The recent Next Generation SAP Enterprise Architecture Forum, engineered by SAP community impresario Paul Kurchina and hosted by SAP in Newtown Square, was one of those rare events that’s so rich and varied I know I’ll be mining it for ideas and inspiration for months to come. So bear with me as I try to summarize in a few hundred words a three-day event with over 30 presentations. I may have to write more than one post to do it justice.
It’s important to start with understanding the different types of SAP stakeholder in attendance – the who question. Without a doubt the issues that this Forum covered are issues that SAP customers will need to understand in order to be successful, and knowing how to find these different stakeholders and by extension how to inform them based on their specific needs will be an important task for the SAP ecosystem moving forward.
I walked into the Forum convinced a priori that enterprise architect is a persona, not a job title. I walked out convinced that there are at least three personas involved, and, judging by the exit survey data, there were upwards of 100 different job titles represented in the audience. The vast majority had the word “architect” in there somewhere, so we saw lots of straight up enterprise architects, as well as SAP architects, principal architects, and lead enterprise architects. There were also enterprise architects who added a specialization to their title, such as enterprise architect for finance, or applications, or advanced analytics. There was a lead architect, ERP and landscape; and several versions of solutions architect, and a cloud architect or two.
But there were also lots of application developers and managers, business analysts, IT applications managers, and other folks with IT in their title. There were a few BASIS leads, an innovation lead, some technical managers, as well as business process people. There was even a VP of accounting from a name brand SAP customer.
Those are the titles of the people who attended. But when attendees were asked what other job titles at their company could benefit from a conference like the EA Forum, the respondents piled on a whole ‘nother list of prospective attendees. There were calls for business managers, business process owners, business executives, not to mention CIOs, product and program managers; and various engineering roles.
This why I started by saying the EA space is made up of three different personas, but that may be a bit limiting. When a respondent says that the most important thing they learned was:
“Business architecture is at a much higher level than we allow for today in the organization,”
and that person is a VP of accounting, it’s clear we’re not just talking about infrastructure and technology architects.
Respondents’ answers to the question What was the most surprising thing you learned this week perhaps said it all. Here’s one trenchant example:
“The various roles that need to come together in approach and discipline to properly structure the function.”
This echoed another favorite comment of mine, in response to the question What’s the most important thing you plan to tell your colleagues that you learned this week?:
“Business architecture is key to long term success in the alignment of business with IT.”
This is the crux of the answer to the what is enterprise architecture question. Perhaps it’s more of a goal than a thing: An alignment of roles and responsibilities in service of the alignment of business with IT. A mindset that looks at architecture as a strategic process, not just an end in itself. A multi-function, multi-level discipline, to use the word of speaker Whynde Kuehn, of S2E Transformation.
In particular, Whynde she sees enterprise architecture encompassing six key domains:
· Policies
· Products
· Metrics
· Initiatives
· Strategies
· Stakeholders
In other words, there’s a little something in enterprise architecture for everyone. If you’re Marco Michel, head of SAP’s Enterprise Architecture Group, this discipline starts at the SAP board and trickles down through various levels of management in the service of “end to end enterprise-wide architecture to support business goals and SAP’s strategy.” Marco’s idea of an enterprise architect is someone who is focused on very high-level strategy. That’s maybe a little too high-level if there’s no one looking closely at how things are going in the next levels down – which is something I asked Marco about. I wasn’t the only one: After I posed my question another attendee backed me up by commenting that “the business keeps giving us these strategies without any sense of how they should actually work.” This disconnect is important, and unfortunately unexceptional, and bridging it is part of the education effort I mentioned earlier.
Next level down in the enterprise architect taxonomy is someone who is more of an enterprise infrastructure architect, someone looking at how to put together the different pieces of the overall IT landscape in a way that fits a specific business need. On the first day of the Forum I sat next to the recently hired chief architect at a major aerospace company who told me their remit was to figure out how to make their company’s global supply chain work with a recently implemented single global instance of S/4HANA. It’s a daunting assignment, though he seemed to taking it all in stride, considering how a certain large American aircraft manufacturer is currently in the midst of a major quality problem created in no small part by its overly complicated global supply chain.
