Our Client, an international electricity transmission company, had successfully implemented an outsourced IT infrastructure model.  As the energy market deregulated our Client, experiencing high growth, was under pressure to expand its product offerings and level of service.

Given the dependency on IT to deliver the business model, our Client decided to establish an enterprise IT architecture group to plan and guide the delivery of IT services in a manner that was fully aligned to business objectives and strategies and that maximised the value of IT to the business.

The Objective

The key objective was to develop a three year plan for IT investment that would support and enable the business lines to grow, innovate and provide superior customer service whilst at the same time delivering cost efficiencies through economies of scale. This plan had to be delivered in three months and be based on sound and justifiable reasoning.

The strategy adopted was to take an architecturally driven approach. Mentoring and skills transfer were also objectives as the Client wanted to build up its own architectural capability concurrently with building the deliverables.

The Approach/Technology

The Client called on our services to assist in the rapid establishment of the architecture practice and to develop the initial sets of enterprise architecture deliverables including, current architecture assessment, target architectures and transition plans. These deliverables were used to develop and justify a three-year program of work to take the Client forward.

We provided enterprise and technical architecture skills to the Client that seamlessly formed part of the Clients Strategy and Enterprise Architecture team. In this way guidance and skill transfer could be achieved whilst building up exposure and credibility of the new team.

We also provided industry based templates and approaches drawn from our repository of work in the enterprise architecture space to fast track the project.

Customer Solution

Applying our Enterprise Architecture processes that had been adapted in consultation with the Client, work began with interviews and surveys to capture the current business, application, information and technology architectures.

These were analysed against business objectives and strategies to develop a target architecture and transition plan.

By sharing our experience and intellectual property with the Client, we were able to tailor the output to suit Client priorities and culture and fast track the development of the deliverables.

By working with and as part of the Client team skills transfer took place in a real time, real life environment.

The deliverables we produced included:

• Documentation of IT objectives and strategies aligned to business objectives and strategies;
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• Identification and acknowledgement of key business issues and “hot topics” to be addressed by the target architecture;
• Current application and technology portfolio, including graphical diagrams and management dashboards showing status of applications and technologies;
• A costed program of work to implement over the next 3 years. This transition plan, included risk assessments of each project;
• A high level target architectural to meet business objectives, business strategies and address current issues raised by the business or evident in stated business plans;
• Architectural processes and procedures to monitor and assess architectural compliance to be reused on a regular basis going forward.