SAP employs an enterprise architecture strategy using SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio to manage IT portfolios, optimize applications, and support growth. This approach uses business capabilities as a common language, with regular assessments guiding investments. Strategic decisions, like the greenfield approach to cloud business, enhance agility and standardization.
Industry-specific challenges – in short, constant change
SAP has always been agile in responding to change. Transitioning from on-premises, license-based software to a cloud-focused model requires changes across its value chain. Staying ahead of disruptive industry changes is crucial to maintain its strong market position. We just want to mention a few challenges that are most relevant to any modern enterprise: Generative AI, competitive pressure and the economical changes.
SAP has put major changes in motion to revolutionize its business architecture:
- From license revenue and software downloads to providing services.
- Transition to recurring revenue models.
- Building and running robust cloud infrastructure.
How we approach enterprise architecture and use it to manage transformations
In a digital, cloud-native company, enterprise architects play a crucial role in linking strategy to execution and fostering business-driven change. At SAP, this process begins with business architecture, using business capabilities as a common language to model SAP’s operations. Since 2018, SAP has utilized SAP LeanIX to manage these business capabilities efficiently. We use business capabilities for the following use cases: IT portfolio steering, architecture evaluation, application portfolio optimization, designing new business models.
To deeper understand how cloud transformation affects SAP’s enterprise architecture and to get more insights into next-generation cloud selling on our cloud runway check out our case study linked below.
Key Lessons Learned
As we wrap up our investigations on our change approach, highlighting recent decisions and our strategies to implement them using SAP’s business transformation tools, we’re keen to share insights gleaned from our experiences. Understanding that reflection is key to enhancing efficiency and success, we now delve into our analysis of lessons learned:
- Enterprise architecture follows business architecture.
- Decoupling new business models from old ones in a greenfield approach.
- Focus on business outcomes in your decision making.
- RISE with SAP is an optimal offering for your transformation.
- Focus on unified customer experience.
With our case study we provide unique insights into the inner workings of SAP’s IT organization, the engine that fuels SAP’s business operations. We provide background, analysis of the challenges we face, and the enterprise architecture approach we use to address them and conclude with detailed lessons learned and implications for future practices: Our Cloud Business Journey’s Impact on Enterprise Architecture.