From Troux Blog
Dell’s entrepreneurial culture helped it grow into a global enterprise. But as Dell grew, disparate applications and processes made it harder to meet competitive challenges and comply with stricter financial regulations.
Using a “simple is better” approach, Dell has been successfully using the Troux EA platform and business suite of applications to cut complexity, optimize IT delivery and improve operational performance. According to Tom Philbin, senior enterprise architect at the global information technology and services vendor, Dell’s EA group is well on its way to trimming 7,000 strategic applications to fewer than 100, delivering more than 60 strategic initiatives supporting $55 billion in revenue, while enabling $200 million in hard-dollar savings and another $300 million in cost avoidance.
And the best part is that Dell has been able to produce these results with a “tiny fraction” of its $1 billion annual IT budget by taking the most simple, straightforward approach wherever possible. This applies to, for example, the process steps required to produce the architecture required to support any specific business agility need.
“We used to have a different set of process steps for each EA engagement,” says Philbin “Now to keep it simple, we have ten Level One process steps that enable all of our application types.” Any EA engagement requires learning only those ten steps, combining them in a different way for each engagement.
Each Level One step has a second level listing the inputs and outputs which comprise it. Each process step has a well-defined set of, “what architectural purists would call `viewpoints’ or artifact descriptions,” he says, most of which are defined in terms of a Troux-enabled Metamodel.
That metamodel is also kept simple and includes only 15 separate object types. These are enough to deliver most of the more than 60 architectures required to meet Dell’s goals, says Philbin. “We spent a lot of time making sure we had this right, so we could leverage architectures from one program to the next to the next.”
One early use of Troux was to improve the quality, control and cost of Dell’s quote to cash (Q2C) process with common processes supported by a rationalized set of IT solutions. In the scoping stage, the team focused on nine viewpoints that included a value forecast, data definitions, deployment roadmap and context models.
Producing these viewpoints was comparatively simple, relying on Troux to produce drawings of the required architectural states. Using Troux for TOGAF the team produced easily understandable color-coded views showing precisely what in the enterprise needed to be change to move from current to desired states, making it easy to identify the necessary development work. Dell’s architectural approach enabled shortened project delivery times by reducing rework and confusion about which systems interact to perform Q2C. This solution also improved financial controls. Other benefits have been TCO savings and improved efficiency from consolidating redundant applications and processes.
The large-scale effort helped the EA team “gain CXO level visibility and credibility,” for subsequent efforts, says Philbin, whose team is “being asked to play a role now in the strategic definition of the business, (with) questions like ‘What architectures will help us to capture future profit opportunities and enable upcoming strategic initiatives?”
You can watch a replay of Dell’s webinar “How EA has become a key to Business Agility at Dell” here
