By Matthew Grant, Senior Writer, SAP Lean IX and SAP Signavio
Long considered a somewhat rarefied and academic discipline within IT management, enterprise architecture (EA) is having a bit of a moment.
While it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly when this moment started (Ardoq receiving $125 million in Series D funding three years ago this month would be one candidate), things definitely picked up in 2023 when SAP announced its acquisition of LeanIX.
At the time, SAP’s Rouven Morato, framed the acquisition explicitly in terms of helping companies drive and manage transformation. He said:
In recent years, companies’ processes and system landscapes have become highly complex. And when they needed to transform their IT system landscape, they had no visibility into it. So, we began looking at how we could address the system-related aspects of business transformations more effectively. This led to the acquisition of LeanIX, an SAP Signavio partner for many years and an undisputed market leader in the enterprise architecture space.
Not long after, in July 2024, ServiceNow renamed it’s Application Portfolio Management product “Enterprise Architecture,” and in September 2024 Bizzdesign announced that it was acquiring two legacy EA vendors, MEGA and Software AG’s Alfabet.
Given the amount investment and consolidation in this formerly obscure niche, one might reasonably ask, “Why EA and why now?”
To answer that question, let’s take a closer look what enterprise architecture is and what enterprise architects do.
Enterprise Architecture 101
For those to whom enterprise architecture remains a somewhat esoteric field, the basic problem it addresses is relatively straightforward.
Every company can be thought of as a set of business capabilities: the things it needs to be able to do to conduct business. Some of these capabilities are common across businesses–the ability to hire and pay people; the ability to issue invoices and collect money; the ability to market products and services.
Some, on the other hand, are unique to particular industries. Manufacturers of appliances will depend on business capabilities that producers of SaaS software do not. (If you would like a comprehensive overview of potential business capabilities a company might need, you can find that here.)
You start with the as-is
One can think of enterprise architecture as the description and design of the complex web of technologies that supports a particular set of business capabilities. I say “description” because most companies don’t initially have an enterprise architect. Instead, they let their technology landscape grow organically. When they need something, they buy it and then work to integrate it into their existing landscape as best they can.
Eventually, as a company grows, the landscape gets so complex that an organic (read: haphazard, unplanned) approach to EA creates more problems than it solves. And, as you can imagine, if company growth has involved mergers and acquisitions, these problems compound. Just consider the agony of merging two or more sprawling thickets of technology.
From description to rationalization
Thoughtful, intentional enterprise architecture management thus becomes a priority. And the first step in that direction involves describing the situation as it stands today. In other words, you start by creating an inventory of the technology you have. An inventory on its own won’t tell you much, so enterprise architects compare this inventory to the company’s business capability map.
This exercise can reveal a lot about your IT landscape because it shows you, among other things, where you have more than one technology supporting a particular business capability. Given that cost management is top of mind for many CIOs and CFOs, one can quickly see the benefit of simply mapping technology to business capabilities.
You may discover, as one SAP LeanIX client did, that your company has four payroll systems (the result of a series of acquisitions). Of course, you can’t just shut pick three and shut them off. You need to understand the whole picture.
You need to ask, as that client’s VP of IT recommended, “What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of a particular application when it comes to servicing this [business] capability? Do users like it? Do users loathe it? Do they loathe it but it’s the only application that can meet a particular need?”
In other words, before making a change to something like your payroll system, which can have widespread repercussions, you need clear insight into the impact such a change will have. EA helps you figure that out.
Architecting the future
As powerful as this exercise can be, EA’s true impact becomes apparent when we move from description to design. To show that this is far from an academic exercise, consider what Tray.ai discovered at the end of last year: 86% of enterprises require upgrades to their existing tech stack in order to deploy AI agents.
Writing about these findings on CIO.com, Maria Korolov stated the problem rather bluntly: “…before AI agents can be integrated into a company’s infrastructure, that infrastructure must be brought up to modern standards.”
Think about everything an organization would need to do to move from its current state to one that reflected “modern standards.” Describing and inventorying the current state would naturally be part of that. But more important would be defining those standards. In today’s world, such standards would include prioritizing cloud technology, adopting a service-oriented architecture for software built in-house, working with open APIs, and so forth.
Enterprise architects are in the business of both defining the technology standards for the business as well as governing the adoption of new and emerging technology in conformity with those standards.
Standards start with strategy
But the definition of standards does not take place in a vacuum. Instead, this work is guided by the strategic aims of the organization. These aims, in turn, can be viewed through the lens of business capabilities.
Specifically, the business must determine what capabilities it will need to realize its strategy in the future. The enterprise architect then begins designing the technology landscape needed to support those new capabilities. The standards help guide the technology choices that the business will have to make.
The challenge many organizations face today boils down to this: A revolutionary new technology–AI–has appeared on the scene. This technology has the potential to transform how businesses operate. In the near term, AI promises to increase productivity and efficiency through the automation of tedious and manual tasks.
As agentic AI matures, it promises to do much more. AI agents, thanks to their adaptive, reasoning capabilities, will not only change the way work gets done, from customer support to supply chain management and beyond, but also change the kind of work that gets done. In the process, AI can and will transform business at its core.
EA and the transformable organization
But here’s the rub: most businesses aren’t ready to transform in the ways that AI will demand. They do not have easy access to the data that AI will need to deliver maximum impact and, what’s more, their landscape is not structured in that agents can easily navigate.
This is the reason that EA is having a moment. At the most fundamental level, companies need to transform their enterprise architecture if they want to benefit from the AI revolutions. Enterprise architects are uniquely positioned to design and define the architecture companies will need. Their understanding of the current state also means that they can chart the course from the as-is to the to-be. And, finally, their focus on standards means that they can devise a framework to guide the evolution of the tech landscape today and into the future.
