6 Steps To Building a Business Case for Enterprise Architecture

A Six-Step Approach

Rapid market shifts, unexpected competition, and evolving customer demands define today’s business environment. To stay ahead, organizations need to transform quickly and efficiently. Enterprise Architecture (EA) can produce a competitive edge through:

Innovation
Agility
Operational efficiency
Strategic decision-making
Cost optimization

As an Enterprise Architect, your mission is clear: help executives accelerate business transformation. However, with competing priorities and limited budgets, you must show that investing in EA is the key to overcoming obstacles and driving growth. This workbook provides a framework to build a strong business case for EA, empowering your organization to tackle every challenge.

Our six steps to build your case for Business Transformation using Enterprise Architecture:

Clarify Business Goals
Assess Current State
Identify Key Stakeholders
Craft Value Propositions
Highlight EA Success Stories
Measure and Prove EA Value

1- Clarify Business Goals

Take a moment to reflect on your company’s priorities.

What are the most important goals for your business today, in six months, one year, and five years? Consider these questions to identify where enterprise architecture can make a difference:

Are you looking to get IT costs under control?
Does your company need to streamline IT operations?
Is there a push to develop more innovative products and services?
Do you need to respond faster to changing customer demands?
Is getting to market quicker a critical objective?
Do you need a better understanding of how changes will impact your organization?

Now, envision your company five years from now. What does success look like for your executives? How is it measured, by cost savings, time efficiency, revenue growth, or risk reduction?

Every stakeholder may define success differently, so it’s crucial to translate the value of business transformation into the benefits that matter most to them. Your role as an enterprise architect is to connect the dots: identify how enterprise architecture can address these diverse priorities and drive company-wide change.

By starting with a clear vision of your company’s goals, you can align EA strategies with the outcomes that stakeholders value most.

2- Assess Current States

Identify the key obstacles within your IT department:

Legacy Systems: Are outdated applications consuming your IT budget and stifling innovation?
Operational Complexity: Is your IT landscape overly complex, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities?
Shadow IT: Do dev teams and business units use unapproved technologies, increasing compliance risks?
Siloed Information: Do different departments lack a shared view of the organization, resulting in poor decision-making?
Lack of Agility: Is your IT department struggling to meet customer expectations due to slow responses to market changes?
Increased Risks: Are rising regulatory demands and cyber threats adding to your organization’s risk profile?

How EA Helps:

Provides a comprehensive IT inventory to reduce shadow IT risks and identify obsolete technologies.
Offers a complete view of applications to guide decisions on acquiring, retiring, or extending IT assets.
Creates future roadmaps linking strategy with business outcomes and enabling ‘what-if’ scenarios to assess the impact of change.
Establishes a single source of truth, centralizing operations data for shared access and better collaboration.
Enhances IT Agility by modeling business capabilities, linking them to IT assets, and allowing rapid adjustments to meet customer needs and market demands.
Reduces Risk through a comprehensive view of processes, assets, and technologies, helping to address compliance, cybersecurity, and regulatory requirements proactively.

By understanding where your organization stands today, you can pinpoint how EA can simplify complexity, optimize costs, improve agility, and mitigate risks, providing a clear path for transformation.

3- Identify Key Stakeholders

You likely know who approves budgets and technology purchases, but it’s crucial to identify all stakeholders and understand what matters most to each of them. Their concerns and priorities will shape how you position Enterprise Architecture (EA) as the solution.

CIOs and Business Unit Heads: Seek dashboards with key performance indicators to guide investment decisions and respond quickly to market changes.
Strategy Teams: Need clarity on business opportunities and the impact of emerging technologies, such as blockchain, on both business and IT systems.
Infrastructure Teams: Want a clear IT roadmap to efficiently plan necessary changes and upgrades.
Development Teams: Often working in silos, they need visibility into the company’s strategic objectives and guidelines on software technologies to use.

Example: In a company that has gone through mergers and acquisitions, the IT team might face redundancies and outdated technologies. Streamlining IT assets could save money, but to the CIO, it’s about freeing up time for innovation. Similarly, a financial company exploring blockchain may need EA to assess its impact on business capabilities and IT systems.

How EA Helps:

Strategic Alignment: Identifies deployed applications, ties new capabilities to business objectives, and maps technology to business operations.
Customized Solutions: Addresses each stakeholder’s unique problems, whether it’s cost-saving, strategic planning, or improving agility.

