Customer success story

How SEEK supports business risk programs with SAP LeanIX

Industry

Technology

Headquarters

Melbourne, AUS

Employees

3,700+

Key highlights

We spoke to Brandon Stafford, Chief Architect at APAC’s leading employment marketplace, SEEK to hear how the company effectively addresses data privacy, disaster recovery, and technology cost management with SAP LeanIX.
Brandon's team has used SAP LeanIX to collaborate with business leaders on their most important problems.
SAP LeanIX supports SEEK by providing the visibility they need to make fast, informed decisions regarding data privacy, disaster recovery, and technology cost management.

SEEK's application modernization journey

As a leading employment marketplace in the Asia-Pacific region, SEEK’s purpose is to help people live more fulfilling and productive working lives and help organizations succeed.

Like many fast-growing organizations, SEEK's application portfolio expanded through organic and inorganic growth. To create the best technical foundation for the company’s future growth, SEEK embarked on a comprehensive initiative to unify their technology landscape.

The goals of this initiative included unifying:

product systems into one online marketplace
finance, people, and culture systems onto one enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool
sales, service, and marketing tools onto one set of customer relationship management (CRM) platforms
data platforms into a synergized toolset

Despite the intensive and potentially disruptive application modernization work involved, the company had to continue daily operations as they planned and implemented changes.

Bringing people on the journey

As the unification initiative achieved its goals, Brandon and his architecture team began focusing on a range of other organizational priorities with the help of SAP LeanIX.

Brandon Stafford shares: "The biggest challenge we've faced is being able to bring people on the journey; for them to see the value of the work that we're doing."

Brandon's solution to winning stakeholder engagement has been to focus on their key pain points. By offering quick win solutions to ongoing challenges, the team could clearly demonstrate the value of the architecture function.

One key to this has been the creation of a single source of truth for enterprise architecture data, one that can be shared with anyone in the organization with the level of detail they need. SAP LeanIX supports Brandon's team in winning the approval of their stakeholders by serving as this single source of truth.

Brandon's team began their SAP LeanIX journey with a focus on resilience and disaster recovery. This has enabled the DR manager and his team to have a record of all applications, the capabilities they serve, their criticalities, and what KPIs thye should meet.

Following this, Brandon’s team developed a view of data and its associated data classifications. This allowed risk managers to understand what data the company held, where it was, and who had access to it.

Finally, Brandon and team has used SAP LeanIX to understand the cost profile of technology at SEEK. The result has been a better understanding of how changes to technology impact operating costs.

"Now we're moving into looking at a cost profile, using IT components to be able to understand cost of our services, our infrastructure, and our cloud."

Brandon Stafford,
Chief Architect, SEEK

The key to great EA is repeatability

The first project Brandon's team used SAP LeanIX to support was SEEK's resilience program. This, however, created a foundation for all the components that Brandon's team would need to carry out further initiatives in the future.

As Brandon explained in the video: "My belief is that architecture can be a compounding capability; that you're able to re-use all the pieces you develop as you go through use case to use case."

SEEK's CEO challenged their chief risk officer to offer complete clarity on what data SEEK holds, where it's held, and what classification it has. This was essential for ensuring SEEK's data privacy.

Since Brandon's team had already documented their business capabilities and applications in SAP LeanIX, it was easy to create Fact Sheets for data objects. With SAP LeanIX, Brandon's team has been able to step up to meet the challenge of data privacy.

Linking to security

Going forward, Brandon's next step is to better link their architecture function with SEEK's security profile. This will empower Brandon's team to better understand how SEEK's vulnerabilities impact their applications.

In addition, Brandon plans to continue to connect the ecosystem of third-party integrations that SAP LeanIX supports. This will offer a more complete picture of SEEK's IT landscape.

Brandon's advice: "Really think about your integrations, design them carefully, model them well, and you can really start to automate the type of data you're getting into SAP LeanIX."

EA’s role is making the invisible, visible

Brandon ends his discussion of the benefits of the SAP LeanIX platform by explaining his philosophy of architecture. He believes that architecture has two key roles in a business:

To make the invisible, visible
It's the role of architects to make the ethereal world of software, networks, and infrastructure apparent to stakeholders. Illustrating to your organization that your digital landscape has real-world impacts helps them understand and think carefully about it.
To help make decisions faster
Having a repository of enterprise architecture information offers a shortcut to decision-making. You no longer need to research your architecture decisions, as the data you need is readily at hand.

"We've been able to deliver value with SAP LeanIX, because it allows us to operate the way that we operate as a business, which is agile and lean."

Brandon Stafford, Chief Architect, SEEK