ARIS BPM Blog

This guide illustrates the key BPMN process types (models) to consider before you start modeling. Choreographies and Conversation have been excluded in this overview. The focus is also on what Business Analysts need to model (non executable) in order to give a quality handover to System Analysts who will transform the models to an executable standard.

Today, our new mother Software AG issued a press release about ARIS Community attracting more than 50,000 members in the first year. In fact, ARIS Community is now the biggest pure BPM community in the world. The PR people gave this press release a nice twist by adding a balance sheet. Here are the key figures for the first year they mentioned:

For those not involved in financial services, you probably haven't heard of Solvency II yet. For those who do work in insurance, if you haven't heard of it, you must have had a long sabbatical! Insurers are very busy with it: initiating projects, aligning activities with risk, actuarial, internal control and internal audit, compliance and process departments. All of them are struggling with hundreds of pages of advice on requirements from CEIOPS (Committee of European Insurance Supervisors), who are taking a leading role in the preparation of the final legislation.

Yesterday, I gave you an overview of the software development method Scrum. My previous post included a high level view of the overall Scrum process. Missing in this picture were any details on the Sprint phase. During a Sprint, a new version of the product is developed. At the end of each Sprint, a new shippable version of the product is ready, which is completely tested and documented. In case of small projects, a Sprint should not be longer than four weeks. In larger projects, a Sprint can be up to three months long.

Since the end of the 1990th, we see an ever growing interest in agile methods in software engineering. At the beginning of this movement, radical methods like Extreme Programming (XP) were proposed. Even though you might need a radical move to kick-start a revolution, it is usually not the radical approach winning the hearts of the many. Nowadays, Extreme Programming plays only a minor role in software development, but the methodology Scrum is very fashionable. But hey, what has a software development method like Scrum to do with business process management?

“All is about money. No, all is about information” said one of ARIS clients opening his speech at one event. Even the primary goal of money itself is to carry an INFORMATION about their value. If we consider a process, what happens in a typical process? Well, the purpose of a process is passing an INFORMATION between involved resources (human and IT) in order to create a value in form of goods or services either internally and\or externally.

The Service-oriented View of the Enterprise The 'service-based view of the enterprise' is an emerging managerial paradigm that defines an organisation as a set of decentralized, autonomous, loosely coupled and interacting capabilities. This is the same approach that currently drives the re-design of IT landscapes in the form of Service-oriented Architectures (SOA). This paper proposes to view and drive process management following the corresponding concept of the 'Service-oriented Enterprise (SOE)'.

We recently rolled out the July update for ARISalign and as usual here is the accompanying post that summarizes what's new:

In spite that the risk is well known, it seems we quite often encounter the happy-path-only syndrome. My recent one was with easyJet airlines. The online check-in is not to be missed, although in that particular case it is not the most pleasant web experience, it's worth a few extra clicks. And really it's such a simple win-win scenario. Apart from the obvious direct and indirect benefits for the airlines, online check-in saves a lot of time both to those who do it and those who don't (especially when the first group is a majority).

This is the part two of the series on auto generation of RFP documents. Just to recap, in previous article, we have discussed:

Products Requirements Management New product development and introduction (NPDI) is probably the most important process for many companies. NPDI is responsible for the revenues and margins that a company can achieve. Product Management involves driving product strategy and vision through the creation of product roadmaps that are coupled with customers, business drivers, technology capability, cost benefit analysis based on factual data, key performance indicators, goals and objectives definition.

In many areas, patterns are used to codify best practices. A pattern describes a solution for a problem. Originally, patterns were used in architecture to describe architectural design ideas. In software engineering, patterns are used to describe typical software design solutions, for example like client-server architecture.

Out-of-box ARIS BA does not provide any generation of so called "Deliverables" (in PMO linguistic). PMO (Project Management Office) guys are interested in Deliverables, Milestones, so that they can keep track of Gates/Phases and feed their hungry Project Servers. Trust me, these guys are not at all interested in fancy looking (but good for nothing) EPC/Value Added Chain diagram. You want to utilize ARIS for RFP generation then this article is for you.

Unfortunately there still remains a vital question about BPM “who cares?” or perhaps more appropriately “why is it so difficult to get many organizations to care about processes?” Even those who do care get confused about whether they are doing BPM or Process Improvement. It is important to recognize that two distinct elements do exist: BPM Transformation and Process Transformation (see below).

Shame on me... I forgot to post the June update on the ARIS Community... I promise that the July update will actually be posted in July and not in August, but for now... here is the June update for ARISalign: ----------------------------------------------