Back to all work

Institutional Software · Global asset management

BMO

Reporting infrastructure assessment

A global asset-management reporting environment needed a decision-ready view of where infrastructure configuration and workload placement were creating avoidable cost and delay.

Looking up at office towers in a financial district at dusk.

The situation

BMO's global asset-management reporting environment supported active production workloads and recurring reporting commitments. The infrastructure could not simply be paused or aggressively reconfigured while the team investigated where cost and delay were entering the system.

Leadership needed to distinguish capacity required for reporting from overhead that could be removed. That required a close view of configuration, workload placement, resource use, and spend rather than a general cost benchmark. Any recommendation also had to respect financial-services controls and the risks of changing infrastructure that supported live reporting commitments.

The mandate

Assess the reporting infrastructure and identify where configuration and workload placement were adding cost and delay, without disrupting production reporting.

Operating constraints

  • Production reporting needed to remain reliable throughout the review.
  • Recommendations had to fit existing financial-services controls.
  • Infrastructure cost and workload behaviour needed to be made visible.
  • Each opportunity required a credible, low-risk path to implementation.

What 0.5 Labs did

0.5 Labs reviewed the reporting environment across configuration, workload placement, and capacity use. The assessment traced where resources were being consumed, where reporting activity encountered delay, and which patterns were adding cost without contributing to performance or resilience.

Each opportunity was assessed for expected value, production risk, implementation effort, and fit with existing controls. The recommendations separated changes that could be pursued directly from those requiring further validation or a staged rollout. BMO could then decide what to address first without treating reporting reliability as a secondary concern.

What changed

The assessment showed where configuration and workload placement were creating overhead, which interventions warranted action, and how each could be approached without disrupting production reporting. It turned a broad efficiency concern into a set of defined choices for leadership. The 22% figure remained an identified opportunity, not a claim of savings already realized.

Relevant practices

Start the next engagement

Facing a similar operating problem?

A high-stakes decision, a system that has to run, or a product people have to use. We will help define the right mandate.