Ørsted: Staying in control of a complex and evolving IT landscape with collaborative enterprise architecture management
A structured approach to deployment
With SAP LeanIX solutions, renewable energy company Ørsted reinvented the way it manages its enterprise architecture across the global enterprise. A robust change management program prepared the organization for rollout of the new solutions, which now underpin critical tactical activities while supporting strategic and transformational initiatives.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Utilities | Fredericia, Denmark | >7,000 employees |
IT users of SAP LeanIX solutions, plus 100 architects.
applications covered.
active applications sunset thanks to new insights.
Head of Technology and Application Portfolio Office, Ørsted A/S
Building a new enterprise architecture ecosystem for a global enterprise
Around 200 years ago, physicist Hans Christian Ørsted discovered electromagnetism, enabling, for the first time, the generation of large quantities of energy without combustion. Named in his honor, Danish enterprise Ørsted A/S has undergone a transformation in the last decade from a fossil fuel–based to a renewable energy company. Ørsted aspires to create a world run entirely on green energy, whether that’s onshore or offshore wind, bioenergy, or renewable hydrogen and green fuels.
Morten Max Andersen, the company’s head of technology and application portfolio office, explains that the company’s transformation “is very much driven by an IT organization working together with the business to make sure we’re moving in the right direction.” This organization comprises around 1,000 IT professionals and 100 enterprise architects in countries ranging from Denmark, Poland, and Malaysia to the United States and the United Kingdom. Ørsted wanted to enable an agile approach across this global IT organization while equipping teams to think more strategically about the constantly changing IT landscape. It also wanted to enable cost transparency in an environment comprising nearly 1,500 applications.
The company’s existing enterprise architecture management tool, which facilitated a number of important processes such as procurement, was heavily customized and could not support this vision. Ørsted needed to find new solutions to underpin an integrated enterprise architecture ecosystem. But it knew implementation was just the start: comprehensive enablement and change management were needed to allow geographically dispersed users to fully understand and embrace the new solutions.
Preparing the organization for rollout and enabling users
Having chosen SAP LeanIX solutions as a central component of its larger enterprise architecture ecosystem, Ørsted first planned to use a staggered implementation approach. However, as Anderson explains, because of the ongoing transformation to a full-blown agile approach across global IT, he and his team were left with only two months to get users up and running with SAP LeanIX solutions. As a result, they opted for a big-bang implementation, going live with more than 1,000 users in one go.
Carsten Hellum, senior enterprise architect at the company, explains that the team defined two guiding principles. The first was to use preconfigured standardization and best practices, including the solutions’ standard data model and modeling principles. He says this helped get users on board by making things clear, consistent, and understandable from the outset.
The second guiding principle was to use the ServiceNow platform for operational activities while adopting SAP LeanIX solutions for use in tactical or strategic initiatives. Hellum says, “We had the tendency to want to do everything with our previous solution, and it was slowly developing into a customized monster, with time to market for new functionality really slow. Enforcing this new division every time we got a request for new features became part of our ecosystem thinking.”
A meticulously planned communication and change management program was equally important. Karolina Czekańska, the company’s senior application portfolio management consultant, explains that the company adopted an “ADKAR” methodology comprising multiple elements.
First, to grab users’ attention and enhance awareness and preparedness, Ørsted used measures including written material, persona creation, and a motto, screensaver, and movie promoting the solutions. It then addressed the desire phase, using targeted e-mails and training to promote engagement and ownership, defining roles and responsibilities clearly, and introducing measures to improve data quality. To build knowledge and ability, the company created an intranet site featuring knowledge content that evolved with the project and offered comprehensive training before and after go-live. Finally, in the reinforcement phase, it launched a dashboard to help users monitor data quality and ran a competition to encourage people to take part in an applications assessment survey.
Building a collaborative and proactive IT organization
This thorough preparation paid off. After a successful implementation, Andersen says, “SAP LeanIX solutions are now a central part of an architecture and technology ecosystem used by the entire global IT organization. We’re steadily growing the value of our initial use cases and introducing new capabilities to actively manage our complex and changing IT landscape.” He adds, “The solutions are more user-friendly and intuitive. Given the support and training we offered, we’re on a very good footing.”
The team has seen the number of service tickets drop compared with the legacy system, while usage has increased. In a given month, around 500 of the company’s 1,000 IT professionals use SAP LeanIX solutions, with around 3,700 logins each month and 25 application updates each day. The company’s more than 100 enterprise architects are part of one architecture and technology ecosystem that uses the solutions for application portfolio, technology portfolio, architecture, and transformation management as well as reporting and insights. These architects are well anchored in their communities, helping share best practices and standard frameworks across the enterprise.
Ørsted’s focus to date has been on increasing control, using the solutions as the primary source of master data on the application landscape. The company has improved architecture management by revising the metadata model, updating registrations for more than 1,400 applications, and enhancing data quality and coverage. Governance is also enhanced, with applications owned by around 18 “agile release trains” and applications mapped to roles or teams in the agile delivery organizations. The company has performed functional and technical fits on more than half of the application portfolio, promoting strategic portfolio management.
The solutions also improve technology risk management, helping mitigate obsolescence with application plans for on-premises assets and enriching IT component fact sheets with lifecycle catalog data.
When it comes to reporting, dashboards present information that’s personalized for each delivery organization, while integrated ecosystem data from SAP software, SAP LeanIX solutions, and ServiceNow feeds into management reports.
Increasing control of the technology landscape
On the road ahead, Hellum says Ørsted intends to use standard functionality in SAP LeanIX solutions to manage technology more proactively, reducing costs and risk. It wants to build the foundation for a technology asset inventory based on a sound data model aligned with the ServiceNow platform. It also plans to extend the solutions’ coverage beyond on-premises applications to diverse technology assets used by the company.
Another step is to implement a framework for technology standards management and promote faster adoption and use of strategic platforms and approved technologies.
On the application portfolio management side, the company wants to increase adoption of application road maps and enable delivery organizations to set up and plan their own implementation road maps. The team is running an extensive cloud migration survey that assesses migration readiness and feeds into the migration paths for different applications. Also on the agenda is enabling visibility of vendors in the architecture and technology ecosystem.
Another plan involves working with colleagues from the ServiceNow team to align the legacy data model with the data model in SAP LeanIX solutions. According to Hellum, allowing ServiceNow and SAP LeanIX solutions to “talk the same language” is crucial to success from not only an operational but also a tactical and strategic perspective as the company’s transformation continues.