IRIS Business Architect is not just another EA tool. It’s foremost a business-centric collaborative planning software application that includes business design, transformation architecture, initiative/project planning, and agile delivery for the entire planning ecosystem of an organization. It’s often owned by the Business Transformation Committee of an organization, not just the CIO. Here’s how our software application differs from the other enterprise architecture tools.
Purpose
The reason why our clients purchase IRIS Business Architect is that it's foremost a business-centric collaborative planning tool that includes elaborate features meant to facilitate the execution of these 5 steps of an agile strategy execution, which includes business design, transformation architecture, initiative/project planning, and agile delivery features, as shown in Figure 2 below.
As for EA tools, they are before anything else an IT-centric planning and architecting software application used by enterprise architects and IT architects. Configuring EA tools to enable them to execute the 5 steps of an agile strategy execution will prove to be extremely expensive.
Ownership
IRIS Business Architect is sometimes maintained by the CIO, but it will often be owned by the Business Transformation Committee. As for EA tools, they will be owned most of the time by the CIO department of an organization.
Modeling Standards
IRIS Business Architect is aligned to the most common and useful enterprise and architecture modeling standard used by enterprise architects, which is the Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). On top of this standard, our software application is also aligned to most usual business standards and methodologies, like the Business Motivation Model (BMM), the Business Model Canvas (BMC), Business Architecture Body of Knowledge (BIZBOK), customer value map (CVM), detailed Gap Analysis, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis (SWOT), the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK), the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), and Six Sigma.
Some EA tools may align to one or two of the standards and methodologies that IRIS Business Architect follows, but most will adhere to TOGAF, BPMN, and other very technical and IT-siloed standards like ARCHIMATE, DMN, UML, and ERD.
Pricing
IRIS Business Architect is a very affordable planning software application, as shown here. It will cost less than US$45,000 for 10 users and 60 viewers for the first year, including an IRIS Business Architect Enterprise version, Gold maintenance and support, a managed and secured cloud hosting of a virtual server, and implementation services. Most EA tools are at least twice as expensive as IRIS Business Architect.
Collaboration with Ecosystem
IRIS Business Architect viewers can view, comment, and be alerted of changes. Additionally, users (editors) can manage, allocate and schedule tasks. Most EA tools are more limited than IRIS Business Architect when it comes to collaboration outside of enterprise architects and IT architects.
KPIs
IRIS Business Architect is delivered with 20 KPIs out-of-box. Customized KPIs in IRIS Business Architect can easily be configured by its users. EA tools only have a few KPIs at best. Configuring customized KPIs is not an easy task with typical EA tools.
Restful APIs
IRIS Business Architect is delivered with very powerful open Restful APIs that can be configured by either the client or Benchmark. It allows you to intelligently synchronize data with other software applications' data, including ServiceNow, Jira, project management tools, other EA tools, and many other software applications owned by your collaborators. Intelligent synchronization enables our clients to take into account the changes made to the data of all synchronized applications and keep the latest version of changes among others. IRIS Business Architect’s intelligent synchronization feature works either using Excel or through our JSON-based REST services.
With most EA tools, their open API is not easy to configure. Some EA tools do not have any restful API feature yet.
Browser-Based
IRIS Business Architect is 100% browser-based. Many EA tools only have a few modules that are browser-based. Some have none. We are aware of only one EA tool that is 100% browser-based.
Implementation
We strongly recommend using Docker for implementation. It’s far more efficient. It takes only one day of implementation on a secured and managed cloud virtual server and usually about 3 days for on-premise implementations. Typically, EA tools require much longer and much more expensive implementation.
Control-Based Security Permissions
Very few people should view the entire planning and architecture of your organization. This is why IRIS Business Architect has very elaborate control-based security permission allowing the administrator of IRIS Business Architect to configure permissions exactly the way that they want it. Most EA tools do not allow control-based security permissions as sophisticated as IRIS Business Architect. Some EA tools do not offer that feature.
Diagrams
Another key distinction of IRIS Business Architect is that it allows its diagrams and tables to be built in a minute or two from pre-defined, extensible templates on any element of your business and enterprise architecture model. Custom diagrams and tables can also be defined with IRIS Business Architect. As for EA tools, they are designed with a predefined set of diagrams and tables.
Training
IRIS Business Architect is very intuitive. After a few hours, users are autonomous and can do what they want quickly. Learning 98% of the features offered by IRIS Business will take you and your team at most 10 hours. As for most EA tools, the learning curve is much longer. Training can take at least a week for most EA tools.
Overall
Overall, IRIS Business Architect is an outstanding collaborative business architecture tool and a good EA tool. Any organization serious about their business transformation should consider using our software application. IRIS Business Architect will easily complement your current EA tool. You will find over time that many of your EA tool users will eventually switch to IRIS Business Architect. As for the business and IT stakeholders that collaborate with business architects and enterprise architects, they will be overwhelmed to finally be able to view the portion of your business and enterprise architecture model that is relevant to what they are doing. It will be easier for them to corroborate and enhance iteratively your business and enterprise architecture model. Collaboration will be increased and planning of your organization will finally stop being executed in siloes.
