Genesis Financial Solutions (GFS), a leading nonprime consumer credit platform, has created a culture of stewardship with LeanIX. Stewardship at GFS includes acquiring, creating, sustaining, enhancing, and retiring assets. Stewards are the primary decision-makers for their assigned assets. They collaborate with consumer lending and technology leaders to guide the evolution of business capabilities, applications, and IT components.
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Enhancing Organizational Performance by Creating a Culture of Stewardship with LeanIX
1. Iver Band, VP, Architecture
Vivek Gunasekaran, Enterprise Architect
Enhancing Organizational Performance
by Creating a Culture of Stewardship
with LeanIX
2. Genesis Financial Solutions, Inc. | Confidential and Proprietary | Pg. 2
Agenda
• Background: Re-Establishing Architecture in a Fast-Growing Company
• Challenge: Lack of Clear Application Accountability
• Approach: Culture of Stewardship
• Result: Accountability for Applications and Other Assets
• Recommendations
4. Organization, History, and Mission
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Organization
• Genesis is a leading service provider for banks in a fragmented and growing U.S. non-
prime credit card market.
• One of a select group of large-scale non-prime credit card platforms.
History
• Established in 2001
• Seasoned management team, with over 50 combined years of service with the Genesis
platform
• Over a dozen portfolio acquisitions and service transfers completed
Mission
• Drive powerful asset generation through two proprietary distribution channels
delivering a unique credit card solution to non-prime consumers and merchant partners
6. Diverse Business Relationships Drive IT Complexity
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Legend
7. Architecture Practice
• Re-established beginning in June 2022
• Spans enterprise, solution and software architecture
• Led by VP, Architecture who reports to CTO
• Enterprise architects report directly to practice leader
• Security, data and solution architects report to delivery teams
• Key process is Architecture Collaboration and Review Cycle
− Integrated with Intake to Delivery Process used for major projects
− Preliminary Architecture Discussion Collaborative Architecture &
Design
− Collaborative Architecture & Design ARB or CTO Review
• LeanIX first licensed in 2022 and established as system of record
for enterprise architecture in January 2023
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11. Establishing Application Portfolio Management
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GFS adopted LeanIX for APM and established clear responsibility for each
application. We did this by following leading practice in three areas.
Provide Enterprise
View
• Inventory
applications
• Add automated
quality checks
• Relate apps to
additional assets
• Visualize and
summarize
application
portfolio
Scale the analysis
process
• Enable user
friendly analysis
with
preconfigured
interactive and
institutive
dashboards and
reports
• Integrate LeanIX
into critical
process such as
audit and
compliance
Define Roles and
Responsibilities
• Identify Stewards
for Applications,
Business
Capabilities, IT
Components, and
other information.
• Define
Stewardship
Responsibilities
12. Ownership versus Stewardship
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0
1
2
3
4
5
Possession
Control
Service
Sustainment
Ownership Stewardship
Stewardship is sustaining, enhancing, or creating assets for stakeholders. Stewards are not
possessive but are the primary decisionmakers for their assets. They care for their assigned assets by:
- Observing
- Learning
- Doing
- Teaching
- Leading
Iver Band
13. Cultural Change Outcome
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Before After
Ambiguity about decision-
making responsibility for
applications and
IT components.
Every application has
a steward
Decisions made
collaboratively but with no
focal point
Now we have primary
application decision makers
who collaborate as
necessary
Difficult to find out who is
responsible for an
application
Now we can look in LeanIX
15. Accomplishments with LeanIX
Genesis Financial Solutions, Inc. | Confidential and Proprietary | Pg. 15
Inventory
• Business
Capabilities
200+
• Processes
~300
• Applications
250+
Planning
• Capability
planning for
IT and select
business
functions in
progress
Adoption
• IT
Management
• Audit
• Information
Security
• Cloud
Migration
• End User
Support
Reports
• TIME
• Application
Lifecycle
• Application
Hosting
• Security and
Privacy
Compliance
16. Building the Future with LeanIX
• Manage process to migrate remaining on-prem systems to cloud
• Complete initial capability-based plans and use them for multi-
year financial planning
• Add application usage information to factsheets through cloud
platform integration
• Complete IT component inventory and integrate with change
management process
• Report on candidates for application rationalization
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18. Recommendations
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Get the endorsement of senior leadership
Tie implementation to critical initiatives
Insert LeanIX into critical, well-understood functions like information security
and audit
Automate data collection
Use manual data collection only when human judgement is required
Consider both surveys and preformatted spreadsheets for manual data
collection
Visualize and publish results frequently
Notes de l'éditeur
Architecture includes enterprise, solution and software architecture
Enterprise architecture includes strategy development with internal business partners; business, data, application and technology architecture; coordination of security and data architecture, including all oversight processes.
Architects also work with development teams to build architecture capability.
Key initiatives accelerated: Compliance, Branding, Capability-Based Planning…
Need to show the scale of our organization: number of employees, customers, merchant partners, whatever we are willing to disclose publicly
Complexity of our business model: Partners including multiple issuing banks, merchants, issuing and underwriting platform providers, investors… this could be a graphic. Investors include private equity investors, lenders, and debt purchasers. Basic business is borrowing money at lower interest rates and lending it out at higher interest rates.
Completeness – Are all relevant information about Application recorded.
Timeliness – Are data collected and recorded in a timely manner.
Uniqueness – Is there a single view about Applications.
Consistent – Is the data about Application consistent across different medium
Accuracy – Is the data about Application reflects the state of the Application
Validity – Does the data match rules
Ref: https://healthinstitute.illinois.edu/connect/news/berd-tips-dimensions-of-data-quality