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Integrating standards to enable IT portfolio rationalization in telecoms

Ryan Schmierer
01 Jul 2020
Integrating standards to enable IT portfolio rationalization in telecoms

Integrating standards to enable IT portfolio rationalization in telecoms

Organizational Challenge

The Vrio story is similar to many modern companies that have seen their business and IT systems evolve over time, either organically or through acquisition. As the business changes, the IT footprint grows to the point that operational costs become burdensome and technical debt gets in the way of agility and new business capabilities.

Vrio's CIO set a goal to lower IT costs by:

  1. Rationalizing the IT portfolio
  2. Digital transformation
  3. Accelerate the journey to the cloud

Each of these strategies depended on developing a deep understanding of what the organization had in terms of infrastructure, applications, and processes across different countries and what capabilities are supported and will be needed in the future. This effort was led by Nathalie Pelser, Sr. Architect of Governance controls and her team members Jose Luis Jimenez and Milton Jimenez under the sponsorship of AVP Jose Antonio García Gonzalez. The CIO made it clear that Vrio needed to reduce the expenses on maintaining legacy systems to focus the IT investments on new capabilities. To accomplish this, the architecture team needed to establish a set of tools and standards to be used as a common platform for driving change across the broad organization.

Maturing the architecture practice was a necessary step to achieve the outcomes the organization needed. The CIO had taken the first step to restructure all the enterprise architects into one team. This removed one of the structural hurdles, but the enterprise architects were still acting more as solution architects – focusing on their individual business stakeholders instead of addressing the organization-wide challenges. This wasn't because individuals wanted to work in siloes - there was no central unified repository, no common practice for reviewing, versioning, or coordinated control of the architecture work that was being done. The result was frustrated architects and outcomes that varied greatly across the business. Being a telecom company, Vrio was already engaged with the TM Forum and was following the Frameworx reference models. As seasoned architects, they were aspiring to adhere to TOGAF. But they struggled to integrate these standards together in a cohesive way across the different business locations and functions.

"We knew that we had to follow TOGAF methodology, we were looking to model with ArchiMate, and we needed to follow TM Forum Frameworx. Then we needed the tools to be able to expose those artifacts and methodologies to the whole Vrio ecosystems (from IT, Business, Executive bodies to third parties). Then we wanted to enable versioning, driving consistency and life cycle with after the fact quality review," said Pelser.

The coordination challenge wasn't just confined to the architecture team. Achieving the goal of application portfolio rationalization required engaging with a broad community of application owners across the company. There are lots of apps that are redundant in the different countries, and many of those applications are not adding value, they're increasing complexity, cost, and risk to Vrio. The challenge was bringing all the pieces of the puzzle together so the team could make informed recommendations on what systems to keep, what to retire, and where to invest resources for the greatest impact.

Anytime Vrio wanted to analyze and rationalize the IT portfolio, it was a big manual effort that involved interviewing people and putting data into spreadsheets. They got insights from whoever volunteered information, but the results of these exercises were inconsistent in both quality and completeness.

With a big company and a relatively small team, Vrio needed consistency to be able to scale. As Enterprise Architects, they knew this but doing it was proving difficult.

Embracing the architecture principle of reuse through standards

The Vrio EA team already had identified a core set of building blocks that they needed to use to build a platform for their architecture practice. Rather than create them from scratch, they looked to the industry for guidance. The TM Forum is the Telecom industry's premier standards organization, bringing together thousands of members from around the globe to share insights, ideas and work together on solving the industry's biggest problems. They had some process, application, and data reference models available. The Open Group is the standards organization supporting the Enterprise Architecture profession – they had an Architecture methodology and modeling language available. Sparx Systems makes the world's leading architecture modeling tools. Between the three organizations, Vrio found a set of standards and tools that would cover most of their needs.

TOGAF – a leading architecture framework from The Open Group that provided an architecture development method and an extensible meta-model for integrating various architectural components together into a common repository

ArchiMate – an architecture modeling language that provides a consistent notation for creating diagrams that describe the various facets of an organization's end-to-end architecture.

TM Forum FrameworxA telecom industry reference architecture, Vrio is primarily using eTOM, TAM, SID, and the Digital Maturity Model to support the application performance management (APM) process as well as the Business Architecture Capability Model for rationalization.

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect – a configurable architecture modeling platform that includes a shared repository, robust tools for modeling and web-based interfaces for curating architecture content to stakeholders.

"TOGAF and ArchiMate are standards for us as Architects - those standards ensure we deliver the same kind of work across all projects and for all our architects to deliver consistent solutions or consistent work. The TM Forum Frameworx needed to be leveraged in Vrio as common reference across different teams– it will work as our magnifier," explains Pelser. "When we are defining services, Frameworx gives us guidance on what to do and what to include. It also helps us see what we have today and how to get where we want to go – a template or stencil of sorts". In an application portfolio management context, these are the capabilities the Vrio team needed to enhance their maturity, working in consistent ways, to deliver a unified picture to IT leadership.

Making Standards Work (Together)

The challenge with adopting these industry frameworks was that they didn't work well together (because they were developed by different standards bodies. "Standards are very theoretic. We were struggling to put them into practice and make them work for us," explains Pelser. We've got this 700-page document (TOGAF) that talks about how to do architecture and this 500-page document (ArchiMate) that talks about how to represent architecture content. The resources from TM Forum were equally rich in content but spread across 50+ static documents and reference models, making it extremely difficult to consume as-is.

"We had a vision, but we didn't have anyone to support us realize that vision – Until we met Chris [Chris Armstrong, Chief Architect at Sparx Services North America] and the SSNA team." says Pelser.

Applying Standards to Vrio's APM challenge

Maturing the architecture practice is only the means – the real business challenge for the EA Vrio team was trying to optimize the IT portfolio to save costs. Pelser and the EA Vrio team made the decision to partner with Sparx Services North America to accelerate the adoption of the chosen standards and deploy a set of integrated tools to support Vrio's application portfolio management process. Engaging SSNA enabled them to rapidly deploy TOGAF best practices, use ArchiMate as a modeling language for creating diagrams leveraging the Sparx platform and using Frameworx as the way to communicate to the wider business to determine what systems and capabilities are needed.

Constructing an APM process that works well requires people, processes, technology, data, and a structure to tie the pieces together.

In partnership with Sparx help, Vrio developed a meta-model to unify the various standards and transformed the 1000+ pages of reference materials into a set of models within Enterprise Architect that could be mapped into Vrio's business processes and application portfolio – providing an objective basis for analysis and rationalization. The Vrio Enterprise Architecture team then mapped IT systems to their business services, organizations, and roles, before described which applications were supporting those processes through the services that they exposed.

Lessons Learned

By taking a standards-based approach, Vrio diminished risk and accelerated time to value for their APM process. If a company tried to do this project by themselves, they'd have to figure out a method, and they'd have to figure out a modeling language, they would have had to transform the content from various standards. Reuse is a key principle in the architecture profession and a strategy well suited to solving problems like Vrio faced in their APM function. The SSNA team helped Vrio close the gaps between standards and provided them with a modeling platform, a set of practices, and content to enable them to start actually doing enterprise architecture instead of thinking and talking about doing it.

Pelser and her team at Vrio accomplished a feat that many others have struggled with – successfully integrating standards together and putting them to work to create a robust APM capability that helps the organization save operational costs, focus resources on developing new IT capabilities and enable the business to operate more efficiently. This is a model that others in the telecom industry can learn from and leverage to "make standards real" in their organization.