Ardoq

What do you like best?

Ardoq software lets us:

- effectively manage a complex architectural landscape

- connect, document and query data across different architectural domains by using the power of the graph technology

- easily review and understand collected data with the help of automated and dynamic visualizations

- use built-in templates

- run effective application portfolio management

- use a set of simple and goal oriented surveys to collect and maintain data that is spread across different organizational units

- bring valuable insight and give a better understanding of the big picture of our architectural landscape to the rest of the organization through the use of dynamic presentations

- upcoming finctionality for use of scenarios to map target architectures and explore alternative designs

What do you dislike?

Overall, we are happy with the Ardoq tool. One issue that we would like to address is compliance with the WCAG 2.0 requirements and universal design. Some visualizations do not fully comply with universal design principles and WCAG -standards but we hope that Ardoq will address and solve this issue in the near future.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

The Ardoq tool is a very powerful and flexible EA tool for work with enterprise architecture. We recommend ordering a trial from Ardoq to explore it's features and many of the ready templates.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Just knowing how many IT-systems we had, how they were connected, how much they cost and who were responsible for their operation and maintenance, and conveying this information through the Ardoq tool to the whole organization in a comprehensible way, was a big benefit for us. The possibility to query the graph database gave us new insights and enabled a completely new level of structure and support for better decision making; decisions based on accurate facts.

One of our main challenges was collection of EA related data from the whole organization and keeping it up to date. This task got much easier when we started using Ardoq's survey module. By hiding the EA complexity and Ardoq models behind a set of simple and goal oriented surveys or forms, we were able to collect and maintain data that was spread across different organizational units, and to put it into structures that we defined in Ardoq. The use of Ardoq surveys and dynamic presentations helped us enable better collaboration across organizational functions, better convey enterprise architecture concepts, and thus achieve broader organizational engagement.

We're also using Ardoq to document our GDPR compliance.