When a global medical technology manufacturer launched a major transformation programme, it was already running many parallel workstreams. Enterprise Architecture was not one of them. Portamus was brought in as the twelfth — not to add another workstream, but to build the foundation the other were operating without.
The starting point was stark: no coherent picture of the IT landscape, no business architecture, no documented domain model, and no binding guardrails for solution architects. Significant architectural decisions were being made across the organisation with no shared reference and no visibility into downstream effects. This is not a rare situation. Large transformation programmes are frequently initiated before the architectural groundwork is in place — and the cost of catching up mid-programme is rarely trivial.
We began by establishing the business architecture: defining the domains of core operations, procurement, and sales, mapping capabilities, and linking IT assets to the domain model. This immediately surfaced redundancies, clarified which systems supported strategic products, and provided the basis for legacy replacement planning and business continuity decisions. The IT big-picture was then completed and fully integrated into ADOIT, giving all workstreams a model-based reference they could rely on.
In parallel, the integration architecture for the SAP BTP migration was designed — making visible the dependencies between on-premise systems and cloud services that had accumulated without documentation. EA principles were finalised and guardrails rolled out, shifting solution architects from ad-hoc decisions to structured, governed choices. Within ten months, the organisation had the architectural foundation its transformation had been running without.