Combining ArchiMate® with standards: BPMN, UML, SysML, ERD, and BMM / BS / BMC
Aug 30, 2016
· Introduction: What is the ArchiMate modeling language?
· Combining ArchiMate® with BMM / BS / BMC
· Combining the ArchiMate with BPMN
· Combining ArchiMate with UML / SysML / ERD
· Conclusion
ArchiMate is an open, standardized modeling language for enterprise architecture. It provides a unified framework for describing, analyzing, and visualizing connections across business domains. It offers a clear, consistent way to capture and communicate complex organizational relationships.
The ArchiMate language is not intended to replace other standards and modeling approaches. For many domains, languages, and techniques are available that provide more detailed descriptions. Those languages, such as UML, BPMN, and others, have a narrower scope (e.g., UML for specifying software, BPMN for business processes) than ArchiMate. Still, they lack concepts for relating these to other domains. Figure 1 below depicts this.
This is where ArchiMate adds value. First, you need a broad, less detailed description to have a general overview of your enterprise. This will help you see the dependencies between different aspects and areas and avoid drowning in details.
For example, the ArchiMate concept of Application Component is largely identical to UML’s Component concept. This allows you to connect ArchiMate models to models for these individual domains, so you can zoom in on specific parts of the enterprise architecture by drilling down into these other models.
READ: Explore our Enterprise Architecture Management wiki
This provides you with an integrated description of the enterprise that meaningfully relates (sub)models from formerly separate domains (as in Figure 2 below). This allows you to analyze and define the dependencies between desired business outcomes, products and processes, IT systems, data, projects and programs, and other aspects of your enterprise, all within one environment.
This is very important in realizing your business strategy: a clear line-of-sight between all the elements of your enterprise, with a single source of truth (instead of disparate modeling silos), efficient analysis of the impact of management decisions, and easy collaboration between the different experts that work on designing and changing your enterprise.
In this blog, we look at the relationships between ArchiMate and other modeling standards such as:
The ArchiMate® language is not intended to replace other standards and modeling approaches, but rather to connect them. In this section, we focus on relating ArchiMate® to several management-oriented techniques: The Business Motivation Model, Balanced Scorecard, and Business Model Canvas.
The Balanced Scorecard is a widely used high-level technique for strategic performance management of organizations. It provides four perspectives on performance and addresses these in a layered structure, using mission, objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives to express the strategic direction. Strategy maps are often used to depict these elements and their relationships.
The Business Motivation Model (BMM) has inspired ArchiMate’s motivation concepts. BMM distinguishes between means, ends, influencers, and assessments, providing a more detailed, fine-grained description of business motivation than ArchiMate’s motivation concepts.
The Balanced Scorecard is a widely used high-level technique for managing organizations’ strategic performance. It provides four perspectives on performance and addresses these in a layered structure, using mission, objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives to express the strategic direction. Strategy maps are often used to depict these elements and their relationships.
The Business Model Canvas provides a high-level overview of the structure of an organization’s current or envisaged business models.
Bizzdesign’s Enterprise Studio offers versatile options for combining various modeling languages, enabling organizations to address specific business questions and deliver value at multiple levels. It supports ArchiMate, along with other frameworks like the Business Model Canvas, while leveraging ArchiMate to represent additional methodologies, such as the Business Motivation Model and Balanced Scorecard.
The main standard for modeling business processes is the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). ArchiMate is typically used for high-level processes and their relations to the enterprise context, but it is not intended for detailed workflow modeling.
BPMN supports detailed sub-process and task modeling down to the level of executable specifications but lacks the broader enterprise context, for example, to model the application services that support a process or the goals and requirements it has to fulfill. To this end, BPMN has a more fine-grained set of elements with various types of events, tasks, and gateways. Both languages can quite easily be used in combination.
There are different ways to relate BPMN models with your ArchiMate models in Bizzdesign’s Enterprise Studio.
The Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is an offshoot of UML for systems engineering. It offers concepts for specification, analysis, design, verification, and validation of a broad range of systems and systems-of-systems. It is less software-centric than UML and much smaller and simpler to learn (although its diagrams can become quite complicated).
When designing physical systems (or systems with physical parts), SysML may be suited as a language for the more detailed design in a context where ArchiMate is used for the architecture level of abstraction.
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In Bizzdesign’s Enterprise Studio users are able to make ArchiMate, UML and ERD models. You could choose to use just one modeling language, but you might want to use different languages next to each other. To support specific stakeholders, which have different modeling needs. Data models in ArchiMate can be modeled using passive structure concepts like business objects and data objects.
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Figure 1 Example of using business and data objects in ArchiMate
JORGEN – there’s an image here I couldn’t find
If more details are required, you could choose to create more in-depth UML Class diagrams of the ArchiMate-defined business and data objects.
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Example of a UML Class diagram
If you are a fan of Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD), you could use ERD instead of UML for your data modeling .
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ERD modeling – Using ERD instead of UML for data modeling
Enterprise Studio is capable of supporting all these different kinds of models. Whether you choose to use just one language or multiple languages like ArchiMate, BPMN, and UML, for example, you will see that making models will help you understand your business better and that Enterprise Studio accommodates all your modeling needs.
First of all, let’s repeat what we started with: ArchiMate is not intended to replace other standards and techniques but rather to complement them. For many domains, there are languages and techniques available with a narrower scope but a greater level of detail.
ArchiMate provides a broader description that helps to see the dependencies between different aspects and areas and gives a general overview of your enterprise. It can connect to those other techniques because their concepts overlap.
Since ArchiMate is only a modeling language, it does not provide its way of working, but it will, of course, be used in the context of such a process. Much has been written about using ArchiMate with TOGAF—both Open Group standards and easily complementary—and we did not want to repeat that in this blog.
In addition to this typical use in enterprise architecture, we discussed the relevance of architecture and ArchiMate in agile development. Although the role of models in an agile approach is different from the traditional ‘big design up front’ development style, they serve an important purpose in ensuring coherence across different timescales, iterations, and domains.
You need to make sure that agile teams work with and not against each other and avoid creating silos, and you want to align everyone from strategy to operations with the same purpose. Creating, evolving, and sharing just-in-time models that capture the information necessary to make the right decisions at all levels of the organization at the right moment is the best way to become a truly adaptive enterprise.
If you have any further questions about linking ArchiMate to other standards, please contact us.
Marc contributes to Bizzdesign’s vision, market development, consulting, and coaching on digital business design and enterprise architecture. He also spreads the word on the Open Group’s ArchiMate® standard for enterprise architecture modeling, of which he has been managing the development. His expertise and interests range from enterprise and IT architecture to business process management.
