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What models to use?

Former Member
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Hi,

We're about to embark on a PowerDesigner journey (PD16.1). Any suggestions as to what type of model to select for defining (a set of) business information requests to other business domains within the enterprise, in terms of data attributes and data types (logical level)?

Overall we want to create a linked consistent set of Architecture-driven, Data-oriented and Object-oriented models. Any best practices?

Greetz,

Patrick

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

Former Member
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Process Models are a good start, but they are a little weak on the "data" side from a creation usability perspective.  They are actually REALLY strong if you use message types and XML but it can get really complicated for most pure business analysts and even real techies. 

EAM's are pretty good and really help with general communication too.  I haven't found UML to be really efficient unless you need to get really fine-grained.  The setup time is too long and the models tend to get huge or you have way to many.  Communication diagrams though can be helpful, but they aren't real pretty.  If you're at the logical level you can just create some non-concrete empty classes and use the diagram to show how they are exchanged.  As you move forward you can fill them out and then gen both table and concrete classes.

If you have the time and skills I would go with XML, or if you are new to the whole thing try a BPM Analysis model without messages.  One of the things to be very careful of in general is that modeling is very expensive and for orgs new to it the is a big culture shift.  I model everything right from the start and usually the model sets are much bigger then the actual code/database.  They pay for themselves many times over though. 

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