Business Blueprinting

Client case: how an insurance company has succeeded in reusing centralized client data creating a blueprint

Do you need also a blueprint for the digital transformation of your company this year? Dragon1 will help you out.

In the shortest time possible (4 weeks) you will have guaranteed a blueprint that you can use to support your strategic decision-making and to guide your projects.

Creating a business blueprint will lead to:

1. Much better aligned and lean business processes and
2. Much more integrated IT systems and
3. An increased speed of adopting new trends and technologies to survive

This is because the blueprint supports you in seeing hidden patterns and opportunities.

You will make decisions as you have never done before! All this will enable you to do a better digital transformation and to compete better in the end.

How does it work?

Dragon1 enables you to work with the 1-2-3 Approach

• 1. Uploading data via .xls or .csv files and create a model
• 2. Setting up generation rules for views and visualization templates
• 3. Tuning the visualizations and sharing them with stakeholders

In this way, you will be most productive. For instance, look at the blueprint below (it is in Dutch and anonymized).

Client Case Study for Business Blueprinting

The blueprint below was created by an insurance company on Dragon1.

The Problem

At the insurance company many IT systems, over 50, were performing their duty: processing incoming insurance data, applying hardcoded business rules, and using pretty much only their reference data, like client information.

The organization wanted to get rid of the hard-coded business rules, deduplicate functionality, and integrate the systems more so they would reuse centralized client data instead of copying and storing it themselves.

Because for years there was no complete overview of the application landscape and data landscape and no overall data model. New systems were bought or modules were switched, but nothing was integrated.

If a client would remarry or relocate it could be easily he or she had various client IDs and his insurance files could not be linked easily together. And of course, that brings a problem when invoicing and fighting fraud.

The Solution

By creating a blueprint by importing data from other systems, the organization in weeks gained insights and overviews of the whole application landscape, data landscape, and overall data model they never had before.

This enabled them to see patterns and opportunities to integrate systems, appoint databases as the source for certain business objects, and have modules of applications switch off to deduplicate functionality.

Every time an application, interface, or database was to be changed, first the impact of the change was viewed on this blueprint and next detailed in a separate diagram.

The Outcome

The result was that the quality of data and speed of processing had increased. When a business rule needs to be changed, no longer the systems need to be re-coded. The business rules can be changed in a repository.

Mistakes made in client data are also mitigated. If a client has several insurances under different names (like maiden name and married name) they can be linked much better. Or if some have different historical addresses, their dossiers can be connected much easier to prevent fraud.

Reflection

Creating a business blueprint brings up surprising things. Like when you import data and generate a diagram from it, the diagram looks different than when it would be created by hand. For instance, people tend to draw a situation more positively without certain problems. Imagine a financial account making use of a spreadsheet. When generating a diagram based on a data file, the problems are shown better.

Also data changes continuously. The moment you have a diagram of a model ready, the data has changed. So if you only need to import the top updating your models and diagram centrally is much quicker and fails to save them having to go over tens of PowerPoint or Visio files and removing all the wrong versions from stakeholders.

Creating a blueprint like this, really shows the benefit of working with an Enterprise Architecture Tool.

This visualization shows strategy on the left, four architecture layers in the middle (market & client, business processes, applications/systems, and technology/infrastructure), and transformation (projects and deliverables) on the right.

Now suppose something changes in the strategy because underneath there is a model, the affected or impact data in the middle will be colored (depending on the setup) in red.

You can easily keep your blueprint up-to-date, by uploading and importing deltas from your Excel sheets (XLS) or CSV file.

On Dragon1 we have built a specialized import module for that.

How to start with Business Blueprinting?

You only need to purchase a Dragon1 PRO license here, and an English visualization template, excel sheet, and example will be made available in your account. We are available with our blueprinting services supporting you via phone, email, or Skype to guide you through the steps.

Do You Need More Information?

If you have any questions or want to discuss your needs, you can contact us anytime via info@dragon1.com or +31 317 411 341.