DONNER & REUSCHEL: Reducing IT complexity
Reinventing the technology ecosystem
Private bank DONNER & REUSCHEL AG wanted to reveal the true state of its IT landscape. Using SAP LeanIX solutions, it identified areas for reconfiguration and risk mitigation, strengthened governance protocols, and streamlined its cloud transformation strategy. The result is a modernized enterprise architecture that’s ready for growth.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Banking | Hamburg, Germany | €9 billion in assets under management |
Head of IT, DONNER & REUSCHEL AG
Eliminating blind spots in the IT landscape that impede governance
DONNER & REUSCHEL AG is a Germany-based private bank that offers investment, trading, asset management, and online banking services for European customers. The bank was established in 1798, has more than €9 billion under management, and employs 580 people.
With a centuries-long history, DONNER & REUSCHEL found its IT landscape had become increasingly complex over time. The bank was outsourcing IT services from numerous large providers while at the same time building and managing services internally. Due to the intricacy of its technology ecosystem, information became siloed or impossible to find, and stakeholders could not establish a clear picture of IT components, applications, and data interfaces across the institution.
The blindness that reigned over IT caused projects to be poorly implemented, without an architecture in mind, and resulted in a lack of proper governance. In one such instance, a Windows 7 implementation left more than €1 million on the table with a great deal of work still incomplete. As a result of this track record of misalignment, and with big aspirations to improve scalability by creating a 100% mobile workforce, the technical team at DONNER & REUSCHEL decided it was time to optimize the bank’s enterprise architecture.
Rearchitecting the technology ecosystem
In an industry as highly regulated as banking, DONNER & REUSCHEL knew it had to address the legacy systems it was running and consolidate vendors to help ensure compliance with diverse governing bodies. The organization also wanted to transition to the cloud, meaning a full-scale audit and rationalization of its applications and data interfaces had to be completed. The team selected SAP LeanIX solutions—software-as-a-service solutions that aggregate IT data and act as a single source of truth for driving strategic decisions.
Once DONNER & REUSCHEL’s IT data was loaded into SAP LeanIX solutions, the bank was able to get a clear, big-picture view of the dependencies residing across the system—both internally and with a reliance on external vendors. Having a clear inventory enabled the team to establish a project plan to prioritize and organize its next steps in modernizing the enterprise architecture.
Harnessing a modern, cloud-native enterprise architecture
Working with preconfigured reports and dashboards in SAP LeanIX solutions empowered the DONNER & REUSCHEL team to take immediate action toward improving and modernizing its enterprise architecture. Work began to centralize system integrations and lighten the load on the bank’s internal IT capacity. This led to the decommissioning, or “burndown,” of redundant or outdated applications, data objects, and office and service hardware.
The visibility provided by SAP LeanIX solutions also improved internal communication with DONNER & REUSCHEL’s governance committee, which oversees data security, information security, compliance, and risk management. Using dashboards and reports, this key team is better able to spot and manage risk, reveal technical debt, and set strategies in place. Currently, the enterprise architecture team uses 12 default dashboards and roughly 140 reports that are key to streamlined decision-making.
Crowdsourcing enterprise architecture efforts across a 40-person, cross-departmental user base of SAP LeanIX solutions accelerated data collection and stakeholder buy-in, especially with regard to the lift-and-shift approach the bank took in migrating to cloud-native infrastructure. In so doing, IT was better able to support its workforce in driving business value while offloading costly, on-premises legacy systems.