The first day of the 2020 LeanIX EA Connect Days conference featured an astonishing range of presentations related to the world of enterprise architecture (EA). In a true display of solidarity, more than 3000 IT and business professionals worldwide from throughout industries joined the event either virtually from home offices or in-person at the World Conference Centre in Bonn, Germany. It was LeanIX’s largest event to date and proved to be an emphatic showcase of the EA Management tool's global appeal.
We’ll be covering each of the presentations in the weeks to come, but for the time being, here’s a roundup of some of the presentations that took place.
Short Cuts
Set the Foundation: Starting a Successful EA Practice
- Application Portfolio Management in UnitingCare Queensland, Australia
- Expand Your User Base — Creating Value for Your Target Audience
- 5 Enterprise Architecture Best Practices
- LeanIX Awards
Keynotes
- 10x DNA. The Mindset of the Future
- Lessons From Space on How to Succeed in a World of Rapid Change
- LeanIX Update, Product Launches & Outlook
Spotlight
- Process Automation at DHL Global Forwarding
- The Best of Both Worlds: Why Process Excellence is Vital to Enterprise Architecture
- LeanIX: LeanIX Product Update
Successful Governance for the Multi-Cloud World
Visualizing Complex IT Systems to Drive Better Decisions
- Microservices @ LeanIX — Then, Now, and Tomorrow
- Reimagine Customer Experience Through Cloud
- LeanIX + Lucidchart: Taking Visualization and Collaboration to the Next Level
- Visualization of EA Data — KPIs Within LeanIX
Better Visibility of IT Costs for Data-Driven Investment Results
- How Costing and Enterprise Architecture Solutions Make Better Decision Together
- Combining the Power of EAM & IT Controlling: The Apptio-LeanIX Integration at Hermes Germany
- Information Security: A Benefit-Oriented Use Case for EAM
Architecting for Resilience
- Supporting Information Security Management with LeanIX
- Modern Integration Architecture
- Building a Resilient Enterprise (With EA)
IT Transformation – Planning for the Business
- Architecture for Business Transformation: Process Over Capabilities
- A Closer Look at the LeanIX BTM Module
- Transformation Management @ Coca-Cola European Partners
- Data Flow as Essential HR Transformation Enabler
Set the Foundation: Starting a Successful EA Practice
“Application Portfolio Management in UnitingCare Queensland, Australia” - Ross Francis (Architecture Services Manager, UnitingCare Australia)
Ross Francis from UnitingCare — one of Australia’s largest charitable providers of healthcare and support services in Australia — presented live from Australia on the topic of his group’s journey to LeanIX. A diverse organization dedicated to providing medical care to communities throughout the Queensland region, Francis shared details about the IT complexity inherent to UnitingCare’s IT environment and the application costs involved in supporting 450,000+ members across 460 locations. Duplicate technology, spreadsheets, inconsistent data — in order for UnitingCare to reach its 2030 transformation roadmap, it had to thoroughly organize its application landscapes and take care of what Francis termed “dirty data”.
Their journey to success started with the basic acknowledgment that UnitingCare had to manage their application portfolio better. As such, in 2018, Francis and his team began taking stock of their application portfolio and measuring the functional fit of their applications. The first results confirmed to them that they could no longer adequately manage their inventory and infrastructure via spreadsheets, and upon meeting Citadel, a certified LeanIX Partner, put forward a proof of value for a new strategy focused on the LeanIX EA Management tool. UnitingCare’s transition to LeanIX involved an analysis-driven approach to identifying and logging applications and actively seeking out rationalization opportunities based on costs, business, technical fit, and customer experience.
Though their journey is ongoing, it is being accelerated by an iterative approach to APM underscored by openness and visibility for all users. Further, despite coming to LeanIX seeking APM as a central use case, they soon began employing LeanIX to help perform technology risk management.
Next up for UnitingCare is “injecting” application portfolio information directly into its current three-year business planning cycle for even more enhanced visibility for the charity.
“Expand Your User Base — Creating Value for Your Target Audience” - Tobias Vogel (Helvetia, Enterprise Architect)
Tobias Vogel from Helvetia, a Switzerland-based insurer and long-standing customer of LeanIX, offered advice on turning LeanIX into a go-to tool for organizations — “one that works for everyone,” he said. Like many others, Vogel’s business is especially prone to IT complexity, and throughout the years, he and his EA team have come to develop best practices on how to decrease the footprint of their IT landscape.
Helvetia's success with LeanIX has broadened to the point where its IT strategies are anchored to and tracked by KPIs (e.g., “Buy vs. Make” ratios). It's a victory Vogel attributes to four particularly advantageous features of the EA Management tool:
- Fact Sheet Self-Configuration (to capture non-architectural information requirements)
- Custom Reports & Metrics (to provision tailored reports for specific user groups)
- Integration APIs (to enable seamless IT management processes and tool integration)
- Data Flows (for transparency on application dependencies)
To help explain these items, Vogel took audiences on a tour of Helevtia’s very own LeanIX workspace. His walkthrough featured unique reports of applications separated by the insurer’s market units, a lifecycle report wherein IT components were rolled up to the application level and paired with those responsible for maintenance, and a metrics dashboard holding up-to-date numbers on topics such as service platforms necessary for overarching IT strategies.
