ADaM

Overview

ADAM is an enterprise dependency analysis tool that identifies and controls the interdependencies that exist within all complex Business installations.

ADAM assigns each Business PROCESS, THE RESOURCES and the TECHNOLOGY upon which it depends with attributes which relate to their importance in the business process and the links, and therefore dependencies to other entities within the corporate infrastructure.

A matrix of these dependencies is created by mapping the entire Business landscape into a known ‘UNIVERSE’.

ADAM maintains this ‘UNIVERSE’ by imposing a DEPLOYMENT CONTROL METHODOLOGY, communicating all change requests to business and IT owners through the corporate email system.

By highlighting the business importance and dependency links prior to the deployment process, disruptions and business risk can be both controlled and predicted.

Existing control systems rely heavily on the knowledge of the individual requesting the change to the environment. In many cases it is the gaps in their knowledge of other systems and dependencies that prevent the full effects of the deployment to be comprehended or to assess its impact to an organisation’s business processes.

ADAM provides the mechanism to monitor and trap such knowledge gaps by referencing the UNIVERSE.

ADAM ensures that all parties work with current and factual information by producing dependency reports for any component within the universe.

These reports contain a system schematic produced through the Topology Builder, a summary of the system purpose and ownership, and a complete list of all dependencies along with additional attributes that can be provided as required for the organisation.

The adoption of ADAM will provide your organisation with a workbench that will enable IT and the Business to monitor and control system change and to produce meaningful reports which highlight technical and operational dependencies and risks.

ADaM - Business IT Simulation

ADaM has been designed to simulate a Business IT environment, and can therefore ‘simulate’ the Services that the Organisation provides, the Business Processes that facilitate the Services, the Applications that drive the processes and the Hardware and Network infrastructure that support them.

No business environment is ever static, and where we aim to simulate an IT environment, change must be managed.

At the core of ADaM is a ‘Change Decision Support’ system, which ensures that all modifications to the Universe are ‘authorised’ by the owners of the components or systems that are affected. Each request is appended with all the required information to assess the business impact of the proposed change, so that authorisers have complete transparency of the dependencies that may be breached.

ADaM actually creates the change notifications and authorisation requests and alerts the respective owners when a component is modified, sending messages via the corporate email system.

Utilising ADaM as the central repository for mapping a Business environment, rather than disparate spreadsheets, ensures that changes to the environment can be assessed in true context to the impact they will have on the business processes.

By highlighting the business importance and dependency links throughout the change process, disruptions and business risk can be both controlled and predicted.

To fully simulate a business environment the concept of Time must be introduced, so ADaM incorporates a Calendar which shows when any planned change is to be made.

This allows the initiators of any proposed change to avoid conflicts.

Furthermore, in a business environment, the ‘ownership’ of the various components will reside with different people throughout the organisation. ADaM provides each component with both Operational ownership and Business ownership, and provides a comprehensive Corporate Governance model.

2.1 ADaM’s methodology

One of the design goals for ADaM was to produce a methodology that took into consideration ‘Human Nature’.

This starts from the premise that all systems, software and processes are designed to work and invariably when initially installed, they do work.

The problems start to arise when these elements are ‘changed’ and this is because as complexity increases so does interdependency, these dependencies and how they affect the overall business operation are largely overlooked.

Human nature dictates that individual’s knowledge of these dependencies will be at best incomplete. ADaM’s integral knowledgebase fills the gaps and presents the underlying dependencies to the initiators and approvers of change.

Extending this consideration, we have ensured that the reluctance for individuals to create change requests is circumnavigated by ADaM doing all the work, automatically generating approval requests to nominated ‘owners’ whenever a component within the universe is changed.

All such requests are ‘proposed’ and only implemented when the owners have given their authorisation.

Extended ‘Change Control’ meetings are no longer required, freeing up your key resources, as all interested parties have complete visibility of the ownership, initiators, extents and impact of the proposed change.

2.2 More than Change Management - Change Decision Support.

Once the ADaM universe is populated, the business IT environment can be simulated.

The Universe can be interrogated via a ‘Top Down’ or ‘Bottom Up’ approach to both document and visualise the Business IT Landscape.

Additional modules have been incorporated to Report on the various aspects of the landscape both in tabular reporting format and also via a schematic generator.

The simulation allows an organisation to;

• Maintain a Knowledge Base of the Business and IT Operational Landscape
• Create a Management Tool for Reducing IT Operational Risk
• Provide Business Process and System Risk Analysis
• Promote Effective Business/IT Communication and Approval
• Create Corporate standard Business Process and Infrastructure Schematics
• Produce Full Compliance and Audit Control reports.

