

The craft of finding the right path
Unlock value and drive IT transformation with Ascendion Pathfinder. Our solution leverages extensive experience and proven benchmarks to help you identify untapped opportunities within your IT systems. Our actionable recommendations provide a clear roadmap to turn insights into tangible results.
01
Due diligence
A thorough assessment of your IT ecosystem to identify gaps and optimization opportunities, executed through our AI-driven frameworks, tools, and industry benchmark-driven data sets.
A thorough assessment of your IT ecosystem to identify gaps and optimization opportunities, executed through our AI-driven frameworks, tools, and industry benchmark-driven data sets.

02
Value hypothesis
Workshop and validate the value proposition of business/IT transformation and cost take out opportunities. Create cost optimization targets and transformation plans.
Workshop and validate the value proposition of business/IT transformation and cost take out opportunities. Create cost optimization targets and transformation plans.

03
Implementation roadmap
An integrated implementation plan based on optimized cost models, leveraging intelligent algorithms with validated data points to execute the right cost optimization strategy.
An integrated implementation plan based on optimized cost models, leveraging intelligent algorithms with validated data points to execute the right cost optimization strategy.

Ascendion recognized as an Enterprise Innovator in the HFS Horizons – Digital Service Providers, 2023 report.
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39% run costs freed up for a leading home-based care provider
A leading home and personal healthcare provider wanted to unify their disparate processes and enable automation. They wanted to build an IT service management structure that drives their transformation initiative and improves customer experiences.
The Ascendion Pathfinder framework identified key operational levers for cost optimization from helpdesk consolidation and fit-shoring analysis to automation and archival. The assessment also identified critical transformation levers like cloud migration, app and data modernization, and digital transformation.
Ascendion developed and implemented the IT optimization roadmap that helped the client gain a 20% reduction in efforts through consolidation and rationalization. The approach helped reduce more than 50% of issues with automation, which freed up 39% of the run costs, and helped the healthcare provider achieve a further 10% savings with transformation accelerators.

Transformation roadmap delivered with 41% IT spend savings for a leading consumer finance bank
A leading consumer finance bank couldn't adapt or transform its IT operations for a few reasons: inflexible legacy applications, high costs for on-premise equipment, plus manual processes and expensive people costs.
Ascendion's due diligence using the Pathfinder framework helped the client identify optimization opportunities to save 41% costs over three years. The framework generated a value hypothesis across fit-shoring opportunities to reduce:
- Operational costs by 60%
- Process debt by 15% with automation and agile adoption
- Technology debt by 11% through immediate legacy modernization opportunities
- Licensing costs by 8% through cloud transformation
- Hardware consolidation and elimination by 6%
In addition, Pathfinder helped develop a unified application architecture, debt heatmaps across technologies and applications, cloud transformation, and a vendor consolidation opportunities roadmap.

