ARIS BPM Blog

We just created a new BPMN Community group to discuss BPMN modeling, BPMN specification, BPMN best practices, etc. Feel free to join! To kick off the discussion, I like to collect some BPMN best practices. BPMN was designed by a big vendor committee and not by users. This usually leads to a very complex specification containing a lot of things nobody needs. Don't get me wrong here: I don't blame the people involved in specification process, it is just how things are.

I guess I was not close enough. I bet Eva will win.

You just clicked a banner in ARISalign pointing to ARIS Community or you stumbled upon it while surfing? However you arrived here, a very warm welcome! ARIS Community is the home of all business process management experts and ARIS users. On ARIS Community, you can download the free modelling tool ARIS Express, which integrates very well with ARISalign. Here are some links you might find useful to get started:

We are back on the road ;-) This year's ProcessWorld events will be held in Berlin on June 8-9 and Washington D.C. on June 22-23! An additional ProcessWorld stop has recently been added in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on May 4. Software AG and IDS Scheer have combined to form the world’s leading event focused on achieving business process excellence!

Some weeks ago we asked you to give us your feedback about ARIS Express . First of all, many thanks to everyone who participated for your time, your ideas, your fair comments and helpful criticism! This is highly appreciated by the whole ARIS Express team.

Here is the link to the ARISalign webinar that we did on March 3rd: http://event.on24.com/r.htm?e=192937&s=1&k=1A8A7F5B5DA5FCFD19B632BD553B5AF4 In the webinar we show a live demo of ARISalign as well as a video of the ARISalign iPhone application prototype.

Business process models and related diagrams such as organisational charts or data models make the tacit knowledge of domain experts explicit. It is one of the hardest tasks of modelling experts to identify those people with the necessary process knowledge and to motivate them sharing it. Usually, workshops and interviews are conducted to collect this knowledge. Later, a modelling expert turns this input into explicit models, which are then approved by domain experts.

ARIS Community survey_We got a winner!

Last week the CeBIT, one of the biggest IT fairs in the world, took place in Hannover. I worked at the combined Software AG and IDS Scheer booth presenting the ARIS Solution for EAM and the integration between webMethods and ARIS. It was great to be there and to discuss with so many people and customers who were visiting our booth. They all liked to see the newest demo showcases of our combined products and services.

Last week I was at CeBIT, one of the biggest IT fairs in the world. My colleagues and I had very interesting discussions and meetings. For the first time, we had a combined booth showcasing all products and services offered by IDS Scheer and Software AG.

Some weeks ago, we released a new service release of our ARIS Platform products. Service release sounds like just fixing some bugs. Well, in this case the new release contains many new and important features. In fact, there are so many enhancements that we could have also released a new major version.

The first entry over on the ARISalign blog was called "It's nice to have friends" and here we are now with our new friends from the ARIS Community. This is very exciting and I can not tell you how pleased I am about this. For starters I would like to make you aware of a big event that is happening next week Tuesday, March 2nd:

Whiteboards are probably one of the most effective tools to sketch your ideas or to brainstorm with your colleagues. Often, whiteboards are combined with post-it notes to visualise ideas of different people. Whiteboards and post-it notes are also used in many business process management efforts, for example to define the initial process design or to extract process knowledge from process participants. It is also a great tool to come up with improvement ideas. In sum, whiteboards and post-it notes are usually used before process modelling.

BPMN 2 is the new and heavily extended version of the popular business process modelling notation by OMG. Most major and minor vendors in the BPM space committed to support this standard, so does IDS Scheer. Some weeks ago, we updated our professional products and added BPMN 2 support. Today, we make BPMN 2 modelling available to everyone with the release of ARIS Express 2.0.

... well, I don´t know why IT Analysts from Gartner call their tool vendor evaluations “magic”. But for me, it´s clear: