Session Information:

Enterprise Architects: Champions of Continuous Transformation and Mergers & Acquisitions

In this time of continuous transformation, mergers & acquisitions (M&As) are an indispensable lever to help enterprises innovate and grow revenue. In recent years, there have been upwards of 50k global M&A deals and transaction volumes of more than 3 trillion USD — numbers which are expected to grow in 2021 despite a decline in 2020.

From an IT perspective, integrating, merging, or carving out another company is a complex process requiring the leadership of enterprise architects. At this presentation, Christian Richter, LeanIX SVP Customer Success, will discuss what enterprise architects (EAs) must consider when transforming IT and why their role is key to the success of M&A activities.

Join Christian to:

• Get useful insights on the role of EAs in M&A deals from the LeanIX M&A survey
• Identify the main challenges of post-merger integration (PMI) activities
• Receive best practices to a successful PMI

Session Transcript:

So I'd like to welcome Christian Rector. Chris Sham Please do join us.

Christian Richter is the Senior Vice President of Customer Success and Lean I X, an enterprise architecture tool provider.

Prior to Lean I X, Christian working works seven years for Deutsche Telekom, and led digital transformation initiatives to improve customer experience in a nominee channel world.

Now, Chris, Chris Christian is a passionate tennis player and runner. He's a father of two kids aged 7 and 5.

And he has had a great career in this field.

And he's got, and he's gonna share his expertise with us today for his presentation. And Krishan, Thank you so much for being with us. It's a real pleasure to have you. Very much looking forward to your presentation.

Yeah, thank you. Or save for the presentation for the introduction. And I'm really happy to to speak to you today. So let me share my presentation.

And yeah, as far as datasets. So I've spent four years now with Linux. I've worked very intensely, from that perspective, with enterprise architects around the world.

And spent seven years with Deutsche Telekom where I was involved in a lot of architecture related discussions and obviously projects. So happy to share some of the experience that I gained over the past decades in enterprise architecture.

So today I'd like to talk about, obviously, as it's the topic of the conference, about enterprise Architects, and I truly believe that these enterprise architects are the champions of continuous transformation, and I'd like to, um, to do 1 1 thing I'd like to dive into M in a project, because looking back now at the last four years, it has shown over, and over again, that M&A projects are a crucial point in in the development of companies in generating growth for companies.

And I believe crucial projects, where enterprise architects can demonstrate the true value for the whole organization.

So, let me start with with, with. with one thing. And that obviously goes back to my experience.

And, in corporate IT.

Um, so first of all, I actually believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the, with the understanding that projects are the exception and changes, the exception in today's companies.

So, as most of you probably know, there, it's, it's long decision cycles until you get approval and budgets for projects. You need to do, go into two business cases, you'd walk out very detailed plans. You try to execute according to them.

And throughout the whole process, once the project plan set up, you've tried to minimize, minimize variance in, in that process.

And there's a belief that there is a lack of back to normal, back to, as it was before, back to, to a stable state, after a project.

So, you have this, You believe you do a project, and then there was a, it's back to normal, and you, you try to get as good as possible, and what's, what does that new normal then look like. And I believe this, this model doesn't work anymore in the world that we are, that we earn.

I believe that it counts much more, to learn fast and to, to continuously adapt and transform, to develop fast hypothesis to, to reduce uncertainty. Because we, I mean, who would have guessed, 1.5 years ago, Situation that we are in now.

And are up on. Opportunities. So, what is C, or, C, the, um, the opportunities that you see along the way.

And, I also believe there, is not this one, digital transformation.

There's a lot of transformations going on that, that need to be considered, and that, have dependencies and, um, to, to lay out some examples here. So cloud migration. So, moving from your own.

Our data center centric world to the hyper scale of, so that's, that's a clear, like, path of transformation, large ERP system rollout. So, going from one country to the next country, or from one domain, and your company, to the next domain, on all whole changes in the operate rating model.

These are all transformations and the, the, the, the trigger that I would like to get a deeper today. That's, that's around mergers, acquisitions, carve outs.

We see them happening across our industries and across countries, obviously. So, mergers acquisitions are very, like, a dominant trigger here.

And I also believe there is not this target picture with all the dependencies that we see. There is no target architecture that you can aim for.

