Enterprise Architects (EA) play the important role of bridging the gap between an organisation’s strategic objectives and business goals and the available technical solutions, which can help them become realities. EAs ensure that the organisation is able to identify a holistic and scalable technical roadmap to meet the defined objectives. With the evolving IT landscape, the role of EAs has become increasingly important, with organisations involving them at the inception of the project and having a broader role in decision-making. 

In modern SAP projects, besides juxtaposing strategy and technology to ensure fitment into business vision, EAs also play a major role in baselining governance and IT strategy. It involves defining data models, security and compliance policies, integration and consistency between SAP and non-SAP systems, relevant technology mix and inclusion of capabilities like AI/ML, Analytics, IoT, etc. EA also help in decision-making by providing an architectural framework around solution simplifications, cloud adoption, and third-party applications.

EAs role ventures deep into the roadmap, focusing on long-term goals and ensuring minimum technical debt. From a solution perspective, it becomes important to identify and eliminate redundancy. Mapping out processes and systems can help with that cause. From a performance perspective, a similar due diligence is needed to avoid data and design redundancies, identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, and ensure the solution is scalable and optimised.

Modern SAP Projects transcend across businesses and geographies, adding different layers of complexity to the solution, relying on cross-technology IT landscape. To steer the ship properly, projects need EAs who can bring a sense of coherence to the transformation. In the absence of a good EA, a wide spectrum of inconsistencies can creep in, leading to design, data and integration challenges and unwanted technical debt. 

~S