TECHNOLOGY BLUEPRINTING
TECHNOLOGY BLUEPRINTING
A blueprint is a visual representation of your organization’s software portfolio that enables you to make informed technological decisions. FPOV’s EA Blueprinting service begins with identifying your organization’s visual language. This is a facilitation session is hosted by FPOV and includes having the right mix of business and IT people to help develop a language that they can us to communicate with. FPOV will then work on assimilating the application inventory and attributes from the subject matter experts, in order to produce the blueprint visualizations.
THE VALUE OF BLUEPRINTS
Consider a home remodel project. Before you knock out a wall you need to know some information.
- What’s the wall made of?
- Is there electricity or wiring within?
- Are there plumbing considerations?
- Is the wall load bearing?
A simple blueprint may not be sufficient. You might need more information.
There are various levels of detail available for builders, plumbers, contractors, architects, and homeowners. Your enterprise architecture should have comparable documentation. In many organizations, critical knowledge resides only in the brains of select technologists.
Blueprinting your technology at the level(s) you need in your organization provides knowledge enabling executives and technologists to work together and make wise strategic decisions.
THREE LEVELS OF BLUEPRINTS
By leveraging the three levels of technology blueprinting, organizations can effectively plan, design, and implement technology solutions that align with their business goals, optimize resources, and enhance overall operational efficiency. Blueprinting helps ensure that technology investments are strategically aligned, well-designed, and scalable. Depending on the level of depth of knowledge you want to uncover about your technology infrastructure, we offer three different levels to suit your needs.
Level 1
Visualization – Enterprise Software
Visualization of your organization’s software portfolio that identifies the primary, secondary, and tertiary applications with in your organization to illustrate their inefficiencies, redundancies, financial ramifications, and process efforts.
PRIMARY AUDIENCE: Business Owner/Executive Level
PURPOSE: To support budgets, discuss legacy conversion, and help the business to understand their Enterprise Architecture.
PROCESS & DELIVERY: We facilitate a series of information gathering processes using a combination of digital tools and meetings conducted in-person or remotely. We conclude by delivering a high-resolution Powerpoint and PDF of the blueprint, a large format print of the finished blueprint, as well as the editable software portfolio spreadsheet we built during the process together.
Level 2
Visualization – Software Attributes + Data
Visualization of your software portfolio, identifying the primary, secondary, and tertiary applications with in your organization to illustrate their inefficiencies, redundancies, financial ramifications, and process efforts while also illustrating critical characteristics of your core software platforms, processes, and data integrations.
PRIMARY AUDIENCE: Business Owner/Executive Level, and IT team.
PURPOSE: To bridge the gap between the business and IT in understanding which software platforms have integrated dependencies (data, flow) and the health attributes of each software ranging from support to disaster readiness.
PROCESS & DELIVERY: We facilitate a series of information gathering processes using a combination of digital tools and meetings conducted in-person or remotely. We conclude by delivering a high-resolution PowerPoint and PDF of the blueprint, a large format print of the finished blueprint(s), as well as the editable software portfolio spreadsheet. This process involves more time for both parties and results in a more complex but informative diagram set which documents critical details around your technology status.
Level 3
Visualization – Integrations
A series of working, interactive schematics that represent each software within your organization’s portfolio. By focusing on the attributes, processes, and data integrations, these allow you to interact with the visual outputs.
PRIMARY AUDIENCE: IT / Executive Team / Business Owners
PURPOSE: To help all people understand the complexity of the integrations. This while knowing the backstory and history of these complex integrations as well as what risks, issues and opportunities they may have.
PROCESS & DELIVERY:
In a manner similar to Level 1 and 2, we complete intense data gathering. However, we complete a more in-depth, hands-on process with your team. We can come to your location to understand the innermost characteristics of your software. We fully document all primary and secondary software platforms and capture numerous properties around each to facilitate full IT engagement. With Level 3 blueprinting, you no longer have to be a technical guru to understand your integrations. Our Level 3 stories allow anyone to get the intimate details of integrations, if they have kludgy integrations today, and what issues, risks, and opportunities they bare.
WHY BLUEPRINTING IS IMPORTANT?
1// Visualize
It’s important to visualize elements of an organizations technology so they can understand how changes will affect other technology areas.
2// Communicate
Blueprints and diagrams provide a common visual language, which aids in communication between IT and the business.
3// Document
Documentation of what you own, what you have purchased or what you have built needs to be done at the appropriate level to facilitate internal conversations around technology decisions.
4// Retain
When IT professionals or other high level leave your organization, it’s critical that their knowledge does not leave with them. Blueprints help you institutionalize the knowledge of your people so it lives on beyond the tenure of your team.
4 COMMON REASONS BLUEPRINTS ARE NOT DONE
1// Triage Mode
Forever in firefighting mode, rarely in “fire prevention mode”
2// Limited IT Personnel
Almost all IT departments are busy, documentation is easy to overlook
3// Lack of Understanding
If you haven’t seen or used blueprints, you do not grasp their value
4// Simple Ignorance
Nobody on the business (non-IT) side of the organization knows to ask