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We are relatively new to LeanIX and have just completed an initial phase with a small selection of applications.  User Groups have proven to be a real challenge and we are considering if the new Organisation and sub types help us address this.

We have grown via acquisition so have a very diverse IT landscape with multiple sites in the same country using different applications for the same business capability.  This is the detail we want to capture.  Therefore User Group has been set as physical locations (addresses) which represent sites.  We have then put in a 4 tier hierarchy to help aggregate that data into meaningful summaries.  The challenges we still face are:

  • Who is using the application versus where it is supporting?  Where we have finance shared services, they are the user of an application for say accounts receivable but the data belongs to a site.  Finance Shared Services being the User Group is a given, but do people also map the site, or just accept that the Accounts Receivable capability is provided by Finance Shared Services and as a result the site is in itself not a User Group for that application?
  • If we switch to the new meta model and replace User Groups with Organisation, what sub types would people recommend, given our desire to map site locations.  A simple Business Unit hierarchy or a combination of Region and Business Unit with relationships?
  • Physical site locations are logical Organisations/User Groups for manufacturing and production plants, but are less logical when looking at corporate functions, where the functional user type is more meaningful.  How have others handled this?
  • As an option to address the challenge above for Head Offices, but also to get a richer view, we would also like to map Functions as a User Group or Organisation Type e.g. Finance, Procurement, IT, HR, Customer Services etc but without a hugely complex organisation model.  Would people recommend using the new “Team” subtype.  And have people used 2 different User Groups/Organisation independent of each other.  So assigning say Finance and Site A, rather than it being hierarchical with Finance as a child of each and every site 

Any other input on how others have addressed similar problems around where and who etc, would be much appreciated.  We are looking at applications and capabilities at the moment not the underling IT components….that is another challenge for another day

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Hello @HelenH ,

the main question we had is what we want to use LeanIX for and which depth and kind of information is necessary for a desired outcome. In the end and additional piece of information  means additional maintenance and  raise complexity. My first proposal is to keep everything as simple as possible, you always can enrich the complexity. To get complexity out means much more work. Keep you system maintainable by the resources available. To have very detailed information which is not maintainable a and becomes outdated is worthless.

 

Organizational model:

We started wit the old meta model and we used User groups just on the affiliate level. What i missed at that point was something like  a matrix Department-affiliate. An idea was to have this as parent/child, but e.g. with 10 main department in 26 affiliates you will have 260 factsheets. And we saw some other limitations. We took the approach to have departments as 1st Level Business Capabilities, which helped us to simplify our approach, perhaps it is worth for you to think about. A different approach may be to create an additional  Application-Organization relation (e.g. we did for IT-Component with the provider to distinct provider and manufacturer).

We are actively using the subtypes Grouping, a FS just for grouping purpose just showing parent/child and Name & Description), Customers, Suppliers, Business Unit and Legal Entity.
We do not use Teams or Regions.

Anyway I recommend to switch to the new meta model, because it provides many new opportunities for grouping and filtering your data.

Best regards,
Carsten

Thank you for the time you have taken to respond, it is much appreciated.  We have moved to the latest metamodel and have taken a view on organisation which is working for our current use requirements.  We will continue to monitor

Hi @HelenH,

per default we have a field on the relation Organization - Application “Usage Type” with the values “User”, “Owner” this is to indicate whether an organization is responsible for the application or simply using it. You can report on this with “views” in reports. Maybe this helps to enhance your experience!

Best, Luca

 

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