Client Synopsis
BAE SystemsOrganisation Overview
BAE Systems offers the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and security customers’ total capability in areas such as through life support; security; logistics and systems integration. BAE Systems is Australia’s most capable defence supplier, with products and services designed to give the ADF a tangible advantage by helping frontline personnel to do their jobs quickly, effectively and safely.
For more than half a century, BAE Systems has been designing, integrating and maintaining systems for the ADF. It employs approximately 6,000 people in urban, regional and remote locations across Australia.
Fragile to Agile Engagement
In 2010, BAE Systems was seeking to uplift its existing enterprise architecture (EA) practice, the aims of which are generally aligned with the reasons any organisation adopts EA as a discipline, being:
- Align business and IT design disciplines;
- Assist in IT Governance;
- Provide input to the budgeting and prioritisation process;
- Provide a more disciplined and structured way of assessing potential solutions;
- Assess how to deal with mergers and acquisitions;
- As the basis for a more systemic approach to business process management and service oriented architecture.
Consequently, Fragile to Agile was engaged to assess its overall enterprise architecture. Although BAE intended to garner all the above benefits, a primary focus of the investment in its EA practice was to maximise estimated synergies from the merger with Tenix Defence.
Identified as a key gap, the initial focus of the engagement was to deliver a Business Capability Model, the foundation artefact for enterprise architecture. Once this was completed, it was used to drive the necessary conversations with the executive on which solutions from the two merging partners needed to be retained to support specialisation and which business functions would transition to a single solution.
The Business Capability Model is now an integral part of BAE’s EA practice and has been recognised and used as an important design artefact within BAE globally. This is evidenced by the adoption of the Business Capability Model to drive global standardised reporting and data classification. It was subsequently used as the vehicle for executive level conversations about which capabilities should be standardised globally and which to allow independent processes and solutions. It has also been used at the next level of detail to drive the same decisions across the different divisions within BAE Systems Australia.
After the success of the 2010 engagement, Fragile to Agile was engaged in 2013 after an RFP process to perform a full end-to-end review of the ICT department and benchmarking it against its peers in BAE globally and similar external organisations. Whilst the exact outcome of this review is commercially sensitive, material cost saving opportunities were identified and have subsequently been realised.
Finally, we were engaged again in 2015 to assess the implementation of the 2013 systems rationalisation and ICT cost savings plan and to identify further savings opportunities to prepare BAE Systems for the anticipated “valley of death” revenue fall.
Our engagement with BAE Systems is ongoing with us performing periodic reviews of their EA and ICT functions and their continuous improvement cycles for these functions.