CASE STUDY : ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE SOLUTION

Health_Forum is a chain of drug stores. It started as a regional chain in 1960. In 1995, it developed an innovative software system that enabled it to run drug stores very efficiently. It called this system ManageAHealth or MAH. MAH incorporated some innovate business ideas, such as patient-relationship management, inventory management, automated insurance billing, and even utility optimization.

MAH consisted of three programs: MAH/Store, which ran on a small computer at a drug store; MAH/Warehouse, which ran on a server in a regional warehouse; and MAH/Home, which ran on a large server at the home office. These three programs communicated through files that were transferred from one location (for example, a store) to another (for example, a regional warehouse). When reliable communications lines existed, file transfers could occur through FTP. The system was also flexible enough to accommodate transfers through courier, where necessary.

By 2000, Health_Forum was doing quite wellin part, because of the cost-cutting moves enabled by the MAH system. Health_Forum decided to begin expansion. To do this, it purchased three regional chains. With these purchases, Health_Forum extended its reach through the southeast quadrant of the U.S.

By 2002, it was clear that the same software systems that had initially fueled Health_Forum's success were now hampering its future. Some of the problems Health_Forum was running into were the following:

MAH/Store required regional specializations. For example, different insurance plans needed to be supported in different regions, and these all required changes to the MAH/Store module.

The regional warehouses that had been acquired through acquisition each had different ways of receiving orders from the retail stores and different procedures from ordering supplies from the wholesalers. Each of these differences required changes to the MAH/Warehouse module.

The file-transfer approach to information sharing that had worked so well when Health_Forum consisted of 30 drugstores, one regional warehouse, and one home office were turning out to be difficult to coordinate among 200 drugstores, four regional warehouses, two geographic offices, and one home office. Files were often delivered late, sometimes not at all, and occasionally multiple times. This made it difficult for the home office to access reliable, up-to-date financial information, especially in the areas of sales and inventory.

It was clear to Health_Forum management that the MAH system needed many enhancements. However, upgrading this system was difficult. Each of the three modules (store, warehouse, and home office) was huge, inefficient, and cumbersome, and each included functionality for everything that each entity might need.

The modules had grown to over 1 million lines of code each. It was difficult to change one function without affecting others. All of the functions accessed a single database, and changes to one record definition could ripple through the system in an unpredictable fashion. Changing even a single line of code required a rebuild of the entire multimillion-line module.

ManageAHealth had become ManageANightmare. Debugging was difficult. Software builds were torturous. Installing new systems was hugely disruptive.

These technical problems soon created internal conflicts within the home office of Health_Forum. The business side of Health_Forum wanted to acquire two more regional chains, but IT was still struggling to bring the existing acquisitions online.

This resulted in a rapidly growing divide between the business and the technical sides of Health_Forum. The business side saw IT as reducing business agility. The technical side saw the business side as making impossible demands and blamed it for refusing to consult IT before entering into acquisition discussions.

The distrust had reached such a point that, by 2005, the CIO was no longer considered part of the executive team of Health_Forum. The business side distrusted IT and tried to circumvent it at every opportunity. The technical side built its IT systems with little input from the business folks. Several large and expensive IT initiatives were ignored by the business side and were eventually abandoned.

By 2006, Health_Forum was in crisis. It clearly needed to revamp its technical systems to make them easier to specialize for regional requirements. This was going to be an expensive proposition, and Health_Forum couldn't afford for the effort to fail.

Just as importantly, Health_Forum also had to rebuild its internal relationships. The constant bickering and distrust between business and IT was affecting morale, efficiency, and profitability. A company that only five years earlier was an industry leader in profitabilityin large part, because of its innovative use of ITwas now struggling to stay out of the redin large part, because of the inflexibility of those same IT systems. Cath, the CEO of Health_Forum, desperately needed a solution.

(1) As a business consultant, what is your recommendation?

-What is the operating model you would recommend?

- What should be the Enterprise Architecture for this firm to be most efficient?

- What is your recommendation ERP, Datawarehouses or Knowledge Repositories? Or a combination ?

- What products would be suggest? (You can see SAP/ORACLE/SAGE/Microsoft/Teradata).. More focus on Organizational memory products for this.