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
Keynotes
Spotlight
Successful Governance for the Multi-Cloud World
Visualizing Complex IT Systems to Drive Better Decisions
Better Visibility of IT Costs for Data-Driven Investment Results
Architecting for Resilience
IT Transformation – Planning for the Business
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.
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:
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.
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:
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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."
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.
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.
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:
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.
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”.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
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”).
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.”
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
Planning & Executing Migration
Establishing Cloud Governance
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.
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:
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”:
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.
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.
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:
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).
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:
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:
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:
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.
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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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
Step 2: Designing the flow
Step 3: Integration Architecture in LeanIX with SIPOC
Step 4: Refine the architecture
Step 5: Publish target architecture v1.0
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 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.
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:
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.
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: