First and foremost within the scope of improvement for the solution would be the cost. It's very costly, which restricts us from using it more extensively and requires us to get approval from the CFO level on how many people we are going to expose the tool to and how many people are actually going to use it. For example, if a particular team has three architects, we always restrict access to only one because of the cost impact, even though those three architects may be taking care of three different areas. We first expose it to one architect and let him complete his part and then we revoke the permission from that person and give it to another architect to take care of his areas, etc. So every time somebody requests BiZZdesign access, we have to recalculate our existing licenses and how we can effectively prioritize and reuse them. We understand that enterprise architecture is not cheap, but I still believe that there is room for improvement from BiZZdesign on this issue. The second point is the user experience. When somebody is documenting solutions in BiZZdesign, it's not very user-friendly at all. There is a learning curve for people to get accustomed to it. The drag-and-drop features and adding properties are okay. But suppose somebody has drawn something incorrectly. The way that type of thing is reverted requires training. There are things that a user can't figure out on his own. He definitely has to sit with somebody from BiZZdesign, if his organization does not have any experience with the solution. Or, if his organization has people with experience, then he has to sit with a person who has already worked on it. Otherwise, he will have to spend quite a significant amount of time learning it. It's not at all user-friendly and requires a lot of practice to get the hang of it. I feel that there is a lot of room for improvement here. A tool like this should be intuitive. I have seen table charts where, if the chart is a little too big, it does not fit in HoriZZon and it is not at all visible. Even if you zoom out and scroll, it's nasty. I don't know an enterprise architecture tool like this—and HoriZZon, in particular, is meant for viewing things. The visibility of things and the user experience in HoriZZon are horrible. There have been several times where we could not publish a chart properly and we had to break the chart into small tables and create multiple artifacts, creating a complete mess. This should be seriously taken up by BiZZdesign because there is a lot of scope for improvement in terms of usability. It's not at all good, unfortunately. There is documentation, of course, and the documentation is good, but not everything is written in the documentation. You will definitely need some intervention either from BiZZdesign's paid consultancy or from a person who has experience working with BiZZdesign. Without that, there will be areas where people will be stuck, for sure. They cannot just figure it out on their own, reading the documentation. In addition, if an organization does not have experience with the solution and needs to work with BiZZdesign, the BiZZdesign consulting cost is also very high. I would rate the solution’s ability to help us manage costs and risks when it comes to the IT and application portfolios in our organization at six out of 10. The pros in this respect are that we can load the costs, create charts, and create different artifacts and publish them to HoriZZon for the key stakeholders to look at. The con is that, while BiZZdesign does have API capabilities, they come with a different licensing strategy. Also, when we looked into it about one year ago, it was not that mature. We have various systems where these costs are stored. We have to export the data from those systems into a spreadsheet and then import it into BiZZdesign. The entire process is manual. Cost is something that is dynamic. For example, we are heavily using AWS cloud, and we get a bill from the vendor every month. How can we monitor those costs? BiZZdesign is not suitable for that kind of monitoring. There are other tools, like CloudHealth by VMware, that give us more of a real-time view of these costs. Whereas with BiZZdesign, because it's a completely manual process, every month-end somebody has to confirm receipt of the bill, get the export of the cost from the system, import it into BiZZdesign and then notify the CxOs. But it's not a real-time view. By the time we load the cost, it's already late. It's a six out of 10 because it has some capability, but it does not have the capability of showing data in real-time. And it's not only cost data. It has connectivity with ServiceNow and SQL Server, but nothing else. We mostly rely on spreadsheet input, but that's a completely manual process. Finally, BiZZdesign has some capabilities in terms of business process flow, but it's not comparable with other tools. Our organization is already spending a lot of money on BiZZdesign. But since BiZZdesign does not have business-process documentation capabilities, our organization had to go for another product called BusinessOptix, to document the business process. We are actually losing the goal of having everything in a single repository. Our enterprise-architecture-related artifacts are in BiZZdesign and our business-process-related artifacts are in BusinessOptix. A compromise solution we have come up with is that, because BiZZdesign is able to provide a hyperlink, we have included all the business process flows as hyperlinks from BiZZdesign, so that people can refer to them from BiZZdesign. But we ended up having two licenses for two very costly products. We have a few users in this one and a few users in that one and some users in both systems. From a business process perspective, the bottom line is that BiZZdesign is not ideal. If these things can be improved, a lot of people will start using BiZZdesign. These are the areas that are restricting organizations from using it.
