Management Information Gap

The days when Enterprise Architecture was something difficult and scary for board members and managers are long gone.

Today, anyone- board member or manager- can use Enterprise Architecture as an interactive Management Information System.

You just need to create the right views for your dashboard. And for that, you need an EA Tool.

The visualization shows 15 different views you can create of the same enterprise. If you build them using 1 consistent enterprise model, the views will stay consistent with each other.

Having the right views for you as a board member or manager makes sure you can use them for the tasks at hand.

So if you want to reduce its cost, you'd better have an IT landscape that shows the TCO and other costs relative to each other and to the strategy.

If you want to increase the effectiveness of activities in business processes (make them LEAN), you'd better have the correct version of your business process landscape.

On the Dragon1 platform, you can create models, create views on top of a model, and create visualizations that graphically represent views.

Now suppose your business process landscape changes. Normally, you'd have to redraw all the other views by hand to reflect the new situation. If you change the model, all views and visualizations are immediately regenerated and ALWAYS consistent.

This not only saves time but also ensures you make decisions based on the correct information.

Create Consistent and Dynamic Views

On the platform, you are encouraged not to draw static pictures, but to create models of data and generate views and visualizations.

Always, these four steps are part of your design process: Data --> Models --> Views --> Visualizations.

If you do this, you fully enjoy the potential of Dragon1 as a Management Information System.

Models

The small catch is that you have to create a model, a set of related entities. This also means you have to decide what type of data you are using: is this a process or an activity, an application or a system, a goal or an objective? The better you classify your data into data types, the higher the quality of your model.

Views

After entering data and creating a model, you have to create views. You will decide which concerns or job roles you will create views for: financial views of IT systems? HR views of business processes? Compliance views of infrastructure or product manufacturing?

Once this has been done, you can define view templates that will filter the data in the model correctly, so that the result is a view that is meaningful for a certain type of stakeholder.

But we are not there yet. We need to create visualizations of the views. We need to create a graphical representation of the views.

Visualizations

On Dragon1, we have a unique feature called Visual Items. These are shape and data placeholders on a drawing canvas that can be interpreted in real time to show specific data from a view, with certain shapes in specific positions.

You can set up any number of visual items per visualization. You can link visual items to one or more views.

You can think of visual items as mini-visualizations grouped on a drawing canvas that together form a visualization.

If you do a good job, you will be able to create visualizations that are appealing to the stakeholders with regard to the type of concern that is presented on the visualization.

On the platform, you have the freedom to create any type or kind of interactive and consistent visualization you like, because of the Visual Items features: whether it needs to be a diagram or report, it does not matter; you can create it.

You can even click from one view to another view, surfing through your organization the way you want it.

And all this ultimately ensures you have visualizations that enable and support the decisions that need to be made by board members and management at your company.

Dragon1 BUSINESS, ENTERPRISE or PRO

This visualization was created using Dragon1 PRO. To create all the views shown in the visualization, you need Dragon1 BUSINESS or ENTERPRISE.

Here is our pricing page, which summarizes the differences between the three editions. If you are ready to start using Dragon1 as your EA Tool for Management Information, please contact us. We are happy to support you as you take the next steps.