NS
In designing the EPC model of a business process, we associate either Role or Person Type with the function, with "carries out" attribute. This helps in generating Job Description of particular Person Type. Must say, an excellent feature, provided by ARIS.
However, there is a confusion of either one should assign Role to EPC function OR it should be Person Type, that must be associated to function. According to us, Roles can be attached to EPC function, and in an Organogram where all Person Types are assigned to Departments etc, Roles can be assigned to each Person Type here.
What should be the best practice?
As you have probably noticed Role is just a different symbol of the same object Person Type so the method allows the same connection types for both of them. It all comes down to your convention but commonly the Role is perceived as a temporary occupation and Person Type is rather related to particular profession. Person type is to internal and external person the same as position type is to position and org. unit type to org unit - a classification. Normally if it's temporary role, the connection "performs" should be used, and when it refers to classification and is not temporary, "is of type" is the more appropriate one. Example: an internal person J.Smith is in the position of Senior Business Analysis which of type Consultant (position type), belongs to the department of BPM Services and currently to the Example project team (group), and for certain period performs the role of a Project Manager and otherwise is of person type Engineer.
Am I confused? I don't have a Role symbol (except for some obscure green rectangle with API name 'ST_SOLAR_ROLE'; it doesn't show in any EPC or Organization chart) in my local database. Oddly, one ARIS user group in my company added a user-defined symbol 'Role', based on Person Type. Is 'Role' an ARIS symbol out-of-the-box, or not?
Current version: 7.1.0.4.
Thanks for all the great info!
