Takeaways from Forrester’s Latest Report on Enterprise Architecture Management Suites
Forrester recently released its “Now Tech: Enterprise Architecture Management Suites for Q1 2020” to give organizations an enterprise architecture (EA) playbook.
It also highlights select enterprise architecture management suite (EAMS) vendors based on size and functionality, including erwin.
The report notes six primary EA competencies in which we excel in the large vendor category: modeling, strategy translation, risk management, financial management, insights and change management.
Given our EA expertise, we thought we’d provide our perspective on the report’s key takeaways and how we see technology trends, business innovation and compliance driving companies to use EA in different ways.
Improve Enterprise Architecture with EAMS
To an EA professional, it may seem obvious that tools provide “a holistic view of business demand impact.” Delivery of innovation at speed is critical, but what does that really mean?
Not only should EA be easy to adopt and roll out, artifacts should be easy to visualize quickly and effectively by various stakeholders in the format they need to make decisions rapidly.
For “EA stakeholders to be more productive and effective,” not only is a central repository a necessity but collaboration and a persona-driven approach also are critical to the organization’s adoption of EA.
Just as an ERP system is a fundamental part of business operations, so is an enterprise architecture management suite. It’s a living, breathing tool that feeds into and off of the other physical repositories in the organization, such as ServiceNow for CMDB assets, RSA Archer for risk logs, and Oracle NetSuite and Salesforce for financials.
Being able to connect the enterprise architecture management suites to your business operating model will give you “real-time insights into strategy and operations.”
And you can further prove the value of EA with integrations to your data catalog and business glossary with real-time insights into the organization’s entire data landscape.
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Select Enterprise Architecture Vendors Based on Size and Functionality
EA has re-emerged to help solve compliance challenges in banking and finance plus drive innovation with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and robotic automation in pharmaceuticals.
These are large organizations with significant challenges, which require an EA vendor to invest in research and development to innovate across their offerings so EA can become a fundamental part of an organization’s operating model.
We see the need for a “proprietary product platform” in the next generation of EA, so customers can create their own products and services to meet their particular business needs.
They’re looking for product management, dev/ops, security modeling, personas and portfolio management all to be part of an integrated EA platform. In addition, customers want to ensure platforms are secure with sound coding practices and testing.
Determine the Key Enterprise Architecture Capabilities Needed
With more than 20 years of EA experience, erwin has seen a lot of changes in the market, many in the last 24 months. Guess what? This evolution isn’t slowing down.
We’re working with some of the world’s largest companies (and some smaller ones too) as they try to manage change in their respective industries and organizations.
Yesterday’s use case may not serve tomorrow’s use case. An EA solution should be agile enough to meet both short-term and long-term needs.
Use EA Performance Measures to Validate Enterprise Architecture Management Suite Value
EA should provide a strong ROI and help an organization derive value and successful business outcomes.
Additionally, a persona-based approach that involves configuring the user interface and experience to suit stakeholder needs eases the need for training.
Formalized training is important for EA professionals and some stakeholders, and the user interface and experience should reduce the need for a dedicated formal training program for those deriving value out of EA.
Why erwin for Enterprise Architecture?
Whether documenting systems and technology, designing processes and value streams, or managing innovation and change, organizations need flexible but powerful enterprise architecture tools they can rely on for collecting the relevant information for decision-making.
Like constructing a building or even a city – you need a blueprint to understand what goes where, how everything fits together to support the structure, where you have room to grow, and if it will be feasible to knock down any walls if you need to.
Without a picture of what’s what and the interdependencies, your enterprise can’t make changes at speed and scale to serve its needs.
erwin Evolve is a full-featured, configurable set of enterprise architecture tools, in addition to business process modeling and analysis.
The combined solution enables organizations to map IT capabilities to the business functions they support and determine how people, processes, data, technologies and applications interact to ensure alignment in achieving enterprise objectives.
Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Modeling
erwin Evolve is a single yet powerful software suite serving both EA and BP use cases.
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