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Business Architecture and Capability Modeling Software Evaluation Matrix

Provided by Capstera.com What are the criteria one should use to evaluate a business architecture and capability modeling software? This matrix lists 16 criteria for evaluation. Please feel free to add or modify the matrix to fit your needs. We hope you will make an informed and intelligent in selecting the business architecture and capability modeling software vendor.

Evaluation Criteria

Description Does the business architecture tool vendor offer the features that are relevant and important to your business architecture efforts? Features to consider are ability to 1. Breadth of Features and Depth create and manage capability maps, draft value stream flows, create and analyze process flows, generate key of Functionality: functional requirements to evolve capabilities, render heat maps, capture rich semantics and compose projects/initiatives using underlying capabilities. Is the vendor focused on business architecture and capability modeling as a core feature and the anchor of its 2. Focus: software? Or is business architecture and capability mapping features just a check box? How easy is the business architecture and capability modeling software? In particular, if your wish is to bring along business users to not only consume, but participate, 3. Ease of Use: contribute and use the tool, the threshold of complexity needs to be very low. What type of modeling capabilities does the business 4. Modeling Capabilities: architecture tool offer? How easy is it for the business architects, enterprise architects, business analysts and product managers to collaborate on creating, managing, extending and evolving the business architecture and capability modeling artifacts? How well and how easy does the business architecture software allow you to generate nested capability maps, marked up value streams and processes, heat maps, footprint analysis and other visually appealing artifacts What configuration options are available to tweak the business architecture and capability modeling software to your enterprise needs? What type of technology stack is the business architecture and capability modeling tool built on? Does it use open standards as well as open source components? How easy it is to implement and rollout the software? If a business architecture and capability modeling tool takes more than a week to implement, it is perhaps a utility for IT users, not necessarily business users.

5. Collaboration:

6. Presentation:

7. Configurability:

8. Technical Stack:

9. Implementation:

10. Openness:

11. Customer Service:

12. Interoperability: 13. Deployment Options:

14. Product Roadmap:

15. Pricing:

How open is the business architecture software vendor in terms of intake and export of data? Does the tool vendor offer APIs? OR import/export functionality in common formats like CSV, Tab Delimited or XML? How well does the business architecture tool vendor support the software? What type of training programs and online help are available? What is the customer service philosophy of the vendor? How well does the business architecture tool vendor play well with other tools in the adjacent realms? Does the vendor offer a cloud-based offering as well as an option to deploy the software inside a firewall? Does the roadmap of the business architecture and capability modeling tool vendor conform to your future needs? Is their product vision compatible with your own evolution? What is the pricing model for the business architecture and capability modeling tool? In addition to total cost of ownership, what is the lock-in period and also the friction/cost of moving to another tool? What is the financial strength and business viability of the vendor? What steps are the business architecture tool vendors willing to take to mitigate the risk? For example, some vendors will place the source code in escrow to ensure that in case of their challenges to the vendors core business, the enterprise can have a path to continuing to use the software and make appropriate customizations.

16. Financial Viability:

Disclosure: This business architecture software evaluation matrix is a part of a series of insights published by Capstera.com, a capability-based enterprise transformation framework and software. Capstera.com helps enterprises better define their business so as to link execution to strategy and help build optimal IT solutions. Capstera leverages capabilities as the capstone of business definition and combines best elements of business architecture, capabilities mapping, process analysis, and requirements management. This enables companies to establish a common language and foster alignment across business/IT, it helps reduce redundancy and rework, and it helps aligns execution with strategy.

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