Problem identification Enterprise Portfolio Management ... - Troux

CASE STUDY
Scottish Widows Investment Partnership (SWIP)
Enterprise Portfolio Management Investment Nets Benefits
SWIP sees bottom-line results from Troux solutions in just 12 weeks
When Jon Gasparini joined SWIP (Scottish Widows Investment Partnership) as its Head of
Architecture, he had a grand vision for the kind of value that enterprise architecture (EA)
could deliver.
A former solutions architect and consultant, Gasparini wanted to evolve SWIP’s
successful solutions architecture practice into a comprehensive EA discipline using an
enterprise portfolio management (EPM) approach. This way, the team could drive better
management information and achieve even greater change in the business.
But he didn’t have the luxury of time. A subsidiary of the Lloyds Banking Group, SWIP
was planning to increase its change budget significantly over the next 2-3 years. He
would have to improve visibility of the SWIP EA landscape and gain access to improve
management information to support this significant increase in the size and complexity of
business and IT change.
Problem identification
SWIP’s EA team supports over 500 financial professionals across a number of business
teams including front office, compliance, risk, and others. The company deploys cuttingedge
technology to process huge volumes of data and manage sophisticated investment
products, all within policies designed to meet industry and regulatory standards and policies.
ABOUT SWIP
More than £140 billion under
management
Offices in Edinburgh (HQ),
London and New York City
Investments across all asset
classes: Equities, Fixed Income,
Cash, Real Estate, Multi-Asset and
Multi-Manager
Global client reach, comprising of
institutional clients from pension
funds, charities and financial
institutions and well as an
extensive wholesale client-base.
Gasparini and his team took a holistic approach to their EA challenge. They engaged
Troux very early and, by leveraging the Troux Accelerator methodology and EPM
approach, identified the critical business questions that needed to be addressed.
If someone new
joins the team we can
point them to STAR,
the Troux system, to
access everything they
need to know about
our landscape. So
they get up to speed
faster. When they
finish the project and
leave SWIP we have
an up-to-date view of
our landscape.
SWIP: Troux Case Study • Page 1

Accelerated Return on Investment
Within just 12 weeks, they were able to capture and store mission-critical
information from six enterprise portfolios spanning business architecture,
applications, goals and strategy, investments, technology and information. They
created the SWIP Transformation Architecture Repository (STAR), a common
platform that manages all elements of the SWIP architecture. The data and
information are consistently available in real-time, across the company and
the portfolios easily scale to meet business needs. By following the Accelerator
methodology they were able to identify an additional 15 questions that they could
answer using out-of-the-box reporting.
“The Accelerator made us successful,” confirmed Gasparini. “It’s a very strong
method that keeps you focused. It really does deliver great results in a short
period of time. I’ve worked with a lot of software providers in my time and I’ve not
had as good an experience as I had with Troux over that 12-week period.”
Rather than having a
technology-led conversation
with the business, we are
having a top-down businessled
conversation that
looks at which parts of the
business we need to change
from a capability perspective
and then driving out the IT
change to support that.
A single point of truth
SWIP leverages capabilities from a number of delivery partners to deliver both business and IT change, therefore having an up-todate
repository provides significant benefits.
“If someone new joins the team we can point them to STAR, the Troux system, to access everything they need to know about our
landscape: business capabilities and processes, systems, applications, servers. They get that single view of our landscape. So they
get up to speed faster,” explained Gasparini. “In addition, the delivery partners don’t walk away with the knowledge of what they
changed. Because we are continually managing and capturing what is changing, when they finish the project and leave SWIP we
have an up-to-date view of our landscape.”
STAR has become not just a tool for enterprise portfolio management, but a decision-making tool for stakeholders across the
company. For instance, in the event of a service failure, the IT support team can refer to STAR to identify the impacted applications,
business functions and business capabilities. Reports producing all the information on a specific server can be run in seconds,
providing enhanced information to support failure recovery and inform affected areas of the business.
“We have established a single point of truth for business,
information, applications and technology architecture.
We’ve decommissioned disparate Excel spreadsheets
and Visio diagrams which used to describe our
architecture,” said Gasparini. “Our team has insight
into the impact of change and we can see where we
have conflicts across projects and make sure we aren’t
digging up the road more than once. Before it would
take days to understand an issue’s impact on our
business; now, we have the information in seconds.”
Figure 2. SWIP Transformation Architecture Repository
(STAR) Platform]
SWIP: Troux Case Study • Page 2