Integration and connectivity

Maintaining the accuracy and validity of the landscape is vital and the open framework allows ADaM to integrate with existing systems and ‘discovery tools’ to provide an automated update and verification mechanism.

Building a system to manage the Business landscape is an iterative process which cannot be accomplished with a ‘big bang’ approach.

The ADaM methodology allows discrete areas of the Business Universe to be implemented in a staged approach so that disruption to the organisation is minimised and the initiative can accommodate business constraints and operational disparities.

The disparate nature of the technologies that any organisation will have deployed is addressed through ADaM adapters, and our suite of data transformation tools enable both legacy systems and technology tools to contribute to the knowledgebase to protect sunken investments and to provide a central platform.

The integration of existing data repositories, CMDB and document management systems enables ADaM to form a ‘federated’ knowledgebase that is both accessible and auditable.

ADaM’s key differentiators

• The knowledgebase that underpins the universe,
• The intuitive change management function that is effectively ‘self maintaining’
• Change Decision Support (Change Management, Governance & Impact Analysis)
• The unique presentation of the components and their dependencies in the Visio based Topology Builder
• Full dependency analysis generated on demand
• Authorisations and alerts for stakeholders
• Central Document repository
• Web based portal access
• Full audit trail

Extendible and Extensible

ADaM’s open framework is extendable and extensible, allowing your universe to grow as your needs change. This might be to encompass more Domains, more Environments, and an increasing number of components and their underlying dependencies.

Alternatively, the ADaM universe might be extended to include additional functionality, such as our unique Spreadsheet Dependency module or the ‘web-services’ or monitoring plug-ins.

ADaM is totally scalable and can accommodate tactical ‘small’ universes with a few hundred components for specific project dependency analysis, up to Global Enterprise models with millions of dependencies under management.

Built on industry standard SQL technology under the Microsoft .Net framework, ADaM integrates with your existing environment and creates the governance framework to allow seamless extension into your existing estate.

Flexibility and Use Cases

ADaM is highly flexible in nature and as such can be customised to accommodate any corporate structure or initiate.

Dependency modelling can be applied in many ways and we have successfully engaged with clients to facilitate such initiative as;

Infrastructure Governance (Finance)

ADaM provides our client with a map of their Business dependencies; from Service through Business Process, Applications and the technology base that supports them.

Links to external service providers creates a ‘demarcation’ to ensure that all changes proposed by the supplier can be approved by the clients’ service delivery management.

The governance structure ensures that all change is backed by full business impact analysis, a “four eyes ” review and Business authorisation, including Audit trail and full regulatory reporting.

Configuration Management CMDB (Global Energy)

Our client has a highly sophisticated middleware and no tools existed to provide change management with business impact and contextual relevance.

ADaM, managing a universe of 4 million component dependencies ensures that the full impact of business driven application change and updates to the middleware layer and can be identified, effectively creating a Business Impact Analysis system for the middleware environments.

ADaM provides a central repository for the global organisation, linking to the existing in-house hardware CMDB and the Sharepoint portal.

System Migrations (Investment Bank)

Our Client was migrating from an aging settlements system and required a full dependency map and governance model to manage the migration. Using ADaM, the principle landscape was identified and a layered dependency model was produced to record; Desks (Books), Trades (Trade Types), Services (Static data, counterparty, delivery, confirmation, GL etc) External Systems (Accounting, Price feed, Reporting, etc) A similar landscape for the incoming system was modelled and the migration of each trade type was orchestrated utilising ADaM.

Outsource Services Reconciliation. (Investment Bank)

The renewal of a long term Outsource contract was causing our client considerable concern, their lack of visibility of the managed estate and more importantly the translation of business requirement into IT requirement, had been outsourced along with the technology.

ADaM has captured the entire Business IT landscape providing the client with not only the ability to challenge the renewal assumptions but also a way of qualifying the actual business requirement for the scope of services.

Spreadsheet Dependency (Investment bank)

As a tactical ADaM solution, we have enabled our client to identify the upstream and downstream dependency for all of the spreadsheets within their Trading Domain.

ADaM allows them to identify the spreadsheets, the data sources, the ownership, the ADD-in dependency and any subsequently linked spreadsheets across their Front Middle and Back Offices.

This facility has identified the onward transmission of Exchange Traded data, the vulnerability of the business to the ‘unstructured change’ that afflicts spreadsheets and has provided a comprehensive Audit and compliance facility.

Want to know more?

Our business consultants will be very pleased to discuss how 3di can demonstrate the benefits of Business Landscape mapping and how, through a ‘Proof of Concept’ implementation, this can be achieved with your Universe.