Um, now, I say when I, when I talk to, or architect, I believe, the architects on the sales persons of the corporate IT, um, they sell options.

So they, um, and I believe when you look at the past, so it went a lot from coming up with nice posters that that people painted on the walls and I'll put on their walls and which were very complex.

And, I believe this, the role of the architect changes to somebody.

We sell the option and when enables continuous transformation so detects dependencies who acts on, like new data.

So you can't change the whole picture on the left side, when, when you get a new input, because that will happen every day, you just need to adapt your model, in a continuous way, and see the dependencies that are coming along the way.

So there are a lot of triggers happening. And another one more that I did not mentioned before is when you break down your monolith into into microservices. So this is another part of IT centric transformation that is happening.

And I said there is not this one digital transformation.

So in the survey by noise on it, it was figured out that 23% of the companies have undergone more than 10 transformations over the past 10 years.

So, that means, one transformation a year, um, and this shows how the, the, the whole IT and the whole business model is in flux.

And this is in movement, and at this point, needs architects who are able to, to understand and to architect in this, in this, continuously on transforming model.

So, um, let's say you, you mentioned the conference next week, so around RPA. Um, I believe looking at it from, from a technology side.

Um, that's one of the triggers, so when we look at our customer base, we see typically that they, they are run around 500 processes, have one around one thousand applications in their portfolio, and have more than 2500 stigma technologies to buy from, like hardware to software that they are in use.

Um, and you will find that across all kinds of capability, this, um, this changes with the business adopting SaaS, with robotic process automation, being being applied to the, to the processes, with IOT, with cloud, with micro services.

So, with tomorrow, I even, I even believe that that's up to date.

For the digital companies where you enter, in growing environments, you're having up to 5000 processes. You have 110000 apps or services that are, that are running, and, but are running critical processes. So, they are they are really, really need to understand what, what they are doing and what, what, what, are the underlying technologies.

And I believe this, being able to do, like this, this full view from or from a technology perspective up to a business.

Across the perspective, this is well, where the world needs more well architects to, to allow for, for the transformation on that it's happening here.

So, why am I so passionate about, about architecture? Obviously. As I said in the beginning, I'm working for Linux, and we are.

We're a software as a service company for Enterprise Architecture and and Cloud Governance resist since about nine years now.

Um, have globally 380 customers in more than 50 countries.

We only end of last year, we, um, we had our 300 employee joining on the Nikes.

We are headquartered here in Germany in Bonn with lower US. Office in Boston.

and we recently opened an office in Hyderabad in India.

And also, we have smaller offices in an interest in Netherlands.

In the analyst or from the analyst view, we are on a strong performer according to Forrester.

The challenge are according to Gartner's Magic Quadrant.

And, I believe, what's what's called, firms, as an approach, that we, um, we truly believe that enterprise architecture is a discipline for everyone in the business that we focused on high usability.

Ever Net Promoter score of more than 60 and have grown, um, significantly over the last years. Last, but not least, dimension, here.

We are funded by inside partners and and by Goldman Sachs.

So, we believe on this, this world of enterprise architecture and cloud governance, It needs to grow together in the next years.

And this is a transformation of the disciplines that we want to shape.

So, um, enterprise architecture, as you're probably all aware, is it's not bound to a certain industry.

Um, so with all of our customers.

We are in all major industries, um, and we have customers in all major industries and geographies from companies like like barstow, large companies, 450,000.

Employees, down to two tech companies who are using our product, too, to like control manage their fast growing IT environments.

Um, as, as I said, the Enterprise architecture world and the cloud native Walt are.

two disciplines, I believe, that are, that are in somewhat some way emerging.

So, we see that the Corporate IT. Oh, that's that's obviously the focus of our enterprise architects.

Um, like adding value to companies.

Whereas the product IT, um, with like own development and engineering teams.

This is where we support with, with our Cloud Native suite, Um, and two to like bring it down to two use cases.

So this is in the, on the Enterprise architecture side, that's application portfolio management, or rationalizing applications technology risk management. So to manage the, the, the legacy technologies and moving that to, or migrating that to newer technologies.

And last but not least on that side of the business transformation management, that means planning ahead and.

Executing on the continuous transformation on the cloud native sites, just mentioned that briefly.

Um, it's it's important to also keep inventory and track on on the business lattes SaaS applications that are that are used in a company on cloud intelligence.

