The upcoming ARIS Business Performance Edition release will also ship a new version of ARIS SOA Architect. The product was extended heavily compared to the previous version. The old version included many features to design and implement executable business processes. The most important feature of the old version is the automated EPC to BPEL transformation generating an executable process out of a business process. Those features are of course preserved and extended in the new version, but there is much more to discover!
The old version of ARIS SOA Architect mostly addressed a technical oriented user base. Focusing on this user base was important, because at that time SOA was mostly discussed as a technological topic for enterprise application integration. Topics like Web Services (WSDL), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and BPEL orchestration engines were and are still hot topics. However, in the meantime the market has matured and companies start to understand that SOA can only deliver the promised benefits of increased flexibility and efficiency, if it is not handled as a purely technological problem. Instead, a business-driven approach to SOA is needed!
The new ARIS SOA Architect version focuses on business-driven SOA with some very distinct features. For example, the ARIS method was extended to provide support for business services as well as software services. The ARIS SOA method is structured in three layers to clearly distinguish the different concepts. This helps to clearly communicate the different purposes of a SOA. The ARIS SOA method is tightly integrated with the ARIS IT Architect. IT and Enterprise Architecture Managers can reuse their models to have a good starting point for their SOA. ARIS SOA Architect and ARIS IT Architect use the same object types so that no remodelling is necessary.
We use ARIS extensively and I have developed an enterprise & solution architecture methodology called iBAS (integrated business architecture solution) which covers the full SDLC. During the software requirements phase, we reuse functions from business processes as use cases. Use cases are then extended to incorporate in order to generate system requirement specificationsand (MS Word)and include screen navigation, screen design, IE data models, UML activity diagrams, appl system type diagrams, access diagrams. I now wish to include the SOA concept, but there is little help on this from the SA ARIS vendor, where can I get more information on this?
sounds like a very interesting project you are working on. I got to know a similar methodology for extracting requirements from business process models recently. After process modelling the business functions are tagged to declare if they will be part of the software to be developed, if it will be part of an external system or if it is a human activity not automated by a software.
Now, if you want to go over to a service oriented architecture, it might be interesting for you to describe your architecture. I have published an ARIS expert paper "Business-Oriented Service Description in a Virtual Automotive Group" about it, which you can find here:
I hope this gives you some pointers how ARIS can support you in buidling your service oriented application. If you need further information, just let me know. You can find an email adress in the expert paper.
We are also doing some business process modeling on Aris for a public institution and we are trying to extract requirements from them. Are there any references for the methodology you have mentioned in your answer above (on Thu, 2009/10/22 - 3:45pm)? It can give us insight about possible solutions. Thank you.
Is there any major difference between “ARIS BUSINESS ARCHITECT 7.0″ when compared to “ARIS BUSINESS ARCHITECT 7.1″. We are in process to acquire Oracle BPA built on ABA 7.0. I’m just confused if we should be going for directly ABA 7.1.
there are of course major new features in ABA 7.1 like heavily improved modelling capabilities. Please contact one of our sales people if you need details. Also, take a look at the ARIS homepage:http://www.aris.com/
