EA/Engineering Modernization

  • Case Study

    Enterprise Architecture & Engineering services assessment & future state design

    • Client: US Audit Firm IT Department
    • Sector: Consulting services
    • Project: Phase I:  EA&E Modernization

    Client challenge

    Continued strong growth in technology demand, combined with a high-touch “expert for every problem”, had created a highly reactive vs proactive environment – leading to unsatisfactory service to the business.  In the context of a larger IT transformation initiative, it became critical for Enterprise Architecture & Engineering (EA&E) services to be a partner to complex business units, who want to be agile (and run their own specialized “IT shops”) but still require enterprise technology services.

    Advisor insights

    Overall, there were people, process, and technology problems.  This resulted in three main issues:

    1. Unsatisfactory service reliability and quality – due to too much focus on technology instead of solutions, lack of product/service lifecycle processes, and ineffective architecture/design consistency and standards.
    2. Insufficient return on investment – due to a lack of business understanding and collaboration (causing duplicate technology investments), too few experts delivering too many high-touch/custom services, and a tactical project focus.
    3. Missed innovation opportunities – due to lack of organization / solution alignment, minimal agility / speed / flexibility, and lack of investment prioritization.

    Client results

    • Priority concern areas exposed, using a combination of our EA toolkit accelerators and interviews, a root cause analysis and maturity score matrix – such as intra-IT organizational collaboration issues, capacity planning, business technology resiliency, lifecycle management, and investment prioritization.
    • EA&E organization was re-designed, including optimal use of onshore/offshore individual roles and organizational units.  This resulted in “internal improvement” (e.g., skill / training gaps), and better “external service partnership” (e.g., between other enterprise IT areas such as helpdesk and portfolio management, and business specialized “IT shops”).
    • End-to-end processes re-designed in context of a business partnership improvement, processes were re-designed to modernize basic EA&E services (e.g., technology lifecycle management) and holistic end-to-end services (e.g., “Demand-to-solution” process).  This process re-design included newly-clarified organization roles (also utilizing more cost-effective offshore resources), identified risks and controls for compliance and “keep the lights on” priorities, and identified key technology capabilities needed for enablement.