Gruppo CAP: Reshaping enterprise architecture to boost business and IT alignment by making complexity visible and actionable
The real scope of change made more transparent
Italian water company Gruppo CAP implemented SAP LeanIX solutions to support better planning and prioritization of change and consequently reduce risks and costs. Informed by data-based decisions, Gruppo CAP can plan releases more realistically, justify the required effort more clearly, and improve alignment between business expectations and implementation constraints.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Utilities | Milan, Italy | 977 employees | NTT DATA Italia S.p.A. |
of interfaces mapped in SAP LeanIX.
of applications and IT components cataloged.
of application and integration dependences documented.
Head of the Digital Solutions Office, Gruppo CAP
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Utilities | Milan, Italy | 977 employees | NTT DATA Italia S.p.A. |
of interfaces mapped in SAP LeanIX.
of applications and IT components cataloged.
of application and integration dependences documented.
Head of the Digital Solutions Office, Gruppo CAP
Accelerating transformation programs while reducing risks and costs
Gruppo CAP plays a key role in delivering essential integrated water services to around two million Italian citizens across the metropolitan city of Milan and 133 municipalities in Lombardy. The organization manages 40 water treatment plants and more than 6,500 kilometers (approximately 4,038 miles) of network infrastructure.
Performing a key role in delivering essential public services and with a strong focus on sustainability, resilience, and innovation, Gruppo CAP is a true “green utility.” Its growth stems from complementary markets that are fundamental to sustainable development, including helping the waste and design sector embark on the path toward sustainability and the circular economy.
Along the path that led the company to become a true sustainability champion, Gruppo CAP embarked on a business transformation initiative as a broader enabler of operational efficiency, resilience, and innovation across the organization. The plan was to modernize and simplify its application landscape, strengthen governance, and create a stronger alignment between business priorities and technology decisions.
Before the transformation, Gruppo CAP managed its application portfolio through an open-source tool. While this setup allowed the organization to maintain a catalog of applications, it was not easy to use and had limited adoption beyond a small number of specialists. And because the information was difficult to access, maintain, and share in a way that supported day-to-day governance and decision-making, it was difficult to keep data current.
Lacking a common view between IT and business stakeholders, Gruppo CAP sought a way to improve transparency, governance, and alignment between business priorities, business functionalities coverage, and technology choices.
Head of the Digital Solutions Office, Gruppo CAP
Creating a strong foundation for governance and informed decision-making
To find the ideal solution for its needs, Gruppo CAP evaluated a number of leading enterprise architecture management tools against its key criteria. Tiziana Lorefice, head of the digital solutions office at Gruppo CAP, elaborates: “We needed a solution that was intuitive enough to be adopted beyond architecture specialists while also being robust enough to capture the different layers of our application environment. In particular, it was important for us to have a tool capable of managing the software lifecycle of the technologies underpinning our applications, from the infrastructure layer up to the business processes they support.”
Impressed by the SAP LeanIX portfolio because it met the key criteria and more, the water company adopted the SAP LeanIX Application Portfolio Management solution to create a structured and reliable inventory of its applications. Combining ease of use with a structured and comprehensive data model, SAP LeanIX would allow the company to connect applications, IT components, and business processes in a single view. This would make overall governance and data maintenance more effective because it also enabled mapping interfaces and integrations. Lorefice comments, “This is particularly valuable in a complex environment like ours. We need to represent different types of integrations, including synchronous and asynchronous exchanges, database links, real-time flows, and batch processes including data mapping details for all interfaces. Having this information in SAP LeanIX improves transparency, supports impact analysis, and gives us a stronger basis for lifecycle management and architecture decisions.”
To guide its enterprise architecture management journey, Gruppo CAP selected NTT DATA Italia S.p.A. through a public tender. The partner was then instrumental in helping Gruppo CAP migrate information from its legacy tool and define a structured road map for progressively mapping and enriching the enterprise architecture data, accelerating time to value, and reducing implementation risk.
Lorefice says that the company approached the implementation in a bottom-up way, starting with the direct involvement of Gruppo CAP’s infrastructure and database administration teams. She comments, “It was essential to build a reliable foundation and ensure that the model reflected the real technological landscape. The most important challenge we had to address was the mapping of hardware components and the many types of integrations between applications. Capturing this level of detail required close collaboration across teams, gradual data enrichment, and a shared effort to standardize information in a way that could support both operational understanding and strategic governance.”
Head of the Digital Solutions Office, Gruppo CAP
Underpinning architectural governance and operational resilience
With 79 applications, 766 interfaces, and 902 IT components cataloged in SAP LeanIX, Gruppo CAP now has an enterprise application landscape backed by a combination of centralized governance and progressive collaboration with different IT teams.
The enterprise architecture team acts as the central point of coordination for all updates in SAP LeanIX, safeguarding consistency of the data model and validating the information contributed by the various stakeholders.
Gruppo CAP built trust in the data by using SAP LeanIX for concrete operational and governance activities such as planning, lifecycle updates, and business impact analysis mapping. As teams saw that the information was not collected for documentation purposes alone, but actively used to support decisions, they became more engaged in keeping it accurate and complete over time.
By centralizing all the information related to Gruppo CAP’s application landscape in a single and continuously updated repository, SAP LeanIX has significantly improved governance and lifecycle management. With a shared and reliable view of applications, interfaces, IT components, and related business processes, the organization can better manage changes, monitor lifecycle evolution, and make decisions based on consistent and up-to-date information.
This centralization is particularly valuable for the service operations team, which uses SAP LeanIX as its main reference point to assess cascading impacts in the event of an application fault. By understanding the dependencies between applications, integrations, infrastructure components, and business processes, the team can evaluate potential consequences more quickly and support more effective incident management.
It’s a similar story when it comes to requests for adopting new features or making changes. Lorefice explains, “Thanks to SAP LeanIX, when there’s a business request for a new feature, we can immediately show how many systems are actually involved. This includes which interfaces are affected and how the requested implementation may propagate across the broader application landscape—making the underlying complexity visible in a much more objective way.”
Head of the Digital Solutions Office, Gruppo CAP
Evolving capability-driven planning and application rationalization
Gruppo CAP considers its adoption of SAP LeanIX as a strategic starting point in its enterprise architecture management evolution. The road map ahead includes completing the layers related to business context and business capabilities. Lorefice says that this is an important next step for the organization because it will allow it to strengthen the connection between the application landscape and the business view. She comments, “This will make it easier to understand which capabilities are supported by which applications and how technology contributes to business priorities.”
The organization is also evaluating the adoption of a business intelligence process tool integrated with SAP LeanIX so that enterprise architecture data can play an active role in guiding its digital transformation over the coming years. In parallel, Gruppo CAP is planning to introduce AI-enabled capabilities in the form of natural-language search that help make it easier for users to access the key information managed in SAP LeanIX. The goal is to improve both usability and the practical value of the repository across the organization.
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Featured partner
NTT DATA is a top 10 global business and IT services provider, helping companies navigate fast-growing technological complexity, ever-rising customer expectations, and rapidly changing business environments. The firm led the structured adoption of SAP LeanIX, helping Gruppo CAP establish a consistent, reliable, and governed architectural dataset covering core domains. This integrated model provides a quantitative and qualitative snapshot of the enterprise, enabling transparency, traceability, and informed decision-making.