Enterprise Architecture at Nationstate Insurance

IS Policy & Strategy

10/5/2015

Enterprise Architecture at Nationstate Insurance

Jane Denton’s position at Nationstate Insurance is the Global CIO. Her task is to make the IT at Nationstate more

“cutting edge” as well as more flexible and agile in today’s fast changing IT environment. To get one step closer to

her goal she has promoted the Senior Architecture for the commercial business unit Seamus O’Malley to Chief

Enterprise Architect. O’Malley is now going to develop a strategy for fewer IT development processes so that

Nationstate’s six BUs can work more centralized.

Major Issues:

 Today’s systems, data, and processes are a mess – most serving just one of the companys six business units

(BUs)

 No one in the organization have before Jane Denton appeared been able to see the big picture of what IT

resources the company has and no strategic goal.

 Senior architects are bad with business but good with IT.

Recommendations:

 Centralize all architecture. Growing company’s

 The BU presidents should go into a team and see how new systems/an enterprise system can support all of

the BUs and how that can be done effective.

 Make the new processes follow a clear standard so it can be followed by all business units.

 To implement a centralized system strong enforcement are needed. To not be seen as the “architecture

police” business people should participate in the architecture teams.

1. List and describe all of the potential benefits (and costs) that Nationstate would realize from the

establishment of an enterprisewide architecture as envisioned by Jane Denton.

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Potential Benefits

Senior management will have a better overall picture of the business units and their systems.

Costs savings in internal customer service units when every unit are using the same systems and software.

Easier to collaborate and communicate between BU when everyone has access to the common database.

By adding more programs over the old one a spaghetti of systems is created....