This guest perspective on the evolution of the enterprise architect in the SAP ecosystem was authored by Josh Greenbaum, Principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting (EAC).
One of the more significant events in a significant year for SAP was the creation of a new board area and a new set of responsibilities for Thomas Saueressig. Having assumed the mantle of the Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE in charge of Customer Services and Delivery, Saueressig quickly sent out an important message to the SAP ecosystem by anointing the role of enterprise architect with a new purpose.
Saueressig further cemented the relevance of that role with a promise during his keynote address at this year’s SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference in June, vowing to assign every new and existing RISE with SAP customer an enterprise architect to help them navigate the interplay of technology and business requirements that are foundational to any SAP S/4HANA implementation.
“We want more skin in the game; we want to be closer to your business transformation journey,” Saueressig said during his keynote. “That’s the reason why we invest and double down on enterprise architects, which will be at your side to guide you through your individual journey as well.” Saueressig also called out an important set of tools and technologies—including the SAP Business Transformation Suite and related offerings—that are intended to “streamline the engagement fundamentally… and accelerate this journey.”
Enshrining the role of the enterprise architect and the importance of the SAP Business Transformation Suite within the evolution of RISE (and to a lesser extent GROW) has raised an important set of questions and challenges for SAP and its customers.
How these questions are answered, and how the challenges are met, will have a profound impact on the course of customers’ upgrades and migrations to SAP S/4HANA in the crucial years running up to the end of standard maintenance for SAP ECC in 2027, as well the even more imminent end of maintenance for earlier versions of S/4HANA.
The four key questions are:
- What is an enterprise architect, what is their role, and where will they come from?
- What is the SAP Business Transformation Suite, and how does it help solve customers’ business problems?
- How does RISE fit into this journey?
- What should ASUG members do to optimize the opportunity presented by SAP’s focus on enterprise architects, Business Transformation Suite, and RISE?
Definitive answers have, so far, not been easy to come by. My conversations with ASUG members and partners over the course of this year have revealed a significant degree of confusion concerning the changing dynamic of the role of the enterprise architect, the different offerings under the RISE umbrella, and the evolving nature of the tools customers and partners are expected to use to migrate their older ECC and S/4HANA systems to SAP’s latest cloud architecture.
Across the board, decision-makers in the SAP customer base have told me they are overwhelmed by the complexity of the technical and business problems relating to migrating to a clean core, modern S/4HANA cloud architecture. RISE has itself been a moving target in terms of the scope of its offerings, and the threat that customers will be unable to consume innovation from SAP without being on one of the latest releases of SAP S/4HANA (a perspective based on marketing and sales goals, not technical requirements) has made planning a migration path that makes sense within the context of a customer’s specific business and technological requirements increasingly difficult for many customers.
This has put an additional pressure on enterprise architects, who are the designated “white knights” charged with riding in and untangling complexity, to define the precise mix of SAP S/4HANA, private and public editions, and SAP ECC necessary to meet their companies’ needs, all while mastering an ever-growing set of tools and technologies that SAP believes are needed to weave these different threads into a coherent strategy.
While every enterprise architect I have spoken with is excited about their new role in the SAP firmament, a concrete definition of the role still requires a more concise definition. As ASUG CEO & Chief Community Champion Geoff Scott told me recently, there’s a long list of questions about how this vision is supposed to come together. What is the actual job title or titles that go with these responsibilities? How should customers define and staff these roles? And, most importantly, in Scott’s words: “How can an enterprise architect know all of what SAP has to offer and then understand their company’s architecture and know how to do all of this?”
“The enterprise architect’s role is to try to make all that make sense,” Scott added. “It’s still a puzzle.”
Below is a summary of how customers can begin to fit the four main pieces to the puzzle and start to make sense of how Saueressig’s promise to elevate enterprise architects, and the associated Business Transformation toolset, will fit into their transformation planning.
What is an enterprise architect? Despite SAP’s promise to provide an enterprise architect to assist every RISE customer in business transformation, little consensus exists on how the enterprise architect role is defined. At a minimum, an enterprise architect’s job is to take a highly configurable and customizable enterprise software system and turn it into an individualized software environment fine-tuned to meet a specific company’s business requirements. But that’s just the starting point.
