As Enterprise Architects, we know the tradeoffs involved with introducing new applications. Investing in a new application is not made lightly. As stewards of the organization's IT landscape, we may shy away from adding another application to our already complicated environment for our own team. However, this may be a short-sighted view regarding Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) tools. EAM tools can significantly increase the ability of the EA Team to leverage technology, make decisions, and manage change effectively. I have outlined two approaches to introducing EAM tools in Building vs. Buying an EA tool, 4 Common Pitfalls to Avoid, where I chronicle my experience building and managing an EA tool. Over the years, my perspective has changed, and I now believe that buying an EAM tool early while developing an EA practice can add significant value. Based on the pitfalls I encountered building my own EAM tool, I identified these critical features: A crowdsourcing model to allow for information gathering from outside the EA team. An easy-to-navigate portal with configurable dashboards. This portal will increase the tool's adoption and usage of the information it contains. An easy-to-learn user interface with built-in data-quality measurements. Data-driven visualizations that are automatically created. The ability to store multi-level, complex relationships between all data objects. I believe this approach ­– introducing a modern EA tool early in developing an enterprise architecture function – can have a significant, positive effect on the value the team delivers in the short and long term. ... View more

  It’s never been easier for non-IT organizations to innovate and deploy systems and applications independently. But this hardly means enterprise architects (EA) are becoming less relevant. Quite the opposite – the role of the EA is expanding. The rise of cloud computing, mobile apps, self-service business intelligence tools, low-code and no-code development platforms, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics requires EAs to operate very differently than they did even three years ago. Instead of their traditional role as the “protector of the system,” EAs must now help ensure every application delivers business value immediately through engineering excellence. EA value expands with hyper-automation A downside of growing interest in digital transformation across non-IT organizations is unplanned enterprise workload downtime – which comes with a heavy cost burden. According to  IHS , the typical midsize business stands to lose $1 million per year on unplanned downtime, and large enterprises can spend upward of $60 million or more. These losses often emerge in operational disruption, revenue leakage, and productivity decline. As the applications, connections, and data volumes grow, unplanned downtime increases because the IT landscape reaches a level of complexity that inexperienced citizen developers cannot decipher. Further exacerbating this risk is the use of outdated manual processes in parallel with technology, the lack of unified delivery of automation and engineered workloads, and a limited understanding of security, governance, and compliance requirements. But how can a team of a handful of EAs keep up with the rate of change, scale, and scope being introduced by hundreds – if not thousands – of employees daily? While seeking out answers to this question, I came across how a hyper-automation platform can empower EAs to take a more proactive approach to IT integrity. Now, EAs can guide and coach citizen and professional developers throughout the innovation process faster, more thoroughly, and with greater impact. By leveraging its strategic relationships with SAP and Microsoft, Vnomic designed a platform to provide an automated and engineered SAP landscape delivery and governance on Microsoft Azure. The company combined advanced artificial intelligence and a model-driven, declarative approach to capture SAP and Microsoft notes and best practices requirements and encoded them in the Vnomic platform as digital knowledge. SAP and Microsoft capabilities are also constantly updated in the platform to help optimize the outcomes of every digital innovation. After EAs input the SAP software landscape they want, the Vnomic platform automatically computes, architects, and deploys it while meeting SAP and Microsoft best practices requirements on Azure end to end, with zero touch. Such a platform allows them to accelerate their work and reduce project risk, cost, and time to value. Moreover, the Vnomic platform frees EAs to assist more business-minded innovators in creating applications, tools, workflows, and systems that help ensure the overall landscape remains streamlined, connected, and secure. Some EAs have even slashed their planning time for each project from four months to eight hours without requiring additional internal and external resources – this is so key especially in these times. In addition, costs related to cloud consumption – particularly Azure cloud services – are reduced by more than 95% during the deployment phase. From technology guardian to innovation guide As they become more comfortable using technology, people like to think they can design and deploy a new tool or application. Yet, few can think through the necessary steps, impacts, and outcomes of the innovation process like an EA. There are only so many hours in the workday – and EAs must now support a community of citizen developers that significantly outnumber their team especially given the recent SAP announcement of SAP Build at the recent SAP TechEd event. However, EAs can drive a profound impact by embedding a practical mindset across the innovation culture. With a hyper-automation platform, EAs can balance their available work time and the opportunity to add more value to the business. They can not only root out potential issues before they impact the entire business negatively, but also educate and coach the entire company on good architecture practices to make a difference today and in the future. Thinking about deploying your SAP software landscape on Microsoft Azure? Check out how Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company is benefitting from the Vnomic platform. What one often thinks as not being possible – is often possible. You often just need to go exploring! ... View more

