Currently use Avolution Abacus as an Enterprise Architecture knowledge base to store Enterprise relevant information to perform analytics to support decision making, risk impact analysis opportunity analysis and accelerate corporate strategy execution.

Pros and Cons

Modelling the Enterprise through the creation of catalogues and matrices of Enterprise information
Creation of views to supports strategy execution and decision making
Central storage of Enterprise information
Management of a agreed meta model

Pre-defined views for foundational EA opportunities

Likelihood to Recommend

- Very easy to use for Enterprise Architects

- Accelerates time to value

- integrates with Avolution Enterprise

- Integrates with ITSM solutions

- import/export functionality is simple & flexible

Most Important Features

Storage of Enterprise relevant information
Import/export functionality for automation activities
Creation of catalogue, matrices, views
Management of the metamodel

Return on Investment

Positive - time to value for EA activities
Positive - robust decision making

Alternatives Considered

ARIS, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Excel and LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM)

- Microsoft tools are manual and data is not centralized

- ARIS is not as flexible as Avolution

- LeanIX is close, but lacks business content/accelerators that Avolution provides

- LeanIX is in the cloud and multi-user

Other Software Used

ARIS, LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM), Microsoft 365

July 13, 2017

ABACUS is a flexible & enterprise grade modelling tool that supports strategic and operational initiatives really well

Nolan Victor Pillay, Pr. Eng

Enterprise Architect

Anheuser-Busch InBev (Consumer Goods, 10,001+ employees)

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The tool is used for enterprise architecture and IT portfolio planning. It gives a centralized repository function to enable strategic and operational planning across various business processes and IT domains, and across various stakeholder requirements such as C-level, architecture, design and operational teams. It's globally used.

Pros and Cons

Customisable meta-model that allows you to focus on areas of interest, cut out the clutter, and grow organically as requirements arise.
Integration to third party products such as SharePoint, and export/import with Excel feature makes getting information in and out really easy.
Reporting and analytics, and impact analysis are simple using the built-in features as well as ABACUS intelligence and/or integration to third party analytics tools.

More standard connectors for integration with other modeling tools could be beneficial for companies having legacy tools/fragmented toolsets.
Better automated diagramming features would be useful.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited scenarios include IT portfolio management, project portfolio management, enterprise architecture planning, modeling of business capabilities, using standard frameworks that ship out of the box such as TOGAF, and integration with SharePoint.

Less appropriate scenarios would be detailed data modeling and using the tool expecting to get model drive code execution.

Return on Investment

Enabled rationalization of IT portfolio to save costs
Supporting of strategic planning of EA and IT initiatives

Alternatives Considered

ARIS Business Process Management (BPM) and Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect

More flexible and user friendly interface.
Better customization enables organisations to grow based on their maturity and requirements
Avolution is highly rated on Gartner and Forrester reviews

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