Enterprise IT frugality is not just a choice anymore!
Businesses are neither invincible nor do they possess inexhaustible resources to propel growth. The reality is that enterprises are vulnerable to market fluctuations, and the recent economic roller-coaster has kept even seasoned leaders on edge.
The most pressing need for leaders is a fail-safe that can drive their business toward sustained growth. For this fail-safe to kick start, one must scrutinize IT operations to uncover and correct overlooked inefficiencies.
Inept infrastructure and processes can devour 60-70% of a company's IT spend, leaving little room for growth and transformation. Low automation levels and redundancies across the workflow can tax enterprise resources significantly. These are reasons enough for IT leaders to ponder over their bloated operational bills with concern.
Does this story sound familiar?If so, enterprise IT operations require not only a birds-eye view to gain clear visibility across the IT landscape but also a moth-eye view to identify hurdles that slow down organizations from achieving their digital priorities.
Set efficiency in motion with Pathfinder
Let’s face it, the problem statement is not new. Most IT leaders grapple with similar challenges day in and day out.
The real question is, how can enterprises identify the source of redundancies and inefficiencies? How to see beyond the obvious? How can one get clear visibility across all the components of enterprise IT? How can you spark a consistent growth mindset while maintaining the status quo?
Pathfinder helps to define a business-focused, continuous discipline to identify opportunities for achieving digital transformation by simplifying and rationalizing workflows across people, processes, and technologies.
It helps to create a highly efficient, practical, and optimal cost-spending framework, allowing your operations to modernize quickly. Pathfinder brings out opportunities to cut down the bloat and shadow costs to the tune of 15-20%.
Within this framework, even small-scale cost optimization projects can make a significant impact. Pathfinder uses a proven framework to eliminate, rationalize, standardize, and renegotiate your operational procedures and IT debt.
Furthermore, Pathfinder focuses on eliciting modernization options to drive 7-12% of cost savings in the medium to long term. By evaluating and optimizing 'as-is' IT operations and comparing against benchmarking data, Pathfinder creates heatmaps to enhance value output from platforms, delivery systems, business applications, and more. It shows the way to modernize the IT ecosystem, making them more efficient, productive, cost-effective, automated, and ready to power the next innovative move.
The Pathfinder framework helps to shed costs exactly where needed and enables re-investments that accelerate digital transformation. Here’s how:
1. Rapid cost-takedown through simplification: Focus on areas that drag – such as systemic redundancies, legacy IT, people-intensive processes, and stovepipes, all geared toward doing everyday things better. These are the first set of opportunities that help cost take-outs by simply doing things better.
2. Cost savings through optimization: Modern technologies (i.e., enterprise cloud infrastructure, line-of-business applications, etc.) provide significant benefits in allowing IT organizations to do more with less. By focusing on standardizing, simplifying, and rationalizing platforms, applications, processes, and services, and automating and digitalizing IT and business operations, organizations can direct their budget and people more toward growth elements.
Realigning people, processes, and technologyTo drive short and medium-term impact, you can first reduce operating expenses through optimal resource utilization across the three core components of your business engine:
1. People
Are you confident that you are utilizing your digital talent most effectively? Or can you do something different? Have you considered a multi-talent application approach? Sourcing talent from on-shore, near-shore, and off-shore locations helps reduce costs. By creating a blend of talent from different regions, you can overcome the hurdle of finding the right digital talent while lowering expenses.
2. Process
Start by streamlining processes to standardize, automate, and remove duplicate workflows. This can eliminate repetitive tasks across various departments, enabling efficient automation implementation.
3. Technology and data
If your business faces substantial expenses due to multiple systems running in data centers, consolidating the data centers or moving the infrastructure to the cloud can immediately save costs. You can also remove redundant servers and outdated infrastructure and shift them to the cloud.
What’s next?Simplifying and optimizing is just the start. To avoid getting stuck between a rock-and-a-hard place, IT leaders must ensure a continuum that extends from your immediate to medium and long-term needs. You must simplify routine activities and rationalize spending to fund long-term innovation.
Consider these questions to activate long-term impact:
- Is your application modernized to match your business needs?
- Are there a lot of underutilized applications?
- Can you convert high-cost legacy applications into modernized, sustainable, and low-maintenance applications?
- Can you migrate your processes to the cloud and consolidate your data centers?
- How do you eliminate redundant servers? Or simplify your technology infrastructure and consolidate software licensing?
- How are you going to chart the course of your transformational roadmap?
Pathfinder can answer these questions for you. It is the GPS that outlines your transformational roadmap and propels growth.

