Enterprise architecture allows you to address the four key questions you need to ask before you undertake any digital transformation. Discover how SAP LeanIX can surface the insight you need to find the answers.
Enterprise architecture is increasingly becoming a key discipline for modern organizations looking to optimize their operations and digital toolset. This is because enterprise architecture puts your technology in the context of your business strategy to answer key questions.
When looking at application rationalization or any technology transformation, it's vital to understand your IT landscape before putting together your road map. To do that, you need to access the raw data on your digital infrastructure.
SAP LeanIX stores all of that information and surfaces vital insight into your digital strengths and weaknesses. Our solution empowers you to answer questions on your IT landscape, including the four key points you need to understand before you can move your digital capabilities forward.
To find out more about how SAP LeanIX empowers you to use enterprise architecture to answer key questions about your IT landscape, download this IDC whitepaper:
Enterprise architecture is the discipline of aligning your software applications and technology with your business strategy and operations. Before you can do any of that, however, you need to know what applications you have.
It may not seem like a challenging question to answer, but a company that grows organically over a long period of time can easily acquire software without tracking and logging it. Not to mention, employees may leverage software of their own accord without IT approval.
With it being so easy to access software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications without even having to install them, any employee with access to a company credit card can leverage unauthorized software for their work. Not to mention, anyone can unknowingly upload confidential information to a free-to-use SaaS application, if they don't realize the risks.
Samsung employees were recently discovered to have uploaded proprietary code into the public instance of ChatGPT to see how effective the tool could be for bug-fixing. They didn't realize that this would make the code available to OpenAI and potentially to other ChatGPT users.
This unmonitored leveraging of software tools is often referred to as 'shadow IT', but we prefer to think of it as 'business-led IT'. Employees will know what software works for them in their day-to-day work and it's best to allow them to leverage the tools that make them the most productive, so long as you keep oversight of it and can ensure risks are mitigated.
In order to do that, you need to know what applications your organization is using and what they're using it for. You can, of course, track all of this in complex Excel spreadsheets, but it's much easier to do in a tool that was designed for the purpose.
The SAP LeanIX solution package is made up of tools designed to track and map your IT landscape, so you can automatically build a complete inventory of all the software applications your organization is leveraging. It even features advanced SaaS discovery tools to surface applications your employees may be using without your knowledge.
Enterprise architecture isn't just about knowing what applications you have. It's also about aligning them with your strategy.
It's common for startups to leverage a communication tool like Slack, but eventually invest in the Microsoft toolset, which will include the very similar tool, Teams. Will you then need to keep spending on Slack licenses or will Teams replace it?
Are some of your customer details stored in Pipedrive and other information in Salesforce? Do you have PowerPoint, but also Miro?
Obviously, paying for one service for all your employees instead of two will immediately cost less, but there are also economies of scale involved. Paying for 200 licenses for one application may well be cheaper than 100 licenses for two applications.
This is low-hanging fruit for reducing your IT budget, but there are also benefits for efficiency. Getting everyone in your entire organization using the same toolset can increase collaboration and reduce the amount of training required for onboarding.
By cataloguing your application portfolio and spend, along with what each application is being used for, you can immediately surface any overlap in use case. SAP LeanIX will also allow you to understand who the users of an application are, so that you can begin change management processes to move them to an alternative.
Cutting budget in this way isn't just theoretical either. Our customer, Openclassrooms told us they cut 15% out of their budget in just a year by rationalizing their application portfolio with SAP LeanIX.
Enterprise architecture documents your application portfolio against the Gartner TIME matrix. This assesses each application based on its technical and functional fit for your organization.
Technical fit is how well an application performs and the general quality of the application. Functional fit is how well it supports your organization's unique needs in its particular use case.
For example, an Excel spreadsheet will have a great technical fit as it's readily available to be viewed at any time, but will have a poor functional fit for enterprise architecture. SAP LeanIX, meanwhile, is a great technical and functional fit for your organization.
TIME categorizes your applications on a matrix according to their technical and functional fit:
Each of the four categories then have a strategy and methodology behind them:
To find out more about using SAP LeanIX to enact the TIME framework, download our free guide:
By tracking technical and functional fit for each application within SAP LeanIX, you can immediately identify a strategy for optimizing each software tool in your IT landscape. This will allow you to rapidly streamline and improve the technical and functional fit of your entire software portfolio.
Enterprise architects don't just provide theoretical recommendations for your IT landscape. They support you in carrying out the optimization work.
Often that support is needed, as removing an application can be more complex than it seems. Simply switching a software tool off can cause disruption to your operations if not planned carefully.
What if you shut down a legacy customer resource management (CRM) tool only to discover that it stored customer data that wasn't backed up anywhere else? What if you remove an outdated Lotus database, only to find a key system relies on it to pull data from?
Knowing who is using a tool for what and how it connects to the rest of your IT landscape is vital for safely retiring a legacy tool, even when you're certain it's no longer needed. Only then can you surgically remove the application without causing damage to surrounding and connected systems.
It's crucial to use SAP LeanIX to map all the relationships between your different applications and data sources before you remove, replace, or even just upgrade a software tool. Not to mention, you need to know who is using the application, so that you can notify the users and engage in change management before you take action on an application.
SAP LeanIX will even allow you to automate user surveys to find out first-hand how applications are functioning and what will happen if they're removed. That information can then be added to your application data repository in SAP LeanIX to ensure it's in sight before you start any work on the application.
Enterprise architecture is vital for answering key questions about your application portfolio and IT landscape. Of course, answering questions is far easier when you have all the necessary information to hand when you're asked.
SAP LeanIX creates an information repository that documents all the key information enterprise architects need to know in order to make informed recommendations about optimizing your IT landscape. This repository allows any authorized person in your organization to see comprehensive information about your IT landscape in order to support transformation activities.
To find out more about how SAP LeanIX empowers you to use enterprise architecture to answer key questions about your IT landscape, download this IDC whitepaper: