Edition 1 – Rewiring IT for Value & £2.3M of Savings
The Business Technology Standard (BT Standard) was created to solve exactly this.
It is an open-source management framework for planning, building, and running business technology in today’s digital economy. Developed over more than a decade with global companies and public organisations, the BT Standard is recognised as one of the leading best practices for technology management. It is widely adopted across the Nordics and is now influencing organisations globally.
At its heart, the BT Standard provides:
A Mindset Model – aligning culture, agility, and digital ways of working.
An Operating Model – defining how to plan, build, and run technology-enabled services.
A Capability Model – clarifying the competencies needed to deliver.
Roles & Responsibilities – setting governance and accountability.
It’s community-driven and continuously evolving, with Version 4.5 released in 2021.
Xonetic’s Role in the UK
Xonetic is the sole UK & Ireland partner for the BT Standard. Since 2017, we’ve been working to introduce UK perspectives into the framework and support adoption across sectors.
Our role includes:
Providing training, workshops, and support materials.
Connecting clients into the Nordic BT community of 500+ practitioners.
Bringing thought leadership and consultancy to help institutions adopt the framework in practical, value-driven ways.
Importantly, BT Standard adoption isn’t “consulting-led” — it’s about enabling organisations to own their transformation, with Xonetic and the community providing targeted support at the right moments.
When we worked with King’s College London, one of the UK’s leading universities, their IT landscape had become fragmented after years of constrained budgets and underinvestment:
Multiple overlapping systems in HR, finance, and administration.
Ageing technologies creating rising risk and costs.
A culture where IT was viewed as a cost centre rather than a strategic enabler.
Meanwhile, King’s had set a new institutional strategy requiring technology to play a central role in education, research, and societal impact. The gap between ambition and IT capability was widening.
Working with the CIO Office, we embedded the BT Standard as the foundation for change:
Facilitated collaborative workshops to align IT and business leaders with a shared language.
Rationalised overlapping systems with a service- and function-based view.
Defined service product strategies tied directly to business priorities.
Introduced activity-based costing for value transparency.
Shifted from traditional waterfall to incremental, agile delivery.
Strategic IT Enablement – IT repositioned from back-office to a strategic partner supporting institutional goals.
Operational Efficiency – Systems rationalised, costs lowered, and digital experience improved for staff and students.
Value Transparency – Activity-based costing enabled better spend-to-value tracking.
Agility & Culture – Shared accountability embedded across IT and business functions.
Savings Identified – A business case showed potential £2.3M annual savings.
Sector Influence – King’s became a sector leader, joining the EU-wide BT Forum HE group and sparking adoption at six other UK universities.
As Nick Leake, CIO at King’s, noted:
“The Business Technology Standard provides a customer-focused approach for all aspects of the IT lifecycle, supporting the student, research, and staff experience and freeing us to focus on delivering value.”
Why it Matters
This was not just an IT cost-cutting exercise. It was about rewiring the role of technology:
From back-office support to strategic enabler.
From fragmented systems to streamlined services.
From opaque spend to value transparency.
The King’s example shows how the BT Standard can be applied to deliver measurable value. And the principle holds across industries: when organisations adopt a structured, community-tested approach to business technology, they unlock growth, resilience, and confidence.
Let’s engineer for value together.
