How DRÄXLMAIER’s Enterprise Architecture Team Won the Trust Of Its Business Partners

Opportunity

The enterprise architecture (EA) practice at DRÄXLMAIER saw an opportunity to develop the business skills and career paths for its architects to expand the influence and impact of the organization across the business.

How Forrester Helped

Forrester analysts held deep-dive sessions with the EA team to help them understand and apply frameworks that would develop individual skills and position the EA organization more strategically. Forrester also provided benchmark data to validate the EA organization’s strategy.

Business Impact

The EA practice is not only more visible across DRÄXLMAIER today but also more trusted as a business partner by functional leaders, as evidenced by its role in hosting the cross- functional board of experts, a forum to agree on strategic architecture decisions and resolve issues where business and IT may be in conflict.

Like many IT professionals, Nitsch didn’t have much experience in building career paths for employees, so he reached out to his Forrester analyst partners for guidance on this strategic initiative. Forrester took the time to understand the goals of the initiative and provide specific advice on the steps required to achieve those goals. “I remember some great working sessions with Forrester analysts who knew our organization well on how to approach this challenge,” he says. “I had some ideas, but Forrester provided me with a people-centered approach that was very effective, because the employees can then see themselves in these roles and envision the opportunities for themselves, which makes it more tangible.”

Nitsch explains that reviewing and evaluating Forrester’s research provided him with new options to consider. But he gains real value from the deeper-dive guidance sessions with specific Forrester analysts where they describe how to apply models in the research to his own organization directly.

“The guidance has helped us move forward faster and avoid some mistakes we may have made if we proceeded on our own,” he says. “I always appreciate the ability to deep-dive with analysts into the research with specific direction for our unique situation.”

One specific challenge in shaping future career paths for internal IT architects was training them to speak and think more like business architects and business leaders. “We naturally speak in an ‘IT language’ talking about applications, interfaces, and data,” he says, adding that can create gaps in understanding between business and IT teams. “We needed to learn to speak more like the business in terms of outcomes, business capabilities, and processes beyond technology to have real business influence.”

Nitsch points to Forrester’s business capabilities research and frameworks as being particularly helpful in connecting the architecture organization’s work to business outcomes. Working with analysts who understand DRÄXLMAIER’s goals and initiatives has helped him use the research and frameworks to better visualize the challenges of the architecture practice, develop strategic plans, and position its work to business leaders.
Nitsch also says benchmark data provided by Forrester has helped build business cases for specific initiatives that the architecture practice supports. For example, the architecture team was working to get business leaders to embrace a data-driven decision-making strategy, with limited impact. But when Forrester provided benchmarking data that showed how much more profitable data-driven enterprises were, the initiative received more support from business leaders.

Like any IT organization, DRÄXLMAIER’s EA practice tracks the level of cost savings it generates by retiring outdated applications and shifting to new vendors. But Nitsch says the organization wanted to measure its performance in other ways, too. So Forrester has helped DRÄXLMAIER’s architecture organization develop some new KPIs and ratings to evaluate the impact the EA team has had on strategic projects and validate their achievements at the end of the year. In 2024, the efforts of DRÄXLMAIER’s EA practice paid off when it was named the EMEA region winner of Forrester’s Enterprise Architecture Awards.

But the biggest impact of working with Forrester in these areas has been an increased level of trust and visibility for the EA practice across DRÄXLMAIER. Nitsch says that more business functions understand what the enterprise architecture organization does and seek out its information and advice on strategic initiatives; today, an average of 1,100 unique visitors visit the internal EA tool to access architecture information each month.

“We have been able to build up a level of trust and now have strong relationships between architects and business function heads, which did not exist before,” Nitsch says, adding that guidance and coaching from Forrester analysts has been key to helping him build these new connections and relationships.

How does this trust manifest itself within the organization? Well, for one, enterprise architecture hosts DRÄXLMAIER’s cross-functional “board of experts,” which evaluates and resolves architectural and process challenges across the business. That could be anything from providing input on how to better manage data within a specific business function to the architecture impact of a new application or IT vendor.

At a personal level, Nitsch says working with Forrester has been invaluable for his own education on a variety of topics and strategies that he would not have been exposed to otherwise. “I get challenged by the analysts, which encourages me to go someplace I would not have gone and expand outside my comfort zone,” he says. “That’s a great learning opportunity that you cannot get from a standard course. You bring a specific challenge or idea to the analysts, and they provide a new perspective and challenge to you to achieve your objective. Working with the analysts has made a difference for me in my professional development.”