Up-to-date technology product information is a key input for Enterprise Architects to assess the risk of their application landscapes. From an organized approach, EAs are able to plan, manage and retire technology components in a smart way.
Modern EAM platforms like LeanIX provide all the necessary information with a smart inventory and interactive reports. Still, the sheer amount of technology-related information, like versions or lifecycles, make it a challenge to stay abreast of the ongoing changes.
The 20 largest technology vendors alone provide over a million different technology products and they change every day. New versions need to be tracked. Lifecycle information changes. Every single day the information of 2,500 products changes.
To help streamline the integration, LeanIX teamed up with BDNA, the creators of Technopedia, which is the most complete and authoritative enterprise IT dataset worldwide. This partnership provides a comprehensive technology data basis for all clients using the tool. Technopedia updates its databases numerous times per day, keeping the up-to-date information on over a million products, and more than 50 million market data points, Technopedia serves as the foundation to enrich LeanIX with better data on your deployed technology.
Avoid inconsistencies in deployed data
A strong baseline for your technology products is the key to analyzing and managing technology risk. Disconnected information silos, lack of integration, and incomplete data about deployed technology hinder efficient technology risk management and cause a lot of manual reconciliation effort. This challenge is hard to overcome with manual data maintenance. For example, take HP as a vendor. Not only can it be spelled as hp, HP Inc, and Hewlett Packard, but you could come up with over two dozen other vendor names when including HP business units and acquired companies. Software can be even worse. BDNA experienced that Adobe Acrobat commonly appears under more than 40 different names.
Figure 1 - BDNA displayes the various ways "Adobe Acrobat" commonly appears inside a company's database.
These inconsistent records cause duplicates, conflicts, and other data quality issues.
LeanIX Technopedia integration
The combination of the modern enterprise architecture platform LeanIX and the standard product catalog of BDNA Technopedia resolves these challenges. When a new LeanIX IT Component Fact Sheet is created, the link to the Technopedia database prevents duplicates by suggesting matches to standard technology names and their versions. Rather than wasting time on regular data cleansing to treat the symptoms, the LeanIX Technopedia integration solves the problems directly at the origin (fig 2).
To quickly identify obsolete or redundant data, LeanIX provides smart matching algorithms to easily cleanse existing data sets. The matching mechanism suggests standard products that fit the existing inventorized data. Combine this with LeanIX’s effective integration capabilities, with xls or the REST API, you’ll be able to quickly normalize your existing technology data.
Figure 2 - Vendor information, product name, version and lifecycle are automatically populated to the LeanIX IT Component Fact Sheet.
Figure 3: LeanIX Technopedia integration, suggesting standard technology products from the Technopedia catalogue matching the LeanIX IT Component name.
Automated lifecycle information
Once the initial baseline is established, it is crucial that vendor product updates are reflected in your inventory. Following version updates and patch updates, lifecycle information is the most critical information that needs to be reflected.
The lifecycle stage is one of the main predictors of technology risk. Therefore, it is critical to understand which stage a vendor categorizes their particular product in. Once a product becomes unsupported the risk dramatically increases, and behind that risk are immense consequences. In a last minute migration, the City Council of Munich was forced to pay $12,000 for every employee still using the outdated Windows XP operating system.
Fortunately, vendors generate up-to-date information on their products, and Technopedia consolidates all the information in one place. Therefore, the Technopedia x LeanIX integration ensures that the current data automatically populates on your LeanIX IT Component Fact Sheet. The right place to make the information actionable.
