BiZZdesign HoriZZon Reviews

BiZZdesign HoriZZon is primarily used as a repository for Enterprise Architecture and is also utilized in broad portfolio management including project management and other applications, but the main focus is on implementing the EA and running the ADM using the tool.

BiZZdesign HoriZZon stands out from other solutions on the market due to its uniqueness in conformance with the standard. Once the standard has been updated, this tool is the first to follow up or commit to the new standard. BiZZdesign HoriZZon is ranked on top in conformance, while iServer follows that, but in terms of integration, iServer can fulfill the requirement for any company requiring implementation faster and with a significant amount of cost reduction because it is easy to integrate from built-in capabilities.

BiZZdesign HoriZZon's visual technologies and visual techniques help organizations make data-driven decisions by providing the required views for key stakeholders, including heat maps, road maps, project implementation, and other visualizations. With smooth integration, operational data can be integrated with the design or architecture, allowing managers, CIOs, and other operational managers in IT to see how their design performs in real-life operations. This can be viewed on the dashboard, but it requires an enormous amount of effort to integrate operational data and IT service management data into the EA repository.

The ArchiMate modeling language features with BiZZdesign HoriZZon help in representing complex architectures, as it cannot simplify to a certain extent. It is not meant to provide a detailed design specification in the way that UML does. Instead, it provides a high-level design guideline and ensures that different key stakeholders can understand what will be done in terms of changing the architecture or building a new system and defining the target architecture.

BiZZdesign HoriZZon needs to publish its integration scenarios and integration points with other digital transformation tools such as IT service management, risk management, asset management, customer service, and ERP. The company should first build the scenario and define its integration points in business and technology to make customers more confident about having a complete solution. Currently, there is a challenge with the company to offer transparent and documented integration. They offer five integration points at a fixed price, but other things come at additional costs. However, specific information about what those additional items are, what the scenarios entail, what the schemas are, what the workflows include, and what the application integration involves is not provided. The learning portal does not include integration documentation at a high level or in detail. The portal does have comprehensive resources explaining how to make their website, how to create dashboards, and how to publish EA content, which are clear. The high-end tool on the laptop is also explained in detail, covering elements, relations, and everything as standard.

I have been familiar with BiZZdesign HoriZZon for three years and have been working with it for three years.

BiZZdesign HoriZZon's technical support has presented challenges, as extra fees are required and the process is not straightforward. In terms of pricing practices, many cases have been observed where prices outside the region are less than what is offered here. Based on experience with support and related factors, I cannot give more than a seven; it is an average rating and not something that is truly satisfactory.

I do not participate in the implementation personally in the deployment process as a solution architect, but rather as an Enterprise Architecture lead, providing requirements to the solution architect and technical team for deployment. Approximately five people from my side take part in the deployment process.

BiZZdesign HoriZZon's reporting and dashboard functionalities are good and very good; they compete well with other solutions and are simpler, but they have scripting and programming tools to produce the reports needed.

The impact of BiZZdesign HoriZZon's scenario simulation on risk management strategies is that this tool is very useful. It can help in analyzing and reducing risk and optimizing processes.

Regarding licensing costs, there is dissatisfaction. The price is very high.

BiZZdesign HoriZZon's collaboration capabilities align stakeholders in the organization, as collaboration needs integration. Integration is weak, but collaboration is present in terms of building views for different stakeholders and facilitating communication between different levels of concerns among people across knowledge, fields, and domains. ArchiMate exists for this reason, and BiZZdesign HoriZZon is effective in this collaboration by presenting the right views for the targeted concerned people and stakeholders.

From experience, the deployment process for BiZZdesign HoriZZon takes on average one month for complete commissioning, with one week for implementation, but gathering information may require more time. I give this product an overall rating of eight out of ten.

BiZZdesign HoriZZon is primarily used for enterprise architecture processes. My clients mostly use it for architecture modeling and planning.

BiZZdesign HoriZZon's visualization techniques help my clients make data-driven decisions. The best function of BiZZdesign HoriZZon is the visualization part, which is unique and the most useful in the product.

The collaboration and integration capabilities of BiZZdesign HoriZZon are strong. The product is easy to integrate and collaborate with. The ArchiMate modeling language feature is excellent.

The reporting dashboard functionality of BiZZdesign HoriZZon is comprehensive and valuable.

BiZZdesign could improve BiZZdesign HoriZZon in several areas. There are potential areas of improvement that should be addressed to make the product better.

I have been using BiZZdesign HoriZZon for five years.

I would rate the stability of BiZZdesign HoriZZon as a nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of BiZZdesign HoriZZon as a ten out of ten.

I would rate the technical support as a five out of ten.

I previously used Orbus Infinity. Based on my expert view, BiZZdesign HoriZZon is the best product when compared to the three.

The initial setup of BiZZdesign HoriZZon is simple. I am working with a cloud-based deployment model.

I last worked with BiZZdesign HoriZZon recently. BiZZdesign HoriZZon is deployed on Amazon Web Services. I was not involved in the purchase process, as it is totally on the client side. I would rate BiZZdesign HoriZZon pricing as a ten out of ten, indicating that pricing is low. My overall rating for BiZZdesign HoriZZon is ten out of ten.

The typical use case with BiZZdesign HoriZZon is basically for enterprise architecture and also for business process modeling.

The most valuable features of BiZZdesign HoriZZon include the diagrammatic representation of BPMN models, which I find good for modeling, and things such as capability maps. It allows for collaboration as if I work on something, someone else can pick up on it too.

Regarding ROI from BiZZdesign HoriZZon, it does what it's supposed to do, mapping capabilities and interacting with users effectively. The benefits are present in the tool, but it's also about user adoption within the company.

There is room for improvement in BiZZdesign HoriZZon. It's quite robust and has good online forums where people discuss it, though maybe the interface can improve, but I don't want to criticize it since I don't have comparisons of other tools. It takes a long time to learn and understand, which is a learning curve you have to go through, but once you know how it works, it's very nice to work with.

My experience with BiZZdesign HoriZZon spans approximately three to four years.

The stability of BiZZdesign HoriZZon rates at a 9 since it's very stable, although we haven't really strained it under very large landscapes that might test big designs.

The scalability of BiZZdesign HoriZZon rates quite highly at a 9 if not a 10, as for our use case with a small team, it was sufficient usage and any additional resources would find it easier to use.

The technical support from the vendor of BiZZdesign HoriZZon has extensive documentation, and I rate it a 9 because we had substantial initial guidance and online forums where people discuss it.

Positive

The initial setup of BiZZdesign HoriZZon was straightforward for me because when we got it, it was already set up. I wasn't involved in that portion, and all I had to do was get access and start to work on the tool itself. Once you start using it, you have to really know what you want to achieve, but it's quite a very good tool for business process and enterprise architecture.

I'm talking about several tools on business solution designs, as there are many calls and I've worked with several tools in this area.

I am employed with a company that has a license for BiZZdesign HoriZZon, so you can say a partner or a user, and if you buy the license, you become a partner.

I'm not involved in the pricing of BiZZdesign HoriZZon as it was bought by the organization.

Based on my experience with BiZZdesign HoriZZon, which I rate as 8 out of 10, I definitely recommend it, but I think it would be beneficial if there were opportunities to trial it before purchase, as it is robust and comparable to other tools I've worked with.

I use the solution in my company for all sorts of things, like enterprise and solution architecture. As part of our design process, BiZZdesign HoriZZon is used for road mapping. We also use it for project governance, so all the project designs we do are subject to governance and are done using BiZZdesign. THe quality data from Bizzdesign is then fed into our CMDB, in order to keep the data synchronised across the two tools. We also import operational data from the CMDB back into Bizzdesign, and use this to enable us to check that the required changes to the CMDB have been carried out correctly.

The tool's most valuable feature is that its collaboration part is very good. The way it supports multiple users working together is very good. I appreciate the use of standards in the tool. The tool is based on standards, which is very useful. I find extending and customizing the tool easy, which is very useful for us.

The ability to generate charts and deal with a use case involving Kibana was quite difficult. We don't use the chart functionality much, and I think that is quite problematic at the moment. We have made some design decisions with the tool, but I don't want to get too technical. The way the tool deals with the built-in way of creating charts with Kibana is quite difficult to use, so we don't use that, which is a problem. We have a problem with some of the visualization parts, as they are very hard to use.

