Why an Organization needs an EA tool

Organizations, especially smaller to mid-sized, often come across a question whether to invest in an EA tool or not while they already have access to various drawing tools and spreadsheet software. Hence, justifying the case internally for why a proper EA tool is necessary remains a challenge. In the following, six reasons are provided that should help prepare a compelling case for getting the CEO sign-off on the purchase of a specialized EA tool.

Strategy and Values Any organization that focuses on digital business growth, while also holding values in demand fulfilment, data security, privacy, compliance and agility, then running an EA program without professional EA tool won’t let it happen. It is highly unlikely that anyone in sales needs to fight for budget approval for a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. However, several EA teams struggle to get through the similar situation. It is very important to emphasize that the EA tool plays a pivotal role in realizing the digital transformation strategies while ensuring that the business demands are met, ensuring audit-ready compliance for regulations such as GDPR, and maintaining oversight of data privacy and security policy adherence across the organization. No organization would execute a sales strategy without a robust and advanced CRM, so why venture on a digital transformation journey aided by a lame EA program equipped with the wrong tools in place?

Improved Management Decisions Management across all levels are required to make impactful decisions every day. Being able to make right decision comes down to having access to the right information at the right time and having confidence in its validity and quality. Quite simply, the poorer the information available, or the more difficult it is to effectively analyze it, the higher the decision-making risk. Organizations with the tools and processes to ensure that they remain agile and responsive to change, without sacrificing the quality of the analysis that underpins major decisions, will be the most successful.

Ease of Understanding Organizations understand their business architecture, business operating model and application portfolio stored somewhere, but they very often tend to be distributed around, owned and maintained by different stakeholders and composed without proper central ownership. As the business grows and evolves over time the gaps between the documented architecture and the actual architecture deepens. This directly results in increased risk, and possible non-compliance with regulations. With a collaborative EA tool, maintaining up-to-date and validated architecture, ascertaining future scenario impacts, and communicating complex analysis to business stakeholders and decision makers in a coherent and consistent way becomes easier and efficient.

Save time The fastest ROI any organization may ever see can result from implementing a dedicated EA tool. This allows the EA team spending less time mapping out required data (most of the data mapping by professional EA tool is automated), less time validating and identifying gaps in data (professional EA tools deploy graph analysis to automate gap discovery), reduced time in drawing (professional EA tools draw and refresh various visualizations automatically) and less time determining if stored data are up-to-date or not. This allows the EA team to focus on providing meaningful information to business owners in real-time and liaise with management to focus on decision support where it matters the most.

Digital Transformation Never has the enterprise architecture (EA) played a bigger role in determining business success, and with the advent of emerging technologies such as AI, IoT, AV/AR, Block Chain, and well-funded digital startups, the stakes have never been higher on incumbents to make the most of their strong market positions. With robust EA governance and EA tool in place, it becomes possible to have informed data-driven conversations around business transformation. Some organizations have gone as far as to proclaim that an EA tool is an insurance against IT and privacy breach disasters. If digital transformation, data security, GDPR compliance, work agility, and overall good enterprise governance are high priorities for a business, then introducing a dedicated EA tool should be at the top of its agenda.

Single Source of Truth Significant time is spent searching for the correct information in organization where information is scattered over multiple places and maintained by different owners. Enterprise architecture tools act as a single source of truth that saves time. It takes time to build EA repository but once it’s operational, the required information is easy to find with high confidence. Moreover, developing and understanding the relationships among different pieces of information becomes easier when the information is structured and captured through a well-thought underlying meta-model in the EA tool.