Ready for the next maturity level of your Enterprise Architecture practice? This training is a unique investment in people skills as it combines: a proven methodology with a real-world case study for an end-to-end architecture engagement cycle in combination with a reference architecture and the support of tools leading to an enterprise architecture certification all provided by SAP ... View more

Learn more about the "One Process Acceleration Layer" and more about the SAP / LeanIX partnership. These tools can help EA's document their Enterprise Architecture on many levels including a process level. ... View more

The need for a common and aligned framework Over the course of time, we have seen as Enterprise Architects in SAP Business Transformation Services, both SAP internal as well in the interaction with customers and partners, that different methodologies, artifacts, and approaches are used in architecture engagements. With the creation of a reference architecture the need for a common Enterprise Architecture Framework at SAP was obvious as different departments within the SAP organization produce and consume the content of the reference architecture. Only one common “language” and approach would ensure that information can be leveraged in an efficient and effective way both inside and outside the organization. ... View more

As part of your Enterprise Architect role, you have to be continuously learning. It can be a challenge to keep up on all things SAP. SAP TechEd 2022, November 15-16 is both Virtual and Hands-On Labs this year. What are you looking forward to? What do you need more information on? The agenda is out there and there will certainly be interesting announcements as there are most years. SAP TechEd in 2022 | November 15–16 | Global You can still register and view or attend! Please comment after the conference as to what you saw, from an EA perspective, that you think will influence what recommendations you make, or how it impacts some of your solution designs. You could also comment on what skills are emerging from what you see and hear that you might require. Let the whole EA Community Group know what your experience at the event was. ... View more

