How much is it worth a black box the size of a nation?

The SIWDz NFZ system is not a single program. It's an ecosystem of over 150 applications and modules that grew alongside the Fund over the years - serving the headquarters and sixteen regional branches, each with its own specifics and local adaptations. Benefit settlements, insured-person records, contracting, monitoring - it all operates as a single, tightly interwoven organism.

At a certain point, NFZ faced a question every large public organization eventually has to ask: how much is our IT infrastructure worth? Not sentimentally - financially and strategically. How much would it cost to rebuild this system from scratch? What does its functional architecture look like from the outside? And what needs to change for a new, centralized system to be ready for the decades ahead?

The challenge was delicate for several reasons at once. First: scale. Over 150 systems across 17 locations. Second: a lack of documentation in a form that would allow for easy inventory - source code and design documentation were inaccessible to an external contractor. Third: the stakes. The valuation result was meant to serve as the basis for strategic decisions about the future of the Fund's entire IT infrastructure.

Engave applied the Mark II point method - one of the most recognized approaches to functional software valuation, based on analyzing what a system does rather than how it's written. Given the lack of code access, this wasn't a fallback option - it was the only path that could produce results defensible under external audit.

NFZ received three things in a single project: first, a professional, defensible replacement-value assessment of the SIWDz system that can be presented to the board, auditors, and the regulator. Second, an in-depth functional analysis of the current systems: what they do, how they do it, and where the gaps are. Third, a design for a new, centralized architecture as a starting point for planning the next step.

Everything delivered on time. Everything verified externally. That combination is rare in projects of this scale and complexity.

Every large organization - public and private - eventually faces the question of what its IT is worth. It most often comes up during a merger, a tender, a modernization decision, or a conversation with an insurer. The answer then carries financial, legal, and strategic consequences.

The problem is that most organizations don't have a current, reliable answer. Systems grew over years, documentation fell behind, code was written by rotating teams. What remains is valuable - but hard to prove without methodical work.

This project shows that valuing an IT system is possible even under the most difficult conditions - without documentation, without code, in an environment spread across more than a dozen locations. And that the result can be reliable enough to withstand independent scientific verification.