Wouldn’t it be nice if your EA solution could use AI to tell you how to improve your enterprise architecture? Now SAP LeanIX can do just that.
The new SAP LeanIX architecture guidance feature leverages our sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to make automatic best-practice recommendations on how to improve your architecture. This means you can benefit from our years of experience with enterprise architecture to leverage guidance tailored to the data in your SAP LeanIX instance.
AI-empowered enterprise architecture is a vital way for organizations to do more with their IT landscape without increasing their expenditure. If you don’t leverage the increased productivity and effort optimization that AI can provide, you risk your company falling behind your competitors.
Of course, AI will never replace enterprise architects, but rapid, automated insights can give your work an instant kick-start. Not to mention, complete basic tasks to free up your time for true innovation.
AI-powered enterprise architecture
SAP LeanIX architecture guidance empowers enterprise architects to leverage the power of AI without the risk. By leveraging AI as an assistant, rather than a replacement, you can accelerate your initiatives and maintain oversight.
We’re sure your experiments with AI show that it makes rapid recommendations to guide your thinking, but you still need to confirm its output before you enact it. The same applies to enterprise architecture.
By leveraging industry best practice from both our own experience and SAP’s, our solution’s AI capabilities will analyze the information stored within your SAP LeanIX instance to generate tailored guidance. You can then look through the recommended improvements and choose which to enact.
This feature can identify applications in your landscape that have overlapping features and may be suitable for consolidation or retirement. It can even tag them according to technical and functional fit as per the Gartner® TIME framework.
It even generates recommended steps to take to improve your IT landscape. This will include suggestions, such as retiring outdated applications.
Let’s look more closely at how SAP LeanIX architecture guidance works.
How SAP LeanIX architecture guidance works
Once you’ve activated architecture guidance, you don’t need to do anything more. Over time, the AI will then generate a list of insights into how your architecture can be improved.
These insights will surface when applications have overlapping features or capabilities, or where the technical or functional fit score should be low when compared to market standards. With full clarity on each insight, you can choose which to enact and which to reject, and the AI will guide you to carry out all the confirmed steps and then mark them as complete.
Completed insights will then remain logged under architecture guidance for reference and can be re-opened if you want to work on them further later on. Be sure to check the architecture insights menu regularly as new insights will be added as the AI gathers more information.
Empowering EA with SAP LeanIX architecture guidance
SAP LeanIX architecture guidance empowers you to:
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save time and costs compared to manual, in-depth analysis
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get quick, clear results with concrete insights and recommended actions
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implement personalized suggestions tailored to your specific context
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uncover blind spots in your application portfolio.
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compare your landscape with best-practice blueprints of similar organizations
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automatically populate application data, such as technical or functional fit, using industry benchmarks to save time
This empowers enterprise architects to make rapid improvements to their EA data and quickly recommend simple changes that have real benefits for their organization; all from a single screen. You can then concentrate on the long-term innovation initiatives that you normally don’t have time for.
The data held in your SAP LeanIX instance will remain private to your organization and won’t be used for AI training or provided to other customers. We’ll only use your data to inform our benchmarking service if you’ve agreed to this in the past.
It’s worth keeping in mind, though, that the insights provided by the AI are just suggestions and enterprise architects should assess the recommendations before taking them forward. Insights are also only generated when the AI processes them, and can’t be produced on demand.
Architecture guidance continues to work in the background, ready to produce insights as soon as they apply. The tool acts as an expert assistant, providing guidance when you need it and freeing up your time to focus on what matters.
How to leverage SAP LeanIX architecture guidance
SAP LeanIX architecture guidance is now available to all our customers. You simply need to speak to your SAP LeanIX customer success manager to agree to the terms and conditions of our AI features, if you haven’t already, and then activate architecture guidance in the admin area of our interface.
None of your data will be shared with other customers or used to train our AI, but you can still benefit from guidance based on best practices from your industry. Activating architecture guidance doesn’t cost anything and you have nothing to lose, but could potentially discover key insights about your organization.
To learn more about SAP LeanIX architecture guidance, you can read our technical documentation. When you’re ready to get started, contact your SAP LeanIX CSM.
