Our client, a specialty insurance company with offices across multiple European countries, had encountered recurring problems resulting from it's legacy application landscape. As a matter of fact, the core insurance application enjoyed only poor acceptance amoung users resulting in a number of workarounds and parallel solutions developed by business departments (End User Computing, EUC). This had led to many redundancies, peer-to-peer interfaces and processing errors. Also, statutory and regulatory compliance were increasingly questioned.

Our mandate was to collect the future landscape requirements of the various international offices in a structured way and develop a target picture as well as a corresponding roadmap. This way, ongoing discussions should be brought to a tangible result agreed to by all parties involved. Ultimate goals were to standardize and modernize the application landscape, to improve integration and automation and to satisfy statutory and regulatory requirements.

In the course of the project an architecture development cycle was completed based on the TOGAF® ADM (used as a standard by the client). Initially, interviews and workshops were conducted with main stakeholders from all international offices. During these, current deficiencies and future requirements were identified and documented within an Architecture Definition Documents (ADD). Based on this, a long-term target picture for the application landscape was developed, discussed and finally approved. Following an agile approach, a modern integration platform was selected and implemented "on-the-fly" to adress pressing integration needs.

Main outcome of the project was a formally approved description of the fundamental requirements of the different international offices and a commonly agreed target architecture (mid-term and long-term perspective). For the first time, this brought transparency into a landscape that was previously understood by few local experts only and provided guidance for the future development. The target pictures were used within subsequent projects to manage a large-scale transformation (which was successfully completed in the meantime). Also, a modern integration platform was introduced concurrently so that ongoing integration activities could be readily implemented according to the target architecture. This way, practical benefits could also be provided to application owners, project managers and developers.