EA Tools and Cost

The availability of useful EA tools is critical to the approach to EA. It facilitates and enables the development, storage and presentation of the work. When selecting proper EA tools, there are many factors that need to be considered.(Factors listed in Enterprise Architecture Tool Selection Guide,Institute for Enterprise Architecture Developments)

• Enterprise Architects
• Solution Architects
• Strategic Planners / Management
• Enterprise Program Managers
• Software Architects / engineers
• External Partners

The modeling language differs in ability, flexibility to express the relations among different domains in the architect and to explain the processes of business and information usage.

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A wide variety of organization and process modeling languages are currently in use, among which the popular ones are: (According to Institute for Enterprise Architecture Developments)

• The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standard for business process modeling, and provides a graphical notation for specifying business processes in a Business Process Diagram (BPD), based on a flowcharting technique very similar to activity diagrams from Unified Modeling Language (UML). The objective of BPMN is to support business process management for both technical users and business users by providing a notation that is intuitive to business users yet able to represent complex process semantics.
• IDEF originating from the US Ministry of Defense is a collection of 16 (unrelated) diagramming techniques, three of which are widely used: IDEF0 (function modeling), IDEF1/IDEF1x (information and data modeling) and IDEF3 (process description).
• ArchiMate as an Enterprise Architecture modeling language, originally developed as an initiative of a consortium of Dutch organizations and the Telematica Institute, today ArchiMate is part of the Open Group set of Standards.