New Plugin - Technology Evolution Tracker

[krisrr3]

Technology enterprises are constantly evolving, and it is hard to keep track of all past, current and future modernization initiatives in a relatively automated manner. Leaders who need to understand historical decisions need the information pretty quickly and it can be a humongous task due to the information being scattered and attrition.

The reasons that make it important to keep track of the technology evolution of an enterprise in one tool

• understand history of an enterprise
• understand the outcome of previous investments and better predict future outcomes
• reduce the risk of reducing momentum due to unclear prior decisions during leadership change
• engage engineering and management community on the evolution journey

I am proposing to develop a plugin (with community support) to aggregate data from various sources and create views in Archimate that will be relevant to various stakeholder levels.



Keen to get initial feedback and understand if this is worthwhile implementing.

[Jean-Baptiste Sarrodie]

Hi,

I am proposing to develop a plugin (with community support) to aggregate data from various sources and create views in Archimate that will be relevant to various stakeholder levels.

I've had discussions on this topic several times in the past years. That's related to the idea of creating a digital twin of an enterprise (or its information system). Not so sure a plugin is the best way to achieve this. I think it would be best to create "adapters" that are able to export information from one specific system and convert them into a small, domain specific, models using the ArchiMate Model Exchange File Format (see these links XSD Guide. Then is should be enough (at least for a MVP) to import all of them into a single Archi model.

Regards,

JB

[jsimoncello]

hi,

it would be best to create "adapters" that are able to export information from one specific system and convert them into a small, domain specific, models using the ArchiMate Model Exchange File Format (see these links XSD Guide.

+1, though instead of OEF files, I am using a lot of jArchi scripts to import directly in archimate model data from excel files, CSV, calling rest api (No SQL Database yet, I had problems calling jdbc from jArchi).

In your use case, creating views seems (to me) the hardest part : adding elements to view is easy but organizing them in a clean and readable layout is a bit daunting.

[krisrr3]

Let me take the time to understand how JArchi scripts work and create an MVP. Any guidance on documentation I should go through as a pre-requisite is appreciated.

[Phil Beauvoir]

Let me take the time to understand how JArchi scripts work and create an MVP. Any guidance on documentation I should go through as a pre-requisite is appreciated.

The jArchi wiki is here - https://github.com/archimatetool/archi-scripting-plugin/wiki

But before you get into the technicalities of jArchi and plug-ins how will you "aggregate data from various sources"? As mentioned above perhaps you don't need an Archi plug-in or jArchi to do that.