I would like to be able to update data from the built-in scripting, irrespective of how that data is put into BiZZdesign. Right now, that is very difficult to do. They have a number of ways to store data. For example, in an application, there are a number of ways of storing data, and it is very difficult to update, use, and store what the product refers to as data blocks from all sorts of applications. I would like to see if I can split or instead put all the data for our business into one database. I would be able to split across multiple databases and have them linked together. I think that would make things easy. We don't have to put everything in one place. It is not so much trying to protect ourselves from risks. It is just that you have everything in one space, and then when you try to open that repository, it is very slow sometimes. Make it a lot more manageable if we can break it into smaller pieces but still link them, as that would make things easier and make things run a lot faster.

I have been using BiZZdesign HoriZZon for six years.

It is a very stable solution. The back-end server side is incredibly stable, but the client side does crash. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

When it comes to the tool, I think it is very easy to adapt. There are some issues, but we didn't find it difficult to do it.

We don't need the large infrastructure because everything is hosted by BiZZdesign.

In my company, there are around 300 users of the tool.

My company plans to increase the usage of the tool in the future.

Many of our company's core processes rely upon the tool. We process documentations, and all of our architecture information is stored in the tool. The tool is used in many parts of the organization and within the data center.

I have communicated a lot with the technical support team for the solution. The technical support team is very supportive, and they do a lot of digging to make sure that we get sorted out. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have used a tool from an Australian company called Sparx Enterprise Architect. Another tool that I have used extensively, but not recently, was a tool owned by a company called CACI, which is called MooD.

I decided to use BiZZdesign HoriZZon because I had used MooD with one employer. I used  Sparx Enterprise Architect with a different employer. I didn't choose any of the tools I work with in any way. I used the tools offered by my employer.

If one is difficult and ten is easy to set up, I rate the product's initial setup phase as a ten out of ten.

The product's setup phase has been very easy.

The solution's setup phase has been very straightforward, and I didn't have any issues with it. The one thing is that in terms of the setup features, the tool integrates with a dataset called Technopedia, which is owned by a company called Flexera. It enables you to have a database of all the IT products that you can buy. I can say this application runs on this version of all Windows. The issue is that, apparently, every customer wants such an integration to be done, but it takes six to eight weeks to make it happen. It is puzzling to me why, in this day and age, you have to wait six weeks to turn on a switch. It should be simple. It is not that big of a deal as we managed it, and it is running fine now.

The solution can be deployed on a hybrid cloud model. The client-server part typically runs on our laptops. Although sometimes we also use the SaaS client, most of us use it on our laptops, along with the repository and the web host by BiZZdesign, but the client server part takes an hour.

It did not take time to deploy the tool. It was done in a day or something.

The deployment process is something that I distinguish between the client and the server. We don't deploy the server part. To deploy the client, we typically package it. There are various technologies you can use to push and use that automatically. We could use SCCM, but we don't just ask users to download it because we don't have admin rights on our laptops. We package it ourselves using the base product from BiZZdesign. We take BiZZdesign Enterprise Studio product, package it, and then deploy it to all of our desktops and laptops that need it.

On the client side, one person is typically involved in the deployment process to package the tool.

If one is very cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the product price as a seven out of ten. The tool's price is justified. There are three different licenses, namely the designer, contributor, and consumer. I think the designer license is a little expensive.

My current employer also evaluated iServer and Alfabet, before deciding in the end to select Bizzdesign. I think that was a good choice, it fits very well into our environment.

Speaking about BiZZdesign HoriZZon's most beneficial part for risk management tasks, I would say that its ability to link risks to things affected by those risks is good. Risks don't just exist on their own. A risk is a risk to something, like an application, or to a process, and so on. The tool's key feature is its ability to see risks in the proper context and, therefore, drive behavior by letting us know what is affected by risk and what can be done rather than just seeing the risk as a standalone aspect.

Speaking about BiZZdesign HoriZZon's strategy and portfolio management features of the solution have impacted our organization; I would say that there are particular features built into the product. We have not really used the tool's built-in portfolio management features because we have our own way of doing it. With the tool, being able to understand what applications do and also record relevant information to be able to say which apps are needed to keep or get rid of are areas that can be managed by the tool. We are not using the built-in features of the product. We are using our own way of using the tool, but we are still using the base product.

I think we have not used BiZZdesign HoriZZon to support compliance with industry regulations.

There is the basic product, and then you have enhancements that my team provides on top of that. We maintain the product with help from the vendor. We maintain the tool, but the base product is something we don't maintain, as we don't. have the vendor to help us with it.