So that means enabling the visibility on what's deployed with the help of scales, as well as all the micro services that the product IT is developing.

So who owns them, um, what libraries dependencies are used in those microservices.

So diving deeper on the on the EA site here, because obviously this is the, the theme of the event, and also the topic of the presentation.

What we see companies doing here is drive transformation in a collaborative approach.

The B in the example of Bosch, um, where more than 3000 people contribute to the to the enterprise architecture.

Inventory and nights, Um, DSV, I will come to that later. Or manage their merger in a Unified Capability Model.

Um, you know, investment German, a financial institution, applying the time method.

Um, and then three transformation examples, one on, from National Bank of Canada, capability based planning, on implementing the scaled Agile framework, which we did with the Negro, and enabling a large-scale ERP transformation in the complex IT landscape for DHL. So these are like typical use cases, and customer examples that we see arising here.

Um, to to help to understand that a bit deeper. I'm a huge fan of the IT for IOT framework.

And Rob ACA shortcuts come up with a nice view on on the two landscape and that, and I think that's, um, that's important to understand where to certain players in that IT for IT stack, um, find their, find their place and like on the on the overall phases? Like strategy portfolio.

I believe this is where an architecture tool Plays plays a very important role, whereas then from requirements to deploy, you will find tools like like a jira from Atlassian or or the CFPB tools like like gitlab or Jenkins here then on the request to fulfill Obviously service or you're getting into request management then into detect and correct service management tools.

Um where again the the the clout um the the efforts to point to the Cloud.

We see ourselves in that space of, like, discovering those assets and connecting this information to be, to be a wallet, but also then, to the IT governance and Finance and Risk Management. Well, and, obviously, it's important capabilities that it's crucial in this IT for IT stack.

Like teams, tools like Teams or Slack, for IOT Financial Management App to yourself, and Intelligence, intelligence, and reporting the BI tools, as they are.

So, this is where I truly believe it's a nice you, um, to to understand what platforms, what tools you, what you use in this I keep for IT STEC.

So, coming to the M&A wallets, mergers, and acquisitions.

We, when, when you look at the numbers, how they evolved, 2020 was definitely a special year, and led to a decline in M&A deals and steal volume around the world.

When looking into the, to the new forecasts, or 2021, ..., I believe, too, to get back to the levels of the two thousand eighteen's and nineties.

So, it's a, it's a, it's super relevant on, like, trigger, and in journeys of, of companies.

And what's been very interesting, when you compare the situation from six years ago, 2 to 1 or 2 years ago, you would see that there is an increasing number of scoped yields happening. So, it's not all about efficiencies and economies of scale, anymore, but it's really to add capabilities to, for companies.

And this, this counts, even more in deals in the technology industry, the way 82% in 2019.

Half of the deals have been sculpt yields to add capabilities. And I believe this is where, where architects can need to play a crucial role as we'll see in the in the next slide.

So in our base, on, mean, we have 380 customers, and I believe we have we constantly discussing the M&A case with with like at least 10 of our customers in parallel, cause for some.

And I will come to some point of a study that we did are like continuously acquiring for summits.

It's happening like once a year, or once every year, or two, or three years.

Um, and some, some examples are, like pointed out here.

So, in the pharma industry, the FBI login deal, not too long ago, um, and a project that we've done about a year ago was the cop out between artists and and UTC.

Where within a six week timeframe Otis needed to understand all the dependencies that they had still from UTC and which projects needed to be set up at this point of time.

two.

Yeah, to allow this, this cargo to happen.

But, for those who follow the press around, him an eighth. And, in the last weeks, have certainly heard about the sale of Slack deal.

And also, um, although it's, it's more on the German side, but I still believe, has a meaning for the whole IT world on the deal between sap, P and ....

So, any more business process intelligence capabilities to the, to the stack of S a P, clearly, to scope deals here, where we see the strong, like, the significance of like, adding capabilities here.

So, um, 1 1 story that was presented last year at one of our events from our customer Atlassian, um, if, if it's, it's really shows how an eight deals are happening at scale. And by scale, I mean, in, in, if it needs to happen in a very frequent way.

So, what, what Atlassian laid out as a challenge is to realize the IT value of any acquisition, um, within the, within a 90 day timeframe.

