Enterprise architecture is a vital business function, but its value can be abstract and challenging to explain. Our Senior Customer Success Manager, Ricky Urdaneta tells us how to win over all your stakeholders on your EA projects.
The challenge, then, is to showcase the, often abstract, value of EA to the stakeholders in your business to win their buy-in on your initiatives. To do this, you need to explain the purpose of your work clearly and persuasively.
So, how can you illustrate to your stakeholders that EA is the solution to their problems?
The best way to win buy-in for your enterprise architecture (EA) practice is to know who your stakeholders are and which of them will be the most receptive to your ideas. EA has a broad scope that impacts your entire business strategy beyond just your application portfolio, so you need to adapt your presentations to your audience.
Defining the specific parts of your EA practice that matter to each stakeholder will keep your discussion relevant and impactful. Put your processes in the context of the stakeholder's business area and show the immediate value you will create and the structure that you have in place to do so.
You can even offer to help install EA processes into other teams' workflows to help improve synergy with their toolsets. Just ensure that you highlight the benefits for them.
Explaining to your marketing team how you plan to optimize your organization's finance software is not going to engage them. However, showcasing the information you have on your content management systems and MQL trackers will catch their interest.
Once a group of key stakeholders are on-board with your EA practice, you will have a group of EA evangelists and a selection of case studies that you can use to win over more and more stakeholders. From there, you can build an EA community to support your function, but it must be one that adheres to best practice.
To find out more about the key stakeholders you need to speak to as an enterprise architect, read our rundown:
Enterprise architecture (EA) is often high-level and conceptual in its initial stages. Aligning your business strategy with business functions can ground your message in your stakeholders' day-to-day operations.
Mapping the business functions that are carried out by your stakeholders every day based on their maturity and EA standards can make the value you're offering feel very real. For example, showing your stakeholders that one of their systems is underperforming or posing an unacceptable security risk and offering a road map for replacing it with a best-of-breed tool can feel like magic.
Enterprise architects can carry out that analysis and create that roadmap. Once you have a plan in place for optimizing the software tools that your teams use, you can start working with your colleagues to optimize the related business processes that involve the applications you've improved.
This is, of course, all theoretical, so what are the practical questions that you need to be asking your stakeholders in order to find out the specific information you need?
So, now you know what questions to ask your enterprise architecture (EA) community, the next step is to find somewhere to store their answers. The best place to do that is within the LeanIX platform.
LeanIX stores information about all your software applications, IT components, and business capabilities within customizable Fact Sheets. To start, you can log an owner against each application, giving you a specific contact to work on building a relationship with.
From there, you can automate the sending and collation of email surveys based on the above questions from within the platform. You can complete this data by importing information from a variety of sources, such as Excel spreadsheets.
You can even add information manually to build up a complete picture of your IT landscape within the LeanIX platform. With this data in one place, you can then create a dedicated EA service portal with a selection of EA services that your stakeholders can readily access.
So, what enterprise architecture (EA) services should you be offering to your stakeholders? The answer is whatever they need, but the LeanIX platform can start you out with five out-of-the-box services to offer while you customize your own.
Using the information contained within the LeanIX platform, you can support your stakeholders in building business cases to gain approval for initiatives.
Deliverables: Business case template
Support your CIO in creating a clear strategic direction for your team, by providing a portfolio assessment, as well as communicate that strategy with clear documentation.
Deliverables: Strategy document, standards, principles, initiatives, guidelines
Make recommendations to your organization on key technologies that it can leverage to support its strategic goals.
Deliverables: Technology radar report
Empower your stakeholders to experiment on a testing ground created from real-time data on your IT landscape
Deliverables: Solution architecture docs
Support your organization in undergoing application modernization initiatives to develop, retire, or maintain parts of your software portfolio using our application portfolio management (APM) product.
Deliverables: Architecture technology capabilities
LeanIX empowers you to transform your digital transformation from a challenging, one-off initiative that involves you engaging every aspect of your business in a complete transformation, to a permanent function and service that your team has to offer your business. Rather than having to persuade your colleagues to change against their will, you'll have them coming to you for help overcoming their key pain points.
To find out more about how LeanIX can empower your EA function, book a demo of the platform today: