Overview
After a protracted period of management turnover, a new leadership team at the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans (SWBNO) launched an ambitious renewal of the utility — and recognized that technology would be central to it. SWBNO engaged tieBridge to conduct a high-level, independent assessment of the state and direction of its information technology, and to recommend where to act in the short, medium, and long term. Working under real fiscal constraints, tieBridge delivered a candid diagnosis and, critically, a prioritized and sequenced path that told leadership not just what to fix, but what to fix first.
The challenge
SWBNO's leadership needed clear, independent answers in a difficult environment:
- A utility mid-turnaround after years of management turnover, needing to know where technology could deliver the most value — and where it could not.
- Eroded public confidence, with concerns over billing accuracy and the integrity of water and drainage operations (heightened after a major August 2017 flooding event).
- Chronic underinvestment that had left vulnerable, hard-to-support legacy systems, a fragmented network, and a "quilt of patchwork solutions."
- Severe fiscal constraints, forcing leadership to separate investments that were essential from those that were merely nice to have.
- Heavy dependence on a single long-standing staffing vendor and on project consultants, little independent oversight or in-house strategic capacity, and no CIO.
Our work
tieBridge assessed not just the technology, but the organization and governance around it — then turned the findings into a practical, prioritized plan:
- Conducted in-depth interviews with 35 stakeholders across departments and functions, alongside site visits and a documentation review, triangulating all three against industry best practice.
- Assessed the IT organization end to end — structure, staffing model, roles and responsibilities, and governance — rather than treating IT as a purely technical question.
- Evaluated the critical enterprise system portfolio — financials, customer billing, HR/payroll, SCADA, work and asset management, GIS, document management, and construction project management — documenting current state, target state, and recommended actions for each.
- Prioritized and sequenced modernization by the urgency of the business need, breadth of impact, the organization's capacity to absorb change, and the risk and cost of doing nothing — including where to deliberately defer.
- Recommended a governance and delivery backbone: an Enterprise IT Steering Committee chaired by the Executive Director, a CIO focal point, project steering committees, and a Project Management Office with real metrics and controls.
- Delivered IT security observations in a separate confidential memorandum, given their sensitivity.
Money alone won't fix it
The assessment's most important finding cut against the easy answer. Chronic underinvestment had done real damage — but tieBridge concluded that even adequate capital would not produce adequate results unless SWBNO also addressed the organizational infrastructure, capabilities, and cultural mindsets around IT. That reframing turned the conversation from "how much should we spend?" to "what do we need to put in place so that spending pays off?" — and shaped every recommendation that followed.
Separating the essential from the nice-to-have
With little fiscal legroom, the value of the assessment was in its discipline. tieBridge weighed each system and initiative against four tests — urgency of the business requirement, breadth of impact, the organization's capacity to manage the change, and the risk and cost of inaction — and, in some cases, recommended deferring modernization so SWBNO could first resolve mission-critical issues and build the muscle to make good trade-offs. The aim, in the team's words, was to see the field and the trees without getting lost in the leaves.
When vendors grade their own work
A recurring risk ran through the portfolio: the same vendors often assessed the need, recommended the solution, managed the implementation, and then supported the result — with little or no independent oversight, and scant incentive to hold down downstream costs. tieBridge recommended breaking that cycle — building internal and independent oversight, standing up a CIO role and a PMO, and reducing over-reliance on a single staffing vendor — so SWBNO could own its most important technology decisions rather than outsource them.
Impact
- Gave SWBNO's new leadership an independent, candid baseline of IT's strengths, gaps, and performance — grounded in 35 stakeholder interviews and measured against industry best practice.
- Reframed the core problem from simple underfunding to a governance, capability, and culture gap that spending alone would not close.
- Delivered a prioritized, sequenced modernization path calibrated to the utility's fiscal limits and its capacity to absorb change — explicitly separating essential investments from nice-to-haves.
- Assessed the full critical-system portfolio, giving leadership a current-to-target direction and concrete recommended actions for each system.
- Laid out a governance and delivery blueprint — an Enterprise IT Steering Committee, a CIO role, project steering committees, and a PMO — to put IT strategy in service of business strategy.
- Flagged the risks of single-vendor dependence and provided a separate confidential security memo, giving leadership a clear, immediately actionable set of first moves.