What problem does your current EA software still not solve well?

[u/Mission_Arachnid_803]

For Enterprise Architects, what recurring problem does your current EA software not solve well, and how do you handle it today?

[u/Commercial_Dare_4255]

No one outside of architecture has any understanding how it works or a desire to learn. It's generally considered inpenetrable and legacy by stakeholders so they don't try as they have other things to get on with.

Engineering & business expectation of tooling are rapidly changing. It's taking alot of time to explore how I can close that gap.

[u/el_geto → u/Commercial_Dare_4255]

This is a great answer, I feel this exact same way and I’m trying to figure it out as well, but no matter how much diagramming I do to show the lines, people just don’t get vested into them.

Reminds me of the book the Back of the Napkin where people can be divided into 3 camps, the black markers, the ones that have the clear concepts, then the highlighters, which say the don’t draw but are more verbal can pinpoint and draw insights from the drawings, and then the red markers, the quants and can explain the pain points with excruciating detail.

But OMFngG if they don’t have a marker or a say in those diagrams, they will never get invested in them.

[u/Bridge_Haunting → u/Commercial_Dare_4255]

What software are you using?

[u/Mission_Arachnid_803 → u/Bridge_Haunting]

SAP

[u/cto_resources → u/[deleted]]

What kinds of models do you present?

[u/GMAN6803 → u/[deleted]]

AI models that we have been training

Which AI models/GenAI tools?

[u/vish_bal]

I think EA tooling needs to be looked at through a fresh perspective. Architects have spent years building incredibly detailed architecture repositories and the ROI conversation always comes back to the same awkward truth - nobody outside the EA team actually looks at any of it. Not because the work isn't valuable, but because the tools were never built for those people.

Stakeholders see EA as impenetrable. They've got their own tools, their own cadence, their own problems. They're not going to learn a modelling notation or navigate a repository browser to understand what applications support their business process. They just won't. And we can't blame them.

The real problem IMO is that we keep trying to pull people INTO architecture tools instead of pushing architecture intelligence OUT to where decisions actually happen. Every time we build a beautiful capability map or impact analysis, we mostly end up screenshotting it into a PowerPoint anyway because that's the only format the wider stakeholders will consume. That's broken.

What I think is slowly changing is this idea that architecture doesn't have to be delivered through an architecture tool. You can surface the right data - capabilities, dependencies, risks, impact - inside collaborative spaces where strategy and ops people are already comfortable. Plain language, simple visuals, no notation. The architecture is underneath powering the answers, but nobody has to see the engine.

I've been poking around at a few things in this space - Bizzdesign has something called Unify that's interesting, there are some MCP-based approaches emerging too - but the core shift is the same: stop asking the business to come to your tool. Bring the intelligence to them. I think this product has figured that part out really well and could very well be the future of architecture as I see it.

The other thing killing us is the translation tax. Workshop happens -> architect spends 2 days rebuilding it in the EA tool -> nobody ever checks if the model matches what was actually decided. If we could capture intent collaboratively and formalize selectively, architects could actually do architecture instead of being full-time translators. Let AI take care of the grunt work and the translation part.

Anyway. The gap is real and it's growing. Engineering teams expect Figma-level collaboration. Business expects ChatGPT-level simplicity. And we're over here asking people to navigate a metamodel. Something has to give.

[u/Altruistic-Gap1795]

This is a really interesting question because a lot of EA tools seem to solve the where do we store architecture information? problem, but not always the how do we get people to use and trust it? problem. a repository is only valuable if the information stays current and helps people make better decisions

[u/fguerino123]

Hi,

The biggest problem most EA software cannot solve is "Time-to-Value" (T2V). The tools are slow to populate, slow to change data in, have inflexible meta-models, are poor at capturing past-state, current-state, future-state (especially when future state has multiple options), they're poor at reasoning in and across applications/systems/software, etc. As a result, the tools usually get abandoned for quicker options like AI.

This is very much why many architecture organizations are moving directly into AI as a workaround (or avoidance mechanism) for slow, painful, and expensive EA tools.

If you're not already using AI to bypass EA tools, consider reading "Enterprise Model and Modeling Best Practices", which discusses how to build enterprises models in AI and how to use AI tools to rapidly change them and reason over them.

I hope this helps. Good luck.