A Leading Asian telecommunications group undertakes IT rationalization initiative

Improve IT agility and foster business innovation with Enterprise Architecture

For this leading Asian telecommunications group, strategic alignment between IT and the business was identified as a critical factor in continuously supporting business priorities and transformation efforts. The project was a complex one as it needed to combine the following objectives:

• Simplify the technology landscape for better IT agility to support the speed of change within the company
• Reduce costs and make more informed IT investments decisions
• Understand the application portfolio, related costs, and maintenance expenses
• Get visibility into how underlying technology supports applications and how business & IT projects drive change in the application landscape across the next few years.
• Get a consolidated view of the overall IT landscape; previously, information was captured in convoluted spreadsheets, word documents, and various legacy systems.

For these reasons, the telecommunications group realized a requirement for a proper Enterprise Architecture tool to address these challenges - one that could holistically bring together all these information sources and build a central enterprise repository.

MEGA's solution to drive the Enterprise Architecture practice from a top-down approach

The solution proposed by MEGA has allowed the company to drive Enterprise Architecture using a top-down approach. It has helped to align business strategy and objectives while unifying the different layers of enterprise architecture. As the company embarked on this new journey, the company also wanted a tool that could provide scalability as it grew and one that would require minimal support without jeopardizing its functionality.

It took six months to implement the project and populate the data, and it required participation and inputs from all five domains of the customer's IT team for the project to be successful. It started with the Enterprise Architecture team setting up the rules to populate information and progressively engaging the different IT domains to provide and update information sources. Over 600 users were registered, 100 active users and 30 actively using the information to perform weekly analysis, assessment, and reporting activities.

The process allowed the team to capture data on all IT projects. It provided visibility on the changes made to the applications and insight into which ones to decommission or modify. It also helped to understand better the cost associated with the applications in the repository.

Full alignment of IT Architecture practices to support the customer's strategic objectives and provide greater visibility of IT objectives and critical IT assets.

MEGA's HOPEX solutions have allowed:

• Better strategic alignment of IT and business roadmaps The clear visibility into the company's IT roadmap and landscape has improved the decision-making process regarding future investments in IT resources. Identifying gaps and redundancies in the IT landscape has also helped maximize operational efficiencies.
• Simplifying the technology landscape to gain IT agility A “single source of truth” makes it easier to carry out application decommissioning analysis, produce roadmaps, and execute IT consolidation projects more efficiently and in line with business requirements. Each year, 60 to 70 applications are identified for decommissioning as they become obsolete or redundant in the continuously changing IT landscape; this level of planning has proven impossible with the use of Excel spreadsheets.
• Consolidated view of the overall application landscape and underlying costs The new view provided by HOPEX has made it easier for the company to understand underlying and maintenance-related costs, the technology supporting each application, and how business and IT projects will drive changes in the application landscape over the next three years.
• Information is centralized in a single repository for accurate reports and easy decision-making. Now, managers assess their business processes every three months to determine whether they are being followed correctly. New processes are entered into the application as soon as they are developed. The company has taken extensive measures to ensure that staff quickly grasp how the new system works and what they must do from now on.

The results achieved from implementing MEGA’s solutions have also facilitated simplified external audit processes. Regulatory and compliance standards are now met since the processes and systems are centrally structured. At the same time, their reporting of them has been simplified, meaning lower costs on IT time and resources required to fulfill the obligations of audits.

The new approach has demonstrated genuine, demonstrable business value to the telecommunication group and, in doing so, has gained the interest of other departments that rely on spreadsheets. Plans are underway to take the project beyond the IT department and expand its coverage to network and business-managed applications.

“We recognize HOPEX software as a tool that effectively strengthens IT governance and are looking to expand the use case for risk management. We also plan to extend the data-modeling capability and possibly other fundamentals necessary to run the organization."
Group Enterprise Architecture Director

Solutions

• HOPEX IT Portfolio Management
• HOPEX platform
• MEGA Services Team