Ending on the subject of LeanIX integrations, Vogel took time to discuss the particular benefits gained from connections to AWS, Snyk, and sonarqube to support Helvetia's microservices management efforts.
“5 Enterprise Architecture Best Practices” — Craig Stanley (Lead Architect, The Citadel Group)
Two-thirds of EA initiatives fail to support organizational goals explained Craig Stanely, Lead Architect at Australia’s Citadel Group. No stranger to success himself, Stanley revealed the following five best practices for EA management with an EA Management tool in use by his group, one of the leading distributors of LeanIX for the Asia-Pacific region:
Engage top executives in key decisions
Though it’s expected for CIOs and CTOs to get involved in EA activities, true buy-in is only gained when EAs give upper management reports and data based on relevant insights. With this information, EAs must do their best to avoid generalized overviews and address the individual interests of their many stakeholders. To support this point, he shared a screenshot outlining the variety of reports in LeanIX’s poster: “How to Answer the Top Questions of Enterprise Architecture Stakeholders”.
Emphasize strategic planning
EA is about streamlining future plans in ways that somehow balance the conflicting methods for strategic planning in organizations. To help, LeanIX provides specific functionality for the use cases most relevant to their clients, such as: Application Portfolio Management; Technology & Risk Management; IT Security & Privacy; Integration & Data; and IT Finance Management. For each of these subjects, the tool extends dynamic configurability in its reports to accommodate individual preferences.
Focus on business outcomes
EA practices need to be "pragmatic" and "practical" to ensure business outcomes are aligned to the innovation from IT. Using the LeanIX data model, Stanley showed how easy it is for EAs to model meaningful, outcome-focused pathways between IT and business.
Use capabilities to connect businesses and IT
In tandem with the point above, Business Capabilities are essential for Citadel Group when bridging the gap between business and IT. Through LeanIX, fully-configurable business capability maps can be built in ways that pinpoint key value differentiators for organizations and make plain where to prioritize investments.
Develop and retain high-caliber talent
In Citadel’s experience, both internally and with clients, the learning resources from the LeanIX Academy are a great way to show what’s possible with the tool and for fast-tracking product training.
“LeanIX Awards” - André Christ (CEO and Co-Founder, LeanIX) and Christian Richter (SVP Customer Success, LeanIX)
The LeanIX Awards is a chance for LeanIX to pay special mention to customer success with the tool — and this year, there were four recipients in four different categories:
“Fastest Time to Value”: Vale
Vale’s Marcelo Menard, Global Enterprise Architecture Manager, accepted the award and discussed how his team’s use of LeanIX was borne out of a desire for more visibility, consistency, and sustainability in its IT processes. In order to expedite the adoption and implementation of the tool, they focused entirely on their main use cases and provided top-line training to those who could most benefit from its success. Ownership was distributed, he explained, and accountability was thereafter established — the fundamentals of any agile strategy.
“Best Collaborator”: Barmer
Bernd Homburg and Marek Odwarko, IT Enterprise Architects at Barmer, praised LeanIX for allowing them to diversify their EA program and collect new perspectives on its IT strategy. Barmer uses the tool to pursue improvements that were once impossible to accomplish via traditional EA means, and by using workshops and coaching sessions, application owners are taught how to gather serviceable information for growing their repository. Their advice on how to best collaborate? "Be brave! Don’t shy away from asking for the data you want — and take advantage of the LeanIX interface itself to make the job easier."
“Fastest Global Roll Out”: Tokio Marine Group
Steven Hanney, SVP & CTO, Tokio Marine North America Services, explained to the audiences that the primary challenge addressed via LeanIX was facilitating data exchanges between all corners of the organization and setting each up in clear use cases divided by global units. Partnerships were mapped out quite quickly, and collaboration between the company’s architectural teams was accelerated by putting forward tangible (i.e., data-driven) points of convergence.
“Strongest Innovator”: Hermes
Marcel Morisse, Enterprise Architect at Hermes, accepted the award on behalf of his group and credited the innovative potential of LeanIX’s integrations and collaborative mechanisms for their success. A company of 15,300 worldwide employees and 2,000 varying suppliers, their innovation efforts with the tool centered on automating data updates and using the LeanIX Integration API. The two LeanIX executives praised especially Hermes' use of the out-of-the-box integrations to Signavio and Apptio.
Keynote
“10x DNA. The Mindset of the Future” - Frank Thelen (Tech Investor & Entrepreneur)
Resident of Bonn and tech investor extraordinaire, Frank Thelen took the stage to give his thoughts on the technology putting the global community on “hyperchange” mode. Disruptive technology is opening markets that more and more businesses are investing their futures on, a trend which Thelen guaranteed will accelerate exponentially in the coming months — or perhaps in just the next days.
