Having deployed Ardoq and configured it to support your specific business need, how can you show your company that both the tool and the EA team delivered added value. How can you demonstrate that this was a good use of time, resources, and investment? How can you show what the Return on Investment really is? How can you improve the quality of decision-making and re-allocating time from boring governance tasks to strategic design?

The answer to all these questions is through the use of metrics, and specifically through capturing and visualizing metric data in Ardoq itself!

The following document describes what metrics for EA-led improvement are, how they are applied and used, and how they can demonstrate real value to your organization.

Metrics are simply variables, identified within Ardoq, to which a value is assigned. These values can be financial, quantitative, simple values, percentages and examples include what percentage of applications are on-premise and the cost of annual application maintenance.

By analyzing and measuring metrics over time, including before implementing change, it will be easy to determine how effective changes to the business, as determined and measured using Ardoq, have been.

Metrics can show the efficacy of a change, from pre-start to finish, how a change is progressing (KPI), and the longer-term benefits highlighted by measuring metrics on a continuous and long-term basis.

There are 3 areas we focus on for collecting metrics to help illustrate the value of change:

Data Quality - These metrics measure the completeness and accuracy of your data set over time. The more accurate your data is the more informed your decisions will be. The goal is that the value will remain consistent over time or, ideally, go up, e.g. percentage of the application portfolio that has been reviewed.

Business Value - These metrics measure the realization of the market and operational performance objectives.

Productivity - These metrics indicate improvements seen by EA as a result of operating more efficiently.

When defining your metrics it is important to keep the 5 principles of effective metric definition in mind:

With those principles in mind, we can begin to formulate what metrics would be relevant to the organization and how they could be implemented and tracked in Ardoq.

There are various mechanisms that can be used when defining metrics in your organization.

Standalone Metrics - The standalone metric is used to track generalized improvements over a specified period e.g. (2 hours). At the end of the predefined timeframe, we collect the realized outcome (0.5 hours) and measure it.

Aggregated Metrics - The aggregated metric is used to track several values and then aggregate them up to an average e.g. time spent doing Impact Analysis. In this example, we can tie this metric directly to change initiatives to collect impact analysis improvements across all initiatives. We can then aggregate up to return what the average improvement was.

Like the Standalone Metric, first, we establish a baseline and expected outcome. Then we can calculate the realized outcome through a calculated field

Many of our Use Case Guides, for example, Application Lifecycle Management, contain example metrics that you can find in the Metrics workspace. These are examples to inspire and help get you started, but it is up to you to identify what metrics are relevant for you to track.

For each identified metric three values of data need to be determined and documented as follows:

The collection process for data depends on the metrics and the metric types. Some data collection can be automated. For example data quality today versus data quality 1 year ago.

Alternatively, data collection could be manual. For example, was the discovery process easier today than it was 1 year ago?

With three values you can determine and present predicted benefits to the company as well as the real, tangible, benefits that change has delivered. Benefits can be monetary, quantitative, or statistical but will always feedback on the financial performance of the company.

Ardoq itself is used to track the changes in the value of those variables enabling you to visualize the trend over time.

Metrics do not have to be perfect or comprehensive. It is simply important to start with something which appears valuable for your business and then refine them over time.

Some metrics can rely on subjective estimation. Our experience is that this still provides a useful measure of benefit that can be discussed with your stakeholders in the organization.

Once suitable metrics have been identified, and the data for each one collected, they need to be presented in an understandable and user-friendly manner. The normal way to do this is through a metrics dashboard.

A dashboard simply provides a high-level overview of your data. You can create insightful dashboards through widgets based on surveys, advanced search, or gremlin queries.

To understand how to create and set up a dashboard please see a description in the file How to create a Dashboard.

Ardoq takes a snapshot of your data every night. That collection of snapshots creates a time series of values that are presented in the dashboard widget. Changes to the values are therefore tracked automatically and subsequently used to show status and trends.

An example of some key Metrics contained in the dashboard is as follows:

Similar graphics exist for all metrics defined within Ardoq.

As outlined above metrics can be used for many different areas of the business using Ardoq. Their definition and application will depend on your business and your implementation of the application.

The type and usage of metrics are extremely varied and can be specific to your business. The following examples demonstrate a range of metrics that can be defined for different areas of your business, what they can measure, and how they can be applied:

There are several clear benefits of defining and using metrics for your organization that include:

Setting up metrics in Ardoq is a straightforward process comprising the following steps:

a) Baseline Metric

b) Estimated outcome

c) Realized outcome

4. Apply the 3 fields to the defined metric component

Now you can use other tools such as surveys and broadcasts to collect the metrics baseline result and subsequent follow-ups to begin populating the change and track that change over time using dashboards.

Many customers have asked how they can prove both their value and the value of using an EA tool, and Ardoq, in particular.

Using metrics is one of the main ways to do this. By identifying relevant metrics for your business, determining their baseline value, the expected value post-change, and then the actual value because of change, you will quickly and efficiently determine the financial benefits resulting from the use of the EA tool.

Metrics can be used in the short term, or over a longer period, and can be modified as required by the business.

By adding a dashboard in Ardoq the latest metric data will be up to date and available for use in strategy and decision making.

In summary, therefore, metrics are used to calculate real, financial, benefits resulting from planned changes within the business.