Something that I’d like to highlight is how the availability of Archi as a free tool has allowed for a greater degree of sharing and discussion of EA in our UK Higher Education sector, and, indeed in the wider community, both commercial and non-commercial. Without Archi would there have been the Coventry Modelling Bash, the London King’s College ArchiMate workshop, and many of the discussions in the EA Practice Group meetings where practitioners are sharing models created in Archi?
My colleague, Stephen Powell, blogged last October on “Why is Archi significant?” and as I attend more EAPG meetings, overhear discussions and see increasing numbers of presentations using screen-shots of Archi models I see Archi’s presence more and more. Why is this?
That Archi is free and open source is one good reason. And also that it runs on Mac OS X as well as Windows (and actually, Linux too). But also because at the other end of the spectrum some of the existing ArchiMate tools are so expensive. Looking at the rich feature-set of some of these tools I wonder why anyone would choose Archi. Could it be the pricing model? The bigger tools are great if you’re a large company and can afford the licence, but not so great for the single user, the EA student, the small enterprise, the cash-strapped University…
This actually puts a great pressure on Archi. Users want Archi to support some of the features that these other tools have. For free. Repositories, sharing, versioning and so on. There’s no real middle ground at the moment between the two extremes of free and expensive. Perhaps Archi will include these features one day. Or perhaps there could be a free basic version of Archi with paid-for add-ons. As it’s open source there are many possibilities to explore.
But whatever the future for Archi, what has been clear to me is that in its one year existence it has provided us with a means to share models and EA conversations that might not otherwise have been possible.
