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Thank you all for joining our call, looking forward for more of these Customer Success Hours sessions with you. Here is an overview on what we reviewed in our session. 

 

Introduction

 LeanIX is an enterprise architectural tool designed specifically to facilitate standard management and governance within organizations while avoiding data silos. It brings together diverse sources of information and maintains high-level visualizations to aid strategic decision making.

 

An In-Depth Look At LeanIX's Standard Management Four Pillars

 

LeanIX employs a systematic approach towards standard management, outlined by four strategic pillars:

 

1. Develop - This initial stage is where the status quo is assessed, leading to the articulation of a desired state. It identifies the standard technologies and methodologies applicable to new and existing applications. It also answers questions on the intent and scope of technology standards.

 

2. Identify - The focus during this stage is on recognizing applications that are making use of non-standard technologies. Detailed scrutiny helps understand the reason for such usage and whether any exceptions are being made.

 

3. Plan - In this phase, there's a concerted effort to develop a blueprint that aims at standardizing the applications in question. The business value of migrating to standard technologies is assessed and it understands priorities for applications that need to be built on vetted, standard technology.

 

4. Adapt - This stage involves a comprehensive engagement process involving other teams such as application owners, technology teams, and more to adopt the standards.

 

LeanIX Approach to Standard Management

 

LeanIX's lean standard management approach emphasizes the role of LeanIX as complementary to existing governance and GDPR tools, as opposed to replacing them. The focus here is to bring in the information gathered from these sources into the LeanIX framework, aiding its primary use cases which include application rationalization, application management, and business transformation management.

 

LeanIX's Fact Sheets Explained

 

LeanIX employs a mixture of custom fact sheets (created based on apparent business value and to maintain data quality) and out of the box fact sheets (readily available in the LeanIX workspace), such as:

 

- Tech Category Fact Sheets – This fact sheet groups IT components by technology categories. It serves as the first line of reference for selecting technology and services.

 

- Control Fact Sheets – This custom fact sheet holds significant security controls such as NIST and ICOE which come into play when dealing with high capacity customer data or managing sensitive data.

 

- Principle Fact Sheets – This custom fact sheet contains the guiding principles of the organization and EA best practices that help mark the enterprise’s trajectory.

 

Custom Sections in Applications

 

LeanIX introduces a custom 'Security and Compliance section' at the fact sheet level of applications. This section gives an overview of various compliance and governance tools such as GDPR, data sensitivity mechanisms, and more.

Besides these, there are single select fields like 'IT Security and Compliance Requirements defined,' 'Data sensitivity,' 'Legal Authorization for Cloud,' and more as an easy way to carry out the security and compliance evaluation of an application.

 

Finally, your insights and experiences with standard management and compliance are incredibly valuable to this community. Please share with us how you’re making it work in LeanIX or, in fact, any other platform in tandem. Moreover, we highly recommend that you take a look at client’s @Jacques  recent post to gain a deeper understanding of their unique approach. Let's help each other grow and refine our procedures by engaging in insightful conversations and driving innovation together. Join the discussion today!

Is there really new custom section in Application Fact sheet or this is an approach you guys discussed? In my case I have created two fact sheet types ‘Business Attributes’ and ‘Control Objectives’ and linked with Application Fact Sheet with maturity/status fields. However, I’d love to have Risk based on Business Criticality (derived from Context FS) and Data Sensitivity (derived from Data Object FS) based auto selection or suggestion in application fact sheets for respective architects.

Happy to collaborate and brainstorming on this topic


@ASARC  The decision to include a new custom section in the Application Fact Sheet isn't a definitive requirement; it's a strategy we've suggested based on past discussions and needs. It doesn't mean you must adopt this approach.

Your current approach, where you've created fact sheet types 'Business Attributes' and 'Control Objectives', linked with the Application Fact Sheet, is a perfectly valid method. 

However, it seems you're interested in automating selections or suggestions on risk based on 'Business Criticality' and 'Data Sensitivity'. You want respective architects to have these auto-selections or suggestions readily available in application fact sheets. So you might need to explore a hybrid approach on field on relation and Fields on Factsheet activated by conditionality? 

Our proposed tracking of these fields in the Application FS was designed with the intention to generate certain views. Your requirement might be a bit different depending on the specific views you aim to generate.

This is a custom practice that lies outside of the standard Metamodel, which means you have the liberty to adopt the approach that best suits your goals. The essential factor to reflect upon here is the end product - the data or insights you're aiming to present. 

The success of showcasing the right data using either your current approach (tracking these fields in relations) or our suggested one (inside the Fact Sheet itself) will vary. Depending on the type of view, report, diagram, or dashboard you're aiming to create, you might have to adjust your method accordingly.


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