EA Tool Trends

Stakeholder Contributors

Higher-end tools such as LeanIX and Ardoq are enabling business stakeholders to be model contributors, facilitated via simplified "user experiences" (notations, workflows), and surveys to populate (primarily) Strategy and Motivation elements, although more comprehensive contributor roles can be assigned.

Surveys

Permit an alternate approach to capturing required data from stakeholders. Common in "enterprise-grade" tooling. Permits stakeholder-driven data capture without direct tool access.

CSDM

Most tools are providing some integration with ServiceNow's CSDM, including directional and bidirectional synchronization. Mappings between (many) ArchiMate elements and CSDM model elements are defined, with the primary emphasis on mapping services, which can simplify an underlying CMDB implementation by removing the need for some custom tables.

ServiceNow itself is taking this to the next level, with its own Enterprise Architecture module that directly integrates with its other offerings. It remains to be seen how much traction this tool will have in the market re adoption and capabilities — it may have to augment other tools rather than replacing them.

Discovery

As an alternative to CSDM integration (which practically requires a ServiceNow implementation) some vendors are offering their own discovery tools, primarily for identification of IaaS resources, accessing major cloud hosting providers. Just like any discovery tools, there is typically non-trivial work required to parse the findings, discarding the discovery equivalent of "false positives and negatives"; such discoveries are typically performed by service management teams via their ITSM tool suites -- which is why a CSDM-driven approach is more common, as discovery tools typically populate ITSM repositories rather than integrating with EA tooling.

AI Enablement

Like everything else in the IT world. Depending on product / version can mean just about anything..., including tool / model creation / maintenance assistance.

Some are providing full-fledged AI Governance capabilities meant to span the enterprise. -> not sure how these work and how real they actually are...

Some leverage AI to ingest "raw" diagrams, whiteboards, etc. to create model elements.

Some leverage AI prompts to generate, refine, and / or validate model elements and structures.

In general, AI capabilities are used to augment the EA's modelling efforts, not replace them

ArchiMate

Long a de facto standard, several EA tool suites have traditionally provided their own "value-add" notations instead. However even those tools have acknowledged the significance of ArchiMate and are providing for that modelling language at least as optional, permitting model interchange with other tooling as well.