As the breadth of SAP’s software portfolio is vast and touches so many parts of a company, enterprise architects can be found at multiple levels of a company, with job titles like BASIS administrator in the IT department, Business Engagement Manager in the office of the chief technology officer (CTO), and Technical Lead in the office of the chief information security officer (CISO). For example, a company may have a Head of Enterprise Architecture, whose job is to align strategic business processes with board-level strategy.
As such, the architecture designed by a person in this role would drive strategic thinking about the design of high-level processes like corporate compliance. But the nitty-gritty of designing an on-boarding process for new suppliers that is compliant with regulations for financial reporting would become the job of an Enterprise Finance Architect in another part of the business. At some point, another kind of enterprise architect with the job title of Basis Administrator may be part of the design and roll-out of a new compliance feature.
This complexity in matching the task to the job title is both a blessing and curse endemic to the elevation of enterprise architects in the SAP ecosystem. On the one hand, companies may need a multitude of enterprise architects at different levels of the organization to drive an EA culture deep into their companies. That’s easier said than done in an SAP ecosystem where talent constraints have been a major problem for years. On the other hand, it’s important to remember that enterprise architect is a role, not a job title. A survey I created for the Next Generation SAP Enterprise Architecture Forum held last spring at the SAP North American headquarters in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, revealed that the enterprise architects in attendance came from over 100 different job titles across the SAP customer base, with only a very few actually having the words enterprise or architect in their title.
The most important thing to bear in mind is that competition for these jobs will be intense. SAP CEO Christian Klein, in response to a question from a financial analyst on a recent earnings call about the provenance of the enterprise architects he and Saueressig have promised, suggested that global systems integrators would be one important source of this talent. Indeed, every major global systems integrator is posting multiple positions under the “enterprise architect” rubric, with impressive salaries that may be hard to match for an ASUG member trying to build this talent base in-house. One recent posting, perhaps an effort to cast a net wide enough to attract any and all potential candidates (“We accept applications on an on-going basis and there is no fixed deadline to apply,” read the post) lists salary ranges from $121,000 to $336,000.
Systems integrators may also have trouble finding candidates, though, as these jobs come with some daunting qualifications. One listing for a data architect requires six years of data governance strategy experience, six years of data architecture and engineering experience, three years of data management project experience, and a year each of experience with structured and unstructured data management, scalable data architecture design, and data quality management. It appears the time spent achieving these skills does not have to be consecutive, as a minimum of only 12 years of total are required. But that’s a lot of skill to pack into a single candidate, much less the hundreds or thousands that may be needed across the SAP ecosystem in coming years. This is why upskilling within your organization will be an important way to have the right people on hand.
What is the role of SAP Business Transformation Suite in the evolution of the enterprise architect? The question of where specific individuals with specific skills will come from isn’t just a matter of the different levels of granularity an enterprise architect might be asked to work within.
Further complexity stems from the fact that, to fulfill Saueressig’s promise, there will need to be a cadre of enterprise architects with a deep understanding of SAP Business Transformation Suite, and that’s not necessarily a skillset that exists in great abundance, at least not yet.
SAP Business Transformation Suite’s broad scope makes it particularly difficult to find architects with the set of skills required to make best use of it. There are five fundamental components: SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), SAP Cloud Application Lifecycle Management (CALM), SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, and SAP Datasphere. As SAP’s flagship cloud technology platform, BTP is the most well-established, with a growing army of experts familiar with its different components. But BTP itself is made up of five individual components – development tools, SAP Build Process Automation tools, SAP Integration Suite and related tools, SAP HANA Cloud, and SAP’s growing AI toolset. This means that the existing base of BTP experts, by definition, will need to become increasingly specialized, and that need for specialization will further complicate the skills gap.
The problem of the breadth of knowledge needed to master the different elements of SAP Business Transformation Suite also extends to Cloud ALM, SAP’s application lifecycle management tool, as well as SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX, two recently acquired product toolsets that support process and architecture analysis, management, and deployment. All of these are complicated, multi-faceted tools that will require further enterprise architect specialization. Another key tool in the enterprise architect’s toolbox is SAP Datasphere, SAP’s latest attempt to consolidate and solve customers’ heterogeneous data management and governance problems. SAP Datasphere, when paired with SAP Analytics Cloud, further adds to the looming skills gap.