Summary In this article you will get to know typical approaches to making a decision about the number of production instances of an ERP system (e.g. SAP S/4HANA) or other major SAP enterprise solution. Business Requirements The current system architecture at customer running SAP environments reflects in many cases not the result of conscious architectural decisions but are historically grown and product of short-term necessities at certain points in time. Going for a major transformation or renovation often raises the question of which instance strategy will be the best fit for the company’s future. We use the term Instance Strategy for the question how many repetitions of the same or almost the same system would serve the requirements best. The criteria and methodology given here can be applied to different SAP solutions. Typically, it’s assessed for SAP S/4HANA solution but also to SAP ERP, SAP Extended Warehouse Management, SAP Transportation Management, MII or other solutions. The SAP services organization, including the authors of this article, offer guidance in the decision process along the methodology described here under the name Instance Strategy Service. We have a long record of these services as well as the experience and tools to make the process efficient and deliver the right set of documentation for a specific customer situation. But we also see that there are organizations that feel capable of performing it by themselves. With this article we want to support them. Solution Options We want to focus here on various patterns: 1. In this option there is only one instance that would serve all parts of the organization, across regions or divisions of the organization. It is often the desired to-go solution when doubts about its applicability can be overcome. 2. In the regional instance strategy different regions of the organization are served from regional solution instances. Regions are often whole continents or continent groups in global companies but can also follow smaller localities such as single countries or even geographical areas within a country. 3. In the divisional instance strategy, the application instances follow the division of a company. They can be by brand, product line, business model or along some ownership borders. 4. There is a multitude of other options, mostly hybrids of the above and functional splits. The same criteria and method can be applied for them. Characterization of the Solution Options SAP colleagues have written a whitepaper SAP Production System Strategy as best-practice document, summarizing trends and observations in the market and experiences from interactions with SAP customers who were in the process of considering different options. Please refer to the whitepaper as the information provided will not be repeated in this article. Criteria to determine the most suitable target solution The evaluation should be performed in a team approach bringing stakeholders and experts from different areas together, representing business, IT department, different LoBs, Enterpise and Solution Architects. The methodology consists of a 5-step approach Definition of options Options should be technically viable. They should be described detailed enough so that pros and cons can be discussed. For that the number of instances should be concretely given as well as what parts of the business those would host. Besides production instance placement the options should also give some idea of the landscape of supporting development and quality systems. We recommend narrowing viable options down to a number of 3 options that can be considered and discussed in more detail. Selection of criteria A catalog of typical criteria is given below. They should be understood and evaluated in their suit for the specific situation. A relative weight can be introduced when it is felt that some criteria are more important than others. Qualitative evaluation An expert quorum looks at each of the criteria for each option and collects arguments in favor or against the model related to these criteria. They are noted down to document the decision finding process and allow reviewing. Quantitative evaluation A score of 0 to 5 points is assigned for each combination of criteria and options. 5 would be the most favorable rating, zero the least favorable. It is advised to use the whole spectrum, to make clear distinctions between the results. Results summary The spreadsheet we provide below automatically creates some graphics on the results showing the total score and the score along the criteria. A typical result is that no option would win in all criteria but will have disadvantages in some. Together with the collected arguments a clear documentation of the decision on the instance strategy can be reached. If a quantitative assessment of scores ends up with a draw, qualitative arguments become of importance to illustrate the tradeoff and support a final decision. The best-practice criteria are Fit to corporate strategy​ Does the solution support key corporate strategic and operational goals?​ ·          Ability to support growth, internationalization, profitability objectives​ ·          Strategic initiatives (mergers & acquisitions, cooperation, disinvestments, shared services, outsourcing, …)​ Business fit and flexibility​ Does the solution fulfill all of the future business requirements?​ ·          Flexibility to support (future) global (or cross sites) processes​ ·          Support for harmonized business processes and data – where required​ ·          Ability to support sharing and adaption of best practices​ ·          Support of global compliance requirements​ Size, Scalability and Performance​ Can all options support current and future demand on size, scalability and performance?​ ·          Ability to support growth in terms of users, data, countries across enterprise footprint​ ·          Management of technical development complexity​ ·          System and network performance​ Software Change Management​ and Maintainability Which approach is best from an IT process point of view? ​ ·          Software change mgmt. flexibility​ ·          Availability and planned downtimes​ ·          Integration to SAP and non-SAP systems​ ·          Security aspects​ Risk of operation​ Which approach minimizes risk and risk impact the best?​ Long-term IT costs​ Which approach has the best IT cost model?​ ·          HW, SW, labor costs (incl. cost for integration)​ Cost and risk of transition​ Which option has the least cost and risk of transition to the future state?​ ·          Impact on project timelines​ Evaluation Spreadsheet Under this LINK you will find the spreadsheet that you can use as accelerator for your decision-making in accordance with the principles described above. Conclusion We have empowered you to follow a best-practice methodology for the decision on the best instance strategy for your SAP solutions in simpler cases. We also provide a whitepaper with the typical talking points and a spreadsheet for download that can be used to guide the discussion and visualize results. For more sophisticated Instance Strategy decisions or to address those in connection with adjacent topics to this decision (e.g., Solution Architecture, Roll-out strategy, Change Management governance), we recommend contacting your SAP account executive or SAP Technical Quality Manager. ... View more

The profession, or role, of an Enterprise Architect (EA) has been around for decades, but still seems to be growing up and evolving. Why is this?  There are many reasons that motivated the creation of this SAP Community Group and why you should want to participate in it. The role is diverse and intense at the same time, Good news is we, as a community, are here to help. ... View more

Connect Different Architecture Disciplines & Contexts In the community, the question of the relation between Enterprise Architecture and Solution Architecture has been raised. Enterprise Architecture aims to advance the strategic decision-making on how to organize an enterprise with its business value creation and the supporting IT. Therefore Enterprise Architecture typically plays on a strategic level. The SAP Enterprise Architecture (EA) Framework addresses aspects of the Business Architecture Domain and Solution Architecture Domain, their components, and their relationships to each other. Both Business Architecture and Solution Architecture can describe experts' shared understanding and decisions [1] on a strategic and operational level. Figure 1 illustrates the relationship between Enterprise Architecture and Solution Architecture.   Figure 1  - Business and Solution Architecture in Enterprise Architecture Not all aspects of Business Architecture or Solution Architecture belong to the strategic level of Enterprise Architecture, but both domains and their relationship play a crucial role in Enterprise Architecture. Architecture groups within these domains address topics such as organization, authorization, processes, data, and security, to name only a few. A principle of the SAP EA Framework is consistently connecting the strategic Solution Architecture within EA to the operational Solution Architecture level. This connection allows customers a smooth transition from strategic decision preparation to the actual implementation of software or services with only a minimal set of hiccups. The consistent connection allows the mapping from high-level process descriptions to run-time relevant artifacts such as events, APIs, and middleware content. The linkage fosters the synergetic collaboration of Enterprise Architects and more technically oriented architects in the Enterprise. Enterprise Architecture provides technical architecture visibility on the management level; the underlying operational architecture level makes Enterprise Architecture more tangible. Georg Hophe's book "The Software Architect Elevator" (O'Reilly, 2020) outlines the importance of every architect's ability to work and communicate on different levels within organizations: "to convey technical topics to upper management" and "translate (business strategy) into technical decisions." I want to recommend reading the books if you haven't had the chance! This consistent connection of different architectural levels is just one principle of the SAP EA Framework. In addition, we plan to provide posts on other applied principles. We also plan to discuss the skills successful architects will need in the future. I am heading NOW for a three-week vacation. I look forward to your comments, feedback, and thoughts about Enterprise and Solution Architecture. Also, please let us know if you want to learn more about the characteristics of Enterprise, Business, and Solution Architecture in the SAP EA Framework. Take care, Andreas   [1] - Compare https://martinfowler.com/architecture/   ... View more

