Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a crucial field for organizations aiming to align their information technology (IT) systems with business goals. At the end of 2023, SAP acquired LeanIX and entered the EA management market to provide a robust solution for supporting digital transformation and fostering innovation in the IT environment. This article explores the definition, key concepts and essential features of SAP LeanIX, providing business leaders with a foundational understanding of its role in enterprise architecture management and transformation.
What is SAP LeanIX ?
SAP LeanIX is a SaaS application that allows enterprises to manage and optimize enterprise architecture. Enterprise architecture management is the practice of aligning IT infrastructure and systems with business strategy and goals. It involves documenting the organization's IT landscape, planning, designing, and overseeing the implementation of architectural changes to meet changing business needs
SAP LeanIX provides a 360° overview of all applications, business capabilities, and IT components so the leaders can gain control of their expanding IT landscape and create roadmaps for major transformation initiatives. Through collaborative and democratized data collection, out-of-the-box integrations, and fast insights through reports and diagrams, SAP LeanIX enables business leaders to manage enterprise architecture effectively.
How can SAP LeanIX help business leaders?
With the various useful tools available on the application platform, LeanIX can support individuals in different positions within the organization:
- Business Owners: By adopting SAP LeanIX, executives and business leaders can understand how IT systems help enhance their business capabilities, ensure that application data is accurate and up-to-date, also make more effective business decisions and improvements.
- Chief Information Officer (CIO): SAP LeanIX helps IT leaders gain a comprehensive overview of IT systems and performance, identify cost-saving opportunities, optimize IT investments, and ensure alignment between IT and the overall business strategy, as well as digital transformation strategy.
- Enterprise Architects: Enterprise architects can rely on SAP LeanIX to document and model the ideal IT architecture their organization desires, as well as analyze and optimize the enterprise architecture of the entire organization.
- Solution Architects: The tools within SAP LeanIX help solution architects design, implement, and integrate solutions that meet specific business and technology needs.
- Project and Transformation Managers: SAP LeanIX provides project managers with a transparent view of all IT projects to create roadmaps, manage relationships between elements, refine budgets, and minimize risks.
- IT Security: LeanIX helps monitor and assess security vulnerabilities, ensuring that preventive measures and data protection are fully implemented, helping the organization maintain safety and comply with security-related regulations.
SAP LeanIX Products
- Application Portfolio Management
Application Portfolio Management is the base product for documenting and managing application landscape. It provides insights into application lifecycles, dependencies, technical and functional fit, and business impact. By generating clear metrics, SAP LeanIX helps assess services across the enterprise and ensures the availability of various supporting technologies.
- SAP LeanIX Architecture and Road Map Planning
Architecture and Road Map Planning is an additional product that compliments Application Portfolio Management. It offers advanced features to plan target architecture, visualize the impacts of the planned transformations, and implement and monitor transformation initiatives. While Application Portfolio Management allows businesses to document and build their “as-is” architecture, Architecture and Roadmap Planning enables organizations to create “to-be” architectural models. Users can also compare and analyze the potential impacts, then choose the most suitable changes to achieve the desired enterprise architecture, driving an effective digital transformation process.
- SAP LeanIX Technology Risk and Compliance
Technology Risk and Compliance is an additional product that extends the capabilities of Application Portfolio Management. It facilitates the discovery of the infrastructure layer in the application landscape and enables businesses to manage obsolescence risks and technology standards. This ensures operational stability and relevance of technology stack.
Key Concepts and Features
- Fact Sheets and Meta Model
SAP LeanIX documents the organization's IT landscape and architectural elements using so-called fact sheets. Each architectural object, such as applications, business capabilities, IT components, etc., has its own fact sheet to store relevant information.
Fact sheets form the foundation of the meta model. Meta model is like a blueprint that defines the relationships between different architectural elements and how the information in fact sheets is interconnected. The meta model can also be customized to adjust the structure and relationships of architectural elements.
SAP LeanIX Meta Model
- Inventory and Collaboration
The inventory is the centralized repository where users create, add, and manage fact sheets, while also supporting information retrieval from these tables, maintaining and ensuring the accuracy of the data within them. Additionally, documenting an organization's IT landscape requires the connection and collaboration of various components within the business. Therefore, Collaboration features like surveys, fact sheet subscription, comments, and to-dos help keep data accurate and up-to-date.
- Reports and Diagrams
Reports and Diagrams in SAP LeanIX provide visual representations and insights into enterprise architecture data to evaluate both current and future architectures, identify trends, redundancies, and potential risks. For example:
- Landscape reports: can be used to get a comprehensive view of the IT landscape
- Matrix reports: provide correlations between attributes of different fact sheet types
- Roadmap reports: can be used to outline strategic initiatives and priorities for future-state architecture
Similarly, diagrams enable users to build visual models of an organization's enterprise architecture. These visualization and analytical capabilities enable enterprise architects to chart out needed action plans, such as application rationalization, modernization, cloud migration, ERP transformation, etc.
LeanIX Application Landscape Report
The integration of comprehensive digital transformation solutions with enterprise architecture management can help businesses minimize risks, make better decisions, and accelerate the transformation process, leading to sustainable growth. With over 17 years as SAP Gold Partner in Vietnam, CMC Consulting owns a team of experienced consultants and IT professionals. Therefore, we are confident to support organizations in effectively implementing SAP LeanIX, as well as providing relevant solutions to build a strong enterprise architecture and optimize business efficiency.
To learn more about the potential of SAP LeanIX, please follow CMC Consulting’s updated pages and contact us today for a consultation!
References:
https://docs-eam.leanix.net/docs/welcome-to-the-user-documentation-for-leanix-eam
https://www.leanix.net/en/wiki/apm/application-portfolio-management
https://docs-eam.leanix.net/docs/architecture-roadmap-planning
https://docs-eam.leanix.net/docs/deep-dive-technology-risk-management
CMC Consulting
07/02/2025
19
