Link: http://resources.troux.com/blog/bid/62776/How-Kaiser-Permanente-Drives-Quick-Value-From-Standards
From Troux Blog
In the middle of a chaotic battle, a “standard” is the flag that rallies the troops amid chaos and uncertainty.
Sandra McCoy and her EA team at Kaiser Permanente have used Troux to create standards to guide, rather than force, business users to abandon overlapping, wasteful or non-supported applications. The effort is leading business managers to question technology assumptions and even ask for standards in areas such as lab and radiology systems. All this helps the sprawling insurer and health care provider drive down costs while increasing the effectiveness of health care, she recently told attendees at Troux’s Worldwide Conference.
With 40 architects and 6,000 IT staffers, “We can’t help everyone individually,” says McCoy, Kaiser’s executive director of business technology architecture and strategic analysis. “But if we can create some standards…for people to shoot for, they will try to do the right thing.”
Without any penalties or incentives to encourage standards compliance, McCoy has used pressure from the top, along with education and persuasion, to drive standards progress forward. The insurer and health care provider began its standards push in late 2009 with a mandate from CIO Phil Fasano, with a key goal of making them more usable than just being listed in hard-to-use spreadsheets. McCoy was about to pay for a custom platform when she found Troux in the summer of 2009.
Within six months, her team was using Troux Standards and its visualization capabilities to show application owners when vendors will stop (or have stopped) supporting a key application, had categorized the middleware and hardware technologies in use within Kaiser, and used Troux Standards to create a recommended lifecycle for each.
Visualizations explain “why their costs are so high and what they’re paying for and if there is an opportunity to reduce those costs” through application rationalization, she says, as well as reducing risk by eliminating unsupported platforms.
Creating standards may seem far removed from completing an enterprise architecture, but the information produced by the effort allowed the EA group to “show some value, which we haven’t been able to do successfully in the past. We’re starting to be invited to the table, which is a huge win for us.”
To build more buy-in, her team is developing “decision trees” to help business units decide when to use expensive, industrial-strength software rather than less expensive open-source products. She also created a standards board that gives users a chance to voice their views, and has worked first with those within Kaiser who are most interested in EA to build momentum with early wins.
With each benefit delivered, she says, standards and EA become “easier and easier to sell.” Her group won a recent victory when senior management made it a corporate, rather than just an IT policy, that departments stop using applications no longer supported by vendors.
With today’s pressures on users to work more quickly and cut costs, standards are actually “the only area of enterprise architecture where I don’t sense people are saying ‘why do we have to do this?’” says McCoy. Instead, she says, they ask the EA group “Just tell me what I’m supposed to do.”
“Of course, they’re not happy when we tell them,” she laughs, but the fact they asked is a sign she’s paving the way for a Kaiser culture that accepts and even embraces standards.
