Flynn: Laying a solid foundation for the enterprise architecture practice
A comprehensive, shared overview of software
With SAP LeanIX solutions, the Flynn Group of Companies created an accessible, single source of truth for a complex IT landscape. This helped the construction group improve stakeholder understanding of the relationships and dependencies between business applications and rationalize these applications to support key business capabilities.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Construction and real estate | Ontario, Canada | >6,000 employees |
Vice President of IT, Flynn Group of Companies
Creating shared visibility into a complex IT landscape
First launched in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1978, Flynn is the leading commercial roofing, glazing, and cladding company in North America. The company has grown and expanded steadily over the last 45 years, both organically and through mergers and acquisitions (M&A).
This growth has brought with it some unique challenges for Flynn’s IT organization, challenges reflected in the increasing complexity of the software estate.
Naturally, Flynn is far from unique in this regard. When a company buys or merges with another organization, it buys that organization’s software as well. This means, among other things, buying duplicate systems to support the same business capabilities. It also means rationalizing the software estate and gradually consolidating operations on common systems best suited to serve the organization into the future.
A company can’t grow and continuously transform in this way without astute and forward-thinking IT leadership. The good news is, that’s exactly what Flynn has.
Alan Zych is vice president of IT for Flynn. As the company grew, Zych oversaw both the vetting of M&A targets as well as the onboarding, integration, and management of an ever-expanding array of new systems and solutions. While he had an able team of collaborators, including business analysts such as Tracy Moffat, the software estate’s complexity reached a point where it exceeded the ability of spreadsheets and tribal knowledge to oversee it. Indeed, it became difficult for anyone outside this team to easily access the information they needed for system consolidation or investment in new solutions.
Zych realized that the team needed to get more rigorous and methodical when it came to its organically evolving enterprise architecture (EA). He also realized that simply hiring an enterprise architect would not help Flynn address software complexity. To have a meaningful impact on the company’s growth, any new enterprise architect would have to collect and organize all relevant information about Flynn’s business capabilities, systems, and data objects. What’s more, that person would have to map, analyze, and model the connections and dependencies between all these components.
Zych wanted to lay the groundwork for this envisioned EA practice by beginning to organize all this information. So, he sought a new solution.
Business Analystl, Flynn Group of Companies
Optimizing enterprise architecture management
Flynn had some smart heads, but it needed a system of record that existed independent of them, a system that Zych and team could more easily maintain and that their colleagues could intuitively access. SAP LeanIX solutions provided that.
“Prior to SAP LeanIX solutions,” Zych says, “this information did not exist in a single spot that someone could go look at. It lived in my head. It lived in Tracy’s head. It lived in the heads of some of our developers. There was no single place to go for that information. You couldn’t get an accurate picture unless you had all the right people in the room, and you couldn’t get all the right people in the room unless you knew who they were and that you needed all of them.”
Thanks to the preconfigured visualizations of data objects and interfaces, among other things, provided by the solutions, Flynn began to have a comprehensive, shared overview of its software.
Zych also appreciated the fact that someone could more quickly and easily get the whole story through an interface that allowed for different levels of granularity. “You could see that we were talking about asynchronous, API-based integrations or, with a simple click, turn that off to get a simpler version of the landscape diagram.”
“That was the aha moment,” Zych says. He quickly understood, “If I can show somebody this diagram, they can absolutely get a better understanding of the integration landscape of our various applications.”
Being able to more easily turn things on and off made it possible to share either a complex view or a more digestible one as needed. “The fact that I can get such a view across a variety of applications is awesome,” Zych says.
Vice President of IT, Flynn Group of Companies
Rationalizing applications and improving lifecycle and risk management
SAP LeanIX solutions have already helped Flynn address a number of challenges.
Dealing with payroll is a universal business capability. However, supporting this capability with multiple solutions is not ideal. “Six months ago,” Zych explains, “depending on the region, this business capability would have been fulfilled by one of four applications.” Recognizing that you have four applications supporting one business capability is an important step. But how do you figure out which one to keep, which ones to turn off, and in what order? Thanks to the diagramming, surveying, and analytical capabilities of SAP LeanIX solutions, Flynn now has three payroll applications. In another six months, it will have two.
With M&A activity continuously adding IT components to the software landscape, managing lifecycles at Flynn is easier said than done. The solutions also help in this area.
“Before SAP LeanIX solutions,” Zych says, “we didn’t have a solid understanding of how much was unsupported, or why we have six different versions of SQL server in operation. There are legitimate reasons, but we had to search for them. When we did, we found things like, ‘This business application doesn’t support anything beyond SQL server 2016.’ Or we discovered, ‘This SQL server 2012 is a general SQL server with no dependencies, and nobody’s ever taken the time to upgrade it.’”
The solutions also improve the group’s IT risk management. “When you hear that XYZ breach or vulnerability is out,” Zych says, “and that affects SQL server 2012 SP2, you need to be able to answer the question: ‘What do we have running on it?’ You can go around and ask everybody or you can go search the central repository provided by SAP LeanIX solutions.”
Zych adds: “Security risk takes precedence, but it can’t take precedence to the point of obscuring or ignoring the other types of risk like business risk. Because we’re associating data objects and interfaces, we know that something going down affects these three other applications. And we can predict how that outage will impact them. We know the accounting system provides X,Y, and Z, for instance, so if X,Y, and Z are not available to the field-service application, that’s not good.”
Documenting the relations between systems in an easier-to-consume way allows you to shine a light on intuitive risks that might otherwise be difficult to quantify and qualify. Zych explains, “Now we can say, ‘The accounting system going down affects these seven other systems, and it affects these subprocesses in those systems.’ With that information, we can start to have a proper discussion about business impacts and how to address them.”
Business Analyst, Flynn Group of Companies
Fostering greater collaboration across the organization
Flynn invested in SAP LeanIX solutions with an eye to the future. As mentioned, the company was looking to lay the groundwork for developing an EA practice by creating a repository of knowledge that any future EA practitioner would need to be effective.
At the same time, it was looking to enhance collaboration across the organization when it came to making decisions about the IT landscape. The first step down that road was to provide stakeholders across the organization with a meaningful view into that landscape.
Collaboration has improved in important ways. As Moffat explains, “SAP LeanIX solutions have introduced people to each other who had previously been hesitant to reach out across the teams. Quite frequently, people would use me as a kind of go-between, instead of reaching out directly to the people who were impacted by a change to a particular system, or the people actually using the system they were integrating with, or the component shared between.”
“Now that we have this resource, and as people become more familiar with it, I’m not relaying messages. People are communicating.”