Target architecture planning will soon allow SAP LeanIX users to better visualize their current and future IT landscape. Let's look closer at the problem we’re working to solve.
Transformation has always been difficult.
Changing the way your organization functions means breaking old habits and restructuring the way your people think. Everything is impacted; from the equipment you use every day to the skill sets of your workers.
The key challenge is that you need to transform the way you work at the same time as you change the tools you use. This kind of business transformation has been compared to re-engineering an airplane while it’s still in the air (Object Magazine, 1997), or perhaps hammering in a nail while you swap the head of the hammer for a new one.
As the pace of enterprise evolution accelerates, change has gone from a once-a-generation project to a constant state of flux. This means transformation has ceased to be an initiative and become an essential business capability.
Over the last five years, organizations have, understandably, struggled with this:
Back in 2020, Boston Consulting Group found that, on average, 70% of business transformations failed
In 2022, 451 Research found that 54% of companies had walked back some part of their IT landscape from the cloud due to a lack of return on their investment
In 2024, DocuClipper found that 53% of businesses considered ERP transformation to be a priority investment
In 2025, we found that 85% of businesses reported an increased demand for IT cost savings over the previous two years
In 2026, the advent of enterprise AI is necessitating the largest rethink of enterprise technology since the invention of the computer
Time and again, the reason transformation has been found to be so difficult is that change has to be holistic and constant. Let’s look more closely at the two realms that need to be changed in synchronization to succeed at a business transformation.
Any modern organization is made up of two realms. On the one hand, you have the physical side of your business, and then you have the digital side.
On the physical side, you have the people who work for your company and the actual work they do. People follow processes to guide them to support the work of the organization as a whole.
In the modern age, they do this work using digital tools. This means software applications and the data that they operate on.
If you restructure your organization without giving your people the right technology to support the new processes, you won’t see the full benefits of the transformation. No matter how efficient your new setup is, a worker can only meet their potential with the right tools.
On the other hand, if you transform your tech stack to incorporate brand-new revolutionary technology, you also need to retrain your people and re-organize your processes. There’s no point having a state-of-the-art CRM if your people are still cold-calling customers.
To see a return on your investment in business transformation, you must holistically transform your physical business in step with your tech stack. This is something that requires total alignment of your organization, which has often been beyond the reach of companies looking to transform.
To succeed, you need a shared vision, a target for everyone across your organization to aim for. You also need everyone to be able to track your progress towards that goal.
Imagine an archery competition without a target. If no-one knows where to fire their arrows, how can anyone ever succeed?
When everyone knows where they’re aiming, you can all fire in the same direction. You’ll then know whether you’re hitting or missing, and improve your aim.
Likewise, if you have a visual illustration of your target state for your transformation, everyone can see what you’re trying to do. Visualization through diagrams and dashboards means non-technical stakeholders can understand what’s going on, while technical stakeholders can see what’s happening at a glance.
This is key for holistic transformation as it means all your stakeholders across your organization, regardless of their background, can align themselves with your goals. They can also track your progress as your transformation continues and support it as it goes ahead.
Should your technology transformation fall behind, then your IT team will be able to see that the physical transformation is moving ahead and attempt to catch up. Meanwhile, your change management teams can still see how the tech transformation is progressing and keep pace with it, without having to understand technical jargon.
Not only does this keep you all moving in the same direction at the same pace, it also helps you assess your progress. By tracking your visualized goal state against your road map, you can constantly report on whether you’re hitting your progress targets, and estimate when your transformation will be complete.
You don’t even need to report to your stakeholders, however, as they can simply access your visual target map and see for themselves at any time. This frees you up to focus on doing the actual work, rather than just constant reporting.
This is all, of course, easier said than done. Maintaining a live, visual, non-technical representation of your goal state and your progress towards it is a huge amount of work to do manually.
This is why we’re adding the functionality to do this automatically within SAP LeanIX.
Target architecture planning is a visual-first approach that empowers you to design, visualize, and communicate the desired future-state of your IT landscape. You can then track your progress against your target state.
This capability will bring clarity to large-scale transformations and accelerate decision-making. It will also ensure strategic alignment for technical and non-technical stakeholders involved in transformation initiatives.
Target architecture planning will allow you to:
leverage diagrams to model your desired target architecture
maintain and derive transformation data out of the diagram
make complex architectures easier to understand
simplify architecture planning and make it more interactive
allow teams to compare scenarios visually
enable better, faster decisions by linking them to diagrams
adjust your planning directly on the roadmap report
This new capability will be coming to SAP LeanIX later in the year. Keep an eye out for the next blog in this series, where we’ll be diving deeper into the value of visualizing your target state in SAP LeanIX.
In the meantime, to find out more about SAP LeanIX, book a demo: