SMART360
Complete Visibility for Powerful EA

To fully enable Enterprise Architecture (EA), a 360-degree view across the business and IT landscape is required. Having this integrated view of EA data is a key to critical decision making for business transformation and adoption of new technologies. With an ever-increasing amount of data and conflicting priorities for its use, EA organizations need a centralized repository of domain information to draw upon. “Additionally, IT needs to visualize the connection of complex business structures with the corresponding application and portfolios,” begins Jean Gehring, Senior Director, SMART360. “Our product, smartEA is a powerful management tool that provides the data repository and the transparency across the EA domain for efficient analysis, planning, and control.”

smartEA is an intuitive EA management and visual modeling product that works on both mobile and SaaS platforms, and recognized by Gartner as a ‘Visionary Tool’ back in 2011. With smartEA, organizations can gain insights into the application and technical inventory, instantly understand the relationships, business value, and costs. You can assess the impact of changing or eliminating an application or technology on business processes and the results of introducing new applications or technologies to the existing portfolio. “smartEA helps in reducing licenses, operations, support, and application integration costs, while optimizing financial resources for innovative solutions,” says Jean. “Organizations can also improve compliance with a measured approach to governing both the technical and application portfolios, and providing transparency on the fulfillment of various compliance issues.

smartEA provides the platform to establish business-capability planning, with which IT requirements can be directly mapped from business processes, strategies, and capabilities. Architects can collect, organize, and manage the foundation data, which is needed to create roadmaps and support decision-making. With smart EA, organizations can also create deployable services, which enable them to transform redundant IT services into shared business services and prioritize the services that need to be built first.

smartEA helps in reducing licenses, operations, support, and application integration costs, while optimizing financial resources for innovative solutions

In one instance, a Fortune 500 insurance company that partnered with SMART360 implemented smartEA to transform its EA delivery capabilities. The insurance company needed a centralized repository of business, application, and infrastructure domain metadata to plan and manage their IT landscape and support its growth strategy. Data was dispersed across multiple systems impacting the ability to provide accurate and timely data for executive decisions. The smartEA software and their advisory services enabled the organization to quickly demonstrate tangible value and increase stakeholder participation. Within a few months, smartEA was fully utilized and integrated with IBM WebSphere Business Modeler and Clarity, a project portfolio management system. A 360° view of the architecture domain helped the client to gain transparency to manage the complexity and increased technical quality.

“Our customer base is global and represents a range of industries and EA maturity levels, and is very savvy. They help ensure our product suite evolves holistically,” notes Jean.
“We are still small enough to listen and execute quickly and large enough to support our customers globally,” concludes Jean. “To put it in simple terms, our customers’ success is our success and that makes us unique in the EA industry.”

In a few months the company will launch smart360 suite, the next generation for EAM products. smart360 suite supports the changing dynamics of EA with a fully flexible meta-model, full context search, and ability to navigate across domains and peek into business functions without leaving the screen.