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