By knowing what’s priceless to each stakeholder, you can frame EA as a tool and the solution to their specific challenges, making it easier to secure buy-in
and drive transformation.

4- Craft Value Propositions

When presenting Enterprise Architecture (EA) to decision-makers, focus on the outcomes that matter most to them. Avoid diving into technical features
upfront; executives want to know how EA will drive business success.

Use the Benefits-Advantages-Features (BAF) approach, but start with the benefit to capture their attention:

Benefit: Begin with what EA will achieve for the business. For example, “EA will make the company more agile, allowing us to meet market demands
faster.”
Advantage: Next, explain how EA creates this benefit. “We can quickly adapt to change by having a comprehensive view of operations and resources,
understanding how changes in one area affect others.”
Feature: Finally, outline the technical aspect. “This is done using an EA tool that centralizes business and IT operations data, helping us plan
transformation, streamline IT, and reduce costs.”

Tailor each value proposition to address your stakeholders’ specific concerns, highlighting how EA will solve their unique challenges. Start with the benefits they care about, then provide as much detail as they need. This method helps you deliver a compelling and convincing case for EA.

5- Highlight EA Success Stories

Executives want proof that Enterprise Architecture (EA) can drive actual results. Share success stories from other companies to build their confidence in EA’s potential impact.

Here are a few examples:

Consumer Goods Company: Used EA to drive a cost-optimization program, saving $150 million in five years. It reduced time to market by 20% and optimized IT assets for 3,000 applications, improving internal service delivery by 75%.
Health Insurer: Saved $50 million in three years by streamlining operations and improving customer journeys. EA helped eliminate information silos and provided critical strategic insights, viewed 25,000 times monthly through an employee portal.
Fortune 50 Insurance Company: Achieved a 300% ROI in three years, saving close to $15 million by consolidating applications, retiring legacy software, and improving IT management. EA also helped identify and mitigate risks, avoiding $3.2 million in costs.
Top US Bank: Saved over $15 million by improving operations and reducing risks. EA pinpointed key business activities to automate, removed inefficiencies, and eliminated redundant applications across 600+ applications and 1,300 technologies.

Use these examples to illustrate how EA can drive cost savings, enhance customer experience, drive innovation, and improve operational efficiency, showing executives that similar results are achievable for your company.

6- Measure and Prove EA Value

Executives measure success in various ways: revenue growth, market share, customer retention, or ROI. To secure investment in Enterprise Architecture (EA), you need to show that it delivers measurable value in terms that resonate with them.

Choose metrics that align with business goals and show clear benefits. Here’s how to quantify the impact of your EA program:

Cost Efficiency:
- Reduction in IT Maintenance Costs: Measure savings from consolidating and retiring legacy systems.
- IT Spend on Innovation: Track the percentage of the IT budget allocated to new projects, showing a shift away from maintenance costs.
- Savings from Reducing Redundant Applications: Calculate the financial impact of identifying and eliminating duplicate or underused applications.
Risk Management:
- Compliance Rate: Show improvements in regulatory and policy compliance resulting from EA-guided governance.
- Risk Mitigation: Quantify the number and severity of risks addressed, such as technology obsolescence or cybersecurity threats.
Strategic Alignment and Agility:
- Time to Market: Measure how EA accelerates the launch new products or services.
- Number of Business Capabilities Enabled: Highlight new or enhanced business capabilities directly supported by EA initiatives.
Operational Efficiency:
- Application Portfolio Health: Track the ratio of actively managed applications, reflecting streamlined operations.
- IT Process Efficiency: Measure reductions in IT process times, like change management, enabled by EA insights.

By focusing on these measurable outcomes, you demonstrate EA’s value and make a compelling case to executives for prioritizing EA in the company’s investment portfolio. A data-backed approach solidifies your case for the ongoing investment in EA, demonstrating its role in the company’s success.

Conclusion: Lead the Transformation with Enterprise Architecture

Now that you have followed our six steps by clarifying business goals, assessing your current state, engaging key stakeholders, crafting tailored value propositions, highlighting success stories, and measuring EA’s impact, you now have a solid roadmap for building a compelling business case for Enterprise Architecture.

As an enterprise architect, you have the power to drive transformation, streamline operations, and position your company for success in a rapidly changing market.

Now, it’s time to take the next step and turn this strategy into action.