Every business wants to be innovative. In practice, however, issues like disruptive implementation, reluctant adoption, and social risk make innovation sporadic and only fitfully effective.
How can enterprise IT leaders turn the rich and ever-expanding pool of technological opportunities into meaningful innovation without undermining – or being undermined by – the day-to-day operations of their business?
At this year’s LeanIX Connect Summit Americas, some of the finest minds in the industry discussed how to walk this particular tightrope – and enable continuous innovation that’s in lockstep with the larger business’s operations and goals.
Our flagship Boston event saw a small army of enterprise architects, CIOs, CISOs, CTOs, and business and IT leaders coming together to share their wisdom. Quite frankly, it’s impossible for us to condense all of the learnings that came out of the three days we spent together here.
So instead, here’s just a taste of what we got out of the event – in the form of 3 of our favorite expert-led sessions.
You can catch up with the rest of the sessions free and on-demand here »
Talk 1: Donovan Simpson, OneMain Financial, ‘Modern Integration Architecture for Enterprises
As Lead Software Engineer for OneMain Financial, Donovan Simpson knows that integrating architectures is a process where complexity only spirals in one direction, especially when a business is scaling.
Meshing together disparate functions is a key part of rolling out better products and services for customers. All too often, though, this leaves internal turmoil in its wake, as tech stacks mutate and become increasingly unwieldy.
Simpson shows us how (with a little help from LeanIX) OneMain Financial found a scalable approach to integration that blends robustness, agility and useability. The beauty is that this approach simultaneously meets their IT, development and operational needs.
Simpson thoroughly unpacks the thinking behind OneMain’s ‘Integration Tree’ – and explains why all it takes is three questions to start integrating and innovating your architecture with confidence.
Register to watch Donovan’s talk here »
Talk 2: Les Ottolenghi, Stride, ‘How LeanIX enables businesses to dominate their markets’
In this talk, Ottolenghi delves into the lessons he’s picked up over a stellar career – from modernizing casinos across Las Vegas to his current role as Chief Technology & Information Officer at EdTech firm, Stride.
Although the markets he’s worked in couldn’t be more different, Ottolenghi has built a reputation in all of them for bringing tech innovation to customers, developers and business stakeholders.
Watch Ottolenghi’s talk to find out how he built a playbook for Stride that’s enabling them to use technology that dramatically increases student engagement from K through 12 – to the extent that over 3,000 schools can now customize Stride’s courses. (And he’s got an NFL star on board for good measure.)
He also explains how he helped flip casinos’ archaic, fragile and sweat-inducingly complex legacy systems into refined, scalable cloud to cloud environments – and how IT’s contribution to revenue went from 12% to 65%.
Pretty cool, right?
To find out more, watch Les Ottolenghi’s full talk here »
Talk 3: Venkat Udayasankar, Intuit, ‘Architecture is for Everyone’
Intuit is a $12bn business with c.15,000 employees working in 20 different sites around the world, spanning multiple time zones, cultures and backgrounds.
How do you even start to architect across a team of this size? How do you build software products that are coherent, consistent and cater to the needs of all the key players?
As Principal Engineer of Platform & Architecture at Intuit, that’s a question Venkat Udayasankar is devoted to answering.
Intuit’s strategy involves making big bets and setting strategic goals – and it needs the right tech to support that strategy.
In his talk, Udayasankar explains how Intuit has developed a Capability Map that connects strategy and execution – a framework that can be used by everyone in the business.
Using this framework, both developers and business stakeholders can ask (and agree on) which capabilities are driving the most leverage for the business, and how they can build more and more effective products.
Get more lessons in continuous transformation, on-demand – and in Berlin
So there you have it: 3 fascinating talks that should give you a heap of ideas focused on supporting your enterprise’s need to continuously transform and innovate at speed. And there’s (a lot) more wisdom where that came from.
You can access a host of remarkable sessions from Connect Summit Americas 2022 on-demand on the event page. Two we’d advise you to check out immediately are:
Christian Holston, Senior Enterprise Architect, Southwest Airlines: How to make the cultural shift to becoming more data-driven »
John Borkowski, Data Officer, Workday: Embracing Decentralized Data for Scale and Agility »
And if you’re feeling any pangs of regret about missing the event in person, there’s good news: LeanIX Connect Summit is coming to Berlin on September 21st, 2022… and you’re invited.
It’s your last chance in 2022 to learn from and network (either in-person or virtually) with the leading minds in Enterprise Architecture and IT today.
So don’t miss out: register now!
SEPTEMBER 20 - 21, 2022 | BERLIN & VIRTUAL
LeanIX Connect Summit Berlin
Focusing on Innovation - learn from business and thought leaders, network with peers, get free training and certification, and participate in more than 30 breakout sessions.