Be future-f‘IT’
Digital transformation accelerates digital outcomes, a point that’s as clear as day to IT leaders. But what about the path leading to it? In fact, enterprises may stumble at the very first challenge – where are the funds to invest in transformation?
An outcome-driven transformation initiative starts with a cost optimization strategy that releases funds for execution. But you cannot guess such a strategy. You can only craft it with meticulous attention. This is where Pathfinder comes to your aid.
For instance, Pathfinder recently helped a multinational consumer bank save up to 41% of its IT spend in three years. In doing so, Pathfinder helped the bank transform its business solution model, delivery process, and practices, aligning each aspect of the business to deliver well-defined business outcomes.
With Pathfinder, enterprises can lay their path to power innovation, by leveraging future-fit, adaptive, creative, and resilient technologies. The result? Enhanced customer experiences, higher profits, a renewed drive to innovate, more cost savings, and peaceful nights for IT leaders.
Accelerating digital outcomes through Pathfinder
Regardless of your outcomes or where you are on your transformation journey, Pathfinder helps you find opportunities to accelerate the drive with a proven framework. This begins with a thorough due diligence of your IT ecosystem to identify cost optimization and modernization opportunities.
By leveraging predictive models, Pathfinder can generate recommendations to implement processes that increase efficiency, mitigate risks, reduce costs, and build automation for adaptation, growth, and governance.
Following this, a business-value-driven roadmap is created across multiple transformation levers, including architecture, technology stack, delivery processes, practices, people, and the team’s technology adoption mindset. The roadmap also provides recommendations on creating standardized processes that are repeatable and scalable.
This ensures there are automated steps in place to lower costs, which can then be benchmarked against the manual processes over time, while factoring in people, processes, and technology.
Pathfinder activates your future-fit competency by eliminating redundant costs and modernizing your technology infrastructure to deliver greater value than your current output.
It helps you to measure, map, and track initiatives against factors like potential financial benefits, business impact, time requirements, degrees of organizational risk and IT technical risks, and investment requirements, enabling clear visualization of trade-offs.
Such a proactive approach can accelerate business outcomes through automation, cloud enablement, software product engineering, integrated operations, app modernization, and more, with clear benefits:
- Significant improvement in user experience
- Enterprise-wide cost optimization and savings
- Enhanced IT contribution to top-line growth
No points for guessing, but Pathfinder transforms your entire IT ecosystem to meet the evolving needs of business, while driving agility, resilience, and intelligence to your operations.
Strategic initiatives for business transformation
Once a business workflow is optimized, Pathfinder takes it on a digital transformation pathway.
1. Value alignment
The effectiveness of any transformation initiative can only be assessed if the output aligns with your business goals. Pathfinder is an outcome-driven framework that streamlines all your cost optimization, modernization, and transformation initiatives and redirects it toward delivering well-defined results.
From enhancing operational efficiencies to automation, each step of your journey is guided toward elevating business outcomes.
2. Plan and prioritize
Pathfinder works in tandem with all the stakeholders to plan, prioritize, and articulate the transformation steps. It prioritizes the areas that need your immediate attention or can deliver impact faster and develops the implementation roadmap accordingly.
As part of the process, enterprises gain greater visibility into present system inefficiencies, misinvestments, and other critical areas that require intervention. What comes out of this stage is a priority-driven roadmap to a value-laden destination.
3. Iterate and innovate
To be innovative is to be agile, responsive, and adaptive toward changing market conditions. Pathfinder adds resilience to your enterprise with automation, AI, ML, and data analytics.
It results in your enhanced ability to experiment, take risks, breed new ideas, and power innovation without the fear of disrupting your operations. This capability helps you identify new opportunities to create value and stay ahead of the herd.
4. Execute and measure
To reiterate a fact: Pathfinder is an outcome and value-driven framework; what this means is that it delivers what it promises. The implementation roadmap begins with business goal alignment and well-defined performance indicators that you can monitor.
From training employees to modernizing your IT ecosystem, Pathfinder implements your transformation strategies with transparency, thereby producing hassle-free transformation across your enterprise with results you can bank on.
Scale your dynamic business ecosystem with Pathfinder
Business transformation at its core entails adaptive, creative, resilient, and future-fit technologies backed by cloud enablement, self-healing mechanisms, IT modernization, and upgrades.
A successful transformation initiative creates an ecosystem that can thrive and evolve even when the winds of change in the market gather pace. To establish a sustainable environment as such, you must ensure that all bases are covered. It begins with addressing workflow gaps, enabling seamless connectivity, and introducing automation to ensure optimal system performance.
By taking these steps, businesses can embrace future-proof technologies and enhance their ability to adapt and thrive in a constantly evolving digital landscape.
Whether you need to optimize costs, analyze returns, explore new markets, or manage resources better, Pathfinder caters to these dynamic needs in the digital space.