Case Study
So let's make it real - CrashesRUS Case Study
The best way to understand ETD is to look at it as you might in real life. To this end, let's assume you are a Non Executive Director on the board of an entirely fictional medium sized motor insurance company CrashesRUS.
This study cites real life products (see Disclaimer), with good reason, all are market leading and have been in use by large commercial enterprises for years, even decades. The IP in these products represent hundreds of man years of effort and careful refinement - to this day they are highly functional, robust, reliable and for those still operating older versions, mainly sunk cost. Precisely the type of products you would choose to run a motor insurance company with hundreds of staff members, and is exactly why they present such a dilemma for this imaginary board of directors.
At the last board meeting, the newly appointed IT Director laid out her initial thoughts on the way forward. Much of her thinking revolves moving over to Cloud Computing platforms and investing heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to maintain competitive edge in the hyper competitive snake pit that is the UK consumer market for vehicle insurance.
This was well received and it was at this point, that you raised the question of ETD and asked how it could tie in to these ideas. The IT Director was ecstatic to be asked about this. The rest of the room less so, as they had no idea what the two of you are talking about.
Anyway, it was agreed that it should go as a topic on the Agenda at the next board meeting with the IT Director speaking to the item. Speed forward to the meeting taking place today and follow the link below for a simulated narrative: