erwin Evolve by Quest Reviews

Evolve's reverse engineering ability is quite useful.

Evolve is primarily focused on the entity's licenses diagrams, but it would be nice if erwin could integrate case development, so that it shows the ER diagram plus certain inputs on the use cases and how the data is used. That deviates somewhat from the overall scope, so maybe they could call it a different product. 

We use EA Agile for enterprise architecture, which means that we want to catalog and keep track of all of the architectural pieces of our enterprise, including processes, applications, servers, and locations. We catalog 24 primitive/primary objects with the tool. The purpose is to provide the employees with a website, a navigable information source, of anything that makes up the enterprise. They can look up all of the servers in here. They can look up the applications, processes, security elements, and so forth. It's publishing information and sharing all the details — the architectural blueprints of our enterprise — with the entire corporation.

We have deployed it on Google Cloud Platform and onto VM. It's our own installation but it is not on-premises; it is in the cloud.

Two years ago, the solution was instrumental in the following way. We're in California so we're affected by the fires and mudslides that happen here. Our main data center was almost completely cut off for a couple of days. After we restored everything and we went through the disaster recovery scenario, a lot of stakeholders were surprised to find out that the systems or application that they care about were not under disaster recovery protection and they were wondering why. We were able to use the tool to show them how they could see what was under disaster recovery and why their things were not under disaster recovery, which was basically due to cost. Everybody then got excited about having more disaster recovery because when disaster happens you're more worried about it for the future.

We used the tool to work with the stakeholders of various departments to flesh out plans for disaster recovery, showing them what could be affected when something is broken or isn't working. It was a good visual aid, since we have all the data in there, to explain to the end-users and the stakeholders what we had to do to go forward. It wasn't really about saving money. It was about improving our business, but it was instrumental in helping regular businesspeople understand the IT world.

Overall, the solution provides output for users across our whole company. It brings visibility to every single employee. We're a software company and we have a lot of applications. There are people at the helpdesk and people in different departments, HR and so forth, who are responsible for a particular application. If one of those applications isn't working and someone calls the helpdesk, the helpdesk needs to know who they're supposed to route the ticket to. In the old days, we would keep all that information in a spreadsheet and we would circulate the spreadsheet, and we would update it once a year and it was always out of date.

With erwin, we keep track of that stuff in the database and they can very easily look it up. They can also see what they are responsible for themselves. An employee could then negotiate with their boss about being responsible for a server, for example, because it's more interesting to that employee. erwin keeps track of roles and responsibilities much better than anything else we've had before. That is one example of why it's valuable to everybody in the company.

The solution is critical to driving business change and transformation in our company in that it helps us make the argument for driving change. The application itself isn't going to drive any change; it's inert. Recently, one of the directives that our CIO has been interested in is moving applications that we have to the Google Cloud. One way I can help convince people to take their application and move it to the cloud is to show them how many other applications are moved to the cloud, and which ones have not been moved. This tool helps me visualize that for people, and I can very quickly pull up the diagram of all the applications that are in our data center in California. That can drive the conversation. erwin supports change and innovation but you have to use it properly.

We were trying to evaluate and compare it with other architecture tools. 

One of my colleagues, a servicing data architect, was trying to create a use case for one of his more recent projects, where he services an auto loan. I was trying to create a process around when some of the dealers sell an automobile, procure an automobile, and finance the automobile, then sell the automobile and get their money.

If we could have gotten it to work, I think it would have really been useful. The software architects felt that what they did already linked to it because it had the data modeling portion. When they did their technical specs, they used Evolve to drive out their technical specs. They would give us their overall technology/technical specifications to then model the data, but we were very frustrated because of the way the data was presented. 

At a detailed level, the software architects would say how the data element should look, what characters it should have along with the naming convention, and how long it should be. We would definitely challenge them on that because we felt that this was our job to do. In some cases, they would throw everything in one table, and we would say, "No, that's not the way we're going to do this because we were doing things in third normal form for our operational databases." 

We reserve the right to change the design, so a lot of the software architects would have to say, "These are just for illustration only. The final data design will be done by the data architect," since that document was the one that the QA testers would use. There was always this problem with them having to update their spec when we made changes. We thought with erwin Evolve we could get something that was more robust from a data point of view.

We are using it for our enterprise architecture reference, describing everything with it. We are describing our business process and we are trying to describe our data catalog. We are describing our complete applications assets, and we are interfacing to the CMDB of our providers. We are also managing some roadmaps for main transformation programs.

We have also linked it to our documentation repository, so we have a description of our data documents.

We are using it to deploy all the processes and IT interfaces for our biggest update project. Without this tool, we couldn't have made and defined all the new processes. Using the tool we have managed to document some 200 business processes. It also helped us to design our qualification review, because we are a pharmaceutical.

The most helpful part is when you try to integrate things; when you have to define some business rules and make sure that there is some integrity in these business rules.

In addition, it has helped us to define the configuration of our SAP software. 

These are the areas it has really helped us during the two last years. And now we are using it to evaluate our software application changes. It is really helpful because we have documented a lot of things and enables us to do impact analyses.

