Edward Jones: Banking on enterprise architecture excellence to better serve more than nine million customers
Maturing enterprise architecture to foster client innovation
Specializing in financial services, Edward Jones wanted to accelerate its enterprise architecture maturity. Adopting SAP LeanIX solutions enables the financial firm to track development initiatives, dependencies with existing software, business objectives, and value components, improving collaboration, enhancing visibility, and increasing planning efficiency.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Banking | St. Louis, Missouri | 55,000 employees |
Department Leader, Enterprise Business Architecture, Edward Jones
Overcoming missed opportunities in product and application development
Edward Jones is a leading financial advisory firm in the United States, with a widespread branch network across 16,000 locations supported by a centralized home office. From its 55,000 staff members, around 20,000 dedicated and passionate financial advisors serve, educate, and help more than nine million clients in achieving what matters most to them.
The firm had a fragmented enterprise planning and architecture landscape. Multiple strategic planning teams identified industry opportunities and created “epics,” a large body of work providing a high-level overview of key goals and initiatives, to guide the enterprise. These epics served as a strategic planning tool to organize, prioritize, and align its software development efforts with its business objectives. Portfolio and product teams reviewed the epics, provided feedback, and flagged potential blockers, but unclear epics were leading to extra discovery work before estimates could be provided. And the lack of a standard engagement process was leading to an incomplete understanding of certain epics until the business and technology teams could review them.
Epics were prioritized by return on investment, making it difficult to compare the importance of new epics to those already planned during annual and quarterly planning. The digital portfolio team reviewed the prioritized epics, engaging solution architects to design and build solutions to meet business needs. However, with epics scattered across various tools—such as Aha!, Jira, GitHub, and Microsoft SharePoint, PowerPoint, and Excel—there was no unified view of how initiatives impacted applications or business capabilities. Nor was there an easily accessible source of truth for critical architecture diagrams. It was also difficult to identify application owners and access relevant models, while version control and traceability were missing by storing models in different software. In addition, collaboration was limited due to siloed teams and inconsistent engagement across product, portfolio, and solution teams.
Plans to implement more than 200 epics, often overlapping, led to an average time from idea to deployment of two years. This resulted in complexity and missed opportunities for the firm’s software developers to create, for example, a new product, way of working, application, or vendor. The firm wanted to enhance its internal applications and build customer applications to differentiate itself from other financial services firms. Robert Morris, department leader for enterprise business architecture at Edward Jones, outlines, “Imagine our software developers trying to design a solution for a third-party application, and epics are coming out of the periphery. This means they may miss certain areas or not engage the right security team, sending them back to the drawing board to spend more time on development. We wanted to move away from a federated way of capturing solution architecture, epics, and models by deploying a centralized tool.”
Edward Jones sought a tool that could capture necessary data, be customizable, and integrate with its existing systems of record. It wanted the tool to be available across the firm for users to easily access relevant data and reports while minimizing user access management.
Department Leader, Enterprise Business Architecture, Edward Jones
Harmonizing enterprise architecture, business capabilities, and value streams
Edward Jones selected SAP LeanIX solutions to centralize its enterprise architecture, business capabilities, and value streams. Morris explains, “Value streams and business capabilities were the main anchor pin for our discussions, because they gave us a common language in talking about where a value stream starts and stops, who owns it and who the main actors involved are, and what applications are embedded in it.”
SAP LeanIX solutions enable capability-based planning, initiative tracking, and impact analysis. Initiative fact sheets allow the financial firm to document and manage the projects and initiatives—from ideas to fully fledged programs—that impact its architecture, require resources, and contribute to achieving specific goals. With initiative fact sheets, it can track project status, manage budgets, and show the impact of a project on its application portfolio. These centralized diagrams and fact sheets help the firm improve transparency and traceability, providing clear ownership of product portfolios and applications. The diagrams and fact sheets also enable impact mapping of third-party applications, such as MoneyGuide. Morris highlights, “We were able to use SAP LeanIX to capture epics as initiatives and show how our business capabilities would be impacted.”
The financial firm’s implementation journey comprised four phases. It initially created the foundation for roles, standards, and quality control before initiating the second phase of building prototypes involving capability models, operational value streams, and ownership mapping. The third phase brought enterprise architecture into planning conversations through initiative fact sheets. And the final phase of reporting and maturity focuses on ongoing optimization and use-case expansion.
Edward Jones also introduced SAP Signavio solutions to deliver detailed business process modeling, integrating the solutions with SAP LeanIX to align its processes with capabilities and applications.
Department Leader, Enterprise Business Architecture, Edward Jones
Improving collaboration, visibility, and planning efficiency
With SAP LeanIX, Edward Jones can track development initiatives, dependencies with existing software, business objectives, and value components. It can increase planning efficiency by making enterprise architecture central to its annual and quarterly planning while expecting a reduction in its two-year deployment cycle. Implementing SAP LeanIX solutions has improved collaboration, allowing the financial firm to identify dependencies across teams early and shift its engagement “left” to avoid late-stage surprises. The deployment has met not only its enterprise architecture needs but also those of its business and technology teams.
Edward Jones can now efficiently create and maintain enterprise architecture models and establish a central system of reference. It can capture business and IT objectives while assigning business and technology owners. And it can align operational value streams with support value streams. On the business side, the firm can capture business epics as initiative fact sheets, centralize epic information and maintain ease of access, and visualize epic dependencies and strategic road maps. It can relate key diagrams to each epic and create a clear line to supporting product and portfolio teams.
Using SAP LeanIX has delivered combined value for its software developers by giving them a holistic view of the firm’s software architecture and the processes it supports. They now have a system of reference for application and IT information, and they can match applications to supporting portfolios. They’re benefiting from a centralized solution for architecture diagrams and clear application ownership with roles. And they can align epics with product and portfolio teams.
As well as limiting the number of tools required for an enterprise-wide view, the financial firm has modeled more than 200 processes in SAP Signavio solutions, enabling it to use data in identifying challenges and improvement opportunities.
Department Leader, Enterprise Business Architecture, Edward Jones
Maturing processes with more capabilities and integration
Edward Jones plans to continue using SAP LeanIX solutions to assess its technology and process maturity so it can single out areas for improvement. It hopes to advance its planning and reporting capabilities, expand its use cases, and leverage new functionalities. The firm also intends to strengthen integration between SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio solutions to gain deeper insights.