Ardoq

The deciding feature for acquiring Ardoq was their survey tool. Keeping information up-to-date on a 1000 application inventory in a decentralized institution required the power of crowd sourcing. Ardoq surveys are targeted to the product owners and the apps they manage. The questions are limited to what we want to focus on. The survey is populated with data from Ardoq. The submitted survey automatically UPDATES ARDOQ - no data re-entry needed. A recent effort to collect disaster recovery information engaged 200 different product owners through the survey process with over 85% participation. Ardoq reporting and dashboards made it easy to monitor results and follow-up as needed. The Presentation functionality is very helpful. It allows you to bundle together reports and dashboards within a single object with a URL. This URL can be sent to users or embedded in an iframe to provide real-time data to users without having to login to Ardoq. Ardoq has created a series of downloadable Solution Packages addressing specific IT areas -- Application Lifecycle Management, Capability Modeling, Compliance Assurance, and a dozen more. Solutions have 2 or 3 white papers on the topic, the value proposition, and how to implement the recommended functionality in Ardoq. They also include new fields for components along with sample reports, dashboards, and surveys. This provides a substantial force multiplier in creating functionality.

The ability to render a full technical landscape of integrations and the ability to create scenarios of future state.

The roadmap and the support. The roadmap releases features that everyone actually needs and it is much more frequent than our previous vendor. This means I can get on and use features much more rapidly. As an example the Data Inventory justt dropped and it is game changer in terms of updating the data in the repository. The support is superb and not via e-mail but direct in the app. I have asked everything from simple questions to complex bespoke queries and always get a timely answer. In addition I will mention the AI features which are great and I know more is coming down the track on that. The social aspect of the tool is a game changer and I can share freely the info that belongs to the whole business not just to the architects and I have multiple ways I can do this: Lists/Reports, Dashboards, Surveys, Presentations. Interally I really appreciate all the data governance dashboards so we can see how far we have travelled and how complete the data is! It really helps us to hone in on who/what/where to target next!

As an architecture modeling tool, Ardoq provides a great deal of flexibility. They provide a lot of white papers with suggestions on what to do. But you need to make choices, the consequences of which may not be clear. You need to be prepared to try out different modeling approaches and start over if needed. The product has a high learning curve. Getting new teams engaged with Ardoq requires time and effort. Ardoq provides lots of ways to engage folks without knowing a lot - surveys, dashboards, and presentations. But bringing in the middle tier - IT teams who are not Ardoq experts - can be a challenge. The Ardoq data model is based on graph theory -- nodes and edges -- rather than set theory -- RDBs and SQL. You need to learn Gremlin - a language for working with graphs -- to do advanced stuff. Reporting across different workspaces, e.g. Apps, People, Orgs, that would be relatively easy in SQL can be a challenge in Gremlin.

Surveys have not yet proven useful for engaging others outside of EA and we hoped that this would be a core value added feature for collaboratively creating the enterprise architecture

I think it could benefit from a landing page for users. There is Discovery but a) it is an add-on and b) it clutters the view and too easy for users to stray into other areas of the model you might not want them in. A slick portal type option with simple links would be perfect for finding the trees in the forest and avoid accidentally clicking around. The other thing is the documentation which has not kept up with the new UI and a lot of the videos refer to older materials. I know they are remedying this at the moment and the in-app support and online support documentation is a good mitigation. Finally I will mention that I think the approvals workflows for Surveys should be an auto-include and not an add-on, this would make more sense so users cannot 'pollute' the model through its social aspect of surveys etc. Just a light workflow would really help in this regard.