Giving Leadership the Big Picture: How Liantis Is Turning Scattered Data into Executive Insight with Ardoq

Roots a Century Deep, and a Push to Future-Proof

Liantis is one of Belgium’s best-known names in HR and social services, built on a foundation that reaches back 100 years. Staying relevant for that long means never standing still, and the architecture team knew the way they managed their own landscape had to modernize with the rest of the business.

The pressure that turned a long-standing frustration into a priority came from the top. Leadership wanted to see the big picture, the whole landscape in one view. With rapid change and a lot of disconnected documentation to get through, the team could not keep it updated as rapidly as their landscape changed. As Stijn Lambert, Lead Solution Architect at Liantis, puts it, once leadership asks for that picture and you cannot bring it together, “that’s really a blocking factor.” That was the moment the team decided the way they worked would not get them where they needed to be.

Data Everywhere, and No Single Source of Truth

The team already worked with business capabilities, mapped business processes, maintained a high-level view of the application landscape, and applied application lifecycle management using Gartner’s TIME model. They had solid frameworks in place, but the problem was that the data behind them was spread across too many places.

“The frustrating part was that we had data everywhere. We had a lot of data about our architecture, about our landscape, but it was scattered all over the place.”

- Stijn Lambert, Lead Solution Architect at Liantis

Application lists sat in one place, business capabilities in another, processes somewhere else, and infrastructure diagrams in a separate tool, none of it linked into an overview that they could easily share with leadership. They used a traditional diagramming tool to handle the models, but it was a specialized architect tool which wasn’t built for the transparency and collaboration the team needed.

“We had a traditional diagramming tool, that fitted its purpose, but it’s not the best tool to be transparent about your architecture models and to collaborate. It’s not really built for that.”

- Stijn Lambert, Lead Solution Architect at Liantis

So the architecture stayed with the architects. The team kept a manually updated “town plan” in Excel, a high-level map of their IT landscape and how it should evolve over time, much like a city's plan guides development. They knew this format wasn’t dynamic enough to present to management. Without a single source of truth, leadership’s request to see the whole picture was a very labor-intensive one. Building yet another spreadsheet themselves was briefly considered and quickly dismissed. As Stijn saw it, the team’s time should go on the value they deliver to the business, “not on creating architecture tools or Excel files.”

How Liantis Implemented and Leveraged Ardoq

A Deliberate Manual Reset for a Foundation They Could Trust

The team could have bulk-imported their existing data through Ardoq’s import options or the API, but they chose not to. Instead, they treated the migration as a chance to reset and validate, starting with the existing sources and checking each one with the right colleagues before entering it into Ardoq.

“It gave us the opportunity to be really sure that what we’re putting in is high-quality data. We thought it was important to do that well, and not just import from everywhere and have imported chaos.”

- Stijn Lambert, Lead Solution Architect at Liantis

The work was split between the solution and business architects and ran over a couple of months, concentrating first on the application inventory as the core around which to build everything else. It was slower than a bulk import by design, as it gave the team a foundation they could trust and the chance to get to know the platform properly.

A Shift to a Data-Driven Way of Working Accelerated by the New Ardoq Experience

Something changed in how the team worked as they went. They started out as they always had in a traditional diagramming tool, but soon found the data inventory approach in the new Ardoq experience to be faster and more efficient.

“What was fascinating to see is that we started out working in workspaces, trying to start from diagrams. Then we saw everyone shift to the new, more data-inventory way of working, and in the end everyone was using that one.” - Stijn Lambert, Lead Solution Architect at Liantis

Bringing Product Owners in with Surveys

To keep the inventory current without the architecture team handling all data entry manually, Liantis turned to Ardoq Surveys to bring product owners into the process. Product owners had been involved before, but Ardoq made it far easier to bring them on board, notify them of changes, and capture their input. It worked well enough that the team now wants to use Surveys more widely, including to capture Liantis’ strategy-to-execution, or “town planning,” work, which they are moving into Ardoq next.

Lowering the Barrier to Insight Thanks to Ardoq’s Homepage Redesign

“With the new design, the barrier is much lower for users. We can see people using the tool and never really coming to us asking how do I do this, how do I do that."

- Stijn Lambert, Lead Solution Architect at Liantis

Rather than expecting people to navigate to specific reports, the team used Ardoq’s new homepage to build a dashboard that greets users when they log in, with the metrics and overviews people want to see, and a touch of gamification.

