Using Modern Enterprise Architecture

The true power of Enterprise Architecture (EA) lies in its ability to transform the organization, and that hinges on effective stakeholder engagement. Engaging stakeholders throughout the entire EA process fosters collaboration and ensures the architecture aligns with strategic objectives.

​​Enterprise Architects (EAs) play a crucial role in sourcing data from stakeholders across the organization. By understanding stakeholders’ pain points, priorities, and how IT intersects with their daily activities, EAs can tailor solutions to better address business needs.

The key to successful communication lies in reaching the right people at the right time with the right message. EAs need to segment their audience and tailor their communication style accordingly. By actively soliciting feedback and addressing concerns, EAs can build trust and encourage broad organizational support for key initiatives.

Additionally, by demonstrating the benefits of Enterprise Architecture and its value in achieving strategic goals, EAs can turn the architecture from a technical blueprint into a powerful driver of organizational success.

All this isn’t easy if EAs rely on manual processes, such as time-consuming interviews and emails, to communicate. That’s why Ardoq Broadcasts is a key part of making EA scalable and keeping architecture up to date.

What is Ardoq Broadcasts

Broadcasts is Ardoq’s highly-configurable automated messaging platform. Broadcasts are a way of sending personalized messages that return the highest quality insights quickly and at scale. This function helps users automatically identify which messaging should go to whom and when. 

It’s crucial to involve subject matter experts in data collection and maintenance. Broadcasts make that process easier, allowing users to meet those experts where they work and, therefore, providing a lower barrier to data collection.

Broadcasts are the ideal way to send surveys, alerts, and notifications to key stakeholders on follow-up actions, automate reminders, and speed up approvals processes. Using Broadcasts, Ardoq administrators can send out Survey invitations and reminders to collect and update data, set up data-driven alerts to inform stakeholders of changes in reports and metrics or drive targeted actions, and build workflows to orchestrate tasks between different team members.

A few benefits of using Broadcasts to collaborate effectively with key stakeholders:

• Send targeted messages based on audience interest and roles
• Follow-up surveys with reminders to improve response rates
• Set triggers to alert selected stakeholders of changes in key reports and metrics
• Avoid spamming unrelated audiences

How Broadcasts Work

Broadcasts can send out everything from mass emails inviting your whole organization to contribute to a survey to personalized, micro-targeted alerts only sent under specific conditions. This supports important workflows in the organization, helping enterprise architects run them nonstop.

Broadcasts can use the structure of your architecture models themselves to route the right messages to the right people. Getting data via stakeholder engagement helps EA teams provide senior leaders and decision-makers with reliable, up-to-date insights, reports, and dashboards.

Broadcasts also work in tandem with other Ardoq features to help collect data from the right stakeholders, providing them with value and keeping them engaged. One example is Ardoq Discover, which uses Surveys to gather data from domain experts through simple, customized forms without requiring them to learn a new tool. Administrators can send out reminders to key individuals using Broadcasts. Ardoq Discover is the elegant, user-friendly interface that their colleagues will be brought to for reviewing and updating information as required.

Learn more about how different roles in your organization can use Ardoq Discover.

Common Problems Ardoq Broadcasts Can Solve

Personalizing messages at scale

Stakeholders are more likely to dismiss or ignore data-collection messages if they receive the same thing as everyone else and it doesn’t speak to their personal interests. Broadcasts allow EA teams to specifically target stakeholders with personalized messaging that is directly relevant to them and drive specific actions. Administrators can specify which components to include in the broadcasts and under what conditions the broadcast will be sent. They can also keep selected audiences informed of changes in report fields and key metrics, such as if costs have exceeded a certain value or if risk scores have crossed a threshold. 

Lack of connection between data collection and reporting

Broadcasts are driven by the data populated into Ardoq. Essentially, the same properties used for heat-mapping a visualization or reporting in a dashboard can also be used to trigger a Broadcast. Broadcasts are critical in helping organizations ensure data is complete and up-to-date in the Ardoq platform.

Recipient lists becoming quickly outdated through organizational changes

The same components and references created in architecture models can also be used to route messages to the right recipients. Ardoq enables EA teams to build a stakeholder map directly into architecture models, and Broadcasts can use that map to route and personalize communications.

For example, you can traverse a business process model to find who the downstream process owners are and send them alerts. You can also add somebody to a Broadcast audience simply by drawing a reference between that person and another component in the user interface.

Identifying the most relevant audience

Broadcasts enable EA teams to use powerful graph queries to build highly-targeted messaging that is only sent to the most relevant stakeholders. This sophisticated targeting capability means avoiding spam and guiding stakeholders to what matters most to them.

Losing best practice momentum

Using Broadcasts to send out Surveys to collect even more data creates a ‘virtuous circle’ of user interaction. This makes it easy to maintain clean, specific operational processes and drive and automate the workflows. Below is an example of how this works in practice for automating application ownership, simplifying an otherwise tedious and manual process:

Broadcasts in Action: Easing Information Capture and Access

Broadcasts, especially when used in tandem with Surveys, have radically improved and accelerated the way EA teams work. Here are just some of the organizations that have experienced the value of Ardoq Broadcasts:

“When we initially implemented Ardoq, we anticipated all of our users coming into the Ardoq UI and therefore having to understand the metamodel in great detail, how it works, and how to use and navigate the UI. Our ‘aha moment’ was when we realized that it wasn’t the best way to get content into Ardoq. The best way was to enable users and contributors to update and populate the metamodel via Surveys and Broadcasts.”

Alex Waugh, Principal Data Architect, Ordnance Survey 

Bertel O. Steen (BOS)

For BOS, rapid changes in the automobile industry demanded technological support to make the company more flexible and scalable. To help this happen, the organization needed a clear understanding of how IT was supporting the business as well as how to scale to meet shifts in its industry.

To help build that transparency and deliver insights, Broadcasts made the Ardoq platform a single source of truth for Bertel O. Steen, connecting the critical overview of the organization to the business’s strategic goals, providing context for top-level discussions across the business. The data contributed to better quality analysis and architecture that was automatic, always up to date, and accessible to everyone in the organization on demand.

Broadcasts also enabled more effective GDPR data processing, enabling teams to fully own the process of handling and managing data, with the architecture team only needed for initial set-up.

Per-Christian Aubert, Head of Integrations and Architecture at BOS, said about the project, "It's not only IT but also the business side that uses this. You could say that it builds a bridge between the two."

Read the full story: BOS’ Enterprise Architecture Project: A Single Source of Truth

State-Owned Railway

A state-owned railway needed a successful digital transformation journey to help it reduce risk, modernize its data management, and derive more value. For effective application portfolio management, Ardoq provided a tool that could quickly democratize data across different departments, speed up processes, and manage stakeholder engagement.

Before using Ardoq, the railway’s Enterprise Architecture team experienced low stakeholder engagement with their data, making it hard for architects to maintain the organization's information, which increased risk. Since adopting the platform, teams now use Ardoq Discover to distribute role-specific insights across departments, allowing each stakeholder to contribute their knowledge.

To manage its stakeholder engagement, the organization regularly crowdsources information using Ardoq Broadcasts and Surveys. Today, the railway stores 40,000+ components with 80,000+ references in Ardoq. Using Ardoq helped transform data into critical insights for 2000+ stakeholders and improve risk reduction and data quality to allow processes to run smoothly 24/7.

Read the full story: Building a State-Owned Railway's Digital Transformation Bridge

“The use of Surveys and Broadcasts has been a game-changer. We discovered this via another department that was using it. One of the challenges in capturing information about your estate is the number of people who have that knowledge, and you can become a bit of a bottleneck. So this enables us to maintain that data much more easily. We can get regular updates from people who know their systems. It has been a key enabler for us.”

- Gary O’Reilly, Chief Technology Officer at His Majesty’s Passport Office 

Read about other groundbreaking eureka moments Ardoq customers have experienced with the power of our cloud-native platform.