EDF Energy — ServiceNow Enterprise Architecture strategy across a 100-application portfolio, scoped and documented in 10 days

A 60% data-quality baseline and a team spending a third of its time gathering data manually: the EA function was an aircraft flying on instruments it could not trust.

The challenge

EDF Energy Central IT operates a portfolio of approximately 100 enterprise applications. Its Enterprise Architecture team faced a data-quality problem that undermined every governance decision downstream: roughly 60% data quality meant four in ten records could not be relied upon for investment decisions, decommissioning analysis, or regulatory reporting. Roughly 30% of EA team capacity was absorbed by manual data gathering — a structural tax on the people best positioned to use the data rather than collect it. The organisation had identified ServiceNow as the authoritative platform for IT governance, but the path from current state to real-time CSDM v5 integration and evidence-based EA mandates had not been defined.

The Blu Wingu approach

Blu Wingu was engaged as the named advisory lead for the ServiceNow EA implementation strategy, tasked with producing the full documentation set from a standing start. The model was advisory-first: establish the strategic vision and evidence base before scoping delivery, so every subsequent investment decision would be grounded in documented requirements rather than vendor assumptions.

The output was produced across three versions of the Business Requirements Document — v0.1 through v1.0 — in ten days: 594 paragraphs and 20 tables covering the full EA implementation strategy. The accompanying Product Requirements Document (v2.0), Project Scoping Document, Reduced-Scope proposal, and Final Approved Proposal gave EDF Energy’s stakeholders a choice architecture rather than a single path. The strategic vision positioned ServiceNow as the authoritative governance platform, with real-time CSDM v5 integration providing the entity-relationship foundation and investment-decision frameworks surfacing cost and risk at the Business Application level.

The data-quality target was defined with precision: lift approximately 100 enterprise applications from the 60% baseline to a minimum of 95% data quality. Recovery of approximately 30% of EA team capacity — currently absorbed by manual gathering — was the operational complement. The programme would not be complete until the team spent its time governing data, not collecting it. A pilot scoped against five applications was designed to validate the approach before full-scale deployment, with a £29,000–30,000 advisory-phase budget and a named transition path to delivery.

The CSDM v5 framework was applied as the modelling standard throughout — ensuring the EA implementation would answer the questions a mature EA function needs to answer: what does each application cost to run per business capability; what is the evidence chain for regulatory reporting; what breaks if a named application goes offline.

The outcome

The engagement produced a complete advisory documentation set in ten days — BRD v1.0, PRD v2.0, Scoping Document, Reduced-Scope proposal, and Final Approved Proposal — with a pilot architecture scoped against five applications and a defined advisory-to-delivery transition path. The 95% data-quality target and 30% capacity-recovery target were established as programme success criteria, giving EDF Energy a measurable definition of done rather than a qualitative aspiration.

What’s defensible

The 60% baseline, 95% target, 30% capacity-recovery target, and the 594-paragraph/20-table documentation scope are drawn from the advisory engagement’s own project artefacts; the ten-day production window is documented in the engagement timeline.

Cross-links: CSDM v5 Service Modelling · Enterprise Architecture