EDGY & Qualiware

EDGY – an Open Source tool for building collaborative enterprises

EDGY is an Enterprise Design Open Source tool created by the Intersection Group to transcend silos and improve communication and collaboration throughout an enterprise.

Enabling collaborative enterprises has always been key to QualiWare, and now we have incorporated the EDGY Open Source tool in QualiWare.

EDGY is easy to understand and use

EDGY is a graphical Open Source tool. It is so simple and aesthetic, that everyone in the enterprise can understand and use it.

This makes communication and collaboration across teams easier than ever.

EDGY focuses on three facets:

1) Identity- describing the identifying elements that explain why the enterprise exists and what it seeks to achieve.

2) Architecture - describing the way the enterprise works and how its different parts fit together to deliver.

3) Experience - describing the way the enterprise seeks to appear in and add value to people’s lives.

Read more about QualiWare and EDGY

Read more about EDGY

Consistent and updated Content

Working with EDGY in QualiWare means that all content is consistent and kept up to date - throughout the enterprise.

In QualiWare you will find diagram templates for each of the EDGY-elements, and it is easy to get started.

Read more about QualiWare and EDGY

Read more about EDGY

Read more about QualiWare and EDGY

Is your architecture EDGY?

Watch the webinar "IS YOUR ARCHITECTURE EDGY?" if you would like to hear more about EDGY and how you, as an enterprise architect, and your colleagues can create a better enterprise, that attract customers, where employees thrive, and goals are reached.

Speakers: Milan Guenther (President at Intersection Group) and Kuno Brodersen (CEO at QualiWare)

Moderator: Alexander James Jensen (Enterprise Architect at QualiWare)

Feedback from webinar participants:

"Thank you very much, tangible stuff here!"

"Nice demo and interesting points. Thank you very much."

"Excellent demo. Thanks a lot!"

"Thank you a lot! Well done QualiWare! "

"Thanks... Brilliant session... "

Watch webinar "IS YOUR ARCHITECTURE EDGY"

Read more about QualiWare and EDGY

Read more about EDGY

FAQ about EDGY & QualiWare

The questions in this FAQ was asked by participants at the webinar "IS YOUR ARCHITECTURE EDGY?"

An enterprise architect usually focuses on the IT side (applications, data, etc.). Is EDGY supposed to change this view and give a different meaning to "enterprise design" in the Enterprise and not just the IT side?

It is a bit of an outdated view that EA should focus only on IT.

We think this is a symptom of not doing what we propose here: designing the Enterprise as a whole.

So if you design the IT in isolation from the organization (people working together etc.) in the end, the whole thing won't work well together.

That said, we are aware that Enterprise Architecture has a heavy legacy and history coming out of IT.

It is similar to other disciplines, for example, user experience design coming more from digital apps and user interfaces but then evolved into more strategic thinking - thinking about the customer experience as a whole.

We also think of physical channels or interactions that are not controlled by us that happen in the ecosystem.

So we feel that this is maturing together as different disciplines.

And I would also like to say there's a lot of architectural thinking and Enterprise Architecture behind a model like this. The idea of thinking of the Enterprise as a set of elements you can describe and you can model with. The idea of looking at these elements in relations.

We have, for example, the link relationships, so we have a model that says: Which element is related in which way exactly to which other element.

Some would call that a meta-model. We avoid that term, but it is something similar in the end.

This is Enterprise Architecture thinking even though we apply it to things like "What's the purpose?" or "What's people's tasks?" or "What's our brand?". That is maybe in historical terms, not part of an Enterprise Architecture comfort zone. But we think it should be.

A framework as EDGY - would you have the same methodology if it's a government or a private organization? And what about the different industries? Is it a one-size-fits-all?

Edgy is by design neutral. Basically, we say: "An Enterprise is an Endeavor of people with a shared ambition", and that also comes back to the essential four elements that we use.

We have used EDGY in government settings, we currently have a user in Germany using it to plan a school, we have used it for startups, we have used it with Enterprises that are made up by more than one legal entity like a consortium, and it works because these questions that each facet asks "Why does our Enterprise exist?" "Who are we?" "What matters to us?" etc. are valid for any enterprise. And that is why it universally works.

What are the deficiencies with, e.g., archimate or business model canvas, etc.? Why do we need a new language?

The business model canvas asks different questions. So, you will not find "Why do we exist?" "What's the purpose of this endeavor" in the business model canvas. You will also not find architectural questions. There's some "What resources do we need?". But it doesn't ask "Which capabilities?", how they fit together, how they decompose, or how they relate to assets.

There are situations where the business model canvas questions are spot on, and there are other situations where they are not, and you see that there's not just the business model canvas right there.

Many, many canvases are now out there because, like us, it's not software; it is a language and the documentation and the model; they are open source; they are out there, you can take them, you can modify them, you can republish them under the same creative commons license. This language was insufficient for many situations we find ourselves in as Enterprise Business Architects, organization designers, etc.

Now, when it comes to ArchiMate, I have tried many times and sometimes successfully used ArchiMate for Enterprise Design. One example: Instead of business collaboration, we said: okay, this is a touch point. Instead of a process, we said this is a journey, etc. So we repurposed all the ArchiMate elements to fit the experience domain that is just missing from ArchiMate, which is one way to do it. But it's not really what the language is made for.

Archimate is about making a model with about 30 elements and with a very rigorous set of relations and rules that are there to ensure that the model is architecturally sound. This makes sense if you want to implement a complex operational, largely it-landscape. This is not the challenge that many Enterprise Design Practitioners face.

We ask, "How should we operate?" "What changes do we need to make to the process?" given that the customer journey now includes that people talk to Chat GBT or whatever. Or we want to become sustainable - we made our logo green, but it's not enough. We need to look at the supply chain.

ArchiMate lacks some of these elements and is too rigorous in its relations and the complexity of the language makes it hard to adopt by people, who are not from the architecture background, for example leadership coaches, leadership teams, HR, managers, and executives.

EDGY seems to be an excellent foundation for what Gartner would term a Digital Twin of an Organization (DTO). Have any EDGY use cases shown interconnectivity of either operational or financial flows between objects, activities, and outcomes?

Right now, QualiWare is the only EA tool that uses EDGY. We have done so for a year now,. It's part of our product development strategy and links into our DevOps environment so that we are sure that everything we have in EDGY ends up in a backlog item. Measurements and integrations with BI Systems etc., are all part of the standard QualiWare tool and, therefore, also part of EDGY.

Could you see EDGY improving the DTO in QualiWare?

When we are talking about the organizational part of Digital Twin, it has to do with communication. You can have all the data you want; if you're unable to communicate the data – transfer the knowledge somehow – then it's not worth anything.

I think that EDGY is providing us with a new language to target an audience. This is a different way of communicating. So I think it is a very valuable contribution to the digital twin of the organization.

Read more about EDGY