This is the final examination for the course Enterprise Architectures 2014 at Reykjavik Uni-versity. This document comprises a case description (section 2) and questions you are ex-pected to answer (section 3). The solution that you hand in should comprise the answers to these questions. The case description provides the necessary background. Wherever necessary and helpful for your solution make your own assumptions beyond the case description and document these assumptions.
Your solution should be a text document that optionally may contain illustrations supporting your arguments. The document format can be defined by yourself, however, your solution must not exceed 7,000 words including all headings, tables, appendices etc. Please provide your solution as a Microsoft Word file or as a PDF file.
Attention: This final examination assignment requires and evaluates your individual per-formance. This is NOT a group work. Please make sure that in case you discuss these ques-tions with your colleagues, your solution is your individual solution and therefore no suspi-cion of plagiarism arises.
Please upload your solution before October 19th, 2014, 23.59 to MySchool.
This final examination represents 60% of your final grade for this course.
Please be aware that for the sake of equal opportunities I will CC my answer to all course participants.
I wish you great success!
Stephan
2 Case description
The insurance company �Caredenia� is established for more than 100 years in some Europe-an countries and has established a high reputation in the area of health insurance. Caredenia�s key to success were their very competitive products for health insurance. In benchmark tests their health insurance products were always among the very best. Therefore sales has never really been a challenge for Caredenia since customers actively approached the company for buying their products. Still, earnings were rather high.
In recent years, however, the market changed fundamentally. First, costs of health care in-creased dramatically. Second, new players particularly in the area of online/direct insurers entered the market. Online/direct insurers have significant cost advantages since they do not run an extensive network of insurance agencies. They rather sell and process insurances di-rectly via internet. Third, the health insurance market faces evermore legal regulations that affect Caredenia�s business. The future of health care and health insurances respectively is unclear.
Enterprise Architecture, Assignment 03, Final Examination, 2014, page 2
Consequently, Caredenia has to improve the efficiency of their business and they have to improve the effectiveness and power of their sales department. Next to organizational changes, IT and information systems are pivotal for this transformation.
A key aspect of this transformation are increasing parts of fully automated business process-es that do not any longer require the manual handling of certain process steps. These fully automated business processes, however, require an advanced level of integration of diverse software systems. Sales applications and other applications need to be modernized, e.g., add-ing capabilities of customer self-service through online portals. Such self-service capabilities enable customers, for example, to update their bank account information themselves as part of a claims settlement process. Another important point is to improve the management and performance of all organizational units of Caredenia. Therefore it is necessary to make the data of the units� operational business available for analytic purposes.
Not only Caredenia�s employees but also independent insurance brokers, insurance broker organizations, banks, and external online platforms should be better integrated in the in-creased sales activities.
The chief information officer (CIO) of Caredenia, Ms. Smith, had a board meeting last week. She got a mandate to develop an action plan that appropriately addresses the changes that are on the horizon.
3 Questions
3.1 Layer model
Ms. Smith�s first challenge is to structure this rather complex mandate. As a graduate from Reykjavik University you are of course familiar with the five Enterprise Architecture (EA) layers. Ms. Smith is very enthusiastic about your proposal to employ these five business-to-IT layers and thus, you got the job.
a) Please discuss three challenges for each of the five layers that Caredenia might face.
b) Beyond these five layers of EA you are aware of the fact that addressing these chal-lenges in a transformation will also affect the individual employees. Please addition-ally discuss the respective challenge of change management for Caredenia.
3.2 Integration
Ms. Smith got offers from a number of consultancy firms proposing concepts like Data Warehousing (DWH), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and Service Oriented Archi-tecture (SOA) as a solution to her challenges.
Please describe each of these three concepts regarding their possible roles and contributions at Caredenia.
3.3 Enterprise Architecture Management
All the anticipated changes in Caredenia hopefully increase the company�s flexibility and agility. However, there is a risk of jeopardizing these benefits by an evolutionary and unco-ordinated change that negatively affects Caredenia in the dimensions of consistency and re-dundancy. In order to mitigate these risks you propose to introduce an EAM function at Caredenia.
Enterprise Architecture, Assignment 03, Final Examination, 2014, page 3
Please describe the five most important products/services that EAM should deliver at Care-denia. Please also discuss why it is necessary to eventually deliver all five products/services and not only a subset of these five products/services.
3.4 EA application scenarios and meta models
The first step for establishing EAM at Caredenia is to achieve transparency of Caredenia�s EA. However, this is a rather laborious and possibly never-ending task. Therefore you pro-pose to focus on a limited number of EA application scenarios to guide your transparency creation.
a) Please discuss five EA application scenarios that could be relevant for Caredenia. Please also discuss why these application scenarios might be relevant for Caredenia. During the discussion of these five application scenarios you should develop five re-spective partial EA meta models.
b) After you have created these five meta models, please integrate these partial meta models into a single EA meta model for Caredenia.
3.5 Designing the application landscape
In the transformation of Caredenia restructuring the application landscape is a central issue.
a) Please explain why designing the application landscape is so central and important from an EA perspective.
b) Please explain how you would approach designing the application landscape of Caredenia.
c) Please describe three types of �ideal applications� and discuss their appropriateness for Caredenia.
3.6 Charging for EAM
EAM has itself the character of an infrastructure. It is developed and established once at Caredenia and can then be used for a variety of projects and situations. It provides some cen-tralized services for a number of potential users within Caredenia. However, such support service always bring along the issue of charging or cost allocation (labor costs, licenses, etc.) within Caredenia.
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