Slingshot Your Way To Enterprise Architecture Maturity

Enterprise architecture maturity is a key driver for business transformation. Discover how SAP LeanIX can slingshot your EA practice towards maturity.

Enterprise architecture maturity is the next stage of your EA practice. Once you've implemented enterprise architecture for a single project, you next need to make it a standard business process for your organization in order to make it repeatable.

As you develop this capability, your enterprise architecture will become more mature and effective. The more mature your EA practice, the more value it will have for driving your business transformations in the future.

This means that the faster you can mature your practice, the more value you can derive from enterprise architecture. Some companies who have had enterprise architects for years still haven't fully matured their practice, so how do you develop maturity quickly?

The key is to have the right toolset to manage your enterprise architecture data and build a repository of live information that will enable, not just your current EA project, but the next one, and the one after that. This is why having an enterprise architecture tool like SAP LeanIX is key for powering a mature enterprise architecture practice.

Before you start maturing your enterprise architecture practice, you'll need to benchmark your current maturity. To find out your current enterprise architecture maturity level, use our interactive assessment tool: 

How mature is your enterprise architecture? Take our assessment to find out

What Is Enterprise Architecture Maturity?

The enterprise architecture maturity rating system is part of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), the enterprise architecture industry's best-practice standard. It's intended be both a ranking system that allows you to compare the maturity of your EA practice with your competitors, and also to give you an indication of a direction to move towards improvement.

Overall, that direction is from a one-off, siloed enterprise architecture project to an organization-wide process of constant iteration on your architecture to ensure ongoing optimization and agility. Instead of gathering your enterprise architecture data every time, you will build a live information repository that can empower your transformation efforts.

For example, onboarding your first customer is a direct process between sales and the customer that you make up as you go along. When you grow to become a multi-national that onboards hundreds of customers every year, you will need to have a standardized, repeatable process, involving multiple teams and stakeholders, in place to ensure quality and reduce effort.

In exactly the same way, your first digital transformation or application portfolio rationalization will likely be improvised and implemented by a small team of enterprise architects. A mature EA practice, however, will have a standardized process that involves experts across your company.

To track your progress between that initial project and a full, developed enterprise architecture, TOGAF rates enterprise architecture maturity across five levels:

The Five Stages Of EA Maturity

Enterprise architecture maturity is rated through five stages by The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). This runs from a casual, off-the-cuff single project to a repeatable, mature business capability:

EA Maturity Stage 1: Initial And Informal

This is the first stage of your enterprise architecture journey where you have first discovered the discipline. A siloed team carries out an isolated enterprise architecture activity as a one-off.

EA Maturity Stage 2: In-Progress And Business siloed

Once you've completed your first project and seen the value of enterprise architecture, you begin to formalize your EA practice and build a business process. You will create a workflow and begin to build greater value.

EA Maturity Stage 3: Defined and Standardized

By stage 3, you've developed documentation and governance for an enterprise architecture operating model. Your EA practice becomes more than a function of your IT team, and instead becomes a practice in its own right with centralized funding and an enterprise architecture review board.

EA Maturity Stage 4: Managed and optimized

At stage 4, your EA practice is fully developed and optimized, producing consistent value in business transformation. All levels of your business are aware of your enterprise architecture team and consult them regularly.

EA Maturity Stage 5: Transformational and Modular

Finally, at the highest level, your enterprise architecture has become modular and integrated into every area of your business. Rather than there being an enterprise architecture team to consult, each area of your business will have a dedicated enterprise architect taking part in their architecture.

The EA Maturity Slingshot

Enterprise architecture maturity is a journey, and you can't skip any of the steps. Implementing a stage-5 enterprise architecture practice from scratch is impossible, so you need to start at stage 1 and work your way up.

While there aren't any shortcuts, the faster you can reach stage 5, the more value you can derive from your enterprise architecture practice. If you spend a year at stage 2, you will get far less value from enterprise architecture than if you can move from stage 1 to stage 5 in six months.

The key to rapidly maturing your EA is to maintain your practice between projects. If you begin your enterprise architecture work from scratch each time, you won't ever be able to move beyond stage 1.

Likewise, if you keep your data from your initial project, then you can re-use it for your next project. Not to mention, you can assess the ongoing performance of your previous projects to prove the value of your work.

Having a constantly updated flow of enterprise architecture information on your applications and IT components will let you dive right into an enterprise architecture project at any time. You can also showcase that EA data to everyone in your organization and continually educate your stakeholders about enterprise architecture.

By storing and updating data about your IT landscape, you can rapidly progress through the enterprise architecture maturity stages. Yet, an Excel spreadsheet or flow diagram isn't going to offer the capabilities you need.

EA Maturity With SAP LeanIX

We've established that enterprise architecture maturity requires the right tool to build an EA data repository. That tool is SAP LeanIX.

SAP LeanIX was designed to store comprehensive fact sheets regarding each of your software applications and IT components. LeanIX will import data from a variety of sources, including Excel and configuration management databases (CMDB) like ServiceNow, and even automated user surveys.

You can then examine this enterprise architecture data using reports and visualization tools built into the platform, and a variety of third-party integrations. This will empower you to engage and educate your stakeholders about enterprise architecture, prove the value of your EA efforts, and accelerate your future enterprise architecture projects.

To begin your enterprise architecture maturity journey, you first need to benchmark what stage your current practice is at before you can plan a road map to develop it. To assess your current enterprise architecture maturity, use our interactive assessment tool:

How mature is your enterprise architecture? Take our assessment to find out