In the past years, the Dragon1 EA practice has shown that architecture products are used much better if the data quality is high and contains certain structures, relationships, and information/metadata.
The Dragon1 Architecture Checker looks into your data to find these structures, relationships, and information/metadata and supports you to improve your data. The architecture checker supports you in optimizing Enterprise Architecture.
How Does the Architecture Checker Work?
The Architecture Checker is very simple to use:
- Select a cabinet with data in your account, or upload a file with architecture data;
- Select a catalog with certain principles and rules that should be used to check for;
- Click on the orange Start Check button;
- Use the generated report to fix the errors, warnings, and hints.
Check Compliance
Companies that work with Enterprise Architecture often have many projects that can make use of many architecture products to create designs and realize solutions or build systems. The challenge for architects, managers, and CIOs is how to know that these designs and build solutions are compliant with the architecture. Or how to know that the architecture products are compliant with standards, rules, policies, and reference architectures.
The Architecture Checker helps to see if a design or an architecture is compliant with this information. As a user of the platform, you can upload or import your catalogs (i.e. lists of) principles, rules, standards, and policies or make use of the Out-of-the-Box catalogs on Dragon1.
Optimize Enterprise Architecture
Architecture is much more optimal when the architecture contains principles (the core building block of architecture) and if these principles are linked to requirements and strategic goals and objectives and when the principles are linked to projects, designs, and deliverables.
Dragon1 Architecture Checker tracks and traces for you if these relationships are there in the data.
Also basic data administration completeness is checked: a unique ID, reference IDs, Naming convention, Single Source, Descriptions, Images, Owners, etc... The better and more complete your data is administered, the more usable the architecture products are for stakeholders and projects.
Focus on Architecture Principles
The Dragon1 Architecture Checker focuses on Architecture Principles, as they are the core building block. Any architecture product that does not contain or relate to architecture principles, is essentially missing its core. The checker looks for the presence of principles in data, the structure, syntax, and models or patterns of the principles. By reporting on this, you get the opportunity to improve the internal and external quality of the architecture. And this is just by clicking on one button.
If architecture only contains principles names, but does not have principles modeled as patterns, one cannot argue or see if the architecture or the design created is compliant with these principles. Just using the name of a principle in an architecture is not enough to have the architecture guide design that is using the principle.
For instance, if the principle "Single Source of Truth" is used for client data, the architecture should model what types of elements are the sources and how many of these sources (exactly 1 in this case) are allowed for certain types of client data. The Architecture Checker looks for these kinds of structures, models, and relationships.
Prevent and Detect Fraud
Dragon1 uses Artificial Intelligence techniques to help you prevent and detect fraud in business processes. Just upload or import your BPMN process models, your process logs, and business principles.
With this information put together, Dragon1 will scan and analyze your data and report with text and graphs how likely certain parts of your process are vulnerable to fraud. If certain process steps in the log are non-compliant with the process flow, Dragon1 can detect that and report it.
Dragon1, for instance, will look for patterns like a change in behavior over time and suspicious behavior in your data.
Want to Use the EA Checker?
To use the Architecture Checker, you first need to create a trial account here.