How Compass Group Australia Built an EA Practice from Scratch

Compass needed to work smarter and be able to pivot to different viewpoints depending on the audience. Said Darren: “LeanIX facilitated this lean need by giving me a virtual enterprise architect.” Upon fully understanding the current state of their IT landscape, Compass could simulate new opportunities and plan for change. All gaps, technical debts, obsolescence, and risks became visible. 

The portfolio planning fell under 3 areas:

• Production maintenance
• Risk reduction
• Transformation (“IT 4 IT” and “IT 4 Business”)

It was critical to establish a collaborative EA practice by involving affected stakeholders. As well, it was key for Compass Group Australia to focus on areas with the biggest chance of impact. The LeanIX “EnterpriseArchitecture-in-a-box” approach, as Darren puts it, fulfilled all these requirements.

Starting with business capabilities

Business capabilities have proven a very valuable concept for managing IT architectures. Capabilities have the big advantage of representing an organization’s anchoring business model while being independent of organizational structures and processes. When introducing the Business Capability model, discussions with business functions, such as HR and Supply Chain, were activated to expand upon technology questions in the proper context.

LeanIX live reports, such as the Business Capability Map or the Application Landscape, helped to instantly generate viewpoints to communicate with specific stakeholders. Supply Chain gained improved “Source-2-Contract” and “Procure-2-Pay” value streams, and HR developed a more functional “Hire-2-Retire” process. Suddenly, business and technology had a common language.

Application portfolio planning

Two strategic IT priorities were high on the agenda for Compass Group: (1) moving applications to the cloud; and (2) back-office transformation for supply chain and finance. The information captured in LeanIX is used to precisely define the scope of these projects to determine how the systems interact with each other and how suppliers are involved. Information was captured through survey workflows.

Of note, it has proven to be very successful for uncovering information previously locked up in employees’ heads, such as: How critical is the system? What are the SLAs? Is there an external party involved? Are there any risks associated? All approval and planning meetings are now based on information within LeanIX. Applications and projects are, for example, tagged as soon as the budget is approved.

Unveiling shadow IT and risks

Shadow/ghost IT is an area that Compass has collaborated with the business to manage. Shadow IT is technology that has been purchased or developed without the involvement of the IT department. LeanIX heat maps make it very transparent whether an application is officially part of the budget. Again, this helps discussions with business stakeholders. Based on a clear information baseline, constructive proposals can be made about the advantages and disadvantages of including applications into the official budget (such as the lack of an internal support model).