“What's nice, maybe even more than nice, is the dashboard you see when you log into Ardoq. We've put metrics and overviews there that everyone wants to see, and a bit of gamification too, like the product owners with the most applications in their portfolio, or applications marked to be phased out that have no successor. It really lowers the barrier to getting insights, without users having to go to specific dashboards. Usability-wise it's a big step.”

- Stijn Lambert, Lead Solution Architect at Liantis

The dashboard surfaces easy, useful insights, such as which product owners have the most applications in their portfolio, or which applications are marked for phase-out and have no successor lined up. Most business users are given read-only access via the new Discover experience, so they can easily find what they need with minimal training in Ardoq.

Key Outcomes With Ardoq

1) Architecture Business Stakeholders and Leadership Can Actually Read and Use

The clearest change is how approachable the architecture has become. Where insight used to sit inside a diagramming tool or a spreadsheet only architects could navigate, it is now transparent and always available.

“It’s much more transparent. Not somewhere in an Excel file where you need to know the procedure to plot the diagram and then present it to business. The diagram is always there, in a presentation or a dashboard.”

- Stijn Lambert, Lead Solution Architect at Liantis

The new Ardoq experience has lowered the barrier further. The team sees people using Ardoq without coming to them for help, which, as Stijn notes, is a good sign that the tool is working for the people it was meant to serve.

2) Self-Service Answers Using Ardoq’s AI Assistant

Some of the questions that used to land on the architecture team now answer themselves. The most-used AI feature so far is the AI assistant grounded across the whole graph.

“People reach out to it in the Ardoq interface out of habit, to ask things like who is the architect for this. The AI assistant was powerful at bringing up the right people.”

- Stijn Lambert, Lead Solution Architect at Liantis

That matters because the answer is not always obvious in the data. An application has no direct field for its architect; the link runs through a domain in the metamodel. The assistant follows that path and returns the right person, freeing the team from routine lookups so they can spend their time where they add the most value.

3) A Single Foundation, Ready for AI

Part of the reason for the move was to get ready for AI in a disciplined way. The team knew that useful AI depends on a solid data foundation, and that a fragmented landscape would not provide one.

“We know that if it’s garbage in, garbage will come out. So we stressed that we needed a single inventory of everything we have, to ground any kind of insight and knowledge, and AI too.”

- Stijn Lambert, Lead Solution Architect at Liantis

With the application inventory established as their single source, Liantis has the grounding it needs to apply AI to its own architecture and processes with confidence, rather than to a stale or partial picture.

Stijn’s Advice to EA Teams Still Living in Spreadsheets

“I wouldn’t do anything differently. We’re still convinced it was the right decision. I don’t think we’d get there if we were still using a scattered landscape of Excel files and diagramming tools.”

- Stijn Lambert, Lead Solution Architect at Liantis

For architects weighing the same move, Stijn’s advice is simple: at least take a look. The value is not only in more day-to-day assistance, but also in the foundation it gives you to automate more, bring in AI, and free up your team’s time for the work that matters, like pointing to the right insight to start a new initiative or flagging a risk. In his view, a scattered landscape of spreadsheets and diagramming tools holds back EA teams from demonstrating their strategic value to the organization.

Strategy to Execution, and Reporting Leadership Can Consume

The foundation is in place, and the team is now building outward. The next pieces are a technology and IT service catalog linked to business capabilities and applications, so Liantis can see, for example, which business capabilities are threatened when a piece of technology reaches end of life. Alongside it, the team is moving its strategy-to-execution and pre-portfolio planning into Ardoq, using Surveys to gather the data and Scenarios to weigh options for initiatives before committing to one.

Those pieces lead back to where the whole journey started: leadership. The goal is to report to management directly from Ardoq, in the language of initiatives, goals, and strategy rather than applications and capabilities, so the people who asked for the big picture can finally consume it themselves.

About Liantis

Liantis is a Belgian HR and social services group that supports entrepreneurs and employers across the full lifecycle of a business, from starting up and hiring to payroll, insurance, workplace safety, and beyond. Built on a foundation that reaches back around 100 years, it serves more than 246,000 entrepreneurs and 76.000 employers from over 60 offices across Belgium.