Mining company instills an integrated modern architecture with confidence

Determine how to take advantage of emerging technologies with an existing footprint

A precious minerals and mining company headquartered in Canada works with diversified natural resources and is engaged in mining and mineral development, including steelmaking coal, copper, zinc, and energy.

The Company recently began a business transformation program to transform production and operating costs. Specifically, the Company was looking to significantly improve safety, sustainability, and productivity while empowering the employees to solve complex problems and generate significant EBITDA improvements. Through these efforts, it became clear the Company needed to determine how its legacy application footprint would coexist with an emerging modern ecosystem.

The Company has several mining sites. Because each site uses different technology and systems, they needed to architect their applications and related processes to illustrate how they worked differently at various locations. A business case was determined to create a small enterprise architecture team to document release features.

The Company purchased MEGA's HOPEX solution to help develop a metamodel design that could be customized for the Company. HOPEX provides the flexibility needed to do many things, help the Company focus on outcomes, and develop a metamodel that supports impact, risk analysis, and planning.

Implement an EA tool that helps the EA team focus on business outcomes

Shortly after the Company chose the HOPEX platform, MEGA began onboarding their team via on-site and virtual training to ensure a smooth implementation of the HOPEX platform:

• Data import brought data and info together under one system – As part of the data importing process, MEGA's Services team integrated data from MuleSoft and ServiceNow. This initial exercise gave the Company a starting point to build a comprehensive view of its IT ecosystem and business applications.
• New business-outcome-driven metamodel emerged – As the project began to architect applications and related processes, a new metamodel emerged, focusing on business outcomes. To validate this new approach, the project team began demonstrating the metamodel with stakeholders across the Company and solicited feedback to continually adjust and build a more robust program.
• Increased visibility led to greater awareness – The Company implemented HOPEX's web portal and customized it so they and their stakeholders could easily access the information (e.g., artifacts, diagrams, reports, etc.) needed to make value-added decisions.
• Governance increased speed and quality – An unintended consequence of the architects' eagerness to churn out artifacts is that the architects were tripping over each other. The Company established some governance to draw clear lines of accountability around roles and who could create specific modeling objects. As a result, the quality of the artifacts improved dramatically.
• The project team proved its value by saving time and money – Throughout their demonstrations and meetings, the team learned of a legacy system being considered for replacement. Because of the due diligence by the team to develop the metamodel, they could show the stakeholders some reports indicating the list of data, integrations, and processes associated with this legacy system. The stakeholders were astonished and had no idea this legacy system had become part of the broader ecosystem. It all came together at just the right time and avoided what could have been a potentially costly improvement project.

A solid enterprise architecture metamodel to develop future roadmaps

The work of the Company's project team inspired other groups to join in and collaborate. This success is rooted in having developed a solid enterprise architecture metamodel and ensuring its integrity continues to be a priority, as well as developing roadmaps.

The Project Manager credits four success factors that helped them to be successful:

• Set a value proposition – Pick a specific goal that will help the business and is attainable.
• Be disciplined on the metamodel design – The project team engaged a strong mentor and organized the group for success.
• Build relationships – Consider how to engage business stakeholders and set regular time-boxed meetings for open dialogue. Discuss ideas and increase business knowledge for all. Listen and open your eyes and ears to the opportunities and then use content creatively to solve present-day problems.
• Increase time-to-value – HOPEX provided the ability to accelerate and publish easy-to-understand reports helping stakeholders respond with insights promptly. As a result, the broader team could confidently explain the risks in both business and technical terms.

Further, due to the project team's success, the Company has developed a formal company-wide enterprise architecture program. The work put into creating a metamodel and building relationships with stakeholders has set this program up for success now that the stakeholders understand the importance of enterprise architecture.

Moving forward, the Company is working to leverage this work into three additional HOPEX use cases around process linkages to departmental training artifacts, IT portfolio linkages to CMDB artifacts, and logical data linkages to conceptual and physical data artifacts (Data Catalog Initiative).

Solutions

• HOPEX Business Enterprise Architecture
• HOPEX Business Architecture
• HOPEX IT Portfolio Management
• HOPEX Business Process Optimization
• MEGA Services Team