Application Portfolio Management (APM) using Sparx APM Suite

By Nizam Mohamed Prolaborate Product Owner

APM is a major architecture use case , a unified view of the Applications is essential to provide the necessary insights to monitor IT investments, risks, obsolescence, Total cost of ownership , deployment type and much more. This session will go over a structured approach, complete with pre-defined templates (to load data from Excel and other sources), tools, and dashboards, that is available in the Sparx Platform to assist teams in getting started with APM and providing the necessary insights to stakeholders.

Session Recording

Questions and Answers

Perhaps you could incorporate resource, resourcerole, partner and partnerrole from BPMN in place of the archimate actor organisation so that they can be used in BPMN diagrams.

sure it can be extended, but that might be on a case by case basis, we shall discuss this in more detail if required, please drop a note to prolaborate@sparxsystems.com

If I am already using archimate and/or I already have some of the APM related objects in my architecture repository, how would I go about converting my current model to use the new stereotypes and metamodel described here?

Stereotype conversation and model conversion will be a manual effort, however we have done scripts that will assist with this

You mentioned the ServiceNow integration. If I start with this accelerator, does it make it easier or harder to integrate with ServiceNow in the future?

yes, the integration is possible, there are very detailed CSDM based ServiceNow Integrations available for users to start with.

Do I need to start with a clean/new repository to use this? Or can I apply this accelerator in an existing repository?

It can be included in an existing repository too. but will require some impact analysis.

How does this accelerator handle data updates? What happens if I have mapped applications to other stuff in my architecture?

You mean the Metamodel updates? most of the stereotype / tag updates will happen automatically. However, some of the updates requires manual updates, we are working on some scripts to do these too. can be done on request too.

If I need to refresh my data monthly or quarterly, does the accelerator scripts handle that? Adding new elements, updating existing, generating/updating the auto generated diagrams

Yes, data refreshes are handled smoothly, even diagram creation will handle updates. However we are continuously developing too, any feedback will be incorporated.

How do you manage multiple Versions of the same product in your APM strategy?

Time Aware Modeling could be a good way to manage multiple Versions, Tom O'Reilly also indicated that there are some enhancements in the TAM in the upcoming builds too. However change management in EA is a broader topic too, we can share the slides on Change Management if that will be of interest to you. Please drop a note to prolaborate@sparxsystems.com

Does importing the accelerator in Sparx EA brings the predefined dashboard in proloborate automatically?

The Accelerator also includes Prolaborate dashboards, that can be loaded to your environment, and once the EA model is mapped, the dashboards will automatically show the contents.

How long would it take to do the examples shown in prolaborate?

The Prolaborate dashboards are pre-configured against EA packages, so once the packages are loaded with Applications and other contents, it will be instantly published.

Imported MDG on Prolaborate. However its tagged values are not assign colors. How can I set the color?

In an EA Diagram the colors are applied based on legends. Please drag and drop the Diagram legends to the diagram, and enable 'Auto Color' to see colors. Using MDG color configuration in Prolaborate colors can be set across model for tagged values https://prolaborate.sparxsystems.com/resources/v4/documentation/mdg-color-configuration

What types of adaptions/configurations are possible if we are to introduce APM? We already have an architecture meta model implemented as a MDG but with another stereotype for application component. And other objects/elements as well of course.

The metamodel / MDG is fully configurable, and so are the dashboards, if you already have a metamodel and MDG, you can definitely try to see how some of the implementations are done in the APM template (like LIfecycle dates, etc) and incorporate them into yours. The Prolaborate dashboards could then be configured on your MDG too.We can have a call to discuss this too, please drop me a note to prolaborate@sparxsystems.com

We use LeanIX for Enterprise Architecture Management and APM in our organization. However, for more detailed solution architecture and software architecture we use SparxEA. We have worked on importing our LeanIX data into SparxEA to ensure the LeanIX content remains in synch within the EA Model. One of the challenges we had was creating a proper meta-model or mix there of, for the different levels of detail.

Combining LeanIX and EA is something that we've seen a good number of teams doing, a lot of what we've shown might be familiar to you, but its possible to have the metamodel implemented in EA, so that the imported items are intact and also used in the right way if mapped to Prolaborate, etc.

Speakers Bio