Thelen's predictions on which technology will fundamentally alter businesses in the near future include:
- Robotics will become more integrated into our daily life
- 3D-Printing will scale exponentially and “go mainstream” to enable, for the first time, AI-built materials unrecognizable to the human eye
- 5G is bringing higher-quality cloud services in more trusted ways to mobile networks
- Blockchain, or distributed ledgers, is giving users more reasons to trust storing their data in decentralized locations
- AI will continue becoming more sophisticated but nonetheless require government intervention to regulate its use
- Quantum Computing is still in its infancy yet is already surpassing what was once thought possible
- Gene editing is being actively experimented with by countries worldwide and is poised to advance despite ethical concerns
- Brain chips, akin to what is being pioneered by Elon Musk, are arriving sooner than we think
Thelen singled out business leaders in Europe and implored them to do what they can to grasp the ethical and economic implications of these technologies. Politicians can’t be expected to grasp these concepts alone, he explained, and in order to help governments and the public set appropriate levers to ensure that traditional industries aren’t lost, those in attendance at EACD were encouraged to do what they can to make sure technological opportunities remain in reach.
Spotlight
“Process Automation at DHL Global Forwarding” - Frank Schüler, Managing Director Global Service Center (GSC), DHL Global Forwarding, Freight
Process automation in the freight division of DHL Global Forwarding (DGF) is accomplished through a calculated mixture of virtual and human interaction. To show how oversight is maintained into these networks of human and robot workforces, Frank Schüler, Managing Director at DHL Global Forwarding, Freight, took EACD audiences on a behind-the-scenes tour of his company’s novel approach for regulating human-robot processes.
Schüler discussed the “Idea2Robot” framework — a methodology encompassing the tools and patterns for DHL DGF’s entire automation journey — which is in heavy use at the DHL Global Service Center (GSC). This framework binds all of DHL DGF’s automation processes (incidents, change, innovation, etc.) and functions as a guiding light during configurations and ongoing sprint-based planning. Schüler explained that his group is in the process of pooling skills and datasets from throughout DHL DGF’s global environments to create a holistic service management platform with the potential to “achieve operational effectiveness across the augmented workforce”.
Spotlight
“The Best of Both Worlds: Why Process Excellence is Vital to Enterprise Architecture” - Gero Decker (Co-Founder & CEO, Signavio)
Gero Decker, Co-Founder & CEO of Signavio, caught the morning’s first flight from Berlin to Bonn to attend EACD 2020 and discuss his company’s renowned approach to business process management (BPM). In the eleven years since starting his company, Decker has witnessed the BPM discipline enter the vocabulary of enterprises worldwide.
This growth, he explained, is largely due to the fact that the popular desire for technological efficiency almost always clashes with the inherently “un-intuitive” nature of technology itself. Further, despite customer-centricity being de rigueur for today’s agile companies, businesses have only been capable of utilizing technology to properly do so in the past decade. Its factors like these which bring the benefits of Signavio's BPM software into focus for businesses of all types.
Interestingly, Decker told how companies from traditional industries like dairy have been especially receptive to enabling process excellence with Signavio. These businesses understand very clearly that processes are the gateway to seeing technology’s overlap to business in tangible ways and thereafter improving efficiency overall.
The presentation concluded with a discussion on how process excellence is the root of automation itself. But in order to truly scale up the technology and “industrialize” the approach, Decker cites the work of those like Frank Schüler as perfect examples of how vital it is to surgically perform process optimization at all layers of a business.
Successful Governance for the Multi-Cloud World
“5 Ways to Ruin Your Hybrid Cloud Setup” - Torben Jaster (IT Infrastructure & Cloud Consultant), Michelle Niedernhuber (Product Marketing Manager, LeanIX), Daniel Neumann (Staff Software Engineer, LeanIX
In a conversation with Daniel Neumann, Staff Software Engineer at LeanIX, and Toben Jaster, IT Infrastructure & Cloud Consultant, common shortcomings to cloud migrations and governance strategies were covered. A key theme of their conversation was uncertainty and imprecision, especially so in terms of overall cloud spend and hosting strategies.
In brief, here were Neumann and Jaster’s picks for how to ruin any well-intentioned hybrid cloud setup:
- Moving applications to the cloud at random without following a cloud adoption framework
- “Lifting” but not “shifting” applications
- Not providing centralized knowledge and launching cloud projects via dispersed teams unfamiliar with one another
- Inadequate tagging strategy/policy
- Overburdened and out-of-date CMDBs
For his part, Jaster cautioned audiences not to think of the cloud as simply another infrastructure bucket to dump resources into. Like anything else, an active governance strategy is needed and enterprises can’t simply will synergies into existence. A cloud center of excellence is recommended — one headed by a team of designated guardians and connected via a tool like LeanIX Cloud Intelligence.
As Jaster explained, LeanIX Cloud Intelligence contains functionality to automate and simplify data discovery on cloud components from leading providers. Tools like this embed structures to cloud environments while anchoring teams to repeatable processes and inventories of contextualized data.
