Riot Games: Simplifying Technology Landscape and Aligning IT With Business Needs

Growth Without IT Landscape Visibility

Riot games initially grew by moving fast and allowing each team to find their own solutions. However, as the company grew, this became unsustainable.

IT redundancy grew as multiple solutions were used for the same capabilities, making synergy difficult. Answering basic questions about the IT landscape became a challenge, as did managing licensing and maintenance costs. 

Silos and Knowledge Fragmentation

As a result of these ways of working, knowledge of the landscape was in the people of the organization rather than being explicitly documented. Whenever technical information was sought about a solution, the EA team had to talk to a person, which could be time-consuming.

Conducting something as simple as a strategic planning forecast required several spreadsheets and meetings, leading to slow decision-making.

Defining a Custom EA Model

Riot defined their own EA model before introducing Ardoq, using the principles of generic Enterprise Architecture frameworks. They started by defining their problems: the questions for which they did not have answers. Following this, they defined the use case scenarios and architectural artifacts they would need to answer these questions.

After establishing this model, the organization evaluated platforms that had the flexibility to support their operating model and metamodel.

Creating “A Strategic Planning Forecast on Steroids”

Riot first defined a process to easily submit strategic planning forecasts (SPF) for the next year. This began with identifying roles and responsibilities, such as application owners, business capability owners, process owners, and data stewards. They combined this with information about the critical architectural artifacts that would need to be kept correct and up to date to ensure an accurate forecast. Now, Riot has what Chief EA Nelson Gama calls “a “strategic planning forecast with steroids.”

Modeling Business Capabilities

Riot are developing a business capability map for the organization. Rather than starting from scratch, they used the APQC process classification framework as a starting point. Then, they met with those identified as capability owners and built closer relationships with business stakeholders to validate this information and establish enablers for:

• Applications
• Information created, generated, or changed
• People and organizational units involved
• Vendors
• Business processes 

This allows them to understand business impact and assess risk in the event that any of these things change or become unavailable.

They also model the criticality and maturity of each capability. To do this, they ask:

• Do we have the right tools or systems?
• Are we manually copying and pasting from one system to another, and could integrations help?
• Do people have the right skills needed?
• Are the right processes in place, or should there be more standardization?

Improvement opportunities are compiled in capability deltas, which show the difference between the current state and the future state. Based on this, they can prioritize projects based on how they can improve capability maturity and deliver value, justifying investment.

How Ardoq Helped

Riot Games chose Ardoq as their EA platform to support their EA model.

They use Ardoq’s Surveys and Broadcast features to get the information needed for their business capability map.

Stakeholders can then use Ardoq Discover to visualize these capabilities and understand how projects could be used to improve their maturity, as well as the expectancies and timelines of each project.

Key Outcomes With Ardoq

• Improved SPF ability – Allowing for faster, more informed decision-making.
• Ardoq as a single source of truth – This consolidates all IT and business data, eliminating redundant tools and confusion.
• Improved stakeholder collaboration – Business leaders now actively engage with EA, ensuring strategic alignment.
• Data-driven prioritization – A data dashboard highlights gaps to address to ensure architectural information is complete and accurate.
• Increased operational efficiency – It’s now much easier to get answers to business problems, eliminating reliance on individual knowledge and reducing time wasted.

Learnings and Discoveries

• Keeping the architecture information correct is perhaps more challenging than building the architecture initially.
• Before moving forward with an EA initiative, it’s critical to define clearly what the architecture should address and its use case scenarios. There is no point creating an enterprise architecture simply for the sake of having one.
• Avoid EA becoming an ivory tower. It should not act as a bureaucracy or a roadblock.
• Stakeholders must participate in the effort to ensure EA addresses their needs and creates value.

Looking Forward

The EA team’s immediate goal is to complete business capability mapping using the defined process. Following this, they plan to integrate Ardoq with ServiceNow and use ServiceNow as a social source of truth.

About Riot Games

Riot Games was founded in 2006 to develop, publish, and support the most player-focused games in the world. As they went from one game to many, they have expanded to over 4,500 Rioters across more than 20 offices around the world bringing a global perspective to the games they create and the characters in them.