Continuous Transformation Blog

SAP LeanIX Community: Working With You To Improve Our Solution

Written by Neil Sheppard | December 5, 2024

The SAP LeanIX community is a thriving network of the world's best enterprise architects, and we take their expertise seriously. Discover how we collaborated with our users to improve the usability of our fact sheets feature. 

The SAP LeanIX community is a thriving network of world-class enterprise architects who know that SAP LeanIX is the right enterprise architecture tool for their organizations. Yet, as well as networking and sharing best practice for leveraging SAP LeanIX and enterprise architecture in general, our community also has lots to say about our solution, and we're listening.

We pay close attention to posts on our community site, particularly when they recommend changes to the usability of the application fact sheets within SAP LeanIX. Our team takes this feedback seriously and we're always looking to enhance our solution in response.

We recently considered your thoughts about our fact sheets and took a user experience-driven approach to optimizing them. This project rapidly expanded into a full rebuild of our fact sheets and an ongoing effort to optimize their usability.

Now we're continuing to work with our community to streamline and enhance SAP LeanIX to constantly support the efforts of enterprise architects. We were even directly inspired to add additional functionality by a recent post to our community forum.

SAP LeanIX users can join the community by visiting the site, and you can become a SAP LeanIX user by booking a demo of our solution today:

 

What Are SAP LeanIX Fact Sheets?

Previous LeanIX fact sheet layout

SAP LeanIX is built around its different categories of fact sheets within the solution. Each software application and IT component in your organization's digital landscape has its own fact sheet containing information about it.

You can customize these fact sheets so they contain exactly the data that you need in the format that works best for you. You can then import information from other repositories, acquire it through integrations and automations, add it manually, or conduct user surveys from directly within the platform.

From the combination of all your fact sheets, you can leverage advanced analytics, and create information dashboards and visualizations to give you complete oversight of your IT landscape. The easier it is for enterprise architects to work on the fact sheets within SAP LeanIX, the better they are able to manage and maintain the data contained within, and the better the data, the better the insights.

With time and effort saved in logging data about your application portfolio and IT components, your enterprise architects will be freed up to focus on modernization and innovation projects. For some solutions, usability is an afterthought, but we see the value of it for the SAP LeanIX community.

Understanding why it was so important, we recently undertook a project to optimize our fact sheets to make them even easier to use. The results were worthy of celebration for our community.

 

Introducing The New SAP LeanIX Fact Sheets

New LeanIX fact sheet layout

SAP LeanIX took action to respond to feedback from its community about ways that its application fact sheets could be improved. Since the fact sheets are the key workplace for enterprise architects leveraging our solution, their usability is very important to us.

Prompted by this feedback, we were inspired to undergo a complete redesign of our fact sheet layout to make them as user-friendly as possible for enterprise architects. We were delighted to release our new fact sheets on November 20, 2024, and, as one of our users wrote on the community forum: "the new fact sheet layout released today is a winner! Very nice!"

The new fact sheets offer:

  • A table format for the list of items related to the fact sheet you're viewing, making information easier to view at a glance and reducing the space it takes up
  • The ability to click on a related item in the list to view complete information about the relation in a side panel without leaving the fact sheet
  • A new drop-down menu at the top of the page to allow you to jump to any section of the fact sheet immediately.
  • The option to link directly to any section of any fact sheet from outside of SAP LeanIX with a URL
  • A function to search for a field or relation in the fact sheet from the top of the page or relations sub-section
  • The option of whether to group relations by sub-types or not

 

A SAP LeanIX Community Case Study

The day after SAP LeanIX released the new fact sheet format, a user posted on a comment to the forum:

"The new fact sheet layout released today is a winner! Very nice! Except for one little thing:

"In the new table layout for relations, clicking the related fact sheet display details on the new side panel (nice). But there should also be a way to enable quick access to the related fact sheet."

This led to a lively discussion with more than 26 replies to the post agreeing to the need and making further suggestions. Adding this capability and assessing the other suggestions now formed the basis of a project to enact the next redesign of our fact sheets - all within less than two weeks.

New features winning the support of our users include:

  • Restoring 'lifecycle' icons to the relations list
  • Adding a list of customized "tags" to the relations
  • Reducing the length of related fact sheet names for ease of readability
  • Giving users the option to customize the information included in the relations table

This is just an exciting example of the level of collaboration between our community and our developers, and the amount of input our users can have into the optimization of their own experience with our platform. Our team continues to return to this thread to ask for feedback on our ongoing efforts to enhance our solution.

 

SAP LeanIX Listens

SAP LeanIX aims to always work closely with our users to ensure that the SAP LeanIX toolset is optimized to support their enterprise architecture work. By talking to our users in our community, we can identify and address their needs in real time and ensure SAP LeanIX remains essential.

We continue to invest in expanding our community so that we can keep in touch with as many of our users as possible. We'd love to see you all there.

SAP LeanIX users can join the community by visiting the site, and you can become a SAP LeanIX user by booking a demo of our solution today: