Global Auto Manufacturer digitizes enterprise architecture, creating single source of truth

Shift enterprise architecture from IT-centric endeavor to a business-centric initiative

Beginning in early 2016, a $160B Global Auto Manufacturer launched its Smart Mobility initiative: an expansion of the company’s business model to be both an auto and a mobility company. This decision to design, build and invest in Smart Vehicles and Smart World services for its customers required the company to find a better way to manage their enterprise architecture. The immediate challenge at this Global Auto Manufacturer was to move enterprise architecture from being primarily a project-based, IT-centric endeavor to an enterprise wide business-centric initiative. Driven by the imperative to adopt a customer-centric approach to product development, the enterprise architecture team was tasked to partner with the business units to architect a connected digital enterprise.

To do this, they needed to:

• Break geographic silos and centralize their architecture efforts under one enterprise architecture umbrella
• Conduct a comprehensive assessment of the people, process and tools required to support the Smart Mobility strategy
• Identify an enterprise architecture software platform that could provide greater breadth and depth than the tools they had at the time.

After reviewing Gartner’s Enterprise Architecture Magic Quadrant and reviewing feedback from the industry, the Global Auto Manufacturer chose two software vendors for further review and selected MEGA International’s HOPEX software for its central, integrated repository that could help streamline their efforts. The HOPEX platform had the right capabilities to grow along with this Global Auto Manufacturer’s enterprise architecture efforts, and it was at the right price-point.

“This Company’s ability to transform demand management was very impressive. Most impressive was their ability to govern IT projects that align to a business vision, resulting in only strategic projects and capabilities being delivered.”  
2019 Enterprise Architecture Awards

Enterprise architecture practice provides value across business units

From the very beginning of the HOPEX implementation, MEGA has remained committed to supporting this Global Auto Manufacturer’s vision and worked diligently to establish strong relationships and a trusted partnership. These key tenants helped this Company to evolve their enterprise architecture efforts and enabled MEGA to provide insights to help them reach their goals. Keys to success included:

• Making the invisible visible – This Global Auto Manufacturer initially leveraged HOPEX to help rationalize their application portfolio inventory. HOPEX’s central application repository provided them with instant visibility of their technology footprint, thereby saving time, resources and money by avoiding the costly move of old end-of-life applications to a new data center.
• Dashboard and KPIs – With the application data in HOPEX, reporting became much simpler, and a centralized dashboard enabled the architects to instantly report on key metrics. A reporting process that took weeks was reduced to several hours, thereby freeing up resources to focus on higher value-added activities. The enterprise architecture team could review their portfolio monthly and track their progress to KPIs, thereby showcasing enterprise architecture’s value.
• Shift focus from IT value creation to business value creation – The Global Auto Manufacturer’s enterprise architecture team successfully built an environment where they could replicate value across business units. As a result, business users are now using HOPEX and can more clearly understand enterprise-wide connectivity and view application diagrams. 
• Scalability - Over time, as the Global Auto Manufacturer progressed along their vision of digitizing their enterprise architecture, they began to leverage HOPEX for additional projects beyond application portfolio management including business architecture, information architecture, technical architecture, and GDPR.
• Focus on strategic planning - HOPEX gave this Global Auto Manufacturer’s enterprise architecture team the ultimate ability to understand and see ecosystems, data, and interdependencies enabling them to manage these across the business units. This data was transcribed into visualizations and shared on dashboards that business units could use and manage. Because this Global Auto Manufacturer spent the time to identify their processes and applications, they were then able to focus their efforts on strategic areas of the business - and thus became a trusted business partner and influencer.

Enterprise architecture delivers IT projects aligned to business strategy and company growth

Today, this Global Auto Manufacturer’s enterprise architecture team helps to shape digital business strategy by leveraging their enterprise expertise and industry perspective to create strategic road maps and innovative technical solutions.

With the implementation of HOPEX throughout their organization, this Company was able to digitize their enterprise architecture by:

• Disconnecting artifacts that are now connected in a centralized repository of architectures
• Using a single repository for application portfolio management and enable an enterprise view to improve decision-making with stakeholders and senior management and identify investment gaps
• Connecting data and aligning business objectives to make better more informed decisions that are founded in quality data and therefore more likely to succeed
• Deploying time and resources in a more efficient manner to mission critical projects using a demand management governance forum that clearly identifies business value of all IT investments. Ultimately this has resulted in an 85% reduction of IT projects.

Solutions

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