In the afternoon, several customer presentations take place to foster knowledge exchange between the participants. As I have to leave early, I will only cover this presentation by Bjørn Storø of Statoil from Norway.
Statoil is a company of 20,000 employees in 34 countries working in the oil and gas production. They operate 80% of all oil and gas production in Norway with many off-shore facilities. Their main business drivers are
- getting the most out of existing natural resources using latest technology,
- having a rapid international growth strategy,
- and incorporating renewable energy platforms.
According to Mr. Storø, this all asks an organization able to cope with continuous change and to provide innovation.
Their enterprise architecture is structured by a value chain. In general, they have a matrix organization. Each business unit has a set of process areas, which are shared between the different business units. It is not required that every business unit must make use of all process areas. On a more abstract level, they have a federated architecture, because each process area itself in considered to be a complete architecture on its own. There is an owner for each process area.
In terms of strategy, they have a corporate business and IT strategy. On business unit level, they have a business strategy for each of them. Each process area is driven by an IT strategy. They maintain the as-is architecture, but also define a to-be architecture for those areas and units requiring change. Based on a gap analysis, they derive their roadmap.
They structure their architecture according to:
- business architecture
- information architecture
- application architecture
- technical architecture
The metamodel behind is based on TOGAF, but Mr. Storø points out that it is important to:
- adapt it to the own needs,
- and have a clear responsibility for the metamodel.
Their metamodel has a strong notion of business services. This is important, because people are usually not interested how you do something, but what you provide at the end of the day. This can be perfectly covered by business services, says Mr. Storø.
All content of the different architectures are stored in a single ARIS repository. With that, they integrate the different architectures. According to Mr. Storø, this is an important success factor. If you don’t manage to put everything in a single repository, you basically end up with independent companies under some corporate umbrella.
It is always great to see such mature BPM users. It shows that BPM and enterprise architecture can be of great value if done correctly.
As I have to leave now, I’m going to miss the presentation by Peter Gustafsson of the Swedish Armed Forces. Also, tomorrow there are several work sessions to discuss important use cases and how requirements should be rolled into ARIS and Software AG development departments.
Make sure to take a look at the International User Group pages if you want to become a member so that you can also directly influence the future of the products.