Three times the services, at 60% lower cost.

Conglomerates accumulate IT the way ships accumulate barnacles: every acquisition brings its own systems, contracts and habits. The question is never whether to centralise — it is how to do it without grinding 400 businesses to a halt.

Business context

Royal Group / IHC spans 400+ companies and more than 20,000 employees across food and agriculture, construction, marine, energy, healthcare, real estate and investments. Each entity had procured technology independently — duplicated licences, incompatible platforms, uneven security postures, and no group-wide view of cost or risk. I led group IT service delivery with a span of control of 120+.

The problem and the stakes

Fragmentation was taxing every entity twice: once in direct cost, and again in the deals, audits and integrations it slowed down. But the standard failure mode of centralisation is worse — a monolithic IT function that becomes a bottleneck, and business units that quietly route around it. The design constraint was to cut cost while making the service catalogue larger and faster, so entities had a reason to opt in rather than escape.

Decisions made

• Service catalogue first. Define what the group IT function sells, to whom, at what SLA — before consolidating a single contract. The catalogue tripled; ambiguity about "who does what" collapsed.
• ITIL discipline as the backbone. A service-centre model with measured SLAs, not a help desk with aspirations. Uptime held at 99.99% through the transition.
• Automate the run, redeploy the people. 5,500 man-days of annual manual effort eliminated through automation — capacity redirected from firefighting to service expansion.
• Consolidate commercially, not just technically. Group-level vendor negotiation and licence rationalisation drove much of the 60% — cost engineering, not headcount slashing.

Outcomes

A single IT operating model across the group: three times the catalogue of services at 60% lower cost, a 99.99% uptime SLA, and an automation dividend of 5,500 man-days a year. More durable than the numbers: entities stopped buying around the centre, because the centre became the best deal available.

Lessons for other executives

Shared services fail when they are framed as a cost programme and experienced as a service downgrade. Sequence it so the service improves before the invoice shrinks, and the politics mostly solve themselves. And treat the service catalogue as the contract between IT and the business — it is the single most underrated governance document in a conglomerate.

About these numbers

Role: Group Head of IT Service Delivery at Royal Group / IHC (employer, 2023–2024), span of control 120+. The 60% cost reduction and 3× catalogue growth are measured against the pre-consolidation baseline of entity-level IT spend and service scope; figures are rounded. The 99.99% uptime SLA is the contracted and reported service level across the shared-services catalogue; 5,500 man-days is the annualised estimate of manual effort removed through automation, from internal service-management reporting.