CIOs face challenges enterprise architects can solve. Explore the five key challenges SAP LeanIX helps CIOs address.
CIOs and CTOs today face an interesting challenge. Against a backdrop of political and economic uncertainty,, they find themselves charged with bringing innovative technology into their organization.
The goal is growth and greater resilience. The challenge lies in ensuring that this technology integrates seamlessly with their legacy technology while keeping everything reasonably in budget.
The good news is, because technical innovation remains a strategic priority, enterprise IT budgets remain healthy. Gartner just reported that IT spending is still on track to grow in 2024, continuing the trend we identified in our IT Cost Optimization Survey 2023. The challenge then is not so much money, but smooth adoption and integration.
Successfully introducing innovative technology to your organization calls for paying down technical debt. Most organizations have IT landscapes built upon legacy systems. Getting new technology to work with these systems – or modernizing them so they can – without impacting operations can get tricky.
What makes it less tricky? A robust enterprise architecture practice which has and established standards for evaluating and adopting new technologies, you have the essential ingredients for a step-by-step, data-driven approach to modernization.
Visualizing your IT landscape and building a transformation road map requires a tool that maintains all of that data in a user-friendly way. Find out how SAP LeanIX supports CIOs by downloading IDC's white paper:
IDC WHITE PAPER: The Business Value of SAP LeanIX
Challenge 1: Business Transformation
Rapidly evolving technology changes market. Consumers once bought physical products. Now they want software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions they can access 24 hours a day from the phones in their pockets.
Every industry – from transportation and logistics to leisure and media – has to offer customers a digital user experience. Whether you're ordering a taxi, a takeaway, or theater tickets, it's all done through an app.
This also applies to business-to-business (B2B) service provision. IT vendors now have apps on their company phones to monitor the performance and security of the software they supply, while acquiring new software is a simple process of entering your billing information into a SaaS tool's website.
As customer preferences and demands change, companies must change to meet them. This means changing the way they do business. And because every aspect of a company's operations today is embedded in technology, a business transformation is necessarily a technology transformation.
Enterprise architecture supports both sides of the transformation equation. By inventorying, mapping, and modeling the existing IT landscape, enterprise architects (EAs) prepare the business for any transformation that may come down the pike.
Because EAs focus on how technology supports the business, they can serve as trusted advisors in business transformations, guiding the evolution of the IT landscape the transformed business will need. Indeed, based on their understanding of the existing landscape and its dependencies they can create the roadmap needed to get from the as-is to the to-be.
To find out more about how SAP LeanIX can support business transformation, book a demo of our toolset:
Challenge 2: AI Adoption And Governance
Everybody's talking about generative artificial intelligence (AI). With many modern enterprises striving to do more with fewer resources, smart software capable of doing the work faster and at a greater scale than mere mortals may seem like a dream come true.
Still, AI is so new it's little understood and organizations are struggling to work out how and where to implement it. Security and legal concerns, not to mention ethical ones, may be overblown fear mongering, or they might be impenetrable barriers to realizing the potential of AI tools.
Organizations that hold back on adopting AI tools face losing their competitive edge. On the other hand, those that move forward rashly could end up facing consequences from security breaches to regulatory fines.
The key to successful adoption is to proceed with AI under careful governance. EAs have a critical role to play here. First, as part of mapping the environment, EAs can and should capture where the organization is using AI. This is certainly critical for governance, and may actually be necessary for regulatory compliance.
At the same time, EAs can and should facilitate AI adoption. They can do this first by helping implement an AI governance framework, in collaboration with others across the organization.
Second, they can help identify areas where the adoption of AI can help support specific business goals. And, as with other innovative technologies, EAs can design and manage the plans to introduce AI capabilities or AI-enabled solutions into the company's enterprise architecture.
Guidance for implementing AI safely has been added to the meta-model IT landscape template within SAP LeanIX. To find out more about the challenges and opportunities of AI, and how we can help, read our report:
REPORT: SAP LeanIX AI Survey Results 2024
Challenge 3: Cloud Transformation
Before artificial intelligence (AI) dominated the headlines, cloud computing was the biggest innovation for the enterprise. More than ten years after its became "the future of business,", cloud transformation remains challenging for organizations and their CIOs.
Building an IT landscape from scratch by buying cloud-based solutions is relatively easy nowadays. Moving legacy, on-prem solutions to the cloud is not. Frankly, ensuring that the move to the cloud is worth it economically often calls for a transformation of the IT landscape.
Organizations that fail to adopt a cloud-optimized architecture prior to migration often struggle to realize the value they seek from cloud transformation. Even those who have prepared properly for the cloud often find that only some parts of their IT landscape benefit from cloud hosting.
In other words, the best cloud strategy may involve a hybrid approach, with parts of the landscape in the cloud and parts on-premise. This can mean taking a step backwards and migrating some of their IT landscape back on-premise in order to reach their optimal state. That is, one cloud migration may lead to another, albeit in the other direction.
EAs focus on ensuring that an organization's technology choices, including how best to leverage the cloud, make the most sense operationally and economically. EAs can recommend the ideal cloud architecture as well as propose pragmatic alternatives.
And once you have decided on a particular course of action, they can provide the insight and foresight required for efficient execution.
To find out more about how to prepare for application modernization and cloud readiness, download our white paper:
WHITE PAPER: Create an Application Modernization Road Map
Challenge 4: Application Rationalization
CIOs certainly need to help their organizations adopt innovative technology and innovative approaches to technology management. At the same time, they need to make sure that the company's current technology investment pays off by optimizing the application portfolio.
Application rationalization is the process of evaluating and addressing whether applications maintain the optimal technical and functional fit for the organization's needs. Gartner recommends its TIME framework for pursing an application rationalization initiatives.
This gives you a matrix to assess the technical fit and functional fit of your applications so you can decide on one of the following actions:
- Tolerate - accept the application in its current state for the time being
- Invest - focus on maximizing the value of this high-priority application
- Migrate - work on finding a better application to fulfill this need
- Eliminate - remove the application as it is not needed or desirable
Once again, sitting at the nexus of business and technology, EAs have the data, tools, and expertise to perform this analysis, make recommendations, and plan next steps.
To find out more about using the Gartner TIME framework, download our guide:
EXPERT GUIDE: Applying the Gartner TIME Framework for Application Rationalization
Challenge 5: Technology Risk Management
Of course, your technology landscape consists of more than applications. The landscape also contains a range of IT components that support it: platforms, operating systems, programming languages, and hardware. Since your applications depend on and run on these components, their relative health impacts overall landscape performance.
IT asset managers can track these components in configuration management databases (CMDB) like ServiceNow. Maintaining such an inventory, however, is just the start. Because IT components, too, can become outdated, you also need to keep track of lifecycle data and, as components age, replace them.
How do you know what to replace and when? This is where EAs come in. They understand the application landscape, and especially how specific applications support specific business capabilities.
They also understand what components support which applications. This means they can provide business context for assessing the criticality of a particular component. As a result, your EAs can help monitor component lifecycles and proactively address obsolescence in a way that makes the most sense from a technical and business perspective
To find out more about how SAP LeanIX helps manage technology risk and compliance, book a demo:
