International award for Enterprise Architecture Excellence

The Saudi Aramco EXPEC Computer Center (ECC) recently received an international award from iCMG for Enterprise Architecture Excellence, 2016.

Winners in other categories included fortune 100 companies such as IBM, HP, and TATA, among others. The iCMG company is a global leader in providing architectural services.

According to Gartner, the world’s leading information technology (IT) research and advisory company, enterprise architecture (EA) is “the process of translating business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change by creating, communicating, and improving key requirements, principles, and models that describe the enterprise’s future state and enable its evolution. The scope of EA includes not only business processes, but also the people, information and technology of the enterprise, and their relationships to one another and to the external environment.”

The iCMG award jury members included industry EA thought leaders such as John Zachman (inventor of EA), Jaap Schekkerman, Ronald Ross (father of Business Rules), and several other professors and consultants.

“This is evidence that EA is positioned to transform ECC solutions through the use of best practices for the highest quality, reliable, and secure systems while maximizing efficiencies and integration by embedding reusable components throughout all ECC applications and services,” said Abdul Latif A. Al-Ghanim, general manager of the ECC.

Accomplishments

ECC efforts have been more than award winning. The introduction of EA to the ECC organization has been a big success, dramatically increasing the quality of work and services provided to the business; such as enabling modeling of over 400 upstream business processes with associated applications and data.

IT portfolio management was another major value realized, whereby demands, data, applications, and software technologies were well classified, organized, and periodically analyzed to better manage upstream technology and data assets. In addition, EA was able to streamline and enhance ECC core activities revolving around application service creation and delivery through initiating efforts to manage software development life cycles, common application development architecture, and IT service virtualization.

One of the key EA projects that continue to play an important role in managing upstream data and controlling its management costs is the introduction of a data life cycle. This practice helps identify critical data components that led to recycling petabytes of storage and improving overall data quality.

Future outlook

With these tangible deliverables realized and the know-how of successfully introducing change to the organization, EA will continue to be the change agent in an agile and adaptive organization.

“ECC paved the way to smoother transformation toward fast turnaround time for our upstream customers. This was accomplished by implementing EA best practices such as reusable services, technology standardization, and software development life cycle,” said Fawzi J. Al Matar, head of the ECC Planning and Technical Division. 

Media contact information

All media enquiries are handled by Aramco's Media & Executive Communications Department, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

For media inquiries, please email us at media.inquiries@aramco.com