What’s the number one challenge of more than 70 percent of CEOs? It’s “the rapid pace of technology change” according to the 2017 Fortune 500 CEO survey. Also, nearly 90 percent of the executives surveyed for the Accenture Technology Vision 2017 report said that their organizations “must innovate at an increasingly rapid pace just to keep a competitive advantage.”
This makes the enterprise architect role more important than ever, because this executive angst is not just 
about the IT infrastructure or pure innovation. It’s about embedding technology into revenue-producing products and services. Enterprise architects can be the catalyst for this transformation by advancing their mission of ensuring the technology landscape supports business goals.
What does being more business-focused look like in practice? Enterprise architects should be:
- Defining a Technology and Capability roadmap that drives corporate strategy
- Facilitating fully informed investment decisions to accelerate implementation of the roadmap
- Delivering a flexible, cost-effective application and technology portfolio optimized for business strategy and capabilities
- Understanding business capability gaps and maturing the capability portfolio to execute strategy
- De-risking the business impact of a rapidly accelerating technology and application lifecycles
- Engaging with the broader organization to drive change, becoming more inclusive
Here’s how a few enterprise architecture customers have furthered their business influence by using Planview’s Capability and Technology Management solutions.
Increase Agility and Achieve Business Objectives Faster
- The enterprise architecture practice of a global tech giant has become more business relevant by helping leaders make more informed decisions and act with greater agility.
- A common vernacular and reference model helps the EA group identify redundancies and other inefficiencies. They have mapped the company’s operational activities to about 250 discrete services and associated them to the underlying, enabling systems and technologies. This eliminates roadblocks when executing initiatives, simplifies cross-functional conversations, and provides the platform to get everyone moving quickly toward a shared business outcome.
- “The common reference model allows us to solve for the collection of requirements across the whole business, rather than for individual BUs.” Director of Business Architecture
- The enterprise architecture organization can also determine how much the company is spending and where, enabling the company to direct investments to the right places and in the right sequence. The EA team has even been successful in stopping initiatives before over-investment.
Reduce Risk Via Proactive Management of Technology End of Life
- With visibility into technology life cycles, a large brewing company has gained control over its portfolio and reduced risk.
- The enterprise architecture group rationalized a list of 5,000 different software product versions and a massive, outdated spreadsheet of applications. Senior leaders can now prioritize and plan based on a list of all the obsolete technologies per manufacturers’ recommendations, plus all the technologies going obsolete in the next 18 months. They can make application retirement assessments based on objective technology plans and risk assessments.
- “We helped business leaders see the risk exposure of using outdated applications and how Planview was the ideal tool to understand where the risks are if an application isn’t upgraded.” Solution Architect
Eliminate Waste and Duplication in the Application Portfolio
- A worldwide insurance company has gained visibility into its global and local applications, enabling leaders to analyze the data for real-time insights and make the right decisions before procuring new assets.
- The enterprise architecture team now has a view of all applications in the estate, categorized to pinpoint where they have a high number of tools in the same space globally.
- “Planview gives us a central repository with built-in data quality checks and workflows, supporting enterprise architecture best practices. Our entire application state, including cloud apps, purchased apps, and custom-built apps, are now mapped to our capability model so we can identify opportunities for rationalization. We better understand our balance so we can make strategic decisions.” Architecture Consultant
The Planview Capability and Technology Management Solution
As these examples show, Planview’s Capability and Technology Management solution enables enterprise architects to advance capabilities and drive business outcomes by connecting technology with business context. The capabilities, while they can be used separately, are part of the recently announced Planview Portfolios.
The premise behind Planview Portfolios is that creating the complex, interconnected products and services that move businesses forward requires continually assessing and evolving business capabilities. It also requires directing an unprecedented level of coordination between strategy, work, people, technology, and outcomes.
To facilitate this, Planview Portfolios powers Planview’s Work and Resource Management solutions for strategic planning, portfolio and resource management, product innovation, and enterprise architecture. Planview Portfolios is the convergence of Planview Enterprise’s Portfolio and Resource Management with Troux’s Capability and Technology Management.
By connecting strategic, business, and technology portfolios, Planview Portfolios defines the roadmaps and programs needed to accelerate digital transformation and time-to-market for innovative products and services. Enterprise architects are better equipped to engage stakeholders to jointly create technology plans and roadmaps that achieve the company’s objectives. The PMO is better positioned to drive execution.
For more information about Planview’s Capability and Technology Management solution, visit https://www.planview.com/tapm-technology-application-portfolio-management/. For more information about Planview Portfolios, visit https://www.planview.com/products/planview-enterprise/.
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