Fully engaged with the business
With STAR, the EA team now has a platform upon which to build target architectures and develop roadmaps. Target architectures
that link back to business capabilities and functions can be created and easily changed as plans change, and impact assessments
can be made effectively and efficiently. As SWIP operates in a highly regulated environment, having this business capability enables
the organization to respond quickly and accurately to requests from regulatory authorities such as the Financial Services Authority
(FSA) in the U.K. who expect SWIP to thoroughly understand its business and IT landscape.
“Ten months ago it was difficult to communicate what we did or measure how well we were doing. Now we have initial metrics in
place and are building more into the program on an on-going basis. We’ve raised the bar for EA at SWIP, from a technology-led, to a
business-led, enterprise-wide practice,” commented Gasparini. “As a team, we are now involved in every part of the business and in
some cases we are the catalyst for bringing parts of the business together, this has never happened before.”
Retooling processes
SWIP uses Microsoft Visio and Word tools within its risk and compliance team to document critical business processes and controls.
Gasparini noted that for one process alone, the document was an inch thick. “If you have to do that for the whole business, how are
you going to maintain and manage that? How do you get any management information from that? Which processes have controls?
Which processes are manual versus automatic? And if you’re changing a process, how much documentation do you need to change
to reflect that?”
Having seen Troux’s capabilities and how Gasparini’s EA team has used them to build a view of the EA landscape, the business now
intends to use Troux to capture that process information. “So this is the business saying: ‘Can we use your EA tool to capture those
processes? It’s a tool that will scale. It’s easy to use. And we can derive good management information,’” says Gasparini.
Ready for the future
Gasparini’s team also used Troux tools to map SWIP’s portfolio of upcoming
projects, with associated alignments to applications and business functions.
When he subsequently ran the goals and strategy data by roadmap and software
life cycle, he quickly saw which underlying technologies were changing or
planned for phase-out.
“We’ve started looking at the scope of future projects now so that when we
deliver them we have the ability to change that technology. We have become
proactive in our approach to managing technology lifecycle,” said Gasparini.
“We have much stronger management information at our fingertips to influence
the scope and the change activities the business is planning in later years. We
have never had that before. This is a fantastic position to be in.”
Decision makers now
have quick access to more
timely, accurate and powerful
management information.
We can now see the impact
of change to our business
and technology landscape
much earlier in the planning
cycle. This means we are
making better decisions.
SWIP: Troux Case Study • Page 3

Top 5 Troux Benefits for SWIP
SINGLE POINT OF TRUTH:
“Troux links together information across six portfolios. I have a connected view of the landscape and how it’s changing.”
KNOWLEDGE CAPTURE:
“We can get third-party resources up to speed more quickly now, and we capture all changes to our landscape so that knowledge
doesn’t leave with the contractor.”
TIME TO MARKET:
“We can structure programs in a way that delivers change in the most efficient way, whether that is faster or cheaper.”
RISK MITIGATION:
“We have a better view of our technology risks and their impacts on our landscape. So we can be proactive and deliver these
projects onto our preferred technology platform.”
COST-EFFICIENCY:
“Legacy technology inherently becomes more expensive to support. If we keep deploying onto legacy technology, costs spiral. We
can make sure projects are deploying onto the right platforms and that those platforms fit with our longer term goals.”
TROUX RESULTS
• Business benefits delivered in just 12 weeks
• Partners get up to speed faster with STAR
• Now able to understand an issue’s impact on the business in minutes not days
learn more at www.troux.com
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