CIO Budget Planning: How Enterprise Architects Can Help

CIO budget planning is about empowering your organization to do more while investing less. Discover how enterprise architects can support you in creating a balanced budget.

CIO budget planning is more than just an annual checkbox exercise. CIOs and CTOs are being called on to continually enable the adoption of innovative and exciting technology, but also to minimize expenditure and maximize profits in a difficult market.

Essentially, CIOs are being asked to do more with less. Thankfully, modern technology often offers a greater return on investment than its legacy counterparts, once implemented.

Sometimes, however, replacing low-value legacy software with high-value modern alternatives involves a full-scale digital transformation. Planning alone for that kind of transformation can be very challenging and, in fact, 70% of such initiatives fail.

The good news is, enterprise architects have a deep understanding of your IT landscape and application portfolio, as well as the IT components that support it all. Creating an efficient, high-value enterprise architecture powered by innovative technology, at a lower cost than a lagging, legacy landscape, depends on your enterprise architects leveraging their insight to rationalize and modernize your application portfolio. 

Investment in rationalization and modernization can free up significant budget in the long term. It not only pays for itself, but will continue to save you money into the future.

SAP LeanIX empowers enterprise architects with deep knowledge of your IT landscape to inform your budget planning, and optimize spend. To find out more, book a demo:

The Challenges For CIO Budget Planning

Putting together a CIO budget is no simple prospect. It has always been challenging enough to plan out your staffing and resource needs. With the pace of technological change continuously accelerating, you almost need a crystal ball to know how your  budget needs will have changed by the end of the fiscal year.

CIOs were already planning cloud transformations, for example, when the launch of ChatGPT suddenly saw leadership calling for more money to fund the research and adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Who knows what technology may appear out of nowhere over the next 12 months and throw your plans out of the window?

Budgeting in anticipation of the next technology trend is a guessing game. Rather than focusing on that, focus instead on building a budget that invests in agility and innovation itself.

Taking this path, you will quickly find that updating your IT landscape will prepare it to adapt to whatever happens over the next year, and to adopt whatever innovative technology becomes essential in the future. By investing in a flexible, innovative IT landscape, you're making it future-ready for whatever happens in the market.

This is one reason why application modernization should be a priority in any CIO budget. App modernization, however, requires enterprise architecture support.

Application Modernization To Cut Your Budget

Application modernization is a vital area for investment in your CIO budget. Updated software, supported by modern IT components, will improve organizational performance while cutting IT expenditure.

Our IT Cost Optimization Survey showed that 26% of IT budgets are wasted on dealing with technical debt. Other studies have placed this figure closer to 75%!

Imagine how much easier IT budgeting will become once you've freed up 75% of your resources? Frankly, even 25% could be revolutionary.

How do you begin an application modernization process? And what does it look like in practice? Your enterprise architects can tell you, so long as they're empowered with the right tools.

SAP LeanIX acts as a single repository for all your application and IT component information. You enterprise architects can populate the tool with the information they have, then SAP LeanIX will fill in the gaps by leveraging our smart discovery tools.

Our platform will then surface insights into your application portfolio and showcase the low-hanging fruit that can make a real difference to your budget planning, both now and in future. This will empower your IT landscape to meet whatever the market requires of it.

Enterprise Architecture For CIO Budget Planning

This isn't the end of the benefits that a SAP LeanIX-empowered enterprise architecture function can have for your CIO budget, however. Once your IT landscape is fully documented in the SAP LeanIX repository, you'll have the clarity that you need to budget effectively for your application needs.

Not only will you have access to contract terms and durations for your applications, but you'll also be provided with information from our Lifecycle Catalog. This will help reveal when your applications are about to enter end-of-support, and which are already there.

You'll be able to drag your application information along a timeline to see what its status will be in a year's time, five years' time, and even 10 years from now. Not to mention, SAP LeanIX will use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to recommend best-of-breed alternatives to your legacy software, and help you budget for optimizing your portfolio for the future.

This kind of clarity regarding your IT landscape makes planning ahead for the resources you'll need in the future a simple matter of consulting our platform. This will ensure that your budgeting process is both streamlined and highly effective.

How SAP LeanIX Empowers CIO Budget Planning

CIO budget planning is increasingly challenging without proper intelligence regarding your technology landscape. That intelligence can only come from an enterprise architecture function empowered by SAP LeanIX.

The information within the SAP LeanIX toolset gives you with everything you need to know to create a budget that optimizes both your performance and your return on investment. That's why SAP LeanIX has become an essential tool for CIOs, and not just at the end of the financial year.

SAP LeanIX empowers enterprise architects with deep knowledge of your IT landscape to inform your budget planning, and optimize your expenditure. To find out more, book a demo: