During our recent event in New York, Christian Richter, VP of Customer Success outlined steps for successful adoption of EA tools. With more than 50,000 users across 120+ customers, the LeanIX team has seen the ups and downs of EA tool deployment. With this foundational knowledge, Christian offered up a pragmatic 3-stage approach to speeding time to value with LeanIX. 
Accelerate
When deploying any new tool, quick wins are essential to show an investment is worthwhile. For this reason, it’s important to stay focused. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Choose 1-2 projects to start and prove value quickly. Once projects are chosen, think transparency and enablement. To empower users across business lines, use visualizations in modeling to make data relevant to all stakeholders. Build bridges between business and IT operations, by using intuitive tooling (remember: LeanIX is not the only tool business owners are asked to use, so make sure you are clear in the importance of data inputs and highlighting how this will make their lives easier in the long-run).
Growth
Once you’ve conquered acceleration and proven first value, it’s time to scale. Start by creating a comprehensive user base. Differentiate between consumers (user who will benefit from outputs) and contributors (users who have meaningful information to add). Then, establish ownership and governance. Be clear in allocation of responsibilities - assigning individual ownering for specific applications is a good place to start the conversation. Once you have a user-base established, it’s important to plan ahead on training and support. In the acceleration phase, it will be easy to host individual or small group training sessions. However, with hundreds of users, this task will become increasingly time intensive. Christian recommends building self-service training modules - either by video or webinar.
Develop
With the necessary levels of transparency created in the acceleration and growth phase, LeanIX becomes a single source of truth relevant for nearly all IT management decisions within the organization. As the EA lead, you can see all data residing in the tool and have the power to make transformative strategic decisions saving the business a significant amount of time and IT cost, while improving efficiencies across the business.
This is a goldmine for your CIO. Show them where the business risks lie, which mission-critical applications are nearing end of life and where money is being wasted on unused applications. Be proactive about presenting strategic options on how each of these should be handled. Set, track, and re-evaluate KPIs often, highlighting key factors for success throughout the process.
One development use-case for many LeanIX users is in enabling cloud transformation. With a clear, accurate view into the application landscape, EA’s can definitively show where the organization can realize quick wins and, conversely, where hurdles exist.
For more on how to drive quick value and make your EA tool adoption a success, see Christian’s full presentation here.
