2025 · Montpellier, France · Hybrid

Technical responsible-IT expert (framework) — banking

CGI — Major Canadian banking institution

An engagement brought in by CGI Canada, on the market opened after the Canadian responsible-IT offering was built jointly with the French teams. The client was merging seventeen corporate websites into one: an occasion to ask what the best practices were and what the best exposure would be, with eco-design treated as a point of differentiation against competitors.

The engagement was framed in three stages: a benchmark of competitors' corporate sites to situate the client, the creation of a best-practice framework, then an audit ahead of coaching modelled on the engagement run for a French public body. The benchmark was carried out by the Canadian team and presented jointly; the framework was built together and approved; the audit was pushed back three months, then in all likelihood abandoned to budget cuts.

A mixed team: a Canadian project manager assisted by a responsible-IT functional consultant, and on the French side a functional consultant and a technical expert consultant — the role held here — alongside a second technical consultant being brought up to speed. Work in French throughout. The framework was aimed first at the merger project, with an extension to the IT department's practices.

Achievements

70 criteria in the final guide
A framework drawn from crossing ten sources
Selecting the GR491 as the base, the most complete and the only genuinely international one, then crossing it with more specific frameworks to arrive at sharper criteria: RGESN, RGIAF, the 150 web eco-design best practices, the 44 mobile ones, the ethical designers' guide, the Davidson framework, FinOps.World, Open Data France's Green Data framework, the Green Score API. A final PDF guide of seventy criteria, enriched, explained and illustrated, with a self-assessment grid. The infrastructure family, centred on data centres outside the IT department's direct control, was set aside.
16 workshops, two per family
Criteria approved with the client's experts
Identifying the best-qualified people across the whole scope: enterprise architects, practice leads — the backend experts already setting the API creation rules, for instance — and the eco-design reference person. Two workshops per GR491 criteria family, bringing together five or six of the client's experts and four responsible-IT experts. The first workshop approves and amends the criteria, the second appoints an owner for each action.
Material designed to secure engagement from the first session
Each deck opens with an awareness section on digital impact and an introduction to responsible IT, illustrated with figures and case studies chosen for the trades of the family being covered. The second part presents the ten pre-selected and enriched criteria — and, just as explicitly, the list of best practices set aside across all frameworks, with the reason for each exclusion, most often a duplicate or too close a match with a criterion already kept.
50 % of criteria reworked per family
Criteria amended in session
At the end of each family's first workshop, the criteria are amended in line with the comments gathered, or replaced where they are judged redundant with practices already in force in the company. Up to half the criteria of a family were reworked at this stage.
Working as a mixed France-Canada team, across time zones
Maximum demands on substance and on form alike: the Canadian teams present nothing that is not visually flawless, where the French teams put their demands first on substance. Decks produced in French hours, reviewed and annotated at the end of the day and overnight on the Canadian side. Preparation required upstream — a full cross-reference of the frameworks and a pre-selection before each workshop — at the cost of half a day to a day's work for a criterion sometimes set aside in two minutes in session.
Bringing a second consultant up to speed
The engagement was run as a pair with a second responsible-IT technical consultant being brought up to speed. The arrangement has been the rule in the business team since the engagement run for a French public body: CGI only sells experts, and pairs are formed to train new consultants without charging for it.

Technical responsible-IT expert (framework) — banking

Achievements

Skills applied