Great design tool for technically-oriented users
March 13, 2020
Great design tool for technically-oriented users
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect
Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect's typical usage scenarios comprise the capturing of business requirements, of more detailed use cases and scenarios that mimic required business situations and processes in a comprehensive way that is understood by business stakeholders as well as IT analysts. Business requirements can be then further translated to business logic (models, algorithms, process flows/workflows, business data objects, and other artifacts) that are linked to a high level as well as low-level ICT design (application logic, integration models, data models, etc.). The main reason and advantage for putting all the above into one IT solution (Enterprise Architect) is to provide a set of business and IT models, that are interrelated and any change to components such as process, data entity, integration service, business requirement, etc., can be traced to all other components. This would be the best practice - to have a tool that keeps track of any change you plan to do to your systems and helps indicates impacted components and relations. In practice, there are several obstacles to reaching this best usage practice.
- Enables recording and managmenet of all changes/requirements on ICT solutions.
- Improves transparency of relations among models.
- Helps to manage complexity of documentation.
- Supports well team collaboration (server version with shared database) and allows to manage user access rules.
- Essential tool for enterprise, application, integration and data architects.
- Is well thought through in respect to user experience, it is easy to work in the tool for both, business occasional users as well as seasoned IT analysts.
- Management of change requests or business requirements is much better implemented in JIRA or Confluence, there is an option to integrate EA artifacts with Confluence/JIRA specifications, via third party solution, in my experience this works one-directional, from EA to Confluence. Maybe there exists other solutions with a full synchronization. The result today is that you can share e.g. architectures designed in Enterprise Architect in Confluence.
- Model governance, especially by working on large scale projects with lots of people, requires double checking of any major change you want to do to the models, e.g. deleting of a particular item/component. Some feature to make deleting "more safe" would be nice.
- No immediate impact, rather long-term benefits, especially when companies launch large restructuring projects, unbundling (as seen in Telecommunications, Utilities etc.) this tool accelerates the analytical tasks. It can save literally man-years of work in any large company, with complex ICT landscape.
- No negative impact, the cost of the tool is negligible, compared to the benefits.
BiZZdesign represents a different new concept to enterprise architecture, its gravity center is not technical modelling, but rather a view on capturing the whole end-user experience or customer journey. It also allows to grasp areas as internal company capabilities, required for adoption/changes and operation of the solution, uses the same Archimate modelling language. This solution is in my opinion a new generation enabling to not only design the solutions, but also manage the whole application portfolio with respect to capabilities and requirement parameters.
Do you think Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect's feature set?
Yes
Did Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect again?
Yes