How does RISE fit into the journey? SAP’s realization that it has tens of thousands of ECC and older S/4HANA instances that need upgrading before the end of standard maintenance has fueled a concerted push to RISE, arguably placing SAP’s interests ahead of customers. This has made the concept of RISE synonymous with a wholesale move to the cloud, something that is simply not possible for many customers within the window of time between now and the end of standard maintenance deadline in 2027. The confusion around RISE has been exacerbated by the proclamation that key innovations like AI will not be available except on one of the latest SAP S/4HANA releases. For many customers with whom I’ve discussed this approach, both of these perceptions have gotten in the way of a reasoned strategy for moving to the cloud.
The good news is that many of the enterprise architects with whom I’ve spoken or who were surveyed at the EA Summit earlier this year have a pragmatically skeptical view of the role of RISE in business transformation. That skepticism extends to their sense of how quickly any company can move its older SAP systems—along with the hundreds of customizations and specialized functionality built into these systems—and still keep up with the RISE program’s timetables and technical requirements.
Another sign of the pragmatism of the existing cohort of enterprise architects comes from last spring’s EA Forum survey. While interest in AI-related offerings from SAP, which are part of the incentive package built into RISE, remains high among respondents to the survey, the survey respondents were virtually unanimous in asking for more data on real business value and ROI from SAP’s AI offerings. As one senior IT architect said in response to an open-ended question about the future of AI in his business: “SAP should share information on the business value that will be achieved by these technologies.”
One of the ways in which enterprise architects can finesse the problems of designing and implementing an architecture that truly fits their business is through the flexibility of SAP Business Transformation Suite. As the suite has been designed specifically to manage the complex, hybrid landscapes that are often the result of a pragmatic view of what a customer needs, and as the suite is not limited by the restrictions in a standard RISE contract, enterprise architects can use it to build the landscapes their companies need, regardless of whether they fit neatly into a RISE contract. In particular, SAP Business Transformation Suite can support the myriad mixes of SAP S/4HANA and ECC systems that are emerging in the SAP ecosystem: hybrid systems consisting of SAP S/4HANA, private edition, and ECC; hybrid SAP S/4HANA, private edition and SAP ECC systems running SAP S/4HANA, public edition sidecars that can support innovations such as AI outside the standard RISE rubric; and SAP S/4HANA, private or public edition hub-and-spoke landscapes, among others.
What’s next for ASUG Members?
It’s clear SAP customers must work within their own organizations to ensure the enterprise architect opportunity is realized to its optimal potential. Here are five suggestions of what ASUG members should do next.
- Build up your Enterprise Architect bench strength. Every SAP customer has enterprise architects on staff, regardless of whether the term is in their job title or not. And every customer is likely to need more people performing the functions inherent in translating their business requirements to their existing and future technology landscapes. As these resources will continue to be in high demand, consider building a Center of Excellence that focuses on enterprise architecture, or expanding the mandate of your existing SAP Center of Excellence to embrace these roles. This expansion should include a focus on SAP Business Transformation Suite, as well as tapping into the growing training and certification efforts offered by SAP. Upskilling existing technical and business staff around the concepts of enterprise architecture and the tools discussed are also vital. SAP Learning has a growing body of training and certifications focused on enterprise architects that your organization can tap into: SAP Enterprise Architect | SAP Learning.
- Engage with your LoB stakeholders. The focus on business success implicit in the enterprise architect opportunity highlighted by Saueressig and SAP will require greater engagement with your internal line of business stakeholders. And your growing enterprise architect cadre will be an important part of that effort. None of the tools and methodologies SAP is bringing to the table to facilitate this mass migration to the cloud will work well if the direct engagement of your LoB stakeholders isn’t part of your strategy.
- Push hard to get the right RISE contract for your business. RISE has been evolving since its inception, and the good news is that SAP is recognizing the need for greater flexibility in how they build RISE contracts, to ensure they favor customers as much as possible. Focusing RISE more on customers’ real-world requirements, and not just trying to fit them into a one-size-fits-all contract, is a much-needed change. Regardless, it’s ultimately up to customers to be their own best advocates.
- Attend an upcoming ASUG conference. If you’re at ASUG Tech Connect in West Palm Beach this week, search for specific content tracks targeted to enterprise architects. And listen in wherever you can, as the conference’s areas of focus are all relevant to enterprise architects, BTP, and the rest of the Business Transformation Suite.
- Watch this space. ASUG is creating a number of initiatives around enterprise architects, including resources and community building. More information will be sent to members in the coming months.
Josh Greenbaum is Principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting.