The refreshing approach is inclusivity: the EA platform for the 21st century, from ValueBlue

8 October 2019 | 3555 Shares

Source: Shutterstock

In technology circles, especially for highly specialist products like enterprise architecture software, business process management solutions, and data modeling applications, there’s an assumption that the platform should be as complex and technical as the subject matter it covers.

But capturing complexity does not necessarily mean the presentation layer of the user interface needs to reflect the complexities that are represented “under the hood.” Indeed, for ValueBlue, the need to involve multiple stakeholders throughout an enterprise’s strategic realignment and digital transformation process (which is key to improve your business) was so urgent, the need for a collaborative approach ensured an approachable, familiar and simple-to-use interface.

That’s because ValueBlue knows that the complex and changing environment in the modern enterprise is interdependent: drawing multiple inputs from business function owners, staff, management, and external bodies. Pulling together the strands dictates a multi-disciplinary collaboration between IT (the apps and services in everyday use), data (repositories of information and their flows) and business (processes, as described by the people involved), and enables organizations to connect their strategy to their operations, empowering them to actually execute this strategy in the real world.

The EA core at the heart of BlueDolphin

Although ValueBlue’s EA BlueDolphin platform is an overarching EA solution, its payment plans comprise of three strands. The EA “core” bundles multiple capabilities, however, unified into a central data instance. It’s from here that the platform consolidates data from various sources. The extremely user friendly interface allows users from all over the organization to add their information, while the platform’s strong and easy-to-configure data connections interfaces with digital sources all over the organization, effectively breaking down the pockets of information (silos) that have organically spread over the different functions, professionals and systems in the enterprise.

By creating a single source of truth for all relevant information, and using the same base for modeling data, apps, services, and BPMN files, there’s a canonical source from which to work, for all users.

What differentiates ValueBlue from its competition is that the software presents its models and garners its informational in different ways: Enterprise Architects see different data and process representations, for example, from C-suite managers, in turn quite different from departmental or division stakeholders. Information can even be represented in plain language so knowledge about modeling in any specialist nomenclature is not even necessary.

That makes the platform an ideal place for collaboration right across the organization, and data gets shared, published and collaborated on, from the same location, but in ways relevant to the audience “type.”

Similarly, because there are several modeling languages and schema (use of one or another tends to depend on industry type as much as personal preference), the platform also comes with the ability to “speak” multiple languages — although under the hood, standard ArchiMate terminology is used; in fact, everything is connected this way, making it impossible to have logical discrepancies between modelling languages.

Each knowledge area is actively involved in improving the quality of the data and business models as they develop, and as data flows are mapped, and IT resources get represented, the coming-together of the whole is, therefore, a transparent and multi-sourced mixture. This inclusivity sets BlueDolphin apart from its competitors, whose products are more vague for non-Enterprise Architects.

Agile Architecure

One of the main objectives of every large organization is agile architecture. How do we empower independent teams to be as effective and creative as possible, while at the same time keeping them aligned with the company strategy?

By allowing individuals to create multiple independent solution architectures, process and data models (while connecting them all together in the back-end), BlueDolphin is the boundary condition for letting teams work independently while still being aligned. The low threshold to usability and strong capability for decentralized connection between strategy and operation make BlueDolphin the perfect platform for agile architecture.

Application Portfolio

Before any considerations can be made with regards to the enterprise’s IT, a thorough audit is needed. As well as providing the backdrop against which the enterprise works currently (and will change over time), the audit process also surfaces extant licensing issues, unused IT stacks, and over- or under-utilized resources. Even taken in isolation, the audit process saves time and money and helps prevent any licensing conflicts or infringements.

Business Process Management

Organizations’ goals might include any number of endgames: improving efficiency, or effectiveness, quality improvements, customer satisfaction metrics boosts or promoting innovation. Each requires aimed business processes to achieve goals, and a BPM exercise — set up and then continuously maintained by stakeholders — provides priceless insights. Areas of weakness, unbalanced relationships between processes and their resources, and the use of incoherent data: these are all areas that will be unearthed, and can be corrected as part of the EA process.

BlueDolphin BPM considers all aspects of the organization, the relationships between business units, and the interchanges on all levels between the enterprise and third parties, like partners, suppliers, and customers.

By documenting, improving and automating in one single data point, the organization ensures maximum support and resource allocation for primary goals, overall improvements to processes, and a new, more transparent picture of the daily running of the entire enterprise.

Data models and Dictionaries

In a digital enterprise, there’s a great deal of correlation between business processes and data flows executed by application integration solutions. In many cases, the two are conceptually the same. The detail, however, of data movements is more linked to the physical practicalities of IT.

Only by careful creation of dynamic data models in the BlueDolphin platform can the disparities between processes and data movements be surfaced. That ensures that business processes are appropriately supported by IT infrastructure and practice, rather than the IT stack dictating working methods.

The adjunct to data modeling is what ValueBlue terms a Data Dictionary. The centralized Dictionary lets everyone (all stakeholders) across the organization see the physical, logical, and conceptual models of data and the differences between them. That promotes a deeper understanding of the underlying framework of the business and its resources and helps all business units understand the ramifications of change.

Learn more

The ValueBlue Enterprise Architecture platform, BlueDolphin, is one that is forward-facing, open, and one that evolves with today’s shifting digital and strategic landscape in mind, which makes it indispensable for digital transformation. As a product, its approach provides incisive power, but via a logical and precise series of graphical and written materials, compatible with existing systems and — vitally— one that’s collaborative and broadly embraceable.

Here at TechHQ, we predict that the ValueBlue offering will continue to make significant inroads into the US Enterprise Architecture market space, from its roots in the European mainland. This platform is one to watch, with a fresh approach that’s significantly exciting and more than sufficiently powerful.

To learn more about BlueDolphin, click here.