BiZZdesign HoriZZon Room for Improvement

BP
Enterprise Architect EA Tooling (APM) at Acrostine

BiZZdesign HoriZZon could use some improvement when it comes to the implementation of the tool. Its origin is quite pragmatic. Although it does have the project as a concept, it's not possible to look at it from a project perspective, which is not very practical.

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OL
Senior Enterprise Architect at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees

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.

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BijoyTalukder - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at Tata Consultancy

One area where BiZZdesign HoriZZon could use some improvement is in its REST APIs. While the platform offers REST APIs, they have limitations when it comes to retrieving and exporting data. Obtaining detailed information at the individual application or component level, including IDs, costs, and deployment-related data, can be challenging through these APIs. This limitation makes it difficult to smoothly export such granular data. I have raised this issue with the BiZZdesign team, and they expressed interest in addressing it, but I'm not aware of the current status of this improvement effort. Nonetheless, improving the usability and flexibility of the REST APIs for data extraction is an area that could enhance the platform's capabilities.

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March 2024
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SubhraBanerjee - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at American Century Investments

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.

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WP
Sr Manager Enterprise Architect at CSL Behring

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. 

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SC
Sr Consultant - BiZZdesign Center of Excellence at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

We are working with BiZZdesign to improve the interfaces with ServiceNow. There are also other tools where we bring the data application components, and data objects into BiZZdesign HoriZZon, and not all the offices are mastered. The initial design assumed that all of the content would be mastered there. So that's one area of improvement that BiZZdesign HoriZZon is working on.

There could be simpler modelling so that instead of users drawing the diagrams in the tool, they can create a table of contents that can automatically be used to create diagrams. In addition, it will make it simpler for non-architects to create representative models.

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Kerim Yuksel - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder and Managing Director at MOS

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

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BT
Enterprise Architect at American Century Investments

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.

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SS
Enterprise Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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AH
Enterprise Information Technology Architect at Akka Technologies

It lacks capabilities with regard to infrastructure modeling.

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PH
Owner at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

The user interface and connectivity could use further improvement. The interface could be more user-friendly and intuitive. There was a big step between version 3 and version 4. I still have to learn how to use a lot of functions in version 4. I'm looking for further adjustment or adaptation to Windows style because for me it's a little difficult to switch the experience between both tools. I guess that the tool is adapting and converting to Windows step by step.

It should be more open to integrating with other existing tools. Although there has been progress in the past.

Some of my clients need a translation of the menu into Eastern and Central Europe languages, but EA professionals are able to work in English, so it's not critical.

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it_user271593 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner with 51-200 employees

It is only available for Windows right now and it really is an outdated interface and framework that is being used. As a Mac worker I really hate that and therefore any other product with less features would be considered a really good alternative.

I find the licensing model not fitting the market.

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OK
Founder at MOS

The automatic data collection and interface need improvement. 

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JL
Owner at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

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. 

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Buyer's Guide
Enterprise Architecture Management
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about BiZZdesign, Sparx Systems, Avolution and others in Enterprise Architecture Management. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.