In this blog post series, I want to show you how ARIS helps you to reach and consistently ensure an excellent quality of your business concept by rolling out design standards across the organization.

Documenting how the business operates, how it is organized and how the different business perspectives interrelate to each other is one of the core use cases of ARIS. This documentation does not only serve as a business blueprint but it also delivers a reliable basis for analyzing interdependencies on both a conceptual and an operational level. It is used as a foundation for process automation, e.g. in terms of implementing software robots (Robotic Process Automation – RPA) or specific IT services, but it also states a critical instrument for communicating best-practice knowledge to all employees of an organization. In short, an Enterprise Digital Twin, which is the logical result of a mature and high-quality business design – that is connected to the real world – is a key driver for a successful digital transformation.

Reaching a high maturity and quality of the business concept at the design time is often challenging. All the different application scenarios imply specific requirements regarding “what” and “how” should be modeled and “which” additional information need to be provided and maintained. Three examples:

1. GDPR Compliance: One of the first steps towards being compliant to the General Data Protection Regulation is the identification and documentation of all activities, that process personal data of customers. Such “processing activities” are marked via a specific ARIS-attribute. According to GDPR, all that activities require a responsibility and a corresponding risk assessment, which might be maintained again via an attribute or via satellite objects such as an organization unit, a role or a risk. For compliance reasons, it is necessary to ensure, that all that information are maintained. Otherwise an organization runs into the risk of painful penalties of up to 20 Mio. € or 4% of the global revenue.
2. Process Automation: Blueprints for processes that are intended to be automated are often described as BPMN 2.0 process or collaboration models. The ability to re-use them in workflow implementation and execution engines requires structural and syntactical correctness with regards to the standard as well as a substantial correctness and consistency to ensure the understandability for the technical counterparts. This, for example, includes the existence of start and end events, the non-interruptability of the process and the consistent definition of gateways.
3. Knowledge distribution: The communication of (process) knowledge to all employees of an organization automatically flows into discussions on how that knowledge should be visualized. Or from a modeling perspective: which symbols and colors should be used; how can we cover the corporate identity? But also from a content perspective, it is often desired to maintain additional textual or visual (graphics, videos) descriptions for models, activities or arbitrary objects.

The examples show a variety of requirements – ranging from content completeness over syntax and semantics up to the visual representation – that are typically translated into design standards! These design standards can be defined in ARIS and now also rolled out across all process designers and across all design clients (ARIS Connect Designer, ARIS Designer, ARIS Architect).

Three aspects are of major importance:

1. A global definition of individual default templates.
2. An active and automated modeling support.
3. Intelligent checks against individual modeling conventions.

Follow the blog post series in the next 1-2 weeks and see how to address this three topics with ARIS!

But already now an appetizer of our new integrated Semantic Check in the ARIS Connect Designer!