How Donner & Reuschel AG Reduce IT Complexity with LeanIX

Donner & Reuschel AG is a German-based private bank that offers investment, trading, asset management, and online banking services for European customers. The bank was established in 1798, has more than 9 billion euros under management, and employs 580 people.

With a centuries-long history, Donner & Reuschel AG’s IT landscape had become increasingly complex over time. They were outsourcing IT services from numerous large providers, while at the same time building and managing services internally. Due to the intricacy of its technology ecosystem, information became siloed or impossible to find, and stakeholders could not establish a clear picture over the IT components, applications, and data interfaces across the institution.

The blindness that reigned over IT caused projects to be poorly implemented, without an architecture in mind, and a lack of proper governance. In one such instance, a Windows 7 implementation left more than 1 million euros on the table with a great deal of work still incomplete. As a result of this track record of misalignment, and with big aspirations to improve scalability by creating a 100% mobile workforce, the technical team at Donner & Reuschel AG decided it was time to optimize the bank’s enterprise architecture practice.

In an industry as highly regulated as banking, Donner & Reuschel AG knew it had to address the legacy systems it was running and consolidate vendors to ensure compliance with all governing bodies. The organization also wanted to transition to the cloud, meaning a full-scale audit and rationalization of its applications and data interfaces had to be completed. The team selected LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Suite, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) that aggregates IT data and acts as a single source of truth for driving strategic decisions.

Once Donner & Reuschel AG’s IT data was loaded into LeanIX, they were able to get a clear, big-picture view over the dependencies residing across the system – both internally and with a reliance on external vendors. Having a clear inventory enabled the team to establish a project plan to prioritize and organize its next steps in modernizing the enterprise architecture.

Working with LeanIX’s out-of-the-box reports and dashboards empowered the Donner & Reuschel AG team to take immediate action toward improving and modernizing its enterprise architecture. Work began to centralize system integrations and lighten the load on the bank’s internal IT capacity. This led to the decommissioning or “burndown” of redundant or outdated applications, data objects, office and service hardware.

Source: Donner & Reuschel AG

The visibility provided by LeanIX also improved internal communication with Donner & Reuschel AG’s Governance Committee, who oversees data security, information security, compliance, and risk management. By utilizing dashboards and reports, this key team is better able to spot and manage risk, reveal technical debt, and set strategies in place. Currently, the EA team uses 12 default dashboards, and roughly 140 reports that are key to streamline decision making.

Crowdsourcing their enterprise architecture efforts across a 40-person, cross-departmental LeanIX user base accelerated data collection and stakeholder buy-in, especially with regard to the lift and shift approach the bank took in migrating to cloud native infrastructure. In so doing, IT was better able to support its workforce in driving business value while at the same time offloading costly, on-premise legacy systems.