Facilitate Collaboration

Decisions are not developed in isolation, but rather require collaborative effort, often starting with some type of strategic intent and ending with an implementation of the Decision Model as a manual business process or automated in an information system. Either way, the realized decision process can be executed hundreds or, in the case of a computer system, millions of times a day.

Enterprise Architect is a team collaboration platform that has sophisticated tools to ensure that all the team members who need to contribute to the creation, development and maintenance of the models can collaborate in the same model, regardless of their role in the team, where they are located, or how they connect to the model. These tools include:

• Reviews - where models and expressions can be analyzed and criticized
• Model Library - a collection of documents and web resources that can be viewed
• Element and diagram discussions - ability to communicate about elements and diagrams with modelers and business users
• Chat - an in-model chat for immediate conversations
• Model Mail - an in-product communication tool allowing messages to reference model elements and diagrams
• Model Calendar - an in-model calendar for important team events

This diagram shows the Discussions facility that can be used to facilitate collaboration between teams that work in different buildings, or even in different countries and time-zones.

When clients use a Cloud Server environment, anyone can view and contribute to the models from anywhere, including from in-built browsers on these devices:

• Smart Phones
• Tablets
• Notebooks

This means that all levels of users from strategic thinkers down to implementation and support staff can access the models and collaborate wherever they are and using whatever device they have at hand. So a business line manager could be at the airport and open their smart phone and participate in a discussion about the data inputs to a particular decision or provide information about the definitive source for a given Business Knowledge model.  A software engineer could be traveling home on a fast train and use a tablet to review some implementation details or generated programming code.