US Healthcare Provider Sets Strategic Direction for IT investments with a 100+ Collaborators
We imagined our Enterprise Architecture program as a strategic organizational function. To have our architects and over 100 business analysts collaborate effectively, were looking for a new modern Enterprise Architecture tool to replace Visio as our primary tool
Country: United States
Industry: Healthcare
Company size: 4,000+
Revenue: $ 4,7 billion
Results:
A leading healthcare provider in the United States is committed to providing the highest quality care to patients and their families. The provider has a health care center that provides inpatient services, specialty health centers, physician offices, virtual care offerings, and health plan programs – all housed in an estimated 800,000-square-foot hospital with a total bed count of more than 600 and approximately 80 operating rooms.
The provider’s Enterprise Architecture program had remained stagnated over the years. Deployed solutions were difficult to integrate, over-engineered, and sometimes redundant and expensive to support, and prone to frequent outages.
The Enterprise Architecture program had many stakeholders across the enterprise. More than 180 analysts, who weren’t trained as Business Architects were creating diagrams that were inconsistently documented in Microsoft Visio using a variety of elements/shapes.
Solutions Architects were merely documenting solutions as implemented, rather than selecting them strategically. Critical applications such as ERP, Telemedicine, and RPM lacked architectural blueprints. Processes were inconsistent and without a central store of reusable design patterns.
The governance and approval of architectural designs were submitted late in the design process. This meant a chance of rework or the introduction of non-standard use of technology or architecture patterns. Additionally, missing architectural metrics hampered visibility into the program, and resulted in a delay in executing programs.
The provider imagined a mature Enterprise Architecture program with a clear roadmap and consolidated enterprise and solution architecture teams. To enable this, they needed a modern Enterprise Architecture tool that could provide them with a common modeling language to represent their business architecture and allow for effective collaboration across all teams and disciplines.
After a rigid vendor selection process, the enterprise architecture team selected BiZZdesign’s platform as their new modern Enterprise Architecture tool. To ensure that architects and business analysts all collaborate using the platform and standards, they started a process of transitioning almost 180 business analysts to use BPMN in Bizzdesign by offering ‘free training’.
Business analysts were taught how to create BPMN process diagrams as one of the required inputs into defining a solution for a proposed change initiative. Along this journey, the team also set up a Center of Excellence to support these analysts as well as a mechanism for cross communications between analysts to share knowledge, for example, sample process diagrams that have been through the review process.
The team also centralized all their artifacts related to architecture. They created architecture principles, a governance board, standards and policy process/ templates, and a waiver process. They moved away from the previous ‘wild west’ application deployment process to a structured Enterprise Architect framework. This allowed them to expose and control the organization’s activities and review solution decisions.
They then also embarked on a portfolio management deployment process to rapidly analyze their investment portfolio. They used BiZZdesign’s platform to identify critical gaps in their CMDB, Program and Project Database, and Finance Records. The team aimed to connect internal systems to link information and obtain an enterprise view of their technologies.
A single repository for all architectural artifacts
The enterprise architecture program has now matured and collaboration across the organization has increased. Using a consolidated repository is better enabling the team to see how capabilities map to solutions and where redundancies may exist. For example, they have created conceptual views of Remote Patient Monitoring that have enabled them to see the advantages and disadvantages of solution options.
Successfully analyzing the impact of transformation scenarios
They have also created views for an augmented reality proof of concept solution that provides the capability of live streaming spinal surgical cases in the operating room to a partner surgical team in Africa. This is a trailblazing effort in the field of simulation and training and the medical center has since completed its first successful surgical case with this technology.
Effective collaboration across people and technology
The team cites that BiZZdesign’s platform is holistically embracing the entire organization and helping to support a culture change and break down silos. Using common modeling languages, the Solution Architects have been able to engage more effectively with the Application teams, Project Managers, and Business Analysts.
Embracing the ability to create future-state models
The rollout of BPMN and ArchiMate along with the early engagement model has allowed Solution Architects to be more efficient in creating high-level architecture designs for use in the solution selection process and creating current and future state models.
“Our Enterprise Architecture program has accelerated from 5 to 55 mph. We can now design a blueprint of our greater medicine community with a centralized data repository that supports both future analysis and strategic decisions.”
