Permira is a market-leading Private Equity investment company with ownership of well-known brands such as Team Viewer and Doctor Martens, which have over 450 employees in 16 different countries. Like many companies of similar size and sector, innovation, agility, and speed have been the critical drivers, but a formal process or any degree of architecture has been missing.
The ask of Konvergent was to work with an existing team member for an initial month to complete the documentation of the estate’s existing application portfolio. The current figures are unknown, but it was expected that the work is circa 40% complete, and there are around 50-70 applications to populate ‘factsheets’ into Permira’s newly acquired LeanIX EA tool. Documentation artifacts on Permira’s organisational structure and application landscape is essentially non-existent. The collation of application information had been started in the form of questionnaire ‘factsheets’ and sent to service\application owners who had very little knowledge of the application from a support and technical point of view.
Run a current state assessment of the 40% work already completed and validate its quality and integrity. In order to validate the data quality and integrity, Permira’s Business Capability Units and organisational structure first needed to be documented and agreed with approval from the stakeholders. This involved an exercise to run a number of interviews with business and application owners.
The agreed structure was then modelled into the LeanIX tool, following the vendor’s metamodel for the data components. With the agreed business and organisational structure in LeanIX, this gave a base line to benchmark to work from for data maturity. Simultaneously, it highlighted that the assumed 40% work already completed was nearer to 20% when aligning the data to the LeanIX metamodel.
For information gathering on the remaining application landscape, the existing questionnaire that was used to collate the information was updated to be more aligned to the LeanIX factsheet. It was sent then out to the application\service owners to be prepopulated and then go through a series of interviews with each application\service owner. All the collated information was then uploaded as factsheet into LeanIX. The newly gathered data components for the applications provided an overview of its integration and mappings to business capability units, organisation groups, and to\from other data components on Permira’s application landscape, with finance a core customer.
Where possible, a lifecycle of the application and its associated business capability unit and organisation groups were also captured. This shows which areas of the business have an impact associated to an application.
Permira now has a base build for data maturity on their existing application landscape. A benchmark that was non-existent prior to this engagement with Konvergent.
In strategy and architecture, an often-neglected aspect is the Return on Investment (ROI). As financial professionals demand concrete figures when considering investments, more than a mere mention of process improvement or technology optimisation may be required. In their eyes, such endeavours represent costs, making it challenging to secure the necessary funding. Considering this, it is crucial to demonstrate ROI, regardless of how impressive a project’s visual outputs may be. How did Konvergent do this on this project?
“Value is a number, everything else is noise”
Though a relatively small engagement, it was one that was able to deliver an ROI. After the application landscape was complete, it identified significant duplication across multiple areas of the business.
Within expense management, we identified that somehow, three applications were being used. Due to the nature of the these, it was a relatively simple process to cut off applications at the end of the next quarter and use the preferred vendor. Over a 2 year period this drove a cost saving of over £75,000, and 3x ROI on the value of the work.
Far greater savings were made across other applications within finance, and will probably give an ROI of well over 20x, but further investigation is required before they can be quantified.
Konvergent,
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