Following the acquisition of a UK-based wills and probate business, InHeritage needed to understand and modernise a fragmented legacy environment without disrupting day-to-day operations or compromising access to critical client data.
Before transformation could begin, the organisation needed clarity on the health, scalability and viability of the technology estate. BBD conducted a Technology Foundations Assessment to evaluate operational processes, architecture, integration capability, data viability and transformation readiness.
Part of BBD’s Technology Assessment suite, the Technology Foundations Assessment helps organisations understand the current state of their technology landscape before major modernisation initiatives begin. For InHeritage, the engagement provided a clear view of what could be retained, what required remediation and what needed to be reimagined to support long-term growth.
Objectives
- Assess the current technology and data estate across operational systems
- Validate whether inherited client data could be extracted, consolidated and reused
- Identify operational, architectural and governance gaps impacting scalability
- Define a target-state architecture aligned to strategic business goals
- Deliver a practical implementation roadmap to support future transformation initiatives
Benefits
Business benefits
- Reduced uncertainty around the technology and data estate
- Validated the commercial viability of underlying client data assets
- Identified opportunities for automation, operational efficiency and self-service capabilities
- Created a phased modernisation roadmap aligned to strategic growth objectives
- Balanced operational continuity with long-term transformation goals
- Reduced dependency on fragmented legacy processes and systems
- Positioned the organisation for scalable digital transformation
Technical benefits
- Extracted and validated approximately 400,000 client and related records
- Identified key architecture, integration and governance gaps
- Defined a scalable target architecture for future modernisation
- Validated which legacy components could be retained, modernised or replaced
- Provided implementation-ready architectural direction and prioritisation guidance
- Established a scalable technical foundation for improved interoperability, data governance, integration and future automation
Approach and project overview
Rather than recommending wholesale replacement from the outset, BBD took an evidence-led and operationally conscious approach to modernisation. The engagement combined operational discovery, technical architecture analysis and live data validation to create a complete picture of the estate.
The engagement began with on-site operational discovery sessions, allowing the BBD team to observe day-to-day workflows in practice. This helped uncover manual workarounds, operational bottlenecks and process dependencies that would not have surfaced through technical analysis alone.
BBD then conducted:
- Architecture and integration analysis
- Database and data quality assessment
- Operational workflow evaluation
- Live data extraction and validation
- Target-state solution modelling
The assessment aligned findings and recommendations to InHeritage’s strategic business goals, ensuring the resulting roadmap balanced immediate operational stability with long-term transformation ambitions.
The assessment identified four recurring themes impacting transformation readiness:
- Fragile legacy systems
- Fragmented and incomplete data
- Manual operational processes
- Limited governance and integration readiness
Technology
The assessment included analysis across:
- Operational management systems
- Document and probate workflows
- Integration capability
- Data extraction and consolidation readiness
- Architecture scalability, resilience and future modernisation readiness
- Governance and compliance considerations
- Legacy platform dependencies
The engagement also included live data extraction validation and external data quality verification to confirm the viability of the data assets.
Impact of BBD’s partnership
The Technology Foundations Assessment provided InHeritage with clarity, confidence and a structured path forward for digital transformation.
By combining operational insight with technical analysis and validated data assessment, BBD helped the organisation:
- Understand the true state of its technology landscape
- Reduce the operational and technical risks associated with legacy modernisation
- Align technology decisions to business objectives
- Establish implementation readiness
- Define a scalable digital foundation capable of supporting future growth, automation and service innovation
The depth and quality of the assessment helped establish BBD as a trusted partner for the next phase of the transformation journey, enabling InHeritage to move forward with greater confidence, reduced risk and a clearly defined path to modernisation.
Of the engagement, InHeritage said, “BBD quickly helped us make sense of a complex legacy technology and data estate and turned that understanding into clear, evidence-based recommendations we could act on with confidence. Their Technology Foundations Assessment gave us a pragmatic roadmap that balances day-to-day operational continuity with our long-term modernisation plans, reducing uncertainty around our inherited systems and data, and positioning us for scalable digital transformation”.
Let’s build what’s next
Chat to your BBD contact about how we can help unlock similar results, or get in touch with our team to find out more about our Technology Assessments.
