Nils Labusch

Many enterprises need to handle programs that impose fundamental changes to the organization as well as the supporting IT systems. While general guidance for such transformations in form of methods, reference models, principles, etc. is available, the specific context of the insurance sector is often not considered. We conducted an interview series with informants from major European insurance companies to explore the specifics of enterprise transformation in the insurance sector. The results suggest amending existing transformation support methods by regarding transformation triggers, transformation program types and core techniques. E.g., transformations that deal with standardization, mergers and acquisitions and internal alignment are not sufficiently covered yet and techniques that deal with soft and social aspects of transformations are less visible in the insurance sector. Our findings create not only the basis for a wider survey to extend and validate initial findings, but also for comparing and discussing concrete enterprise transformation cases.

In addition to continuous, evolutionary optimizations, most enterprises also undergo revolutionary transformations from time to time. Knowledge about current corporate practice for coherent IT and business transformation is therefore very valuable. In this paper we present the results of an empirical study on the management of large-scale transformation programs that focuses on IT as much as business aspects. Companies that rate themselves as mature with regards to transformation management, assess certain transformation management components different than less mature companies. Cost reduction, revenue improvement, and agility improvement are the most relevant goals of transformation programs all these are business goals and not IT goals. Current state of the art transformation management can be classified into three approaches: Value-driven, ungoverned and change-driven. We found that no single management approach covers all these areas appropriately yet.

In this Chapter we present a reference framework, more specifically a catalogue of capabilities, needed for doing ACET. As such, it also provides guidance on which elements/artefacts of enterprise architecture can be used to support which aspects of enterprise architecture. For architects, it shows where their services might generate value, if requested. For transformation managers, it provides a “capability catalogue”, describing for which parts of enterprise architecture they may seek advice from the enterprise architects. The framework as a whole provides a structure for the solution components that addresses the challenges as presented in Part II, and it comprises of the perspectives of strategy, value and risk, design, implementation, and change. The capabilities of all the perspectives together support transformation management, which is concerned with the management tasks at the overall transformation level, and with the architectural coordination function, which forms an umbrella function of integrating the individual perspectives into a consistent whole.

In this chapter we report on the case of a globally operating insurance company that has leveraged enterprise architecture management to support business transformations. In order to do so, the company has developed enterprise architecture management capabilities that help the business structuring the business transformation particularly in the early stages before handing over respective responsibilities to more specialized corporate functions later on. This case is interesting for understanding ACET because it is one of the rare cases where enterprise architecture management truly bridges the business–IT gap.

In this chapter we address the fact that not all ACET problems are equal, and ACET solutions therefore need to be configured to address the specifics of the respective ACET problem. We approach this configuration problem by the means of situational method engineering. We find that the two most important differences of ACET problem situations result from the enterprise architecture management approach used, and the respective type of the transformation. We therefore present classifications for enterprise architecture management and enterprise transformation, and propose an appropriate ACET problem situation matrix. We finally demonstrate how ACET solutions are configured to a given problem situation.