Case Studies - Health Care 's-Heerenloo

Special Care company 's-Heerenloo communicates Information Strategy

's-Heerenloo - Facts & Figures - With a revenue of €600 mio, 14000 employees and 7000 special care clients in 2011, 's-Heerenloo is the biggest and most important special care organization in the Netherlands

Solution
Enterprise Architecture as Strategy

Products
Dragon1 as Enterprise Architecture Tool
Dragon1 Foundation

Background

At 's-Heerenloo, because of their new Information Strategy, the CIO needed a way of communicating ideas and the impact of new information & IT solutions, as part of the strategy. The CIO and the management team wanted to create more support for the strategy and wanted to calculate the impact of a change to support decision-making more.

Information Strategy

Dragon1 enabled this by letting the client visualize different views of the strategy: static views to show to various stakeholders and interactive/playable views to test and study the impact of change.

The Case

Three visual architecture products were created with Dragon1:

Design Book
Blueprint
Roadmap

Solution Strategy

Below in short these three products are detailed:

1. Visualizing Principles in a Design Book

At 's Heerenloo the impact of the most important information principles was visualized. The most important information principles, that needed to implement in order to execute the information management strategy, were selected.

2. Enterprise Architecture Blueprint

The information principles were visualized and also their impact was visualized with principles drawn in a design book. In this way, the management could adjust the impact of the strategy and with the same visualization communicate the impact to create more support.

Information Strategy Roadmap

Challenges

At 's Heerenloo Dragon1 was used to visualize an EA Blueprint. After a few workshops, data was collected in excel sheets and these were imported into Dragon1 EA Tool - Enterprise Architect. Then together with view templates in the tool, a layered EA blueprint was created.

With the blueprint everyone in the organization has an overview of the structure. With this, it is much easier to freeze, focus and discuss issues. Everyone has insights into his or her role in the organization. A lot of benefits with only one visualization.

In the information strategy the rollout of new information services is dictated. The business that ordered these services was very curious to know when the new information services would appear and what their dependencies were.

Outcomes

Because the business maybe wants to promote certain information services to arrive before others. For this purpose, a Roadmap poster was created showing all the business functions and departments side by side and below that the need for and actual of the new information services with their interdependencies.

Immediately this roadmap had an impact on the planning of information services. To the right, you see a generic example of a roadmap. The actual roadmap may not be shown here because of information security matters.