How enterprise architecture connects culture with technology.
2Connect - Colruyt Group
Challenge
Colruyt Group prides itself on the "collective brain"; the availability of all information and knowledge flowing through the company is available to every employee, regardless of whether this information is contained in documents or e-mails. All information is just a click away from a central search engine. In-house developed applications to communicate and archive ensure that this whole thing is considered a differentiator.
However, the exponential growth of information, evolutions in forms of collaboration (working from home, hybrid working, etc.) and the associated new applications are making additional demands in order to continue to handle this information efficiently and effectively.
Add to this the expansion both horizontally (new sectors in addition to retail) and vertically (in addition to retail also production, development and mining, ...), the increased and more intensive collaboration with organizations and people outside the group and, last but not least, AI is also causing a revolution in the information domain. Clearly, the question for Colruyt Group is:
"How can the differentiating nature of the collective brain be maintained and even enhanced to contribute to these new challenges?"
Strategy
An integrated approach presented itself in the strategic program 2Connect.
Thus, the first step was to catch up. With a strategic exercise, the business leadership, based on suggestions from the enterprise business architect and other experts, determined which business functions were truly differentiating and which were more supportive. Based on this and a market study conducted by the enterprise IT architect, it was determined how the basis of the application landscape could be redesigned with a standard cloud solution.
A difficult task, in which 3 in-house developed applications (mail, calendar and archive) responsible for communication and information management and thus used daily by some 15 000 users were replaced. These applications access 400 million e-mails and more than a million documents.
At the same time, a strategic direction was set for the differentiating functions. During this process, enterprise business & IT architects worked together with the business to form a future picture of the organization, its services, processes and IT landscape. This revealed that the guiding elements are best organized centrally to achieve unified policies, and that the operational functions are diversified to best accommodate each specialization in the business, with specific skill sets. New capabilities, such as generative AI, were positioned so that it is clear who is responsible for what. The appropriate responsibilities were thus placed in and assigned to the various domains of the organization
Outcome
However, a dream without realization remains a dream. In a multi-disciplinary team, the enterprise architects in a program structure provide a framework for realization. This framework includes both the "hard" aspects such as the architecture components (processes, applications, dependencies, etc.), as well as the equally important guiding, supporting and following up of the project architects to reach the intended goal via various transition architectures.
This goal can be expressed not only in increased efficiency for employees, whereby a number of hours per week per employee are gained, but also in faster, more focused, safer and with more job satisfaction collaboration with employees inside and outside the organization. Finally, a number of qualitative goals are also set around the quality, availability and retrievability of information.
This involves, for example, migrating nearly 4,000 SharePoint sites, personal & shared drives to a new digital workplace based on OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint Online.
A number of applications have already been rolled out on a large scale and seamlessly integrated into the landscape, and new forms of collaboration are being designed and implemented. The strategic process and the supported architectural framework provide guidance during implementation and support during this immense change for Colruyt Group.