Business Architecture and Capability Modeling Software Evaluation MatrixProvided by Capstera.com

Evaluation Criteria Description

1.      Breadth of Features and Depth

of Functionality:

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

create and manage capability maps, draft value stream

flows, create and analyze process flows, generate key

functional requirements to evolve capabilities, render heat

maps, capture rich semantics and compose

projects/initiatives using underlying capabilities.

2.      Focus:

Is the vendor focused on business architecture and

capability modeling as a core feature and the anchor of its

software? Or is business architecture and capability

mapping features just a check box?

3.      Ease of Use:

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,

contribute and use the tool, the threshold of complexity

needs to be very low.

4.      Modeling Capabilities: What type of modeling capabilities does the business

architecture tool offer?

5.      Collaboration:

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?

6.      Presentation:

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

7.      Configurability:

What configuration options are available to tweak the

business architecture and capability modeling software to

your enterprise needs?

8.      Technical Stack:

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?

9.      Implementation:

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.

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.

10.   Openness:

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?

11.   Customer Service:

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?

12.   Interoperability: How well does the business architecture tool vendor play

well with other tools in the adjacent realms?

13.   Deployment Options: Does the vendor offer a cloud-based offering as well as an

option to deploy the software inside a firewall?

14.   Product Roadmap:

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?

15.   Pricing:

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?

16.   Financial Viability:

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 vendor’s core

business, the enterprise can have a path to continuing to

use the software and make appropriate customizations.

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.