What is a Fact Sheet?

Fact Sheet Definition & Structure

Fact Sheets are used to document and save information regarding architectural objects, like Applications, Business Capabilities, or IT-Components. With a Fact Sheet, you can keep all relevant information on a single page and, at the same time, maintain the dependencies within your IT landscape.

Header: Offers you the options to see and subscribe to the current Fact Sheet, see and add comments or documents, see Fact Sheet metrics, surveys, as well as the change history (Last Update section) of the current Fact Sheet. Besides the Fact Sheet Name and Type, the header also contains Tags and Data Quality Information. Basic actions like Fact Sheet editing, printing, deleting or cloning are also found here

Body: Contains all the relevant information of a Fact Sheet (e.g. lifecycle, criticality, dependencies). It is structured in sections so that you can easily find, add or update the information you are looking for

Sidebar: Shows you the integrations active for a certain Fact Sheet, as well as To-Do's, Fact Sheets you recently viewed and related Diagrams

Fact Sheet Types

Every architectural object (Application, Business Capability, Project, etc.) is stored in an individual template, according to its Fact Sheet type. For example, Fact Sheet type "Data Object" has a "Data Management" section, while a Fact Sheet type "Project" has a "Project Environment" and "Project Setup" section. You can access Fact Sheets types on the upper left side of the Inventory.

LeanIX Meta Model

The following logical Meta Model illustrates the main LeanIX Fact Sheets and the relations between them.

According to our Meta Model, there are ten main Fact Sheets types. The following overview provides the definitions we use for the standard setup of a workspace. If they do not match the definitions of your organization, it is possible to configure the workspace to your needs.

Application
An Application is something that is visible to the end user. This is usually the core Fact Sheet Type in LeanIX as it's interconnected with many different Fact Sheets. Some of our customers chose to rename it to "Solution", "IT System" or even "Service". The information flow between Applications is accounted for by connecting Interface Fact Sheets.

Data Object
A Data Object reflects information about important business items. This could be account, employee or other organizational data. A Data Object Fact Sheet can be linked to Applications and Interfaces, and stores additional information about data sensitivity. A good use of the Data Object is when you want to manage data sensitivity or manage consistency of business information. Where do you use data of a special sensitivity level?

Project
With a Project Fact Sheet, you can manage or build budgets, reflect a project status and show the impact of a project on your Application Portfolio and their affected User Groups. In addition, orders of each provider can be managed to get a good overview of the real budget status. Cost centers and controlling reports very often show valuable information only after the fact events, so it is preferable to keep a “real-time” eye on where you spend your money.

IT Component
An IT Component can be a service, a software or a hardware, anything that you need to offer an Application. An IT Component has a lifecycle for risk and succession management, contains cost per Application and has a Provider. You should consider your internal services as an IT Component. With this approach, you can make the cost of your IT management effort visible.

Provider
The Provider is connected to Projects and IT Components to get an overview of provided services and total cost of services.

Tech Category
This Fact Sheet type is used to group IT Components into different categories of Technology. These could be a database, an operating system or a web server. The Tech Category is used to make IT-Components comparable and visualize the technologies and services used. This is very helpful to identify redundant or out-of-lifecycle IT-Components. Another use case is to see what kind of know-how about certain technologies or programming languages is necessary to maintain your IT portfolio.

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Best Practice

Since a Tech Category can be seen as a rather stable structure, it will look pretty similar for different companies. If you want to start classifying your IT-Components using a Tech Category, you should have a look at our Best Practice Technology Stacks.

User Group
A User Group represents the consumer of Applications. A User Group can be a single person, a country, an organization, a subsidiary or a certain location. Every consumer can be created as a User Group. You can even edit several different types of User Groups into LeanIX to view as many dimensions as needed. LeanIX geocodes the User Group.

Business Capability
Business Capabilities are serving as a placeholder to reflect the primary dimension of the needs of the business. These can be capabilities, process groups, functional building blocks or anything else. We know that each of the mentioned dimensions is of interest to a company. Our experience is that it is already a challenge to concentrate on one primary dimension.

Process
Processes show how you perform certain activities in your organization. Close integrations, e.g. to Signavio, are provided to incorporate the full functionality of a modern process modeling tool.

Interface
Interfaces are connections between Applications. They transfer data objects and are implemented via IT components.