The New Zealand Ministry of Justice leveraged LeanIX to drive an application modernization initiative. Watch the video above to see MoJ's Simon Hide explain why he chose LeanIX and how we powered their success.
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Two years ago, a challenge was set for the New Zealand Ministry of Justice (MoJ). The government wanted them to digitize all of their services to ensure better outcomes for all New Zealanders and meet their expectations of modern services.
“The use of paper files limits the ability of courts and tribunals to perform their core function of delivering justice to all people in a simple, accessible, and timely manner, and to meet the reasonable expectations of court system participants.”
Dame Helen Winkelmann, Chief Justice of New Zealand, Digital Strategy For Courts And Tribunals
This required an application modernization initiative to bring the MoJ's systems in-line with modern cloud-based software. The key question was: where to start?
A View On The Elephant
The MoJ knew their offline systems were in place, but they had no standardized documentation. They didn't know:
- how many applications they had
- any detail about what business services they offered
- how everything hung together
The situation was akin to the old adage about people in the room with an elephant. Some people know all about the tail, and others can see a leg, but nobody has a clear picture of the entire animal because they're too close to it.
Without being able to step back and look at the elephant from a higher level, all you can do is take each person's knowledge and combine it together to form a full picture. That's exactly what the MoJ needed to do with their application portfolio.
The first step was to build an information repository for all the puzzle pieces of the larger application portfolio map to act as a single source of truth for stakeholders before an application modernization initiative could begin. This was easier said than done, however.
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Painting A Full Picture Of Your App Portfolio
The New Zealand Ministry of Justice's (MoJ) Enterprise Architect, Simon Hide, was up for the challenge, and he initially began documenting the department's digital services across in-house databases. Within a couple of weeks, however, he realized that these weren't sufficient for the scale of the task.
Simon next went to market and looked at three different enterprise architecture management platforms. Of the three, Simon found LeanIX offered the best customer service, and the best return on investment in the shortest amount of time.
"We tried a few different tools on the market. Of all the vendors, LeanIX was the fastest to respond to all of our questions, and their tool provided the fastest time-to-value."
Simon Hide, Enterprise Architect, New Zealand Ministry of Justice
Soon, Simon had a complete application catalog with detailed information on the more-than 200 applications operated by the MoJ. This information could be categorized and visualized to provide instant insight into the current state of their application portfolio.
When it came to planning their digital transformation, Simon could use LeanIX to design an ideal state for the MoJ's application portfolio. He could then create a roadmap and timeline for moving between the two states.
LeanIX empowered Simon to instantly call up information about:
- the categories and details of all 200 MoJ applications
- a map of which business capabilities the applications support
- who the users of each application were and what teams they supported
- the full lifecycle of those applications and when contract renewals were due
- a full, five-year plan for the application landscape
Proving The Value Of Digital Transformation
With LeanIX, Simon could now pull up application modernization data for the New Zealand Ministry of Justice (MoJ) within minutes, rather than the days or weeks it used to take. This was an immediate hit with stakeholders:
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"It allowed them to pull together a plan, working with the senior architects, to actually plan out what their business looked like in the next five years' time, and when we played that forward by using a feature in LeanIX where you can fast forward the timeline, they were just completely amazed at their outcomes and how much we knew about it."
Simon Hide, Enterprise Architect, New Zealand Ministry of Justice
Simon even offered an anecdote about a stakeholder who came over to his desk and asked for a report on all the core systems running on Oracle within their organization. Using LeanIX, Simon was able to provide the report while the stakeholder was still at this desk.
The Final Test For LeanIX
Once Simon had completed documenting the New Zealand Ministry of Justice's (MoJ) application portfolio in LeanIX, he took the information to the deputy secretary. She immediately called the chief executive to look at what he'd done.
The chief executive told Simon he wasn't going to ask any more questions, as he could see Simon had it under control. That's the best validation Simon could ask for.
Simon's final words on the LeanIX platform:
"If
you want to interact with people digitally, you need to have a good understanding of the landscape. Stop putting stuff in spreadsheets, get all that information into LeanIX."
Simon Hide, Enterprise Architect, New Zealand Ministry of Justice
To discover the first step in your own application modernization process, hear from Gartner about deciding what the right approach is for your organization:
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