Note these features have been deprecated from Waltz 1.14 as user uptake was low and complexity was high.
This document addresses how two features in Waltz may be used to facilitate a better understanding of the data within Waltz.
Waltz, by design, typically stores simple facts against entities. For example:
- Application A supports Function F
- Application B supports Service Y
- Service Y relates to Product P
Sometimes a more nuanced view is required, to support this Waltz supports an extension to the above model known as Perspectives. Currently perspectives allow you to refine an application view by combining two viewpoints (taxonomies) into a grid and allowing users to specify which combinations of viewpoint items are valid and which are not. For example if we have a set of simple facts (for business and product) stored against an application like so:
We can create a viewpoint relating Business against Product and specify the valid combinations.
The Products form the rows and the Businesses form the columns.
From this diagram we can see the second column (Business / Rates) explicitly has a rating for Rates/CapFloor and implicit ratings for the rest. Also it explicitly states that Rates/Portfolio Swap is an invalid combination. The colors indicates the alignment to the rating scheme (typically Invest/Disinvest/Maintain) which can be configured to suit the domain.
Multiple perspectives can be defined in Waltz, but each can only related two viewpoints.
- Limited to two 'dimensions'
- Only available against applications (cannot record a perspective for other types of entities)
- No aggregate (summary) views yet. It's on backlog, but currently unprioritized
- Increases complexity and effort involved in mapping (n x n, rather than 2 x n)
- Uptake of existing functionality has been low due to above mentioned complexity/effort
- Perspectives are currently unaware of hierarchies and view the viewpoints as flat structures (as can be seen in the TBC columns).
Waltz recently introduced a new way to view two viewpoints together at an aggregate level (i.e. Organisation Unit). This allows users to pick two viewpoints (or select from pre-defined combinations) and navigate through the application data (simple facts) for those dimensions. he drill grid has similarities to the familiar pivot table in Excel.
In this example we will use Function and Product. Initially the columns are the top level Functions and the rows represent Products with the applications against that deal with those products.
We can select a column or row-group to drill into more detail. In this example we have drilled into the Operations function (columns) and into the Equity product sub-tree (the popup shows more detail about the selected cell)
- Currently only used against simple facts (not perspective aware yet, on backlog but nor prioritized)
- Row groups are dominant (they determine the apps to show, columns are there as supplemental detail)
- Can be quite complex to operate/interpret.
- Problems scaling to large numbers of applications
- Limited to operating on applications within an organisational unit.