We have grown through acquisition so we have a number of different divisions throughout our company. There was an initiative to develop standard operating procedures to be used across all the divisions. We needed a way to be able to present the information to our employees in an easy to consume manner. We use Casewise to be able to capture that information and store it and we use Evolve to be able to present it in a user-friendly way, for consumption.

The product is a repository for our procedures and what it really helped improve are the processes that we want in place to gather the standard operating procedures. As part of the governance around that, we had a team that represented all the divisions and we had to get to consensus on a way to document a procedure that would work across all the divisions; to get some sort of standardization and agreement. The Evolve tool was a real impetus to have that happen. To put it into the tool, they had to go through that governance process, to really do some standardization on our processes and procedures. Then we were able to put them in the tool. Now, in projects across the US, they're able to find the standard operating procedures to help them on their jobs.

The process of capturing all the standard operating procedures forced us to come to an agreement across all the divisions, as far as standardization goes. That was really huge. It was something that was really needed. Going through that effort enabled us to become more a single company, as opposed to independent divisions where each had its own way of doing things.

The solution provides output for users across our whole organization. Now, there's a website that everybody has access to and they can look at the policies in our company and at our procedures, including the application catalog and the different parts of our enterprise organization.

I mostly use it for enterprise architectural work, doing business process modeling and high-level strategic modeling with its capabilities. 

Others in our company are using it for IT infrastructure, such as aligning requirements to system solutions; that kind of architectural work. 

We don't use it much for the data architecture capability it has. That's actually where erwin started, it's their strength. They're one of the premier companies in that space. I'm not a database architect, but I'm aware that it's a great product in that space. We just haven't used it much for that.

We just upgraded to the 2018 version. We were using the 2015 version, the Casewise Suite and Evolve. So we're a bit behind.

It's helped us advance in our capabilities to perform model-based systems engineering, and also model-based enterprise architecture; in those two domains. By placing the data and the metadata into a model, which is what the tool does, you gain the abilities for linkages between different objects in the model, linkages that you cannot get on paper or with Visio or PowerPoint. That is a huge discriminator.

In addition, the solution’s web platform tells us which insights have been accessed the most. That provides us with clues as to what are the most important things to our stakeholders, so we can better adapt to their needs.

I use the automatic diagramming features a lot. When one of erwin's company reps showed that to me a couple of years ago, I was stunned. That saves hours of work in diagramming. That capability is something I have not seen in other suppliers' tools. That really helps too with when your data is up to date. The tool will then automatically generate the updated diagram based on the data, so you know it's always the most current version. You can't do that in things like Visio and PowerPoint. They're static snapshots of a diagram at some point in time. This is live and dynamic.

We do a lot of system interface analysis. We have about 40 systems that we rolled up and manage at the CIO level, in the office where I work. We do system analysis: system coordination, systems that are being retired, systems that are merging together, systems that are consuming other capabilities resulting in an older system being shut down. We organize, manage, and administer the funding that flows to those 40 different systems. We use the tool to model and analyze the decisions we make about those 40 systems. Those kinds of decisions are helped with the analysis we do and the modeling that we do.

We also have an associated group that works on the workflow process side. I helped them convert a lot of their old Visio work to erwin EA. That took a lot of man-hours.

We use it as a hosted solution. erwin hosts the servers that provide the product.

With Visio, you simply get a picture, a diagram. It doesn't have any intelligence behind it and you can't really do any collaboration. The collaboration that we do use with erwin EA is like a check-in/check-out-type of functionality where, if I'm working on a diagram, my colleague can only see the diagram but he can't change it. He's locked out while I'm working on it.

Because work is in a single, hosted location, everyone is hitting the same image. That's helped us a lot in being able to share work and exchange ideas and thoughts. We can make changes and still have it all in one central repository. That's helped us a lot because we're a geographically distributed group of people.

Before erwin, we would have had to send giant files back and forth. We had to send PDFs and printed copies of things. To work in Visio you really have to exchange files: You update a file, send it to a person, have them look at it, mark it up, scan it, and PDF it back to you. It was not very good.

We use it for the registration of any IT solution. This solution is now linked to our CMDB (our technical asset management database). We also use it for its business capabilities support, e.g., business subjects or business data used by each application to understand what we are doing with solutions and trying to rationalize it as much as possible for our entire worldwide team.

erwin is for all users and the chief distributor of the web interface. From the admin side, we are using the back-end of erwin to try and do data modeling.

People use this solution for many IT functions. It can be an IT business partner looking for IT solutions in other countries, a project manager or architect looking to implement a solution, or IT leaders getting KPIs on a report.

We are using their SaaS version hosted by Azure. Therefore, we are using the latest version.

We use erwin Evolve to publish to the website. This allows us to enable publishing our website using parameterisation features. In a very fast, quick way, we can publish a table or chart onto a website.

This is the first time that we have a central repository in our company where we can see and look at all the legacy applications which are used to serve the world. We are able to consolidate all our new solutions/technologies and plan some standards in our company.

Its reports show our IT landscape and we can better understand how technology is communicating.

It's taking the place more and more of our daily usage, as a way to consume information since it's more concentrated. While I don't think it will become critical, it will become more useful on a daily basis in order to plan and follow IT transformation.