5 Ways to Generate Value with Enterprise Architecture

Improved processes, greater efficiency and better decision-making are some of the values that Enterprise Architecture brings to modern companies.

Enterprise Architecture is a discipline that aligns the complex business and IT structures in large-scale organizations. It is a strategic and technical function that introduces practical standards across all areas.

Here are some use cases:

But what is the value of enterprise architecture?

The value comes from establishing solutions to organization-wide problems. It is a function that supports companies in becoming more agile and achieving strategic goals by working towards a cohesive technology landscape across the enterprise. It is a function that has the most comprehensive view of an organization’s IT landscape.

As such, it fully understands the key business needs and how to improve processes.

The value of enterprise architecture is best realized through improvements in data management, application development, IT infrastructure, business processes, and overall organizational impact.

The following paragraphs outline the key value of enterprise architecture and why it plays such a vital role in modern organizations:

1. Better alignment of IT with business objectives

Enterprise architecture supports or leads business strategies to improve processes and optimize the IT landscape. This means that the EA (Enterprise Architecture) will have a comprehensive view of the application landscape, business processes and information flows between departments.

By improving alignment between IT and the business, EAs can analyze multiple sources of information to solve unplanned or future problems in business scenarios.

This could be anything from IT maintenance and upkeep, overseeing software migration, optimizing vital business processes, or maintaining industry-relevant technology knowledge to help the company remain competitive.

2. Greater efficiency and effectiveness

One of the main reasons to optimize and align the IT landscape with business processes is to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of important processes across the organization. This will impact the organization as a whole and provide a solid foundation for ongoing optimization efforts.

Part of how EAs do this is by implementing vital tools and collaborative platforms. These allow them to understand and analyze the business architecture. The tools allow EAs to identify business needs, collect data, research solutions, define plans, and measure results. All of this is important for the EA to achieve its target state architecture.

The LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) tool is a software that provides actionable dashboards and can create reports for multiple stakeholders. This enables them to transform the business in a continuous and collaborative way.

LeanIX EAM helps EAs identify and eliminate redundant applications, systems, and processes to reduce costs and increase efficiency, among many other benefits.

3. Greater agility

Another great value of enterprise architecture is that it will enable business agility across the organization. It is important to note that this is not the same as agile software development. Business agility is a separate concept that helps organizations respond effectively to changes in markets and customer environments.

Broadly speaking, EA and enterprise agility enable companies to move with fewer constraints, helping them implement strategic changes more easily and effectively.

Increased agility helps companies become more competitive by increasing their responsiveness to customer needs, better positioning them to deal with ongoing and constant change, and effectively reallocating resources, to name a few.

4. Better decision-making

Enterprise architecture supports better decision-making. It does this by providing business leaders with clear data and insights into the structure of the business so that decisions can be made quickly and effectively, even under pressure.

Information and data gaps tend to result from a lack of transparency and unclear access to information. This creates technology confusion, bottlenecks and poor information sharing between platforms and domains.

What EA provides is a clear view of an organization’s digital functioning so that decision-making becomes easier and faster. This adds greater value and transparency to the business and IT, improves flexibility, answers critical business questions and provides data-driven insights and visualizations that support the organization’s strategy and goals.

5. Improved governance

Another value of enterprise architecture is improved governance. EA governance encompasses all elements of enterprise management. For example, EA governance involves strong leadership, thorough understanding of an organization’s structure, clear strategic direction, and enabling effective IT processes to achieve an enterprise’s goals.

The primary goal of EA governance is to harmonize an organization’s architectural requirements into a simple set of policies, processes, and procedures—all of which help ensure the organization’s vision and align its standards with real-life business requirements.

EA governance can help organizations achieve significant cost savings, improve architectural consistency, and overcome challenges through greater transparency and accountability. It can also uncover areas for improvement to determine true best practices.

The challenges of Implementing Enterprise Architecture

While enterprise architecture is vital, organizations are likely to encounter some obstacles during its implementation. EA challenges can include:

Enterprise architecture requires a long-term vision, which can create tension between the short-term needs of the business and the long-term investment required to implement the desired architecture. Its important stakeholders across every department are on board to support the process.
Enterprise architects need to keep the entire organization in mind and not just focus on the latest technology or trend. Is the implementation of this technology aligned with the organization’s business logic, data quality, processes, information sources, and solution architecture? It is vital that EAs analyze the overall needs of the company.
Keep lines of communication open between stakeholders and user groups throughout the lifecycle process. EAs must be able to communicate architecture progress, benefits, and scope consistently.
Finding the right team members is another challenge of enterprise architecture. Finding a balance between business, process, and IT technical skills will provide EAs with the most balanced team to achieve business goals.

Conclusion

To conclude, there is great value in investing in enterprise architecture. EA offers companies an agile, transparent and data-driven way to optimize processes, achieve strategic goals and adapt to changing markets.

It is one of the best ways for organizations to stay competitive and up-to-date with business technology.

While the process of designing a cohesive target architecture may seem daunting, the benefits and selection of the EA tool implemented will future-proof the organization by helping to anticipate challenges, increase efficiency and reduce costs.

Would you like to know more about how SAP LeanIX can support your transformation journey, migration to S/4HANA and reduce costs and technological risks?