Bupa is a leading global health insurance and healthcare company with 87,000 employees and 50 million customers globally. They aim to help people live longer, healthier, happier lives, and make a better world.
The company has defined six key strategic and enabling pillars for business-wide transformation activities. The aim is to ensure that Bupa will become the most customer-centric healthcare company in the world. This involves increasing the percentage of customers interacting with Bupa digitally and serving customers with immediate access to healthcare.
We talked with Stephen Marchant, Global Enterprise Architect, and Johan Hall, Enterprise Business Architect in Asia-Pacific, about the value of working globally in a common EA platform to support the delivery of digital initiatives and technology services.
This involves:
- Accelerating progress towards the company’s 3x6 strategy of becoming the most customer-centric healthcare company in the world
- Facilitating knowledge-sharing and collaboration across a federated organization
- Eliminating technology and development duplication between business entities
Bupa’s Organizational Challenges
Highly Federated Organization
At any time, Bupa is running hundreds of initiatives, all at different stages of execution. Their architects identify opportunities to modernize the technology portfolio, shift applications to the cloud, roll out new mobile applications, and speed up service delivery.
“Bupa is a highly federated global organization with ambitious transformation objectives. We want to share architecture knowledge to accelerate that transformation and achieve better outcomes.”
- Stephen Marchant, Global Enterprise Architect at Bupa
Bupa hoped to address this challenge with a new EA platform.
Benefits of a Global EA Platform
After evaluating multiple EA tooling options, Bupa chose Ardoq as their global Enterprise Architecture (EA) platform.
Ardoq has empowered them to:
- Facilitate knowledge sharing and enable cross-organization collaboration within the architecture community
- Derive insights from data
- Present complex concepts in a digestible way with multiple viewpoints
- Reduce the discovery time needed to support transformation initiatives
“Ardoq is now Bupa’s global EA platform for architecture teams. We’ve made the software available for architects worldwide to support a range of use cases and in time to develop a common enterprise architecture for Bupa.”
- Stephen Marchant
Ardoq is used to:
- Map their business and technical capabilities and understand their relationships
- Map the current technology estate
- Understand whether technology is a strategic fit and where there are gaps
- Support decisions on the strategic direction of systems
- Share architecture designs
- Share information across multiple teams with technical and non-technical decision-makers
“Now that Ardoq is available, architects across the business are joining forces and working together on the most valuable use cases.”
“Ardoq is helping us develop our architectural insight globally by enabling us to capture and share information about our architectures and make data-driven decisions.”
- Stephen Marchant
Encourage Experimentation and Innovation to Meet Local Needs
In addition, local teams are continuing to experiment and find new ways to use Ardoq, fueling new ideas and discussions. When you make a data platform like this available to architects and engineers, they uncover use cases you never expected.
Enterprise Business Architect in APAC, Johan Hall, who’s been using Ardoq for over a year, says that Ardoq is very easy to use.
“With Ardoq, you don’t have to draw boxes anymore. It’s much faster, and diagrams update automatically. How you can create relationships between architecture and objects, processes and people is second to none. For architects who are used to traditional tools, this makes a big difference.”- Johan Hall, Enterprise Business Architect at Bupa APAC
More Efficient Mapping and Modernizing of Core Systems
An interesting example of Bupa’s use cases with Ardoq is modeling a massive core business system that had been maintained for many years. Bupa needed insights about the system’s internal code structure to help them make important decisions about its future.
Key questions they wanted to answer included:
- What business capabilities are supported by the system?
- What are the functional dependencies between components in the system?
- What are the data dependencies between components?
- What is the impact and cost of decoupling and/or replacing functions?
“We used Ardoq with data from code scanners to map the entire system, see how data and functions are coupled together, and gather facts about costs, technical fit, and strategic fit. That changed the whole discussion.”
Instead of debating whether they should replace the entire system, they discussed a more detailed examination of the individual components within the system. By focusing on the fine-grained architecture decisions and considering how to utilize each part effectively, they were able to develop a smarter roadmap for the future-state architecture.
Significant Impact on Decision-making
“We rely less on knowledge only being in the heads of key people, and are able to share more information about the systems we are working on - and what the impact of changing the systems will be. That helps us get better decisions made faster.”
Bupa’s next steps will be to surface more insights and support architecture design activities by integrating their CMDB to Ardoq and diving into capability-based planning.