So, um, they want, when they acquire a company, they give themselves 90 days to, to, like, do the full project from the day zero till, till the end.

So, what they did from an, like architect, an enterprise architect 15 perspective, is to do a stock take off the applications, and be at the business capabilities.

Um, to identify, for each application, if to retire, or retain it, to prioritize and execute the, the rational innovation approach.

And to, um, to agree and aligned with, with the partners in the IT landscape. Obviously, there are, like, vendors involved and contracts and off, and so on.

So, the learnings that they shared in their presentations was to really align with all partners, so be it the acquired company, the vendors, and.

Yeah, I didn't very early point. Um, and, and talking about early, um, it's, it's, it's crucial Not only to like, jump into the process. When the PM, when, the PM audience or post merger integration's thoughts but re as early as possible.

I'm also S, atlassian's doing very frequently. These, these acquisitions.

Um, each acquisition is different, and needs to be treated in, a different way, can depend on, on the size of the company, the stage and maturity of the company, And, and, like, when, especially when a large company buys a smaller company, you cannot expect that you have a 10 people, enterprise architecture team on the other side.

You can, like, contribute all the information that you wish within within a week or so.

And, that leads me to the point, which they share.

Um.

That, it's OK.

So, two, to sometimes not reach the 100% quantity, but rather prioritize so important, Um, yeah, the important applications and important capabilities and to focus on those.

So, for those who are interested, I can strongly recommend two To like, watch the 15 minutes. The full story where Atlassian shares are filled Ziglar from Atlassian share their approach.

Um, and, and there, like, a segmentation of the applications into retain and retire, and how that, how they went through the whole process and managing that, I'm with you next.

So, another example I chose, because it's, like, on the, on the on the other side of the spectrum.

Um, we one of our customers that F was one of the loggers.

Automotive suppliers.

And in Germany, um, there the team was involved in an in like post merger integration after the eight months after the the project was already running.

So it's, it's, what I said, just, that, it's like it's important to get early on, into the, into the process. Obviously when the train is already running, since eight months, you architect your, your quite late.

um, but still this, this really accelerate. It wasn't accelerated in involvement, but it's it really led to significant and important business outcomes.

For the, for the company, because what the set F as a company went through, like, in a target architecture planned for 2025.

And so made sure that all the platform technology decisions that were taken as part of the murder, we're now in line with the, with the set F target picture.

Um, and in that process of retaining and retiring that, that's where the V eight team, then than moderated.

And it came up with structures and it's as simple as you don't have the same naming, or for the same thing on both sides.

So to getting these, it's ...

into the game, that's, that's really a value add, that the team brought for the whole of the whole project. And I mean, as you, as you're probably aware, for, those who've been involved in a project, they have a lot of work streams.

And, um, when you have one single source of truth that you can rely on, when it comes to the, the future of the IT landscape, it's good to have that, as a cross, to see crosswalk screen dependencies there.

And one interesting thing here, the the the M an 18. So the, which was stopped from the strategy team, really started walking with, with the next. And.

To to like give some more detail. That was the first time that the ... made it, to the boardroom.

Of the, of the organization.

Because this is what was used to really show the, um, the, the impact of the yemeni off the murder that was happening.

And to also lay out the plan, how the, the new entity should be integrated.

Um, and B, being a value contributor here, the 18, really came to a new role and position in the whole company. So it was a success story. And has led to the team being involved in a lot of other initiatives now early on.

Um, and this really makes what was seen as a like sustainable impact, um, for the company.

So, um, as I mentioned before, we've, in December, January, surveyed our customers in and on mergers and acquisitions and carve outs.

You'll see that that's in 74% of, of our customer base.

Um, either mergers or acquisitions happened in the last in the last 12 months.

So, it's happening over and over again, some more frequent than others, some with a different focus on the, more on, like, economies of scale somewhere on, like, extending the scope or getting new capability.

Um, and when you see how involved these at the enterprise architects were in, in the M&A deals and projects, you see that 80% of the EAS were involved and some so that means 7% were cost quite heavily when you look at the the stages, that where, where it could be involved.

So, 7% were involved in 4 to 5 of those of those stages.

One third was involved only in one step.

And when you look at the, um, where enterprise architects are involved, I think it's, it's, it comes very natural that the post merger integration.

