Large Global Insurer improves IT health and drives business modernization using HOPEX

Undergoing business transformation while dealing with technology discontinuity

This Fortune 50 Insurance Company launched a business transformation initiative to ensure all its efforts were unified and directed toward achieving corporate growth goals and improved performance. The transformation initiative focused first on the IT infrastructure and resources since IT would be the driving force behind implementing change throughout the Company.

The Company's specific IT challenges included:

• Lack of visibility into application and technology portfolio
• Different geographic regions, divisions, and business groups still use legacy processes and outmoded technology.
• No enterprise-wide standards led to redundant/old technologies being created across the siloed organization, and several instances of employee assistance programs existed due to diverse operations.
• The size of the IT infrastructure required a large, costly support team
• The focus of IT was on maintaining IT resources rather than business innovation
• Substantial risk of IT obsolescence, regulatory compliance failures, and security threats

After examining different solutions, the Company issued a Request for Proposal (RFP). The Company chose MEGA because its HOPEX platform provided a holistic approach, a critical success factor for the initiative.

Creation of a centralized enterprise-wide IT repository

To understand the Company's requirements, MEGA kicked off the project with an on-site workshop to begin planning the two-phased approach to take inventory and create standards.

First, the Company used MEGA's HOPEX to take inventory of the existing applications and technology. The platform helped the Company to:

• Manage IT portfolio and lifecycle through the creation of a shared repository, a single source of truth, that collects and maintains IT inventories and efficiently monitors technology obsolescence
• Perform transformation analysis by assessing the impact of change and increasing alignment between IT and the Business
• Map business capabilities and define strategies that produce a clear view of the organization and identify areas for improvement.
• Identify and assess IT risks, threats, and vulnerabilities and implement the appropriate control structure to support business objectives.

Once the inventory was established, the Company worked to standardize IT resources. Because MEGA's HOPEX provided a holistic approach, they were able to manage them across business units and divisions.

Rationalization and architecture significantly improved the Company's IT health.

MEGA's HOPEX solution gave the Company a single source of truth to view all technologies across departments and identify redundant, out-of-support, and shadow technologies.

With this knowledge, the Company established a consistent architecture across its entire organization, helping to drive business modernization and support an improved customer experience, as well as enhanced product innovation and profitability. The Company has reported both immediate and long-term value, including:

Immediate value:

• Consolidated three home-grown asset-management systems into one, resulting in one centralized portfolio
• A clear picture of IT assets that are used throughout the organization and the business value of each one
• A single shared view of architecture that eliminated siloed development
• Increased visibility into IT assets, streamlined application portfolio, and better management of risks and compliance
• Expanded visibility into the impacts of decisions and activities on other lines of business
• Created metrics and dashboards on application technology health to enable ongoing monitoring
• The formalized application certification process to ensure the technology that doesn't meet standards is not added
• Certified the currency and accuracy of application data through the application certification process

Long-term value

• Increased organizational agility that supports better decision-making when it comes to implementing new technologies
• Better aligned business strategies with operations and IT, with the ability to cross domains and understand transformation impacts
• Improved the value of IT as a strategic asset by optimizing the application portfolio and building a dynamic roadmap for IT strategy to support business strategy
• Improved audit procedures and data flow.
• Achieved strategic architecture and governance to drive projects to successful execution
• Increased collaboration using a central repository of company-wide information

"We evaluated several tools. We purchased MEGA because we did not want to retool after we achieved the first step, portfolio management. We needed a tool to grow into our vision for enterprise architecture," said the Company's Vice President of Enterprise Architecture.