analysis of EA Tools

"EA tools are the various types of commercial software applications that required to support EA documentation and analysis activities." [1] According to the definition above, EA tools are a set of software applications that could provide support to EA process. The main usage of EA tools is to provide support to facilitate EA process.

Enterprise architecture tools are used to aid the enterprise architect in a number of ways; allowing them to capture information regarding the enterprise, undertake modelling in all domains, capture the links between the various artifacts, provide a meta model to standardize the capture and hold this information in a repository to allow interrogation of information, for example in the form of standard or ad-hoc reports. [2] In this way, EA tools could improve facilitation for all the EA processes. Thus, we could say that EA tools are particularly useful. For example, people can not provide a comprehensive analysis on the software designing process without the support of UML. However, we cannot design UML without UML tools like Rational Rose. Architects need EA tools to process their business.

However, just like EA, every sword has two sides. People should not invest too much money in EA tools. Although some fancy tools look quite cool, you need to ask yourself whether you really need it before buying. We need learn to control budget.

Following is the minimum capabilities for EA tools given by Gartner: [3]

EA tools must address the requirements of a variety of stakeholders in the organization, and contain the following minimum capabilities:

• Repository, which supports business, information, technology and solution viewpoints and their relationships. The repository must also support the enterprise context composed of environmental trends, business strategies and goals, and future-state architecture definition.
• Modeling capabilities, which support all architecture viewpoints.
• Decision analysis capabilities, such as gap analysis, impact analysis, scenario planning and system thinking.
• Presentation capabilities, which are visual and/or interactive to meet the demands of a myriad of stakeholders.
• Administration capabilities, which enable security, user management and other tasks.
• Configurable capabilities that are extensive, simple and straightforward to accomplish, while supporting multiple environments.
• Support for frameworks and standards, most commonly used while providing the flexibility to modify the framework.
• Usability, including intuitive, flexible and easy-to-learn user interfaces.

When selecting EA tools, people should first refer to the criteria that Gartner provided. Then, combining with the existing problems and requirements they have to select the EA tools they need.

Obviously, people should be cost sensitive. One solution is to select open source EA tools, which is extremely cheap or even free. Besides the cost of buying the software, people should also take cost of training into consideration. However, cost should not be the only criterion people use to select EA tools. The tools used must have a high ROI, and that should be enough.

Here is an analysis given by Gartner for different tools. We could refer to that to make selection: [3]





[1]: An introduction to Enterprise Architecture, Scott A. Bernard.
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_enterprise_architecture_tools
[3]: http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CVXD3X&ct=121119&utm_content=c26292b9-8692-4afe-9fec-28e9315d6a34