Opti­miz­ing an enter­prise soft­ware land­scape requires inten­tion, plan­ning, and vision from enter­prise archi­tects; the process of align­ing busi­ness strat­e­gy with process­es with­in an IT infra­struc­ture is, in fact, not dis­sim­i­lar to the process of rebuild­ing a phys­i­cal struc­ture. Both require blue­prints, con­sid­er­a­tions from var­i­ous spe­cial­ized teams, and work­ing under time­lines and bud­getary restraints. EAs can derive insights from study­ing suc­cess­ful con­struc­tion projects in the phys­i­cal world.  

Speak­ing at SAP Enter­prise Archi­tect Learn­ing Forum in Feb­ru­ary, Gau­r­ish Des­sai, an SAP EA, com­pared imple­ment­ing an enter­prise-wide dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion to the €1 bil­lion recon­struc­tion of Notre Dame Cathe­dral in Paris, which was com­plet­ed five years after a dev­as­tat­ing infer­no engulfed the land­mark. After 800 years in exis­tence, the destruc­tion of Notre Dame in 2019 was a nation­al event and its restora­tion a mat­ter of cul­tur­al importance. 

Des­sai walked atten­dees through this anal­o­gy, high­light­ing the impor­tance of gain­ing buy-in from the top, doc­u­ment­ing base­lines, and find­ing the right team will all con­tribute to the suc­cess of an enter­prise-wide project. 

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Build­ing Buy-In 

Imme­di­ate­ly after the fire, Pres­i­dent Emmanuel Macron set a five-year time­line for Notre Dame’s restora­tion, to have the struc­ture ready for the Paris Olympics. Here, Des­sai not­ed the anal­o­gy and advised EAs to pri­or­i­tize get­ting buy-in ​“from the high­est author­i­ty,” adding that, ​“Even across the next five years, [estab­lish­ing ear­ly] the time­line and the com­mit­ment is impor­tant.”  

He cit­ed anoth­er recent exam­ple in which a clien­t’s CIO was try­ing to pitch the imple­men­ta­tion of SAP S/4HANA at their busi­ness and got five min­utes in a board meet­ing to make his case. This CIO focused on mak­ing every minute count and high­light­ing the enter­prise-wide ben­e­fits to be gained; he ulti­mate­ly earned the go-ahead he need­ed for the project to pro­ceed. ​“You can tell from that five min­utes whether the buy-in will come from the board or not,” Des­sai said. ​“If you don’t have the buy-in from the board, there’s no point. You have to appeal to the col­lec­tive pride of the peo­ple.” 

Doc­u­men­ta­tion Base­lines 

In rebuild­ing Notre Dame, a num­ber of fac­tors need­ed to be con­sid­ered: Should the facil­i­ty be mod­ern­ized or built from scratch? Should the orig­i­nal col­or palette be paint­ed? Those types of con­ver­sa­tions, Des­sai not­ed, are sim­i­lar to con­ver­sa­tions that hap­pen with cus­tomers and inter­nal stake­hold­ers pri­or to a trans­for­ma­tion — but those con­ver­sa­tions aren’t the most impor­tant part of prepa­ra­tion. The key ques­tion to ask, Des­sai offered, is: ​“What is the base­line for the rebuild?”  

In the case of Notre Dame, the recon­struc­tion team relied in part on a full 3D mod­el of Notre Dame and sur­round­ing envi­ron­ments that had been orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed for the 2014 video game Assassin’s Creed: Uni­ty. This full scan allowed the Notre Dame team to under­stand the building’s pre­vi­ous con­struc­tion in gran­u­lar detail. The doc­u­men­ta­tion of Eugène Emmanuel Vio­l­let-le-Duc, who rebuilt the Notre Dame after the French Rev­o­lu­tion, was also an impor­tant part of estab­lish­ing the doc­u­men­ta­tion base­line. Des­sai point­ed out the com­par­i­son here between the base­line pro­vid­ed by Assassin’s Creed and Vio­l­let-le-Duc to the kinds of base­lines made attain­able by process-opti­miza­tion prod­ucts like SAP Sig­navio in help­ing busi­ness­es ana­lyze their core process­es before begin­ning trans­for­ma­tion. 

Notre Dame’s doc­u­men­ta­tion base­line also came from then-archi­tec­ture stu­dent Rémi Fromont, who’d com­plet­ed a four-year doc­tor­ate pro­gram sole­ly on the cathedral’s beams. Fromont’s research had allowed him to doc­u­ment pre­cise size and place­ment of beams. He was cho­sen to be part of the recon­struc­tion team. Des­sai com­pared this metic­u­lous doc­u­men­ta­tion to LeanIX, which sim­i­lar­ly allows com­pa­nies to map the full scope of their soft­ware estate.  

Here, as in any major trans­for­ma­tion, back­ground exper­tise is cru­cial. As Des­sai stressed, ​“You can’t just start a trans­for­ma­tion overnight. You have to pre­pare.” Even before recon­struc­tion start­ed, the building’s col­lapsed scaf­fold­ing had to be cleaned from its lead cladding joints, which can give off harm­ful micro-par­ti­cles. ​“They had peo­ple with vac­u­um clean­ers going around and clean­ing every struc­ture, mak­ing sure that it was safe for peo­ple to rebuild,” Des­sai not­ed, ​“then they had to put sup­port in place. If you have teams who are work­ing on big trans­for­ma­tion, you need to have back­up teams to sup­port the orga­ni­za­tion. They had to put sup­port in place so that while they are rebuild­ing it, the whole struc­ture doesn’t col­lapse. That is the prepa­ra­tion part of the trans­for­ma­tion — before you start the build­ing the new scaf­fold­ing, before you start the prepa­ra­tion for the new trans­for­ma­tion.”  

Prepar­ing the Right Team 

Expert teams were also required to, among oth­er things, cre­ate the same type of glass that had been made and used for Notre Dame for 800 years ago, as well as find­ing the same stone used to con­struct the build­ing. Because no one knew where the stone was sourced from, ​“they did a fos­sil analy­sis of the stone, and checked every stone to find which fos­sils are in there, and test­ed fos­sils all across France to find which was the right stone,” he said. ​“Because it was not one stone right, as you saw in the start­ing pic­ture, it was built over time — dif­fer­ent types of stones, dif­fer­ent quar­ries.”  

The same kinds of issues arise in enter­prise dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions: ​“You have teams in India, you have teams in Poland, you have teams in Brazil. They are devel­op­ing some­thing for you. How do you get all of that in a cen­tral place and then com­bine it and make sure it fits cor­rect­ly?” 

Des­sai not­ed one oth­er unex­pect­ed take­away from Notre Dame’s restora­tions: with dona­tions of €850 mil­lion raised, the final cost turned out to be a low­er-than-expect­ed €700 mil­lion, with the left­over funds made avail­able to be used for ren­o­va­tions of oth­er cul­tur­al mon­u­ments. ​“That is the beau­ty, that is the suc­cess of the rebuild process,” Des­sai said.  

A skill­ful team that is ded­i­cat­ed to a suc­cess­ful trans­for­ma­tion might also be able to come in on time and under bud­get. At least today one can pray for such a result at a beau­ti­ful cathe­dral.  

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