Like most modern engineering organizations, our Activity Team is geographically distributed, temporally distributed, work for independent companies, share only a best-effort public Internet for connectivity, and use a variety of modeling tools.
We need a solution for modeling that:
Has a high User Experience quotient. (I call this “fluidity”, that is, it just works.)
Has a high Artistry quotient. (I call this “the pictures it draws look good”.)
Offers one or more notations for Enterprise (“Business Motivation”) and Systems Engineering
Offers change management.
Offers “composability” (I call this “an ability to divide a model into pieces, each of which can be evolved contemporaneously offline and can be merged together conveniently to form the unified model”.)
Accesses information where it originates rather than requiring centralized migration and storage.
Is available to charitable organizations at no cost.
Plays in a heterogeneous modeling ecosystem.
In the absence of an ideal solution we pragmatically mashup what can be found.