The primary driver to getting an overview of your architecture is to better understand the impact of change. So it is no surprise that being able to consider multiple future states or to-be models is a critical need for anyone working with change management or strategy.

The future remains a big problem for architects. These include 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 without affecting production instance data. 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.

Ardoq’s Scenarios takes the lessons learned from collaborative code development and branching and applies them to your architecture. The result is an agile and accurate approach to consider any number of potential future scenarios without diverging from the continuous changes in your organization.

With Scenarios, users can select any part of their architecture and branch it. This creates a safe space to design potential futures whether it is removing retired systems, adding new process designs, or even architecting future organizational structures with people, departments, and locations.

Scenarios provide you the same functionality that you come to expect with Ardoq, meaning that you have all the automated visualizations, data-driven heatmaps, perspectives, and real-time collaboration support. You also receive additional support for differential analysis between your designs and the original “mainline” data.

The architect and strategist's problem is that internal and external changes can quickly occur within the timeframes of their roadmaps. These can then rapidly change a story about digitization and growth into a story about cost-cutting and retrenchment.

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, Enterprise Architects and IT and Business Strategists need to be able to model and analyze them.

Branching gives you the benefit of speed without sacrificing detail, data, or accuracy. By applying branching, you have a starting point for your designs, but instead of simply copying data and dooming it to be outdated, branching ensures that you are always aware of the changes which may impact your designs.

Ardoq knows of any underlying data changes, like attributes or dependencies, but also what is not included in your branch which may be of interest. For this reason, Ardoq can show you everything within the proximity of your designs allowing you to easily expand your scope when necessary or see when new projects are spun up which may impact your design. Without branching, future states are left to isolation and completely removed from the living ecosystem which you are charged to navigate.

Our data-driven approach to modeling future states allows you to consider any scope or use case. This type of functionality loans itself perfectly for:

No other solution on the market gives you the tools to rapidly model any number of future states, compare outcomes and maintain continuous overviews of the changing ecosystem across your organization.

With Ardoq’s Scenarios, you will have the speed and confidence to evaluate and decide the best solutions to realize your strategic ambitions.