GUIDE Scenarios: A New Way of Modeling, Predicting and

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Scenarios: A New Way of Modeling, Predicting and Preparing for the Future Using Enterprise Architecture

GUIDE

The future - and specifically how to get your organization there - is the core function of the Enterprise Architect.

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Roadmaps, the most demanded EA product, answer the core organizational need for knowing what the future looks like and how to get there - across many different audiences.

There’s been a longstanding argument

about whether architects should concentrate on understanding the As-Is or planning the To-Be.

(Spoiler alert: the answer is both)

But even with agreement on this core function of the EA, the future remains a big problem for architects. Difficulties with predicting the future, deciding how the organization should respond with technology and process change, but also knowing how to model it at all. All three pose significant challenges for practicing architects.

Low-level technology considerations around future-state modeling may seem trivial compared to the need to respond to the next global crisis or technology disruption. But being able to efficiently model the future is foundational to articulating, analyzing, optimizing, regulating, and even anticipating that next wave of change, wherever it comes from.

This is why Ardoq’s all-new Scenarios feature matters.

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The first and most apparent challenge architects face in modeling the To-Be is the sheer uncertainty of the external environment and its effect on the organization.

Most of us know what it is to live through climate events, economic meltdowns, technology disruptions, the shifting balance of global and regional politics, and global pandemics.

These macro-level events can sometimes seem distant from the daily reality of architecture, yet they can stop a project or derail a strategy at any moment.Even at a lower level, disruptive business models, shifting demographics, and

customer and employee expectations change the business we do and how we do it.

The architect and strategist’s problem is that these changes can quickly occur within the timeframes of their roadmaps. They can rapidly change a story about digitization and growth into one about cost-cutting and retrenchment.

Architecting in the Age of Disruption

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This demands a level of strategic

agility from EA teams that

few are practicing.

It means the ability to articulate not just one future, but many , each of which can be analyzed and optimized for a different outcome.

Because if the future is a series of forking paths with very different outcomes, then Enterprise Architects and IT and Business Strategists need to be able to model and analyze them.

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The second challenge architects face in shaping the future is working within an organizational change framework that sometimes seems opposed to the whole concept of long-term planning: Agile.

EA was born 30 years ago as a planning methodology to determine how best to deploy technology and resources in support of the business strategy. Its legacy is an enterprise architecture that takes the long view, creating multi-year roadmaps on a large scale and monitoring and governing their implementation.

In more recent years, the Agile movement has grown to prioritize not foresight but feedback as a prime driver of development

in an uncertain world.

Agile concepts such as iterative development and emergent architecture can sit uncomfortably with conventional EA practices like road-mapping and governance gating. Architects may struggle to get oversight of day-by-day changes, which can carry far reaching implications.

Not that Agile and architecture are necessarily opposed.Methodologies like the Scaled Agile Framework (SaFE) have integrated the traditional architect concerns of road-mapping and cross-portfolio design into Agile development processes. EA is finally getting a place at the Agile table.

Agility at Every Level

But there’s still a problem.

No matter how well-embedded the architect is within the agile team, those principles offeedback, iteration, and emergence demand that their roadmaps flex and evolve in the same way and at the same tempo.

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On the other hand, conventional EA tools haven’t been flexible enough to spin up and analyze disposable futures in the same way. They’ve relied on laborious governance processes to check in and check out ‘approved’ versions of the To-Be, which are poorly-matched to the high-tempo, iterative, and sometimes experimental approaches of Agile change.

Agile teams are enabled by sophisticated tooling - Kanban Boards, Infrastructure-as-Code, Test Automation, Continuous Deployment - allowing them to rapidly spin up and configure new environments and solutions.

So to stay ahead of the curve, architects need tooling that can keep pace.

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Modeling Many Futures

Which brings us to the third - and in some ways, most surprising - challenge that architects face: Uncertainty on how to even model the future.

The foundation of EA is describing the journey from As-Is to To-Be; many EA tools struggle with the whole concept of modeling different points in time.

This is a significant constraint, and it’s one that kills the value of many EA tools implementations.

If you can’t model the state of an architecture at a point in time, you can’t describe what needs to be done and will struggle to analyze whether or not it’s the best course of action.

If that wasn’t bad enough, many tools really struggle with the other characteristics of modeling the future: That it is not built as a single, grand cohesive whole but in pieces, project-by-project and sprint-by-sprint - A swarm of micro-changes that spring forward from the As-Is and evolve independently before being re-integrated back into the baseline.

