What have we delivered in 2024
EAS have delivered a lot of new features and functionality to the Essential EA Management Tool in 2024, and our clients seem to appreciate the direction we are moving in.
There were a number of key objectives for 2024, driven partly by the demands of our customer base and partly to deliver on our own strategic goals:
- Improve ease of use, specifically around onboarding and value realisation
- Consolidate the Strategic Planning and Roadmapping features
- Solidify our AI position and lay the foundations for next year’s delivery
- Improve the Diagramming support provided
- Support the Higher Education sector
We feel we have made great strides in addressing and delivering on all of these objectives:
Improve ease of use for onboarding and value realisation
We’ve delivered a number of features that make onboarding quicker and easier for our new clients, and expansion of the enterprise architecture capabilities into new areas for our existing clients.
These include:
- Improved the EA Assistant for onboarding, including AI features to set the direction for the EA Team, depending on objectives
- Drag and Drop modelling to make modelling visual and, therefore, quicker and easier
- Using AI for data improvements across areas such as descriptions and business process identification
- Making all our editors configurable, meaning that it is quick and easy for organisations to design their own data capture web-based forms. These can be specific to their users, job roles, organisations and so on, making collaboration across the business a real possibility
Consolidate the Strategic Planning and Roadmapping features
Our expansion of the business model portfolio manager and proposal editor means that Essential now seamlessly manages the pipeline from trend to idea to proposal to approved strategic plan. The impacts on the organisation and the alignment to strategic goals are highlighted every step of the way, providing excellent decision support to CIOs and EAs. The Essential EA tool places enterprise architecture at the heart of the strategic planning process, where technology decisions can be made involving people from across the organisation
Solidify our AI position and lay the foundations for next year’s delivery
A number of our team have backgrounds in intelligent systems and our choice of a self-describing ontology, which underpins Essential, was taken from the very beginning to allow us to exploit various forms of AI, providing semantic context in a form that AI technologies can easily understand – this is a real USP. We have had AI in the tool for around 4 years now, the Essential EA assistant uses a mixture of inference engine (which it is has done for several years) that we have augmented with Gen AI capabilities, so we are quite ahead of the curve.
Based on our deep understanding of AI capabilities, we are taking a considered approach, rather than a rushed one. For example, the pace of evolution in approaches and frameworks to address many of the predictable issues currently being felt with GenAI (e.g. RAG, GraphRAG etc), shows that a more considered and measured approach is justified to avoid wasted costs and disappointing outcomes (read more about our AI approach here).
We strongly believe that our semantic, self-describing Ontology and underlying architecture, mean we are ideally placed to deliver, at speed, disruptive capabilities and solutions based on AI or other emerging tech.
Improve the Diagramming support provided
We have seen a strong demand from our clients for diagramming – clients want a tool that not only provides the higher-level qualitative views that Essential provides, but at the same time delivers the diagramming functionality needed by solution architects. We have delivered the BPMN modeller and Sketch functionality in 2024, and have more to come!
Roadmap for 2025
We have big plans for 2025, so keep an eye out for our thoughts on 2025