Astrakhan and Ardoq have decided to strengthen their partnership around an Agile Enterprise Architecture offer equipped with the product of the Norwegian SaaS scaleup.
It was at the 2018 Gartner EA Summit in London that Astrakhan and Ardoq first met, and quickly saw their alignment regarding their respective vision for a new era of Enterprise Architecture.
The innovative and disruptive positioning of Ardoq – a visionary entrant in this market and promoting a collaborative, iterative and data-centric practice – was immediately in line with the core business of Astrakhan. This latter is built on the two pillars of Architecture at the scale of the company’s Information System on the one hand, and agility and innovation on the other.
The meeting took place at the same time as Astrakhan embarked on a new type of offers combining Enterprise Architecture and Agility. Hence, Astrakhan conducted in 2018 a comparative study related to several tools on the market, focusing on their efficiency in the emerging context of Digital Transformation.
At the end of 2018, Astrakhan was already communicating on its strategy, first on its vision of an Agile Enterprise Architecture at the service of Digital Transformation, and second on a choice of tools consistent with this vision. This selection was particularly based on Gartner’s study named “Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Architecture Tools” published in late 2017.
Three use cases were presented in this study:
● “Speeding Time to Value”
● “Creating Signature-Ready Actionable Deliverables”
● “Making Smarter Decisions Faster”
The first group of criteria focused on the speed of appropriation and mastery of the tool, the ease of use and access. The last two referred to the ability to produce deliverables with high added-value in order to facilitate decision-makings adapted to corporate IS strategy.
These three classes of criteria were found to be perfectly aligned with Astrakhan’s vision of a tool adapted to the new requirements and purposes of an Agile Enterprise Architecture.
● A repository with a shared view of the IS understood by all allowing to anticipate the scalability of the company’s business services
● Support for aligning the IS with a constantly evolving business
● Facilitation of collaboration between teams
● A vector for producing value analysis and major impacts for the Enterprise IS.
● A need for co-construction based on the teams’ diversity in terms of expertise, sensitivities, and cultures.
From this study, emerged the differentiating positioning of Ardoq, reinforced by other features of its solution.
● A “Data Driven” approach easier to understand by all stakeholders
● Secure deployment in the cloud
● Unique graph technology for powerful analysis, particularly suitable to the management and course of relationships between objects
● A “native web” solution promoting collaboration around the tool
The next two years allowed the Astrakhan teams to gain skills in Ardoq’s product and test it at “real world business cases”.
Among the most successful are two Ardoq implementation projects responding to two business cases representative of the use of an Enterprise Architecture tool, in two very different business and motivation contexts.
The first led us to meet the needs of a leading global group in the CPG (“Consumer Product Goods”) field, faced with the need for harmonization and clarification of the governance of its application portfolio applied to a part of its geographic areas.
The second business case led us to carry out an audit and a new roadmap for the Information System of a human-sized cooperative company in the field of agriculture. This company is a trusted third-party between several players in this field, and a guarantor of significant financial flows.
The major challenges of the project were:
● To take into account the marked obsolescence of a part of its “Legacy” information system
● To integrate new needs for digital services to internal and external users
● To put interactions between IT and Business teams into perspective
● To create a new trajectory for the Information System under control in terms of costs.
These first projects enabled Astrakhan and Ardoq teams to gain mutual trust, improve their technical and commercial relationships, and thus consolidate a first level of partnership.
In Ardoq, Head of Partnerships Gard Havelin is excited about strengthening Ardoq’s bonds to Astrakhan:
“We see Astrakhan as a pivotal partner for Ardoq. They are in the forefront of data-driven digital transformation and have embraced New EA in a way few others have. Given the traction we have had together the last two years and with Astrakhan’s proven ability to execute, we cannot wait to give this partnership another boost and deliver superior customer value together.”
The second step towards a lasting partnership is underway. It will be punctuated in the short term by a strengthened agreement between the two partners, especially for the French and French-speaking areas, as well as for the APAC area.
Astrakhan and Ardoq are thus committed to a long-term collaboration in order to implement a new type of Enterprise Architecture’s offer, both agile and innovative, pushing back today’s limits of a rigid and self-centered Enterprise Architecture, leading to real added value for the user company and its stakeholders.
