enterprise interface diagram

[Marty]

Hi everyone,

Have you created an enterprise interface diagram that you are proud of?

I'm referring to a diagram that shows a high-level view of all the interfaces between the various business & clinical applications in your health system.  I'm calling this an enterprise interface diagram for lack of a better term.

I created this topic so we can share such diagrams as well as how we create & maintain them.  The goal being that we can all learn from each other's efforts and end up with better diagrams.

If you are like me, you have a love/hate relationship with these diagrams.  I love them because they are an excellent way to communicate about future projects, outstanding issues, impacts, and more.  I hate them because they take a long time to create and maintain; and if they are not maintained they become inaccurate and less useful.

To get this started, I want to share the diagram that I created at my previous job (see below).  Here are some important points about it...

• I used Visio to create this diagram and found it to be a good tool for the task.  Sometimes I wonder if a tool like ERwin would have been a better choice.
• The biggest time sink for me was going back & forth on the right classifications and color schemes for the message types, application types, etc...  But once I came up with the final legends, I found that creating the diagram itself was rather straight forward and fairly quick.
• Maintaining the diagram can be a bit painful at times when you need to make space to add a new application.  Visio does a good job of letting you group/attach items together so you can move things around in chunks.  Even still, I found myself having to tweak the layout a bit and that usually meant ungrouping/unattaching, moving, then regroupwing/reattaching.
• At times, I would like to be able to show/hide specific interface types or application types.  For example, for a revenue cycle meeting I may want to show the billing interfaces only.  I tried using Visio's layers feature for this and it works OK but ends up with a lot of wasted space.
• I have plans to create something similar for my current job, but we have a lot more interfaces here and I fear that this same type of diagram may get too cluttered and therefore not be as effective.
  

I welcome any feedback about my diagram and I look forward to seeing/hearing about everyone else's.

Cheers,

-Marty