Today at the Metastorm User Conference, one financial services customer presented an insightful session on their use of enterprise architecture (EA) to support a customer-centric business model.

The customer, a Canadian credit agency, needed to address a business need to deliver improved service to its customers as well as a technology challenge to improve a disjointed and siloed IT application portfolio.

To begin addressing these issues, the EA Group defined a core value chain (CVC), mapped applications to it and identified points of redundancy. They realized they needed to reframe their IT in a business context – with the goal of aligning its business and application architectures and improving access to customer data. The customer used Metastorm ProVision EA software to decompose its architectures to the lowest function level, define discrete business services along with associated inputs, outputs, data elements and deliverables.

By taking a more agile approach to its architecture, the customer was able to align its IT investment with its business goals. Through integrated EA modeling, the customer was able to achieve:

Line of sight from corporate strategies to the lowest level of IT: they use an SOA approach to collapse duplicate functionality in various systems into a single instance for maintenance and upgrade.

Application portfolio management and component infrastructure roadmaps: IT infrastructure stays “one step ahead” of the business and ensures that effective applications and systems are in place when they are needed.

Strategic resource planning: Every new initiative is quickly placed within the IT framework. By analyzing Metastorm ProVision models, the customer knows which functions support which strategy and which systems and platforms are related to them.

With a new customer-centric focus and effectively integrated systems, the customer established a business-oriented IT investment strategy, reduced administrative overhead associated with IT project portfolio management, streamlined its systems—and clearly translated EA modeling into true business value.

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