Coles Group sees enterprise architecture tool uses "proliferate"

Coles Group is seeing a “proliferation” of uses for an enterprise architecture tool it has stood up - from identifying simplification opportunities across its technology landscape, to helping meet its obligations under Security of Critical Infrastructure (SoCI) laws.

EAT@Coles, as the tool has been codenamed, is based on LeanIX and - among other things - has become the “go-to source to understand the technology landscape at Coles,” enterprise architect for supply chain and stores Muffazel Lotia told the recent LeanIX Connect Summit APAC.

The retailer’s general manager of technology strategy, transformation and architecture Nick Walker said that information about the group’ app estate and architecture had previously been stored in spreadsheets.

“Everyone had a spreadsheet or many, and it was always out of date,” Walker said.

“The hardest part for me was everyone spoke a different language. The nomenclature, the way we interacted, the terms, the descriptions of criticality - are we talking about SoCI-type criticality? Is it the number of users impacted?”

Walker said that Coles’ environment was already significantly complex pre-Covid; the pandemic drove significant further investment in technology, and the problems with access to information and with language “got worse before it got better”.

In addition, concerns over the threat landscape meant more questions being asked about the app estate, and more compliance audits.

“The key for us, and where I started, was the need to establish and define an enterprise capability model and implement an enterprise architecture management system,” Walker said.

The decision to go with LeanIX had already been made, and work on a common vernacular started, when Lotia joined Coles in late 2021.

Coles internally termed the “first part of the journey” to LeanIX as “the great consolidation”.

“This was actually one of the longest phases we ran,” Lotia said.

“First, what we had to do was find, unearth, collate, validate all of our application data from multiple sources - these were all in Excel spreadsheets everywhere. We reached out to multiple teams across our technology domains to get at the application data points, combined them into a master spreadsheet, from which we then loaded the data into LeanIX.”

“After the great consolidation, we literally assassinated all our spreadsheets.”

Work then commenced to build relationships between the different pieces of information in LeanIX, and to “ingrain the tool in our architecture practice, in our DNA.”

Use cases for LeanIX had since “proliferated”; “We’ve got a lot of teams using our EAT now,” Lotia said.

“Our security team works with the architecture team to understand the security posture and health of our technology. We are using it to identify technology risk in our landscape. 

“Our strategy team are one of the biggest users of LeanIX because what they do is try and use LeanIX to understand our entire tech landscape. 

“We use it for our business continuity planning, we use it to discuss and understand our tier 1 systems and our dependencies and components. We [also] use it for lifecycle management (LCM) now to understand which of our components are towards the end of their lifecycle, so when we do our LCM planning for the next year, we use our EAT to build reports and understand their operating cost and build plans around it.”

Lotia also said the EAT is being used to aid SoCI Act reporting: “Coles is an essential services business,” he said. “We are using the data within LeanIX to build our SoCI reporting out of that.”

In additiion, it is being used in ongoing simplification work.

“We’re under a massive simplification strategy, and we’re using LeanIX to just look at all of the simplification opportunities in our tech landscape,” Lotia said.

Lotia said that future efforts cover the association of processes to architectures.

“Coles is a big business, and we have many processes across many areas,” Lotia said.

“As an example, in our supermarkets, we have team members doing things such as checking the expiry of products and from that they work out what is the price they need to put on that product which is coming to its end-of-life.

“There is a system associated to that process, but once you tag that process, we can now start to understand how much of that is manual, what does it cost to do that process, what is the system that we’re using it, and what efficiency we can gain by doing automation on that.”

Walker also said that LeanIX dashboards would increasingly be put in front of Coles’ leadership team.