Mapping the Future: Ordnance Survey’s IT Transformation Journey With Ardoq

From Organic Sprawl to Evidence-Based Decisions

Ordnance Survey (OS), the national mapping agency of Great Britain, plays a critical role in providing accurate, up-to-date geospatial data for businesses, governments, and citizens alike. Behind that role sits a technology estate that grew organically over decades: numerous point solutions, limited central visibility, and valuable institutional knowledge concentrated in a handful of key people.

As the demands on that estate grew, so did the need for a data-driven, evidence-based way to make decisions. OS needed to see its architecture clearly before it could plan its future confidently.

We caught up with Dave Stow, Head of Architecture at Ordnance Survey, at IRM UK 2026 to hear the latest chapter in that journey. You can watch the full conversation below, or read on for the highlights.

A Fragmented Landscape With Knowledge Locked in People’s Heads

Prior to Ardoq, OS faced a challenge common to many large organizations. The IT infrastructure had developed without a single connecting view, decisions leaned on spreadsheets, and critical knowledge lived with individuals rather than in any shared, maintainable system.

That fragmentation made it hard to answer basic strategic questions: what do we have, what depends on what, and where is the risk. Without a connected, current picture, planning was slow, and evidence was thin.

Building the Practice One Use Case at a Time

OS selected Ardoq as its Enterprise Architecture platform for three reasons:

• Flexibility: Ardoq's adaptable metamodel let the team map their unique organizational structure and complex geospatial data processes.
• Scale: Ardoq's data-driven design could handle the volume and variety of OS's data.
• Licensing: A cost-effective, usage-based model gave them room to scale without heavy upfront investment.

The journey began with the data estate, a deliberate choice given how central data flows are to OS’s operations. From there, the practice expanded steadily over five years. The team built out Application Portfolio Management to gain visibility of the full application landscape, including lifecycle status, costs, and roadmap planning. They added third-party data catalogs and a Technology Reference Model to assess technology risk and currency, business capability mapping to structure the organization down to capability level, and an Information Asset Register to support governance of personal data and regulatory compliance.

Throughout, Ardoq Surveys let subject matter experts contribute and maintain data directly, driving both accuracy and a sense of ownership across the organization. What began as an initial deployment became a mature, strategically embedded practice.

Key Outcomes With Ardoq

Speaking at IRM UK 2026, Dave Stow highlighted two use cases that show how deeply Ardoq is now embedded in operational and strategic decision-making.

1. Disaster recovery you can actually trust

OS used Ardoq to map critical business functions and connect them directly to the applications that enable them. That let the architecture team cross-reference business requirements, including RTO and RPO expectations, against the actual disaster recovery plan for each application.

“We’ve done an exercise to identify the critical business functions and map those to the applications that enable those functions to take place. That’s been very important within our disaster recovery planning. We can now understand the relationship between what the business asks of a particular application and what its DR plan actually says.”

- Dave Stow, Head of Architecture at Ordnance Survey

Connecting business context to technical risk like this is exactly the kind of high-value outcome that justifies EA investment at board level.

2. Technology risk you can see coming

OS injected their Technology Reference Model into Ardoq, so they can proactively identify applications running technologies that are approaching end-of-life or a version change. Rather than reacting to technology risk, the team now asks structured questions of the data and plans ahead.

AI and Natural Language Querying

The most forward-looking development on OS’s roadmap is integrating Microsoft Copilot with Ardoq as a source of truth, enabling natural language querying of the architecture data. The aim is to let a wider set of stakeholders ask questions of the model without needing specialist EA tooling knowledge.

“The structure of the metamodel within Ardoq gives a really firm basis for the AI to take successful decisions when you’re asking a question about what the data is.”
Dave Stow, Head of Architecture at Ordnance Survey

The metamodel OS has invested in carefully over five years is becoming a direct enabler of AI utility. Well-governed architecture data isn’t just operationally useful; it’s becoming a prerequisite for effective AI-assisted decision-making.

About Ordnance Survey

Ordnance Survey (OS) is Great Britain's national mapping service. Headquartered in Southampton, OS creates, maintains, and distributes detailed location data for Great Britain, recording and managing more than 600 million geospatial features in its National Geographic Database (NGD). Mapping the nation since 1791, OS has spent over 230 years turning location intelligence into tools that help build a modern, connected, and sustainable Britain, from managing climate risk to connecting people with public services.