Data Quality with SAP LeanIX

Your success in creating value with SAP LeanIX heavily relies on precise data quality. To support this, SAP LeanIX offers multiple features—some configurable at the fact sheet level, and others managed separately.

Within the configuration area of each fact sheet type, you can define quality standards and monitor data completeness. This includes features such as (1) Quality Seals and (2) Fields, which allow you to set the scope and prioritize the most relevant data points for your organization. These mechanisms can also trigger automated quality checks and are tailored individually per fact sheet type.

To access this, navigate to Inventoryselect a specific fact sheet type (e.g., applications) on the left sidebarclick the three dots (on the top right of the inventory)then click Configuration. In this area you will find (1) Quality Seals and (2) Fields.

In addition to these, Subscription Roles play a key role in ensuring data quality by assigning responsibility to specific stakeholders. While not part of the fact sheet configuration, they enable distributed ownership and accountability.

Maintaining data quality requires collaboration with several stakeholders. That is why SAP LeanIX offers a collaboration feature as well. What this is and how it functions will be a focus at a later stage of your onboarding.

At the moment, we have three subscription roles pre-configured into the workspace:

1. Technical App Owner (Responsible): This role should be served by someone who is functionally responsible within the technology domain and has a vested interest in IT's performance and success.
2. Business App Owner (Responsible): This role should be served by someone who is functionally responsible within the business domain and has a vested interest in the business’s performance and success.
3. Application Leader (Observer): This role should be served by someone in middle management, leadership, or a domain lead position who has visibility into team responsibilities and can assist in identifying the appropriate responsible individuals.

For now, we want to further understand that those collaborators can be assigned to specific roles, delineating their responsibilities regarding a certain fact sheet. Subscription roles will establish long-term governance of roles and responsibilities for specific actions and fact sheets in SAP LeanIX.

This section of the tool allows you to configure the Quality States and the Mandatory Fields. Let's discover what the different options are:

• Quality Seal-Overview

  Quality Seals are a configurable mechanism that ensures regular data checks and thus contributes to the reliability of the data in SAP LeanIX.

  Withing the tool configuration, you can define a time cadence for when this Quality Seal shall trigger on a regular basis. When the seal breaks, the Fact Sheet owner is in charge of controlling the data, updating if necessary, and setting the seal from "check needed" to "approved".

  The Quality Seals come with predefined settings tailored to support a smooth start.

  The Draft state is pre-enabled. Additionally, these configurations are integrated already under the Quality Seal tab:

  Mandatory fields:

  • Name
  • Description
  • Lifecycle
  • Functional Fit
  • Technical Fit
  • Business Criticality

  Mandatory subscriptions:

  • Responsible

  Mandatory relations:

  • Business Capabilities (BCs)
  • Organizations (Orgs)
  Note

  In the Application fact sheet type, the Quality Seal breaks if any user who is not marked as 'Responsible' modifies the fact sheet.
• Quality States

  The Quality State is a great mechanism that combines collaborative editing with clear responsibilities and a rigorous governance process. The main concept is simple: it assigns accountability to the responsible or accountable user (Subscription role) to approve the quality of a Fact Sheet whenever other users make a change to it. Additionally, you can define a certain timeframe when the Quality Seal shall break and automatically change to state "check needed".

  The following states are available:

  
• Mandatory Fields

  Mandatory fields are defined in their own subsection of the Quality Seal tab within the configuration. Unused or read-only fields shouldn’t be defined as mandatory. This configuration will be only active when the 'Draft' state is enabled. You will see all the active and possible fields that can be set as mandatory and you can define multiple fields as mandatory. The purpose of Mandatory Fields is to define which data needs to be filled before a Quality Seals can be approved.

  Hint

  You can only set fields as mandatory when the fields are part of the data model. Customer-defined fields are part of the data model and can be set as mandatory. Except for the description field, base Fact Sheet fields such as ID, Display Name, Level or Status cannot be set as mandatory.

  Every workspace we provision comes with a pre-configuration.

  For example, for Applications, the 'Draft' state is pre-enabled and the mandatory fields pre-configured are:

  • Description
  • Lifecycle
  • Business Capability
  • Functional Fit
  • Technical Fit
  

Within this section you can configure the completion weights. The weight defines how much a field, subsection or section affects the completion score of its parent. This is also preconfigured as part of the default setup.

• Completion Score

  Displayed as a percentage at the top of each Fact Sheet's name, the Completion Score indicates the completeness of stored data within that Fact Sheet. This score is a crucial step towards achieving high data quality - a decisive factor in the acceptance of Enterprise Architecture Management. In SAP LeanIX, data quality is automatically computed based on several indicators and automated values, allowing you to set individual weights for each element.

  
• Completion Weights

  Completion Weights allow configuring the weight of each individual attribute, contributing to the overall completion score of a fact sheet.

  This is also preconfigured as part of the default setup, with the following weights applied on fact sheet types:

  • Fact Sheet type: Applications
    • Weight 1:

      Mandatory Fields

      • Name
      • Description
      • Lifecycle
      • Functional Fit
      • Technical Fit
      • Business Criticality

      Mandatory relations

      • Business Capabilities
      • Organizations
    • Everything else comes under Weight 0
  • Fact Sheet type: Business Capabilities and Organizations
    • Weight 1:
      • Name
      • Description
      • Parent & child relation
      • Relation to Application
    • Everything else comes under Weight 0