Before start
Remember the step-by-step process guide that helps you to get your colleagues on board. This course is about step 2:
Plan Fact Sheet Owner Onboarding: Data Collection and Maintenance
Objective
After completing this lesson, you will be able to plan your fact sheet owner onboarding
Step-by-step: Fact Sheet Owner Onboarding
Data Collection
As an EA team alone, you require Fact Sheet Owners to validate and enrich the attributes such as Lifecycle, Business Criticality, Functional Fit and Technical Fit. Fact Sheet Owners can efficiently add this data through following options presented below.
Please read all three options to get an overview and make up your mind which options you want to choose for initial data collection. We also show you how to configure and prepare each option, so you get a better understanding on the preparation needed:
- OPTION 1: IN WORKSPACE USING DASHBOARD
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- Description:
You can invite your Fact Sheet Owners directly to the workspace and onboard them through the Fact Sheet Owner Onboarding Dashboard. The Dashboard provides a landing page with relevant details and quick guides through LeanIX that should help them to self-serve, add & maintain data independently. This way, Fact Sheet Owners participate and contribute data in the workspace while navigating and learning in-tool first during onboarding but also for later purpose when they continue to use SAP LeanIX.
Your task:PRO: Foster decentral ownership of information from the very beginning CON - Stronger learning by actually "working hands-on" in the Application Fact Sheet in-product
- Fact Sheet Owners get to know SAP LeanIX and are able to already explore full value of the tool
- Dashboard is used for both initial onboarding and data collection, as well as data maintenance
- Risk of Fact Sheet Owners not being able to navigate on their own in the tool
Prepare and if needed configure the Fact Sheet Owner Onboarding dashboard in your workspace. Do not invite your colleagues at this stage yet, we will do this in the next section in a central communication.
How to:Read through the documentation to familiarize yourself with the necessary features of the Onboarding Dashboard within your SAP LeanIX workspace. We provide a default option, but you can also add personalized messages or links if you like by configuring the Fact Sheet Onboarding Dashboard within your SAP LeanIX workspace.
We recommend to focus app owner engagement for your applications marked as "in scope. You may consider creating a saved search for reusability. For more information: See Here.
- OPTION 2: SURVEYS
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- Description:
A Survey is an automated way to gather information from several people in one go. It is a way to crowdsource the effort to bring up the data quality you have in SAP LeanIX.
PRO: Quick automated data collection if training your Fact Sheet Owners in-app seems too challenging short-term CON - Fact Sheet Owners simply have to fill out a response form of specific fields that keeps data collection narrowed to the very basic required fields
- No login needed
- Onboarding of Fact Sheet Owners to the tool (via dashboard) needed at a later point in time, as Surveys are not recommended for continuous data maintenance
- Fact Sheet Owners may not understand the full value of SAP LeanIX and need for their contribution
Admins play a crucial role in utilizing Surveys to collect additional information from various stakeholders. To make use of Surveys effectively, they need to be configured in the first place. Let's explore the configuration process and how it enables admins to gather valuable insights from stakeholders
Your task:Configure Surveys within your SAPLeanIX workspace to collect initial data on Applications. The fields you should ask for are:
- Lifecycle
- Business Criticality
- Functional Fit
- Technical Fit
We recommend to use the "In scope" field to filter for your focus applications.
Caution
IMPORTANT:In order to send surveys to responsible fact sheet owners, they need to have the status "invited" in the workspace. To avoid sending invitation emails next to surveys to your users, you can use the "silent invite" option for changing the user status from "not invited" to "invited" by accessing the bulk invite option in the admin user list. For more information, See Here.
As a pre-requisite, you should have added the respective user as a subscriber without inviting them, which is possible from the fact sheet subscription tab, inventory inline table or via .xls import. Please note this option is only available for workspaces where SSO is enabled for authentication.
For further guidance or in case you need help, please reach out to support@leanix.net)
Silently invite your colleagues to the workspace, but do not send the Survey at this stage yet, we will do this in the next section in a central communication.
How to:Watch the video below to guide you through the necessary steps within your SAP LeanIX workspace. For additional information, you can also refer to the resources provided here.
- OPTION 3: SPREADSHEET
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- Description:
Rather than inviting the Fact Sheet Owners to the workspace, you can also manually collect the data for Application Fact Sheets outside the tool. The Admin / Enterprise Architect collects the attributes in a spreadsheet template. The Spreadsheet is then uploaded through the import function to workspace inventory.
Your task:PRO: Manual collection if you are more comfortable with familiar spreadsheet content or have spreadsheet content already available CON - Targeted requests of specific fields from Fact Sheet Owners leads to little confusion
- No login needed
- Direct communication via mail or familiar communication channel
- Manual tracking of responses
- Possibility to adjust and control input before data import
- Very manual data collection for Enterprise Architect Team/Admin
- Onboarding of Fact Sheet Owners to the tool (via dashboard) needed at a later point in time, as Surveys are not recommended for continuous data maintenance
- Fact Sheet Owners may not understand the full value of SAP LeanIX and need of their contribution
Fill the spreadsheet with the relevant attributes to collect central data for an Excel import and upload it to the inventory.
How to:Export your Application list with the right columns selected from the inventory to get the suitable template incl. IDs of your Applications according to our documentation article. The columns to select to collect right data should be:
- Name
- Lifecycle
- Business Criticality
- Functional Fit
- Technical Fit
Then use the template to collect attributes from Fact Sheet Owners in the central communication (see the later section where we provide you with a template for outreach to your colleagues) and once collected, you can upload the spreadsheet with the Excel Import/Export function in the inventory.
We recommend to focus app owner engagement for your applications marked as "in scope. You may consider creating a saved search for reusability.
For more information See Here.
Data Collection Hands On!
 | Click here to log in and open your workspace in another tab. Afterward, proceed with the tasks from the How-To section of your chosen option. |
Data Maintenance
Stakeholders must not only provide initial data but also remain engaged in data maintenance. SAP LeanIX can only grasp the full value as a tool to keep transparency across your IT landscape with continuous data quality. In order to maintain high data quality and relevant insights, you should leverage integrated methods to ask Fact Sheet Owners to maintain data.
- DATA MAINTENANCE PROCESS
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- Description:
Think about a long-term process to maintain data quality for SAP LeanIX. This requires transparency and communication of standard monitoring processes, stakeholder governance and time planning.
Your task:Develop and align with your senior sponsor and core team on a data maintenance process. This should include:
- What are the responsibilities of Fact Sheet Owners? Update data on Application Fact Sheet whenever changes occur, approve or decline Quality Seal.
- How do you track data quality? Define KPIs, dashboards and minimum standards for what good data quality is (e.g. approved quality seals), show leaderboards of data completion across departmental units.
- What are governance mechanisms to ensure data maintenance? e.g. If after certain time, data is still not filled, need to involve management to remind.
- How often do you ask for updates? You can set specific time frame (for example, 6 months) with a manual call to action to update information and audit of the data quality.
Once decided on this governance and process steps, you continue configuring your workspace accordingly and onboard your Fact Sheet Owners to this process.
- QUALITY SEAL
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REMINDER: The Quality Seal is a mechanism to govern data quality of the respective Fact Sheet by the responsible Fact Sheet Owner. Depending on how you have set the Configuration, the Quality Seal will break and ask for a check needed (e.g., 6 months have passed or a change has been made to the Fact Sheet). Once the Quality Seal is broken, only the responsible subscriber is able to approve the Quality Seal to set it back to the "Approved" State. Otherwise the Quality Seal will stay in "Check needed" mode or "Rejected".
The subscribed Applications of each Fact Sheet Owner with its Quality Seal will also be shown as a quick search panel on the Fact Sheet Owner Onboarding Dashboard.
INCREASE YOUR DATA QUALITY
You can only rely on your analysis as you are sure that your data quality is sufficient. This is why SAP LeanIX provides features such as Fact Sheet Completeness, Quality Seal or Surveys to keep track of your data quality and completeness.
For further guidance, you can refer to our documentation:
- NOTIFICATIONS
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- Description:
Notifications are a useful mechanisms to let subscribed Fact Sheet Owners know via system generated e-mails when data is changed or needs to be checked. This way you can quickly set reminders or call-to-actions triggered from the workspace.
Your task:In order to automate notifications to responsible Fact Sheet Owners, you can set the configuration under the SettingAdministrationNotifications. Here you can set when which subscriber should receive notifications and when.
Best Practice: It is recommended to notify the Responsible Owner subscriber, as this person should be the key owner for the data quality of the respective Fact Sheet. You should set instant notifications for responsible subscribers when the Quality Seal is broken.
How to:For more details information read our documentation:
Notifications | SAP LeanIX User Docs
- ADDITIONAL: CALL TO ACTIONS (OUTSIDE TOOL)
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- Description:
Instead of independent governance of Fact Sheet Owners in the workspace and through notifications, you can also chose to create internal company processes to regularly ask for data maintenance and checks. This would be at your own pace, i.e. you send an e-mail with a call-to-action to check Fact Sheets every 3 or 6 months to the relevant stakeholders.
Your task:Align with your core team on a good sequence to manually ask for a data update.
Align with your senior sponsor to support those call-to-actions, by e.g. sending the prompt for data maintenance or monitoring the results of data quality closely.
- ADDITIONAL: AUTOMATIONS & TO-DOs
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- Description:
To-Dos are action items you can create manually or automated in your workspace and assign to a user. You can configure to also send notifications once a To-Do is assigned.
To-Dos can be combined with automations, an easy-configurable and no code feature, that allows admins to set up Automation flows, which react to concise events and thereby trigger sequential actions. This can be a useful feature to automate some steps along the data maintenance process.
An example could be: When the Quality Seal is broken, then a To-Do is created and assigned to the Responsible Owner with a notification and call-to-action to adjust the Quality Seal.
The to-do dashboard panel is also included as a summary and quick link in the Fact Sheet Owner Onboarding Dashboard.
Your task:Create Automations with To-Dos. Here is guidance on how to create Automations and To-Dos.
Data Collection and Maintenance Checklist & Task
I confirm I have completed the tasks below:
- You have selected an option and configured your workspace for initial data collections from Fact Sheet Owners
- First data maintenance measures are defined and in place