“Microservices — The Good, The Not So Good, and the Ugly” - Ramesh Nagamalli (Senior Key Expert, Siemens)
Over the years, the evolution of software application architectures has moved from modular/distributed monoliths and being service-oriented into that of microservices — an architectural style for building distributed systems and characterized by independently deployable, modular services. The benefits of microservices range from good to excellent, but nonetheless, Ramesh Nagamalli, a Senior Key Expert at Siemens, used his presentation to shed light on the oft-overlooked consequences of the technology.
Based on Nagamalli’s experiences with the technology, microservices necessitate new approaches to monitoring and troubleshooting, more agile forms of dependency management, and a way to efficiently test integrations and perform source code management. Users must make sure that services are in accordance to the requirements of central systems, and when an application model is decomposed into decoupled services, there arises a heightened risk for failure that should be addressed with architectural design patterns such as: Domain-Driven Design; Event Sourcing; CQRS; Saga; and Message-Oriented.
To embrace the technology and counteract the operational complexity gained as a result of deploying many microservices, better observability is required.
“We need to have black belts in observability in order to tackle distributed systems operations,” said Nagamalli. And to do so, he proposed a strategy based on metrics, alerts, logs, and traces — each of which can be performed using the functionality of LeanIX Microservices Intelligence, a tool:
- Fully based on Kubernetes and Azure Cloud
- Already experiencing more than 120lk logins per month
- Run by 16 engineering teams based in Bonn, Germany and Hyderabad, India
- PHP-based monolith to > 30 microservices
Visualizing Complex IT Systems to Drive Better Decisions
“Microservices @ LeanIX — Then, Now, and Tomorrow” - Per Bernhardt (Staff Software Engineer, LeanIX) and Dominik Rose (Director Customer Success Engineering, LeanIX)
Fittingly, LeanIX’s Dominik Rose (Director Customer Success Engineering) and Per Bernhardt (Staff Software Engineer) arrived on stage after Nagamalli to share several customer-based perspectives on LeanIX Microservices Intelligence. The two emphasized that microservices only really work when paired with clear objectives, and by using LeanIX Microservices Intelligence, a clear boundary is scoped to ensure enterprises don’t fall into the trap of “deployment monoliths”.
From a business perspective, Rose made it clear that monoliths are an unavoidable element of any fast-scaling business and take time to dismantle. Patience is needed, and though autonomy is a perennial target for business efficiency, it takes a great deal of time to establish systems of observability over iterative software designs. That being said, Rose recommended that teams do their best to measure qualities like “Mean Time to Recovery”, “Deployment Frequency”, “Lead Time”, and “Failure Rate”.
The two ended their presentation by giving EACD audiences a closer look at LeanIX Microservices Intelligence and how the tool can perform such qualitative measurements on microservices. With ways to conform to the diversity of technologies used by developers, the tool provides visibility for development teams while also guaranteeing that information conforms to data security standards. Rose pointed out how useful this can be when making decisions on the trade-offs common to any microservices development and deployment process.
“Reimagine Customer Experience Through Cloud” - Niklas Sundberg (Chief Information Officer, ASSA ABLOY)
How does ASSA ABLOY use LeanIX to manage its vast application landscape as well as utilize cloud to enable new business opportunities? Niklas Sunberg, Chief Information Officer at ASSA ABLOY Global Solutions, offered a brief introduction to his company’s journey to creating digital twins out of its physical security products.
Since 1994 the company’s IT landscape has consistently undergone change as a result of acquisitions (250 and counting, by Sundberg's estimate). In recent years, however, a fleet EA Management tool like LeanIX has become an absolutely indispensable weapon in their efforts to perform efficient post-merger integrations. But apart from this, Sundberg discussed how LeanIX has helped his team employ faster ways to navigate the challenges of enabling the so-called “subscription economy”. The key to this business model is creating and packaging products as fast as possible, and in order to do so, an ERP system alone can't be relied upon. Sundberg shared that LeanIX supports the operations of its digital factory — a cornerstone of its customer-facing digital products & solutions — and helps make the following a reality:
- An “always on” customer experience
- Going digital at scale
- The convergence of R&D & IT
“LeanIX + Lucidchart: Taking Visualization and Collaboration to the Next Level” - Brint Markle (Director of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships, Lucidchart)
Make no mistake: focus and visualization are the first steps to success. Brint Markle, Director of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships at Lucidchart, explained in clear and direct terms just how foundational better modeling is when charting future-state architectures and optimizing data interfaces. Together, Lucidchart and LeanIX empower organizations to visualize, understand, and optimize their enterprise architecture. 20% of LeanIX's users, he reports, are already taking advantage of the integration with his company’s tool, and, in the short amount of time that the integration has been available, are taking full advantage of its templates and shape libraries to:
- Easily visualize processes and understand information and data flows
- Monitor and improve systems and architecture
- Design and document complex applications and systems in one source of truth
- Share their visions of systems and networks with key stakeholders and non-technical users
“Visualization of EA Data — KPIs Within LeanIX” - Benjamin Häußler (Senior Professional, Enterprise Architecture Management, Schwarz IT) and Christian Vogel (Director of Enterprise Architecture, incowia)
A large part of Benjamin Häußler’s (Senior Professional - Enterprise Architecture Management, Schwarz IT) role at Schwarz IT, the central IT Service Provider for some of Germany’s largest retail groups, is concerned with generating transparency. LeanIX powers Schwarz IT’s central platform for managing architecture transformation and is a core component of its KPI-driven approach to making IT architecture quantifiable and more visible. Häußler took the time to share two LeanIX dashboard reports that are particularly useful for this purpose — “Quality of the landscape documentation” and “Dependencies and redundancies” — and which were both designed by incowia GmbH, a certified LeanIX Partner and active contributor to the LeanIX Store.
Through the ongoing assistance of incowia and its reports, Schwarz IT is able to narrow workspace data into default filtering capabilities perfect for a variety of KPIs. These reports can be unlocked by different stakeholder groups and stored within personal dashboards. Moreover, as illustrated in a live demonstration by incowia’s own Christian Vogel, Director Enterprise Architecture, the data from the reports can be split into two sections: "Key Numbers" (i.e., a quantitative KPIs displaying results as a number) and "Data Qualities & Assessments" (i.e., a qualitative KPIs displaying results as a “speed-o-meter”).
Keynote
“Lessons From Space on How to Succeed in a World of Rapid Change” - Mike Massimino (Astronaut, NASA)
Having seen our planet from afar, Mike Massimino, a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University and a former NASA astronaut, has developed a unique perspective on the merits of teamwork that resonated with EACD audiences. Even though no one in the attendance could perfectly relate to his memories of repairing technologies in orbit or fighting for contact with mission control, it wasn’t hard for listeners to draw a parallel between being stranded in space and that of a misaligned EA program.
Massimino’s success when training in the NASA space program was judged entirely on the achievements his team made as a whole. Since personal glory takes second place to the galaxy of interests (and resources) tied up in any given space mission, he and his classmates were demanded to collaborate with one another in order to progress through the program in unison. This meant getting over fears faster than Massimino initially wanted, communicating to others more regularly, and learning how to put faith in others while accepting more accountability for himself.
Interestingly, while stationed behind the desk at NASA headquarters and awaiting his first spacewalk, these elements of teamwork were pushed to the limit before Massimino even hit the thermosphere. Here, Massimino was required to give 24/7 support to astronauts in orbit, a responsibility that proved to him that relationships and trust could be formed at a distance. Day in and out, the astronaut kept his far-flung teammates in the loop in whatever way he could to make sure that their needs were being addressed. The work might not have been as glorious as what soon awaited him but it nonetheless had a direct consequence on the collective success of the mission.
Massimino ended his presentation by encouraging others to recognize their ability to influence the central strategies of their organizations — which, for an audience full of EAs, was not a hard stretch to make. “Be mission control for those that need you,” he said. “Though we enjoyed our time as astronauts and our moments in space quite a bit, our job at the end of the day was to help others see the beauty of our planet and the big picture.”
“LeanIX Update, Product Launches & Outlook” – André Christ (CEO and Co-Founder, LeanIX)
It’s so far been an incredible year of growth for LeanIX. Passing the 300-customer mark, receiving $80 million in Series D funding from Goldman Sachs, and opening two additional global offices (Munich, Germany and Utrecht, Netherlands): LeanIX CEO André Christ used his keynote address to give the global EA community an update on the evolution of his company while unveiling a long-awaited tool capable of helping organizations hit new milestones themselves.
Launching September 30, the LeanIX Business Transformation Management (BTM) module is a key piece of LeanIX’s wider suite of products. As André explained, BTM provides end-to-end visibility, governance, and speed to cover several essential stages of any IT modernization journey — in particular, the planning and execution phases.
Giving cloud transformation management as an overarching example, André demonstrated BTM’s value and its complementary offerings in the context of the larger LeanIX product line in eight steps:
Assessing Cloud Readiness
- Building EA inventories and collecting data in surveys
- Analyzing migration strategy by application
Planning & Executing Migration
- Modeling migration strategies as impacts (*new BTM module)
- Aligning dependencies in transformation roadmap (*new BTM module)
- Project the future state of the application landscape (*new BTM module
Establishing Cloud Governance
- Track aggregated cloud KPIs on the dashboard
- View details and violations for cloud services
- Mitigate architecture issues (e.g., technology risk)
For details on LeanIX BTM, here’s a white paper detailing how the new module works and the functionality it provides for gaining transparency into IT and business transformations.
Better Visibility of IT Costs for Data-Driven Investment Results
“How Costing and Enterprise Architecture Solutions Make Better Decision Together” - Greg Holmes (Regional Vice President, Pre-Sales, EMEA, Apptio)
As Regional Vice President, Pre-Sales at Apptio, Greg Holmes knows the demand for IT cost savings fully well. But as demonstrated in his presentation, his experience with Apptio and the world of IT Financial Management (ITFM) has helped him realize that his product’s universal applicability stems from the basic truth that business disruption is eternal and “organizational fitness” through cost re-structuring is the surest way back to stability. In any crisis, he observes, budget cuts are employed to offset falling profit margins and CFOs attempt to optimize strategic initiatives in more resource-friendly manners
Holmes views this perpetual state of chaos as a reason for EAs to leverage data-driven tools more habitually to:
- Prioritize the most impactful applications, services, and technology
- Remove and reduce redundant technology
- Building integrations that increase output
- Align technology choices to new ways of working
- Ensure applications meet regulatory and operational needs
Specifically, with the LeanIX-Apptio integration, EAs have more opportunities than ever to take situations of unparalleled uncertainty as a chance to re-evaluate their technology portfolios for the better. To help, Holmes summarized the following as ways to help organizations “become fit to thrive”:
- Prioritize the most impactful applications, services, and technologies
- Remove and reduce redundant technology
- Build integrations that increase output
- Align technology choices to new ways of working
- Ensure applications meet regulatory and operational needs
EA powered through LeanIX serves as the enabler of cost transparency, and with ITFM through Apptio, more datasets can be brought together to accelerate this five-point list. With EA data, requirements can be flagged and distinguished according to region or industry, and through ITFM, redundant applications can be considered for consolidation to truly see whether applications can meet company-mandated requirements.
“Combining the Power of EAM & IT Controlling: The Apptio-LeanIX Integration at Hermes Germany” - Marcel Morisse (Enterprise Architect, Hermes Germany) and Daniel Selbach (Product Marketing Manager, LeanIX)
In conversation with LeanIX, Marcel Morisse, Enterprise Architect at Hermes Germany, showed audiences how his team excels at using Apptio. Though Hermes had chosen Apptio as its ITFM tool of choice, it was soon realized that EA data was needed to link Apptio's reporting to deliver more precise architectural insights. The integration between LeanIX and Apptio has since been automated and now provides seamless exchanges of information between the tools. In a stunning display of efficiency, Morisse revealed that there is no longer any manual effort required to generate the answers senior management needs to address application sprawl.
Hermes' future use of the integration will involve taking full advantage of the LeanIX-Apptio Advanced Integration to facilitate even more tangible interactions inside Apptio itself. Of note, Morisse hopes to give users more customized views of application costs and use it as a companion during their wider IT-business harmonization strategy.
“Information Security: A Benefit-Oriented Use Case for EAM” - Clemens Schwarz (CISO / IT Security Officer, Messe München) and Inge Hanschke (General Manager, Lean42)
In a presentation hosted by Lean42 General Manager Inge Hansche, Clemense Schwarz, a CISO / IT Security Officer from Messe München, introduced audiences to LeanIX’s role in his company’s digital business. Messe München is the operator of the Neue Messe München exhibition center, the ICM Internationales Congress Center München, and the MOC Veranstaltungscenter München, and in order to keep one of Europe’s premier exhibition spaces fit for business, Schwarz's team depends on highly-streamlined risk analysis.
Thanks to LeanIX and the support of Lean42, Schwarz and Hanschke were able to elevate information security management for:
- Faster evaluation of reusable assets
- Tool-assisted assessment of security requirements
- Comprehensive ad hoc risk analysis across ISM and EAM elements
- Support in carrying out control activities and information security management
Architecting for Resilience
“Supporting Information Security Management with LeanIX” - Kai Höfler, Enterprise Architect, DKMS / Dennis Endert, Manager IT Governance, Risk & Compliance, DKMS
The role of LeanIX at DKMS, an international nonprofit bone marrow donor center, was a story very much worth sharing with the global EA community. Kai Höfler (Enterprise Architect, DKMS) and Dennis Endert (Manager for IT-Security, Governance, Risk & Compliance, DKMS) imparted lessons on how to save time when connecting essential business data to varying corporate functions. But instead of trying to do everything for everyone, Höfler and Endert used the EA model of LeanIX as the basis for its ISMS efforts and used the EA Management tool to isolate the shared needs of everyone via attribute tags relating to confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
The two presented a step-by-step breakdown on the inheritance of information classification which was used as the foundation for DKMS’s security policies and checklists — one each for IT components, applications, and interfaces. Of note, the process that LeanIX helped institute is easily repeatable when performing tasks variously relating from management (via lifecycle management) to modeling Technical and Organizational Measures (via Provider tagging) to linking security concepts (via resources in fact sheets).
“Modern Integration Architecture” - Philipp Wagner (Manager, Technology Strategy & Transformation, Deloitte) and Gabor Vincze (Manager, Technology Strategy & Architecture, Deloitte)
Two representatives from Deloitte Consulting — Philipp Wagner (Manager, Technology Strategy & Transformation) and Gabor Vincze (Manager, Technology Strategy & Architecture) — took to the stage to share a case study on integration management with LeanIX. The client in this consultation sought to establish a modern integration architecture capable of generating:
- Opportunities for different consumers to access client source data
- Holistic API management with a common governance structure
- A data virtualization layer for interconnectivity across different domains and systems
- A set of future proven technologies
- A trusted platform that controls the access and approval workflow to data across all departments or regions
And Deloitte’s solutions for doing so were based on three central hypotheses: (1) that SAP technologies could integrate the client use cases, long-term, and with the future proven technologies wanted; (2) MuleSoft could represent a long-term solution to cover all requirements for integrations; and (3) MuleSoft could also be combined with SAP technologies to cover the client use cases, long-term, with future proven technologies.
