Today in the morning, The Linde Group already received the Software AG innovation award for the best business excellence vision. I hope that we will get some insights how they shape the future of their company using BPM in this talk. The talk is presented by René Zellmann enterprise architect at Linde. This talk is very well attended. Besides the keynotes, I think this talk has most attendants of the presentations I have seen. Linde is for example a global provider of all kinds of gases.
They started enterprise architecture management back in 2009. At the beginning, they had a very typical as-is situation:
- application lifecycle not actively managed
- uncontrolled evolution of application landscape
- local application solutions are preferred
According to Mr. Zellmann, they wanted to:
- phase-out as many special use software
- define standard for application and technologies
So basically, they want to consolidate their application landscape and portfolio. Mr. Zellmann says that IT architecture itself doesn't save costs, but it enables for example transparency so that cost saving potentials can be identified.
They cluster their enterprise architecture in several building blocks called architecture layers, namely:
- strategy
- business architecture
- application architecture
- data architecture
- technology architecture
They follow this enterprise architecture approach to:
- describe how the enterprise works
- have simple understandable models
- have different viewpoints on the enterprise
In their project, they first defined this enterprise architecture framework described above. The IT architecture is part of it. The main objectives of this IT architecture effort are:
- create transparency
- plan application lifecycle
- define standards
- optimize application portfolio
- enable management reporting
The combination of IT planning and dashboards is really impressive. With a few clicks, they can see for each region and country the maturity of the different applications. This is only possible, because they got a complete inventory of all their applications deployed. In addition, they have defined processes for their different objectives. For example, they got a process for strategic planning of IT architecture or another process for maintaining application information. They manage their IT architecture with ARIS Platform products.
After creating the framework, they rolled it out to a first region. After refining the framework based on the feedback gathered during this first rollout, they also deployed it in other regions, one region at a time.
This was a very comprehensive presentation. I think everyone attending this session is now convinced that the award was given to the best application!
Note: Check this overview post to get all links to the other live posts from ProcessWorld 2011 in Berlin
