Bouygues Construction with myCarto

Case Study: Managing 1,500 applications and accelerating IT urbanization with myCarto

Bouygues Construction at a glance

Three business sectors: infrastructure, industry, and building
35,600 employees across more than 50 countries | €10.3 billion in revenue
400+ IT professionals based in France, Morocco, and Vietnam
Including 4 people in the Enterprise Architecture division
1,500+ applications listed in the IT landscape

Objective: Master and urbanize a vast Information System

Discover how Bouygues Construction transformed its IT governance by creating an Enterprise Architecture division and deploying myCarto to map, rationalize, and modernize a portfolio of 1,500 applications serving more than 35,000 employees.

Bouygues Construction ranks among the top 3 global players in the construction industry. The group designs and builds major infrastructure, residential buildings, and industrial facilities such as hospitals and production sites.

In construction, the importance of IT systems isn’t always obvious. “With or without IT, the jackhammers keep running.” Yet digital tools are becoming increasingly vital—from HR systems (HRIS) and CAD tools to BIM and ERP systems—across more than 50 countries, totaling over 1,500 applications.

People are realizing that without IT, it’s actually quite difficult to run a construction site.»

Valérie MERCIER – Functional Architect, Enterprise Architecture Department

To address the challenges of an ever-expanding and diverse IT ecosystem, Bouygues Construction’s IT Department launched a structured Enterprise Architecture initiative in 2020.
This initiative relied on IT mapping with two main priorities:

Ensuring data reliability
Making the cartography useful and actionable for digital stakeholders (architects, product owners, and project managers)

Enterprise Architecture challenges in the construction sector

“IT isn’t our showcase. For us, it’s mainly back-office,” explains Valérie MERCIER.

This industry-specific reality amplifies familiar challenges for IT departments:

Fragmented documentation: scattered Visio diagrams, PowerPoint slides, and unmaintained repositories
Significant Shadow IT: business teams subscribing directly to SaaS tools without governance
Uncontrolled data flows: “spaghetti architectures” with numerous point-to-point links rarely kept up to date
Poor data quality: multiple unsynchronized repositories
Resistance to change: complex communication with business teams and the need to enforce IT best practices across all IT divisions

While Bouygues Construction set up a dedicated Enterprise Architecture team, it consists of only four internal members responsible for a vast scope. The team must work efficiently and rely on the right tools. Among these tools, the Enterprise Architecture team immediately turned to an IT system mapping software.

General Mapping of the Corporate IT Application Portfolio

Choosing an integrated IT cartography solution

When selecting a mapping solution, the team focused on:
ease of configuration, integration capability, autonomy, and total cost of ownership.
The choice naturally fell on myCarto.

Implementation was based on several key principles:

Maximum automation: API integrations (e.g., application repository, ITSM tools) for daily updates
Focus on functional and application layers: prioritizing high-value areas
Use-case-driven approach: proving value through real projects
The Crucial Importance of Data Quality

Data quality is fundamental to ensure the reliability of the mapping initiative.

“Data quality is essential.”

To make the cartography process factual and actionable, the Enterprise Architecture team implemented:

Quality KPIs in Power BI
Gamification via the “Data Quality Olympics”
Collaborative work leveraging internal and external expertise to structure the approach

Concrete Uses of myCarto at Bouygues Construction

Visualizing and Rationalizing Data Flows

A key use case involved rationalizing flows. In HR (HRIS), the team visually demonstrated how to urbanize the system:

“If I decommission this and migrate it to an urbanized system, this is the result.”

myCarto filters allow instant visualization of as-is / to-be scenarios.

Point-to-point connections are cheap initially but expensive over time. myCarto helps identify and propose optimization scenarios.»

Valérie MERCIER – Functional Architect, Enterprise Architecture Department

Supporting Transformation Projects

For the finance module redesign, an ERP system with over 20 years of legacy, the team’s goals with myCarto were to:

Map the complex existing system
Identify redundancies
Propose urbanization scenarios
Facilitate decision-making

“With myCarto, I can work on target scenarios. Using filters, I can simulate the impact of decommissioning components or integrating flows into the urbanization framework.”
Valérie MERCIER
Functional Architect, Enterprise Architecture Department

Managing Technical Debt

The tool enables visualization by department of: vulnerabilities, obsolescence, key competencies, critical applications, and remediation priorities.

Onboarding and Process Documentation

With teams in France and abroad, myCarto centralizes information and simplifies knowledge sharing.
Beyond IT, the team uses a business process (BPMN) approach to facilitate collaboration, especially for new employees and business units.

Two Key Success Factors in Implementing IT Mapping

Pedagogy at the Heart of the Approach

“We focus a lot on education to demonstrate value”, says Valérie MERCIER. The team promotes adoption through:

Concrete use cases
Before/after visualizations
Easily identifiable quick wins

Importance of Internal Advocates

To drive adoption, Bouygues Construction created an internal community of 70 employees who include architecture-related responsibilities in their roles (functional, application, technical).
The goal: amplify the impact of the Enterprise Architecture initiative.

Additionally, the IT department relies on external enterprise architecture experts who provide patterns, communication kits, and support—reinforcing adoption and accelerating team maturity on IT urbanization.

Results and Key Benefits of myCarto

For Bouygues Construction, IT mapping delivers:

Intuitive navigation: “The main advantage is knowing all the features of a given application, identifying its associated flows, and navigating seamlessly from one to another.”
Improved efficiency: No more scattered PowerPoint and Visio diagrams, everything is centralized.
Unified vision: A single entry point for the entire IT landscape.

“myCarto is the gateway to the company’s IT assets, providing a graphical and intuitive view of business objects, applications, flows, and data, which we integrate into our transformation projects.”
Valérie MERCIER
Functional Architect, Enterprise Architecture Department.