iTnews recently hosted a webinar with Aquion, the ANZ master distributor of global enterprise architecture solutions provider BiZZdesign, and UniSuper, to discuss how the superannuation provider is leveraging BiZZdesign’s Enterprise & Business Architecture platform to accelerate and streamline its digital transformation.
The panel included Aquion’s BiZZDesign Practice Lead Tim Steele and UniSuper’s Head of Architecture Andrew Sanders, Business Architect Graham Hoggan, and Business Design Manager Toni Ireland Hay.
Digital transformation has been a defining theme of the past two years as enterprises globally have been forced to address the disruption of Covid-19 and the changes it has wrought to their workforces. Many businesses have revamped their business models to stay afloat, and a very large part of this has involved a rapid transformation of their outdated and ineffective enterprise IT architectures.
Aquion established a partnership with BiZZdesign five years ago with a mission to help organisations take advantage of the Dutch solutions provider’s platform to execute their digital strategies.
“Our aim is to help complex organisations thrive through the structural change required for fast and successful IT transformation across the entire enterprise," Tim Steele says. "This includes everything from collaborative platform portfolio management, security and risk assessment, business insights and the removal of business silos through greater enterprise-wide visualisation. A lot of businesses have multiple tools but their lack of integration is seriously hampering their agility."
For almost forty years UniSuper has been the super fund for the higher education and research sectors. Earlier this year it became a public offer fund and is now open to all Australians. The fund has 500,000 members and more than $105 billion in FUM including $13 billion in environmental, social and governance (ESG) themed strategies.
BiZZdesign provides a holistic solution
The fund, which has won a string of awards over the years including SuperRatings Fund of the Year 2022, had been on a solid growth trajectory for some time, but moving to an open fund required a revamp of its IT infrastructure. That involved a comprehensive review of existing systems to ascertain what was required to align IT capabilities to the fund’s business strategy to achieve better customer outcomes.
“We were already in the midst of our digital transformation thanks to big changes in the tertiary education sector through Covid-19 and accompanying changes to the super industry and government legislation. Opening up UniSuper to the public, however, meant we required a new level of agility to increase our scale. BiZZdesign offered a holistic enterprise solution with the ability to identify process simplification opportunities and reduce waste,” Toni Ireland Hay says. “This meant the removal of silos for greater transparency and visualisation so we could clearly see the effects of the changes we were implementing.”
BiZZdesign provided all of the answers in one solution, according to UniSuper’s Graham Hoggan. “Capability-based planning requires a whole-of-organisation approach and our IT infrastructure is inseparable from UniSuper’s business strategies.”
UniSuper Head of Architecture, Andrew Sanders, says the fund was looking for a single tool to support all business process management and they also wanted a single repository for all its domains – business, data, application, technology and security to conduct analysis. “We went through a full RFP process and were impressed by BiZZdesign’s platform, it’s easy to use interface, SaaS platform and intuitive front end for business users,” Andrew Sanders said.
“BiZZdesign also helped accelerate deployment by providing training and modelling services, while the development of a metamodel helped establish linkages and relationships across domains, so from an enterprise architecture perspective it ticked all the boxes.”
From a business perspective, it was also key to engage with frontline business units. “The visualisation tools allow us to model our users’ business processes, while the workflow system and front end allow business units to easily upload content while we manage it,” Toni Ireland Hay says.
Additionally, BiZZdesign’s solution has tools that map and maintain data criticality and sensitivity, which with the accelerated rate of industry change and heightened security threats, has become more important than ever before, Graham Hoggan adds.
“BiZZdesign has also given us a platform that accelerates business process management integration so we can monitor, control, refine and improve our business and respond to challenges and opportunities quicker. Bridging the gap between business and IT has opened up a new integrated set of capabilities that have a common language and business context. This, in turn, has allowed us to transition to physical processes for fulfilling the most important day-to-day functions.”
BiZZdesign’s mapping feature also allows organisations to better understand knowledge gaps in business processes, with all information stored in a single, central repository. “BiZZdesign supports traceability and linkage including data stored on applications, while ensuring it is maintained with compliance,” Andrew Sanders says.
Business need to adapt quickly and to scale
The ability to make the best, informed business and technology decisions has never been more critical in the post-Covid environment. A recent State of Enterprise Architecture report from BiZZdesign found that, of 250 IT professionals surveyed, 13 per cent of their companies were fighting for survival, 43 per cent had survived but further adaptation was critical, and one third lack the fit-for-purpose tools they require.
“Businesses need to adapt to change by being flexible. We can’t conduct business transformation if we don’t have the tools and information to make informed decisions. The BiZZdesign tool has allowed us to accelerate our initiatives,” Toni Ireland Hay says.
From a technology perspective, BiZZdesign’s solution has greatly enhanced every aspect of UniSuper’s operations, Andrew Sanders adds. “Eighteen months ago, we didn’t have a single fit-for-purpose tool. We used Visio and PowerPoint and a range of other applications stored in different places. This meant we couldn’t analyse data properly within a domain, let alone across domains. This tool has given us the power to build collaboration across domains which we can derive a lot of future value from.”
