Enterprise Architects can have a tough time proving their value to the business. That’s not to say their work is a waste of time, but the typical achievements of an EA department can be hard to translate into outcomes that are meaningful for those outside IT. Visualizing the technology landscape and mapping business capabilities don’t exactly get stakeholders’ pulses racing. But what if you could focus your efforts on just one outcome while achieving a whole host of others, too? Enter reducing costs.
Focusing on reducing costs as a business outcome benefits both the Enterprise Architecture and the organization. It provides a wider goal for EA efforts to coalesce around, while achieving other valuable outcomes in the process. For example, building an accurate picture of the IT landscape is the perfect way to prepare for application rationalization, one of the most impactful ways a business can reduce its IT costs and enable the execution of other strategic initiatives. And that’s just the start.
When businesses reduce the day-to-day costs of running their IT department, they free up budget for innovation. But this can be easier said than done. Cost-saving EA measures, such as application rationalization or technology lifecycle management, require an accurate picture of the IT landscape. The problem is that with the speed at which businesses change, this is a moving target.
Information about what the business uses and how this connects to its capabilities can be spread across many disparate sources, from spreadsheets to people’s heads. How do you gather and verify all of this, while ensuring it’s understandable and presentable to the business? How do you keep up when things change? Manual diagramming can be so time-consuming that it quickly falls out of date, requiring hours of drawing and redrawing to remain accurate. EAs get stuck just trying to figure out the applications their organization uses, meaning they don’t even get to the initiatives that would really bring business value.
These are age-old problems, but there’s also the latest one: AI. At the moment, all eyes are on the future. But there is so much pressure for organizations to launch AI initiatives and not fall behind that they’re moving first and thinking later. EAs don’t know where their organizations are deploying AI solutions, what data they’re using, what they’re costing, and how they align with business priorities. This lack of governance is costly: it results in wasted investments that do not make their money back and fail to deliver what was promised. For example, an MIT study in August 2025 found that 95% of AI pilots do not achieve return on investment.
As a result, when it’s crunch time and the business is looking for ways to reduce costs, it’s the EA department that gets cut because they struggle to show value that the business understands.
But there’s another way. Imagine a world where the IT landscape is easy to map initially and just as simple to update. Where application owners across the organization are responsible for updating their own data. If anything new is needed, it’s simple to source, and when things change, diagrams can be quickly generated.
In this IT landscape, applications are linked to business capabilities and owners, allowing the impacts of change to be easily calculated, resulting in fast and accurate decision-making. Opportunities for cost savings in the application portfolio are clear and tangible, and the same goes for technology. The lifecycles of individual systems are tracked in detail, meaning migration plans can be put in place long before end of support dates are reached.
When it comes to AI, you have a transparent view of where AI initiatives are used in your organization and how they are making an impact—as well as who is responsible for them and their compliance status, letting you responsibly balance innovation with risk. Does this sound like the land of dreams? Well, it’s not.
Ardoq’s data-driven, user-centric Enterprise Architecture platform connects people, processes, technologies, and strategies to form a living map of your organization. When your data changes, it does too, and you can easily source new data from across your organization using surveys, ensuring your IT landscape stays up to date. Future state modeling enables you to understand the impact of changes to your landscape, providing valuable insights into what happens when personnel or technology, such as AI, is introduced and where it is best applied. You can also document and measure your tech debt, making smart data-led decisions about what to tackle first and preventing the support costs that come with having to fix it when it’s out of control.
To engage stakeholders, you can filter, visualize, and customize how you present this data to tell engaging, tangible stories and answer the most pressing stakeholder questions about cost, risk, requirements, and impact. Configurable viewpoints make EA accessible to everyone in the organization, allowing them to source their own data insights.
Ultimately, with full governance, the business operates with reduced risk, so it invests more wisely, makes fast and accurate decisions, and reacts more effectively to a rapidly changing technology landscape. Plus, you’ve reduced costs.
Don't just take our word for it.
North American mattress manufacturer Serta Simmons needed to find significant IT cost savings after the organization emerged from bankruptcy in 2023.
To make sense of their sprawling technology landscape, they used Ardoq to construct a clear and reliable view of the organization’s technology spend. In doing so, they uncovered areas of duplicate spend, identified quick wins from expiring contracts, and shifted costly month-to-month subscriptions to more favorable terms.
The result? In just under two years, Serta Simmons saved over $5 million in technology costs; $2M in the first year and another $3M in the second. Now, Enterprise Architecture is a strategic business partner, not just a support function.
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