Vattenfall

The Challenge

Due to a long history of mergers and acquisitions, Vattenfall have historically faced challenges with their IT footprint and application consolidation. This challenge intensified when Vattenfall management insisted on the maintenance of a good quality technology infrastructure and organizational objectives, in order to safeguard the company’s competitive advantage. Identifying applications with overlapping functionality within a vast landscape such as the one supported by Vattenfall was as difficult as it was valuable for expediting ongoing and future projects. With the extra focus placed on them, the architects’ activity was at risk of becoming paralyzed.

The main obstacle in delivering this business objective were the inherent limitations within their existing tool Troux (now Planview). For one thing, the tool’s scope could not be widened to address the actual range of practices for which they needed support. The team also faced issues related to Troux’s usability, which at times limited the impact of their architecture. With these challenges in mind, the team decided to look at other options on the market.

Selecting iServer

Vattenfall looked at all tools available on the market. They used analyst reports and executed a comprehensive search of their own. The team were looking for a solution that would replace Troux as the de facto EA solution within the company. During this search, they discovered that iServer was already in use in another area of the company for different purposes. Still, the architects analyzed all the vendors carefully to ensure the new tool would receive everyone’s approval.

To begin with, they listed a number of key requirements. Then, to separate the tools that had passed the initial evaluation stage, they described a set of use cases to see how well they would perform on live tasks. The use cases effectively formed an overview of the IT architecture processes, comprising Technology Standards Management, Lifecycle Management, Solutions Selection, and Application Portfolio Management. This initiative had a broader remit than any attempted previously with relation to the IT function. The goal was to establish a practice that was wider in scope by supporting the team with a joint modeling platform and a central repository where architecture could be modeled, stored and managed.

The Proof-of-Concept stage was insightful. The principal consultant that assisted Vattenfall with setting up a demo environment offered extensive care to the team’s requirements. As such, the architects were able to answer all questions they had and get an in-depth feel for iServer. Despite the high level of scrutiny, Orbus Software’s iServer was selected as the tool of choice.

iServer’s maturity, flexibility and user-friendliness, as well as its content sharing capabilities were key to Vattenfall’s decision.

iServer provided a secure, easily governable and feature-rich central repository that acted as a unified location for all architectural content and documentation.

This eliminated disparate repositories of information. It also standardized documentation and promoted best practices through alignment with widely used standards and frameworks (ArchiMate, TOGAF, etc.).

Additionally, iServer had strong governance capabilities with the ability to conduct risk analysis, and provide reports for audit, compliance, traceability and mitigation purposes, as well as baselining and self-assessing features. The team at Vattenfall also took advantage of the tool’s range of communication modules, making it easy to disseminate any information to a chosen audience. iServer Portal, for instance, allowed them to share architecture insights with desired stakeholders.