Preparation
Before you dive into your transformation project, there are a few things that need to be considered. These relate to your processes, stakeholders, IT landscape, and your specific regulatory requirements. We suggest that you make notes of all these aspects to speed up the process and avoid roadblocks later in the process.
1. Transformation Stakeholders
Initially, you and your team should perform a stakeholder analysis for all key persons that are affected by the transformation. We suggest creating a RACI matrix for this purpose. Here are some of the main questions you should be able to answer before you proceed:
- Who are the stakeholders with architectural knowledge of your applications? These are typically your enterprise architects, solution architects, or application owners.
- Who are the stakeholders with knowledge about the deployment stacks and infrastructure?
- Who are the stakeholders with ownership, access, and knowledge about existing data silos? Data from CMDBs, Enterprise Architecture Management tools, virtualization environments, monitoring tools, etc. provide a great part of the required data collection.
- Who are key persons with knowledge of your regulatory requirements?
- Who are key persons with knowledge of your security architecture and requirements?
- Who is responsible for taking care that the data is provided by the necessary stakeholders?
- Who is responsible for running the Txture platform? This can be a mix of people from your team and the team of your professional service partner.
For each of these stakeholders, you will typically have Txture user accounts created.
This allows for easy data entry and self-service access. Txture already provides pre-defined roles.
More information on how to set up custom roles can be found in User Roles.
If you plan to have many user accounts and want to connect them to your organization's user management or IAM you might want to use a User Importer.
This can be a required first step e.g. to employ Txture surveys in order to collect data from different application owners, but allow them the delegation of data entry to other users (e.g. database administrators) too.
2. Process & Reporting
Now that you have an overview of the stakeholders, you should consider specifically what process and reporting requirements you have. First of all, Txture provides you with the Transformation Cockpit reflecting the standard cloud transformation process and implementing the required reporting for all the phases during the transformation.
Beyond the Transformation Cockpit, Txture freely allows access to applications and IT asset data, so that you can provide stakeholders also with custom reports or dashboards.
3. Data Model
Txture CT comes with our standard data model optimized for the cloud transformation. In Txture, the data model is called "Structure". It is built to store all transformation relevant data about...
- ...your applications,
- ...their communication path,
- ...transmitted and processed data,
- ...responsible persons,
- ...their deployment stack,
- ...as well as business support.
Especially when you are planning to do custom reporting there may arise new requirements to the structure too, beyond the ingredients of the standard model. In Txture the structure can be expanded at runtime and at any time, even as your Txture supported transformation is ongoing. You can adjust the structure of Txture with the Structure Editor, which is accessible to Txture administrators.
We recommend keeping the structure as simple as possible and only adjust the default model if really necessary. Especially for the calculation of the cloud readiness and the target architecture, the use of the default data model is mandatory. In this case, only extensions but not fundamental changes of the structure are possible.
4. Data Sources
Before you get started you should consider which data sources about applications and related IT infrastructure assets exist in your organization.
Typical sources for architectural information are...
- ...CMDBs,
- ...Enterprise Architecture Management tools,
- ...discovery and network scanning tools,
- ...virtualization/container environments,
- ...or just list-based data (e.g. excel, csv, json files).
Additionally, there might be custom-built databases. Using existing data sources can be crucial to speed up the data collection process. Still, for each of the existing data sources, consider their level of data quality and up-to-dateness. Also, you should be aware of potential access restrictions to this data and know the corresponding owners of the data sources to get started with data automation efficiently.
5. Long term Usage
Txture is a highly flexible and scalable IT asset platform and is built with a long-term perspective in mind.
Cloud transformations are typically executed within months or years and while some applications undergo a migration, others are either still untouched or already in the new mode of operation.
Txture unifies the tracking of different states, the planning of new migration waves, the optimization of the application landscape as well as a strategic and operational perspective on the AS-IS application and IT portfolio.
This way, Txture represents a central platform for transparency, communication, planning, and management of application IT.
On the next page, we provide an overview of the first phase of the transformation process, the collection of data (Discovery).