So once the yellow sign, and then doing the IT integration, that's, that's the major pop but also helping into diligence as is a major contribution as well as executing the cop out as as I like described it in the in the autistic sample who kept out of a UTC. EA's are not too much involved When it comes to identifying candidates.

Um, and I also believe that that's OK.

Um, but as soon as the due diligence thoughts, we've seen customers who have already picked out there. The templates that they in the due diligence phase sent over to to get an idea of what platforms I use. What are the applications and so on.

So, um, the key blockers that we've, we've received during that's an ace study, basically, threefold.

So first of all, um, it's it's a lack of visibility.

So it's when starting on the the PMI as there are no insight into capabilities, sometimes, you know, understanding of capabilities, systems, technologies, of the combined infant entity. So, this is something that we want to solve as soon as possible.

Um, and also the thing, the dependencies, it's, this isn't the crucial to to get an idea on the feasibility or effort of the integration or separation of of systems Though highly integrated environments it's it's very hard to to like take something out of the middle and rationalize it.

Or if you are doing, if you're in the coupled scenario to do, like, simply called 1 1 application, um, which is, which has a lot of dependencies in the overall landscape.

Um, one point that came up very often is the lack of strategic direction.

So, this is where ...

commented a lot that, as early as possible, it needs to be clear.

what the, um, what the strategy moving forward with the integration is.

So, is it, it's, like, the best of both worlds. So, for each capability, or for each platform we look, which is, which is fitting better? Or is it a winner takes it all. So, one company clearly on giving the direction on what should be applied.

And there could also be clear preferences for a platform for hosting, for certain capabilities, which which needs to be taken into consideration, which is a very important guidance.

So, and having done that, that really fosters the central decision taking that you want to, to increase the speed and in such processes, there's so many decisions that need to be taken. And, the more essential, the better.

Um, also blocker it is, it can be change management when it's not in the right way.

So, you want to keep the highly talented people from the, from the New Joining organization. And you want to give them perspective in the future organization.

The knowledge that that these experts have on how things are working together and how they are dependent.

This is important knowledge for the eighth to make good architecture decisions because if you don't don't know what it takes long to, like through the bottom-up like, information gathering.

What you also want to make sure is the people who joined the day, find something that's where they can fast ramp up and see what's there.

How can they already contribute the knowledge that they have?

So, these are all motivational factors that need to be taken into consideration when we're doing the ... projects here.

So, last point from the study here, on The major use cases or involvement of the enterprise architects in such IT work streams, it's the most obvious one is IT. Landscape transparency.

So see what's there, um, rationalization is the second most important.

So, once you know what to half, then, obviously, you don't want to keep the, the full 100% but want to want to rationalize from the IT perspective and bridges complex complex.

Next thing, I think that that's also a clear is getting involved in the target landscape to, to then develop application roadmaps, business capability maps. As a relevant artifact.

And I think the next presentation, we'll also like shed some more light on business capability.

And when it comes to two scenarios, that's, that's still something that's not happening.

Um, that often, sometimes, the time is not there to come up with like 3 or 4 different scenarios that you, that you can do.

So, to share our, our best practice here, that, that we've seen across the, our several customers. So it's four steps. The first one, to develop a joint capability map, the second one, create full transparency of the application landscape, the third one way forward for each application. And the fourth one to develop a roadmap, and track the implementation. This is where we believe the eighth candidate, the value.

So, the starting point is definitely the business capability. So, I Can only recommend if you don't have one start with the best practice one, This is, this, is one that I can can strongly recommend and develop the, the joint business capability here.

Um, structure them.

You say what's important?

What's not so important so that you can derive your application source and strategy from it So, where do you want to allow, um, south applications, where do we allow for custom applications, and so, on.

Then, map it to the, to the conference goals that you have, so, And objectives that that makes the translation.

What's business? much easier if you saying, Hey, We take the objectives. We break it down.

Relate these, and then we can still say, what's now a very important, so what's, what's just as important capability, or what's really something that's innovation and bonds.

As a second step, get the 360 degree view on your applications.

So collect feedback from stakeholders.

There are a lot of people who have the good, the relevant knowledge about the costs, about the function of the technical fit, And see also, what the dependencies from the applications are, Especially when you're later on eliminate. You want to see, what's the effort, what's the feasibility around that?

