INRY and Aon: Driving Market Leadership with ServiceNow Enterprise Architecture for Informed Investment

Market Leadership Through Informed Investment

The Mission

As a $12B insurance and risk management juggernaut, countless opportunities exist for investing – whether in real estate, information technology, acquisitions, or virtually any other area in which efficiencies, capacity or top-line revenue can be impacted.

For Aon’s leadership, the problem has never been a lack of investment opportunities but instead a consistent methodology for capturing, evaluating, and (if approved) monitoring them. Investment processes were often siloed in the parts of the organization from which they emerged – Legal, Finance, Facilities, IT, Human Resources, or Product teams.

Understanding which investments can have the biggest impact is a complex challenge in such an environment. A siloed approach also complicates the possibility of a cross-functional investment strategy in which multiple functions can invest in a coordinated fashion. In a worst-case scenario, some parts of the organization may even invest in ways that undermine the investments made elsewhere.

As the firm sought options to bring a more informed, agile approach to its investment and portfolio management strategy, it turned to INRY to leverage the Power of the Platform to enable the data capture critical as part of the first step of the overall process.

The Approach

The firm has long leveraged INRY as an engine for innovation, employing it for a wide range of global business services as well as IT and colleague experiences. As the organization sought an enterprise-scale solution to build an investment evaluation and oversight engine, the Application Portfolio Management (APM) built by INRY on a leading platform was an obvious choice. APM had been used to track the firm’s application investments’ performance, so its potential was well understood.

APM also provided core capabilities essential to modelling complex investment requests, including the concepts of the Business Service Portfolio, Taxonomy Layer (and Nodes), Business Service, Business Service Offering, and “Sell / Consume” services delivery and monitoring model relevant to this type of request.

With the underlying APM foundation already in place, the firm leverages INRY to build an application “hub” at the heart of its Portfolio Investment Reporting (PIR) system to address these opportunities.

• Organization Transition Planning: As the merger or acquisition transaction goes from the evaluation stage to the implementation stage, choreographing the movement of teams and leadership requires complex approval and sequencing. The Organization Design and Talent (OD&T) functions of the M&A Portal provide key functions like:
  • Iterating on the structure of the to-be organization
  • Defining leadership roles and responsibilities for the combined org
  • Determining HR systems of record be leveraged
• Data Request: Providing a means to facilitate the request of documentation or data needed to advance the merger or acquisition transaction and to notify stakeholders when this request has become delinquent
• Meeting Request: Allowing actors in the transaction to request meetings to discuss any aspects of the deal through the M&A Portal, where these requests can be fully documented via an audit trail. By providing a hub for all interactions related to the merger or acquisition, the M&A Portal increases the transaction’s transparency compliance and level of
• Access Request: Creating an access control and permissions model to ensure that all the actors in the process are given only the level of information access appropriate to their area of responsibility is critical to the integrity of the M&A process. As part of this, Access Request features made it possible to delegate new permissions as needed through a well-governed and traceable process
• Process Simplification and Ergonomics: To make this aspect of the solution usable and ergonomic, special attention was given to making the information captured within the M&A Portal more sable. For example, colour-coding was employed to differentiate players within each organization – with the firm participants contributing “red data” and target company participants contributing “purple data.” Seemingly minor features like this made a big difference in making the large volume of collected information more easily digestible by transaction participants
• Process Guidance and Enforcement: Delivering guided interactions to help ensure that participants in the M&A transaction clearly understand where they are in the process, which steps come next, and if they are delinquent in fulfilling any of their review or approval responsibilities

As the firm looked to fulfill these and other critical technology and functional requirements, the platform recommended by INRY proved to be an ideal choice thanks to built-in security, process traceability, accessibility, and ergonomics. Likewise, INRY surfaced as an ideal partner for this engagement thanks to their deep knowledge of the INRY platform and the firm’s business. The firm and INRY worked to deploy the first iterations of the M&A Portal in a matter of weeks, then refined it incrementally afterward to support more complex functional and technical requirements.

The Result

Implementing a transformational set of portfolio management capabilities like those described is something other than something that can be implemented at the flick of a switch. However, by defining a clear long-term roadmap that emphasized incremental progress and quick time to value, the combined firm and INRY team showed substantial value in just 6 months – with the system going live in November and reports with approval and forecast data going live in May.

By providing a system of interaction for the capture, review/approval, and tracking of investments across all enterprise functions, the firm has achieved significant benefits that enhance its competitive position in an everchanging market, including:

• Enterprise-wide insight into investment opportunities allows firm leaders to make informed decisions about those investments with the greatest return
• Deep insight into portfolio performance to ensure that investments meet or exceed identified targets and to understand the cause of any underperformance
• Improved business resilience thanks to a system that allows revenue protection, risk mitigation, efficiency, automation, and growth opportunities to be surfaced, evaluated, and implemented timely

By accessing these benefits through a single environment where all stakeholders can interact to evaluate and monitor large-scale investments, Aon has transformed its business in critical ways that strengthen its competitive position and drive value for customers, colleagues, and shareholders. This powerful solution proves the possibilities that innovative technology can deliver when combined with expert delivery and configuration services provided by INRY.