• Digital business transformation results in the need for EA tools. As the digital transformation becomes inevitable, EA tools help organizations manage their resources and architect the enterprise without disrupting the core business functions.
• Cloud computing is another reason why EA tools are becoming more important. As the enterprises migrate from on-premise to cloud, the enterprises should plan their migration operationally and architecturally.

The main benefits of EA tools are both strategic planning and operational management.  

• Enhancing decision making: Thanks to decision-making algorithms in EA tools, EA tools enable enterprise architects to evaluate their investment and related problems. Thus, EA tools provide improvements in the decision-making mechanism.
• Improve compliance and risk management: EA tools help organizations adapt their operations to regulatory changes and ensure risk management
• Create operational efficiencies: EA Tools provide dashboards and visualizations for customizable workflows and evaluation of ideas in order to improve organizational efficiencies.

• Scenario analysis: Users can generate and compare scenarios automatically to see how changes in a business model affect other models with the help of visualizations.
• Portfolio management:  EA tools help architects analyze and manage the current status of IT portfolios. These tools can guide technology projects by emphasizing the effects of factors such as cost optimization, income increase, and risk reduction on the portfolio.
• Requirements management: EA tools support enterprises in the process of documentation, prioritization, and agreement on requirements.
• Architecture governance and assurance: EA tools help enterprise architects to manage EA assets in a single repository and ensure agreed-on standards created during the architecture creation process.

• Decision support and analysis: EA tools enable users to analyze the different impact factors such as process, IT, employees on enterprise decisions. These analyses can be reported and transferred to managers. Actionable, ready for signature outputs can be delivered.
• Driving innovation: Business managers and innovation teams use EA tools to plan and implement projects involving new technologies.
• Digital transformation: EA tools enable companies to rearchitect the organization for digital transformation. Organizations develop a roadmap for the future and they also ensure that the enterprise remains important participants in their ecosystems.
• Architecture modeling: Enterprise architects can use EA tools to illustrate the dependencies between different platforms, services and databases.

Though companies should follow usual procurement best practices such as minimizing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), the points below are specifically important for EA solutions:

• Product capabilities: In the selection of EA tool, it is necessary to have a detailed idea about what the product can do. These options may differ as follows.
  • Does the product modeling capabilities include main viewpoints of enterprise architecture
  • Does the product support different decision analysis capabilities?
  • Does the product support different presentation views for different types of stakeholders
  • Does the product include features to administer user access rights and security?
  • Is the product configurable for different types of users and environments?
  • Does the product support frameworks and standards, while enabling customization according to user needs?

• Integration and deployment:
  • Does the product deliver all features and functions in a readily usable manner?
  • Does the product support integration with the different tools for analytics?

• Service and support: Product support is an important factor in terms of the usability of the product. Maintenance, training and technical support should be usually available in order to reduce latency on decision making and enterprise management.

• Cost: EA tool costs increase over time as additional usage of functionality increases. The number of editor user licenses can change the overall cost of the tool. The integration capabilities and training price is another factor that affects cost.