What's Up With Business Architecture Vendors?

William Ulrich

The Jan. 2010 bulletin has an upcoming article that I wrote titled "What's up with the business architecture tool vendors?" In this article, I have outlined the current state of BA tooling and what steps vendors should take this year in order to provide more useful tooling to the business architecture community.

Take a look at my blog posting for more details at http://brainstorm.leveragesoftware.com/blog_post_view.aspx?BlogPostID=b60f571234cf471b893a1562cdbea0b6

If you are a business architect and share similar frustrations, I would like to hear from you. What have your BA tooling experiences been and what would you recommend that tool vendors do to address current limitations?

If you are a tool vendor and fall into the category of tool I describe in the article, then let me know what your plans are for BA tool support in 2010. How are you addressing the needs of the business architecture community?

View the article here:
http://www.bpminstitute.org/articles/article/article/what-s-up-with-business-architecture-vendors.html

[Updated on 1/12/2010 3:54 PM]

[Updated on 1/12/2010 3:58 PM]

Geoffrey P. Balmes

There is too much of a tendance for tool vendors to try to shoe-horn a client's artifacts into their tool and then try to convince the client that the tool does what the client wants. Since we still don't have standards or an agreed upon meta model, tool vendors need to develop tool sets that the client can configure to meet their needs and extend as business architecture matures.

Business Architecture Bloggers

There are, however, best practices that vendors can draw from. Most tools have too many artifacts for the business architect, due to their enterprise architecture roots. However, using the work done to date in the standards and best practices community, you can customize a given tool repository to establish the relevant business architecture artifacts and associations. This gives you a good running start assuming you have a comfort level with the vendor and with the vendor's future plans for providing executive views from the tool.

William Ulrich
[Updated on 2/10/2010 10:59 PM]