Abacus

Enterprise architects spend much of their time drawing the organisation as it is and as it should become, and Abacus is the modelling and strategy tool Avolution makes for that work. The company says it is used by more than 3,000 organisations worldwide and can be installed on premises or used as a cloud-based service.

Modelling and roadmaps

Abacus keeps diagrams and models in sync, so that a change to the underlying data shows up in every view. Users build visuals on a canvas with stencil-based diagramming tools, and ready-made icon sets for AWS and Azure speed up cloud architecture work. Dynamic roadmaps and charts set timelines for projects, technology lifecycles, risk programmes and larger transformations, and current-state and future-state scenarios can be mapped side by side to compare options.

Business capability mapping

The tool maps business capabilities to applications, processes and technologies, giving a connected, top-down view of the organisation. Data on business units, functions and strategic goals can be imported, and dependency analysis helps to spot redundancies, gaps and chances to optimise. Standards such as TOGAF, BizBok and PCF come built in, together with hundreds of templates that can be configured to a company's own needs.

Analysis, governance and scale

Avolution says Abacus starts simple for small teams and grows with them, and that it offers governance capabilities that give leaders clarity and control. Dashboards and visual reports present the results, and algorithms can be run to predict the outcomes of strategies. The company reports that Gartner has placed it as a leader in its Magic Quadrant for enterprise architecture tools for nine consecutive years, and that teams save an average of 22 hours a month, both of which are its own statements.