Corporate IT is expanding and so does the number of hardware and software enterprises these days. This can add to the complexity. According to the Impact of Automation on IT Operations report, 76% of IT professionals consider the complexity of the IT landscape as the biggest hurdle in the productivity of IT operations.
In order to prevent complexity and streamline operations, you need an enterprise architecture. It can pave the way for innovation at the business unit level and free up your IT team from mundane tasks and help them focus on mission-driven projects. In addition to this, it can minimize your risks and ensure optimal resource utilization. When you have an enterprise architecture in front of you, you can easily decide where a particular service belongs to at a service level.
In this article, HOSTNOC will give you seven reasons why you should invest in enterprise architectural tools.
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Hassle-Free Management
You need specialized enterprise architecture tools if you want to manage your enterprise architecture efficiently. It can not only help you control the number of architecture documents and keep the complexity under control. The lower the number of architecture documents you have, the more convenient it is to manage. Moreover, enterprise architecture can give you a holistic view, which can come in handy when it comes to managing assets.
You can also identify areas that need improvement and make changes to those areas to increase the efficiency of your organization. Not only that, you can identify and take advantage of opportunities and prepare yourself for emerging challenges. It can also help you identify multiple applications which serve a single purpose so you can eliminate redundancies and make the process leaner and smarter.
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Reusability
Once you have an enterprise architecture tool, you can collaborate more effectively on projects. This also allows your team member to stay laser-focused on their goal and play their part in making the project a success. Building blocks that are designed by a single architect can be reused by other architects especially if they are stored in a repository. This means that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel whenever you are working on a new project. This can also save you a lot of time and effort as you can reuse components instead of creating newer ones.
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Consistency
When your web design agency business is just starting with enterprise architecture, they might be experimenting with different techniques and methods. This can lead to fragmentation in architecture and might result in gaps and overlaps. Your goal should be to put all the pieces of the puzzle together to bring more consistency. This would only be possible if you use an enterprise architecture tool. An enterprise architecture tool can ensure that your architecture is stored and administered consistently and as a coherent whole.
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Resource Allocation and Optimization
One of the biggest advantages of cloud-based tools is accessibility. This also trickles into cloud-based architecture tools. In addition to being more accessible, it also lets you assign tasks more conveniently using AIOps. This can drastically improve collaboration. Cloud technology gives you the flexibility to collaborate on architecture irrespective of where you are and what time is it.
With effective enterprise architecture tools, you can assign the right task to the right people and ensure optimal resource utilization while minimizing waste. You can even create dedicated teams for different tasks. For instance, you can create a separate team for conducting research and a different team for designing a roadmap and blueprint.
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Higher Productivity
One of the first questions top management will ask when you try to convince them to purchase enterprise architecture tools is how it will benefit our business? What will be the return on investment and how quickly you will be able to recover the cost of these tools? Thankfully, you can tell them that enterprise architecture tools can increase your productivity, save a lot of time and money in the long run.
Additionally, you can recover the cost of these tools within months, which is another big plus. All this will help you convince top management to invest in those tools. When you look at it from the cost/benefit ratio, it can certainly look like a sensible investment your business should make.
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Administration
The pace at which technology is evolving forcing businesses to adopt flexible systems which can scale up and down according to the business needs. The advantage of investing in enterprise architecture tools is that it can make administration a breeze. Even though you can create the enterprise architecture using word processors, spreadsheets, or presentation software but it involves a lot of manual work.
With enterprise architecture tools, you can easily make changes and it will automatically be reflected in all the documents in real-time. As a result, you can have a single and updated document, which not only represents the situation correctly but also is easier to manage.
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Maturity
We are just starting out so we don’t need an enterprise architecture tool. This is the most common response you will get when you ask them to invest in enterprise architecture tools. They argue that they first need to get some experience working with architecture then they can adopt one of these tools. What they do not realize is that these tools will only make their journey a lot more convenient.
They try too hard to create a future enterprise architecture for their business. They try to embed that architecture in their organization. Since they don’t have visibility, their efforts don’t bear fruit. On the contrary, if they had used an enterprise architecture tool, they would be following a systematic approach that consists of multiple phases. The biggest advantage is that all these phases are designed after years of experience and research hence they are more mature. This will lead to more refined outcomes and you are less likely to bump into any issues.
Which is the biggest reason why you would choose enterprise architectural tools? Share it with us in the comments section below.