How Otis Reached Enterprise Architecture Maturity in 30 Days

Otis Worldwide Corporation (Otis) is the world’s leading company for elevator and escalator manufacturing, installation, and service. Their solutions transport 2 billion passengers, across 2 million units, daily. The company serves customers in approximately 200 countries across the globe and employs 69,000 people.

Previously a part of United Technologies Corp (UTC), now Raytheon Technologies, on April 3, 2020, Otis was officially spun-off to become its own independent entity. From this point forward, the Digital Technologies team at Otis was given a 5-week timeline to build out, understand, and establish ownership over all its architectural dependencies.

Further complicating matters, this project had to be done at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. This meant moving forward with a fully remote workforce and information spread out across people, teams, and various file formats – not to mention inconsistent data and a lack of structured classifications across a portfolio of more than 1,000 technology assets.

The timeline and complexity of this project led Otis’ team to seek out not just the right tool to architect their newly formed IT landscape, but the right people to see the job through successfully. They selected LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Suite as the SaaS solution, and enlisted the LeanIX Professional Services group to see through their implementation.

The urgency of needing to untangle Otis from UTC to create a standalone IT environment was not lost on LeanIX Professional Services, who knew that collaboration across the organization would be the key to success. The team began training 30+ stakeholders and end users immediately. They worked day and night to respond to inquiries, configure workspaces, and organize, clean, format, and transfer data into dynamic Fact Sheets. Daily communications between the Otis core team and LeanIX Professional Services took place to review best practices, transfer knowledge, and report on project status.

In the end, the 5-week timeline to realize enterprise architecture maturity was met.

With the LeanIX EA Suite fully up-and-running, the Digital Technologies team at Otis was able to leverage the knowledge of Professional Services to take ownership over their architectural dependencies and successfully complete the IT portion of the company’s spin-off from UTC.

The power of the platform and its ease of use has excited Otis team members to the point where weekly stand-up meetings are held to review key reports and identify technology risks or pursue growth opportunities. There is now a single source of truth for all IT components, data interfaces, and applications – enabling stakeholders throughout the organization to contribute to EA management in real-time, with accurate information.

More technical users have begun leveraging LeanIX open APIs to create custom dashboards based on Otis-specific use cases. For instance, users are taking LeanIX EA data and manipulating it in Zudy using GraphQL to easily build custom charts. These, along with out-of-the-box reports like free draw diagramming, data flow visualizations, interface maps, and application roadmaps are used to create reports for key business stakeholders with a few clicks of a mouse, as opposed to hours or even days.

Furthermore, the empowerment to make global, data-driven decisions has increased the visibility for all Digital Technologies team members amongst Otis’ executive leadership team. LeanIX has become a strategic driver for IT ecosystem discussions and has helped the organization position itself to fast-track future mergers and acquisitions.