One of my favorite roles during my career was establishing an enterprise business architecture operation at a major life insurance carrier. This was a new discipline for our organization; it was part of the enterprise architecture team that reported to the CTO. Since it was new, we worked closely with an advisory firm to map out the charter, roles and responsibilities, and objectives for the group.
In the past, we had a difficult time getting the business leaders to understand the rationale for significant spending on new infrastructure technologies. One of our goals was to tie these infrastructure investments to business outcomes, specifically breakthrough outcomes. Another was to create a methodology for developing business requirements that would provide traceability to a set of committed outcomes related to sales, service improvements, and cost efficiencies.
The team was comprised of several business and technology disciplines:
- Business Design Team: This team was staffed with the best business analysts across the enterprise. They engaged with our business partners to ensure a level of consistency and specificity to the requirement documents for all large-scale IT projects. There was a focus on ensuring that the requirements were couched in business terms and had clear and committed returns that were quantifiable and contained a method for tracking outcomes after the project was completed.
- Business Modelling Team: This team developed an overarching, three-tiered drill-down map of our business similar to the Core Systems Maps outlined in Aite-Novarica research. The map only included business terms, drilling down into each functional area (e.g., new business, product, billing). This was linked to a functional component representation of our operating environment and provided a structure for us to map our systems and databases at a sub-function level.
We used these maps as a prelude to launching strategic initiatives. Much like a mall map, it provided a big red “You Are Here” pointer to both business functions and technology components to be included at the onset of a project."
- Services Modelling Team: This team focused on the development of insurance models, with emphasis on taking industry standards like ACORD insurance models and extending them to fit our business. This included the definition and development of core business services to be used across the enterprise and a reduction in the time and effort to development new web-based solutions.
- Data Architecture: One team was responsible for data architecture and data strategy, including the development of an enterprise data model. Prior to this, the data teams reported directly to the CTO and were viewed by the business as “technology for technology’s sake.”
Operational data stores and data warehouses were created but struggled to get traction within the business areas and IT applications development teams. A lot of data was moved, but much follow-up work was required to normalize it across multiple core systems and allow it to be easily consumed. Our team focused on ensuring that the models were complete and that any unverified data was reviewed with the business areas to ensure it had the appropriate business context for use in projects.
- Emerging Technology and Research: This team officially reported to the Chief Architect but had a dotted-line reporting relationship with the enterprise business architecture group. The team focused on emerging technology and worked closely with the business architecture team to understand how the new technology could be used to enable business capabilities. In the past, the research team worked directly with each business area, which sometimes resulted in the implementation of redundant technologies. The team now worked with the business architecture team, the business areas, and vendors to understand the potential across the enterprise. The team also participated in the development of proof-of-concept programs to define the business-focused success criteria for moving forward.
It took about a year for the team to be fully embraced by the business leaders. As part of the next budget cycle, the team assisted with the development of the proposal for the technology infrastructure spend. The team was successful in creating a line-of-sight justification for investments in each technical area by providing linkage to a new business capability and/or cost saving.
The next year, the CEO challenged the business leaders to develop a plan to achieve breakthrough results in areas where progress had plateaued. The enterprise business architecture team partnered with senior business leaders to develop a comprehensive, five-year strategic investment program that contained traceability between technology investments and business capabilities/results. The artifacts created to represent the program were used extensively by the business leaders to map the progress of the program.
For related research on this topic, read the Reference Report Novarica Core Systems Map and the Research Report, Insurer CIO Foundations: Leadership, Practices, and Technology.
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