Exostrategies
Innovative Toolkit for Enterprise Architecture

After completing his Ph.D. from MIT, Dr. Daniel Heimerdinger spent almost three decades supporting U.S. space program executives. He has served on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board team and as a member of a Joint NASA/Russian Commission on our collaborative human spaceflight program starting with the Shuttle and Mir and continuing onto the International Space Station. This experience led to him founding Exostrategies in 2006 to focus on innovative approaches to decision-making for complicated, costly, and inherently risky enterprises. “I sat in on many meetings where winning arguments was often based less on analysis than on the loudest or most pedigreed voice in the room,” remarks Heimerdinger, Exostrategies’ CEO.

Headquartered in Woodland Park, CO, Exostrategies provides Enterprise Architecture (EA) decision support services and tools for the government and private industries. The company’s primary focus is to help customers affordably balance architectural and business objectives, investments, and enterprise risks. Exostrategies leverages their commercially available tool suite, the Architex Decision Support Toolset (Architex™), to help achieve these objectives.

Architex is a cloud-based subscription service that provides a collaborative environment to model the impact of potential decisions on the performance and affordability of the enterprise. Architex™ integrates EA, Lifecycle Affordability, and Enterprise Risk Management to fully expose elements of budget, schedule, dependencies, and risks into the architecture. Architex is data-driven and artifacts are auto-generated, reducing the cost and time to product. “We never in¬tended to develop software,” says Heimerdinger, “but we could not find a collaborative, fully integrated, easy to use, and affordable tool to support our customers’ needs.”

“Virtually all of our innovations are driven by a desire to anticipate and solve customer problems at reduced time and cost,” explains Heimerdinger.

One customer annually required architectural products using the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF). These are often static, labor-intensive, hand-drawn and tabular reports that exclude cost and risk. Architex™ provided the environment to dynamically query the data, auto-generate the standard products, augmented those with new products that show where the risks reside and the projects and budgets required for mitigation. “This provided our customer with a new way to view their EA and model a plan to mitigate the enterprise’s risk posture,” says Heimerdinger.

Tools like Architex provide the framework for managing data and analysis. Individual character and ethics, experience, and a study of history are needed to turn that data and analysis into a good decision. I have built my company around supporting those basic principles

Exostrategies sets itself apart from the competition by, “providing our customers with decision support solutions that deliver seamless integration of architecture, cost, and risk data into a single collaborative environment ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the enterprise,” explains Heimerdinger, “We anticipate our customers’ needs and provide better decisional information before it becomes a crisis and a major expense.”

“My team is now using Architex for applications that we never imagined including animal shelters, municipalities, investment banks, mergers and acquisitions, and mortgage underwriting. This has been really fun to watch unfold,” concludes Heimerdinger.