Find­ing a com­mon lan­guage between the busi­ness and IT sides of the enter­prise is one of the main roles played by the enter­prise archi­tect (EA).

And accord­ing to Syl­vain Gar­neau, EA for Res­olute For­est Prod­ucts, ​“align­ing busi­ness strat­e­gy with IT action” is both a key part of his day-to-day work and among the most impor­tant ways to enable the long-term evo­lu­tion of his company’s tech­nol­o­gy landscape.

Under­stand­ing how appli­ca­tions and sys­tems work, as well as how to oper­ate and main­tain them, is only one crit­i­cal IT func­tion that the EA pro­vides with­in an orga­ni­za­tion. Increas­ing­ly, EAs must also be cross-func­tion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tors, trans­lat­ing IT capa­bil­i­ties into mean­ing­ful busi­ness solu­tions, and deliv­er­ing val­ue to both busi­ness col­leagues and customers.

At the 2023 ASUG Tech Con­nect con­fer­ence in New Orleans — the des­ti­na­tion event for the North Amer­i­can tech­nol­o­gy com­mu­ni­ty and a go-to occa­sion for devel­op­ers, prac­ti­tion­ers, enter­prise archi­tects, and glob­al IT lead­ers in the SAP prod­uct ecosys­tem — Gar­neau reflect­ed on the EA’s evolv­ing role in a vari­ety of edu­ca­tion­al, inter­ac­tive settings. 

First, Gar­neau joined Peter Keller, Enter­prise Archi­tect at SAP, to lead a peer dis­cus­sion around how the EA can sup­port the plan­ning and exe­cu­tion of trans­for­ma­tion activ­i­ties to adopt SAP S/4HANA, SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP), and oth­er SAP solu­tions. Then, he par­tic­i­pat­ed in a com­mu­ni­ty ses­sion led by mem­bers of the ASUG Enter­prise Archi­tec­ture Alliance, a year-round oppor­tu­ni­ty for EAs to stay up to date with the lat­est indus­try trends and best prac­tices while net­work­ing with oth­er professionals. 

Ahead of 2023 ASUG Tech Con­nect, ASUG sat down with Gar­neau to dis­cuss his expe­ri­ence as an enter­prise archi­tect, both as an invalu­able asset to Res­olute For­est Prod­ucts and as a thought leader for the ASUG tech­nol­o­gy community.

This inter­view has been edit­ed and condensed.

ASUG: How does your EA prac­tice sup­port the plan­ning and exe­cu­tion of trans­for­ma­tion activ­i­ties at Res­olute For­est Products? 

Gar­neau: The enter­prise archi­tect aligns the strate­gic objec­tives of the busi­ness with what IT pro­vides as a ser­vice; that’s the main task of the enter­prise archi­tect. You can think of this align­ment in three areas: moti­va­tion, process, and technology. 

1. Moti­va­tion explains how and why we pur­sue mod­i­fi­ca­tions to IT land­scapes: the objec­tives, assess­ments, chal­lenges or issues, and expect­ed benefits.
2. Process refers to busi­ness process­es and capa­bil­i­ty lay­ers, with­in dis­cus­sions of what’s involved in those mod­i­fi­ca­tions and how it will change the work that peo­ple do.
3. Tech­nol­o­gy refers pure­ly to IT objects: Sys­tems, appli­ca­tions, inte­gra­tion, data­base servers, and others.

It’s very impor­tant that busi­ness and IT teams have a com­mon under­stand­ing of where we are. This is why I’ve estab­lished an enter­prise archi­tec­ture map, which includes those three lay­ers of infor­ma­tion rep­re­sent­ing impact­ed objects and depen­den­cies between them. This visu­al map serves as a pow­er­ful com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool to demon­strate the cur­rent sta­tus, tar­get­ed sta­tus, and changes required to meet busi­ness require­ments. This tar­get archi­tec­ture must bring val­ue to the com­pa­ny and respect the stan­dards in place.

ASUG: What chal­lenges have you faced in build­ing an EA prac­tice and align­ing enter­prise and IT strategies?

Gar­neau: With­out hes­i­ta­tion, time. One of the chal­lenges I always face is hav­ing enough time to prop­er­ly design the best solu­tion. Today, changes are required by our busi­ness more and more quick­ly, and the time allo­cat­ed to design­ing each solu­tion is as a result great­ly reduced. Anoth­er chal­lenge, of course, is to con­tin­u­ous­ly update doc­u­men­ta­tion and train our IT teams, in order to pro­vide ade­quate sup­port for the business. 

ASUG: Find­ing a com­mon lan­guage between the busi­ness and IT sides of the enter­prise is one foun­da­tion­al chal­lenge for the EA. What tech­niques have you found help­ful in clos­ing this dis­tance amid man­ag­ing day-to-day operations?

Gar­neau: The EA map I men­tioned can be pre­sent­ed with more or less detailed ver­sions. This map shows moti­va­tions; there­fore, it is use­ful to dis­cuss the map with man­agers, because they can see the strate­gic objec­tives on which they work and by which they are eval­u­at­ed. Busi­ness­peo­ple are able to under­stand this map because we can dis­cuss it in terms of process and capa­bil­i­ties. And, of course, IT peo­ple can see tech­no­log­i­cal objects on the map.

What allows us to reach a com­mon under­stand­ing are the links between objects includ­ed in these lay­ers. If, as an exam­ple, the busi­ness require­ment is to improve the effi­cien­cy of an inven­to­ry man­age­ment process, every­one will be able to refer to the objects of the lay­er or lay­ers they con­trol and thus see the impacts of any changes on those sets of objects. I start­ed that map last year. The biggest chal­lenge of main­tain­ing it is to find peo­ple who have knowl­edge of all the objects and links between the objects. 

ASUG: What chal­lenges have you faced from new tech­nol­o­gy on the mar­ket? How do you han­dle that chal­lenge of ori­ent­ing the busi­ness toward transformation?

Gar­neau: Mon­i­tor­ing, research, and pro­to­typ­ing can all be full-time jobs in the process of eval­u­at­ing to what extent a new tech­nol­o­gy will or will not bring val­ue to the com­pa­ny, and the extent to which that tech­nol­o­gy is aligned with the busi­ness strat­e­gy. That’s too often the case in sit­u­a­tions where com­pa­nies have lean IT teams or are tasked with a com­bi­na­tion of day-to-day sup­port and long-term project tasks.

ASUG: How do you nav­i­gate the ques­tion of whether to pur­sue cloud-first trans­for­ma­tion or imple­ment on-premis­es software?

Gar­neau: I believe that we should not fall into the trap of plac­ing our choic­es only on one side or the oth­er. I start from the prin­ci­ple that busi­ness­peo­ple will express their require­ments in terms of func­tion­al­i­ty, and it is up to us in IT to find the best tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion — cloud or not — to meet their needs. The request is rarely that the busi­ness wants ​“cloud.”

We must con­sid­er all the sce­nar­ios that will be impact­ed by our final deci­sion to move to the cloud or stay on-premis­es, such as the work­force cur­rent­ly in place and the one yet to be trained, the process of pur­chas­ing tech­nolo­gies such as servers, avail­able sup­port, the need for inte­gra­tion, and so on. 

Based on mar­ket trends, the SaaS mod­el is becom­ing more impor­tant, and the advan­tages are in many cas­es greater than the dis­ad­van­tages. In that sce­nario, you only need to pay for the use of the solu­tion. You do not man­age the tech­ni­cal aspects of the appli­ca­tions and, more­over, the roadmap and future devel­op­ment for fea­tures with­in all of the appli­ca­tions is shared by many com­pa­nies. Stay­ing up to date is easy, because no mat­ter what you are deal­ing with with­in your busi­ness, you’re mov­ing for­ward at a set pace.

ASUG: For com­pa­nies that do not run SAP end-to-end, and that have lega­cy sys­tems in place along­side one SAP or S/4 instance, what are the chal­lenges of dri­ving the over­all soft­ware port­fo­lio of the enterprise?

Gar­neau: If you only run one SAP soft­ware, whether it is SAP S/4HANA or SAP ECC, it’s easy, because every­thing resides inside one soft­ware. It becomes more com­plex the more you add soft­ware appli­ca­tion sys­tems to that, because you are sud­den­ly deal­ing with mixed tech­nol­o­gy, ven­dors, con­tracts, and require­ments. This caus­es com­plex­i­ty and adds to a vari­ety of items inside that het­eroge­nous land­scape. Man­ag­ing dif­fer­ent sys­tems is the biggest chal­lenge, and inte­gra­tion is the key.

For inte­gra­tion, we rely on SAP Process Orches­tra­tion, and we have knowl­edge­able peo­ple through­out the busi­ness, han­dling inte­gra­tion and tak­ing the sub­ject seri­ous­ly. As an enter­prise, your over­all IT sys­tem land­scape is only as strong as your inte­gra­tion tools and their performance. 

ASUG: What role does the EA prac­tice play in the plan­ning and exe­cu­tion of trans­for­ma­tion activ­i­ties on the way to SAP S/4HANA and SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form migrations?

Gar­neau: One role the EA plays is to make sure that IT projects of that scale are co-pilot­ed by busi­ness­peo­ple, and that there is a clear com­mit­ment from man­age­ment. IT is in ser­vice to the busi­ness. And align­ment with busi­ness strate­gies will ensure that the project will involve the right peo­ple, that it will be planned and exe­cut­ed at the right time, and that it will there­fore pro­vide value. 

ASUG: In join­ing peer dis­cus­sions like the ones you’ll par­tic­i­pate in at ASUG Tech Con­nect, what kinds of ques­tions do you seek to have answered? How do you approach these types of sessions? 

Gar­neau: I’m try­ing to find peo­ple mov­ing along the same evo­lu­tion path as myself. I’m always par­tic­i­pat­ing active­ly by shar­ing my expe­ri­ence and exper­tise, try­ing to find solu­tions to chal­lenges pre­sent­ed by oth­ers. This is the biggest ben­e­fit, for me. I also need to be sure I’m shar­ing my infor­ma­tion, because it’s impor­tant to give back to the com­mu­ni­ty and con­nect with one another. 

ASUG: What ben­e­fits have you gained from the EA ASUG Alliance?

Gar­neau: I’ve always said we have to find ways to con­tin­ue our con­ver­sa­tions out­side of events. That’s real­ly impor­tant, and the ASUG Alliances are one way to do that, which is one rea­son I tru­ly believe in them. Peo­ple can con­nect fre­quent­ly through them. I hope to get to a point where we have month­ly meet­ings, at the same hour and on the same day; cur­rent­ly, it’s only four times a year. But I tru­ly believe in con­tin­u­ing the con­ver­sa­tion and shar­ing con­tent with oth­er peo­ple. It’s a major ben­e­fit for me. 

For more insights and ways to get involved with ASUG, check out the Enter­prise Archi­tect Com­mu­ni­ty Resource Cen­ter.