Lance Gardner, the founder and Chief Architect at DCO Enterprise, has started to evaluate a number of Enterprise Architecture (EA) toolsets. Starting with iServer from Orbus Software, he has completed his user and administration accreditation.

"A few years ago EA toolsets were geared only towards architects. They assisted architects with defining and maintaining the EA. However, it was very difficult for anyone except architects to decipher these artefacts. That made creating the business case for a toolset extremely hard and architects often lived with Office like tools creating static artefacts that were hard to keep in-sync and up to date.

In the last couple of years however, the EA toolsets have matured considerably. Artefacts are now dynamic with updates propagated through related items and integrated with dynamic dashboards. No longer does the CIO or other business stakeholder need to spend hours creating executive presentations. User friendly dynamic dashboards with drill down capabilities are readily available for everyone, including a rich set of dashboards for the CEO and their executives."