Pathway to Operational Resilience
Operational resilience is crucial for Exchange and Clearing organizations’ compliance with stringent industry regulations. Implementing Ardoq has allowed one such organization to continue on its pathway to document its complex interconnected landscape and ecosystem. Ardoq allows information from numerous sources, including knowledge from subject matter experts, to provide structure, support governance, and ensure control over key aspects of operational resilience.
“Our domain is complex; you need structured tooling to model and understand it. Ardoq helps me do that. Now I can assign ownership and visualize our metadata which is extremely important on the pathway to operational resilience.”
- Distinguished Engineer at the Exchange & Clearing Organization
Mitigate Operational Risk With an Enterprise Architecture Platform
Exchanges and Clearing organizations rely heavily on their technology infrastructure, making it imperative that we understand and connect the impact of technical glitches, cyber-attacks, and system failures to the business processes. Preparation and testing play a big part in the resilience team’s day-to-day work.
Ardoq enables the team to:
- Document the important business services alongside the dependent business processes and associated resources that they rely upon
- Visualize dependencies between processes, applications, and technical resources from top to bottom to help provide a consumable overview of the estate
- Facilitate impact analysis and provide metadata to the incident and change management teams, including documenting the dependencies for recovery purposes
A Journey to Widespread Adoption and Cultural Shift
Adopting Ardoq at the organization presented an opportunity to improve and to do things differently.
One example being the shift to data-driven visualizations, ensuring diagrams and views always reflect the latest information; for instance, stakeholders are automatically being updated after a survey has been updated and approved. The organization recognized the potential of Ardoq's democratization capabilities in fostering a culture of collaboration. To support this change and fully utilize the democratization features of the Ardoq solution, the organization collaborated with Ardoq to implement a structured training approach. This was done by making the platform accessible to a range of employees and providing them with role-appropriate training, spanning workshops, gamified simulation training, hands-on sessions, and ongoing customer support.
The solution enables and triggers more collaboration across business and IT to enhance the mutual understanding of the domains where specific roles have the opportunity to contribute their expertise and knowledge to the Ardoq platform in order to map out dependencies across business and technology components. This emphasis on active participation and ownership creating an ‘us’ culture within the company helps establish a trusted source of information, leading to more informed decision-making and the basis for an effective operational resilience framework.
Addressing Operational Resilience With an Enterprise Architecture Tool
Ardoq’s flexibility, functional integrations, and the fact that it is SaaS (software as a service) with a mixture of features such as continuously-updated and live self-serve data appealed to the team.
They particularly liked Ardoq’s:
- Democratization and assigned ownership of data with Ardoq’s Surveys and Broadcasts features, meaning the broader organization takes responsibility for their individual pieces of the estate
- Data-driven visualizations using live, up-to-date information
- Flexible metamodel, meaning it can be applied to resilience as well as classic enterprise architecture domains
- Scalability to build the sociotechnical architecture, strengthened with Surveys and Broadcasts, allowing people across the organization to contribute their data and knowledge
Enhancing Operational Resilience Through Visible Ownership
“We’re already seeing value. We have a strong baseline of metadata to inform wider processes outside of Ardoq - all these are fundamental for increasing resilience, understanding interdependencies and ensuring ownership.”
The firm has seen fast time-to-value. Using Ardoq Discover, the team can engage with organizational stakeholders to distribute role-specific insights. It allows those in technical and non-technical roles to contribute their knowledge equally through the embedded surveys.
Key benefits include:
- Traceability and planning for IT Disaster Recovery events: Overview of the as-is, with top-down and bottom-up visualizations of necessary processes, applications, and their dependencies
- Clear ownership: components have clear ownership, and owners have a fast and easy way to check and update the metadata
- Foundation to perform impact analysis: What-if queries can determine, for example, what business processes would be impacted should components become unavailable
- Knowledge sharing: Employees benefit from faster onboarding and a more collaborative environment to share and discover knowledge
“Operational Resilience is a huge domain and requires shifting organizational culture, which is incredibly difficult. This organization is something of a dream customer; they have a clear vision of what they want to do and exactly how and why Ardoq can support them with this vision and have made amazing progress towards this!”
- Amrik Soar, Customer Success Manager at Ardoq
Looking Ahead
To enhance its operational resilience, the organization is exploring additional Ardoq use cases, such as asset lifecycle management and scenario-based planning. Asset lifecycle management, in particular, is currently a very time-consuming process for them, but Ardoq's new IT Pedia integration promises to save them substantial time in data input. This will lead to more integrated strategic decision-making, better planning, and more optimized asset lifecycle management.
