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Cure & Care
Pacific Dental Services
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Who is Pacific Dental Services?
Pacific Dental Services (PDS) is a dental support organization in the US. The company partners with dentists and clinicians to provide business and administrative support to their practices, allowing dentists to concentrate on providing the best patient experience. PSD has been on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US 14 times and maintains its impressive growth today.
The Challenge
In its first three years, PDS went from supporting one client to nearly twenty and has kept this rapid growth trajectory for the last two decades. Despite its huge success, the company faced some common challenges of high-growth startups. Its mission and vision were not translated fast enough to the decision-makers at the operational levels, while the application landscape kept growing, both in size and complexity.
Without the 'big picture' being communicated to project leaders and stakeholders, there was a lack of strategic alignment on new projects and initiatives. In addition, the more PDS grew and the higher the number of clients it supported, the more difficult it became for the organization to track dependencies and ensure standardization in the application landscape. The data silos between the business and IT departments kept growing — resulting in out-of-date application information and a slow process for getting projects off the ground.
Pacific Dental Services knew they needed an Enterprise Architecture (EA) tool that would help them in three key areas: (1) understanding dependencies; (2) creating standardization; and (3) reducing complexity and increasing visibility of the application landscape.
Why BlueDolphin by ValueBlue?
“Gaining visibility and control over the complexity of an organization is critical. It's about how can you get out of your own way and not hinder the IT operations team. Ultimately, ValueBlue helped us achieve this goal by ensuring our activities aligned to business-critical goals and capabilities while remaining agile and competitive.”
Nemi George, VP/Information Security Officer at Pacific Dental Services
The Approach
By using an EA tool, PDS hoped to leverage templates to map their landscape, define a clear framework for technology standards, and apply metrics to define key services.
To start with, they broke down and mapped the high- level strategic initiatives into business capabilities. They then assigned those to business units to understand their service dependencies, main processes, and the key assets needed to realize goals.
Central Repository
Due to their siloed way of working, business and technology stakeholders didn't have a clear overview of the architecture, including processes and applications. By acting as a central repository, BlueDolphin allows different teams to log relevant data in one place. This significantly improved cross-functional collaboration and allows stakeholders from various departments to refer to a single, up-to-date repository.
Mapping the Application Landscape
The team used the central repository to map their entire application landscape. This helped them see the relationships between applications, as well as project dependencies. From BlueDolphin, they sent out questionnaires to application owners to gather all the relevant application information, such as users, cost, and contract end date. This helped them gain better insight into their landscape and flag dependencies.
Technology Guidelines
With all the application information in one place, PDS set out to make better technology purchase decisions. Following EA best practices, they used BlueDolphin to create a set of rules and guidelines for applications. The criteria were first applied to existing applications, where those that didn't meet the guidelines were set to be phased out. The guidelines were then used to improve future purchasing decisions.
The Results
Understanding Dependencies
Pacific Dental Services is now working with a complete and up-to-date application landscape. Its repository contains 363 applications, all of which are connected to the business capabilities and processes. This provides a big-picture overview of their day-to-day operations, as well as the relationship between the applications and their key business activities.
Reducing Complexity
Understanding the application landscape and dependencies inherently reduces complexity. As part of their discovery process, PDS identified 110 mission-critical applications.
Standardization
All key stakeholders for projects can now rely on the same information, regardless of which department they belong to. This repository of data has increased collaboration across the entire business. Half of the active users in BlueDolphin are now from technical departments, while the other half are business users.