Enterprise Architecture Management Tool Survey 2014 Update

Over the past decade Enterprise Architecture (EA) developed to a mature discipline that is widely applied in many organizations. EA departments are rmly established in large organizations helping various stakeholders in the business and the IT departments to get a better understanding of the complex interrelationships of business processes, information systems and IT infrastructure. Main goal of these initiatives is to manage to evolution of the EA. For this purpose enterprise architects document current and future states of the EA in repositories.

Due to the complexity of organizations today many tool vendors provide software solutions for the management of these repositories. Tools for EA management support enterprise ar- chitects with the documentation, the generation of reports as well as the communication with stakeholders. The variety and the number of tools that are available for EA management on the market makes the selection of the right tool increasingly di cult for organizations. Next to well established tool vendors many smaller products are entering the market with niche products recently.

In this study we investigate EA management tools with a scenario based approach. These scenarios are evaluated with a consistent information model of a ctitious organization. Every step of these scenarios is well described and documented with screenshots to help readers comprehend the capabilities of the tools. This information model as well as the scenarios are based on the our previous EA management tool survey that was published six years ago in 2008. Although minor criterias for the assessment have changed over the time, we experienced that the general scenarios are still valid today.

Based on our previous EA management tool survey, we created an update with four new tools that were not investigated previously. The evaluation of each tool is categorized into two parts: One part deals with speci c functionality, e.g. adapting the information model, supporting multiple users and collaborative work, creating visualizations of the application landscape, or usability. The second part analyzes the enterprise architecture management support of the tools, e.g. landscape management, project portfolio management, application architecture management, SOA transformation.