I am currently making workshop to design all infrastructure layer.
All architects are very attached to Visio symbols and I would like to know if there is any recommandation to create same symbols as visio inside ARIS ?
What are your best practices and if you have any return of experience on this topic
There is built-in functionality to add your custom symbols, E.g. is you want to mimic Visio shape for function, you can do this. There is a symbpol editor to create your new graphics. Then in Administration > Conventions > Method > Symbols > Derive symbol you can assign your shape to the existing one.
- check, if you have the EAM licence extension for Architect and/or Designer, if you are using the Java clients. This will unlock some more (ARIS-) symbols and model types for EA purposes and may serve well for infrastructure modelling. In Connect Designer you would have those model types without extra licences. Consider those method elements as a basis for Alexander's suggestion, if you like the Visio symbols so much.
- Have you considered the Archimate modelling method? On the installation media there is a full set of Archimate symbols and model types you can import.
Also consider: There are industry standards for Enterprise Architecture like TOGAF, Archimate and some more.
I don't know if your Visio symbols are originating from any of them. The main point is following a method of modelling instead of producing Visio artwork. It's about which concepts you want to model and how they should be linked.
So moving away from Visio symbols to a proper method may support the shift of mindset to applying a method. Otherwise you may have to fight arguments on why you cannot make this or that connection between two symbols (where it does not make sense anyway).
I'd say it works just very badly. If to assess the time that you need to (1) amend this import according to your Visio method, then import and get absolutely messy model, where instead of objects you can get a shape + free form text, and instead of the connection a line. So time for manual amendment (2) is huge.
We had a project last year where the Client had about 300 BPMN diagrams in Visio. So before the conversion, we assessed how much time it takes to import and then manually amend. So we got that it is twice faster to model them from scratch than to import + amend.
