How Innogy SE Uses LeanIX and Apptio to Enable Cost Transparency

Reducing IT costs is a top priority for all organizations — and that's no different for Innogy SE, one of Germany’s leading energy companies. With 21 million energy and commodity customers and a €12 billion asset grid, Innogy SE's Christian Schürmann, Team Lead, Demand & Project Portfolio Management, revealed how his company merges enterprise architecture (EA) and IT financial management (ITFM) to enable cost transparency across its dynamic IT landscape.

The company-wide “Transparency@IT” initiative, Schürmann explained, was formed in 2017 and involves a cross-departmental team of experts to review Innogy SE’s existing data models and tools to design a more integrated solution prior to and during their merger into E.ON SE. Like many other large companies with legacy systems and many re-structuring measures, Innogy SE aimed to use the initiative to bring as much clarity as possible to servers (e.g., ownership, applications supported, who can provide security updates, etc.) as well as provide better versions of the following:

• Information security (to receive insights on and strengthen critical IT)
• Operational efficiency (to support the reduction of incidents with a well-documented and transparent IT landscape)
• End-to-end cost flow (to enable IT and business for “insight hunting” and deliver more cost efficient IT services)

Before its Transparency@IT initiative, Innogy SE had been using Apptio as its go-to platform for reviewing IT costs — an IT Finance Management tool with such a high degree of technical depth that Schürmann likened it to “magic”. But even Apptio, he explained, needs an information backbone to work effectively, one reflecting real-time, up-to-date data extending throughout the entire IT value chain. In particular, Innogy SE needed to know exactly which IT business service consumed what proportion of IT resources — and this is where the company found a perfect use case for applying LeanIX’s data-driven forms of enterprise architecture management to drive total IT cost transparency.

Figure 1
General introduction to automated data flow Between Apptio and LeanIX

Source: LeanIX GmbH

Schürmann revealed that LeanIX functions as a single source of truth for IT data exchanged between two key Transparency@IT objects: (1) IT Resource Towers and (2) IT Business Services. Here, in addition to out-of-the-box LeanIX features for documenting the service lifecycles of active applications or those used in test or development environments, Innogy SE implemented custom-made LeanIX Fact Sheets related to applications underlying company-specific services and offerings.

With this information segmented, the items were to be automatically translated into the ServiceNow CMDB via a LeanIX-ServiceNow integration to become further defined via attributes like configuration items and support groups. On a weekly basis, these same objects were to then be processed automatically by Apptio via a LeanIX-Apptio integration — including special attributes such as contribution keys — to deconstruct and contextualize the diversity of IT costs related to any business service.

In order to ensure that their LeanIX-Apptio integration was outputting absolutely accurate information, Innogy SE created a “Fallout Report” in Apptio to pinpoint if and where improved mapping was required. With clear insights on where linkages need to be tightened between, say, installations (environment of an application related to a Configuration Item) and their various installation compositions (collection of these environments), or applications and their business service offerings, the wide-ranging benefits of such a report is why Innogy SE runs a weekly update of Apptio (as opposed to most other companies who do so monthly). This process was heavily dependent on how well existing data in Innogy SE’s IT inventory was maintained (or “cleaned up”), a task involving regular correspondence with those offering differing architectural, commercial, and technical viewpoints.

Seamless interaction with a variety of stakeholders is nonetheless the essence of modern IT management, and thanks to the collaborative and accessible functionality of LeanIX, Innogy SE was able to make maintaining its IT inventory — from the acquisition of data onwards — a straight-forward and shared task for each of these parties. With the LeanIX-Apptio integration running, Innogy SE is able to ensure that they receive correct data and thus enable full IT cost transparency.

Figure 2
Summary of general features of the LeanIX-Apptio integration

Source: LeanIX GmbH

The integration helps Innogy SE improve their information security, operational efficiency, and end-to-end cost flow with contextualized analysis of IT cost, criticality, technical & functional fit, and technology risk. Now, Innogy SE can easily provide insights on critical IT and continue to strengthen them, greatly reduce the number of technical incidents that occur in their IT environment, and enable IT and business to deliver their IT services in a cost-efficient manner.

If you’d like to hear more about Innogy SE’s success with the LeanIX-Apptio integration, you can download the recording of Schürmann’s presentation here. This video also features an in-depth introduction to the integration from LeanIX’s Johannes Wilden (Product Manager) and Apptio’s Ed Hayman (TBM Architect & Sr. Director, Product Management).