Software AG > Case Studies > Strategic IT planning leads to million-dollar savings

Strategic IT planning leads to million-dollar savings

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Country

Other

Product

Alfabet Enterprise Architecture Management

Tech Stack

Enterprise Architecture Management

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

Applicable Industries

Oil & Gas

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Infrastructure Inspection
Asset Lifecycle Management

Services

System Integration

About The Customer

The customer is a global player in the oil and gas industry. They provide customers with fuel, energy, and petrochemicals. The company has a workforce of over 85,000 employees worldwide and generates annual revenues of over $300 billion. The enterprise portfolio includes upstream and downstream sectors, and exploration and production take place in over 30 countries. The company spends over $1 billion annually on technology to help organize, store, and share the information that drives the business.

The Challenge

The global player in the oil and gas industry was spending over $1 billion annually on technology to organize, store, and share information that drives the business. However, the enterprise IT infrastructure had become complicated due to piecemeal construction throughout the company’s business units and a tangled web of legacy systems from mergers and acquisitions dating back to the early 1980s. The company had an estimated 8,000 applications costing over $600 million to run annually. Despite the significant annual expenditure on new systems, there was no alignment to a multi-year road map. Application strategies were inconsistent across the business units, and there was no common architecture or strategy.

The Solution

The company's enterprise architecture team came up with a solution called the Bill of IT, a revolutionary way of optimizing the enterprise’s investment and simplifying the complex legacy of 8,000 applications. The Bill of IT comprises a list of all the IT components in an organization and how they fit together to support the business processes. The team first undertook a rigorous survey of the application landscape, mapping applications to business processes, and classifying applications according to whether they were critical or strategic. Only those fitting both criteria became part of the Bill of IT. The enterprise architects worked with more than 300 people from around the organization to define the future Bill of IT: what the company’s business processes would be and the IT infrastructure needed to support this. Once a Bill of IT was established for each business unit, a road map and spending framework were agreed upon to align spending as closely as possible to the strategic goals.

Operational Impact

The company now depends upon 7 percent fewer applications.
The company is able to maximize the return on its $1 billion annual spend on IT: 85 percent of IT asset investment is now aligned with its strategic goals.
Alfabet has helped to provide a true understanding of the applications the company uses.
The company is embedding the good practices in everyday routines.

Quantitative Benefit