Springer Nature

Springer Nature is a leading global research, educational and professional publisher.

CLIENT PROFILE

Springer Nature is a leading global research, educational and professional publisher. The company was formed in 2015 by the merger of Macmillan Science & Education and Springer Science & Business Media.

CHALLENGE

As a result of the merger, there were many duplicate and overlapping applications and business capabilities across the organization. This added complexity, cost and operational inefficiencies – a problem that needed to be solved.
The enterprise architecture team at Springer Nature began an expanded application portfolio management initiative to catalog and rationalize all applications across the enterprise. The goal was to eliminate duplicate systems and capabilities along with associated costs and complexity.

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The erwin support team was extremely helpful and responded to emails within the hour

SOLUTION

Springer Nature evaluated erwin EA Agile along with several other well-known tool vendors, but quickly determined that the other tools were simply too expensive and required too much technical overhead to implement and maintain. As a full- featured, software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise architecture tool, erwin EA Agile was a very attractive solution.

“The erwin SaaS model was a lot easier to justify,” says Ian Flaherty, enterprise architect. “We started off by aligning our current spreadsheets with erwin EA Agile and found it to be pretty straightforward. The erwin support team was extremely helpful and responded to emails within the hour,” continues Flaherty.

Using the erwin solution, the team had a central repository for the first time to store and reuse their application portfolio, business capabilities and other architecture models and assets. They customized the meta-model to align with their approach to enterprise architecture and application portfolio management. Unlike other tools, erwin EA Agile is flexible and easily customized by the administrative end user.

They are also using erwin EA Agile in other areas, such as data and risk management assessments. “It’s a good value proposition,” says Flaherty. “The tool updates and changes that occur week by week are all valuable advancements.”