We're excited to announce the release of our new Enterprise Architecture Maturity Model. We spoke to Dominik Söhnle, Senior Consultant in the LeanIX Professional Team and the expert behind the tool's development, to find out all about it.
Tell Us How You Came To Enterprise Architecture?
I used to work for a management consultancy, and I was staffed onto a project to develop the target architecture of a company, and that's where I caught the enterprise architecture (EA) bug. That was my first direct contact with EA and it's stuck with me ever since.
I joined LeanIX in early 2021 as one of their first consultants and, since then, my role has been to support our customers in implementing LeanIX as their new EA tool, developing their EA practice, and engaging in activities like application rationalization or post-merger integration.
To find out more about EA maturity, watch a recording of our recent webinar:
WATCH: Increase the Value of your EA Practice - Assess your EA Maturity with LeanIX
What Is Enterprise Architecture And Why Does It Matter?
Enterprise architecture (EA) is a comprehensive framework that provides a holistic overview of an organization. Therefore, it’s always important to me to mention that EA is not only about IT and underlying technology, but also about the organization’s structure, strategies, and processes.
EA is key to align business goals with IT infrastructure to ensure consistency, flexibility, and adaptability in an increasingly connected world. It helps you to react faster to new situations, and improve the quality of digital products and services to have a positive contribution for a competitive advantage.
Why Is A Mature Enterprise Architecture A Competitive Advantage?
A mature enterprise architecture (EA) is one that supports the goals of the company.
We're talking about well-defined and standardized processes, clear governance and, for example, an agile IT infrastructure. When your EA is mature, business and IT stakeholders will be in alignment and a coherent framework will promote informed decision-making, support innovation, optimize resources, and effectively manage complexity.
With a pro-active approach, a mature EA practice facilitates collaboration, drives transformation, and adapts to changing market conditions, keeping the business ahead of the competition. An immature EA practice, on the other hand, may focus only on alignment between business and IT, and miss valuable opportunities to positively impact the entire enterprise, limiting its potential to drive change and growth.
What Prompted LeanIX To Design An EA Maturity Model?
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In 2022, I did some research about the future of enterprise architecture (EA) and discovered a correlation between the maturity of EA Management (EAM) and business outcomes. This indicates that a mature EAM supports the most relevant business goals, such as identifying innovation opportunities, improving business agility, and enhancing customer experience.
To find out more about Dominik's research, read our previous blog post:
READ: The Future Of Enterprise Architecture - IT or Business?
To complement the reasons already mentioned above that mature EAM can contribute value to the business, we also learned something in conversation with our customers and partners. While they're using LeanIX as a technology to support enterprise architecture (EA), they are often focusing less on complementary aspects that are essential for long-term success.
We want to provide our customers even more individual and tailored guidance and orientation for the further development of their EA and strengthen our position as a thought leader for EA. That's why we created our EA Maturity Model.
How Do You Benchmark Enterprise Architecture Maturity?
Once we decided to create our Enterprise Architecture Maturity Model, our first step was to develop a framework of factors to include:
Organization - people-factors like buy-in and enablement, and integration of EA in processes and governance
Use cases - a journey towards a holistic management of IT spanning from classic corporate IT to cloud-native and product IT
Data - elements of data collection, data accessibility, and data structure
Technology - the use of EA tooling, as well as integrations, third-party systems, automation, and workflows
Within these categories, we discerned 20 questions for you to answer, so you can get a better understanding about your priorities, challenges, and enterprise architecture (EA) maturity. Working with us, you can then use your new EA maturity model to roadmap the growth of your EA practice and we'll suggest LeanIX features that will support you on the way.
What Are 3 Key Benefits Of The EA Maturity Model?
1 Identify Strengths And Weaknesses
The assessment provides a comprehensive understanding of your organization's current enterprise architecture (EA) capabilities and identifies areas where you are performing well and where improvements are needed
2 Develop A Roadmap To Maturity
By knowing your organization's current EA maturity level, you can develop a roadmap for advancing your EA practices that includes clear priorities, objectives, and action plans for areas in need of development
3 Improve Communication And Collaboration
The maturity assessment can identify inconsistencies or deficiencies in communication and collaboration between different departments and stakeholders, and enable organizations to address these issues to improve cross-functional collaboration and synergy
What’s Next For The LeanIX EA Maturity Model?
Obviously we're very interested in customer feedback. If you've completed an assessment, please reach out to us to tell us what you thought of the process.
We'll use your feedback to develop and improve our Enterprise Architecture Maturity Model and ensure it aligns with your needs. More than that, we're looking to benchmark an industry average, so we can offer you more information on how your enterprise architecture (EA) function measures up against your competition and what the critical success factors are.
To begin your journey to EA maturity, try our EA Maturity tool for free:
