A Primer on EA Connect Days 2019: Europe's Best Enterprise Architecture Conference

Just as LeanIX itself was designed to accommodate the unmet needs of those seeking Business Capabilities-focused IT architectures, the annual EA Connect Days was started in 2014 to showcase their previously overlooked insights. Both product and event have since become integral to one another, and though the scale of each has increased in pace with customer/attendee demand, the fundamental objective of the two has remained the same: keep improving the IT-Business relationship.

Happening on November 26 and 27 in Bonn, Germany, the 2019 edition of EA Connect Days will again reveal to all varieties of IT/Business strategists how LeanIX is continuing to serve their interests—this time, however, in front of its largest audience yet.

Registration details can be found here, but for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the event (or perhaps for the enjoyment of those who’ve attended in the past), this post will present a collection of the best insights from the previous LeanIX EA Connect Days.

Enjoy the evolution! *Cue flashback swirl*

EA Connect Day 2014 — Helvetia Group — Basel, Switzerland

Helvetia Group, a global insurance group and longstanding LeanIX customer, hosted the very first LeanIX EA Connect Day from its offices in Basel, Switzerland. Representatives from 12 companies joined for a day-long exchange on key EA themes such as cross-functional cooperation and “next generation” IT architecture management. A notable presentation by Juha Mylläri, former VP of IT Architecture at RUAG, offered a detailed account on the following cornerstones of collaborative EA (the third of which being accomplished by LeanIX at the time throughout RUAG operations in Switzerland):

Addressing management risks due to unsolved architectural issues
Immediate consideration of urgent business issues
Strengthening the same understanding in a federal architecture community

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Image 1: Signage for the first EA Connect Day in Basel, Switzerland in 2014.

Mylläri's points were later driven home by Inge Hanschke, a dedicated LeanIX partner and the Managing Director and CIO of Lean42 Management Group, who endorsed the product’s multi-faceted functionalities to provide analysis to stakeholders.

EA Connect Day 2015 — Axel Springer Headquarters— Berlin, Germany

Building on a year’s worth of growth, LeanIX was invited to the offices of Axel Springer in Berlin to hold their 2015 edition of EA Connect Day. IT Managers, EAM specialists and DevOps experts convened to network with one another and listen to presentations like the following:

Carlo Velten, Crisp Research - “Cloud Architecture Excellence”

Requirements for the next generation of IT management tools to suit cloud and cloud-hybrid worlds.

Paul Mueller, Adjust - “Scaling Without End”

How to design architectures to maximize performance—by optimizing current models or building from the ground up.

Syliva Westphal, Zalando - “DevOps Meets EA”

How Zalando uses LeanIX to monitor the lifecycles of applications in automated and synchronous ways.

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Image 2: Fashion styles in IT as seen at the 2015 EA Connect Day in Berlin, Germany.

Yet perhaps more than anything else, the 2015 EA Connect Day marked the beginning of the now-famous LeanIX BBQ: arguably the only thing IT and Business need more than problem-free digital transformations.

EA Connect Day 2016 — Zalando Innovation Lab — Berlin, Germany

More than 100 participants attended LeanIX’s 2016 EA Connect Day—this year hosted at the Zalando Innovation Lab in Berlin. It was a remarkable moment in LeanIX’s short history, and in addition to putting the vibrancy of the global EA community on display once again, the day offered focused customer testimonials like the following from what was unmistakably a LeanIX power user community:

Timo Derstappen, Giant Swarm

Timo Derstappen, co-founder of Giant Swarm, reported that he and his company had committed themselves to relieving their clients of the burden of running microservices infrastructure. Combined with LeanIX metrics, Derstappen spoke about how his group helped customers store and analyze all technical and business metrics directly in the context of their IT architecture thereby allowing them to receive real-time feedback and iterate more quickly.

Andreas Puke, AMAG

Andreas Puke, Head of Enterprise Systems at AMAG, gave a step-by-step account on how LeanIX helped the car manufacturer achieve full transparency into its SAP landscape and develop more practical ways to coordinate its SAP and non-SAP applications.

Priya Kothari, BDNA/Flexera

Priya Kothari, former Senior Director of Technology Partnerships (Business Development) at Flexera, detailed why state-of-the-art technology—as exemplified by LeanIX—is key to Enterprise Architects for assessing risks in IT landscapes. The talk was a perfect occasion to underscore the benefits of Flexera’s Technopedia integration with LeanIX.

EA Connect Day 2017 — Adidas Global Headquarters — Herzogenaurach, Germany

Inside Adidas’s global headquarters, IT and business executives from the most iconic brands gathered to compile industry insights and witness the launch of more innovations to LeanIX’s freshly-released “Pathfinder” product. Banners throughout the sportswear titan’s conference hall sparked obvious comparisons to the collaborative EA Management tool itself, and as demonstrated in the following presentation by Michael Voegele, Adidas's former CIO, the parallels weren't a coincidence:

EA Connect Day 2018 — Former Plenary Chamber of the Federal Republic of Germany — Bonn, Germany

Yes, you read that right. The 2018 edition of EA Connect Days (note the plural) took place inside Germany’s former parliamentary building in Bonn, Germany, now the World Conference Center.

By the numbers, it was the biggest yet: 350+ attendees; 31 presentations; 12 sponsors. Kicked off by a keynote address from futurist Peter Hinssen on how IT can instil daring ideas in traditional and agile business alike, the conference spanned two days—enough time, that is, for all nearly all participants to receive personalized walkthroughs of the many new product features revealed at the conference by André Christ, LeanIX’s CEO and co-founder.

And to help Christ contextualize the numerous use cases of his product, the following industry leaders stepped to the stage to demonstrate the advantages of performing data-driven Enterprise Architecture with

Andreas Pfeiffer and Nicolas Braun, Zalando - "Technology Governance in Zalando's Microservices World"

LeanIX is used to document and model the Microservices Architecture of Zalando's entire eCommerce store. As well, it now functions as a company-wide tech glossary—a dynamic archive for its self-sustaining development teams and their equally inventive approaches to software design. By inventorying all their services within the Modern EA Management Tool, Andreas Pfeiffer and Nicolas Braun explained how they have the data necessary to engineer a custom-built, in-house risk management tool to specifically address GDPR compliance.

Kati Gholam, TUI - "Fact-Based Transformation at TUI"

Kati Gholam, an Enterprise Architect and dedicated LeanIX user from European travel giant TUI Group, showed an audience her company’s journey from process-led rigidity to an agile, full solutions architecture using a modern EA Management Tool.

Thorsten Düvelmeyer, Hermes -"Lean EAM With the Microservices Add-On and the Signavio Integration"

Hermes’ Solutions Architect Thorsten Düvelmeyer needed his company’s IT portfolio to match its vertical integration strategy. Inside the Plenary Chamber he shared the imperatives of de-coupling monolithic architectures in favour of a microservices architecture. Hermes used a lean approach to EAM to centralize its documentation landscape—“one place where all EA data could be found”—and to chart their target architecture. With a focus on accessible collaboration, documentation, and future roadmaps, Düvelmeyer showed attendees the evolution of its EA procedures from sluggish mechanisms like Microsoft Word and Visio to agile teams employing holistic modeling and a uniform language.

Oliver Schwarz, Vaillant Group - "Enterprise Architecture and Digital Transformation"

Vaillant Group, the oldest company represented at EACD, was hit hard by digitalization. “The world changed,” announced Oliver Schwarz, Enterprise Architect IT for Vaillant. “And we were forced to adapt.” Schwarz and his team had sought out an EA approach that best reflected their company's ever-growing reliance on intangible assets and the need to analyze customer preferences. With a LeanIX tool, Vaillant now has a platform to map its Business Capabilities to its shifting IT landscape while comprehensively studying systems data.

Interested in coming to EA Connect Days 2019?

LeanIX offers a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for Enterprise Architecture (EA) that enables organizations to make faster, data-driven decisions for their IT landscape. More than 180 leading brands worldwide such as Adidas, DHL, Merck, Vodafone, and Zalando use the innovative tool. Users of LeanIX gain insights on how to organize and leverage their IT landscape to increase competitiveness and innovation going forward. LeanIX addresses the common enterprise predicament that information regarding IT landscapes is missing, outdated, or difficult to analyze. LeanIX is headquartered in Bonn, Germany.