RasGas EA leads business transformation through strategic technology roadmap
RasGas is one of the world’s premier integrated liquefied natural gas (LNG) enterprises. It faced the need to Increase synergy between IT and business, improve alignment of IT Initiatives to corporate strategy and business goals, and cost optimization/efficiency through cost-effective IT solutions and Integrated business functions. It also wanted to minimize shadow IT, as well as move away from redundant IT solutions and obsolete legacy systems.
EA started by addressing these needs with zero resources. The EAs approached technology leads to gather their pain-points. EA resolved the infrastructure team’s first pain point: lack of an integrated repository for annual corporate finance asset verification processes. This success triggered other business technology leads to approach EA for support, resulting in development of holistic IT artifacts such as reference architecture, technical evaluation criteria, and total cost of ownership.
The EA team has now scaled from being an IT unit to a corporate/enterprise function. It provides an integrated view of strategic business and technology domains across lines of business, services, and systems. That was the key to optimizing project capabilities and resource utilization. EA is the only management best practice that serves as a context for enterprise-wide planning and decision making.
IT and executive leadership have seen the value of the EA program in promoting outcomes, so it expanded the EA organization as the empowered authority to approve business solution requests and stewardship of strategic planning through short-term objectives, annual business plan, five-year strategy, and technology roadmap.
Enterprise Architecture Awards judge Jason Cook, head of EA at Mass Mutual, said, “They started small with zero resources allocated, addressed visible issues to gain buyin, and with that momentum are now achieving significant financial outcomes.”