How Helvetia Successfully Consolidated Two IT Landscapes in the Nationale Suisse Merger

Helvetia has a long tradition. In over 150 years, it has grown from a number of Swiss and foreign insurance brands into a successful insurance group that does business in six European countries.

Today, around 7,000 employees serve more than 4.7 million customers. At the beginning of 2014, Helvetia joined forces with the former Nationale Suisse insurance company. Besides new growth they wanted to realize economies of scale amounting to over €100 million per year.

After the merger, IT had to balance multiple priorities: First, they needed to ensure business continued its operations as usual. Second, they had to combine the IT departments of the former Nationale Suisse and the “New Helvetia.” Finally, they needed to provide IT support for the integration of all business processes, such as transferring thousands of insurance policies and claims dossiers while keeping the overall target architecture in mind.

A best-in-class IT management ecosystem

To execute a successful IT merger, an overarching transparency is essential.

The IT management needed answers to questions such as:

• Which application is used in which functional domain?
• Where is the highest potential for synergies?
• How does this change the risk profile?

To meet this challenge, Helvetia relies on an ecosystem of best in class IT management tools. LeanIX is the backbone of Helvetia’s strategic application intelligence management. In combination with other IT management tools, it provides a 360-degree view on technology data in a business context.

A sound basis for decisions

The Confluence Wiki integration allows IT to link documentation directly to applications, as well as to publish LeanIX reports to Confluence projects. As a next step, IT also planned to show development tickets and architecture decisions from Jira as LeanIX heatmaps.

In the context of the IT merger, LeanIX best practice reports served as a basis for many decisions. The matrix visualization of the complex relationships between applications, user groups and business capability domains helped to make the right decision on the target landscape of the new Helvetia. For technical planning, the LeanIX visualizer provided necessary information on existing data flows, interfaces and technology.