For IT, Ardoq visualizes what’s in your head

Magnulf Pilskog and Erik Bakstad, two Norwegian consultants who specialized in visualizing large datasets, felt that they kept repeating the same steps over and over again.  Rather than embrace the tedium, they started Ardoq to save them from bureaucratic boredom.

Ardoq automatically visualize business processes, so that an organizations documents, business processes, and dependencies on their IT systems can be easily assessed.  With Ardoq, any changes made on in a system can by visualized in real-time, so that people working in a company can easily collaborate and have an overview of projects.

How do you visualize complex IT processes?

Ardoq is not re-inventing the wheel – there are existing programs that visualize business processes across a company.  But they are not exactly meant for the average worker.

“The existing products on the market are very, very expert level,” says Magnulf.  “They are really complex, and meant for super-experts.”

Ardoq wanted anyone in an organization to use their product – not just IT – so that people could understand business processes across departments.

“Before, you had to do a lot of investigating and play the detective to find out how systems are connected, and what will effect existing processes.”

Ardoq automates this process, so that changes in a system can be seen automatically, in real time.

“If you have a complex infrastructure, with a lot of applications and systems, all of those systems are connected.  If you want to make a change in one system, you don’t know how it will effect other systems.  With Ardoq, you can see across the whole value chain.  It does not only cover the systems and integrations but also the systems and business processes and requirements”.

In other words, say you are working at a company, and it takes way too much time to fill out an invoice.  But your IT guys has figured out a way to automate a step in the process to make it easier.  In order to do that, he has to make a change to the IT systems – and that can potentially effect every other part of the company. With Ardoq, you can see which systems are involved, and what the effects are.

“It’s a simple process of catching dependencies that usually reside inside people’s heads,” he explains.

Sure.  Sounds simple.

Onwards from automation

Since being founded in 2013, the company has built a roster of local partners that include Norway’s Statoil, Fjordkraft, and Gjensidige.  In January of 2016, Ardoq closed a seed round of $1.26 million, which they will use to expand outside of Norway.  And as companies move their documentation into the cloud, the market for Ardoq’s service will only get bigger.  Arctic Startup has reported that it is estimated at $7.8 billion.

The company is also planning to make even more automation in their system, and send insight reports and analytics to their users.

“If you have this business process and you have 15 applications that you have to make changes to, we can give you some predictive insights on what resources you need.  This is the kind of research companies spend a lot of time on, and we can do it in real time,” says Magnulf.

Check out Ardoq in action at their demo here.