Many organizations today have successfully established EA, but still lack the resources and capabilities to meet the challenges ahead. This is especially true when major transformations require additional capacity and/or specialized expertise. In such cases, clients can rely on our architecture office.

As an architecture office, we take on architecture engagements of all kinds, expanding your capacities as needed – whether for short-term or extended periods:

• Capturing of current business architectures and IT landscapes
• Development of target pictures for business and IT landscapes
• Development of information architectures
• Development of technical architectures
• Development of integration architectures
• Development of security architectures
• Development of reference architectures/patterns
• Development of architecture principles
• Development of standards
• Management of transformation programs and projects
• Development of solution architectures
• Conducting architecture checks/reviews

The natural starting point for architectural work is the business strategy. However, strategies are often vague and relatively unstructured, making them difficult to use for architecture work. With our Strategy Mapping service, we help you extract the key concepts and relationships of your business strategy and map them onto a Business Model Canvas or our extended Business Architecture Framework. This can then be used to derive concrete goals and business principles for specific business domains, value streams and/or capabilities, which in turn form the basis for a strategy-compliant transformation of the business and IT landscape.

Many organizations use capability maps primarily as a reference for IT landscape planning. However, the concept of capability-based planning goes far beyond this. In fact, capabilities themselves can be analyzed and planned at different levels. To provide the necessary operationalization, we have developed a specialized Capability Assessment Model. Capabilities are described here along five different dimensions (processes, organization, people, information, systems) and a set of standardized items. This allows for an accurate assessment of the current state, the definition of target states, and the identification of existing gaps.

IT landscape planning is one of the core tasks of enterprise architecture. However, it requires a relatively high level of maturity and a solid data foundation. It is also methodologically demanding, as it necessitates a deep understanding of the business strategy, anticipation of technological developments, and consideration of various dependencies. We have been performing landscape planning on a regular basis for over 12 years and are happy to support you with our experience. Our projects have also resulted in a number of best practices and presentation formats. Using these can significantly speed up your project and make it a success.

Large transformations typically require special architectural support. Ideally, architects should be involved right from the beginning to ensure a vendor-neutral setup guided by the target vision. However, architects also need to remain active throughout the transformation process, as target pictures can continuously evolve and need to be centrally documented and communicated. For this purpose, the establishment of a Transformation Architecture Office is recommended. We are happy to support you in the setup and staffing and provide you with appropriately qualified architects.

Finding an architect is often a lengthy process these days. This is especially true for business architects and the chief architect position. However, architectural decisions and developments often cannot wait. In such cases, interim solutions may be a sensible measure. We are happy to support you in such situations and take over vacant positions and/or tasks on an interim basis.