The 2018 Enterprise Architecture Awards

This year’s winning EA initiatives, brought to you by Forrester and InfoWorld, focused on making digital transformation real, usually with agile techniques

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Asurion: Enterprise architecture is the driving force behind transformation and innovation

IDG

Traditional EA teams—even those that realize today’s need for speed and agility—are struggling to find the proper balance between prescriptive guidance and responsiveness to the business.

Asurion EA has taken a pragmatic approach to EA and work withjourney teams composed of product development and business people set on achieving common business outcomes with shared goals of success in the customer’s context. EA expertise is embedded in the journey teams, addressing specific business needs and achieving defined business outcomes. This lets the EA team remain as close as possible to the reality of business, technology, and product development needs.

Asurion started its EA transformation by meticulously assessing its staff and their needs, making significant investments in getting the very best people and providing them with all necessary tools and professional development. In a span of about 24 months, Asurion converted its EA team from one comprised of engineers with traditional commercial off-the-shelf product skills to one firmly rooted in cloud-native development, devops methodology, automation engineering, and data analytics. That prepared EA to lead Asurion’s product and organizational transformation.

The EA team laid out a path to break down the core lines of businesses into several discrete capabilities using a methodical business architecture and modeling approach, then transforming that into an IT strategy of building discrete functional blocks using microservices-based architectures deployed in a cloud-first model. The EA team enabled an agile devops methodology using cloud-native tools. This let product and development teams quickly build and release features continuously to customers.

The foundation of Asurion’s platforms are loosely-coupled, capability-driven functional microservices. These microservices are exposed as capability-oriented APIs to several consuming channels that drive the digital strategy by meeting their customers where they operate and providing a rich experience.

The result? Enabled by EA-driven changes, Asurion can now connect and mix core lines of business into customizable packages that customers can pick and choose based on their specific needs. Using a cloud-based devops methodology, the firm can deliver these solutions far more quickly than was possible in the past.

Alberto de Andrés Ibáñez, vide presdent and head of transformation at First Abu Dhabi Bank, said, “Asurion presents a clear case of EA metamorphosing to address business change and transformation that requires resilience to change. They changed a classic EA approach into a ground field team, working closely with journey teams.”