Then there are what I’m going to call the enterprise architecture implementers, the ones rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands on a keyboard trying to make higher-level architectural visions a reality. These are the folks presenter Patrik Fiegl from Tricentis was talking about when he riffed on Whynde’s metrics discipline by showing how to use Tricentis’ test automation technology to continually test how well the essential alignment of business with IT is actually working, starting from the earliest stages of an implementation project and continuing throughout its lifecycle.
For these implementing enterprise architects, the challenge of architectural excellence beings when the implementation starts and all that high level planning smacks into the reality of actually getting the work done. Or, in the words of someone who calls themselves an operations solution architect:
Enterprise architecture is a rallying cry “to pull together our siloed efforts at architecture … and rally around a common framework, toolset and set of priorities based on capabilities and value streams.”
Similary, echoing Whynde’s “discipline” concept, the resident VP of accounting had this to say about enterprise architecture:
“…the right discipline for the company can bring real value to the organization and allow for some of our departments attempting pieces of this work to be more empowered and impactful.”
Armed with a sense of the who and the what, let’s move on to the final question: How to make the SAP ecosystem a better place for all types of enterprise architect and help them improve the implementation and business success of the companies they work in?
The good news is there’s a concerted effort in the works to do just that. I recently spoke with SAP board member Thomas Saueressig about enterprise architects and his new board responsibilities, and he’s putting a lot of resources and personal effort behind enriching and enabling this community. ASUG CEO Geoff Scott also recently told me that ASUG is looking to play a greater role in opening up opportunities for its members to better support their enterprise architects and the myriad functions they enable. And Paul Kurchina has assured me there are definitely plans cooking for more EA Forums, with demand coming from US, Europe, and beyond.
Some of my own personal effort in this regard will revolve around continuing my work as a translator of SAP’s technology strategy to the wider SAP ecosystem. One of the problems with being an enterprise architect of any stripe is that SAP has an overabundance of entry points for enterprise architectural efforts. The big point of entry on the technology side is owned increasingly by the Business Transformation Suite, which represents a multi-year effort to combine and integrate home-grown assets like Cloud ALM with acquired assets like Signavio and LeanIX. As with virtually every attempt to integrate acquired products, putting these three assets in the same fully integrated suite alongside BTP, DataSphere, and the Activate methodology – all of which constitute their own points of entry – is easier said than done.
Then there’s the partner problem. A few partners, Tricentis primary among them, are relatively well-ensconced in SAP’s strategy. There’s a larger partner ecosystem issue at play here, however, and SAP is well known for not exactly being the best company to partner with. But if this enterprise architecture bet is going to pay off, SAP will need to rethink how it wants to work with the larger partner ecosystem, many of whom showed up in abundance as well: Basis Technologies, Convergentis, and Data Migration International, among others, were there because they have a lot of value to bring to an enterprise architecture party that’s currently starving for resources and expertise.
If SAP wants to give this enterprise architect community the support it deserves – and by extension give its customers the support they deserve – SAP will need to buck its usual benign-to-malign indifference about its smaller partners and make it a lot easier for them to fill in the enormous gaps in what SAP can bring to the table and what the different types of enterprise architect need to get the job done.
Of course, the customer side will need some serious help as well. And the time to get moving was yesterday. One shocking data point that came out during one of the SAP sessions was that SAP’s most recent data show only 12% of customers are on the latest version of S/4HANA. Another shocker was that 86% of on-premise systems in the SAP ecosystem, which presumably includes S/4HANA as well as ECC, were never upgraded even once. If anyone reading this was wondering why SAP created a new cloud success board area for Herr Saueressig, you now know the answer.
One final note. One of my favorite presentations – and an audience favorite as well, judging from the survey data – was from Jason Porterfield, the head of SAP’s North American enterprise architecture advisory group. Jason’s message was simple:
“The best architects tell the best stories.”
And there’s no better way to enable this story-telling imperative than to marshal the different stakeholders – SAP, Kurchina, Inc., ASUG, the partners, as well as the many different versions of enterprise architect – and bring them together for more events like the Next Generation Enterprise Architect Forum.
Or as one IT Center of Excellence operations manager put it:
“The issue we are facing is similar cross the board, which means we can always share and learn from each other, build the strong community and collaborate.”
Share, build, learn. This is what the enterprise architects in the SAP ecosystem need. Now more than ever.
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