To prove this, Deloitte used LeanIX to model combinations of the above scenarios so the client could gain a clear understanding of how it might best reach the target modern integration architecture. The benefits and shortcomings of displaying this information via LeanIX were summarized by Vincze and Wagner as follows:
- By modeling the API integration as an IT component, they were able to create a direct link to the applications connected to the middleware without needed to “double-model”. One of the drawbacks of doing so, however, was that there was no way of showing connections between individual middleware instances.
- By modeling API integration as an application, they could provide visibility across most LeanIX reports given that the reports themselves are application-centric. Doing so unfortunately meant double-modeling middleware application as an IT component in order to enable a technology matrix and landscape report.
- By modeling the integration architecture with a point-to-interface (an approach that’s essential for legacy interfaces), they benefitted from a clearer way of defining the ownership of applications and being able to add manual interfaces relevant from a business standpoint.
“Building a Resilient Enterprise (With EA)” - David Torre (Business Technology and Engineering Consultant, Center Mast)
David Torre, Business Technology and Engineering Consultant at Center Mast, used his slot at EACD to speak directly about how IT can respond to a crisis. “Knowing how to re-calibrate after disaster is essential,” said Torre, “one way of doing so is by thinking very clearly and practically about what your customers, audiences, or decision makers may need. There’s always a green flag — there’s always one semblance of calm.”
Torre likened EA to a beacon of stability, and in order to make his comparison apt, he utilizes the following as guiding principles in his practice:
- The value of EA must be crystal clear — or else tough decisions get made
- EA cannot be viewed as solely a strategic function. There should be immediate, tactical value as well
- Leadership focus constricts down in order to focus on what really matters.
- Leaders need information and options in order to make prompt decisions. This is where EA can shine
Thankfully, there are immediate ways for doing so that don’t require reinventing the wheel. For starters, insights can become more results-driven and opinion-based to give palatable directions to overstretched executives. Traditional EA artifacts (e.g., business model canvases, capability maps, etc.) can be elevated into “crisis-mode” tools such as business risk registers, executive onboarding dossiers. Additionally, common EA information can be converted into crisis-mode insights wherein transformation options are limited and directives quantified and clear.
Spotlight
“LeanIX: LeanIX Product Update” - Jan Puzicha, LeanIX
In tandem with André Christ’s presentation, LeanIX CTO Jan Puzicha’s presentation at EACD took a look at Q2 and Q3 product releases and the future roadmap of the company.
LeanIX Self-Configuration
With LeanIX Self-Configuration, data displayed in Fact Sheet types can be customized to individual customer needs. The latest improvements to Self-Configuration now offer admins the possibility of creating, changing the order of, or deleting sections and subsections. Subsections can also be moved between sections. For every section or subsection, admins can define whether to show or hide it from the view for users. Further, admins can now create fields on relations and fields of type "string" can now be rendered as a date. If this option is chosen, a date picker will be provided on the Fact Sheet.
LeanIX Surveys
The LeanIX Survey Power Features have been further improved to support a new type of survey question called "Fact Sheet element". This question type allows users to define single Fact Sheet elements such as fields, tag groups, and subscriptions as the survey answer. In particular, Fact Sheet fields of type "string" or "single-select" can be chosen in Fact Sheet fields, Tag groups, and Subscriptions.
Selected Fact Sheet elements in the survey response are saved in the Survey tab and on the Fact Sheet itself as soon as the survey has been finalized by the recipient. Also, the values are shown as answers in any survey export and changes are reflected in the Last Update tab alike every other Fact Sheet change.
LeanIX Self-Service Portal
The LeanIX Self-Service Portal — a web portal that can be configured for better coordinating IT support and software/hardware orders via contextualized overviews of technology landscapes — has been restructured to improve the usability of the portal setup. Among many others, admins now have tabs such as “Status”, “Localization”, and “Detailed View” to provide detailed overviews of approved and available-for-order software. LeanIX Self-Service Portal was released earlier in 2020, but following these latest improvements, users can take advantage of even more customization elements to display applications and IT components based on key parts of LeanIX Fact Sheets themselves.
Flexera + LeanIX
In the past several months, LeanIX has heard many unfortunate complaints about data missing in Technopedia components. Now, with a “Missing in Technopedia” button added, users can immediately report data gaps and get this omitted information within one week.
These updates are all tied to the strategic 2020 theme of becoming more actionable. In terms of both the Enterprise Architecture Suite and the Cloud Native Suite, this means:
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IT Transformation – Planning for the Business
“Architecture for Business Transformation: Process Over Capabilities” — Martin Wieschollek, (Team Lead Enterprise Architecture, C&A)
C&A is a European fashion retailer with a long history of changing the world of fashion. In the past ten years, this has been particularly evident in its strong omni-channel presence. As a means of background, Martin Wieschollek, Team Lead Enterprise Architecture at C&A, revealed their efforts have so far been a result of becoming more flexible in terms of processes and systems.
