An enterprise architecture model (EAM) helps you analyze and document your organization and its business functions, along with the applications and systems that support them and the physical architecture on which they are implemented.
Organization Charts – for documenting groups and people
Business Communication Diagram – for documenting sites and analyzing the interactions between various parts of your organization
Process Map – for documenting functions
City Planning Diagram - for providing a big picture, global view of the organization, and for descending to the system and database level, to provide links into the next, application layer.
The enterprise architecture model is intended to give you the big picture of your organization, and to provide means to decompose your functions, processes, and systems to a certain level of detail. However, when it comes time to model the implementation of databases, web services, or OO components, you will want to do this in the PowerDesigner module designed for the task.
The EAM contains wizards that allow you to import objects from and export objects to other PowerDesigner modules. Objects exported or imported remain linked to the original objects, in order to keep all your models synchronized and to allow you to perform cross-module impact analysis to identify the technical impact of changes on your enterprise architecture.
The following diagram shows how you can enrich the analysis of your architecture by linking your EA objects with lower-level objects in other types of PowerDesigner models:
PowerDesigner projects allow you to easily combine multiple models and view the connections between them. You can follow an enterprise architecture framework such as FEAF by creating a project that combines your EAM diagrams with those of a Physical Data Model and other PowerDesigner modules.
For more information, see Creating an Enterprise Architecture Framework Project.
O'Rourke, Fishman, Selkow, Enterprise Architecture: Using the Zachman Framework, Thompson Course Technology, 2003, 716 pages, ISBN 0-619-06446-3.
David C. Hay, Morgan Kaufmann, Data Model Patterns: A Metadata Map, 2006, 406 pages, ISBN 0-12-088798-3.