US Commercial Bank

Headquartered in a major U.S. city with roots dating back to the late 19th century, this US commercial bank provides business real estate, construction, residential, agricultural, and consumer loan services. In 2016, the bank finalized a merger with another US business-focused community bank, which doubled the size of the bank.

Today, the bank operates more than two-dozen branches in the eastern region, and it has about 170 locations throughout the western region and is proud to be known for its commitment to serving local communities helping customers find financial success.

The challenge – Why did the bank need control of applications?

The bank didn’t have a collaborative single source of truth and lacked transparency in their application landscape. Stakeholders found it challenging to capture and reconcile data. They owned an Application Registry, but there were disconnects between the data in the registry and other data sources, such as a business continuity solution attempting to capture the same types of information.

Additionally, some stakeholders used the Application Registry as a single source of truth. Others used the bank’s business continuity solution because it tracked all their various processes and the names, and the types of technologies aligned to them. Data reconciliation was, therefore, a resource-consuming, laborious, and slow process.

The bank needed to combine different data sources into a single source of truth repository to get transparency and to support decision-making for future architecture design.

The solution – How did the bank transform their applications landscape?

The bank has a small enterprise architecture practice, and Bizzdesign’s out-of-the-box solution helped them quick-start and mature an applications portfolio management discipline in their organization. APM+ is built on the collaborative change platform, Bizzdesign Horizzon.

As a start, the enterprise architecture team captured data to create a single source of truth repository of the applications in their environment. They combined different data sources into one single source to have a more business-applications-focused view of their IT landscape. Data was collected from the business continuity solution, and PowerPoint presentations, among others.

They then did a business-driven application fitness assessment which gave them transparency to identify almost 280 applications. Transparency was the first step to knowing how many applications they had. The former Application Registry now lives in Bizzdesign Horizzon, the bank’s single source of truth repository.

The team also reused the out-of-the-box dashboards and extended it with customer-specific additions such as ownership assignments. They also embarked on a vendor management project. They defined the vendors (and their associated technologies) used in the organization and then assigned vendor relationship responsibilities to form a vendor procurement team.

Future plans include embarking on an application rationalization project. They aim to reduce the costs of owning duplicate technologies and the unnecessary time and effort stakeholders spend on them and to identify the risk aspects. Dashboards provide information on cost-heavy applications, the user base, on-premises, and cloud applications, the number of users, and data for application lifecycle management.

Key benefits – Benefits from APM+ for the bank

Single source transparency enables better decision-making
With their collaborative single source of truth repository, the bank has transparency in their applications landscape. They can combine business and architecture insights based on a trusted repository and use fact-driven data to support decision-making.

Rapid time to value of APM+ in just 20 days
The bank achieved time to value of the APM+ solution in just under three weeks. During this time, the team quickly set up the APM discipline and demonstrated the value of APM+ to their CIO.

Predefined dashboards improve stakeholder collaboration
The team cites APM+’s Starter Dashboards as a key contributor to help them save time on collaboration and capturing data. They quickly achieved buy-in from stakeholders when they demonstrated the solution’s value through the APM Starter Dashboards.

Support for future application landscape design
The team can now design future landscape and migration plans, which empowers them to consult with Application Portfolio Managers to drive IT transformation.

Customer quote 2, the outcome – no more than 20 words.
“APM+ helped our team to position the broader benefits of Enterprise Architecture beyond just APM and our achievements to the CIO. It allowed us to do a quick turnaround and show our business partners and senior leadership what we were planning to accomplish.”