My suggestion would not be specific to BiZZdesign but common introductions. You can do anything with the tool, but you would have to be focused on doing something well with it or just dump stuff in and then find it. The data in the usual systems is never going to be those things you would want to create in BiZZdesign, as some of the things you would want for yourself would be elsewhere. The tool can help in mastering traffic., and understanding where they come from in the first place.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

I used BiZZdesign HoriZZon at two organizations. At Manchester Metropolitan University, I used it with a small team for architectural modeling of the student record system. We modeled teams, process objects, and their interactions with applications. We also used it to model a gradual rollout with plateaus showing migration over time. At the BBC, I used it to model software services for publishing content online. I showed key model views to senior stakeholders using Horizon, allowing them to modify and score applications and services.

There's always room for improvement. When I finished using it over a year ago, I discussed implementing C4 notation with BiZZdesign HoriZZon.They've likely done this now, but I haven't seen it. Setting up interactive views for stakeholders to score services was a bit difficult.

I have been using the product quite a lot. 

I don't recall any stability issues or bugs. The tool has a fully version-controlled data storage system that saves work continuously.

Scalability is great - it's one of the product's biggest benefits. Multiple team members can simultaneously contribute to the same model without overwriting each other's work.

I didn't contact the tool's technical support for problems, but I did contact them for guidance. They're very open and helpful. I could easily get in touch to ask how to do things, and they'd respond with video calls, screen sharing, and walk-throughs. This was especially useful for scripting functionality, which is powerful but not well-documented. We called them several times for proactive help, not to solve problems retrospectively.

We were customers and bought licenses from them. We used their remote instance initially but upgraded to the on-device version due to lag. For pricing, we paid about £1200 a year per seat for the client installation at an educational rate but that was a long time ago. I'm not sure about commercial rates. I managed to get a free evaluation copy at BBC since it was for evaluation purposes. 

It's not easy for anyone to use without training. When we purchased licenses, we bought a week's training. The solution also offers consulting and training services, which is helpful. 

I would recommend the tool to others. I currently work for the British government and would love to use it here. I'd happily recommend it to anyone seeking an enterprise architecture tool, particularly those who like using different modeling notations that can interact with each other and for teams that could grow over time.

Key attributes include scalability and a unique feature that offers a window into the models for senior stakeholders without requiring installation on their machines. These are significant benefits of the product.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten. 

Our clients deal directly with BiZZdesign. They use it, but what we do is we have some experts who have hands-on experience, and we use that knowledge to implement solutions for them. We don't use any separate licenses for HoriZZon ourselves.

There could definitely be regulatory impacts to comply with industry regulations. 

Since we're currently supporting clients in two specific countries, I'm mostly confident it's compliant. If clients in other countries require it, they'd likely raise questions about regulatory compliance. 

As these clients seem to be familiar with the product, it's currently compliant. 

The features I like are that it's very easy to implement and it's reliable.

This is one of the best tools, especially because of its collaborative nature. Anyone using it can access previous projects and related data. It's definitely a strong collaborative tool.

It's configurable, meaning you can integrate this product with different tools. However, there are some restrictions. 

Integration definitely needs improvement. There are some restrictions. We've seen that it doesn't integrate with everything we might expect.

Out of ten products we want to integrate, maybe five or six integrate easily. The other four might face challenges due to lower investment in the products or compatibility issues. It's definitely not easy to achieve seamless integration for any product.

We can only test to a certain extent, and issues could arise from either BiZZdesign HoriZZon or the other product.

Another point is the cost of licenses. If they were a bit lower, it would be easier for businesses to acquire more licenses... something like an enterprise or bulk license model. Maybe different pricing tiers based on the number of licenses, like significant discounts for orders over one hundred. This could help clients adopt the product.

I have been using it for five to six years now. 

It is a very stable product. We don't have any challenges in this regard. 

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. 

It is a scalable solution. I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten because it has an autoscaling option. It's generally scalable.

The solutions support medium and enterprise level businesses. 

We struggled once to get adequate support. It took a long time to receive the solution we expected.

Neutral

We don't use this product in isolation. Different clients use different products.

We can recommend the best products for our clients. Some clients may be new to us, or existing clients who already hold BiZZdesign HoriZZon licenses.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten. The setup process is relatively smooth. 

We've only worked with cloud deployments. I'd also rate the cloud setup experience an eight out of ten. We have instructions, user guides, and support details provided. In case something happens, we have contacts to reach out to. However, we haven't tried on-premises deployments.

