TechRadar: EA Technology Visualisation for Commercial development
Summary
Provides the ability to generate multiple high-quality visualisations of the enterprise technology landscape from a single underlying source
Description
Medium-sized enterprises often have complex technology and system landscapes, but may lack the funds or desire to invest money and effort in a high-end toolset to describe and control them.
The usual result is a proliferation of spreadsheets, each telling a different, fragmentary version of the story. Reconciling these multiple versions of the truth can be a complex and time-consuming task. In addition the tabular representation may not be appreciated by some consumers.
The “Technology Radar” representation became popular in around 2016, but on its own this just makes the problem worse: it requires further disjoint sets of information, cannot portray all the complexities, and at the time I investigated all the available low-cost tools were of shocking poor quality and reliability.
TechRadar directly addresses all these problems. The Enterprise Architects maintain a single, simple, version-controlled spreadsheet (or simple database) with a very “flat” presentation of the data. TechRadar can then generate from any given spreadsheet a multi-page PDF with visualisations of the data, in both “Radar” and tabular formats.
TechRadar is a simple .NET application, using only native features and the open-source PDFSharp library. It requires no special installation and can run on any Windows machine with the appropriate minimum .NET version.
TechRadar will shortly be available for download on a shareware basis.
The following images show two visualisations of an enterprise technology set, a "technology radar", and a more traditional "roadmap", both generated from the same underlying Excel sheet:
Outcomes
Working tool, proven by use with one enterprise customer
Timescale
November 2016 - January 2017
Current Status
Currently being packaged for shareware distribution
Tools and Technologies
Technologies: VB.Net, PDFSharp, Excel
Tools: Visual Studio
Abstract
TechRadar enables Enterprise Architects to maintain a single, simple, version-controlled spreadsheet (or simple database) with a very “flat” presentation of the data, and TechRadar can then generate a multi-page PDF with visualisations of the data, in both “Radar” and tabular formats.