Bridging the Management Information Gap

Bridging the Management Information Gap

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

Today anyone, board member and 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. And if you do that using 1 consistent enterprise model, the views will be consistent with each other.

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

So if you want to reduce the cost of it, you'd better have an IT landscape that shows the TCO and other costs to each other and 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 processes 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 all the other views would have to be redrawn by hand presenting the correct situation. If you change the model, all views and visualizations are immediately regenerated and are ALWAYS consistent.

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

Create Consistent and Dynamic Views using Dragon1

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 things data you are using: is this a process or an activity, is that an application or a system, is this a goal or an objective? The better you classify your data into types of data, the higher the quality of your model is.

Views

After entering data and creating a model, you have to create views. You will decide for what concerns or job roles you will create views: financials 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 residue 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 placed on a drawing canvas that can be interpreted in real-time to show certain data from a view with certain shapes on certain positions.

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

You can regard visual items as mini visualizations that are grouped on a drawing canvas and together form a visualization.

If you do a good job, you will be able to create visualizations that are appealing to the stakeholders with regards 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 finally ensures you have visualizations that enable and support the decisions that need to be taken by board members and management in your company.

Dragon1 BUSINESS, ENTERPRISE or PRO

This visualization was created using Dragon1 PRO. But if you want to be able to create all these views that are shown on the visualization, you need Dragon1 BUSINESS or ENTERPRISE.

Here we have a pricing page that sums up the differences between the three editions.

If you are inspired to start using Dragon1 as your EA Tool for Management Information, please contact us. We are happy to support you in taking the next steps.