CNCF-hosted Co-located Events North America 2024

Backstage is typically adopted by platform teams to solve engineering problems. Securing extended funding can be challenging if its broader business value is not clearly articulated. We present 2 case studies from the energy and insurance sectors where we have used Backstage to address questions from business stakeholders: Is our tech organization aligned with strategic objectives? Is our information system enabling key initiatives? Can we explain and measure how our tech teams deliver value? By driving the initiative with executive-level sponsors and extending Backstage with "business-oriented" features, we have demonstrated its value beyond an IDP platform. We share learnings from two projects, and demonstrate a set of new features: 1) the augmentation of the (static) System Model with (dynamic) concepts such as initiatives, 2) the design of a flexible measurement framework (for KPIs), and 3) the integration of Enterprise Architecture concepts and their visual representation.