Enterprise architecture empowers everyone in your organization to contribute to data-driven decision-making regarding the optimization of your IT landscape. Discover how SAP LeanIX enables the democratization of IT.
Enterprise architecture is the discipline of ensuring that your organization's IT toolset is aligned with its strategic goals. Sometimes that involves saying no to an initiative that doesn't align with your long-term plans.
Unfortunately, this has led to enterprise architects getting an unfair reputation for blocking innovation. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Enterprise architecture is vital for ensuring that your initiatives are truly innovative, and not a misstep in the wrong direction. Yet, proving that requires aligning your enterprise architecture work with the rest of the business.
The best way to do that is to recruit the rest of your business into enterprise architecture. While having enterprise architects on-hand to guide the process helps, there's no reason enterprise architecture can't be practiced by your entire organization.
Think of it like information security. You have an infosec team, but you still train and make infosec content available to your whole company as you expect everyone to work together to protect your data.
There's no reason why your enterprise architects can't make data about your IT landscape available to everyone and allow that data to govern their decision-making. Doing that, however, requires a central EA data repository that anyone in your organization can access.
To find out more about how SAP LeanIX can democratize enterprise architecture in your organization, book a demo:
What Is Enterprise Architecture?
Enterprise architecture has actually been around far longer than our current digital toolset. The concept was first created in the 1980s and was originally about aligning your phone and fax service with your business strategy.
Regardless of whether we're talking about how information flows through phone and fax lines to support your operations or how it's stored in servers, applications, and the cloud, however, the principles of enterprise architecture hold. Since digital technology has become far more vital to enterprise than telecoms ever were, we can see that EA was ahead of its time when it was first formulated.
In the 80s, of course, when organizations were smaller, more localized, and much more hierarchical, enterprise architecture was more about ensuring your operations were lean and affordable by removing telecoms that you didn't really need. This is what gave rise to the rumours of enterprise architects gatekeeping innovation.
When you're siloed at a certain level and would like to spend budget on something that would make your job easier, it can be hard to hear that your needs aren't a vital part of your organization's strategy. This can leave enterprise architects in the difficult position of saying 'no', but this very setup is rapidly being left behind in favour of a more business-led structure.
While strategic alignment is crucial, it can be easy to forget that the forest is made up of trees, so to speak. Empowering your employees with the workplace tools that make them personally most productive can drive overall productivity.
The Future Is Business-Led IT
Enterprise architecture in the modern world is about empowering your employees with the tools that best support their work. Of course, you must take budget and security concerns into account, but the employee experience is an equal concern.
An Adobe survey in 2021 found that 49% of US citizens would quit their jobs due to frustrations with workplace technology. Not giving your workers the cutting-edge tools that they need to do their best work won't just create sub-par performance, but it could also lose you key talent.
Working together with your employees, enterprise architects can help choose an enterprise digital toolset that gives them the ability to do their best work, and still fits your budget and keeps your data safe and compliant. This is the key to success in the modern business world.
As former SAP CEO, Bill McDermott, explained there are key questions facing any business at the moment:
"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?"
What Does Democratized IT Actually Look Like?
Enterprise architecture should be more than just something a couple of people in your IT team do. It needs to be a permanent part of everyone in your organization's role, like goal setting or health and safety.
That is, of course, all very easy to say, but what does a democratized IT team look like? How does enterprise architecture work in practice when it's distributed throughout your organization?
With a democratized enterprise architecture system, you store comprehensive, live data about all of your software applications and IT components within a central repository that anyone in your organization can access. Your employees can then view for themselves exactly how the workplace tools they're using are performing.
Under an old structure, IT needs to monitor when an application or device goes past its useful date and contact the user to arrange to replace it. This can lead to frustration when tools become ineffective before they're due for retirement, or when they could have continued doing the job long after they're taken away for scrap.
Of course, when enterprise architects are involved in this process, they'll do investigation work in order to confirm a tool is no longer suitable before retiring it. With democratized enterprise architecture, however, they don't have to.
With SAP LeanIX, a user who is dissatisfied with their current customer relationship management (CRM) platform, for example, could access real-time data about the system's performance and life cycle. They could log their dissatisfaction and compare it to the feedback of other users, and even see recommendations for possible alternatives.
If the data shows that the CRM platform isn't a good functional or technical fit for your organization, then it can be marked for replacement. The system can even allow you to prioritize the replacement based on the criticality for your business strategy.
SAP LeanIX Empowers Democratrized EA
SAP LeanIX is a collaborative, data-driven solution to empowering everyone in your organization to support the organization and iteration of your IT landscape. Our sophisticated solution was designed by enterprise architects for everyone in your company to use.
Import enterprise architecture data from systems like Excel, ServiceNow, or SAP, as well as directly from your IT landscape. The information will then be completed by automated user surveys and software discovery.
This information can then be viewed by anyone in your organization through customizable visualizations and customized dashboards. Our toolset will make your enterprise architecture information so easy to understand that everyone in your organization can work on EA together.
To find out more about how SAP LeanIX can democratize enterprise architecture in your organization, book a demo:
