Enterprise Architecture (EA) Tools Reviews 2023 | Gartner
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_help_What is Enterprise Architecture (EA) software?
Enterprise Architecture (EA) software provides a centralized, consolidated source of truth about the enterprise and captures the limitations of the IT assets, processes, value streams, change programs, and projects. While helping organizations mature and improve their business operations and operating model, they also support the overall business strategy and the enterprise’s ecosystem of relationships up and down the value chain.
_help_What features do EA tools need to include?
EA tools help to create a better-aligned enterprise that uses a cohesive and comprehensive set of models to shape and drive its future, and may include some examples of core features / capabilities which are:
Innovation Management: Supporting the creation and tracking of innovation and change initiatives.
Automation: Industrializing activities to deliver value more quickly and reliably while keeping information current.
Integration: Exposing and importing data to and from other products.
Publication: Enabling wide consumption of the data contained within the EA tool, across the enterprise and beyond.
Repository: Providing a single source of truth for the organization with storage, categorization, and versioning of objects and model primitives of various sorts.
Modeling: Structuring relationships across entities, such as business strategies, objectives, goals, constraints, capabilities, personas, or customer journeys.
Analysis: Identify, assess, prioritize and track gaps, challenges, opportunities, and risks.
Presentation: Display and illustrate information in the form of dashboards, heat maps, models, and scenarios that contribute to the presentation capability of the tool.
Usability: Ease-of-use features and functions that enable support for various classes of users.
Configuration and management: Set up and administer the support and security of the EA tooling platform.
Frameworks: Apply EA, industry, or other frameworks as a starting point for structuring the repository and the relationships among artifacts.
Extensibility: Extend the metamodel of the EA tool through the definition of new modeling primitives (concepts) and relationship types.
_help_Who uses Enterprise Architecture tools?
EA tools are often used by enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders. As they serve across a broad range of architectural and IT disciplines (information, solution, security, applications, and infrastructure), many stakeholders from the boardroom and the C-suite across all strategic and operational roles can benefit from EA tools.
_help_In what areas can EA tools help the organizations?
EA tools operate at many levels and across a broad spectrum to enable insights and support informed decision-making. This spectrum includes but is not limited to:
Business strategies, objectives, capabilities, competitors, ecosystem partners, and products/services, as well as the KPIs, metrics, risks, and costs related to them.
Supporting technologies and applications, the services they offer, and interfaces between them, as well as infrastructure providers and vendors that provide these things.
Customer segments and stakeholder personas, customer journey maps, and the processes, value streams, and activities that the organization depends upon to deliver value.
Business scenarios, managing innovation, change and transformation programs/initiatives, and including the individual projects and development sprints in IT.
_help_What are the challenges for Enterprise Architecture tool deployments?
Organizations are likely to experience three major challenges while deploying an EA tool:
Initially structuring and continually restructuring the repository: This involves looking into the future to predict the value desired, how to get there within the specific tool and who should contribute to and consume that value.
Populating the repository with consistent and usable information: While evaluating the objectives, programs, products, projects, capabilities, applications, and technologies, it is important to define the right relationships between the individual elements in the repository.
Maintaining the repository and evolving its use over time: Heavy maintenance is required to maintain the repositories and the complex models built within them so revisiting the processes and models in the repository is required regularly.
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