Transcript
IT Director – Data & Architecture, Assurant Health
Pravin Nadkarni
Architecting the IT Foundation
The IT landscape develops project by
project as the organization reacts to
the next business demand or burning
crisis with a sense of
urgency and best intent
We found our IT landscape in this state a few years ago
The result is an IT architecture that has grown over time without an overarching plan and governance to guide its
growth
Disorganized. Expensive to Maintain.Slow to Adapt. Unable to Scale.
Poor Experience. Excessive Points of Failure.
We had to find our way out of this mode of functioning.
We found our alternative to constructing the IT Foundation
as an aftereffect of shortsighted decisions in Architecture Based Development
The approach is to:proactively envision the “big picture” – the enterprise
architecture, seek agreement and investment from all stakeholders,
plan and progressively build out the vision, andbuild governance into SDLC to ensure alignment of all decisions
with it
Enterprise Architecture describes:• WHAT business capabilities are necessary to make our
enterprise successful• HOW these capabilities are enabled through systems and
technology
Transformational initiatives require compelling business drivers.
Changes in technology, customer expectations, regulations, business strategy and so forth.
We found our driver in the rapidly changing marketplace
How automated and mature are our capabilities?
What can we do to reduce
expenses?
What’s
slow
ing us d
own ?
We had to find answers to these questions.
The journey begins withassessing the current state of architecture to gain insights
We studied our inventory of business capabilities, systems & integration, interviewed executives, leaders and managers,
and analyzed IT financial history.
We found gaps and areas forimprovement in our capabilities.
We observed thatredundant systems and point-to-point integration slowed us down and inflated our expenses.
Our study also revealed that some fragmented, antiquated systems could not scale to provide great customer experience.
It was an eye-opening exercise.
Identify areas of opportunity from current state assessment
We analyzed and debated several alternatives, sought multiple perspectives, performed cost projections
…
Evaluate architectural options to address opportunities
… and settled on an Enterprise Data Strategy that would remedy point-to-point integration, promote reuse and information consistency
We evaluated alternatives and charted our course
to eliminate system redundancy
We streamlined our change initiatives and developed several
new business capabilities.
We also eliminated 11 redundant systems.
Business operations have to continue
uninterruptedeven as its foundations
are being revised
Inject architecture governance into the development process
We defined principles to guide solution architects, created a process to review architectural options for projects.
The solution architecture is reviewed and signed off by governance team.
We created versatile components that served
multiple needs.
Build reusable components
For instance, we created a configurable engine to publish eligibility data to multiple systems & partners in a project to supply data to one
system for one product line … and reused it numerous times in subsequent projects
Make short term architectural tradeoffs when necessary
We created a customer database to provide call center with a customer centric view of all insurance policies covering the caller and their household.
Later, the learnings from it and some of its components became foundation for a comprehensive Customer Master capability.
If a problem could not wait for a strategic solution, we made architectural tradeoffs with an understanding that it was only a short term measure.
Engage the organization early and reinforce their engagement
We involved the entire organization in our journey, communicating our vision and our progress periodically,
recognizing their effort in bringing it to life, and reinforcing the reason why the change was critical to our
business.
Architecture Based Development had a profound impact on our IT foundation, expenses and
agility
Summing up …
Key Learnings Do not lose sight of the big
picture Assess current state to
identify opportunities Evaluate multiple
architectural alternatives Streamline change initiatives Add architectural governance
to the development process Build reusable components Make architectural tradeoffs
when necessary Engage the organization
early, and constantly reinforce their engagement
Image CreditsVia Wikimedia Commons
1. Het Nieuwe Instituut - Architecture
2. Anatomia Formy
3. Christopher Walker from Krakow, Poland
4. Tobias Karlhuber
5. Alexander Heilner
6. Riverrat303
7. BSRavikiran
8. Order_242 from Chile
9. Ozz13x
10. SuSanA Secretariat
11. Hinzel
12. Andrew Toskin
13. Twobobswerver
14. Kosta021
15. Public Domain
16. Lesser Ury
17. Harris.news
18. Pastaitake
19. Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK
20. Ryan Stubbs (Haljackey)
21. UK Government
22. Brian Read Castillo
23. Baldomer Gili i Roig
24. Japanexperterna.se
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