Create an Architecture Layers Map

This tutorial first discusses a use case and then presents how it is modeled into an architecture atlas.

Next, it shows how it can be accessed by stakeholders in the viewer.

At the end, the steps are provided on how to create an architecture layers map yourself.

Provide Landscape Transparency - Use Case

To understand Dragon1 and the power of Enterprise Architecture well, we suggest you watch an example Use Case in an Atlas in the Dragon1 Viewer application.

An atlas is a set of visualizations or a design book, shown in the Dragon1 Viewer.

An easy use case to get started with is the Provide Landscape Transparency Use Case, presented on this help page.

Click here to visit the FSwin-USA demo in the Viewer. FSwin-USA is a fictitious (non-existing) example company in financial services.

Mapping the FSwin-USA Strategy

FSwin-USA is a fictitious financial services company.

To stay ahead of the competition, they decided to significantly change and improve how they do customer contact, process payments, and enable clients to make digital payments.

They identified three business capabilities that should be implemented:

• Customer Terms Contact - the client decides how we contact them
• Payment Processing and Mediation -
• Digital Micro Payments - Banking clients can do real-time micro-payments (less than USD 10) with an exact cost of 1 USD cent.

The CEO is very impatient and wants to implement these capabilities within 3 months and all at once!

As this impacts everything in the organization, it was decided to create an architecture atlas with the following three diagrams:

• Current State Enterprise Architecture
• Future State Enterprise Architecture
• Reference Architecture, containing the capabilities and their elements

The online demo of FSwin-USA in the Dragon1 Viewer shows all these diagrams (Click on the picture to view it).

In the Dragon1 Viewer, a user has many features to use and alter the demo:

• One can select views to analyze the data in the visualizations in more detail.
• One can see which capabilities are not implemented fully in the current state and what needs to be added or changed in the future state.
• One can see out of which elements every capability consists.
• One can change any data of the demo. Such as the processes, applications, capabilities, principles, rules, and views.
• Finally, the altered demo can be exported in JSON or Excel and later uploaded to the Dragon1 Viewer.

The Viewer supports doing a round trip with .dragon1 Files (JSON) and Excel Sheets.

Because Dragon1 supports imports and export of data in .dragon1 Files and Excel Sheet, you as a user never encounter any vendor lock-in ever.

Enterprise Architecture Layers

This use case deals with providing landscape transparency on all enterprise architecture layers.

The main diagram in the FSwin-USA demo shows six layers. A layer for stakeholders, services, processes, data, applications, and IT infrastructure components.

Per layer, the key objects and components are shown as dependencies across layers.

As you probably already know, the clearer it is to everyone how everything is connected and how well everything is or is not compliant with principles, standards, and rules, the better things can be planned and improved.

Therefore, creating a diagram that gives this insight and overview is a good and smart thing.

Enterprise architecture is a tool for planning business and IT changes, strategy, and business model transformation and managing the risks accordingly.

This example use case provides a demo showing how easy it is to generate a landscape overview of the organization in several layers.

Dynamic Views

When you access the demo, you see a list of views shown.

Per layer, a couple of views are defined.

When you click on a view in the list, you see icons appear next to shapes, and you see shapes disappear or change color. This is based on the queries and rules of the view.

If you click on the first view "Manual Tasks", the shapes of the processes that contain manual tasks are colored red.

To see how this view is configured, click on the edit button in the view row.

The views are called Dynamic Views because when the data in the repository is changed, the views will immediately show a different result.

The Action Script help page lists the different options there are to configure views.

Current State and Future State Capabilities

The FSwin-USA demo presents a fragment of the enterprise architecture of a demo company.

According to their strategy, they need to gain certain capabilities so they can execute their strategy.

Before they can improve capabilities, they created this atlas with a couple of diagrams that provide insights and an overview of the current and future state of their companies' enterprise architecture.

The reference architecture diagram contains the capabilities they want to gain.

In this diagram, the dots show how well it is implemented per capability.

The dots for a certain value can be toggled on and off by clicking on a view in the list.

The fill color of a capability shows how significant it is for the company's strategy.

With the buttons below the diagram, the criticality for a certain value can be toggled on and off.

Analyzing Capability Implementation

If you click on the business capability view in the current state diagram, you see that various required capability elements are missing or not implemented well enough.

If you click on the business capability view in the future state diagram, you see that most required capability elements are present and implemented well enough.

With this demo, you have an example of how creating current state and future state diagrams with dynamic views has added business value for planning business and IT changes.

Dragon1 Viewer Application

Part of the Dragon1 platform is the Viewer application.

The Dragon1 Viewer provides access to atlases consisting of interactive visualizations.

It gives an overview of published atlases and visualizations according to your role-based access level.

The application generates atlases, visualizations, and views based on data from the repository.

The Viewer can also view .dragon1 files (JSON) and data from Excel sheets directly.

Interactivity

If you go with your mouse over a shape in a diagram in the Viewer, a popup dialog box appears showing values for attributes of the corresponding entity (or data object).

More details about the corresponding entity are shown if you click on a shape.

If you press shift, you can drag the popup dialog, click on URLs, or drill down links if any are shown in the popup.