by Paul Estrach – Product Marketing Director – MEGA, a Bizzdesign Company
Enterprise architects have struggled to quantify its value to an organization. While benefits are undeniable, they are often indirect and hard to measure. But what if financial impact became the primary indicator of success for enterprise architects?
Turning Strategy into Tangible Outcomes
Enterprise architecture delivers widely recognized value, particularly in specific areas where cost efficiencies and operational improvements are clear. Take application portfolio: removing obsolete, or redundant applications significantly reduces licensing, maintenance, and infrastructure costs almost immediately. Similarly, optimizing IT infrastructures, particularly through cloud adoption, offers measurable ROI.
Operational efficiencies offer another area of financial impact. Automating manual tasks boost team productivity, accelerates time-to-market, and improves cash flow. These gains are quantifiable and directly support business performance.
Making the Invisible Visible: The Challenges of Enterprise Architecture
Despite their contributions, enterprise architects often operate in roles, where their impact, is indirect and harder to express in financial terms.
Consider IT governance: aligning IT projects with strategic objectives has clear advantages, but these are rarely captured in a balance sheet.
Similarly, in digital transformation, architects play a pivotal role by mapping existing business processes and identifying areas for IT system optimization. However, they are rarely credited with the resulting cost reductions or faster processing times.
The scope of their responsibilities has also expanded to include emerging challenges like cyber risk management and compliance. By collaborating with security and compliance teams, architects provide a holistic view of the IS, facilitating risk mitigation efforts. Although valuable, their contributions often revolve around avoiding hypothetical scenarios (e.g., cyberattacks or regulatory fines), making them difficult to measure in hard numbers.
This challenge is compounded by limited access to financial tools, leaving enterprise architects without a clear way to quantify their value.
Financial Metrics: The New Strategic Imperative
In an era where investment decisions demand measurable benefits, enterprise architects must integrate financial insights into their work to remain relevant and influential.
Gartner underscores this trend: “By 2027, 75% of organizations will enrich enterprise architecture by linking financial benefits to digital investment decisions.” This highlights the urgency for architects to adapt and position themselves as strategic enablers.
A New Approach: Embedding Financial Insight into Architecture
One effective approach to demonstrate financial value is by enhancing business capability mapping. Traditionally, this mapping identifies gaps in business needs, highlights application redundancies, and guides rationalization efforts to align IT with organizational goals.
By incorporating financial data—such as application costs (licenses, maintenance, infrastructure)—architects can provide decision-makers with a clear data-driven understanding of IT spending and its relationship to business priorities.
Architects also play a key role in defining IT project roadmaps, including cloud migrations, legacy application modernization, and new system integrations. A robust roadmap should include ROI estimates for each initiative, comparing implementation costs (e.g., licenses, migrations) against expected benefits, such as reduced infrastructure expenses or improved productivity. This financial perspective underscores the architect’s contributions to projects with tangible outcomes.
Additionally, enterprise architects should integrate financial metrics into their reports and dashboards. For example, an application portfolio optimization report—one of the architect’s core deliverables—should include direct cost savings from eliminating redundant or obsolete applications.
By speaking the language of business and making financial impact a core part of their deliverables, enterprise architects can solidify their strategic influence and secure their role as key drivers of enterprise transformation and success.
About the author
Paul Estrach is Product Marketing Director at MEGA, a Bizzdesign Company, with over 15 years of experience in Enterprise Architecture practice. Before this role, he worked with many organizations on their transformation projects, from process optimization to the evolution of their information systems, first as consultant then as Services Director for over 7 years.
About MEGA
MEGA, a Bizzdesign company, is a global SaaS software company offering solutions for Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Analysis, Governance, Risk & Compliance, and Data Governance operating with a global presence. MEGA created HOPEX, a collaborative platform that provides a single repository to help companies collect, visualize, and analyze information to plan better and adapt to change. In 2024, MEGA merged with Bizzdesign and Alfabet, forming a €110 million group with 2,000 customers and 600 employees worldwide, now operating as Bizzdesign. www.mega.com
