Today I've finished a 4-day course on ARIS. For those of you who don't know ARIS, it's a Business Process Modelling (BPM) tool from IDS Scheer. You might wonder why I'd follow such a course? For several reasons, really. One is that BPM is a part of my daily work. Most architectural studies I do, also address the organization and especially the processes within. Another reason is that Oracle started to work with IDS Scheer about a year ago, to create the Oracle BPA Suite (Business Process Analysis). This suite is meant to bridge the gap between designing Business Processes (BPM) and developing Executable Business Processes (BPEL).
With the BPA Suite it has become possible to automatically generate BPEL Outlines from BPM processes, modelled as EPC (Enterprise Process Chains). So finally we have integration between business design and IT implementation! The good part is, we already have customers ready to use it, so I can bring my new found expertise into play.
I've been working with ARIS at one of our customers. We also attended an IDS lead workshop to develop our set of diagrams and symbols. I wonder why the key diagram is the EPC and not BPMN. Oracle is a key player in the development and standardisation of BPMN. Would you advice your customers to use EPC or maybe a more common style with UML and BPMN?
ReplyDeleteThat depends on the situation at the customer. If they're using Aris purely from a BPM/BPR perspective, I would advise them to use BPMN as it's the closest to being a standard. Oracle customers who are using Aris to define their processes who want to convert the EPC schemes to BPEL, there's only one choice: go EPC.
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