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 the 2024 SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence, 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. 

Enter­prise Archi­tec­ture in the SAP Ecosystem

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. 

Enter­prise Archi­tec­ture Careers

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.