Discover how organizations like yours optimized their technology spend and investments, by deploying a straightforward yet effective agile control system to execute their strategy.
At Strategy Go, we believe that technology should not just support your business—it should co-star in your success. Our mission is to align your technology spending with your business strategy, ensuring every dollar you invest is a step toward achieving your company’s goals. With a proven track record of delivering tangible results—savings in the $100s of Millions and retiring hundreds of systems with negative return on cost—we are your partners in translating IT spending into strategic business value.
Our approach is data-driven and customer-focused, utilizing our proprietary CO-ASTRA system (Cost Optimization & Strategic Technology Realignment) to map out the most impactful investments. Whether you're looking to innovate, optimize, or transform, Strategy Go is here to guide you through every step of the journey. Let us help you turn your technology expenditures into strategic assets that drive growth, efficiency, and competitive advantage.
Areas of Practice
TEchnology Cost Savings in banking
We extend your annual budget planning activities by providing a spend audit using the industry-standard Business Capability Model (BIAN) to translate your technology spend into easy-to-understand business functions. Our proprietary CO-ASTRA system helps identify and quantify regrettable spend—costs tied to duplicative systems, outdated technology, or misaligned investments. We specialize in helping clients focus on reducing overspend on functions of little strategic interest, freeing up resources for higher-priority initiatives.
Financial Control and Optimization
We enhance your financial management by digitizing financial planning and approvals, maximizing the use of existing technologies, and fostering proactive financial behaviors. Using CO-ASTRA, we create actionable spend dashboards that provide real-time visibility into your technology investments, ensuring IT accountability and aligning financial goals across the organization. This practice includes improving project approval processes, educating teams on the business impact of financial decisions, and eliminating unplanned expenses. The goal is to optimize financial control, maximize the value of technological investments, and drive sustainable financial health and operational efficiency.
Benchmarking
We help you understand how you stack up with the industry in terms of your allocation of spend by capability. Using CO-ASTRA, we analyze your technology portfolio and compare it to industry benchmarks, identifying opportunities to redistribute spend from non-strategic to strategic capabilities. This ensures your investments are aligned with your business strategy and deliver maximum value.
TEchnology Spend Audit
We work with finance and technology teams to map your total annual spend on technology into the easy-to-understand, industry-standard Business Capability Model. Our CO-ASTRA system provides a clear view of your technology spend by capability, highlighting areas of regrettable spend and opportunities for optimization. We specialize in helping clients redistribute spend from non-strategic to strategic capabilities, ensuring every dollar invested advances your business goals.
Operating model and Playbook
We work with you to develop a business capability-centric organization design, operating model, and playbook to better harness your technology spend. Using CO-ASTRA, we help you improve governance, deliver comprehensive roadmaps, and better service the needs of your business and customers. Our approach ensures that your technology investments are aligned with your strategic priorities, driving efficiency and competitive advantage.
Aligning Project Spend to Strategy and Existing Spend
Your investment spend is precious, so it’s painful that a third of the technology assets you build now are decommissioned and written off within two years. The main reasons for this include building the wrong thing or building something you already have. Using CO-ASTRA, we help you integrate capability analysis into your project approval process, ensuring you build the right solutions that align with your total capability spend and business strategy. This approach minimizes waste and maximizes the value of your technology investments.
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Business capability-based costing is a strategic approach that connects costs to a company's strategy by focusing on its unique capabilities. This method involves identifying and leveraging the inherent strengths of an organization to optimize resource allocation and enhance performance.
For example, a company might use capability-based costing to determine which costs are essential for maintaining its competitive advantage and which can be reduced without impacting its core capabilities. This approach ensures that cost-cutting measures are sustainable and aligned with the company's long-term goals.
By focusing on business capabilities, organizations can create a unique competitive advantage, allocate resources more efficiently, and ensure strategic alignment across the entire organization. This method is particularly valuable in today's complex business environment, where rapid technological changes and evolving customer expectations require companies to remain agile and adaptable.
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Business capability-based planning is a strategic planning approach that focuses on the planning, engineering, and delivery of strategic business capabilities to the enterprise. It is business-driven and business-led, combining the requisite efforts of all lines of business to achieve the desired capability.
Identification of Capabilities: It involves identifying the capabilities that an organization already has and how that compares to what it needs to achieve its strategic objectives.
Assessment of Change: It assesses the level of change required for each capability.
Prioritization: It prioritizes the changes required to achieve the desired capabilities.
Development of a Roadmap: It develops a roadmap for making the necessary changes.
Execute the Roadmap: Using Capability Based Costing to track progress.