And, you know, only when, when you see those dependent, the third one is on the way forward for each application. So we usually recommend students to use Gartner's time model here.

So to just see, based on the strategy, it can be quite easy to just take everything from company A or company B?

Or if it's like the best of both worlds, then it's it's more like a diligent discussion.

Then once you've done that, define what, What's a successful assessor, and what are like what Set the life cycle, Phase one to phase out until the end of the year, we set up the project and do it.

Well, this is whether the elimination starts and really putting, putting in, like, a stop sign to be to the applications that you want to get rid of and communicate that in a proper way and set up the projects.

Make sure that the, that, the projects remain on, like in time, so that you can really like, leverage the material benefits that arise from it.

And it's continuous transformation as I said. So be prepared.

2, two, adepts when necessary.

And what this usually ends and it's like such a such a Bruin talent burned down so what you see over time how your number of applications will will decrease over time, see that you can stick to that point.

So, to come closer to the end here, um, I briefly set of planning scenarios. That's, that's still on, like the Outlook from the X, I've seen, it's applying that some customers applied it.

So, too, really say, hey, we're, we're looking at 2 or 3 different scenarios on how we want you to integrate.

Um, so this is definitely where I see EA's adding additional value and then detecting where based on these scenarios where do you have dependencies. So, if I go for something A or B, what what other implications does it have on ... or fade out.

Um, and Obviously the possibility to jump into the future and say, hey, what does that look like from like in 20 23, if we take that, and what's the Delta between now and 2023?

Um, so this is this is yeah, something where we, we see in those discussions, the Enterprise Architect, I'm very engaged, so, then, let me conclude.

I truly believe that M&A projects require, well, what looking Enterprise Architect in the in the driver's seat? What what what do I mean by that?

So, um, did they need to require a tiered integration strategy and establish a joint business capability map as a starting point? So, business where, it needs to come and understanding.

The artifact and the success of an, of an enterprise architect shouldn't be a target architecture, but it's the moderation in the process of that transformation.

It's also not a waterfall project.

So you can see all the, all, the view, the events that are happening, um, but it continuously on, like, new, on, new trigger wall, where the eighth need to react.

And I believe one of the biggest values here is that the enterprise architects really provide these options.

They sell these options, and they, they track the impact on the business outcomes, and communicate that this to all involved stakeholders in, in such a lot.

So thank you very much.

Happy to answer your questions now.

Fantastic. Fantastic question. So, wonderful presentation. Thank you for that. We have about seven minutes for Q&A. So I want to remind the audience that you can now engage live of creation and ask questions. I'm going to be monitoring your questions coming in and coming in now. And right off the bat, I'm going to bring one from Eduardo Rodriguez. Eduardo, great to see you at the water, is coming to us from from Europe.

And he asks, What about project accounting? We're very happy to start projects, but bad at close them down. What are your or your perspectives on project accounting, and when it comes to this M&A?

kind of a transition activities?

So EASA project accounting, right?

Yeah.

And Eduardo, you may want to clarify does a bit further, but I think that he's thinking in the context of what you're saying of ..., and the And it's more about projects that start the projects that don't necessarily finish. And all of a sudden, you have M&A activity going on, right? You know, you sell the company, and, all of a sudden, you're in the mergers and acquisitions, and you started all this things, you know, in the previous company, and now you're merging with someone else. And how do you deal with with those complexities during an M&A, with, with, you know, in the, in when it comes to your enterprise architecture?

Yeah.

I think that's a, it's a perfect question, and it just emphasizes, um, that's like, it is really lot of factors coming together in the way. If you have your, your app, your own plan, and one of the customer examples actually goes in that direction.

So, the tariff example, they have all the products already running at what's the, um, they're like, Oh, target architecture. So, a lot of, like introduce an ERP and Oregon State with an ERP change it for some business unit. So, these, these things are already in flux, and then you suddenly get like, an entity joining, which has an old ERP system on project running.

So, I think what really counts is on to bring all those together in one view.

All Look, the project, it's a, it's, like, it's a project portfolio that you're looking at, and some were like taken for, for good reason to to run them.

And I would always advocate for what's like continuing to evolve our business.

It shouldn't be capped.

and it's also relates to one of the points of having a clear strategy in place on that integration.

That's super crucial, and this new entity, perhaps doesn't like a new evolved company objectives.

