Partner perspective

Partner perspective

The Bizzdesign partner network extends the range and depth of industry expertise available to our customers.

In this blog post, our UK partner, Edifit, explains how they have applied their experience as architecture practitioners to extend the document production capabilities of Enterprise Studio.

Automating document generation from your architecture model

Eddie Walker

Good architecture will navigate an enterprise towards a target state that supports and enables fulfilment of business outcomes.
First comes the design phase which is where the Bizzdesign product suite excels. The self-service capabilities of the HoriZZon platform make it possible for stakeholders to understand, critique and contribute to the overall blueprint and roadmap. Within Enterprise Studio, HoriZZon’s modeling environment, coach views help the architect to communicate the design story via a series of sequenced and navigable views.

Next comes the delivery phase which implements the design changes. Delivery methods such as Prince2 ensure that time, quality and cost constraints are met. Deliverables, including solution option papers and high-level designs, contain relevant content from Enterprise Studio and other sources. These design documents provide auditable snapshots of the architecture which can be updated and managed through change control.

But managing design changes is time consuming – collating data from various sources, updating the model and ensuring design documents accurately reflect all amendments. If only you could use your coach views to generate documents that communicate the same design story you have already modeled within Enterprise Studio. Well, now you can!

The Edifit Document Coach lets you produce Word and PowerPoint deliverables automatically from existing coach views. You select which model content to include and which output formats and styles to apply. The document can also be further enriched with content not maintained in the repository.

Figure 1 – Customising Document Structures

Using the coach view, you configure the document structure and layout. You select the model content and the output formats using the report content profile for each view. Model content can include views, charts, objects, relations, properties and metrics; and output formats include images, text, tables, matrices and viewpoint filters. Here are some examples:

Figure 2 – Generating Views, Images & Documentation

Figure 3 – Generating Attribute & Metric Property Tables from Objects or Relations

Figure 4 – Generating Matrices or Tables from Bizzdesign Charts

You can refresh existing documents from the architecture repository to support version control. Furthermore, Document Coach templates ensure that you produce consistent deliverables across all projects and teams.

The Edifit Document Comailto:info@bizzdesign.comach improves efficiency – meaning you spend less time on document production and more time on architecture modeling and design. Like to know more? Try it yourself at https://edifit.co.uk/document-coach/.
And to learn more about HoriZZon get in touch here.