US electric power provider implements enterprise architecture

Client Challenge: The company was looking to innovate more effectively and take advantage of new technologies while also optimizing its IT estate to save money and redirect savings towards digital transformation efforts

Solution: The Capgemini team helped deliver a comprehensive program of innovation, cost savings, and digital transformation that substantially improved standards, products, and charters across the organization

Benefits: 

• Heightened standards and training 
• Improved innovation and strategy
• Complete product transformation
• Comprehensive charter creation

This prominent US electric power provider delivers safe, reliable, clean, and competitively priced electricity to power companies. It serves large, energy-intensive industrial customers responsible for the delivery of technology solutions that enable and grow the digitization of the enterprise. 

To accelerate its digitization growth goals, the company was looking for a managed service partner to help develop and implement an Enterprise Architecture (EA) function that would bring a heightened focus on innovation, business outcomes, creation of easy-to-use and understand deliverables, and the implementation of a comprehensive organizational change management plan for IT and internal business stakeholders. After evaluating a host of potential providers, the company chose Capgemini to help it achieve these goals.

Rapidly moving from a managed services provider to a trusted business advisor 

As the project began, the partners had a number of critical challenges with which to contend. Firstly, the electricity provider had only two resources in its EA organization, a limited set of standards, and outdated governance and assurance processes. In addition, the pandemic lockdown occurred at the initial stage of the program execution phase, which forced the team to work remotely. This presented a multitude of significant obstacles when it came to onboarding the team, such as the need for physical security clearance checks, connectivity and access issues, and remote knowledge exchange sessions. 

So, to address these challenges, Capgemini onboarded a dynamic team that would work remotely while adhering to strict security requirements and managing the maintenance of business-critical applications. Capgemini also helped the company by shifting its role from a standard managed services provider to a trusted advisor. The team effectively engaged the company’s leadership early on to increase engagement and cement their trust, which was especially important since the organization had recently brought in new CXO leadership. 

A program of Architecture Content, Governance & Assurance, and Community & Culture 

Moving further along the roadmap, the electricity provider and Capgemini staffed a team of five enterprise architects and OCM consultants. This team rapidly assessed and developed recommendations to address gaps in processes and deliver the methods, tools, capabilities, and skills necessary to structure a successful, business outcome-driven EA organization. Overall, this twelve-week engagement founded on Capgemini’s EA engagement model was structured into three workstreams: Architecture Content, Governance & Assurance, and Community & Culture. 

Firstly, a current-state assessment, along with gap analysis and recommendations, were developed for each workstream. The team then facilitated workshops and fostered a collaborative approach in framing POVs and achieving consensus on direction. Next, online surveys quickly captured feedback from a broad array of internal stakeholders. The company and Capgemini also staffed a team of sixteen enterprise architects, analysts, and OCM consultants to deliver on the planned nine-month program. 

Activities and deliverables were grouped into teams aligned to standards, technology and product capabilities and strategies, and change management and training. The scope of standards included: infrastructure, networks, applications, orchestration, cybersecurity, information management, operations management, and platforms. 

Substantially improved standards, innovation, products, and charters across the organization 

The Capgemini team supplied the electricity provider’s head of architecture with a plan outlining the remediation needs of current standards and the requirement to develop an additional 29 measures for the digital enterprise. Additionally, a catalogue of roadmaps identified areas of improvement for all 19 IT roadmaps that are managed across the organization while a Governance & Assurance report focused on APM, project delivery, solution architecture, and KPIs. 

Overall, the EA transformation strategy provided insightful recommendations on staffing, skills training, change management, communications, and capacity modeling. The result was a transformation program with a series of 21 initiatives delivered over a nine-month period that achieved: 

Heightened standards and training that improved operations management support processes, reduced duplication of design efforts by the solution architecture group, and accelerated technical training of new IT software development employees 

Improved innovation and strategy using Capgemini-facilitated workshops, such as Accelerated Solutions Environment and TechnoVision, that led to a Cloud strategy, Self-Service strategy, identification of IoT use cases, IoT standards, and a governance model for an IoT Center of Excellence 

Completed product transformation by delivering a technology product strategy, governance model, roadmap process, and technology capability model that drove the company from an application-centric IT model to a product-focused organization 

Comprehensive charter creation established the emerging standards practice, application portfolio management practice, and enterprise architecture practice within the IT organization. 

Generating future innovation and renewable energy strategies 

Moving forward, the company is looking to continue achieveing operational excellence. This journey will see the organization expand upon its enterprise architect program. And with assistance from Capgemini, the company will increase its focus on continuous innovation and renewable strategies and solutions.