The benefits of enterprise architecture (EA) are more clear today than ever before. We explore five reasons why EA is key for your organization's digital transformation.
70% of digital transformations fail with no return on investment, but enterprise architecture (EA) could be the solution. According to a Gartner report on how enterprise architecture enables digital innovation, 60% of organizations will soon depend on enterprise architecture to lead their business approach to digital transformation.
“With 58% of chief information officers (CIOs) increasing investment in business intelligence (BI) and data and analytics (D&A) initiatives . . . there is an opportunity for EA leaders to provide an enterprise view against which hundreds of decisions comprising data initiatives are made.”
Enterprise Architecture Enables Digital Innovation, Meghan Rimol, Gartner
As Architecture & Governance Magazine explained in their article, In 2022, The Strategic Role of the Enterprise Architect is Confirmed, 97% of organizations are planning significant EA-related investments over the next few years. Let's explore five of the most critical benefits of enterprise architecture to know and pursue
1. Aligning IT With The Rest of The Business
In the past, IT was just a tool for the business. It automated processes and made manual tasks easier, opening up time for more strategic endeavors.
Today, however, technology is at the very core of how businesses operate. Data informs decision making, strategy is dictated by tech capabilities, and remote work requires technology for even the most baseline tasks, like communicating with colleagues.
Companies must look at IT and business strategy as two sides of the same coin. One doesn’t exist without the other, and they should be designed to complement and optimize each other in every way possible.
One of the key benefits of enterprise architecture is that it aligns each item in your tech stack with your business capabilities. This provides instant clarity as to how each software application you use supports your business strategy and how, showing the value of your IT team and the tools they manage.
Find out how our EAM platform can support your business alignment:
Beyond this, EA gives an overview of IT spend aligned to business need, optimizing cost expenditure, highlighting where cuts can be made, where investment is justified, and showcasing how to get the most out of your current state architecture.
2. Data Visibility and Literacy
Data informs strategy, but to be effective, data needs to be accessible to employees at every level of your organization.
According to Forbes, data literacy is one of the top 10 most in-demand skills for the next 10 years across all industries. Another one of the benefits of enterprise architecture (EA) is that it makes application data more visible to support your organization in becoming more data literate as a whole.
It does this by:
Encouraging participation — good EA utilizes crowd-source data from throughout your organization, requiring supported participation. This means upskilling the data literacy of your whole business to work on a practical project.
A single source of truth — all your application data is stored in one place that's accessible to everyone in your organization, meaning anyone can get an overview
Data visualization — sophisticated EA tools go further in taking your application data and visualizing it in a variety of formats to support your team in understanding and summarizing the data they're using
To find out more about how the LeanIX enterprise architecture management (EAM) platform acquires, stores, and presents application data, book a demo:
3. Optimized Tech Stack
According to Statista, the average number of software as a service (saas) applications used by organizations worldwide from 2015 to 2021 was 110. The largest organizations can use more than 3,400.
As such, it’s easy to imagine how tech stacks can take on unintentional costs and technical debt without frequent optimization. One of the benefits of enterprise architecture is a focused strategy for managing complex tech stacks, and EA platforms are powerful tools for doing it effectively.
Companies that use EA to optimize their tech stacks can reduce software complexity, eliminate technical debt, lower their TCO, and as a result deliver more value to their end users (internal and external alike).
Find out more:
6 Smart Ways to Optimize Your Tech Stack
4. Streamlined Processes and Workflows
Speaking of tech stacks, because IT is so intertwined with business operations, a messy application portfolio significantly impacts efficiency and productivity. The benefits of enterprise architecture include visualizing both the tools in a tech stack and how they match up with capabilities, tasks, and business processes across the organization.
Using this enterprise view, decision makers can:
- Make decisions about which tools will be used for which initiatives
- Eliminate redundant or outdated tools in the stack
- Implement better access control and governance around sensitive data
- Build more intentional workflows across the enterprise
- Continually identify opportunities to optimize and improve existing processes
To support this, we've created a Business Capability Map to support you in getting started with this initiative:
5. Greater Operating Flexibility
Collectively, the benefits of enterprise architecture listed above all enable companies to operate with greater flexibility and agility. The unpredictability of the economic conditions of the last few years have shown just how critical this is.
Agility empowers you to change quickly to adapt and thrive during any market circumstance or world event. Only by adopting a culture of continuous transformation can you organization move forward in the digital age.
The Benefits of Enterprise Architecture Management Realized by LeanIX
The LeanIX enterprise architecture management (EAM) platform realizes the benefits of enterprise architecture (EA) to leverage technology, make decisions, and manage change with our outcome-driven approach. The flexible, best practice data model is the foundation to meet all future business challenges.
To find out more about the platform, book a demo.
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