Alfabet FastLane 11.4 IR

Alfabet FastLane release 11.4 IR (Innovation Release) continues Alfabet's journey to provide an easy and joyful end-user experience aimed to remove the barriers of adoption in the user community. The functional scope of Alfabet FastLane release 11.4IR has been extended and new functionality has been integrated in the user interface to further ease data maintenance and analysis. With Alfabet FastLane 11.4 IR, you can make informed business decisions about your IT architecture based on up-to-date and accurate data. Out-of-the-box analytics address business questions that provide meaningful insight to your IT architecture and the interdependencies of applications and technology in the business.

Alfabet FastLane release 11.4 IR is available as a cloud-based application and accessible via Microsoft® Edge®, Chrome™, Firefox™ 109 and higher, and Apple® Safari® web browsers. No system set-up is required. Minimal configuration allows you to extend the indicators, roles, and custom attributes that reflect your company's needs. You can begin straightaway.

Alfabet 11 introduces a completely overhauled, clean, modern, and intuitive user interface:

• Standardized navigation provides immediate access to your favorites and your most recently touched objects and ensures you can quickly get your hands on all IT assets captured for your company's business, application, information, and technology architectures. Easy search capabilities allow you to find any IT asset or business question in your repository directly in the home page.
• Powerful and smart data workbenches enable you to capture and maintain your data as a single source of truth in the company. Sorting and moving columns in the data workbench as well as advanced filtering options gives you the control to see the data how you want to see it, and global settings ensure that you don't need to repeatedly set the same filters in other views in Alfabet FastLane.

  Every data workbench includes a data table - where you decide which data is relevant for you at the moment - and additional out-of-the-box graphics that allow you to visualize your data according to your needs. Graphic visualizations can be sliced-and-diced via filter settings to show content from various perspectives. These visualizations can then be exported or added to a content repository and later displayed in content areas throughout Alfabet FastLane. Out-of-the box visualizations include matrix reports, Gantt charts (timelines), portfolio charts, bar charts, pie charts, doughnut charts, and line charts. Preconfigured analytical reports are also available for some data workbenches to address a fixed thematic scope that visualizes the dataset specified in the data table.

• Enhanced data capture and editing capabilities ensure users can enter and maintain data with only a few clicks. Object creation is straightforward. The New button is prominent and easy to understand and only a few attributes like Name are required to create an asset in the new streamlined editor. All other information is entered directly in either the data workbench or content area. When the user clicks in the field, the relevant selector will open and the user can specify the value or values in case of the definition of an attribute of the type Reference Array. Data workbenches also support the simultaneous update of multiple data entries at once (bulk update), simplifying the efforts of keeping data up-to-date and accurate. Data quality issues are highlighted directly in the data workbench and content area so that critical information can be fixed immediately.
• Customizable content areas allow users to decide on the layout of the analytics and data they see. Content areas are available throughout Alfabet FastLane to present analytics about the IT architecture as a whole as well as detailed information about each asset in the IT portfolio. Any content saved by a user to their content repository can be added to the content area. Views, data workbenches and their graphic visualizations as well as attribute groups and cards showing KPIs can be added to any content area.

  Users can decide on the layout of the content area so that it is optimal for their screen size and to reflect the information relevant to their needs. Entire tabbed pages in a content area can be hidden from view and the layout of embedded views in a tabbed page can be customized by changing their size, moving them around, or removing them from view in the tabbed page. The layout of a content area is automatically saved in the user's context settings and will be displayed in future sessions.

• Data quality assessments are available throughout Alfabet FastLane to ensure decision-making is based on reliable and precise information. Each user has a dedicated view listing the data quality rule violations for the objects that they are responsible for with links that open the location where the data quality issue can be fixed. Data quality issues are highlighted with coloring in data workbenches and content areas and hints tell the user what needs to be done to fix the issue. Right after the data is changed, directly affected data quality rules will be immediately recalculated and data quality scores will be updated in the user interface. Dedicated data quality reports are available for every data workbench and business question.

  Administrative users can activate and deactivate preconfigured data quality rules provided by Software GmbH and create new data quality rules for their company's IT portfolio. Furthermore, administrative users can also configure that emails are sent at regular intervals to either authorized users or users with specified roles listing their data quality rule violations. The email provides links that open the location in Alfabet FastLane where the issue can be resolved.

