BiZZdesign HoriZZon Reviews

We primarily use BiZZdesign to get a clear overview of our enterprise architecture, especially when dealing with multiple departments. It helps us centralize data, acting as our central source of truth. With BiZZdesign, we establish connections between different architectural elements, making it easy to gain insights. For example, we can assess resource usage in departments like HR and finance, understand application costs, and find interdependencies. We also align department capabilities with our overall architecture, from business to technology levels, occasionally diving into infrastructure details. This helps us make informed decisions and optimize our processes effectively.

The most valuable features of BiZZdesign HoriZZon, from my experience, include its out-of-the-box connectors, such as integration with ServiceNow, Excel, and SQL databases, making data repository management more efficient. It adheres to the ArchiMate 3.0 standard, enabling the creation of globally understandable enterprise-level architectures. Additionally, the HoriZZon dashboards are beneficial for higher management, offering quick access to key architectural insights, and they automatically handle dependencies, enhancing overall usability and capabilities.

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.

We use it for enterprise architecture information, with the main purpose today being to analyze our IT investment portfolio and the architecture related to it. That includes process, data, applications, and infrastructure. We collect all of that information by each of our initiatives or projects and we analyze it there. It gives us a single source of data.

We're using the latest cloud version.

It requires a lot of effort to really standardize and have a single source of truth. All of that effort can pay off when we scale and grow more and we can keep building on top of that. The functionality allows us to do that, even though I don't think we are using the full range of its capabilities yet. Because we are using the cloud version, they keep bringing new functionality. That sometimes allows us to do things in a better way.

We now have one way for communicating between IT and business, and that's true, as well, for our partners or implementers when we do IT projects. That way, everybody is talking about the same elements and we don't have different versions to refer to. The benefit is mainly in communication and collaboration.

In addition, the HoriZZon portal allows us to generate visualizations and charts that can be understood by people who aren't enterprise architects. We just started using that more extensively one month ago. It requires some understanding of how the data source works, but after you get to that point, it's pretty easy to start generating charts and information that non-technical people will get and understand. And at the end of the day, that is our purpose: to communicate to our broader audience. These visualizations and charts help business stakeholders assess and make investment decisions on technology to really optimize our IT investments, and they provide the right capabilities to achieve this strategy.

It will also help us to quickly identify where there are risks in our technology portfolio. We are implementing some metrics that allow us to measure and do a risk assessment of our applications. So far we have prepared all of the foundations to allow us to start creating that type of analysis. This is a very important aspect because it's a way that we can provide value to the organization, from the architectural perspective. So it's not only to help on the investment side, but also to prevent risk. In terms of putting plans in place to mitigate those risks, we are not there yet, but I think it will. We are still more at the stage of implementing the methodology, determining how we do assessments, and creating all of the metrics. When we finish those pieces, we will be able to use it to make decisions and plans.

BiZZdesign helps us look at everything in our enterprise architecture through a business capability lens, rather than in EA language. We are translating almost every single action from the infrastructure or technical level into what it means in terms of our capabilities or functionality.

The solution also brings high visibility into the costs of how we are set up in our infrastructure. It comes down to two main areas: helping us to decide where we should put our investment in the portfolio, and at the same time, how we mitigate risk in our current landscape. Of course, that includes costs. But because we are just building the foundation, we haven't done that yet, but that's what we are going to end up using it for: our IT investments and analyzing our operating models.

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. 

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.

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 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.

Our primary use case of this solution is for enterprise architecture diagrams. We are working with ArchiMate and we have several hundred diagrams for specific purposes, like current state architecture, future state architecture, capability maps, and road maps. 

The feature I find most valuable is that the start times and loading times are short. It takes only a few seconds to load the repository and whenever I want to open diagrams, they are there almost immediately. So you don't have to wait long for diagrams to open. What's more, you have "undo functionality", and it has some great features because each object has icons where you can set functions, like when you want to connect with somebody else. 

The program also has a bulk edit feature where you can insert multiple objects by entering a list of names, after which you can say which object types you want to have. The program then creates five or six of these object types. This also helps click editing. 

It also has an import feature so you can import, like Visio diagrams for example. We've been importing the Visio diagrams exported from the other products we've been using. If we want feedback on that, you can have it on that system as well. You may need to do some tweaks like if the background is using an XML file, which I think is quite outdated, you just enter these things and then it is imported correctly. 

The program also supports the ArchiMate exchange format, which has been specified by our group. So when you're using ArchiMate, this is a free product. I highly recommend ArchiMate because it doesn't have an enterprise repository. It is most efficient because it's running on the desktop, it's very fast and it has a context tool. So whenever you forget what a specific icon is, it has a quick help feature.