When, how much and how? Answering the hardest questions in Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture Trends according to the EA Connect Day 2016

On October the 6th, LeanIX hosted the 3rd EA Connect Day at the Zalando Innovation Lab in Berlin with over 3 times as many attendees as last year. The EA Connect Day has been a conference favored by many Enterprise Architects in the last years as it has become a venue to exchange ideas and gain new insights into modern Enterprise Architecture.

"To see how the EA Connect Day grows from year to year, establishes itself as an industry event of the enterprise architecture scene, and brings together an ever-increasing number of innovative heads is something very special for us," says André Christ, founder and Co-CEO of LeanIX.

This year we could appreciate topics ranging from general discussions, such as the best ways to integrate an Enterprise Architecture culture into your business, to cutting-edge enterprise architecture trends and methodologies, such as lean and agile methods. Enterprise Architecture with a focus on business outcomes and big data integrations were also the subject of discussion leading to many questions and controversial opinions. Following these lively speeches, the EA Connect Day attendees were treated to a sneak peek of the new LeanIX "Pathfinder", receiving information on its roadmap, what is to be expected, and its main features.

In the end, the people present had the opportunity to network and share tips and insights into their practical and often creative solutions when using Enterprise Architect Management tools. All in all, we think this was an amazing event where every attendee left with more knowledge on how to achieve the perfect Enterprise Architecture Management at his organization, no matter the size, the area, or the mindset it might have.

Provided below is a general overview of the conference with many interesting interviews, it's a must-see!

In case you are interested in the complete video presentations, we recommend following our social media channels, such as Twitter, Linkedin, and Youtube, as we will be releasing a new video weekly!

Smart EA Deep-Dives

We would also like to provide a deeper insight into the EA Connect Day program and its speakers. First up we had “Smart EA Deep-Dives” from LeanIX Power Users such as:

How to train penguins to fly - Efficient data collection via surveys

Sylvia Westphal, Senior Enterprise Architect, and Andreina Tirado, IT Risk Manager at Zalando show us how Zalando uses LeanIX Survey to collect all the data they need for an effective IT risk management that meets their legal requirements and the high standards set by themselves.

They also show us how they integrate a new application in LeanIX saying that with LeanIX they have a very good overview of their whole IT Landscape including 3rd party, legacy, and new applications related to the owning team and product.

We also see how LeanIX can be used to assess risks with the free LeanIX addon “Survey”, which allows you to create surveys regarding all aspects of the IT landscape. The captured data is immediately integrated into the LeanIX repository. Improving data quality and collecting data for urgent ad-hoc requests has never been easier.

Metrics First

Timo Derstappen, CTO & Founder of Giant Swarm says that everybody strives to release new IT applications faster and more frequently to gain competitive advantages. Giant Swarm takes the burden of running their own infrastructure for microservices from companies.

Combined with LeanIX Metrics, organizations can store and analyze technical and business metrics directly in context of their IT architecture, allowing them to gather real-time feedback and iterate faster.

The main theme from Timo’s presentation is also how to own something that you haven’t built saying that 3rd party software without owners means legacy from day one. This is definitely a presentation anyone in the field of Enterprise Architecture must watch!

Click the image to see the presentation

LeanIX Integration with SAP PI

Andreas Puke, Architect Manager at AMAG speaks about how to achieve full transparency on their SAP landscape and the reconciliation of their SAP and non-SAP application landscape with Enterprise Architecture.

The increasing complexity of SAP setups, the pressure to move to SAP Hana, and the dependency on Oracle technologies created a need to consolidate at AMAG. Other challenges, such as rising customer demands, new business models, and on top of that over 300 applications, 400+ IT-Components, and 500+ interfaces made this even more difficult to tackle.

This is where the LeanIX enterprise architecture integration came into play. Andreas speaks of the motivation to model complex SAP landscapes in LeanIX (Transparency, reconciliation of SAP with non-Sap information, and understandable technology) saying that the LeanIX data model covers all important SAP landscape aspects in an intuitive way. The SAP PI integration allows automatic capturing and maintenance of an SAP landscape allowing consistency and flexibility to add more information at the same time. All in all, Andreas thinks that a lean, collaborative Enterprise Architecture approach is the right one.

Curious to know more? Check out his presentation by clicking on the image below.

Technology Risk Management made easy

Priya Kothari, Senior Director, and Technology Alliances at BDNA (creators of Technopedia) says that poor data quality is the primary reason for 40% of all business initiatives fail to achieve their targeted benefits.

She says that Up-to-date technology product information is a key input for Enterprise Architects to assess the risk of their application landscapes and to plan, manage and retire technology components in a smart way. BDNA Technopedia serves as a foundation to enrich LeanIX with accurate data on technology to reliably support business decisions. The Technopedia Catalog is integrated with LeanIX, giving LeanIX users an ultimate source of Enterprise IT Data with over 1,500,00 products and 55M+ market data points. Priya shows us in her presentation how every Enterprise Architect can benefit from BDNA, to view it, just click on the image below!

