BiZZdesign HoriZZon Reviews

We are thinking of making BiZZdesign as a single source of truth for the entire American Century organization. We have found out a lot of information through their enterprise architect, scattered here and there, and it is very difficult to track. Our aim is to consolidate all the information and do something with that data/information, where meaningful insight can be extracted and presented to the executive level and other departments at American Century.

People have created many artifacts or system architecture diagrams for different American Century systems. These are now scattered here and there. We are currently working to load the architecture diagrams into BiZZdesign, which can't just be copied and pasted because of PPT. The way things do not work exactly in the same way with HoriZZon. So, we are redrawing all those artifacts and putting them systematically into the BiZZdesign system. This is the use case that I have been working on for the last month and a half to two months. Two people besides me are working on this.

We are currently in the process of starting things. We will start with its capabilities. From those capabilities, we will then go from the business to application level. After that, we will go from the application level to the technology level, then from technology level to infrastructure level, if required. In this way, we are tagging things. In American Century, there are many different applications that have different properties and parameters. Once we link everything, then it will be easier for us to generate different fields to determine, for example, what type of relationships application A has with other technical layers or the infrastructure layer. With these types of views, we can easily generate, then show the application's linkage and how this particular application can be used in a business unit, related to its capability. These types of things are currently going on. We have categorized some capabilities for Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 to tag.

We have an Adobe license, which is currently being used for investment management, distribution, enterprise architecture, etc. Now, I can generate how much I am paying for distribution, investment management, or enterprise architecture. Our senior management is very much interested in cost-related stuff, which helps them out.

We can find out why the cost is there. For example, if I have spent $10,000 in the last six months for some AWS licenses, then this information was found in different systems and scattered. Now, by using BiZZdesign and generating some charts, this information can be easily viewed and helpful for others to see.

It has different process flow diagrams. In American Century, we do something a bit different because BiZZdesign, the company, bought another software mostly for the process flow part. Now, process flow diagrams can be drawn and very easily referenced from BiZZdesign. 

We classify architecture in three ways: business layer architecture, application layer architecture, and technology layer architecture. Within these layers, different artifacts can be found. So, we are working to convert our PPTs into meaningful information. 

Once things are put in BiZZdesign, it is very easy to use. I can just click on an application component and find out if we are using this particular component. This provides us flexibility.

This solution enables us to generate different charts or graphs that can be understood by people who are not enterprise architects. We are mainly preparing these charts and graphs for senior management who don't understand much technical stuff. So, this feature can be useful. Our CEO or other executive-level personnel don't have a lot of time to look into the details. There is the BiZZdesign HoriZZon platform and their Enterprise Studio, which are two different things. The executive-level personnel don't go into Enterprise Studio at all. With the HoriZZon platform, it is very easy to link everything in a dashboard on the HoriZZon site. So, somebody goes there, clicks it, and then they can see everything. Hopefully, once everything is in place, the charts should be useful for business stakeholders to make decisions more quickly.

BiZZdesign follows the ArchiMate principle, which is very good because it is standard practice. For the last year, from architecting, enterprise, and microservices perspectives, this particular tool has been good. This is a good tool with ArchiMate capabilities. 

One good thing that I found out about Enterprise Studio is its import and export capabilities. For example, if an Excel is properly added, and that particular meta model is done in HoriZZon, then we can import thousands of records and assess their relationship very easily. This import function is a good feature in that context. HoriZZon has very good connectivity with ServiceNow, SQL tables, and Excel.

In HoriZZon, there are different matrices. In some of the cases, there is an option to aggregate them, but in other cases, we have not done this, e.g., to see the proper costs. For example, if I have 10 different matrices, then I need to create an aggregate view out of those 10 matrices somewhere. That is where we have been struggling a bit. We have a counterpart from the HoriZZon product team with whom we have bi-weekly discussions. We have suggested to him that this can be improved. He said, "He will take care of it," but he will probably give it to someone.

They have some capabilities where there is significant room for improvement when exporting. Sometimes, some of the enterprise application systems may need to be disenabled for some queries, and then I will get different returns. Once I get different returns, then the components and relationships will be created from that. I think HoriZZon should work on this. While the Excel connectivity is working, I don't think this particular REST API capability is quite there.