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Behind Ardoq’s Approach to Scenario Modeling

Magnulf Piskog is Co-founder and CIO at Ardoq and has over 15 years of experience as a strategic and operational technology consultant and executive manager.

“When we started thinking about how to do this seven years ago, we were certain we wanted to do it in a way that allows you to model the future as data in the graph...”

If you look at any organization, you’re constantly trying to model the future in different ways. You’re using whiteboards to draw a solution (or on paper, or a napkin, or in a document) where you try to describe with words what a potential future might be.

Even a simple to-do list is a potential future state of things we need to do.

When we look at the past (the As-Is), we should agree (in theory) on the facts. After all, it is what it is.However, with the future - there’s an infinite amount of uncertain possibilities.

In an organization, the key things that you want to control and analyze are the potentialoutcomes, benefits and problems, and risks and possibilities that a given future state can bring.

To make it even more challenging, you then add to the mix the question of how potential futures of given changes interact with other potential future changes?

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The best-laid plans...

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Organizations try to control these changes through projects, where the participants in the project should be aware of the current As-Is and how it might affect or impact their potential future as it is happening. This is why it also is so beneficial to make smaller changes and actively push them to As-Is (production) because the rest of the organization can see the impact of your changes immediately.

Big changes that need to be coordinated across many different projects will increase the impact of failures significantly.

Just think about how many times a change that has happened to the As-Is (production) that failed, because another project has changed how the rest of the systems work.

If your project cannot be adapted to the new current state, you either have to roll it back or change the current state to fit your project. This causes an immense drag on the organization and risk aversion because we all start to fear the effects of change.

To have insights into how we can succeed with a potential future, we need to understand how the current As-Is is changing and how it will impact your future.

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Enter scenarios.

Starting with seeing the potential future states as branches that always address the As-Is that is the accepted state of things.

A scenario allows you to take any elements of the as-is to your project, regardless of what kind of type or workspace it is. As flexible as a whiteboard but allows you to monitor andaddress the changes happening in the As-Is.

Meaning, if something changes that you need to be aware of, you now have control of it. You (or the approver who has access rights) will always address the changes in the As-Is first, make conflict resolution in your scenario, then merge those changes back to the As-Is if you have access.

Scenarios are a safe, secure way to collaborate on large-scale changes that will enable you and others to keep track of what’s happened and control how to address those changes.

Change management can now be done at speed and with confidence.

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Ardoq’s Graph Makes It Possible to Analyze the Impact of a Scenario

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Erik Bakstad is Co-founder and CTO at Ardoq. Through his 10-year professional career as a developer, SaaS product architect, and technology evangelist. He has experience across various industries, including biology, banking/finance, and telecoms.

“During the development of Scenarios, we focused on the concrete problems our customers are facing when modeling their organizations’ future states.”

Early in Ardoq’s journey, we knew that one of the core problems we wanted to optimize for was the flexibility to extend your models while retaining full analytical power. This is why the platform is built on top of a Graph data-model.

What that means in practice, is that you should be able to add a new concept to your meta-model, without needing to do

any customization of the platform - only configuration. Crucially, it’s about bringing the ability to query and analyze the new meta-model without losing any analytical capabilities.

From day one, this has been a core design philosophy in Ardoq. When we decided to take on the hard problems of As-Is/to-be modeling - we stayed faithful to our philosophy.

Data-Driven Insight in Future State ModelingScenarios in Ardoq takes the concept of branching and merging, known to anyone that has used a source control system before, and applies this concept to our graph data-model.This allows you to have multiple “future-states” branches without creating a mess. Instead of having to maintain multiple copies of your data with slight variations -

you only create a branch and then model the changes in the branch. Those changes will be kept isolated until you decide to merge them back. An immediate benefit is that it removes the burden on the user to manage copies of your data - Ardoq handles this.Secondly, it allows you to compare branches to either the As-Is or other branches.Last but not least - we can treat a Scenario as a first-class concept in Ardoq. One that you can analyze and compare visually and using graph traversals to aggregate relevant metrics of your branches. i.e., accumulated risk, complexity, or impact to the As-Is.

Now we can have data-driven decision making in future state modeling - this is a game-changer for EA tools.

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See how Ardoq can help you use EA to transform your

organization.

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Documents

GUIDE Scenarios: A New Way of Modeling, Predicting and