Groundswell Architecture:
Competency Centre for a Major Oil & Gas Company
Company Description
Our client is a technical and environmental leader in enhanced oil and natural gas development in western Canada. This organization is focused on applying new, progressive thinking to unlocking energy resources. Operationally, they are active in oil sands projects in Northern Alberta, and have established natural gas and oil production in both Alberta and Saskatchewan.
With a 5,000-plus employee base, this oil and gas leader is anchored by stable production and cash flow. Organizationally, their strategy is focused on developing top-quality oil resources, strong project execution, progressive environmental performance, expansion of markets and sustained financial strength – all aimed at increasing total shareholder return.
Business Background
Our client’s focus was using fewer systems while growing a solid corporate identity. The adjustments of processes and technologies were vital in accommodating a smaller set of systems with clearly defined interfaces. The focus on oil sands required greater capital investments than conventional oil and gas, following a manufacturing or plant-based model. This approach required the organization to be agile and empower knowledge workers by providing accurate, accessible and timely information.
Additionally, the company lacked guidance and governance around proper tools, particularity in the domains of Enterprise Integration (EI), Extract, Transform and Load (ETL), Point to Point (P2P), Business to Business (B2B) and Business Process Management (BPM) integration. Thus, style selection was completed based on familiarity rather than the best tool for the task. Furthermore, once a tool was selected, the organization had no standards or best practices in place on how to use the tool in a consistent manner.
The lack of process and central oversight inevitably began to impede the organization’s ability to operate efficiently, a hindrance which also led to strategic business issues.
The Solution
Our client chose Groundswell based upon previous project collaboration and our deep understanding of the organization’s core technologies and business needs. Upon project inception, a Steering Committee was created to apply governance at a strategic level. The committee was responsible for ensuring all integration projects aligned with business strategy, as well as, with the overall IT strategy. As a result, Groundswell defined a Competency Centre.
Figure 1– Groundswell’s Competency Center
As shown on Figure 1, the Competency Center includes the following disciplines:
1. Delivery Services – Includes deliverables that provide standards, best practices and guidance to developers, technical leads, system administrators, support and maintenance developers, and Quality Assurance personnel.
Figure 2– Development Best Practices
2. Business Services - Includes deliverables that revolve around proper identification of integration opportunities aimed at solving business and Information Services problems, effective and constant communication with the stakeholders, benefits tracking, financial planning and management, etc.
3. Strategy Management - Includes deliverables that are aimed at different mechanisms for providing governance to new integration projects, and to support and maintain activities for existing integration solutions; the definition of the future vision and strategies around integration projects and integration solutions; the current and future integration strategy; communications planning; the Service Level Agreement (SLA); and Capability Maturity Model (CMM) assessments.
Figure 3 – Maturity Assessment Results
4. People Management - Deliverables focus primarily on the process around staffing operational teams and projects, resource management, training, career paths, performance frameworks, etc.
5. Knowledge Management - Includes all methodologies required in project delivery and operational work (Software Development Lifecycle, Support and Maintenance); selection of the proper technology for new projects; Reference Architecture independent of technology; a set of Design Patterns aimed at designing integration solutions to be delivered with different technologies, etc.
Figure 4 - Reference Architecture
Figure 5 – Design Patterns
6. Portfolio Management – Includes deliverables related to assessing the impact of new integration solutions within the organization, templates aimed at risk management for new integration solution implementations, the identification of proper alignment of newly implemented integration solutions into the overall corporate strategy, scope management, issues management, budgeting and cost allocations.
7. Environment Management - A set of deliverables aimed at protecting the infrastructure and software components of the different integration solutions owned by the organization, architectural artifacts related to the hardware where the integration solutions will execute, security and systems management approach, capacity planning, disaster recovery planning, etc.
Figure 6 – Security Management
8. Solution Management - A set of deliverables aimed at standardizing the support and maintenance activities performed by the different operational teams, guidance to the support and maintenance team in order to propose and manage initiatives aimed at the improvement of existing integration solutions and best practices around upgrade of integration solutions executing on different technologies and platforms.
Figure 7 - Enterprise Inventory
The project was delivered in three phases:
Phase 1
Also known as the Foundation, this phase lasted three months between September and November 2011 and had the following outcome:
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Identification of standard technologies.
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Guidelines on appropriate integration approaches for a given problem domain.
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Best practices and standards around the use of approved middleware tools.
- An accessible location for integration Inventories.
Phase 2
This phase began in February and lasted until October 2012, bringing the following additions to the Foundation:
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Updated Integration process documents, including processes for reusable domain and enterprise services.
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Creation or updates to processes that interface with integration processes.
- Document that identifies processes that interface with integration process, and stewards of processes.
Phase 3
The Operations are currently active and started in February 2012. They will continue on for the next five years.
The Benefits
The Competency Center managed to solve our client’s initial challenges regarding the guidance and governance and brought the following benefits:
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Provided expertise around system integration, assisting in elaboration of technical recommendations for solution improvement initiatives and decision records.
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Enabled and maintained communications across different teams and stakeholders.
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Provided guidance on integration development guidelines and best practices, along with enforcing adherence to established Integration Reference Architecture and Design Patterns.
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Provided governance for new and existing data integration projects by following current, established governance processes, engagement models and execution models.
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Provided guidance around established methodologies.
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Continued to update and maintain the master Enterprise Inventory.
- Provided quarterly evaluation of new technologies.
