Enterprise architects need the right digital tools to empower their work, just like any other profession. See your enterprise architecture function revolutionize your organization in 2025 with the SAP LeanIX toolset.
Enterprise architects have been around since the 1990s, and like any other profession, they've had to adapt with the times. Just as sales executives used to work with telephones and paper files, but now work with sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, EAs now need cutting-edge, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools to do their best work in the digital age.
Trying to build an enterprise architecture function without SAP LeanIX can feel like trying to make a sale without Zoom, Powerpoint, or Salesforce. Your enterprise architects will, therefore, appreciate having the SAP LeanIX toolset so much, it will feel like a Christmas present.
In turn, their work will then be accelerated to drive business transformation for your organization. This is essential for keeping you agile and adaptive to the needs of the market.
To find out more about how you can slingshot your enterprise architecture function forward in 2025, book a demo of the SAP LeanIX toolset:
Enterprise Architects Drive Business Transformation
Enterprise architects are vital to business transformation, which is an essential capability for any organization in the modern market. What do we mean by "business transformation", though, and why do we feel it's so important?
We used to talk about 'digital' transformation, but this was too narrow a view. Your IT landscape touches on everything you do as a business, so you can't just transform your digital operations without adapting the rest of your operations.
This is why 70% of digital transformation attempts failed. To succeed, you can't just look at your digital landscape, but you need to transform your entire business.
Former SAP CEO, Bill McDermott summed it up best:
"What's happened is digital transformation has really turned into business transformation. How do companies deflect the pressure from their people using digital technology? How do companies avoid having employees swivel-chair between 13 applications, on average, a day, burning up 33% of their productivity? And now, how do companies take generative AI to completely rethink the game in terms of their business processes?"
We've known that organizations needed to update to the digital age to survive for years now, and it's unlikely any company has managed to stay in business without having undergone some kind of transformation at this point. Yet, this isn't the end.
Those who have completed a digital transformation have realized that it was never a one-and-done change. As the pace of technological evolution accelerates in a turbulent market, organizations need to change and keep changing again and again to stay relevant.
Rather than a one-off transformation from analog to digital, organizations need to make business transformation an ongoing project and a constant set of initiatives. They need to stay agile to ensure that the digital toolset they're using is always providing the greatest possible return on their investment.
This is still an incredibly challenging endeavor, which is why SAP LeanIX has created a set of tools designed to empower business transformation. Give your enterprise architects their best Christmas gifts ever by empowering them with our three powerful solutions.
1 SAP LeanIX Application Portfolio Management
Enterprise architects work to answer three important questions for your business:
- What software do we have and how does it all fit together?
- What software do we need and how do we integrate the technology we don't have?
- What software do we no longer need and how can we get rid of it?
This is what Bill McDermott meant when he said:
"How do companies avoid having employees swivel-chair between 13 applications, on average, a day, burning up 33% of their productivity?"
Too many applications means too much time wasted switching between them, but too few means your people will lack the capabilities they need to do their best work. Likewise, spending too much on software is a waste of your budget, but not enough means you aren't putting that money to work.
Before you can make decisions about which applications you want to keep and which you can retire, you need to have a comprehensive picture of your application landscape and how it fits together. You need both detailed information about each of your applications, and analytics and dashboarding tools to gain oversight of your whole IT landscape.
The SAP LeanIX Application Portfolio Management solution stores customizable fact sheets on each of your software applications that can be populated by pulling in information from a huge range of systems or through automated user surveys. You can then gain deep insight into your application portfolio as a whole with powerful analytics, visualization, and dashboarding tools.
Best of all, you can track these against a business capability map, so you can immediately see what your applications are being used for and how important they are for your organization. This allows you to prioritize your transformation efforts.
To find out more about SAP LeanIX Application Portfolio Management, book a demo:
2 SAP LeanIX Technology Risk and Compliance
Enterprise architects don't just work with software applications. They also need to ensure that those applications are powered by up-to-date IT components.
Outdated physical technology and operating systems are at constant risk of failure, but they also pose security risks. Legacy tech simply isn't prepared for modern cyber threats, and poses a constant threat to your organization.
Yet, an organization that can afford to completely replace its entire hardware portfolio in one go is extremely rare. To optimize your return on investment in your technology transformation, you need to prioritize replacing the IT components that are posing a risk, and that's not as simple as it sounds.
If your web team keeps some outdated mobile devices around to check that your public website still works on older devices, then you don't need to replace them with bleeding-edge technology. In fact, if you replaced them with the latest, secured devices, you wouldn't be able to test the site that way any more.
Of course, your configuration management database (CMDB) will log information about your IT components, but it won't tell you what they're used for. Your CMDB may show you that you have the above test devices that are outdated and vulnerable, but it won't tell you that they don't need to be replaced.
Likewise, it won't warn you about outdated IT components that are supporting critical business capabilities that could fail at any moment. To have that advanced warning, you need SAP LeanIX Technology Risk and Compliance.
Our solution will import all your IT component information from your CMDB and map them against your business capability map within SAP LeanIX Application Portfolio Management. This will allow you to immediately surface technology that's out of date or soon will be, and also how urgent it is for you to replace it.
To find out more about SAP LeanIX Technology Risk and Compliance, book a demo:
3 SAP LeanIX Architecture and Road Map Planning
So, your enterprise architects now have oversight of what parts of your IT landscape, including software and hardware, are optimal and which need to be upgraded thanks to SAP LeanIX Application Portfolio Management and Technology Risk and Compliance. What do you do with that information?
Of course, you need to retire the technology hardware and software that isn't a good functional fit for your business operations; replace the tech that is a good functional fit, but a bad technical fit because it's outdated or poor quality; and invest in tech that's a good functional and technical fit to make sure you're getting the most out of it. That is easier said than done, however.
First and foremost, retiring, replacing, and investing in tech all costs money and causes disruption to your operations, so you need to be realistic about how much you can achieve. Not to mention, as we established, this isn't going to be a one-off, and you will likely find your transformation project will be permanent.
There's an enduring myth that San Francisco maintenance workers start painting the city's famous bridge and, by the time they've finished at the other end, it's time to start painting the beginning again. In truth, workers will, like enterprise architects, inspect the bridge and find which areas need painting and prioritize, but the metaphor still works, maintenance is a constant process that never ends.
Think of your enterprise architects as maintaining your IT landscape and keeping it in a constant state of optimal operation. Enterprise architecture isn't a project, it's a vital, permanent function of your business.
This means that you need to carefully and strategically plan your business transformation and application and IT component management to fit within your budget and minimize disruption to your operations. If your modernization efforts constantly block your organization from doing business, then it won't be doing business for long.
In the worst case, removing an application or IT component without fully understanding how it fits into your IT landscape can be disastrous. What if you remove a seemingly unused application only to find it still hosts some of your essential customer data that can't easily be migrated into another of your systems?
Undergoing perpetual business transformation to stay on the knife's edge of optimal return on investment into your IT landscape requires intentional strategy. You need to design a realistic target state and prioritize a series of timed steps to progress towards that, even knowing your goal will likely change form long before you reach it.
Achieving this requires a tool that can inject real data from your IT landscape into your planning to ensure it's grounded in reality. It also needs to be flexible enough to adapt when your business goals, market state, and definition of innovative technology is constantly in flux.
That's exactly the value of our enterprise architecture planning tool, SAP LeanIX Architecture and Road Map Planning. Using all three tools together, you can ensure that your IT landscape is always aligned with your business goals.
To find out more about SAP LeanIX Architecture and Road Map Planning, book a demo:
