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Strategic IT planning leads to million-dollar savings
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Oil & Gas
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Asset Lifecycle Management
- Infrastructure Inspection
Services
- System Integration
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.
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 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
Quantitative Benefit
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