ARIS EXPRESS use in the corporate environment

Hi,

you are right, every user of ARIS Express needs to have a community account. Since it is cost-free software, we'd like to have at least the knowledge how many users use this tool. I think that's fair.

Creating a user account takes 2 minutes and every user needs to do this one time only, so I do not think this costs that much time.

By the way: replacing a professional tool like ARIS Business Architect or Designer will have a drawback! Regarding your the points you mentioned:

# 3

I think it is quite easy to create a user, also not time consuming. You get the benefit of building one common database for your processes. You'll never get this by using a drawing tool like Visio

# 4

# 5

Here is the biggest mistake. If you use a "method free" drawing tool like Visio, you can not make sure that all processes etc modelled by different users fit together, because it is quite hard to assure a common modelling standard.

Using tools with a well-defined modeling notation prooved by thousands of projects is an advantage.

#6

Well, if all users have database accounts, sending data around should not be possible, because you can have a look into the database directly. Alternativly, you can still create PDF exports.

Bye,

Frank

Hi,

I understand you completely.

You want to have a package for company wide distribution, without registration, right?

All I got to say is, that currently, there is no package like this provided.

Bye,

Frank

removed comment - lack of interest

removed comment - lack of interest

In ARIS Express, I had hoped to discover a "lightweight" modeling tool suitable for use by business people for working with process ideas. Professional ARIS (in which I am trained) is not suitable for average non-technical professionals for reasons of cost and complexity of the environment. Thus I hoped AE would be a tool that such folks could use to develop simple models to be shared among themselves, perhaps for experimenting with process improvements prior to bringing in the trained specialists and the big gun - ARIS Pro.  If nothing else, AE could be useful to provide a set of common standards to help business users learn some best practices in process work.

Alas, I think AE is not that tool.  It suffers from several drawbacks:

1. No library support for defining standard objects to promote reuse and consistency.

2. No ability to extend the symbol library or change default symbol appearance.

3. No ability to add additional attributes.

Note: I stand to be corrected on any of these points, but they are my impression after several hours of working with the tool.

I appreciate and agree with the comments concerning the value of AE over (say) Visio, but addressing these few flaws would allow folks like myself to make the case more convincingly. If AE is only seen as an enticement to ARIS Pro, it will often fail because ARIS Pro requires too much investment of learning time and money for the occasional non-technical user.  If one the other hand it was positioned as a simple tool to introduce process models for the average user, and encourage collaboration with standards and best practices, it would be very popular.  In a corporate environment that includes ARIS Pro, it might let users build models that would represent a "draft" step on the way to enterprise models maintained by specialists.  By the way, the notion some have that users can continue to do ad-hoc diagrams, and then a trained ARIS specialist will "enter" those to ARIS Pro is laughable. It also ignores the potential for productivity and innovation in democratizing process modeling, just as word-processing has enhanced and innovated the creation of written text.

So what is AE to be?  A marketing "teaser" for the ARIS Pro product, or a tool to bring a whole new population of users onboard as valued customers, and extend the impact of process modeling to all levels of user?

If you aim for an entry-level ARIS product meant for business, then give ARIS Cloud a try:►http://ariscloud.com/

ARIS Cloud supports a professional modeling environment, including a repository, the proven ARIS methodology, user management etc. Its subscriptions plans are flexible.

ARIS Express is meant for zero budget.

Cheers

Rune