And you need to, like, relate all the projects to those company objectives and say, are they still paying into it?

Or, I don't know, we want it to be on I don't know if we wanted to get into a new category of business, but that's not important anymore. So, we can cut all the projects that were going in that direction.

And this is, this is where we see also the, on the conversations with the business stakeholders. do it going in the right direction.

So using the business capabilities, mapping, and to the, to the company objectives, that then you're always talking about like a fan or enthusiast on the other side, because you're speaking their language.

Very, very good. Christian, we have lots of questions coming in. I'm going to try to get to them rapid fire in three minutes here. So one of them that's a theme that has emerge has to do about ANA EA, professionals and the function itself values. And this comes from Pamela Bishop.

And she asks, how do you suggest position EA involved involvement in the M&A process, and specifically, hold on, let me keep an eye on your question because it keeps scrolling on me, because it's going fast. Lots of questions coming in.

And specifically, D as part of the due diligence for companies, where Enterprise architecture has only recently been established. How do you get enterprise architects involved in this process? in a in the best possible way?

Yeah. So there's no way around an IT integration that I know. There are a lot of other parts of a post merger project. But it is a crucial part.

It's also the crucial part where companies look for synergies in their deal.

So, in some cases, 50% of the calculated synergies are where the finance strategy, people say, hey, we want to buy this company, because we, like we can save a lot of money.

50% come from the IT perspective, so I believe there's that there's quite a huge attention on IT from Financial Perfect method, another high intention on IT because you want to make sure that the operations run smoothly.

So the people who join in the merger a case on, that you want to make sure that they get productive, that they stay productive in the way they do so. As an enterprise architect, you have all the arguments on your side.

Um, to come up with it with a process to say, hey, this is really important as part of the BMI. Otherwise, we lose the good people. We risk then they get unproductive.

And take the so that this company that you acquire, it certainly has a lot of contracts running. So every second that you spend, or every day that you spend, there might be renewing these contracts. So you're, like, spending and spending money, again, for the, but you don't need anymore, because you're going to licenses for, I don't know, Oracle would that you could merge. So there are a lot of arguments. But I would say you can use them when addressing the MTA project teams.

Fantastic. And the Christian, one final question to wrap up here, and then I'm gonna give the audience a way of getting in touch with all of us to carry on this conversation. But the next question is, You have work now, with a number of M&A ace, and you have seen enterprise architectures, you have seen the good, The bad. And the ugly, you know, people, who do you really allow people who are, like, technically capable, but unable to really participate on the M&A function effectively. So, give me, like one skill that you think that the enterprise architects who are listening to us today, that they should develop to get to that next level as an Enterprise Architect.

Yeah.

1, one skill that that's that's really that's a tough one if I need to.

Um.

I would refer to, I love the book of Grigor Hope I would love, I would call it the elevator skill.

Um, it's being able to, um, to try to move from the pure technical conversations.

Straight to the business conversations. So talking in, synergies in, and like saving money down to what needs to be done with this data center.

There are only a very few people who who master that, but the, the Enterprise Architect, that I've seen of being very successful, they know how to choose to do that.

That's, that's excellent. So what I want a great gift and what thank you so much from Bonn Germany to the world sharing our expertise and your knowledge about the subject. Tremendous presentation. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Yeah, thank you, Jose.

Good luck with the rest.

Thank you very much.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's Christian Richter. Senior vice-president for Customer Success at Lean, I X, and the and we have a whole lot more coming up. But before we get into that, I want to remind you that some of your questions that we could not get you, join us on LinkedIn. The link has been provided to, you can look up. My name is: Joseph Areas on LinkedIn and there will see a posting about the conference. You can ask questions there and we're gonna have some of our speakers come back and answer to as many questions as they are able to in that format as well.

Now, we're gonna wrap up the session and we're going to start the new session at the top of the hour, and you do not want to miss starting next session on business capabilities as a cornerstone cornerstone of Enterprise Architecture. And we have our doctor Arthur Proust who is the Senior Business Architect and Digital Transformation Leader for Deutsche Bank, who's going to be directly telling us how to do that effectively. Now, as you close, as we close this session, there is an opportunity for you to provide feedback on the session survey that you can fill out. And, if you can, if you'd like to do that, please do that, and let us know. But we see you back at the top of the hour.