The deployment time depends on the complexity of the project. For complex projects, it definitely takes a few weeks. There might be dependent tasks involved. 

However, most deployments happen within minutes if there are no dependencies. If not, it takes a few hours, maybe three to four, based on any related tasks.

We are the implementors. We implement different solutions for our clients. 

In terms of licensing, my clients take care of everything directly with BiZZdesign. We don't intervene in that process. However, we provide advisory services. 

For example, if we determine that additional licenses are needed, we inform the client, and they manage the licensing changes.

In terms of this particular product usage, my clients currently only use per-user licenses.

I would rate the pricing a five out of ten, with ten being expensive. It's not too costly, but not particularly cheap either.

I would recommend using this product. However, it depends on the clients we acquire in the future. Not every client needs this type of software. If we encounter clients who aren't using HoriZZon, or are using a different solution, we might recommend this product if it aligns with their interests. 

We'd need to understand their current setup, costs, stability requirements, and any challenges they're facing before recommending a switch.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

I've used the solution for business architecture.

The most valuable feature is that it allows you to work with different methods, using the same tool. You can work with ARki and BCNN as they are connected in BiZZdesign HoriZZon, which is fantastic. Its documentation is also really good. It's easy to read and it's open to the Internet.

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.

I've used BiZZdesign HoriZZon for many years.

When it comes to stability, I give it a seven out of ten. It's a fairly stable solution but has issues with deployment. The database itself and the synchronization with the database of multiple users are not up to standard. A lot of manual synchronization steps are required from the user. The solution depends on someone to manually update the Central Point in order for it to receive the information. We had about 200 people using BiZZdesign.

Scalability is a bit of a problem for BiZZdesign. There is always a possibility it will failover. I would rate the scalability of the solution an eight out of ten.

We also use ARIS at our company, but BiZZdesign HoriZZon is a lot easier to use and allows you to maximize your knowledge and abilities while using it.

BiZZdesign has a lot of issues with deployment. It is web-based and can get a little complicated. It had to go through multiple streams such as Amazon and Virtual PC, which makes things pretty complex. 

The administration and the licensing part of BiZZdesign are quite easy since it's a smaller company. It is also not very cheap. It costs about $2,000 per year.

BiZZdesign HoriZZon has strong requirements for the technical aspect of things, but it is easy to start working on it if you have knowledge of VPN and UML. It gives you the chance to adapt it to your environment and to implement the things you already know.  Overall, I give it a ten out of ten.

We use it primarily for architecture and capability-based modelling. We plan to use it more as an analysis rather than a modelling tool.

We previously used System Architect and Provision, which did not work for us. Since implementing BiZZdesign HoriZZon, many of our solutions and technical and segment architects have been using it actively. We recently changed how we developed BiZZdesign HoriZZon and have completely moved away from the word-based SAHLD, the high-level architecture design, to a fully automated and dynamic solution intent. The advantage of doing that is if one project finishes, the architecture can pick up from there, and all the architectural artifacts are already available in one place for the next project team to pick up.

The enterprise studio where the modelling happens is valuable and a critical part of the tool for non-architects and business stakeholders. In addition, the HoriZZon, where we share most of our models with the stakeholders, is a feature that businesses appreciate because it makes it a collaboration tool.

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.

We have used this solution since the beginning of 2019, using SaaS from AWS.

I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

There is room for improvement with the scalability, and we have been working with BiZZdesign on that. So I rate the scalability a six out of ten. We have 750 active architects using this solution and developing models and about 5,000 stakeholders. We don't have any place to increase the usage right now, and I don't see a considerable increase in the active architects modelling in the BiZZdesign HoriZZon. However, there may be an increase in the number of stakeholders because only certain business stakeholders currently provide consumer access.

I rate technical support an eight out of ten. They're good at solving problems and have good lines of communication internally, so if the first line of support cannot solve the issue, the second line of support does. If the second line of support cannot resolve the issue, they escalate it to their development or product management team.

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten, and I rate the features available a five out of ten. When we were implementing the solution, the product itself was being evolved. So the implementation was not that difficult, and it was relatively easy. However, many features you would expect from an enterprise architecture tool were still missing. I think a lot of the missing features are covered now, but a lot of them are still on their roadmap.

BiZZdesign technical support was primarily involved in the setup. There were third parties involved, and the documentation provided by BiZZdesign was helpful. The deployment took about three months, and it was not complicated. A lot of the challenges were post-implementation, and not everything is mastered in BiZZdesign. At the core team, four people from our organization were involved in the deployment comprising three consultants and the account manager from BiZZdesign. In addition, there is a support organization that looks after maintenance.

