Overcome Business Challenges with Essential
Transform your business with the Essential enterprise architecture tool, designed to tackle your specific challenges
Strategic Planning Tools
Essential provides the ability to create architecture roadmaps that map out the strategic plans required to enable an organisation to meet its strategic goals objectives. The Strategic Plans show all the elements of the architecture that are impacted by the plan, and also the projects that are delivering the changes required to implement the roadmap.
Essential allows you to flip between the architecture view and the project view so you can see, at a glance, the projects (and their status) that are implementing the roadmap changes. Essential also allows you to switch between a current and future state in the views, so you can see what your organisation looks like now, and what it will look like once your roadmaps have been implemented.
As companies continue to embrace technology, digital transformation tools are becoming increasingly important. Essential can help organisations to understand the impact of these changes, how it impacts the organisation and its people, how to align technology with business goals and ensure that the right systems and processes are in place to support digital initiatives.
Cloud computing offers many benefits, including cost savings and scalability, but it also requires careful planning and strategy. Essential can help organisations to determine the best approach to cloud adoption and ensure a smooth transition.
New Technologies are emerging all the time and, as a consequence, the way business operates is changing quickly. These changes present many challenges, not least in terms of security and data management. Essential can help organisations to understand how to incorporate these technologies into their operations, manage the risks and leverage it to drive business value.
Risk Management Software and Regulatory Compliance Solutions
Identifying and managing Enterprise Architecture risks to the organisation, as well as ensuring compliance with the relevant regulations for their industry are key areas that organisations need to ensure they manage well. Essential has a number of views that provide key support in these areas.
As cyber threats continue to evolve it is important for organizations to be able to identify potential vulnerabilities, understand the impacts and implement appropriate controls to mitigate risk. The Essential Technology Security Vulnerability Analysis view maps the vulnerabilities released by NIST NVD Database to your technologies, highlighting where you have a vulnerability and, crucially, how this impacts your applications and your processes so you can fully understand the severity and take appropriate action.
Ensuring compliance with relevant regulations is a key need for CROs. The Essential Framework Manager provides a solution to managing any control based regulation, such as ISO or NIST, to ensure that not only are the processes in place to ensure you remain compliant, but that the assessments of you applications, technologies and processes are also completed, monitored and reviewed.
Ensuring that your products, both technologies and applications, are up to date and supported, and understanding the impact on the business area of any breaches, is a mandatory requirement. The Lifecycle View that manages the lifecycles of both Technologies and Applications and provide the detail of impacted elements.
Portfolio Management Tools
Essential delivers key support for Portfolio Management by providing the information needed to allow an organisation to understand its strategic objectives, assess theses against the current state and plan how the implementation of change to support these objectives can be balanced with maintaining business-as-usual.
Understanding key metrics about your application estate, such as which teams use them, where there is duplication of functionality, costs and integrations, allows an organisation to make informed decisions about rationalisation. Crucially the Essential meta model has the fidelity to support decision making. Many tools take a simple short cut of mapping applications directly to capabilities – this provides a high level “picture” but not the detail to allow decisions. The Essential Meta Model allows the detail to be captured and represented in easy-to-use editors and dashboards.
Understanding the impact of a change to an application is crucial to ensure unknown impacts do not arise. This covers organisations, processes and products, other applications and information flows and also, from a procurement perspective, suppliers and contracts. Essential allows this to all be available at your fingertips.
A key aspect of managing an IT portfolio is managing costs. A detailed understanding of the IT estate, including duplication, and use across the business is required to allow costs to be cut whilst supporting the business in achieving its strategic goals.
Standards and Governance
Making sure that Standards and Reference Architectures are captured and, most importantly, available and understood across the IT Team is a pre-requisite to ensuring adherence and minimising shadow IT and technical debt. However, this needs to be seen to make jobs easier, not a blocker to progress. Essential has a number of views that allow architects to access and use standards, to not only ensure they remain on plan, but to ease their workload and make change quicker.
Technical Debt
Understanding where there is technical debt, why it has been introduced and the steps and timescales required to mitigate the risk is required to ensure that risk and cost is not introduced across the organisation. It is all too easy to lose track of waivers and required mitigation, so the Risk Register is crucial in combating that.
Data Quality Management Solutions
Quality of data is obviously crucial but knowing where there are different stores of the same data, and which is the most accurate and up to date can be a key mitigating factor. Essential has views that allow you to understand the dependencies between data, processes and applications, and demonstrate the impact of poor-quality data on the business. It provides the information required to make informed decisions about your data.