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Section C: Case Study Questions
[30 marks]
Read the following case study and answer questions below.
Enterprise Architecture at Chubb Industries
Enterprise architecture (EA) at Chubb was the framework the organization used to align IT and
the business. EA provided a target architecture for business leaders and IT professionals to use
to collaborate and to enable the company to adapt and prosper. "Our EA is the glue that brings
Business and IT together," claimed Chubb CIO, Jim Knight. Chubb Industries, which now
operates in 54 countries and territories, is the largest publicly traded property and casualty
insurance company in the world and the largest commercial insurer in the United States.
Having been founded in North America in 1792, it may well be one of the oldest underwriting
companies.
CIO Knight had put in place a decentralized (federated) EA in place to support Chubb's seven
lines of business (LOB). However, after six years he realized that tweaks to the decentralized
EA were not able to deal with problems that surfaced over time. In particular, standards
weren't being followed closely enough and the business units were focusing on their own unit's
goals but suboptimizing on the organizational goals. The decentralized approach inhibited
agility because it misaligned IT and the enterprise business strategy, created duplication, and
impeded coordination across the LOBs. Knight decided to consolidate the LOB architects into
a centralized enterprise IT organization with a broader scope.
CIO Knight reorganized Chubb's IT group to have a Chief Architect/Architecture Practice Lead
who reported to the Chief Development Officer who, in turn, reported to Knight himself. A
Manager in charge of Development also reported to the Chief Development Officer. The
Manager in charge of Infrastructure reported directly to Knight. The new IT organization was
designed to deliver integrated solutions to the business.
One of the first things Knight did was create a target architecture with four major
components: Architecture Principles (i.e., general rules and guidelines including "Be business
oriented with a business-driven design," "Promote consistent architecture," etc.); Architecture
Governance (i.e., practices to manage at the enterprise-wide level including controls,
compliance obligations, processes, etc.); Conceptual Reference Architectures (i.e., target
architecture support domains including business, application, information and technical
architectures, policy administration, advanced analytics, i.e., content management);
and, Emerging Technology (processes to promote innovation and explore emerging
technologies). The target architecture used 50 architecture compliance rules derived from the
TOGAF framework.
All new projects were issued a "building permit" by the Architecture Governance Board and
were assigned one or more architects from the five EA domains (i.e., Business, Application,
Information, Technical, and Security) to ensure that the target architecture was being adhered
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