Alfabet FastLane 11.3 IR

Alfabet FastLane release 11.3 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 11.3 IR has been extended and new functionality has been integrated in the user interface to further ease data maintenance and analysis. With Alfabet FastLane 11.3, 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 11.3 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 you 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 capability allows 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.

  Data workbenches support inline editing and the simultaneous update of multiple data entries at once (bulk update) in order to streamline the efforts of keeping data up-to-date and accurate.

  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 include Kanban reports, Gantt charts (timelines), bar charts, pie charts, doughnut charts, line charts, spline charts, radar charts, area charts, spline area charts, and waterfall charts. Kanban reports and Gantt charts support drag-and-drop to simplify planning efforts of the IT architecture.

• 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 also highlighted directly in the data workbench so that critical information can be fixed via inline editing right on-the-spot. Right after the data is changed, 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 AG 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. To name just a few business questions in Alfabet FastLane:
  • What should we be focusing on? 
  • What is our technical debt? 
  • What are our investment/retirement candidates? 
  • What is our roadmap? 
  • How will IT failure impact our business? 
  • What is our cloud migration strategy? 
  • What is our project budget? 
• 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. 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.
• 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. 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, and the layout is saved for future sessions. 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.
• Alfabet FastLane release 11.3 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 11.4.

Alfabet FastLane release 11.3 IR is an Innovation Release.

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 details regarding the maintenance policy for innovation releases at Software AG, see https://empower.softwareag.com/rz_images/SAG%20Maintenance%20Policy.pdf

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

Have thoughts, suggestions, or ideas for Alfabet FastLane ? Let us know at https://alfabet-software-ag.ideas.aha.io/