Monday, May 11, 2015

Do we really need ArchiMate? UML vs BPMN vs ArchiMate (Example)

It is useful to have a look at Archimate website's Example and understand what benefits Archimate provide that is can not be achieved by UML and BPMN. 

The Archimate community is sharing very few examples of Archimate modelling, so we try to take the most of this example
http://www.archimate.nl/en/about_archimate/example.html

As an engineer with an MBA degree I can see that this example is no where near real-life complexities both from Technology and Application layer or business layer. 

Archimate is trying to act as normative framework to document the following
  • Business Roles & Actors,
  • Business Services
  • Business Processes
  • Application Services
  • Application Components
  • Infrastructure Services
  • Infrastructure Instances
This is very useful when trying to very high-level view of the IT system in the organization. 
It is important to remember that there is no way we can put all the details for even one system or business services in a single diagram without having thousands of boxes and lines almost going from any box to the other one. 

UMLDeployment or Component diagram can come into competion modelling the 'Technoloyg' and 'Application' Layers while BPMN can be used to model the processes in the 'Business' layer. 
UML Usecases can be used to model usage of the system, but they fall short on easily modelling how different actors are using different usecases to follow a business process. 
Unfortunately there is no standard way to link a BPMN documentation along UML documentations. 

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