How the Atomic Weapons Establishment uses Enterprise Architecture to understand its IT Estate AWE plays a crucial role in the UK’s national defense. The organization has been at the forefront of the country’s nuclear defense program for over 60 years and supports the ‘Continuous At Sea Deterrence program’ and national nuclear security.

Supporting all of this work is a large complex IT estate of wide and varied systems and applications. Because of this, the need arose to move from PowerPoint and paper-based solution design into an IT modelling solution where dependencies and relationships are more explicit.

The main driver of the project was to understand the cost of IT software and applications, how IT is utilized across the business and when technology needed to be refreshed. With so many solutions, vendors and applications to map, diagrams and modelling were the most logical fit or this and represent the best approach to the goal of full business visibility into how everything fit together.

AWE decided to look for a software that will support them to answer many overlapping questions:

• Understand cost of IT and how it is used across the organization
• Providing a systematic modelling approach to capture design information
• Advanced awareness and planning for technology lifecycles and obsolescence
• Reduce costs through efficiency and avoiding technology duplications and redundancies
• More efficient regulatory compliance and audit preparation

They have selected the HOPEX platform for its strong IT portfolio management and architecture capabilities.

The IT portfolio management provides the platform to provide full inventories of all systems, applications and software indicating dependencies, relationships, vendor support information and costs.

Architecture provides the platform to enable model-based designs of how the inventory of “stuff” needs to be deployed, enriching the lists developed as part of applications and technology portfolio management activities.

Clear deliverables have been produced that are shared with various stakeholders across the organization in graphical form.

The outcomes of the project that have better enabled AWE to understand its IT estate are as follows:

• A managed central repository of IT estate information providing key information for decision-making and awareness
• Clear understanding of the relationship between systems, applications and software, and how all of this supports the business
• Software obsolescence roadmaps to enable improved forward planning
• Required reporting available “out of the box” reducing time to publishing the information

Atomic Weapons Establishment’s role in keeping the UK safe is to manufacture, maintain and develop the warheads for Trident, the country’s ultimate deterrent, and use its unique skills and expertise to support nuclear threat reduction. The organization operates from four sites across the UK and has some of the most advanced research, design and production facilities in the world.