He explained how, as part of a much wider end-to-end process transformation roadmap, C&A is utilizing LeanIX to carry out the initial stages of their strategy and for designing their target architecture.
Step 1: Process application mapping
- An end-to-end business process framework with each business process documented in Signavio
- Process owners on both business and IT sides were nominated to align to the processes
- Applications of strategic partners were mapped to each process in LeanIX
Step 2: Designing the flow
- Based on best practices and application standards, the target business processes were defined.
- The objectives of this included validating new processes, getting process owner buy-in, confirming application fit, and cementing business cases
Step 3: Integration Architecture in LeanIX with SIPOC
- Output-driven analysis of suppliers (appliction), inputs (interface/data), processes (applications + capabilities), outputs (interfaces/data) and customers (applications) (SIPOC) based on the entities of the LeanIX data model
Step 4: Refine the architecture
- According the overall fit of processes and application to target operations model
- According to gaps in applications to target processes
- According to overlaps and redundancies in applications
Step 5: Publish target architecture v1.0
- Stronger positioning during vendor negotiations with more transparency on C&A needs and architectural discussions with vendors
- Optimized integration architecture to reduce TCO of target landscape and increase overall flexibility
- One version of the truth
For more information on the success of C&A with an EA Management tool, take a look at their LeanIX Success Story: "A Greenfield Approach to IT Modernization with C&A and LeanIX".
“A Closer Look at the LeanIX BTM Module” - Johannes Wilden (Lead Product Manager, LeanIX)
A highly-anticipated presentation exclusively about the LeanIX Business Transformation Management (BTM) module was given by Johannes Wilden, Lead Product Manager at LeanIX. To show the product’s benefits, his presentation was divided into three sections highlighting BTM’s versatility:
1. Plan: High-level scenarios
From corporate strategies to business objectives, BTM
presents a collection of functionality to help EAs assess “as-is” IT architectural landscapes before embarking on business transformations. Business objective “hotspots” can be identified within a series of unique landscape reports and the maturity of a company’s services can be tracked to help prioritize transformation needs. These objectives can be broken down into further IT initiatives to faithfully model architectural change via high-level scenarios.
2. Decide: Data-driven
In addition to dedicated reports for showing real-time insights on the costs of transformation costs, architectural changes can be projected on IT landscapes via impact modeling. Impacts let users foresee the outcomes of initiatives and evaluate how IT entities will change as a result. Users do not need to actually set attributes live in LeanIX to build these impact models.
3. Execute: Keeping track
BTM users can collaboratively monitor strategic objectives using methods like in GitHub plus update attributes in inventories in summary once changes occur. Interactive timelines are available within the majority of reports in the module to see the shape of future architectures at a glance.
“Transformation Management @ Coca-Cola European Partners” – Andreas Nold (Director Enterprise Architecture, Coca-Cola)
Coca-Cola European Partners was established in 2016 and was formed out of three very dissimilar groups. As such, its initial IT landscape was characterized by diverse data definitions, a fragmented and aged landscape, and a diversity of processes across geographies.
Andreas Nold, Director Enterprise Architecture at Coca-Cola European Partners, told audiences that a program was set up right away to try and enable common ways of working via a Business Capability Programme (BCP). It took place on four levels:
- Business Capability Maturity Assessment
- Application and Infrastructure Building Blocks
- Scenario Planning
- Roadmap
Their structured plan won Nord and his team considerable buy-in from senior managers and allowed the group to proceed in an unfettered manner. For a brief moment, however, since LeanIX was not able to accomplish the company’s intricate transformation needs, they developed for themselves an "operationalized" transformation management framework encompassing maturity assessments, EA dependency analyses, and sequencing diagrams. Of note, in a true testament to LeanIX’s customer-centric approach to product development, Nord’s transformation management framework functioned as a guiding light for the development of LeanIX’s Business Transformation Management module.
Nold closed his presentation by explaining how the methodologies he and his team developed for business transformation — in which EA and LeanIX serves as the nucleus — has made Coca-Cola’s European Partners better positioned to monitor, track, and realize transformation.
“Data Flow as Essential HR Transformation Enabler” — Bernardo Tarillion (Senior Manager Enterprise Architecture, Magna)
Bernado Tarillion, Senior Manager, Enterprise Architecture at Magna, focused his presentation on the evolution of EA at his company. Though Tarillion hopes to reach a stage wherein heatmaps can identify, prioritize, and lead future-state architectures, he and his teammates are currently leveraging EA to map applications to capabilities and establish data flows for “in-flight” projects.
With LeanIX, Tarillion’s EA program functions as guardians of the company’s data to showcase in crystal-clear ways all potential conflicts to their business development. In particular, optimizing HR — a department with extensive documentation and disparate data sources — has been a prime opportunity to implement improved data flows with LeanIX and help others to understand:
- Which system is the source of data
- What data is transported through which interface
- Where data will be created, modified, and consumed
- What interface technology is used (e.g., point-to-point, middleware, etc.)
- Identify data redundancies/conflicts
- Document and visualize functional design and reflect functional decisions
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