Continuous Transformation Blog

How To Synergize Business And Digital Transformation

Written by Neil Sheppard | July 4, 2024

The idea of digital transformation has evolved into a need for holistic business transformation across your entire organization. Discover how you can effortlessly transform your physical processes and technology in one initiative.

Digital transformation and wider business transformation are no longer two separate considerations. Since all the business processes a modern business engages in have a digital aspect, it's now impossible to separate the two worlds.

This means that any changes to your operations will impact your IT landscape, and vice versa. As such, any transformation project must synergize digital and physical change.

This presents a complex challenge. How do you make changes in two interconnected, but distinctly different, worlds simultaneously?

The key is to employ a specialist tool in each area that is designed to integrate with its alternate. We recommend leveraging SAP Signavio for business process transformation and SAP LeanIX for technology transformation.

To find out more about what SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX can do for you, book a demo:

 

Why Business And Digital Transformation Are Linked

Everything we do in the modern workplace is touched by technology. When we call a customer, we log it in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool; when we hold a meeting, we set up a conference video call; and when we send a product to a customer, we do it through a logistics system.

READ: Is Every Company Really A Software Company Now?

We've written before about how every company is a software reseller nowadays, providing a customer experience in the form of the software it buys or builds. If that is the case, then changing your organization must involve changing your technology, and changing your technology must involve changing your organization.

Infamous Boston Consulting Group (BCG) research explained that 70% of digital transformations fail. This is because they only consider technology, when the business side is equally important.

To succeed in business transformation, you must transform both your IT landscape and your business processes at the same time. If you don't, you will leave the two facets of your organization out of alignment and risk crippling your operational capabilities.

If your logistics system requires scanning a barcode on each item of stock, you must also provide your warehouse staff with barcode scanners or your supply chain will fall into chaos. Simultaneous transformation requires careful planning and complete clarity on both sides of the coin.

Let's consider how a partnership of SAP products can unlock business transformation success. Firstly, let's consider how our partner Signavio can support business process transformation.

 

SAP Signavio For Business Process Transformation

SAP Signavio has long believed that the key to success in business transformation is aligning your efforts across four pillars:

  1. People
  2. Processes
  3. Applications
  4. Data

To understand how your people operate and what processes they carry out, you need a tool to map out your operations in a way that's both comprehensive and easy to understand at a glance. SAP Signavio makes creating this map simple and fast.

You can begin by process mining in Signavio, building a comprehensive image of how your organization runs and clear lines of responsibility, as well as which processes are mission-critical or drive success. This map of your business processes in Signavio allows you to prioritize your focus.

Next, Signavio will provide deep insights into your processes, helping you to surface points of improvement. Armed with this information, you can design your target state and build a robust plan to move towards it.

As you do, Signavio will document that change and improve communication and collaboration among your stakeholders, as well as empowering change management. Finally, you'll be able to continue monitoring your processes into the future to prepare you for your next transformation.

Armed with Signavio, transforming your business processes becomes straightforward. Yet, as we've established, you also need to consider the digital side of your business in any transformation.

 

SAP LeanIX For Digital Transformation

So, Signavio is a key tool for managing the "people" and "processes" of your transformation. What about the applications and data?

Just as SAP Signavio builds a map of your business processes and their owners, SAP LeanIX will empower you to create a detailed, but comprehensible, map of your IT landscape. From the software applications you use to the IT components that run them, you can view how each aspect of your technology functions and interconnects.

Signavio helps you prioritize your applications, while LeanIX will show you which IT components support which applications and which business capabilities those applications enable, and how your business data flows through your IT landscape. This means you can see at a glance which servers and operating systems are driving your critical capabilities, and which are no longer needed.

Each of your applications and IT components will have their own LeanIX fact sheet, documenting all the necessary information and customized fields so you can add anything else you need to detail. This information can then be visualized in order to surface insights such as:

  • functional and business fit
  • cloud readiness
  • application and IT component obsolescence
  • generative artificial intelligence (AI) use
  • environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics, such as carbon output

Using this data, you can also build your target state in a sandbox environment in LeanIX to test its functional fit. Once you've established your vision, the tool will also help you build a road map to move from your as-is to where you want to be.

Using SAP Signavio, you can optimize your people and processes, while SAP LeanIX will support the modernization of your application portfolio and data distribution. Covering the four pillars of business transformation, the two platforms drive success independently, but the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

 

The Power Of SAP LeanIX And SAP Signavio

While SAP Signavio is a powerful tool for business process transformation and SAP LeanIX is key for application portfolio development, it's when the two solutions work together that they become essential. Signavio and LeanIX have always been the perfect partners, which is why we've both now become a crucial part of the SAP toolset.

As SAP software, LeanIX and Signavio now work together, with out-of-the-box integrations to pass data between the two platforms, improving the quality of their insight. Each solution manages its own aspect of your business, but also provides the connection between the digital and process worlds.

Together, LeanIX and Signavio enable swift, seamless, repeatable business transformation. To find out more, book a demo: