How DTU Uses LeanIX to Optimize IT Resources

A research institute like the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), one of the country's and Europe's most renowned engineering schools, is a perfect place to observe the impact of dynamic enterprise architecture management.

While always a hotbed of innovation, DTU’s administration and education staff operated for years without a joint understanding of the university’s underlying IT infrastructure and the available data networks to optimize its offerings. Services were largely developed and distributed on a first-come-first-served basis, and technological investments were made without clear links to business priorities — all of which resulting in a strategically misaligned and overburdened IT department. But despite many officials at DTU recognizing this dilemma, IT personnel had difficulty using traditional architectural models and visual representations to chart more pro-active technology roadmaps with stakeholders. A more evolved version of IT management was needed — something capable of balancing the levels of technical support given to staff and faculty while perhaps also spurring cross-departmental collaboration.

Historically a decentralized institute, DTU realized it could not make the transition to a more holistic IT governance practice using speculative frameworks alone. To orchestrate improvements to the institute’s IT infrastructure in a distributive yet measured way, technological decisions had to be calculated in full view of every current and planned IT entity across the university’s application landscape. By migrating to the LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Suite (EA Suite), such IT assessments could be held using interactive business capability models (i.e., reports on the capacity, materials, and expertise an organization needs in order to perform core functions). These views would offer tangible explanations to representatives from any branch of the institute on where, why, and how IT was investing its resources — whether to elevate individual projects and quarterly departmental reviews or perhaps to perform more accurate risk assessments. Further, in addition to simplified reports based on business criticality, DTU’s IT department could also leverage the LeanIX EA Suite for configurable reports on application interfaces and technological dependencies to spot new ways to optimize services throughout the university network.

Thanks to the LeanIX EA Suite, DTU’s IT department has become better equipped to forecast its technological capacity for the benefit of its students, researchers, and professors. Nearly 300 applications are now cataloged in DTU’s application inventory, and with the support of users across departments, the research institute has been able to hold tangible conversations on digital transformation with up-to-date metrics on application data and interfaces sourced from business-critical services.