By Axel Dancoisne for WBISCT.net
So, you now have been certified in TOGAF, Zachman, FEAF, TEAF or Gartner…Now what?
Whether you are starting with EA or you are already a seasoned professional, you will soon realise that with the fast growing amount of work coming your way (especially if you have been successful at selling EA in your organisation) you will need to automate parts of the work to ensure you can cope with the complexity and allow for your limited capabilities to manage the productivity of your EA team.
One can start with at the very least a good modelling tool and a repository which would have strong qualities like a workable fit-for-purpose structure, a perfect version control and a manageable access control of its content, amongst its strongest features.
Jaap Schekkerman – Institute For Enterprise Architecture Developments (IFEAD)- who has written quite a good set of papers on EA, released a paper in 2011 called an Enterprise Architecture Tool Selection Guide version 6.3. Quite a few EA tool manufacturers were mentioned in that paper and some of them are still doing very well in 2020.
Whether you read the Gartner Magic Quadrant year after year or any other reliable source, you will see that there are a small group of tools which lead the EA tools market and cover quite a wide spectrum of functionalities.
Such view is proprietary and only reflects the position of its author. It is used here as a simple view to show you what tools are present on the market but you will need to test them yourself or at least evaluate them while testing your EA team abilities to find the top 2 or 3, which would suit your needs.
Borrowing from Jaap’s document mentioned earlier, the scope of a E tool can be as narrow as a mere BPMN or UML tool or a very highly integrated tool with wide coverage across the enterprise.
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Governance, Risk, Compliance |
Program Management |
Enterprise and IT portfolio Management |
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Enterprise Architecture |
Solution Architecture |
Software Engineering |
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Business and IT Strategy |
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In essence the top tools on the market, allow you to align your business objectives with your IT goals (as a supportive tool for your business) and infrastructure. These tools help manage information related to EA while helping companies plan roadmap for digital transformation. Most can offer collaboration, reports, testing, simulations and more to help organisations create and implement models for better business and IT processes, development and architecture.
The following enterprise architecture tools provide a mix of visualisation, collaboration, and project management features in support of a wide range of enterprise architecture frameworks.
Source: https://sourceforge.net/software/enterprise-architecture/
- Archi
- Archimate 3
- Ardoq
- Avolution ABACUS
- BiZZdesign Enterprise Studio
- Cameo Enterprise Architecture
- EAComposer
- Enterprise Architect
- Envision VIP
- ER/Studio Data Architect
- erwin Data Modeler/EDGE
- Franck
- IBM Rational System Architect
- Insight EA
- iServer for Enterprise Architecture
- LeanIX
- MEGA Hopex International
- MID Innovator
- Modelio
- ModelRight
- Mood Platform
- OpenText ProVision
- Planview Enterprise Architecture
- Planview Enterprise One (formerly Planview Enterprise and Troux)
- Promis
- QPR EnterpriseArchitect
- QualiWare Enterprise Architecture
- SAMU
- SAP PowerDesigner
- Software AG Alfabet Enterprise Architecture Management Platform/ARIS
- Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect
- UNICOM System Architect
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Obviously this list is not exhaustive and will change over time as the market keeps moving fast.
Happy testing and reviewing my fellow EAs.
WBISCT Team