What is LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM)?

LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is a core product of the LeanIX Continuous Transformation Platform. EAM enables companies to take control of their evolving IT landscape, rationalize their existing applications, drive collaboration with robust reporting, and tackle major transformation initiatives (cloud migration)

Manual data collection is still a common practice for IT to get a comprehensive overview of their application landscapes. What takes architects and IT organizations usually weeks, is available on click within seconds thanks to LeanIX. LeanIX EAM makes it easy to get a 360° overview of the Enterprise applications, business capabilities, and IT components. In addition, companies can leverage the integration with the LeanIX SaaS Management Platform (SMP) to automatically discover all their SaaS applications.

The core of LeanIX EAM is collaborative and democratized data collection and fast insights using out-of-the-box reports, which help companies create any view needed to make better decisions, faster and align a company’s IT & Tech strategy with any of their business goals and objectives. With LeanIX EAM, companies save costs, reduce risks and drive innovation and continuous transformation.

The flexibility of the Meta-Model is the foundation to meet all future business challenges.

How does it work?

Once you subscribe to one of our modules (Application Portfolio Management (APM), Technology Risk Management (TRM), Business Transformation Management (BTM)), you will get access to your EAM workspace and can start uploading your data and creating reports right away. Our basic configuration will be good enough to get you started, but LeanIX offers a variety of custom admin & developer configuration options that you can explore in our detailed product documentation. These are the key steps to start working with EAM (more details under Getting Started):

  1. Import data into your EA repository. Leverage out-of-the-box integrations to automate data synchronization and open APIs to link custom tools to LeanIX. All your data will be linked to our best practice Meta-Model which structures and links your Application & Data Architecture with the Business Architecture and your Strategy & Transformation projects in the backend

  2. Invite stakeholders (unlimited number) to contribute their knowledge. Use features like Surveys, Quality Seals, and Subscriptions

  3. Generate insights for your organization with our out-of-the-box reports and diagrams. These will help you to identify needs for action (e.g., retire applications with low functional & technical fit) and align with any stakeholder of your company on your IT & Transformation strategy, no matter which of the use cases you tackle first. For all our customers, we offer best practices to implement high-value use cases in a short period of time

Check our documentation for a deep dive and leverage our LeanIX Academy training resources to get proficient in using LeanIX EAM intuitively.

Who uses EAM?

EAM is an industry-agnostic solution. Companies from any industry benefit in a similar way from our solution, using the same features and views. The differentiating factor is reflected in each company’s individual business capability map which represents everything the company does. Read more about business capabilities here.

The key stakeholders that directly drive the usage of EAM within their company are:

  • CIO / CTO: EAM helps IT and Tech Leaders to get visibility of the company’s IT portfolio they need to ensure cost efficiency, business continuity, and a good foundation for technology-driven transformation (cloud, AI, ML, etc.)

  • Enterprise Architect: With LeanIX EAM, Enterprise Architects get the data and views they need to help their organization make better decisions. The intuitive and collaborative usage of the tool will help increase the visibility of EA in the company and boost its benefits for the entire organization

  • Solution/ Business Architect: LeanIX EAM enables faster time-to-value for Solution and Business Architects as each new solution and strategic business project can be designed in a way that fits optimally into the current company Enterprise Architecture and is aligned with business goals

  • IT Project Manager: LeanIX EAM enables IT Project Managers to increase the delivery time and quality of their projects by providing a real-time picture of the as-is landscape, dependencies, and risks. Our out-of-the-box templates make it simple to create roadmaps and track activities accurately!

  • IT Security: With our out-of-the-box reports, we help IT Security Managers to get real-time views of the security and compliance risks of their IT landscape, keep up with the latest standards (e.g., GDPR compliance) and mitigate faster external attacks

What use cases exist?

Following typical use cases can be realized by leveraging our EAM modules (sometimes, more than one module will be recommended to get the full potential out of the use cases):

Application Portfolio Management module (APM)Technology Risk Management (TRM)Business Transformation Management (BTM)
Application Portfolio ManagementObsolescence Risk ManagementApp Modernization
Application RationalizationERP Transformation

Why use EAM?

EAM enables the IT organization to become the best possible sparring and innovation partner for their business as it translates the technical way of doing Enterprise Architecture Management into an intuitive practice that can be performed by anyone in the company on the level they need it. Our product follows a collaborative approach to collecting data about the company’s business and IT on an ongoing basis which keeps the inventory data clean and up-to-date and ensures that responsibility for data maintenance is a shared effort across the company.

700+ Enterprise customers use EAM, covering 390k Managed Business Applications. There are 200k+ active LeanIX users globally.