Over the years, the enterprise architecture (EA) and business architecture (BA) tooling market has had its share of struggles. As I’ve written about before, EA as well as BA have long faced questions about their relevance to the organization, and the tools to support these roles face similar concerns.
Both types of architects traditionally spend much of their time creating and updating elaborate diagrams, charts, and other artifacts that represent the business in all of its elaborate glory. But without a practical connection between the models and the business transformation that architecture purports to drive, such documents are little more than pretty pictures.
Now that so many enterprises are struggling with digital transformation initiatives, the efficacy of such architecture tooling has never been more important. But digital priorities have raised the bar for such tools. Simply keeping track of business entities is no longer sufficient.
Fortunately, there is light at the end of this long tunnel – both for the practices of EA and BA as well as the tools that support them.
The Importance of Holistic Tooling
Next-generation architecture tools are now taking a holistic approach to supporting the transformation needs of the organization – holistic in the sense that such tools combine EA, BA, and other planning disciplines including business process management, case management, and decision management into a seamless, business-focused platform.
At this week’s Building Business Capability conference, the annual shindig of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA), architecture tooling vendors go head to head, contrasting older technologies for architecture modeling to the more modern, holistic approach.
Representing the old guard is France-based Mega International. Mega talks a good game about digital transformation, but at its heart the Mega platform is a content management system. While competitors are walking the transformation walk, Mega is focusing on moving its client technology off of 1990s-style fat clients to the web interfaces of the 2000s.
They are also tweaking their portfolio management capabilities to poach some of Troux Technologies’ customers, now that IT portfolio management vendor Planview has acquired them.
Ready to steal the digital thunder – and market share – away from the Megas and Planviews of the world are vendors like Quebec-based Trisotech.
Trisotech’s core offering is the Digital Enterprise Suite, which is a visual prototyping platform that it bases on a semantic graph paradigm it calls the Digital Enterprise Graph. The suite includes a discovery accelerator strategy planning tool, an insight analyzer for gathering information out of the tool’s underlying semantic graph, as well as modeling tools for business processes, decisions, and case management.
The Trisotech insight analyzer appears in the screenshot below.
The Trisotech Insight Analyzer (source: Trisotech)
The Digital Enterprise Suite enables both technical as well as non-technical people to participate in EA and BA discovery and modeling. People across the digital spectrum can thus use the suite to gain insights into relationships among models.
The suite also includes tools for discovering, modeling, analyzing, and finding insights with the Digital Enterprise Graph as a common semantic framework. In fact, perhaps the most interesting feature of the Trisotech platform is how it leverages its underlying semantic graph to tie every business entity together across models. The user can simply click on an icon to navigate to other entities related to that icon.
Bringing to market a platform similar to Trisotech is Australia-based Capsicum. Capsicum leverages an underlying metamodel it calls the Capsicum Framework. This framework describes business endeavors in a structured way that depends upon an underlying semantic model, much as Trisotech does.
Leveraging this framework is its Jalapeno Platform, which is an interactive modeling platform for building Capsicum models. Jalapeno is a model-driven business architecture platform that helps people model the full breadth of business entities, including roles, tasks, rules, entitlements, requirements, etc.
The diagram below is a screenshot that illustrates the Capsicum semantic model.
Capsicum Jalapeno Semantic Model (Source: Capsicum)
Leveraging the Capsicum framework, Jalapeno externalizes the flow logic from process models, shifting that logic to its governance model. In this way Capsicum essentially promotes governance to the primary activity of the organization.
In Jalapeno, governance covers entitlements, conditions, and the definitions and constraints of terms. Because Jalapeno includes the process logic in these entities, the domain models that describe the business and its capabilities become reusable intellectual property. An organization can now change the governance entities in order to apply an existing domain model to a different division or initiative.
Architecting Your Digital Transformation
Because digital transformation is in reality business transformation more so than technology change, it is essential for digital leaders to maintain a big picture of all the moving parts in their organization. Traditional architectural approaches, including both EA and BA, must transform themselves in order to support such end-to-end initiatives.
Architecture tooling is an important enabler of such approaches – but only when it takes a holistic approach that supports cross-cutting, transformative efforts. Capsicum and Trisotech are two examples of platforms that can play an increasingly important role in today’s enterprise digital transformations.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers.
