Vodafone IoT – Implementing Application Portfolio Management with Sparx Prolaborate
Are those different columns listed in front of each application on your list modelled as attributes? tagged values? or what in Sparx EA?
These are modelled as Tagged Values in Sparx EA.
The list of tagged values is long. Was it considered whether these values should be another element type in the meta-model or just be a tagged value?
There was analysis done upfront when implementing the metamodel; to determine whether the values should be Tagged Values or Relationships. Unfortunately there is no hard and fast rule that says when a value should be implemented as a Tagged Value vs a Relationship, but at the time this long list of Tagged Values suited the Vodafone requirement better. There are pros and cons for each of these implementations, which is probably a topic for another day.
Have you used “Analysers” for your APM use cases, for example for impact assessments around app changes?
No, we haven’t used any of the Analysers for APM.
Do you have application integration maps in your model when you want to decide about your apps' migrations?
For the Vodafone implementation we don’t. For one of our other deployments we have 2 repositories, one for APM which shows the details as presented in the webinar; i.e. only the applications and their metadata and dependencies. The other repository is the modelling repository (with diagrams etc.) where we have the applications with integrations (defined as interfaces).
How have you connected your info gathering resources with your Sparx model? For example, we have surveys in excel, sending to different departments in periodical manner or in some change situations, when we got them, we should input them manually into our APM model in Sparx. Your responsible bodies have access to repositories and can change them in real-time?
If you have bulk updates to be done in APM, this can be done via the Microsoft Office plug-in available for Sparx EA. However, periodic changes is a manual exercise and is done by users who have the necessary access permissions to update the repositories, in real-time.
Is there a way to directly integrate with CMDB sources or ServiceNow to receive catalogues with application lists and associated metadata? Our data exists with ServiceNow which is the single source of truth.
Yes, Sparx EA provides integration with ServiceNow. You can reference these links for information:
What would be the best approach to create a model that spans a enterprise group of companies? The requirement is to have a enterprise view as well as the ability to view each group separately. Should we use a single repository or a repository per brand and import these repositories into a Group repository?
I would therefore suggest a federated model (or hybrid). It combines the best of both worlds. It treats each brand’s repository as a local “source of truth” for its specific details, while a central, group-level repository serves as a “single source of reference” for shared, high-level information.
For this you’ll probably need:
- Brand-level repositories: Each brand maintains its own repository containing detailed, brand-specific models (e.g., product catalogues, local processes, application inventories).
- Group-Level Repository: A central, lightweight repository containing only high-level, shared data and models (e.g., list of legal entities, group-wide capabilities, application portfolio).
- Synchronization/Linking Process: Mechanism to pull relevant high-level data from brand repositories into the group repository (scheduled import, data replication, or live API sync).
Can you speak to the relationship between the Solution Architects and the APM?
As mentioned in the presentation, Vodafone has 2 communities; the Solution Architect community and the Enterprise Architect community. APM was built in Prolaborate for the EA community to have a view of the application landscape and all its metadata and dependencies and to manage this estate. The SA community uses Sparx EA for modelling purposes. They create high-level architecture diagrams and sequence diagrams using these applications. But all of this information (both APM and modelling content) resides in the same repository, so everyone has the same view of the application landscape.
Does the APM work at the Application Component level as shown on your metamodel? Possibly this would be a good topic for another presentation.
Yes, APM works on Application Component level. The Application Component is the central element which everything else revolves around; i.e. the application component has its tagged values, and has relationships to other elements.