Gadrian: Leveraging analysis efforts at the desktop

There is a strong need today to improve the predictability and productivity of analysis efforts in businesses. No longer is classic numeric or financial analysis sufficient. Best practices, benchmarking, process analysis, content management, taxonomy analysis and other language oriented approaches demand a more complete business analysis and enterprise architecture approach than has been available. The key to this type of successful business analysis is descriptive modeling. A descriptive model is a group of language phrases with relationships between the phrases such as the process sequence of steps describing work or a topical outline such as a taxonomy. The value of Gadrian and especially its descriptive approach to model types, semantic model analytics and knowledge management, is in its ability to provide an integrative metaphor for analysis material. This metaphor must work

Gadrian has four core analytic groups: Single model Two models Single class Two class

in a remote fashion at the desktop as well as a connected manner at the enterprise level through a related model repository. Such an approach is used at the desktop level for initial filtering of the material gathered for such efforts as business analysis, enterprise architecture and process analysis and modeling and later at the enterprise level for integrating the results of the many analysis efforts.

The importance and awareness of models has increased today due largely to the widespread use of products such as Excel. The benefit of this awareness phenomena is that better and more useful techniques for coordinating benchmarking, best practices and many other analysis results are now available through the use of software such as Gadrian.

Gadrian in a Nutshell

There is a frustration with current analysis tools for such efforts as business analysis and consulting. Most analysts and consultants still use spreadsheets and word docs with the more recent addition of Lotus Notes and web search tools. Still there is no way to coordinate the analysis results of major and expensive enterprise efforts for benchmarking, best practices, process management, competitive intel and other key studies performed on a regular basis. Further, businesses are constantly revising or replacing their business models with alternate views or perspectives so they can come at a problem from different points of view. Gadrian is an integrative tool designed to resolve these analysis issues, build analysis value and accelerate the analysis process. It supports the modeling features typical of business consulting such as cross impact matrices, simple flows, topic structures and others. It also provides interfaces to other key tools such as Visio for graphics and MindMapper for ideas and decompositions. Gadrian helps shape the design envelope of a solution and as a result reduces downstream costs related to design, especially of today’s systems.

Gadrian also does knowledge positioning to help a worker function much more efficiently. It is this feature that gives Gadrian strength as a desktop tool. A company can embed its own methodology for repeatable performance results such as in CRM, ERP, EAI or data warehousing/business intelligence projects. Finally, Gadrian can also be used as a grass roots knowledge management tool that links the content to the work structure of the user.

Why Gadrian? Leveraging thought to actionable results.

• Desktop gathering, organizing and filtering relieving the load on a repository and providing focused methods for the analysis at hand improving productivity
• Sharing the gathered analysis materials among several projects while linking to a repository
• Methodology embedding for repeatability and predictability of the results expected