I have been using it for around a year.

It is deployed with AWS, so scalability should not be an issue.

The enterprise architects are using it everyday. 

For the entire staff, we make some arrangements, like admin access has only three enterprise architects, including me, at American Century. Now, for different system architects and other fellows who also need BiZZdesign, we usually try to categorize them into two parts: 

1. Somebody needs to contribute, like a designer. 
2. Somebody who only wanta to see the dashboard and information, but usually is not going to contribute. 

For this, we have set up a single sign-on mode and somebody needs to raise a request, if somebody is interested, that will come to us. One of our people will validate and approve the request after the role is assigned so the access is relevant.

Currently, we are educating people in system architecture, because somebody may only be comfortable doing something in PowerPoint. Now, if we need to put something into BiZZdesign, then some extra things need to be done. Therefore, we are currently working very closely with their enterprise architect. We are meeting with them biweekly and weekly. We are shown how some meaningful information can be extracted, which is already there, and how some meaningful information can be added to BiZZdesign.

Support is very good. I would give it 10 out of 10 because I usually receive very prompt responses from their support guys.

Previously, I worked with IBM Rational Rose, which is also very good software. It is very difficult for me to compare because I am not familiar with the latest version of Rational Rose. I used it seven to eight years ago. So, I do not know what features they currently have. 

Another guy worked with others to set the solution up for American Century.

I haven't found any issues with the scalability and licensing parts that are access-related.

This tool is good for enterprise architecting. It should be used for architecting purposes only. We can derive some meaningful insights from whatever data that we have, which is the main thing.

I would rate this solution as nine out of 10.

We use it for enterprise architecture information, with the main purpose today being to analyze our IT investment portfolio and the architecture related to it. That includes process, data, applications, and infrastructure. We collect all of that information by each of our initiatives or projects and we analyze it there. It gives us a single source of data.

We're using the latest cloud version.

It requires a lot of effort to really standardize and have a single source of truth. All of that effort can pay off when we scale and grow more and we can keep building on top of that. The functionality allows us to do that, even though I don't think we are using the full range of its capabilities yet. Because we are using the cloud version, they keep bringing new functionality. That sometimes allows us to do things in a better way.

We now have one way for communicating between IT and business, and that's true, as well, for our partners or implementers when we do IT projects. That way, everybody is talking about the same elements and we don't have different versions to refer to. The benefit is mainly in communication and collaboration.

In addition, the HoriZZon portal allows us to generate visualizations and charts that can be understood by people who aren't enterprise architects. We just started using that more extensively one month ago. It requires some understanding of how the data source works, but after you get to that point, it's pretty easy to start generating charts and information that non-technical people will get and understand. And at the end of the day, that is our purpose: to communicate to our broader audience. These visualizations and charts help business stakeholders assess and make investment decisions on technology to really optimize our IT investments, and they provide the right capabilities to achieve this strategy.

It will also help us to quickly identify where there are risks in our technology portfolio. We are implementing some metrics that allow us to measure and do a risk assessment of our applications. So far we have prepared all of the foundations to allow us to start creating that type of analysis. This is a very important aspect because it's a way that we can provide value to the organization, from the architectural perspective. So it's not only to help on the investment side, but also to prevent risk. In terms of putting plans in place to mitigate those risks, we are not there yet, but I think it will. We are still more at the stage of implementing the methodology, determining how we do assessments, and creating all of the metrics. When we finish those pieces, we will be able to use it to make decisions and plans.

BiZZdesign helps us look at everything in our enterprise architecture through a business capability lens, rather than in EA language. We are translating almost every single action from the infrastructure or technical level into what it means in terms of our capabilities or functionality.

The solution also brings high visibility into the costs of how we are set up in our infrastructure. It comes down to two main areas: helping us to decide where we should put our investment in the portfolio, and at the same time, how we mitigate risk in our current landscape. Of course, that includes costs. But because we are just building the foundation, we haven't done that yet, but that's what we are going to end up using it for: our IT investments and analyzing our operating models.

I like the flexibility of the modeling part for standards like ArchiMate and, at the same time, BPMN. It allows us to connect elements from different areas and to have a single repository and a single source of truth. It gives us one place to do analysis throughout the organization. I also like the dashboards.

Its breadth of capabilities is very good from the modeling perspective, as it really covers all of the standards that we use in our company and even some that we haven't really used yet. I'm sure we will use those others as well because we keep growing our information.

They are already working on this, but there is room for improvement in making it more seamless between the modeling and the analysis pieces. Sometimes you have to do some work in the backend to ensure that the HoriZZon portal really gets all of the information the way you want it. They are working on the seamlessness between what they call Enterprise Studio and HoriZZon. It's something we have voiced to their team and I believe it's in their roadmap.

I have been using BiZZdesign HoriZZon since May of 2019.

The stability is pretty good. I have never lost any data, even if my connection has gone down. Because it's on the cloud, you really need to have an internet connection all the time if you're using it. But whenever my connection has gone off, I have never lost data.

So far, the scalability is pretty good. We could keep growing and adding a lot more use cases that we don't have today.

We want to keep growing more use cases, more metrics, more analyses, and that means getting more data into it. One of the bigger challenges is how we ensure that the data is consistent and that it's the right data. And we need more people to maintain that data. Ideally, you should be connected to the source, even if it's done automatically with less people. That's where we need to keep growing, to make the ingestion of data more automatic.

Our experience with their technical support has been very good. They have a system where you raise a ticket in their online support. By answering different questions you are able to raise how critical the issue is. For the ones that I have raised that were very critical—and that has only happened on a couple of occasions—they have responded very quickly; within one hour. For the other ones that are not that critical, there is still a good response time. Overall, it's pretty good.

We were using Excel and Visio and SharePoint. In addition, I and maybe one other person were using the free software called Archi, which has some modeling capabilities based on ArchiMate. We are still using Visio for business process modeling and that's mainly because it's quite expensive to give licenses to everybody. So some people are creating business process models in Visio, and then we upload them to BiZZdesign. We also still have a lot of data in SharePoint.

We brought in BiZZdesign to have consistency in our information and so that we don't have to update an Excel file 10 times, just to produce one analysis. With Excel we also didn't know which one was the latest version and that created a lot of challenges. Now we know the information is in one place and that we should just be looking there from now on.

In terms of making the business case for bringing on BiZZdesign, the vendor helped by providing insights and charts we could share with business leaders. We also got some guidance from third-party reviews. We agreed that we needed an enterprise architecture tool to help us to mature and organize our information and analysis. After that, it was more a matter of which one to choose, and that came down to a cost-benefit analysis. 

The initial setup was straightforward because we are using the cloud version. The part that took us slightly longer, but it was not that bad, was to ensure that our IT directory was connected to BiZZdesign. We used the same security setup that we have in the company. But that was okay.

We did the whole implementation within three months. It only took a couple of weeks to have the system running, and after that it was more up to us to decide and define how we were going to start using the tool. The tool is really open to whatever you are using in your company. So there's some work to do in defining your metamodels and what kind of data you want in it, and around how to implement or define the processes that you want around management of data.

We used consultancy services from BiZZdesign. They were with us for four days. They not only helped us to learn how to use the tool, but from the enterprise architecture perspective, they showed us how to take advantage of it as well. That was pretty good.

From our side there were just three people involved. And that was more because of the data that we wanted to collect from different areas. We had to understand the current situation, what information we had available and whether we could upload it straight into BiZZdesign or we needed to do some compression of the data to allow us to use it.

Our whole team is involved in maintaining it. Everybody is responsible for their own information, so everybody has to add different pieces. Ours is a small team today with seven people, although I am the sole administrator. The team of seven is using the modeling piece and ensuring the data is being collected, but we have around 80 users who are reading and consuming the information from HoriZZon. They are mainly the IT community, in different IT areas. We have some business users, what we call "business sponsors," at least one per function. We also have an internal auditing team that is doing all of the analysis of risk in BiZZdesign.

We have seen ROI, but more from the non-financial benefits. The ROI is that our architectural practice has matured and BiZZdesign tools have supported that maturity process.

The speed to value is more dependent on the team than the tool. It's more a matter of the number of resources and the amount of time that we can dedicate to it, rather than the tool having any limitations. But the time to value is pretty fast, considering that we are a small team.

It took us almost a year to start showing value, and we are still in that process. It's only now that we have the foundation there and have established the processes where we can start seeing the different analyses and perspectives.

There are no costs in addition to their standard licensing fees.

We evaluated MEGA, Orbus and LeanIX.

LeanIX didn't have the whole modeling capability and we really wanted that. Orbus was connected to Microsoft and, in theory, that gave us some good options, but their pricing model was based on every single functionality having a price. The pricing was comparable but if we wanted to scale, it would have ended up being a lot more expensive. BiZZdesign gave us one price with all of the functionality, and we could scale as much as we needed.

Start simple and be consistent and understand what is the longer-term vision, as well. That way, you know what the next step is and can keep growing in that direction. If you try to start with a complex model and to capture every single piece of data that is important from the beginning, it's going to be a bit bigger task. And because you really need to start showing value, you need to start with a small amount of information and keep growing from there.

HoriZZon, is an important part of the solution. For any use case that you create, you should really create it in parallel on the HoriZZon dashboard and analyses. That will allow you to start showing the value of the information that you are putting in to a bigger community. We took slightly longer to start doing that.

One of the main advantages of this solution is that they have representation in the Open Group Forum, which means that any changes in ArchiMate are immediately implemented in BiZZdesign. The other big advantage is its ability to interweave various modeling languages and provide a seamless view between them that allows one to navigate from one language to the other through the integrated links and cross-model relations.

This tool is something of a beast - it takes a long time to learn, and it isn't possible for casual users and most architects. Unless a person spends 500 or 1,000 hours on the tool or does very concentrated sessions using all its functionalities, it's very difficult to master. Improving the capability of architects to use the tool would be a big improvement. In the next release, I'd like to see better integration with other product companies in this space, like CMDB and ServiceNow, and for BiZZdesign to introduce knowledge-sharing sessions to showcase new best practices, what's being promoted, client success stories etc.

I've been using this solution for the last four-and-a-half years.

This is a fairly stable tool in terms of integrity and performance.

BiZZdesign's technical support could be improved. For example, we have given them access to our environment, but when we log tickets, they're taken by their level-one team and only go to the experts with access to our environment once they progress. It would be better if when we're logging a specific problem in our environment, it could go directly to a person with access, which would propel the turnaround time. 

Implementation was fairly complex because of constraints on resources when it comes to architects. Layers get implemented at various speeds, so there are gaps, which creates problems because the core layers are supposed to be addressed in parallel. The documentation is also not up to standard, and we would expect better support material in general.

The pricing model is slightly on the high side and could be more competitive for long-term partnerships.

I've evaluated ARIS (which has an additional capability of process mining on its BPM layer and the Alfabet to handle enterprise architecture), TransUnion (whose Sparx tools are loose in the standards and haven't had good feedback), and Signavio.

If you're thinking of implementing BiZZdesign, take it from a capability perspective. The first and primary element to be covered is the architecture capability the organization wishes to establish. Then have your use cases defined very clearly and factor in a fair bit of time for implementation to give it time to produce results. I'd rate this solution as seven out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is for enterprise architecture diagrams. We are working with ArchiMate and we have several hundred diagrams for specific purposes, like current state architecture, future state architecture, capability maps, and road maps. 

The feature I find most valuable is that the start times and loading times are short. It takes only a few seconds to load the repository and whenever I want to open diagrams, they are there almost immediately. So you don't have to wait long for diagrams to open. What's more, you have "undo functionality", and it has some great features because each object has icons where you can set functions, like when you want to connect with somebody else. 

The program also has a bulk edit feature where you can insert multiple objects by entering a list of names, after which you can say which object types you want to have. The program then creates five or six of these object types. This also helps click editing. 

