Strategic upgrade of integration platform
in Generali Česká pojišťovna
Case study: NOTIX together with Generali Česká pojištovna have set up a 5 level Maturity integration model and an action plan, which we have helped partly put into practice.
Start of the project
Generali Česká pojišťovna (GČP) has been one of the first major companies in Czech Republic, that have adoopted SOA principles and have built an integration platform based on ESB. The dynamics and pressure from the competition results in increasing demands on IT and technologies in general, which impacts also the proper functioning of the system integration – more automation, sizing, real-time responsiveness. Also there is the need to cut the financial costs for integration, accelerate the time-to-market or increase the quality and reliability.
That's why, GČP decided to design and implement strategic measures, that would address the current needs for integration, but also those that can occur in near future.
Strategic uprade project
This Strategic upgrade of integration platform project has been divided into 2 phases. In the 1st phase an action plan has been designed for upgrade of the integration platform, which prioritized the vital spots of the project. In the 2nd phase NOTIX helped implement part of the vital steps that have been assigned top priority.
1st Phase - identification of strategic initiatives and design of action plan
In the first phase of project NOTIX together with GČP, have prepared 5 level Maturity integration model. After a detailed inspection of the current state of the integration in GČP, it that has been proved that integration in GČP meets the criteria for level 3 maturity (well-established) and after a set amount of changes will meet a level 4 (well-managed).
After inspecting several criterias (costs, time-to-market, reliability)we have been able to create an action plan which included around 60 steps to reach level 4 maturity. These steps were assigned priority 1-3 and we moved on to implementation.
Fáze 2 - Realizace akčních kroků
In cooperation with integration team of GČP we have divided the implementation steps into 2 categories: 1. suitable for internal implementation and 2. suitable for implementation by external team. In the second category were steps that have been intertwined and had to be implemented as a group. Apart from designing the Maturity model and action plan, NOTIX has been implementing several of the steps:
- The base for building the central data model GČP
NOTIX has a platform and methodologic know-how to build a central data model of a company. This has an important meaning, not only for the system integration, but also for the identification of the impact of the changes, which the newly modeled entities into all parts of architecture and integration. Firstly we have deployed platform for data model, including the custom changes for GČP (artefact generation, document archiving and so on) subsequently we have modeled individual parts of the organisation. - Deployment of loh-management for the components of integration platform
Logs of individual parts of integration platform have been included into the central log-management on Elastic platform. During this process we have also standardized the format of logs in the integration platform - Prophylaxis of integration platform components
The needs of application support and stability called for implementation of bug detection and prevention, as well as operations risk management mechanisms into the integration platform. - Platform for event-driven distribution built on Kafka
Taking into consideration our positive experience with Apache Kafka regarding event distribution, we have recommended this reliable and highly-performing platform. We successfully executed PoC, which resulted in estabilishing Kafka as integral part of integration platform in GČP. - Support for automated deployments and testing on integration platform
For individual components of integration platform, we created CI/CD pipelines, thanks to standardized DevOps tools( Jenskins, Ansible) in combination with proprietary scripting languages, in each component. For core components such as ESB it has been the first step towards the agile approach.
Lower costs, faster time-to-market, higher reliability of integration
The project of the strategic upgrade of integration platform has positively impacted GČP in each of vital areas.
- Lowering the costs: reduced the needed capacity for the application support team, thanks to upgraded log-management and prophylaxis system. Simplified creation of integrations, thanks to central data model and architecture design unification.
- Rychlejší time-to-market: faster design, testing and interface deployment (unification, implementation of CI/CD procedures, increase in quality), platform for event distirbution accelerates new interface development (eliminates, originally essential part of development).
- Higher stability: prophylaxis with timely warning and deviation notifications works as a prevention of incidents, automation with DevOps tools minimises error rate of deployment changes in various environments.
Implementation of action plan helped GČP significantly close the gap in reaching level 4 (well-managed) of Maturity integration model.
