Lexmark announced it has received a prestigious 2020 Forrester/InfoWorld Enterprise Architecture Award, recognising the Lexmark Enterprise Architecture (EA) team for its strategic leadership, concrete business impact and vision for enabling digital transformation.
Lexmark has transformed its EA organisation from technology strategists to an outcome-driven organisation in order to further the company’s digital transformation. The team has enriched its capabilities portfolio to align with its vision for a “transformation-as-a-service” delivery model.
This model required the creation of two digital frameworks: the digital thread and the digital asset. “The digital thread is an information framework that EA leverages to capture all data associated with the end-to-end lifecycle of our hardware and supplies—from design through use to end of life—and deliver it via a business-consumable semantic layer,” explained Tom Eade, Lexmark Senior Vice President and Chief Information and Technology Officer.?“The digital thread enables the offerings we envision as part of a transformation-as-a-service portfolio.”
Eade describes the digital asset as a hybrid architecture framework that the EA team leverages to create Lexmark’s “enterprise digital twin”—a logical model of the people, processes and technology that make up the business.
The digital asset enables Lexmark’s analytics capabilities to mature from descriptive analysis and predictive insights into prescriptive actions. This improves Lexmark’s ability to architect and design for operations, security and privacy and makes more offerings possible as part of the company’s vision for a transformation-as-a-service portfolio.
“Lexmark’s digital thread is where we gain insights; the digital asset is where we architect and design a transformed future state that operationalizes and monetizes these insights,” Eade said.
Lexmark realised significant improvements in time-to-market for IT initiatives and reductions in defects in the first full year of adoption, as well as reductions in the human and technical infrastructure required to manage non-value-added activities.
The EA team also sparked a new wave of innovation at Lexmark by democratising data across the value chain and by unleashing even more analytical potential of its data scientists. As a result, Lexmark envisions its transformation capabilities portfolio as an integral component of emerging go-to-market offerings.
“Lexmark has long been a company built on innovation,” Eade said. “The work we are doing to transform enterprise architecture is part of that tradition.”