It also has an import feature so you can import, like Visio diagrams for example. We've been importing the Visio diagrams exported from the other products we've been using. If we want feedback on that, you can have it on that system as well. You may need to do some tweaks like if the background is using an XML file, which I think is quite outdated, you just enter these things and then it is imported correctly. 

The program also supports the ArchiMate exchange format, which has been specified by our group. So when you're using ArchiMate, this is a free product. I highly recommend ArchiMate because it doesn't have an enterprise repository. It is most efficient because it's running on the desktop, it's very fast and it has a context tool. So whenever you forget what a specific icon is, it has a quick help feature.

The repository of duplicate objects is bad. There is a function to identify duplicate objects, but if you don't recognize that they are duplicates, it becomes a problem. 

Also, the repository is not easy to handle it because it just shows you a list of objects in the scroll books. For example, if you have 2000 applications, it is not really feasible to scroll 2000 objects. 

Thirdly, the query engine is very awkward. If you want to use queries to define viewpoints in anything, the queries are very cryptic. It takes you a really long time to get to it. It does, however, have a query feature but the query only works on objects and not on relationships. It can show you where the objects with the match are, but it doesn't allow you to search, for example, on relationships that way. 

What's more, Enterprise repository doesn't allow you to store documents. I thought we were able to store documents, like Office documents for example, and that one would be able to open them from there. But this flexibility is not offered. 

You often get error messages so perhaps the developers can improve their product by using customer feedback because I think that's important. 

The program stalled twice during these few months that I've been using it. I think it's acceptable because, as far as I can remember, I didn't lose any data. I think it is quite stable. 

BiZZdesign is supposed to be used by many users - more than what our company has. We have only five users. So I can't tell you how it really performs under a huge load. With the number of people in our company, everything runs smooth and there are no performance issues.

There is a limitation, though. You need to use either Chrome or the old Internet Explorer. I didn't actually check the other browsers, but we have found that it runs best on Chrome. I found that the program was very slow on Firefox. If anybody has issues with Chrome, he should look at using the current version of BiZZdesign.

When we have technical issues, the person who helped us, was most experienced and he managed to solve our problem. 

We also used iServer and Archi so when somebody wants to work with ArchiMate as a modeling language, this would be my strongest recommendation. It's a standard published by the open group. They have training courses available, you can certify, and you can find a vast amount of material on this on the internet. 

These two solutions are really fast and you can also define your properties in the repository to enhance your reporting features. I've been using it now for four or five years and I'm always astonished by its functionality and strength. 

The Office iServer portal is quite flexible and gives you access to all the information and you can even define who's able to see what. With BiZZdesign you have more interaction. I saw in the demos that you also can successfully build diagrams and color code them based on some performance features.

This solution helps you to have multiple modeling techniques in parallel so that you can define a model based on ArchiMate. You could have another one in the same repository based on BPMN and so forth. All of this is built into the design. This is what I really like about BiZZdesign. And we did consider using iServer, but we didn't have this with iServer. With iServer, you must pay for extra packages. When you say value for money, I would say you get more when you look for multiple modeling, but when you need work on the repository for harmonization, the data is very important and run reports from it. 

I will rate this solution a seven or eight out of ten, because of the missing features. I like its strong capabilities of modeling and I am impressed by the fact that it is easy to use.

We use this solution to publish our customers' enterprise models.

I find the publishing on the web feature to be the most valuable. The interface is intuitive enough as well.

The users of BiZZdesign should be able to enter their data or make modeling changes via HoriZZon.

I've been working with BiZZdesign HoriZZon since 2018.

It is stable, and I would rate the stability at eight out of ten.

BiZZdesign HoriZZon is scalable, and I'd give it an eight out of ten for scalability. Our customers are enterprise level companies, but the solution is suitable for small and mid-sized companies as well.

My experience with technical support has been good.

We used Software AG previously and switched to BiZZdesign because it is more scalable.

HoriZZon is a cloud platform, and we need to install it for our customers due to certain regulations. Thus, an easier implementation process would definitely help. If it is on-premises, it usually takes at least two days. Two dedicated staff can handle the implementation.

The price is reasonable.

