CASE STUDY
Marsh McLennan preserves critical software knowledge and boosts the speed of delivery
Marsh McLennan is the world's leading professional services firm in the areas of risk, strategy and people, with 85,000 employees advising clients in 130 countries.
The company created a central technology organization, to raise the agility and efficiency of execution. It leveraged CAST Imaging to speed up the transition and ongoing delivery of software changes.
CIO POV: The value of software intelligence
CAST Imaging allows us to get very familiar very quickly with the application architecture and code.
Alan Capper
Global Leader,
Application Modernization
Months
instead of
years
of transition to shared services team, thanks to accelerated learning curve
Challenge
Marsh McLennan created a central technology organization, to raise the speed and efficiency of delivery.
This major transformation would see the transition to a shared services organization of all the development, maintenance, and support of 800+ custom-built applications, totaling 100M+ lines of code, and spanning a dozen different technologies.
The success of that transition hinged on the transfer of all technical knowledge about these applications to the incoming team, including ‘tacit’, unwritten knowledge hold by select individuals.
The new team was expected to deliver the same, or better, level of service, and to start doing so as soon as possible.
Solution
Marsh McLennan launched a program to preserve and make more explicit the key technical knowledge about their most strategic applications.
They onboarded hundreds of their applications in CAST Imaging which would automatically extracts the knowledge about their inner workings: mapping out all their code & data elements, and all their dependencies, into interactive blueprints of the internal structures.
The shared services team would then use CAST Imaging to learn and understand the application faster, without digging into the massive, multi-technology codebase.
Results
The accurate, easy to navigate blueprints offered by CAST Imaging allowed the incoming team to get familiar very quickly with the inner workings of MMC’s applications.
Moreover, the team was able to obtain knowledge they couldn’t get before without months of manually reverse-engineering the structures.
Access to such explicit technical application knowledge dramatically accelerated the team’s learning curve and ensured a fast transition to the new organization.
CAST Imaging is now helping onboard newcomers faster, has freed SMEs time, and has boosted the overall team responsiveness to the needs of the business.
