One place for everything your organisation knows about its architecture — connected, current, and actually used.

The Problem

Ask any architect where the current architecture lives and you will get a familiar answer: “It’s spread across Confluence, a few Visio files someone made three years ago, some Word documents from the last programme, and this diagram I did last quarter.”

That is not an architecture repository. That is archaeology.

When architecture is scattered, it cannot be governed. Investment decisions get made without a clear picture of what already exists. Solution architects repeat work. The same capabilities get built twice. Nobody can answer “what would break if we replaced this system?” with any confidence. And when a regulator, auditor, or board asks for a view of the estate, someone spends two weeks assembling a picture that is already out of date.

The alternative is a single, maintained, governed repository where the architecture is a living asset — not a collection of documents that drift further from reality with every passing sprint.

What This Engagement Covers

Enterprise Architecture Repository is an engagement to design, configure, and establish your EA repository — selecting the right tooling for your context, designing the meta-model, loading the baseline landscape, and putting the governance in place to keep it current.

What You Get

  • Tool selection and meta-model design — Structured evaluation of LeanIX vs Sparx Enterprise Architect (and alternatives) for your context: cloud-native vs on-premise/hybrid, team size, integration requirements, and budget. Then: meta-model design — the object types, relationships, and attributes that give your repository its structure
  • Current-state architecture baseline — Systematic documentation of your existing business, application, and technology landscape in the repository. A starting point that is accurate, not aspirational
  • Target state and transition architecture — Current state plus target state plus the delta — roadmap items, decommission plans, and planned changes all visible in one place
  • Solution architecture linkage — Connecting individual solution designs to the EA repository so changes in delivery automatically inform the enterprise picture
  • Governance and maintenance model — Who owns what in the repository, how changes are submitted and approved, nightly validation rules, and the minimum viable process to keep the repository from becoming stale
  • Business to Application to Component to Data traceability — The full chain: a business capability traces to the applications that support it, which trace to the components they are built on, which trace to the data they use. Impact analysis becomes answerable
  • Training and handover — Your team can maintain and extend the repository independently after the engagement

Tool Context

LeanIX is the preferred choice for cloud-native, SaaS organisations that need strong business capability mapping, application portfolio management, and out-of-the-box integrations with Jira, ServiceNow, and Azure DevOps.

Sparx Enterprise Architect is the preferred choice for organisations that need deep modelling capability — full ArchiMate, BPMN, and UML in one tool — with on-premise or hybrid deployment and low per-seat cost at scale. A strong fit for regulated industries with data residency constraints or complex model governance requirements.

Both tools can be used together: LeanIX for the business and application layers, Sparx for detailed technical and solution modelling.

Who This Is For

  • Organisations with an EA function but no EA repository — architecture exists in people’s heads and in ad-hoc documents, and it needs to be externalised before those people leave or the programme grows beyond what informal coordination can handle
  • Architecture teams scaling up — adding more architects, more domains, more geography, and needing a shared, structured workspace rather than individual tooling
  • Application Portfolio Management programmes — an EA repository is the technical foundation for APM: you cannot rationalise a portfolio you cannot see
  • IT leadership preparing for transformation — digital transformation, cloud migration, M&A integration — every large programme benefits from a baseline landscape that is authoritative and current
  • Regulated organisations that need to demonstrate to auditors, regulators, or boards that they have a governed, documented view of their technology estate

The Governance Reality

A repository that nobody maintains is worse than no repository — it creates false confidence. The governance model is therefore as important as the tooling. This engagement designs governance for the reality of your organisation — not for an idealised EA team with unlimited time. That means automation where possible, clear ownership, and a low-friction contribution model for solution architects and development leads who feed the repository from their delivery work.

🌟 Important

“Architecture scattered across a dozen tools is not a single source of truth — it is a distributed source of guesses. The repository is not the goal; governed, connected, current architecture information is.”

Scope and Approach

Repository engagements are scoped based on the size of your application estate, the tooling selected, and the depth of baseline documentation required. A focused engagement for a single domain or a 50-100 application estate is typically 6-12 weeks. Broader enterprise estates are scoped accordingly.

Schedule a discovery conversation to discuss your estate, your tooling context, and what a well-governed EA repository would mean for your organisation.