There are many articles about the outstanding value of enterprise architecture. According to The Open Group TOGAF Standard [1], a cross-enterprise optimization can bring the following benefits: More effective strategic decision-making by C-level executives and business leaders. More effective and efficient business operations More effective and efficient Digital Transformation and operations Better return on investment, reduced risk for future investment Faster, simpler, and cheaper procurement The book “Enterprise Architecture – Creating Value by Informed Governance” [2] lists many values for Business Stakeholders, IT, and both, Business and IT. Overview and understanding of the enterprise, process improvements, eliminating duplication, underpinned decision-making, etc., are relevant for the business stakeholders. Effective IT planning and management of IT Roadmaps and much more address IT stakeholders. Overall, enterprise architecture helps to bridge the gap between Business and IT and to align a shared vision. At SAP, we use Enterprise Architecture(EA) in different areas or “dimensions” (which gave me, on various occasions, the possibility to attract attention by talking about 3D-Enterprise Architecture). Overall, SAP business stakeholders and our SAP IT organization use EA to align - as most enterprises when they leverage EA. In addition, we use EA in Product Engineering as an engineering practice to ensure business-driven portfolio planning, precise product positioning, cross-engineering unit alignment, business-focused rollouts, etc. Finally, we leverage EA and offer Enterprise Architecture services to our customers.   Rarely a discipline has countless benefits for any company in any industry, such as Enterprise Architecture! When you have found this blog, I assume you also have a reasonable belief in the benefits of EA for your company! Nevertheless, some individuals do not have the same level of trust in the EA discipline. Why is that? EA does not only come with vast potential, but it also has its challenges. I invite anybody to reply to this post, sharing key challenges and obstacles. Some key challenges we have been facing you will find below. In the following blogs, I would like to share how we addressed those difficulties and discuss the best possible approaches with you!   Challenge #1: Number of Existing EA Frameworks and Methodologies There are many enterprise architecture frameworks available. Matthes [3] provided 2009 an overview of more than 50 EA frameworks, including the Zachman EA Framework, The Open Group Architecture Framework TOGAF®, and Gartner's Enterprise Architecture Framework. Many different frameworks can cause difficulties, especially when the units of a single enterprise adhere to various frameworks. Challenge #2: Overwhelming EA Scope The goal to improve business processes across an entire enterprise will automatically touch many architecture domains and concern a large number of stakeholders. Therefore, a successful enterprise architect requires particular (power) skills to interact with those stakeholders and to establish an accepted EA practice (with the appropriate focus, at the right level of detail,  respected governance, …).   Challenge #3: Involved personalities Actors who dedicate themselves to improving the structures and processes of an entire company are often strong personalities who aspire to achieve their vision and provide direction. Unfortunately, alignment and compromises are often time-consuming. Such challenges often delay the value creation of enterprise architecture. I look forward to reading about the top challenges you have been facing and the discussions of we should ideally deal with them. [1] The Open Group (2005-2022): The Open Group Standard , The TOAF Standard [2] Martin Op ‘t Land (2009): Enterprise Architecture, Creating Value by Informed Governance [3] Dirk Matthes (2011): Enterprise Architecture Frameworks Kompedium   ... View more