FAQs

What is ITatlas™?

ITatlas includes a set of navigational models that combine visual graphics with flexible, extensible category hierarchies. Users click on graphical images to drill into hierarchical representations of product categories.

ITatlas is role-based, able to present information differently to different groups of people. This is accomplished using views. Both end-user and administrative privileges can be assigned to individual users based on these views.  Views are customer defined.  Views can also be used to “slice and dice” the content within ITatlas. ITatlas supports an unlimited number of views, each of which can be organized along any dimension. For example, views can be defined by geographic location, by business unit, by job function, by computing platform, etc. Different views can also be created to represent different time periods. 

Additional models, such as organizational charts, data models, or enterprise architecture diagrams, can easily be plugged into ITatlas to extend its basic functionality with custom-defined category trees.

What problem does ITatlas Solve?

21^st century IT organizations have inherited an enormously complex portfolio of applications and infrastructure products

 
Operating at "web speed" IT has spent huge sums of money for computer and communications equipment. Over the years business investments in information technology exceeded 45% of all capital expenditures. Such high levels of spending have contributed to IT's reputation as big, complex, expensive, and high risk.

More troubling than the rate of growth has been the haphazard way in which IT infrastructures have expanded. This problem has been especially severe in organizations that have experienced mergers and/or acquisitions. Today's typical IT architectures are exceedingly complicated.

Over the past two decades IT has withstood wave after wave of paradigm shifts. There was relational, ethernet, client/server, object-oriented and the Internet. Over the next several years communications will experience dramatic drops in price accompanied by exponential increases in performance.

For IT, major technological breakthroughs invariably translate into significant capital expenditures. Note, however, that product acquisition costs represent only a fraction of the total cost of such investments. Products need to be identified, evaluated, purchased, installed, learned, used, supported, maintained, and eventually, retired, archived, and replaced.

Every IT organization must define its own technology architecture that models its technology usage. Technology architecture is a complicated, complex, and expensive process - one that is continuously changing and evolving - a process that is never finished.

Managing technology architecture requires a model depicting IT assets. IT assets consist of an enterprise's portfolio of products and applications. As IT assets grow, so too does the need to manage, communicate, and control corporate IT standards as well as keeping everyone throughout the enterprise informed regarding new technology initiatives and product acquisitions.

The best way to describe corporate IT standards is to identify selected products from among lists of competing alternatives. To build a consensus within the IT community, it helps to share the results of the standardization evaluation process, such as explaining why selected products were chosen as standards and describing the reasons why competitive offerings were rejected. Sometimes non-standard products are appropriate for specific types of tasks. It's imperative to provide information so that practitioners scattered across an organization can effectively make those determinations.

Another common issue nowadays, is that IT must often depend on outsiders like contractors, system integrators, temp workers, and outsourcers. The quicker these external people can be brought up to speed on how to use the enterprise IT computing environment, the sooner they can contribute productively.

One of the reasons it's difficult for organizations to enforce corporate IT standards is because the computer industry has never adopted a universal taxonomy for describing standard product categories. Nothing exists in IT that's comparable to SIC codes used by manufacturing, or UPC codes employed by retail businesses. The net result is an environment where comparing apples to oranges is more the norm rather than the exception.

A universal truth among computer industry professionals is that no one likes to admit what they don't understand. Pervasive ignorance commonly leads to erroneous comparisons between products drawn from different product categories. Comparing apples and oranges can lead to extremely costly purchasing mistakes.

Compounding the problem is that knowledge in the IT industry has a half-life of less than four years. That means for someone who graduated college four years ago, half of what they learned there is already obsolete. Many IT professionals graduated college much longer than four years ago!

Enterprise architects need ITatlas to communicate models and disseminate knowledge regarding their organization's IT infrastructure and applications portfolio

Enterprise architects have long suffered from an inability to effectively communicate their technical architectures and IT strategies. Frequently, architectural documents written to describe IT plans, analyses and strategies are read only by their authors.

The pace of change in the IT industry, marked by innovative technological breakthroughs, is rapidly accelerating. A new paradigm shifting shockwave about to hit IT is the switch to the assembly of dynamic web services cobbled together at execution-time based on parametrically declared business process specifications. This is the approach Microsoft is taking with its .Net initiative. Sun has a similar offering called ONE - Open Network Environment. IBM, HP, Oracle, and others are also offering Web Services based around XML standards like UDDI, WSDL, SOAP, etc. It's difficult to imagine how this next transition can succeed without technology architecture models already in place.

The models created by Flashmap Systems are implemented using a repository for capturing sharable product-centric knowledge. The models, organized and classified based on hierarchical product category trees, help establish the formation of user group communities.

The largest individual investment a firm makes in technology architecture, is also its most poorly managed. Namely, the technical skills and product know-how that's locked up inside the heads of those people who use information technology products and applications everyday as a part of performing their jobs. IT organizations need to improve how they collect and share internal knowledge.

How is knowledge about how to use a product shared among members of the IT community? How does an organization describe its IT infrastructure to external consultants, contractors, outsourcers, new hires? How are users guided through the tool selection process? How do companies avoid the expense of supporting multiple products that offer equivalent functionality? How many times are products purchased that don't conform to corporate standards? How often are products purchased but never used?

Given the unrelenting pace of change, IT must adopt a strategic top-level management commitment to continuously re-educate and re-skill IT professionals. ITatlas can help by providing a mechanism to answer questions like those above and by facilitating the sharing of knowledge among communities of IT users.

ITatlas is a framework for Models

Product models describe point products. Point products refer to the list of currently in-use tools along with the full set of products currently being evaluated, piloted, considered, rejected, retired, etc.

Collection models or reference models represent groupings of point products. Collections can be used to describe certified, pre-tested configurations (groups of tools) that specify sets of products designed to work together in order to implement a particular application design pattern. An IT developer responsible for creating a new application can lookup the application domain corresponding to the class of system being built and immediately determine the full toolkit of required products, including specific version information.

Another use of collections is for describing application bill-of-materials. BOMs define the comprehensive list of tools comprising an application system. This information is particularly helpful when analyzing the impact associated with upgrading to a new version of a product, or migrating from one vendor's tool to a competitor's offering. ITatlas can show inter-relationships among any models incorporated into the product, including those that represent business processes, applications, services and products.

Custom-defined models can easily be added to ITatlas. These extended models include their own graphic illustration and corresponding hierarchical category tree. Users can navigate and access information in custom models exactly the same way as ITatlas' bundled Flashmap Systems' models.

ITatlas also supports multiple views within models.   Views are used to identify key characteristics of an organization’s enterprise architecture.  A common use of views is to depict the lifecycle status of products (e.g. Current Standard, Being Evaluated, Rejected, etc.).  ITatlas can support an unlimited set of views which can be targeted at specific users or groups of users allowing companies to distinguish multiple different time frames, product life cycle by different business units, etc.  Each view can have its own set of customized product descriptions or legends.

Summary

ITatlas is a highly visual, interactive, easily navigable web-based environment that allows people to navigate and drill down into their own IT architecture framework.  It's designed to enable industry and government organizations to manage, communicate and control organizational IT standards and strategies.  The models integrated into ITatlas provide quick, easy, and effective navigation for sharing information about IT product usage.  ITatlas provides views that allow different standards and different product life cycles to be specified for different business units, geographical regions, job functions, computing platforms, time periods, etc. by allowing for different views. ITatlas supports collections that can be used to describe certified pre-tested configurations that specify lists of products which work together to implement application design patterns.  Another use of collections is for describing application bill-of-materials.  ITatlas is fully extensible.  Both custom Flashmap Systems’ models and 3rd-party models can easily be added.

ITscout (www.ITscout.org) provides a publicly accessible view of the four taxonomies that can come bundled within ITatlas and ITguide.  Inside ITscout are models that correspond to the wall posters published by and available through Flashmap Systems.

In addition to providing a product category taxonomy, ITscout classifies vendor product offerings and industry standards according to Flashmap Systems' categorization hierarchies.  ITscout also includes web content personally selected by Jeff Tash, president and CEO of Flashmap Systems.  Links are organized by products and product categories.