More and more QualiWare users consider a consensus-driven management philosophy and enterprise collaboration to be a key driver for business agility and innovation. This has always been essential for QualiWare when we design our products and services.
For several years, we have been surprised and disappointed that Gartner sticks to a rather traditional view on EA Tools, when they evaluate a vendor. For us, collaboration is such a central prerequisite for an enabling and outcome-driven enterprise design platform. For Gartner, collaboration is hardly mentioned in the criteria for evaluation and is completely lacking in several important areas.
QualiWare delivers a platform for Enterprise Architecture Management and several other management systems. For us, and for all of our customers, the collaboration features are core functions in the implemented information system. Further details on this can be found in our whitepaper Collaboration: The Key to Successful Enterprise Architecture.
Gartner’s evaluation criteria are not available in the public domain, so we cannot go into details in this blog. But suffice to say that Gartner ranks stuff like “print hardcopy” higher than the total sum of collaboration features in an EA tool.
It is particularly striking that the evaluation criteria neglect collaboration when Gartner in much of their research over the past five years have – like other analysts – argued that collaboration is key to the success of enterprise architecture. Perhaps the “magic” in the Magic Quadrant is a five-year delay? It certainly seems so.
Over the past year, QualiWare has doubled the number of users on our collaboration platform, which now has hundreds of thousands of users across enterprises around the globe. See our whitepaper for more evidence and customer examples.
The shift in EA towards collaboration is a response to several challenges. EA is at a crossroads, and should be regarded as a powerful problem finding and problem solving tool that supports transformational activities both on the strategic and operational levels. Read John Gøtze’s blog post about this.
QualiWare strongly recommends Gartner to include collaboration relevant criteria in future EA tool evaluations. We also encourage Gartner to make their evaluation criteria public and accessible to all, and engage in a public dialogue about these. QualiWare is very keen on engaging in such open dialogues, and open all our social platforms for that purpose: Make comments to this blog, or on our Linkedin page, to our Twitter handle, or on Facebook.
As a vendor, QualiWare has an obligatory relation with analyst firms. Gartner include QualiWare in their Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools. QualiWare is also included in the Forrester Wave for Enterprise Architecture Management Suites.