Enterprise architecture diagrams within SAP LeanIX are the key for engaging your stakeholders. Discover how you can share your vision directly from our solution.
SAP LeanIX' extensive enterprise architecture diagramming capabilities aren't just for enterprise architects. By sharing your illustrative diagrams with your stakeholders, you can expand their understanding of the value of enterprise architecture and of your initiatives.
Busy stakeholders rarely have time to read through extensive documentation to better understand why your IT landscape needs to change to accommodate the latest innovations. Visualizations, however, can provide instant clarity on the need for change and win you the support of everyone in your organization.
In the first part of this series, we considered the value of the SAP LeanIX diagramming capabilities for enterprise architects. In part two, let's look at how enterprise architecture diagrams can benefit your entire company by getting everyone on the same page about business transformation.
Learn for yourself how powerful the diagramming capabilities of SAP LeanIX can be. Book a hands-on demo of our solution today:
Sharing Your Vision
Enterprise architecture diagrams are a useful tool for conceptualizing and experimenting with your IT landscape. By building a model of your nebulous digital landscape, you can actually see it in action and then move the working parts around to see if you can improve it.
This is such a valuable exercise for advanced enterprise architects that it's become an essential part of their work. Yet, it's just as valuable for their non-technical stakeholders.
The majority of people will find it much easier to conceptualize and understand a visual representation of a complex task than complex technical documentation. Perhaps even more importantly, diagrams are a lot more interesting to look at.
Gaining the attention of stakeholders is vital as you'll need buy-in from corporate sponsors and application owners if you're going to make any improvements to your IT landscape. Yet, it's often challenging to get their full attention.
All your stakeholders will have their own roles and responsibilities with their own challenges and day-to-day tasks to accomplish. Asking any of them to ignore their current priorities to focus on a potentially disruptive initiative is an uphill battle, even if it promises to help them with their tasks in the future.
Creating an impactful visualization to gain attention and immediately surface the benefits of your proposal will make your job easier, even for the most open-minded stakeholders. Diagramming is near essential for enterprise architects, but it's also key for the vital stakeholder management aspect of their role.
A Picture Is, Again, Worth 1,000 Words
In the last article in this series, we explored how enterprise architecture diagramming within SAP LeanIX empowered enterprise architects to conceptualize their vision for their target IT landscape. Diagramming, however, is just as important for sharing their vision as building it.
A vision shared is a vision actualized, and sharing your vision with the rest of your organization is the first step for realizing it. If you keep your vision for your target enterprise architecture to yourself, it has no value at all.
Yet, even sharing your vision is pointless if no-one else understands it the way you do. Modelling your vision with a diagram makes it far easier for others to understand your concept than simply trying to explain it to them.
If you stand up in front of a non-technical audience and talk about APDEX, latency, and security exposure, you'll lose them very quickly. However, anyone can understand a traffic light diagram for a key metric where the application in question is glowing an ominous red, and the visualization can be trusted when it's fed with live data.
Being able to present live visualizations of your IT landscape in SAP LeanIX to your stakeholders will revolutionize your meetings. Even better, your stakeholders can return to your diagrams at any time with read-only access to SAP LeanIX.
SAP LeanIX Can Paint You A Picture
SAP LeanIX is a repository for all your application and IT component information. Once that information is stored within fact sheets in the solution, you can start leveraging it to build engaging stakeholder dashboards including custom diagrams.
SAP LeanIX comes with three out-of-the-box diagramming tools:
- Free Draw: allows you to create any diagram you can imagine within SAP LeanIX
- Data Flow: is a similar, but more-prescribed type of interface, that allows you to model the flow of data through your landscape
- LucidChart: is another option that integrates with the leading visual collaboration tool, Lucid
You can use any of the three tools to create tailored visualizations for any aspect of your IT landscape. Not only can you then share these diagrams with your stakeholders, but you can use them as part of a custom viewpoint for specific user groups.
Your sales team can immediately see the performance of Salesforce and user feedback on whether Slack is right for managing their sales calls in simple diagrams. Meanwhile, your finance team can view a finance dashboard with visualizations of uptime metrics for Xero and QuickBooks.
Offering this kind of tailored service to your stakeholders will keep them engaged with and supportive of your work, making your lives much easier. Essentially, diagramming offers a shared visual language that allows you to talk to your stakeholders in a way they'll understand.
Many tools have integrations to allow you to export diagrams, but we know this isn't enough in the modern day. That's why we've added capabilities to create, annotate, combine, and share reports and diagrams directly from within SAP LeanIX.
Sharing Your Diagrams In SAP LeanIX
SAP LeanIX enterprise architecture diagrams allow you to conceptualize your IT landscape, experiment with it, build a vision, and share that with your stakeholders in a way they can immediately understand. We wouldn't be a market leader for enterprise architecture if we didn't have the advanced diagramming capabilities that we do.
Yet, perhaps even more important than these capabilities alone, is the ability to share your diagrams with your stakeholders and get them involved in your enterprise architecture initiatives. This is part of our work to democratize enterprise architecture for everyone in every organization.
That's why we don't charge for our solution by the number of users, meaning you can give read-only access to anyone in your organization at no extra cost. Instead of being part of a small team of enterprise architects working alone, you can lead specialists across your business to take charge of their own part of your IT landscape.
SAP LeanIX diagrams empower enterprise architects to communicate their vision with their entire organization and recruit them in their initiatives. To find out more, book a demo:
