Case Study TUI - Project Period: January 2004 – June 2004

In an industry characterized by decentralized IT organizations, aligning business needs and IT can lead to tremendous complexity unless a clear strategic IT plan is in place. Faced with this challenge, TUI, a leading tourism enterprise, sought to reorientate its IT organization with regard to future projects, investments, methodologies and leading principles to retain its competitive advantage.

The Challenge

Spurred by the Internet, the vertical integration of service providers in the tourism industry, has resulted in a frenzy of new competition in recent years. In order to retain its competitive edge, TUI launched a new group-wide strategy in 2004 to develop an agile IT infrastructure, focus new IT investments on business priorities and align IT with the business. In this context, the challenge was to introduce a transparent, business focused culture to transform the infrastructure and achieve greater synergy amongst its multi-disciplinary and geographically distributed data maintenance and IT planning teams. With hundreds of decentralized stakeholders throughout the European source markets and World of TUI platforms (airline, hotel and destination), managing the planned transformation from documented as-is architecture to target architecture to reflect business objectives and architectural standards, seemed at first like a daunting task.

The Task

alfabet was contracted to provide a software solution to support the strategic IT planning process and catalyze the transformation from a structured as-is architecture to the designed target architecture to help TUI realize its IT transformation vision and reach an executable strategic IT roadmap.

The Solution

The initiative first focused on documenting the application architecture layers that support TUI’s sales, product and inventory. Using alfabet’s Logical IT Inventory, which incorporates a rich, commercially proven meta-model that captures the relationships between different architectural layers (business, information, application, technical and deployed architecture), an accurate end-to-end view of the as-is landscape for TUI’s sales, product and inventory layers was captured in a central repository.

Secondly, the vision of the target application architecture was defined. Projects derived from the future application architecture development provided further guidance for implementing IT governance, guidelines, standards and IT measurements. Through the clear definition of future IT projects and migration activities, TUI could evolve into an effective, efficient and innovative IT landscape and realize greater flexibility and integration within the World of TUI IT portfolio.

Having created a transparent as-is landscape and defined the target architecture, the next step was to compare these two worlds and initiate an integrated planning process to transform the as-is to the to-be architecture. In this phase alfabet’s software was used to devise the transformation plans that would guide TUI’s future project investments in support of the business requirements for all source markets.

The Approach

The approach was to bring the technical know-how from the architecture management arena into portfolio management to streamline the infrastructure and focus innovation. This involves the deployment of a fully integrated and collaborative planning process from demand to budget to deliver full visibility of the dependencies in skills, resources and the architecture. alfabet’s software solution comprises a Logical Inventory for complete IT transparency and focused modules for Business Demand Management, Application Architecture Management, Enterprise Architecture Management, Program Portfolio Management and Value Management that align IT investments with business objectives.

Customer Benefits

The IT planning solution tightly integrates demand, architecture and portfolio management techniques and resources through the planning process to:

• Achieve transparency of the as-is IT landscape by creating a logical IT inventory
• Development of an IT strategic roadmap with project recommendations, IT governance frameworks and migration plans
• Quickly focus the IT investment portfolio on business priorities
• Achieve longer term business benefits through transformation of multiple legacy infrastructures to an adaptive architecture
• Clearly reveal the value of the IT organization for the business.

About alfabet AG

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