For Uniting Care, an organisation that supports more than 450,000 people across 460 locations in Australia through its private hospitals, residential aged care homes, foster care homes, and retirement villages, relying on spreadsheets to keep track of its application portfolio was no longer viable.
Prompted by the organisation's 2030 vision to invest further in its facilities and to merge all brands under the single Uniting Care umbrella, Uniting Care began in 2018 to look at alternative options.
It first started by undertaking a stocktake of its applications with the help of a managed service provider. The only problem with that was the provider at the time also relied on spreadsheets.
Uniting Care Queensland architecture services manager Ross Francis described that the "mountains of spreadsheets" created a "spiralling complexity" for the organisation, pointing out how it did not know exactly how many applications it had in its portfolio across all the different sectors, the cost of them, or the risks associated with those applications.
It wasn't until last December when Uniting Care worked with Citadel to carry out a four-week proof of value using LeanIX did the organisation gain visibility of its application portfolio for the first time.
"We literally took the information that we had in those spreadsheets and uploaded it into the architectural repository of LeanIX … we learnt from seeing the reports our data was actually quite dirty. There wasn't a high data quality element to it," Francis said, speaking during the digital APAC Gartner IT Symposium 2020 this week.
At the same time, LeanIX has given the organisation access to information about the technology risks associated with its applications, as well as the costs of running them.
"What we really got a view of was where that risk