Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 23 | Page 57

CASE STUDY I n the modern world, the journey to Digital Transformation is both exciting and daunting. Astute businesses are forming smart Information Technology (IT) strategies to drive better operations and greater customer experience. For PPS, it became clear that a comprehensive IT strategy was required. Upon research the company identified the architectural approach as best suited to its industry and sought assistance in building this plan using best practice architectural principles. PPS essentially wanted to create a 2020 vision. Preparing the strategy was only part of the equation, as it would need to be presented to PPS executives. To do so effectively, a well-defined Enterprise Architecture (EA) was required. At the time, while the PPS IT team had participated in The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) training, they lacked the practical experience to develop this EA on their own. The goal was to build a plan to empower the application of data within an intelligent architecture, using developed infrastructure to deliver on conceptual, logical and physical levels. “We were acutely aware of the need to partner with a business that could help us develop an accurate target state architecture to develop this strategy,” said Avsharn Bachoo, Chief Technology Officer at PPS. “This need is fueled by the desire to improve.” Established in 1941, the PPS Group is the only mutual financial services company in South Africa focusing exclusively on graduate professionals. The company provides tailor-made insurance, investment and healthcare solutions to its members and is an exclusive organisation of graduate professionals. Solution For PPS, the Knotion approach aligned with its strategic requirements given the changes that were taking place inside the company. “We successfully launched an EA function within the group and examined ways to effectively grow it,” said Bachoo. “Following extensive research, we decided to outsource to a specialist company as opposed to building the capacity in-house.” Marius Snel, Chief Executive Officer and owner of Knotion, said the process began with modelling the current PPS environment. “Information was drawn from existing configuration management systems, providing the data required to create the initial building blocks to show the current, physical state,” he said. “Reference models were then built to represent the target state both conceptually and logically, based on architectural building blocks.” With the current environment and the target state effectively represented, Knotion could now map the ‘as is’ to the ‘target’. Using colour coded visual representations, PPS could easily identify what should be re-used, where potential problems were hiding, what needed to be retired or fixed, and what they didn’t have in place but needed. “A gap analysis was put together to close the gaps between the current and the target – and this is the information that was fed into the strategy,” added Snel. To achieve this, Knotion used its ‘Smart Strategy’ solution; a customised method based on TOGAF. While this international framework gives companies insight into what to do, Knotion’s customised framework tells users how to do it. “Many companies choose a framework such as TOGAF, as the foundation to develop their EA capability,” said Snel. “This is followed by customising the framework for the organisation based on the architects’ skills and experience. By the time that the EA capability is up and running, a company would have spent a significant amount of resources already, without showing any clear business value.” With EAaaS, the value is derived by providing services to develop the relevant architectures as and when required by the client. THE POSITIVE IMPACT KNOTION HAS ALREADY HAD ON OUR APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE IS THE BIGGEST SUCCESS STORY. www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 57