction from an actively-involved Board of Directors. There is an experienced advisory board that offers strategic insights and advice to the management team.
• Team-Building: The company adheres to recruitment policies designed to drive effective talent acquisition. Staff receive comprehensive training to ensure they are effective in their respective positions. The company employs a range of methods to manage goals.

Financial Management Score: 71

• Financial Flexibility: The company is financially agile, with the financial flexibility to scale the business.
• Financial Governance: Governance procedures facilitate effective financial management within the company. There is a structured employee incentive scheme in place.
• Financial Planning: Financial planning is integrated into the company’s strategy. Enterprise-wide access to real-time financials complements regular financial forecast data. Financial planning systems are robust and streamlined.
• Resource Management: Resource allocation is proportionate to company size and maturity. The company has a sufficient runway. Plans to scale are appropriate and realistic.
• Revenue Strategy: The company anticipates a recurring revenue stream which is increasing year-on–year. The company has attracted multiple types of investment.
• Risk Management: The company has formal risk management processes and internal risk controls in place, along with risk management documentation. It takes active measures to identify and mitigate threats across the risk landscape, including cybersecurity.

Technology Performance Overview

The Technology Assessment analyses a company’s technical capabilities and ability to build high-quality, market leading software products. It does not directly assess a company’s software. Technology is scored against the four following categories:

1. Design: Company has a clear, concise product vision, demonstrates an awareness of the competitive market, has a robust system and data architecture in-place with a clear roadmap and understanding of key risks.

2. Build: An aligned organisation with appropriate governance of technical assets and employee resources. Executes projects efficiently and quickly, delivering high quality, secure software aligned to market opportunities.

3. Deploy: Company manages critical software and hardware dependencies. Minimises complexity in system and data integration, adequately manages client customisations. Executes repeatable deployments whilst maintaining system integrity.

4. Support: Provides customers with excellent training and leverages analytics to provide detailed insights. Proactively identifies issues and software is resilient to component/hardware failure. Customers are fully engaged throughout entire issue resolution lifecycle.

Design Score: 60

• Competitiveness: Assessment of how competitive the technology services or products are based on TDH criteria.
• Data Architecture: Management of data assets are aligned to organisational strategy, have cloud native support, scalable data pipelines, offer seamless integration, data structures are loosely coupled and real-time data enablement (validation, classification, management, governance) is supported. The firm has secured ISO/SOC compliance or other industry standard software best practice accreditations ratings as supporting evidence.
• Risk Management: Technology risks likely to impact the company are understood, mitigated and actively managed.
• Roadmap: The technology roadmap is aligned to the business strategy to deliver the goals of the business.
• System Architecture: The conceptual model of the overall system describes its structure and behaviour clearly and accurately.
• Vision Captured: The CTO’s vision translates to a technology roadmap that supports the business vision of the Board of Directors/CEO.

Build Score: 68

• Execution: Products are seamlessly deployed, releases are delivered successfully, outages are rare and responses are timely. The firm has secured ISO compliance or other industry standard software best practice accreditation as supporting evidence.
• Governance: The governance framework enables and protects the technology teams minimising technical/operational risks.
• Organisational Alignment: Business and technology teams are closely aligned. Technology supports the business goals, works as a trusted partner and develops the business through innovation and adoption of emergent technologies.
• Quality Assurance: The testing framework is complete, testing is thorough, test coverage is high, testing frameworks are automated, CI/CD is employed where possible/appropriate, functional and non-functional testing is covered. The firm has secured ISO/SOC compliance or other industry standard software best practice accreditations ratings as supporting evidence.
• Resourcing: The firm is resourced with appropriately skilled technologists, the recruitment pipeline is aligned to the technology roadmap, key person risk is mitigated, staff are committed, motivated and productive.

• Security: The software products are resilient to external cyber-attacks, the security framework protects the data and governs authority of users and their permissions, the firm has secured ISO/SOC compliance or other industry standard security accreditations ratings as supporting evidence.

Deploy Score: 49

• Application Integration: The systems provide endpoints for integration via APIs for cloud and on-prem apps with minimal custom coding required and support for commonly used technologies like JSON, SOAP and OSS technologies.
• Customisation: Products are customisable through configuration by the customers where possible.
• Data Integration: Business objectives, data sources, data consumers, data models, data transformations, data validation, data governance, data lineage tracking and data security policies are defined and documented. Data integration strategy, design, and architecture is documented. Data is optimised for performance and scalability - evidenced use of parallel processing, incremental loading, caching, partitioning, indexing, compression, and encryption. Cloud-based, distributed, or in-memory systems for data storage and processing are employed. Suitable tools (ETL/ELT) are provided. The firm has secured industry appropriate data standard accreditation as supporting evidence.
• Dependency Management: Dependencies with external and internal teams are well understood and managed to minimise impact to delivery timelines, product quality and robustness. The firm has secured ISO compliance or other industry standard software best practice accreditation as supporting evidence.
• Integrity: Software demonstrates a high degree of integrity - it is testable, security features are designed in removing security vulnerabilities, code is simple to understand, logical path can be traced and is determinate and edits/upgrades are unlikely to introduce untested side-effects. The firm has secured ISO/SOC compliance or other industry standard software best practice accreditations ratings as supporting evidence.
• Repeatability: Repeated test results for a version of the software, for new software releases or for upgrades, under the same conditions, will produce consistent results.

Support Score: 62

• Analytics: Tools or metrics are supplied with the software products that monitor data and systems operations characteristics that highlight anomalous, undesired or unexpected behaviours to identify patterns that help derive Business Intelligence insights to improve the products/user behaviour.
• Maintenance: Software is continually modified based on customer feedback after product delivery to correct faults, and improve performance or other attributes. The firm has secured ISO compliance or other industry standard software best practice accreditation as supporting evidence.
• Monitoring: Software tools, either internal or using standard cloud monitoring is actively used for monitor network, security, latency, load, dependencies, website usage and performance and business activity to identify and help remedy issues before users are negatively impacted by them. The firm has secured ISO compliance or other industry standard software best practice accreditation as supporting evidence.
• Resiliency: Software resilience can/has been measured, resilience thresholds have been detailed, a static analysis of resilience capabilities and known flaws has been documented and system behaviour under realistic disruptive conditions is understood.
• Training: Training on the software products is available to ensure developers/configurers/admins and other users can use the software without difficulty or recourse to the supplier in everyday use or 1st line support.
• User Support: End users are supported based on a published set of operational support KPIs that if met support the business usage of the software without any avoidable impact to their business operations. The firm has secured ISO compliance or other industry standard software best practice accreditation as supporting evidence.

Disclaimer

This Report has been produced based on information contributed to The Disruption House by the Company reported on. The Company has confirmed under contract that such information is accurate in all material respects and can be relied upon for the production of this Report. While we have made every attempt to ensure that the information contained in this Report has been provided by reliable sources, The Disruption House is not responsible for any errors or omissions, or for the results obtained from the use of this information. All information in this Report is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness, accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this information, and without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to warranties of performance, merchantability and fitness for purpose. In no event will The Disruption House or its partners be liable to you or anyone else for any decision made or action taken in reliance on the information in this Report or for any consequential, special or similar damages, even if advised of the possibility of such damages.

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This scorecard was produced on March 20, 2024