IT Application Owners - how do you define this role/subscription?

Good question, and I’ll be interested in reading the responses that you get. We’ve been in production 11 months, and we struggle with this, too. A couple of months ago, we did publish a list of responsibilities for IT Application Owners (not all the responsibilities are specific to LeanIX). Unfortunately, it didn’t really move the needle. But it isn’t linked to a formal job description. I hate to shame people, but I have published lists a couple of times with quality seal statuses (at a summary level, by IT App Owner). And that will result in a bit of a bump, but it isn’t sustainable. 

We do have a SOX control that states we maintain an inventory of our applications and review them at least annually. So, we’ll have to rely on that “stick” later this year to get the owners to approve their fact sheets. Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they truly updated any out-of-date information. 

From a more positive perspective, we’re starting to use the LeanIX data for various reporting purposes. And I’m hopeful that the owners will realize that if their data is current, then we are adding value by being able to satisfy inquiry requests without reaching out to the owners. On a related note, we are producing some reports that the IT app owners should be using with their business partners. Again, if the data is current, then it helps them have productive, strategic conversations with their partners. 

This is something we are dealing with as well. We have been in Prod for 5 years and created an initial set of what we are calling ‘evergreen’ processes where we onboarded fact sheet maintainers, trained them on how to deal with notifications we set up through LeanIX automations, and how to keep fact sheets in an approved state. 

Because their interactions with LeanIX is often only every ½ year when we have our quality seals set to break, most of those trained individuals are not following through and performing the fact sheet quality checks. 

So now we are looking to set up version 2.0 where we are going to work with the managers of the people we are assigning to be fact sheet maintainers. we are creating reporting outside of LeanIX that will show ‘who is not quality sealing their fact sheets’ and are looking to set up a monthly email to the managers containing this report… 2.0 version is still a work in progress. This would go along with better scripted/documented training.

I’d be interested to hear what others are saying here as well. 

I don’t think there is a “one fits all” answer to that question but I am happy to share a couple of actions which worked for us (to some extent ;)

1. Provide clear instructions and guidance to your app owners: easy digestible training, documentation, clear definitions (what is an app?), use mandatory fields
2. Define KPIs for data completion + data quality, measure and share the results. We use a Power BI app for that since that provides more options than the LeanIX dashboard
3. Implement another role on top of the app owners, e.g. one for each IT team. We call them LeanIX Champions and they help to chase the individual owners for completing the data. That might only be relevant for larger organizations.
4. Define a couple of overall Application Portfolio goals, get mgmt buy in (e.g. from your CIO) and make sure that these goals are added to the annual targets of the IT leadership. As a side effect you will have a top down pressure to have a complete and correct application data.
5. Make the different IT teams responsible for their application portfolio and offer LeanIX as a tool to manage that.

There are a few other challenges which are not covered by above, e.g. finding owners for those apps which do not have one, or even finding the apps which have no owner at the first place. We are leveraging also our Champions to sort that out but this remains a problem...

I am a novice here and can’t say that we have this figured out in our organization.  But one idea we are exploring is to find a way to fold it into business processes that resonate with leadership.  For example, we have a strat planning and Op planning cycle that occurs through the course of the year.  We are exploring if getting data updated could be tied to it and furthermore, we could look over the team’s portfolio as a part of the planning cycle.

Curious to hear if others may have tried something analogous or leveraged other business processes?

We are a smaller implementation, so we are able to do an assisted model. EA will “assist” groups of app owners with applying updates. It also helps keep my knowledge fresh on what is in use and where we are headed.

We join semi-annual/quarterly org strategic planning sessions with senior leaders in the room, stepping through the capability model and app stack, live in LeanIX. This is used to drive discussion at a CxO level about their org’s capabilities, apps, direction, etc. Any overlays or views that are not current quickly stick out and become an “issue”. :) Then we schedule monthly or quarterly “refresh” sessions with sets of app owners, to ensure their apps are up to date. Some parts of the company, like Marketing, need a monthly sync up on current state as their app portfolio never stops changing.