Modernizing the IT of a key defense player

The Challenge

A key player in the European defense sector saw its headcount triple in seven years, driven by a multi-billion-euro order backlog. Its information system, built in successive layers for a far smaller organization, had not kept pace: fragile resilience fundamentals, no IT roadmap, unmanaged vendor dependencies, and inadequate multi-site coverage. At the same time, business teams were calling for generative AI to absorb the workload, at the risk of building on unstable foundations.

The Solution

The client engaged Talan to deliver a comprehensive IT diagnostic and a prioritized roadmap to 2030. We conducted around twenty semi-structured interviews spanning every domain (workstation, networks, infrastructure, applications, cybersecurity, governance), in an environment with strong classification and sovereignty constraints.

Our approach:

• A domain-by-domain diagnostic grounded in business verbatims, surfacing eleven structural findings: from a missing continuity plan to fragmented collaboration tools.
• A prioritization matrix separating regulatory and operational urgency from foundational investments.
• A strategic plan built on three priorities: secure the foundations, structure governance, then seize digitalization and AI opportunities.
• Concrete, actionable recommendations, many drawn directly from the teams themselves: infrastructure automation, virtualization-stack modernization, encrypted multi-site links, and a usage framework for sovereign, locally hosted, human-supervised generative AI.

The Impact

A sequenced roadmap that first secures the fundamentals (continuity, resilience, compliance) before deploying AI across high-volume administrative and contractual processes. The client now has a clear path to turn its IT from a drag into a growth lever, with success markers at 1, 3, and 5 years and a governance framework to steer execution.