Every now and then you get unexpected external acknowledgment for a job well done.
This is what happened in October 2024, when Roche, my current employer, received the “Fastest Time to Value” award at the SAP Transformation Excellence Summit for our implementation and go-live of LeanIX, an EAM Enterprise Architecture Management tool.
I like to think an award winning EAM implementation doesn’t happen by chance, it’s architected. 🙂
This blog gives a short description of some of the things we did to win that prize. It is not fully comprehensive, but I hope you find it helpful!
Start with the Problem
All too often, teams run after fancy technologies from the get-go. Without spending time in the „problem space“ they jump to the „solution space“.
Organizations could save so much time and money if they would first consider what they are optimizing for before running after a solution to a problem they don‘t fully understand.
Our LeanIX journey started with a small team, Nick White, Mike Douse and myself. We did the initial architecting, “shaping”, piloting and technology proposal. We even built a low code application to test our information model and ensure that it provided the insights we were expecting. Hartmut Mastall, Stephen Smith and Kuldeep Bhardwaj were also great soundingboards and support.
Once the foundations were set we were happy to hand over to Michael Schneider and Frank Geier, who led the implementation team during the roll-out and continued “productization” of the tool within our organization. Shibani Sharma‘s support was also essential to our introduction of LeanIX at Roche.
Don‘t just go after a pretty face
When choosing technologies it’s always easy to be tempted by “a pretty face“, a nice UI, fancy reports, the latest and greatest in the top right of Gartner’s quadrant.
What is often neglected, and what leads to hundreds of billions of additional spend in IT organizations across the world, is the “Information” part of “IT”.
The Data-Centric Revolution is a fascinating book that describes the “Software Wasteland“. Each time you buy an application, you are forced to adopt their meta-model and you are tasked with integrating it with the rest of your systems and information.
It’s all about the Information baby!
Applications and technologies come and go, but information stays.
If you assess technologies not only on functional and non-functional requirements, but also on the compatibility and configurability of their information model, you lay the groundwork for an award winning implementation! 😊
IT IS a Domain
In order to understand the information you have to understand the Domain. In the case of EAM, we didn’t have to start from scratch. The IT4IT Framework is a huge help to conceptually understand how different IT capabilities and functions should interact, and what kind of information flows and functionality your IT4IT toolchain likely should contain.
IT4IT should be a mandatory read for anyone that influences how IT organizations work.
Apply Frameworks to YOUR Context
In our context there are several important factors that influence our Enterprise Architecture practice and information model:
- Our internal offerings are grouped within “products”
- We are trying to optimize flow through our organizational Value Streams.
- We want to effectively manage Socio-Technical architecture at scale, hence we need to know how Teams connect with everything else.
These are just several factors we took into consideration while applying IT4IT, ServiceNow, Archimate and other factors within our context.
The end result, a technology agnostic domain information model for our internal IT domain.
Think Big but Start Small
It is often best to “nail it before you scale it”, and that can’t be achieved if you stay in the conceptual world. You need to pilot and test your solution.
As I mentioned before, we first did this in a simple low code application which we built based on our information model. After that, we did a technology evaluation.
Technology
Technology evaluation can go in different extremes.
On the one hand, focusing only on functionality and cost often leads to unhappy users and poor adoption. On the other hand, analysis paralysis is a very real risk. We are not building an innovative application, EAM is really something that should be considered a commodity.
Therefore, we did a lightweight technology assessment. How did it work?
We organized our assessment in several logical groupings:
- Functionality
- Quality Attributes / Non-functional Requirements
- Design Principles
- Commercial
- Implementation
We prioritized these in High, Medium and Low.
The high priority ones were the ones we prioritized in our short technology pilots.
Using Scenarios to Validate the Implementation
As this is the application of non-validated commodity capability, we did not go to the work of defining hundreds of use-cases to check every single functionality available.
Instead, we defined and prioritized scenarios according to the following groups:
- Business Architecture
- Strategy Management
- Portfolio Management
- Product Management
- Product Led Landscape Management
- Product Component Portfolio Management
- Information Management
- Integration Management
- Technology Portfolio Management
Using prioritized scenarios we were rather quickly able to compare technologies and assess them according to our needs.
In particular, adaptability of the information model was important, so that we could ensure we have an Enterprise Architecture Management tool that is able to model OUR enterprise and our information.
In addition to this, usability and integrability in our overall landscape were important factors.
After the pilot our decision was easy: LeanIX
Implementation and Go-live
At this point in time the internal implementation team was extended and Michael Schneider and Frank Geier began to take over with members of the architecture chapter.
As a SaaS application there is not much heavy lifting required to get the ball rolling. The main initial hurdles were getting the contract signed and then integrating SSO.
The greater challenge in our organization was related to OCM organizational change management. Rather than trying to boil the ocean, we did internal pilots within several parts of our IT organization.
We focused on engagement and knowledge sharing sessions.
Slowly but surely we kept getting more traction and positive feedback from senior leaders.
The end result after several months: an award winning EAM implementation!