We are still working with BiZZdesign on some of the issues. So while we are in this transition period, we are still investing in the solution. So calculating ROI metrics is difficult at this point.

I rate the pricing a six out of ten, but I can't share more details about the costs. However, the pricing model could be improved considerably.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use it as our enterprise architecture tool, for keeping our enterprise architecture documentation. That not only includes infrastructure components but everything else as well. For example, what are the different components that we have, enterprise-wide? What are the technologies being used? What are the technology services being used? Who are the business actors and what are the business departments? What are the business capabilities that we have in the organization? We keep everything in BiZZdesign. 

We are also using the tool for architecture governance and the gating process, and all the different business-view needs. Whenever they're implementing any application, they document the solution architecture of that application in BiZZdesign. It then goes through our weekly governance process in front of our architecture review board. Based on the documentation quality and on certain standards, we evaluate whether this application is fit for implementation. If not, we provide feedback: what the corrections are that need to be done. Once again it goes through that feedback process and, once approved by all the relevant stakeholders, the application is ready for implementation.

There are certain applications that are transformation-type projects. We use BiZZdesign Enterprise Studio to document the current architecture, the transition architecture, the future architecture, as well as the network, monitoring, infrastructure, and security views. These are the things that we usually cover as part of the governance process.

It is running on AWS cloud. We don't use the desktop version.

We are, of course, able to generate visualizations and charts that can be understood by people who are not enterprise architects. Primarily, it depends on the person who is creating that chart and how much information they put in. But if they use it properly and create the charts with all the relevant information and publish it, it is definitely going to help the business users and others understand what we are doing.

For example, our CTO wanted to have a "10,000-foot view" of everything. Previously, that was not possible. Now, with BiZZdesign, we have started publishing those views in HoriZZon. She just logs in to HoriZZon and can take a quick glance at the different artifacts published there and provide feedback. That view includes the different business areas and covers things like the costs we are incurring, the technologies being used, and our overall reference architecture. It includes almost everything.

Among the valuable features is the ability to document standards. For example, we have mandatory operating standards that need to be followed by every application and every architecture. We use things like table charts and pie charts for documenting the costs incurred across the systems. All of these are good features.

Another good feature is for documenting architectures. We use the classic view to put together all the components and to establish the relationships among them.

A third important feature is the HoriZZon part, where we actually publish all these views. We control access privilege in BiZZdesign, restricting edit permissions, meaning Enterprise Studio access, to only the architects. HoriZZon, on the other hand, is exposed to pretty much everybody across the organization, because it provides view-only access.

The breadth of capabilities the solution provides is also good. The best part is that it follows the ArchiMate principle, which is something of an industry-wide accepted principle.

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.

I have been using BiZZdesign HoriZZon for around close to a year.

The stability of HoriZZon is good. There have been outages, at times, a couple in the last year, but they have not been very frequent. Because it's an enterprise architecture tool, a couple of outages for a couple of hours is acceptable because it is not something that is going to destroy the business. Maybe people are not able to document, or people are not able to view something, but it's not stopping the business. The effect of the outages has been minimal and the number of outages has also been minimal.

We don't have a huge number of people in our organization. Scalability-wise, there has been no issue. We are growing the number of artifacts and there is a huge difference between the number of artifacts we had initially and what we have now. But we have never faced issues in this regard.

We have 15 to 20 designers and about 50 users. Those 50 people are mostly using HoriZZon, while the 20 people are using both HoriZZon and the Studio. And there are three or four people who are admins.

Their technical support is good. They're really professional and they respond quickly to any queries. They are good, but they're costly.

Return on investment is definitely there because we never had a single view of everything. Although we are not there yet, there is still a lot more work to do, we are slowly getting there.

Be very clear about your objectives, what you want to use BiZZdesign for. It is an enterprise architecture tool. It's not for documenting low-level designs. A good use case would be if an organization is trying to transform its overall enterprise. They obviously need to know what they currently have, where they want to go, and how they are going to get there. If these kinds of things are being discussed in your organization today, then business design tools like BiZZdesign will be very effective and valuable. But if you are only looking to document solutions, BiZZdesign might not be a good investment because BiZZdesign is very costly. You should probably look for other tools.

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.