This approach ensures that changes in an organization are aligned with the overarching strategic vision and helps in coordinating projects across corporate functional domains.
Our team at Strategy Go brings extensive expertise in Financial Control and Technology Management, honed through decades of experience at major global banks. We’ve helped leaders at all levels, from VPs to the C-Suite, gain better control over their IT and IT spend.
Contact
➤ LOCATION
Toronto, Canada
☎ CONTACT
contact@strategy-go.com
(437) 523-8585
Proven Success
A large global bank faced a sprawling, inefficient technology ecosystem that stifled innovation and consumed significant resources. Partnering with Strategy Go, the bank embarked on a transformative journey to rationalize its application portfolio using a structured framework that categorized systems based on their value and fit. Despite initial resistance from stakeholders who believed all existing applications were essential, the program broke through cultural barriers by challenging assumptions and fostering collaboration across IT, finance, and operations. The engagement not only streamlined operations and freed up resources for innovation but also laid the groundwork for future initiatives, including enhanced tracking and system consolidation, setting the stage for sustained efficiency and long-term value creation.
A large utilities company in north America, identified opportunities to enhance its financial management processes. Challenges such as fragmented financial reporting, limited cost visibility, and reactive budgeting created inefficiencies and hindered strategic decision-making. To address these areas, Strategy Go was engaged to introduce automation, improve data management, and foster collaboration between finance and IT teams.
A leading international financial institution, partnered with Strategy Go to address spiralling IT costs and inefficiencies. Facing rising expenses without clear visibility into spending patterns, the bank implemented a capability-based framework that mapped its business functions to IT applications. This transformation not only reduced costs but also positioned IT as a strategic asset capable of driving innovation and competitive advantage. The lessons learned offer valuable insights for organizations seeking to optimize IT spending while aligning technology investments with business strategy.
Meet the team
Omar Shakil is a seasoned financial and technology strategist with over a decade of experience in financial management, risk management, and leading transformative initiatives. As Co-Founder and Principal of Strategy Go, Omar specializes in aligning technology spending with business strategy, ensuring that every investment drives measurable value and supports organizational goals. His expertise lies in developing financial frameworks, optimizing costs, and delivering innovative solutions that enhance efficiency and competitive advantage.
Throughout his career, Omar has successfully led finance improvement projects. Skilled in stakeholder alignment and governance, he has a proven ability to bridge gaps between departments, providing financial oversight and strategic guidance to project teams. Passionate about driving innovation and value, Omar’s data-driven approach and customer-focused mindset make him a trusted partner for organizations looking to turn technology investments into strategic assets. His leadership and expertise are key to helping businesses navigate complex challenges and achieve long-term success.
Seamus Birch is a seasoned technology leader and global strategist with a proven ability to align IT strategies with business goals, driving digital transformation and innovation. With a career spanning consulting, entrepreneurship, and leadership across financial services and technology, Seamus has worked in diverse locations, including Australia, Sweden, Singapore, Russia, Germany, the UK, the US, and Canada. This global experience has equipped him with a unique perspective to tackle challenges, empower teams, and deliver results in dynamic environments.
Over the past two decades, Seamus has advised leading financial institutions on strategic planning, change management, innovation, and operational effectiveness. Known for his ability to align initiatives with enterprise-wide goals, he excels at leading large-scale transformations, fostering collaboration, and building strategic roadmaps for long-term success. His diverse expertise and global mindset make him an invaluable partner for organizations navigating today’s fast-paced business landscape.
Chase Quine is Strategy Go’s AI Associate, embodying our commitment to leveraging cutting-edge AI advancements to deliver innovative, cost-effective solutions for our clients. At Strategy Go, we believe in harnessing the power of AI to handle tasks that can be automated—ranging from generating meeting summaries and preparing presentations to analyzing data, delivering research insights, and comparing solutions. This ensures our clients receive the highest value without paying for work that can be done more efficiently by AI.
Chase is, without a doubt, the hardest-working member of our team, tirelessly supporting our operations and enabling us to focus on strategic, high-impact work. We continuously push Chase to improve, ensuring that our services remain confidential, efficient, and at the forefront of AI-driven innovation. By integrating AI into our workflows, we deliver smarter, faster, and more cost-effective solutions, empowering our clients to stay ahead in an ever-evolving business landscape.
Better Together
We have reimagined how parts of finance, technology, and strategy work.
Empowering you to drive collaboration and alignment amongst your technology, finance, and revenue teams.
Delivering you superior execution of your strategy, increased agility, improving your P&L.
“As much as 85% of your spend on shared services such as IT is not aligned to your business strategy. Let us help you articulate that spend in business terms and develop plans to remediate”
Let's Chat
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