By 2026, it’s projected that spending on digital transformation technologies and services worldwide will hit the 3.4 trillion USD mark. Now more than ever, organizations must position themselves to succeed in their stages of digital transformation.
Digital transformation is critical in adding business value, and it pays off long-term. Deloitte found that “Higher-maturity (digital) organizations…were far more likely than lower-maturity ones to significantly outperform their industry average on key financial metrics.”
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a key component of digitization or digital transformation. The right EA tool can help track an organization's applications, manage business capabilities, and provide the foundation for complex change projects.
These nine organizations have become digital transformation success stories thanks to EA. They’ve used technology to digitize their non-digital services, products, and operations. Their progress can aid and inspire others on a continuing digital journey.
Feel free to jump to the section most relevant to your business situation:
- Automation: Reduce Manual Processes
- Change Portfolio Management: Prevent Parallel Projects
- Communication: Align IT and Business
- Data Management: Make It Manageable
- Digital Overview: Understand the Current State of IT
- FinTech: Drive Innovation
- Merger: Unite Many Entities
- ROI: Proving Return on Investment on EA and Change Initiatives
- Strategic Growth: Build an Enterprise Architecture Program
Communication: Align IT and Business
As organizations grow, the gap between IT and business invariably increases. Often IT develops its own language that makes sense only to those working directly within the system. Due to the ‘language barrier’ in Enterprise Architecture (EA), sometimes vital business information goes unutilized because stakeholders simply don’t understand its worth.
At University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), the Enterprise Architecture (EA) team confronted the challenge of aligning communication. Working with the business departments, they engaged in dialogues and adapted their communication to convey how EA could support business-specific functions.
This new way of communicating improved how the EA team leveraged capabilities. The team engaged stakeholders in open dialogues, which led to stakeholder ownership of the capability roadmaps for strategic planning. These dialogues introduced a new way of defining capabilities. For example, using ‘societal impact’ as a capability because of its importance to the UMCG Research Department.
Interested in learning more about UMCG? Get in-depth stories of how they improved IT’s communication and developed critical business insights.
ROI: Proving Return on Investment For EA and Change Initiatives
Budgets are always limited, so CIOs want a clear ROI when any new tool is added to the IT portfolio. STIHL's Cloud and Data Governance team built a valuable business case and implemented their chosen EA tool.
STIHL’s Four Steps to Building an ROI Business Case
- Reducing Effort for Solution Architecture Sessions
- Minimizing Efforts for Technology Risk Management
- Identifying Cost-Saving License and Contract Adjustments
- Reducing Application Portfolio Duplicates
After they received stakeholder approval, the EA team moved on to execute, delivering what they promised. They enabled a new IT vision at STIHL, building trust between teams, giving 360-degree insights, and allowing more constructive conversations.
Digital Overview: Understand the Current State of IT
All organizations would benefit from a complete digital overview of their technology. With it, they can better manage applications, connect business and IT, and provide insightful knowledge to decision-makers. This is especially true for organizations with offices sprinkled around the world, like the IG Group.
Previously, the IG Group manually gathered digital data into a spreadsheet to see which technologies to update or replace. Unfortunately, as with all manual work, it fell out of date quickly.
By gathering data with an automated tool, IG’s Enterprise Architecture team had many achievements, including:
- Gathering materials for their annual health of IT check in record time
- Garnering stakeholder support by delivering meaningful information
- Implementing an As-Is central repository in less than six months
In addition, they had a proactive approach to data analytics and reporting, with an As-Is central data repository that aided general questions and project risk assessments.
Automation: Reduce Manual Processes
When Innovation Norway started with digital transformation, they wanted a starting point for managing application lifecycles, integrations, and rationalization. Most importantly, everything needed the maximum automation to lessen the work for their one Enterprise Architect.
With EA they can:
- Understand the impact of change and the complexity of projects
- Estimate costs and time needed for project delivery
- Guide decision-making with key data
- Communicate effectively with business leaders
With the help of a flexible tool, Innovation Norway has integrated and automated data collection and now has implemented an up-to-date and complete overview of the application landscape. 
Change Portfolio Management: Prevent Parallel Projects
Across large organizations, it's easy for silos to create parallel projects. Nebraska Medicine often has numerous projects that require funding, and it needed a simple solution to track current projects and avoid duplicates.
The Enterprise Architecture team helps decision-makers decide which project to support and adds value with application portfolio management. The hospital’s EA tool tracks all projects and allows them to visualize their data to point to critical applications and identify areas where investment is needed.
Strategic Growth: Build an Enterprise Architecture Program
Building an Enterprise Architecture (EA) program from scratch takes time and skill. Premier Tech started from the ground up, building an EA team to leverage strategic growth and planning. Their EA team mapped the application catalog and started to show, not tell, the company how they could help.
Some of the value they showed internal stakeholders include:
- Cost and time estimates: Evaluating the impact of change initiatives and putting them in a time frame with an estimated budget
- Project tracking: Having a complete project overview to track where projects would overlap, saving time and funding
- Robust business analysis: Connecting capabilities to corresponding technologies and people to provide key analysis information
Get the details of starting an EA program in Premier Tech’s story, Meeting Strategic Goals and Building Stakeholder Trust. You can also watch their live presentation about using their EA tool in part two of the TechFest 2021 Video.
Merger: Unite Many Entities
Change isn’t easy, especially when combining several entities into one organization. During a time of organizational transformation, Schibsted merged its entities. The result was several IT departments that needed to reconcile their different approaches to work and form a single unit.
The EA team used their tool to build the structure as they documented data. The process went quickly with the help of crowdsourced data collection and automation. With the basic data in place, they could model their business capabilities to pinpoint potential risks and successfully move forward with merging.
Understand the power of Enterprise Architecture when combining organizations with Schibsted's experience merging IT departments.
FinTech: Drive Innovation
With new disruptors constantly trying to break into finance, established organizations need to stay on top of innovation. At the Brazilian Bank Sicredi, the Enterprise Architecture team provides the bank with insights needed to leverage emerging technologies.
The EA team maintains an application and business capability map. With these maps, they can improve operational efficiency, identify opportunities for new applications, and optimize innovation. Sicredi used data-driven EA to prepare and save money. With their focus on leveraging a tool to help them, they drove innovation forward internally and stayed on the cutting edge of technology.
Data Management: Make it Manageable
Some business decisions significantly impact an IT landscape. TINE SA wanted to see this impact long before it happened, so they set out to improve their data management and connect their IT with business. TINE chose an Enterprise Architecture (EA) tool offering a comprehensive IT system overview and automation.
The EA team used their tool’s configurable viewpoints to create visualizations for each group of stakeholders, highlighting the areas most relevant to them. As a result, stakeholders could quickly have up-to-date visualizations, giving them a complete overview of the IT systems, system interactions, and user lists.
Make Your Digital Transformation Success Story
Every organization continuously works on effective, successful digital transformation. These examples give a taste of how a variety of organizations around the world are keeping on top of their current stage of transformation.
While each organization achieves digital transformation using methods tailored to its needs, these nine examples provide ideas which can be adapted. Use them as inspiration when looking for ways to add critical business value using Enterprise Architecture.
Interested in learning more about how an Enterprise Architecture tool could make your digital transformation successful? Book a demo with us today.
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