My advice would be to scale your organization and project well, and BiZZdesign will fit your requirements.

Overall, I would rate this solution at eight out of ten.

Our customers' primary use cases include application portfolio, information, and data architecture.

The most valuable features are the application, portfolio, data, architectures, and modeling things.

The automatic data collection and interface need improvement. 

We've been using this solution since 2016. 

The stability is fine. 

Scalability is okay. There are twenty users in my company.

We require two staff members for the maintenance. 

Their support is really good.

The deployment took one month. 

We are the implementation consultants. 

I would recommend it.

In the next release, I would like to see an open API.

I would rate BIZZdesign a nine out of ten.

This is very good software and very useful. As long as you are intending to do design at a business process level, at application processes levels, or even at data op level.

When you go down to modernizing the architecture of your infrastructure, which is part of my job, it's not at all made for that. They have only covered the eye level part of architecture design in IT, but they have not provided the capabilities to properly do what an organization is designing to do in the future.

It's a good tool. My colleagues that are making use of it for application, business processes, or data modeling, are very satisfied with it. They find it easy to use. The graphical representation is simple but therefore efficient, so I know that they are planning a very good commencement on the use of these tools.

It lacks capabilities with regard to infrastructure modeling.

I have been using BiZZdesign for around two years. 

It's a cloud-based solution but I have not noticed any issue connecting to it, or any problems while using it, and my colleagues have not reported having any kind of issue with it, so I would say that it is pretty stable.

We have five users using this solution. 

It is used on a daily basis.

I haven't needed to contact customer support. 

My advice to someone considering this solution is to follow the training. It's nice to use when you know how to use it. At first, it's good to have some explanations on how it is working. And this information is very important in order to set up your BiZZdesign environments, your libraries, typically, from an architecture standpoint, to make sure that you use it efficiently.

I know that this has been a problem at setup time, so it's not a software installation problem. It is a problem with customization. It's important to have a proper understanding of how BiZZdesign works if you want to make the right first configuration.

In the next release, I would like to see the modernization of the software.

I would rate BiZZdesign an eight out of ten. 

Our primary use for this solution was architecture modeling and ArchiMate. We have now switched and are no longer using this solution.

It was deployed on-premises.

We had a lot of problems with BiZZdesign, and I was happy when we switched to another tool. At first, we used the file server for sharing models, which didn't work because it freezes BiZZdesign. We switched to a database while still in a pilot project. Even then, we found that a lot of the functions were grayed out and unavailable for unknown reasons.

We tested it, and we had support from BiZZdesign, including patches, but it just didn't do what we wanted. It was too frustrating. I know that in the meantime there has been a new version and that they have improved, but I never gave it a try because it was too frustrating.

The user interface is in particular need of improvement. Every supplier of these tools knows how to make systems to let users model architecture, maintain relationships, and stuff like that. But, the user experience is of the main importance. You want to model quickly, and usually, you want to model in a team and to collaborate on the same model, and this is where I think BiZZdesign could improve.

Technical support for this solution can be improved.

This solution would benefit from the inclusion of support for different models, beyond ArchiMate-based and architectural, for other kinds of users. This might include strategy or business-wise modeling. 

The version that I have seen is not stable.

The version that I have seen is not scalable. That is when the problems arose.

We contacted technical support when we had our problems. The tried helping us, but I'm not saying that I was satisfied. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate them a five, or six, max.

The initial setup of this solution was very straightforward.

The deployment took perhaps half an hour when we were installing locally, and then using a file server. When we switched to a database, we needed the organizational procedures. So, this takes a little longer. Overall, it is not a problem for BiZZdesign.

We deployed this solution ourselves.

We did evaluate other options before choosing BiZZdesign, although I am not sure why we selected this option.

We have now moved to a new solution that works. The most important things are stability, collaboration, and of course, the user experience. Stability is a very important part of the user experience.

I do not recommend using BiZZdesign. It is too much of a niche solution. Solutions like Enterprise Architect, or Visual Paradigm, are much more usable for the different kinds of audiences and users. For example, with Visual Paradigm, you can also model business processes and UML models.

I would rate this solution a one out of ten.