Improving Communication between Business and IT with Enterprise Architecture Information
Aug 12, 2021
Olga Lucia Salgado, a senior enterprise architect at a privately held manufacturing company, used to rely too much on Excel and SharePoint for enterprise architecture (EA) information. She and her team came to the conclusion that an EA tool was needed to help them mature and organize their information and analysis.
After evaluating a number of vendors – including Orbus and LeanIX – the solution they chose to go with was BiZZdesign. According to Salgado, the reasons were: one vendor did not have the whole modeling capability that they really wanted, and with the other vendor, it would have “ended up being a lot more expensive” if they wanted to scale.
Salgado’s full review on IT Central Station shows how BiZZdesign’s Horizzon platform provides a single source of data and pays huge dividends.
Salgado has the latest cloud version of Horizzon and shared that they are using it to “analyze our IT investment portfolio and the architecture related to it.” That includes process, data, applications, and infrastructure. They collect all of that information for each of their initiatives or projects and analyze it on HoriZZon.
The functionality of Horizzon has greatly improved communication and collaboration at Salgado’s company. She said, “We now have one way for communicating between IT and business, and that’s true, as well, for our partners or implementers when we do IT projects.” With this approach, all stakeholders are talking about the same elements. They don’t have to refer to different versions.
In addition, the Horizzon portal allows Salgado’s team to generate visualizations and charts that can be understood by people who aren’t enterprise architects or technical people. She remarked,
Salgado will soon utilize Horizzon to quickly identify where there are risks in their technology portfolio. She explained that they are implementing metrics that allow them to measure and do a risk assessment of their applications. She noted that “this is a very important aspect because it’s a way that we can provide value to the organization from the architectural perspective. So it’s not only to help on the investment side, but also to prevent risk.”
The solution also brings high visibility into the costs and how they are set up in their infrastructure. Salgado remarked, “It comes down to two main areas: helping us to decide where we should put our investment in the portfolio and, at the same time, how we mitigate risk in our current landscape. Of course, that includes costs. That’s what we are going to end up using it for: our IT investments and analyzing our operating models.”
Salgado likes the flexibility of modeling for standards like ArchiMate and, at the same time, BPMN. She explained that “it allows us to connect elements from different areas and have a single repository and a single source of truth. It gives us one place to do analysis throughout the organization. I also like the dashboards. [HoriZZon’s] breadth of capabilities is very good from the modeling perspective, as it really covers all of the standards that we use in our company and even some that we haven’t really used yet. I’m sure we will use those others as well because we keep growing our information.”
Salgado’s experience with BiZZdesign’s technical support has been very good. She particularly likes their online ticketing system. “By answering different questions, you are able to raise how critical an issue is,” she shared. She then added, “For the ones that I have raised that were very critical – and that has only happened on a couple of occasions – they have responded very quickly; within one hour. For the other issues that are not that critical, there is still a good response time.”
Salgado reports that her company has seen return on investment (ROI), but more from the non-financial benefits. “The ROI is that our architectural practice has matured and BiZZdesign tools have supported that maturity process. The time to value was pretty fast, considering that we are a small team.”
Overall, Horizzon has been an important part of their EA solution. She offers this advice for new customers: “Start simple and be consistent and understand what the longer-term vision is as well. That way, you know what the next step is and can keep growing in that direction. Also, for any use case that you create, you should really create it in parallel on the Horizzon dashboard and analyses. That will allow you to start showing the value of the information that you are putting into a bigger community.”
Would you like more information about how we can support your transformation efforts with an enterprise architecture approach? Get in touch at innovation@bizzdesign.com
