Case Study on Enterprise Architecture

Mini Case Enterprise Architecture at Nationstate Insurance

Jane Denton looked around at her assembled senior IT leadership team waiting to hear what she was going to say. Most were leaning forward eagerly, though some appeared more cautious. They were a good team, she knew, and she wanted to lead them well. A seasoned CIO, with a whole career behind her in IT, Jane was the newly appointed global CIO of Nationstate Insurance. This would be her last job before retirement in three years and she wanted to find a way to make a lasting difference in this company. Nationstate was an excellent company— Jane had done her homework. It was one of the largest in the United States, with a worldwide presence in personal and commercial insurance, and had recently been voted one of Forbes’ “ Best Big Companies.” It had good systems, good user– IT relationships, and good people. But the company aspired to be great and Jane wanted to help them by taking IT to the next level. She knew that the world was changing— largely as a result of technology— and she knew that IT and its traditional approach to systems development was also going to have to change. “ Our IT function needs to become more cutting edge in adopting emerging technolo-gies,” she had told the CEO shortly after she was hired, “ and we need to become more flexible and agile in our approach to development work.” Now she had this time and this team to accomplish her goals.

However, it was much easier said than done. Like almost every large organiza-tion, Nationstate had a hodgepodge of different systems, data, and processes— most serving just one of its six business units ( BUs). Nationstate’s decentralized structure had served it well in the past by enabling individual BUs to respond quickly to chang-ing market needs but a couple of years before Jane’s arrival, recognizing the need for some enterprise thinking, the CEO had created a federated structure with some central-ized functions, including parts of IT. So some of...