As a public organization, we need to demonstrate that we are delivering the best value for our customers and making good investment decisions, therefore our policy requires us to regularly review the market. We had to ensure that whichever tool we selected would be intuitive and easy to use, as well as support the needs and requirements of our internal teams.
The Challenge
Scottish Water looks after Scotland’s most precious natural resource. From source to tap, Scottish Water is trusted to keep its customers supplied with world class water and care for the environment every minute of every day, servicing 2.56 million households and more than 150000 business premises. The company employs more than 4000 people in order to provide 1.44 billion liters of water per day, and take away 983 million liters. They are able to offer domestic charges that are among the lowest in Great Britain, while still topping the UK Customer Service Index’s Best Water Company for 2020.
Finding the Right EA Tool
Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been a part of Scottish Water for several years, with the organization first implementing iServer in 2011. However, in line with their Standard procurement policy, the Digital Strategy and Architecture team re-evaluated the various EA tools on the market to guarantee that they continue to get the most out of the tools they use. Taking place over almost a year, from winter 2019 to winter 2020, the organization went through a public RFI/RFP process to find the best tool for their needs. As well as functionality that supported the needs and deliverables of enterprise architecture, Scottish Water were particularly focused on an intuitive user interface, user experience and finding a tool that matched their vision for the future development of their EA practice so that they could continue spreading the ethos of EA throughout the organization.
iServer Selected as the Best Fit for Scottish Water
Having evaluated a number of industry leading EA tools, Scottish Water selected iServer as best able to meet its requirements. Given the breadth of activities undertaken by Scottish Water’s EA practice, iServer offered the functionality needed to cover a broad range of use cases, both current and future. The iServer roadmap matched well with Scottish Water’s digital strategy and provided a familiar Microsoft user interface.
One of the main highlights of the Orbus offering were the impressive Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) reports. Implementation of the iServer SPM solution is already helping Scottish Water to mature its EA practice and support strategic decision-making. Furthermore, the organization was impressed by the SPM capabilities as one business stakeholder emphasized, “Christmas had come early”.
As OrbusInfinity now offers a fully cloud enabled enterprise transformation suite, Scottish Water sees the potential in exploring some of these developments in the future, according to Paul Douglas, Lead Enterprise Architect at Scottish Water.
Scottish Water also recognized the dedication of the Orbus team throughout the procurement process. The Orbus Consultancy team have already demonstrated excellent responsiveness and have produced quality outputs, always listening to Scottish Water’s needs and delivering accordingly.
The Solution
The Result
Scottish Water first began using iServer in 2011, and the tool now supports an increasingly mature EA practice. The original business case was focused on impact analysis and Application and Technology Roadmapping. EA also encouraged other teams across the organization to undertake business process modeling within iServer, to understand the as-is position and its relationships to enable changes to the to-be position.
With the introduction of the SPM reports and the connector to iServer, the EA team are better able to surface complex data that is consumable by business stakeholders and that helps them drive value from this rich data source. These new features complement the existing visuals and dashboards within the iServer tool. The EA Team highlighted 4 key areas where iServer has helped deliver value:
- Building the Digital Strategy, enabled by modeling Scottish Water’s digital capabilities.
- Supporting the organization’s “management approach” for digital investment.
- Technology roadmaps helped to build the digital business plan for the next 6 years.
- Informing strategic transformation.
Orbus Software look forward to continuing to support Scottish Water’s Enterprise Architecture practice through iServer, turning digital strategy into digital business outcomes across the organization.
