One of the keys to ensuring that a major corporation can sustain its activities and continue thriving despite market instability and unpredictability is having a robust and agile structure that is flexible and adapts to unforeseen changes. In order to achieve this, all processes should be digitized and migrated to the cloud, but this process alone is not enough. Without a well-defined enterprise architecture encompassing the entire company, even having everything digitized could create issues. A few years ago, Gartner predicted that by 2023, 60% of companies would rely on enterprise architecture to guide their business strategies toward digital innovation. In other words, without that architecture, it’s difficult to fully capitalize on digitalization.
According to SAP, enterprise architects “build a bridge between business and technology,” and enable companies to “achieve desired business outcomes” through effective use.
But how can this architecture be achieved and optimized? The first step is to create a common framework for all departments—a sort of shared language that ensures information is leveraged efficiently and effectively both inside and outside the organization.
This common framework is provided by the SAP Enterprise Architecture Framework (EAF), which is made up of these main pillars:
To achieve an enterprise architecture with a common framework across the organization, SAP offers three essential tools, each key at different stages of the process:
Let’s take a closer look at each of these solutions and why NTT DATA is the ideal partner to implement these complex tools:
Signavio consists of a complete suite of multiple solutions, that includes the Process Explorer, which provides a reference for how various processes are executed in the industry or shows market standards, and Process Insights, which connects to SAP’s ERP, to reveal how the company’s processes are functioning and where bottlenecks exist, suggests recommendations for process transformation and simplification based on SAP Best Practices. For non-SAP ERPs, Signavio comes with a Process Mining solution (Process Intelligence) that helps to get full visibility on true process execution based on system logs data.
Thanks to the dashboards provided by these solutions, the path to an enterprise architecture with a common framework becomes clearer: it allows you to see how everything is functioning and apply the necessary changes (often suggested by the tool itself through the data it collects and analyzes).
Additionally, since everything is done from a single platform, and the practices of the entire company are unified, collaboration is easier and resources are less likely to be wasted.
At NTT DATA, we’ve had experience with Signavio even before it was acquired by SAP, so we are familiar with its full potential and how to tailor it to each business.
LeanIX allows you to view the organization’s IT landscape from a single place and as a single source of truth: the IT applications that support business processes, the IT components (hardware) that support applications, the lifecycle of the technologies used, and the risk of obsolescence, etc.
Some of the benefits of this advanced capability are:
Software solutions also have a lifecycle, and it’s essential to manage this to ensure that the efficient and effective architecture that’s been built doesn’t start to crumble over time. This is the idea behind CALM, which stands for Cloud Application Lifecycle Management. Its objective is to ensure the smooth operation of applications throughout their lifecycle, from the moment they’re implemented.
As the name suggests, CALM has been designed for the cloud, with all the scalability and flexibility advantages that come with it. It also streamlines processes, provides a real-time view of system performance, automates tasks, and, as a result, optimizes costs. It can design (process, documentation, requirements and define your to-be-solution), build (projects, tasks, user stories, Agile implementations), test (test plans, test cases, test end-to-end), and deploy (plan releases, execute fixes, and features), using E2E methodology, integrated analytics and full traceability and Open APIs.
Based on the SAP Activate methodology with template roadmaps for agile implementation projects, extended by your own tasks and user stories, integrated with planning and reporting. It can ensure quality by managing all tests from users, it can be used in manual testing with a step-based approach or using automatic execution engines. You can manage successful deployments and Go-lives using releases and consistent deployment with traceability an audit trails to production.
Using these three tools allows companies to design and maintain their architecture, which, consequently, will guarantee smoother navigation through the turbulent waters of the markets. To implement them, it’s a good idea to work with a partner experienced in collaborating with large corporations across different sectors and with deep knowledge of the SAP ecosystem. NTT DATA fulfills both of these requirements.
Jens Sinnigen, SAP Enterprise Architect at NTT DATA
Pablo Mortera Fernandez, Arquitecto SAP & Technología at NTT DATA
Xavier Gracia Rocafort, Head of Digital Transformation – Finance at NTT DATA EUROPE & LATAM