Features and Benefits

Many companies are seeking a tool that provides a highly visual, interactive, user friendly, web-based environment allowing various employees to navigate and drill down into the organization’s Enterprise Architecture Framework. Their immediate goals are to facilitate the sharing of standards, principles and a multitude of technical review documents. In short, they desire to transform enterprise architecture documents from shelfware, that’s read only by its authors, into web pages, organized by tool, that are universally accessible to the entire IT community and beyond.


Flashmap Systems’ ITatlas™ product can assist companies in achieving these goals by establishing a process and tool set to enable the following:

Architecture

• Provide the architecture team with a structured environment (a framework) in which to collect, organize, track and document their IT infrastructure(s)
• Quickly and easily convey and explain their architectural standards and requirements with no training required for the end-user
• More effectively and rapidly make enterprise architecture decisions and assist management in their architectural planning
• Share information, knowledge and application components among different business units and architecture groups

Strategy

• Communicate IT's strategy throughout the organization both inside and outside of IT
• Identify and minimize redundant technologies, applications and development efforts across the organization and enforce architectural standards and requirements
• Provide organizations with a single repository for all their architecture and infrastructure components easily accessible through visual cues
• Reduce the ramp-up learning time needed by employees, new hires, temp workers, contractors, consultants, systems integrators, outsourcers, business partners, etc., to learn about the company's IT architecture as a result of mergers, acquisitions, reorganizations and growth

Products

• Assist developers in comparative analyses of products
• Establish a comprehensive enterprise set of standards that all business units can reference
• Create multiple views of an organization's architecture to assist in managing their IT assets (i.e., views can be identified by lines of business, geographic locations, current/future time, platform, etc.)
• Communicate what a standard tool set might look like and provide a means to convey reusability of different products among different applications
• Show inter-relationships between hardware, software, applications, products, etc.
• Consolidate and leverage the purchasing of software among the different Business Units and/or independent subcompanies within the organization.

It is IT's responsibility to provide an adaptable enterprise architecture that serves as the foundation for managing an organization's labyrinth of interconnected computing platforms. The goal is to deliver reliable and secure functionality at the lowest cost. Costs include technology assessments, product evaluations, product selections and rejections, product recommendations for standardization, and product retirements including implementation, change and enforcement.

Many companies have already expended considerable effort working with their IT architecture set of requirements. Flashmap Systems can assist your enterprise architects in integrating your architectural requirements and data into ITatlas. Flashmap Systems will help you customize the existing models that come bundled in ITatlas to reflect your own infrastructure. Flashmap Systems is also available to work with you in creating additional models into ITatlas, incorporating your terminology and organizational structure, making it unnecessary for your personnel to learn new vocabulary or models.