Miagen

Miagen is a specialist technology company based in Dublin, building forecasting and planning models for large, complex organisations. Despite being a relatively small team of around 20 people, Miagen serves large financial planning teams reporting directly to the board, whose requirements for information are stringent. The team recognised that as a consultancy to those organisations, its own standards needed to match or exceed theirs, and that continuing to work with these clients long-term wouldn't be possible without it.

Miagen engaged Smarttech247 to deliver ISO27001, the standard they identified as the right one for a company in their position. The scope caught them off guard: the expectation going in was a relatively quick project given the organisation was already "in pretty good shape," but the reality of completing the standard properly proved to be significantly more involved than anticipated.

Miagen has now achieved ISO27001 accreditation. Externally, this gives customers, clients and prospects a recognised, independent signal of how the business operates. Internally, the more significant shift is behavioural: Miagen now lives the processes and policies day to day rather than treating them as documentation, which means future audits won't require the same scale of effort, since the standard has become how the business already runs.

Founded in 2003, Miagen has grown into one of the fastest-expanding CPM (Corporate Performance Management) solutions practices across EMEA, with its models implemented in more than 17 countries.

Smarttech247's approach was to work with what Miagen already had in place, molding existing systems and processes to meet the standard rather than adding an entirely new layer of work on top. The engagement ran through frequent weekly meetings, reviewing how things were done and how they should be done, with Smarttech247 filling gaps in Miagen's policies with best-practice guidance where they existed.

"I remember one day saying to Smarttech247, 'we're never going to remember all this,' and they said, 'you're going to have to live this process.' I think that was their approach all along, to bring us along, to mould us, but not really make it feel like an extra job."