Our CEO and co-founder, André Christ, recently spoke at the Next Generation SAP Enterprise Architect Forum. Watch a video of André's presentation and then deep dive into how LeanIX and SAP Signavio work together to support your business transformation.
Introducing André at the Enterprise Architect Forum, SAP Signavio General Manager Rouven Morato described him as the 'Godfather Of Enterprise Architecture'. André has earned this moniker over the 12 years since LeanIX was founded, as he has guided the industry by creating a powerful toolset to empower enterprise architects.
Now that LeanIX has joined the SAP family, we're excited to expand on the number of use cases we recommend our product for. Among them, combined with SAP Signavio, LeanIX is now becoming a powerful tool for business and technology transformation.
According to Boston Consulting Group, 70% of digital transformations fail. Yet, leveraging both LeanIX and the power of SAP Signavio, you can drive your business transformation forward.
From Business Strategy To IT Execution
There are a whole different set of expectations placed on enterprise in the modern market. From leveraging new technology like artificial intelligence (AI), to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) regulation, organizations and IT teams are being asked to function in a completely different way.
Transforming your business into what it needs to be to thrive in the modern market requires change. Therefore, managing transformation is now a vital capability for any enterprise, and that transformation must span:
- People
- Processes
- Applications
- Data
SAP Signavio is the perfect tool to manage transformation across your people and processes, while LeanIX gives you both comprehensive intelligence on your applications and data, and a tool to empower you in mapping out that strategy. Using LeanIX, you can gain a:
- faster path to transformation decision: overcome uncertainty and build your transformation value case
- safer path to go-live: plan with confidence and implement with less risk
- smoother path to continuous value: roll-out faster and more efficiently, while tracking value realization
By gaining clarity on your current landscape and planning out your path to the future, you can make confident decisions without risk, and accelerate transformations while monitoring your success. Yet, you also need to inspire that same confidence in all of your stakeholders.
How To Engage Your Organization
Inspiring confidence in your enterprise architecture efforts is all about evidence. You don't need to argue the value of your efforts if you can prove it.
The challenge, however, is in the complexity of your organization. With so many applications and so much data spread across all the different countries that your organization operates in, you face a long time to insight, and by the time you've won over your stakeholders, it could be too late.
Using the viewpoint across your entire IT landscape that you can gain from using LeanIX and Signavio, you can offer your stakeholders instant clarity on the value of your initiative. From there, you just need to maintain their engagement with some creative thinking.
One of our customers ran a competition to "kill an app", where they challenged anyone in their organization to identify a software application for retirement, with a prize for anyone who suggested an application that could actually be retired. All of this was run directly through their own LeanIX dashboard.
With this kind of engagement you can build an enterprise architecture community to support your initiatives. Where, however, should you start?
ERP Transformation: A CIO Expectation For EA
We surveyed a range of CIOs whose organizations make use of LeanIX about what they expect their enterprise architecture teams to accomplish. Most of the answers were basic housekeeping, such as improving agility, data quality, and expenditure.
Of the answers that related to specific initiatives, enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformation was by far in highest demand. In fact, upgrading ERP systems was the second-highest EA priority, only behind improving agility.
That's why leveraging LeanIX and SAP Signavio to power your ERP transformation is so vital. Working together, our toolsets give you clarity over the people, processes, applications, and data that you need to understand in order to change.
Modern, cloud-based ERP tools like SAP S/4HANA, however, aren't the only innovative technology that you need to start leveraging. ERP transformation and application modernization, however, will put you in the perfect position to make best use of this new tech.
EA Enables AI... And Vice Versa...
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is set to revolutionize the way we all do business. Yet, we're increasingly seeing early adopters of this technology facing logistical and legal challenges.
From Samsung employees carelessly uploading proprietary code into ChatGPT, to the Air Canada team finding they are liable when their AI-powered chatbots give incorrect advice, evidence is accumulating that AI needs guidelines and governance to achieve its potential. Since enterprise architects are used to implementing new technology into existing IT landscapes, EAs are perfectly placed to oversee the use of AI.
Enterprise architecture is about aligning your application portfolio with your business strategy. This gives enterprise architects the experience they need to offer your organization viable and safe AI use cases, rather than just raw AI technology that users need to work out how to leverage.
To do this, however, they need the right toolset - one that can track where AI is being used in your IT landscape and monitor the technology. That's why we're extending the meta-model within LeanIX to include a template of how AI can fit into your application portfolio.
Between this guidance and the ability to add information about which of your applications are using AI to LeanIX application fact sheets, our products will enable enterprise architects to become AI guardians for their organization. Far from holding back AI, monitoring it and applying the right approvals and guard rails will enhance and accelerate the safe adoption of the technology.
We believe enterprise architects are a natural champion for AI, and that's reflected in our software. LeanIX already includes a variety of AI capabilities that enterprise architects can use in their work.
LeanIX already leverages generative AI as a chatbot interface, and to make recommendations for actionable use cases. We're building on these features all the time and we're excited to see what AI can do for enterprise architecture in the future.
Make Transformations Fast, Not Furious
The old expression 'more speed, less haste' means that accomplishing value quickly requires making confident, informed steps, rather than frantic gambles. Making the wrong decision and having to change course often takes more time than slowing down and ensuring you're taking the right path before proceeding.
For enterprise architects, however, LeanIX reduces the time-to-insight when it comes to understanding your IT landscape. This means you can assess your transformation decisions rapidly, but comprehensively, so you can make the right choices, fast.
To find out more about what LeanIX can do for you, book a demo:
