Group 5

EDS Case Submission

California State Automobile Association

CSAA is a not-for-profit organization providing travel, emergency roadside assistance and

insurance to over 5 million members spread across northern California, Nevada, and Utah.
They process over 3 billion documents and scan 1.6 million images annually as part of their
work. But in order to support its members and employees, CSAA lagged in terms of IT
infrastructure with major problems in terms of old servers, outdated software and serious
security concerns. To fix these concerns CSAA tied up with EDS, a leading global
technology services company. The EDS business case presented several infrastructure levels
changes to CSAA which helped in revolutionizing the overall business model of CSAA
putting the projected net five-year benefit to $29.5 million.

EDS business case had numerous strengths which resulted in increased value for CSAA:

1. Existing database sizes can be scaled up as per business requirements along with
capability to add new databases into existing infrastructure thus maximising processor
utilisation.
2. Virtual servers take much lesser time to configure as compared to traditional server
deployments. Also, these servers provide efficient development and production
environment with rapid turnaround time and zero down time.
3. Multiple instances of databases could be stored in Windows and UNIX Solaris
environments helping in keeping the data more secure. This was facilitated through
clustered database servers.
4. Balanced server loading feature was available which helped in efficient processing
with the increasing business requirements.
5. New project deployment time would be reduced drastically with the SAN based
optimized environment.
6. Huge savings of over $29 million can be achieved in terms of hardware, server,
support and application related costs.
7. With a payback period of just 12 months, ROI is anticipated to be around 493%.
 8. Increase in productivity, quick process runs and more reliability in applications
helping in enhanced member support and services.
9. Claims processing time has reduced drastically by almost a day.

EDS business case did have some weaknesses:

1. Since this rationalized infrastructure is altogether new for CSAA environment, it is

not very clear how well this new infrastructure will fit together with the existing
organisational structure. There has been no discussion on the cultural and
organisational fit and risks involved surrounding it.
2. Most of the stats provided are anticipated and seem to be overstated not considering
the real time implementation costs and side effects, real figures might be substantially
different from these. Evidence seems to be missing.
3. There is no proper structure to the business case with clear indication on financial,
quantifiable, measurable and observable benefits.
4. It is important that few of the systems should be piloted so that knowledge of the
potential future benefits is available.
5. There is no clear mention of how the efficiency will be measured once EDS is
implemented and discussion on distribution of benefits across the organisation is
missing.

Submitted by:
Group 5
1901031 Neha Agarwal
1901043 Rahul Bhayana
1901059 Vivek Kumar
1901058 Vikash Chirki
1901008 Ayush Maheshwari
1901007 Ashutosh Shukla