• Analytics focus on the most business-relevant questions in order to help you know where to focus change efforts to execute your company's strategy. Business questions are out-of-the-box visualizations that provide answers about the as-is state of your application, technology, and investment portfolios. Each business question includes analytics that provide answers to your most critical issues as well as views that allow you to understand and update the relevant data. Business questions are grouped to help you focus your efforts:
  • Governance: Establish governance of your IT assets with business questions that address responsibility and accountability for IT assets and where to focus your change efforts. Typical business questions include Who is responsible for our assets? and What should we be focusing on?
  • Transparency: Gain transparency of your IT portfolio with business questions that provide insight about the as-is landscape, architectural dependencies, and technical debt. This includes questions like What are our architectural dependencies? and What is our technical debt?
  • Rationalization: Rationalize your application landscape using business questions to identify functional redundancies in your IT and understand how to eliminate the complexity of architectural dependencies without endangering critical business areas. Examine the business questions What are our investment/retirement candidates? and What are our cost drivers?
  • Roadmapping: Plan your application roadmap using business questions that enable your company to coordinate IT change efforts so change is efficient and fast. This includes analyses such as What is our landscape? and What is our target architecture?
  • Risk: Assess risk to your business with analyses that support business and IT innovation with the confidence of better compliance, decreased risk to critical applications, and knowledge of the potential impact of IT security issues on critical business areas. Review the business questions How will IT failure impact our business? and Where do we use sensitive data?
  • Cloud Migration: Manage migration to the cloud with business questions that focus on making your migration to the cloud fast and reliable and help you to identify cloud candidates in alignment with your migration strategy. Explore the business questions What are our cloud focus areas? and What is our cloud migration strategy?
• Preconfigured user profiles allow the right user to access the right functionalities and the right data. The following user profiles are available with Alfabet FastLane:
  • Portfolio Admin

    This user profile is for superusers who are responsible to carry out administrative tasks. It provides exclusive access to views that are required for user and account management, data import for all relevant IT assets, and the customization of indicator types to evaluate your data, role types to capture responsibilities for IT assets, and custom attributes that are relevant to your company's data requirements. Administrative users can also specify indicators that users can add as KPI cards to content areas. Notifications provide easy access to administrative users to log information about maintenance jobs that run in the background.

  • Portfolio Manager

    This user profile is for users who are responsible to input and maintain data relevant for IT portfolio management. It provides access to analytics based on relevant business questions and to the data workbenches that allow that data to be maintained and understood in detail. Users with this profile have read/write permissions to all objects that they have authorized access to via the user group definition.

  • Portfolio Analyst (formally Viewer)

    This user profile is for users who are interested in seeing up-to-date analytics about the IT portfolio in order to understand the most business-relevant questions and make informed strategic decisions. Users logging in with this user profile have read-only access permissions to all business questions and can see the detailed data for all objects that they have authorized access to via the user group definition.

  • Application Manager

    This user profile is for users responsible for capturing and maintaining data relevant for the application portfolio management.

  • Technology Manager

    This user profile is for users responsible for capturing and maintaining data relevant for the technology portfolio management.

• Alfabet FastLane provides out-of-the-box integration with Eracent's IT-Pedia ® to support the import of product data from IT-Pedia's comprehensive IT product library. IT products from IT-Pedia's model catalog can be imported as components to the Alfabet FastLane repository. The import also supports merging of IT-Pedia model catalog information to existing components or vendors. Product lifecycle and vendor information are also imported to ensure that end-of-life information about technologies is up-to-date and accurate. This ensures that your technology portfolio is based on a reliable data source and minimizes IT risk to the business.
• Alfabet FastLane release 11.4 IR provides multi-language support. Users can render the user interface in English, German, French, Polish, Portuguese, and Arabic. Please note that there are some known limitations in the right-to-left display of the Arabic user interface with this release. Multi-language support of the user help is planned to be available with release 11.5.

Alfabet FastLane release 11.4 IR is an Innovation Release and thus has a Standard Maintenance duration and Sustained Support of six months.

In future releases, the data and analytics documented in Alfabet FastLane can be migrated to Alfabet Accelerator or integrated in Alfabet Enterprise Edition for complete enterprise architecture management and IT portfolio management. For an overview of the support phases at Software GmbH, see https://empower.softwareag.com/rz_images/SAGSupportPolicy_Final.pdf

Curious for more? Contact us at: https://www.softwareag.com/en_corporate/platform/alfabet/alfabet-fastlane.html

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