Hi Folks,

Thanks so much to everyone who watched along with my first series of videos, covering some basic technical features of the ARIS platform. In case you missed it, take a look here.

Also, a big thank-you to the many comments and emails I’ve received providing feedback and suggestions on videos to create – it’s exciting to hear from our vibrant community, and I’m glad there are so many folks interested in a wide variety of ARIS topics. I’ll be addressing many of the requests in a subsequent technical video series – keep your eyes on ARISCommunity.com for more updates as those come out.

Meanwhile, I wanted to continue the conversation about ARIS with a new set of videos – one focused on the “Art of the Possible” using the platform. I’ve been using and consulting on ARIS for more than a decade, and I’ve found over and over that the keys to success don’t lie in functionality alone. Instead, our most successful clients are using ARIS as a catalyst for change in their business transformation practice, and as a result, improving their modelling speed, accuracy, control, visibility and impact.

Evolving a practice starts with having the right approach, and that involves a few key questions that need to be answered by each organization. These topics revolve around some common themes:

• How do I build my practice? Which roles and skillsets will I need to be best equipped for success? How should I organize that team, and how should they be measured?
• How do I create and maintain a repository of process? How do I lay out a hierarchy that represents my business? How does that decomposition work?
• How do I bring new information into my enterprise repository? How do projects, as small as a single process or as large as a major transformation, integrate into this enterprise repository?
• How do I set and maintain standards for modeling within my environment? How do I decide which symbols and models are right for my use cases? How are those decisions represented in templates and governance mechanisms in my system?
• How do I create and maintain reusable enterprise assets for use in my models? How can I govern and protect this reusable knowledge, and how can I quickly share those assets with my teams?
• How do I know what’s happening in my environment? How do I track progress on projects? How do I know how current my information is, and what steps can I take to ensure that models are kept fresh and relevant?

These questions are answered and put into practice through two parallel streams of work: organizational development (work outside ARIS) and best practice implementation (work inside ARIS). This series of videos will help you better understand how to approach that work inside ARIS, talking through some common scenarios and decisions you’ll be faced with, and providing some of my thoughts on the best path to take.

• Bottom-up Modelling and Consolidation
• The Importance of Customer Journey
• Methods and Conventions
• Data-Driven Transformation Lifecycle
• Project Management in ARIS
• Choices in Organizational Objects
• Functional Decomposition vs. E2E
• Federated vs. Centralized Operations
• The Importance of Libraries
• BPMN vs. EPC

As always, please let me know if you have any questions, comments or requests, and we’ll see you in the next series!

Cheers,

J-M