Trying to understand Enterprise Architecture in PowerDesigner

[Former Member]

I've got decades of experience with data modeling and process modeling in PD, but EA is new to me.

Getting started, it is a bit daunting.  Which diagrams to start with?  What are the differences and purposes of each diagram?  What are the different symbols and why would I use each one?  The PD Help is just as useful as you would expect, much more about which buttons to click on, and much less about why you would do it.

So, I'm trying to understand the tool.

It makes sense to start with the business side, so I do the org chart.  This is fun to begin with, but gets cumbersome very quickly.  I'm trying to link the people that are associated with the project, but they are scattered across the enterprise.  I have lots of org structure gaps.  It would be really nice if I could import my organization from SAP or Outlook.  Let me specify a starting person and load their structure.

Now, what are you thinking the Organization Unit is?  I'm assuming department or work team.  I have a symbol to put on the diagram, but it doesn't have a way to reflect who is in the unit.  It would be nice to be able to draw a link from the person to the org unit, or something like that.  Not intuitive, or I'm missing something.

What about Sites?  It would make sense to be able to show the people who are in each site, because I have the metadata showing who is in which site.  So, why no site symbol for the org diagram?  I'm not sure what to do with that.

Now, getting to Roles, it is cumbersome to assign people to roles.  I double-click the person, click the Roles tab, click the New button, click the appropriate checkbox, save that dialog box, then save the person dialog box.  That is the only way I could figure out how to do it.  Am I missing something?  I'd like to see a way to "drag-and-drop" roles to people (from the list of roles dialog box to the person symbol, or to the list of people), or people to roles, or org units to roles, or people to org units.  It seems that similar functionality exists elsewhere in the tool, so why not here?

OK, that's enough for my first post.  I'm just asking questions and making initial observations here.  But, if you know me, you know that I'll keep on digging into the tool.  🙂