Our client, an international insurance group, had recently merged two of it's subsidiaries. Both subsidiaries had previously operated independant of each other and managed their own IT landscapes. After the merger, the two subsidiaries were to be consolidated to a single target organization with a unified market presence and business operations. Regarding IT, the existing landscape of only one of the partners was to be carried forward and extended appropriately. However, the chosen IT landscape had not been architected for that purpose and was technically outdated.

The goal of our assignment was to determine the business requirements of the merged organization and to map these to the capabilities provided by the existing IT solutions (from the selected partner's IT landscape). Based on this, a target picture was to be developed for the core application landscape and additionally required solutions were to be identified and selected.

At first, the business architecture of the merged organization was captured. This included the development of an overall business capability map. For this purpose, a number of interviews were conducted with major stakeholders from both entities. In a next step, the available IT solutions were analyzed and evaluated against the capabilities to be supported. The analysis revealed that the existing solutions for policy management and technical accounting did not provide the required functionality and also had reached the end of their lifecycle.

Therefore, an RFP process was initiated to select a modern core insurance solution. Following a market analysis, requests were sent out to the main vendors. Selected vendors were then invited to 1-day workshops with all important stakeholders to present their solution offerings along a set of defined use cases. Based on the results, a solution was selected and validated within a proof of concept. In parallel to this, the overarching target application architecture was elaborated and finalized.

At the end of the project a commonly agreed description of the business architecture as well as the future IT architecture were in place. Beyond that, a modern cloud-based core insurance solution had been selected (and sucessfully validated within a PoC). In the meantime, the new solution has been implemented successfully. This was a major step in actually completing the merger and laying the foundation for future growth of the new organization.