Chubb’s Enterprise Architecture: Description And Comparison

Evolution of Chubb’s Enterprise Architecture

You will find a previous case related to Enterprise Architecture (EA), introduce the case, and discuss how the documentation framework in the case is different from the EA³ cube framework in the textbook.

Enterprise architecture is termed as a practice of management and technology related aspects that are responsible for improving the performance. This is mainly done by introducing integrated and holistic approaches for getting an overview of the business related strategies and perspectives. The main concept of the enterprise architecture involves the development of both the present and the future aspects of the business systems which will be responsible for integrating into the business solutions. This report includes a description of the Chubbs enterprise architecture. This report also discusses about the architecture of the company involved. Lastly, this report includes a comparison among the architecture of the case study and the EA3 architecture.

This section discusses about the main structure of the report.

The Chubb’s enterprise architecture has evolved in a considerate manner since the year 2012. As the business model of the recent years is changing, the previously accepted model of business addressing cannot be adopted for using. For addressing such requirements, Chubb selected efficient personnel as leader with excellent leadership and management skills in place of technical skills. The main components of the architecture used in Chubb are the EA practice and the target architecture (Smith, Heather and Richard 2015, 195-209). The target architecture consists of various architecture related principles, conceptual reference architecture, architecture governance and emergence of technologies which is mainly designed for integration purposes.  Similarly, the EA practice is used to administer the five different domain disciplines which includes Application, IT strategy and governance, technical, information related and platform architecture.

The Chubb is termed as the 12^th largest property and a casualty insurer in the country of United States. It is also supposed to include a wide network of 120 offices in 25 different countries. The employee count of the company is considered to be 10,200. The assets of the company are counted to be $51.3 billion and the revenue metrics for the year of 2014 is supposed to be $14.1 billion. It is also listed to be a Fortune 500 company.

By the adoption of the new architecture model, the implementation of them faced various challenges which led to loss of important staff and lack of responsibilities (Hansen, Peter and Simon 2017, 56). However, due to this, Chubb has been responsible in handling demand management systems and IT leadership development processes leading to the foundation of next level in the enterprise architecture maturity.

Main Components of Chubb’s architecture

In the year 2008, the CIO of the organization, Jim Knight was sure of the possibilities of the architecture. It was also considered to be mature and well-developed. The redesigning of the architecture in the year 2012 was responsible for the development of a centralized mechanism which led to the integration of IT solutions for adopting the digital solutions that can be achieved. In this new architecture, the line-of-business architects (LOB) were consolidated into the architecture (Iacob et al. 2014, 1059-1083). The redesigning of the architecture was responsible for the discovery of a well-developed architecture which enforced its standards and principles. In addition, it also includes two different components, the EA practice and the target architecture.

Figure 1: Initial architecture

(Source: Iacob et al. 2014, pp 1070)

The target architecture is considered as a high-level solution that is responsible for showing the relation among the various goals and future solutions with respect to the strategic aims of the business (Safari, Faraji and Majidian 2016, 475-486). In this architecture, the product line applications and the business units are not listed in its future scope. In turn, the architecture includes a solution that will lead to maintenance of the business perspectives. There are four major components of the target architecture.

1. Architecture principles: These components include the general guidelines and rules which are to be followed. The first rule is to be business oriented that mainly supports business related priorities and gets maximum profit from business actions (Farwick et al. 2016, 397-426). Another rule is to use the information as a key asset which will be useful in implementing transactional solutions and incorporating key architectural qualities. In addition, the promotion of these guidelines is another requirement to be followed for eliminating the presence of any technical risks (Luo, Jiong and Junxian 2016, 733-737). Moreover, the reduction of technical debt results in an increased effort and holistic approaches initiation which in turn leads to leveraging of technical solutions.
2. Architecture governance: This is termed as the practice which manages all the present domain architecture at an enterprise level. It is used to establish the compliance obligations, controls, practices and processes, for ensuring the effectiveness in introduction, implementation, and evolution of organizational architectures. At each of the stages, the architect responsible must validate the compliance requirements with the rules of the architecture. The documents must be successfully submitted before logging off. If any deviation in plan is necessary, the review process is put through a lot of checks. These must be removed if required or must be handled by the proper authority.
3. Conceptual reference architecture: This section consists of eight reference architecture for varying domains.

• The business architecture is used to successfully map the capabilities and resources of the business to reach the aims.
• Application architecture is used to describe the logical structure of the associated software.
• Information architecture is used to define the categories of information usage in the company.
• Technical architecture defines the technologies used in the enterprise.
• Policy architecture is used to describe the policy administration procedure.
• Advanced analytics are used to address the components of big data
• Content management architecture is used to maintain and improve the investments of the enterprise.

1. Emerging technologies: This section of the architecture is used to document technological innovation processes by describing an R&D lifecycle for enabling technological innovations through prototyping (Lagerstrom et al. 2014, 3847-3856). In addition, the architects responsible also develops roadmaps that are used to address the key business drivers like social media collaboration, analytics, mobile and remote computing, virtualization and cloud computing.

There are six architecture domains that are to be maintained by the new architecture practice team. The roles and objectives of these domains are mainly involved in the execution and delivery of the requirements.

1. Application architecture: This is termed as the largest architectural team which is responsible for providing cross-organizational leadership for guiding construction, deployment, performance and evolution of the technical processes (Simon et al. 2014, 5-42). The team is responsible for aligning the processes involved to the target architecture of the company. For this reason, the application architecture is responsible for addressing individual applications and broader portfolios.
2. Information architecture: This architectural team is responsible for visioning and designing the solutions for addressing the needs of the current information problems. It is also responsible for the development of strategies to improve quality, data integration and delivery.
3. Platform solutions architecture: The architectural team is responsible for identifying and designing reusable technical capabilities. They are also responsible for providing a larger roadmap for developing strategies for establishment of standards.
4. Technical architecture: They are responsible for designing and defining the vision for underlying technologies that are responsible for information, application and platform related architectures.
5. Security architecture: They are responsible for the defining of various security related aspects like encryption and confidentiality consideration. In addition, they are also responsible for developing identity management works.
6. IT strategy and governance: They are responsible for the development of various disciplines so that it aligns with the other principles of the target architecture.

According to the EA3 framework, there are six core elements. They are governance, methodology, best practices, framework, artifacts and standards (Zarvi?, Novica and Roel 2014, 63). However, in the Chubb enterprise architecture, there are two different components, the target architecture and the architecture practice.

The next point of comparison is that for the Chubb’s EA, the reference architecture is diversified into various sub-architectural components (Lapalme et al. 2016, 103-113). However, in case of the EA3 framework, the reference architecture is very simple and is very close to the segment architecture.

Lastly, the security architecture and the standards of the Chubb’s EA framework are more complex than the EA3 framework.

Chubb’s EA framework	EA3 framework
1. Two components	1. Six components
2. Diversified reference architecture concepts	2. Simple reference architecture
3. Complex security architecture	3. Simple security standards.

Conclusion

Thus, it can be concluded that the enterprise architect of the Chubb’s framework can be considered as more upgraded in terms of efficiency than the enterprise architect cube framework. The major benefits of the Chubb’s EA framework are the alignment of the total business processes. This helps in achieving various objectives and goals associated. Another benefit of the framework is that it reduces the total cost of ownership for the IT processes. Moreover, it is also responsible for improved application, technology, information and portfolio management. Lastly, this is also responsible for minimizing duplication of information and overlapping. The description of the enterprise architectural framework of the Chubb is successfully covered in this report. This report also lists the comparison among the Chubb’s EA process and the EA3 framework.

References

Chorafas, D.N., 2016. Enterprise architecture and new generation information systems. CRC Press.

Farwick, Matthias, Christian M. Schweda, Ruth Breu, and Inge Hanschke. “A situational method for semi-automated Enterprise Architecture Documentation.” Software & Systems Modeling 15, no. 2 (2016): 397-426.

Hansen, Peter, and Simon Hacks. “Continuous Delivery for Enterprise Architecture Maintenance.” Full-scale Software Engineering/The Art of Software Testing (2017): 56.

Iacob, Maria-Eugenia, Lucas O. Meertens, Henk Jonkers, Dick AC Quartel, Lambert JM Nieuwenhuis, and Marten J. van Sinderen. “From enterprise architecture to business models and back.” Software & Systems Modeling 13, no. 3 (2014): 1059-1083.

Lagerstrom, Robert, Carliss Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, and Stephan Aier. “Visualizing and measuring enterprise application architecture: an exploratory telecom case.” In System Sciences (HICSS), 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on, pp. 3847-3856. IEEE, 2014.

Lapalme, James, Aurona Gerber, Alta Van der Merwe, John Zachman, Marne De Vries, and Knut Hinkelmann. “Exploring the future of enterprise architecture: A Zachman perspective.” Computers in Industry 79 (2016): 103-113.

Luo, Aimin, Jiong Fu, and Junxian Liu. “An impact analysis method of business processes evolution in enterprise architecture.” In Progress in Informatics and Computing (PIC), 2016 International Conference on, pp. 733-737. IEEE, 2016.

Safari, H., Faraji, Z. and Majidian, S., 2016. Identifying and evaluating enterprise architecture risks using FMEA and fuzzy VIKOR. Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 27(2), pp.475-486.

Simon, Daniel, Kai Fischbach, and Detlef Schoder. “Enterprise architecture management and its role in corporate strategic management.” Information Systems and e-Business Management 12, no. 1 (2014): 5-42.

Smith, Heather A., and Richard T. Watson. “The Jewel in the Crown–Enterprise Architecture at Chubb.” MIS Quarterly Executive 14, no. 4 (2015): 195-209.

Zarvi?, Novica, and Roel Wieringa. “An integrated enterprise architecture framework for business-IT alignment.” Designing Enterprise Architecture Frameworks: Integrating Business Processes with IT Infrastructure 63 (2014).