How lean EA affects companies

After this, we were able to get an insight into how lean EA actually affects companies. To view the presentations just click on the previews below.

Usage-oriented EAM @CCEP DE

Kai Groth, an Enterprise Architect at Coca-Cola, says that the basis and at the same time one of the biggest challenges of a successful Enterprise Architecture Management is the acceptance by the organization. Is this missing, guideposts are ignored and boundaries are crossed. Kai shows us how Coca-Cola uses this experience in the context of its IT reorganization for a practical restart. Coca-Cola started by restructuring the targets of IT Architecture and Governance making it faster and more scalable. After this, they restructured the principles of IT Architecture creating an adequate IT-Governance.

Kai’s presentation finishes with an Organizational ITAG Framework and future prospects.

Lean EAM at Webasto

Dr. Thomas Mannmeusel, VP Global Process Optimization & Group CIO at Webasto talks about Lean Enterprise Architecture at his firm, saying that Enterprise Architecture Management is not just for large corporations, SMEs cannot afford to ignore this topic.

The good news is that especially SMEs can have Enterprise Architecture Management with a smaller budget and achieve concrete results. Dr. Thomas speaks of simplifying Enterprise Architecture Management, he says that Lean EAM principles consist of being capability-focused, with purpose-driven granularity and acknowledgment of reality.

Quoting Saint-Exupery “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” If you are a SME, this presentation is defiantly for you, check it out!

Digital transformation in a non-IT company

Oliver Schwarz, Enterprise Architect IT at Vaillant Group speaks about how central IT provisioning has become a relic and the need for SMEs, like Vaillant Group, to design the software for their own products themselves. Oliver describes some of the challenges Vaillant faced on their journey from a traditional engineering company to a software development company. Introducing technologies like Hadoop or MapReduce didn't do the job alone. Oliver and his team needed to solve many challenges around data management, architecture, and compliance. The second part of his talk covers how traditional companies can benefit from modern concepts like the lean startup principle, the agile manifesto, and scrum.

Disruptive trends to productive architecture

Finally, we spoke of disruptive trends in productive architecture.

New challenges with cloud integration

Renat Zubairov, CEO of elastic.io wants us to know the old and new challenges Enterprise Architects face for cloud / SaaS integrations - From standards and lack of experts to new customers, business models, technologies, and security and data protection requirements.

The main problems are that it takes longer to build new integrations, it’s hard to keep track of batch integrations, a lot of times data is typed in manually and it doesn’t matter how fast you deliver new integrations, businesses always perceive it as too slow.

Renat Zubairov has the solution all Enterprise Architects have been waiting for and reveals it in his presentation.

Data integration in the world of microservices

Valentine Gogichashvili, Head of Data Engineering at Zalando Tech. shares what Zalando has learned from the past year of digging deeper into data integration in a microservices-based environment.

He speaks of Radical Agility saying that the best way to achieve this is by creating autonomous teams who can choose their own technology stack, are responsible for operations, and use isolated AWS accounts. Their teams have created Saiki, a scalable, cloud-based data integration infrastructure that makes data from the company’s many microservices readily available to analytical teams. To know more, be sure to review this fascinating presentation!

Real-world consistency explained A short introduction

Uwe Friedrichsen, CTO of codecentric, speaks of Microservices, containers, cloud … and lots of data to deal with saying that that’s where the real trouble starts. He shows us what our options are and what the price is that we need to pay. Uwe thinks that many developers still base their designs on the concept of perfectly consistent ACID transactions, everything being always consistent and in order, with no anomalies around.

But the reality is different: Perfect consistency does not exist and many real-world use cases require much weaker consistency models in order to satisfy the scalability or robustness requirements.

So, what are our options, and what is the price we need to pay?
Do we need to accept potentially losing data in order to get higher availability?
How much can I scale without compromising consistency?

In this presentation, Uwe answers these questions and also has a look at some popular data stores and examines what kind of consistency models one can achieve with them and how. In the end, he gives us a peek into the latest research and sees new ideas that might push the borders of the current state of art.

The next big thing

André Christ, Co-CEO of LeanIX will show us the next big thing …and no, it’s not an iPhone 7 head jack adaptor… it’s LeanIX 4.0 “Pathfinder”, the next big thing in Enterprise Architecture.

André says that you can´t build your IT architecture today with yesterday´s tools and stay in business tomorrow. This is why LeanIX has introduced 3 Key changes in Pathfinder; A flexible Data Model, Powerful Inventory, and a new GraphQL API thus giving you better technology, usability, and functionality. Now you can also create custom attributes, relations, and Fact Sheets.

All this and more in André Christ’s presentation of LeanIX “Pathfinder”.

Once again, thank you to all attendees and speakers, it was incredible having you here!  

Also, in case you don’t use LeanIX and have become curious after seeing these presentations, we would love to let you experience LeanIX for yourself, just request a free demo!